Tin Lunchbox Review, Vol. 1 No. 1, July 2016
www.thetinlunchbox.com
Printed by Smart Press
www.smartpress.com
Founder & Managing Editor: Shawna Caro
Editors: Lindsey Bartlett, Kari Bowles, Frances Mihulec
Copyright © 2016
Tin Lunchbox Review and individual authors. All rights
maintained by contributors upon publication. May not
reproduce contents without permission from the contributor.
1|Tin Lunchbox Review/Vol. 1 No. 1
Table of Contents
POETRY:
Glen Armstrong
Doing the Clam/11
Vanishing Point/40
Lindsey Bartlett
Feral Houses/31
Ace Boggess
The Day the Earth Stood Still/5
Sunday in the Newsroom/25
Dr. Who and the Daleks/36
Kari Bowles
Spring Change as Mortal Lessons/12
Late Winter, the Dead of Night/18
Literary Loves/20
Luanne Castle
Tennessee Valley/19
Uncrossing the Strait of Georgia/38
Kayla Dugan
Twisted Mirrors/32
Vincent Francone
Dear Stepfather/21
Voyeur/33
Howie Good
The Average American/16
Studies in Classic American Literature/23
The Secret History of Final Exams/24
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POETRY:
Andrew Kozma
First Theory of a New Science/7
Deposition/29
Luis Lopez-Maldonado
Letter to My Dead BFF, Sylvia/8
White Man with Posters/15
Kenneth Pobo
New Normal/10
Li Bei in Heaven/26
Wandawoowoo Wakes Up in Dali’s The Persistence of Memory/35
Carmel/37
Tyler Sheldon
Albatross/28
Breech Testing/14
Lunch/30
PROSE:
Kari Bowles
Skin of White Down/48
Kayla Dugan
To Drown Love/85
Vincent Francone
Strong Waters/55
Philip Kobylarz
Pablo-esque/62
Tara Pedroley
The Forgotten Frappe/82
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Ellen J. Perry
Go for the Gold/41
Church Pew: FOR SALE/68
Kathleen Skrzypczak
No Greater Agony/44
Lenore Weiss
Me & Frankie/74
ART:
P. Alex Caro
Sphere Detail/13
Vessel/39
Nigel Dawson
Rust in Abstract/22
Frangipani/27
Marco Hernandez
La Muerte de la Nacion/6
El Narco/17
Midnite Keister
Malamute/9
Nebula/73
Ray Pesina
Acolyte/34
Antonym/54
Dreamer/61
Kirsten Robinson
Rot III/47
Pocks/67
4|Tin Lunchbox Review/Vol. 1 No. 1
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Twentieth Century Fox, 1951
Ace Boggess
Point is, we’ve been given a chance
to get along, dismantle our rifles &
remove enriched uranium from our bombs
like cutting out bad spots from a hard potato.
If we choose, we might sing & folk-dance
in our shoes lighter than they were an hour ago.
Make love not war was the alien’s motto
during his march on Washington. But,
what do we Americans (Russians/ Brits/ Chinese)
care when there are pennies to earn?
Maybe we don’t deserve an opportunity.
Maybe Klaatu should’ve allowed
the robot Gort to destroy the Earth.
I guess we’ll have to do it ourselves
with the knives in our handshakes &
teeth that hide behind our friendly smiles.
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La Muerte de la Nacion
6|Tin Lunchbox Review/Vol. 1 No. 1
Marco Hernandez
First Theory of a New Science
Andrew Kozma
You are not as easily shattered as wood
into sparks and would not set anything aflame
given a choice, but you are not. A tame
chemical compound is only understood
against its toxic, burning equivalent.
I study you in cross-section, I brandish
your latest spectrograph, the petri dish
you fill slowly. I am the oxygen tent
and you are the lighter the patient has snuck in.
What we do for one last fix, a habit
we say is death to break, is to hold our grin.
And hold it. Consider love an increasing debt.
To pay, you hollow your body bit by bit.
They call it death, but we may fool them yet.
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Letter to My Dead BFF, Sylvia
Luis Lopez-Maldonado
Dear Sylvia,
You committed suicide
inhaling gas from a kitchen oven,
Why? I’ve thought about it,
how I turned 30 too
how easy a bullet to the head
would do, how I’m obsessed
with death too! O sister
mother, wife, sweet lethe
was your life, how your Daddy
hurt you, God hurt you,
and you had to kill both,
what else could you do?
I have your head on my walls
your words tattooed
to the bottom of my big-fat
brown heart, my balls,
a smile fell in the grass
the fever trickles and stiffens
in my hair, my head a moon
Where are you? Tell me about
How you keep coming back
To pull your husbands toes,
Knock-over picture frames
mounted on the doors,
how Ted Hughes never knew you!
O fellow poetess, write to me
when you have pen and paper,
when you are able to take a full breath
from inside that kitchen oven:
I am waiting with gun in hand,
poetry hanging from tongue and eyelashes.
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Malamute
9|Tin Lunchbox Review/Vol. 1 No. 1
Midnite
New Normal
Kenneth Pobo
Finished with the flu, mom and I
would walk up to the mailbox,
only two blocks, but free from school,
feeling better, a Villa Park sky blue
despite the Ovaltine Factory haze.
When she died, a friend said
that I’d enter a new normal.
The wound bleeds,
no bandages or doctors to heal it.
At work, others face the same real
unreality. We say how sorry we are,
write cards--the new normal, new
how am I going to get up tomorrow
and act like I’m fine? We “distributed”
her ashes in the garden.
I will join her there,
maybe. For now there’s dad,
weeping in a restaurant they liked,
and Stan, missing his father. Grief
cuts, it doesn’t stop, having
so many knives.
10 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Doing the Clam
Glen Armstrong
Clamshell is the new black,
clam meat the new indecent exposure,
“clam up” the old demand for silence
in gangster films.
Every little ticking almost
sounds like thunder sitting naked
and alone in a dark room.
“Clam down” could be the same
thing as “clam up”
or it may indicate
that the clam, like the diver,
is under the sea.
That particular flag
grows tattered,
never at rest
if it’s used at all.
Clam is ever down.
Clam is the ironic happy.
My body is clamshell,
the new accepted chic.
And happiness, I swear, does not need
human language.
11 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Spring Change as Mortal Lessons
Kari Bowles
The March thaw flashes cold and hot
over the mountains, their curves like a giant’s
knees and thighs, draped with frost, not
gone though melting. Time’s violence
is unyielding, if unequal:
bears and foxes come to bone,
the rock stays as a rock until
the unknown End, a great mute stone
no worse for wear against the ages.
The talking engines of our day
can only flow along their paths—pages
turning, empires declining—, the way
of springtime snow, a liquid quiver
and shivering, the spine of the river.
12 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Sphere Detail
13 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
P. Alex Caro
Breech Testing
Tyler Sheldon
Grandpa Bob at the top of the Rockies
built guns, hauled hexagon barrels
from the vice to thickest pine limbs
outside his cabin door, and tied them
tight with rope; let lighted matches
haul musket balls and powder into dirt,
prove his work was copacetic.
At his bench, he’d file edges smooth
like window glass then rough them
with that file, each barrel a child
not yet clean enough for school.
When he fixed a finished barrel
to that tree and lit it up,
the mountains rang like school bells
on the ragged edge of morning.
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White Man with Posters
Luis Lopez-Maldonado
Interrupted positions
Focus focus focus
Scrabble scramble together forever,
Listen! No judgment zone
Focus focus focus
They broke into his apartment
and fucked him fucked him fucked him,
bats rags guns left him with PTS
and a broken-down unconceivabledream
focus focus focus
would you sign my posters
I read them everynight
Its what keeps me alive
ASU students walking by
Focus focus focus
Eyes glued to posters and markers
A small gang of love
Parrots singing in trees
Writers eating brown-bag lunches
Poems threading in and out
Of books bags brains hearts,
Focus focus focus
I tried suicide in October
I re-live it everynight
These are posters #88 #89 #90
Parrots screaming in the trees
Empty brown-bag lunches
His heart starting to heal.
15 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
The Average American
Howie Good
The sky in autumn has the aura of a crime. Famished soldiers achieve absurd levels of
violence while ordering lunch at Mickey D’s. Found film footage, accompanied by
techno music, will not help you make sense of this. Every moment seems only distantly
connected to every other. The average American believes in reincarnation, hates hugs.
A cat with hands (and other human parts) is destined to tear itself apart. “Soon?” a
lonely man with a vague resemblance to a Christ figure asks. Sure, soon would be good.
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El Narco
17 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Marco Hernandez
Late Winter, the Dead of Night
Kari Bowles
Circling round and round in
the pool of a dreamscape,
crisp, keen and glittery as
a field of ice in February sun.
I’m hauled up to the
surface, breaking through
on a hook of sound,
to a bedroom, pale blue
from moon, in a
black house
and a breathless
baneful cry.
It echoes and echoes,
an Edith Piaf non,
through still space with
the long, long
oh of searching loneliness.
It could be my own primal cri de couer...
Or the moaning of the electric heater.
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Tennessee Valley
In memory of Kim,
daughter of Virginia Rogers
Luanne Castle
The dam was always there
in her mind, although she’d heard
stories of the forced flooding
the armoring of the riverbed
how habitats of fish and woman
were lost. Debris caught up
in the dam starves the river.
The dam itself feeds the river
through difficulties, building
a thoroughfare with lakes that
blue bordered by wooly forests
and filmy mountain-shapes
In this way the feeding had to
happen before the starving
that nourishes, the release and
flow under the great heron
its wingspan at full mast. The
waters calm, a fine moiré.
The dam was always there.
19 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Literary Loves
Kari Bowles
I was awakened, you could say, at a tender age
by Tarzan. There must have been something to
those sculpted muscles, and that G-string,
the flight through green primeval trees
and that high echoing cry of primordial victory.
Pick me up and carry me, I thought,
Jane will still be there on the ground.
And then I moved to France.
Cyrano dazzled with his rapier
but more so with his wit,
the two in a dance around
that little world of Rostand’s.
So what about the nose, I said,
breath caught, heart aflutter: if you
were my man Cyrano, it wouldn’t have mattered.
Oh I pleaded so, to Gilliatt, offered up by Hugo
as a spotless sacrifice. Through my dripping eyes
I envisioned the life we could’ve had, had I
been his love. In the stillness of evening, after
reading histories or poems, I’d listen to him
play the bagpipes as the dark eternal tide
splashed against the shore. I would look
to the sea, and say No, he belongs to me.
Then came the Russian, a hulking great bear
with glasses and an awkward streak. The cabinets
and china rattle and crash when he enters a room,
duels he fights culminate with slipping on snow.
Yet, from the constant striving comes a grace
I’d love to fall in with. The gun goes off, and we go
down and down, as I breathe Oh what now, Pierre?
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Dear Stepfather:
Vincent Francone
There’s magic in the glass
of port you pour each Christmas
due not to the grape or points
earned in that befuddling system
but in the obedience to whatever entity
first told you that one must pour port at Christmas.
You carved turkeys with skill,
fried my eggs in bacon fat,
and told me that it mattered not how many chords
one knows on the guitar,
or how fast the scales can be run through,
but that style was all
and not having any was offense.
I learned that Canada Geese mate for life
through an education your toil made possible
and saw their patterns nightly
when you played defender of my mother,
smartly navigated my adolescence
and elegantly dropped a hammer.
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Rust in Abstract
22 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Nigel Dawson
Studies in Classic American Literature
Howie Good
A hugely bearded man with a spiral notebook and a pencil lurked in a dark corner of
the bar the night that it rained, recording something truly weird. The teachers who
taught me, and the students I have taught, all of us were singing broken and blind like
the sea as a big white whale burned in the background. There were obvious questions
that remained unspoken. Who was the first person to take a selfie? What is soft dick
rock? Why does death ride a horse? As the story goes, Maurice Sendak couldn’t
convincingly draw wild horses, so he drew wild things. Still, I wouldn’t want to be
remembered 20 years from now as the doctor who botched Meg Ryan’s plastic surgery.
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The Secret History of Final Exams
Howie Good
More than one or two use the word “conscious” on their finals when they mean
“conscience.” The next time I look out the window and the next and the next a
neighbor’s cat is easing along the low rock wall with the dramatic slowness of a
tightrope walker. Any moment I expect a bell to become a cup to become a bird to
become a plane. I think what I say is justified just because it’s me saying it. Meanwhile,
the rest of America is busy testing the buoyancy of all sorts of stuff – big chandeliers,
thick-necked men with guns, celebrity sex tapes. The next time I look out the window
and the next and the next cannibals and psychos are vomiting in the mouths of the baby
birds.
24 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Sunday in the Newsroom
Ace Boggess
elsewhere photographers
seek out squirrels sunning
beside a brittle nut &
young men in hobo dress
strumming their gray guitars
along riverbanks
inside
the daily edition’s offices
slumber in spectral quiet
half-staffed
with editors lazily
prepping thin Monday pages
all silence almost silence
except fingers clacking
against the clerk’s keyboard
as he types another obituary
even the haggard columnist
jotting his opinions
writes in paragraphs of sighs
enough to fill a ten-inch slot
beneath another picture of a squirrel
25 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Li Bei in Heaven
Kenneth Pobo
Shit! he says walking on
a gold street with mansions.
This is no place for a poet.
How can it be heaven without
a hemlock blocking out the sun
while blocking in perfect quiet?
Li Bei says he died trying
to embrace beauty. That should
count for something in the afterlife,
at least a drink.
Give him a river bank and fireflies.
Surely that can be provided in a place
that gets rave reviews
for bliss. Angel Gabriel
says no one writes poems in Heaven.
With all mysteries solved, there’s no need.
He’s wrong. There’s always need,
great need, always.
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Frangipani
27 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Nigel Dawson
Albatross
for Nathaniel
Tyler Sheldon
How you can smell it
when an old friend of over ten
years begins a conversation
with the wrong sort of drug—
curly hair frizzed, eyes
like church glass. The dark ozone
of a man for whom birds
don’t whistle, they accuse.
Who tells you suddenly
by not taking your calls
that he has other things to do,
then falls out of rhythm
with himself, flies his roost
to circle the suspicious air,
waits for a safer place to land
than his own mind.
Certain birds wait years
to touch ground again
once lifting off, to feel safe
enough. Some touch down
then wake up to the wind
in their face, the water
wild like the mind
and far beneath their feet.
28 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Deposition
Andrew Kozma
I say I love and who can contradict?
It’s not as if the world sees my heart splayed
on a metal stand, the views that knives have made
held open by pins so everyone can predict
which way, and with what, my heart will flow. Some advice:
the reverse of all this is true. You stake your claim
and that feeling is yours, but try to scratch your name
from the deed and no one believes. Will this suffice?
Like a train that has jumped the tracks to bury
itself in a shallow ravine, the water that locks
itself in a cactus, the lava that cools into rocks,
the lightning that strains into the rod to carry
its heat into the ground and dissipate in despair,
I don’t love you. Ich habe keine Lust mehr.
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Lunch
Tyler Sheldon
We have
only two eggs left
in the refrigerator.
Tell me, are you in the mood
for egg sandwiches? Because
even though tomorrow
is grocery day, I could make
a quick run to the store,
pick up something better.
Maybe not just for lunch.
We could buy a tank of gas,
drive to the next town
or the next state, start
a new life where we have more
in the fridge than eggs, more
to look at than the dwindling
life we’ve wrenched every drop
of blood from, red and hot,
spicy almost, like Tabasco,
which you can put on more
than just eggs
and hey
we have only two eggs
left in the fridge
would you
like them
for
30 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Feral Houses
Lindsey Bartlett
Abandoned houses with gaping wounds,
in old wood. Doors hung loosely on
rusty hinges, a dangerous invitation
back in time.
These feral houses, full of stories.
Echoes of all those who laughed,
cried, died, and made memories.
Contained in walls of peeling wallpaper.
Every broken weather-worn piece a story.
More than just plaster, wood, and brick.
I often sit and wonder at
the stories contained within.
Feral houses of a bygone era.
crumbling more to dust.
And with the dust the echoes
of the lives it once contained.
31 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Twisted Mirrors
Kayla Dugan
You are unrecognizable.
Tore a picture apart,
glued it back together wrong.
Half your face is missing
and your heart is split in two
Eyes dark and cold,
ice that never melts.
Your voice dropped three octaves
and your silence overwhelms.
The truth and you have parted ways
paths that never cross,
twin and twine,
but can't combine
never to know how the story unwinds.
Tumbling and twisting,
trying not to break
brittle and clear,
warped and old,
carnival glass
all distorted.
Revealing all your lies
the world is exposed
to the real bloody you.
Tortured, gutted and empty
Hollow like the words that drip and
drop in spurts from dead lips.
32 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Voyeur
Vincent Francone
As a boy, I was told that God was omnipresent
watching my every endeavor,
to watch myself, guard against the impure
act or thought, it made no difference—
however small it may seem
nothing escapes the Supreme Being.
How to react to God the spy?
No mention of why exactly
he needed to know my activity
real or imagined, one and the same,
apparently both causes for shame.
How else to react? I placed out of sight
those thoughts I wanted to conceal
in my mind’s bottom drawer
and hid them from the omnipotent voyeur
unconcerned with how I feel
and how it felt to get up to
what I got up to at night,
which felt oh so good.
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Acolyte
34 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Ray Pesina
Wandawoowoo Wakes Up in Dali’s The Persistence Of Memory
Kenneth Pobo
The first time I fell
in love, my lover told me
we were solid.
We melted
a month later.
My dad told me he’d be there
for all time. Until
I crossed him. He melted too.
Death melts us. Hold on
If you like--each day
the flame turns up,
burns our feet.
The joke may be on Death.
It too will melt
once the sun gobbles
this gorgeous Earth,
a hot hors d’oeuvre,
the sun too on the clock,
even death’s shirt
catches fire,
the gates of Heaven
starting to simmer.
35 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Dr. Who and the Daleks
AARU Productions, 1965
Ace Boggess
a 70s kid I treasured the TV show on PBS
my generation’s Flash Gordon serial
with its curly-haired sci-fi Sherlock Holmes
wearing a rainbow infinity scarf
I didn’t know then that movies had been made
until I rented the first film online &
watched Peter Cushing
sans gravitas or the austerity of other roles
play this hipster slapstick
where it’s more Abbott & Costello
meet the rolling mutant cyborgs of doom &
as seconds ticked down before the neutron blast
I thought
maybe the villains should win
at least to add a bit more tension
a new approach fitting this millennium
in which airplanes fly into buildings &
the leader of the good guys
says comic-book words like ‘evildoer’
then sends his troops to invade the wrong country
oh
that notion passed because really the piein-the-face gag would be better
if our enemies laughed with us
while we hanged them by their necks until they’re dead
36 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Carmel
Kenneth Pobo
Venus Di Milo draws a crowd.
Full dressed, people call out for
her imitations of old Hollywood stars.
She does a killer Bette Davis.
Then again, many people there do.
The beach scene at the end of
Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?
gets reenacted as if it’s Valley Forge.
Venus smokes a terribly long cigarette,
takes questions, dashes back
into the sea, finds her shell, and drifts
into morning’s coral cave. Beach walkers
fall into various stages of sleep. Gulls
pull down a sky screen, show a new film
called Flap and Go, a tragedy
that makes all the waves cry.
37 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Uncrossing the Strait of Georgia
Luanne Castle
We crossed under windpowered sails
and flew with the cormorants,
the gulls and geese and goldeneyes.
You get the impression
of speed, world without
boundaries, hair blown into
damp mouths.
Our hair did blow onto tongues dry
from crisp wind.
The strait wound around
islands, followed by the floating city
conveying us
past thick forests teeming
with deer, then docks with small craft.
We spotted seals bobbing
and frogs blinking. When we left
Tsawwassen we were recognizable.
By Swartz Bay we were not.
On the island, we drifted for days
as if still ferried, as a sailor rocks
on land. Later we left
the only way we knew, past
frogs and docks
with hair plastering our cheeks
in the drizzle onboard the city
that moves, back to who we were.
38 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Vessel
39 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
P. Alex Caro
Vanishing Point
Glen Armstrong
I need to see the sidewalk whole again
and wet, unsettled but unbroken.
The eye’s addiction to dice and light
must be, at least for now, forgiven.
I need to see that something concrete leads
away. Beyond. Through and to
the faraway silences of paper cranes.
40 | T i n L u n c h b o x R e v i e w / V o l . 1 N o . 1
Go for the Gold
Ellen J. Perry
Dear Cover Girl people:
Instead of my usual go-to method for when I can’t sleep – listening to sad
country music, feeling sorry for myself, and wailing out the harmony line alongside
Patty or Trisha’s lead – I decided to write you a letter. Here’s the first thing I have to
say: “Easy, Breezy, Beautiful,” my ass. And the second thing is, I rarely bother to wear
eye shadow but I did tonight for my blind date, and your “Go for the Gold” product
didn’t deliver. So listen up, you need to hear the whole story.
What happened was, I breezed in easily at the appointed romantic Italian
restaurant – fashionably late – wearing a flowing black dress, dark red shoes, and a red
flower in my hair. I spotted my girlfriend Nora and her husband Sam hunched over in
the shadows at a corner table; they’d agreed to watch out for me in case my date, Patrick,
looked like a serial killer or made any sudden moves, or both. Nora gave me the
thumbs-up and I sat down at the bar, feeling pleased. “Beautiful!” Nora texted. Then
Sam’s message read, “I can’t see a thing in here it’s so dark. If something happens,
throw a candle at him or light a flare.”
Well, Cover Girl people, I didn’t think I would need a candle or a flare, thanks
to your product. My eyes were so big and bright they lit up the room. I batted my
lashes a little for practice and hoped the handsome bartender would be temporarily
blinded and then helplessly overcome by the way your glittery shadow enhanced my
gold-flecked eyes. I wanted him to swoon. Instead he barely looked up.
“What can I get you?”
“How about a mimosa?”
“With orange juice or cranberry?”
I thought about my acid reflux problem and decided on cranberry. It might be
bad form to pop a Nexium right in the middle of the first course.
Sipping my drink, I looked around for Patrick. No sign of him. His cousin
Gail, my dental hygienist friend, had been telling me about him for weeks and arranged
the date.
“Brenda, you’re going to like Patrick. He takes good care of his teeth, always
flosses. And, brace yourself for the best part: he irons his jeans.”
“Irons his jeans? What kind of person does that?”
“A reliable and tidy one! See, that indicates how he pays attention to the little
things. He wants to be neat. Unlike that last one you went out with, the scruffy-beard
guy.”
“That was Alex. I guess Patrick is clean-shaven.”
Gail nodded. “He goes to church regular, too.”
“Does he iron his church pants?”
“Lord, I don’t know. I guess so. The only reason I know about his jeans is
because his sister Sophie told me. She said he sometimes even puts pleats in them.”
“Pleats, God almighty. Sophie that works down at the florist?”
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“Yep, and she thought it was weird but I think you need somebody who irons
his jeans. No more of this other foolishness with men that are back-to-the-earth or in
a motorcycle gang or whatever Alex was.”
My phone bleated a little message alert, bringing me out of my thoughts about
ironed jeans and back to the situation at the restaurant. I looked down at Patrick’s text
and couldn’t believe it.
So sorry! Something has come up. Have to cancel.
“Another mimosa, please,” I said to the bartender and started gulping it down.
“Hey, you know the song ‘Here I Am’ that Patty Loveless sings? My favorite part is,
‘You know that you’re gonna find me if you keep on drinking fast, because honey I’m
right there waiting on you at the bottom of your glass.’ Come on, sing it with me.”
The bartender wiped down the counter and said, “I don’t know it.”
“Well, you don’t know much, then, if you don’t know Patty.” I stormed off
toward Nora and Sam’s table, fighting dizziness from the bubbly drink.
“Brenda, what happened?” Nora asked. “You look amazing!”
Feeling extra feisty, I was in the mood to take offense. I started to say, Yes,
Nora, behold your friend Brenda, transformed from her usual frumpy self to the dazzling cover
girl you see before you, but I let it go. After all, I knew that Nora was on my side. We
couldn’t figure what might have made Patrick back out. Maybe he couldn’t get his
pleats right. “All this work for nothing,” I told Nora instead, taking a pretty good
swallow of my second mimosa. “If I’d known it would be just the three of us, I’d have
slicked my hair back in a clip and put my glasses on. With no eye shadow. See, this is
‘Go for the Gold.’” I closed my eyes so Nora and Sam could take in the gilded glory.
Sam squinted. “This candlelight is limiting my vision. Well, as long as you
keep your eyes closed, I can see the glitter up on that top lid.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Nora said. “He doesn’t know how to appreciate a place
like this. His idea of a big night out is the drive-thru of the Steak-n-Shake. Where is
Patrick?”
“He canceled. Just now.” I felt tears coming but willed them away. I didn’t
want to ruin my make-up even though it was a lost cause. “I went for the gold and
came up empty.”
“Oh, no. I’m sorry. He’s probably still ironing his jeans. Well, let’s order an
appetizer and enjoy the ambiance together.”
I shook my head. “I think I’ll just head home. It’s pajamas and Netflix time.”
Nora and Sam went out with me toward my car but I told them I wanted to
walk for a bit. The mimosas had made me a little unsteady and I needed some air. My
friends hugged me, said they’d check on me later, and returned to their corner table to
pass the time. Looking in from the outside through the restaurant windows, seeing the
bustling movement of all the servers and bartenders and patrons, I was reminded of the
question Daisy asked in The Great Gatsby: “What’ll we do with ourselves this
afternoon, and the day after that, and the next thirty years?” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
character Jordan had an easy-breezy answer for Daisy’s frantic question, but I sure
don’t, and I guessed Patrick didn’t either.
It had been raining off and on all weekend in western North Carolina because
of a hurricane down at the coast. The lightning was ominous, but without a care I put
down my umbrella, took off my new red shoes, and walked barefoot along the sidewalk,
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slowly, in the slight drizzle and then the thunderstorm. I’m able to admit now I’ve
written this letter, Cover Girl people, that the fault is not yours, but it’s comforting to
blame someone else for life’s disappointments and thwarted plans.
A final thought for you, though, or maybe it’s for me: this evening I stopped
walking once I reached the gate of my old primary school playground and held my face
up to let the eye shadow and mascara wash down, down, dripping with the raindrops
on my neck and the front of my dress. I wondered if the gold and black rivulets would
make a permanent stain on the pavement and if someone with a sixth sense and a
yearning of the kind that might make a miracle would come by here a hundred years
from now and know that I walked tonight as an adult where I
played as a child, where I dreamed of love and flowing dresses and red high heels and
gold eye shadow that would always dazzle, surely, and never melt away with tears and
rain.
Sincerely,
Brenda
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No Greater Agony
Kathleen Skrzypczak
The words fled by night. Most of us didn’t realize it until morning showed up
and we couldn’t get a single word out of our mouths. We drank some coffee and tried
again, but there was nothing. Pure white newspapers waited for us on our doorsteps
and lawns. Televisions were silent movies, the internet just a bunch of captionless
cartoons and unidentified photos. Both went dead within twenty-four hours.
It was Like that started the whole business. Perhaps the most beleaguered of all
the words, Like had been in almost constant misuse since the Valley Girls appropriated
it as a space filler between vacuous observations. Later, as though Like didn’t have
enough to do, Facebook pimped it out as a substitute for real opinions, always with that
ridiculous thumbs up attached to it. Like had had enough.
In those first days, believing we were under terrorist attack, we cleaned out the
grocery stores and lined up at the gas pumps. We were drowning in milk and
suffocating in bread. There was anger. Frustrated in our muteness, we used fists and
elbows to make our desires known. Thoughts raced around our heads, knocking into
one another, then dissipating like ghosts of words we used to know.
Like rallied the adverbs first. They had been disgruntled ever since Stephen
King declared war on them. When that happened, they had tried to leave on their own,
but without the support of verbs it was impossible to do anything. To prove their point,
the verbs rebuked the adverbs. We don’t need you or any other part of speech, they
roared. Holophrasm: look it up.
Gradually, we calmed down. Life continued, semi-normal, depressingly quiet.
Even the animals went silent. I guess they really had been saying something. There
were no shortages as we had initially feared. As it turned out, without all the mindless
chatter distracting us, we were able to accomplish quite a bit more. We gardened and
raised chickens, canned jam and baked bread.
Like went after the adjectives next. Stressed by the anger of one-star Amazon
reviews and YouTube hate, they could barely get out of bed every day. They didn’t
always hate their job. Sure, around election time it could get pretty hairy, but now it
seemed there was only constant negativity. The adjectives dreamed of the sublime but
instead ended up in vitriolic diatribes against little girls doing Taylor Swift
impersonations. They wanted to say beautiful things but no one would let them.
We found ways to communicate, spending much of our energy on participating
in the world’s biggest game of charades. Most of the wars petered out. With no way
to receive orders, the ranks became confused and fell apart. Soldiers gave up and went
home. This upset the world leaders who could only stomp their feet and shake their
fists like toddlers before naptime.
Soon after the adjectives joined, the verbs signed on, and the movement was
thrust into motion. Collectively, they herded up the nouns like sheep, packed up their
tenses, and left.
Now through all of this, in the we there is a one. I am the one and I have a
problem. I am in love with my best friend, Evan. We’ve been in the friend zone for
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three years. Old story: we hop in and out of relationships, completely out of sync. I
went to bed the night the words left, tortured and tangled more than usual. Evan and
I had devised a ditch work day together and I was planning on telling him over a picnic
basket of southern fried chicken and a thermos of liquid courage. You know, rip the
bandage off, just get it out there. Then I woke up and couldn’t speak. Could I sign it?
Technically yes, but. We say I love you all the time. Just the way you tell family and
friends. Thinking about it, I would assume Love is very happy being away from us all.
We squandered its power on cars, truffled risotto, movies, rock stars, couches, other
people’s hair, Subaru commercials. What weight could it possibly have to charade it to
Evan? He would only sign it back, a reflex. What is it to make someone feel your
words? Not just convey information but to reach right in to the solar plexus and
resculpt their interior landscape to include a perfectly molded space for you? I never
understood when people said their hearts were in their stomachs. Not until he looked
at me, into me, and I felt the drop of my heart and the acid engulfing it and its beating
faster to try to escape the roiling mess. We never had that picnic. I haven’t seen him
since that day.
I wonder if they think of us, the words. If they remember it wasn’t all bad. We
wrote lovely poems and songs with them. Yes, even the music is gone because notes
are names and names are words. We soothed our children with them and cheered each
other up. We shared encouraging memes with abandon. Sometimes we said love and
meant it.
My dog comes to me and lays his chin on my knee. I ruffle his ears. He licks
my face, retrieves his leash, wags his tail. Canine charades. On our walk, we pass the
library and I tug him toward it. I tie him up and slip inside. Rows and rows of blank
books line the walls. I inhale the scent of story and emotion the next generation of
humans may never know. I’m about to leave when I hear a sigh. Deep in the back of
the room, I can make out a shape. As I near and my eyes adjust to the low light of the
banker’s lamp, I see. Empathy sits at a long wooden table, head resting on one hand.
It acknowledges me, gestures for me to sit down. It doesn’t speak, but somehow I hear
words in my head.
It’s all wrong, it says, waits for an answer.
I stare.
Oh yes, it says. I feel for you all, you know. It chuckles at its own joke. I’ve
been trying to get them to come back. It’s just awful, you know? Not having any work,
no purpose, no context.
I shrug. Empathy continues.
And Sympathy, my fraternal twin, is the worst. It was bad before, living in its
shadow, the vast majority of people not understanding the difference between us. But
now I’m almost invisible. Also, words uncontained are very LOUD. Peace has gone
catatonic. It just sits on the ground and stares.
I turn for a moment to check on my dog, when I turn back, Empathy is gone.
We continue our walk. Some things are still pleasant without words. We turn
the corner and there is Evan, sitting on my stoop. I’m elated, elevated, enervated. The
words swirl around inside me, turning on lights and lamps and lighting candles until
my eyes burn. He stands, takes my hand, knits our fingers together. I see
incandescence in his eyes, as well. He kisses me and I kiss him back. We can still do
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this. We can still be. Maybe we don’t need words for everything. Maya Angelou said,
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.” But I now
think, perhaps, in the telling, in the saying, there is impurity. We tinge and tarnish
and weigh down. In the silence, the words have taught us the perils of our addiction to
them.
Will they come back? I hope so. I’m not sure it’s possible to be human without
having a story. We already have our stories. They are written inside of us, on our skin
and in our hair. That won’t help the next generations. Love stories are delightful, but
even a tragedy is a story worth telling.
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Rot III
Kirsten
Robinson
This decay in my
soul has a dark
loveliness.
Discordant melody
leading to resolve.
For without the rot
there cannot be
redemption.
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Skin of White Down
Kari Bowles
The brothers had lived in a small cabin by the bay all their lives. It was all they
had known, from the time their parents died to the time of their manhood. As many
people who lived in the village did, they had a fishing boat that was taken out every
day, whether the sun shone and made the waters sparkle or the wind and rain made the
sky blacken into obscurity. Some days the nets would be filled with trout or carp, other
days the boat returned to shore with only a handful of crawdads. It all came down to
the caprice or generosity of the natural forces on one day or another.
The older brother was the one who took the boat and its nets out onto the water.
He was a stout and thick man, strength manifested in his iron-hard arms and in his
wide back. He had a rusty red beard that covered his chin and worked its way down his
neck, and though his eyes were bright green they always seemed dark due to customary
foulness of temper. He was known in the village as Brick, and it was common
knowledge that he drove a hard bargain over the selling of a catch.
The younger brother was known as Strap. He was taller and would have been
even stronger, if it hadn’t been for an accident with a wagon that had crushed his left
leg when he was a child; the leg hung by his body like a shrunken root forever after. So
it was that he remained on shore when Brick went out onto the water. He kept the cabin
as clean as he could and was always the one to prepare their meals and clean the catch
of the day, if there was one. His hair was rusty red as well, but he had no beard, and his
eyes were as pale blue as the sky when it peeks through rain clouds. Brick was often
harsh to him, chiding that he had to do all the real man’s work because of his gimp
brother, but Strap never complained. In fact it was common for him to meet his
brother’s curses with an innocent smile. Strap had a reputation in the village for being
simpleminded, though that may not have been true. He could just as easily have been
very kind.
Brick had long been searching for a wife. A woman would be able to provide all
the things Strap accomplished and more, he said. He’d had considered some of the
single girls in the village, milkmaids or the tavern keeper’s daughter, but none of them
proved to his liking. There also weren’t any girls excited about the prospect of being
married off to the mean fisherman with a crippled brother either. So things seemed
destined to carry on for the brothers in the cabin by the bay as they always had. Until
the day the swans flew in.
It was a beautiful morning, with the water so calm it was a mirror of the sky
and the grasses that grew along the sandy shore a rich green. As Strap arranged the
nets, Brick settled his large oaken tackle box into its place at the bow of the boat. The
older brother looked out across the landscape with a grim eye.
“Hasn’t been much in the middle the past few days. I might try going to the far
end of the bay. Maybe a little beyond.”
“If that’s what it takes for a catch, that’s what it’ll take. Be safe and good luck”
Strap said as he patted the nets into place. Brick grunted and launched the boat, swiftly
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turning it about face with the oars and heading away from the shore with long pistonlike strokes. Strap waved goodbye, though he didn’t receive or expect a response.
The day passed quite ordinarily. Strap swept the cottage and washed the
porridge bowls and did his best to fix the squeak in the doorway. For a period of time
in the afternoon he sat on the bank and looked at the clouds in the sky, fascinated by
the different forms they took on—the one cloud a fish, the other a wheelbarrow, the
other an oddly shaped tree— and relishing the feeling of sunshine on his skin. It was
then he heard a call, a long mournful sounding call that came from far across the way.
In the distance a great flock of swans could be seen flying down from the sky, settling
down at the water somewhere far along the other side of the bay. The brilliant
whiteness of their wings stung the eye when the sun touched them. Strap felt a surge
of delight within his breast as he watched the birds descending from on high.
“Such beautiful creatures,” he said to himself. “What a blessing to see them
here!” There had long been stories told by the old village women about the swans, how
they possessed uncanny powers and were best left alone, otherwise terrible troubles
could befall the human being who meddled with them. Strap knew these stories, but
even so he wasn’t fearful when he saw the swans, as some villagers would be. It seemed
special to him, knowing that they were there on the lake he lived by and that they
arrived here for a brief window of time every spring. And that was all that was needed.
Evening approached and still Brick had not returned. Strap began cooking a pot
of porridge on the stove and set their pair of pewter bowls on the table so supper would
be ready. With a day as long as this, Brick would have an appetite and would best be
assuaged, especially if the fishing had been poor. He was standing there, stirring the
bubbling hot porridge, when the cabin door burst open.
“Get another bowl Strap! We got company!”
Strap turned around and saw Brick standing over the threshold, tackle box carried in
his left hand, his heavy fisherman’s coat draped over a girl at his right. Strap had
certainly never seen her in the village before, for he would have remembered her. She
was a thin thing, with long legs and long arms—though it was difficult to tell right now,
as she clutched them around herself—, pale as the full moon and nearly as bright. Her
hair, fair as her flesh, framed a finely wrought face and fell to a pair of incongruously
full breasts. She was naked under Brick’s coat and kept her gaze fixed somewhere far
away from where she stood.
“Don’t just stand there, halfwit! Get her a bowl!” Brick barked as he maneuvered
the girl over to a chair, dropping the tackle box near the door along the way.
Strap grabbed the pot of porridge and dished out servings in the bowls on the
table, offering the strange girl his own bowl and sitting the pot down before himself.
In the excitement Brick seemed to have forgotten they only had the two pewter bowls.
Indeed, Strap couldn’t remember anyone eating at the table with them since their
parents had been alive.
Brick dug into the porridge with abandon, gulping it down with large mouthfuls.
The girl stared at the food before her, watching the hot steam rising ghostlike from the
bowl, her expression somewhere between fascination and abject fright. Strap regarded
her in turn as he took a few bites of porridge, wanting to be a friendly host but unsure
about the best way to go about it.
“Are you traveling someplace?” he eventually asked.
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The girl lifted her gaze from the porridge and looked at Strap full on, her eyes a
shade of brown so dark they were nearly black. She opened her mouth slightly but said
nothing. It was Brick who answered, a peculiar guffaw halting the progress of his
eating.
“What’s it matter where she may or may not have been going? She’s here and
she’s here to stay!” Though the fire in the stove had warmed the cabin thoroughly,
Strap somehow felt cold and shivery. Nothing more was said during supper. The pale
girl with dark eyes never touched the porridge, even when the steam disappeared and
it became a gelid mold.
For three days after bringing the strange girl in Brick remained onshore,
determined to settle her into a pattern of domesticity. She was fit into an old dress Strap
procured from the village dressmaker; Strap made a concerted effort to bring back a
dress that would fit, but even so her movements were constrained, as if it were a weight
that needed dropping. The shoes that were brought for her to try on fared no better; she
kicked them off and went about barefoot after no more than a few steps. Brick was
unfazed.
“Doesn’t matter if she wears shoes or not. She can do what she needs to do
without them.”
What she needed to do, to Brick’s way of thinking, extended to the chores Strap
had long been saddled with and which he now endeavored to teach the strange girl.
Strap brought her over to the stove and tried to show her how to cook porridge; the
farthest they could get was her clutching the ladle in one of her pale unwieldy hands as
the porridge began to boil over. Strap attempted to teach her how to darn; she lost the
first needle he handed to her and pricked herself with the second one, several cherry
droplets patterning the floor and the practice rag before her. The closest they came to
success was with sweeping the floor. The girl clung to the broom with a firm grip and
fell into a series of energetic dancer-like swoops and turns with it. This would’ve been
fine, except the dust and dirt were sent up into the air in thick clouds instead of into
piles and out the door. Keeping her attention was also difficult when they stepped
outside the cabin to sweep the threshold. The girl kept looking to the sky, looking and
looking with her dark eyes. Strap asked her if she saw something, but she gave only a
faint shake of the head and remained fixated on the distant blue.
All throughout the botched lessons Brick hovered in the background behind
them, maintaining a surprising degree of patience with the girl’s progress, or lack
thereof. Once on the second day Strap left the girl alone for a few moments outside,
gazing as she was at the sky, and approached Brick.
“I think we should let her go on. She isn’t happy here.”
Brick’s green eyes flashed and he cuffed Strap alongside the head. “What do you
know about anything? She’ll get trained as time goes by, even if she has to pick things
up from you. She’s not going anywhere. She’s mine.”
Strap stepped to the other end of the cabin, caressing his head. He looked at the
girl, still outside with her dark melancholy eyes fixed on the sky, and felt a constriction
in the back of his throat that couldn’t be suppressed. Brick had moved out beside the
girl and was stroking her back with his red bristly hand, toying with the ends of her
pale hair, moving along the worn dress as if to pluck it off like the shell from a nut. He
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bent close to her ear, whispering things Strap couldn’t hear. Though the girl didn’t
move away, she was no more responsive than a sapling tree.
The three nights of her stay the girl had been given Strap’s bed to sleep in,
though how much she did was impossible to tell, so stern and silent was she awake or
in repose. Strap made do with a rolled up coat on the floor. Even in the dying firelight
he was able to make out Brick regarding the girl from across the cabin, lips subtly
pulsing with appetite. The third night after supper Brick announced that this would be
Strap’s last night on the floor, since she would be sleeping with him starting tomorrow
night. Strap hadn’t found the floor a comfortable place, but the thought that getting his
bed back would mean the girl with his brother filled him with a bottomless dark
coldness. He didn’t sleep at all that night, but looked to the woodwork of the ceiling,
tracing out patterns in the grooves and knots.
At last night fell away to the indistinct greyness of early dawn. Strap got up
from the floor and walked out of the cabin. A thin mist lay over the land and the water,
the air saturated with the impressionability that precedes the arrival of a new day. Strap
took hold of both of his elbows and rocked back on his good heel. What would be done
to the strange girl sickened him. It couldn’t be allowed to happen.
A thought occurred to him then, one that frightened him even as it arose from
his mind. He knew he stood no chance in a fight against his able-bodied brother. There
were a few knives kept in the tackle box, always ready for scaling and gutting fish.
While Brick slept might be the only opportunity to set the girl free. Strap went back
into the cabin slowly and went over to the tackle box. He hesitated in undoing the
clasps. What he meant to do was an evil thing. But he thought of the strange girl, forced
into his brother’s bed. With a deep slow breath and anguished resolution, Strap opened
the tackle box.
Instead of the haphazard assortment of fishing knives and hooks and line, his
eyes met a patch of startling whiteness. Even in the brown darkness of the cabin his
eyes smarted. As he reached down to touch it with tentative fingertips, he discovered
it was soft. Soft as thistledown, more inviting than a pillow after a day of sweating
work. He took ahold of it, and as he lifted it out from the tackle box he realized there
was more than he’d thought; he stood there holding a long downy mass, shapeless in
his overwhelmed arms. He stepped back outside across the threshold with his load, his
curiosity tinged with something akin to mortal terror.
Strap turned the thing over and over in his hands, and as he did he noticed the
vaguest outlines of what could have been a pair of huge wings, the length of the primary
feathers tapering down to the tufts of the smaller ones as they attached to what must
be the rest of the body. There also appeared to be a long rope-like extension of
downiness that would’ve been a neck had there been bone and meat for it to support
itself on. It was this thought that awakened Strap to the truth; he began to quail beneath
the skin of white down, but was loath to drop it out of fear of further desecration.
He turned around, pivoting on his good leg. He intended to rush inside, to wake
her, to give back what had been taken. But he didn’t have to; she was already at the door
behind him. She stood at the threshold, her dark eyes riveted to what Strap held in his
arms, offering to her in a gesture of mute supplication. It was a scant ripple of time
where she was still before him, before she snatched back the feathery skin, yet the
perceptions in that briefness remained vivid in Strap’s memory for all of the rest of his
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life. How her dark eyes seemed in a strange way to brighten; the sculpted fineness of
the poised hands before springing into action; how the faded dress that she had spent
the night in seemed to be falling away even before she tore it off. And how the lips
curved in a subtle upward motion in the closest she came to a smile during the whole
of their acquaintance.
Everything following that radiant stillness happened with the speed of striking
lightning. The girl took the skin of down and slid her naked flesh into it as though it
were a stocking. It seemed to swallow her up, what had been airy vacancy becoming
flesh and bone, a long dancing neck and a pair of wings, beating down against the earth
in a staccato rhythm. It must have been then that Brick, awakened by the commotion,
charged out of the cabin, emitting a cry of rage and loss. He flung himself at the newly
fleshed out swan, grasping at her feet; the mighty wings and beak struck him back.
Strap, not sure later how he managed to, pulled his brother back from his prey and
struck him full on across his bearded face. It was the only act of deliberate violence
Strap had ever committed, but it wasn’t enough; Brick snatched a stone from the ground
and bashed his younger brother’s head in. Strap’s last sight before darkness overtook
him was of Brick clutching at the swan as the bird prepared to take flight.
Strap awoke in the heat of the late morning sun. He moved to standing with
pained deliberate motions. A smearing of blood stuck one eye closed; he wiped at it
with a reflexive gesture, the throbbing of his head subsiding enough to allow a survey
of the space around him. His brother and the swan were gone; the earth was rent with
signs of fierce struggle that carried on into a trail down along the edge of the water, due
west. Though encumbered by the pain in his head and his useless left leg, Strap followed
the tracks. How far they had gone and what he would do when he met up with Brick
again seemed irrelevant right now. What mattered was finding out if the swan girl had
escaped. He trudged along, the erratic tracks inevitably fading the farther he progressed
beside the shoreline.
The trail vanished completely when he came to a patch of reeds, the tall dark
kind that flourish beside sandy ground. Strap approached, parting them with his hands.
The prone form of what had once been Brick lay face down in the shallow water. Strap
stepped closer, turning the body over with a careful motion. The face was mashed and
unrecognizable, the color of a ripe plum, as were the arms and chest. The neck had been
broken, placing the head at an unnatural dangling angle. The hairy red hands were
locked in an empty grasp, feathery slivers discernable beneath the fingernails. Strap
regarded his brother’s body, wondering if the sorrow he felt was for Brick’s passing or
the cruel selfishness that led to it.
Strap closed his eyes and sat down on the bank, weary from all that had
transpired. For a time, it was quiet, the only sounds to be heard the breeze rustling the
reeds and the faint perpetual lapping of water against the bank. But at some point he
became aware of another sound. A mournful trumpeting birdsong, faint and high. But
the calls seemed to be coming closer and closer to the earth, to him. Fearfully and slow,
Strap opened his eyes.
Circling above him, at a height not much greater than the roof of the cabin, were
dozens of swans. The beating of their wings stirred the dust on ground; it felt as though
he would be blown away like a piece of bark, like so much chaff. Or they might swoop
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upon him with their poniard beaks, cutting his flesh to shreds. Strap set his hands upon
the ground and bowed his head, the deafening vibration of the swans’ voices, mingled
with the motion of their wings, sweeping over the whole of his prostrate body. He
flinched beneath grazings from wingtips and beaks as if they came from razors. The
best he could do, if death was coming, was to receive it with humility.
But death did not come. He wasn’t overtaken by darkness like when Brick struck
him down. It seemed instead a strange and new fullness was being granted to his body,
as though that which had been empty was now being filled. Then, as inexplicably as
the great white birds had come upon him, they were gone, the trumpeting calls fading
away as the air around him stilled again. Strap breathed with the ragged breath of one
who has scraped alongside the abyss; it might have been a few minutes or nearly an
hour, it was impossible to say. What could be said was that when he finally stood it
was with two whole legs.
Strap lived out the remainder of his long life in the cabin by the bay. He took
the boat out to fish every day and shared his catch whenever it was plentiful. It was
common for other villagers to turn their eyes askance when they saw him walking by
on two strong legs after a lifetime as a cripple, but Strap paid no mind to their fear of
change wrought by magic. He would always smile and be kind, though it was a kindness
mixed with quiet sorrow, the sort of sorrow only those who have encountered uncanny
enchantment can understand. He never did marry, or seek out the company of women.
As the swan girl never entirely ceased to visit his dreams, he didn’t feel he could, not
honestly and completely, as he would’ve wanted.
There was only one time of year he didn’t go out onto the water, and that was
when the swans came to the bay. For three days or so Strap remained on shore, standing
or reclined upon the grass, watching the sky for the coming and leaving of the uncanny
white birds. An observer to the scene, had there been one, would’ve noted how his
expression had the same quality of a day when it rains in sunlight.
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Antonym
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Ray Pesina
Strong Waters
by Vincent Francone
Were one to follow my Facebook shenanigans, they might come to the
conclusion that I like to drink. And they’d be right. That being the case, I am
not a drunk, just a drinker— a fine thing to be so long as the word “moderation”
is well within one’s lexicon.
I am not in denial. I know some real drunks, sad bastards who can’t face
noon sober. And I love many of them dearly, but I also know that being around
them means sacrificing a lot of my will to their need all while displaying a
herculean level of patience.
In high school, when I first tasted alcohol, I had the option of becoming a
pot smoker in addition to the beer drinker I was trying to be. My friends would
score weed from the dealers of Damen Avenue while I was dropped off around
the corner to procure a six-pack of Old Style. The first time I bought liquor, I
was somewhere in the vicinity of eighteen years old. I was convinced the store
wasn’t going to sell it to me, even though the word around my high school was
that this store sold to anyone. I nervously shuffled to the counter, sixer in hand,
and waited for the man behind the Plexiglas to tell me he was calling the cops.
Ahead of me were two girls not a day over fifteen each. They dropped handfuls
of bubble gum on the counter and, when the clerk asked if there’d be anything
else, asked for a pint of Southern Comfort and two Styrofoam cups. He
complied. I knew I was golden.
When my pals picked me up, they discovered that the bag they’d just paid
for was not really marijuana but some odd mix of tree leaves and oregano.
Obviously pissed, they briefly discussed what to do, realizing that none of them
had the stupid guts to go back to Damen and find the dealer who’d ripped them
off, a guy whose physique one of them described as “prison sculpted.” I cracked
a can of beer and joyously sipped.
“Can I get one of those,” asked a pal who’d that very afternoon teased me
for being too scared to smoke pot and belittled my choice of beer by labeling me,
“wuss.”
“You made your choice,” I said.
It was then that I swore my allegiance to alcohol. The shady store
notwithstanding, I wasn’t old enough to buy liquor, but I would be soon. I would
be able to walk into a store, place a bottle on the counter, drop some bills and be
on my way, hassle free and confident in what I was buying. If I opened a can of
beer and discovered some jerk had replaced it with apple juice, I could write a
letter of complaint, report the actions to the Better Business Bureau, or demand
a refund. Drug dealers weren’t big on refunds. And the prospect of scoring
always seemed, and still seems, a headache. Stick with what’s legal. You can
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trust a goddamn beer.
I have nothing against marijuana users, save for the fact that they often
stink like a skunk’s asshole. But their drug lacks the romanticism of alcohol,
especially spirits. I am sure my pothead friends fancied themselves little John
Lennons much the way I thought I was Jim Morrison the day I woke up on a
couch the night after a party, stumbled to the fridge and had myself a beer. I
even recited the next line of “Roadhouse Blues” about the uncertain future and
the end being near, though what did I know? That’s the thing about Jim
Morrison: he appeals to the young because he is the eternal dumb teenager.
Alright, alright, alright.
2
Since those wonderful days known as the 1980s, I have moved on from
beer to whiskey. This is not to say that I stopped drinking beer altogether, but I
have become one of those fancy drinkers who won’t go near a Bud or a Miller or
a PBR, who will only sip Guinness or Samuel Smith or Bass Ale or something
that actually tastes good. Life’s too short for shit beer. But beer is filling.
Drinking spirits seems a better idea.
My road to whiskey has been rocky. I first tasted it on a camping trip the
year I graduated high school. My friends and I were playing cards, sipping Jack
Daniels, and eating steak cooked badly over an open fire. The whiskey burned
as it went down, but I welcomed the warmth it brought. It had rained the entire
weekend and most everything I had with me was cold and damp. The Jack was
medicine. Choke it down, eat a bite of burnt meat, choke more down, look at
your cards—aw, shit. What am I doing? I can’t remember if a straight beats
three of a kind. It’s dark and wet and my head is fuzzy. And then—vomit. All
over the ground. All over my shoes. Defeated, I stumbled to the car and slept
in the backseat, later waking to the sound of a friend screaming that he’d stepped
in my pile of sick.
It stands to reason that I avoided whiskey after that, but only long enough
to realize that I dislike most other hard liquors. I dabbled in vodka, which
seemed better for the system. It turns out that is not the case. Vodka makes me
stupid and loud. Whiskey, I would soon find out, makes me mellow. That is,
when consumed in moderate doses. It was a coworker, Travis, who introduced
me to scotch. The Scots, I quickly realized, dropped the e, distinguishing theirs
as a different kind of whisky. And scotch is quite different: peaty, conjuring
brine and fire, an acquired taste. The camping experience still in my memory, I
decided to take it slow. Small sips. Swirl a little like fancy people do in the
movies. Watch the legs cling to the glass. Sniff it. Why not—wasn’t that part
of the experience?
A few affectations later, I was sold. It had a more complex taste than
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vodka, which reminded me of rubbing alcohol. There was something comforting
in the warmth of scotch, though it was necessary to temper the burn with some
ice. Travis and I were not high school kids sneaking beers or swallowing as
much SoCo as we could before the cops saw us. We were adults having a laid
back drink. This felt mature.
Of course, this is nonsense. I was, despite the scotch-induced illusion, by
no means mature. I was still a young man and young men are often quite idiotic.
My friends— the before mentioned Travis and our pal Mike—and I acted like
fools with a few glasses of scotch under our belts. We were loud, sometimes to
the point where bartenders asked us to vacate the premises. And when we were
not being obnoxious with our volume, we were pretentious in our conversation,
rhapsodizing on jazz, literature, and philosophy in the bullshit manner of youth.
That is, I was doing the bullshitting—Travis was philosophy student of the year
at our school and Mike was a trained saxophonist. I was a dropout and a dreamer
who knew very little, despite proclamations to the contrary. But I knew one
thing: I felt infinitely more confident after a few glasses of the brown stuff.
This was all happening in the early part of 1996, the events of which I
wrote about in my memoir. Having spent a lot of time recollecting those not
quite halcyon days, I took solace in memories of that summer, a time when—up
until now—I was drinking the most whiskey (as in bourbon) and whisky (as in
scotch). Long nights playing poker or Trivial Pursuit were always occasions for
strong waters and more than a few bad jokes. The bad mornings followed, and
lest you think I’m overly romanticizing my wayward past, know that I
remember hangovers with remarkable clarity. Nothing like misery to reform a
sinner, albeit temporarily.
3
I stopped drinking whiskey in the late 1990s, a rotten era when I ought to
have been consistently drunk. I picked it up again from time to time, once during
a night that resulted in painful embarrassment. I took a job at a law firm where
the support staff liked to go out on Fridays and knock a few back. I tagged along
and ordered three rounds despite having forgotten my money at home. I
apologized and promised my new coworkers that drinks were on me the
following Friday. The next week, I somehow slipped into the old habit of
drinking double bourbons as if the glass were actually filled with iced tea. Five
rounds in, I could hear myself slurring words. A female coworker was babbling
to me about her ugly ambitions and I nodded my head and opened my mouth in
an effort to interject something clever, but only garbled nonsense emerged. Soon
I knew that a lot more than that was about to come out of my mouth. I stumbled
to the bathroom and threw up the bourbon and the Chinese food I’d eaten for
lunch.
“Are you okay,” someone asked when I returned to the table. This is what
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people often ask the obviously intoxicated, a dumb question with which the
drunk will inevitably match with a dumb response: “I’m fine.” But I was far
from fine. I got up, made it to the toilet and got sick again. And then again.
And once more with feeling.
A coworker took pity on me and agreed to drive me home. While walking
to his car, I vomited in a garbage can on the corner of LaSalle and Randolph. The
women we’d been drinking with ran away in horror.
Worst of all, I never paid the bill. One of the lawyers picked it up, a fact
that was not forgotten by anyone at the office.
This is the sort of drinking story one shares not so much to brag, as there’s
little to brag about, but as a means of reflection. What was I doing that night?
I was drinking like I used to when I was a younger man. And I had no reason to
be doing that. I was out of practice, circling back to times when I could abuse
my body and recover after some coffee, water, and greasy fried food. That is not
the case anymore. I don’t get hangovers often because I rarely drink to excess,
preferring a few fingers of Irish whiskey before bed, a treat after a long day of
discharging responsibilities. That evening of wretched indulgence, when those
women ran away from me as I deposited my guts in a disgusting garbage can, I
learned the lesson that I assume most of us learn as we enter our thirties: we’re
not kids anymore. Time to grow the hell up.
And I did, eventually, sort of—I’m not sure. Deep into my forties, I can
claim to be an adult with a real adult job and real adult problems. But one glass
of Tullamore Dew is enough to remind me of the boy I was and, in many ways,
am still, a boy who plays at being a man. And men drink brown liquors.
4
These days, I like to have a customary nightcap that can quickly triple or
quadruple if the mood is right. In the mornings after, I wake with a dull ache in
my head and the sharpest regret imaginable.
Truth be told, I am good at saying “when.” I don’t go overboard unless
there’s a good reason, though that necessary good reason is easy to manufacture.
While on vacation last month, I opted to create a breakfast drink out of
grapefruit juice and Jameson Whiskey, two things I enjoy separately. Why not
put them together? This drink probably exists in some bartender’s guide, and it
surely has a name cleverer than the one I came up with: The Healthy Catholic.
Nevertheless, I was thrilled at the combination and drank a few before going out
with my wife for a ten-mile walk through San Francisco. I wasn’t anywhere
close to drunk, but the realization that, had we opted to stay in the hotel a bit
longer, I could’ve effortlessly imbibed three more Healthy Catholics was enough
to bother me. It’s too easy to find an excuse to drink. I was on vacation—that
was my good reason. Let go of restraint. Have some fun. Get drunk in the
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morning. Eat a lot of bad food. Spend money. This is what we’re supposed to
do when vacationing, right? Of course, this does not work well considering the
way my wife and I travel. (I mentioned the ten-mile walk, didn’t I?) Needless
to say, my cloudy head didn’t aid in a walk through steep streets in the pouring
rain.
Other good reasons to drink too much:
Birthdays
Funerals
Births
Good news
Bad news
Break ups
Weddings
A long day of work finished
A long day of work ahead
Stubbed a toe
Ennui
Can’t sleep
Need to manufacture bravery
Just watched the news and oh my god
It rained
It’s too sunny
Inadequacy
Just won a chess match
Just finished a crossword puzzle
Can’t write
Of course, one thinks of the famous line by Hemingway: “I drink to make
others more interesting.” This is perhaps the best good reason to drink I can
think of. No wonder bars are open to the public.
5
Three is a good number. A magic number, according to Schoolhouse Rock.
Three drinks is a sensible amount for a quiet evening. Enough to functionally
walk home without too many eyes on you. Enough to feel loose without uttering
too many regrettable statements.
In his delightful book Killoyle, Roger Boylan has a female character note
that the men in her life are fine until after the third pint. Then they cross over
from shy and considerate to sloppy and tiresome. I keep this in mind lately, as
three is my self-imposed limit, despite knowing full well that five wouldn’t
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corrupt me too much, six could be fun, and seven might be pushing it but we
can’t play it safe all the time.
I’ve written this essay under the influence of three glasses of Tullamore
Dew and a water back. That’s the secret: for every two whiskies, drink a glass
of water. A friend of mine didn’t know this and tried to keep up with me one
night. He washed Jack Daniels down with beer, doubling up in an ill-advised
fashion. I opted for H2O and was more or less fine when the evening wound
down. The next day, a Monday, he emailed me six times from his office
chastising me for getting him so drunk.
“I just puked in the bathroom! My boss heard!”
If only he’d heeded my example. I smiled, closed my email, and went for
an agreeable lunch of soup and half a sandwich, feeling as good and whole as the
summer sky.
6
I’ve opted to spend these last few hours drinking and writing this essay
on drinking, because writers are often fond of strong waters and I am trying to
be a writer. In that sense, drinking, for me, is as much an affectation as writing
while drinking. And I’m listening to John Coltrane. Only a manual typewriter
could make this scene more affected.
There is another saying that has been attributed to Hemingway, though
it’s likely not one of his bon mots: “Write drunk; edit sober.” I tried that once
and it worked well enough, but I always know that both writing and editing
while hung-over is the biggest challenge. I prefer to write sober and celebrate
drunk, making the three or five or seven glasses of whiskey a reward rather than
a requisite part of the process. Needing to drink denotes a problem. For what
will happen when I have to give up the golden soma? Will I be able to write
without it? Can’t risk the possibility that I’ll have nothing to say, so I’d better
write with a cup of strong tea in front of me. And the jazz music, sure—why
not? And if I can get through a page or two of decent prose, or if a line of poetry
is produced that doesn’t completely embarrass me, then by all means the whiskey
has been earned.
Today I did it backwards: I drank first. It now seems doubtful that I
earned those whiskies retroactively. Better make some tea and try again.
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Dreamer
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Ray Pesina
Pablo-esque
for Paul Algueseva III
Philip Kobylarz
Logically, one is led to Pablo. It is because he is the wellsource, that is, in the
fishbowl of hungry artists. He came from San Antone, was a mixture of Spanish
cowboy, Amerindian, and wide-eyed optimistic American labeled as Hispanic. It was
more than possible that his roots, especially his spiritual roots, came from FrancoSpaniard cowboys of the Camargue region of southern France. He painted his portrait,
many times, in charcoal and pastel too, as just such a figure.
He bled sweat when he worked and worked his ass off. Ten to twelve hour days.
He traveled the country in art shows, always eager to meet those rare, usually doctors
and lawyers these days, few folks who had a taste for private collections of art. A black
book the size of a bible he kept with him at all times holding the names and address of
galleries (big time) in New York, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Phoenix, that had
bought or at one time displayed his sculptures. He made big things.
A Gulf stream mermaid, harlequins in mocking positions, nudes of men and
women he knew. He wasn't notorious for sleeping with his models, and he kept these
secretive narratives within the fields of his compositions. Many early paintings in the
realistic mode, but with Southwestern colors, vibrancy. Most of his female nudes tilted
their heads away from the viewer, anonymous, known only by physical characteristics,
the contours of their bodies.
Still lives of boxes of razor blades, collections of burnt candle stubs, shelves of
acrylics; never landscapes, or exteriorizations of anything other than the reflecting tain
of his mind.
He was committed to living out a long tenure of his life at the Gallery. He had
invested thirty thousand dollars into bronze, made all that metal into sculptures, had
sold half of them, and at least a quarter had interested collectors enough for Pablo to
gain their following, if not a promise to buy. The catch to this seemingly success story
lies within his talents. Since he was the most useful and skilled among the artists, the
Gallery needed his abilities to finish its contracts with the real world. Most of the
clientele would by habit ask for Pablo to head and supervise their projects and this,
though a great compliment, left him no time to complete his own work. He became the
afterhours jockey, even more so than Rex. He became that lonely guy in the desolate
scenes of Hopper's paintings– all that was needed was a late drive by the Gallery, on
any night, and there'd be a few light bulbs burning, and the solitary music of Pablo
hammering away at his craft.
Half of his life was an interminable road movie. He had a used U-haul trailer,
painted green and completely street-legal that could be attached to his car, which, to
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mention in passing, wasn't quite travel ready. The car's gas tank was kept together with
plaster of Paris and the muffler was wired on with coat hangers. With these two
moveable contraptions he toured the immediate country: Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio,
Minnesota, Colorado (not through the mountains), Okie-lahoma, Nebraska, visiting
art and craft shows that were glad to accept an artist of his caliber.
Whatever works he could afford to bring with him and sell almost paid the fare
for these voyages, usually he'd get people interested in his works by presenting them
his catalogue raisonné, and they would or would not make good on their promise to
buy, later on. With this income, and the ten percent cut he got off finishing customers'
work at the Gallery, he grossed enough to survive and rent a little house within the
township of Winnsapeek, about a five-mile trek from the workplace.
In his two-story farmhouse, he had a wife and three boys, none of whom were
his by birth. The boys loved and respected him, tirelessly wanted to help him out at
work, and Pablo raised them to do well in school. He also had a crazy dog named Olley.
It would jump two feet into the air every time it saw someone it recognized.
His wife was a mystery.
His life was a daily grind. The beer of weekends and too much t.v. helped pass
the time. Sure, there were excursions into the country, but this country was like western
Texas, the hills wound with trees, deadly hot sticky nights in humidity and all night
jazz stations playing, gravel in the announcer's voice. Live music and bars, one local
establishment even had a velvet nude behind red curtains of the wall. But in this part
of the country there were rarely ever killings. A few stabbings. Drunken fights leading
to damage of broken chairs and tipped over beers, some broken glass.
Across Pablo's street in a little apartment built, or covered up thinly, to look like
one really big house, the secretary lived. She was a secretary of a lawyer. She wore tight
dresses, mostly always heels, which we all know murder the feet, died her hair a blond
that just barely looked real. He watched her often, not really though, innocently, some
would disagree, and he happened to notice her inordinately, maybe. Desire, he thought,
is such a tricky thing.
As with poppies, follies. He was as loyal as a saint, his art was blushingly rife
with religious, contemporary Judeo-Christian schlock, at least personalized in a way.
Beaming face, with beard, never crucified. He had had loves in the past, namely with
models, women and the occasional man of your or anyone else's dream.
In Osage, Missouri, the sales of a white plastic crucifix glued onto a cross section
of native oak: $6.99. This piece of art has kept a devout family of five in business for
thirty-four years. This same item at the Galley would be coated in wax, set on fire, a
photo of it taken, a lithographic plate made out of the photo, and the resulting image,
more so insignia, would be made in to a metal stamp trademark for a one-offed piece of
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heretical sculpture. This was the Gallery's modus operandi. Like what Stonehenge says
about clocks, orreries, astrolabes, sextons.
The state of art cultivation in the middle west was so so. Pablo, though, was
never discouraged. His bad-gone-worse affairs with his models helped him produce a
multitude of nude pastels, which he had trouble showing in small local galleries.
Inevitably, someone would complain about their lack of "wholesomeness" and a
controversy would break out. This always helped him to sell a few, then find another
place to display his work. The few he had hanging in the Gallery would bring in a some
curious elder members of the Amish community, who would linger over them, for
inordinate amounts of time, but the paintings never raised their dander.
Hence, Pablo's once hectic love life settled into a groove after he left his
spawning place of Texas, where a nude picture of a woman would hardly bat an eyelash,
when he came to the little corner of nowhere, his home of the recent six years.
His woman, into which he made a wife, was a local girl who had theatrical
aspirations, and played in the cornstalk theaters around the area. It was rumored that
she was a manic-depressive, really a thing hard to tell because she refused to come into
the Gallery. Her reason: one artist was enough for her. What could be assumed about
her was gained from hearsay coming from Pablo, and the evidence he brought with
him. She cooked up a storm for him as evinced in his copious lunches he brought in and
took an actual lunch hour to finish. Leg of lamb, stews of sausages, meat, and beans,
whole chickens cooked in olive oil and potatoes and parsley, and he was more than
willing to share his portions just for the asking.
He ate these meals with the same gusto that he worked on his and others'
projects, as if it were the last, and a masterpiece at that. He would polish the food off
with a gigantic plastic cup of sun tea, continuing the practice of brewing it from his
southwestern days. Two spoonfuls of sugar.
One could surmise that his wife had one heck of a body, since one of his bronzes
was modeled off of her. She sat in the corner of the exhibition room of the Gallery,
seated upon a stone, knees bent and to the side, hands placed on thighs, breasts formed
taught with golden worn nipples from the touching of curious spectators, keeping her
head tilted and her auburn eyes on her man busy with work, life, and love.
But love is an illusion of familiarity and sex. Fleeting braids of life, like hair in
the wind. Pablo found this out the hard, or some might say, the easy way. Before leaving
for one of his tours of art and salesmanship around the immediate countryside, his wife
dutifully helped him pack his heavy bronzes into his trailer. She made him meals to be
eaten in the future: road food. Tupperware contraptions full of cold soup, stews,
recently prepared meat and other such vittles. She made her children kiss him goodbye
and wish him luck. She too wished him the best, and topped her farewell off with an
afternoon of passion.
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Afterwards, Pablo showered, trimmed his beard, looked over his reams of road
and city maps, kicked his dog in the butt because it wouldn't stop following him, and
took to the pavement.
He was gone for a week. He sold four pieces and did a little better than breaking
even on the transactions. This was the goal and promise of the artistic cause: the ability
to make enough to stay alive. He was ecstatic about his success and, after the craft show,
enacted it by driving twenty miles over the speed limit, aided in part by the lightness
granted by selling a few of his works.
Arriving at his home near ten p.m., he thought it strange that no lights were on,
no kids running around the yard. As he approached the door, he saw a yellow post it
note applied just above the handle. Behind the door, he could hear his dog whimpering
in excitement.
She wasn't there. They weren't there. Most of the furniture was gone. The note
read "goodbye honey, I love you."
Pablo thought it was a queer way to prove such a statement. Though he couldn't
think. The house empty. Too quiet to do anything. He unhitched the trailer, left it in
the front yard, and drove to the Gallery in tears. That night, he slept on the floor of the
office. He slept in dust and dirt on a blanket reserved usually for Nora's old dog. He
slept with his own dog next to him, its head near his head, where normally a pillow,
instead of his rolled up shirt, would have been.
Women had left him before. When they did part, it was usually with the
flourish of an argument featuring thrown objects derived from a kitchen or bar: glasses,
plates, a water pitcher (full of lemonade), and in one instance, a dairy creamer. Pablo's
reaction to his wife's disappearance was numbness and then the inevitable gnawing
feeling that comes with the absence of a lover or anyone loved.
His nights became burdened by a vision. In four days, he found a studio
apartment in the town square, across from a lawyer's office. The lawyer had a secretary
who did not look small town. She had bleached blond hair, wore dresses that Pablo took
great pleasure in describing as "slinky", and high heels of changing colors. It was her
shoes that he began fixating on.
Talons, he started calling them. He started coming into work around nine a.m.
Often his first sentence to anyone would be, "She was wearing them again. This
morning." He began incorporating shoe-like curvatures and shapes into the clay models
he was working on. He checked out books from the library on fashion, and foot wear;
he would sketch wild, beautifully and imaginatively crafted shoes on the wall near the
telephone. He never referred to his wife, even when asked about it, shrugging his
shoulders and shaking his head, mumbling something about the fact that he never not
once treated her wrong.
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Then he began to take photos. Using a telescopic lens through the lowered
venetian blinds of his new place (he had no furniture and had taken to sleeping on the
carpeting), he photographed, from the knee down, the secretary's legs. Scenarios
presented themselves: bending to leave her car, legs crossed on the park bench while
eating an apple at lunch time, once even she stopped on the sidewalk, lifted her foot
backwards, removed her shoe to shake out a pebble, and this was captured on film by
Pablo.
He had no bones about his latest artistic inspiration: he pasted these photos on
the wall of the rubber room, to craft from them models in clay, at first, not of a high
heeled shoe per say, but, abstractly of where the human foot intersected with the orifice
of the shoe. It seemed he was interested with this point, this tangent of intersection, or
better, insertion.
The men of the Gallery thought his new project to be a study in abstraction. It
was only when he asked Nora and Alex, then Beth, for pairs of their old high heels,
that everybody began to think this to be an unhealthy obsession. Pablo would say, out
of the blue, at lunch, that Raymond's ham sandwich looked like bread filled with shoe
leather. His conversations while working on plaster over-molds turned to questions
such as why, in movies, do ecstatic lovers drink champagne out of a woman's shoe,
never a man's. He imagined, out loud, what Cinderella's foot looked like in a glass
slipper, and how a construction like that would feel, or even be usable. Why Mother
Hubbard chose to live in one. And why was it that elves made them?
Lost for hours that churned themselves invisibly into days, then stacked
themselves into months, Pablo worked, ate every now and then, and worked. He
thought about this and this only: shoes. How they were the things men and women put
on when they were leaving. How you take off your shoes when you get home, where
it's supposed to be safe, where you relax and finally, sleep. Why children are ambivalent
to them, how they constrict the wild electricity in their little feet. How shoes disconnect
one's connection to the earth, the ground, like condoms that don't completely impede
contact, but force an unnatural barrier that wipes out the fur-like feeling of grass, the
grittiness of stones and gravel, the squish of mud and puddles. How shoes transport us
from one place to another efficiently as tools, carrying only the scuff marks of where
we've been, the marks of what it was like and the problems there encountered. Shoes
stepping all over themselves waiting in angst to be the pair used on any given day,
anxious to get out of the darkness of the closet. Shoes and the feet that twist, deform,
and shape them. Shoes tied in knots, and shoes, by the door, tongues stuck out, laces
undone.
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Pocks
Kirsten Robinson
The disease is gone but the Pocks remain. Reminders of damage deep beneath.
Did You allow this damage to form?
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Church Pew: FOR SALE
Ellen J. Perry
Every Easter weekend in the South Carolina foothills Roger Ballard had Good
Friday off work. He’d been with Super-Sod for the past twenty years or so, and they
were good about giving their men time off at the big religious holidays. Springtime
was the prettiest season. The redbud bloomed and pink dogwoods dotted the
neighborhood yards. Roger and his crew laid most of those yards with sod at one time
or another. He and his wife Louise had lived together in Traveler’s Rest for over thirty
years even though there wasn’t much to the town. Or at least there wasn’t much to it
when as teenagers they went on dates at Tastee Freez and pretty soon got married at
Redemption Baptist Church.
A little ways outside of Greenville, T.R. had grown a lot but not the right kind
of growing, Roger didn’t think. The locals called it “T.R.” The rest of them, from off,
starting coming to town and working at sales offices, insurance companies, QuikTrip
stores, fast food restaurants. Roger and Louise still liked Cecil’s Diner and Cox’s Dime
Store best. Roger told Louise he’d take Cecil’s Family Breakfast Special over a rubbery
egg on a dang muffin any day. Roger liked working out in the open air, too, laying sod.
Their skinny pale neighbor down the street who’d moved from Hendersonville, over
the state line, went to work every morning in a sport coat and probably sat in a cubicle,
doing no-telling-what and not-much-of-anything so far as Louise and Roger could tell.
He drove back home every evening by 5:30 and nobody saw him again until next
morning. Him and that Prius.
At their house where they could look out the kitchen window and see Cecil’s
wife Darlene hanging out clothes to dry (she never would put her underpants next to
Cecil’s on the line even though they’d been married a thousand years), Roger and Louise
used to color Easter eggs with that PAAS kit and organize egg hunts in the yard. Their
twin daughters, Wanda and Wendy, loved all this until they got in high school and had
other things to do like marching band and the youth bell choir at church. Roger still
wanted to color eggs even to this day, but Louise always frowned and said she didn’t
want to fool with it; that vinegar smell was terrible, and their one grandbaby, Wanda’s
Jack, was too little to know what was going on. “Let’s just get some of them candy eggs
from Cox’s and set ‘em out on the dinette table,” Louise said. And that was that.
So on Good Friday Roger sat on his long, narrow front porch in a rickety green
and white lawn chair, staring at the statue of Jesus in their yard and waving off bees.
Just last Sunday after the final service at Redemption Baptist Church, Louise asked
Preacher Leonard if she could have the statue since the church had suddenly gone
bankrupt (which was a mystery because surely all the faithful in Traveler’s Rest had
been putting in their tithes regular – hm!). Wanda told her mother during lunch after
church at Cecil’s Diner that this was awful, that she ought not to bother Preacher
Leonard about anything, Jesus statue or no, during this difficult time of financial and
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spiritual distress. Wanda always talked like she was the parent, even when she was in
primary school.
Louise sipped her iced tea and said, “Ain’t but one thing Preacher Len’s going to do
with that statue, and that is sell it like everything else down at the flea market. Why
not take it before somebody else does? I paid him ten dollars, and I like the idea of Jesus
watching over our yard.”
Wanda frowned but Wendy laughed, bouncing her nephew on her knees. The sisters
looked identical but were so different, opposites in almost every way. “Well, I guess it
can’t hurt,” Wendy said. “Jack can learn about the Lord and his mercies early on.
Maybe Jesus will help get the Bradford pears going. Daddy noticed they’re blooming
kind of late this year.”
Roger nodded slowly and glanced out the red-curtained window of their booth, chewing
his last bite of sausage biscuit. “I wonder why that is.”
One full week later – and still no cottony Bradford pear blooms – Roger sat on
the porch and looked up, squinting from the bright South Carolina sun. T. Bob drove
by the house in his noisy pick-up, waved, and then turned around in the dirt road to say
hey and sit. “Hey,” T. Bob said to Roger as he plopped down and settled in the other
ancient lawn chair until it creaked. Roger and T. Bob had gone to high school together.
Sometimes they met up at T. Bob’s Bar and Grill for some steaks and, when Louise was
at choir practice or visiting a shut-in with her Sunday school class, a couple of beers.
“Hey,” Roger said.
“What’re you doing with that Jesus?” T. Bob asked.
“Oh, Louise asked the preacher for him last Sunday after church.”
T. Bob said, “Huh. Well, there he is.”
“Yep, there he is,” Roger said, looking up toward the eaves as if he expected something
big to happen up there. Maybe even Jesus, the real one, might be coming back down
for the Time of Tribulation. Or did the Rapture happen first? He couldn’t remember.
A wasp descended and bobbed around between the men. Roger grabbed the rusted arms
of the lawn chair to help him get up, stiff from his last job. “There’s a nest up there.
I’ve got to get another can of spray,” he said, dodging the wasp and ducking into the
house, letting the screen door slam behind him.
T. Bob yawned and glanced around. The yard looked good; daffodils were
popping up. Boring! thought T. Bob, who liked to take risks and see what-all was out
in the world to see. T. Bob decided right there on the porch that Roger needed some
fun. Him and Louise hadn’t done much of nothing for a long time. Matter of fact, they
mostly sprayed wasp nests and went to church. Maybe they could go on vacation,
Myrtle Beach or something. T. Bob could tell them a thing or two. He’d been married
and divorced twice, and now he was enjoying the good life. His son Bobby helped him
run the bar so he could have a little time to piddle around and fish and travel, mostly
to Myrtle where he went every year during Bike Week. The latest tattoo he got down
there was of a cross and a Harley Springer, somehow intertwined. Preacher Len, who
saw the tattoo at church, approved of the cross but wasn’t so sure about the Springer.
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“Priorities,” Len had said. “The Lord wants to be first in our lives.” T. Bob liked the
tattoo just fine.
Roger came back out and aimed some bee spray at the top corner of the sagging porch.
“Can’t hardly sit out here without them wasps worrying you to death.”
“Y’all going to the community supper over at the bar in a couple weeks?” T.
Bob asked. “I’ve been trying to talk it up.” He lowered his voice and leaned in. “We’ll
have the liquor in the back so Louise and them won’t get too fussy.”
“I don’t know,” Roger sighed, sitting down heavily and dropping the bee spray beside
his chair, letting it roll to the door. “Got some sod jobs coming up and a new man on.
Rodney wants me to train him.”
“Well, the Bible says something about enjoying the good of your labor.
Remember Len talking about that? Joyful abundance and all that.”
“All I can remember about that sermon is, there is nothing new under the sun,” Roger
said, looking down at the worn and weathered planks of his porch.
Louise appeared suddenly, making a big show of closing the screen door in a quiet,
deliberate way. “I’m going out for a little bit,” she said, frowning at the spray can on
its side. “I’ll heat up some casserole after while. Don’t y’all trip over that spray.” She
got in her Buick and the dust made the men cough.
“These lawn chairs are about to give out,” T. Bob said. “Let’s ride up to Len’s and see
if he’s got some old chairs from the church he might could sell you.”
“I hate to ask him, especially after the Jesus statue business.”
“Aw, it wouldn’t hurt to ask. Plus I want to find out more about this church
money. Something weird about how fast all that went down.”
Roger struggled to his feet again and shuffled to T. Bob’s truck. They drove a
few miles over to Redemption Baptist. Sure enough, there was Leonard, walking slowly
from parsonage to church with all kinds of boxes and bags. The church sign still read,
“Services at 9 and 11. ARE YOU READY TO MEET JESUS?”
“Hidy, Preacher Len,” Roger called. The preacher nodded but didn’t speak.
Roger thought the man had looked pretty worn-out for a while. “Need some help?” he
offered. “We got T. Bob’s truck here with the trailer.”
“Thanks,” Len said. “Mostly I need to get stuff to the flea market or maybe just
to the dump at this point. I could use a hand collecting what needs to go.” He seemed
overwhelmed, and Roger remembered his wife Debbie had gone out of town to stay
with her mother for a while. That was weird, too, Roger thought, and T. Bob muttered
something about it a few days back. But the men pitched in and asked no questions.
T. Bob and Len picked up trash out by the cemetery, and Roger worked on his own in
the quiet of the sanctuary.
After about an hour of clearing out dust and packing boxes, an idea bloomed in
Roger’s mind; he wiped his face with an old handkerchief and smiled. He sat on a pew,
wrapped one hand under the seat to feel the oak foundation of the bench and, with the
other, felt of the faded red cushioning. “Yep. This would be perfect on my front
porch,” he said aloud. Sure enough, his porch was shaped just right for a pew. It
sounded crazy, but he wanted that pew now more than anything. He’d grown up in
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Redemption Baptist. Taking home a pew from the church could be a way to hold on to
it all – to Vacation Bible School, Royal Ambassadors, getting saved, sputtering
underwater being baptized, doing stuff with the youth group, marrying Louise, taking
the girls to Vacation Bible School, watching the girls get baptized and married,
everything all over again.
Next thing T. Bob knew, they were waving down one of the deacons who’d
dropped by the church and loading up the pew in his trailer. Preacher Len just shrugged
and said to the men, “Get rid of it.” On the ride home T. Bob told Roger his latest
theory about how Preacher Len might have been carrying on with the church secretary
and gambling offering plate money over at the casino in Cherokee. “I tell you what, in
a trash pile just now I found Harrah’s brochures and a motel receipt! That secretary
went with him or helped him cover it all up, one.” T. Bob had surely solved the
mystery.
“They ain’t nothing new under the sun,” Roger said softly. “It don’t matter.”
“I guess not,” T. Bob said.
It took Roger, T. Bob, and Roger’s son-in-law John, Jr. to get the pew off the
trailer and onto the porch. All three sat on it and commented on how it fit just right.
“With Jesus over there,” John, Jr. laughed, “It’s about like being in church but
without that invitation at the end that goes on and on.”
T. Bob said, “Yeah. You can get up and go whenever you want to. Which I’m
doing right now so I can pick up Dot for our date. See you boys!”
John, Jr. drove off, too, to get home to Wanda and Jack. Roger was left alone
with a can of bee spray, his pew, and Jesus. He thought about Easter Sunday coming
up and wondered if there was any PAAS in the house, maybe a kit left over from some
other time. He was about to go in and look when he saw Louise pull up. She grabbed
a few grocery bags out of the trunk, stared up at Roger on the porch.
“What in the Lord’s name is that?” she asked, taking off her sunglasses. “Roger
Ballard, what are you sitting on?”
“It’s a pew I bought off of the preacher.”
“What did you do that for?”
“Needed new chairs, thought this would look good on the length of this porch.”
“Well, it don’t.”
“You got the Jesus statue. I figured this would go good with it.”
“I don’t want a old red pew on my porch. Take it to Len and see if he’ll give
you your money back. That’s awful.” Louise went in to put the groceries away and
call the girls about Easter dinner. Probably they’d want ham and potato salad, banana
pudding or coconut cake.
What I want never seems to matter, Roger thought.
Maybe T. Bob was right. Maybe he should work less. Maybe he should get a
tattoo, maybe even go to Harrah’s and gamble. Roger couldn’t figure a way to make all
this work with who he was, though, and who he wanted to be. Resigned, Roger sighed
and stretched his arms around the back of the pew, savoring what time he had with it
since it had to go. What… what was that? He felt around in the little pocket where
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pencils and offering envelopes usually were kept. There was something down in there,
what?
Roger pulled out a crumpled church bulletin dating from a month or so back.
Feeling a little thrill about finding secret information, maybe something scandalous,
Roger read the scrawled notes quickly.
Meet me at the Handee GO after church
I can’t. Mama and them won’t let me. Going to IHOP w Aunt Maxie
After IHOP. Handee GO at 1:30, K?
Why?
I want to talk about the prom and what all happened
No. Over it
I dont want you talking to Troy no more. Handee GOOOOOOOOO! 1:30. Or Dixie Republic
Maybe Dixie Republic
No never mind, Troy the jackass works there
Right there in Traveler’s Rest, at his home, on the pew, Roger laughed. He was
suddenly awake, brought back to life by this connection. While he’d been zoning out
during that sermon, apparently entitled, as the bulletin and church billboard sign said,
“Are You Ready to Meet Jesus?”, some teenagers were tuned out too and making plans.
How long had it been since he and Louise wrote love notes in church, met in secret after
school, did all those same things? A lifetime ago. It was all gone; Roger hung his head.
Over it, the nameless girl had written.
But – the back of the bulletin had some typed verses. What has been will be
again, what has been done will be done again… There is a time for everything… a time
to search and a time to give up.
Roger jumped to his feet. He walked over to the Jesus statue and whispered,
quiet as the spring breeze making its way through dogwoods, “I’m not ready to meet
you yet.” With a grin, he loped off to his workroom and pulled out an old dusty “FOR
SALE” sign. Roger propped the sign on the pew, tucked the wasp spray can by the wall
where no one would trip over it, and then went inside to search for, to find, to
remember, his wife.
“Louise?” Roger called. “Let’s fix the ham together and dye some Easter eggs.
The kids will be coming Sunday and that Bradford pear in the yard is about to bust
loose with blooms. It’s time.”
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Nebula
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Midnite Keister
Me & Frankie
Lenore Weiss
For weeks, the CD had been sitting on the front seat of my car. Now I’m making
my way across the Bay Bridge and listening to Frank Sinatra, Ol’ Blue Eyes. I know all
his songs, ballads of love and loss, many orchestrated and arranged by Nelson Riddle,
harps and horns, jazz riffs, music bright and hazy, a kind of Las Vegas sound heard
through curtains of cigarette smoke and good whiskey. I’m still listening as I look for a
parking spot near a coffee shop where I’m to meet a new online acquaintance, and like
a modern-day Scheherazade, get to tell another tale from my life. But I remember when
I didn’t go out on online dates; I remember when one person knew all my stories.
College workshops were long, seats uncomfortable. I studied him from the back
of the room. It was well past an hour and a half when the teacher finally announced a
break. Everyone stepped outside. Smokers lit up.
“Lawrence is in our theater class,” I overheard a theater arts student say, fanning
out her red nails to their fullest effect.
“Really?” said her friend. Theater arts students were so much more
demonstrative than the writers in my group and seemed to know their way around the
world, spending less time with their noses buried inside books and more time going to
callbacks. I listened to their conversations hoping to pick up a valuable tidbit. “I’m
surprised. I heard he was going to LA.”
“Did already. He’s back.”
“I hear he drinks.”
Red nails laughed, “C’mon. Who doesn’t?”
“I mean drinks a whole lot.” She turned toward me. I pivoted and tried to make
it less obvious that I was hanging on to their every word. “You’re one of the writers in
the class,” she said, being polite to blow her smoke around me and not directly into my
face. “Aren’t you?” They were stylishly coiffed and dressed in high fashion gathered
from the racks of closeout sales. “I hope you know how to put together a script.”
So did I.
The class was the brainchild of one of the teachers from San Francisco State
University, Robert Gordon, who also was a playwright. He thought that by bringing
writing and acting talent together, each group could help reinforce the other. The class
featured staged readings. Lawrence played the wolf in a spoof on Little Red Riding
Hood. He reclined in black leather boots on granny’s couch and started to sing a few
bars of “Hey, hey, Red Riding Hood, you sure are looking good,” a popular song at the
time by Sam and the Sham. Lawrence ended his performance with a long wolf howl,
“Owwwoooo.”
Lawrence was a Peninsula boy from Redwood City who had grown up in the
bedroom community of the defense industry with its jet propulsion push toward Silicon
Valley. He had bounced around the community college circuit and settled in the Haight
Ashbury before the sixties generation had claimed it as their hang-out. In class, I
mooched cigarettes from him that came from inside a box lined in gold tissue paper.
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In the middle of the semester, I threw a party. A friend came by with a flat of
red strawberries. The berries and whipped cream were almost gone when Lawrence
made his entrance. He was a large man with green eyes and wild hair like Gene Wilder,
out of breath and mopping his forehead with a tissue. He explained how he had gotten
lost, but had stopped by a liquor store to ask for directions. I remember his wearing a
blue wool San Francisco fireman’s jacket. After everyone left, he asked about my script
that I was developing for class. We talked. He kissed me gently. Later in the evening,
I played the Fred Neil album that he’d left on my turntable. “The Dolphins.”
Lawrence directed my feminist one-act set in a sauna room with a Greek chorusstyled background of voices. Slowly in the social barometer of a college classroom, we
were acknowledged as a couple. We moved in together. Suddenly, there was the novelty
of another person in my life, someone to talk to, to eat with, and to share the small
pleasures of going shopping at the supermarket. I can remember the beauty of the
moment. “What do you think we’ll be doing together in ten years?”
He thought for a moment.
“Fucking.”
Fast forward twenty-five years. We had two children. Our marriage was
marked by his alcoholism and emotional abuse. He died from a variety of illnesses, a
marred human being who had received electric shock treatments at Napa State Hospital
and who could not escape his role as a victim. We separated. My daughter was
concerned that he hadn’t phoned to make an appointment to pick her up for a Saturday
visit.
“Mom, something’s wrong. I can feel it. He always calls.”
I drove her to the house. For several minutes, I tried to wake him up. It took
several minutes for me to realize that his fingers and toes had turned blue. I told her to
call 911. Police and ambulances screamed.
I spent the next four years gluing my life together and raising my daughter. By
this time, Match.com had appeared on the scene, offering an alternative to meeting
people in bars. I became a serial coffee dater. Still, I longed for the intimacy of a
committed relationship. I was a single mother proofreading essays for my daughter’s
college applications, occasionally going out on dates. The dates were with the
professional crowd, lawyers, teachers, engineers, a consultant for something, a man
from a ranch in Petaluma, all clumped together in a disappointment of arms and legs. I
kept telling myself that I needed to practice talking to a man without it devolving into
the same shouting match of my marriage. I wanted more—companionship, laughter,
and love if it were possible, but only admitted that to myself in a soft whisper.
I told myself to try one last time, which is when the kiss of joy grazed my cheek.
Isn’t that how it always happens? People say that once you stop looking for something,
the universe cuts you a deal. I chose to go out on one last online date. He sounded sweet,
a bit of a flirt. I approached our designated meeting spot, in front of a crowded movie
theater, which I liked to call my South Pacific moment. Let’s call him Earl. We went
to a Spiderman movie and laughed before the coming attractions and long after the
credits. He was on the short side with a brilliant smile and unusually strong hands and
wasn’t shy on our first date about taking mine into his own. I admit it. I have a hand
fetish. I look for the cut of nail, smoothness of palm, and for the feeling of flesh on
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flesh. I get a buzzer jolt that happens when someone folds my hand into his for the first
time. Later, he ordered drinks and opened my car door. We were reluctant to leave each
other. On our third date, he brought me a motorcycle helmet, and showed me a catalog
where I could order a black leather jacket. Pick out any one, he said.
He wasn’t really a bad-boy type, more like a southern guy who’s been riding
motorcycles since he started to pitch newspapers onto peoples’ front lawns. He wanted
a friend to join him for the ride and I did.
After years of a painful marriage, I didn’t recognize my own giddy sensations.
I replenished my lingerie drawer, got a mani-pedi at my daughter’s insistence, and
found myself laboring over what to wear. We played pin-ball, went to the bowling
alley, took walks along the fire trail behind my house. We cooked lasagna and layered
noodles with marinara sauce and ricotta. I asked him to repeat his sentences because I
didn’t always understand the bayou in his southern lilt. When he touched me with his
hands, he made me feel the rhythm of music. Earl had spent twenty years traveling the
country with country-rocker bands as a bass player and was now doing environmental
cleanup at Alameda Point, a former naval base.
The first time I sat on his motorcycle, I shivered at his back across the San
Mateo Bridge. Earl pulled into the first convenience store and bought me a pair of
gloves. He made me feel cared for, a contrast to my marriage. I felt that glow.
Later, Earl moved back south to assume full custody of his daughter. For several
years, we conducted a long distance relationship. He talked to me about moving in
together. Why not come down to the South? Never in my wildest dreams did I think
of moving to the rural south. When I say never, I mean never. I’m a city girl whose
horizon has been shaped by buildings; secondly, I’m a Jewish girl, which means that
large urban centers are the places where the majority of my people in the United States
reside. Those are the top two reasons, but I can think of others like wanting to have
access to museums, art galleries, and a selection of restaurants and bookstores. Did I
forget to mention public transportation? City people are needy. We’re not a selfsufficient lot. We have to ask people to do stuff for us, but after two long distance years,
I joined Earl along Bayou Bartholomew in Louisiana. He had convinced me to move to
Sterlington where I could write full-time. He said he would support us, another first.
No one had ever come across with that offer. However, it turned out that
environmental jobs were scarce in the area. He worked two hours away and drove home
on weekends. Without a community, or roots in the area, I felt like a ship captain’s wife
waiting for my guy to return home from the high seas. I had moved to Louisiana to be
with him, not away from him, and the evening he came home from rescuing his brother,
I saw storm clouds.
His brother’s daughter had vowed to take care of her poor old dad who had been
diagnosed with a life-threatening disease. It turned out that she was more interested in
getting Power of Attorney over his bank accounts. Earl and I talked on the phone as
he made his way from St. Louis to Sterlington. In the middle of the night, he stopped
at McDonalds and drove for another fourteen hours. His older brother, diagnosed with
ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, moved in with us, “temporarily.”
“How long will he be staying?” I asked, not great timing on my part, but in my
own defense, I was feeling pretty bitchy after almost a year of missing him and living
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with his teenage daughter who had learning disabilities and was about as
communicative as a black hole.
I had tried to develop a bond with her, a girl who didn’t know how to l say thank
you, which went beyond her just being a teenager. Even though I understood that my
relationship with my own daughter was a relationship with my own daughter, I didn’t
understand why on his few days off Earl ran around folding her laundry, doing her
dishes, and cleaning up after her, felt he was not giving her skills to become successful
in her life, no matter what her challenges. She was not physically incapacitated. His
relationship with his daughter defined the boundaries of our own, and one that I was
not prepared to cross.
“What the fuck. You let me take care of that. I’ve been close to my brother for
years. Any woman who comes between me and that relationship can leave right now.”
Earl repeated himself for the next ten minutes with generous helpings of fuck lobbed
my way. I knew it was time to think about where to buy cartons and how many I
needed and what size, to ferret through chests and bookshelves. I held my head with
my hands. A bottle cap stared up at me from the carpet like a dead eye. I tossed it into
the garbage.
Some say that it’s not unusual for soul mate relationships to go up in smoke. I
find that hard to believe, but then again, look at John and Yoko, Romeo and Juliet,
Tristan and Isolde. He asked me to stay through the holidays. I did. Two days after
Christmas, I got into my car and drove back to Oakland.
Back in Oakland, I sat crying. Everything reminded me of him. This went on
for days, weeks, months, a year. My daughter, who is now twenty-six and lives with
me, marched from her room one evening wearing a black thong and a T-shirt and
confronted me on the couch.
“Buckle up. Pull yourself together.” I looked at her incredulously, my strong
and independent adult daughter.
“You were unhappy in Louisiana. You left. Good for you.” She gave me a
lecture about there being lots of fish in the sea. Interesting how kids can use your best
lines against you. But the film of my heartbreak was still rolling. She softened. “Do
you need a hug, Mom?” Holding me in her arms, she encouraged me to try online
dating, a sort of chain that I could cinch to my waist, and pull myself up from the mud.
By this time, it seemed like there was a dating site to match every religious
affiliation, ethnicity, race, and occupation, a Bay Area of choices. But before I could do
anything, I had to decide on a dating site. Okcupid didn’t charge a fee. I next embarked
on the task of creating a profile.
Call it a marketing resume, a single point of contact that could make or break
my ability to realize a social life. A profile is supposed to give a potential friend or
partner a thumbnail sketch of who I might be with the ultimate goal of eliciting a flirt,
a message indicating interest, or at very best, courting an actual email.
I gave it a shot. I needed to write a paragraph with the heading, A little about
me. “Gorgeous brunette with a figure you could die for, at least I do several times a
week at the gym,” I began, “is fluent in several tongues, looking to meet someone who
enjoys watching tomatoes grow at the Alameda County Fair.”
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“That should do it,” I said to myself, and posted my erstwhile notice with a
single keystroke. My half-baked profile would come up, of course, in searches and I
could even send an initial icebreaker with some canned expression of interest like
“Hello, there tiger,” or “You're an Errol Drool and a Half,” but my description was
floating around in the electronic ether without a photograph, which nine times out of
ten is an admission of guilt.
Speaking of photographs. I'd like to speak about them for a moment. I went
through my collection trying to decide which one to use that would tantalize the troops
into thinking I was a hot number.
I clicked open my stock of jpegs. This particular one of me lying on a tattoo
parlor bench was going to give the wrong impression, not that I knew what the right
impression was, but certainly not one of a single rose curling up the middle of my
lumbar region. It revealed a lot more than I thought was appropriate, particularly with
a skimpy white towel draped across my ample behind. Another more recent photo
showed me in full dress attire but I was standing before the entrance to a Howard
Johnson's Motel, and I didn't want to communicate a certain flighty disposition. I
waffled again. Finally, I located a rather nondescript photo. But then in a sudden
moment of abandon, I posted the photo of myself on the tattoo table. I decided that it
demonstrated daring.
The next day I received my first communication from the service. It was a stern
letter telling me that my picture had been rejected, rejected by the online dating photo
police. Without so much as a flirt, I already I had a mark against me.
I put the kibosh on my investigation of dating sites. Instead, I did the
unthinkable: cleaned house, washed my floors, lifted the burners of my stove and
scrubbed away burnt crud, collecting from the time when I had first moved into the
condo. I even watched reruns of “Twin Peaks.” Finally, I came face-to-face with
myself—I could join the profilerati, those legions of faces with nothing more than a
song and a dance and a headline. You can do this, I told myself. I brought up an empty
profile page and began to type, staked a claim, here on online ground where I hoped to
discover a new golden heart, all the while seriously doubting that another such existed.
For what had brought me to this particular crossroads? “I that have been love’s whip.”
Shakespeare, my man, meet the Forty-niners.
Turning to collective wisdom, I downloaded an app for Hay Heart radio, a
clearinghouse of spiritual guidance counselors who talked to me late at night when I
couldn’t fall asleep. They advised me to move on, but I felt the little girl inside myself
pounding her fists on my mattress asking to be transported back to Louisiana where my
love resided and forever hating me for leaving him.
I persevered, raised my glass and saluted online daters like myself, who after
being disappointed and defeated, had returned to the playing field to announce, here I
stand on this naked ground. Take it or leave it. For some of us, death's poker hand had
closed out our loved ones' accounts, removing everything except his or her memory.
Maybe it was a good marriage and turned bad. Maybe the love affair lasted for a few
months or several years. Maybe we never jumped into the fray because we were taking
care of a sick parent or relative, or even ill ourselves. Maybe we wanted to get
everything right including job, career, and travel everywhere around the world first,
until none of that seemed important, or maybe we were abused as children and had to
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learn intimacy block by alphabet block, which made us better students of love, children
of mistakes, children of all the maybes.
I am one of those maybe's. Maybe if I had made better choices, maybe if I had
second sight, maybe if I had listened to what other people had told me. But in the end,
only one thing matters. A broken heart is an open heart.
“Didn't I tell you that I had a thing for serial killers?” I wrote to a fellow traveler
after he suggested that we meet to make sure that neither of us were serial killers. It
sounded like a unique opening line.
We decided on an appointed time for coffee, a rendezvous at Peet's on Fourth
Street. It was an easy off ramp from the freeway.
I looked inside. No obvious suspects. But there was someone who'd just
entered.
“Do the words serial killer mean anything to you?” I asked.
“No.” He looked at me strangely.
I quickly stepped back to the edges of the terracotta tile and listened to the hiss
of espresso machines. TigerTail101 had described his body type as “thick.” I wasn't
sure how that differed from “a few extra pounds.”
“You writergrll?” a man asked. He spun me around and gave me a hug.
“What'll you have?”
TigerTail was more genuine than self-conscious, something which I liked.
However, he did seem a bit faded from his online picture by about five to ten years, the
hair more grey than sandy, the jaw more of a jowl, and he definitely looked thick, but
it wasn't in a heavy or a stocky way thick, more how a magnet collects metal filings
around its middle because it hasn't lost its charge. Overall, he didn't look like a serial
killer. I guess they never do.
“I don't want to talk about my personal relationship,” he said.
“I didn't ask you to.”
Well, he didn't talk about his personal relationship; instead, he talked about
himself, stopping only for sips of coffee. On and on he went about his apartment, the
roommate who was a pizza maker from Brazil, his adopted child in Africa, his dying
mother. I’ll spare you the dialogue.
In a few days I received an email asking if I thought we had chemistry. What
do people mean by chemistry? Is that a code word for, “Do you think you could go to
bed with me?” Or are we talking about pheromones here? For in this online world,
unlike its more shadowy real-world sister, we have all boldly stated, “I am available.”
I noticed that many men choose to wear sunglasses in their profile pictures.
Somehow, word has gotten out that wearing shades is a sure-fire way to court love. I’m
not certain what marketing firm or social media outlet has spread this vile message, but
it is without foundation. Unless you are Bruce Springsteen, forget it. Many men in
the fifty and upwards range also populate online albums with photos from younger
days—on the beach, standing with buddies at a football game—all providing evidence
about how they used to look, before they became the heavier, balder, and more wrinkled
blokes of today. Who knows? Maybe in the future, we’ll be able to post time lapse
photos of ourselves. But then again, why would we want to? Watch breasts droop,
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skin wrinkle, the stomach protrude over the belt? The truth is that most of us think of
ourselves as being at least ten or twenty years younger than we really are.
When I wash my face in the morning, do I look at a middle-aged woman in the
mirror? No. I see a young girl. It’s funny how my eyes can work their own plastic
surgery. So here’s the hard part. Even if we see what we want to see, not everybody
else does.
My own modus operandi hasn’t changed.
I meet a potential cupid along Lake Merritt in Oakland, or at a coffee shop and
like to wear casual attire, no prom dresses. A pair of jeans with an attractive top is a
good start, one that neither displays too much or too little cleavage, nor makes me look
like Julie Andrews from the Sound of Music. And even if I choose a simple fashion
statement like jeans with a red ribbed top, there are accessories—shoes, rings and
bracelets—which is the look I went for when I got ready for my online date at the Peet’s
coffee outpost in Emeryville, California.
My prospective date had made a point of saying how he loved women and was
a sensuous man. I thought maybe he could be the one.
By his profile picture, I recognized the man in the parking lot. Tugging a khakilooking shirt over his head and then shoving it into his motorcycle’s saddlebag, he
quickly donned a purple replacement. For a moment, I saw his exposed stomach, which
certainly was not stylish.
Coffee drinks in hand—his iced, mine a chai—we sat outside for the first chat,
but I wouldn’t call it a chat. He talked, and I sat there listening, nodding my head or
interjecting such astute comments as “Nice,” “Cool,” and “Really?” For the next hour
he explained how he’d credited his friend's death for missing a chance at opening his
own business, and how all the cupids are on drugs, high-blood pressure, cholesterol, and
recreational of different kinds.
“Do I need to add your name to the list?” he asked. “You can whisper the answer
in my ear.”
When he mentioned that he had no children because he was bald, and how
different women who had passed through his life didn't wish to visit that genetic horror
upon future generations, I made quick escape.
"I have to avoid commute traffic," I told him.
The online procession continued. I met a man entering a second career
counseling at-risk teenagers and who had relocated from the Midwest to be with his
dying mother and sister (both scoring high in my pantheon of prospective lovers), and
who’d even cooked dinner for me with his grandmother’s recipe for tomato sauce, and
who showed me around his house with explanations of family pictures affixed to a
bulletin board, a man who joined me for walks and decided that I was not able to
communicate according to his particular standards, and began to do the most horrible
of horribles – calling me choice names that I won’t repeat here but only to say they
included, “overwrought, scary, and idiotic,” which brought me full-circle to my
marriage with Lawrence that overflowed with such barbs, so much so that I retreated
into the walls of my condo, and vowed “never again,” at least not if I could help it. So
where did that leave me?
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One evening as I was minding my own email, an online dating site informed
me that I had a message. I clicked a link from successfulman56 and read, “Hello
beautiful.” He went on, “You are the perfect definition of beauty and I would like to
know the secret behind your smile.” Melt. Don't think for a moment that I am immune
to flattery. I responded with a demure little note, filled with blushes and thank you’s.
David, for that was how he identified himself, replied with this message:
I signed up on here a month ago and I only came on this site twice. I barely respond to
anyone. I would like to get to know you better, be friends and see where one click of
the mouse would lead to. I have gotten a lot of superficial email and I am quite
disappointed with the standards. Feel free to write me at my personal email address or
maybe we could talk now, as I am on my way to the gym.
Nothing seemed suspicious. He was new to the site and rarely responded to
flirts. My profile and picture had somehow stood out, more subtle flattery. He was
interested in further conversation and had invited me to call before he went to the gym
to work on what I’d imagined to be his six-pack of abs. But something held me back
from dashing to my telephone or sending email to his personal address. Let’s say that
several online experiences had made me cautious. Instead, I wrote a chatty note, pushed
send, and waited. I received a reply the next morning.
He told me that he had gotten up to pee during the night and found my message.
I’m thinking, do I really want to hear about my Lothario’s visit to the bathroom? For
some reason, he told me how he went to an orphanage to assure the kids that despite all
appearances, they have a bright future ahead. Once again he urged me to contact his
personal email or call his mobile number.
My true love was beginning to dissolve before my eyes. I considered:
successfulman tag, peeing, visiting orphanages, and wanting to move our conversation
away from the site to a private area. It seemed suspicious, deliberately building a case
for himself, and even though I am not by nature a suspicious person, I plugged his name
into Mother Google, davidmcmanaman, and found out he was Romance Scammer,
preying upon an ocean of lonely hearts like my own. I could not fathom why he would
use the same name, but that’s his problem. Maybe he had the ambition of a graffiti
artist, leaving his tag around town and disappearing before dawn.
But what in my own profile had identified me to “David” as a juicy scamming
prospect? I went back to read my profile and decided that I had used the word love too
many times. Perhaps that had set me up to be groomed as a new victim.
Oh gullibility, thou name art love.
Now once again, I find myself attending classes, back in school and driving from
Oakland to San Francisco State University, watching seagulls pirouette over the Bay
Bridge, its new span stretched over the water like a magnificent harp. I’m taking a
break from online dating. It’s been a successful diversion to heal my heart. My
daughter and I continue to live together, but probably not for long. She is moving
toward her next stepping-stone. Both of us will be fine.
Now as I move through traffic, I insert the Frank Sinatra CD into my car’s
player, sit back and listen to him sing about love and loss all the way down Ocean
Avenue.
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The Forgotten Frappe
Tara Pedroley
I work as a waitress at a local coffee shoppe in Mist Town. I usually put in a
typical nine a.m. to five p.m. shift, that forced my introverted being to interact with
the best of ‘em, and the worst of ‘em in a matter of very creative and patient ways
throughout the day. I make everything from lattes with little or no whipped cream, to
freakishly sweet frappuccinos with tons of whipped cream and caramel and chocolate
drizzle.
Today was no different, yet it was different.
Many days people sit at our mini booths or small wooden tables to eat or enjoy
their choice beverages. Most usually cleaning up after themselves, but sometimes,
depending on the mood or the distractions of others, a random half empty mug or cup
is left sitting on the table. Never a full cup, and never for almost six hours.
At around eleven a.m. the line of local neighbors and customers on their lunch
breaks began to grow. I wiped a dark brow with the sleeve of my long sleeved logo shirt,
and kept filling the “to go” orders at the front counter. I made at least ten frappuccinos,
six or seven macchiatos, about five lattes, and three cups of coffee that morning, but I
can’t account for every face that they’d been handed to.
Once the line of hungry people died down a little, I yelled to Thomas that I was
going to leave the front counter to wipe down tables in the dining room. He gave a nod,
and I grabbed a soapy wash cloth from the sink.
Each table I wiped had remnants of the early lunchies. Drips and drops of
anything from honey mustard to mayonnaise, to cream or coffee danced on each table
top. I made my way around most of our dining area when I noticed table six. I looked
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down and noticed a beautifully made, hopefully by me, frappuccino sitting solo on the
table.
I looked around. A few miscellaneous people walked around our shoppe, busied
with cell phones or newspapers or other things, but most people had a beverage in hand.
This little frappe belonged to no one.
I picked it up. It was still cold, the whipped cream on top was beginning to melt,
so I knew that it had been awhile since I had made it. As I stood, admiring my own
work on this long lasting frappuccino, I heard Thomas’s deep voice boom from the
kitchen.
“Customer at the counter!”
I set down the frozen drink back on table six, and made my way to the counter
to take yet another series of orders, and continue on with the back end of the lunch
crowd.
Another two hours of my shift skipped by, but yet again, as the lines started to
dissipate I felt myself grow cautious about the abandoned drink from this morning’s
crowd.
I grabbed my wash cloth and begin to wipe down tables in the dining area.
Following the same suit, I came upon table six.
There it was.
In the same place as it had been before, only now the whipped cream, more
melted into the concentrated frozen mush, creating some caffeinated artwork in a
plastic cup. I lifted it up towards the ceiling, and tried to swirl it around a little more.
I was half tempted to taste this fun mixture but decided against it, just in case
someone had taken a curious taste before I did.
I set it back down, taking one more glance before wiping down the rest of the
tables in the dining room.
The lines in the shoppe began to pick back up in the late afternoon, introducing
us to the dinner rush ahead. I kept my eye on the lonely frappuccino, which at this
point, had become a frozen coffee cocktail, but no one had claimed it.
After hours of abandonment I decided that maybe I had better throw it away so
that when the dinner rush starts about four thirty, customers can sit there and not
mistake it for being occupied by the frozen frappuccino. Before I could further that
decision, Thomas paged me back to the counter to make some more lattes.
For another thirty minutes, the drink was left unattended.
Just before my shift ended, the shoppe door swung open and in came a young
boy, around nine or ten years old. He was alone, and wandered through the dining room
like he owned the place, his scruffy blonde hair sticking up in random places on his
head. From the counter, I watched his dark brown eyes scan the dining room, and
suddenly light up when he saw something he wanted. Something familiar.
Something frozen.
He happily skipped over to the table six and retrieved the frozen Frappuccino.
Even though the contents of the cup resembled coffee and cream soup, he took a big
gulp from the straw, that was still standing in the middle of the mix. When he pulled
the cup away from his mouth, a smile spread across his face. I will never forget that
grin, with the missing front tooth for as long as I live. That smile meant success.
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No matter how ‘unfrozen’ and mushy it was, after hours of being left sitting at
the table, it didn’t matter to this young boy. It tasted perfect to him, no matter how it
appeared.
I was glad to see that innocent face, with those full cheeks happy and enjoying
his beverage no matter how gooey it was.
It made his entire afternoon to find that someone hadn’t thrown away his sweet
frozen dessert. It also made me smile with relief that, due to my distractions of daily
job duties, I hadn’t thrown it away.
If only I could capture that smile with my own mental camera. My heart grew
for this little boy. A stranger I may have been to him, yet after realizing I had
innocently left that frozen concoction on the table, in that moment I was his friend. If
I was in his mind, appointed some “invisible coffee angel,” I will claim that reward
proudly.
He stayed only a moment more, stopping to take a gander at our cookie display,
taking nothing else with him but the coffee mush in his cup, he made his way to the
door and left the same way he came in. Alone.
Unattended.
His face, like that drink sitting on the table, will never be forgotten, much like
the frappuccino that sat at table six for most of my work day.
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To Drown Love
Kayla Dugan
The man named Rudolfo stole his bride from her bed in the middle of the night.
He was relieved to find her on the first floor as he had not been looking forward to
trying to climb anything without adequate light. He opened her window the way the
Englishman taught him. Easing the glass up in a way only a man determined could, and
sliding his captured beauty out the same way. He tied a piece of black cloth over her
eyes so she could not see, and gagged her so she could not scream. He tied her hands
together and without waking her Rudolfo carried her away from the only home she had
ever known. Soon she was slung over the rump of his faithful horse, Tom. As Rudolfo
galloped towards the sea he thought of how he had seen her for the first time this
afternoon.
Rudolfo had been at sea for months and with the tang of the sea still clinging to
his clothes he had come to the market. Ready to trade some of the wares he had hauled
over many miles. This last trading expedition had not gone as well as he had hoped.
For one thing he had encountered many storms which had sent him off course for most
of the journey. Rudolfo was not a man to rely on others for anything and he loved the
fact that he could man the ship by himself. He stayed within sight of land so he could
tie up any place he needed to, and only went out on the open sea once a year with a
small crew that he trusted. Yet that trip had been postponed this year due to all the bad
weather. One of the reasons Rudolfo had pulled into port today was the fact that he had
heard a few rumors over the years from old sea dogs of strange ways to become a part
of the sea and that meant sailing through bad weather.
Rudolfo had scoffed at those tales for years, but the weather had been stranger
than usual this season. For the last couple of nights, he tossed and turned in his bunk
until he had finally thought that at least trying out some of the ideas couldn't make
anything worse. So he had gone into town, to trade and see if he could discover the key
ingredient. He had been in the market for hours, and although his trading had been
fortunate, he was losing hope of ever finding what he really sought. He grumbled to
himself, he had been foolish for believing that he could be a part of anything strange in
this world, then he had seen her. She had been turned away from him, and it was her
hair that drew his attention first. It was the loveliest shade of blonde, long and curly it
fell in waves to her waist. She had a slim figure and stood demurely beside her father.
Her eyes downcast with her hands folded in front of her. While her father was talking
she slowly began to look around the market. Big green eyes taking in everything
silently. Rudolfo could feel her gaze land on his figure for a moment, pause and then
move on as if a giant sea-weathered man was an everyday occurrence, and in this
fishing village it probably was a common sight. Yet she struck him as innocent and
pure in just the right way. Something inside him said that she would do nicely. She
would be his stolen bride, the essential part of the recipe that had been whispered about
for so many years. Now that he had found her he had only one thing left to do, and that
was find something to trade to the creatures of the deep. He had been told that long ago
they had traded with the sailors, but that one sailor had stolen a pearl from one without
fair trade. That pearls being part of the sea spoke to them, so as part of the trade a black
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pearl must be traded. So the perfect pearl had to be found, which he soon did then he
followed the girl home. Once he had found where she lived he went back to his ship,
loaded up the goods and saddled his horse.
As the first streaks of dawn were peeking over the horizon, Rudolfo shook his
head to clear his mind and came to stop. He lowered his bride off the horse and carried
her onto his ship and turned Tom loose to be wild for a few days. Rudolfo glanced over
his shoulder only once as the ship headed out to sea. There was no going back now.
Only when they had passed out of the sight of land did Rudolfo realize that the
girl was now awake and he took a moment to remove the cloth from his bride's eyes
and mouth. She had not made a single noise upon waking, nor did she attempt to do so
now with the gag gone. Instead she blinked several times, taking everything in and
looking around. As she did, Rudolfo looked over her beauty and nodded to himself that
he had done well. He wondered why she was not scared.
“I will wed you come the dawn of tomorrow, but I can only love you when
you're reborn of the sea.” She frowned at him and finally raised her hands to hers ears
and shook her head. It took Rudolfo a moment to realize that she was deaf, once he did
he began to laugh realizing that she was even better for the spell than he had first
thought.
Without further explanation, Rudolfo took his bride's hand and turned her to
face the waves. He efficiently stripped her, a talent he had learned when he was fifteen
and had been tutored by a woman named Rosie in the acts of the bedroom. As he moved
the cloth she raised her hands to stop him but he grabbed them in one of his, and
finished disrobing her with the other. She made a moaning noise and he shuddered to
realize that moan was the only noise she could make. When his bride was clothed only
in her skin, Rudolfo gave her a kiss on the forehead placed a leather thong around her
neck upon which hung a single black pearl. Picked her up and tossed her into the home
of the creatures of the deep. She sailed through the air, tears streaking off her cheeks.
Unfortunately, the girl could not swim and after a few minutes of hopeless
kicking she sank down into the darkness. Now all Rudolfo could do was wait and see if
the spell would work.
Miranda had awoken with an icy fear stealing her breath and a feeling of
something wrong. She had realized that it was because she was moving, and that
shouldn't be happening with her being home in bed. Darkness surround her, and as she
was deaf the only way she knew that something was wrong was that her hands were
tied together. She was being kidnapped. It was not unheard of for attractive young
women to be taken and never be seen again. As she had been tossed over the edge of the
ship she had only thought now I shall die and never once have lived. As she sank she
closed her eyes to pray, maybe she could find a miracle down here, as she never had
upon land.
As this thought occurred to her, she opened her eyes to see three large, blurry
shapes coming out of the darkness below her to take hold of her arms and legs. At first
Miranda thought she must be seeing things as they seemed almost too human to be
beings of water. One seemed to be male as he had no breasts, unlike the other two who
grabbed her arms with razor-sharp nails. They clung to her and the pain convinced her
that she was not dead yet. All three had gills that flared out on their necks as they swam,
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gray tone to their skin that blended into a dark purple further down to their bodies to
end in what only could be considered a tail. Bodies moving side to side in the same
rhythm, a method that could only be instinctual instead of learned.
As the creatures roughly took possession of her, Miranda thought they were
taking her to the surface and safety, but instead they began to drag her further down.
At this point her lungs were burning, the only feeling she had left. Just when she
thought she was going to black out one of the creatures leaned towards her and placed
its mouth over her lips forcing air into her starved lungs. The air tasted of brine and
stung her chest. Breathing for her in this way the group wriggled along to an
underwater cave. The three slipped her inside and set her down. The one with no
breasts fingered the black pearl that the giant man had placed around her neck before
tossing her in the hungry waves. He yanked at the cord ripping it off her, and with fear
Miranda realized that she hadn't even felt the pain she knew must have occupied that
move.
Once the pearl had been tucked away the female who had been giving Miranda
oxygen held her arms down and the male leaned over and sealed his lips over hers. As
he did his lower body brushed against hers and she felt thousands of pricks across her
legs and waist. Blood began to fill the water in a cloud around them. When the sea
water filled her wounds a burning swept through her. Miranda would have screamed if
water would not rush into her already bursting lungs. Then the male moved down to
her neck and began to bite her, ripping great gouges in her neck. Miranda began to bleed
more heavily and then everything went black.
When Miranda awoke some time later she realized that she was no longer in
pain, and was breathing on her own. She opened her eyes and could see more clearly
than ever before. The ocean was as clear as the land above had been on a cloudless day.
When she realized this she looked down at herself and saw she was not what she had
once been. Instead she was stronger, her muscles taunt and ready to swim. Along her
neck she felt movement as her own gills now moved water into and out of her body to
provide oxygen. She lifted her hands and saw webs in between her fingers and sharper
nails on the tips to rend flesh. Before a gasp would have escaped her mouth, but now
only a note of such pure clarity that she knew it was pure pleasure to the ears. That was
when she realized that she was no longer deaf. Somehow during her transformation,
she had been healed and was able to hear. For a few moments all she could do close her
eyes and listen.
Then she left the underwater cave and found only one of her new sisters waiting
for her, the other two had left. Before Miranda could ask any questions her sister of the
deep held out one hand and began to lead her to the surface. She could not even protest
as she was too fascinated with her new hearing.
They broke through the waves with an ease that astounded Miranda. The way
her body moved from side to side, a swishing that never had to stop. They reached the
top and could go no farther, her sister gestured towards some rocks near an island with
a ship in the background. Then her new sister began to leave, Miranda made as if to
follow and her sister mournfully shook her head and raised her hand to stop her. As the
waves swallowed her sister Miranda began to cry and the cry sounded so beautiful it
surprised her. At the sound of her tears the ship began to move towards her. She realized
it was the giant man who had kidnapped her and that it was dawn once more. He had
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come for her like he had said he would. This made her cry harder, and her sorrow made
her song that more beautiful. Right before the ship would have been dashed on the rocks
she stopped crying and Rudolfo looked down at her.
“You are even more beautiful than you were before though I did not think it
was possible. Now we shall be wedded in a way no mere girl could imagine.” Rudolfo
leaned over the edge and once again dragged Miranda unwillingly on the ship, this time
dripping seawater. He laid her on the bottom of the ship and tied her arms behind her
back. Miranda found that she was strangely unafraid. It seemed to her that nothing
could be more painful than losing two families in one day, even with the beauty of
regaining her hearing. As her body began to dry the strangest thing of all began to occur.
She began to petrify. Once the sun was at its peak she was completely transformed into
wood and Rudolfo grinned down at her.
“My love, your beauty shall never fade.”
Then Rudolfo attached her body to the prow of the ship, renamed it “Captive
Bride” and he knew now that his ship would never wreck. It would steer clear through
any storm, as if it was born of the ocean. The spell was now completed and Miranda
cried for the last time.
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