Muriel

A short story by Bryan Dobson

This issue’s Critique Corner: See the author’s bio at the end of the story regarding how to contact him to comment on his story.

It is hard to say how long it has been since Muriel has heard the voice of another human being. The last time she thought about it she suspected it had been a few weeks, at least. As Muriel sat on her blue satin pillow next to the window watching the rainfall she wished for another voice aside from her own. Perhaps Harold would telephone and ask how she was, but that was just wishful thinking and nothing more. Her son Harold had not called in more than five years, yet every time the phone would ring she held onto a glimmer of hope it might be him. Three years ago during a rare telephone call with her brother she had found out where he was. Harold had found himself a job managing a fancy new restaurant on a long pier in Florida. She suspected he was doing just fine. Harold had always loved people and he always loved the sun and sea. He would be happy there as there was little for him to smile about in Vancouver.

Muriel tried her best to look through the rain but her eyes are not once they once were years ago. There had been a time when she could have shot a marble of a post from a distance.

As far back as her memory would recall her father had loved guns. He polished and cleaned his favorites daily, stroking them like a lover and purring to them like they were his babies. Muriel sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor in her yellow dress would stare up at him awestruck. Her father never said a word during his gun cleaning rituals, which usually lasted a few hours. Many long hours had been spent with her teaching exactly how to handle and shoot a gun safely. Muriel learned every inch of her gun and was able to strip it down, clean it, and reassemble it before she ever fired her first live round. Now, at age sixty-five, she was lucky to see more than a few feet out into the rain.

All life on her block had seemed to have come to a complete standstill. There were not even any cars on the street as far as she could hear, which was rather well. God had, so far, been kind enough that if he was to start taking her sight from her he would leave her hearing alone. The lack of sound made her feel more alone than ever. At least with the sounds of life carrying on outside of her world was some comfort to her old bones.

Why do you look so sad China Doll?

“You know why I am sad, please don’t make me explain. You know how I hate that,” Muriel said to the voice and rested her forehead against the cool glass.

Why do you do this to yourself? You sit in front of that window day in and day out yet you cannot see anything. Why not listen to one of your records or play a book on tape. You know you like those. Just please dear do not sit there like that all day. It breaks my heart.

Muriel was not listening to him, forgetting all about her earlier wishes for the sound of another voice. Instead, she focused more intently on the rain. Finally the sound of a car, likely one of those boxy mini-vans (her son had told her about them in one of his last visits) that everyone was buying lately. The only car she had ever owned was a Cadillac, the same make and model her father had driven. Her father had loved Cadillacs almost as much as he had guns, so Muriel loved them as well. It was always that way, her father’s likes when she was a little girl quickly became her own and his enemies were always hers too. They were inseparable from the age of four until she turned eighteen and he passed away suddenly. The doctors could not give them a clear reason why he had died. All they could say with any certainty is that he did not suffer when he went. Muriel thought that her father had missed her mother too much to continue on anymore, constantly wishing she were still there. She had read the statistics when couples reach a certain age and one passes away, that the other generally follows soon after. Living alone and thinking of her husband every hour of every day, that scenario never left her mind.

I can see that tear you know, you cannot hide these things from me. The voice from behind her spoke again.

“It is my house I am allowed to cry as much as I want to,” Muriel said, sounding rather indignant. After all she had worked very hard to have a home while others she knew moldered in old folk homes.

This is far from a party, if you happen to be crying about that, but if it is your party. I guess you can cry if you want to.

She thought she could hear soft laughter following his comment.

“Very funny. Now please dear, no more jokes today.”

Muriel sighed and looked away from the window to the voice, at the body of her husband who not have been there but was. “You look well I guess, all things considered.”

All things considered, yes I do” He smiled and she looked into his soft gray eyes with a clarity that was impossible. The rest of the room was its typical blur but her late husband was clear as day and crisp as a photograph. He was a ruggedly handsome man, very stocky with extraordinarily broad shoulders. She had noticed him back in college from a seat thirty rows up at a football game. Her college had been very much a football college as it was all that mattered to most of the students. The stadium on game nights was always filled right to the rafters with screaming, hollering intoxicated fans.

How she had been so blind not to see him until then she never understood and they would joke about this throughout their marriage. Vincent would laugh so hard sometimes that he would double over in his chair saying he had decided to turn on his blinker that day. Whatever it was, blinker or not, she had seen him the moment he stepped out onto the field that day. He was much larger than the other players, who she later found out all affectionately called him ‘the bear’.

She had asked a girl sitting beside her who the large man was near the bench. There was just something about him that even from a distance had deeply intrigued her. At the time it was only budding curiosity. It took another year for it to evolve into something as potent as love. The girl beside her had looked at Muriel like she was from another planet and told her it was the bear! That and where the hell had she been for the past three months of the season?  It was a valid question as after all she had been to every game so far that season.

She had found out that Vincent had been just that, a bear, when she met him a week later behind the school near the faculty parking lot. Only he had no aggression in him off the field and she saw that his eyes were much too small for his large cranium. It truly gave him the look a stuffed, chubby bear. However Muriel had seen the streak in him, the kernel inside that allowed him to explode on the field and tear a hole through anyone in his way.

The man had been stubborn as well — so very damn stubborn as most men are by their very nature, she supposed. It had been a struggle to win his eyes and a long battle to get his heart. If her father had taught her anything, and she felt that even after a lifetime of her own experiences that he had taught her a lot, it was to never give up.  Muriel did not give up and another year rolled by when she finally got her prize.

“Are you putting on weight again?” Muriel asked the portly wavering image of her husband. After graduating from college, he had weighed in at just over three hundred pounds. This was taking into account that for a man of his size and stature, two hundred and twenty-five is average.

Me? Vincent asked and ran a hand through his ash-colored hair, what was left of it anyway. I will eat as much as I please! You know that as much as anyone that no doctor ever did manage to tell me what to do.

“Yes dear. You were thickskulled all the way and it got you far it did,” Muriel said, now standing a few feet from her husband.

Yes, Vincent said, letting his head hang down like a bulldog accepting scorn from its master.

“Oh come over here love, I am sorry,” Muriel said and walked toward her husband until she came into contact with the wall beside the fireplace. She looked back to see that he was still standing there and saw a tear in his eye. They each stood together in silence and looked at each other hands at their sides like department store mannequins. The room around them might have looked like a painting if you were to have stood back against the window and looked at them.

There came a knock at Muriel’s door a few minutes later, which received no immediate answer.

Harold stood outside in the rain wondering how long it would take his mother to answer the door this time. It had been some time since he had visited, much too long, but even back then it took her a year to respond. He continued to knock awhile longer, then tried the door, which was not locked.

Harold stood in the doorway like a deer caught in headlights. He was afraid to move. Never in his entire life had he ever known his mother not to lock the door behind her. It had just become a habit to lock the door when he came home and to triple check that it was locked whenever he left. The fact that at this time of night, at least eight-thirty or so, and in this weather that her door was unlocked meant only one thing.

In his mind he could clearly see her lying in the middle of the living room floor. Her eyes opened wide staring up at her carnival glass sculptures that littered its landscape. Many years had pointlessly gone by without contacting her, even so much as a few minute telephone call never happened. He would have very much liked to have a solid explanation, but he did not. The rain was soaking through his clothes as he stood on the threshold staring into the dimly lit front hall. Soft light streamed from the living room as well as the sound of what was likely a radio.

As Harold took his first cautious step into the house, he immediately felt like turning around and going back home. Whatever it was he was going to find, he felt would be easier to handle if he received it as a phone call rather than in person. His eyes looked to the living room to the door and back again. Harold was about to turn around when he heard voices coming from the living room.

“My dear bear, now look who is crying.”

It was the voice of his mother.

Then came another voice he had not heard in a long time. His father’s. And, while it had its old familiar edges, it sounded very old.

I do not know where to start love. Too many things to say.

“We have all the time in the world,” he heard his mother reply.

My China Doll.

Harold walked into the living room feeling more frightened than he ever had before in his life. Everything up until that point in his later years would seem nothing more than a blur. He saw his mother sitting beside the window with her eyes closed and a smile across her burgundy-colored lips, a small brown teddy bear with tiny blue eyes clutched tightly in her arms. He could see no one else in the room or signs that anyone had ever been there.

“Mother?”

He asked quietly at first, not really hearing himself. “Who were you talking to?”

She gave no reply or even turned her head and opened her eyes. In fact, she seemed to be perfectly still, like an old doll or a mannequin from a department store.

Copyright © 1999-2008 Bryan Dobson
All rights reserved.

Author bio:

Bryan Dobson aka PeeJay is an author from North Vancouver, British Columbia Canada, who says that “once I manage to finish editing my first novel, I may make it somewhere. Any day I can go through less than seven cans of coke to make it through another two pages of text is a good day.” Peejay spends much of his time online in the #Authors on the Undernet chat channel, where he is an op. You can learn more about Bryan at his Web site. Bryan welcomes your comments about his story; send them to him via email.

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