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The Writing Disorder is a quarterly literary journal. We publish exceptional new works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction and art. We also feature interviews with writers and artists, as well as reviews.

The Art of Claudia Pomowski

 

Claudia Pomowski

 

Claudia Pomowski

 

Claudia Pomowski

 

Claudia Pomowski

 

Claudia Pomowski

 

Claudia Pomowski

 

Claudia Pomowski

 

Claudia Pomowski

 

Claudia Pomowski

 

Claudia Pomowski

 

 

BIO

Claudia Pomowski evokes visions of surreal landscapes and whimsical characters, often connected to German Romanticism. She creates poetic moments in her line drawings, graphics, collages and handmade art books. The freelance graphic artist and lecturer of book design lives in Germany near Trier.

 

See more of Claudia’s work:

www.c-pom.de

https://instagram.com/c.pom/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/75678715@N03/albums

https://www.facebook.com/CPOM-328767923908045/

https://de.pinterest.com/claudiapomowski/

http://www.poste-aerienne.com/Schlaft-Weiter-Mir-Ist-s-Egal

 

 

 

Midnight Mass

by Thomas Elson

 

It was on December 28, three days after Christmas, and unbeknownst to David while he rushed through the hospital garage at 5:15 in the morning, his wife, Nicole, had called him at home. In the days before cell phones and voice mail, their recording machine took her message. When he returned home the next day, he would hear his wife’s voice, “Where are you?”

He heard other messages, each from a different person, but each the same, “David, no need to call back. Just wondering how Nicole is?” Repeated multiple times on that single tape. Only one asked, “How are you?”

#

Three days earlier, during the best part of his week in the best part of their house, David sat at the table next to the bay window – in an area so deep it created another room between the kitchen and family room.

Early in their marriage, he and Nicole had crammed the table and four chairs into their small Chevy. The tabletop, with its legs detached, fit in the trunk; they stuffed two of the chairs in the back seat. The other two chairs Nicole stacked on the passenger’s side of the front seat on David’s lap – the backs of the chairs dangled onto the floor.

 

Near midnight that Christmas Eve, they had driven over icy roads and squinted against the glare of the oncoming headlights, left their warm car and walked through the dark night toward the vestibule of the church, then waited outside as others blocked the front doors and stomped snow from their feet. David and Nicole kept their heavy coats on until their upper bodies overheated even though their feet remained frigid.

Inside the church, the multitude of candles complimented the hanging electric lights designed to echo the stalactite glow of beeswax candle chandeliers in medieval churches. Mid-way through the services, David heard the military sounds of tramping as parishioners rose from their pews, genuflected, stood erect, and formed near-perfect communion lines with a precision learned in the first grade from nuns well-trained to channel unfocused youth into disciplined adults.

David recalled how he had stood ramrod straight during the services that night – proud of how he felt in his bespoke 42-long diplomat striped suit, proud that people guessed his age twenty years younger that it was; proud of his wife – beautiful in her one-of-a-kind dress; proud that people would believe him if he said Nicole was twenty-two years younger– her enthusiasm and laughter supplied all the facts they needed; proud that he continued to feel the desire to hug her in public, proud that he had survived three cancer scares thanks to skillful surgeons, and relieved that Nicole had not fainted during this three-and-one-half hour service.

Before their Christmas lunch later that day, David completed his ritual. He touched and kissed the inscription, “Forever”, on his mother’s marble urn, which he referred to as a vase – because life grows from vases. He whispered a few words, then returned the urn to the walnut bookcase his mother had given him on his seventeenth birthday. Afterward, David stayed close to Nicole – alone with hours of uninterrupted time. Tomorrow the world would begin again.

 

Late on the morning of December 26th, while he and Nicole sat in Dr. Keegan’s waiting room, it struck David that these rooms were all the same – no matter where located, or how festively decorated. No one wanted to be there, but all were eager to hear the test results, and receive relief. His emotions hung under a compound cloud of fearful anger and fearful stoicism. He knew that they waited alone no matter how many others tried to comfort them. They talked with forced smiles, in turns silent; then, with a start, they would look for a nurse, or doctor, someone to enter, see them, and tell them something hopeful.

Behind the receptionist’s glass curtain, the medical staff’s movements ranged from languid to hyperactive and separated them from the patients. David hugged Nicole’s hips, then held her hand as they waited. She cupped his hand within hers, then squeezed. The same movement she did three years ago when David was diagnosed.

#

On a July afternoon, three years earlier, as David and Nicole arrived at the medical clinic’s parking lot, Nicole saw yet another someone on yet another corner with yet another hand-written cardboard sign. She reached into a dedicated compartment of her purse to rifle out yet another five-dollar bill.

David sat in the exam chair in the ophthalmologist’s office that July morning for a routine visit. He felt the smooth plastic forehead rest of the retinoscopy machine – the alcohol rub still cold against it. He placed his chin in the alcohol coldness of the lower bar, then felt a sting as the intense light hit the surface of his left eye.

David heard the ophthalmologist gasp, “Oh God.” David felt the machine move to his left as the doctor’s eyes met his, “You have a rare form of-” Then the doctor said the one word that freezes families; makes them unable to move, think or speak. “I’ll have to call someone. Wait here.” He rushed into the office next to the exam room. In his panic, the doctor had left both doors open.

Within moments, from the next room, David heard, “Doctor Hollis, I have a patient here with a form of eye cancer I’m unfamiliar with. I don’t know how I should proceed.” There was silence followed by a few inaudible murmurs, then David heard, “Should I take a biopsy?” Of my eye? A biopsy? Now? Remove a portion of my eye? Then what?

“You have an appointment tomorrow at 3:30 with Dr. Hollis,” the ophthalmologist said.

The doctor walked out to the waiting room with David, and said, “I hope I see you soon. Good luck.” David felt as if he were heading for the arctic region with only a light jacket and a ham sandwich.

#

On that late December 26th morning, three years after David’s eye operation his bouts with chemotherapy, he waited with Nicole in the exam room. Their family practitioner, Dr. Keegan, a man who usually displayed a distinct Celtic sense of humor, entered with his head down. He landed mechanically on a round exam chair, clutched the papers in his hand as if they were fifty-pound weights, cast his eyes down, stuttered, coughed, then read without looking up, “The lab results came in, and you were diagnosed with-” Again David and Nicole heard the one word that freezes families.

Dr. Keegan finished, inhaled, coughed, wiped his face, then outlined the specialists he had arranged for them to see. Nicole remained motionless. David, four feet away from her, was rigid. That would haunt him later. He looked at his wife and felt his eyes pool.

 

In the afternoon of that same day, Nicole lay on the doctor’s exam table. The young and meticulous surgeon, lab report in hand, looked directly at her, “Here’s where the mammogram showed the growth.” David saw a mass as dark as midnight on the screen. Then, the surgeon drew interrelated circles with a permanent marker on Nicole’s upper body. After he detailed the hospital admissions process for the next day, he said, “I’ll leave the two of you alone for awhile to discuss the options,” then he left the exam room.

Nicole rose from the exam table, balanced herself , then lifted her eyes filled with the familiar look of determination toward David. “If I’m going to lose something, I’m going to get something out of it”. She opted for reconstructive surgery, including liposuction, to be performed immediately after the surgeon removed the mass.

 

Two days later, and the hospital admissions office was as bleak and airless as the hospital parking garage – despite elaborately wrapped, albeit empty, gift boxes, peppermint sticks, and toy soldiers.

Huddled in clothes too flimsy for winter, a rail-thin woman, her gaze frozen on the linoleum, sat near David and Nicole. He watched as the woman nodded “no” when an admissions nurse asked, “Do you have insurance?” “Is there any family in the area?” “Do you have a mailing address?” “Do you think you can walk?” “Do you have someone to call?”

David and Nicole were lucky. Both employed, both with insurance to cover all costs and co-pays, the admission officer ushered them into her office. Nicole was admitted by 7:15 p.m. Within minutes, a medical assistant escorted them to her private room.

Seated on the bed inside her hospital room, Nicole reached for school papers to grade, but her hand shook so much the papers slipped away. Gone was her laughter. Gone was her sense of humor. She reached for David. This time he reached back. They sat there, her unpacked overnight suitcase still at the side table.

 

That night, as David drove home alone and on autopilot, he turned right instead of left from the parking garage, and found himself lost four miles north of the hospital and across the street from the football stadium. He stopped the car, leaned his head against the steering wheel, and shook.

Three turns plus a driveway later, at a time unremembered, he arrived at their home eight miles south of the hospital. His call to Nicole was answered at the shift nurse’s desk, “She’s resting now – asleep. We gave her something mild.”

 

On the morning of her surgery, after David’s rush through the parking garage, he sat next to Nicole in the cramped prep room, amid the curtains, tubes, needles, and watched the surgeon apply his purple ink initials to Nicole’s surgical site. Afterwards Nicole received an unanticipated, but much welcomed, injection of liquid valium, David heard his wife exhale seventy-two hours of tension.

When she was rolled away, she waved at David with the abandon of a happy child. He returned her wave, watched the attendants turn her surgical bed toward the surgery hallway, and waved once more. David, short of breath with the sensation of liquid motion in the corners of his eyes, steadied himself against the wall.

Without notice, he was thrown back into another room of another hospital twenty-eight years earlier. His mother lay as rigid as a corpse, her eyes alternating between bitterness and panic. An anesthesiologist entered, and within seconds, her liquid valium was working. When they wheeled his mother to surgery, she shot David a carefree wave, her face looked as young as a schoolgirl, and said, “They’re taking me away.”

 

David fretted in the surgical waiting room for hours. A young doctor entered and every head in the waiting room turned toward him. “Dr. Hollis asked me to tell you that it may become a bit more complicated,” the doctor said as he placed his hand on David’s right shoulder, “He called in a second surgeon.”

Later that morning, Nicole’s first surgeon returned, looked around, recognized David, motioned him into the hallway.

They stood in the glass-walled hospital hallway filled with sunshine reflected from the newly waxed floors. David leaned against the telephone bank around the corner while the surgeon talked, “I completed my part, but we found a second mass.” The surgeon looked away for a moment; then continued, “This second one was not on the mammogram your wife had. My colleague will need to remove that mass along with a few lymph nodes for testing. It may be some time yet.” With a wet palm, he shook David’s hand and walked away.

 

Around six that evening, amid the piped-in Christmas music just above the din of the television, a second surgeon with near flawless bearing, walked through the waiting room doors. She looked at David, nodded to the hallway.

Once again, David was in the hallway by the phone bank. He leaned against the same phone bank that had supported him hours earlier. This time there was no sun through the windows. “We found two additional masses.” She rubbed her right hand against her spotless scrubs. “We removed them, but will have to wait on the results from the lymph nodes to see if it spread.”

The second surgeon continued to talk while a feeling swept over David that he was afraid to touch. Relief? Resignation? From that point on, he heard only white noise.

#

David sat at their table nestled in front of a bay window for the first time since Nicole’s surgery one year ago. Through the window, David was transfixed by the lush pasture protected by the parallel two-pronged barbed wire fence. In that room, he could see life forever; the endless land attached safely to the blue-gray sky.

He reached across the table for the telephone answering machine, listened to his saved messages. Once again, he heard his wife’s voice, “Where are you?” This time he felt her fear surge through the phone. Then he wiped wet spots from the table and his eyes.

As David began his ritual, he touched his mother’s urn, kissed the inscription, “Forever”, then whispered a few words.

He felt as if Nicole touched his hand. He reached for her, and, as he does almost daily, apologized for not moving toward her the day she received her diagnosis. Her response seemed comforting and understanding.

His ritual these days takes him a little longer – for now there are two urns.

 

 

BIO

Thomas ElsonThomas Elson lives in Northern California. He writes of lives that fall with no safety net to catch them. His short stories have appeared in Cacti Fur, Clackamas Literary Review, Conceit Magazine, Cybertoad, Dual Coast, FTB Press Anthology, Literary Commune, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Perceptions Magazine, Potluck, and Walk Write Up.

 

 

 

 

empty streets

Domenic James Scopa

Empty Streets…

by Bakhyt Kenzheev

 

Empty streets, deep gaps beneath the doors.
The autumn world is cool and fleshless.

The forty-year old poplar above my head
still rustles with its tinfoil foliage.

Its owner, by next summer, is bound
to saw it down—so it doesn’t block the sun,

so it doesn’t rustle, doesn’t sing above me,
doesn’t wreck the pavement with its roots,

and you can’t breathe deep enough—but want to—
of even the September bitterness, the final feeble sun…

 

 

Willow

by Anna Akhmatova

 

I was raised in checkered silence,
in the chilly nursery of the young century.
The voice of man was harsh−
it was the wind whose words were dearest to me.
I cherished burdocks and nettles−
most of all the silver willow.
And, gratefully, it lived
with me all my life, its weeping branches
fanning my insomnia with dreams.
−Strangely−I outlived it.
Out there a stump stands, and other willows
speak with foreign voices
beneath our skies.
And I am silent…as though a brother has died.

 

 

Someone Is Beating a Woman

by Andrei Voznesensky

 

Someone is beating a woman
in a car so hot and dark
only the whites of her eyes shine.
Her feet batter the roof
like berserk searchlight beams.

Someone is beating a woman.
The way that slaves are beaten.
Beautifully whimpering,
she yanks open the door and drops
                                    onto the road.

Brakes squeal.
Someone races towards her,
flogs her, drags her
face down in the stinging nettles…

Scumbag, how deliberately he beats her,
Stilyaga, bastard, tough guy,
his dashing shoes, as slender as a flatiron,
stabbing into her ribs.

Such are the pleasures of rebel soldiers,
the delights of peasants…
Somewhere, stamping under moonlit grasses,
someone is beating a woman.

Someone is beating a woman.
Century on century, no end in sight.
It’s the young that suffer this. Somberly
our wedding bells stir up alarm.
Someone is beating a woman.

And what is with the blazing welts?
Last-minute slaps?
That’s life, you say—how so?—
someone is beatin a woman.

But her light is steadfast,
death-defying and divine.
Religions—no,
                        revelations—no.
There are
                        women.

She lays there placid like a lake,
her eyes tear-swollen,
yet still, she doesn’t belong to him
any more than the stars to the sky.

And the stars? They’re pounding
like raindrops on black glass.
Slipping down
they cool
her grief-fevered forehead.

 

 

The Cemetery

by Miguel Hernandez

 

The cemetery lies close
where you and I are sleeping
among blue prickly pears,
blue ancient-plants and children
screaming full of life
if a dead body darkens the road.

From here to the cemetery everything
is blue   golden   crystal clear.
Four steps   and the dead.
Four steps   and the living.

Crystal clear   blue   and golden,
my son, out there, seems far away.

 

 

BIO

Domenic James Scopa is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and 2014 recipient of the Robert K. Johnson Poetry Prize and Garvin Tate Merit Scholarship. His work was selected in a contest hosted by Missouri State University Press to be included in their anthology Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, volume 3. He is a student of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program, where he studies poetry and translation. He is also a staff writer for the literary journal Verse-Virtual, a book reviewer for Misfit Magazine, and a professor of literature at Changing Lives Through Literature. His poetry and translations have been featured in Reunion: the Dallas Review, here/there: poetry, Touchstone Magazine, The Bayou Review, Three and a Half Point 9, The Mas Tequila Review, Coe Review, Cardinal Sins, Boston Thought, Howl, Misfit Magazine, Poetry Pacific, Untitled with Passengers, Gravel, Crack the Spine, Stone Highway Review, Apeiron Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Literature Today, Tell Us a Story, Verse-Virtual, Malpais Review, Les Amuses-Bouches, Shout Out UK, Fuck Art, Let’s Dance, Sediments, Birds We Piled Loosely, and Empty Sink Publishing.

 

 

 

Gin Fizz

by Eric Brittingham

 

 

When Alexander Quillen’s grandmother told him she expected him to get up first thing in the morning on the first Monday of his summer vacation to help her paint her backyard fence and three-car garage, he couldn’t believe she was serious. Alex had made other plans. Or more truthfully, he’d planned to have no plans. He’d spent the final weeks of the sixth grade imagining that his summer reward for high grades and hard work would be a hot and humid haze of irresponsible sameness, with no discernable distinction between any given weekday and a typical weekend. If planning were necessary, he would say he planned to sleep and eat and perhaps to read (but only comic books and newspaper funny pages) and perhaps to watch television (cartoons and old sit-coms). Of course, he should have known that his grandmother was quite serious and would have no sympathy for such unproductive indulgence. After all, even the self-discipline his mother exhibited during the school year to rise before dawn each weekday morning failed to earn her a weekend reprieve in the eyes of his grandmother, who instead despaired that “laying abed clear to eight or nine o’clock of a morning” revealed in her daughter a dreadful moral failing.

And he should have remembered that he’d promised long ago to help repaint the fence and garage that bisected his grandmother’s backyard. This was no minor chore. The fifty-foot-long fence extended from the neighbor’s property line to join the back of the open-bay garage, which was turned around backwards so the bays opened away from the house and toward the soybean field at the edge of the yard. The sun shone year-round on both the fence and the garage walls, and as a result they required repainting about every five years. It was a job that Alex’s grandmother insisted on doing herself because the painters in the area had been former associates of the late Mr. Charles Quillen and so were persona non grata to his grandmother.

She did require assistance, however, and this supporting role had always been played by Alex’s mother. Although she never expressed any particular excitement about the prospect of a multi-day painting project, neither did his mother ever express an unkind thought about it within Alex’s hearing, and Alex had grown up thinking of the periodic fence-painting operation as something like a holiday. When the fence and back garage had last been painted five summers earlier in 1975, a younger Alex had tried his best to take part, helping with things like fetching water to drink and cleaning up drips, and he’d made his grandmother promise to let him help the next time the fence would need painting. She had in fact promised, with his mother adding dryly that she would be quite willing to hand over this grave responsibility to her son.

When his grandmother reminded him of this commitment, the now twelve-year-old Alex had to admit he’d forgotten all about it, but rather than argue the point, he’d instead put her off, saying he wanted at least a week of rest after what he proclaimed to have been a most strenuous academic year. After that, however, he didn’t even bother with excuses. Each time she would bring it up, he’d shrug and suggest they do it later. At first, she fussed a bit and complained about his laziness, but with his mother busy for several weeks teaching summer school, his grandmother was loath to start the project without some assurance of help. As the summer heat settled in that July, she set the project aside, but when August arrived, the act of turning the calendar seemed to rile her. She put her foot down—not metaphorically but in a literal, foot-stamping demonstration of her frustration—and she decreed a starting date for the project that following week. She wanted to get it done that summer, dag-nab-it, and she was done hearing his excuses.

“We’ll start the scraping and peeling early morning so we can get it done by noon. It ain’t no chore to be started with the mid-day sun beating down on you the whole time.” Alex demurred, noting the misfortune that, now that he was old enough to be helpful, he’d reached the age of requiring double-digit hours of sleep. She was unmoved by his protests. She repeated her schedule and left it at that.

The morning in question dawned, lightened, and began to burn more brightly with no Alex in sight, and she began without him, which he discovered at eleven-thirty as he sauntered through his neighbors’ backyards—his mother’s house was on the same side of the road as his grandmother’s and separated by only two neighbors—and he could see as he approached that she’d already worked her way down the fence line more than half-way. She’d scraped away the loose and flaking paint from its entire length on the side that faced the house, the easy side with the outward facing boards, and on the other side with the difficult angles of attached board she’d worked nearly to the gate-break that swung out from the section that met the garage. He was impressed with her determination and the quality of what she’d done, and the weight of shame and disappointment made his arms feel heavy pulling on his shoulders. He thought he would volunteer to do the garage in the afternoon, but his paper-thin level of maturity burned away when he came to stand across from her on the other side of the fence and she locked eyes with him through the slats just under the fence header. “Just sit yourself inside, boy, and I’ll be in directly to make your dinner.” Despite her anger—the sweat rolling down her reddened face revealed the effort she’d expended—she spoke to him the way she’d spoken to him when he was a little boy, when she would set him up in front of his cartoons with his TV tray in air-conditioned comfort. “I wonder if I could trouble you to mix up your own chocolate milk. And draw me out a glass of water with three ice cubes. If you would.” Alex didn’t say anything. He merely nodded, which she didn’t usually accept as an answer, but to extend his humiliation, she ignored his juvenile response, dropping her eyes and resuming her scraping.

After a quiet lunch, she said she was done for the day, that it was too hot to work anymore, and that he should “just go on home.” He didn’t even look at the fence as he ran from the yard. His mother had gotten home by then, and when he came in through the back door she was coming up from the basement with an empty laundry basket and said, “You’re back awful early.”

He didn’t want to talk about it. He sat down in the kitchen while his mother moved around the house, and he tried to understand why he was so angry. He knew he was in the wrong, more or less—as long you discount the notion that he was, after all, a kid on summer vacation. He figured he had every right to relax and not to have to do chores, to appreciate the freedom of being young, or so all the grown-ups would say when they got nostalgic and depressing and envious of his so-called freedom. He was only doing what they wanted him to do, he reasoned. He grew indignant. When his mother came back though the kitchen on her way somewhere else, he said, “What do we have to paint this stupid fence and garage for, anyway? Don’t they have people who do that? What do we have to do it for?”

She stopped and stared at him for a few long seconds. “So what happened?”

“She started without me. And then she’s all like, ‘It’s too late now, go home, it’s too hot anyway.’”

“I do wish she’d hire that job out.” His mother pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and settled in. “But I don’t think she ever will.”

She seemed to be validating his bitterness, so he asked indignantly, “Why not?”

“Because your Grampa was a painter, and she judges all of them by his standard. You know he had a little trouble with his drinking.” There was no humor in her eyes, no wistfulness, only her normal flat stare. “He was friends with all of them. All the painters and builders. He was 4-F during the war—you know what that means, right? He had a bad back, and the Army didn’t want him—so he got a lot of work in the war years and got to know all the other painters and builders around here. Your Gramma thinks to this day they all drink and carouse like your Grampa used to, and she won’t hire any of them. It doesn’t make much sense because none of those men work anymore. But it doesn’t matter. She’s set in her ways.”

He was pouting, building up a grievance against his grandmother, as well as the fence. Alex had a love-hate relationship with the fence. He loved it as a pretend outfield wall when he played baseball in her backyard, but he hated that it was in the way for just about any other kind of play. It was an obstacle, an eye-sore that cut her yard in half for no obvious reason. “I wish we could just tear it all down. Her and her stupid fence. How about if we just get rid of it?”

His mother frowned, and her eyes hardened. He was surprised. She usually supported or at least was amused by these little frustrated outbursts about his grandmother’s obsessions and interests. “You don’t know the story of that fence and garage. Do you?”

He shrugged, then shook his head. His grandmother had never told him anything about the history of the house, except for occasionally saying, “I wish they’d built it a little better, but anyway, the roof don’t leak.”

His mother said the house had been his grandparents’ first home together, built from a standard plan offered by a local builder back in 1943. Dee had wanted a garage that was bigger than the single-car building in the plan, but the builder wouldn’t compromise, and he asked too much for the customization. So, as a surprise, Charlie called in all his debts and favors and arranged to have a big new open-ended three-slot garage with an attached fence built in the back, with a new extension to the driveway dug out and stone put down—all of it done by his buddies in the week while they were away on their honeymoon in Atlantic City.

“That was back when things were still okay with the two of them.” His mother was staring off at something, nothing, just looking into her memories. “Daddy was drinking then. He always drank, but not like later.”

Alex didn’t know much about his grandfather. Neither woman wanted to talk about him, and they didn’t seem to miss him all that much, as if he’d been something they’d had to live with for many years that had simply been removed one day, like the food and fuel rations during the war years or a long spell of foul weather that had passed. “Was Grampa that bad?”

“He wasn’t easy.” She took a breath and looked at him again, a smile lifting her mouth as if remembering it was Alex she was talking to. “Your Gramma, she’d fuss and fume at him about his drinking. It didn’t help. Might have made it worse.” She dropped her eyes for a moment and shook her head. “For your Grampa, life was just too much to handle. I think he thought maybe your Gramma was strong enough to handle it for both of them.” Her eyes were smiling again. “So, the fence and the garage, they were a gift—really a wedding present from your Grampa to your Gramma. So that’s part of the reason they might be special to her. It may be just about the only thing he ever gave her that she really wanted.” On saying this, she frowned for a moment, and her eyes darkened. She looked at Alex, as if to see if he was still paying attention. He was, but he hadn’t heard what she’d said. That is, he’d heard her words, but he’d not understood her accidental meaning. She rose from her chair. “Anyway, it means more to her than just a fence and a garage. That’s the point,” she said, rubbing his shoulder on her way back to the basement.

#

That evening, after supper, when the orange sun had dropped behind the houses across the road, Alex got permission from his mother to play in the yard while she watched television in the living room. He knew his grandmother would be doing the same thing in her living room, and so he snuck out of his mother’s yard and along the edge of the soybean field to his grandmother’s backyard figuring he’d be sure to have the back garage all to himself. There were several relics of his grandfather’s life in there. Hung on the south wall was his wooden ladder, splotched and spackled with spilled paint. Several slats of leftover press-board paneling lay across the rafters. Folded against the back wall were a pair of metal-framed canvas-seated lawn chairs. He pulled one of these down and unfolded it and sat in the mouth of the middle bay of the open garage, looking eastward over untold acres of soybean field and beyond that to the forest of elm and oak trees that lined a distant road. The night was coming on, and from where Alex sat it wasn’t a sunset, but instead it looked as if the darkness was rising in the east, the emptiness of deep space at the tops of the trees deepening and pushing the bruised border of the daytime sky over and behind the garage. Stars were flickering awake by degrees, no moon was out, and no safety lights had yet turned on as Alex sat in the gloom with the things his grandfather had left behind after he drank himself to death years before, back when his mother had been much younger than he was then, only eight or nine, still a little girl.

Until that day he’d not given much thought to what it meant to be a man named Quillen in this family, but as he reflected on the history lesson his mother had given him that day, he found there was little to recommend them. It was no wonder his grandmother hadn’t bothered to remarry, and he guessed this bad history must also be the reason his mother would never allow his own father to be a part of Alex’s life. Whoever that man had been. She would never say.

He considered for a squeamish moment what his grandmother might be thinking of him as she watched him growing lazier in the summer heat. Did she think it was typical? Just like a Quillen man? Or was it all men? Is that why his mother hadn’t said anything about it? Is that why she never let him have a father? Maybe she thought all men were just as useless as her father had been, all of them useless and lazy. But Alex didn’t feel like that. He wasn’t intending to be lazy his whole life. He wanted to be lazy that summer. He figured he had his whole life to be a grown-up. So why hurry? Why not enjoy it while he could? But what if that’s the way all bad men think? What if you just keep thinking that way, all the time, forever?

Alex’s departure had not gone undetected. His mother’s footsteps crunched the gravel in the turn-around in front of the bays. The light was so weak that she had to get within a few yards to be able to see him. “I thought you might come here,” she said. She pulled the other chair off the wall and sat beside him in the growing darkness. “You know, your grandfather used to sit out here like this, too.”

Alex didn’t exactly like hearing this might be an exclusive behavior of Quillen males. “Did you sit with him, too?”

“Sometimes. And sometimes I’d sit here by myself, after he was gone.” She paused, and he thought he heard her snort, like she did when she smiled at something kind of funny or kind of naughty. “Sometimes it’s good to get away from your mother for a little while, isn’t it?”

That wasn’t what he was doing, though. “I guess it’s good. Maybe not always.”

“That’s true. I’m trying to focus on the good part, though.” It was getting difficult to see her in the fading light, but she was turned to face him. “It’s hard to recall only the good parts out here in this place, but it’s nice that you’re here, now, Alex. I can’t tell you what it means to me right now to see you sitting next to me in that chair.” She put a hand on Alex’s shoulder and then ran her fingers through his hair, just past and over his left ear. It was a touch she often used to soothe him when he was younger, and it usually made him feel safe and comfortable. This time, though, he couldn’t help but feel that somehow it wasn’t meant so much to comfort him but instead to comfort her.

Now he didn’t want to sit out here in the dark anymore. “I guess maybe we should go inside, though. I guess I need to get up early if I want to help Gramma.”

It was too dark to see his mother’s eyes, but he heard her take a breath and let it out. “Yep. That sounds good.” They put the chairs away and started the walk back home. He’d begun to feel too old for it lately, but she wanted to hold his hand, and he let her this time. It was dark, after all, so no one could see it. And it was kind of comforting.

#

The next morning at seven, he sprinted over to his grandmother’s backyard, meeting her as she was beginning to pull out the equipment to finish the fence and start stripping the garage. She frowned at him, but he’d decided not to rise to any of her baiting. While she finished the fence, he took the ladder and started scraping and peeling the old paint off the west side of the garage, the side with the most weather damage that would be blistering hot in a few hours, saving the north and south sides for the afternoon when there would be shade. He worked until lunch and then afterwards went out alone and finished the rest of the building on his own.

While he was scraping and scraping and scraping, many times his arms and shoulders and legs would tire, and he’d take a break and think about what he was doing. As he watched the yellow chips flying off the boards and fluttering and twirling and diving onto the grass around the garage, he wondered how deep he’d have to scrape to get all his grandfather’s paint off this building. And how many of those flakes belonged to his mother, when it was just her and her own mother left to do the whole job themselves? He wondered if that was why his grandmother had been scraping so hard when she went at the boards herself the day before. He wondered if she did this every five years just to freshen up the paint or because she wanted to get rid of every last vestige of that man if she could. Or maybe he wasn’t in her mind at all. She’d kept the ladder and chairs and plywood, after all. She was nothing if not a practical woman.

He and his grandmother hadn’t said much to each other all day, but in the late afternoon when Alex was done and putting the ladder back into the garage, she came out to survey his work. She squinted in the brightness, shielding her eyes with her hand as the sun beat down on the scraping he’d done that morning on the west side. “You do good work, boy,” was all she would say about it. “There’s storms coming on, so make sure you get everything inside.”

The next morning, they started the painting, but they both stopped at lunchtime because the sun was too hot. When they resumed the following morning, his grandmother stopped them after they finished the western side. “I don’t know if we’re laying it on too think, or if the boards are soaking it up more than normal, but we’re about out of paint. I’m going to have to send your mother to the store to get another gallon, I reckon. Maybe two, just to be safe.” She had a few marks of cream-yellow paint on her checks and nose. “About time to quit for the day anyhow. You think you can get your mother to go to the store this afternoon?”

He was committed to the project now. He told her he’d see to it. After helping her put away their tools, he ran to tell his mother about their chore.

He never wondered why his mother had to be the one to go buy the paint. He just assumed it was one of the things that his grandmother was set in her ways about, and sometimes she delegated tasks to his mother. He went along to the hardware store, feeling as though he wanted to see out this aspect of the project, too, and when she asked the service man to mix up two more gallons of Gin Fizz, he didn’t even notice, really, what she’d said. But as they were riding home, his mother asked him, “Did you overhear what the paint color was?”

He repeated it for her.

“Now, this might seem a little strange, but do you think you can keep that to yourself?”

“Sure, I guess.” He shrugged it off, and then, when they got home and they carried the paint inside and he watched his mother popping the lid off one of the cans and smearing paint over the words “Gin Fizz” that the paint-mixer had helpfully written in grease pen, he understood what was going on. “You mean, Gramma doesn’t know that the fence and all is painted in Gin Fizz?”

He didn’t know what the “fizz” part meant exactly, but he knew about gin. He started to laugh at the thought of his grandmother surrounding herself with this color of paint named after booze—so much righteous indignation over liquor, like when she insisted that she would disown them both, him and his mother, if he was allowed to go on a school-sponsored trip for all the year-long honor roll students to a theme park because the park was sponsored by a beer company. He started to guffaw dramatically, but when his mother turned to look at him as if he’d just interrupted a funeral, he stopped himself. “I know it seems funny to you,” she said with her teacher’s gravity and self-possession, something he rarely saw at home, “but this is serious, Alex.” She secured the lid with some well-placed hammer blows, set the can on a porch step, and invited him to sit beside her.

He was already feeling repressed. “Why? I don’t even know what ‘gin fizz’ is.”

“It’s a cocktail. An alcoholic drink with gin and lemon juice. And I don’t know why your Grampa chose this color. Of all the colors to choose. I don’t know if he meant it as a joke, or if it was just a coincidence. But she’s always loved this color, ever since the day she saw it. That’s what she told me. She had Daddy paint the whole house this color, even the little garage and some of the lawn chairs we had when I was little. You know she likes cream-colored things.” She did have a number of yellow or cream-colored objects in or around her house, including wall paint, curtains, bed linens and coverings, dresses, shoes, hats, and the interior of the car she drove. “He knew she liked things that are lemony and citrus colors. I like to think that he just picked a color she liked regardless of the name and then tried to hide it from her for her own good. So she wouldn’t have a fit and reject it for the silliest of reasons.”

“What’s her deal with that anyway? I thought she was just like that because of Grampa. She was like that before, too?”

“I believe so. Her daddy’d been a bit of a drinker, too, and when her mother died kind of young, she had to care for her daddy and sisters, and it made her kind of bitter.”

Alex had never before considered his grandmother being any age other than as old as she was then. Even when he’d been imagining her as this newly-wed with a new house and husband, he saw her as wrinkly-faced and gray-haired. But she’d been a little girl once, and her mother had died, and she’d had to move into her aunt’s house, and she’d had to deal with a drunk father and two younger sisters who weren’t responsible to the mistress of the house like she was—he’d heard this history before in bits and pieces. Now he saw it. He saw that girl. He saw them trying to get away with all manner of foolishness, and how she would straighten them out, make them be a respectable family, make them mend their ways—or she’d have her foot up their asses.

“So, your Grampa had me go along with him the last time he picked up the paint for her. He let me in on the joke then. He was tickled by it. I was little, but I remembered. We had to keep it a secret. We had a lot of secrets.” He looked at her then, but she got up and moved to stand in front of him. She grabbed the handles of the two cans. “Let’s go drop these off and let her know it’s done so she won’t fret over it.” Before they left the yard, she stopped. “And we’ll keep the name to ourselves?”

He was suddenly uncomfortable with secrets. Keeping secrets was maybe another male Quillen characteristic he didn’t want to inherit. Still, he nodded. He didn’t want to make trouble.

#

The paint went up, across each board and down the posts and around the windows. In one way or another, he’d touched nearly every board of the garage, and a lot of the fence, and it was all covered now, all of it, with his own layer of paint, and he knew it was all Gin Fizz.

His grandmother was unquestionably pleased when they were finished. “It sure looks a darn-sight better now, don’t it?”

“Yep.”

“Sure does. A darn-sight better.”

They went into the house, and although the air-conditioning made the ninety-degree weather feel even stickier by contrast, they decided to take their celebratory glasses of lemonade out into the yard and sit in the shade behind the house and look on the sunbrightened results of their week-long efforts. They’d both downed a full glass and were settling into their second when a sick feeling took Alex’s stomach. He thought it might have been too much lemonade too fast, but when he closed his eyes, what he saw was a dark garage filled with secrets.

He held his tongue for as long as he could, but he saw no end to this discomfort. He had to make it stop, and he felt it wouldn’t stop until he’d gotten out from under the shadow of at least the one secret he knew about. “I heard about something the other day,” he said, believing he was being delicate and discrete. If he’d had a beard to stroke or a pipe to hold in front of his nonchalantly squinting eyes, he would have effected these poses. Instead, he plowed ahead with a quavering voice. “Have you ever heard of a drink called a Gin Fizz?”

His grandmother made no move at all for several moments. She didn’t even appear to be breathing. She looked straight ahead at the fence, same as she had been before he uttered those contemptible words. Finally, she took a sip of her lemonade and continued to look out into the yard. “I take it you did in fact accompany your mother to the paint store.”

He nodded, but she wasn’t looking at him, so he said, “Yes.”

She took another sip. “I know all about that. Yes, yes, yes. I know all about Gin Fizz.”

The truth had emerged from the darkness, but it hadn’t lightened his stomach. Now what had he done? Had he betrayed his mother? He hadn’t meant to do that.

“Your mother thinks I don’t know. Is that what she told you?”

“Yes.”

“Her daddy probably told her that. But he’s the one who told me. Never trust the memory of a drunkard.” She looked at him now, and he saw the color of her eyes was a lighter brown than his or his mother’s. He’d never noticed that before. He may have never really looked until then. “Told me a few times. Trying to hurt me. Your mother was too little to know anything about any of it. He’d do a lot things and not remember. Or claim not to.”

They were quiet for a while, and Alex felt calmer in the silence. So she knew. She’d known all along. “You’re okay with Gin Fizz?”

She pursed her lips, like she was about to spit. “That don’t mean nothing to me. It’s just a dang color name. And look at it.” She pointed her glass at the fence. “Your granddaddy weren’t good for much, but he knew his paint.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell Mom then?” He was growing upset again, this time because it was like she was keeping a secret from them. “So you could make her keep buying the paint?”

“No, boy. She buys the paint because she thinks she’s keeping a secret for her daddy. It ain’t got nothing to do with me. But I never have told your mother because she never has asked me about it.”

“Shouldn’t we tell her?”

“What for, boy?”

“Because.” The truth was self-evident. He didn’t know how to explain it. But she didn’t respond to him and didn’t seem likely to. His stomach was no less sour, and he didn’t like the idea of these secrets at all. There were too many secrets. He hated them. It was too much to hold in. “Because secrets are lies. You’re just lying to her. You’re not telling her the truth.”

His grandmother took a sip from her lemonade, ruminating on the matter. “Boy, sometimes things just ain’t that simple.”

“Yes they are,” he said. But after he thought about it, he asked, “What do you mean?”

“They ain’t that simple. It ain’t just about lying and such. I can’t explain it to you. You’re too young to understand. It ain’t your fault that you’re too young, so don’t go on belly-aching about it. But there’s some things that are best left dead and buried. They ain’t secrets so much as they’re just dead history, and just like you don’t go digging up dead things to prove they’re still dead, you don’t go bringing up old dead history just because you want to feel good about yourself. Am I making myself clear, boy? It ain’t a secret not bringing up stuff nobody wants to talk about. It ain’t lying.” She took a breath. “It’s just common decency.”

He knew now he’d been right all along about the garage, no matter what his mother had told him, no matter what his grandmother might think of it. They’d be better off without that man’s garage, just like they were better off without the man himself. But they wouldn’t rid themselves of it. They’d live with it, and every five years or so when its ugliness threatened to reveal itself, they’d scrape the ugly away and paint over it, cover it up, and make it look like they loved it. Even invent excuses for it. Make you feel bad for even suggesting there’s anything wrong—oh, no, there’s nothing wrong here, nothing dark or ugly to see here. Look how pretty it is now, shimmering in the sunlight. No one’s ever going to know what darkness is inside it. As long you don’t say anything about it and embarrass everybody.

“I don’t understand,” Alex said into his sour glass of lemonade. But it wasn’t true. He was beginning to put it all together, beginning to understand exactly how it works in a family with secrets to keep. In fact, he was already playing his part, trying to fool himself and his grandmother, saying what he wished was true. “I just don’t get it.”

“I thank the Lord for that.” His grandmother leaned back in her chair, a rare contented smile warming her face, and closed her eyes against the brightening reflection of the lowering sun. “The Lord knows if it were up to me, boy, you never would understand.”

 

 

BIO

Eric BrittinghamEric B. Brittingham was born and raised among the soybean fields of downstate Delaware, and now lives and works as a technical communicator in northern Alabama. He is currently working on a novel that further explores the lives of the characters in this story. This is his first published work of fiction.

 

 

 

The Last of the Cowboys

by Jude Roy

 

 

When Joe Archer threatened to kill me, I took it up with the head of university security.

“There’s very little we can do unless he physically assaults you.” Paul Richelieu was a burly man with a grayish buzz that covered his head like a swath of mowed grass. A slick handlebar moustache dangled from the corners of his mouth. His nervous brown eyes kept dancing from me to the door and back to me.

“What?” I asked. “You mean he has to kill me before you can do anything about it?”

Richelieu studied his fingernails for a second of two before glancing up at me. He had large hands with stubby sausage fingers.

“It’s your word against his. Was anyone privileged to the alleged threat?”

“Excuse me? ‘Alleged threat’?” I wanted to say more—to remind him that I was the professor and Archer was the student—to remind him that I had been teaching at Immanuel University for five years and Archer was a first-year student—but I knew that none of that would help my case. Richelieu had a reputation for being tough on faculty.

He shifted his bulk in the office chair, and it creaked in protest.

“You know he’s going to deny it. Then it’ll be your word against his.” His eyes darted to the door and back at me. “You did say that there was no witness to the alleged threat?”

“Not that I know of. He came to me after class. “Richelieu held his hands out and shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of helplessness.

“I am the professor,” I said, despite myself. “Doesn’t that count for something?”

A grin slowly spread across Richelieu’s face. He was going to enjoy his response.

“Diddily shit,” he said through yellow teeth.

I nodded, stood, and made to leave.

“Do you want me to talk to him?” He asked, reluctantly.

“And piss him off more than he is?” It was my turn to smile. “I’ll deal with the situation since security seems incapable.” I turned my back on him and walked out.

***

“He did nothing?” Gayla yelled when I told her the events of the day.

“Nothing,” I said shrugging my shoulders. “Apparently it’s my word against Archer’s and neither one of us holds the edge.”

“But you are the professor, the authority figure in this case. Aren’t you?”

“According to Richelieu, that means diddily shit—his words, not mine.”

Gayla paced a few times before the stove. She cooked chicken curry stew, my favorite meal, and the aroma stimulated my appetite. I reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a beer, one of those dark Spanish types that I liked.

“Don’t go to class,” she said. “It isn’t worth it.”

“I can’t just shirk my responsibility,” I said. “What about all the other students who paid good money to be taught English? I owe them something.”

“You don’t owe them your life.”

My six-year-old son walked into the kitchen, hugged my leg, poured himself a glass of lemonade, and disappeared again out the back door.

My wife waited until the screen door slammed shut before continuing.

“This is ludicrous. Someone threatens to pop a cap in your head and you don’t take it seriously.”

Coming from my wife it sounded farcical, but it hadn’t sounded funny when earlier that afternoon Joe Archer said almost the same words. My three o’clock developmental class was the last of the day for me. It ended at three fifty and I was usually at home by four fifteen if no students stayed after class with questions. I waited respectfully as the students filed out. Then I started to file out with them. As I was just about to go past Joe’s desk, he stood up and blocked my path. He was a non-traditional student—older than the others were—a tall sinewy man with dark, severe eyes.

“Just a minute,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”

“Okay.” I returned to the front of the room and placed my stack of books on my desk. Joe Archer threw his backpack next to my books and leaned across the desk.

‘I don’t like English,” he said. There was not a trace of humor or sarcasm in his voice.

I laughed, suspecting a joke. I looked over his shoulder expecting someone to pop in and say, “Got you.”

“You see something funny out there?” He indicated the door with a nod of his head. His eyes never left mine.

“Listen,” I said, trying to disguise the sudden fear rising in my chest. “You don’t have to like English. It’s a class. You take it. You pass it. You go on.”

“You’re going to pass me. Right?”

“If you make the grade, I’ll definitely pass you.”

“Let’s get something straight, Mr. Professor. Either you pass me, or…” He held his arm out, his hand shaped like a pistol and aimed at my forehead. “Or bang.”

“Are you threatening me?”

He glanced over his shoulder at the empty room.

“I been to Vietnam, Mr. Professor. I killed more gooks than I’d care to count. I even killed a snotty-nosed lieutenant that tried to send me down one of those rat holes out there. You think I’m going to have any problems popping a cap in an English professor’s head?”

I didn’t answer. I picked up my books and marched out of the room on shaky legs. When I arrived in my office, I called my wife and relayed what had occurred.

“Go see security,” she said. “He needs to be removed from campus.”

That hadn’t worked.

I tried not let on to Gayla just how frightened I was. I took a spoon from the silverware drawer and dipped it into the curry chicken. I blew on it for a few seconds and sipped it.

“Man, I’m so glad I married you and didn’t let that skinny biology dude grab you. If he had known how well you cook curry chicken, he would have put up much more of a fight.”

My wife scowled at me.

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing. You’re not going to get out of this that easy.”

‘What can I do, Gayla? I need the job. I can’t just quit because some psycho asshole decides to intimidate his English teacher.” I chuckled and reached in the refrigerator for a beer. It was just too bizarre—an English teacher of all things.

“Call your department head.”

“Oh, come on Gay. I’m on tenure track. I can’t go around stirring up the waters.”

My son popped his head in the doorway.

“Are you two fighting?”

“No,” we both exclaimed and he quickly withdrew.

“Call him,” Gayla said and handed me the phone. I sighed and took a long sip from my beer.

Paul Washburn’s specialty was John Donne. He was a small pale man usually dressed impeccably in a suit and a skinny tie. He had a whinny voice that sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a tin drum. I was hoping he would not be in his office or would not be answering his phone at 6:00 o’clock in the evening, but I knew he would be.

“Washburn,” he whined.

“Dr. Washburn, this is Gary Soileau.”

“Yes, Gary. How are you?”

“Fine, sir. Uh, I’m afraid there’s been a sort of incident during my developmental class today.”

“Oh? Nothing serious, I hope.”

I looked at Gayla and rolled my eyes. She shook a stirring spoon at me, threatening me forward.

“Serious enough that I took it to Richelieu.”

“That does sound serious. What happened?”

“One of my students, Joseph W. Archer, threatened me. He threatened to pop a cap in my head if I didn’t pass him.”

“Pop a cap?”

“Yes, sir, that’s the vernacular for put a bullet in my head.”

“Are you sure there was no misunderstanding?”

“Absolutely sure.”

“What did Richelieu say?”

“That he couldn’t do anything until the student actually carried out his threat.”

“He actually said that?”

“Perhaps not in those words, but that was his meaning.”

“You probably should have come to me first with this, Gary. It usually is best to keep these kinds of problems within the department if we can.”

“Sir, this was very serious. The man looked capable of carrying out his threat. At the time, I thought security was the right choice.”

“Water through the dam. What do you want me to do? Reassign you?”

“No, sir. It doesn’t matter who takes over the class. He is going to have to deal with Archer.”

“What then?”

“I wasn’t asking you to do anything, Dr. Washburn. I simply was informing you of the situation, in case something untoward did happen.”

Gayla glared at me. I shrugged my helplessness.

“I tell you what I’ll do, Gary. I’ll have Security place extra people around that area Wednesday. What is your classroom number?”

“25B, sir. But I don’t think Archer would attempt anything at school. Extra security may just complicate matters.”

‘Tell me what you want me to do, Gary.”

“Nothing, Dr. Washburn. I can handle Joe Archer. If it gets any messier, I will contact you.”

“That sounds like a good plan, Gary. Keep me posted. Okay?”

“Yes, sir. I will. Goodbye, Dr. Washburn.”

“Goodbye, Gary.” He hung up.

I handed the phone to Gayla, and she slammed it on the cradle. I chugged my beer and reached inside the refrigerator for another.

“Damn,” I said and faced an angry Gayla.

“You should have been more assertive.”

“Alright Gayla, You tell me. What would you have done?”

She stepped away from the stove and stood in front of me. Her action reminded me of Archer.

“I would have told Washburn to do something. It is his responsibility to make sure his people have a secure place to work in, Gary. You wimped out and took on the responsibility on your shoulders. You always do that. Sometimes you’re so damn macho.”

“You can’t have it both ways, Gayla. Either I’m wimpy or I’m macho. I can’t be both.”

She raised her hand. I thought she was going to slap me, but she didn’t. With a cry of exasperation, she stomped out of the room.

***

I prepared myself as best I could for the next meeting with Joe Archer. I bought a pepper spray canister and convinced myself that I could handle him if he tried anything in my classroom. He entered with the other students, dropped his book bag, with the skull and cross bone patch stenciled on it, on the floor, and glared at me. I taught my class as usual, keeping a hand close to the pepper spray and a wary eye on Joe.

Actually, the only real problem I had with Joe during the course of the semester was the time I took the class to the computer lab to introduce them to word processing. He waited until all the students had filed out. Then he stood and confronted me.

“I’m not going,” he said crossing his arms over his chest. He wore a black sleeveless shirt and his biceps bulged intimidatingly.

“What?” I rested my hand on the pepper spray.

“I’m not going. I don’t know a damn thing about computers and I don’t want to either. I’m not going.”

‘Do you know how to type? That’s basically all I’m going to ask the students to do.”

‘I don’t type either.”

I decided that I had two choices. I could cite my syllabus, pointing out to him that it explicitly stated that all papers written out of class needed to be typed, or I could try a different approach.

“How’s your handwriting?”

He looked at me at me in surprise, his eyes widening, his arms dropping to his side.

“Decent, I suppose.”

“Good,” I said. “All I’m going to do is have the rest of the students type up a rough draft of their essays. Why don’t you stay in the classroom and write yours out. When you’re done you can bring it to me in the comp lab. Okay?”

“Yeah, sure, I guess.” He started to turn around—then stopped. “What else?”

“Nothing. Don’t forget to double space.”

He sat down and I joined the other students in the computer lab. Thirty-five minutes later he handed me his paper, printed in a careful hand.

“You’ll let me know how I did on that?”

“Next meeting,” I said.

Joe’s paper was a three-paragraph proposal to use ex-servicemen as supervisors of youth boot camps. His idea was well thought out—the execution was weak; however. I saw the potential of the work and kept him after class.

“That’s a good essay,” I said, placing it face up on his desk. He looked down and lifted it with two hands.

“It can’t be that good. You bled all over it.”

I smiled. It was the first time I’d ever heard him joke about something in the class.

“Sure, it’s got a few problems with execution, but the idea is solid as a rock. I believe it’s an idea worth pursuing, Joe.”

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot, Professor. I can’t think of anybody who would be more qualified to run them than ex-jarheads like me.”

“Were you in the marines?”

“Yeah, man. Spent two years in Nam. Took a shrapnel in my arm.” He lifted his arm and showed me an ugly red scar. “Damn thing entered just above the elbow and came out just behind my shoulder there.” He pulled his shirtsleeve back and showed me the exit scar. “I was damn lucky it didn’t hit a bone. I spent a few weeks stateside healing up, turned right around again, and volunteered to go back to Nam. I was there at the fall of Saigon. I felt the humiliation.” He paused a moment, and I watched as he consciously pulled himself together. “Yeah, man. I was in the marines.”

“Tell me about those boot camps, Joe.”

He talked for a good while and I was impressed with how knowledgeable he was on the topic. He invited me to go have a beer with him at the local VFW Post. I agreed and I called Gayla, who was horrified that I was even considering it.

“He’ll take you somewhere and shoot you,” she argued.

“No, honey. I got a glimpse of him today. I don’t think he would do that.”

“You don’t think? Gary, you’re not a psychologist.”

“Listen, he’s an interesting person. He’s invited me to have a beer and talk. I think I should take him up on it.”

There was a long pause over the phone.

“Damn it, Gary, you’re doing that macho stuff again.” She paused waiting for me to say something, but there was no way I was going to take the bait. She broke the silence with a sigh. “Where are you going?”

“The VFW Post.”

“Oh, god. With all his homicidal, fanatical, ex-army friends.”

“Marine.”

“What?”

“Marines, he was in the marines, Gay.”

“Damn you, Gary.”

“It’ll be alright, Gayla.”

“It damn well better be, or I’ll never talk to you again.”

“Listen to you.”

“Be careful, Gary.”

“I will.”

***

I met Gayla in Lafayette, Louisiana where I was student teaching and working on my Masters of English degree. It was a beautiful spring day, and I had a break, so I took the Evelyn Waugh book I was reading for one of my classes and made my way to Garrard Park just a few blocks from campus. I chose a picnic table shaded by a live oak and cracked open the book. The table sat next to a walking path and Gayla jogged past. I couldn’t believe how beautiful she was. When she jogged past me again, the book lay closed on the picnic table—forgotten. The only thing on my mind was Gayla. She wore skimpy jogging shorts and a sleeveless tee shirt. She had tied her hair, almost as long as it was now, into a ponytail, and it bounced in rhythm with her running. When she came around the third time, I made my move.

“Aren’t you tired yet?” I called out.

She stopped running, faced me, and jogged in place.

“No,” she said simply and took off again.

The fourth time she came around, I didn’t say anything, as well as the fifth. The sixth time she came around, I decided to say something.

“Now, I’m tired.”

She stopped again and jogged in place. She was breathing hard.

“Are you watching me?”

“Uh, huh. That’s how I get my exercise.”

She smiled. Probably because that was either the most unusual pickup line or the stupidest, she’d ever heard.

“Who are you?” She was still jogging in place.

“I teach at the college.”

“You’re a professor?”

“That’s in my future. Right now, I’m a student teacher.”

“What do you teach?”

“Writing, mostly developmental writing. I struggled with writing all my life, and now that I’ve seen the light, I want to share it with others.”

“Really,” she said and took a seat at the table with me. “And just what is the secret?”

“Exercise. Now, it’s my turn to ask a question.”

“Wait a minute,” she interrupted. “What do you mean by ‘exercise’?”

“Writing is a physical memory like shooting a free throw or hitting a tennis ball. The more you do it the better you get.”

“What if you start off doing it wrong?”

“Then you miss and figure out why. My turn to ask questions.”

“Okay, that’s fair.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a student at the college?”

“Really? I’ve never seen you in my classes. I would remember.”

“I know how to write, apparently.”

“Touché.”

“I’m working on a BS in mathematics.”

“Oh, God, my Achilles’ Hell.”

“Shouldn’t that be Achilles’ Heel?”

“No. Hell as in H E double L.”

She laughed. She had a nice laugh uninhibited as a child might laugh. “Do you ever go out?”

“Sometimes.”

“Where do you like to go?”

“Now, who’s asking all the questions?”

“One more, okay?” She nodded. “Would you consider going out with me?”

She looked at the book sitting on the table.

“What book is that?”

“You’re avoiding the question.”

“Yes, I am. I don’t know you.”

“What’s there to know? My name is Gary Soileau. I teach writing. I’m kind to animals. I like to help people better themselves, and I earn enough to afford to take a beautiful woman to a decent restaurant.”

She laughed again.

“Okay, but I’m a tough nut to crack.”

“Believe me, my intentions are honorable.”

The rest was history. The chemistry between us was incredible. We married the day after I received my diploma.

***

The VFW Post was just out of town, down a narrow tree-lined blacktop road. The building was a low-slung brick rectangle with a glass door and no windows. A dusty graveled driveway circled the flagpole in front of the building and a sad-looking Sherman tank in need of paint sat alone in a circle of gravel to the side. Someone had planted lilies around the edge of the circle.

Joe met me at the door with two bottles of Budweiser. He handed me one and then led me through a lobby and down a short hallway to a bar. A Johnny Cash tune blared from the speakers hanging from the four corners of the room. Several men smoked and drank at the bar while another group sat at a table in the corner playing cards. The room was thick with smoke and smelled like beer.

“Hey, everybody,” Joe yelled out over the music. ‘This is my English professor.”

“Big fucking deal,” someone at the table said. A couple of men from the bar nodded. One of them slid off his stool and shook my hand.

“Any friend of Joe’s is a friend of mine,” he said and returned to his drink after a nervous glance at Joe.

“These are the regulars,” Joe said, indicating the bar with his beer bottle. “They come in every day and this is what they do—drink, play cards, and relive the wars.” He offered me a stool and sat on the one next to it.

“How about you?” I asked.

He nodded, slowly.

“Yeah, me too.” He turned and picked at the label on his beer bottle for a while. “Can I tell you something, Professor?”

“Go ahead.”

“I can’t talk to them about some things. You know what I mean?” I shook my head. “I can talk to them about wars and killing and shit like that, but I can’t talk to them about other things.”

“Such as, Joe?”

He glanced over his shoulder at the card table.

“Ideas, you know. Oh shit, man. I write poetry.”

I almost laughed. He was so serious.

“Oh,” I said, stroking my moustache. “What kind of poetry?”

“Just stuff, man. About the war. About John Wayne. About my woman. You know, stuff.”

“About John Wayne?”

“He’s my hero.”

He fell silent again, picking at the beer label. I listened to a Waylon Jennings tune, and surveyed the room. It wasn’t a big room. The bar ran along one wall, the shelves behind it filled with bottles of whiskey and liquor. The music came from a small cassette deck. The bartender was a short man with a hard face and thick arms and legs—probably an ex-serviceman, too. The walls were covered with posters—of servicemen, scantily clad women, and weapons. Three small round tables lined the wall opposite the bar. A ceiling fan twirled on low, the light from it joined the two beer sign lights hanging from the entrance wall and the back wall to illuminate the dark room. A floor lamp provided the card players with light enough to read their cards.

“I know me and you got off to a rough start,” Joe said. “That was before I understood about you.”

“What do you understand about me, Joe?” I was curious.

He glanced at me, and then returned to his beer label.

“That you care about whether we learn this shit or not. It’s important to you.”

“You’re very observant.”

“I know about caring, Professor.” He looked at me. “Can I ask you a favor—a big favor?”

“Sure,” I said. “Ask away.” I wanted another beer, so I signaled the bartender to bring over two more.

“Would you mind reading over some of my poetry? Letting me know if it’s any good?”

“Not at all, Joe. I would love to.”

I had two more beers before I left there and drove home. Gayla was furious. Why hadn’t I called? Didn’t I know that she was worried sick about me? I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.

“Don’t ever worry about Joe Archer, honey. He and I are buds. He’s letting me read his poetry.”

She looked at me as if I was crazy.

***

At first, married life with Gayla was fantastic. I got a job teaching at Clemson University in South Carolina, but it was one of those four years and you’re out kind of jobs.

“Without a PhD,” the department head told me. “We can’t put you on tenure track.” That’s when I knew that I would have trouble finding a tenured job. I had three choices: find another career, get a PhD, or publish. I had taken a few creative writing courses, so I wrote this satire about a black man elected mayor of a small Louisiana town and sent it to the Atlantic. To my complete surprise, the magazine decided to publish it. When my four years at Clemson ended, I applied for a tenured position at Emanuel University and they accepted me. Washburn wanted me to teach creative writing. I said I would if he allowed me to teach developmental writing also. He jumped on it. Apparently, most tenured teachers didn’t like teaching developmental. I gathered my wife and my five-year-old son and moved to Springfield.

At first, life was good. The department liked me fine. They had me teaching two creative writing classes and two developmental classes. Where life was getting complicated was at home. Gayla was becoming officious. She started monitoring my career telling me how to act in front of the senior faculty, and whom I needed to impress. She told me that I wasn’t aggressive enough—I needed to sway the right people—make demands. I felt as if she was entering a part of my life I didn’t want her in. I felt as if my home life should be separate from my work life. I wanted her to let me handle my own career. Her meddling was irritating.

***

The semester was a good one. Joe passed my developmental class with an A+. In fact, I recommended the department give him credit for Writing I. He had improved that much. About a week after finals, I received a phone call from him inviting me to come to his apartment for a drink. I suspected he wanted me to read his poetry, so I accepted.

His apartment was about a block from campus in one of those neighborhoods that catered to students. I climbed the iron stairs to the second floor and knocked on the door. Joe opened it holding a bottle of Corona in his fist.

“Here,” he said and pushed the bottle at me. I took it and followed him into the place. He led me to a cloth couch across from a television. The first thing I noticed was the John Wayne posters. There must have been five or six in that one room—John Wayne as a green beret. John Wayne as a World War II soldier. John Wayne as a Seabee. John Wayne as an oilman. John Wayne as a cavalryman. John Wayne as a cowboy. And my favorite, John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn, the cantankerous old cowboy in True Grit. A stack of VCR tapes sat on the television. All the titles I could read were John Wayne movies. In fact, The Green Berets played on the television with the sound turned down.

“You like John Wayne, huh?”

“I told you. He’s my hero. Nobody did more for our country than John Wayne. I try to live my life following his example.”

“I see.”

Joe disappeared for a few minutes and reappeared holding a bottle of tequila and a black folder. He held out the bottle to me; I shook my head. He shrugged and raised it to his lips. I watched his adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed several good drinks. He pulled the bottle from his lips with a satisfying sigh, recorked it, and placed it on the floor between us. He handed me the black folder.

“These represent my life,” he said, his voice stony serious.

The folder contained about twenty or thirty poems, carefully hand printed in blue ink. Each poem was numbered and dated. Each one rhymed. Poem number one beseeched Emily to “fill his heart and empty his head”—begged Emily “to lose her innocence and climb into his bed.” Poem two rejoiced in his love for her. Poem number five was a tribute to John Wayne. “He walks across the screen like he walks across my heart. With everything he does, he asks me to do my part.” The poem ends with, “And now that he’s dead and gone to his maker/his memory a mere cocktail shaker/of scenes and lines, I can only drink to who he was/and offer him my drunken applause.” Poem nine was about Vietnam—a friend “spread around the gook countryside like chopped up manure.” In poems ten through fifteen, he begs Emily to come back to him. In fifteen, he threatens to commit suicide if she doesn’t: “I will blow my fucking brains out on this clean white ceiling. /Understand what I’m saying—listen to my feelings.” The rest of the poems, sixteen through twenty-one, were about Vietnam or people he knew in Vietnam. Number nineteen was about a friend’s ashes “sitting on the altar of life. /Free from all worries—free of all strife.” Number twenty-one, dated the day before, expressed the futility of making sense of life after Vietnam. “Once you’ve held a bleeding heart in your hand—/Once you’ve heard the music of God’s big band,/Then you can never go back to living as normal people do./You can only mix in with the living stew/Drink yourself to death—drink yourself to death/And breath your last breath—breath your last breath.”

When I had read all twenty-one, I reached down and took a swig of tequila.

Joe took the bottle from me and swallowed some more.

“What’d you think?” He asked after capping the bottle.

“There are some very powerful poems in here, Joe.”

He took the folder from me and scanned the pages.

“It’s like I told you, Professor. This is my life. This is me.” He shook the folder at me and tossed it on the coffee table where it came to rest next to a John Wayne comic book. “Can I tell you something, Professor?” I nodded. “It’s personal.” I nodded again. “Come with me,” he said, and I followed him into his small kitchen. He pulled open the refrigerator and pulled out two Coronas. He gave me one and pointed the other to a row of pill bottles neatly lined up on the counter. “A couple of years ago I visited a VA psychiatrist. I was depressed—couldn’t seem to stop myself from crying. I’d watch a John Wayne movie and boohoo like a baby. Hell, I’d be sitting in a restaurant eating a Burger King or something and start boohooing. The doctor prescribed me TCA’s, uh, Tricyclic Antidepressants. I started shaking like a tree in a windstorm. I couldn’t even hold a phone to my ear without pounding myself to death. Then I started throwing up. I’d go to piss and it was worse than an old man—I’d stand at the urinal with my thingy in my hand and wait and wait and wait for a teeny little drizzle. It was pathetic. So the doctor prescribed Phenelzine and when that didn’t work, he prescribed tranylcypromine.”

I shook my head. I had never heard of any of those medications.

“Yeah, I know what you’re thinking; ‘He sounds like a fucking pharmacist.’ Well, I do. It’s a necessary side-effect of what I have.” He took a swig from the tequila and chased it down with a swig of Corona. “I ballooned to twice my size and nearly killed myself when I gorged on a hunk of blue cheese. How the hell was I supposed to know that you weren’t supposed to eat aged cheese with that crap? That’s when the doctor put me on fluoxetine, Prozac. Life is near perfect for me now.” He picked up a bottle of pills and shook one out. He placed it on his tongue and chased it down with a swallow of tequila. I tend to be a little more aggressive, but not nearly as aggressive as I was in Vietnam, so it’s a matter of degree, I guess. I don’t sleep as much, which is okay because when I do sleep, I have these violent dreams. The last time I slept, I dreamed that I killed a man by shoving a mop handle up his butt. Can you imagine? A mop handle?” He shook his head and laughed. Then he took a long swallow from his beer. “Come here,” he said. “I want to show you something.” We walked down a short hallway until we came to a door on the right. He pulled out a key and unlocked the deadbolt installed in the door. “This is no everyday flimsy interior door, Professor. This is a steel reinforced exterior door. If you’re going to break into this room, you’ll have to have a battering ram or the key.” He swung the door opened with fanfare. “Welcome to my special room,” he said.

The room was a standard apartment bedroom, approximately ten feet square, but what was amazing was the color. The ceiling was a glossy white, the walls were a glossy red, and bright blue tile covered the floors. The two windows in the room were painted red and barred. The wall opposite the door held a map of Vietnam about five feet by five feet. Little black and white pins covered the map. The wall to my right was an arsenal. Several rifles and pistols rested on racks and in rectangular cases. I recognized an AR15 and a .45 caliber pistol. Another weapon looked like a grenade launcher, but I didn’t know enough about military weapons to say for sure. One rectangular case held four grenades, the pins still in them. An American flag covered the wall to my left. Behind me, the wall held several road maps: Arkansas, Louisiana, Michigan, California, Montana, and Missouri. Pins dotted their surfaces, too. In the middle of the room, directly under the light, a flag-draped altar stood. On top of it sat an urn.

‘How do you like it?” Joe asked.

I was speechless. The room frightened me—perhaps it was due to the bars on the windows, or the weapons, or maybe the care with which he had arranged everything, or the garishness of it all.

‘What is it, Joe?”

‘It’s my special room. You’re only the third person to ever see it, not including me.” He grabbed my arm at the elbow and led me to the Vietnam map. “The white pins are engagements I’ve been in—the black ones indicate the death of someone I knew.”

“Wow.” There were at least twenty-five black pins, and too many white ones to count. I nodded toward the urn. “What’s this?” I asked.

Joe walked over to the altar and gently placed a hand on the urn.

“This is ConnieMac. The sweetest son-of-a-bitch to ever share a foxhole with me.”

“You served with him in Vietnam?”

“Uh huh. CM and I were at Khe Sanh together. We separated when I got wounded in the Lam Son 719 operation. I got a ticket home. He and I joined forces again just before the Fall of Saigon. You know what’s crazy—CM never received even a scratch in Vietnam. He dodged bullets, grenades, mortar fire—you name it. He never even received a scratch. Comes back to the U.S. and the next thing I know, I get a telegram from some rinky-dink town in Louisiana saying they got the ashes of one ConnieMac Beauregard and that they found a paper on him requesting that they send his ashes to me. Would I send them the postage money?” Joe took a long drink from the bottle of tequila. “CM was a hero, man. A fucking hero and they don’t have the courtesy to pay for mailing his ashes.” He shook his head. His eyes watered, and he wiped the tears away with his forearm, the tequila sloshing in the bottle. “I sent them the money. I wouldn’t want those SOB’s to dirty his memory with their cheapness.”

I tried to think of something, but I had the distinct impression that I did not know the whole story, nor was Joe going to tell it to me. Instead, I nodded, indicating to him that I shared his sense of outrage.

Joe walked to the wall, which held the weapons and pulled down a .45 caliber pistol.

“This was my favorite,” he said, charging the weapon. “I couldn’t hit the side of a barn with it, but when I did hit, man, it would knock those gooks back. I shot one at twenty-five feet once. Right here.” He pointed to his forehead with the gun. “Went in clean—a tiny little hole like a third eye—but the back of his head was missing. I mean it was totally missing. Killed that mother instantly. Never knew what hit him.” Joe examined the gun in his hand, then raised it and pointed it at my forehead. “If I was to shoot you, Professor, it would go in smooth as a hot knife through butter, but it would come out like a brick through glass.”

“Joe, would you point that thing somewhere else?”

“You are a trusting individual, Professor. What’s makes you think that I didn’t lure you here to pop a .45 in your brainy head?”

I had trouble standing, and I developed an uncontrollable urge to urinate. I forced myself to stand taller.

“Take your best shot, Joe, but don’t you dare miss.” My hand went automatically to the pepper spray canister that I still carried in my pocket. Joe’s eyes followed my movement. He laughed.

“You got balls, Professor. I’ll give you that.” He lowered the pistol, and I was able to breathe again.

I turned and walked out of Joe’s apartment and never saw him again.

***

“You fool,” Gayla yelled at me when I told her what happened. Will sat at the table eating cookies and milk. Gayla was visibly shaken. “You stupid, stupid fool. Didn’t you even think about your family? What about our son? What about me having to raise a child without his father? How do I explain to him just how stupid you were?”

I glanced at Will, but he looked down at the table.

“I didn’t know he was going to do that, Gayla.”

“What is it with men that they have to court danger—that they need danger to feel more alive? Fucking cowboys, all of you. That’s it, isn’t it? You’ve been flirting with this guy all semester—playing Russian roulette with a mentally unstable person just so you can feel macho.”

“Oh come on, Gayla. I had no idea the man was so unstable.” She hit me—slapped me on the arm, over and over again until I grabbed her wrists.

“What the hell is the matter with you?”

She cried, the tears flooding from her eyes.

“You are an intelligent man, Gary Soileau. Who in the hell do you think you’re deceiving?”

I released her, and she turned away from me.

“I’m sorry, Gay. Maybe there was some of that macho, John Wayne stuff in what I did, but I never thought…”

“You never thought, Gary. That’s it exactly. You never thought about your family.” I reached over and placed a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off. “Don’t touch me, Gary. You don’t care about Will and me.”

“Come on, Gay. I love you.”

“No you don’t, Gary.” She faced me. Her dark eyes pierced mine. “Look at him.” She nodded at Will, who sat quietly at the table, tears leaking down his cheek. “Look at what you’re doing to him.”

I went to him, but he stood and ran to his mother, who encircled him protectively with her arms. I wanted to yell, “Joe is the dangerous one. Not me,” but I didn’t because I knew she would not understand.

***

That night Gayla and I attended a small get-together at Dr. Franks’, a professor of psychology, house. There were several other people there, academic types. The conversation turned to the differences between men and women. Dr. Franks said that men were much more aggressive than women were, and I countered that women were just as aggressive but in more subtle ways.

He nodded.

“In what ways, Gary?”

“Their aggressiveness is more verbal than it is physical.”

“Interesting. Give me an example.”

The only example I could give was between Gayla and me. I’d had a couple of beers, so I figured, what the hell. I glanced at Gayla, and her eyes pleaded me not to go on.

“Here is a hypothetical situation. Suppose a woman is not happy with her husband, so she demeans his manhood.”

“Demeans, Gary?”

“She calls him a wimp—spineless and cowardly.”

“And how does this make him feel?”

“To be crass, deballed. He does everything in his power to support his wife and child, and when he does show signs of aggression, she calls him a cowboy, another derogatory word in her vocabulary.”

“He has a child.”

That’s when I realized everybody was aware that I was talking about myself and Gayla.

“The point I was trying to convey is that women are just as aggressive as men except their aggressiveness is more verbal,” I said feebly.

Afterwards, once we were home, Gayla tore into me.

“How could you embarrass me like you did?”

“I didn’t mean to, Gay.”

“You didn’t mean to?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Tell me something. Do you love me?”

“Of course, I do.”

“Then how could you embarrass me in front of those people the way you did?”

“You weren’t the only one I embarrassed, Gay.”

“Who else?”

“Me. I embarrassed myself too.”

“Yes, you did,” she said and stomped off.

***

When I said I never saw Joe Archer again, I was only partially correct. In the middle of the spring semester, I received a phone call from the Bohemian National Crematorium to pick up the ashes of Joseph Wayne Archer. The urn was ceramic with the American flag depicted on one side and a marine at parade rest on the other. A trip to the police department told me how he died. Apparently, Joe stared into the muzzle of a gun for the last time.

“You shoulda seen the room they found him in,” the detective in charge of the case told me. “Painted red, white, and blue with maps of Vietnam and all sorts of guns hanging up on the wall. There was a busted up plastic urn on the floor and ashes spread out all over the place mixed in with the guy’s blood. It was a real mess. The guy musta been watching a John Wayne movie when he decided to do it, ‘cause there was one playing on the television in the living room—the one where John Wayne has cancer or something—The Shootists, isn’t it.”

“Did he leave a note?”

“Nope, not a word. Just did the deed.”

“Then how did the crematorium know to send me his ashes.”

The policeman shrugged.

“Guess he arranged it ahead of time.”

***

A couple of days later, I received an envelope from Joe, dated the day he died. He had stuffed a pile of paper ashes in it—his poems, I assumed. I dumped the ashes in the wastepaper basket.

One day, a few weeks later, a brother with the same severe dark eyes picked up the urn from me, and Joe Archer disappeared from my life forever, except for the recurring dream. In it, he is sitting in my class at a desk much too small for him. He pulls out a revolver from his book bag and points it at me. I want to run but my feet won’t cooperate. Joe pulls the trigger, and I brace for the impact, but nothing happens except a loud click. With a crooked grin, he places the muzzle against his temple and pulls the trigger—another loud click and Joe flinches. He laughs, revealing coffee and tobacco-stained teeth. He points the pistol at me and pulls the trigger again. Click. Joe’s lips move, but I can’t make out the words. He places the muzzle against his temple again and pulls the trigger without hesitation. When nothing happens, he points it at me again. I watch his lips move. Two more, they say, but I can’t hear anything. I realize that I can’t hear what he is saying because of the music playing. It is the score from The Cowboys—a masculine sound as big as the outdoors. I watch his finger depress the trigger—the hammer rears back and slams forward. Nothing happens. Then I see the certainty of death in Joe’s dark eyes. He brings the muzzle to his temple. Don’t do it, I yell, but he can’t hear me over the violins and the orchestra. Fire flies from the revolver, entering Joe’s temple. The music ends abruptly. The report echoes from wall to wall. The left side of Joe’s head explodes like a volcano. I smell the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood. Joe Archer slumps over the desk, his misshapen head leaking onto the floor.

***

I awoke with Gayla shaking me awake. My son stood at my feet between the television and me. In the background, the boys have buried the dead body of Will Anderson and are standing around the grave. “It’s okay,” I told my son’s worried face. “Just a bad dream. That’s all.” He nodded his face as solemn as the boys on the television screen were.

“Come on, Will,” Gayla said. She took his hand and walked out, slamming the door behind her.

It sounded like a gunshot.

 

 

BIO

Jude RoyJude stories have appeared in The Southern Review, American Short Fiction, National Public Radio’s The Sound of Writing, The Fiction Writer, Mysteries and Manners Quarterly, Journal of Kentucky Studies, Mysterical-E, The Riverbend Review, and many others. Jude is originally from Chataignier, LA and currently, teaches writing at Madisonville Community College in Madisonville, KY.

 

 

 

Elizabeth Perdomo

Scenes from the Window

by Elizabeth Perdomo

 

Sweet potato vines
Tangle out past the edge
Of gardens

Tobacco barns
Tall & faded grey,
Now empty

White churches, a primitive
Baptist paradise, with outdoor
Tables for picnics on the grounds.

Weathered brick chimneys
Stand solitary in stark vigil decades
After the house fire.

Bent woman wearing bonnet,
Hoeing a long row of fine looking
Collard greens.

Last year’s leftover bales
Of faded hay dot pasture fields
Strewn like pieces from a large game.

Faded box cars abandoned
On rusty rail tracks, faded farmer’s coops
Surrounded by the sparse sea

Of a gravel parking lot spotted by
Tobacco spittle & equally faded
Pickup trucks.

Skeletons of old cotton bales
Stand lost at the red dirt margins
Of a now empty field.

 

May 1979 – Greyhound Bus, South Georgia

 

 

A Woman

 

A sunny day,
A warm pause before
The onset of hard winter.

She enters alone

Afraid, bending in pain
From time abused; human, frail,
Old, forlorn.

Her cold hands
Shake like windows on
Subway trains just passing.

Too many robbers
Stalk her, take her mind,
Her meager security rent checks,

Rob her of what
Life even she no longer
Possesses.

Thieves lurk as death
Behind doors, on side streets
She must pass, unwilling.

Beauty which once flashed in a young smile,
Now gone like dignity; she sits empty,
Wrinkled as a barren womb.

An aged woman, waiting,
Known well by any who dare look
Into her time-worn face

& see the empty road
Of many futures.

 

July 1978 – Boston, Massachusetts


 

A Kidding

 

White
plum blossoms
fly upon fragrant afternoon;
spring breezes swaddle a wet kid,
fresh dropped, first soft bleating breath;
innocence, his mother licks,
urges him to discover
yet untried
feet.

 

8 March 2000 – Rockdale County, Georgia
After Ruby’s 1st Kidding

 

 

BIO

Elizabeth PerdomoElizabeth Perdomo has lived and written in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas these past fourteen years, moving to the region from the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. Born in Kansas, and raised both there and in Colorado, she has written poetry works since a young teen. Perdomo also lived in the Southeastern USA for a number of years. Her written pieces reflect on local place and culture, cooking, gardening, ecology and nature, traditions, spirituality and much more.

 

 

 

Denis Mulroony

Sucking Air: Above-Ground Pool Chronicles

by Denis L. Mulroony

 

 

In the summer of 1984, my father purchased for our family an above-ground swimming pool. The pool was placed in a corner of our backyard and was, as the law required, surrounded by a chain link fence. Its width was fifteen feet; its height was four feet, and in the height of usage, it was filled from dawn to dusk with the friends, enemies and acquaintances of my two brothers and me. With the exception of the Moreno family who had an in-ground pool, ours was the only one in the neighborhood.

The two pools could not be more different, however. The Moreno’s lavish watering hole was a bean-shaped masterpiece that would have made a Vegas casino owner jealous, and except for an assortment of professional landscaping, it assumed the majority of their entire backyard. At one end of the pool sat a circular hot tub whose overflow of steaming goodness spilled into a shallow end of four feet and warmed the entire body of water to bath-like temperatures. This wading area gently sloped into a spacious deep end that sunk to ten feet. Overlooking the crystal waters was a diving board with a legendary spring, and overlooking the entire scene was a sprawling deck complete with lounge chairs, barbecue grill and eating area. While the beauty of the Moreno pool was unquestionable, gaining access to it was another matter.   Mr. and Mrs. Moreno regulated admission as though as it were an elite country club and their two sons had no problem following suit, relegating our paltry construction as the place to be during the summer. While the Moreno’s oasis was an elite, serene, and controlled swimming experience, our four-footer was akin to a Chuck-E-Cheese: poorly supervised and a little dodgy.

Every summer since its genesis, our pool was overflowing with kids, their bikes littering our driveway, towels scattered around the lawn to dry, and looking back, I can say with total confidence that at least half of the kids in Parsippany peed in my pool at one time or another. My parents, in their typical laissez faire approach, did not care who was using the pool as long as they weren’t floating face downward in it.

As to how the pool was used, however, they had a few straightforward rules that were followed to varying degrees of obedience. My mother’s only decree was that the pool was hers from 3:30 to 4:30 each day, no exceptions. During this time she would float around the pool reading Danielle Steele, her torso on a raft while her legs drifted behind her. Meanwhile, my friends and I watched the clock and filled our time playing prison-rules basketball. By the time 4:30 hit, ten to twenty little hands gripped the chain-link fence as five to ten noses poked through the openings. My mother’s departure down the ladder corresponded with an army of ten year olds flinging themselves over the side of the pool like it was D-Day.

My father, on the other hand, whose patience was usually to a fault, possessed several hot buttons regarding his favorite, above-ground child. They were as follows: no food in the pool; no “whirlpooling”[i]; no wave pool[ii]; no wrestling, no jumping off the side of the pool; and most important, no screwing around with the filter. It serves as no coincidence that in the hours my father was working, these specific activities filled the majority of our days. We filled our bellies with sandwiches and chips, whirlpooled until we were nauseous, wavepooled until we were sea sick, wrestled, chicken-fought, marco-poloed, shark-and-minnowed, and jumped/dove/splashed until he returned from work, at which time we innocently practiced swimming laps and lightly tossed Nerf balls to each other.

Despite our resistance to authority, there was one rule that was followed at all costs: no screwing around with the filter. During the summer my father’s day started and ended with a calculated check of the pool’s mechanics. He would arise at the crack of dawn to turn on the filter for the day and then lovingly place two chlorine tablets into its basket. Upon his arrival home from work, he would return to the side of the pool to empty the basket of any debris and check the ph levels of the water. The checking of the ph levels was an intricate routine that required intense concentration and no interruptions of any kind; we were forced to stand completely still and utterly silent for the entire proceedings. My father, with the focus of a geneticist on the brink of discovering a new genetic strand, would fill both tubes of a tiny plastic beaker with pool water. He would then remove two little bottles whose chemical contents he would carefully drop into each tube. Once filled, he would cover the tops of each tube with his fingers and shake vigorously. It was then time for the reading. At this point, he would take his glasses out of his chest pocket and place them onto his face; simultaneously, he would bend down into an absurd crouch and hold the conjoined tubes against the sky with an extended arm to get an accurate reading. If the color of each tube matched the desired color of the code in the middle, then swimming could resume; if not, the pool would have to empty until the next day as it was deemed unsafe.

Despite my father’s concern for a clean and safe pool, the structure itself was a veritable deathtrap, capable of killing children in multiple, painful ways. I am proud to say that my friends and I did nothing to decrease the odds of a watery grave in any way. There were several factors that made swimming in our pool so treacherous. The first was the side of the pool, a four-inch piece of aluminum that capped off the walls. As two of our favorite games required jumping into the water (sharks and minnows[iii] and the golf tee game[iv]), our use of this precipitous high wire was frequent. Due to its frail construction, walking around the side of the pool was tenuous as it wobbled and shook with every step one took. Falling into the pool was obviously not a concern; however, hitting the land was another story. For reasons unknown to me, my father decided the best surface material for the area surrounding the pool was jagged rock. I am not sure if this reverse-moat was his attempt to keep us permanently out of the water or in it or if this was his feeble attempt at Medieval landscaping. Nevertheless, many people had the unfortunate experience of falling away from the water and tearing up their feet, legs and arms on the crags below.

Chemical and viral disease was also a threat at the pool. Every year during the last week of June, after we begged him for a month and the Morenos had banned us out of theirs, my father would announce that it was finally pool season. The next Saturday morning the Mulroony clan would make their way through the fence and gather around the pool in silence as my father gave directions for pulling the cover off. It should be noted that while in-ground pools, during the winter, are as empty as the a realtor’s soul, an above-ground pool remains filled with water and requires a floatation device and a cover, both objects designed to keep things (animals, leaves, garbage) out of the pool and thus maintaining the clarity and quality of the water. It should also be noted that this is only a theory, and every June when we took that cover off of the pool we were greeted with the blackest, most malodorous water I had ever seen. As my brothers were assigned to bleaching and hosing off the vile pool cover (a job I always questioned the assignment of two people for), it always fell to me to brave the murky, freezing water and skim out everything that had found its rest at the bottom of the pool.

It remains, to this day, the most horrifying experience of my life.

The memories of skimming the black, death water are understandably blurry. I remember shivering, dry-heaving, and crying as my brothers laughed at me from the lawn. My skinny, pasty-white frame stood in dire contrast to the oil spill we called a pool as I struggled to lift the leaves to the surface and dump them over the fence with the skimmer. Ultimately, leaves were the least of my concerns. It never failed that every year at least one animal would, for some inexplicable reason—part of me thinks my brothers put them there—choose our pool for its final resting place. I know this because during the formative years of my life I spent several Saturday mornings stepping on the rotted carcasses of squirrels, birds, rats, mice, and in an instance that elicited instant and violent vomiting, a possum. After locating the critter with my feet, I then had to fish them to the surface and dump them over the side of the fence as well. In these moments of horror, tears streaming down my face and sick gathering in my throat, my father would offer to take the skimmer and do the job from the outside the pool, causing me to always wonder why he made me get in the pool in the first place. Despite an intense phobia of dead animals and road kill that persists to this day, I suppose I should be happy I never got malaria or trench foot from the experience.

At no time was death nearer than when my brothers and their friends would join us for a swim. I am amazed that no one ever had to be carted away to the morgue, myself in particular. While my ten-year-old friends and I leaned more toward organized pool games, my brothers’ teenage friends expressed an interest in acrobatics and violence. Together, they formed an illegitimate family of sadistic circus performers whose routine consisted of grabbing me and throwing me as high as they could into the air with little or no concern to my safety, the aluminum side of the pool and the rocky terrain constant hazards. As I was both slight in build and submissive in nature, I was the perfect carnival prop and was recklessly flung eight to ten feet in the air or simply tossed between two of them. On the rare occasions that I protested my use as a projectile or as they inevitably grew bored, their activities would turn even more sadistic. While their friends preferred chicken fights[v] as an aquatic alternative to torture, my brothers omitted the competition element and went straight for the payoff, simply dunking me under the water in fifteen second bursts (like skipping the main course and eating dessert first). As I fought under the water on those afternoons, struggling to escape to the blissful sky above and earnestly praying for gills, I was never quite positive that they wouldn’t actually kill me.   Having never really been shown any affection from them in the ten years prior, I was pretty sure that they dreamed of a world without me in it- the couch would become bigger by 33% as would the rations of cookies, ice cream, and chips; my room would become a personal gym/love den where they would bring their unwitting teenage girlfriends who had no idea they were cold-blooded conspirators.   I suppose that the only thing stopping Leopold and Loeb was fear of retribution from my father as my water-logged corpse would undoubtedly clog up his precious filter. Ironically enough, the only thing that sucked more air than the filter during those years was my lungs, in-between dunks from my brothers.

As was the custom, my father insisted that we close up the pool each Labor Day, regardless of the weather. Despite our protests, we dutifully inflated the ineffective floatation device and fastened down the plastic cover to the aluminum sides of the pool with water-filled milk cartons. The entire process took about half an hour, longer than a game of sharks and minnows, neater than a wavepool, tamer than a romance novel and less fun than attempted murder. As I peered into the crystalline waters, the site of my near-watery grave, I always got so sad, not because I almost died there but because for nine weeks we really lived. For our father, it would be ten more months until he resumed his love affair with the filter; its affection would be replaced with various projects at his basement workbench. My mother would devote herself to three months of Christmas preparations and two months of holiday cleanup. My brothers would return to high school, sports, girls, partying and when time permitted, the contemplation of patricide. As for me, I usually rode my bike to the Moreno’s house with my fingers crossed and a baby-blue golf tee in my pocket, hoping for a few more days of summer.

 

[i] “Whirlpooling” or “Whirlpool” was a game where the inhabitants of the pool circled the perimeter of the structure in the same direction at the same time, thus simultaneously creating a vortex and pissing off my father to no end. My father claimed the whirlpool effect caused the filter to, as he put it, “suck air”.

[ii] “Wavepool” was a similar game only in the propensity to cause the sacred filter to “suck air”; it was played by simply grabbing any floatation device and making the biggest waves you could. It was accompanied by hooting and hollering and usually ended with the garden hose being inserted into the pool to reestablish a water level above the filter line and prevent air to be sucked by it.

[iii] “Sharks and Minnows” was a game of skill and strategy where one person begins as the shark and treads water in the middle of the pool while the minnows stand perched above the water. The object of the game is to jump into the pool and swim to the other side without being tagged by the shark. If you were tgged you fulfilled the shark role as well. This continued until there was one minnow left. (Potential for filter clogging: minimal)

[iv] “The Golf Tee Game” started with everyone standing on the side of the pool. One person held a baby-blue golf tee in their hand and jumped in to place it on the bottom of the pool. Everyone tried to get it first as it floated to the surface. As with any game, score was intensely kept and physical contact was encouraged. (Needless to say, this game was a lot more fun at the Moreno’s house.)

[v] “Chicken Fights” were gladiatorial contests where smaller, younger victims were placed on the shoulders of larger people and pitted against each other until one of them was thrown under water. Punching, scratching, pulling and pushing were the rule.

 

 

BIO

Denis MulroonyDenis L. Mulroony is a part-time writer and full time educator with twenty years of experience as a teacher, coach and currently, a high school principal. He earned his D.Litt. from Drew University and his undergrad from King’s College.  He is an eager writer and essayist who hones his craft whenever time allows (usually after his wife and kids go to sleep). Denis’s creative non-fiction has been published in the Atticus Review, Inkwell.org, FortyOunceBachelors.com and Survive Parenthood Magazine. He only uses his middle initial for writing purposes and when trying to compensate for being less-than-photogenic (see author photo).

 

 

 

Vincent Mannings

Not Always Easy

by Vincent Mannings

 

In blesséd paradise, here on Earth,
Peaceful now, and free –
My every breath and all my spark
I’d give for her to be.
(Anon., c. 1825, England)

 

“Got it, Dad.” Sam emerged from the garage into the light with the bike in his hands. His father had showered, and his mother had gone out to town. Dad was wearing slacks and a shirt and tie. He sat a few yards from the garage door, at a wicker patio table beneath the kitchen window. He’d just opened the newspaper. There was some iced tea in a glass before him and he was about to eat a good breakfast. “Wonderful,” he replied to his son, folding the paper again and picking up his knife and fork. “I assume you know what you’re doing. I’ve no idea why you’d need two bicycles but the truck’s keys are here whenever you want them.” They were beside the paper and he tapped at them.

“Thanks,” said Sam. He was distracted, gazing at the old bike. He’d propped it on its stand in front of the garage and he was walking around it. He squeezed both grips and tried to push. The brakes were good. Next he pumped the tires and he spent the best part of an hour cleaning off the dust and the spider webs. That bike was kind of rusty. And, it was a guy’s bike. He ran his fingers through his hair, remembering. Mary: she had been wearing overalls a couple of days before, when he’d met her at her garden gate.

By the time he’d driven the six short blocks to Carmelo Street and Lopez he’d decided for sure that he’d be the one who’d be riding his brother’s old bike. He’d be lending his own bike to Mary. She had just now seen him arriving from part-way down her front yard. She’d not been doing much, just touching at her flowers, fussing with them; that and some light watering with a can. She’d been enjoying the morning fog and listening to a digest of the day’s news; a white iPod wire was dangling from her left ear. She’d put the watering-can down when she’d noticed Sam and she’d begun to walk up a gravel path toward the garden gate. Sam had parked the truck at the curb, a black Toyota pickup that his Dad had owned for thirty years. He’d stepped around to the back of the truck and he was beginning to unload the bikes as Mary reached the gate.

She waved, grinning, calling to him, the iPod bud now in her hand: “I do have my own bicycle, you know.”

“I figured,” he replied, turning to face her. He’d felt strong, energized by his busy morning. But when he looked at Mary she surprised him. He almost lost track of what he’d been about to say. “I guessed you’d have your own bike,” he continued, “but I didn’t know for sure and I don’t yet have your number.”

He stopped, and she smiled. She’d opened the gate and had stepped out onto the sidewalk; she seemed tentative and she’d not yet closed the gate behind her. She had on a pair of white shorts and a loose red cotton blouse. No overalls this morning. She was barefoot and she clutched a straw summer hat in her hands; her hair was up, all tamed and pinned. Two days ago, when they’d sat together on a fountain wall, Sam had decided that Mary could not be more beautiful, but she was more beautiful today. He could see the bone structure in her face, the long and graceful neck, the lovely shoulders.

“How is your mother?” he asked.

She turned and glanced behind. She looked down into the mist, across the sloping yard, through the flowers and the shrubs, toward the big front door and quickly at a downstairs window. Her house was on a cliff that overlooked the sea and the pair of them could hear the fog-muffled thumps of waves crashing on the whitesand beach below. Turning back to Sam, she shrugged. “She’s fine. Just a little tired. Like I told you on Wednesday it’s not always easy being descended from writers hoisted by everyone upon such lofty pedestals; it can be difficult and it sure doesn’t always help my mother.”

“Come on, Ms. Mary Shelley,” he said, smiling, “let’s go for a ride.”

The fog had been stubborn but the sun had started to clear it away as he stared at her; patches of blue sky were appearing overhead and the trees near the gate were suddenly a vivid green. He held his bike with his left hand and gestured with his right.

Mary turned her head. She closed the gate and glanced at the house for just a couple seconds more before looking back at Sam. He continued holding the bike for her.

“And I thought maybe we’d get some breakfast,” he added, “if you like: at the Brown Pelican.”

She grinned a second time and walked toward him in her bare feet. She lifted the straw hat above her head and let it dangle behind from a cord around her neck. She was close to him. He could smell perfume and he looked again at the hair.

“I’ll see you at the Pelican,” she said, laughing. She slapped him on the shoulder, threw her left leg around the seat and over the crossbar and set off down Carmelo, changing gear right away to third, and fourth.

“Wait!” yelled Sam. He grabbed his brother’s bike, knocked the stand back with his foot; Mary was already half a block away, still laughing; she shrieked and her hat bounced up and down. “Wait!” he called again, bumping the old bike off the curb. He caught up with her near to Eleventh and rode alongside; she slowed, turning her head to smile. “Hey,” he said, returning the smile and catching his breath. They rode another four blocks south through a tunnel of cherry blossom trees, then swept on past Thirteenth and on to Santa Lucia; there, they turned right and continued a block west; this was steep; it took them down to the beach-road where they turned and headed north for half a block before continuing west toward the sea; a narrow footpath quickly opened up and surrendered to freshly-blown white sand. The tide was out. They stopped, got off their bikes, and listened.

The wind was strong; it whipped about their ears. The waves were distant but they were big and very loud. The fog had gone and the sun was bright. The sea was too loud for talking. Sam glanced at Mary, who closed her eyes with her face toward the waves, enjoying the winds, smiling as she tightened the strap of her straw hat. Her hair began to unravel. She opened her eyes again and looked at him.

“Come on,” she yelled. They walked the bikes up and over the dunes and made straight for the wet sand where they climbed back on and cycled along the edge of the sea. Mary led the way, and the Brown Pelican soon came into view. The place was an old snack-shack, basically a large hexagonal shed. It was Carmel’s take on a Martello fort, perched on the grassy dunes between the beach proper and the beach road, right about where Eleventh Street would have ended if a mansion and a quarter mile of tended rolling lawns had not been in the way. The Pelican had been on those dunes like a sentinel since the early nineteen fifties. It had weathered its share of Pacific storms and, though dilapidated, it possessed some character, honed well by the decades of salt and sand.

They propped the bikes against a low brick wall at the edge of the shack’s parking lot, and Sam bought two coffees and a couple of hot muffins. They were handed to him by a teenaged girl, through a hatch. “Thanks,” he said. He put the change into his wallet, stuffed a dollar bill into a plastic cup, picked up some napkins and sat down with Mary on a small bench at a tiled concrete table. The table was behind a short breeze-wall. They were facing toward the waves.

“So,” Mary announced. She’d shaken down her long black hair and had completed what the wind had started. She’d then lifted the straw hat up from behind her neck and had patted it down hard on her head. She seemed annoyed. “Two days ago you said there’s something you want to tell me.”

Sam hadn’t expected annoyance. He took a sip of his coffee, stalling, and put it back down on the table.

“There is something I want to tell you,” he began. “On my last day in New Mexico, I met with a Professor Ray Wasserman at the Taos Research Institute’s school of medical sciences.”

Mary cut in: “And I suppose he told you everything about my mother.” She’d said it with a casual air, picked up a piece of muffin, popped it in her mouth and washed it down with a gulp of coffee.

“Wasserman told me almost nothing,” said Sam. “That man is rather imperious, Mary. He’s not the chatty type. I was quitting, leaving graduate school after just one year. He’d seemed bored with me, barely listening until I mentioned my parents’ place here in Carmel and that sure got his attention. It jogged his memory. He simply said that he’d known your mother; that she’d been a professor and that she’d resigned from the Institute a long time ago and returned to her family’s old home in Carmel.”

Mary drank some more of her coffee. Now she was the one who was stalling. She put the cup down, reached out and put a hand on Sam’s knee, leaning in a few inches. The brim of her hat came close to his face. “Is that all Wasserman said?” she asked.

“Mary,” replied Sam, peeking beneath the hat. He surprised himself by placing his hand on hers, the one still on his knee. “That old guy gave no details, none at all, but he did suggest your mother had no choice but to leave the Institute. And that’s pretty much all he said to me.”

She slipped the hand away and sat up straight, folding her arms. Sam watched. She seemed to be taking in the information, absorbing it, processing it. The breeze tested her hat. She reached up, absent-mindedly, and pushed it back on. “Sam,” she said. It startled him. “You’ve been very straightforward so it’s my turn to be likewise and I am being straightforward when I tell you that now we both know about as much as each other when it comes to my mother’s career in New Mexico.”

She smiled. He’d no clue why she’d be doing that. In fact she was remembering the book she’d caught him reading a couple of days before, at his Aunt’s bookstore, just a few hours after she’d first met him at her garden gate. “Oh,” she said, “I’ve always known that my mother worked for some time at the Institute, but that was before I was born, and she never says much to me about those years.” She grinned and laughed out loud and touched Sam’s forehead, pretending to read his mind. She dropped her hand and folded her arms again. “Don’t worry,” she said, still laughing, “I never knew my father, and the Shelleys are on my mother’s side, but I have no unexplained stitches. There are no strange wounds and there are definitely no old scars.”

Sam patted her hand.

“Eat your muffin,” she said, “before it gets too cold.” She nodded in the direction of his plate. She’d more on her mind and a few more things to say. “These days, my mother’s just a writer, Sam. That’s pretty much all she does. She leads a quiet life but there’s an obsessiveness about her, and I’m worried.”

Sam had already filled his mouth with food. He held a napkin in one hand and his coffee in the other, about to take a gulp, and he felt silly. Mary saw his concern and she smiled: “Go on, eat,” she said. I’m talking enough for the both of us.” She glanced at the beach, giving him some time, and looked back. He was drinking. “Sam, I think my mother’s sick. I know this isn’t your problem; it’s for me to deal with but there’s something wrong with her. Whatever burden my mother carried when she was a professor, she sure as hell brought with her to Carmel. Something’s changed since then. It’s evolved, I suppose.” She smiled suddenly, trying to lighten things again. “I’ll figure it out.”

Sam drank the rest of his coffee. He remained quiet for several minutes. Mary had stopped talking. Sam already liked her. How could he not? All of his instincts told him to dive right in, to tell her how much he wanted to help. But his head told him the opposite and, being Sam, he settled for something in between.

“I’m going up the road to Santa Cruz,” he said, “this afternoon, to the campus: I’ve arranged to meet with a couple of English professors; someone called Seth Morton, and another named Wintour; Professor Jonathan Wintour.”

Mary flinched. He saw it. She recovered quickly.

“If you’re talking with Wintour, that’s good.” She’d said it with her mouth close to his ear, almost a whisper. “You’re your own man.” She sat back again. He looked at her. A teardrop was making its way down her right cheek. At last he heeded the smart voice that’d been lodged somewhere deep inside his head. He shut his mouth and he said nothing. He touched her hand and shuffled in closer before putting his arm around her. She leaned her head on his shoulder and he felt her hair brush against his face.

Suddenly, she got up. She collected their cups and went to the Pelican’s hatch. “Two refills, please,” she said to the girl, “and may I borrow a pen?”

Sitting down with new coffees she scribbled something on the receipt she’d been given and passed it to Sam: her phone number. Her eyes were still watery but she felt better. She’d put the iPod bud back into her ear and she flashed a smile that almost stopped Sam’s heart.

“Okay,” he said, as coolly as he could muster before storing the receipt in his wallet. He took the pen from her hand, wrote his own number on their sole remaining napkin and gave that back to her. “Hey,” he said, smiling: “Mom and Dad are having a garden party tomorrow. My brother and his family are settling back in town. You want to join us?”

 

* * *

 

By noon he’d showered a second time. He’d also brushed back his wet hair and had changed into some brown loafers, a pair of khaki slacks, a white button shirt and a beige linen jacket. The jacket was on the passenger seat beside him as he drove his Dad’s truck forty miles north around the bay to Santa Cruz.

Seth Morton turned out to be Dean of the School of Letters. Sam found himself being ushered from a reception desk to a wood-paneled waiting room by a tall and very direct executive assistant. “Professor Morton will be with you presently.” She’d said it just before turning on her heels. The door closed and Sam sat alone for ten minutes on a leather chair, gripping a saucer and a white china cup. That cup contained a pale herbal tea that he never once touched. He’d said “yes” when asked but it’d been from politeness only and he felt ridiculous, holding onto the cup and saucer. But he also worried he’d seem ungrateful if he just set them down on the table in front of him. He crossed his legs, the cup rattling. Slowly, he began to relax. A grandfather clock stood in one corner of the room. The tick was loud. He could see the pendulum swinging, hypnotic, soothing after the busy morning, and it lured him to a peaceful place before shattering his calm with a single great chime. One o’clock: the doors to an office suite swung open and Morton burst in.

“Hello!”

The big voice flash-flooded the room. Morton was stocky, energetic, every bit the square-jawed man that Sam had seen on his website’s picture. He strode across the carpet. Sam put the cup down at last, too quickly. He’d done it as he rose from his chair, and he slopped tea into the saucer and onto his pants; it also got onto his hands and he wiped them on his jacket as Morton got up close.

“So you’re Sam Robertson! A pleasure to meet you. We’ll have you with our Romantics aficionado very soon!” Morton chuckled. He’d seen the mishap and, the chuckles done, shot out his right hand. The arm was firm and steady. Sam shook the strong hand. Already the blushing began. He’d expected to be led next into Morton’s suite but was instead rotated one hundred and eighty degrees by the professor’s left hand; together, they left the waiting room and stepped into the hall.

“This way,” said Morton. His right forefinger pointed at the corridor. They hurried along a tiled floor. Morton glanced at a wall clock, turned a corner and passed another secretary.

“Jonathan here?” The tone seemed sharp. Before the lady could begin to answer, Sam was being led into Wintour’s office where a middle-aged professor stood behind a desk.

“Jonathan: please meet the young man I mentioned.”

With that, Morton nodded at the both of them, made eye contact with Sam for a final time and left.

Wintour continued to stand behind his desk. He watched Sam. His expression seemed kind. He said nothing, so Sam tried first:

“Robertson, sir. Sam Robertson.” Sam took a deep breath and tried to calm himself, looking all around the room. The entire building was old and this room’s ceiling was very high. The office was large though rather cramped, and it was dark. In addition to the desk there were several tables laden with books and papers; heavy bookcases were against each of the walls and, a good six feet up the wall behind Wintour, a single small window. Sam touched at the collar of his shirt and held out his hand. He held it firm and steady, just like he’d seen Morton do it. But Wintour was no Morton. He removed the jacket he’d been wearing and came around the desk to greet Sam with a two-handed shake and a warm smile. A genial man; the eyes were bright and enthusiastic. His hair was gray and his face was pale from too much time in that gloomy room. Sam saw engagement but no trace of arrogance: the man seemed secure, happy in his own skin, with nothing to prove. Wintour scratched his head. He was trying to remember. He closed the office door and showed Sam to a seat across from his desk before settling with a contented sigh back into his leather swivel chair.

“Seth told me you’d inquired about Mary Shelley.” He clapped his hands, swung around in his seat and pointed to a coffeemaker.

Sam really did not want coffee but again for the sake of being polite he nodded.

Wintour snatched a couple of pods from a basket. He set about the brewing with his back to Sam, lifting his head and calling over his shoulder. “Seth also told me you’re from Carmel. Now!” – and he clapped his hands a second time – “would your being here today have anything to do with the Carmel Shelleys?”

Sam felt blindsided. He’d lived most of his life in Carmel without knowing anything at all about the residents of a house on Carmelo Street just six blocks from his home, and here he sat today with a professor who knew about both Mary and her mother.

Wintour continued, still calling across his shoulder: “I had the privilege of meeting those two fine ladies. Met them five years ago, not long after I began my tenure here.”

Sam leaned forward in his chair. “As a matter of fact, sir, I am here today because of them; because of one of them, at least: I’ve come to know the daughter.”

Wintour stopped fiddling with the coffee machine and turned back to Sam. “And now you want to know if those two are for real?” he asked with a mischievous smile. “Initially, as far as I could tell, that seemed to be the reason the mother wanted to see me. A fascinating woman. Extremely intelligent and very serious. Looked the part too, I can tell you. She was somewhat vague as to why she needed my help with her ancestry; she referred to a ‘disappointment’ but she never elaborated. She visited twice, the first time alone, the second time with her daughter. The younger Mary: well, she was just a teenager when I saw her and she was quiet, rather uncomfortable I thought.”

The coffee machine clicked and hissed. Wintour removed the first cup, swapped the pod and began the second brew. He got up and opened a small fridge below the high window and took out a carton of skimmed milk.

“I don’t have very long today, Sam, but I do have time to tell you what I know. It’s not particularly confidential; public record, really.”

Within a couple of minutes they were both relaxing in their chairs. Sam took a few sociable sips from his cup, and listened. Like Sam, the professor had drawn a blank when he’d searched online. “After that,” he said, “I enlisted the help of a former colleague, a chap I’d known during my previous position, at New York University. That colleague is married to a professional genealogist, a delightful and very sharp young woman named Annabel Stark. If you’re casting about for a career, Sam, do consider genealogy. I found it can be a most lucrative profession. Her clients tend to be the wealthy and the established; the Hamptons set; patrician types who are keen to prove that their blood is blue. Annabel took a third of my research account that year but I was of course intrigued. Absolutely astonished. Shelleys! Just forty miles from this office! Could it really be? You know exactly what I mean, huh?” He glanced at a clock on his desk and looked back at Sam. “Young man, I can tell you that my rather expensive genealogist did a very thorough job. The Carmel Shelleys are indeed descended from Mary Shelley: the Mary Shelley, that is. In fact there are three different lines they could have come along and still been her fourth- and fifth-generation descendants. And, it turns out, that’s exactly who they are. That’s all good of course but when the mother came back to discover what I’d learned, this time with her daughter, I realized that I’d wasted my money. Completely wasted it.”

Sam was confused. “Sir, but you said -”

Wintour broke in. “First, it became obvious the older Shelley was already quite sure of her ancestry. I’d merely affirmed it for her and I could sense that she’d not really been listening. My words seemed intended more for the ears of the young lady accompanying her. Second, well, here, take a look at this.”

He got up and walked over to the bookcase against the wall to the right of his desk. He reached, grunting, and pulled out a very large hardcover. Next he came round to Sam and slapped the book down on the desk in front of them. Sam looked at Wintour, took off his jacket and opened the huge book. He turned the pages slowly. Between long sections of dense text he saw photographs of birth certificates; they were for Byron, for Percy Shelley, and for Mary; he also saw facsimiles of the title pages from anthologies of poetry; there were maps of London, of Venice and of the shoreline of Lake Geneva; he saw gravestones in England and on the Continent; there were pictures of locks of hair; a funeral pyre in Italy; he saw museums and he gazed at portraits of Byron’s mistresses and, oval and tiny, portraits of the Shelley children. Sam lost himself in the pages as he turned from one to the next, first near to the front of the book, then at the back, then in the middle.

Wintour became impatient. “Page thirty-six, Sam. Please look at page thirty-six.”

Sam, slipping back into the role of the student, looked up again at the professor, who seemed fatherly, almost concerned. He turned again to the book in front of him and he followed Wintour’s instruction. The entirety of page thirty-six was a large color-plate reproduction of an oil painting from the archives of the National Portrait Gallery in London. Sam was looking at Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. She was eighteen years old, one year before she married Percy Shelley in 1816, and she would have been pregnant by him for a second time. The painting was all dark tones. Mary was seated on a plum-colored couch, the wall behind her unlit. She was visible only from the chest up. She wore a black dress. Her shoulders were bare and her long dark hair framed a sad and serious face. This beautiful lady didn’t just resemble the young woman with whom Sam had shared breakfast at the beach shack that morning; she looked precisely like her. Sam forgot all about Wintour now and he stared at the picture. His heart raced, but gradually he became calm again. He reached out with his hand. His movements were slow and he touched the color plate, running his finger across it; in his mind he changed the mournful clothes into something bright; he brushed the soft and lovely hair back from the young lady’s face; gently, he slipped an iPod bud into her ear; and he saw her smile.

 

 

BIO

Vincent ManningsAlthough Vincent Mannings is American, he was born in Liverpool, England, and was raised in Cheshire by Irish parents. Twenty years ago, he moved from London to Pasadena, where he’s lucky enough to live with his wife, Helene. He has a Ph.D. in an arcane discipline, and he works at the California Institute of Technology.

Vincent has edited a textbook, published by the University of Arizona Press. He’s also recently completed a couple of novels and is about to brace himself and try to get them published.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Art of Howard Skrill

 

wsqarch2015rev2

Washington Square Arch

 

Asia Customs House

Asia Customs House

 

Grandfather Daughter Watson2013

Grandfather Daughter Watson

 

Soldier on Tomb

Soldier on Tomb

 

Four Angels

Four Angels

 

Brooklyn War Memorial

Brooklyn War Memorial

 

Flute Player

Flute Player

 

Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc

 

Washington

Washington

 

 

 

ABOUT

howard skrillThe Anna Pierrepont Series, my drawings of public statuary in NYC, is plein air appropriation. Plein air drawings come into being through visual encounters with the constant changes of light and color in things ideally encountered out of doors. I roll a blue whole foods cart behind me, jammed with a folding chair, pencils, oil and chalk pastels, oil sticks and a pad of paper. I encounter a statue I wish to draw, unfold my chair, lay out my materials and struggle to represent the object emerging from the light and shadows of its surroundings onto a sheet of paper. The drawings are appropriation because the subjects I invariably select are public monuments created by other artists. In 2014, I began to augment the drawings with pictorial essays that enable me to explore beyond the plein air limitations of sight. The essays enable me to explore how the monuments came into being, their connection with their surroundings and their fate after installation. I have named the entire project after Anna Marie Pierrepont, a grand dame of 19th century Brooklyn interred in one of the most magnificent tombs in Greenwood Cemetery. I named the work in her honor as a comment on the gap between my silent and anonymous wanderings and her exulted self presentation.

A central theme of the Anna Pierrepont Series is the utilization of public figurative monuments in the creation and perpetuation of collective ‘American’ identity among a diverse population whose cultural and national identities typically originate elsewhere. In order to create this identity, other identities need to be subsumed and rendered invisible. Statues installed in public spaces act as soil to be churned and tilled in order to transform identities thro

 

 

EXPERIENCE

St. Francis College, Brooklyn Heights NY, 2001 – Principal Instructor in Studio Practice

Essex County College, Newark, NJ – 2001 – Senior Lecturer in sculpture and drawing

 

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2015 – “HMS Jersey” at the Callahan Center Gallery/St. Francis College and online

[http://howardskrill.blogspot.com/], youtube video of reception

[www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TsThl0aC5I ]

2011 – “Anna Pierrepont Series” at the Callahan Center Gallery at St. Francis

2006 – “Thru Rain” at Chashama Gallery, New York, NY

2006 – “Thru” at Safe-T Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2001 – CUNY – Queens College, “Thru”, Thesis Exhibition

2000 – Liquitex Corp. – “Artist of the Month”, www.liquitex.com/aotm/howard/home.cfm

 

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2006-13 – “Faculty Exhibition”, CUNY – Bronx Community College

2005 – Dumbo ‘Under the Bridge Festival” at Safe-T Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2005 -‘Color Mix’, Studio/Gallery 64, Brooklyn, NY

2004 – ‘Friends’, Studio Gallery 64, Brooklyn, NY

2002 – “Site Lines”, St. Francis College, Brooklyn, NY

2002 – Object Image Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2000 – Queens Museum of Art, Flushing, NY -Intervention/Tiffany Permanent Collection

2000 – “Altered Realities”, Manhattanville College, Purchase, NY

1997 – “Urban Landscape”, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Mass.

 

ONLINE PRESENCE

HowardSkrill.blogspot.com – 2011

Kickstarter.com – “Anna Pierrepont Series on the Road”

Electric Gallery – “egallery.com” [Abstract Realism] 2003-

 

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Green-Wood Blog by Historian Jeff Richman, Fall 2015, [https://www.green-wood.com/2015/another-artist-inspired-by-green-wood/]

Kyso Flash, ‘Works from 1990s’, Fall 2015, [http://www.kysoflash.com/SkrillFivePaintings.aspx]

Red Savina Review, Cover of the Fall 2015 Issue [http://www.redsavinareview.org/]

Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts and Letters of St. Francis College, ‘Civic Virtue’

Columbia Journal [from Columbia University], ‘Liminal’, Summer 2015, [http://columbiajournal.org/the-anna-pierrepont-series-by-howard-skrill/]

Newfound:An Inquiry of Place, ‘Erasure’ [newfoundjournal.org/archives/volume-6/issue…/nonfiction-howard-skrill]

3Elements Review, Issue 5, Fall 2014, plate/http://3elementsreview.com/past-journals,

Doppelgänger, Bludgeon, Dirge] ‘Brooklyn Dirge on pg. 50, 51 and back’

Slag Magazine, Issue 2, Fall 2014/http://issuu.com/jonhenry5/docs/slagmagissue2fina ”Return’ on pg 11′

 

EDUCATION

Queens College – CUNY, 1999-2001, MFA in Studio Arts, June 2001

State University of New York, College at Purchase, BFA with Honors,1985 – Faculty Award in Painting and Drawing

 

Images for Inga

by Kjell Nykvist

after Richard Aldington

 

I.

Ice encased the rosebushes—
The frozen flowers’ colors
Like fluorescent fish
In cloudy water.

 

II.

The elk at the water’s edge,
Massive and horned and red,
Look back at the towering limestone
Adorned with lodgepole pines.
The highest of the green needles,
We think, seem to scratch
The azure sky. To this mountain
Of green and grey, the elk are like
Red sparks from a distant fire.
And we are even smaller—like
White specks floating in a cave
Filled with water.

 

III.

Seeing you there—blue on blue—
Your feet in the warm Adriatic
Is the licking of a pleasure-tongue
Inside my sleepy head.

 

IV.

The merry completion of anticipation is
An empire of catkins sending
Dreaming gleaming grains
Across tender fields.

 

V.

Fears from the past, at last, vanish
Like a swirl of angry blackbirds:
All that remains of self-loathing
Can fit inside a pyx.

 

VI.

The thinking of strange thoughts, and with a loss of words:
Faint shapes in a faded tapestry, on fire.

 

VII.

The darkness deflected merely by candlelight.
The scent of satiety. On a table,
The cool wetness of empty shellfish,
Bread crumbs, the remains of asparagus,
Two punch bowls of chardonnay.
In the background, a melodic web
Of Otis Redding. Close your eyes,
My dear, and you become Otis, singing.

 

VIII.

To a child of winter, the cattails of heat.
To a child of summer, a barrage of ice.
To a child of fall, a pint of pollen.
To a child of spring, a cup of colored leaves.

 

IX.

The rain falls round the patio
In clear lines ending in clear starbursts.
Here is a crystal architecture
Where what is built was never fully designed,
Where what is designed can never be built.


 

Melting Into Portraiture

 

The sun perches
On creamy clouds. The day
Through the oaks makes
An adagio. There’s the
Happiness of honeysuckle.
There’s mint. Birds skip about
And thoughts coalesce.

The mind drifts
On the eyes’ sea until
There’s a soft rupture:

Light yellow bleeds through
Fluffy white, pale blue
Descends on green leaves,
Everything moves more,
Moves more in a sudden breeze.

In my eyes and
Through the breeze

A woman stirs
On a green knoll, her flesh
Fusing with a shower
Of shadows sprayed onto
The ground by the oaks.
Her hair dances round her.
I can see

The amber of her eyes
When she stares back.

It’s a subtle refinement of nature,
The ability to shift, to sway,
To change eternally, to tower above
The mind and eyes, only to shrink
Into grains of thought.

And this new woman,
In the wind and sun-play,
Like the land itself,
Shifts and sways too.
As do I.

We each adopt the attributes
Cast upon us by the other. We each
Consent to the other’s vision.
If joined as one
We’d be a kaleidoscope revealing
A thousand moving shapes
Through a single lens.


 

What is Poetry?

after John Ashbery

 

A Melanesian girl, in Sami clothing,
On the road to Dushanbe? The glissandi

Of birdsongs, how they’re draped in carmine?
Lake Louise? Or this striving

Towards something? Something
Arcane? Though we plead

To know it and clarity too? Will no one
Envisage the different visions

We have envisaged? Perhaps
They will. But it’s all been shattered

Like a fish bowl striking wooden floors,
The wooden shelving having collapsed.

So what? Will an empire of palm leaves
Still fill the vision of she who sees?

 

 

BIO

NykvistKjell Nykvist was born in Kalmar, Småland, Sweden, but grew up in Butte, Montana. He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in Museum Studies from Baylor University. Kjell is currently a museum curator in Houston, Texas. He recently married his long-time love, Inga Stefánsdóttir, who is a harpsichordist. Kjell’s work has appeared in such publications as Poetry Super Highway, La Noria Literary Journal, The Deronda Review, and Asinine Poetry, as well as in several American and Canadian anthologies. (Kjell Nykvist is a heteronym of Bryan Damien Nichols, who writes his poetry through Kjell, and another heteronym, Alexander Shacklebury. Kjell and Alexander’s debut collection of poems, Whispers From Within, will be published later this year by Sarah Book Publishing, a small, independent Texas press.)

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Taugher

Crow on the Cradle

by Mary Taugher

 

Whenever someone enters the tiny curtained space where they’ve wheeled my gurney, I ask if Mr. Ramsey is alive. Is he in surgery, in a coma, dead? Either the ER nurses don’t know or they won’t give me an answer. They’ve dimmed the overhead lights, plugged an IV in the crook of my arm, and clamped a sensor on my finger. The jagged lines of my heartbeat zigzag across the monitor’s screen, and its bleeps overlay the noises of the emergency room. A nurse or doctor, I don’t remember which, told me I’m in shock and that I might have suffered a concussion. But I know I haven’t. I didn’t hit my head, the airbag didn’t even inflate when I hit Mr. Ramsey.

On the other side of a curtain a man calls out to the nurses to find him an electric shaver. Shave me smooth before I die, he moans. I try to tune him out. I curl into a fetal position, worrying about why my husband is taking so long to get here and whether he knows the pedestrian I hit is Mr. Ramsey.

It happened so fast. I remember the glare of the late afternoon sun. A man jogging toward me in the bicycle lane. Wisps of fog, jazz on the car radio. Then my vertigo returns so violently that I spin like a ragdoll in a washing machine, and I realize the jogger is Mr. Ramsey, whom I’ve seen a half dozen times in the past running this same path.

My dashboard, the pavement, the canopy of red flowering trees – it all swirls. Then everything collides into a nauseous blur until I see him inches from my front end. Mr. Ramsey, the man I loathe. I stomp on the brakes, yank the steering wheel. Which way? I can’t remember. The SUV lurches. Impact. God, the sound. A terrible thud reverberating through my body. My front right tire bumping over the curb.

It was an accident, a bizarre coincidence. I remember telling myself this as I sat trembling in my SUV. I don’t remember calling 911. I don’t remember climbing out of it. Next thing I know Mr. Ramsey’s head is in my lap. He’s unconscious. Sirens echo in my head, still spinning from the vertigo. My heart thumps wildly. And Mr. Ramsey’s legs, they’re twisted at unnatural angles, his shirt torn, a gash above his hip oozing blood. It’s the last thing I see before blacking out.

 

I was working at home from the third floor of our condo this morning, putting the finishing touches on a landscaping design before handing it off to the gardening company, when the vertigo first started. A loud cry, a hoarse gronk-gronk, startled me and I looked out my window to see a raven the size of a shoebox swooping down toward me. Tracking the raven, I felt a pull, a yanking really, in my forehead, and the room began to spin.

I squeezed my eyes shut. The sunlight from the window caused a blotchy afterimage of the bird and a fragment of a song about a crow on a cradle tumbled into my mind. I could hear the Irish folksinger’s voice, wistful and ethereal, as clearly as I had heard it so often at my friend Eileen’s house when our girls were young. The verse was about a baby’s birth, and the prophecy that if it were a girl, she would have rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, but that a shadow would trail her wherever she goes.

Spells of vertigo, from ear infections and high altitude, have hit me in the past so I wasn’t too alarmed. The verse, looping and insistent in my head, worried me more. I knew I needed to distract myself, so I used a cognitive-behavioral technique I’d picked up years ago. I got up from my desk and walked to my bathroom to count the shower floor tiles. After I’d counted to seventy-three, the song vanished.

Not long after, I took a break to walk down to the corner deli for lunch with my daughter. But as soon as we stepped outside I became woozy again. Christ, I said, grabbing her arm, I’m so dizzy it feels like the ground’s vibrating.

Earthquake’s in your head, Mom, she said, giving me a look of irritation.

The vertigo stopped seconds after I grabbed her, maybe because I was happy to be holding her arm, happy for any excuse to touch her. For nearly two years, my daughter had been depressed and sullen, in and out of therapy, off and on meds. In part, I blamed myself. My genes.

Earlier in the morning, I’d found her on the living room couch. It was six o’clock, way too early to be awake for someone her age, sixteen, and she told me she’d barely slept, couldn’t get back to sleep when she woke before dawn, couldn’t remember what it was like to sleep through an entire night or even three or fours hours at a stretch. She looked so sad telling me this. Her cheeks were flushed, and I flashed back to a day long ago, her cheeks glowing, her smile irrepressible as she accepted a gold medallion attached to a green ribbon for first place in the reel competition at an Irish feis.

I bit the inside of my lower lip, hard, until it hurt, then asked the question I knew I had to ask. Honey, you wouldn’t do anything to hurt yourself would you? You would tell me, right, wouldn’t you?

She shook her head yes and said, I’m okay, Mom, don’t worry about me.

I wondered if I’d ever stop worrying that she might harm herself. But what mother wouldn’t worry about a depressed teenage daughter, especially one who had skipped third grade and was young for her class, who had spent three and half years immersed in the culture of a high school where every year for the past six years a student had committed suicide, and who had left that school seven weeks ago, distraught and humiliated, to finish up her senior year at home in independent study.

When we entered the deli, I nearly fainted. I grabbed my daughter’s waist.

What is your problem? she snapped.

I’m dizzy again, I said.

Well then sit, she said, as if talking to a dog.

The deli owner, a Lebanese man named Sam, with coal black eyes and teeth so white and perfect they must have been capped, came from around the counter to ask if I was okay. Touching his forearm, I thanked him for his concern. I gave my daughter a twenty to buy lunch and by time she came back to the table with our salads, I was feeling better.

An hour later we went to family therapy. While we waited in the office, my husband scrolled through his phone, I flicked through trashy magazines, and my daughter stared as if hypnotized at a potted plant. And then, the damn song about the crow on the cradle snuck back into my head.

Stop, I told myself, wishing for the millionth time that I could overcome my anxieties. To calm myself, I employed another cognitive-behavioral trick that involves replacing an obsessive thought with a sensation that overpowers it.

I keep Altoids, the spearmint flavor, in my purse for just this purpose. I found a single one left in the tin box and popped it in my mouth. The taste at the core, stringent, almost medicinal, makes my mouth water with distaste and longing, opposing sensations that I suppose stretch back to my childhood when my beloved father gave me spearmint flavored mints, once after he’d disciplined me with a belt that left a row of welts on the back of my legs. You could argue that I was replacing one negative thought with another, but the overpowering effect of those mints was the handiest thing I could keep in my purse and certainly less harmful than a cigarette or a finger-pricking pin.

Dr. Mueller, a transplanted New Yorker with a mustache, barrel of a stomach and diamond stud in his right ear, didn’t keep us waiting long, and the four of us settled into his deep-cushioned, black pleather chairs and footstools.

We started family therapy because of what happened to my daughter. Nothing in her daughter’s history prepared us, but I suppose life unfolds like that, unexpectedly you round a corner of your life and bang: your mother dies or you lose your life savings. Or your daughter has sex with her teacher, Mr. Ramsey.

And not just once but multiple times, in multiple places, in classrooms and supply closets, in motels, in his Volvo wagon. Perhaps even in his home. Mr. Ramsey lives less than a mile from us.

A charismatic teacher, he taught at the high school for twenty years, right up until he was arrested, charged and released on bail. He’s my age, forty-six, with three children. It makes me nauseous if I pause too long to think about it. I mean the fact that this father, this teacher, sexually abused my daughter — and the fact, too, that his children may now be fatherless.

Family therapy didn’t start well that day. Dr. Mueller seemed distracted and my daughter refused to answer any questions with anything other than “I don’t know” or “maybe.”

My husband admitted that he’d wanted to do “bodily harm” to Mr. Ramsey, but had mastered the “ugliness” of the situation. The women in his life needed help, he said, and he was here for us, to help us deal with “our” guilt and sorrow, “our” anger and humiliation.

Ticked off by his above-it-all attitude, I scolded my husband, told him he’d bailed out on us, that all he ever did lately was immerse himself in his busy, busy work, that he might as well have a leash around his neck for all the time he spent attached to his computer.

Why are you yelling at me? he asked.

I turned to my daughter to gauge her reaction or to look for her solidarity, I’m not sure which, and was stricken by her expression.

A twisted smile. It might have been a nervous smile but, God help me, what flicked through my mind was sadistic smile. She was gloating.

Christ, I cried. Why are you smiling like that? Do you think this conversation is funny?

Maybe, I don’t know, she said.

I squeezed the arms of the chair, clenched my jaw. My daughter crossed her arms, still smiling. My husband cleared his throat. Dr. Mueller pulled on his ear and twisted the diamond stud, waiting like therapists do for the dynamics to play themselves out.

Babe, calm down, my husband said. I admit I’ve been a detached. It’s hard. Hard for all of us. We’ll get through it.

Say something, I said to my daughter.

She shrugged her shoulders, poked the tip of her tongue between her lips and licked her upper lip. A wave, no, a tsunami of vertigo washed over me. I leaned forward, put my head between my knees. I could hear my daughter fidgeting, the sound of her bare legs rubbing against the pleather chair.

Vertigo again? my husband asked.

He turned to Dr. Mueller and said, She’s had several episodes today.

It could be stress, Dr. Mueller said. But see a doctor if it doesn’t go away by tomorrow. I’ll get a glass of water.

I righted myself. The room gyrated. The back of my shirt was wet with sweat. My husband reached over to rub my back. Just as Dr. Mueller re-entered the room with the water, my daughter started laughing. She covered her mouth with both hands, but couldn’t stop.

You’re laughing because you’re uncomfortable, Dr. Mueller said. He handed me the glass of water and sat down. Perhaps you’re angry too, as angry as your mother. Tell us what you’re angry about.

No, no, my daughter said. I’m not upset. I’m relieved.

I took a sip of water. The vertigo had receded but I felt faint. My daughter curled her lips into a sneer again and locked her eyes on mine.

Get that snide smile off your face, I snapped at her.

She clamped her lips shut, and I could tell she was biting the insides of her cheeks as I sometimes do. Then she relaxed her jaw and slumped in her seat. With contempt embedded in her voice, she said, I’ll never be like you. That’s why I fucked Mr. Ramsey. I never want to be like you. I will kill myself if I ever become like you. I hate you.

Her words knocked my breath away. I couldn’t, wouldn’t believe what she was saying. I saw her little-girl self sitting on my lap, twisting the cloth carrot I’d sewn back on her blue-jacketed bunny, her face nuzzling the space just beneath my breastbone as she described why I was the best Mommy in the world.

My husband looked stunned. Dr. Mueller waited for one of us to speak. The silence hung over us like a dark holographic presence until my daughter broke it.

Your turn to say something, she said to me. But you’re probably afraid. You’re always afraid, always worrying about something. Afraid of heights, of flying. Dr. Mueller, do you know she has to down a scotch and a couple of Xanax before we leave for the airport?

Dr. Mueller looked at his watch and said, I want to talk about the comment you made earlier, about having intercourse with your teacher because you didn’t want to be like your mother.

I didn’t say intercourse, my daughter said. I said, fucked.

And you said you hated your mother.

This is stupid.

What do you mean?

What do you think? This. Family therapy. All we ever do is talk about me. I try to talk about my mom and her wacko problems, and you bring it back to me. Fuck it.

With that my daughter jumped out of her chair and stormed out of the room. We’d already gone beyond our time, and Dr. Mueller had another patient waiting, so we agreed to revisit her disturbing disclosure at our next session.

 

On the drive back, we were quiet, polite, distant. On the bridge, I counted sailboats to shove my daughter’s ugly words from my mind. When got home, my daughter ran up to her room. I told my husband I needed to unwind, that I was going to go to the YMCA for a yoga class. He offered to drive me, a conciliatory gesture I appreciated but didn’t accept.

What about your vertigo?

I’ll pull over if it happens again, I assured him.

Yoga relaxed me. Lying there on my mat under the gently whirring fans in the waning light of the afternoon, the eucalyptus trees swaying in the high windows of the studio as the instructor’s melodious voice guided us, I felt my limbs loosening, my legs twitching, as if I were about to drift off to sleep. My breathing was slow and expansive.

Afterwards, as I rolled up my mat, a woman I knew came up to me. Our children had been in the same class in grade school, but I saw her these days only at the Y or grocery store. She couldn’t wait to tell me which college her daughter had been accepted to, ranked seventh in the latest U.S. News and World report. She barely paused for my response before asking in a hushed tone about my daughter.

How is she coping? It must be so difficult for you. If there is anything, anything at all I can do, please call.

Please call, I repeated.

I meant to voice my disbelief that she would under any circumstance expect that I might call her to lean on, but my voice came out like a mimicking parrot. I felt my face flush. Slapping her crossed my mind, but instead I ran out of the yoga studio.

Walking across the parking lot, I felt pressure clamp my head like a vise being screwed tighter and tighter. Within seconds I was woozy. The parking lot’s black-topped surface bounced like a trampoline. I stopped to lean on the bumper of a car, and started when someone spoke my name. The yoga instructor was standing beside me, asking me if I felt ill.

Vertigo, I told her. I’ll be okay in a minute.

The instructor suggested that I return to the gym and call someone for a ride home. But the dizziness seemed to be subsiding, so I told her I’d wait in the car for ten minutes. I thanked her and promised to call someone if the vertigo didn’t go away.

 

My memory is fuzzy. I must have arrived here in an ambulance. I cannot remember much until the detective came into my curtained cubicle. My adrenaline kicked in. She wasn’t wearing a uniform, but I knew right away who she was. She had an air of authority twinned with weariness. She’d heard it all. All the versions people conjure of their own reality.

We didn’t talk long. A nurse shooed her away. I wish now I’d feigned a concussion. Except for the vertigo, I’m not sure exactly what I told her, how I worded things. You need to be precise, cautious in a situation like this.

 

My husband leans over me. I reach up to touch his face. His hair is graying near his ears and at his temple. I squeeze his hand.

It was an accident, I tell my husband.

Quiet. Don’t say another word. The doctor says you’re in shock. It was the vertigo, wasn’t it? I should have driven you, damn it. You’re going to be fine. I’ve called an attorney.

Is Mr. Ramsey —

Shhh, it wasn’t your fault, my husband says, and I can tell by his hesitant tone that Mr. Ramsey is dead. An arrow of fear flits through me, but that’s all, just a single dart, and I wonder idly why I’m not more frightened by the idea that I’ve killed a man.

Don’t talk, my husband says. Just rest now. What are they giving you? Do you need more painkillers? Have they given you a sedative?

No, where is -–

She’s in the waiting room.

How is she? Is she all right? You shouldn’t leave her.

Babe, calm down, my husband says, your sister is with her.

He strokes my forehead.

I ask him if my purse is in the room. I need an Altoid. He finds my purse and rifles through it, but the tin box is empty. Please, please find me an Altoid, I tell him.

Alone, it comes back to me, like a missing link I didn’t know I was searching for. I remember now what I felt when I saw Mr. Ramsey and became dizzy. I can only describe it as a controlled rage. I didn’t mean to kill him.

My heart rate judders rapidly across the monitor, and I watch it as if from a great distance. I feel as though my years of practicing coping strategies has culminated in this moment, in this decision: I put my terrible revelation in a small box and seal it with packing tape, winding the tape around and around the box until I’m satisfied that it will never come undone, and then I shove that box into the furthest corner of our attic. All these years of therapy I’ve been told that denial doesn’t work, but I know with every deep breath I take, watching the monitor as my heart rate calms, that I will never open this box again.

I prop myself up on the gurney and wait for my husband to return. But when the curtains part it’s my daughter. She’s been crying.

Mom, are you okay? she asks. Have you heard anything about Mr. Ramsey? I can’t believe it was him that you hit. Mom, I –

My daughter pauses. Stares open mouthed at me.

Why are you looking at me like that?

Everything is going to be okay, I say.

I want to tell her that she’ll never have to worry about that damn crow, but I know she’ll think I’m crazy, so I give her a wider, reassuring grin.

She takes a step back from me. Stop it, she says. Stop smiling at me like that.

I clamp my lips together, curling them inside and over my teeth. Then I close my eyes, concentrate on my counting. I count the people who can attest to my vertigo. One … Sam, the deli owner. Two … Dr. Mueller. Three … the yoga instructor. Four … my husband. Five … my daughter. She didn’t mean what she said in Dr. Mueller’s office. She loves me, and someday, maybe when she’s a mother, she’ll realize how fiercely I love her.

 

 

BIO

Mary TaugherMary Taugher is a graduate of the MFA creative writing program at San Francisco State University. Her work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Transfer, Instant City, 580 Split, Prick of the Spindle. She was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s 2009 Short-Story Award for New Writers contest.

John Spencer Walters

The Importance of Casket Readiness

by John Spencer Walters

 

I just received a lovely letter from the Neptune Society informing me that persons of my vintage are choosing in large numbers to have their rotting bodies cremated. The missive fails to indicate specifically, but I assume that the good people of Neptune are soliciting post-mortem incinerations only. Perhaps the letter is purposely vague to include those willing to accelerate the inevitable. I consider excessive and presumptuous the urgency with which Neptune spurs on the Postmaster, “time sensitive information enclosed.” I’ve often thought of doing the job myself but I lack the courage necessary to inflict pain upon my palpably rotting body. The contents of my mailbox reveal daily that Neptune is not the only commercial buzzard circling relentlessly above.

One thing I can remember without prompting is that I’ve entered the penultimate stage of existence, a leading indicator of which is that even though I’ve begun to drool I’m still able to drive myself to the liquor store, where well-meaning attendants ask (much too insistently) if I require help toting that half gallon of Johnny Walker to the car.

As long as the sun shines brightly on my liver spotted head, I will not allow the funeral industry to hasten my death. Though I’m certain as one can be of my near term survival, I comport myself as if death were imminent, dressing always in such a way as to be casket ready or oven worthy, as the case may be. I wear a sport coat, even to get groceries. If the trip to the market rises to the level of an outing (includes a stop at the pharmacy or dry cleaners), I accompany the coat with a tie. I’m considering wearing a tie to bed, in the event that death is merciful and takes me in my sleep.

Why, you may wonder, should anybody dress formally after having toiled forty years in a uniform he has longed to shed, perhaps even shred? In retirement you’re as inclined to compromise your comfort as you are to set an alarm clock. Why should you forsake cargo shorts in favor of gray flannel slacks? You’ve earned a stint of unmitigated leisure. You require a reason more persuasive than merely appearing spiffy upon arrival at Cheerful Charlie’s Funeral Home.

Simply put, nothing needs to be turned on its head quite so compellingly as a few beliefs cherished among retirees, to wit: upon retirement the typical American male consummates THE DREAM, unloading every reminder of time spent in button down confinement, trading the wing tips for well-worn flip-flops, lounging in his favorite sweats, the ones that pair splendidly with the baseball jersey, so much so that they evoke the specter of formal attire, unbecoming of his new found freedom and clearly violating the unwritten dress code to which the American male retiree unflinchingly (and unabashedly) adheres. While tossing the jersey to the closet floor he notes the unwelcomed presence of a charcoal brown suit, which somehow evaded the U-haul on his epic post-retirement party trip to the consignment shop. He settles on the wife beater T as his “go to” shirting, largely for its liberating effect on that which he has no doubt is a fetching shock of hair growing on his upper back. He reserves the baseball jersey for October, and for weddings and funerals at which he considers his attendance inescapable.

I strongly advise against this practice, this line of thinking. For those males aged 62 years and older, your need has never been greater than to dress like those sartorially resplendent adults of the 1940s and 50s. I ask my aged male brethren to carefully and objectively study their physical appearance. Even without rose-colored glasses, a rush of delusional thoughts fills your brain, which you embrace as perfectly plausible. You imagine your age defying face appearing as a Google pop-up, the caption to which encouraging viewers “to read further and discover this 63 year old grandpa’s secret to looking 30.”

Clear your mind of all such chimera. Allow reality to take control of what remains of your cerebellum. Note that the lines on your face, which for years you dismissed as mattress indentations, are now pronounced and sufficiently deep to transport water. Your eyes are drawn to one such rivulet carved into your forehead. You follow its path and realize that it’s shaped much like the I 695 Beltway around Baltimore. You need help and imagine it arriving in the form of a Lamborghini, followed by a head-to-toe- skin transplant, which you imagine as powerful palliatives, if only you could afford these. Don’t despair. You can obtain a measure of grace and dignity without breaking the bank.

Nothing is as affordable as dressing well to compensate for the unsightliness of old age—all the while keeping you looking sharp for your inevitable date with the funeral pyre. Do this, if not for yourself, then for your community, which already is blighted from excessive exposure to gnarled, ancient flesh. It matters not how fit you think you may be. Elderly flesh requires more not less clothing. The over-the-calf socks are a good idea when combined with a nice pair of slacks, but never with a pair of Bermuda shorts. You can rehabilitate your community’s aesthetic by unburdening it and yourself of the Bermuda shorts, all bottom wear, really, that fails to cover your ankles. Please retain, and tenderly care for, the navy blue blazer.

Ask yourself whether swimwear is really necessary in life’s final chapter? The answer clearly is no. Find a recreational activity that calls for a superabundance of outfitting, perhaps fencing or snowmobiling. Why should I care either about the beautification or greater edification of my community, you ask? Your community, as with all things that don’t meet with your approval (which includes just about everything) can go to hell!

I’m aware that old age offers no gift greater than the freedom to disregard what others think. This gift often impels us to enter into situations for no purpose other than to tell somebody, preferably a snot-nosed kid, to fuck off. I get it. It’s one of my great indulgences. It’s the one thing that makes tolerable the infirmities of old age. Indeed, I’m a charter member of the HEHE Club (Hate Everything, Hate Everybody), an elite organization established specifically by, but not limited exclusively to, old timers. It demands only that its members demonstrate the unremitting surliness of a grizzly bear.

That said, I hope to awaken your highly developed social consciousness for which you were famous but which succumbed effortlessly to the comforts of middle class living. Whether by the grace of God or by force of superior talent, our generation developed a rich culture worth sustaining. The young have rendered it barren. As you examine our cultural landscape, hideous in nearly all of its aspects, are you not aroused by the desire to edify it, even if only in some small way. Consider the music, but for your sake don’t dwell on it. Our young people have done for music what ISIS has done for Islam, taken it back to the sixth century, otherwise known as The Age of Alvin and the Fucking Chipmunks. Consider the state of literacy—but again don’t dwell on it. Our grandkids can neither read nor write—neither can their teachers. Ours may have been the last generation to produce persons of intellectual depth, musicians who actually played musical instruments, who wrote songs demanding an audience whose IQ’s exceeded 60.

You may think that it’s only fitting that civilization die with us. Music and literacy are in a state of moribundity, and even though we no longer can do the kind of heavy lifting necessary to give life to these, we can put an arthritic shoulder to the wheel in an effort to salvage at least one vestige of civilization. We can show younger generations how to dress like adults.

In closing remember, too, that death is rarely merciful. Too often death is preceded by an extended institutional stay, where you will languish, too enfeebled to dress yourself. This task is left to nursing home staff, perhaps in your case a fun loving bunch known for hilarity, who relieve their drudgery by “dressing up” the residents. Imagine the staff collapsing in merriment as they admire their handiwork: you lay in bed staring blankly at the ceiling, wearing a sundress, your heavily rouged face accented by blonde hair extensions. There’s no telling what indignities you may suffer in your addle brained oblivion. In the charge of strangers, you have no idea how foolish you can look, which is one more reason to dress yourself smartly, and make the most of it, while you are able!

 

BIO

John Spencer WaltersJohn Spencer Walters has published several award-winning academic journal articles, in addition to a monograph, U.S. Government Publication: Ideological Development and Institutional Politics, from the Founding to 1970, which is as dense as its title suggests.

 

 

 

to the Utter East

by Josey Parker

 

If the ocean was
full of flowers,
how long would it
take for them to wilt?
How long before petals became chips?
Natural with sea salt.

And would they look
like bouquets
or accordions?

When you bite a clover flower
and press it between
your molars,
somehow that blossom
unfolds on the buds
of your tongue.

-no, the flowers
aren’t bouquets or
accordions but carousels like
sticky fingers, maybe?

But the ocean is full of them and so
is your mouth-
your lips spit pollen;
there is no ark to
save us.

Your head is a buoy,
bobbing in
stems, sepals, petals, seeds.
Close your mouth
before
your tongue
catches mine.
I told you I’m allergic to pollen.

 

 

Greensleeves

 

hand me that leaf
we rescued last fall
to press between the p’s

it paled anyways
with veins
like a dry wrist

all we have are the photographs
of our fingers
dusty with chlorophyll

 

 

what will we do with the princes?

 

It’s hurricane season
-so sue me for
boarding up my windows

you didn’t tell me you would
be here throwing
pebbles

 

 

BIO

Josey ParkerJosey Parker is a frazzled student and coffee enthusiast who somehow finds time to write copious amounts of poetry and flash fiction. Her work has previously appeared in the Claremont Review. Although she is an author, she is not in fact, dead.

 

 

 

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The Art of Olga Furman

 

Billie

Billie

 

Welcome

Welcome

 

Taurus

Taurus

 

The Clown

The Clown

 

Wanda

Wanda

 

Sarah

Sarah

 

 

 

ARTIST BIO:

OlgaFurman3I was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, where I spent my childhood years. The Soviet Union was ruled by Leonid Brezhnev at the time and the USSR called itself the most powerful country in the world. At age four, my parents left for the Polar Far North for jobs in the Soviet oil and gas industry. They left me with my grandmother, who lived in a town called Luga, which was famously called the “second worst city in Russia” by the great Russian poet Alexander S. Pushkin.

My childhood memories of the town were quite different. The town was situated in a beautiful natural setting consisting of a luscious pine forest and blue lakes covered in yellow water lilies with golden sandy shored. This was my first encounter with vivid colors and I immediately attempted to reproduce them on paper.

My grandmother would spoil me. I distinctly remember the smell of a new pack of crayons she bought me. I loved to color, and my grandma would always buy me coloring books. There were only two different coloring books available in the store. One had line drawings of dogs, and the other of all kinds of fish. I would outline and color them again and again.

At the age of seven I joined my family in the Far North . The colorful palette of Luga changed to the black grey and white of the arctic north. My parents weren’t really supportive of my art. Their plan was to train me as a piano teacher. They never denied my requests for art supplies however, and I was drawing and painting constantly. At school, kids noticed my love for doodling and made me the illustrator of the school newspaper. I really enjoyed doing this. Most of the drawings  I made for the paper were caricatures. I took my inspiration from a magazine called Krokodil (crocodile) which was a Soviet propaganda magazine. One of my first tasks was to copy a caricature of president Reagan playing a grand piano with the caption “Reagan is playing the strings of International Capital.” I was praised for the result. This was the beginning of my fascination with portraits.

We left Russia in 1991. We immigrated to Israel and we were penniless since all our property was taken away by the Soviets together with our citizenships. New life, new language, new college (I studied industrial engineering). I put my art on hold for a while to provide for myself and my family. One of my new friends later on brought me to the School of Art in Tel-Aviv, where I attended still life painting classes.

15 years ago I got married and immigrated to the United States, where we live happily with two kids and a pup in the suburbs of New Jersey. In the present, I am a full time artist and own a home art studio where I create my paintings and give art lessons.

 

My art is available for viewing here:

https://www.facebook.com/olga.furman.1

https://instagram.com/olga.s.furman/

http://olgafurmanart.blogspot.com/

My Grandfather is a Pilot

by Tommy Dean

 

He only flies on the weekends and since my girlfriend left me, my grandfather and I have been flying around the world. He always calls me on Thursday, and asks me, “Are you ready for your lesson?” to which I usually reply, “Just until I find something better to do.” He laughs and I can usually hear the tinkling sound of ice against his glass as he stirs another Bloody Mary. Chelsea didn’t break up with me to go out with a football player, because I used to be that guy. No, she broke up with me to start dating the trombone player. A senior, with a promising career and a scholarship to Notre Dame. Whenever I say Chelsea’s name around my grandfather he takes a long drink of his Bloody Mary and says, “Women,” as if that’s all there is to say about the subject. Both of his wives died, he reminds me, so he’s never felt that kind of heartache. Then he smacks his lips and winks. The pictures, both black and white and color in dusty frames tell me otherwise. I spot them all over the small house: the back of the toilet, the end table next to the recliner reserved for guests, and several next to the computer.

Saturday night, I pull into my grandfather’s driveway. My parents’ only let me drive in a forty mile radius and I have to call or text them when I get to my destination. I’m here, I type, close the app, and then open it back up to add a smiley face. I don’t feel all that happy, but it’s part of the illusion I’ve quietly agreed to continue with my family. I could sit here and listen to the engine settle and cool, but my grandfather gets anxious when cars pull in and no one gets out in like the first five minutes. Once, I sat there fighting with Chelsea on the phone and he came out with a pistol in his hand. When he confirmed it was me, he put it in the waistband of his jeans and waited for me to get out of the car.

“Jesus, Gramps.”

“I was just confirming it was you,” he said, a wrinkled smile breaking across his face.

“What if it wasn’t me?”

“Depends on who it was.”

There was more to his life, moments in his youth he never talked about, though I never asked either. Over the years, I’d heard mention, from the distracted and broken off conversations of my parents, of pool halls and bars. My father, an accountant, who had no sense of adventure, even in movies, shook his head when I told him about the gun. “That man’s always been a fighter. You get a chance, Joel, take a look at his knuckles.” “Oh, and don’t tell your mother.”

It feels like there is a lot we’re not telling my mother right now. My father thinks it’ll be easier if she finds out later. “When the dirt settles?” I ask more and more. All he can do is nod and grip my shoulder.

I walk up the sidewalk, concentrating on each step, willing my feet to do as they’re told, marveling at the condition of the concrete. The house was built in the late 40s, but you wouldn’t know it from all of the maintenance my grandfather does every year. The porch light is on, and though it’s a summer night the wind through the breezeway is cold and if I had any hair left, I’d surely have been wiping it out of my face. They say it won’t grow back this time.

I knock and wait for him to answer. From inside, the floorboards creak under his weight and there is the rustle of locks being undone. Light spills from the kitchen around the broad shape of my grandfather as he peers through the screen in the storm door.

“I guess the raccoons have learned how to knock.”

“You’d probably treat them better than your grandkids,” I say.

“Hell, it’d be a lot easier. Throw them a few scraps and they’d be on their way. I suppose you want to come in?”

The house is small; a three bedroom with less than twelve hundred square feet. How my father lived here with three other siblings I’ll never know. Except somehow they all survived the closeness that small houses bring. The kind of closeness that develops into fights and the sharing of colds and accusations, the kind of hurts that bond a family together though they never tend to see each other except for the holidays.

The linoleum in the kitchen has yellowed and is peeling underneath the table, which in a larger house would have fit nicely in a dining room. Here it sags underneath the weight of mail and old Coca-Cola bottles that my grandfather collects. When he’s not flying the plane, he sits at the table and rubs away the dust and grime that comes from years of neglect. I often wonder if we all couldn’t use a gentle twist or flap of a rag, something to shine us up before we go out into the world. Though I’m sure some of us wouldn’t prefer it. Our bodies chipped and stained, the ugliness of light reflected through glass, vulnerable to another crack when we’ve been mishandled or thrown against the pavement.

My grandpa leads us through the kitchen into a short open space offset between the kitchen and the living room. He walks slower than normal, his hands, usually in his pockets, are out at his sides poised to catch himself should he suddenly lose his balance. His hair too, seems to have thinned since I’ve last seen him. He falls more than sits in the desk chair.

“Getting old isn’t for sissies,” he says.

I stand there looking down at him. His hands gripping the armrests as though he’s afraid he’ll fall right through the seat.

“What the hell are you looking at?” he asks, his voice weak at first, but filled with piss and vinegar at the end. A phrase he taught me when I was four, at a Fourth of July parade. I remember the look of horror on my mom’s face while I ran around in circles, shouting “piss and vinegar, piss and vinegar.”

“You need a hat. A pilot’s with the wings stitched into the middle.”

“What for?”

“You know, to make it official.”

“Nah, that’d make it too real. Then I’d feel bad flying with one of these.” He picked up the sweating highball (another word he taught me) and took a swallow of the red juice. The vodka concealed by the color, but no one that knew my grandfather was ever fooled.

I take a seat in the creaky, wooden dining room chair that sits to the left of the office chair. When we first started our routine, I carry the chair back at the end of each visit, but now I’m too weak to protest, so it sits there every weekday night waiting for my return. I’m sure it bothers him to snake around the damn thing every night when goes to check his email, but he’s never said a word.

My grandpa pecks at the keyboard and images of his first wife vanish from the screen. Other pictures take her place, and I’m surprised by the chronology: second wife (my grandmother crocheting prior to the MS), their children (my dad with long hair and buck teeth), and then shots of my two sisters and I aging from infants to teenagers and all of the awkwardness in between. His life flashes onto and off the screen in seconds. The computer fan whirs and a life that’s just about out of gas passes away back into a binary plasma until they’re called back to the screen again.

Against the wall, next to the computer is an old roll-top desk covered in picture frames. I had attributed these remnants of the past to my grandmother’s sense of decorating, but she’s been gone for several years and still the frames remain. They make the house feel smaller as if it’s full of life, while my parents home seems devoid of pictures as if they would take up too much space. I’ve overheard my mother comment to my father that she likes clean, sharp lines.

I grab one of the frames and wipe my finger around the corners. When I look at my finger I expect to see a smudge of dust, but there’s nothing there but the whorls of my fingerprint. It reminds me of a time when I was younger when I was active in Cub Scouts and our group leader took us down to the local police station to have all of us fingerprinted. It satisfied the requirements of one of the badges, though I no longer had the stoll they were collected on. The cop was fat with smelly breath that leaked out of a mouth covered by the wisps of a half-grown mustache. His face was so round, his hair buzzed tight to his scalp, it could have used the extra hair to give his features some kind of definition. His head looked like a watermelon perched atop human shoulders. I wondered if he got punched a lot. A face like that was just asking to be pummeled. He took my wrist roughly and pushed my thumb into the ink pad, rolling it right and left as if I didn’t have any motor control, as if I were a doll, a thing he could fling around as he chose. He made a big deal about telling us, six boys under the age of thirteen, that the fingerprints would help the police find us if we were ever taken. Alive? I wanted to ask, but didn’t because I didn’t want him to remember me. I kept thinking about the record they now had of my prints, how they’d now be a part of the national database, where if I should ever commit a crime they’d be able to link me to the crime scene. Now I didn’t plan on committing any crimes not then, and not now, but I didn’t like the thought of them having everything they needed. And I’d given it to them willingly.

My grandpa sighs as he repositions himself in the leather office chair. He tabs at the keyboard and the flight simulator comes onto the screen. The rattle of a large engine blares from the speakers that sit next to the bulky rear-projection monitor.

“I know it’s your turn to pick the destination, but I’d like to have another turn. You don’t mind, do you?” he asks, his eyebrows raised, as if this is an honest question, when we both know that I don’t care where we go. Even when I do pick a place, it’s only to make him happy and through his gentle suggestions.

“Like Hell,” I say, because that’s how we talk to each other. A couple of old men, who should have seen better days, but they never really materialized.

“”Good, because there’s a flight I’ve always wanted to pilot and I think today is the day.”

“Just tell me that we’re not going to Europe again, because that took forever. And you were definitely over your limit that night.

“That’s why I’ve got my copilot.” he squeezes my neck, but the pressure seems weaker than usual.

“My captain, my captain, where are we headed?”

“Boston to California, my good lad.”

“And our mood tonight? Cherished memory or shameful regret?”

He takes a long drink of his Bloody Mary–his father’s drink. “Oh a little of both, I’m afraid. It’s the measure of life.”

“Just as long as we can land the thing this time. That airport in Fiji was unreal. Who plops an airport down between the ocean and a mountain? I can’t believe people really fly there.”

“I don’t think we’ll have to worry about the landing this time.”

“Fine. Then move over old man and pass me that keyboard. I’ll take her up to cruising altitude.”

He rocked his chair to the right and slid the keyboard closer toward my waiting hands. I moved my fingers expectantly like a Jazz pianist. Tap, Tap. The keys responded to my poking and the plane on the screen rattled to life. The pilot avatar, with only his hands showing, since the camera in the game was slotted for first person point of view, pushed the speed lever forward and the camera switched to the outside of the plane where it taxied faster down the runway. The number on the tail of the plane was 73. I tapped a key and the camera focused back on the cockpit. The simulator was actually pretty easy to play in that it only took a few taps of the keys to get the plane up into the air and cruising along. Like most kids my age, I enjoyed more complex and violent games, but the one time that I tried one of these games with my grandfather he almost broke my controller by throwing it at the ground. He had stomped out of the room and refused to return until I had got the goddamn thing off the screen.

I pivot the camera from cockpit, to the engines, to the tail, and then to the interior where usually there were pixelated people stretched out across the seats. In this flight, there were two lone avatars sitting in the front close to the cockpit door. The graphics aren’t up-to-date, so the two figures look too much like cartoons compared to the newer games that were made for the latest gaming consoles. I flip through row after row until I get to the front and I notice that the figures match our likenesses. A few months back, as a joke, we had made ourselves using the limited character building options. I looked more like a kindergartener than a sophomore in high school and my Grandfather had really large biceps, which he assured me he used to have in his own youth. I didn’t remember ever actually adding them to the passenger list before tonight though.

“Where’s the rest of the passengers?”

“Check the Flight List, Co-pilot.”

A few clicks of the mouse takes me away from the interior of the plane and to a screen with a list of the passengers. My grandfather and I are the only names on the list.

“Where are all the other fake people? Donny, the accountant with the drinking problem, and Celeste, who is thinking about running away from her family?” Sometimes we make up fake backstories for the other avatar passengers. It’s our way of living different lives I guess, though sometimes I wonder if I’ve lived enough of my own to know that someone’s else’s life might be better. I’m just starting, I want to tell God or the universe, whoever is control.

“We’re flying solo, bud. I didn’t want anyone else on this flight.”

Why, I almost ask him, but there’s something in his voice that stops me from asking. Even when I was a child, it wasn’t a question he ever liked to answer. Ask your mom, he’d tell me over and over.

“I guess we’d better get this over with,” he says, as if he’s suddenly exhausted. “Would you get me another one of these while I get us back on track?” He hands me his glass, the smell of tomato and vodka drifts between us and I can’t tell if it’s coming only from the cup or if he’s getting closer to that moment where the smell of his body is more vodka and tomato than his normal smell of cigarettes and western aftershave.

In the kitchen, I rinse out the red residue from the bottom of the glass. He hides the vodka in the cabinet next to the sink. He told me once that a man shouldn’t be ashamed of the things in his home, but he didn’t need to invite gossip either, so the vodka stayed hidden and guests were offered Pepsi. The bottle is large, with a round bottom and a long neck. There isn’t much in there, maybe enough for two or three drinks so I pour about half into the glass. I don’t have much experience in this, so I don’t know if it would be considered the normal amount or not, but I’ll have to warn him that’s he’s almost out. I grab the tomato juice from the ancient and yellowing fridge. It’s so old that the seal in the door doesn’t work all that well and the door opens easier than a swinging gate. As I pour the juice, I try to imagine again what it tastes like and why it’s so appealing to my grandfather. How could he stand to drink one or six every night? My mother had outlawed alcohol in our home except for the rare bottle of wine around the holidays. It’s not something my father or her ever talked about with us, but I’d never seen either of them drunk. It wasn’t how they dealt with the minor dramas of their lives. My mother, especially, attacked everything head on and she relied on her ability to be ever present if a problem should arise. Alcohol would have diminished her ability to concentrate on the solution, a solution she might suffer over for weeks.

“Ty, why don’t you make yourself one too,” my Grandfather shouted.

I walked into the next room carrying the glass, my legs already stiffening up from standing long enough to make the drink. I wish I could tell him about the pain, how I know that it might be coming back.

“You sure?” I ask, handing him the cup. “I don’t want anyone to get in trouble.”

“Go, go.” He shoos me away with his free hand. “We won’t tell your mother. Besides what good is flying first class if you can’t enjoy the free drinks?” He smiles over the brim of his glass, takes a long drink, and motions for me to hurry up.

Though it feels like I’m dragging my left leg, I hurry into the kitchen. I open the cabinet with the cups and I hesitate. At home, we only use plastic cups, but that seems so childish when I’m going to have my first drink, so I grab a glass like my grandfather’s and I go to work making another drink.

My mother didn’t like these visits. Not because of my grandfather’s language or references about the seedier things he had done in his life, though these things were usually included in her arguments with my father; arguments that I wasn’t supposed to hear, but inevitably heard, because my mother’s vehemence didn’t allow her to whisper. No her real problem with the way that I spent my Saturday nights was that she thought that I was wasting my time. Time that had become even more precious as I got older and the chances of remission twindled. She’d casually mention dances or movies, things I could do with my friends. Normal things, she never said, but her eyes often pleaded in those few minutes we spent passing each other in the darkened hallway outside of my bedroom before I went off to bed. My friend options had narrowed through the years as my cancer became normal, boring, and a thing they could avoid without much guilt. It was no longer cool to hang out with the kid with cancer. And I too had realized that it was no longer worth trying to fit in. I never would. So I helped my grandfather fly his simulation missions and waited. This, I wanted to tell my mother, is when I owned time.

When I sit back down I notice two things: the first is that my grandfather’s drink is about gone already and that there is something wrong with the plane. The plane takes a wide arc and the engine starts to whine with the increase in speed. We’re traveling at 500 miles per hour and the pixelated clouds look like marching marshmallows as they glide over the windshield. A bell dings warning us that we’ve drifted well off of our original course. Another warning sounds goes off, reminding us that we may run out of gas or stall at these speeds. My grandfather hits the spacebar twice and the alarms are silenced leaving only the synthetic sound of rushing wind outside the simulated cockpit. We’ve never went off course before, nor have we ever cranked the plane up to these speeds. The game, with its weak graphics and lousy processor hitches and threatens to crash.

“Are you trying to give your fake self a heart-attack?”

“I wish it were that easy, Ty.” He shakes his head and holds up his glass. “Let’s drink, son.”

He gestures at my glass and I hold mine up like his as if we’re about to toast.

“Normally, for a first drink I’d tell you to take it slow, but tonight’s a little different and we don’t have the time for all of that namby-pamby stuff. We’ll drink together, alright? Don’t stop until I do. Can you do that for me, Ty?”

The tone of his voice–sad, angry, a bit hostile–makes me look him in the eye and I can see why my dad is so scared of him, but also why he loves him so much. I’m surprised that he’s not crying, but finally I nod and put the glass up to my lips. The smell of tomato is strong and the glass is cold against my lips. We tip our glasses and at first it tastes only like soup, but then as the liquid slides down my throat I think of eating hot food, campfires, and the time I had bronchitis. I tip the glass until it feels as though I’m drowning. I catch, from the corner of my eye, my grandfather lowering his glass and finally I take the cup away and suck in air.

“Jesus, How do you drink that stuff?” I wipe my mouth the back of my hand.

“It’s an acquired taste,” he says, laughing. I laugh too and I think of that scene in Beauty and the Beast where Gaston sings about his triumphs. I don’t mention this thought, because it’s another reminder of just how young I must seem to him.

“Grandpa, why are we doing all of this?” I wave my hands and arms around as if I’m a conductor who is fed up with his orchestra, indicating God knows what, because my head feels as though it’s trying to float away from my neck. The edges of my vision have gone a bit sparkly as the liquid settles in my stomach.

“Just watch the screen. A few more minutes and we’ll have our answer.”

“Answer? What? What are we doing?”

Tap, tap at the keys and my grandfather drops the plane several thousand feet. The camera tilts and I know that we’re nosing down toward the ground. The Earth comes into focus and I’m amazed again at how it looks like a patchwork quilt with it’s tidy squares of farmland and suburbs.

“Ty, We don’t have much time.”

“Time for what? This is getting a bit creepy Grandpa. Even for you.” Nervous, I take another sip of the drink.

“I wanted to see what it felt like. You know, to make those calls.”

“What calls? Look, the plane is going to crash,” I said, pointing at the screen. I killed thousands of soldiers in my own games, but I didn’t want this plane to crash.

I reached for the keyboard and he smacked my hand. It didn’t hurt at first, just stung like I was a child, the one I’d been trying to hide all night.

“What the hell was that for?” I sat back in my chair, a little afraid of where this was all going.

“You remember the movie we watched a couple of weeks ago? The one about Flight 73?”

“9/11? That was over ten years ago. What does that have to do with anything?”

“What doesn’t it have to do with? I’ve got some news. Bad news, actually. And I wanted to tell you when we were watching that movie, but I saw you crying…” I start to protest, and he waves me down. “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it, but I thought we had heard enough about death that night, so I’ve been trying to figure how to tell you ever since.”

The bells and alarms are back, forcing their way out of the speakers. I glance at the screen and the plane looks as though it’s been flung like an arrow toward the earth. A field comes closer, the individual details coming into focus. The field is surrounded by several small groups of trees, their branches fanned out like a huddle of school children waiting for the bus in winter.

“We’ve got to pretend here like I’m on that flight. I know I’m headed for a crash that you don’t walk away from. They’ve got these phones on the plane, you see, that can call anywhere in the world from the air. I’m up there with those other people, and I’m crying, and praying and cussing and I’m only thinking about you, Ty. You’ve been dealt a shitty hand. Christ. At your age, but I call you, son, because I know that you’ll understand. You might not remember it, but you’ve stared down that coward Death before and I need your strength, because he’s coming for me now. My plane is going down and I thought I was ready, but I’m not so sure now. So I thought I’d see what it was like to die. And I’ve been thinking about it for weeks, and this is the only thing I could think of and I’m sorry you have to come along, but I need a co-pilot for this last flight.”

He looks at me and the anger is gone, replaced by the same emotion I often find in my own eyes when I look in the mirror: fear.

I pull my chair closer and I take his hand. If I ignore the calluses and the gnarled knuckles, the skin is clammy and weightless, his grip loose, as if he’s waiting me for me to lead the way. We brace ourselves for the impact, holding onto each other, knowing full well that neither can really save the other, but in this simulated moment of panic, we take solace in knowing that somebody else is there. It won’t protect our bodies, as the plane hurtles toward the Earth, but for these last seconds, we free-fall into the place where our bodies, finally, cannot harm us.

No one died that day, at least not anybody real. We never flew again. We had, finally, one less mystery. Death, we agreed, could wait.

 

 

BIO

Tommy DeanTommy Dean is the author of a flash fiction chapbook entitled Special Like the People on TV from Redbird Chapbooks. A graduate of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA program, he has been previously published in the Watershed Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, r.kv.r.y, Boston Literary Magazine, Foliate Oak, and Gravel. Find him @TommyDeanWriter on Twitter.

 

 

 

tara vanflower image

The Tara Vanflower Interview 

Author, Musician, Mother — and much more

 

Tara Vanflower

 

We all have our favorite writers, our favorite artists and musicians. Sometimes an artist will have more than one creative outlet, like music and art, or filmmaking and writing. Tara Vanflower is one of those artists. She channels her artistic abilities in both music and writing. She’s published several novels, and is vocalist in the band Lycia. She’s also worked with a number of other bands, and with artists like Daniel Serra, whose work was featured in our summer issue. Having just released a new album with Lycia, and continuing to work on her novel series, Violet, Tara is always busy working. She also finds time to raise her son, along with husband, Mike VanPortfleet. We are pleased that she had time to talk with us about her work.

 

three Tara Books


THE INTERVIEW:

 

Writing Disorder: You’re known for your writing and your music. Which one is more challenging, which one do you prefer?

 

Tara Vanflower: I find music more challenging because you have to fit everything you want to say/evoke into a certain pattern, into a limited amount of space. With writing you can expand and elaborate. So, finding the right set of words to properly express your feeling or what you’re trying to say, and making it fit rhythmically/sonically, is very challenging. I think I prefer writing because there are really no limitations but your own imagination.

 

What has been the more rewarding for you personally?

 

Really, it’s hard to choose. Lycia has given me a whole life I would have never had, with experiences and relationships and travel, I never would have had, but writing is an entirely different kind of reward. There’s more pressure with music because a lot is expected, whereas with my writing I’m the only one that expects anything at this point. I’m only ever letting myself down. Well, that’s true in both regards. HA!

 

Talk about your life growing up. Where did you live? What was your family life like?

 

I grew up in NE Ohio in a small town called Mantua. My family are factory workers, blue collar, normal.

 

What was your youth like, and what made you want to become a writer?

 

Very simple and very fun for the most part. Typical kind of exurban life. I played outside all day with friends. Group baseball games, hide and seek, football, whatever. I twirled baton competitively, so I always did some travel with that. Having stories to tell is what made me want to become a writer. My imagination never stops and these people want their stories told.

 

When did you begin to think of yourself as a writer?

 

I haven’t begun to think of myself as a writer. I don’t know what flip needs to be switched for that to happen. Maybe some level of success? I honestly don’t know. But I don’t consider myself a musician either.

 

What music did you listen to as a child? Were your parents artistic? Or siblings?

 

I grew up listening to country & western, (the old GOOD stuff) bluegrass, southern gospel, that sort of thing. It definitely has had an impact on me. My parents are creative in their own ways. My mom painted and always sang around the house, as well as planting flowers and trees, which to me is a form of creativity. My father can build things with his hands like barns and dog houses and crap like that and I consider that creative. My brother played the sax for awhile but never pursued that. He was an athlete. But he could’ve been a great musician.

 

Before music and writing, what kind of work did you do? What type of work did you envision yourself doing?

 

I started young so I never really did “anything” before I started in music. I floated from job to job – cleaning hotel rooms, factory work, amusement park, whatever. I went to cosmetology school for a while, but I quit to go meet Mike and the rest is history. I never saw myself as really BEING anything. In my head I had random plans, but nothing was ever concrete. I didn’t care about anything enough before music.

 

What does your family think of your work and success? Do you ever get their input on your work/writing?

 

They’re proud, I guess. My mom is friends with a lot of people who follow our work and she randomly tells people in the store about Lycia. It’s not honestly a huge topic of discussion. I don’t talk about my writing much with family because it still feels like sharing my diary.

 

Who influenced your work early on? What books, authors did you read growing up? Which authors do you like to read now?

 

When I was really young I liked George Orwell and Ray Bradbury. But I can’t say anyone really influenced my work. I basically read trashy novels, or did. I don’t have time anymore. My desire was to tell the stories I had in my head. I didn’t use anyone else’s path or style to follow. I know my “style” is pretty improper, I imagine, I don’t really know. So I wouldn’t want to offend anyone by saying I was following their path anyway. If I am I’m doing it poorly.

 

Did you read any comics or graphic novels growing up? Name some titles that stood out.

 

Nope! Sadly I never got into that. I simply wasn’t exposed to it. It makes me sad. I still haven’t read a ton, but of the few I have, I love Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and Alex Ross. The art is phenomenal. I think that Superman is my favorite version. I may or may not be in love with Superman. Just throwing that out there.

 

Where do your stories begin? What is the process?

 

The first three books were inspired by dreams I had. The others have built upon those characters and their own tales evolved from there. I have very detailed dreams and gain a ton of inspiration from them. Or random fleeting images I catch from the air.

 

When was your first work published, and what was it?

Violent Violet originally came out in 2004. It has since been re-released.

 

Describe what happens when you write a story.

It’s on my mind nonstop. I never leave the characters or their world fully and every spare moment I have my mind is on them. I describe it like they’re sitting in this waiting room, pacing back and forth, waiting me to come back and spend time with them so they can tell their story. They get antsy and impatient. Some of them have been waiting years.

 

Your write lyrics, do you also write poetry? Is there a difference for you?

I started off writing poetry. The poetry I wrote naively gave me the belief I could write lyrics and thus I got involved with my first band. There is a difference. I don’t have to “fit” poetry into a finite box.

 

How much of what you write do you throw away?

Very little. But I do abandon things to return to later when I’m “feeling it” more. I have ten stories in various stages of completion.

 

How do you balance a story so it’s not too extreme, too violent, etc.?

I don’t believe in writing (or music for that matter) being “too” anything if it’s honest to the story/characters. The story dictates the level to which it reaches, not me.  

 

Talk about your Violet character. Is she based on you or someone you know?

Violet is definitely her own person. The scenarios in which she found herself in the first two books were based on my dreams, but she is most definitely her own person.

 

What are you working on now?

Way too many things. Right now I’m editing the next two “Violet” books. Then after that I will be finishing up a book called Black Owl. Then editing the two that I’ve already written that come after that one called Ilya and another called Mourning Glory. I’m also working on a music collaboration.

 

What do you do when you’re not writing? What do you do for fun?

All of my time is spoken for, so honestly, writing has to fit in the cracks where I’m not doing something else. I work fulltime, I’m a mother and wife, plus I have the music business. Writing is the last on the list because it has to be. What do I do for fun? Write! Ha! I love watching stuff on Netflix when I can and talking to people online.

 

What are the challenges of being a writer today?

Finding anyone to give a shit. You can write the best book in the world, but if no one reads it, who cares? I care because these characters mean something to me, but finding anyone else to care, there is the problem. I think there’s so many books out there, so many writers, that unless you stumble onto some magic wave of pure chance and luck, you fall through the cracks.

 

Are there limits to how far a writer can depart from the real world?

I don’t think so, but you still have to be able to relate to the characters. I think the problem with a lot of writers is they’re so busy trying to be clever they forget to tell a story that anyone can relate to or care about. I write about vampires, but they are real people first. The fact that they’re vampires isn’t the point of their stories, it’s secondary, and being a vampire is  just a fact of their reality.

 

Where do you write? Describe your work space.

A lot of different places. From my work comp, to the bed, to the couch, to the recliner. Wherever, whenever. I write in my head while I’m driving then rush to write notes when I get wherever I’m going. The beauty of using Google Docs is I can write from anywhere I have internet access. I would love to have a specific place, like an office, but that’s not my reality.

 

When do you write?

Late at night once everyone’s gone to bed, after work between the time I finish and the time I pick up my son from daycare, and during his naptimes on the weekend.

 

Does anyone else in your family write?

No, but they should. Everyone should.

 

Was writing encouraged at home?

It wasn’t a “thing”. I was more into twirling baton in my youth and didn’t start writing until I was in high school and I didn’t talk about it with anyone but a couple friends. They would spend the night and we would write these teenage romance novels back and forth. I miss those days. But no, it wasn’t encouraged because no one knew it was a thing.

 

How do you feel about turning people you know into characters in your stories?

I fucking love it. I’ve killed several arch nemeses in my books. I write aspects of people I know/love into some characters but they are never “that person”… just hints of their personalities or their looks.

 

How much research do you do before you begin a writing project?

None. Since I write from my personal experiences and a brand new world I’ve created, I don’t really need to do research. I will do random google searches on certain topics as a reference, but generally speaking, nothing I do requires researching. Is that good or bad?

 

Once you have the basic story written, does the editing process take longer than the initial writing?

This is a really hard question for me to answer. I think I’ve changed through the years since I’ve been writing for awhile now. Violent Violet and the three follow ups have been heavily edited. They were written a long time ago and VV was the first thing I ever wrote. So it has needed some work once my style kind of evolved. I think the books I’ve most recently written are more about editing grammar and less for sentence structure or continuity etc.

 

Do you have other creative talents?

Hmmm, I think talent in any regard is debateable. Ha! I’m an excellent swearer and work at a high level of sarcasm and self deprecation. My wood burning skills are up for debate.  

 

What music did you listen to growing up? What do you listen to now?

I listened to the music I noted earlier. But then I discovered punk and post punk music and that’s been pretty much it. I like a lot of stuff from 1920s-1940s, still listening to punk/post punk, I like a lot of bands like Ides of Gemini, Godflesh, Swans, Ulver, Pyramids, Killing Joke, White Lies, etc. A sort of mix of darker, brooding, slow motion, melancholic stuff.  I provide music lists in my books to share the stuff that is influencing me while I’m writing as well as setting an overall mood for the story/world I’m creating.

 

What is a typical writing day for you?

I don’t have writing days. Basically I just write when I have time allotted for it. God, I would love to have “writing days”.

 

Do you spend a lot of time on the internet? What do you do, what sites do you visit most often? Is there a point when you have to turn everything off?

I spend way too much time on the internet. My problem is that I love people and I love interacting with them. I’m mostly on the usual haunts: Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter. I have boards on Pinterest dedicated to writing inspiration and each book/character I’ve created, which I love. I do have to turn it all off sometimes, but it’s hard for me to check out. I used to feel bad about that but I don’t anymore.

 

How do you find time to write with a family and music projects? Would you like your son to be a writer or musician?

As I said earlier, basically when there isn’t anything going on with the family, that is my writing time. I won’t sacrifice my family time for my own selfish pursuits. I think it would be really cool if my son did something creative, but I would never push that if it wasn’t something he was into. I will support and encourage whatever he chooses to do. That having been said, he’s already making music and writing books. Ha ha.

 

What are you looking forward to in 2016 and beyond?

I’m scared to even answer this question. I just want to be happy. God knows the desires of my heart, I don’t need to speak them to the air.

 

When working on a project with your husband, Mike VanPortfleet, what is the process like, who does what?

Lycia is Mike’s project. I get involved when I’m asked to get involved. So, basically he’ll tell me “this is your song” and then I start working out my parts and get them recorded. I’m another instrument he uses.

 

Does he have any input on your writing?

No. I rarely discuss writing with him.

 

Would you rather tour with the band, or do a book tour?

Book tour. I wouldn’t have to worry about bullshit sound problems on a book tour. I could focus on meeting rad people and not worry about the technical side of playing shows. It would be awesome.

 

Any plans for a tour in the future, for your music or your writing?

Definitely no plans to play live shows. I wish I could do a book tour because I think that would be a hell of a lot of fun. Who knows what the future holds.

 

Thank you for your time.

 

Books by Tara Vanflower

Music by Tara Vanflower/Lycia

 

 

 

nuta gangan

still missing

by Nuta Istrate Gangan

 

some day
you will forget me
while I will always remain
a vague uneasiness
some day
you will turn me
into a memory
but you will be startled
by the thought I still exist
I know
you will sense me
the rest of your life
like a soldier
returning from the front
who feels his lost arm
present always
alive pulsing
but still missing

 

love

the world was ending
and still we owed each other
the unconsummated kisses
of all lovers
it rained bitterly
desperately feverishly
it rained with the need of droughts
the despair of floods
your body unleashed
merciless thunder
lightning ripped mine
into quivering arches
you finally slept
by the hot thighs of my thought
at the edge of a long kiss
desperate as the end of the world
with bloody lips
I rose
wrapped you in a dream
and with a single gesture
stopped the rain

 

the eyes

close first but die last
your teeth
stuck into the flesh of my thigh
seek reasons beyond the skin
with a wave of your hand
you balance the world
nestled in a tight fist
the moment of pain
transforming purifying
unspoken words
burn in my blood
those spoken
err beneath your mouth
eyes leave streaks of light
my skin grows translucent
illuminated from the inside
you kindle fires in my heart
kiss butterflies on my ankles
carve me in your image
the empty space inside
begs to be filled
fractures seek to be joined
my sunrises
cannot exist without your sunsets, darling
(paint petals on my eyelashes
do not let my eyes die)

 

white

the hunter never kills for meat
he craves the smell of blood
the agony
the last look in the doe’s eyes
that painful
white look
pierces his retina
and haunts him
stirring his blood
pulsing like an orgasm in his veins
the bloodstain
spreads crimson in the snow
my hands are so cold and white…
I dare not breathe
for fear of waking humanity
from this grinding frost
my sleepy eyelids twitch
my lips can taste my own blood
your white words
scratched on an equally white paper
hurt my eyes
I do not see
I can no longer see
there is only an ocean of white
giving rise to thousands of eyes
snow falls again
over my world
sanguine and absurd
oh Lord…
I do not want
the smell of fresh blood any more
(and you
don’t talk…
don’t talk of love
when my heart is closing
like a doe’s eye dying)

 

eve

you used to say
blue butterflies hide behind my knee
and one day
jasmine will blossom on my ankle
your blood
used to swirl in my veins
hot and silky
you’d take my soul in your fist
drinking me thirstily
to the last drop
you made love primitively
I was your first and last woman
you would bite my hip till it hurt
while kneading children in my womb
you used me
so you could breathe
you would tear pieces from my body
pleading with me to give birth
by a fire
in the middle of a field
biblical
raw
wild
thrusting my teeth into your shoulder
until the unleashed scream
would free the rain from the sky’s manacles
and disturb angels’ wings
in heavens full of primeval sins
I was young
I was Eve
I used to walk carefully
not to disturb
the fragile sleep of butterflies
or start a flowering
and catch your children in my womb

 

 

BIO

nuta ganganNuța Istrate Gangan is a Romanian-American author living in Davie, Florida with her son, Christian, and her husband, Dorin. Her poems are published both in Romanian and English, and her books are available online. Gangan’s poetry is translated into English by Adrian George Sahlean.

 

 

 

Tad Bartlett

Head Space

by Tad Bartlett

 

 

While I’m writing this essay, on a weekend in between drafts, Nicole and I pack up our three kids and go to visit her parents at their boat house overlooking Lake Pontchartrain. It’s the day before my father-in-law’s birthday, so I’m carrying his presents in each hand as we walk up the stairs to the main room. I’m focusing on the stairs in front of me. I have everything balanced and don’t want to trip. I forget about the low overhead clearance of the ceiling before the landing, that it’s low enough that I should duck. I fail to duck, and bang the top of my head hard into the ceiling.

“Not again,” I think, angry at myself, stunned, dizzy, trying to get out of the way as my two boys and little girl push past me up the stairs. A high-pitched whine, like a fine-tuned turbo engine, fills my ears. A gray curtain drops in front of my vision. Four days later, when I’m adding this intro to this essay, the headache won’t have stopped, the unsuccessful search for easy words will continue, and I’ll still have a stumble to my step.

 

* * *

 

On March 2, 2012, the National Football League announced it was investigating New Orleans Saints officials and defensive players for operating a system of bounties, pooling money and giving cash awards for deliberate hard hits on opposing players, hits that often resulted in the opposing player leaving the game. As a result of that investigation, two months later the NFL suspended four Saints defensive players: defensive captain Jonathan Vilma for one full year, Anthony Hargrove for eight games, Will Smith for four games, and Scott Fujita for three games. Vilma filed a federal lawsuit to fight against his suspension two weeks later, followed soon by a suit brought on behalf of the three other players by the NFL Players Association.

The first meaningful skirmish in the litigation took place on the morning of July 26, 2012 in U.S. District Judge Helen Berrigan’s courtroom in the imposing brutalist federal courthouse on Poydras Street in downtown New Orleans. Vilma was there with three of his attorneys, including Peter Ginsburg, stick-thin and hatchet-faced under thinning gray hair; and Duke Williams, a big man, built like he may have been a football player himself once. The League had a representative down from the executive offices in New York, along with five attorneys from New Orleans and Washington. The Players Association and the other three suspended players added three more attorneys to the room. They were all gathered for Judge Berrigan to take evidence and hear testimony on behalf of Vilma, who had requested a temporary restraining order to lift his suspension and allow him to go to Saints training camp—commenced that same day in the heat and humidity of the Saints’ practice facility in suburban Metairie, Louisiana—while the legal issues were pending.

To win his temporary restraining order, Vilma would have to prove a “likelihood of success on the merits” of his case. While there were esoteric legal issues involving the Collective Bargaining Agreement and principles of labor law, on the facts Vilma would have to show Judge Berrigan that it was likely he could prove he did not offer stacks of cash during defensive meetings for the players to take out Kurt Warner or Brett Favre or other opposing players, that he and the Saints defense only engaged in legal tackling under the rules of the game, that even legal tackles could be “big hits,” and that injuries suffered by opponents were just part of the game and not the result of a nefarious bounty scheme.

The public had a chance to see much of the League’s evidence during releases of documents and affidavits from the investigation, and the players had, as the Alabama country folks I grew up around liked to say, a heap of ‘splaining to do. I was in the courtroom that day for my job, but I had personal thoughts on the day’s issues, as well. While I was a huge Saints fan, going into that hearing I was pissed at Vilma and the other players and coaches. To me, the released documents showed them to be a bunch of entitled athletes celebrating hurting people, then saying anything to try to get away with it. In team meetings, they’d shared pictures of the opposing quarterbacks they’d left crumpled on the field, exhorted each other to “destroy each quarterback” and “kill the head,” awarded money for “cart-offs” and “knock-outs,” and promised to pay for any fines levied by the League. In public, they acted flabbergasted that the League executives would get upset at them for “just playing the game.” Boys would be boys, and what’s the harm? It felt like high school writ large, the football players out smashing mailboxes on a Friday night for laughs and no consequences.

 

* * *

 

I had my first diagnosed concussion when I was nine. I was in fourth grade. I was playing “chase” at recess. I don’t recall if I was the pursuer or being pursued, but the pursuit had taken us around the playground equipment. This was in 1981, when playgrounds were still all metal and rust and sharp edges and hard ground, before today’s rounded corners and plastics and “play surfaces.” We ran at full speed around the merry-go-round. Trying to be clever, we changed directions several times in mid-orbit so that the chase might collapse on itself. I remember running fast in one direction, the merry-go-round full of laughing kids rotating the other way. I remember the feeling of air rushing past me, and exhilaration. I remember turning my head to look behind me. I remember the sudden collision with a friend as I faced forward again. I remember the breath being knocked out of me. I remember falling sideways toward the merry-go-round, flailing my arms out. I remember my head making contact with the edge of the rotating metal platform, just behind my left ear.

I don’t remember anything else until five or six hours later, when my mom got home from work and woke me up. I was lying on top of my bed. I’d apparently gotten up from my fall, gone back into class when recess was over, finished the school day, ridden my bike a little more than a mile home, let myself into the house, and laid down on my bed and passed out. My mom took me to the emergency room and I got my first concussion diagnosis. In those days, that came from nothing more than a penlight shined in my eyes and resulted only in advice to my Mom to “keep an eye on him the next few days” and an admonition to me to “watch where you’re going, young man.” No CT scans or MRIs. No medications or orders of bed-rest.

 

* * *

 

The main strategy for Vilma’s case against the League was, in large part, to demonstrate that football is inherently a rough game. His attorneys wanted to drive home the point that defensive players engage in violent contact as a routine part of the game, and that it would be preposterous to suppose that defensive players would be able to control their hits to differentiate them from the routine to such a degree as to underlie a bounty system, that such a bounty scheme would be neither necessary nor feasible.

After Vilma testified for an hour, his attorneys called up a succession of current and retired Saints defensive players. First up was Troy Evans, for several years the Saints’ special teams captain and a back-up linebacker who had played with Vilma before retiring and starting a school bus company back home in Ohio. Evans was a solid block of a man, full of right angles, blonde hair spiked up over a square-jawed face.

Peter Ginsburg, Vilma’s attorney, asked Evans, “Is the NFL a violent game, in your opinion, Mr. Evans?”

“Yes.”

“You and your teammates are expected to deliver big hits. That’s your job, isn’t it?” Judge Berrigan watched Evans intently as he answered Ginsburg’s questions.

“Correct,” Evans responded. He elaborated, “A big hit is—how do you classify it? A big hit is obviously a high-speed—probably—collision that would result in sometimes the defender and sometimes the offensive player violently getting taken down, which in turn makes the crowd go crazy.”

“I was going to ask you about that,” Ginsburg said, his finger moving down his legal pad, as if Evans had jumped ahead of script. “It has an impact on the crowd, obviously. Correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Does it have an impact on the team, your team?”

“Absolutely. Just euphoric, natural, celebratory—it’s part of the game. Hard hits just kind of—it’s like slapping the table in this room.” Evans slapped his hand hard on the small table in the witness box. “Everybody would jump.” Sitting at one of counsel tables, I flinched.

Ginsburg smiled. The reporters sitting in the gallery tapped away on their laptops. Ginsburg asked, “Do those kind of hits also have an impact on the opposing team?”

“Absolutely. One side of the crowd gets loud, and the team gets jumping up and down; and the other team is picking the other player up, and the crowd goes quiet.”

 

* * *

 

I didn’t play football as a kid. I played soccer. I played it for twenty-two years, from ages five through twenty-seven. In Selma, Alabama, of all places, we had a thriving league operated by the local YMCA, with two three-month-long seasons each year, one in the spring and one in the fall, and a traveling team of all-stars in several different age groups that traveled throughout the South. I played in the Y league from five until fifteen, and was on the traveling team beginning when I was ten. We weren’t the typical jocks in town. Instead, we were largely an odd collection of speedy and spirited misfits whose coaches ran us and trained us until we were resilient and smart about the game in ways you wouldn’t expect kids from Selma to be.

My next three diagnosed concussions were from soccer. It wouldn’t sound so bad to say that I had three concussions in twenty-two years of soccer, but in reality those three concussions came in a four-year span starting when I was twelve.

The first one was at an all-star game in Montgomery. An aggressive player from a Montgomery squad and I were in the air challenging for a head ball. I got the ball, and he got my head. I remember a few minutes later that I was on the sideline, vomiting, but telling my coach to put me back in. I don’t remember the space in between, or the ride home to Selma after.

The second soccer concussion was the next year. Kicked in the head.

The third one came two years later. It was the consolation game in the final round of the state tournament. We were fighting for third place, and the game was close. It had been raining all weekend and the field was a mess. The opposing team lined up for a corner kick. I was guarding the back post. The corner kick sailed into the box past our keeper. An opposing player settled the ball to the ground, then kicked it toward the back post. There was no way our keeper would be able to cross the mouth of the goal to make the save. I left my feet, launched so that I would intersect the ball’s trajectory. I’d like to think I headed the ball clear and that we won the game, securing third place in the state, before I hit the side goal post. But if I’m being honest and not just relating the myth of me, I can’t really tell you what happened in that game, other than that I hit the side goal post with my head. I have no idea if I saved the ball, or if we won the game. No idea.[1]

 

* * *

 

Vilma’s next witness was Randall Gay. Gay grew up an under-sized but highly recruited all-around player from the small town of Brusly, Louisiana. He’d been a star defensive back on LSU’s 2003 national championship team. He made the New England Patriots as an undrafted free agent, and was a member of the 2004 Super Bowl champion team his rookie season. In 2008 he signed with the New Orleans Saints, where he played for three years, including as a member of the team that won the 2009 Super Bowl.

When Gay entered the courtroom, his suit was a little looser than Vilma’s and Evans’s had been. He wore a bright orange tie, but the knot was slightly askew. He gave Vilma a brief but nervous smile as he passed the plaintiff’s table. When he raised his right hand for Judge Berrigan to administer the oath, it trembled.

Vilma’s local counsel, Duke Williams, conducted the direct examination of Gay, as Ginsburg took a seat next to Vilma. Williams had a casual, garrulous tone. He first tried to put Gay at ease by exchanging pleasantries about their respective nick-names, “Duke” not being Williams’s given name. “I understand you have a nickname,” Williams said to Gay, “correct?”

“Yes, sir,” Gay said, stifling a grin. “Blue.”

Williams smiled. “I may call you ‘Blue’ at some point today, but—”

“That’s fine,” Gay said.

“Do you prefer to be called ‘Blue’ instead of ‘Randall’?”

“I’ve gotten to love them both,” Gay answered. I started to feel anxious for Gay. He seemed ill-fitted to the setting. There was that loose suit and askew tie. Then there was the hand tremor, which was continuing, and the inconclusive almost-grins. Something seemed not quite right for him. I quietly rooted for him to calm down.

Williams turned to the line of questions about the nature of the game. “Now, as a defensive back in the pro game, you do a lot of hitting, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How would you characterize the hitting that you guys do back there in the secondary?”

“Well, a lot more than a lot of us really want, especially for a small guy like me, but it’s a lot of contact. No matter how you put it, you’re going to get hit.”

Williams bulled through the point. “That’s what you’re expected to do, isn’t it?”

Gay sighed, looked down in his lap where he was trying to stash his trembling hands, then back up. “If you want to play, you better.”

Williams pushed on, oblivious to Gay’s discomfort. I wanted him to stop, move on to someone else. I couldn’t put a finger on it, but I was feeling for this guy. “Even if a guy weighs thirty, forty-five, fifty more pounds than you, you still have to take them down as best you can?”

“Even when a guy weighs even more than that,” Gay said, “because sometimes you go against guys a hundred pounds more than you, and you better get them down or they will find somebody else to do it.”

Williams kept going down this line of questions, though he’d already made his point and then gone beyond it. “In that position, you’re not just doing all the hitting. You’re not dishing out all the punishment. You’re taking some too, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” Gay said, “because if not, I would still be playing football.”

Williams looked down at his notes. Perhaps he realized that this wasn’t part of the case, to show the actual harmful effects of this violent game they were trying to portray to the court. So he changed the subject, trying to get to some basic timeline testimony. “Now, how many years did you play with Jon Vilma as your teammate?”

Gay looked back at his lap, then up to the ceiling. He tried to smile at Judge Berrigan, but she didn’t smile back, so he looked to Williams again. “Well,” he said, drawing it out with a pause. “We came in around the exact same time, because I was a free agent and I signed with the Saints and I think either he got traded to the Saints right before I signed or right after …” I could see he was trying to reconstruct a string of events to find the answer to Williams’s simple question. He paused, then concluded, “But we came in together.”

Williams looked at Gay for a beat, then asked what I’m sure he hoped was another simple, factual question. “He was the team captain, wasn’t he?”

“Well, I don’t know about that year,” Gay said, and Williams’s face fell. “He may have been. My memory isn’t that good, but he was—you could tell he was a team leader from the beginning.”

Williams tried to shift gears again. Perhaps he wanted the court to hear if Gay appreciated Vilma’s team leadership when he was injured, or perhaps he just wanted to establish whether Gay had been in all the team meetings. Williams asked, “Did Mr. Vilma—while you guys were with the Saints, did you—were you ever on Injured Reserve?”

“Yes.”

“Did you—what year?”

“Oh, my last year I went on Injured Reserve because of a concussion my last year.”

Williams soon gave up on his direct examination of Gay. Gay looked relieved when Judge Berrigan told him he was excused from the stand. He practically ran out of the courtroom.

 

* * *

 

Between my fourth diagnosed concussion and the fifth one, twenty-four years passed. In the interim there were plenty more hard hits.

My junior year of college, there was the collision on U.S. Highway 231 just south of Sylacauga, Alabama. I was driving my then-new girlfriend, Nicole, and two more friends up to hike and camp on Mount Cheaha. It was a crisp day. “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” by Bauhaus, was playing on the car stereo as we approached the intersection with Alabama Highway 38.[2] We had a flashing yellow light and the cross-traffic on Highway 38 had a stop sign and flashing red, so I didn’t come off the accelerator much as I saw an ivory-colored Nissan Maxima approach on 38 and slow down. When the Maxima suddenly sped into the intersection, I had no time to stop, and we t-boned it hard. The police report estimated from the short length of the skid marks that we likely hadn’t slowed below fifty miles per hour before the impact. Despite the seatbelt, I spider-webbed the windshield with my forehead. But the initial pain I complained about in the ER was my shoulder where the seatbelt had dug in, and my knees, which had left two holes in the dashboard. Those pains faded quickly, but I suffered headaches for several weeks.

Then there was the summer trip to the beach a decade later. We’d rented a house on Dauphin Island. I woke up at daybreak one morning to the sound of waves crashing. I’ve always loved body-surfing, and the break that morning was irresistible. Long, steady, four-foot faces, curling east to west, one after another, a low-pressure system somewhere out in the Gulf. Without waking anyone else in the house, I slipped into a swimsuit and swam out to where the bigger waves were breaking. I waited until the perfect wave stood above me, its front crest teetering, ready to crash down. I dug hard with my arms and kicked out in front of the wave to match its speed, was swept up to the top, and felt the curl start to rumble beneath me. I tried to hold my body stiff and stay on top, but found myself suddenly out too far, my upper body in mid-air, and then the wave threw me down its face, the whole weight of it crashing down and pile-driving me head-first into the sandy bottom. As my face dragged against the sand, I began to see silver stars at the periphery of my vision before I lost orientation. Seconds later I was at the edge of the surf-zone. My head was pounding. My face stung. I put my fingers up to my right forehead and temple, then brought them out to where I could see them. They were covered in blood. After a few minutes of sitting there, I went up to the house and admired my bloody, scraped-up face in a mirror. I was proud of that one, in the stupid way you can be when you’re only freshly into your thirties, and forgot completely about the headache.

Several years later, about to turn forty, I was less stupid about my health. I was going for bike rides in the mornings before work. On one ride, a slip of my foot as I tried to get my shoe back into the clips on the pedal after I’d slowed for a car at an intersection, and somehow, clumsily, I twisted over my handlebars and hit the pavement hard. The dumbest, simplest thing, but I was in the middle of the road with my helmet cracked in three places. I picked up my bike, waved off the motorist who had just gone through the intersection, and went and sat on the side of the road for a few minutes. Then I got back on my bike and turned around and went back home, abandoning the rest of my ride. I felt a little fuzzy as I tried to put thoughts together, and wondered if a hit hard enough to crack my helmet may have done worse damage on the inside, but after a few days I felt fine and forgot about it.[3]

 

* * *

 

After Gay’s testimony, the hearing moved through testimony from the Saints’ interim head coach, Joe Vitt, and defensive players Scott Shanle, Sedrick Ellis, and Jonathan Casillas.[4] The final player to be called to the stand was Roman Harper. From the moment he entered the courtroom, he was on a different level than the other players who’d testified. Other than Gay’s tremulous appearance, the rest had been competent and on-message, but they seemed like what they were, football players in a courtroom. It wasn’t their natural element. But Harper was as at ease walking into Judge Berrigan’s courtroom as he was blitzing opposing quarterbacks from his safety position.

Other than Gay, the other players had worn well-tailored but largely conservative attire, had spoken precise answers in restrained voices. Harper entered the courtroom in a powder-blue suit, wide lapels, and an open-collared shirt. But where that could have come off as too casual for a courtroom on other people, or even costume-ish, on Harper it looked sharp. Put together. When he answered questions, he spoke in a loud but relaxed voice that included everyone in the courtroom in the tale he had to tell. I somehow felt for the short time he was on the stand as if we were buddies. He didn’t smile out of nervousness, or out of some conspiratorial camaraderie with Vilma, or to curry favor with the Judge or the lawyers. He smiled because he was confident and because he was happy in his space.

“Where did you play college ball at?” Williams opened up his direct examination.

“University of Alabama, 14-time National Champion,” Harper answered.

Williams dove into the line of questions about the inherently violent nature of the game, but as they moved through the testimony, Harper rejected the word, “violent,” and tried to get those in the courtroom to understand the game as both a brotherhood—among both teammates and opposing players—and as a response to what the crowd demanded.

Williams asked, “Based on your experience and your observations as a college and professional football player, can an entirely legal hit sometimes hurt somebody?”

“It can hurt both sides, actually,” Harper said. “I’ve been in those collisions where it’s just large men running into each other at high rates of speed, and collisions are going to happen; big hits, things like that will occur, and sometimes guys get injured. I’ve been hit a few times.”

Circling to his theme, Williams asked, “Would you say, among other things, that the NFL is a violent sport?”

“It’s a violent sport,” Harper began, but then he shook his head and restarted his answer. “It’s a gladiator sport.” When he said this, his countenance was serious, and it was clear he wasn’t boasting or engaging in hyperbole, but reaching for a genuine historical referent. “I hate to use the word ‘violent,’” Harper continued, “because people think violence is guns, knives, things like that. I think it’s a gladiator sport where guys are actually grown men, they get out there and compete in front of a large crowd. It’s all about winning. We are going out there to compete with each other. It’s a blessing to be in this business, and we all understand that, but I would never want to say it’s a violent, violent sport, but it is a physical sport. It’s a gladiator sport. We are all out there competing to try and get out there and earn a living.”

Williams began to key in on the language that appeared in the evidence presented by the League about talk during Saints defensive meetings, language that appeared to back up the allegations that Saints players had a bounty system to reward deliberately targeting opposing players. “In your experience, and you can go back as long as you want to, even when you played when you were a younger boy—is it true that football talk, locker room talk, meeting room talk between coaches and players, it’s pretty rough, profane, and violent talk at times, or gladiator talk? I know you don’t like the word.”

“Yes, sir, it’s pretty brash. The thing is, when you are younger, you can try and motivate guys, ‘Hey, guys, if we win this game, let’s go to McDonald’s. Let’s go to Pizza Hut.’” Harper flashed a smile, and everyone in the courtroom suddenly remembered their own childhoods and team trips to McDonald’s, possibly even if they had never played a team sport. Harper continued, “And then as you get older, those same things don’t matter anymore. You have to take care of your body. Nobody wants to get excited about McDonald’s. You can always go buy McDonald’s. That’s not going to be the same case. Then as you get older, college, it’s more about the buckeye on the helmet or a different stripe or different things, you know, getting out—girls. You know, they get girls if they make big plays and things like that that enthused other guys.

“Now that you are in the League, you get out there, you have to rowdy guys up, you have to talk it. Not everybody cares about girls. Most guys are married and things like that. Nobody cares about McDonald’s because we all can afford that. Now you have to go out there and use different angles and different ways, choose your words to try and fire guys up and get them going. And that’s where you can kind of get it misconstrued because you’re working with grown men. We all have our different factors of motivation. When you try to get a group of grown men thinking the same angle, with the same mind-set, that’s what you want to try and do; sometimes your words can be misconstrued from the outside looking in when they don’t know exactly what you mean. That’s what it’s about, trying to get everybody on the same page to go out and try to win the game.”

Williams seemed enthralled with Harper’s take on the game and on the locker room bravado and brotherhood. “Forget about the money,” Williams said. “Vilma holding up cash in his hands or stacking it up on a table or stuffing it in an envelope. I don’t care.” And really, by that point, who cared about that in that courtroom? This all seemed to be about something more. “You have never heard him suggest or tell another player that they should go out and intentionally injure a player on the opposing team; is that right?”

“Yes, sir, that is correct. No, sir, he has never said that. This is a privilege to play this game. Nobody wants to take it from anybody. It’s a brotherhood. We all are trying to go out there to earn a living, and we all understand that. I would never want to try to intentionally hurt anybody. Injuries do occur playing this sport, but nobody wants to intentionally hurt somebody. We are all trying to earn a living for our family and friends.”

“You often have good friends, sometimes very close friends on opposing teams, right?” Williams asked.

“Yes, sir. All the time—I grew up playing with a lot of guys on other NFL teams and things of that nature. So nobody wants to hurt anybody. We are just out there competing at the highest level, and we definitely enjoy it and we all love to do it. We’ve been doing it since we were kids.”

 

* * *

 

By the beginning of 2013, I was wearing thin. At work, the Vilma litigation had taken as many twists and turns as a Barry Sanders touchdown run, and we were awaiting a ruling from the court on motions to dismiss Vilma’s lawsuit; while at the same time our other cases were going full-tilt. In late August 2012, I’d added going-back-to-school to my full-time law practice, starting in the MFA program at the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. On the home front, our third child, Lucie, was nearing ten months old and proving to be much more energetic than her brothers had been at that age.

On January 17, 2013, Judge Berrigan issued an order dismissing Vilma’s claims, bringing that litigation largely to a close. I began to look forward to a retreat with my writers’ group at the end of the month to a cabin in some low mountains in Tennessee. On January 31, the day we left on our retreat, the copy of Rolling Stone that arrived in my mailbox and that I threw in my bag with my other books and writings contained the story, “This is Your Brain on Football,” by Paul Solotaroff.

Solotaroff’s story detailed the horrors of repeated head trauma, which can result in a condition known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or “CTE.” According to Solotaroff’s article, CTE develops as small clumps of brain cells essentially short out, then begin poisoning other clumps of brain cells, with disastrous effects—depression, mood swings, violent outbursts, and suicide, or, in other cases, an eggshell-headed victim where one insignificant-seeming bump to the head can lead to sudden swelling of the brain and quick death. The kicker is that CTE can’t be diagnosed using current scanning technologies, and can only be positively determined in a post-mortem examination of brain tissue. Suffering from the ill effects of multiple concussions, retired NFL linebacker Junior Seau committed suicide the previous spring by shooting himself in the heart, so that his brain would be left intact to be studied by researchers.

As I began reading the Solotaroff article, I thought back to Randall Gay, whose trembling testimony had struck me so profoundly. Gay, in his tremors and his unspoken difficulty in answering the questions, was a living example of the result of the gladiator mentality that Roman Harper had followed up about in his own testimony. Even during a hearing that wasn’t actually about concussions, I had quietly registered that connection. As I reflected on that while reading Solotaroff’s article, the article then turned on my own experiences:

Each year, according to one study, up to 3.8 million Americans suffer a concussion on playgrounds or in contact sports, and the majority of them are children. That’s a staggering number, both in human suffering and the costs exacted on their families. It is also very surely an undercount. “The large majority of concussions don’t render kids unconscious, so neither they nor their coaches know they’ve happened,” says Dr. Robert Cantu, chair of neurosurgery at Emerson Hospital, the co-director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE) and the nation’s leading authority on concussions. “Boys in particular don’t tell us when something’s the matter. The real number is way north of 4 million.”

I sat up a little straighter in my chair in the cabin in Tennessee as I read the rest of the article. I hadn’t experienced many of the symptoms discussed in the article, but I began to wonder. I thought I could understand my instinctive relating to Gay during the hearing the previous summer. At the same time, I took comfort that I didn’t suffer from the continuing headaches mentioned in the article, from confusion, from any of the rest of it. I was mentally sharp and had to be in order to continue as a lawyer and a writer.

The night we arrived in Tennessee, it began to snow. The cabin was on a remote hillside looking down into a tight holler, a frozen creek at the bottom. Our car could only get halfway up the steep, rutted dirt drive before we had to leave it and walk the rest of the way. For three days, everything was about writing, and about being a writer in a community of writers. The stress that had been building up in me began to unwind, and I began to regain a focus I felt I had been losing. The day we left, a Sunday, the sun shone down strong and melted the snow and thawed the ice. The sky was a deep blue. I’d gotten exactly what I needed out of the weekend. I could sense there was a fragility to the peace I felt, but it was peace nonetheless. We said good-bye to those in our group who had come from other places, and our New Orleans contingent, five of us, began the eight-hour drive home.

In Warrior, a town in north Alabama, we stopped at a Jack’s Hamburgers for a quick lunch. It had warmed into the low 50s, and there were some tables outside, each one topped with a red fiberglass canopy with a scalloped edge, shaped to look like a jaunty umbrella to shade the table. Inside, the restaurant was chaotic, and the peacefulness I’d left Tennessee with began to ebb. There was a Twilight Zone feel to the place. All the customers were scrubbed clean and dressed well, and all seemed to be carrying bibles, as if we’d just walked in at the end of a church meeting. They gave us strange looks. We were scruffy, for sure, after three days in the cabin. The two males among us needed a shave. I sensed distinct distaste on the faces of several of the other restaurant patrons to see our group all together. I ordered my food first. It was hard to get the order in because the restaurant manager was yelling abusively at the counter clerk for getting a previous order wrong.

By the time I got my food, I wanted nothing more than to get out of that restaurant, so I headed for the door to the outside seating area. I slipped open the door and aimed for one of the tables, focusing only on the table and on putting my tray down and on being out of that place. I didn’t look up at eye level to see the canopy. The hard, fiberglass canopy. I rammed the top of my head into the canopy edge, which forced me down onto the seat. I sat there, stunned, while the rest of our group came out and ate. I had a hard time focusing on their conversation. When it was time to go, I told my friend, Maurice, that I’d hit my head. I tried to laugh it off, but when he asked if I wanted him to drive, I quickly gave him the keys. I was dizzy. The rest of the drive home, whenever I started to drift off Maurice would punch me, then engage me in conversation. I remember the drive home on Sunday perfectly.

On Monday, when I got up, I had a throbbing headache, radiating out from where I’d hit the canopy. I took some ibuprofen, then drove my boys to school, went to work, worked a full day, then went to fiction workshop that night, went through two and a half hours of workshop, then drove home. By all subsequent accounts, I participated fully in the day, though several people told me later that they’d noticed me wincing and grabbing my head from time to time.

On Tuesday, I still had the headache, and noticed I otherwise didn’t feel quite right. I thought of it at the time as “dizziness,” but in the barrage of new terms I would learn over the next few months I would re-term the feeling as “disequilibrium.” I took some more ibuprofen, then I took the boys to school again and went to work. While sitting in a meeting around ten that morning, I had to put my head down on the conference room table. One of my partners asked me what was wrong, so I told her that I’d hit my head “the day before” and was feeling nauseated, and that the lights were too bright. I offered up no resistance when she told me she was going to drive me to the emergency room. After a consult with the ER doctor and a CT scan, it was determined I’d had another concussion, and that I was experiencing post-concussion syndrome. That was a new diagnosis for me.

When Nicole came to the hospital to pick me up, I asked her if she thought I should still go to fiction workshop that night or if I should call my professor to tell her I couldn’t make it. That’s when I figured out I was mistakenly thinking it was Monday, and that I’d gone through all of the actual Monday without knowing it or remembering it.

The pain grew worse each day. Light was unbearable. My appetite dropped to nil. My children’s voices were torture to me, and they’re not loud children. I couldn’t walk a straight line. I was angry often. I was angry that I couldn’t sit upright for more than fifteen minutes. I was angry when my partners told me not to come into the office. I was angry that the pain wouldn’t stop. For the next three and a half weeks, I spent my time largely in our bedroom with the lights off, my head buried under a pillow. I would try to keep up with work via email, only to learn later that my colleagues had gone to each other with emails I’d sent them, concerned over the multiple typos and lack of general coherence.

Some days all I could do was sleep. Some days and nights I only slept fitfully, waking every few minutes. I missed class for the first two of those weeks, then began to go again, but Nicole had to drive me there and pick me up. When I tried to drive, I couldn’t make sense out of the lane markings on the road.

When I got in to see a neurologist, he confirmed the diagnosis of post-concussion syndrome and prescribed diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory, and a series of different pain-killers until we found one that actually at least took the edge off. He also prescribed nortriptyline, originally formulated as an anti-depressant but now prescribed commonly to manage pain in patients with post-concussion syndrome.

By April, I finally felt the curtain that seemed to separate me emotionally from everyone around me begin to lift. More often than not, I was mostly clear-headed again. The times I found myself searching in vain for a word or for the name of the person I was talking to began to come less frequently. By June of that year, I was off the anti-inflammatories. By September I was able to go off the pain killers except for a few days a month, and was taking only the nortriptyline on a regular basis. After a year and a half, I cut the nortryptiline dose in half. Six months later, still experiencing a few days of crippling pain every few weeks, I theorized that it would likely be better to still have occasional pain without medicine than have the same occasional pain with medicine, and went off the nortryptiline altogether.

I’ve held on to the end of the prescription for the painkillers and a large bottle of ibuprofen just in case one of the bad periods gets really bad, which they do sometimes. In researching post-concussion syndrome, I’d learned that, if symptoms weren’t clear by twelve months, they would likely never fully go away.

I know the pain is about to return in full force when the ringing in my ears turns up. The ensuing pain runs along two axes. Imagine a drill boring down into my head at the point of impact, extending down a couple inches. Then imagine a second drill perpendicular to that one, going in one side of my head about an inch below the top of my head, through the first axis, and out the other side. And then it radiates from there. Sometimes disequilibrium comes with the pain. Sometimes nausea. My old bouts of depression feel more ominous. I continue to blank on words and names from time to time, some times worse than others. I’ll forget conversations. It’s been two and a half years now. Even this far out, I had a three-day episode last week that was almost as bad as the immediate aftermath of the concussion. Stress—common, of course, for litigators and graduate students—can trigger the worse headaches, or sometimes they just come with no precursor.

The rest of the time I have a constant low-grade ringing in my ears and a background amount of pain. The only alternative to living with the pain is not-living with the pain.

Through all of that, through the paranoia about CTE, I wonder if I’ll end up like Randall Gay. Through no athletic heroism of my own, through no gladiatorial exploits or brotherhood-protecting machismo, but essentially through plain high-spirited living combined with a propensity to klutziness, I know about the misery and mystery of the multiply concussed brain. I think about Harper’s explanation of football players’ gladiator approach to wanting to give the crowds what they scream for, voluntarily subjecting themselves to the hard hits they know are coming, and I wonder if my own hard hits—knowing full well what has come before—aren’t any less voluntary.

These choices we make. On a recent trip back to Dauphin Island, I had my two boys—now 12 and 9 years old—out in high surf with me. It was those long, straight sets again. I was teaching them how to ride the waves. They would emerge from the tumbling foam, a whoop on their lips and a soreness in their bones, and would swim back out into the break with me. I’ve let them try out soccer, too. It didn’t take with my older son. My younger one, though he’s not very good at it yet, seems to love the sport. And my little girl, now 3, is following up behind them. I wouldn’t deny any of them these things I love about living.

But I wouldn’t—I won’t—let any of them play football. I recognize my hypocrisy and the fundamental contradictions. Is this just another symptom? Cloudiness of brain, cloudiness of heart? All of us, including my youngest, yell for the Saints on Sundays—“Go Saints! Get him!” Our lusts, our adulations, our living.

 

 

Note regarding sources:

The following articles were relied on by the author to corroborate his recollection about the New Orleans Saints’ “bountygate” investigation, and to confirm details regarding the players involved: Larry Holder, “New Orleans’ Saints bounty scandal timeline as Sean Payton prepares for return,” NOLA.com (Aug. 30, 2013); Mike Triplett, “NFL’s evidence against New Orleans Saints is legitimate, but it won’t end the debate,” NOLA.com (June 18, 2012); “Saints Agree to Terms with Randall Gay,” NewOrleansSaints.com (March 2, 2008); Jim Kleinpeter, “Former LSU, Saints Cornerback Arrested,” NOLA.com (May 9, 2013); and “Randall Gay among latest ex-players to sue NFL,” Associated Press (July 20, 2012).

The “bountygate” litigation in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana fell under the caption of Jonathan Vilma, et al. v. Roger Goodell, et al., 12-CV-1283 c/w 12-CV-1718 & 12-CV-1744. The Temporary Restraining Order hearing occurred on July 26, 2012. The excerpts from that testimony contained herein are taken from the transcript prepared by official Court Reporter Toni Doyle Tusa, CCR, FCRR.

Rolling Stone magazine’s coverage of football’s concussion issues, relied on by the author here, include Paul Solotaroff, “This is Your Brain on Football,” Rolling Stone, Issue 1175 (Jan. 31, 2013); and Matt Taibbi, “The NFL’s Head Game,” Rolling Stone website (Sept. 12, 2012).

The author also relied on the following additional sources in research for this piece: Eckart Kohne, et al., Gladiators and Caesars: The Power and Spectacle in Ancient Rome (Univ. of Calif. Press, 2000); Peter Rudegeair & Sharon Begley, “NFL’s Junior Seau had brain disease from blows to the head,” Reuters (Jan. 10, 2013); and Tim Anderson, et al., “Concussion and mild head injury,” Practical Neurology (Nov. 23, 2006), 6:342-357, at p. 354.

[1] After that season, I was more tentative on the field for a few years, mostly riding the bench on my high school team, before I found my spirit again and made the team at Spring Hill College my freshman year. In the final practice before our first game, I broke my ankle. I spent the next four years helping to bring a tough and all-in brand of the game to four intramural championship seasons, that first year as a hobbled coach and the last three years as a player-coach. After college, I played in any pick-up games I could find for a few years and in intramural leagues again when I was in law school.

[2] “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” was on a mix-tape I’d made a few weeks earlier. Something occurred during the wreck that left a glitch in the mix-tape at the moment of impact, such that for about five seconds in the middle of the song, the tape plays the music on the opposite side backwards before “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” comes back on. Every time I listen to that mix-tape (now ripped into my collection of .mp3s on my iPod, with the glitch intact), I recall that moment of impact.

[3] These three incidents weren’t the extent of my non-diagnosed head traumas. I’m constantly forgetting others. In proofreading an early draft of this piece, a close friend reminded me of another time when I hit my head on a low roof overhang at a lodge during a writers’ conference in Petit Jean, Arkansas in 2011 (I was dancing, badly), and wandered off into the night, where he and some others found me lying on the ground an hour later. There’s also the time I hit my head on the edge of the roof of a golf cart I was trying to jump on during the 2013 Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge, trying to hitch a ride down to the book tent from the main venue at the state capitol. There may be other times I’m not recalling, as well. The point is, I’m extraordinarily clumsy, and often don’t account for where my head is in relation to other objects. It’s downright embarrassing.

[4] Of the witnesses who testified that day, only Coach Vitt remains with the New Orleans Saints currently, as the Assistant Head Coach and Linebackers Coach.

 

 

BIO

Tad BartlettTad Bartlett’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in print or online at the Oxford American, The Carolina Quarterly, Euphony Journal, The Rappahannock Review, Bird’s Thumb, The Subtopian, and Double Dealer, among others. He’s earned an MFA in fiction at the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans; and is a graduate of Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, and Tulane University Law School. He is a founding member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance.

 

 

 

Jackie Bridges

J is for Jammy

by Jacqueline Bridges

 

 

To My Beautiful Wife, my lover,

This is not a suicide letter.

I am not planning to kill myself, you, or my neighbor (my contempt for Mr. Sherry’s lavish spending is of no consequence in this matter).

The opportunity to read this letter should arise after my untimely death, but should not coincide with my funeral. This should be addressed afterward.

I know how these things go.

Modest, black garb and white, gaunt faces will crowd around at my wake, and the occasional muffled sob will echo in the foyer at my service. I am not worried about that day, for it will take care of itself. This is about what will soon follow.

As a keen observer, I can predict what will come next: day-to-day life, which can be summed up by a famous cliché, “time heals all wounds.” Eventually, you will move on. At first, you will feel my breath on the back of your neck. The guilt will hover around your shoulders, like my corrective criticism that enabled you to recognize your faults during our arguments. In this case, please turn to another famous cliché, “this too shall pass.” I have other plans for you. Before long, you will return to our favorite independent theater and join the discussions on the use of light to portray cinematic themes.

Those were some of our best times, I think.

I encourage you to remain seated in the theater until all of the credits have scrolled off the screen. It will be difficult to sit alone, without me at your side, but it is the right thing to do. On this we both agree.

It will be like it was before, enjoying a glass of red wine by the fireside of the Bistro that shares a wall with our little theater. I can imagine the long, clear stem snuggling between your fingers as the balloon glass rests upon your delicate palm. Do not let the wait staff intimidate you. If needed, use my tasting notes as a reference guide, and remember two simple rules when ordering: One, always order red wine, and two, if you must order a white, the drier the better. Now I will present my first gift to you, Jammy.

I hope you cherish both syllables. Jam∙my.

I thought you might like to use it when describing your wine. The adjective should not die with me. The word will earn you respect in many circles, albeit, not with your mother or sister, but definitely amongst a more educated crowd. Word of caution—use it sparingly, that’s my trick. I hope you picked up on my foreshadowing when granting you your first gift. Of course you did. Your persistence to increase your observation skills has paid off. You have always been an astute pupil. Yes, there are two other gifts I will be adding to the collection. I was known for my generous spirit in life, and it is something that should be remembered in my passing as well. I would like to bequeath my anthology of first editions to you.

Many of our relatives will insist on owning one, claiming they want a piece of me. Do not listen to them. They are merely scavengers. Only you will honor my love of literature. Anyone else will sell them to the highest bidder at the first sign of financial crisis, but you would never consider it. I trust you will hold them dear to your heart, as they were to mine.

And for my final act, I have some advice you will want to heed. It is obvious that you rely on me for certain things in our marriage. I have no qualms with that. Each person should put their energy to the tasks they perform best. Numbers have always been my strength, but it is something you can develop.

Some people think they are better than others, that finance is an art few individuals have the eye for.

I disagree.

It can be taught, and it can be learned. On my bedside table, you will find the three most influential money management books of the current year. Feel free to read them. I recommend a highlighter and small notebook when scouring the pages. As for my gift, I am leaving you with a sizable nest egg. However, it is important you do not squander it. Grief can be a terrible thing that clouds our judgment. Remember Ms. Pendleton? I should hate to think that some salesman will try to take advantage of a lonely widow like you.

For your protection, I have locked your nest egg into a three-step ladder, high-yield CD. You will learn all about CDs in your new evening reading. I have arranged a small allotment to see to the funeral expenses, but our accountant will release the first of three CDs, 12 months after my passing. This will keep you from splurging on frivolous trips or fancy cars to fill the initial void, but once the year has passed, I will relinquish control because you will be ready to create your own portfolio. I know you can do it.

That is all I have to offer at this time. I wish I had more to give; more time and more love. If we are privileged to marry in our next life, I will choose you. My wish is to make you happy, or at the very least comfortable. If you happen to find true love again, falling twice in this lifetime, I will not keep you from it. In fact, I will be happy for you, but if that is the case, please pay a visit to Harold Andrews. I had him draft a pre-nuptial agreement.

Sincerely,

Your Husband, your lover

 

My thoughts are interrupted, “Lover?” It’s my wife’s voice.

I cover my paper as best I can, trying to exude indifference. It would have worked, had my hands not flailed in the air before coming to rest squarely on the letter.

“Who’s that for?” Her voice raises in anticipation, and I can tell she believes it to be a love letter, for her. She’s about to be disappointed.

“It’s nothing.” My voice cracks.

“Nonsense!” Carly pushes my hand away and reaches for the letter. “Let me read it.”

There’s nothing I can do, but wait, with outstretched arms, ready to dry her tears. At first, Carly smiles. I know my terms of endearment must be the cause. Right after, her smile falls flat. She must be past the first paragraph by now—she’s a speed reader of sorts. I expected this. She’s quiet for the length of the letter. Not a frown, no smiles, no scrunched brow. Finally, she lowers the letter and tilts her head sideways, the same way our lab does when we’re talking to him.

“Who’s this for,” she demands.

I’m quick to jump in, “You, of course.”

“You don’t call me lover.”

“I might,” I defend. When I see that she doesn’t buy it, I shrug, “I might start.”

She returns her attention to the letter, ignoring my last comment. I can see that she’s in shock, so I offer my condolences, “There’s a chance I’ll pass away before you.”

Carly’s smile returns, this one a bit wicked, “A good chance.”

I push past her joke, then ask, “So, what do you think?”

Now her eyebrows scrunch, “It’s cute.”

I jump up, “It’s cute?!” My voice is strained, “It’s my last wishes—you can’t call it cute.”

She purses her lips, and I know she’s holding back.

“What? Is there something on my list you can’t honor?” I place my hand on my heart, “I need to know if you can do the things I ask?”

“Seriously?” she’s practically laughing.

“Seriously!”

“Okay, then.” She traces the lines of my letter, then stops, “First of all, I don’t like that artsy theater. It smells like mold. I go there for you—so I won’t be going there once you’re dead.”

I hold a hand up, “Please, once I pass away.”

“What do you care what I call it if you’re dead.”

I wince.

“Fine,” she rolls her eyes. “Once you pass away, I’ll be seeing movies at the new theater in that strip mall of 6th avenue, you know, the one with the reclining seats.”

“Fine.” I look for a pen so I can strike the theater reference in my letter. “Anything else? It’s best to clarify it now.”

“Yeah,” she jumps right in, “I’m not using that word.” She’s pointing at my Jammy reference.

“What?”

“I’m not using it. It sounds ridiculous.” She pauses, “Even when you say it.”

I place my hand on my heart once more, “It’s very descriptive, in a classic way.”

“And what’s this about your first editions?” She turns, holding the paper out for me to see. She’s like a cat, swift, sneaky, and in full attack mode before I’ve even registered her last move. “Do you mean your comic books?” she asks, a furtive brow in place.

“They’re first editions!” I defend.

She purses her lips again, “So it’s safe to say you took a few liberties with this, aye?”

“Aye?” I taunt, “It depends on your circle. For the record, I don’t include Cananda in my circle, nor your sister.”

Mentioning her sister triggers the let’s not go to bed angry glare, but she moves past it sooner than I expect. “Okay.” She says. Her tone is even, lacking the placating tone I’ve come to listen for, “I can go with that—among your friends,” she clears her throat, “and perhaps many other Americans, your collection may be an asset.”

It bothers me that she placed quotations around my collection, but I’ve escaped an argument at this point, so I just nod.

“But in what circle is 5000 dollars a sizable nest egg? American or not.”

I snatch the letter from her hands, “Obviously I’m not going to die for a long time.” I fold the paper up and slip it into an envelope, “Just wait, that nest egg is going to be huge. It’s called compounding interest, but of course you don’t know about that yet.” I lick the envelope and seal it. “I can see you’re not ready for this just yet. I’ll find nice spot for it, someplace safe. Don’t worry,” I add, “When you’re truly ready, you’ll find it.”

She smiles, “I’ll never be ready for Jammy.”

 

 

BIO

Jackie BridgesJacqueline Bridges works as a guidance counselor to junior high students, where she puts her Masters degree to work, and then some. She is new to flash fiction and reads it daily (even in the counseling office). Her students join her weekly for a writing club, where they impress her with stories about fairies, dragons, and golden retrievers. She has three publications to-date, with 365 Tomorrows, Touch Poetry, The Fable Online, and Short Fiction Break. She’s currently working on a young adult, science fiction novel, mostly void of fairies, dragons, and golden retrievers.

 

 

 

Space Ex

by Sara Regezi

 

 

Dear Mr. Musk and the Mars Colony Selection Committee:

My name is Trudy McCormick, and I am ready to be a Martian. I eagerly read your announcement regarding your proposed colonization of Mars and now, just moments later, I have retrieved this stationery and am writing to you forthwith of my qualifications for Martian space travel.

I know you will seek a broad swath of sturdy Earthlings for the journey and I’d like to count myself among those brave souls. I have worked as a homemaker, and formerly as a Girl Scout leader in these United States, for more than 20 years. I know you will have plenty of engineers and scientists among your chosen crew, but can any of them create a satisfying casserole from last night’s picked-over meatloaf?

My husband Frank will attest to my creativity in the kitchen, as referenced above, as well as my overall innovative mind. He will, in fact, tell you that I should be put in a padded room for some of my ideas, but I ask you, Mr. Musk, as a true futurist, isn’t that the attitude that innovators have so often faced?

I just re-read the above paragraph: let me be clear, this letter is in support of my Martian mission, not my husband’s. Yes, he is somewhat handy on Earth, but he would only muck up the works on the Red Planet. Frank does not dream like you or I, Mr. Musk. His two feet are firmly planted in the U S of A. When they’re not elevated in the La-Z-Boy, that is. Frank took early retirement at our local GM parts factory two years ago and he is, frankly (pardon the pun, his name is Frank), driving me nuts. I believe that my becoming a Martian colonist would help our relationship, in that he might actually learn some survival skills on this third planet from the Sun, while I’m busy colonizing the fourth.

Anyway, in addition to creativity, your chosen few will also need the ability to withstand incredible hardship during the difficult journey just to get to Mars. When I think back on our 1989 trip from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where we live, to Ft. Lauderdale in a mini-van (this is me, Frank, and FOUR children), I believe that a nine-month trip in a spaceship with actual grown-ups would be a relative picnic. Now, as then, I can easily entertain a pod-full of people with song and story, while also breaking up arguments that arise—though this time I promise not to reach back and pull anyone’s hair!

And once we land on Mars, the hardship will have only begun, I realize. As I read on your website, Mars is currently not a terribly hospitable place, but I believe I can help make it welcoming to humans. You see, having raised four children from scratch, I understand the challenge of sustaining life, at least on Earth. The job is never finished.

In fact, our oldest, April, now 33, has just moved back in with Frank and me, along with her three kids, Lonnie, Lori and Lynn, 12, 8, and 5 respectively. April has “checked out” and prefers to spend her evenings at the Red Lamp Tavern rather than with her children, so I am in the unique position lately of entertaining three of my nine grandchildren on a nightly basis. Lonnie’s homework he proclaims “total B.S.” and stomps off to play with his phone most evenings. Lori, the eight-year-old, is disturbingly enamored of rap music, reciting the most foul lyrics you can imagine at the top of her lungs. Poor Lynn has taken to carrying around one of my pink slippers in her arms, calling it her “lost little lamb.” Meanwhile, Frank just turns up the volume on ESPN.

But I digress. In summary, Mr. Musk and honorable Selection Committee, I believe I have the qualifications for life on Mars, given my ample Life Experience on Earth. In fact, I believe my talents are desperately in need of a new interplanetary outlet, rather than being wasted within the ever-shrinking confines of our house here on East Hazel Street.

One question I have for you: what is the time frame for your mission? Please note: I am ready as soon as the ship is space-worthy. I eagerly await your orders.

Sincerely,

Trudy McCormick,
Grand Rapids, MI
(Future Proud Martian)

 

 

BIO

Sara RegeziSara Regezi is a former copywriter, former comic, former musician, and current nurse practitioner in Silver Spring, Maryland. She wants to marry Jess Walter except that she’s already married (and so is he, probably). Her previous work has appeared on girlcomic.net and live onstage with Monalog Cabin. She is thrilled to be published in Writing Disorder.

 

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