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    Complete Child
    Complete Child
    Complete Child
    Ebook92 pages1 hour

    Complete Child

    By Sharon Creal

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    About this ebook

    In this fiction collection by Sharon Creal, contemporary urbanites explore baffling situations and find even more surprising truths: a mother realizes her son is intimately acquainted with a friend’s death; a woman leaves her perfectly adequate husband for a woman baker who keeps disappearing; a couple arrives at their country house expecting only to grieve by skating; a heavy drinker makes plans; and a photo archivist discovers an apparently perfect man in Florida who turns out to be her New York City neighbor. Set in New York and Los Angeles, these stories feature a variety of strangers – straight, lesbian, married, single, men, women – who might live close enough to jostle each other, deciding where next to step.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSharon Creal
    Release dateMar 4, 2014
    ISBN9781310438769
    Complete Child
    Author

    Sharon Creal

    Sharon Creal lives in Los Angeles, in the port town of San Pedro. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School in New York City and her BA in English came from Drew University, home of the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival. Sharon is working on other stories, a novella, and a poetry collection. The short story collection "Complete Child" is her first Smashwords publication.

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      Book preview

      Complete Child - Sharon Creal

      Complete Child

      Five Short Stories

      Sharon Creal

      Complete Child: Five Short Stories

      Copyright 2014 Sharon Creal

      Please remember to leave a review for my book at your favorite retailer.

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Cover Design by Jude Haig

      heyjudesign.com

      For Judith, the heart of my story

      Complete Child

      Five Short Stories

      The Bluff

      Complete Child

      Her Romeo

      One Murph

      Eva Hart

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      Dedication

      The Bluff

      Only because my son Sean came out here to study filmmaking do we have a tape of my daughter’s latest ex-boyfriend, Vladimir, falling to his speedy demise backward from a bluff in San Pedro. The park people had everything right, by the way. There is a triple rail and a sign at the spot that says, DANGEROUS CONDITION—Do not climb on or over railing. Don’t even think about it. It matches the genius of those don’t-even-think-of-parking-here signs back in Brooklyn, calling you stupid whether or not you do the thing, a New York insult. It's not typical here. Out here, there’s less irony and more entitlement—a result, I suspect, of all this space and light. Anyway, I divest, as a friend of mine back home says without realizing it. Back to Vladimir.

      I wasn’t there, and you’ll think I’m cruel when I tell you he didn’t climb over just to show off. Not that showing off would necessarily justify his death. It does, however, fit the paradigm of an ex of my daughter. Vladimir, an extremely sensitive Russian biology student, saw a postnatal sparrow fluttering its wings near a scrub branch on the dusty bluff edge, and made the quick decision—if you can call it that; it was more of a reflex, Julie, my daughter, said later—to rescue it. Julie had been back up the hill at the observation platform studying wildlife plaques, so she was too far away to stop him. On the tape, Vladimir sits on the top rail and raises the heel of the hard, leather-soled boot he wouldn’t be talked out of wearing hiking, to the metal of the lower rail. He hoists his six-foot-something frame upward and as he does this, his foot slips out like a cruise missile and propels him up with such force that he stands, places both feet on the top rail and teeters back and forth for a millisecond before losing the battle with gravity.

      A word about Sean. He was in no way cheering on the Russian, going for great footage. With Julie’s distant screaming underneath, we can hear Sean on the tape, panic cracking his voice, pleading with Vladimir not to do it. Sean has a harness that steadies the camera as he carries it, giving everything that annoyingly popular bounce of reality while rendering it, at the same time, viewable. The camera jumps a bit, but through its eye, Vladimir becomes larger and larger in the frame until we see Sean’s hand reach for his. Then the thing happens that we, many of us—with the exception of Julie, who could not bear to watch—have seen in super slo-mo many times. There is a clear potential connection point of their hands, so clear that you think—we all think—Vladimir will be saved. You feel it about to happen. You see Vladimir’s face, his eerie gaze fixed on Sean’s hand. Then, his eyes lift to stare into the camera, casting a look that can only be described as demonic, both his arms jerk back, and off he goes backward, screaming like a stunt man getting paid for it. He lands on a bush, but the park people weren’t kidding. The shrubbery masks a chasm. As Vladimir drops into it, he displaces enough of it to reveal his final destination two hundred feet below—the rocks, and the surf pounding them.

      On only about the fifth viewing did I notice the film’s cartoon postscript. As Vladimir flaps his own wings at the start of his descent, we see the dusty little bird fly off in perfect health, saving itself from the plunging giant with the timing of Tweetie dodging Sylvester.

      Julie, I was to find out, really cared for this one and was inconsolable. I admit a suspicion that the dramatic tragedy of his death seduced her feelings for Vladimir beyond what they had been while he lived. I was proud of her anyway. It was a tragedy, however one felt about him, and she stared it in the eye. With my help, of course. I spent the first night, then the second, holding her wrapped in a blanket, as she cried and cried. It was no leap for me. It felt like only the night before that she was three and it was the flu that had her awake, clinging to me.

      The fates showed little mercy in the disposition, as the Russian authorities insisted upon calling the body’s transport to its homeland. First, there was the retrieval, the Harbor Police’s term. You don’t want to know. Let’s just say it involved multiple crews, airlifts, stretchers and not a little plastic wrap. Sean had to go up to school to register and get books, and I told him to go on, that there was nothing for him to do here. When they were growing up, I knew how to fix things—as an RN I had lots of training in preventing infection. I knew what I was doing when I yammered at them never to start smoking, or taking drugs. Now, I had no tools, and wasn't sure what I was preventing. Finally, I directed Julie’s attention outward by taking her to malls. That seemed to work at least for small bites of time. She refused to go back to New York until Vladimir was on his way back to Russia.

      Arranging that was a hell comprised of his relatives, headed by frantic, non-English-speaking parents who blinked excessively and did not speak at all but only yelled in their mother tongue. Everything. Is it petty of me to mention that their translator, a sixtyish cousin who spoke paltry English himself, reeked of garlic morning and night? I will never again taste or smell the stuff without him, the memory of his comb-over and too closely set eyes under that huge sweaty brow. The least of it, of course, but the olfactory flavors everything forever.

      All I can say is I was this close to picking up a pack of Marlboros—reds—even with what I went through to quit in the late eighties. I have never been more relieved at the removal of anything, including two babies and four nasty wisdom teeth, as when that jet shot those people away from LAX with their sad, enormous boy locked in his coffin in the hold.

      Julie returned, early and shaken, to her shared apartment at NYU after another week. She wanted to focus on arranging a memorial service in Washington Square for Vladimir’s few friends. This was early July and she would have six more weeks before her classes began. I did not like her having so much unstructured time.

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