Secret and the sacred

The Secret and the Sacred Erin K. Parker

Copyright © 2015 by Erin K. Parker

PUBLISHED BY UNKNOWN PRESS

First Edition

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction, all resemblances to persons living or dead are purely coincidental. Nothing may be reproduced without permission of the writer or publisher, unless the work is being quoted in short critical reviews or interviews.

Edited by Bud Smith Cover by Brooke Shaden Back cover portrait by Dennis Hernandez Book design by Bud Smith www.unknowneverything.com

Curiosity was far greater than our fear It felt so simple and so prodigious at the same time Incredible things are happening in the world Magical things are happening in this world

Peng! 33 - Stereolab

Contents

9

Red Velvet Couch

19

In the Shade

23

It’s a World of Hopes

31

Personality Test

39

Small Creatures

45

The Evening Sun

61

Visitation Weekend

69

Message to the Girl with the Dark, Dark Eyes

77

Gone Like the Moon

83

The Photo Album

89

Bicentennial Summer

95

Dance Home

105

Storybook Girl

111

Geranium

119

When the Thaw Comes

The Secret and the Sacred

Red Velvet Couch

In the summer of 1988, I left home for good. I packed my car full of books and clothes and went north. I moved into the worst apartment building on the best street I could find.

Acapella Hill rose up suddenly, the bay on one side, the city on the other. My new apartment was the perfect blend of patchouli and the former tenant’s cat. The kitchen was missing some drawer fronts and there were childish crayon scribbles inside the closet. But none of that

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mattered because the rent was low and there was a sweeping view of the city from the living room.

Just beyond the apartment building, the road wandered up the hill and ended in a tangle of thick brush, wild pine and eucalyptus. A feral island in an urban sea: home to stray cats, a family of raccoons and things people discarded and left to rust in the salty air. I liked to see what kinds of things people abandoned in the weeds.

One afternoon I found some cinder blocks. I made a few trips carrying them down the hill, cleaned the cobwebs and dirt off them, and set them up in my living room. Later I bought some boards at the local hardware store and made a bookshelf by layering the boards between the cinder blocks. With my books unpacked, the place started to feel like somewhere I could live. I was good at making do.

Finding a job in a new city isn’t hard for people who knew how to wait tables, and I knew how to wait tables. I got hired at Blue Plate CafÊ where I worked nights. I made enough to get by every month as long as my car held up. To save mileage, I took the train to work if I could get off early enough to run to the station and catch the

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last train out. If I was scheduled to close the restaurant, I’d miss the last train, so I drove my car. When I drove my car, I worried the whole time that it would break down. I memorized where the call boxes were on the highway so I’d know how far to walk if my car died on the side of the road. Every single day was an exercise in confronting fear. Living on the edge of catastrophe became normal.

When I grew tired of sitting on milk crates in my living room, I put the word out at Blue Plate that I needed a couch. A week later, Victor, the night shift manager, told me he had a couch he wanted to get rid of. Victor was rail thin, quick with humor and had the smile of a movie star.

“I remember what it was like when I first moved out,” Victor told me. He always let me take a container of the restaurant’s day old soup home instead of throwing it away. “Seems like living on your own is going to be cool, right? But most of the time it’s just hard.”

One night after the restaurant closed, I finished cleaning the front stations and was prepping them for the morning shift. Victor had

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finished his paperwork and had started inventorying the pie case.

“What kind of pie do you want? Most of these are two days old. Grab what you want before I start tossing them,” he told me.

I grabbed the tin of Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup pie and lifted a piece out.

“You want a piece too, Victor?” I asked him.

“Sure,” he said, counting the rest of the pies he was pulling out of the case. He moved a stack of glass plates over so he’d have more room.

“Watch out!” he yelled, and I turned to see the plates slide off the edge of the counter and crash to the floor. Victor was holding his hand out and I could see he was bleeding.

“Hold on,” I said, reaching for some napkins.

“No,” he yelled, panicked.

“Here,” I said, “come here, you’re bleeding.”

“No, it’s okay, don’t come over here.”

I stood still, not sure what to think. I’d worked in restaurants long enough to have seen cuts and burns before, and I wasn’t sure why he was so upset. He was bleeding a little, but it didn’t look too serious.

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He walked quickly to the restroom without meeting my eyes. I cleaned up the smashed plates and swept the floor. Then I finished the pie inventory for him, threw out the two day old pies and took the trash out to the dumpster. When I got back inside, I clocked out and washed my hands. He was waiting for me, sitting in one of the booths with our plates of pie on the table.

His finger was bandaged, and he was embarrassed but okay. I slid into the booth across from him. His uneasiness passed, and we both relaxed over our slices of pie and coffee. We talked about everything that night. He told me all kinds of stories about when he first moved to the city. He was only a few years older than me, and I realized as I talked to him that I hadn’t laughed like this since I’d moved. I was making a friend.

A week later he brought the couch over in a shiny pick-up truck and I helped him carry it in.

It was a red velvet couch that looked brand new.

A real show piece that amplified the scuffed and dingy walls of my apartment. We placed the couch in the living room so it faced the window.

Victor studiously arranged the throw pillows, and we sat down to admire the city below.

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“I could look at this view forever,” he said.

“Why are you giving this couch away,“ I asked. “It’s so nice.”

“I don’t know,” he rolled his eyes and grinned. “Just wanted a change.”

After he left, I stood in my silent living room surveying the cinder block bookshelf, the milk crates that were now my coffee table, and red velvet couch. I felt a quiet glow of satisfaction. I was settling in.

A few weeks later when I was done with my shift, Victor said he wanted to talk to me. After I clocked out, I grabbed an empty booth in the back of the dining room and waited. He sat across from me and looked down.

“You know that night I cut myself?”

I nodded, “Yeah?”

“Well, I’m sorry I freaked out. I know you were trying to help me.”

“Oh. That’s okay,” I said, confused.

“I’m sick. I have AIDS” His words were a bucket of cold water in my chest.

“So. I just wanted to tell you,” he said.

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“Victor,” I said, and reached for his hand, but he moved it away and shook his head no. There was nothing to say. AIDS was a death sentence, and we both knew it.

“The funniest thing happened,” Victor went on without meeting my eyes. “Last weekend I picked out my casket. It’s metallic gray with a maroon interior. It was kind of like buying a car.

Oh, and the inside is padded. Isn’t that stupid?

Like I’m going to care if it’s comfortable. They gave my mom really good financing on it. She wants me to have something nice.”

He abruptly stopped talking and looked down at his slender hands folded neatly in front of him on the table. I swallowed hard and tried to stop my eyes from running. I wanted to be strong for him, to tell it would be okay. But I wasn’t strong.

And it wouldn’t be okay.

Victor looked up at me, startled, as if he suddenly realized he wasn’t alone.

“Oh God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry. Here,” he said, handing me a napkin.

I took it and wiped my eyes. “No, I’m sorry.

I’ll be okay.”

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But you won’t, I thought. You will never be okay again.

“The restaurant is letting me go,” he said firmly. “I have to apply for public assistance or something. My doctor is helping me figure it out.

They said I can’t work in the food industry. I’m a health hazard now, can you believe that? I guess it’s better this way. I haven’t been feeling very good. Just tired all the time.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I said, wiping my eyes.

Victor nodded. “I’m moving to Arizona.

Anyway. I just wanted to tell you what was going on.”

“Arizona?”

“My mom lives there. She has a pool.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

We sat in silence, and I memorized Victor’s face. His gaunt cheekbones, his dark golden hair, his eyes filled with light.

“Hey, it’ll be nice,” he grinned. “I’m gonna lay in the sun by the pool and read GQ. I’ll have a cosmopolitan in the evenings. Maybe I’ll start smoking cigars.”

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Victor sighed and then he stood up, so I did too.

“I have to go,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you myself before the rumors start. I have to finish all the paperwork they have for me in the back.”

I nodded, “Yeah, okay.”

“Hey,” he said quickly and put his hands on my shoulders. “Listen to me,” he said fiercely, leaning close to my face. “You’re going to have an amazing life.”

He grabbed me and hugged me as hard as he could, which was really not very hard at all. I held him gently, his thin, lanky body all bones under my hands. I couldn’t bring myself to say goodbye and I watched him walk across the dining room and into the back office. He was older than he had been before he told me he was dying. We both were.

I walked out of Blue Plate Café knowing I’d never see Victor again, and went downtown to wander the shops that were open late. I ended up at my favorite coffee house where I put on my regular armor: strong coffee, cream-no-sugar, and a worn paperback book I had in my

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backpack. These things made me invisible so I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone. I wanted to be a rock in a river, letting the conversations of other people flow around me. I longed to be unmovable and immune to erosion. I turned the pages of the book without seeing the words until I was steady enough to head for the train station.

When I got home, I went to the living room window. Fog from the bay had crept in under the hill, blotting out the city lights. My apartment floated on an ocean of clouds underneath a dark sky pinned with stars.

After a time I lay down on Victor’s red velvet couch. Inside I began to crumble.

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In the Shade

I am in the backyard of a stucco house watching my dad and his girlfriend play badminton on the back lawn. Kelley wears shorts and a macramé bikini top, her hair streaked sunlight blonde. This summer my mom has been teaching me how to macramé. We are making things like plant hangers and trivets. If I ever asked to make a macramé bikini top, she would say no because they are not modest. Kelley is not modest.

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The patio table is littered with paper plates, plastic cups and a carton of orange juice. Hot dogs sizzle on the grill. A toy horse stands next to the bottle of Vodka. My dad says the horse is a present for me, but it has to stay here when I go home. I don’t want to play with the horse if I can’t keep it, but I do because there is nothing to do when I’m at my dad’s house. I turn the horse away from the bottle and pretend he is galloping away from a crystal castle. The day is heating up.

Kelley smiles a lot and begins every exclamation with “Christ!” She doesn’t go to church. I know this because I asked her what church she goes to.

“Oh Christ,” she had exclaimed, smiling so big that she showed her gums, “not everybody goes to church. I don’t buy into organized religion, you know?” I had nodded, uncomfortable, not sure what she meant.

I keep quiet now. I am pretty sure she doesn't like me, but I don't know why.

“Go on and play with Kelley,” my dad says, handing me his racquet as he goes to the grill. He is turning the hot dogs and taking long drinks out of a plastic cup. Kelley is waiting by the net,

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jiggling the birdie in her palm and bouncing on the balls of her bare feet.

I don’t want to play because it’s Sunday and I am supposed to Keep The Sabbath Day Holy. I wish I was at church, steadied by the perfume of aerosol hairspray, powdered babies and white sacrament bread. I want to be wearing a pretty dress and knee socks, sitting carefully on the hard pews with my ankles crossed, listening to the soothing talks, the gentle laughter from the congregation, the resounding group Amens. I shake my head no and stay on the patio.

My dad shrugs. “Suit yourself, kid,” he says as he finishes his drink and strolls over to Kelley.

He is kissing her in the sunshine. They call it Frenching, and they pass a sweet smelling cigarette back and forth, holding their breaths, then smiling and smiling.

“Right on,” he says to her. “Right on.”

Kelley smiles a lot at my dad, big smiles.

Behind my dad’s back she looks at me and her smile goes away. The silver bells around her ankle tinkle every time she moves.

Kelley is swatting his bottom with her racquet. She is showing him how playful she is.

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For a minute I think he is going to get mad, but he doesn’t. They are in the bright sunlight giggling like they’re kids. I am flushed with embarrassment for them.

“Christ, she keeps staring at me,” Kelley says to my dad in a low voice, glancing at me then turning away. I twirl the racquet like a baton, acting like I don’t hear her. I am humming hymns under my breath. I am staying in the shade

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It’s a World of Hopes (and a World of Fears)

When I am nineteen, I get the job of my dreams. I am hired at Disneyland as a Fantasyland Attractions Hostess—which is Disney-speak for Ride Operator. I start out working on It’s A Small World.

This is the place I craved as a child. This is the spun sugar, spiritual candy that I stockpiled, doling the memories out to myself in small pieces to get me from one visit to the next. Small World

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is a white and gold temple, an enormous, surreal, architectural toy sparkling in the sunshine. The tick-tock of the giant clock is the heartbeat of Fantasyland. I think of the steady parade of pastel boats gliding toward the entrance, how your eyes adjust to the cool dark air conditioning, and the sweet smell of chlorine and fresh paint wash over you. There’s a celebration inside, and the whole world is singing. This is the place that makes sense to me. This is the place I want to live. The world outside isn’t like this.

The hardest part is working the Load position. Arranging people in the boats, sizing up their weight. Boats hold 14 adults. Four rows of three, plus one row of two, equals fourteen. More if there are kids. Less if the adults are large. And strangers can’t sit together. The boats have to be balanced, and the weight of the people distributed evenly so the boat doesn’t get stuck.

We call that “bottoming out.” Keeping families and couples together hinges on my basic math skills, and this is daunting. I have never liked to look strangers in the eye because they might see me.

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The lines of people never stop. There are always more flowing toward me in an endless river of faces. The rhythm of the Load dock is structure that I cling to. It keeps me afloat, makes me into someone that I’m not. Someone in charge of things. Someone running the show.

How many? Three? Row 1.

How many? Four? Rows 2 and 3, please, 2 and 3.

How many? Seven? Wait right here.

How many? Four? Great, come on up here to Rows 4 and 5. Rows 4 and 5.

Okay, party of seven? You will be in the next boat, Rows 1, 2 and 3. Rows 1, 2 and 3.

How many? Row 4.

How many? Row 5.

How many? How many?

The song goes on and on, swelling joyfully, and everyone knows the words. Everyone in the entire world knows the words. People sing the words while they wait in line. Some people whistle (men). Some people sing out with feeling (women with small children). Some people make fun of the song and say they hate it (teenagers).

Some people ask me if I hate hearing it all day

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(pretty women in sunglasses, their boyfriends smirking). It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears. The truth is that I don’t hear the music anymore, just the tick of the giant clock. Inside my head it’s all blue sky and white noise. Inside my head I can be anyone I want. Inside my head I am safe.

It’s my first summer working there, and I haven’t developed a thick skin yet. That comes later. That first summer is daily abrasion mixed with fireworks that blossom inside me as I wonder at my luck to work at the Happiest Place on Earth. My job is the only thing that makes sense, and so I learn to do it with all that is in me.

I am removed from the over lit asphalt reality of a life that has become too real. When I am not at work I don’t know who I am. Here I can stand up straighter and practice looking strangers in the eye and smiling at them. This feels foreign and intrusive. Dangerous and daring.

Eleven to seven, five days a week. Split days off. It’s the shift that nobody likes. But I like it because I don’t know anything else and nothing outside of work really matters to me that summer

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anyway. There is nothing else I want to do. On my days off I am lost. Sometimes I go there to look at this place from a distance. To walk around by myself. To eat churros and sit on benches.

Because the only time I feel safe is when I am alone with fifty thousand strangers.

At night I dream about faces coming toward me. All night I am counting people, trying to make the numbers come out to fourteen. People wearing ray bans and hats with their names stitched on them. People who smell like sunscreen and perfume. People holding hands.

People with bags. People in matching t-shirts.

People laughing at me. People looking at me, not seeing me.

It’s so important to get the numbers right. I am counting to fourteen and nobody wants to sit alone. Nobody wants to sit with strangers. How many? How many? How many? The only reason I get out of bed in the mornings is so the dreams stop. I wake up exhausted and then I go to work.

Mostly people wiggle fingers at me and don’t bother speaking. I learn to bring them through with my hand and announce them like I’m a circus ring leader.

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“Two? Row 1, please, Row 1. Five? Rows 3 and 4, Rows 3 and 4. Wait for the next boat please. How many? Row 1. How many? Row 2.

How many? Row 5. Wait right there please.

You’ll be in the next boat.” I am in control here.

“Keep your hands and arms inside the boat at all times, folks,” I say into the microphone when I am in the Dispatch Tower. “And... (wait a beat)… away you go. And welcome back,” I say as the next boat pulls up to the dock and stops.

“Please exit to your right.” Leaving, returning, leaving, returning, leaving and returning. Like breathing. In and out. In and out. Away you go, and welcome back. And away you go.

On our 15 minute breaks we sit at the picnic tables in the break room, buy Cokes from the vending machine, rub sunscreen on knees and arms, pull up white knee socks, smooth our blue skirts. We take off the straw hats and brush our hair, wiping our sweaty hairlines. On the really sweltering days, we soak paper towels in cold water and place them on the back of our necks.

We are a patient and funny people who trust each other with our lives and sanity. We are Teamsters who operate heavy equipment and smile and

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pose for pictures that end up in people’s photo albums of the day they will never forget.

Now I am working on the Unload Dock, and it’s hot. Sweat trickles under my hair, and down the back of my neck. A boat glides gently to a stop in front of me. My bare knees are eye level to the people in the boat. It’s 10 more minutes until my break. I am watching to make sure nobody tries to get into a boat that’s about to move. I can control small groups of people with my hand and the angle of my head.

A man’s voice carries, “Look at her scar!”

My eyes find his finger pointing at my knee.

Evidence that life outside this place can hurt you.

That it’s painful and not fair, and he feels the need to point this out. I look at his face. His eyes meet mine, daring me to react. A spark of anger erupts inside my chest and I make it die. I am instantly blank, immediately empty. I am in charge.

The woman sitting next to him laughs, “That’s mean!” She waits for me to react. She’s joined the game he started. Talking about me like I am not there.

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“Please exit this way,” I gesture to the people in the boat, waving them toward me and taking a step back. As the couple stands and steps out of the boat, I catch the man’s eye again.

“I am not audio-animatronic. I’m real,” I tell them.

They laugh, “Good one!”

I don’t smile. I hadn’t meant to be funny.

They don’t know that this place is bringing me back to life.

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Personality Test

“This place has great food. You like Mexican food, right?” Eric asked.

“Of course,” I said, picking up the menu.

“What about Chinese food? Do you like Chinese food?”

“Yeah, there’s a great place downtown with the best dim sum,” I said. “I’ve only been there once, but I really liked it.” Don’t ramble, I told myself. First dates always made me nervous.

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“I have to go to China with my Dad next week,” he said casually, looking down and then quickly glancing at me to check my reaction.

“China! You’re going there on vacation?”

“No,” he paused. “It’s for my Dad’s company. He wants me to go with him to look at factories.”

“Oh, that should be interesting,” I said politely.

He laughed, “Not really. I don’t want to do it.

But, you know. I have to.”

“It’s like an adventure!”

“No, you don’t understand, it’s for business,” Eric said abruptly.

I quietly scanned my menu.

“The tamales are good,” said Eric.

“Okay, I’ll try them,” I smiled, trying to break the tension that had arisen.

After our chips and salsa were delivered and our orders taken, Eric turned his attention to me.

“Look. My dad owns the company and they do a lot of manufacturing in China. It’s what I have to do. I have to work for him. I don’t really have a choice.”

I nodded, listening.

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“I’m only getting my degree in Business so that I can take over the company when my Dad retires,” he continued. “That’s the only reason. I really don’t like it.”

“It’s nice that you get to travel,” I offered a smile.

“So listen,” he said, reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out a folded up piece of paper.

“I brought this list of questions. You know, it’s supposed to tell you more about yourself. You want to answer them?”

“Sure,” I smiled, glad that he was talking about something other than how much he didn’t want to go to China. We were silent as our dinners arrived.

“Okay,” he said finally, and unfolded the paper. “You have a day off. Do you: A. Stay home with a good book B. Go out where there’s a crowd C. Visit family members D. Go to a sporting event.”

“Oh, that’s easy. A. Stay home with a good book,” I said, taking a bite of the tamale. “How about you? What would you do?”

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“Nope, we can’t talk about it until we’re done. Otherwise you might change your answers to match mine,” he said.

“I wouldn’t change my answers. Hey, I thought this was to help us get to know each other.”

“It is,” he said. “Don’t worry so much. I can already tell from this that you’re a worrier. I hate that. Okay. Two of your friends are arguing with each other. What do you do?

A. Walk out of the room. You don’t need the drama.

B. Get mad and yell at them to stop. Can’t we all just get along?

C. Take a side. One of them is clearly wrong.

D. Try to explain to each one what the other one is upset about.”

“I guess I’d try to help them resolve it, I mean, are they both good friends of mine?”

“I don’t know, they’re your friends, you tell me.”

“I mean, is one of them upset over something unrelated, like something going on at home?”

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“You’re overthinking it. Seems like you do that a lot.” He sounded agitated. “They are just two friends arguing. Do you want to stay with your answer?”

“Yeah, I would try to help them.”

“Really? You would?” he shook his head and shrugged. “I think that’s enough.”

I waited while he tapped his pen on the table.

I started on my enchilada.

“Well, I have good news and bad news,” he finally said. “Which do you want first?”

“The bad news,” I said.

“Hmm. Interesting. I think I’ll give you the good news first. The good news is that I’m going to stop the test.”

I laughed, but he didn’t join in. I stopped abruptly and cleared my throat.

“The bad news is that you failed it.”

I thought he would laugh in a second, but he didn’t.

“I’m sorry. I thought this would turn out differently,” he said.

“Wait, you’re saying I failed a personality test?”

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“How’s everything tasting tonight?” our server interrupted as she refilled our iced teas.

“Fine, thanks,” Eric said.

“Any dessert?”

“Yeah, I was thinking about the flan. Hey, do you want dessert? The flan is really good here.”

“No,” I said.

“Just one flan,” he nodded to our server and smiled. Then he cleared his throat, and I looked at him.

“I guess I should have given you this test before we went out. I actually thought you would do better on it. The thing is, my dad was an Olympic swimmer. And it’s important to me that you like sports and not just want to stay home and read books, you know?”

“I really like the Olympics,” I said. “I didn’t know that question was about the Olympics. You just said sports, so I was picturing football or something.”

“See? This is why I didn’t want to talk during the test. I want to know if we’re compatible so you can’t change your answers just to go along with what I want.”

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“I’m not changing my answers,” I said carefully. “I really do like to read. I really do like the Olympics. And I really don’t like football.”

“See? Now it’s hard to trust you!” his voice rose sharply. “I don’t know what to believe!”

“Why didn’t you just tell me that your dad was an Olympic swimmer and that sports were important to you? I mean, why didn’t you just mention that instead of making me take a test?”

The flan arrived with two forks.

“Here, try it,” he offered me a fork.

I looked around, “Can we just leave?”

“Sure. I’ll take you home if that’s what you want,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s what I want.”

“It’s kind of wasteful to just leave this,” he said as he scooped up a bite of flan before putting his fork down.

He put a couple of twenties on the table and stood up.

My face was hot as we walked through the restaurant to the lobby. If he didn’t want to go out again, why didn’t he do what most normal people did? Stop calling. Disappear.

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We left the restaurant and walked to his shiny black Porsche 911 without a word. He drove back across the city to my apartment with the radio on for noise.

“Well,” he said, as he pulled in.

“Okay,” I said and opened the door.

“Hey, wait, this is stupid,” he said.

I got out of the car and shut the car door behind me. I didn’t hear his Porsche drive away until I was inside the dark apartment.

A month later a small package arrived. The note said that he’d gotten back from China a week ago and to give him a call. I tentatively parted the tissue paper inside the box and lifted out a necklace strung with silk wrapped plastic beads.

They made a satisfying clunk as they landed in the trash can.

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Small Creatures

It all started the spring I was nine. There was an infestation of caterpillars everywhere in my neighborhood. They covered the unruly Chinese Elm in the front yard, holding on to the tree’s long branches that hung like curtains over the ivy below. I would stroke them with my fingertips and thinking about their future and what they would become.

“Soon,” I would say to them.

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One afternoon under the sweep of the long branches, I caught a fat caterpillar between my fingers and put him in a jar. He was soft as suede.

In went sticks for him to climb, in went fresh leaves for him to eat. And when he was settled, I punched holes in the lid of the jar with an ice pick and screwed it on. After a day or two, he started wrapping himself in a cocoon until he was out of sight. I whispered to him about how the sun would feel on his new wings.

The days of waiting for the butterfly to hatch were long. I wondered how it felt to go to sleep and then wake up as someone different, someone better than before.

The afternoon arrived when the cocoon began rocking back and forth. I took the jar out to the front porch and waited. I wanted to touch him, to break the cocoon open and help him out, but I didn’t. I just waited and told him in a whisper about the early spring air and the flowers that were in bloom. As the shadows grew long, the butterfly finally emerged and climbed on to the top stick in the jar. Wet wings stretched out to the sun, opening and closing like taking long deep breaths.

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“Hello,” I whispered. “Hello!”

Black wings edged in white with lavender marks on each wing. Opening and closing, opening and closing, stretching and letting the sun dry his dark velvety wings. I breathed with the movement of his wings and I wanted to cry for the ache of such newness and possibility.

Suddenly he fluttered up into the air and landed on the top of the bamboo bush. Opening and closing, opening and closing. And then he was gone! I caught sight of him floating near the top of the tree, and then he was too high to see.

I sat down on the porch and looked at the jar.

The cocoon swung broken on the stick. The lid with the holes in it lay upside down on the concrete step. I smiled and smiled to think of him flying over the houses and trees, and imagined him flying over the park and landing on the tallest branches. After a time, I walked around the yard looking for him, hoping he would land somewhere near so I could ask about what he saw. So I could make sure he was okay. I didn’t see him for a long time.

But as I rounded the corner of the house, I did. He’d landed on the sidewalk in front of me,

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and I ran over to greet him. As I got closer to him, I saw one wing was torn off and resting on the sidewalk near his body. He was so still. Like a leaf. I remember screaming. I remember a gray striped cat watching me from the top of the fence, tail flicking. I remember the horror streaming through me like cold water.

I fell to my knees on the pavement, picking up the pieces of him with trembling fingers. Holding the wing in place I breathed in and held it. I breathed out, then in. Out and in. I was starting to float off the ground a little, but I kept breathing and holding the butterfly together. I breathed on the butterfly until I saw his wings move. Opening, closing as I breathed in and out.

His wings kept time with me, and I laughed with joy and surprise and held my hand out. I was a couple of feet off the sidewalk in my kneeling position, so I stretched my legs until I was standing up. When my feet touched ground the butterfly was aloft, was overhead, was fluttering away. I didn’t know how it happened, but it had.

All I knew was that it felt right.

That night I went outside to see if I could float again, using the cover of darkness so nobody

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would see me. I held my breath, and up I went. It was really very easy. It was all in the way I breathed, and I found I could use my shoulders to steer. I flew over to the Park across the street, the toes of my sneakers brushing the tops of the pines. The lights in the houses twinkled below, and drifting through filmy clouds was like feeling the moon sigh.

After I while, I felt a tug to go over to the main road. With a start, I saw that my neighbor’s gray striped cat had been hit by a car, and I zipped over as quickly as I could. He was dead in the street. Just this afternoon I had been so angry at him, but all was forgiven now. I floated carefully down to the deserted road, wincing because I didn’t want to see this up close. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes hard, and put my hands over the cat. I thought about mending and breathing and about the cat being put back together. For a long time there was nothing, but then I felt the cat push his head up under my hand, and I laughed with joy. The cat shot away into the park and I hovered above the road watching him for a moment before I headed home.

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When I got to my front door, the neighbor’s porch light came on and their front door opened.

“Stripe! There you are! Where have you been?

I’ve been so worried,” she said to the cat that was sitting on her porch crying to get in. There was a look of relief on her face. I smiled and stumbled exhausted into my house.

Some nights are easier than others. I free the dog that is living his entire life on the end of a chain in someone’s backyard. Open the gate so he can run free. Guide him to the house on the other side of town that has room and love for a new fur covered family member. I rescue a cat who climbed a tree and is suddenly afraid of heights. I return the baby possum that fell off his mom while she was walking across a dark road.

In the mornings on the way to school, the neighborhood dogs bark greetings to me as I pass. I am followed by a trail of meandering cats, and the butterflies are like a cloud swirling overhead.

That’s how it all started. Nobody knows who I am except for the animals. I don’t have a catchy name, a mask or a cape, and that’s the way I like it.

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The Evening Sun

My first glimpse of him was in the dark. I laid on my stomach and peered under the bed. His eyes caught the light and flashed. He was pressed into the back corner by the wall, low against the floor.

“Kitty... kitty, kitty..” I crooned at him, patting the carpet gently. “Come here, kitty...”

He wouldn't budge.

Earlier that evening I had gotten a call at work from my boyfriend, who asked me to come

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right home when I was off. I had a habit of staying late and hanging out with the other waitresses at the restaurant. He told me he had a surprise for me.

“Is it ice cream?” I asked, “Did you bring home some ice cream?”

“No,” he laughed, “It's better. Just come home as soon as you're off.”

What could be better than ice cream? Never in my imagination did I think the surprise that night would be one that would change my life.

But it was better than ice cream. It was a cat. And not just any cat. It was Fishbone.

I brought him food and water and pushed the dishes under the bed. I didn't see him for two days. When he finally crept out and started exploring, he was ready to take over the apartment. He had been rescued just in time, having lived in one of those houses you hear about on the news, those houses filled with thirty cats a shelter in his near future because Animal Control was on the way. My boyfriend's dad had heard about it from a co-worker, and that very night Fishbone was hiding under the bed in his new home.

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I was taken immediately by his goofy, expressive face. His eyes were huge. Years later, my friend Tom would describe his eyes as being “anime big.�

I figured that Fishbone was about a year old when I met him, and the following year he began to fill out. He was a sturdy cat. His fur was a deep pumpkin pie orange with no white on him at all.

His nose was pink for the first couple of years, and then he got black freckles on it. His whiskers were long, expressive, and often looked tangled because they seemed to go in all directions.

We quickly became friends. I made him a lot of promises right at the beginning. That he would always have a home with me, that he would always be loved, that I would make sure that his world was safe and he would be taken care of.

That I was responsible for making his world work. And that at the end of his life I would be there with him so that he wouldn't be scared.

I did not guess that I would know him for almost 17 years, that no matter what was going on, no matter where I lived, no matter where I worked, or who was in my life, I could count on Fishbone greeting me at the door every night

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when I came home. That Fishbone would be there saying good morning to me. That I could sweep him up into my arms and drop a kiss on top of his orange head whenever I wanted to. I would talk to him in an accent, “Oh, Feeesh, ju are a magneeeficent cat.” I would call him Señor Pescadito, or Mr. Little Fish. He would lay on his back and want his belly rubbed. He would grab my hand with his paw and pull it toward his head to get me to pet him. He would press his head into my leg and complain about being ignored if I ever made the mistake of not giving him my full attention.

Fishbone was happy in that first apartment.

But when I brought Scampi home about a year later, I turned his life upside down. He stopped eating. He hissed at her, knocking her over again and again, sending her tumbling as she tried to play with him. I hadn't known that he liked being the only cat. He’d actually preferred it. And in all fairness, Scampi was a difficult cat. Scampi was only 6 weeks old when she came into our home feral, wild, high strung, too intelligent and intense to make people feel comfortable around her. After the difficult first few days with

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Fishbone and Scampi, I caught him grooming her when they thought I wasn't looking and I breathed a sigh of relief. Out tribe would be fine.

We would find our way.

In 1998, Suzuki joined us. A sweet and/or invisible cat depending on who was around, a bully to Scampi, and completely infatuated with Fishbone. She gazed at him, her great, golden hero. He would do almost anything to get away from her. She meant well, but he just wasn't interested. She spent a lot of time following him around.

We moved every year that I was in my twenty's. Every year. I used to say that I just wanted to have Christmas in the same place twice. Fishbone got used to moving with me, but he never liked it and he never stopped looking alarmed when the books would get boxed up.

That's when he would know – when the bookshelves were empty and he could walk around in them and look over at me with his big eyes, slightly disconcerted. Here we go again.

And I always felt terrible and would apologize to him even though sometimes the moves were for good reasons or to better places.

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He got used to settling in to new places quickly. The litter box was the first thing that always got set up. He'd mark his territory in the box, and then having accomplished that very important business, would find some kind of central location to supervise me as I unpacked.

His voice was rumbly, and the older he got the more his meows sounded like a duck quacking.

When he wanted something badly, the quack came out in a squeak.

Fishbone knew me when I was a waitress, a choreographer, a store manager. Fish knew me before I ever took any Art History classes, before I could talk your ear off about Cycladic Idols from the Bronze Age. Fish was there when I got my very first computer and had no idea how to turn it on, let alone use it. Fish was there the night of the Northridge earthquake when the pictures fell off the wall and the kitchen was covered with broken dishes. Fish was there during the time when I got married. And he was there when the divorce happened and when I got fired right after that and I didn't leave my apartment for almost 3 weeks except to go get coffee and cat food from 7-11. Fish was there when I fell in love again and

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made a life with someone for 9 years. Fish moved to the Bay Area with me when I got promoted and started my career in corporate Visual Merchandising. He was there when we came back to Long Beach, career and creative opportunities abounded, and life was satisfying. Fish was there when I spent months figuring out how to go back to school full time and get my Bachelor's Degree.

He was there to see me off to my first day of classes, and he was there with me when I stayed up late at night doing homework at my drafting table, listening to music or late night radio.

Fishbone was there when circumstances forced me to leave school before I graduated and I couldn't stop crying for the entire weekend before I started my new job. Fish was there when the 9 year relationship ended and I found myself drowning in panic and fear. And he was there when I repainted the inside of my house night after night, weekend after weekend, to make it look different so that I could learn how to go forward into what felt like the darkest path I have ever started down. And he was there when the sun finally broke through the clouds and I could see where to go.

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When I was back in school full time, Fishbone had a reaction to some flea medication, and it was touch and go for a few days. The vet called me during class, and told me it would probably be a good idea if I came in to see him as soon as possible. I packed up my drawing supplies and raced to my car, raced to Fishbone. Raced to say goodbye to him. I arrived at the Vet, and they told me that Fish was in trouble, that they didn't know if he would make it or not. I spent an hour with him in a small exam room, just me and him.

I washed him with a wet paper towel and combed him and talked to him and held him. I kept saying, “Please just one more year, Fish. One more summer out in the backyard on the deck, one more Christmas playing in the wrapping paper and bows, one more winter of sitting in the window watching the rain, one more time, please... more time.� The sun came in through the window of the exam room and he was so pale under his orange fur, his nose was almost white, his eyes were red and swollen. I took him to the window and we looked out into the alley.

We looked at the sunlight, and I remembered how I had always thought of my cats as my own

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Egyptian Gods: Fish was, of course, Osiris the Sun God. Scampi, so mysterious, secretive, elegant, long and lean – the greyhound of cats – was Isis. And Suzuki, sweet and comical and full of quiet self containment, was Horus by default.

“We need you, Fishbone, don't let the sun go out,” I said. And then I cried and said goodbye to him and prayed that he would get better so I could bring him home.

I got my wish. Every morning for the next few days I called the vet, expecting the worst, and asked how Fish was. One morning they said I could bring him home. He was still not eating, and I had to force protein pasted in his mouth. I was prepared to lose him then, and made him a bed of towels in the closet. But he got better slowly, and soon he was running around the house in his heavy, clumsy, thunderous way, talking to himself and complaining at me to open the back door. He never was a graceful cat. He was a big cat, stocky, masculine, easily embarrassed if you caught him doing something silly and laughed at him. Sweet natured. Always came when you called him, and liked more than anything to lay at your feet and gaze up at you

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adoringly, quacking his contentment.

One of his finest moments was when he caught a baby possum in the backyard. He was never much of a hunter. Well, to be honest, he was never a hunter at all. Too slow, and too much excited quacking always gave him away. He never learned the art of sneaking up on something. But one night I saw him stalking something in the bushes, and I rushed over to him to stop whatever he was trying to do. He dove into the bushes, and I screamed and tried to grab him too late. He emerged with a baby possum in his mouth and dropped it on the lawn in front of me as I stood there absolutely stunned. I grabbed him and put him inside. “Fish! No, no! No possums!” I told him. I was so mad at him. The possum was still there when I went back out. Not dead, not injured, just “playing possum”. It was a baby, about 10 inches long. After a time, it got up, shook itself, walked around the yard and hid in the crossbar of the back gate. I was relieved the possum was okay, and I told Fishbone he shouldn't have done it, but inside I was secretly proud of him. I really never thought he had it in him.

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When his back legs started giving out under him last month, I was concerned about arthritis.

He got worse but then he would get better. I gave him arthritis and joint pain relief medication and watched him and worried. He was 17, after all.

When I saw him drag himself, back legs splayed out on the kitchen floor, to his food dish to eat, my own legs felt like buckling because I knew our time was short. I sat down on the floor with him and cried because I could not, cannot, imagine life without him. My sun cat.

I promised him there would be no extreme measures, no days and days in a little cage with strangers around him. Had he been younger, then yes, we would try anything. But not now, not at 17. I couldn't put him through it. Every day I would say, “Fish, let's have one more afternoon on the deck.” Or “Fish, let's have one more night on the sofa together.” I begged him to show me when he was in pain, because I couldn't tell.

He was acting normal, eating, drinking water, using his litter box. He was just having trouble moving. Some days went by, and then I saw that his eyes weren't looking as bright and he turned and hissed at his back legs. I knew the next day

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we would go to the vet. I pulled him up on the bed and we lay there together, my hand on his back. He got up after a few minutes, and that's when I saw the blood. I turned him over and found a gash on the bottom of his foot – he had been biting his foot so badly that he was bleeding, and I hadn't known until then. I had asked him to tell me when the pain was too much, and now he had. My heart sank.

The next afternoon I fed the cats all together.

Scampi and Suzuki had been staying away from him or sniffing his back legs and backing away, another sign something was wrong. I sat on the floor with them, watching them all together for the last time. When he was done eating I got the cat carrier and put him in it, then took him out to the porch while I went back in to get my keys.

When I went into the kitchen, Suzuki was sitting in the pool of sunlight that was coming in the back door. She looked at me with huge, scared eyes.

And then came a sound I have never heard before. It was Scampi in the other room. It started as a meow, but turned into a long, drawn out howl. She cried like a little wolf, a sound of

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despair, heart ache, and formality. I knew Fish wasn't coming home, and now I knew that Scampi knew it too. She was saying good-bye.

I knew what the Vet would say, and she did – that he was in bad shape, he was in pain, that there were some extreme measures we could try, or that we could just let him go. I nodded, crying, and said I didn't want to put him through anything extreme. She talked to me for a while and told me I could spend as much time with him as I wanted beforehand. She told me that if I wanted to stay with him when they put him down I could, but I couldn't do it. I could barely breathe I was crying so hard, and I don't know if I can ever forgive myself for breaking this promise to him.

They brought him into the room wrapped in a towel and left us alone. I held him like a baby in my arms, and he lay still. He looked up at me, stretching his paw up to touch my face and play with my long hair. Our old game. I told him I was sorry. I told him I loved him. I told him that I would miss him, that I would miss him every day for the rest of my life. But mostly I told him thank you. After a time, I looked around the room and

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noticed it was the same exam room we had been in a few years before when I had wished for more time. And I took him to the window again and we looked outside at the sunlit alley like we had before, and I knew how lucky we'd been to get not just one more year, but four.

When he was calm and quiet, I opened the door and a girl came in for him. They told me they would let him go soon after I walked out the door and they would not make him wait around in a cage all day. For that, I was grateful.

I hugged him and handed him to the girl. She said, “I'm so sorry.” And she really did look sorry, even though she must be used to these kinds of scenes. I was still crying and couldn't speak, but nodded my head. She took a step back to let me pass, and I impulsively reached out again for Fishbone in her arms and bent down to kiss his head, “Goodbye, Fish,” I wanted to say but couldn't get the words out.

I got my keys and kleenex and left through the waiting room full of people with their pets, saw the looks of sympathy and fear they gave me, their hands and eyes going to their own beloved friends. We all know this day will come, and we

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all decide that the heartbreak at the end is worth it because of the love.

I drove home with a knife in my heart. Home to Scampi and Suzuki waiting together by the door in the living room, and I held my hands out to them so they could smell him. They sniffed and sniffed for a long time. “He's gone, he's gone,” I kept saying. “Fishbone is gone.”

I went to the deck outside in the backyard, his favorite spot in the sun. And I knew they were doing it right then, letting him go, setting him free from his pain. I could feel him going. I could feel his absence, but at the same time I could feel his presence.

I lit a candle and it burned bright and strong in the evening sun.

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Visitation Weekend

When I stay at my dad’s house I sleep on the brown plaid couch in the living room. I wake up because Kelley is stirring her coffee, the spoon clinking rhythmically against the mug over and over.

“Good Morning,” Kelley says.

I go into the kitchen and stand by the table.

Kelley looks at me and sips. I don’t say anything because I can tell she doesn’t want me around.

My dad is nowhere to be seen.

“Can I have some cereal?” I ask Kelley. !61

“I don’t know, can you?” she says quickly, and I’m suddenly self-conscious, aware that I am still in my nightgown.

“Why don’t you try asking me again,” she says.

“Can I have some cereal please?”

“I don’t know, can you have some cereal?”

“Yes?” I say, trying to guess the right answer.

She looks at me and shakes her head. “You mean, may you?”

“What?”

My dad comes up behind me, giving me a quick hug.

“Hiya girls!” he says. He is in a good mood this morning. We’re all smiling now.

Kelley stands up straighter, her eyes lighting up when he looks at her. He goes to her and presses her against the sink. “Mmmm,” she says, smiling. “That’s nice.”

“You’re nice!” he says.

I go back to the living room and open my suitcase to take out the clothes my mom packed for me. There are no socks. I unroll yesterday’s socks and put them back on. When I am all

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dressed, I go back to the kitchen where they are both sitting down at the kitchen table.

“Can I have some cereal?” I ask.

Kelley jumps up. “Sure! I’ll get it for you, hon,” she says. “You just relax,” she tells my dad, and I see him sit up a little, watching Kelley take charge.

She puts some unfamiliar cereal into a bowl and then pours watery looking milk on it.

“Here,” she says, setting the bowl down on the table.

“What is this?” I ask. “What kind of cereal is this?”

“It’s cereal that’s good for you,” my dad says abruptly. “It’s healthy. Not the garbage your mom buys.”

Kelley pulls the box out of the cupboard and reads from it. “It’s natural multi-grain organic cereal with bran and flax seed. Oh, and non-fat milk.”

I eye the cereal with distrust. This isn’t the kind of cereal I eat. This is cereal for grown-ups, not for kids. I am frozen for a moment, overwhelmed with longing for Sugar Pops or Honeycomb or Captain Crunch in my regular

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yellow cereal bowl. If I were at home right now, I’d be eating cereal in front of the TV and watching Saturday morning cartoons. My mom would be in the kitchen. She’d be singing along to the radio. The sunlight would be slanting in through the glass panes in the back door and the cats would be on the patio. It is suddenly the only place I want to be.

“Eat your cereal,” my dad tells me sternly.

“It’s getting soggy.”

“I don’t want to,” I say, filled with panic that I don’t understand. “I don’t like it!”

“Eat your cereal,” Kelley says. “It’s good for you. See?” She picks up the spoon, scoops up cereal from my bowl and pops it into her mouth.

“Now you,” she says, handing my spoon back.

I am mortified that she used my spoon, and frantically shake my head no.

My dad gets up from the table quickly and leaves the kitchen. I hear the bedroom door slam.

“Great,” Kelley says, turning toward me, “Look what you did.” She grabs the bowl from the table and dumps the cereal down the sink.

Brushing by me, she goes into the bedroom and closes the door with a definitive click.

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I stand alone in the kitchen listening to the clock tick, looking at the mugs left on the table.

Yesterday’s socks feel damp and my hair isn’t brushed. I go back to the brown plaid couch and sit next to my suitcase. The curtains keep the daylight out. There are flashing Christmas lights tacked up around a poster on the wall that says “Remember, Be Here Now” over and over in a circle. The refrigerator begins to hum like it has shifted gears. On the bookshelf across from the couch, there are framed pictures of my dad and Kelley. They are standing next to his van. They are hugging in front of a tent. Kelley is in front of a giant tree with a tunnel cut through it. There are no pictures of me. I wonder if he thinks about me when I am not here. It suddenly seems possible that he doesn’t. On the coffee table there is a sculpture with a row of metal balls hanging on wires. I pull back the ball at the end of the row and let it slam into the other ones, watch the balls knock into each other, clacking heavy and dull.

It’s the sound of disappointment.

Kelley is crying in the bedroom and I know it’s my fault. After some time, my dad’s bedroom

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door opens and he comes out alone. He looks at me and I hold still.

“Let’s go,” he says. “We will not put up with this kind of behavior. If you can’t do what you’re told, we aren’t going to have you over.”

He grabs my suitcase off the couch and we go out to his van. It’s quiet on the drive back to my house except when he tells me that I hurt Kelley’s feeling because she always wanted to have a little girl. He drives fast, and that’s how I know he’s mad. I hold on to the seat and try not to think about how I have let everyone down. I think about shame and the heavy weight of responsibility. I don’t know how to fix all the damage I have done.

He pulls up in front of the house and honks the horn. My mom opens the front door and is coming down the sidewalk fast.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, looking at me as I run past her toward the house. He is out of the van and talking loudly to my mom from the curb.

“She is willful,” I hear him say. “Every little thing is an issue with her.”

I run into the house and go straight to my bedroom to hide. I sit on the edge of my bed

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waiting for the sound of the front door to close so I know my mom is back in the house. I don’t know if I am in trouble.

She finally comes into my room and gently asks me if I am okay and to tell her what happened. All I can say is that I’m hungry and I didn’t like the cereal.

We go to the kitchen where the sun is slanting through the panes of glass in the back door. The radio is on, and she hums a little as she pulls my yellow cereal bowl out of the cupboard and opens a box of Honeycomb. I am not sure why I’m suddenly crying.

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Message to the Girl with the Dark, Dark Eyes

It was early spring in Southern Utah. Clumps of left-over dirty snow remained under trees and up against houses where there was shade. Here and there, tulips were fighting their way up through the cold ground. On my way to class, I glanced up ahead at the campus. The street was empty except for the car in front of me. It was driving slow, keeping pace with a girl who was walking on the sidewalk. Someone in the front seat leaned out the passenger side window and

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yelled at her. She winced as the words were thrown. She was about my age, walking fast in the cold afternoon, with her arms crossed in front of her, her long skirt wrapped around her in the wind.

Her pioneer style clothes and long braided hair gave her away. She was from Colorado City, or Short Creek, as the locals called it. A member of the FLDS church who lived in a small town of unfinished houses that straddled the border of Utah and Arizona. They’d broken from the mainstream Mormon Church in the 1800’s so they could practice plural marriage. Polygamy.

Some of the women were allowed to attend classes at Southern Utah State College so they could become teachers in their community.

Otherwise, they didn’t really leave their town. At least the women didn’t.

As a California native who’d grown up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, I’d never heard of this group until I moved to Cedar City to attend school that year. It seemed everyone I talked to had a story about the Polygamists from Short Creek. There were stories of fourteen year old girls being married off to fifty year old men. Girls

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drowning themselves in the river the night before their marriage. Young men being sent away to make their way with a 3rd grade education because there were too many boys in town. After all, the ratio of women to men had to stay at a certain level. Of course it did, because it was part of their belief that the men had to have at least three wives to fulfill "the Principle", which helped ensure their eternal salvation. There were stories of groups of young men being taken out and left in the desert. Or ending up in Las Vegas on drugs and then in jail. There were stories of women that ran away, and were caught and forced back into their marriages after being beaten or locked up in hidden rooms. The stories were all the same.

So there was this girl walking down the sidewalk in the cold, being followed by a car full of people. I knew it must be a car of college boys, the ones who told crude jokes or made insulting remarks about the women from Colorado City, and I was instantly furious. These women had a hard enough life without enduring harassment from other people.

The girl walked fast, trying to outpace the car, but it had slowed down and was going along right

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next to her. I would help her. I had to help her.

I’d tell those boys to leave her alone. I’d offer her a ride. Anywhere she wanted to go. My anger surged as I quickly pulled my car over, parked, and ran down the sidewalk behind her.

"Excuse me,” I called to her. “Do you need help? I’ll help you."

She whirled around to face me. Her eyes were dark, her skin was pale and smooth. She looked at me, shocked, frozen and unable to speak.

I stopped running and approached her slowly, as if she were about to bolt.

"Do you need help?" I asked again cautiously.

Her eyes wide, she turned her head slowly to look at the car that had pulled up next to us and stopped, the motor idling. I turned toward it angrily, ready to start yelling. But it was not a car full of college boys. It was a car full of adults. The windows were all rolled down in the cold, even the ones in the back seat. A large man in a buttoned up Western shirt was in the driver's seat. A woman with her hair pinned up was in the front, and two more women were in the back. I looked at them and their freshly scrubbed scowling faces and plain pioneer clothes, their

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eyes hard and mouths closed tight. They were all looking back at me and they were angry.

“Oh,” I said, turning back to the girl on the sidewalk. “Oh. You know them."

She looked down and then back up at me with those dark, dark eyes.

"I’ll help you. Do you need help?" I said in a quiet voice.

Silence exploded from the car beside us.

Nobody breathed. She looked at me hard, and for just a moment I thought she would say yes. But she didn't. She shook her head no.

There was nothing I could do but turn and walk back to my car. By the time I got in and turned the key, they had opened their door for her and she’d climbed into their back seat. I was shaking. She must have been a young wife, maybe the newest wife. Or maybe a daughter who didn’t want to get married to the man she was assigned to. Maybe she’d rebelled. Maybe she was being punished. Taught a lesson. Being made to walk in the cold while they drove next to her, yelling taunts. I was sick to think that I may have made it worse. There was nothing to do but watch their car pull away and disappear around

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the corner. Whatever scene I had interrupted was over.

A few days later I saw her again on campus in a long, powder blue skirt, her hair neatly braided.

She saw me and smiled with quiet recognition. I scribbled my name and phone number on a scrap of paper, went to her and slipped it into her hand.

Her fingers were warm and damp, and she took the paper quickly, her eyes meeting mine.

"I’m sorry if I made things worse the other day,” I said. “You can call me if you need anything."

She had a half-smile on her lips before she moved away from me without a word.

I got hang ups on my phone for a while. Was she trying to get a hold of me? Had she been getting up the nerve to ask for help so she could escape her life? And then the school year ended, the phone was disconnected and I moved back to California for the summer.

She would be in her late forties now. I remember her clear skin, her dark eyes, her warm fingers. She’s probably still there in Colorado City in the foothills of Zion National Park where the late afternoon summer storms

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throw lightning across the desert, where the red rocks glow in the sunset and the night skies are filled with more stars than you've ever seen. Does she have a husband who treats her kindly? Does she lay in bed at night and wonder about her life or the choices she isn’t allowed to make? Does she feel known and loved? Does she fight with her sister-wives about not getting enough attention? Has she become hard and tough, determined to be righteous and blessed in doing her duties as a wife with an obedient heart? Has she watched her young daughters marry older men in other communities? Is she allowed to know where they have gone? These are the old, old stories of the women in that town.

I reach for her hand again back through the years. I find her in my memory, my imagination, and now I push another note into her warm fingers that brush mine. Not my phone number this time, but something more. It’s a message. A message for the girl with the dark, dark eyes and the woman she’s become. A note she can take out and read sometimes when she’s lonely: I remember you.

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Gone Like the Moon

“You have to choose,” my sister says. “You can stay here with me, or you can go into the woods where there is an entrance to a magical world.”

“The woods,” I say right away, enchanted with the idea. The excitement swells inside me as I imagine what a magical world would be like.

“The woods,” I repeat.

“There’s a catch,” she says in a conspiratorial whisper, pushing back her long blonde hair. “You

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would never be able to come back home. You’d have to stay there. Forever.”

“Okay,” I say. “I want to go to the magical world.” It’s suddenly so close now, I can almost taste it, this magical place.

Her smile fades into silence, like a cloud moving across the sun.

“What?” she hisses, her eyes snapping.

“I don’t want to play this anymore,” I tell her.

“Too late,” she says. “I can’t believe you said that. I can’t believe you want to go. What is wrong with you.”

It’s not a question.

“No,” I panic. “No, I don’t want to go now.”

“Too late. I already heard you. You said you wanted to go and never, ever come back,” she says with disgust. “I can’t believe you would do that to mom.”

The look of disdain on her face scares me. I have made a terrible mistake, and creeping shame starts spreading.

“No, wait,” I say. “I don’t want to go, I want to stay here.”

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“I don’t believe you. You’re lying. You really do want to leave. I’m going to have to tell mom that you want to go. I have to tell her,” she shakes her head in disbelief. “I really have no choice.”

The guilt is too much. What had I been thinking? The tears start, and I am frozen with regret.

“Oh stop it,” she says with a sneer. “I was only kidding. Be quiet or everyone will hear you.”

I sniff. Maybe I am getting a second chance.

She stands up and laughs as she goes downstairs.

In the living room after dinner she takes me aside by the stone fireplace.

“I had to tell mom,” she says quietly. “You know I had to. She is really hurt. You can tell by the way she’s not even talking about it.”

I look across the room at mom who is reading a paperback book. She won’t even look at me.

“See how she isn’t even talking to you? That’s because she’s so hurt. She said she’s going to act like she doesn’t know you want to leave. That’s how upset she is.”

I look at the fireplace to show her I’m not listening.

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She grabs my arm hard and squeezes. “You’re really selfish, trying to hurt her like that.”

I yank my arm away and look her in the eye.

“You’ve always been such a selfish little girl,” she says in a low voice before she goes into the kitchen.

That night I wake up in the dark. The fire is out, and I sit up and look around. The light from the moon is shining through the window. Pine tree shadows spread across the floor. I need to see the sky, the moon, the pines. I’m up and getting dressed in the dark, lacing up my sneakers carefully and walking to the door. Clickthunk and the door is unlocked. Slowly I open it, controlling the creak of the hinges. The night mountain air is sharp with the tang of pine needles and stars. I go down the front steps of the house and turn toward the trees on the side of the driveway.

Above the treetops the moon is large and white, throwing silver on the passing clouds.

There’s a flicker of light just in the trees, and the sound of bells. The lights flash again, pink then blue then gold. Laughter, faint music, sparks like

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fireflies and fairies pull me across the dark and into the dim grove. The moonlight makes a path, and the lights are dancing with me until I get to a stone wall and stop.

In the wall is a worn wooden door carved with wildflowers. Silver glows from the crack underneath. There are kids playing, friendly laughter, bells and the smell of freedom. I look behind me, but it’s too dark to see anymore. I put my hand on the door and push.


 


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The Photo Album

Derek was shot while he drove on a freeway in Los Angeles. Who dies like that?

His wife calls Mara a few months after the funeral to tell her he was dead. She tells Mara the service was really nice and a lot of people came.

Mara sits in stunned silence. She takes it in, hears the sadness in his wife’s voice, hears also the drink his wife must have downed before she

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made this call to her dead husband’s exgirlfriend.

A slow motion wave rolls over her, erasing her, dragging her under and back to the day she’d really lost Derek, the day she found out she wasn’t enough, the day she came home from work and he’d moved his things out of their place. He’d left a note apologizing that he’d fallen in love with someone else. It was paper clipped to a check for the next 6 months of rent.

That’s how Derek was. Thoughtful.

“I am so sorry for your loss,” Mara says slowly, and then asks how the kids are.

“They are having a difficult time. It’s hard,” she says.

“Of course,” Mara says quickly, regretting that she’s asked. About Derek’s children. That she’s asked about Derek’s children.

“I have something for you, it’s just some pictures…” his wife trails off. “I thought you might want them. He always spoke very highly of you.”

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Wasn’t that just like him to have married someone who was really thoughtful, someone who would want to return photos to her dead husband’s ex-girlfriend? They’d all met once, running into each other in a restaurant on the West Side a few years after he’d left Mara. Mara was out with her first husband. And Derek’s wife was so warm, so accessible with her generous smile and her expensive haircut. There wasn’t a whole lot to say after the introductions were made, complete with promises to all get together for dinner sometime soon. They all knew it would never happen, but went through the motions anyway and exchanged numbers. It was the right thing, the adult thing to do. Derek’s face had been full of questions that left her feeling sick, and his eyes hadn’t left hers during the quick exchange. The smell of his skin was like a slap when they quickly hugged their surprised hellos.

They must have kept Mara’s number all these years, that’s how his wife had found her now.

Mara, of course, had thrown their number away as soon as they’d left the restaurant, before she even got to the car. Her first husband didn’t like

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to hear about her exes, and she certainly couldn’t imagine an evening out with Derek and his wife.

When Mara gets the box in the mail from Derek’s wife, she studies her name written in the neat, careful handwriting that would have been so familiar to him, looking for clues to what kind of a life Derek ended up having. Organized, she assumes, from his wife’s handwriting. A life of order. So different from their life together. They were anything but orderly, she smiles. It doesn’t matter, he left her and made a whole life with someone else. She is a footnote in his life, but in hers, he is a chapter. Was. She was a footnote.

And then she opens the package without hesitation, tearing her carefully written name.

Derek played guitar in a band when they were together 15 years ago. It was really just a cover band that played bars and small parties, but he took it pretty seriously. Slide guitars and bolo ties, cowboy boots and old punk t-shirts.

Country-Folk-Punk, he called it. He even had one of those cow skulls wrapped with barbed wire hanging on the living room wall in his apartment.

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Mara loved that cow skull, and when they moved in together, Derek drove a nail hard into the wall over their bed and hung it up. He taught her how to drink bourbon and sometimes they’d get out the checker board and play checkers in bed while they listened to records. Derek had a massive record collection that he kept meticulously organized.

“King me!” he’d say, grinning. She was crazy about him.

She opens the package and pulls out their old photo album, opening it across her lap. This is the photo album she’d put together when they lived in the apartment on La Brea, and now it’s been given back to her. The photos turn her inside out and suck the air out of her lungs. They were so young, his arms around her, the way his hips felt through his Levis, his guitar calloused fingers running down her spine, his flannel shirt warm against his body. The way he made time stand still when they were alone with the curtains drawn. All the things that she couldn’t think about after he left, after she stopped being angry, after she buried her broken parts so deep inside

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herself that nobody could find them, not even her.

Mara calls in sick to work for a week straight so she can look at the pictures with the lights off, missing the life they had and the future they lost, which is now the past. The bourbon he taught her to drink still makes her sick when she has too much, which she is doing while she lays in bed with the photo album, but it brings him back, God, does it bring him back. So she keeps on drinking it. It keeps him close until she is empty and hollowed out, a husk of the girl he left. And now he’s gone, gone again and gone for good and his absence is everywhere.

After a few days she stumbles back out into the daylight looking for anything that used to resemble her life. Nothing looks right. She realizes that it hasn’t for a long, long time.

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Bicentennial Summer

In the summer we go camping at the hot springs in the desert and Kelley takes her clothes off because my dad says it’s beautiful to be so free in nature. He kicks off his shorts and strides around our campsite in only heavy sandals, beautiful with a beer in his hand. I put on my American flag bathing suit that my mom got me because it’s the Bicentennial. They laugh at me in my one-piece bathing suit and my dad says I am

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just like my mom. I figure that’s an okay way to be.

Kelley and my dad hold hands a lot, looking into each other’s eyes and kissing with their tongues. They laugh and laugh. I want to laugh too, but I don’t understand what’s so funny.

Later we walk down to the edge of the hot springs where the water smelled like Easter eggs. The ones behind the living room drapes that you don’t find until July.

The next time I see my dad that summer, he takes me to his house. It’s empty now, and I run from room to room, my footsteps echoing off the tile floors. There is only a hard mattress with tangled black sheets in the middle of the bedroom. My dad says it’s called a futon. He shows me how his bedspread has a cover like a giant pillow case and tells me it’s called a duvet, and that it’s hand-blocked and dyed in India. He tells me how Kelley has a lot of emotional baggage and that means she has hang ups. He says he is going to stand up for himself and that he isn’t going to enable her crazy-making any more.

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The house is empty because Kelley has moved out and taken all the furniture since it was hers anyway. I feel sorry for him because he tells me he doesn’t have any of his own furniture because he gave it to my mom, so now all he has is a futon and a duvet. He says things are hard for him because he keeps losing furniture to his exes.

Then he tells me that he sure hopes I appreciate living in a house with his furniture.

Just before summer ends, he wants to show me his new apartment. He calls it his pad. He’s painted the bathroom walls black. They match his sheets and the velvet pansies he’s planted in the strip of dirt on the edge of the small patio.

There is a pinball machine next to the kitchen table. He explains that he is getting his head together, getting in touch with his needs, and getting honest. He talks to me about the importance of yogurt and the mind body connection. He buys vitamins and granola and books about meditation. Now there is a glass of orange juice and a bottle of vodka on the kitchen counter next to bags of pills that he says are good for him and his healthy lifestyle. He says he is

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waking up. Sanka stained mugs are left overnight in the kitchen sink.

“Can I play it?” I ask him, touching the sleek flipper buttons on the sides of the pinball machine.

“Sure. Do you have any quarters on you?” he asks.

“No,” I tell him.

“Me either,” he shrugs. “That’s life.”

I like his new apartment because I can roller skate on the smooth sidewalks around the courtyard. I go around and around until it gets dark and I see the lights go on in his window.

When I come in with my skates, he is sitting at the kitchen table wearing a brown velour track suit. The apartment smells warm and sweet, murky and heavy like springtime. I think he’s been crying because his eyes are red. Maybe he is sad about Kelley.

The next day he takes me to a record store on Melrose in Hollywood, and points to a closed door in the back behind the racks.

“Smell the grass?” he asks quietly with a conspiratorial grin, gesturing to the back room.

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I can’t smell it and I keep saying, “I don’t smell it.”

And he laughs at me because it is so strong, how can I not smell it. And I keep saying I don’t know what he’s talking about.

All I can smell is my dad.

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Dance Home

The detective’s name is Joanne. They must have given my case to her because they thought I would be calmer with a woman. They thought I was falling apart. But I’m not falling apart. A little rude, perhaps. A little angry, perhaps. But not falling apart. That’s what I tell myself. When the police came to the house to take the report and asked if I’d been wearing shorts when I got raped, I shouted at them. I found I no longer had the capacity to worry about other people’s feelings.

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“Yes! Yes I was wearing shorts!” I yelled.

“What are you doing, putting that in your report?

What difference does that make?”

So now that I am at the Police Station to make the composite sketch of the man who raped me, I admit I am glad to have been handed off to Detective Joanne.

“How are you?” she says seriously.

“Fine,” I say.

“It’s okay if you’re not,” she says. I hear fierceness under her words of studied casualness.

“Okay,” I say after a moment. I can only think of one word responses.

“My daughter was raped a couple of years ago,” she tells me. “Just remember, you have done nothing to be ashamed of.”

Unable to speak, I can only nod.

There is this flicker of fear that licks the base of my skull and travels to my heart. It’s so heavy.

So nobody is safe. Not even a detective’s daughter. And not me, certainly not me.

Especially not me.

Let’s get this over with.

She flips open a book filled with strips of clear plastic. Each strip has a different facial feature.

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There is a stack of eyebrows, a stack of noses, a stack of haircuts, a stack of eyes. The eyes are the worst. We painstakingly go through each strip and build layers to create a face. We create his face. And after a long time, and in no time at all, there is his face. The eyes, the eyes, the eyes aren’t right. They aren’t right because they aren’t laughing.

His shirt was blue. His shirt said Maui in yellow letters. His hair was blonde. He was strong. Don’t break my knee. Don’t break my teeth. Don’t break me. Don’t. Don’t. That’s what I thought as he pushed me in the back of my head down to the linoleum floor.

“Don’t scream or I’ll kill you,” he said.

Do whatever you have to do to stay alive, I told myself. Please God, don’t let me be the body they find in a dumpster.

Detective Joanne stands up quickly when his face appears on her layered plastic strips.

“Are you sure?” she asks. “Is this him?”

“Yes,” I say. “That’s pretty close.”

She excuses herself and leaves the room. I am left alone with his face on the desk. I don’t feel anything.

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In a moment she is back with a file folder in her hand. She opens it so I can see what’s inside.

It’s his face. She flips the page. It’s his face again.

The next page is his face again. It’s the whole file folder filled with reports and pictures. Variations of the same face.

“We’ve been looking for him for a while,” she tells me quietly.

“Those pictures were done for other.. other girls?” I ask.

“Yes, he has attacked other girls in that neighborhood. You were very lucky you got away,” she says.

All I can think about on the way home are the other girls. I am surprised to find myself crying.

That summer I drive to Santa Monica at least once a week. I say it’s about escape, but I suspect it’s about healing. Either way, it’s terrifying. I don’t think about what I can’t bear to think about. I just want to run away for a few hours and do something that’s hard. I don’t want to be me anymore.

By the time I get to the Dance Home on Santa Monica Boulevard, it’s already getting dark. I

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lock my car door and walk to the entrance. The sound of drums is drifting down to the street. I pay the optional five dollar donation and climb the stairs to the dance studio on the second floor.

People lounge on low futon couches that are pushed against the walls. The mirrored wall of the dance studio doubles the size of the room.

Dance bags for clothes and shoes are piled in corners. There are smiles and hellos and crates of fresh oranges in the kitchen. The lights are down low, and tonight there are candles burning in the window sills.

I stand still, breathing in the oranges and the candle wax as the sounds of Santa Monica traffic and car alarms recede. I smell the ocean through the windows that are open to the summer night air.

I am in my black leotard and footless tights.

My feet are bare. A Modern Dancer at heart, there is nothing I love more than being barefoot on a scuffed, warm, wooden, dance studio floor. I survey the people that are in the room. I am trying to quiet down inside, but I am ready to bolt down the stairs and back to my car if I can’t.

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Breathe, I think.

You’re okay, I tell myself.

There is music- a turntable and stacks of records. It doesn’t matter what records, as long as they keep spinning. Tonight there are people banging on milk crates or hubcaps they’ve found on the street, and people pounding on the studio floor with their hands. Dancers inspiring the drummers, and the drummers making the dancers move. The sound is physical, tangible and almost has a taste. Strangers are becoming one, and the whole time we don’t say a word because we’ve found a rhythm that is a truer way to communicate.

People are dancing together in a group. Some are walking in circles. Others are moving through yoga poses. Over near the windows I see the man who always spends his time standing still in the most crowded part of the room. Still as a tree. I view his stillness with suspicion and envy because I don’t know how to do that.

People move their bodies without shame.

They dance and they laugh and I feel like crying because I don’t know how to do that anymore,

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and because there is nothing of hope left inside me. Surely others in here have had bad things happen to them, I think. They move, and I want to join them, but I can’t remember how to move with joy. I don’t tell my story because I don’t know what it is.

I am waiting for the Contact Improv group to begin. It’s the reason I come, it’s the reason I always come, but I don’t know if I can go through with it. I never have before. It terrifies me.

Contact Improv is mentally challenging. Scary and boundary breaking. Improvise a dance with another person or a group of people. Stay in physical contact with people. Allow yourself to be off balance. Resist or give physical support. Fall and get back up using the floor and other people to counterbalance each other’s body weight. And do all this with people you don’t know and will, most likely, not talk to. Contact Improv tends to be very quiet. It is everything that is hard to do with strangers. Touch. Trust. Eye contact. The worst part is the eye contact. I don’t like to look at people because I don’t want anyone to see me.

But I know that in the language of Dance there can be no lies, so I am not sure how to begin.

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The people in the group who start moving together look like one giant shape moving across the floor. After a few moments, I no longer see the individuals: only the group. And this is where the longing for healing and wholeness take me. I don’t want to be just me anymore. I want to let go of the smallness. I want to let go of the large pain.

I am sitting on the side of the studio watching the dancers move together, and they start traveling toward me as a group. A man steps forward from the front of the group and extends his hand. The group is dancing behind him. He’s inviting me to join them.

I take a breath, frozen.

He looks at me and smiles. He takes a step toward me and tilts his head in invitation. I dare myself to do this. I dare myself to have a new experience.

Don’t hurt me. I step toward him, trembling.

Don’t break me. My fingertips touch his.

Heal me. I make myself look at his eyes.

There is calmness there, and there is warmth.

And that’s what I want. I give myself over to the !102

rhythm being made in the studio. I let go, and I go dance.

The drumming is loud, and the music is moving us. The group of dancers is in a circle now, and we are twirling and jumping, leaning against each other, and shouting with joy. People are clapping and stomping and laughing. The whole group is around me.

“Ready?” a dancer asks.

I answer with my eyes, and then I’m picked up and lifted by several people. A moment later I am over their heads. There is this heat, and I’m in the center. In one shining moment, I catch a glimpse of myself in the studio mirror. I am part of the whole as I float above the group. And in that moment I feel something inside me come home. And I remember what joy feels like. And I laugh.

When it’s over I move away from the group and sit down on one of the futons to watch the dancers. I can finally breathe, and I’m so grateful that it digs deep into my chest. Grateful that I am alive, and grateful to have this night.

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I came here to feel something. I came here to tell stories with my body, and to watch larger stories unfold in the weight of a stranger’s body supporting mine. I came here for the intimacy of eyes and breath, and the language that blooms in this dimly lit room. I have found these things tonight, and I am full.

I carry with me the freedom of movement, the naked energy in the studio, the oranges and the tea, the candle wax in the windows.

I carry the sound of bare feet on wooden floors.

I carry warmth from the heat of the music.

I carry the spinning records and the tall windows overlooking the back alley.

I carry the touch of strangers that I held up as they held me, breathing together and finding our balance.

All of this is inside me as I walk out into the night, car keys between my fingers like a claw.

The hot sweat on the back of my neck turns sharp and cool, and I am lifted by the soft ocean smell of Santa Monica on a summer night. 

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Storybook Girl

When I grew up I learned how to tell stories. I became a Storybook Girl.

Storybook Land was one of the original 13 attractions when Disneyland opened in 1955. It’s a charming, narrated boat ride through a land of miniature scenes from Disney's classic animated films. The small village scenes are scale models done in exquisite detail. It feels like the old Disneyland of my childhood, a place still thick with the original magic.

Storybook Land could be very tedious to work day in and day out, so there were people who

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didn’t like to work on it. I, on the other hand, had harbored this as a dream since I was a little kid.

To be a Storybook Girl had always seemed unattainable. On the annual trips to Disneyland when I was growing up, I would eye the girls working on Storybook Land and feel desperately unhappy, sure that I would never look like them or sound like them. I just wasn't the type. Not pretty enough. Not confident enough. I tried to memorize what they said and how they said it, and would sometimes conduct my stuffed animals on tours of my bedroom while I waited to grow up to see if I could become a Storybook Girl.

After my first summer on It’s A Small World, I was ecstatic to get chosen to be trained on Storybook Land.

My job was to narrate the 10 minute ride on a microphone while guiding a boat filled with Guests through the canal. It's on a track, so all I had to do was turn the boat switch on and off throughout the ride to match the pacing of the spiel I delivered to the Guests on my boat.

Getting the knack for how far the boat would glide when you turned it off was the real trick.

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The best part was delivering the perfect spiel.

The dictionary defines "spiel" as "plausible glib talk, useful to a salesperson." At Disneyland, spiel is the narrative that you are required to deliver.

Glib? Perhaps. Sing-songy? Definitely. The art and skill of delivering the perfect Disney spiel is in the rhythm of the delivery, as well as the pitch of the last words of each sentence. It’s something everyone who works there seems to pick up, because it's nearly impossible to say these lines in a normal voice or tone. Besides, it's part of the role, and you want to play that role - why else would you work there?

I systematically tracked down the origins of each story on the ride. The Disney versions are always watered down, of course. Everyone knows that. What I was after were the real stories. I wanted the history. I read Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows, and started down the dark and tangled paths of the origins of Snow White and Cinderella. I found solace and inspiration in the best of children's literature.

Wind in the Willows told me about the beauty of a meandering river, adventure, and finding one's

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place in the world. The end of Peter Pan always made me cry - the description of children as cruel and heartless, and the ache of homesickness for a place I'd never been. A window thrown open in anticipation of flight and friendship. I came to understand that Disney hadn't ruined anything he had made these stories accessible to the masses - it was our responsibility, if we so chose, to go deeper. And I did.

Once at the end of my ride, an elderly man in my boat patted my hand and leaned forward to kiss my cheek as I helped him out of the boat. "I know I can't give you a tip,” he said, “so I threw some pennies in the water for you. That was just beautiful." I still remember his eyes.

And once, a man on my boat told me he was a literature professor who taught classes in fairy tales. He chastised me to see if I was aware that the Disney stories were the incorrect versions.

“Yes. Yes, I know it,” I stammered. There was no time to explain my life-long fascination with stories and fairy tales to him. I had no credentials to show off except that I had been reading them my entire life. He wanted me to know that he was scornful of what Disney had done to these stories.

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All I could manage to say was that maybe these versions inspired kids to pick up books and start reading. I felt like a star-struck fan in front of her favorite guitar player.

Sometimes I remember the lines of people, the sound of the turn-styles, the rows of strollers outside the fence, my sunglasses falling in the water, the summers of sunburned knees, the smell of the dye in the water, and the music in each area as my boat skimmed by. The Three Pigs singing about the Big Bad Wolf, Alice singing about the Sunday Afternoon, the music and clatter of the Casey Jr. Train going around the canal, the thumping music of the Teacups, and the ringing bell of the Fantasyland Carousel. But there was more than this.

Here is how I more often remember Storybook Land: In the autumn the sun would start to set behind the tall pines up near the old Fantasyland Skyway station. I would imagine I was at the edge of the Black Forest, my cottage behind me and the night falling fast. There was some kind of journey to start. A quest. Something to find.

Tasks to perform in order to succeed.

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The sky would turn orange and pink with the tall black trees silhouetted in front. Hundreds of crows would gather there in the last of the daylight, yelling for the night to rise up and cover the world. The lights would come on in the small cottages on the edge of the canal, and for a few minutes I would imagine that all the stories I ever read were true. That I had managed to see into another place. That the side-by-side worlds of the best of children's literature were real. That I had looked through the doorway into another realm for just a split second.

But then my boat would glide along with a small splash as it cut through the dark water, and nothing would have changed except that I knew the doorway might be there the next time I went around the canal. Might be there even when I couldn't see it. I would breathe this knowledge in like a prayer, like a promise, like a gift. To have glimpsed it, to believe in it, just for a moment, was always enough.

It still is. 

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Geranium

I move into the old Spanish bungalow apartment up the street from Neptune Cove. It’s a hundred year old rambling building that had been a fine summer hotel before it was turned into apartments in the seventies.

When it was new, it was the place where people from the city could rent furnished apartments by the week. They could vacation here, stroll down to the shore. Men with straw hats and mustaches. Women in skirted, buttoned

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bathing suits and long stockings. Everyone in black and white, horizontal stripes, carrying nickel sodas and sun parasols.

I don’t care that the building is sagging with age and damp ocean air, or that the center courtyard has a broken fountain that’s been filled with dirt and turned into a planter that is in need of care. It’s the part of town I can afford and I am mesmerized by the rows of arched windows, the cupolas on the roof, the plaster detail and the glass doorknobs that have turned a pale violet.

My apartment is on the end of the building that faces a busy street and a bus stop. After I move in, I stop at the market on the corner and buy a potted geranium for my front porch. I want things to be nice. I can’t wait to feel like I live here.

The apartment next to me mirrors mine. We share a porch, and our front doors angle away from the street and face each other. I can see straight into their living room when they leave their door open, which is often. In the evenings people spill out on to our common porch, sit on the broad railings, eat dinner from paper plates, gather on the grass in front of my living room

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window to smoke in small groups. I am not sure who actually lives there. The kids, who don’t seem to go to school, run up and down the sidewalk, shrieking as they chase each other around the bus stop in the twilight. When the evenings are warm, it’s a nightly carnival outside my curtained windows. In the morning there are cigarettes stubbed out on the sidewalk and the occasional stray beer can crushed against the porch steps.

Most nights after I turn off the TV and get into bed, they start vacuuming. The vacuum bumper hits the wall we share over and over sending my cat into the closet to hide. Every night I listen, and every night I grow angrier. In the dark, my mind tries to piece together why they do this. Why do they vacuum in the middle of the night? Why do they just vacuum the room that’s on the other side of the wall from my bedroom? And why do they need to hit the wall with the vacuum bumper?

One night the vacuum wakes me up after 2:00 in the morning. They push the heavy vacuum slowly until it hits the wall, then pull it back.

Push, thump, pull. Push, thump, pull. Twenty

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minutes later the vacuum is turned off. Furious, I reach over to the wall from my bed and pound several times to let them know I can hear them.

There is silence. Then a woman laughs as someone knocks back three times on the wall right next to my pillow. The vacuum starts up again, striking the wall in earnest. Push, thump, pull. My heart pounding, I get up and move to the couch for the night.

The next evening when I come home from work, my geranium has been moved to the railing next to their door, which is open as usual. Several men are inside watching TV. As I fish my keys out to open my door, one of the men calls out, “Hello!� It sounds like an invitation. I keep my eyes on my door, fumbling with the lock.

Someone pounds on the coffee table three times and they all start laughing. I open my door, go in, close the door and turn the dead bolt. Press my hands together to stop them from shaking. There are footsteps shuffling outside on the porch and then silence.

In the morning when I leave for work, their door is closed, so I take the geranium back and move it to my side of the porch. But when I come

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home from work that night, it’s back on their side. The group of people in their living room are silent for a moment as they watch me unlock my door. When I am dead-bolted in, I turn on the TV and eat my microwaved dinner on the couch.

Shadows move across my windows lit by the street lights. There are people walking back and forth on the front lawn. The kids are laughing, the men’s voices are low, the women’s are flirtatious. Everyone is having a good time. I lay a paper towel on my coffee table and paint my toe nails while I watch a movie. At 11:30 I get into bed. The vacuuming starts at midnight. And the next morning on the way out for work, I hesitate a moment before I move the geranium back to my side of the porch.

When I get home in the evening, their front door is closed. My geranium is on their railing, naked in its small plastic container, the pieces of the broken ceramic pot are stacked in front of my door. I angrily kick the pieces to their side of the porch, rescue my geranium off their railing and take it inside.

For the next few weeks the rain keeps them locked in. Conversations and light leak under

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their door. Sometimes when I get home from work, I feel like someone has been in my apartment and I have just missed them. Nothing is disturbed, but the carpet looks walked on in places I don’t often go, and one evening I find mud in the entry. On closer inspection I see the geranium in the kitchen has been knocked over, dirt spilled into the sink. It must have been the cat. It had to have been the cat.

On a cool afternoon before the rain starts, a woman who lives on the other side of the building is at their front door yelling for them to open it.

When I open my door, she turns to me, frantic, “She has my baby! I let her hold him and she ran in here and shut the door!” She yells at the closed door while she pounds, “Open your door! I’m calling the cops!”

A small, wrinkled woman quickly opens the door, a toddler loosely held on her hip.

“Baby,” she croons.

The neighbor gasps and grabs her child, turns and runs down the sidewalk toward her apartment. The small woman steps out on to the porch, smiling and waving.

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“Nice baby, good baby,” she smiles sadly at me and goes back inside. A door slams hard on the other side of the building. For a minute I think it’s a gun shot.

Later that evening men gather on the porch, talking quietly, then gradually becoming more heated. Cars pull up outside, motors idle, radios play. The group grows larger, the smell of cigarettes stronger. Even turning the TV up doesn’t mask them, and I finally go into the bedroom and close the door. That night there is no vacuuming. Instead there are cabinets closing and floorboards creaking, feet shuffling and car doors slamming far into the early hours until it’s almost light.

In the morning when I open the door to leave for work, the apartment is wide open. It is silent.

It is empty. They have disappeared in the night.

Smiling, I get the geranium from my kitchen and take it outside, carefully placing it on my side of the railing. I will pick up a new ceramic pot at the market after work. I want things to be nice. I can’t wait to feel like I live here.

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When the Thaw Comes for S.

Six months after life pulled the rug out from under me, I decide to run away from the suburbs of Los Angeles and go back to school in a safer, slower world. Safe is more important than slow, but slow is appealing. I long for my old out of state college in the foothills of the Wasatch Front.

I want the red canyons of Color Country. I want mountains covered with quaking aspen and bristlecone pine. I want to throw myself into Lit classes, to write papers about words and stories

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and their meaning. I want time to move differently than it does in Los Angeles.

I register for classes over the phone, pack a few boxes and give notice at my job. And then with a week until classes start and no place to live, I leave the crisp sunny days of Southern California in January, drive hours through the desert, and arrive in the muddy gray of a winter that’s already gone on too long. I have reserved 3 nights in a motel on Main Street, confident I’ll find a furnished room to rent. A room where I can find my way out of the dark. There is no Plan B. And here it is: a room for rent listed on the first flyer on the first bulletin board I come to at the Student Center on campus. I take the flyer down and drive carefully on icy roads to the address.

I knock on the front door of the house. The woman who answers tells me the room for rent is in a 3 bedroom apartment in their basement, and 2 of the rooms already have tenants. She leads me to the driveway lined with snow drifts, down the dark stairs next to the garage, and knocks on the door. A girl about my age lets us in. Inside it’s a cozy, dim, wood paneled basement and the

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bedrooms have windows right under the ceiling with dirty snow piled against the glass panes outside. The bedroom for rent is in the back, and when the girl opens the door to show me, nobody says a word. It’s musty and dark and could use some paint, but it’s quiet and furnished and that’s all I want.

“I’ll take it,” I say, turning to the owner and the two girls who live there. My new roommates, Viv and Tina. They exchange a glance and smile at me.

The winter progresses and the snow gets higher until the windows are covered with gray and no light can get through the ice. I live underground like a rabbit. I listen to records and read books and drink hot peppermint tea against the cold. Sometimes I stay up late and write stories in a notebook. I sporadically attend classes. I eat a lot of Top Ramen and hardboiled eggs because they are cheap. I crave salt and warmth. Sometimes my roommates make chocolate chip cookies and invite people from church to come over and play Uno. I realize fairly quickly I may have made a mistake in coming back to this town. Everything has slowed down

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and has now buried me in this underground room with no light. Paralysis has set in. I am homesick for things I can’t put into words.

One night I have trouble going to sleep and am laying in the dark room looking at shadows on the ceiling. I am wondering how to gather the energy I would need to move back home. The thought of packing my car up and driving home feels impossibly difficult. The thought of staying here also seems impossibly difficult. Then the heavy air in the room becomes heavier and the dark gets darker. Over by the closet there’s a ripple in the shadows, and maybe it’s from the tree branches outside through the ice on the windows, but maybe it’s not. I sit up in bed, straining to see into the corner across the room. I realize I am not alone, and go cold.

A girl’s face flashes lightning-quick into my mind, and I see her shaking her head at me, disappointed and a little amused. In an instant, I see myself like she sees me: a girl huddled in bed, drowning in self-pity and circles. I see her face again, like quick frames from a film. She’s shaking her head, a mocking half-smile on her

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lips. She’s chiding me. She can’t believe the despair I have allowed myself to fall into.

“You have everything,” she says to me, her words flashing in my mind. She’s not sympathetic, or wise, or all knowing. She’s annoyed. This is something you might say to a friend who needs to be told the hard truth. A friend who has taken things too far for too long, and could benefit from a reminder to get up and start living. I have a strong impression of a finger wagging. Enough, she scolds. Enough.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” she says.

“You’re alive, so you have everything.”

She’s in front of the closet door facing me, laughing a little, shaking her head, mouth pursed in amusement. I strain to see her in the dark. I feel her looking at me. She’s right there. Is someone there? Curiosity wins out over fear. For a moment I am comfortable, content even, accepting that I may have gently slid sideways and lost my grip on reality. I am surprised that it’s so easy. I reach for the lamp on my nightstand, and before I can switch it on, she’s gone. She’s just gone. I’m still in the dark, but very much alone.

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I wrap the covers tight around me and lie back down, holding this flash of a girl in my mind. The impression of her words, her knowing look, her message that is starting to make sense.

Or maybe I am losing it. Have already lost it. I think I am kind of okay with that as I drift off to sleep.

The next morning I wake up feeling better than I have in weeks. The snow is almost gone now and I can see light out the windows. Spring must be close. I am lighter and happier than I have been in a long time. Maybe I am crazy, but crazy feels pretty good.

In the afternoon, my roommates and I are in the living room doing homework with the radio on. I’m drinking hot tea. Perhaps we will make cookies later.

“You’re in a good mood today,” says Tina.

“The weirdest thing happened,” I say. “Last night I couldn’t sleep. Then, you know how you can feel that someone is in the room with you?

Well, that’s what I felt. Like someone was in my room. I got this image in my head of this girl. She was in my room over by the closet. She was kind of making fun of me for being so depressed.”

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They look at each other quickly.

“What,” I say. “You think I’m crazy. I know it sounds weird.”

“No it doesn’t,” Viv says.

“It was like this girl was telling me to stop feeling sorry for myself,” I continue slowly, “that I have no excuse to feel depressed. She said I was alive, so I had everything, that I was lucky. I mean, that makes sense, right?”

They look at each other again, and Tina says to Viv, “Should we tell her?”

My heart starts pounding and I’m filled with apprehension. “Tell me what.”

“Didn’t you ever wonder,” Viv says slowly, “why your room was available when you moved here to start school in the middle of the year?

Nobody has lived in that room for a long time.

Nobody wanted to.”

“I just thought I got lucky when I found the ad that the room was available,” I say. “But you’re right, it is kind of odd.”

“There was a girl that lived in your room about a year and a half ago,” Viv says, her eyes filling. “She died. She had left to go to her hometown, but never made it. She disappeared.

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She was missing for a couple of weeks. Then they found her body. She was murdered. It was an awful time, such a nightmare.” She stops and looks at me, wiping her eyes. “This is hard to talk about. You would have liked her.”

Viv is crying now, remembering, telling me how the girl’s dad and brothers showed up. How she helped them pack up boxes, clean the bedroom and load their car up with her things.

How she had always kept the door to the bedroom closed, and sometimes she would hear sounds in the room like someone was opening the desk drawer. Sometimes she would find the light on in the closet even though no one had been in there. The older couple who owned the house didn’t try to rent the basement bedroom out for over a year. They’d put the notice up at the Student Center the week before I got into town and came by. There had been no interest until I showed up.

Tina jumps in. “I didn’t live here last year,” she says, “so I didn’t know her. But I knew the story, and poor Viv was trying to deal with everything that happened. Nobody else wanted to live here. So when you showed up to look at the

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room, we decided not to tell you. You looked so nice we didn’t want to scare you away. I’m sorry.”

Viv wipes her eyes and says with a sad smile, “I hope you don’t want to move out now.”

I am letting it all sink in. Now there is this girl who has died a horrible death. This girl who was my age, who had slept in the same room, under the same iced windows, and in the same bed.

This girl who had lost her life, who saw me wasting mine by feeling sorry for myself. This girl who reminded me I had everything, and my whole life was in front of me. Who knows when it will all be over? None of us know. She hadn’t known.

She told me to wake up, to grab life, to make it what I wanted and stop wasting time. Because even the bad times mean you’re alive. And when you’re alive, you do have everything. She was telling me to get up, seize it and hold on tight.

Because it is valuable and rich and far, far too short. She told me to start living.

And so I did.

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Acknowledgements

My heartfelt thanks to everyone who knew I would publish a book someday even when I had stopped believing. Someday is here.

Thank you to the whole Uno Kudo crew. You continue to support and inspire.

And many thanks to the editors of the following publications where these stories first appeared: The Altar Collective, Vol. 5, “In the Shade” Drunk Monkeys, “Gone Like the Moon” and “Visitation Weekend” Ka-Pow! – Timid Pirate Publishing, “Small Creatures” Lost In Thought, Vol. 6, “Red Velvet Couch” Santa Fe Literary Review 2015, “The Photo Album” Uno Kudo Vol. 2 and 4, “Dance Home” and “Message to the Girl with the Dark, Dark Eyes”

About the Author

Erin won her first Creative Writing contest when she was 11, and has been writing ever since. Her work has been published by Uno Kudo, Red Fez, Drunk Monkeys, Cadence Collective, Lost in Thought, Timid Pirate Publishing, The Altar Collective, Santa Fe Lit Review, Silver Birch Press and Lucid Moose Lit’s anthology Like a Girl: Perspectives on Female Identity. Erin was a finalist in the 2012 NGR Literary Honors contest and was nominated for Best of the Net 2014. She is an editor for Uno Kudo and JMWW. The Secret and the Sacred is her first book.

Visit her online at erinkparker.com

The Secret and the Sacred companion playlist on Spotify visit: http://tinyurl.com/p8cppd5