FOR michelle.

this is a recent short story i wrote for my creative writing class.. its a rough draft, so still needs a lot of fleshing out. Let me know what you think! Criticism would be nice since I am going to have to start writing another draft of this soon.

The Belly Talks with the Train in It

For some reason, his shoes were not on his feet. At the same moment he turned to go back to his car to get them, he remembered why he'd left them in the first place. He stood on a dewy lawn somewhat illuminated by a porch light and remembered the last time he stood here, between his car and his home.

He had not wanted to leave, but his mother's blasting yells jabbed his wet teary face through the grass and into his car, and then far away to the western shore of the United States. She wanted him to "Go! Go on! Get out of here!" just like a dog. Right then he had felt like a dog, but decided to turn around, just to look at her, to show her that he was leaving because he was more human than she was. Past her tormented red hair, his father had stood behind the glass door, his face covered by a simple reflection, and his hand resting on his plaid beaten heart. The young man's heart had to wrestle big bears to turn away from the sight of his father.

"Bye, bye, Daddy. Bye, bye, Carolina." He had said. Carolina wasn't his mother. Carolina was his home. Angela, that was the name of his mother, and she had warned him to never come back here, to his home, to his Carolina.

He began to slither through the grass by way of the porch light and stood up at the side of a large Camellia bush he had helped his father plant as a boy. The Camellia had grown to be slightly shorter than himself, in fact, he thought, it had probably grown the same amount as he had since the time they had planted it. He moved past it now, to the right side of the house, latched against its side like a sucker fish until he came to the window. Here he stopped. With his face pressed against the glass, he shielded his head with his hands so he could see inside. The nighttime held his father in his sleep, but the night light by his bed made the father's face light up golden so that his son outside the window could see him well. The young man's hands slid to the bottom of the window and lifted it open. He pushed himself up over the window sill and inside his bare feet met warm oak with silent recognition. All but his father's head lay buried beneath the squares of fabric treasures.

The bedroom door was open. A climbing fear began to rise up in his jaw, and right as it had nearly reached the top of his head, he had shut the door and sat down in a chair across from his father's bed. He tried to soothe his bones and took great notice to the deep lines in the face in front of him. The young man's own face was in there somewhere, and he knew it, though it seemed more difficult to find than it once was. This was not the father he remembered, and he almost began to fear that maybe his parents had moved on and this wasn't his father at all. But the man that lay in the bed across the room was no doubt his father, and was no doubt a much different man than the one he had been only a year ago.

"You need to let go of the man your father once was." The doctor had spoken this without a pinch of sympathy in his voice, like it was because of the family that the father had, had the stroke in the first place. "You should be happy he can still walk and feed himself." He had plopped a peppermint in his mouth and began to walk away as the son stated what the man was, "a son of a bitch." The doctor had heard him, but walked on, away from the sunken faces of the father's wife and son. When the father was well enough to come home, they had tried to give him a wheel chair so that he wouldn't wear out. All the father could say was, "I don't go to the blanket with a strapper." He had said it with so much resistance to the wheelchair, that the son assumed he didn't need it. For the rest of the evening, from the moment in the hospital room until the door was closed to his father's bedroom that night, the son could hear his father rambling on, seemingly catching up on the times they had missed while he had been supine in a blue hospital room. The details of that day had been blurred by the son's tears, because everything that his father had been saying seemed so important to him, yet it had made no sense at all. "Forever is great foliage, and sing to cats in the grey when nelson stomps." He said things like that. He said things like that everyday, all day long and wanted you to listen to him. And it broke the son's heart into blunt shards.

One day the son had decided that there couldn't be any way that everything the father said was nonsense, so he followed him and wrote down every word the father said in a small yellow notebook. He thought he could find some kind of code or whatnot that the father had unsystematically been using. His mother had not encouraged this, explaining over again everything the doctor had told them about the father's damage to the Wernicke's area in his brain, as though she were also trying to convince herself. The son was old enough now, nineteen, determined to do as he pleased, so he let her opinions be.

His mother had stood in the doorway for an hour or so that day. She watched the son follow the father around as he built a raised bed for gardening vegetables in the back yard. She had sobbed. From this advantage, she could imagine they were having a normal conversation; she could picture her son at every year of his life, following the father around like that, helping in the garden. But the reality was a repetitious nightmare, and at that moment, she began to set herself apart from it.

After the first day of recording all of his father's incomprehensible ramblings, the son decided he must do the same for at least a few days to be able to see any sort of patterns in the father's language. After a few days, he decided on a couple of weeks. And after a month, some of the plants began sprouting, and the days were warming, but the son decided to give up on his now hopeless idea. Recording the words of his father had made him look at the situation through a thick glass lens in which no emotion could penetrate. But now, reality had no choice but to seep back in, to cleanse his lying blood of any hope, to make his skin hard as bricks.

The last time he spoke to his father, he had begun to yell. They had both been eating bowls of corn flakes and the father had looked up at the son and smiled at him. The father had moved his hand across the small round table and placed it on his sons. The hand of the father was great and weathered, covered in wiry black hairs, and he patted the sons hand with it in a very kind gesture. He had shook his head with a smile and said, "My, my, its candies given to the water my, my." The sons left eye blurted out a single tear as he backed up his chair and walked over to his father. The father held out his arms to embrace the young mans oncoming hug to find out it wasn't a hug at all. The son had shook his father back and forth holding on to his bear like shoulders, "Candies given to the water!? Where are you at?! Where did you go! Where are you at!? Do you not realize that no one can understand anything you are trying to say? Are you a fucking idiot, an absurd fucking idiot!?" The fathers face began to melt into the deep lines that covered it and his tears flowed through them like rivers. The son let go and stood there, staring at what he had done.

The son in the chair of his father's room wipes the tears that his thoughts have made. Outside the window the sky begins to turn a lighter shade of deep blue. The son knows he must move soon, get his father and leave. He stands and moves toward the bed, each step revealing a familiar shape or crevasse in the father's furrowed face. He wonders if his father can speak intelligibly in his dreams and thinks hard about this before tapping him on the shoulder. The father's eyes open wide, blasting around the room before settling on the face of his son.

"Ssshhhh" The son holds a finger to his lips.

"You! Oh! Oh!" The father is whispering and smiling, and smiling. "Oh! You…you…oh!"

"Do you want to just go for a ride with me? Spend a day out?" The son pulls back the covers and hands his father clothes to wear before the father can answer.

"Oh, you! You! My, my. . . I, I, lost in faw the uncle . . ." The father continues on and in slow, tired movements as he hangs from the side of the bed clothing himself.

"Shh, shh, shh, you HAVE to be quiet, ok? Mom doesn't know I'm here and I don't want her to know I'm here, I came to see you, so be quiet and come on. I've got your shoes, we'll put them on - " Right then as the son was in a jumbled mess, looking for the father's shoes, rambling words that were mostly consolation for himself, the father had gotten up and headed for the door. "No!" The son's whisper almost cracks into a full volume voice and he catches his father's hand just before it can turn the knob. He feared that he had wrapped himself up into a big mess, and that if his mother found him, there would be no way he could ever see his father again. He threw a piece of ruled paper covered in large handwriting onto the bed: "Mom, I am taking Dad out for the day, I think he needs a change of scenery. I will call you and let you know when and where to pick him up. Love, Danny." The note had creased lines where the writing had disappeared in places because it had been in Danny's wallet since a week after he had left home. He had written it all the way across the country so that it could travel back with him and help him find his way.

Danny watched his father fold his enormous body through the small square outlet of the window, throwing the shoes down after him so that he himself could hop out easily. The sky was now a light shade of magenta and the trees had yellow glares on the half of their leaves that faced the sun. Their bodies moved like heavy bags of rich soil moving through the yard, passing the Camellia bush, and finally reaching the wood grain family station wagon Danny had received for his sixteenth. His father had followed him along as though he had expected to be doing this, without a single burst of incomprehensible speech. Together in the car, they began to move toward the sun that was sending beams of light into the windshield. Danny patted his father's leg, smiling large. He was almost afraid to speak, for the fear of his emotion at his fathers responses.

"You, know Dad, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to - "

"You are, are, yea. You know that most of the tinker plays with the bird and that." The look on his fathers face was more than sincere. "Can I just flow in the gully, you know like mom said go."

Danny began to fill it rise up. He swallowed it back down. "Yea, you can just flow in the gully dad, flow in the gully."

The following conversations in the two hour ride to the beach at Oak Island were much like this. The father would speak fervently and point out the window, smile at Danny, laugh hysterically, point his finger as though he were repeating some dialogue of a story, and not like before, Danny would smile, laugh, agree, and speak unintelligibly back to him. As they pulled into a small parking lot outside of the beaches dunes, the father said "Oh my" and grew a great big spread of teeth. He knew where they were, as he had been here many times before. Danny could remember more trips to Oak Island than he could count on his two hands. His birthday happened to be in the middle of July, so the father would take a day off and bring the boy to swim and dig in the sand for shells and sand dollars. When Danny was older, he would bring his guitar and they would sit on the beach singing songs together at varying pitches.

The father hopped out of the car before Danny had a chance to pull the keys out of their ignition, he saw his fathers shoes left in the floor board of the car and decided to take off his own. He took the guitar laying in the back seat and replaced it with his shoes. When he had gotten out of the car, his father stood in front of him rolling his jeans up to his knees.

"By go! You know, wow! Ha ha! Whew! Feels something you know.. I just can't… Can you? Ah!" Danny felt like his father was probably thinking something about not being able to believe how long it had been since they had been here. "Free running in long time shows no." He was confused again by his father, but somehow on the drive here he had learned to appreciate this confusion and was able to take it somewhat light heartedly. They walked together across the beach toward the water and Danny watched as the sand swallow the feet of his father. The father watched the ocean's movements, the way the sun would run across the waves like dancers in a darkened room.

Through the day they sat right at the waters mark so that their feet would get crisp with the salt from the water. Danny told stories of California, how different the people were there, how much more beautiful North Carolina was and the father would respond with meaningless words but with fluctuations in his voice that hinted toward understanding. The father would laugh and go on, and on, and Danny would try to imagine what the father would talk about. The father would say things like, "Greatly men doing fast around that streeting, marking the . . . the, well, give me that dial and Ill go down forks meaning gravy things! Hahaha!" and he'd slap his leg and shake his head while he laughed. And then Danny would begin, pretending to laugh until it turned into a full roar of both of them going at it, laughing their heads off.

When it seemed neither of them had much to say, half the day had gone by, and Danny began to play familiar tunes on his guitar. The father would watch him carefully and then dig his toes in the ground. He'd bob his head, and then he did something very peculiar. The father sang. As he began, Danny stopped singing himself, listening to his father with a look as though he had been slapped across his face. But the father took no notice at all, and was very happy to sing the tune. He made a circular motion with his hands, much like the motion of the waves in the ocean before them. Danny knew he was supposed to do this, he knew that something was going to happen on this day. It had been a year since his father's stroke, and 20 years since his birth, and there had aught to be something special about that. The father's mouth hung wide, singing the words of Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind, and you could see it in his eyes that he felt freedom. Danny's voice began at a verse with his fathers and for fear that this was a single miracle, Danny continued to play the song without worrying when to stop. The father didn't seem to mind, and they sang and watched the seagulls fly over the sea and swoop down, and eat fish, and swoop down, and eat fish.