Short Fiction

Harvey had been so upset Saturday night. "Jenny, I can’t take any more of these evenings with your dad. Damn, I’m judged, stuffed and ripped to shreds every single visit."

The words pounded against her head, staccato rhythm as she squirmed uneasily. Her dad had always been hard on Harvey but there was nothing she could do about it. The older she grew, the higher the stack of unchangeables mounted. Parents, siblings, spouses.

She sighed. The sole variable she could change was herself. The thought conjured up an ocean of maybes, like a diet gone out of control. One shoved in the throttle, let out the clutch and hoped, and then....

Her gaze took in the sweeping lawns, pink and purple bubbles of hydrangeas blossoming, white althea so delicate that it left her yearning for the same beauty within. Maybe it wasn’t just her dad Harvey resented. What if it was her too? A sinking feeling formed in the pit of her stomach every time she learned of another divorce.

"Daddy, please don’t hit Mommy. You promised me, you wouldn’t hurt her." Jenny blinked as she thought of her parents, fourteen roller coaster years of marriage, four kids and good-bye.

Being happy, Jenny thought, was out. Yet she couldn’t give up without becoming a casualty. Dear God, she wondered, where are you this morning? Is there never an answer for me?

She stared out at the disappearing blue sky and saw the cloud cover rapidly swallowing the sun’s rays, the horizon billowing puffs of soft pewter.

She watched, engaged in some three dimensional cycle as grey receded and a golden orb of sunlight emerged. The gentle scent of honeysuckle grown wild across the back fence wafted through the air. So crisp and clean. The truth. How had she missed it?

Her problem wasn’t Harvey’s or her father’s animosity, rather the old fear of rejection, buried so deep she hadn’t recognized it: The terror that kept her from confronting her dad. When her mother tried, he’d left her. Since then, Jenny had held an inner core of herself in reserve, afraid that if she didn’t appease her father he would leave her as well.

The back door opened and Harvey, looking contrite, stepped onto the patio. "Look honey, about your father—."

She shook her head, seeing the layers of relationship through crystal prism. "No," she said. "That doesn’t matter. Daddy was awful. He probably always will be. This is about you and me. I...." Her teeth worried at her lower lip. With honesty came transparency and vulnerability. In the recesses of her mind the past warred with the metamorphosis drawing her into the future.

"Jenny?" Harvey said, his face appearing concerned, sheepish and wistful all at once.

To survive, one had to take risks. Jenny tentatively held out one hand and suddenly they were meeting in the middle, wrapped in each others’ arms.

note:The above short short appeared in SUDDENLY II (Martin House 1999).

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         Left Without a Trace

                                            by Jeana Kendrick

Wham. Wham. Sandra dodged the ball and ran as fast as she could toward the front porch stoop.

    "I got. . . you. . . ," her nine-year-old-son sang out as he tackled her on the second step.

    "So you have. " She laughed, ruffling his hair. "Come on, Davy. Time to do homework. "

    His freckled face screwed up in a grimace, reminding her painfully of his father. "Mom, do I have to? I can do it later, can’t I?"

    "Nope." She took his hand, leading him onto the porch and inside the three-room duplex where he grudgingly sat at the kitchen table and opened his books.

    Sandra squeezed into the tiny adjoining kitchenette and started on the tuna noodle casserole that was a Thursday night staple. They ate the leftovers every Friday night. Hot dogs on Saturday and so on. Their unvaried menu was a reflection of their life, since Chad had left them–-or rather disappeared from their lives without a trace. No messy divorce. No custody battles over their son. Also no alimony. Just this feeling of being deserted, wondering what she did wrong, feeling as if some defect within her drove him away.

    Almost one year had passed. A year in which she grew reconciled to his abandonment. Accepted that he wasn’t sick somewhere needing her, kidnaped or dead. Accepted that he didn’t want either one of them. Not her and not their son, sensitive and intelligent, made in his image so much that sometimes looking at him or listening to him talk sent shafts of pain barreling through her chest.

    Chad’s letter arrived three weeks after he left. The paper was now worn and tear-stained, its message rehearsed and spun into the web of their lives:

Sandra,

I left because I couldn’t stand the pretense. Our marriage was a prison, and the family you desired created the bars that locked me into a job I didn’t want and an image of your choosing. Stop calling the hospitals and the police. Call off the investigators. Accept that I’ll never be back. If it helps, pretend I’m dead. You’re so good at the game, it shouldn’t be hard. Chad

As much as she would have liked to, she couldn’t deny that the letter was real. The handwriting was Chad’s and the postmark Zurich. But such cruelty from the man she thought of as her tender, unassuming husband was new. When had his heart grown so cold? How ? Lord, she prayed, give me a clue.

Had she been so different from the other wives she knew? Or was it that Chad hadn’t wanted what everyone else had? Now she’d never know. Neither would her son who assumed some of the guilt, just as she did, for boxing Chad into a corner and driving him away.

The silence haunted her. Why hadn’t he said something earlier? Was she the one pretending or had it been him? She truly believed that Chad loved her, that theirs was a happy family. Maybe tomorrow, she and Davy could trust again, but not yet. . . not today.

Only last night, Davy asked, hiccuping back the sobs that shook him. "Will Daddy ever come home?"

Sandra gathered him in her arms. "I don’t know, honey. Someday though, I promise you, everything will be better. "

"How soon, Mom? Most all my friends have daddies. "

"Shh. . . darling. After the trees have lost all their leaves, and are laid bare, they winter the cold harsh winds, rain and snow, and their roots dig deep into the earth for nourishment, then spring always comes. "

Davy’s hand slipped into hers. "Mom, when does spring come?"

note:The above short short appeared in SUDDENLY IV (Stone River Press 2001).

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     Rocket Launchers and Tears

                                        by Jeana Kendrick

It happened in Russia, back in the early 1980s when the Cold War was still in effect and travel severely restricted. There were six of us Americans in two separate cars traveling from Kiev to Cernovcy. We had pulled off the highway near a major intersection to study the map and ended up in a heated debate on whether to turn left or go straight.

The intourist map of the Ukraine showed only a straight route, but my husband Jeff had a map with a short cut. While he and the males championed the shorter way, I led the female rationale against it.

The men won out and both cars whipped a left when the militia directing traffic glanced in the opposite direction. We had been traveling for weeks, meeting secretly with Christians. I often wondered what I was doing there, me—a housewife from Texas documenting interviews with oppressed and persecuted Russians.

Initially, after obtaining our visas, I had set out from Vienna in a battered Toyota station wagon with Peter and Natalie, a dubious pair of Russian translators. As planned we met Jeff, Hugh and Louise in Romania at a crowded campground in Oradea. After distributing Christian literature across the country, we were forced to hide the remaining fifty garbage sacks of Romanian Bibles we’d brought in a thick green cornfield near the Ukraine border. Our Soviet entry visas would expire the next day, resulting in the time crunch which was their standard policy to discourage foreign visitors.

We would return later, shocked to find tractors busily harvesting the cornfield with our hidden Bibles. But that’s another story.

So, there we were, in my Toyota and Jeff’s Volkswagen Golf traveling down a questionable section of highway in the Ukraine when suddenly all of us began clicking our 35 millimeter cameras. Our photos had nothing to do with politics! We weren’t U.S. spies, whatever the Russians might have thought. After staring at miles of boring brown grass, we had blundered across a convoy of Russian Rocket launchers.

When the militia pulled us over at the next guard shack, our exuberance quickly evaporated. A middle-aged beefy officer ordered us out of our cars and collected our passports before radioing headquarters. Minutes later, a black sedan screeched to a halt.

After a brief consultation with the newly arrived ranking military man, our beefy officer demanded in Russian, "Give me your film."

My husband and I, the appointed spokespersons, shrugged, tripping over ourselves to explain we didn’t speak Russian. "What is this film?" we said.

Fleshy jowls moving, the officer pretended he was clicking a camera. "Film," he said again and again, growing more irritated at our failure to grasp his meaning.

We avoided mentioning our two translators, three, counting Louise who was born in China, after her family fled Russia to escape persecution. Ironically, the Russian word for film is film. Still, we couldn’t just hand over pictures of the Christians we had visited. The consequences to them could be fatal.

It was a miracle that they hadn’t found the cameras, well hidden but far from irretrievable, in the car.

Finally, Jeff said, "Wait, I think I know what you want." He turned to the Golf and pulled out an old 35-millimeter that we had never bothered to use.

The officer seized it and jerked out the film, exposing it to light. "Into the cars," he barked.

I managed a weak smile. "Our passports...?"

"Nyette." He motioned to the militia who hustled us back into our autos. A convoy formed, the Toyota and Golf squeezed between two military vehicles, the black sedan following. We raced down the center of the highway, straddling two lanes. A loud speaker atop the first car and its driver waving a traffic control wand warned cars going in both directions to move out of the way. They peeled off the road moments before impact. This state of affairs continued for about fifty miles.

At headquarters, army and KGB chiefs pressured Jeff to sign a confession for making an illegal left turn. He refused since that intersection had no signs forbidding left turns.

They compelled the rest of us to view a Russian war movie, its theme a constant barrage of machine gun fire in which the Americans lost to the Russians. Our morale was low and we feared any moment the film would be discovered.

Hours passed before Jeff ultimately agreed to sign a confession in exchange for a receipt stipulating there had been no sign. He wanted such proof to present with his complaint to the American Embassy. The chiefs panicked. What if word leaked to the Kremlin that we’d been there?

The authorities went into a huddle and emerged to say they didn’t have the proper form. They were willing to forget the whole matter. Again, we found ourselves in a racing convoy, wincing at oncoming traffic.

Denied permission to travel to Cernovcy and forced to Lvov instead we were brazenly pressed by authorities into a bungalow with other Russians. That afternoon while shopping, we were followed everywhere. The trip had turned into a nightmare.

Back at the bungalow, Jeff parked the Toyota and we stared out at the pouring rain. Jeff lost his temper and I began to cry. He glared at me and said, "What are you crying for?"

I looked at him and for once seemed to find the right words though I spoke them in exasperation. "For the same reason you’re angry."

"Oh," he said quietly, as a look of understanding passed between us.