Hollis grips the smooth wooden armrests and lowers herself onto the worn-out seat cushion of her favorite chair. Hollis has sat here thousands, maybe tens of thousands of times in the 60 years since she’d bought the blue house on 13th street. People have come and gone, rooms rearranged, but the dining table has remained firmly fixed beneath the kitchen window. Solid oak and detailed with the decorative swirls expected of grandmother’s furniture, it has survived a house-fire and two burglaries. She sits in her chair, in her spot, and looks past the yellowing lawn to the street beyond.
Her hearing isn’t what it use to be, and in the past six months has gotten worse. She nods and smiles at neighbors wishing them good morning with relative ease, furrows her brow in concentration as she watches the lips of the checker at the grocery store, and avoids meaningful conversation when it can be avoided. Like sinking to the bottom of a pool, the sound of the world above had become muffled, isolating her in the deep of her own thoughts. This gray afternoon, as she peers through the kitchen window, she’s thinking of a weekend in 1972, when she and Eddie had camped at Paradise Valley.
It was late June and the snowy sides of Mt. Rainier had erupted with colorful wildflowers. This, this is how she’d pictured paradise she’d told Eddie. He’d nodded, smiled, bent down and touched the earth. Fifty years later she imagined Paradise hadn’t changed much, the wildflowers stuck in a groundhog’s day of Springs, blooming and dying, blooming and dying, ad nauseam. Mt. Rainier, Eddie had told her, was not a mountain at all, but a sleeping volcano– no a resting volcano. Looking at those beautiful wildflowers, on that perfect day in Paradise he’d told her the mountain they were standing on would someday explode with the power of hundreds or even thousands of atomic bombs. The very place they were standing would turn to ash, and all that lovely, vibrant color would be wiped to a dirty gray. A thing like that, she’d thought. Eddie would say a thing like that in Paradise, wouldn’t he? Standing in the garden of Eden, and Eddie only thought of the lava flowing beneath the wildflowers.
Eddie, her ‘Beloved Eddie’ is what they called him now that he was ‘Dead Eddie’. Dead Eddie. The first time she’d thought those words she’d actually mumbled them out loud. “Dead Eddie” she’d said, standing in her grandmotherly living room in her grandmotherly robe and slippers. And then again, “Dead Eddie!”, she’d chuckled. “Dead Eddie!”, she’d giggled, and the more she said it the harder it was to contain. “Dead Eddie” she’d crowed, tears streaming down that weathered, elephant-skin of a face as she laughed and gasped, gasped until she’d choked and vomited all down that grandmotherly robe. Dead Eddie.
But now, anointed by the muffled friends and family that eat her pies and drink her coffee, he is ‘Beloved Eddie’. “How she must miss her Beloved Eddie”, they say over Sunday brunch, looking at her with wrinkled foreheads of pity. “Her Beloved Eddie” they say as they pick up her wedding album, turning each page with a sigh. She smiles, nods, wrinkles her forehead and joins in their condolences. And why not? After 54 years of marriage, the least she can do is wrinkle her forehead in feigned grief when expected to do so. After 54 years of marriage that spread from black & white to color and back to sepia tones, the least she can do is to play along, to let them remember her and Dead Eddie and their marriage any fucking way they please. After 54 years of marriage that went from bliss to black & blue to red to gray, the least she can do is to wipe the vomit from her grandmotherly robe and keep their wedding album firmly fixed on the living room coffee table, firmly fixed where it goddam belongs, an everlasting testimony to her everlasting devotion to goddam Beloved Dead Eddie.
Raindrops pat the roof and ping the aluminum eves of the blue house on 13th street and Hollis has returned to the present. She grips the oak armrests on either side of her, blue-veined hands tighten as she bears down, slowly rising to a stand. She glimpses herself in the kitchen window, the faint reflection of an old woman shrouded in falling rain. Steadying herself on grandmother’s furniture she makes her way to the living room, past the blue recliner and the grandmotherly vomit stain, to the grandmotherly coffee table. She bends, lifting the thick ivory photo album from its place, holds it to her chest and carries it out to the garage.
This is a beautiful piece <3.
So many images stuck with me since reading this yesterday evening. I especially liked the images of wood and nature.
At the beginning we’re introduced to what we assume is a lonely old woman reminiscing about a summer camping trip with her dead husband. How quickly it goes from wildflowers and mountainsides to the realities of lava and ash.
“the least she can do is to play along, to let them remember her and Dead Eddie and their marriage any fucking way they please.”
“the least she can do is to wipe the vomit from her grandmotherly robe and keep their wedding album firmly fixed on the living room coffee table, firmly fixed where it goddam belongs, an everlasting testimony to her everlasting devotion to goddam Beloved Dead Eddie.”
This made me think how as the reader and as people in general, we tend to create false narratives about long marriages. We often mistake long marriages for happy marriages…as if something to be, something to aspire to.
Also, Hollis and Eddie are good names that fit their characters. I have a pet-peeve about names in fiction. I took a fiction class a few years ago. When reading other’s stories, I noticed many used unique names with even more unique spelling haha or they would use names that didn't fit. Hollis and Eddie are believable…if that makes sense : ).
Thanks for sharing!
Oh and a few questions!
Did you recently write this?
Is this your first fiction piece?
What do you like and dislike about writing fiction compared to non-fiction?
Thanks for writing and rewriting and rewriting the comment Beth :), I appreciate the feedback. I haven’t really written much fiction, so it’s a new way to write for me, and yes this was just written this week. I really enjoyed the process of trying to surrender to the characters thinking, vs. my own. I actually started this with no roadmap and just let it develop by writing about Hollis. Hollis was actually the great great aunt of the girls on the their mother’s side. She was mostly deaf when I met her in her late 80s, so sweet and kind and sad. I realized while writing this though that I really didn’t know her at all, just a projection of my own feelings about her. Since she couldn’t really communicate I realized I’d made all sorts of assumptions about who she was, her marriage to Eddie, etc. I’d never seen her in conflict, in love, in danger, taking risk or dreaming about the future, things we reserve for young hearts I suppose.
I want to piggyback on Beth’s statements and observations—she expressed a lot of what I’d wanted to say myself.
Such an impressive stab at fiction, given you haven’t written much of it. Just really well-crafted. It has all the markings of a good piece, good storytelling. Many writers, even good ones, tend to neglect the important things. Like the little particularities of Hollis, of her world, that make her feel 3D. Like good sleight of hand, you snuck those details in quickly and easily, without drawing attention to them.
That part, the laugh-cry-vomit about “Dead Eddy”. A great moment. The emotional dissonance of it, the fast mashup of a joyful image and a grotesque one, the quickness of it, laughing to vomiting. I love it. I like it so much I want to steal it.
That moment feels so true to me, though—how expressions of emotion, good/bad or happy/sad, often play themselves into their extreme opposite. Sorry Beth, you’ll be mad, but I’m using you as an example. It’s not uncommon that Beth will fall into a fit of laughter over some very silly thing—hard, convulsive, no-sound-coming-out laughter—and will then suddenly start crying, with genuine little-kid sadness, over something she probably didn’t even know was weighing her down. Emotional releases are strange.
I agree with Beth about the characters’ names. One thing you did really well (not even sure if you were conscious of it), you wove their names into the story like physical objects—the name itself has mass, weight, it actually physically affects the character. Because Eddy is “Dead Eddy”, and Hollis has a violent physical reaction to the name itself, not to Eddy the person. I hate naming characters, hate it. But this observation I had about your piece, I’m going to try something like this in the future.
And just good images: “She glimpses herself in the kitchen window, the faint reflection of an old woman shrouded in falling rain.”
I’d love to challenge you to paint a scene from this story. Not just a portrait of Hollis, or the like. But an actual zoomed-out shot, more like a cinematic composition, where you actually communicate what’s happening. It’d be interesting to see what image you’d choose, how you’d pull the tone out visually.
I was telling Beth yesterday—you’ve got a real foundational talent for writing, Josh. Like with every craft, there’s always something to improve, to polish, no matter an artist’s experience level. But it’s rare to find a writer who can laxly whip up pieces like this, where the important stuff is already baked into the early draft.
…That’s something to think about.
Man, it means so much to me that you guys take the time to read and give me so much feedback. It really really does. So, thank you.
I felt like writing fiction was very similar to how I think of acting, imagining you aren’t just portraying someone but becoming them, moving past the stereotype of them and really trying to be them so you can think like them and emote like them. So it was a fun exercise and I will for sure be working on more.
I can’t take credit for the names, in fact Hollis was the girl’s great great aunt on Becca’s side and she really was married to an Eddie that I never met. Their names seemed so fitting for this story, and as I was writing about Hollis remembering Eddie I couldn’t help but imagine that the rhyme had not crossed her mind in real life after he’d died. From everything I knew, which was basically nothing, the real Hollis and Eddie had a perfectly happy marriage, but as Beth pointed out we assume so much about the elderly and long term marriage. But, in reality a 90 year old woman still feels rage, still feels resentment and the loss of youth and opportunity. That’s what I was attempting to capture to some degree.
Thanks again for taking all the time!