After the Memorial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Read More Dragon!

For my darling fans, all 14 of you:

If you enjoy my microfiction, imagine how much more you'll like my short fiction! You can order a copy of the January 2011 Bards and Sages Quarterly, which features my first published piece of fiction. My short story, "Spin Free," about a dust devil that wants to be a tornado, appears here, along with lots of other great speculative fiction.

If you enjoy my short fiction, imagine how much more you'll like my novels! You can read my YA novel The Final Flavor on inkpop.com. This cool website allows you to upload YA content, which is then reviewed by other users of the site, who can recommend your book to others and send you feedback. Every month, the top 5 books are sent directly to the editorial board of HarperCollins.

Here's the blurb for The Final Flavor:

What do a compulsive overeater, a bulimic cheerleader, and a renegade neuroscientist have in common?

One hundred ninety-five pound high school sophomore Dougal Gulden has a unique talent: the ability to eat, and eat, and eat, without ever feeling full. If he keeps working, once day he’s sure to get big enough to take on the world. Unfortunately for Dougal, his pediatrician decides he’s already too big for a teenager who’s only five-six, and thus begins a journey that will turn a shy, shallow outcast into a warrior for the power of good taste, taking on mad scientists, bulimic cheerleaders, and the social hierarchy of the American high school in his quest for the final flavor.

If you read and enjoy my book, you can create a profile on inkpop, leave me feedback, and recommend the work to other users, perhaps bringing me one step closer to fulfilling my dreams. It's a long shot, and, indeed, it's a bit scary sending work out into the world, but I'm trying to step up my game. If you love me, give a Dragon a hand, OK?

 

Reverse Dream Journaling

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

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

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*

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