Love Helped A One Eyed Gelding

Love Helped A One Eyed Gelding 
copyright @aladreth antoinette brown
(shorter version previously published 2008 or 2009 - I can't remember and it's not like it is that important because who would want this story as their own, anyway?)



All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living, dead, or undead is purely coincidental.  But, I did use real names.

Love Helped A One Eyed Gelding 

Nothing happens until I tell you about it.  So, here goes.

I met a clairvoyant today at the hair and nail salon where I had my fingernails painted the colour, "Avalanche."

You would guess that colour to be white, but it's more like the colour of Mount St. Helen's ash mixed with silver glitter.

I said aloud to all of the women in the salon, "God grant me an avalanche, but without too much damage."

A couple of the women replied, "Amen."

There was a dead crow in my yard and I knew bad things were coming.
 
The clairvoyant.  Well, you would think she would know bad things were coming and would warn me, but she just kept talking about, "Clara," the dead little ghost girl who held her hand on a ghost tour in Colorado.  She walked and talked with her for a very long time and then when she released her hand, Clara kicked her in the ankle.

I tried to catch the eye of one of the other five women so I could smirk, roll my eyes; you know, do something disapproving.  Maybe make a motion like, "She's crazy," but they were too busy talking and laughing about the parties in Wales where men dance with paper loch ness monsters and the bobbies wear their badges on their leather jock straps.

Since the crow was a harbinger of danger, I laid down for a nap when I arrived home.  I thought, "I must go get cucumbers for my desert tortoise when I wake up."

My dogs laid next to me on the California King water bed. I laid my hand on my older dog's stomach several times to check her breathing.

I dreamed a lesbian had her own, "Google."  It wasn't called, "Google."  I used it and found all sorts of pretty images of flags and intense looking women.  I found updates on "Jon and Kate."

Half asleep, half awake, I recalled Shannon and my favourite games when we were young.  We would pretend we were witches with gold mirror boxes full of nails.  We never used the nails but we knew they would come in handy at some point in time.

We were Kate Jackson.  Kate was the one we liked best.  The one of the three witches.  I mean, angels.  You know Kate was hot.

We were crazy old women from nursing homes.  We would stand in the utility room dressed in night shirts eating peanut butter cups.  We would put our hair in curlers and then shake our heads making the curlers hit us hard on our temples.  We would make weird noises with our tongues and pretend we had escaped from our rooms.

Finally, we would turn our eyeglasses upside down and mimic the stork's voice on the Vlasic Pickle TV commercials and say, "Did you skin yer elbow?" We would reply to ourselves, "You didddd?"
We would say, "Hey, sonny, ya got any money?"  We would pause and then finish, "To help an old lady out?"

Sometimes we would tie up Jamie.  He was a neighborhood boy.  We would hog tie him and whip him with his own belt when we played 'house.'  I would say, "How dare you steal your father's red Corvette and drive it to Vegas!"

There was no red Corvette.  We were poor.  The most exciting thing was that Jamie's parents owned a Dairy Queen.  It didn't help, though, as there were no favours (or free ice cream) given us.

If we only knew then what we know now.  We could have bribed fourteen year old Jamie, somehow, I'm sure, since we knew of his extracurricular activities.  Imagine that.  Letting girls tie and whip him.

I was so young.  I could see it all ahead of me.

I would say things like, "I will be a cool old lady."

I wanted to be old; my mother's sister, instead of my mother's daughter.

I kept trying to remember that green was green and orange was orange.  My father, before he died when I was 12, had confused me for years.  He teased me unmercifully telling me orange was green and green was orange.

To this day, I'll say things like, "Please hand me that green thing over there."  And it will be orange.

I fell in love one time.  He was a sweet blonde boy from Las Vegas who gave me a gold bracelet of the "Ten Commandments" in the back of a church van.  He kissed me.  It was soft.  He wasn't like the other boys.  He dressed in proper white dress shirts and black slacks.

The Pastor separated us.  He said I was getting too "boy crazy."  It really should not have mattered as we didn't even live in the same town, but I was forever known as the girl who got too close to boys.  I was made to  ride in the front of the church van between the Pastor and the Pastor's wife.  They were in their 70's, I think.  I was bored out of my skull as I sat on that hump that housed something mechanical, I'm sure; with Pastor's thick veined, desert tanned hand on my knee.

Sigh.  That sweet little innocent boy in the back of the church van.  Does he remember me like I remember him? Does he tell his girlfriends all these years later about me?  About how he bought a stringy haired bony girl a bracelet and softly kissed her.

Maybe he stole that "Ten Commandments" bracelet.  That would definitely make a good story.

Even now, I lose my breath for a moment, thinking of him.

I still have the bracelet.  I will be in a nursing home shaking my curlers at my temples, talking about the bracelet.

That is, if I make it to nursing home status.  

Oh, I had another boyfriend, but it was not love.  It was obsession and possession.  We took turns being door mats.  Dirty door mats we would wipe our feet on many times and nasty wet mats that would get soaked by the rain.  If it had been true love, I would still think of him and how he grew up to be an airline pilot in Alaska or a police officer who shot at hobos on the train.

But, I don't think of those things.

I try hard not to hold time on the head of a straight pin.

I try to find the lights in parking lots late at night in the summer so I can see to write in my car.

To write - to cure this one eyed gelding.  She's no longer a bony pony girl.  The old girl is quite fat and half blind.  I will make the other horses wear bells to help lead her.

I write to remember my finest hour.

It was not when I was a cool old lady, but when I was 12.

Directly after my father died, my half brother came from California for the funeral.  He made enchiladas and picked up some of my dad's guns.
 
More than a dozen years before, he had been to Korea as a Communications Specialist.  He was the same age as my mother.  He had seen things.  He had a dog, a beagle, he had to leave over there.  The Army never let the boys bring their dogs home.  He gave my dad the pictures of him and the beagle and now I have those pictures.  Being a dog person, myself, I think the Army must have sucked back then.

He had a daughter three years younger than me who wouldn't eat anything except pancakes with mustard.  He had a new dog named "Charlie Brown" who would wake me up whenever I would spend the night when we visited him in California.  Charlie Brown would jump on the bed and lick me in the face.  I loved the smell and feel of that dog.  He was blonde and fat.  It was a loose fat, and you could get your fingers lost in the soft folds.  It was attractive on the dog.  That dog was like a voluptuous woman.  Getting woke up in this manner; it was downright exciting.

My half brother had a wife who was a paralegal when she wasn't a horribly depressed nut case in a terry cloth robe glued to the living room couch.

He had a pool, a Jacuzzi and a really nice back yard.  His front yard had a huge Magnolia tree.  He had a truck with a camper on the back.  He listened to country music with harsh language.  He had lots of coins in his ashtray.  He wrote large checks to animal rescues like Doris Day's place.  He bought me bright yellow perfume they called "toilet water" and powder with soft satin puffs and told me I was beautiful and that my eyes had pretty flowers in them.

He hated his job.  That's what adults do.  They hate their job.

He dropped me off at the county fairgrounds.  "Go find your friends,"  he said.

I did not see any of my friends or any kids I knew, for that matter.

I was by myself.

He dropped me off anyway.

He put more money in my jean's pocket than I had ever seen at one time before.  It must have been about thirty bucks.

The dusty fairgrounds behind that chain link fence enveloped me.  The swirling lights of the carnival rides, the screams from the top of the Ferris Wheel, the smell of the small animal stables. Wind flapping the white, red and blue ribbons against the wood, the cries from the dusty fairway to lay your money down, the smell of the corn dogs and Navajo Fry Bread, the free things in the booths (how I loved the free things!), all the wonderful displays of houses made from match sticks and the town's largest pumpkin.

"Go have fun."

Fun must continue.  That was the feeling in the air.  Pretend nothing devastating has happened.  Your dad didn't just die.  You ain't just twelve years old.

Grieving can be postponed.

I learned the hard way this is not true.  I should never be left to my own devices.  I should never be left alone for any amount of time.  I should never be forgotten.

No one should be ashamed of me or embarrassed of me.  But, they are.  I am always "too much" for people.  At the same time, I am easy to forget no matter how crazy I pretend to be.

I become invisible.

But again, let's not dwell on this.  Let us remember that one hour.

My finest hour.

Oh, really, it was.

My finest hour...and the winning of a beautifully decorated cake in the Cake Walk.  And getting that dime straight on - in the carnival Fenton glass.

I'm.

So.

  Twelve.