FLASH FICTION: Bean Sidhe

First Published: October 8th, 2015
Word Count: 250


 

Bean Sidhe

by Alexandra Erin

“Tall whipless double espresso soy mocha!”

“We’ve talked about this, Morgan.”

The barista blanched at the sound of her supervisor right behind her. She stood with a fixed smile on her face until the drink had been collected, then turned.

“Simon, I’m sorry,” she said. “It just slipped out! Force of habit.”

“It never should have become a habit in the first place,” he said. “You’ve worked here long enough to know the policy. We ask the guest’s name, we write it on their cup, we call it out! It makes people feel welcome, as if you’re treating them nice. It’s not rocket science. If it was, you wouldn’t be doing it.”

“Couldn’t I just be nice for real? I have… issues… with shouting people’s names. Julia never had a problem with my little quirks.”

“Yeah, well, Julia retired,” Simon said. “I don’t have a problem, either. You do, and you need to get over it right the fuck now.”

“You’re sure I can’t just call out the drinks?” Morgan asked.

“No. Names or nothing,” he said. “Do your job or hit the bricks.”

“Could I… practice with yours?”

“If that’s what it takes,” he said, rolling his eyes.

She called his name.

It didn’t take long for the EMTs to get there, but it was too late to do anything. The shop closed for the day, and Morgan knew it might be closed a bit longer, but when it reopened, no one would ask her to call out names.

POEM: Nevers

First Publication: October 7th, 2015


 

Nevers

by Alexandra Erin

 

prayers never spoken

thoughts never shared

vows never broken

glances never dared

 

chances never taken

wounds never healed

dreams left forsaken

secrets unrevealed

REPOST: And So I’m Having A Wonderful End Time But I’d Rather Be Whistling In The Dark

(Originally published on May 21st, 2011. Picked up and dusted off because this nonsense is rearing its head again.)

I’ve got some twitter on my Yahoo yahoo on my Twitter giving me guff about the fact that I chose to live tweet the lack of an apocalypse last night.

Supposedly, I’m being intolerant of Christian beliefs.

Well, first of all, let’s make something very clear: the Rapture in general and Harold Camping’s incredibly specific version of it are beliefs and they’re held by people who are Christians, but they are not Christian beliefs in the way that, say, “Jesus is Messiah” is a Christian belief. We in the vaguely-Christian-by-default/Easter-And-Christmas/Secular-Humanist world are told by serious and passionate men who’ve given the matter a lot of study and a lot of thought and who care about the Bible more than we do that the Bible says this, that a literal reading of the Bible means we must believe that… and because we see little enough reason to care about the Bible in the first place and they’re clearly experts we take it as so.

I’m not going to go into all the ways that any of the various versions of End Times, Inc. absolutely fails at being based on a literal reading of the Bible. A better blogger than I (and one who has invested far more time in Bible study, being himself a Christian Evangelical) has done this at Slacktivist. You can pick almost any one of his Left Behind recaps to see examples of the kinds of weird leaps that End Times enthusiasts make and the contortions they go through to claim that they’re treating the Bible literally.

Simply put, someone who declares Revelation to be an allegorical fairy tale aimed at Christians in the opening centuries of A.D. is being more literal than someone who claims that all that talk of seals and judgments and horsemen and thunders uttering their voices means that there’s going to be an earthquake sweeping across the globe at 6 P.M. or someone who thinks it’s foretelling a Secretary-General of the United Nations becoming Emperor of the World (using all the authority of the Secretary-General of the U.N.) and declaring war on Israel.

Where are the thunders? Where are the horses? If we’re promised horses, we need to be given horses… that’s what literal means.

If you take it as an allegory, you can keep the whole of the text and assume that each and every part of it holds meaning. If you call it “literal prophesy” then you’re stuck throwing out most of it.

But I digress… all I really meant to do was spend a paragraph or two pointing out the difference between “What Harold Camping and his ilk believe” and “Christian beliefs”, so that I can show how disrespecting Harold Camping’s teachings is not the same as disrespecting Christians in general, Christianity, or Christian beliefs.

So here we come to the question: do Harold Camping and his beliefs not deserve respect and tolerance in and of themselves, Christian or not?

And I will answer that question: no, no they do not.

Folks, I feel a great deal of pity towards Camping’s followers, and I mean that in the kindest and least biting sense of the word. The spirit of simple human charity… the form of love that the Bible tells us is the greatest virtue, above faith and hope… demands nothing less. I try in my heart to even feel such pity towards Camping himself. I would encourage anyone who finds themselves dealing with Camping’s followers to be as charitable towards them as they can be. These are people who have been hurt. These are people who have had their hopes and fears manipulated, who have been brought to a crescendo of simultaneous joy and panic, and I can’t imagine what they’re feeling now.

But the thing is, we need to be able to laugh at Harold Camping and what he taught. This is terribly important, for two reasons.

One is that if we treat his pronouncements with dignity, we are abetting him in the harm he does to himself and others…. him, and all the End Times prophets and profiteers who follow. He is a ridiculous figure. We must be able to acknowledge that. Will people laughing at him make him see the error of his ways? No, if anything it will probably harden his resolve. He expects that real true Christians will be persecuted in the End Times. But as in politics, we have to think of the “swing voters”… the people who could go either way.

A lot of us grew up with the received notion that the Bible is kind of important, and some people who are looking for answers might see a Harold Camping type as being a passionate and serious man speaking with a lot of conviction on a subject he’s studied extensively and he’s quotes and math–math!–that says he’s right.

We need to be unafraid to point out that the emperor has no clothes rather than letting him tell everything his own way.

And the other reason we need to be able to laugh has to do with those same received notions about the Bible and Christianity. A lot of us in the western world are sort of Default Christians, even if we’re agnostics or secular humanists. If you grow up as a Christmas-and=Easter Christian, if you have older relatives who go to church and give stern looks when you take the Lord’s name in vain, if you grow up in a culture where the Judeo-Christian God is the default for swearing oaths in vain in the first place and where Christian demonic and apocalyptic images and ideas are among the most popular wells to draw from for horror stories…

Well, in those cases it can be hard to ignore a Harold Camping completely. You may joke about it… you may laugh it off… but it’s there, in the back of your head: what if he’s right? Again we come back to the fact that Harold Camping cares more about the Bible than most people do. If you’ve never read the Bible or never made a serious study of it but you have the received notion that it’s kind of a big deal stuck in the back of your head…

The phrase here is “whistling past the graveyard”. You know intellectually that people do in fact walk past graveyards all the time and nothing rises up and grabs them. Even if you can’t empirically prove to yourself that there are no ghouls or ghosts or zombies you have to know that the graveyard’s been there for ages and there’s a road or sidewalk going past it so people do, in fact, go past it and some of them go past it at night.

But then you have to walk past it at night…

The moon is out. Or the sky is clouded over. Maybe the leaves are off the trees and there are bare skeletal branches. And you walk a little faster, or you walk with deliberate slowness to show yourself how unafraid you are… because you feel it. The dread, the horror, maybe not of any one particular thing that you think will happen but the fear that something could happen.

Harold Camping collectively walked us past the graveyard today, and we dealt with it the way human beings always have: with raised voices and forced cheer. It’s how we relieve tension. It’s how we banish the baleful spirits that we don’t really believe in but wouldn’t want hanging around our campfires all the same.

Does Harold Camping in fact deserve the kind of treatment he’s getting? I’m not prepared to say he does. Simple human charity says he doesn’t. It also says you don’t kick a man when he’s down. But he’s the instigator here, and he’s also one person. The needs of those he victimized… which includes anyone who has chuckled nervously while watching a clock today… outweigh his needs at this point.

POEM: Mind The Gap

First Publication: October 7th, 2015


 

MIND THE GAP

By Alexandra Erin

 

There is a place between

where I was born

and where I live now

and there are no words

for how I feel about it

 

There is a space between

what I once was

and who I’ve become

and there is no way

to bridge that gap

 

There is a pause between

the moment I act

and the moment I think

and I’m not sure

what I can do about it

 

There is a gulf between

the things that I dream

and the things I can do

and I’m less and less sure

which even is which.

 

 

 

SHORT STORY: Made With Love

First Publication: October 5th, 2015
Word Count: ~1700


 

MADE WITH LOVE

by Alexandra Erin

When I made Annabelle, I wasn’t looking for a companion. I hadn’t known at the time how much I needed one.

I didn’t think of myself as lonely as a child, even though I was frequently alone and didn’t have anyone who shared my interests. I was simply solitary. My interests were unique, or so I thought at the time. The adults in my life assured each other I would become interested in boys any time, and then some of them assured me it would be fine if I was interested in girls.

Mostly I was interested in making things, and in the strange blue stone that dotted the quarries and rocky outcroppings near our home, and in making things out of the stone.

Astralite, it was called. The star-stone. People used to think it came to the earth in falling stars, but that’s nonsense.

A geologist once told me we have no idea what made astralite form, but it definitely had a terrestrial origin. I don’t know that I could have articulated this as a child, but the way it appeared in veins running through the limestone certainly testified to that.

The name had stuck even after its celestial origin was disproven, because it was popular and evocative and it certainly fit in other ways. The luminescent qualities of the star-stone were one of its many notable qualities.

Despite the difficulties involved in commercial exploitation, high-quality astralite has always been in demand. I was fortunate that our local strain was not seen by anyone as particularly pure or interesting. It marbled our limestone with whisker-thin wisps, not great galloping rivers.

Over the course of several summers, I collected slivers and dust and pressed them into molds of my own devising, stamping out the gears and shafts and other bits that would become Annabelle. I’d created the technique to make jewelry that I gave away as gifts.

Astralite has a tricky reputation for jewelry. My mother still has the first pendant I ever made, but everyone has heard about the rich lawyer who had astralite stones faceted and polished like gems set into a necklace for his wife, only for them to break apart completely before she opened the box. The world is full of stories like both of these: the cherished astralite heirloom and the junk jewelry that disintegrates.

Sometimes astralite is like the most solid of bedrock. Sometimes it is fragile as hematite, soapstone, or amber. People chalk this up to differences in composition or structure, though no one’s been able to reliably measure such differences.

Those who work astralite will tell you the truth, though most people think we’re just being romantic. It’s simple, though. You have to love it.

The proof of this sits next to me on the sofa every evening, and lays beside me in bed while I sleep. I pressed her parts together out of dust and scrapings, but in twenty-three years not a single piece has broken, not a single axle has cracked. There isn’t so much as a chip on the tooth of any of her gears.

People think I’m a genius. Even the ones who believe I’m a fraud—and that’s most people—think I’m a genius at it. Even making a person-shaped machine that can walk and speak like a person is something of a holy grail in the field of robotics, an area in which I have no actual expertise or experience.

If Annabelle were nothing more than a remote-controlled automaton and all those intricate visible clockwork pieces suspended inside the thin blue glowing wire frame that bounds her limbs were simply there for show, she would still be a triumph in both design and execution.

The truth is, I don’t know how I made her. I started with the simple idea for an astralite clock. The immediate inspiration for this was an old spring-driven alarm clock my parents had, which I had taken apart and put back together many times.

As soon as I started making the pieces, though, I found that they pulled me in a different direction. I started making more pieces, other pieces, and putting them together in the way that made the most sense.

I started when I was eleven. It took three years, during which time most of the adults in my life thought I was making an impressive sculpture. When asked, I said “Something like that.” I’d had a vague inkling in my head of what my labor was leading to, but it sounded ridiculous to say it aloud. I was making a person. I was making a girl.

People tell me she is a work of art. I used to correct them by saying that her creation was done out of love, but I’ve stopped, mostly because I realized that the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

Still, I don’t like to hear Annabelle described that way, as a work. “A thing of beauty” is another one that makes me see red, though that one is also applied to other women.

When I was a child, I made Annabelle the size of a child. Since then, I have grown and she has grown with me. She bathes in astralite dust periodically, according to her own unfathomable internal rhythms. She takes it into herself. She grows. She changes.

We are adults now. We live together, loving each other yet not quite lovers, at least not in the sense that my more prurient correspondents assume. They like to ask how we have sex. I used to ask them why they assumed that we do, but more often than not, this would only result in even cruder inquiries in the next follow-up.

I support my love and myself with my astralite art and jewelry, which I sell to a select clientele in order to preserve my reputation for quality. It’s not enough for the customer to love a piece in the aesthetic sense, or to love the idea of having it. There has to be real love attached to it, flowing through it.

Astralite needs love to survive when removed from its rocky womb.

That’s the secret.

That’s the key.

That’s why I can work it as easily as if it were soft clay, and make a sculpture you can’t dent with a sledgehammer. When my pieces leave me and go out into the world, though, my love for them cannot sustain them. They must go to loving homes. They must be purchased with love, given with love, treasured.

Annabelle helps me vet my clients. While my explanations of astralite’s nature are still regarded as new age fringe theories by many, they are known. So are the qualifications I set for buying my pieces. Many have tried to bluff their way through the interview.

Usually it’s obvious when someone is faking, covering their covetousness with cartoon hearts in their eyes. I can be fooled, though. People can even fool themselves. Annabelle, the treasure of my heart, is never fooled. Love comes as naturally to her as breathing does to you or me. If this means she does not often have to stop and ponder about its existence, it means she acutely notices its absence.

Even with the vetting process, I offer no guarantees with my work, as things can change and hearts with them. I’ve heard from people who received one of my pieces secondhand, often through a bequest or at an estate sale, only to have it fall to pieces. Usually they’re just complaining, but in a few cases a new owner has sought my help in establishing that the piece was a counterfeit so they could seek redress from the seller. I have no choice but to disappoint them again.

On the other hand, I’ve received many kind messages from people who have found a secondhand treasure which appeared pitted and pocked but which cleaned up more nicely than they would have thought possible with a little tender love and care, or who inherited a cherished keepsake from a family member and want me to know how they feel closer to their loved one than ever when they wear or handle it.

I also receive several inquiries a week asking me for instructions on how to build another Annabelle, along with offers to buy her or requests that I make her available for an in-depth examination. I used to try to respond to these, but now I don’t bother.

It’s not even the volume of them. It’s the fact that even explaining that she is a person whom I love feels like I’m granting too much legitimacy to the premise that she’s not. It wears me down.

I couldn’t tell someone how to make another one of her. I don’t think there could be another one of her, any more than there could be another one of me, or you, or anyone else. I doubt copying her framework or the pattern of her gears would create a spritely blue glowing woman who laughs at my jokes and shares my fears.

The mechanics by which her physical form were constructed hardly matter. That’s not what made her. Sometimes, when I receive a query about her origins that is neither presumptive nor insensitive, I share what advice I have to give on the subject, though to my knowledge no one has yet succeeded in making another living being out of astralite, at least not on purpose.

I did receive an email yesterday from a hysterical mother whose daughter had found one of my tiny carved hummingbirds with its wing broken off. The girl had pressed the pieces back together. She wants to be a veterinarian, her mother said, and she cooed over the poor broken thing, and made it a tiny bandage, and kissed it better, and now a tiny blue hummingbirds follows her around, flitting around in circles around her head and watching over her while she sleeps.

Her mother wanted to know if this is normal.

I told her it’s natural.

Quick update…

…so the people who follow what’s going on solely through my blog will know that my travel went well and I arrived safely: my travel went well and arrived safely. One silver lining to this particular tropical storm system: because I arrived ahead of schedule, I’ve had more time to spend with my father.

My father describes himself as the worst writer in the family. This might be an instance of a person blessed with faint condemnation—he is certainly a masterful storyteller—but it’s certainly not a thing he feels called to do. He’s more in the business of business. The interesting thing is how much I find that the things he says about it translates to both the business side of art, and to creativity.

I told him last night I love reading his advice to his clients. If the making piles of money for himself and his customers thing he’s got going on doesn’t work out for him, he could seriously turn out some impressive motivational posters and advice books.

Between last night and this morning, our conversations have helped some things that were pretty shapeless in my mind to gel up quite a bit, and given me more confidence about some of the directions I’ve been moving in.

So that was a huge positive note to end a stressful and tumultuous time.

With most of two work days already lost and my typical post-travel fatigue and spaciness, I’m just declaring this week a casualty of the storm. I’m going to spend the day relaxing with my parents, dinking around creatively in the presence of fresh air and sunshine, and figure out what’s happening next week next week.