Story: Excellent Potatoes

Reed only had one stop on his sales route that day. Yolni Fatapopolous, a grumpy, wide-set Greek with black hair, black eyes and a nasty case of bowlegs, had placed an order for three cases of russet potatoes two weeks earlier. Apparently there was a problem, one Yolni was unwilling to disclose by phone, insisting Reed visit the restaurant to see the disgrace in person. Reed had begrudgingly agreed to meet at the diner, The White Isle of Oak Park, to investigate the potatoes and soothe old Yolni into accepting them as-is for a deal on the next order. When Yolni spoke in his thick Greek accent, a scratching sound like a baby’s rattle muffled by quilt, or a sheet of paper torn in half one room away, came over the line—a sign that Yolni’s voice was traveling through an old wall phone, the spiral cord wiggling loose where it connected to the plastic cradle.

Though Reed had, over his first year as a salesman for Hadley Foods, had his share of grumpy, spendthrift clients like Yolni, he had taken well to the position, assuming a respectable position among his seasoned teammates. Management chose Reed for Seller of the Month twice in a row, and when passing Ron Carp, supervisor of northern Illinois regional sales, on his way to the bathroom, Reed was graced with a wink, an action Reed found both creepy and deeply gratifying.

Besides the money and the frequent acknowledgement of his good work by his superiors, what Reed liked best about the job was that his Jeep was his office. He was required to make only one appearance at the physical office per week. Otherwise, he was driving freely on the highways through the suburbs north and west of the city, stopping here and there at diners and restaurants like The White Isle and a handful of high-traffic franchises. The towns he passed through were familiar and calm, sometimes scenic. Illinois was flat, but it could be beautiful, especially now that June was upon them, the debris of fall and winter receding, making way for lush lawns and flourishes of leafy trees and garden beds. Reed might have regretted moving to the city had he not the daily opportunity to see woods, open fields, geese floating on subdivision ponds, the sun as it touched the horizon, dogs chasing tennis balls across sprawling backyards… There was nothing wrong with the suburbs, though his girlfriend, a staunch supporter of urban living, disagreed.

He pulled into a spot in front of The White Isle and saw Yolni past the entryway of plate glass doors and windows, his squat frame planted at the head of the house. A few feet away, three shelves of pies and cakes turned slowly in a tall glass display case, glistening under a soft light. He stood in a full suit with his hands clasped behind his back, monitoring his wait staff with hawk’s eyes. As he turned toward the register to observe a group of punk kids in hoodies and studded belts pay their tab, a line of stitches was revealed, running from the corner of Yolni’s mouth up to his cheekbone—where he assumed the cheekbone was anyway. Hard to tell with a face like Yolni’s, all its edges rounded out with pudge.

Reed stepped out of his Jeep, straightened his tie, and checked that his shirt was properly tucked before entering the diner. Upon greeting Yolni, Reed realized a chunk of his thick moustache had been shaved away for the procedure. He imagined a dog attack. With Yolni’s pronounced widow’s peak and thick, frustrated brows, he could see how the man could easily provoke an animal’s survival instinct. He could also see Yolni not taking very kindly to pets—the kind of man who would kick a begging dog in the gut to protect his own pride.

Yolni did not say hello. If he could have smiled, he wouldn’t have, though on rare occasions he would belly laugh at his own jokes.

“You came to repay me the potatoes,” he said.

Hoping to avoid the ugly gash, Reed steadied his eyes on Yolni’s, which were bulbous and sagged at the lower lid like a cocker spaniel’s. If he caught Reed staring at the wound, he might get up in arms, making compromise a matter of cutting diamond with a butter knife.

“How’s business lately now that the weather’s turned?” Reed deflected.

“Business is always good. Spring, summer, fall, winter. Good weather, bad weather. Recession, depression. Internet bubble burst. House market crash. September eleven. Always customers. You know why?” Yolni stared and waited, demanding Reed play along.

“Why?”

“Remarkable food. Excellent potatoes. You refund my deposit?”

“Well, no. I mean, I’ll have to take a look.”

“Oh, I will show you. I am happy to show you. Come!”

Story: Real Mountain Bluff

Real Mountain Bluff by Anne Feher

Story #4 for Lindsay Sproul

Howdy wondered on the train back to Manhattan if the animals in the valley could still smell them where she and Indra had slept. Overnight their bodies had made an impression in the earth. She saw it when they were folding the blanket together, Indra bringing two corners of it toward her with his hands, which were big and thick, tan on one side, pale on the palms. They were rough hands, strong from working his neighbor’s landscapes since he was twelve. They reminded her a little of her father, whose wrinkles were permanently lined with dirt, only Indra hadn’t scared her at all.

As the trained pulled back east and picked up speed, Howdy tried not to think of her father or of Indra or how her checkered quilt was covered with dust from the mountain floor. It would go straight in the wash, she decided.

A whole night lying on the ground had left her sore, and so had having sex with a man again, one like Indra. She laughed at herself. Why had she picked out such a lumberjack? Out of the men she had talked and danced with at the bar in the quaint little town, which pretended to be a village stopped in time, why had she gone and chosen the Paul Bunyan of the group? She could have had the lighter wiry boy, but his lips were palsied on the left and she worried he might drool while kissing. Kissing was not the thing she was willing to chance.

She rolled her head from one side to the other, letting it pop, and leaned back into the lonely high-backed leather bench. Next to the tracks, the ground rushed along. She focused on the gravel blurring into a slurry, but it only unsettled her sour stomach. Instead she turned to the enormous river in the distance and counted three faraway boats with white sails. They looked like bath toys. At least, she thought, the apartment had a bath. That was a luxury in the sardine can city, at least amongst those in her income bracket. Everyone who visited made a point of what a blessing it was. Sometimes they would call her into the bathroom, and stand there waiting with their arms crossed. She would walk in, and they’d marvel for her, stricken with envy. “A bathtub! You didn’t tell me there was a bathtub!”

Howdy had once brought a girlfriend out this way, to the Adirondacks, so long ago that it made her feel old to remember, and on the train the girlfriend looked out the window and scoffed at the backs of the tree-lined giants rising out of the Hudson.

“See?” Howdy had asked. “Aren’t the mountains beautiful?”

“Those are bluffs, Howdy,” the girlfriend said.

“Aren’t they mountains?” Howdy asked, dumb as a fawn on newborn legs.

“No. Haven’t you ever seen a real mountain, like, Yellowstone? Yosemite?”

The girlfriend, her first one, had turned out all wrong. She insisted they sleep at one of the inns off Main Street. It was expensive and smelled like the potpourri her mother kept in a bowl on the bathroom sink. Howdy broke out in hives the first night from the linen spray, a tiny bottle of which was presented as a souvenir on the end table, after the girlfriend lavished the comforter with it. The second night, the trip ended with Howdy in a hospital bed the next town over. The girlfriend had insisted on a bowl of shrimp bisque for dinner, despite Howdy’s extreme shellfish allergy, which was so easily triggered that after one closed mouth kiss post-bisque, Howdy’s throat closed up.

Writer’s Block

Okay, the brief hiatus at Story Here! can’t really be blamed on writer’s block.

Like I said in my last post, I’ve been struggling with the story for Lindsay “about a mountain,” which was scheduled to be your next installment. See, Lindsay is this amazing writer. I met her at Beloit College, where we both studied fiction writing under Chris Fink (another amazing writer), and in workshop, her stories left me jealous, inspired and floored.

Beautiful Lindsay in Cold Spring, New York

Luckily she got up the nerve to talk to me one day, just a couple weeks before she graduated and moved back to the east coast. And do you know what she said?

She said she loved my stories the best, too. We were each other’s secret favorites that whole time.

The first day we spoke, the weather had turned suddenly warm after an accosting Wisconsin winter, and the snow in shock fell away from the tree limbs above us in wet clumps, smacking the sidewalks and melting fast. Birds were chirping furiously all around us where we had paused, unable to drop the conversation that had waited so long to happen. We were fast friends but there was no time in her last weeks at Beloit for us to really hang out.

Something to tide you over

I will be honest. The piece I’m working on now is for my best friend Lindsay, one of the best fiction writers I’ve ever read. She has influenced and inspired me over the years immensely, and so her story (about a mountain) is taking me a lot longer than I had planned.

But I want to post something. When her piece is ready, this excerpt may be a part of it. The story is something I worked on last year for months, feverishly, and I’ve got about thirty (not exaggerating) versions of it to pull from and puzzle together into something that she deserves. Someday I hope every one of you knows her name. She’s going to be famous. I am so lucky to be her friend and to have the honor of writing a story for her.

I’m going to get her full story posted tomorrow, but it might be a long one that requires multiple posts. Time will tell…

Here is something to tide you over. I’m sure you’re all just waiting at your computers on a Friday night with baited breath for this. Anyway, it’s more for me than it is for you. Plus, I promised you guys something. I don’t like breaking promises.

Anyway, here is the something.

---

There was a smoky look to the forest at dusk, with the light of the sun filtering weakly through the heights of vegetation. If I’d been there in Cold Spring with Glory May instead of Nathan, I might have thought it romantic, but I felt pathetically uneasy in the half-dark. As we crunched across the forest bed, I imagined our feet disturbing a hidden multitude of rodent skeletons and insects clinging to the undersides of leaves from last fall. I sweated through my t-shirt. It was awfully humid for September.

Nathan was brave, as usual. He didn’t even use his flashlight.

“Why the light?” he asked me. “Sun’s still up.”

It was. We moved slowly like weighted divers traipsing seabed in the waning sunlight blinking through the leaves stories above us. I widened my eyes to let light into my pupils, but still, I could not make out the shape of things past the nearest tree trunks.

We trekked toward a clearing where a white boulder, the only object around that reflected light, sat lonely in its glow.

The eyelids of the forest paused, half-lidded, holding the space around us hostage to the lucid dreams of almost-sleep. In the gaps between our steps, it was so quiet, a stillness I remembered from my California trip, when Glory May and I hiked alone through the Sequoia National Forest. I felt that same fear. At any moment, the silence would break under the crash of some cataclysmic washout, the approaching din of which I thought I could hear thundering softly through hundreds of trees wide as the bodies of cars, tall as sky. They were all going to come down on top of us, fallen by wave or wind or fiery surge, and we would have had to die that lonely way, just me and the girl I loved.

Nathan and I both paused and, looking up from our feet to the murky land before us, we saw a beastly shadow standing still and tall, watching us. Nathan’s hands grabbed my arm for a moment, then fell away.

“It’s a buck!” Nathan yelled a whisper.

He was right again. I could just make out the sharp ends of his horns.

“Turn that off,” he whispered, facing the shadow, still except for his hand waving back at me.

I looked at the circle of light on the ground that came from out the palm of my hand. What was that? Oh, yes, I remembered. The flashlight. I flipped the switch. My heart beat in my temples. I was afraid I’d be charged by the buck, which looked more moose to me. Were there moose in Cold Spring, New York, here on the banks of the Hudson? Or bear or mountain lion?

These are bluffs, I reminded myself. These are just some stupid bluffs, not mountains like Nathan had written in his letters, and there’s a deer about to run out onto the blacktop two-lane road at the edge of the forest preserve, just twenty yards behind us, and farther down the trail are bees and flies buzzing around garbage cans at a group of picnic tables.

Nathan was at the base of the boulder, which his sneaker soles gripped as he deftly climbed to the top. I stood absolutely still, sweating. Why was it still so humid? At home, where my car sat waiting for my ass to fall back into the usual work commute, in a suburb that clung safely to the side of the Fox River, the air had already grown chilly, the way it should this time of year.

Some Gentle Poems by Eugenio Montale

It’s wake-up time…

…with poems by Eugenio Montale, a poet able to turn any subject into a dreamy, gentle creek of words best dipped into feet first in the early morning.

later today, expect my next assignment with the prompt from lindsay sproul: “about a mountain.”

enjoy your morning. check back this afternoon.

xo – anne feher

---

 

MAYBE ONE MORNING

Maybe one morning, walking in dry, glassy air,

I’ll turn, and see the miracle occur:

nothing at my back, the void

behind me, with a drunkard’s terror.

 

Then, as if on a screen, trees houses hills

will suddenly collect for the usual illusion.

But it will be too late: and I’ll walk on silent

among the men who don’t look back, with my secret.

---

I THINK ABOUT YOUR SMILE

to K.

I think about your smile, my clear pool,

a chance encounter on a rocky shingle,

hand-mirror where ivy studies flower-clusters;

everything hugged by a quiet white sky.

 

I remember that much; I can’t tell, oh far one,

if your face expresses a candid simple soul

or if you’re the kind of vagrant, hurt by the world,

who lugs her suffering everywhere, a talisman.

 

But I can say this: that your image in my mind

submerges my wilder fears in a swell of calm,

and your look inhabits, slyly, my gray memory

sharp as the top of a healthy young palm.

Story: Of Knowing Nothing

At his desk, Howard had very few personal effects displayed. He liked to keep it neat. Even the dozen or so neon-green sticky notes that served as his endless to-do list were lined up along the sides of his monitor, not one off kilter. On the right hand side of the desk sat two framed photos: one of his sister Ashley strapped in a harness as she climbed the right side of a rock formation in Sedona, and the other of his parents with their arms around each other, smiling, before the green backdrop of Banff National Park.

These were the pieces of his life he was willing to show his coworkers. The speculation about his family and his life outside work ended there. His family liked the outdoors. Howard was an outdoorsy type. Howard was organized and clear-minded. Howard had no secrets.

But inside the desk drawer where he threw his keys and wallet each morning before setting to work was a piece of lined paper, torn sloppily from its notebook so that the little rings around the spiral binding frayed out down its side. He did not know why he kept the note, which a girl, Mary, had written him in high school nearly ten years ago. He did not try to understand. It was a little thing. When he got to work early or stayed late to finish an assignment, he would slide open the drawer slowly, quietly, and reach inside to the back corner to retrieve the folded paper. It had stiffened and yellowed over time and felt fragile. Always sure to first wash his hands, he handled it, this delicate artifact, gently.

On a Friday when they had all met their goals for the week, management, in their pious way, sent an email blessing of a three o’clock release. At a quarter to three, Howard heard the bodies of his coworkers shifting around in their seats. He sat still, facing his computer screen, pretending to read an angry email from a client written in all capital letters, scrolling up and down, up and down, in the hopes that no one would ask him to go to the bar.

He had tried that before a few times, but he’d just let them get him drunk on Irish Car Bombs—a half pint of Guinness and a shot of Bailey’s to drop into the glass. It made him uncomfortable, having to participate in the act. Everyone at the same time had to drop the shot glass into the Guinness and, for some reason he didn’t think anyone knew, they had to slap the bottom of the glass on the table before taking the whole foamy mess down in a few gulps. This performance resulted in a sticky sheen across the entire table so that he couldn’t comfortably rest his arms, and left him unable to take his eyes off the receptionist’s uneven breasts, a trait he found endearing. By the end of those happy hours, they were all hugging on each other, laughing at the bad music on the juke box, and excitedly planning canoe trips once the weather turned reasonable.

It had turned to spring, and no one had gone canoeing. He was staring out the window at his favorite tree, where two fat squirrels scurried up and down the trunk, chattering away, chasing each other across the branches, when a piece of crumpled paper hit him on the cheek. It was Frank, the one who was most interested in prying Howard from his chair every Friday. He unwrinkled the paper. It said:

Dude!!! Come out. I bet you 20 bucks we can get Holly to sing the national anthem at karaoke. I bet you 40 bucks we get her drunk enough to tango. I bet you 100 bucks she lets it out that she’s got a boner for you.

Peccadillo by Mary Ruefle, a Poem for Love on a Sunday

Sunday morning inspiration…

Beware, ye bitter ones.

Pulled from Mary Ruefle's beautiful website, maryruefle.com

 

Enjoy your morning, my loves, and the evening. Don’t let it pass unenjoyed.

xo,

anne feher

Peccadillo

I love you like pink tiles and white cigarettes

and the brown underfeathers of a fat hen

and I do not even know you, you are like my toes

which I have never seen because I was born in shoes

whose laces continually come undone

so I am forever stooped and while I am down

I gather for you all the porcupine quills

left by the rain, my collection is formidable

but not for sale, and when I am up

I make for you color enlargements of the day:

look at this cloud will you, until you arrive

I will not know if the rain fell beautifully

or dripped continually, I assume by now

my commitment to you is transparent

and that you accept the topographical error

in the depths of my atlas,

still there will be many mysteries between us,

you were not exactly here when my alarm clock was stolen

or my cat sold without my permission,

but those days are behind me,

after a life of expensive moments devoured by fogs

they mowed the fields into haystacks,

they covered the haystacks with white shrouds

and rolled them off to the side like stones

and brought in the trembling lights of a carnival

where it is my one desire

we will hang together upside down on the wheel

while the crowd gasps as you kiss me.

Mary Ruefle

buy her book: Indeed I Was Please With The World

Short Story: A Mind Made Up

Crane sat her mother down at the table, intending to make public the secret she’d been keeping for a year. On her way home from work, she’d bought her mother’s favorite pizza from Fox’s, the thin and greasy type. Before she began the well-rehearsed speech, she set it in front of them, tore open the paper in which it was wrapped, and noticed her hands were perfectly calm.

“Gretchen,” she said to her mother. “Tell me the story of why you named me Crane.”

Her mother blinked at her and shook her head. She had dyed her hair that day and did a sloppy job of it. The reddish paste had stained patches of her pasty skin around the crown of her head. Her hair was frazzled, thinning and dull. It used to be full. It once shined in the light and was highly manageable.

“Where are the napkins?” Gretchen asked.

Crane sighed. She stood up and headed to the cabinet above the sink. When she was little, her mother had told her the story just a handful of times. Her childhood was hard, something like Cinderella’s sans the step-family, but at least then she had felt her mother loved her the way other mothers loved their children.

Out the window over the sink, their backyard was a mess of tree limbs and last fall’s leaves. Spring was finally coming, though she knew the tricks of a Chicagoland change of season. A burst of warmth would hug away some of the grayness, convincing parents to send their children off to school without coats, and daffodils to unwittingly sprout along the sides of houses, so ready to be alive again. But Crane knew—her mother had taught her long ago—not to let this weather fool her. Give it the weekend and the frost would be back, wringing its white knuckles around the plant stems; the kids would go back inside to their televisions, and the parents would be seen cursing a fresh snowfall in the early morning, not having allowed themselves enough time to scrape their windshields.

Crane was born during that in-between time of winter and spring. The story went that while Crane was still a tenant of Gretchen’s belly, her husband, who would be taken from Crane by a buildup of plaque in a major artery before she could ever know him, took her to go walking along the hoar frosted grounds of the Little Red Schoolhouse, a nature center and preserve near where they lived.

Your father took my hand and said, We should all be so lucky as the birds. And then he pointed out to the water at a tall, skinny bird that was all white with a red crown. It was a crane, just standing still in the shallow water, paying us no attention at all. He said, Those things are endangered now, but do they quit? Do they scatter around, afraid to keep flying south and north again? No. They have wings, damn it, and they’ll use them.

That February, her father died in his sleep. When Crane was born in May, she was a long and thin baby with wisps of auburn hair. Gretchen’s mind was made up right there, at first sight.

Wake up, kitties.

It’s okay. We can do it together.

me, you, and annie dillard. here is your thursday morning inspiration. enjoy. don’t forget to share.

oh, and check back later for a surprise about finally being free.

“We could, you know. We can live any way we want.

People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience–even of silence–by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting….

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”

– Teaching a Stone to Talk

Thoughts on Grandma Genevieve Donnelly

 

Grandma Genevieve Donnelly holding her granddaughter Genevieve Feher

Dear Readers,

Below is the eulogy I was given the honor to read at Grandma’s wake in Washington, Illinois on March 11th, 2011. As those who knew Gram will agree, she lived life determinedly, allowing very little to stand in the way of enjoying the later decades of her life. She lived on her own and with surprising strength and stamina until the age of 91.

I am posting the eulogy for a few reasons.

First, it’s all I’ve written since my last update and I feel I owe you, my small but dear audience, a fresh piece of writing. Secondly, there is a section from one of my favorite books excerpted at the end of the eulogy that is some of the best advice on living for the present, and how best to do so, I have ever read. But last and most importantly, this for the sake of Gram and her loved ones, so that we might have the chance, if ever we wish, to easily go back, read and remember her. Especially her grandchildren.

Maybe this is more for myself. Maybe it is because the reading was a bit hard to understand as I wept through the majority of it. But, my family, this is truly for you. Let’s try to live as long and with as much conviction as she did. I love you all.

Rest, Gram.

— Anne Feher

My most vivid, happy memories of Grandma come from way back when I was still her youngest grandchild. During summer break, she would kindly take us kids off our parents’ hands for days and sometimes weeks at a time, and we were glad to go. She had cable TV. She had reserves of Lucky Charms and vanilla ice cream and hot dogs, and she had piles of costume jewelry – gaudy necklaces that my sister and I would drape around our necks and earrings we would clip-on until their heaviness hurt.

But maybe what I remember best and most gratefully are the books. When she was not preparing food for us or out renting us our nightly movie, she was reading. She could read and read, devouring the thickest novels I’d ever seen in a matter of days, sometimes just one day.

Grandma did not talk too much about the books she read, but she did encourage me to read – first, by the mere fact that I saw just how much she enjoyed it, how important they seemed to her; and second, because she would take me to the Washington library and let me get as many books as I wanted, even if I could never read all of them by the time we had to go back home.

With all this consumption of the written word at a young age, I became a writer. Writing is all I have and it is all I want.

That is why when I was given the honor to read for her here today, my first instinct was to pick up a book, any one of the dozens I have cramped in my little room at my parents’ house, and find some inspiration.

Something divine led my hand to reach out and grab The Inland Island, a book of gorgeous descriptions of nature’s changes, which author Josephine Johnson divided into the twelve months. I turned to the essay on May, because Grandma’s birthday was May 3rd. Mostly, it is about birds and worms, but then, just as I was about to give up and try Annie Dillard instead, this paragraph reached out to me, grabbed me back, and said, Here is the perfect thing.

I’ll read it for you now, and for Grandma, as my last thank you to a woman who was so kind, generous, strong, and loving.

Warm days come off and on in May. Islands in the ocean. The great rose fountain blooms with small sweet flowers. Warm heavenly sweetness in which one drifts, not drowning. Nostalgia comes. A sadness for all the lost, the unreturning summers of childhood. The cooing of the doves and the scent of roses brings it on. It’s sharp and sweet. It stabs into the heart. Tears come for all the unreturning dead. For the dear aunts; for their love, for the days of summer, the long warm days of roses that would return each year, that would return—that as far as we dumb little kids could see, would return forever and ever. Aunt Mary… Aunt Edith… Aunt Elizabeth… Aunt Alice, oh, especially Aunt Alice. Why isn’t there a heaven for such people—some reward for lovely lives, for kindness beyond imagining; some compensation for the long sickness and the long death? There’s no Oakland, no family home anymore. Only the cemetery, Oakhill. So snap to it and appreciate the living. Live the summers now. That’s all you’ll ever have. They’re all anybody will ever have. Wipe the fog off your glasses and you’ll see the living people around. This is their now. This is all there is. Be kind now.

Johnson, Josephine. The Inland Island, 1969. Simon and Schuster. New York, New York.