Friday, March 29, 2024: Susan H. Evan's "Displaced"

Bio: Susan H. Evans lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and writes memoir, poetry, and reflective fiction. She is published in many online, as well as print journals, and magazines. 

Displaced 

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life. -- Jack Kerouac

    The canvas jaws of the sodden suitcase open wide, taking a big bite out of the large rock, the rest of it inflating and deflating like a shabby accordion. Although the water current -- brisk, swirling, and cold –pushes against the case, the baggage clings like a jilted lover.

    I wrench the case from the surface of the gray boulder, flops it face down in winter’s sparse grass, and expose it to the overcast day’s hollow eyes. The case seems to gasp, to pant, to sigh. The creek trickles out of its seams, pockets, and tight corners.

    A day passes. I return to the scene of the case. It lies still, out of context, bluer than the sky, dispirited as its faded airport tag,

    A vagrant holed up at the creek until a landowner cleared away the kudzu curtains. I imagine the hobo crouching in the twiggy underbrush only to be dispossessed once the weed whackers destroyed his secret walls, exposing him to the prying eyes of car headlights. Was the suitcase his?

    But the creek passes by a seedy Econo Lodge two blocks away next door to the Chinese Buffet.

    What if a down-on-his luck door-to-door salesman, weary of the Greyhound circuit, walked from the depot on West Market Street to the north side of town? Footsore, an endangered species, only his suitcase full of undesired wares and a change of suits, threw what he had left in the Chinese buffet trash receptacle and hurled the suitcase in the swirling stream?

    Or, maybe an alcoholic Vietnam War veteran, sleeping on cardboard bed behind Target’s recycling bin, propped the baggage next to the dumpster and a great North wind swooped up the case and tossed it into the creek the way a child tosses a ball into the air?

    I search the root-exposed, stubbly stream bank for clues, but only find an empty mulch bag, a Pabst Blue Ribbon can, a small undergrowth of honeysuckle, and a patch of bright green watercress.

    This forlorn blue canvas sojourner, damp, directionless, and funky-smelling, appears to have no future and no past.

    I wheel the case across the dormant garden, over the brick footbridge, past the broken Blue Spruce and the blueberry bushes, to the dumpster. In the dragging, a silver padlock dangles like a heavy necklace pendant around the handle. What previous treasure warranted a lock?

    I wonder if all our treasures spill and vanish at journey’s end. And I question whether life just carries us drifters, peddlers, and dreamers, until we end up against a final inescapable hard place? And I wonder if all creeks in the world dead-end to a dry stillness.

    I leave the case in a bed of sleeping irises next to the dumpster, no heart for ending its story just yet.

    The World Turns

    Using Granny’s razor-sharp, worn-thin knife, I slice big ruby tomatoes. Drops of red nectar spot mayonnaise that’s spread over white bread slices. My little sister and I carry paper plates and sweaty Tupperware glasses to an old card table shaded by two scaly-barked Black Cherry trees.

    Dressed in 1950’s netted hats and faded adult print dresses, we nibble our sandwiches and sip grape Kool aid. Birds chirp in the tree tops, and dark blood-red fruit dangles in beaded clusters. Tomato juice runs down our arms; we push up dress cuffs.

    Sheltered by leafy boughs, Betty and I play act soap opera actors as easily as the old musty dresses flowed over our small bodies.

    Nebulous images of lovers and husbands flicker through our minds, endless streams of plots and subplots airing on the black and white RCA while Mama irons clothes. In cut-off blue jeans and pale, short-sleeved shirt, her legs blue with broken veins, she stands mesmerized by Bert’s drunken husband’s latest dark act, or her daughter-in-law’s cheating ways, or her light- haired son’s gambling problem, and by all the hush-hush about Mata being eat up with cancer.

    All this drama, we swallow as innocently as tomato sandwiches and imbibe unknowingly as Kool aid, my nine-year-old sister and me, accepting stories whole, lamenting and shaking our heads at the chaos, the folly, and the insanity of the adult world. We remain unconscious for a few more years that the grownup world will ever touch us.

    Too soon, the juice of the tomatoes, like red ink, eventually crosses out the remaining days of our August summers. As quickly as the half-hours of Mama’s soap operas, our childhoods end. The red wheels of Time, like those sweet tomatoes of sunlit days, leave painful tracks over our soft white skin, taking us further and further away from our young selves towards the addictions, compulsions, infidelities, and the suffering of the adult world.

© 2024 Susan H. Evans