Yes Mary is flawed- the whole family is flawed. I guess it all comes out in the end.
Short Story / Little Black Box
Little Black Box
“My family is so messed up,” thought Mary while steering her car through the traffic on the freeway towards San Francisco. She moved over to the slow lane and held her hand in front of her face shielding her eyes from the morning sun, and turned her head sideways to avoid the bright light staring in her eyes, but nothing worked, she couldn’t see. The back of her eyeballs felt like they were burning in the white light. She could not stand it any more, so she drove the car towards the Pinole Exit off highway 80. With only twenty bucks in her pocket, Mary stopped in front of a small strip mall/gas station off the freeway to buy cigarettes and a bottle of vodka.
Her eyes had rims of tears, but in order to feel like she had some control, she looked directly into the dark, stubbly face of the younger Arab man behind the counter and told him, “Marlboro Light 100’s and a small bottle of Absolut.” He spoke Arabic to the older man in a white turban who sat behind the counter. The younger man looked through her and said something in Arabic to the old man who looked like his father. His stare made Mary uncomfortable. He judged her according to some Arabian standard. She could sense his disgust. She stared into his eyes, “Like I care what you think.” He handed her the change.
Mary got back in her car and lit a cigarette. She turned the music up full blast and pulled out of the parking lot heading west. The traffic had grown thicker the closer to Berkeley. It became gridlocked at the Bay Bridge. It was stop and go. Barely doing twenty miles and hour now, she looked over at her little brother in a little black box on the front seat beside her. “Rocky Mountain Way” played on the CD. It was one of his favorite songs, but they weren’t singing. He was dead.
Mary started thinking over the events of the past few weeks, how everything had suddenly changed between her brothers and sisters. Things she didn’t perceive before were now blatantly obvious. The realization that her family was totally flawed and did not measure up to any standard of what a good family should be was an idea that had never crossed her mind before. Before all this, Mary never realized that her family was messed up. She always operated under the assumption that her brothers and sisters would always be there for each other- especially in time of need. Yeah, good luck.
People had always looked at the family in amazement that they had managed to stay together as a family despite their parent’s ugly divorce, which came as a complete surprise to the children. Didn’t they pray together every night? In spite of the prayers, their mother had been in and out of asylums for alcoholism, and their father had brought home women, but it never dawned on any of the kids that their parents would get a divorce. Maybe on some it did. Not on Mary.
On the way home from school one day, Mary remembered how her friend just blurted it out: “Your parents are getting divorced.” Mary could still feel the confusion she felt on that day even now driving to the ocean. She could picture it, how she had stood still and stone faced in shock when Jean said she had overheard her parents at breakfast- discussing the divorce in the society pages of the Chronicle. Mary felt the need to runaway told Jean that she needed to go home, and left right away.
Mary cried. She felt betrayed. She had to hear it from someone else about the divorce. “How could you?” Mary asked her father. He cried. The mother was in the hospital- again.
Before the divorce, Mary’s family had money. All the children went to the best schools; and the parents knew the best people. But after the divorce, the children were carted off to live in second-rate Catholic boarding schools, and they never graced the society pages again. Despite this cataclysmic fall from grace, they were thought of as a tightly knit group of siblings. They stayed close even during the ensuing years when her brothers went off to a war that the sisters protested against. The family spent many nights around the dinner table talking about politics and arguing as most close knit families do. Time had healed those wounds, and they had forgiven each other.
Years had passed and family dinners together had been regulated to Christmas time only. Both parents had long since died. Their mother had left years after the divorce and was never heard from again; and decades later the father died a lonely man. Their tight little group endured this and other various sundry familial trials that normal families go through in a lifetime, and they came out all right. They were still together. Some had married, some divorced several times, and Mary had since become a widow.
Four weeks ago a detective called, he said he was trying to find a relative and asked if she would be able to identify the body.
“Yeah,” Mary said, “he has a tattoo of a girl’s name- Janet on his forearm.” She held onto the phone trying to listen if he was playing a trick on her, or was he for real?
“Did he have any enemies?” the detective asked.
“What happened?” she asked, and the flip flop sinking feeling in her stomach told her she already knew. She had her answer. “Everywhere he went. He got into a lot of trouble. He was on the run.”
“Why was he on the run?”
“He had problems with his ex. He owed child-support. The sheriff was looking for him. He’d been in jail before. He was worried about three strikes.” Mary knew he was writing everything she said down, but she didn’t care; she was also writing down what he was telling her on a yellow legal pad. Mary knew there would be still more phone calls from the morgue, the medical examiner, the police, the funeral parlor, and finally her family. It was going to be endless. It would be impossible to remember everything, and there would be many questions from her brothers and sisters. She wanted to have all the answers and all the details.
First, Mary called her twin sister with the news. How do you put it, Mary thought- simply- politely? She settled on bluntly- “He’s dead.” Her twin sister couldn’t believe it; she dropped the phone and ran out of the house.
Mary called one sibling after the other and filled them in on the details. The autopsy said he was in good shape. Nothing was wrong with his heart. There was no physical reason that led to his death, so the coroner’s office ordered a medical examiner’s report which meant tests would be done to find out why he died. It would be at least six weeks before the medical examiner’s report would come back from the lab.
Mary asked the family to meet and talk. A couple of days later the brothers and sisters sat on the dining room chairs- all of them facing Mary like they were at a camp fire roasting marshmallows. They kept talking with one another as Mary watched them, one had a funny feeling, and another knew it was going to happen; he would be the first to go etc.
She listened for a while. Each one said their piece, and then Mary began. “The detective coroner said they could bury him in a potter’s field, or we could bring him here and scatter his ashes in the ocean.” Then she asked them for money. A couple of hundred dollars a piece to cremate him and scatter his ashes in the bay… She waited. First the silences came, and then talk about money. Mary just wanted to review the costs. “It’s two thousand to cremate him. Then we’d have to ship him out here, or I could fly back and pick him up, or I could drive. Then there’s three hundred for the fisherman’s boat.”
They had money, yet one brother said, “It doesn’t matter to me. He’s dead. What does he care? I don’t think it matters.” Mary kept her mouth shut.
Another sister- the nurse said, “I believe the soul leaves the body after death. It doesn’t matter to me either. They can bury him. What’s done is done.” Mary’s held her breath, thinking- how could she think that? Wasn’t she supposed to be the one with the big heart?
Mary knew she had to reach them somehow. “What about his kids?” she pleaded, looking for something that would sway them. “What will we say to his kids?”
She needed the money. There was no way to pay for everything. She couldn’t do it alone. “What if it was me?” she asked them staring into their eyes. “Would you let me be buried in a pauper’s grave?” They shook their heads no, but no one said anything. Mary didn’t want to lose this battle. “Then how could you do it to him?” she yelled. Dead silence.
No one offered a dime. They started talking about him; then they started talking about money. Mary realized that it was at this very moment that the ties that bind were cut. She walked out of the house to the street and smoked a cigarette by herself and looked up at the stars through the silver maple tree in the front yard. There was a big spider web in the tree. Mary watched it blow in the wind, thinking it was beautiful- what a tangled web we weave- and felt stupefied. The love she had for her bothers and sisters was over. It would never be the same again. She threw the cigarette into the gutter, got in her car and left in silence without saying good-bye to anyone.
Mary vowed to get the money herself and went all over town asking people-the Hell’s Angels painter, the guy who managed the tire store, the bartender, and the guy with the moving company-everyone that she knew that he knew for donations, and there still wasn’t enough money.
Mary knew she would have to go back to her brothers and sisters. This time, after they thought about it, she got some from each of them.
The detective called again with bits and pieces of news. He told Mary that he had been doing odd jobs painting, and he worked for a guy who owned a bar, and lived in the apartment in back. He used to drink a couple of beers for breakfast, and then he’d paint. People said he was a really good painter- that he was a really good guy. Mary felt like the detective smiled when he said this. He meant it as a compliment- and she thought that’s what everybody said when they first met him, but he always screwed up. He always did something stupid.
The owner told the detective when he didn’t show up to work for a week that he got worried. He had a key to the apartment, so he opened the door a little. He saw my brother sleeping, the TV was on, and he thought my brother was drunk; so he shut it. He went back in the room a couple of days later and found him dead, so he called the police. He had been dead for a week. It seemed fishy to Mary so she asked, “Doesn’t a body smell after a week? How come the bar owner didn’t smell anything when he opened the door the first time?” The detective seemed to think it wasn’t of any importance, so she let it go.
He went on to say that the body was pretty decomposed. The coroner couldn’t even tell what color his eyes were. “Green,” Mary said, “they were green.”
Weeks later the medical examiner’s report came in the mail. Mary started reading it and it said that he died of an overdose of ethanol and too much beer. “Ethanol?” thought Mary, “isn’t that an ingredient in paint thinner, or gasoline?” She thought for a moment that maybe someone made him drink it- then put that idea out of her head. Mary called the medical examiner. She said that he died of a combination of speed, heroin, and beer, and that it all made a deadly cocktail; it actually poisoned him when it created ethanol. It affected his central nervous system, and he stopped breathing. She said that her brother’s heart didn’t know if it should speed up or slow down, and that he basically went to sleep and never woke up. Mary thought, “At least it was peaceful.”
It took weeks and many phone calls and face to face visits, but Mary managed to get most of the money together, and it still wasn’t enough to fly him home. He would need to buy a ticket, he couldn’t go through baggage. In frustration, Mary called the funeral parlor that had his cremains and started complaining about the costs. The woman said she could send the cremains through the U. S. Mail to a local funeral parlor, and Mary could pick them up there. It was the law, she went on. Thank God, thought Mary as she breathed a sigh.
The local funeral parlor called when his ashes arrived. Mary picked up the heavy little black box and brought him home, put him on her dresser, and he sat there for over a week.
Mary wanted to scatter his ashes on the bay, but couldn’t get a boat. It was illegal to throw anything off the Golden Gate, so that was out of the question. Mary’s sisters said they’d scatter his ashes with her on Saturday, but when the weekend came, no one showed up at her house, and no one called. Mary phoned her sisters twice that morning, but neither sister answered the phone. Mary started assuming by the way they talked when they were discussing the arrangements; that they wouldn’t come, so she left to go do it by herself. She felt like Antigone’s sister as she drove down the freeway alone. She didn’t have money for the boat, so she would have to go to the ocean.
The fog grew thick over the Bay Bridge, and it stayed like that all the way down to 280 where she turned off heading west down Junipero Serra Boulevard. She turned left at Merced Lake, onto The Great Highway and drove past the zoo where she had to wait for the light on Sloat Boulevard.
She looked for a place to park passing little kids wrapped up in wet beach towels lined up outside cars and vans parked along the cliffs at Ocean Beach. They had sand crusted hair and blue lips. The kids shivered from the cold onshore breeze as mothers bent down to wipe the sand from the bottoms of their feet. She passed blond surfers in black wet suits smoking cigarettes while standing beside their long boards and talking about the waves. Young lovers in hooded sweatshirts huddled in blankets to stay warm. Groups of Mexican boys leaned on their car doors drinking beers.
Mary drove to the spot where no one was parked and where no one would be on the beach. She waited a minute to look around before she pulled the vodka out of the paper bag and took one long pull from the bottle. She took and another until she felt the warmth radiate in her belly, then reached in the glove compartment for her dad’s old Buck knife. She looked at the box, the staples, read the label, then cut open the top. She unfolded black plastic and found a clear bag with the ashes a pale grey- almost beige color. Mary stopped looking at them, pulled the clear bag out, and put the knife and bag with the ashes in her purse. She stood outside her car and put on her Levi jacket. He once said she stole it from him. Mary chuckled at that one. Mary slung the purse over her shoulder, slammed the car door, and started walking along the sandy cliff dotted with sea grass to get away from people. She saw several paths; some looked too dangerous to walk down. Some fell too steeply and one would need to be a good climber, which she was not. Some would take longer to get down to the beach, but she wouldn’t mind because they sloped gently down to the water. She took the path of least resistance and held on to the long sea grasses where it narrowed and dipped like a rollercoaster. With each step, the sand flew up into the heel of her shoes. Finally, she reached the beach. It was so cold. The air hung wet with salt.
A young, red haired man came up jogging beside his black lab. Mary stared out to sea ignoring him and waiting for him to leave. She smelled the salt from the ocean and took in a deep full breath of it to clear her head. As she scanned the beach, she spied a long, smooth half -burnt out log. She walked over to it with the sand flipping up over her toes. She put down the purse, took off her jogging shoes, and shook the sand out. She rolled up her socks and put one of them in each shoe. Mary put her hands on her cold thighs, and looked down the beach, and took another long slow breath to steady her mind. She saw a few white shells sprinkled like bread crumbs along the dark sand by the water. She remembered looking for sea shells with her brother, jumping off the pier that used to be here, and teaching him to body surf in the cold water.
The winter ocean churned up more sand dollars, memories, seaweeds, and clam shells, and left them on the shore. The wind blew her hair back. It was cold and overcast. She buttoned her jacket. She’d have to go into the ocean to drop the ashes. She rolled her jeans above her ankles.
When the man and his dog were far enough away, Mary pulled the heavy bag of ashes and the Buck knife out of her purse and looked at them. She said the Our Father and slung the purse over her shoulder and walked barefoot into the icy, cold saltwater that came from Alaska. Mary felt nervous, and quickly opened the knife as the wave and sand rushed over her feet. She looked around- she was afraid of being caught, of scaring people with what she was doing. With one cut she opened the bag on the top under the staple, and turned it upside down. The thinning wave had pulled back into the sea. The ashes plopped in a pile on the wet sand. Some blew on her feet and jeans. Looking down, Mary saw the many sand crabs’ bubbles of air popping holes in the sand, “Oh, no.”
She looked up several gulls had swooped down hovering above the mound. They were so close; Mary saw the red dot on their yellow beaks where the chicks peck to get food. She put the knife and bag in her purse. Another small wave came to shore spreading its white salt fingers up and out. Sandpipers ran up the beach away from the water. The wave stopped about two feet from the pile on the sand, then it retreated, and the sandpipers ran down to search for sand crabs. “Oh my God, what if it’s low tide?” thought Mary.
Mary walked down to the water, washed off her feet, and went to protect the mound from the gulls. She bent down to slap the ashes off her pants. As she looked up the beach she saw a couple walking arm in arm in the distance. Mary looked back at the pile of ashes and grew hopeful when she saw another small wave coming in; she watched carefully as it flattened itself then slowly spread up the sloping wet sand like a Spanish shawl being thrown over an old piano. Mary hoped and watched hope slip away as it stopped three feet from the ashes then slipped quietly back into the sea.
Mary began to panic and pray, “Please, God; please don’t let it be low tide… I’d have to scoop him up with my hands.” She didn’t think she could do that. One wave came closer lapping near the beige mound, yet it too- stopped and slithered back to the sea with nothing. Mary’s heart beat faster. “What am I going to do?” she thought looking down the beach at the couple. They were closer, she could see their faces.
She pleaded with God, almost begging, “Please… don’t let it be low tide.” Then another wave churned up the brown sand. Another wave came- this time with a white tipped salty tongue lapping at the shore like a cat. Mary watched it come- closer, closer, it still had a chance-closer- then nothing, the pile sat intact.
Two more medium sized waves came. They crisscrossed each other and spread slowly up the sand like fans and they finally touched the pile, and pulled a pale line of ash out to sea. “Thank you,” she prayed looking up. Then another small, cold wave came in and scooped another handful out to sea as the waves receded. More than half of him sat on the dark sand.
Mary decided to have patience. It wasn’t low tide. The ocean would come. She began counting the waves as they came in sevens- each a little bigger, and each took a little more out to sea as the couple down the beach came closer. “Hurry,” she thought. She could see the woman laughing at the man. They were in their own world. They hadn’t noticed what she had been doing. May didn’t want to have to explain to any one- as she stared at the slowly disappearing pile on the sand. The last thin line floated up a wave, and then finally, he was gone. Thank God. Mary said the Our Father again.
She looked up at the blue patches of sky starting to show through the fog. As the couple passed by, the woman smiled at her lover. The cold air caused her eyes to tear. Mary turned to stare at the horizon and watched the streak of beige floating out to sea on top of the water. A line of five California Brown Pelicans slid several inches above the serpentine colored waves off shore, and she felt relieved. She sat down on the log and lit a cigarette, wiped the wet sand off her feet, and put her socks and shoes on. It was freezing.
Mary walked up the cliff and sat in her warm car and listened to some music while drinking sips of the vodka. She cried, and then smoked a few more cigarettes. Finally, it was done except for one last thing. Mary tore the funeral parlor’s address sticker off the empty little black box. She got out of the car and thought to herself, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Mary threw the little black box and then the empty bottle into the rusted metal trash can, and vowed, “I will never forgive them for this,” as she stared in the garbage can. “Never.” She took one last look at the Pacific Ocean and the far reaching horizon under the endless sky and thought, “My family is so messed up.” She got back in the car and headed back down The Great Highway for home.
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FrakKevin reviewed Version 2 -
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bulletwithbutterflywings reviewed Version 1 -
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paragraph 2, this sentence “He spoke Arabic to the older man in a white turban who sat behind the counter” is redundant & not needed as you already state in this paragraph he spoke arabic to another man who looked like his father.
I think when she is thinking, instead of putting quotations around it, you should italicize the text. putting quotes around something means she’s speaking it, but she’s only thinking, & it gets confusing when she actually is talking such as in the conversations with her siblings.
pg 2 paragraph 3, “People had always looked at the family in amazement that they had managed to stay together as a family despite their parent’s ugly divorce” think you should consider changing the first ‘family’ to children or siblings or something, so it isn’t so repetitive.
in paragraph 3, page 3, you state both parents had died, but you also state the mother had left & no one had talked to her again. how do they know she died then? i think you should consider taking out the sentence that both of them are dead.
during the conversation with the siblings, you say this “One had a funny feeling, and another knew it was going to happen; he would be the first to go” but don’t expand on why they believed that. i think you should explain.
pg 9, last paragraph, “She took and another until she felt the warmth radiate in her belly” she took what? should be ‘she took another and another’ or simply take out and if she only took one more drink.
pg 10 paragraph 2, “Mary put her hands on he cold thighs” ‘her’ cold thighs.
in page 11, & again page 13, when your speaking of her saying this ‘our father’ thing, is this a prayer? I would say ‘Our Father prayer’ or something, it sounds a little awkward the way you have it.
pg 13, paragraph 2, “May didn’t want to have to explain to any one” typo =mary
overall not a bad read, but a bit boring. You don’t give much descriptions of this brother, so the reader can feel the attachment mary has for this particular sibling, except a couple of sentences in 10 & 11 of Mary remembering a few things. i think you should give the character of her dead brother more personality, more descriptions of him, even sprinkle some memories of mary’s throughout the story, so the reader can feel the emotions mary is feeling, the loss of her brother, the reason why she is going through all this trouble to scatter him in the sea. as is, there is really no emotional impact here. also
also where she starts scattering his ashes out to sea, you devote a lot of time and words on her sitting there watching & hoping & getting nervous that the waves won’t come in to carry his remains out to sea, my question is why didn’t she just walk out further into the ocean in the first place? why just plop his ashes at the shoreline?
i think this story needs more emotions, more of a plot. the plot in this is a little weak. it’s simply a story of a woman carrying her brother’s ashes to the sea & throwing them in. i think you could trim this up alot, take out some that isn’t as interesting (such as her just sitting there, waiting for the waves to come & carry his ashes away) & give us more descriptions of her lost brother, of the other siblings, why they won’t help her with her brother. give us more emotions to feel, make it more appealing, give us more of a plot. why is she carrying her brother’s ashes to the sea? maybe her brother has an attachment to the sea, it was his favorite place, he would want her to do this, that would make it a bit more interesting if you went into that a little further & mary’s memories of her brother & them by the ocean, such as you start to hint at in pg 10. give the deceased a life so we can know how mary is feeling. develop the character of mary a little more as well, instead of just telling a story of her going through these actions, of getting money, taking care of her brother’s remains, talking to her siblings.
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aqriusldy09 reviewed Version 1 -
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The background of the protagonist directly connects to the theme of the story. The tone is consistent throughout each page. Mary is a flawed character, which is shown on each section of the story. Mary’s flaws also are linked or are directly caused by her family’s divorce, her father’s infidelity, and her mother’s alcoholism. She seems to be someone who holds on to hope, despite the destruction occurring around her. This story is excellent, regarding those aspects. Continue with Mary and I will be glad to read what happens next.
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