the oracle hunter Book Trailer

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Previously published in Fabula Argentea

TATTERED HEART by Robin Lange

Raggedy  Ann smiled at me today. It was unexpected and delightful. Sitting, as  she was, on my living room shelf, grinning like an idiot without a care  in the world. I was at once comforted and annoyed. It occurred to me  while I had been sitting here fuming over the fact that I couldn’t  remember what had happened to my childhood—or at least to my little red  sewing machine my mother gave me when I turned five—that perhaps Raggedy  Ann would do as a substitute comfort.

When  I turned to reach for her, there she was... smiling... waiting. In that  smile was thirty-five years of understanding, commiseration, and  empathy. It was a fortuitous moment indeed. Only old Anney could  possibly understand the torment of that particular instance of need,  that unique and urgent gasp born of dreamer’s breath.

You  see, I am the restless spawn of a myriad of turn-of-the-century  forbidden love stories adorned with secret kisses and clandestine  weddings delicately cloaked in darkness and shrouded in mist. Romeo & Juliet, Samson & Delilah:  These are the tempestuous plots that shaped my predawn. I am a great  grandchild of a coterie of hopeless romantics doomed by virtue of birth  to a life of sweet torment.

I  discovered this at thirteen. My eighth-grade class was instructed to do a  family tree of stories, a novel of sorts relating an oral map of my  heritage. I set out eagerly to find my history in the tales of those who  made me. I asked grandparents, great-uncles, and old neighbors for  stories of people I’d never met. I hunted through old trunks for clues,  finding crumpled taffeta ball gowns, forgotten photos, and a $5  honeymoon hotel receipt. A fascinating web of remarkably similar dramas  emerged: the debutante disowned for embracing (and marrying) a man  beneath her social status, the Catholic and the Protestant exiled from  the church for eloping, the rescue from war-torn Europe finding  forbidden love in the middle of the Atlantic.

And  so, I realized the day I completed that chart my fate was sealed  forever. I was a child of romance, a child of drama. Suddenly, my habit  of splashing barefoot through mud puddles in the drizzling rain didn’t  seem so odd. The somber wraith of an image emulating a faded Morton Salt  tin suited me. I liked it. I like the solitude—the image—the melancholy of it all. My peculiar penchant for gloom now took on a hopelessly and heartbreakingly romantic sheen—for that was who I was.

Raggedy  Ann smells like 1975. I was ten. She smells like summer humidity and  sand dunes and Fancy Pants, my best friend who died years later at the  ripe old age of seventeen (119 in cat years). It was she who stretched  the boundaries of my imagination far beyond the borders of the small New  Jersey farm town of my adolescence. Fancy was an adventurer seeking the  forest whenever possible, all the while bringing home exotic treasures  to deposit beneath my bed.

It  occurs to me that she never used the front door. That would never do for  the Indiana Jones of the cat world. She used my second story bedroom  window. We were adventurers together like Darwin & Fitzroy or Lewis  & Clark. Many new species of bug and rodent were discovered over  those seventeen summers. Fancy knew how to live and told me many stories  of her explorations. There’s not an inch of forest she didn’t creep nor  a single lofty branch from whose perspective she didn’t gaze across the  treetops.

I should be so lucky  to see that much of my world. And I guess that’s what I’ve been doing:  living in different countries, traveling whenever I can, settling as far  away from Jersey as possible, all the while leaving a trail of men (or  rodents, if you will) beneath my bed. It occurs to me that I’m still  trying (and succeeding) at being hopelessly, heartbreakingly melancholy.

Fleet  of foot with what appears to be my heart recklessly pinned to my  sleeve, I’ve never landed in one place long enough to take root. The sea  called to me and I answered, alighting in this new place that smells  dangerously like a home. Recently someone remarked that I seem to live  inside of a movie—that my little beach cottage and nearby village are a  dreamland, almost not real, like living a life that doesn’t exist....  That’s when I suddenly wanted my little red sewing machine.

I  almost sold it once, for seventy-five cents. Lisa Chambers and I were  playing Yard Sale selling off “old junk” and “clothes only good for Good  Will.” I brought out the sewing machine. I mean, we were just playing  right? But Lisa paid me seventy-five cents and took it home with her. I  cried for the rest of the day. When Lisa’s mom made her give it back,  Lisa was mad and we weren’t friends anymore.

I  don’t know where she is now. Nor can I remember the ultimate fate of  that miniature appliance. Suddenly that little toy stood for everything  that was permanent and solid and real. In my young imagination, my  little red friend could fix anything—and at this moment, I needed it to  fix everything.

But Raggedy Ann  is here. I think she likes my little house by the sea. Her ever-present  smile tells me so. Yet, maybe her smile hints at a peace that I don’t  yet know. She accepts her fate and is happy with what she’s got. She  just is who she is and is happy about it—sitting on her shelf all  content with the world... always smiling. The secrets behind that smile  are as seductive as the Mona Lisa.

I  wonder if she might like to come down off the shelf more often. I think  we’ll talk some—get reacquainted. I notice a small tear on her dress  that I had sewn shut when I was seven—my first official mend. Maybe she  can help mend the tear in my heart. I feel as if my chest is branded as  hers is with an “I LOVE YOU” in little red letters right in the  middle—tattooed there like a banner of affection with no one to read it.  Hers, hidden beneath the red flowered dress for years just waiting to  be rediscovered and cherished. Mine, new and raw, waiting for a gentle  hand to heal the burn. Maybe we can mend my broken heart together, and  someday someone else will discover the little red message that is there,  concealed and protected, just waiting....

Raggedy  looks very raggedy today—me too. It occurs to me that she is so raggedy  and worn because she has been so loved. She has given and received  quite a lot of adoration and twice as much hugging and clutching. I  think she will be hugged a lot more from now on. Perhaps I am growing  raggedy because I have been loved. I think so. I am wiser for having  loved and lost—maybe too many times—but wiser nonetheless. I love so  well it wears me out, leaving me a little shabbier from each experience.  Yet each fine line on my face or scar on my soul tells part of the  story of my life.

Raggedy’s got a  big brown stain right smack in the middle of that smile. It doesn’t  make her ugly—rather it endears her to me even more as that must be the  place I kissed her each night before falling asleep. Her left leg is  wrapped at the ankle in masking tape that has gone soft and translucent  over the years. Her right leg dangles—stuffing protruding at the knee  where little red stitches have given up. Her red yarn hair has frayed  soft and cozy from twisting it around my fingers in earnest  contemplation. Tattered and old and stained, she still smiles with all  the ardor and wistful vision she always has.

She  is telling me who I am just as I was beginning to forget. She whispers  to me of a life well lived that leaves traces of itself behind on my  heart and my visage. She shouts of adventures through the forest, of  breathtaking views high atop the brink of ordinary life, of a heart  broken but also well broken-in to be ready and waiting for true love  when it arrives, and finally of a unique and romantic journey that, with  a little luck, will find me stumbling upon an inner peace and  satisfaction to last a lifetime upon the shelf. She smiles at the beauty  of my life because it is mine and no one else’s, because it is  singularly magnificent and secret. I smile back at her because I know  when I tell my grandchildren the story of my life, my branch on the  family tree will be wild and twisted with extravagant colors and leaves.  And when I tell them, I will be holding Raggedy Ann, and I will be  smiling.

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AUTHOR BIO:

Actor,  earth mother and wannabe witch, Robin has been secretly writing  prodigiously since she was a child. “Tattered Heart” is the first piece  she has unveiled to the world while she builds up her courage to open  the Pandora's box. A graduate of Villanova University and a lifetime  globetrotter, she is currently more than knee deep in developing her  first novel.

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WHY WE CHOSE TO PUBLISH “Tattered Heart”

We  discovered this piece not as a submission to the magazine, but among   the stories posted in the workshop at the Silver Pen Writers site  (www.silverpenwriters.org), where we have found a number of others  pieces we’ve published. We  liked how author Robin Lange took the adult  narrator back to her  childhood to re-experience and relearn the lessons  of one’s youth. A  strong character and a well-written resonant story are  a recipe for a  successful piece for us.