words+images - Cuyahoga County Public Library

M U S E
I S
T H E
Q U A R T E R L Y
J O U R N A L
P U B L I S H E D
WORDS+IMAGES
B Y
T H E
{ F I R S T A N N UA L M USE LITER A RY C OM PE T I T ION }
02.09
ISSUE
L I T
VO LU M E 2 , I SS U E 1
02
09
contents
2 UNREQUITED RELIGION
GRANT BAILIE
6 GRANDPA RUDY ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON
MARK KUHAR
7 PODIS
JOHN PANZA
11 INFINITE LOSS
ROB JACKSON
15 EIGHT TO FIVE, AGAINST (EXCERPT)
MARY DORIA RUSSELL
18 BOXERS DON’T FLOSS AFTER EVERY BOUT
JOHN DONOGHUE
20 BLUE GIRL
MARK KUHAR
33rd cleveland international film festival
it’s starting march 19-29, 2009 tower city cinemas clevelandfilm.org
21 DANCING WITH SOMETHING SHIVA SAID
CLAIRE MCMAHON
BACKGROUND
LITTLE GIRL BLUE
JASON OASIS
26 A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY
AMY BRACKEN SPARKS
BILLY DELPS
PLAYGROUND, NYC, 2003
VO LU M E 2 , I SS U E 1
02
09
contents
2 UNREQUITED RELIGION
GRANT BAILIE
6 GRANDPA RUDY ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON
MARK KUHAR
7 PODIS
JOHN PANZA
11 INFINITE LOSS
ROB JACKSON
15 EIGHT TO FIVE, AGAINST (EXCERPT)
MARY DORIA RUSSELL
18 BOXERS DON’T FLOSS AFTER EVERY BOUT
JOHN DONOGHUE
20 BLUE GIRL
MARK KUHAR
33rd cleveland international film festival
it’s starting march 19-29, 2009 tower city cinemas clevelandfilm.org
21 DANCING WITH SOMETHING SHIVA SAID
CLAIRE MCMAHON
BACKGROUND
LITTLE GIRL BLUE
JASON OASIS
26 A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY
AMY BRACKEN SPARKS
BILLY DELPS
PLAYGROUND, NYC, 2003
Words + Images is our tag line, and for this issue, we focus on
MUSE IS THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL PUBLISHED BY THE LIT
VO LU M E 2 , I SS U E 1
JUDITH MANSOUR
Editor
[email protected]
Literary Competition. When the judges submitted their final
choices, I curled up with a mug of coffee (and just a little
Bailey’s to sweeten the pot), and read for the better part of
T I M L AC H I N A
an afternoon. The prose and poetry that won this year’s first
Design Director
[email protected]
and second place categories exemplify everything that we
R AY M C N I E C E
want MUSE to represent: excellence in craftsmanship, origi-
Poetry Editor
write now.
Words as we publish the winners of the first annual MUSE
[email protected]
nality, and an edginess of voice sharp as a skewer.
A L E N KA B A N CO
Art Editor
[email protected]
K E L LY K . B I R D
Advertising Account Manager
[email protected]
Thomas Dukes’ poetry is at once emotional and lyrical, while
packing a punch. Kelly Bancroft’s prose plucks heartstrings
without ever bordering sentiment. Giao Buu’s fiction makes
me want a personally guided tour of real Cleveland landmarks
SUBMISSIONS
(content evident) may be sent electronically to
[email protected], [email protected].
We prefer electronic submissions. MUSE publishes
all genres of creative writing — including but not
limited to poetry, fiction, essay, memoir, humor,
lyrics, and drama; stories about the writing life;
profiles; book reviews; news of importance to
writers, publishers, and agents; and other things
which might stimulate public interest in reading
and writing. Preference is given Ohio-based authors.
that he captures with laser focus. And, Amy Thacker’s fiction
reminds us that the insecurities and foibles of adolescent
crushes never really escape us. I applaud each of these
writers and am proud to publish their work.
Also in this issue, we have printed an excerpt of Sheila
Schwartz’s novel, Lies Will Take You Somewhere, along with a
The 5th Annual
April 23rd – 25th
$50 fee. Scholarships available.
Cleveland-area high school students are invited to work with
professional writers in small workshops focusing on poetry, fiction and
creative non-fiction. For an application or more information, visit hb.edu.
essence as teacher, mentor, friend. Sheila Schwartz passed
away this past November, leaving in her wake scores of people
Founded in 1987 as Ohio Writer, Muse is the quarterly
journal published by The Lit, a nonprofit literary arts
organization. No part of this journal may be reproduced
without written consent of the publisher.
THELIT
CLEVELAND’S LITERARY CENTER
ARTCRAFT BUILDING
2 5 7 0 S U P E R I O R AV E N U E
SUITE 203
CLEVELAND, OHIO 44114
216 694.0000
Shaker heightS, ohio • girlS k – 12 / co-ed early childhood • 216.932.4214 x 7252 • hb.edu
who loved her, and whom now, through this novel, have the
opportunity to savor her company for just a little longer. Lies,
which is slated for release this February by Etruscan Press, is
contemporary ethnic fiction at its very finest.
Find yourself something hot and soothing to drink, grab a
blanket, and escape the cold, Cleveland winter through the
eyes of the writers in this issue.
02
09
W W W. T H E - L I T. O R G
Judith
M
U
S
E
M
High School Writers’ Festival
beautiful tribute by Lori Wald Compton who captures Sheila’s
5
{short fiction}
FIRST PLACE
FIRSTAN
NUALMUSE
LITERARYCO
MPETITION**
David Giffels’ most recent book, All
the Way Home: Building a Family in
a Falling-down House, has received
widespread acclaim, from The
New York Times, which described
it as “sweet and funny,” to the Los
Angeles Times, which called it “a
truly wonderful book,” to Oprah’s O
at Home magazine, where it topped
the “Fantastic Summer Reads” list.
Giffels, a longtime Akron Beacon
Journal columnist and former writer
for the hit MTV series Beavis and
Butt-Head, has recently been named
to the creative writing faculty at
the University of Akron, where he
will begin teaching in fall 2009. He
is a contributing commentator and
essayist on National Public Radio station
WKSU, and has been nominated six
times for the Pulitzer Prize and was a
2008 Writers & Their friends honoree.
POETRY JUDGE
FICTION JUDGE
Honor Moore is the author of three
collections of poems: Memoir, Darling,
and Red Shoes. The Bishop’s Daughter,
her memoir published in May 2008
will be published in paperback this
spring, along with a new paperback,
Of The White Blackbird, her biography
of Margarett Sargent, the painter who
was her grandmother. In April 2009
The Library of America will publish
Poems from the Women’s Movement,
an anthology of poems from the
1970s, which she edited. Her website is
www.honormoore.com.
Christopher Barzak’s new novel The
Love We Share Without Knowing
(“Exquisitely perceptive and deeply
affecting”—Publisher’s Weekly) was
released by Bantam in November
2008. Barzak grew up in rural Ohio,
went to university in a decaying postindustrial city in Ohio, has lived in a
Southern California beach town, the
capital of Michigan, and in the suburbs
of Tokyo where he taught English. His
stories have appeared in Nerve.com,
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror,
Strange Horizons, Salon Fantastique,
Interfictions, Realms of Fantasy, and
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
His first novel was One for Sorrow.
Currently he lives in Youngstown,
Ohio, where he teaches writing at
Youngstown State University.
M
8
1. SOKOLOWSKI’S INN
I believe in t-shirts because I love New York. If Brooklyn is the bottom,
and the top is the Bronx, Manhattan is the middle, fitted perfectly in my
heart. I couldn’t tell you exactly why. Maybe it’s the sound of high heels
tapping out a beat on the concrete, or hot dogs on the street in the morning at three. But it’s me—NYC. It’s my kind of dreams, my style, the rain
in the air, the gum on my feet.
But at the moment I’m singing my Cleveland love song, my
goodbye tour if you will. For the past seven years, I’ve been saying goodbye, slowly falling out of love with my hometown as I fall for New York
(we just got an apartment together). But now that I’m finally moving,
and kissing Cleveland goodbye, the break up is a little harder than I
thought. Knowing for some time now that I was leaving, I’ve also known
that I would never come back.
I am singing my love song to Cleveland, and what better place
to start than Sokolowski’s Inn, a big blue collar fuck you to urban gentrification? As a neighborhood—as my neighborhood—Tremont is a burgeoning crossroads of bohemian cool and bourgeois slumming in a town
that could never define either cool or bourgeois. And Sokolowski’s
stands as a great wall against those hipster and middle management
invaders. Too bad they just went around it. I should know; I’m one
of them.
Sokolowski’s is cafeteria style, and the desserts are on display
first because you may not pick up any once you see how much you get for
your entrée and sides. So it’s too many choices, too much food, and too
many people in line trying to hurry through and get a table before you
miss out on one in the piano room–with the piano player who looks like
he could also be an enforcer for the mob, his face scratched out of Lake
Erie driftwood, his talent that much more amazing because it’s a surprise. Everyday magic—Cleveland magic—is low expectations, and
then getting more than you expect. Someone bumps my tray right before
the meatloaf station, and my piece of carrot cake falls over. I hate cake
laying down (it’s just a thing from childhood; I’ve always liked things to
look good in their presentation). Arching an angry, thick eyebrow and
biting my bottom lip, I give my best impression of a Hell’s Angel as I
look over.
Her impression is better. It helps that she’s a little taller so she
can look down on me. Arching two thin eyebrows to my one, her tongue
is sticking out one side of her mouth just a little bit, twisted like red licorice just a little bit. She narrows her eyes slowly to the rhythm of fingernails tapping against the plastic of her tray.
“You knocked my cake over.” My look of anger is a joke.
“I knocked my cake over.” Hers is not. “You took the last piece.
My piece.”
GIAO BUU GOES BY THE NAME G. BECAUSE THERE ARE TOO MANY VOWELS IN HIS REAL NAME. HE LIVES IN
TREMONT WITH A ROOMMATE, A REFRIGERATOR, SOME REALLY FAT SQUIRRELS, AND A BOX OF HONEY BUNCHES
CEREAL THAT JUST WON’T DIE. HE WORKS AS A HUMOROUS GREETING CARD WRITER/EDITOR AT AMERICAN
02
09
M
U
S
E
BY GIAO BUU
GREETINGS, AND HIS BEST FRIEND IS LUCY, A DOG OF AMAZING AMAZINGNESS WHO HE BELIEVES IS A SUPERHE** PLEASE NOTE THAT JUDGING WAS BLIND.
RO IN HER OFF-TIME. HE HAS INSANELY WONDERFUL PARENTS AND FAMILY WHO LET HIM QUIT MEDICAL SCHOOL
TO WRITE, AND BALLER FRIENDS WHO, WELL... BALL, AND WHO INSPIRE EVERYTHING HE WRITES. G. LIKES TO
RUN, WRITE, AND WATCH ANY SHOWS INVOLVING ANIMALS BEING AWESOME. HE ALSO LOVES TO EAT (BACON
ESPECIALLY) AND SLEEP (DREAMING OF BACON), AND OTHER ACTIVITIES THAT DIRECTLY HELP HIM TO LIVE.
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
NON-FICTION JUDGE
Cleveland Love Song
9
{short fiction}
FIRST PLACE
FIRSTAN
NUALMUSE
LITERARYCO
MPETITION**
David Giffels’ most recent book, All
the Way Home: Building a Family in
a Falling-down House, has received
widespread acclaim, from The
New York Times, which described
it as “sweet and funny,” to the Los
Angeles Times, which called it “a
truly wonderful book,” to Oprah’s O
at Home magazine, where it topped
the “Fantastic Summer Reads” list.
Giffels, a longtime Akron Beacon
Journal columnist and former writer
for the hit MTV series Beavis and
Butt-Head, has recently been named
to the creative writing faculty at
the University of Akron, where he
will begin teaching in fall 2009. He
is a contributing commentator and
essayist on National Public Radio station
WKSU, and has been nominated six
times for the Pulitzer Prize and was a
2008 Writers & Their friends honoree.
POETRY JUDGE
FICTION JUDGE
Honor Moore is the author of three
collections of poems: Memoir, Darling,
and Red Shoes. The Bishop’s Daughter,
her memoir published in May 2008
will be published in paperback this
spring, along with a new paperback,
Of The White Blackbird, her biography
of Margarett Sargent, the painter who
was her grandmother. In April 2009
The Library of America will publish
Poems from the Women’s Movement,
an anthology of poems from the
1970s, which she edited. Her website is
www.honormoore.com.
Christopher Barzak’s new novel The
Love We Share Without Knowing
(“Exquisitely perceptive and deeply
affecting”—Publisher’s Weekly) was
released by Bantam in November
2008. Barzak grew up in rural Ohio,
went to university in a decaying postindustrial city in Ohio, has lived in a
Southern California beach town, the
capital of Michigan, and in the suburbs
of Tokyo where he taught English. His
stories have appeared in Nerve.com,
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror,
Strange Horizons, Salon Fantastique,
Interfictions, Realms of Fantasy, and
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
His first novel was One for Sorrow.
Currently he lives in Youngstown,
Ohio, where he teaches writing at
Youngstown State University.
M
8
1. SOKOLOWSKI’S INN
I believe in t-shirts because I love New York. If Brooklyn is the bottom,
and the top is the Bronx, Manhattan is the middle, fitted perfectly in my
heart. I couldn’t tell you exactly why. Maybe it’s the sound of high heels
tapping out a beat on the concrete, or hot dogs on the street in the morning at three. But it’s me—NYC. It’s my kind of dreams, my style, the rain
in the air, the gum on my feet.
But at the moment I’m singing my Cleveland love song, my
goodbye tour if you will. For the past seven years, I’ve been saying goodbye, slowly falling out of love with my hometown as I fall for New York
(we just got an apartment together). But now that I’m finally moving,
and kissing Cleveland goodbye, the break up is a little harder than I
thought. Knowing for some time now that I was leaving, I’ve also known
that I would never come back.
I am singing my love song to Cleveland, and what better place
to start than Sokolowski’s Inn, a big blue collar fuck you to urban gentrification? As a neighborhood—as my neighborhood—Tremont is a burgeoning crossroads of bohemian cool and bourgeois slumming in a town
that could never define either cool or bourgeois. And Sokolowski’s
stands as a great wall against those hipster and middle management
invaders. Too bad they just went around it. I should know; I’m one
of them.
Sokolowski’s is cafeteria style, and the desserts are on display
first because you may not pick up any once you see how much you get for
your entrée and sides. So it’s too many choices, too much food, and too
many people in line trying to hurry through and get a table before you
miss out on one in the piano room–with the piano player who looks like
he could also be an enforcer for the mob, his face scratched out of Lake
Erie driftwood, his talent that much more amazing because it’s a surprise. Everyday magic—Cleveland magic—is low expectations, and
then getting more than you expect. Someone bumps my tray right before
the meatloaf station, and my piece of carrot cake falls over. I hate cake
laying down (it’s just a thing from childhood; I’ve always liked things to
look good in their presentation). Arching an angry, thick eyebrow and
biting my bottom lip, I give my best impression of a Hell’s Angel as I
look over.
Her impression is better. It helps that she’s a little taller so she
can look down on me. Arching two thin eyebrows to my one, her tongue
is sticking out one side of her mouth just a little bit, twisted like red licorice just a little bit. She narrows her eyes slowly to the rhythm of fingernails tapping against the plastic of her tray.
“You knocked my cake over.” My look of anger is a joke.
“I knocked my cake over.” Hers is not. “You took the last piece.
My piece.”
GIAO BUU GOES BY THE NAME G. BECAUSE THERE ARE TOO MANY VOWELS IN HIS REAL NAME. HE LIVES IN
TREMONT WITH A ROOMMATE, A REFRIGERATOR, SOME REALLY FAT SQUIRRELS, AND A BOX OF HONEY BUNCHES
CEREAL THAT JUST WON’T DIE. HE WORKS AS A HUMOROUS GREETING CARD WRITER/EDITOR AT AMERICAN
02
09
M
U
S
E
BY GIAO BUU
GREETINGS, AND HIS BEST FRIEND IS LUCY, A DOG OF AMAZING AMAZINGNESS WHO HE BELIEVES IS A SUPERHE** PLEASE NOTE THAT JUDGING WAS BLIND.
RO IN HER OFF-TIME. HE HAS INSANELY WONDERFUL PARENTS AND FAMILY WHO LET HIM QUIT MEDICAL SCHOOL
TO WRITE, AND BALLER FRIENDS WHO, WELL... BALL, AND WHO INSPIRE EVERYTHING HE WRITES. G. LIKES TO
RUN, WRITE, AND WATCH ANY SHOWS INVOLVING ANIMALS BEING AWESOME. HE ALSO LOVES TO EAT (BACON
ESPECIALLY) AND SLEEP (DREAMING OF BACON), AND OTHER ACTIVITIES THAT DIRECTLY HELP HIM TO LIVE.
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
NON-FICTION JUDGE
Cleveland Love Song
9
Dinner is six potato and cheese pierogies drenched in butter and
sour cream. I’m going to miss eating fat. In fact, I’m going to miss the people who love fat, because they are unabashed in their love. I was never fat,
but I’m going to miss living like I was, giving into taste like it was a onenight stand.
Passing by her table, I don’t look this time at all on my way out.
Scouts honor. I simply put the untouched plate of carrot cake down in
front of her.
2. GREAT LAKES BREWERY
02
09
M
M
U
S
E
10
Why did I pick fall to leave? Cleveland fall is the best kind, picture calendar fall blowing by in sunset outside the bar’s wood-paneled windows. It’s
fall colored in a coloring book by the sweet girl who takes her time and has
the big box of crayons. Good sweaters are made for northern fall, not
southern winters. Also, Great Lakes Brewery releases it’s Christmas Ale in
the fall. And the nutmeg and cinnamon mask the nine percent alcohol
that makes the coming Cleveland winter warmer than you think.
“Yeah, you didn’t need to ask for that girl’s number,” Mike says,
folded half over the dark oak counter trying to wave down a bartender.
“I know. It’s my last weekend here. I don’t need to be starting
anything. New York is for starting stuff.”
“No. New York is for homos.” Mike is so completely Cleveland
and one of my best friends, but he’s exactly one of the reasons I’m moving
to New York. “You didn’t need to ask for her number because she’s here.”
I lean over the bar, as well, my shirt on something wet. At a table
against the wall, she’s standing while two guys are sitting. Hands in her
back pockets, she’s put tortoiseshell glasses on for some reason, and still
won’t laugh even though her friends are cracking up at something. She
eventually does break into a smile, however, a smile that catches her
around the eyes and just one corner of her mouth. Her face is incredibly
Slavic in it’s cherubic features starkly contrasted to the gracefully slim stalk
of a neck and her thin frame. It’s as if her face is stacked out of bubbles:
two small, tart apple cheeks and a cherry nose, all made rounder and redder against her pale skin when she smiles. She looks like the badass type
that fights every single smile, too. And for no reason I can imagine, it
makes me smile.
“You owe me a beer.”
“So you’re going to come with me on my goodbye tour tomorrow?”
“You’re driving and paying for all the food, right?
“Yeah.”
I think she does it to keep me off balance and for no other reason—she leans in, as if to kiss me passionately, stopping inches away from
my mouth and hesitating before leaning to the side and kissing me on the
cheek . Except she slips, and being taller than me, she lands with the full
force of both lips (and a little bit of teeth) somewhere half on my ear and
half on my temple. Her right foot is on my left toes, and she’s holding on
tight to my left elbow, a perfect imprint of saliva on the side of my face
where lipstick might be if she wore any.
“I’m just drunk,” she says.
Like most Clevelanders, she’s going to drive home.
“How does that math work? Carrot cake equals beer?”
“I’m not good at math.” I’m really not.
“What do you want, then? Something light? And fruity? I don’t
think they serve non-alcoholic beer here.”
You can only be a smartass for so long before a Wes Anderson
movie breaks out, so I tell her my name is Charlie. Jo suits her very well—
short for Josephine, which suits her not at all. Although Josephine does
match her purple eyes, the name of a long, lost Russian czarina if I ever
heard one.
I’m not a chach, so I didn’t have the nerve to talk to her while she
was with her guy friends. She came up to the bar to get another beer, and
poor girl got me instead. My second beer says I don’t need to start anything. My third beer says she’s really so cute, though. In four beers, I’ve
told her I’m a graphic designer who makes cards for American Greetings,
though presently I’ve just become an associate web designer at a recruitment advertising firm in Brooklyn. Williamsburg is the new Lower East
Side, apparently. And my tight pants and thick black glasses will play better there than they ever did in this town. Calling herself a nerd who likes to
drink and fight, she says she’s a librarian in the Cleveland Heights Public
Library’s main branch. She loves books, her dog, Chinese food, cable TV,
running in the snow, and perhaps most telling and enlightening of all—
plain old cheese pizza. Oh, and Cleveland.
“New York, huh?” She pounds the last half of her beer, but very
lady-like without gulping, never raising the glass past a ninety-degree
angle, never breaking eye contact with me. “You know you can’t spell
‘skanky’ without ‘n’ and ‘y,’ right? New York is a hooker. They got a lot of
those, too, by the way. New York is cool, don’t get me wrong. But it’ll do
anything for you as long as you pay out the ass. It’s expensive as hell.”
Her thoughts are broken like that. Yet they make some kind of
Taoist sense, winding in their own music. We end up talking for four
hours until it’s past midnight. My friends are gone, and so are hers, having
said hello to the one of us they didn’t know and goodbye at the same time.
Like most Clevelanders, she talks in absolutes. Like most Clevelanders,
she means it.
“You’re stupid.”
“See? This is why I’m leaving.”
“Seriously. You trust people too much. New York is going to
eat you alive.”
“I’m an optimist. I do trust people. I’m hanging out with you,
and we just met.”
Coventry is where you meet if you’re on the eastside. It’s the
eastside Tremont before Tremont was cool, and Tommy’s is where you
meet if you’re in Coventry. With Tommy’s menu, you can be a vegetarian
and meet a burger-lover and fall in love over a shake, still served in frosted
metal cups straight from the mixer. It’s the most unpretentious of places,
full of people trying very hard against their better instincts and good upbringing to be pretentious. There are a lot of windows that let in little light
because Cleveland is gray, three hundred days of the year, for the last
twenty years of my life.
“I think it might be why I’m going to New York, because I’m an
optimist.”
I really don’t know if it’s why, but I feel I’m always on the defensive with her. Straight-faced, she believes she is never wrong because everything is just that easy: right or wrong, black or white, yes or no.
Cleveland or New York.
“Everybody thinks New York is ‘real’ and ‘gritty’ and shit like
that. But New York is totally a dream, too. It’s everything Cleveland can’t
be. You can go to a concert at three in the morning. My brother saw Keifer
Sutherland hitting on a girl in a bar on his block. Lou Reed lives in New
York, man.”
“Lou Reed is an asshole,” she replies, eating the last French
fry from a shared plate now surfaced in oil. “What are you looking for
in New York?”
For five years now, I’ve given an immediate and passionate
3. TOMMY’S
answer to family members, friends, co-workers—to anyone who would
listen—proselytized it to people who didn’t even ask the question.
“I don’t know.” Often, it’s easier to tell the truth to strangers.
“Well, maybe it’s here then. Have you looked?”
As we drive over the bridge to the Westside Market, the river is
surfaced in oil, reflecting nothing. This city is slowly eating itself to death,
but then death by indulgence is a delicious way to go. Long lost of pretension or desire, Cleveland never runs out of French fries, and you know you
always wish there were more fries.
4. BEACHLAND BALLROOM & TAVERN
She doesn’t have many moments, so it makes those moments all the more.
It was the song that made her let down her guard. I wanted to go the Grog
Shop to see whatever too-cool-for-their-shoes band was playing there, but
she insisted that we go to the Beachland Ballroom instead. More high
school auditorium than concert hall, the Beachland’s floor is paneled
wood worn smooth and orange. Chandeliers offer no light, but are made
to look good in the light, at least from a distance when you can’t tell what’s
fake and chipped and what’s not. Dressed up with no place to go, the
Beachland stays home on the weekends and listens to its music, blasting it
so that it can forget about everything else. Jo insists on the place because
there’s the better chance of us seeing someone local. What we get is one
drummer, one bassist, and three thirty-something guitarists playing their
twenties out in ridiculous Journey licks. Open Arms-ageddon re-imagines
Steve Perry as Brian Johnson of AC/DC, and the rest of the band follows
from there. But their interpretation of “Faithfully” is as straight up as it
gets, soft and soaring, the synthesizer put into piano mode.
She’s dancing, and it’s a moment I never expected. Like I told
you, Cleveland magic. But it’s not dancing really; she’s pantomiming the
lyrics, in possibly the nerdiest and cutest way possible. I’m watching eleven
year-old Jo, her dad’s cherished records on a vintage turntable she’s not
supposed to touch. What I’m watching was years in the making.
“They say that the road ain’t no place to start a family...” (She’s
driving an imaginary steering wheel, then shakes her finger in motherly
scolding before pointing at her left ring finger.)
“Right down the line it’s been you and me...” (She draws a line
from top to bottom in the air and points to no one in particular, and then
touches her heart.)
I’m not going to lie—I just about lose the two days of cool I’ve
been trying to perfect with her, and a small part of my small heart wishes
she had pointed at me. I should wait’ll she’s done, but I can’t help myself.
If you saw her right then, you would understand. Pantomiming has never
been something I’ve done well myself, but she understands enough what
I’m asking. Neither of us really leads, and it’s the most formal dancing
I’ve ever done: one hand on her hip, holding our other hands in the air at
shoulder height, leaving room for the Holy Ghost between us like they
taught me in Catholic school. Though they probably never imagined me
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
“This isn’t yours. It doesn’t say ‘Happy Birthday Your Name’ on it.”
“I know, because my name is Give-Me-That-Cake.”
She’s good. I can’t hold half my laugh behind my disintegrating sneer.
“Wow. I should give it to you just because your parents are hippies
and named you that.” I still can’t get a laugh from her, however. “But I won’t.”
They don’t take kindly to anybody holding up the line at
Sokolowski’s, even for witty bantering. The server’s question of what I
wanted as my main course and the throat clearing from the back of the line
are the best that Cleveland sarcasm can muster: loud and none too clever. I
pay for my pierogies without ever looking back. Despite the animal paintings and wooden benches, we’re still in Tremont, and you have to play it
cool. I don’t look back, but I can tell you she has flint black hair cut short
like a boy rebelling against private school—a bit too clumpy and a bit too
long in the bangs. I don’t look back, but she has dark blue eyes that reflect
almost purple, like they’re a curse or possibly a recessive trait indicating
she’s in line for succession to the throne of past Russia, still evident in the
onion spires of old Tremont’s orthodox churches. Her generic, thin blue
sweater is worn to the point of turquoise, almost flat over her chest, and she
doesn’t wear a bra. She doesn’t really need to; no one will notice because
Cleveland is a town for big-breasted women instead, both in fashion and in
the preference of its men. I don’t look back, but I can tell you there’s a Star of
David on a slender chain tight around her long neck, and that her teeth are a
nice shade of Westside white, which is to say not quite white at all (I caught
the beginnings of a smile when I had peeked over my shoulder). Okay, so I
lied—I absolutely snuck a look back. Sue me. You would, too; she was cute.
11
Dinner is six potato and cheese pierogies drenched in butter and
sour cream. I’m going to miss eating fat. In fact, I’m going to miss the people who love fat, because they are unabashed in their love. I was never fat,
but I’m going to miss living like I was, giving into taste like it was a onenight stand.
Passing by her table, I don’t look this time at all on my way out.
Scouts honor. I simply put the untouched plate of carrot cake down in
front of her.
2. GREAT LAKES BREWERY
02
09
M
M
U
S
E
10
Why did I pick fall to leave? Cleveland fall is the best kind, picture calendar fall blowing by in sunset outside the bar’s wood-paneled windows. It’s
fall colored in a coloring book by the sweet girl who takes her time and has
the big box of crayons. Good sweaters are made for northern fall, not
southern winters. Also, Great Lakes Brewery releases it’s Christmas Ale in
the fall. And the nutmeg and cinnamon mask the nine percent alcohol
that makes the coming Cleveland winter warmer than you think.
“Yeah, you didn’t need to ask for that girl’s number,” Mike says,
folded half over the dark oak counter trying to wave down a bartender.
“I know. It’s my last weekend here. I don’t need to be starting
anything. New York is for starting stuff.”
“No. New York is for homos.” Mike is so completely Cleveland
and one of my best friends, but he’s exactly one of the reasons I’m moving
to New York. “You didn’t need to ask for her number because she’s here.”
I lean over the bar, as well, my shirt on something wet. At a table
against the wall, she’s standing while two guys are sitting. Hands in her
back pockets, she’s put tortoiseshell glasses on for some reason, and still
won’t laugh even though her friends are cracking up at something. She
eventually does break into a smile, however, a smile that catches her
around the eyes and just one corner of her mouth. Her face is incredibly
Slavic in it’s cherubic features starkly contrasted to the gracefully slim stalk
of a neck and her thin frame. It’s as if her face is stacked out of bubbles:
two small, tart apple cheeks and a cherry nose, all made rounder and redder against her pale skin when she smiles. She looks like the badass type
that fights every single smile, too. And for no reason I can imagine, it
makes me smile.
“You owe me a beer.”
“So you’re going to come with me on my goodbye tour tomorrow?”
“You’re driving and paying for all the food, right?
“Yeah.”
I think she does it to keep me off balance and for no other reason—she leans in, as if to kiss me passionately, stopping inches away from
my mouth and hesitating before leaning to the side and kissing me on the
cheek . Except she slips, and being taller than me, she lands with the full
force of both lips (and a little bit of teeth) somewhere half on my ear and
half on my temple. Her right foot is on my left toes, and she’s holding on
tight to my left elbow, a perfect imprint of saliva on the side of my face
where lipstick might be if she wore any.
“I’m just drunk,” she says.
Like most Clevelanders, she’s going to drive home.
“How does that math work? Carrot cake equals beer?”
“I’m not good at math.” I’m really not.
“What do you want, then? Something light? And fruity? I don’t
think they serve non-alcoholic beer here.”
You can only be a smartass for so long before a Wes Anderson
movie breaks out, so I tell her my name is Charlie. Jo suits her very well—
short for Josephine, which suits her not at all. Although Josephine does
match her purple eyes, the name of a long, lost Russian czarina if I ever
heard one.
I’m not a chach, so I didn’t have the nerve to talk to her while she
was with her guy friends. She came up to the bar to get another beer, and
poor girl got me instead. My second beer says I don’t need to start anything. My third beer says she’s really so cute, though. In four beers, I’ve
told her I’m a graphic designer who makes cards for American Greetings,
though presently I’ve just become an associate web designer at a recruitment advertising firm in Brooklyn. Williamsburg is the new Lower East
Side, apparently. And my tight pants and thick black glasses will play better there than they ever did in this town. Calling herself a nerd who likes to
drink and fight, she says she’s a librarian in the Cleveland Heights Public
Library’s main branch. She loves books, her dog, Chinese food, cable TV,
running in the snow, and perhaps most telling and enlightening of all—
plain old cheese pizza. Oh, and Cleveland.
“New York, huh?” She pounds the last half of her beer, but very
lady-like without gulping, never raising the glass past a ninety-degree
angle, never breaking eye contact with me. “You know you can’t spell
‘skanky’ without ‘n’ and ‘y,’ right? New York is a hooker. They got a lot of
those, too, by the way. New York is cool, don’t get me wrong. But it’ll do
anything for you as long as you pay out the ass. It’s expensive as hell.”
Her thoughts are broken like that. Yet they make some kind of
Taoist sense, winding in their own music. We end up talking for four
hours until it’s past midnight. My friends are gone, and so are hers, having
said hello to the one of us they didn’t know and goodbye at the same time.
Like most Clevelanders, she talks in absolutes. Like most Clevelanders,
she means it.
“You’re stupid.”
“See? This is why I’m leaving.”
“Seriously. You trust people too much. New York is going to
eat you alive.”
“I’m an optimist. I do trust people. I’m hanging out with you,
and we just met.”
Coventry is where you meet if you’re on the eastside. It’s the
eastside Tremont before Tremont was cool, and Tommy’s is where you
meet if you’re in Coventry. With Tommy’s menu, you can be a vegetarian
and meet a burger-lover and fall in love over a shake, still served in frosted
metal cups straight from the mixer. It’s the most unpretentious of places,
full of people trying very hard against their better instincts and good upbringing to be pretentious. There are a lot of windows that let in little light
because Cleveland is gray, three hundred days of the year, for the last
twenty years of my life.
“I think it might be why I’m going to New York, because I’m an
optimist.”
I really don’t know if it’s why, but I feel I’m always on the defensive with her. Straight-faced, she believes she is never wrong because everything is just that easy: right or wrong, black or white, yes or no.
Cleveland or New York.
“Everybody thinks New York is ‘real’ and ‘gritty’ and shit like
that. But New York is totally a dream, too. It’s everything Cleveland can’t
be. You can go to a concert at three in the morning. My brother saw Keifer
Sutherland hitting on a girl in a bar on his block. Lou Reed lives in New
York, man.”
“Lou Reed is an asshole,” she replies, eating the last French
fry from a shared plate now surfaced in oil. “What are you looking for
in New York?”
For five years now, I’ve given an immediate and passionate
3. TOMMY’S
answer to family members, friends, co-workers—to anyone who would
listen—proselytized it to people who didn’t even ask the question.
“I don’t know.” Often, it’s easier to tell the truth to strangers.
“Well, maybe it’s here then. Have you looked?”
As we drive over the bridge to the Westside Market, the river is
surfaced in oil, reflecting nothing. This city is slowly eating itself to death,
but then death by indulgence is a delicious way to go. Long lost of pretension or desire, Cleveland never runs out of French fries, and you know you
always wish there were more fries.
4. BEACHLAND BALLROOM & TAVERN
She doesn’t have many moments, so it makes those moments all the more.
It was the song that made her let down her guard. I wanted to go the Grog
Shop to see whatever too-cool-for-their-shoes band was playing there, but
she insisted that we go to the Beachland Ballroom instead. More high
school auditorium than concert hall, the Beachland’s floor is paneled
wood worn smooth and orange. Chandeliers offer no light, but are made
to look good in the light, at least from a distance when you can’t tell what’s
fake and chipped and what’s not. Dressed up with no place to go, the
Beachland stays home on the weekends and listens to its music, blasting it
so that it can forget about everything else. Jo insists on the place because
there’s the better chance of us seeing someone local. What we get is one
drummer, one bassist, and three thirty-something guitarists playing their
twenties out in ridiculous Journey licks. Open Arms-ageddon re-imagines
Steve Perry as Brian Johnson of AC/DC, and the rest of the band follows
from there. But their interpretation of “Faithfully” is as straight up as it
gets, soft and soaring, the synthesizer put into piano mode.
She’s dancing, and it’s a moment I never expected. Like I told
you, Cleveland magic. But it’s not dancing really; she’s pantomiming the
lyrics, in possibly the nerdiest and cutest way possible. I’m watching eleven
year-old Jo, her dad’s cherished records on a vintage turntable she’s not
supposed to touch. What I’m watching was years in the making.
“They say that the road ain’t no place to start a family...” (She’s
driving an imaginary steering wheel, then shakes her finger in motherly
scolding before pointing at her left ring finger.)
“Right down the line it’s been you and me...” (She draws a line
from top to bottom in the air and points to no one in particular, and then
touches her heart.)
I’m not going to lie—I just about lose the two days of cool I’ve
been trying to perfect with her, and a small part of my small heart wishes
she had pointed at me. I should wait’ll she’s done, but I can’t help myself.
If you saw her right then, you would understand. Pantomiming has never
been something I’ve done well myself, but she understands enough what
I’m asking. Neither of us really leads, and it’s the most formal dancing
I’ve ever done: one hand on her hip, holding our other hands in the air at
shoulder height, leaving room for the Holy Ghost between us like they
taught me in Catholic school. Though they probably never imagined me
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
“This isn’t yours. It doesn’t say ‘Happy Birthday Your Name’ on it.”
“I know, because my name is Give-Me-That-Cake.”
She’s good. I can’t hold half my laugh behind my disintegrating sneer.
“Wow. I should give it to you just because your parents are hippies
and named you that.” I still can’t get a laugh from her, however. “But I won’t.”
They don’t take kindly to anybody holding up the line at
Sokolowski’s, even for witty bantering. The server’s question of what I
wanted as my main course and the throat clearing from the back of the line
are the best that Cleveland sarcasm can muster: loud and none too clever. I
pay for my pierogies without ever looking back. Despite the animal paintings and wooden benches, we’re still in Tremont, and you have to play it
cool. I don’t look back, but I can tell you she has flint black hair cut short
like a boy rebelling against private school—a bit too clumpy and a bit too
long in the bangs. I don’t look back, but she has dark blue eyes that reflect
almost purple, like they’re a curse or possibly a recessive trait indicating
she’s in line for succession to the throne of past Russia, still evident in the
onion spires of old Tremont’s orthodox churches. Her generic, thin blue
sweater is worn to the point of turquoise, almost flat over her chest, and she
doesn’t wear a bra. She doesn’t really need to; no one will notice because
Cleveland is a town for big-breasted women instead, both in fashion and in
the preference of its men. I don’t look back, but I can tell you there’s a Star of
David on a slender chain tight around her long neck, and that her teeth are a
nice shade of Westside white, which is to say not quite white at all (I caught
the beginnings of a smile when I had peeked over my shoulder). Okay, so I
lied—I absolutely snuck a look back. Sue me. You would, too; she was cute.
11
5. THE SHVITZ
As her going away present, she leaves me (she has to work on Sundays) and
hands me over to her Uncle Pete. Peter Dubinsky is connected. The Cleveland mob has always been a buffet, a mess that somehow comes together
on your plate—Italian, Greek, Russian, Jewish, and Irish factions all at one
time or another working with one another to work against each other, and
somehow prospering and crashing all at the same time. Both Russian and
Jewish, Uncle Pete is everybody’s uncle, big and soft, both in his appearance and the way he talks, and he knows everyone everywhere. In fact,
everyone calls him Uncle Pete. In my twenty years in Cleveland, I’ve never
even heard of the place he’s taking me to.
02
09
M
M
U
S
E
12
On the way there, Uncle Pete tells me that buying the giant
Lexus SUV was one of the hardest and saddest things he’s ever done. And
according to Jo, if family whispers and bedtime stories between cousins
were to be believed, he’s done many hard and sad things to many people in
his life. Constant breakdowns forced him to finally give up his beloved
Chevy Silverado he tells me as the neighborhoods we drive through keep
getting more crowded—more houses closer together, more people huddled outside with seemingly nothing to do. Then we’re on Kinsman, a
street and neighborhood that’s on the wrong side of a wrong town.
“I got nothing against the Japs, you know. I just wanna buy
American. But shit, I’m starting to love this Jap car. It drives real nice.” He
gives me a smile that’s Jack and Coke—three parts sweet and one part poison—and adds, “Don’t tell anybody I said that.”
All the guards at the second gate carry shotguns. I would never
believe this place existed if I wasn’t seeing it. They are large, old, black men
paid to keep other black men in the surrounding neighborhood out of the
private club. Aged and tired like most of the steel mills and factories of the
city, the building we’re ushered into looks ready to fall, which is how they
want it, I think. Old white men love their secrets and their clubs and being
old white men so much it might seem gay until it goes three-hundred and
sixty degrees to the point of ridiculous manliness again.
Inside, you go up to the locker room on the fourth floor and
change into a towel, surrounded by old men of Eastern European descent
with no towels who don’t give a damn about strangers and bare asses.
We sweat; we drink (you bring your own, and Uncle Pete produces a jug of
homemade wine); we smoke cigars and play cards with characters who
look more ramshackle than the building we’re in, all stone ledges and broken facades. We get massages and then steam off ten pounds that we easily
put back on with the thirty ounce steaks we eat (you pick your thickness of
from a side of ribeye, and they cut it with a band saw). You tip everybody.
Well, at least Uncle Pete does for the both of us.
This is Cleveland.
“Jojo must like you, kid. I think I’ve met one of her boyfriends
once. And she ain’t never asked me to take anybody here before. Lucky for
you, she’s my favorite.”
“I’m not really a boyfriend.”
Smiling through stubbled jowls, he doesn’t bat an eye at my
confession.
“She says you’re moving to New York.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s like I told Jo: I just can’t find what I’m looking
for here.”
“Fair enough.” He throws cold water on heated stones and says
above the hissing, “I lived in Red Hook for five years when I was young,
and everybody there wanted to get out of Brooklyn.”
Uncle Pete rocks. He proves to me that you can party at a funeral,
that in the dying of neighborhoods, tradition and customs keep you warm
and are as much defiance as they are solace. Filling my plastic cup with
more bad wine that gets you drunk quickly, he teaches me that in an old forgotten building, there are complex men doing simple, wonderful things.
2473 W. 11TH ST.
Like the rest of Cleveland, Prosperity isn’t really prospering at all. It isn’t
my favorite bar in the world either, but it’s only a block from my apartment, and on my last night, I want to stay in Tremont, close to home because I’m not done packing, and I have a lot of goodbyes left to give. She
shows up after almost everyone has left, even though I asked her to come
for dinner. It’s easy to forget that we only met a couple of days ago. My best
friends Mike and Mike are the last to go, winking back drunkenly like they
have palsies as they head out the door beneath October rain. “Your Uncle Pete’s a good guy. Good advice. He was your real
going away present, wasn’t he? Not the Shvitz.”
“Uncle Pete wasn’t a present. He’s not gay, you homo. He’s got a
wife and at least two girlfriends.” Jo is Jo till the end.
Her car is actually parked closer to my place than the bar
because there’s only street parking in Tremont. Neither of us has an
umbrella, yet we still walk back slowly in the rain. Nothing much at all is
said, the end of my Cleveland long song fading away on unmemorable
notes with no lyrics to remember. Considering the girl beside me and the
places I’ve been the last two days, I thought there’d be so much more
than this. Maybe the leaves will return to green, and fall up, back on the
trees. Maybe the rain will be drops of paint, coloring the city. Maybe she
will ask me to stay, and the sun and the moon will both shine at the same
time. Maybe, like in a movie, I will ask her to marry me tonight. But we
walk in silence over wet, dead leaves, going over the same old streets
between too many vacant buildings and too much exposed steel, and I
realize Cleveland is no movie. Instead, it’s repetitive in its reality, and I’ve
always been a dreamer—that’s just me. I can’t change and neither can a
city. For everything this weekend has been, I was already gone; I had left
long ago.
If she comes up, I tell her I can give her a sweat shirt. Luckily for
me, I had packed my clothes that afternoon, and I remember which trash
bag has all of my winter attire As I turn around with the faded Cleveland
Browns hoodie, she’s already begun to take off her wet sweater, her face
cynical as ever. She has on a bra this time—thin cotton, thin straps, dark
blue. I’ve always loved the color blue on a girl. The Star of David is not
there this time. A dark birthmark shaped like Africa between her small
breasts makes me realize how pale her skin really is, and except for the
birthmark, how profoundly rich even in the poor light.
That’s when I accidentally fart, lost in our moment. Horrified,
that moment seems to last forever. As well as the smell. She farts and our
laughs echo in the emptiness of my apartment. God, I like this girl. With
no awkwardness, she takes the offered sweatshirt and slips it on, drying her
hair with her hands in long pulls as she walks out of the room towards the
front door.
“Did you have a good weekend?” she asks before getting in
the car.
“Yeah. I did.” There are many things I love about Cleveland.
But this weekend has shown me that they are things I can look back on, not
things I can look forward to. After all, I’m an optimist. “Thank you.”
“Since you’re leaving for good. I guess I’ll keep this shirt. So
thank you.”
Sometimes the best love songs are the ones that say goodbye.
I-80 EAST
She’s not there in the morning even though she told me she has Mondays
off. Not that I expected her to be, but I still look, hoping. People are working, and I told everybody, even my parents, that it wasn’t a big deal, that
Sunday night was the party and the drinking and the crying and the goodbying. Not to mention I’d be home in a few weeks for Thanksgiving anyway. So I head to my car with the first load for my trunk and see the CD
FICTION JUDGE
under my windshield wiper, tucked in a Ziploc bag . The plastic case is
turning opaque, scratched so that you can tell it was probably a cover she
took from another CD. I’m guessing Neil Young (although if I really think
about it, the best bet would be Guns ‘N’ Roses knowing her). The picture
under the plastic is Jo; it looks like it was taken by lamplight beside her bed,
her features casting sharp shadows across her tired, inscrutable face. The
resolution is grainy and the colors faded almost black and white, probably
the product of a cheap computer printer. Written in Sharpie, the title is
simple: “When You Can’t Sleep.” Inside there is no track listing, just a note.
I couldn’t sleep. So I’ve been up all night thinking of a way to say
goodbye. This is my going away present, dummy. Or wait till you get to NY to
open it, and it can be your hello present.
Jo
We use the word love too easily. Cleveland? NYC? You love a
person, not a city. We use the word love too easily. You don’t love in a
weekend. You don’t love in a kiss. At least I don’t. Somewhere over the
Pennsylvania border, in the middle of small mountains, in low clouds between tall trees, for the third time I finish her mix CD. There are songs by
the Strokes about last night; there are songs by the Beatles about the sun
coming even though outside, it’s setting, putting stars in the sky, in my
eyes, and in New York City somewhere in front of me. It’s the New York of
my dreams, a castle of towers above the streets. It’s a Broadway moon on
opening night over Manhattan, stars too large and too bright hung on
wires against a royal blue sky, and couples in scarves tied European style
walking somewhere important in Chelsea. But it’s also the Brooklyn I
won’t sleep in until the end of the Beastie Boys, the NYC of no parking and
dark alleys.
Crossing the Manhattan Bridge into Fort Greene, her CD ends
for the seventh time, and there’s no mistaking it—“love” is not said once
anywhere over fours states and twenty-one songs. We use the word love
too easily. So we’ll call it something else instead for now. Sitting sideways
with her shoes on the seat and her arms hugging her knees, I let her sleep,
while I drive the last few feet.
Chris Barzak
This story was a real joy to read. It’s full of lyricism, like a good pop song, and the dialogue crackles. Its
movements from section to section, from place to place, throughout the environs of Cleveland and the city’s
well-loved landmarks, made the story come alive. It was something of a disappointment to reach New York
at the end of the story, after having fallen in love with this author’s nostalgic, lovingly-detailed portrait of
Cleveland. 02
09
M
U
S
E
M
applying it to a Jewish Girl. She’s giving me the prom I never went to, and
she doesn’t even know it. Her defenses down, she won’t look me in the
eyes, but I can see that she’s fighting her smile really hard this time. I can
see even in the darkness of the crowd.
Sometimes in the dark, there’s a song. Sometimes, you’ve listened to the same song for so long, you forget how good it is.
13
5. THE SHVITZ
As her going away present, she leaves me (she has to work on Sundays) and
hands me over to her Uncle Pete. Peter Dubinsky is connected. The Cleveland mob has always been a buffet, a mess that somehow comes together
on your plate—Italian, Greek, Russian, Jewish, and Irish factions all at one
time or another working with one another to work against each other, and
somehow prospering and crashing all at the same time. Both Russian and
Jewish, Uncle Pete is everybody’s uncle, big and soft, both in his appearance and the way he talks, and he knows everyone everywhere. In fact,
everyone calls him Uncle Pete. In my twenty years in Cleveland, I’ve never
even heard of the place he’s taking me to.
02
09
M
M
U
S
E
12
On the way there, Uncle Pete tells me that buying the giant
Lexus SUV was one of the hardest and saddest things he’s ever done. And
according to Jo, if family whispers and bedtime stories between cousins
were to be believed, he’s done many hard and sad things to many people in
his life. Constant breakdowns forced him to finally give up his beloved
Chevy Silverado he tells me as the neighborhoods we drive through keep
getting more crowded—more houses closer together, more people huddled outside with seemingly nothing to do. Then we’re on Kinsman, a
street and neighborhood that’s on the wrong side of a wrong town.
“I got nothing against the Japs, you know. I just wanna buy
American. But shit, I’m starting to love this Jap car. It drives real nice.” He
gives me a smile that’s Jack and Coke—three parts sweet and one part poison—and adds, “Don’t tell anybody I said that.”
All the guards at the second gate carry shotguns. I would never
believe this place existed if I wasn’t seeing it. They are large, old, black men
paid to keep other black men in the surrounding neighborhood out of the
private club. Aged and tired like most of the steel mills and factories of the
city, the building we’re ushered into looks ready to fall, which is how they
want it, I think. Old white men love their secrets and their clubs and being
old white men so much it might seem gay until it goes three-hundred and
sixty degrees to the point of ridiculous manliness again.
Inside, you go up to the locker room on the fourth floor and
change into a towel, surrounded by old men of Eastern European descent
with no towels who don’t give a damn about strangers and bare asses.
We sweat; we drink (you bring your own, and Uncle Pete produces a jug of
homemade wine); we smoke cigars and play cards with characters who
look more ramshackle than the building we’re in, all stone ledges and broken facades. We get massages and then steam off ten pounds that we easily
put back on with the thirty ounce steaks we eat (you pick your thickness of
from a side of ribeye, and they cut it with a band saw). You tip everybody.
Well, at least Uncle Pete does for the both of us.
This is Cleveland.
“Jojo must like you, kid. I think I’ve met one of her boyfriends
once. And she ain’t never asked me to take anybody here before. Lucky for
you, she’s my favorite.”
“I’m not really a boyfriend.”
Smiling through stubbled jowls, he doesn’t bat an eye at my
confession.
“She says you’re moving to New York.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s like I told Jo: I just can’t find what I’m looking
for here.”
“Fair enough.” He throws cold water on heated stones and says
above the hissing, “I lived in Red Hook for five years when I was young,
and everybody there wanted to get out of Brooklyn.”
Uncle Pete rocks. He proves to me that you can party at a funeral,
that in the dying of neighborhoods, tradition and customs keep you warm
and are as much defiance as they are solace. Filling my plastic cup with
more bad wine that gets you drunk quickly, he teaches me that in an old forgotten building, there are complex men doing simple, wonderful things.
2473 W. 11TH ST.
Like the rest of Cleveland, Prosperity isn’t really prospering at all. It isn’t
my favorite bar in the world either, but it’s only a block from my apartment, and on my last night, I want to stay in Tremont, close to home because I’m not done packing, and I have a lot of goodbyes left to give. She
shows up after almost everyone has left, even though I asked her to come
for dinner. It’s easy to forget that we only met a couple of days ago. My best
friends Mike and Mike are the last to go, winking back drunkenly like they
have palsies as they head out the door beneath October rain. “Your Uncle Pete’s a good guy. Good advice. He was your real
going away present, wasn’t he? Not the Shvitz.”
“Uncle Pete wasn’t a present. He’s not gay, you homo. He’s got a
wife and at least two girlfriends.” Jo is Jo till the end.
Her car is actually parked closer to my place than the bar
because there’s only street parking in Tremont. Neither of us has an
umbrella, yet we still walk back slowly in the rain. Nothing much at all is
said, the end of my Cleveland long song fading away on unmemorable
notes with no lyrics to remember. Considering the girl beside me and the
places I’ve been the last two days, I thought there’d be so much more
than this. Maybe the leaves will return to green, and fall up, back on the
trees. Maybe the rain will be drops of paint, coloring the city. Maybe she
will ask me to stay, and the sun and the moon will both shine at the same
time. Maybe, like in a movie, I will ask her to marry me tonight. But we
walk in silence over wet, dead leaves, going over the same old streets
between too many vacant buildings and too much exposed steel, and I
realize Cleveland is no movie. Instead, it’s repetitive in its reality, and I’ve
always been a dreamer—that’s just me. I can’t change and neither can a
city. For everything this weekend has been, I was already gone; I had left
long ago.
If she comes up, I tell her I can give her a sweat shirt. Luckily for
me, I had packed my clothes that afternoon, and I remember which trash
bag has all of my winter attire As I turn around with the faded Cleveland
Browns hoodie, she’s already begun to take off her wet sweater, her face
cynical as ever. She has on a bra this time—thin cotton, thin straps, dark
blue. I’ve always loved the color blue on a girl. The Star of David is not
there this time. A dark birthmark shaped like Africa between her small
breasts makes me realize how pale her skin really is, and except for the
birthmark, how profoundly rich even in the poor light.
That’s when I accidentally fart, lost in our moment. Horrified,
that moment seems to last forever. As well as the smell. She farts and our
laughs echo in the emptiness of my apartment. God, I like this girl. With
no awkwardness, she takes the offered sweatshirt and slips it on, drying her
hair with her hands in long pulls as she walks out of the room towards the
front door.
“Did you have a good weekend?” she asks before getting in
the car.
“Yeah. I did.” There are many things I love about Cleveland.
But this weekend has shown me that they are things I can look back on, not
things I can look forward to. After all, I’m an optimist. “Thank you.”
“Since you’re leaving for good. I guess I’ll keep this shirt. So
thank you.”
Sometimes the best love songs are the ones that say goodbye.
I-80 EAST
She’s not there in the morning even though she told me she has Mondays
off. Not that I expected her to be, but I still look, hoping. People are working, and I told everybody, even my parents, that it wasn’t a big deal, that
Sunday night was the party and the drinking and the crying and the goodbying. Not to mention I’d be home in a few weeks for Thanksgiving anyway. So I head to my car with the first load for my trunk and see the CD
FICTION JUDGE
under my windshield wiper, tucked in a Ziploc bag . The plastic case is
turning opaque, scratched so that you can tell it was probably a cover she
took from another CD. I’m guessing Neil Young (although if I really think
about it, the best bet would be Guns ‘N’ Roses knowing her). The picture
under the plastic is Jo; it looks like it was taken by lamplight beside her bed,
her features casting sharp shadows across her tired, inscrutable face. The
resolution is grainy and the colors faded almost black and white, probably
the product of a cheap computer printer. Written in Sharpie, the title is
simple: “When You Can’t Sleep.” Inside there is no track listing, just a note.
I couldn’t sleep. So I’ve been up all night thinking of a way to say
goodbye. This is my going away present, dummy. Or wait till you get to NY to
open it, and it can be your hello present.
Jo
We use the word love too easily. Cleveland? NYC? You love a
person, not a city. We use the word love too easily. You don’t love in a
weekend. You don’t love in a kiss. At least I don’t. Somewhere over the
Pennsylvania border, in the middle of small mountains, in low clouds between tall trees, for the third time I finish her mix CD. There are songs by
the Strokes about last night; there are songs by the Beatles about the sun
coming even though outside, it’s setting, putting stars in the sky, in my
eyes, and in New York City somewhere in front of me. It’s the New York of
my dreams, a castle of towers above the streets. It’s a Broadway moon on
opening night over Manhattan, stars too large and too bright hung on
wires against a royal blue sky, and couples in scarves tied European style
walking somewhere important in Chelsea. But it’s also the Brooklyn I
won’t sleep in until the end of the Beastie Boys, the NYC of no parking and
dark alleys.
Crossing the Manhattan Bridge into Fort Greene, her CD ends
for the seventh time, and there’s no mistaking it—“love” is not said once
anywhere over fours states and twenty-one songs. We use the word love
too easily. So we’ll call it something else instead for now. Sitting sideways
with her shoes on the seat and her arms hugging her knees, I let her sleep,
while I drive the last few feet.
Chris Barzak
This story was a real joy to read. It’s full of lyricism, like a good pop song, and the dialogue crackles. Its
movements from section to section, from place to place, throughout the environs of Cleveland and the city’s
well-loved landmarks, made the story come alive. It was something of a disappointment to reach New York
at the end of the story, after having fallen in love with this author’s nostalgic, lovingly-detailed portrait of
Cleveland. 02
09
M
U
S
E
M
applying it to a Jewish Girl. She’s giving me the prom I never went to, and
she doesn’t even know it. Her defenses down, she won’t look me in the
eyes, but I can see that she’s fighting her smile really hard this time. I can
see even in the darkness of the crowd.
Sometimes in the dark, there’s a song. Sometimes, you’ve listened to the same song for so long, you forget how good it is.
13
{poetry}
FIRST PLACE
A Woman Bathes
in the Ohio River on Sunday Afternoon
BY THOMAS DUKES
M
M
U
S
E
16
I put up my hair.
I lower my colors:
a white blouse of surrender,
black pants of mourning.
Now, my husband passes
cars on midnight runs
that will not kill him.
My son in Seattle drinks cool
coffee but calls home every day
to scare off bad things.
My Paris son cried so hard
his girlfriend offered to marry him.
My daughter, the eldest,
made this body
of full breasts,
global belly,
thighs that can crush cars.
My stretch marks stretch
from pregnancy
to her funeral last month.
“I WRITE FOR SEVERAL REASONS. YEARS AGO, I CAME ACROSS A STATEMENT BY ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH THAT
GOES, ROUGHLY “WRITING IS MORE THAN LIVING . . . . IT IS BEING CONSCIOUS OF LIVING.” MY EDUCATION, READING,
AND WRITING ARE THE KEYS TO THAT CONSCIOUSNESS. WRITING ENABLES ME TO SHARE MY PARTICULAR TAKE ON
THINGS WITH OTHERS WHO LOVE LANGUAGE AS MUCH AS I DO. I WRITE FOR THE SHEER JOY OF WRITING, FOR THE
PLEASURE I GET WHEN A PHRASE, POEM, OR EVEN BOOK COME OUT JUST THE WAY I WANT THEM TO, WHEN I CAN
SAY, “I CAN’T MAKE THAT ANY BETTER.” FINALLY, I WRITE AS A FORM OF WORSHIP: WRITING FOR ME IS A WAY
HONORING GOD (THAT IS, WHEN MY WRITING IS ANY GOOD). LIKE THE CHILD IN AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS
WHO OFFERS HIS CANE BECAUSE THAT IS ALL HE HAS, THIS IS ALMOST ALL I HAVE TO OFFER, BUT HERE IT IS.
THOMAS DUKES IS PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF AKRON HE IS THE AUTHOR OF A POETRY
COLLECTION, BAPTIST CONFIDENTIAL, AND A FORTHCOMING MEMOIR, SUGAR BLOOD JESUS: A MEMOIR OF FAITH,
MADNESS, AND CREAM GRAVY. HE LIVES WITH HIS SPOUSE, SIX CATS, AND A POODLE (PRINCESS DIANA) IN A
TOWNSHIP NEAR AKRON, OHIO.
POETRY JUDGE
The water raises me
above the nonsense of suicide.
I bob, a post-menopausal cork.
Some boys on the bank
snicker at my nipples,
a woman says
John, call the cops, it’s indecent.
Bury your child, lady,
if you want indecent.
The summer she turned thirteen,
I paid my daughter twenty dollars
to teach me to swim:
now you won’t drown, Mom.
Today, the sun’s rod and staff
comfort me. Perhaps
I shall take up knitting,
or the ponies, or song styling
in better lounges.
Until then, I am art:
Still Life with Floating Mother.
I know how to get
to shore.
Honor Moore
“A Woman Bathes in the Ohio River” by Thomas Dukes
A combination of wit and depth of feeling, and surprises like “Bury your child, lady, / if you want
indecent” give this poem a quality of originality that make its speaker take up residence in a
reader’s imagination.
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
02
09
17
{poetry}
FIRST PLACE
A Woman Bathes
in the Ohio River on Sunday Afternoon
BY THOMAS DUKES
M
M
U
S
E
16
I put up my hair.
I lower my colors:
a white blouse of surrender,
black pants of mourning.
Now, my husband passes
cars on midnight runs
that will not kill him.
My son in Seattle drinks cool
coffee but calls home every day
to scare off bad things.
My Paris son cried so hard
his girlfriend offered to marry him.
My daughter, the eldest,
made this body
of full breasts,
global belly,
thighs that can crush cars.
My stretch marks stretch
from pregnancy
to her funeral last month.
“I WRITE FOR SEVERAL REASONS. YEARS AGO, I CAME ACROSS A STATEMENT BY ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH THAT
GOES, ROUGHLY “WRITING IS MORE THAN LIVING . . . . IT IS BEING CONSCIOUS OF LIVING.” MY EDUCATION, READING,
AND WRITING ARE THE KEYS TO THAT CONSCIOUSNESS. WRITING ENABLES ME TO SHARE MY PARTICULAR TAKE ON
THINGS WITH OTHERS WHO LOVE LANGUAGE AS MUCH AS I DO. I WRITE FOR THE SHEER JOY OF WRITING, FOR THE
PLEASURE I GET WHEN A PHRASE, POEM, OR EVEN BOOK COME OUT JUST THE WAY I WANT THEM TO, WHEN I CAN
SAY, “I CAN’T MAKE THAT ANY BETTER.” FINALLY, I WRITE AS A FORM OF WORSHIP: WRITING FOR ME IS A WAY
HONORING GOD (THAT IS, WHEN MY WRITING IS ANY GOOD). LIKE THE CHILD IN AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS
WHO OFFERS HIS CANE BECAUSE THAT IS ALL HE HAS, THIS IS ALMOST ALL I HAVE TO OFFER, BUT HERE IT IS.
THOMAS DUKES IS PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF AKRON HE IS THE AUTHOR OF A POETRY
COLLECTION, BAPTIST CONFIDENTIAL, AND A FORTHCOMING MEMOIR, SUGAR BLOOD JESUS: A MEMOIR OF FAITH,
MADNESS, AND CREAM GRAVY. HE LIVES WITH HIS SPOUSE, SIX CATS, AND A POODLE (PRINCESS DIANA) IN A
TOWNSHIP NEAR AKRON, OHIO.
POETRY JUDGE
The water raises me
above the nonsense of suicide.
I bob, a post-menopausal cork.
Some boys on the bank
snicker at my nipples,
a woman says
John, call the cops, it’s indecent.
Bury your child, lady,
if you want indecent.
The summer she turned thirteen,
I paid my daughter twenty dollars
to teach me to swim:
now you won’t drown, Mom.
Today, the sun’s rod and staff
comfort me. Perhaps
I shall take up knitting,
or the ponies, or song styling
in better lounges.
Until then, I am art:
Still Life with Floating Mother.
I know how to get
to shore.
Honor Moore
“A Woman Bathes in the Ohio River” by Thomas Dukes
A combination of wit and depth of feeling, and surprises like “Bury your child, lady, / if you want
indecent” give this poem a quality of originality that make its speaker take up residence in a
reader’s imagination.
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
02
09
17
FIRST PLACE
Singer Sewing Machine No. 66
(With Attachments, For Family Use)
B Y K E L LY B A N C R O F T
My grandmother’s sewing machine rests under a sheet in the upstairs hallway. It is the treadle kind where the band wheel and bobbin winder and belt guide groan to life only when you pump its
wide, iron pedal. Permanently fixed in its oak cabinet, the machine
rises stubbornly from it. It is black, anvil-heavy, always cold, with
hand-painted gilt swirls along the arm and throat and face plate, as
if to make delicate a most practical and indelicate machine. I never
saw my Grandmother Jones sit at the Singer, but I easily imagine
her there, neck bent, slippered feet pumping as she guides a hem
over the feed dog. Her arms jiggle in the cheap, sleeveless housedress she loved so well that she insisted her daughters bury her in it.
When my grandmother became too ill and too volatile
for her daughters to care for, she had to surrender her slim savings—along with any proceeds from the sale of her tiny, cluttered
house and its contents—to Shepherd of the Valley nursing home
so she could become a resident there. My mother nabbed the machine before the auctioneer came to peddle the old woman’s things:
the collection of rooster knick-knacks, her blonde dresser set, my
grandfather’s spittoon, my uncle’s defunct pistols, the new stove,
the print of Jesus with his hemorrhaging heart. Of the four Jones
girls, my mother, Verna, was the only one who wanted the ma-
02
09
M
M
U
S
E
18
chine. She was really the only one who cared much for homemaking. She kept the cleanest and prettiest house (her youngest sister,
Marilyn, threw out dishes if they sat too long in the sink). She was
the best cook (Aunt Betty, the middle child, found even garlic salt
too exotic). She had the greenest thumb (Edna, the eldest, put out
cigarettes in her withered spider plant). And she attained the highest domestic goal any girl from Mineral Ridge, Ohio, might dream
to reach: She landed the best husband (Betty’s was a bigot, Edna’s a
drunk, Marilyn’s a philanderer).
As a teenager, my mother learned to sew practical pieces
such as curtains and pillow cases on the treadle machine. She occasionally indulged in sewing personal items, mostly plain dresses
with simple lines. The attachments that came with the machine, for
plaiting and gathering and ruffling and embroidering, my grandmother had no use for and my mother found too unwieldy to use
on the heavy machine. When she got her own electric Singer (and
her own daughter), she made up for lost time. She sewed for us
matching mother-daughter Easter outfits of eyelet with fuscia rickrack and smocking at the sleeves. She made for herself a lavender
evening gown that gathered and slid off the shoulders just-so. For a
Christmas party once, she created four snowmen costumes out of
KELLY BANCROFT LIVES IN YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO, WHERE SHE COORDINATES AN ARTS EDUCATION PROGRAM
FOR K-12 STUDENTS. SHE HAS TAUGHT STUDENTS OF ALL AGES, INCLUDING BOYS AND GIRLS RESIDING IN THE
MAHONING COUNTY JUVENILE JUSTICE DETENTION CENTER, WHERE THEY PRODUCED HANDMADE BOOKS
OF WRITING AND IMAGES IN HER CLASSES. SHE HAS RECEIVED AN OHIO ARTS COUNCIL INDIVIDUAL ARTIST
AWARD AND TWO WRITING RESIDENCIES AT RAGDALE. HER POETRY, FICTION, AND ESSAYS HAVE APPEARED
IN XCONNECT, CORTLAND REVIEW, LITERAL LATTE, SALT WATER REVIEW, WHISKEY ISLAND, AND JMW, AMONG
OTHERS. SHE IS CURRENTLY PURSUING HER MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING THROUGH THE NORTHEAST OHIO
MASTERS OF FINE ARTS PROGRAM. SHE SINGS FOR THE FOLK BAND “BRADY’S LEAP” AND IS MARRIED WITH
TWO STEP-SONS AND TWO CATS. My mother stopped using her machine around the time
my grandmother went into the nursing home. I would later recognize this period as when the depression my mother had battled
most of her life began to overwhelm her, as it had my grandmother.
Her neck hurts too much, she said. The close work bothers her eyes.
There’s no one to sew for any more since I am all grown-up. Patterns are so expensive, you might as well just buy the damn dress.
I have inherited my mother’s graceful but poorly constructed neck. It stiffens easily, sticks like a rain-warped door. I have
inherited, too, my mother’s love of texture and fabric. I collect unusual vintage prints that catch my eye, like handkerchiefs featuring
drink recipes or bark-cloth cowboys riding the range of the living room curtain. My favorite find: a few stained yards depicting
Charles Lindbergh’s Trans-Atlantic flight, discovered in the bottom of a five dollar box that I won—the sole bidder—at an auction.
NON-FICTION JUDGE
I will inherit my mother’s sewing machine and cabinet when she
dies. At sixty, she began to label and list those objects that will come
to me, those that will go to my brother. I will have two cabinets
then, my grandmother’s and my mother’s. I will never use either.
What I have not inherited is my mother’s ability to sew.
More than that, I have not come into the patience she once had for
her craft. I’ve made some attempts. During my first (and failed)
marriage, I sewed simple curtains and skirts with a second-hand
machine my mother-in-law gave me. But I sewed them on the fly,
cheating, it seemed to me, because I would use “stitch witchery,” a
hemming tape that sticks to fabric when ironed. I couldn’t sit still
long enough to hem by hand. I would avoid button holes or zippers or waist bands. I never used a pattern, not because I could
succeed without one, as my mother could, but because I couldn’t
read them. Just as I can’t read maps. Or instructions. Or recipes.
My eyes don’t light on the page well or for long enough. I misread
signs, misconstrue meaning, see the number five as the letter “F.” If
I had grown up in the days of diagnosing children, I’m sure I would
have been labeled. But it has always seemed like more than that to
me. I somehow have the wrong temperament for home-making,
the wrong hands and heart. Indeed, my grandmother’s machine
lies under a sheet to protect it from my latest decorating project.
I started to paint the upstairs hallway in April but now, in the last
week of October, it remains half-done.
Though I am more content than not, though I laugh more
than lament, though my faulty transmitters negotiate most of my
days well enough, I do sometimes dwell in the future. I have no
nieces or nephews, no children of my own. My step-sons—one
lives with me and my second husband, mostly cooped-up in his
bedroom, the other lives with his mother—seem far away, unreadable. I am at the age now that my mother was when she closed her
own cabinet. I try to picture what will happen to my grandmother’s
machine when I die, who will unfold my Lindbergh fabric, what
will become of that second cabinet, beautiful and useless, that will
eventually come to me.
David Giffels
Vivid writing, with easy control over voice and pacing and deft detail. The insight and sentiment
are apt and understated. The writer’s personality is generous, vulnerable and therefore likeable.
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
{non-fiction}
sheets, with glittery buttons and hoops and tinsel fringe that shimmied right above the knees of her and her friends.
When we lived overseas, my father hired a Spanish carpenter to build for my mother a sewing cabinet of magnificent proportions, like a ring box an emperor might give his betrothed. It
stood seven feet high and five feet wide when its elaborate doors
were closed. When opened, they revealed built-in shelves, storage
nooks, a bobbin rack, a fluorescent light and a counter for the sewing machine to rest upon. My mother’s triumphant creation at that
machine: a flamenco dress for me made without a pattern— endless ruffles of taffeta and cotton, black punctuated with buttercups.
The cabinet now hovers, closed, in the smallest bedroom of my
parents’ house, the room from which they forward to me mass
emails about the war or salvation. Its shelves overflow with neatly
folded fabric my mother has purchased over the years and remnants from outfits she made for me as a girl. One printed swatch
shows animals in the impossible shapes of the alphabet—an elephant making an “E” with its legs and trunk, a giraffe bending into
an “L”. Neither of my parents seem to notice or mind the unused
cabinet, though it fills over half of the room. When my father teases
my mother that it’s big enough to bury them both in, she says he
planned it that way all along.
19
FIRST PLACE
Singer Sewing Machine No. 66
(With Attachments, For Family Use)
B Y K E L LY B A N C R O F T
My grandmother’s sewing machine rests under a sheet in the upstairs hallway. It is the treadle kind where the band wheel and bobbin winder and belt guide groan to life only when you pump its
wide, iron pedal. Permanently fixed in its oak cabinet, the machine
rises stubbornly from it. It is black, anvil-heavy, always cold, with
hand-painted gilt swirls along the arm and throat and face plate, as
if to make delicate a most practical and indelicate machine. I never
saw my Grandmother Jones sit at the Singer, but I easily imagine
her there, neck bent, slippered feet pumping as she guides a hem
over the feed dog. Her arms jiggle in the cheap, sleeveless housedress she loved so well that she insisted her daughters bury her in it.
When my grandmother became too ill and too volatile
for her daughters to care for, she had to surrender her slim savings—along with any proceeds from the sale of her tiny, cluttered
house and its contents—to Shepherd of the Valley nursing home
so she could become a resident there. My mother nabbed the machine before the auctioneer came to peddle the old woman’s things:
the collection of rooster knick-knacks, her blonde dresser set, my
grandfather’s spittoon, my uncle’s defunct pistols, the new stove,
the print of Jesus with his hemorrhaging heart. Of the four Jones
girls, my mother, Verna, was the only one who wanted the ma-
02
09
M
M
U
S
E
18
chine. She was really the only one who cared much for homemaking. She kept the cleanest and prettiest house (her youngest sister,
Marilyn, threw out dishes if they sat too long in the sink). She was
the best cook (Aunt Betty, the middle child, found even garlic salt
too exotic). She had the greenest thumb (Edna, the eldest, put out
cigarettes in her withered spider plant). And she attained the highest domestic goal any girl from Mineral Ridge, Ohio, might dream
to reach: She landed the best husband (Betty’s was a bigot, Edna’s a
drunk, Marilyn’s a philanderer).
As a teenager, my mother learned to sew practical pieces
such as curtains and pillow cases on the treadle machine. She occasionally indulged in sewing personal items, mostly plain dresses
with simple lines. The attachments that came with the machine, for
plaiting and gathering and ruffling and embroidering, my grandmother had no use for and my mother found too unwieldy to use
on the heavy machine. When she got her own electric Singer (and
her own daughter), she made up for lost time. She sewed for us
matching mother-daughter Easter outfits of eyelet with fuscia rickrack and smocking at the sleeves. She made for herself a lavender
evening gown that gathered and slid off the shoulders just-so. For a
Christmas party once, she created four snowmen costumes out of
KELLY BANCROFT LIVES IN YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO, WHERE SHE COORDINATES AN ARTS EDUCATION PROGRAM
FOR K-12 STUDENTS. SHE HAS TAUGHT STUDENTS OF ALL AGES, INCLUDING BOYS AND GIRLS RESIDING IN THE
MAHONING COUNTY JUVENILE JUSTICE DETENTION CENTER, WHERE THEY PRODUCED HANDMADE BOOKS
OF WRITING AND IMAGES IN HER CLASSES. SHE HAS RECEIVED AN OHIO ARTS COUNCIL INDIVIDUAL ARTIST
AWARD AND TWO WRITING RESIDENCIES AT RAGDALE. HER POETRY, FICTION, AND ESSAYS HAVE APPEARED
IN XCONNECT, CORTLAND REVIEW, LITERAL LATTE, SALT WATER REVIEW, WHISKEY ISLAND, AND JMW, AMONG
OTHERS. SHE IS CURRENTLY PURSUING HER MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING THROUGH THE NORTHEAST OHIO
MASTERS OF FINE ARTS PROGRAM. SHE SINGS FOR THE FOLK BAND “BRADY’S LEAP” AND IS MARRIED WITH
TWO STEP-SONS AND TWO CATS. My mother stopped using her machine around the time
my grandmother went into the nursing home. I would later recognize this period as when the depression my mother had battled
most of her life began to overwhelm her, as it had my grandmother.
Her neck hurts too much, she said. The close work bothers her eyes.
There’s no one to sew for any more since I am all grown-up. Patterns are so expensive, you might as well just buy the damn dress.
I have inherited my mother’s graceful but poorly constructed neck. It stiffens easily, sticks like a rain-warped door. I have
inherited, too, my mother’s love of texture and fabric. I collect unusual vintage prints that catch my eye, like handkerchiefs featuring
drink recipes or bark-cloth cowboys riding the range of the living room curtain. My favorite find: a few stained yards depicting
Charles Lindbergh’s Trans-Atlantic flight, discovered in the bottom of a five dollar box that I won—the sole bidder—at an auction.
NON-FICTION JUDGE
I will inherit my mother’s sewing machine and cabinet when she
dies. At sixty, she began to label and list those objects that will come
to me, those that will go to my brother. I will have two cabinets
then, my grandmother’s and my mother’s. I will never use either.
What I have not inherited is my mother’s ability to sew.
More than that, I have not come into the patience she once had for
her craft. I’ve made some attempts. During my first (and failed)
marriage, I sewed simple curtains and skirts with a second-hand
machine my mother-in-law gave me. But I sewed them on the fly,
cheating, it seemed to me, because I would use “stitch witchery,” a
hemming tape that sticks to fabric when ironed. I couldn’t sit still
long enough to hem by hand. I would avoid button holes or zippers or waist bands. I never used a pattern, not because I could
succeed without one, as my mother could, but because I couldn’t
read them. Just as I can’t read maps. Or instructions. Or recipes.
My eyes don’t light on the page well or for long enough. I misread
signs, misconstrue meaning, see the number five as the letter “F.” If
I had grown up in the days of diagnosing children, I’m sure I would
have been labeled. But it has always seemed like more than that to
me. I somehow have the wrong temperament for home-making,
the wrong hands and heart. Indeed, my grandmother’s machine
lies under a sheet to protect it from my latest decorating project.
I started to paint the upstairs hallway in April but now, in the last
week of October, it remains half-done.
Though I am more content than not, though I laugh more
than lament, though my faulty transmitters negotiate most of my
days well enough, I do sometimes dwell in the future. I have no
nieces or nephews, no children of my own. My step-sons—one
lives with me and my second husband, mostly cooped-up in his
bedroom, the other lives with his mother—seem far away, unreadable. I am at the age now that my mother was when she closed her
own cabinet. I try to picture what will happen to my grandmother’s
machine when I die, who will unfold my Lindbergh fabric, what
will become of that second cabinet, beautiful and useless, that will
eventually come to me.
David Giffels
Vivid writing, with easy control over voice and pacing and deft detail. The insight and sentiment
are apt and understated. The writer’s personality is generous, vulnerable and therefore likeable.
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
{non-fiction}
sheets, with glittery buttons and hoops and tinsel fringe that shimmied right above the knees of her and her friends.
When we lived overseas, my father hired a Spanish carpenter to build for my mother a sewing cabinet of magnificent proportions, like a ring box an emperor might give his betrothed. It
stood seven feet high and five feet wide when its elaborate doors
were closed. When opened, they revealed built-in shelves, storage
nooks, a bobbin rack, a fluorescent light and a counter for the sewing machine to rest upon. My mother’s triumphant creation at that
machine: a flamenco dress for me made without a pattern— endless ruffles of taffeta and cotton, black punctuated with buttercups.
The cabinet now hovers, closed, in the smallest bedroom of my
parents’ house, the room from which they forward to me mass
emails about the war or salvation. Its shelves overflow with neatly
folded fabric my mother has purchased over the years and remnants from outfits she made for me as a girl. One printed swatch
shows animals in the impossible shapes of the alphabet—an elephant making an “E” with its legs and trunk, a giraffe bending into
an “L”. Neither of my parents seem to notice or mind the unused
cabinet, though it fills over half of the room. When my father teases
my mother that it’s big enough to bury them both in, she says he
planned it that way all along.
19
SECOND PLACE
Yossarian Gives In
BY AMY THACKER
It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he
fell madly in love with him. He went out the next day and bought
the Tiger Beat with the actor’s face on the cover. “It is for my sister,”
Yossarian explained to the clerk behind the rows and rows of fruity
flavored gum. The clerk barely looked up from her sticky magenta
nail polish as she pulled Yossarian’s dollar toward the cash drawer.
Yossarian stared at the crispy haired girl, with her curls
pulled high onto her head by a scrunchy. He wanted to make sure
she believed him.
He shoved the magazine into his green canvas tote, slung
it on his shoulder and scooted through the mini-mart’s door as the
bell rang behind him. He ran home, not because it was raining, his
Chuck Taylors sloshing over the sidewalk, but because he felt so exposed on the street with the magazine nearly out in the open.
“Romano Estoban. Romano Estoban. Romano Estoban.”
He mouthed the name as he flipped through the pages to
find the tell-all article and photo spread of the Cuban-born actor.
While watching Developing Baja, Yossarian believed that
he was the Mexican chaplain that Estoban played in the Saturday
matinee. Estoban had managed to retain his rugged appeal through
the black shirt and priest’s collar. The second the lean, glossy haired
seductor stepped into the frame, Yossarian’s mouth gaped. He
felt a burning sensation in his chest, and then his head began to
throb. His palms clammed. He looked to his left, at his little brother
Raz who had his hand deep into the popcorn, fishing for a kernel
squishy with butter. He glanced to his right; his sister Isabel was in
another world, her body in a trance while her mind danced among
the Californian villagers. On the screen, peasant beauties wore gar02
09
M
M
U
S
E
20
denias behind their ears the white petals in their shining black
manes illuminating the whites of their eyes. Yossarian indulged
himself in the theatre’s flickering lights and slinked lower in his
seat, waiting for the glistening, bronzed chaplain to reappear.
His favorite part of the film was when Teresa, a young village girl, wept over the burning of her home. Romano knelt to the
ground, his white blouse blackened and torn as he had spent hours
fighting the blaze. Yossarian watched the chaplain’s biceps tighten
through the tear in the fabric as he took her chin in his hands and
wiped the streaky soot from under her eyes. The chaplain’s eyes
wrinkled as he smiled. His eyes told her he cared, and his smile
promised a better tomorrow. Her tears stopped and she buried her
face into his billowing chest. Last night, Yossarian replayed that
scene from under his blue woolen blanket in his little room. He
tried to remember exactly how the chaplain’s eyes tightened, and
how Teresa drifted into the pillow of his chest. The fabric looked
cool against his hot skin. Yossarian felt his sheet between his fingers, then grazed his face with the edge of his pillow. He didn’t want
to sleep until he got the scene just right.
Today, the raindrops pounded on the window, on the
roof, down the street, over the city and into Yossarian. He sat on
his bed, in his bubble, alone with Romano Estoban. He found the
right spot in Tiger Beat. Romano’s smooth chest, the color of Nestlé
Quik, poked through the laces of his white, loose blouse. The actor
was leaning on his right knee, with his boot perched atop a jagged
rock, wind tussling his hair. Yossarian stared, waiting for Romano
Estoban to speak. The stoic figure would have seemed too perfect,
but Yossarian had seen him alive in the theatre.
as she placed the platter on the table.
Paul was older than Izzy. He was a varsity guard for the
basketball team and held the long jump record for the district. Yossarian knew Paul before Izzy had snagged him. Yossarian ran track
as an eighth grader and had seen Paul jump. Paul had given high
jump a try, but didn’t have the stomach for it. Yossarian was let
down when Paul stopped practicing high jump; he thought Paul
floated like an angel. His pulling torso, arching back, and following shoulders moved like poetry. But Paul didn’t see the beauty in
losing.
After baklava, the kids wandered down the stairs to the rec
room. Raz and Yossarian played table tennis in the dark end as Paul
and Izzy listened to records by the sliding-glass door.
Yossarian was frustrated playing with his little brother.
Raz was barely old enough to see over the ping pong table, let alone
volley. Yossarian didn’t mind that they didn’t keep score; he just
wanted to work up to some sort of rhythm. If Yossarian could get a
volley going, Raz would inevitably hit a wild shot to ruin the back
and forth.
Izzy stood to switch songs to her favorite. She tugged at
Paul. “Come on,” she goaded.
“Heeeeee yaaaaah!” cried Raz, smashing the ball overhand
and plinking it off the wood- paneled walls.
FICTION JUDGE
AMY THACKER IS A NATIVE OHIOAN BUT A CLEVELAND TRANSPLANT. CLEVELAND, AND ITS FRIENDLY NATURE,
HAS WON HER OVER. HER FAVORITE HOBBY IS FINDING INTERESTING AND ENDEARING LOCAL ACTIVITIES
TO SHARE WITH OTHERS TO SPREAD HER LOVE FOR CLEVELAND. WHEN NOT GALLIVANTING AROUND TOWN
SEEKING HER NEXT ADVENTURE, AMY IS MOST LIKELY TO BE FOUND COOKING AN ELABORATE AND MESSY
MEAL OR CHATTING ON THE PHONE WITH ONE OF HER THREE SISTERS. AMY HAS PASSION FOR WRITING,
PAINTING, SWIMMING, LAUGHING AND EXPERIENCING LIVE MUSIC.
“That was the last ball, Raz,” Yossarian complained with
pursed lips. “You’d better help me find it.” Both boys began looking
under the feet of the various old pieces of furniture stacked along
the walls.
Yossarian rustled the drapes along the sliding door as he
stared at the reflection of Izzy and Paul in the darkened glass. Izzy
was still pulling at Paul. She pulled his right, then left hand, swaying him to stand. He stood in one spot as she twirled around him,
swinging her long, flowing skirt about her sides.
“Antic-i-pa-a-tion is making me wait,” she sang.
She raised both his arms again, his white t-shirt sleeves
slipping to the biggest part of his arm. She stepped back. His long
arms stretched as she pushed forward. His biceps bulged. She giggled until he was pulling her, then releasing, stretching, bulging,
pushing, and pulling her back into him. He raised her left hand and
twirled her. She laughed louder and he pulled her tightly into his
body. His palms clutched her above her hips. He swayed with her.
She giggled big, one last time, and slid her face into his chest. They
swayed together through the end of the record. The two giggled
louder as they embraced and flopped onto the couch.
“Hey, weirdo,” Izzy called to Yossarian. “Snap a picture. It
lasts longer.”
Yossarian’s stomach ignited.
“Your brother is strange.” Paul whispered to Izzy. “He just
stares all the time.”
The fire spread down Yossarian’s extremities. He didn’t
speak. He found the ball and returned to the table. He served the
ball to Raz, but couldn’t seem to make a return. Raz thought his
older brother was letting him win, but he didn’t complain. Raz
wanted to be the best. Yossarian couldn’t focus. He couldn’t feel his
hands. He didn’t want to be in the basement anymore, but he was
too scared to make a move. He served again. Ping pong was safe.
When Yossarian entered his room, he fell face first into his pillow. He inhaled. He pulled out the Tiger Beat and shoved it in his knapsack. Tomorrow he would start over. He would toss it in the dumpster behind the corner store on his way to school. He stuffed his
books on top. He slipped into bed and read his Chemistry book. He
drifted off somewhere between Hydrogen and Helium.
Chris Barzak
The prose of “Yossarian Gives In” takes us so tightly into its point of view character’s perspective that it
almost feels as if it’s written in the first person instead of the third. The dialogue is snappy, the emotional
tenor true and heartfelt, the details and images evocative of a place and time and family that feels far
away and yet somehow very present. This is a skillfully written slice-of-life.
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
{fiction}
Raz knocked on his door. Yossarian slipped the magazine
under his mattress. It was time for dinner.
In the kitchen, his mother stood in front of the stove,
spooning the chickpeas onto the wide platter.
“Where have you been all day, young man? Your father
needed your help in the garage.”
Yossarian slipped into his seat at the table and watched
Izzy slide down the stairs. She wore ballet flats and a tiered denim
skirt draping to her ankles. Izzy handed her mother the ends of the
black ribbon to tie around her neck. One long tendril of Izzy’s thick
curls dropped from her left temple, the rest slicked into a low, black
bun. She had tucked one of Mrs. Nayak’s chrysanthemum’s behind
her ear.
“Wooohoo!” Father whistled as he stepped to the head of
the table. “You look gorgeous! What is the occasion?”
“Paul is coming over for dessert,” their mother answered
21
SECOND PLACE
Yossarian Gives In
BY AMY THACKER
It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he
fell madly in love with him. He went out the next day and bought
the Tiger Beat with the actor’s face on the cover. “It is for my sister,”
Yossarian explained to the clerk behind the rows and rows of fruity
flavored gum. The clerk barely looked up from her sticky magenta
nail polish as she pulled Yossarian’s dollar toward the cash drawer.
Yossarian stared at the crispy haired girl, with her curls
pulled high onto her head by a scrunchy. He wanted to make sure
she believed him.
He shoved the magazine into his green canvas tote, slung
it on his shoulder and scooted through the mini-mart’s door as the
bell rang behind him. He ran home, not because it was raining, his
Chuck Taylors sloshing over the sidewalk, but because he felt so exposed on the street with the magazine nearly out in the open.
“Romano Estoban. Romano Estoban. Romano Estoban.”
He mouthed the name as he flipped through the pages to
find the tell-all article and photo spread of the Cuban-born actor.
While watching Developing Baja, Yossarian believed that
he was the Mexican chaplain that Estoban played in the Saturday
matinee. Estoban had managed to retain his rugged appeal through
the black shirt and priest’s collar. The second the lean, glossy haired
seductor stepped into the frame, Yossarian’s mouth gaped. He
felt a burning sensation in his chest, and then his head began to
throb. His palms clammed. He looked to his left, at his little brother
Raz who had his hand deep into the popcorn, fishing for a kernel
squishy with butter. He glanced to his right; his sister Isabel was in
another world, her body in a trance while her mind danced among
the Californian villagers. On the screen, peasant beauties wore gar02
09
M
M
U
S
E
20
denias behind their ears the white petals in their shining black
manes illuminating the whites of their eyes. Yossarian indulged
himself in the theatre’s flickering lights and slinked lower in his
seat, waiting for the glistening, bronzed chaplain to reappear.
His favorite part of the film was when Teresa, a young village girl, wept over the burning of her home. Romano knelt to the
ground, his white blouse blackened and torn as he had spent hours
fighting the blaze. Yossarian watched the chaplain’s biceps tighten
through the tear in the fabric as he took her chin in his hands and
wiped the streaky soot from under her eyes. The chaplain’s eyes
wrinkled as he smiled. His eyes told her he cared, and his smile
promised a better tomorrow. Her tears stopped and she buried her
face into his billowing chest. Last night, Yossarian replayed that
scene from under his blue woolen blanket in his little room. He
tried to remember exactly how the chaplain’s eyes tightened, and
how Teresa drifted into the pillow of his chest. The fabric looked
cool against his hot skin. Yossarian felt his sheet between his fingers, then grazed his face with the edge of his pillow. He didn’t want
to sleep until he got the scene just right.
Today, the raindrops pounded on the window, on the
roof, down the street, over the city and into Yossarian. He sat on
his bed, in his bubble, alone with Romano Estoban. He found the
right spot in Tiger Beat. Romano’s smooth chest, the color of Nestlé
Quik, poked through the laces of his white, loose blouse. The actor
was leaning on his right knee, with his boot perched atop a jagged
rock, wind tussling his hair. Yossarian stared, waiting for Romano
Estoban to speak. The stoic figure would have seemed too perfect,
but Yossarian had seen him alive in the theatre.
as she placed the platter on the table.
Paul was older than Izzy. He was a varsity guard for the
basketball team and held the long jump record for the district. Yossarian knew Paul before Izzy had snagged him. Yossarian ran track
as an eighth grader and had seen Paul jump. Paul had given high
jump a try, but didn’t have the stomach for it. Yossarian was let
down when Paul stopped practicing high jump; he thought Paul
floated like an angel. His pulling torso, arching back, and following shoulders moved like poetry. But Paul didn’t see the beauty in
losing.
After baklava, the kids wandered down the stairs to the rec
room. Raz and Yossarian played table tennis in the dark end as Paul
and Izzy listened to records by the sliding-glass door.
Yossarian was frustrated playing with his little brother.
Raz was barely old enough to see over the ping pong table, let alone
volley. Yossarian didn’t mind that they didn’t keep score; he just
wanted to work up to some sort of rhythm. If Yossarian could get a
volley going, Raz would inevitably hit a wild shot to ruin the back
and forth.
Izzy stood to switch songs to her favorite. She tugged at
Paul. “Come on,” she goaded.
“Heeeeee yaaaaah!” cried Raz, smashing the ball overhand
and plinking it off the wood- paneled walls.
FICTION JUDGE
AMY THACKER IS A NATIVE OHIOAN BUT A CLEVELAND TRANSPLANT. CLEVELAND, AND ITS FRIENDLY NATURE,
HAS WON HER OVER. HER FAVORITE HOBBY IS FINDING INTERESTING AND ENDEARING LOCAL ACTIVITIES
TO SHARE WITH OTHERS TO SPREAD HER LOVE FOR CLEVELAND. WHEN NOT GALLIVANTING AROUND TOWN
SEEKING HER NEXT ADVENTURE, AMY IS MOST LIKELY TO BE FOUND COOKING AN ELABORATE AND MESSY
MEAL OR CHATTING ON THE PHONE WITH ONE OF HER THREE SISTERS. AMY HAS PASSION FOR WRITING,
PAINTING, SWIMMING, LAUGHING AND EXPERIENCING LIVE MUSIC.
“That was the last ball, Raz,” Yossarian complained with
pursed lips. “You’d better help me find it.” Both boys began looking
under the feet of the various old pieces of furniture stacked along
the walls.
Yossarian rustled the drapes along the sliding door as he
stared at the reflection of Izzy and Paul in the darkened glass. Izzy
was still pulling at Paul. She pulled his right, then left hand, swaying him to stand. He stood in one spot as she twirled around him,
swinging her long, flowing skirt about her sides.
“Antic-i-pa-a-tion is making me wait,” she sang.
She raised both his arms again, his white t-shirt sleeves
slipping to the biggest part of his arm. She stepped back. His long
arms stretched as she pushed forward. His biceps bulged. She giggled until he was pulling her, then releasing, stretching, bulging,
pushing, and pulling her back into him. He raised her left hand and
twirled her. She laughed louder and he pulled her tightly into his
body. His palms clutched her above her hips. He swayed with her.
She giggled big, one last time, and slid her face into his chest. They
swayed together through the end of the record. The two giggled
louder as they embraced and flopped onto the couch.
“Hey, weirdo,” Izzy called to Yossarian. “Snap a picture. It
lasts longer.”
Yossarian’s stomach ignited.
“Your brother is strange.” Paul whispered to Izzy. “He just
stares all the time.”
The fire spread down Yossarian’s extremities. He didn’t
speak. He found the ball and returned to the table. He served the
ball to Raz, but couldn’t seem to make a return. Raz thought his
older brother was letting him win, but he didn’t complain. Raz
wanted to be the best. Yossarian couldn’t focus. He couldn’t feel his
hands. He didn’t want to be in the basement anymore, but he was
too scared to make a move. He served again. Ping pong was safe.
When Yossarian entered his room, he fell face first into his pillow. He inhaled. He pulled out the Tiger Beat and shoved it in his knapsack. Tomorrow he would start over. He would toss it in the dumpster behind the corner store on his way to school. He stuffed his
books on top. He slipped into bed and read his Chemistry book. He
drifted off somewhere between Hydrogen and Helium.
Chris Barzak
The prose of “Yossarian Gives In” takes us so tightly into its point of view character’s perspective that it
almost feels as if it’s written in the first person instead of the third. The dialogue is snappy, the emotional
tenor true and heartfelt, the details and images evocative of a place and time and family that feels far
away and yet somehow very present. This is a skillfully written slice-of-life.
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
{fiction}
Raz knocked on his door. Yossarian slipped the magazine
under his mattress. It was time for dinner.
In the kitchen, his mother stood in front of the stove,
spooning the chickpeas onto the wide platter.
“Where have you been all day, young man? Your father
needed your help in the garage.”
Yossarian slipped into his seat at the table and watched
Izzy slide down the stairs. She wore ballet flats and a tiered denim
skirt draping to her ankles. Izzy handed her mother the ends of the
black ribbon to tie around her neck. One long tendril of Izzy’s thick
curls dropped from her left temple, the rest slicked into a low, black
bun. She had tucked one of Mrs. Nayak’s chrysanthemum’s behind
her ear.
“Wooohoo!” Father whistled as he stepped to the head of
the table. “You look gorgeous! What is the occasion?”
“Paul is coming over for dessert,” their mother answered
21
{poetry}
{non-fiction}
SECOND PLACE
SECOND PLACE
Stealing Lumber on a Sunday Afternoon
(for Rick Bragg)
Crazy Horses
B Y K E L LY B A N C R O F T
BY THOMAS DUKES
Let Methodists take the high road to Jesus:
Lucas rocks his axle on clay so rutted
the sheriff can’t follow.
He’s got 190,000 miles on this life
where rehab means the rich
are messing in your business again.
Once he shot the mayor’s mule dead
on general principles and won
fifty dollars from Jubal Slade,
now doing time for statutory rape
of all the sugar named Georgia he could find.
Lucas himself got eighteen months
for a wrong turn that took
02
09
M
M
U
S
E
22
his illegal hooch to a debutante picnic:
it pleasured him to hear the blazer boys
scream like girls.
Azaleas bloom as he passes,
wild dogwood take a bow.
He’ll buy his grandpa some Red Chief,
his sister coffee and steak,
yellow roses for their mama’s grave:
Eastertime’s a-comin,’
Lucas sings, for ever’body. .
One night not long ago, I dreamed of Donny Osmond —the
grown-up, Technicolor-Dream-Coat Donny, not the Tiger Beat
idol whose face used to paper my bedroom walls. In the dream,
Donny desperately loved me and wanted to take me home to his
sprawling, toothsome clan. I’d impressed him by reciting the
birth order of his nine siblings, as well as their instruments and
favorite colors. Donny and I were motoring to Utah when the
scream of my husband’s rotary saw rudely awakened me.
The sweet Donny dream interrupted a stretch of far less
pleasant ones. On and off for two weeks, I’d been dreaming of,
well, feces, poop, crap, grumpies, number two, dropping the kids
at the pool. I’m taking one and I can’t stop. Or the toilet’s plugged
up, and I’ve got to unclog it with my bare hands. Or the bathroom
stall where I eternally squat has a glass door that opens onto a
mall’s concourse. A quick on-line search of “dreams of feces” assures me this is a common dream-theme, and analysts offer several meanings. Dreams of defecating, I discover, suggest a huge
excess of emotion that needs to be dealt with “before it turns
toxic.” Gillian Holloway in “Dream Discoveries” says that “the
body cannot survive in good health without proper elimination
and evacuation, and the psyche in its own terms requires the release of psychic waste as well.” Some cultures claim that feces
dreams portend great financial success. Freud thought you were
fretting over money if you dreamed of playing with your poop.
On the eve of my Donny dream, police hit the lottery
when they pulled over a red Cadillac Escalade for having no visible registration. Driving the vehicle was Isaac Jeffs. Beside him
sat his trembling brother, Warren Steed Jeffs, the leader of a polygamist sect who was also on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Warren Jeffs
had fled Utah in 2005 to avoid prosecution for arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old girl and a middle-aged, married man. The news that night featured shots of Jeffs in handcuffs, a
ferret-like, frightened man.1 Women across the country wondered who would marry a man like that, let alone be devoted
enough to share him with a few dozen others. The big news shows
that week tried to answer that question with exposés on polygamy. Their guests included adult women who had been handed
off to grown men at the age of 12 or 13. One program gathered a
roundtable of polygamous “sisters” touting the benefits of multiple marriages; they shared household chores and jointly looked
after their hoards of children.
Discussion of Jeffs’ church crammed the airwaves. He
had inherited the throne of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints after the death of his 98-year-old father, Rulon Jeffs, who left behind 65 children by several women,
nearly all of whom the son later took as his own wives. The FLDS
had broken away from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints when the LDS denounced polygamy in 1890. “President
and Prophet,” was Warren Jeffs’ official title. “Seer and Revelator.”
Members of the Latter-day Saints Church vehemently informed
us that week that Jeffs was not a Mormon. Mormons do not believe in polygamy. Mormons believe in family, in clean living.
Think Tabernacle Choir. Think Osmonds.
Like a million other girls in the seventies, I worshipped
Donny Osmond I watched every “Donny and Marie Show” episode and knew all the Osmond trivia. I wore head-to-toe purple
(Donny’s favorite color) and still have a photo of myself wearing a
crushed velvet Donny cap. I knew all of his songs, of course, but
1
In May and July 2007, Jeffs was charged with multiple counts, including sexual conduct with minors and incest. In September 2007 he was found guilty on two counts
of rape as an accomplice. He was sentenced to 10 years to life. He is imprisoned at the
Utah State Prison.
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
Lucas hauls a devil’s load of pine
in his daddy’s pick-up
that the law loves to hate:
welcome to Alabama.
He contracts for every poor white
whose mama picked hours
of someone else’s cotton and tomatoes
to feed her kids with, whatever
Big Man said she could tote home.
23
{poetry}
{non-fiction}
SECOND PLACE
SECOND PLACE
Stealing Lumber on a Sunday Afternoon
(for Rick Bragg)
Crazy Horses
B Y K E L LY B A N C R O F T
BY THOMAS DUKES
Let Methodists take the high road to Jesus:
Lucas rocks his axle on clay so rutted
the sheriff can’t follow.
He’s got 190,000 miles on this life
where rehab means the rich
are messing in your business again.
Once he shot the mayor’s mule dead
on general principles and won
fifty dollars from Jubal Slade,
now doing time for statutory rape
of all the sugar named Georgia he could find.
Lucas himself got eighteen months
for a wrong turn that took
02
09
M
M
U
S
E
22
his illegal hooch to a debutante picnic:
it pleasured him to hear the blazer boys
scream like girls.
Azaleas bloom as he passes,
wild dogwood take a bow.
He’ll buy his grandpa some Red Chief,
his sister coffee and steak,
yellow roses for their mama’s grave:
Eastertime’s a-comin,’
Lucas sings, for ever’body. .
One night not long ago, I dreamed of Donny Osmond —the
grown-up, Technicolor-Dream-Coat Donny, not the Tiger Beat
idol whose face used to paper my bedroom walls. In the dream,
Donny desperately loved me and wanted to take me home to his
sprawling, toothsome clan. I’d impressed him by reciting the
birth order of his nine siblings, as well as their instruments and
favorite colors. Donny and I were motoring to Utah when the
scream of my husband’s rotary saw rudely awakened me.
The sweet Donny dream interrupted a stretch of far less
pleasant ones. On and off for two weeks, I’d been dreaming of,
well, feces, poop, crap, grumpies, number two, dropping the kids
at the pool. I’m taking one and I can’t stop. Or the toilet’s plugged
up, and I’ve got to unclog it with my bare hands. Or the bathroom
stall where I eternally squat has a glass door that opens onto a
mall’s concourse. A quick on-line search of “dreams of feces” assures me this is a common dream-theme, and analysts offer several meanings. Dreams of defecating, I discover, suggest a huge
excess of emotion that needs to be dealt with “before it turns
toxic.” Gillian Holloway in “Dream Discoveries” says that “the
body cannot survive in good health without proper elimination
and evacuation, and the psyche in its own terms requires the release of psychic waste as well.” Some cultures claim that feces
dreams portend great financial success. Freud thought you were
fretting over money if you dreamed of playing with your poop.
On the eve of my Donny dream, police hit the lottery
when they pulled over a red Cadillac Escalade for having no visible registration. Driving the vehicle was Isaac Jeffs. Beside him
sat his trembling brother, Warren Steed Jeffs, the leader of a polygamist sect who was also on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Warren Jeffs
had fled Utah in 2005 to avoid prosecution for arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old girl and a middle-aged, married man. The news that night featured shots of Jeffs in handcuffs, a
ferret-like, frightened man.1 Women across the country wondered who would marry a man like that, let alone be devoted
enough to share him with a few dozen others. The big news shows
that week tried to answer that question with exposés on polygamy. Their guests included adult women who had been handed
off to grown men at the age of 12 or 13. One program gathered a
roundtable of polygamous “sisters” touting the benefits of multiple marriages; they shared household chores and jointly looked
after their hoards of children.
Discussion of Jeffs’ church crammed the airwaves. He
had inherited the throne of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints after the death of his 98-year-old father, Rulon Jeffs, who left behind 65 children by several women,
nearly all of whom the son later took as his own wives. The FLDS
had broken away from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints when the LDS denounced polygamy in 1890. “President
and Prophet,” was Warren Jeffs’ official title. “Seer and Revelator.”
Members of the Latter-day Saints Church vehemently informed
us that week that Jeffs was not a Mormon. Mormons do not believe in polygamy. Mormons believe in family, in clean living.
Think Tabernacle Choir. Think Osmonds.
Like a million other girls in the seventies, I worshipped
Donny Osmond I watched every “Donny and Marie Show” episode and knew all the Osmond trivia. I wore head-to-toe purple
(Donny’s favorite color) and still have a photo of myself wearing a
crushed velvet Donny cap. I knew all of his songs, of course, but
1
In May and July 2007, Jeffs was charged with multiple counts, including sexual conduct with minors and incest. In September 2007 he was found guilty on two counts
of rape as an accomplice. He was sentenced to 10 years to life. He is imprisoned at the
Utah State Prison.
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
Lucas hauls a devil’s load of pine
in his daddy’s pick-up
that the law loves to hate:
welcome to Alabama.
He contracts for every poor white
whose mama picked hours
of someone else’s cotton and tomatoes
to feed her kids with, whatever
Big Man said she could tote home.
23
In 1972, young girls needed such innocence. Hanoi
burned with Nixon’s bombs. George Wallace’s campaign near my
home ended with a bullet. And on the other side of the world, a
girl the same age as me tore naked down a street in South Vietnam, skin on fire from the Napalm payload accidentally dropped
on her village. Along with my purple get-ups, I wore a clunky
POW/MIA bracelet inscribed with the name of a soldier gone
missing in the war. Sunday nights I checked the rows of names in
our local paper to see if his showed up among those men who,
whole or in pieces, were brought home. I don’t recall the name of
my soldier, just the shadowy weight of it circling my wrist.
The Osmonds were the antithesis of war, the opposite of
agony, though my older brother certainly howled in pain when I
played their music. But in that year of Donny’s “Puppy Love” and
“All I Have To Do is Dream,” the Osmonds came out with an
album that puzzled me even more than would their later album
entitled “Osmonds Live” (I read the title as Osmonds live—rhymes
with “give”—which made me wonder if I’d somehow missed rumors
of their death). In an attempt to electrify and harden their sound,
the Osmonds wrote and recorded the album, “Crazy Horses”.
There’s a message floatin’ in the air
Come from crazy horses ridin’ everywhere
It’s a warning, it’s in every tongue
Gotta stop them crazy horses on the run
What a show, there they go smokin’ up the sky, yeah
Crazy horses all got riders, and they’re you and I
02
09
M
M
U
S
E
24
The “Crazy Horses” album cover pictured the brothers
standing in a cluttered junk yard in strange dress—overalls, engineer hats, a limo driver’s jodhpurs. The grills and chrome of
trashed cars surrounded them. Jay (the drummer) held up a huge
wrench like the kind my father used on his VW jalopy.
A cartoonish cough of gray smoke behind them spelled out
“Crazy Horses” in exhaust-shaped letters. I didn’t get it. Where
was Donny’s girlish face, his helmet of dark hair, his gleaming
keyboard of teeth on the cover of the “Portrait of Donny” album
released three months before? Where was the photo I could hold
close and kiss goodnight? The “Crazy Horses” album cover
frightened me, at least the front of it did. The back side pleased
me, though its relationship to the front confused me. There the
brothers stood in another yard, this one lush and green. Instead of
a wrench, Jay held a spade, a rainbow patch stitched on his breast
pocket. Donny tilted a watering can. In the background, Alan sat
atop a ladder beside a thriving, dense tree.
The sound of the album frightened me as much as their
newly-formed politically conscious image. Though they’d
recorded earlier songs with guitar riffs and polite nods to their psychedelic contemporaries, the title track proved too much for me:
Never stop and they never die
They just keep on puffin’ how they multiply
Crazy horses, will they never halt?
If they keep on movin’ then it’s all our fault
So take a good look around
See what they’ve done
What they’ve done
They’ve done
Crazy horses
Right after “horses” came the electrified whinny of a
horse, created with voice or guitar or bass, I just didn’t know. I
didn’t like this new sound. I couldn’t make it fit my image of the
honey-toned Osmonds. It felt dangerous and not in the thrilling
way of ghost stories or roller coasters. I resented the brothers for
reasons I couldn’t understand then. I felt like they had defected,
grown-up without me. I stashed “Crazy Horses” on my bookshelf
between “Portrait of Donny” and a Herb Alpert and the Tijuana
Brass album I liked to dance to alone in my room.
Osmond fans still debate the meaning of the critically maligned song. Some swear it’s about shooting heroin while others
think its theme is obvious—it’s about air pollution. In an interview
decades later, Jay Osmond set the record straight and confessed it
was an anti-smoking song. I have downloaded a clip of it to my laptop, and when I listen to it, I still get the sour feeling in my gut I
experienced when I first heard it, when I felt suddenly unsafe, exposed, betrayed.
It’s no great mystery, then, why Donny appeared in my
dream, all grown up and just as sweet as he had seemed as a boy.
Who wouldn’t want their childhood symbol of innocence to remain
intact despite the inevitable lowered voice and five o’clock shadow
that accompanied his adulthood? That he visited me on the heels of
Warren Jeffs’s capture is even less mysterious. Jeffs stands for the
adulterated life, a misconstrued version of what the Osmonds stood
for. He symbolizes the best of the Mormon religion gone bad. Jeffs’
was a criminal abuse of power, especially over young girls. Donny’s
power was to enrapture them and carry them safely to the threshold
of adolescence.
But what about the poop dreams? Perhaps that is more
mysterious. Was my psyche so toxic I needed to clear out my innards
on a nightly basis? Maybe I was tapping into an ancient, universal
symbol of the transition that each of us undergoes throughout our
NON-FICTION JUDGE
lives. Certainly innocent, androgynous Donny became that symbol
for me when I was a girl on the brink of becoming a teenager. The
sound of “Crazy Horses” seemed to signal the shift that would inevitably come for me, and soon, a change I both longed for and feared.
The Osmonds had revolutionized themselves with that album. When
and how would I revolutionize myself?
The anxiety I felt in my toilet dreams resembled what I felt
as a girl in the midst of violence and change. And it is what I sometimes feel these days among the presidential debates and another foreign war, the shadow of Korea’s nuclear arsenal, the stock market
crash, gunshots in the neighborhood, college coeds disappearing,
trapped coal miners, collapsed bridges, quarrels with family, dust
bunnies, piles of laundry, late movie fees—you get the picture. It’s
no wonder I still need Donny. Don’t we all crave the return of innocence? Let Donny appear, angelic, while I’m plunging the commode. Let him steal me away for a night. He’ll bring me back, no
doubt, my pockets filled with souvenirs from the trip.
David Giffels
Brightly written opening paragraphs are offbeat, surprising and strong enough to carry the
reader forward. Choosing an unusual, obscure song from a ubiquitous pop group allows most
readers to feel like insiders, even though most of us don’t know the song. And I was prompted
to Google it immediately after reading; a good sign.
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
my favorites were those my parents also knew. In a brilliant marketing scheme to hook pre-orgasmic girls on an idol harmless
enough for their parents, Donny crooned remakes of classics my
mother liked to sing around the house—“Go Away Little Girl,”
“Twelfth of Never,” “Too Young.” The Osmonds’ background, of
course, smelled Bazooka-sweet. As Mormons, this clan shunned
pre-marital sex, alcohol, drugs, even caffeine, and my love for
Donny was equally chaste, as uncorrupted as the “Puppy Love”
he sang only to me.
25
In 1972, young girls needed such innocence. Hanoi
burned with Nixon’s bombs. George Wallace’s campaign near my
home ended with a bullet. And on the other side of the world, a
girl the same age as me tore naked down a street in South Vietnam, skin on fire from the Napalm payload accidentally dropped
on her village. Along with my purple get-ups, I wore a clunky
POW/MIA bracelet inscribed with the name of a soldier gone
missing in the war. Sunday nights I checked the rows of names in
our local paper to see if his showed up among those men who,
whole or in pieces, were brought home. I don’t recall the name of
my soldier, just the shadowy weight of it circling my wrist.
The Osmonds were the antithesis of war, the opposite of
agony, though my older brother certainly howled in pain when I
played their music. But in that year of Donny’s “Puppy Love” and
“All I Have To Do is Dream,” the Osmonds came out with an
album that puzzled me even more than would their later album
entitled “Osmonds Live” (I read the title as Osmonds live—rhymes
with “give”—which made me wonder if I’d somehow missed rumors
of their death). In an attempt to electrify and harden their sound,
the Osmonds wrote and recorded the album, “Crazy Horses”.
There’s a message floatin’ in the air
Come from crazy horses ridin’ everywhere
It’s a warning, it’s in every tongue
Gotta stop them crazy horses on the run
What a show, there they go smokin’ up the sky, yeah
Crazy horses all got riders, and they’re you and I
02
09
M
M
U
S
E
24
The “Crazy Horses” album cover pictured the brothers
standing in a cluttered junk yard in strange dress—overalls, engineer hats, a limo driver’s jodhpurs. The grills and chrome of
trashed cars surrounded them. Jay (the drummer) held up a huge
wrench like the kind my father used on his VW jalopy.
A cartoonish cough of gray smoke behind them spelled out
“Crazy Horses” in exhaust-shaped letters. I didn’t get it. Where
was Donny’s girlish face, his helmet of dark hair, his gleaming
keyboard of teeth on the cover of the “Portrait of Donny” album
released three months before? Where was the photo I could hold
close and kiss goodnight? The “Crazy Horses” album cover
frightened me, at least the front of it did. The back side pleased
me, though its relationship to the front confused me. There the
brothers stood in another yard, this one lush and green. Instead of
a wrench, Jay held a spade, a rainbow patch stitched on his breast
pocket. Donny tilted a watering can. In the background, Alan sat
atop a ladder beside a thriving, dense tree.
The sound of the album frightened me as much as their
newly-formed politically conscious image. Though they’d
recorded earlier songs with guitar riffs and polite nods to their psychedelic contemporaries, the title track proved too much for me:
Never stop and they never die
They just keep on puffin’ how they multiply
Crazy horses, will they never halt?
If they keep on movin’ then it’s all our fault
So take a good look around
See what they’ve done
What they’ve done
They’ve done
Crazy horses
Right after “horses” came the electrified whinny of a
horse, created with voice or guitar or bass, I just didn’t know. I
didn’t like this new sound. I couldn’t make it fit my image of the
honey-toned Osmonds. It felt dangerous and not in the thrilling
way of ghost stories or roller coasters. I resented the brothers for
reasons I couldn’t understand then. I felt like they had defected,
grown-up without me. I stashed “Crazy Horses” on my bookshelf
between “Portrait of Donny” and a Herb Alpert and the Tijuana
Brass album I liked to dance to alone in my room.
Osmond fans still debate the meaning of the critically maligned song. Some swear it’s about shooting heroin while others
think its theme is obvious—it’s about air pollution. In an interview
decades later, Jay Osmond set the record straight and confessed it
was an anti-smoking song. I have downloaded a clip of it to my laptop, and when I listen to it, I still get the sour feeling in my gut I
experienced when I first heard it, when I felt suddenly unsafe, exposed, betrayed.
It’s no great mystery, then, why Donny appeared in my
dream, all grown up and just as sweet as he had seemed as a boy.
Who wouldn’t want their childhood symbol of innocence to remain
intact despite the inevitable lowered voice and five o’clock shadow
that accompanied his adulthood? That he visited me on the heels of
Warren Jeffs’s capture is even less mysterious. Jeffs stands for the
adulterated life, a misconstrued version of what the Osmonds stood
for. He symbolizes the best of the Mormon religion gone bad. Jeffs’
was a criminal abuse of power, especially over young girls. Donny’s
power was to enrapture them and carry them safely to the threshold
of adolescence.
But what about the poop dreams? Perhaps that is more
mysterious. Was my psyche so toxic I needed to clear out my innards
on a nightly basis? Maybe I was tapping into an ancient, universal
symbol of the transition that each of us undergoes throughout our
NON-FICTION JUDGE
lives. Certainly innocent, androgynous Donny became that symbol
for me when I was a girl on the brink of becoming a teenager. The
sound of “Crazy Horses” seemed to signal the shift that would inevitably come for me, and soon, a change I both longed for and feared.
The Osmonds had revolutionized themselves with that album. When
and how would I revolutionize myself?
The anxiety I felt in my toilet dreams resembled what I felt
as a girl in the midst of violence and change. And it is what I sometimes feel these days among the presidential debates and another foreign war, the shadow of Korea’s nuclear arsenal, the stock market
crash, gunshots in the neighborhood, college coeds disappearing,
trapped coal miners, collapsed bridges, quarrels with family, dust
bunnies, piles of laundry, late movie fees—you get the picture. It’s
no wonder I still need Donny. Don’t we all crave the return of innocence? Let Donny appear, angelic, while I’m plunging the commode. Let him steal me away for a night. He’ll bring me back, no
doubt, my pockets filled with souvenirs from the trip.
David Giffels
Brightly written opening paragraphs are offbeat, surprising and strong enough to carry the
reader forward. Choosing an unusual, obscure song from a ubiquitous pop group allows most
readers to feel like insiders, even though most of us don’t know the song. And I was prompted
to Google it immediately after reading; a good sign.
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
my favorites were those my parents also knew. In a brilliant marketing scheme to hook pre-orgasmic girls on an idol harmless
enough for their parents, Donny crooned remakes of classics my
mother liked to sing around the house—“Go Away Little Girl,”
“Twelfth of Never,” “Too Young.” The Osmonds’ background, of
course, smelled Bazooka-sweet. As Mormons, this clan shunned
pre-marital sex, alcohol, drugs, even caffeine, and my love for
Donny was equally chaste, as uncorrupted as the “Puppy Love”
he sang only to me.
25
CHAPTER 3
02
09
M
M
U
S
E
26
One of those letters arrives today. It’s been
years since Saul got the last one, but he gets
a feeling when he sees it on the tray of
morning mail Dena has left him. As he
slides his finger under the flap, there’s a
burning sensation as if it’s been coated with
acid, not glue. Ridiculous, of course, such
paranoia, such a strong sensation—it’s just a
paper cut—but each time he opens one of these
envelopes, his finger bleeds, like an omen.
There’s nothing else similar about
them. He’s kept a file over the years and
none of these dispatches is the same. The
stationary they’re written on varies, from a
heavy creamy bond to Xerox paper to sheets
from lined yellow legal pads. Nor does the
handwriting match. There are only a few
that are handwritten, and these are all different in rather spectacular ways—big
loopy letters, tiny scrunched-up letters like
wiggling ants, block print so square and
regular it could be wallpaper design. And
not all of them are letters. There are postcards too.
“Dena?” he calls into the other
room. His finger is now bleeding onto the
blotter. There are drops of blood sprinkled
on his other mail, too—the letter from the
Federation, a packet from JTS, an invitation
to attend a philosophical conference in Or-
Lies Will Take You Somewhere
~ A Novel by Sheila Schwartz
lando (about the least philosophical
place he can think of).
“Dena?” Saul tries again. “Would you
mind bringing me a Band-Aid?”
“Of course not, Rabbi.”
He hears a drawer slam and
then she bustles in from the reception
desk carrying her first-aid kit, the one
from Mogen David Adom which was sent
free because of the synagogue’s yearly
contribution. It has Band-Aids, aspirin,
gauze pads for non-denominational first
aid but also Jewish items—Tums, AlkaSeltzer tablets, and antiseptic wipes in
wrappers decorated with Jewish stars.
“What is it?” she asks as she
nears the desk. “What happened to you?”
Saul holds up his hand. “Just a
cut. A very messy one.”
“Oy!” Dena looks at the finger,
her face a pressed flower of concern. “That’s a lot of blood. Are you taking a
thinner?”
“Not yet, thank God.”
He allows her to wrap the BandAid tightly around the wound, to cluck at
him, “You need to be careful. You need
to take better care of yourself, Saul.”
After he gives her the all-clear
sign—(he can manage solo from here on
in)—she scurries back to the front desk.
Saul sighs as he takes a Clorox wipe from
the container next to his pencil jar and
tries to do damage control on the letters.
His desk looks like a crime scene. Oh
well. No one will ever see these envelopes. Though when he tosses them into
the trashcan they do look like evidence
he’s getting rid of.
But evidence of what? That his
mother still exists? There’s someone out
there pretending to be her? Why do that?
Why do it for so many years?
It’s a question he hasn’t been
able to answer ever since she disappeared. He doesn’t have a mother, hasn’t
had one since 1956, the day she went to
Atlantic City and never came back. But
someone keeps pretending to be her—
someone intrigued by the mystery
maybe, wanting to participate in a celebrated case. “The Boardwalk Murders”
the newspapers called it, though there
was never any clear evidence that anyone
had died, not his mother nor the three
other women who joined her on this excursion, none of whom returned. The
theory was that they’d been murdered,
wholesale. Another theory had it that
they’d staged their own deaths; each had
a problem to escape from—an unwanted
pregnancy, a terminal illness, a violent
husband, a life of turning tricks—the
usual tabloid reasons. Someone else claimed he’d spotted the four of them swimming out to sea,
to a glamorous white yacht that had been
idling too close to shore all day. They’d
climbed aboard and sunbathed the whole
afternoon until dusk when the boat gunned
its engines, churned a wake towards the
horizon, and was never seen again.
Who knows what really happened? It’s a question he shouldn’t be
pondering this late in his life. He doesn’t
need a mother anymore. And yet, he’s
kept every one of these strange letters
since the first dated October 12, 1956—
an unexplained birthday card two
months after his mother disappeared,
then an identical card each year until he
was eleven, only the number of balloons
increasing, as if she’d bought them all in
advance, mailed each one from a different place. Boston. Chicago. Santa Fe. But
they don’t sound like they’re from a real
mother. The tone of these greetings is so
exaggerated they sound almost mocking—My Dearest Darling Son, Most Precious Light of my Life, My Brilliant and
Beloved Child. There’s also an array of
postcards from 1970 with historic sites of
Philadelphia, a condolence card from
1973, when Saul’s father died—So sorry
for your UNFORTUNATE loss—and
four letters from 1976, the year he and
Jane got married. In these the tone is bitter. The writer speaks of relationships
that have failed her, of the despair of a
bad marriage.
As with the others, he doesn’t
really want to open this one. He has a
busy schedule today and he knows it will
upset him. He gets pointlessly upset, Jane
says, because these letters take him nowhere. They don’t illuminate his past,
they merely roil it. She complains that he
broods, that his despair causes him to be
cruel to her and the girls. Once, after that
awful letter he received after Malkah was
born, the one that began: Don’t you
know that children will destroy you? she
claimed that the letters were destroying
them. And for what? For nothing. She
doesn’t believe any of the letters were sent
by his actual mother, whom she’s sure is
long dead. Or long gone. “What mother
would torture her own child this way?”
she asked. Jane’s view is the letter writer
is crazy. Crazy and bitchy.
It’s true. There’s no evidence to
the contrary thus far. As Saul slides the
note from the envelope and unfolds it, a
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
E X C E R P T
27
CHAPTER 3
02
09
M
M
U
S
E
26
One of those letters arrives today. It’s been
years since Saul got the last one, but he gets
a feeling when he sees it on the tray of
morning mail Dena has left him. As he
slides his finger under the flap, there’s a
burning sensation as if it’s been coated with
acid, not glue. Ridiculous, of course, such
paranoia, such a strong sensation—it’s just a
paper cut—but each time he opens one of these
envelopes, his finger bleeds, like an omen.
There’s nothing else similar about
them. He’s kept a file over the years and
none of these dispatches is the same. The
stationary they’re written on varies, from a
heavy creamy bond to Xerox paper to sheets
from lined yellow legal pads. Nor does the
handwriting match. There are only a few
that are handwritten, and these are all different in rather spectacular ways—big
loopy letters, tiny scrunched-up letters like
wiggling ants, block print so square and
regular it could be wallpaper design. And
not all of them are letters. There are postcards too.
“Dena?” he calls into the other
room. His finger is now bleeding onto the
blotter. There are drops of blood sprinkled
on his other mail, too—the letter from the
Federation, a packet from JTS, an invitation
to attend a philosophical conference in Or-
Lies Will Take You Somewhere
~ A Novel by Sheila Schwartz
lando (about the least philosophical
place he can think of).
“Dena?” Saul tries again. “Would you
mind bringing me a Band-Aid?”
“Of course not, Rabbi.”
He hears a drawer slam and
then she bustles in from the reception
desk carrying her first-aid kit, the one
from Mogen David Adom which was sent
free because of the synagogue’s yearly
contribution. It has Band-Aids, aspirin,
gauze pads for non-denominational first
aid but also Jewish items—Tums, AlkaSeltzer tablets, and antiseptic wipes in
wrappers decorated with Jewish stars.
“What is it?” she asks as she
nears the desk. “What happened to you?”
Saul holds up his hand. “Just a
cut. A very messy one.”
“Oy!” Dena looks at the finger,
her face a pressed flower of concern. “That’s a lot of blood. Are you taking a
thinner?”
“Not yet, thank God.”
He allows her to wrap the BandAid tightly around the wound, to cluck at
him, “You need to be careful. You need
to take better care of yourself, Saul.”
After he gives her the all-clear
sign—(he can manage solo from here on
in)—she scurries back to the front desk.
Saul sighs as he takes a Clorox wipe from
the container next to his pencil jar and
tries to do damage control on the letters.
His desk looks like a crime scene. Oh
well. No one will ever see these envelopes. Though when he tosses them into
the trashcan they do look like evidence
he’s getting rid of.
But evidence of what? That his
mother still exists? There’s someone out
there pretending to be her? Why do that?
Why do it for so many years?
It’s a question he hasn’t been
able to answer ever since she disappeared. He doesn’t have a mother, hasn’t
had one since 1956, the day she went to
Atlantic City and never came back. But
someone keeps pretending to be her—
someone intrigued by the mystery
maybe, wanting to participate in a celebrated case. “The Boardwalk Murders”
the newspapers called it, though there
was never any clear evidence that anyone
had died, not his mother nor the three
other women who joined her on this excursion, none of whom returned. The
theory was that they’d been murdered,
wholesale. Another theory had it that
they’d staged their own deaths; each had
a problem to escape from—an unwanted
pregnancy, a terminal illness, a violent
husband, a life of turning tricks—the
usual tabloid reasons. Someone else claimed he’d spotted the four of them swimming out to sea,
to a glamorous white yacht that had been
idling too close to shore all day. They’d
climbed aboard and sunbathed the whole
afternoon until dusk when the boat gunned
its engines, churned a wake towards the
horizon, and was never seen again.
Who knows what really happened? It’s a question he shouldn’t be
pondering this late in his life. He doesn’t
need a mother anymore. And yet, he’s
kept every one of these strange letters
since the first dated October 12, 1956—
an unexplained birthday card two
months after his mother disappeared,
then an identical card each year until he
was eleven, only the number of balloons
increasing, as if she’d bought them all in
advance, mailed each one from a different place. Boston. Chicago. Santa Fe. But
they don’t sound like they’re from a real
mother. The tone of these greetings is so
exaggerated they sound almost mocking—My Dearest Darling Son, Most Precious Light of my Life, My Brilliant and
Beloved Child. There’s also an array of
postcards from 1970 with historic sites of
Philadelphia, a condolence card from
1973, when Saul’s father died—So sorry
for your UNFORTUNATE loss—and
four letters from 1976, the year he and
Jane got married. In these the tone is bitter. The writer speaks of relationships
that have failed her, of the despair of a
bad marriage.
As with the others, he doesn’t
really want to open this one. He has a
busy schedule today and he knows it will
upset him. He gets pointlessly upset, Jane
says, because these letters take him nowhere. They don’t illuminate his past,
they merely roil it. She complains that he
broods, that his despair causes him to be
cruel to her and the girls. Once, after that
awful letter he received after Malkah was
born, the one that began: Don’t you
know that children will destroy you? she
claimed that the letters were destroying
them. And for what? For nothing. She
doesn’t believe any of the letters were sent
by his actual mother, whom she’s sure is
long dead. Or long gone. “What mother
would torture her own child this way?”
she asked. Jane’s view is the letter writer
is crazy. Crazy and bitchy.
It’s true. There’s no evidence to
the contrary thus far. As Saul slides the
note from the envelope and unfolds it, a
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
E X C E R P T
27
02
09
M
M
U
S
E
28
He tosses it in the wastebasket
just as Dena rings her little silver bell that
tells him a congregant is here. She devised
this trick a few years ago as a way not to
jar him, to save herself from reprimands
when she accidentally pries him from
some absorbing thought. She thinks he’s
a control freak, but a tragic one. She’s
known him since he was a boy—that’s
why she tolerates him. She was his
babysitter after his mother died. She
knows how much Saul wept for her, has
been watching over him ever since. She
even told Saul once this was her destiny,
to protect him from the outside world.
They’re like Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester.
Or maybe it’s his wife Jane who
is Jane Eyre (that would make more sense,
wouldn’t it?) though she’s never expressed
the degree of eagerness to protect him
that Dena has. Every once in a while, in
fact, she’s claimed that they’re ill-suited to
one another, that if she hadn’t been so
much younger than he, if her mother
hadn’t been so thrilled he was a rabbi…
And so his day begins, the usual
combination of personal conundrums
and overwhelming tasks. “Boker tov,” he
says to the prenuptial couple Dena ushers
in. “Good morning,” he translates just in
case, as they seat themselves in plush
chairs—a plump young woman and a
very skinny man. She must outweigh him
by forty pounds, though this shouldn’t be
a factor in marital bliss. It’s not a wrestling match after all. “Let’s begin our
counseling with a small prayer,” Saul suggests, and they bow their heads so deeply
he can see the man’s ring bald spot, the
snarl of curls in the woman’s hair she’s left
uncombed. “Blessed are those who seek to
combine,” he says. “They will find joy
here on earth and in the kingdom of
heaven.” Can they tell he made this up?
There is no prayer, actually, for counseling sessions. He just says it to get everyone
in the mood. Add a touch of solemnity.
“Amen!” the couple proclaim in
unison.
“Knock on wood,” the man adds.
“That’s not our superstition,”
the fiancée scolds him.
“That’s okay,” Saul says. “I’ve
knocked on wood a few times myself.”
Can they tell how bored he is, how distressed that he has to tell them what he no
longer believes? If only marriage counseling could be truthful, if he could simply
say, “Stay alert. You never know what will
happen next.” Instead he goes through his
usual routine: questions about their spiritual connections, their housing accommodations and sources of income, what
hobbies they share, all of which they
answer with utmost sincerity, their faces
composed to suggest they’re considering
each question carefully. A townhouse.
Bowling. He’s a CPA and she’s a lawyer.
Saul has never seen such a fortunate
pairing in all his life.
His hearty “Mazel tov!” as they
depart his office implies that he agrees.
“Don’t forget to fill out the questionnaire,” he reminds them. “Dena will give
you each a copy.” From this he’ll compose
a speech for their wedding ceremony.
He’ll select several prominent
and unusual facts about each one and
write a little narrative from it. This is an
idea he got from the New York Times’
“Vows” column, and it really works.
Everyone goes away feeling as if Saul understands them, that he’s been personally
involved with their coupledom. He’s been
intimate and warm.
After they leave, Saul checks his
list again. There are many, many scheduled tasks and then there are the unscheduled mitzvahs he adds on—not for
the points, but because he likes these better. They make him feel normal. They
don’t require prepared speeches. He keeps
lists of these tasks.
—Help Mr. Abramson trim his hedge.
—Bring Jeanette Weissman the blintz
cookbook from the yard sale.
—Loan Harry Fishman my extra blood
pressure cuff.
Today’s list includes even
details as minute as Remember to smile
more at Dena. _
Lori Wald Compton
Sheila always began her emails to me like this: Hi, Lori. Never — Hey there;
What’s up; Dear Lori. Never. After twenty or so I finally asked her. What’s
the comma for? Crooked smile. Amused look. I could see that even in her
written reply. “You’re not a hi Lori, right?”
I keep thinking about the comma. It appears to me in my dreams. It keeps
me company while I wait for the dentist. It floats above the barista’s head in
the coffee shop.
I keep thinking about the comma. I miss my teacher. I miss my friend.
The comma is a separator. Tiny, unassuming. It’s job is to remain unobtrusive, injecting a little clarity in a sentence that might otherwise be run-on or
melded together in an unseemly way.
It’s value is inestimable. Remember the story of the daughter (Cordelia?)
who loved her father, not as much as silver or gold, but as salt? Subtle, underrated, but a key ingredient in most of what we cook. Commas are the salt
of literature.
Sheila taught me about the subtle and the underrated. “The creative writing students at Cleveland State are the most talented pool of writers from
any university, anywhere,” she’d insist. It would be foolish to underestimate
a population where students live in tragedy’s neighborhood, losing friends
to acts of murder, growing up where a transvestite prostitute might also do
a little babysitting. They were the writers who’d write fearlessly, their imaginations cultivated by gritty reality, not from a TV cop show, but from their
own neighborhood.
She taught me about the subtle underpinnings of my own fictional characters and showed me how to mine their psyches and their family histories in
order to weave the diaphanous elements of a story together.
Like salt, a common substance that brightens the flavors of food, Sheila enhanced her students’ writing through praise. She’d learned over the years
that by encouraging students to do more of what they did well, they’d produce better work. But using too much salt ruins a dish. While harsh criticism isn’t productive, there needs to be a balance. Sheila taught me that
when you make students uncomfortable, it’s a sign that they’re learning
something.
So, I’m rereading my emails from Sheila and I savor every bit of criticism and
praise, and every last comma. And from now on, I’ll begin my own emails
with a hi and a comma in the hope that someone will ask me — what’s the
comma for?
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
bizarre greeting chastises him: You think
you’re pretty smart, don’t you? An odd
way to address someone you haven’t contacted in at least five years.
Maybe this one isn’t from
Stalker Mom (as Jane calls her) but from a
congregant. There are many who might
hold a grudge—someone who didn’t get
an aliyah to the Torah, or a board member upset with Saul’s demand that they
find ways to downsize, they’re going to
have to reduce the size of floral sprays on
the bima. A flower lover. But it’s impossible to tell. He can’t read the rest of the letter , typed in medicine bottle-sized print,
so tiny he can’t make it out even with his
bifocals. And why bother anyway? Jane’s
right about that. It will just ruin his day.
Maybe it’s time to take a stand.
A Hint
of Salt
29
02
09
M
M
U
S
E
28
He tosses it in the wastebasket
just as Dena rings her little silver bell that
tells him a congregant is here. She devised
this trick a few years ago as a way not to
jar him, to save herself from reprimands
when she accidentally pries him from
some absorbing thought. She thinks he’s
a control freak, but a tragic one. She’s
known him since he was a boy—that’s
why she tolerates him. She was his
babysitter after his mother died. She
knows how much Saul wept for her, has
been watching over him ever since. She
even told Saul once this was her destiny,
to protect him from the outside world.
They’re like Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester.
Or maybe it’s his wife Jane who
is Jane Eyre (that would make more sense,
wouldn’t it?) though she’s never expressed
the degree of eagerness to protect him
that Dena has. Every once in a while, in
fact, she’s claimed that they’re ill-suited to
one another, that if she hadn’t been so
much younger than he, if her mother
hadn’t been so thrilled he was a rabbi…
And so his day begins, the usual
combination of personal conundrums
and overwhelming tasks. “Boker tov,” he
says to the prenuptial couple Dena ushers
in. “Good morning,” he translates just in
case, as they seat themselves in plush
chairs—a plump young woman and a
very skinny man. She must outweigh him
by forty pounds, though this shouldn’t be
a factor in marital bliss. It’s not a wrestling match after all. “Let’s begin our
counseling with a small prayer,” Saul suggests, and they bow their heads so deeply
he can see the man’s ring bald spot, the
snarl of curls in the woman’s hair she’s left
uncombed. “Blessed are those who seek to
combine,” he says. “They will find joy
here on earth and in the kingdom of
heaven.” Can they tell he made this up?
There is no prayer, actually, for counseling sessions. He just says it to get everyone
in the mood. Add a touch of solemnity.
“Amen!” the couple proclaim in
unison.
“Knock on wood,” the man adds.
“That’s not our superstition,”
the fiancée scolds him.
“That’s okay,” Saul says. “I’ve
knocked on wood a few times myself.”
Can they tell how bored he is, how distressed that he has to tell them what he no
longer believes? If only marriage counseling could be truthful, if he could simply
say, “Stay alert. You never know what will
happen next.” Instead he goes through his
usual routine: questions about their spiritual connections, their housing accommodations and sources of income, what
hobbies they share, all of which they
answer with utmost sincerity, their faces
composed to suggest they’re considering
each question carefully. A townhouse.
Bowling. He’s a CPA and she’s a lawyer.
Saul has never seen such a fortunate
pairing in all his life.
His hearty “Mazel tov!” as they
depart his office implies that he agrees.
“Don’t forget to fill out the questionnaire,” he reminds them. “Dena will give
you each a copy.” From this he’ll compose
a speech for their wedding ceremony.
He’ll select several prominent
and unusual facts about each one and
write a little narrative from it. This is an
idea he got from the New York Times’
“Vows” column, and it really works.
Everyone goes away feeling as if Saul understands them, that he’s been personally
involved with their coupledom. He’s been
intimate and warm.
After they leave, Saul checks his
list again. There are many, many scheduled tasks and then there are the unscheduled mitzvahs he adds on—not for
the points, but because he likes these better. They make him feel normal. They
don’t require prepared speeches. He keeps
lists of these tasks.
—Help Mr. Abramson trim his hedge.
—Bring Jeanette Weissman the blintz
cookbook from the yard sale.
—Loan Harry Fishman my extra blood
pressure cuff.
Today’s list includes even
details as minute as Remember to smile
more at Dena. _
Lori Wald Compton
Sheila always began her emails to me like this: Hi, Lori. Never — Hey there;
What’s up; Dear Lori. Never. After twenty or so I finally asked her. What’s
the comma for? Crooked smile. Amused look. I could see that even in her
written reply. “You’re not a hi Lori, right?”
I keep thinking about the comma. It appears to me in my dreams. It keeps
me company while I wait for the dentist. It floats above the barista’s head in
the coffee shop.
I keep thinking about the comma. I miss my teacher. I miss my friend.
The comma is a separator. Tiny, unassuming. It’s job is to remain unobtrusive, injecting a little clarity in a sentence that might otherwise be run-on or
melded together in an unseemly way.
It’s value is inestimable. Remember the story of the daughter (Cordelia?)
who loved her father, not as much as silver or gold, but as salt? Subtle, underrated, but a key ingredient in most of what we cook. Commas are the salt
of literature.
Sheila taught me about the subtle and the underrated. “The creative writing students at Cleveland State are the most talented pool of writers from
any university, anywhere,” she’d insist. It would be foolish to underestimate
a population where students live in tragedy’s neighborhood, losing friends
to acts of murder, growing up where a transvestite prostitute might also do
a little babysitting. They were the writers who’d write fearlessly, their imaginations cultivated by gritty reality, not from a TV cop show, but from their
own neighborhood.
She taught me about the subtle underpinnings of my own fictional characters and showed me how to mine their psyches and their family histories in
order to weave the diaphanous elements of a story together.
Like salt, a common substance that brightens the flavors of food, Sheila enhanced her students’ writing through praise. She’d learned over the years
that by encouraging students to do more of what they did well, they’d produce better work. But using too much salt ruins a dish. While harsh criticism isn’t productive, there needs to be a balance. Sheila taught me that
when you make students uncomfortable, it’s a sign that they’re learning
something.
So, I’m rereading my emails from Sheila and I savor every bit of criticism and
praise, and every last comma. And from now on, I’ll begin my own emails
with a hi and a comma in the hope that someone will ask me — what’s the
comma for?
02
09
M
U
S
E
M
bizarre greeting chastises him: You think
you’re pretty smart, don’t you? An odd
way to address someone you haven’t contacted in at least five years.
Maybe this one isn’t from
Stalker Mom (as Jane calls her) but from a
congregant. There are many who might
hold a grudge—someone who didn’t get
an aliyah to the Torah, or a board member upset with Saul’s demand that they
find ways to downsize, they’re going to
have to reduce the size of floral sprays on
the bima. A flower lover. But it’s impossible to tell. He can’t read the rest of the letter , typed in medicine bottle-sized print,
so tiny he can’t make it out even with his
bifocals. And why bother anyway? Jane’s
right about that. It will just ruin his day.
Maybe it’s time to take a stand.
A Hint
of Salt
29