“Aunt Fan’s Private Journey” was previously published, without illustrations, in Drumvoices Revue, Vol 15 Spring-Summer-Fall, 2007, 178-179 and Vol 17/2011-2012, 300-301.

In the beginning I have saucer eyes and honey curls and skin delicate as pear petals. I long to do cloud dances, but the music of my life is jukebox tunes and country classics. I am hollow. I gulp down filling words—apple pie, potato bread, cupcakes, and steak—but they do not feed my soul. I look for peace, but it isn’t listed in the Yellow Pages. I search for the meaning of it all and I find Mr. Clean. Life is hard.

Life is hard when you are the third of thirteen children. There is never enough. Even when everyone has shoes and there’s plenty of bread and beans to go around, there’s never enough of the things that would really nourish you. People hardly even notice you’re there and so sometimes you aren’t.

I was wearing an inner tube, pretending it was a bright balloon striped in gold and blue. But it was one of the grinding days, one of nights wearing me down, filing me away, leaving me too heavy to float above it all and too weak to climb out of the pit. Sometimes I cannot find the rungs to the magic ladder.

Life is harder when the world is at war—and even when it isn’t, like when your soldier husband comes home from Japan and brings the war with him. Sometimes the world is at peace but you are at war. You deserted the Baptists for the Catholics, but good Catholics don’t desert the war. 

I fear they put love potion in the punch when I was at the prom, and that could lead only to marriage. I dusted on make-up and whirled into the dance dance dance. But I fell at the grand finale, spilling red paint everywhere, or maybe it was blood, like real death—or maybe real life. I must leave, I must leave.

Life is granite hard when your second-born son isn’t right. You do what you can but you can’t do enough, and so you take him to your sister’s house on Saturday mornings. They have the only TV in the family. His cousin is just four years older, but she’ll sit with him for hours. The little round screen in the big wooden box shows horrors that look worse than your son, like Frankenstein or Herman Munster—though he was decades later, of course, and funny. They watch the robots build walls of glass bricks and your baby grins and drools, his heavy head wavering side to side, his wispy hair stuck in summer sweat. It’s hard when your baby dies just after his fourth birthday, hard to feel anything under the relief. 

The babies are under cabbage leaves—perfect babies. I must not eat them. I am supposed to feed them. But I will not let them have what is left. I will not let them eat me. I must stand very still, no matter what, and then they all will fly away. I have only one son now and one son is never enough—not even for the Blessed Virgin Mary—and so the Catholics fly away. I must wait for them to leave before I can go. Bear in mind, this is not a dream like a heart or a lily pond.  It’s a device to reach the starhead. I reach for the star colors, cold colors, silver ice burning away my pain.

Life is steel hard and razor sharp when your husband dies and your only remaining son takes you to court, telling the judge you are crazy, trying to get control of everything you own—trying to get control of you. 

So the trip is on now. I pack all the essentials in my hatbox: a cooking pot to catch rainwater, a heating pad for comfort, a coloring book for art, a shower cap to keep me safe, and a pottery shard to remind me of my serpent’s tooth. 

But I forgot the chopsticks! They are lying on the grass still, beside the Gideon Bible. I forgot. I’m brought before the High Church Council. I tell them I forgot. I sing what I forgot. I chant all that I forgot. The priest is rabid, red robes wrapped around his fury. I see his skull, bony beneath straight black hair.  He says, “We would never hurt you.” But his voice is a knife and he pushes me toward the Care Givers. Low cries rise around us and bleeding rosaries link the watchers. The dance begins. The soft dirt beneath my feet feels like sweater fuzz or eraser dust, and I wonder why we all wear paper slippers.

It’s stony cold when your brother who worked all those years for the electric company won’t get them to take the telephone lines out of your basement, won’t make them stop spying on you. You call your niece. She was so kind to your dying baby—scarcely more than a babe herself back then. But now Jean says, “I’m hundreds of miles away, Aunt Fancy. I don’t think I can do anything from New York.” You hear her relief at the distance as the line goes dead. And in that dead space, you hear them laughing. You must leave now.

Sometimes even leaving is hard. I hear the moan of the midnight train. A beacon hurtles down the track, a strange, exploding star arcing through black. It is traveling the Blossom Route, winding through thousands of miles and oceans of pear trees that do not bloom in the night. It is my moon time and I howl for light. I clutch the rain stick. It brings sunshine. And silence. It is hard hard hard to dance alone, to dance a stone, to dance a one-way ticket down. But when I am completely stone, I will be hard and life will be easy.