SELECT CREATIVE PROSE
INOSCULATION (Short Fiction)
By Liz Baxmeyer
Published in Beyond Words Literary Magazine, May 2023
She was always there, it seemed, swaying in the breeze, shielding me from the road beyond. She listened intently while I whispered my grievances like prayers through the glass and rain and the fizzing traffic beyond. She responded with a wave and bristle of her plush, emerald hair and told me, in a voice all rasp and wood, that it would take time before I would hear my own voice again.
I did not yet understand her meaning.
I was afraid the first time she spoke to me, her tone so unlike a human voice—deep and resonant like the sound of someone speaking though a broken underground pipe threaded with roots and lined with cracked metal or clay; a voice reclaimed by nature; a root through the throat; the acoustics of dirt. Earthworm-speak.
She told me her name was Bala of the Ilexes. She became my dryad.
Bala spoke to her brothers and sisters through the roots and silt. It was how she could see through far-away windows, like portals to other worlds: a bone-root network of vibrations sharing languages and stories. Sometimes the birds carried the dryads’ messages, but they were often forgetful; unreliable; never translating the right words from heart to tongue.
She would tell me tales about strangers—the stories other trees told her: how the moles on Anthea’s back were becoming misshapen but she still refused, even at her boyfriend’s insistence, that she see a doctor. Instead, she prayed to her dryad for strength. Then there was the commotion Zoe created by burning the Easter meal because she found out her husband had been unfaithful and couldn’t bring herself to tell anyone, except for her garden holly tree, whom she confided in the most. And then there was Milo, whose dryad was the great Oaken one, Hama, sheltered by the courtyard of St. Joseph’s hospital one town over. Milo had been in a coma for weeks, unable to speak, except through the electric signals of his body. Only Hama understood him.
“There’s something about how human bodies sing to trees that resounds like no other vibration,” Bala said. “It is as if our species have a mutual understanding from before time. The human nervous system, if splayed out without its skin and bones, looks much like spindled branches, or an unfurled fern, but with large, round eyes that often see more than they can perceive.”
Like a dryad.
I asked of my family across the sea, but Bala could not speak nor hear through oceans. They were too chaotic, their walls protected by towers of salt and the deafening whispers of fish folk. The sound of wood deadened when it hit the water. Roots and twigs, she told me, could not permeate the seas. The salt dried and shriveled dryads’ veins if they tried. “This is why the wind-warped cypress perpetually wretches over the cliffside. The salt is bitter and most sickening in her throat,” she said.
She told me my voice sounded, to her, like a series of echoes and breathy vacuums vibrating against the window and into the ground, down through grubs and grass roots until it, or something made of it, reached her in flickers and fragments between the high whoosh and low rumble of the underworld. Her bark skin absorbed my fleshy undulations as she stood rooted to the spot. I told her how I had heard her from the earth, the feeling that shot up through my toes and into my body, the sound of rasping wood.
“We hear each other similarly, then” she said.
“What about Milo?” I asked. “How does Hama hear him when he cannot speak?”
She told me that dryads can hear not only words but the intentions and needs of the human body. “There’s a vibration to your desperation, or desire, that resounds inside of me like nothing else” she said. “Even when your world is silent, I hear your longing.”
I secretly visited those she told me about because knowing the intimate details of their lives weighed on my conscience. I wondered if they knew of me—my grief and conversations—through their own dryads. I watched through Anthea’s window to see how misshapen her moles really were and wondered which part of knowing the truth she feared. I shopped at the same supermarket as Zoe when she dropped a large bag of rice and sobbed uncontrollably as it split like an atom and scattered into all corners of the isle. I comforted her shaking body as a stranger. I tried to visit Milo but when the time came, I could not build the courage to enter the hospital.
Bala reminded me that it was not my place to intervene. It would cost me her kinship if I did, and I didn’t want to lose it for the sake of my own guilt.
So, I chose to try and forget my knowledge.
But forgetting eventually sifted my soul, bit by bit, into a vacuum of rhythmic uncertainty until one day, I gave myself to it, and stopped remembering anything at all. My toes sprouted shoots and grew downward plunging into soft, black earth. My belly hardened and cracked and browned and my arms twisted upward, curling round my neck as my mouth filled with leaves and the soft down of baby birds. The world became a rustle of vibrations, and I heard the worms deliver their timeless incantation.
I heard my own voice.
LITTLE REVELATIONS (Fiction)
By Liz Baxmeyer
First published in Syncopation Literary Journal, Vol. 2 Issue 2
It would have been Bessie’s 52nd birthday. Kane O’Malley was sixty-five years old, grey-bearded, skin-weathered, and burly. He’d been a lead miner until his heart got weak and, despite his willingness to go on, had to retire early under doctor’s orders. He was sent home with a pen and a bottle of cheap bourbon for his years of service; mostly, though, he was lucky to get out alive. Kane lived in a small, dilapidated house in the foothills of the Ozarks, a land rife with river magic, and the kind of old music that summons a man from bed in the early hours just to see the Devil leave his smoke trail across the burning ember sky. He lived alone, surviving on drink, music, and the faint memory of eggs and bacon on brisk, pine-scented mornings. His wife, Bessie, had disappeared ten years ago. Nothing strange turned up in the search so the police assumed she just didn’t want to be found, hard as it was for Kane to swallow. But deep down, he knew why. He called everyone he knew of, and no one had heard from her, or so they said. He thought she’d tried to call him a few years later, but when he answered the phone, all he heard was silence, then the familiar click of separation. Maybe it was a wrong number; maybe Bessie just wanted to know he was still alive. Either way, he carried on, unbearable day after day, until his soul gave up its hopeless yearning. Oh, what a singing voice she had; rough and raspy like the tree-lined valleys it often filled, but with the power and beauty of the echo after a She Wolf’s howl ricochets off Shepherd Mountain: all heartache and protest. He hadn’t learned to live well without her, but he had learned to live all the same.
Bessie was a clog dancer. The very night she and Kane met, Bluegrass music billowed out of the dance hall, spilling into the parking lot like smoke from a wildfire. Kane sat in the bed of his brown and beige pickup attempting to emulate the tune on his banjo when Bessie sidled up to him like a blue-jeaned goddess and bummed a cigarette.
“Hey, you don’t look like a dancer,” he drawled.
“What’s that s’posed to mean?...You don’t look like a musician,” Bessie quipped in return as she jumped up next to him. Kane looked away, embarrassed. “Ya can’t even play that simple tune you was playin’ very well!” She looked over his shoulder with mischief in her eye. She could see it made him uncomfortable, which made her want to carry on.
“Hey, now! All I mean is usually you dancers keep away from trouble,” he said, trying to take the focus off of him.
Bessie grinned. “Is that what ya are? Trouble?”
“That depends on your idea a trouble, I guess.” Kane replied, blushing. He realized he was flirting.
“Well, you’re out here instead of in there like the rest of us. Don ’t ya like havin’ a good time? It’s good for yer soul, ya know!” Bessie took another drag of her cigarette.
“I ain ’t got no int’rest in drinkin’ beer and clappin’ my feet around like a crazy person. Just like to sit out here and listen to the music is all. Learn some new tunes. I’d say that’s good for ya, too!” Kane responded, hugging his banjo for reassurance.
“Oh, you sound like someone who avoids goin’ inside because they can’t move their feet.” She nudged his leg playfully with hers. “I could show ya!” Clearly, Bessie was flirting right back.
“Naw. Too late for that. Anyways, I prefer pickin’ to dancin’. I been practicin’ this one tune, though. Wanna hear it?” “Sure, hun,” she giggled.
As Kane started to play, Bessie jumped down from the truck, trampled out her half-finished cigarette and started tapping away on the asphalt. They made a mighty storm that night, her feet as constant as a steady downpour, his fingers gliding, metal twanging, like lightning rippling on steel against the backdrop of the silver moon, and the low rumble of another man’s bassline. He’d never been so inclined to play well for anyone. # A year later, they were married; she was young, but that was the way things were back then. They never had kids; they didn’t know if it was her or him, and they didn’t care to find out. They were happy playing, drinking, and dancing, and that was enough for them both for a long time. It was when they reached middle age that Bessie began to feel a void. She started to contemplate how things would be in their old age. Who would look after them when they didn’t have one another, or when she became too decrepit to move her feet with the music? Their friends all had curly-haired children who were growing into little images of their folks, continuing the family legacy. Truth is, Bessie was afraid to end up alone, and this pervaded her every waking moment.
She loved Kane very much, but as the seasons changed and the town slowed down, she became more and more subdued. Kane carried on the same way he always did, not knowing how else to be. One day, perhaps out of guilt, he came home with a young sheepdog, which, for a time, gave Bessie great joy. She named her Suzie. Still, their memories of the early days got fuzzier, their connection got weaker, and the music got quieter, until finally the notes held no real meaning between them at all.
#
Every year on her birthday, Bessie woke at five a.m. to perform her birthday ritual. She slipped on her robe, made a cup of Irish coffee, and tiptoed out onto the porch, dog in tow, while the spring mist was still thick in the air and surrounded the house like a blanket of burnt-sugar smoke. The pink sunrise that tinted the dim sky was becoming brighter and brighter until the haze burned away, and the birds began their morning chorale. This was her favorite time of day, and when she felt most content with the earth. She would sit in the wooden rocker, Suzie on her lap, breathing it all in and feeling renewed. Kane would rise about an hour later and put on the breakfast: eggs, bacon, and homemade cornbread for the birthday girl. He would pour himself coffee and come join her while it warmed on the stove. Sometimes he would compose a tune and dedicate it to her right there on the porch. He would let her name it whatever she felt like it meant. Over the years, Bessie’s ritual remained, but Kane’s part in it came later and later until her forty-second birthday when he overslept and missed making breakfast altogether. She understood; mornings had been hard for him since he was forced to quit his job, and she didn’t like to wake him if he needed the rest, but still, this was one day a year, and she couldn’t say it didn’t hurt just a little knowing how things used to be.
That morning, things felt different. It wasn’t just that Kane had slept in. The forest seemed quieter and more solemn, the air was cooler, and the mist was less sweet. Perhaps it was her own mind that had led her to see things differently over the years, but as she sat there sipping her spiked coffee, hole-filled blanket draped around her, she suddenly saw a path ahead of her that she didn’t want to tread. Bessie had never felt this way about her life; she was a go-with-the-flow kind of woman, free about the world and the choices it carried for her like being immersed in an easy foot-stomping dance. She felt the years catching up, and was, in that moment, inflicted with a drowning sensation of grief. As she contemplated what used to be, a lone Whip-poor-will rustled out of the forest and perched on the ledge of the deck, warbling its incantation so that she was thrust out of her own head and into the immediate wild. Moved by the moment, Bessie finished her whisky, quietly collected the packed blue suitcase she had hidden under the bed—knowing a day like this would come—and slipped on her long, woolen coat, being careful not to wake Kane. She patted Suzie on the head, and at the brink of a new turn round the sun, strode down the driveway and out to the road and stuck out her thumb. For the first time in a long while, she was sure about not being sure.
#
To read the full story, please visit Syncopation Literary Journal, Vol 2 Issue 2
BIRDSONG (Creative Nonfiction)
By Liz Baxmeyer
Published in The Examined Life Journal, Issue 10, 2022
When I was a teenager and my family still lived in rural Worcestershire, I snuck into my father’s study to explore his desk drawers. These miniature troves were filled with all manner of interesting trinkets: keepsakes, scripts, and props from various plays he had been in or directed. This particular afternoon, as the spring sun split through the blinds in rays of bright dust, I found an old cardboard matchbox carefully lined with cotton wool containing four delicate blue speckled bird’s eggs. A couple were slightly more crushed than the others, which were surprisingly intact for their age. The chicks were long gone, of course, but I could picture their tiny bodies chipping away from the inside so many years ago. What were they? Blue birds? Thrushes? Wrens? I was not knowledgeable enough to know, but I could tell these shells were special; a source of life that had been imprinted with the little chicks’ spirits forevermore, and perhaps even my father’s, too. After inspecting them carefully, I tucked the delicate things away again; they seemed like the kinds of items I should not have gone poking around for; too precious for prying hands. My dad wouldn’t have minded at all, but, they had survived intact for so many years I didn’t want to jinx them by announcing the discovery, only to have my siblings paw over them with their young, fat fingers. I later found out he had collected the eggs as a child and kept them with him wherever he moved. Somehow, they hadn’t gotten broken amongst the chaos of an acting and teaching career spanning, at that time, three decades, plus four school-aged children, an American wife, and a transatlantic life. These eggs had been from the West Midlands, to London, then all the way to Los Angeles, only to arrive back in Shelsley Walsh, our then home. I was impressed with how this treasure had lasted all the while, nestled in the comfort of this small but sturdy structure—a cocoon of sorts for the remains of a cocoon that once held the beginnings of life. We all create nests where there are nests to be made, and preserve them as best we can to remind ourselves of where we came from; of the fragility of the past. It seems only natural to feel comforted by these things (if indeed our pasts bring us comfort).
I think these shells signified the beginning of my dad’s love affair with nature, especially birds. He grew up in Kidderminster, a small town in Warwickshire, and spent long stints in the Worcestershire countryside at a farm owned by family friends. He was, for much of his adulthood, a long-time member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and can name all of the English garden varieties, and then some. He taught me and my siblings about their various calls and songs—from the sweet “pip-pip” of the wren to the bandit “cu-ckoo”—so we could listen more closely to the world around us. Though I don’t remember much of that education now, I do listen intently to the world around me as a sound designer. People-chatter is a lot like bird-chatter. We ‘twitter’ through life without really thinking about how voices shape our worlds and send messages into the ether. I am sure that on some level the birds are listening to us thinking what a strange call these ugly, featherless creatures have.
My father has been an actor for years. He has a voice fit for Shakespeare, and this is what he primarily did before I and my siblings were born, and during our formative years. His vibrant tenor singing voice—courtesy of my Welsh Grandma Gertie—would shine through any gathering where songs were sung. I used to be embarrassed by that; how loudly he would project (my father is one of those people that doesn’t realize—or perhaps care—how much his voice travels, even when saying rather rude things in public). But now I understand it is not simply audacity, as I once thought.
As I sit with him presently, at the cusp of my middle age, the birds are still here. They are not English songbirds but brash California Woodpeckers. They squawk, and drill, and writhe with one another outside of his hospital room window like something out of a Hitchcock movie. They are in the midst of their mating season dance, and flashes of red and black flicker by on spindled branches that team with new shoots in vibrant golds and greens. And the display is chaotic and violent, but one that is necessary for their lineage.
My father cannot speak. It is not by choice, nor by muteness, but by the respirator attached to his throat blocking flow to his vocal cords. Still, he attempts to converse however he can. He takes a minute to think about what he will communicate. He is measured, unlike the jumbled presto of the tree-dwellers looking on. With a furrowed brow, he then mouths his syllables—eyes-wide—over-pronouncing each one. He keeps his tongue as visible as possible so I can see the airless shapes; shapes I had never really noticed before but that now seem so vital. Small pockets of sterile wind and pressure and fleshy undulations heave under a pink concave roof, half in shadow. So, this is what words really look like. He must think carefully about his choices; some words, without sound, resemble others too closely; these will take me two or three repetitions to understand, and that is too many. Apparently, I am good at this “lip reading.” I do not feel worthy of the compliment. My mother is here every day—my siblings often—but our paths do not always cross; we cannot be here as a family because of COVID. We cannot work together to decode this new language as we usually would. I avoid using the letter board because it is just another barrier in a series of many too overwhelming to conquer for fear of the flood that will come. This is a rude and sudden throwback to childhood: phonating syllables, one by one, to communicate rudimentarily.
By age seventy-six my father has mastered language artfully through Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Hardy. Now he uses it to request a silent “Turn,” and “Wash,” and a “Scratch my nose!” Words stake claim to necessity, sometimes desperation—this is where simple beauty contends with indignity. I know what he is thinking, of course, and this is a part of the conversation we do not have. Each brief utterance brings with it a world of subtext awash with frustration, and the wretchedness of history. Like the large, spring-endowed oak tree being assaulted by feuding woodpeckers outside, we, too, endure the springtime of language. Perhaps these are notions that I cannot fully understand because I have never had my life taken from me while I still live inside of it.
We must hold our cocoons close and make our nests of comfort within, when outside lies the shattering cacophony of the seasons’ mayhem; each little being vying for its own survival; each loyal to its own bloodline. The split rays of light that bend and refract and cast cruel shadows on the floor know that we must dance between them: they know we will perish if we get caught in the dark places. So, we watch and listen and choose our shapes with intention in the hope that we will not have to repeat ourselves, because repetition leans into monotony, and monotony slaughters the spirit and forces it into a disorienting largo.
About two months before this at my fortieth birthday party, I’d scolded my father for using the communal cheese knife to stab and eat a candied fig from the charcuterie board. He did not even make contact with the blade, a fact he plainly defended at the time, but in the moment, I felt a wash of panic. I don’t know why this stands out to me in my memories of that evening; probably because COVID has made us all paranoid about the mouth. I suppose I was worried about shared vapors and exposing others so obtusely to another’s germs; it was my house and I felt responsible for any resulting illness. But the fact was that we were all in the same room, eating from the same table, letting our breath intermingle in the air as we conversed in close quarters without much care for whose molecules were whose. We were all healthy and close-knit. Every person in that room had held me as I’d cried over an ex-partner, fall, or failure; seen me through a danger, wedding, or epic mistake. The truth is, my father always did things like that, and it didn’t really matter. He has never been a person who keeps himself separate from others, injury or no, for better or worse. Sharing a syrupy cheese knife was his way of putting me at ease. He was the first to break the taboo and say, “It’s okay; I’ve done it, now you can relax a bit.”
Later that evening I served cake from a large platter, and when I thought I was done, I licked the gooey chocolate filling directly from the serving knife. My father wanted seconds, and without thinking, I shoveled up another helping, contaminating both the cake and his plate with my germs. He didn’t seem to care. And you know what? Nobody got sick. That isn’t to say they could not have, but sometimes, I think we focus on the wrong things, bogging our souls down with unnecessary guilt. Sometimes we could lend a little more trust to those we have always endowed with the responsibility of our safety.
One month later my father passed out and fell from his bicycle; he wasn’t even in motion at the time. He woke up in the ER with a C-2 fracture and acute spinal damage; no sensation from the neck down; no breathing without life support. This is likely how things will be for the rest of his life. In some ways he was lucky to survive. In fact, the number of people living with that level of spinal injury comprises only one to two percent of all spinal patients because usually, due to the proximity of the brain stem, and how the diaphragm cannot function, that kind of break simply kills you. His brain was, luckily, unaffected. My father survived because someone trained in CPR happened to be out walking the same path and leapt to his aid in seconds. But there will be no more syrupy figs, or birthday cakes, or cups of tea—at least for now—only a dry, puckered tongue, and half-masked directors trying to work out how to block the next unwritten scene.
Birds possess endless forms of intonation and melody within their languages, but what happens when the sweet voice that carries this poetry is changed? We must find new languages to speak, form new voices and ways to listen, and we must hold our nests and our birth vessels close—brittle as they may be—because they are all we know when the birdsong is gone.
So here I sit, the little blue bird’s eggs in hand, as I did so many years ago, and they are still as they were: broken, but survived. We can learn to pluck our souls from the thin walls of our shattered, speckled shells, and piece things together again. Only the fragility of our being will predict how much we may reconstruct, and how long it will take.