Mark Simpson

​Monaco
 
Jamey went to the thrift store to buy luggage for her trip to Monaco. She wasn’t sure where Monaco was (Europe, she wondered) and was going because she had fallen in love with Grace Kelly, “Princess Grace,” after seeing her in movies alongside Cary Grant. Grace Kelly was beautiful and wonderful and lived in Monaco and that’s why Jamey was going. She did not have the airline ticket yet, had not even checked into it, nor a hotel. She would do that after she bought the luggage. She paid $27.00 for a large, black suitcase with a faded “España” sticker on it, a strap around the middle and firmly attached handle. “Perfect,” she thought. As she walked out of the thrift store, suitcase in hand, she wondered if she should find a travel agent. Someone who knew where Monaco was. Who knew who Grace Kelly was, but was not in love with her.

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The Button 
 
She spent many years in psychoanalysis—often difficult, sometimes fruitful. For example, she said she had a dream in which she pushed a button and nothing happened. So she pushed it again and then again, frantically, fearfully and then she woke up. "So what did your analyst say about that," I asked. I was particularly interested because I had had the same dream. "Perhaps you are the button," the analyst said. "Go home and fiddle with the wiring. Then try again." She said she went home to fiddle with the wiring but realized it was solid state—no wires. "You either throw it away and buy a new one or forget the button, open the door, and go in. That’s what I did," she said. "Once you go in, the door shuts. The room is large and not what you expected. There is another button."

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The Voice that Once Seemed Clear

to me seemed part oracle, part a blathering fool offering bad advice. Where it came from I was never sure—I once thought a decaying stump of a tree cut when, as a child, I dreamed of trees. The stump was shrouded in tangle of brush, and when I made my way  to it, the voice seemed to come from somewhere else entirely. I gave up the search and made my way back to the trail, and heard, it seemed, a susurrate cough of relief coming from where I’d looked and so  was certain it was the  stump speaking to me.  Always the voice spoke to me. It was a voice not sweet but more like an endless ocean and perfectly understandable. It offered advice: what I should do and when  and what would become of  me if I followed it or not. It seemed advice worth  considering. I listened but often grew tired of it.  This happened for a year or so and then an odd silence as I passed the spot of the decaying trunk, still shrouded by the brush. I found myself speaking to the absent voice—confessions,  recriminations, diatribes, and sometimes quiet words of sorrow, of something lost. My voice came back to me not an echo but impersonal and detached like a wind through trees whose  leaves were about to fall, a private language I’d not heard before.  

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Death and Life
 
Flannery recounted his experience. He’d expected more and was therefore disappointed. “But who am I to complain?” he’d said, as if to discount it all. He reflected on the sense of transcendence. some have reported, an ethereal transport into a greater consciousness, unrestricted by embarrassment or the swamp of mood. But he did remember it was dark and painless, a black hole that seemed stellar in size and into which he felt himself falling until he returned here. “Nothing’s changed,” he reported,;  given the trauma, he’d hoped he’d get something out of it, only the understanding that existence was a slow accretion of things that might or might not stay around, sometimes a  memory of them and more and more the inability to name them and therefore to not see them at all.

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Purpose
 
Lives always have a purpose, and Fred’s was waiting for the telephone to ring. Purposes are like waves—troughs and peaks but it’s only the motion that moves, not the water, and in that way also, purposes are illusions that have the pleasure of movement that seems movement but is not. Fred took his telephone (not a “cell”) with him wherever he went, plugging it in to any available telecom outlet, sure that the ring was coming, might be out there in the wires at that very moment. He relished the wanting because waiting is pure possibility if one gives oneself t to it. As you know, one day Fred began to wonder if his telephone was working, that something inside might have broken loose with all the moving around. Thoughts like these  are poison to possibility, an indrawn breath, then nervousness and concentrated anxiety. He understood the world was entirely external and there he was, fear and anxiety, hope and passion an uneventful calm like a telephone and its inconclusive possibility of ringing or its silence.

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Mark Simpson: Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sleet (Pushcart Prize nominee), Broad River Review (Rash Award Finalist), Columbia Journal (Online), Third Wednesday, Clackamas Literary Review, and Cold Mountain Review. He lives on Whidbey Island, Washington.