Shaking out the Dead by K M Cholewa

Duty calls. You forget that flowers once grew there. You kneel without question and labor.
    But no. She would not think these thoughts. They were not conducive to carrying out gladly the task of the day. Love shrinks on the witness stand. Questioning it did a marriage no good.
    The blue of the sky was hot and bright as Geneva took the curves through the canyon, through the cliff walls rising in mudstone layers of red and green. She knew well that she had not been born with the stuff that greases the skids for married life. Acceptance. Amnesia. Marriage required a duck’s back. Geneva was born with a porcupine’s topography, a back like a pine-covered hillside. Nothing rolled down it, nothing shrugged off. Experience tangled. Words jammed. She’d find the emotional debris, pick it up, dissect it, and smear it on a slide, view it under the power of magnification, all grotesquely large. Making studies of feelings is big business — therapy, talk shows — but Geneva learned the hard way that the scientific mind applied to love instead of test tubes leads not to high fives and by-George-I-think-we’ve-got-its. Picking through their love in a petri dish, to Ralph, had seemed a lot like looking for problems. And problems are, well, problematic, negative indicators, cause for alarm. And Ralph’s alarm led to his anxiety, which led, for Geneva, to frustration. A stray musing or theory on their relationship, she found, inevitably morphed into conflict. There were two speeds: agreement and argument. What she had been seeking was exploration.
    It took her years to realize that her mental tinkering was not a quality that had attracted Ralph, as she had believed. Because it was one of her most defining characteristics, it was hard for her to imagine anyone loving her without loving it .
    But so it was.
    For the sake of peace, then, she learned to work quietly in her mental lab.
    The roads were clear and the miles added up quickly. Canyon Creek reflected the sky on its way to the Missouri. As she drove, Geneva worked to cast past choices in a more positive light. Was it so bad a lesson to learn to keep the peace? Peace is sought everywhere, marched for by throngs, and she had established it simply by keeping her thoughts to herself. It would be different, of course, had she died in her silence. But she had not. She simply lived in seclusion, mentally speaking, for which there is something to be said. Folks climb mountains to reach monasteries because they’re good places to be if you’ve got a lot to think about. You don’t make it in one if you don’t.
    So you see, I wasn’t a doormat , she said silently to some other point of view that lived inside of her. Then she hit the gas pedal hard, hoping to leave her thoughts behind, choking on her dust.
    Earlier that morning, when infested with such thoughts, Geneva had taken measures to jar her mind into better thinking, measures not currently available as she hugged the mountain curves. Those who consume drugs, legal or otherwise, are seeking relief. Some want to feel better. Some don’t want to feel at all. Then there were those like Geneva, those who were seeking to melt the ice in their minds, having found themselves frozen into one of its frosty corners. It wasn’t about feeling better but coming to new conclusions. Optional conclusions. Geneva believed there was a danger in allowing any one opinion to be left alone to run amok in her mind.
    So she had retrieved an empty water glass from the kitchen and headed to the bedroom. She grabbed her toiletry bag, still packed, off the pillow and had rummaged, finding her sewing kit readily. She dug out her tiny travel scissors and a sewing needle. Then she reached to the floor for the underpants she had worn home from the airport. She pulled the thick sanitary napkin from the crotch, and she cut into it. She pulled out two sticky chunks of hashish bundled in plastic wrap.
    Here in her bedroom,