| Fiction | Essays | Poetry | The Ten | On Baseball | Chapbooks | In Memory |
|
-Merde. The word came out more as a lingering sigh than an audible invective. She idly noticed that she always cursed in French when she was tired, or when she had been drinking red wine, both of which had occurred tonight. She rubbed the back of her hand across her bleary eyes and took another sip of the Merlot, deeply inhaling the fragrant oak. It was a cheap wine, and the three days it had spent lounging in the refrigerator, where her husband mistakenly stored it after their two-month anniversary dinner, had not treated it well. It tasted bitter, but it suited her tonight. Earlier in the evening she had received a call from her mother-in-law (after just two months, the word ‘mother-in-law’ rolled around awkwardly on her tongue, like the acidic wine), and she was still trying to digest what she had heard. A high school classmate, a boy she’d known casually ten years ago but with whom she’d never had much to talk about, had died. Suicide. It was an ugly word, made even more monstrous by the fact that he’d left behind a young wife. Right now, that seemed the cruelest part. The phone call had interrupted her reading. Not pleasure reading, mind you, but the German critic Walter Benjamin. His writing about the life and afterlife of books was generally so far over her head that she prayed for the phone to ring and give her a few minutes of reprieve before she returned to a mental workout that drained her energy. Normally she would have been grateful to hear her mother- in-law’s cheery voice, but tonight she wondered why she had answered the phone. The call just added to the melancholy tone of the evening. Well, misery loves company, she thought, and as her husband was still performing surgeries at work and would be gone for at least another hour, she picked up the phone next to her to dial her high school sweetheart, someone she had loved as much as she was capable of loving at fifteen, someone whom she now felt, despite twelve years of friendship, was barely an acquaintance after the strained conversations they’d had the past year, after he had learned she was engaged. But, because they always made the requisite quarter-year calls in order to keep up the pretense of having a real friendship, she wanted to make sure he heard the sad news from someone. - Hey, it’s Elizabeth. - Not much. Just sitting here trying to get through some reading for class tomorrow. - Yeah, married life is great. (There was an awkward pause as they contemplated the fact that ten years ago they had both thought they’d be the ones married to each other. She cleared her throat to pierce the silence.) Anyway, I wasn’t sure if you’d heard, but James Franklin died yesterday. Killed himself. - Maybe. I’m not sure how. Matt’s mom didn’t say. - You don’t remember James? He was kind of, well, average height, kinda stocky, brownish hair. I’m not quite sure who he hung out with, but I know he carpooled with Leah for a year or so. I think he went to St. Edward’s in middle school. - Hmm. He might have been friends with them. I’m not sure. We didn’t have many classes together. Maybe homeroom. Or religion. Maybe both. When they hung up the phone after the obligatory pleasantries that have to follow sad news (how’s your mom, that’s good, great to hear that), she was surprised to realize that, in actuality, she barely remembered James. She felt foolish for having been so depressed after hearing the news, when she wasn’t even friends with him in the first place. Even his face was a blurry image, like the glimpse of a passing car from the rain-streaked windows of the Metro she took to the university every day. She gazed for a while at her wine glass, as if it were a crystal ball that would make James’s face become clear before her very eyes. Nothing. She lifted the glass to the light, staring through it and imagining herself a connoisseur. She knew little more about wine than she knew about Walter Benjamin, but a fondly- remembered summer spent in the south part of Normandy gave her a feeling of proprietorship about all things French. - Noir. She said the word aloud and slowly swirled it around in her mouth. That was another word that she only used when she’d been drinking red wine. It paired nicely with it, like a full-flavored cheese. There was something heady and mysterious about the word. Film noir, pinot noir, the New Orleans cabaret Le Chat Noir. The words chanted and goose-stepped in her mind, an army marching determinedly to the mass grave where all fleeting thoughts spend eternity, the mass grave the Jewish Walter Benjamin avoided when he allegedly committed suicide. The light rain increased in intensity, blocking out the sounds of DC traffic outside the window. She reflected again on James’s death. She supposed that she had reacted so strongly to it because of the odd mood she’d been in all day. It began with the realization that the fifth anniversary of September 11 was just around the corner. Her husband had called her in the morning with “an escape plan” (his words) for the next several days, in case the capital was once again the target of attack. She had laughed at his irrational (or so she perceived) fears, but the news about James had her thinking about life and death again, and how impossible it seemed that anyone was alive, considering all of the dangers that exist in everyday life. There’s everything from car accidents on the Capital Beltway to slipping in the shower to explosions at the gas station. Several years ago she read a sign on a gas pump about the dangers of cell phones and gas pumps, and ever since then she panicked when she saw someone whip out his phone and talk casually, as if he were not about to unleash a fireball to consume everything around him. Her reveries took her back to Seattle, five years ago, where she had been on a vacation when the terrorist attacks took place. She had been drying her hair in front of the television when the second plane hit in New York. When she heard about D.C., she had worried about her belongings in her apartment, which was close to the Pentagon. It now seemed so trivial because there had obviously been no people in her unit since she had lived alone then. She didn’t know anyone who had died, but she wondered now about those people. Had their faces been forgotten by classmates long gone? She reached for the wine bottle and poured the remaining deep, ruby liquid into the nearly empty glass. She wondered what people would say about her. You know, Elizabeth. She was that blonde (or maybe they would say brunette—it all depended upon when they knew her) girl who ran over a brick mailbox… drove from Washington state to Arizona in three days… got drunk on her twenty-fifth birthday and karaoked to the Village People, or some other anecdote detailing the high- and lowlights of her life. But what if there were no anecdotes? What if she died and no one (besides her family and closest friends, of course) could quite imagine her face? She was Catholic, so she believed in heaven, but what if, unlike Walter Benjamin and his books, she had no afterlife on earth? Her husband entered in the midst of her reflection. She hadn’t heard him -- she hated when she didn’t hear him enter through the front door. It made her feel defenseless, like a rabbit caught in a trap. She closed her eyes as he rubbed the tension from the taut muscles in her neck, barely hearing his voice as he teased her about drinking all of their fine wine and how pensive she looked. - I’ve just been studying. - Yeah, your mom called about three hours ago. She wants you to call her back. - No, seriously, I’m fine. Just a little tired. As he turned and left the room, she picked up her book again, leaned back in the chair, and a small murmur escaped her lips, so low she almost missed it: -Mort.
©2007 by Lisa Cochran Lisa Cochran is a graduate student at Texas A&M University, and a former high school English teacher. She loves to read, travel, and drink red wine. Lisa moonlights as an aspiring writer and poet. Her poetry has been published in Words-Myth.
|
| Home | Contributors | Past Issues | Search | Links | Guidelines | About Us |
|
|