Cry Your Happy Tears by Phillip Gardner
page two
r.kv.r.y. literary journal special winter-spring 2008 fiction
page two
r.kv.r.y. literary journal special winter-spring 2008 fiction
We see and feel the bombs going off inside Chloe, for Pete’s love is true and his devotion written in
the bruises on his face. Pete plays his last card: “After all I’ve been through for you,” he says. We
know he has to say it, and we don’t blame him; we’d say it too. But we’re at the ten-minute mark,
and we know that Pete might as well be holding Chloe’s head under water. And we can’t stand
that. So when Pete says he can never let her go, dangles his truck key over his open mouth like a
goldfish, and then washes it down with bourbon, we gasp for Chloe, who reaches for the bottle and
then brings it down on Pete Hump’s drunken head. When she holds up the roll of duct tape, we
applaud.
If this were a movie, we would be at the end of the opening hook. But this is not a movie; this is real.
If this really were a chick flick, we might cut to an establishing shot or two of Nashville, then to Chloe
standing outside the Grand Ole Opry. She would find her way inside, up on the dark stage, and
there she would lay bare her soul in a rendition of the Dolly Parton composition, “I Will Always Love
You,” which is her way of saying goodbye to her past, to Pete and Russ. We see her tears and
choke back our own. And we’re not the only ones. The old custodian who has swept those sacred
floors since the days of Hank Williams senior watches too with bubbly tears in his eyes.
The security guards who take Chloe away are more the hard-hearted type.
The thread that holds this plot together is Chloe’s attempt to break into country music. In the
movie, she has the talent but can’t get the breaks, which is the way we all feel about ourselves.
From now until the end of the third act, things will go from worse to worse for Chloe, and if the
movie is a success, those things will be even worse than we can imagine they might be. She will
find and lose the love of her life, a man very much like Clint Black; and if that isn’t enough, she’ll
have a miscarriage after their love falls apart; and if that doesn’t do it, the young mentally
challenged girl who makes Chloe her hero and upon whom Chloe turns her back because she
simply can’t carry another ounce of emotional baggage will get run down by a bus owned by a
country music star. At the end of act three, after it becomes known throughout Nashville that Chloe
is responsible for the death of the mentally challenged girl who adores her and that the bus
accident is likely to ruin the career of someone who holds a striking resemblance to Clint Black, we
know that she’ll never get work in this town. Chloe feels low.
But deep down something tells us that we’re closing in on act four, and though we can’t figure out
how the hell she’s gonna bring it off, we know that this is a chick flick and that it’s going to end well,
that we’ll leave the theater crying happy tears and boohooing to folks waiting in line for the nine o’
clock show that they’ll love it.
And of course we won’t be disappointed.
Because there is that old custodian who drank with Hank and had a thing for Minnie Pearl, and who
happens to be like a father to—you guessed it—Dolly Parton.
Or if the producers don’t think the country music-NASCAR target will buy tickets, they might have
the script re-worked. Before it’s over, the script may be rewritten until the Chloe character becomes
a martial arts diva or a Dalmatian. As for now, Chloe, the knockout in the red and white poke-a-
dots, still goes to Nashville. But when she gets to The Grand Ole Opry and stands outside waiting
for a sign from God, she gets none. In the next scene, she finds herself inside the Nashville airport
looking at the lighted destinations, feeling lost and alone. Maybe she spends the night there, or
even a couple of days there, until someone whom we suspect is on a mission from God, some guy
in a turtleneck, says to her: “You belong in Hollywood.”
Act three retains much of what was written in the original script, except Chloe is a gifted, struggling
actress who repeats most of the mistakes she made as a struggling singer. Finally, at the point at
which she’s devastated by guilt following the death of the mentally challenged girl who idolized her,
Chloe is offered a spot in a television commercial in which she is obviously cast as her idol, Dolly
Parton. The commercial is a smash hit. It’s everywhere. Chloe’s big break comes when she’s
invited to appear on a late night show that we all know is David Letterman. But things go badly;
Dave wants to pick fun at and mock Dolly, and Chloe loses her shit—not Dolly’s but her own.
Brought to tears by the rich and arrogant host, she calls the Letterman impersonator a pencil dick,
dumps coffee on his Armani suit, and storms off stage in a display that makes couples having bad
sex all over America stop and stare slack jawed at the screen.
Chloe goes lower, then even lower, then gutter low. When it appears that her only option is
returning to either Russ Watts or Pete Hump, both of whom still love her, she thinks seriously of
putting out the Big Light when—you guessed it—Dolly appears.
And of course we are not disappointed.
But this is not a movie. This is real, and disappointment is for most of us our appointed destiny.
And so Chloe drives to Nashville. She even makes her way to the Grand Ole Opry where she
stands outside thinking about Dolly and Elvis, about need and desire, about love and emptiness.
But standing there also reminds her of who she really is--a small-town Southern woman, like Ava
Gardner, born to freak beauty, one who has spent most of her life feeling that she is living in a
movie. But life, she knows, is not a movie. She is like us, with these exceptions: her ravishing
beauty is a curse and her meager talent an unending thirst, enough only to fuel the need that
drives every artist. And worst of all, she has the brains to know that the greatest stroke of luck—all
that might be sucked up in her universe and brought to a single moment—would be required for
one instant of legitimate, though third-rate, artistic validation. Her one hit. Unlike Willie Lowman,
Chloe knows she’s a dime a dozen.
Still our need is to think of her as a sexy, liberated woman who exercises the full range of
contemporary feminine prerogatives—from innocent victim to atomic estrogen; we want that for
ourselves; we’re not thinking of her, a breathing suffering human being who will suffer more for her
beauty by watching it fade. Not as a woman who has been blessed with physical perfection and
cursed with her single drop of talent when no drop at all could have meant a happier life—someone
who knows that she will amount to nothing.
Chloe pumps her own gas and then heads east on I-40, but she is not running to; she is running
from, like most of us; and like us, she doesn’t know when it’s time to hold on and when it’s time to
move on; and what she really says aloud is, “If you can’t learn to live with who you are, how, dear
God, can you learn to live with who you ain’t?” Which we really don’t want to think about.
When she sees the sign for the Great Smoky Mountains, she reflects upon Graceland, Dollywood,
Pete Hump and Russ Watts, and what she feels is bottomless regret and immeasurable
worthlessness.
As the horizon flattens, Chloe stares at the interstate ahead and enters a sort of exhausted trance,
a period of mindless absence, when a few hours and several hundred miles fold into a place that is
no place and a time that is no time. It is not peace that she feels, only the cold comfort of
nothingness.
Since this is true of the human condition and therefore violates what we’ve come to expect from
most movies, it might be convenient and academically satisfying to think of Chloe as a victim of
advertising and commerce or in terms of a history that has been unkind to women. This might work
as battleground for gender or culture wars. But I doubt it.
We’re talking about the human heart here. And for Chloe, no abstraction illuminates what she feels
in her heart. All she knows is that she can’t go back and that the big green sign she just passed
says she’s two hundred miles from Wilmington, North Carolina and the end of the road—the Atlantic
Ocean. What occupies her mind is only whether or not at the end of the interstate she takes her
foot off the gas.
When the weight of darkness visible becomes too much for us, our internal conversations take the
form of metaphors, and the simplest thing can bring us to tears. We see a dead doe on the side of
I-40 near Winston-Salem and that William Stafford doe becomes us, everybody we’ve ever lost, and
the fate of human experience. The deeply embedded connotations of the word and the dead doe’s
image reflect a topographical map of our shattered soul.
Chloe stands at a gas pump and sees a mentally challenged young girl reach for her mother’s hand
as the unknowing mother turns her back. Chloe is overcome with self-loathing for having spent one
minute of her life feeling sorry for herself. She just wants it to stop, for it to go away, to get outside
of her own head. But she can’t.
Chloe has to reverse this falling effect. Her metaphors are anchors, and she can hardly hold open
her eyes. She reaches for some small, manageable act, some first step in an effort to turn those
metaphors into something smaller than what they represent.
She begins reading road signs aloud and discovers that the right combination of sound and image
soothes her spirit. “Chapel Hill,” she says. She pictures the two, the church upon the hill. Then
says it again, like music, allowing the connotations of “chapel” and the soft vowels and breathy
consonants to do their work. “Cary,” she whispers, and thinks of her burdens, her obligation to
carry on. And later, when she voices, “Fuquay-Varina, Fuquay-Varina, Fuquay-Varina,” she is
reminded of “sugarplum fairy,” and a little smile appears on her lips.
Then she feels a panic like electricity.
She has come to the intersection of I-40, which runs from Barstow to Wilmington, and I-95, which
runs from New Brunswick to Miami. She can’t go forward and she can’t turn back. I-95 south takes
her to Darlington, South Carolina, where she started, where she’s lived her life, where she married
a man she never loved and had an affair with his boss, his childhood friend.
The exit says North, Rocky Mount. In spite of the sign’s implications, she takes the exit.
Soon she sees a sign for Smithfield. And she thinks that’s where the Smiths of the world are
produced, that Smithfield will inevitably have a Main Street, and that on that street live the most
common of the common--that she is one of them.
Near exit 95 on Interstate 95, Chloe looks up. She has never seen the arrestingly beautiful woman
on the billboard. The words under the picture say The Ava Gardner Museum, Smithfield.
Chloe thinks the place is much too small to be called a museum. It is no Graceland. But its
intimacy comforts her, and the progression of photographs, from sharecropper’s daughter to
international movie star fill her eyes with real tears. The Lost Angel, My Forbidden Past, The Angel
Wore Red, The Blue Bird, This Time For Keeps: She reads the titles of forgotten movies.
She studies Ava’s wedding photos, one to a short man with a goofy smile, one to a man who played
clarinet, and one to a man Chloe recognizes but can’t name, Frank Sinatra. In another photograph
Ava is in the arms of Rhet Butler, and the caption of another says that the man beside her is the
richest man in the world. She stands in the company of bullfighters and a man named Hemingway.
The museum hostess touches her nametag. “I know it looks like ‘Deidre’,” she says with a pleasant
smile, “but I pronounce it ‘Dead-ra’.” She invites Chloe into a small theater, as quiet and softly lit as
a funeral home. When Chloe enters, a large painting, the poster model for the film The Barefoot
Contessa, makes her want to flee: Ava stands at the edge of some great precipice, her arm
extended, one slipper about to fall from her fingers. Behind her stands a man, his face buried in
her shoulder, his arms around her, clinging, holding her in a kind of death grip as Ava looks down
in sad resignation.
The actress’s life is reduced to twelve minutes of video that Chloe watches alone. The woman on
the screen, the fetching sex queen on the billboard, was not the real Ava Gardner, the barefoot
country girl from Grabtown whose freak beauty drove the world’s most famous, talented, and
wealthy men to madness. In the video, Ava is so stunningly beautiful that Chloe hardly hears the
narrator’s voice until he says, “She was always searching for the love that was always out of reach.”
When Chloe senses that the short video story is closing in on act four, she walks away because
childless Ava is living in another country, alone, and Chloe senses that she is going to die there,
alone.
The museum hostess looks up from her newspaper and smiles.
“Where is she now?” Chloe asks.
“What?” smiling Deidra says as she folds the paper.
Chloe looks up at the photo reproduced on the billboard.
As Deidra reaches for a small brochure, Chloe recognizes the woman’s look. It asks, Are you a
movie actress? Are you in the stories?
“How long have you been an Ava fan?” she says in her lyrical eastern North Carolina accent,
sounding a little like Ava, a little like Chloe.
“All my life,” Chloe says. “All my life.”
A summer storm is waiting when Chloe steps out of the museum; she can smell it. It reminds her of
home.
She stops at a liquor store and buys two pints of bourbon.
Sunset Memorial Park is on Highway 70, Smithfield. There are strip malls close by, a damaged
furniture warehouse outlet, and tobacco fields within view.
She parks near the cemetery gate, stuffs the bourbon into her purse. The clouds are the color of
slate and as thick as cotton bolls. She takes off her shoes. A cool, cool breeze lifts the hem of
Chloe’s thin red and white poke-a-dot dress, and the shade soothes her eyes as she searches the
landscape of headstones.
Chloe believes that the living can communicate with the dead, and she feels in no hurry to rush out
to whatever life awaits her. Together, they’ll remember what it was like to walk the soft furrows
barefoot when they were little girls. She’ll have a drink and pour one for Ava and ask her about
true love and maybe about how to go on living without it. Then she will wait and she will listen. And
if the rain comes, she will wait and she will listen.
But she has to commence to begin, as the old people used to say. She must take a first step.
There are no identifying signs, no clear directions, no promises. Still, Ava is out there. It is the one
thing Chloe knows, the one certainty, the one sure thing. She will look and listen. Await a sign.
Chloe stands at the gate, the heavy summer clouds behind her a dark bruised Technicolor, the
cool breeze lifting her blond hair, sculpting the red and white poke-a-dots to her woman’s body.
She imagines a path through the dead, a line that will form a giant A.
She takes the first step. If this course doesn’t lead to Ava, she will take another. She will walk the
alphabet A to Z until the letters spell out the words that give her a reason to be, a direction, a
destination.
“Ava?” she whispers. She stops. She listens. “It’s me.”
the bruises on his face. Pete plays his last card: “After all I’ve been through for you,” he says. We
know he has to say it, and we don’t blame him; we’d say it too. But we’re at the ten-minute mark,
and we know that Pete might as well be holding Chloe’s head under water. And we can’t stand
that. So when Pete says he can never let her go, dangles his truck key over his open mouth like a
goldfish, and then washes it down with bourbon, we gasp for Chloe, who reaches for the bottle and
then brings it down on Pete Hump’s drunken head. When she holds up the roll of duct tape, we
applaud.
If this were a movie, we would be at the end of the opening hook. But this is not a movie; this is real.
If this really were a chick flick, we might cut to an establishing shot or two of Nashville, then to Chloe
standing outside the Grand Ole Opry. She would find her way inside, up on the dark stage, and
there she would lay bare her soul in a rendition of the Dolly Parton composition, “I Will Always Love
You,” which is her way of saying goodbye to her past, to Pete and Russ. We see her tears and
choke back our own. And we’re not the only ones. The old custodian who has swept those sacred
floors since the days of Hank Williams senior watches too with bubbly tears in his eyes.
The security guards who take Chloe away are more the hard-hearted type.
The thread that holds this plot together is Chloe’s attempt to break into country music. In the
movie, she has the talent but can’t get the breaks, which is the way we all feel about ourselves.
From now until the end of the third act, things will go from worse to worse for Chloe, and if the
movie is a success, those things will be even worse than we can imagine they might be. She will
find and lose the love of her life, a man very much like Clint Black; and if that isn’t enough, she’ll
have a miscarriage after their love falls apart; and if that doesn’t do it, the young mentally
challenged girl who makes Chloe her hero and upon whom Chloe turns her back because she
simply can’t carry another ounce of emotional baggage will get run down by a bus owned by a
country music star. At the end of act three, after it becomes known throughout Nashville that Chloe
is responsible for the death of the mentally challenged girl who adores her and that the bus
accident is likely to ruin the career of someone who holds a striking resemblance to Clint Black, we
know that she’ll never get work in this town. Chloe feels low.
But deep down something tells us that we’re closing in on act four, and though we can’t figure out
how the hell she’s gonna bring it off, we know that this is a chick flick and that it’s going to end well,
that we’ll leave the theater crying happy tears and boohooing to folks waiting in line for the nine o’
clock show that they’ll love it.
And of course we won’t be disappointed.
Because there is that old custodian who drank with Hank and had a thing for Minnie Pearl, and who
happens to be like a father to—you guessed it—Dolly Parton.
Or if the producers don’t think the country music-NASCAR target will buy tickets, they might have
the script re-worked. Before it’s over, the script may be rewritten until the Chloe character becomes
a martial arts diva or a Dalmatian. As for now, Chloe, the knockout in the red and white poke-a-
dots, still goes to Nashville. But when she gets to The Grand Ole Opry and stands outside waiting
for a sign from God, she gets none. In the next scene, she finds herself inside the Nashville airport
looking at the lighted destinations, feeling lost and alone. Maybe she spends the night there, or
even a couple of days there, until someone whom we suspect is on a mission from God, some guy
in a turtleneck, says to her: “You belong in Hollywood.”
Act three retains much of what was written in the original script, except Chloe is a gifted, struggling
actress who repeats most of the mistakes she made as a struggling singer. Finally, at the point at
which she’s devastated by guilt following the death of the mentally challenged girl who idolized her,
Chloe is offered a spot in a television commercial in which she is obviously cast as her idol, Dolly
Parton. The commercial is a smash hit. It’s everywhere. Chloe’s big break comes when she’s
invited to appear on a late night show that we all know is David Letterman. But things go badly;
Dave wants to pick fun at and mock Dolly, and Chloe loses her shit—not Dolly’s but her own.
Brought to tears by the rich and arrogant host, she calls the Letterman impersonator a pencil dick,
dumps coffee on his Armani suit, and storms off stage in a display that makes couples having bad
sex all over America stop and stare slack jawed at the screen.
Chloe goes lower, then even lower, then gutter low. When it appears that her only option is
returning to either Russ Watts or Pete Hump, both of whom still love her, she thinks seriously of
putting out the Big Light when—you guessed it—Dolly appears.
And of course we are not disappointed.
But this is not a movie. This is real, and disappointment is for most of us our appointed destiny.
And so Chloe drives to Nashville. She even makes her way to the Grand Ole Opry where she
stands outside thinking about Dolly and Elvis, about need and desire, about love and emptiness.
But standing there also reminds her of who she really is--a small-town Southern woman, like Ava
Gardner, born to freak beauty, one who has spent most of her life feeling that she is living in a
movie. But life, she knows, is not a movie. She is like us, with these exceptions: her ravishing
beauty is a curse and her meager talent an unending thirst, enough only to fuel the need that
drives every artist. And worst of all, she has the brains to know that the greatest stroke of luck—all
that might be sucked up in her universe and brought to a single moment—would be required for
one instant of legitimate, though third-rate, artistic validation. Her one hit. Unlike Willie Lowman,
Chloe knows she’s a dime a dozen.
Still our need is to think of her as a sexy, liberated woman who exercises the full range of
contemporary feminine prerogatives—from innocent victim to atomic estrogen; we want that for
ourselves; we’re not thinking of her, a breathing suffering human being who will suffer more for her
beauty by watching it fade. Not as a woman who has been blessed with physical perfection and
cursed with her single drop of talent when no drop at all could have meant a happier life—someone
who knows that she will amount to nothing.
Chloe pumps her own gas and then heads east on I-40, but she is not running to; she is running
from, like most of us; and like us, she doesn’t know when it’s time to hold on and when it’s time to
move on; and what she really says aloud is, “If you can’t learn to live with who you are, how, dear
God, can you learn to live with who you ain’t?” Which we really don’t want to think about.
When she sees the sign for the Great Smoky Mountains, she reflects upon Graceland, Dollywood,
Pete Hump and Russ Watts, and what she feels is bottomless regret and immeasurable
worthlessness.
As the horizon flattens, Chloe stares at the interstate ahead and enters a sort of exhausted trance,
a period of mindless absence, when a few hours and several hundred miles fold into a place that is
no place and a time that is no time. It is not peace that she feels, only the cold comfort of
nothingness.
Since this is true of the human condition and therefore violates what we’ve come to expect from
most movies, it might be convenient and academically satisfying to think of Chloe as a victim of
advertising and commerce or in terms of a history that has been unkind to women. This might work
as battleground for gender or culture wars. But I doubt it.
We’re talking about the human heart here. And for Chloe, no abstraction illuminates what she feels
in her heart. All she knows is that she can’t go back and that the big green sign she just passed
says she’s two hundred miles from Wilmington, North Carolina and the end of the road—the Atlantic
Ocean. What occupies her mind is only whether or not at the end of the interstate she takes her
foot off the gas.
When the weight of darkness visible becomes too much for us, our internal conversations take the
form of metaphors, and the simplest thing can bring us to tears. We see a dead doe on the side of
I-40 near Winston-Salem and that William Stafford doe becomes us, everybody we’ve ever lost, and
the fate of human experience. The deeply embedded connotations of the word and the dead doe’s
image reflect a topographical map of our shattered soul.
Chloe stands at a gas pump and sees a mentally challenged young girl reach for her mother’s hand
as the unknowing mother turns her back. Chloe is overcome with self-loathing for having spent one
minute of her life feeling sorry for herself. She just wants it to stop, for it to go away, to get outside
of her own head. But she can’t.
Chloe has to reverse this falling effect. Her metaphors are anchors, and she can hardly hold open
her eyes. She reaches for some small, manageable act, some first step in an effort to turn those
metaphors into something smaller than what they represent.
She begins reading road signs aloud and discovers that the right combination of sound and image
soothes her spirit. “Chapel Hill,” she says. She pictures the two, the church upon the hill. Then
says it again, like music, allowing the connotations of “chapel” and the soft vowels and breathy
consonants to do their work. “Cary,” she whispers, and thinks of her burdens, her obligation to
carry on. And later, when she voices, “Fuquay-Varina, Fuquay-Varina, Fuquay-Varina,” she is
reminded of “sugarplum fairy,” and a little smile appears on her lips.
Then she feels a panic like electricity.
She has come to the intersection of I-40, which runs from Barstow to Wilmington, and I-95, which
runs from New Brunswick to Miami. She can’t go forward and she can’t turn back. I-95 south takes
her to Darlington, South Carolina, where she started, where she’s lived her life, where she married
a man she never loved and had an affair with his boss, his childhood friend.
The exit says North, Rocky Mount. In spite of the sign’s implications, she takes the exit.
Soon she sees a sign for Smithfield. And she thinks that’s where the Smiths of the world are
produced, that Smithfield will inevitably have a Main Street, and that on that street live the most
common of the common--that she is one of them.
Near exit 95 on Interstate 95, Chloe looks up. She has never seen the arrestingly beautiful woman
on the billboard. The words under the picture say The Ava Gardner Museum, Smithfield.
Chloe thinks the place is much too small to be called a museum. It is no Graceland. But its
intimacy comforts her, and the progression of photographs, from sharecropper’s daughter to
international movie star fill her eyes with real tears. The Lost Angel, My Forbidden Past, The Angel
Wore Red, The Blue Bird, This Time For Keeps: She reads the titles of forgotten movies.
She studies Ava’s wedding photos, one to a short man with a goofy smile, one to a man who played
clarinet, and one to a man Chloe recognizes but can’t name, Frank Sinatra. In another photograph
Ava is in the arms of Rhet Butler, and the caption of another says that the man beside her is the
richest man in the world. She stands in the company of bullfighters and a man named Hemingway.
The museum hostess touches her nametag. “I know it looks like ‘Deidre’,” she says with a pleasant
smile, “but I pronounce it ‘Dead-ra’.” She invites Chloe into a small theater, as quiet and softly lit as
a funeral home. When Chloe enters, a large painting, the poster model for the film The Barefoot
Contessa, makes her want to flee: Ava stands at the edge of some great precipice, her arm
extended, one slipper about to fall from her fingers. Behind her stands a man, his face buried in
her shoulder, his arms around her, clinging, holding her in a kind of death grip as Ava looks down
in sad resignation.
The actress’s life is reduced to twelve minutes of video that Chloe watches alone. The woman on
the screen, the fetching sex queen on the billboard, was not the real Ava Gardner, the barefoot
country girl from Grabtown whose freak beauty drove the world’s most famous, talented, and
wealthy men to madness. In the video, Ava is so stunningly beautiful that Chloe hardly hears the
narrator’s voice until he says, “She was always searching for the love that was always out of reach.”
When Chloe senses that the short video story is closing in on act four, she walks away because
childless Ava is living in another country, alone, and Chloe senses that she is going to die there,
alone.
The museum hostess looks up from her newspaper and smiles.
“Where is she now?” Chloe asks.
“What?” smiling Deidra says as she folds the paper.
Chloe looks up at the photo reproduced on the billboard.
As Deidra reaches for a small brochure, Chloe recognizes the woman’s look. It asks, Are you a
movie actress? Are you in the stories?
“How long have you been an Ava fan?” she says in her lyrical eastern North Carolina accent,
sounding a little like Ava, a little like Chloe.
“All my life,” Chloe says. “All my life.”
A summer storm is waiting when Chloe steps out of the museum; she can smell it. It reminds her of
home.
She stops at a liquor store and buys two pints of bourbon.
Sunset Memorial Park is on Highway 70, Smithfield. There are strip malls close by, a damaged
furniture warehouse outlet, and tobacco fields within view.
She parks near the cemetery gate, stuffs the bourbon into her purse. The clouds are the color of
slate and as thick as cotton bolls. She takes off her shoes. A cool, cool breeze lifts the hem of
Chloe’s thin red and white poke-a-dot dress, and the shade soothes her eyes as she searches the
landscape of headstones.
Chloe believes that the living can communicate with the dead, and she feels in no hurry to rush out
to whatever life awaits her. Together, they’ll remember what it was like to walk the soft furrows
barefoot when they were little girls. She’ll have a drink and pour one for Ava and ask her about
true love and maybe about how to go on living without it. Then she will wait and she will listen. And
if the rain comes, she will wait and she will listen.
But she has to commence to begin, as the old people used to say. She must take a first step.
There are no identifying signs, no clear directions, no promises. Still, Ava is out there. It is the one
thing Chloe knows, the one certainty, the one sure thing. She will look and listen. Await a sign.
Chloe stands at the gate, the heavy summer clouds behind her a dark bruised Technicolor, the
cool breeze lifting her blond hair, sculpting the red and white poke-a-dots to her woman’s body.
She imagines a path through the dead, a line that will form a giant A.
She takes the first step. If this course doesn’t lead to Ava, she will take another. She will walk the
alphabet A to Z until the letters spell out the words that give her a reason to be, a direction, a
destination.
“Ava?” she whispers. She stops. She listens. “It’s me.”
photo by Scott Ingram