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Short Story / into the night
You’ve got to have faith, pray that the lord will hear your cries, give thanks, and rejoice in his name, he helps the faithful. He will show his hand and bring me from despair.” She recollects before she kneels, in front a single white candle on a naked bed side table, save, A white doily beneath the holder of the candle.
Flickering illumination; her shadow falls against the wall behind the candle. She is a silhouette. The flame whispers to the breathing breeze coming through an open window by the corner. The cotton window net sings with the faint wind that blows gently through the small gaps in the flowers crocheted into the cotton of the net; quietening the soft constant cushion of warm air as it enters the room through the window. “I pray now and offer you my soul; I ask you for direction. Show me the way to your side, and to ever lasting salvation.” The words fall out of her mouth like the flailing wings of dying moths, their dusty bodies carried towards the flame by the force of the breath that surrounds and cushions each one.
There’s never a response, never an answer, not a word has been said back, the fear must continue, must be constant. The flickering shadow on the back wall, ominous and steady–she prays-awaits his hand, anticipates his breath, as she whispers into the night.
Always thinking of the son; thinking of what she could have done in her past that would justify the present being this way. “Lord, why you make it so bad for my family? I pray you give me the strength to keep going, to live until I see my son happy and know he is going to be ok when I go. Give me the knowledge to understand, to help me understand why my son is so angry. And I beg you open his eyes to your kingdom and your love; please show my boy your guidance out the temptation and the hell he in now. What was all the schooling for? What sense it make? What plan you got for him? If I knew it would turn out like this I wouldn’t have let him go to that school, so far away, so far from me. What they do to his head?”
She holds back her head and stretches her spine, a hand holding on to her side as she slowly stretches upward alleviating the pain accumulated whilst in the kneeling position, “Lord, help me nuh, me too tired now.” Heavy and full of ache she struggles to her feet, both hands on the bed for leverage, doesn’t straighten up all the way, the journey, far and unnecessary. Still hunched over she folds back the duvet, then carefully, slowly, under the pressure of numerous years (they leave no real coherent memory); years that have accumulated and blocked the current of a life, still able to remain light, weightless as it floats in limbo; she attempts to sit on the edge of the bed. She more falls than sits, the wind she creates agitates the fire of the candle; the twisting flame distorts her shadow and throws light into dark corners of the room, performs an erratic spontaneous dance on the surrounding walls; only for a moment. She reaches over and opens the drawer beneath the pristine alter and produces a small white bible with a silver cross in the middle of the cover; other than the cross it is white, and plain.
Steven’s christening bible; “He should have it with him; he’d taken everything else that was his when he left. Even the Diplomas, the high school and the University, that one he’d given to me on his graduation day. Why did they lie? Why they do this to him?” She moves her hand slowly across the clean cover of the small bible. “If he had it with him, in the bedroom drawer of wherever he is now (where is he?), it would help him. If he had it so he could read the words, and understand them; he wouldn’t be in such misery.” She acknowledges with a slow nod of the head. The bible was here with her, still as new as the day she bought it, thirty years ago, in a small bookshop in Harlem, where they lived; it never left the drawer by her bedside, in her bedroom of the small apartment with two bedrooms, on the fourth floor of a tenement building between Amsterdam and St Nicholas Ave, that was its home.
There was no christening. She had intended to wait for the return of his father. The father of the child that never returned from looking for work in Maryland, where he said he would move them once he’d found employment. She eventually, years later, got word through the network, that he remained unemployed and was a drifter of sorts doing odd jobs somewhere between Georgia and Florida. She never received contact from him and she had no knowledge of how to get in touch with him. The time came and went and before she knew it the child was too old for the christening. During the beginning of his troubles, she’d thought about it, but there never seemed a right time to give him the bible. “He wouldn’t take it now; he don’t believe in your word. I don’t know how else to get through to him. I don’t understand what he says when he talks to me now, and he get angry when I say that he should look to the church for help. I feel so hurt when him say that you haven’t helped me, when he says that I am the blind one, and not him. If he only knew how much I suffer over the years and it’s only my faith in you that keep me alive, keep me going.”
When the son finally left the flat, it was a year after he’d graduated an ivy league University in upstate New York. That was after he’d graduated from a boarding school he went to on an academic scholarship in Massachusetts. The more he went to school, it seemed to her, then the more he didn’t call her on the weekends, then the more he didn’t come back on vacations and holidays, and the more she didn’t know him. By the time he was in University; she’d try and call him every week, and every week, when she could get a hold of him-he was always so busy-, they had the same conversation. The more he seemed like he would rather not be talking to her. Like it took effort to say any words at all besides yes, no and I don’t know. Whenever he spoke in more than mono-syllables it was with poly-syllabic words that she’d never heard before. “What?” She had started the habit of saying whenever they spoke on the phone, whenever he said something that wasn’t in the script. Not so much because she didn’t understand what he’d said, but to understand the way he talked now, she needed to hear him say it again, and probably again. He’d get annoyed at having to repeat almost everything he said to her, and had gotten into the habit of responding to her “What?” with, “forget about it; it wasn’t important.” But she knew that often times it would be important; that he was saying something that would give her a clue as to what was happening to her clever and loving boy, a reason they’d become so distant. She felt he was ashamed of her; though he did make attempts. He gave her a book for her birthday one year Zora Neale Hurston’s, ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God.’ “I hope that you give it a go.” He said when he saw how she looked and held the book like something alien, like a puzzle to figure out. “It’s something I read years ago, in high-school. It helped me to see things in a different way.” But what could she say? She was always so tired. Work took a lot out of her; the continuous lifting and carrying of old people and disabled children that she had to feed, bathe, change, transport, and, usually, watch die; had already put her through two back operations, and one stroke. Still she couldn’t afford to retire; she continued working through all the operations partly to pay for the part of the operations the insurance didn’t cover.
She attempted to begin the book once or twice; but the words were so small, the paragraphs so dense. She’d found the experience intimidating; so tiring. The words swirled around the page, they would blur as she tried to reread a sentence; understanding how these abstract sentences linked to each other was like a school exercise. It gave her migraines. She had to put it down and leave it, where it rested now; at the bottom of a pile of documents, bills, and nursing folders. In the pile of things to be dealt with that only got bigger. She wished she could find the words that would explain to him that she didn’t have the scope for life that she hoped he had. She only wished to see that he knew this world better than she; that he would use his advantage. That he would take what she would never know and make her proud, would it be too much to hope that he would one day look after her.
Instead he became lost, a bewildered, tortured soul, floating through the world of the living. How could she ever forget how she felt when she saw how lost he’d truly become, when she realised that they were strangers and twins, who could no longer help each other; they no longer knew each other. Maybe that is why she referred to the bible when she spoke to him. There was no longer any physical or mental help she could offer him, or he for her. Only the lord could help him, only the lord could offer him the salvation that she still awaited.
That night she realised, was the night she had to rescue him, just before he made his decision to go to Canada. She had to drive to the outside of an all night diner in Mid-town Manhattan; where he was stranded, said on the phone that he’d pan handled the quarter to make the call to her, he was in tears on the phone. He begged and cried for her to pick him up in a cab because he couldn’t find his way home and he couldn’t walk any longer. She remembered how the tears poured from her eyes when she pulled up and saw him in a dark corner of the entrance of a shop front, the ‘Global Village’ internet cafe; hunched on his heels by the door, his arms wrapped around his bare body, in just his under-shorts and socks, no shoes or shirt, no jeans, no jacket. He was high on a drug he wouldn’t tell her about. He’d shed the rest of his clothes, his wallet, the rucksack with his book and diary, his drivers’ license and cash cards somewhere along his altered state journey.
Her vision of him altered at that moment. She wouldn’t have been able to say it because she didn’t exactly understand what it was; she only knew that something felt as though it had fallen off of the shelf of her heart. He’d not escaped and he was as trapped as she was, in the dark, the all encompassing darkness that had plagued her all her life. What happened? He had the world open to him. They said that this was a chance in a million, said that he was one of a chosen few, out of millions, that would receive the best education on offer in America; hand picked, to be groomed for a lucrative and prestigious job somewhere in the private sector, or he could‘ve been a champion for his people, an educator, a lawyer, a doctor, a politician.
He raised himself slowly off the ground when he saw the car pull up, his eyes red from crying and his pupils fully dilated they shimmered like glass, coated in glistening water not yet ready to fall. The bottoms of his white tennis socks were black. The heels and parts of the toe fabric worn away, the exposed flesh as black from dirt as the fabric left on the soles of his feet. “Oh Lord!” He saw her gasp as she caught sight of him. It was a hot summer night in the city, yet he could feel the hair all over his body standing on edge. He didn’t seem to be fully conscious of the fact that he stood there half naked and exposed; It was only when he saw the tears falling from his mother’s eyes that a hammer hit his heart and nearly sent it through his chest. He saw her face, the disappointment the look of resignation, and shame, for him. He wanted to fall to the floor and scream, something from within kept him from breaking down like that in front of her. The cab driver slowly shook his head. The son tried to put on a smile for the mother to show he was okay now, as he opened the door.
“Lucky I had on clean underwear.” He tried to say without his voice breaking, but he couldn’t, it did. She didn’t hear him. He was not loud enough to breach the sound of her sobbing. As soon as he was seated, she threw herself over him and pulled him to her in an embrace. She held on tight to his body like she hadn’t held him in years; since before he left for boarding school at 14, she held on to his life and amid her slowing tears. She could only ask “What happened?” Not even to him, to the skies, to the darkness, to the emptiness that coated them. Her question, so intense, and her embrace, so tight, that it forced the tears out of him in jerks he couldn’t control. He cried with relief, with anguish, with confusion, with pain and anger, with everything. It poured out of him and he couldn’t stop.
It wasn’t a month later, while she was in the hospital, recovering from her second back operation, that he came in to visit, and announced that he had bought a ticket to Toronto, and would be leaving before the end of the next week. He kissed her on her brown wrinkled forehead and told her that he didn’t think he’d be able to come back. She told him to be safe and he told her to take care of herself and left.
He was gone by the time she got home from the hospital. That day she returned from a sick bed, she started work on crocheting a white doily and went out to the spirituality shop on Broadway and bought a pack of white candles.
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jedward reviewed Version 1 -
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This was a very sympathetic read. The sympathy mostly comes for the mother who is proud of her son, but at the same time, doesnt want the world to overtake her son while he is away from her. Your use of first person is this piece makes it very strong, though there were some errors with captitalization that I am sure you will probably go back and fix.
Diplomas was capitalized, on the third page, it may or may not need to be
I loved the old southern gospel rural slang of the woman while she leans on the Lord to bring redemption to her sons life as she struggles to understand the changes that have overtaken him.
On the fourth page, you can capitalize Ivy League since it is describring a type of school of higher learnin.
I like the way you pinpoint exactly how the guy has changed when he leaves for the university, very believable for a contemporary fiction style of writing.
Also, realized is mispelled a couple of times, but im sure you can fix that.
This was a great emotional and sympathetic style of writing that if you keep up the tense of present and first person in future chapters, others will agree with.
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Plain_Jane reviewed Version 1 -
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“The flame whispers to the breathing breeze coming through an open window by the corner.” this line and the one that follow are awe inspiring, really made for a wonderful image.
“Lord, why (do) you make it so bad for my family?’ sounds less awkward.
Okay next page I realize now that is how this character speaks. You presented a very clear image of her through your dialog she has with God! I can tell she is a black woman even before you mention him kissing her on her brown wrinkled forehead.
very nicely written, I hope there is more to this story seems as though there should be. Flows very nicely. You do a wonderful job setting the emotions of the mother character feeling lost and confused about her son.
alysonm reviewed Version 1 -
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I think that the story line is strong and that you can build a strong story around that, a drug addicted son and his devastated mother. However, I found the beginning hard to follow, particularly when she is talking, and perhaps that is supposed to be part of her character that she can’t speak English very well. I personally didn’t find that the story had much flow until about page 7 so about the last third of the story. IT isn’t that the other parts were hard to read because they weren’t and they were very well written, I just found the last third a bit more readable and captivating, and had more of a flow. Overall nice work.
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