Beyond the Fence

by Marilyn Horn

  Beyond the Fence

  A Short Collection of Stories

  Marilyn Horn

  Thinking Ink Press

  Campbell, CA

  Copyright © 2016 Marilyn Horn.

  “Return of the Son” was published in NonBinary Review, 2015. “Don’t Mind the Vet” was published in Blotterature Literary Magazine, 2015. “So Many Shoes” was published in Fine Linen Magazine, 2015. “A Big Gift” was published in Waterhouse Review, 2013. “Soul Mate” was published in The Ottawa Object, 2015. “Monster on the Loose” was published by Wild Age Press (Restless), 2015. “Beyond the Fence” was published in Rose Red Review, 2015.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher of this book. Brief quotations may be used in reviews prepared for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or for broadcast. For more information, contact: editorial@thinkinginkpress.com.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Thinking Ink Press

  P.O. Box 1411, Campbell, California, 95009

  First ebook edition, 2016

  ISBN 978-1-942480-16-7

  rev 2

  Project Credits

  Cover art: Sandi Billingsley

  Cover concept: Keiko O’Leary

  Cover design: Keri Knutson

  Editor: Keiko O’Leary

  Interior layout: Betsy Miller

  Contents

  Foreword

  Return of the Son

  Don't Mind the Vet

  So Many Shoes

  A Big Gift

  Soul Mate

  Monster on the Loose

  The Dolphin and the Healer King

  Beyond the Fence

  About Marilyn Horn

  Foreword

  In this marvelous chapbook from Marilyn Horn, a writer friend I’ve been happy to know for years now, you will find tenderness and wonder, siblings and Jupiter, a mobile made of armadillo bones, Forever Trees and soul genes, a story-telling dolphin, and a monster for justice. Wisdom and a sweet quiet voice.

  Unpredictable, these stories and characters will stick with you, accompany you on rainy mornings and foggy afternoons. Some are so short you can practically read them before the light turns green (not recommended), others in the time it takes to wait for a prescription. How lucky we are to have these gems threaded on one string, a portable collection. Perfect, as they say, for gifts, especially a gift to yourself.

  —Lita Kurth, co-founder, Flash Fiction Forum; creative writing instructor, De Anza College and private workshops

  Return of the Son

  Mary lives at the end of the garden path. She is my only friend these days. But what she said yesterday — I didn’t like that. Perhaps we shouldn’t discuss our sons. You know how it is, when mothers talk about their children. Sometimes things are said that shouldn’t be. Once I find my cane, I’ll go see Mary, and she and I will have a little chat. Perhaps then our friendship can be saved.

  But where is my cane? Someone has hidden it. They hide things from me here. They never admit it, of course. They say instead, “No, dear, we didn’t hide that. You never had one of those.” That’s their way of telling me I’m crazy. They all think that here.

  Mary doesn’t think I’m crazy — one more reason she’s my only friend. But she shouldn’t have said what she did. I seethed over it all night, pacing the halls, until the nurse took me back to my room and tied me to my bed.

  I see my cane now: on top of the trunk. My son’s trunk, below the window. Both cane and trunk are made of mahogany, which is why I couldn’t see it before. The trunk takes up nearly the whole room, but I’ll never part from it. My son will want it when he returns. My room here is too small, that’s the problem. Not like my flat on Kensington Square. But at least it’s sunny here, and I have a view of the garden, and the trees, and the hills beyond, crisscrossed with stone walls and dotted with sheep. “Such a grand view!” is what my son will say.

  It was a sad day when his trunk arrived in Kensington. I cried as I sorted through his things — his helmet, his medals, the pistol they say he drew during that nasty battle …

  My son would never charge a rapid-fire gun with only a pistol — such nonsense! Why do they lie to me so?

  My husband lied to me, too. “Yes, yes, my love. He is only asleep,” my husband said, but he didn’t believe it. He’s the one who sent me here.

  Mary understands my dilemma, or at least I thought she did. “It is our burden to bear, knowing what we know, and having such sons” — that’s what she told me the first time we met. But now her heart has turned from me. Why else would she say such awful things? Why say “My son never …” Oh, I can’t bear to think of it.

  Cane in hand, I leave my room. I hobble down the long white corridor, past the orderlies who reek of cigarettes, past the fat nurses in their stiff starched dresses. All in white, as if they are angels. But they aren’t. They watch me as I pass. They are always watching me. The doctor is the one I hate the most, with his oiled hair and sour breath. He says terrible things to me when he visits my room. “The Somme” and “no-man’s land” — those are the words I hate the most. I cover my ears when he says them.

  Outside, the clouds are low, and the air is cool, thick and moist, making everything muted — the bird song, the colors of the flowers, even the crunch of the gravel path. “Off to see Mary, are we?” It’s the gardener who asks me this, a pip of a man with broken teeth and one blind eye. I don’t answer him. He knows — everyone knows — that I visit Mary every day.

  It would not be right, not fitting, for her to visit me, and so neither she nor I mention it. We speak only of our sons. She is waiting for hers to return; poor thing, she has been waiting all these years. I am waiting as well, of course, but I will not have so long to wait.

  Still, it’s been ages since I saw him last. So handsome in his uniform, a grown man for all to see, and yet still my little boy. My baby. The youngest of my six children. The strongest and healthiest of them all, and the only one left to me, all the others dying so long ago. Even that day at the train station, as he stood there in his uniform, I saw my little boy, with his ruddy cheeks, his unruly hair, his eyes bright with mischief. “I’ve brought you a gift, Mummy,” he’d say when he was small, after an excursion to the park, and from behind his back he’d reveal a toad, or a lizard, or — sometimes — a flower. Violets, mostly. Such tiny things, so delicate.

  Violets grow here, too, along the garden path, and there at the end of it stands Mary. Her face is pearled white, as are her hands, but her hooded robe is blue — the softest of blues, like a robin’s egg. Her head is bowed. She is gazing at the red and purple primroses growing at her feet. Such a supplicant stance; so innocent, as if dreadful words have never passed her lips.

  Mary smiles. She is always so happy to see me. I smile, too, and for a moment I forget I’m angry with her. But it doesn’t last. “I was thinking of what you said, dear,” I say as I approach. “It wasn’t very nice.”

  Mary smiles. Says nothing.

  “Did you hear me? I didn’t like it. Not at all.”

  She doesn’t answer at first. But then, her head still bowed, she says the same awful thing she said yesterday.

  “My son never woke up.”

  I put my hands to my ears but can’t block out her words.


  “He never returned.”

  Such a hateful thing to say! And still she smiles that awful smile. Your son won’t return, either — that is what her smile means, as if it is all some terrible joke, this waiting of ours. She’s no better than the doctors or the orderlies or the hateful nurses. She’s no better than my husband.

  I strike her with my cane. I strike her again and again. I am not so old and feeble after all! I make a small chink on her nose, and yet still she smiles.

  The gardener is soon there, and he takes my cane. Then there are others — two young men, both in white. Young men, my son’s age. I search their faces, but they are only orderlies. My son is not among them. He is still asleep in France.

  They hold my arms. They drag me away, and my slippered feet scrape over the graveled path.

  “Liar!” I yell at Mary. “Liar!”

  My son will return to me.

  No matter what Mary says.

  Don't Mind the Vet

  The mobile made of armadillo bones rattled in the stiff cold breeze at the window. Bettina looked past it to the dirt hills dotted with sage brush, silver with frost. Cold morning outside, but hot in here, even with the window partly open, the mesquite logs in the small fireplace filling the whole house with their sweet warmth.

  “In English, Meyma,” Bettina said again, careful not to sound impudent. This was her mother, after all. “Please say in English.”

  Her mother lay pale and listless on her narrow bed. She sighed and said, “For Chico sake, don’t mind the vet.”

  Bettina moved her chair closer to the bed and felt her mother’s brow. “Meyma, what you — what do you mean, ‘Don’t mind the vet’?”

  Chico the Chihuahua watched Bettina from his spot atop Meyma’s stomach. Meyma stroked his little black ears with her thumb and finger and shook her head. “Eku nu eku nu.”

  “You know I don’t speak the old words anymore. English, Meyma. English.”

  Meyma turned her face away from Bettina, a gesture that meant the words would pain her to say. Bettina sat up straight in her little chair, extra alert.

  “The eyes see what they see,” Meyma said. “Don’t mind the vet. Nothing more to say.”

  Meyma talking in riddles, the way she had always done, like everyone here in town did. Not saying anything point blank, not like in San Antonio, where Bettina lived now, and had lived these past 10 years. In San Antonio, if you said, “I’ll have the lemon-butter grilled salmon and a glass of Pinot Noir,” that is what you meant, and that is what you got.

  “Fine. Fine. I won’t mind the vet,” Bettina said and then muttered, before she could stop herself, “not even if he puts a goat in my attic.” Meyma smiled at her use of the old phrase, but Bettina pretended not to notice. “But it’s you who should see the doctor, not this dog. He’s just sick because you don’t feel good.” Chico looked up at her with sad kind eyes and Bettina softened her tone. “Or maybe you’re just not feeding him right.” This morning he had spit up ugly chunks of brown and red all over the straw rug.

  Meyma shook her head. “I sick because he sick. Once he better, I be. How it works.”

  “Fine.” Bettina checked her watch and got up to leave.

  “You not wearing that?” Meyma said, her black eyes big and round. Scared.

  Bettina looked down at her long-sleeved shirt, her slacks and boots. “Yes, why not?”

  Meyma turned her face away. “Too much. Too much. Wear the blue blouse. In the closet.”

  Blue brought health, Bettina knew that. Or that is what Meyma believed, anyway. “It’s too cold to wear that,” she said and then added, when Meyma still looked perplexed, “I’m wearing a blue bra. Don’t worry.”

  She bundled up the dog in an old weaved blanket and walked down the hard-dirt road toward the vet’s office. The sooner Meyma got to feeling better, the sooner Bettina could go home. Back to San Antonio. Away from this cold dust hole 500 miles from anywhere. Back to her real life, back to her friends — the ones who glittered sharp and brilliant and piercing, like the bleached bones the townspeople here hung in windows to ward off evil. If getting back home meant taking Chico to the vet, then she would do it.

  In the vet’s waiting room, a nurse with a long white braid sat reading a paperback . She took notice of Bettina and pointed her to an empty seat and went back to her reading.

  Chico snuggled into the crook of Bettina’s arm and peeked out at the other women filling the room, coddling their dogs and their cats. All women, Bettina noticed. No men. Women she had seen throughout her growing-up years, coming down from the hills for the bonfires and the festivals. All women here, and all wearing such low-cut blouses. “Ay ko!” Poppy would have said, back in the day, for he had always admired the feminine form. None of them younger than 60, as far as Bettina could tell, and all showing their cleavage. Wearing blouses like she had found hanging in her mother’s closet. Like the blue one Meyma had wanted her to wear.

  Bettina ran her fingers up the long line of buttons on her long-sleeved shirt. Even the top one was buttoned. Her friends in San Antonio wore shirts like this. Stiff and starched, like something a man might wear.

  The woman sitting next to Bettina had a broad brown face and long gray-black hair and held a despondent Pomeranian on her lap. “You Evie’s daughter,” she said and grinned, revealing a mouth of silver teeth (“Such a mouth means luck and wisdom” — another thing Poppy would have said). “How she be?”

  “Not as well as can be.” An expression Bettina hadn’t used in years, and yet it fell easily from her lips, like fluff from a cottonwood.

  “And little dog worries about her,” the woman said. “Poor little dog. Your meyma’s best friend all these years, since your poppy passed.” The woman kissed the tips of fingers when she said it. Bettina nearly performed the ritual, too, but held herself in check.

  “She tell you about the vet?” The woman inclined her head toward the closed door of the examination room.

  “She told me not to mind the vet. What she — what did she mean?”

  The woman smiled knowingly. “Ay keke. Let’s say he not look you in the eye.” She readjusted the neckline of her blouse, revealing a worn and wrinkled cleavage.

  Bettina noticed again all the low-cut blouses in the room and felt a pang of panic. Her hand went up to the buttons at the top of her neck. “You mean …”

  “Just let him look.” The woman readjusted her neckline again. “He a miracle worker. He need inspiration. Everyone know that.” She nodded to the other women in the waiting room and they responded in kind. “So don’t mind the vet. For little dog sake. And your meyma.”

  Not mind? Bettina didn’t know how she could not mind. And her friends back in the city — how disgusted they would be! Just like when Bettina told them about the wintertime bonfire, and how the snakes sizzled on the fire. “Sounds ghastly,” they said, their voices clinking like champagne glasses, and after that she didn’t talk about home. Not even her favorite things. The flower parade. The salamander dance.

  If she listened hard, she could just make out what the vet said to each woman who entered the exam room. “They are as shy as two bunnies,” she heard him say, and later, “They remind me of flying ducks.” With each pronouncement, Bettina’s hand flew to the buttons at her throat. More than once she got up to leave but sat right back down again, for Meyma’s sake. Word would get back to Meyma that she had left without seeing the vet, and Meyma would cry. Not get angry, but cry. And that was worse.

  But that was not the only reason Bettina stayed. Maybe, she thought, the vet really could cure the dog. She had seen such things before, on her very own body. The warts that fell off like scabs. The earaches and stomachaches, gone in a flash. All from the touch of sacred hands. If the vet could heal Chico, then Meyma would get better. And Bettina could go home.

  The door to the exam room opened, and the nurse motioned to Bettina to go in. The woman with the silver teeth smiled encouragingly as Bettina crept toward the open door.


  The vet was short and thin, brown and sun-parched, just like the desert sages who wandered into town on occasion, singing praises to the Old Mother. He looked at Bettina’s buttoned-up shirt as she set the dog down on the examination table. His small brown eyes held a warmth and a depth Bettina had not seen in many years, and she felt safe with him, like she did with the old priest who had taught her the old prayers, even though the vet would not take his eyes from her chest. Chico looked up at her, pleading with her not to mind, while back at home, Bettina knew, her mother lay on the couch, awaiting good news.

  “This is my mother’s dog,” she said and then quickly added, “I don’t live here.”

  Chico looked from the vet to Bettina. The vet looked briefly at the dog and then stared again at Bettina’s covered-up chest. Stared at the long column of buttons, each one tight in place. He frowned slightly and his shoulders seemed to sag.

  “I don’t live here,” she said again.

  They stood there for a long silent moment, the vet staring at her chest and Chico looking from one to the other. Finally Chico put his head down on his front paws and heaved a big sad sigh. “No can help little dog,” the vet said, still staring at her chest, and he seemed like he would cry as he put his gnarled hand on the doorknob to let her out.

  “Wait.” Bettina looked deep into Chico’s scared wet eyes and sighed. She undid the top button. And the next. And the next until they were all undone. And when the vet kept his hand on the doorknob, she undid the clasp of her little blue bra and pulled it down.

  “They are like two healthy guinea pigs,” he said, eyeing her breasts happily, unashamed, and he put a healing hand on the dog’s stomach. And back at the house, Bettina saw it clear as day, Meyma got up to make a stew.