Mario Muscar

12 Days of Fiction

 

I had an idea. An idea that would make the perfect gift for people this holiday season. Story. Creation. Narrative. All for free.

 

So I contacted some people I know who I thought might make a good fit. People who have a creative streak and have something to say. People from different backgrounds and different ways of expressing themselves.

 

Each day for 12 days, new material will be released. It's our gift to you. Happy Holidays. Celebrate story.

 

 

 

Gravity

by Trina Sutton 

 

When I was eight years old, I thought everyone in the world went to their own little white-washed church on Sunday morning and belted out “Rock-a my soul in the bosom of Abraham, O, rock-a my soul” with such enthusiasm that it made God grin in heaven. When I was eight years old, the limits of my Grandfather’s fruit orchards were boundless and I felt I could walk and walk until I fell right over and I’d still not be somewhere where I didn’t belong, that didn’t belong to me and my granddaddy.

 

I didn’t know that hatred has a language of its own when I was eight years old. One summer night my brothers and the boys who lived half-a-mile down the hollow were playing a spirited game of tag that involved chanting “Smear the Queer” while our parents played spades at the kitchen table. The boys were all seven, eight, nine years old, and they dodged and slid and raced around the grape arbor and under the plum tree, hollering and shrieking while the lightning bugs flashed little exclamation points in the dark. The quick thwack of the screen door was the only warning they got before our parents descended upon the innocent game like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

 

There was a scramble to corral the boys and then my mother bent my brothers over the porch rail and spanked their bottoms with a wooden paddle until they squirmed and wailed. The fathers stood in the shadowy background, arms crossed tightly over their chests, while the neighbor boys’ mother vehemently reprimanded them. “We don’t use that word! Do you understand?” she shouted. The boys knew better than to answer; bewildered, they dug their toes into the soft dust in the driveway and tried to look penitent.

 

I don’t think any of us understood until years later why none of us were to ever play that game again, or why our parents were upset. If there were any gay people in the area, we children certainly knew nothing about it. We had all witnessed bulls mounting cows in the fields, but the nuances of human sexuality were not something that our parents were comfortable discussing with us.

 

When I was eight, I felt as if I had my own gravitational pull and that the whole world revolved around my family and community. I didn’t yet understand that all of humanity didn’t conform to our implicit beliefs and ideals and philosophies. No one ever talked about why we were who we were, or why we believed what we did. We just were, we just did, and, it was assumed, everyone else in the world felt the same way about things. The biggest differences between us and our neighbors were in the recipes that were handed down from their German and Polish and Italian great-grandparents. In Sunday school, we learned that it didn’t matter whether they were red, yellow, black or white, Jesus loved all the children of the world, and that we should love everybody, too. I was twenty years old before it occurred to me to question the validity of my belief system.

 

I try to explain this to my boyfriend, Dante, who I am taking home for the first time. He doesn’t seem to be nervous at all. I have assured him that he has nothing to fear, that my family will love him. For months, I have been casually telling my mother about all the things he does to take my breath away, and repeating all of the poetic compliments he pays me. I have been suggesting to my brothers that he would enjoy going mountain biking or rock-climbing, and mentioning to my garden- and bird-feeder obsessed father that Dante amazes me with his incredibly detailed knowledge of flora and fauna. They will love him.

 

How can I be so sure? he wants to know. Have any of them ever actually known a black man? He just wants to know what he is getting into, and I feel anxious because I don’t know. Although I have told my family about Dante’s accent and that he’s from the Caribbean, I haven’t explicitly told them that he is black, choosing instead to believe that their grasp of common knowledge will lead them to the correct conclusion. I suspect that my parents might take issue with his race and try to disguise it as concern. They’ll say that other people won’t understand and they want my path through the world to be free of hurtful things, but another worse suspicion has crept in around the edge of this fear. What if they have an issue and don’t tell me? The idea is so awful that I have refused to make any room for it in my head.

 

Dante says he noticed me first, but I cannot imagine that this is true. He has a way of filling up space all the way to the walls and the ceiling and when we are outside, you can tell he is a part of the whole wide world, that if you could float up into the sky you’d still be able to feel him up there with the birds. He is that big, and when our hands touched one day as the F Train rounded a curve beneath Lexington Avenue and 57th Street, I didn’t think there was enough room in the car for all of him and my racing heart. He smiled down at me and spoke my name in a voice as warm as steel drums and white sand. “You were in my Composition class last semester. I thought the city had swallowed you up and I would never see you again,” he said. When he told me he couldn’t let me slip away again, I felt giddy.

 

By this time, I’d been living in New York City long enough to understand that my gravitational pull was limited and that other people thought I was as foreign as I thought they were. No traffic lights in your town? The closest Starbucks is an hour away? You know how to milk a cow?!?! Can you play the banjo? The questions were amusing and mostly easy to answer until a Jamaican girl in my Latin American History class asked me if I knew anyone in the Klan. I was astonished. No! I told her. What kind of backward redneck place did she think I came from? I hadn’t even heard anyone use the N-word until I moved to New York City. And it was true.

 

Meeting Dante sent everything I thought I knew spinning into another realm. “Just because you haven’t noticed it yet doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” he told me.

 

“Yes,” I argued, “but I think I would notice if I had grown up with hatred or fear or animosity.” I told him I had come to think of it as a good thing that there had been no discussion of race or religion or sexual orientation at the supper table. It meant that I was free to meet the world unencumbered by other people’s beliefs and opinions. But you’ve got to talk about things, he told me.

 

So we talked about things. I told him about the first time I saw someone who didn’t look like me. I was about five years old and the whole family had gone to Cleveland to see my aunt and uncle. On the way home, we stopped at a Dairy Queen. My mother told us to sit down and not to move and then she went to the counter to order ice cream cones for everyone. At a table near the window two little black girls dressed in lace and frills were sitting with their parents. They dipped their red plastic spoons into hot fudge sundaes with the delicateness of kittens lapping up milk. Their almond shaped eyes and their smiles animated everything they said. It was their hair, though, that I couldn’t stop staring at. I sat there on my knees peering at them over the back of my seat, thoroughly impressed by the tight braids plotted out in careful patterns on their heads, and the candy-colored balls on elastic bands that fastened them. I knew that if they shook their heads that the balls would clack against one another and I wanted badly to hear that sound.

 

My mother returned, carrying five ice cream cones with that particular deftness of balance reserved for mothers and cocktail waitresses. As soon as her hands were free, she tapped my head sharply and hissed, “Turn around! Stop staring!” Startled, I scrambled to obey. The odd timbre of her voice made me feel as if I was being admonished for a sin greater than rudeness.

 

“Why do you think it bothered your mother so much that you were staring at those little girls?” Dante asked.

 

“I don’t know,” I said. His question made me uncomfortable, as if answering it honestly would be a betrayal to my mother. “It just did.”

 

Dante looked at me for a long time and shook his head almost imperceptibly. “I love you, Sweetie,” he said, “and I know you love your mother. Nothing good in all of history – no moment of enlightenment – has ever crawled out of the darkness of denial. Ever. Don’t be afraid to shine a little light on it.”

 

“My mother is not a racist, Dante,” I told him. “I have never heard her say a hateful word about anyone.”

 

“You’re putting words in my mouth, Love,” he said. “Talking about race is complicated even if – maybe especially if – you’ve never known anyone who didn’t look, act, or think exactly like you do.”

 

Now, nearly a year later, we are driving a rental car out of the clamoring heat of the city and into the idling buzz of the countryside. I want Dante’s first impression of my childhood home to be favorable, so I have chosen to bring him home in June. The dust will not have risen to mute the bright, fresh green of the meadows and the trees; the streams will still be running cold and deep; all my favorite wildflowers, the rhododendron and wild roses and Turk’s Cap lilies and Queen Anne’s lace will be in bloom; the turbid humidity of late summer will not hover on the horizon, blurring the view from my mountaintop home. There is almost always a litter of mewling, tottering kittens under the front porch. It has always been my favorite time of the year.

 

I take the wheel an hour from home because I want Dante to be able to see everything. “It’s beautiful, Love,” he says. “Now I know why you were so homesick last summer. It’s spectacular.” We ride along with the windows rolled down and the radio turned low, breathing in the fresh air. I point out where my brother flipped the car into the creek, where we found the litter of baby skunks, where my best friend from elementary school grew up and the level field where we used to play softball and have church picnics. I tell my best stories and the idylls of my childhood rise up luminously around us.

 

“Oh, man. Look at that,” Dante says as we round a bend a mile and a half from home. Nearby, sunlight winks from the pond where my cousins and I used to capture tadpoles in cupped hands to feel them squiggle against our palms.

 

“Oh, yeah! The barn ad. Isn’t it great?” My eyes follow his pointing finger to a weathered grey barn, sagging at the rafters, standing about twenty feet from the edge of the road. There is a fresh coat of white paint on the broad side that faces us and the words “Join the National Alliance” have been stenciled in three-feet-high red letters above a toll-free number. Lower, at a height easily reached without a ladder, someone has spray painted “FUCK U, N.A. GET OUT!!”

 

“When I was little,” I say, “there used to be tons of those barns around here with Mail Pouch Tobacco ads painted on them. I guess since using tobacco is so un-PC these days, the company hasn’t bothered to maintain them. I think there’s still one down by Rock Creek, though. Some of the farmers around let politicians paint campaign signs on their barns during elections. It’s pretty crappy that somebody came along and sprayed profanity all over this one. Nobody around here would ever have done something like that when I was a kid.”

 

Dante’s gone quiet and I glance over at him. His jaw is clenched. “You think a barn ad for National Alliance is great?” he asks.

 

“It’s a barn ad. It’s a country billboard. What’s wrong with it?”

 

“Do you really not know that National Alliance is a white supremacist group? How can you not know that? You grew up running through these fields and climbing these trees. Whoever owns this land is your neighbor! Don’t you people ever talk to each other?”

 

We’ve reached the turn where the blacktop ends and I ease the car onto the dirt road that meanders through the land that my granddaddy’s granddaddy roamed as a child. The crash of Dante’s words and the chirping whirr of the cicadas are thick in my head; I know their mandibles are clamped tight to the green freshness of the sugar maple groves. I can hear them chomping away, draining the leaves of their sweetness. A three-legged dog rises up from the grass near the ditch. He chases the car for a little while, snapping and snarling at the tires until he is enveloped in a reddish-brown cloud. I reach for Dante’s hand, straighten out the fingers that are curled into a loose fist, rest my palm in his. I want to tell him not to worry, but I can’t. “Hurry,” I say. “Roll up the windows before the dust gets into everything.”