Muriel
by
Al Bruno III
This
Town is a cluster of homes and businesses that mark the point where the
highway begins to stretch across the open desert. The Town is slowly
fading; the population growing older and dying off leaving their homes
and dreams behind. I live in a trailer park near the scrapyard that
employs me.
The
woman that lives on the other side of the trailer park is a middle aged
widow living off her husband's pension, but the money she receives
barely covers her rent. She lives on a diet of fast food and reads
tabloid magazines by candlelight. To make ends meet she sells her body.
Her name is Muriel and I'm her last customer on the nights I can afford
it. Our physical intimacies are just a ritual, she knows I'm there
because I'll pay dearly for not having to wake up alone.
One
night it was too warm to sleep. We sat on the bed in the dark smoking
cigarettes and talking. I thought to myself how beautiful she looked as a
shadow, her every feature softened. It was only when she inhaled on her
cigarette that the orange pinpoint of light revealed the toll time and
her husband's cruelties had taken on her.
Somehow
the conversation turned to personal photographs and she said, “No
pictures, burned all there was after my Mamma passed on and I told Joe I
didn't want no wedding photos either. I don't want anything to do with
any of it. I don't like the way photographs look. It's not that I don't
like the way a picture makes me look. I know I ain't no beauty queen.
What I mean to say is that I don't like the way pictures look.”
In
my long lost university days I had studied psychology and this sounded
like a case of paranoia but bitter experience had taught me never to
judge, never to be sure. “Why did you burn your mother's pictures of
you?” I asked.
“By
the time I was sixteen I was staying out all night, drinking and
screwing around. It didn't matter what time I came home, my Mamma was
waiting up for me. She always knew who I was with and she always knew
what I was up to. She would yell at me but she always yelled at me, and
sometimes she slapped and pushed. It was that way ever since I was
twelve. I used to tell myself she was jealous because...” Muriel paused,
I could hear how much she wanted me to believe what she said next,
“...I was beautiful then.”
“Go on.”
“I
was maybe twenty-one when the cancer took her. I started going through
her things, deciding what to keep and what to give away or sell. I
started to find photos of me, not in an album or a frame, they were just
stashed all around,” Muriel lit another cigarette and shook out the
match, “all the photos I found of me were ruined. She marked them up
with some kind of a pin.”
“What did she do?” I stubbed put my hand on her shoulder but she pulled away.
“She
poked out the eyes. I didn't know why, I thought maybe she was crazy
or she hated me more than I thought,” Muriel explained, “I don't know
what came over me but I held one of those ruined pictures up to the
light and stared through the holes. I saw something through them. I
looked closer, held the picture right up to my face. The holes were like
windows. I saw where I was when the picture was taken. It was the old
playground off Sixteenth Street.”
“How?” I asked.
If
Muriel heard she ignored me “It was the same with every picture I
found, they all showed me someplace I had been but everything looked
spent and tired. I searched and found more photographs I never knew she
took, some really new. She hadn’t gotten to a few of them. So I poked
out the eyes. When I looked through the holes I was suddenly watching
the past. It was like I had gone back in time and I was four years
younger and heading out of the house to raise a little Hell. I saw every
minute of it, even the things I had been too drunk to remember before.
It was like a memory but brighter.”
I was shivering, I told her she could stop now if she wanted to.
A
tone of annoyance crept into her voice, “I don’t know how it works,
maybe I don’t want to. But now I’ll never know if she was just a shitty
mom or if she treated me the way she did so I would run wild to spite
her. I'll never know if I was just a puppet.”
“So you burned all the pictures,” I said.
“Just
in case someone ever wants to try and look through my eyes. My life may
be shit but it's mine,” she got out of bed and threw me my clothes,
“get dressed, you can't stay here. Not tonight.”
There
was nothing else to say; I pulled on my pants and shirt and walked back
to my trailer with my boots in my hand. The ground was cold and rough
under my feet. I thought to myself of what Muriel's life had become, of
what it might have been. Instead of going inside I sat on my front steps
and looked back to Muriel's trailer and thought of all the glossy
magazines she had strewn about every room. I wondered to myself what I
would find if I thumbed through one- would the pages be pristine or
would the eyes of choice celebrities be poked out?
But I never asked or looked for fear of having to spend all my nights alone.
