Two short stories by Miriam Sagan

Winged Victory

Vicky looks down at her father. He is in a coma-like state—not a coma—the hospice nurse has emphasized. That is, he could sit up and speak at any moment, but he hasn’t. That’s fine with Vicky, she doesn’t need him to speak. He has always been a considerate man and he is considerate still, dying swiftly in the guest bedroom. She hears the soft putt of the oxygen tank, a distant lawn mower, smells the cut grass through an open window. She has a full month off as principal of the elementary school. The kids are headed home for the weekend from their summer jobs to say good-bye to grandpa. Her husband does not mind the hospital bed in the spare room. Her father is dying as conveniently as if he had called ahead to say he’s be there for the Jewish holidays.

Sam wanders in the nether realms of memory and sleep... but not what Vicky would expect. He does not revisit the split level ranch house or the typesetting business he had the foresight to bring into the electronic age or his student days at Cooper Union or the first time he saw her mother. Rather, he has just liberated Paris.

Trained on mules in the cavalry, set down to drive a tank, not much has prepared a kid from the Bronx who has lied about his age for this. The tank takes off flower window boxes from the houses along narrow streets towards the liberation of a small obscure concentration camp. The handful of survivors are skeletal, sub-human. Sam’s first reaction, one he will always be ashamed of, is to simply want to kill them, like vermin.

Then Paris. He doesn’t fancy himself an artist. He can draw, but knows he is going to have to make a living, and he is no Rembrandt. Still, he can’t help but follow the rumor—the Louvre may be closed. boarded up—but inside it is intact. And there is a gentlemen letting in American service men, for some cartons of Lucky Strikes and slabs of butter that just fell off a truck.

In the late afternoon the Louvre is shadowy, vast, echoing... as if the world had ended, and he alone with beauty. The Winged Victory of Samothrace stands by the great stair, headless, feathered, an enormous woman, one foot forward, the drapery of her dress clinging and rippling, poised for flight.

She seems—at that moment—and will in memory—more real than other things. And later he’ll try to puzzle it out—why does Victory speak to him that way, when personally he has so little claim to her.

Sam goes on down the corridors, the great paintings, the Mona Lisa, everything shrouded, hushed, but pristine. For two hours, it is his alone. He will never return, not even after they can afford Europe, and enjoy London, Rome, even Tokyo, but never Paris.

Vicky takes his hand, paper dry and weightless as a child’s. He does smile, but doesn’t open his eyes. She wonders, surprised at her own sentimentality, if he sees mom, gone these two years. Vicky is grateful that she herself was never a smoker.

What he sees is another woman—gigantic, winged—rushing toward him with a wind of feathers.

The Reader

The moon is out, a three quarters moon, as the car crosses the lonely bridge, Heading out miles past Española, the stream is on the right, and as the road curves the house comes into sight. The house is set high, back from the road, adobe with a tin roof, two storys. And as always, this late at night, only one light is on, in the top bedroom.

Cows are sleeping, dark shapes in the field, and because this land is watered by warm springs and pools, frogs are cheeping, will cheep half the night long until it falls cold at 3 am.

She won’t stop the car now, not to listen to the frogs or peer up at the lit window. She’s exhausted from the late shift at the hospital, just wants home and a shower.

But sometimes, even later at night, she writes letters in her journal, letters to the unknown occupant of the lit bedroom. Someone she imagines a woman like herself, in young middle age, inexplicably alone in the world, reading.

No, she won’t stop, for what is she to do, knock on the door, terrifying the occupant. Besides, this road is dangerous as it is desolate. A drunk driver, a deer on the road, the big cottonwood which is a landmark for drug dealers. She’s seen witch lights, too many times, bobbing green spheres that might be an old man carrying a lantern across the field, phosphorescent and uncanny. It disturbs rather than thrills her to see it. The only light that warms her is the lit bedroom, lit yellow, where she imagines the reader sitting propped in bed, eating an apple, a stack of library books on the floor.

***

Joe checks on his house up north every so often, mostly to make sure it hasn’t been broken into or the windows smashed by the drug dealers who congregate at the big tree on the curve. The land is mostly leased to neighbors who run cattle along the river. It’s getting to be a pain, taking care of his mother’s old house when he lives more than two hours south in Albuquerque. But he can’t quite sell it, let it all go.

It’s a nice Saturday afternoon when he comes up to check. The river is running lowish at the end of summer, and just a few leaves are turning yellow. But the fields are green, and sunflowers line both sides of the highway. He pulls into the circular drive. Everything looks ok, no windows broken, but what is that on the front door? Someone has taped a thick envelope to the weathered frame. He opens it, curiously, and finds several lined sheets of yellow paper scribbled in handwriting. It begins:

Dear Reader,

When I drive by late at night after my shift I always see that your light is still on. It comforts me. I imagine you are a woman like myself, a reader. What are you reading? Recently I finished....

Joe looks up in bemusement. Someone driving by thinks that the light in the bedroom is a real person, not just a lamp on a timer. Well, at least it is good security.

Without reading further, he crumples the letter and tosses it to the wind, which pulls it and scatters it among the yellow flowers of the field.

Miriam Sagan is a founding editor of Tres Chicas Books, http://treschicasbooks.com/

"Tree Dream Encaustic " by Stephen Mead

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