We Are All Fine.
Short Story Genre
1687 words
Feedback desired: General impressions of characters (anything interesting you find about them or the setting), impressions of the story, of the writing style. Thanks!
Michelle woke up suddenly, heart racing, an imprint of touch and fear and meaning just beyond her consciousness. She tumbled through the fading dream, trying to grasp what it was that had seemed so clear a few seconds ago. A dog barked in the distance. She struggled to pull her eye mask up over her forehead and her iPhone—never far away— came into focus: 4:30am.
I may as well get up, she thought. Plenty of work to do. These sleep interruptions had become more and more common. It couldn’t be peri-menopause, whatever the fuck they called it these days? Might be worth asking her Chinese herbalist about it.
Michelle lived just outside of a rather unnoteworthy, but thriving, college town in the Midwest. She and her husband had built a beautiful house, complete with pool, waterfall/slide for their blended family – one daughter of their own, and four children combined from their 2 previous marriages. Perfect landscaping, a rec room with a 100-inch flat screen TV, a two car garage with two expensive cars –all of the trappings of a modern-day American success story. In addition to working full-time Michelle made sure that Christmas held the promise of multiple, perfectly lit and decorated trees, numerous and lovely family photos with all 5 kids, and a dinner that left them all happy, stuffed, and ready to watch some football. She loved having a full house.
Their five-acre plot was tiny compared to the 20-acre expanse of land where she grew up. Her father was a farmer, their barn held a handful of horses, and the adjoining plot had cows. Their farm was 25 minutes from the nearest town which, growing up, didn’t even have a stoplight, but had a high school. In the old farmhouse she shared a room with two sisters and a brother, and her other sister shared the downstairs bedroom with cousins, nieces and nephews who often stayed. Their house was always uncomfortably full. The kids shared a single tub in the morning before school, oldest kids got the clean water, and it got dirtier with each bath. The kids tended to look after one another, most of the time.
Her family moved into town at about the time it got a stoplight and a McDonalds. Her father sold the farm for a modest sum. Michelle’s father now spent a lot of time near his childhood home, in adjacent farm country several hours north, where the pig farms had gotten larger and larger over the year through consolidation; very few of his kin still worked their family’s farms. Most worked, in some form or another, for the large corporate factory farms which processed most of the animals in the region. There was very little connection to the land, but her father still felt rooted up there. Plus, his wife kept bringing more children into their home.
In high school, Michelle’s life wasn’t that much different than most of her classmates’– high school life revolved around varsity basketball and football. She had a couple of serious boyfriends, but really didn’t date. Cruising around town, or out on the back roads, some of which ran near her old house, she drank – beer, wine coolers, schnapps, occasionally the harder stuff.
It was on one of those nights during senior year of high school, cruising around town, drinking more than she should have, that she confessed. She told her friend Arwen that her father had, for her entire conscious life, molested her siblings. Sexually molested each of them, boys and girls. And that the only reason he hadn’t molested her was that she had locked herself in her room so that he couldn’t get to her.
Her friend Arwen listened, said that she was glad that Michelle had stayed safe. Michelle secretly hated her for this, in part because she was so goddamned accepting, in part because she hated being vulnerable. Arwen, for her part, was happy to have someone to drink with and felt that universal warmth and comfort that comes with knowing you are not the only one with secrets.
Arwen was smart and fairly popular, a pretty girl whose parents had graduate degrees and good jobs. But Arwen was insecure enough that she would hang around longer than she should once girls got mean, because they always got mean. But well-bred enough to ignore the insults and pretend that everything was fine. (Michelle was just positive that Arwen had been taught to take the high road.) If it weren’t for Arwen’s insecurity (and a binge drinking habit that some would say veered into alcoholic territory) she might have been bulletproof: she dated the most popular boy in school, she had more guy friends than anyone Michelle knew – and was so oblivious to the fact that they all had crushes on her that in Michelle’s eyes, she was so easy to hate that it almost wasn’t worth it.
But Michelle was the kingmaker. Not captain of the varsity basketball team, but close, and even closer to Coach, which counted for a lot. She ran with the heroes of the school, in a small town where sports was the number one ticket to recognition. She could be a bully. Her mother didn’t give her a curfew, so she regularly stayed at her boyfriend’s house, and was largely absent from her home during her senior year, to her relief.
Arwen’s secret was that in the course of a single year, she had gotten pregnant not once, but twice. The first time, the end of her junior year, Arwen’s oldest and trustworthy best friend, who was a year older than her, took her quietly to the neighboring state for an early abortion. It was their secret, and Arwen’s ex-boyfriend’s, and it stayed that way. The second time, her trustworthy friend was in college several hours away. And Arwen, as she was diving headfirst into her drinking problem, had not taken care to note whose baby it might be. Arwen turned to Michelle and two other friends out of desperation. Michelle drove Arwen across the state line this time, thinking in the back of her mind, how could someone so smart be so stupid?
Michelle knew that a couple of years after her father had approached her, her younger brother began to cry at night, and she would sometimes comfort him. She knew in the mornings, watching him slowly shrink into himself, what was happening. She did nothing as she watched the light fade from his eyes, and she watched him cover it up with a wicked sense of humor only a few years later, his armor intact. She found this reality—that she could not do anything to help him—hard to accept.
As she drank her coffee, Michelle shook her head, shaking her back to the present. The kids would be up soon. She heard the shower running and knew her husband would be downstairs soon. But she returned to her senior year in that town. Her father had permanently moved back to his home up north. Why should she visit when her mother and all of the kids could come to her home and be perfectly comfortable, much more so than there?
During their senior year, there wasn’t any sort of falling out, but Michelle was devoted to her boyfriend and basketball season, and she wasn’t quite sure what happened with Arwen. She seemed happy. Maybe too happy. But to this day, Michelle still wasn’t sure why she did what she did one night just before graduation.
She and a friend snuck down the pitch black road where Arwen’s house was located, and left Arwen a Mother’s Day card in her mailbox It was signed “from both of us, from the place across the state line.”
Arwen, she of the belief that people were inherently good, and that people, if you needed their help, would give it to you and that people, if they were good (which most people inherently were) could be trusted, and that people, if you loved them, would probably love you back. Arwen was heartbroken. But Arwen needed to learn, didn’t she?
Arwen never moved back home once she graduated college. She visited, of course, but Michelle heard that her disastrous senior year was one of the biggest reasons she never returned. Michelle had a twinge of guilt about this, but heard from friends, and later saw on social media, that Arwen looked just as happy as ever, living someplace on the east coast. This assuaged Michelle’s guilt, and she had even befriended her on social media.
After all, thought Michelle, Arwen didn’t understand pain for any longer than a nanosecond, she didn’t understand the fear of living in a house with a man who was not inherently good (never good and never stopped), who wouldn’t give help freely (there was a cost, always a cost), and who most certainly could not be trusted, even when she locked her door. Someone who, when you loved him, he did love back, but in a twisted, grotesque, terrifying way that left a scar across her soul. This was a truth, but she did not share all of it on that night in the car with Arwen. Because the truth is that Michelle didn’t stay locked in her room forever, and her heart was slowly broken as well.
It was 7:30. She finished her coffee, and heard her husband walking down the stairs. She made him a cup of coffee, just how he liked it, with a splash of milk and two spoonfuls of sugar, in her comfortable kitchen, in her lovely home. For one brief moment, she flashed back to the imprint of her dream this morning and the sinking feeling it left her with, and she reached quickly for it before it slipped right out of her mind again.
“Good morning, honey,” she said to her husband, handing him a cup of coffee and starting her day.
Experience as Creation 