Old Bones

This postcard story written in Welsh Cakes: Book of Short Stories, was originally written for Halloween. It has memories of student nursing days from 50 years ago. The story is so short, it is given in its entirety.

What Old Bones had been called when he was clothed in the flesh and walked the earth he couldn’t remember. His brain was pickled in formaldehyde and sat in a jar on a laboratory shelf, and his memories came to him now through his bones. He was left alone in his closet for days and months on end—the instructor brought him out in front of the class only when he wanted to give particular emphasis to a certain bone. Little else happened that would jog his memory these days.
Old Bones did remember, however, that tonight was All Hallows’ Eve; and it gave him a thrill knowing that he might be hi-jacked from his hook. Tonight, a medical student might carry him to the nurses’ residence, enter a room, and place the skeleton’s trembling bones between cool cotton sheets. He wouldn’t be able to smell the perfume, his olfactory sense lay with his brain in the jar of formaldehyde, but the feel of the sheets as they caressed his frame would be enough to stimulate his scent memory.
Old Bones felt himself become young in spirit in anticipation of the evening ahead; his jaw chattered and his bones rattled with excitement at tonight’s possibilities. Perhaps the nurse would take him in her arms and dance with him down the corridor of the nurses’ residence. If not, Old Bones would do a tap dance of his own in honor of this night.
Halloween was Old Bones’ very own celebration, his patronal festival, so to speak. He would make the most of it before the moon was set this night and the sun rose to shine its rays on empty eye sockets. Old Bones gave himself a shake. This was no time to think thoughts of melancholy; he had 364 other days for that.

Never Too Soon

I saw her on a hot summer day, one of those sidewalk-shimmering July days, more typical of Toronto than Muskoka. Her grey hair was pulled into a bun, and her blue silk dress told of a more gracious time. She stood on the curb watching the traffic, hesitant, unsure of herself.
I finished my errands and had almost forgotten her. But there she was, still standing on the sidewalk, as if the cement had set around her feet and held her to the ground.
I put aside my ‘mustn’t get involved’ thoughts.
“Do you need help?” I said.
“I’m waiting for a ride. Jean said she would pick me up and take me across to the other mall. It’s too far to walk.”
“I could take you, if you like,” I said, “I’m going there, anyway.”
I thought she might be too afraid to accept a ride from a stranger, you hear so many bad things on the news these days, but it made me feel better that I’d offered.
“Thank you, it’s very hot standing here.”
I helped her into the car and buckled her into the seat belt. The whole exercise took no more than a couple of minutes of my time. I gave her my name and address before we parted.
“Thank you,” she said. Her voice crackled like radio static and a smile crinkled her face.
A few days later I got a note in the mail.
“Dear Grace, At eighty years of age you don’t expect to make new friends, but I made a new friend today. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.’ Thanks for not being too late, Iris.”

This story is based on an actual event. This lady was a writer and I visited her in her apartment and helped her with some writing about her life that she wanted to record for her family. A couple of years after we met, she passed away. I was glad I had got to know her.

Music of the Night

This is another short-short story from Welsh Cakes: Book of Short Stories with a widow living alone and lonely, missing her husband's presence.
The venue of this story is a house in Toronto, where I lived for many years, and the situation is summed up in the following words from the story:
"She listened to the sounds of the night. The reggae music poured into the darkness and mixed with the sounds of laughter and bottle clinking. Smells of late night cooking rose from hibachis and seeped through her screened protection.
The Saturday summer gatherings were regular rituals in the back lane and Dorothy hated them. She knew that the morning would reveal unpleasant sights of litter, broken beer bottles and the mark of men on the garage doors; the smell would be rife in the hot humidity.
Even though she dreaded these nights, she felt sorry for these immigrants who were taken advantage of by landlords getting rich off their desperation. Dorothy understood their need to escape from the dark and airless rooms in which their poverty forced them to live; their need to go into the night air, to sit on fire escapes and in concrete yards without walls.
They were full of hope when they came to Canada, and an infusion of the music of their homeland was a renewal of optimism to them like an infusion of blood would replenish the white blood cells of a leukemia victim."
The story ends with a decision to make a new beginning:
"Dorothy rose from her bed and began another day of putting her life in order. She turned the radio up in an attempt to let its music and talk drown out her thoughts and heart beat. She had to stop grieving soon and listen for a new beat, a new song, a new voice. Perhaps today she would take her daughter’s advice and look for an apartment and open her heart to a fresh start. The music of the night had forced her into an awareness of a life grown stale. She made up her mind. She must begin again and this time she would, as the old song said, begin the beguine."

Holy Week

Through Lent’s discipline,
Journey’s road
Becomes repaired.
Vigilance discovers debris;
Diligence repairs
The potholes on the path.
Stones are rolled away
Life is renewed,
Resurrected.

New fire is lit,
Kindled from last year’s
Devastation.
Forgotten promises and
Rituals are gathered together,
Built into a funeral pyre.

New fire is kindled from
Old dead deeds; new light
Flames in heart and soul.
Let us rekindle
Promises of devotion;
Exchange new lives for old.

© Judith Lawrence 2010

This Is Your Life

This is another short-short story in Welsh Cakes: Book of Short Stories. The basis for this story is the old TV program that showed the life of a person through the eyes of different people who had known him or her at various life stages. The person was presented at the end of the evening with a book of his or her life. This is the story of a fictional teacher. She is retired and is asked to make a presentation about someone whom she has known. Estelle agrees but was none too pleased. "Estelle hung up the phone. Always someone else in the limelight, she thought. Even now, when I've had my first novel published at almost eighty years of age, my ex-student gets recognized ahead of me. How old would Martin be now? Forty? Half my age! Writes those self-help books and makes a fortune off other people's inability to make their own decisions. Oh well! Never mind! It will be a night out and I don't get many of those now. I'll get Joyce to make sure that I look presentable. She's always been a good daughter to me. I think she had a thing for Martin at one time." So she prepared her speech about Martin and was totally taken by surprise when the evening began with the introduction, "Born in 1920, in this very town; devoted almost forty years to teaching here in Crane High, Estelle Samoth, THIS IS YOUR LIFE."

The Ice Storm

This is another postcard story from Welsh Cakes: Book of Short Stories; and, again, it is narrated by an elderly woman. I wrote this story after a particularly devastating ice storm in January 1998. Many people had no power for many days and elderly people, in particular, suffered and some died from hypothermia. I am putting this story in its totality.
My teeth chatter and my body shudders deep inside, so that my muscles and spine ache from the effort. The layering of clothes isn't helping at all and I fantasize about lying naked inside a sleeping bag next to Joe's unclad body. If I could wrap my arms around him and entwine my legs with his, skin touching bare skin, I would feel better.
I can't feel my toes, not even a tingle. My fingers are waxy-white like the emergency candles we keep in the kitchen drawer. The candles are almost finished, burned down to streaky grey-black stubs. I hold up my bloodless fingers in front of my eyes and contemplate snapping them off at the knuckles like frozen twigs and striking a match to them to light the dark.
A cup of tea would be nice, but there's no power. I'd have some brandy even though I'm teetotal, but Joe finished the bottle a while ago. Doesn't look like it did him much good.
“At a hundred degrees below zero, I button up my vest.”
I shake myself to stop the words of Joe’s firewood song repeating in my brain like a needle stuck in the worn groove of an old 78. With a final hiccup the singing stops in response to a loud knock on the front door. A young chap in army fatigues, no older than our Billy would have been next birthday, peers at me with eyes wide and bright from too little sleep and too much coffee.
“I'd better take you somewhere warm, ma'am,” he says.
“We'll wait. Joe'll feel better when the guy comes with the generator to warm the house through.”
“I'd better take a look at Joe,” he says.
He comes in without so much as a “by your leave” and walks over to where Joe propped himself up next to the wood stove last night.
“Ma'am, he don't look so good. I'd better get him to the hospital.”
“I told him we should get naked together in the sleeping bag. But he never would let his skin touch mine, something to do with his religion he always said. I told him, that's the way God made us, Joe, naked. That's the way we came into the world and that's the way we'll go out.”
“Ma'am, will you come with me to the hospital?”
“Billy? My, you've grown tall. Are you taking your dad and me home?”
“Yes, ma'am. Let's go home.”

The Green Carpet

This post is about The Green Carpet, a postcard story from Welsh Cakes: Book of Short Stories. The story is narrated by an elderly woman who is standing at the graveside of her recently deceased husband. She has been married to her husband for so many years that she has trouble thinking of him not being there when she returns to their home following the funeral. "This ceremony is outside of me, apart from my reality. When it is finished, I will return home and tell you of my morning's experience as I always do. We will have lunch and all will be as it was before...My eyelids are cold behind my glasses. The tears collect at the corners of my eyes and run slowly down my cheeks. I look up and see the snow falling in big flakes, gathering on the carpeted mound. The snow will blanket the earth and settle on your grave. It is the right time in the seasons' circle for death to come upon you. It will be your winter's hibernation. I break free from my son's support and walk toward the mound. I reach under the coarse green covering and my hand closes around the cold wet earth. I throw the clod into the hole and it breaks into tiny pearl size offerings. It is my last gesture of love for you. I turn away, the smell of earth's promise of new life still on my fingers."