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February 6, 2020
Flash Dancers: Ekphrastic Singles - "Mary’s Dress Waves" by Kathryn Kulpa
The Flash Dancers: Ekphrastic Singles series is curated by Meg Pokrass. Authors pair an original work of flash fiction with a song.
Mary’s Dress Waves by Kathryn Kulpa (after "Thunder Road")
I used to dream of being kidnapped. I would be drooping in my molded plastic desk/chair, drawing lightning bolts and three-dimensional boxes in my notebook. The door of Mrs. Casey’s sixth-grade classroom would slam open and he would scan the room for a hostage and I, only I, would meet his gaze: defiant, unafraid. “You,” he would say, and I would stand, walk away. Chosen. He would be some desperate criminal who was really just misunderstood, and we would fall in love. And then someday—I would be rescued, safe, back in my normal life—he would come back for me. Not that I would have to go. But I would be in church or something. And he would have the car door open. I would realize that this time it would be forever. I would be leaving it all behind. Friends, family, school: no going back. And I would get in that car.
I’m waiting for someone, I would write in my teenage journal. Who am I waiting for?
It feels like I’ve been waiting all my life.
A saxophone sounds like yearning. Like the Portuguese word saudade. Nostalgia for a past that was never mine, that I still want to return to.
In this dream it’s always summer. In this dream it’s always dusk. Shadows fall across the porch. A mourning dove coos its fading cry: Who-WHOO-who-who. Singing for the lonely. For the girls like me, not beauties, but maybe we could be all right.
She left all the safe and walked-in paths. She threw away the easy life, the expected life. She did it for love.
Would they say that about me? Would they believe it?
I knew that I would climb in that car. Over and over again. For love or something more than love. It wasn’t love but desire. Desire not only for the man who would take me there but for every place I would go I hadn’t been before, everything I would do that I hadn’t yet done.
Author's note: "Thunder Road" is a song about hope, about waiting for dreams to come true. The music builds, rolling like a pot on the edge of full boil. Waiting for the triumphant release of a chorus that never quite comes. This is the song that breaks all the rules of a pop song, a song that was never a hit but still was everywhere, somehow, there to be discovered when you needed it most. Like a voice outside your bedroom window at night. A dream of freedom. A promise of escape.
Kathryn Kulpa is a writer and editor with work published in JMWW, Pithead Chapel, Smokelong Quarterly, Women's Studies Quarterly, and other journals. She was a winner of the Vella Chapbook Contest for her flash chapbook Girls on Film. Three of her microfiction stories were selected by Michael Martone for Best Microfiction 2020. She was born in a small state, and she writes short stories.
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