George Washington’s Bandaid
by Stefanie Freele
We had to dig a trench. For the tortoise’s fence as she needs winter quarters to semi-hibernate. It might have been Betsy Ross’s hair band we found in the dirt first, the very same band she used to hold back distracting tendrils as she sewed with concentration on the American Flag. Or the sharp piece of glass shattered from Ben Franklin’s light bulb. We located the sturdy feather used to write the Declaration of Independence, and a pen tip from 1907, proudly made by Joseph T. Pen, whose wife invented the Pencil. Her name was Maryanna. Every treasure must have a story. Two soil-encrusted beads: jewels lost for centuries from the queen’s crown when she came to visit the garden and tripped on a root. A sticker, most likely dropped by Abraham Lincoln on his way to return that penny. A small rock with white: a drop of paint from a hurried Picasso, or from that troubled bloody guy who cut off his ear? The Mariana Trench we called it, George Washington’s trench. Dig! Someone—a huge fan of David Attenborough—pointed out that the Mariana Trench isn’t necessarily the deepest on the planet because we haven’t discovered everything about earth yet. Go discover, we shouted, Go! as we dug farther, further, deeper, uncovering King George’s favorite green crayon, tile from a nearby undiscovered Egyptian tomb containing King Tut’s coffee cup collection, a reddish clay piece of the world’s original wheel. There was shouting and ah-has and look! The reptilian eyes of the tortoise watched as we unearthed history and when asked if she’s happy, none of us knew how to respond. How do you tell? She’s a tortoise, we shrugged. We don’t speak tortoise.
Stefanie Freele is a previous contributor to The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. Her short fiction can be found in Flash Fiction Online, Glimmer Train, and Witness. Stefanie is the author of two short story collections: Feeding Strays (Lost Horse Press) and Surrounded By Water (Press 53).
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “George Washington’s Bandaid”? Sulcata tortoises show affection by bumping into you. Should you be bumped by a tortoise, I would think it ranks as a special moment. Staring into a tortoise’s eye is much the same as gazing into the night sky. How do you make sense of something so expansive? What she’ll rent as soon as she gets there—maybe Fort Bragg, Point Arena, Crescent City, Gold Beach, Port Orford—a room on a second floor, one block from the ocean. It will be in a fishing town—one of those industrial-type areas, not a nautical-decorated vacation home neighborhood with anchors exhibited in the front yard. She’ll find a run-down peeling paint building, sagging here and there with a rusty screened door and a drafty bathroom, right in the heart of the fog. From her room, she will scan the ocean through her window, if she’s lucky; there will be a little deck, most likely drooping and not up to code. No matter, as long as she can hear the foghorn and taste the fog. In her duffle bag: hooded flannel jackets, waterproof boots, raingear, books. Below she’ll watch the scrappy jetty-cats wander the streets under dim street-lights. She’ll feed them leftovers from the local dive that carries fantastic clam chowder or terrific fish and chips, but never both. In her room, she’ll read, listen for the every-ten-second foghorn—a rhythm she can count on, rest. There will be no television, no telephone. Several of the cats will have kittens and she’ll take home a tame white one, comb out its fleas and make it hers. She’ll call it Moonlight. She and Moonlight will sit on the rocks during storms watching the last of the fishing boats come in, the air thick with salt, turmoil and the knowledge that all things end and begin here at the ocean. She won’t get to know any of the fishermen, but she might say hello. That’s enough communication for a woman who was thrown from the back of a speeding pickup and broke many bones. Her hair will grow long, gray and humid-curly. Her ribs will always ache. She’ll eat as much damn clam chowder as she wants. Because the room she rents is in an undesirable area that often smells like decaying fish, she’ll stay forever, living cheaply, attaining a tanned wrinkled face because you can still get sunburned on a cloudy day. Stefanie Freele is the author of two short story collections, Feeding Strays, with Lost Horse Press and Surrounded by Water, with Press 53. Stefanie’s published and forthcoming work can be found in Witness, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, Wigleaf, Western Humanities Review, Sou’wester, Chattahoochee Review, The Florida Review, Quarterly West, and American Literary Review. <a href="http://www.stefaniefreele.comwww.stefaniefreele.com What surprising thing(s) can you tell us about this piece? “When A Foghorn Is The Answer” includes a nod to one of my son’s favorite bedtime books A Kitten Called Moonight by Martin Waddell, a tale of a young child who loves to hear the retelling of the story of how she found her little lost kitten by the ocean. In my story, the main character who is purposefully nameless has christened her own kitten Moonlight also. Is the name perhaps retrieved from a subconscious memory of this childhood book? Certainly she hasn’t named it Moonlight as a conscious tribute to her own childhood, because she begun a new existence, one of minimalism and anonymity, a state of mind I often daydream of. On a dark afternoon of half-rain, Rampart planes old-growth redwood seeking the precise intersection between growth rings. This is how he holds the wood: he feeds it in flat and gets the hell out of the way. (more…)When A Foghorn Is The Answer
by Stefanie Freele
Blown
by Stefanie Freele
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
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