FICTION DRAMA SAD
Craft a story where a character finds themselves swept away by the wind, either physically or metaphorically.
Posted in Angst on Mar 1, 2024
“Candle in the Wind” by Jack Kimball
I’m no Marilyn Monroe, believe me, as my husband reminds me, but I think of her, how her life was like a candle in the wind, the Elton John song. ‘You’re gaining weight Katie,’ my husband says. ‘Maybe a gym membership?’
Each night, my favorite part of the day arrives. I slip into the tub at 10:00 p.m. and relish the feeling. A warmth from the hot water rises in my hips, up my back, and into my head, and then I go into a dream and leave my life behind.
Maybe it starts when I am seven. I see us driving to the hospital: myself, my father, and Billy, my little brother. On a cold-gray fall day a castle looking monstrosity looms ahead, tall brick walls border the property. Inside are ragged unkept lawns and in our children's eyes white-coated zombies lounge about on benches. We gather silently in the dayroom with our father. The walls are an institutional green, the smell of urine, disinfectant.
The two of us scrunch down seeing my mother’s eyes in black empty circles. I hold Billy’s hand. It’s sweating, small, and clenching my own. ‘It’s not your fault,' I say. We’ll make sure you change when we get home. Here, hold this magazine so no one sees. Don’t cry.’
When our mother comes home the red in her eyes is now white and she silently takes her place, the family room chair by the window. There she stays day in and day out taking her Thorazine, but her ghosts, whoever they are, come calling. I see her mumbling to them. Sometimes they argue back and forth through the window. The drinking begins. With my father at work, us kids at school, a shot and beer place, Hank’s, is just at the corner.
‘God? It's Katie. Not for me, but for my brother. Did you forget?’
My brother and I sit at our assigned places at the kitchen table for dinner while my parents take the dining room. We think nothing of this. How would we know what a household is, or is not? My father works as an editor for a small magazine and my mother lives in the PTSD of her own upbringing, the poverty, and the diseased trauma of whatever it is we never talk about. We never speak, we never hug.
I go to school on the bus, return home, hide in my bedroom. On occasion, I listen to the yelling and crying and agony of whatever lives in my mother rising up through the heat vents to my upstairs bedroom. It’s then I carve with my penknife, ‘I hate you’ on the top of my kid’s wooden desk. Mostly though my brother and I gather at the top of the stairs and listen. Maybe there’s some secret that will make sense, we think. My father comes to me one day. “Should I divorce your mom?’ We are in the kitchen with my younger brother, the snow outside. Billy starts crying. ‘No Dad. No.’ No matter what, kids love their parents.
At sixteen, I have friends in high school. We drink six packs in the park, hard liquor from parent’s cabinets, smoke hash in aluminum foil pipes. I never think about the liquor, how I drink to passing out, the blackouts. Strangely, I also never link my drinking with my mother’s alcoholism. All my friends drink, or at least my crowd does. Someone else’s parents leave town, a hundred teenagers swarm over. My friends step over me to get in the front door. ‘She’s so a crackup, a real knockout,’ they say. ‘’Her head slams about when the front door opens.’ Later, I puke in my bed. Sneaking around, I wash the sheets the next day.
A random book comes to me in high school, a book about a manager of a theater. People ask me. What are you going to school for? ‘Theater Arts,’ I tell them. This answers their question and makes me think I have chosen a profession. Later, the first semester at college, I smoke marijuana and focus on the small TV at the head of my dorm room bed, Days of Our Lives, Robert Barker and Price is Right. ‘Come on down!’ I don’t attend much class. ‘English,’ the advisor says. ‘You can get a degree in English. That’s the easiest with your grades.’ So I major in English, 2.0, it’s easy.
My first job is no more thought out than what to have for breakfast, the randomness of the want ads. I manage a woman’s clothing store, live in my studio apartment, again no friends.
The store is a chain and moves me around the country. This is a lot of work. Six months in this city, six months in another. My social life consists of going out drinking with the employees and screwing the boys after the store closes. I don’t bring them home; I’m not a slut and there aren’t multiple boys at the same time. After fifteen years, there are seventeen; Seventeen boys who I call a long-term relationship. Many others are one-nighters, but these seventeen are each a few months at a time, then six months or a year with no one, then a new boy for six months. I never, not once, think I am in love. The boys think me remote, uncommunicative. I get notes or calls or intense conversations. ‘You don’t talk, you don’t share, but I love you. Don’t you love me?’ These questions piss me off. I quickly cut the boy out. They beg to have me back. ‘Don’t you love me?’ I have a good job. I look good enough, sexy even. I shut them down, no return phone calls. How dare they? Then no one for six months. I know how to relieve any desire. This is easier and a lot less complicated.
When I’m thirty, my mother passes away, and I don’t think it remarkable the only people at the funeral are my dad, my younger brother (who is now an alcoholic), and the priest. My brother? A steel train rips through my heart. If only I hadn’t left, abandoned him to go to school? Who was there to hold him at the hospital? The conductor leans out the window of the roaring train. His angry eyes leer at me, the screeching whistle never stops. The priest mentions he met my mother once. Months later, the three of us take her remains in a slick plastic milk carton. It’s a fall day, the trees barren, and I spread my mother’s ashes at the side of a highway down an embankment. My father and brother stay up on the curb. A dim and blustering day, the wind blows the ashes in my face. We laugh, my face a tight grimace, gray white, a chalk-like taste in my mouth. The ashes spill in a dusting cloud down the hill, chunks of bone tumble like hundreds of tiny white dice, eighteen wheelers roar by in a blur. We don’t mark the spot.
At thirty-five, I meet my husband in a Holiday Inn bar during happy hour. Why not? He’s as good as another. Soon I’m pregnant, we’re married, a new baby girl. I work now as a supervisor for a different woman’s clothing chain. Nannies, daycare. I love our daughter.
Ten years fly by. I am now in the C-Suite, a corporate exec, and the clothing store chain hits the market, big time. I come home one day and tell my husband, ‘We have a little money now. Going public means we get fifty-thousand per month.’ Soon after, my husband comes to me. ‘I always wanted to be an actor. Local theater has an opening. It pays zero, but we’d be giving back. It’s my dream.’ I think, with the extra money, we can somehow make it work. He has his dream. How can you hold your husband, who you love, back from his dream? I love my daughter and I love my husband. But my working sixty to eighty hours a week means traveling the country and leaving the house for a flight I breathe relief. While traveling, men suggest we have sex. I remain loyal to my husband. I don’t have sex because I’m scared of getting caught; I don’t have sex because looking at myself as an adulterer would mean I am pretty much scum. You have your honor, I tell myself.
My husband makes sure I don’t have any girlfriends he hasn’t vetted as the husband of those friends would likely cheat with me. I can’t conceive of being friends with a male friend, married or not. My husband won’t permit this. He cuts out unmarried female friends also; they might lead to another man. With my work, I am mostly exhausted, but also don’t fight his picking our friends. One less thing I have to worry about. Plus, this adds a lot of drama I don’t need. Why fight my husband? Bury yourself in your work.
I feel I’m a strong woman, independent. And I am strong too, a corporate exec, hundreds of people working for me. But my husband reminds me how stupid I am, how he is the only one who can manage a social life, how selfish and lazy I am. ‘I have to travel to San Francisco next week,’ I say. ‘Of course,’ he says. The subtext is I don’t care about him or the family. Maybe he’s right, I think to myself. ‘Who’s going?’ he asks. ‘Who are you meeting?’
Shouldn’t I understand and accommodate the person I love? And I love him most because he needs me. I can be strong for us both.
After my company goes public, the country club membership begins. The expensive gourmet dinners ramp up, houses git bigger, vacations further. ‘This is going to bite us in the ass,’ I say, but then I think, ‘Don’t make waves. It’s not worth the drama.’
A funny thing. Even confident people I’ve noticed, to my surprise, when told they’re stupid for decades, eventually start believing it. I didn’t use to think this, but I do now because my husband has convinced me.
A good day arrives, a new couple. And they are more interesting than the self-satisfied entitled assholes at the country club; the ones with their country club homes and smug expressions, measuring each other’s cars and houses and second homes and exotic vacations to Hawaii, all to see whose is bigger.
I like the new couple; they possess a grounded mindset rather than entitlement and wealth. ‘I saw you flirting,’ my husband says. The couple is out.
On business in New York, I meet with a fashion designer for an account my company is consulting with. Myself and the fashion designer work together, laying out thin paper templates of dresses, suits, ladies’ fashion. Quick sketches with pencils. The process of the design world enthralls her and soon me as well. The creativity is fascinating. Can people really have a job like this? Over two years, I return many times to the company and with the woman’s help, I submit my own designs, rough, and no more than amateur work. The design firm loves them. “You’re good, really good,” they say.
I have an epiphany. For your whole life, I hear from my most inner self, the winds have simply blown you in different directions. You never knew this job existed. You never knew people did this because you were too busy, neck deep in marketing and sales. But this fashion design; you are new at it and you need to learn a lot, but you are talented and you love it and you know your place in the world, finally. The random winds of your life at long last have brought you to a shore where you know you should be.
My husband and I sit together and watch Netflix while my daughter texts her friends in her bedroom and more and more has a life of her own. I love her very much but I don’t understand her world and we’re not close. She will soon be at university.
As for my husband, how can I ever hurt him? I just don’t have it in me. We work together on his memorizing lines for the local theater. I’m proud he’s living his dream. For me to live my dream in New York means living there, moving from here. My husband has been very clear he loves this town, will never leave. He loves this house and I love it too. The fifty-thousand per month, though, is long gone and the house owns us as much as we own it.
So I sit here in my pink robe, with Netflix on, thinking there will be no New York. No fashion design. No doing what I know I was born to do. More than the expense of a divorce to leave my husband, I love him. He needs me and we have a child together. I cannot destroy another human being. I can’t have any more steel trains ripping through my heart.
The mail comes and the company has sent a letter wanting to hire me as a fashion designer. Thank god I caught this before my husband sees. I rip up the letter in small pieces and bury it in the trash.
I have a dream. Just over a hill is the pink and blue lights of paradise. I run up the hill but my legs are moving slowly in a molasses water. No matter what, I can’t get over the hill. Crows laugh in the trees.
Where does it end? I slip into the tepid water of my bath at 10:00 p.m. and relish the feeling, leave all this behind. Not to live in dreams, but a great unconsciousness simply lasting forever. When I turn on my side, I imagine lying in my mother’s lap. She holds me in her arms and strokes my head, her hand warm and gentle. ‘It’s ok Katie darling,’ she says. ‘I’m ok now and I love you.’
March 03, 2024 16:56
Jack Kimball
31 likes 25 comments
2 points Jason Basaraba
01:40 Mar 14, 2024
Unless I am mistaken, this tells of a person ( like many of us) who project a full and happy life to the world while dying inside. Yet we persevere. Either way I enjoy your style of writing, the depth of your character is vivid and touches the reader.
1 point Jack Kimball
21:04 Mar 14, 2024
Thanks Jason. I appreciate you reading, liking, and commenting. Jack
2 points Helen A Smith
14:51 Mar 13, 2024
Listening to the agony of my mother rising up through the heat vents into the MC’s bedroom- a powerful image. What a burden to carry into adulthood- the burden of the unhappiness of her mother. Then a steel train runs through her heart when she finds out her brother is an alcoholic. This makes complete sense. Something very closed off and detached about her - as if she’s never been able to express her needs. Or allowed to express them. Then the loveless marriage with her husband and despite her abilities having her dreams repressed. How ...
2 points Jack Kimball
18:46 Mar 13, 2024
I hadn't thought of the word, "alienation", but I believe you are correct. Also, estrangement, disconnectedness, and loneliness. Thanks for reading!
2 points Helen A Smith
18:50 Mar 13, 2024
The way I look at is it’s a kind of survival technique where the victim disconnects from life for self-protection. Like wrapping a shell around themselves that no one can really penetrate. The boys cannot really get close to her because she seems aloof.
2 points Wally Schmidt
01:17 Mar 11, 2024
This is such a painful and well-written saga. At the end you don't know what you want for the mc and I suspect she doesn't really know either. No matter how competent people appear, if they are broken on the inside, it makes it difficult for them to move ahead emotionally and simply function in any manner that is fulfilling. I think your mc does this to an extent but with many compromises along the way. Very powerful and emotional read.
1 point Jack Kimball
14:09 Mar 12, 2024
Yes. I wanted the character to be successful on the outside and broken on the inside. I really appreciate you reading, liking, and commenting!
2 points Tom Skye
13:47 Mar 10, 2024
I saw the other comment regarding Camus comparisons. The emotional detachment, the taking life as it is. The paragraph beginning... " I have an epiphany. For your whole life, I hear from my most inner self, the winds have simply blown you in different directions. You never knew this job existed... ..was very powerful. I think this alludes to the element of contingency in our lives that Camus and Sartre discuss. The MC isn't quite as dysfunctional as Mersault but seems to be tackling the absurdity of life with similar strategies. The MC is...
1 point Jack Kimball
23:04 Mar 10, 2024
Thank you Tom. Yes. I was trying to convey that people can be broken inside while appearing successful on the outside, exhausted to fight back because they were programmed in their youth do to family circomstances. Your comments were dead on to the intent, highly insightful. I appreciate it!
2 points Victor Lana
00:11 Mar 10, 2024
This story saddens me in the way that 'The Stranger' by Camus saddens me. This story is nothing like that one, but it is the parental factor that links them for me. Mersault, the protagonist, doesn't know what day his mother died. The alienation is startling. Her death begins his descent into catastrophe. Katie knows when her mother died, but it was like she lost her mother long before that. That is when her descent begins. This is about dreams dashed and found. Her husband can have his dream of acting because Katie makes enough money for i...
1 point Jack Kimball
13:25 Mar 10, 2024
Interesting you mention Camus. I wrote this thinking of the 'absurdism' and I like Camus' bare frankness, his dry style. During COVID I got into him by reading "The Plague". Now you've got me intriqued to go back and read "The Stranger". Thank you for reading! Given your background I'm truly flattered.
2 points Claire Trbovic
17:44 Mar 09, 2024
Jack, I feel like the mark of a great story is one which tugs firmly on our emotional strings, mine were held tight reading this. So eloquent and so subtly painful, really enjoyed this
1 point Jack Kimball
13:38 Mar 10, 2024
Thank you Claire. From you I am highly flattered.
2 points Aidan Romo
05:41 Mar 06, 2024
A well executed character study that truly has a gut punch of an ending. Upon re-read, it does all make sense and is more than just a shock. Her whole life she was very much akin to the phrase in the title, and not much changes by the end. It's interesting to see her mindset throughout the whole tale in regards to her desires, her lifestyle, and her life being guided by those around her circle. There is a small part of me that can almost sympathize with her feeling that same sort of way myself. This was a great story, Jack. Also, I must say ...
1 point Jack Kimball
13:52 Mar 06, 2024
Thank your Aidan. Your insight is aways so well thought out. Katie is indeed a character study that my hope was people could relate to. Nearly everyone, I suppose, feels like a candle in the wind for at minimum some period of their life. I appreciate you taking the time!
2 points Marty B
03:11 Mar 05, 2024
A life lived in the wind, buffeted by chance, and the whims of others. Katie does choose, though in the end. She chooses to rip up an opportunity, risk for happiness, to bury it in the trash for the safety and security she missed out on growing up. She prefers to have her life directed by someone else. Maybe because she doesn't trust herself? As she points out- 'How would we know what a household is, or is not?' These are great lines- 'I have a dream. Just over a hill is the pink and blue lights of paradise. I run up the hill but my ...
2 points Jack Kimball
15:46 Mar 05, 2024
Interesting that you picked up on Katie actually choosing for 'the safety and security she missed out on growing up.' They say EVERY story is autobiographical because the dream the author sees is only possible from their own experience. Thanks for the read! Jack
2 points Joseph Mir
16:58 Mar 04, 2024
"I’m no Marilyn Monroe, believe me, as my husband reminds me, but I think of her, how her life was like a candle in the wind, the Elton John song. ‘You’re gaining weight Katie,’ my husband says. ‘Maybe a gym membership?’" This is such a strong and well written introduction to the story. I was captivated from the start.
1 point Jack Kimball
15:56 Mar 05, 2024
Thank you Joseph! I really appreciate you reading, liking, and commenting.
2 points Trudy Jas
15:28 Mar 04, 2024
Oh my! Finally, after a lifetime of drifting, she finds a dream, but .... So, lets herself be swept away again. Womderful story, Jack.
1 point Jack Kimball
16:02 Mar 05, 2024
Thank you Trudy!
2 points Mary Bendickson
05:09 Mar 04, 2024
Blown away by your story. Poof!
1 point Jack Kimball
16:07 Mar 05, 2024
Thank you Mary!
2 points Alexis Araneta
18:02 Mar 03, 2024
Jack, another brilliant one from you. I love how you illustrated that for all your protagonist's life, she was only blown by the wind. Now, she's stuck. Very rich prose with great imagery. Lovely job !
2 points Jack Kimball
16:11 Mar 05, 2024
Thank you Stella!