Fiction >> Mark Sashine

RUNNING STILL

 By Mark Sashine

… Here it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place..’

The Red Queen talking from
“Through the Looking – Glass”
By Lewis Carroll

I. A Different Smell of Autumn

I live in New England and there are magnificent falls here. Fall is the twilight zone between Johnny, the Appleseed and the Halloween Demons. Who knows, maybe the little gremlins light the leaves on fire every night before the costume ball. You have to be very careful on the back roads that night especially if you want to smell the leaves on the way home. Smoke can kill all the senses. But even if you are lucky and there is neither fire nor rain, just one of those perfect transparent days full of gold and cinnamon, the smell you crave is not there. There is no chance any of that smell crosses the Atlantic and somehow swirls down here even if one of those hurricanes with politically correct names picks it up on the way from Africa. But the hurricanes don’t come here in the fall and the leaves are different and fall down carelessly in random.

The horse- chestnut leaves of my childhood never fell in random. There was an order in the way they glided down like paper airplanes. In the silence of the Park Alley over the river I could hear them touching their still hanging brothers on the way down between the trees. The triangular shapes floating through the woods even had shadows and if you watch very carefully, you could spot a hawk hiding among them, a perfect tactics for a hunter.

In that alley I wondered alone with my backpack, skipping school in search of silence. When you are a kid silence is really golden because there is so much noise around you; that noise prevents you from using your perfect other senses like smell or taste or even eyesight. Only in the Park Alley I felt that I really could see far away through the woods, that my eyes were as perfect as the hawk’s and that I could smell a ripe chestnut on the ground to pick it up among the ornament.

When opened the spiky eggshell reveals a perfectly smooth brownish- white miracle with a distinct smell of Mother Earth. It is a mix of soil, wine and a touch of mushroom. Every time I uncork the bottle of French red wine I catch a touch of that smell, only part of it, not the great wave of feeling, the disappointing ghost of Lost hopes, the sign that what is gone will never return. So was the feeling of the smooth skin when I filled my backpack with those chestnuts where they lolled among the books until their color faded and skin became rotten. Then we would gather them in heaps from our backpacks and closets where our parents put them to protect the clothes from the moth. We carried packs of those rotten chestnuts outside, where the road warriors lighted their big tar cans and threw the chestnuts into the boiling tar. The explosions spread the drops of tar and smoke patches all around. That smell of tar guided all of us into adolescence and some of us even further, right into exile..

The Day to Go

They blocked the road with the cement blocks and caged the entrances of the buildings the way Universal Studios caged the entrance to the Jaws attraction. The line crawls endlessly towards the revolving doors. It begs for the overhead TV with newsreel or the corporate morning update. The PR guys must be hungry for the new ideas; should I give them a call?
          “May I have a teaspoon with the cake, please? And a porcelain cup for my coffee. Thank you.”
This is my last line of defense since they replaced the metallic utensils with the plastic ones. I know that defeat is inevitable. They will soon discontinue the porcelain cups because no one asks for those but me. Bringing utensils of my own? Who wants to be branded as an OCD? It took me five years to dissolve the suspicion about me being gay just because I always eat alone at the corner table. I didn’t want to see the cake cobwebs hanging through the teeth of numerous forks. That could induce the Pavlovian vomiting response even in the compulsive extravert.

My grandfather in the old country used to drink the railway tea. The color was deep red, and there was a distinct aroma, so strong that when you dunk the raw cube sugar it came out as tea- candy. That candy could last for a day and the taste of fresh tea stayed with you much longer. My granddad always drank his tea from a special glass placed in the silver holder. The thin glass revealed the color and transferred every bit of taste when the hot drop touched the tip of your tongue. I tried to recreate that ever since but the taste of that tea remained on the other side of the Ocean as well as the railways with their glass holders, cube sugar and endless Pullman passages. What kind of taste do you expect from the tea- bags? When I opened one the stuff inside looked like ashes after multiple cremation. Porcelain helps only that you don’t carry the feeling of the rough paper edge with you. This is a temporary solution though.
After I park my car among the beat-up trucks I enter the revolving door to the airless territory. The internal walls of our cubicles are made from a sound & flow- absorbing material. I tried several times to excite an air movement in the hallway, to no use. The Minotaur could roam around in the glowing bright lights without being asked for a badge. People snooze under the neon lights in front of their computers. They wake up only at meetings. Around the corner, in the tight enclosure, a speakerphone barks orders to a group of greenish- pale zombies around the desk. It is Charlie talking to his angels. Bald angels they are.

There are no sentences, just words. With every new word the heads nod in agreement the way the cuckoo- clock chimes the time. What if there’s no one on the other side, just some old record spitting out the meaningless blubbery? They would still nod their heads and the coffee- mugs would clink melodically in unison, the same way they clink in the hallways whenever a group converges. Not a word comes from those clusters of human psyche; they stay there in circles with mugs in their stretched hands frozen in an everlasting greeting ritual as long as their coffee supply lasts.

The afternoon comes to you only if you wish it to come because there are no windows. When the draft from several open doors replaces the clinking sound I sneak quietly out through the broken emergency exit. In the parking lot the lights of my car glow warmly through the mist as I climb in and turn on the CD with the songs of my fathers. Back home at last.

The Matter of Accent

I have a Dalmatian accent.. People who live in Dalmatia are called Dalmatians. They were called that way long before white people in the US started to call themselves Caucasians and got acquainted with Dalmatian dogs. I wonder what accent would an American have if he lived in Dalmatia and try to speak the Dalmatian language, one of those great old dialects. Most likely those people, polite and decent as they are, wouldn’t define it; they would just smile at him and let it pass. Why don’t they let it pass here? Whenever you strike a conversation it always goes the same way:
          ‘ May you please, pass the salt. Thank you.’
          ‘ Here it is, buddy. What an accent! Where are you from?’
          ‘ I am, uh, from Eastern Europe.’
          ‘ Curious accent, really. Haven’t heard anything like that. I have Polish neighbors but they have something different.’
Different, my ass. As if he knows what to compare with. Had you ever listened to yourself, “Hir et az, budah?” Sounds like one of the characters from the MIB movies. I bet Eastern Europe for you is somewhere between 42nd and 55th Streets in New York City.
          ‘ This is a Dalmatian accent.”
          “What! You mean like those doggies in the movie?”
          “ Yes, the dogs are called for the territory, the Dalmatia. That’s in Western Carpathia, closer to Hungary.”
          ‘You bet! That’s fascinating. Dalmatia in Carpathia, that’s where Dracula is from! Man, I want to go visit there sometimes.”
          “ You are always welcome.’
There is no Dalmatia anymore. American and European aircraft bombed it into oblivion. Before there were Germans and Tito and then it was Civil War. How many mischiefs can people endure before they become a mischief themselves? There are more Draculas there now then it was at the time of Vlad, the Impaler. Some of them really like the fresh tourist blood, with Alabamian or Arkansas aftertaste. So, pass the salt and start talking about money.

The Confessionary in the Cursed Cathedral

I always loved gothic cathedrals because of darkness, coolness and echoes. When you enter a gothic building, the fist thing you feel is something touching you. It seems obvious that souls would prefer to wonder over the nave, hang in the corners of the ribbed arches and watch people through the stained glass windows. That’s what those cathedrals are for; lost souls and one visitor. I know, I know, they do Mass there, communion and all, but you are always all alone there and if some soul wants to talk to you, it can do it without interruption. Who knows those really are priests on the other side of the confessional booth?

In the city of my childhood we had a Cursed Cathedral. It was gray, had two-edged towers and looked pretty strange when you passed it every day on the trolley- bus. It was abandoned for a long time and sometimes I would drop off the trolley and come up to the entrance, to those oval doors with huge, bronze rings, so irresistibly touchable. There were two salamanders over the doors, guarding the entrance from those not welcome although so it happened that because of them the cathedral never enjoyed a Mass in its walls. It was a mixed church, Greek Catholic, a child of the Unia, the compromise between the Greek Orthodox and Catholic Churches in the 17th Century when Russia took over part of Poland. In the beginning of the 20th Century an architect who designed the Cathedral was in love with Notre Dame de Paris and its gargoyles. He put those salamanders over the door. Unfortunately the Unia bishops decided the salamanders to be the ‘devil’s breed’ and cursed the building. After that it stood empty being used occasionally as a warehouse and for a while- as a music hall for organ concerts. I visited the hall once and heard the organ wave reflected in the corners for the first time, resembling to me the voices of the lost souls who had chosen the Church for their permanent residence. Since that time I think that all gothic cathedrals are just a part of Purgatory and all of them are blessed and cursed at the same time; the places where Heaven and Hell meet in Alliance. You float down the nave and spread your hands over the transept waiting for the guidance.

The confessional was uncomfortable, as it was supposed to be. I sat down on the bench in front of the draped window and said,
          “ I ‘ve sinned but I don’t want a blessing. I want an advice”
          “ We don’t give advices; we grant absolution. Do you believe in God?”
          “ No, but if for a moment you could see the invisible souls hiding here, I am sure, may of those would be like mine. It is the advice they seek, not absolution because the road had only started for them.”

The lights went out in the hall and it became pitch dark. Somebody moved on the other side of the drape, the door squealed open and I felt a gentle push. I rose and walked towards one of the long benches, the one which seemed to be enveloped by the breathing dark contour, which I felt, but didn’t see. I was not afraid, just tired.
          “ You came here because you have nowhere to go,” said the soft voice.
          “ I came here to stay,” I said. “ Turn me into one of those souls, hang me in the corner, let me watch people, invisible, disembodied, free.”
          “ There is no freedom in being a ghost. Your desires, your sufferings will stay with you for eternity. What if I give you another choice? I can transport you far away from here, to some planet, where it is eternal spring and you could stay there for the rest of your life, resting. Or you can stay here as you are now but you will be alone no more. You can come here anytime and I will be listening to your stories. It is not sins we seek, just stories. How about that?
          “ If I stay, how will you help me?”
          “ I’ll ask you to pray from time to time. Will you do that for us?”
          “ I will,” I said.              

© Mark Sashine, 2003. All Rights Reserved.

Mark Sashine was born in Russia in 1956. His family immigrated to the US in 1989, and they now live in Connecticut. Mark holds a PhD, Professional Engineering license, and works as an engineer. In 2002 he graduated from the Breaking  Into Print Course of study in the Long Ridge Writer's Group in Connecticut. You can reach him at spockovich@att.net
 

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