Our New Features page offers you exciting news, insights, and fun facts about Confessions authors.  This time, we bring you a short excerpt from a collection of short stories by Nicole Reid.  Nicole’s contribution to Confessions is Careless Fish. Her book, So There, New and Selected Stories, was published in 2011 by Stephen F. Austin State University Press.  We hope you enjoy reading an excerpt below, and we urge you drop in on Nicole’s website www.NicoleLouiseReid.com to read more about her and her other fantastic works of fiction.

So There

In those days, Daddy danced me around the Black Diamond Lounge, swinging me up high into the air and back down onto his shoes, shuffling me along.  It was a real dive of a place, with its rotten post beams and regular fistfights—most started by my daddy over Mother—but that’s where I knew that he loved me, and that’s where he chose me over her.  Those were the only days that mattered at all.  I remember that much.

I was seven or eight and we went almost every night, the three of us.  Shirley Temples for me, sometimes hot boiled crab soaked in peppercorns and bay from a pot taller than I stood on tiptoes, rigged over a hole in the floorboards where a fire raged down below us in a metal tube.  Mother dressed me in something cream or beige to keep me missing—kept the bright reds and oranges for herself—and my dancing shoes, little white patent leathers scuffed to grey around the toes from me trying the steps on my own.  So the band would be juicing it up real fine and he’d grab me up off the stool or I’d tug him off of his, and we danced the two-step and the alligator and everything in between.

He whispered peachy things:  “You look pretty as a peach, smell good as a peach,” and then biting at my cheek, “are just as juicy as a peach.”  He talked ridiculously just to keep me laughing.  I was the only one in the room for him, that was clear.  One hand to my shoulder, the other twirling me then tugging me, sending me shooting off one way then pulled in tight to him.  There is a way dancing with a daddy will make a girl feel, and I felt that something fierce.  Tingly.  New.  In love.

Order Nicole’s book at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, or get a signed copy through her website.

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Our last post highlighted the work of Mark Farrington, who shared with us the inspiration for his story, My Father’s Court.

“I believe that writing this story helped me see my father for the man he was, and helped me recognize and admit the love I truly felt for him” – Mark Farrington, on writing “My Father’s Court”

My father passed away last fall, a few weeks before Confessions: Fact or Fiction? came out. He was 88 years old and had been sick for several months, so his death was not surprising. What did surprise me was the intensity of the sadness and sense of loss I felt. My father and I had always been friendly toward each other, but we had never been close.

He was a working man. He served in the Army in World War II, stationed in China, Burma, and India. After the war he worked in a General Electric plant, as janitor of a small high school, and as a “size man” at a paper mill. He finished high school but he didn’t like to read, and I don’t think I ever saw him reading anything other than the newspaper. I was a writer who loved books and art and music and theater. Growing up I played basketball and football, but even here we found no common ground, as he did not care for sports.

I write fiction primarily, and “My Father’s Court” is a fictional story. It’s based on a true situation, in that my father when he was a janitor did bring me to school with him, when I was eight or nine or ten, and he was working in the evenings. Sometimes he brought me to the empty school and I shot baskets in the echo-filled gym while he swept and mopped floors. On other occasions, he brought me to the school to watch a high school basketball game. Although I recall no specific game that unfolded like the one in the story, nor do I remember any particular players like the ones I wrote about, the details of that evening are all based on truth, even the white “S” in the blue circle in the middle of the floor, and the way the bleachers folded and unfolded like an accordion when my father stuck a key in a slot in the wall.

What’s “truest” in the story is the character of the father. I did not intentionally change anything about him, other than his name. (Changing the name was no small thing: my father told me once that he had read one of my published stories, one that was about a husband and wife having troubles, and one for which I “borrowed” events and details from my own parents and their lives. He told me that some of the things in my story seemed familiar, but, he said, “I knew the guy wasn’t me because his name was Al and my name is Ed.”)

Much of my fiction has its roots in autobiography, but most of the things I’d written before “My Father’s Court” focused on relationships between a man and a woman – lovers, or husband and wife, or the relationship between a mother and son.  With this last group of stories, the father was always absent – killed in a tragic car accident, or just out of the house working all the time.  Sitting down to write “My Father’s Court” marked the first time I specifically set out to write a story about a father-son relationship; the first time I set out to write about my father.

The relationship between the father and son that came out in this story feels accurate to the relationship my father and I had for most of our lives. He was always loving, always proud of me, always patient with me; what struck me most about the father in the story (and what strikes me now, too late in my relationship with my father) is how steadfastly proud of his son, and how unconditionally loving, he is. On the other hand, it feels as if I spent my life forever tossing the ball to anyone but my father. I seemed always torn between being proud of him and being embarrassed by him; wanting on the one hand to shout out to the whole world, “He is my father and I love him,” and on the other hand wanting to deny I even knew the man.

During the period he was sick, I got to spend a lot of time with my father. And for some reason I cannot explain, finally, I got to see him for the man he was. “He never said an unkind word about anyone,” the minister said at his eulogy. “He never said no to any person in need.”

I had seen those qualities all my life, but usually they only frustrated me. Especially as a kid, I didn’t want a father who treated everyone with equal kindness and concern; when I went up to my father, surrounded by a group of my friends, and asked him for some money to go to the store, I felt offended when he not only gave me money, but he gave the exact same amount of money to every one of my friends. If he said he was proud of me when I triumphed, and said he was proud of me when I failed, what did him being proud of me matter? Unconditional love doesn’t satisfy a child who has grown up believing he has to earn love by his deeds and behavior.

When I was in high school, teachers in the English Department nominated me for a national award that required as part of my application I write an essay about how and why I was proud of my father. I struggled so much that I finally went to one teacher and told her I would have to withdraw my nomination because I could not write this essay. “Nonsense,” she said. “Your father is a wonderful man.” She had known him when he was a janitor, and she proceeded to give me example after example of my father’s kind and thoughtful acts. I wrote the essay, feeling as if I had plagiarized (or written fiction), and won the award.

Flannery O’Connor once said, “I don’t know what I think until I see what I’ve written down.” I feel the same way about my fiction: it teaches me what I think and feel and know and believe. When I first wrote “My Father’s Court,” one of the first things that struck me was the tenderness and love the author seemed to have for the father in the story. (The author’s emotion seemed far less ambiguous than the boy’s.) I believe that writing this story helped me see my father for the man he was, and helped me recognize and admit the love I truly felt for him.

Maybe if I hadn’t written the story, I still would have been as open and affectionate toward him as I was able to be when I visited him during his illness. Maybe I would have felt the same depth of sadness, and the realization that I had lost not just my father but all the opportunities I’d missed to share his company and his unique gifts all throughout my life. Maybe I would still find myself missing the Sunday phone calls that for so many years had seemed such an obligation and a chore. Maybe, if I hadn’t written that story, I would still grieve his loss as much.

But I suspect that writing “My Father’s Court” caused me to grieve my father’s passing even more. And I’m glad it did.

An Excerpt from Mark’s story:

There was a time the boy stood beside his father. Eight years old, ankle-deep in fresh-fallen snow, on the wide concrete step outside the back door of the high school gymnasium. A few straggling snowflakes flitter from an oatmeal sky. The boy’s father takes off one glove, pins it in his armpit, and searches the brass key ring attached to his belt, isolating each key and holding it up to the diffused light of the street lamp behind them, because the light above the back door isn’t working. “Have to fix that, too,” the boy’s father says about the bulb. “I’ll catch hell from the coach if they have to tromp through here in the dark.”

A laugh pops out of him in a cloud of cold air. The same laugh, nervous and childlike, that irritates the boy’s mother so. You won’t think it’s so funny, he hears her say, when you wake up some morning and find me gone.

Recently, the boy has realized he and his father share the same curly dark hair and green eyes. They both like Abbott and Costello, who the boy’s mother calls, Idiots. A pair of clowns.

I don’t think this is it,” the boy’s father says about one key, then forces it anyway. “I already tried this one, I think,” he says about another. But this one turns, making the lock click free. “Eureka, Watson!” he cries. When he jerks open the door, the warm air pouring out stings the boy’s tight cold cheeks. Even his eyebrows feel stiff.

“At least the furnace is working tonight,” his father says. The boy follows him upstairs, imagining the horror of an ice-cold gym. “Here we are.” The door closes, trapping them in the immense dark.

Lights pop on, a row of them, then another, and the formless dark gives way to a high ceiling and walls, and a floor of pure magic. To the boy it’s as gloriously breathtaking as a baseball diamond; more so, because it is a floor and it’s been painted – black lines around the edge and more in front of each basket, and in the center a big blue circle with a white “S” in the middle. Superman, the boy thinks, although he knows it stands for Stanton, the high school’s name.

“We don’t want to cross that line.” His father points to the black border, and the boy steps back as if at the edge of a lake during spring thaw. “Not with our boots on, we don’t.” He laughs. “It’s the law.”

He unlocks a door in the corner that opens to a closet large as a garage. Inside are rolled-up mats, a folded trampoline. He drops the paper bag he’s been carrying onto a card table in front, next to a rack of basketballs, and sits on a folding chair to yank off his boots. The boy tugs his off, too, and when his father picks them up they leave a little puddle of melted snow on the concrete floor.

“You have to wear sneakers to be allowed on the court,” his father explains as they put theirs on. Their boots are lined up on top of the newspaper, the large boots and the small boots matching the way the boy and his father would look if they, too, stood side by side…

Read the full story and others by purchasing a copy.  Available at Amazon.com.