Where's My Tiara?

By Majaji

Where's My Tiara? is a collection of seventeen short stories with multidimensional female characters, from all walks of life, that illuminates and celebrates the many facets and complexities of being a woman. Women writers of various racial and cultural backgrounds and sexual orientation have contributed to this short-story anthology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ideate Publishing
• Release date: Feb 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9780999361511

Book preview

Sculling Water

by

tamara lee

Inlet mythologies run deep in our family lore. All the men work the boats up and down the Indian Arm and Georgia Strait waters, while daughters dream of silkworming their way into mermaid gowns. I, too, imagine sliding into one—a shimmering sheath held together by a million fingers yearning to enwrap my body like seaweed around a vessel. 

My father, our captain, has supplied a bounty of dresses only my sister Simone can wear. Me, I can barely get the damned things on, so today I settle on a loose navy frock my father would compare to an abandoned boat tarp. 

As the old man lies dying from a disease buried deep in his bones, I feel the weight of the significant shadow I’ve carried since youth. Before my father became too ill to speak, he spoke plenty about my lack of first mates and the need to keep our family story alive. My sister—so seaworthy, so sublime—yearns for mermaids. But she holds her story close and never told it to my long-ailing father. Just closeted promises overflowing with gowns, perfect shoes, and yarns about an upcoming marriage to a seaman.

Our childhood swelled with our mother’s words. She spun tales and wove myths into truths with which we could live. And when our father came home from weeks away—smelling of smoke, beer, and ladies-of-the-sea—we’d settle at his feet. As we scooped out the flesh from the mangos and kiwis, he described how he’d fought anacondas to get them. Later, while my mother and father hollered about broken promises and leaving, Simone and I fell asleep and dreamed of faraway worlds, exotic fruits, and mariners who might save us. 

Mermaid dreams follow me, sinuous through my lucid hours, and only just before I plunge into sleep’s depths do those silky threads turn into swarthy ropes of bullwhip kelps that wrap their rubbery nature around my belly and throat. 

Yes, my voice echoes into the break of water, I get it. Control my appetite. So, subtle. Now will you let me sleep? The kelps release me, and I smell my father’s aftershave as I fall into darkness. Upon resurfacing into wakefulness, I spout water and imagine I am Esther Williams and not the other mammal metaphor my father would use. But, I have never been fond of swimming. 

Clutching onto the side of a hotel pool, struggling through family vacation, I’d watch Simone stroke the water with her sleek frame—me in my black one-piece and she in her shape-revealing bikini—a siren calling to men and women alike; all of us imagined what it would be like to have that body. 

You’ll grow out of it, she promised. A cruel comfort below its surface, as I continued to grow out of every stylish hand-me-down Simone lavished upon me. Her fickle fashion sense and elegant physique overshadowed me: her shadow-maker. 

One summer day, as we played on the broken sidewalk in front of our house, she posed like the statue called Girl in a Wetsuit erected on the rocks near the inlet water leading out to the Pacific Ocean. Our father had always said it was a mermaid frozen in time paying homage to the seafarers of this town. Simone stretched her long legs and arms into position, as I lumbered along the walk and cast her shadow-shape with my new favorite chalk color, Screaming Green. Look, she said, then laughed, you’ve drawn yourself. The looming, oversized Simone-shape laid stationary at her feet dressed in asphalt-black. She skipped away, while I remained with the shadow envying Simone’s confidence as she seemed to glide through life. 

There was a time when I nearly cast a perfect shadow and caught my father’s approving eye. He was marrying a woman half his age and they asked us to look like mermaids for him on that very special day. Simone showed me how to apply eye shadow then insisted the girdle would only hurt a little. I sucked it up, sucked it in, and counted to a million as the day wound down. 

Daddy’s asking for you, Simone says quietly. I am in the waiting room, doing what people do when their loved ones are about to die. She hasn’t called him Daddy for years. 

As I stand over him, I notice the folds in his once-taut skin, umber and weatherworn from fifty years of seafaring. I remember the time he tried to teach me to swim while on vacation in Laguna Beach. Simone watched poolside, unable to stop him, as he picked me up and held me like a strongman over the pool.

Imagine, a mariner’s daughter who cannot swim, his voice exhaled scorn enough to surge the still water. Insisting it was the only way, he released me into the pool; while Simone cried, Daddy, don’t let her go, and was poised ready to save me from the inevitable drowning. But it was her tears that saved me.

In this hospital room, quiet as that day in Laguna Beach, the only sounds I hear are Simone’s sobbing and my father’s breathing. The sunlight feels too kind for us. It floats through the window and fills the room with a lightness our story can barely hold.

Taking his hand, I recall a time hidden deep below the surface of our myth. Sitting on his knee at a summer campsite by the sea, he drank Lucky Beer from stubby brown bottles I could easily hold in my hand. Each bottle cap had a rebus, which we’d work out together. He held my finger and pointed to a pictogram as I struggled through the puzzle. If I got it wrong, he’d laugh at my error then lean in and whisper the solution. When I would get the correct answer, he’d let me take a swig from the bottle. 

The machines pump life into my father now. The murmurs and blips must sound like engines and seagulls to him as he takes his final tour. My heart begins its descent into mourning; and I think about the story he only shared once and told with a quiet I rarely heard in his voice. 

We were driving across the Second Narrows Bridge, high above the inlet, his hands on the steering wheel like he was navigating a boat. He told us how he was there when the bridge was being built. He was working the night it collapsed and was sent out to help recover the bodies of the seventy-nine mostly-migrant workers who had plunged over 100 feet to the waters below. In the darkness of the midnight water, he had cast focus lights out across the inlet. Swimmers is what we were searching for. So many of them didn’t know how to swim. Barely knew water. But if you could scull water, you might live… 

As I bend over my father, I imagine his mind is where mine has been on those nights I battle against the darkness of sleep. I imagine the million little fingers of my sister’s tears holding up this vessel and saving it from disappearing into the deep. I am wearing a silken, flowing gown as I enter the ballroom and smile for strangers. His sweet-sour breath draws me near. I kiss his lips and breathe out as I let him go, as he had let me go so many years before. 

Now swim. 

Type a Little Faster

by

anne anthony

Mr. Barnett stands behind me and rests his hand on the back of my desk chair. I feel the burn of his eyes over my shoulder. I lean back and inhale the spicy fragrance of his cologne. My typing slows. 

Type a little faster, he says. His husky voice is soaked with masculine heat. I never fathomed fingers could sweat, but mine do now and slide from the keys of my typewriter, a vibrating gray monstrosity. Almost every part of my body seems to sweat near this man. See the thing is, the mere sight of Mr. Ronald Walter Barnett fires a heat between my legs like a fever. Mama says a man with his smooth looks has no business teaching young girls. When I ask why not, she refuses to answer. 

Miss Emily’s School for Girls only employs this one man. The only man the headmistress can trust—her son returned home from Up North. Graduate of a fine Ivy League school, I’m told, and full of bright ideas about the world and politics and such things. All the girls enjoy hearing about his travels far from this town; a town so small it has no need for a traffic light.

No point spending money for something that people could work out for themselves. Just common courtesy. I overheard the mayor say in Collins’ Dry Goods store between sips of that brew old Mr. Collins dispenses to his loyal customers. The mayor has been one of the most loyal coming in every day at noon to sit with other upstanding citizens who take pleasure in swapping tales. You’d think they bear the weighty responsibility of President Kennedy himself the way they go on and on about their big business.

I hear it all. They never hush their jawing for a young girl. I move about the store as if invisible. But Mr. Barnett, he has a way of talking and looking straight into my eyes that makes me feel like I matter. I tried to explain this feeling to mama one night and fumbled my words. I couldn’t help but blush, which she took as a sign of my attraction. 

Don’t you get any ideas, Miss Lucy. She threw me her stink-eye. She uses this look whenever she believed I considered an unrighteous path. He’s stopping home for his mama’s sake. You know she’s having that touch of pneumonia. He’ll be on his way to somewhere else when she feels stronger. That boy is cursed with daydreams like your daddy.

She mutters something about my daddy believing combat could cool his wanderlust. Instead, it just got him killed. Every conversation, no matter its beginning, always ends with Daddy’s decision to join the Army. Mama’s warning forced me to keep my ideas private, particularly due to their unholy nature. Truth is I’ve never kissed a boy, much less held one’s hand; but I ache every day in Mr. Barnett’s class and yearn to stroke the fine bristles of his velvety beard. 

Miss Lucy, you need to type faster. You’ll never be hired in any secretarial pool if you go this slow, Mr. Barnett says. I stop then and there and turn to face my teacher. 

I’ll be the one doing the hiring, Mr. Barnett. Someone will be working for me, typing my letters, I say with more gumption than I’d felt in all my fourteen years. 

The clickety-clack of each typewriter slows and stops one after the other. It’s replaced with the buzz of girls’ voices. The heat I feel with his nearness cranks higher. Mr. Barnett folds his arms and stares at me with a look that makes my legs twitch.