The whole story: Episodes 1-8, The sisters creep up on Halloween.

Here are all eight episodes, reprinted, in chronological order.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

The sisters creep up on Halloween

Among their multiple imaginary personas.  Photo found here.

(For those of you who saw the earlier version of this post, I've changed illustrations.  I presumed to borrow another artist's work, which had inspired the story, and did so without her blessing.  She was enormously gracious about the whole thing.)

Referred to by their mother as Ambulancia and Sireena, these two unquiet children began the holy hell of costume planning weeks before Halloween.  Negotiations, if they could be called that, did not go smoothly.

They were a one-tiara family and Ambulancia, as the elder sister, claimed the crown as hers.  Sireena retaliated by grabbing all the pastel tulle from deconstructed prom dresses, lashing it about her waist, not unlike Odysseus and the mast, refusing to untie it or share unless some detente could be reached about the rhinestone head piece.  The wailings they generated caused drivers to pull over and stop as they motored north on Fair Oaks Avenue, scanning rear view mirrors for emergency vehicles which never materialized.

Matters at school were no less fraught, the wearing of tiaras and ballooning net overskirts being unwelcome on any day that wasn't actually Halloween.  The sisters, stubborn eyes agleam, were sent home for the duration.  They seemed oddly jubilant.  Even victorious.  The unplanned holidays gave them uncommitted hours to squabble and plot.  To be continued.  Honest.

Monday, October 19, 2015

Episode 2: The sisters creep up on Halloween

A frou-frou bonanza.

The tiara in question.

Previously on "The sisters creep up on Halloween," 

The vintage tulle was taking on a fatigued air, belted as it was with gift wrapping ribbon and worn for days - and nights.  The tiara fared somewhat better, being more sturdily made and not being sat or slept upon.  Ambulancia built for herself a head-cradling pillow mound, tucked against the far wall side of her bed, that allowed her to sleep with the tiara in place and kept her unreachable by any hands seeking to plunder.  Her mother thought in sleep she resembled a half-mad dowager of royal ancestry determined to keep the throne, the rest of the world be damned.

As household nerves and costume materials began to fray, their mother asked the girls who exactly they planned to be for Halloween.  There was some muttering that sounded like "princesses" but one couldn't be certain.  "If we had two tiaras," shrilled Sireena, "we could be, like, zombie bridesmaids or, you know, just sort of Grey Gardens bridesmaids."

"Wilted, withered bouquets," Ambulancia volunteered.  "Chipped manicures, torn hems, smeary lipstick."  One of the things the girls loved best about costumes was makeup.  Lots and lots of experimenting with makeup.

"What if I got you matching tiaras, like bridesmaids would have?" their mother asked.  "Would that work?"  Shrugging, turning their faces away and mumbling, the girls said, "It might."  Their mother, whose temples already throbbed at the notion of these children referring to Grey Gardens as inspiration for costumes, nodded gently and said, "Good."  She helped Sireena release herself from the bunchy cloud of old gowns and saw that Ambulancia removed the antique tiara and put it away.

When their mother was out of the room, the sisters scowled at each other, battling with mean-eyed, squinty stares and stuck-out tongues.  Then each began to chuckle softly, little "heh heh heh" sounds.  Oh help us, with Halloween still so many days away.  To be continued.

Episode 8: The sisters creep up on Halloween

Cover art and illustrations by Joseph Mugnaini for Ray Bradbury's "The Halloween Tree."

It was Halloween morning on Sycamore Avenue.  The previous night's slim chance of rain never materialized, fallen leaves remained crisp and noisy underfoot.  They skittered when rearranged by the cool north wind.

With their mother acting as trail boss and the voice of reason, the sisters and the brother-friends eventually began to arrange themselves in the car for the ride to school.  Mrs. Garrick would pick them up, assuming no incident occurred before the last bell rang.  Sireena had already been told she could not go barefoot, regardless of how that compromised the authenticity of her costume.  The sisters had each made a copy of the photo showing their vintage selves with dollies and wore it like a Comic-Con badge around her neck.  They wanted everyone to know how exactly like the long-vanished girls they were.  They hoped some of the less attentive students would believe they were their own ghosts. 

Starting somewhere around dawn or perhaps earlier, Ellington and Henri had arrived, ready for their make-up.  They'd made a pretty good start of it (had they slept at all?) but needed help reaching the backs of their necks and ears and the girls' unsurprisingly professional touches.  The pomade used to slick the boys' dark hair even smelled vaguely of flowers.  Ambulancia pulled a tin of it from their, as they called it, Trunk of Wonders where it may have rested since the 1930s.  One could not be sure.

Once they finished sewing their costumes, the girls took the various pieces outside, rumbled them around in dirt and dust, then smacked them half-way clean again so they had a lived-in look.   They powdered their skin and hair, shadowed their cheeks and eye sockets and did look convincingly spectral.  The last thing they wanted was to be mistaken for zombies, a costume they felt was just too common for words, though they understood why so many chose it.  Odd and screamy as they were, neither girl was unkind.  They rehearsed together paying sincere compliments to fellow students.  They were not snobs as some assumed,  they were simply great fans of nuance, as were the brothers, not that many of their contemporaries would notice.  Before piling in the car, they posed together and separately for photos to document this year's achievements.  The boys looked happily peculiar with clip-on bow ties attached to horizontally striped tee shirts, worn with plaid shorts, the waists of which reached nearly to their armpits.  None was trying for a Best Costume prize but instead savored the contentment which came from hard work and goals achieved.

As the car stopped at the curb, a minor hoard of zombies pretended to claw at the windows.  "Menace 101," whispered Ambulancia.  "Tell Allison her hair is fab," she reminded her sister.  "Tell Jaleel his fingernails terrify you."  With dramatic shudders at the horror they faced, the quartet squeezed from the car and the sisters began to shriek, another reason why Halloween was their favorite holiday.

  

Episode 7: The sisters creep up on Halloween

Comedian Harold Lloyd as a giant papier mache head.

The expression, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree," could have been coined to describe Ambulancia, Sireena and their mother.  Creative extravagance ran through more than a couple generations of the family.  It manifested in the girls' mother in, among other things, the making of giant papier mache heads of beings known and unknown.  She, too, loved Halloween for its expressive vistas.  This year, even with a late start, she planned to fashion (in paste, old newspapers, cardboard, brown wrapping paper and paint) five of history's worst despots.  She could see them, spotlighted on the front lawn, a cautionary tale for trick-or-treaters who had enough curiosity to ask what or who they were.  How to pick just five!  The list was nearly endless.  She felt the enormous, heartless faces would help illustrate Santayana's quote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  Each moment was an opportunity to learn.

For the sisters, the love of old photographs began with their grandmother, whose collection of family members, contemporaries and chums kept the girls engrossed and quiet for hours on end, listening to stories, gossip and opinion concerning every face they studied.  Their mother inherited the stockpile and, knowing they'd learned to tread gently among the fragile portraits and snapshots, let the girls visit their ancestors as they wished.  In its way, the collection was a time machine.  They did love to look at some of their mother's almost-historic discoveries, referred to as The Archives, too, especially the giant heads, though they took equal delight in her vintage photographs of balloons from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.   None of them had yet devised a way to replicate those great floating beings but they were not ready to give up on the possibility.

Laurel and Hardy, from The Archives.

Episode 6: The sisters creep up on Halloween

Perhaps a life of ease and options, thought the brothers.  Photo found here.

(For those of you who saw the earlier version of this post, I've changed illustrations.  I presumed to borrow another artist's work, which had inspired the story, and did so without her blessing.  She was enormously gracious about the whole thing.)

Of course Halloween could not be creeping ever closer to the sisters (or vice versa) without a pow-wow with their best friends, the brothers Garrick, Ellington and Henri (pronounced on-REE).  As they had known the sisters since all were toddlers, they knew the girls' real names (which no one other than teachers ever used), calling them Cia and Ree.  As Henri, junior partner, liked to say to the younger girl, "We are practically name twins."

While Ambulancia and Sireena threw themselves like volcano sacrifices into the costumes of the season, the brothers favored clothing as close to normal as they could muster and extravagant face makeup, for which the sisters were their advisers and practitioners.  The boys would gladly have sported their Halloween pallor and smudged, sunken-appearing eyes year 'round but had to be content with as many days as they could squeeze out of the holiday without being ejected from public places, like the library.  When a staff member hissed at them, "Go wash your faces or go home," they invariably chose home after a pair of deep glowers and what they hoped were death-ray stares.  Yes, they practiced, in the mirror, on each other, on their parents, on the sisters.  They were actually quite fond of the library employees but boundaries were meant to be tested, or so they told themselves.  In their journals, each kept a running list of potential adult employment for which their painted faces would be suited.  The jobs of clown and mime did not appear on the list of either.  It pretty much narrowed down to something in the arts or wealthy eccentric.  Being creepy for no good reason didn't appeal to them, yet the thought of growing up wearing nothing but their own pinkish complexions day in and day out made them gloomy.  Ellington had the task of reassuring Henri that just because there was no solution today didn't mean there would never be one.  Henri hoped with crossed fingers that he was right. 

Episode 5: The sisters creep up on Halloween

The truth was that each of the sisters could have had her own room.  Their home was spacious, rambling, not exactly ramshackle, not House Lovely.  Their enjoyment of each others' company, they knew, was not necessarily the usual thing.  If they'd had separate bedrooms they would just have spent all their time together in one or the other, so, they asked, what was the point?  The room they shared actually had its own sitting room which became their atelier as soon as they discovered their affinity for vintage clothes and fabrics.  Their mother helped them learn to sew, though Ambulancia became Sireena's mentor, bringing out the younger girl's astonishing natural ability.  Their mother told of her "home ec" class in junior high, back when the ability to sew was expected of girls.  The sisters howled with laughter imagining some of their classmates handed a pair of scissors during school hours.

Using as a pattern an Edwardian nightgown in their collection, the girls planned to adapt it as a pinafore to match the photo of what they called their antique selves.  When their mother discovered the tulle piled in a corner of the atelier, she knew enough not to ask but simply said, "Changed your minds, I see."  Without speaking, Ambulancia held up the photograph and kept sewing.  Time was short and there were miles to go.  Miles.

Word of the Week - 86

Painting "One Flew Over the Wasps Nest" by Vladimir Kush.

Word of the Week:  DUALITY

Want

by Carrie Fountain 

 

The wasps outside
the kitchen window
are making that
thick, unraveling sound
again, floating in
and out of the bald head
of their nest,
seeming not to move
while moving,
and it has just occurred
to me, standing,
washing the coffeepot,
watching them hang
loosely in the air—thin
wings; thick, elongated
abdomens; sad, down—
pointing antennae—
that this
is the heart’s constant
project: this simple
learning; learning
how to hold
hopelessness
and hope together;
to see on the unharmed
surface of one
the great scar
of the other; to recognize
both and to make
something of both;
to desire everything
and nothing
at once and to desire it
all the time;
and to contain that desire
fleshly, in a body;
to wash it and rest it
and feed it; to learn
its name and from whence
it came; and to speak
to it—oh, most of all
to speak to it—
every day, every day,
saying to one part,
“Well, maybe this is all
you get,” while saying
to the other, “Go on,
break it open, let it go.”

“Want” by Carrie Fountain from Burn Lake. © Penguin, 2010. Reprinted with permission. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Episode 4: The sisters creep up on Halloween

Photo found by Ambulancia at the second-hand shop.

"Tell me this isn't us," Ambulancia demanded with a hiss once the sisters were back in their room.  "That's you, your I-just-got-away-with-murder demure smile."

Sireena took just a moment, swallowed, before saying, "It kind of scares me, in a good way.  They look just like us."  When she said, "In a good way," she gave a short cough to cover up nervousness.  Oh, it scared her.  And not in a good way, yet it was okay.  "Are we ghosts?" she asked.  "I mean, us, now.  Is that who we used to be?"

"Don't be such a duck," said Ambulancia scornfully.  "What a find!  We'll have to start our costumes all over again."

"What about our tiaras?" asked a somewhat down-hearted Sireena, who had become very fond of her bridesmaid/prom girl ensemble.  "I was looking forward to being faded pretty."

"I know," Ambulancia told her.  "Let's wear them the last day before Christmas vacation.  We'll say we thought it was a party day.  And no one else will be in costume.  All for us." At which they both smirked and muttered, "Heh heh."

Episode 3: The sisters creep up on Halloween

It was understood among family members that Ambulancia and Sireena would make their own costumes, no matter what they were, how sophisticated the design or engineering.  In their signature voices they lamented a return to school - the dress code violations at least temporarily cleared up - as taking away valuable creative time.  As though her "no shenanigans" look would carry any weight at all, their mother shooed them along the next morning.  Tomorrow she would need to write a note explaining their tardiness.  I think they arrived some time before lunch.

In their defense, the sisters, in addition to soaring inventiveness, could be said to possess, let's call them virtues.  They could sew like no others of the same ages and, at flea markets attended with their mother, collected not only bits of vintage fabrics and garments but sewing implements from another time, another place.  These they stored with surprising care in a shared curio cabinet.  The same piece of furniture was home to the disputed tiara but as though the glass-fronted case were sacred ground, no monkey business would ever intrude upon it there.

Cabinet photo source.

Vintage Chinese pincushion.

With the sisters' afternoons now full of costuming, a word they spoke in italics, home life became less high-pitched and confrontational.  Though one occasionally, and purely by accident, jabbed the other with a pin on its way back to the pincushion, the tone might have been called sedate.  Halloween was three days away.

"I am simply not tatty enough," shrieked Ambulancia suddenly.  "I need more trashed flowers for my corsage."  They had not stuck with bridesmaids for long but shifted to something that sounded like (mumble, mumble) punk-slash-zombie prom girls, who, of course, would have wrist corsages., though they could still be bridesmaids.  "We never tell everything we know," was one of their mottoes.

"Is it too late to go to Blanche's?" Sireena shrilled, referring to a favorite junk/thrift/second hand store.  It was not too late, their mother drove them in their not-abnormal states of disarray and they plunged into the bins and boxes in which Blanche offered the ragout of hard-worn remnants of other lives that was her specialty.  Suddenly Ambulancia grabbed her little sister, none too gently, and held out an old studio photograph that caused Sireena to gasp.  They shuffled it in among their finds and hurried back to the car where they exchanged sinister grins and sidelong glances all the way home.  To be continued.

Episode 2: The sisters creep up on Halloween

A frou-frou bonanza.

The tiara in question.

Previously on "The sisters creep up on Halloween," 

The vintage tulle was taking on a fatigued air, belted as it was with gift wrapping ribbon and worn for days - and nights.  The tiara fared somewhat better, being more sturdily made and not being sat or slept upon.  Ambulancia built for herself a head-cradling pillow mound, tucked against the far wall side of her bed, that allowed her to sleep with the tiara in place and kept her unreachable by any hands seeking to plunder.  Her mother thought in sleep she resembled a half-mad dowager of royal ancestry determined to keep the throne, the rest of the world be damned.

As household nerves and costume materials began to fray, their mother asked the girls who exactly they planned to be for Halloween.  There was some muttering that sounded like "princesses" but one couldn't be certain.  "If we had two tiaras," shrilled Sireena, "we could be, like, zombie bridesmaids or, you know, just sort of Grey Gardens bridesmaids."

"Wilted, withered bouquets," Ambulancia volunteered.  "Chipped manicures, torn hems, smeary lipstick."  One of the things the girls loved best about costumes was makeup.  Lots and lots of experimenting with makeup.

"What if I got you matching tiaras, like bridesmaids would have?" their mother asked.  "Would that work?"  Shrugging, turning their faces away and mumbling, the girls said, "It might."  Their mother, whose temples already throbbed at the notion of these children referring to Grey Gardens as inspiration for costumes, nodded gently and said, "Good."  She helped Sireena release herself from the bunchy cloud of old gowns and saw that Ambulancia removed the antique tiara and put it away.

When their mother was out of the room, the sisters scowled at each other, battling with mean-eyed, squinty stares and stuck-out tongues.  Then each began to chuckle softly, little "heh heh heh" sounds.  Oh help us, with Halloween still so many days away.  To be continued.

Word of the Week - 85

Richard III, "The Daughter of Time."

Word of the Week:  MYSTERY

Discussing possibly the best mystery ever, Josephine Tey's "The Daughter of Time" - a friend of my son's had just read it and was urging him to do so - brought to mind other classics, favorites, of the genre.  To lounge about and read mysteries has been among life's great joys since I was in grade school.

Over many decades I've read my way through Dorothy L. Sayers,  Rex Stout, Raymond Chandler, P.D. James, Dashiell Hammett, Carolyn Keene, Francis and Richard Lockridge, Josephine Tey, Elmore Leonard, Deborah Crombie.  I've spent time with knitting mysteries, coffee house mysteries, scrapbooking (!) mysteries, cat and/or dog mysteries, cooking mysteries, horse racing mysteries.  I don't want to know, nor do I try to figure out who is responsible.  Those are surprises I enjoy.  Being the smartest guy in the room is seldom my goal.

I find life itself to be a daily mystery.  It may intrigue or merely baffle.  We have no idea how it comes out, other than that it does eventually cease.  Every moment is a new unknown.  There is much we can learn from the fictional sleuths for, in our way, each of us is a detective, following thin leads or playing our hunches.  Intuition is a great ally, for many people will tell us any old thing.  Knowing true from false is a desirable skill, one that can save us from some terribly unpleasant and startling moments.  But it comes with the territory.  At least everyday situations rarely leave us knocked unconscious, drugged with chloroform or attempting Houdini-like escapes.  Simply keeping our wits about us and our spirits buoyant is enough of a task.

Being of the old school, still having a land line without caller I.D., brings its own unexpected encounters.  Depending on the time of day, I may ignore any calls, see if there is a message or if it was just another robot.  In Los Angeles, I suppose our biggest current mystery is whether or not it IS an El Nino year, whether it will rain and, if so, when and for how long and then what do we do?  Venomous water snakes washing up on California beaches does not speak of good days to come.

The answer to most things is that we don't know.  Like members of a book club all making their way through the same story, we keep turning the pages to see what's next.  I promise to share any clue I find and hope you'll do the same.

The sisters creep up on Halloween

Among their multiple imaginary personas.  Photo found here.

(For those of you who saw the earlier version of this post, I've changed illustrations.  I presumed to borrow another artist's work, which had inspired the story, and did so without her blessing.  She was enormously gracious about the whole thing.)

Referred to by their mother as Ambulancia and Sireena, these two unquiet children began the holy hell of costume planning weeks before Halloween.  Negotiations, if they could be called that, did not go smoothly.

They were a one-tiara family and Ambulancia, as the elder sister, claimed the crown as hers.  Sireena retaliated by grabbing all the pastel tulle from deconstructed prom dresses, lashing it about her waist, not unlike Odysseus and the mast, refusing to untie it or share unless some detente could be reached about the rhinestone head piece.  The wailings they generated caused drivers to pull over and stop as they motored north on Fair Oaks Avenue, scanning rear view mirrors for emergency vehicles which never materialized.

Matters at school were no less fraught, the wearing of tiaras and ballooning net overskirts being unwelcome on any day that wasn't actually Halloween.  The sisters, stubborn eyes agleam, were sent home for the duration.  They seemed oddly jubilant.  Even victorious.  The unplanned holidays gave them uncommitted hours to squabble and plot.  To be continued.  Honest.

Words, time and words, revisited

With art added to the original post, one from the vault. xo

 

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Words, time and words

Paintings by Kristin Vestguard.

There is a shipwreck aspect to writing. Surrendering to the call means other pieces of life are abandoned. The tighter its grip, the farther I drift from ordinary. I hadn't thought of writing and me in these terms until today, until a ship I hadn't known I was waiting for sailed into view.

I am so thankful for the writers I have met recently through our blogs, yet it is still a solitary, lonely business. At times the connections make it feel more remote for I see where others have found the thread they need and I, in my own eyes, am stumbling around, getting my foot caught in a bucket, stepping on a rake, having misplaced the last known pencil. I find it impossible to explain the writing desire - or is it a compulsion? It is not like anything else that I can name...a day's work can produce pages of words, but if they are not the right words...

So much about life I find to be acts of faith and writing is surely one of them. So is getting out of bed in the morning. A writer has a place she wants the writing to take her - and those who read the words - but, at least as I practice it, the act is much closer to interpretive dance, I don't know which way I will bend until I do it, than to, say, something for which I have created an outline and have a...plan. I haven't done an outline for anything since junior college and what I remember is writing the outline after the paper. You can guess what that did to my grade.

The left side of my brain gets a lot rest. It is never invited over to play when I write; the times when it has popped in to see what we were up to, its suggestions made me feel like I was trying to swim while zipped into a sleeping bag. While taking part in a fiction writing workshop, someone asked (not the classic "where do you get your ideas?"), "How do you know what happens next?" The only, the honest answer was, "When the car pulls up, I wait to see who gets out and then tell about it."

My rescue vessel arrived in the form of a writer friend who has taken some time away from writing to do the work for which we rely on that other side of the brain. Life, rude and intrusive or the opposite, sometimes needs us to talk to attorneys, reduce soaring piles of magazines and mail, make arrangements, show up. But in talking to her, feeling our mutual urgency about whatever it is that we're doing - for neither of us is sure, we just know we have to do it - I wept for knowing that this is not madness and that fact could be confirmed.

Drama in my everyday world is, in my opinion, something loathsome and to be avoided. When I use a word like madness my self-regulator tries to give me the stink eye. I look away, knowing this isn't the exaggeration it might seem. Pushing forward with a body of work that is not a novel, not a collection of poems or short stories, more a gathering of thoughts from heart, mind and spirit, is not a wholly rational act and, because of its solitary nature, becomes a questionable investment of all the resources, down to those dollar coins the post office machines give as change.

It may be a measure of commitment, the single mindedness that makes it possible to float so far from known landmarks without having a clue that I am no longer tethered. The work may be epic, the work may be one paragraph that builds upon another, or one word, followed by three more, but the force it exerts once the call is answered could pull a bulldozer out of quicksand.

One of my core beliefs is that each of us is called to something and as long as it does no harm, the possibilities are infinite. I wobbled and waffled for years, trying to understand the call, trying to meet its expectations, halfway trying to dodge it and substitute an activity like writing. It now has me for however long it takes or however long I last. There are far more meanings to the word surrender than waving the white flag.

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