Little Deaths

By Geoffrey K. Watkins

Even for those who are already acquainted with the insightful and brooding work of Geoffrey K. Watkins, Little Deaths will come as a dark surprise. Here are sixteen stories of life, each story standing alone in its own small world, but all of them clustered like spectators at an accident scene, not wanting to see what is happening, but unable to look away, watching and waiting for the ending; an ending which is in each story as inevitable as death, but just as unpredictable. These are not, however, stories of Death, of final rest, but of the tiny shards of shattered emotional glass which without warning cut away at our hearts, our minds and our souls and lead to those little deaths which slowly and relentlessly slay us while we are still alive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 29, 2000
• ISBN: 9781469799445

Geoffrey K. Watkins

Despite the tantalizingly suggestive nature of his published works, Geoffrey K. Watkins remains one of the more enigmatic literary figures of our time. All that is known for certain is that he presently lives a very contented life in California with his wife, their daughter, four cats, and a chicken.

Book preview

First Blood

Did Mom explain where we’re going, Cassandra?

The small girl to whom the question was directed tensed immediately. She recognized the flat, controlled tenor of the question and stopped her play, waiting, unsure, instantly aware of her quickening heartbeat and the sick feeling in her stomach. Two plastic action figures, one an alien, the other a female human dressed in Dickensian rags, stood on her knees, facing each other across the chasm of her spread legs, grasped firmly in the child’s hands, all held motionless.

No, she answered without inflection, without the hesitation that might leave the door open for other words, angry words.

She could see her father’s face in the rear view mirror. His eyes seemed to be looking at her, but she neither smiled, nor not smiled. She merely waited. She recognized the tone of voice and though it had surprised her at first, she knew now that it was not because of something she had done wrong. It was the other voice, the adult voice, the scary voice. The woman we’re going to see– her name is Miriam–is someone your mother grew up with.

Without looking up, Cassandra closed her legs and marched her dolls warily towards each other across her lap. Is she as old as Mom?

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Both adults answered No at the same moment and with the same abrupt vehemence. Cassandra recoiled slightly and unconsciously made herself smaller by rounding her shoulders and bowing her head. As she did so, her long blonde hair fell forward and framed the tiny players she manipulated on the long neat folds of her carefully pressed and pleated skirt, but her toys took no notice of their newly constrained stage. They continued to stare intently at each other, expectant, determined, incognizant of the greater movement of their world as it merged smoothly into the next lane over, becoming a link in yet another line of worlds, each world, each inhabitant of those worlds racing to their own private destinies, sharing nothing save the tenuous bond of inexorable movement.

Why did you do that? Her mother’s question was angry, the real angry, not the other. Cassandra looked up. Relieved, she saw it was not a question for her to answer.

Do what? Why’d I answer Cassandra’s question? He glanced quickly at his wife. She stared back coldly. You mean why’d I move over? He cocked his thumb angrily back over his shoulder. Because that jerk in the beat up Chevy was tailgating me. I’m not about to get rear-ended again by some loser without insurance. Remember the Camry?

Well, you need to get over again. We’re getting off soon.

First came the exasperated sigh, then Cassandra watched as he turned and looked past her, back at the Chevy. His lips were compressed into a knife edge line and with the slightest motion of his hands he slipped the car back into the slow lane, back into the same spot from which it had just escaped.

Cassandra’s mother turned her head to look at her father. The Buena Vista offramp, she instructed, then, moving only her eyes, looked back at Cassandra.

With her mother’s face in profile, her eyes turned to the limit of their orbits, the bright brown iris that faced Cassandra was limned in white and reminded her of pictures she had seen of scared horses, rearing, their riders nearly unseated, their eyes turned towards a danger only they could sense.

Miriam and her family lived next door to us on Fulton Avenue when I was growing up. She’s a few years younger than Grandma.

And she’s very ill with cancer, her father added. Remember? We talked about cancer some time back?

The child and her toys each nodded silently to each other as the car sped along, its tires moaning dolefully on the grooved concrete below.

Is she going to die? Cassandra watched as her parent’s faces separately but simultaneously tightened a degree. Turning away, her mother nodded slightly and Cassandra understood, but then, with her next breath, didn’t. Maybe, her mother continued, a small break in her voice. We don’t know, but Miriam is sick and we’re going to visit with her.

Is she a relative?

No, honey, she’s just an old friend of Mom’s.

She’s important to me, Cassie. That’s all.

And again Cassandra nodded, but without comprehension, and her silence and the silence of her father and mother filled the car with a terrible aloneness.

Off the freeway, gliding along strange, unfamiliar streets in the half light of a December afternoon, Cassandra imagined that the three of them were shadows, passing shops of people alive and vibrant with color and taste and smell. Only they were gray and cold. But, being invisible, they could sample life at will and with impunity. In her play, her hands reached out towards the lights and sounds and feelings and snatched them hungrily as they passed by. Some she popped in her mouth, some she hid under her sweater, for later.

Not what I expected, her father said as they approached the hospital and slowly surveyed the grounds. It looks more like a country club than a hospital.

To Cassandra the land seemed limitless. Even though Christmas was only three days away, the grass was verdant and manicured, accentuated with neat white stucco cottages with red tile roofs laid out like a fairy tale village beneath tall, strong limbed trees made for climbing. But she did not ask her father to stop the car so she could run and climb and, though he looked at the same grass, the same houses, the same trees, he did not offer.

They parked in a nearly empty lot and walked silently past the leafless trees and the two lifeless orderlies who sat on the wall of a planter box to one side of the courtyard fountain, hunched over cigarettes, their crisp hospital blue uniforms speaking of a clean efficiency that scared Cassandra, though she didn’t know why. She grasped her father’s hand and watched the men the whole length of the courtyard, twisting her neck to see as they neared the automatic doors of the lobby, but the orderlies never moved. Only when the main doors whispered open with the sound of a great indrawn breath and then closed behind them with a squelched sigh did she turn away.

Room 367? her mother asked the teenaged receptionist.

The lobby smelled sharp and sour. She held her father’s hand a bit more tightly as they followed her mother past the large, soft furniture and pastel colors of the lobby and into a hard, linoleum lined labyrinth of sea-foam green walls and heavy wooden doors. Beyond each door, all were open, were beds with curtains drawn back from around them as if they were showers, not beds, and in the beds were faces; cold gray faces hungry for color and life. Cassandra tried to avoid looking into the rooms, tried to look forward like her parents so as not to have to look into the faces, but she knew that even if she did look away, they would still be watching her. That would be worse. She grasped her father’s hand so tightly that the blood ran out of her fingers and pressed her face hard against his arm, but she was too afraid to speak in this echoing hall, too afraid to ask to go back.

This is it, her mother said quietly. Cassandra looked up. In front of her was a nurse’s station whose front desk and overhang were festively covered with Christmas wrapping paper and ribbon. It was meant to look like a huge present which had just been opened, but what joy it might have contained had already escaped.

Two nurses sat far back in the station, amid piles of binders and charts and chrome equipment on wheels. They sat with their backs half turned to the hallway, either oblivious to what was beyond their box or not caring, pinching dry popcorn out of paper cups and gossiping in whispers. Neither looked up when Cassandra and her parents passed by. Room 367 was the last open door in a hallway that ended with a door marked EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. The emergency exit was barred, but it could not keep out the cold sunlight which filtered into the corridor through a small frosted glass window in its top half. It was that sunlight which Cassandra walked towards, not the room.

She hesitated at the final step, fearing the room, watching her mother enter and stop. It was smaller than the other rooms. There was only one bed, a bed high like a crib with chrome bars on the side, and in the bed was a body. Cassandra caught her breath at the sight of the thick yellow tubes and the red wires that ran from the body to the bags and bottles and machines that flanked it. It was as if the body had been turned inside out and all the veins and tendons and organs that should have been hidden inside were outside now and what should have been visible was in darkness.

Miriam, Cassandra’s mother whispered. Then again, Miriam, can you hear me? a bit more insistent, but still softly.

Is she asleep, Daddy?

He nodded slightly.

Cassandra watched the nearly hairless head, transfixed by its lack of color. Her mother’s friend looked ghostlike, difficult to distinguish in the white glare of the room lights from the starched pillow case that supported her. She held her breath as the eyelashes fluttered uncertainly, then opened to reveal two colorless orbs which turned towards her mother, tiny luminous moons reflecting the light of some other world, each ringed by moist