Sweet Sixteen

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.