God is a Woman in a Rice Field - Chapter 4

by ©dianegreen

Summertime (section) - Acrylic on Canvas - by © diane green 2005

Chapter 4

Moving In Slow Motion

Memories.

Put them in order.

There’s spontaneity with derangement.

Leaves falling off trees, seasoned beggars asking for bread poking you with the handmade cane you know they dance with at night.

Where it starts is where it ends.

Far far away. Abby’s early life could be a disarray of nightmares bordering from Pippi Longstocking holding up a liquor store with an assault rifle to having Rhodesian grandchildren and making cookies for the new Mongolian first Lady.

Ok. Here’s the short version:

Birth. Kindergarten. Smear. Elementary Chimera. Junior High. Ideation. Sex. College. Sex. Run Away. Come Back. More College. Run Away. More Sex. Marriage. Less Sex. Art School. Bum Rush. Shoulda known better. Disgust. Playing in a Rock & Roll Band. More Sex. Marriage. Less Sex. Relocation. Having Children. Near Death. Having Something to Live For.

Then came this: Falling in Love.

By now a reader could be curious if this is being written postmortem.

Abby must’ve been out like Lottie’s eye.

Didn’t see that one coming.

All Abby wanted to do was tell her story

Downloaded power outage

Out of mind outrage

Fearful brainwaves flying through tunnels

Unfounded disharmony

Utter nuances of trance and dance.

Falling over laughing and crying at the same time.

Back to square one.

Abby’s earliest memory:

At about two years of age Abby was in the living room of her folk’s new American dream home; some people call it the front room (that would be the “frunch” room if you’re from Chicago) Anyway, the Grails had just moved in. There were cardboard boxes all over the floor. Abby’s mom and sister were gone somewhere shopping for an elder sister’s bonus. Abby’s dad was smoking, standing, staring around the living room.

Abby was attempting arranging the boxes into a make-believe order, trying to line them up. Abby was trying to make them into a train. Abby wanted to show it to her dad, but he was paying attention to something else - like his cigarette smoke. Abby just kept pointing at the train.

Here's another hint from a song written by Abby with the help of her Doppelgänger Guardian Angel 25 years later:

“Train Goin’ By

Grandpa worked the Missouri Line

Fell between two cars one day

I guess it was his time

A soul will fly

Train goin’ by”

As time went by, at school during recess, Abby couldn’t / wouldn’t play with the other kids. Abby walked alone to an old, twisted oak tree that was in the park. It was not like the other trees. Abby could relate. She could blend into a landscape as if she were a part of all Nature itself. Every day, Abby played a game walking round and round only on the roots, talking to the tree, hopping over empty spaces. Making up rhymes. Talking to … the unseen.

When Abby was very young, like 4 or 5, she thought she was the only girl in the neighborhood, which didn’t really matter much at that point. Being the nonconformist that Abby was, she just toughed it out. Playing with boys required some diligence in Abby’s younger years. One boy named Jay tried to beat her up for no reason. Payback was fierce. The next day Abby told him she had a new circus trick requiring him to sit under a wheelbarrow. Jay’s 3-year-old sister was with him. The poor, annoying fellow went under the wheelbarrow. All Abby had to do was sit on top of it and not let him out. Piece of cake. He started screaming. His little sister Teresa laughed in glee.

Ok. Abby had some foresight. She realized Jay could croak, and she didn’t want a spanking. So, she lifted the wheelbarrow. Bloodthirsty, Jay jumped up and started trying to beat Abby up, but with a single right hook to the face she sent him running home to his mom. His sister Teresa was laughing hysterically. She and Abby became friends. Teresa was also a redhead.

Junior High School

Abby always sat alone in school with dreams of times, past and future upon a whim. She couldn’t really deter time as a difference from eons of thought at any moment. She’d been doing it all her life. For instance, in 7th grade, here’s an example: “Abby, can you answer the question number 3 on the board?” From staring out the window at the birds in the trees then being reeled back into her 1970 present day American history class. Abby just couldn’t wrap her head around a lesson on WWI from her history teacher who had only one lung and spoke in a whisper.

Besides, war was something spookier. Abby’s great uncle was a WWI veteran. She thought perhaps he was visiting her from the other side and leading her around keeping her from paying attention to studying the American atrocities class. He hated WWI. They exposed him to mustard gas. It probably disgusted him, ghosting as he was, that the teacher was saying nothing about the Native American massacres and the worldwide pandemic which were going on at the same time. Some things we’ll just never know.