Tiffany Midge’s previous work for The Butter can be found here.
(2004) I’ve been saving newspaper clippings, curious human interest stories to inspire my writing efforts. A cache of yellowed newsprint lies in a small pile:
Woman charged with death of overfed toddler
Man married twenty-nine times will have funeral
Mermaid girl to have legs split
One clipping holds particular interest for me: Mother’s coma ends after sixteen years. The woman resurrected from her coma is from my tribe, Standing Rock Sioux. She emerged from her sixteen-year sleep on Christmas Eve!—and her nickname was “Happy,” which makes me think of The Seven Dwarfs, which makes me think of another Disney icon, Sleeping Beauty, a more apt attribution.
(2014) My headlines collection today is harvested from mostly Facebook newsfeeds:
The day my pastor claimed gay people are possessed by fart demons that can drive pigs to suicide
Charles Manson’s wedding canceled—bride ‘just wanted his corpse’ to make money
Idaho Lawmaker wonders if women could have gyno exam by swallowing a little camera
Years ago, in the early ’80s, I watched a TV movie starring Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched. The movie was about a woman who emerged from a coma after over a decade. Her readjustment from being a popular high school cheerleader to being poised on the edge of middle age met with harrowing challenges. A handsome high school basketball coach fell in love with her, and after much aggressive pursuit to break down the barriers of her “teenage” shyness — culminating in the literal breaking-down of her door, yelling “Love me!” — she finally submitted. These days there’d be a twelve-step group for what the basketball coach was inflicted with, not to mention a restraining order.
Pastor claims women are penis homes and men’s penises belong to god
(1984) My Aunt Carlotta suffered a brain aneurysm and never woke up. She’d always been active and in good health. She and her husband had just adopted a little boy; she sent us pictures. And then abruptly—silence. For nearly two decades she slept, wasted away, slept, growing thinner and thinner, sleeping and sleeping in a convalescent home outside Glasgow, Montana. Her husband remarried. Her little boy grew up and married. Relatives passed away. Presidents served out their terms, were reelected, served out those terms. More headlines: The Berlin wall fell. The U.N. declared war in the Middle East. Waco. O.J. Simpson. Oklahoma City Terrorism. Cloned sheep. First Black President. My aunt slept. And slept.
Practical help for the demon-possessed: Vatican rolls out new exorcism course
Some thought my aunt was the victim of Indian witchery. A jealous enemy, perhaps. An imagined trespass, or a real trespass. I don’t know that I believe in those things. I don’t know if I even believe in ghosts. Believing might only allow such things to surface. Once I wished out loud for a woman to be dead and the next year she died, her body blooming with tumors. She was my boyfriend’s old lover, a kindled old flame, and was a catalyst for the breakup of his marriage, a wedge in his relationships that followed. Like with me. I was not the only woman in his life who seethed with jealousy.
Woman in sumo wrestler suit assaults ex-girlfriend in gay pub after she waved at man dressed as Snickers bar
(1960) My father had dated my aunt Carlotta before he met and married my mother. Carlotta was my mother’s sister-in-law. It was less than a year after my mother’s husband died that my mother married my father—her sister-in-law’s ex-lover. I wish I knew why my dad and Carlotta broke up. I don’t know if there was any animosity between my mother and Carlotta; they always seemed to be good friends. But you never know. It is easy to become confused about these things.
Students cook and serve grandparents
(1961) My mother’s best friend in Havre, Montana — Arlene — was stricken with a troubled marriage. Maybe stricken is the wrong word, it wasn’t like getting the flu, but then again maybe a troubled marriage is like getting the flu. If I can wish someone dead, certainly someone else could catch a bad marriage, that marital virus that’s going around, maybe even a hex. Arlene’s husband stalked her whenever she went out. He thought she was running around on him. Roy stowed away in the trunk of her Riviera and she caught him when she went to put groceries in the trunk. On another night my mother dropped by to visit with Arlene, and as she was getting out of her car to walk up to the house she discovered Roy perched twelve feet high in the branches of a tree spying on his wife.
Man with nothing to declare has 55 tortoises in his pants
(1972) The Lakota word for horse is sunka wakan, which translates to “sacred” or “mystery,” wakan, and sunka, meaning “dog.” The Sioux are a horse culture, and the horse is highly revered, a spiritual being. I suppose my father didn’t take this into account — the fact that my mother was Lakota and raised on a reservation in Eastern Montana — when he brought home what looked like a gift and presented it to my mother. It was a package wrapped in brown butcher paper and tied off with white string. Words were exchanged between my parents, voices raised, some alarm, and then my mother rushing from the kitchen in tears. My father calmly pulling out a fry pan, unwrapping the meat from its brown paper, and cooking it like it was any other.
PETA suggests Washington Redskins keep controversial name, change logo to potato
(1973) I learned of death’s paradoxes when I was six—how acts of violence are sometimes demonstrations of mercy, even love. Along a Pacific beach, he found a wounded mallard and applied an axe to end its suffering. From flight and prey to a naturalist’s specimen, the mallard submitted to an inexact science—one of air and wind, one of pressure and temperature, one of sand and ocean salt. Among the viscera and ruins my father indicated the transparent bubble, this is how it floats. A fretwork of shadow and light, the blood mirrored the portentous reading of clouds, a swirl of lines and curves from where a song begins.
Emotional support pig kicked off flight for being disruptive
(1982) The last time I ever saw Jeff alive, he gave me a gift—an hourglass. And it took over two decades later for the symbolism to finally dawn on me: an hourglass, gifted from a young man with one foot planted in the next world. His time was running out. Even the hourglass he gifted me appeared to have been stolen, I imagine from the desktop of one of the school classrooms he was hired to clean. Not borrowed time, but stolen.
Old man, 98, wins lottery, dies next day
Agoraphobic grandma finally leaves home, immediately falls down manhole
(1998) “When were these photos taken?” I ask my mother. We are removing items from her dresser drawers, taking inventory to prepare for the day she will die. She has lung cancer. I hold up the black and white photos for her to see. I have never seen these before. There are three pictures, all taken in the same location, some isolated forest road. She looks gorgeous, disheveled, dreamy. They are from an earlier era, the ’70s, taken when I was still very small, when I lived with both of my parents, my sister and my grandfather. The photos were taken by her lover, a man my mother admits was a close friend of our family. I barely remember him. She hid the pictures away for years.
The Eagle has landed, two men walk on the moon
Chronicles of an Affair with his Secretary, Found in an Abandoned Suitcase
Lana Turner’s daughter fatally stabs her mother’s lover
