Lovely Penguin

by marie gordon

My mother always told me life wouldn’t always be easy, but that, I could always count on my family to be there for me. She told me I could always count on them, on my own integrity, and, on God…

I remember when I was there. I looked at her so peaceful. She was 85. She didn’t look very old to me. She looked contented with her arms by her sides, her tiny cross hanging from her neck on that gold chain. The flowers engulfed her as if she lay in a field, as if she slept on this silk pillow so quietly, just for the afternoon. I knew who she was, but my grandmother never touched my life like she did that one day.

My mother told me to touch her. “You may touch her. Hold her hand,” she told me. I wasn’t scared. Grandmother was a pillar, although so delicate, her faith on a bed of flowers. Her hands felt so smooth, so soft, like silky coolness. I remember the feeling of holding her hand in mine, my tiny hand. Her grace never left and I wanted to hold on. She captured me in her peace and I wanted to stay there. Instead, I followed my mother’s lead, knelt down before grandmother on the altar, and said a prayer for her soul in heaven.

That night I was given my grandmother’s Bible, her glow-in-the-dark cross. I held my blanket tightly, the one she had given me. The silky side of the blanket I slept on in the summer and spring and the cotton side in the fall and winter. But tonight I could not find that warm cotton side. I held my blanket in my hands like I held my grandmother’s hand that that day and I pictured her stitching the tiny figures of bunnies and flowers into the fabric. She never lost her beauty.

Grandmother did not speak much to me. I did not know her like I knew her until that day and until I first opened her Bible, to find it marked by the page marker on my favorite psalm, Psalm 23. I read it aloud and I began to wonder what my grandmother was feeling those last few days of her life. If she was in pain, we never knew. Everyone said she died quietly in her sleep. But I wondered. If anyone in my family has strength, Grandma Hyatt had a reputation for it. She’d been through Hell, so I’d been told. I’m not really sure what exactly. Certain secrets were always implied by a tone in my family, one marked by certain secrecy. For what she had gone through, Grandmother’s faith was amazing. She went to mass daily. She knew the old Latin masses. She came to my birth and baptism in her old age.

For Grandma Hyatt, having a Christian family wasn’t just a way of life, it was her whole life. When I look at my Bible, at that passage, I know Grandma Hyatt must have gone through more than what she ever told us. But I wouldn’t have known that seeing her at her funeral. For a woman of 85, she looked as if she’d slept on beds of roses her entire life. Maybe her body was old, but her soul never grew old. When I think about that, I do not feel so withered by my past. Despite what she’d been through those 85 years, she left too peacefully to ignore.

I didn’t know how or why Grandma left me that Bible. Maybe she felt what I felt long before that day I held her hand. Maybe she didn’t know who else to give these things to besides her oldest granddaughter. Nevertheless I felt her. I felt those cool hands, their softness in mine and I smiled. My grandmother had lived so fully and slowly, I prayed for her soul and that I might follow her footsteps.

And now, despite my petty suffering, I looked back on this particular experience and I remember that most important thing she’d marked in her Bible: “Yeah, I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me (Psalm 23:4).”

by marie gordon

Tap. Tap. From the foyer an old glass cabinet reverberates from the sound. I hear myself, my breath, the house, its noises, in the dark. Tapping, tapping…

This house feels quiet and empty. I creep down the staircase at night, through the dim halls where shadows follow my every step and I feel alone. At the opposite end, down the lengthy hallway, there is another room where he slumbers. But I lay awake unprotected, cold. The covers do not warm me here. The echoes of the walls, the house settling wake me at night. A beat, like the echo of a rusty drum from the center, Thump, thump.

Loneliness shivers through me with the chilled air. And the lights, never come on at night. I stare at blank walls, at canvasses and imagine their pictures filled with faces. But the house has barely two faces but bodies of halls and passages. It is too vast to sit so empty and dormant. Sleep, sleep.

When I dream I see bleak figures at my door—pounding, pounding. They reach through the oak frame for me and I stand back. A violent chill shivers down their spines and they retreat quietly while I lay crying in their absence.

The water turns on and I wake. I lay open-eyed. Pump, pump, the pipes run the walls and the water drenches me in terror. This is my home. Be still, be still and the night will rock me back to sleep. But the house remains unquiet— and I, afraid.

The mice lie dead under the staircase, petrified animals with beady eyes. What will I look like in the end? Has paranoia taken over me, or has this house? I wonder when the hallways will stop quietly creaking at night, when footsteps and shadows will fade back into the walls. When do the guests arrive and this place reawaken with vital sounds of human heartbeats? Waiting, waiting, waiting…

by marie gordon

It was approximately 4am the other morning when I awoke to a scratching sound. I saw a large shadow in the middle of the room. What was it? Was it moving? I couldn’t move. I was afraid to even move my eyes.

It appeared upon a midnight hour
When frozen vials thaw from ice
A single shadow- o’er bed it glower
Upon my soul of timid mice

I lay still, afraid to so much as move my hands, as if some horrid Chucky doll lurked beside the on switch to the light. Then I heard it again, like a screwdriver scratching away on the sides of my walls. Who the hell is in my room?

And on the floor I felt a cracking
Creaking shifting in my bedroom floor
Sounds so utterly a-gasping
I drew my breath and held my chilly core

In a swift movement, I flung myself upward into a sitting position while gripping the on-switch on the lamp. Should I turn it on? Do I even want to see the fate that awaits me? Why the hell did I sit up anyway? There’s a murderer in my room.

Alas a candle in the window
Just a wanderer this eve
Who passes by my window oft
Moving the shadowy manikin I perceive

Where is the light coming from? The window. I forgot to close the blinds. I feel the glow, seeping over my shoulder from behind. Who is it? The scratching, it becomes wild and unceasing.

As the bronze of lock swings open wide
And the click invites my guest inside
I shiver on my neck for refuge to hide
While yellow beady eye glares near bedside

I grip the switch. Click. Light. Slowly I move my eyes around. No one. I stand up slowly, out of bed and move towards the scratching sound coming from the wall. I see it, like a little joke-box, wobbling. My Raisin Bran box is moving.

The box it wiggles, creepy snails
Inside just waiting to arise
To haunt the corpses of those dead
But moreso those alive

I grab the box, and grip it in between my hands. Inside a creature scratches and squiggles. Inside, I reach. I grip it tight in my fist. I feel the fur. Its wriggling tail. A trapped little mouse drowning in cereal.

O to be less terrified of death
And so much less, to live
To battle in the tiny tomb of thoughts
O what I would not give

I pull the mouse out of the box and toss the remaining Raisin Bran in the trash can. Bloated from her cereal binge, her belly swells in my grip. She squeaks. I open the lid to her cage. I sit her back in and hop back into bed. Nothing to worry about. I turn off the lamp.

But solitary flicker glares
Inside my window its bearer dares
Staring breathlessly un-erred for where
I lay silently aghast under pallid cover layers

Shit. I forgot to close the blinds.

by marie gordon

Megan had a saying she loved to write on her hand in gel pen, “Fuck the world and kiss my ass.” I looked at the pink gel pen writing on her hand as we rode the bus to my house one day after school. She took the pen, grabbed a hold of my ten-year-old hand and wrote her saying. I looked at the glittering letters. “Fuck the world and kiss my ass.” I smiled and we laughed. We giggled. Because that’s what fourth graders do.

As far as I know, Megan and I had the dirtiest mouths of any elementary school girls I’ve ever met, but only around each other. As we approached my front door that day the two of us began frantically rubbing the tops of our hands with our palms, spitting and rubbing until the gel pen blurred into some incoherent pinkish smudge on our hands. We laughed.

Until I met Megan I thought I was the only girl who knew these words, these filthy words my mom had washed my mouth out with soap for saying. Megan and I found release in something so painless and yet so potent—cussing.

We crawled out the first floor window of her house at two in the morning. We scampered out to the barn barefoot in our pajamas and grabbed Megan’s horse “Blue” by its mane. From its stall we lead it outside, took running starts and leapt on Blue’s back. Blue would grunt under our weight. Megan was always the heavier of the two of us. Sometime we switched off, or if one fell the other kept riding. I remember the rain falling down, dripping off the roof of the barn and Megan and I at full canter quietly exclaiming, “God damn!” We giggled and let the rain come down on us. As we rode we would slander our parents, who were both divorced at the time. We would demean the purpose of life in general. And as Blue wore out, we would dismount and lead her back to her stall. We crawled back through the window and headed to the shower to clean the mud off.

Our favorite part of the evening began afterwards. Megan’s mom was a massage therapist and I learned from Meagan a few things about massage therapy. We took turns on each other. It was a release. The two of us spoke about things we never spoke about to anyone. We told each other the worst things we done. We told each other about what we thought of one another. We both determined that neither of us had it better than the other.

I can remember in her garage Megan had a huge box of individual packets of Halloween skittles. Those Skittles never ran out. We played basketball by her hoop, played teacher and classroom in her room and every time we went for Skittles they were there.

She had an old dog named Grey that she was always picking off fleas from. The dog looked about 20 years old, although I believe it was 10. Sometimes I helped Megan pick off Grey’s fleas. I felt sorry for the old dog. And I can remember the only time I met Megan’s father was because of Grey. The fleas kept getting worse as Grey aged and his arthritis was worse. Mr. Hart brought over a rifle and a shovel. I heard the gunshot and I remember feeling as if the world had flipped wrong side up my stomach got so queasy. Then I thought of Grey, laying there on the porch, too tired to keep fighting the infestation of fleas and bugs and I realized that he was decaying already.

After that day I realized something about Megan that I had never seen before. When she told me she understood why Grey had to be shot I was dumbfounded. But I knew she loved her dog, she loved it enough to have the mercy to call her father to come over and end its suffering. That’s when I knew Megan understood more about life than I could hope to in my immaturity. It wasn’t a façade anymore for Megan and me. We had friendship. I realize now our love of each other surmounted that of our overbearing lives at the time. We dumped our family turmoil into nights of horseback riding in the pouring rain and cussing, cussing like sailors never cussed, cursing like the words had as much significance as the inventions of Surge soda and quantum mechanics.

I think we took pain away from each other with our hands and our words. But when I remember seeing Megan, I remember sharing pain and as we shared, the pain weakened. We held on to each other and I learned what love really is. We loved each other enough to pick off the fleas together and to end each other’s suffering by doing the only thing we could do…

We took out our packs of gel pens and wrote on our hands, “Fuck the world and kiss my ass.”

by marie gordon

Oh, sweet robins gape
At me here
In my hole between narrow walls
Frigid with envy’s leer

They tweet and dance
They prance and smile
While I toil
My soul, they, sing, defile

I wonder as they flap
Their wings and fly
I cross my arms
Away from the feathery sky

Tweet you little prey
Of dogs and fly
Like pansy birds
Over power-lines high

My shaky hands tap
On the window sill pondering
Wanting to frolic free
Swooping wings tempting

Freely, little birds
You sing, I weep
For all you have
I would not hope to keep

Oh fleeting springs
And budding golden rays
On my eyes and on my mind
Your freedom weighs

I gape at you through
Thick glass and bear
The seeds of envy
That I toss at you with listless care

My weary pupils
Do rest on your beady eyes
Behind my scope
Thee robins I despise

This is a picture of my lion, given to me by my lil’ bro David Benjamin. The lion’s name is Pierre.

Photo taken by: Rob Goodlatte