Tag: storytelling

Old Ollie

Old Ollie would wander around town, but she always seemed to be going somewhere. She wore a long skirt and a heavy cardigan, always colors of the ground, varied but earthy all the same. She wore a little hat. Not a fancy one or even recognizable as a style, more like a few flattened pancakes on her head.

Her hair was just to her shoulders, blunt cut and strung with grey, a bit wild.

She walked with a rolling limp, as though she was walking along inside a dingy, she was bent and twisted a bit so maybe that’s why.

She talked to herself, muttering along as she walked. She never talked to me, but I would follow her if she was going in my general direction. Even when she looked at me, she looked through me and past me.

She would glare at the monster kids who threw stones at her. The same rotten kids who threw them at me. That’s why I followed her. I never saw her do anything more than hold up her arms to shield her face. I beat those kids when they picked on my brother, and I beat them if they went to hurt Ollie. They were just nasty little sissies, so I never got hurt too much.

The reason I followed Ollie (and probably why everyone said she was crazy) was the way she recycled her chewing gum. She would walk and chew and mutter along, then she would take it out of her mouth and stick it on the bottom of her shoe, walk awhile without it, then get it and chew on it again. I wondered why she didn’t drop dead. My mother hated dirt and germs, gagging when men spat on the ground. Making us wash our hands when we touched things she deemed unclean. Yet here was Ollie, collecting all of that, and putting it inside herself. So, seeing Ollie always made me happy, because she was winning and all the germs my mother was crazed about were losing.

water

The water showed me what life was.

There is water that you see, and the water you feel. The feeling kind is underneath, hidden, strong, and impossible to fight against. If you fight against it, it will kill you with no conscience at all. Not even noticing it did. You’re nothing more than a leaf or stick along for the ride. I went for a ride a few times, but it decided it didn’t really want me.

People are like that too. 

What you see on the surface is nothing like the depths flowing through them below. Some can hold you warm and close like a warm lagoon between the rocks. Others can dash you to pieces, throwing you against the boulders and banks, while others can pull you so far down, that you will never surface again. 

Families are like that too. 

Maybe, there are some like the lagoon, that exist in a constant state of calm and peace, but I don’t know of them.

I think most are just like the real water. Water that is turbulent at times, still at other times, occasionally brutal, deceptive on the surface, but nevertheless, carries you from your beginning until your end.

–Ossibell

little soldiers

My father would usually work again after dinner, late into the evening, after he got the big machine he used to make his instruments. It stood like a small car in one half of the basement, which was more like a first floor, because the house was built into the steep hillside. The other half was a room we played in and a place where he had his wine fermenting. I loved the smell of grape must, the sweet-sour foam, bubbling away in the cabinet.

When he came upstairs, I would come out to the kitchen, where he was eating his supper. He smelled like sweat and metal. His face stubbly by now. and his clothes grimy with dust and perspiration.

Usually, he ate kolbasz. He made it himself because we had no Hungarian sausage maker or butcher in this town. he ate it with fresh bread and a glass of red wine, he had made from the grapes that he grew on the first hillside terrace above the house.

It was my favorite snack. I would sit on his lap, and with the knife in one hand, and kolbasz in the other, he would cut the knife toward his thumb, then put the cut piece, along with the knife onto a little piece of bread, or he ate it from the knife still in his hand. He put the tiny bread and kolbasz pieces together and formed them in a line on the white and grey Formica top. He called them “katona falat”  Little soldiers. He said a rhyme that went with the lining up of the pieces, he might have sang it if he had a good singing voice, but he didn’t.

Pick up at orphanage

Many months later, it felt like years to me, we, as in three, went to pick him up. My father was clean and pressed. My mother was glamorous from her long rest away at the convalescent spa. Her done-up black hair with perfect waves, her long red fingernails, ( which I’d only seen in magazines or the poster in the window for fire and ice.) High heels with a navy dress with a matching short jacket. I’d never seen her so fancy.

Finally, they opened the gates to let him out. He ran to us screaming, “My Ossi!, my Ossi! and he jumped at me and held on to me for a long, long time. So my world was coming back to where it was before, to the familiar.

I was glad to be home, but I was even happier to back to the bush, to the wild vacant land next to our house. I was glad to be back to what I knew, the places where I could go to hide and make-believe. I had missed my secret places, my tree huts, my bush houses, my little house under the outside stairs, which I’d decorated and made cozy with rags and junk I found. It was my very own house. I had many places, and I was rich in my town of homes. The old apricot was the Tarzan tree, it was bent all the way over so it was easy to live in and swing from the rope that dangled from the middle. The hillside was so steep, I could climb the trunk, then walk over the middle, like a gang-plank, and jump off the top and only be a little further up the slope. The pear tree was bent over too, but the other way, which made an extraordinary pirate ship, the leaves and upper branches hiding the decks below. Further down closer to the street, stood the apple tree, it had a cozy little seat sling, the branches made it that way. I could sit there and see the street. I was hidden. Occasionally, I would throw rotten apples at someone who deserved it.

She never let go of the fact he ran to me first. Just another unfortunate incident for her to go crackers over.

–Ossibell

Invisibility

The strangest part of being invisible is that you are able to see things that are brewing in the invisible unformed space. They’re not non-existent, they’re just not fully formed, like a pregnancy, the child is there but hasn’t manifested into the world yet.

In the invisible space, you can see it is a boy or girl, it has blue eyes and red hair. You can see it will be bitten by the neighbor’s dog, get sick and die.

So here’s the worst part:
No matter what you say to the parents of the baby,
“Please move away for the sake of the baby!”.
“Please do things to protect the baby from that dog!”.


No-one listens! They might see and hear you, but they believe you’re a little crazy.
When “the thing” happens, you cry even more than they do, you feel the pain, then you feel their pain and then the pile it all on me pain of being unable to change things.
That’s the worst part of invisibility.

—Ossibell

Losing my voice

I lost my voice when I was almost four, but that’s another story for another day. I became invisible too – so invisible in fact, that people couldn’t see me, even if I was right in front of them. So invisible, that they would bump into me when I was walking on the street., I’m not a ghost, so they couldn’t walk through me, so I got some nasty jolts and bumps on occasion.

This is not a fantasy, it’s real, and it was painful then, but now I’m grateful. This condition made me an extraordinary “fly on the wall”. An invisible, extraordinary, “fly on the wall”.

My powers of observation were honed to a degree, that I could see beyond what was said or demonstrated. I could feel them, smell them, all the invisible memories and thoughts. The thoughts and memories would bounce from them onto a screen in my mind so I could watch them there.

Sometimes I would feel them there too. Sometimes, I could see other movie clips of other times. But after a while, I chose not to. Mostly because it became too jangled inside me. It became difficult to separate my movies from theirs, and it was a pain, a nightmarish pain to separate it all, especially because feelings slide around, they’re slippery and sticky at the same time. They will stick to yours so you don’t see them at first, then pretend to feel like your own, but they’re really not.

That’s also around the time I just got tired of people. My friends became the books. Books became my real family, and my safe place became the space between the rows and walls of them. Whole entire tribes of them. They became my insulation from the bothersome feelings and thoughts floating around other people.

Hearing one thing coming from their faces was one thing, but seeing and feeling the inside percolating with something very different was confusing, unsettling, and very annoying. I was very irritated because others around them couldn’t see the inside of what that person really was. That their words were lies. Smarmy lies that covered dirty cores, dirty cores full of desire to cheat and hurt.

So, on occasion, the rare occasion I’d come across someone who was whole and complete, which to me means, the same on the inside as the outside. In those rare instances, I would just be still. Or the opposite, my words would flow out like chipmunk chatter, an endless flow of thoughts, dreams, and observations.

They would just nod and listen. Didn’t happen very often. I can count the times on one hand.

—Ossibell