Irish

 

 I found out at the end that they called her Irish. I never knew why because no one knew if she was even from there. I thought she may have been about sixty years old, but she may have been older or younger. Regardless of whether she had lived a hard life in her youth, it was plain that she lived a hard life now and it showed on her face and the way she carried herself. Irish was not hunched over by any means, as if she had that bone-wasting disease that so many women of her age have. She stood straight and rested most of her weight on one leg and kicked the other one out in front of her as if to tell the world that she had claimed whatever spot she happened to be standing on.  She was not very tall and slight of build, but she was wiry and strong for her size and had short and coarse curly gray hair which she had brushed back from her forehead. She wore mismatched items that seemed as though she might have gotten them dumpster diving. She wore a black leather patch over one eye which had a strap that went across her head and cut through her thick hair. Her brown leather jacket was a duster and fell to her ankles. You could tell it had been worn a lot before she got it. It was marred all over with cuts and creases and completely covered in a layer of dirt. She wore a belt that was made for gun ammo, but it never seemed to have any in it. She never wore skirts or dresses. Always trousers and those were mostly cargo pants. You know, the kind with all the pockets. God only knows what she kept in them. Her shirts were always thin and full of random small holes. If there was a design or a picture on them, they were always so faded that you could only see what might have been there when it was new. To complete her ensemble, Irish always wore a pair of black army boots that were never tied all the way up. Somehow, the laces always seemed to drag, but she never tripped. That was a miracle, I thought. Overall, Irish gave off the air of someone who had come up the hard way and still had to grapple for everything she had and what she did have she would not give up without a fight. She was not a woman whom most would approach easily. This was how she looked when Sam, our local detective, brought her to stand on my front porch. 

She had kidnapped my daughter and a number of other townsfolk's children. My daughter was 9 years old when she disappeared. A blur of giggles and long hair, she was. Sweet, stubborn, insanely smart and empathetic and the love of my life. The day she was taken was the day I died inside. So, when Sam knocked on my door that chilly fall morning, I opened it hoping that he had news of the whereabouts of my daughter. I pushed open the screen door and looked to my right and there she was. On my porch. In handcuffs. Smirking with that damned leg kicked out standing there in front of me like she owned my house. 

"Sam," I said tentatively, "Why is Irish on my porch in handcuffs?"

He cleared his throat nervously.

"She has something she wants to tell you, Fae." 

I turned toward her and right then her smirk broke into a wide grin revealing teeth that looked like they had been blackened with a marker. 

"I took yer daughter," she drawled nonchalantly. 

I looked at Sam questioning, "Is this true?"

"I'm afraid so, Fae," he said lowering his head. 

I came fully out on to the porch at that moment and let the screen door slam. I was numb or livid or desperately sad. I couldn't tell which. I stood still for a couple of minutes, which, to me, felt like millennia. I was trying to process what had just taken place. Out of all the emotions I was feeling at that moment, anger became the foremost. No, it was not just anger. It was homicidal anger. I turned my body toward Irish and lunged at her screaming. A sound that couldn't have come from me tore itself up and out of my body through my throat. I sounded like a wild animal. When I landed on her, I smelled whiskey, cigarettes, and unwash. It permeated everything about her. As if by my touching her, I loosed some weird spores that made up her being. I felt surrounded by her essence and I hated her for so confidently telling me that she had taken my daughter, whom I loved more than anything in the universe. I punched and clawed at Irish until Sam managed to pry me off of her.

"She's not dead, Fae!", Sam yelled as he pulled me off Irish, "That's what I come here to tell you!"  

I disengaged from Irish and looked alternately at Sam and at her. I noticed that when Irish got to her feet, she wasn't so nonchalant. Her face looked like it had been through a meat grinder. Two black eyes, a broken nose and, I noticed a few of those black teeth littered my porch. Now, it was my turn to smirk. 

"That's right, she ain't dead and neither are them others," Irish hissed through her missing teeth. 

Sam let out a breath as if he had been holding it since he had arrived, "Irish told us where all them kids are, Fae. They're out by the old airplane graveyard." 

I started awake. The last thing I saw in my dream was my daughter running toward me down a hill of airplane trash with her beautiful hair trailing behind her. I lay in bed for some time trying to convince myself that this was not real. I got up and padded down the hall to my daughter's bedroom and peeked inside. There she was. Her angelic face relaxed and her hair all around her looking like a burnished bronze halo. It was all a dream. Just a bad dream.

Life Is Lived In Moments

You left. You stood on my front porch and said flatly,
"I'm leaving for band practice and I'm never coming back."
 At that moment, I was so angry with you.

A few weeks before, we sat in my sunroom with the sun setting outside the three walls of windows and settling over us like a veil of spun gold. I asked you why you had not introduced me to your family. I asked you why you had never invited me to your house. We were engaged to be married, yet I had no idea where you lived and had never even met your parents. You launched into a monologue about past hurts, trust issues, and compartmentalization. You eventually agreed to work on being more open, more trusting and you agreed to introduce me to your parents.

Christmas season came. I remember laying in my bed with you and hesitantly asking you if you would go with me to my family's Christmas dinner. You turned to me and smiled. I never thought you would say yes, but you did. I was so happy at that moment. I felt that our relationship was progressing, deepening. All I ever wanted was to be with you. I wanted domestic bliss with you and all that that entailed.

My family adored you. You were charming. You smiled and were funny and witty. My cousin even pulled me into an unused room and asked me if you had proposed. When I told her that I had proposed to you, her eyes went wide as saucers. She laughed and hugged me. It was nice to feel accepted. It was nice to finally feel like I belonged in my own family. I felt like you had made that possible and I was so grateful. I loved you at that moment.

When I asked you a few weeks later why we had not gone to your family's Christmas dinner, you became evasive and irritated. You gave me some half-excuses. I was skeptical and hurt. I felt like you had completely forgotten our conversation about being more open, more trusting, and the introduction to your family. Then I thought that maybe you hadn't forgotten, but that you had previously told me just what I had wanted to hear because you wanted to continue our relationship without furthering your responsibilities. Then, I thought that maybe you had something to hide. Or both.

Later that night, after you had gone, I lay in bed going over and over everything I could remember that you had ever said with regard to how you felt about me, our relationship and things that had been said in arguments or discussions. I was so hurt and angry with you at that moment. So, I acted on what would be the beginning of the end of our relationship. I texted you,
"You have until the new year to introduce me to your parents. Otherwise, we're done."
I never would have thought, at that moment, that you would have retreated back into your distrust and compartmentalization.

I remember your face as you stood at my door preparing to leave. I think you were waiting for me to suddenly change my mind, to say I was wrong, to beg for forgiveness. I, however, did none of those things. I loved you at that moment, but I had to let you go. At that moment, I had to choose to love myself.

First Impressions and The Handsome Neighbor

It was the beginning of Spring. She had had to move from Arkansas to New York City, with her eight-year-old daughter, for her new job. She was in her early thirties, petite, with long, extraordinarily white, hair which was as thick as her wrist in a ponytail and which hung down to the back of her knees. With her large sky blue eyes and pale skin, some people from her home town had taken to calling her Fae after the fairies they believed inhabited certain places. She had a dark wine stain birthmark right in the middle of her eyebrows which looked, for all the world, like a diamond. This day at the beginning of spring, she was standing on the sidewalk in front of her new flat in Brooklyn Heights overseeing, as best she could, the removal of hers and her daughter's belongings from the moving van into their new building.

She was frustrated and so had climbed into the moving van herself and was attempting to arrange things at the edge of the van for the movers to grab. They charged by the hour, you know, and this was getting a bit expensive. It seemed that the movers today had not had their breakfast or coffee, she thought, because they were moving slower than molasses in winter. Temporarily satisfied with her work, she jumped down from the moving van to see a tall, rather handsome, man walk out of her new building. Their eyes connected and he walked toward her.

"Are you moving in?" he asked.
"Yeah, I'm in, ah, 3C," she stammered with her drawling southern twang.
"Oh, then you're my new neighbor," he replied, "My wife and I live just across the hall from you in 3B."

He was so handsome and brawny that she felt she was having to really concentrate on what to say. She was nervous, as she usually was, talking to those whom she found attractive. There was an extended silence in which she realized eventually that she must say something, but thankfully, the handsome neighbor broke the awkwardness for her.

"You need some help with that stuff?" he asked, while peering into the interior of the moving van.
"Well, yeah, kinda." she said nervously, "The movers are going at a snail's pace today, but I don't want to put you out or anything."

To her complete surprise, the handsome neighbor took off his jacket and began to pull several things down from the van and walk towards the entrance of the building. She sized him up covertly and thought to herself,"Good God he's built like a brick shit house." Of course, she'd never say that out loud. Her churchified southern upbringing would never have allowed it and her mother would have blushed ten shades of red if she ever heard anything like that coming out of her daughter's mouth.

The handsome neighbor paused a second on the last stair and turned to look at her. She was still standing agog watching him when she realized that he wanted her to open the door for him since his arms were quite full. Embarrassed, she danced up the steps quickly and showed him to her apartment.

Passing through the doorway to her apartment, the handsome neighbor, who introduced himself as Adam on the way up the three flights of stairs to their floor, sat her belongings near the pile in the living room area where the movers had been depositing most of her things. He looked around at the nearly empty apartment unabashedly curious.

"Your apartment is set up differently than ours," he mentioned as he walked towards the back wall where a row of floor-to-ceiling windows offered a stunning view of the back of the next building over.

She walked into the kitchen and turned to ask him if he wanted some iced tea, the house wine of the south you know, when she noticed Adam was perusing through her collection of books which were still laying around the dining table in random places. He seemed lost in concentration. She took this moment to really study Adam's features and the way he moved. He had shoulder-length jet black hair which took on a subtle blue sheen when the light hit it just the right way. It was parted in the middle of his forehead and hung in loose, thick waves. His eyes were fairly large, but not overly so, and were the most amazing shade of green. Well, shades of green actually, Fae thought to herself. For when he turned his face toward the sunlight coming in from the windows she thought his eyes were the shade of the amber you find sometimes with little fossils stuck inside. He was tall, about six-foot-two or three, she guessed. His frame was proportional. She figured he weighed about one-eighty or two hundred pounds give or take. His skin was the most marvelous color of light coffee. His lips were full, which was a bit unusual for most men Fae thought, but nice nonetheless. The rest of his face was all angles and planes. He had a very aquiline nose and cheekbones so sharp that it almost made his face look severe. He had a broody sense about him, but Fae did notice that he smiled easily and that when he did, it lit up his whole person. It was as if there were a heavy cloak he deliberately pulled around himself either to keep other people away or to protect himself somehow.

Fae thought to herself, "He must have been through some bad times if he feels he has to cloak his light like that," but she kept all of her curious questions to herself. He was married after all and she had no intention of being a home-wrecker even if he was outrageously handsome.