RED SAVINA REVIEW spring 2014

RED SAVINA REVIEW spring 2014
Red Savina Review
The Online Literary Magazine in the Southwest
Volume 2 Issue 1
Spring 2014
ISSN 2169-3161
EDITOR in CHIEF
John M. Gist
MANAGING EDITOR
Wendy Sue Gist
ASSISTANT EDITOR
Matt Staley
COPY EDITOR
Anthony Martin
POETRY EDITOR
Richard Stansberger
Red Savina Review (RSR) is an independent, bi-annual e-zine publishing short films, creative
nonfiction, fiction and poetry in March and September. RSR is a nonprofit literary review
headquartered in southwestern New Mexico. For submission guidelines visit our website
redsavinareview.org/submit-2/.
Copyright © 2014. Red Savina Review contains copyrighted materials, including but not limited
to photographs, text and graphics. You may not use, publish, copy, download, upload, post to a
bulletin board or otherwise transmit, distribute, or modify any contents in any way. You may
download one copy of such contents on any single computer for your own personal, noncommercial use, provided you do not alter or remove any copyright, author attribution, or other
notices.
A Letter from the Editor
March, 2014
“I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s. But behind all
of them there is only one truth and that is that there’s no truth.”
-Flannery O’Connor
“Only as an individual can man become a philosopher.”
-Karl Jaspers
Greetings, Fellow Readers!
The time has come to launch the spring issue of Red Savina Review (RSR), and it is with
great pleasure (and a certain sense of dread) that I sit down to finger-punch the keyboard in order
to make sense of this latest endeavor. First, this issue, as usual, came together in organic fashion;
there was no pre-established theme.
It becomes clearer to me with each passing issue that themes emerge of their own accord
because we receive so many high quality submissions. It is natural for the mammalian brain to
seek patterns. Humans, as the reading animal, find patterns in words. What better place, then,
than a literary journal (in particular RSR, if I may be so bold) to seek the truth that has been lost
in the postmodern bog? Yes, a theme emerged in RSR 2.1, a theme suggests that, just maybe, as
Heidegger put it, “Only a god can save us now.”
Not the flowery bloom that I was expecting for a spring issue, though there is some rain
involved, sweet rain to long for, a real rain that will wash all of the scum off the streets. In short,
many of the submissions are buoyed on an undertow of desperation regardless of locale: on a
plane, in a school on the Navajo Reservation, at Harvard, on a cold and gray beach in New
England, in a Texas bar. Angst, it seems, is part and parcel of human experience, if RSR’s
submissions are any indicator (and I’d bet my last nickel they are).
Much of this unease stems from the postmodern dilemma concerning truth as relative to
context and perspective. In mainstream society this complex intellection has been boiled down to
“truth is relative” and, as such, non-existent in the final analysis. If everybody has their own truth
based upon their particular context and perspective, then, at the end of the day, each cancels out
the next ad nauseum until there is no truth at all. So it comes to pass that each of us stands alone
upon the precipice of nihilism with nothing to believe in but a piddling truth that evaporates upon
our inevitable demise.
This knowledge that all I know is that I know nothing, and neither does anybody else, at
least concerning ultimates, sits on my chest like a rabid gorilla who has, for the time being, fallen
into a restless slumber. Many of the submissions for the spring issue indicated that I am far from
alone. One piece, which, in my opinion, might have been entitled, “A Portrait of the Nihilist as a
Young Woman,” provides a penetrating depiction of the “truth is me” phenomenon so common
today: individualism turned into a prison from which there is no escape.
Behind the apprehensiveness, however, hidden in the dark eddies of encroaching despair,
are gems of what I believe is the true nature of individualism. Flannery O’Connor, of course, was
a devout Catholic and employed the character Haze in Wiseblood to illustrate the postmodern
paradox. In the end, no doubt about it, O’Connor believed in absolutes. Karl Jaspers, who wrote
that philosophy had to be grounded in the faith of the originary transcendence of human
existence in order to unfold its full potential, realized that it is necessarily up to the individual to
struggle for and with truth; group efforts must, by their nature, remain fruitless. Both of these
stances suggest that—though it is, with rare exceptions, generally beyond human grasp—there is
a truth which we, as individuals, can, if we try hard enough, access and so express. We are called
upon to burst the bars of the prison asunder.
The works in the spring issue indicate that beyond individual expression there exists a
field that outvies the individual; the dark dungeon of what I call inauthentic individualism that
leads necessarily to nihilism, once acknowledged, demands the light of day: we call it art. That is
why RSR exists, to provide a clearing where, to return to Heidegger, the absolute, through the
individual, might manifest, so we might catch a glimpse of it, just a blur, and, in doing so, return
to the all-too-often thankless task of writing fully-charged and confident that truth exists beyond
the confines of human being.
So, to the writers published in RSR 2.1: Thank you! Muchas Gracias! Eskerrik asko! I
mean it. I really do. And to those who submitted: Thank you as well. I hope you keep submitting
to future issues. Since our process is organic in nature, one never knows what theme will emerge
from the collectivity of the individual pieces, and yours may very well fit next time.
It goes without saying that my hat is off, once again, to our incredible staff, to our
steadfast readers, and to those donors who believe in RSR enough to pump in the lifeblood of
funding. We barely stay afloat here, but afloat we are, and we aim for the far shore!
Enjoy!
JMG
Contents
Creative Nonfiction
Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt
Cynthia Gibbon
Gone to Seed
Stephen D. Gutierrez
Come Again Good Rain
Robert Vivian
Poetry
Bazarov, Everything
William Aarnes
Running to Escalante, Spiral Jetty,
The Book with no Pandas,
The Trout of Knowledge
Amy Brunvand
Punk, By-Pass
Wayne F. Burke
Pajamas with Feet
John Cullen
Three Ten Appointment
Nancy Dobson
Yellow Daisies
Death of a Home Product Salesman,
God at the Stove
Michelle Bonczek Evory
Brad Garber
Red Alarm, The Story of Each Day
James Grabill
Side Trips, Elegy with Streams
Larry Jordan
APOPHTHEGMS
Len Krisak
After Researching Her Origins
Sandra Kolankiewicz
Corbeaux
Sheree Mack
Old Man Mopping the Floor
Josh Medsker
My Dear Martian, Rapprochement
Jacqueline Michaud
Philosophy, Unease
The only shame
Alexander Motyl
Holly Painter
Can the Dead Really Live Again? LESSON EIGHT
LESSON TWELVE
LESSON ELEVEN
LESSON FIFTEEN
Stan Sanvel Rubin
10TEMBER,
Elizabeth Kate Switaj
FERMENTED POMEGRANATE SEEDS
How Dying is Done,
Choreography
Jessica Tyner
I Wish to Enquire Concerning, Other Ancestors
Known
Howard Winn
Fiction
They Are Waiting
Melanie J. Cordova
The Importance of Color
Jeanne Gassman
Knife
Steve Mitchell
Fading Behind
Sean Padraic McCarthy
End of Days
Kelly Morris
Blackbonnets
Erica Seiler
A Portrait of Her
Rebeka Singer
Cynthia Gibbon
Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt
I finally confessed to hallucinations when I heard Christmas music coming out of the dishwasher
(the dishwasher had also produced hymns and hip-hop, marching bands and classic rock). I
waited five months for an appointment with a psychiatrist. He asked why I didn’t say it was an
emergency. Within twenty-four hours of changing medications, the music stopped emanating
from the dishwasher.
In 2008 I was diagnosed at fifty with early-onset Parkinson’s disease (PD), PIGD subtype. The
letters stand for Postural Instability, Gait Difficulty (I call it GD PIG PD, but that is a slander to
swine). I now move like an Arte Johnson character in the 1960s television show, Laugh-In,
walking slowly, hunched, shuffling in small steps. Johnson’s character used a cane; I use a
walker. I do mutter like the Dirty Old Man character but my subject is not lewd; it’s profane.
What can I say? I cannot dress myself, so yeah, I’m frustrated. And afraid.
It is fear that motivates me to attempt to do as a neuro-psychiatrist suggested five years ago. He
wore the most heavily starched, bleached, and crisply ironed lab coat I had ever seen, causing
him to look as brown and as wooden as polished walnut furniture. He was Muslim and chastised
me for drinking three alcoholic beverages a week (I barely kept myself from rolling my eyes). I
wasn’t ready for what came next. His hands held an invisible ball larger than a softball but only
just. “You must . . . you must,” he muttered while twisting his hands in opposition to each other
as if unscrewing the ball, “make your life,” he opened the ball, finished the gesture with his
palms up as if in praise, “beautiful.”
***
I was raised a Christian and was the Bible verse memorizing champion for all of grade school.
My mom was so proud. She still encourages me to find a church to attend even though she
doesn’t go anymore. When she adds, “It’s such a comfort,” I kneejerk that religion is an opiate
and wonder how she would know it is a comfort? In our big Italian family, everybody churchesup when faced with a mortal illness, and so she thinks I should too. My devout Catholic
psychologist teases me, says that I find Christianity too confining. And I guess he’s right, but I
would say it’s the language that chafes. God is our father, who art in Heaven, not gender neutral
and not with us. He is somewhere else. I used to attend a General Conference Mennonite Church
full of ex-hippies, lesbians, and recovering Catholics because I liked their emphasis on good
works, but after five years I tired of editing under my breath.
To Christianity’s credit, the claim that Jesus settled all debts makes the concept of grace
possible. Genius. If you can forgive yourself enough to accept it. Oh I know: it’s not me who
forgives; it’s God or Jesus. I only need accept the forgiveness, but it amounts to the same thing.
To accept forgiveness I must be able to feel it. Once I can conceptualize the act and feeling of
forgiveness, is it God or me? If the emotion of mercy washes over me just when I’ve been
begging for pardon, does it matter from where the clemency originates? For either explanation,
God or me, I must shift my way of seeing the world. To accept grace, I must believe I am
deserving and to feel forgiveness in myself.
To my shame it’s a rare moment when I’ve been able to accept help, affection, or support from
others. Suspicion of what will be owed and feelings of unworthiness dog me even when my
mother hugs me, her skin and hair smelling like Ivory soap and green apple shampoo.
***
In 1998, I watched a Japanese film that I borrowed from the library where I worked. A new
professor was building a collection of Asian films, and so suddenly many films were available to
the staff for an overnight borrow from a cataloging cart. Koreeda Hirokazu’s After Life happened
to be at the end of a row.
In the film the audience learns quickly that all the characters are dead, and they have a task: in a
limited amount of time they must select a moment from their lives in which to live forever. I
wondered how one would subjectively experience forever. Would it be experienced in real time,
taking millennia, an eon for an eye to blink? Or would it loop over and over, replaying millions
of quadrillions of times until it filled up “forever” like an endless day in the
film Groundhog Day? Or would the moment expand to feel like a moment to me, but in fact,
take all of time? Schrödinger’s cat is in a state called the superposition, both alive and dead. In a
quantum system a particle can be in more than one state and place at the same time. To
be and not to be. It spins my head. In grade school I conflated the structure of an atom with the
solar system, resulting in my first experience of cognitive dissonance. With awe and terror, I
uttered “I am a universe.”
Later, as a theater major in college, I remember dividing a script or a scene into beats. A beat is
the basic unit of a scene and is measured by an emotion or a character’s through line of
motivation. A beat is not subject to a clock. I nominate a beat as a moment. Would I experience
the moment twice or would my initial experience of the chosen moment be double-stuffed with
resonance, significance, and power? What transcendent moments had I experienced? These
questions were yet to be resolved before the plot of After Life brought up others.
As the newly-dead characters selected their moments, I couldn’t stop reviewing my life. What
memory would be worth living with forever? The idea stayed with me ever after, but I changed
the focus. I tried to ask in present tense so as to change my emphasis as the moment was
happening. I would remember the movie’s premise and ask myself, is this a moment I would
choose? And if not, why not? Not many moments made the cut.
A few years later, in 2004, our family had Cuc Nguyen, a Buddhist nun, home to dinner. She was
hired for the summer to research the library’s Asian Art Collection. Cuc hadn’t had an easy life.
She was forcibly taken to a nunnery at thirteen-years-old where she was frequently beaten. A few
years before she arrived at the library, Cuc had her first bout with kidney cancer. She was so thin
I could hardly imagine legs under the layers of her powder blue robes. I wanted to feed her.
When I told her about the movie and asked her what moment from her life she would choose, she
said, “Oh my, I wouldn’t know. There are so many.”
I have thought of that many times.
The whole family attended dinner—a small miracle when the kids were in high school. We were
having corn on the cob, and salad, peppers, beans that were purple on the vine but cooked up
green—all the more colorful against a backdrop of white platters, white linens, and the long
lavender twilight of June. Cuc loved the corn. She claimed she was being a “piggy” by eating
two half-cobs but she thought the corn was so beautiful! Glistening with butter, she had to have
seconds. The corn was so tender and sweet, she compared it to the “sun made crunchy.” We
laughed in delight. A good candidate for a forever moment. Sadly Cuc succumbed to cancer two
years later.
***
In my mind I have pictured a Toolbox for a Beautiful Life. Below its two-foot handle is an oak
belly that holds the tools I am accumulating to make a beautiful life—grace and awareness. I
notice that, as usual, I dove into the task without fully understanding the goal. How should I
define beauty? A philosopher friend lent me a book by Crispin Sartwell to help.
Sartwell’s Six Names of Beauty begins with the English language definition of beauty, evoking
romantic love. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, yet the beholder perceives beauty as
emanating from the beloved.Beauty must be observed to exist. What’s more, beauty is confined
to describe the human female. I rejected this definition as too cloistered; I needed to experience
beauty more broadly, more inclusively.
The subsequent chapters add cultural definitions of beauty: yapha from Hebrew, sundara from
Sanskrit, to kalon from Greek, hozho from the Navaho Nation. Wabi-Sabi is Japanese for
“humility and imperfection.” I noticed the parameter of temporality or impermanence is integral
to all these concepts, as in the closer things are to ending, the more beautiful they are.
My favorite was Wabi-Sabi because the words Wabi and Sabi come with negative connotations:
poverty and loneliness (and because Wabi and Sabi rhyme). More than half of PD patients have
depression and anxiety; I am not an exception. Melancholic Wabi-Sabi attracted me like songs in
a minor key, rainy days, and unrequited crushes. Wabi- Sabi reveres the ordinary, the old, the
flawed. Check, check, check. Once one can see with Wabi-Sabi, all things are beautiful because
they are impermanent. That particular slash of light, the color of the sky, the set of
circumstances, the cast of characters—these can never be reproduced. Our dinner with Cuc was
precious and beautiful, made more so because it could never be repeated. Beauty and ugliness
are opposites like light and dark; one cannot exist without the other. Wabi-Sabi intends for
practitioners to see beyond dualism and enter the Zen state of no mind, “the beauty beyond
beauty.” I chose Wabi-Sabi for my toolbox.
***
But how will I know the kind of beauty I aspire to. How will I define beauty if I haven’t
experienced something I have called beautiful in the past?
***
I climbed the stairs of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine at 112th and Amsterdam in
New York City in 1980. I was twenty-four and relieved that I wasn’t sub-vocalizing the line I
had been shocked to hear myself chant several days earlier. My stair-climbing “song” had been a
step per word: “I-Wish-I-Were-Dead.” What I really wished with all my heart was that I was
magical, beautiful, and lived in a Tolkein-esque world. That I was a heroine.
That day I had paid to have a reading by a channeler—someone who acted as a conduit for
another. The other participants sat in folding chairs arranged in a U-shape around the housewife
for whom was found a better chair, ornate but not high-backed. A lay minister’s chair. She was
round, blonde and spoke by rote; I guessed she’d made the same introduction many times. Then
she said breathlessly, girlishly, “He’s waiting.” She immediately relaxed and appeared to fall
asleep. Then she sat up straight, spreading her legs, planting her feet in an unmistakably male
posture. She was channeling a man.
“He” spoke to the first person on the left side of the semi-circle and I learned afterward that he
said, “Listen to each person I speak to, and you will learn from each.” As soon as he spoke my
vision narrowed to tunnel vision and my ears rang. I’d paid a hundred dollars! Why couldn’t I
see or hear? When he turned to the next participant, my eyesight and hearing cleared. I calmed
down.
He told one man a story of a past life where he climbed a wall and saw the morning sun come up
and felt transported. I wanted a memory of an exotic past life too. And then there was a woman
who had seven scars on her body, and he told her the cause of each scar. I had scars. He talked to
another woman about finding friends to be her family because her own family was abusive. My
family had conflict.
When he finally came to the young woman to my immediate right, I could suddenly sense a
round beam of light connecting him with her at the heart. He said to her, “You are such a
wonderful person, but you do not love yourself. You are not kind to yourself.” She said, “No,”
and wept. I agreed, crying. I didn’t love myself either, and I certainly wasn’t kind. He gestured
with his hand for her to come, and, as she closed with him, he turned away from the rest of us
and positioned her so she could be seen. He cupped the mic. No one could hear what he said, but
her face was ecstatic.
My turn. I held up my hands, my palms out to him. The beam of light was connected to me now.
I did not speak aloud, but I thought, I don’t need anything. I thanked him for the experience and
for everyone before me. He was pleased, proud in a way no one had ever been before. Of me! He
asked if there was anything I wanted. Without hesitation I thought, I wish to see what it is I will
be.
I am yanked elsewhere. Dark, dirt underfoot, cool on my bare feet. A rushing wind. I glance over
my right shoulder and I can see in the distance a ball of light like a comet growing from a
pinprick to … it’s big! The light passes through me and carries me. I am astride it like a horse.
The light arcs and its movement is somehow constrained because we make a wide circle. When it
closes the loop of the circle, the lights spirals, gaining speed as the span of the spirals shortens.
What shape is bending this path? An upside-down funnel? A pyramid? Faster and faster until I
feel like I am on an amusement park ride called the Round‘em Up, rotating fast and
continuously. Centrifugal force pins my body to the wall while the floor drops out. Without sound
or fear, the sensation of an explosion. An opening. I slide out as if in a drain, not down but up.
Light. All around—even below. I expand, feeling every emotion, even sadness and despair, but
they are so wonderful and powerful I can barely contain them. Then a face presses through the
light as if through the skin of a balloon that I am inside. The face is masklike, but its symmetry is
obvious, idealized. Brighter than the light, the face is orange. Fire. Beautiful.
Falling. The chair under me, I raised my head, opened my eyes. He nodded and went on to the
next person.
The first years I lived with this experience I thought it meant I was someone special; maybe I had
a destiny. Now I think it was a gift given, a boon I’ve never been able to replicate. Once I had the
sensation of up as in the spirals and I was afraid. I ask now, afraid of what? I can only answer
that in the moment I felt I was at risk, in danger of leaving this reality because I was elsewhere
when it happened. I was pregnant and I wanted the baby. So I shut it down; I quit trying. My son
connected me to this world, and, gradually I released fantasy.
But what does it mean? Is the vision literally what I will be? Is it an alternate ending than the
ones envisioned by Christianity or the Japanese movie? Is it like the ending of Raiders of the
Lost Ark when the beautiful spirit is released? The Nazi soldiers adored her until she transformed
from exquisite to a shocking monstrosity, melting the Nazis where they stood. Or is it all
endorphins and these visions are the body’s surcease as in Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”? Or maybe like the series finale of the television series Lost?
***
The only thing I know for certain is I can choose how I feel in the moment. I cannot know if an
afterlife exists or if it will be a specific moment or many or any. If there is an afterlife, will I die
but my spirit live on? Will I experience it as a “oneness” or as “spirit” or as some mash-up of
identity—a soul? The truth of it is, by the time I discover if this life is all I get, it will be too late.
Too late to break out the booze. Too late to send in the clowns. Yet, until I die, it’s all life.
Do I have the courage to strive without hope of reward? Hope is the hinge. In the Greek myth,
Pandora opens a box she was forbidden to touch and releases all the evil into the world; last
comes hope. Is it a curse or a blessing? I like how Ann Patchett describes it, “Hope is like
walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling
it.” I like the poetic take by Cervantes in Don Quixote: “The phoenix hope, can wing her way
through the desert skies, and, still defying fortune’s spite, revive from ashes and rise.” Or is the
definition of hope as a blight or boon a dualistic mirage? What is hope’s “beauty beyond
beauty”? I am free to hope, I think, and what I hope for may or may not happen. That caveat
makes this life bearable while we are alive, and, afterlife or not, it does no harm to hope.
STEPHEN D. GUTIERREZ
Gone to Seed
Now this field shows up in my dreams at night. I don’t know why. I’m not a country guy and
hardly know wheat from corn on a good day, but I try to make connections between my life and
pronounced somnambular visitations, and I cannot find one for a while. I am stumped. But still,
the field, golden-haired and flowing—raked over by God’s caressing fingers, a puff of breath
unfelt by me—bends and ripples in the wind under a clear blue sky.
“Ah, that’s a field,” I tell myself in the morning. “A beautiful field.” Sometimes I am walking
across it. Mostly, though, I am lying down just upon it, barely touching the tips of the stalks of
wheat, floating as if on air—one with the field, with the harvest. When a bird screeches across
the sky, I wake up to the alarm and pop up with regret. I don’t want to get up anymore.
I want to stay in that condition forever.
Now I begin to get a sense of it, though, what it is, and that is what this piece of writing is about.
I have no prideful airs when it comes to this business, writing, no sophisticated strategies to
puzzle you with and sow confusion in your already tired brain. You want answers, and I plan to
give you some.
This essay/personal monologue/spotty reminiscence is about going to seed, and a young man
named Edward King, whom I hardly know, is the inspiration for it. He graduated from Harvard
recently and has gone to seed.
When I first went to seed—oh, God, it’s been quite a while ago—I shocked myself and others. I
scared a neighbor girl at the corner grocery store, so grotesque and beaten I must have seemed,
so hopeless and changed.
“Gone to seed, gone to seed.” I could hear it all around me.
My teeth hadn’t been cleaned in a long time, and my hair lay in a mess on my head, tangled and
greasy. Too many pounds weighed me down, my pants dirty and beltless, always a sign of
dissoluteness in my previous life, and my eyes stared out at the world bloodshot and sad, I’m
figuring, achingly lonely despite the thorough merriment I felt at that moment because, well, I
felt so natural and pure.
Nobody had anything on me now. I lived unaffected, without expectations, either societal or
personal, pressing down on me.
“Hi, Steve,” she said, my friend Tracy, a skinny white girl from the neighborhood grown into a
more formidable young woman now, full of curves and style. She had been a swimmer on our
renowned swim team. She looked me up and down.
She couldn’t help herself.
I was a mess.
I had come home during Christmas break, from far, far away, clear across the country, and
showed the disaster of my graduate school career at a glance.
“Hi, Tracy,” I said, kindly. We stood at the counter of the local store waiting to be rung up and
smiled and went on our ways soon enough.
I could hear her, though, telling her mom, her friends, anybody who knew me from those days
what a mess I had become.
“He’s just, he’s just gone to seed.”
Yes, I had gone to seed. I had bombed out of graduate school, on the verge of having my funding
cut, my crucial support knocked out from under me, that wonderful fellowship I had been given
stripped because of my terrible performance in the MFA program I labored in at the prestigious
university, Cornell. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t think.
I couldn’t be.
I finished the degree later, after much travail, but for now I relied on my own instinctual
response to get me through the sad days. I sunk miserably lower, happily.
I felt grotesquely renewed, on the way up even, as I wallowed in self-complacency with no real
ambition in me. I looked like a dude gone wrong in the neighborhood, which I was. But the usual
vices didn’t attach to me.
I had fallen apart with a healthy corpulence.
“God, that Steve Gutierrez has gone to seed.” I could just hear Tracy telling her mother so, the
good Mrs. Perkins who had whistled us into order during yard duty not so many years ago, and
they both shake their heads at the kitchen table, Tracy now a fetching senior at Cal State L.A.,
doing respectably well in the field of her choice: physical education.
She is now a swim coach and PE teacher at a Southern California High School not far from
where we grew up, a model citizen from The Model City, Commerce, in Los Angeles County.
Well, this is not her story, but she does have a last word here.
“He looked awful.” I had been somewhat of a golden boy, on top of it, and now I had busted up
on the shoals of failure. “Just awful.”
“Yup,” I would have agreed heartily, “he looks awful and feels awful, too. Well really he feels
empty, quite peculiar. He is just a mess; he has gone to seed.” I would have spoken of myself in
the third person because I was that disconnected from and observant of the phenomenon known
as Stephen Gutierrez, he who had heretofore been me.
I was outside myself with casual interest still alive inside.
I had plummeted where before I had ascended in the world. But it wasn’t the first time I had hit
bottom, and likely not the last. There was precedent for my implosion, my refusal to give a damn
anymore and my willingness to let it all go.
It happened a few years previous.
Senior year, high school, my first real depression that I don’t recognize as one until later is upon
me. I’m going to school, coming home, sleeping. I’m eating badly and erratically, without an
appetite at all, even though I’m a growing boy, or I’m gorging on junk food suddenly because
it’s there, in front of me, in all its greasy glory, and not enjoying it really, either. I’m not
enjoying anything, really, not even not enjoying anything, which is probably what really
separates me from other teenagers. I am truly, horribly miserable, with no real reason to get up in
the morning, absolutely nothing, nothing to look forward to.
Maybe a wet dream at night.
I’m not taking care of myself. I’m not even bathing regularly, which for me, a shower freak, is
unusual. It should have told me something clearly but didn’t, so deaf am I to my own body. My
own psyche sets up the system in which it festers and hurts more and more until, one day,
looking out the window, I cry, I simply cry.
“What is wrong with me?” I think, but cannot come up with an answer.
Of course I know what it is about. My father is sick with a fatal disease devouring his brain,
housed in a convalescent home, and I am ugly besides, really ugly in my mind, not just going
through an awkward teenager phase. I hate myself. Beyond hating myself, I don’t recognize
myself as myself, and let myself go.
My mother sets me straight. She crashes into my consciousness with a mother’s sharp probing
and absolute pronouncement that wakes me up temporarily, if only for the good reason that I
harbor dreams of one day renewing myself with a nose job, while Dad will surely die, so why not
tend to myself minimally before that time, instead of going through the motions of full
participation in life, which I don’t feel a part of? Why not give it up, the charade?
She says the right things. “Stephen, what is wrong with you?” she asks me one day when I am
home from school in the afternoon, lounging about in bed, a magazine in hand, but more like
sleeping the day away in day clothes, shuttered in my room, lazily moving about the house to go
to the bathroom or eat a cracker.
“You’re just letting yourself go!” She looks up from her tea at the kitchen table.
It stings. It stays with me. It spurs me into action.
I do something. I brush my teeth. But too late. To this day I have a minor brown spot on my front
tooth, very tiny, almost undetectable because the rot has been filled in, reminding me of that
period when I was feeling so bad I wasn’t even brushing my teeth regularly, me, who prided
myself on one physical feature, if any: my good, strong, clean, straight teeth.
My eyes were something, too, but they were sad, sad. They were so sad they should be put up in
the Sadness Hall of Fame, circa 1977, a pair of brown glistening eyes looking out at you from a
framed mirror. They got corroboration, too. They got a big vote from a fan.
I’m eating at Denny’s with a Chicana beauty one night. How that happened is a mystery to me
now, but we end up in a booth sitting across from each other, joyfully chatting away, when
suddenly, I swear, she puts a hand to her mouth and starts crying. “Your eyes are so sad, my
God, so sad! How did you get so sad?”
I stare down at the pile of French fries between us. I’m having a good night! What’s wrong with
her?
Later, in just a few minutes, our impromptu date ends with a kiss on the cheek, and a big smile, a
big, wonderful, beautiful smile. “Bye! You’re a great guy, but so sad! I hope everything turns out
really good for you!”
I squeeze her hand in the foyer, and we both rush out into the night. We go our separate ways,
she into a car driven by a girlfriend looking nervous behind the wheel and filled with screaming,
chattering fans—“Where have you been all night?”—and me hunkered down for a long walk
home, interrupted by a long-haired guy in a raised Nova.
“Want a ride home?”
“Sure.”
“How’d you end up at Denny’s?”
“I just did.”
I came out. I saw. I conquered.
Like hell.
In the next week or so, I dropped all pretensions to caring about life. I couldn’t fake it anymore. I
quit doing the basic things it asks of us to stay decent, and got called on it by my mother.
I had gone to seed. I had let myself go out of depression and was close to true despair. But
wasn’t there yet. I just relaxed my standards of daily maintenance. I could give a damn what the
world thought. That might be the basic definition of it, that last part—showing no inclination to
please the socially sanctioned expectations of others and living in the world without pretensions
or affectation of any kind, only defeat and bemusement.
There has to be a quality of bemusement about going to seed. Without it, it is the abyss, the
impossibility of ever regenerating, and that is not what going to seed is. That is more like going
to the dogs, or hell in a handbasket, or just losing all self-respect and self-worth, any semblance
of it, any last bit of it, without any motivation even to enjoy your fallen state, just fallen, fallen,
giving up completely before the last walk into skid row and death in a grim alley.
See tattered Hurstwood in Drieser’s great novel of personal failure, Sister Carrie, and forget
anything you’ve heard about naturalism. There walks a man who loses faith in himself, in life,
and destroys himself in a New York slum. Literally turns the gas on. Breathes in
deeply. Succumbs.
But that is not it at all. It is fruitful.
“Going to seed” is nobler than giving up completely. It has an element of self-sacrifice. That
somewhere, somehow, someone or something will benefit from this surrender is the unconscious
belief, I think, that keeps one on the right track. One’s place in the universe feels assured during
this changing period, not threatened at the deepest level of being. But bleakness can attend it,
and the doldrums, the real doldrums.
I cried and fretted much when I went to seed. But I didn’t despair to the point of nihilism.
I hope I have drawn this distinction well. But it is really quite simple: I kept the slightest regard
for myself still in that first major depression I suffered that brought me somewhere near the
original condition I’m talking about, going to seed, which brings me to Edward King, the real
subject of this essay.
Edward King. Let me tell you about Edward King, whose name, yes, has been changed to
protect him (and me), as life is fickle and I am all for Edward (and me) passing through any
seedy phase it finds us in without any harm coming of it. But I have picked a name that suits him
well nevertheless: “Edward King.” Without the diadem apparent, in front of you, on his head,
you can still see the man I’m talking about, the young heir to the throne of American happiness.
He could have everything our society offers in the way of materialistic comfort and respect by
virtue of his birth alone, and the privileges afforded him. He could have it all.
“Edward King,” get this, “III.” He’s the man I’m talking about here.
But I hardly know him. I have to be honest about that.
My son had him over to the house once to practice for a play put on for an English class, and he
struck me as a genuinely nice boy with charming Southern manners that showed the move to
California wasn’t complete. He had come from Virginia the year before.
He remained deferential with his elders, me and the missus, and oozed intelligence and
practicality. Lively with his peers, nothing less than a good kid full of laughter and hope, a black
kid with a mild afro and soft brown eyes and big, big, cuddly, in a soft Panda kind of way but in
fact athletic. He owned a football player’s body that he later turned to good use on the baseball
field where he starred as a pinch hitter with real punch in his bat. Football had been too brutal for
him. He liked the finesse of baseball.
His father was a lawyer, and his mother a professional of some kind, and, come to think of it, he
was (is) half white, with a light cocoa-colored tint, but proudly black, after his father, Edward
identifying with the cultural organizations on campus attracting African Americans. He was well
liked by everyone, according to my son, not bound by his ethnicity in his easy identification with
everybody around him at Catholic School High in Northern California. He was (is) “the king,” a
regal sort destined for great things.
He got into Harvard. He went.
God, I don’t know what happened between seeing him graduate from high school and seeing him
at the airport the weekend we flew back to California after watching our own son graduate from
Harvard, but he had changed, changed greatly, and for the worse. He had gone to seed.
“Isn’t that Edward King?” My wife pointed him out from the front row seats we had settled into
at the terminal, with a good view of the foot traffic passing before us.
“It is, isn’t it?” Before I could say anything else, he had spotted us, and he came over to say hi.
“Mr. and Mrs. Gutierrez.” He stuck out his hand.
He stood before us. He looked like hell.
Overweight, unshaven, unwashed, clad in a soiled warm-up suit with a cheap, tattered bag at his
side, he retained his charm, but something had been lost. Call it the greater glow that had
impressed the world back then.
He had been much more glorious than I have painted him. In high school, he dazzled coaches
and administrators with his polish, his confidence. At an award ceremony for athletes I attended
one fine spring day, the athletic director gushed at the podium so effusively I thought to check
his pants for stains. He had never met a kid like this kid. “And now, the future governor of the
state of California, heck, the next president once he reaches thirty-five, Edward King!”
Edward walked onto the stage so suavely in a fine tailored suit he caused businessmen in the
audience to fidget nervously and stare admiringly at the same time, and the rest of us to vote for
him in our minds on the spot: Yes, he’s the one!
But now he had gone to seed.
“What are you doing next, Edward?” I asked him after congratulating him on graduating and
getting that done: Harvard no less!
“I think I’m going to rest for a while at home, and then go to South America, practice my
Spanish in a village that’ll have me.” His eyes twinkled.
“Yeah? You got a job lined up?”
“Nope.” He shrugged. “I’ll do something useful without disappointing my father.”
He almost winced. He nearly collapsed.
A sigh came out of him, and then he regained himself. His self-possession came back to him.
He rocked on his heels. “I’m not worried about anything anymore. I’m just enjoying myself.
How is Ben? I didn’t see him at graduation. I meant to call him.”
“He’s fine. I’ll tell him you asked.”
“All right now.” The Southern manners returned, the old way of putting the world at ease before
considering yourself. “You all take care of yourselves, and it was my pleasure seeing you both.”
He inclined his head, smiled, looked up at us with heavy lidded eyes, with stubbly refractoriness,
cheerfully.
He had never looked better.
“He had never looked better.” That is the line I wanted to end this with. I had it all figured out
and plotted in advance.
It came to me on a treadmill, that line, and I was happy and satisfied. I would KO the reader—
you! ka-pow!—with those five little words. I ran an extra mile that day.
I hit the running track hard and sweat flew off my forehead and life wasn’t so bad in my fiftyfirst year at the health club. I mean I am fifty-one years old and the health club is fairly new and
sparkly and prevents my sags from overwhelming me, my drooping spirits, more than anything,
from winning, from vanquishing any remnant of fight left in me, and there is a lot.
I have been a seed, a weed, and a thrice-borne thorn in the gushing side of life, my own. I have
been my own worst enemy, and when I have let go and relaxed every muscle from the sphincter
to the one controlling the brain—the mind-ola band, they call it in rare doctor’s circles knowing
a thing or two about the head beyond the textbooks and whatnot, and beyond those insane
formulas for success urged by society—I have recuperated and come back stronger than ever and
shot up another foot or two in psychic height. Whoa there! Call me silly. Call me worse. I don’t
care.
I have died and lived and sighed and, well, written bad poetry I’ve only shared with
sadomasochists in my own kinky set. But I have learned to abandon plans, all right, if I have
learned to do anything useful. And one example of that amazing carelessness is taking root right
before your astonished eyes, as you sit in your favorite chair and move your butt over and try to
maintain composure with all that I am unveiling in the way of downright un-American activity.
You’re coming along for the ride, slithering along with me, going nowhere I know in advance,
maybe to a dead end, maybe to a wondrous forest filled with trees reaching up to skies so blue
you are assured of divine purpose for the brief moment you stand under them, sheltered and open
to everything.
“Hallelujah, hallelujah,” you sing to yourself, and I am just a lapsed Catholic carrying the creed
inside.
What creed, I don’t exactly know, because I never got all that theological crap right.
Only to live a little—okay, here we go!—is sweet. And any abilities I show now are tied to the
theme of this essay, which, if you think about it, I stated directly in paragraph five: going to seed,
and all it has brought me, and is still giving me, now, at this moment.
I can’t go on. I can’t stop.
Samuel Beckett said something to that effect, and he was a dry, hard-shelled, difficult seed
producing deliberately pessimistic works with just the right amount of sad-happy truth in them to
keep us going.
The seed pops, and explodes, and there’s no stopping it now. As much as you want to give up
and quit, watered by your own tears, you better pick yourself up and keep going, as long as there
is life in you.
I’m a thick root at your feet. I’m the tumescent vein of life.
I warned you I was bad.
Edward looked worse than bad. He looked beaten, and great. He looked like a poster boy for
Harvard’s flipside, its shadowy side. Anything can happen in that magical place, including
falling apart gloriously, and, my God, ingloriously. Three suicides that I know of darkened my
son’s time there, undergraduates pulling the plug on themselves, and those are only the ones he
cared to talk about.
“They found him in a lab, a sophomore, with a vial in his hand, and a note by his head, lying on
the table.”
Immense prestige creates its own problems. They are real.
Real and biting, and as great as any problems existing beyond the brick wall and wrought iron
gate admitting the next class to Harvard’s fabled yard.
Anything can happen there, and does. Have a heart, reader. Expand your sympathies upwards as
well as downwards and sideways. Expand until you explode.
Ka-boom! But I know some of you disbelieve.
“Harvard angst, good Lord, give me a break,” I can hear the detractor moan, groan, gnash his
teeth and mutter obscenities too severe for the fine ears attending to this colloquy, yours, dear
reader, whose ultimate comfort is still my fervent goal.☺
I’m so unconcerned about reputation I can risk extreme schmaltziness with élan.
I have been nothing in my lifetime. Divested of ego, I go on merrily. I’m okay you’re okay rock
the boat baby who is this asshole picking on poor Edward he isn’t worth our time the
unsympathetic hate everyone ultimately they just pretend not to so caught up in judgment are
they. But I’m smiling at him anyway.
“So you say.”
“Yes, I do.” But he gets up and leaves.
So I’m happy about that. I’m happy about so much it’s hard to express.
But I’ll try: “Yabba-dabba do!”
Sorry for the silliness. But on second thought I refuse to apologize for who is essentially me, a
fun-loving, uncensored, uninhibited, working class guy with a touch of deviltry in him.
“Fuck yes! I’m ruining this essay!”
I say no to the caretakers of decorum and order.
Could be that Edward is on his way, too. Could be that whatever joy lies in him is working its
way up and out of him.
But he looked terrible that day in the airport, really terrible.
“He’s really gone to seed, hasn’t he?” my wife said when he ambled out of earshot and we could
have at him now, the social niceties observed. Don’t gossip until the subject is safely away.
“Yes, he has,” I said, “gone to seed.”
“Do you think maybe he’s just been partying after graduation and hasn’t washed up yet? He just
looks so dissolute, though, like something else has happened to him.”
“He’s changed. He’s not the same old Edward. Either he’s partied himself into a new state, or
he’s just given up on the old guy.”
“King Edward?”
“Yeah, King Edward, future President of the United States, remember? Maybe Obama ruined it
all for him and every other black kid wanting to be the first. Maybe baseball got boring, I don’t
know. Maybe being Edward King the Third was too much to take. But he’s changed, believe
me. He’s gone to seed. I know it when I see it.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Don’t you remember?”
“No.”
“I don’t remember if you were there, then. Yes, I’ve gone to seed. It’s great. It’s the only chance
we have. God bless him.” By this time I was nearly talking to myself, both of us getting up to
gather our things and stand in line.
I saw him on the other end of the terminal. He was standing with his hands in his pockets,
looking out the window. Big planes nosed around on the ground, and an empty, nearly barren
field separated the airport from the city. He slouched and picked at his teeth.
“Gone to seed, man, that’s all right.” I offered up a last benediction for him.
But he didn’t really need it. He was looking better than he ever did in his life, so seedy.
Robert Vivian
Come Again Good Rain
Rain beading the window late at night one streak at a time and each drop a world of water and each
one connected to something alive and breathing shy to make a sound for the sacred listening it is
heir to, late November rain come quietly now in the woods dark and waiting and how precious the
rain and every form of water whose very shape is made for blessing, falling or in stillness and the
rain that is home come out of the sky from clouds who know only the wind breathing them before
passing on to atmosphere and inside this rain many rooms and many windows opening out on to
gardens and though the leaves have fallen and no longer have to eat their bread of sun they still
turn with color as if to shine one last time and with this rain I know hush and the stillness that
abides and waiting inside rain I know only to listen and to hear what water has to say which is
mystery beyond all knowing and with this rain I see that my hands are empty and incapable of
flight however they wave or gesture and with this rain I know that I will die and that this dying
has already commenced, already issued from my first breath to this one and into rain I commend
my spirit, little ragged stray of longing whose tendril is lighter than a sigh, lasso of smoke meant
for disappearing and under rain I am animal and I am bird bone worn around the holy man’s throat
and the nothing that lasts and the nothing that is everywhere falling with rain and shaped by rain
and its tiny hands, which is all life and imagining and cave wall painting of spear and arrow and
amulet and the first poem written or uttered or great hidden epic deep inside the ground including
every root and seed and the withered faces of the dead who know how to compost under cairns
and by this rain I stand alone but not separate from the reed bed or the plover’s song, not separate
from the rough calligraphy of bark upon which the scrolls of the world unfurl their silent cry and
summons and to this rain I give thanks for every rainbow and petaled flower and the syllables that
would speak me saying me now in a drove of speech and this speech made of water and the current
that carries me down the ladder of my days and each rung made of waterfall, rising mists and
aureole and ions of great spray reclaiming the glorious air of paradise, and I give thanks to rain as
the author of every tear both in joy and sorrow and even agony along with the turning of dew into
hoar frost, the first icing of winter that wreathes all it crowns in dazzling raiment and rain of many
mountains, rain of many rivers swelling over with milk, rain falling on to fields bedizened by
shower and every manner of thunderous hand, rain filling the gutters and rain falling from the
eaves, oh, let it rain and let it wash over us and let it wash through our wide awake dreams, let it
come again and again blessing every window, doorstep and mailbox and the woodpile behind the
shed and the junkyard stacked with shredded tires, refrigerator doors, and rusting hubcaps only let
the rain guide me and water my soil and deepen the ache within for sunlight which is always just
behind and above watching all in vast trusting blindness, even the scurrying of the titmouse for its
hovel made of muddy straw and the turning blade of grass cutting the air in a sibilant whisper that
says yes and yes and yes again before it falls silent once more.
William Aarnes
Bazarov
Another lasting memory
is of Bazarov
hiking through a blizzard
with an indifference
only a nihilist
could pretend to maintain.
And, though a rereading
of Fathers and Sons
makes clear no blizzard
occurs in the novel,
acknowledging that truth
doesn’t stop the story
from once more blurring
into a whiteout
Bazarov emerges from
as if his arriving uninvited
shouldn’t bewilder anyone,
the snow swirling in the entry
as he stomps his feet.
Everything
He found on her computer, nearly done,
her article on George Sand. Her cogent prose
block-quoted French he couldn’t follow. One
endnote was blank. Her ending didn’t close.
He found among her underwear a stash
of letters he’d written early on. He read
a couple—trite intimacies. Best trash
them all, he thought but put them back instead.
In her closet he found his two wool shirts
she’d often worn. He won’t wear them himself
or give them to Good Will. But all her skirts,
blouses and slacks might go, as might her shelf
of head scarves. She’d bequeathed him everything—
simply “everything.” Everything seemed wrong.
Amy Brunvand
Running to Escalante
At the start of the race
A fat guy in a white ten gallon hat
Rides up on his ATV and says,
I’m not too sure why you folks want to do this.
It’s a grueling course,
But I’ll give you some advice:
While you are running don’t look down at your feet,
Remember to look up at the glorious scenery.
The Lord’s beauty all around you
Is the only reason for being here.
Are you all done with the potty? OK, then.
Now when I pull the trigger on this gun
It’s time to start running.
BANG!
And we are huffing and puffing
Up the hogback, down the other side.
Around mile three we start to think
Maybe we should have trained a little harder;
Maybe we should have trained at all.
But we are still running.
At the aid station polygamist girls in braids,
Long calico dresses
Brushing the tops of their running shoes.
Hand us cups of water. We drink
Still running
As we toss our paper cups aside.
At mile ten we cross the finish line
Running.
A beauty queen steps forward
Beribboned in a satin sash.
A tiara glitters on her long dark, windswept hair.
Good job, she says, her lovely teenaged face
Blank of any past experience.
She hands each of us a medal
That we can hang around our own necks
Now that we have finished running.
Spiral Jetty
Et in Utah ego—Robert Smithson
I am walking down the dark mountain
Past tumbled boulders of black basalt.
Particles of dust and tiny drops of water
Change the direction of sunlight;
The sky is blue behind high ringlet clouds.
Cartoon rays of light spike down
Painted in the recursive sky above the lake
By some anonymous communist artist.
Sunlight bounces and breaks apart
On filmy sluggish gray waves
Sudden flashes of peacock and gold
Are nothing after all but water, light and salt.
I am walking through the dusty parking lot
Past crayon-colored cars and trucks
Made in factories far away from here.
A woman barks the name of her running dog,
I am following the rocky spiral path
That coils around its own watery image
A skiff of brine shrimp cysts drifts
In smokelike wisps of suspended animation.
Primordial soup must have been like this:
Sloshing against black volcanic spew
Frothy with white, pillowed foam
Stinking of something pickled.
This is Arcadia for haliophiles
Feasting on shining beams of light.
I am immense, reaching for a small stone
That glints with square prisms of salt;
Circles ripple from my tossed stone.
A gull screeches for bread in indignation.
Salt burns my wounded feet.
I am standing in the center, spinning.
The Book with no Pandas
Q: What’s black and white and red all over?
A: A re(a)d panda.
Once upon a time
There was a book with no pandas
And the book was sad
Because the only books anyone wanted to read
All had pandas.
So the book with no pandas asked a Librarian,
May I have some pandas, please?
No, said the Librarian,
I pride myself on curating a diverse, unbiased collection.
I must give fair representation
To the pandaless worldview.
Why don’t you ask an Environmentalist?
So the book with no pandas asked an Environmentalist,
May I have some pandas, please?
No, said the Environmentalist.
Don’t you know that pandas are an endangered species?
There aren’t enough pandas in China to spare even one.
So the book with no pandas asked China,
May I have some pandas, please?
Sure, said China,
Panda rental costs one million dollars per year.
You must also agree
To provide each panda
Thirty-three pounds of bamboo per day
At your own expense.
Just sign here on the dotted line.
On hearing this, the book with no pandas fell into despair
And flung itself into a recycle bin.
So I wrote this poem which is chock-full of pandas.
If you have written a book with no pandas
Don’t despair. Just include this poem
And your book will have pandas
And your book will be happy.
The Trout of Knowledge
People who go on and on about the mystique of trout fishing
Are not entirely making things up.
Trout, metaphorically speaking, are hidden knowledge,
Secret desire, dangerous emotions,
Lurking down there in your watery subconscious.
Up they come, fooled by pretty feathers on a hook.
Look! I have one on my line! It’s a big one!
It thrashes, frantic, trying to shake free,
But I keep my line tight, playing the fish.
I’m too clever! This one isn’t going to get away.
I’m going to reel it in, land it in my net,
Smack it’s head on a metaphorical rock,
Slit open its belly with my metaphorical knife,
Slide my thumbnail down its backbone
To pull out its metaphorical guts.
I’ll fill the cavity with butter, onions and salt,
Wrap it tight in metaphorical tinfoil armor
And bake it on a metaphorical fire,
Burning desire, a conflagration of passion.
Now the metaphorical wood has been consumed,
The red hot bed of coals, just right
To cook, not burn, the pale pink flesh.
I’m going to eat that metaphorical trout for breakfast
Skin and all, then lick my lips,
And after I spit out the metaphorical bones
What remains is going to swim from my stomach
Upstream through metaphorical rivers of blood
Into the fathomless pool of my heart
Where it can lurk again in the watery depths
Hiding behind a metaphorical rock, waiting, just waiting,
For some more pretty feathers to float past.
Wayne F. Burke
Punks
Standing on the main street of Framingham,
Massachusetts, holding my thumb up
in the air
watching all the cars in the world
drive by me
with drivers who began to look,
to me, like assholes
every one
and a car went past with punks in it
and one of the punks gave me the finger
and I turned and chased the car
as the punks
pointed and laughed
until their car had to slow then stop
for a red light
and I gained ground
and the smiles of the punks disappeared
their eyes grew wide like dolls’ eyes
and the car squealed out and I chased it
to the next light
as the punks
hopped around inside the car like monkeys in a cage
and I closed the gap
and the punks’ mouths opened and closed like fish
gasping for air
and the car shot ahead
and I chased it to the next light
which the car blew through
and I gave up,
short of breath
though still pissed,
but not really
about a damn bunch of punks.
By-Pass
I need to go to the market
to buy unsalted bread
and unsweetened tea
and white meat not red;
don’t want to have another
by-pass surgery
during which they ripped a vein out of my leg
chain-sawed my sternum
plugged the vein into a new outlet
and jump-started my heart.
Afterward, the doc came to my bed
and said “fine, you’re fine” and
explained that the operation
was “routine”
but I did not feel “fine” or “routine”
I felt as if dying
and had lost ambition to do anything
but lie in bed and
hope everyone left me alone
and no one asked “how do you feel?”
because I was sick of the question
sick of people asking
sick of hearing myself answer
and sick of myself:
the suddenly fragile self
that had betrayed me;
had left me hurt and stunned,
like the apostles must have felt
when they saw Judas
with the soldiers.
John Cullen
Pajamas with Feet
Why, why did we ever give them up?
When did we become embarrassed
by childish pleasures and our desire to be
fitted with those protective callouses?
No wonder every kid admires the astronauts
and desires to scuff through lunar dust.
No wonder we freaked at National Geographic
when natives danced barefoot through bonfire blossoms.
Who, after all, honestly prefers slippers,
which sneak off like beagles on cool spring nights,
destined to catch the madness of rabbits?
So who is the one who made that decision?
Certainly no mother who suckled her own flesh!
It could only have been a cabal
of old men, orphaned and unhappy,
sucking the dregs of clubhouse scotch.
Too bad it’s you and I on the cold linoleum!
Think of the bloodshed that might have been avoided
if their feet had stayed warm in footed pajamas
and they had not forced others to dance on cold tile flooring!
Nancy Dobson
Three Ten Appointment
I’m a package of tissue and bone
lying on the paper-wrapped table
hoping I don’t have cancer.
I know the routine here
How are you? says the receptionist
typing with glittered acrylic nails.
Fine, I say pleasantly as I initial
things I don’t read on a HIPAA form.
Five minutes in the waiting room
thumbing through Coastal Living,
then a door opens,
I’m called to the inner chambers
where I don the paper vestal garments
that strip away the last of my identity
and leave me an anonymous specimen
a slab to be cut, probed,
and I submit to this ritual
praying for answers
but fearing the knife will open
a whole new set of questions.
Michelle Bonczek Evory
Yellow Daisies
After our unimaginable neighbors
dumped a cooler of water over
our sleeping bags, books, and tent,
I could not remember why I once
had been a true people person.
But then you walked past
our neighbors, approached us, a flower
behind each ear, a vial
of yellow daisies in your hand.
You asked if you could be a gentleman
And give us a each a flower,
place it behind our ears, trim off the stem.
“Flowers make beautiful girls even more
Beautiful,” you said. Reaching behind my ear, your hand
trembling like a new leaf in wind.
I could hear the snap and sharp
blade of your knife cutting
the stem’s end and for one moment
I thought, what if my ear too. But
You stepped back, smiled, and thanked us.
You strolled toward your tent, and it was then
I noticed your prosthetic leg. My eyes had never looked
so relaxed on loss. A loss? I hadn’t even noticed
the sliding metal. Not even later when you helped us
carry our heavy gear to the gate, the radiant
water drying and rising.
Brad Garber
Death of a Home Product Salesman
Here, try some soap made of rosemary fat and legal documents the arguments about whether one
product will last longer and where it is made but put it on your body and you may order a metric
ton paying gold in molten form into the aqueduct that runs uphill placing my livelihood in
jeopardy in order to bring someone else satisfying golf games quiet hotel room rivers of wine
and rare spaghetti but I am running around the base of the pyramid looking for the secret passage
to the tomb and my toothpaste is better than the other ones my window fluid higher in alcohol
until I stop to look out into the surrounding desert to the march of lawyers receding into the dust
followed by screaming pharaohs and wild dogs the liquid of spoiled brains watering oases and
large courthouses painted by hatred vindication discretionary justice shaded truth and the spunk
of the rich who collect collect collect while you wash your body down into dark holes along with
dignity do not convince yourself of friendship or respect the watch is not a gift but marks an
anticipated passing the packing of leftover products into shipping containers while silver forks
stab fresh lamb in tomato sauce and laughter rings through hallways of a place once called home
until phone calls and knocks on random doors fall silent like the concept of loyalty the product of
diligent effort funneled away and the injured left to straggle away from the herd moving ahead.
God at the Stove
“There’s lots a water t’boil out.”
A pot of wild mushrooms is busy.
There are flavors and personalities
divided by the knife
softening in discussion
melding ideologies.
On hot coils, everything is equal.
Steam fills the place
shouting boisterously
a thin coating of conflict
contemplation
every angle foreseen
and explored cooling
in character and consensus.
“When it cooks down, a bit, I’ll add the cream.”
James Grabill
Red Alarm
From locked smelters of clinical disinfection excoriated by watery electrical singes come freshly
cut bodily chords with the scent of people who parachute through cumulus desire down a
transverse future axis to one of the opposites of climate disruption.
The school gymnasium goes white and fiscally sanitized, as amendments are steam-shoveled off
the living sea floor of denials, as Michael Parenti appears on cable to explain the shadow behind
Reagan: “Wealth doesn’t trickle down, but is siphoned up from everyone working.”
In a yellow light of skirts, root blue longing, the look on a veteran’s face for what will soon be
missing, endorphic grass-thick wake-downs each moment, the next wave arrives face-down and
face-up with plenty of coal-burning behind bodily cells, vibratory, international, ringing as if the
ringing we’ve heard weren’t the alarm of climate disruption.
Amber and dark-green last train lanterns signal, red on the vast white wall against black
unspiraling night, as each arc and wheeling scrawl from the spray-paint piano keys comes from
future desalination mounds at the gut of matter, where the ancient sky doesn’t stop orbiting with
the Earth.
The Story of Each Day
Ratcheting and fibrillating industrial drums keep splitting the beat within wing pulse and shaded
folds, splintering the wooden frame in these walls, then letting it solidify, driving a shimmering
cymbal close to the origin of people.
Out of split-second union comes division in which knowledge and ignorance race ahead. As
knowledge progresses, ignorance torques.
We find ourselves in the middle, the foundational replaced atom by atom, as thinking shifts.
Hungers that have assumed names, to not offend the appetites, may need to be seen.
This is a time in which centuries are colliding, where oceans of change have been rising up from
greenhouse heat and blood-making marrow.
Larry Jordan
Side Trips
These side trips in Buicks
leaving lovers with a wave,
or the waiting
outside an elevator door,
were nothing at all
like what I worked on
in Miss McDermott’s
English class:
Rocket fins
and thrusters,
little charred patches
on my desk.
Elegy with Streams
In the end she died, fitting nicely
in a suit of wool trimmed with lamè.
I watched a squirrel climb a limb
as I listened to the priest use words not his.
Later, we’d drink a round of scotch
and laugh about the way she walked.
Father Paul laid his hand on my shoulder,
and looked deep into my eyes.
I could stir nothing for him to see,
nothing he could recognize.
In the end she died and then it rained
washing a rivulet of chalk down the drain.
Len Krisak
APOPHTHEGMS:
HISTORY OF A RELATIONSHIP
My dear, I loved you for your wit,
And you me, for my lack of it.
DEDICATED TO PETA
A lot of furry creatures like to roll in dung
Then steal—and kill—the broods of others.
A lot of species like to eat their young.
So many mammals make such lousy mothers.
FOR SOME,
Not even ninety years of feckless drift
Can keep the end from seeming far too swift.
DIDACTIC POETIC PRECEPT
First astonish,
Then admonish.
EXHORTATION
Old Pegasus I’ve ridden for so long,
I beg you, help me put not one foot wrong.
Step slow enough to keep your rider humble,
And smartly when you think that I may stumble.
NO THANKS, TORSO
Though I’ve been told to change my life by Rilke
(Be better? Pulse with human kindness’ milke?),
I’m sorry, but I’m just not of that ilke.
AFTER ARCHILOCHUS
(from The Greek Anthology)
The one thing I know how to do
Is getting back at someone who
Decided he
Could screw with me.
TO THE FEMINIST LEFT IN AMERICA
Be grateful that you don’t live in Arabia,
Their patriarchals sew up women’s labia.
Sandra Kolankiewicz
After Researching Her Origins
While going through the archives, I saw
a trend: many young women left after
he arrived. I could determine it like
the passenger list of the Titanic,
So-and-So here embarking for there. The
daughter of the owner of Such-and-Such,
leaving for parts unknown. He ruined them
all except they had money, didn’t waste
time corrupting a waitress, went straight for
the top for no reason other than, like
mountains of virtue, they were there to be
conquered. How many late night trains boarded
for non-existent prep schools? His response
to the class that wouldn’t have him, that locked
every door to him except the back.
Sheree Mack
Corbeaux
In the midday heat, they prey;
ravished and ragged with history,
their feathers midnight;
new world vultures
in an old world town.
Sewer laden waters lap the highway
where cars drive too fast for pedestrians to cross,
where these bald-headed scavengers circle
in a wave listening for the final notes
of rotting bodies, road kill and your last sleep.
Their relentless calls of darkness weave out
from their pink beaks, picking raw pink flesh
from white bones. Returning again and again
until only the past is left to drift away in the dawn.
Josh Medsker
Old Man Mopping the Floor
On Water St. he mops.
He mops and mops, all day he mops.
He looks at the shoes.
The tasseled shoes and the brogans,
the loafers and the sneakers,
He looks at the shoes.
The tasseled shoes and the brogans,
the loafers and the sneakers,
he mops after all of them.
As he re-dunks the mop,
the bleach water
slops onto the top of
his Danskos.
The mop is not heavy, in his hands. He twists
it in a figure eight, like his father taught.
He gets the corners with the hard part of the mop,
not shoving the muck into the corners, but really pushing,
making sure each square is clean,
until it gleams.
Yet, the handle is rough on his old hands. He feels its grooves
against the faded silver band he still wears,
It chafes, but still
he mops.
Jacqueline Michaud
MY DEAR MARTIAN
Because so little separates us –
the occasional moon, a billion or so
songs of longing and such, this need
to embrace what may be holy, sweet
and saving, like uncertainty,
or merely dangerous, like trust –
and given our respective histories,
save the cosmologic details,
we have much in common, you and I,
or why would you be here now
peering in, if those are actual eyes?
That we walk upright, or appear to
while claiming we know what we know,
ah, the illusion we create to deny
what’s undeniable, all the talk of fate
a ruse we use to worm our way out
of this skin we fear no Grail
is imprisoned in.
RAPPROCHEMENT
Let’s take a walk and talk
about what we agree is a given,
like the actual, or material,
or any number of matters
teeming in the natural world.
Let’s consider what we know
well, say, the Old Man’s Beard
devouring our orchards, or
other themes organic, like,
did you know
proteins control what happens
at the heart of things,
or certain acids carry instructions
that ordain, in effect,
who shall possess substance,
and who merely exhaust it?
For you see, don’t you,
it’s vital we confront those words
that threaten to defeat us
if we don’t pay closer attention. So
let’s take a walk, and
if along the way we should find
a random chanterelle,
perhaps we’ll not run from talk
of enchantment as well.
Alexander Motyl
Philosophy
I saw a bit of light the other day,
while sitting in the dark and waiting,
with ears plugged with ear plugs,
for the goddam trailers to end
and the film to begin.
I realized that the best thing
about ear plugs is not,
as you might think,
that you can plug your ears—
that would be trivially true, obviously—
but that you can plug them
whenever and wherever you desire.
I bet Socrates would’ve used ear plugs
if only he’d been able—
especially on his many forays
into the cave,
where the din of the crowd
must’ve given him a killer migraine.
After all, what else could they do
but watch the same ol’ shadows
and miss the point of the parable,
over and over again?
Well, he should’ve used ear plugs.
Youth would’ve stayed uncorrupted,
the Greeks would’ve let him be,
and that cup of hemlock
would’ve stayed undrunk.
True, we might think less of him today—
after all, we want our thinkers
to put their money, or poison,
where their mouths are—
but who cares about a mere opinion?
And if Socrates had passed on
those plugs to Plato,
who knows what that might’ve led to?
No forms? No ideal city?
No civilization? No philosophy?
We can’t know for sure—
after all, epistemology is a bitch—
but I’m betting they’d be pleased to see
how much they matter ontologically.
Unease
The Hudson was nervous that day:
flapping its wings
like a flock of crazy gulls
on Coney Island,
twitching its eyes
like Thunderbird bums
on the old Bowery,
cracking its fingers
like Willie Sutton
before a big bank job.
In anticipation of what?
I thought.
The end?
The beginning?
The catastrophe?
It’s impossible to say
with any degree of certainty.
After all, there is nothing here:
only determined joggers
with windshield-wiper ponytails,
slim sunglassed boys
with silent dogs,
mascara moms
with big baby carriages.
Nothing stood still
and you couldn’t hear a pin drop.
I guess unease is inevitable
when there are more waves
than you can shake a stick at.
Holly Painter
The only shame
And now you’ve got yourself a smooth pole
smooth and shiny you rent it like a vacant teenage hustler
You twist it up for them you wrench it between your legs
slather it with sweat with spit with any wet they like it wet
Like the lean lamppost at Fourth and Main in any America-town
but without the municipal ridges to brace your swollen ankles
You practiced in those shoes – you knew
Now you’re six foot four with a pierced up face
shaved so they ache for your sandpaper graze
He told you only topless you told me only this once
No delicate boats where I sit only tankers welded cold to sirens
You’re translucent a rotting orchid beside those sultry neighborhood girls
and I drove but I sped but I’m out of breath just sitting this far west
while you’re there and I wish this sun cancer was quicker than this
We drenched ourselves once in a field in Nebraska
pushed each other down in the dew peeled our shirts
peeled our mouths from our nipples that’s two more rings
They appreciate the symmetry these strangers
with their damp dollar bills
And he lied and you lied and
I’m early this is the space between words between goodbye and
I love you the too long space he chides me I should love her better
She cried because I cried but this is only a lonely nighttime pickup game
a hot lit hallucination and the only shame here is not loving her enough
So I’m ashamed to study the night trains to wish myself into their carbon bellies
to wake up charred and crisp and free in any Mexico-town where you aren’t
because you’d never stop for me
Stan Sanvel Rubin
Can the Dead Really Live Again?
the purple pamphlet asks
and asks—
Would you say
•yes?
•no?
•maybe?
the folded paper
having been left
on my front door
like a summons
you don’t have
to sign for because
you’ve already signed.
Out the window, that
red-headed hummingbird
has once again
chased his competitors
from the feeder
that dangles a few feet
above the deck.
The others will return
when he has had his fill
of sugary water
and rests on a winter twig
bent like a violin bow.
If anything worries him,
he doesn’t show it.
I want to answer,
all of the above,
but that’s not a choice.
LESSON EIGHT
These are the basics:
you learn to present
claws,
you learn to kiss
the ground.
You need flexibility,
you need weapons,
and you need to know
how to use them.
These are hard
things to learn but they
will teach themselves
with more or less
damage. Who
does not need them?
LESSON TWELVE
This time we will make
practical decisions about conserving
energy, we will explore
thought processes and pain,
how we are hurt
invisibly by others,
the words they say
and the words they don’t say,
the promises they break
even when you stand
in front of them,
your two eyes open,
the way we tend
to expend emotion fruitlessly,
draining the place
where the future lives
as it lives inside everyone,
swelling and receding
beyond our control
unless we take it
with mastery of thought
and that requires patience.
We will do exercises
to achieve this.
LESSON ELEVEN
You have to look
behind you and
in front,
you have to look
left and right,
up and down.
Prepositions are important.
They are the dice
in the game.
Does spelling count?
Maybe. It’s up to you.
You can’t control numbers.
As many players
as want to
participate.
LESSON FIFTEEN
What is the significance
of what we’ve
been doing?
You have looked
at lies, you have
studied examples.
You have hated
being right as much as
being wrong.
This is normal.
Remember the
parable of the horse.
You can expand
your powers further
step-by-step.
Just keep in practice.
There are always
wise men circling.
Elizabeth Kate Switaj
10TEMBER
1.
the wet red leaves on the little green bench
2.
the ickle gean, decaying sheen
the enter me
3.
the here already
dances in the streetlight
going out, going steady
4.
flat even out
the cardboard box
signs & choose a route
to the docks
5.
labor
pushes blue birth
sing — don’t cry: either way
you’re breathing the smoke & plastic
we lovthe
6.
back breast, back bench
the oil sheen in me
already streetlight steady
out of the box, out of the route, rotting docks
labor to birth to way to plastic love
to, we love t(o)o
7.
give up all our kings & fools
their feet singing like haberdashers
to hawks & ghouls
we drink — with the crashers
of gates and never with the snatchers
of tomorrow
of Miracle Gro
8.
wth enough investment
said they cd stop the stomach
pains, the indigent
the wasting of the sick
into bones and sticks
so we gave them the money
& we got a lick
so we gave them the money
9.
crumpled up red
crumpled up brown
the lips of our dead
their skin in our ground–
their skin is our ground
their eyes our won’t be led
their tongues our won’t go down
their legs: we walk instead
the crumpled up dead
10.
rise
starvation means
our ghosts & revenants
will become our majority
stronger
than our
skin that still grows & heals & breathes
and bleeds like leaves in rain
on cold concrete
black
FERMENTED POMEGRANATE SEEDS
the drunk girl on the bottom of the world
lifts her head & sings
angelhair
pasta dried between her teeth
can't feed all your dead
they're coming for your books
they're coming for your kindle
-ing and tinder
they're coming for Enlightenment
they're coming for your popopomoocow
your popomao
your pomo glass of shards of glass
zombies should not be racist
but they rot differently depending on their wounds
bullets are gangrener
blades are sparklier
light leaves shadows instead of skin
but the bitten will always be royalty
the drunk girl on the bottom of the world
cannot be infected
she tastes like cotton candy & air
eventually they give up on her
the drunk girl on the bottom of the world swallows
grappa & whiskey
so she doesn't have to see us through volcanoes
and when she rolls through cobra to her feet
tectonic plates grin
and when she stumbles through the ocean
tsunami sirens ring
poor women just die
and when she rises
you rise
you kiss & claim
the bitch that launched a thousand ships
was always unfaithful
she always denied
the bottom of the world
its gold & wine & cense
Jessica Tyner
How Dying is Done
They always tell you it’s like a cancer, horse piss
spearing thick as butter into perfect alabaster,
but it’s not like that at all.
When the black sickness began to crawl
up my arm, claws
dug in deep, inching up forearms
wrapped tight in veins,
the paramedics and nurses and doctors were right,
It did look like cancer
if cancer had the vanity
to primp and preen in the ugly
morning light, but cancer,
it has more modesty
or shame than that. I watched it spread,
arching and keening like a crazed lover
while the doctors filed in, pudgy, tired penguins
telling me time and again
We don’t know what this is, but this,
this is how dying is done.
We’ll cut off the arm
to save the head and heart.
I’d heard that before,
year after knife twisting year,
but an amputation doesn’t stop It.
Cuts aren’t clean,
no matter who’s wielding the scalpel.
God, I waited for the clichés, for the lights
or the montage or the regrets
to pour in as the monsoon,
but that’s not how dying is done.
You keep on wanting
what your heart’s been suffocating,
bearing down underneath blood and muscle, but still
It refuses to drown, what your head
turns away from, holding up ridiculous
mobiles and distractions that even a child
wouldn’t fall for. You.
You were what I wanted
when the darkness set in, so furious and real
that It refused to stay buried like a guilt-soaked
secret. We’d grown into something so much heavier,
something of such Botero grandiosity,
that not even a vehicle as strong as my body
could keep it quiet or stop it from bursting into blossom.
Choreography
To follow in dance is to have a conversation,
Albeit often one of the sexually-laced variety,
The kind made in hushed corners of bars between
Sips of gin and sweetened breaths—the kind
Leading to a crescendo of fingertips
Pressed into thighs and loose kisses
In corners or taxis I’ll forget by morning,
But to lead,
That’s giving a persuasive speech,
A manifesto of sorts, oily words slipped
Between practiced smiles, a litany
Masked as a spoonful of something
That’s supposed to be good for us,
And I,
I’ve never been good at politics.
So let me just follow, match
My body to yours and we can both pretend
It’s all for the sake of a rhythm and rules
Written hundreds of years ago,
An excuse
To do as the beasts do.
Howard Winn
I WISH TO ENQUIRE CONCERNING
I have an unfinished conversation
with my father.
He vanished while my young daughter
spoke on the telephone,
leaving me to inform my mother
who was cooking her dinner.
She cried she was not with him
and he could not die without her.
That is the way it is with family.
Thoughts left waiting
while food is purchased
or the car serviced.
Occasionally I have tried
to complete that talk
with my brother who is altering
into our father,
but we cannot do it.
He has his own earth to make,
and nobody has forever.
Winter does not end the year.
Spring does not begin it.
We step in sometime
when solstice sun shines dimly,
test white ice with foolish toe,
or risk bathing in a warm equinox.
Only calendars and clocks
mark beginnings and conclusions.
OTHER ANCESTORS KNOWN
They lived at Bryn Mawr,
sprawling farm on the great hill,
and worshiped
but not the king.
Laws said they did not
have rights as others,
so they separated from Canterbury.
Cool spring silence over fields
gave way to hot summer sounds
as insects and animals
wake to blossoms,
stamen and pistol.
Dogs bark,
impersonating bishops,
and sheep move together
under shadows of distant Snowden.
They celebrate days of their own,
assemble in rooms of that farm
with the smell of horse, cow,
and cut hay spinning like brittle gold.
Green and gray leaves hang over ivy,
making walls live.
Another lived at Plas Mawr,
great house in the city.
Doors opening upon commerce or war.
Knighted, building no castle,
but the city home of many halls,
rooms, stairways, courtyard and kitchen.
A coat of arms and regularity
astride harbor and monarchy,
both beasts of burden.
Melanie J. Cordova
THEY ARE WAITING
Gloria nudged the dead body with the sandal in her hand. It bobbed in the calm pool of the hot
spring. She always wondered how she’d react to a corpse. Her mother had raised her
on CSI and Law and Order, and now Gloria knew for sure that dead bodies didn’t bother her.
They had no spirit in them, and the spirit was the frightening thing. Warm water flowed in
channels over this guy’s back.
The leaves in the trees whispered in the wind and Gloria shivered, looking up the slope to the
263 freeway. What does one do in the intertime between a call to 911 and the arrival of the San
Miguel County sheriff? She’d planned a relaxing day off at the Montezuma hot springs in the
shadow of the international high school that occupied an old castle up the mountain, but now it
would be a day of red tape and police statements.
Aside from the gentle pulse of the hot spring ballooning the dead man’s swim trunks, the sight of
him face-down in the pool didn’t bother Gloria too much after the initial shock. She knew better
than to get into the water with him, though, and looked longingly at several other connected
pools around them, waiting, just waiting for the officer to show up. She tasted the humid air
clouding above the hot springs on her lips. Her knees ached from crouching and she groaned.
The noise floated into the wind and joined the shaking leaves. She poked the man again and
watched the pale skin of his left calf indent with the pressure and then fill out again. The body
glided to the other side of the pool and bumped an ear against the jagged corner. Gloria tilted her
head and her ponytail slipped over her shoulder. She wondered what the autopsy report would
say—that’s what they usually did in these situations on CSI. Autopsies were par for the course
with found dead drowned guys.
Gloria flicked the excess water off her sandal and the drops sailed through the humid air. One
landed on her big toe, another on the lip of the pool, another on her canvas backpack, still more
on her hands. She leaned back onto her butt, her knee cracking, and slipped the sandal on her
foot. As she massaged her knee the wind picked up and she saw a figure out of the corner of her
eye. When she looked there were only the trees thick with leaves. She stood and wiped dirt from
her shorts. She took a step forward toward where she thought she saw the figure.
“Hello. Are you from the high school?”
The wind answered her. She grabbed her backpack and pulled open the front zipper. Her hands
quickly shifted aside the lip balm, lotion, pencils, and loose note cards to get to her pepper spray.
She pulled the pack over her shoulders and saw a flash of a shadow disappear behind a tree.
Gloria glanced at the dead man—swim trunks swelling with water and his right arm bent at an
odd angle like a mannequin. The water current quietly spun him clockwise.
She unhooked the top of the pepper spray and gripped it in her palm. She walked to where she
thought she saw the shadow. Dead leaves crunched beneath her feet. The crumbly sound hovered
around her toes like a swarming cloud of gnats. The trees arched over her as if she viewed them
from a fish-lens, branches moaning under the weight of the leaves and the air and the birds and
the bugs. Gloria’s stomach grumbled.
There was the shadow again—behind the tree. “I can see you,” she said. Gloria knew that many
of the highschoolers from the castle up the way came down to get drunk at the hot springs, but
she thought that she’d be alone if she came mid-morning. “Just come out already.”
She took one more step and stopped, trapping leaves trying to escape on the wind under her feet.
They flapped against the dirt and her sandals. Gloria traced the edge of her backpack straps with
her free hand. A bird landed in a branch of the tree in front of her, hopping down the bark to get
a better peek at Gloria. It tilted its head and fluffed its wings.
“You’ve got ugly eyes,” she said to the bird. “You must be a towhee.”
Yet towhees avoided humans, and Gloria frowned. “What are you doing so close to the springs?”
The bird called from the branch, a sweet chirp followed by the sound of a shaking rattlesnake in
its throat. It was a human sound, and she fought the urge to look back at the corpse. Maybe she
wasn’t as unperturbed by the dead body as she thought.
And then a man emerged from behind the tree.
He was exactly Gloria’s height and wore a brown cardigan that melted into the woods around
him. She was so surprised not to see a teenager that she forgot to blink and instead clenched the
pepper spray in spasms, her hand weaving through the air. The man placed a hand on his belly
and seemed to grow rounder, more corpulent than she could have thought for someone hiding
behind that tree. His clothes grew with him—even his brown loafers stretched to accommodate
his feet. He knotted his eyebrows and opened his mouth to speak.
Gravel crunched behind her and she turned toward the highway to see a police car pulling onto
the shoulder. Rocks tumbled from beneath its wheels down the incline to the hot springs, one
landing in the pool of the dead man with a little plop. This snapped Gloria out of her stupor and
she stumbled back a few steps. She blinked and turned back to the man in the forest, but saw
only the bird on the branch above her, leering at her with his wide round red towhee eye.
“Hello? You Gloria?” The sheriff slammed the car door and adjusted his sunglasses on his walk
down to the springs.
Gloria shoved the pepper spray into her pocket. “Yeah, hi, I’m Gloria.” She walked out of the
trees to stand next to him at the lip of the dead man’s pool.
The sheriff’s boots scratched against the smooth rock as he squatted to get a better look at the
body. His pants stretched tight around his thighs and a droplet of sweat trickled behind his ear.
He wobbled for a moment but gripped the side of the pool to steady himself.
Gloria adjusted her backpack as he asked her questions. What was her full name? What did she
do for a living? Why was she out here this morning? What time had she arrived? Did she come
here by herself often? Would she be willing to come back to the station for more questions? Had
she seen anything suspicious that morning? Had she seen anyone else out here at the hot springs?
She blinked and peered back into the woods. There was no man there now, and no bird either.
No sunshine poking through the trees. No noise from the shaking wind. No single leaf floating to
the ground. No squirrel scurrying down a branch. No figures behind trees.
Gloria’s beat up Ford Taurus launched down the freeway, its engine groaning with exhaustion.
She hated the thing but couldn’t afford anything better. Her neighbor Mr. Waverly had called the
police twice in the last three months complaining about a suspicious vehicle in their
neighborhood, and Gloria had to promise him she wasn’t making meth or anything in her
apartment, only that she was poor, living off the hourly wage of an assistant at a dental lab. Still,
every time she turned the Taurus onto their street, she saw the swish of her neighbor’s curtain
and the glint off of Mr. Waverly’s eyeglasses.
It was late afternoon before the police let her leave the station, and now she drove through the
busy northern New Mexican outlands on her way back to town. The landscape hummed by her
as the Taurus sighed along—a mule deer that looked up at her passing; a tumbleweed the size of
her head bobbing alongside her in the wind for a few hundred feet; bushes dancing and stretching
their stubby arms for the sky. In the hum of the car and whoosh of the wind in her windows,
Gloria zoned out, thinking of the man in the woods. Where had he gone? Had he drowned the
man, or was it an accident? Should she have said something to the sheriff about him? Her sinking
stomach told her no. Had she imagined him, how he grew and shrank?
She knew that towhees usually fled from humans. She knew that ghosts liked water.
She drove the Taurus in a daze, forgetting how she did it just as she forgot sometimes how she’d
learned to walk. She thought perhaps she ought to be thinking of the dead man, but he concerned
her less now that he wasn’t floating in a peaceful pool right in front of her.
Soon she navigated the narrow streets of town, driving in the late afternoon glare to her
apartment. When she turned the car onto her street and saw Mr. Waverly’s curtains shuffle, she
remembered she needed to pick up a few things at the grocery store and slowed the Taurus,
wondering if she should stop and change out of her unused swimsuit and shorts. The glare from
Mr. Waverly’s glasses glanced across her eyes and she stepped on the gas to get it out of her
face. Fine, she’ll just go straight there, but she wondered if he’d call the cops on her again for
cruising the neighborhood in such a crummy car.
The parking lot at Safeway was crowded—stores closed early in this town and everyone wanted
to get some last minute eggs or bread or ice cream before they locked their doors. Gloria pulled
the Taurus into a tight squeeze between the cart collector and a maroon van.
The cold air shocked her as she entered the store between the sliding glass doors. Gloria reached
for a basket and crooked it on the side of her arm. Eggs for cookies, extra spinach, some
milk. She shivered in the air conditioning. People zoomed past her as she navigated the aisles. A
woman pushed a cart that held a crying baby and three packs of Diet Snapple. Two teenagers
crouched in front of the canned green beans. An elderly woman coughed and tapped her foot at
Gloria so she could scoot around her to the cereal aisle.
Gloria found what she needed and dashed out of the store, thankful for the burst of warm air that
greeted her outside. Searching her pockets for the keys to the Taurus, she didn’t see that a large
man was leaning on the bumper of the maroon van she’d parked next to.
“Is that you?”
His voice made her jump. The keys dangled from her fingers. Gloria knew better than to speak to
strangers when it was growing dark. She gripped the keys firmly in her fist and made a beeline
for the Taurus.
“So it is your car,” the man said, heaving his bulk from the bumper. “Where do you get off,
lady?”
She unlocked the back door and dumped her grocery bags on the seat. When the door clanged
shut she jumped. The man had walked over to the driver’s side.
“What makes you think you can just park however you want? You parked too close to me. I
can’t get into my van and I’ve been waiting out here twenty minutes for you to move this piece
of junk.”
Gloria saw that her side mirror was only inches from the man’s car. She gripped the door handle.
“Sorry, I didn’t realize—”
“Nah, of course you didn’t. Only looking out for yourself—”
Gloria was too dazed to listen. She glanced at the man and found that he looked exactly like the
man in the woods. She could barely move, barely breathe. Yes, that was him and he was growing
in size here, too. As he spoke and gestured to his van she shook her head. When he measured the
distance between her Taurus and his van her mouth dropped. It was him. He was here. Could he
have followed her?
“Are you listening to anything I’m saying?” The man’s face flushed and Gloria thought he
looked like a sausage stuffed in a brown paper bag.
She tried to clear her head.
“Listen, I’m sorry. I’m leaving now.”
She opened the door and threw herself inside, but could hear him through the glass: “No, I’m not
through with you yet, lady. I don’t know where you get off doing this, you know. I waited for
you out here. I could have been in a hurry. I could have had somewhere to go.”
The low rumble of the engine cut him off. Gloria slammed the Taurus into reverse and fled the
Safeway parking lot, swerving around a woman in a wheelchair. She saw in the rear view mirror
the man clench his fist and then clamber quickly into his van.
Just as her heart was calming at the stoplight three blocks from her house, a movement in her
rearview mirror made her blood shake. There was the man, the van, everything, right behind her.
The man from the woods had followed her from the grocery store. Was he really going to follow
her all the way home? Just for parking too closely? He wouldn’t have had to wait for her if he
weren’t so fat, she thought. In the mirror his face shone like a red light bulb. She thought she
could see the sweat glistening on his nose.
“Oh my god, it really is him,” she whispered. The rattlesnake rush of the bird call filled her ears
and she almost sobbed. Ghosts weren’t supposed to be able to detach from their haunts. They
were supposed to stay put, in place. They weren’t supposed to follow young women around. He
should be growing and heaving and shrinking and pulsing back in the woods by the hot springs,
not in a minivan.
The light turned green and Gloria drove quickly to her block, but the man stayed on her tail,
following so close he nudged her bumper once or twice. Gloria’s arms shook. She could hardly
work the pedals. She didn’t want this man knowing where she lived, hadn’t even wanted to meet
him at all. When she pulled the Taurus onto her street she realized what she was doing and sped
up to pass her house. Maybe if she drove around a bit more he’d lose interest. She could drive to
the police station. Her pulse quickened. Yes, that is what she would do.
But the light from Mr. Waverly’s glasses shone through his living room window once more, and
Gloria didn’t have to. Her neighbor had called the police when she’d done her earlier drive-by,
and a cruiser turned the corner. Gloria pulled the Taurus over in front of Mr. Waverly’s house,
fully aware he was watching squint-eyed from the window. The man pulled the van over behind
her, but Gloria saw his reaction when the police car stopped on the other side of the street. He
shook his head, slammed a fist on the steering wheel, and pulled away.
Gloria felt tears well up behind her eyes. That couldn’t have been the man from the forest. She
couldn’t let it be. She had to be imagining things. Everyone was always saying how haunted this
town was, but ghosts don’t just—
A tap on her window made her cry out. She rolled it down.
“Didn’t mean to scare you, hon,” the officer said. “Mr. Waverly called in a suspicious vehicle,
but swore it wasn’t you this time. Know anything about it?”
Gloria knew Mr. Waverly probably had called about her Taurus, but was grateful for it.
“That van,” she whispered, feeling weak and sweaty. “That van that followed me in here and just
left. That’s it.”
The officer nodded and trotted back over to his cruiser and climbed behind the wheel. He turned
on his flashing red and blue lights and swerved around the corner after the van. Shaking, Gloria
grabbed her grocery bag and nearly ran to her front door. Mr. Waverly shut his drapes when she
waved at him.
Gloria turned the handle of the faucet to its hottest temperature and sat fully immersed in the
bathtub watching her feet through the white-blue of the water. It glossed her toes into an oil
painting. A bath would have to do in lieu of the hot springs, but she needed to feel the water seep
into her skin, to feel it ooze into the marrow of her bones. She wondered how she’d feel about
everything in the morning, if she’d tell her coworkers about the dead guy at Montezuma or the
fat ghost. Probably not. In fact she hoped she’d wake up the next morning with no memory of
her day off.
The water rose to her armpits and Gloria shut off the faucet. It was so hot that it sent little
needles into her nerves. She took a deep breath and leaned back onto the ceramic of the tub. The
steam from the bath floated into her face like a scent, blurring her feet into pale peachy clouds in
the water. She heard the trickle and burp of the drain trying to suck the bath’s contents down the
pipe. The fan in her bedroom across the hall spun so quickly it knocked off a post-it note she’d
stuck to her dresser, which floated like a leaf to the carpet. In the dim light she saw its
text: stamps? email mom.
In the corner of the bathroom were the sandals she’d poked the dead man with. Maybe that had
been a mistake. Or is it possible to be haunted for absolutely no reason at all?
She looked at her sandals and then at her feet, already feeling coarse and wrinkly. Gloria thought
that floating in the hot springs must be very much like floating in her bathtub. If the man hadn’t
drowned, would he have been there to enjoy the water as she had set out to do? Would he have
nodded at her arrival, maybe given her a silent wave as a co-conspirator in the beauty of the
forest? Maybe they would have chatted about how the juniper bushes looked at high noon or
discovered that they both enjoyed watching sand crumble from the high climb of Hermit’s Peak.
Would he have heard the hush of the trees around them, heard the bird, seen the man and the
shadow in the trees?
Gloria blinked and realized the water had gone cold. She shivered and emerged dripping with icy
droplets stabbing her feet. Again the image of the drowned man popped into her head. He’d died
in warmth; he’d never remember cold water. Grabbing a towel and then her robe from the
bathroom door, she unscrewed the drain and watched the water swirl, as cool and patient as a
stream, down the pipe. The steam had long since disappeared from the room.
A sound stopped Gloria as she bent to pick up her sandals. The crunch of a shoe—the flight of a
rock from the sidewalk into the yard. She dropped the sandals and stepped into her dark living
room that overlooked her front yard.
She paused, feeling her heart dissolve and course into her fingers and toes. Gloria’s breath came
in short supply and she hoped it was Mr. Waverly, prayed it was Mr. Waverly, begged Mr.
Waverly to call the police on her. The harsh call of the towhee echoed in her ear. So intently did
Gloria listen to the coarse song that she nearly lost her sight to it.
She stepped to the side of the picture window and, as slowly as she could manage with shaking
hands, shifted the drapes.
Sure enough it was not Mr. Waverly, though light from his window illuminated much of the
street.
It was the man from the woods, the grocery store, her thoughts. The man without his maroon
van, only his knotted eyebrows, his sweaty nose, crossing and uncrossing his arms, leaning on
the concrete slab around the city lamppost, tapping his foot and shaking his head, growing and
shrinking. Fading in the light, detached from his haunt. Waiting, just waiting.
Jeanne Gassman
THE IMPORTANCE OF COLOR
The lesson was a failure.
As Rose Bryant flipped through her students’ drawings, she kept muttering the same refrain:
“Brown, brown, tones of sepia, more brown.” The assignment had been to draw an imaginary
flower garden, but these kids had never seen the kind of flowers Rose wished them to draw.
They lived in a world framed by rock and clay-colored mesas. She had hoped to inspire them to
dip into their palettes to create wild, imaginative landscapes. Instead, her students relied on what
was already familiar: the barren land of their high desert home.
Outside her office window, tumbleweeds danced crazily across the quad of the high school
campus, some finding repose under the bumpers of the battered Ford pickups in the parking lot.
A sudden gust slapped a spray of ochre dirt against the windowpane, and the cracked sill filled
with a pool of sand. Rose shivered as she listened to the tail-end of the weather front. The storm
was swinging to the north, toward the Four Corners area. Many Farms, Arizona, would get no
rain today.
When Rose had first driven her ’73 Chevy hatchback into town last summer, she’d hoped she
took a wrong turn. Many Farms. The name evoked an image of a rural landscape dotted with
small plots of grain and corn; but in Many Farms, there were no farms. No trees, not a single
blade of grass. Mac, the longhaired hippie vice-principal, took her on a tour. “Everything here is
government-built,” he told her with some pride. “Made to last.” She tried to hide her growing
revulsion as he pointed out the barracks serving as the student dorms, the gray slump block
classrooms and the long row of faculty apartments, each with identical concrete stoops and
clotheslines strung across the dirt patches that counted as lawns.
“Doesn’t anybody plant flowers?” Rose asked. It always surprised her to sound so timid when
her feelings were so bold.
Mac laughed. “Jackrabbits eat them before they bloom.” That first night, Rose stayed awake
listening to the yip of coyotes as they hunted down the jackrabbits. Why did she ever come to
this desolate Navajo Indian Reservation? Survival. That was the answer.
After her Art 1 class completed the basic shapes unit of drawing the box, cone, cylinder, and
sphere, Rose was hopeful. Most of her students had a grasp of form and perspective; she believed
they could do more. Rose handed out the pastels and brought in her color wheel, explaining the
combinations and contrasts of primary colors. Some colors, such as red and yellow, were hot,
warm and passionate, while others—blue, green—were cool and calming. Then she brought in
slides of works by the master painter of flower gardens: Monet.
The girls stared at the pictures of water lilies and cascading vines of wisteria with doubtful eyes.
The boys in the last row, the ones tall enough to be men, leaned back in their seats and dozed.
Rose persevered. “See?” she asked as she sketched out her own Monet-style garden. Her fingers
blurred the sharp lines, blending the rose pastel crayon into the white to create a soft creamy
pink. Water lilies. “See how they float on the surface?” she said. “The water isn’t a solid color
but a mix of many hues.” She drew finely hatched lines to shape the mirror image of the flowers
on the water, aligning one color against another. “See?”
They didn’t see. The lesson had been a failure. Those who attempted to master the medium
created garish cartoon copies of Monet, with sad, dead smears of pastel chalk, lacking any blend,
any illusion of light. The others just…gave in, drawing a few faded sunflowers or dull khaki
weeds thirsting on an omnipresent mesa. Always the mesa. The boys preferred to place a Navajo
warrior on a wild pony in the foreground, while the girls favored oversized pots propped on
mounds of dirt. And every bit of it was brown, gray, black, white, and that horrid Navajo brick
red.
Rose turned over the last drawing in the stack. She thought she knew the work of her students
well, but this artist was unfamiliar to her. He—or she—had sketched out a lush water garden
with dark green trees dripping Spanish moss over deep purple pools. Daylilies shivered on the
banks, their orange blossoms tipping forward on chartreuse stems. Streams of soft yellow
sunshine poured through the trees, reflected off the water, and shot through the petals of the
golden flowers.
Penciled on the back were the initials: DJB. Dalton John Begay. How many times had he
actually come to class? Ten? Twelve? His grade was a fat F in her book; but now it wouldn’t
stand for failure. It would stand for fabulous. Rose studied the drawing and smiled. She had just
discovered her Monet.
* * *
“So, what do you think?” Rose asked her teaching supervisor as she dropped Dalton’s work on
the desk. “Does the boy have talent?”
Folding her hands primly on her lap, Rose leaned back in her chair as she awaited Shelley’s
opinion. She and Shelley were the only female Anglo teachers at this godforsaken place called a
school, but the two felt no real bond. To Rose, Shelley was the classic Navajo-wannabe, with
dyed black hair pulled into two chunky braids and long, thin fingers weighted down with silver
and turquoise rings. Coffee room gossip had it that Shelley spent her weekends in one of two
locales: alone at the Prairie Moon Tavern in Gallup, or at the Warm Comfort Lodge with Mac,
the school’s vice-principal. Mac was married with a couple of kids and had to be at least ten
years younger than Shelley; Rose couldn’t understand the attraction.
“I thought you were going to have them do a still-life of your fancy-schmancy vase,” Shelley
said at last.
Rose frowned. The vase was a genuine Tiffany glass Favrile, signed by Monsieur LCT himself.
A gift from her former mother-in-law, it was the one thing of value she took away from her
broken marriage. Rose originally planned to bring the vase in to class for her students to draw,
but decided at the last minute that they would be overwhelmed by such a beautiful object. Unless
they would be underwhelmed, which was just as likely. “I changed my mind,” she snapped. She
nudged Dalton’s picture forward. “Well, do you agree? I think he’s pretty good.”
Shelley reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a pack of Tiparellos. Her “kiss-me-withpassion” nails tamped the cigar against the edge of the desk. Smoking outside the lounge was
against the rules, but rules never stopped Shelley. “Close the door,” she said. “So we can talk.”
She lit the cigar and sucked at it hungrily. “There’s a certain sexual energy in the drawing.”
Rose watched Shelley’s long red nails trace the curves of the leaning trees. “Sexual?” Rose
asked. “No.” Dalton’s art, a work of transcendence, was not to be debased by Shelley’s everpresent lust.
Shelley took a heavy drag on the slender brown cigar. The ash lengthened, glowed orange, and
faded to gray. She exhaled blue smoke through her nostrils, the lines around her mouth
deepening with the effort. “What do you know about Dalton John?”
“Not much. He’s in my Art 1 class but rarely shows up. Sullen when he does. Sits in the back
row with the other boys.”
Flicking the cigar into a brimming ashtray, Shelley tapped the drawing. Her silver bracelets
clinked against the desk. “You’re right. He’s got talent. In fact, he’s a man of many talents.” She
glanced at Rose, her expression unreadable. “You know Dalton is twenty?”
“No.” But she wasn’t terribly surprised. Normal standards didn’t apply in Many Farms. Students
left school for weeks at a time, then returned to class as if five minutes had passed. Girls dropped
out at fourteen to have babies. Why shouldn’t there be a twenty-year-old in a high school class?
It made as much sense as anything else.
Shelley pursed her lips, drawing in a fresh plume of smoke. “Old story. Starts school late. Held
back a year in third or fourth grade because he can’t read or is absent too much. Doesn’t really
matter. Parents send him to school because they think a diploma will help him in the white man’s
world. And so he stays. Until he graduates or turns twenty-one and the government kicks him
out. Whichever comes first.” She cocked a tweezed eyebrow at Rose. “So what do you plan to do
with this talented kid?”
“I’m not sure.” Rose resisted the urge to snatch back the drawing.
“He got a girl pregnant a couple years ago. Her parents tried to force him to marry her, but
Dalton’s family paid them off with part of their herd. The girl dropped out of school and kept the
kid, and Dalton is still here.” She laughed. “He does fill out his jeans nicely.”
Waving the smoke away from her face, Rose stuffed Dalton’s drawing back into its folder.
“Honest to god, don’t you ever get tired of the sheer apathy? Just once, I’d like to see one of
these kids have hope for something more than herding sheep or living in a hogan with no running
water or ending up—” She took a breath, staring pointedly at Shelley. “Or ending up at the
Prairie Moon begging for change to buy a drink.”
“And just what kind of rescue did you have in mind, Rose?” Shelley’s brown eyes were as cold
as polished stones now.
Ordinarily, Rose would have been intimidated by her supervisor’s disapproval, but the image of
Dalton’s pools of water gave her courage. She cleared her throat. “He needs to bring up his
grades, of course. But I’ll help him with that. And I’ll help him put together a portfolio of work.
He should apply to college, maybe to some of the better art schools. He could get a scholarship.”
And get out of Many Farms, she thought. At least one of us can escape.
“Do what you want. Just do it on your own time.” Shelley slid a piece of paper across the desk.
“I assume you got this?”
Rose had seen the memo already; she didn’t want to read it again: THE KNEEL-DOWN
BREAD CEREMONY IS SCHEDULED FOR THURSDAY. GIRLS WHO ARE IN THEIR
MENSTRUAL CYCLE THAT WEEK SHOULD NOT ATTEND. FEMALE TEACHERS,
PLEASE SPEAK TO YOUR GIRLS AND INFORM THEM ACCORDINGLY. THOSE
AFFECTED WILL BE EXCUSED TO WATCH A MOVIE IN THE GYM. “Female teacher?”
Rose said, her voice trailing. She pushed the paper back toward Shelley. The offensive tone
made a natural bodily function sound dirty.
“That’s us, chickadee. Just you and me.” Shelley’s cigar had gone out; she dug into the pack for
a new one. “You’ll talk to your girls?”
Rose sighed. “You’d think that in 1978…” She shook her head. “It’s positively medieval.”
“No, it’s tradition. The girls bake the kneel down bread every year and serve it to the whole
school. Menstrual blood spoils the corn meal.” She flicked a gold lighter. The flame sparked and
then sputtered. “Damn! You got a match? Never mind.” She jerked open her bottom desk
drawer. “I have a book in here. So you’ll be there, then?” she asked as the match brought her
cigar to life. “To help me mind the troops? Thursday, in the gym?”
“I suppose.” But Rose was still thinking about Dalton John. Shelley was wrong about him. His
artistic talent deserved to be nurtured. She decided to offer him private lessons after school in
order to give him a chance at a future.
***
When Rose returned the students’ drawings, she gathered up the boxes of pastels and announced
that their next project would be a still life: an arrangement of apples and bananas in a traditional
Navajo pottery bowl that was painted with black and white geometric designs. This was her
concession to their culture, and she had to admit that the red apples were stunning against the
charcoal lines on the bowl. As she passed back the students’ work, she talked about how to use
colored pencils. “Keep your touch light,” she said. “It will be easier to correct your mistakes.”
She did not return Dalton’s drawing. She wanted him to come to her.
Dalton watched her as she squeezed between the desks. His dark lashes shielded his eyes like a
black curtain, but she could feel his gaze following her movements. The students set to their
work, heads bowed, but Dalton’s fingers trailed listlessly across his paper, doodling tiny red and
orange circles. He stared out the window and tapped his pencil on his desk. Apparently, fruit did
not inspire him. The bell rang and he was the first one out the door. He did not ask about his
floral landscape.
On Thursday, Rose and Shelley marched the selected girls to the gym. Shelley had chosen the
movie, “How A Bill Becomes A Law,” for them to view. “It was all I could find on such short
notice,” she whispered to Rose as she turned on the projector.
The girls’ long, straight hair looked almost blue in the flickering light. Rose sat in the back,
watching to make sure no one slept through the film. The room was close and hot, and she
imagined she could smell the cloying odor of menstrual blood in flow. Fecundity trapped in a
closed room. “I smell fish,” her mother had always said when Rose had her period as a teenager.
Code words for the curse of womanhood. The scent of cheap perfume collided with the stale air
in the gym, overpowering Rose’s senses. She fought to keep her eyes open.
Dalton was waiting for her outside the gym after the movie ended. He stepped close to her as she
exited the building. Unlike the girls, who were powdery and sweet, his scent was acrid and sharp,
the smell of sweat.
“Where’s my picture?” He stared directly at her, though she understood the Navajos considered
eye contact to be rude.
“What?” Rose blinked. His skin was the color of dark copper; a pulse fluttered at the base of his
throat. She felt slightly dizzy. Before he could ask her again, she turned away from him and
started to walk. “It’s in my office,” she said, moving quickly across the quad. She could hear the
heel-to-toe thud of his footsteps in the dirt as he followed. She glanced behind her. His jeans
were worn and faded, but his boots were shiny, polished to a golden gleam. She kept walking.
In her office, Rose stalled as she fumbled through the art folders. She didn’t want Dalton to
escape before she had time to present her plan. When she turned around, he was looking at her in
that same bold-faced way. She ducked her head, tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear. Rose once
considered her students’ evasive glances to be sneaky, but now she understood their discretion.
Traditions and taboos. Always out there, waiting to trip her up. One day she had talked to her
students about her deceased grandmother, about her “Mima’s” love for art. When she mentioned
her grandmother by name, several students made a gesture to ward off evil. Two of them walked
out of the classroom.
“The Diné,” Shelley explained, “have serious taboos about the dead. They won’t say a dead
person’s name, and they won’t touch a dead body. It could bring retribution from the evil
spirits.”
Rose thought that was a ridiculous superstition and told Shelley as much. But then she
remembered the horror on her students’ faces and knew she had committed a terrible
transgression.
“Ah, here it is,” she told Dalton as she spread his drawing out on her desk. She motioned for him
to pull up a chair. He moved closer but remained standing. “This is fine work. You’ve been in
my class all semester, but you’ve never done anything like this. Why now?”
He shrugged. “I liked the paintings of flowers by that man.”
“Have you ever considered doing something with your art? Going to college, perhaps?”
“College?” he asked, as though she had just named some exotic food he’d never heard of. He
reached for the drawing.
Rose took a breath, slid her hand away from his but still kept it firmly on the paper. “You’ll need
a portfolio of work, and you’ll need to bring up some of your grades. But I could help you,” she
said. “Monday afternoons? Right after school?” He didn’t answer straight away, but Rose was
patient. She stood there, watching him, waiting, knowing full well the Navajo youth were taught
not to contradict their elders.
Tradition won out. “Okay,” he said.
* * *
In the days that followed, Rose discovered that Dalton was a cooperative but unenthusiastic
student. He followed her directions exactly, never venturing beyond her suggestions. She knew
from experience with the Monet that Dalton could produce imaginative work. She just had to
find the right spark for his creativity.
Shelley, obviously aware of the private sessions, asked, “So, is Dalton coming to class more
often? I see him hanging around school a lot.”
“I’m tutoring him so he can graduate in the spring.” She changed the subject. “Oh, by the way,
I’ve decided to bring in my vase for them to sketch after all. We’ll use the pastels.”
Shelley nodded but offered no other comment. Rose didn’t tell about the other part of her lessons
with Dalton, about the sly questions that probed into her personal life.
Once, he said to her, “How old are you?”
Rose tried to laugh it off.
“Old enough to be your mother. I turned forty this year.”
“The grandmothers are your age,” he said, referring to the matriarchs in his clan. “But you’re not
a grandmother.” It was a question, asked in the typical Navajo manner: flat, with no inflection.
“No grandchildren.” She spoke the words before she felt the pain. She had not been a mother and
would never be a grandmother. That gift was denied to her. “And are you a father?”
Dalton didn’t reply.
At times, her office seemed too small for the two of them. He had been working in tempera,
painting an antelope with a turquoise hide and cream-colored antlers. A creature of legend and
dreams, he told her. They reached for the jar of blue paint at the same time, and his hand draped
over hers, squeezing it lightly. “What color is your hair?” he asked.
Thinking of the strands of white already blossoming along her temple, she smiled. “This is the
color you want.” She peeled his fingers loose and handed him the jar.
The references to parenthood resurrected memories best forgotten, making Rose even more
uncomfortable than she wanted to admit. Roslyn Smythe. Mrs. James Smythe. That had been her
name, her title, once. For fifteen years she had been the supportive wife of James Smythe, a
successful attorney in a small town in Alabama. But no children. Idiopathic infertility, the
doctors called it, a term Rose always thought made her sound like she was too stupid to get
pregnant. James referred euphemistically to her prize-winning roses and peonies as “Roslyn’s
babies.”
She thought the two of them were happy, until James came home and said, “You bore me. I want
out.” Apparently he wasn’t bored by his young secretary, who soon became his second wife and
gave him a son a short time later.
She wallowed in her despair for several months, hiding in the home she once shared with James.
She couldn’t bear the whispers at church or the sympathetic glances from the clerks at the Piggly
Wiggly. In such a small town, everyone knew her story, and everyone had an opinion. Her rescue
arrived in the form of a magazine, the Christmas issue of Arizona Highways, ironically a gift
subscription from James before the divorce. The photographs dazzled: forests of sage-green
saguaros topped with tiny caps of white snow; a rose-streaked sunrise over the Grand Canyon
that bathed the rock walls in soft tints of violet, dusky blue, and pink; golden aspens that
quivered against a cerulean sky.
When she read the article about the desperate need for teachers on the Navajo Reservation, she
realized that she could reinvent herself, transform into another person in another world far away
from this unhappy place. Thus, she became Rose Bryant. Bryant, the surname she had carried
before she married James, and Rose, a beautiful flower protected by prickly armor. But Rose
knew too well the lessons of the garden: seeds don’t always germinate, and tender shoots don’t
flourish under harsh conditions. The Arizona she imagined was not the Arizona she now knew.
***
Rose brought her Tiffany vase into the classroom the first week of November. Her students had
worked so hard on their still life drawings that she felt they were ready for a more challenging
subject. Setting the vase on a pedestal near the window, she twirled it around in the sunshine so
the class could admire its iridescence. Almost a foot tall, the glass vessel was shaped like a tulip.
There were ten curved panels the color of warm butterscotch, brushed with hints of maroon and
gold. Hunter-green leaves twined around the spine of each panel only to disappear into the fluted
top. Inside, the vase glowed with coral hues, like the interior of a conch shell.
Unlike the Monet, which had been just a picture to most of them, her students viewed the vase as
something infused with energy and life. They grasped their chalk crayons and struggled to
capture the luminescent sheen on their sketchpads. Dalton, slouched in his seat in the back,
watched her turn the vase. The expression on his face was remote, as distant as one of those
mesas on the horizon, but his eyes sparkled, taking on the caramel tones of the glass.
The fall semester sped to its conclusion. Many Farms received its first snow, and the chill wind
pricked exposed skin. Rose was so pleased with the second set of her students’ pastels that she
hung the best works on the wall. A dozen tawny vases surrounded them, but her class was
reluctant to give up the real thing. They asked her if they could continue to the draw the vase
using a different medium.
Rose handed out watercolors and began to instruct them on the use of washes. She warned them
that watercolors were unforgiving: when you make a choice of color and place it on the paper, it
is permanent. She showed them how to spray water on the paper and brush the jeweled tones of
color over the damp surface. And every night, after the last class, Rose packed up the vase in its
original box and took it home, only to return it to its place of honor on the pedestal the next
morning.
Dalton’s portfolio was progressing nicely as well. Rose had guided him through sketches of
charcoal and pencil; paintings of tempera, oil, and watercolor; and drawings of oil and dry
pastels. He still needed some life drawings, but there wasn’t enough time. Dalton suggested that
he sketch a portrait of her. She closed her eyes and placed his hands on her face.
“Feel the bones,” she told him. His palms were rough and calloused as they caressed the planes
of her cheeks. When his fingers stroked her nose, she could smell the dirt—redolent of wood
smoke, manure, and sweat—under his nails. Rose thought his finished portrait made her look
forlorn.
The college information she requested arrived just a few weeks before the end of the year.
Unable to contain her excitement, Rose told Dalton at the next lesson, “I have a surprise for
you.”
Dalton picked up a gum eraser and changed the curve of a line on the page in front of him. He
didn’t look at her.
“The college catalogues came.”
“College?” he said, as though they had never discussed the possibility.
“We haven’t been doing all this work for nothing. We need to talk about your future, what you
plan to do next year.” She took the soft lead pencil from him. “A horse’s head is more angular,”
she said, reshaping the picture he had drawn. “Like that.” She held out the pencil, but he didn’t
reach for it. “Tell you what, why don’t we talk about this more on Friday? You can look at the
brochures and the scholarship applications. Ask me any questions you want.” Rose could see she
was losing him. He had no interest in her plans for his future. “In fact, come to my apartment for
dinner. I’ll fix you a home-cooked meal, better than what you get in the cafeteria— ”
Dalton pushed the unfinished drawing away from him and stood. “I’ll be there at six-thirty.”
***
Rose set a special table Friday night, covering the Formica kitchen table with an antique white
lace cloth. The silk floral arrangement of periwinkle blue strawflowers and yellow daisies she
had chosen provided cheer on a gray, overcast day. Mutton stew was the favorite of her students,
but Rose couldn’t stand the taste, so she prepared a beef roast instead. The peppery aroma of
cooking meat and vegetables wafted through the tiny apartment as she arranged and tidied
shelves and countertops. She spread the college literature out like fanned travel brochures on the
coffee table and placed a foil-covered Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket in the center; a bottle of
white wine nestled in the ice.
Rose had asked Shelley for help in buying the wine. Since alcohol was illegal on the
Reservation, Shelley brought the bottle to her wrapped in a towel. “If you get caught with this, I
don’t know where it came from.”
Rose shook her head. “I’m having trouble sleeping. That’s all.” She stared at Shelley,
challenging her to disagree.
Shelley just smiled. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
No longer violating taboos but breaking laws. “Strictly medicinal,” Rose said, her gaze
unwavering. She would do whatever was necessary to help Dalton escape.
Dalton arrived dressed for the occasion, wearing a red and black plaid Western-style shirt and
brand new blue jeans. His boots scraped over the threshold when he shuffled through her front
door. He glanced at the bottle in the KFC bucket.
“Would you like a glass?” she asked as she waved him toward her threadbare couch. Nervous
with anticipation, she had already helped herself to two drinks. Her tongue felt fat and thick in
her mouth, and she wondered if her speech sounded slurred. “After all, this is a celebration. We
should have a toast.” She sat down next to him and filled two jelly glasses decorated with
stencils of purple grapes. The honey-colored liquid looked like apple juice. “To your future.”
Dalton drained his in one swallow. “I could report you.” He paused, reached for the bottle.
Poured himself another glass. “Grandmother.”
Startled, Rose forced a smile. “Why don’t we look at the information from Arizona State? They
have some good scholarships for minorities.” She picked up the first brochure.
“Yeah, I see.” His hand slipped under the paper she held and rested on her thigh.
Rose stilled, thinking suddenly of the turquoise antelope he had painted with wide, frightened
eyes. His fingers—the same fingers that had shaped her face with pencil and charcoal—tugged at
the zipper at her waist, slid up under her skirt. Legends and dreams, he had said. She could not
look at him.
He pushed her back, and his weight bore her down into the pillows of the couch. He did not kiss
her on the mouth, but she could taste his breath: spearmint and tobacco. When he pulled at the
front of her blouse, the tiny buttons popped off in a shower, scattering like seeds cast off on the
wind. She closed her eyes, falling into the moment. Just let things happen. Tender hands stroking
her waist. The press of cool, dry lips on her throat. Skin to skin. How long had it been?
Fingernails scraped impatiently over her breasts. A hard belt buckle jabbed her hip. She opened
her eyes: not a fair-skinned middle-aged man with light red hair and blue eyes but a boy with a
smooth brown face and a dark, impenetrable gaze. Not James. Dalton. “No.” Struggling under
his grip, she stiff-armed him in the chest.
The sudden motion sent him off-balance. He tipped sideways as he grabbed for her wrist. “Get
off me!” Rose shouted.
Dalton jerked back, his leg hitting the table, and the wine bottle toppled to the floor with a
thump. He was on his feet now, yanking his belt up over his hips. He muttered something in
Navajo, an oath Rose didn’t understand. “Bitch,” he said. He tucked in his shirt and fastened the
silver buckle on his waist. “You don’t have to fight me, Grandmother. I’m leaving.”
Rose stared at the spreading puddle of wine on the floor. He’d never taken off his boots.
* * *
He wasn’t in class on Monday, and he didn’t come to his lesson that afternoon. Rose lingered by
her office door, hoping, fearing, to hear his familiar boot-step in the hall. After a week or so,
Shelley noticed his absence. “I think he’s ill,” Rose told her. A continuing line of unexcused
absences and F’s filled the spaces next to his name in Rose’s grade book. She knew he wasn’t
coming back.
But he did, on the last Monday before finals week. Outside, the clouds were coated in charcoal
black; a soft drizzle—“female rain,” the Navajo called it—had been falling all day and would
turn to ice before nightfall. Rose had just finished packing up the watercolor boxes and was
sorting through her students’ folders when he walked in. A trail of muddy footprints followed in
his wake.
Dalton stood at her desk for a moment, saying nothing. Digging deep into his pocket, he
extracted a damp wad of twenty-dollar bills and clenched it in his fist. From the thickness of the
roll, she guessed that he had close to five hundred dollars. “Where did you get so much money?”
He still had that same disconcerting, direct gaze, and Rose preferred not to look into his eyes.
“On the rez,” he said, “people want stuff. I get it for them.” Peeling a twenty from the roll, he
flattened it on the desk in front of her. “For the lessons.” He shoved the rest of the money back
into his pocket. The single bill curled up like a dying caterpillar. As he started for the door, she
thought to call out to him, to ask him to stay. But she remained silent.
Rose had planned to throw his portfolio away, but it was still there under the pile of student
folders waiting to be graded. She turned over the pages of his drawings and paintings, the hours
of work and hope, looking at the initials detailed so neatly in the lower left-hand corners: DJB.
Taking up her pencil, Rose began to draw on the blank back-sides of his work.
Her fingers moving swift and sure over the paper, she sketched out the familiar shapes of flower
gardens long forgotten. She drew stately magnolias spreading their canopies over dark, emerald
lawns; the roses on her old sun-drenched back patio; flowerboxes of begonias nestled in the
shade of awnings; frothy camellias planted in bunches near the street; the aging clematis that
draped over the front porch; irises that returned every spring; massive peonies gathered in pots;
and azaleas, mounds of azaleas that lined the brick walk to her front door. All of these floral
treasures had been there, faithfully tended and nurtured by a woman once named Mrs. James
Smythe. With her pencil and hand, she made them live again on the back of Dalton’s work.
But the black and white pencil renderings were not enough. In her perfect cursive, she wrote the
names of the colors next to every flower, every leaf: vermillion, cerulean blue, cadmium yellow,
chartreuse, indigo, violet, cerise, cobalt, coral pink, even titanium white. She could see them all.
Growing and vibrant and perfect again. Once she had finished, she gathered them up and held
them close to her heart.
When Rose looked up, she was surprised to see that the rain had stopped and dusk had crept into
the sky. She dropped the pages on the floor and reached for the vase, still on its pedestal, waiting
for her to take it home. In the weak light that filtered through the windows of the room, the glass
had lost its luster. Slowly, reverently, she turned the vase over in her hands. Then, with a single
forceful blow, she struck it against the edge of her desk. The broken shards flew out in a graceful
arc, tinkling like bells as they struck the floor. She turned to leave, thinking as she clicked off the
lights and closed the door behind her that the janitor would have a rainbow of color to clean up
in the morning.
Steve Mitchell
KNIFE
Flesh parts. My flesh parts. I spread my legs, opening myself. You see that as an invitation. But
there is something required first. Something necessary. You don’t ask. You don’t want to know.
You want it to remain silent. Unspoken. You’re already forming an apology for later.
I am not waiting for you. My body flutters like a petal upon a single stem. It rises and falls within
its own currents. It does not need a whisper from you. I keep my own secrets. Folding them
within me, pressing them into the creases, the soft openings in my flesh. I hold them on my
tongue, on the tips of my fingers, between my legs. My secrets are encoded in my body where no
one can read them until my flesh parts. I don’t have to worry about you.
You stand watching, your subtle smile, the heat along your chest. You breathe as if you know,
but my language is closed to you. It’s an exotic dialect you can’t perceive as language.
I bend my knee, fingers along the threads of my inner thigh, a fine wheel turning high within me.
And you, you don’t want to speak. Your every muscle straddles bone and aches for a tension as
clear as the flat of my hand at your cheek.
So, you ask me out. Bring me here, to this restaurant. Sit across the table from me over hot and
sour soup and search for a way in. Your words probing, your eyes hot.
You want to leap to the last dance. Scheme it all out after, tease the knowledge from the memory
of my flesh. First, you want to fall far into forgetting. Dragging yourself onto the beach later,
certain that now you are a hero and a castaway.
But I won’t let that happen. I won’t let you sink below the white water. I’ll hold your head above
the curling waves by your hair and never allow you a liquid breath. No matter your begging and
tears.
Flesh parts. I open myself but will not allow you to drown. I’ve already heard your apology. I do
not forgive you.
***
I live thirty seconds from a scream.
I’ve measured it once or twice—the time it takes if I let everything go. The time elapsed before
the force of the terror is there, white-hot and barbed, clutching at the pit of my stomach. I relax a
little, allow my mind to slacken, but the tension kneads at my shoulders, my hips, seeping toward
the center like India ink upon a burgundy cloth.
Before I close everything down. Slam the doors to all the open rooms, ignore the immensity of
the house, and collapse into the dark and cool of the closet.
Sometimes, I let it happen. I let the scream come. Let it vomit forth like a foul, dark liquid the
color of old blood. Screaming until it tears my throat and cramps my stomach and twists me into
a knotted snarl of flesh on the floor.
But all that screaming doesn’t help. When I open my eyes I’m still in the closet and the closed
rooms still lurk, down hallways behind doors, with an idiot constancy.
The last one called me unstable but I know more about stability than he’ll ever imagine. I know
every bolt and nut, every joint and eave. I count, every morning, the number of nails required to
compose that structure.
That scream, its roots clotted in my chest and knotting down my legs, always thirty seconds from
the light: it’s the closest I get. That scream, cutting its way loose from my body, is the closest I
get to knowing all I need to know. About me.
***
The lover is incidental, an arm prone along my abdomen, a foot curled into mine beneath the
sheet, a hair falling against my face with the scent of wine and sex and sleep.
Bodies lie. They don’t hold together. Disjunctive, they break into parts and hardly slide back
again. The fingers upon my skin, the tongue at my neck, the thigh pressed against mine, they’re
all struggling to will themselves into form. A body that might hold me in strong arms, gather me,
contain me until I begin to take shape.
I know the weight of those fingers but not the muscles that trace back to heart and bone. Except
as a force, a violating blade. I know your touch. Even now, so soon. Your touch which will begin
so delicate and loving but will file slowly to an edge scratching out a hollow in my chest in
which your breath will nest.
I want to slide into a still pool. If only for a moment. Underwater, we might lose our faces, the
pressure of the depths drawing our limbs together and holding them fast so I might follow the
trace of your touch fully up your arm. Into the sinews of your neck and the shallow of your
breath.
We could look up together, our eyes blind except for the sunlight puddling upon the surface high
above us. The sun no longer a singular orb, but dispersed and rippling.
The lover is incidental. He cannot gather the weight necessary to push me below the surface deep
enough that I will never have to breathe again. Where faces disappear. Where fingers penetrate
beyond bone, fingers growing stiff from the cold in these depths.
I want to slide into the pool where everything enters, its entrance stitching my limbs within the
arms of another. I want to share my origin with another, all at once, without words.
***
I told her one night. In the kitchen. Days after his visit. After we’d driven her brother to the
airport and she’d hugged him at the gate. I stayed behind at the table after she cleared the dishes.
Told her while her back was turned and her hands were clattering in the sink. Trying to say it
without crying but crying, of course, anyway.
She slipped each dish quietly beside the other into the wooden rack on the counter. I watched the
water sheet slowly down the facing one and collect into a bead at the rim. I studied that drop,
clear and trembling, willing it to fall. But it never did.
I took a lot of baths then, when I was seven. She had a hard time keeping me out of the tub. I
would deposit my Hello Kitty book bag by the front door after school and escape to the
bathroom without an afternoon snack. I would run the water hot enough to redden my skin then
scrub until the flesh was raw.
She asked me what I’d done to provoke him. She asked me without ever turning away from the
sink. What I’d done. Because women always take responsibility for men. All men. We want to
be stable. We do not want a hole in our boat.
It always hurts more, what comes after. It’s the shadow that fills your life long after the fist has
opened.
So, I scrubbed my abraded skin until scabs formed and she dragged me to the doctor and he
never thought to ask my secret.
She would never have allowed him to enter our special world, this world of voiceless and noble
suffering, of martyrdom, to which I was now initiated. More a marker of femininity for her than
menarche or the sanctified ease of blood.
The doctor told her to watch me bathe, so she stood in the open doorway every night, eyes steady
at my fingers, while my father cluelessly questioned the silent mysteries of women.
I lightened my touch, not wanting her close, not wanting her to wash me with her hard, strident
strokes. Still wanting so much for her to lift me dripping and limp from the tub, swaddle me in a
clean sheet and sing to me softly.
I watched the plates in the drying rack so I did not have to stare at her motionless back.
Depositing my tears back into my body, one by one like coins into a ceramic bank. I could save
them there, watch them accumulate and take on weight.
***
I needed a scar. I wanted a scar. At thirteen. Now. A scar here on my skin where there can be no
argument. A secret marker like a box buried deep underground with only a thin branch to reveal
its position.
I had to wait until my mother no longer watched me. I stilled my scrubbing hands, feeling the
tension ebb back from my fingers, up my arms, into my shoulders and down my spine until I was
hard. Solid as a stone. I was awaiting blood, already enthralled by its scent. Anticipating the
warmth, the thin trickle snaking down my thigh, dropping bead by ruby bead into the still water
below.
The first time. I held the scissor open upon my leg, a thin silver cosmetic scissor near the hinge
of my thigh and I relished the certainty of the metal. Cool, hard and unrelenting. And when I
drew it across my skin, when my flesh parted and blood oozed forth, I was no longer solid. No
longer a stone but something softer, more vulnerable, a register of touch.
And that scar was mine. It belonged to me. It was the first stroke of a map of secrets I could
carve into my body. Each thin line rising to form a topography. My history, my knowing. My
secrets. I could, I did, claim my body for myself.
I touched myself and drew blood. I drew blood and made myself real. I claimed my legs, my
arms, my breasts and the damp between my legs, reserving only my face for others. My face as
the mask, the shield. To protect me from others, to protect me from her.
And when I was older, thirty-one, and she was dying, I was steady at her bedside. Sometimes at
night I would slip my hand beneath the taut blue sheet to the loose flesh of her thigh and I would
take her skin between my fingers. Pressing and twisting as hard as I could.
The next day, there would be a massive bruise and I would confront the staff at the nurse’s
station, threatening retribution, nearly deranged by their blatant maltreatment of my mother.
I spent months feeding her, changing her, washing her clothes at home and returning them folded
to her room. Choosing her meals and spooning them into her weakening mouth. Bringing her the
chocolates she liked best. Watching her favorite shows.
As she declined, as she stopped speaking, withdrawing from me and into her body, I continued
our conversation, day after day after day. And the night before she died, I pushed my hand
beneath her nightgown and pinched the flesh of her abdomen above the saddle of her hips until I
drew blood.
I stayed with her that night. I fell asleep with my head on the bed by her hand. When the nurse
shook me gently and told me she was dead, I looked up at her with blank, unblinking eyes.
That night, at home, my clothes damp from the day, my eyes swollen, I drew a knife from the
drawer and stabbed one palm then the other. Holding my hands over the sink. Blood dripping
bright and hot onto the dirty dishes. I didn’t scream then, I wailed. I wailed, knowing I had
vanished, that the only witness to my life was a wound.
***
And now, you. Requesting confidences. Across the table with the ease of a sunrise. The menu
spread open, you choose confidently. Your certainty as sharp as a blade held hard to my throat.
As if you stared through me at first sight, knowing I had no one. Believing I was awaiting your
word, your invitation. As if you envisioned me huddled by the phone anticipating the ring and
the possibility of a beginning.
Your hands are quiet upon the table while I turn like a cyclone. Your eyes are blue and open
while I burn in all directions.
You ask questions, assured that you want to understand. You don’t know the answers you want
yet, but you will. Soon your face will shallow and smile when I lie but darken when I venture the
truth. I will wriggle under your gaze to color within the narrative lines. You want the voice
which speaks from the face; the neatly manicured, well-drawn voice colluding in agreement.
People leave. I know. One scream and they’re gone. A single glimpse of a darkness and they
recoil. Disappearing, even before they leave the room.
You want a lie but would never admit it. You want golden stories of childhood and a mildly
inquisitive interest. You want to share beautifully sculpted secrets, trading them like cherished
antique toys.
You turn to me in the grocery store with a sly smile, introducing yourself. And I ache to be the
one you might love. You cradle a cabbage like a welcoming pilgrim and in the sway of your
crooked grin I struggle to believe in your grace.
It’s a new self that inches toward you. A shadow awaiting feature, as faceless as a
stone. Adjusting my posture, my syntax. Shifting to your subtle clues, I find a way to be for you.
I want to vanish at your touch. Sink so far beneath the surface at your fingers that I discover a
new voice, uncover new flesh.
For an instant, in your arms, folding within your scent and your weight, I take another shape.
Leaving my broken and scarred body behind to find a shadow self held still and clear. You ask
and I might ease a single door open. My body rising in the instant of your touch. Your
fingerprints, your word, at my breast. Smoothing the flesh lush over my bones.
And I would love you. In the solitude of our tangled bed, I would take your body into mine. I
would take you in the arms made strong by your breath. I would not shy from your desires but
embody them and make them whole. I would love you. I would love you.
I would become for you. I inhabit the beautiful machine you desire. I lie still and moan. I move
where your hands draw me, to the rhythm you choose. My mind is a fine blanket of open snow
awaiting your footprint.
Wanting so much. To believe. That your chains might free me. That their weight might bind me
to a warming core. Wanting so much to believe, even as I watch my limbs vanish at the bite of
each link. Separating at joints. Rattling loose.
And now, you. Struggling to hold my dissolving form. Calling to me as if you know my true
name. Keening in my absence as if I had once been clean before you.
You don’t know the emptiness I bring. You don’t see the blood beneath my nails. You don’t
know the ragged stump of my heart. You are blind to the jagged truth of the world. You.
Thinking you want me only because you don’t know me. There is no shadow which you caress,
only the raw teeth of the scream which is my soul.
I step back. Away from you. Watching you search for me with your watering eyes and trembling
hand. Aground somewhere between your cock and your heart. My body limp beneath you,
humid in your heated breath.
And now, you. Here, when I was alright before. Alright within my world. Without someone
saying they want me.
You don’t want me. You want a lie. A lie you can believe in. A lie you can fuck.
***
I remember the night was black and burning with stars. I was five or six and I looked up with
sleep-glazed eyes through the back windshield, drifting in and out of dream. Aware of the
motion of the car. The nearness and the constancy of the stars. I remember turning my face into
the seat, my dream accepting the hum of the road passing beneath me.
And when the car came to rest, when we arrived back home, my father opened the back door and
the chill winter air raced over my naked face and hands. His firm arms slid beneath me like
deepening roots, lifting me from the seat. And for an instant, half awake, I floated there, midway
between the car and his body in the cold, silent night. Only the plane of his arms to support me.
In an instant, he drew me to his chest, my head lolling upon his shoulder, my arms loose down
his back. His face rasping against mine, his breath pluming around my head. He carried me
wordlessly into the house and up the stairs. He lowered me into my bed and drew the blankets to
my chin.
And I was safe in the car. Safe in the bed. Safe in his arms. Yet what I remember most is the
moment I hung in the air. Waiting to be drawn toward him.
Maybe I’ll tell you that story at the table, over dessert. Offer you the moment. If I allow my
hands to rest loosely by the coffee cup, if I take my time in the telling and speak gently, maybe
you’ll understand something small and fragile within me.
Maybe you’ll be nice to me. Turn and smile as we stand by the cash register, sharing a silly joke.
Hold the door for me when we leave the restaurant. Open my door at the car.
Maybe, you’ll drive me home and we’ll talk easily and perhaps I’ll watch your hands on the
wheel and the way you glance over to me as you angle the car through the blinking and wet night
traffic.
I’ll slide down in the seat, stretching languidly, allowing a slight yawn, not of boredom but ease.
I’ll ask you about the book resting upon your back seat.
You’ll park the car in front of my apartment but I won’t make a move to get out. We’ll sit there
together. In the quiet, in the darkness. Nervous, unsure. But relishing the anticipation. And I
won’t be anxious.
We’ll sit in the car. Together. And I will wait. The water will pool quietly at the bumpers,
swirling toward the doors. We’ll watch it rise all around us. Perhaps we’ll feel the tires lose
touch with the ground, the car listing gently in the current. And when the water spills through,
around the doors, up from the floor, we’ll be shocked at first by its cold and its force.
The car will lift and begin to spin away. The water will be relentless. You’ll look over at me. I’ll
turn away, momentarily shy. The water cold upon my legs, rising to my waist, taking my breath.
You’ll speak my name. Softly.
I won’t say anything. I’ll hold my breath, waiting for you.
Sean Padraic McCarthy
FADING BEHIND
It was a day after Diana confessed to her mother that she was pregnant, two weeks before she
was to leave for Saint Elizabeth’s School of Nursing, that her mother called the family meeting.
The family lived in a small, barren city in the southeastern side of the state—once known for
shoes and a handful of boxers—in a peeling white -A-frame with holes in the roof. The yard was
a dirt one, and far in the back corner was a cracked cement patio, overgrown with weeds. Bats
would come in through the holes in the roof, and sometimes when Diana went to the attic with
her friend Margaret to get stoned, the bats would squeal and dive bomb their heads. Margaret,
unlike Diana, wasn’t going to school—she had already started a job at a nursing home on North
Main Street, and her boyfriend, 23, had proposed the month before—but she liked to help Diana
with her planning for school. It was 1985, and Diana was seventeen.
Diana’s mother escorted her downstairs after they were all seated at the kitchen table: her father,
grandmother, her brother Eddie and the three younger boys—Danny, Stephen, and Roger, 12, 10,
and 8, and her little sister, Bibi. Everyone except her older brother Phillip—Phillip lived on his
own. The table consisted of sawhorses Eddie had stolen from a construction site and a long piece
of plywood, a cloth thrown over the top. Diana’s father had nailed the plywood into the
sawhorses, and sometimes if you pressed your hands too hard against the cloth, you would end
up with a splinter. Diana was given a seat at the head of the table, directly across from her father,
and her mother sat right beside her, holding her hand. Eddie looked stoned and he squeezed his
lips tight with his fingers as if he were trying not to laugh. Their grandmother shot him a look,
and then he put his head down.
Their mother tapped a spoon against her glass as if about to make a toast. “Well,” she said,
taking a breath, “I called you all together to make the announcement official. By now most of
you know—though some of you little ones might be too young to understand—that your sister,
my daughter, and your granddaughter,” she said looking at her mother, “is a slut.”
Diana’s insides felt as if she had been punched. She went to speak. Couldn’t. But the shock
lasted less than a few seconds and then she felt the cords of her neck beginning to tighten, and
she was afraid she might start to scream. She looked at her mother. She shouldn’t have trusted
her. Knew it the moment the woman came into the room holding the insurance statement. Diana
had taken the bus and the family insurance card to go see the family doctor, and after she had
pleaded with the man not to tell her parents, he had agreed, but now she realized he didn’t say
anything about the insurance company. Her mother’s eyes looked empty. Empty meant crazy,
and crazy meant rage. Her mother asked what it was about, and Diana didn’t bother trying to lie.
She didn’t look at her either. Just went about the packing she had started that morning. She knew
she had enough money to start school—she had been saving for three years with the rest coming
in loans, and come Labor Day she would be gone. That was it. Gone. The baby wouldn’t be born
until her second semester, and by then she could figure something out. Daycare. Adoption.
Something. She began to make a list of the toiletries she needed, nauseous and dizzy, and waited
on the rage. But there hadn’t been any rage. Her mother had just continued staring at the
insurance statement, calm and composed.
“Well,” she said at last, exhaling a sigh, “I guess we’ll just have to work through this.” And
when she did look up, the emptiness was gone. Diana started to cry. She went to her mother and
her mother held her, rubbing her back and quieting her sobs. And Diana believed for the
afternoon that things would be okay. It would all be okay.
She shouldn’t have trusted her.
Now Diana stood to leave the room, but her mother stood with her, hand tight on her shoulder,
and pushed her back down. Two of the boys started to snicker and Diane’s grandmother’s hand
shot out and belted Roger on the back of the head.
“When you lead a life of lust,” her mother continued, “when you stray from the Lord and behave
like a whore, there are consequences. There has to be consequences. And that is what your sister
is now about to learn.”
Diana could feel her father’s eyes on her, and she could picture him sitting there—hooded eyes
and bristly dark hair—and she wanted to look back at him, to plead with him, to make this stop,
but she couldn’t. Out of all of them she figured he would be sympathetic. She had always been
his favorite. He had doted on her when she was small, taking her to the beach, alone time, just
the two of them, and smuggling her home little individually wrapped candies from the market
where he worked cutting meat. Letting her scratch off the numbers on the ticket he bought on the
last Friday of every month—never winning more than twenty dollars and always splitting the
proceeds fifty/fifty—and listening to the Patriots games with her on the radio on the back porch
on autumn afternoons. He bought her a flute—against her mother’s objections—when she turned
ten and as she got older she promised herself that once she made enough money she would send
him a check to get away from her mother. But now he was sitting there not saying a word.
Diana heard the click of a lighter, smelled a whiff of smoke. Her grandmother was staring her
down, the cigarette smoke curling before her. The old woman lived two blocks over. She had
silver hair and translucent skin, blue veins running beneath. Watery eyes with blood red lids. She
was only in her early sixties, but hadn’t moved far from her dining room table in the past fifteen
years, complaining of endless aches and pains and ailments. Most days she sat and smoked—
occasionally taking a small glass of scotch—did crossword puzzles and said the rosary. She was
much too unwell to travel far, she told anybody willing to listen, and it wouldn’t be long before
she would be seeing her savior. Good God. She was sure of it.
“What got into you?” the old woman asked now. She dragged deep on the cigarette. Despite not
lending much credence to her grandmother’s ailments, Diana had always gotten on well with her.
She would clean her house and wash her dishes. Massage her back and sometimes her feet and
listen to the old woman moan with pleasure as she did. “I’m talking to you,” her grandmother
said now.
Diana looked down again. She didn’t want to answer to her. To any of them. She wondered if
Scott had called—if he had come looking for her—but she was now sure they wouldn’t let her
know if he did. It wasn’t supposed to have happened this way. None of it. She had already put
the deposit down on her dorm room back in early June.
She had bought her bed sheets and started on new clothes. Boxes of non-perishable food to store
in her room. Posters, an alarm clock, and notebooks.
“The good Lord gives you looks and brains, and a cute little figure,” said her grandmother, “and
what do you do with them? You throw them back in his face. And in the face of your mother.
And for what? A quick little slap and tickle. And where has it gotten you? A baby. At your age.
You ought to be ashamed.”
“We’re going to have a baby?!” spouted Bibi. Bibi was going into fourth grade. Ketchup
smeared her lips. “What kind of baby?! A boy or a girl?! I have to tell Melissa.”
“We’re not going to tell anybody,” her mother said. “Not yet. And this is nothing be proud of,
Bibi, nothing to celebrate. What your sister has done is a very bad thing. She’s thumbed her nose
at our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
“Thumbed her nose and pulled down her pants,” said the grandmother. She snubbed out her
cigarette. “It’s really very sad, if you ask me. Very, very sad. You had the whole world ahead of
you—full of noble ideas of being a nurse—and now what do you have? Nothing. Ashamed. I’m
telling you—you should be so ashamed.”
Diana looked up. “I’m still going to nursing school,” she said. All eyes, all around the table, were
on her. And all, except for the children, seemed to know something. Something she did not. “I
saved enough money, and I am going to go to school.”
Her mother was silent a moment. Then she sighed. “Well, I already spoke with the Sisters at
Saint Elizabeth’s. And no, dear, you’re not.”
***
Diana knew when it had happened. The night, the place. Her boyfriend, Scott, was older, just
turned twenty. He had played hockey in high school, but now he mostly just got stoned and
played Atari. Space Invaders and Asteroids. He worked with Diana in the kitchen at the city
hospital, and that was where she had met him. Diana was a server, and Scott washed the pots.
Scott looked like a hockey player—broad shoulders and a broken nose—and Diana liked the
look. They had been together six months, and for the past three he had been trying to talk her out
of going to school. Boston was too far, he said. Forty-five minutes. Did she realize what that
meant? Did she realize how seldom they would see each other? Diana had told him she could
come home on weekends, and she figured that at least once a month that could be true.
“It’s not that I don’t love him,” she had told Margaret while sitting on the roof a few months
earlier, pre-pregnancy, smoking a joint. “I do. I want to spend the rest of my life with him—but
right now this is something I need to do. I’ve wanted to be a nurse, planned on it, since I was like
eight years old.” She dragged on the joint. “No, wait a minute. When I was eight, I was still
going to be a nun. And before that I was going to be an Indian. I still have my moccasins.” She
looked at the joint, canoeing on the side, and licked her finger and wet the paper. “I think they
were the only thing I ever got from my mother that wasn’t a hand me down from the neighbors.”
Scott liked to listen to Aerosmith, and he liked to listen to Madonna—one finger on the wheel as
he drove, singing along with “Get Into the Groove.” They spent more time with his friends than
Diana’s—Diana only saw her friends when he wasn’t around—but Scott never played Madonna
if his friends were near; he hid the tape under his seat. One of them, Lenny Campbell, had parties
most weekends when his parents were away, and at the end of the night, he would usually let
Diana and Scott use his parent’s bedroom. By eleven or twelve, everyone knew where they were
going, but no one made a big deal out of it. Diana had been embarrassed the first couple of times,
but then she figured it beat trying to sneak Scott upstairs when she got home.
Lenny referred to his parent’s bedroom as the “presidential suite,” and it was indeed the biggest
room in the house. It was also the filthiest. Clothes covered the floor, and the sheets, dingy
yellow and covered in a thin film of sand, were always tangled. There was always a peculiar
smell to the room—a smell that made Diana want to get in and out as quickly as possible—and
the closet door was broken, exposing a messy stack of porno mags on the closet floor.
Diana had commented on them that night, saying it made her uncomfortable, but Scott had just
glanced their way for a moment, as if trying to think of something clever to say. Instead he just
laughed. He was sitting in his underwear—tight and white—on the foot of the bed, smoking a
joint. Diana was behind him, still completely clothed, her back against the headboard. There was
only one lamp in the room, and the light was dull and muted, yellow. There was a jar of Vaseline
next to the lamp, and the jar made Diana even more uncomfortable than the magazines.
Scott passed Diana the joint, and she took two hits before putting it in the bedside ashtray. They
had been smoking all night, and her thoughts were cloudy. Stunted. Scott pulled her down on top
of him, and then his hands were moving about, lifting her skirt up around her waist. It was a blue
cotton skirt, light, and cut high on the thigh. Diana was wearing new black panties she had just
bought that day, and a black, sleeveless top. The room was warm—they were stuck in the middle
of a heat wave—but they had a fan blowing in the window.
Diana kissed Scott and nibbled a bit on his lip. He had his fingers beneath the band of her
panties.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked. It was unusual for Scott to ask, and Diana figured he
must be very drunk. “I want you to pull them off with your teeth,” she giggled.
“Yeah? And then.”
She leaned up to whisper in his ear. “And then I want you to fuck me.”
They didn’t use anything. When they had first started he had used condoms but that had been
over four months ago, and now if Diana questioned it, he told her not to worry about it—that he
had taken care of it. Diana didn’t exactly believe him, but she figured it didn’t matter. She knew
her body. Knew when she was ovulating. And if there was even a chance she could have him
pull out, or if worse came to worst, just push him off. She could listen to his breathing, the
noises he made, and watch his face. His face always betrayed when he was about to cum. But on
that Saturday in July, he took her off guard. He climbed on top of her, pumped twice, and then it
was over.
After, he lay on his back, panting, staring at the ceiling, a small smile coursing his lips, and
Diana rolled over her side, her head on his chest. She didn’t want to say anything, didn’t want to
ruin the night, make him angry. He lit a cigarette. “Must have been the dirty talk.” Diana could
hear voices rising below them. Somebody drunk. Somebody arguing. And she suddenly just
wanted to be out of the bed. She just wanted to be home.
***
They sent her to Connecticut to live with her Uncle Maury. Her uncle lived in an old Victorian
and worked in a bakery. He was an obese man with small blue eyes and a mane of red hair. He
had three children of his own who lived with his first wife, and at first he had balked at his
mother, Diana’s grandmother, said that he couldn’t afford to take on another. Not with what he
already had to pay in child support. But then, from what Diana understood, her grandmother had
bullied him into it. “It will only be temporary,” she said. “Just until she has the baby. Then she
can go back to work to support it herself. We can’t have her parading around the neighborhood
showing with a baby.”
Her uncle settled Diana into a room on the top floor. A converted attic. The room was stifling hot
at night, and there was only one small window. She slept without any blankets, and stripped
down to a t-shirt, but then her uncle started coming to her room at night, reeking of gin, and
Diana would lie curled on her side of the bed, terrified to move. The next night she started
wearing her panties, and she covered herself with a thin white sheet. She always pretended to be
asleep, and her uncle never tried to wake her. He would merely take a seat on the wooden chair
in the corner—she could hear the mass of his weight settling in—and sit there and stare, but each
night it seemed he was moving just a little closer. Through nearly closed lids she could see the
enormous shape of him, breathing heavily from his climb up the stairs, but he never said a thing,
and Diana never let on that she knew he was there.
Around the house, he generally only grunted in response to questions, though sometimes he
would verbally snap if he found something out of place. He worked at the bakery from early
morning until closing, and so was only around for dinner one day a week. On those days he
would drink two to three bottles of wine with his wife and get very drunk.
His wife, Lizzie, was round too, but a smaller, safer, round, and she generally cowed down to
him, saying very little. “He’s going to be famous,” she told Diana one night when they were
alone, “a famous pastry chef.” She looked at her, wide eyes behind thick glasses, and she smiled
a little before she sipped her wine. “His own show on channel two and everything.”
Diana felt like telling the woman you needed to have a personality to have a show, but she
didn’t. There wasn’t much point. The woman had told her that there was technically only room
for one woman in the household, and that it was only as a favor to her grandmother that they
were taking her in.
“I know how you can be around men,” the woman said, “and I’m not going to put up with any of
that here. No dancing around wearing your little next to nothings. So don’t go getting yourself all
moist when he comes home late at night. Kabeesh?”
After that they watched television in silence together during the evenings of the first month, but
that was all. Diana snuck phone calls to Scott on a few different occasions, but each time she
brought up the baby, he changed the subject. “Can you talk dirty to me again?” he whispered on
one occasion when Diana had been talking about finding an apartment, a place for the three of
them.
She laughed a little, taken aback. “You mean when we move in?”
“No, now,” he said. “I’m so horny, Diana. I feel like I’m going to burst. I’ve felt like this for the
past two weeks. It’s horrible.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been throwing up for the past two weeks.”
“Just a few words,” he said. “Tell me, tell me…you want to suck my cock.”
Diana hung up on him with that one. The next time she called, he spent the first five minutes
talking about how much work sucked without her, and how much he missed her. “I still want you
to be part of my life,” he said. “We can still be together. The two of us.”
“You mean the three of us.”
Scott had paused then. “I don’t know if I’m ready for that. I love you, Diana. You,” he said, and
she knew then that she didn’t want to see him again.
It was after the phone bill came that her Uncle Maury blew his top. “Three calls?!” he screamed.
“Three calls?! I’m not subsidizing your long distance relationship with some little punk in
Massachusetts who doesn’t know enough to put a rubber on his dick!” He was red in the face,
moving closer, spittle at the corners of his lips, and for a second Diana thought he was going to
hit her. But then, when just a few feet away, he spun around and turned to his wife, the bill still
in hand. “And where the fuck were you?! You’re supposed to be watching her!”
“There’s ten rooms and three phones in this house,” the woman said, sitting, hands folded, at the
kitchen table. “The little bitch must’ve used one upstairs.”
“You’re supposed to be watching her!” he yelled again.
“I have been, but what do you want me to do, follow her to the bathroom, too? I’m sorry,
Maury,” she said, “but it’s getting to be too much. Just too much.” She began to sob then,
covering her face with her hands, and Diana’s uncle studied her a moment, and then turned back
to Diana, his lips shifting about. “Now, you listen,” he said, “I see one more call on here, just one
more call, and I’m going to smack the crap out of you, you understand?”
Diana had nodded, saying she did, and the next day she was gone.
She took a cab to Hartford, and from there she got the bus to Springfield, and from there back to
Boston. It was Columbus Day Weekend, the air damp and cool, and the bus was packed with
kids from Springfield and Amherst, UMASS, all on the way home. Some were drinking—
passing a pint of vodka back and forth—and some were loud, but the bus driver either didn’t
notice or didn’t care. Diana had left most of her belongings, only taking a small bag, and she was
just beginning to show. She kept her bag on her lap, covering her belly, and her eyes out the
window. She didn’t want to see any of the students, didn’t want to hear them. Somebody had a
radio blaring, a new song by Night Ranger.
***
From South Station in Boston, she jumped on the T and went to see Phillip. Phillip was home for
lunch, drinking vodka tonics.
He giggled a little when he opened the door, his face already red and beginning to sweat. He
always sweated when he was drinking and he was always drinking. Phillip lived on the third
floor of a three-family, a mile from their mother’s house, with an effeminate boy who sold shoes
and talked with a lisp. Even though Phillip declared the two of them to be soul mates, he insisted
they were not gay. Its way beyond that kind of love, he had told Diana, lowering his voice to a
baritone. “Way beyond and much, much deeper,” he said, but Diana just figured he was afraid to
be crucified if he ever admitted it to himself and stepped out of the closet. And that’s what the
family would do—crucify him. She and Phillip had been close since they were little, but it was
always Diana sticking up for Phillip, beating up the neighborhood bullies, and not vice versa.
Phillip liked to cook and liked to clean and he liked to listen to Broadway musicals. Funny
Girl was his favorite—he kept one copy of the cassette tape in his car, and a copy upstairs—and
back in junior high school, he and Diana would take turns acting out the parts, singing the lines.
Phillip had attempted college for a semester the year before, but then he dropped out and
returned to his job at the record store, but he never went back to the house on Green Street. The
filth, he would say, if Diana ever asked. I just can’t take the filth. His apartment was spotless.
White walls, black and white photographs, and black leather furniture. He even bought some
crystal and china. Nesting, Diana thought. If I’m going to eat, I want to eat off something I enjoy
looking at, he said. And the same with drinking wine—I love wine, he said. Phillip loved all
alcohol, and Diana sometimes wondered if pickling himself helped him forget who, what, he
was.
Now he made a long face, looking stern. “I heard about the family meeting,” he said, “and I
made absolutely certain that I couldn’t be there.” He slugged some of his drink, leaving his lips
wet as he pulled it away.
“Well, thanks,” she said.
He waved his hand, sipped again. “No, no, no. Don’t get me wrong. I would have loved to have
been there to support you. But I just couldn’t bear to witness what they would do to you. At least
what Grandma would do.” He grimaced a little. “Ma, I think, would be more reasonable. One
thing about Ma, she’s always reasonable.”
“Are you kidding me?!” Diana shouted. “After the meeting, she locked me upstairs!”
“She told me that you locked yourself up there. She said you were trying to starve yourself.”
“Yeah, well, she lied.”
“That surprises me. Ma usually doesn’t lie.”
“Doesn’t lie?! She lies all the time. That’s all she ever does!”
“Well, you can’t blame her for being upset.”
Diana, her teeth clenched, glared at him.
Phillip waved his hand again, slugged his drink. “You’re right. You’re right. She lies all the
time.” He looked at his watch. “I have to get back to work. I’m training a new sales associate this
afternoon.” He pulled out his wallet. “What do you need? Do you need some money? I can lend
you a little money.”
“I need a place to stay,” Diana said.
Phillip put his glass down on the table. “Diana. I can’t let you stay here. There’s just not enough
room, and besides Ma would kill me. It would be World War Three.”
“Just for a few weeks. I can’t go home, Phillip. Please. Don’t make me go back there.”
He lowered his chin again, his voice. “World…War…Three.”
***
The church was on a hill at the fringes of their neighborhood. A small church with a towering
spire. Diana’s mother had always said that her grandfather, Diana’s great grandfather, had helped
build it, but Diana never knew if that were true; Diana’s great grandfather had worked as a tailor,
and she wasn’t quite sure what he would be doing building a church. There were three other
buildings in the complex—a long, wooden schoolhouse, an enormous, empty, brick convent, and
the rectory. Only one priest lived in the rectory. Father Smolinsky. An octogenarian and a
longtime friend of the family.
“The holiest man in the entire archdiocese,” Diana’s mother always said, and if nothing else, the
man had always seemed holy. He reminded Diana of John Paul II, with a full head of white hair,
but he was taller than the Pope, and he hadn’t started to stoop. He had baptized Diana,
administered her first communion, and confirmed her, and she had been saying since she was
eight that if he wasn’t around to preside at her wedding, then she just wouldn’t bother getting
married—she would become a nun. The priest’s eyes, a remarkable blue, were always alert,
cautious, and, except when saying Mass, he always seemed to be eating a piece of hard candy.
Peppermint or butterscotch. He looked at Diana for a moment as he came out of his office at the
rectory, and then he stepped aside without saying a word, ushering her in and shutting the door
behind them. Almost as if he had been expecting her.
The priest moved slowly but with confidence, and he never rushed anyone in or out—always
making them feel as if they were the only things on his agenda. He took a seat behind his desk,
and sat silently looking at her, his finger up alongside his cheek. Diana, her palms moist and
clammy, clenched her hands together in her lap. Her whole body felt tense, almost as if it were
about to snap, and she was doing everything she could to stop herself from crying.
“If you’ve come looking for a place to stay, I can’t give you one,” the priest said at last. “The
church won’t allow it. Is that what you’re looking for?”
“No,” Diana said quietly.
“What then?” the old man said. “Penance? If that’s what you want, I’m not sure I should offer
you that either. You see, I’m not sure you’re sorry. You’ve upset quite a few people. Your
mother, your grandmother, your uncle. Your mother has already been in here today. The poor
woman is a wreck. And your grandmother has been on the phone. Nobody has had any idea
where you are.”
“I just need somebody to talk to,” Diana said. “And maybe somebody to talk to my mother.”
The priest sighed. “Well, I’m here to listen. That’s part of my job—to listen—but I can’t promise
you any sympathy.” He glanced down at her belly. “This is the first time I’ve heard from you
since this whole unfortunate incident occurred. Have you been to see another priest? Have you
been to confession?”
“No,” said Diana.
The priest sighed again. “Then you’re going to Hell.” He hesitated a moment. “You know that,
don’t you? And so is that child inside of you unless you get it baptized. And if you refuse to get
it baptized its life means nothing. Nothing. Worthless.”
Diana felt herself moving to the defensive, her words rough and dry in her throat. “I plan on
getting it baptized.”
“Well, that’s not what I heard.” The priest began to tap the fingers of his free hand on his desk.
“And I thought maybe today, I could make my confession.”
The priest just stared. “You’ve upset your mother so much. Do you have any idea what you’ve
done to her? A wonderful, wonderful woman who has sacrificed her whole life for you, and this
is how you thank her. This is how you thank God.”
“But it was an accident,” Diana said.
“Accidents don’t happen if you follow the laws of God,” the priest said. “Sex before marriage is
a mortal sin, there’s no way around it. This man, the father of the child….I don’t even know his
name…what is his name?”
“Scott.”
“Yes, Scott. He doesn’t love you. If he did, he wouldn’t have done this to you. Is he Catholic?”
“Kind of,” said Diana.
“Kind of,” he repeated now. “That’s the problem with your generation today—too many ‘kind
of’ Catholics. People who like to say they are. They may even go to Church—but they don’t
want to follow the rules.” He shook his finger at her. “Sexual relations can be a blessing, a gift
from God, but it is a gift he gives to couples who have accepted the sacrament of marriage. Not a
gift for children, and that’s what you are,” he said, “a child.” He sat staring again, silent. “Before
you ask for God’s forgiveness through me, I think you need to ask for it from your mother.”
***
She walked for an hour after she left the rectory, passing the shoe factory and the Polish Pub
where her uncle had once worked and where they used to order pizzas. Past the playground, and
the enormous boulder, left from the glaciers, set beyond the schoolyard. Early in high school,
Diana and Margaret would climb the boulder, talk about boys and movie stars and watch the city
moving below. She had called Margaret, but Margaret wasn’t home, and now there was a group
of kids—young teens—gathering about the pay phone, making her nervous. Diana recognized a
few of them from the projects down the street. The projects were less than a mile away, built in
the early sixties but already looking as if they had been caught in a war zone. Broken, boarded
windows, graffiti and crumbling bricks. The kids were shouting and giggling, every now and
then turning her way, and she didn’t want to stay around. It started to rain, the spitting sky
breaking into a pour, and she took a seat at the shelter of the bus stop, contemplating going back
to Connecticut.
She watched the road, the cars passing loudly on the wet pavement, and the kids from the phone
booth splashing in the puddles. One, a young girl, was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, completely
soaked through. She had her hands in the front pouch, and every thirty seconds or so, would put
one to her teeth and bite at a fingernail. Probably about the same age Diana had been when she
stopped spending time with her father. Diana tried to imagine him pulling up now, calling her
over to the car, a small blue Datsun with a bright orange front fender. Telling her he would fix it,
fix everything.
The kids were drawing closer, and Diana stood and started walking. Rivulets of rain ran down
her nose and cheeks. She wondered if she should just go back to the pay phone. Call Scott. Try to
work out some sort of deal. Maybe she could stay at his mother’s temporarily until she got her
feet on the ground. But she had promised herself she would have nothing more to do with him,
and besides, he hadn’t even told his mother she was pregnant. He said he didn’t think she could
handle it.
A car did pull up beside her then, a car she didn’t recognize. A gray Ford Escort. The car crawled
along the curb beside her, and then the driver leaned over and rolled down the passenger side
window. Diana stopped and turned. Directions, she thought, he might just be asking for
directions. The man was smiling. “You’re getting wet,” he said.
Diana kept her bag on her lap as she climbed into the passenger seat, just in case she had to make
a quick exit. The man was close to her age, told her he was twenty. Short hair and a light brown
mustache and close-cropped beard flecked with red. Jeans and a blue striped shirt. He told her his
name was Ed. He lived in Willington and worked at UPS. “I just work loading right now, but I
want to get a job driving the trucks. They pay you pretty good. Enough so I could get my own
apartment and everything.” Ed looked into his rear view before pulling back onto the road. Led
Zeppelin was on the radio, Ten Years Gone. After a minute he took a joint out of the ashtray, lit
it and offered it to Diana, but she just shook her head.
“I like to smoke while I’m driving,” he said. “It relaxes me. After working all day, I need to
relax.”
He had asked her where she was going, and she told him the beach. She hadn’t really thought of
it until then, but thoughts of her father brought back memories of the beach, and besides, she
didn’t know what else to say.
“Cool,” he said. “I don’t mind taking you.”
“You sure?” she said.
“Sure. I like going down there, and I’m not doing anything else. We used to go party up at the
forts, up at the far end of the town, when I was in high school, but then the cops started coming
all the time.” He toked on the joint again. “The cops down there are ball busters.”
Ed kept looking her way from the corners of his eyes as he drove, nervously tapping his fingers
on the steering wheel. Changing back and forth the radio stations. “I like Crosby, Stills and
Nash,” he said, “I saw them last summer at Great Woods in Mansfield. It was pretty cool. You
like them?”
Diana nodded but didn’t respond otherwise. Nothing seemed much worth responding, too. As
they drove along the curve of the bay, entering Hull, Nantasket Beach, she was jarred for a
moment to see the empty lot ahead of them. The roller coaster gone, the entire park, Paragon,
gone. They had just leveled it a few months earlier after eighty years, she had forgotten that. The
roller coaster was always the first thing you saw as you rounded the bay. Now, nothing. She had
spent a lot of time at the park in the summer when she was small. Her father always taking her.
Rides on the antique carousel, the painted ponies with glass eyes. Her father watching, waving
each time she passed. Later the Galaxy, the Congo Cruise, Kooky Castle, rising above the whole
park on a ski lift ride called the Skylark. Voices, barkers, and rock music from the race car ride,
The Indy 500. And of course, the roller coaster. Now gone. She heard they planned on building
condos.
Diana could smell the sea. There were still a few boats moored upon the bay, soon to be in for
the winter, and there was an old man wrapped in a yellow rain coat ahead, walking a small,
scruffy dog.
“Place is practically deserted.” Ed turned up the hill, and then down past the Atlantic Motel, and
then onto the beach parking lot. He parked next to the pavilion where the old people line danced
in the good weather. Plaid short sleeve dress shirts, and polyester Bermuda shorts. The women in
light cotton, flowered dresses. Now empty. Diana rolled down her window a crack, needing to
get a breath of air. The rain had let up, but the air was still damp with mist. The waves at
Nantasket always looked bigger once summer was gone. Rolling white breakers. She loved to
hear the sound of them crashing. The tide was coming in, already submerging the rocks she
would walk out to in the summer when the tide was low. Climb to the top and jump off the other
side. The water cold and pale green and heavy with salt. Diana remembered her father carrying
her out and tossing her into the surf. Counts to three.
Now a few beach combers walked in the distance.
A seagull landed on the sea wall before them. Small, empty black eyes, feathers ruffling in the
wind. It sat there staring. “My Dad used to tell me when I was little that seagulls are really the
ghosts of drowned sailors,” Diana said. “A lost soul within each of them. That’s why their eyes
look like that.”
She turned then. Ed was looking at her with his fly down and his erection in his hand.
“You only have to suck it if that’s all you want to do,” he said. “I’m cool with that. Will
probably only take like thirty seconds. I’m really horny.”
Diana felt bile rise in her throat. Ed began to stroke himself, moaned a little, and she opened the
car door and put her feet on the pavement, waiting for the wave of nausea to pass. She took two
deep breaths and then walked down the boardwalk and the concrete ramp that led to the beach,
the ramp crumbling from salt, sea, wind, and time. Ed called out the window after her. He liked
her, he was saying, he thought she was really pretty.
The sand was flat, wet and packed down hard from the receding tide. Diana’s heart was racing,
her head spinning. She stopped to catch her breath. She looked over her shoulder to see if Ed was
out of the car, but the car was already gone. He didn’t seem like the type to pursue her. He
probably had his moment, and the moment was gone.
The air was wet with the spray from the sea. Down close to the waves, a man in a black overcoat,
his collar high and slightly hunched over, was throwing a stick to a black dog. The dog chased
the stick out into the surf, unbothered by the cold, and then came paddling back in through the
sea foam to drop the stick and wait for the man to throw it again. Further down a woman walked
with her child.
A small girl. Maybe two, maybe three. The child toddled forward, bundled in a winter hat and
coat, and the mother followed, her arms folded against the wind, her head down as she toed at
the sand.
Diana felt something building inside of her then, everything building inside of her. A rush of
memories, the bad and the good. Bright colored lights and her mother rocking her, singing Silent
Night just before Christmas. The small blow-up pool she had when she was four, her little yellow
bikini, and her mother beating her black and blue after accusing her of pulling it down to show
her little friend next door. Her sister being born, and her mother going to bed for three months
after. Her youngest brother was still less than a year old, and Diana had helped her aunt take care
of the infants sometimes after school. Diana and Phillip. They used to have a diaper changing
system set up between the two of them, and Phillip called it “the assembly line.”
She remembered crying in school, in the seventh grade, after her mother swore that the jeans she
had given her were from a consignment shop in a faraway town, and then Lori Spellman, from
two houses down, commenting out loud that they used to be hers on the first day that Diana wore
them to school. It’s all right, she confided in her later, your family has no money—everyone
knows that. She remembered her prom, her mother taking a wet cloth and wiping the makeup
from Diana’s face before she and Scott made their way out the door, and she remembered the
look on her mother’s face when she had received her acceptance letter to Saint Elizabeth’s. “You
should be very proud, dear,” she said. And then she took a rag to the counter—not so much
cleaning as wanting to pretend she had something to do. “Now wouldn’t it be nice if we just had
the money to send you.”
But Diana had saved the money.
She remembered rumors of an affair when she was nine. Her father and their neighbor. She
remembered the screaming, her mother throwing dishes at her father’s head. He said he was
leaving, and Diana had climbed to the top of the oak tree in their back yard, refusing to come
down if he actually did. But he couldn’t, and her mother knew that. As did Diana, even at nine.
She tried to picture returning to the house now, her father taking her side, defending her, a small
victory, and then she thought back again on the years with her mother, everything that happened
between them, everything she had done, and she couldn’t see him. Hear his voice. Anywhere.
Diana felt something move inside of her. Maybe a kick, or maybe just her stomach tightening
and moving. But it was something, and everything else was fading behind.
Ahead a gull flew over the heads of the young child and its mother, circling, and then landed
between them. The little girl spotted it and was up chasing, the gull soon taking flight, a short
leap. Stop, wait, and then the child pursuing again. The mother moving slowly behind. Watching
but disinterested. Removed. The seagull flew off for good, and then the child crouched down to
examine something in the sand. She picked it up and held it out in the palm of her hand, holding
it out for her mother to see.
Kelly Morris
END OF DAYS
Owen had hoped to have the whole airplane row to himself, had already placed his computer
case on the middle seat. He was what people euphemistically called “a nervous flier.” To combat
this fear Owen tried everything from medication to counseling to meditation. But pills didn’t
knock him out; they only made him weirdly talkative. The last time he popped something before
flying he told his wife Eve that he loved her ears, oh those sexy little ears—he wanted to nibble
them, suck them, just lick those perky things right off her head.
Counseling involved watching footage of take-offs and landings. Owen was soothed by how
effortless flying looked, all those airplane parts working together, a perfectly choreographed
dance. But once he was on a plane, a plane with an as yet unrecorded take-off and landing, Owen
could not stop thinking about all the thousands of parts that comprise an airplane. So many parts,
and if just one wasn’t working—one out of thousands!—well, that’s all it took, wasn’t it? And
meditation? Please. Deep breathing did not keep your mind from imagining the plane suddenly
plummeting to the ground. What if the plummet wasn’t all that sudden—what if it was like those
dreams where you fell out of the sky in slow motion that prolonged sick feeling in your stomach,
all the time in the world to realize your time was up and there was nothing to be done about it?
The only reason Owen was even dealing with this phobia was because his widowed father up and
moved to San Francisco last year. The man who had depended on his wife for everything—“I
didn’t even know where the supermarket was until your mom got sick”—this same man sold the
house Owen and his brother Sam grew up in, donated the bulk of his furniture to Goodwill, and
moved halfway across the country.
“What the hell, Dad?” Owen’s brother Sam said. “San Francisco? Have you even visited San
Francisco? Nobody moves to California to retire! What in God’s name could possibly be in San
Francisco?”
A lady friend, (their dad’s words). This particular lady friend was named Bitty and had been
sorority sisters with their mother. The new couple had re-connected on Facebook.
“I could have told you this would happen, Dad,” Owen’s daughter Claire said. “Bitty friended
me awhile ago. She and G-daddy post messages on each other’s walls. She types everything in
all caps.”
Bitty’s husband was not dead, but spending his remaining days in a nearby nursing home. “A
complete vegetable,” Owen’s dad told his sons cheerfully. “A real tragedy.”
And now Owen and Sam, but mostly Owen, flew to San Francisco every few months to check up
on their dad. This last visit Owen helped his dad and Bitty move into their third assisted living
home, the previous two deemed unsatisfactory on “too many levels to enumerate, Owen” (this
was Bitty; his father didn’t use words like ‘enumerate’).
Now that Owen wouldn’t have to fly again for another few months, all he wanted was to sit
alone, grip the armrest, and try to sleep. But a tall man in brown corduroys and a white dress
shirt stopped in the aisle. “This one taken?” the man asked.
Sometimes Owen wished he were the kind of guy who said things like, Listen, bud (this kind of
guy called people bud or man, maybe even dude) there’s plenty of empty seats in the back of the
plane. It’s not going to be a full flight, so how about you just mosey on back and find another
seat? He also wished he were the kind of guy who flew on airlines with assigned seats.
“No,” Owen said. “It’s not taken.”
The man didn’t have any luggage, not even a computer. He held out his hand to Owen. “Bill,”
he said. Bill’s hair was a blonde buzz cut and his five o’clock shadow was reddish. His eyebrows
were a dark brown.
“Owen.”
“I had a dog named Owen once,” Bill said as he sat down. “Got run over right in front of me
when I was six.”
Owen was not in the mood for this kind of oversharing.
“You know what I remember the most?” Bill asked. “Not my dog getting run over, but my older
brother asking if he could dissect the dog. He wanted to be a doctor back then, and he dragged
that dog into our garage and just started cutting him up.”
“Jesus,” Owen said. He realized he should have done what his brother-in-law Peter did when he
wanted to sit alone, which was pull out one of the air sickness bags and stare into it, spit into it if
someone went to store luggage in the overhead bin by his seat.
“Stored all his organs in little mason jars.” Bill wasn’t wearing a wedding ring but he absently
touched the ring finger on his left hand. “That’s the kind of thing that stays with you, isn’t it?”
Growing up, Owen’s garage was filled with mason jars, except they had contained screws and
nails instead of dead dog parts. Dude, you come from one seriously fucked-up family.
“That’s an awful thing for someone to do to the family dog,” Owen said.
“So what do you do, Owen?”
“I’m a doctor actually.” Owen experienced an unexpected urge to laugh, and he pinched the
bridge of his nose, hard.
“No kidding! My brother never became a doctor. He cut up our dog for nothing, I guess.”
Owen did not want to be, but he was suddenly, insanely curious about this guy’s brother, the dog
dissector. He pulled out the in-flight magazine to distract himself and skimmed the first article.
Best Sushi Places in SoCal. He turned the page. Top Ten Bars for Singles in San Francisco. He
looked out the window at the tarmac and watched as two guys in orange vests walked up and
looked at the wing closest to Owen. One of them pointed at something. Were they frowning?
“What’d he become instead?” Owen asked, quickly turning from the window. “Your brother?”
“A writer.” Buzz Cut Bill was sitting in an odd way, leaning forward with his weight balanced
on his toes. He was wearing scuffed dress shoes without socks. “You read mysteries, Owen?”
“My wife does.” Owen preferred science fiction and fantasy, but he didn’t plan on sharing that.
“My brother’s pen name is Cameron Jacobs.”
The name did not sound familiar. “Maybe I’ve seen his books on my wife’s nightstand table,”
Owen said.
“They’re not bad,” Bill said. “Not bad at all. He’s working on a new series with a detective from
Alabama. The guy’s name is—” He leaned forward and tapped his fingers against his head. “I
can never remember the character’s name. Daniel. No, I think it’s Dave. Or is it Charles?”
One of the flight attendants hobbled over to them. Her right foot was encased in a black boot that
stopped right below her knee. Her dark hair was cut short, her skirt wrinkled and cinched too
tight around her waist, and she looked as if she wanted to tell them she’d had it up to here and
she was Not. In. The. Mood.
“What happened to your foot there?” Bill asked.
“Fell off a curb in Chicago,” she said. She had a British accent, which was a little thrilling. She
looked at Owen. “In case of an emergency, will you be able to operate the emergency exit?”
Owen nodded.
“Sir, I need a verbal confirmation from you. Or I will be forced to move you.” Several
passengers turned to look at Owen.
“Oh, sorry. Yes, I can operate the door.”
“In case of an emergency, will you follow oral directions and hand signals given by a crew
member?”
“Yes,” Owen said. She remained in the aisle with that same exhausted, disapproving look. “I
will,” he said in a louder voice.
She nodded curtly and then pointed at his laptop. “Stow it,” she said before limping away.
“Wouldn’t want oral directions from her,” Bill said. “She looks like she’d bite your dick off.”
Owen was already imagining telling Eve about this guy. Twelve years they’d been married, and
he still collected stories for her. Eve was a good audience, always laughing or widening her eyes
at the right time. He imagined she might even blush when he repeated this story. He said that?
Bite it off? She’d never say the word dick.
Owen slid his computer under the seat in front of him, and when the flight attendant shuffled
past, she gave him a thumbs up. He risked a look out the window again. A third guy in orange
had joined the crew studying the wing; they were all frowning now and two out of three were
pointing at something. The third guy was talking into a walkie-talkie.
“You live here in San Francisco, Owen?” Bill asked.
“No,” Owen said.
“What made you visit the city of sin—business? Pleasure?”
Owen had always thought Las Vegas was considered the city of sin.
“My dad lives out here now.”
“No way would I move to California,” Bill said. “Not with the earthquakes. One of these days
there’s going to be a big one and this state’s going to just—” He made a popping sound with his
mouth. “Drop off into the Pacific Ocean.”
Sam had said something similar before their dad moved, except he had been joking.
“Hey, you mind closing that window there?” Bill asked. “I don’t like looking outside during
take-off.”
Owen slid the window down but not before seeing one of the guys roughly tap the wing with his
stick.
“You can’t say they haven’t been warned,” Bill said. “The end of days is near. The apocalypse is
coming, and those who are choosing to ignore the signs will be damned.”
Those two words together, apocalypse and damned. The air grew thicker; it seemed to hum and
vibrate around them.
Bill leaned across the seat and whispered, “The signs are there, Owen.” Bill’s eyes were big and
blue, fringed by long lashes, lashes so long they looked fake. Owen became aware of a strange
smell coming from Bill, sharp and eye-watering, like bleach or vinegar.
The recorded safety instructions came on over the intercom; at the front of the plane, the
stewardess held up an oxygen mask which she slowly lowered over her nose and mouth.
“Even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased. Well,
clearly we’re living in a time of knowledge,” Bill said. He didn’t raise his voice, but Owen heard
him perfectly over the sound of the engine as it whined to life.
Owen shifted in his seat. His childhood had involved some form of church, but only peripherally;
God had been treated with the utmost importance for one hour a week and then promptly
forgotten until the following Sunday.
“Computers. Cell phones. Everybody texting and sexting all day. You can’t tell me those aren’t
signs.” The plane began to taxi down the runway, and the stewardess pointed out the emergency
exits at the front and rear of the plane.
“And what about Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart
from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils?”
Bill held up a hand like it was a stop sign. His fingernails were fussily short. “Just look at the
movies everyone’s watching these days. Twilight. Harry Potter. Lord of the Rings.” He folded
down a finger as he ticked through the list of movies. “All the smut on HBO and Showtime and
Skinimax.” Bill made a fist. “Shows about vampires fucking humans, werewolves fucking
vampires. They’ve legalized abortion; they want to let the gays get married; the president is a
black man! I mean, the signs are there, Owen. They are there. But no one is listening.” Bill gave
a small shrug and a big sigh. He visibly relaxed in his seat; he looked almost happy now.
Owen did not want to tell Eve about this guy anymore. He didn’t even want Bill to know he had
a wife. And a family. Had he mentioned his daughter? He couldn’t remember, and the not
remembering made him light-headed and queasy. He could feel the roar of the engine in his ears
and stomach, even in his hair. He needed to stand up and change seats, but the seatbelt light was
on and the plane was making its way down the runway. Owen fumbled for the air sickness bag
and breathed deeply into it. He watched as the flight attendant closed her eyes and propped up
her foot on the seat adjacent to hers.
“All you can do is preach the word and hope someone listens,” Bill said. He reached up and
turned off his air conditioning vent and then Owen’s with a flick of his wrist. The vinegar smell
grew stronger. “That’s all you can do, Owen.”
The flight attendant’s eyes snapped open. “Sir?” she called to Owen. He lowered the bag from
his mouth with a shudder of relief. “I need to move.” He couldn’t tell if he was whispering or
shouting.
“You have to leave the window shade open for take-off,” she said. “Airline regulations.” She
offered him an unexpected smile before closing her eyes again.
The plane left the ground with a jerky stutter.
“Open it up, Owen,” Bill said. “Go on and let the light in.”
Owen opened the window and looked outside. His father and Bitty were somewhere down there.
So was Bitty’s husband, albeit in a different facility, one that Bitty visited every Tuesday from
10-11.
Don’t let me die that way, Owen’s dad had told him this last visit. He looked serious as he said
it. Promise me right now. Owen was tempted to tell his dad that his poor diet and lack of exercise
meant that he was more likely to have a massive heart attack, the kind people likened to an
erupting volcano. I promise, Owen told his dad, and they shook hands, a gentleman’s agreement.
Out the window of the plane the highways and cars and houses slid away until there was only
water, stretching ahead and behind them, a dizzying, suffocating expanse of blue.
Erica Seiler
BLACKBONNETS
A few years back I was in Texas researching material for my latest book. Around the same time
a young mother went on trial for the murder of her two children. The details weren’t particularly
gruesome, a simple drowning for the love of a man—a typical story in the realm of filicide. What
put this tale in the spotlight was the outrageous excuse given by the mother. The woman claimed
she’d killed her sons because she’d been possessed by the spirit of an obscure ghost, The
Blackbonnet of Texas.
As with most of these types of stories, the origin of the Blackbonnet isn’t widely known, even
among paranormalists, spectrologists and the other kooks. At the time, I was busy investigating
the ghosts of the Alamo, the Marfa Mystery Lights and La Llorona. My wife is Mexican and said
she’d leave me if I wrote one more book on the ghost of Ben Franklin. I had to mix it up.
Along the road, I fell in love with the endless small German towns that paint the South Texas
highways. I also fell in love with their bars. In my line of work you quickly learn to supplement
the testimony of “experts” with the drunken yarns of locals who know the real story.
No one is quite sure where the legend of the Blackbonnet originated and there is even more
debate over her actual identity. The following summarizes the typical telling:
A beautiful, young woman moves from California to Texas with her husband, a young Texan
gentleman and future high-ranking officer in the Texian Army. Happy years bring a child, but as
the Texas Revolution breaks out, she’s left alone for long stretches of time in a strange land. One
autumn, her son falls ill and wastes away. Rather than watch her son rot, she smothers the boy in
an act of mercy and buries his body in the yard. The townspeople become suspicious and days
later an angry mob hangs the woman from an oak tree. The officer returns from war and shoots
himself over the loss of his young family. Following the suicide, all eight hundred acres of the
officer’s land are covered with flowers that look like bluebonnets, but come up black as pitch.
Today, the flowers remain. No matter what is done to remove them, the buds bloom every
November, as if to commemorate the deaths.
As you can imagine, all sorts of modern twists have spawned from the legend. In the late 1950s,
three homes built on the site burned to the ground, killing the families inside but leaving the
flowers unscathed. Auto fatalities along that stretch of highway increase by 500% each
November when the blackbonnets bloom. And so on.
What makes this ghost story so peculiar is, well, the lack of a ghost. No one has ever seen an
apparition of the woman or can directly blame her for the plagues of the area. Some even argue
that the young mother was the victim of some terrible force herself. They say this force may have
caused her son’s illness and even driven her to the subsequent murder. Regardless, the woman
has been branded The Blackbonnet of Texas, in connection with the weird flowers that appear
each year.
I’ve found in my research travels that people love to flash their regional knowledge—especially
in front of me, the Yankee writer. Through many bourbon-soaked conversations with local bards,
my knowledge andconfusion have grown substantially. One night at a small pub—you know the
type, a bar where you can still smoke and the walls are antler adorned and the dart set is
incomplete—I held court with a group of patrons and learned two possible identities for the
young mother and her officer husband.
The discussion started with Brenda, the sun-leathered owner of a flower shop and feed store in
town. Two things about the story obsessed her: the bloom cycle of the blackbonnets and the
identity of the original woman herself. Brenda had a taste for straight bourbon and self-made
venison jerky that she offered to me every few minutes by shaking a sack full of the stuff in my
face. Her worn canvas backpack carried six packs of minty-slim cigarettes and a small library of
western lore and botany books. Her wealth of useless knowledge on the sacred state flower was
anesthetizing, but I smiled and encouraged her to go on.
“Bluebonnets typically grow from April to June and the blackbonnets spontaneously bloom in
November. There’s no logic in it. Horticulturally speaking, it isn’t even possible,” she said with a
deep swig of her drink.
“Have you taken samples?” I asked.
“Oh of course. Genetically, the flowers are exactly the same as bluebonnets. But the petals
bloom black. Not dark blue, not eggplant. Black as a raven’s ass.”
A doughy waitress walked up and stooped to hand me a cloudy gin and tonic. She winked and
tucked the chipped plastic tray under a pasty arm. I nodded and took a sip, trying to hide that I
could taste the remnant vapor of the waitress’s fruity body spray in my drink.
“Kelly likes you,” cooed Brenda, “she don’t serve on a tray for nobody.”
“Ah, bringing out the good china for me?” I charmed, easing back into my wobbly chair. “I’m
honored. But please, continue.”
It never ceases to amaze me when yokels prove themselves savants. I let Brenda take over the
conversation. She pulled several scrapbooks from her backpack and played show-and-tell with
yellowed pages outlining the lineage of dead Texans. She pulled a thick pair of readers from the
leathered ravine on her chest. The barroom hush left only the muffled voice of George Jones and
the plastic clicking of her bracelets as she shoved the ashtray aside and spread a chosen book on
the table.
“I’ve narrowed it down, and I’m sure this is our gal,” Brenda said proudly, pointing a red glossy
fingernail down at a page of interest. “My second husband Carl was a real history buff. Knew all
about this kinda thing.”
“Is this true?” I asked, poring through the pages. “The Texian Army gave eight hundred acres to
any officer who joined the revolution?”
“That’s right. Is it a coincidence that the legendary patch of blackbonnets is exactly eight
hundred acres? I don’t think so. The story is clear. Eight hundred acres of blackbonnets bloom
each and every November,” she said, her bracelets clicking as she crossed her arms in selfsatisfaction.
Tom, the scotch-soaked large animal veterinarian chimed in. “Yeah but there were hundreds of
officers. How’d you narrow it down to this couple?” There was a fire in his watery gray eyes that
seemed out of place on his soft face.
I liked Tom. He’d lived. Seen things, bad things. And like most wild men who slowed down with
age, he always seemed on the edge of cracking. He was a book worth reading.
“John Avery Rollins is the most likely candidate for our mystery man,” continued Brenda, using
her minty smoke as a shield from Tom’s eyes. “He rose to the rank of Captain during the
Mexican-American War, andwhom do you think he brought home from the Golden State? His
pretty young bride, Virginia.” She punctuated her point with an emphatic stamp of her butt into
the ashtray.
I needed more. I needed something to link the old legend and the modern-day killing. It wasn’t
every day that a writer from Boston descended upon these parts, and I knew with a little stoking I
could get more.
“I’ve read that the son came down with cholera. I know there was an outbreak in this area during
the Civil War, not the Texas Revolution. Could the timeline be off?” I asked, lifting my glass and
my eyebrows.
“I’ve thought of that too,” said Brenda, dismissing me with a slosh of the ice in her glass.
“Another young officer, Major Wallace Branson, was a leader in the biggest Texas-based
regiment of the Civil War, Walker’s Greyhounds.”
“That’s right! And guess what,” shouted Marcus, a stock boy at the local supermarket, “he had a
wife from California too. And guess what else.” He collected himself and slowly swigged his
beer for dramatic effect. “Her name was Virginia too.”
Everyone turned and stared at Marcus as he waved one of Brenda’s old newspaper clippings with
a massive grin. We all turned back to our drinks.
“I’m serious y’all!” Marcus begged. “It could be her!”
“No, no, no,” dismissed Tom. “That don’t account for the eight hundred acres. It’s the wrong
war.”
“That’s all bull. I seen them blackbonnets and they ain’t no more than forty acres tops,” chimed
in Kelly the waitress.
Tom picked up his drink and muttered, “You wouldn’t know forty acres from four, you stupid
bi—”
Brenda spread her palm in front of Tom’s face. “Now Tom, that ain’t necessary.”
She lit her cigarette and plopped into the chair next to mine. The wooden legs creaked as she
situated her legs.
At this point, the Rollins and the Branson histories were viable options and I had more than I
needed to build the story. The truth is, we’d never really know the facts.
What are facts? All history is told from a skewed perspective and no one has the facts. Between
the fires, the car accidents and now this other young mother who killed her kids, I could easily
suck in the masses. I just needed something to pull it all together.
“Brenda, is there anything in that stack that tells us how the boy from the legend actually died?”
I asked, pointing at the mass of documents.
Tom’s eyes blazed as he shot up and crouched over the piles. “Yes there is! You show ‘em Miss
Brenda. This one’s a doozy. She tells it best—you know the one.”
“This one,” she said, a cigarette between her teeth. She pulled a document from the pile. “Several
accounts deny any sign of illness in the boy. In the court of public opinion, she killed that boy for
no good reason. They said she was just a loony.”
“Now I don’t know about all that,” said Kelly. “No mama up and kills her baby for no reason.”
Brenda shot the younger woman a sharp look. Marcus came out of his seat and forced another
yellow page onto the table. I sat back, my phone recorder soaking it all in.
“Women do it all the time, Kelly!” screamed Marcus. “In my book, the Blackbonnet was just
some real evil lady who killed her boy and now floats around and takes possession of folks’
souls. How else you reckon this other woman, the one on the TV, drowned her two babies?
She’s possessed by that Blackbonnet!”
Kelly looked genuinely puzzled, but Tom and Brenda seemed content with the conclusion. I’d
had enough. Hadn’t these rednecks ever heard of the hundreds of deluded women who’d killed
their children in order to keep a man or free up some pocket money? I wanted to buy them a
subscription to The Times but opted to finish my drink and shake hands. I thanked them for their
contributions and promised a mention in the dedication.
A few days later I was on my way back to Boston and got an AP alert on my phone. The young
mother from Texas was found dead in her cell. The story identified no cause of death. The next
morning I called the prison. They had no explanation for how the woman died, but when asked if
they’d seen anything strange, I was informed that an inmate had come across two small black
flowers in the prison yard. They’d not been there the day before but were suddenly in full bloom.
It was too good to make up. My story had an ending. I vowed never to travel in that part of Texas
again. Facts or no, some things should just be left alone.
Rebeka Singer
A PORTRAIT OF HER
I placed a pair of golden toenail scissors on the coffee table for you in a dream. You must have
been asking for them. Maybe it was all I felt I had to give. I placed them down in such a delicate
way: a golden infinity.
I stopped feeling things when I found you, F. I don’t think I felt much with him either. I just
began to experience life, with you—so these things I once felt so deeply became my living
experiences, and then the analysis stopped, and I felt more found than ever before, that was until
I was lost like never before, or perhaps like always.
You tripped on the lightweight ottoman. Fell on me. Your weight knocked me flat on the Persian
carpet. I hit my left ribcage and then my head. We both smelled of booze—you stronger than me,
mixing beer and wine. That wasn’t typical; you’re usually strictly a beer drinker.
You say you’re lost. You lost yourself in this relationship. You’ve never been so unhappy. You
don’t remember what peace felt like. Love is the easy part.
You brought up this concept of losing yourself in this relationship with me. Drunk, you screamed
it at me drunk. You uprooted your life, quit your sales jobs at Sear’s and Macy’s. Or more like
lost them because you were partying with me and wanted to stay in my bed and make love to me
rather than drive to work. You moved to Providence for me. What an ironic name for this city,
you say.
There was this other guy, O, back from college. And, of course, he contacts me all these years
later now that I’m dating you. I was scared of his message at first—flattered and frightened and
flooded with adrenaline when I read it (so simple): Looking through my messages and found
this, haha… How are you doing? I thought he hated me after I kissed him on three separate
occasions, let him sleep in my bed on one and hold me in the morning and tell me that I was the
most beautiful freshman in the whole class and he wanted me to be his. And then I brought my
boyfriend to his fraternity and there was a scuffle—some threats from his brothers and some
tears later from him and the call, the call from my boyfriend to him: She’s sucking my dick now,
dude, in the car. He didn’t talk to me again after that save for a few texts about how he loved me
and how I could have been his girlfriend—how we could have been like some homecomingwinning couple on campus. That was college.
The boyfriend became my husband, E, and then my cuckold husband and now my ex-husband.
You, F—the man who lost himself for me—called me your wife yesterday. The sun shone
through the windshield, blinding through the smoky sky, and the wind beat the sides of the car so
that it swayed so slightly. My beautiful wife, you said. My face froze. I could just about smile. I
don’t think you felt reassured, so I touched your knee as you drove.
It was last Wednesday when I picked you up at the apartment to accompany me to the hospital. I
thought I had a concussion from your falling on top of me the night before. My head throbbed,
back bruised—so sleepy from the cocaine hangover. In the car I realized you were still drunk.
You’re not an artist, you told me. You’re an interloper. You repeated it. You’re not an artist, you
said. You’re just an interloper. The left cavity of my chest started to sting. I got a $1,500 chest
X-ray at the hospital. You seemed proud of yourself.
In the waiting room, I hated my life. In the waiting room, I cried, wetting my sleeve that I buried
my face in. I’m going to leave in one minute, you told me, if you don’t stop crying. You
squeezed my hand too tight and said: They’ll think something else happened. They’ll think I
abused you. Then leave, I said. You rested your head on my shoulder and softened your grip on
my hand and we stayed like that—my supporting you while I slipped in and out of sleep. I
supported your drunken weight. Too tired to lift you. That sleep state was my beautiful escape.
I have dreams some nights that we’re trying to have sex or maybe I’m trying to have sex with
you but you’re not hard enough. I keep trying to grasp it in my hand and pull you inside of me
but nothing. You get angry. I’m being too rough, I think, and that’s why you’re angry. Or you
don’t agree with me that you’re not hard enough and you’re annoyed that I won’t just put it in at
the density that it is, as if I’m choosing to reject your penis in its current state, as if I could just
make it easier and slip it in. But I already said I can’t slip it in and it’s slipping between my
thumb and forefinger trying to guide it. And we’re failing. I’m failing at our having sex. No
wonder the toenail scissors seemed like such a glorious gift in that dream.
*
I tiptoe around my musty apartment in my underwear. I twist at the corner of my sheer cotton tee
shirt to expose my hipbone and smooth stomach as if I were trying to be sexy in front of you, F.
But I’m alone. I pour champagne into one of the $12 flutes I received from the wedding registry.
I am wildly free and sophisticated, my mouth now stinging with the gentle bubbles against fleshy
cheeks.
I have one of those phones with a spiral cord that I twist clichéd around my finger as I lie in bed,
knees bent, one leg extended to the ceiling. Who should I call of my F.O.E? I’m on my second
glass of champagne, already mellowed, already wandering outside of any intellect I possessed
earlier in the day. Now my thoughts wander through my body, finding the men in their respective
corners inside me. F leans against my lungs, balancing on a rib; O taps at the top of my spinal
column; E sleeps in my stomach, cocooned in bile and peaceful as an angel.
I do this thing: I leave things open. Stories and books, windows and doors. I sometimes resent
myself for it. Resent myself.
You tell me things like: They’ll never accept you. E’s family will never be your family again.
And I believe you, F, because sometimes it feels in life that I’ve just gone too far down one path
to turn around. There is no backtracking, but, just maybe, another fork in my path? Why not
another fork? That fork could be my truth—whatever that means.
I don’t believe in much anymore. I don’t believe in ever feeling really safe from myself. I am
untrue to men. I wander through doors and windows, let the electricity and heat escape these
relationships I build, let them crumble. I don’t trust myself. And I want to say that I do but I’m
already doing what I did before that got me into trouble, that got me into love with you—
spinning in my golden infinity. Unfortunately, it just never got me out of love with him.
Literary Bios
William Aarnes lives and teaches in South Carolina. His work has appeared in such places
as Poetryand The Southern Review. He has poems forthcoming in Weave and FIELD.
Amy Brunvand
lives in the Jordan River watershed at the edge of the
Great Basin. She is a librarian, part-time nature mystic and monthly contributor to Catalyst
Magazine in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her writing has appeared in an odd assortment of
publications including the late great Inside/Outside Southwest.
Wayne F. Burke
was born in Massachusetts. He was raised in the home
of his paternal grandparents. Burke went to public schools then college. He graduated college in
1979. He went to work and worked. He wrote in his spare time: mostly prose then mostly poetry.
His poetry has been published in Industry Night, FORGE, Sassafras, The Commonline
Journal, Boston Poetry Magazine, Visions With Voices, and elsewhere. He currently lives in
Vermont.
Melanie J. Cordova is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing Fiction at Binghamton
University. She has stories out or forthcoming with Whitefish Review, The Oklahoma
Review, Yamassee, and various others. Melanie also serves as Editor-in-Chief to Harpur
Palate and as Coordinator of Writing By Degrees 2014.
After attending school at SUNY Geneseo, John Cullen
has worked as a
bee keeper, talent agent and literature teacher. His work has appeared in Grist, The Cincinnati
Poetry Review, The MacGuffin, Gulf Stream, IthacaLit, Blast Furnace and Dark Matter Journal.
His book Town Crazy won the 2013 Slipstream chapbook competition.
Nancy Dobson’s
poetry has won several awards, including an Academy
of American Poets Prize. Her work has been published in a variety of publications including The
Sun Magazine, Noyo River Review and ARDOR. Dobson lives and teaches in Northern
California. Follow her on Twitter at @nancy_dobson.
Michelle Bonczek Evory is the author of The Ghosts of Lost Animals (Trio House Press,
forthcoming) and the chapbook The Art of the Nipple (Orange Monkey Publishing, 2013). Her
poetry is forthcoming in the Best New Poets 2013 anthology, has been published in over sixty
journals and magazines, including Crazyhorse, cream city review, Green Mountains
Review, Margie, and Orion Magazine, and has received numerous awards including the Jane
Kenyon Award, The Sherwin W Howard Award, and the Consequence Prize. Currently she is a
Visiting Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. She’s a mentor
at The Poet’s Billow thepoetsbillow.org.
Brad Garber
lives and writes in Lake Oswego, Oregon. He has
published poetry in Alchemy, Fireweed, Uphook Press,Front Range Review,
theNewerYork, Ray’s Road Review, Generation Press, Penduline Press, Dead Flowers, New
Verse News and other quality publications. Nominee: 2013 Pushcart Prize for poem, “Where We
May Be Found.”
Jeanne Lyet Gassman
lives with her husband and children in Phoenix,
Arizona. Her work has appeared in WOW!, Switchback, and Barrelhouse, among others. Recent
awards include fellowships from Ragdale and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Her
novel, Blood of a Stone, is forthcoming from Tuscany Press in 2014.
Cynthia Gibbon
is a former librarian and has published in that field.
She’s taken an early retirement and now writes.
Since the ‘70s, James Grabill’s
poems have appeared in periodicals such
as Harvard Review, Terrain, Urthona (UK), Shenandoah, The Oxonian
Review (UK), Stand (UK), East West Journal, and The Common Review. His books include An
Indigo Scent after the Rain and Poem Rising Out of the Earth. He teaches “systems thinking”
relative to sustainability.
Stephen D. Gutierrez
is the author of Elements and Live from Fresno y
Los. He has a new collection forthcoming, The Mexican Man in His Backyard, Essays and
Stories. Originally from Los Angeles, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he teaches
at California State University East Bay. His creative nonfiction has appeared in Fourth
Genre, River Teeth, Under the Sun, Third Coast, Los Angeles Times Sunday, San Francisco
Chronicle Sunday and elimae. He has a new piece forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review.
Larry Jordan’s
work has appeared in Comstock Review, Straight
Forward, Miller’s Pond, Pirene’s Foundation, Antiphon and others. He resides in South
Carolina.
Len Krisak’s books of poetry and translation include Even as We Speak (the Richard Wilbur
Prize) If Anything, The Odes of Horace, Virgil’s Eclogues, Ovid’s Amores and Ars
Amatoria, Afterimage, Catullus’s Carmina, and Rilke’s Neue Gedichte. He is the recipient of the
Robert Penn Warren and Robert Frost Prizes, and is a four-time champion on Jeopardy!
Sandra Kolankiewicz’s
poems and stories have appeared widely, most
recently at Prick of the Spindle, Per Contra, Pif, Bellingham Review,and New World
Writing. Turning Inside Out is available from Black Lawrence Press. Blue Eyes Don’t Cry won
the Hackney Award for the Novel. She teaches Developmental English in West Virginia.Listen
to Kolankiewicz read her poems at Red Savina Review’s audio series.
A highly motivated and experienced writer, artist and arts project manager based in the North
East of England, Sheree Mack
has a PhD in Creative Writing. One of
the few international experts on Black British Women’s Poetry, Mack travels the world sharing
her creative and academic writings. She is completing her third collection of poetry.Listen to
Mack read her poem at Red Savina Review’s audio series.
Sean Padraic McCarthy
has new work either recently published or
forthcoming in december, Glimmer Train, The Sand Hill Review, The Ledge, The Greensboro
Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Forge, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Water~Stone Review,
and Sou’wester, and his novel Where the Birds Go to Die was recently named a finalist for both
The Black Lawrence Press’s Big Moose Prize and the Autumn House Press Fiction Prize.
Josh Medsker’s poetry, fiction, non-fiction, literary criticism, and journalism has appeared in
many publications, including: The Anchorage Press, The Brooklyn Rail, Enchanted
Conversation, Everest, OVS, The Review Review, Haiku Journal, We’ll Never Have Paris,
and Criminal Class Review. He was also the editor of (In)Visible Memoir: Voices from The
Fortune Society, in conjunction with the Bay Area literary magazine Memoir (and). Since 2001,
he has edited the literary blog and zine, Twenty-Four Hours twentyfourhoursonline.org. Listen to
Medsker read his poem at Red Savina Review’s audio series.
Jacqueline Michaud’s poems have appeared in New England Review and Breadloaf
Quarterly, The Florida Review, US1 Worksheets, New Laurel Review, American Letters and
Commentary, Per Contra, and the anthology, Voices from the Robert Frost Place. A member of
the American Literary Translators Association, she has had translations of Francophone poets
published in Per Contra, Poems for the Millennium: University of California Book of North
African Literature (2013), and Chicago Quarterly Review, forthcoming in 2014. Michaud has
published two collections of poetry: The Waking Hours: Poems & Translations, and White
Clouds.
Steve Mitchell’s
fiction has been published in The Southeast
Review, storySouth, and Flash Magazine, among others. His short story collection, The Naming
of Ghosts, is published by Press 53. He has a deep belief in the primacy of doubt and an abiding
conviction that great wisdom informs very bad movies.thisisstevemitchell.com
Kelly Morris holds an MFA from Spalding University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming
in Spry Literary Journal, Sundog Lit, and drafthorse literary journal. She blogs with three other
writers at literarylabors.com. When she’s not writing, Kelly can be found hanging out with her
kids, who remain unconvinced that being a writer is actually a very cool job.
Alexander Motyl
is a writer, painter, and professor. He is the author of
seven novels, Whiskey Priest, Who Killed Andrei Warhol, Flippancy, The Jew Who Was
Ukrainian, My Orchidia, Sweet Snow, and Fall River (forthcoming). Motyl’s poems have
appeared in Mayday, Counterexample Poetics, Istanbul Literary Review, Orion Headless, The
Battered Suitcase, Red River Review, Green Door, and New York Quarterly. His paintings are on
display on the Internet gallery site, www.artsicle.com. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark.
Holly Painter
is an MFA graduate of the University of Canterbury in
Christchurch, New Zealand. Her poetry has been published in literary journals in the US, New
Zealand and Australia. Holly lives with her partner in Singapore and Michigan, where she writes
love poems on behalf of besotted people around the world at adoptapoet.wordpress.com.
Stan Sanvel Rubin’s fourth full collection, There. Here., was published in September by Lost
Horse Press. Poems are forthcoming in The Florida Review,The Laurel Review,The National
Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Talking River.
Erica Seiler
manages the brand for a Fortune 500 company where she teaches writers
how to master tone-of-voice and messaging. She is pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at Our
Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas and has published work in advertising and
journalism.
Rebeka Singer
writes, works and teaches in her native Providence,
Rhode Island. She received her MFA in Creative Fiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.
Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eclectica Magazine, Drunk Monkeys, The Fat City
Review, Contraposition, The Bookends Review and Dogzplot.
Elizabeth Kate Switaj
is a Liberal Arts Instructor at the College of the
Marshall Islands and a Contributing Editor to Poets’ Quarterly. Her first collection of poetry,
Magdalene & the Mermaids, was published in 2009 by Paper Kite Press. For more information
visit elizabethkateswitaj.net.
Jessica Tyner
is a Pushcart Prize nominated writer from Oregon and a
member of the Cherokee Nation. She has recently published short fiction in India’s Out of Print
Magazine, and poetry in Penumbra, Straylight Magazine, Solo Press, and Glint Literary Journal.
Robert Vivian
is the author of two award-winning books of meditative
essays, Cold Snap as Yearning and The Least Cricket of Evening. He’s author of The Mover of
Bones, Lamb Bright Saviors, and Another Burning Kingdom . His most recent published novel
is Water and Abandon . He’s written many plays that have been produced in New York
City. His essays have been mentioned numerous times in The Best American Essays Series, and
his stories, poems, and essays have appeared in magazines and journals such
as Harper’s, Georgia Review, Creative Nonfiction, and numerous others. Listen to Vivian read
his dervish essay at Red Savina Review’s audio series.
Howard Winn’s writing, both poetry and fiction, has recently appeared in The
Galway Review (Ireland), Antigonish Review, Taj Mahal Review (India), Dalhousie
Review, Descant, Break the Spine, Cactus Heart, and Chaffin Review. Winn’s B. A is from
Vassar. His M. A is from the Stanford University Writing Program. Winn’s doctoral work was
done at New York University. He’s a faculty Member of SUNY.