An excerpt OF FROM OUR MOTHER'S ARM'S, a modern novel by author, C. D. Faulconer

FROM OUR MOTHER'S ARMS, a modern novel about "family dysfunction" by author, C. D. Faulconer

Excerpt of

FROM OUR MOTHER'S ARMS

woman at beach

How do I break into the silent deep of your day and mine? How do I shove off these outward predators that occupy my attention, in order that I may feel the blood of my heart pumping through your heart? How restless and spilling we are under the sun. We gasp to be accomplished at the end of our seemingly endless and important days. Guilty are the Mums and the shifting of papers and the ceaseless travels of macadam and cyber highways, because we always end up with ourselves as ballast. Just the me and the I. That is our human paradigm. I have been in a hole of sirens. The redness hurts. My fist I shake at the incomprehensible God because this corner is crushing and He promised it would not kill. But there is stuff floating in the sky that looks like clouds . . . stuff that I recognize as the monarchy and enigma of life. I shout as all in eternity have shouted, but there is only a little strut across the face of the silent moon for answer.

This day of our story, Earth had its back to eternity with benevolent indifference. It was alive and glad, in spite of the human, animal, and vegetable tumult spilling over its vast surfaces.

Mindy paused, allowing the quiet to sink like healing into her senses. She cast a look out the window, into this warm day of soft air. Below, she noted the thickly vegetated hillside that she knew descended sharply into Bayleaf Canyon. It was a dry tangled landscape, dense with indigenous vegetation . . . Manzanita, Coyote Bush, Madrone, Poison Oak, and the stunning cobalt-blue wild California Lilac.

Directly across, rising sharply up the opposite canyon wall, a Douglas Fir forest clothed the slope, with an occasional dead tree standing white and stark amidst the greenery like a lurid reminder of the eventuality of death. In your dead pockets? In your box or urn? Will your money embalm?

Mindy resided two thousand feet above sea level on this southern exposure, at an angle affording a view overlooking the western valley below and its earth floor covered in vineyards turning golden in the approaching autumn.

Directing her gaze into the further distance, there stood three mountain ranges. The nearest was low and rounded, its mounds yellow and brown from the lengthy summer. The second was more peak-like and summer-burned, except for its crevices still filled with greenery. The last range was a tall bold relief covered entirely by vegetation. From here, it looked hazy and charcoal in color. "Sleeping Maiden" was the local name for its outline.

Mindy knew the opposite side of that furthest height plummeted into the sands of a Pacific Ocean beach, across from which, spanned by the Golden Gate Bridge, lay malignant and benign, but lovely San Francisco.

Like an elegy, the distant sound of a dog barking from deep within Bayleaf Canyon leaked into her hearing. Inexplicably, she thought of eternity when she heard distant barking, and liked the provocation because it awakened ideas otherwise made deaf by a noisy world.

That lonely remote sound caused her to wonder about the blue pebble, Earth, floating in the depths of space with trillions of other such pebbles, separated by distances too vast to measure or comprehend. She pondered her Earth home flying swiftly towards no one knows where, while beneath the lacy shawl of clouds hugging the planet, life suffered and exalted, oblivious to the mysterious passage. Miracles are not the blind ones.

Mindy stood up from where she had been sitting on the edge of her bed and stretched with the pleasure of an awakening body.

Maneuvering down the narrow hallway of the antique but sturdily built mobile trailer in which she lived, she angled her body sideways and like a crab passed that tightest portion of the hallway before straightening and taking the few remaining steps to her living room couch.

Her fondness for this piece of furniture caused a frivolous idea to laugh in her thinking as she recalled how Poe and Shakespeare immortalized women they loved by writing verses to them, while she would rather give everlasting life to her sofa. Mindy considered the innovation, then spoke, "Your darks, your lights, from cocoa black to ivory, and your golden hues, have been my Earth. A hundred musing hands have stroked your patterns of an arrow's feathers. You have been site of bed and board for a covey of family and friends. People yet ask, 'Do you still have that comfortable couch?' and I'm pleased to return a 'Yes.' Your soft cushions, the three large ones at your back and the three aligned along your surface, then two smaller ones at either end, all of them round and yielding, have cradled human needs and given you honors otherwise settled on royal heads. What is this glory toward you, a mere couch?"

But more urgent thoughts washed over Mindy, flooding her like an overwrought Nile, and she submerged into memory. The water was swift and cold.