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Making That Short Walk by David Sheppard Michael sat in a chair at the kitchen table with his legs folded under him, constructing a totem pole for his class on North American Indians, an orange and white striped cat named Tiger sleeping in his lap. He was alone in the house with his mother, and he like that. She switched off the static coming from the small Philco radio and leaned against the sink as she hummed "Just a Closer Walk With Thee," pealing and slicing potatoes into a large glass bowl. It was dark outside and through the house walls, Michael heard the deep hum of the vacuum pump, the machine that sucked milk from the cow's teats, coming from the milk barn. Through the night air, the hum alternated from high to low pitch. Michael felt comforted by this pulsing heartbeat from the barn. He saw the barn's silhouette... |
| Grand Canyon Lament by David Sheppard You are blind and standing at the south rim of the Canyon. Gently and with kind words, as if performing a long overdue service for a patient of some convalescent hospital, he takes the cane from you, and you listen to the dull clunk of wood as he leans it against a rock. You learn that place, knowing you may have to return to it alone. The heat of the midday sun is on your head, and you wish to see the wall of the north rim, realizing that the image can be nothing more than a mental fabrication. He returns, encourages you to stand a little closer to the edge. "To see," he says, "if you can sense what she must have, the ground plunge downward to the first plateau." He solicits more courage, urging you ahead, creating a comforting, therapeutic confidence in your action. "Don't be so timid. That's where they found her, you know, on the first plateau more than 2000 feet below which now has a thin covering of desert grass, just enough to give it a tinge of green. That's where she stopped. This world is a stranger to you, to both of you. But with the untimeliness of her passing, you must take extraordinary measures..." |
| Riding Horses by David Sheppard I look through the widow into the failing light and see a horse clopping a jagged path up the mountain toward my cabin, its black head bobbing with each hoof fall. As they come closer, I see the rider, her body a chrysalis in coat and hood. I step from the cabin into snow as all the dark moving parts of the stallion emerge from trees. His sweaty horse smell, caught by wind currents, precedes them. Now he is against me, moving me around with his head, nose buried in warm places, large articulate lips tugging at my clothes. I feel the broad side of his long thick nose, wrap my arms around his neck. He shrugs me off easily, nuzzling and blowing steam into my coat, his coarse-haired tail swishing side to side. A faint reflection of light comes from the eyes of the cocoon above. Her leg lifts slowly over the horse's neck and she drops to the snow. All the clothes contain almost nothing then a cold nose, hair, a warm ear. First, the stallion goes in the shed, then the ceremonial unclothing of the rider... |
| High Heels by David Sheppard The reason Brenda's mother has hurried down the hall and is now turning the door knob to Brenda's bedroom (Brenda is at this second in the very throes of ecstasy) has a lot to do with the reason she's wearing high heels. Her name is Ramona, and today she is forty. Just yesterday she was thinking that when she was born, her grandmother was forty. And she had always thought her grandmother was very old. Now Ramona is the same age her grandmother was then. That's bugging her, even though she's not a grandmother, maybe in part because she is not a grandmother; maybe she could accept her age if she was a grandmother; but the fact is, she's not. She exists in this woman's no-woman's-land; she still feels young and vital, and she has never crossed over into that state of mind, that state of mental existence, that state of being old and knowing it, as she expected she would. She specifically does not mean a state of acceptance, no that is not what she means at all. When you are old, she thinks, it should be like you were always old. You shouldn't have to accept it. You're just that, old. Enough said. It is on you just like skin... |
