"Stories" by Sheldon Lee Compton
- 4 days ago
- 14 min read
The afternoon was foggy. I took five Percocet instead of one when my medicine was due. My left arm was so swelled when I moved it I had honest-to-Jesus worries it might bust open. The doctor had already said yesterday if the steroids didn’t work he’d have to do a flaying procedure to keep me from losing it completely.
“Flay sounds bad,” I said to him when he told me. “Where’s that leave me?”
“A significant part of your arm,” he said, “will be gone. I’ll save what I can, but it’ll be noticeable.”
But things were noticeable already.
Soon as something were to give one way or the other with my arm, I intend to jump to my stories. The computer tower on a desk at the foot of my bed has not been turned on for three months. The last thing I saw on the monitor was a page of a Word document, except that page of prose was for a story called “Discount Paint for Houses,” one of my favorites, looking back.
I wanted to get back to writing my stories, but the arm was for sure a problem. The doctor’s appointment had been a week ago with a follow-up set in the next couple of days, but I should have called them. I didn’t have a phone, though. Or television, for that matter. Only the house, because also no car. A lot happened to bring all that together at once, and that’s why I stay inside my stories as much as I can. But there has been help. I walk to my grandmother’s house every few evenings, so I could go there to call the doctor. Then I could borrow my aunt’s truck and go to the appointment. After all that’s done, I’ll could come back here and wait for the painkillers I hope the doctor gives me to start working and write my stories.
The person who had been my third wife had split a few weeks ago. She left me three months behind on house payments, and also left an SVU that was hers that was repossessed a few days after she drove off in mine. It had all been building to the point that there was no reason to even get into all that was wrong around this time. It was just all wrong. I would lose the house a month after my arm cleared up with a second round of steroids.
And after had been the hoped-for pain meds. And the beer, when I could borrow money to get any and find a way to a store to get it. It happened more than you might think. I stayed high and drunk enough that I could still write sharply but not sober enough to fall into the black mouth of an odd pseudo death. Now I can understand that I wasn’t trying to do anything except write the stories. If I could get out of my head a little and get in front of that computer screen and compose, then I let everything else go. When I started to worry, feel guilty, panic, get depressed, cry uncontrollably, cry in pain, cry from guilt, fold inward on myself, I turned on the computer monitor and pulled up whatever story I was writing and floated.
It was all wrong and it was all strange.
“Discount” had been a good story. It took me out of the world for a good spell. But it wasn’t the one I most remembered writing around that dark-as-a-crow’s-wing time period. I remembered writing what ended up being the title story of the collection, which would eventually be published, one called “The Same Terrible Storm.” But the individual stories mattered less than the whole of the stories themselves, the collective final gasps of one life passing away and the uncertainty if another would take its place.
“Storm” was sad, like all my stories, and exactly as all my novels would be in the decades to follow. But I kept at it; I wrote my stories to keep from going slowly insane, even though they were sad. Sad, sad, sad, all the way down.
/
It was about a week after a crew came and repossessed the doublewide that I moved in with my Aunt Jimmie. Her Auxier Heights apartment had no light fixtures. Aunt Jimmie had bought five or six lamps, the tall kind, not the old-fashioned ones. She had them in the corners of each room so that the light was always at a low level and always seemingly dimming lower and lower. It wasn’t all bad, the lighting. With my computer on it gave off a nice glow like a white-flamed fireplace. It was calming and made writing that much better. It was another week when I got my first story rejection in the mail.
“That’s just one person’s opinion,” she said, raising her chin in the air and sweeping her long, Old-Regular-Baptist hair defiantly over her shoulder.
I didn’t say different, because I supposed she actually wasn’t all wrong. I started to develop false hope. I stopped being a writer and became a participant in the literary race of which I’d always had the highest level of disdain.
Soon, Aunt Jimmie started asking if she could read my new stories. Or maybe the collection of stories she’d mailed out for me. How could I say no? She read the collection and brought the stack of pages into my bedroom and dropped it on the bed where I lay reading.
“Don’t know what you expect trying to get rich with stuff like that,” she said.
It was as disappointed as I’d ever seen my aunt. And she’d been through some difficult times in her life. Ex-husbands who were exes because they had beat the shit out of her, like the first, or slept around with everybody she knew, church friends, everybody, like the second one. Had it been her hopeful imaginings of my stories somehow selling and pulling us from the world of poorly lit rooms in Lego apartment buildings checked by HUD inspectors every month? Yes, it had been exactly that.
I made a pot of coffee the morning after she tossed the manuscript aside like a stained shirt. I asked her to give me some ideas for jobs and took a careful sip from my cup.
“Write your books,” she said, her eyes shining more spirit than usual.
It had happened before, someone telling me to make a living as a writer without knowing precisely what it meant. It’s no one’s fault, all those who do it; they’re only speaking from a place of love or encouragement, but it’s a difficult goal to achieve. Instead of answering in some way that would insult or hurt her feelings, a smartass reply, in other words, I said for now what I needed was just a job. My career path would have to wait.
This made sense to her and then she offered up a dozen or more options for plain old jobs. When she was done, the suggestion to try to get back with the newspaper was the best I’d heard. I had been thinking about it myself, so I borrowed her ’83 Ford pickup and drove to Pikeville, home of the Pike County News.
/
A strange thing happened, though. After I landed the job (a new publisher had been hired, so the interview involved a lot of catching him up), I gradually began to regret it. By the time I was back to Aunt Jimmie’s, I was sure I’d made a bad decision. So now again I had to let her know without making her feel bad about her advice.
What I let her know was that when I wrote for the paper before, it was a high-stress job for not much pay. And it still wasn’t much pay: a mere ten dollars an hour. I told her I would do better to get a job at McDonald’s. I’d seen on their sign they were hiring at eleven dollars twenty five cents an hour.
She was astonished, more or less, about the pay rate, but still insisted it would be easier to take a job I already knew I was good at rather than jump into fast food, which she personally knew to be a beast in ways difficult to explain.
I took the newspaper job and showed up the following Monday, worked two weeks, and studied my pay stub. It was all I needed to see to understand I would be staying with Aunt Jimmie for awhile, and she was okay with that. Still, it was a good job for a man eviscerated.
The first week there I finished three stories. Each one longer than the next. I wasn’t crazy about it. I always liked to hit about five or six pages on a story and then, boom, the end. It’s called a short story for good reason. I thought of stopping once. Maybe things had improved enough that I could and get back to a normal writerly routine. But I didn’t, and the pages kept adding up. At one point, I thought I might have started a novel, but that wasn’t it. I could have called a couple of them novellas, by definition and accepted phrasing in the writing community. But I never liked the idea. If it’s not a short story, it’s a novel. And on the fringe, there are poems accidentally becoming short stories.
It went like this for a long while, me spending any extra time I had only writing. I can’t imagine how I was able to do it and not stay constantly guilty or worried. It was easy at the time, being so self-absorbed. Maybe I felt I deserved some decisions made just for me. I’d been through a lot. But I still planned to make more of an effort to at least spend some of my free time with Aunt Jimmie.
I finished enough short stories for a book, a collection of stories. All of them except maybe two were really solid. I could tell, and I wasn’t surprised. I had always done better work when broken down into my most fundamental parts, either through bad relationships, addiction, depression, or circumstances exploded from bad decisions like supernovas born out into the mess. I printed four copies of the manuscript at the library and Aunt Jimmie mailed them out for me. I had her keep a tally of how much it cost in postage so I could pay her back.
“That won’t be a bit of a problem when you get one of them books published and make a million dollars,” she said after getting back from the post office.
She wasn’t trying to insult me. The comment sounded sincere, and probably was. The everyday person had a point of view, I believed, that if somebody had a book published that it was an achievement so rarely made that there must be some kind of incredible reward. A movie contract, Hollywood at your beckon call, mansions like Stephen King’s. Basically, Aunt Jimmie and a lot of other people thought getting a book published resulted in the same thing that happened to King. Instant millionaire, books everywhere being read by everybody. And you couldn’t explain and really manage to completely shake them from the idea.
I let Aunt Jimmie think that, yes, if I had the book published, I would buy her and myself mansions in whatever state we wanted. She wanted so little, even for daydreaming. Only a comfortable home. One with three bedrooms, all made up nicely as guestrooms for visitors to have a place to rest and sleep that was as comfortable as their own at home. She wanted to decorate those rooms with nice pictures on the walls and little antique washstands with bowls white as snowflakes in the corner beneath a fancy mirror where her friends could check their faces and hair after washing.
“Wouldn’t they just do that stuff in the bathroom?”
“Not in my fantasy, Vince,” she told me. And I swear I thought I could see tears in her eyes.
/
I probably knew Aunt Jimmie’s real story better than anybody.
Her first husband began dating her when she was fourteen and he was twenty-five. The man had every intention of grabbing her young and raising her up like a hunting dog to serve him in whatever ways he desired. By the time she wrested herself away from him, she was seventeen and shared with this pedophilic, weak excuse of a man a sickly son. They divorced when the boy was two, and the man only spoke to the boy three times after that to tell him all three times that he never wanted to be a dad.
Less than a year later, she and her son moved in with a man closer to her age. But he was a troubled, abusive alcoholic, and beat her regularly, while spending his Friday paycheck on alcohol and women. By this time, she’d had another child, a little girl this time, with the younger man. She and her two children nearly starved in those years. Much of the first year after her little girl was born, there was only a bottle of water mixed with sugar for the baby and a jug of spring water and the occasional loaf of bread and stick of butter for her and her son. All three grew malnourished, moved month to month when rent came due, and Aunt Jimmie eventually lost them both to child protective services.
That was the end of her first life. When the children were taken, she dropped from the family map. Everyone had their turns trying to find her, tracking her once as far as Idaho only to see the trail go cold a week later. When she came home, she was transformed. Not as a new woman or a stronger person or reinvented with a renewed passion to reunite her family. She returned a spiritless person, a woman whose soul had suffered a splintering death and left her empty in all respects.
However, even a spiritless person must eat, and Aunt Jimmie eventually took a job. She hitchhiked to work while saving money for a truck, bought the first one she could find for three-hundred, and kept working. From then to now, I’ve only ever known of her, outside of rent and utilities, to buy food. She has worn the same clothes all my life and bought only one pair of Justin boots, good and sturdy, the kind, if taken care of, could last twenty years or more.
Aunt Jimmie’s stories were the kind that shatter stone, hard beyond measure, close enough to Hell they could boil water, and so constantly heartbreaking it could jerk a tear in a glass eyeball, as she put it.
“Music got me through a lot of it,” she said one night. “Not sad music, but songs from the Eighties. Fun songs, you know? They made those back then. Cindy Lauper, Culture Club, Billy Joel, and, oh my, Weird Al. They just go on and on. None of this grunge punk the world is a bag of shit and my life ain’t fair bullshit Nirvana and just all that morose, I-hate-everything bunk.”
“Yeah, just good fun music,” I said. I’d never heard music during that time talked about that way, yet it was so true. Money for nothing and chicks for free? How could it get any lighter and more laid back?
Some nights we made up fun songs, new takes on old classics. Other times we listened to 107.3, a local station that played Eighties music. Africa, Billie Jean, Let’s Hear It for the Boys, Micky, Puttin on the Ritz. Fun songs, fun stories, all stories meant to make people feel good, aimed at entertaining, not preaching.
That old music led to Eighties movies. Footloose, The Breakfast Club, The Outsiders, National Lampoon’s Vacation, Fletch, dozens of those old King Arthur flicks popular back then like Excalibur, the best of them all.
We listened, we watched, we built our barricades with stories offering open arms, replete with good hearts.
And other than her grudge against dark, introspective, nihilistic music, Aunt Jimmie never really complained, not in the way you might expect, not mantled in self-pity or in constant search for pity from others. Our talks were venting sessions, ways of saying aloud what could hardly be believed or survived otherwise. Misery loving company. We were anti-Hallmark cards, anything but uplifting and pleasant reminders that there were people in the world walking about with good, open hearts.
/
In the evenings I had free, we ate supper in the living room and talked about what could be, what we hoped for whenever circumstances improved. It was the fantasy exercises again. But we were both fine with it.
Aunt Jimmie insisted before she shared any more that I say what kind of house I would want.
I said I wasn’t sure I wanted a house, not necessarily. I’d had a doublewide, a nice one with three bedrooms, two and half baths. “I might want a two-story log cabin, but one of those real sharp ones. Chimney, big fireplace, some of that old rustic looking stuff in the kitchen like a brick oven and a hood vent, big sinks with those faucets that you can move around.”
“But you don’t cook.”
“I could learn.”
Aunt Jimmie started expanding out from houses. She talked about places she would go, places besides the Smokies and Myrtle Beach. Paris, London, Hawaii, those places. Every so often while listening I had to remind myself that these were her dreams, that I shouldn’t say a thing against them. Even if I did want to tell her that I’d heard Paris smelled like piss all day and all night.
“First I’d hire somebody to take me to those places, though,” she said. “I get lost going two hours to Lexington. I’d never make it to Hong Kong and back.”
We were slipping off into a seductive arrangement of dreams, not fantasies. Fantasies were safe because they were so far from reach there was no risk of a rising hope coming to the surface. Dreams were just enough to inspire ambition. And ambition, if not guided by absolute clear-sightedness, would unquestionably end in disappointment. Dreams were too close to a common enough realm, too tangible, too possible. For the hopeless, nothing worked better than the unattainable constructs of a strong fantasy.
“Why not become an emperor and have your advance team plan, take you, and accommodate you on any travels you’d want to do?” I said.
“Emperor. Yes, that’s a fine thought,” Aunt Jimmie said. You could see by her grin she knew what I was thinking. Having a new car or finding a good-paying job were for the others, people who already had means. Those were plans, not the elaborate worlds we could pull from thin air. “Ah emperor,” she said again, feeling the word on her tongue. “I wouldn’t be a dick emperor, either. I’d kick the highfalutin folks out and bring in the good old guys and gals. Have parties with all that fun music of ours. I’d have a full theatre built onto the house. Not a theatre room. I’m talking about the big screen. Projection booth and all. Have a concession stand free to all.”
She was on a roll.
“I would go for the subtle, though,” I said.
“What’s that mean?”
“The big prize stuff like a lifetime — no, wait — lifetimes of peace and comfort. Days where all the little things go right, days after days of that. Red lights turning green at the perfect time, your work slipping into a flow so natural it no longer feels like labor, communicating perfectly with the people you love, the people who matter.” I stopped and put my hand on top of Aunt Jimmie’s. “People like you, Aunt Jimmie.”
It was late. What was left of supper was cold on the stovetop. “Tell me more about the subtle, big prize stories,” she said.
And so I did. Over the next several months I became a skilled revisionist and even better at complete overhauls. We took our worst days and compared them to our best days, we pulled threads of memories when small things went well, hundreds and hundreds of these brilliantly luminous threads, and created a future that reposed perfectly in spacetime.
I also spent time during those months writing new stories. They came easier and hurt less and maybe they were not better for it, but I enjoyed it. Aunt Jimmie even wrote a couple stories. She had one or two based on some of those Eighties songs, and they were pretty good. I suggested she send some out, see if a journal or two might pick them up.
“These ain’t for other people,” she told me. “Just like them we tell each other at night, these are for us. It’s not everybody could appreciate our stories.”
I didn’t want to say what I was thinking, that it would be for the ones who needed them the way we did, because I knew in the truest rooms of my heart that all of this, as far as Aunt Jimmie was concerned, was for me and her. It was our thing, the hard work of our own imagination down in the fray with us against empty refrigerators, dead-end jobs, rickety vehicles, t-shirts ten years old or more, words foreign to us like vacations and savings, real-world mysteries like health insurance, retirement, and new car smells.
And when it was all in fantastic sync, we used our thin-air worlds to tell each other how it would be, how genuinely and routinely good it would be without ceasing and for all time. Everything was still only the stories, like it never would be again.