Jean-Luke Swanepoel's Blog

For years my mother lived in a three-bedroom house, a bougainvillea bleeding blossoms in the yard. It was a house with a number—225—and a street with a name, in a town that fit snugly within the triangle formed by three intersecting interstates. This town had a hospital, and the doctors there said that cancer was blooming like a field of wildflowers in her chest. Three bedrooms and a bathtub became mere theory before long: the staircase, now precipitous, became insuperable. In theory there was a street, and in theory there was a town; in theory there was light and color beyond the incessant hospital rounds. When her breathing became shallow and her legs turned ornamental, my father began to carry her up the staircase in his arms, and if she seemed surprised at the sheer size of the place, it was only because of the endless corners against which tender and tumorous limbs and digits might be bumped.

What about the plants? The bougainvillea, the aloe, and the orange tree, which—sincere efforts notwithstanding—never yielded any fruit. They were all in pots—cerulean, puce—because we no longer had a yard, having scaled down from the house with three bedrooms and a lawn whose hollows we could not manage to fill. Not with laughter, or with tears except my own, and not for a lack of trying. It was a house which—as my mother-in-law liked to proclaim—simply longed to be a home, and we failed to deliver. Where some couples watched their children grow, we—you know, that couple—came to content ourselves with watching oranges ripen on a fucking patio. Some parents dreamed of futures for the fruit of their loins, and we—the non-parents—dreamed of slicing and devouring the fruit of our labor.

When I was five and fretful, my uncle was the kindest man I knew. Until I watched him run over a dead raccoon on that road to the mall on the outskirts of town. During summer it was a road through a field of green stalks, but it was winter and the fields were barren. He swerved firmly to make contact with the pile of blood and bones which passed like a hiccup beneath the wheels.

When I was seven, my uncle did the same again, this time with the carcass of a squirrel. Two crows were picking bloody bits of pulp from the road, and they scattered only briefly at the approach of his truck. We were on our way to the mall again, this time to see Finding Nemo.

“Why do you always do that?” I asked. My uncle played dumb. “I mean, what you just did with the steering wheel.” But my uncle merely fiddled with the radio, as if I’d objected to the song.

The butter stained our fingertips and kernels crunched between our teeth, and squirrel bones were on my mind for much of the afternoon.

We were on our way home when my uncle said, “Never be afraid of a little blood and guts.”

When I was fifteen, I became a vegetarian, and at a Sunday barbecue my uncle said, “I’m proud of you, kid.” I didn’t laugh in his face or mention the influence of his bloody entertainments. One of his colleagues had died at 3PM that Friday aged only thirty-three. Aneurysm. The man had had a family, three children and a wife, and my uncle became doleful at the mention of this detail. Why wasn’t my uncle married yet? He was handsome and could have his pick of women.

The house was a pigpen when she bought it in the forties. Doors falling off, roof caving in. She’d spent the thirties falling in love, not with a man—her husband had had an affair and she a nervous breakdown—but with a landscape. Red cliffs, and purple hills, and scrubby green cedars. Her husband died an old man in 1946. She buried his ashes at Lake George, where he could hear the water run, and retreated permanently to the desert after that. War had left the whole world in disrepair, and even this corner of it, remote as it seemed, was not left untouched.

The house wasn’t a Spanish house, or an Indian house, or a Mexican house. It had adobe walls, viga-and-latilla ceilings, and a hand-hewn wooden ladder climbing to the roof, which looked down on a central courtyard. On the picture windows she’d insisted, because an artist needed light. The doors all clung firmly to their hinges now—one in particular featured in several of her paintings—and the ceiling, with the addition of the skylights, gave merely the impression of having fallen in. It was a New Mexican house on a sedate Sunday evening. Her house. Home.

Her younger sister had gone back to Beverly Hills, and except for Cook, who hardly seemed to draw breath, the artist once more had the place to herself. As much as she loved her sister, the woman chattered constantly and her departure was never anything but a great relief. But the house wouldn’t remain quiet for very long, as she was generous with her time, and the next visitor was always only a letter or a polite request away. Soon there would be some photographer—she seemed to attract them like flies—stalking her with a camera. Where were the days when she had posed nude for her husband, her breasts hanging like ripe fruit for all the world to see?

Nobody would think of taking such photographs of her now. Now they photographed her on her morning walk, her evening walk, sitting with her rock collection, or climbing the ladder to the roof. She might pose in front of the chimney or while writing letters, while brushing the dog, or standing in front of the white skull of a cow, a horse, a ram on the wall. Portraits of the Artist as an Old Woman. She adored skulls, bones, stones, and shells, but she was far from any ocean now.

Guests she tolerated graciously, but an unannounced visitor brought out the worst in her. She wasn’t often in need of a plumber, but when she was, she expected a single individual to report for the job. The last one had shown up with a friend, not a colleague but some tagalong. While the plumber fixed the kitchen sink, his friend whistled, very badly, and asked to use the bathroom with the house’s water still turned off. Cook had taken fiendish pleasure in directing him to the outhouse in the yard. “Watch out for rattlesnakes,” she’d added cruelly, to her own delight.

* * *

It was Monday morning, and the moment Cook showed up she would express the usual surprise at seeing her employer still breathing. She, artist and old woman, cooked for herself on Sundays, which was Cook’s day off. She was no bad cook—bright soups and hearty breads were her specialty—but the ingredients had to be fresh, and so, with Santa Fe fifty miles distant, she’d long since planted her own garden. Goat milk she procured from neighboring Franciscans, and one of her sisters sent walnuts and dates. She employed a local gardener so as not to spend whole days pulling weeds, which would leave little time for painting or for anything else, such as getting her old muscles massaged on the third Monday of every month. It was one of the few extravagances in which she indulged—before the sun was up and Cook was back on duty...

Doctor Hornicker adjusted his instrument and examined the eye again. He hadn’t been mistaken: within the dilated pupil he could see the universe laid bare. He considered whether it might be a trick of the light, and was conscious of the lunch that still lingered on his breath.

“It’s perfectly natural for our eyes to weaken as we age,” he said to the young man who sat facing him. The man had reddish hair and a band of freckles across his nose and might have been twenty or forty, his pale complexion made it difficult to tell. Doctor Hornicker was nearly sixty, and for most of his life had lived alone; to love was a burden in the world as he now knew it.

The man, Phineas Redmond, said that he was a turbine technician on one of the wind farms powering the electrical grid, and that without his eyesight he was as good as dead. All of Doctor Hornicker’s patients knew this to be true, but very few had the mettle to remark on it.

Doctor Hornicker once more assured the man that there was nothing to fear—he said this to all of his patients—and for the first time took notice of the irises surrounding the dark pools; anyone else would have thought them magnificent, but their colors, peacock colors—blue-green and copper—paled in comparison with the unexpected splendor of long-forbidden celestial bodies.

“Look up. Left. Good.” There was no mistaking Centaurus A, familiar to him at once. He had known the names of many celestial bodies as a boy, but since the last labor rebellion half a century ago, the stars were forbidden to the working class and the streets were flooded nightly with a dense and artificial fog. That the stars belonged to everyone, and that in theory anyone could reach for them, was an idea too dangerous to be allowed to flourish...

I. Recording the beginning of a relationship is easy: the first date, the first kiss, the first fumbling blowjob in the Jeep on the roof of that parking garage with Roxette playing softly on the radio. The first I love you, a not unfamiliar phrase, but come our first anniversary we have to count backwards simply to settle on the date. Only the truly precious couples mark the first argument, and the next memorable argument is the last argument we’ll ever have. The argument that ends all arguments, after which we, should we ever argue again, will be nothing more than two people who fucked for a while, perhaps lived together for a time, arguing. But not yet.

II. I steal lemons and you make lemonade. It isn’t this many lemons, or this much juice, to which this much water is added, and this much sugar to that. As many lemons as I bring home, and as much juice as they contain. Stolen from around the corner where the yellow trumpet flowers grow, and that man burned his hand shooting fireworks on the Fourth. Or else from the driveway halfway down the block while teetering on a jungle-green garbage bin. Warm water from the sink until the color is just right, and sugar until the mixture tastes sweet enough..

III. The woman on the cableway asked if we were brothers. Friends my grandmother tried her best to explain. Visiting from America. (Before my first trip to Cleveland you liked to joke that you had traveled three times across the globe for me while I hadn’t crossed the country for you even once.) It was the woman and her young grandson, and the three of us—you, my grandmother, and myself—on a painful ascent up the side of that mountain. We don’t make it ugly is what my grandmother said on that very first trip, meaning that we never touch, or kiss, or cling in public. I did not tell her that we had learned not to, and so endure the awkward silences instead.

The guy on the train was reading a book called Foe, but I don’t remember the author’s name. Someone literary, no doubt. I might have been staring because he asked if I’d read it.

We must have been somewhere between Bay Fair and Castro Valley, but the world beyond his moving lips was undeniably on mute. He was handsome, with longish dark hair, and eyebrows that were severe but not unkempt. I was wearing jeans and my GAY AF sweatshirt, while he sported a peacoat, neatly buttoned, and a (possibly) cashmere scarf.

He smiled at me and said: “You know, I always imagine that the books people read on trains are only for show. If a guy is reading Little Women on his sofa, for example, I’d bet you a hundred bucks that he wouldn’t be caught dead reading it on the train — not that anyone actually reads whatever book they drag along. Am I right?” Had he said that the sun glowed green, I would wholeheartedly have agreed. Friend, I thought, glancing at his book again. Not Foe.

He was interrupted by an old man hacking up a lung in the seat behind him, and I tried my best not to show my disgust. But had he insisted that the old man be pushed from the moving train, I would have used my savagely bitten fingernails to pry the sliding doors open myself.

One by one, Nina managed to sleep with every man—fat, thin, tall, short, hairy, and bald—at the advertising firm where she worked. It wasn’t something that she planned, and it wasn’t something of which she was either proud or ashamed. Like much of life, including her brief marriage to a man who played the theremin, it just happened.

It started with Jim at last year’s office Christmas party—there’d been chemistry between them from day one—and not long afterward followed Tim. Tim with the rather old-fashioned Ray Bradbury glasses, whose name just happened to rhyme with Jim. Then Perry—an Australian by birth—and Will, and Mark—uncircumcised—and Glen, whose fling with Lucy was not yet old news then. There was no pattern to the incidents—it wasn’t one a week, or one a month, or only on Wednesday nights when the moon was full—and Nina considered herself merely finely attuned to recognizing opportunities when they arose.

Some of the office men had wives—it was the same old story; these were women who didn’t understand their men—and sometimes Nina imagined a situation in which she had to face their collective scorn. A Christmas party—like the one at which she’d slept with Jim, who wasn’t married then—could very quickly lose all sense of merriment. But the men had all devoured her, so why not give their wives a chance?

Each month we offer a prompt to subscribers of Prime Number Magazine to write a 53-word story—no more, no less—and send it to us by the fifteenth day of the month. Our judges select one winning story, and the author receives a book from Press 53 as well as publication in Prime Number Magazine.

Jean-Luke Swanepoel

November 2020

Prompt: Write a 53-word story about thanks

Followed by 53-Word Author Bio

BUY A DONKEY

The last thing the self-help presenter had said was buy a donkey. So Irma bought a donkey. The presenter, being South African, had in fact said baie dankie, Afrikaans for “thank you very much,” but Irma found the donkey to be an excellent listener, and urged her friends to buy donkeys as well.

~ ~ ~

Jean-Luke Swanepoel was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and immigrated to California with his parents and younger brother in 2005. Much of his writing is influenced by his memories of South Africa, and he returns there for a visit every year. He is the author of The Thing About Alice, published in 2020.