the
Perch
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volume 1; spring 2013
ending. Her heartbeat hit rapid staccatos. She snatched short breaths. Panicked. She must be failing the hero’s tests. Perhaps she needed to return to the underworld. The day passed in a swirl of confused thoughts and uncertain plans. Alice listened to the radio flea market, people buying and selling. Fence wire, solar panels. Someone wanted a TV that still worked. Armageddon, she thought. Neither eating nor drinking, she stared at the fish skeleton, again. Her mother’s story. Trying to tell her mother’s story, she had stepped through the smoky mirror of initiation. The Tower card, her mother’s suicide. That was the turning point. But Death came before the Tower. What were the events in her childhood story, her mother’s influence that sublimated her ego? Symbiosis, a therapist had said once. Stuck in symbiosis. How can you sublimate an ego that a mother’s mental illness thwarted? Alice struggled to
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remember the scene. Futile, she thought.
Afternoon ignited her restlessness and she climbed in her truck, driving into a valley blanketed by smoke. A fire burned somewhere and the dingy gray air affirmed the descending apocalypse. She kept driving. There was a park where they kept dolphins. Alice had talked with them before, many years ago. They were her old friends. She wanted to see them again. When she arrived at the park, the gates were closed and two broken people slumped on a bench near the entrance. She climbed back in her truck to navigate this different world, one with traffic and busses, people who avoided looking in each other’s faces. As the sun set, she pulled her truck to a curb painted red, parked it and climbed on the first bus that stopped. The hero couldn’t be hampered by a truck in the underworld. A shriveled hunching woman skittered into the bus, sat in front of Alice, twitched and
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jerked and scanned from side to side. The bus stopped and the woman skittered out.
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