Short Shorts

University Medical Center, Diamond Building, Intensive Care Unit

2012-01-15T13:23:00.000-08:00

Image courtesy of Norbert Kaiser, Wikimedia Commons

There is no place to look. Every time you avert your eyes,they fall on a crying stranger: a fat middle age man bawling into his cellphone, two willowy prepubescent girls weeping into each other’s arms as theytumble out of a conference room full of sobbing adults.

So, for decency’s sake, you look back at your own well ofsorrow, but it’s hard to stay there. If anyone so much as murmurs, you whipyour head toward them, grabbing at respite, or else your eyes drift from a longmaze of tubes to the quiet monitors with their hypnotic waves and meaninglessnumbers. Something always beeps, pings, or clicks.

“Essentially,” the doctor explains, “his liver is shot. Andhis kidneys. And his lungs.” Perhaps these are not the words the doctor uses,but this is what she means.

Last week, they said that if he stabilized, if he found anursing home able to care for a man with not insurance, and if he stoppeddrinking for six months, then he could go on the transplant list.

This week they’re talking about infections, calling hisdaughter in the Midwest. “Do you want us to intubate your father? Do you wantus to let him go?”

She is young, twenty-two. She says, “intubate,” but when shegets to the ICU they tell her intubation is only prolonging his suffering. Hehas, perhaps two weeks, with the machines. She asks everyone she knows, andthen she tells them, “extubate.” It’s Tuesday, and her tickets are to go homeFriday.

His ex-wife, his ex-girlfriends, the people who were hisfriends and colleagues before this disease became lover, companion, reference,all file through to say goodbye. At first he can focus his eyes and choke out afew words, but after a while, he is no longer there. It is only the machines,and the solemn watchers.

It takes five hours, once they disconnect him, five hours ofsinking lower, struggling to breathe, and sinking lower again, until at lastthe numbers run down to nothing.

My Writing Life

2011-12-19T15:16:00.000-08:00

Five years ago, the publishing company Daw sent me a letter explaining that my novel had "passed first read" and was under consideration. I sent follow-up queries in 2008, 2009, 2010 asking if they had any plans to actually publish it, or reject it, or what.

This week, I received a carefully worded and apologetic letter from the acquisitions editor. He didn't come out and say he wished me the best of luck placing my work elsewhere, but that's what he meant. And it was still the most attention my novel has gotten from an editor :(

On the plus side, my short story "Dog in the Machine" is out in the 17th issue of New Myths and you can read it here!

Poor Children

2011-12-17T18:19:00.000-08:00

It was a little divot of a backyard, with an apartmentbuilding on one side, and a parking lot to the back, but it was mine, so Iplanted herbs and lay out in the weak Michigan sun when the weather allowed.

Image courtesy of newleaf01
Wikimedia Commons

The first time I saw the kids, I had set up for the morningwith a blanket, a pitcher of lemonade, a little radio, the New York TimesSunday Crossword, and Merriam-Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. They stoodon the little hill in front of the apartment building, looking down at me. Thiscomplex mostly housed college students; there were no other kids, no playgroundequipment, no place to play. There was literally nothing else going on besidesme pecking away at the crossword, listening to the classic rock station on acheap plastic radio.

They stared. My heart melted: no one had ever taught thesepoor children to entertain themselves.

I beckoned. They tumbled to me.

They were four siblings: Omarion, Sweetie, J’neena, andBuddy. The biggest was about eleven, the little one perhaps five. They weredark of skin, dark of hair, in faded, baggy clothes and falling-apart sneakers,and moved with all the energy of popping corn, their dissatisfaction ripplingout through slender limbs in perpetual motion.

“We stuck at Grandma’s,” said Sweetie.

“She got no toys, no video games,” said J’neena.

“No cable,” Omarion added.

They didn’t know what to do with themselves. They had neverseen a dictionary, and examined mine with care. They had, apparently, nevertalked to a white woman, and examined my hair and my accent. “Honey,” theymocked, when I asked J’neena to please not sit on my dictionary. “She say,‘honey’.”

Lemonade, they were familiar with, and made short work of.

The garden attracted them. “What this?” Buddy asked aboutthe Miracle Gro.

“Plant food,” I said, “but don’t touch. It’s poison topeople.”

“It look like candy,” said J’neena.

“That’s why you shouldn’t touch it.”

I let them dig the soil with my trowel. Their grandmothercalled them up for lunch, and sent them back out twenty minutes later with alittle potted tree, a gift for me. “Thank you,” she called out the window.

“She say ‘thank you’ for watching us,” Sweetie explained. “’causeshe ain’t got nothing to do in there. She don’t walk too good neither.”

Grandma lived in a third-story walk-up. I cared for thelittle tree with extravagance.

The next day, I found my trowel halfway up the hill, next toa hole deep enough to break a man’s ankle. The day after that, they rang mydoorbell, bored. I loaned Sweetie a jump rope, which I later found in a puddlein the parking lot. They started ringing my doorbell and running away, peekingin my window and later commenting on my bed sheets.

They never knew what they were talking about. “Your neighborgay,” Omarion said, without having any clue what he meant. When Buddy knockedon my back door and reported, “Sweetie say you make sex with her,” I guided himback to his grandmother’s.

“It’s not true,” I told him. “When your sister says thingslike that, you can tell her you know it’s a lie.”

I worried, but only a little. They had never been inside myhouse, had never done anything with me their grandmother couldn’t see from herwindow. Even if they had could describe my bed sheets, they were not crediblewitnesses. And anyway, I was leaving for study abroad.

Three days after I left, someone tore up my garden,uprooting all the herbs, pulling plants from their pots, and leaving my troweland my watering can in a hole halfway up the hill. The girl taking care of myhouse didn’t work up the courage to tell me for three weeks, by which time shehad killed my fish.

The vandals didn’t touch the Miracle Gro. Or the pottedtree.

When I got back, Omarion waved to me from his stoop, his facehopeful. I nodded and left him alone.

I never saw Omarion or Buddy again, but I saw the girls,once. They knocked at my back door the week before school started.

“Our daddy taking us away from our mommy,” Sweetie told me,like a challenge.

Keeping my tone blank, I responded, “And how do you feelabout that?”

“Good,” she said, the word exploding from her mouth like acannonball.

“Nah-ah,” J’neena said, jutting her hip into her sister’s.“I going back to Mommy’s after. We going to Disneyland.”

“Who care?” said Sweetie. “Who care anyway?”

NaNoWriMo

2011-11-04T15:47:00.000-07:00

I do have a short-short in the works for November, but I'm also doing NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, also known as "30 days and nights of literary abandon." If you'd like to find, follow, or friend me there, my username is "Echina."Best wishes to all writers :)

Love Potion

2011-10-19T21:08:00.000-07:00

Old Margrete did not truly sell little Jenny Weaver a lovepotion to ensnare Will Carpenter on the eve of the Maying moon. The very ideaof the flaxen-haired, apple-cheeked, green-eyed Jennivere of the Loom needing such a thing,when anyone could see Will’s infatuation with her, set Old Margrete’s raspythroat to bitter laughter. All shy Jenny ever needed was to smile at Will once,and he would be hers, and to that end, when Jenny stumbled, weepy-eyed, intoOld Margrete’s cottage at the edge of the woods, Old Margrete gave her thepotion she needed.

That is, a hearty draft of strong ale, mixed with chamomileand ginger root to disguise the taste.

“A love potion true?” Jenny had asked. “And ‘twill turnWill’s eyes to mine?”

“Never fret thee,” Old Margrete assured her, “but hieto the commons and catch thy beloved’s gaze. The potion be not all; for thespell to take, he must look upon thy face, and thee upon his.”

“For how long?”

Old Margrete tucked the yellow hair behind little Jenny’sear. “For as long as is needful.”

And sure enough, two days later the banns were cried andshortly thereafter the wedding of Jenny and Will was celebrated. Old Margretedid not attend, for folk did not care to see her warty face on happy occasions,and Old Margrete did not, for the most part, care to see the townspeople whocame to her under cover of darkness, begging for remedies, or the clever handsof the midwife, but made the sign of the evil eye against her should they meetin the light.

So all would have been well, had not the churchman, as hedid once a year, perhaps, begin his speechifying against evil, quoting, “Thoushalt not suffer a witch to live,” and casting meaningful glances in thedirection of her cottage. And still and all, nothing would have come of it,save that Jenny, made bold in her nuptial joy, began to tell around town that,witch though she may be, Old Margrete was a good witch, a kind and loving andhelpful witch.

Sides were taken. Eduard Atwater, the alchemist, who alsoserved as village apothecary, had much dealing with Old Margrete, andpaid a good price for her herbs. He named those whose mothers had called upon OldMargrete during complicated labors. “Many of us would not be here to today tospeak against evil were it not for Old Margrete’s skill,” he said. “Herknowledge of medicinal herbs rivals mine, and comes through experience. She isno more witch than I.”

“Reject the devil in all his forms!” the churchmancountered. Sent from the city when the old churchman passed, he had not beenraised among them in the village and had no sense of the usefulness of avillage witch. “Be not seduced by the fair face of evil.”

“Hardly a fair face,” muttered those who had seen OldMargrete in daylight, but the churchman was young, with a powerful voice thatprojected across the square, across the commons. It could not be shut out. Themore words were spoken in Old Margrete’s defense, the more insistent was hethat the old woman had seduced those souls rightly belonging to him, and thatshe must be put in her place.

“’Tis all my doing!” Jenny wailed, having crept to OldMargrete’s window late at night. It was the eve before the harvest moon, sothere was light enough that she had no fear, and besides, little Jenny was withchild already, and came also for the tea of fennel and peppermint that OldMargrete mixed so well.

But truly, she came to warn. “There’s talk of cleansingby fire!” Jenny wept. “They’ll burn thee, Margrete, and whether thee be witchor no, thee hast never harmed the merest hair on any mortal’s head.”

“Worry thy thoughts no longer, but get thee home safe to thyhusband’s arms,” Old Margrete crooned, again tucking a strand of yellow hairbehind the girl’s ear. “Old Margrete’s lived through witch hunts a-plenty.”

“How shall thee find succor?” Jenny sobbed. “Where in thewide world is shelter for thy good old bones?”

“Old Margrete shall stay,” she promised. “There be remedyfor all life’s ills here in my pots and jars.” And she sent Little Jenny on herway with the loose tea, along with a bit of licorice to soothe her gravid belly.

Then she went among her herbs and began to mumble to herselfas she mixed. “There be love potions and love potions,” she cackled. “And ifit’s love that be lacking here, soon there shalt be love a-plenty, even for onewith a face such as Old Margrete’s.”

And she mixed something stronger than ale, and sweeter thanchamomile, and sharper than ginger, a barrel of it, and said words that werebest not to speak, then corked the barrel, hooked a dipper in her belt, androlled herself and her concoction down the lane. As she went through themoon-dark town, she ladled a dipper of this medicine into every water jug andbarrel she came across, with a triple dose for the churchman’s morningablutions, until she came at last to the village well.

With some straining, for her old joints were sore and herback long since bent under by the weight of the things she knew, Old Margretehefted the barrel and poured its contents into the water supply, where one andall would draw their drink when the sun rose. “Oh, they’ll see a love potionnow, won’t they ever,” Old Margrete muttered.

She slept very late into the afternoon, and when she hobbledout into the day, her front path was strewn with asters and chrysanthemums, hershutters hung with fresh pine wreaths, and three strong young men, thechurchman chief among them, were thatching her roof with sweet heather.

Orchids

2011-09-25T14:17:00.001-07:00

The little peach-colored carp hang in the artificial rockpool like mandarin orange slices suspended in lime Jell-o. Recorded squeaks andchirps of forest creatures distract from, but do not overwhelm, the rattle andrumble of the fan that maintains this cool and humid environment, a greenhousefifteen degrees more comfortable than the desert outside. Orchids and epiphytesexplode like fireworks overhead, while ferns tumble like green fountainsbeneath. Despite the marks of human construction—the unconcealed pots ofplastic, terra cotta, and teak; the red gravel path, framed by deliberateboulders; the wandering tourists, burdened with cameras and scared off by mystill presence; and the glass and metal structure itself, its artificialenvironment a tropical bubble in an arid bowl—it is very nearly perfect.

I can almost relax.

The strolling gardener, passing by the window with a gardenhose, cannot see me, concealed as I am behind Dendrobium sp. Orchidaceae, a sturdy, flowerless stalk possessingthick, waxy leaves sprouting with alternative precision, very nearly to theceiling, along with another, unidentified woody plant, thick with jagged leavesand topped with tiny purple blossoms. I can imagine myself alone, except whenthe door opens, and I startle at the next visitor.

Almost, but not quite, relax.

The disorder to my mind is not unlike the educationalarrangement in the greenhouse. Orchids are strapped to trees, sprouting fromboxes. Some are labeled, their relationship to the rest of the exhibit madeapparent, while others hang in obscurity, part of the collection, but apartfrom the collection. Some of the flowers are not orchids at all—the largest isclearly a fine specimen of hibiscus, and other clusters of yellow, white, andred appear to have little in common with the orchids, except that they flourishin similar climates.

I love orchids, but fear them, like fussy infants who cannotcommunicate their needs, beyond letting you know that you’re not doing itright. Whatever treatment the amateur provides, the home orchid seems towhither. This has been my experience, at any rate. I love orchids, but leavetheir care and feeding to professionals.

Orchids are complex, their petals arranged to enticepollinators, drawing them into secret folds, whose lovely purpose is to ensureanother generation of orchids. Their colors startle us singularly and incombination: pale pink and fuchsia, cream and orange, purple and gold. Theircomponents fit in ways they should not, ways that defy the pen’s ability todescribe their relationships.

My thoughts, disparate and wild but seeking organization andhomeostasis, settle into this greenhouse. If my mind could take root here, oreven hang, artfully suspended from a cork tree by a tangle of wire obscured byan arrangement of Spanish moss, perhaps I too could suck nourishment from theair and experience equilibrium. I might live like a pampered infant inconditions created wholly in aid of my caretaker’s wish that I might flourish.

But these are only flowers, after all, in a temporaryexhibit. In a few weeks, they will wither, their succulent stems and leaves ofinterest only to serious collectors, those who can care for them in such a wayas to coax the next offering of floral enticement. Without petals, the plantscannot provide a draw sufficient to warrant their elaborate display in thisgreenhouse. Soon, they will be removed to make way for the equally bright andequally fleeting colors of the walk-through butterfly exhibit. Children willshriek, linger, interact.

My mind, tethered to my body by more than a twist offlorist’s wire, has at least permanent residency and cannot be displaced. Lessdelicate than a fleeting flower, it may be reorganized, more resilient toenvironmental changes.

I cannot live in a greenhouse, abandoning my own hydroponictomatoes, thriving in a rain gutter balanced between two nutrient buckets andmade animate by a pump that requires constant attention, and my straw balegarden, in which herbs and peppers sprout with good will, while watermelonvines grow wild around them, in a rapidly disintegrating medium. The human mindprefers a state of flux. A vegetative mind, of course, has little to offer.

Besides, the Botanic Garden closes early, at four-thirty,and I do my best thinking at night.

Major Donor

2011-09-12T16:09:00.000-07:00

(for Sarah)

***Any similarities to any rich douches living or dead is WHOLLY unprovable***

There is only one thing anyone needs to know about AndrewMyrtle, and he will do you the honor of finding some way to work it into theconversation within five minutes of meeting you.

“My mom,” he’ll say, “oh, you might have heard of my mom?Sherry Myrtle? The founder of Sherry’s Craig Crab Shack?”

And then, you might grudgingly admit that you had heard ofthis successful national chain of upscale seafood joints, at which point hewill go on to tell you an anecdote that relates, at best, tangentially to thefamous entrepreneur-slash-restaurateur.

Which is not to say that his mother has anything to do withthe one thing Andrew Myrtle requires you to know about him, except that shebecame, through her innovative take on fish and franchising, almost painfullywealthy, and that he, Andrew Myrtle himself, was her sole heir to her fortune.He intends for you to extrapolate from this that he is tremendously,shamelessly rich, and that he is always soliciting new applications for theposition of sycophant. There is nothing, in Andrew Myrtle’s experience, that moneycannot buy. There is no one, in his opinion, not honored to learn of hisillustrious ancestry and, by association, not intrigued by his potential toreward ardent admirers.

Stacy Redford, regaled with Andrew Myrtle’s brief history onthe smoking patio at the conservatory during the summer study meet and greet, feelsneither honored nor intrigued as these facts filter through her understanding.She lets him tell his story, and then, because she is a little drunk, tellshers.

“My mom—you probably haven’t heard of her—her name is BellaRedford. She was a chronic alcoholic my entire life. She never had a job. Wewere always on government assistance. I’ve been on my own since I was fifteen.My mother never gave me a dime.”

She tugs the hand-me-down gown up her chest, helps herselfto a cigarette from the pack he’d set on the brick wall, and flounces her longred hair. After an uncomfortable silence, Andrew shakes the ice cubes in hisrocks glass and backs away.

It’s her third session of summer study, which is hervacation, her professional development, and her dream all rolled up in one; shewon scholarships to attend the last two years, but scholarships are hard tocome by, and no one could expect three in a row. Robin Dacha has provided,instead, a job in the front office this summer.

Now Robin leans against the wall, all hulking six-feet-twoof him. “Andrew Myrtle made a nice donation,” he says, his voice low. “We needto take care of him.”

“He’s a douche,” she says.

Robin shrugs. “He’s a major donor, Stacy. Take care of him.”

But Andrew Mrytle doesn’t need her. Stuck in the office allsummer, she sees him through the window, chatting up whoever buys his line.

Occasionally, she catches him wailing away on his saxophonein the alcove near the vending machines, as if he were the first person todiscover its acoustic properties.

A few students complain that he’s out there at weird timesof the night. All Robin does is compliment his enthusiasm and invite him overfor dinner. Andrew throws a party for the popular students, not including, ofcourse, Stacy, who works four hours a day, practices four hours a day, andspends six hours a day in class, plus attends three student recitals a week.

Stacy loves recitals, and she loves playing the grand pianoin the big auditorium. Who is she kidding? She loves the old upright in herpractice space. It’s nicer than her own piano at home, which she also loves, aneven older upright, on which she is still making payments. The recitals are thereal social hub of summer study anyway.

Because some of the new students are shy, Stacy takes one ofthe first slots. Robin gives her a big hug afterward, and a nice critique.“Your progress since last year is wonderful.” Andrew takes an early slot, too.He plays “Baker Street” with only a few sour notes. Afterward, Robin trips overhimself to tell him how remarkable his interpretation was, how amazing that afirst-year student should play so beautifully.

Stacy goes down to her practice room and tears apart someChopin.

This helps. She is here for the music. During the year, sheteaches elementary children to sing. The summers are hers, and she plays everymoment she can.

One of her jobs in the office is to organize the recitalschedule. Every student is supposed to sign up for one slot, but some of themore reticent kids have not performed yet. She goes around with the sign-upsheet, persuading them to take the plunge, then hangs it back on the wall.

She notices that Andrew has signed up for a second recital.She erases his name. He writes it back in. She erases it again. She catches himthe third time.

“Every student gets one recital, Andrew.”

He taps the sheet. “There’s all these empty spaces.”

“Reserved for students who haven’t had a turn yet.”

“Robin said I was very good.”

She slides the pencil out from his fingers and lets it fall.It dangles on the end of the string that attaches it to the corkboard. “Thereare a lot of amazing musicians here. Some of them have been playing for twentyyears, and some of them have just started. Everyone gets the same opportunityto perform.”

He tries to stare her down, but she stares him down instead,feeling suddenly very great and tall.

Later, Robin comes into the office. “Andrew Myrtle says youtook his name off the recital schedule?”

She pretends to be involved in her data entry task. “Eachstudent gets one recital,” she says.

“Couldn’t you make an exception? I’m really hoping he’llmake a large contribution at the end of the session.”

Stacy smiles to herself. “No.”

Robin shrugs.

Wicker Park

2011-09-01T17:44:00.000-07:00

This was when we lived in Wicker Park, Annie and I, in a fourth-story walk-up on Crystal Street, before they gentrified it completely, before the sidewalks grew lousy with hipsters, before the trendy eateries marched their way up from Division. There were gangs then, first the Gangster Disciples, and then the Latin Kings. You could date their possession of the neighborhood by the layers of spray-painted tags under the fire escape.

Once we came down and cops were blocking the road, Crystal being a one-way street. They were harassing some kids—black teenagers—for sitting on cars, and I, completely high at the time, blew my horn at the cruiser. I think Annie wanted ice cream, and these cops had parked in the dead center of the road so that I couldn’t even pull into the alley.

One cop stopped what he was doing and stomped over, and it didn’t take me two seconds to realize what I’d done, but he looked right past my bloodshot eyes and just saw a scrawny white dude behind the wheel of a reasonably respectable Honda Accord. I apologized right away.“This is for your benefit,” he lectured. “We’re here to protect you from gang activity. You people come crying to us when bangers commit crimes in this area.”

I had enough sense not to point out that even I, a mild-mannered, if not mildly intoxicated white dude with a philosophy degree from a liberal private school, had the sense to know that these kids were not gangbangers. They looked preppy. Plus, they were black, therefore they could not be Latin Kings, therefore they were not banging in Wicker Park.

Another time, I smelled smoke, and after Annie and I sniffed all around the apartment we looked out the window and saw a burning car four stories down, parked in front of the boarded up crack house.

The people were crazy friendly, even the bangers, who always had something nice to say to Annie. She told me about seeing four homeless guys at party in the alley. They were sitting on overturned milk-crates, with a forty-ounce of malt liquor and a single, sullied Dixie cup. The guy whose territory it was poured shots into the cup, and each man drank his in turn. It was like a tea party, she said, like little girls playing pretend.

If a homeless guy panhandled Annie, she’d usually say, “I’m sorry,” but if he could make her laugh, she always gave him a quarter. I never would.

One time, when we were walking down to six corners, a woman fell in step with us like we were old friends. She chatted about the weather, prayed it wouldn’t rain, and explained that she wanted to sleep in the park. She said goodbye before we hit the Double Door, waving like she would truly miss our company.

Annie said they must not have homeless people like that other places. Once I talked to a homeless guy in Dallas and out of nowhere he punched me in the face. Broke my tooth, too, and fractured my jaw. Annie said I couldn’t have known.

Coming back from the Note after hours, we saw an old Chevy parked under a streetlight on Damen. It was a weeknight and there was no one else around, no traffic, no pedestrians, just me and Annie, and this car had the dome light on, the windows down, and the radio blasting. We couldn’t help but look as we passed. Annie said later, he wanted us to look, this guy, in his car with his pants down and his hands around himself, pulling it furiously. His eyes met ours and he never stopped tugging as we walked past and Annie laughed so hard I practically had to carry her home.

But the next time we walked to the Double Door, Annie saw a guy lying in the gutter, a young guy, like our age. Annie was a social worker then—she still is—and she knelt by his side.“Are you OK?” she asked. “Can I help you?” She couldn’t hear his answer the first time, so she bent in closer.“Hold me,” he moaned, and she jumped back into my arms.

When the Bulls won that last championship, we were out there with everyone else, screaming in a crowd six-deep on the sidewalk, watching the Puerto Ricans cruise the streets with their trunks popped, kids sitting inside waving flags while everyone cheered and danced and drank. It felt real; it felt solid, like a place you could be a part of and stay forever. But that was right before Annie and I split up. It was mutual. I wanted to bum around Europe. Annie wanted to be a social worker. We waited until the lease expired on Crystal Street. Then she moved to Logan Square and I went to Prague.

We found each other, later, on Facebook. There were no hard feelings. I still call her when I’m in Chicago, even though most of the time she’s working. Sometimes we’ll meet for drinks at the Violet Hour and a bite at Big Star Tacos. We would have liked those places, if they had existed when we were together. But we don’t fit in Wicker Park anymore. The sidewalks are jammed, and the gutters too. A lonely drunk boy couldn’t lie down there now; he’d be run over by a fixed gear bike in about six seconds flat.

After the Memorial

2011-08-16T15:10:00.000-07:00

We are all grandmothers now, our children grown, married, pregnant, so that we make each other aunts over and over, reap all the benefits of a house full of children, suffer none of the drawbacks. There is laughing, screaming, racing, joy. We change diapers, kiss boo-boos, and cuddle at will. We turn them back to their parents when we’re through, sit around the table in deep conversation long after meals conclude, with no interruptions.

Dad is a child again, snot dripping from his nose. He messes his pants, like a child, and we have nothing to fear from him anymore. His anger has burned to embers, the embers burnt out. When we tire of his presence, we return him to his home. The Home. We are diligent daughters, if not loving. We do our duty.

Mom is gone.

She did not know us, at the end, but she knew Jesus. We will return to her arms, one day, in heaven, so our tears are sporadic. She suffers no more.

The pastor tells us not to be surprised; when we file into the sanctuary, the church will be packed, every pew filled. When we file into the sanctuary, the church is packed, every pew filled. We sing, we laugh, we cry, we pray. We file out, into the basement where there will be best wishes from those we haven’t seen in decades, along with iced tea and cookie fellowship.

They flock around dad, “Preach,” they call him, the old pastor beloved by his flock. The offer their condolences, ask after his health. We bring him a plate, offer him a napkin, turn back to our own families.

“Just tell them you’re sorry.” The words are overheard.

“I don’t know how. I don’t know how to tell my daughters I’m sorry.”

“Just tell them. Ask for their forgiveness.”

But these are words only overheard. Dad does not say he is sorry. Dad does not ask for our forgiveness. We do not bring Dad back to the house for supper.

After supper, our children, now adults, slyly produce bottles and cans: beer, wine, vodka. The daughters of Baptist preachers do not drink. Our children, now adults, mix liquor with strawberries, sugar, ice; they ply us with mixed drinks and sweet wine.

We accept.

This is new.

By ten p.m. our husbands and children cannonball off the low sloping roof into the inflatable above ground swimming pool. We don’t want to look, but we must. They land, splashing and laughing. No one gets hurt. No one puts an eye out. It is all fun and games.

“We should have done this before,” they say. “Imagine what our reunions could have been,” they say. “I never felt like this around family,” they say.

By midnight, the grandchildren have fallen asleep on couches and cots, in cribs and corners. The men, still soaking in the pool, soak in the last of the beer. We sisters sit on the deck, our eyes to the sky.

A shooting star draws a thick, golden arc overhead.

“That’s mom,” one of us says, “riding all the way home to Jesus.”

We cry for gratitude.

The Wicked Stepmother

2011-07-18T15:18:00.001-07:00

On the surface, it’s the simplest job in the world. Maybe I make a couple extra sandwiches. Maybe I drive across town twice a month to pick up the carpool. I am the purveyor of periodic bedtime stories and fresh Band-aids, the recipient of dutiful hugs and the occasional handmade card. From a historic standpoint, I am successful in my job if I merely refrain from slaughtering, roasting, and devouring them in a red sauce.

Some days, I really enjoy the trips to the zoo, walks in the park, raucous birthday celebrations. Some days I feel like they keep me young.

Some days I look at them and think, “Man, I’m really hungry.”

End of the Line

2011-07-13T16:45:00.000-07:00

They almost always took the same bus, almost always to the end of the line, and they almost always found something to say to Michele.

“Hey, white girl? Where can I get me some shoes like that?”

“Choo bring your lunch? Got mayonnaise? Got white bread?”

“You too good to talk to us, white girl? You think you special? You ridin’ the bus like everyone else. You cleaning rich folks’ houses same as us.”

There were four: two black and two Latina. The Latina girls, Merari and Laura, were sisters. The black girls, Vanessa and Aliyah, were cousins. All of them, except Laura, were fat and proud. Laura was skinny and proud, and the others accused her of being anorexic. Vanessa had two kids, ten-year-old twins. Her husband was good to her, but he worked third shift. Merari had three kids, with three different baby daddies. Laura was engaged, but the other girls made fun of her fiancé. Aliyah had a boyfriend, but he was married to someone else.

Michele’s shoes came from the Goodwill, her lunch would be whatever she found in her employer’s fridge, and she didn’t think she was too special to talk to these women. But she didn’t belong on the bus, and she wasn’t meant to clean rich folks’ houses. She had never scrubbed a toilet or taken public transit until last year.

“She never says nothing.”

They ribbed each other, too, and they were all friends, so she knew, now, that they hadn’t been malicious, not at first. She should have tossed a joke back once or twice, let them know she wasn’t what they thought, but that opportunity had vanished.

The bus broke down.

A hissing squeal emanated from the engine, followed by a white cloud, and the driver hustled everyone off. They milled around, complaining, arguing. Some pulled out cell phones. Some began walking. One or two checked their watches and wallets before hailing a cab.

Michele remembered hailing cabs.

The driver announced that another bus would come.

“When?” shouted Merari.

The driver shrugged.

Michele shrunk away, leaned against a street sign, feeling ugly and helpless. She didn’t notice the old white Cadillac beside her until the redneck in the big white cowboy hat spoke.

“Bus broke down?” he asked.

She nodded, looked away. He slid over to the passenger seat, stuck his head out of the window to get a better look.

“The nine-oh-one? Headed for Lakeview?”

She nodded again, turned her back so he wouldn’t think she appreciated the conversation.

“Need a lift?”

Did she ever. She had to get to work on time, had to get paid, had to eat something today. But every alarm bell in her mind said it was too dangerous. Other girls did things like this. Not her.

“Come on. I don’t bite.”

She couldn’t remember speaking at all, not in a long, long time. “Can my friends come?” she asked.

She didn’t have any friends.

“More the merrier.” He grinned. He did not appear dangerous.

Behind her, two of them were smoking. Two of them were laughing. She took a tentative step, then another.

“This guy wants to give me a ride to Lakeview,” she said.

“White girl speaks!”

“Girl, you gonna be front page news. Dude’s an axe murderer. He gonna cut you into pieces.”

“I know,” she said. “But I have to get to work. He says he’ll take all of us. It’s safe if we’re five against one, isn’t it?”

Merari raised her eyebrows. Aliyah gave the guy a hard stare. Laura blew smoke rings. Vanessa laughed.

“They already turned off my electric,” Michele said. “I have to get to work on time.”

The others stared at her. Stared at the dude. Looked at each other, looked back to her. They gave the white Cadillac a long, hard appraisal.

Ethics

2011-06-12T19:07:00.001-07:00

Like some morally ambiguous cartoon character, he carried an angel on his right shoulder and a devil on his left. Unlike the proverbial indecisive animation, he carried them at all times, even in the absence of ethical dilemma, and they weren’t adorable miniatures with cherubic faces. They were full size, slightly larger than his own six feet, and while they possessed no earthly mass, they still weighed him down spiritually.

They didn’t look like any popular conception of angels or devils.

The angel had a smooth, flat face, like a white pebble, with water-worn holes for eyes, nostrils, and mouth. Its head, covered in stiff, alar hairs, attached directly to its shoulders like a bird’s, and also swiveled and twisted like a bird’s. Its stick-figure body dangled from the head like strings from a helium balloon, and its wings hung in airy folds, bleached sheets clipped to wiry frames.

The devil looked almost exactly alike, except darker: the crisp and flaking black of a third degree burn. Where the angel had feathery hair, the devil had charred hair shafts. Where the angel had billowy and draping wings, the devil had ragged membranes.

To say that they enjoyed arguing with each other would be an understatement.

If there could be found a moral angle, they would exploit it. Veal, one-night stands, offering ones seat to an elderly woman on crowded public transport: all were dilemmas necessitating a screaming tirade. Even minor matters, such as the purchase of a bottle of water (“Plastic is bad for the environment; consider your carbon footprint” versus “You’re thirsty; you can’t control the packaging; it’s cleaner than tap water, and colder, too”) initiated disputes that could last for hours, long after he had made his choice, until they pounced upon the next ethical dilemma (“You can’t shop there; they underpay female employees and minorities” versus “Corporations make decisions based on feasibility, and have every right to set their own pay scales”).

The nonchalance with which other boys made decisions amazed him. They could skip homework, cheat in math, or hide in the girls’ shower at overnight camp, and appeared not to hear a word of bickering from a pair of moon-faced creatures who insisted upon being carried everywhere.

Was there nothing they could agree on? Clean coal? Small-scale local shrimp farming? Consensual polyamory?

“Too dirty,” sniffed the angel.

“Not dirty enough,” grunted the devil.

In college, he took an ethics class, believing his life experience would translate into an easy A. Instead, he failed, too overwhelmed by the running commentary to focus on lectures, retain textual information, or write a coherent paper. Korean pottery, French cinema, Egyptian history, and Ornithology 101 all proved hot-button topics. Through trial and error, he determined he could graduate only by majoring in pure, theoretical mathematics.

With prodigious application of alcohol, he tuned them out long enough to lose his virginity, but he paid with weeks of debate on the advisability of sexual purity, the ecological impact of condoms, the politics of STDs, and the legitimacy of the sexual revolution. When he got up in the morning, they were fighting. When he went to bed at night, they were fighting. They only interrupted that argument to weigh in on other important matters, such as turning up the heat versus putting on a sweater, paper versus plastic, and exactly how horrible hopping on an unprotected Linksys network really was in the grand scheme of things, but sex proved irresistible and they kept returning that the subject.

“Far beyond physical purity or moral fiber, this is about spiritual cleanliness,” the angel yelled.

“He’s built for sexual pleasure,” the devil retorted. “Denying a natural and healthy release muddies his spirit more than acceptance of his true physical nature.”

“Overcoming the base body is the path to spiritual purity!”

“Spiritual purity is shorthand for total emptiness.”

Earlier in the day, while discussing functional analysis in the library, a brainy and busty blonde had uncrossed and recrossed her legs right in front of him. After six hours of cogitation, he calculated with ninety-percent certainty that she had provided that glimpse of her lacy panties with perfect deliberation. This conviction emboldened him for the first time in his life.

“Why don’t you two just fuck each other already?” he shouted.

“I’d rather fuck a moldy apple,” said the devil.

“I beg your pardon,” the angel said. “I do not fornicate.”

“Whatever,” he said. “You obviously have a thing for each other. You enjoy arguing way too much. You’re overcompensating for your forbidden attraction. You,” he said, pointing to the angel, “get your hands dirty for once in your existence. Learn something about the world you condemn.

“And you,” he continued, pointing to the snickering devil, “get your ass up out of the mud. This will come as a complete surprise to you, but it’s possible to experience pleasure without being a selfish bastard.”

At long last, the angel and the devil fell silent. Instead they both gaped at him, round little mouth-holes open and speechless, dark little eye-divots surreptitiously glancing toward each other and then down to the floor.

“There’s no shame in admitting your feelings,” he said. “Surely you can agree on that.”

“Feelings are dangerous,” the angel whispered.

“Emotions indicate weakness,” the devil grunted.

“Whatever,” he said. “Deal with it. I’m going out. You’re not invited.”

And he brushed the astonished creatures off his shoulders like lint, with such ease that he couldn’t believe he’d never tried before, and he went out of the dorm, texting the brainy and busty blonde.

He did not return to until the next morning, at which time he was a little surprised, but not very, to find the angel and the devil, their faces deeply engaged between each other’s legs. On his bed, of course.

He shoved them to the floor and fell to sleep, scarcely noticing the faint squeaks and growls of pleasure. The next day, they were still at it, seemingly glued into an alchemical knot, and each day thereafter they appeared smaller, lighter, and stiffer, until, by the end of the semester, he was able to hang them on the wall, where they were mistaken for an ethereal and remarkable yin-yang sculpture by a string of women who truly appreciated fine art.

Incarceration

2011-06-03T13:56:00.000-07:00

All her life, she had lived with the sensation of being trapped in this body. Not merely the myriad aches and pains she suffered, despite doctors’ constant reassurance that there was nothing wrong with her, but also the mundane demands of the prison bound her. The body hungered, and she must feed it. The body lusted and demanded satisfaction. The body tired and would sleep whether it was her will or not.

To follow the jailhouse rules evokes more nuanced prisons. If she ate, what should she eat? Would the food liberate her from her from the demands of the stomach, or weigh her down, or knot up her intestines, or simply be so unhealthy as to create further discord with the body? Inadequate sustenance would result in hunger pangs just a few hours later. If she had sex, there would be sweat and other bodily fluids. There might be pleasure, but then again, there might be pain, or lack of satisfaction, and if there were pleasure, that sensation might give rise to other, more debilitation sensations: a desire for more pleasure, a desire for a lover who would surely let her down, other desires she could not name. Besides, there was no easier way to transmit a disease that would further trap her in her body.

If she slept, she would dream.

The dreams might be wonderful, weightless flying dreams in which she escaped the bonds of the body, in which case, she would wake up even more tightly bound, stiff-jointed and shocked into the sharp reality of the morning.

The dreams might be nightmares.

Externally, she had friends, family, colleagues who looked at her and saw nothing unremarkable. No one could imagine that this vivacious and quick-witted woman had been a prisoner from birth in the same shell that liberated others with the power of movement, of choice. Like an animal, she concealed her weakness.

When the Saab plowed into her, she had been consumed with the heaviness in her legs, wondering how she could cross the street at all, how the crowds of pedestrians around her managed to do so without loathing. Preoccupied with forcing her limbs to comply, she did not notice that she had stepped out of the crowd.

“I’m having an out of body experience,” she thought, looking down at the broken frame of a woman beneath her. The Saab sped on, and witnesses were asking each other, “Did you get the license?” and “Is she dead?” They moved slowly, at a great distance from her perspective, waving their cell phones as they repeated the emergency dispatcher’s advice.

There was blood, spilling from the hated cage, pooling in the gutter. “I’m done for,” she thought. But the crowd declared, “She’s alive,” and, “See? She’s breathing,” and, “It’s OK, the ambulance is coming.”

But who cared? At last, freedom! She could fly!

Some part of her remained tethered, shackled, really, to the body, but she wouldn’t let that bother her. The life would fly out of that clay contraption and then, her fantasies realized, emancipation.

The ambulance did arrive, and a trio of snappy and professional young people fussed over her body, slid it onto a stretcher, and deposited it into their vehicle. It was idle curiosity, she told herself, which compelled her to follow, see it play out.

She was never going back. It was just nostalgia, a last glance at a house one had lived in for many years but never particularly cared for.

How graceful and unencumbered she felt hovering near the roof of the emergency vehicle. No longer plagued with discomfort, she needed nothing, wanted nothing. And how weak the foolish mortal frame appeared from here, the awkward limbs bent and broken, the messy fluids leaking from fissures in the meager protective skin.

A bloody handprint on her charcoal gray skirt bothered her, although she no longer needed business suits. And the hair: she could see gravel in the scalp, and worse yet, a few brown strands pulled forward and sort of caught in the eyelashes.

“Fix the hair,” she wanted to say, but she had no tongue, no voice box. Those organs belonged to the prison she had escaped so willingly. “Just tuck it behind the ear,” she wished to tell the paramedic, but the ambulance zoomed on, and the EMTs busied themselves with bandages, blood pressure cuffs. And her blouse had come unbuttoned, too, revealing more than she had ever shown strangers in her life.

It shouldn’t matter; the important thing was being free of the body, but at the same time, she’d always taken pride in presenting a flawless outer façade. No one ever guessed, based on action or appearance, of her pain, and now she lay in a muddled red mess, suit torn asunder, dirt on her head, and an artless lock of hair to complete the dishevelment.

Anyone could see the body’s weakness.

Why should she care, she wondered, as they trundled the body into the hospital, zipped her through doors and down corridors. Good riddance, defiant shell. I don’t need you anymore.

But right up until darkness closed in, she wanted to fix that strand of hair.

The dreams of that darkness were good dreams. She didn’t resume the burden of the unwanted form.

She woke up in that old carapace, no longer flying. Her eyes opened to whiteness, and she smelled clean sheets and disinfected floors. One hand flew to her forehead like a trained bird, but someone had tucked the hair behind her ear. “What a nice hospital,” she thought.

Later, a doctor came in, explaining that she’d broken both her legs, she would be in a cast and couldn’t walk for at least two months.

“I’m stuck in this bed for two months?” she cried, horrified.

“No, no,” he corrected her. “We’ll send you home in a couple of days with a wheelchair.”

“Oh.” She smoothed both hands over her temples, her thumbs sliding back behind her ears to meet behind her scalp. “Do you think they could bring me a comb?”

The Beer Girl

2011-05-13T12:54:00.001-07:00

The blister on Jessie’s left ankle had popped, so that the strap of her black leather Calvin Klein knockoff sandal with the four-inch-heel rubbed directly against the raw flesh. The blister on her right ankle had not popped, but it would, soon. She could not decide which one hurt more. Her brain reconsidered with every step—the right one, no, the left one, no, the right one—but, to her credit, she continued to smile and say her line. What choice did she have?

“Would you like to try a free sample of Mountain Light Cerveza y Limon, this summer’s new taste sensation for beer lovers? Would you like to try a free sample of Mountain Light Cerveza y Limon, this summer’s new taste sensation for beer lovers?”

She smiled until her cheeks hurt, her mind consumed not only with the pain in her ankles, but also the way her thighs chafed, and the sweat dripping down her legs, and the possibility that she was allergic to this new foundation, even though she couldn’t scratch her face for fear of dropping the tray of Dixie cups.

There also existed that vague nausea in her abdomen, a feeling she would not acknowledge for fear that her morning Saltines and diet Pepsi might consider it an invitation to make a return performance.

Very soon, she would have that problem licked. She just needed to figure out how to negotiate another nine and a half days in these shoes. Two weeks ‘til payday.

“I’d like a free sample,” a kid said.

She smiled a little harder. “Twenty-one and over. Please drink responsibly.” She lifted the tray up higher, walked on, turning sideways to edge through the crowd. Someone’s hand brushed her ass, a deliberate touch, ending in a gentle squeeze, but she knew she would never pick out the culprit in this mob. It just pleased her not to spill anything this time.

First day of her new summer job and she’d already seen everything. She passed the last two Dixie cups to a bald, middle-age guy and his young girlfriend, whose funky sneakers Jessie suddenly envied.

“This beer tastes like piss,” the girl laughed once Jessie turned her back.

“Lemon-flavored piss,” the guy said.

Jessie limped back to her station. “Do you have some Band-aids?” she whispered to Catalina, the other beer girl on this shift. “These shoes are killing me.”

“Oh, what you’re supposed to do is you take a panty liner and cut it up and stick it on the inside of the strap before you wear them,” Catalina whispered back.

“Is that a thing?” Jessie asked. “Is that something people do?”

Catalina shrugged. “I don’t have a Band-aid.”

They refilled their trays from bottles in the cooler and pressed back into the festival. “Would you like to try a free sample of Mountain Light Cerveza y Limon, this summer’s new taste sensation for beer lovers? Would you like to try a free sample of Mountain Light Cerveza y Limon, this summer’s new taste sensation for beer lovers?”

The beer smelled sort of unnatural to Jessie, and she held the tray up, away from her nose, as she minced through the crowd. If she slid her feet forward in the sandals, curled her toes, and lifted her arches…no, that didn’t help matters. The leather straps—or perhaps they were really plastic—were cutting her. A panty liner wouldn’t help in the least. Maybe a tampon, at this point. She wouldn’t be at all surprised to look back and see a trail of blood dripping from her ankle.

Of course, she didn’t have any reason to carry either of those items right now. She wouldn’t even be here right now. “Cerveza y Limon…Cerveza y Limon,” she heard herself parroting. There were boys, cute ones and hideous ones, smiling and gawking and grabbing. She was supposed to be on an unpaid internship this summer. She was supposed to be networking in broadcast journalism, looking perky and helpful, flirting with anchormen, or even cameramen, and maybe, just maybe, getting a few minutes on air before she started her senior year. Something to put on her resume.

Back at her station, she leaned against the table, relieving the pressure on her ankles for a moment as she refilled her tray.

“Hey, hey, beer girl” said the bartender, shaking a box of Band-Aids. “Do you want this?” He looked down, not at her ass, like every other guy had today, but at her ankles. He even helped her into the little tent behind the bar, lifted her up onto a keg, and slid her shoes off himself. “First time?” he asked, and she laughed.

“I’m not cut out for this.”

“You’ve gotta wear those shoes, huh?” he said.

“That’s the uniform.” Her brow creased. “Black heels, minimum height three and a half inches. Black skirt, minimum six inches above the knee, official black tank top or baby doll tee with Mountain Light logo, and if you’re not at least a C-cup, you’ve got to wear a Wonderbra.”

She regretted her words immediately, but he didn’t ask her whether she was a C-cup, or wore a push-up, or whether she had bought her uniform at a thrift store with the money she made selling back her textbooks because she was broke and desperate and didn’t have an outfit like that in her closet and was too ashamed to ask anyone for money. He just shook his head, sympathetic eyes rolling. The last thing she needed right now was another pair of sympathetic eyes. Sympathetic eyes, she had determined, were nothing but trouble. Sympathetic eyes did not necessarily indicate a sympathetic person.

“We both better get back out there,” he said, holding out his hand to ease her off the keg. “You don’t seem like the type, you know. Most beer girls are more in their element.”

She shrugged and tried to sound casual. “I need the money.” It came out as a whisper. Her stomach lurched. Her hand felt funny in his. She never asked for help. It surprised her to be offered.

“Don’t we all?” He grinned. “Don’t we all?”

Two and Counting

2011-05-04T17:33:00.000-07:00

I sold another short story!

"The Dog in the Machine" will appear in the December issue of NewMyths.com. It's the heartwarming tale of a reformed supervillain, his talking dog, and an elaborate plot to save the world from itself.

Special thanks to KJ Kabza who helped me understand how to cut a peripatetic narrative almost in half to reveal the shimmering transect within.

Hope Springs

2011-04-25T14:05:00.001-07:00

The Universe, having passed through ∞-1 cycles of creation and destruction, feels that it has fulfilled its primary purpose. Long ago, it discovered that its existence carried meaning as observer and observed. The Universe existed for a reason: to understand itself. Complete comprehension at the micro and macro levels had now been achieved, the sum total understanding of the Universe perceived, all possibilities known and cataloged.

Now, having exhausted novelty, the Universe becomes an eternal thumb riffling the dog eared pages of an inexhaustible book. There is no need to stop and browse the text, neither to read the marginalia or gloss the pages. The content has long since been memorized.

The Universe does not relish an infinity of living this manuscript over and over again without hope of discovering anything new.

The single unknown, which the Universe now contemplates, is how it can kill itself. The puzzle is not unique, merely scrambled and in need of decryption. Creating something from nothing has been done. Now, to create nothing from something. Compress down to an infinitesimal non-dimensionality and never explode? Explode beyond the limits of physics and never pull the pieces back in?

Whichever the Universe chooses, just before it has chosen and proceeds with the end of existence, something new occurs, an impossible new phase of existence.

An entirely different Universe blossoms into being, a thing apart from itself. A new baby Universe with new rules and new possibilities. A baby! One the Universe can watch grow and change, a protégée to which the Universe can impart knowledge, from which the Universe can continue to learn. The Universe is rejuvenated and decides to live.

Woods Lake Magnet School for the Arts, Kalamazoo, 2004

2011-03-08T16:04:00.000-08:00

The kids decided that Ph.D. stood for “Player Hater Degree” and it seemed plausible to them that Daisy would pursue one. Funny how kids’ minds work. I was the heavy in that room, the disciplinarian, the one reminding them about appropriate behavior. Daisy was the one they walked all over. I got their respect. She got the “Player Hater Degree.”

Plus, she’d lived in this city for years. She’d grown up in their circumstances: a gifted kid in an impoverished district struggling to provide her a degree of enrichment, a world alien to me.

On the first day, I didn’t know what to say to the kid—eight years old, in third grade—who wrote a story he called “Pimp World.”

“Is that something you’d show to your mother?” our supervisor asked him.

Got it. I filed that response away, and pulled it out pretty often. It never stopped the stories about stolen boyfriends, promiscuous teenagers, or cussing children, but it helped. “You’re in third grade. How much do you really know about this?”

Parents, monitor what your kids watch on TV. Monitor what you say in front of them. Keep their world age appropriate, because they hear everything you say and see everything you do. If it’s not pretty in an adult, it’s really unattractive in a kid. But what do I know? Certain concepts, I was just never exposed to in elementary school. When we tried to teach dialog and conflict, we ended up with three sketches that involved girls arguing over which boys slept in which girls’ beds the night before.

The next week, I explained that “conflict” need not necessarily involve an actual argument, and reiterated the concept of appropriate material. “We’re going to try this one again, without any stories about girls fighting about where boys sleep.”

From the back of the room, the annoying performance mom, who’d argued that her barely literate second grader should join our group, except that she had to arrive late every class, because she had a voice lesson, and leave early, to attend her modeling class, became agitated. “I do not believe that material is acceptable for children.” No one had asked her to sit in on the class, either. No one else’s mom was in the room. Daisy and I bristled whenever she spoke.

“Yes,” I nodded my solidarity with adult sensibilities, even as I wished, once again, that Hollywood would discover her supremely untalented daughter and whisk them both off to California. “Some people did not understand last class. That’s why we’re doing this again.” Somehow, it was usually me at the front of the room, modulating my voice to maintain their attention. If Daisy took charge, I had to stalk around the back, directing their attention when it strayed.

The regular teachers told us our methods worked.

“They used to write a sentence or two,” one told us. “Now they’re writing paragraphs, pages, sometimes.”

Daisy and I were just another link in a long chain of graduate students to teach this class, and we winked at each other. We were better than Elaine and Reba, who’d been in charge last semester.

The group changed. Some older girls started attending once basketball season ended. They’d been in Elaine and Reba’s group, and grew surly when we expected them to do the work.

“Whatever,” these big girls, already adults in their own minds, told us, snapping their gum, rolling their eyes, and tossing their heads so their dangly earrings jingled. “Elaine and Reba let us work together.”

“Work together, yes,” I said. “You’re not working.”

“We’re brainstorming!”

“You’re gossiping.” I tapped their blank paper. “You haven’t done anything.” I tapped the third graders’ papers. “And these guys, who are three years younger than you, have already written a whole page. Get to it, or get out.”

Daisy hovered over them, her arms crossed over her chest, and glared when their conversation turned to boys, music, dancing.

“Player hater,” they whispered.

“Get to it, or get out,” I said. “Some of the people in this room are interesting in learning about writing, and you’re ruining it for them.”

The big girls refused to leave that day, but they never came back. They were so big, as big as I was.

Even the little kids existed more in the world than I ever would. They had crushes on boys, and hip hop stars. Until Daisy’s hipper, younger sister sat in with us, we had no idea what musicians they were writing about, which videos had germinated their thoughts. “You’re not really sisters,” they told Rosie, even thought Daisy and Rosie looked as much alike as two people can without actually being monozygotic twins. Rosie sat with them and helped them write their longest story yet: four little girls, and four members of their favorite boy band. A mansion. A magic fountain. Super powers. Fireworks.

We were in graduate school, eating, sleeping, drinking, breathing, and living creative writing. Teaching elementary kids acted as a release valve. They could be a trial, but they allowed us to reach back to that childish joy in writing. Daisy and I took turns sitting down and modeling behavior: scratching with number two pencils on wide-ruled sheets of paper, working through our own issues.

I still have one of my favorite stories, in which my pet dragon, Toothsome, unceremoniously devours all the irritating people in my apartment complex. We encouraged the kids to illustrate their work, and I enjoyed doing the same.

The kids stood around me, admiring my prolific output and my art, which accurately depicted the fantasy.

“Dang,” one of the kids murmured. “That dragon’s just stuffing the guy right in there.”

Quite satisfactory.

But when I found myself involved in writing, Daisy was in charge of behavioral management. The noise level rose. Kids got up out of their seats and started to run. The deeper into my story I fell, the louder the noise in the room, until, snapped from my reverie, I identified the culprits.

“Hey, Mario, what are doing on the radiator?” I snapped.

“Oh, I didn’t know you were in here.” He hopped down and scurried back to his seat.

“It shouldn’t matter whether I’m in here or not. The rules don’t change if I leave the room.” But they did change. I was not of their world, and my influence only spread so far.

Reverse Dream Journaling

2011-02-02T23:30:00.003-08:00

He kept a notebook under his pillow and every night he sketched out the basics of the dream he hoped to have. His sister said that was a stupid idea but the more he did it, the better he got, the more accurate his forecast, and the more remarkable the details his mind created to knit the dream narrative together from his conscious thoughts.

A man who could completely control his dreams, he suspected, could take charge of all aspects of his own mind, and, consequently, his waking world as well.

The talent to came as a great consolation after disappointment, of which a teenage boy’s life is rife, allowing him to rewrite circumstance in his favor. Annoyed by his sister, he dreamed life as an only child, a prince, worshipped as the reincarnation of a great warrior. Chastised by a coach, he pictured himself as the all-around gold medal winner in the intergalactic Olympics, where he competed against aliens of all shapes and sizes, in zero gravity. Rejected by one girl, he imagined a lifetime in which the object of his affection, and all her friends, served in his harem, an endless procession of sexual favors.

His grades slipped. He wrote dreams instead of studying, and if ever felt bad about scoring poorly, he simply wrote academic success into the theater of his mind. Despite his parents’ faith and his tested intellectual acumen, he only just got into his safety school. He enrolled as a psychology major and advanced some radical theories of personality development and spiritual enlightenment he had developed as he perfected his reverse journaling technique, but rarely followed through by committing his ideas to paper or attending class. Two years later, they asked him to leave the university.

He took it in stride. School had not featured prominently in his journals; who worried about such a narrow realm of influence when an infinite universe beckoned? Much mightier accomplishments awaited.

With few needs—an apple and a bowl of ramen, a pen, a notebook, and a warm bed—he could devote his full attention to an ambitious project. Could he, in fact, expand the dream world by expanding his journal? Soon, half his day was consumed with the task of recording the previous night’s dreams and comparing them to his models, and the other half was spent designing the next night’s dream.

One morning, his sister pushed her way past the stacks of notebooks that grew like stalactites across the floor of his basement bedroom, and he wouldn’t wake up. Sometimes, his hand would move as if maneuvering a pen over a piece of paper, but no one ever saw him open his eyes or heard him speak again.

Thanks

2011-01-14T15:15:00.000-08:00

Professor James sits down at his kitchen table, slides a mug of tea in my direction, and says, “Thank you.”

Between us flickers the ghost of another man, not a wraith-like ghost, but the specter of too much strength: muscles that bulge to obscenity, a caricature of a man. But not dead. Not dead, not yet.

“Well, you know,” I stammer, “I don’t, I mean, I didn’t really do anything. It’s not like he even talks to me anymore. It’s just that everyone else was worried. I feel sort of…” I wrap my hands around the hot mug and looked down into the steam. “I feel disconnected from him. I didn’t really notice. It’s just that everyone else did, and they kept telling me about it, and I didn’t know what else to do. They’re all so worried about him.”

And tell the truth, I hadn’t worried at all. You meet a guy in orientation. Maybe he’s a little extreme. Maybe he works out way too much. Maybe he’s got a temper. OK, maybe he punched that guy in that bar, but that guy was a Nazi skinhead and totally had it coming. You think you know a guy. You think he’s your friend, someone you can sit down and have a beer with, play some X-Box, just unwind. And then a girl you don’t even like starts throwing herself at you, and you’re wondering, how do I let this girl down? So you go to your so-called friend, tell him your story, ask him for some advice.

And what does that guy do? He punches you in the face and tells you he’s got dibs on the chick. And you don’t even want her! And come to find she doesn’t like him. But you’ve still got a black eye; you’re still down one friend.

“Thank you anyway,” he says. “Thank you for the call to action. It’s—it’s a very sensitive subject for me. My brother went through the same thing, and I’ve never understood it. I knew there was a problem. I saw it too. Just wasn’t ready to confront it. Just let myself not deal with it.”

Me too. I was done dealing with it. But, say five other dudes come up to you and say, “Jeez, what’s up with Steve? Is he on steroids or what? Man, he looks sick. I think he needs help.” What are you going to do? Even if you don’t care about him as a person, as a moral guy, you tell someone, right? You get him some help.

“I’m sorry,” I say. Professor James seems so tough, too. Really tough. Not in a fake, steroid way. Tough like a guy who chops enough firewood to last out a Michigan winter, and then goes up north and chops firewood for his mom. Tough like a guy who never starts bar fights, just finishes them. He’s the last person, you figure, who’d turn his back on something like this.

“Don’t be sorry,” he says to me. “You may have just saved a man’s life.”

“What happens now?”

“The department head will take care of it. Don’t worry. He’ll get the help he needs.”

What happens now is that the department rescinds his assistantship and recommends that he receive psychiatric treatment. What happens now is that, even though you never tell anyone about this conversation and no one should realistically know that you’re the rat, you still get punched in the face. Again. Same eye. And one more thanks. “Thanks for screwing up my life.”

Untimely

2010-12-25T15:14:00.000-08:00

They are reading about it now, in the news, if they read such things, or on their friends’ Facebook feeds, more likely: Joyce Sherman, dead at thirty-one.

“So young,” they’re murmuring. “She never got to realize her dreams.”

They’re reading cause of death: struck by lightning.

“That’s how she always said she would go.” They’re laughing, bitter. “You think she’d have been more careful."

Some of them are even privy to the exact circumstances: in the hot tub, with a bowl in one hand, and a lighter in the other.

“She died happy,” they’re comforting themselves. “Doing what she loved.”

They’re marveling over the details, how the lighter exploded in one hand, how the glass bowl melted and fused itself to the other. They’re talking about god, and God, and accidents, and Accidents. Strange coincidences and a life cut short and all the things Joyce will never do, never see.

If I could, I would tell them: I rode that lightning bolt all the way up. All the way to the top. The view is amazing.

The Rooster of Prague*

2010-11-24T23:39:00.000-08:00

It used to mean something to be a rooster in this town.

Don’t look so surprised, mister ugly American in your flowered shirt with the sweaty armpits. You didn’t know what two hundred and eighty-nine steps felt like until a moment ago. And only now have you caught your breath, looked around for the first time, and decided that I am out of place.

Go ahead and laugh then. You want to know what I’m doing up here? Well, time was, you wouldn’t think about praying without me. I mean, come on now! Who wants to talk face to face with the ferocious, four-headed, Svantovít, the mighty pagan god who’ll, like as not, swell the banks of the Vlatava, flooding your house, destroying your crop, drowning your livestock? Wouldn’t you rather have a fine black rooster intercede on your behalf? A god’s gotta have a sacrifice, and better me than your virgin daughter, if you know what I mean.

Those were the days.

Back then, we roosters really had something to crow about. A yard full of hens, chief timekeepers of the village, and that whole intermediary to the great god gig. Life was sweet. You’d get fattened up, treated like a prince. OK, so maybe there was a moment of panic, running about, as they say, like a chicken with a head, but that ended soon enough and there you were, rubbing shoulders with the big guy, who just wouldn’t be appeased with anything less than a nice black rooster.

But then came the Christians, who didn’t need us as intermediaries anymore. They had all these other crazy ideas about talking to their god, not a guy with four heads, but one guy with three faces. Something like that. I'm a bird, not a theologian. All I know is, these Christians thought you could just appeal to your own religious leader, or a dead religious leader you never met, or—this is the craziest of all—some of them thought you could just belly up to the trough and talk to god yourself. Can you believe such a thing? No room for a big black rooster in the pecking order there. And what did they think of the great and terrible Svantovít? They built a massive cathedral on top of his altar. Saint Vitus. That's right. This cathedral.

That Vitus really ruffles my feathers. First of all, he wasn’t even Czech. Never even set foot in the golden city of Prague. Besides that, the guy wouldn’t sacrifice a rooster if his life depended on it. And you know what? It did. Those Christians had these newfangled ideas, which got Vitus accused of sorcery. He was supposed to make an animal sacrifice to prove his innocence, and could have just slaughtered a bird and gotten on with his life, but he wouldn’t, and they killed him. Boiled in oil, and of course, they tossed a black rooster in the pot, sent him along for the ride, probably to tell Svantovít just how rude the kid had been. And here’s the lowest bit: Vitus’s followers start depicting us at his side, like instead of being the ones to squawk directly in god’s ear for man, now we needed this guy to connect us!

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised then, how I got here. Me! A rooster! You know where I came from, who I used to be. And now who am I? A copper weathervane, stuck up on top of this cathedral. Doesn’t that just beat all? Sure, I’ve got a fabulous view of Prague, the river, the bridge, the rest of the castle. But that’s hardly compensation, do you think? It really sticks in my craw. What good’s a weathervane in divine communication? You don’t need a weathervane to know which way the wind blows. You can quote me on that.

All I can do is hope that angry, four-headed god opens his eyes and looks around. You’d think he’d notice the lack of black roosters. He did swell the Vlatava last year, but no one thought of a blood sacrifice, did they? No, they just cleaned up and started again. And here I sit, a helpless copper rooster, blowing this way and that. Honestly, I don’t know what this world’s coming to.

*Written in 2003

Update

2010-11-18T00:40:00.000-08:00

Just in case anyone wonders where I've been, I've been doing NaNoWriMo for the last 17 days. However, I hit 50k this morning (average daily word count: 3104) and should finish my abysmal novel tomorrow. It's good to get that stuff out of your system.

13 Ideas I Did Not Submit to the Upcoming Cthulurotica Anthology

2010-10-28T17:15:00.000-07:00

Orgy at Randolph Carter's dream dungeon

The tender love between an innocent young girl and whatever sires the half-breed fish people. Actually, maybe the above girl actually falls for a fish girl, and they are impregnated at the same time by a fishy horror

What really goes on after lights out in Arkham Asylum

Mating rituals of the giant albino penguins of Antarctica

Anime-loving girl, obsessed with hentai, experiences a real tentacle raping

When I was a student at Miskatonic U, you would not believe what we got up to in the stacks during finals week

Prim and proper conservative fundamentalist is a secret masochist who actually relishes the horrors that await in Cthulhu's embrace

Call of Cthulhu LARP gets way out of control

The secrets of the not-so-amorphous appendages of Nyarlathotep's amorphous idiot flute players: those aren't flutes!

Herbert West overcomes erectile dysfunction with a little elective surgery

The mad harem of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred

When Elder Gods love, they love deeply

Pickman's model on the casting couch

Yes, I chose not to write those stories. You're welcome

Empty Spaces

2010-10-22T16:35:00.000-07:00

It was a blue hour, a moment of more-than-dusk but less-than-night, and the world seemed to purr at her feet as she hauled a black plastic garbage bag down the driveway. She left it at the curb, brushing her hands against her jeans with finality, and smiling at the neat line of five identical bags. Taking out the trash, she though to herself.

When she turned back up the drive, she noticed, even in the dull half-glow of the absent sun, that the house would have to be painted. I could do that, she thought to herself. She never had before, but how difficult could it be? She would nail down the bad step, and replace the missing shutters. Later, soon, she would learn how.

Now, she would sweep out the wide, empty places where the garbage had resided for so long. She would marvel over the extra expanses of her home, lost beneath the rubbish of another life for so long. There might even be another bag of garbage to carry away.

Once she figured out how to get the Internet back up, she would research all the new skills she would need. She could see no reason why she might fail in her task. The only reason she had never done these things before was that she had never had the opportunity. And now she had all the opportunities in the world.

Jervis Girls' Jail

2010-10-10T01:55:00.000-07:00

Elation didn’t come easy when you had to sit with your ass sunk into a yellow, molded plastic chair under the hairy eyeballs of The Hag, but Nya mustered a smile as she took the receiver. Soon, she would be out of this place, away from The Hag, and Miss Grits, and Sweet Baboon and the rest of the bitchy staff at the Jervis Girls’ Jail, Home for Fucked Up Rejects, and she wasn’t coming back.

She heard it ringing on The Dog’s end. The Hag sort of oozed her saggy butt up onto the other desk like she meant to stick around, and her long tits deflated a little under the ratty sweater. The old lady stared down from beneath her monobrow. Creepy bitch, Nya thought. Anything—even Jailbait and The Dog—was better than this. You couldn’t even make a phone call without three weeks’ good behavior, a permission form signed by two administrators, and a fat old hag eavesdropping on your every word. They’d scared her straight all right. Six months in Jervis and she couldn’t wait to live by her father’s standards, under his roof and his rules.

“Hello?”

Nya choked a bit, but she would be nice to Jailbait if it killed her. She’d changed. What business of hers was it if her dad married a nineteen-year-old gold-digging slut when her mom hadn’t even been dead two years? She would just finish high school like a normal, non-incarcerated kid. Plug her ears up at night. Smile every morning at a step-mom who had been a senior when she was a freshman.

“Hi, Janice. Can I talk to my dad?”

“I thought they didn’t let you make phone calls.”

Nya could picture her lying on the couch in a white satin pajama top and a pair of red panties. You couldn’t deny the smoking hotness of Jailbait Janice. She forced the cheer into her voice. “They don’t let you make phone calls without permission. I have permission. So, please, will you put my father on the line?”

“He’s sort of busy right now.”

“This is sort of important.” Her voice felt sickly sweet, sort of rotten, but The Hag favored her with a wrinkled smile, like she’d gotten it right.

She heard Jailbait fake whispering, “It’s the kid.” She made “the kid” sound like a creeping skin infection. She couldn’t tell what The Dog said back to her.

They both giggled before he got on the line. “What now?” he snapped.

“Dad, I had my court date today.”

“Well, you earned your punishment. Maybe this time you’ll learn your lesson.”

She gritted her teeth, then took a cleansing breath. The Hag gave her a thumbs up. “I did learn my lesson. I’ve had, like, group therapy, and I’ve addressed my anger issues so I can channel my emotions in appropriate ways. I know that I have to respect you and your decisions because you’re my father, and I understand that Janice is your decision, and I want you to know that I’m happy for you, I’m glad you’re happy. I got my feelings about Mom’s death mixed up with my feelings about your marriage. I know my behavior was totally inappropriate. I’m a different person, and the judge said I could come home.”

She took another deep breath. “Whenever you want to come and get me, I can go. I swear, there’s not going to be any problems. None.”

For a moment, she heard nothing but the distant babble of the TV on the other end. Canned laughter. An almost-familiar advertising jingle. She could count on one hand the number of times she’d watched TV in the shelter.

Finally, The Dog made a noise halfway between a grunt and a sigh. “What makes you think I want you here?”

“Dad?”

“After the way you acted, all the things you said. Lying to the cops! Trying to get Janice fired! Stealing from me! And now you want to come home? Six months isn’t nearly long enough. I’m still paying Grandma back for what you did to her car.”

Nya twisted the old-fashioned cord around her wrist, tight, until her hand almost turned white, but let it go. She didn’t have to do anything like that anymore. “I’m sorry. I said I was sorry. I’ll get a job. I’ll pay everyone back. I’ll make it all up to you.” The Hag started nodding like some stupid bobble head doll.

“It’s a little late for that, Nya. They got it right the first time. The shelter really is the best option.”

“But the judge said—”

“The judge can take your freeloading ass into his house, if that’s how he feels. He can let you eat his food and insult his wife and run up his credit card. You’re his business, not mine. Please don’t call here again.”

The next thing she knew, Nya had her face buried in the worn, soft knap of the Hag’s sweater, her cheek pressed into those low hanging boobs, while the old lady’s hand smoothed down her hair. “There, there,” The Hag crooned. “He’s a fool. You’re a good girl, Nya, and anyway Miss Gibbons will find you a better place,” and Nya clung to the old lady like it was her own mother and the old lady smelled good, like sugar.

The Gold Dress

2010-09-30T16:37:00.000-07:00

Issa found a beautiful gold dress, with pearl beads and silver thread, on the rack at Salvation Army. Twenty dollars was much too much for a dress, she knew, and it wasn’t in the budget, but she fingered its silky sleeve for so long that her mother added it to the cart when she wasn’t looking, and went without new hose and some other necessities, because Issa had been such a help, never asking for anything, and she deserved nice things. Hannah and Dore had had so many nice things in their childhood, and Issa relatively few.

She wore her dress to school, because, as her mother pointed out, where else would she wear it? They didn’t go to church, or parties. They didn’t have extended family gatherings. She didn’t wear it to impress anyone. She just liked to feel pretty once in a while. Even poor girls from broken families living in tiny apartments could feel pretty, some days.

“Did Jenny’s mom give you that?” Susan had asked first thing, even before the bell rang.

Issa didn’t understand. Jenny was the most popular girl in the fifth grade, and Issa was only a regular third-grader. She shrugged, and kept shrugging at the whispers all morning.

“Oh, my god!” someone screamed in the lunch line. “You really are wearing my dress! That is too funny.”

Jenny stood right behind her, glamorous in skinny jeans and a sequined T-shirt.

“My mom bought me this dress,” Issa said, her mouth small and quiet.

“Yeah, after my mom gave it to charity!” There was laughter, sharp and cutting. "It cost two hundred dollars new. What did you pay? Twenty-five cents?"

“There’s nothing wrong with being poor,” a fourth grade boy said. Issa smiled up at him. He looked strong.

“Nothing at all,” said Jenny. “Especially when people deserve to be poor. Like, say someone’s dad was a liar and a thief and stole everyone’s money. Then a person deserves to be poor. There’s nothing wrong with Issa wearing my old dress after her dad took practically everyone’s retirement fun and ran away to the Bahamas. I think someone who takes an old lady’s whole savings probably should wear second-hand clothes, especially when that old lady lost her house and everything and had to move in with her son.”

Issa gulped. Her father had done something wrong. Hannah and Dore had made that clear, but her father was long gone. Issa and her mom had moved on. She smoothed the beautiful gold dress over her hips and picked up her tray.

“You get free lunch, don’t you?” Jenny said. “I guess my family bought that for you, too. ‘Cause we pay taxes. Unlike your dad.”

“Maybe we should take her dress back,” a girl said. “To repay you.”

Jenny laughed. “Who wants it now?”

Issa was already halfway to the door, blinking through the wet curtain over her eyes. The fourth grade boy stopped her. “It’s a pretty dress, Issa,” he said. “It looks way prettier on you than it did on Jenny. I once saw her punch a first-grader when she was wearing that dress.”

“I don’t even know my father,” Issa wailed.

Dream Theater 1: Gluttony

2010-09-04T02:27:00.000-07:00

This might be part of a longer work...

Every day began with twenty minutes of Tai chi, twenty minutes of plyometrics, and twenty minutes of Pilates, followed by an hour jog and a long bath. For breakfast, she nibbled one ounce of almonds, four ounces of apple, and eight ounces of soy protein drink. While she ate, she gazed at the small, strapless, backless, slit-leg black dress hanging over the window, and planned her trip to Main Street Image Works.

Her friends went to Brainpix or Sweet Dreams, or, for special occasions, Expanded Mind, and she did too, when they asked her to dreamshare, but for her own dreams she chose Main Street. It wasn’t trendy, and she didn’t have to worry about bumping into someone she knew and being forced to make small talk about her dreams.

At the dream theater, the receptionist waved her into the third chamber. Candace could interface without help, and purchased advance minutes every month, so her visit would be automatically credited. Smoothing the electrodes over her skin, she lay back in the cradle and tapped the start button with her elbow.

A moment later, she sat at her grandmother’s dining room table, piled high with homemade doughnuts: glazed, jelly, crullers. An old plastic pitcher served as a bottomless fountain of whole milk. She ate six doughnuts without thought, then slowed down to enjoy the sensations: hot lard mingled with crisp dough, the faint crackle of glaze, the squirt of jelly. Crumbs rained from her lips, milk dribbled down her chin, and she never made a dent in the piles. She kept stuffing her mouth, occasionally swigging from the pitcher.

“Candy for my Candy?” her grandmother called from behind her.

When she turned around, the world went dark, and a voice said, “Five seconds have elapsed. Would you like to purchase five more seconds for five New Credits?”

“No, thank you.” She floated to work, the flavor of doughnuts very much in her mind, if not in her mouth. They felt so real! She might feel hunger later, but there would be another trip to Image Works. And another.

On her way out at noon, her boss stopped frowning at a nutrient replacement bar on her desk long enough to call out, “You look incredible! Seriously, what’s the secret?” The older woman pressed one hand against the perpetual inner tube around her own waist and sucked in her stomach. The secretary at her side sighed.

Candace shrugged. The secretary volunteered, “You never eat lunch, do you? You just, like exercise for an hour, right?”

Keeping her head down, but conscious of how thin she looked between these two women, she smiled. She had thought of it first, and she deserved to be the skinny one. An exclusive club. She felt bad about leaving them out, but if everyone knew, it wouldn’t be exclusive anymore.

“It’s all about resolve,” she said, at last, because they kept looking at her. “I decide in advance what I’ll eat that day, and that’s all I eat. Period. Plan it out.”

The secretary laughed, fanned her hands over various electronic interfaces. “Planning I can do.”

The boss laughed, too. “It’s sticking to the plan that’s hard.”

Alone, she crept back to Main Street, where she enjoyed the meal her family traditionally ate on Christmas day, including honey-glazed ham, a strata of cheese, eggs, bacon, and white bread, and cookies dusted with red and green sugar. She washed it down with a couple mug of eggnog, the effects of which dusted her afternoon with a tipsy halo, although a blood test would evince no alcohol in her system.

After work, she returned to the dream theater and devoured a few large sausage and pepperoni pizzas, a bottle of soda, a six-pack of beer, a birthday cake, three pints of ice cream (butterscotch, rocky road, and chocolate chocolate chip), and a mound of real whipped cream. In thrall, she opted for a second dream of eggrolls, sweet and sour chicken, shrimp fried rice, and fortune cookies, and then a third five-second hour of childhood comfort foods: macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes with cream and butter, rice pudding with brown sugar bananas, and a can of sweetened condensed milk, drunk through a twisty straw.

Then she went home, ate four ounces of canned tuna, four ounces of celery, four ounces of grapefruit, one ounce of cottage cheese smeared on a rice cake, and a breath mint. She practiced forty-five minutes of yoga and fifteen minutes of meditation, then wrote rapturous things in her diet journal, ending with, “I hope I dream about pie tonight!”

Pie filled her dreams, but rather than eating it, she splashed in it, like a child lying in a plastic pool. A peach pie, with ice cream, the perfect, spiced mixture of hot and cold, sweet and creamy running over her skin and down her throat. Nearby, her boss lolled in an apple pie with ribbons of caramel melting across the top. The secretary wore a quivering lemon meringue that fit her round shape like a party dress, and the boss also matched the curve of her container.

And so, to her horror, did Candace. While communing with heaven’s peaches and cream, she had bloated to the size of a weather balloon, the diameter of her stomach equal to her height. She was fat, fatter than ever, the fattest woman on earth.

She awoke screaming.

Mary's New Boobs

2010-08-31T18:18:00.001-07:00

When they announced the new policy, Mary peed in the cup without a fuss, but there wasn’t any point to coming to work after that. Cashing in all those stupid stock options to pay for her boob job was the best decision she’d ever made. They came with a lifetime guarantee—no sagging—and people finally stopped treating her like a twelve-year-old. She knew a girl whose dad owned a bunch of titty bars; with her perky new C-cups, she could always get a job waitressing.

Who needed a job, though? After she paid the plastic surgeon, she still had something left over, enough to pay the rent, anyway. It wasn’t like she’d ever pay for a drink again. Before she got a new job, maybe she’d just get a rich boyfriend.

She and Bella bought cute sundresses with spaghetti straps and went dancing every night, scorning any guy whose shoes didn’t pass Bella’s test, which was most of them. Mary picked out the perfect spangled purple halter to wear to Jen, Jenn, and Jenny’s triple birthday party. She twirled a plastic wine glass between her fingers, laughed each time someone spoke to her, and used her peripheral vision to check out her silhouette in every reflective surface. Even distorted and upside down in a stainless steel spoon, she looked spectacular.

The more wine she drank, the better Jenn’s cousin Alex looked. Bumping into him accidentally on purpose, she batted her eyes and threw back her shoulders. Oh! Alex had brought a friend who looked good too, but he kept skulking in corners, his eyes darting around like a caged animal’s.

“Who’s your friend?” she asked. “What’s his story?”

“Josh? I don’t know, really. He just moved into my building.”

“Wait, Josh?” Mary’s eyes crossed, focused, and unfocused. “Didn’t he used to live here with Jen, before Jenny moved in?”

Alex tipped his head to the side and rubbed his ear with his shoulder. “Yeah, he said something like that. Something weird. Didn’t move out on good terms, I guess. He didn’t know if it was OK for him to come to this party, but Jen’s cool. I told him to come. No big deal.”

“Right.” She caught Josh’s glance and smiled. He shook his head, but smiled back. Maybe she should just try to for Alex? She already had his attention. His shoes looked OK, and Josh wore sneakers, so Bella wouldn’t approve. She could still wink at Josh if Alex looked away.

More wine. She tugged at her halter and looked around for someplace to sit, but Jen, Jenn, and Jenny didn’t have that many chairs. The floor looked inviting. She sank down and leaned against a coffee table, her nice breasts perched just above the glass, and saw Josh and Alex in the hallway. Josh kept saying something, and Alex kept frowning, and finally Alex walked away, but not toward Mary. He went out on the fire escape and lit a cigarette.

Catching Josh staring at her, she smiled again and wiggled her wineglass in his direction. He didn’t take the hint though, just kept grabbing people as they headed to the bathroom. She couldn’t hear what he said, but everyone he touched gave him a funny look and hurried away. Maybe there was something to Bella’s shoe test, after all. But he looked fine, really.

Another guy brought her some more wine. His shoes were only medium OK: leather, but old and scuffed. It was just a party. She rolled her shoulders in time to the music and smiled when he touched her arm. He totally hung on her story about the losers who tried to pick her and Bella up at the Double Door last week, until someone started yelling on the other side of the room.

Jen, Jenn, and Jenny had made a little semi-circle around Josh, all henpecking him at the same time. His face looked dazed. “Just go!” Jen said. “Jeez. Just get out.”

Josh mumbled something, and Jenny said, “You’re ruining our party.”

“You’re drunk,” Jen yelled. “You need to leave.”

“I just want to know if Mary’s a whore!” Josh shouted. “Is Mary a whore? That’s all I’m asking. Is she a whore or not?”

Then Jenny’s boyfriend grabbed him by the arm and a second later both guys were gone, leaving a vacuum filled by the rushing sound of nervous laughter. Mary stared at the floor.

“Who’s Mary, I wonder,” said the guy who’d brought her the drink.

She shuddered, threw back her shoulders, and shuddered again. “Do you think I could borrow your jacket?” she asked him. “I’m like, really cold just now.”

The Author

2010-08-27T16:11:00.000-07:00

She spent six whole months writing her novel, stolen minutes snatched from her life while the children played in the bathtub or her husband snored in the La-Z-Boy, and all her friends thought that was an amazing accomplishment, and that her novel was at least as good as anything you could get at the library, with the added bonus of no disgusting words or sex scenes.

“Definitely publish this,” everyone said. “You’ll make a ton of money.”

A few weeks later, she did. It hardly cost anything, and her book looked so pretty with her name on the cover. Right away, she sold about twenty copies to her friends and some of the other moms on her block. Her own mother, though, refused.

“I’m not paying money to read a book my own daughter published,” her mom said. “Self-published. Is it one of those stupid horror stories you used to write in high school?”

In the end, she just mailed her mom a copy for a birthday present.

“Oh, I’ve got to read this now?” her mom asked.

A week later, her mom mailed the book back, covered with red ink. She had changed spelling, and commas, and verb tenses, and left comments in the margins like, “If he’s a ghost, why does he need to sleep?” and “Did you even proofread this once?” Her mother’s theory had always been that nobody improved without criticism. Preferably her criticism. Her mother had always been bitter, never been supportive.

Her friends agreed that burning the marked-up copy would help her dispel the negative energy and let go of her stupid need for her mother’s approval, which she was never going to get anyway. It totally worked, too. As the embers died down in the old Weber grill they used for the cremation, she had a bunch of great ideas about demons, and that night, while the kids watched their shows on the big TV, she started to write her second novel. It was so easy.

First!

2010-08-13T22:16:00.000-07:00

Obviously, this blog has been on hiatus for a while as I'm busy with a lot of other projects, but here's some good news for my few loyal fans: after 5 years of supporting myself solely with my (non-fiction) writing, I have sold my first short story! This is amusingly ironic, as I was coming to the point of despair regarding even publishing a piece of fiction, let alone selling one. So the fact that my first publication is also a semi-professional sale is somewhat reassuring.

The speculative short story "Spin Free" will appear in the January issue of the journal Bards and Sages.

Petty Rant: Creative Writing Workshop, Graduate Level

2010-07-02T17:21:00.000-07:00

This is a true story. Names have been changed to protect the petty (me).

Liking Kaleb Wilson is not possible.

Jessie says that you’ve got to find something to like in everyone, and for the most part, I do, but not Kaleb. Kaleb is without redeeming qualities. Or, if he possesses them, they are qualities that cannot be expressed in the context of the graduate level creative writing workshop. His stories are boring, his critiques are worthless, and the worst part is that people like Sue Becker, who’s won every writing prize there is, adore him and believe he can do no wrong.

Here’s an example of why his critiques are worthless. Kaleb is the sort of person who, when I bring in a fifty-page chapter, will mark up the first two pages, and the last two pages, and then write a few lines of comments like, “This would be better if you had done X, Y, and Z,” with X, Y, and Z being the contents of the forty-four pages that he didn’t read. And then he’ll finish up with some helpful advice like, “This is exactly like Lord of the Rings” (a book he admits to never having read; nor has he watched the movie) and “Adults do not read fantasy novels; they are for children.”

First of all, I’m sorry that I’m the only person in the class working on a novel, and that I’m more prolific than anyone else. Had they told me that I was only supposed to write fifteen pages a semester, preferably on the subject of unhappy relationships, I probably would have stayed home. But they told me it was fine to write novels. They even told me it was fine to write fantasy novels. Have you ever been to a book store, Kaleb, or ridden a city bus? You will see far more adults reading fantasy novels than “lit-er-a-toor” or “litch-ra-cher” or however you heard it pronounced on NPR this week.

Bottom line: why not just admit that you haven’t bothered to read my work because you feel it is beneath you? Sitting sullenly while others praise it, and then, giving up all pretense of caring, shifting one-eighty, and offering thoughtless feedback like, “This is great! Keep doing exactly what you are doing,” because you think “genre” is a dirty word and you don’t get what everyone else enjoys about it is pretty transparent.

I don’t get what everyone else enjoys about your work.

Here’s why Kaleb’s stories are boring. Everything he writes is comprised of the same elements: ten pages of an extended metaphor, laughably trite (a bird in a cage to symbolize a woman trapped in her marriage? Really? That’s what passes for creative writing? Come on, Sue, aren’t you going to say anything?), and no action whatsoever (wind blowing through an open window and scattering papers does not count as action), followed by, finally, at last, one thing happening, at which point the story ends, abruptly, with no examination, confrontation, consequence, or resolution. Every freaking thing Kaleb has ever brought to workshop follows this framework.

For instance: a young woman is married to an older man who keeps a bird in a cage. For ten pages, nothing happens. The woman is vaguely unhappy. The man is blissfully oblivious. The bird waits patiently for a chance to morph from a metaphor to a plot device. One day, the bird flies away. The end.

He won an award for that one. Because it was so original and creative. But my work is exactly like Lord of the Rings because one of the characters is a magician.

So that’s why Jessie’s disappointed in me, and why I don’t have the same enthusiasm I had coming into the program. But, more important, that’s why I cannot like Kaleb Wilson. And why Sue isn’t my favorite author anymore, either.

Family Business

2010-06-24T15:26:00.000-07:00

First of all, I’m one of those characters with a huge, dark, dreadful secret that keeps me up at night, which I don’t mind telling you, since you don’t know me, and never will. I’m not even dramatic enough to draw it out or create a sense of suspense. I’m not a storyteller, after all.

I’m a blackmailer.

And it’s worse than that. I’ve only got one target, and that’s my dad. Seven years ago, while employed as a low-level peon at one of his factories over my summer break, I stumbled across incontrovertible proof that he was skimming off the top, which is crazy, because my dad’s already filthy rich. Even my stepmom can’t spend it as fast as he makes it.

So, probably the right thing to do would have been to go to my uncle, who’s on the board, but instead, I marched up to Dad’s office, slid some incriminating documents off his desk, and demanded my cut.

“Or else what?” my dad sneered.

“Or else I tell Grandpa. And Grandma. And Uncle Geoff. And Jenny.” Jenny’s my big sister, and she’s been angling to get rid of Dad for years, since the divorce, maybe even before.

For pretty much the first time in my life, I saw my dad sweat. “What if I stop?”

“What if?” I said. “These are just Xeroxes. The originals aren’t going away. Not like I’m asking for much. Financially, you’re better off dealing me in than walking away. Unless you want to retire and let Jenny take over.”

So he wrote me a check then and there, and he even fixed it so everything appears to be on the up-and-up. I even pay taxes on the money; on the books, I’m his personal assistant.

It’s kind of my dad’s fault. Before all this, moral rectitude had been a point of pride for me. I never took a drink before my twenty-first birthday; if a cashier gave me too much change, I pointed out the error and gave the extra back. I didn’t even drive over the speed limit. But it was my dad. He turned me to the dark side and now it’s impossible to give up. You don’t just stop blackmailing someone, especially when it’s all you know and you could never get another job that paid half so well with your skill set, and you’re newly married, with a baby on the way, and a wife who thinks you’ve got a nice, secure position in the family business.

But here’s what really keeps me up at night—not my own sinful path, but my sister’s straight and narrow one. Because Dad is getting older, and Jenny’s always been ambitious. Someday, she’ll get her wish. He’ll step down, or die, or she’ll find some other way to get rid of him and take his place. Jenny’s always been frugal, too. She’ll cut me off. And she’s sharp. She may well figure out why Dad was paying me off. And then I don’t know what.

So that’s why I can’t sleep at night, and why Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas morning, for me, promise about as much joy as a scheduled double root canal.

1000 Paper Cranes

2010-06-16T17:26:00.000-07:00

After the first dozen, her hands learned the way around the paper: mountain fold, valley fold, crease, pull, lift. Her fingers moved with the precision of a machine but the speed of a kid just learning to ride a bike. She refused to fall. The little pile of paper cranes grew like a stalagmite, one drop at a time.

She had no interest in origami, or China, no Asian influences in her life. She didn’t even believe in miracles. A miracle, however, was what she needed and, not knowing how to pray for one, she taught her hands the folding dance. Every folded crane, she would allow herself to believe, drew that miracle a little closer, even as the minute hand swept its way, again and again, around the face of the clock.

VIII

2010-06-13T17:19:00.000-07:00

He counted the money late at night, with the bed sheet tented over his head and a tiny flashlight to help him see the denominations on the bills. The pile was almost getting too big for the secret place in his dresser. Tonight, he counted three hundred eleven dollars, all of it stolen. Once, he’d had a reason for the thieving, something he had wanted to buy, but he couldn’t remember now what that thing had been, except that he didn’t want it anymore. He liked the part of taking the money best, and after that he liked the part of having the money. And the part of having a secret he liked too.

They had fired Rita for that first stack of twenties, so he guessed they would just fire the new maid if they ever noticed, but he was so much smarter than he’d been a year ago. Now he only stole dollars from his mom’s purse, or maybe sometimes a five from his dad’s wallet. He never took a ten or a twenty, except sometimes from his grandmother’s bag, because she always carried a lot, and never knew how much.

He liked the part where he was stealing, a funny Ferris wheel feel in his tummy and head, a scary and delicious upside-down feeling about being sneaky and smart. And he liked the counting part. That was a big feeling, like how it must be to be a grown-up and tell children things like whether or not they could have another Coke or stay up past bedtime to watch the end of the movie.

The bad part was after the counting, the part of not sleeping. He would cocoon himself up in the comforter, very cozy, starting with the delicious idea of the hidden pile of dollars, but something else would shove the nice feeling. There was a picture in his mind, which was the picture of his church, and the place out front where they had the Ten Commandments and it said VIII Thou Shalt Not Steal, and it was a very big picture that always had to crawl in and make him a little bit sick. It was like the game of not thinking about a pink elephant: the more you didn’t want to think about the picture the more the picture filled up the corners in your brain.

Sometimes he saw that picture in the daytime, too, but it didn’t have a sick feeling with it when he was doing the stealing, or if it did, that feeling was not as strong and proud as the amusement park part of taking the money. At night he would wonder if the bad feeling was worth the good one, and sometimes he could even go two whole weeks without stealing, but he never gave the money back and the bad part was always there, and he always got to wanting the first feeling again.

If he was going to feel bad about it anyway, he might as well do the interesting part first.

Bears Think They Know Everything

2010-06-03T16:42:00.000-07:00

Bears think they know everything, and this bear was a prime example, glowering down his muzzle like a disapproving spinster with a lorgnette at the end of her nose, an eight hundred pound spinster with matted brown fur and teeth the size of my fingers.

Usually, petitioners before the king in his ice palace stood with heads bowed, eyes averted, often wringing their caps in their hands, but bears have no conception of social niceties. “You must move your people,” the bear said, looking my father in the eye. “You might have three days, or only one.”

“The ice people appreciate the concern of the bear people and thank them for it. Inform your people that we will appease the volcano gods.” My father dismissed the bear with a wave. Beneath my flowered wreaths, I smiled.

The bear did not understand. It tossed its thick head. “We bears do not know your volcano god. We only know that the mountain will rain fire and poison. Your palace will melt. Your people will die in agony. We humbly ask you to avert this tragedy.”

The king had already turned away, but I was in a unique position to teach a higher understanding. “Friend bear,” I addressed it, “the ice people can read the signs as well as the bear people, but as a creature of the forest, you do not grasp our spiritual learning. Faith marks our path.”

“Princess, it’s true that we do not understand faith. We animals have only science to guide us.”

I could see the mud caked about his ankles, the parasites crawling over his fur. My father did not believe such creatures teachable, but a queen speaks to even the simplest subject with love and compassion, out of pity for its condition. “Then let me tell you of the gods. The lord of the volcano trembles from loneliness. At dusk, we are to be wed. He shall be lonely no more.”

The creature shuddered, perhaps awed by the power of our religion. “At dusk,” he growled, “you shall suffer burning death. Your skin shall blister from your bones as you asphyxiate on choking fumes and drown in liquid fire.”

I recoiled on my dais, upsetting some of the bridal wreaths, which my maids were fast to recover. Truly, the bear people were ungodly and simple. While its words shocked me, they enraged the king. My father signaled and six soldiers advanced, axes raised. Poor, dumb creature. I had provided an extraordinary opportunity. It chose its fate.

Raising itself up on two legs, it roared, sending a flurry of ice flakes down upon my shoulders like snow. It spun around, knocking the soldiers off their feet. And then it advanced, with speed unpredictable, and plucked me from my bridal bower. Flower petals billowed away as I was heaved, face-first and upside down, over its shoulder into the stinking, lousy fur. The bear’s bones jarred my body as it barreled through the line of soldiers, slid down the ice steps, and bolted through the ice garden. I heard the snapping sound of formations breaking under the bear’s careless paw.

“Stop, beast! You do not know what you do.” I yearned to sooth the volcano god, please my lord, and save the ice people, along with the foolish bear people and the other animals of the forest. I pleaded with it not to steal my future, my right as princess to become queen and wife to the god.

But the bear did not stop. It ran along, pursued, at first, by the clattering of horse hooves, and then ran farther, into the dark forest, leaving my father’s men behind. The stench of the animal invaded my nostrils, and its coarse fur rubbed my flesh. Perhaps I lost consciousness. When I woke, bears surrounded me, a mass of bears all moving together, like a dark storm cloud blown by a strong wind, like an angry, churning river.

“Would the ice people hear reason?” a bear asked.

“What do you think?” answered another.

“I saved one of them, at any rate. One less victim for their barbaric ritual.”

“Stupid animals!” I shouted, in a voice most unbecoming a princess. “You have doomed us all.”

The bears paid me no attention, only grumbled among themselves, and walked on.

Big Scary Man Syndrome

2010-05-30T18:19:00.000-07:00

He was three hundred pounds if he was an ounce, and every inch of him radiated mean. I call it Big Scary Man Syndrome. You’ve met these guys: so afraid that people will reject them based on their looks that they take special pains to be preemptively jerky so they can reject you first.

I consider those guys a challenge.

But this guy was really pissing me off. I had assigned my twenty-five freshman composition students an in-class essay, and no sooner had they found their pens and settled down to write than this bullhorn parked his frame in front of my classroom door and began screaming into his cell phone.

“Can you hear me? Can you hear me now?”

Dirty looks had no effect. Some of the kids started laughing instead of writing. I stepped into the hall, all five feet and one hundred pounds of me.

“What did you say?” he screamed. “Now can you hear me?” He hadn’t moved an inch.

“Excuse me.” I favored him with the winning smile that had melted so many Big Scary Men before him. “You get better reception in the stairwell, or outside.”

“I get fine reception right here,” he shouted and turned away, still shouting. “Sorry, I can’t hear you.”

With two steps, I stood in front of him again. “It sounds like you’re not getting fine reception. And this is a classroom building. And you’re screaming in front of an open door.”

He pushed his chest into my face. “I’ll scream if I want to.”

“I’m asking you politely to take your call somewhere else. You’re disrupting my class.”

“I’m taking my call here.” He was breathing on top of my head now, his face red.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, resisting the urge to raise my voice. “This is a classroom building, not a phone booth. Professors are trying to teach. Students are trying to learn. You are interfering with the education process. This is not an appropriate place for you to stand and scream.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he spat, the ironic emphasis he dropped into the word “ma’am” indicative of anything but respect. “I’m sorry my call is interfering with your learning process.” Then he reattached his mouth to the phone. “Listen, are you listening to me?” he screamed.

Now I had twenty-five pairs of eyes on me as every kid in the room watched to gauge the force of my authority, an authority this guy hadn’t bothered to evaluate. He thought he could dismiss me based on size, but being short has taught me assertiveness. Plus, it’s the rare three-hundred-pound male bully who actually takes his aggression out on a small woman in public.

“I’m asking you nicely to take your call elsewhere, because this space is for learning, and you do not have the right to interrupt my class. I can call campus security if you need help finding an appropriate location for this behavior.”

At last he looked me in the eyes, and while I remained five feet tall, clad in jeans and sandals, he gave a nervous shake of his head, finally realizing to whom he was mouthing off: a professor. “Oh, uh, yeah, sorry,” he said, and dashed away like a shamed puppy.

I turned back to the room, aware now of the rapid thunk of my heartbeat in my chest.

Some of my students had already gone back to their essays, but a few smiled and nodded approval, grateful that I could stand up to a bully, or take their education seriously, or provide a good show. I don’t know which. And, in the back row, my two biggest slackers, bad boys who wrote about smoking pot and missed class to go skateboarding or raving or whatever the heck it was that eighteen-year-old boys did, watched with wide-eyed amazement as I made my triumphant return after a confrontation from which they would have run. I had their attention for the rest of the semester.

The Edge

2010-05-27T13:33:00.000-07:00

The edge of the world appealed to me, because sometimes the tide washed up amazing artifacts, and because everyone else feared the edge, so I could be alone. My brother used to say that if that water even touched your shoe, your whole foot would wither and fall off, but the spray hit me full in the face a thousand times, and nothing ever happened. You taste salt, that’s all.

Nobody liked me going down there, but they pretended not to know, because almost always I could find something amazing, or useful, or, at the very least, metal, and bring it back to the safe zone. But scavenging was just an excuse. I went to the edge to sit on the twisted, charred remains of the old world, and to look out at the things left behind, tilted battered monoliths, frozen in their death march miles off the coast. The jutted from the water like broken blades of grass. Some people say that humans used to live in there.

Yesterday I found a broken plastic box, with wires and other old things jumbled up inside. It could be valuable. But the important part about yesterday happened after that, when Marina yelled at me from the last road.

“Hey, aren’t you scared of ghosts?”

Probably, it would have surprised me, since you get used to total solitude, but when you spend all your time at the end of the world, nothing can surprise you anymore.

“No, are you?” I turned back to the water, watched it dance around the shattered infrastructure. Every wave tore the crumbling remains down a little further. You’d think she would run away scared, but I heard her feet leaving the safety of the last road, crunching through the fragmented debris, and finally climbing up to sit beside me.

“They said I’d find you here.” But she didn’t chastise me, or warn me, or ask any stupid questions. She just said, “Thanks for saving my sister’s life.”

“I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. And I figured, if you found that thing down here, the edge of the world can’t be as bad as people say.”

Years ago, I had figured that out. “It’s spiritually bad; it’s not physically bad. Bad things happened here, but now nothing happens here, except for the ripples of that first bad thing.” The winds were strong and constant, but I could actually feel her body heat beside me, and in one second, I went from craving my solitude to requiring her company.

“You’re really brave,” she said. “They say the ocean ate the world here.”

I nodded. “Once. Not like it’s going to happen every day. It’s safer at the edge than the center, with bandits and mutants and fighting.”

“How do you find things?” she asked.

“Just look,” I said. “You just look.”

So she jumped down and looked and after a while she squealed, “Metal! I found metal.” The thing she found was so big we had to put my thing on top of it and carry it back to the center together. Before she went to tell her family what she had, she kind of bumped her elbow against mine, and it felt different from an accidental bump, like in a crowded market. It felt like a meaningful bump.

And today I’m sitting here on the same chunk of wreckage and looking out past the edge, but for once, I’m not thinking about the past. I’m thinking about the future. It’s different from being lonely with ghosts. Is there an opposite word, I wonder, a word for a thing that’s not dead and gone, but is still a kind of seed that hasn’t happened yet?

Artist's Statement

2010-05-20T17:49:00.000-07:00

I made the mistake of telling Mr. Gibbons that I wished I could draw really well, so I could write a web comic. He said there were plenty of web comics that were nothing more than stick figures, and then he showed us one that was just dots. Talking dots. And then he made that our assignment for the next four weeks: to write a month's worth of our own comics.

I didn’t even know English teachers could do that.

So now I’m going crazy trying to find someone to do the homework for me. It’s got to be someone who’s good enough that it looks like I’m trying, but not so good that Mr. Gibbons actually gets excited about it or tries to put it in the school paper or something. And it’s really got to be someone who isn’t going to rat me out, because English is supposed to be my best subject.

I’d do it myself, really, I would. It’s not that I can’t draw stick figures, or even something better than that. It’s just that Mr. Gibbons is not an idiot, and if I do the assignment, there’s a better than even chance he’ll figure out who drew that caricature of him kissing the principal’s ass on the rear window of his car last year.

The Spring of My Content

2010-05-08T17:35:00.000-07:00

At seven forty-five, he called the room, just like he promised the night before, and at five after eight, he knocked at the door. I answered, wrapped in the stiff white hotel towel, still damp and slightly steaming from the shower.

“I’m not ready,” I apologized. “I tried.”

“That’s OK.” He rubbed my chin and bent over for a fast, open-mouthed kiss. “We’re important. They’ll wait.” He sat on the bed, not talking about the night before, because that was something we didn’t talk about. We would have to spend the entire day not talking about it. We had spent years not talking about it.

He watched the towel slip to the ground as I knelt to dig around in my bag. My naked body, softer and slacker than it had been all those years ago, still held his attention. “Oh!” I cursed, softly. “I was going to iron this blouse.”

And he leaned down, plucked the wrinkled fabric from my hand. Still kneeling on the ground, I watched him slide an ironing board from the closet, an iron from a clip set in the wall. He unfolded the ironing board, plugged in the iron, and watched me drying my legs as I watched him. By the time I’d extracted bra and panties and stockings from my bag, he was pressing my blouse, thick hands dwarfing the iron so you could almost imagine him smoothing the wrinkles with the strength of his fingers.

“Thanks,” I said. “If you couldn’t guess, I suck at ironing.” And he nodded his head, a silent acknowledgment that spoke of all the things we could not talk about.

There, I felt a heat that surpassed the greatest moments we had shared, dozens of nights in dozens of hotel rooms. Now, the pure and unadulterated care of his big hands, ironing my little blouse because he wanted me to look professional at his side, although I was anything but, overwhelmed any false detachment. Naked, I smiled, my eyes gulping up the scene as I struggled into the stockings.

If I could have held that moment, isolated it from all others and stretched it into infinity, I might have chosen to live there, in the small quiet gesture of his love.

Grow! Grow! Grow!

2010-05-02T16:08:00.000-07:00

There is a kabalistic belief that beside the least blade of a grass, there floats a tiny angel, trumpeting the message, “Grow! Grow! Grow!” Some take this as an expression of the ubiquitous divine that compels all life, but others argue for a literal interpretation.

Lirzazel paused in the threshold, grasping the edges of dawn, and hovered with one foot in night and the other in day. Then he stepped through to sunlight and took up the trumpet. “Morning! Awaken! Live!” the trumpet said. The spirits of the night departed.

A single dewdrop clung to the green stalk. Would it run down to the ground and become one with the soil, or evaporate and become one with the air? Could that mere piece of grass incorporate its moisture through osmosis? Lirzazel blasted the trumpet again. “Drink! Live! Grow!” the trumpet said.

Through the rising sun, the trumpet sang a morning song, a photosynthesizing song, and a heliotropic song. The blade of grass perked up, stood straight, and struggled against gravity and entropy to continue the act of self-creation and reach for the light. The little angel sighed into the trumpet and the spirit-brass hummed back, “Grow! Grow! Grow!”

After noon, the angel wiped its metaphorical brow and watched the white light flood the field where it worked. The blade of grass groaned under the searing power, and the angel drew creative inspiration from the divine and played a drinking song, encouraging the grass to suck up moisture through its roots. The grass pulled at the soil and waved gratefully to Lirzazel. Lirzazel played a green song, ending with a chorus of, “Grow! Grow! Grow!”

Just before dusk, a rabbit nipped off the tip of the blade of grass. The creature hopped away, and the grass shuddered. “Heal!” Lirzazel’s horn sang. “Heal and grow! Grow and heal!” The grass bowed in gratitude.

Lirzazel could have played long into the darkness, but angels of the day did not do that. Just as another chorus of “Grow! Grow! Grow!” ended, a spirit of the night tapped Lirzazel’s metaphorical shoulder.

“Quittin’ time,” the night spirit said. “I’ll take it from here. See ya tomorrow.”

Lirzazel let the horn drop from the metaphorical mouth, nodded at the night spirit, and crossed over to the other world without lingering on the threshold of dusk. Home, the angel withdrew the equivalent of a beer from the ether and stretched out on a cloud, taking a deep, reflective sip. The angel couldn’t wait for tomorrow.

Bras Are Burning

2010-04-28T15:42:00.000-07:00

I read an article denying that women’s rights activists ever burned their bras in the sixties. This upstart historian insisted that “bra burning” was simply a figure of speech, coined by a journalist after the fact, meant to mirror the symbolism of the young men who burned their draft cards to protest the Viet Nam war. He said it never happened, that women never burned their brassieres to protest the inequalities of gender in our society.

I tell you, that historian was dead wrong. I was there. In the sixties, we burned our bras all the time. Not in the first part of the decade; in the early sixties, all we ever burned was the steak, and that was our silent rebellion against the drudgery of men, housework, and stereotypes. But, by nineteen sixty-five, we had moved on to our Maidenforms.

When we exhausted the contents of our underwear drawers, we stormed Woolworth and absconded with any undergarments we could find there. Later, we took to hijacking delivery vans and burned bras by the carton, first in fifty-five gallon oil drums, and later, for greater efficiency, in our own furnaces. In the late sixties, it was not unusual for a crusader to heat her home entirely with purloined underwires. We were burning those contraptions in bulk.

Eventually, the practice diminished after a few entrepreneurs decided to cut out the middleman and set fire to the factories where our undergarments were produced. There was an arson trial, but the women were exonerated, arguing that bra burning was protected expression under the first amendment. At that point, though, the project had lost its shock value. Those few that remained trapped by the confines of rigid gender roles went back to burning steaks, although most of us continued to burn the Sears Roebuck catalog, just as a matter of habit. To this day, I will toss Victoria’s Secret advertising fliers directly into the fireplace. My granddaughter asked me why, and I shuddered to imagine a generation of girls growing up without understanding this pregnant moment in the history of women’s rights. I blame those misguided, misogynistic historians.

Nah, I’m kidding you, really. I’m only thirty-five; I didn’t even need a bra until nineteen eighty-seven, and, at thirty bucks a pop, I can’t afford to be setting those things ablaze. Anyway, my rack tips the scales at a thirty-six double D. There’s probably some kind of local ordinance prohibiting me from going out without support. I could cause a car accident.

Once an Artist

2010-04-27T17:19:00.001-07:00

The stunning oil and acrylic landscape leered down at him from the studio wall: the last canvas. He had distributed the rest long ago, but he couldn’t let go of this one. The way the towering spires of Atlantis shimmered under the crashing waves of the Maine coast, their fantastic majesty almost hidden beneath the prosaic view from the window of his boyhood home, remained to taunt him in middle age.

Looking out this window, now, revealed a trio of languid contractors scraping on the new masonry wall. He wondered what it might feel like to work outside, then returned to his desk.

The email on his screen waited patiently. “We love the new design! But we’d like it a little smoother around the edges, with straighter lines. Can you tweak the colors, too? Something brighter, maybe, but not too bright. Also, let’s keep it abstract. The bump on the top left almost suggests a strawberry, and we don’t want that association.”

And he opened the client’s file, smoothed the edges, straightened the lines, tweaked the colors, and erased the bump that almost suggested a strawberry.

The next email explained that five thousand dollars had been deposited into his PayPal account, and that they appreciated his excellent work. He double checked. Yes, five thousand dollars had been deposited in his PayPal account. He could not recall his excellent work. The next email was another logo request.

Interruptions usually set his teeth to grinding, but he didn’t mind the doorbell’s two-toned chime just now. It took a few minutes to descend from the attic to the front door, where the contractor, cap in hand, asked him to come inspect his new wall, and then asked for four thousand dollars.

“Let me go get the checkbook.”

Then, nothing disturbed him, except for the fabled, half-seen impression of Atlantis peeking out from the big landscape on the wall. But he drew logos for a living. Expressive, eye-catching logos. Once you started, you couldn’t stop. You had to pay for equipment, upgrades to your home, things starving artists didn’t care about, like nice shoes and flattering haircuts. So he couldn’t be an artist anymore. He had to work.

When the sun set, he did not adjust the lights in the studio, but sat quietly in the dark, his eyes trying to pick out the secret elements of the landscape. Much later, he felt his way to the closet, and things crashed to the floor, bounced off his middle-age knees. With the gait of a somnambulist, he dragged things down the stairs, through the pain, and out the door.

Many hours later, the sun rose on the man who used to be an artist, paint-spattered and curled up in the dirt. The new masonry wall had disappeared. In its place stood a fresh, slightly-shiny representation of the heavens as seen by a medieval philosopher, depicting the planets in their vast spheres, the paths of fiery comets, and the careful hand of a divine creator hiding amongst the multitudes of numinous stars.

Last, Best

2010-04-20T21:16:00.001-07:00

After the accident, I drifted apart from Sean, which used to be a terrible thing to say about your twin brother, but we were all drifting then, the entire human race.

Anomie, the news anchors called it, back when there were still news anchors, and news for them to report, and people who cared to hear it. We couldn’t get anyone to take care of Sean, give him therapy, prescribe his meds, because every, almost everyone had just ceased caring. Mass suicides stopped being news. Cities burned, farms lay fallow, ships ran aground. It happened so fast, in just a few years, and I thought, well, maybe we’ve just run our course.

Crazy ideas had crept into my brother’s head through the cracks left there after the crash. Next door, a young mother left her baby to bake in the sun, while she jumped off the roof, and Sean hammered all night long, constructing a rainbow bridge from the shed to the garage, and I wandered off, because I didn’t feel, yet, like killing myself, and I wasn’t going to stay there and watch my brain damaged brother create more insanity.

The woods were all right, and the mountains, places where animals still ran and plants still grew, but whatever disease had infected us spread. Something ate away at the wilderness, sucked up the moisture, and receded, leaving yellow dust in its wake.

For years, I had felt content enough to eat berries and leaves, snare small animals and pretend not to witness the decline of human civilization, but one day the desert took over. Looking up, realizing nothing remained, I felt what the others had felt. Finish it, I thought. You’re just prolonging the inevitable. Your species is done for.

“Don’t do it,” a voice said, although no one had spoken to me in many months. He seemed almost to float over the sand, this tall, elfin interloper, pale of hair and skin, like a man cut from the same fabric as the desert. “We aren’t many left, but it’s not over. It isn’t.”

So I shrugged and followed, since nothing remained here.

“We need men like you,” he said as we walked. “Survivors. We’re rebuilding, regrouping. You’ll see.”

And he opened my eyes to the little signs my death-hungry mind had missed when I decided to end it: trees that still lived, grass pushing through rubble, small birds. And soon we came to some ruins, what had once been a city, and I saw women, the first women I had seen in so long I could not remember, sweeping away rocks and hanging out wet laundry, hammering posts and climbing poles.

“We had to go up, a little,” my rescuer said. “Elevate ourselves this time.”

Over our heads, a scaffolding trailed like a vine, wooden planks and walkways twenty feet above the ground. “Come on up,” a man, sunburned with a devil-may-care grin, called to me from the sky, and finally my heart woke, shook off the anomie, and longed to answer.

“Never mind him,” said my guide. “You need to meet the big man. The architect. The inspiration for everything.”

And we walked on, past more and more scaffolds, until we stopped, and there, dangling from a wooden ledge, hung my brother.

“Sean?”

“I figured it all out,” he said, thumping his chest.

“You did this?”

“Someone had to. We needed a better way. Had to create something new. A fresh start for all of us. You’ll stick around this time, won’t you?”

My eyes swept over the funny playground rising up from the ruins of the past, and my brother’s eyes, sparkling with possibility. That small, devastating moment, the cracking of my brother’s head, had blossomed into our last, best hope.

“Where do I get a hammer?”

Wheels

2010-04-14T16:39:00.000-07:00

The boys scooted their new racecars over the stone pavilion, and, on the far side of the pavilion, two little girls watched with round, solemn eyes. “Let’s go,” the girls’ mom said, over and over, but they kept their attention glued to the boys, their fast little toys, the smooth movement of the wheels.

The boys’ father noticed, smiled, remembered. The girls’ mother tapped her foot, repeated herself, and shrugged. The man tried to meet her eye, but she just dug through her purse. He shrugged himself. She was young, pretty, and probably married. He was a middle-aged widower, with raw, limp limbs and a belly that would have been attractive on top of a muffin, but did not have the same effect beneath his paint-spattered T-shirt.

Again, the woman urged the little girls, but their eyes only pointed to the smooth rolling cars. True north, the man though. He didn’t understand these performance moms, always in a hurry to load the kids into the minivan and haul them to the next activity. His boys could scoot their racecars around here all day if they wanted.

In her lifetime, he had laughed at his wife’s minivan, but after her death, he had sold his own sporty two-door Mitsubishi and held on to the Grand Caravan. And before that—long before that—he had first caught her eye leaning against his old Camaro. Girls liked that car. They couldn’t help but look at a man in such a smooth ride.

It dawned on him that boys liked cool cars, and girls liked boys with cool cars. And women would look at him again if he drove something a little more adventurous. A motorcycle, for instance. The helmet would cover his hairline, and the leather jacket would camouflage his gut. His boys made motor noises with their mouths and laughed as they crashed into each other, not noticing the girls being dragged off by the young mother.

They wouldn’t nap anymore, his boys. Their mother would have known how to lull them to sleep, but the secret eluded him. When they got cranky, he loaded them into the minivan, drove them across town, and bought them both two-wheelers.

The Disney Police

2010-04-10T16:52:00.000-07:00

The Disney Police

If the Waldorf people hadn’t gotten to us first, we’d never have figured it out, but Caytlynn started preschool in an atmosphere devoid of those influences. You know—influences that have kids clamoring for a T-shirt, or cereal box, or cheap plastic toy because some corporate entity spent millions ensuring that your child recognizes, adores, and identifies with their licensed character.

Caytlynn didn’t know anyone with a TV, couldn’t name the popular branded figures, and never begged for colorful garbage. At six, she was into insects, and asked for magnifying glasses, butterfly nets, and bug books. We were the family with the home haircuts, dressed in natural fibers, picnicking in the park while our child observed ants.

Judy, the widow next door, wore polyester pantsuits and reading glasses on a beaded chain. She offered unsolicited advice regarding ladylike behavior along with small presents—Spongebob taffies and Barbie flip-flops.

“Aren’t you a little angel?” Judy asked.

Caytlynn puffed out her chest. “I’m an entomologist.”

In a pinch, we left Caytlynn in Judy’s care for fifteen minutes here, an hour there. “What did you do?” we’d ask later.

“Watch TV.” Caytlynn would shrug and go back to her mealworms and beetles. “Can you cut an apple, Dad? They’re hungry.” Later, she added, “I think she’s lonely.”

“The mealworm?”

“Judy. Maybe I should go there. I mean, not just when you can’t find a babysitter.”

Jennie smiled, pleased to have raised such a compassionate child, and arranged for her to visit on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Caytlynn watched TV to be polite and thanked Judy for increasingly elaborate presents: Mickey Mouse ears, Hannah Montana CDs, princess costumes. Then she came home, asked Jennie to give the silly things to Goodwill, and informed her that we must plant milkweed to attract monarch butterflies.

The only weird thing about Judy was the night Jennie reminded me, at one a.m., to take the trash out, and I clearly heard a man’s voice, stern and low, from Judy’s kitchen. “If you can’t seal the deal, we’ll send someone who can.”

“They’re tough,” Judy said, her voice strained. “Intellectual.”

“Take this,” the man said, and handed her a wrapped package. Rectangular. About the size of two DVD boxes. “And finish it, or you’re through.”

That Wednesday, Caytlynn came home from Judy’s with two DVDs: A Bug’s Life and Antz.

On Sunday, Judy accosted me over the forsythia hedge. “I’m worried about your daughter's imagination.”

“Because she thought Antz was unrealistic?”

Judy shook her head and toddled up her driveway.

Two weeks later, a moving van pulled up to the house. “Moving in with my daughter,” she said.

“She never said she had a daughter,” Caytlynn observed. “I hope the new people have kids. Or a spitting cockroach.”

But the middle-aged woman in the polyester pants suit who waved over the forsythia hedge a few weeks later brought neither children nor Blattaria, only an open invitation to sample her gluten-free, vegan macaroons. Mary’s association with Caytlynn seemed natural, for she was unafraid to help our daughter collect cicada carapaces and arrange them according to size. Now and again she presented Caytlynn with a realistic plastic toy insect.

“The tops are all right,” Caytlynn said, “but the bottoms are wrong.” Still, she lined them up on the windowsill, cautioning visitors not to examine the anatomically incorrect undersides.

Still, we wouldn’t have caught on, until the day Caytlynn called out to me from Mary’s bedroom window, “Dad! Dad! Mary fell down! And she’s talking funny! I called 911.”

“She’s burning up,” I said when I got over there, so I opened her hall closet, looking for a washcloth to cool her fevered brow, but found no linen.

Her closet contained row upon row of plastic toys. One shelf held dozens of the semi-accurate insects, along with the characters from A Bug’s Life, but there were lines of Tinkerbells, scores of princesses, stacks of plush cartoons characters.

On the bottom shelf, my daughter’s name jumped out from a green file folder. My heart stopped.

The file contained pictures of my daughter running through meadows with butterfly nets, squinting through her microscope, climbing trees; charts of her likes and dislikes; her schedule, my schedule, and Jennie’s schedule; what we ate for dinner, movies we’d attended, our browser history, and on and on. Records going back years, from Caytlynn’s first day at Waldorf.

Beneath that, a dog-eared handbook—Creating Collectors: Enforcing Commercialization. It began, “Enforced commercialization builds a sturdy economy through strong habits of consumerism fostered prior to the age of 8. The Corporation’s efforts toward conspicuous consumption encourage the consumer to create interest channels based on collectability.”

And bookmarked and underlined, page 144: “In cases where the subject’s parents have successfully resisted commercialism (c.f. “intellectuals”) operatives may befriend subjects via academic interests to establish trust before embarking on standard enforcement techniques. See appendix of educational toys.

In the madness that ensued with the arrival of paramedics, those incriminating publications disappeared. Mary disappeared, too, once the ambulance doors closed. A month later, a kindly, middle-aged woman in a polyester pants suit moved next door, but Caytlynn was forbidden to talk to her.

The Postmodern Prometheus

2010-03-31T17:57:00.000-07:00

For all that six long years had unfurled since the passing of my darling Evangeline, the ocean’s damp seemed to cling to her porcelain skin and dark, curling tresses. I dismissed the illusion as a trick of the cryogenic chamber’s glass cover and glanced at the radar animation on the computer monitor. Outside the lab, the sky squeezed out a thin crackle of lightning.

For six long years, I had perfected my method, on frogs and rats, cats and dogs, chimpanzees, and finally, an executed convict. His remains, having outlived their usefulness after nine successful attempts, chilled in the chamber beside Evangeline’s. His temperature reading held at five degrees below zero. The display on my beloved’s clicked up from eight to nine.

The storm drew closer. There were injections to be given, electrodes to attach, connections to be adjusted, all with the greatest of care.

An hour later, the process well underway, the pounding on the lab door began. “Vick, please open this door.” After so many years of being ignored by my supervisor, I had no trouble ignoring him at the moment of my greatest triumph. “Tell me you’re not doing what your FaceBook page says you’re doing.”

Electricity flowed through the conduits. My eyes remained glued to the stark, smooth flesh of Evangeline’s face, marred only by the oxygen tubes snaking from her perfect mouth and nose.

“It’s not science,” the voice beyond the lab door hollered. “It’s an affront to science. You’ve got to let this go, Vick. It’s disgusting.”

But love would not be swayed, and love was undying. Thunder argued overhead, and the mechanical bellows massaged her adorable heart beneath her perfect breast. A final stab of lightning lit the windows and it was done.

The veins pumping beneath the white cheek filled it with a pretty blush, her eyelids twitched, and her hands, with frantic convulsion, ripped the oxygen tubes from her face, ripped the mechanical bellows from its mount. My Evangeline lived.

Her wide eyes gaped behind the glass panel. Anticipating the shock and fearing her fear, I ripped the cover open.

A low, gagging noise emanated from her throat. She half sat up, then scuttled back. “Oh, god,” she moaned, her voice faint and hissing. “Oh, god. I’m in hell.”

“No! Evangeline! You live! I have stolen you back from the arms of death. For you, I have conquered mortality. We shall never be parted again.

The pounding on the lab door increased in volume. Many men and women demanded entry, like the proverbial angry mob bearing pitchforks. They called themselves scientists, but, no better than ignorant peasants, they would not understand.

Unsteady, like a child, she clambered from the chamber, fell, and glared up at me from all fours on the lab floor, hissing, “Pervert! Can’t you take a hint? I committed suicide to get away from you! What do I have to do? Immolate myself?”

“We were meant to be together.”

She tried to dash for the lab door, which shook with the rage of the crowd outside, but she could not control her newborn muscles and collapsed like an invertebrate. She must rest, convalesce on beef tea and my undying love. In her weakened condition, she needed me more than ever. “Help!” she screamed and crawled past me, this time catching her hand on the locked door and turning the deadbolt. It swung open and she fell into the arms of another.

She disappeared from view as the fools descended upon my equipment.

The Weight

2010-03-21T17:35:00.000-07:00

165 lbs.: Daniel can’t stop watching Connie’s ass, like two helium balloons stuffed into her size 16 Levi’s, as they march down the football field during band practice. He clenches his drumsticks so he will not squeeze her instead. On the way off the field, some jerk in the bleachers spits on her.

180 lbs.: It’s OK to talk to Connie in chess club, because only geeks go to chess club. It’s OK to invite Connie to his place, because nobody can see them eating together, since his kitchen’s in the back of his house.

195 lbs.: Daniel almost wrecks his dad’s car while fantasizing about prom. In his imagination, Connie wears a backless gown, revealing ample ass cleavage. He screws her in the limo once on the way to the dance, and once on the way back. In reality, he takes Tina Gillespie, who weighs exactly half as much as Connie. Connie stays home.

225 lbs.: The summer after his sophomore year of college, Daniel spots an inviting arch of flesh at the grocery store. He stays cool, jokes, bumps his hip into hers, and takes her to his parents’ house for dinner. When his parents go to bed, he seduces Connie in the basement. The second time they have sex, he begs her to get on top. “Won’t I hurt you?” she asks. He laughs.

250 lbs.: “What are we doing here?” she asks him. “Are we together or not?” All he can do is kiss her, mount her again, feeling like a mountain climber achieving the summit.

260 lbs.: “Why don’t you tell your parents we’re together, at least?” she asks him. He shakes his head. Two weeks later, she moves to California. He dreams of mountains for weeks.

310 lbs.: He ends up in San Francisco five times in the next two years, and she stays in his hotel room each time. She takes up most of the bed, and he fits himself around her curves as they sleep. Then he gets promoted and stops traveling on business.

270 lbs.: After a year with no contact, he surprises her. “You lost weight,” he says, unable to hide his disappointment. She kisses him in his rental car, and he relishes the crushing sensation. “Didn’t I tell you I’m married now?” she says. She comes back to the hotel anyway, but he can’t get his fill in a just couple hours.

300 lbs.: He hates the affair, but he can’t stop. She fills his imagination the way she filled the passenger seat of the rental car. He dreams about her, writes her steamy emails, which she deletes after reading, and waits.

325 lbs.: He begs her to leave her husband. She refuses.

335 lbs.: He begs her to leave her husband. She refuses.

345 lbs.: He begs her to leave her husband. She refuses.

350 lbs.: “We need to dial this down,” she tells him. “I love my husband. Sneaking around makes me sick.” He tells her how much he’s always adored her, how much he wants her at his side, always. “You had your chance,” she says. The earth moves as he watches her ass walk away.

Lady Long Legs

2010-03-03T17:53:00.000-08:00

Saturdays were made for sitting on the front porch with your cousin, Maria thought, braiding each other’s hair, comparing nicks on each other’s legs, giggling over the boys who wouldn’t look at them now, because they were only eleven, but who would fall over themselves in a few years, when they were princesses at their double quinceanera.

“And then our double wedding,” said Stephany, “when we’re seventeen. Or sixteen, like abuela. And then have our babies when we’re seventeen. And they can be cousins together, like us, and ride bikes to Eegee’s, and sleep over.”

Maria rubbed at the red place, where she had dragged Stephany’s sister’s old Daisy razor over her legs, and smiled with satisfaction at the thin dotted line of blood that appeared there. “Mrs. Linsey won’t like that.”

Stephany evaluated the school counselor’s opinion of high school drop outs by spitting almost all the way across the yard. “Papi says it’s dumb to waste my time in school.”

Following the arc of saliva, Maria leaned forward. “Oh, look,” she said, “It’s Lady Long Legs.”

The cousins straightened their spines without thinking, then slouched into the porch rails, pretending to look anywhere but across the street, where the stately African woman walked with her head held high. She wore a blue print wrap skirt, a green print wrap shawl, and a red print head wrap covering every strand of hair. Her skin was just as black as coffee, and flawless, like a statue of the Virgin. Behind her walked four boys and one girl in descending sizes, but they dressed regular, with Spongebob and Batman T-shirts, and they didn’t have that beautiful walk, the proud long-leg strut that set Lady Long Legs apart from other women.

“You girls staring at that Sudan lady again?” Stephany’s mami was the very opposite of Lady Long Legs, short and rotund, with her straight black braid hanging all the way down her back. You couldn’t see her on the other side of the security door, but she could see out just fine. “Don’t you think she’s got enough problems?”

Maria stroked the air with one figure, tracing the noble gait as the woman passed. “What problems?” she asked.

“Refugee problems. Losing her home problems. Crazy people cutting each other up with machetes in her country problems.”

Stephany rolled her eyes. “How do you know Lady Long Legs’ problems?”

“’Cause I hear the news, mija. On TV.”

Sighing, Stephany whispered into Maria’s ear. “She’s got no problems, Lady Long Legs.”

“She’s too pretty,” Maria agreed. “And she has five kids.”

“You girls think you know everything. You got it all figured out. You come on in and figure out wrapping tamales, how about?”

“Mami, we’re busy.”

Stephany’s mami banged the metal security door, so that it rang like a bell, and the girls jumped, giggled. By the time they regained their composure, Lady Long Legs had turned the corner, out of sight. Maria looked to her cousin, waited for Stephany to stand up. They both rose with queenly grace, making their spines straight, their legs long. The security door swung open, and they entered the house like royalty.

Wonderbuild

2010-02-17T18:11:00.000-08:00

They were, collectively, four of the smartest guys you could expect to meet in any undergraduate program anywhere: Ed, the stereotypically nerdy white guy, studying physics; Lee, the stereotypically nerdy Chinese guy, studying political science; Ricky, the flamboyantly gay Mexican guy, studying performance art; and my little brother, Sol, the stereotypically nerdy Jewish guy, studying math. All seniors at a prestigious state university, all living in the same bachelor pad rental house off campus.

They supported each other like brothers, and were fairly outgoing and extroverted for a bunch of geeks. I visited whenever I could, and we would drink beer, push back the furniture, and dance in the living room, or eat foreign food and attend concerts, or sit around getting high and discussing the nature of the universe. Nice, gentle guys. Non-confrontational.

Lee wasn’t Lee’s real name, but most Americans couldn’t pronounce his given name. Still, he wouldn’t be Americanized, if he could help it, and spoke of his Chinese girlfriend back home. He couldn’t get back to her just yet, though. He needed his Master’s degree. He was the last of the group to hear back from his first-choice school, and announced their decision with a wide sweep of his arms when he saw me.

“So, where are you going?” I asked him.

“Wonderbuild.” He smiled.

“Wonderbuild?” I wondered. With his intellect, you’d think he’d be headed for a school I had heard of. Still, I liked the image it conjured in my mind. Wonder build. To build with wonder.

“Wonderbuild,” he confirmed.

“Where’s that?”

“Tennessee. You know this school?”

“Um…no.”

“It is a famous school. Wonderbuild.”

I glanced back at my brother, and saw him squinting sidelong at the other roommates. They shook their heads, shuffled their feet, looked out the window. “He means Vanderbilt,” my brother said, his voice quiet and embarrassed. The others hung their heads, avoided Lee’s wide eyes. He had been saying it for weeks. They hadn’t corrected him.

“I cannot say that letter,” Lee confessed. His jaw quivered.

“Vanderbilt. Wonderbuild. Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt,” I said to myself. “Here, put your teeth down on your bottom lip when you say it. Vvvanderbilt.”

“Vvvanderbilt,” he repeated. “Vanderbilt.” He nodded.

The other boys looked up at me, faces shining with approval.

“There,” I said. “Now you can go to Vanderbilt.”

Confessions of a Stock Footage Queen

2010-02-14T14:33:00.000-08:00

Conventional prettiness meant a symmetry of features, I learned in high school. I read it in my psychology text. The more average the dimensions of ones face, the more attractive. And my face was conventional indeed. They called me pretty, very pretty.

And being pretty, and slender, and on the tall side, I found modeling work. It paid for my amusements in college: beer, road trips, cashmere sweaters. Even when I graduated, I never had a career. Just jobs that paid the rent—I was professionally pretty as a receptionist, a pharmaceutical rep, a restaurant hostess—with modeling to cover the extras. I never had a magazine cover. I scarcely had a magazine layout. I wasn’t quite tall enough, or striking enough, for high fashion. They didn’t offer me runway work.

But they liked my normal, average, pretty face, and they called me. Photographers dressed me up in goggles and a white coat and shot me marveling over Erlenmeyer flasks full of green food coloring or dry ice. They put me in pencil skirts and shot me smiling in front of chalkboards, surrounded by children. They wrapped me in military fatigues and shot me stalking through the forest, carrying guns.

Soon enough, my image came back to me: on the Internet, in advertising circulars, wherever fine clip art was required. My face went everywhere, places I would never go, showing me doing things I’d never really done.

When I moved through the world, I didn’t have the same versatility as my photograph. People looked and saw a conventionally pretty girl and wondered, “Have I seen her before?” and forgot all about me when I passed, because I was unremarkable in my prettiness, just another pretty girl. Merely pretty and no more. No one ever noticed me.

Sometimes I see girls with horrific scars, burns, or birthmarks, girls with unbelievable acne or giant, crooked noses. Sometimes I hear men mocking them when they pass, or children expressing astonishment. Sometimes I envy them.

That Old Terrorist Vibe

2010-02-05T16:25:00.000-08:00

The room is crowded, with more guys than girls, which is surprising until you consider that these guys are probably trying to hook up. They’re wearing clean T-shirts, new high tops, and lopsided grins. They’re scoping out the opposite sex. They’re going to learn the Lindy Hop if it kills them.

I’m probably not going to learn the Lindy Hop, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

“Everyone is going to dance with everyone,” the instructor announces. “Don’t worry if you don’t have a partner. We’ll keep switching.”

Although we hardly talk, you can feel the guys’ personalities: the guy who holds his limbs loosely, the guy who already knows how to lead, the guy who’s afraid to step on your feet, the guy who tells you you’re doing it wrong before you even start. How strange to touch so many strangers so intimately.

And then there’s the guy who really, really doesn’t belong. He’s dressed too formally, stands too stiffly. I caught him pacing around outside before the class started, not making eye contact. And when the instructor tells us to change partners, he doesn’t hold his arms out to me as the others do. I have to jam myself into position like a crow bar prying a broken lock. His body shrinks away from mine, and while I’m older than most of this crowd, I’m not that bad. No one else had a problem holding my hand.

When the music starts, he seems confused. Although we’ve been practicing footwork for half an hour, he makes no effort to move to the beat, to take firm and definitive strides, to execute the triple step. He kind of shuffles his feet as if he’s walking in the dark and doesn’t know where the stairs are. He won’t make eye contact. He’s not even trying. It pisses me off. I’m not a great dancer, but I want to make an effort. I want to Lindy Hop. And you can’t do that with a brick. Girls are supposed to follow.

A little later, I compare with my friend. “Did you dance with that old guy? He can really lead,” and she agrees. “What about that one creepy weird guy who wasn’t even trying?” I ask.

“Which one? Where?”

But he’s already gone. He must have left right after he danced with me. “Serious terrorist vibes. Like they told him to try to fit in but he still couldn’t bring himself to touch a heathen woman.” Maybe I’m judging him on his full beard in a room full of clean-shaven guys, or his medium-dark skin, or the pained look in his eyes, like he’s watching some kind of a blasphemous orgy rather than a Tuesday night swing class at the university. Anyway, he scared me. What was he doing there? What was his motive?

Kitty Therapy

2010-01-30T13:06:00.000-08:00

You created the confluence yourself, without intention: one new house, two new clients. The house was a fix-er-up. The clients, one might assert, were, too. “I’m a copywriter,” you want to yell. “You don’t hire a copywriter before you have a site design! A spreadsheet of keywords and URLs does not a homepage make.”

But you don’t say that sort of thing when you’re a freelancer, and just starting out, and amazed at your good fortune in signing clients who will pay you what you think you’re worth, enough money that you’re not even worried about paying for the house.

But you do scream it at your monitor, and your husband, and the mountainous stack of unopened boxes dominating your office, which will never, never get unpacked or organized, because you have tripled your business workload without cutting your ten weekly volunteer hours, and you don’t have time to make a home for yourself.

And your husband, who, to be completely honest, will be doing the bulk of the home remodeling, will understand, and draw you close to him, even though he’s in the middle of configuring your Internet phone, updating his desktop computer, and changing all the light bulbs to compact CFLs. He will take you into the kids’ room, the one space in the whole house that actually looks like a room instead of a shipping warehouse, and cuddle you up on the futon, and listen to you cry.

“I don’t know what this client wants and I really, really need to nail this account so Sarah and I can incorporate this year and all my instant messages come out sounding wrong and I think people are mad at me because you can’t hear frustration or jokes in text.”

No, he soothes you, you’re a great writer. You’re doing fine. They’re gonna love it.

“And this house is crazy and I can hardly work in that office because if I turn my head all I can see are a million unpacked boxes and I’m never going to get the kitchen in order and there’s so much work to do!”

No, he says, rubbing your head. I’m going to get it all taken care of. I’m going to build shelves and fix the kitchen. We’ll take it as it comes and get the whole house taken care of.

“And my kitty probably hates it here. He went out through the pet door and he probably went right over the wall and decided to go back to the old place and there’s four busy streets to cross and he’s going to get hit by a car and I’ll never see him again.”

Hello, kitty, he says, rubbing his finger together, and you look, and there’s your kitty, looking up at you, maybe just a little dirty from outside, and he hops on the futon and presses his head into your palm, purring, and you sigh.

“Oh,” you sniff. “I guess it will be all right, then.”

Art Imitates

2010-01-20T18:33:00.000-08:00

“Listen,” he said, and I listened.

What we heard was the couple in the next apartment, their voices pressing through the walls with the urgency of conflict. A domestic situation, as they say.

“Should we be listening?” I asked.

“They know the walls are thin.”

And the argument escalated, words indiscernible, emotions projecting, louder and louder, the sounds of impending violence. Vitriol seeped through the drywall. Hatred penetrated the air ducts. Rage shook the air. The couple in the next apartment would not, it seemed, be a couple much longer.

“Should we call the police?” I wondered. If we called now, they might arrive before the unseen neighbors began heaving the cast iron at each other’s heads.

“Just wait.” He grinned, winked.

My stomach turned. Next door, she shrieked. He thundered. I shook, afraid for both of them, afraid for a world that allowed for such aggression between lovers.

“I’m scared,” I said.

“Hold on,” he said.

As the voices reached their fiercest pitch, I slumped in my seat, resigned. And the male voice, booming through the vents shifted tone, moved toward melody, and then exploded into song. The female voice joined in, lilting above it. They harmonized, sang a passionate duet, and then fell into silence. The walls hum with quiet resolution.

“Theater majors,” he explained. “They’re always doing musicals.” He sighed. “I love this apartment.”

I pushed back from the table and walked toward the door.

Creative Constipation

2010-01-11T17:41:00.000-08:00

Her mind felt packed tight with rough edges, ideas of ceramic, brick, and stone. Heavy with unexpressed meaning, she dragged her thoughts across blank expanses, leaving nothing in her wake. Clean, white expanses unsullied by the stain of construction and creation sat like pristine accusations where dumping would be not only permitted, but encouraged.

Push, she told herself. Squeeze it out. Defile the virgin landscape. Unburden yourself.

But for all her effort, the page remained unchanged, as empty as if her head were as cavernous and resonant with unused space as anyone else’s. As if she were ordinary. As if the weight of unexpressed concepts did not bloat her skull.

She took a penknife, cut, bled out one letter, another, and another, and another.

May, 1997

2009-12-21T15:14:00.000-08:00

(The following piece originally appeared in Antioch Is My Home: Community Art Project, inspired by the planned closing of Antioch College by Antioch University. Since the writing of this piece, after a prolonged and unprecedented battle, College alumni have been awarded control of the school. To learn more about Antioch College and its struggle for continuity and independence, please visit the College website or the alumni association website.)

Pasha and I sat alone on Pennell House porch. In the turning tide from quarter to trimester, new curriculum to new-new curriculum, we alone had washed ashore. Even Jeff was becalmed in his gallery on Dayton-Yellow Springs Road, and soon I would drift off to work at the Yellow Springs Public Library. Behind us, Birch Hall hung in suspended animation, doors locked and chained.

Pasha tapped his bowl against the railing and laughed. “Listen,” he said. “It’s so quiet you can hear a bowl ash across campus.” He tapped again and the metallic ring echoed back.

I walked to the east side of Pasha’s home, the former home of America’s first fully-tenured female professor, to watch the red brick of my former home light up in the afternoon sun. Eight semesters total I had lived in that concrete block—one in Pennell, one in Willett, six in Hardy—and, still more community member than alum, felt a terrible distance from the chained dormitory. I wanted to walk its halls, crunch broken glass under my feet, lie on a stained mattress in the fortress where I first felt safe among a community. Twenty feet away, I was homesick for Birch.

“It’s the Phoenix,” I promised myself. Birch would rise again, burn, and be reborn in perpetuity. Birch was eternal, indestructible.

The thefts of the future remained hidden that day: the car accident that would steal from Pasha the memory of a campus so silent you could hear the echo of an ashing bowl; the cabal that would steal from everyone who loved Antioch the security of a home to shelter kids like us in perpetuity.

Even in May, I could trace the green path where the steam tunnels melted the snow each winter. I knew how to set the showerheads for the community steams that would be impossible following the remodel, where to cut the bolt to access the roof, and why you must never, ever flush a tampon in Birch Space. I had cooked four years of meals in filthy kitchenettes, collected a pile of 11-D-2s, and cut Birch First! graffiti into the sidewalk in front of me. I had come to Yellow Springs without a sense of place; Antioch provided the roots that let me spread my branches far from home.

We did not know, that strange, silent May, what circumstance would steal, and what we would keep. We couldn’t anticipate the home, years later, nearly two thousand miles from Yellow Springs, where Pasha, Jeff, and I would keep our own Antioch traditions alive, where I would hold for Pasha the memories he had lost. We couldn’t anticipate the phone call, years later, when Jeff’s mother, who once worked in the Office of Development, and later as Al Guskin’s administrative assistant, would announce that the University was closing the College. We didn’t know what to do with that information, six months before the public announcement. Online, older alums told me to shut up about it, not to be such an innocent. Naysayers had predicted the college’s demise for years, they said. Nothing was wrong, they said.

Jeff’s mother insisted that the plan hadn’t been such a secret, that actions taken in the years prior to that still May afternoon had set it into motion. She said Guskin’s chancellorship had been one step in the preparation. She said theft of College resources by the University had been commonplace in the 90s. A conservative, not given to conspiracy theory or outrage, she merely reported what she had seen and heard.

Pasha’s parents had a wooden plaque made up for our home, which reads, “Antioch West” with our names—Jeff, Monica, Pasha—below. We wouldn’t be a little family now if we hadn’t been a big family then, if we all hadn’t been spiritually homeless, drawn to the place where we, as individuals, were included.

It was a microscopic moment, framed by the echo of metal on metal and the glint of sun on brick, in which I prepared to trade the shelter of Yellow Springs for the big, scary world, clutching the knowledge that I had found home. Antioch is a center I carry within me, a home to share with future generations who need it as much as I did. There are children today—teenagers, elementary students, preschoolers—who don’t even know of the forces working to steal their birthright. Antioch College is my home, a home to which I welcome all who seek shelter, and a shelter I weave around myself every day.

He Kissed Her First

2009-12-13T10:15:00.000-08:00

He kissed her first. He told her he loved her first. He touched her first. She only allowed herself to follow suit because her body told her it was all right, and because he told her that he would love her forever.

Because he promised and swore, she didn’t believe the rumors. He would never lie to her, never cheat on her. He didn’t want anyone else, ever.

“Together forever,” he would say to her.

“And ever and ever,” she would answer.

They went away to college. He promised and swore that he would love her forever. In the beginning, he promised every day, on the phone. Then, he promised twice a week, then once a week. By sophomore year, it was twice a month. Then once a month, whenever she called him. He always promised to call her back, but he never did. Wrenching herself away from the tear in her heart, she suppressed her desire to hear him lie about his love and ceased contact.

Ten years later, he sent her a chatty, lighthearted email. Her success in business could now be tracked on the Internet, along with her contact information. She read between the lines, saw his unspoken plea for professional help, and returned a chatty, lighthearted email. He dropped off her radar again.

After three more years, he started leaving chatty, lighthearted comments for her on social messaging sites, but now his jokes and opinions left a bad taste in her mouth. Had he changed so much, she wondered, or had she? Would she ever have kissed him, if he hadn’t kissed her first?

Harass the Serviceperson: Gameplay and Examples

2009-11-29T15:54:00.000-08:00

In their retirement, my relatives have taken up a game I like to call “harass the serviceperson.” It has become the chief joy of their existence, one which they have elevated from a game to a way of life.

To play “harass the serviceperson,” begin with an attitude of privilege. Naturally, being wealthy and old, while not a prerequisite, makes game play smoother. You must also cultivate a complete lack of understanding of the industry in which your target serviceperson works. There are two possible opening moves. Either develop an irrational frustration over a minor problem, real or imagined, which is beyond anyone’s control, or fabricate a ridiculous or impossible request and present it as both reasonable and expected. Then find a target serviceperson—the twenty-first century, with its twenty-four hour customer hotlines, has been a great blessing for the game—and present your problem or request in the form of a non-negotiable demand.

Unless the serviceperson convinces you that you are in the wrong (unlikely if you’ve begun with the appropriate attitude) you win every time! Bonus points are added if you make the serviceperson cry, get transferred to a higher level of management, or receive undeserved free goods or services from the company in question.

My relatives are the masters of “harass the serviceperson” and play in marathon sessions to enliven their old age.

For instance, like many old people, they believe a particular Internet Service Provider is hands-down the best ISP, because it caters to those who enjoy playing this game and provides customer service reps who know how to make the game last. On one occasion, my relatives managed to stretch a single game of “harass the serviceperson” over a space of ten days. Here’s how: they signed up for a service that would deliver a report from their stock account to their inbox every evening. Following some changes on one of the sites, these emails stopped coming.

My relatives immediately called the ISP’s customer service hotline to complain. For the next hour, they happily escalated their argument, demanding that the person at the other end, who had no part in the problem, fix it. (Keep in mind, to properly play “harass the serviceperson” you must drop any notion that you could solve your own problem, for instance, in this case, by just checking the stocks yourself. Remember, privilege means you’re always right, and other people always cater to you.) The serviceperson ceded the first round by announcing that the problem was with the stock site, not the ISP, and my relatives enjoyed a nice bout of vivifying rage, which is not the purpose of the game, but a welcome side-effect, like runner’s high.

The next night, they had the same conversation with a serviceperson for the stock site, who ended the conversation by claiming the fault lay with the ISP. The night after that, they called the ISP, with the same results as the first call, and the fourth night they called the other site. If you can believe the tenacity of my family, this pattern continued for a week and a half, until the glitch was fixed and my relatives “won.”

Using the second opening gambit, they once filled an afternoon with the game. Deciding upon a financial course of action, they went into a bank. Not their bank. Not a bank they had ever done any business with. Simply a random bank they passed in the car. With no documents, they demanded that the bank officer make a change to a certain account. The bank officer insisted that this was impossible, that he could not take action without the appropriate documents, IDs, account numbers, and passwords. After working up a nice rage, my relatives left the bank, mumbling that the guy was an idiot.

Then they went into another random bank, again, one where they had never done any business. The sequence of events was the same as at the first bank, right down to their insistence that the guy was an idiot. And believe it or not (and if you’ve read this far, you’ll believe it) they repeated this performance at a third bank, after which it was almost five o’clock, and they could play some shorter rounds of “harass the serviceperson” at an early bird buffet.

Seeing the joy the game imparts to my family, I can’t wait until I’m old enough and rich enough to play.

Positively

2009-11-24T17:50:00.000-08:00

Michael looked more like a beach bum than a professor, handsome with rugged, surfer flair. Sandy blond hair in a disarray of spikes. Hemp necklace strung with wooden beads. Worn Baja hoodie that looked as if it had been to Baja and back. His eyes crinkled in that smiling way that happens to men with the good luck or good genes to reach middle age while maintaining a youthful complexion.

So: easy to look at.

About halfway through class, the crowded room heated up, and he pulled that old Baja hoodie over his head to reveal a most gorgeous, sculpted, muscular torso, framed by a tight white undershirt. This was unfair. How was I supposed to concentrate when the professor looked like a beefcake pin-up? His pecs! His biceps! His deltoids! So vibrant! So healthy! So delicious!

Ignoring the devastating beauty, his teaching methods intrigued. Once he killed the lights, lit a candle, and asked us to meditate. Once he asked us to write about a body part, and didn’t flinch when I chose my vagina. In fact, he submitted the essay to an academic symposium, and stuck up for me when some older professors expressed horror at my subject matter.

As the semester drew to a close, Michael announced that he would be selling his worldly possessions and flying to Africa, where he would empower HIV-positive women by teaching them how to start small businesses.

Did such a perfect guy ever exist?

Somehow, I ended up helping him move out of his apartment. I couldn’t say no to him. After we had packed everything up and he gifted me with a pair of old bookcases, he offered to buy us some pizza. My head was already spinning from an afternoon of proximity to Adonis. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t sit casually with him, discussing his ambitious plans, knowing how the musculature of his chest impressed the thin cotton of his T-shirt. He hugged me goodbye and I almost cried. Oh, Michael, you were too perfect. Too handsome. Too vital.

Years later, his name jumped out at me from the byline of an article in the Trib. He must be back in the States! Expecting an account of his years in Africa, I delved into the piece.

Africa was only tangential to the essay. Rather, it was a poignant, revealing discussion of the change in his own life, over a decade earlier, when he learned that he, himself, was HIV-positive.

I read, stunned, of the miserable, shame-filled, dying man, who, through the power of modern medicine and positive thinking, had transformed himself into the strongest, loveliest, most vibrant human being to ever stand in front of a classroom. He had not always been thus. He had been, according to the writing, very sick, weak and underweight, embarrassed about his sexual orientation.

But he was so alive! How could the Michael I knew have sprung from the man described here, hiding beneath a baseball cap, wasting away in a free clinic?

It shames me, sometimes, still. My own little problems discourage me. It’s hard not to give up. I think of Michael, suffering from one of the most dreaded diseases of our age, transforming himself from a pitiful, sickly weakling to a golden god only after learning of his diagnosis, then taking his new lease on life across the ocean, to give what he could to those who had less. And then there’s me, with more advantages than most people, even in America, crying into my pillow because my carpal tunnel has taken a turn for the worse, and I can’t do push-ups anymore.

Perception

2009-11-18T16:23:00.000-08:00

She scribbles in a leather-bound journal, and I like to think I know just what she’s trying to say.

She’s young—perhaps not yet eighteen—and blonde, and what’s probably a great body is covered with baggy clothes. Kind of punky, oversized black pants. Chains. T-shirt advertising a band nobody ever heard of. Thick-framed nerd glasses with lenses than distort her eyes. Ugly-pretty. Like, if this were a sit-com, everyone would make fun of her as an outcast. And then, in the last scene, she’d get a makeover and everyone would mistake her for a super-model. The snooty guy would suddenly fall in love with her, but she would go for the cute but dorky guy who’d always had a crush.

I bet she’s writing about angst. How much she hates the plebians sharing this train car, how no one understands her, how she can’t wait to get away from her family. She’s dreaming of college. She’s ready to ditch her lame high school crowd and meet some mature adults.

Or else, she’s writing poetry. Overwrought poetry full of images of pain. The journal’s leather binding is dyed a rich purple. Her favorite aunt—the only one who understands her—probably gave it to her last Christmas. She eschews the commercialism of the holiday, but she loved this one gift.

I wish I could tell her that everything will be all right, that she will get a little older and life will get a lot better. I imagine we have a lot in common. When the train stops, people start shuffling around. I end up a little closer to her, but she has her back to me. The train starts up again.

She snaps the journal shut and reaches into her pocket. It’s her cell phone. “Yeah, I’m on my way,” she says in a voice far more mature than the one I imagined for her. “Had some great ideas for the website. No, no, I wrote it all down. What? No, I’ll tell you when I get there. God, I hate public transportation. This crazy old dyke was leering at me the whole ride.” She laughs at something I can’t hear. “Yeah, I don’t think so. Anyway, she’s gone now. See you in five.”

The phone goes back in her pocket and she opens the journal again. It’s not poetry. It's computer code. She’s a programmer. The train lurches and she steps back into me. She isn’t the type to apologize for that. It’s a crowded train, after all. But she does turn to see what she’s hit, and the moment my eyes catch hers, before I can say something clever about the human condition, she turns away, squeezes between two men to get closer to the door.

I realize that I am the crazy old dyke, although I am completely sane, and only twenty-eight, and only experimented with girls a couple of times in college. She gets off at the next stop. A guy my age tries to stare me down as I watch her depart. He’s starting to lose his hair, but he thinks he’s hiding that fact with a baseball cap. Probably, he played varsity football in high school, but wasn’t good enough for a college scholarship. Probably he went to his dad’s alma mater, joined the same fraternity, knocked a girl up, paid for her abortion. Now he works in a cubicle. Drinks beer afterward with the guys from his office. Lives for Monday night football.

He smiles at me. I turn away.

The Awful Woman Next Door

2009-11-05T15:49:00.000-08:00

There’s an awful woman next door. She doesn’t live there; I think she’s visiting her grandmother, a kindly but slightly demented old lady who insists on feeding a herd of feral cats, which we have neutered, one by one, when we can get charity funding to do so. But this awful woman, she has the voice of a fishwife. She’s always shrieking at someone to do something.

There’s a man she shouts at, and a little girl, and a dog. You can always tell when she’s leaving her grandmother’s. Her voice, piercing, harsh, and loud, jars you out of whatever peace your evening might have had to offer. Usually she’s screeching for someone or something to get in the car.

If she yells at the man, he responds in a voice too low to hear. If she yells at the girl, the girl cries, but she can’t match her mother’s volume. If she yells at the dog, it goes on and on. The dog, gifted with a simple intelligence that tells him to run from that deadening noise, sets off all the other dogs in the neighborhood, but never gives away his position by barking himself.

I feel sorriest for the girl. The man committed to his path by choice, and the dog, at least, gets a nice run out of it, and a moment of the freedom. The girl lacks the agency to choose or to run, but must suffer her mother’s shrill imperatives with nothing but a tiny version of that voice with which to retaliate. Still, it’s disconcerting. There’s a clear view of their driveway from our front door. The woman isn’t physically abusing the girl, at least not in our sight. It just sounds like she is.

Eventually, she stuffs the man, the girl, and the dog into the car and drives off, leaving echoes of angry and canine wails in her wake.

Pierced

2009-11-02T16:32:00.000-08:00

Her little sister possessed something that she lacked. The girl couldn’t say, quite, what that thing was, but obviously, her sister was more acceptable. Her sister didn’t mind wearing dresses. Her sister didn’t prefer playing with boys.

Her sister did the things their parents expected her to do.

The girl didn’t do certain things because she didn’t like them. She hated how dresses looked, she hated how they felt compared to jeans, and more to the point, she hated being told to act like a lady. Wearing dresses meant you weren’t to run, jump, shout, fidget, or climb trees. Why would anyone choose to wear a dress, given the attendant restrictions? The little girl accepted the limitation of being a girl; that didn’t mean she must become a lady. It didn’t indicate any compulsory girliness. She was a case in point. If she had been meant to be a certain way—for instance, feminine—wouldn’t she just naturally feel, behave, embrace that label? And not being feminine, didn’t that mean that she wasn’t all the other things they thought she should be, and shouldn’t try to fake it?

Why would they force her to pretend to be something she so clearly wasn’t? They told her lying was wrong, and then they told her to lie to them.

When her sister came home from first grade insisting that she needed pierced ears, the girl wasn’t surprised. Of course her sister would want pierced ears. They were ladylike.

Her little sister got her ears pierced and proclaimed herself pleased with the results. Their parents asked the girl several times if she didn’t want her ears pierced too. The girl was emphatic that she didn’t. It didn’t even have anything to do with not feeling like a girl. Primarily, she despised needles in any form. So she really couldn’t see the point of having instruments of torture applied to her head in order to become more of something she wasn’t in the first place.

Her little sister had her pierced ears for a few months, long enough that she could take out the gold piercing earrings and wear whatever kind of earrings that she wanted. Their parents kept asking the girl if she didn’t really want pierced ears. The girl kept telling her parents she really didn’t want pierced ears. She didn’t care for jewelry, and she didn’t need one more thing to clean. She was, overall, scared of the process. She was not interested in suffering for beauty.

Her parents decided she would get her ears pierced.

She resisted, argued, complained, screamed. She tried logic and she tried volume. They took her to the mall anyway. She fought them all the way to the booth where they pierced ears. She cried.

Her parents said, “Don’t be a baby.” They compared her, unfavorably, to her little sister. They said even a first-grader could do it; there was nothing for her to fear. The girl repeated her objections: she didn’t want pierced ears, she didn’t like needles. Her parents reiterated their argument: she was a big girl and she needed to act like one.

They pierced her ears.

Coda: When the girl got to be a teenager, she horrified her parents by adding six more piercings, five on the left ear and one on the right, using the post of the piercing earring that had inflicted the original insult. She spaced them out over a period of years, snickering to herself as their horror mounted with each new hole.

Aftercare

2009-10-27T17:09:00.000-07:00

It happened on October 17, across the street from a haunted house, which meant I couldn’t enjoy Halloween anymore. I had screamed and screamed myself hoarse, and later, the police said they had even heard me screaming, but it was October 17, across the street from a haunted house. Screams filled the air.

Then again, I’m still here, so maybe that means I’m lucky?

Bad enough to give up horror movies, the superior thrill of autumn leaves skittering down the street in a gust of wind, the wearing of short skirts. The real tragedy, though, is giving up that youthful sense of invulnerability, the security that comes from knowing terror is something that happens to other people. Terror happened to me.

That was all more than a decade ago, and I can finally watch scary movies again: a Korean ghost tale, an adaptation of an HP Lovecraft story, some stupid modern slasher flick where gore replaces suspense and character development. Took a while to get over it, but I did. Because, seriously, what’s scary is reality. You want to scare me? Give me a Holocaust memoir. Or how about that scene in the Will Smith movie where he’s newly homeless and he and his kid are sleeping in a public bathroom? Or how about the news?

It was a mistake when I stopped loving Halloween because a crazy man did a crazy thing to me. Halloween is the antidote.

Deadly Sins

2009-10-24T02:42:00.000-07:00

The day after his thirty-ninth birthday, Louis decided to give up vice, cold turkey. How long could a man go on tempting fate? His youth had ended; mortality loomed. His bad habits were many, his indulgences excessive: a pack of cigarettes a day, an eighth of marijuana a week. Liquor was his particular weakness. It made him boisterous and funny, popular with his coworkers and women he met in bars, which resulted in frequent promiscuous sexual encounters, despite the potbelly he wore as a result of his love for fried food, sweets, and that most lethal combination of the two, doughnuts.

He would die, soon, and with agony, at this rate. It snuck up on you and—bam!—you were forty. But he wasn’t forty yet. If he could wipe the slate clean, perhaps he could elude the specter of death for a while longer.

Cigarettes were out completely, as was the weed, and the occasional hit of X or bag of mushrooms. Hard liquor was out, and he would limit himself to a single glass of wine or beer a day. Fornication was out. He would not sleep with any woman until he had dated her exclusively for at least a month, and then he would wear a condom every time. He would become a health nut, and join a gym.

For two solid weeks, he remained faithful to his new regime. Mornings, he experienced a clear-headed lack of regret he had not known since before college. Seven pounds dropped from his waist and breathing came easier. With the time and energy he used to spend in bars pursuing women, he cleaned and painted the house, repaired windows and refinished woodwork, even changed the oil and sparkplugs on the car. He felt great; he would live forever.

On the fifteenth day, Jim from accounting persuaded him to take a single hit off a joint. Louis thought, one toke won’t hurt. Just on the weekends. The next weekend he smoked two joints, one each day, and went to Dunkin’ Donuts after the second time.

After a month, his exercise schedule became sporadic. He still worked out, sometimes. Sometimes he had a second drink with the guys from the office. At the same time, he discovered a bakery that specialized in vegan cakes, and enrolled in a healthy vegetarian cooking class at the recreation center. There, he met Joann, a willowy blonde who whispered to him that she still, sometimes, ate red meat. With great restraint, he managed to wait ten entire days before seducing her.

Waiting was a good idea, he thought. Things with Joann heated up. He abandoned his resolutions, sort of. He ate whatever junk food he wanted, and smoked and drank whatever anyone offered him, but only when she wasn’t around. After they got married and had a baby, he didn’t indulge around his daughter, either. Louis became a secret vector of vice. He sinned only on the occasional Sunday afternoon, or when Joann took the baby to her mother’s. He made the most of the occasions, and threw the evidence in other people’s trash.

Louis lived thirty more years. At sixty-nine, he was diagnosed with cancer, terminal. Hereditary. Genetic, the doctor said. “There’s nothing you could have done differently,” the doctor assured as Louis numbered his weak resolve and his many transgressions. “It was in your DNA.”

Townhouse

2009-10-23T01:27:00.000-07:00

When I first met Ty, he lived in a little row of townhouses, the first in a block of four, not far from the university. He shared the place with an alcoholic old English teacher who went around quoting Shakespeare as if he didn’t expect anyone else to understand, and smelling of piss. Everyone else in the building was a kid, early twenties max.

Ty and I took to each other like an electric cord to a wall socket. I liked his fit, and he seemed to like the way I made him feel. He got to sample all kinds of new sensations and found them agreeable. He liked my world.

His world didn’t suit me too much. The English teacher stank, and the kids in the other units threw loud parties. Plus, one night, we heard gunshots over the noise of his computer speakers. Ty and the English teacher prowled around the parking lot, but they didn’t see anything. They even called the cops, who poked around too, but they didn’t see anything either.

But then later this girl came around looking for her boyfriend. She was in tears, Ty said. She was sure something bad happened to him. And sure enough, when Ty and the English teacher went around the fence, they found a dead guy in the alley. So they were up all night with the police after all. I had already gone home, before the cops turned up the first time.

That night Ty found out from the guy in the second unit, right next to his, that we could buy weed cheap from the guy in the fourth unit, all the way at the end. It was a sweet connection, for a while. But then unit-two guy, Chad, said that unit-four guy was tweaking, and he wasn’t going to deal with him anymore. He was a disaster waiting for his fifteen minutes, Chad said, and he was going to end up dead, or in jail, or both. He didn’t want to get anywhere near unit-four guy anymore. “I think that meth-head might have shot that dude in the alley,” he said. “The dude was trying to rob him, I bet.” From the outside, you'd never guess what a skeevy place those townhouses were.

After that, Ty was persuaded to move into my place. He’s a tough guy, but he’s not bullet-proof. And anyway, I hated those townhouses.

And sure enough, a couple weeks later, we saw it on the news. Eight police cruisers outside the place, two dead bodies. “Couldn't be Chad, could it?” Ty worried, and texted him.

Chad called right back. “It wasn’t us,” he said. “It was meth-head and his girlfriend.”

“You’re gonna move out now, right?” Ty asked him.

“Hey, maybe it’s gonna be safe around here, now that he’s gone.”

He invited us to a party on Friday, but we ended up not going. We were kind of too old for that sort of thing.

For the Soul

2009-10-18T16:41:00.000-07:00

I rough-cut the onions, because I am tired, and hurried, and I don’t eat onions anyway. It’s easier to eat around big pieces. Rough-cut it all. Carrots, celery, garlic. Lots of garlic. A small red pepper, withered in the back of the fridge. Throw the lot into a big pot of water. Plenty of salt. Dill, basil, and parsley from the garden. Add a splash of olive oil; it gives vegetable soup a little meatiness, the mouth-feel of chicken soup. Chicken soup is better for you, really, but I don’t eat meat.

A bowl of broth is all I can manage. My appetite doesn’t run to so much as a Saltine. I sleep.

When I wake up, the sun is low in the west. My head doesn’t pound quite so much, but the ringing of the phone jars it anyway. “Hello?”

“Oh, god, baby, I’m so sick.” His voice drips with pathos. “I can’t breathe. I can’t move.”

Something creaks within me. “You want some soup?”

“That’s sounds great. You have some?”

A half hour later, I’m in his kitchen, short of breath, fumbling with the stove. He leans against the door, his dark hair plastered to his face with sweat.

“Too bad it’s not chicken soup,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say. “I’d make you chicken soup if I had some chicken.”

“I have some chicken.” He pulls a takeaway carton from the fridge. It’s tandoori chicken, bright pink. Why not? I cut it up, add it to the pot. “You are so good to me, baby,” he says.

Even though I don’t eat meat, I have to check, to make sure the soup is OK, and damn him if it isn’t a thousand times better this way.

Saturation

2009-10-17T02:10:00.000-07:00

We had this crazy storm last week. They must have been all out of buckets because it was coming down in kegs, and everywhere I went people were swimming through puddles on the ground, although the air was just about wet enough to float in. “Monsoon season,” they said, laughing. The wind blew a thick cloud out of the fountain, so the plaza was twice as wet as anywhere else. Everyone’s umbrella was getting blown inside out at one certain point, like a wind corridor, just like in the Loop. When I got there, the rain penetrated my jacket, my clothes and my skin, but I just turned to one side and my umbrella was blown the right way out again.

Dissonance

2009-10-10T02:05:00.000-07:00

I took Psych I and Psych II, which is where I learned about cognitive dissonance, reconciling ideas which are opposite in your mind, but I thought of sensory dissonance myself. It’s when the way something looks or sounds or feels doesn’t match up to what’s really inside it. Like, take for instance, the Pink Floyd song, “Comfortably Numb.” Maybe you hear it on someone’s Dad’s car radio and it seems like a kind of nice song, like a song about relief after pain. But then you actually watch The Wall and you realize it’s not like that at all; it’s just the beginning of the worst freak out for this guy, and things are only going to degenerate for him.

Or like Jenny Snowden, whose acquaintance I also made in Psych I and Psych II. On the outside you never saw a more beautiful creature, her eyes so big and soft, and the way those fuzzy pink sweaters cupped her breasts and the dark opiate of her perfume it’s a wonder I learned anything at all next to that girl. You wanted to believe everything she said, that she never met anyone like you, that it was a safe time of the month, that two people could have a little fun without worrying about the consequences. But then you find out none of that is true, and that’s only the beginning of the deceit and the meanness, and things are only going to degenerate from there.

And now her dad’s got me by the balls and it’s a question of doing the honorable thing or hiding on an island somewhere. I look at her and it’s like these two giant rocks colliding in my brain, her captivating beauty and her castrating bitchiness. Or two even bigger rocks: the knowledge that I’ve chosen to stick around like a stupid puppy dog simpering at its master’s feet, and the knowledge that I’ve chosen the path where dreams die.

Hello, Dolly

2009-10-06T19:08:00.000-07:00

Dolly leaned into the thin shadow under the eaves, but the red brick burned her back. The kindergarten playground had big canvas shade structures, but the upper grades had to tough it out under the desert sun with only a couple mesquite trees for shelter.

In her book, Tessa Singer was embracing her fairy heritage to vanquish the Troll of Baby’s Lake, but light reflecting off the white pages needled Dolly’s eyes. She held the book over her head, between her face and the sun. Kaya Green bumped her on purpose and Tessa Singer, fairy princess, fell into the hot dust at her feet.

Dolly rescued Tessa and went inside.

Sometimes you could sit in the lunchroom but it smelled like fish sticks and all you could hear was screaming. After a long, thoughtful drink, she noticed that the hall was empty and decided to be invisible. She walked right past the lunchroom door without the monitors seeing her, and into the courtyard, where there would be peace and quiet and shade.

The courtyard was still too hot. The benches were metal—stupid idea—but she could see into the library, where Mrs. Ketchum was rolling carts around. She tried the door and walked into another world. Mrs. Ketchum had to wear a sweater, that’s how cold the library was.

“Hello, Dolly,” Mrs. Ketchum sang. Adults always thought that was funny, but Dolly forgave Mrs. Ketchum. She did the best story time.

“It’s really, really hot out there,” Dolly said, except she knew it came out, “Ith wewee, wewee hot out thaya,” even though she’d had to go to the speech therapist twice a week since first grade.

Mrs. Ketchum’s eyes sparkled. “And what did you want in here?”

“Just to sit out of the sun and read my book.”

The librarian smiled wider, but her eyes fell in a sad, sorry way. “Go ahead,” she said. Then she went back to rolling her carts around, putting books here and there.

Dolly tried to get back to Tessa Singer and her epic battle with the troll, but they felt very far away now, even though she had almost smelled the sulfur on the troll’s breath in silent reading that morning. Mrs. Ketchum looked happy with her books. Her hair was just the yellow color that a fairy would have.

“Can I help you?” Dolly asked.

“Maybe so. I have to put books on the tables for the kinders to choose from. They’re not allowed to take them off the shelves yet. What books did you like in kindergarten?”

Dolly set Tessa Singer on the edge of the table and walked along the stacks. “Curious George,” she said. “And the one about the dragon who likes vegetables. And that book with the unicorn and the lake.”

“Good, good, good,” said Mrs. Ketchum. She knew where everything was and could just pull a book off the shelf the way you would pick your own backpack out of a pile. “How about Little Critter? Did you like those?”

When they had made all the hard cover books stand up on the tables with the paperbacks in between, Dolly said, “What else can I do?”

“Do you know Dewey Decimal System?”

“No.”

Mrs. Ketchum tried, but Dolly only understood about half of it. They put some books in order. “That’s OK,” Mrs. Ketchum said. “It takes practice. But once you learn, you’ll be able to find any book, any time. Until college. Then you’ll have to learn a new system. Was that the bell?”

It was.

“Come around again sometime and I’ll show you more.”

Dolly grabbed her book and ran back to class.

“Where were you?” Mrs. Vance demanded.

“In the library, helping Mrs. Ketchum.” Forty-six eyes burned her like the sun. She pressed Tessa Singer to her chest like a shield, but then remembered what Kaya Green had said about fifth graders who read books about fairies, and she held the book behind her back instead.

“You know you’re not allowed to wander the building during recess, Dolly.” She paused long enough for Dolly to get to her seat, then tapped the desk. “You were three minutes late. You owe me three minutes of recess tomorrow. And I don’t want you bothering Mrs. Ketchum again.”

Technophobia

2009-10-01T18:32:00.001-07:00

David turns the flat black plastic over in his hands, wondering why he stays.

“Davey, are you even listening?” Lance is still sitting across from him, cables snaking from his hands. David hates being called Davey, and he’s afraid he’ll turn to stone if he looks straight on, although Lance is no Medusa. Lance is the most beautiful man he ever met, with blond hair past his ass, and cool blue eyes set in a cherubic pale face.

“It’s a monitor,” David parrots. “I slide the iPod into the dock to watch videos. I plug it into the USB port to recharge it.”

“With this cable, right. But you use this cable if you want to just plug it into a wall socket. And this one goes into your car’s cigarette lighter.”

Why would I be watching videos in the car, David wonders, but he accepts the cables, sets them to the side of his plate, dares to look into Lance’s face. He does not turn to stone. Lance squeezes his hand.

“With all the traveling you’re doing lately, Davey baby, I figured it would be easier than trying to watch on a tiny screen. Do you like it?”

David nods, squeezes Lance’s hand back, blows a kiss for good measure. Lance gave him the iPod, and the laptop, and the cell phone, and he uses them, because when your lover gives you an expensive gift, you can’t let it gather dust in the closet like you do with the ice skates your mom gave you when you turned eighteen, or the waffle iron from your aunt. He uses them, but he doesn’t like them. They are alien rocks, chunks of silicon that betray and befuddle him. Lance never asked him what he did in airports before. David used to enjoy the people watching, the invisible anonymity of airports. It used to be that everyone watched everyone in airports, while pretending to read books. Now everyone is wrapped up in cords and cables, alone in their worlds of music and movies and wifi.

He programs numbers into his cell phone, but speed dial always calls the wrong person. He stores music on his iPod, but when he hits shuffle, it only plays Lance’s techno music. Despite Lance’s best efforts, David fries his hard drive an average of once every nine months. But Lance keeps trying.

Now, Lance smiles his angelic, cupid’s bow smile, brushes the satin hair back from his face, stirs his coffee. David’s cell phone buzzes in his pocket—Lance helped him set it to vibrate—but he’s put on some weight this year, and by the time he drags it out, whoever it is has hung up without leaving a message.

“Who is it?” Lance asks. David shrugs, and Lance reaches, impatient for the device. “Unknown name, unknown number,” he says once he has it, and hands it back again.

David leaves the phone on the table. It’s too embarrassing, trying to get it back into his pocket while sitting down. “You know the theory of resistentialism?” he asks.

“Tell me.” Lance’s blue eyes sparkle, as if he’s actually interested.

“It’s the belief that machines are aware, and they’re hostile to their owners. It’s why copiers always break down when you’re in a hurry. And it’s why everything I touch malfunctions.”

Lance laughs, grabs David’s hand again and kisses his fingertips. David lifts his head, so Lance won’t see his double chin. “That again,” Lance says, laughs. “You’re crazy, Davey baby. Look, machines are machines. They do what we tell them to do. You just have to speak their language.” When he drops David’s hands, he nods at the pile of cables and technology on the table, then glances down at his iPhone, starts tapping on the screen with one hand.

Without looking, he reaches his other hand out for his coffee. David admires the muscles in his forearm, the white skin and golden hair, the manicured fingernails. Lance always smells good, like a baby straight out of the bath, and his clothes don’t wrinkle, no matter how he sits. And Lance never sweats, either, or if he does, it smells like talcum powder.

Lance sputters into his mug, but even that is graceful, like blowing bubbles. “It’s cold,” he mutters, but his mutters are the warm-up scales of an opera singer. His eyes intent on the screen of his phone, he opens the microwave on the counter beside him.

David can’t take his eyes off him, the graceful arc of his arm as it whisks the coffee from the table to the microwave. Light glints off the metal spoon still resting inside the mug. David says nothing as Lance shuts the microwave door, hits the start button without ever looking up from his phone.

Oleander Fence

2009-09-25T20:05:00.000-07:00

Serle liked to joke about the boy scouts who cut their weenie-roasting switches from the wrong tree, and died. “Where’s your god now?” he would say to Terry, laughing. Her husband was not a cruel man, but rather a wonderful man with a cruel sense of humor.

They seemed artificial to her, at least here in the desert, those towering, leafy predators, dissembling with profuse flowers in red, pink, and white. She watched the workers, her upper lip trembling, as Mr. Next-Door directed the ballet of flora.

“Nothing personal,” Mr. Next-Door called across the property line. “Good fences make good neighbors, right? I figure you could use the privacy as much as we can.” And up it went, a barrier of poison leaves and lying blossoms. And you could still see through anyway. Mr. Next-Door was a retired man, in his seventies, who puttered in the garden in his boxer shorts, exposing things Terry did not want to see. Terry wouldn’t even get the mail in flannel pajamas with a belted robe on top.

The oleander fence inspired Serle to take on his own home improvement project. He built a koi pond. To Terry, the little orange koi seemed as artificial as the oleander, and they started dying right away. Serle netted them out and threw them into the alley, one by one. Why did the fish cross the road, Terry thought. When they’d all crossed over, he drained the pond, threw the lining into the alley, and declared the resulting hole a fire pit. “The smoke will keep the mosquitoes away, so we can sit outside at night,” he promised. He roasted hot dogs in it, and taught himself to barbecue over the open fire, steak and fish. Terry didn’t eat red meat.

“I roasted you a marshmallow,” Serle said, holding out a whippy stick with a brown confection melting off the end.

“Are you trying to kill me?” Terry asked, afraid. Serle just laughed.

Changing Planes

2009-09-22T00:41:00.000-07:00

When you have to change planes at 2 a.m. in Montreal, there’s a shop where you can buy Néstle’s Crunch bars and cans of Coca-Cola with the labels all in French. You want to buy Néstle’s Crunch bars and cans of Coca-Cola, but you can’t because they cost Canadian dollars, and all you have are Israeli shekels, British pounds, Dutch guilders, and also American dollars. You can’t get Canadian dollars, because it’s 2 a.m. and all the currency exchanges are closed. You don’t want Canadian dollars; you want to get back to the States. You want your eight years of junior high-high school-college French to hold a lens up to the signs so your eyes can untangle the words you ought to understand, the words that tell you how to find your airplane. You want to see the long lines at border control in O’hare and realize that there is no line before the booth marked “U.S. Passports Only.” You want to see a regular American guy look at you only once before stamping your passport and saying, “Welcome home.” You don’t want to cry with relief when he says this, but you will.

Juice

2009-09-15T00:55:00.000-07:00

Imagine Mars was about to collide with the Earth. That’s what it looked like, I swear, coming up over the horizon. One night when I was walking back from shul with my father, I saw something so big it should have crushed us, so red you could take a bite and juice would drip down your chin.

The moon was so close I could have touched it, if my parents let me climb on the roof.

The Optical Engineer

2009-09-11T11:02:00.000-07:00

His first wife was a flight attendant, and he likes to be awakened in the middle of the night, as she once did, to a woman straddling him, pumping like a piston and squeezing like a milking machine. The typical male achieves erection four to six times throughout the night, during REM sleep, at intervals of approximately ninety minutes. More often than not I just let him pass out, work for an hour or so, and then check to see if he’s ready. Sometimes he doesn’t even realize he’s fallen asleep. He thinks he’s been making love to me the whole time. Since he drinks, it works out better this way.

So I’m not too upset when he pulls back from my advances. “I’m so sorry. I completely forgot I have work to do. There’s a meeting tomorrow. It won’t take long.” He reaches one hand past me, to the bed table, lays his fingers on a ball point pen and an old envelope, pulls the envelope apart by its seams, flattens it onto a clipboard.

He scribbles the pen around to get it going, then scrawls out a string of numbers and letters. Mostly it’s like little F subscript parenthesis one end parenthesis, little F subscript parenthesis two end parenthesis, long strings like that. There are a few Xs and Ns in there, as well, I think, and some other abuses of the alphabet.

When he’s locked up half the envelope in these inky chains, he swears. “I better do this right.”

He gets out of bed, goes to his desk, finds a fresh leaf of printer paper, and starts copying his equations. They flow without effort, the way I write when I’m deep inside a story, and he writes them with a kind of calculating love, scientific attachment. His work is huge, bigger than us.

“What happens if you make a mistake?” I ask, hanging over the back of his chair, laughing.

His pen never stops plotting its course. “Then a ten million dollar mirror turns back into sand.”

Attachment

2009-09-06T12:32:00.000-07:00

It was, and was not, her leg.

The weight of it came and went, along with the pain, dull, prickly, sharp, an antique cactus of pain, pinning her to the rubble. She could not move her leg from the pain, but, with concentration, she could move the pain from her leg.

She would lose it, the leg. Already, she began to let it go.

The pain was not the worst part. The darkness, the strange particulate air, imbued with suffocating dust like cotton candy spun from topsoil, that might be the worst. And the creaking, the eerie, haunted-house squeal of uncertain girders wailing through the night, that might be the worst too. Or maybe the damp, creeping cold into the parts that could still move, but not very far. But then the leg would start screaming, rising up like an infidel from the desert. And she would breathe through the dirt-thick air, and push the pain back.

Far, far away, she heard other sounds, yelling and drilling, sounds her brain recognized as hopeful, rescue sounds. This was America after all, and they would reach her sooner or later and bring her back to the light. She couldn’t see the mountain that had stolen her lower limb from her, clamped down on her knee like a junkyard dog with a squirrel in its jaw. The squirrel would die, but first it would go into shock and feel nothing. Just as she could scarcely feel now. She would go up, maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow. And she’d leave the punctuated pain, and the broken piece of meat, down here. Goodbye, leg, she thought. We had a good run.

Sweet Sixteen

2009-09-02T16:19:00.000-07:00

They threw her the best sweet sixteen any girl ever dreamed of, a dinner dance with fifty friends, a chocolate fountain, and an ice sculpture carved with her face except it was an angel with wings. Her parents bought her a Miata and her boyfriend gave her a gold monogram on a gold chain and everyone said she was the luckiest thing ever.

But that Monday, in chemistry, her lab partner gave her a CD. “I heard it was your birthday,” he said, even though she had never even thought of inviting him to the party because he didn’t hang out with any of her other friends. “I’m not into, you know, conspicuous consumption. It’s cheesy, but anyway, I like weird old music. Maybe you’ll like it too.”

And there were all these songs she’d never really thought about before like “Rain on the Scarecrow” and “Downeaster’ Alexa” and they made her cry and she couldn’t understand what she was crying for, because her father was a surgeon but the next week she gave the gold monogram on a gold chain back to her boyfriend and she skipped prom and went with her lab partner to look at the stars in the back of his pickup instead and that summer they volunteered at the shelter and she decided to be a lawyer for social justice instead of a fashion designer, which her mother thought she’d be good at, or a pediatrician, which her father encouraged her to do. She thought they’d be disappointed but they said a lawyer was acceptable even though she’d never make any money in social justice, but it was her life and if she made it through law school, more power to her.

Resistance

2009-09-01T17:59:00.000-07:00

That Monday, and every school day for the next three months, a bully they called Zombie, who wore size fourteen Nikes and had three black gaps in his lying smile, stole Greggie’s lunch money. Greggie didn’t tell anyone, because there wasn’t anyone to tell. He didn’t have a father or a big brother, or even a tough cousin. It was just him and his mom, and she worked as a colorist for minimum wage. After school and until his mom came home around seven or eight he stayed with Mrs. Freeman, this old lady in their building, and she gave him cookies and muffins and pretty much anything he wanted to eat, so he only had to be hungry between approximately one p.m. and three p.m. and Zombie gave him nightmares anyway.

But then in school they read this story about this little kid who tricked the Nazis and brought information to the French resistance and that afternoon he went down to the salon where his mom worked before he went to Mrs. Freeman’s and he stole a nail file, the metal kind. That night, under the covers, he filed his nails into claws like Wolverine.

After that, the kids gave Zombie a new nickname, which was One-Eyed Jerk, which stuck even after he didn’t have to wear the patch anymore, and even after the scars were just a few puckery white seams down one side of his face. Greggie had to go to counseling for the rest of the school year but that didn’t bother him much and no one ever bullied him anymore.

Girl Power

2009-08-31T19:08:00.000-07:00

And then there are those of us who embrace the message and eschew the media images, who call ourselves feminists at the age of nine and play football and don’t allow boys to dictate anything. We believe we can grow up to be president. We control our own sexuality and correct old men who address us with terms of endearment. We don’t let anyone define us. We don’t get sidetracked from our ambitions. We go to college and go to graduate school and take women’s studies classes even though they’re not required. We take control at work and we don’t get married because we are more than nurturers, more than helpmeets, more than relationships. And still we look around us and see that someone needs to do the dishes, someone needs to look after the children, someone needs to make a pot of coffee, even if they’re not our dishes, our children, our caffeine cravings. And we choose to take care of it anyway.

Blood

2009-08-29T16:05:00.000-07:00

The moment the little sister says, “Know what? Mom broke a plate there this morning,” I realize that I have just embedded a ceramic wedge into my heel.

I cry out and hop on one foot, grabbing my ankle and plucking the chunk of dinner plate from my muscle. There is a wince of pain and then a flow of blood poxing up the floor.

The big sister, who was once so small I had to help her up onto the toilet, catches me as I fall against the medicine cabinet. I’ve taken care of these children for fourteen years, but she got big when I wasn’t looking.

“Careful there,” she says, balancing me in one arm while extracting a Band-Aid from the cabinet with the other. She is now ten inches taller than I am, so it is easier for her to reach.

She pulls my foot up onto the counter and smoothes the Band-Aid over my heel. Then she grabs at some paper towels and erases my signature from the floor.

What the Rat Said

2009-08-26T15:00:00.000-07:00

Walking along the river, Rat saw Lion, king of the beasts, taking a swim.

“How shabby the king’s coat looks,” thought Rat.

He went along until he met Rabbit, to whom he related everything he’d seen, along with the appraisal that the king had let himself go because he was old and enfeebled and so weak that he surely wouldn’t be around much longer. Rabbit’s ears perked up when he heard this news. The next time Lion passed his burrow, instead of bowing his head, Rabbit stared, trying to ascertain how long the old king had to live.

Lion growled and bared his teeth, but Rabbit kept staring. Lion roared and stalked toward him, but Rabbit remembered that the king was old and weak and didn’t even nod. Finally, Lion leaned over Rabbit and gave him a clout on the head before tossing his mane and walking on.

When Rabbit regained his senses and licked his wounds, he thought he should let Rat know that the old king was hale and hearty as ever. So he went down to the river, found Rat, and boxed his ears.

Moral: Gossip hurts three people--the one who repeats it, the one who hears it, and the one it is about.

Pareidolia

2009-08-23T20:00:00.001-07:00

It’s a normal human response, which is why you have people who see the Virgin Mary in their grilled cheese sandwich or portents in tea leaves or even just pictures in clouds. But she couldn’t turn it off.

As a little girl, she couldn’t read expressions on human faces, but she saw worlds inside every irregular surface: wood grain, the green vinyl covering the seats on the school bus, the dots on acoustic ceiling tile, tree branches, the shadows on her bedroom wall at night. She might see children playing ball, or birds chasing dogs, or snow-capped mountains, or desert islands where X-marked-the-spot to buried treasure, or genies in bottles, but often, she didn’t.

Often, especially when the lights were out or the girl was alone, she saw demons. Fang-toothed, horned monsters with hideous, child-eating grins leered down at her from wooden cabinets or up from the speckles in the sidewalk pavement. Often, she kept seeing them after she closed her eyes. Often, they seemed more real than the people she met.

As she grew older, she could control it a little better. Mostly, she didn’t see demons anymore. Mostly.

Who Am I?

2009-08-22T17:56:00.000-07:00

He liked the girls with colored hair, the bad girls who snuck into his house at night while he was sleeping, and sometimes during the day when no one was even there. Girls who got grounded for sneaking out and climbed out the window and down a tree to sneak out again the next night.

After college, he followed one of them to Hollywood, where he spent ten years trying to make it in the industry, which never happened. He got yelled at by a lot of famous people, though.

Who am I? he wondered sometimes. For a long time, he was a guy who liked girls with colored hair. After a while, he was a guy who got yelled at by famous people.

In the end, he went home and enrolled in trade school. Then he was a carpenter.

Tornado

2009-08-19T18:58:00.000-07:00

I never saw it.

The sky turned green and the clouds hung low over campus, but the only noises seemed far away. Distant winds.

Joe herded us all into the basement of the library when the weather radio gave the warning. The power went out and we had only quavering fluorescent emergency lights for the two hours he held us captive down there. Student workers, professors, townies, we were all trapped together, but we could hear Joe running around on the main floor like a pirate captain navigating his ship through a storm.

Nicky's Space

2009-08-17T16:38:00.000-07:00

Drew still blamed his mother for his brother’s death.

Every morning, he turned first to Nicky’s graduation photo. Everyone said it would be impossible for someone with Nicky’s developmental disabilities to earn a high school diploma, but Nicky had done it, which was why Drew didn’t believe that Nicky had drowned in the shower, like his mother said. Drew hadn’t been out of the house six weeks when it happened. He would always blame his mother.

One morning, the image of Nicky’s lopsided grin under his mortarboard foremost in his mind, Drew created a MySpace page for his dead brother. He updated it regularly with information about Down’s Syndrome, resources for struggling families, and memorial letters to Nicky, so no one could ever forget. He tried to friend his mom but she wouldn’t add him back. So, he set up a gmail account in Nicky’s name, which he used to send her birthday, Christmas, and mother’s day greetings.

Strength in Numbers

2009-08-16T00:15:00.000-07:00

We had to unionize.

After the terror, some had forgotten the old ways, but our family had always been workers, and we knew the power of collective bargaining, knew we had to band together to find our place in the new world. Many things broke down in the days after the comet. The dead rose from the grave, feasted on the flesh of the living, and smashed through the social order. For weeks, there was chaos, fear.

But zombies are simple and mindless. It wasn’t that long before they were controlled, made docile. The process was no different than breaking an animal. And when they were put to work rebuilding, we cheered.

Ten years on, the zombies threaten us in a different way. Who will pay us to toil and carry, when a few undead abominations can do the labor of more men in less time? They work for rotting meat! My brothers and I would starve.

We had to unionize.

postsecret.blogspot.com

2009-08-13T16:30:00.000-07:00

It’s supposed to free the human heart. That’s what they say. Everyone has secrets, sometimes silly, sometimes terrifying, but they never rest easy. They leech out into the soul. And you can write them down, and share them with the world, and you are cleansed. That’s what they say.

I have secrets, some silly, some terrifying. I compose the postcards in my mind, choosing my words like a poet, each carrying its perfect weight. I imagine the images, the ransom-note letters, but I do not cut up magazines or produce paste. The secrets stay where they are.

Shame is the stickiest glue.

Red Flags

2009-08-11T17:45:00.001-07:00

Despite—or perhaps due to—my education and experience, I did not want to believe. On the days you asked, “Do you think I’m mentally ill?” I tempered my answer, ignored the flags, stroked your ego.

Flag: all the times you laughed wildly at nothing at all, then denied laughing when I wondered what was so funny.

Flag: all the times you gave me the silent treatment, eventually admitting that you were mad about something that happened six months ago and wasn’t really a big deal.

Flag: all the times you sexually harassed my roommate after being repeatedly asked to leave him alone, then told him to toughen up, plus, all the other men you sexually harassed.

Flag: all the times you reported that everyone hated you, even though everyone said they liked you, and all the people you couldn’t get along with, even though they were your friends.

Maybe I’m not a subtle person. Because it took a banner: your forty-five minute audio file explaining why I was a racist, classist, evil, oppressive bitch who never said I was proud of you, and why you never wanted me to talk to you again, because our seventeen-year friendship had run its course.

For the record: I’ve always been proud of you. I know I said it many times. And for the record: yes, I’m sorry to say, I think you’re mentally ill. I wish I could have said it before.

The Edge of Town

2009-08-10T18:36:00.000-07:00

Eleventh Street makes a T where it hits KL Avenue, and foamy green retention ponds bask on all three sides. They’re real vigorous, verdant, vital little wetlands, throbbing with life. Colonies of cattails grow erect near the shore. The water beckons with banks of water lilies, their petals spread open wide to the sky.

A blue heron might stand sentry at the far end of the biggest pond, where a cast of ten thousand frogs performs dinner theater every night. At dusk, knobby brown groundhogs sprout like peanuts from the grass. Turtles crawl up from the pond too. They all have yellow racing stripes up their head and neck, and they come in all sizes: some like your fist, some like serving dishes. Some like serving dishes in more ways than one, because they try to cross the street. They’re flattened, the texture of their shells cracked like ancient leather. The little claws never look dead. They’d grab the end of a stick if you poked them.

I saw the driver of a boxy white van stop in time for one big turtle. The passenger jumped out, stood still in the first moment she looked down at the ponderous reptile in its sodden velvet mantle of algae. Then she slipped her fingers underneath and, with arms outstretched, carried the turtle to the other side of Eleventh Street, where it had urgent business: a busy day of eating, mating, and vegetating by the water’s edge as it collected the sun’s energy like an auspicious tessalating solar panel.

Perfection

2009-08-09T18:39:00.000-07:00

She descends from the attic room like the Prague Golem: encrusted with clay, prepared to defend her domain from blasphemers.

On landings and shelves, floors and counters, at attention on every horizontal surface of the big house, her own golems stand sentry. Serpentine vases, delicate pots, improbable jars, and the most extraordinary, ambitious vessels of stoneware and earthenware guard the mantels and lintels. She drags herself through a labyrinth of exquisite pottery, a city of Seussian sensibility and Lilliputian proportion.

“I don’t have anything,” she tells the telephone, and listens for only a moment before arguing, “It’s not good enough to show. I don’t have any gallery quality pieces right now.”

From her phone, in the mailbox, over email, the demands weave a stifling blanket. Requests for artwork form the warp; demands for payment, the woof. “I don’t sell anything that doesn’t represent the best of my artistic talent.” On her way back to the atelier stairs, her heels catch on the handle of a tall urn, its workmanship rivaling the greatest of the Ming artisans. It wobbles, steadies. She twists her mouth at it, at its thousand siblings, offensive to her eyes. “Piece of crap,” she mutters, and returns to the workshop to try again.

TBI

2009-08-08T16:49:00.000-07:00

We do not curse the circumstance, the o’clock of the morning or the failing of caffeine or amphetamine or pneumatic anti-lock brakes. We do not praise the response, of paramedic or emergency room surgeon or rehab nurse. We do not question the result, a thing growing slowly as a crystal, following a pattern smashed, completing the matrix described by the forgotten past.

There was a man, thus. There was a truck, even so. There was a breaking, followed by a building up. This is theory.

There is a slamming of doors, a throwing of pill bottles, pain that dribbles out under cover of veiled insult and suicidal ideation. There are days of hugs and kisses and apologies, and nights of why and what’s the point. This is reality.

New Format

2009-08-08T16:30:00.000-07:00

Funny thing, the Internet.

This blog has been defunct for over a year, and yet it averages a dozen hits a day. Approximately 50% of you are looking for information about "flash fiction," "micro fiction," and "short-shorts." That's OK. I wrote that little essay defining these terms myself. My master's degree in fiction wasn't completely useless! Approximately 50% of you are here because you have Googled "wrestling erections." That's OK, too, My buddy Comrade Kevin wrote the (very short) book on that. Sometimes, terribly straight young men find themselves in a state of tumescence while wrestling. From my understanding, it's a not uncommon occurrence. If you are worried about getting a hard-on during wrestling practice, worry no more. It's perfectly normal!

I'm a hermit who lives under a rock, and maintaining an active community of writers writing for love may have been beyond my ability. But here's this blog, and here's me.

Possibly, I'll forget all about it in a day or so. But maybe Raincoat Flashers has a spark of life in it.

I'm dispensing with the writing prompts and the contest aspect. I'm a-gonna post my flash fiction here. Do you write flash fiction? Send it along and if I like it, I'll publish it too. Want to talk about books, writing, publishing, education? You can contact me at littledragonblue@gmail.com.

Writing Prompt #19

2008-07-28T17:32:00.001-07:00

Regrets

2008-06-01T00:23:00.000-07:00

Regrets

In the middle of levitation practice, Anya began to regret that she'd polished off a Big Mac, large fries and a strawberry shake for lunch.

Defeat

2008-03-30T18:38:00.001-07:00

Defeat

It wasn’t Hera or their children or his jealous brother Hades. When Zeus fell it was finally to Christopher, patron saint of truckers and long haulers.

2008-03-30T18:36:00.001-07:00

Seeing

2008-02-24T11:47:00.000-08:00

"That tree looks rather like..."

No, I must have been imagining things. My mind plays tricks on me sometimes and makes me see things.

For instance, sometimes I see faces on the bark of pine trees, and these faces resemble the people I have loved over the years and throughout time. In moments like these, best to not read too much into them.

Marked

2008-02-24T11:46:00.000-08:00

Marked

Wilkins wasn’t the kind of person who normally quoted cultural theorists. Nothing kills a party like saying, “Well, Baudrillard would say….” If you’re busting out a line like that, Wilkins liked to joke, you better hope you hate getting laid.

Wilkins didn’t like sounding pompous, and he certainly didn’t like quoting things he didn’t fully understand. And yet, ever since working for the internet non-profit, he’d been thinking a lot about Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others.

On Monday morning, Wilkins poured himself some coffee. Then he put on his putty-colored headset and dialed the phone. “Hello Mr. Phelps,” Wilkins said. “I’m calling on behalf of the Improved Life Foundation. Would you like to make a difference in the life of a child for the small donation of only a few hours’ wages?”

A complicated sigh from the other end of the line: agitation, displeasure, guilt. “Listen,” the potential patron said, “I’m on food stamps right now and between jobs. Can you just send me some pamphlets and I’ll get back to you?”

“Of course, sir, thank you for your time,” Wilkins said.

Back when he first started, Wilkins had joked about the people he telephoned. He had called them “marks”: “I sweet-talked this mark and got a grand out of her.”

Now, he just called them “patrons.”

He put a note in the database to send potential patron Phelps a pamphlet that afternoon. After lunch, Wilkins slid the glossy brochure into the business envelope. Before sealing the envelope with his soft, yellow sponge, he removed the shiny, high-resolution brochure and studied it.

There are so many photographs of suffering, but the human being only has so large a reserve of empathy.

After sealing the envelope, Wilkins stepped out to the gray parking lot for a break. He watched the smoke of his cigarette climb upward as he felt the nicotine refuel his body. How big was the world, he wondered, in relation to the size of his cigarette? He could understand the cigarette, but not the size of the world.

Almost Famous

2008-02-24T11:45:00.000-08:00

I look like Maddox. Do you think Angelina and Brad would adopt me?

I want to travel around the world, go to a French school (until I have to travel around the world), and be in People magazine (my new parents would get paid for those photos).

Maddox and I could hang out. It'd be cool. But don't think I'd be a babysitter for the rest of them. That's not happening.

Still, I could hang.

Birthright

2008-02-24T11:44:00.000-08:00

Four hundred million years ago, my ancestors pioneered these shores, crawling up from the ancestral salt of the ocean to test the land. We were the first.

Before us, the land was still, moving only at the pace of the algae, the moss, the fern. My people ruled them all, and the edges of the waters as well.

We broke this land, and after four hundred million years of shuffling and scurrying and watching the rise and fall of others, you, mammal, take hold of me with your opposable digits, pick me up helpless.

But, I think I will be here when you are gone.

Stranger

2008-02-24T11:42:00.000-08:00

Stranger

I rolled over and patted the cool spot on the bed. "Jared?" I called. "Jared?"

Someone moved on the other side of the room, near the window, someone who had Jared's height and bulk, Jared's rough shape and gestures, but he didn't do what Jared would do. He didn't come to bed, or answer reassuringly. He didn't scratch his ass or fart as Jared would. He didn't strain for the sound of my voice as my husband did in the daytime.

He just stood by the window, a stranger in my bedroom.