On Emma's Bluff by Sara Elizabeth Rice, edited by davebccanada (audio ebook reader txt) 📕

by Sara Elizabeth Rice

copyright 1998

All rights reserved by Sara E. Rice.

(begun 1/3/98 10.44 pm S E Rice)

"But you can, you can have it all."

"Lisa," she said, not hearing Irene, "You don't understand. I was living with an anthropologist in Nepal when I was sixteen. I was booting heroin by nineteen. Rehab, thank you Jesus, it took, for two years. Married to a man eighteen years my senior by the time I was twenty-five. And now at thirty, thank you, today"

She stopped to pour another shot and raised it to the bare kitchen bulb studying the contents.   "Happy Birthday Rita!!!" She cheered herself. I am the mother of two and I have done it all and there is nothing, and I mean nothing left to excite me!   I am depressed, I said Depressed. And do you know how I define that?

I define that this way, if my sister, Rose were to call me in the morning and say {"Surprise, we just won a thousand dollar shopping spree... blah, blah, blah, blah....} and I would only say "why did you call and wake me up!!!!   Damn you, go away!!   Hell no I don't want to go shopping.......................

…but this all happened many years later....

(I seem to remember it as 1985, no, the earliest copy says 1984. Let's see that was after Hal Milton, my new (ha) employer cornered me in the back warehouse and forced me to stand there and watch while he took his ugly sixty two year old "thang" out and played with it. I remember puking my guts out when I finally reached mine and Winston's (husband numero uno / correction perpetually unemployed husband numero uno, [ his mother told me he was too sensitive to work] "you know suicide runs in his family" ) apartment. I told Winston as soon as I was able to speak clearly again.

And like the true gentleman he was, he personally got up early the next morning and drove me back to the scene of the crime and went in while I waited in our broken down Nova and got down on his knees and begged Hal to take me back...........because we needed the money........

So the next night while Winston was locked in his own private room (despite our poverty he required a two bedroom apartment so that he could have his own space {where he believed pennies thrown on the floor, never to be picked up again brought the muses} I began my first and only to date completed novel. In all fairness and honesty, for I will into eternity hold a very special love for Winston and even to this date can not resent even a moment of the years I spent with him, Winston is the most glorious, natural, by birth, writer I have ever known, no matter how much he betrayed you Richard (and Richard I hope you read this some day and know how sorry I still feel......)

My most sincere prayer be that he one day over comes his own self hatred enough to allow his volumes of words to be published. The world would be enriched for this. (in them you can recognize me under the character he calls Peck, she, I mean me, never even survived into the 1980's, alas) But like my own version of Mary Shelly I took to my hand written notebooks to kill the time and fight my demons (I often think I was anxious to be married the first time because of my own irrational fears of the closet door being open at night as well as the closet door being closed and those things which force us to tuck all of our body parts under the sheets. (and in my case, a copy of the King James Bible across my chest )

It may not be a very good book but I tell you, writing it has forever (and I mean having since lived even alone in the darkest nights in places that give others the willies in broad daylight) cleansed and banished my old fears.

If only one reader should find his or herself to be equally redeemed, then it will have been worth all of the most nasty of reviews this should ever receive.   ….until we meet again on the 99cent discount table.........sincerely

Sara E Cook Rice

"There has to be some better way to do this," Emma thought sharply, clearly enunciating, inside her own head. "I hate, I mean I truly HATE peeling potatoes."

She sat straddled on the cane backed, goatskin, spotted black and brown on white covered chair, which she could never fail to remember, this being the same chair about which her Aunt Liz was constantly berating her. At the supper table Emma had the habit of leaning back and balancing on the two rear legs.

"You are going to fall! You are going to break that chair! You are going to…” - ‘scream out loud,’ Emma often finished in her own thoughts.

She looked down into the white with blue speckled enamel tub at the mess of slimy peels. Even on her wrist the peels clung. So rapt was she in her own dialogue that when the front door slammed, she jumped. It was only Aunt Liz, and then she noticed the harsh stiletto of her Aunt’s heels as Liz pattered rapidly into and beyond the kitchen. Her familiar baby step run was distorted by the weight of her gait.

Liz moved directly to the rusted chest freezer on the enclosed back porch. Emma was vaguely aware of the vapor that wafted up as the lid was lifted.

"It's all, every single bit of it has got to go!" Liz managed to say as she clearly choked.

"Huh? What?" Emma was up and rubbing her starchy palms into her jeans.

"The fish, the fish, all of the fish, help me, we've got to throw it all out."

Casting her eye upward in a direction that usually caused her Aunt Liz to rant, Emma blew her sigh out loudly, thinking, "Yeah sure the fish! Right! The fish that Uncle Ray spent all summer catching, filleting, wrapping...boy she really has blown a gasket on that poor man this time."

"Bring me the garbage pail" Liz demanded, "slide it across the floor and here, help me."

Emma was just about to let her unbridled thoughts erupt into the air so that trees that were falling with no one around for miles would hear, when Liz doubled a quarter of the way over and slapped her own mouth with her right hand so sharply that the sound jarred Emma in her tracks. Liz did not quite make it to the back door before she began heaving up what had presumably been her lunch.

Emma' mouth was still open when she stepped toward her aunt and saw that her Uncle Roy had already reached the back yard and was standing astride Liz's bent form supporting his wife's head as she unbecomingly "tossed her cookies".

"Now, Liz honey, I told you not to come down there. I told you, honey." Emma noticed the beefiness of his forearms as he hefted his stricken wife upright and guided her back into the kitchen.

"Em, baby, would you go get your aunt's housecoat, please? I think it's on the knob of the closet door."

Liz jerked herself away from Roy's grasp, taking two steps back before bellowing into his face, "What a nasty, nasty thing for Sam Prather to say! How, I want to know how, he could stand there joking that it was our fish, from our trot lines that done that to her? How! And you let him!”

Emma stood stark still in the hallway listening for Roy's response to this curious declaration, but his soft-spoken voice failed her ears. As mutely as possible, on her toes, she fetched the housecoat.

Emma had lived with her Aunt Liz and Uncle Roy for going on seven month's now. After the deaths it seemed that she had lived with every single one of her relatives for some length of time. "You ain’t never happy until you win someone over just so that you can hurt 'em better" her Grandpa Lewis's word rose up to strike her.

"Shut up, she told her seditious mind. Yet she knew she had always wished that "they" would send her to live with Uncle Roy, her uncle by marriage to her daddy's second to the youngest sister. Roy had always been a little bit kinder to the cousins than all the rest of them. Yet now, she wondered. Well, of course Liz and Roy had their own girl, Barbara Lee, and it wouldn't be right for Emma to expect them to treat her, just their niece, like one of their own, she knew that. And she really tried not to scowl every time she heard her Aunt Liz going on about Barbara Lee at Thomas & Williams Jr. College; about how Barbara was in this sorority, and on that homecoming committee and.…

But even so, Emma had finally just begun to feel comfortable enough, in this house on the dead end of a gravel road, in the most obscure county of the state, to relax her guard and to experience plain old boredom along with a little antsyness. The last month of the summer had done the trick, or so she had thought. But now that familiar demon reared up it's head to block her, "It's your fault," the demon said, "you bring trouble every where you go. You, my dear would be better off not to mention everyone else, if..."

"Shut up!" Emma rebuked the brain bound spirit. “Just shut up!” But guilt was never far behind, as she moved, it followed. So once again she glimpsed it’s shadowy form just to her side. "This all must somehow, some way, be my fault." Emma reasoned.

Her Aunt Liz was stripped down to her tatty slip when Emma returned with the chenille wrapper. With guilt as her current co-pilot, Emma sought to make herself of value again. She side stepped her aunt and uncle and made her way out the back door. Avoiding her aunt's ugly bi-product, Emma managed to find the garden hose and turn on the spray full blast to clean the wooden steps. From the kitchen she was able to discern the words they spoke.

"Honey, I just wish you had never even come down there." This was Roy speaking. "I told you that weren't no sight for a woman to see."

"Who found her?" Liz's voice demanded.

"I told you baby, the men hauled her up in the trot line."

"What would cause her to look like that?   I know it was the fish."

"Yeah, well, fish, turtles, gars, honey, but she was long dead before any of them got to her. Her soul was departed. It was just her body left. I know it was a bad sight, but you can't let it do this to you."

"And our own fish been getting fat on her" Liz's hand fluttered to meet her mouth.

"Honey, black folks been killing each other off and dumping the bodies in that river for ages. Don't