Chapter One
Other
fathers looked like Ward Cleaver in suits with white shirts and skinny
ties and drove huge cars with bulging bumpers to work in offices or
stores. They took their wives out for dinner on Saturday nights and left
the kids home with babysitters to watch TV and eat pizza. My father was
Italian and had an eagle tattooed across his chest and a pierced ear. He
drove a 650 cc Triumph Bonneville motorcycle to work at an Esso service
station and went out nearly every night without my mom. Some kids went
to the
But he wasn’t always this way. During Daddy’s stint as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman we prospered. He wore those suits then, and slicked back his shiny black hair with Brylcreme. Mama said he was so charming he could sell fire to the devil. We moved to the beach, into a pretty house only a few blocks from the pier. He bought a used 1959 Cadillac El Dorado convertible, white with red leather interior and power windows—that was the model with the big fins that shot jets of red fire. The summer before second grade Daddy’s Cadillac was replaced by an old Ford Fairlane and we moved inland to a cracker box house with goats-head stickers in the backyard. By the start of third grade Daddy was riding his motorcycle to work as an auto mechanic, Mama had no car, and we’d moved into a run-down duplex next to the railroad tracks.
Living in a duplex next to the train tracks, I was used to waking up in the middle of the night when a freight train blew its horn. But I’d never before awoken to my Mama and Daddy screaming at each other.
“As long as my mother is paying our rent and putting food on
our table, you will NOT quit a regular paying job to go back to
swallowing swords.”
“Don’t tell me what I will or won’t do. The shop’s going to
piss since Vinny died. Dorothy don’t know shit about running a garage.”
“Dorothy told me she’d put you in charge if you’d step up to
the responsibility.”
“She only wants in my pants. Always has.”
“You're so full of shit. Dorothy is nearly fifty.”
“She looks better at fifty than you ever did. Look at you in
that moo-moo. You look like a goddamn cow.”
I pulled the covers over my head and buried my ears in my pillow. Something crashed. A door slammed and the voices stilled. Pulling down the covers I listened hard, my ears itched for sound. Then I heard it. Sobbing, loud and wretched, the kind of crying where you can’t catch your breath. I knew it was Mama.
The next morning Mama’s eyes were puffy and red, and her glasses were broken. Instead of making our lunches, Mama was packing up our clothes in brown grocery bags and told us we were moving in with Grandma. Just like that.
“Can I go to school and tell my teacher we’re moving?”
“No. I’ll take care of it later. Go pack.”
In that deepest place of truth, the place where you don’t want to look because the answer is just too awful, I already knew, but still I asked. “Is Daddy coming?”
Mama didn’t look up this time. “No. He’s not moving with us.” I wanted to feel sorry for her, but the deep truth hurt too much. My daddy said a mean thing to her the night before, but he never did to me. I was his special girl, his pisana. He loved me.
Just after noon, Daddy came home to help us pack. He and Mama didn’t talk much; they mainly gave directions about who got what stuff. Sometimes they’d break into kizzarney, the weird-sounding carney talk they spoke when they didn’t want us to understand. Daddy said the only thing he wanted was our dog Deliah and some pictures of us girls. I shadowed Daddy while he sorted his things, begged him to play me a song on his clarinet and pouted when he declined. It was not like Daddy to turn down a request to perform. He dug through the dresser he and Mama shared and gave me a picture of him looking so handsome in a suit and tie it made my heart break for love of him.
Daddy gave me a quick goodbye kiss and said he was going out to make
a phone call. Our phone had long been turned off and when Mama needed to
make a call, she’d walk us down to the pay phone at the liquor store on
Aside from some old record albums, the covers browned and falling apart; some magazines with naked women in wicked poses—none of which resembled Mama in the least—and an album of black and white photos of Daddy in various stages of swallowing swords, Daddy didn’t have much.
I unrolled the thick velvet cloth where Daddy kept his swords. Each sword had a special pocket sewn into the velvet. I withdrew my favorite of his swords, a dagger really, its blade only about eight inches long. I ran my fingers over its edge like Daddy did, then moved to the mirror and watched myself mimic Daddy’s act. I licked the edge up and down, slathering it with saliva. Daddy said he did this to make sure there were no nicks in the blade that might tear up his throat. I had just thrown back my head and opened my mouth to insert the dagger when Mama burst into the room.
“Get that filthy thing out of your mouth this instant!”
SHORT FICTION
Look for a flash excerpt from
THE SWORD SWALLOWER'S DAUGHTER,
in the October 2007 issue of
Breath
& Shadow.
My short story,
EXPERIENCED ONLY NEED APPLY,
appears in the Summer 2007
edition of
The Rose & Thorn.
I have participated in the short story competitions held at the writer's forums at Backspace.
First place:
Second place:
Third place:
A PENNY AND A POSTCARD (Contest #4)
A novel complete and available.
Novel in Progress
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17,000 words / 80,000 goal
(21.3%) complete |
Carolyn is working on a new novel set on the Yorkshire Moors in Victorian England. A literary mélange between The Jane Austen Book Club and Wuthering Heights, WHISPERING NIGHTS is a novel of love, betrayal, and equality.
In WHISPERING NIGHTS, three diverse women in one household
indulge in reading a scandalous new novel of romance, revenge and
retribution written by the little known Ellis Bell. The 37-year-old
governess in the home of a wealthy British peer surreptitiously uses
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