Rachel Weinhaus
My Mother Is a Peahen
My husband found her at an art fair while he was traveling. She stands erect, mid-waist tall, a bossy blue with hints of regal gold and bruised purple. I put her in the corner of our front hall, and sometimes on my way in, I stop to talk to her and tell her about my day. She’s not the best listener, and I know she’d prefer to be fluttering her wings or flirting with a delivery man, but it’s nice to pause before I set the groceries down and connect this way. Sometimes the boys play too rough, and I have to say, “Be careful. Your grandmother was very expensive.” And other times I let them tumble about and hope the bullseye tips of her feathers aren’t broken. She likes to be dusted, my mother, so every week, I take the brush from the hall closet, and I watch the mites swirl in the sunlight that kisses her through the window. I imagine her out in the wild surrounded by lesser grand species, her wings unfolding in a curtsy call. I know it’s selfish, but I can’t help being happy she’s finally here with me.
Cicada Song
There’s a story I lost. It was about the time my dog swallowed a cicada. I told it to dates I met for coffee, for brunch, for a walk in the park, for drinks at happy hour, before happy hour, after happy hour. The brown-haired man, the bald man, the man with a mustache, all smiled politely when I told them how Roxie was prone to eating the singing bugs. How, in her excitement, she swallowed one whole, and how I could hear the cicada’s sorrowful longing in the hallows of Roxie’s belly. How the vet told me not to worry. How the cicada kept me up at night for weeks on end until the mournful call became a soundtrack I learned to get used to. The man with a mustache told it to his next date as if it were his own, and then she told it on a plane to a flight attendant on her way to Australia, and last I heard, the story landed in New Zealand, and now Roxie is a Kiwi who flies its sleepless nights with a soulful song about loneliness forever stuck in its throat.
The Rock Collector
It started after his father left, when I bought him a rock tumbler. He took it very hard, his father leaving, but he found solace in the slow transformation of his dirt-crusted possessions turning smooth and luminous in his hands. Soon, the house filled with them. He stacked them on bookshelves, lined them up across our kitchen counter, tucked them into the hall closet. The living room floor, covered wall-to-wall with gems, made a rocky beach path all the way to our front door. One day, finding a rock in my sock, in my other sock, in my salad, I asked him to consider changing hobbies. Maybe he’d like to plant gourds and tomatoes. We could tend to the seeds and watch them grow. He shook his head no. I lay with him, on a night his father didn’t call, and the bed seemed taller than I remembered. When he finally fell asleep, I peeked under the mattress. A sea of glittering light.
Rachel Weinhaus is a screenwriter and memoirist. She earned an MFA in screenwriting from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television and a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her personal essays have been published in The Huffington Post, The Today Show, Newsweek, Insider, Kveller, and Brevity Blog. Her work has appeared in Necessary Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, Micro Fiction Monday Magazine, Five Minutes, MoonPark, Moon City Press, Does It Have Pockets, and is forthcoming in Frigg. Rachel is the author of The Claimant: A Memoir of an Historic Sexual Abuse Lawsuit and a Woman's Life Made Whole. Visit her at www.rachelweinhaus.com.
