The Grieving Woman

TODAY, I SAW A SOUL, first hand, being ripped and shredded from the breast of another human being.

I watched from my closed screen door.

For fifteen minutes I ogled a young lady, a half block down and across the street, sitting on the curb, knees spread, reading from something — from my angle and the lighting, it could have been her iPhone (but no, it was larger), an iPad, perhaps — and I swear, I could detect the first stages of the fraying of her soul!

Bear with me. It’s important that I retrace for you what signal event could have been so urgent to have sprung me up from my writing desk and to the screened door at 7:30 in the morning.

See, you need to know, I sanctify the first three hours of my day, from seven to ten. Why else would I drag myself out of bed at 6:45, if it weren’t to attend a ceremony?

It’s when I write.

It’s the moment I call on my Muse at 7 AM; I expect her to be here — and generally, she is. She’s here with all her senses at the ready and tingling with the magic she’s about to release. When she’s in her groove, truly, I am here but for three hours of dictation.

Groove or not, at 10 o’clock sharp, by arrangement, my muse leaves, and I drag my spiritually desiccated carcass to the kitchen for my much-needed nourishment.

What catapulted me from my chair this morning was my dog Serius’ barking. Serius has the most annoying bark in the world. Loud. Off-key. Grating. My Muse shuts down at the first sound of it. Usually Serius stops when I scream at him, but this morning he continued on. It was, as I said, 7:30.

Ours is a quiet neighborhood — save for the street that fronts my house, with its almost steady hum and occasional honk of cars going to and from Bakersfield Community College, a mile away. Mostly retired people, who had settled in back when the college had a couple of thousand students, still live here. Good people. Deeply rooted in a relatively rootless time. I didn’t want Serius’ barking to disturb my sleeping neighbors at this hour.

I went to the door to see what he was barking at.

It was at that moment I saw her. A young adult. She couldn’t have been more than in her mid-twenties. And I heard her. Was she talking to herself? If so, it wasn’t a private conversation. She was very loud. In fact, I was surprised that some of the neighbors didn’t come, droopy-eyed to their bedroom windows or stumbling to their doors.

I figure the young lady must have been reading from whatever she was holding between her spread knees. And she didn’t care who listened. Suddenly she stopped in the middle of her reading, and said a simple, “No.” She mumbled a few more words and then, “No!” a second time, louder. And then several more times, machine-gunning it, “No, no, no!”

I shifted my angle at my screened security door to get a better view.

She began punctuating her “no's” by slamming her right fist into the top of the curbing, and her no’s started sounding more like a chant, then a wail, “No-no-no-no-no!” — all run together, like that.

Still, no neighbors came from the doors of their houses to see what the ruckus was, to see if she needed help. I could see no window curtains pulled aside to watch. Ours is a busy street, yet none of the cars, whizzing by, slowed down to see if something was amiss.

It was at that moment, with her pounding her fists (which had to hurt) and shouting “no-no-no-no-no” loudly enough to be heard, probably a block away, that it first dawned on me that … maybe I should, perhaps, venture out, down the stairs to the street, and across it, to see if I could comfort her.

Now, I’m not proud of my thought processes at that time, or later. Or now, for that matter, as I’m writing this. As she shifted from her fist pounding to the most mournful wailing I’d heard in recent times, and rocking into her open knees and back, and now sobbing, I questioned myself about whether she could be a street person.

Should that make a difference? I asked myself. She’s a human being in pain! She’s suffering the throes of hell, and you’re up here, in the comfort of your robe, wondering if she’s a street person!

Still, over the course of years, I’d watched the parade of drugged-out street people, cascading up and down my street, cursing, pissing on the curbside bushes, gesticulating wildly, one fellow throwing punches at the ghost-people who left his brain long enough to flick at his ears or try to trip him.

Sad, sick people — all of them. Daily. I see them daily.

I took note of the alleyway, not ten feet to this desperate young lady’s left — an alley that goes back between a concrete wall on one side and bushes on the other. I watched the news the other night about some guy who’d grabbed a school girl, dragged her up that same alley, and raped her, there in the bushes, off from the street. He could have killed her, but he left her to stumble back home while he ran away. The police were investigating whether it might have been connected with the rape of another student in Bakersfield Community College. Same in-the-bushes M.O.

Now I sensed where my mind was taking me. I could feel the gears turning in the scenario it was creating to buffer my reasons for not going to her.

If I were to have gone across the street, dressed in my robe and pajamas, sat down beside her and said, “Is there anything I can do, dear?” Would she have spat in my face? Would she have seen me as the parent she was reading about, pulled out a knife from beside her and stabbed me — me, dead! And just because I cared?

These were things racing through my mind. I’m sorry, reader. I’m sorry I wasn’t your Hollywood hero-type.

And while I berated myself for not being Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, her sobbing was taken over by, “Whyyyyyy… Whyyyyyy… Whyyyyyy!”

Meanwhile, I was upping the ante to my guilt by imagining her getting to her feet, timing the approach of a car, then throwing her body under the wheels.

It was then I asked myself if I could live with the image of that looping through my brain the rest of my life.

What should I do? What should a caring human being do?

I gave one long, last look at her, pulled back from the wooden door I closed, flush against the screened one, double latched it, and returned to the safety of my computer.

Of course, my muse, the old gal who had aged with me over the years, was gone. She’d vanished, and she had taken with her, the fifteen-minutes of writing time I’d never — never get back.

As I sat there, staring foolishly at the unyielding screen, the seven-line poem I had published last year, kept running through my mind:

The Windows We Close¹

I saw
enough to grieve his fall
then drew the blinds
and latched the door
and proved to myself
it was I

who fell.

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¹Published in The Howling Owl, May 22, 2024