Click here for info on the Print Journal (and to purchase your copy)!

A Place to Land

By K.J. Stevens

---------------------------------------

It is December. I’ve hung the lights. I’ve nailed stockings to the wall. I know I'm too old, but I'm waiting for Santa Claus to come.

I’ve erected Slim Noble. A six-and-a-half foot artificial tree. I wasn’t sure if a fake tree would have the same feeling, the same meaning as a real tree, but as it turns out, it does. The plastic gem is wearing twinkling lights, silver-blue garland, and red-and-green glass bulbs. He radiates harmony and good will. Across the room from him are two fuzzy red stockings hanging over the living room doorway. One for Mr. Ted, the cat, and one for me.

I’m sitting in a comfortable hand-me-down leather chair watching my ghosts of Christmas future beam and flash in broad daylight. I’m months away from being 30, decades away from my childhood, and a lifetime away from the person I’d thought I’d be.

Mr. Ted, the cat, is sleeping.

You’re put here without much choice. Actions take place in bedrooms and hotels, on squeaky beds and on couches. Actions send us on our way. Into the light. A beginning.

We start as basic desire. Hot bodies excited, moisture dripping. Lips licking. Hips rubbing. Fingers touching. Teeth biting. We grunt and groan, loving like dogs, so as not to end up alone.

I started in the woods. A drip, a drop, a spark of light. An accident. Two teenagers, my Mom and Dad, in the backseat of a 1969 Chevelle Super Sport parked off the end of a grassy two-track. Call it making love. Recognize it as coming together. Most of us, hot and together in the dark, will call it what it is. Fucking.

In any case, Mom and Dad, before they were Mom and Dad, were doing the thing that lovers ought to do more of.

“We were in love,” Mom tells me time and time again, “We parked back there because we wanted to be alone. Where else could we go? The woods was where you went. Things were better there.”

I’ve had her retell the story several times. In the re-tellings, details change. Sometimes she’s wearing a tee-shirt. Sometimes a blouse. Sometimes she remembers Dad smelling like motor-oil, other times it’s tobacco. The inconsistencies are important. I recognize that she remembers the way she needs to. That she’s doing it all again.

It’s strangely comforting to see the place you’ve come from, especially when it’s your Mother’s desire. We must remember that parents are people. They breathe and see, they care and seethe. They cry. They hurt and rise. They fall. If we could remember how close we really are, how we all come from the same place, whether you call it Love, or God, or Existential Wandering, then we could relate.

I ask for it, the telling and re-tellings, but Mom needs it too. It is validation. A starting point. A measuring stick for the day, for a tick, for a tock, for a lifetime. “Yes,” she can say to herself after I’ve gone and she’s left alone, “I have come a long way.”
And she has. From a 16-year-old girl in the backseat of a ‘69 Chevelle, to Wife, Mother, Successful Artist. A growing woman. An adult. All fight and creativity. All peace and passion. Her eyes still have a beginning. She too, is a light. She burns bright. No matter how seasoned and womanly she’s become, she still has the purity of a child.

“You’re my little stinker,” she says to me. “But, you know that. You know about the skunks.”

Her smile is brighter every day.

I know about the skunks. I smell them dead near roads when I travel. I’ve seen them crossing roads. But always, I find them in my dreams. I make love in vivid visions to a dark-haired girl with a full, bouncy pony tail. We love in dreams, on cold backseats. My knees slipping. My body falling into her. I put my nose into her hair and I can smell them. Skunks spraying outside the car. Their claws scraping doors. Chattering under the floorboards. Black-and-white tails passing the windows. I dream harder, half awake in bed, half asleep in my head, trying to control something I cannot, for I’m a puppet swallowed by light. Bright light.

In the dream of the dark-haired girl, we love like mad, feeling the rightness of it and all that is to be, when my parents appear shining flashlights all over our bodies. In the light, the girl disappears, and I can hear skunks hissing and running away. The light becomes so white it wakes me, and I’m born into reality, into another bright morning, newborn all over again. I’ve had the dream so many times I find it hard to analyze. It’s become a friendly companion, something I look forward to when I fall away from this world and into the other.

At my conception, the skunks were there. A mommy and her little ones parading past the backseat window of the Chevelle. My mother saw this. This is what she remembers about that day in the woods. The skunks. But it is her face and eyes, the smile that rises on her thin lips that tells me that she was in Love. That she is in Love. The memory is Love. The reality is Love. Her son, asking questions about the beginning of his time, is Love.

What’s the defining moment of love? Love with a capital “L” like God with a capital “G”?

Maybe there isn’t any Truth to them, the Loves and the Gods, and my stories. Could be they’re as believable as Santa Claus. Things we need to believe while we’re here in this stage, on this earth. At the end, we’ll learn the Truth. But for now, we’re like children behaving well so that we’re rewarded come Christmas time.

Belief is a fictional necessity.

* * *

We hurt those we love. We do the most hurting to those who love us most. Without hurt, where is love? Without love, where is the hurt?

The first time I remember hurting someone was when I was eleven years old. I am certain that I hurt my parents before then. From conception to birth, I am sure I caused pain. Wide awake nights. Terrified conversations. Days of regret. Dad, a boy, and Mom, a girl, shackled to unborn roles. Mommy and Daddy. Provider and Protector. Nourisher and Nurturer. Yet, these are not my memories to have. They are crafted considerations.

I’m caught trying to remember how I might remember moments that could not have been mine.

Why is it that today, in December, while basking in the glow of Slim Noble, and thinking of Mom and Dad, I find myself engaged in this internal conversation? Why am I hurting? And why does the hurt take me to then? To them? To being eleven, playing King of the Mountain with my brother, Kevin? Two of us being boys. Pushing and shoving. Hitting and headlocks. Love and hate.

What about what’s outside? What about NOW? Beyond this fake tree, these decorations, these hardwood floors and stucco walls? Beyond Mr. Ted, the sleeping cat, and through the glass?

I should be out there, on the icy sidewalk, down the street, walking hand-in-hand with these December snowflakes. Instead, I’m in my hand-me-down chair, cat at my feet, and I’m a kid again. Eleven-years-old in northern Michigan's December snow.
Drifts seven feet high. Wet packing snow. Kevin had bested me. He was King of the Mountain. King of the hard-packed icy mound on the edge of our driveway. Kevin had made King by breaking the rules. Our rules. The rules of brothers and friends. Rules of sensible love. No biting. No Kicking. No hitting in the face. No anything below the belt.

I had him in a headlock and was punching him in the ribs. He was trying to wriggle free when he seized my arm, put my hand in his mouth, and bit through my mitten. Lips on fabric, teeth through skin, bones to bone. I tore off my mitten and examined purple teeth marks.

“You bit me, you goddamned cheater!”

He laughed and taunted.

“What? Is big brother feeling a little small?”

He wasn’t King. He wasn’t my brother. He was a cheater, and I hated him. I pulled my mitten back on, made a fist, and lunged forward, hoping to sock him in the eye. To make my mark. To make him see the real King.

Things happen in fights. Terrible things. I’ve heard that the most terrible things happen between people who love each other. The most destructive fights, the most violent crimes, are committed by family members. Relatives and friends. We love so much we hurt.

It was as I raised my fist to hit him that Kevin committed the cardinal sin. He stepped back then rushed forward and swung his right boot full force into the one place we said we would not go.

Moon boots are a thing of the past. My past. My childhood. Soft, bouncy, comfortable boots. No ankle support. No arch support. No support at all. Cotton and sponge held together by vinyl and thread. But what an anvil a little boy’s foot can be when stuck in a moon boot on an icy December day.

The boot to the nuts was not enough for Kevin. He stood there, like some martial arts expert on one foot, holding and pushing the boot into my groin. I hunched over and waited, trying not to move as the pain seeped into my gut then seized my entire body. As I wheezed for air, Kevin stood over me, flashing his big toothy grin.

"Merry Christmas, brother!" he yelled, as he gave me a moon-booted shove.

Down, down, down. Falling. Fallen.

My brother, on top of the mountain, standing there in his red snowsuit stomping his blue moon boots, raising his green mittens in a victorious “V,” looking like some insane elf that didn’t make Santa’s cut.

I was hurt, but growing strong with anger as I curled onto my side. Sucking in what breath I could, I worked my hands in the snow making the hardest, meanest snowball I could.

"I’M KING! KING OF THE MOUNTAIN!" Kevin shouted again and again.

My brother, the gloating King.

I rose up with my throbbing hand, my aching nuts, and I was raging inside. I packed the snowball tighter and tighter. I rolled over, rose to my feet and took the deepest breath I could. I glared straight-away into his rosy-cheeked face and launched the snowball like a bullet.

The iceball hit Kevin so hard it knocked him off the mountain. He fell so quickly that all that remained was one of his lopsided moon boots.

All my pain gone, numbed by the thrill of victory, I ran to the top of the mountain. I raised my arms above my head.

"I AM KING! I AM THE KING AND I'LL ALWAYS BE KING!"

I danced and shouted. I sang and celebrated. Victory. Satisfaction. Then, I saw him. Face down and still. Blood soaking into the snow like red ink into thick cotton. At the sound of the scream, Mom and Dad burst out of the house. I ran and hid behind the woodpile. Freshly cut logs from Dad’s morning chores. Neat stacks of split wood. Chips and sawdust floating in the snow. I huddled against the dead logs and cried.

Kevin’s scream moved out from the mountain, around the house and screeched and echoed inside my cold ears. With it, I could hear the commotion. Mom trying to calm Kevin. Dad running. Screen door opening, closing, slamming. Car keys rattling. Car doors opening. Car doors closing. Motor starting. Exhaust rumbling. The three of them riding away in fast-moving metal glass and rubber, heading to the hospital fast as they could.

Sawdust in my nose, eyes and ears, I was sure I’d stay there with the wood. It would snow and snow, and I would stay there until buried and dead. Mom and Dad would find me, forever frozen, an icy gnome. They would defrost me, lacquer me, bronze me like baby shoes, and put me on the mantle. “King of the Mountain,” it would say on a plaque beneath me.

Mom tells me that when they returned from the hospital, I was at the place where Kevin had fallen. My snowsuit and mittens were soaked in water and blood. I had been digging in the snow for hours trying to find Kevin’s teeth.

"You found four broken pieces. It was amazing!" Mom says to me in one of her re-tellings. "We felt so bad for you being out there that whole time we were gone. You thinking you threw that snowball and hit him in the mouth."

Mom says I told Kevin I loved him when they got back from the hospital. That I handed her the moon boot, broken teeth inside it, and stood there crying at Kevin’s feet.

"Your snowball missed me," Kevin said. "My teeth got knocked out on the slide down the mountain, not by you. Your aim was off."

I stared at his red face, his big swollen lips.

"I got caps," Kevin said, pointing to his new, solid white teeth.

* * *

I sit now, writing this, wondering if the entire story is a lie. Had the snowball really hit him? Had they concocted the story on the way home, knowing full well that I was hiding out somewhere suffering? I’ve asked them to tell me the story over and over again. Dad and Kevin jot through it, like lines over-rehearsed. Mom, she relishes and relives it. Gruesome or not, her sons are Love. They are always young and fumbling through the world with their innocence gained and lost. It gives her joy.

And yet, I struggle. I struggle with these memories. With those moments. With that time. With this, because it is gone. All of that being there, learning without knowing, is gone. Today, it is me. It is my cat, Ted. It is us, away from home in this one bedroom apartment, searching.

He watches birds and squirrels, and he chatters as they dart from ground to branches, tree to tree. I watch white flakes twirl around. Below me, on a college campus, bodies move against the cold. Students. Professors. Faculty. And I want to give things to people to keep the world warm, but people already have what they need. In backpacks and purses, identities slung over shoulders, hanging from arms. Life in a driver’s license. Existence in a credit card, a family picture, an apartment key. Somewhere, at home, there’s a birth certificate bringing it all into perspective.

After the birds and squirrels are gone, Ted searches for things invisible. I can’t see what he sees. Up the walls on the ceilings, across the floor under the bed. He’s after something human eyes cannot see, chasing cat nap dreams, visions, or memories. After several minutes of seeing and chasing, Ted returns. He's succeeded and he's happy. His bushy tail whisks the hardwood floor. He purrs at my feet.

Me, I sit and think. I chase yesterday while clinging to tomorrow. I sip coffee and paint pages with black letters. I put memories onto paper for you because I believe we’re seeing the same thing. Fake trees. Shimmering decorations. Ghosts of yesterday and tomorrow. We sit alone in hand-me-down chairs loving like Gods, proud parents and fighting children. All of us twirling like December snowflakes, waiting for Santa Claus and a place to land.

---------------------------------------

K.J. Stevens was born 1973 in Alpena, Michigan. He has written three books.
The most recent, A Better Place, was published in May 2002. His stories have been published in Prose Ax, Framework, The Adirondack Review, East of the Web, and Events Quarterly. K.J. can be reached directly by writing kjstevens73@yahoo.com, or by visiting www.kjstevens.20m.com.

© 2003 Me Three