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The Lady and the Dragon

The Writing Prompt:
Write about the dragon who rescued the princess from the knight.

My 3-Minute Response:



Dragon to Knight: “Dude, the lady, she is mine."

Knight draws his sword: “You’ll have to kill me first!”

Dragon takes in a deep breath. Blows hard. Flames engulf Knight. His armor bubbles and cracks. His beard catches fire. His eyes explode.

Princess drops Knight’s hand. Races over to Dragon.

“Lady,” he says, and bows down.

Princess drapes a white kerchief over his mouth.

“You have awful breath,” she whispers.

~sr~

Casino

It’s the city that never sleeps, thought Mindy. She took a sip of her daiquiri and frowned. Too sweet. She held the glass anyway, twirling it in her hands.

That would be New York, the man said, leaning over her to snag an extra olive off the bar tray.

Mindy frowned. She’d spoken out loud. This wasn’t the first time, but it was getting to be a habit. A bad one, by the way this man was looking at her now. He had a nice enough face, she supposed. A bit wrinkled around the eyes and when he smiled he had all his teeth. He slid onto the empty stool next to her.

This is Vegas, he said, glancing around the gold room. And it was gold: wallpaper, light fixtures, carpet. Even the wait staff was decked in gold with blood-red accents. Overhead fixtures were fitted with gold filters, making the light an ambient gold instead of harsh fluorescent white. Mindy glanced at the man. His skin would be harshly lit in other lights, cheeks over-exposed, blue eyes washed out. In this room he was a mellow gold, a perpetual suntan. Midas, Mindy thought to herself. Made of money.

The man laughed again, charmed. I’m not that rich, he said. But I can buy you another drink. He signaled the waiter.

Mindy set down her glass and studied the lipstick ring. Sorry, she said, then louder, in case she only said that word in her head. It would figure. Saying crazy things out loud when she should be silent and keeping mum when she needed to speak.

He looked at her. For?

She looked at him and lied. One too many of these. I can’t tell if I am talking or thinking anymore. I don’t mean to be rude. Call you Midas. She set the glass down, stood to go.

He put a hand out, gently. Don’t. Don’t go. Please. He smiled again, flashing teeth that were a little too bright in the gold room. Caps, Mindy thought, then prayed she’d kept that one to herself.

She slid back on the stool, half on, half off. One foot on the rung, the other tapping the floor. Whipping out a beat to a tune only she could hear. She could feel her body shaking, even her breasts were in motion and now her hands were barely still on the bar top. Her foot wasn’t shaking. She was. She could feel it, sorrow rising up like backwash in a dirty lake. Who was this man anyway? She only wanted to sit in the casino. Be alone. Stare at the lights. Talk herself down.

My name is Daniel, he said. Rhymes with Midas. He laughed. Threw his head back, and his hair, a bit unruly with a cowlick and a curl, flopped over his ears like a shaggy dog.

Cute, sarcastic Mindy said, then covered her mouth, hoping he hadn’t heard. He had of course, his grin was back. He quickly patted the back of her hand, then slid a fresh drink before her.

Mindy picked up the napkin, dabbed her mouth. She studied her pink lip print and frowned. The casino was deafeningly loud, a peaking crescendo this close to midnight. Still, he seemed perfectly tuned in to the whispered words that slid out of her mouth.

Except she probably wasn’t whispering. Maybe not shouting, maybe just speaking clearly, sounding out her mind, the way she always did. It was what Harry loved about her.

She pressed her lips, gently forcing them apart. For a moment she felt the line of her teeth, tongue darting to the roof of her mouth. A parody of a dummy, lips jerking without a hand to hold her up. She spoke. I think out loud, I talk to myself. Sometimes I say odd things. Sometimes I forget I’m not alone.

She glanced around the casino. Hard to believe I’m even here, it’s where I most don’t want to be.

Daniel was staring at her, eyebrows furrowed, one long bridge across his nose. She pressed her mouth again, said: I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to talk. To you, to anyone. Then she made a zipping motion, sealing her lips closed. She picked up her glass and moved away.

Wait 'til I tell Harry! Moving my mouth like some madcap dummy. Harry will -- Mindy stopped. Harry was why she was here, stuck in this endless round of drinks and bars and strange men.

2

Another casino. Another conjoined embryo, seamlessly connected. Inside, the colors were different, the servers, the music. Costumes in this new space: masks, feathers, sequins, an eternal Mardi Gras. As she stepped through the doorway, someone draped a strand of beads over her head. It caught on her ear, hung like a purple strand of glitter. She let it be, thinking it a strange flower, somehow right.

Mindy sat at another bar, faced another mirror. Touched her lips. You’re not going to start that again, she said. This time her lips stayed closed.

She looked at her fingers, wiped away the pink lipstick on her napkin. Someone talks to you, you just answer. Like you use to do when Harry was alive.

The bartender leaned in, smiling. He said, Can I – and then pulled the purple garland out of her hair and settled it around her neck. His fingers lingered, burned.
Now. What can I get you?

No more daiquiris. Wine? No. Harry never liked either.

Scotch, she said. With a beer chaser. Then she winced, knowing the combination would make her violently ill later. So who cares, she said. Out loud.

‘Scuse me? He set the drinks down, wiped the bar with a white towel.

Mindy smiled, lifted the Scotch. Cheers, she said, and swallowed.

Anything but, her mind flipped back. Mindy choked on the slow fume, started to cry.

Hey hey, he said, reaching for the glass. Mindy pulled back, knocked over the beer. It splashed across the polished mahogany, funneled onto the floor. She fumbled in her purse and stuffed a wad of bills in his hand.

Sorry. To herself. Sorry. Out loud.

Sorry.

3

Another casino. King Arthur this time, a fantasy inside her bad dream. Sitting in a restaurant this time, the buffet behind her. A plate of cold eggs, bacon, toast. Coffee. No one paying attention to her. No one talking to her, touching her. Why must they touch?

Stop touching me, to the server who came to drop the check. He had set a hand on Mindy’s shoulder. The paper fluttered to the table. Mindy pinned it under the water glass.

Mindy looked at herself in the mirrored walls. Wide green eyes, ringed with sleepless nights and failed mascara. Full lips, swollen from too many licks of pink. Tousled hair, black and white, pepper and salt. Small hands, nails bitten, flecks of red polish looking more like blood down by the cuticles.

You’re still beautiful. Harry’s voice. Guys always want to talk to a pretty girl.

Her gaze dropped. Figure, better now than before. Not eating, not sleeping, not breathing, not being. It agreed with her waistline, had leavened her breasts. The dress, not new, not old. Worn once on her wedding, twice on a cruise. Now it skimmed where it had stuck.

You could wear a burlap bag. Harry used to say. You’d still be my beautiful wife.

Mindy started. Lurched out the door and into the lobby. Through the double doors, past the slot machines, Black Jack, craps.

More lights, more blaze, more heat.

The lights never go off in the city, she said. To herself. The casino is always day and it’s always night. Conversational, said to the waitress gliding past.

Roulette: random wheel, matching pebble. Mindy slides over a pile of chips, watches the wheel race and slow, the white rabbit landing on Harry’s death date.

She turned to the man next to her. Blurted. I don’t like the dark. I’m waiting for morning.

He showed her the time. You’ve made it, he said.

by Susan Rich, (c)2014 All Rights Reserved

Ring around the heart

"It’s all I have left of my grandma,”
my mother says, twisting the diamond ring on her left hand. This is not her wedding band, that stays in a box on her dresser. This ring, with its tiny diamond chip worn flat, is handled with gentle reverence.

My mother studies it now, slowly turning the ring on her own small hand. Her knuckles above the ring are swollen, too large to slide the ring across. It doesn’t matter, she never takes it off: not to bathe, do the dishes or rub lotion on her hands.

Memories, memories, this ring is all about a lost, sad time. It reminds my mother of the woman who wore it last, a woman my mother yearns for, a woman she loves more than the rest of us. She has never told me this, except today I see it in her seated stance, how her shoulders roll forward over her hand: a protective, downward sloping curve. In this pose her jowls sag and press extra wrinkles around her smile.

My mother looks at me now, her brown eyes tinged with longing. “My grandma raised me when the war began. My mother was working—too busy.”

Plus she had a boyfriend. Within days after the Nazis took my grandpa to a labor camp, my grandma fell in love, a grand sweeping passion that was as scandalous as much as dangerous. That’s the reason, the secret reason, why my mother was raised by her grandmother. The older woman spirited my mother away to her tiny farm in the foothills of Austria.

“There was never a child more loved than I,” my mother says.

The words spill out now, flecks of fact and fancy. I’ve never been able to tell the difference and I no longer try. My mother is talking to me, and these are the stories I want to hear.

She tells of how the Germans finally came for their family, of how uncles and wives first tried to escape, then hide. She tells how their farm was eventually stolen, how those remaining were crammed into cattle cars that rattled and bumped along rails. She tells of Theresienstadt (Terezin), the barracks where she lived for three years. She describes wooden stalls over the camp’s mortuary, where the dead lay stacked for mass burial.



She tells of seeing one small girl, face waxy yellow, stilled by the violence of the camp. “It was no big deal,” she later told her grandma. My mother: numb to death before the age of 7.

Still, there was that ring, a powerful circle that drew my mother and her grandmother together. “She protected me and hid me through the years we were there,” my mother said as she stroked the ring. My great-grandmother gave her food and grew thin, she gave her coat and lost fingers to frostbite.

One bitter autumn day, when the leaves were whirling off the trees and breaking underfoot, when the reds and greens and golds were the only signs of wealth left on that blackened hillside, there came the word, a whispered rumor: liberation.

Less than a week later my mother's grandma was shipped to Auschwitz.

My mother stood on the tracks and watched the train crunch slowly out of sight. With it went her love, her heart, her hope. For years that train returned in her dreams, finally dragging my mother’s sanity down those dirty tracks.

I gently lift my mother's hand, touch the ring myself. Her warm fingers briefly curl over mine, then let go.

“How did you get the ring?” I ask. Jewelry, artwork, even the fillings in their teeth, all routinely stolen from the Jews.

My mother shrugs. “My mother--your grandmother--I don’t know how. But she gave it to me, for luck, when I was pregnant with you.”

My mother stares at her hand, then back up at me. “It’s my most valuable possession.”

by Susan Rich, (c)2014 All Rights Reserved

Circle, Circle, Circle

“Should I get a divorce?” I asked the therapist. We’d been talking for nearly an hour and I was still torn. No one in my family had ever split up, no one in my family knew my marriage was falling apart.

It was also true no one in my family knew about Daniel’s drinking, the never-ending fights, the violence. Not even my best friends knew what was going on.

Now I was sitting in a therapist’s office, discussing the unbelievable.

“Let me draw you a picture,” she said. Taking a black felt pen, she drew a circle. Inside, she drew a tiny bottle. “That’s alcohol, your husband’s one true love.”

Then she drew a large circle around the smaller one. “That’s your husband, revolving around his one true love. Whether he’s drinking or not, he’s always
thinking about his alcohol, there’s little room for anything else.”

She looked at me. I stared at the picture, then into her brown eyes.
“What about me?” I asked.

Now she drew a third circle, neatly trapping the first two circles inside.

“This is you, revolving around your husband, revolving around the alcohol. This is you, revolving around the love you want to have, but can’t, because he is not free to love you.

“No matter how long you stay, how hard you try, how much you love him, your husband will always revolve around the alcohol. Even if he stops drinking, he’ll always think about that last time, the next time, the ‘if only’ time.”

“What should I do?” I asked in a whispery voice. Close to tears I asked, louder: “Just tell me what to do.”

Dr. Angela sat back in her chair. “Have you ever heard of an intervention?”

I shook my head.

She explained: Family, friends, boss, co-worker, me, others —anyone, everyone— corralling Daniel into a corner, telling him he needs help, he needs to quit drinking, he needs to be better to himself, better to me. And at the end of it all, a treatment program, maybe in-house, if he can’t stop on his own.

“What the f*** are you talking about!” I bellowed. “You’re telling me, after everything I have been through and – I told you, I told you what he’s like, what he has done, can’t you see what he will DO to me once he gets back, oh my god are you crazy? An intervention! Oh my God, no!” I smacked the table, crumpled that piece of paper. Now I was standing, leaning over her.

“You think I should ride in on some white horse and rescue him? WHO THE F*** is going to rescue me? Where is MY white horse? Where is MY white knight? How come I always have to be there for him, to do for him, goddamitt, WHO is going to DO FOR ME?”

Dr. Angela draped her warm hands over my balled fists. She gave them a squeeze and looked directly into my eyes.

“I guess you’re getting a divorce.”

I left my ex December 1993. Those words, that moment, still electrify me to this day. She led me straight to the painful—and critical—conclusion abused women hate to face: We are the agents of our rescue.

by Susan Rich, (c)2014 All Rights Reserved

Epiphany

I was folding his socks in the basement.

The washer gurgled, the dryer hummed. The noise was a rumbling freight train, a caboose trembling on the tracks.

I had a stack of his clean socks and was mechanically matching and rolling one into the other. He hated that. Said I should line them up neatly, one atop the other, toes touching, leg bands even, and fold it in thirds, leg band to middle, toe to middle. Just like his mom did. He liked how his mom did things.

I’m the one doing the job, my mind ground out in reply to his endless criticisms. I didn’t speak the words. He wasn’t listening and I’d already learned not to talk when he drank.

He was sitting on the couch, holding a can of beer. There was a pile of empties stacked neatly in the corner. The sour stink of Old Milwaukee’s Best fouled the sweet scent of clean sheets.

I was folding, rolling his socks.

The washer gurgled, the dryer hummed.

We’d moved into the house not three months before. I was already tired of the large rooms, manicured yard, the never-ending housework. I was tired of him, tired of myself, and I knew it.

Trapped, I’d trapped myself.

The pile of socks grew. White round balls. He frowned at them.
I wish you wouldn’t do them that way.

I threw a sock ball at him.
Here. You can do it yourself.

He shook his head. Frowned. Swapped an empty can of beer for a full one; the pop-top cracked and hissed. He sipped.
You don’t have it so bad. Lots of girls would be happy to have a husband like me. No one will ever treat you the way I do.
He sat, threw the sock ball back at me. Do it right, he said.

I was folding his socks in the basement. I stopped. My breath stopped.

The washer gurgled; the dryer hummed.

I looked down at my hands, hands holding a white tube sock.
I put the sock down.
I looked at him and spoke to the inside of my head, to my invisible ears and shaking heart.

I can treat myself better. I can treat myself better.
I can treat myself better than you treat me and I can treat myself better than anyone I will ever meet.
I can treat myself better and I deserve to be treated better and I will learn how to treat myself better.
I want to be treated better.
If I live alone I will be treated better.
If I never have another love I will be treated better.
I can be treated better.
I want to be treated better.
I deserve it.

The washer drained; the dryer clicked off. The room grew quiet.

I finished folding his socks.

by Susan Rich, (c)2014 All Rights Reserved