Woman in a Fur Coat Walking a Shih Tzu

It was the last box. Fifteen moves in twenty years, both her parents gone, and somehow still a renter. Clara realized it was time to eject sentimentality. People without homes didn't get to have closets of momentos. She had clung to things, moving them time and time again, waiting to finally find a final destination. She had the ever-pink, dried bleeding hearts, and lily of the valley flowers from her mother's garden that had been pressed between the pages of an old Reader's Digest Condensed Book. She still had the picnic basket complete with plates, bowls and utensils from an outing with her first serious boyfriend, contraband metal lawn darts, a Tupperware popsicle making set, and three shelves of DVDs. The movies were mostly copies of summer blockbusters she remembered seeing at the local theatre back when people still lined up to get in. She had seen at least one of these at the drive-in theatre before it closed. Those summers the movies conquered the world with huge adventures, and made you loudly exclaim "YAH!" at the end. As if your favorite team had just won a game. Clara remembered the feeling of emerging from the cool cave of a dark theatre those late July nights. Of being energized, the surprise of the sun still shining and the heat soaked sidewalks that huffed lava.

She had a croquet set. Two brown and orange lawn chairs her Uncle Tom had woven in his macrame phase after he retired. Twenty-three swim suits she had collected over decades; one, in neon pink and green she was pretty sure she had worn in high school. Her body certainly knew she was never going to attend a "reunion" with it again! It was time to “let go”. A dozen counsellors had told her this with about the same frequency as the eviction notices appeared. She had pointed out to these wizened helpers that by choosing a career as an Archivist she had been trained to hold on! Clara’s whole career had been devoted to saving things, even the most minute ephemera.

But even in the archival world things were let go. Items got demoted from the collection to be used for hands on learning, sold to raise funds for operations, or tragically, despite exquisite care and precaution, sometimes things got damaged. The forces of nature had a way of creeping in: heavy rains in their relentlessness could widen a crack in an old roof in days, especially skilled insects found weak spots to break-in, and there were always a few sweaty summer researchers wearing mustard stained t-shirts who didn't quite wash off the thick PABA sunscreen on their hands. Maybe that was her life too, she thought. Carefully collected, only to be smudged away over time, by unexpected drips, oily fingers, and pests. Oh yes pests, she’d known a few.

Clara had parked her sensible hatchback in the single lane on the edge of the waste management site. Here stood a row of giant metal bins where people could do quick drop off dumps of recyclables like glass and paper. This was the last box of everything she had stored and saved. She lifted it like a sleeping child. It was the hardest to throw away. It held every writer's notebook, journal, and hundreds of yellowed pages of dot-matrix-printed poetry and stories she had written. It was a hefty heavy box, a cardboard treasure chest. Clara could imagine this formerly full Caribbean rum package with it's fake wood and tropical illustration, resiliently washed up on a sunny, palm-lined beach. As she hoisted her cargo up to the rim of the dumpster one of the bottom corners tore open leaving a hole the size of her elbow. A dead bumblebee, two pennies and some gold star stickers spilled out and bounced like hail stones off her jeans onto the hot speckled asphalt. Perfect. She thought sarcastically. There was something symbolic in this image, but she didn’t have the energy or time to write an Ode about it now. There were cars lined up behind her, a half a dozen of them, all crammed with boxes, bags, and sails of styrofoam. Each was occupied by people clearcutting the clutter of their lives, to make room for BBQ's and beach balls. In their wilted guilt, they came here, to preserve their do-gooder merit badges by recycling it all. It wasn't the same as throwing it out. Here there was a last hope for a still useful conclusion.

Clara grimaced as the box made its own last decision. Leaving her grasp it toppled over the rusty, paint chipped edge. She paused a few seconds feeling slightly nauseous when a wave of regret hit her. As she turned away, her glance caught a bright yellow warning sign “No Books Allowed!”. Too late now, she thought, stepping back to her vehicle in a hurry before anyone noticed her violation. She had just shut the car trunk when her phone rang,

All the world is waiting for you and the power you possess. In your satin tights, fighting for your rights… her ring tone was the theme song from Wonder Woman, the 1970s TV show version.

“Hello?”

“Is this Clara Powers?”

She clenched her jaw. Bloody spam calls! She paused longer than she meant to and took a deep breath bracing herself for the annoying barrage, and preparing her inevitable “Sorry not interested,” fake-polite, brush off. What she really wanted to say came from what she called the "Land of F” and it's dialect consisting of variations of the same "F" first letter word. It made the satisfying sound of mosquitos hitting a bug-zapper light. F, F, F, F, F-ing, she cheerfully loaded into her inside voice, then drew blanks when she heard,

"I'm calling about your poetry manuscript, Woman in a Fur Coat Walking a Shih Tzu."

Clara frowned, and the scorching wind chose to hit her then with a gust that pushed a swath of pollen dusted curls across her face and mouth. This delayed her response even longer and caused her to begin her reply with a rude “pfffuuuut” spitting sound as she cleared away the intrusive locks the way a weed-wacker whizzes tall grass in a frantic burst.

“I think you have the wrong person” zipped her reply into the phone.

"Writers often submit to several places, but this was noticible. It is your cassette tape manuscript with spoken-word recordings, and a handwritten label. It was unlike anything else in this year's submissions. The vintage presentation was irresistible”.

Clara felt the world spin. Suddenly she was that dried out cardboard box with a giant hole plunging into the dumpster. She felt the hard thump of hitting the bottom. A publisher? This was a publisher calling her?

She asked dubiously, “Umm who is this?"

"My apologies. I should have introduced myself first. This is Helen Watson. I’m an acquisitions editor with Farnham Press.”

Farnham Press! Holy crumbs on a cross! She'd chosen them deliberately because they'd published one of her favorite poets. She dared to send her work there, mostly because she didn’t know where else to start.

She had sent a submission of her poetry on cassette. She remembered it vividly. She'd spent a whole day on it, picking just the right instrumental music to go with each piece, recording that onto cassette tape too, digging out an old microphone buried at the back of a peg-board rack at the thrift store. She plugged the mic into an ancient duffle bag sized ghetto blaster borrowed from the forgotten storage room at work. Then she had written the label for the tape with a quill pen and ink that a friend had brought her back from Germany.

The day she recorded the tape Clara was living in a basement apartment. It was a boiling hot summer and the basement was a refuge. Her roommate Trevor she'd met in a University French class. He was a Math major with rock star hair. At six foot four, he was as thin as a Y-axis on a graph and it gave her ongoing joy to see his lanky frame bend into a downward trend in their statistically subterranean home. “Trev”, also hiding from the heat, had been playing video games loudly in the next room. He leaned against the broken-springed, cat-scratched, brown couch on the green shag carpet. His stretched out legs were sweatpant-tube sock lines that connected him to the screen. The scent of potato salad hung in the air. This shabby scene and its tinny repetitive gaming music was not the ambient ambrosia, nor the rose petal infused elixir that muses and poets needed. Exasperated, Clara pulled the single mattress off her bed and propped it up against the door of her bedroom to soundproof the room. This quilted baby blue sentinel stayed up pinned by a bent legged ironing board, a dead fiddle leaf fig plant, and her 12-inch-thick copy of “The History of Art”.

Unintentionally mimicking her roommate, she stretched her legs under the bed. The top of the frame became a baby’s highchair locking her in. In front of her at neck-height the double cassette portable stereo stared her down. Stacks of poems printed on paper were cued up in order, ready to read, and her mix tape of music was loaded. Clara clenched her teeth hoping the abandoned machine worked. She launched her creative mission with the complicated maneuver of hitting three buttons, using two hands simultaneously with precise timing. The play button on the left cassette compartment started the music cassette. On the right side, the fresh destination cassette waited to be transformed by pressing the side-by-side play and record buttons. It worked.

The first poem was on top of the stack, so there would be no amateur sounds of shuffling papers. Emboldened by the call of the Spanish guitar music, she began. Clara spoke into the slender silver tipped stick mic with what she considered to be a very smart British narrator voice, sans accent, and added a heavy dash of a sexy American lounge singer's breathy lilt.

“Woman in a fur coat walking a Shih Tzu. It's already 27C degrees out at 8:45am...Yuppies in houses and puppies in blouses. Infill snatches of homes that drew sweat, and tears...”.

The tape wheels rolled slow and steady and Clara's words went along for the ride. It was a bumpy trip as it turned out. There was a lot of stopping and starting, re-doing, re-recording, stumbling on words, music that ended too soon, banshee sounds of rewind screech, frustrated howls and abusive yelling at the middle aged tape machine, and a 10-minute emergency binge of a giant bag of chocolate raisins.

Finally, hoarse voiced, with a few paper cuts of honor, it was finished. Clara cracked the door open like a garden pea and took the cocoa smeared tape out of the deck. It was shining, fresh and ready. She laid back on the floor in exhaustion, and looked up at stuccoed clouds in the sky of her ceiling with relief. This is the way people collapse in gratitude when they flop down on a hotel room bed after a long flight, she thought. Rumpled inside and out they make a backwards Olympic dive onto rented polyester seeking gold.

For quality control Clara had listened to both sides of the tape in their entirety four times in succussion. Eyes closed, it made her feel a little drunk, like swaying to guitar music beside a late night campfire. One by one she heard her poems read aloud. The music held them up as if her words were on a dance floor, twirling and dipping, or in a boxing ring jabbing and ducking. She had given them life. With a huge smirk on her face she imagined herself doing a Rocky Balboa boxer sized leap of success with her arms raised, at the top of a huge set of steps, accompanied by an inspiring punchy theme song. For the first time in years, she saw herself like that again.

A car horn honked shrilly making her jump back to reality and drop her phone.

A disembodied voice drifted up to her from the ground below,

“Miss Powers? Hello? Are you still there?” said Helen Watson of the Farnham Press.

“I’m here!” Clara's voice shouted, spilling over the edge of her mouth and tumbling through the empty space down to the phone. She quickly grabbed it and raised it to her ear, clutching the cell to her head so tight it hurt. Behind her the car horns were sharper now, and there were more of them, mixed with mumbling voices.

“Thanks for waiting." Clara added.

"You caught me just as I was getting rid of some things”.

...woman in a fur coat walking a Shih Tzu. Who cares? Do you?...

"I'm glad we were finally able to reach you."

The rest of the conversation was a blur. Clara heard “details will be sent” and “we’ll meet soon”. That one made her laugh out loud. Soon was a matter of opinion. She had sealed the envelope and put that package in the mail twenty-five years ago. Somewhere along the way that tape had been misplaced. Whatever happened, however it reemerged, somehow they both had endured long enough to find their moment.

She leapt toward the dumpster.