Beth Bishop

I Learned A Lot About Myself From A Dead Guy

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As I teacher, I try to learn from my experiences.  At times, the lessons are so blatant that I take immediate pause and think, “This is a teaching moment.  What have I learned here?”

For example, when you’re fourteen and walking down The Strip in Panama City Beach, you don’t hitchhike, no matter how sore your feet are, especially when the offer is from a carload of forty-something, mostly toothless men in a rusted-out Ford Crown Vic.  You absolutely do not trust your brother when he tells you to stick the end of the radio adapter plug to your tongue right after he’s plugged it in the wall, and you don’t let yourself be alone in the same room with a man that you know beats his girlfriend (because you might do something rash like stab him with your pocket bottle opener).

However, other times, the lesson is more subtle, something you come to hours, days, or years after the event.  With that in mind…

Several years ago, I lived in an upstairs apartment of a large complex. On a Sunday, around three in the afternoon, and as per my weekly routine, Fluffy and I were writing our grocery list to head out for our weekly run. He grabbed our bags; I grabbed my purse.  When I opened the door, I heard: “Oh God.  Oh, dear sweet Jesus.  Oh, somebody help me.  Jesus help me.  I think he’s dead.  He’s dead!”

I’m a moderately friendly neighbor.  I don’t always know names, but I know faces.  I wave or speak, pet dogs, and gripe about the weather, so I knew this voice.  It was my redheaded diagonally downstairs neighbor.  She was outside going into hysterics.  I sighed and looked out around the complex.  No one, and I mean no one was outside on this beautiful sunny Sunday.  No kids, no adults, no college kids.  No one.

To Fluffy, I said, “No one else is going to help her.”  He shrugged, and we went downstairs.

When she saw us, she grabbed my arm and begged us for help.  “I’ve already called my brother. I’m on the phone with 911.”  When Red gave me her cell phone, the operator asked me to go inside and check the body of her boyfriend.

That is when I saw my first dead person who wasn’t all prettied up in a casket.

He was face-down on the carpet in the nebulous “no-room” space between the kitchen, dining area, and living area.  His arm was outstretched with a piece of hard candy, a pink Jolly Rancher, just beyond his fingertips.  Their golden retriever mix was going ape shit, racing around the room, barking at us, at her, at the dead boyfriend.  The operator told me to have her put the dog in another room and then roll him over for further assessment.

When Red grabbed his arm, she squealed and began hyperventilating.  Fluffy, cool and calm as always, bent down and helped her heave her boyfriend – a heavyset man – onto his back.  He was purple, swollen, bloated, and leaky.  Red squealed again and jumped back.

To the operator, I said, “Ma’am, he’s purple.  It looks like he’s been dead a while.”

She said, “I can talk you through CPR.”

My automatic response was, “No!”  The guy was purple.  His lips were blue and swollen.  All of him was swollen.

Fluffy knows CPR, but when I asked if he would do it, he shook his head at me.  “I’m sorry, but this guy is dead dead.  I’m not doing CPR on him.”

At this point, Red launched into full panic mode.  She was too upset to try, not that I think she would’ve.  I walked back outside, still on her phone, and I heard the sirens of the ambulance.  Moments before it arrived, her brother did.  I gladly handed him the phone, got myself and Fluffy into my car, and drove to the grocery store.  In the parking lot of Publix, the adrenaline wore off.  I had the shakes for a solid half hour.

Later, we returned to the complex to find it crawling with police, paramedics, and gawkers.  People were actually sitting outside their apartments in lawn chairs watching all the goings-on.  “Where were they when she was screaming for help?” I asked.  “No one to be seen for miles until all the lights and sirens come.”  I was as sick and disgusted by the living as I was by the dead guy.

Red was out on her porch with her mother and brother, and she got up to thank us for trying to help and trying to calm her down.  “They said he died while I was at work, probably not long after I left.  We were going to get married this summer.”  I gave her a hug.

While unloading groceries, I said to Fluffy, “Just so you know, I’m going to be clingy for the next few days.”

The next morning, as I was getting ready for work, the lesson came to me: when someone is screaming for help, I will try to help…to an extent.  I could never give CPR to a complete stranger.  I just don’t have it in me to do something like that for the corpse of someone I don’t love.  I feel a little bad about that, but now I know.

White Noise

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I stood at the pump, smelling the rain come from the west. Big fat rain, the kind that you can walk in and not get wet. It’s been an odd summer, too wet then too dry.  Ancient oaks are falling, and I’m filling my gas tank on my way to buy groceries.

I stood at the pump, hearing snippets of someone’s phone conversation as it drifted from the store’s front to me. I wondered if there were times that my mother went to church just because she needed a break from my brother and me, because she needed adult interaction.

I stood at the pump, calculating just how long it had been since I’d made a joyful noise unto anyone. The baby used to cry every time I sang Mozart’s piano sonata in A minor k331. It’s what I sang to him at night when he was in the hospital with his liver malfunction. After the first few bars, his eyes would fill and his lip quivered. Sometimes, I would sing it just to make myself laugh, and that is terrible and cruel.

Some things, usually horrible things, just stay with you.

I stood at the pump, snapping out of my thoughts when it clicked, signalling the tank was full. I declined a car wash, declined a receipt. I got back in the car and cursed at the CD player until it accepted the first mix CD Fluffy ever gave me. Then, I drove on to the grocery store.

Editorial Aid: My List of Overused and Abused Words

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Why I need my list: One thing I have been told repeatedly is to edit the hell out of everything before trying to get it published. This stands to reason, as a manuscript full of typos and incorrect word usage is a turn-off for agents, editors, and publishers. Great, but no one has ever told me how to edit the hell out of something. I figured that grammar and spell checks factored in, but beyond that, I wasn’t sure, and those checks don’t catch everything. Thus, I developed a system for myself, and this list of words is a big part of that.

How I started my list: After I sent my mother the first novel I ever wrote, she called me and said, “I am sick and tired of Mr. Chuckles.” I had used that word over 50 times in 300 pages. No one chuckles that much. Because of that, I did some searching <ctrl+f> and came up with a list of words that I abuse. I always search these when editing. For the overused words, I don’t remove all of them, just enough to spread it out so you don’t notice it. (The book I am currently reading has “diffidently” 20 times in 400 pages. That is too much for an adverb!) The others are words that are abused – used incorrectly or typed in error.

My List:

  • cliches and colloquialisms (grammar check catches most of these, for American English)
  • then/than
  • farther/further
  • hear/here
  • your/you’re (a mortifying mistake for an author, but it happens)
  • there/their/they’re (another mortifying mistake)
  • form/from
  • fro/for
  • words that end with -wards should be -ward (toward not towards)
  • piece of [my, his, her] mind/peace of mind
  • you outside of a quotation
  • had/passive voice (you can’t get rid of them all; you can’t and shouldn’t, but you should try to keep your writing active!)
  • is/was (you can’t get rid of them all, and you shouldn’t)
  • fuck/shit/piss/hell/damn (no one should curse all the time)
  • my own (replace with “mine” or just “my” whenever possible)
  • grumble
  • growl
  • chuckle
  • snicker/snigger usage (I don’t think anyone really uses snigger anymore)
  • flop (my characters flop onto furniture a lot)
  • hum (related to sex scenes)
  • hiss (dialogue must have have words with S’s for characters to hiss)
  • wiggle
  • smirk
  • like (when I should use “as if,” “as,” or “as though”)
  • could, would, and should
  • words in place of “said” (don’t over-do it)
  • seem
  • appear

Those last two are often used incorrectly, so it’s best to avoid them if you can. If you have more suggestions, please share!

Where the Wild Things Hunt

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Shadow stood on the edge where the dormant grass met the rip-rap-covered bank.  In the bay, the water gently lapped against grayish rocks.  Rusty water, made less inviting by the bright sunlight.  Through oval glasses he didn’t need, he stared at the ferry as it approached the docks.  He’d been compelled to wear them, putting on the face of an intellectual.  People stereotyped glasses-wearers as geeks, nerds, and squares long before Velma began single-handedly solving mysteries for the gang.  He could play off that for the day.

Looking to his left, Shadow recognized the teenaged boy sitting on a tripod stool in front of an easel.  He knew that the boy painted ocean scenes in watercolor, all the same shade of blue but with different concentrations of the color.  Several empty tubes of acrylic lay scattered around the boy’s feet and on the easel two cups – one for water, one for paint.

The boy moved the brush over the paper with inhuman speed, starting in the upper left and working his way to the lower right.  He didn’t wait for it to dry.  As soon as one was finished, he flipped the paper over the top of the pad to reveal a fresh, white sheet.  Always intrigued, Shadow walked over to stand behind him and watch as the boy transferred the world onto paper.

“Sea, sea, sea, sea,” the boy murmured over and over as his arm jerked and hitched.

Shadow couldn’t understand how such uncontrolled movements made something so beautiful.  The result was a surprisingly realistic rendering with exquisite detail to the tiny crests of waves.  For only a moment, he took the pad from the boy and flipped through the paintings.  As he flipped, Shadow saw the nebulous blob that marked the position of the ferry make steady progress toward the dock.

“Sea, sea, SEA, SEA.”  The boy grew increasingly agitated.

“Yes, I know,” Shadow said to him and returned the pad.  “It’s the only thing you see clearly.”

“Sea,” the boy sighed and resumed painting.

Shadow took the ferry to the island.  It was a small boat, and the waves were rough, but since the trip was uneventful, he tuned out for a while.  He never noticed the young woman, no more than twenty, staring at him with large blue eyes rimmed with black liner.  She longed for a hat as she fought to keep her pageboy-cut hair out of her eyes.  Eventually, she settled for holding each side of her hair in her fists.

Beyond the draw of a handsome face, she marveled that Shadow’s hair hardly moved.  The wind picked up only a few strands and twice saw him scratch at the stubble on his face.  Other than that, he didn’t move, and she wondered how anyone could be so still for so long.  She thought that, if he embraced her, her ear would rest just over his heart.

On the island, Shadow stared into the forest while the others set up camp.  The young woman spoke to him, and he greeted her, letting his eyes pass over her face to record it for future reference.  Her eyes, hope and good will seemed to arrow out of them, and he wondered if other things – hate, fear, lust – would also come through them, not only transparently but forcefully so.  He gave her a half-smile and a half-laugh, which she returned with a wide, guileless grin.  Clingy, he thought and walked away from her to the main tent.

Fourteen feet-by-fourteen feet, the tent stood in a patch of evergreen needles just large enough to contain it.  Two adjacent sides had both the flaps and screens unzipped and tied open to allow easy access.  A long table and several camp chairs were already set up, along with two laptops, a scanner, and a printer.  Shadow gave the equipment the same treatment he’d given the young woman.

“You can try,” he said quietly and left to set up his own tent.

He was up, sitting in a chair in the main tent and listening to the night.  A man’s scream cut off abruptly.  Snapping, snapping, rending, gurgling growls of satiation.  More screaming.  His lantern was on, and soon, the surviving five people clustered in the center of the tent, looking to him to know what to do.

“Did you see it?” one horrified man asked of Shadow.  “It was eight feet tall!”

“Furry, too?” Shadow asked, his smile haunting his face again.  He stood and turned up the lantern.  “With lower tusks, large black eyes, and a nose that’s almost comically human.”

The man poked his head out of the flap of the tent and never had the chance to scream before the snarling thing outside batted his head off his shoulders.  His body dropped to the ground, and the young woman, beyond terror, darted to Shadow’s side.  She tucked her head under his arm and dug her fingers into his shirt.

“What are they?”  Her skin was cold, and she quivered with the rush of adrenaline.

“Wild,” Shadow answered.  When the beast poked its head into the tent, the young woman looked up at him, searching for an answer, for deliverance.  Shadow passed a hand over her short, soft hair and removed his glasses.  “Hungry,” he added.  As he breathed warm air onto the lenses, the beast leapt.

Thunder

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I remember staring west, waiting and watching as the sun dipped below the tree tops, below the street that curved to meet our driveway at the top of the hill. I heard it then — groaning, rumbling, rushing.  At any moment, I expected to see great giants crash through the three line to trample my house and my family.

“Do you hear that?” I asked my brother.  “It changes, but I hear it every night.”

“It’s just the trees growing,” my father said.

Later, I learned that, whether it was air masses colliding or the pounding of my pulse in my ears, the sound was thunder.  Now, when I hear either one, I think, It’s just the trees growing, and I’m not afraid.

Medieval

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In a time and place where men inherited rather than purchased land, the fiefdom was plagued with territorial disputes. Generations of civil war meant that young men were scarce. Thus, although I was a young woman, I served on my father’s guard.

My duty was manning the closest watchtower to the keep. Hair cropped severely short — shorter than some of the men — and leather armor helped me blend. I was trained in all manner of martial weapons, but my talent was archery. I sat atop this tower, crossbow pointed at the tree line, watching, watching, waiting, day or night depending on my shift.

I was off duty when the Vikings came. My ancient father held my arm as I led him through the market. Screams, the smell of burning wood and burning flesh, I put a hand over my father’s. “Hurry back. Bolt the doors.” I shoved him in the direction of the royal house and drew my dagger.

When I turned to head down the path to the watchtower, a fist connected with my face. I staggered back, yelling for my father to run, run. “Save yourself, my lord!” Another blow to the face, a hard kick to the hip sent me to my knees. I heard the blade as it left its sheath.

“No!” my father shouted. I looked up to see him running my way, hands up, long white beard flapping. “Do not kill my daughter!”

“Care not for me.” I coughed and spit blood. “Run, Father.”

My assailant murmured something. I awaited death but instead, received a hard lash across the back. The Viking hit me over and over with the sword sheath. Crack, crack, crack. I fell onto my face and still he struck me. He beat the armor off me, and when my skin was exposed, he kept going.

My father fell to his knees and wept. “I surrender it all. Just don’t kill her.”

The man stopped, pulled me up by my scruff of hair, and looked into my eyes. He laughed and laughed. Then, he shoved my face into the dirt and went after my father.

The Bird Carver

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I sat across his desk from him as he used his soldering gun to burn texture onto wood.  It had changed drastically from the previous day.  It was a rough-cut hunk of white oak, a piece he’d scavenged after lightning killed the eighty-year old tree.  After ten hours of carving, gouging and sanding, the hunk took on the form of a small bird.  Today, he added the feathers.

He wore two sets of glasses – his usual pair and his bifocals.  He peered through both sets, studying his work.  Next to the soldering gun, he had a small gouge, and in a piece of soft pine, he had stuck the legs.  They were made of copper wire that he meticulously cut, twisted, and etched until every crease of “flesh” and the curves of the tiny claws were just so.  He made everything but the eyes.  Those, he ordered from a ceramic eye company.

He spared the book on his desk a look, making sure that the layering was coming along as it should.

“I’m glad you decide to stay another year,” I said.

“My wife wants me to retire so we can take cruises,” he said.  “I suppose I can carve just as well on a boat deck as in this office.”

“At least she won’t make you give that up.”

“Oh no.  She knows a cash cow when she sees one.”  He shook his head, his brow drawn down.  “I used to make all sorts of things and just give them away, and one day she put her foot down and said I should make money off them.  It’s in her blood; she can’t help it.”  He made so much off his carvings that he had to get a business license and report his income to the IRS.  “I think it was when I made a violin for one of the doctor’s children that she insisted I charge for it.”

I blinked deliberately.  “You made a violin?”

“Yes.  I’m going to make a guitar for him,” he gestured to the office next door, “out of the same tree this came from,” he waved the bird.  “It’s his tree, so I’ll give him a discount.”

I shook my head.  “So, what are you feathering today?”

“A youth grosbeak.”

He leaned forward and let me take the bird while he turned the book around for me to see.  One side of the feathering was complete, and I could see exactly how the bird would look once he painted it.  He would spend a day layering, dabbing, and washing color over the body until it was perfect.  Then, he would paint the legs, pop them in, and add the eyes.  When he finished, it would look as though a real grosbeak perched on his pine block –  a perfect replica.  It would go for $200, easily.

“May I look?” I asked, pointing at the book.

“Sure,” he said, taking the bird from me and sliding the book over the desk.  The motion sent a spill of curlicues over the edge of the desk.  “I suppose I’ll be chided for that,” he murmured as he looked down at the mess.

“Well, you have to do something to pass the time until the whistle blows.”

That made him smile.  He liked to compare the job to something blue collar.  He’d been in it for over twenty years but only recently felt pressure to stay in his office a required number of hours every day.  It was just another reason to call it quits.

“We punch our time cards like the sheepdog and coyote,” he said.

When we weren’t working, he carved and I read, or we sat together and talked.  One day we sat outside and watched as a hawk tried to pluck a squirrel from the side of a pine tree.  I was rapt as I watched the tree rat wait until the last possible moment to scoot around the tree, just out of the hawk’s grasp.  The raptor would squawk, fly back, adjust, and fly in again.  We stood watching for so long that we grew bored and went back in the building.

Now, it was too cold to stand outside comfortably.

“I saw a crow dead on the side of the road on my way in this morning,” he said.  “Strange business.  Crows are too intelligent to get killed in the road.”

I looked up from his book on North American bird species.  “I saw something on Discovery about how crows in some city or another would drop nuts into crosswalks and let cars run over them.  They watched for when the people would cross and knew they would be safe to retrieve the nuts.”

“It’s nice to have someone that enjoys learning around this place.”  He grinned at me, and I chuckled.  We were, after all, in a building on a college campus.  “What are you looking for?”

“A particular type of black bird,” I said, turning the book around to him.

“Did it have a breast of burnt orange and a light yellow beak?”

“No, its breast was cream.”

“Oh, then it was a regular blackbird and not an oriole.  Did you kill it?”

“No,” I said, stunned.

“Pity,” he said, picking up the soldering gun.  A curl of smoke and the scent of charring wood filled the office.  “Terrible birds, blackbirds.  They rob bluebird nests.  Did you know?”  I shook my head when he looked up at me.  He nodded.  “They aren’t native.  Some moron thought it was a brilliant idea to bring to America every bird Shakespeare mentioned in a play or poem.  They call them starlings, trying to give a trashy bird a better name.  Kill every one that you can.”

A Stone Skipping Over Water

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Our relationship was like that – here and there only a moment of contact but with enough impact to make a mark. Not a bad one, mind you.

Our mothers played tennis together, and this was how we first met. My mother often dragged me to the courts and left me in the clubhouse with a lunchbox of toys. Even though I would’ve preferred being left at the swimming pool, this wasn’t often possible, but I had an active imagination and could make do with my toys and an almost-house.

One day, I sat upon one of the bamboo sofas with neon palm tree printed cushions (hey, it was the 80’s) and applied makeup to a Barbie head. He came in, looked at me, and said, “That’s terrible, and look at her hair!” It didn’t matter that he was six years older, he sat with me and showed me how to brush the tangles from her hair without ripping it out of her scalp. Why would he play with me? This, I asked my mother.  “He has a little sister. He knows your brother.” Judging by how rarely my brother allowed me to play with him, I couldn’t understand how this was an answer.

<long skip>

He sat with me on the porch of the clubhouse and helped me tear out dresses for my paper dolls. “Don’t be impatient or you’ll rip the folding tabs.” No, I couldn’t abide that. This obsessive trait, we mutually understood.

<long skip>

“Here,” my tennis coach said, “Practice returning Jason’s serve.” It glanced off the top of my racket and hit me in the chin. He crossed the net to have a look at it. “Sorry,” he said and smiled.

<long skip>

I stood beside an outdoor fireplace, plastic cup of keg beer in hand, chatting with another girl. I saw him and he me. “Oh my God! Is that you?” Yes, it was. “How old are you?” I was eighteen. “Really?” We talked for three hours.

<short skip>

I hugged him at his engagement party. By now, he was a dentist, and I was working on my bachelor’s.

<short skip>

I chatted with him at someone else’s engagement party, told him I was married and that I was a teacher. “You’re too smart to do that.” Well, kids need smart teachers. “It was good to see you.” You, too, and it was the last time.

<the stone sinks>

Rain-tinted Glasses

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Clouds blanket the sky.  Everything is saturated and squishy, but I take pleasure in the sharp contrasts found only when the land is drenched.  Wet like this, things appear to exist more.  The world looks skewed, as if I have been transported to a realm similar to my own but where every color is deeper, bolder, richer.  Everything is off-set just a bit, distances seem further, and the empty spaces, emptier.

The tree bark is almost as black as the asphalt.  Where they reach into the puffy, gray sky, more naked branches, limbs, and twigs of the white oak are visible in the tops of the trees.  The ultra-green of the pine needles glows when compared to the trunks.  The vinca blossoms are purpler, the fallen leaves burnt orange instead of dry, dull brown.  The tiny, dripping leaves of the boxwoods seemed livelier, and the dormant grass, a warmer shade of beige.

I first felt this shift, this different realm, as a child.  I pulled my mother outside and said, “Look how different everything is!”

“It’s just wet, honey,” she said and went back inside the house.

She didn’t see.  Confounded by her reaction, I focused harder, trying to see the world as it had been when dry.  I couldn’t.  I never have been able to, and I wonder how anyone with eyes can.