I ended up cutting this excerpt from the novel when I rewrote it in third-person, but this version appeared in the Columbia/Bath Spa University journal Open to Interpretation in 2008.
“Comfort Food”
Robert
I wake up this morning after the sun’s up, which is a something of a triumph for me, seeing as I’ve been tossing and turning the last two nights, but what strikes me right away is the silence of the house. It’s an old farmhouse and has its share of arthritic creaks and moans, but this morning, it seems everything’s still. You know how sometimes a dream will come back to you just like that? Well, sitting there on the couch, with the sweet, cool smell of dew drifting off the front lawn and into the window, and the finches in the shrubs outside peeping at each other, and Godbeams pouring through the curtains onto the coffee table, just like it’s a dream come rushing back, I realize it’s because Jeffrey’s not poking at me to get him the cereal or tell him it’s okay if he watches cartoons. And I’ll never tell Tammy this—I swear I’ll go to my grave with this on my chest—but knowing he’d never again poke me awake before the alarm goes off, well it feels to me like the first day of a long overdue vacation.
My first thought was to make myself a real breakfast, the kind you can read the newspaper over. And while I’m enjoying the coolness of the fridge on my chest, I move the milk out of the way and spot, way back where Jeffrey never could reach, the cardboard box with birthday candles taped to the lid, and it dawns on me. Today he would have been five.
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Donna Seaman dishes about five years of Story Week interviews
by Daniel Prazer
Managing Editor/Fictionary
The first time I saw Donna Seaman interview somebody was during the 2006 Story Week Festival of Writers. I was new to Chicago, in my second semester of my MFA coursework at Columbia College, straight from two years as a newspaper reporter. So I’d done interviews. Plenty of them. But nothing like this.
Donna sat on the stage at the Harold Washington Library next to Studs Terkel and Stuart Dybek, two writers who, in very different ways, had spent their careers documenting Chicago. Stuart struck a deferential pose, sitting back in his chair and not saying much. Studs was on a tear. At 93, he rattled off one hilarious, self-deprecating anecdote after another. When an audience member asked what his day was like, he snickered and said, “Well, mine is trying to keep alive. If I wake up tomorrow, I say, ‘Jesus, what a day this is going to be!’… I’m working on a memoir. It’s called Touch and Go.” The audience—Donna and Stuart included—howled with laughter.
I, like the rest of the audience, felt drawn forward toward the stage until we all sat on the edge of our seats, grinning with fascination. Donna smiles when she talks; there’s a calm presence about her that hides a burning enthusiasm for literature. Authors respond to that, and so do audiences. At the risk of sounding like a crystal-clutching hippie, that interview felt somehow transcendent. Before that night I’d been nervous about my new city, about leaving my reporting job, about trying my hand as a novelist. As the crowd filed out the doors and into the line for the book signing, I felt like I’d be just fine.
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Hindsight
1. When I was four, my dad stood in the driveway talking to a neighbor and drinking a Michelob. I’d been playing alone in the backyard for the past hour, waiting for him to set up the tee-ball, and a thin layer of dirt was glued to my skin with sweat. Dad towered over me in the driveway, his hair black in those days, his body still lean under his Case Western football t-shirt. He looked down and said, “You want a taste?” I nodded, and he handed me the beer.
2. I told on my dad once, not long after that. “Dad was drinking and driving,” I told my mom, thinking of the glass of orange juice he had in the cupholder.
Read the rest at Flashquake.org
Flag-draped Coffins
During Grandpa’s funeral, there wasn’t much crying. This was twelve years after his stroke, and everybody had watched my grandmother become worn down by caring for him, had visited the nursing homes with their astringent odors and nondescript food, had seen him go from a man who held two jobs in retirement to an ignored shell of a person leaning to the right so heavily he seemed as if he may fall out of his wheelchair. I felt relieved as I helped ease the steel casket onto the mausoleum’s catafalque. We were finally out of the rain, and as the minister spoke, I wiped my glasses and watched it fall through the double doors leading to the cemetery.
Read the rest in the Story Week Reader.
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