Franklin Falls
by Shelley Pineo-Jensen, Ph.D.
Part 1
published 8/22/24
published 8/22/24
As Loretta closed the outer door of her apartment building, the street lit up as lightning crackled the sky and thunder bloomed in the air. The hair on her arm stood straight out from her skin and a stab of lightening cracked the darkness as thunder smacked the Painted Ladies, reverberating off the buildings lining both sides of the otherwise quiet neighborhood.
The air smelled fried – frizzled. Across the street and down past the corner, light was fluttering from the roof of a hundred-year-old house that dominated the north-west corner of the intersection. Dark, with copper cornices, the mansion seemed to have a yellow hat – it was on fire! Loretta called 9-1-1 to report the fire and then sat in one of the dirty chairs on her front porch to wait for her car.
She heard sirens start up somewhere and then swoon and wobble their way to the fire. An ambulance roared up her empty street, coming to a stop to block the intersection from the south and the east, and then immediately back up, to let a fire engine past. Cars coming up the one-way street from the east attempted to squeeze past, in between the fire engine and the ambulance. Then a police car arrived, having driven the wrong way down Loretta’s one-way street, coming from the north. Two officers got out and commanded the scene – moving traffic back and away; firefighters were already spraying water on the ragged band of flame that was spreading out along the roof ridge.
Her driver pulled up in front of the 150-year-old row house and she dragged her little gray suitcase down the steps and told the driver he should back up, down the street to the south, or they would be there for hours. And so he did, back up his shiny black automobile all the way down the street to the last intersection, and thus Loretta was on her way to the airport. An expensive way to travel, but easier than negotiating a ride from any of her nearby family, in the middle of the night. A small price to pay, with greater prices coming soon enough.
When she got to Reagan International Airport, she waited in a line to buy a ticket to the coast. The staff seemed non-plussed and put-out by her request. No one buys a ticket at the airport – you buy a ticket on your phone. But Loretta was not interested in learning how to buy a ticket on her phone, that day, and was eventually able to purchase a ticket on a flight to Sea-Tac, requiring that she wait for four hours. Loretta made her way to her gate, found a spot with a window view, and took out her book, a one-volume collection of Dashiell Hammet’s novels. She was currently rereading Red Harvest. Loretta loved the part where the Continental Op wakes up to discover he may have killed a woman with an ice pick while in a laudanum haze. Solving the mystery of “if” he killed her – now that’s a nice twist.
It was long flight to Seattle and her seat was in the back of the plane, wedged between two men who thought they owned the armrests. She read her book and avoided eye contact for six hours, when she was not sleeping or pretending to be asleep. She ate all the food she had in her “personal item” – a Disney backpack containing some apples and graham crackers, and of course her book. She fingered a black and white on silver yin yang pendant on a black fabric cord hanging from her neck; she visualized being in balance with the universe – her body in the material world, her spirit connected to the eternal life force permeating – enlivening - the universe. Once every hour she got up and walked the length of the plane, all the way to the front, and then to the back, before squeezing into the tiny, slightly smelly bathroom at the back of the plane.
When they landed, she took her time getting to the car rental area. Loretta found she didn’t need to rush. She chose Avis because she didn’t want to get fucked around by one of the cheaper outfits. She didn’t want to get to some distant parking lot and discover that the car was not the type she had ordered, or that there was no car there at all, like Steve Martin’s dilemma in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. She rented a small automatic and was able to claim the car without a major incident.
After she started the engine, adjusted the seat and the mirror, and fiddled around with the radio, she sat still and did some deep breathing to refocus herself on her next task. Then she got out her phone and set a course for Olympia, the state capital. She was on her way to see the ocean, and the Pacific Rain Forest, and something else. What was it? Ferns? To smell Washington state? Something called her. Beckoned her. Lured her.
She finished setting up her highly intelligent phone to guide her journey and got on the I-5 Freeway. As she drove south it started raining, at first softly, and then harder and harder, finally pounding the landscape, making water bounce up as the drops pelted the earth. What should have been a 50-minute drive slowed to an hour and a half, as she stuck to the slow lane with the commerce trucks and other chicken-shit drivers like herself. It had been five years since she had driven this far in an automobile; she didn’t intend to get in a car wreck on the I-5 on the first day of the rest of her life.
Eventually, she reached Olympia, obscured by rain. She got onto the business loop of I-5 and pulled into a motel – a member of the OYO chain. It looked promisingly cheap – a former swimming pool at the front of the parking lot had been filled with dirt and was now covered with a low growth of recently wacked weeds. The dead cuttings lay listless on top of the struggling green elements.
The room cost less than her car to the airport; suspicious, she checked for bed bugs first thing upon walking in the door. Bright red pillowcases emblazoned with the OYO logo annoyed her eyes. She found the charger in her fanny pack and connected her phone to a USB port on the nightstand. She found her pills in her Mickey backpack and took her one night-time pill. Finally, she took off her clothes down to her underwear, got under the covers and was asleep within seconds.
The air smelled fried – frizzled. Across the street and down past the corner, light was fluttering from the roof of a hundred-year-old house that dominated the north-west corner of the intersection. Dark, with copper cornices, the mansion seemed to have a yellow hat – it was on fire! Loretta called 9-1-1 to report the fire and then sat in one of the dirty chairs on her front porch to wait for her car.
She heard sirens start up somewhere and then swoon and wobble their way to the fire. An ambulance roared up her empty street, coming to a stop to block the intersection from the south and the east, and then immediately back up, to let a fire engine past. Cars coming up the one-way street from the east attempted to squeeze past, in between the fire engine and the ambulance. Then a police car arrived, having driven the wrong way down Loretta’s one-way street, coming from the north. Two officers got out and commanded the scene – moving traffic back and away; firefighters were already spraying water on the ragged band of flame that was spreading out along the roof ridge.
Her driver pulled up in front of the 150-year-old row house and she dragged her little gray suitcase down the steps and told the driver he should back up, down the street to the south, or they would be there for hours. And so he did, back up his shiny black automobile all the way down the street to the last intersection, and thus Loretta was on her way to the airport. An expensive way to travel, but easier than negotiating a ride from any of her nearby family, in the middle of the night. A small price to pay, with greater prices coming soon enough.
When she got to Reagan International Airport, she waited in a line to buy a ticket to the coast. The staff seemed non-plussed and put-out by her request. No one buys a ticket at the airport – you buy a ticket on your phone. But Loretta was not interested in learning how to buy a ticket on her phone, that day, and was eventually able to purchase a ticket on a flight to Sea-Tac, requiring that she wait for four hours. Loretta made her way to her gate, found a spot with a window view, and took out her book, a one-volume collection of Dashiell Hammet’s novels. She was currently rereading Red Harvest. Loretta loved the part where the Continental Op wakes up to discover he may have killed a woman with an ice pick while in a laudanum haze. Solving the mystery of “if” he killed her – now that’s a nice twist.
It was long flight to Seattle and her seat was in the back of the plane, wedged between two men who thought they owned the armrests. She read her book and avoided eye contact for six hours, when she was not sleeping or pretending to be asleep. She ate all the food she had in her “personal item” – a Disney backpack containing some apples and graham crackers, and of course her book. She fingered a black and white on silver yin yang pendant on a black fabric cord hanging from her neck; she visualized being in balance with the universe – her body in the material world, her spirit connected to the eternal life force permeating – enlivening - the universe. Once every hour she got up and walked the length of the plane, all the way to the front, and then to the back, before squeezing into the tiny, slightly smelly bathroom at the back of the plane.
When they landed, she took her time getting to the car rental area. Loretta found she didn’t need to rush. She chose Avis because she didn’t want to get fucked around by one of the cheaper outfits. She didn’t want to get to some distant parking lot and discover that the car was not the type she had ordered, or that there was no car there at all, like Steve Martin’s dilemma in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. She rented a small automatic and was able to claim the car without a major incident.
After she started the engine, adjusted the seat and the mirror, and fiddled around with the radio, she sat still and did some deep breathing to refocus herself on her next task. Then she got out her phone and set a course for Olympia, the state capital. She was on her way to see the ocean, and the Pacific Rain Forest, and something else. What was it? Ferns? To smell Washington state? Something called her. Beckoned her. Lured her.
She finished setting up her highly intelligent phone to guide her journey and got on the I-5 Freeway. As she drove south it started raining, at first softly, and then harder and harder, finally pounding the landscape, making water bounce up as the drops pelted the earth. What should have been a 50-minute drive slowed to an hour and a half, as she stuck to the slow lane with the commerce trucks and other chicken-shit drivers like herself. It had been five years since she had driven this far in an automobile; she didn’t intend to get in a car wreck on the I-5 on the first day of the rest of her life.
Eventually, she reached Olympia, obscured by rain. She got onto the business loop of I-5 and pulled into a motel – a member of the OYO chain. It looked promisingly cheap – a former swimming pool at the front of the parking lot had been filled with dirt and was now covered with a low growth of recently wacked weeds. The dead cuttings lay listless on top of the struggling green elements.
The room cost less than her car to the airport; suspicious, she checked for bed bugs first thing upon walking in the door. Bright red pillowcases emblazoned with the OYO logo annoyed her eyes. She found the charger in her fanny pack and connected her phone to a USB port on the nightstand. She found her pills in her Mickey backpack and took her one night-time pill. Finally, she took off her clothes down to her underwear, got under the covers and was asleep within seconds.
Part 2
published 8/25/24
published 8/25/24
Bright and Early
Loretta slept in, past the time of the free breakfast, waking hungry. Her skin was tight and yet somehow also greasy. The inside of her mouth was coated with film and her hair was stringy and matted in one place.
She had been dreaming of the waterfall again. It left her with a feeling of dread, as it always did. On the edges, a clear pond; you could see right to the bottom, little fishes, waving grasses. Over at the far end, the water poured down as from a spigot, plunging deep, churning the water against straight gray rock cliff walls. Behind the falls, the hint of a cave. She moves towards the falls, each step heavier than the last, until she is plunged under the falls. She is drowning.
She shivered and tossed her head from side to side, to shake off the dream. Then she propped up the pillows behind her head and reached for her phone. There were 30 text messages waiting for her – from her children, from her mother, from her neighbor Frankie, and one from Arby’s, with a great offer on a new item: hamburgers.
She skimmed through the outrage and worry of her loved ones and chose to answer only the texts from the older of her two daughters. “I’m out,” was all she wrote. Then she silenced her phone again. It was all their problem now. She had more important matters that required her attention, starting with her sanity and moving to issues of freedom and respect. She allowed the feeling of weight to lift from her body – she could almost see it coming off her being, in waves of brown particles drifting out and away in a hazy aura.
She sat up, readjusting her pillows to a new posture, and got into the Notes app on her phone. She started a note entitled “TO DO” and then left it empty while she sorted through the dozens of lists already created. She threw away everything except the ones about movies she wanted to watch – she combined all of those together into one so that she now had only two notes and one of them was empty, but for the title.
To do, or not to do, that was the question. Item one – do nothing in particular. She nodded her head; I tell it to myself, and I agree, she thought. Then she got up and bathed in a shabby shower using stingy supplies – tiny bar of soap, slightly and unidentifiably scented shampoo, and a couple small gray-white towels. She had brought only the bare necessities for this journey; she would buy supplies if she ever stopped moving from motel to motel . . . she didn’t have a plan. She pined for the Pacific Ocean was her plan.
As she was checking out of the motel, she collected some brochures from a rack in the office. While she ate breakfast in a Denny’s near the freeway, she read about Port Angeles - it had whale watching - and Sol Duc in the Olympic National Forest – it had hot springs and a restaurant “on site.” She determined that Sol Duc would be a good place to have lunch on her way to the beach.
She gassed up the car and made good time. After seven years of living in a city on the east coast, the scenery was amazing to her. There were actual trees, not what passed for a forest on the Eastern Seaboard: a tick-filled tree farm decorated with kudzu. She enjoyed her neighborhood in Baltimore, loved the old houses and the college students, but the air never smelled like anything – it was neither good nor bad – it was non-existent.
She had the window rolled partway down so she could smell the fresh air . . . it invigorated her spirit. That’s what I’m talkin’ about, she thought. She inhaled deeply, a smile starting to curl just the edges of her mouth. Her first smile in months, she realized. Tears came to her eyes.
She looked for a place to pull over – a turnout with a view of Sequim Bay near the town of Blyn appeared on the right. She pulled over and got out of the car to cry. She thought of her mother, stuck in that basement apartment, abandoned by her primary caregiver. She cried but she found she didn’t care, didn’t feel guilty. Her mother had drifted away, first just losing at backgammon, not remembering how to lay out the pieces, then leaving the burner going after making tea, then criticizing others over her own deafness and inability to keep up with a conversation, finally leading to perpetual anger. Loretta felt unencumbered.
She thought of her children, unfairly burdened with the aged one, with her incompetence and venality, all traces of her former wit and intelligence completely erased from her brain. She cried but could find no mercy in her soul, no grain of human decency to help her children negotiate this new obligation. Loretta thought about the last years of her life, of using up every morsel of her charity and kindness out of duty to her ancestor. She cried hard but she did not regret any of it – not the decision to care for her mother and not the decision to walk away with nothing more than clean underwear and some headspace on her credit cards.
That reminds me. I need a toothbrush. And I will need to do laundry pretty soon. . . She took out her phone and opened her to do list: 1) toothbrush, 2) toothpaste, and 3) laundry.
She took a plain white handkerchief from her pocket and wiped off her face and blew her nose. It was refreshing to feel the free attention available after a discharge of emotion like that. She stood herself up straighter and taller and watched sea gulls swooping and calling over the water for a few minutes. She inhaled deeply the complex smells of sea, coastal grass, and a touch of creosote – from a nearby stack of blackened logs – telephone poles? Pier parts? Sunbeams lit up a bit of warmth on her face; a soft breeze coming up off the water cooled it back a bit. She savored the moment. Then she got back on the road.
She stopped in Port Angeles, not for whale watching, but rather to buy a toothbrush, toothpaste, and some Earl Gray Tea. She used the bathroom, brushing her teeth with her new supplies. Spooning handfuls of water up from the tap, it was difficult to both rinse her mouth and keep her shirt dry, but she was careful. This was the only shirt she had, at the moment.
She stopped at a liquor store and purchased some miniature bottles of Rum Chata; she had decided that since booze can be held at room temperature, it would be a better choice than milk to lighten up her tea. Her final stop was a gas station; then she got back in the car to finish the drive to Sol Duc for lunch.
Loretta slept in, past the time of the free breakfast, waking hungry. Her skin was tight and yet somehow also greasy. The inside of her mouth was coated with film and her hair was stringy and matted in one place.
She had been dreaming of the waterfall again. It left her with a feeling of dread, as it always did. On the edges, a clear pond; you could see right to the bottom, little fishes, waving grasses. Over at the far end, the water poured down as from a spigot, plunging deep, churning the water against straight gray rock cliff walls. Behind the falls, the hint of a cave. She moves towards the falls, each step heavier than the last, until she is plunged under the falls. She is drowning.
She shivered and tossed her head from side to side, to shake off the dream. Then she propped up the pillows behind her head and reached for her phone. There were 30 text messages waiting for her – from her children, from her mother, from her neighbor Frankie, and one from Arby’s, with a great offer on a new item: hamburgers.
She skimmed through the outrage and worry of her loved ones and chose to answer only the texts from the older of her two daughters. “I’m out,” was all she wrote. Then she silenced her phone again. It was all their problem now. She had more important matters that required her attention, starting with her sanity and moving to issues of freedom and respect. She allowed the feeling of weight to lift from her body – she could almost see it coming off her being, in waves of brown particles drifting out and away in a hazy aura.
She sat up, readjusting her pillows to a new posture, and got into the Notes app on her phone. She started a note entitled “TO DO” and then left it empty while she sorted through the dozens of lists already created. She threw away everything except the ones about movies she wanted to watch – she combined all of those together into one so that she now had only two notes and one of them was empty, but for the title.
To do, or not to do, that was the question. Item one – do nothing in particular. She nodded her head; I tell it to myself, and I agree, she thought. Then she got up and bathed in a shabby shower using stingy supplies – tiny bar of soap, slightly and unidentifiably scented shampoo, and a couple small gray-white towels. She had brought only the bare necessities for this journey; she would buy supplies if she ever stopped moving from motel to motel . . . she didn’t have a plan. She pined for the Pacific Ocean was her plan.
As she was checking out of the motel, she collected some brochures from a rack in the office. While she ate breakfast in a Denny’s near the freeway, she read about Port Angeles - it had whale watching - and Sol Duc in the Olympic National Forest – it had hot springs and a restaurant “on site.” She determined that Sol Duc would be a good place to have lunch on her way to the beach.
She gassed up the car and made good time. After seven years of living in a city on the east coast, the scenery was amazing to her. There were actual trees, not what passed for a forest on the Eastern Seaboard: a tick-filled tree farm decorated with kudzu. She enjoyed her neighborhood in Baltimore, loved the old houses and the college students, but the air never smelled like anything – it was neither good nor bad – it was non-existent.
She had the window rolled partway down so she could smell the fresh air . . . it invigorated her spirit. That’s what I’m talkin’ about, she thought. She inhaled deeply, a smile starting to curl just the edges of her mouth. Her first smile in months, she realized. Tears came to her eyes.
She looked for a place to pull over – a turnout with a view of Sequim Bay near the town of Blyn appeared on the right. She pulled over and got out of the car to cry. She thought of her mother, stuck in that basement apartment, abandoned by her primary caregiver. She cried but she found she didn’t care, didn’t feel guilty. Her mother had drifted away, first just losing at backgammon, not remembering how to lay out the pieces, then leaving the burner going after making tea, then criticizing others over her own deafness and inability to keep up with a conversation, finally leading to perpetual anger. Loretta felt unencumbered.
She thought of her children, unfairly burdened with the aged one, with her incompetence and venality, all traces of her former wit and intelligence completely erased from her brain. She cried but could find no mercy in her soul, no grain of human decency to help her children negotiate this new obligation. Loretta thought about the last years of her life, of using up every morsel of her charity and kindness out of duty to her ancestor. She cried hard but she did not regret any of it – not the decision to care for her mother and not the decision to walk away with nothing more than clean underwear and some headspace on her credit cards.
That reminds me. I need a toothbrush. And I will need to do laundry pretty soon. . . She took out her phone and opened her to do list: 1) toothbrush, 2) toothpaste, and 3) laundry.
She took a plain white handkerchief from her pocket and wiped off her face and blew her nose. It was refreshing to feel the free attention available after a discharge of emotion like that. She stood herself up straighter and taller and watched sea gulls swooping and calling over the water for a few minutes. She inhaled deeply the complex smells of sea, coastal grass, and a touch of creosote – from a nearby stack of blackened logs – telephone poles? Pier parts? Sunbeams lit up a bit of warmth on her face; a soft breeze coming up off the water cooled it back a bit. She savored the moment. Then she got back on the road.
She stopped in Port Angeles, not for whale watching, but rather to buy a toothbrush, toothpaste, and some Earl Gray Tea. She used the bathroom, brushing her teeth with her new supplies. Spooning handfuls of water up from the tap, it was difficult to both rinse her mouth and keep her shirt dry, but she was careful. This was the only shirt she had, at the moment.
She stopped at a liquor store and purchased some miniature bottles of Rum Chata; she had decided that since booze can be held at room temperature, it would be a better choice than milk to lighten up her tea. Her final stop was a gas station; then she got back in the car to finish the drive to Sol Duc for lunch.
Part 3
published 9/1/24
published 9/1/24
Sol Duc
On this cool day in May, the parking lot was not full. She parked near the restaurant and brushed her hair with a little collapsable brush she kept in her fanny pack. She put on a new coat of lip gloss and practiced smiling in the little mirror on the back of the brush. It looked like a rictus grimace to her, but it seemed to be the best she could do.
The restaurant was empty at that odd mid-afternoon time when no one eats. It was lovely, with large windows on three walls. The fourth wall was dominated by counter service. The walls were creamy yellow and there was old pale wood everywhere – the tables, the chairs, support beams, some of it actual logs and branches, shiny with varnish.
The hostess, a big blowsy woman with blond hair and dark roots seated Loretta at a table with a view of a creek. She dropped a greasy plastic-covered menu and said, “Your server will be with you in just a moment.”
Her server was a small woman with short black hair, several small rings in one ear, and a tattoo of a clenched fist on the inside of her right wrist. She could have been pretty, but her expression was bored with flashes of hostility. Marge ordered a turkey sandwich and a glass of unsweetened ice tea. $15 for a sandwich seemed outrageous, but the view was a soothing green. She twitched off the aggravation of the attitude of the waitress and the price of the sandwich with a tiny shimmy and took out her book.
She was aroused from her concentration by the sound of women’s voices, arguing, getting louder and more shrill. It was coming from the kitchen. She could see the cook put a plate up on the counter at the narrow opening between the kitchen and the counter service area. He rang a bell. The quarrel was escalating. He rang the bell again. And again.
With a crash of metal hitting a floor and the sound of a door slamming, the squabble was over. She heard a car starting, then its engine revving, and then a screeching of tires against gravel, then gone.
Through the swinging kitchen door, Blondie came running out into the restaurant, her keys in her hand. She rushed out the front door. Through the windows facing the parking lot, Marge watched as the large woman sprinted to an ancient white Cadillac, fired her up, and raced out of the parking lot.
I guess no one is going to serve me my sandwich, she thought. So she got up and walked behind the counter. She looked at the sandwich, looked at the ticket it rested upon, and looked at the cook. He nodded his head. She took the plate back to her table and ate some of her lunch. The sandwich was fabulous. It was large, with fresh sliced turkey, multigrain bread, thinly sliced tomato and red onion, alfalfa sprouts, and just the right amount of mayonnaise. But she didn’t have her iced tea or even a glass of water. Hmmmm.
Loretta got up and went back behind the counter and looked around. There was a fridge with a glass front – inside she found a gallon jug filled with a brown liquid. She found the glasses, took one, poured a bit of the liquid and tasted it. She filled her glass and went back to her table and read more of her book, glancing at the brook every so often. The waitress and the hostess had not returned.
She picked out a shirt from a small display of merchandise near the front door. It was stenciled with the words “Sol Duc.” She took it and her ticket over to the slender opening into the kitchen and called to the cook, who was standing at the back door smoking and blowing the fumes out the open doorway. “I wanna pay for this,” she called back to him.
“You gotta pay cash,” he growled.
“Okay.”
“You know how to make change?” His deep voice was querulous.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Can I trust you?” His voice softened a bit and he stared into her eyes.
“Always,” she replied. She found she was grinning a wide teary smile. She stared back at the middle-aged bald man in the dirty apron and waited.
“Just push the red button on the front left corner of the machine to pop it open,” the cook said gruffly. He turned and faced out the back door and continued to drag on his cigarette. Loretta thought she better give herself a nice tip and smirked.
Loretta was just closing the cash register when the door opened to admit a young couple. She picked up two menus from the hostess’ station and asked them if they wanted a window seat.
On this cool day in May, the parking lot was not full. She parked near the restaurant and brushed her hair with a little collapsable brush she kept in her fanny pack. She put on a new coat of lip gloss and practiced smiling in the little mirror on the back of the brush. It looked like a rictus grimace to her, but it seemed to be the best she could do.
The restaurant was empty at that odd mid-afternoon time when no one eats. It was lovely, with large windows on three walls. The fourth wall was dominated by counter service. The walls were creamy yellow and there was old pale wood everywhere – the tables, the chairs, support beams, some of it actual logs and branches, shiny with varnish.
The hostess, a big blowsy woman with blond hair and dark roots seated Loretta at a table with a view of a creek. She dropped a greasy plastic-covered menu and said, “Your server will be with you in just a moment.”
Her server was a small woman with short black hair, several small rings in one ear, and a tattoo of a clenched fist on the inside of her right wrist. She could have been pretty, but her expression was bored with flashes of hostility. Marge ordered a turkey sandwich and a glass of unsweetened ice tea. $15 for a sandwich seemed outrageous, but the view was a soothing green. She twitched off the aggravation of the attitude of the waitress and the price of the sandwich with a tiny shimmy and took out her book.
She was aroused from her concentration by the sound of women’s voices, arguing, getting louder and more shrill. It was coming from the kitchen. She could see the cook put a plate up on the counter at the narrow opening between the kitchen and the counter service area. He rang a bell. The quarrel was escalating. He rang the bell again. And again.
With a crash of metal hitting a floor and the sound of a door slamming, the squabble was over. She heard a car starting, then its engine revving, and then a screeching of tires against gravel, then gone.
Through the swinging kitchen door, Blondie came running out into the restaurant, her keys in her hand. She rushed out the front door. Through the windows facing the parking lot, Marge watched as the large woman sprinted to an ancient white Cadillac, fired her up, and raced out of the parking lot.
I guess no one is going to serve me my sandwich, she thought. So she got up and walked behind the counter. She looked at the sandwich, looked at the ticket it rested upon, and looked at the cook. He nodded his head. She took the plate back to her table and ate some of her lunch. The sandwich was fabulous. It was large, with fresh sliced turkey, multigrain bread, thinly sliced tomato and red onion, alfalfa sprouts, and just the right amount of mayonnaise. But she didn’t have her iced tea or even a glass of water. Hmmmm.
Loretta got up and went back behind the counter and looked around. There was a fridge with a glass front – inside she found a gallon jug filled with a brown liquid. She found the glasses, took one, poured a bit of the liquid and tasted it. She filled her glass and went back to her table and read more of her book, glancing at the brook every so often. The waitress and the hostess had not returned.
She picked out a shirt from a small display of merchandise near the front door. It was stenciled with the words “Sol Duc.” She took it and her ticket over to the slender opening into the kitchen and called to the cook, who was standing at the back door smoking and blowing the fumes out the open doorway. “I wanna pay for this,” she called back to him.
“You gotta pay cash,” he growled.
“Okay.”
“You know how to make change?” His deep voice was querulous.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Can I trust you?” His voice softened a bit and he stared into her eyes.
“Always,” she replied. She found she was grinning a wide teary smile. She stared back at the middle-aged bald man in the dirty apron and waited.
“Just push the red button on the front left corner of the machine to pop it open,” the cook said gruffly. He turned and faced out the back door and continued to drag on his cigarette. Loretta thought she better give herself a nice tip and smirked.
Loretta was just closing the cash register when the door opened to admit a young couple. She picked up two menus from the hostess’ station and asked them if they wanted a window seat.
Part 4
published 9/5/24
published 9/5/24
Life as a Waitress
At her hiring interview, she asked for help getting rid of her rental car. The chief boss, a thin, prim, exacting woman who preferred to be addressed as “Mrs. Bonifax” or “Mrs. B” for short, had one of the resort mechanics drive the company truck out to Port Angeles to pick Loretta up from the car rental drop-off.
Max was a talkative young goofball with silly ideas and a non-stop stream of chatter as they drove back to the resort. He would ask her questions but then interrupt her answer with ideas of his own. Apparently, he knew a lot about how the hot water to the swimming pool and baths got from nature into the facility. Water temperature, apparently, was very important. He told her if she ever needed a hand, she should ask him. He liked helping people, he told her. Loretta was grateful to be unchallenged by his shallow conversation and leaned back into the stiff crusty seat of the truck and enjoyed the view back to work.
Loretta rarely communicated with her family. They were all, as a unit, totally pissed off at her. She accepted their invective and their pleas, in the form of texts, emails, and voice messages. She skimmed the texts and deleted them, almost before reading them. She never answered any of them and eventually they stopped buzzing her phone. She never answered the phone calls – and reading the text versions of the voice messages was too grim. She deleted them too, as quickly as she could, trying not to get her mind too involved with that which she had left behind. She read the emails a little more carefully, but she never found anything actionable. With all their whining and complaining, they were actually handling the situation with Mother quite well. They moved her into a nursing home within a few weeks, with the eldest of her two children forced to take time off work to babysit Grandma. Her former neighbor, Frankie, had been a big help and had not given Loretta a hard time, either. In fact, Frankie had a pretty good understanding of what life for Loretta had been and was very understanding about the sudden departure.
Time passed. Loretta settled into the role of waitress/hostess of the Sol Duc Café. She never found out what happened to the previous employees – except they both lost their jobs for walking out in the middle of a shift.
Loretta got her choice of rooms newly vacated by “the angry women” as she thought of them. Both rooms were part of a collection of strips of small rooms behind the main building, pushed back up against a forested hill with only graveled paths to reach them. She chose the room at the end of the strip; it had an extra window looking out to the forest, just a few feet away. She had a single bed (yes, she checked for bed bugs upon first entering the room) and access to the laundry operation and the housekeeping supply sheds attached to the back of the main building.
Her wages weren’t much, but the free room and meal tickets allowed her to live a slow pace of life. The work at the restaurant was not challenging; for a few weeks it was just her and the cook (his name was Ted, but everyone just called him “Cook”). When management did start hiring more staff, for “the season,” she was the hostess and the senior waitstaff, so she didn’t have any power differential looming over her, some small-minded maggot playing “under my thumb” with her. She did her job pleasantly and efficiently, didn’t give Cook any grief, and management, namely Mrs. B, left them alone. She had bigger fish to fry.
Loretta was part of a skeleton crew when she first arrived, and they all seemed to have back stories that they declined to discuss. The housekeeping staff was mostly people with light-brown skin who spoke fluent Spanish to one another. This group sponsored a party every Friday around seven pm, at the forest-end of one of the other employee housing strips. These were potluck affairs, BYOB.
Here she learned that the angry women were jealous lovers who used to tear up the scenery with big dramatic fights. Generally, folks found it shocking that they had both lost their jobs, but it was also not surprising that such “passionate” people would make reckless decisions.
Part of the conversation would always land on a big party that they were planning for after Labor Day. It was to be held at a place called Franklin Falls, a place you couldn’t get to by car. A place that was hard to get to – you had to know the way. They discussed logistics like: How possible was it was to lug an ice chest on wheels up there? Could they bring a barbeque? The rational ones always pointed out that the path was steep, and it would be impossible to get big items up to the falls. The dreamers just wanted what they wanted and kept bringing up new and more ridiculous ideas such as rope and pullies and teamwork. The menu was negotiated freshly, each Friday. At the end of the party, 8:30 pm precisely, they sang “Goodnight Irene,” raucously, and then they would all clink glasses and bottles, toasting themselves. “Cheers to one! Cheers to all!” they would shout. Then they methodically cleaned up any evidence of their shindig, said their goodbyes, and headed to their various destinations.
The Nightmare
She hadn’t had the dream about the waterfall since she got to Sol Duc, but one morning in August, she woke up in a panic, sweating and trembling. A silent scream framed her lips, wordlessly expressing her terror.
She had been dreaming that she was somehow behind a waterfall in a shallow low-ceilinged cave that had been etched out of hard rock by a thousand years of water erosion. Some light came in through a narrow opening at the base of the falls, with water lapping up onto a mud shelf. The sound of the falls was muted. She crawled around the dimly lit space on slippery mud, moving away from the opening into the dark. She kept putting her hand out – reaching to find the ending, not wanting to bump her head. Soon she was in pitch black. Her hand brushed something sticking out of the mud. She thought it was a tree branch, but it was soft and bendy, almost squishy. Her eyes accustomed themselves to the low light. What was it? It was . . . a hand. It was a hand connected to more beneath the mud.
This new development in her dreams horrified her. The recurring nightmare of drowning, held down under water by the powerful force of a waterfall had been bad enough, but this new thing, the hand of a dead person? She felt it still, clammy and soggy in her grip.
If everything in the dream was her, she tried to sort out the symbolism. In this new dream, she did not feel trapped in the cave. She wasn’t afraid until she found the hand and understood that it was connected to the rest of a body. A dead body. Was this her way of acknowledging that she was responsible for the shortening of her mother’s life? Was her mother dead to her now?
Her ideas didn’t make any sense to her; they didn’t resonate. What it felt more like was that there was something really scary to be found somewhere in her past, or perhaps in her future. But as she gazed out the window into the branches of green fir and red cedar, she found that she felt no anticipation, bad or good, . . . of anything. She was fine. Well except for the drowning and dead body of her dreams . . . she was great.
A robin landed on a branch near her window and seemed to be looking in at her. She smiled at the red-breasted fellow. She decided that she would have a stinky mud bath today. She got a nice discount . . .
At her hiring interview, she asked for help getting rid of her rental car. The chief boss, a thin, prim, exacting woman who preferred to be addressed as “Mrs. Bonifax” or “Mrs. B” for short, had one of the resort mechanics drive the company truck out to Port Angeles to pick Loretta up from the car rental drop-off.
Max was a talkative young goofball with silly ideas and a non-stop stream of chatter as they drove back to the resort. He would ask her questions but then interrupt her answer with ideas of his own. Apparently, he knew a lot about how the hot water to the swimming pool and baths got from nature into the facility. Water temperature, apparently, was very important. He told her if she ever needed a hand, she should ask him. He liked helping people, he told her. Loretta was grateful to be unchallenged by his shallow conversation and leaned back into the stiff crusty seat of the truck and enjoyed the view back to work.
Loretta rarely communicated with her family. They were all, as a unit, totally pissed off at her. She accepted their invective and their pleas, in the form of texts, emails, and voice messages. She skimmed the texts and deleted them, almost before reading them. She never answered any of them and eventually they stopped buzzing her phone. She never answered the phone calls – and reading the text versions of the voice messages was too grim. She deleted them too, as quickly as she could, trying not to get her mind too involved with that which she had left behind. She read the emails a little more carefully, but she never found anything actionable. With all their whining and complaining, they were actually handling the situation with Mother quite well. They moved her into a nursing home within a few weeks, with the eldest of her two children forced to take time off work to babysit Grandma. Her former neighbor, Frankie, had been a big help and had not given Loretta a hard time, either. In fact, Frankie had a pretty good understanding of what life for Loretta had been and was very understanding about the sudden departure.
Time passed. Loretta settled into the role of waitress/hostess of the Sol Duc Café. She never found out what happened to the previous employees – except they both lost their jobs for walking out in the middle of a shift.
Loretta got her choice of rooms newly vacated by “the angry women” as she thought of them. Both rooms were part of a collection of strips of small rooms behind the main building, pushed back up against a forested hill with only graveled paths to reach them. She chose the room at the end of the strip; it had an extra window looking out to the forest, just a few feet away. She had a single bed (yes, she checked for bed bugs upon first entering the room) and access to the laundry operation and the housekeeping supply sheds attached to the back of the main building.
Her wages weren’t much, but the free room and meal tickets allowed her to live a slow pace of life. The work at the restaurant was not challenging; for a few weeks it was just her and the cook (his name was Ted, but everyone just called him “Cook”). When management did start hiring more staff, for “the season,” she was the hostess and the senior waitstaff, so she didn’t have any power differential looming over her, some small-minded maggot playing “under my thumb” with her. She did her job pleasantly and efficiently, didn’t give Cook any grief, and management, namely Mrs. B, left them alone. She had bigger fish to fry.
Loretta was part of a skeleton crew when she first arrived, and they all seemed to have back stories that they declined to discuss. The housekeeping staff was mostly people with light-brown skin who spoke fluent Spanish to one another. This group sponsored a party every Friday around seven pm, at the forest-end of one of the other employee housing strips. These were potluck affairs, BYOB.
Here she learned that the angry women were jealous lovers who used to tear up the scenery with big dramatic fights. Generally, folks found it shocking that they had both lost their jobs, but it was also not surprising that such “passionate” people would make reckless decisions.
Part of the conversation would always land on a big party that they were planning for after Labor Day. It was to be held at a place called Franklin Falls, a place you couldn’t get to by car. A place that was hard to get to – you had to know the way. They discussed logistics like: How possible was it was to lug an ice chest on wheels up there? Could they bring a barbeque? The rational ones always pointed out that the path was steep, and it would be impossible to get big items up to the falls. The dreamers just wanted what they wanted and kept bringing up new and more ridiculous ideas such as rope and pullies and teamwork. The menu was negotiated freshly, each Friday. At the end of the party, 8:30 pm precisely, they sang “Goodnight Irene,” raucously, and then they would all clink glasses and bottles, toasting themselves. “Cheers to one! Cheers to all!” they would shout. Then they methodically cleaned up any evidence of their shindig, said their goodbyes, and headed to their various destinations.
The Nightmare
She hadn’t had the dream about the waterfall since she got to Sol Duc, but one morning in August, she woke up in a panic, sweating and trembling. A silent scream framed her lips, wordlessly expressing her terror.
She had been dreaming that she was somehow behind a waterfall in a shallow low-ceilinged cave that had been etched out of hard rock by a thousand years of water erosion. Some light came in through a narrow opening at the base of the falls, with water lapping up onto a mud shelf. The sound of the falls was muted. She crawled around the dimly lit space on slippery mud, moving away from the opening into the dark. She kept putting her hand out – reaching to find the ending, not wanting to bump her head. Soon she was in pitch black. Her hand brushed something sticking out of the mud. She thought it was a tree branch, but it was soft and bendy, almost squishy. Her eyes accustomed themselves to the low light. What was it? It was . . . a hand. It was a hand connected to more beneath the mud.
This new development in her dreams horrified her. The recurring nightmare of drowning, held down under water by the powerful force of a waterfall had been bad enough, but this new thing, the hand of a dead person? She felt it still, clammy and soggy in her grip.
If everything in the dream was her, she tried to sort out the symbolism. In this new dream, she did not feel trapped in the cave. She wasn’t afraid until she found the hand and understood that it was connected to the rest of a body. A dead body. Was this her way of acknowledging that she was responsible for the shortening of her mother’s life? Was her mother dead to her now?
Her ideas didn’t make any sense to her; they didn’t resonate. What it felt more like was that there was something really scary to be found somewhere in her past, or perhaps in her future. But as she gazed out the window into the branches of green fir and red cedar, she found that she felt no anticipation, bad or good, . . . of anything. She was fine. Well except for the drowning and dead body of her dreams . . . she was great.
A robin landed on a branch near her window and seemed to be looking in at her. She smiled at the red-breasted fellow. She decided that she would have a stinky mud bath today. She got a nice discount . . .
Part 5
published 9/8/24
published 9/8/24
The Big Party
The morning of the big party, Loretta was called down to the café to help with a minor flood in the kitchen. Cook and Max were there. Max had stopped water from gushing out of a broken pipe and was in the middle of replacing a section of pipe. Water was everywhere.
Sloshing around in the inch of water that had not escaped over the door sill, Cook had moved all of the obviously wet items up onto every available horizontal surface in the kitchen and was selecting items that were now unusable. He set Loretta to work searching for anything food related that had been missed that should be examined. As Cooked worked through the questionable items, discarded things began to pile up outside the back door.
Max left to get the “big” shop vac and was back in a few minutes in the company truck. He quickly got to work sucking up all the water on the floor while Loretta and Cook took a break, sitting on a couple of broken restaurant chairs out by the dumpsters. Cook lit up an unfiltered Camel and told her his plan of attack on recovering the kitchen.
“First, we’ll make sure that the floor and the wet part of the walls are real clean – mop ‘em up with disinfectant. And the table legs. And the bottoms of the shelves. Systematic-like. And we gotta find all the stuff that was hit with the water. I think the food’s all sorted, but we better make sure. Then we need to wash all the dishes what got wet. I don’t want nobody getting sick on account of this mess.”
Curious residents arrived to pick through the waste and take stores back to their rooms – Loretta wondered how someone would use a giant wet bag of flour but voiced no opinion. She learned that one carload of staff had already gone to set up flags on the trail to the party location. It was a tricky path; it was hard to figure out the way to the somewhat inaccessible falls.
She was supposed to be getting a ride to the party with one of the carloads, but she thought about the dirty dishes in the kitchen and knew it was unlikely that she would be done in time to get a ride to the big party. She had really been looking forward to it and she did not correct the sadness that took over her facial expression as she walked back to the kitchen to continue with the clean-up project.
“Why the sad face, pretty lady?” said Max. Having loaded the shop vac into the back of the truck, he was gathering up a stack of towels to soak up water from the nooks and crannies of the flood.
“Looks like I’m going to miss the party,” Loretta told him.
“Ah, it’s not that much,” he replied. “I’ve been a few times. It’s a long walk back. Poison ivy. You could stay here with me and help me fix the leak in the big hot tub, after I get done here.”
Loretta laughed, “I think I’ll pass. And I’ve never been there. I was really looking forward to this thing. Most of the kids are leaving tomorrow. This is the goodbye party.”
“Well,” Max hesitated, “I have to go into town to get some blades. I could make a detour and take you to the trail head. Would that work?”
“Oh Max! That would be great! Thanks!”
A few hours later, they drove out to the shore, turned west and drove for fifteen minutes, and then turned off into the forest on an unmarked narrow asphalt road that appeared, at first, to be a driveway. The road twisted and turned up into the hills, with dirt roads leading away on either side, probably driveways. After about twenty minutes of car-sick road, they reached the end of the line. You could tell this was the place because there were half a dozen cars parked along the sides of the road, nearly blocking the way in some cases.
Max pointed out the first flag. It would have been hard to recognize that there was even a path there without the marker. It was a faded battered disc-golf flag emblazoned with the number “5.”
“Well, somebody’s not really OCD,” Loretta said to Max. Then she had to explain what OCD meant. Then she had to explain why “5” should not be the first flag.
Eventually, Max got the joke and chuckled. “You are one funny chick,” he said.
Loretta grabbed her bag of towel and swimsuit, thanked Max, and got out of the truck. Max drove away, cranking up the volume of some music that appeared to be little more than a loud drum beat. She studied the trail, such as it was.
The Path Not Taken
Loretta followed flags that led her straight up the side of a hill, and then zig-zagged down the other side. In some places it seemed to be more like deer paths than any kind of legitimate trail. Finally, she got to a place where there were choices in several directions. A flag was laying on the ground, useless to her. She walked down the track that seemed the widest, but it petered out after about 100 feet, dead-ending at the base of a dirt cliff. She made her way back to the downed marker and took a new tack – up the hillside.
She was hoping to find a vantage point that would give her direction to this mysterious falls. It was hard work, and she was sweaty from her efforts and a bit scratched by tree branches, but she was rewarded by a view from the top of the hill. She had arrived at bare rocks she could scramble. Keeping her center of gravity low, she explored in all directions. At one end of the rock mass, she was gratified to see a wide stream at the bottom of the adjacent ravine. She could just make out the top of the falls. The sun was behind that point, though so high in the sky that it was hard to be certain of the bearing, but she thought, “south.”
She looked around the rocky top to find an easy way down in the direction of her proposed travel. She wasn’t going down the way she came up; she couldn’t really tell which way she had come up anyway. Things were working well for a while; the terrain was a gentle slope at first, just grassy, then low shrubs. But she reached a place that was too steep, so she headed off to the right. She felt that “to the right” would take her to the picnic spot or back to the road.
She stopped to reconnoiter at the lip of another patch of steep terrain, atop a small dirt cliff, when the ground beneath her gave way and she was sliding down, her feet bouncing of each tuft of turf, her bag waving about in the air behind her. Down and down she slid, surfing the incline, trying to aim for the trees on her left, with little success.
With apprehension rising, she realized that there appeared to be an actual cliff below her now. Quickly, inexorably, the chasm approached her and then she was upon it and then she was hurtling through the air.
The morning of the big party, Loretta was called down to the café to help with a minor flood in the kitchen. Cook and Max were there. Max had stopped water from gushing out of a broken pipe and was in the middle of replacing a section of pipe. Water was everywhere.
Sloshing around in the inch of water that had not escaped over the door sill, Cook had moved all of the obviously wet items up onto every available horizontal surface in the kitchen and was selecting items that were now unusable. He set Loretta to work searching for anything food related that had been missed that should be examined. As Cooked worked through the questionable items, discarded things began to pile up outside the back door.
Max left to get the “big” shop vac and was back in a few minutes in the company truck. He quickly got to work sucking up all the water on the floor while Loretta and Cook took a break, sitting on a couple of broken restaurant chairs out by the dumpsters. Cook lit up an unfiltered Camel and told her his plan of attack on recovering the kitchen.
“First, we’ll make sure that the floor and the wet part of the walls are real clean – mop ‘em up with disinfectant. And the table legs. And the bottoms of the shelves. Systematic-like. And we gotta find all the stuff that was hit with the water. I think the food’s all sorted, but we better make sure. Then we need to wash all the dishes what got wet. I don’t want nobody getting sick on account of this mess.”
Curious residents arrived to pick through the waste and take stores back to their rooms – Loretta wondered how someone would use a giant wet bag of flour but voiced no opinion. She learned that one carload of staff had already gone to set up flags on the trail to the party location. It was a tricky path; it was hard to figure out the way to the somewhat inaccessible falls.
She was supposed to be getting a ride to the party with one of the carloads, but she thought about the dirty dishes in the kitchen and knew it was unlikely that she would be done in time to get a ride to the big party. She had really been looking forward to it and she did not correct the sadness that took over her facial expression as she walked back to the kitchen to continue with the clean-up project.
“Why the sad face, pretty lady?” said Max. Having loaded the shop vac into the back of the truck, he was gathering up a stack of towels to soak up water from the nooks and crannies of the flood.
“Looks like I’m going to miss the party,” Loretta told him.
“Ah, it’s not that much,” he replied. “I’ve been a few times. It’s a long walk back. Poison ivy. You could stay here with me and help me fix the leak in the big hot tub, after I get done here.”
Loretta laughed, “I think I’ll pass. And I’ve never been there. I was really looking forward to this thing. Most of the kids are leaving tomorrow. This is the goodbye party.”
“Well,” Max hesitated, “I have to go into town to get some blades. I could make a detour and take you to the trail head. Would that work?”
“Oh Max! That would be great! Thanks!”
A few hours later, they drove out to the shore, turned west and drove for fifteen minutes, and then turned off into the forest on an unmarked narrow asphalt road that appeared, at first, to be a driveway. The road twisted and turned up into the hills, with dirt roads leading away on either side, probably driveways. After about twenty minutes of car-sick road, they reached the end of the line. You could tell this was the place because there were half a dozen cars parked along the sides of the road, nearly blocking the way in some cases.
Max pointed out the first flag. It would have been hard to recognize that there was even a path there without the marker. It was a faded battered disc-golf flag emblazoned with the number “5.”
“Well, somebody’s not really OCD,” Loretta said to Max. Then she had to explain what OCD meant. Then she had to explain why “5” should not be the first flag.
Eventually, Max got the joke and chuckled. “You are one funny chick,” he said.
Loretta grabbed her bag of towel and swimsuit, thanked Max, and got out of the truck. Max drove away, cranking up the volume of some music that appeared to be little more than a loud drum beat. She studied the trail, such as it was.
The Path Not Taken
Loretta followed flags that led her straight up the side of a hill, and then zig-zagged down the other side. In some places it seemed to be more like deer paths than any kind of legitimate trail. Finally, she got to a place where there were choices in several directions. A flag was laying on the ground, useless to her. She walked down the track that seemed the widest, but it petered out after about 100 feet, dead-ending at the base of a dirt cliff. She made her way back to the downed marker and took a new tack – up the hillside.
She was hoping to find a vantage point that would give her direction to this mysterious falls. It was hard work, and she was sweaty from her efforts and a bit scratched by tree branches, but she was rewarded by a view from the top of the hill. She had arrived at bare rocks she could scramble. Keeping her center of gravity low, she explored in all directions. At one end of the rock mass, she was gratified to see a wide stream at the bottom of the adjacent ravine. She could just make out the top of the falls. The sun was behind that point, though so high in the sky that it was hard to be certain of the bearing, but she thought, “south.”
She looked around the rocky top to find an easy way down in the direction of her proposed travel. She wasn’t going down the way she came up; she couldn’t really tell which way she had come up anyway. Things were working well for a while; the terrain was a gentle slope at first, just grassy, then low shrubs. But she reached a place that was too steep, so she headed off to the right. She felt that “to the right” would take her to the picnic spot or back to the road.
She stopped to reconnoiter at the lip of another patch of steep terrain, atop a small dirt cliff, when the ground beneath her gave way and she was sliding down, her feet bouncing of each tuft of turf, her bag waving about in the air behind her. Down and down she slid, surfing the incline, trying to aim for the trees on her left, with little success.
With apprehension rising, she realized that there appeared to be an actual cliff below her now. Quickly, inexorably, the chasm approached her and then she was upon it and then she was hurtling through the air.
Part 6
published 9/29/24
published 9/29/24
Waking Up Is Hard to Do
Loretta slowly drifted into consciousness and became aware of pain. Her feet hurt the most, but also her ankles, her legs, and her hands. She was lying face down in dirt and sharp rocks poked into her cheeks. She was breathing through her mouth, shallowly. There was something wrong with her nose; she couldn’t breathe through it. She turned her head to the left and tried to roll over on her back, but the effort didn’t seem worth it. Anything she moved seemed to hurt. Her shoulders, her neck . . . she rested her face back onto the pointed stones and drifted back out of consciousness.
Later, she found she was awake. She opened her eyes, but it was all darkness. She was no longer laying in the dirt. She was now on her back. She scratched with her fingers to feel the ground; it felt like that old gray army blanket she used to keep in the trunk of her car. She pushed up with her hands to raise her body, but it hurt too much. Her back hurt. Her hips hurt. Her arms hurt. She gave up and just lay still with her eyes closed and listened. She heard the sound of trees rustling in the wind but could feel no breeze. She heard the sound of a bird, who-whooing, at some distance. She thought it must be an owl, and then remembered that as a child, what she had thought were owls turned out to be mourning doves. But this sound was different. Maybe it really was owls.
I’ll just rest a bit. I’ll rest until the sun comes up and then I’ll see what’s what. She floated back to sleep.
Her face was hot. It woke her. She opened her eyes and closed them again quickly. A direct beam of sunshine was toasting her cheek and blinding her right eye. She lifted her right hand, painfully, and brought it up to block the ray and opened her eyes again.
She was lying on the floor of a room crammed with objects. She could not discern what all the stuff was. She was lying on a scratchy blanket, covered by a tattered quilt. There was an open door in front of her and an open window on her right. A sunbeam sliced through a sliver of an opening between steep hills and sharp narrow trees.
With some difficulty, she rolled over to her left side.
“Oh, you’re finally awake, are you deary?” a shrill, scratchy voice said from somewhere nearby.
You Look Like a Witch
Loretta was startled into swift awakeness and attempted to turn to see the source of the voice. “Now, now, settle yer drawers. Go slow, missy – yer pretty banged up there.”
The voice was languid and calm and yet abrasive. Slowly, Loretta repositioned her body to a sitting position, with her knees up close to her chest, and slowly, she pivoted to face a tall, broad-shouldered woman, older than her, sitting on a large metal canister.
The woman was wearing gray coveralls over a black t-shirt, and huaraches; a blue bandana popped color from around her skinny neck. There was an unlit corncob pipe hanging from one side of a wide mouth. Bright eyes peered out from beneath protruding tufts of ragged white hair. Add a black dress and she would look just like a witch, Loretta thought.
Sharply, the woman cackled, as if she had been following along Loretta’s thoughts. “You hungry, missy?” was what the woman said. Loretta mutely nodded assent, and suddenly exhausted by her efforts, she slowly repositioned herself to lie back down.
Then her minded wandered back to a time when she was very little, when she and the rest of her family went to visit her father’s grandmother, her “Nana.” Out in the back yard of her great-grandmother’s picturesque cottage, they had been walking down paths of vegetables. They had stopped to admire and eat raspberries growing on low trellises at the back fence, when Loretta’s little sister had said, apropos of nothing, “Grandma! You look like a witch!” Grandma started to cry and left them all to go back into the house. Loretta remembered thinking about how the old lady DID look like a witch, especially her starkly white hair and the deep wrinkles in her face, cracks they looked to little Loretta, but that Nana had kind eyes and a sweet voice, and her home was more like fairy godmother than witch. She was appalled at her sister’s comment. She took these thoughts back to the present, vowing not to judge this strange woman who seemed to have saved her life.
Loretta slowly drifted into consciousness and became aware of pain. Her feet hurt the most, but also her ankles, her legs, and her hands. She was lying face down in dirt and sharp rocks poked into her cheeks. She was breathing through her mouth, shallowly. There was something wrong with her nose; she couldn’t breathe through it. She turned her head to the left and tried to roll over on her back, but the effort didn’t seem worth it. Anything she moved seemed to hurt. Her shoulders, her neck . . . she rested her face back onto the pointed stones and drifted back out of consciousness.
Later, she found she was awake. She opened her eyes, but it was all darkness. She was no longer laying in the dirt. She was now on her back. She scratched with her fingers to feel the ground; it felt like that old gray army blanket she used to keep in the trunk of her car. She pushed up with her hands to raise her body, but it hurt too much. Her back hurt. Her hips hurt. Her arms hurt. She gave up and just lay still with her eyes closed and listened. She heard the sound of trees rustling in the wind but could feel no breeze. She heard the sound of a bird, who-whooing, at some distance. She thought it must be an owl, and then remembered that as a child, what she had thought were owls turned out to be mourning doves. But this sound was different. Maybe it really was owls.
I’ll just rest a bit. I’ll rest until the sun comes up and then I’ll see what’s what. She floated back to sleep.
Her face was hot. It woke her. She opened her eyes and closed them again quickly. A direct beam of sunshine was toasting her cheek and blinding her right eye. She lifted her right hand, painfully, and brought it up to block the ray and opened her eyes again.
She was lying on the floor of a room crammed with objects. She could not discern what all the stuff was. She was lying on a scratchy blanket, covered by a tattered quilt. There was an open door in front of her and an open window on her right. A sunbeam sliced through a sliver of an opening between steep hills and sharp narrow trees.
With some difficulty, she rolled over to her left side.
“Oh, you’re finally awake, are you deary?” a shrill, scratchy voice said from somewhere nearby.
You Look Like a Witch
Loretta was startled into swift awakeness and attempted to turn to see the source of the voice. “Now, now, settle yer drawers. Go slow, missy – yer pretty banged up there.”
The voice was languid and calm and yet abrasive. Slowly, Loretta repositioned her body to a sitting position, with her knees up close to her chest, and slowly, she pivoted to face a tall, broad-shouldered woman, older than her, sitting on a large metal canister.
The woman was wearing gray coveralls over a black t-shirt, and huaraches; a blue bandana popped color from around her skinny neck. There was an unlit corncob pipe hanging from one side of a wide mouth. Bright eyes peered out from beneath protruding tufts of ragged white hair. Add a black dress and she would look just like a witch, Loretta thought.
Sharply, the woman cackled, as if she had been following along Loretta’s thoughts. “You hungry, missy?” was what the woman said. Loretta mutely nodded assent, and suddenly exhausted by her efforts, she slowly repositioned herself to lie back down.
Then her minded wandered back to a time when she was very little, when she and the rest of her family went to visit her father’s grandmother, her “Nana.” Out in the back yard of her great-grandmother’s picturesque cottage, they had been walking down paths of vegetables. They had stopped to admire and eat raspberries growing on low trellises at the back fence, when Loretta’s little sister had said, apropos of nothing, “Grandma! You look like a witch!” Grandma started to cry and left them all to go back into the house. Loretta remembered thinking about how the old lady DID look like a witch, especially her starkly white hair and the deep wrinkles in her face, cracks they looked to little Loretta, but that Nana had kind eyes and a sweet voice, and her home was more like fairy godmother than witch. She was appalled at her sister’s comment. She took these thoughts back to the present, vowing not to judge this strange woman who seemed to have saved her life.
Part 7
published 10/1/24
published 10/1/24
Strange Brew
The woman’s name was Blanche. She kept chickens and owned the little house and property “free and clear.” There was no electricity, no indoor plumbing and no road to the place. All this Loretta learned from sideways mutterings from the old woman while she made breakfast on a cast iron stove – oatmeal, one hardboiled egg and one apple each. And tea. This was a vile stuff served in a what might have been an old mayonnaise jar.
“I’m having regular herb tea, but I made you a special blend that will help mend your damaged parts,” she said. Loretta drank it slowly. It immediately soothed her – made her realize that there was not one part of her body that did not hurt.
Loretta was still sitting on the floor with her legs out in front of her, her back resting against a stack of chicken feed bags. On her lap, she balanced a large cast iron skillet that was now a make-shift food tray. She ate slowly and found she had nothing to say, had no questions. The air smelled good – it had rained in the night, and this freshened atmosphere heightening the scent of the trees and soil of the forest.
She finally spoke, “I have to go to the bathroom.”
The old woman bent over Loretta to help her to her feet. As the crone’s face loomed in close to Loretta’s, Loretta thought she saw the faint scar of an X her host’s forehead. Then the mop of white hair fell forward and blocked this view.
Loretta was having difficulty keeping her balance, so the old one helped her shuffle out to the “little house out back.” The toilet paper was a stack of books. She tore out a page of Manufacturing Consent and figured out how good real toilet paper was. When Loretta came out of the outhouse, the older one was waiting for her nearby, leaning up against a tree, smoking from that corncob pipe. She took it out of her mouth, looked at it, and then banged its contents out against the tree.
“You read Noam Chomsky?” Loretta asked.
“Nah. I just get them at them free little book houses people put up in front of their hoity-toity houses. When I go into town for supplies.”
Loretta laughed inwardly, outwardly, her face hurt too much – it was swollen and stiff and she could barely breathe through her nose. Leaning against Blanche, she shuffled back to the house, found her spot on the floor and picked up the jar of tea.
A strange brew, but it doesn’t taste that bad, Loretta thought. She finished the whole container while her host put the dirty dishes and cooking things in a net bag and carried them outside. The sounds of squealing metal, then water gushing, then the banging of a pot against a pipe, Blanche was washing the dishes out at a pump spigot. Loretta carefully slid down onto her floor blanket, wrapped her top blanket around her, and went to sleep.
Things Get Weirder
It was warm afternoon when she woke, urgently needing to pee. She got onto all fours and struggled to get into a standing position from there, almost knocking over a low table she tried to use for leverage. Finally, she was upright and hunching her body over, she treaded out to the toilet.
Her vision was fuzzy, the ground seeming to rush up to her face as she stared down towards her next step. She made it to the outhouse, peed, and tore out a few more pages of Chomsky to dry herself. Then she sat and tried to focus her mind. Her thoughts blurry, she countered rising anxiety with her relaxation strategy, breathing into a sequence of body parts, straightening her spine when she got to her back. Before she could finish, the stench of the pit toilet roiled her senses and she clumsily rose, pulled up her pants, and stumbled out the door into the fresh air.
She took faltering steps to a tree stump and sat down. She started the breathing strategy again; hands, feet, arms, legs, hips, back, shoulders, abdomen, chest, neck, and head, each breath carefully directing the energy of the life force into a segment of her body. Straightening up again, she looked ahead. Her vision was hazy, the scenery represented by indistinct patches of green and brown.
What is wrong with me? she wondered. I must be concussed. I fell off a cliff. Oh gawd.
She closed her blurry eyes and sat still, listening. Off in the distance she could hear a noise, kind of a sharp thudding noise. Where was that old lady? What was her name? Rita? Darwin? Blanche! I’m hungry . . .
Day passed into night; night passed into day. Her body healed but her thoughts remained incoherent, and her vision moved in and out of focus. Her steps grew stronger, but her balance was off kilter. The swelling in her face receded. She bathed in cold water in a tub outside by the water pump – finally dislodging the dirt that had been packed into her nose, obstructing her breathing.
She learned that Blanche had found her, unconscious, while out foraging for ingredients to use for tea she made and sold in town. Loretta began to help with simple chores, carrying downed wood from the forest to a firewood preparation area near the house. She learned to chop kindling with a small axe, making the sharp thudding noise herself.
She joined Blanche for two meals a day – the same breakfast every morning, oatmeal, an egg, and a piece of fruit. Oh, and healing tea. In the midafternoon, they had a “main meal” of canned food or perhaps a simple stew of potatoes and rabbit meat, flavored with herbs Blanche gathered from the forest or harvested from plants growing around the property.
Sometimes, when she woke up, Loretta would be in a cold sweat, back at the foot of a waterfall, being pushed down. Other times she would wake up dreaming of crawling around in the mud behind the falls. She had a new dream – a dream in which she was under the falls with a child, a small girl with flowing blond hair, who was struggling in her arms. At first, she was trying to save the child from drowning, but then the dream twisted dark; she was holding the child down under the water until it was still.
Sometimes, right when she woke up, she could remember the resort, and Cook and Max, and she wondered if she should maybe be trying to get back to the resort. She asked Blanche about her phone, but the old woman had no idea what had become of it, or what had become of the bag of swim things.
Loretta’s early morning concerns would fade as the day progressed, as she learned to help Blanche with the tasks of survival. She cut cheese cloth into squares for Blanche to hand-sew into sachets. She helped fill the little bags with various mixtures of leaves, stems, berries, seeds and bark from the herb garden and the forest. She used an old paper cutter to prepare cards that Blanch hand-lettered, and helped, with a stapler and heavy thread, to put these tags on the several types of tea. She helped fill small and larger paper bags with assortments of the tea bags.
The woman’s name was Blanche. She kept chickens and owned the little house and property “free and clear.” There was no electricity, no indoor plumbing and no road to the place. All this Loretta learned from sideways mutterings from the old woman while she made breakfast on a cast iron stove – oatmeal, one hardboiled egg and one apple each. And tea. This was a vile stuff served in a what might have been an old mayonnaise jar.
“I’m having regular herb tea, but I made you a special blend that will help mend your damaged parts,” she said. Loretta drank it slowly. It immediately soothed her – made her realize that there was not one part of her body that did not hurt.
Loretta was still sitting on the floor with her legs out in front of her, her back resting against a stack of chicken feed bags. On her lap, she balanced a large cast iron skillet that was now a make-shift food tray. She ate slowly and found she had nothing to say, had no questions. The air smelled good – it had rained in the night, and this freshened atmosphere heightening the scent of the trees and soil of the forest.
She finally spoke, “I have to go to the bathroom.”
The old woman bent over Loretta to help her to her feet. As the crone’s face loomed in close to Loretta’s, Loretta thought she saw the faint scar of an X her host’s forehead. Then the mop of white hair fell forward and blocked this view.
Loretta was having difficulty keeping her balance, so the old one helped her shuffle out to the “little house out back.” The toilet paper was a stack of books. She tore out a page of Manufacturing Consent and figured out how good real toilet paper was. When Loretta came out of the outhouse, the older one was waiting for her nearby, leaning up against a tree, smoking from that corncob pipe. She took it out of her mouth, looked at it, and then banged its contents out against the tree.
“You read Noam Chomsky?” Loretta asked.
“Nah. I just get them at them free little book houses people put up in front of their hoity-toity houses. When I go into town for supplies.”
Loretta laughed inwardly, outwardly, her face hurt too much – it was swollen and stiff and she could barely breathe through her nose. Leaning against Blanche, she shuffled back to the house, found her spot on the floor and picked up the jar of tea.
A strange brew, but it doesn’t taste that bad, Loretta thought. She finished the whole container while her host put the dirty dishes and cooking things in a net bag and carried them outside. The sounds of squealing metal, then water gushing, then the banging of a pot against a pipe, Blanche was washing the dishes out at a pump spigot. Loretta carefully slid down onto her floor blanket, wrapped her top blanket around her, and went to sleep.
Things Get Weirder
It was warm afternoon when she woke, urgently needing to pee. She got onto all fours and struggled to get into a standing position from there, almost knocking over a low table she tried to use for leverage. Finally, she was upright and hunching her body over, she treaded out to the toilet.
Her vision was fuzzy, the ground seeming to rush up to her face as she stared down towards her next step. She made it to the outhouse, peed, and tore out a few more pages of Chomsky to dry herself. Then she sat and tried to focus her mind. Her thoughts blurry, she countered rising anxiety with her relaxation strategy, breathing into a sequence of body parts, straightening her spine when she got to her back. Before she could finish, the stench of the pit toilet roiled her senses and she clumsily rose, pulled up her pants, and stumbled out the door into the fresh air.
She took faltering steps to a tree stump and sat down. She started the breathing strategy again; hands, feet, arms, legs, hips, back, shoulders, abdomen, chest, neck, and head, each breath carefully directing the energy of the life force into a segment of her body. Straightening up again, she looked ahead. Her vision was hazy, the scenery represented by indistinct patches of green and brown.
What is wrong with me? she wondered. I must be concussed. I fell off a cliff. Oh gawd.
She closed her blurry eyes and sat still, listening. Off in the distance she could hear a noise, kind of a sharp thudding noise. Where was that old lady? What was her name? Rita? Darwin? Blanche! I’m hungry . . .
Day passed into night; night passed into day. Her body healed but her thoughts remained incoherent, and her vision moved in and out of focus. Her steps grew stronger, but her balance was off kilter. The swelling in her face receded. She bathed in cold water in a tub outside by the water pump – finally dislodging the dirt that had been packed into her nose, obstructing her breathing.
She learned that Blanche had found her, unconscious, while out foraging for ingredients to use for tea she made and sold in town. Loretta began to help with simple chores, carrying downed wood from the forest to a firewood preparation area near the house. She learned to chop kindling with a small axe, making the sharp thudding noise herself.
She joined Blanche for two meals a day – the same breakfast every morning, oatmeal, an egg, and a piece of fruit. Oh, and healing tea. In the midafternoon, they had a “main meal” of canned food or perhaps a simple stew of potatoes and rabbit meat, flavored with herbs Blanche gathered from the forest or harvested from plants growing around the property.
Sometimes, when she woke up, Loretta would be in a cold sweat, back at the foot of a waterfall, being pushed down. Other times she would wake up dreaming of crawling around in the mud behind the falls. She had a new dream – a dream in which she was under the falls with a child, a small girl with flowing blond hair, who was struggling in her arms. At first, she was trying to save the child from drowning, but then the dream twisted dark; she was holding the child down under the water until it was still.
Sometimes, right when she woke up, she could remember the resort, and Cook and Max, and she wondered if she should maybe be trying to get back to the resort. She asked Blanche about her phone, but the old woman had no idea what had become of it, or what had become of the bag of swim things.
Loretta’s early morning concerns would fade as the day progressed, as she learned to help Blanche with the tasks of survival. She cut cheese cloth into squares for Blanche to hand-sew into sachets. She helped fill the little bags with various mixtures of leaves, stems, berries, seeds and bark from the herb garden and the forest. She used an old paper cutter to prepare cards that Blanch hand-lettered, and helped, with a stapler and heavy thread, to put these tags on the several types of tea. She helped fill small and larger paper bags with assortments of the tea bags.
Part 8
published 11/27/24
published 11/27/24
Discovery
One day Blanche loaded up a large rucksack with all the tea bags and stuffed her hair into a brightly colored scarf. She put on what she called her “city clothes” which were much cleaner than her everyday wear. Telling Loretta she would be back by dark and to “stay out of trouble and don’t go wandering around in the woods and eat just the food I set out for you,” Blanche hoisted the large bag onto her back and hiked away, disappearing into the woods.
Excused from the usual survival tasks, Loretta thought to read one of the books piled up in the outhouse, but her vision was off just enough to make the task unpleasant. Bored, she started investigating the seemingly random assortment of objects that filled the cluttered cottage. Boxes, bags, and tins were opened and examined – one filled with dozens of skeins of embroidery thread, bright as a rainbow, another containing old wine bottle corks.
In a Danish cookie tin she found . . . her cell phone. She held it in her hands, cradling it like a dying bird. She tried to turn it on but no matter how many times she pressed the buttons, nothing happened. The glass on the front was cracked and one corner was chewed up. Slowly, fear rose up in her stomach, like bile. She felt queasy and sat down where she was, still holding the dead phone in her trembling hands.
She sat for a long time, trying to clear her mind of panic and dread, to look at her options, to make a plan, but her thoughts were cluttered, bouncing around. Slowly, she restored the phone to the cookie tin and put the container back on the shelf where she had found it. She wanted to leave, right that moment just walk away, but she had no idea how to get out of the forest. She laid down on her dirty blanket and rested.
Something HappensLoretta was woken by the sound of Blanche dumping a bag of potatoes near her head. She roused herself into a sitting position. Blanche was sitting on her can, which seemed to be her favorite spot. She was filling her pipe with some kind of weed and was soon puffing calmly.
“I got more supplies out in my shed. It’s out at the road. It’s a mite of a hike; I’m plumb done-in for this day. Tomorrow will be soon enough to haul it all in. Would you be a dear and make us the main meal?”
Loretta didn’t know how to get the stove started but Madge talked her through it. It was actually set up and took only a match in the starter hole to get the fire going. She poured a large can of bean soup into the pot and mixed a can of stewed tomatoes in, and then heated it up. She served it with saltines at the dinette style kitchen table placed next to a window.
After the meal, Loretta gathered up the dishes and pot into an old mesh potato bag and washed them in the cold water of the pitcher pump. Clean and back in the bag, she hung them to dry from the spigot.
Back in the cabin, Blanche taught her how to set up the starter fire. “You put some bigger pieces in the back, if you need to, and then here in the front you lay some crinkled paper or dry pine needles or wood shavings. Spread them out -- they can’t be all clumpy like that. Okay, now balance the thinnest pieces of kindling around on top and then a few bigger pieces on top of that. That looks good.” And Lorreta had learned something new.
Her enjoyment of her new skills was short-lived. As she put on the overly large nightgown that Blanche had given her, she remembered the cell phone. It was HER cell phone. Or was it? She fretted, wanting to ask about it but knowing that if Blanche had lied about this, well . . . she had to stay quiet.
King of Infinite Space
She was underwater holding the still body of a small child. Dragging the child with her, she pushed up through pounding water into a still and quiet, gloomy space. Her eyes adjusted to the dim light and she could see a ledge ahead; she swam to it slowly, with the dead weight of the little former person under her left arm.
She lunged her way onto slick mud, feeling the filth of it clinging to the exposed skin of her legs and arms. She rested, panting. She looked at the inanimate object she still had stowed at her side, pulled it out and looked at its face.
Loretta woke lurching up and then stunned, rested on her arm; a muffled scream issued from her mouth. She had been dreaming of Mabel. What about her sister? She tried to remember the dream but could only recall the face of her sister, long gone from this world, staring at her with dull unmoving eyes. She shuddered.
She thought of the Black Prince, who once claimed he could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself the king of infinite space were it not that he had “bad dreams.” She sighed. She was weary of these nightmares. She had been having dreams like this since childhood, but their frequency was increasing. And her waking life was bad enough.
She counted her miseries: her vision was clouded, her thinking unfocused, and she no longer trusted Blanche, the woman who had clearly saved her life.
Later, after she had finished washing up the breakfast things, she sat in a bit of direct sunshine in an Adirondack chair, recently painted forest service green. The sounds and smells of the forest refreshed her. She held her wet hands out in the sunshine to airdry them. Blanche came out of the house, letting the screen door screech back to closed position by the pull of an ancient spring.
“You forgot your tea,” she said, walking up to Loretta and handing her the half-consumed jar of brown liquid.
“Oh that’s alright, it’s cold now,” Loretta replied.
“No, no, no,” Blanched urged, “You gotta drink your healing tea to finish getting well! Didn’t you say you couldn’t see right?”
Loretta took the tea and had a little sip. The tea was cold and bitter now, and she looked up at Blanche’s face to see the shaggy-haired woman staring at her intently, almost aggressively.
“Okay, I’ll drink it,” Loretta said compliantly, but a jagged crevice split her chest. On one side was grateful cooperative Loretta, smiling vaguely, staring at Blanche, and on the other side was adrenaline fueled mistrustful Loretta, suddenly paranoid. Only it’s not paranoia if your fears are grounded in reality.
“Okay then, that’s good,” Blanche said. “You just sit there and finish yer tea while I go chop a little kindling up. Later we’ll go out into the forest and gather wood. I have a nice log picked out and I need you to handle the other side of the big crosscut saw.” She turned away and lumbered off. Loretta watched the retreat of the hulking backside and knew that she would not be drinking any more tea. Not if I can avoid it, she thought.
She poured the rest of the tea out under a nearby bush, washed up the cup and took it back into the house. She used her time to organize the tea bag business, straightening up the piles of cut pieces and other materials along the back of a worktable pushed up against a wall in Blanche’s bedroom. She could hear the faint sound of chopping, so she decided to take a little look-see at Blanche’s things. She was careful to put everything back the way she found it.
She was just lifting a blanket covering something next to the foot of the bed, oh it was a carved cedar chest, when she realized that the chopping sound had stopped. She got out of Blanche’s room and quickly walked right out the front door, heading to the head to cover her anxiousness about almost being caught snooping. Just as she got to the door of the outhouse, she heard Blanche call out, “Time to saw wood.”
“Be right there,” Loretta called back. Then she hid in that vile place until she had calmed down enough to make up a presentable face.
Remembering
As the day progressed, Loretta started to feel a bit queasy while simultaneously feeling more clear headed. By nightfall she was nauseous and found that her vision was no longer fuzzy. She worried that Blanche would see in her face that she was no longer under the influence of the tea and so she kept her gaze on her work, on her plate, on her hands. She kept her mouth shut and her head down. As she lay on the floor on her “bed” she noticed that she was sharing the space with a gigantic daddy-long-legs ambling along the floor.
She remembered her fanny pack. She had had on a fanny-pack when she went down that cliff. Surely that had not come off her body in the fall. She kept very still, stifling the urge to confront Blanche. Keep your cards close to your vest, girl, she mutteringly thought.
In the morning, Blanche announced at breakfast that she was going into town. She was off as soon as she finished eating, leaving Loretta to clean up and take care of the day’s work. If had been dry, that would have been work outside, cleaning up the chicken coop, gathering ingredients for tea, or doing the never-ending work of creating firewood. But it was raining, so the work centered on tea production.
Loretta spent a little time setting up some cutting, trying to create the appearance that work had been done. Then she renewed her search of Blanche’s bedroom. First, she got out the cell phone and looked at it. There was no way to be sure that it was her cellphone – it had no case and it wouldn’t turn on. It wasn’t “not” her phone. Then she started methodically at the door, working her way down the left side of the room, looking inside every container.
Suddenly, she thought of the chest at the foot of the bed and broke her strategic plan to go straight to it. She carefully lifted off the blanket and set it aside on the bed. She opened the chest. It was filled with sheets and blankets. She was disappointed, but she began to methodically remove each item, creating a neat stack on the bed. Wadded up pieces of paper had been crammed down the sides of the chest, and they fell onto the bottom as she removed each item. At the very bottom, she found a scruffy brown tagboard accordion file, and beneath that . . . her fanny pack!
She eagerly opened the zipped section in the back of the fanny pack to find that the little pouch with the money in it was empty. The plastic snapping card case was likewise cleaned out of her driver’s license and credit cards. She was momentarily stunned but shook it off and took up one of the crumpled papers from the bottom of the box. She gently flattened it out. It was a statement from her bank noting her change of address to a Post Office box number in Port Angeles. She took up one of the other papers. It was a credit card statement in her name, showing recent charges at Leitz Farm Supplies. She looked over the rest of the documents and found receipts for a chain saw and other items.
Squatted in front of the chest, she rocked back on her heels, thinking, worrying, trying to remember things that were going to be forever foggy to her. Then she turned her attention to the file holder.
In the first pocket was a True Detective magazine from October of 1966. As she flipped through the dry pages, she found an article about Richard Speck, who brutally murdered eight student nurses. Someone had used a red marker to color in the blood stains shown in the black and white photos of the crime scene of the first famous American mass murderer.
In the remaining pockets, she found newspaper clippings in plastic sheet protectors. The first subject was the Manson Family. there were several photos of the X’s that they carved into their foreheads.
The remaining sections featured clippings about Juan Corona, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer. As she flipped through the articles, she noticed that an X had been penciled on to the killer’s foreheads.
Loretta shuddered, and then slowly, with trembling hands, she put everything back into the hope chest, reversing the unpacking process and carefully re-wadding up the papers and pushing them down the sides of the box. She was trying to remember something, but it was elusive.
Then she methodically worked on cutting fabric and cardboard, quickly producing stacks of supplies. It was so much easier to do the work now that she wasn’t loaded. While she worked, she plotted a way to get out of her situation. She needed to figure out how to get out of there.
When she had done enough work to make it look good to her master, she went outside and gathered white stones and filled her pockets. She was thinking of Hansel.
When Blanche got back, she was carrying a roll of chicken wire. Loretta asked if she could help unload and carry things, being sure to keep her voice soft and blurry, somewhat inarticulate.
“No thank you, dearie, I’ve got it covered,” was the reply.
When Blanche left for her next load, Loretta followed her, leaving a white stone at what she saw as divides in the path or tricky spots. She was able to follow all the way out to the top of the last ridge, where she could see the shed down by the road. She watched Blanche unlock a padlocked door with a key hanging from cord around her neck. She’d seen enough and she headed back, carefully repositioning the white stones to be unnoticeable, unless you were looking for them and knew where to look. She would need them to get out.
When Blanche got back, Loretta was sitting in the Adirondack chair, pretending to be asleep. Blanche came close and shook Loretta’s shoulder. Loretta got a close up view of Blanche’s face and then saw what had been eluding her memory – the faint scar of an X on Blanche’s forehead.
Franklin FallsThe next day was rainy and Loretta helped Blanche make up more tea bags and package them into collections. She resisted the urge to suggest that they decorate the tags with little drawings of the plants that went into the tea. She intentionally spilled a stack of cards and then looked at them with what she hoped was a blank expression. She dragged her feet as she walked. She hoped she was hiding her sensibility from her captor.
She felt a malevolence in Blanche that she hadn’t noticed before, a feeling that that there existed great danger from her captor. Loretta didn’t have a plan of escape, yet. She attempted to keep her eyes downcast and her heart still; it seemed to be beating so fast whenever Blanche was nearby.
The following morning was clear. Blanche carried her new shovel and had Loretta carry four of the new green five-gallon buckets with handles. They were going to collect mint plants.
“We won’t need to come all the way down here to collect mint for the tea,” Blanche explained. “We’re gonna dig some up and replant them up by the house.”
They followed a steep, hairpin-turning thread of a trail down the side of the hill into the ravine and thence farther down to the side of a creek. There, they took up an actual path. Loretta pressed her shoe into a wet patch of dirt by the side of the path, deeply, to leave her a sign of how to get back to the cabin. A plan was formulating in her somewhat fevered brain, if only she had the courage to carry it out.
The path upstream led them to the base of a waterfall. It seemed vaguely familiar . . . scary.
Blanche found some mint on a small jetty of land near where the water poured down from above. She showed Loretta how to push the shovel straight down into the moist earth to form a square around the plant, and then heave the shovel back and forth on one of the cuts to create a wedge-shaped opening. She deftly pushed the shovel beneath the roots and hoisted the plant up and out, gently placing it in one of the buckets. “Now you try it. We’ve got room for twelve, I reckon.”
Seeing Loretta successfully dislodge a mint plant from its place, Blanche sat on a small boulder at the edge of the water. She took out her pipe, loaded it, lit it, and relaxing, turned to face the falls. Loretta dug up another mint plant and then she made up her mind.
She snuck up behind Blanche and using all her might, swung the shovel blade into the back of Blanche’s head with a resounding smack. Blanch pitched into the water, blood flowing freely from the base of her skull. Loretta leaped into the water behind her and jumped onto the back of the prone woman, grabbing her head and pushing it down under the water.
Blanche was dazed, almost unconscious, and put up only the mildest of resistance. The force of the water plunging from above into the deep spot beneath drew the struggling pair like a whirlpool. Soon they were under the falls, being driven down by the force of the water, bearing down with the commensurate weight of bowling balls. Loretta held her breath as she grappled Blanche to her chest tightly, until finally, the monster stopped resisting, stopped moving, and was totally still.
Loretta knew what to do next. As in a dream, she pulled the inert body of Blanche to the inside of the falls, looking for the opening she knew would be there. She found it, and with great difficulty, she dragged the corpse up onto the mud bank. Then she went back for the shovel.
Coda
Loretta was standing on the Northwest point of the Olympic Peninsula, looking out at Miracle Point from an observation Deck at Cape Flattery. Cool mist bathed her face and dampened her clothes but she didn’t mind. The waves soothed her with the surging and sucking sound of water filling and emptying the rocky places below.
She was thinking about her sister, finally remembering what happened the day her sister died. They had gone for a picnic at Franklin Falls – she was only six and was not her fault! She had done her best. She should not have been left in charge of a four-year-old. “Watch your sister while I unpack the food,” Mommy had told her.
But Mabel got tired of playing at the edge of the water and quick as a wick, she walked right into the rippled pool. Loretta followed her into the water, but her little sister was just too nimble. By the time Loretta got close to her, Mabel was drowning, being drawn into the swirl of water at the base of the falls, then pushed down.
Poor little me, she thought, I tried to help her. But by the time I got her out of the water, there on the dark side of the falls, there was no life left in her. Just those empty eyes.
She shuddered and then took another pull on the corncob pipe. The intermittent sound of waves, slowly crashing a melancholy beat, soothed her weary mind.
One day Blanche loaded up a large rucksack with all the tea bags and stuffed her hair into a brightly colored scarf. She put on what she called her “city clothes” which were much cleaner than her everyday wear. Telling Loretta she would be back by dark and to “stay out of trouble and don’t go wandering around in the woods and eat just the food I set out for you,” Blanche hoisted the large bag onto her back and hiked away, disappearing into the woods.
Excused from the usual survival tasks, Loretta thought to read one of the books piled up in the outhouse, but her vision was off just enough to make the task unpleasant. Bored, she started investigating the seemingly random assortment of objects that filled the cluttered cottage. Boxes, bags, and tins were opened and examined – one filled with dozens of skeins of embroidery thread, bright as a rainbow, another containing old wine bottle corks.
In a Danish cookie tin she found . . . her cell phone. She held it in her hands, cradling it like a dying bird. She tried to turn it on but no matter how many times she pressed the buttons, nothing happened. The glass on the front was cracked and one corner was chewed up. Slowly, fear rose up in her stomach, like bile. She felt queasy and sat down where she was, still holding the dead phone in her trembling hands.
She sat for a long time, trying to clear her mind of panic and dread, to look at her options, to make a plan, but her thoughts were cluttered, bouncing around. Slowly, she restored the phone to the cookie tin and put the container back on the shelf where she had found it. She wanted to leave, right that moment just walk away, but she had no idea how to get out of the forest. She laid down on her dirty blanket and rested.
Something HappensLoretta was woken by the sound of Blanche dumping a bag of potatoes near her head. She roused herself into a sitting position. Blanche was sitting on her can, which seemed to be her favorite spot. She was filling her pipe with some kind of weed and was soon puffing calmly.
“I got more supplies out in my shed. It’s out at the road. It’s a mite of a hike; I’m plumb done-in for this day. Tomorrow will be soon enough to haul it all in. Would you be a dear and make us the main meal?”
Loretta didn’t know how to get the stove started but Madge talked her through it. It was actually set up and took only a match in the starter hole to get the fire going. She poured a large can of bean soup into the pot and mixed a can of stewed tomatoes in, and then heated it up. She served it with saltines at the dinette style kitchen table placed next to a window.
After the meal, Loretta gathered up the dishes and pot into an old mesh potato bag and washed them in the cold water of the pitcher pump. Clean and back in the bag, she hung them to dry from the spigot.
Back in the cabin, Blanche taught her how to set up the starter fire. “You put some bigger pieces in the back, if you need to, and then here in the front you lay some crinkled paper or dry pine needles or wood shavings. Spread them out -- they can’t be all clumpy like that. Okay, now balance the thinnest pieces of kindling around on top and then a few bigger pieces on top of that. That looks good.” And Lorreta had learned something new.
Her enjoyment of her new skills was short-lived. As she put on the overly large nightgown that Blanche had given her, she remembered the cell phone. It was HER cell phone. Or was it? She fretted, wanting to ask about it but knowing that if Blanche had lied about this, well . . . she had to stay quiet.
King of Infinite Space
She was underwater holding the still body of a small child. Dragging the child with her, she pushed up through pounding water into a still and quiet, gloomy space. Her eyes adjusted to the dim light and she could see a ledge ahead; she swam to it slowly, with the dead weight of the little former person under her left arm.
She lunged her way onto slick mud, feeling the filth of it clinging to the exposed skin of her legs and arms. She rested, panting. She looked at the inanimate object she still had stowed at her side, pulled it out and looked at its face.
Loretta woke lurching up and then stunned, rested on her arm; a muffled scream issued from her mouth. She had been dreaming of Mabel. What about her sister? She tried to remember the dream but could only recall the face of her sister, long gone from this world, staring at her with dull unmoving eyes. She shuddered.
She thought of the Black Prince, who once claimed he could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself the king of infinite space were it not that he had “bad dreams.” She sighed. She was weary of these nightmares. She had been having dreams like this since childhood, but their frequency was increasing. And her waking life was bad enough.
She counted her miseries: her vision was clouded, her thinking unfocused, and she no longer trusted Blanche, the woman who had clearly saved her life.
Later, after she had finished washing up the breakfast things, she sat in a bit of direct sunshine in an Adirondack chair, recently painted forest service green. The sounds and smells of the forest refreshed her. She held her wet hands out in the sunshine to airdry them. Blanche came out of the house, letting the screen door screech back to closed position by the pull of an ancient spring.
“You forgot your tea,” she said, walking up to Loretta and handing her the half-consumed jar of brown liquid.
“Oh that’s alright, it’s cold now,” Loretta replied.
“No, no, no,” Blanched urged, “You gotta drink your healing tea to finish getting well! Didn’t you say you couldn’t see right?”
Loretta took the tea and had a little sip. The tea was cold and bitter now, and she looked up at Blanche’s face to see the shaggy-haired woman staring at her intently, almost aggressively.
“Okay, I’ll drink it,” Loretta said compliantly, but a jagged crevice split her chest. On one side was grateful cooperative Loretta, smiling vaguely, staring at Blanche, and on the other side was adrenaline fueled mistrustful Loretta, suddenly paranoid. Only it’s not paranoia if your fears are grounded in reality.
“Okay then, that’s good,” Blanche said. “You just sit there and finish yer tea while I go chop a little kindling up. Later we’ll go out into the forest and gather wood. I have a nice log picked out and I need you to handle the other side of the big crosscut saw.” She turned away and lumbered off. Loretta watched the retreat of the hulking backside and knew that she would not be drinking any more tea. Not if I can avoid it, she thought.
She poured the rest of the tea out under a nearby bush, washed up the cup and took it back into the house. She used her time to organize the tea bag business, straightening up the piles of cut pieces and other materials along the back of a worktable pushed up against a wall in Blanche’s bedroom. She could hear the faint sound of chopping, so she decided to take a little look-see at Blanche’s things. She was careful to put everything back the way she found it.
She was just lifting a blanket covering something next to the foot of the bed, oh it was a carved cedar chest, when she realized that the chopping sound had stopped. She got out of Blanche’s room and quickly walked right out the front door, heading to the head to cover her anxiousness about almost being caught snooping. Just as she got to the door of the outhouse, she heard Blanche call out, “Time to saw wood.”
“Be right there,” Loretta called back. Then she hid in that vile place until she had calmed down enough to make up a presentable face.
Remembering
As the day progressed, Loretta started to feel a bit queasy while simultaneously feeling more clear headed. By nightfall she was nauseous and found that her vision was no longer fuzzy. She worried that Blanche would see in her face that she was no longer under the influence of the tea and so she kept her gaze on her work, on her plate, on her hands. She kept her mouth shut and her head down. As she lay on the floor on her “bed” she noticed that she was sharing the space with a gigantic daddy-long-legs ambling along the floor.
She remembered her fanny pack. She had had on a fanny-pack when she went down that cliff. Surely that had not come off her body in the fall. She kept very still, stifling the urge to confront Blanche. Keep your cards close to your vest, girl, she mutteringly thought.
In the morning, Blanche announced at breakfast that she was going into town. She was off as soon as she finished eating, leaving Loretta to clean up and take care of the day’s work. If had been dry, that would have been work outside, cleaning up the chicken coop, gathering ingredients for tea, or doing the never-ending work of creating firewood. But it was raining, so the work centered on tea production.
Loretta spent a little time setting up some cutting, trying to create the appearance that work had been done. Then she renewed her search of Blanche’s bedroom. First, she got out the cell phone and looked at it. There was no way to be sure that it was her cellphone – it had no case and it wouldn’t turn on. It wasn’t “not” her phone. Then she started methodically at the door, working her way down the left side of the room, looking inside every container.
Suddenly, she thought of the chest at the foot of the bed and broke her strategic plan to go straight to it. She carefully lifted off the blanket and set it aside on the bed. She opened the chest. It was filled with sheets and blankets. She was disappointed, but she began to methodically remove each item, creating a neat stack on the bed. Wadded up pieces of paper had been crammed down the sides of the chest, and they fell onto the bottom as she removed each item. At the very bottom, she found a scruffy brown tagboard accordion file, and beneath that . . . her fanny pack!
She eagerly opened the zipped section in the back of the fanny pack to find that the little pouch with the money in it was empty. The plastic snapping card case was likewise cleaned out of her driver’s license and credit cards. She was momentarily stunned but shook it off and took up one of the crumpled papers from the bottom of the box. She gently flattened it out. It was a statement from her bank noting her change of address to a Post Office box number in Port Angeles. She took up one of the other papers. It was a credit card statement in her name, showing recent charges at Leitz Farm Supplies. She looked over the rest of the documents and found receipts for a chain saw and other items.
Squatted in front of the chest, she rocked back on her heels, thinking, worrying, trying to remember things that were going to be forever foggy to her. Then she turned her attention to the file holder.
In the first pocket was a True Detective magazine from October of 1966. As she flipped through the dry pages, she found an article about Richard Speck, who brutally murdered eight student nurses. Someone had used a red marker to color in the blood stains shown in the black and white photos of the crime scene of the first famous American mass murderer.
In the remaining pockets, she found newspaper clippings in plastic sheet protectors. The first subject was the Manson Family. there were several photos of the X’s that they carved into their foreheads.
The remaining sections featured clippings about Juan Corona, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer. As she flipped through the articles, she noticed that an X had been penciled on to the killer’s foreheads.
Loretta shuddered, and then slowly, with trembling hands, she put everything back into the hope chest, reversing the unpacking process and carefully re-wadding up the papers and pushing them down the sides of the box. She was trying to remember something, but it was elusive.
Then she methodically worked on cutting fabric and cardboard, quickly producing stacks of supplies. It was so much easier to do the work now that she wasn’t loaded. While she worked, she plotted a way to get out of her situation. She needed to figure out how to get out of there.
When she had done enough work to make it look good to her master, she went outside and gathered white stones and filled her pockets. She was thinking of Hansel.
When Blanche got back, she was carrying a roll of chicken wire. Loretta asked if she could help unload and carry things, being sure to keep her voice soft and blurry, somewhat inarticulate.
“No thank you, dearie, I’ve got it covered,” was the reply.
When Blanche left for her next load, Loretta followed her, leaving a white stone at what she saw as divides in the path or tricky spots. She was able to follow all the way out to the top of the last ridge, where she could see the shed down by the road. She watched Blanche unlock a padlocked door with a key hanging from cord around her neck. She’d seen enough and she headed back, carefully repositioning the white stones to be unnoticeable, unless you were looking for them and knew where to look. She would need them to get out.
When Blanche got back, Loretta was sitting in the Adirondack chair, pretending to be asleep. Blanche came close and shook Loretta’s shoulder. Loretta got a close up view of Blanche’s face and then saw what had been eluding her memory – the faint scar of an X on Blanche’s forehead.
Franklin FallsThe next day was rainy and Loretta helped Blanche make up more tea bags and package them into collections. She resisted the urge to suggest that they decorate the tags with little drawings of the plants that went into the tea. She intentionally spilled a stack of cards and then looked at them with what she hoped was a blank expression. She dragged her feet as she walked. She hoped she was hiding her sensibility from her captor.
She felt a malevolence in Blanche that she hadn’t noticed before, a feeling that that there existed great danger from her captor. Loretta didn’t have a plan of escape, yet. She attempted to keep her eyes downcast and her heart still; it seemed to be beating so fast whenever Blanche was nearby.
The following morning was clear. Blanche carried her new shovel and had Loretta carry four of the new green five-gallon buckets with handles. They were going to collect mint plants.
“We won’t need to come all the way down here to collect mint for the tea,” Blanche explained. “We’re gonna dig some up and replant them up by the house.”
They followed a steep, hairpin-turning thread of a trail down the side of the hill into the ravine and thence farther down to the side of a creek. There, they took up an actual path. Loretta pressed her shoe into a wet patch of dirt by the side of the path, deeply, to leave her a sign of how to get back to the cabin. A plan was formulating in her somewhat fevered brain, if only she had the courage to carry it out.
The path upstream led them to the base of a waterfall. It seemed vaguely familiar . . . scary.
Blanche found some mint on a small jetty of land near where the water poured down from above. She showed Loretta how to push the shovel straight down into the moist earth to form a square around the plant, and then heave the shovel back and forth on one of the cuts to create a wedge-shaped opening. She deftly pushed the shovel beneath the roots and hoisted the plant up and out, gently placing it in one of the buckets. “Now you try it. We’ve got room for twelve, I reckon.”
Seeing Loretta successfully dislodge a mint plant from its place, Blanche sat on a small boulder at the edge of the water. She took out her pipe, loaded it, lit it, and relaxing, turned to face the falls. Loretta dug up another mint plant and then she made up her mind.
She snuck up behind Blanche and using all her might, swung the shovel blade into the back of Blanche’s head with a resounding smack. Blanch pitched into the water, blood flowing freely from the base of her skull. Loretta leaped into the water behind her and jumped onto the back of the prone woman, grabbing her head and pushing it down under the water.
Blanche was dazed, almost unconscious, and put up only the mildest of resistance. The force of the water plunging from above into the deep spot beneath drew the struggling pair like a whirlpool. Soon they were under the falls, being driven down by the force of the water, bearing down with the commensurate weight of bowling balls. Loretta held her breath as she grappled Blanche to her chest tightly, until finally, the monster stopped resisting, stopped moving, and was totally still.
Loretta knew what to do next. As in a dream, she pulled the inert body of Blanche to the inside of the falls, looking for the opening she knew would be there. She found it, and with great difficulty, she dragged the corpse up onto the mud bank. Then she went back for the shovel.
Coda
Loretta was standing on the Northwest point of the Olympic Peninsula, looking out at Miracle Point from an observation Deck at Cape Flattery. Cool mist bathed her face and dampened her clothes but she didn’t mind. The waves soothed her with the surging and sucking sound of water filling and emptying the rocky places below.
She was thinking about her sister, finally remembering what happened the day her sister died. They had gone for a picnic at Franklin Falls – she was only six and was not her fault! She had done her best. She should not have been left in charge of a four-year-old. “Watch your sister while I unpack the food,” Mommy had told her.
But Mabel got tired of playing at the edge of the water and quick as a wick, she walked right into the rippled pool. Loretta followed her into the water, but her little sister was just too nimble. By the time Loretta got close to her, Mabel was drowning, being drawn into the swirl of water at the base of the falls, then pushed down.
Poor little me, she thought, I tried to help her. But by the time I got her out of the water, there on the dark side of the falls, there was no life left in her. Just those empty eyes.
She shuddered and then took another pull on the corncob pipe. The intermittent sound of waves, slowly crashing a melancholy beat, soothed her weary mind.