Short Story / Twilight
The north Texas winds are always meaner in the fall, bringing with them thoughts of tornadoes and the musk of the Mississippi. These winds rattle windows off farmhouse frames and spook cattle into believing in a fate worse than the slaughterhouse. These winds don’t care about man made dams or peeling farm stands; if they’re angry, they’ll bowl it all over and stretch it back to the dusty plain it used to be.
It’s these winds that’ll wake a man in the middle of the night and force him outside to look at the moon and wonder if it’s as bloodshot and violent somewhere he hasn’t escaped to yet. These winds have a habit of blowing folks back, stripping them down to their history with gusts of dirt and the debris of old habits and maiden names then leaving by morning, satisfied with the pools of blood growing larger from reopened scars.
Buck had promised the trip would go smoothly. He promised not to let himself tarnish under the oxidized winds of his old hometown; a promise made more to himself than his wife, Simone. She’d been against the trip in the first place, offering to book tickets to Tahiti or Denmark.
“Honey, it’s not that I don’t love your family. I do. Really. I just don’t see why we have to go down on the farm to see them. You know how bad my asthma is.”
“The air’ll be good for you then. It’s fresher in Hearne than anywhere else I know.”
“I like the air in LA just fine, Buck.”
“That’s probably why you have your asthma, you know. All that pollution. Roll down your window, just do it for a second. Smell that?”
“Smells like dung, Buck.”
Simone wasn’t made for this. She was the poster child for seven a.m. pots of coffee, crisp duvets suffocating 1,000 thread count linen sheets and one-a-day vitamins. She took calcium supplements because, even at the age of twenty-seven, she worried about osteoporosis and bone density loss and cancer, which she remedied with weekly lavender baths and twice-daily applications of SPF-45. She couldn’t figure out how it had happened. How she was half-naked, riding shotgun in his car at midnight, barreling down the highway and chasing a red harvest moon, wondering if Texas nighttimes were supposed to be this cold.
Her arm hung limply out the window, supported by the wind rushing under it, creeping up her sleeve as her hand moved slowly in half arced waves while she thought about the way her ring finger always bent at the will of her pinkie and if she remembered to pack her hairdryer. She silently wished he would stop playing with the radio, nothing came in clearly, and if it did, it was just more over-processed Nashville country, which, she thought, was much worse than silence.
Ever since Buck’s position at Wickham Advertising had been cut in November, he’d silently hoped to take a long vacation with Simone. From the time they were married he had wanted to take her home with him, had wanted to show her who he had been, still wished he was, under the crisp collared Oxfords and black hand-tooled loafers he had traded his boots for, nearly seven years before. He thought it strange and unfair that she’d only met his family once, on their wedding day. He recalled the strange way she held his arm so tightly while shaking his father’s hand and did nothing but smile, petrified, as his mother took her by the shoulders and kissed her on the cheek. It wasn’t that she was cold, Simone was just that kind of woman; indefinite and so incredibly finite in the same breath.
As Buck barreled down the one-lane highway, he couldn’t help but silently scrutinize his wife. He remembered a conversation they’d had some years before when, curled like an infant at her side, he asked why she thought she would never want a baby.
“It’s not a matter of want, Buck,” she said, making sure to haughtily stress the word ‘want,’ “It’s more a matter of reality. What would a baby do to us? You’re busy climbing some bullshit chain and I hardly have enough time blink.”
“Well, I could always find something more permanent and substantial. I mean, I could use my communication’s minor and, I don’t know, I could… You could, you could change too, you know.” Buck’s voice broke off and the thought diminished slightly, or more accurately, the possibility did.
“Honey. A baby? Do you really want to be a slave to something for the rest of your life? To check your existence at the door and live to clean and hush and, I don’t know. I don’t know why I don’t know.”
“But couldn’t we just give it some thought; not now or anything, but just think about how beautiful our kids would be. They’d have dark straight hair like their momma and my granpapa’s green eyes and they’d be so, so smart,” as Buck rambled on he ran his hands across Simone’s naked belly, wondering how she made her skin so remarkably soft, “and we’d make sure they knew the difference between Degas and Renoir same as we’d teach them the difference between how to throw a great curve and a crap one. Goddamn, honey. Just think about it, is all.”
There was, at that moment, movement in the room that neither Simone nor Buck could detect, even if their eyes were opened and there had been light blazing from every lamp in the room. It was the movement of sadness exiting the personal self and fixing itself into all surrounding matter; when a person feels such despair that the air actually becomes heavy and thick, saturated with invisible black and cold.
It was then when Simone shivered and pushed his hand away and turned on her side leaving Buck to wonder, was it something he had said?
The sky moved over them slowly, and Simone swore she read the same roadside signs over and over. The first advertised an oasis only ten miles north; the second pictured a woman smiling toothily and dangling a frosted, half-empty Coke bottle over an attractive cowboy’s shoulder. The third sold God. Neither Buck nor Simone spoke much since they passed out of New Mexico, preferring instead to watch the clouds of the day ease themselves into thin strips of pastel mist until they were just grey inkblots against the muddy blue of the sky.
“Honey couldn’t we just stop in Dallas or something. Isn’t Austin supposed to be nice? I’d be more than happy to offer to put your parents and sister up with us.”
“Simone, for chrissakes, we’re going to the ranch and we’re staying through the weekend. God, I haven’t been back in years. I’ve been gone too long.”
“Don’t raise your voice at me, I swear to god, Buck, I wonder about you sometimes. I mean what can you find here that you can’t find at home? Hmm, corn? There’s corn in LA. A breeze? Go to the beach. A flock of crows? Go to the goddamn park!”
“Murder.”
“Excuse me, what?”
“Murder. That’s what a group of crows is called, a murder.”
Simone put up one helluva fight. She couldn’t see why anyone would ever think to go back anywhere, for anything. The only time she went home to Indiana after leaving, she wore her burgundy Marc Jacob’s cashmere coat the entire visit, though it was springtime and tepid. She sat erect on the jacquard Davenport so as not to induce creases in either her jacket or the sofa. She had only gone in the first place to deliver a well-rehearsed speech about her pregnancy and to see to it that her self-extraction from the family was clean and final. This was five years before Buck, two into college and nineteen too late. Her parents simply nodded and asked for her door key, which she hardly used anyhow.
The baby, as it turned out, never materialized into anything other than a cluster of cells and blood before loosing itself one night at a particularly bloody climax of one of Simone’s bad dreams. She had these dreams often; where faces flashed in the half-light of comically sinister moons and someone was always, always bleeding and crying and blinded.
On marrying Buck, she made him promise, though drunkenly, that they’d never have children together, “I just don’t think it’d be wise…” is all she said.
Buck and Simone drove down Route 79, past deserted windmills and rows of dying cornfields full of sleeping cows and horses till the check engine light flickered on sometime before dawn. The engine clicked off in front of a peeling farm stand advertising pecans in faded red script. Buck just laughed when the car sputtered and jolted to a stop. Simone only looked over her shoulder out the window and bit her nails.
“Where the hell are we, Buck?”
“We’re about two miles away from the ranch, don’t worry. We’ll just walk the rest of the way and I’ll have dad drive me to the filling station, it’s not big deal. Just get out of the car and I’ll lock it.
“No, can’t we just try to drive the rest of the way. This happens all the time with this piece of shit. All you need to do is turn over the engine. Please don’t make me walk in these heels. Besides, it’s too windy, we’ll get blown away!”
“Oh, Christ, Simone.”
“Oh, shut up, Bucky, you love it. You know you love it.”
Buck closed the hood and walked around to Simone’s window and bent inside to kiss her on the forehead then walked back to the driver’s seat and restarted the car.
“Wasn’t that easy? Lord knows what you’d do without me! Oh, dammit Bucky, watch the road, its dark as hell.”
“I know how to drive, love. I can drive around here with my eyes closed, hands behind my back.” He reached over to Simone and put one hand on her thigh and the other one over his eyes, steering with his knees.
With his eyes closed, Buck tried to remember the way he used to ride his bike down the same road. With arms outstretched and palms facing upwards, he’d close his eyes and try to navigate the pebbled road by the smell of gasoline and cattle, only stopping to open them once the paralyzing fear of crashing seized him. But tonight he felt nothing. He only knew that he loved his wife—loved the company of her milky thighs on his warm palm and her deep breathing, which he presumed was half fear and half exhilaration.
He opened his eyes and clamped his hands to the wheel only moments before the tires caught the grooved, sloping edge of the road and seconds after Simone shrieked about crashing.
“What the hell’s the matter with you? You wanna get us killed? Jesus.”
“Oh, for god’s sake, Simone, you really think I’m all that stupid? Just relax, here,” he straightened in his seat and adjusted his mirror. “That better for you? Look, I’ll even go under 70,” he paused to look at her, he wanted to touch her thigh again, but as he reached over she shifted in her seat and straightened the hem of her denim skirt. “You okay?”
“Just stop, alright. Just stop. The last thing I want to do right now is talk, okay? And just don’t…” for a moment her voice faltered and became almost inaudible, “just don’t touch me.”
Buck slowed down to a halt in the middle of the road and opened his window. He needed to flush out the heavy, black air. He needed to breathe in something he could understand. He just needed air. Without looking over at Simone, he reached for his door handle and paused. “Stop me,” he thought, “You want me here. You need me here.” It was true too, Simone wanted and needed him but she would not let herself stop him because, more than she needed him, she needed for everything to stop. She needed to stop from thinking that maybe crashing would’ve been better. She needed to vomit.
As Buck opened the door, Simone for the first time felt the heaviness of her body. She felt sicker. She wanted to slide off her skin and dissolve but all she could do was rest her head against the seat and close her eyes.
“I need to walk right now. Don’t say anything. I don’t want to hear anything; I just want you to know that I am going. I am walking. I…” the momentum of his remark had suddenly died and he paused for a moment, as if surprised that speech had failed him. He tried again.
“Do you have anything to say?” Knowing this was a loaded question, he had half-expected a rebuttal of some sort, an attack even, but all he heard was the sound of choking, “Simone?”
As Simone threw open her car door she felt sicker in that one second than she’d felt in her life. Everything that was ever in her came out her mouth at that very moment and she couldn’t help but be surprised at the force. Buck climbed through the car to hold back her hair, which was already dirty with sweat and sickness, and even though he didn’t want it to be, that was all he could do.
The radio was still on and somewhere far away there was playing a radio call-in show about birds. Between the static and heaving, Simone could hear faint voices steeped in twang, discussing the feather patterns of North American Woodpeckers and the mating rituals of Cardinals.
As she lay in bed that night, Simone dreamt about screaming and bloody pavement and woke up to find the other side of the bed cold. She looked up to find Buck standing by the window, staring up at the bloodshot moon, shivering in the wind. “Why,” she wondered “are a flock of crows called a murder, and a flock of man and wife and child not called the same.”
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I really liked this , but the twist ending will leave a lot of people confused…I didnt really understand her last statement even though I got the ending. I was enjoying the bickering between the two already imagining arriving at the parents house in a possible second chapter. But once reach the end I see thats never going to happen. I think you put to much spaces between paragraphs…it makes the story 8 pages long even though it could be around 5.
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Excellent, the characters are well-drawn, substantive, evocative descriptions. There are a few typos, such as man-made dam(needs hyphen), but generally I think this is outstanding, delivers the story through just the right mix of dialogue and backstory. I have to say the one thing I wasn’t super fond of was the ending. You might want to work on that last line a little.
I have to say your writing is really great, I love it. The events leading to Simone getting sick was very well done. The dialogue between the couple was good, except at times I had to go back and make sure it was Buck or Simone, so maybe adding some extra tag lines for the dialogue wouldn’t be so bad (although i do that when I write too so I guess I need to practice what I’m suggesting). You used “For God’s sake!” and “Christ” a little too much for me, just that it was repetitive between them. Although very realistic, I’d say to leave out a couple of those or make them further apart.
She definitely didn’t want children obviously wanting to forget her past, and Buck even though he promised he wouldn’t have children with her, still wanted to talk and hint at it. I really love the words you wrote that became images in my mind, it made the dialogue make more sense, and you developed the characters really well. I enjoyed it and I have no complaints, I’d love to read more of your work!
This was a very interesting read. You did a very nice job in writing this. I love how each character had depth. This in itself makes the story resonate. I have very little to fault in this piece. The dialogue was handled marvelously, and your descriptions were spot on. Very, very nice. I look forward to reading more of your work in the near future.
A very well written piece. It held me quite well and I found myself wanting to read more. There was some speech that seemed to be completely irrelevant to the story, but that may just have been how I looked at it and didn’t quite understand the context the things were said.
One critism I do have, and it’s just one of the things that gets on my nerves in general with peoples writings. It just jumped from the perspective of one person to another with almost no warning. I am fine with that happening, it was just written here in a way as if they were standing right next to each other – that sort of thing is just something that always annoys me. But I, myself, do find that sometimes you have no choice but to do that. It’s just something that annoys me, even when I have to do it.
Besides that, it was a brilliant piece of writing
This was an exceptional read, although it began to becoma a bit fragmented at the end. Your story was imbued with language that was strong and vivid, but it stumbled a few times. Here’s an example: ‘The only time she went home to Indiana after leaving, she wore her burgundy Marc Jacob’s cashmere coat the entire visit, though it was springtime and TEPID. She sat erect on the jacquard Davenport so as not to INDUCE creases in either her jacket or the sofa.’ The areas in which I have capitalized are the words that don’t seem to mesh well. I don’t presume to place words in your text as some of the other reviewers herein might do, but I do think that a read-through, aloud, will allow you to see what I’m saying. This is one of those ‘polish’ things, those small details that will put your story over the top.
As for the other components of the story, I would like to commend you on your characterization and your setting. These people are realistic and their problems steeped in the thick muck of what we all must endure. That made them not only credible, but likeable, and worthy of our emotional investment. There could have been a little more strength to their end-game, but that is more a plotting conundrum, it would seem, than weakness in the character. The setting is rich, and punches from the onset of the story. The texture of the descriptions was vivid, but ran a bit to the over-dramaticized end. That is more a matter of personal preference, but I would stress that too much of the metaphor can kill the story. Not that I feel that this is a danger for this piece as its other merits carry it fairly well through its entirety. The last thing I want to cover with you is the ending. It fell flat, and became a point of detriment for this otherwise wonderful story. Give it (the ending) another shot and then let us see what becomes of Buck and Simone. And the last sentence, ‘“Why,? she wondered “are a flock of crows called a murder, and a flock of man and wife and child not called the same.? ’ requires a bit of explanation and clarity. I’d love to see this revised, and I know that if you do, it will be even better than it stands. But thank you for this great piece.
I liked this story. I found the characters very well developed. Buck actually reminded me a lot of a friend of mine. I like how radically different they really are, especially when it comes down to the prospect of children. That’s really what the piece is about, the effects that children, even unborn ones, can have on a couple not entirely ready for them?
I did notice that some spots were kind of rough. Especially the sentence starting your second paragraph. That looks like a run-on sentence and is just kind of awkward to read. You may want to try to split that up or try to tidy it up somehow. I may also just be slow or stupid, but I didn’t really understand exactly what you meant by the line “indefinite and so incredibly finite in the same breath.”
There are also some spelling and grammar errors you should check out just to make your piece look a bit more professional. I noticed you should probably touch up on comma placement, a lot of them seemed out of place.
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