Rachel Wolcott, Fact & Fiction

WAG #29 is supposed to be about habits. When I started writing I was thinking about habits. What resulted seems to be about something else.
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Her sister walked the woods adjacent to her parents place when she had the energy. She walked, taking an inventory of last experiences. The way summer felt on her skin. The beauty of an unwinding frond. The perfect roundness of frogspawn and the smoothness of a salamander before it scuttled into the leaf litter. She listened for bird song, the distant rumble of a tractor and her own footfall on the damp ground. The family ate the mushrooms she brought home, then tended to her broken body when at the end of the summer she didn’t want to move. Her mother doled out pills and felt helpless when the hospice nurse administered pain relief. Even her father did his part to give Debbie a quiet death.

The last time Debbie walked in the woods, Kendra went with her kicking at leaves and trying not to cry. The sisters reached the tree that housed the ruins of a tree house. A pair of weathered boards nailed to a branch and the remains of a frayed rope ladder hung from the tree—a reminder of their youth. Debbie leaned on her sister who almost had to carry her back to the house, to her chair by the window overlooking the vegetable garden where the rampant pumpkin vine had taken over. Kendra lifted and steadied her, remembering the fights they had in the tree house. The girls were supposed to share, but Debbie would climb up gathering the rope ladder behind her. Kendra screamed and begged her to let her come up. She smiled and taunted her younger sister and pelted her with crab apples.

“Build your own,” she said. “This one’s mine.” She turned her back on Kendra and used a stick to stir an empty saucepan she’d taken from the kitchen. Kendra tried to climb the tree, but couldn’t pull herself up. She struggled, falling, scraping her legs on the rough bark. She retreated to the loft in the barn, looking for abandoned swallows nests, weaving straw into a rough mat, waiting for her mother to call them for lunch. Kendra hid, ignoring her mother’s shouts and pleas for her to come in and eat. Waiting for Debbie to run by, Kendra slipped out of the barn and headed back to the woods. She pulled at the rope ladder and hacked at it with a sharp piece of stone until it was mangled.

Debbie barely weighed ninety pounds now. It was easy for Kendra to help her along. She could have scooped her up and cradled her. But they stumbled toward the house, Debbie trying to suppress her low moaning and imagining what the pain relief would feel like. At the bottom of the porch steps they stopped. Debbie caught her breath slowly and turned around to look back at the woods, the barn. Kendra started to cry.

“It’s going to be ok,” said Debbie.

The challenge for WAG 28 was little things. I’ve got a lot of little things here. Do they add up to anything? Continuing adventures of Kendra…
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She couldn’t help it. The first thing she did in a new place was buy the local paper and turn to the police log. It helped put things in perspective. Seneca County wasn’t the only place with more than its fair share of domestic violence call outs and drunk drivers. It told you more than you wanted to know about a place. Attenburg, Ohio was another one of those Anytown, USAs–a diner, a drugstore and a bank on Main Street and the same kinds of crime.

Kendra sat in the diner and read. The long-time church deacon was charged with embezzling funds (also front page news). Twenty-five cords of firewood were stolen from a farm. A deputy was called out last Tuesday to dispatch a rabid raccoon. A gang of underage kids were stopped in the state park for alcohol infractions. That’s what the paper called them. Infractions. Attenburg’s paper had a hall of shame too. Pictures of men wanted for non-payment of child support, armed robbery and check forgery. They all looked the same—skinny, mulleted, scowling. She took a good look at the picture of Nelson Arnold. Everyone was looking for him and this mugshot taken two years ago felt like as close as she might get to him.

The waitress brought her coffee and omelette. Kendra waved over Andy Mercer, her counterpart in Attenburg. There’d been three sightings of Arnold here in the last week, but the Sheriff’s department had come up with nothing. Both sheriffs thought there might be a mass hallucination—but Attenburg was only a forty-minute drive from Seneca so Kendra decided to cruise over on this Tuesday morning and follow up the lead.

Andy Mercer was a good policeman and friend. He and Kendra had worked cases together before and got to know each other fairly well. For a small town sheriff he had an impressive arrest record and had solved some serious crimes. He sat down with Kendra and smiled. A second later a coffee was placed in front of him. He ordered himself some eggs.

“I doubt anything’s going on here,” he said. “I’ll show you what I got back at the station. Not a heck of a lot.”

“I can add that to the next to nothing I got already,” said Kendra. She slammed her hand on the table, startling Andy. If she burst into tears now, she might as well give up on the case. This two-month crime spree and now a murder already had tested her patience and her frustration was beginning to show.

This piece is my attempt at the challenge to write about deception set by WAG 27.
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Loving her grandchildren wasn’t easy for Ina. Little misses, the both of them and spoiled, she thought. They were adorable when they were younger, but now, so demanding, so energetic. Her daughter Mindy only encouraged them by letting them run wild. Didn’t take them to church, dressed them like little boys. At age ten, the eldest was practically an atheist. Their visits were tiring, but she couldn’t tell them not to come. This year though, they brought their puppy and as she anticipated, they’d left it in the house. Whining. At least their grandfather took the girls fishing. They were gone for hours, permitting her to relax, but her husband wasn’t exactly a good influence. He drank and chewed tobacco. Ina hated his cat.

She dragged her sunlounger out of the garage onto the lawn. It had been a long while since she’d been able to lie out and about five years since she’d had on her swimsuit. The weather had been terrible. The sun had finally come out, accompanied by humidity. She sat back. The warmth felt good on her skin, soothed her veiny and bluish legs. This spot was the only place outside she could tolerate. Here she had her privacy. No neighbors could look in on her and it was quiet. She put on her sunglasses and dozed off.

The sound of her daughter coming into the house awoke her. The puppy started to bark and whimper. This dog, like her granddaughters, was uncontrollable. They’d made absolutely no attempt to train it. Already it’d had three accidents in the house. By the time they left she’d be forced to change the carpet. The roar of a car engine and the continuing whimpering told her Mindy had taken off again, leaving the dog. It would be up to Ina to look after it. The granddaughters had vanished, which was a blessing. But the Lord giveth and he taketh away and she was left with the dog.

Inside, the house was dark and cool. Ina changed into a light skirt and blouse and shuffled into the spare bedroom. The puppy was in its cage, whining and crying. She didn’t like to see an animal suffering. She shook her head. When would her granddaughters learn responsibility? The puppy ran out of the cage and leapt on her when she opened the door. It barked happily and wagged its whip of a tail. Its nails dug into her legs, tender and lumpy with varicose veins. Ina picked up its leash and took it outside.

The dog darted excitedly around the yard, behind the bushes, in and out of the garage. It raced in circles like a greyhound after a mechanical rabbit. Ina walked slowly, following it up the driveway and back again. The dog sped off and she called it back, but it was gone. For a few minutes she couldn’t see it. She walked after it, calling, looking for it to run out from a neighbor’s yard, but it had vanished. Further up the drive she called again, tried whistling before walking towards the main road. Cars whipped by, but there was no sign of the dog. Again she called, shouting this time, but he didn’t come back.

She didn’t feel badly for her granddaughters, Mindy or the dog. They put her in this position and now, even though they said nothing, they blamed her. Ina was fixing herself lunch in the kitchen, the dog already forgotten, when Mindy drove up and leapt out of the car crying and screaming. Ina went outside and saw the dog in the back seat of Mindy’s car, it’s muzzle bloodied and hindquarters smashed. Mindy found it on the main road.

It must have run off, said Ina. She admitted she let it out to piddle and watched it sniff around the yard. Must have chased after a squirrel. Mindy sobbed and paced, not knowing where to turn. Ina took herself back to the sunlounger and prayed quietly. She asked the Lord for strength and listened out for her granddaughters’ sorrowful shrieks. Mindy and her girls spent the afternoon in the darkened spare room crying while their grandfather buried their dog.

The theme this week is “a fish out of water”. More info on WAG: here. Thanks again to India Drummond for the ideas. More on India and her upcoming debut novel: here. Anyway, I’m continuing with Jenny the farmer’s daughter from WAG 25. Turns out that at a wedding everyone’s a fish out of water.
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Her father smiled in a drunken way. To the other guests and the bride’s family he looked rosy cheeked and jolly, but Jenny knew he’d been drinking before they got to the church. Soon he’d wander off to find a chair in a warm corner and have a nap. Next to him, her mother appeared oblivious, but she must have been worried. It might be best to leave before the disco and vodka shots or at least pack her parents off home. Her mother tried speaking to Hayley’s parents a few times during the afternoon, but they were taciturn people. Not the gregarious hosts she and Jenny expected. Her mother wondered whether they were looking down their noses at her, because she was a farmer’s wife. The idea these people were judging her parents, made Jenny angry, but as the evening progressed she realized they were diffident. Hayley’s father had little positive or interesting to say in his speech. Apparently, he ran a watch repair concession at the department store in Colchester.

Her brother Geoff met Hayley while Jenny was working as a medic at the Red Cross in Phnom Penh. Before she got on the plane to return to the UK for the first time in two years, she assisted the senior surgeon in a complex amputation. He’d texted to let her know the elderly female patient died. “We were too late,” he’d written. It happened more than she liked. Many patients, particularly the elderly, arrived at the clinic only to be diagnosed as terminal, having suffered for years. Jenny was due back in Asia in two weeks time, but her brother had almost convinced her to stay on in Essex. It wouldn’t be for him. She didn’t believe her parents had become the burden he described. Being back at Rookery Farm, walking the muddy footpaths, even in the dead of winter, was exhilarating. Perhaps she’d had enough of the tropics. For the first time in months her heat rash had vanished. She loved her mother’s cooking.

Geoff and Hayley sat on the dais, smiling and laughing at the best man’s speech. They were flanked by their parents and the wedding party. Hayley had two sisters, both older and married. They looked on with distain. Jenny couldn’t remember their names, but Geoff assured her they were horrible, complete and utter bitches. Hayley was a bit too orange for Jenny’s restrained tastes. She and her sisters freely used spray-on tan, which in the stuffy hotel ballroom had started to leech into their satiny dresses. The bride wore a tiara and her fingernails were bejewelled with tiny rhinestones. Jenny wondered how she would like being a farmer’s wife. That was assuming Geoff stayed on at Rookery Farm. She got the impression he’d be happier working in a more social environment.

Since they’d met Hayley had remarked on Jenny’s gaunt appearance to her face and behind her back. She’d overheard her telling Geoff she was started to look like one of them, like one of them refugees. Jenny went along on the hen night, where her somewhat emaciated figure was commented on by many of Hayley’s friends. One girl asked her if she had cancer. It had been a long night and Geoff had called her far too early to get all the details. He was paranoid and asked a lot of questions about male strippers and a woman called Mel.

She ate her cake and the piece of the woman sitting next to her. Keeping a watchful eye on her parents, Jenny reckoned her father was fading. He’d nodded and snapped his head back a few times during the speeches. Her mother looked uncomfortable, as if her stockings were twisted or too tight. It was time to go. She walked her parents to the cloakroom where they retrieved their coats and headed out to a cab waiting in the rainy night. As soon as the cab turned onto the main road, her father fell asleep.