Signs of Life

By Marilyn Komechak

Signs of Life follows diverse characters as they live, bravely though often blindly, in the rural areas and small towns where they run into life's jagged walls—yet still they seek for marrow, some sign, to sustain them on their singular journeys.

Here you will find eleven stories that will both trouble and please you. You'll come upon a woman who goes to the funerals of strangers, a Texas beauty parlor operator, the manager of a trailer park, a country preacher, a bare-back bronc rider and a lovelorn bachelor–the kinds of people who'll make you marvel at their courage and at the same time wonder at the precariousness of their lives. And you'll recognize in their stories people you've known all your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marilyn Komechak
• Release date: Feb 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310898723

Marilyn Komechak

Before working twenty years as a licensed psychologist and therapist in private practice in Fort Worth, Texas, Marilyn was on the staff of the Fort Worth Child Study Center, and was the Associate Director of the Center for Behavioral Studies at the University of North Texas. She holds degrees from Purdue, Texas Christian University and her Doctorate from the University of North Texas.During her work as a psychologist, she also served as a consultant to schools, businesses, and corporations. She had ten articles published in various professional journals. While maintaining her private practice office, she wrote a self-help book "Getting Yourself Together." The CD-ROM edition was introduced at the Chicago Book Expo by Waltsan Publishing.A second book, also published by Waltsan, "Morals and Manners for the Millennium," was presented at the Austin Book Fair. She is a prize-winning poet and short story writer. Her poetry and short stories have been published in the U.S., Canada and Europe. Her children's book, "Paisano Pete: Snake-killer Bird," published by Eakin Press of Austin, garnered the Oklahoma Writers' Federation, Inc. (OWFI) "Best Juvenile Book of 2003." Marilyn has participated in numerous readings and book signings in Texas. The book, "Deborah Sampson, The Girl Who Went to War," has been well received by a readers' review panel that passed the book with high marks.She is a member of Fort Worth Writers, the Fort Worth Poetry Society, the Poetry Society of Texas, the Fort Worth Songwriters Association, Tuesday Study Group Trinity Episcopal Church,National Women's History Museum, Who's Who of American Women, and Who's Who in America.

Book preview

SIGNS OF LIFE

(A Short Story Collection)

by

Marilyn Gilbert Komechak

The Smashword Edition

Copyright © 2015 Marilyn Gilbert Komechak

Smashwords License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment. It may not be resold or given away. If you would like to share this ebook, please purchase an additional copy for each person with whom you want to share it. If you're reading this ebook and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, please return to smashwords and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

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Disclaimer

This is a work of fiction, a product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance or similarity to any actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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Other books by Marilyn Gilbert Komechak

Getting Yourself Together

Morals And Manners for the Millennium

Deborah Sampson-The Girl Who Went to War

Painted Poems: Interior Scapes

(with Kim Komechak, painter)

Paisano Pete: Snake-killer Bird

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Cover photo courtesy of canstockphoto.com

Formatting and cover design by Debora Lewis arenapublishing.org

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Table of Contents

Review

Acknowledgments

Dedication

Reading Signs: An Overview

The Price of Red Carnations

Flamingo Road

Thunder in February

Just One Good Thing

A Dozen White Shirts

The Parlor

Barney’s Sweet Revenge

Shepherd’s Cave

Camping Out

Flowering Weeds

The Whole Enchilada

About the Author

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REVIEW

In Signs of Life you will find eleven stories that will both trouble and please you. You'll come upon a woman who goes to the funerals of strangers, a Texas beauty parlor operator, the manager of a trailer park, a country preacher, a bare-back bronc rider and a lovelorn bachelor–the kinds of people who'll make you marvel at their courage and at the same time wonder at the precariousness of their lives. And you'll recognize in their stories people you've known all your life.

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In Marilyn Komechak's collection Signs of Life I visited small towns and rural areas where I have never lived and found kinship with the people I met. Several must find their ways through the aftermath of death or the end of relationships. In The Parlor Gwen is finally able to enter the funeral parlor across from her beauty shop after her son's death. Grieving parents reach out to a young couple and their child and in so doing ease their own grief. In Camping Out the woman leaves her husband. People search for love (Tom in A Dozen White Shirts and the two characters in Flowering Weeds.) These are people we might know, and we enjoy glimpses into their lives. Komechak knows and loves her Texas (and Hoosier roots) and gladly shares the lives she has witnessed.

~Priscilla W. Tate, PhD, Retired from teaching and administration at Texas Christian University (TCU)

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Barney’s Sweet Revenge, StoneThread Publishing, The Least He Could Do, anthology, 2013.

A Dozen White Shirts, Fort Worth, Texas, FWW- Fiction, Poetry, Memoir & More, Fort Worth Writers’ anthology, 2012.

The Whole Enchilada, Weatherford, Oklahoma: Westview, summer/spring, Western Oklahoma University, 2009.

Thunder in February, Fort Worth, Texas: A Journal of Creative Expression, July, Texas Wesleyan University, 2005.

Camping Out, Tulsa, Oklahoma: Voices of the Heartland, Hawk Publishing Group, 2005.

The Price of Red Carnations, Fort Worth, Texas: A Journal of Creative Expression, summer, Texas Wesleyan University, 2003.

Just One Good Thing, Belton, Texas, A Center for Texas Studies Book, University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, 2002.

The Parlor, Salado, Texas: The Judy and A.C. Greene Literary Festival Anthology, performed June 5-8, 2002.

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To Jane Hirshfield, writer/poet–

...But because there is a fertile dilemma,

a rich imbalance somewhere in your life

or heart or understanding, you write a story.

I turn to story in order to address some flood

or some gap, to stitch across a place of puzzlement

or overspill or bewilderment or sorrow.

from Fooling With Words by Bill Moyers

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READING SIGNS: AN OVERVIEW

by

The Rev. Bruce W. Coggin, PhD, educator and priest retired of the Episcopal Church

A woman who by unhappy circumstance came late to her father's funeral sedulously follows funeral announcements, and, when she detects the possibility some daughter may come late, buys red carnations—the only flowers for a man—and waits at graveside for the latecomer to appear. Hit or miss, she returns to her plain home a little gladdened… but keeping her eye open for the next occasion of whose coming she seems doggedly aware.

Komechak's Signs of Life, a collection of layered vignettes of people clutching at the shards of all but shattered lives, tends forgotten graves and leaves flowers… or at least flowering weeds. They are stories of resurrection albeit not triumphant. Rather they recall the resurrection of Lazarus, called back into life and doubtless glad of it, though not to a new life exactly. Rather he, like Komechak's people, returns to the life he once knew and will never see the same again. An unlikely family made of up two widowed souls and a thirteen-year-old recovered alcoholic, delivered from a murderous father, smile bravely at the new day shafting light into the cave which is for them both refuge and redoubt.

Komechak searches life's peripheral details for symbols, signs, of the return of life. The owner of a shabby trailer park sets aright a pair of tacky plastic flamingos, long askew, as he sheds his obsession for a lost child for the chance to love a child not his own and recover his disappearing marriage. A woman whose husband treats her like chattel scours pennies from her egg money to buy one good purse when her gaoler-mate, with lordly condescension, treats her to an annual shopping spree, one good thing rescued from a torrent of dismissal. Dandelions are the occasion for a pair of lovers in waiting to recognize themselves as each other's willing prey. A caring woman married to a careless jerk sees in a tourist brochure her photograph, posed with him in seeming rapture, surrounded by a landscape worthy of Olmstead. What she does to declare the picture's mendacity and her defiance gives the reader a wry chuckle.

Set in familiar American surroundings and presented in often ornately figured language, the tales ease deftly back and forth through time, leaving the reader at times not quite sure if what's happening is happening now or some time back or even in a previewed future. Komechak sketches quickly at times, leaving plenty of white canvas for the reader to fill in. At others the smell of a goaded bronc, of rosin pounded into the palm of a sweaty nineteen-year-old straddling the lurching beast crotch close, thicken the air with intimate finish.

Never conclusive, bright but tentative, these delicate tranches de vie pick their way through the landmined geography of uncertainty and loss into an equally uncertain upland