by Joe Woodward
A mother, an elephant’s gray belly sliced pink, green sludge spilling out, grasses half-digested puddling in the midday sun. Violet shuddered remembering it from the television. The men waving their machetes over their heads. Somewhere in a jungle this was happening, or an abandoned zoo on the edge of a municipal park. Violet came and went in her thoughts, pulling on her gray sweatpants, and straightening the shoulders of her jean jacket.
A dank odor floated out and down through the air-conditioning. Rottenness. Violet turned in pigeon steps to see. Maybe it was those half-digested grasses puddling in her mind? Behind her, Mrs. Winston from the building wrestled her pink ballet skirt from the band of her black knee-highs.
“Are you quite right, Mrs. Winston?” Violet asked.
“Where to start.”
“Are you sick with something?”
Mrs. Winston continued to pull and curse.
“I’ve been fine myself,” Violet said, flashing a half-broken front tooth.
“Violence?”
“Violet.”
“Violet, where do you stand on the birds? That’s something interesting to talk about.” Mrs. Winston asked.
“The birds into the windows?”
“A virus, or have they been poisoned?”
“It’s the reflective glass panels. Glare reduction. Energy efficiency.”
“Self-murder, but why?”
Violet shook her head, no.
“They call us old birds,” Mrs. Winston finished.
The two women rode into town on the same bus. They live in Building One on different floors. Violet goes to dinner with the red group at five, and Mrs. Winston with maroon at six. They see each other in the butterfly garden sometimes, Wednesdays at Save Democracy. Neither of them scrapbook nor sew. Mrs. Winston flirts with the male nurses, which she insists push her around in a wheelchair even though she walks fine. Violet admires defiance. Adjacency and small jealousies are the root of their friendship.
“May I call you…”
“Mrs. Winston.”
“Aurora. That’s me.”
“Violet Aurora.”
Mrs. Winston whispered, “I’d go with Violence.”
“It isn’t bad.”
They both smiled.
“Are you childless? You look like you might be. I have a son. He’s a technologist, rich for a while and then divorced. Busy, busy, busy, but doing what? He pays for the apartment, otherwise…,” Mrs. Winston said.
“My father’s father was rich, then my father. My mother. Now me. It’s burdensome in its way.”
“No children, though?” Mrs. Winston asked.
“Not anymore,” Violet answered.
From the other side of the bank lobby the women’s bus driver wagged his index finger at them, condemnation for something, shifting his lumpy body in the fat velvet chair blinking toward a nap. Neither of the women remembered his name. He was the On Duty today. There was always a new one. He took them into town to get their blue envelopes. Mrs. Winston called him George, after her least favorite dead husband of which there were three.
The teller line lurched and lingered, so they talked about the technologist, about richness, about what Violet meant when she said “anymore.” They understood they could say anything to each other and no one would pay them any mind. Two old women talking in a bank lobby are just gases belching from an imaginary swamp.
After they had exhausted children and politics and birds, Violet fixed her stare on the man in front of her in the teller line. She ran her thin, boney fingers through the air as if playing a harp, tracing the man’s wiggly spine poking up from under his baby blue sweater. Violet nodded to Mrs. Winston, raising both hands as if to ask a question with them.
“Various stages of calcification. Conical spheres. Painful, but not contagious,” Mrs. Winston said.
Violet shrugged. “Mystery solved,” she said.
Each of them battled the mysteries of life in old age. Violet was increasingly trailed by shadows, little beasts that came and went without reason, black crows flying between the ground and the sun. In the clinic, they gave her pills for it. Mrs. Winston started to hear things, voices, songs, women talking; her whisperings reminded her she was never really alone. They both enjoyed various forms of companionship, but did not miss it when it was gone.
“It was just after the fires, the birds into the windows, everywhere!”
“Yes, years ago, now,” Mrs. Winston said.
“Did you have dogs then?”
“Two.”
“They both went?”
“I couldn’t even save myself. The neighbor came for me.”
Violet nodded and Mrs. Winston turned away.
They waited together for another hour, the rest of it in silence. When they got their blue envelopes, they stuffed them into their matching backpacks and headed into the street. They were allowed one hour in town on bank day. At the first corner they came to, Violet pointed to a set of concrete stairs leading to the beach. They bobbed and weaved into the wind.
The shore was mostly deserted, except for the people who lived there in rusted out school buses, or those burrowed into the cliffs. The air was wet and cold. Just beyond the black waves, Violet pointed out a sailboat, half-submerged, its hull eating a rock. Further out, the ragged teeth of oil rigs against the gray sky.
“I’ve always wanted to go to Iceland. Have you ever been?” Mrs. Winston asked.
“You better hurry.”
“There’s a black sand beach there where a melting glacier spits giant chunks of ice into the sea, and then the sea spits them back worn down, little boulders, diminished.”
“I don’t think so,” Violet said.
“Ice diamonds.”
“That seems like the internet,” Violet said.
“I’ve seen it in photographs, in a book.”
“A book?”
Thinking and walking, Mrs. Winston occasionally looked over at Violet and wondered if the two of them weren’t becoming something entirely new.
“Children are difficult, like geometry, algebra. Mine wears T-shirts and yoga pants all day and he’s 62 years old. He goes barefoot to the grocery store. He loves his dog, but doesn’t speak to his sister because she protests in front of the police station.”
“Ordinary troubles in extraordinary times,” Violet said.
“The dog has a nanny.”
“A live-in?” Violet asked. She laughed.
“In the pool house!”
“The pool is a good idea, when the fires come,” Violet said.
“Optimizations. Effective altruism. A dog nanny!”
“A bit desperate.”
Mrs. Winston nodded. They kept walking down the beach.
“Trimethylaminuria, what you smelled back in the bank,” Mrs. Winston said.
“How do you mean?”
“Dead fish. Uncommon, but not unheard of. Both my parents carried the gene. Stale Fish Syndrome.”
“Are you some kind of scientist, or something?” Violet asked.
“I retired from the Post Office.”
“I thought it was the television from last night, stuck in my head,” Violet said.
Mrs. Winston shrugged.
“Were you in management? You seem bossy.”
“What about you?” Mrs. Winston asked.
“I had a shop.”
“A shop?”
“Sweets. Candy.”
Mrs. Winston talked and Violet listened. Violet understood the words on their own, but not what she was telling her. They walked and talked and looked out at the sea. Further down the beach, a yellow fog rolled up on the sands. A large brown shadow-figure appeared. As they got closer, they could see a man with a sword throwing himself into the shadow, again and again. The women stopped when they reached him.
Mrs. Winston said, “The warm water, maybe noise from the oil rigs. Confused the poor dear. There are probably others. Pilot Whale. Only a matter of time for this one.”
“You’re not Jesus Christ. You’re not even an angel,” the man said.
“You shouldn’t eat the meat,” Mrs. Winston said.
“You’re not God,” he said.
The women turned away and kept walking up the beach. The man cursed behind them.
“The last time we spoke, he was going on and on about some airport lounge,” Mrs. Winston said.
“You’re son?”
“I thought he was joking, I might have even giggled. It was intricate, almost biblical. The business class lounge was closed for repairs, so he had to go to the other one. Cold noodles, runny eggs. He was enraged. I finally hung up. I wasn’t that good at being a mother. It’s possible to lose interest along the way. Are we to be faulted into eternity?” Mrs. Winston asked.
“When the awful, awful happens, you understand the universe is accidental,” Violet said.
“A crosswalk is there for a reason,” Mrs. Winston said.
“Reasons are useless things, too.”
Mrs. Winston didn’t disagree. They walked and listened to the police sirens come and go above the cliffs. Were they coming for them? The waves got louder as they got closer to the last jetty.
“Come and go. We all come and go,” Mrs. Winston said.
They watched the seagulls skim the water.
“The Earth turns counterclockwise, isn’t that interesting,” Mrs. Winston went on.
The giant pelicans in a curved line.
“Is the future in front of us and the past behind, or the other way around?” She finished.
“The future is a question, not a place. The future is theoretical,” Violet said.
Mrs. Winston nodded.
“For most of life you’re dumb as a board. That’s just the truth,” Violet said.
“And so happy.”
“One golden sunset after the other.”
“The little miracles that appear out of nowhere, now and then, a young person needs this. How else does one live?” Mrs. Winston said.
When they reached the jetty, a group of teenage boys came running out of a cave and quickly circled them. It was like a scene in a new children’s book full of old lessons.
“Look at these old purses. This is our beach. This is our land!” one of the boys yelled.
There were seven of them. Their clothes were torn and ragged, strings and plastic bags woven and tied in knots. The boy pretending to be the leader wore a broken cowboy hat. Not one of them wore shoes.
“What’s your name?” Mrs. Winston asked the boy.
“Fuck off old lady,” he said.
“Where just passing through. We’re headed there,” Mrs. Winston said.
She pointed across the deep turn in the shoreline to the cliffs in the distance.
“The New Country?” the boy asked.
“Yes.”
“You are fucking crazies, then.”
“My name is Violence.”
As she spoke, one of the boys moved on Violet. He grabbed the neck of her jean jacket and flung her backward onto the sand. The boys howled and Violet let out a scream, surprised. Another boy kicked sand on her. When he did, Mrs. Winston slowly put down her backpack and pulled out a small black revolver with a pearl handle from the front pocket. She held it above her head and pulled the trigger. The boys stood still, stunned.
“Do you really need to bother us?” Mrs. Winston asked.
The boys slowly backed up, widening their circle, slithering sideways like little crabs. They made jokes about the two old purses, but more quietly now. They grabbed their crotches and slapped their backs and turned toward the cave they came out of.
Mrs. Winston picked up Violet off the sand. The women walked on.
“He struck me, the boy, as if he’s enjoyed too many meringues,” Mrs. Winston said.
Violet agreed.
“Do you have a favorite?” Violet asked.
“Lemon drops.”
“I could have guessed that. Saltwater taffy, strawberry, or peach,” Violet said.
“Pulls at the dental work,” said Mrs. Winston, her finger in her mouth.
Once the women reached the jetty, Mrs. Winston went first. She hiked her pink skirt above her knees with one hand and gripped her two leather sandals with the other. The black jagged rocks glimmered in the gray sunlight. Violet followed.
“Nothing is more surprising than the next moment, is it?” Violet said.
At the flat outcropping at water’s edge, they stood in silence. The sky brightened to a smile. Violet laughed at it, quietly at first, then let everything go. They were taking a journey and going nowhere, really. Of course, they both knew there was no other country, no New Country, only this streaming gray sunlight at the edge of the ocean with no center and no edges. Where they stood.
Joe Woodward is the author of ALIVE INSIDE THE WRECK: A Biography of Nathanael West, and a two-time winner of a Los Angeles Press Award. His work has appeared in Passages North, Notre Dame Review, New Ohio Review, Brick and elsewhere.