Permission to Enter

By Susan Helene Gottfried

Women feature in this collection of short stories and one novella. Women regaining their power, moving forward through life, learning to face and deal with their pasts. These women have lived, loved, and lost. They have optimism for the future and darkness in their pasts. They have been granted permission to enter, they have seized it, or else they stand ready to do so.

 

Really, they're just like us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: West of Mars, LLC
• Release date: Aug 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223799801

Book preview

Permission to Enter

Susan Helene Gottfried

West of Mars, LLC

Copyright © 2023 by Susan Helene Gottfried

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permission requests, contact Susan Helene Gottfried at West of Mars, LLC.

The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

Book Cover by Rachel Bowdler

First edition 2023

Contents

1.Shirt Thief

2.Burning Bridges

3.Puddles

4.Permission to Enter

5.Intro to Nothing

6.What She Willed Me

About the Author

Also By

Shirt Thief

He used to steal her shirts.

She’d somehow forgotten about that. Years later, years after they’d broken up, she’d forgotten about it.

Until one day, she saw her name written on the tag of a t-shirt she’d found at the very bottom of the drawer. It had been a freebie, given out as they’d entered the stadium’s gates; the team had wanted the fans in white to open the season and so everyone had gotten one. Her shirt and his had been impossible to tell apart once they took them off, even down to the size.

The only way to tell them apart was to take a Sharpie and put her name inside. But even then, if he was the one who folded the laundry, he wouldn’t notice her name. Or maybe it was more accurate to say he hadn’t cared. Once, she’d caught him pulling her marked shirt out of the laundry basket while she was finishing folding the same, unmarked shirt. He held hers; she held his.

Here, she’d said, finishing the final fold and holding it out. This one’s yours.

This one’s fine.

But it’s mine.

He had paused, his lips tightening like his asshole, his eyes simultaneously bugging out and somehow growing smaller in size. If she had thought to look, his fingers had probably gone white, they were holding on so tight. But she hadn’t been able to think, to look. She was caught by the transformation of his face. This. One’s. Fine.

She had reached for it, knowing she didn’t need to hold her breath, trusting he wouldn’t snap and hit her. That was the one thing he’d never done. Held her so hard, he’d left bruises, yes. But that was because she’d been wild, out of control, trying to open the locks on the front door and get out, get to the green space across the street, get some air and calm down. Wasn’t that why he’d done it? She’d been wild. He’d needed to stop her. Before…

Before what?

And sure enough on that day when they’d been folding laundry, he’d let go, his fingers coming open as if the shirt had suddenly turned distasteful. Well, then, he said and turned away. He’d scorned both t-shirts after that, but more of her own had begun to vanish.

She’d started hiding them. All the shirts they’d bought together at concerts, the freebies from various sports—spectator and participant—the promotional shirts he brought home from work. She’d used to love them, would wear them running, would sleep in them, would wear them whenever she just wanted to hang out and feel comfortable, but then she’d discovered how much better it was to wear actual running clothes, how cute pajamas and lounge clothes made her feel. She’d bought four running shirts and six pair of pajamas before he’d started complaining about how much money she was spending.

They were on sale, she’d protested.

What’s wrong with the shirts I brought you from work?

I— These are—

I like it when you’re comfortable. This stuff doesn’t look comfortable, he’d said and curled his lip at them, his opinion unavoidable. If she wore them, he’d tell her she didn’t look good. He’d ask what was wrong with her usual t-shirts.

So the running shirts went into the bottom of the dresser. She chose a few of the free shirts that she wouldn’t miss and offered them up as a sacrifice, all the while hoping the game was over and he’d stop snitching the wardrobe he preferred she wear.

One turned up in the laundry, covered in paint. Funny how it was the exact same color that he’d painted the foyer while she was away for the weekend. She’d initially hated the new foyer color but had eventually made peace with it. So what if the entry to her house was now the color of her nipples? No one needed to know.

Another turned up covered in grass stains and grease. The lawn mower had jammed. He hadn’t realized he was wearing her shirt, emphasis on her.

And a third, she had quietly folded and stuck in the back of her drawer until the next time she could sneak out and go running. Because at some point, she’d started needing to sneak if she wanted to run.

Now, these years later, she fingered the tag on this shirt she held. RACH, it said in blurry black Sharpie. If he’d been smart, he’d have taken his scissors and cut all the tags out so it would have been impossible to tell whose was whose. She’d expected him to; more than few of the shirts had sported a small black square above the tag. She’d colored the inside of the collar, just in case.

But he hadn’t. He’d had his schtick. He’d worked it. It had been about the slow attrition, the obviousness of it, the anger and frustration of the mix-up. It had been about the discovery of what he’d used her shirts for.

It had been, she’d come to realize, a specific, planned attack.

Part of her wanted to bunch the shirt up in her arms and cry, to cry for what had happened. But it had been years now that she’d been free of him and his games. The tears were gone, sopped up by time, dried up along the way as she’d first woken up, then healed, then finally learned to thrive without him.

Most of the pain and anger and frustration had faded, too. Looking back on it, on that pile of t-shirts, it was all so dumb. They’d been free t-shirts. She’d always had enough to wear even if she’d gotten tired of the same ten shirts. She’d been okay despite his upset and protests about money when she bought something new.

She wasn’t sure what it was about those free shirts that had caused her to become so possessive of them. This one wasn’t even particularly attractive: The team’s mascot had been done in a pen-and-ink style that hadn’t translated well when caught on TV. The letters were some heavy metal jagged type that sorta worked with the artistic style, but mostly it was a mess.

Why had she fought so hard for a stupid t-shirt?

She knew the answer to that. It had been rooted in the way he’d taken them from her. Like he had no regard for her, for what was hers, for anything other than himself. It was a shirt, but it had turned into so much more.

She unfolded the shirt and looked at it for a long minute, then pulled it over her head. He hadn’t even had the grace to leave her the paint-spattered one. He’d taken that one but left her the grease-and-grass-stained one. And this one. She wondered if he’d known to look for this one, if she’d hidden it too well, if he’d stopped because the game had gotten old or because she’d finally found her spine and used it as a sword, fencing with him, pushing him ever closer until he did what she wanted at last and walked through their front door for the final time.

They hadn’t even shouted loudly enough to alert the neighborhood.

No, this one last shirt had been down here, near the bottom of the drawer, where the other shirts had been, had sat for years, untouched, forgotten. She didn’t know how long the lawnmower shirt had been there either, if he’d planted it a long time before he’d left or if it had been one of those things, like the box from her bridal set, that he’d discovered while moving out and left in a visible spot, impossible to ignore.

She stretched the shirt down over her leggings. At least he’d never stolen those. Not that she particularly cared now. She was only wearing this pair because, like the shirt, it was time to sacrifice them to the inevitable push of forward movement, of erasure of his presence.

It was time to go for a quick run, just because she could, and then she would come home and get to work.

The front hall wasn’t going to be the same color as her nipples anymore.

Burning Bridges

Louda’s earliest memory was of standing someplace—an art gallery, a museum, although neither made much sense because her family avoided culture—and looking at a long, rectangular clear box. It looked like glass, but it was probably plastic or some other manmade material. The Louda of now knew that. The Louda of then thought it was glass. Both Loudas still believed in its magic.

Because inside the long rectangular box was a bridge. Now-Louda knew it was a model and maybe then-Louda had, too, but it wasn’t the bridge that had mattered and held her attention and even haunted her for all those years between then and now.

No. It wasn’t the bridge.

It was the orange flames that licked up over its supports, across its deck. Silent, orange flames that flickered and threatened but never consumed.

Louda remembered that burning bridge more vividly than she remembered anything else from her youth. Except for one thing: She remembered her fingers, so very brown as they stuck out of the pink sleeve of her puffy winter coat, touching the glass that contained the burning bridge.

Her fingers were as important as the bridge, but Louda never understood why.

Now, Louda sat at the performance piano on the stage and watched her fingers work the keys in her latest attempt to articulate the feeling she’d had that day as she’d stared at the magic flames inside the clear box. She had no memory of the first time she’d tried putting the experience to music, only knew that so far, she’d spent every day since trying to do it.

Hey, Louw?

She looked up, her fingers stopping of their own accord. It was, of course, Bart who was speaking to her. No one else would interrupt another student’s practice time, especially not here on the stage. They had their performance in a few days and getting time to absorb the atmosphere, the acoustics, the feeling of being on stage, in the spotlight was as vital as the grade they’d get for poise, performance, and presentation.

You still at it? he asked and scratched at his razor stubble, down near the hinge of his jaw.

Louda focused