Hot Toddy, Cold Ground

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The ground was moist from recent rain, but she’d brought one of the thick, wool blankets from the old cedar chest and it was enough to keep her dry. She sat down on the folded fabric and pulled the thermos from inside her cloak.

There was barely any moon, just enough to let the gravestones show as reverse silhouettes – pieces cut out from the surrounding dark. Pieces that seemed to exist in a world where the light never reached.

Cemetery at by ELG21 via Pixabay

Or maybe that was her grief speaking.

It had been years since she’d lost him, not to any plague or pandemic, but to the very mundane condition of extreme old age. He’d admitted to being ninety; she had been certain he was over one hundred when he died.

Not that it mattered anymore.

She lit a candle and placed it on top of his stone. Then she opened the thermos and poured steaming liquid into the cup that was also the lid. The first pour, she gave to the ground, and the scent rose around her: cinnamon, cloves, alcohol, damp earth.

The second pour was hers to drink. She lifted the plastic vessel toward the gravestone in a toast and forced a smile. “I brought your hot toddy, Granddad, just like always.”

Spiced tea, honey, and bourbon warmed her from the inside out. Between sips she told her grandfather what had changed in her life since her last visit.

When the candle flickered out, she drained the last of her drink, replaced the lid, and rose to leave. Folding the damp blanket over her arm, she bid a final. “Good night, Granddad. I love you. See you next year.”

She walked away, unaware that, beneath the bourbon-laced earth, frail, fleshless hands were reaching upward, and a withered, rasping voice was speaking.

“Love you too, kiddo.”


Written for the October 2021 #Creativefest. Prompt: silhouette.
Special thanks to Fran H. for a line suggestion.

 

But Old Towns Are Always Haunted, Aren’t They?

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That one stretch of Highway 75 across the corner of Nebraska between the Kansas Turnpike and the turnoff to cross the river and connect with I-29 always spooked her.

When she made the trip alone, she would make sure she had enough gas to drive that section of her journey without having to stop. When she was with her partner, she still got the heebie-jeebies, but at least she had another human being, real and alive, sitting next to her.

Ralph's Market by Daniel RitterSometimes, she even let him drive.

“I’m just going to shut my eyes,” she’d say, even though they both knew she never slept in cars. “Wake me when we get to that rest-stop with the fancy Japanese toilets.”  She’d pop headphones in her ears, and squinch her eyes shut, and pray she could keep them that way until they’d crossed the Iowa state line.

Invariably, though, she would wake up just as the speed limit slowed and the road narrowed to two lanes as it crept through the old town.

Tonight, they hit that part of the trip just as the sun was setting, and she couldn’t help but watch as the dying rays illuminated the creaky old buildings with their ghost signs still evident on long-derelict buildings.

“You okay?” her husband asked, more focused on the road ahead than on her.

“Yeah. I just… this town makes me sad.”

Sad was an understatement. She could feel the neglect like a weight upon her shoulders. The town had been cute once – the remnants of it were still here – the old bones of a place that was too far from any city to be a suburb, and too small to thrive.

The post office was little more than a phone booth – or maybe one of those roadside ice cream stands that are only open in summer. She imagined Ralph, from the market still bore his name even though it was long since closed (replaced by a Walmart up at the crossroads between this tiny town and the next), rushing over to handle the mail or sell some stamps in between customers picking up their grocery orders.

She could almost hear the happy voices of children playing tether ball in the yard of the schoolhouse across the street – the school that no longer hosted lively classrooms. A few windows were broken, and the chains for the balls hung limply.  Probably the kids would have trooped over to the market when they were done playing, and spent their allowances on penny candy and the kinds of pop they didn’t sell much anymore: Mr. Pibb, RC Cola, Grape NeHi.

Up at the corner, the motel still had lights on, and one lonely car was parked in the criss-cross of broken paint lines that was its parking lot, right in front of the payphone – an actual payphone! – and the sign promising free ice. Those lights were a beacon to her, a sign that the oldest part of the town was behind them, and the next block would hold the Tast-e-Freeze and Dog House  – two stops on an endless march of fast food.

They waited at the light – the only one in town, and she could have sworn she saw shadowy figures in the background, the essences of the people who had lived and worked here once upon a time, but then the red switched to green, and she realized it must’ve been a trick of the light.

Still, she shuddered, glad they were back up to speed.

Old towns always made her feel like someone was watching her.

And who knows? Maybe they were. Old towns are always haunted, aren’t they?


Photo credit: Daniel Ritter
Written for October 2021 #CreativeFest. Prompt: Ghost

 

La Signora della Luna

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When I was little, my grandmother kept the moon in a glass on her bedside table. She kept her teeth in another glass right next to it.

girl-5760295_1280I always wondered what would happen if she mixed them up, and put the moon in with the fizzy tablet that cleaned her teeth. Would it wipe away all the craters? Chase away the mares and level the Archimedes mountains?

But she never mixed the glasses.

I asked her once, why she trapped the moon that way. She told me that after my grandfather left this world, she was lonely. During the day, she had friends and neighbors to visit with, and family to talk to on the phone. But in the deep, darkness after bedtime, she missed having someone right there, with their head on the pillow next to hers, to share her thoughts with.

“But don’t people miss the moon, when you have it in the glass?” I’d asked.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Because the moon isn’t just the moon;  it’s the quiet listener we all need from time to time. I have the moon in this glass, and we talk, and then the moon goes to the next person who needs it, and I drink the moon-water.”  She paused and smiled at me, and her teeth were shiny in her mouth, in a way they never were in the glass. “The moon-water is what makes it possible. Your grandfather used to snatch the moon from the sky when we was away at war, and keep it in his canteen.”

“He didn’t!”

“He did. He sent me a drawing of it, once. I think it’s in the bottom drawer of my bureau.”

I went to the bottom drawer, the one where my grandmother kept her treasures and found the manila envelope of my grandfather’s drawings. We never found the picture of the moon in his canteen, but we flipped through pages showing the anatomy of flowers and insects in textbook detail, and a sketch he drew of my grandmother when they were young and newly married. He’d written La Signora della Luna in the top margin. It meant “Lady of the Moon.”

“Would the moon listen to me, if I needed to?”

“Maybe.” My grandmother rarely gave definitive answers. “If the mood was right and you asked politely.”

Of course, I resolved to ask.

I tried and tried – constantly that summer, and less frequently as the years turned and I grew older. In time, I forgot all about the moon being in my grandmother’s water-glass, and when I did remember, I assumed it was a trick of the light, a reflection shining through her window.

But after she left this world to go be with my grandfather again, I found the thick, heavy glass in a box of things to be donated, and I asked my mother if I could have it.

“I guess so,” she said, puzzlement in her voice. “But it’s just one glass. We were never sure, but we think she took it from the Officer’s Club dining room.”

That didn’t surprise me. My grandmother had many mysterious acquisitions among her belongings: a tiny milk pitcher from a favorite bed and breakfast, one purple satin shoe, a pair of gold bracelets that didn’t seem big enough for even her tiny wrists, yet somehow, magically, she managed to wear. A stray glass was nothing by comparison.

Except that I knew the secret.

Alone at home, a year and a day after the funeral, I filled that glass with water and put it on my bedside table. I wasn’t even thinking about a possible lunar visitation. I just remembered that it had been hers.

That night, I dreamed of my grandmother, not the way she’d been in the last years before her death, but vibrant and relatively young the way she’d been when I was little. Her cheeks were barely lined then, and her eyes were bright and shining. She didn’t speak to me, but I felt the edge of the bed dip when she sat down, and I smiled at the touch of her cool fingers on my forehead.

I woke up to dim light, certain that I could detect her rose-scented perfume in my room. Reaching for the water glass on my table, I froze. Because instead of just water, the moon was there, just floating as if it belonged there instead of the sky.

Moon-water doesn’t taste any different from plain old drinking water,  I discovered later. But drinking it makes you feel lighter inside. It’s as if gravity isn’t pulling on you quite as hard as it should.

And the moon… well, it’s an excellent listener. It never talks back, of course, but the next morning I always wake up with an answer to whatever problem I had told it about.

I bet if I had a lover who could draw, instead of one who played music, he’d call me the Lady of the Moon, now, and I guess that’s how it should be. I don’t have a granddaughter to pass my legacy to, but one of my nieces has the soul of a dreamer. Maybe I’ll ask her what she sees in the glass, next time she spends the night.

My grandmother used to keep the moon in a glass of water on her bedside table. Now it’s my turn.


#Written for the October 2021 #Creativefest. Prompt: Moon.