FICTION

Non Sequitur

By Sam Schieren     VOLUME 57 No. 1

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What Mary wanted to know was the exact sequence of Rice’s thoughts.

The sequence of Rice’s thoughts, of course, had something to do with the sequence of events. But the two were not the same, and this distinction was important.

Rice might think, for example, that Mary’s daughter, Ava, was a pain, even while he smiled at her child and told her that Ava was charming, so well-behaved.

Rice had slept with another woman about a year ago. Mary knew the sequence of events well enough. After the dinner—he would tell Mary when she asked—he and the other woman talked for a long, long time.

Mary could not imagine Rice being any different with the other woman than he was with her. Wry, challenging, a bit mysterious. This made Mary feel cheap. She wanted to believe that she had found something in Rice no one else had. Three years ago, Mary had rescued this great man from an anemic marriage. Rice had been married to a chiropractor when Mary found him, buying a cedar planter at Home Depot.

This is what Mary thought about throughout the day of her mother’s funeral.

It did not feel like a choice but like a sentence.

Rice told Mary that he and the other woman had been sipping wine.

Rice had had too much. The other woman had had too much.

Mary found these details of little use. At most, they offered vague hints at what had gone through Rice’s mind.

All Mary cared about was the moment the fiction of thought met the fact of act and it all became irreversible.

But here was Rice holding her daughter. And in just the way Mary wanted someone to hold her daughter. Ava was quiet, comfortable. She listened to Rice while he showed her a photo of Mary’s mother muddy at Woodstock.

Soon after, Rice helped Mary’s cousins and uncles carry the casket.



Mary felt alone. Her mother died last week, and she had not yet shed a tear.

Mary, Rice, and Ava sat together on the bench seat of the limousine as the procession left the funeral home.

Why were they in a limousine? Why would anyone ever ride in a limousine?

Her mother had died from a brain tumor.

Mary looked at Rice.

Her mother seemed to have liked Rice. She didn’t know why.

Mary liked Rice because usually he seemed like a very good person, but sometimes, like once when she was watching him watch the snow fall silently past their apartment window, he seemed like a bad person. A mastermind. Clever to the point of fault. And then he’d exit from this private realm of cruel calculation and return to her, make her feel loved, convinced of his love.

“Tell me,” he would say. “What are you thinking?” As if she were the mysterious one.

Minor details, single sentences, the briefest periods of time. They often last the longest.

Rice had had too much. The other woman had had too much. Then the other woman said to Rice, “Stay the night.”

Rice told the other woman that he was seeing Mary, is what Mary wanted to believe. If Rice had told the other woman, if the other woman knew about Mary, that would make it better. For if Mary had been present in both of their minds, she felt it made the other woman, “the other woman.”

Mary had been “the other woman” before.

Like with Greg. Greg worked in the lab next to Mary’s.

He gave fruit flies methamphetamines, and he smoked cigarettes.

Before Rice, Mary had sex with Greg in his lab once or twice a week.

When Greg’s girlfriend came to the lab, he’d ask Mary to join them for lunch.

He went on about the flies.

“They mate,” he’d say, “through traumatic insemination. The male pierces the female’s abdomen and injects the sperm through the wound.”

Greg had a motorcycle that Mary had refused to ride.

“This is how flies do it,” he’d regale.

She’d stopped with Greg soon after she met Rice.

And of course, there had been Rice’s marriage, Rice’s wife. Though she was not a very memorable person. Rice had seemingly forgotten her before they even divorced.

Sometimes, Mary thought about Greg when she thought about Rice. Her mind was probably making up patterns, but there was something in their smiles that bound them.



Something is always replacing something else.

The whole world follows this simple scheme.

They had to wait for an empty hearse to pull out of the cemetery.

The gravestones were like thumbs in the steep grassy hill. At the bottom of the hill was Main Street. Then farther, the large redbrick hospital.

It was not a good hospital. When Mary brought her mother to a hospital, she brought her to the Presbyterian one in the city.

Rice pointed to the hospital.

“That’s a hospital,” he said to Ava.

Ava pawed at the window. Her hands left clammy smudges.

“Let’s go!” said Ava.

This was sadistic. Mary should be mourning her mother. But her mother was her mother. Rice was she never knew what. Rice was teaching her daughter. Her mother believed Rice might be the one. But the last person to trust men was her mother.

Rice did not tell Mary whether he had told the other woman about Mary.

This was part of the problem. Another part of the problem was that the problem had lodged itself in Mary’s head.

What Rice did tell Mary was that he and the other woman had left the other woman’s apartment together. The other woman said to Rice, “Stay the night.” And he told her, “No.” He was going to walk home. The other woman offered to walk with him. She could go for some fresh air. And so, they walked. But then she offered to show Rice her office.

“And then it happened,” he’d say.

It.

Mary kept waiting for a breakthrough, for the story to budge.

But when she asked him about it, the story jumped. From walk to fuck.

The gap killed her.



She told her mother what Rice had done, but months after it happened, when the tumor was already everywhere.

It.

Mary was pretty sure she was talking to her mother at the very moment of it happening. Talking to her mother, about Rice in a way.

Her mother always told the same stories as a way of giving Mary advice on how to be a mother. On husbands. On daughters.

But one year ago, when it happened, her mother had yet to be diagnosed.

“Your father had just won his Grammy,” her mother said. “We flew to Cabo for the holidays. You loved it. You tried to learn Spanish. Eight years old and you wanted to learn another language. I’ll never understand it, how any of it happens. Hello, good-bye, el baño, el mar. I’m sure there was more.”

Even for the hundredth time, Mary let her mother tell the story.

Her father had fucked the concierge or the bartender or the ex-wife of some banker. Her father fucked all over the place. Her mother liked to say she could smell it.

That trip she refused to sleep in his bed. She slept with Mary on the roll-out.

“Remember those mornings?” her mother asked. “Every day we were the first ones to the beach. You made friends with the soda man. He gave you a bottle opener. Abierto! Oh, I love when the words come back.”

“You bought me a Coke every morning.”

“And then that little plane,” her mother said.

Her mother had been worried about Rice, even before it. She was worried about yet another man. Ava was three and had already met four boyfriends. Somehow this story was her mother’s way of getting at why.

“Or more, far as I know,” said her mother. “If I can’t remember, she can’t remember, I guess. Anyway, thank god your father never brought these women around.”

Mary wasn’t sure how much of the story was real and how much was her mother’s reimagining.

Mary did remember the little plane though. The low hum in the distance grew into a motorcycle roar overhead. With a small puff of sand, it landed on the beach. What had looked like a kite far away was a bright yellow plane.

“You wouldn’t remember that though,” her mother said, chuckling.

What Mary remembered were the cliffs in the distance. All week she had seen the plane flying off the cliffs, dipping like a bird, and gliding over the crystal clear Pacific.

Mary ran to the pilot, and her mother followed.

“I knew some Spanish too. I did! And the pilot, he seemed so nice. No shirt, his body glistening. It must have been sea mist. God. Like a dream. And he said he’d take you up for free because your mother was hermosa. That there was nothing better to do until the tourists came,” her mother said. “As if we were not them, the flirt.”

So, the man flew her to the cliffs. He landed on the rocky field on top and took Mary out of the plane. He led her to the edge of the cliff, facing the beach.

He pointed to a blip in the middle of the sand that was her mother.

“¿Ves a tu madre?” he’d said. “Te ama.”

This is the story her mother told her.

“That is when I learned what it really meant to be a mother,” her mother said. “Right then. Remember this with Ava, sweetie. I mean it. It’s important. Once you have a kid, the world will do whatever it wants with her and there is nothing you can do. You can love her or not. You can answer her questions. Try to show her how not to be afraid, to think for herself, whatever. But she’s going to learn how to walk, and then run, and then she’ll climb into the back seat of a rickety plane with a handsome Mexican flirt and fly over distant coastal cliffs while the wind blows where the wind blows.

“And where do you think your father was that morning? Don’t answer. Stupid question. He was asleep. I’m sure. In the wrong bed, dreaming something peaceful.”

Tired, Mary would ask, “How does this story end?”

Mary felt similarly now as the limousine arrived at the reception hall.

Similarly. But there are many different shades of tired.

“The man flew you off the cliff, over the ocean, right back to where you started. To me. You jumped out and ran to me and begged to go again.”

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TO READ MORE FROM THIS STORY, PICK UP A COPY OF VOL 57 No. 1




SAM SCHIEREN is from Valley Cottage, NY. He received his MFA from the University of California, Davis. His work has been published in Bellevue Literary Review and Gulf Coast, among other journals. He has taught at UC Davis and Champlain College in Burlington, VT. He lives in Richmond, VA.


VOLUME 57 No. 1