Strange Ruins: Volume I

By Mary Johnson

When two aliens meet on a foreign planet, one is willfully lost. The other is friendly but sad. As both impart their wisdom on the other, each walks away with a different perspective on life and loneliness.

Within a collection of short tales, Mary Johnson leads others down an imaginative path that explores the ecstasy and the agony of life examined from an intimate panorama. When a man signs up for a speed dating shindig, he does not expect to find depth and love at first sight. But as he is about to discover, life is full of serendipitous moments. When Orner Thomas receives an in-flight note from his travel companion, Caron, he decides not to open it, taking back control over his destiny. Opal is a makeup artist who holds her lovers at a distance. Now as she ends another soul-tying love affair with yet another transient straggler far from home, Opal reaffirms to herself that she is not responsible for her lovers’ happiness.

Strange Ruins: Volume I is a collection of short stories filled with diverse characters on unique journeys through life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jan 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781480884694

Book preview

A COMPROMISE

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Time ago, while ambling along my interstellar vagabond’s way, I met a small man. His skin was smooth and green. He wore a purple suit that looked a lot like an Earth baby’s onesie, sans the undercarriage snaps or rear trapdoor. He was a friendly fellow, but terribly sad he seemed.

We were both aliens on a foreign planet, far away from home. I was willfully lost. He seemed to have no choice in the matter of his uncertain state of being. No third eye was needed to perceive his melancholy.

As our paths intersected, we exchanged affable intergalactic greetings. The salutation indicated safety, and that we had at least one language in common. Employing that language, he asked if I knew which way from what. I shrugged and said I knew a little which what was where. I pointed him in the direction I thought to be right.

His lower lip then bulged and began to quiver. Thank you, he said in a strangely strained voice. Then he broke suddenly into sobs.

Fudge, I thought crabbily. Who needs this today?

I made no inquiry about his tears. However, I did reach down to pat his shoulder sympathetically.

You are kind, he said.

Been alone too long to know what I am to anybody else, I said honestly.

They left me, he said under sobs and rankled eye rubbing. You’re better off alone.

Everybody’s got a tribe out there. Somewhere. We’ll find them, or they’ll find us. Probably sooner before later, I said to console him but was also hoping to be right.

Tribe. Bah. He was composed again. Still friendly, he looked irritated at the thought of his abandonment.

"If you are constantly in search for your tribe—a group that may or may not exist, from which it is presumed you will derive an ultimate sense of belonging—stop, he advised. Consider that perhaps the reason this tribe has not been found by you, or has not yet zeroed in on you, may be because you do not need this group, which may or may not exist. And this group, which may or may not exist, would not know how to be of benefit to you. You have survived thus far in a state of independence. What is to impede your continuance?"

Considering his words, I decidedly agreed. Truth be told, I started thoughtfully, as if he would have any way of comprehending my befuddled Earth American popular culture aphorisms, "cliques went out with Carrie Bradshaw’s ghetto-gold name necklace. Even Sir Mix-A-Lot left his posse on Broadway. Surely, we, in all our exceptional inimitability, can strut our own stuff—for ourselves, by ourselves—just like Tony Manero did in Saturday Night Fever."

He smiled as though he understood every bizarre reference and waved goodbye as he started in the direction I had previously advised.

I waved back and resumed my way in better spirits, feeling far less loneliness inside of being alone.

CURED

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To him, she recounted this anecdote:

Knowing when to take yourself seriously and when to pay out a good sense of humor over your own hysterics is an understanding equally worthwhile as figuring out that you never have to prove your goodness. One does not gird herself in goodness like donning a new dress. Goodness grows from choices and it radiates inside out. Some will see it. Others won’t. To the bearer, peripheral revelation is moot. To persist in well-doing, despite life’s perpetual failing-down properties, has its rewards.

Case in point…

Years ago, during my first week of being a green, happy-go-lucky freshman in college, I made the prodigal blunder of forwarding an unmixed message of sociability to a swaggering egotist.

Back then, I knew no strangers. To everyone whose path intersected mine, I smiled and said hello. One day during that week of collegiate acclimation, I saw a fellow student approaching. As was my way, I began to smile long before our paths crossed. At our point of intersection, I cheerily declared hello, to which this girl responded with a disdainful smirk. She projected a look that queried as to just how it could be possible that someone of my low eminence could dare assume sanction to utter greeting to one of her elevated distinction.

Fast-forward to not more than a year later. The university newspaper broke a story of her—the egotist of elevated distinction—being arrested for shoplifting from a Catholic thrift store.

To her, he narrated this rejoinder:

When I was in the third grade, I made a paper heart for a girl as quantifiable proof that my heart was all hers. The hours I poured into that heart… Revealing my feelings to her was my New Year’s resolution. That being so, I started working on it January 1st that school year. Every night between then and February 13th, I added some glittering specialness to further layer that paper heart.

As far as I was concerned, the sun rose and shone as excited as I was to greet her. The moon lingered in the morning to be with her longer. Corny? Maybe. I was in love. I don’t know if an in-love state is ever as pure as first love.

The only feeling I’ve had that superseded the purity of that first bout with love was the moment when the existence of my child became a reality to me—when he was no longer a kicking fetus quivering around inside my ex-wife’s belly and then when he was no longer a crying, unappeasable, wriggling animated object with needs I could not readily comprehend the way his mother naturally could. Almost every time I held him or even approached him, he cried. I thought he hated me. And because of that, I wasn’t all too sure how I felt about him.

One day, lo and behold, he stopped crying.

It was the silliest of last-ditch attempts to shush him that finally worked. At my wit’s end, I laid him on the living room sofa. He was on his back, kicking and nearly turning blue from crying so hard. He was fed, clean-diapered, and suffering from no ailment decipherable to the naked eye. After checking his temperature, singing, making silly faces, I took his little crochet blanket that had footballs and beagle puppy designs and tossed it up in the air, letting it cascade down slowly over his face. I hate to admit that I think the reason I did that was out of pure frustration with him. Maybe he could feel that—my annoyance with having to be alone with him for the first time ever. His mother was either out with her mother or attending a business dinner somewhere. I can’t remember. All I know is that I never felt more alone and more lost. As the blanket landed on his face, the crying stopped and illogically became, of all things unexpected, an emphatic giggle. Under the blanket, he kicked and flailed—happily. Not sure if I had gone crazy and imagined this happening, I lifted the blanket and quickly repeated the previous action. When he laughed again, I think I may have shed literal laughing tears. It was a miracle. He laughed. I picked him up, swung him around and hugged him close. When I pulled back to look at him, he was looking back at me, seemingly with love in his big, beautiful eyes. My son loved me. Suddenly, right then and there—not a minute prior—I loved him too. More than anything.

That, in truth, was very nearly how I felt about the paper-heart girl back in the third grade. Every day I spent longing for a microcosm of her courtesy, but doing nothing about how I felt, I suffered. Being so close to her, yet feeling so far away, was magnificent anguish. Hence, the resolution of the paper heart.

On the morning of Valentine’s Day, I rushed to exit the school bus ahead of everyone else. I ran to my classroom and while it was blessedly empty, I placed the paper heart, which was by then greatly embellished, on her desk. When she arrived and sat down, she picked up the heart, looked it over once, frowned and stuffed it into her backpack. She never again acknowledged that heart—or me. We were in the same classes straight through the fifth grade. Yet, she never once even looked my way. Yes, she knew the card was from me. I’ve always regretted the fact that I most foolheartedly signed it with my full first, middle, and last names. I guess that when you love someone, you want them to know it’s you—the fullness of you—who loves them. Passion incites abandon. Sometimes focused. Most times, reckless. But the bottom line I learned from that first in-love experience is that no one is obligated to reciprocate feelings. Even at that tender age, I couldn’t find a way to hate that girl for not liking me back. I felt the way I felt. I experienced that experience fully and leaned into the light of that circumstance instead of the bleak bitterness that made me want to run away fight-dancing to hole up inside my broken heart. Sure, there was a brief moment when I wanted to pull her hair, spit on her face and snatch back my gauche, unwanted little paper heart.

But then I looked at her and still felt love.

In that moment, it was like falling down and bumping my head against full accountability. I realized that the same way I didn’t ask to be the bearer of a longing I couldn’t even define, she never asked to be the recipient of my feelings. She was not obligated to return my blind affections. Just as I had a choice to love none but her, it was her human right to love and not love whomever, however, she pleased. The most valuable takeaway was that no one has to eat dirt to have a good day.

To this end, she disclosed:

My parents divorced when I was in fifth grade. Prior to that time, every Sunday morning we watched Sunday morning news programming as a family. I had grown to appreciate and look forward to news programming that, without tempering truth, was cozily decipherable by a child. The first Sunday after our familial disbandment, however, I was in the mood to break all ties with tradition. So, I switched over to a different network’s morning news program. On this program, there was a panel of mostly white-haired, suit-and-tie stately old gents who all in some form or another reminded me of different life-phase photographs of Richard Nixon.

As I sat listening, I remember feeling disappointed, not necessarily by my lack of knowledge, but by my limited understanding. I listened closely to those garrulous, banal Sunday talkers, but understood nearly nothing they said. Every other word was alien. I hadn’t yet discovered the nature of using prattling windbaggery as dialectal armory.

So, I pulled out a notebook and started writing down all the terms I did not recognize. By the program’s end, I had filled up several pages. Straightaway, I went to work decoding those words and phrases, only soon to discover that defining words is not what gives them meaning. Context, I realized, is the clarifier.

Later in life, I learned that the same held true about a wedding. When I was a young girl, it was a beautiful world of possibility comprised in a single word. Wedding. A gateway to an interminable state of bliss. To become a wife meant debunking the petulant reality of my wonder years. When I was growing up, most of the adults around me were regrettably paired. A few were miserably single. But all, somehow or another, blamed someone they once loved for their personal discontent.

I cringe now, remembering how unreasonably conclusive I was in thinking that saying I do would magically transport us—my first love and I—into a happily-ever-after that life bred us to presume impossible. In time, I discovered that wedding is really a euphemism for a death party. Marriage is its clarifier. All along, I do was the syntactical loaded gun.

My old friend and I were both romantic dreamers from broken homes. Struggling to believe in fairy tales, we tried—perhaps too hard—to prove all the pragmatists around us wrong. I don’t think we were in love with each other nearly as much as we were with the romanticized notion of making our ill-informed dreams come true. But when real life hit us, it hit us hard and fast. Money problems so easily tore us apart. He was a lot more dedicated to his aspirations than I was to mine. Debt grew me out of my fantasies. Quick.

In time, his venerable passion took him all the way to exactly where he aimed to be. It took a little longer for me to find and decrypt my passion. Once I better understood it, my passion propelled me toward probing for meaning. Not just of words, but of everything—all things life.

Correct paths do rise to meet us, I believe. They aren’t handmade. You don’t handpick your happiness. It has to find you, and then maybe you get to choose whether to leave it or to accept and integrate it into your life at a natural pace. The problem with being happy is that it sometimes makes us think that the development of happiness needs to be expedited. As if the rate of natural growth is too slow. So we dig down deep into the earth of a certain joy to seek out the foundation of what’s making us happy. We find the rhizome. We get a firm strangle-hold and yank it up above ground. At the end of that damning rush, we’re left with weeds, severed roots, and a great big empty hole. Then—without culpability—having the blind gall to ponder how it all got to be that way.

My former spouse and I never refer to each other as exes. We salute one another as Dear Old Friend. In our beginning, we were conspirators of a sad, short dream. Reality struck like St. Elmo’s fire, leaving our quasi happily-ever-after flat and defeated. But even after the heartache of losing a dream, we never lost the ability to be kind and loving to each other. I consider that to be a notable accomplishment.

I’m not opposed to dreaming. I just grew tired of talking about dreams. Dreams are necessary visions. ‘Where there is no vision…people perish.’ Proverbs 29:18. I get it. But a goal should be a dream’s best friend. Right? I think so. A goal is something to fall in love with that does not allow you to rest on your oars, dreaming about it. A goal launches ambition into reality. During the marriage, I equated a perpetual dream-state to death. I didn’t want to dream anymore. But, with time and a little more emotional maturity, I better understand that a dream for two, takes two. When I stopped believing, the partnership dissolved. My dear old friend chose to keep dreaming, which paid off for him. I chose to evolve differently—to take the path that was patient and considerate enough to meet me at my convictions. Funny to think that had I not viewed that Sunday morning news program and felt stupid, I might not have developed a windswept interest in etymology, which I never thought to pursue as a career until my marriage ended. Today, I’m a professor of Linguistics. Funny, isn’t it? A path rising to meet us does not infer that traveling said path will be effortless. But we do have to summon the bravery to step on to the path and allow it to take us where we should be. I really think so.

This is completely random… But at the start of this process, we were advised to talk about anything that naturally comes to mind, as well as to try and leave off on a pleasant note. I guess because the end is near, I’m thinking of a beautiful moment that’s been lingering on my mind like a delectable spice on the palate…

I was going into a home improvement store not long ago. A couple passed me by. The man pushed a wide, supply-laden cart. The woman, whom I assumed to be his wife, sat on the edge of the pulley. For no known reason the man launched into a scuttle, pushing the cart briskly ahead of him. Instead of chiding the man for immaturity, the woman clung to the cart’s side rails, laughed and shouted, Faster, honey, faster! It was beautiful. They were like happily playful children. I turned and stopped to watch them. Really looking at them then, I could see that they were nearly elderly. Yet, they were exuberantly youthful. I could easily imagine them as teenagers, not looking much differently, except for the gray hair and deep laugh lines. I thought then that if I ever venture into love and marriage again, that’s all I’d want from it…deep laugh lines.

This too is random, but somehow related… On my way here tonight, I heard a public radio program play an ancient recording of Charles Laughton masterfully reciting a passage from Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. In that work, Kerouac wrote, Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said ‘God, I love you’ and looked up to the sky and really meant it. ‘I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other.’

Imagine it. Laughton—the consummate accomplished performer—defending Kerouac against what Laughton must have considered a lessening to the title of beatnik. The thespian heralded the author as a prolific transcriber of life. I have to tell you, it warmed my heart in such a way. Laughton closes the reading by relaying the writer’s gratitude to the little mountain shack that has allowed him time and space to fall in love with a Creation and its Creator.

That is how I felt about the old young couple outside of the home improvement store. I am grateful for the sight of them. They helped me to remember laugh lines, as well as the possibility of inextricably connected hearts and souls. Maybe it’s an off-kilter notion, but I might not have come here tonight if I had not encountered them. When my marriage initially ended, I dismissed every belief I held about love. It’s not that I considered my run with it false. It was definitely real. Just…overzealous in the wrong direction, I think. Although I remain fond of my memories, I haven’t craved falling in love again. I figured that true love is a one-time deal. We, my old friend and I, didn’t handle love well. So, somewhere along life’s way, I concluded that once was enough. I was done with it. But when I reacted to the couple at the home improvement store, I got to thinking that maybe love isn’t done with me.

A bell rang.

I guess that means times up, she said, giggling hesitantly—feeling less confident than she could ever recall feeling at any other particular point during the evening.

Wow. Already. Prior to this exchange, minutes felt like decades. This is the first time tonight I haven’t wanted to move on so soon, he said sincerely.

Same here, she admitted, more at ease.

A standing man cleared his throat impatiently and reminded, It’s called rapid dating for a reason, people. With that, he motioned sweeping gestures to urge his predecessor forward.

Ah, your prince doth await, he jibed, not bothering to veil sarcasm.

It was an honest pleasure to meet you, she said as she extended her hand to shake his.

He accepted her hand, saying, Likewise indeed.

Reluctantly, he released her hand and conceded to this process, which he now silently deemed heinous.

At the close of the social…

She scoped the room, irrationally hoping to find him waiting for her. Instead, she saw him near the main exit helping a young woman into her jacket. He smiled jubilantly in response to something the giggling woman sheepishly uttered for his hearing only. He opened the door for her. She stepped out into the night, jutting her hand out behind her as a logical invitation. He accepted without hesitation. Hand-in-hand, together left the pair—a portrait of cheerful contentment.

Watching them go, she heaved a low and sunken breath. Hooooo, she softly exhaled. Awash with a heavy, unquantifiable sadness, she lacked the will to immediately recover from disappointment. This sickened feeling, she briefly considered to be a symptom of the justifiable shame she deserved to bear for unnecessarily positioning herself to be the one unwanted. Before tonight, she had been content to live her life as it happened. Never had she hoped in pursuit of another. Never had she been spurned by anyone. Tonight, she experienced both circumstances.

A gentle hand on her shoulder claimed her attention.

Do you have dinner plans? I think we made a pretty nice connection and I’d like to explore that further, the man said gently.

She turned to see that the man who sidled up to her was one of the compassionate lineup prospects from earlier, compelled by pity, or so it seemed to her, to extend a sympathetic gesture that might spare her the embarrassment of leaving alone.

No. Thank you for your kind consideration. I’m kind of feeling like this process isn’t for me. She smiled, hoping that he would not be offended or consider her response to be a personal rejection. Her intention was not to hurt someone because she had been foolish enough to set her sights on one person who had not set his sights on her. She merely wanted the comfort of home and its recuperative properties of familiarity.

The suitor smiled, nodded understanding, and walked away.

She helped herself into her coat and left the great hall feeling better about the future as she chuckled at her own hysterics. On her way to the parking lot, she entertained the thought that, Frogs are frogs. Men are men. A prince earns his status by birth, not magic. Securing her scarf more cozily around her neck, she paused to look up at the dusky evening sky. She smiled love, and really meant it. By the time she reached her car, melancholy had been tossed out of remembrance. Much the same as one would chuck salt over a shoulder to ward off bad luck. Forgetting, she recalled, happens easier when one does not try to do it.

The next morning…

He skulked out from under the young woman’s sleeping body and glided away from her apartment feeling delightfully empty. All the way home, the sun shone brightly, warming him inside his guiltless relief. For reasons unknown, his thoughts drifted toward the linguist. Some part of him considered that maybe she was a plausible choice. For someone. But not for him.

He was contented with his selection. The woman with whom he left the previous night’s rapid dating party was certainly gorgeous at first sight. But beauty, for him, was merely her preliminary lure. What he appreciated most about her was that she was wholly happy all on her own. She was not deep, but she was weightless—buoyant—full of life and comforting good cheer. She was not witty, but simply endearingly funny in an all-heart way. He was also inspired by her work as a live-action cartoon character, goofy-dancing on children’s television programming. For such a role, her good-natured joviality was well-matched.

He reminded himself that he did not sign up for that speed dating shindig to find depth and love-at-first-sight. All too much for a night. He simply thought it might be fun, daring himself to do something that he had never previously even contemplated. It was meant to be no more than an inconsequential bucket list item check-off.

All he needed last night, was a night. A one-and-done night with a natural beauty whose ambition in life is to keep it simple. Just as he decidedly kept his. He was cured of complication, having been there and back.

He learned not to require too much of life, so that life would expect of him in kind. It was suitable enough for him that Serendipity found herself in amiable spirits, intersecting his path each morn with freshly brewed coffee. That was all he needed to meet and greet another day.

One cup is magic, in that it demystifies illusions, he thought aloud, pulling into his driveway, already anticipating the imminent brew. The durable taste industrializes extravagance, he expounded upon his initial thought. "It says to a new day that being wherever here is…is enough."

Again, his thoughts returned to the linguist from the night before. There, his mind lingered.

She admired him with expectancy, in an unnerving way. Hers was an admiration for which he felt undeserving. He could sense her sinking into his speech, absorbing the meaning of each word as he uttered them. Her unspoken enchantment with possibility needed breaking. Charles Laughton reading Jack Kerouac… Falling in love with God… It was all a bit much, he thought. Despite her tall talk of being a newfound realist, she had visions of kismet sugarplums dancing in her head last night. He, being a true and living realist, sensed her truth. She is still a dreamer. Reluctant, perhaps. But a hopeful fantasist, nonetheless. Now, instead of debunking the unbelief of family and friends, it was her own doubt that her secret optimism aimed to disprove.

He considered now that if they had met under different circumstances, exchanging two-way discourse in a natural setting—un-timed—perhaps there might have been a chance for amity, at most.

Coffee would have been a cure, he thought.

Imbibing warm fluids, he felt, would have demythologized the hypnotic spell of the unknown that seemed to momentarily captivate them both last night. That one magic cup, he believed, would have possessed properties to defog the delusion of the pedestal—to humanize the gypsy—to prove that certain truths do not remain unchanged while waiting to be gathered or debunked.

SOLVING FOR X

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I.

My house is empty. There is nothing between the walls, save for myself, the grubby wooden floor beneath my bare feet, and a sparsely dressed baby sitting on an otherwise empty wall-shelf. The baby is waiting quietly. Sadly. What is it waiting for? Why does this child’s sadness cause me to feel guilty? I do not feel capable of alleviating this child’s melancholy, but I will try.

I go to the child, lifting it away from its place on the barren shelf and cradle the baby with one arm. This action feels obligatory more than instinctive, comforting, or protective. Is this child mine?

The baby leans its head against my shoulder and gasps a tiny sniffle. The child lifts his hand and wearily scratches its head. The woolly, unkempt hair amassed there almost appears to swallow his little hand. This baby begins to rub its eyes until it becomes rankled by the seemingly perpetual itch. The child’s crying elevates. I feel exhausted, exasperated, but incapable of blame.

There is an abundance of space in my house. Why is it empty? If I can afford to live in this spacious house, which I feel no inclination to call a home, surely, I should possess the means to furnish it. Shouldn’t I? Yet, I feel no desire to work at replenishing this empty space around me—only a yen to see it filled with cheerful things. Yet, how will cheerful effects appear if I do not find these spirited encumbrances and place them where they belong?

There is a man in what I believe to be my house. He seems to bend his will to prove something. It looks as though he wishes for acceptance, not approval. What he is attempting to aver, I assume, is his love. I am not convinced by his efforts. Should he stop trying to impel, perhaps then I may believe. As of yet, I am leery. Of him. Of this great-big empty house. And principally of this needy child.

Am I to assume that this child loves me as well?

It stops crying and tilts its head to once again lean on my shoulder. Finally, I feel what must be the slightest component of maternal.

This child pleads to me with its cushiony brown eyes. What is it pleading for? What does this child want? I do not feel capable of satiating this child’s needs time and again. Yet, I feel duty-bound to try. Looking at this baby makes me feel marginally sad. What does the future hold for this child? At this point in time, I