Taboo's Junk Trunk: A Storage Dump for Taboo's Random Literary and Cultural Blatherments
A Very Short Story
Published on January 6, 2005 By TaBoo Tenente In Writing
Somebody's Mother

Early on in her life, Susan Sanders found she was left out from the Marxist revolutionary activities of her parents, while her older, aggressive brother was earmarked for significant participation. Disenchanted with her parents’ social vision, she rebelled against the rebellion, and her father turned a neglectful shoulder while her mother became abusive.

She attended Clark College briefly, but soon fled the institutional stagnancy in order to follow a young man who shared a new revolutionary vision, and they both set out with thousands to find the West, the Haight-Ashbury scene and its search for social and mental truth. She imagined the world of California, watched herself flourish in dreams of petal-white sun, so pure, so cleansing of bigotry and a sexual repression that she believed she understood.

The man abandoned her two-thirds of the way across the country when a party erupted at their camp, where the other women danced unabashedly nude in plump writhing circles of rhythm. For all she knew, he might have evaporated between one hot sighing exhalation and the next, because by morning he no longer existed, no memory of him could be found anywhere, and her heart exploded between moments, her chest caved and the world died without a sound. Nothing mattered anymore and the lights shut down, and the sky flowed around her like shadowy night-black waves, sweeping her along, drowning her in the soft, aqueous blanket of oblivion. It was to her endless surprise that one painfully bright morning she found herself opening her eyes and smelling the sea.

There was an old growth canopy of yellow cedar speckling across the shining sun, and then it opened itself and humped away silently behind as she discovered that she stood a hundred feet above the Pacific Ocean. The glowing blue breakers crashed and roared in muted violence so far below, and tall yellow stalks of grass tickled the backs of her thighs when the warm air gusted and gathered itself with its salty breath.

Four other women gazed beside her, strangely solemn, and she did not know their names, or how she came to this place in the midst of their serious company. Profoundly disjointed and disconnected from time, fear struck her suddenly and sweated from her pores in a sticky sheen, and she feverishly accepted for a moment the depths of her own insanity. Then she considered the possibility that the whole world was only a dream.

These thoughts passed as her senses adjusted to the morning. A hot, salty breeze blew up from the water, gathering in resinous, moist swirls around the bareness of her skin, and it thrilled her soul, opening her ever-widening eyes.

A sandy trail Indian-weaved its way down the cliff, and in a single, solemn file the women descended behind Susan, heading down the narrow, difficult path. They steadied themselves with their hands by grabbing fistfuls of the fibrous grass stalks and ice plants, so surprisingly succulent and deeply rooted that, when forced to drop to a lower tier many feet below, two sufficient grasps of the stubby ice plants anchored them as securely as well-knotted ropes.

They finally gained the base of the cliff. In front of them was a swell of sand dunes rising gently toward the hidden sea, away from the scattered copse of red alders rustling their leaves absentmindedly, as if they were thinking of something else. Then they crested the highest of the dunes, and before them stretched the long blue line of the sea.

In a trance, Susan stepped forward, unconscious of her anonymous companions following closely, and she walked to where the white sand smoothed out perfectly, and transformed the beach into something new.

The wet sand supported her shoes as if she weighed less than the wind, and a thin finger of water crept up to where she stood, passing her, and when the water returned again it sucked away the ground beneath her heels. She found her balance again, removed her shoes and socks, and then instinctively moved a hand to the top of her jeans. Soon she was naked, and her companions stripped down, also naked. The ocean was icy cold, shocked and restored her sensibility and modesty in a red flush of shame, but once again the sun claimed her attention and dazzled her away. The sky and sea joined together into one infinite blue curve that was suggestive in a way that she had never before considered.


Some months later she would meet a young, serious man, short, confident, and, if not happy, then content in his way. She would spend time with him over the next two and a half years, but a blooming disappointment would cause her to break things off suddenly; then a subsequent, almost automatic fruition of that dissatisfaction would motivate her to return to him and impulsively marry him.

Soon after she would conceive a child, and would equally conceive of new Purpose, somehow knowing instinctively that the zygote within would develop masculine hormones and mechanics. She would nurture the young boy, she imagined, in a way that would bring forth devotion and intuition, an enlightened understanding of true, inner beauty. Seven months into the pregnancy the child would die in her womb, stillborn, drenched in blood and clear yellow liquid that clung to his already formed, lifeless body.

Six months later she would conceive again, but her mind would twist and find dark, pathological manias to live in, while she attempted to nurture the soul she imagined lived somewhere inside of me.


But knee-deep in the Pacific, in that sapphire-blue ocean so many years ago– accompanied by the nude impression of women at her side; sharing some subconscious pilgrimage unexplainable to men; the power of the waves lifting her gently into the gathering swell—all of it must have felt like hope. And after a lifetime of one disappointment followed by another, that moment of faith must have, for once, made her believe in the possibility of changing the world, like a brief, wavering vision of the promised-land itself.


Copyright ©2004, ©2005, ©2006 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
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