New Short Story "Cartography"

One of my favorite parts of traveling is a rather non eco-friendly one, I'm afraid (although I always do recycle or have someone else reuse them)--I absolutely love using paper maps to navigate through a city's streets. While I'm not quite the younger "Ellie" in the story, the reasons for loving maps are pretty much all mine. This short story was inspired by my recent trip to Philadelphia, where I used maps a great deal. Hope you enjoy!

There was something inherently appealing about a fastidiously mistreated map, worn and crinkled around the edges, with concierge circles in Sharpie marker around the must-see sights. Perhaps it was the way a map folded back neatly into place, like an accordion opening and collapsing, to satisfy one’s most orderly instincts; or perhaps it was the simple joy of owning something, leaving your mark on it in the most primal way (that was, with a marker of course).

          What few understood about the way Ellie looked at maps was that she harbored a very secret dream of being a cartographer. For all she knew there were no real cartographers any more, or if there were, they were strange government scientists who worked on a very technical level, like her uncle did. She guessed that maybe computers did all the work of plotting maps out now. Now that there were Garmins and Google Maps and Mapquest, who needed someone to draft a map on paper?

          Ellie’s ideal cartographer was a romantic one who appeared in the occasional storybook: a bearded sage in flowing robes who sat in a pencil-sketched tower, looking out pensively over the world, pen hovering over a scroll—about to draw it in perfect, beautiful 2D. This was what a cartographer was to Ellie. It was not a programmer and it was certainly not a Google car with a camera on top. If this was what cartography was in the “real world” (this nasty place her mother and father often referred to) she would do horticulture instead. She had just learned how to say the word “horticulture” and was very proud of it. She also had forgotten exactly what it meant.

          Though Ellie was not entirely sure that it was realistic to be a cartographer, she knew that it was entirely realistic to use a paper map. Paper maps, despite their consistently small-font street names, were reliably openable and closeable, unlike her mother’s bedraggled GPS. She took pleasure in being her family’s savior, proudly opening up the map when the GPS failed, and navigating them back to the hotel. She often opened up the map just to double-check a route, simply for the pleasure of standing authoritatively in the middle of the street and saying, “Yes, that’s right” with a grave nod.

          Just as she opened up the map for what would perhaps be another “Yes, that’s right” moment, her reverie was interrupted by an “Ellie! Hurry up!” moment thanks to her mom. Ellie looked up to see her mother standing ahead, waving rapidly as Ellie stared into the map.

          “I was just—” Ellie said, half in protest, half in anticipation of saying something meaningful, but stopped short. She realized that her mother and her little brother would probably not understand (or care) why she looked at the map so deeply, held its edges so tenderly, in that moment.

          A map, thought Ellie, was a beautiful orderly representation of her mother and father’s “real world.” A world that was disorderly and littered and loud and smelly and small, a world that was sometimes violent, a world where GPS devices stopped without warning and emitted loud beeps in noisy streets. A map, on the other hand, was a perfect world on a page.

          For all its disreputable ties (in small print fonts on clean white lines) to the contrasting greyish gum-ridden sidewalks under Ellie’s feet, a map was still a land of someone’s dreams—a picture of a long ago someone’s half realistic, half idealistic imagination as to what the “real world” ought to be.

New Short Story

I was inspired to write this one by the recent story of the piano on the sandbar in Florida's Biscayne Bay. It's similar to another one of my stories, A Gossamer Inch. It seems like my characters lean towards old ladies. Maybe it's my alter ego. :) You can find my other short stories on my Scribd collection.

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On Biscayne Bay

I heard a story ‘bout a piano on a sandbar, says the woman in line who I kind of know from someplace. They say some punk kid put it there—in Biscayne Bay. She says it like it’s a brand of peanut butter or frozen food—familiar like Birdseye or Aunt Jemima or Jif—not some place halfway across the country where the old people go for vacation once a year.

I nod, coolly, and hand the cashier my credit card. The cashier’s just a kid, maybe nineteen, maybe twenty, with whitish blond hair spiked up on the back of his head. His skin is bad on one side of his face.

          Remember, put the eggs in the bag last, I caution him as he takes my groceries, too briskly. OK, old lady, I can hear him say in his head, but he just nods politely with a Yes’m and puts the eggs in the bag—last. I can remember doing the same job when I was sixteen, nineteen, maybe twenty. Not at a big store with a supervisor and a manager and endless aisles, but the corner store on Main Street—the kind of store politicians like to bring up in their speeches. The “small business.” The “mom and pop store.” The “multigenerational family business.” They talk a lot about how these places go out of business because there’s no money or taxes are too high. They don’t give a whole lot of wordage to the idea that sometimes the next generation doesn’t want to continue the “family business.”

          Do you have a rewards card? asks the cashier.

          Do I? I think, and fumble around in my bag to find my wallet. I fumble around in my wallet to find my card, and when I finally find it, tucked behind my ID card, I just know the cashier is tapping his foot. I can’t hear it, but I know it. He slides the rewards card deftly. We didn’t have rewards cards that kept automated track of our balances and how much we’d gotten back when I worked at the corner store. We knew Aunt Ines was a good customer at the butchery from seeing her in there often enough, and that was why we slipped her an extra bag of ground beef or a bone for the dog every couple of weeks. (That was before the dog died and Ines moved to Southern California to be with her daughter, and son-in-law). By then she and I were both so old, I didn’t call her Aunt anymore. Ines’ son-in-law was about my age. I never liked him. He was smarter than me and knew it. That was why he took a bus for two hours just to take Advanced Classes at another high school, one that wasn’t out in the boondocks. No one knew what he took, but it apparently gave him enough Educational Background to be a Software Engineer. And who would want to take over their papa’s corner store when they could be a Software Engineer?

          The receipt prints out, slowly, but the young cashier with no patience rips it out and hands it to me with a pen to sign. I sign slowly. I think of the letters I never write any more and how my signature used to look. I used to write letters to Ines, and Martha, and Edith Jones, and to my daughters and cousins removed once or twice, I never could remember. I’d write “Come and visit”—but they’d write “Come and stay”—and after enough people write you enough times saying, you come live in Southern California or Iowa or Georgia or New York or Vermont, your body starts feeling dragged across the Continental United States and you want to write, None of Your Business, but that would be impolite—so you don’t write at all. And they think, stubborn old lady, there’s no convincing her to leave, so better we don’t waste our time anyhow. And they go back to their comfortably populated cities and suburbs where the nearest grocery is an easy walk and they share a ZIP code with twenty thousand other people. And I go back to my lone house off an empty Main Street and thirty-mile country road drive for groceries and a ZIP code I only share with dead Mr. Parry who still gets credit card offers.

          I get my own credit card back at the moment I think about Mr. Parry, and I hand the cashier the signed receipt. The woman behind me is only buying a carton of juice. She puts it up for the cashier to scan. As I push my cart out of the line, stiffly, because my joints are arthritic, I can hear the chatty woman I know from someplace say now to the cashier, Pretty strange story ‘bout that piano on the sandbar, isn’t it?

          And I think to myself about Aunt Ines and corner stores and Software Engineers and moving and leaving and staying and going, and I think, I’m that piano on a sandbar in the middle of my own little Biscayne Bay, even though I’m nowhere close to Florida. I’m that piano in the nighttime when the faithless birds fly off the banged-up keys. I’m that piano with its legs in the sand, a little less rooted every time, as the tide goes down and the tide comes up—and the tide comes up to wash me away.

A Gossamer Inch--A Short Story I Wrote

You can read a short story I wrote recently on Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/35929690/A-Gossamer-Inch

It was heavily inspired both by Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" and Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."

Here it is:

She moved her head an inch—a gossamer inch, ever so slightly—off the pillow, until her dry cracked lips touched the dry starched linen of the bed sheet. A matted wisp of hair, gray and oily in its disuse, fell in front of her eyes. She had not the energy to brush it away from her face, but let it stay there, tickling—taunting—slowly.


Her leg, thin and varicose-veined, dangled over the edge of the bed. The (now faded red) bed sheet twisted round it like a barber’s pole—red and white, faded dusty color on faded dusty skin. The minutes ticked by, unforgiving soldiers marching on—blindly. Whose orders did they follow? she thought, angrily. She remembered when her legs had been white and not transparent. She remembered when the bed sheet’s red was not faded, but proud in its garish glory. She remembered all this from a time before. But minutes—days—years—were unceasing soldiers. It had been folly to think that she could fight against them—she, when no others could. Not the belles she’d envied, whose rich locks of brown and gold had turned to white and gray; not those spry gentlemen she’d danced with…Dancing. What a word. It was like honeyed water, dripping slowly, torturously before a parched traveler—out of reach, far away—and when you reached for it, gone.

A cough forced its way through her frailty. She seized up in pain, then stilled. Moving never helped.

A minute passed. Stubbornly she kept her wrinkled eye open, scanning the room back and forth with bad, desperate vision—she was the man on the edge of a cliff barely hanging on, prey encircled by predator with nowhere else to go. Insistently, she did not blink, though she knew sometime, she would have to fall, be killed and eaten. Then she heard the clock tick once more.

Wobbling on the bed’s edge, she allowed—she had no energy to make—her leg’s descent, sloth-like in its speed, but jarring in its movement, as though she were a rock climber in freefall. Her foot, her useless twisted gray cracked foot, hit the floor. She winced, clutching the sheet as though it were a climber’s rope. Fondly she remembered those towering peaks her brother liked to climb. They called him crazy then, before he won the medals. Then they liked him. She smiled as she thought of it, and glanced up at the wall where she saw the medals glint.

But what good had they done? Had they saved her brother? Had they paid for his hospital bills? Were they food, water, shelter? Her brother was dead. The peaks he climbed were gone, strip-mined, no longer pretty. Yet those medals glinted, untouched, on the wall—as though to remind her of lost things, as though to say, “We’re still here.”

She had no time for vengeance. Her second leg drooped of its own accord, following the first in its drop off the bed. When she had both legs on the ground, that was when she could try to lift her dizzy, weary head. It made her gag the first time. She would have retched, except for that she had not eaten any food. She coughed up blood instead. It made splotches on the bed sheet. Where the red had faded, her blood restored it. The crumpled yellow blouse she wore gained two more stains, one on each side, like small red buttons. She did not care. Her head fell back down to the bed.

Instead of lifting her head, she decided to slide downward, off the edge. She knew it would hurt, but it was less energy. She dragged the bed sheet, blood and dust and all, with her as she slid off the hard strict edge—then fell onto her knees, legs bent under in an awkward position. The fall, onto her knees and the cold wood floor, sent pain through her legs and made her faint.

It was too hard to stand upright and walk. She would crawl. She was past humiliation, indignation now. She wanted water, and that was that. Feeling half-crippled, she dragged herself past old dusty stacks of letters from friends (now dead, long ago), past the folded evening gowns that reminded her of dances with spry gentlemen, ballrooms and rich families’ houses…

There, on the old table that had been a gift—from who she didn’t know, nor care—sat a pitcher of water and a box of pills. The doctor had told her to take them all—with water, he said. Pills, and water, she thought, as she gulped them down hungrily, what a breakfast. She was knelt down on the ground in pain, surrounded by the dusty stacks of letters, evening gowns spun of rich memories, her brother’s glinting, smirking medals on the wall…

The clock ticked by. Seven minutes had passed since she’d awoke. It had felt longer, just as the minutes when she was young felt shorter, quicker. No matter.

She looked back at the clock though her neck, twisted and painful, told her not to. She looked at it with the calculating glower of a fencer, looking at her enemy in the face, about to begin another duel. Perhaps she had won today, but it had been folly to think that she would win forever—her enemy’s unceasing, unforgiving minutes—days—years—marched on blindly. Perhaps she’d thought that she could win? She had waged a losing war. But today—today was her victory.