The Journey To Now

This has been a journey; though solitary, not one I'd willingly embraced until I saw the end results.  In those solitary moments I discovered literary wells that were untapped--just waiting. In those untapped wells characters waiting to be discovered, poetry waiting to be written and prose awaiting dialogue.

Allow me now, if you will to share with you a result of that solitude an excerpt of my forthcoming book, Etched:

I learned over time from Cousin Thea about her man Crawford.  To hear Cousin Thea tell it she and Crawford had invented love and loving.  I didn’t want to hurt her feelings and tell her that I believed both of those things started with Milton and me so I let her talk.  I didn’t have to say anything that would hurt Cousin Thea’s feeling since it seemed as if Crawford had forgotten himself about hurting her feeling.  He’d forgotten all the good and beautiful things they done to get to the point where she was pregnant and her feeling were raw, fragile and it was important that he not do or say anything to hurt them.

Cousin Thea and I were sitting in the upstairs drawing room—we’d taken to using it but mostly if Aunt Bess was at church, down town or visiting one of her friends.  Aunt Bess didn’t mind.  She said the whole house was for living and she was glad that we were doing just that by using the upstairs living room.  I’m not sure what Cousin Thea and I were doing but for sure it had something with our hands and had to involve some kind of needle .  We’d been doing our needle work quietly for a while with the radio playing for itself as Aunt Bess called it when the radio was on and nobody was really listening when Cousin Thea said, “Remember that day we met—on the bus; well it had taken me just a few minutes to get on that bus but I’d waited weeks—as a matter of fact; three…three weeks of hiding and not knowing if I’d be able to get on and get away.”

“Hiding?  Who or what were you hiding from?”

“The police and Crawford.”

“But why?”

“Before you ask a thousand questions I’m just going tell you and when I’m done with this telling I’m not telling it again because to tell it means I have to live it again and I don’t want to do that.  Living, what I went through, the year leading up to those three weeks no woman should have to live through.  You see if Crawford had gone to her, don’t ask me who her is, I’m going tell you or its going come out in the telling anyway. If I’d never known—you know, never saw the way he was loving up on her I would have gone on—maybe suspecting; if I had even suspected, hurting if I felt hurt—I would have just gone on loving him, loving him, loving him but he went to her.

The “her” was my cousin. She was more than three or four times removed on my father’s side, and no I’m not going to say her name, her name isn’t important.  What’s important to the telling of this is that she was a nasty stinking whore—cousin or no cousin.  She was a stinking, nasty, slimy bitch of a whore.