For our 50th Anniversary Short Fiction Contest, we asked you to send a 700-word, or less, story in which Montana Public Radio is mentioned in some way. We'll be accepting entries until March 15, 2015. Winners will be announced in April. This story is by Mark Leichliter.
Kay Loder needed to turn the radio off immediately. She required silence. Demanded darkness. She felt the seeds of her next migraine forming. Perilous, like a kernel lodged in a weak tooth. She knew better of course, yet it seemed as if the headaches really did form from seeds, and she imagined them, tiny, perfectly round dark pods, like celery seeds, so light a breath might carry them away. And yet. And yet they would tumble and fall down the folds of her brain (and yes, she saw this clearly too, the sulcus furrows, pleated and curving within the cerebrum, these seed paths within her brain, a vison enabled, she knew, by the intersection of painstakingly acquired anatomical knowledge and artful fancy that had led her to construct a life-size model she handed to patients as she talked them through their conditions, encouraging them to dismantle and rebuild the model, hold its parts in their hands, perhaps, by the touch, come to love the reality modeled even when its counterpart carried the source of their pain). Yes, tumble and fall down the sulcus and lodge in darkness and moisture, there to sprout fibrous roots.
What she knew with certainty was the nausea-causing pulse and throb that would inevitably follow this whispering sensation. The roar that would accompany movement. The tunneling reduction of vision. Without predictability, no matter the course of action taken, was the duration and severity of the pain she would suffer, and she lay momentarily, willing herself to arise, close the thick blackout curtains, walk to the bathroom, and take her medicine.
But here came the Montana Public Radio call sign broadcast for the half hour. The roster of eight stations, nine if you counted the digital signal too, which she did, counting as the announcer read the list of transmitters and their host cities. She always counted, the action of counting call signs as certain and as required as counting the number of steps she would take to the bathroom (nine) to retrieve her medicine, as certain as the precision of her mind in knowing the passage of the nine seconds she would run the cold water before filling her glass to down the pill. Her interior clock was precise, and as such, while she silently counted the call signals, she did not count the seconds passing, which should be thirteen but today would be longer—a recorded guest spot by someone from her very own town she noted, with an odd quickening of pulse, a ponderous voice weighing in at nineteen seconds. The time, though annoying to her in some inarticulate way, didn’t matter, only the count did. Nine. A troublesome number. It would have been so much better had it been eight, a perfect number. A number you could turn on its side and retain meaning.
“Nine,” she said aloud, the vocalization providing the trigger to turn back the sheets and rise to a sitting position. The dogs, sleeping on their beds against the wall by the bathroom door, lifted their heads, then dropped them again. OCD dogs, she joked with her friends. Creatures of habit. Perhaps, she thought, perhaps she’d get one of her rare wins and crush the seeds before they found fertile ground.
That thought, that wishful hope, was enough to reach with her feet into awaiting slippers when the familiar music opening Storycorps stopped her cold. She sat without moving. The interview featured a mother and the man who, at sixteen, had murdered her son. Two minutes, fifty-nine seconds. Two minutes and fifty-nine seconds for seed to root. The woman had not only forgiven her son’s killer, she had learned to love him. How was that possible, Kay wondered? To love what had harmed you. To love those you had harmed. Involuntarily she raised fingers to temples and massaged circles, as if she were capable of healing.
What would it be to surrender? Stay in bed. Give over to the pain. What would grow there? “The time is 7:09,” the announcer said. But she remembered instead the closing words of the mother: “I love you, son,” and Kay Loder got out of bed.
She would reach the bathroom in eight steps.
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Enter your story in the MTPR 50th Anniversary Short Fiction Contest.
