Season of Fury and Wonder by Sharon Butala

Author:Sharon Butala
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: aging, aging, elderly, Old Women, Inner Life, Tribute Stories, Raymond Carver, Willa Cather, Hemmingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Anton Checkov
ISBN: 9781550509762
Publisher: Coteau Books

Hadn’t she seen enough of the brilliant ones whose faces repeated themselves day after day on the television set while she sat before them watching, listening intently, tears leaking steadily from her eyes, dampening her cheeks, their words constructed into sentences so cleverly that they made her weep, and still nothing of the world changed? While she suspected them of loving the words’ sounds and their facility with them most of all? Not that it mattered anymore.

In any case, she had her standards. Having discovered, or so she thought, the shocking unreality of reality television, she didn’t watch reality shows at all, nor the more vulgar of the half-hour sitcoms that actually, she discovered, lasted at the most only around twenty minutes, this seeming to her another in an endless line of hypocrisies big or small which made up the knitted threads of the world. She always muted the commercial messages, although she watched the screen with interest thinking how ingenious the scriptwriters were, even those who wrote the most loutish of the sitcoms, in being able to tell a story visually in so short a time, while their real purpose was only to sell the products in the advertisements. She was saddened at her lack of originality on this issue, and wished that she had been gifted with a bigger brain or one capable of more complex thought. She wondered if maybe they were the same thing but decided probably not. It was the sort of thing she could never talk to Mervin about.

Sex scenes annoyed her, though, to the extent she could still be annoyed about anything. They annoyed a part of her that had once mattered – that was it – but that nowadays was more a hazy recollection of annoyance than the real thing. Her once-normal sex life had ended with Mervin’s death, whenever that was, and while for a number of years, as far as she could remember, this lack had been the source of the worst pain (again, she was not sure what that pain had felt like), it had been one of the first of the things that had mattered to simply melt away. At first this failure of its mattering had worried her a great deal, that she was abnormal both to want and not want its return, until its not mattering overcame the mattering and seemed both touching in some sweet way (or what she would once have called sweet) and inevitable and right, as breathing remained inevitable and right.

Her name was Velma York and she no longer knew for sure where her children were, although her eldest son had graduated from Harvard. When she had last seen her youngest son, he had just finished his training at a technical school, and was a plumber in this same city where she sat all day in front of the television set and wept – the children dug out of rubble from bombings, their tiny bodies as flexible as rubber, caked in a choking, grey clay, silent and merely acquiescent in their rescue.

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