Healed

Fiction by Krista Kenny of Cerro Coso Community College
2014 Met Awards - Honorable Mention for College Fiction

“I’m healed,” she says. She sits in front of me smiling a smile I have never before seen on her lips. This is the first time I’ve seen my mom in a week. The plan had been for her to stay in rehab for much longer, but after several unexplainable days of neither pain nor withdrawal symptoms, the doctors had no reason to keep her. When she had told me on the phone that she wasn’t in pain anymore, I cried. I have been praying for this day since I was old enough to understand the concept, but I had never imagined that such a surreal event would have such a mundane setting: sitting in our house—in a chair I had sat in before on so many dull days—hearing that everything had changed. It didn’t seem real. But sitting in front of her today, in the same chair, it is impossibly real. I can hardly get a word in edgewise with all her stories of rehab: the friends she made, the food she ate, the bafflement of the doctors when she never entered withdrawal for the Oxycontin, and then stopped feeling the pain of the fibromyalgia altogether. She’s catching up really, for all the words that through the years the pain had wrested from her mind and strangled in her throat. My mom likes to talk, I realize for the first time in my nineteen years with her. My mom likes to laugh. Her laugh sounds alien to my ears though, which have so often heard her cry. Her smile is foreign to my eyes, which have become so used to her grimace. The sense of dissimilarity is overpowering. She starts to talk about all of the things we can do together now that she’s healed, all of the things she has to make up for as a mother. Her pretty words fall on me like half-unwanted caresses. My memories persist in dragging me back to all the other words I’ve heard from her, words so often filled with the venom of her pain, and all the hate and anger that had no other convenient target. I don’t blame her for those words. I’d long since gotten in the habit of ignoring the pain when it decided to speak through her. But this mother—the one that isn’t fighting the pain for words—she doesn’t seem like mine. Her arms, so strong and sure when she embraced me, aren’t the wary, trembling arms that have gingerly hugged me so many times before. The manner of her every minute gesture is strange to me without the weight of the pain dragging at her limbs. The adult in me is happy of course and reminds me over and over that this is my real mother; all the years before this were the façade. But there is a child in me screaming, screaming that the smiling, laughing person in front of me is an imposter, a mimic come to live the life my mom had wanted. Her strange laughter seems a mockery of all the years my mother had lived with the pain. It had become no more bearable but all the more familiar. In being given the thing I had begged God for my entire life, I feel somehow robbed of my mommy. But I cannot let it show. My feelings would hurt her, and I have been too thoroughly conditioned to never do anything that would hurt her. So I talk with her, and laugh with her, and put on a smile that I have never before worn on my lips. My mind tells me that God is present in this, but my heart tells me that he—and my mother—are further from me.

Montmartre, Paris

Poem by Janace Tashjian of Cerro Coso Community College
2014 Met Awards - Honorable Mention for College Poetry

She wept
and weeds grew around her feet
the black cat leapt

Words inept
granite cloak to hold her seat
she wept

Hooded eyes as shadows crept
across each stone, hide ... retreat
the black cat leapt

Endless mourning; below he slept
above, scorching freezing sleet
She wept

Barren bracken o'er the crypt
ravens swoop and caw conceit
the black cat leapt

Eternal. Wind swept
oh beauty! The bell tolls "Silence"!
she wept
the black cat leapt

An Irrelevant Edge

Fiction by Aubrey Elliott of Cerro Coso Community College
2014 Met Awards - Honorable Mention for College Fiction

“I wasted the best years of my life with you,” she said bitterly as the conversation escalated into a fight.

“You gave me the best years of my life,” he replied with an underlying meaning he knew she would mistake.

“You’ve held me back from the life I wanted to live,” she said missing his point.

“All I’ve ever done was try to better your life anyway I could.” True as it was, he knew it left no impact.

“Everything you say is a lie,” she said, perfectly aware of the nerve she would hit.

“What will make you happy?” He asked feeling obligated to do so.

“He makes me happy,” with that she unleashed the true cause of their withering marriage. It struck him speechless even though he had known it for a while. He didn’t need to know a name or any details once she confirmed his suspicions.

For their son’s sake, he would have tolerated the treachery, but he knew she wouldn’t be gratified by merely a new escort. She wanted the freedom to indulge in the vices he tried to save her from.

He was mournful that his marriage would have to end in such an unscrupulous way. Her selfish lust was an affliction on him and he resented her for it; but he held back form retaliation. He wasn’t ashamed by what his wife’s inconsiderate actions would reflect on himself; rather he knew her actions would leave a more devastating impact on others at stake. So when he was asked why his marriage was ending, he would say “I wasn’t making her happy,” to distract from, but not lie about, the real reason.

He kept her guilty actions out of the picture and let her take half of everything he worked for in the divorce. But in the custody battle for their son, against his conscience, he exposed her dependency on entangling types of escape. He tried not to stain her image as much as he could, even though she had already done so to herself. He tried to make the court hearings and the arguments that followed them as painless as possible. She made his attempts at being passive difficult; not seeing his motives for being so distant, and would spark an argument, after every hearing, spitting painful retorts at him, while he held his breath. And after the final verdict, she privately lashed out at him for what she perceived as delusive nobility.

“You should have just exposed my affair; half of your hard work isn’t worth your smug stance. It’s just like you to try and keep your higher ground.”

He tried to refrain from giving the impression of pretention but there was no better way to express the honesty of his motives, “I didn’t do it for me,” he told her.

Scornfully she argued, “I don’t need you to spare me.”

He took his son from her arms. And as she kissed her son goodbye, he told her “I didn’t do it for you either.” And he walked away without holding his breath anymore.

Snow Walk

Poem by Katy Harvey of Cerro Coso Community College
2014 Met Awards - Honorable Mention for College Poetry

spring snow in Tahoe
pitching pinecones, gentle wind.
diggin' earth this day.