Tangled Hearts

By Harden Taylor

No matter what the feeling - no matter pain, joy or blind indifference, the tangle within will come undone and truth will be revealed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harden Taylor
• Release date: Jul 2, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452465791

Harden Taylor

Yes, I was a cog in the industrial machine, grinding out reams of technical and business writing to support the once mighty American manufacturing colossus. But something happened in the early spring of 1995 – a bolt of lightening from the god of letters. “Fiction,” She said. Bit-by-bit I tried it, a little more each year till it became for me the quixotic enterprise it is today. Yet, I can’t complain, though my family may from time-to-time, because I found in this experience a liberation of style and content that is very appealing, drawing me into a new kind of grinding – a love/hate enterprise that wears the repetitive trudge down to fine dust.Recognition for my short stories (in descending chronological order):• “One Dish at a Time” – Honorable mention in the 2007 New Millennium Writings Short-short Story Contest.• “Mentors” – Honorable mention in the 2006 New Millennium Writings Short Story Contest• “What Will You Do for Me Yesterday?” – Published in the 2005 Dan River Anthology and was in the top five out of 75 submissions to Jerry Jazz Musician Magazine, June 2004 short story contest.• “A Rock by Moon World” – Honorable mention in the SpecFicWorld.com’s 2005 Speculative Fiction Contest magazine out of 93 entries.• “Where’s Jason” – Finalist in the 2005 Abroad Short Story Writing Contest. All finalist attended workshops & lectures given by Michael Bishop, Dan Chaon, Margaret Drabble, Anne LeClaire and Margaret George in Bourdeilles, France.• “Experiments of the Mad Chemist” – Semi-finalist in the 2005 New Millennium Writings Short Story Contest.• “In an Instant” – In the top five in Jan. 2005 Jerry Jazz Musician short story contest.• “Numbers Four and Five” – In the top 10 out of 90+ submissions to Jerry Jazz Musician Magazine, March 2004 short story contest.• “Stones, New and Old” – Honorable mention in the Whim’s Place on-line short-short story contest, May 2004 and published online 2004 by Whim’s Place.• ”Theraxis Comes to Visit” – In the top 14 for the SpecFi World magazine 2nd quarter 2004 short fiction contest and was in top 10% out of 1200 entries in the 18th Consecutive New Millennium Writing competition closing July 2004• “Flying Flowers” – In the top ten in the September 2004 Jerry Jazz Musician short story contest.My body of work (Fiction only):v Four full-length novels under my copyright –ÿ Project 334 – The first person to leave the solar system discovers and attempts to understand a battered civilization. His presence generates conflict (this is the first expedition.) – unpublished.ÿ Cerulea – A History of the Second Expedition – A pregnant female Robinson Crusoe-type story. She raises her children & incestuously created grand children alone on a forbidding planet – unpublished.ÿ Outhouse by the Moon – A series of murders at a small midwestern university by a Christian doomsday cult of prominent citizens leads to revelations of a terrible conspiracy – unpublished.ÿ A Rock by Moon World – Two twelve-year-olds discover a Lilliputian world ripped apart by war. They save them from the rages of a maniacal leader – published on Kindle. Based on my short story of the same name.v Completed short stories – This is an eclectic assortment of over 40 stories with different styles, themes and character portraits ranging in length from 240 to 40,000 words.v I have other novels short stories and poems in various stages of completion, including sequels to Project 334 /Cerulea and A Rock by Moon World.

Book preview

Tangled Hearts

A Collection of Short Stories

by

Harden Taylor

Copyright 2012 to John Harden Taylor

Smashwords Edition

Also by Harden Taylor at Smashwords.com and most platforms, discover:

Project 334 - The first human to leave our solar system - when great differences meet

A Cerulean Hug - Lost, betrayed, alone - can she find the strength to survive?

The Children of Cerulea - A growing family meets growing mysteries.

A Rock by Moon World - A children’s adventure novel - understand your enemy or die.

Swimming in the Lake of Fire - An exploration of the black heart of righteousness.

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License Notes

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Disclaimer

The characters in these stories bear no resemblance to persons living or dead. The places are fictional and are not intended to represent or suggest any real place whether presently existing or not. The events described are also completely fictional and are not intended to suggest or imply real events. A few parts of some stories do contain adult content relevant to character development.

Table of Contents

Where’s Jason?

Tripping Over Treasures

Numbers Four and Five

The Balls O’ Fire

Stones New and Old

Through the High Wall

Flying Flowers

Oh, Christmas Tree

Experiments of the Mad Chemist

Eating Cheesecake?

What Will You Do For Me Yesterday?

In an Instant

A Life Lived in Death

A Leg up on God

One Dish at a Time

One Unlike the Other

The Musicman Store

Where’s Jason?

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Information about this story:

Length - Approximately 5,000 words

Blurb - Adult children witness the results of their empty nester parents’ sexual explorations.

Kudos - Finalist in the Abroad Short Story Contest, 2005, Bourdeilles, France.

The fine mansions lining his route are comforting in their tidy but unique elegance, their expansive picture windows revealing pleasantly appointed living rooms, their exteriors appropriately festooned with Halloween pumpkins and fanciful spider webs. Imposing in their height, rows of grand elms create a soft dark tunnel for his shortcut to work. The commuter drives slowly, absorbing the soothing ambiance.

On the corner of Greenland and Marion sits an attractive English Manor with a steep slate roof, his favorite for the fine mystery of its noble alcoves and cleavages. Normally dark at this early hour, the wide first floor window radiates a flickering orange and yellow light framed sharply in a gray trapezoid on the front lawn.

Within this display dances a shadow, a figure twirling and flailing. The commuter lifts his startled eyes to the window and sees the dancer, tongues of fire shooting out of him as he leaps, then falls, disappearing into the agitated flames.

Shocked, the commuter hesitates, then plunges his shaking hand into his pocket, grasps his cell phone and calls 911. Black smoke billows out of an open second floor window. He runs to the front door, hoping to rescue the burning dancer but the door is locked fast. Within a few minutes, fire engines, an ambulance, police cars arrive. The commuter watches, horrified but also fascinated as the flames are battled and defeated, the twisted blackened bodies retrieved, the charred shambles cordoned off, his statement taken. As the last truck pulls away, he sits on the lawn grappling for control of his dismembered emotions.

It’s the heavy swath of black and gray stain sweeping up from the window of her parent’s bedroom that takes her breath away. Susan Atkins, not yet 25, not yet ready to do this, not yet understanding what happened or why, stops her car in the middle of Marion Street when she sees her childhood home. The undulating rows of Chicago-style sculpted bushes, the soon to burst-out tulip beds, the huge shaggy lilac bushes – they are unchanged from her earliest memories. An ache beyond tears swells up in her gut. She waits and remembers.

Her father had always been a loving man, a devoted husband, a good Christian. Dr. Gary Atkins was the Chancellor of the Wellington Christian College, board member of two hospitals and three non-profit organizations.

Yet he had taken his own life, just six months before. And her mother – a healthy vivacious woman, always active, always engaged in life – her death so unexpected, so strangely out-of-place.

She regains her composure as her younger brother Jerry arrives. They park their cars in the driveway. They are there to inspect the house. The contractor says it must be done before restoration work can begin and there is no one else to do it, no other living relatives. The police and the lawyers are satisfied, the house is still structurally sound, thanks to the quick response of the fire department, so it is now a matter of sorting belongings and determining their disposition. Make piles, they say; piles of memories, piles of unanswerable questions. Susan removes a small bottle from her purse, takes out a Valium and downs it with the stale Coke by her side.

Susan and Jerry enter the side door, the first time for Susan in almost three years and for Jerry it’s been over 18 months. The fine lace curtain covering the inside surface of the door’s window is gray with infiltrated smoke, ripped to long, sad shreds by fire axes and broken glass. Splinters crunch under their shoes as they ascend the short stairwell to the kitchen where smoke has smudged and darkened the previously perfect walls. The air is infused with a dirty stench. Chairs, a table, and broken dishes, all are strewn about in frenzied disorder – fossils of someone’s rage. A lumpy dark gray slime coats the floor – the mingling of carbon, water and dried food. Susan steadies herself, breaths deeply, slowly, covering grief with discipline. Jerry is stiffly walking beside her.

The hallway connecting the kitchen to all the other rooms is a cave of tortured vinyl sheets, partially melted and burned, peeling off the walls, curled on the floor.

Brittle to the touch, a piece Jerry pulls off the wall leaves a gray smudge on his fingertips.

They enter the living room – strangely spacious but dismally monotonous, all the color removed and replaced with black, gray and spatterings of white ash. In the middle, in the large open space there are two shapes of unburned carpet – light greenish brown in a sea of charcoal. The one closest to the window is the outline of a torso, two legs spread wide apart, arms clawing at the carpet and the head turned away from the window. The one further in is shorter, the legs together, the arms straight out from the sides – like a crucifix outlined in dark gray. Susan gasps, Jerry says, Oh God that’s where it started. Jerry’s hand seeks out Susan’s.

Jerry, it’s terrible. I wish we hadn’t come in here.

Susan’s tears seep out quietly, her hands against her mouth holding her grieving precariously in check.

She stands still gathering her strength. Jerry waits without moving, stunned to silence.

They recover slightly and move toward the stairwell, not knowing where else to go. Then Susan turns back around, facing the burned living room. She looks up and says,

Jerry, look at this. They said it was a suicide. A suicide! Why? I don’t believe it. Not Dad.

I don’t know it’s too damn crazy, Replied Jerry.

He was always happy, Susan, said between halting, sniffling breaths, I always wanted to be as happy as Mom and Dad were.

Something … something, Jerry said.

I’ve got to know. Susan looked intently at Jerry as she spoke.

Sure. Much as I don’t like the idea, I want to too. Jerry replied.

Blackened branches of blistered paint traced the fire’s path up the stairs and toward the master bedroom. As they climb, Susan sees her mother’s pink lamb’s wool slippers singed and strewn carelessly on the stairs. She stops and groans, Oh no! Oh Jerry look! Why…

Jerry clasps her hand and says, I think… maybe he carried her down and they fell off.

Why? Why would he carry her down stairs? It’s like he laid her out, like some kind of crazy ritual. A cold chill grips Susan as she speaks.

Jerry is speechless as they warily proceed to the second floor landing. The master bedroom door is open.

The window, the door … open. says Susan suspiciously.

He left the window open so the draft would draw the flames up – I think they said that,

How do they know? How do you know? Susan says bitterly.

I don’t really and they don’t either but it’s … well like it just seems to be the most likely because it was cold that day. If the fire department hadn’t come so quickly, the whole upstairs would have burned, Jerry says.

So … he really did do it … he really planned it all out?

Yeah, I think so. I don’t think any thing else fits. The police said there was a five-gallon gas can in the living room … and the empty wine bottles. They said she was dead before the fire. You remember.

Oh, God … it’s so terrible.

Jerry walks to the window. Susan stands near the door, stiff, confused, wanting to leave but unable to move. The master bedroom is large, dominated by the king-size bed against the wall opposite the dormer window. Its quilt, embossed with autumn colored leaf-shapes is thrown back in a rumpled triangle; the exposed sheets are wrinkled and stained with urine and blood, the pillows piled in a crushed stack on one side of the bed. It was a sickbed; perhaps, thinks Susan, the place where her mother had the fatal stroke the pathologist said was the cause of her death.

A woman’s vanity sits adjacent to the smoke-smudged window well and on its beveled glass top is a full array of toiletries – rows of soldiers to fight the encroachments of time. The large oval mirror jutting up from the vanity’s top is dotted with neatly arranged photos of relatives, friends and prominently, Susan and Jerry. At the center of the array is a large photo of a stiffly smiling Dr. Gary Atkins.

Sue, you remember the desk … mom’s desk? It … I think that’s it over there.

Yeah. It was her big secret place, Sue replies.

The only time dad ever spanked me was when I tried to pry it open. I used a screw driver from the garage … chipped off some of the veneer.

So, you were the one. I always wondered where that came from. Jerry says,

Jerry, go get the big screw driver from the garage. There’s something in there we need to know.

He looks startled, hesitates then runs down the stairs to get it. Susan looks over to the rumpled bed. A terrible sadness covers her. She senses her mother’s misery, then her losing struggle for consciousness. It suddenly bursts into her awareness – if her mother died here leaving her father in utter confusion and fear, the anchor of his life removed, he might have been cut adrift; having lost so much he couldn’t bear to live anymore. Susan mulls this disturbing thought in her mind, trying to define its edges and weigh its reality.

But why the ritual death, why not pills or …

Jerry bounds up the stairs waving the screwdriver in his hand.

He did something bad. He was afraid. I feel it, Susan blurts out.

Dad? Something bad? I don’t think so. He was mister straight, Jerry says. Then again, I just hope it’s … well, you know that old saw, ‘still water runs deep’.

Jerry, please, break it open.

Jerry looks at his sister quizzically. Knowing her, he knows she senses something and more than likely it’s real. The anguish on her face fills him with foreboding. He jams the screwdriver into the seam between the drop-down lid and the top of the desk and yanks it forward. There is a loud crack as the lid pops out.

Journals are stacked up covering the entire surface of the desk – ten, maybe 12. Each has a date range neatly hand-written on the front.

You remember when Mom took that journal writing course? asks Susan.

Yeah. She tried to get me to do it to but that’s just not my thing.

Jerry … The answers are here in these books. I know they are. We’ve got to look … to find out.

I don’t know if I want to do this.

You take the first stack, I’ll take the second.

He sighs, then lifts them out. Susan throws the quilt back over the bed, covering her mother’s stains. They start to read.

Look, she put in pictures, exclaims Jerry.

Mmmm. Looks like that orchid she bought just before I left. I wonder if it lived?

Oh and look Jerry; pictures of the tulip garden … she loved them so much. Little beauty cups she called them … Oh, God, I miss her so …

Remember when she tried to fill one with wine and drink from it?

Ohhh … she spilled it all over her Easter Sunday dress, Susan says half way between tears and laughter.

And Dad got to laughing so hard he fell over in the tulip bed – squashed a dozen tulips at least. She was so mad, Jerry and Susan look at each other with filled eyes. Susan gently squeezes his hand. He looks away.

They continue, silently reading, turning the pages with a reverence they never expected from themselves. Jerry finds his mother’s worried comments about his slightly less than 4.0 average at the end of his first semester in college. There are photos of a trip to London, then another to Paris and Rome.

Jerry finds a passage written shortly after he left for his summer job. Puzzled by its meaning, Jerry reads it aloud,

"Everything‘s the same except for the one thing, the one big thing that makes all the difference – the children are gone, we’ve got the house alone. No more words with Jerry about when he needs the car, what music he can blast our ears with, whether or not his noisy friends can come over, etc., etc. ad sick-of-it um!! Jerry’s off to his wonderful school and Susan’s got her nose in her MBA books so deep she can only be rescued by attaching her to a large construction crane and applying full power to the hoist.

I fixed Gary his favorite kind of macaroni and cheese with meatloaf and a salad to pacify the doctor. Figured that would soften him up for the kill. He was oblivious watching the evening news. But I was in a take-no-prisoners mood. I took a shower, got all prettied up – still not so bad for 48. I know I’m on the right track. Look what he got me for my birthday – like hint, hint, hint!!!

Jerry looks up at Susan and smiles, OK, what’s goin’ on here? This is so weird.

Well, don’t stop.

Jerry returned to the journal, Gary was totally mesmerized by all that nonsense on TV. HA! I fixed that. I snuck around and closed all the drapes and turned off most of the lights. When they signed off and went to the commercial I struck! I clicked off the boob tube and gave him the real thing: two 42s in his face. The look on his mug was priceless – hooray for Victoria’s Secret! His wonderful present had its desired effect. And wow, was there ever desire! That reserve of his cracked and he fell like a house of cards. We hadn’t screwed like that for 20 years. I couldn’t believe how much energy he had. After he came he had a strange sheepish smile on his face – like a kid who got caught sneaking an extra piece of pie. It was wonderful.

There is an embarrassed silence. The words aloud hit home with savage impact. The walls between the generations, between parent and child, between the veneer of