Sundays at Seven
Magical Realism, short story (kinda longish)
Dear reader,
I have submitted this story to so many magazines and since they won’t accept work that has been posted on a personal blog, I haven’t posted it here. But I finally decided that since I haven’t had any luck, I would post it here.
While the last collections of work have been poetry, I started out with fiction. My book The Gift of an Imaginary Girl published by A Word with You Press in 2015 is a collection of magical realist short fiction as well as a novella, Coco, which is to date, my favorite work I’ve ever written.
During the pandemic, I took a remote class on flash fiction and each story was set in the pandemic with a surrealist twist. You can read three of these stories in my most recent publication, Shapeshifters: A Love Letter to the Resistance published by Beyond the Veil Press. The story I’m sharing below is one in a what I hoped and still hope, will someday become a full collection. For now, I’m sharing it here. It reminds me too, how magical realism was my focus during my MFA program and how my entire thesis and essay revolved around the history of it. Maybe sharing this remind me to not limit myself to poetry. I am a Gemini after all. “…I contain multitudes,” Walt Whitman, Song of Myself 51, (who I just happen to share a birthday with!).
I hope you enjoy it:
Sundays at Seven
Monster disappeared from Stella’s apartment the night she began to glow in the dark. He escaped out the window and down the fire escape. For the first couple of weeks, she let the wet food remain in his bowl, eventually molding and sprouting awful white spores, reminders of his absence, until finally the stillness of everything robbed her of any hope and she cleaned out his bowls and stored them atop her fridge.
In the early days of the pandemic and the lockdown, Stella relished having nothing to do. She felt as if she’d won the lottery. No more answering phones eight hours a day at the real estate office. No more dodging co-workers and their incessant invitations to god-awful hole-in-the-wall bars. No more getting up at 5 AM to put on a full face of make-up, strap on an underwire bra, rushing out the door to catch the 6:30 bus for the two-hour commute to a barely above minimum wage paying job. She could sleep in, at least long enough for Monster to paw her face, dig his claws into her robe to knead biscuits. She watched the news channel, watched the infection and death toll grow by the hour. She ate ice cream for breakfast and let Monster lick the spoon clean. She took long afternoon naps, and ordered delivery, waited to hear the masked delivery driver drop her food off outside her apartment door. Sometimes she would look out her second story window at the mostly empty streets below.
In the Before Times, Stella’s life was far from social, and she felt superior in this ability to be alone for long stretches of time. She was, after all, an only child raised by a single mother, a tax accountant. She had learned how to tolerate boredom and loneliness, to disassociate so effectively that she’d forgotten how it felt to yearn, to long for something, anything, out of reach. She had built an inner world, so detailed and historic, that it took precedence over anything surrounding her.
She received a once-a-week call from her mother every Sunday at 7:00PM on the dot. Her mother loved to talk about her retirement, and she’d often given Stella unwanted advice about pensions, 401ks and the dangers of credit cards, expensive coffee drinks and did she know about high yield savings accounts? She worried her mother could hear her roll her eyes.
“Two years, three months, and fourteen days till retirement,” her mother announced the latest countdown every single week. Stella could remember her marking off the years and months even as far back as when she was in the first grade in Mrs. Miller’s class, the year she ended up in the principal’s office for throwing a punch at a boy who’d knocked a nest out of the tree and stomped hatchlings who would never fly. She still felt her bones shift and earthquake every time the memory resurfaced.
During the fourth week of the lockdown, Stella noticed her exceptionally punctual mother had not called. This had only ever happened once before during an especially chaotic tax season when her mother had a very difficult client. The client insisted her mother check and re-check her work and was totally convinced her numbers were erroneous. But apart from that, her mother never missed their weekly phone call. She called her mother and got her voicemail. She called again and again and again. No answer.
Up until that moment, the pandemic and lockdown had been a welcomed reprieve, an “introvert’s paradise,” she’d told her mother just a couple of weeks earlier. She felt her time had finally come to finally know comfort. But now, something was different. An uncertainty arose that she had not counted on, the idea that this terrifying thing could touch her directly.
It was Wednesday night when a nurse finally called her.
“I’m so sorry,” the nurse said, “We would have called you earlier. There have just been so many…”
“Can I see her? When can she come home?”
The nurse was silent.
“I really am, so sorry,” she repeated, “I’m calling because your mother isn’t going home. I wanted to make sure you got to say goodbye.”
The nurse put the speaker to Stella’s mother’s ear, and Stella spoke softly, “Hello? Mom? Hello? Mom, it’s me. It’s Stella. I’m here, mom. I’m here.” But all she heard was labored breathing followed minutes later by its absence.
After it was over, Stella drew a bath so hot it turned her skin red. She felt nothing.. Monster followed her inside and curled up on the bath rug, purring. Stella was sweating and the bathroom mirror was fogged over. She reached for Monster, who rose to meet her wet hand with his head. She remembered when she found Monster by the apartment complex dumpster. He was maybe three months old, appeared feral, and swiped at her when she first made a grab for him. It took another week and several cans of tuna to finally win him over. He was covered in fleas and ringworm and for days she had to treat him with sulfur. Patches of his fur fell out, and he had an upper respiratory infection that gave him a hoarse sounding and menacing mewl. She sent videos to her mother who said, “Jesus, what a little monster you’ve got, Stella!”
A funeral was out of the question. These were perilous times. Even in death, even when the worst of it happened, there were no exceptions to the rules. A memorial over Zoom felt anticlimactic, almost embarrassing. She had few people to contact. Her uncle Robert in Portland, Oregon, a great aunt who had helped them out a few times when money was short, and her mother’s oldest friend Diane in Tacoma. Her mother would be cremated, her ashes delivered in a few weeks, they told her.
It started shortly after her mother’s death, with hot spots on her arms. Even Monster seemed to notice, and he would rub the top of his head against her skin. At night it sweltered. She scratched her forearms only to watch them seethe. The heat spread from her arms to her shoulders, her neck, and eventually her face. She scoured the internet for clues. She found nothing.
She expected the typical symptoms: fever, sore throat, joint aches, blurred vision, a ground shaking cough, and then… But she had no other symptoms and was puzzled as to how she’d been exposed. She wondered if she had caught something from a delivery driver. So, for two days she stopped ordering any food and instead ate a stale box of saltines and plain, brown rice. She finally caved when she finished a box of croutons.
Just as Stella had tired of the ambiguity of her condition, the warming sensation and the itching stopped. She celebrated with pizza and wine, and a can of sardines for Monster. She fell asleep on her couch to the blue light of her television, the fresh breeze from her cracked window, and Monster, curled between her knees.
It happened right as the sky turned pitch black and starless. At first, Stella thought she was dreaming. But when Monster hissed and growled, when he swiped at her like he had done all those years before, Stella shot up from the couch and saw her glowing, neon reflection. She shrieked, rubbed at her skin as if it was something external, something superficial. But the glow was emanating from a deeper place inside of her. She thought she could feel it in her organs–not painful, but uncomfortable.
“Monster!” she called to him, but he sprinted away from her, through the slight crack in her window, an opening so narrow his escape was unfathomable. But fear changes all living things. She called for him, manic and desperate. Her heartbeat, visible through the green center of her glowing chest. She wanted to run after him, but she was blinded by the brightness of her light. She called for him until her voice went hoarse and her skin stung with heat and tears.
Stella wondered if she was hallucinating, but if so, why did Monster react how he did? She went to the bathroom and stood naked in front of the mirror and nearly blinded herself trying to get a good look. She thought of fireflies. Glow worms. The glow in the dark stars on her ceiling she had as a child. Was it a sign of toxic radioactivity? Was it related to the virus itself, or the trial antidote she was so quick to order from the Department of Health? Or something otherworldly?
Stella watched the news and searched message boards trying to find out if anything like what she was experiencing had been reported. Instead, she watched hours of the rising death count, scientists versus men of faith arguing over the state of the world. Even when she took a break from the news, she could hear the neighbors on both sides of her watching as if they were in her living room. One day, the apartment to the right of her went silent. She no longer heard the man or woman shuffling to turn on their coffee maker, no longer heard them slamming cabinet doors, or clearing their throat. A knock came a few days later and Stella did not answer. Later, Stella noticed that a card had slipped under her door. She opened the white envelope addressed to “Apt 311” and found a notecard with a picture of a lone sunflower in a field, a barn in the distance. The inside read, “Dear Banner Apartment tenants, please join us over Zoom to remember our dear neighbor, Phyllis Reynolds. Beloved grandmother, retired music teacher, and friend. Also known as Phyllis from apartment 312…”
Stella didn’t know her neighbors. She made sure of it. If one of her neighbors was in the hallway, she would wait until they were gone before opening her door. Her first Christmas in the apartment building, she found a Christmas card and a poinsettia outside her door and her stomach curled. To be seen, perceived, in all her averageness was her nightmare. Why can’t we all just keep to ourselves, she would think. Getting her mail, throwing out her garbage, were tasks that filled her with anxiety. She kept her eyes glued to the floor or the walls and her heart raced when she would run into a neighbor on her way out to the dumpster, or when she unlocked her mailbox and heard footsteps behind her. Her mother had always blamed herself for Stella’s antisocial tendencies, saying it was due to her being an only child, and their being as isolated as they were. But Stella always denied this, telling her mother, “I just came into the world like this.”
But with Monster gone, and another month deep into the lockdown, Stella grew curious of her surroundings, a diligent observer from the safety of her second story apartment. She was the type to daydream even as others spoke to her, and then panic when asked a question about minutes of conversation she had zoned out.
She kept no body length mirrors in her apartment and when she bathed, she’d let the small, cracked rectangle of a mirror fog over and she refused to clean it until she was fully dressed. Her body was something of a burden, a load of laundry she kept forgetting in the dryer, kept re-washing, adding exorbitant amounts of soap to, but avoiding just the same. Now, she noticed things. Like, how the fibers of her mid-century couch looked almost like human hair, orange and brown, tightly braided. She noticed how the spot where Monster used to lay on her armchair was still brighter in color than the rest of the upholstery, but now, that deep green shade too, was fading little by little, without him to preserve its saturation. She noticed a pattern of sounds on the street below her window, and when it was more silent than ever, she was tortured by the sounds of her own body and its terrible churning, its hunger and its drought. But the most unsettling observation she’d made had to do with her own growing desire for something she’d never wanted for pre-pandemic: intimacy and connection.
After another couple of weeks, of the glowing keeping her from sleep and no cat to keep her feet warm, Stella cursed her reclusion. As the days grew shorter, her glow brighter than ever, Stella spent more and more time in the window of her two-story apartment, looking down at the scarcely populated streets, counting the few cars that came and went. She took notice of the few masked delivery drivers who dropped off groceries. She noticed the sober march of masked insomniacs, six feet apart.
Occasionally, a drunken stranger noticed her luminescence, gaze a green glowing woman standing naked in the window. The stranger would point, pull the mask down from his face, and stumble back. Stella would retreat, draw the curtains shut, and try to suffocate the glow with her weighted blanket. But usually, this was not the case. Unusual phenomena had become par for the course during the pandemic: babies born with full sets of teeth, UFO sightings, and morphing symptoms and hospitalizations. So, what did a glowing woman matter in such an unpredictable, dangerous time?
A knock at the door one Monday morning, the first one since the neighbor left her the invite to the Zoom memorial for her neighbor, startled Stella awake. She saw the back of the delivery driver turn the corner of the corridor and was surprised how sorry she was to have missed the hand-off. When she looked down, she saw what was left at her door. Her mother’s ashes. Stella picked up the plain black box, her mother’s name printed on a label. Just as Stella was about to bring the box inside, her neighbor in 313 opened the door to pick up a newspaper. She had seen him a few times, pre-pandemic, pre-lockdown. He was fifty-ish, handsome in a way that would make her mother blush. She liked the fact that he seemed as uninterested in getting to know her as she did him. She was grateful back then for his silent understanding.
“It’s really something, isn’t it?” He was still wearing pajamas, a mask hanging from one ear which he quickly strapped onto the other side after speaking to her.
“I’m sorry?”
He pointed with his eyes to the box in her hand.
“All our cares and worries, everything we hold dear and everything that terrifies us and we end up…” he didn’t finish, but Stella understood.
“This is my mother,” Stella told him, her voice cracking, her eyes avoiding him.
He shook his head. “No, my dear, that is not your mother.”
She held the box a little further away from herself at that moment, her vision blurred by tears.
“I lost my partner. He was a nurse. He stayed away for months. Didn’t want to risk getting me sick.”
“Oh,” she said. She was surprised. She couldn’t remember ever hearing a second voice in the apartment or seeing visitors. But then again, she made it her mission not to see or hear anything at all. “And you, have a box like this?”
313 smiled. “No,” he said. “He has a new home.” But he did not elaborate.
Stella stood there holding the ashes of her mother, talking to her neighbor of two years for the first time in a sort of suspended animation, as if she was watching herself, frozen.
“By the way,” he said, “it was my partner who left you the poinsettia on your doorstep that Christmas. I hope you don’t have a cat. I told him they are toxic to cats.”
“What?”
“I said, I hope you don’t have a cat. Poinsettias. They’re no good for cats–”
But Stella had already sucked herself back into her cocoon, the black box pressed against her chest. She remembered how she had thrown the poinsettia away immediately, knowing already.
“I’m so–I’m sorry,” she managed to say through the door, but she knew he did not hear her.
That night, Stella sat at the kitchen table, staring at the black box that wasn’t her mother but also, very much her mother. She thought about a more appropriate receptacle and dug around her kitchen cabinets until she found a pretty, vintage tin she’d bought to stash her tea. She emptied the tin and just as she was about to transfer the ashes, she heard chaos below. This time, she wrapped her bathrobe around her glowing body before approaching the window and looked down to see a small crowd of masked strangers hovering over something in the street next to a delivery vehicle with its hazard lights blinking, driver door open.
She cracked her window open, and the icy January air sent chills even through the warmth of her glow. That’s when she heard a muffled voice among the gaggle of onlookers crying out, “Is it alive? Is it breathing?” followed by a familiar but warped sound, a weak but persistent yowl, and then a cheer. Someone said, “It’s okay. It’s alive!”
Stella turned her head slowly towards the cat tower covered in piles of laundry waiting to be folded, and two bowls stacked on top of her fridge, covered in dust, a box of half canned cat food, open, unused. And Stella ran, barefoot out her apartment door, down each flight of stairs with its flickering lights, its ash trays, until she made it down to the street where everyone turned towards her radiance.
Stella pushed through the crowd of strangers until she reached the center and found her long lost Monster, his gray fur sticky with his blood but his eyes alert as ever. And once he was in Stella’s arms, her sobs dying in his long mane, she felt the iridescent glow leave her body, felt the weight of everything ripple off her skin and finally, she felt the familiar sandpaper tongue licking the tears from her face. Strangers pulling off their masks and cheering. And though she was no longer glowing, warmth ran down Stella’s spine as the rejoicing grew louder. Stella looked up from the street and one by one, watched as glowing silhouettes filled the windows of her building, each window cracked just enough so she could hear the whole chorus of them applauding.