The Flag. A small act of defiance.

A piece of short fiction, originally published in The East Hampton Star, July 19, 2012. It's seems pertinent right now.

Image: Shital Morjaria, @shitalmorjaria

One morning that February Mrs. Murphy walked onto her porch and took the flag off the flagpole attached to their house. She folded it in thirds, draped it over her arm, and carried it inside.

“Yes,” she nodded to Mr. Murphy in the living room,“the attic.” He couldn’t hear exactly what she said, but got the general idea through her gestures.

The Murphys lived at the corner of Cedar and Osborne, in a small square house built for them a year after their marriage. The cedar board siding was stained a gray you didn’t notice until the greens of summer surrounded it, bringing forth latent blues. It looked extremely well in the snow, Mrs. Murphy thought, when its crisp white trim caught the winter light. Their small high lot overlooked Osborne from the front, and from the steeper side onto Cedar Street. Over the years it became busier and busier with car traffic. One day it was suddenly a two-way street with a yellow line down the middle. Mr. Murphy’s hearing had grown steadily worse over time, so he couldn’t say he noticed such a difference, but Mrs. Murphy never turned the car onto Cedar anymore. She always took Osborne into town.

By the fourth of July the flag was forgotten. Mrs. Murphy was concerned about how to get up and down to do her gardening, as there was always weeding to be done. It was already very hot when she got back from the store in the late morning. She tooted the car horn so that Mr. Murphy could stand at the door and watch her from the porch. This was the deal they had struck in the winter when the ice was treacherous and Mr. Murphy feared she would fall in her quiet way and freeze to death, right there in the drive.

She took the grocery bags and headed up the walk when she saw the flag hanging from the pole. It stood out so loudly, clashing against the gray of the house. This was the brightest one she had ever seen. Or, were they making them brighter these days? The reds were so deeply, shockingly red and the whites were much whiter than normal. It looked unnatural to her in the heat. like an apparition, swaying lightly in the breeze, its brightness and coldness a contrast to July’s golden haze. It also looked like an advertisement, but she couldn’t say for what. When she looked back up Osborne she saw that all the houses on both sides of the street had their flags out. She must have known this, still, the symmetry made her anxious. It reminded her of those three-way dressing room mirrors when she was a child. The thick glass captured you each way you turned, multiplying you, swallowing you forever into deep infinity.

When Mr. Murphy called she turned her head sharply. She could just see his dark outline behind the screen door, hands on his hips, his elbows jutting oddly out. Closer, she saw his large grin through the faint metal weave. She didn’t speak, as was her custom, until she put the grocery bags down on the kitchen counter.

“Well,” she said to him, with all the hopefulness she could muster.

Their son-in-law, Roy, had brought the flag by while she was out, and had hung it himself because they couldn’t very well have an empty flag pole on the Fourth of July. She unpacked the groceries and then folded the paper bags at their creases, and stored them in their cupboard, careful not to meet his gaze.

After dinner Mr. Murphy moved the old electric fans into the bedroom for her. Their metal blades coursed across the imperfections in the grills, creating a familiar repetitive tempo. She took barefoot steps out of the side door and into the fenced yard at the back of the house. She sat under a close sky, falling slowly toward black. Small pinpricks of stark white appeared on the night backdrop, the first sharp explosions of the rockets firing from the ocean beach. She felt the deep thumping of the giant drum that shot trails of light in red, blue and sparkling, spangling gold into the air. After the last round of explosions she sat with her head hung back on her chair, waiting for the silence, for the firmament to reassemble its dense ink and take back the heat from the earth. She wished that each in their beds, no matter where, might sleep safe that night.

Inside Mr. Murphy dozed in his chair in front of the TV, and she had a pang for the days when television went off the air at night. In the bedroom the fans only moved the heat around, shuddering and clacking at the end of each oscillation. She turned from side to side on the bed, letting the air from the fan cool her hip where her nightgown had stuck, then turning to cool the other side. When the sky grew light enough for her to see she moved through the living room past Mr. Murphy and opened the front door. She looked down Osborne, and again on every porch saw the familiar colors and felt a stab of pain just under her heart. She was astonished to find that she was angry. Her pulse was racing, and her heart beat like a drum inside of her. With her back toward the street she quickly slipped the flag off the pole, folded it neatly over her arm, and carried it inside.

In the middle of the attic she could just stand upright under the roof peak before the walls on either side pitched sharply down. The smell of freshly sawn wood still remained in this untraveled room. The morning sun was making its way through small holes where the roof joined, the last traces of blue from the disappearing night. She lifted the blankets out of the cedar chest and put the new flag on top of the old one at the bottom. She replaced the blankets, patting them firmly down. She closed the lid, and dusty or not, sat on the top. Suddenly morning heat was jungle heat. The thick air spread an inscrutable layer of moisture onto her skin and thin nightgown.

In another place, or another house, just as different from this one as this one was the same every day, there was the possibility that her son was alive. No one else knew this. If he was somewhere else, then he could be anywhere, and if so, then he could be here, or in a house just like it, with glass knobs on the doors that jangled lightly when a body came down the stairs. The days were still the same no matter where you were. The sun started its climb in the mornings and sank slowly from view at night. Only, outside his windows there would be hardly any sky. Vines might hang, tangled in front of the windows, blotting out most of the sun, filtering its rays down through towers of trees into a cooler, liquid green at the bottom. Monkeys could skitter up and down, their chatter a comfort to him maybe.

She did know there was a possibility that he might never return, but thirty years of waiting had carved an ache that rose and fell inside her breath, and even pulsed in the intricate tributaries of her bloodstream. It was capable of hiding itself in the house, waiting for her in cupboards or high shelves, old boxes, or in this attic, which itself was only another large empty cupboard. She lay on her back on the floor with her hands folded carefully across her breasts. No. She was sure there wasn’t anything that could make his absence easier. Not even this age of everyday disasters could blunt his vanishing, not even planes crashing deliberately into buildings, or people just two hours away jumping, burning into the streets.

Suddenly there were flags everywhere. They were painted on the sides of barns, some strapped to roofs, or taped to cars. Big flags. And little ones stuck into car antennas. They were on every T-shirt. Every TV commercial and every shop window had a flag. She was sure she didn’t feel the way she was supposed to feel. Then she felt worse and worse. She could not place this response. Last week she sat on the edge of her bed and tried to cry, but no tears came. Had she woken up to find herself somewhere else, lost in a place that looked just like this one? She couldn’t ask Mr. Murphy.

The shouts from downstairs jolted her out of a deep sleep she didn’t think possible on the bare attic floor. She had agreed to feed Cynthia, Roy, and the boys lunch before they went to the beach. She patted her hair and clothes down, as if she had been engaged in something illicit, and carefully descended the narrow attic stairs. As she pulled jars and bottles out of the fridge she noticed how loud everything was. Cynthia’s boys shouted above everything to be heard. She hadn’t brought up Cynthia this way. And the children’s clothes were loud. Oranges and Day-Glo greens, and of course, the inevitable red, white, and blue of the flag on stickers stuck to their beach buckets, woven into their sweaters, even in the rubber design at the bottom of their sandals, everything advertising itself to itself.

“What are you doing, Mother? We brought food.”

Is that how they had left it?

Her daughter hastily unpacked grocery bags filled with cold cuts and tubs of coleslaw and potato salad. She held cartons of ice cream aloft as the boys begged and squealed at her feet. Summer food, Mrs. Murphy thought. Her daughter couldn’t really find the time to cook. There was a commotion on the porch. The screen door slammed and she could hear Roy’s voice, louder of course than Mr. Murphy’s. The boys rushed out, running under her feet, their voices rising in volume until Mrs. Murphy thought she might fall down.

“Grandma! There’s no flag!” the boys screamed breathlessly.

She swung the kitchen door back and saw Mr. Murphy standing uneasily, resting his hand against the front doorjamb. Roy stood beside him with a suspicious look in his eyes.

“I think we should eat,” Mrs. Murphy tried.

“Roy wants to know about the flag, Mom,” Cynthia said matter-of-factly.

“Did you notice that it’s missing?” Roy said sharply.

“I did. Yes.”

Mrs. Murphy widened her eyes as if in surprise while she spooned potato salad onto plates.

“I don’t want any of that!” the youngest boy, Anthony, screamed. “I don’t want any!”

“Because,” Roy continued, “it took some trouble to find it on a holiday weekend, and it cost some money.”

“Roy-” Cynthia began.

“No,” he continued. “This is weird. Nobody else on the street took their flags down. I just want to know.”

Mrs. Murphy shot a glance toward Mr. Murphy, but was saved from explanation by the boys, who screamed and tugged at their fathers shirt before running back onto the porch.

“It’s stolen! Somebody stole grandma’s flag! It’s stolen!”

Roy’s face fell. “Is that what happened?”

“Is that what happened, Mother?” Cynthia looked at her awkwardly.

“I guess that’s what could have happened,” Mrs. Murphy replied.

In bed that night Roy told Cynthia that anyone who would steal an American flag had better think twice about it because it wasn’t just what they had done to a poor old woman, but what it symbolized, and at a time like this when the hurts were so deep still. he couldn’t believe that someone, even a common criminal, or a kid, even a kid, could be so thoughtless. And just to think of Mrs. Murphy’s empty flagpole made him angry, and not just on the face of it, but deep inside, he said patting his chest, a deep sorrow for people in general, especially American people in general, and this kind of thing couldn’t be taken lying down. This was just the kind of thing that caused other things to happen, and he wasn’t going to just let it go by. This was just the kind of thing that should be reported to the police.

When Lieutenant Watt came to the door Mrs. Murphy kept to the back of the house. She heard Mr. Murphy say, “Yes, Sir.” And then “No, Sir. No one saw a thing.”

On Thursday Cynthia called to tell her mother that she’d made it into the police logs.

“That’s your fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes?” Mrs. Murphy asked.

“Mother, your fifteen minutes of fame.”

Roy and Cynthia insisted that the Murphy’s start locking their doors at night. Roy said they were “living in a fool’s paradise.” And Cynthia said “It only takes a minute, Mother.” Actually the Murphy’s had lost track of their front door key long ago. They hadn’t needed one since they hadn’t gone away as long as he could remember. Besides, what was there to steal? Mrs. Murphy bolted the doors from the inside at night. She didn’t tell Cynthia about the keys.

That night the Murphy’s sat on chairs on their front porch and watched the night draw in. If you closed your eyes the intermittent rush of cars on Cedar Street sounded like the ocean, rising and ebbing, less than a mile to the south. Mr. Murphy pushed himself out of his chair and steadied himself against her shoulder before he made the steps into the living room for the news. She could hear shouting even from the porch. There were crowds of thousands sometimes shouting in languages she didn’t understand, waving flags she didn’t recognize. She was sure there wasn’t anyone anywhere in the world that didn’t recognize their flag. Even cave dwellers in the most remote place on earth would know full well what it meant.

She didn’t have to be a part of something so big - did she? Mr. Murphy might have thought she was getting old if she asked him if he felt the same panic that she felt. If she asked him if he saw that the flag was being multiplied over and over. Did he see that the message was so diluted now that people had to say it more and more, brighter and brighter, and louder and louder? After all, they knew where they lived, so who was everyone telling!?! That’s what she would ask if she could.

When she rose to go in it was almost nine o’clock, but the last rays of orange light were still glimmering across the wood floor that she waxed and polished twice a year. No one else knew that Mrs. Murphy lived inside her house as though it were a portal, the one and only place where it might be possible for her son to enter back into her world. There was no need to tell anyone. But would he remember? Or had it been beaten out of him? How would she even recognize him if he came to the door? Sometimes she polished things so hard, the dark walnut of the dining room table for instance, that she might have been genie rubbing a lamp, asking for her wishes back. To be taken back to a place when she hadn’t used them up on silly things - that his team win the baseball game, that he be the first swimmer to touch the cement edge of the pool, that his first love, small, dark Sheila, might accept his invitation to the prom. All these wishes had been granted, used up before she knew she might need the power of all of them combined.

Before she turned off the TV a commercial seemed especially important, and she sat down to watch. A family was lit up inside of their their house, safe under an island of golden light, while outside it was vast and dark. On this night, which was must have always been the same night, little blonde children were baking in the kitchen with their mother. Father was absent, wasn’t he? The camera saw them from the outside the window where there was only darkness beyond. Suddenly a shady face emerged, and the camera movement became jerky and frightening. Then a shadowy arm came out of nothingness holding an iron bar. He was trying to break in! An alarm shrieked, and the impossible sound was everywhere, a visible and pulsing thing, and underneath it the children ran to their mother, and she clasped them to her breast under a lone ring of light. The phone rang and it was the men who put in the alarm system! Was everything alright, they asked? Now there was silence. The camera moved in slowly, showing her face distorted by fear, still clutching her children around her. No! she cried, they are trying to break into our house!

It was all out of proportion, Mrs. Murphy thought, as she turned off the set. “What are they advertising?” she said out loud, even though she knew what they were advertising perfectly well. She wondered if she was ever this woman, who didn’t know yet that the wolves were always at the door, and that nothing you could do would matter, certainly not locking them out, or bolting yourself in. There wasn’t anything more that could be taken away from her now that hadn’t been taken already. On her way to bed she visited each door and left them unlocked. First fall would come. Then winter. And then spring. That was the only thing of which she was convinced.

That following winter there were stretches of days when it was well below freezing, and the sky was a blank sheet of white. She would have been happy for snow even, something besides the static of the sky. But in late February the light spilled through the windows in ways having little to do with winter, and the birds sounded on mornings when the temperature climbed. When Mrs. Murphy drove to town she squinted until the branches on the trees were black etchings against the gray sky. In their clamoring and tangled silhouettes she was certain she saw tiny dark bumps. The beginnings of buds!

At night, in the windowless, sutured attic, her house was a ship at sea, floating seamlessly over whole continents, bobbing in squalls, roof rafters and floorboards creaking under the strain of wandering. No papers were required however. No one else saw. The house had moored itself by morning. Blue new light staking it again into the ground.

She woke with a start one morning while it was still dark. The flag was made by a person. She lay on her back in bed, and stared up at the dark creases where the walls met the ceiling. Her breath came in shallow gulps. The flag was made by a person. She put on her slippers and robe silently, and took the stairs down into the living room and then further down into the basement. When she pulled the chain on the overhead light the bulb swung slowly, illuminating first Mr. Murphy’s workshop on one side, his workbench a still life with tools hanging unused in neat rows, and on the other side her sewing area with everything as she had left it - how many years ago? She was wide awake, more than she ever was in the middle of the day.

She stood on a chair and lifted the topmost box down from the metal shelves. Always start at the top, her mother had taught her, back in a time when cleaning house was a real job that required the passing down of secrets, such as left to right, and top to bottom. She pulled down her box of scraps, and unfolded a favorite old sheet, holding it wide with her hands across her body. No one used this pattern anymore, large flowers crowding each other, repeated in violets and blues, swarming over yellows. It hung wet on a line when she was a girl, and she had run into it to feel the cool damp fabric slapping against her face.

She sat down and untied the stiff cord wrapped around the base of the machine. She plugged it into the socket under her feet, and when she pushed the foot pedal it purred in the pleasure of being used. Her tears surprised her as they landed on her cheeks. She hadn’t cried in so long. She thought they should have a color after all these years, be brownish or rusty, and be capable of staining whatever they came into contact with. Now she caught them in her hands, hot and transparent. They tasted right, and salty in her mouth.

She climbed the attic stairs, lifted the flag out and laid it down on the attic floor while she measured it, and then replaced it in the trunk. Downstairs she spread her flowered sheet onto the sewing table. The cutting shears were sticky and slow from years of disuse and Mrs. Murphy’s wrist was not what it had been; even so she managed the cutting to her measurements. She sewed a two-inch hem around the square of the floral sheet and then a stitch an inch or two from one edge that would serve as a loop to slide it onto the pole.

Her fingers trembled as she slid it into place. She was sure some of the neighbors slowed down as they went by, but no one shouted or honked. She was worried that she might even be arrested for such a subversive act, but no police came to the door. Cynthia and Roy gave her cool looks as they came in, but they didn’t mention it during dinner. While she dried the dishes she heard them hushing the boys in the living room and she heard Cynthia shout.

“Yes! All right!”

Mrs. Murphy moved to the swinging kitchen door and put her eye to the crack.

“Is this the beginning of senility?” Roy said sharply.

“I don’t know what it is,” Cynthia said softly.

“That’s not a flag!” one of the boys yelled as he danced across the living room.

She saw Mr. Murphy rise from his recliner and open the door to the front porch.

“So what!?” Cynthia was angry, raising her hands and letting them slap against her sides. “Is it a federal offense? My mother lives in a different place - so what?!”

“Another country!” Roy shot back.

Mrs. Murphy saw her husband’s back shudder as he braced himself in the doorway. He let out a great hollow chuckle. She smiled. This was his signature sound. She hadn’t heard that strange, spontaneous bellow for what seemed like a hundred years.