GOLDEN OLDIES

Last weekend I brought a cardboard box labeled Old Publications in from the garage. I packed the box in Flagstaff, AZ eleven years ago when I moved to Colorado. I hadn't opened it since. What fun it was to look back at poems and stories I've published over the years. What an encouragement to see that most of them were pretty well-written. So I've decided to use a few of them as occasional blog posts. This morning I'll share a story that won a "flash fiction" (in this case 1500 words or less) contest in a publication called Inklings.The date was Fall, 1997.

                      "Of Pinyon Jays and Miracles"
       by Susanne Larkin [a name with echoes from the past]

    As soon as Pat Johnson said, "My name is Patricia" to her husband, the legion of fears that had possessed her for ten years rushed out of her soul. No swine being available, the demons went into a flock of pinyon jays that had come to gorge themselves with sunflower seeds. The jays cried with loud voices and flew up from the aluminum pie plate, a raucous tangle of iridescent blue feathers and silver beaks.
   Of course it was years later that Pat put this interpretation on what happened. A curious art dealer pointed to a watercolor of a flock of suicidal pinyon jays diving three and four at a time into an undefined body of water. "What," he asked, "can I say about this one? Something you saw?"
   "No," said Pat slowly, not remembering at first. "No. Nothing I saw. A dream perhaps."
   That night she remembered. Not a dream. A memory. Mr. Gonzalez fishing drowned jays out of stagnant leaf-covered water with his long-handled pool net, crossing himself, muttering fearfully in Spanish. The memory of a miracle
   At the time Pat didn't even notice the birds. She simply wondered where the strength to say the words out loud had come from. It wasn't as if she hadn't been working up to it--practicing in front of a mirror to say the words clearly, performing for her therapist to say them with conviction, thinking them to overcome her fear whenever Charles called her "P.P." She'd had the words for a long time. she just hadn't had the courage. Not until that moment.
   They were standing outside Pat's apartment under the iron and concrete staircase that went to the second floor. Charles wanted to come in. He wanted to make her French toast. He said something like, "I miss my little P.P."
   Without planning it or even getting ready, Pat said clearly and with conviction, "My name is Patricia."
   Charles laughed. "You really should try to develop a sense of humor," he said. "You'll never have any friends if you can't take a joke."
   "It's not a joke," said Pat. "It's disrespectful." As she said these words, new ones she'd never practiced, she was dimly aware of a confusion of jays overhead.
   The nickname had started out as a joke, at least Pat was willing to think it had. They'd gone to Ardrey Auditorium to hear Beethoven, the Symphonie Pathtique. She'd loved it, and Charles had picked up on her enthusiasm. On the way back tot he car, he'd laughed about it and, giving her an affectionate hug, had called her "my darling Pathetic Pat." In the darkness she'd smiled. Later, though, when he called her "my Pathetic Pat," she'd protested. He laughed again and called her "my little P.P. instead." After weeks or months or years, Pat got tired of fighting about it, just like she got tired of fighting about how to button shirts on hangers and where to keep the skillet.
   When the fears left her and went into the pinyon jays, Pat felt strangely light, so light she thought her feet might leave the earth, and she might have to grab the top of the golden cottonwood to keep herself from floating away into the clear, blue morning. Charles didn't notice how light Pat had become or how strangely the pinyon jays were acting. He kept on talking. Something about how appropriate the nickname had gotten since she'd left him to try to find herself. Something about how pathetically thin she was, about how pathetic her attempts to take art classes at night were.
   Savoring the lightness and her new courage, Pat turned her back, went into the apartment, and shut the door. Furious, Charles started to open the door to follow her in. As light as she was, Pat discovered she was stronger than she'd ever been before, as strong as some kind of space-age metal, lighter than air but with the tensile strength require to escape the pull of gravity. She pushed against the door with all her new strength and turned the dead bolt. Charles pounded on the door and shouted obscenities.
   Behind the door, Pat didn't care. That was part of the new lightness. Before the demons fled, she'd cared about everything. About whether the microwave bell in her kitchen would wake the neighbor's baby next door. About whether her art teacher was bored with inept students like her. About whether Charles would be able to do his own laundry while she was gone.
   Now she leaned against the door, feeling it shake from Charles' fists, hearing the ugly words he was screaming, even hearing the jays screeching. Instead of caring, she breathed in the stale air of the apartment slowly, one breath at a time. As she breathed, the apartment expanded around her into a vast spacious place where Charles couldn't come.
   Pat Johnson didn't know much more than her name as she leaned there against that door. She didn't know she would learn to draw birds so well the museum would hire her to do their avian exhibit. She didn't know that eventually she would learn to paint so well that people would buy her pictures. She didn't even know the pinyon jays had been part of a miracle. But as she leaned there, her light soul, free of the demons the jays had taken, opened up like a pale yellow forsythia bud the first day of spring.