MOONCALF - Published

by Linda L. Zern

(click on the above link to download or order a copy for your family at Amazon.com)

Children are born loving. They must be taught to hate. 

A juvenile fiction novella set in the rural countryside of 1966 Florida.

Tribute in Hot Wax

When I was a girl growing up in the liberated seventies after the radical sixties, we were told that true freedom consisted of two things: 1) letting it all hang out after burning your bra and 2) going natural after losing your safety razor. 

After all, men didn’t have to wear restrictive, tight whalebone corset stays . . . er . . . um . . . I mean they didn’t have to wear over the shoulder boulder holders, and men got to have hairy wildebeests legs, so women should get to have hairy wildebeest legs too. 

We called it liberation. Mostly it was just droopy and hairy.

Still . . . it was kind of interesting to think that women might be more than the sum of their . . . er . . . um . . . parts, even if they had to be hairy to do it. It was interesting. 

For a day or two.

Now it’s bizarre uses for hot wax.

Please be advised that the names have been changed to protect my daughters who are going on a cruise and feel the need to render their bodies as hairless as newborn rats.

“But why?”





“Because everyone is doing it,” one unnamed daughter argued.

“Always a great reason to do anything,” I countered.

She then demonstrated the proper position to assume when having hot wax poured over your . . . er . . . um . . . less than hairless bits, followed by her pantomiming a violent ripping motion. She then acted out the resulting screaming, throwing her legs over her head, crossing her eyes, and passing out.

My other nameless daughter sighed and said, “I didn’t use hot wax. I tried those wax strippy things.”

“Have you lost your . . .”

She cut me off, frowning.

“They didn’t work very well. I now look like a well loved teddy bear.”

“Good grief. You turned yourself into the velveteen rabbit before it winds up on the rubbish heap,” I said with a hand on my . . . er . . . 
um . . . heart.

“Pretty much.”

“What happened to the bra burning, boob drooping, hairy legged, proud momma, caftan wearing women of my youth?”

“They got a special deal on a Caribbean cruise.”

Right. That’ll do it.

Linda (All Natural) Zern

Accident Monger

My husband hasn’t worn a wedding ring since the emergency room folks had to hacksaw it off. He was wrestling with some teenagers in a swimming pool. They broke his ring finger.

“You boys better settle down before someone gets hurt,” I remember saying.

My husband hasn’t had the full use of his right knee since he hopped over a fence trying to help our neighbor catch his escaping bull.  His ACL detached, causing his leg to dangle loosely—my husband’s ACL, not the bull’s.

“Sherwood, maybe you should try opening the gate first?” I remember yelling.

My husband ‘s knuckle is scarred where he rammed a loose prong of field fence into his hand. He was loading a roll of field fence onto our truck at Tractor Supply. When he showed me his gushing wound and asked me if he thought he should get stitches I said, “It has been my experience that when you can see the stuff that’s supposed to be on the inside of your skin from the outside, you’re going to need stitches.”

“Babe, you should probably put your work gloves on,” I remember warning.

A couple weeks ago, my husband slunk out of our bedroom into the foggy morning to play racquetball with several younger, sprier men.

I said, “Don’t go. But if you go, don’t fling yourself around like a twenty year old. If you do fling yourself around like a twenty year old, make sure you have someone to drive you to the emergency room, because I’m not doing it. I have things to do today.” He scoffed at my scorn.

Later that day my husband came home from racquetball and worked on the duck pen, fed the animals, and mowed the front pasture—with a potentially BROKEN wrist. He refused to tell me he had fallen while flinging himself around like a twenty year old.

I trimmed the hedge and watched him mowing the pasture. He had to keep his left arm bent across his chest.  Every time he crossed in front of me he hit a bump, which caused him to double over the lawn mower steering wheel in agony; he continued to pretend his hand didn’t feel like it had been partially severed.

Back and forth, hit the bump and collapse. Back and forth, he rode by, like one of those rabbits you shoot at in a shooting gallery. Back and forth, hit the bump and collapse. It was like watching the Shoot the Sherwood Off the Lawnmower Arcade Game.  At one point my vision blurred, and I thought if I had a gun I’d shoot him off that lawnmower.

Our son, Adam, drove my husband to the emergency room later that day. The bone was only  “compressed” not broken. He was supposed to wear a wrist brace for three weeks. He didn’t.

My husband is an accident monger. A monger is a person promoting something undesirable (hatemonger, warmonger, bad judgment monger.) On the other hand, I am a cynic monger or a prophetess.

Linda (Butterfly Bandage) Zern