“Hey Sophie,” he yelled up the hill, offering an odd smile. It suddenly reminded me of a time when we were kids and we had to take our dying cat, snowball, to the vet. Snowball sat on the examination table purring, but his face was tense and we could tell he was incredibly uncomfortable; he kept looking around the room at us while desperately pleading with his eyes to be taken home. I asked the vet why he was purring when he was obviously so scared and miserable, and she said a cat’s purr is a lot like a human’s smile– we don’t always do it just when we’re happy.

Maybe Ivan’s smile looked strange because it’d been nearly a year and half since I’d last seen him and he was starting to show the strain of life. He was tall, about six-two with thick, highly disorganized brown hair and piercing blue eyes. Unless he was really laughing hard, he had this funky little halfway smile that most people would probably classify as a smirk. Sometimes I think he looks a bit like a young Harrison Ford, but if I ever told him that he’d probably say he didn’t look like anyone but himself. Over the past ten or fifteen years that he’d been running his own business he’d grown more serious and calculating, but I still retain this mental image of the goofy, teenage Ivan who was going to join a rock band and be the next Jimmy Page.

“Hello!” I tried to sound cheerful, but my voice sounded tinny and hollow, far away from me like it didn’t belong. As a cluster of clouds rolled by, temporarily obscuring the sun’s end of summer rays, the cemetery was very suddenly colder. But by the time Ivan finally reached me, the clouds had passed and all was well again.

“Sorry I . . . didn’t make it for the whole thing; I was kind of, you know, running late,” he said. Seeing Ivan again after so long and everything that had happened was wonderful, but seeing him like this was horrible. I had no idea what to do or say so I just stood there, like an idiot. There was so much pain in his face I thought my heart was going to rip itself out of my chest right there, but just as suddenly as the clouds had left the cemetery his face changed. He smiled his weird half-smile and said, “let’s get out of here. There’s a new cafe I want to take you to.”

The standard protocol for dealing with unspeakable tragedies in my family is to pour relentlessly into work talk. Almost immediately Ivan was absorbed in the telling of work stories, and I was glad for it. He owned a small web design firm in San Jose, and while he never mentioned money I knew he was probably well off. We usually had Thanksgiving dinner at Ivan’s four bedroom Sunnyvale home as a family . . . but with mom gone things would be different this year. The farther we drove from that place of death the more the darkness seemed to lift from him, until everything seemed nearly ok.

We were headed to a place situated rather inconveniently in the industrial district of Sand City. Though I’d lived in this area all my life, it was an entire section of town I’d almost never been to. In the midst of this industrial wasteland lay the Blue Dragon Cafe.

The first thing is that I have no idea whatsoever how to write a novel. I’ve never taken a single creative writing class in my life. As a result, I’m mainly versed in how to write persuasive essays and research papers which are boring as hell to read. Papers where you must be concise and say exactly what you mean in as few words as possible. Creative writing isn’t like that at all. I imagine the job of the creative writer is creating an experience rather than an idea. How one goes about doing this I’m not sure.

The only thing I am sure of is that I want to do it. Just for me. One of those “before I die” type things. I don’t care if it gets published or if anyone reads it all or even if it’s any good, but I just want to do it.

That having been said, if you have any feedback whatsoever, please email me. My new super-spiffy email is thehotchickATcalinazaretDOTnet. In fact, you’ll have to email if you have anything to say at all because I’m disabling comments on the “novel” posts. Not exactly sure why. Perhaps because I think people will write more honest, in-depth feedback if they have to write an email.

So there you have it! Now back to our regularly scheduled ramblings.

She had died in a car accident. My step father, James, told me they were arguing over the phone as she was driving home from work. It was one of the three times a year when it really pours rain in southern California, and she just hydroplaned right over a cliff. More than likely she was driving way too fast as she often did when she was irritated. It was the deepest kind of tragedy; one of those stupid thoughtless mistakes that changes absolutely everything in a single moment.

For some reason I have never been able to figure out, James waited a full two days to call and tell me what happened. It was a horribly awkward conversation that’s almost impossible to describe. The closest I can think of is how it might feel if the ground beneath you suddenly disappeared. It’s true that my mom and I were not exactly close, but the idea that my mom had been dead for two days without me knowing gave me an uneasy feeling. Watching James now, with his head in his hands and weeping, I had conflicting feelings of embarrassment and sympathy. He was a bit short and had this unfortunate sort of piggish look about him, but he’d always been kind. James really was a decent man and I was glad my mother found him. Not that I particularly interacted with him much; at 28 I had my own life to worry about. I was glad my mother remarried, but I was too old for a father-daughter dance or any of that crap.

An antsy, persistent anxiety crept into my bones. The funeral was basically over, and what I really wanted to do right then was drop my purse and run full speed out of the cemetery. Not to my car, just out. I would just keep running until I couldn’t anymore. For a second it seemed like a perfectly fine and sane idea, but then I realized I would just have to come back for my car and purse eventually, and what would I say to explain why I’d run off the way I had?

I hadn’t cried the entire time. I knew my mother was buried and never coming back, but there was something about the situation that felt a lot more like I was watching it in a movie than actually living it. In much the same way that a dry river bed is strange, useless and sad, my eyes refused to give a single drop. But then I saw a distant figure standing at the edge of the trees that brought me as close to tears as I could possibly go– my brother, Ivan.

About a year later, when my mom was having trouble paying the rent, I watched my saddle ride away in the back of some man’s truck. Somehow my mom had lugged the huge saddle and its wooden rack out of the house without me noticing, but I got to watch him drive away with all my little girl dreams of owning a horse. I wondered for a long time if that strange man had any idea the part he played in the destruction of a little girl, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Later on she told me that she sold my saddle for $300 and she needed that money for rent, but I didn’t understand these things. The bitterness of that single moment would follow me through the next few decades. Years later the anger and hurt would still well up in me, and I’d think that she should have sold something of her own, like her useless first wedding ring, or some of her other jewelry if she needed the money that badly.

But one Saturday afternoon in late summer many years later, as I sat watching her casket slowly lowered into the ground, I wondered if it had been a foolish thing to hate her for.
piece #2