Rachel Bostwick

25 Places That My Mother Will Always Live

May 12, 2014 by Rachel Bostwick

My Mother Hates This Picture But I Love it So Much. Taken By Me.

So Here is That She Loves Instead. Taken By Someone Else — So here is one that she loves instead.

I passed around a quotes on Facebook about how your mother is always with you in certain things, even when you don’t have her any more. It was a beautiful quote, but I realized that the quote spoke to me, but only on the edges of it. The truth is, there are very real places in my heart where my mother will always live. Fortuitously, I still have my mother so I got to share them with her. So here they are – the 25 places where my mom will always live:

25 Places Where My Mother Will Always Live

1. Dusty treasures in dimly-lit thrift stores
2. Yellow-edged paper backs
3. The Secret of Roan Inish while folding laundry
4. Anne of Green Gables
5. Learning Spanish together just for fun.
6. Walking about the lake at Bob Woodruff Park
7. Making stories about the geese
8. Watership Down
9. The Pine smell of the cabins
10. Making stories about if we lived on an island and had to survive
11. Cats
12. Newts
13. Flipping through the Childcraft books
14. Go, Dog, Go
15. CInnamon rolls and stockings on Christmas morning
16. Birthdays with always just the right book
17. Pink cake with blue frosting
18. Blue cake with pink frosting
19. Puff painted denim jacket
20. Queen Anne’s Lace
21. Dramatic Movie Soundtracks
22. West Side Story & The Sound of Music
23. Paper Dolls & Post Cards
24. Dreaming about moving to India
25. Puffed Sleeves

Thank you, mom, for the happy childhood 🙂

“Alex is a girl’s name.”

April 25, 2014 by Rachel Bostwick

After his thirteenth birthday, Alexander Jackson begged to be called anything but Alex. Al. Lex. George. Fartweasel. Anything. Before that day, he had been indifferent. After that day, Alex he would not be called.

Father laughed.

Mother brushed his concerns away and said that if Alex had been a suitable moniker for his great-grandfather, Alexander Patterson, the renowned late senator of New York for whom he had been named, then certainly it was good enough for him.

Alexander’s mother was descended from Money, and for that reason, he was able to attend the finest prep school in the Bronx. His father mopped the school floors, and for that reason he was able to attend for free. He wasn’t well liked there. No one told him that he didn’t belong. Mostly they ignored him. He was chubby and poor at sports; he assumed this was why he was left alone. On those rare sunny days when someone talked with him at recess, they were kindly treated to one of his stories and one of his homemade snacks (Mother made irresistible German chocolate cupcakes with thick coconut icing), regardless of age or gender or athletic ability.

So when the girl a few grades down from him with a dozen braids sprouting all over her head started to follow him around, he was well pleased, even when she bossed into his stories and made him change all the endings to reflect equal treatment of women and minority creatures. Each of those bewitching braids was secured at the end with a gaudy pink barrette which she would swing into Alex’s face to punish him when he was wrong about something. He was wrong at least once a day. Once, one of the barrettes had worked itself free from her braid and stabbed him right through the eye. She didn’t speak to him for two days after – that, too, was his own wrongdoing – but he kept the little weapon of death as a souvenir.

Those pink plastic daggers were against the strict dress code, but no one dared tell the Girl that she didn’t belong, either. She was attending the school on a diversity scholarship, and a portion of the school’s federal funding relied on her regular attendance and admirably superior grades. She wore them with flair and spent her recesses eating sweets with the janitor’s son.

All of this was good for Alex. The bad? She was called Alex, too.

On his thirteenth birthday, they had a disagreement. Alex the Boy was wrong about something. Alex the Girl had recently suffered a haircut, and was mourning the loss of her pink barrettes. Having nothing to fling at him to remind him how wrong he was, she narrowed her eyes and said the words that would change him forever.

“Alex is a girl’s name.”

It was the end of his world.

Concurrently with this devastating revelation, Alexander’s father was interviewing for a job as junior maintenance crew at a new super-retro dance club called The Electrolux Palace. He brought his son to see the place and boy and man both fell in love with the four-story 20th century Beaux Arts architecture. Neither knew those highfalutin words yet, but they would learn them in the near future, poring together over dusty books of art history and manuals of plumbing and mason repair. Equally, they loved the wires and the lights and the sound and the smells of the dance club. They sat together in the wings while the wild patrons danced and the hypnotic beats moved their hearts.

For the first time, Clive Jackson saw a bright future for his son in the promising world of general building maintenance. He clapped the boy on the back and called him by a new diminutive of his forename, one that paid homage to the building they had both fallen so soundly in love with. He called his son Lux. The name might not have stuck, but his mother was horrified and said her son would never-never-ever be called after a filthy, wicked den of sex and loud music. That sealed it. From that day forward, Alexander Jackson would respond to nothing else, no matter how Mother begged and pleaded. Eventually, even she came around.

The maintenance job at the club paid double what the prep school had, but it wasn’t enough to make tuition. Lux left for public school. He said goodbye to lonely lunches, too-tight uniforms, and Alex the Girl. On his first day at P.S. 173, where he was well-liked, he told the other children that his name was Lux. And from that day forward it was.

“So, to make a long story short, your legal name is Mrs. Alexander Jackson. Mrs. Lina Jackson. But no one will ever call you that, I’m afraid. They’ve already started to called you Mrs. Lux. Now if you’re thinking of monogrammed towels, the correct monogram for you would be lower case L uppercase J lowercase N. But that’s boring. I say skip the traditional and we’ll just get double-Ls. Lux and Lina. Lina and Lux. I like the ring of it.” He groaned and kissed the side of her neck. “What do you think?”

Lina laughed and wrapped her arms around him, shuffling down so that her head was laying on his chest. Not comfortable for him but it was nice and just inviting enough to get him a little revved up again. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Lux,” she said into his skin.

“Before the fall,” he said, “when people got married, they would have their initials embroidered onto towels. Oh, you know. Like my robe. The one that has an R sewn on the breastpocket.”

“But you aren’t called anything that starts with R.”

“No,” he laughed. “But the hotel I liberated the robes from was.”

Later, when Lina was all the way asleep on her stomach and snoring lightly, he disentangled himself from her. He had been so happy this week that he thought talking about the old days couldn’t pierce his mood. But somehow it had. He pulled the robe around his waist without bothering to close it – the drawstring didn’t fit around his middle, anyway – and paced over to the tall dresser. He slid open the top drawer and shuffled through thirty pair of wrinkled briefs and a hundred mismatched black business socks. There it was – the little pink barrette, unfaded by the dust of three decades. He touched it to his lips and wondered – what had happened to the little girl with the dozen deadly braids?

Perry Alexander Howard

April 20, 2014 by Rachel Bostwick

But, no, it is Perry who concerns me the most. Now that his brother has gone to stay and work with Lux on a room and board basis – a mutually beneficial arrangement which brings me great personal happiness – I fear Perry will wilt. Though there is a three year age difference between them, Perry has always been grounded in his brother’s presence, if nowhere else. He is like a a fast-growing vine – a creeping Jenny, if you will – which, unchecked, will expand unendingly. Dell and I have only so much attention we can spend on him, only so much affection we can express, though certainly our love for him is without end. But his brother gave him safety to stop. With a word, with a gesture, with a whispered invitation to come and play, Andrew could rein him in.

Though Andrew was five when we took them in, Perry was only two, and I wonder now if that affected him more deeply than we originally thought. We thought Andrew would be the angry one. He used to scream at me and tell me that I wasn’t his mother. Perry, on the other hand, attached himself to me from the first day and never let go. Perhaps his abandonment was pushed deep down in – or perhaps it’s just his creative spirit. Perhaps my fears are baseless, and without his brother to live up to, Perry will thrive. Already, his father has ideas – his art has gotten to be quite realistic, and the judges have begun to hire artists to document crime scenes and public events. After the event in the third JD, it was decided that pod pics would no longer be admissible. Lux has an idea about artists of good character being sworn in like notaries in the old world, and he thinks maybe Perry could be one of the first.

From the Memoirs of Apple Howard, c. 2123

Wounded.

April 17, 2014 by Rachel Bostwick

I burnt myself yesterday. It hurt a lot. Three-inch diameter second degree burn on my abdomen, plus some lovely first on the sides with these pretty blisters. I cried for a long time and then I made my mother come over and look after me for a little while, which was nice.

And today I felt better, but it still hurt – it hurt to sit, to lie down on my side or tummy (my ALMOST exclusive sleep), or to walk around. So all of the hurting.

And then it was cold outside but Elijah had a baseball game and the Chief had work, and it was left to me to take the boy, plus his three siblings to the game and to the park around the game.

Did I say that it was cold, yet? I hate the cold. It made me tense all up which hurt even more. And so I walked around the park, hobbling, scowling, trying to watch the game and three good but active kids at the same time.

And I thought, I would like it if people knew why I was scowling. They probably think I’m mean, but I’m lovely. I’d like to wear a t-shirt that says, ‘Wounded – Catch me Next Time.’

But you don’t.

Nobody does, and they’re all wounded, aren’t they?

I learned something about my daughter recently: something that had been secretly causing her pain. Something that had been causing her deep, soul pain for almost a year. Something she was keeping a secret. Not someone hurting her or anything like that, but something inside of her that was hurting herself. I had no idea. I was crushed. How could my daughter, my beautiful sparkly daughter, been carrying weight around like that for almost a year?

That mean waitress who forgot to leave the lemon out of your water, and the neighbor who’s angry at your music? Wounded. The lady who bumps into you at Wal-mart and then scowls at your children? Wounded. The guy who rear-ends you or who you rear-ended? Wounded. All of them, they are wounded. They may not actually hate you. They might just have a gaping red hole in their abdomen (read: heart) that they can’t or won’t or don’t know how to tell you about.

So let it go a little bit; maybe even show them your scars or tell them theirs are okay. Smile at them and mean it.

Because next time it might be your turn to be wounded.

Messengers (MSNGR1.2)

April 15, 2014 by Rachel Bostwick

The messengers?

Of course I remember the day that I found them. No one could forget a day like that. So strange. It was July. Hot as hell out. The markets hadn’t taken off, not yet. Trade routes were spotty. If you needed something, you were better off scouting for a hardware store somewhere north of the city that hadn’t been cleaned out. I was out of something – something crucial. Nails, I think, just regular carpentry nails. Feeling helpless. Dell and I’d come up with the idea to split up the city among a bunch of us, but it wasn’t going well. I didn’t even like the name we’d settled on – judges? Two of the guys had actually been judges, but not me. I was the son of a security guard. Who the hell was I to judge anybody? I couldn’t even find a box of nails.

So I was taking a walk down on the docks and just randomly opening stuff. Looking for whatever. I found a couple of crates of SPAM – it was a kind of processed meat. Pink and salty and cube-shaped. Before the fall it was considered pretty disgusting, but canned meat afterwards was a delicacy, no matter what shape it was. So I was feeling pretty high about that even if I didn’t know how the hell I was getting it home. Then I started looking in the big containers. I knew some of it would be useless – computer parts or whatever – but I thought, who knows, right? I got lucky once, maybe I’ll find some nails. Or screws. Or duct tape. Whatever.

So I made myself a kind of crowbar and I wa working my way through shipping containers. Well most of them had been raided already. It’d been over a decade since the fall and I wasn’t the only dumb-ass around with a crowbar, you know what I mean? But I found this one that was kind of laying at an angle, not all the way, just a little, but kind of bent in the middle, too. It must have been about noon because I can remember how high up the sun was and how it just beat down onto these shipping containers and the light hit this one just right. It was like a spotlight and I was almost blinded by the stupid thing. But I could see that even though it was kind of compromised, it’d never been open. And I just knew – I was gonna find a whole hardware store in there. It just felt right.

So I opened it.

And a guy stepped forward. He was six-three, physically stacked, carrying a 45, and I figure my time on Earth has come to an end. It’s been a good run. I survived past the end of the Earth – what else can a guy ask for?

“What is your name?” the guy asked. He’s black-skinned, black-eyed, black-garbed. Big, deep voice. Wearing a suit a lot like mine. Nice black tie.

“Alexander Jackson.” I tried to put a little authority in my voice. “I’m the 7th judge.” It was the first time I’d introduced myself that way – everyone just called me Lux and I hadn’t even decided if I like being the judge.

The black man took a knee. “We are the MSNGR1.2 units. We have been sent to obey you, Alexander Jackson.”

I don’t remember what I said after that. It was a hot day and I was confused. I do remember the whole group of them filing back to the castle – all 200 of them, one after the other, each one different, each of them carrying two boxes of SPAM. 12 cans per box. We served processed meat and green beans for lunch for a solid month. Never got tired of it. But after that, they just never stopped following me. They wouldn’t say who they were intended for – just that they had been waiting for me. I guess who ever was supposed to receive that shipment needed some security. I tried to teach them to shoot, but they ended up teaching me. Taught to do construction and whatnot, but then Dell had the idea that they could be our protection. So we split them up between all the jds, 25 or so per judge, and that’s it. At first they said they could only obey me, but then I convinced the first one that obeying the other judges would be like obeying me. By proxy. And that was that. Now we’ve had the messengers for almost two decades now and I don’t care where they came from anymore. Maybe they weren’t originally meant for me, but at the same time – they were meant for me.

It’s crazy, though. I mean, we had bots before the fall. Some really cool ones. Celebrity impersonators. House cleaners. Definite security workers. But you could always tell. Something wasn’t quite right. These guys – well, you’ve seen them. You really can’t tell the difference until they start pushing their limits. They just look like big, scary guys.

If you want my theory, I think they were military. Federal, probably So what were they doing sitting in cargo? It makes me wonder if someone knew what was coming.

But I guess we’ll never know.

Alexander “Lux” Jackson

Lux

April 14, 2014 by Rachel Bostwick

Alexander “Lux” Jackson was only 16 years old when the world fell. His father, a night guard, also survived the fall, but died due to complications from diabetes a few months later. Lux continued to live in the four-story Beaux Arts building that had formerly housed the dance club his father helped guard and maintain. Driven by grief, Lux gutted the building and began to turn it into a safe house for other survivors.

One such was the man who would become Lux’s closest friend, Dell Howard. When the number of families living in and around the palace and in the underground tunnels of New York City began to overwhelm Lux’s leadership and generosity, Lux and Dell hatched the idea to create a simple, benevolent government to encourage peace and prosperity among the people and to discourage seedy activities such as tolling and human trafficking.

Upon creation of the council of Judges, Lux accepted responsibility for the borough he had grown up in and where he had taken residence after the fall – The Bronx was named the 7th Jurisdiction and Lux its leader.

Around the same time, while scouring ruins in search of undamaged building materials, Lux happened upon a large, damaged shipping container. Curious, Lux pried open the door. 200 strong men, standing elbow to elbow in rows of four, stood perfectly still in the darkness. A man at the front asked for the judge’s name. Upon learning his name, they informed him that he was now their commander and they would obey him in all matters. After much questioning, Lux realized that the men were a company of androids, advanced beyond anything public before the fall. Pleased by his good fortune, Lux divided the messengers – they called themselves MSNGR1.2s – between the seven judges to serve as a standing militia.

Lux is widely considered to be the most fair and likable of the judges, and is generally well-liked by the citizens of his jd, although some of the more elite residents of the Bronx resent his refusal to follow precedent laid down by the other judges in cases involving disputes between the classes.