She finds a seat by the fireplace, bobs her head to the music, and enjoys the over-priced drink of the day. A few more people sit by the fireplace and she wonders if they’d like her seat, but she likes her seat so she doesn’t move. In her twenties, she would have carried a book or a notebook. In her sixties, the thought of hauling out her phone to look preoccupied is upsetting.
The people next to her seem to have come from seeing a movie. They interrupt each other, highlighting the plot, the facial expressions, the music, the final scenes. She realizes she has seen the film, laughs a bit, then leans over to add her own two cent’s worth. Someone tells her to pull her chair over and join them. She can’t believe her luck.
They exchange names. Talk about ticks while out hiking, careless drivers while biking, and someone recognizes her as the woman he sees walking the cute dog all over town. “They look just alike,” he laughs. His friends look momentarily embarrassed. “No, really. The dog wears this pink harness, and is this cute white furry creature, and I remember you wearing a matching pink coat.”
“That isn’t deliberate,” she mutters. “I mean, the coat. Well, the hair, well, that just happens.” They laugh and they include her drink with their next round.
“I love your white hair,” Maura coos. “I wish my mom would quit dying hers.”
Just like that, she no longer feels as if she’s in her twenties, remembering when she’d head out of the bar with a young man looking for a late-night breakfast diner, an invite to one or the other’s apartment, a long walk through town. Then she returns to the present, back to her sixties, and a new but old Cowboy Junkies song plays, and she says, “I love ‘Don’t Let it Bring you Down.’ I can’t believe this is the Cowboy Junkies.”
“You are so old school!” Maura holds her glass for a toast: “To the old school!”
To the old school, she thinks, the day no longer feeling so grey.
Author's Comment
“A Temporary Guest” was taken from a current work in progress.
Randa Jo Downs’ childhood in Texas was a dichotomy of innocence and darkness. A haunting family secret lurked among her love for dancing, the escape of her vibrant imagination, and summer days spent swimming in rivers. While father-daughter incest is not an uncommon crime, it is veiled in secrecy and shame.
Comfort, Texas is a poignant memoir that explores why Downs’ father hurt his family beyond measure and why her mother did not protect her. It is a testament to the resilience of one spirit and the transformative power of using storytelling to understand and reclaim her childhood. Downs emerges not only as a survivor, but as a fierce lesbian feminist, theater artist, and child welfare advocate.
Downs dissects the crime of incest with a sharp blade. She examines a compelling body of work on the history of father-daughter incest in America and discovers a shocking betrayal of women and children going back generations. The psychoanalytic and legal professions depicted girls and women as unreliable narrators of their pain and trauma and only out to make trouble for their abusers. Downs joins the voices of second-wave feminism in challenging those cruel beliefs.
Her stories and essays will deeply resonate with other survivors and the people who care about them.
Available from Barnes and Noble.
For more information, visit the author’s website
Diane Payne’s most recent and forthcoming publications include: Best of Microfiction 2022, Quarterly West, Cutleaf, Miramachi Flash, Microlit Almanac, Spry Literary Journal, Another Chicago Magazine, Whale Road Review, Fourth River, Pine Hills Review, Tiny Spoon, Ellipsis, Bending Genres, New York Times, Unlikely Stories, Hot Flash Fiction, The Blue Nib, anti-heroin chic, X-ray Literary Magazine, Oyster Review, Novus, Notre Dame Review, Obra/Artiface, Reservoir, Southern Fugitives, Watershed Review, Superstition Review, Windmill Review, Tishman Review, Whiskey Island, Lunch Ticket, Split Lip Review, The Offing, Elke: A little Journal, Punctuate, Outpost 19, Abandon Journal, McNeese Review, The Meadow, Burnt Pine, Story South, and Five to One. 
Marilyn Whitehorse describes her layered life: "In the topside world, I teach academic writing to people who are learning English at Kapiolani Community College in Honolulu, Hawaii. In the river that flows beneath I am a writer, photographer and collage artist."