Gazelle: Nine Monologues

By Alison Armstrong

Five of my narrating voices are male, middle aged to elderly. Their accents varyan East Coast American professor in Driving, Oxbridge is British with a tinge of Irish in Hippo Club, Mose Konen, and The Man in the Apple-Green Tie. And for the narrator of Ostraneni, the reader may imagine the dialect of a member of the elite of ancient fifth century BC Athens. Four of these monologues are in a female voice: the elderly womans aggressive/defensive voice of Gazelle came to me in a dream shortly after I had moved to New York City to live in the early 1980s, the naive voice of a Midwestern girl recounts a childhood trauma in Snakedoctors, a subdued young woman tells of her relationship to her parents in At the Lake House, and Bronze Age Greek accents of Ismenethe lonely, hysteric, forgotten princess of Thebes and sister to Antigonein the eponymous tragedy by Sophocles, again, invite imagination. That is how I hear them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543471809

Alison Armstrong

Alison Armstrong is a writer of prose and plays. She grew up in Leeds and East Yorkshire and has worked as a cleaner, waitress, painter and teacher, as well as developing her writing career. She won a Northern Writers’ Award for short fiction in 2017, a Literature Matters Award from the Royal Society of Literature in 2020 and a Project Grant from Arts Council England in 2021. Her poems, essays and short stories have been published in magazines and journals. She now makes her home in Lancashire, and Fossils is her first book. 

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Copyright © 2018 by Alison Armstrong.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2017918815

ISBN:                  Hardcover                        978-1-5434-7182-3

                             Softcover                          978-1-5434-7181-6

                             eBook                               978-1-5434-7180-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Photo Credits:

Cover: Alison Armstrong

Author Photo: Robert E. Jensen

Rev. date: 06/06/2018

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INTRODUCTION

Five of my narrating voices are male, middle aged to elderly: their accents vary, an east coast American professor in Driving, Oxbridge British with a tinge of Irish in Hippo Club, A Song at Twilight, and The Man in the Apple-Green Tie. And for the narrator of Ostraneni, the reader may imagine the dialect of a member of the elite of ancient 5th century BC Athens. Four of these monologues are in a female voice: the elderly woman’s aggressive/defensive voice of Gazelle came to me in a dream shortly after I had moved to New York City to live in the early 1980s; the naive voice of a mid-western girl recounts a childhood trauma in Snakedoctors; a subdued young woman tells of her relationship to her parents in At the Lake House; and bronze age Greek accents of Ismene, the lonely hysteric, forgotten princess of Thebes and sister to Antigone in the eponymous tragedy by Sophocles, invite imagination. That is how I hear them.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to my son Edward who, at the age of ten, discovered my first draft of Snakedoctors when we were living in a bed-sit in North Oxford in 1974. He read my story notes one afternoon when he got home from middle school. Seeing that I had left a blank on the last page, he suggested the final childhood thought that completed the tone of ironic naiveté the story needed. Of the several stories in this collection that have been published in earlier stages of composition, I wish to thank the following: Edwin Rivera, editor of the on-line literary journal Match Factory (School of Visual Arts) for publishing Driving (2014); Cheryl Armstrong, guest editor of New Observations (No. 77) for publishing Mose Konen (1990) excerpted from A Song at Twilight, a novella still in progress; Andre Codrescu, editor of Exquisite Corpse for publishing Gazelle (1985); John Matthias and William O’Rourke for publishing Ismene in Notre Dame Review (2009); and Betsy Sussler, editor of BOMB magazine for publishing The Man in the Apple-Green Tie (1984) and Ostranenie (1986).

Contents

1.   Driving To Maine

2.   The Man In The Apple-Green Tie

3.   A Holiday At The Hippo Club

4.   A Song At Twilight

5.   At The Lake House

6.   Snakedoctors

7.   Gazelle

8.   Ismene

9.   Ostranenie: 404 B.C.

DRIVING to MAINE

It is not the destination but the journey that counts. Somebody wrote that. Leonard Woolf. I’m not a cynical man, but I think he got it from somebody else. Still, there’s truth in it.

My only journeys now are to Maine. I enjoy driving. In fact, it is right up there with fly-fishing: mind free and nobody really knows quite where I am. Out of reach of the world, except what I choose to let in. But I let you in whenever you care to accompany me. You know I always do. You always knew I would.

Twelve hours door to door from the West End Avenue apartment to the quiet side of Mount Desert Island. Bass Harbor to be accurate. And then a bit onwards to Pretty Marsh. I like the scenic route, going. Take the short cut to Somesville on the return. Bill and Clarence are up there already. At our camp, my paradise. Well, really, a rambling colonial house that was once in my family. We all share it now as a home base away from our homes. From there, Seal Cove and Bass are our usual fishing spots. And sometimes we row out to Gotts Island for mussels picked fresh right off the pink rocks at low tide. We used to dive for sea urchins too, when we were young, but now we are getting on. All that gear too much of an effort for us retired city guys. Bill’s still a banker, Clarence a journalist, and me, Prof. Emeritus of English and Comp. Lit., Columbia, as you well know. Urban guys with a love of nature that grows now we have freedom to follow our inner selves.

Bill remains the happy bachelor. Reared on Maine summers, as you know, with that large banking family of his, he likes to revert to being the Down Easter. Big bucks. Clarence, as traveling journalist, never had much to do with his wife; we hardly saw her socially at any rate. Kept her off to the side you might say. And me with my Mary. She stopped coming up with me years ago, you know, when grandkids and her volunteer work in the city seemed to interest her more than rattling around in our big house and cleaning mackerel or whatever we caught. Besides, if the wives don’t get on as a group, might as well leave them be. Get on with what it is we three come to Maine to do: fish. Or just float around in a boat and gaze at the pink granite rocks on the horizon edged with green-black pines. Or is it spruce? Listen to the loons and frogs and the relentless moving of the wine-dark sea. Cast bets on whether that there bobbing in the water is a seal’s snout or a lobster pot marker. Never tire of it.

After I load the Jeep I drive a couple of hours northeast out of the city, make a pit stop around Danbury or later, depending on weather and traffic. Wherever gas is cheap. Then I augment the food situation with things Mary will never pack for me. Those long sticks of spiced beef jerky, corn chips, chocolate bars…the sort of thing you can eat with one hand while driving. And a couple of fat cigars.

After that, I sometimes pee into a jar while driving along so as not to interrupt the flow of the driving, the flow of my thoughts so to speak, and to make sure the remaining hours are one long meditation. And so I can pull in right on the dot. We three make bets on my arrival time. I phone from the apartment just as I’m making the last trip down to the car. I like to keep to my record of twelve hours, door to door.

After Danbury the mind is free. No stops then but for gas at those few remaining full service stations. And the quick stop in New Hampshire for discount booze. They rely on me to replenish the liquor stash at the house, you know. Glenlivet for Bill, Bushmills for Clarence. John Jameson for me. Drive right up to the loading dock and the boys bring out the cases. No need to get out of the car or to break the reverie, so to speak.

But I am so glad you are driving with me now, Martha. Seems the only time I can really unburden myself is when you are beside me. You don’t always show up, you know. Now that you are safely laid to rest, so to speak, you are more with me than ever. More real, especially this morning. Or is it only that I finally feel in control behind the wheel again? This old Jeep and I have been together so long we’ve exchanged molecules like the bicycles in The Third Policeman. As if we were one body. So, here we are, safely on the road, just you and me. Good of you to turn up like this.

Can’t wait to stand on the rocks at Seal, listen to the waves coming in, going out, recite in my mind Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach. You remember? That long withdrawing roar…. Makes me think of all we’ve experienced, fading in memory and then washing back