The Storyteller--Interior

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The Storyteller

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By Kayla Dos Santos

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The Storyteller

Ashley Prints Boston

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Text copyright © 2010 by Kayla Dos SantosAll rights reserved.

Published by Ashley PrintsFirst Edition

Front Cover Photograph by Barnabas Bona

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For Mom and Dad

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table of contents

The Duke 3

The Storyteller 17

Letters to a Rock Star 29

My Mother’s Ghost 39

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The Duke

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I wish your books told the truth.

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When Veronica stomped onto the gravel track, head-down, blinking from the sunlight like a baby mole, Tim thought that the girl was going to punch him.

Every morning Tim gulped a half glass of orange juice, ate a power bar and went to the town reservoir to run. He never listened to music. He had brought his iPod once, but found that it messed with his mental rhythm. The honking of the geese, the panting of the other runners, the sound of the gravel impacting beneath his feet--these were enough.

Veronica huffed, her pale face flushed, her brown hair limp with sweat. She was wearing a black turtleneck in the middle of a heat-wave. Tim wondered if she was one of those Goth girls, the kind who listened to mopey music and drew morbid pictures on themselves with ink. She stood in his path, arms crossed and fingers hooked around her elbows.

“Nice day, isn’t it?” Tim jogged in-place, “I guess,” he puffed. Two miles to go. He pumped

his legs up and down; he wasn’t going to sacrifice his exercise for this twiggy girl.

“We need to talk,” she said through thin lips.“Did you follow me here?” Veronica had wide eyes and frizzy dark hair. He never noticed her at

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school, but now he recalled seeing her once at the gym reading a paperback book on the bleachers while the track team practiced. He only noticed then because his friend Mark had pointed her out, “She’s sleeping with the coach.”

Mark thought everyone was having sex with everyone else. Mr. Harris the pudgy Geometry teacher was having an affair with the school librarian, the vice principal Ms. Penny was having sex with the school nurse, and his classmates were going at it like squirrels. This was, of course, because Mark had never gotten past first base. He was also madly in love with Beth; a futile relationship because Beth lived in California and Mark’s only contact with her had been through an online dating site.

No, what had really caught Tim’s attention was that Veronica was reading one of his mother’s books Devilish Duke.

“Yeah, and I have a shrine of you in my closet. Would you please take me to prom?” Her voice was heavy with sarcasm. “I didn’t come here to ask you out. It’s about your mom.”

Tim stopped jogging-in-place.“What?”“She’s screwing my dad.” She said this with a peculiar expression on her

face, as if she had bitten into something sour.

Tim walked into his mom’s office, not caring that his sneakers dirtied the woven carpet and that the water bottle he had dropped to the floor had not been fully closed and was creating a damp mess. Since Veronica had told him he had only been capable of staccato thinking.

The room was empty. He kicked his mother’s mahogany desk. He had barged into the house, slamming doors and stomping around hoping to confront her and she had dared to be absent.

His father had insisted that the office was the first room to be finished when the house was being built. Tim’s uncle Pete worked as a contractor who despised what he termed “cookie-cutter shacks” and so he made sure that his brother’s house was fashioned to suit the needs of the family.

Tim’s mother helped design the office as it was where she wrote and spent most of her day. When Tim got ready to run, often before dawn, it was

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normal for his mother to already be at her computer jabbing at the keyboard with one hand and holding a cup of coffee with the other. If his father smelt like powdered sugar, his mother always smelt of roasted coffee beans.

The office was a small cramped space that she deemed “cozy.” Wall-to-wall bookshelves were stuffed with dusty tomes. Whenever Tim read a book from the library (which was such a rare event that his mom would peer over her thick lenses at him as if he had sprouted an extra limb) he would sneeze so much that sometimes he thought he was allergic to them.

They were all Victorian novels. His mom always made the embarrassing joke that she wrote enough about sex, she didn’t need to read about it too.

The shelf above her desk and computer had a copy of all of her books from Dastardly Duke to Dancing with the Duke.

He ripped Dastardly Duke from the shelf. The paperback book was bright pink with florid font and an illustration of a shirtless Fabio riding a horse on the cover. Fabio’s hair was depicted as if it was being whipped back by a harsh wind. The Duke Drake Englesbury was the romantic lead in all of his mom’s books. He often rode in to save a damsel from pirates, thieves, or scoundrels. He was noble, brave, and Tim thought a bit stupid.

He flipped the novel open to a random page. Drake picked up the young maiden as if she weighed nothing more than

a loaf of bread and placed her on his faithful steed.“Love, don’t be frightened,” he said, tossing his auburn locks over his strong

shoulder.“I am not your love! I have never seen you before in my life. We must go

back; the dragon will kill my family if we do not.” The beauty sobbed into Drake’s emerald cloak.

“My apologies. You need not fear anymore. I will be by your side until I am sure you and your family are out of danger.” The Duke knew that their time together would be brief, but there was something that drew him to this strange, pretty girl.

The Duke was always thinking drippy things like that. And in all of the books he fell deeply in love with the woman he rescued only to promptly

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forget her in the next book in the series. Tim had never been in love, but he hoped it wasn’t like the romances

in his mother’s books.Was Veronica’s dad the Duke? Tim’s father certainly wasn’t.His dad was losing his hair and had never saved anyone in his entire life.

He smelled like powdered sugar and had a round, soft face. Every weekend when Tim was little his father brought home a brown paper bag filled with buttery croissants, Italian cookies, and cupcakes from The Doughboy, the bakery he owned. This stopped when Tim was 12 and his stomach rolled over the waist of his jeans making it seem as if he had an inner tube attached to his body. His mother suggested that he join the track team and his father stopped bringing sweets home.

Tim tossed the book onto the desk, knocking a ceramic mug over. He thumped the mug upright, but something made him take it again in his hands. The rim curled and its blue color had been sloppily applied, traces of brush bristles feathered the paint. A wisp of a memory settled lightly on Tim’s conscious. In a friend of his parent’s basement, possibly one of his father’s because of the intoxicating smell of just-baked cookies. Hands wet with clay. He had made this mug. He was four and couldn’t read the cards at the convenience store, so he had frowned at his father and had said, “Mom doesn’t want that.” He almost instinctively knew that somehow mugs were essential to his mother’s happiness.

He flopped down on the chair, drawing his knees up to his chest and balancing the mug that he had made and hadn’t recognized on top of them. He wondered where his mom had decided to go so early in the morning. Tim gazed around at the empty room once more and wished he knew what his mom wanted now.

At the reservoir he had shoved that Veronica girl and she had fallen onto the gravel. Her stupid black turtleneck got dirty. She threw a fistful of gravel at Tim, but she had horrible aim and the rocks flew harmlessly past his shoulder. “It’s not my fault, moron!” Tim suddenly thought how this must look. Some of his neighbors jogged along the reservoir. He stuck out a hand

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to help her up, but she pushed it aside and scrambled up by herself.“Look,” he said, wiping sweat from the back of his neck, “I don’t know

you, but my parents are happy.” The shape of the words felt awkward in his mouth.

“Happy people don’t have affairs,” Veronica replied. Shadows rimmed her eyes, she hadn’t been sleeping. For the first time

Tim noticed how short Veronica was compared to him. She picked gravel off her jeans and Tim pretended that he hadn’t seen her blink back tears.

“Why did you tell me this?” “You’re going to help me end it.”

“Hey Mark, is Veronica Dent having sex with Coach Saunders?” Tim asked after the second lap around the track. It was the day after he found out that his mother was cheating on his father. He had thrown himself into his classes, taking neat, comprehensive notes, raising his hand for almost every question. It was as if he had to find an outlet for the steadily increasing wave of panic that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up and his hands sweat. Running usually helped stem similar anxious tides, but this time the wave threatened to drown him.

“Cassie saw Veronica in Coach Saunders’ pick-up truck last Friday,” Mark grunted, struggling to keep up. Track was not his sport, he had only joined the team because running didn’t involve any kind of catching or throwing of balls, for some reason Mark got conked in the head a lot. He joked that his head was a ball-magnet, but Tim thought it was because Mark was nearsighted and refused to wear his glasses because they were too dorky or to wear contacts as they freaked him out.

“That’s all?” Tim asked, watching Coach by the orange cooler, sipping lemonade from a paper cone.

“They’re always in his office, too. I walked in on them when I was going to ask Coach to sign my hall-pass.” Mark smiled, his blue eyes glinting, “Do you like her or something?”

Tim pictured Veronica standing by the reservoir, pale skin pink with anger, green eyes blood-shot, hands fisted.

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“No, I was just curious about the rumors.”Coach blew his whistle and a ragged line of boys wearing red and white

jerseys ran to his side.Tim had not been able to avoid his mother entirely. He had found

a variety of excuses to be out of the house. He went back to the reservoir and he ran, but he couldn’t find his mental rhythm, he kept on starting and stopping. Since he wasn’t paying attention to where he was running, he almost tripped over a goose, which raised its wings and hissed at him. He gave that up and tried to think of other ways to keep himself busy.

They needed milk (they had plenty). He needed new track shorts (the old ones were fine). He wanted to try Mark’s recently purchased zombie-hunter video game (he disliked playing video-games on nice days, he could feel his brain turning into sludge as the sunshine slipped away). This pretended frenzy of activity, far from distracting him, only made him twitchy. A minute past his curfew, he pulled into the driveway. In the dark, the house, a jumble of additions that amounted to what looked like a high-speed collision of shapes, seemed unfamiliar. Maybe time had shifted without him knowing. Maybe a different family lived there one with happy, functional and boring lives.

There was a light on in the kitchen. It should have warned him away, but instead Tim was drawn to it. Growing up, his mom had to keep a careful eye on him. He was one of those skeptical children who never believed an adult until he could confirm it for himself. He tried to touch stovetops to see if they were hot, he micro-waved his favorite plastic ninja turtle and Michelangelo’s face got melted off, he walked beneath ladders and on Christmas Eve he waited by the fireplace to see how a fat man could fit down their chimney.

He quietly unlocked the front door, slipped into the house and stepped into the kitchen. Ellen was eating a slice of New York style cheesecake. “Don’t you think you’re pushing it a bit?” She said between tiny bites.

“I was in the middle of a good videogame. How’s the cake?” He said to the cabinet, which he had opened in order to hide his confusion at seeing his exercise-fanatic mother indulge in a whopping serving of calories and fat.

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The Storyteller

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They were a family of liars.

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Scheherazade was at the bar again. The tip of her red lacquered fingernail traced the rim of her martini glass. Nick rolled up his paperback copy of War of the Worlds and stuffed it into his back pocket, ending his break ten minutes early. She was his favorite customer and his most dangerous. She left men in her wake like shattered porcelain dolls. Nick wanted to be one of them. He had a bit of a self-destructive streak.

Scheherazade wore a red slinky dress with black spiked heels--a man-eater. Nick’s ink-smudged fingers itched for his pen and notebook, instead he walked to his place behind the bar.

“Another White Russian for you, Tommy?” Tommy looked up from his newspaper, his face was like a Roman

sculpture--a crumbling one. He was a regular. Tommy went to the Luxe each night after he worked at Henry’s Diner across the street. Whenever he was at the bar, Nick craved breakfast, Tommy’s plaid shirts always reeked of bacon.

“Triple homicide. Jilted lover walks in.” Tommy tapped the newspaper with a stubby thumb, “Can you believe it?”

Nick poured cream into a rocks glass and slid it neatly in front of him. “No, I can’t,” Nick said. He glanced over at Scheherazade.She was tossing her dark hair and baring her teeth. She had her hand on

a man’s shoulder. Nick evaluated: plump fingers with a gold band, glasses, briefcase--married businessman. Easy target.

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Letters to a Rock Star

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I followed you like I was blind.

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Dear Mr. Rick Simms,Before you became famous, you used to live on Cherry Lane with your

parents. The house was a ramshackle white clapboard, held together with paint and not much else.

Every morning when you still had your baby teeth, Grandpops Arthur would put on a plaid shirt and jeans and walk your rangy mutt Stevie. Grammy Ellen would make you biscuits. They were soft and pillowy and tasted like heaven with butter. Did she ever teach you her secret? She taught me when the rain poured so hard that the yard transformed into a shallow and hideous lake. My fingernails had traces of flour for days afterward. She uses orange juice.

Do you miss them?They tell me stories about you. Rick ripped his britches hopping the

backyard fence is Grammy’s favorite. She laughs so hard in telling it that her cheeks turn the color of apples and she has to pat the corners of her eyes with her favorite embroidered handkerchief. Rick trades his winter coat for a radio and shivers happily to music for four months is the tale that Grandpops tells. He doesn’t laugh at that one. He takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose.

I’m writing to you because they need your help. They’re about to lose their home. Do you remember it? Your old room is still a sky blue with stars

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My Mother’s Ghost

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I wanted to die.

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When I saw my mother on the tube, I knew she was dead.She wore an unfamiliar green dress, but the stitching was her painstaking

work. The green was unsettling, flickering in the unsteady light of the train. Her hands rested lightly on her lap, her fingers curled in the moment before motion.

When I was little and my mother was too preoccupied with preparing supper or sewing a dress for a customer to pay me much attention, I would climb into her wardrobe. In the dark, I would wrap myself in the bright colors of her pleated and gored skirts. When I emerged, I smelled like soap and rosemary. Nothing could have made me happier. My mother put an end to this practice when I was nine and she discovered a small tear on the sleeve of a dress.

On the Hammersmith and City line, she stared at me and smiled. In death, she’s still beautiful. A mixture of equal parts hatred and love choked me, and I couldn’t breathe the train’s humid air.

When I was fifteen, I took my mother’s favorite dress out of the closet. The dress was the bright blue of a macaw and she wore it every Sunday. I lifted the bell of the skirt and slipped it over my head, the fabric kissed my skin and settled softly against me. I twirled, lifting the skirt and delighting in the rustling. I walked into town humming a British jazz song.

That morning our next-door neighbor Mr. Grayson had been singing

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