Rumi said, “You have been released from ten successive prisons/ Each larger and containing the last.” (Coleman Barks translation)
I thought of that quote when I saw the prompt for the Carrot Ranch challenge this week. I used it in one of my poems in Chicken Shift, where escape is a recurring theme.
It’s a great quote; at it’s worst, escaping the pan for the fire; at it’s best, a comforting delusion of linear progression.
But here we are.
“Here’s the pisser, here’s the catch
Any one could peck the latch.”
And then where are we?
Here. Alone together.
***
Charli’s post and prompt led me back to Robert, my fictional Civil War vet.
Did he imagine as a seventeen year old farm boy that going off to fight the Rebels would be an escape from the Vermont farm, or simply an escape from the perceived limits of childhood? I had some vague idea of showing Robert back on the farm trying to escape his memories of the war through hard work but the flash went differently and upon completion had no mention of “escape” other than stalled development. So I cheat, and use the prompt in the title.
***
No Escape
She wiped her eyes with her apron when he came through the gate. Standing awkwardly with her, his eyes rolled quickly over the headstones, finally settling on his own feet. “You’re mourning the young’uns?”
“No. That’s past.”
A thrush called. He looked at her tear stained face, waited.
“I’m mourning Robert.”
“Robert? He’s home Anna. We haven’t lost our oldest boy.”
“He’s not the boy he was.”
“He’s a man now.”
“He’s a broken hurt child. You must see that it’s Thomas, all of seven, looks out for him. I’m mourning the man that our Robert will never become.”
***
With no argument left, he embraced his wife and mourned with her, allowing his own tears to fall for Robert’s pain, witnessed only by her and the granite markers of their other lost children.
Walking together back to the farmhouse they met Robert carrying a bundled rag.
“What is it Robert?”
“Mice. From the kitchen.”
“Oh, just kill them!” Anna instantly regretted her command, but Robert smiled forgiveness.
“A mother and pink babies. Surely you could allow them to live in the stonewall.”
“Anna, maybe our boy isn’t the man we’d expected. He’s different. But he’s a good man.”
War takes each individual into all sorts of other unanticipated directions, and turns him into something of quite a Frankensteinian nature
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Different than expected isn’t automatically bad. I like the kind-hearted Robert who cares about mice.
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Me too! Robert has been in a few flashes. I am always glad when he shows up.
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Oh my! So powerful. Wonderful setting and superb characters.
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Thank you. Robert has been showing up intermittently for two or three years now.
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So many of life’s events change us, some times in positive ways, sometimes negatively, sometimes in ways that are unexpected but not necessarily better or worse. As a parent, I feel Anna’s pain – grieving for what might have been, even though Robert is still a good, kind and forgiving man. He could have been that – and more, but she is fortunate to have someone to help her see.
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Thank you Norah, it’s good to know I wrote Anna right. But yeah, she just needed to mourn for a bit. She knows Robert is good, but she also knows he’ll likely never have a family of his own. (Yikes, I may have more writing to do)
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Yeah – more writing, D. That’s a good thing for us readers.
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This line struck deep: “I’m mourning the man that our Robert will never become.” How difficult for a mother who has lost many of her children. Healing though, the way the couple grieves together. Robert has good folks to guide him, yet.
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Thanks. Might need a longer story for to show why she grieves for him… how he is…
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I love the hermit thrush or flute of the woods!
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Vermont’s state bird.
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