A Message

This message is for Grandaddy: My other blog is here at BiblioAddict.  See you there!

Recommendation Letter: A Template

I’ve been a busy bee lately (though not as busy as I should’ve been) trying to get off my recommendation letters for graduate school before the deadline. It’s gotten so bad that I have to draft one of my recommendation letters myself (the recommender is too busy and I’m too impatient). I hate writing these things myself, which is why when I stumbled across this little gem, I had to chuckle:

Dear _________,

I have had the pleasure of knowing Insert Name Here for X Years/Months/Days/Brief E-mail Correspondence, and I can say with conviction that he/she possesses a unique talent. Unique talent and rare gifts. Yes, Insert Name Here has these in abundance. However, it should be noted that he/she wields these as an elderly man wields a sword, modestly. Not to say that Insert Name Here does not enjoy extraordinary confidence, of the variety shared by dictators (benevolent ones) or someone undergoing a manic episode. Insert Name Here, a modest dictator, benevolently talented.

I recall a specific occasion when Insert Name Here utilized a special quality in a rarely gifted way. Luckily, this is just what I imagine you’re looking for. It is fortuitous for a specially-gifted unique rarity to find its way to an institution such as yours.

Let me speak for a moment about character. Very strong.

That’s about all I have to say on this matter. Insert Your Name Here has actually written this entire document, though I have requested to edit it, so as to show my position of authority. “Specially-gifted unique rarity,” that’s all me. A shame really that someone in my position would have to write letters of recommendation. All part of the circle of life, to quote the film, if I may.

I thought forcing Insert Your Name Here to write this would impede his/her efforts. No such luck. There’s some perseverance. It’s not like I don’t want you to accept Insert Name Here. Rather, I want it in the same way I desire world peace or a perfect bowling score: vaguely. Therefore, it is with a genuine sense of indifference that I request you grant him/her admission/acceptance/parole.

Best,
Recommender

By Ethan Bernard at Yankee Pot Roast.

Spirit

Part 1:

I can’t shake the feeling that this house in haunted.  Recently, I’ve felt something breathing down the back of my neck when I stand at the kitchen sink with my morning cup of coffee, or when I sit down with cup of tea and a newspaper in the afternoon, or when I undress next to the bathtub in the evening.  On occasion, I’ve sensed movement hovering in the corner of my eye, which disappears as soon I turn to catch it. I know there is nothing there but then, I know something is. Seeing is not always believing – sometimes sensing is enough.

My therapist thinks I’m lonely. She theorizes that perhaps the apparition I’ve yet to actually see is a disturbed adult’s version of an imaginary friend. But I never said it was a friendly ghost. I’m not living with Casper for Christ’s sake. Casper wouldn’t haunt your dreams with nightmares. Casper wouldn’t wake you in the middle of the night at 3:00 am, with your heart in your throat and sweat stinging your eyes. I’ve never heard of ghosts infiltrating their victims’ dreams, but I’ve never had nightmares every night before either. Not even when I was a child afraid of the menacing darkness beneath my bed. Of the nightmares, the only things I remember is that it’s the same nightmare every night, and that it involves a lot of screaming. The details are negligible.

My best friend thinks I should buy a Weegie board – that I should attempt to commune with the spirit to see what it wants before it becomes hostile. “We could do it together. Like Michelle Phiffer in that movie What Lies Beneath,” she says. I remember that movie: a second-rate homage to Psycho starring an unconvincingly murderous Harrison Ford. When I point out that Phiffer’s experience with the Weegie board didn’t exactly turn out well, Shauna rolls her eyes and points out, “It’s only a movie.” Her logic is undeniable.

It is only a movie. My front door hasn’t opened of its own volition, I haven’t seen ghosts in the bathtub water, nor has my radio turned on by itself. There was a time, once, when my remote control wasn’t where I’d left it (it was inexplicably in the bathroom medicine cabinet), but I’m convinced that had more to do with my forgetful negligence than with a ghost who likes to play ‘hide the remote’. There was also another time when I returned to the kitchen to find a pot of rice I’d left simmering on the stove turned up on high. The water had evaporated, the rice had turned into a yellow mush, and a black encrustation of burned rice had coated the inside of the pot. Again, I attribute the incident more to my horrible cooking skills than I do to a ghost trying to ruin my dinner. I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that night.

My neighbor’s cat Bobo hates my house. I’ve never been particularly fond of cats, but this one is more of a kitten than a fully grown cat. In the mornings, I can hear the jingles from the bell tied around its neck, harmonizing with the morning bird chatter, as it plays with its cat toys and chases flies. One day, he got tangled in the bushes that separate my backyard from my neighbor’s. I was standing in the kitchen doorway, sipping on my cup of coffee, thinking of a story I’d been tossing around, when I heard a soft mewling. It was so soft that I thought I’d imagined it at first. But then it came again, a soft meow sneaking into the morning quiet.

I put my coffee on the table and went to investigate. I started on the right side of the yard and worked my way around, investigating the bushes. I found him clawing at the dirt, his back foot stuck in the bramble. How he managed to get stuck, I’ll never know but he made such a pitiful picture, that I laughed and felt sorry for him at the same time. His eyes glowed in the darkness of the bushes, and I think he considered lashing out when I reached for him, but in as much as cats do so, he rethought it and meowed again.

I made some cooing noises, pulled the bushes apart with one hand, and snatched him up with the other before he could run off. He made a small bundle of trembling orange fur in my arms, and he let out a high-pitched yap when I adjusted him in my arms – he’d gotten a minor cut on his paw. “Aw, poor baby,” I mumbled as I walked back toward the house, thinking I’d rinse his foot before returning him to his owner.

His head was hidden against my chest, but as I started up the porch steps, Bobo whipped his head around and stared with narrowed eyes at the open doorway. When I stepped onto the porch, his fur stood up and, for an instant, I thought the pictures one often sees during Halloween of a frightened cat with its fur stiffly standing up wasn’t an exaggeration. I stopped before the doorway, wondering if he’d calm down. The more we stood there, however, the stiffer his fur got, and a growl began as a rumble in his chest before it came barreling out of its mouth. Grrrrr.

“What, boy?” I asked. “What is it?” From our position at the doorway, I could see through the kitchen, all the way down the hallway to the front door; I didn’t see anything but for the shadows which seemed to cling to the walls and to the corners no matter how much sunlight I let in. But, unless he was afraid of the dark (and who’d ever heard of that?), Bobo saw something. He was glaring at the doorway as if a particularly large dog was waiting on the other side. When I made to make the final step fully into the house, he dug his claws into my palms and let out sharp hiss. With a screech of pain, I dropped him and, in an orange blur, he ran across the lawn, safely through the bushes, and across his own yard in an instant. I guess his foot wasn’t as bad as I’d thought.

I watched him as he crossed the lawn, before I went inside to treat my hands. The neighbor came by about an hour later asking if I knew what had happened to Bobo. After I told her and showed her my bandaged hands, she glared, pursed her lips and glanced at the dark hallway behind me. I invited her in, but she was no more inclined to come in than her cat had been.

“No thanks,” she said, rather brusquely before she stomped off to mend Bobo’s frightened nerves. That was two months ago. Whenever Bobo sees me now, he hisses as if I’ve somehow been contaminated by whatever is in my house.

For He So Loved the World

I found this story on my computer. This is one of those stories I wrote, and promptly forgot about. I remember, however, that I wrote this a couple of years ago, after hearing that a high school friend faced a situation similar to the one my protagonist faces. Except for a few minor edits, this is just as I found it.

– J.S. Peyton

He likes to walk when he talks. It was one of the first things I noticed about him. That and the fading platinum tooth on the right side of his mouth; then the navy suit that was too short in the arms and too long in the pants.

Of course, now as I watch him pace across our bedroom floor, foiled tooth gleaming in the forced ambiance of our bedroom light, he has on nothing but his boxers. His knees are knobby and rusty, his nipples hardened against the chill seeping through the plastic taped over our windows, and he’s saying, “…and Baby I swear it was the fucking voice of God. He said, he asked me, he said, ‘Do you believe in me? Do you believe that I can be your salvation, your staff of strength in your time of struggle?’”

His eyes begin to mist. It’s a manly mist. The off-white of his irises glaze without a single tear dropping and, in his emotional effort to believe that it really was the voice of God in his dream, his fists bawl – those wonderfully masculine hands that I admire so often out of the corner of my eye – and his throat convulses.

Watching him pace the floor, hard feet slapping against the scratchy rug, wanting to feel anything but emptiness I’m feeling, I force a reverent emotion into my heart – the same emotion I imagine the women throwing themselves to the ground in possessed convulsions of the spirit in church must feel. A mist too clouds my eyes.

But, engrossed within his own struggle, he continues, “…And, Baby do you know what I said? I looked into the face of God and I said…I said ‘No.’”

“You said ‘No’?”

Finally, he stops pacing and turns towards me. He’s not handsome. It’s the second thing I noticed about him; it always surprises me when I remember that it wasn’t the first. Especially since now it’s always the first thing I think every time I see his face, as if it were for the first time. He’s not handsome. His eyes are too large. Sometimes they appear lidless which lends an ever-present expression of surprise to his face. By contrast, his nose and mouth are too small and mashed together, as if, having expended so much energy on his eyes, the Creator tired of this particular project and threw the rest on quickly and haphazardly.

Now he licks his lips which are, for all their smallness, still fuller than mine, before he says, “I said ‘No.’ And then He left me. One minute He’s there and the next minute He’s gone.”

He walks to my side of the bed, kneels down, and takes my hands. “And I have never felt so alone in my life. Then I woke up and the first thing I saw was you.”

This isn’t entirely true. Twenty minutes ago, I was woken by the rumbling in our bed. I turned over and shook his sweaty shoulder until he popped up with a shout. The first thing he saw was probably the wall and the old picture of a Black Jesus his mother banished to the attic along with us. Then there was me.

We stay that way for a while: me trying to try not to cry and him watching me, looking earnest and surprised, until he says, “I believe in you. Sometimes I don’t know about God, but I know that you can be my strength in my time of struggle.” Now he puts a beautiful, quietly shaking hand to my face. “Don’t leave me Baby. Please don’t leave me.”

Looking into the beautiful, unhandsome face I wanted to love with all my heart, I quieted the women in my head, the ones with the snapping fingers, the twisting necks, and the quick retorts and said, “I won’t.”

When it came to dealing with men, there were only two unshakable rules in the oral doctrine my mother handed down to me: never let a man disrespect you, and always stand by your man. At the time, I didn’t know that I would ever find myself in a situation that put the two in contradiction. What does a woman do if by standing by her man she is allowing him to disrespect her? Which is more important: her pride and self-respect, or loyalty to the man she’s pledged to love?

I don’t know, which is why I’m standing in the kitchen that’s not my kitchen thinking about things I never thought I’d have to think about.

“You ready?” his mother asks as she walks in the kitchen.

“Yes, mam,” I say. I turn away from my study of the backyard, which is actually just a piece of grass to examine my two-month-old stepmother. She doesn’t look at all like my husband. She’s light where my husband is dark; she’s short but sturdy in the way of old black women, where my husband is tall and lanky; her eyes are the color of hazelnuts where my husband’s are commonly dark brown. In fact, the only feature I recognize of the man I married can be found in her small but full mouth.

I imagine that once, a long time ago, before life got the better of her she had been a beautiful woman who looked as if she’d have the gift of laughter ready to burst from her bosom at any moment. Now, as always, her mouth is squeezed into a perpetual look of displeasure and eyes which should have been soft and glittering are hard, tired, and dull. I wonder if someday I’ll eyes like that.

I pour my tasteless tea down the drain, grab my purse and bible, and follow her out to the car.

I always feel underdressed when I go to church now. Until about two years ago, my own mother and I used to attend a nondenominational church on the other side of town. Their church policy was that you dressed up for God. Every Sunday, women would wear their best dresses, and men would wear their best suit even if it was the only suit they had. After service, it would look as if a fashion show was taking place in front of St. Joseph’s Episcopalian Church of the First Holy Order on Luther and Bolemont St. It was as if we thought God would only rain his blessings upon the best dressed. It may have been a little absurd, but every Sunday morning I went to church dressed to the nines. My mother would say, “If you can dress up to meet a man for dinner on Saturday night, then you can dress up to meet the man on Sunday morning.”

Things are a little different at Mt. Zion Baptist Church on Lowell Ave. Here, they dress down for God. Instead of the glowing colors and sweeping skirts and dresses of St. Joseph’s Episcopalian Church of the First Holy Order, women of the Mt. Zion Baptist Church dress in dull brown, gray, and black dresses that drag rather than sweep. They wear big, floppy hats which hide their faces and flat shoes that are so soft you’d think they were afraid of disturbing God’s sleep.

After roughly three months of attendance, I still don’t know everyone’s name. At embarrassing times, I find myself reaching for the name of the preacher. The only people I do recognize are the ones in the choir with whom my husband, as the church pianist, practices every Tuesday evening. I wave to him as we find our seat and he smiles and waves back. I notice two women on our right give each other knowing looks at our display as if they already know but I ignore them and sit down.

The preacher, a small brown skinned man, who looks even smaller when draped in his elaborate blue robe, advances to the podium and the sermon begins. I don’t pay very much attention to the ceremony. I’m too busy counting the seconds until it’s time for confession. Never before have I wished to be a Catholic more than I have now. When did God decide it okay for us to bare our sins and souls to a church full of people?

Soon the sermon is over and we have sung until at least one person caught the Holy Spirit and passed out. I know that “now is the time, amen, when the spirit should come upon us all and urge us to confess our sins so that we may be cleansed. Amen.”

The church quiets while at the same time the music gets louder with my husband banging on the piano. Sister Seagle jumps up and confesses that she’d just been diagnosed with Diabetes and wanted everyone to pray for her. Brother Campbell confesses to being arrested for a DUI last weekend, and Sister Lloyd confesses to writing a bad check to her hairdresser.

After the tenth confession, I realize I’m holding my breath. The Spirit tells me it’s my turn to confess a sin that’s not really my sin. The church is waiting. God is waiting. I will my legs to move and my vocals to work but I feel a long skirt brush my leg. My stepmother has stood up.

“My son has just found out that he’s impregnated a woman that is not his wife,” she says. “Pray for us.”

An Evening With Apple

She was a writer.

“I don’t care about the computer,” she was telling the technician, “Just save my book.” It wasn’t clear whether the technician heard her. Besides the store noise behind us, an odd beeping sound was coming from her computer at which the technician was busily making faces. I knew that look. It was the look a technician gives your electronic device when he knows there’s likely nothing he can do to fix it. It’s the look that says you’re screwed.

Her boyfriend was there patting her on the back, lending moral support. “It’s alright,” he said into her hair.

The technician raised his eyebrows. ‘Well…”

I don’t know about her, but my heart dropped. This wasn’t going to be good.

“I looks as if your hard drive is completely fried. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get in and retrieve your work.”

Devastation.

“Not anything?” the girl asked. She was being a whole lot braver than I would have. If I’d had a book in the works (which I don’t and probably should), I’d have been in hysterics. Once, I lost a five page term paper to a malfunctioning PC. Alerted by the sound of my screech of horror and red-hot anger, my roommate rushed into my room seconds later to find me dangling my computer out of the tenth floor window, threatening to throw it down. I didn’t kill it that night, but I wanted to. Oh, did I want to.

“Well, how big is your book file?” the tech asked.

“I don’t know. Two hundred pages.” Two hundred pages? Yeah, all those nice pretty new iPhones would have been in mortal danger of my anger had that been me. I like to break stuff when I’m angry. She took it rather nicely. She clutched her stomach, frowned, and looked as if she was on the verge of tears. “And my poetry….” she whispered. “What about my poetry?”

The tech smiled. He dealt with this kind of stuff everyday. “I had a lady come in here once. She was two pages away from finishing her Master’s dissertation when her computer just crashed on her. I couldn’t even turn it on. There was just nothing,” he recounted some time later with an equanimous smile. Right now, though, he’s telling the girl, “Hold off on the tears now. We might be able to save something.”

They do. The girl buys an external hard drive onto which they download her two hundred page book, her poems, and some short stories she’d written in the past few years. While they’re doing that, I notice she has a personal statement for Emerson College. Damn it, could she be applying to the same school I am? This girl, with her 200 page book, her many folders of poetry and short stories, and her excerpts from the book she’s assisting someone else to write is my competition? Maybe I should have crossed my fingers in the hope the technician would have told her nothing was salvageable.

But I could never wish such horror on a fellow writer. I consider asking her about Emerson, but then I’d have to admit that I was spying on her computer while the tech worked on it. I also think about saying something like, “Hey, I’m a writer too. I feel your pain.” But, she has enough worries, and I didn’t quite like the way she turned her nose up at the book I was reading – Neil Gaiman’s FRAGILE THINGS. She covered it well, but not quickly enough.

So I say nothing, and worry about my own computer. My own technician is a nice, kindly soul who jokes with me about the question I’ve written above my laptop screen: “What’s important?” While my computer is fixing itself – a messed up hard drive that I have no idea how I broke – we watch the other girl and computer problems. After the girl’s tech tells her that her hard drive is busted and that she’ll have to send out for a new one, my tech – that genius, that kind and gentle soul – says to me, “Don’t worry. Your problem isn’t nearly so bad.”

Words to a sorry writer’s ear.