Fiction/Short Prose Fiction July 2001 How She Chose the Day Meredith Sue Willis The Sky Is An Old Lady With Fire In Her Cheeks by Peter Markus ~ . ~ . ~ How She Chose the Day Meredith Sue Willis          The first day had heavy air and row after row of greasy clouds. The second day had a high sky, painfully fresh, after much heat and dampness. It was a day when distances were precise and the white clarity of edges like a high-pitched baby's cry.          The cry turned to keening, her sons were dead again, her husband had betrayed her again, and the work she had thought might sustain had failed. Courage to go on was beside the point; she had nothing to prove, but the clarity made her wince, so this was not the day.          The third day she never knew the weather. She took a room in the motel. She checked in the night before to give herself plenty of time to think and perhaps even fall asleep if she got tired and wake up refreshed and ready to put in another day or week or month. She didn't fall asleep. She was wary and wakeful, watching the dullness of the pink and orange forms, the thick-waisted lampshade, the corner of the bed frozen in place like a colorized photograph of Niagara Falls.          She tried to think of the boys in the old, good days but was tortured by an image of the Betraying Husband squatting like a cheap statue on the bedside table.          She thought of the little girl she mentored on Saturdays, took shopping for lunch, to performances. But what good is the ballet, she thought, when the girl's mother keeps her out of school to clean house, and the stepfather feels up her new breasts? That child has no more chance than Stephen's quick broken neck in the car accident or James' inexorable bipolar disorder.          James said, I'm doing fine, Mom, much better! And bought the gun and rented the motel room. This motel, but not this room. At the other end. All her letters and petitions had not even made them hesitate when she purchased her weapon or when she rented the room.          She knew it was morning when light seeped under the drapes, washing out the perfect ugly colors. It didn't matter what kind of day it was. She had only wanted to prove how easy it was to rent the room, to purchase the firearm. She was too angry that day. She left the key in the motel office and went home.          December rain began as an ice storm, then changed over. She called in to work sick because she woke so heavy. She thought that this was the day. She would not have to be here for the holidays. She felt no relief, but a fittingness.          On the phone, their piping voices called: "Are you okay? You sound stopped up. You take it easy. Good-bye," they said.          She sat by the phone until the floating embers of human voices burnt out. This was where she had been alive for the past months, in the faint crackling of energy between the ones who called her and her hollow self. To make sure nothing else ignited, she unplugged the phone.          She examined what was left: a few objects in pouches and pockets. A silver charm, a pink lozenge of glass dropped hot on a surface and hardened with a flat bottom. A book she once read, a ticket for a museum exhibit, a perfect acorn with its little cap. Things that had given her a sense of riches, back when she used to dive into the green world.          She gathered up the babies in her arms, and they began to wiggle, and she said, Sleep, sleep, but the wiggle turned to struggle. Her arms weakened, her hands became clumsy. They escaped, grew large, broke apart. She could not save even one. It was not that her good things were worthless, and not even that they had lost their savor. They were as real as her suffering, but too few and too rare.          So, in the kitchen, with a black linoleum floor and black-out paint on the windows and the refrigerator carved of stone, and one small lightbulb casting just enough gray and feeble light to find the pistol in the drawer.          She didn't wait for the exact anniversary or the second reservation at the motel where her last son checked out.          Does not wait. Does not care for symmetry or statement or the effect on friends. She sits in the chair facing the wall and braces her elbows on the counter. She puts this bitter barrel in her mouth. She has practiced, in order to make no mistakes. She scatters her memories.          All the jewels and charms of her life roll across the floor.   (Meredith Sue Willis has published eleven books of nonfiction and fiction, including three novels, Higher Ground, Only Great Changes, and Trespassers (all from Hamilton Stone Editions). Various excerpts appear at http://www.aol.com.members/MSueWillis. Her most recent is an expanded edition of Personal Fiction Writing (Teachers & Writers Press, 2000). Raised in West Virginia, she now lives in New Jersey.) The Sky Is An Old Lady With Fire In Her Cheeks by Peter Markus          When Girl calls out to us brothers, "Hey, Boys!" us brothers come arunning. Usually it is Girl asking us brothers to give her a bath, for us to scratch her back. We always do whatever Girl says. This time Girl asks, "Do you have a light?"          We point to the moon, the stars, the lighthouse, to the red and green river buoys that blink on and off, to the bridge and the bridge's leash of light that crosses the river, the lights of houses, windows and doors, TVs and kitchens, of fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters sitting under a single bare lightbulb, reading or drinking, eating a late night snack, unable to sleep, to do what us brothers had been doing until we heard Girl call our names.          "Boys," she says. "Hey, Boys." It might've been the voice of God telling us that our house was on fire, the way that us brothers jumped. But it was a voice better than God's. It was the voice of Girl. "Light," we say, as we point the light out. But Girl says she means fire. "Fire," she tells us. "Have you boys got any fire?"          "Have we got fire?" Brother shoots back. "You're asking us if we have any fire? Come with us," Brother says. Just this once, Brother gives me this look where I don't hear inside his head. I look back, but I don't say what I'm thinking back. What I'm thinking is, Brother, I hope you know what you're doing.          Brother takes us up the river, over humps of limestone and pig iron not being put to use. Up ahead, dark in the dark, is the factory where our father used to make steel. "This," Brother says, letting go of Girl's hand, "is the place where fire was born." Brother is smiling as he speaks. Brother, his whole face, is lit up. He is on fire. He is a thing burning, the brightest light on the river. He is a lighthouse, he is a smoking smokestack. "Come inside," he says. There is no saying no.          Inside, it is us walking with our eyes closed; it is that dark. We hold on tight to Brother. He is this halo of glowing hair throwing off sparks. He is a runaway train. Girl and I are boxcars dragged along into this tunnelish dark cored out by the fire of Brother's lone headlight. We cross a river of worn through the floor dirt over to where the blast furnace is. The blast furnace is the beast our father used to feed. It is the lion's mouth. It is the belly our father used to have to climb up inside when the tongue of fire lulling inside failed to lift up and lick and kiss and make blush the widowed sky above.          "Kiss me," Girl says, after Brother sticks his head inside that dark place. And so we do. We kiss, all three of us at the same time, kissing, kissing, slipping in our tongues, three tongues tangling, kissing until the night's sky becomes an old lady waking to light a candle, kneeling down on both of her knees, her face (see her face, see all the dried up rivers), see the fire of us brothers (if you look too long, we will blind you), feel the puckered lips of the sun (close your eyes now), burning its kiss, its lipstick of light, upon her wrinkled cheek. (Poet/fiction writer Peter Markus lives in Southern Michigan.) ~ . ~ . ~