Scraps Read online

  Scraps

  Audrey Faye

  Contents

  Copyright

  Author Note

  1. The End of Snow

  2. Story of an Introvert Mama

  3. Soldier in Fishnets

  4. The Day Before Fall

  5. Christmas

  6. The Grim Brother

  7. Words for My Boy

  8. The Day She Was Born

  9. Unfolding

  10. The Last Note

  Thank You

  Copyright © 2015 Audrey Faye

  www.audreyfayewrites.com

  Author Note

  I’m pretty sure everyone reading this page is a devoted fan of Audrey Faye or her previous incarnation, and I want you to know that you are why Scraps exists.

  This is a strange little collection of random bits of my writing that have never really belonged anywhere in particular. There are a few short stories, and some fictional snippets that are even shorter. There are some words from my heart as a parent, and some from my walk as a woman (and I’m still perplexed about how and why some of those took the form of poetry!)

  There are a number of melancholy notes, because in the last couple of years, those are often the moments that have sent me scrambling for my keyboard. There are a few bits that began as dares or writing workshop assignments. And there’s some wing stretching—me writing in directions I don’t usually go (poetry!! creepy stories!!)

  But in the end, what makes this collection of words most interesting is you. Someone very important to my journey in the last couple of years looked at my astrology chart and laughed. My moon sign—the one that represents my innermost landscape—is a Leo. The outgoing performer who craves an audience. Not all that comfortable a persona to have tucked away in the most private corners of your soul.

  What it means for me is that my words need an audience. For this author, it isn’t in the act of creation that my words find their fullest purpose—it’s when they connect with another human heart.

  Thank you for letting my words matter to you. By reading, you become part of them.

  In deep gratitude,

  Audrey

  1

  The End of Snow

  Every year, I watch them out my window, slogging through the wet rain. The pilgrims, come to see the place where the last snow on earth fell. Hoping, maybe, for that impossible, mystical temperature dip that would turn our never-ending rain here in Tonka, Minnesota into something white and magical.

  It’s the kids who make my guts ache the most, holding out their mittened hands into the sodden, grey rain like hungry baby birds who don’t know their mama ran into the great big window in the new library downtown and isn’t ever coming back.

  I remember snow. Not the big mountains of it that the old-timers tell of where you had to put a monster shovel on the front of a pick-up truck just to get out of your driveway. That kind of snow disappeared from the earth before I was born. But I remember the winter of ’47, when there was enough snowfall to blanket the entire town in a skiff of white and make it look like one of those pretty Christmas cards that everyone sends now and nobody believes in anymore.

  It’s hard to believe Santa comes to visit the people who killed snow.

  We killed a lot of things before the snow died. Oak trees and pelicans and enough species of turtles to cover the Vietnam Memorial and several island nations that nobody could ever find on a map even before they drowned. But killing snow did something to our DNA, and I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to change it back.

  The snow came for the second and last time in my life in the winter of ’53. I was fourteen and lost in the depths of despair because my breasts were still the size of acorns and Ronan McGee hadn’t noticed I existed, which in a town the size of Tonka is pretty hard to do.

  I forgot all about Ronan when I woke up on Valentine’s Day, my eyes squinting at the brightness beaming in my bedroom windows. I could have cared less about the acorns on my chest when I flew down the hill behind the hockey rink on a waxed dinner tray and got my first taste of incandescent freedom.

  There’s a small boy walking by outside right now, his hand locked in his mama’s fierce grip. I’d like to go out and tell her that he won’t get into any trouble here in Tonka—not of the kind she’s worried about, anyhow. We’re used to little boys and the things they get into their minds to do. All the dumbest ones have already happened—my three made sure of it.

  I guess that’s what happens when you inherit the genes that made your momma jump out of airplanes into the middle of the California water wars, trying to get her next taste of freedom.

  That was a decade after my last snow and six years after I’d punched Ronan McGee in the nose for trying to kiss me. I’d learned by then that kisses didn’t lead to freedom, and I was bound and determined to get the heck out of Tonka, Minnesota.

  Why I went to California I’ll never know. Maybe to see a pelican before they were gone too.

  That little boy outside—I hope he doesn’t have to spend as much of his life as I have saying goodbye to things taking their last gasping breath on the planet. It’s easier, somehow, when they’re already gone. Strange artifacts of history, just like that doomed Pacific island where the last inhabitants paddled away in outrigger canoes, waving as their home went under water forever.

  We didn’t wave at the last snow in Tonka—we were too busy speeding its demise under our boots. In our defense, the climatologists had spotted a cooling trend that was supposed to have turned Minnesota back into a winter wonderland for at least another decade or two.

  They hadn’t counted on Arizona using a nuke to settle the California water wars.

  I did some work in the refugee camps after it hit—people with glazed eyes and parched skin and the mental shattering that hits long before hell arrives from the sky. After three months of that I moved back to Tonka, where water was plentiful and we didn’t seem to have anything worth being nuked for. And this time, I let Ronan McGee kiss me.

  The little boy has dragged his mother over to the snowflake shrine. Some artist painstakingly replicated 1013 of the flakes from that last snowfall and hung them from invisible wires that have long since been replaced with dental floss. Nothing kills dental floss. The boy uncurls his red wool mittens, palms up, under a couple of snowflakes in some atavistic memory of what he might have done in the days when they were made of water instead of glass.

  I remember what it felt like when they landed on my tongue.

  These days I’m feeling more and more like one of those jackrabbits that still turn white up in the lake country in the winter. Wishing for a time dead and gone.

  Today, that feels itchy under my skin. We might have killed snow, but we haven’t killed everything—not yet. I turn from the window and smile at the tall old man watching me from the kitchen doorway. “Feel like a walk in the rain?”

  Ronan smiles.

  We’ll go on our daily pilgrimage, down to the little lake at the end of the road and the small colony of brown pelicans that nests on its south shore.

  Turns out that they weren’t all dead—and they like rain.

  2

  Story of an Introvert Mama

  I’m an introvert. My idea of bliss is a hammock in a whitewashed cave overlooking a jewel-blue sea. One nobody else knows how to find.

  I’m also a single mom with two kids, one of whom has special needs and meets the world most days like a toddler full of espresso beans.

  These two things don’t go together all that naturally (you probably already figured that out).

  I’ve known I’m an introvert for a really long time. It was a word I discovered in my teenage years—one of those words of power that explained a really important piece of who I was and set me free from the worry that wanting
to live in the fantasy novels I read was some kind of dread disease.

  Introverts aren’t all the same, even though most would probably like to come visit my hammock cave by the sea. I’m one of the ones who can take over in a meeting (cue wry nods from all my former coworkers), does crowds just fine if there is chocolate or dancing involved, and likes to meet new people, as long as they are willing to talk about things that matter.

  But I’m also an introvert who craves quiet spaciousness, a home that is a nest, tucking into bed with a book and a treat, and the glorious, soul-filling gifts of silence and solitude.

  Those things are not easy to find in the life of a single mom, especially given the aforementioned eight-year-old and his frequent consumption of figurative espresso beans.

  In the early years, I thought I’d done pretty well at figuring out how to live as an introvert mama.

  I took all the batteries out of all the toys. All of them. I am not entirely anti-noise, because that would have involved banishing all my kitchen pots as well. But anything that beeped, squinked, sang, or flashed when it arrived at my house very abruptly ceased that behavior, even if I had to do major surgery to accomplish it.

  I learned to sit on the couch with a book and check out. I’d always known how to do this, but giving myself permission to do it with kids was harder. I don’t vanish as completely as I did as a teenager—I leave a sentry brain cell or two watching for blood, fire, or apocalypse. But I do pretty thoroughly ignore my kids, and I think that’s actually a good thing. I want them to know there are worlds they can disappear into—and that it’s okay to go there.

  Because it turns out that sometimes kids are introverts too.

  As my kids got bigger, my repertoire of survival mechanisms got wider.

  I decided that extracurricular activities are the work of the devil—or at least believing that they’re necessary is. I look in horror at the calendars of some of my daughter’s friends—they never stop. I have no idea if this is good for the kids or not, but I would never survive as their parent.

  I need large swaths of time in my week in which nothing in particular needs to happen—so that what wants to happen has time to come out and play. Because it does, and one of the really cool parts about being an introvert who watches and feels deeply is that I see these moments and sometimes get to be absolutely present when they happen.

  I’m working on being present more.

  These things didn’t make life perfect—parenting is still a big and sometimes exhausting endeavor—but I felt like I had the whole introvert-mom deal pretty well figured out. And then single mamahood landed.

  Here’s the thing about single parenting—it makes you figure out your priorities really fast. There’s just not enough energy to waste it on things that don’t matter. Not if you want to stay sane, anyhow, and most days I do.

  So after several long moments (okay, months) of panic and overwhelm, these days I’m letting my introvert wield the remodeling tools, because she’s pretty smart under that quiet exterior.

  I choose to hang with one kid at a time more often. This is a really hard one for me, because “family time” is somehow imprinted for me as something to aspire to. Family time hasn’t entirely gone away—there are sweet cuddle piles on my bed as we wind down in the evening, and fun outings, and trying to squeeze all three of us into a selfie for the modern version of a family picture. But as an introvert, I do best one on one, and that includes being with my kids. I put a lot of my energy nowadays into seeking moments to be with each of them, just the two of us.

  And then I seek out the moments when I have ten minutes I can take for me. I don’t run errands or clean the toilets or reach for my to-do list.

  I don’t run errands or clean the toilets or reach for my to-do list.

  My son will, if all goes well, be in school for several hours a day this fall. When I tell this to people, the first thing almost everyone says is, “Oh, great—you can go grocery shopping by yourself!” Heck, no. The time I get to myself is incredibly small and precious, and the last thing on earth I want to spend it doing is replenishing our hot dog stash.

  I spend money with an introvert’s priorities. I have a box full of “Mama needs a time-out” new toys and books in my closet, and I use it often. I pay babysitters to take my children away. I do it the regular way sometimes too, where the childcare person stays at the house with the kids and I go out. But often, it’s not “out” that I want. It’s peaceful solitude in my bedroom with my music on. Espresso-bean boy comes back tired and happy, and my mama tanks are a little closer to full.

  I ditched family dinners. This was a wildly hard one to let go. Families are supposed to eat together, right? And yet, as I watch my daughter and I happily tucked into opposite ends of the couch with our Kindles and a bowl of food, and my son, already fed, playing on the floor beside us, it feels good. It honors all of us.

  I’ve written stories where motherhood is a gaggle of kids and big family dinners and abundant, loud, talkative love.

  It can be… but it can be this, too. Some of us need it to be this. Some of us are better mamas if it’s this. And some of our kids thrive best when it’s this.

  So these days, I’m letting the woman who does best one-on-one, who feels most fulfilled when I get solitude and silence, who needs spaciousness, who seeks connection in the quiet moments… be the mom.

  It’s not a hammock cave by the sea. But it feels pretty darn good.

  3

  Soldier in Fishnets

  Ever tried to hold up a combat vest with your boobs?

  No, me neither—not until today.

  I look over at Hugh, the self-absorbed asshat who is directing this, the worst B movie of all time. He’s still in deep conversation with one of his minions, which means we aren’t getting out of this shoot any time soon.

  He thinks he’s making art.

  “Want some bacon?” Danny Casale, B movie star and really nice guy, settles on the bench beside me.

  I hand him a napkin. “You have blood in your mustache.”

  He wipes, not very effectually, and holds out a slice of bacon, which is sadly droopy in the Hollywood heat.

  “Can’t. Bimbo gear.” Normally I have the appetite of a teenage boy, but droopy bacon and squished intestines are a bad combination.

  He eyes my outfit. I know what he’s seeing—I had to describe it in gory detail for my roommates’ amusement last night. A pair of form-fitting fishnet stockings and the kind of skirt that screams “Do me, but make sure I put the gun down first.”

  Because there is a gun, of course—a very big plastic machine gun, circa 1998 Penthouse. I’ve seen water pistols that look more real.

  Oh, and one combat vest. A real one this time, borrowed from some sucker of a soldier who found Hugh on the Internet and bought the whole big-cheese-from-Hollywood-wants-to-imbue-his-movie-with-realism act. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure our brave soldier isn’t a 32DD, and as a result, the guys back in costuming had to resort to desperate measures. It’s hard to be perky with twenty pounds of bulletproof Kevlar duct-taped to your girls.

  When it’s time to pay the rent, my standards get really low.

  Danny does away with the last of his bacon. “We’re up.”

  Sure enough. A minion is on her way over, dripping with vacant importantness. We’ve stopped trying to learn their names. Hugh’s minions are legion and change more often than my underwear.

  Danny stands up, adjusts his kilt, and peers down at the bloody three-foot gash crossing his naked chest. “Is everything still stuck on?”

  I reach over and wipe off some stray ketchup—at least I think it’s ketchup. “Go die valiantly, Braveheart.”

  The minion gazes at Danny in obvious lust. I want to tell her he’s gay, but that might have been last week—he’s a very flexible guy. A pretty hot one, too. He’d probably get laid a lot more if he didn’t hold out for bed partners with IQs higher than a turnip.

  Minion chick looks over at
me, odd pity in her eyes. Maybe she knows about my squished girls. “Mr. Hugh would like a word with you.”

  Damn, that didn’t bode well. “Did he say why?”

  The vacant look didn’t wobble. “Something about an upgrade to your costume.”

  I look down at my ensemble, thinking fast. Any more nudity and he’ll be flirting with an R rating. A little side-boob is okay—anything more and the prudes who keep children safe from naked breasts and show them blown-up body parts instead will rear their ugly heads.

  I head the direction of the director’s trailer, trying to keep my grumbles about high heels and gravel lots mostly to myself. It’s paying the rent. And if karma isn’t PMSing this week, I’ve only got a couple of days left on the set of Bimbos and Grenades.

  That’s not the real name of the movie. I swore a contract oath that says I won’t reveal the real name until release day on pain of death, dismemberment, and taking my name out of the screen credits.

  It’s okay—it’s not my real name anyhow. Someday I’m going to be a world-famous neurolinguist and I don’t want any side-boobs coming back to haunt me.

  I stumble over the last bit of gravel, landing more-or-less gracefully on the baby-bottom-smooth plastic that keeps Hugh’s dainty feet off terra firma. And then I see the glint in his slightly manic eyes and know this day isn’t about to get any better.

  He stretches out his hand from the depths of his director lounge chair in one of those strange only-in-LA greetings, duke to comely pawn. “What’s up with the elbow pads, doll?”

  Only a total idiot calls someone holding a machine gun “doll.”

  I smile and imagine him naked, hairy, and begging for mercy. “They’re only for the run-throughs.” A probably futile attempt to keep my pretty blonde head from cracking open while trying to run in a combat vest and four-inch heels.