“A True Calling”
Wendy Balconi
Collage
It may be that the young composer will still find love even though he is afraid of relationships ever since his mother thrust a knife deep into his father’s neck. His father was a Pentecostal Minister. Money was the problem. He didn’t make enough, his mother said. In his father’s church, members of the congregation rolled around on the floor and spoke in tongues.
The young composer had done so himself.
Speaking in tongues may not be good preparation for finding love outside the church. Witness the composer on a second date. They haven’t even made out yet when he says, “I’d like to spend the rest of my life with you.” She looks at him, wide eyed.
When he asks older women how to find love, he is met with shrugs and smiles. This doesn’t give him much hope.
But one day while he is out on his daily run a common raven with its rolls and somersaults follows him. He doesn’t pay much attention at first. But when he sees the same raven follow him every day for a week, he sees it as a sign. But no one else believes it is the same bird.
It may be that the songwriter will be obsessed with her late husband for the rest of her life. He’s dead twenty years. A military man, he died young. She only wears black but denies she’s in mourning. Her late husband’s name was Ben. Those who also teach at the small college in a small town hear his name often. They still don’t know the name of the partner she’s been living with for over a decade.
Her partner is a baker. He bakes bread and sells it online. The baker is understanding. He encourages her songwriting even though her songs are only about her late husband. That makes her happy, so he is happy too. But he would be even happier if she did not teach at the small college in the small town, a couple of hours from their house in the country where few others live. He is happiest when she is nearby.
When the baker overhears her on the phone with a much younger colleague she had mentioned who also teaches at the college, he’s afraid she will fall in love with him. But the younger colleague grows tired of hearing Ben’s name. He breaks off the affair.
The baker sighs with relief.
Of course, the baker prefers her obsession with her late husband. He knows what to expect. Her late husband never gets sick. He never gets old. The baker cannot compete with her late husband. He doesn’t even try, but he can bake him in his tasty bread. Whenever she eats a slice, she knows that Ben is there.
“Are night terrors like panic attacks?” the nail biter asks her colleague at breakfast. “Or like nightmares?”
“Oh no. Much worse!” the woman says. “Much worse than panic attacks. I wake up terrified, screaming, crying. I’m in a cold sweat, shaking, waving my arms and legs about. I’m always very confused. I never remember what terrified me. My husband told me that once I even sleepwalked.”
“Do you know what causes it?” asks the nail biter in the dining room of the conference center.
“Stress, I think.”
“Sounds terrible!”
“It is.”
Still, the woman has a husband, the nail biter thinks. She glances at the woman’s wedding ring. Why do women wear wedding rings? she wonders. Why on that finger? Why the left hand? Why not the right hand like the Germans? Is a ring supposed to prove the couple are committed? Why do they need to prove it? If they need a daily reminder maybe they shouldn’t be married at all.>
Roberta Allen: “A Tennessee Williams Fellow in Fiction and a Yaddo Fellow, I have nine published books, including three collections of flash and short stories, a novel, a novella in flash, and a memoir about my trip alone in the Amazon. My latest story collection is The Princess of Herself. Well over two hundred flash and short stories have appeared in such magazines as Conjunctions, Epoch, Guernica, and Bomb. Also a conceptual artist very active in the 1970s and early 80s, I have work in the collections of The Met Museum and MOMA. The Fales Archive of NYU is taking my literary papers.” Online: robertaallen.com.