Conceptions Southwest, 2010

Vol. XXXIII

Fine arts and literature magazine

Conceptions Southwest 2010

Southwest of the University of New Mexico...

Conceptions

The 2010 issue of the fine arts and literature magazine of the University of New Mexico

Vol. XXXIII

Southwest Conceptions

Copyright © 2010 Conceptions Southwest Published by the Student Publication Board Univeristy of New Mexico All rights revert to authors upon publication ISSN 1048-8790

Conceptions Southwest is published annually by student volunteers under the auspices of the Student Publications Board. This issue has been funded by the Associated Students of the University of New Mexico (ASUNM) and the Graduate and Professional Student Association (GPSA). The magazine has served as an outlet for creativity in the UNM community since 1978. Submissions are accepted from UNM undergraduate, graduate, professional, nontraditional students, faculty, staff, alumni and participants in Continuing Education.

Published works are selected from submissions by a volunteer staff in blind-jury process.

Copies and back issues are available in the Daily Lobo Classified Advertising Office, room 107 or Marron Hall at the University of New Mexico. Conceptions Southwest is located in room 225 Marron Hall Cover art: “Curl up and close your eyes” by Emma Difani

505.277.5656 csw@unm.edu www.unm.edu/~csw c/o Student Publications MSC03-2230 University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001 Printed by Starline Printing 7111 Pan American West Freeway NE Albuuerque, NM 87109 505.345.8900

Thanks Thanks Anne Hillerman and UNM Press for permission to publish “Othello in Union County�

The Daily Lobo for advertisement The Student Publications Board for constructive criticism The creative writing department and professors for spreading the word ASUNM for funding GPSA for funding The entire CSW staff for its work Most importantly to all the artists and contributors. Without you, the magazine does not exist.

Staff Staff Editor-in-Chief Mario Trujillo Assistant Editor Tricia Remark Fiction, nonfiction and poetry selection committee Mario Trujillo Tricia Remark Nikki Razz Rachel Tucker Scott Palmer Visual art and photography selection committee Mario Trujillo Vanessa Sanchez

Magazine Design Sean Gardner Copy Editors Mario Trujillo Tricia Remark Photo Editor Vanessa Sanchez

Contents Table

Poetry

Visual Media

A Record

by Kayla Hofius

1

Big Tobacco

by Susan Thiele

9

Bella

by Elaine Soto

2

Eve

by Gabbi Campos

10

Concerning Love and Machines

By Dean Wyse

3

Persuasioin

by Susan Thiele

13

Deflated Bubbles

by Alexandra Jirik

4

Natale

By Joseph Trisolini

14

Geddaloadathis

by Kayla Hofius jh

by M.A. Goodman

5

Sundanese

by Nancy Bennett

17

The Wedding Dress

by Emma Difani

18

Tengo la Cabeza Como Un Bombo

by Gregory L. Candela

7 Tremzow Possible

by Mara K. Pierce

21

I saw the Madonna

by Elaine Soto

8

Wet Jaw

by Nancy Bennett

22

New Years Poem

by Rachel Tucker

11

The Tie That Binds

by Kayla Hofius

12

Recreation

by Mattew Skeets

15

Signs of Fall

by Max Early

16

No

by Mandisa Bradley

19

The Pleaser

by Gregory L. Candela

20

6

Fiction/Non-Fictions Othello in Union County

by Tony Hillerman

23

Half Sunk

by Michael Gay

32

If Only For Myself 33

by Christopher Quintana Martinez Ladãro Blues

by Miiky Julian Cola

38

Kaya

by Perry Penick

40

The Rise

by Juni Dillard

46

Looking for Change

by Michelle Dyer

51

Refuge of Being (Chapter 1)

by R.L. Steele

53

Eat ’em

by Miiky Julian Cola

58

Strands

by Katlyn McKinney

62

The Last Gift

by Wendy Meek

67

Crack

by Alyssa Mohon

70

notes Editor’s

Conceptions Southwest has published the writing and art of budding authors in the UNM community since 1978. That is no different this year — with one exception. Among the works of students, staff and alumni, CSW chose to honor Tony Hillerman, UNM instructor and famed writer, who passed away in October 2008. Hillerman came to New Mexico in 1962 to pursue a graduate degree in English. He received his MA in 1966 and went on to become a journalism professor and department chair at UNM until his retirement in 1986. He also published numerous novels.

As a UNM student, it is important to not only remember the man, but also to remember what he symbolizes to the University. A professor once told me it is important to see people from New Mexico really succeed. In a community that thinks it is almost ironic to see a work titled “The Center of the Universe” on the UNM campus, it is important to show that New Mexico and Albuquerque are not places to get out of to become great. On the contrary, they can spawn greatness. Since I didn’t personally know Hillerman, that is what he means to me and, hopefully, to other students as well.

“Othello in Union County” is a short story taken from Hillerman’s master’s thesis, which was eventually published in a book of short stories titled, “The Great Taos Bank Robbery.” I would like to thank Hillerman’s daughter Anne Hillerman for granting permission to publish his work as a tribute.

Setting Hillerman’s early work along side current UNM authors serves not only as a tribute to the late writer. Hopefully, it also serves as the foreshadowing of New Mexico writers to come.

MarioTrujillo

1

A Record

by KaylaHofius Help me lift the table, let’s roll back that rug; these toes are feeling restless, these hips too still The varnish on this floor has long been overwritten with a history of bodies, a web of cryptic markings carved with passion with apathy; with furniture and fingernails; tonight the pebbles caught in the soles of our shoes will inscribe the latest chapter as we shuffle with something short of deftness, with a grace we have invented

Bella

by ElaineSoto Dusky grey and black Salt and pepper coat Large chocolate eyes lined with mascara Long snout and a crooked tooth Salt and pepper coat Comes for her pet in the morning Long snout and crooked tooth Sniffing me as she pushes her body against my thigh Comes for her pet in the morning Her retina covering over with a white film Sniffing me as she pushes her body against my thigh Diabetes is taking its toll

Insulin shots two times a day Dusky grey and black Balancing the love I feel Large chocolate eyes lined with mascara

2

Her retina covering over with a white film Insulin shots two times a day Diabetes is taking its toll Balancing the love I feel

Concerning Love and Machines

3

By DeanWyse The contours of your body fit my frame So I feel your bump nudging my behind.

I sit astride you and find it pleasing That you are firm and yet so comfortable.

By what fortune did I come to know you?

You, a minty flavored praying mantis?

You, a seafoam god like Aphrodite?

You, who buzz through life in search of freedom?

May we live in polygamy and be In matrimony: you, me, and the road.

Together we could glide on starlight and Sustain ourselves on the space between suns.

Can you tell me if there is anything We cannot accomplish, my dear scooter?

Collide, With me Drip the honey down my back Trickling slowly and viscous Like our time together, the clock Ticks backwards.

Thick, sweet clover fills my throat, Incensed effervescence frothing I catch your eyes, hold a gaze, Sadness and love gather Streams reaching the mouth.

This bubble we’ve created will pop, I think, Blink my eyes quickly I’ll lose you if they linger The thin iridescent film teases us, Rippling, As we wrestle, as we scream, as we touch.

Becoming more translucent, skin thinning out Both of us bound to a sticky mess Layers of time and honey on the floor.

Step, Towards me Bundle me in the blankets of love Time moves forward, your feet Drag backwards.

My stubborn, sticky body wont move, Not for this love Pressed, To the edges Of this clear cocoon, punctures visible Foam ruptures gushing, metamorphosed minds, collapsed hearts, Deflated bubbles.

4

Def lated Bubbles

by AlexandraJirik

Geddaloadathis

5

by KaylaHofius yesterday outside the Leisure Bowl two old men sat smoking. thin plastic tubes linked four nostrils to two chrome cylinders that mirrored the air filters shaking between their fingers. across the median Erin sucked her last drag laughing flicked it out the window flipped a bitch and pulled into the Leisure Bowl lot, crawling past these men and she turned to me and said “I wanted you to see this.�

jh

by M.A.Goodman died face down in the frozen mud of the White River off the street, he’d picked up a job he’d picked up some weight had a 30, 60, 90 day chip and socking some money away

6

a kid, a thin young man sit behind you in math maybe shared your locker your junior year a regular mom and dad straight laced catholic folks we shook hands at the funeral IPD says he died of exposure the coroner says he died of exposure the family they don’t understand they scream for answers in the office, on tv he was murdered it was the bums it was the police they just don’t want their last memory being of him face down in the mud alone, and drunk without hope without them.

by Gregory L.Candela

Tengo la Cabeza Como un Bombo

7

for José Amadór Pérez

From one who clenched his abdominals anticipating life’s gut punch to one who bellies into the world: Your Andean music was chirping sentiment or threnody Now? Now I hear the bombo’s rumble the thumpthump of adrenaline-driven heart valves and clouds that do not keep a beat but release the beatbeat from cumulus nimbae onto the chapped earth.

From one whose piping, squeaked along on rubber tires or tired un-oiled springs I hear, now, the dense, blue-green feathered, staccato-red trill, of quena and of zampoña the Amazon’s mud-flood tumble in the tuvo the churango’s tingle of expected rain at the sky’s epidermis Now—comes raw peasantry that the studied, stiff-necked Spanish guitar cannot perfume into smooth romantic trovas.

I saw the Madonna when I was ten She was a calm presence looking at me I was inconsolable I cried every night in boarding school She was a calm presence looking at me She was the only parent I had I was inconsolable My father left when I was three She was the only parent I had A feisty, courageous but frightened woman My father left when I was three Attractive, loving, but unaware A feisty, courageous but frightened woman She supported us from a distance Attractive, loving but unaware He disappeared She supported us from a distance I saw the Madonna when I was ten He disappeared I was inconsolable

8

I saw the Madonna

by ElaineSoto

9

Big Tobacco

By SusanThiele

Transparent Watercolor on Yupo

Eve

10

By GabbiCampos

New Years Poem

11

by RachelTucker Spending Saving Wasting time.

Trying to throw watches and clocks into bank accounts unaware that time only exists with mortality And that in reality, life is infinite even if it is not our own and we begin to appreciate the technicolor of fall because even in death there is beauty and wonder.

Thunderstorms become our symphonies and the rhythm of raindrops, our melody.

Making love turns into our past time and sadness turns into a dot on the time line as insignificant as our births into dying breaths.

It is no longer a test of what we can accomplish, but what we can feel and healing comes as easily as a smile after our grandmother has told us her story for the eleventh time though like a child, to her its the first and the circle becomes clear we are not here to become adults This portal is leading us into childhood again where scraped knees and dropped lollipops were reasons to get up and run again and friends were made simply because we were all playing the same game though different sized feet created various paths on the grass.

It was all ok cuz at the end of the day that giant circle in the sky became a little dimmer so that we could all stare straight on without squinting our eyes and chase the fireflies in the night It was all alright....

And it can be again, if we stop putting our watches into boxes of tin And let life live again.

I stand at a crossroads, six years old.

Two doors lie ahead of me, and neither leads to safety but my bladder urges me onward so bowl-cut clad I march through the doorway marked “Girls.”

The chit-chat-chatter stops, mob splits screams “no boys allowed!” and I stand reminded of my mother’s words: “Kayla, you can wear the tie, but just know this: there will be consequences.”

And still, I wear the tie.

I stand at a crossroads, twenty years old, slumped before the fitting room attendant, chest flattened and hips tucked away behind large square clothing the chit-chat-chatter stops, and I watch while her eyes roll over my figure, from chest to hips to hands to face, struggling to read in a foreign language, while another woman points me with conviction to the boys’ room at my left.

But the ladies reevaluate, and panic stricken, fumbling over themselves, shocked at their own illiteracy, they redirect me to the right.

And smiling, I straighten the tie.

12

The Tie That Binds

by KaylaHofius

13

Persuasion

By SusanThiele

Transparent Watercolor on Yupo

Natale

14

By JosephTrisolini

Recreation

15

by MattewSkeets Crickets don’t dream of such madness and neither do I. The night songs, made by the long green legs, have no recollection once they hit my ears.

I make them mine.

The endless slew of melody adds more to the question of the insect psyche.

Do they have a brain?

I am sick of choking, I whisper, the air is not good here. and they do not stop to listen.

I captured one once, for my very own personal radio.

It didn’t play however, As much as I wanted it too.

I have felt strange ever since.

I gave it all that I could. the greenest leaves and what had I hoped was an opposite-sex companion.

They didn’t mate like lovers do, nor did they play music.

I had no choice but to let them free.

It doesn’t matter what I wantthey have their night songs and they never stop to listen.

Shivering tree drops a leaf Banquet of season moves South with the hum of a bird Sweet nectar, sweet nectar Dries on mouths left behind Wipe off your sticky sadness Cool autumn evening chills Grasshopper wishes to fly on Sitting on the window pane Atmospheric directive blows Touching down to signal Will I see another summer Smart ants eat in their retreat You don’t want to catch cold Honey, close the door now Chopped scent of cedar wood In my arms falls to the bin More ash for the winter winds

16

Signs of Fall

by MaxEarly

17

Sundanese

By NancyBennett

The Wedding Dress

18

By EmmaDifani

No 19

by MandisaBradley American IdolYou are next in line for a promotion at your firm you deep throat death, black gold like the best ExxonMobil Chevron Shell saint. slandered your peers even bamboozled the journalists. (Did you see the Earth bleed today?) You are next in line for a promotion in your firm Promises in the grocery store She was staring at the words. Useless fucking words to convey some intangible personalized want to scattered primate freaks

“Why am I here?” Surroundings were sterile, white. Artificial breeze A/C mist droning above the genetically modified strawberries (GMO’s folks)

Three hours prior she had been:

electromagnetic waves

nirvana

goddess

orange juice.

She slightly turned her eyes back to the words. What did they mean? Did they mean? Nothing: Void of any molecule of significance.

Just gibberish to titillate, socialize one into this reality.

gibberish.

No. Tell me you need mybones©, from ever Rupert Murdock medium. They preach, “man is not equal to the sum of these parts”

project us, protect us in the stocks.

Customer. Consumer. Victim. Rapist. money snickers corporations. Poison. Deconstruct. Advertise. Program.

My third eye dormant. I am American

I think therefore I shop. kow-tow to plastic, petroleum, oil. bury me in your stock.

Oh cannibals all! Are we not the privileged slaves

fed and loved by the masters?

Can I be a patented commodity? (iGenes?)

The Pleaser

by Gregory L.Candela

Someone removes the light-green oxygen mask; its cupped vapor dissipates quickly.

Spitless, gasping, emaciated, you lie on your right side, knees drawn up, a premie laboring to begin oblivion.

You open the fingers of your

precise right hand—supple fingers that never trembled—and drop the scalpel on the theater floor.

What is the word you proffer me, as you excise yourself from existence, leaving the wound unsutured?

Say—to this pancake-faced red-nosed, hobo-shoed, antic your second son sad …earnest no longer able to bend up your bitter lips.

You forgave me, pre-born.

You forgave my refusing to take up the knife.

You bless me, now, with the air you leave unbreathed. I lie close to your last exhalation.

You whisper: “Please yourself.”

20

Now clenched, those long feminine fingers had banged or squeezed out Glenn Miller on the upright piano or tenor sax had navigated through packed carpal bones, muscles and threaded nerves to remove an air-rifle pellet from a young boy’s hand (another boy had watched)

21

Tremzow Possible

By Mara K.Pierce

Akua ink monoprint with chine colle

Wet Jaw

22

By NancyBennett

Othello in Union County

23

By TonyHillerman Out of respect for the previous publisher, CSW did not edit or change the style of the original 1973 edition.

The drama was there, and a leavening of tragedy, and irony aplenty. But everything else was wrong. The affair at Folsom was out of joint with time. For example, neither of its principal characters knew the other existed. The cowboy was a bookreading, violin-playing Negro, a ranch foreman who carried a telescope in his saddle boot. The scientist collected skulls and won his highest glory for his worst mistake. It was all stranger than fiction. The one who was right about the meaning of the bone pile uncovered in Dead Horse Arroyo lies today in a weedy grave, remembered only by a few old men.

But the one who was so stubbornly wrong is memorialized by a halfpage biography in the encyclopedia on my desk and his bust stares from a place of honor in the Smithsonian Institution.

The stage for this strangely disjointed affair was set about eleven thousand years ago. Eight miles up the valley of the Dry Cimarron from what is now the village of Folsom in Union County, New Mexico, a band of humans trapped an unwary herd of long-horned bison. They slaughtered twenty-three of these oversize beasts, skinned them, and feasted. The carcasses lay where they had fallen.

Silt gradually covered the skeletons.

The light of day would not touch them again for a hundred centuries — not until August 27, 1908.

Newspapers reported that the cloudburst that afternoon dropped an incredible thirteen inches of rain

on Johnson Mesa. The flood it sent roaring down the bed of the Dry Cimarron was like a tidal wave. Up the valley at the headquarters of the Crowfoot Ranch, someone heard the rumble of disaster and cranked through a warning to Sarah Rooke at her telephone switchboard in Folsom.

Mrs. Rooke won a lasting place among the heroes and heroines of the Bell System by staying at her post and spreading the warning among customers until she and her office were swept away by the wall of water.

The flood washed away much of Folson. The hunt for bodies dragged into autumn, with seventeen victims eventually recovered. Upstream, George McJunkin, the foreman of the Crowfoot, and a cowboy named Tom Wylie rode along the rim of the Dead Horse Arroyo. The flood had cut its bottom much deeper than it had been. Fourteen feet down from the top of the arroyo bank, the bones of the bison slain eleven thousand years ago reflected white in the sunlight. Old bones are common in cattle country — not something to warrant a second glance from a cowboy. But George McJunkin was not the usually drover.

What we know of Nigger George McJunkin is pieced together from the little he chose to tell of his early life and from the recollections of those who knew him later. Today those memories are mixed with legend.

Scholars seeking to reconstruct the man agree on some points and disagree on others. He was born a slave (or, if you prefer another version, he was the freeborn son of emancipated sharecroppers) about 1856 on an east Texas plantation owned by a man named Jack

“”

Horseman.”) He is wearing large silver spurs, a vest, the sun frown and the faint embarrassed smile of a man posing for a camera. He is medium size, ramrod straight, slender, gray mustache trimmed, the brim of his flat-crowned felt hat turned up in front giving his a rakish look (one guesses the photographer wanted more sunlight on his face). He has the long chin and the broad, flat nose of some Negroes and he looks much younger than he must have been in 1911 when the picture was taken. Tied to the saddle behind him is a long canvas tube, too slender for a rifle scabbard.

In it, George McJunkin carried the telescope through which his curious eyes surveyed the universe around him.

But apparently, unlike some former slaves, he left another name behind him.

when he was twenty or twenty-one, part of a crew driving Bell Ranch cattle to summer grazing in Colorado. He got a job on a ranch near Clayton, filed a homestead claim, registered his own cattle brand, and subsequently was hired by a prominent cattleman named Bill Jack, owner of the Crowfoot, which sprawled across the Union-Colfax county border above Folsom.

A photograph taken when he was fifty-five years old shows McJunkin sitting stiffly on a large black horse. (He called his favorite mount “Headless,” which made him one with Washington Irvin’s “Headless

Three years before the picture was taken, the McJunkin curiosity had been stirred by the depth of the bones exposed in the newly cut bank of Dead Horse Arroyo. (Some call it Wild Horse Arroyo. Being cowcountry-born myself, I find it easier to believe cowboys would name an arroyo, if they name it anything, after a dead horse than a wild one.

Wild horses, being mobile, make poor points of reference.) McJunkin had read geology extensively and suspected that eons of silting would be required in this location to bury bones so deeply. When he inspected them he saw they were too large to

24

McJunkin. When the Civil War ended slavery, the boy’s parents stayed on the plantation to work as sharecroppers.

McJunkin befriended the boy, lent him books, and helped him learn to read.

(If you preferred , his patron helped him attend school for four years. In still another version, formal education came much later, in Amarillo.) When he reached his teens, the boy headed west. At a ranch near Midland, Texas, he applied for a job and adopted his patron-landlord’s name, calling himself George McJunkin. No one seems to know what his name had been before he began this new life. But apparently, unlike some former slaves, he left another name behind him.

George McJunkin is believed to have first arrived in the Union County

“

25

”

The young bone specialist was already assuming the role of defender of scientific accuracy.

be the skeletons of modern buffalo — and they were partially mineralized.

He also found in what appeared to be the same stratum artifacts of chipped flint —small hide scrapers and thin, leaf-shaped points that were large for large for arrowheads but small for spear tips. They were nothing at all like the crude stonework with which nineteenth-century Indians littered the countryside. McJunkin’s logic suggested that these bones must be immensely old, that man had killed and skinned the animals, and that therefore man must have hunted the Dry Cimarron valley many thousands of years ago. McJunkin was well enough informed of the state of anthropology to know this was exciting stuff. He set about, as best he knew how, getting the discovery to the attention of science.

Which brings us to the second actor in the drama of Folsom — Dr. Ales Hrdlicka. Hrdlicka had emigrated from Bohemia at thirteen, worked in a New York City tobacco factory, graduated from two medical colleges at the head of both classes, and won a job as coroner-medical examiner for the borough of Brooklyn. Working with the remains of the poor souls who died in public asylums, hospitals, and prisons of the city raised a question in the young physician’s mind. Did these mentally deficient citizens have the same skull characteristics as the run-of-the-mill American? Hrdlicka suspected not. He began collecting the skulls of mental cases, making cranial measurements, accumulating statistics, and establishing standards.

Hrdlicka seems to have accumulated and measured some two thousand skulls — a gargantuan job and a mind-

boggling storage problem. And then it developed that no one had ever bothered to collect statistics on the skulls of normal persons. Thus there was no basis for comparison.

A more flexible personality might have sworn off bones for life after this debacle. Not Hrdlicka. Off to Paris he went to study bones under Dr. L. P. Manourrier, a pioneer of physical anthropology. Then to mexico with the Lumholtz Expedition to examine the skulls of Mexican tribes. Then to the American Southwest to study American Indians for the Museum of Natural History. By 1903 Hrdlicka had established such a reputation as an authority on the skeletal structure of humankind in all its ages and varieties that the Smithsonian Institution asked him to take over its new division of physical anthropology at the National Museum. By that autumn day in 1908 when Nigger George McJunkin was finding his bison bones, Ales Hrdlicka had published the first of his major books, Psychological and Medical Observations among the Indians of the Southwestern States and Northern Mexico. More significant, Hrdlicka had also published his first important paper attacking a claim to antiquity for an anthropological discovery.

The so-called Calaveras Skull (found 130 feet beneath a glacial gravel bed in California) could not be as old as its location suggested, Hrdlicka reported, because its bone structure was clearly modern.

Hrdlicka proved to be correct.

Calaveras was exposed as an elaborate hoax. The young bone specialist was already assuming the role of defender of scientific accuracy. The times demanded just such a man. Only fifty

“

”

The only fault you can find with Hrdlicka’s theory is that it was wrong.

Western Hemisphere. Therefore men could not have evolved here. The only possible route for aboriginal man (lacking seacraft) to reach the hemisphere would be out of Siberia across the Bering Straits. Hrdlica’s own pioneering research established definite links between people in Central Asia and the American Indians. But these Mongoloid people could not have crossed the straits into Alaska while the route was blocked by the great, slow-melting ice cap of the Wisconsin glaciation. There had been no ice-free- passage until about three thousand to four thousand years ago.

Supporting this late-arrival theory was negative evidence. Hrdlicka had established to his own satisfaction that Neanderthan Man had evolved into a man with a modern skull shape only about six thousand years ago. All human bones found in the New World were modern bones. There were none of those big-toothed skulls with the bony ridges over the eye sockets so common in the Old World. Therefore ancient man had not reach the Americas.

The only fault you can find with Hrdlicka’s theory is that it was wrong. Neanderthal did not evolve into modern man. The modern skull type developed at least forty thousand years ago and probably much earlier than that. And ice-free passages across from Asia seem to have come and gone many thousands of years back into prehistory.

As curator of physical anthropology at the National Museum, Hrdlica stood like Horatio at the bridge, defending anthropological

26

years had passed since discovery of fist axes in European glacial deposits had first suggested that man had been around the planet a lot longer than the six thousand years allowed by accepted Calvinistic philosophy. Quite a lot had been learned subsequently about the development of homo sapiens from the primates. The beetle-browed skull of Neanderthal Man had been dug out of his cave in Germany and was now turning up throughout the Middle East and Asia.

The great blank spots in the history of man’s first million years were filling fast. Scientific circles buzzed with new finds, new theories, and with hoaxes and humbug, bad guesses and crackpot speculation. (A pictograph of a lizard found in Arizona was used as proof that man was contemporaneous with the dinosaur in America.) From such chaos, Hrdlicka and other likeminded scientists were beginning to bring a cautious order. As curator of physical anthropology of the National Museum and founding editor of the Journal of Physical Anthropology, Hrdlicka was in the right place for the job. He became American’s last word on the antiquity of human bone. By the time Mcjunkin was making serious efforts to lure scientists to Folsom to take a look at Dead Horse Arroyo, Hrdlicka and associates had sorted through the nonsense and hysteria to a bedrock of common sense. In brief, they concluded that what McJunkin thought had happened in New Mexico was impossible. There had been no Ice Age Man in America.

It seemed clear enough.

There had been no primates in the

27

truth agaist the besieging army of error (or perhaps even deceit). As his stature and reputation grew and his fame became international, any discovery involving human antiquity in the Americas had to get past the sharp and suspicious eyes of his National Museum staff to be certified as legitimate. Thus the word which filtered out of New Mexico of a site where human tools were mixed with Ice Age animal bones met skepticism.

George McJunkin might have just as well been trying to sell a dragon. No one was interested enough to come and look.

Nor was the Folsom site the only victim. In 1914, human bones were found with the bones of ground sloth and other extinct mammals not far from Los Angeles. In 1916, human bones and stone tools were discovered with mastodon and mammoth remains deep under the earth at Vero Beach and Melbourne, Florida. In each case, and in a good many others, Hrdlicka’s forces held the bridge. The bones were ruled modern and the circumstances explained away. Perhaps, it was said, they had been dumped into a grave dug down into the fossil deposit, or perhaps erosion had mixed the artifacts into the mastodon skeletons, or perhaps roots growing downward had pushed the stone tools down among the bones. The evidence seems to have been inspected with the same sot of enthusiasm a virologist would show for arguments that toads cause warts.

Among the discoveries debunked by Hrdlicka happened to be one made by Jesse Figgins of the Colorado Museum of Natural History (now the Denver Museum).

Hrdlicka was not the sort to spare the feelings of the recipients of his unfavorable rulings and the records suggest that Figgins was determined not to lose a second argument with the man at the Smithsonian. When he ordered the bones recovered from Dead Horse Arroyo he warned the digging crew to be especially alert for human artifacts which might be found among the fossils. If any were found every precaution would be taken to preserve the evidence. It was spring, 1926. in Washington, Hrdlicka was at work on his sixth major book, which would be a college text and would support Hrdlicka’s point that the First Americans had migrated to the New World only recently from Asia. And in Folsom, Nigger George McJunkin had gone to his grave in the village cemetery.

For McJunkin the last years must have been disappointing. In 1918, the Jacks had sold the Crowfoot to the Lud Shoemaker family.

McJunkin stayed on as foreman and that same year he and the shoemaker’s teen-age son, Ivan, dug more bones and a fluted lance point out of the arroyo bank and got them off to the Denver Museum. The next spring the museum sent a paleontologist named Harold J. Cook to the Crowfoot, where McJunkin helped him with some exploratory digging. At last science was interested.

But nothing happened, and 1920 came and went without a word.

In 1921, McJunkin fell ill. By summer he was often too weak to ride. By fall he moved his belongings into the lean-to room at the rear of the Folsom Hotel. There was little enough to move. His house on the Crowfoot had

“

”

It is the thankless job which rural society reserves for the outsider. isolated him. But Ivan Shoemaker remembers two stories mcJunkin liked to tell in his declining years. In one a cattle drover friend pulls his pistol in the lobby of the Eklund Hotel in Clayton to persuade the manager he should serve Niger George in the hotel dining room. In another, the cowboys from the Crowfoot — at a neighboring ranch to help brand the spring calf crop — walk out when they learn Nigger George is being segregated into the kitchen for his lunch. The stories seem to tell us that his man with his flat nose and his black skin was included in the fraternity of the west.

But don’t they tell us that only part — and perhaps a very small part —of this society accepted him as an equal? His pride in them is revealing.

We also know that Nigger George became the unofficial surveyor and arbitrator of property disputes in that big empty country. Such an assignment shows the community acknowledged his skill and his fairness. It also suggests something less comfortable. The arbiter cannot be friend to either side. It is the thankless job which rural society reserves for the outsider.

If his race hadn’t made him that, it seems to me his turn of intellect would have done it. The flintiness of life at the turn of the century on the windy east slope of the Rocky Mountains demanded concentration on the essentials — the market, the feed supply, the desperate need for rain, the gynecology of cattle.

There was no time for philosophy, or abstractions, or books, and scanty interest. The bison bones McJunkin

28

been struck by lightning and burned, destroying his telescope, his violin, his well-read books, and a lifetime’s collection of fossils, oddities, and artifacts. The doctor came to Folsom to examine him. He proclaimed his disease to be incurable dropsy.

Whiskey seemed to ease the pain. A cowboy friend rigged up a system of rubber tubing which allowed him to sip from his bottle. When he became too weak to hold a book, young Ivan Shoemaker would read to him — often from the Old Testament. The way Shoemaker recalls it, McJunkin died on a cold, dark night in March 1922, telling those keeping the death watch with him that he was “going where all good niggers go.”

(The man waiting in the Doherty Mercantile Store, which now serves as the Folsom Museum, had heard about it from his daddy and he knew George McJunkin only by local legend. “They didn’t know his real name. not even to put it on his grave marker,” the man said. “That always seemed sort of sad to me.”)

To me, many things about the life of Nigger George McJunkin seem sort of sad. Even with today’s all-weather highways, the world of the Dry Cimarron remains a closed world. Johnson Mesa walls it off from the Colorado to the north. In all other directions the barrier is space — that rolling sea of grass that is the western fringe of the Great Plains. Once this was Comanche country. But when McJunking arrived it was white man country. For most of his adult life he was the only black man in it. The legend does not tell us that his race

29

put on his mantel and his habit of talking about them produced amusement among his neighbors.

Fossil bones were no more useful than the constellations which McJunkin studied through his telescope. A hungry land held little patience for the hungry mind. Nigger George in Union County recalls Othello among the Venetians, misfit more by mind than by color. He was a stranger in a strange land.

Had he lived to see it, McJunkin would have been immensely pleased by the Dead Horse Arroyo dig. Fairly early the crew from Denver knew the find was important. The skeletons

“

the American Museum of Natural History, and A. V. Kidder of Phillips Academy arrived, studied the lance point embedded between two ribs, and agreed that The-Man-Who-CouldNot-Be had, in fact, been.

Figgins and Cook published their report in Natural History, announcing what they had found.

Science generally remained skeptical.

Figgins ordered the dig continued into the third summer. This time the American Museum of Natural History joined the expedition. Again points were found among the bones. One had been jammed between two vertebrae and snapped off. The broken butt was

”

A hungry land held little patience for the hungry mind.

were still articulated, which meant the deposit had not been disturbed by erosion or anything else. And among the bones in the hard clay were artifacts made by man. Figgins and Cook contacted archaeologists and anthropologists and tried to persuade them that these extinct animals had been killed by man. They failed.

The anthropologists argued that the artifacts might have somehow worked down into the deposit.

Four times, when the dig resumed in the summer of 1927, projectile points were noticed only after they had been jarred loose from the clay holding the bones.

The fifth point was noticed in time.

Figgins stopped work and sent tetlegrams. Frank H. H. Roberts of the Smithsonian, Barnum Brown of

found and matched with the tip. And there was more proof now. It dawned on Barnum Brown that the tailbones were missing from all twenty-three skeletons because, as they say in how county, “The tail goes with the hide.”

The bison had all been skinned. Some of the bones also showed the marks left by flint knives cutting away the flesh. Some had been cooked. Again telegrams were sent to the doubters.

At the very moment when Figgins and crew were reducing his theory to nonsense, Hrdlicka was publishing a broadside blast which should have sunk, once and for all, the persistent idea of Early Man in America. Scientific American, then as now the prestige interdiscipline magazine of science, gave him its cover and devoted most of an edition

“

I find I enjoy standing by the vast old wood stove at the rear of Doherty Mercantile Store and thinking perverse anti-intellectual thoughts.

”

the great Lindenmeir Ranch site in Colorado and the horizon of man in the Western Hemisphere was being pushed still further back by discovery of a mammoth hunter near Clovis, New Mexico. Hrdlicka was swept aside. He could do no more than stalk angrily from a session of the American Anthropological Association when a report on Early Man was being read.

An incident had rarely been less kind to those who influenced it. Folsom came too late for George McJunkin. It came too early for Ales Hrdlicka. He lived on, seeing his books turn from dogma to bad guesses and his theories shattered by discovery after discovery. His last book was an odd work entitled Children Who Run on All Fours which appeared in 1931. in 1942 he retired as curator of the division of physical anthropology, leaving it its superb skeletal collections and its bright worldwide reputation.

He died the next year.

I know Ales Hrdlicka only in the least satisfactory of ways — having tracked his ghost in the archives of libraries, seeking a personality in what he wrote. What I think I saw between the lines in those outdated journals was a man of tremendous energy, self-discipline, almost arrogant selfesteem, and unusual intelligence. I think he would have little tolerance of me, or of you (who are at this very moment wasting precious time), or of George McJunkin.

Perhaps because I sense this, I find I enjoy standing by the vast old

30

to a long and profusely illustrated article by Hrdlicka. It bore the unflinching, unqualified subtitle; THERE IS NO VALID EVIDENCE THAT THE INDIAN HAS LONG BEEN IN THE NEW WORLD. Even when read today, with full knowledge of how wrong he was, the brilliant Czech’s arguments are almost persuasive. Hrdlicka wrote in an era before anthropology fell into the turgid, semiliterate jargon it uses today. His prose is graceful, his thesis lucid, and his case for an America populated from Asia no earlier than a couple of thousand years ago seems ironclad. And then, almost as if fate had conspired for the scientific establishment to disgrace itself, it was announced that Hrdlicka had been invited to London, there to address the Royal Academy. The Royal Anthropological Society, to anthropology what the College of Cardinals is to the Vatican, would call itself into a rare special meeting to hear Hrdlicka lecture. And it would award him the Huxley Medal. This signal honor would be in recognition of his years of service in destroying “unwarranted claims for the extreme antiquity of man in America.”

By 1930 and 1931 field anthropologists almost universally accepted the reality of the strange hunter whom Figgins called “Folsom Man” (the village, fortunately, had changed its name from Ragtown much earlier). By 1934, Hrdlicka’s own Smithsonian people were excavating

31

wood stove at the rear of Doherty Mercantile Store and thinking perverse anti-intellectual thoughts.

For seventeen years the drovers and gandy dancers who thawed their boots here and heard Nigger George speculate on the meaning of the Dead Horse Arroyo bones had a clearer idea of the prehistory of their continent than did all the certified brains of the Department of Physical Anthropology of the National Museum. It’s an unkind thought but if it does Dr. Hrdlicka injustice it can do him no harm.

by MichaelGay

Half Sunk

replied. Inside the cage, next to the male, was the baby we assumed had died. We watched as it crawled feebly. When we removed the baby, the male grabbed through a cage bar as if we would hurt the infant. We fed the baby as his mother lay underground, turning to mud.

***

An old homeless man asked me for change. His pants were covered with piss and mud. Busy people, dressed nicely, are repulsed by him. What can they know of his situation?

They rationalize; their money will just go to booze. Living like that makes a man crave a bar.

People are repulsed by him. They fear him. What if he hurts me or breaks into my car? Someone, feeling oppressed by his begging, called the police. I stood and watched as they told him to leave. He said he has nowhere to go. “You don’t belong here,” they replied.

***

“Can you believe that asshole?” I asked my wife. “No, I can’t,” she replied. Were I king, I would cleanse the country with fire. Charred bodies would rot in the mud. The ignorant, wasteful, and proud would be executed in the street. In my head I watched this fantasy play out. In this dream, my actions are justified by our country’s situation.

All this death and carnage would be carried out because of how someone drove their car. He could be a good person, for all I know. At least he never sat with his father at a bar. I watched as my father emerged from the mud. He was warmed by alcohol he drank at the bar.

***

“I’m cold,” I said. “Sorry, I have no heat to give,” he replied and started the car. The human condition is absurd, dirty, and painful.

Or maybe that’s just my own situation.

32

When I was three, my father picked me up and took me to a bar. “Got anything for the kid?” he asked the bartender. “Milk” the bartender replied. When my father finished drinking he paid the tab. We got in the car.

Driving home, through old dirt roads, the car jerked and stopped. It sunk into deep mud.

My father sat still for a while. He got out and, in a drunken haze, inspected the situation. My father stumbled and slipped, covered in mud, he tried to free the car. I watched.

***

In an open field, after a heavy rain, two men wrestled. We stood in a circle and watched. I was on the outside, and was approached by a man who wore on his collar, one bar. He wore a freshly pressed uniform and shined boots. “Private, what’s the situation?” “Training sir, by the regs, we are learning how to tear one another apart,” I replied. We exchanged salutes. His hand was rigid. My hand quivered, covered in mud. He decided that all was in order and left us in his brand new car.

***

“This thing is filthy,” my wife remarked.

So we went to wash the car. We drove into the automated wash. It started and my daughter quietly watched. Jets of water screeched and swooshed. Suds melted the caked on mud. My daughter whimpered and cried as brushes descended, attached to a bar. She screamed loudly and asked to leave. “Don’t worry, it’s fine,” I replied. If only she knew how important it is to be clean and new. She didn’t understand our situation.

***

Loud cries filled my daughter’s room in the early morning. Our dog caused this situation. He killed our female Sugar Glider during the night. My wife left for school in the car, crying. “Something wrong?” my wife asked later. “Come to the cage, quickly,” I

If Only for Myself

33

by ChristopherQuintana Martinez He says I was riding my bike too fast, clipped the side of the wall with my handlebars and hurtled to the cracked concrete without so much as screaming. He says the only sound was the rattle of the bike as it fell to the ground and a dry thump when my head hit the sidewalk. He says he didn’t call 9-1-1, because I wasn’t bleeding too much then, and the hospital was just across the street and that he didn’t think it would be such a far distance to carry me. So he did, and I guess here I am. Vincent, finished with the story, looks over me. I ask how he knows, how hurt am I, where am I, but he just shakes his head and demands to know how I’m doing.

“Not fine, Vince, not fine. My head feels — well I don’t know, but god my head.”

He wears a torn and fitted grey blazer, revealing his anorexic build and various lacerations on his arms, accidents obtained while drinking cheap vodka from the bottle. His curly brown hair spills onto his forehead and in front of his eyes, so every minute or two he has to push it back.

The lights seem too bright, though there is only one on. It’s too hot, and even the paisley green polka dotted hospital gown seems like too much clothing. He saunters about the white, sterile room, changing the channel on the TV every five seconds and then sets the remote on a corner table. My eyes trail him as he wanders around the room touching the off-white plastered walls with his left knuckles.

He paced the same way in my dorm after Sheila broke up with him.

“Hey, you need to stop

worrying man. I know what you’re thinking,” he says while taking another lap around the room. “You’re thinking Beth is going to freak out, you’re thinking you need to call your mom and your dad and tell each of them what happened, and, worst of all in my humble opinion, you’re worrying about that shitty twelve page paper you have to write.”

I push against the grey plastic railings alongside my bed in an attempt to raise myself to his level. As I do, far-off stars twinkle in the sea of blackness that becomes my field of vision and vivacious ringing thrums in my ears, as though I had been standing too close to an explosion.

I sink back into the soft bed, and breathe solely through my nostrils with my eyes closed. Dry air wiggles a strand of mucus in my nostrils and interrupts my concentration. Vincent still walks around the room, his feet making small thumps against the grey-tile floors. His hands, now in the air, make circular and gesticulating motions interrupted by sudden thrusts of his arms.

“- worry. I took care of it all,” is all I can hear when the ringing ceases. “I told Beth, what happened, she freaked, you knew that, but she’s coming over a little later. Your parents have been informed, but I told them I got it covered, so no worries. No need for them to fly out, right. And don’t you dare worry about that paper. Your teacher will understand, you know.”

“Vince, it’s not enough, whatever you did. I need to talk to Beth. I need to talk to my parents.”

And with those statements, I brace my

“

”

That frequency that you’re hearing, that’s the last time that you’ll ever hear it.

to be here any longer than needed either. He wanders back to the door and leans against it. His left leg bends so that his foot rests against the door while his right leg is extended on the tile for support. He whistles some tune I can’t remember, maybe something classical.

“You going to trust me, and just rest already?” He seems to throw the words out of his mouth, as though eager for me to relax. He probably has things to do, and Beth’s coming soon anyway. He wants me to sleep so he can scram. That’s fair, he’s done enough. He brought me here didn’t he? I nod at him, and push the blankets to the bottom of the bed such that they don’t even touch my toes. He nods back, and meanders around the room. My eyelids, too heavy to hold, close.

It’s dark when I wake up, and unless I slept for twelve hours, that can’t be right. My head is still wrapped, but the after images of stars have faded from my vision. My ears still ring, and I remember something Vincent told me a while ago. It was after we dropped some dry ice into a plastic bottle and watched it explode.

The crack must have smashed my eardrums because the ringing overwhelmed everything else in my ear canals.

“I know you get that ringing your ears. I see it the way you crane your head around, searching for the sound. Here’s the thing — the sound is just in your ears, and that frequency that you’re hearing, that’s the last time that you’ll ever hear it. I would try to savor those moments if I were you.”

34

arms against the railings again and try to rise from the bed again. The stars still twinkling in the distance, and the ringing a faint, but a still present hum in my ears. Vincent, though, is at my left side, pushing me on the chest so that I’ll lie back down. I can’t help but think of the way I held him back the same way when he was too drunk to stand without aide and tried to knock out a guy in a Pink Floyd shirt at the party two weeks ago.

“Hey man, I know how you love to control everything, but shit, man you are out of control here. Time to deal with that, don’t you think?”

I can’t get out of the bed, and maybe he’s right for not letting me up.

He stands close, his arms poised as though ready to push me back should I reach for the railings again. I ask him for my phone at least, but he says it must have fallen out of my pocket after the crash or something because he can’t find it. I nod and blink my eyes rapidly to keep them open. The bed is warm now, not hot, and the pillows are softer than my own. It’s 5:34, and dark outside. Vincent looms over me now it seems. It must be the light.

He looks at me, his eyes sharp and focused, and then turns back to the door, and then back at me. He’s even watching for Beth.

“So,” he says while mussing up his hair on the back of his head and walking from the bedside. It’s the same motion he makes before turning in big tests and essays or before deciding he needs to smash the rearview mirrors on his ex’s car. He’s stressed, and I guess I would be too were I in his position. I wouldn’t want

“ ” 35

I can see light under the crack. And the curved handle, like that of a claw, is cold like the floor.

The lights are off. The hospital gown feels twice as revealing in the dark, and I wonder where the nurses are. I press the call button on top of the bed frame, and wait. And wait a little longer and hit the button several more times, but no one ever comes.

All I get is the sharp click of the button being pressed.

“Hey, are you all right?” he asks from the corner of the room. The interruption of silence fills the room and lingers in my ears. Vincent.

“Yeah Vince, a bit better. My head doesn’t hurt so much. Shit man, so this the way you felt after you hit your head in the parking garage, huh?

What the hell were you doing?”

“I was drunk.”

“Right, that was the night Sheila left you, huh? Good thing you were drunk, huh? You are the worst sort of drunk though. Hahaha” “Yeah.”

“Vince?” I fancy I can hear a sharp hiss.

In the dark, I can’t see what he is doing. I imagine he’s sitting and crossing his legs, uncrossing them and then crossing them again. His hands might be in his lap, but they are more likely behind his head. And he might be whistling, but I would hear that.

Instead, I hear footsteps, sure and soft, getting louder, which means he must be near the bed. Stop, an inky mass appears in my vision, it must be him.

“Yo Vince, where are the nurses, I could use some painkillers, or food, or whatever comes first.”

“I dunno, did you try the button?”

all.”

“Yeah, nothing man, nothing at

I squirm in the bed and pull the covers up. Instead of being too hot, it’s far too cold in here, the hair on my legs and forearms standing straight.

Vincent doesn’t wander around the room now. He just leans over the bed, looking down on me.

“So Vincent, man, where’s Beth? I thought she would have taken over by now. Plus, I know she’s freaking out if she’s not here, what’s happening man?”

“Yeah, I don’t know, why don’t you just relax?”

“No, no, I don’t think so. I really need to see Beth man. I’m getting up.”

And this time I do. The tips of my toes tingle when they touch the cold tiled floor. I feel my way to the door. It’s a pretty close distance, so I only bump into a couple of fixtures before getting there. I can see light under the crack. And the curved handle, like that of a claw, is cold like the floor. I pull, but nothing happens.

I turn, and it refuses to budge. I pull, twist, and turn, and shove, and kick, and then slump against the wooden doors, the polished wood cold against my skin. Vincent’s voice fills the room again.

“What’s a matter with the door?”

“It won’t open man. Shit, I can’t be that weak. Can I?” “I dunno, but that’s not it. It’s just locked. I needed some time.”

“What?”

Vincent, I know, is not stable.

I had seen him shove and kick other

“

what were you talking about the whole time. Beth this, and Beth that, and Beth is going to be so worried, and that you want Beth to come and see you and all this shit.”

Vincent stands near the bed, and a soft thump marks his striding toward me. I watch the light under the door and wait for a passerby to pass and thus break the stream of light.

“Yeah Vince, you know though, I’m really crazy about her. Well, you know, we spend just about every day together. You know, I can’t ever thank you enough for introducing me to her.”

“Yeah, that was me, and what happened huh? You got Beth, and that would have been fine, but then Sheila dumped my ass. Did I ever tell you why? I never told you why, you stupid-”

I had always been safe, though, behind his anger, like that of a bomb maker behind one of his constructions.

you’re prone to do. Always riding faster than your friends. Of course something like this was going to happen one of these days.”

He does ride slower than me, though that was nothing. My road bike, a glossy silver with red stripes, was meant to outride bikes like his old, green mountain bike. But this isn’t the time for idle thought. Vincent’s breathing, audible now, increases in its frequency. Another tell.

“You clipped the wall, just like I said, but you didn’t believe me, did you? And I dragged your ass to the hospital like the good friend I am. And

”

He starts cursing now, a sure sign he’s losing his shit. I can hear the wet slick of his tongue against his lips.

I hear his jeans rustle as he wipes his palms against the front and then curls his hands into fists. And now I have just a few more 30-second intervals before he throws his wild left hook either to the head or the body. I can never tell which.

“No Vin, you never told me.

Why don’t you just tell me what happened Vinny?”

“Beth told her how great you were, how nice it was to be with someone who cared so much,

36

guys on campus over things like salt and pepper dispensers or the last slice of Boston Crème Pie. I had always been safe, though, behind his anger, like that of a bomb maker behind one of his constructions. I only ever could imagine the fear, evident in the trembling eyes and lips, on the faces of others, that was felt in others when the vein in his forehead popped or when his forearms would start to tremble before he curled his hands into fists or the inanimate nature of his eyes when he glared. I could now see all those markers perfectly in the dark.

“Vince, man, what’s happening here?”

“You should sit down, I think.

That fall was pretty nasty.”

“I didn’t fall did I?” “You fell, riding too fast like

37

someone who asked about her life and her favorite color, and what it’s like to be so beautiful and so much other crap. And so Sheila, seeing what good boyfriends should do — her words, not mine — leaves me. What do you think of that? Huh? What do you think of that?”

“I think that’s a pretty shitty thing Vinny. Vince, man, maybe we can —we can get you back with Sheila.

Would you like that man? Do you think that would make you happier?”

“It’s Vincent.”

I couldn’t have asked for better timing. As his breath stops, I see a shadow break the bar of light under the door. I wait a second, then half of another and then roll to the side.

I land on my head, and the stars are back, brighter than ever, but Vincent lunges into the door, rattling such that it shakes in the frame. I think I heard a slick crack, over the pounding in my ears, probably caused by his face’s collision with the door. There’s no way whoever was on the other side didn’t hear that. I have too few seconds.

He’s lying on the floor, and he, being twice my size and my consciousness clouded by unyielding pulses of pain from my forehead, proves no easy task to lift. I do though — freak strength, Vincent use to tell me, comes pretty natural in stressful situations — and ram his head against the clawed handle, to be sure he stays down. I must have hit the nose or something because I’m pretty sure blood, or that’s what I think it is judging by how warm it is, oozes over my hands and through my fingers. I let the body thud to the floor, wipe some of the blood on my hands across my gown and face, and wait curled with my hands

over my knees near the door. It opens, as planned, and a nurse in maroon scrubs screams when she sees Vincent prostate on the floor. I tell her he went crazy, tried to attack me for reasons I couldn’t explain. The stars twinkle too bright now, the noise in my ears too loud to create a coherent accurate sentence. I hold my head with my left hand and tell her he hit the door or something, I can’t be sure. She helps me up, flinching at the blood dripping from my face and gown, and asks me, “Did he get you?” I nod and then shake my head. I don’t know. She guides me back into bed where she cleans up my face and then shouts for the orderlies. Vincent, still passed out, moans about Sheila, me and Beth and then struggles to get up, but fails when the nurse kicks him in the stomach.

Lying in bed, the stars fade out of my vision and the ringing stops. The orderlies come, dressed in white and lift the moaning and bleeding Vincent by the armpits. I wave goodbye as he’s dragged from the room.

Chaos below! Salvador rules!

Harken!— the dusk of an early Bahian morning. I was torn between reading a theatrical essay penned by Augusto Boal and resisting a slothful return to dreamland, when my Argentinean roommate darted from his floor mattress towards the veranda to catch a glimpse of the welter and commotion seething below. The once peaceful, hazy morning air was rattled by the sound of rumbling feet and yelling that echoed from the cobblestone street below. “PEGA ELE! PEGA ELE!” (CATCH HIM! CATCH HIM). I tossed Augusto Boal aside and dashed to the veranda.

There he was — lying flat on the cobblestone, twisting, turning, fanning, trying to defend his vitalities.

A young man repeatedly swung a two

“

The armed crowd held unfalteringly steadfast. The uproar had summoned the entire neighborhood to its verandas, doorways and windows. “CHAME A POLICIA!” (CALL THE POLICE) someone yelled.

Aware of his fate, the man quickly rose to his feet and attempted a dashing, zigzag escape. The mob counteracted, pursuing its victim as he wobbled upon the uneven cobblestone grooves. Someone slung a brick in his direction. Two men, armed with clubs and sticks, swung at his torso. Others simply swung their fists and attempted to trip and kick him. Unable to resist the mounting adversities, the man collapsed once again. Escape seemed futile.

An inexorable crushing defeat culminated in verbal lambasting.

”

The mob counteracted, pursuing its victim as he wobbled upon the uneven cobblestone grooves. by four upon the battered legs and chest. Some men brazenly dashed from the local bakery. Eight men, possibly more, ran from behind— many brandishing sticks, stones, bricks and anything of violent custom lying in the street. The gang of angry locals, jockeying frantically for position, violently surrounded the succumbed man. Two more men rushed to the scene. “PEGA ELE! PEGA ELE! ELE ROUBOU A BOLSA DA SENHORA!” (CAPTURE HIM! CAPTURE HIM. HE STOLE HER PURSE, IT’S HIM).

38

Ladãro Blues

by Miiky JulianCola

All that remained was for the man to lie peacefully and quietly while awaiting the arrival of the law. By any reckoning, even the slightest elucidation of rising to his feet would muster yet another fiercely violent antidote. This inevitability was foreseen by everyone bearing witness, except our man on the ground. Nonetheless, with the tact of a foolish waif and dexterity of someone running with broken legs, the man tried, as best he could, one final, daring escape before being clobbered into complete subjugation.

39

With the back of his head and chest flushed with the red sap that once flowed through his veins and reduced to nothing more than a dazed, mockery of himself, armed police arrived to apprehend what remained of him— not much. They sort of helped him to his feet, placed him under the care of the law and hustled him away. A solemn end for an unidentified man who’d risked crime in the wrong bairro.

After his removal, the neighborhood buzzed with the latest news. My neighbor, a sweet 50something native of Ilheus, stood on her veranda. She was appalled and deeply saddened by the ugly display of brutality, albeit trumped upon a thief. “All they had to do was capture him,” she complained. “They didn’t have to beat him in such a despicable manner. Last time they caught a burglar, beat him and tied him to that post ‘til the police came and took him away,” she said. “I have a big family with all of my sons and relatives so I’ve never been robbed. We don’t tolerate thieves in Santo Antonio.”

It was the beginning of yet another beautiful, sunny day in the Historical Center of Salvador, Bahia.

Kaya

by PerryPenick paid for our rooms, and she lived for free, or near enough. Our apartment was on the third floor, up two flights of concrete stairs which had stains all over them, so they were multicolored gray. The building was noisy, like most of the buildings in India.

Your footsteps echoed climbing up the stairs, the flat door shut excessively loudly. Our voices were amplified from bouncing off the walls and floor. We heard everything two or three times, what one said and what someone else answered and so on. Our conversations got all tangled up from bouncing off the concrete and running into each other. We got used to it as almost everything in India was loud.

My girlfriend and I stood in our newly rented room, looking at our newly purchased coconut fiber mattress that had just been delivered and was now lying on the floor in front of us. We were evaluating its comfort, looking at the little pile of clothes next to it, our few other simple belongings. I walked over to the screened door to look at our balcony and found myself studying a hornet’s nest. It was crawling with some of the meanest looking insects I’d ever seen, attached to the overhang above the balcony. The nest was almost a foot long, and there were what seemed like a hundred or more yellowstripped black hornets crawling all over it.

Obviously we weren’t going to be spending any time out there.

“You can get those removed,” Anna said from the doorway, stopping for a minute to peek in.

“There’s a job,” I said back to her, trying to imagine stepping out into that little space outside with the intention of upsetting them as a source of income.

40

Sometimes, looking at a crowd of people, you see certain things about individuals, note them, catalogue or judge them. It might be the thin height of someone, the glint or texture of their hair, or the mismatched colors of their clothes.

It might be a certain attractiveness they have, an air of mysteriousness or purpose, a singsong or whispery voice. Sometimes it is something indefinable, some unique combination of nondescript detail that blends into something artistic, curious or cool. I saw Kaya standing out for a brief moment from the noise, the crowd. I was impressed by her distinct, to put it honestly, unattractiveness. That’s how it is sometimes — what life gives us. Then she was gone, blended back into the crowd, a snapshot in time.

It was right after my girlfriend Mary and I rented a room in a flat that I saw her again. My girlfriend and I were examining our living space. The floor, walls, and ceiling were a study in gray concrete. There was no closet, just four walls two doors and one window. We rented the room from Anna, who posted a note for two rooms for rent. She already rented a third room to Arpan, a gay man from New York. He was blond built and troubled. But mostly he was level — average in a way and fun to talk to. He tried to add some color to his concrete room, but somehow the gray just sucked the color out of everything. So his yellow chair was yellow gray and his green tapestry over the window was green gray and so on. . .

Anna, our landlord and flat mate, was a retired Dutch concert pianist, down to living on scraps but well enough connected to have landed these flats. We all

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“Wow,” was all I said.

“Well if you want, I can find somebody,” she finished and went on down the hall.

Mary walked over and stood next to me, looking at the hornets too.

There wasn’t much to say. They were a statement in themselves, dangerous as hell. She stepped sideways to the window and looked down onto the muddy field below us and pointed. I stepped over and looked to see two or three small pigs that, while rummaging around in the trash below had found a bright pink ribbon about four-feet long and were playing chase with it. Down there in the drizzle of the afternoon, surrounded by dirty, picked-over trash, slopping around in a muddy field, were the happiest pigs on the planet. And there we stood, two westerners framed

“

She had a wide moon face, a strong jaw, hair that was cut in a bowl shape, brown and thick and short. She looked at us with brown eyes set back in her pale face and started to say something.

Anna cut right in. “Ah, come in!

Welcome.”

Whatever she was about to say went away with a tired look of relief. She stepped into the flat as we all stepped back to give her space, sort of drawing her in by creating a little emptiness, a vacuum. And there we stood, Mary, Anna, Arpan and I.

“I am Kaya.” she said directly, looking at each of us in turn. We all nodded. She looked at me last.

There I was, in one of those rare, valuable times when someone has just walked straight up and said, “Deal with me.” This person, on whom I had so

”

There wasn’t much to say. They were a statement in themselves, dangerous as hell. by a window on the third story of a lower class flat in a city suburb of India, watching pigs play.

There was a knock on the door, and Anna immediately walked past our room again to answer it. “That must be her,” she said in passing. “Our other flat mate.”

Automatically we followed her down the hall with Arpan joining us.

We all stood like a little welcoming committee as Anna opened the door.

And there she was, standing there, a small pinkish suitcase held in her right hand down next to her thick body, eyes slightly wide, wearing no expression.

easily, carelessly, thrown my opinion upon earlier, anonymously and secure from a safe distance, was now standing directly in front of me, forcing me to engage. She was now my flat mate, with whom I was going to interact for the next month or so, talk to, eat with, share the bathroom with. Not just some passing, forgotten snapshot in a crowd.

Now I was facing the real, and it was suddenly much more complicated. No, she was not attractive, but that’s just one part of it all, isn’t it? An actual person has a history, stories, jokes, fears, dreams, tastes, opinions, ideas, their own prejudices and so on — a person-

” “

She was German. Her voice immediately told us that, that heavy accent spoken from the gut.

weeks. I said he was smart. He’d poke his head up out of the drain in the early morning or late evening, crawl out, crawl around, do cockroach things.

Suddenly I would come tearing into the bathroom swatting a towel or something, and he’d immediately run for the edge of the floor next to the wall where the towel wouldn’t reach into the corner crevice, run down the length and dash back down the drain. I quit trying to kill him after a while. It didn’t seem quite right to take his life — something so alive.

There are levels of living, and in India the levels can be quite extreme.

Our flat was actually fairly up standard to many other living situations around us, and Kaya had apparently come from a lower living standard, which had been too much for her. That’s why she wanted a shower. She had been living in a wooden hut for a week, with dirt floors and no water. During the day, she had washed and ate at the ashram, which is why we were all there in the first place, and slept in her wooden hut at night. It was cheap, her funds were limited and it had seemed like a good idea at the time. But it was too much for her because of the cockroaches.

Kaya had never lived with cockroaches in Germany, so cockroaches were a new experience for her, one she had learned she was terrified of. After a few night encounters, she abruptly decided to move out of the hut and had saw the notice on the bulletin board at the ashram and now was moving in with us and wanted to take a shower and forget it all. This was how it was that she came to our flat, she told us later.

There was more we didn’t know

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ality and a being.

She was German. Her voice immediately told us that, that heavy accent spoken from the gut. You could hear a directness that reminded me that Germans are tough. I once read about a Tibetan teacher who said the real warrior, the tough one, is not one who can kill in a hardened and disciplined way. Rather, a real warrior is one who feels the entire act — the pain, the loss, the tragedy — and does so anyway, because it has to be done. He described the real archetype of the soldier as one who doesn’t hide from the path, deny it by escaping behind duty, but rather embraces it fully, makes it personal in all its terrible pain and goes through it.

So it is with the Germans in a way. They are tough. They deal with life face on, directly, carry a crucifying past, but still have an incredible warmth, life energy and love that is not obvious.

Anna quickly introduced us all to Kaya, and then proceeded to lead her down the hall to her room. We followed like children, with nothing else to do. And after a minute of watching Kaya look at her room, her expression told us to do something else. She said she wanted a shower. We all nodded, pointed down the hall and left. The shower was another concrete experience, simply a four walled room with a pipe out of one side and a drain. Down in the drain lived a cockroach, one with whom I would battle the next couple weeks. He was smart, and I never did catch or kill him. I came close, but he was always quick to disappear back down the drain. I came to respect him, and I think once he sensed that, he decided to leave us alone after a couple of

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about Kaya, which she told Mary and me in her deep, direct German accent.

We had stepped back into her room to answer a question, which led to a short conversation about the ashram, our experiences, travels, gossip and nonsense. I said that we had been there for a little over two weeks, having spent the first week locked up in shock in the best, cleanest hotel we could find. Then we spent the second week in a noisy, cheaper hotel, and now more acclimated, we had just arrived at the flat too, because it was cheaper yet. Moving down in standard in contrast to Kaya’s moving up. As I talked, Kaya listened to me, looking directly at me, not moving, taking in everything I was saying with a strange attention, as if whatever I was saying was the most important thing there was to hear in the whole world.

After a couple of minutes of this, I quit talking, and Mary and I just stood there looking back at Kaya, waiting.

“I am here for three weeks,” she said. “After that I go back to Germany to have a brain operation. The doctors say that there is less than a fifty percent chance I will come back to consciousness. They wanted to operate immediately, but I told them I had to come here first.

“Every day I am here makes my chances worse.” That was how she said it: German, direct, real, a warrior. Whether she was attractive or not looked pretty unimportant now. She wasn’t looking for sympathy. I don’t actually think she was looking for anything, just speaking her truth. She was just stating why she was there as part of a conversation, but it added a whole new dimension to our casual chat. Now

“ ”

I understood her gaze, three weeks to live, maybe four. “Wow,” was what I said. Looking at her, I thought about how my own spiritual tourism was a rather shallow experience, comparatively. I didn’t have a lot to say then, and the conversation sort of just stopped.

Kaya went into the shower and was in there for a long time. It wasn’t a particularly nice shower, but it was a lot nicer than she was used to. After that, she walked down the hall in a towel and went into her room, where she opened up her little pink suitcase and put on a plain little dress. It wasn’t much really, but none of us were wearing much.

India can be very hot at certain times of the year, hot enough to force one to search out any and all ways to cool down. I was stripped down to just the thin light white pants commonly worn there, without a shirt. It was just too hot to want to wear anything.

I returned to looking out the window — at the hornets, at the pigs, at the general activity down below on the street, the people and bicycles and motocabs and rickshaws and cars and colors and noise. My eyes followed the street down as far as I could see and then up at all the gray/white buildings with laundry hanging out on the balconies. My thoughts had drifted off from Kaya, into daydreaming...

Suddenly the shrieking started, real shrieking. Instantly, I ran down the hall into Kaya’s room with Mary right behind me. What we saw as we charged into Kaya’s room was her going berserk, doing a crazy, stomping dance in the middle of the room, her arms flailing about, just losing it.

“What!” I yelled at her, “What?”

Suddenly the shrieking started, real shrieking.

“

”

The others, maybe six or eight in all, scattered in different directions according to insect logic. me, breathing, breathing slower... and just as I was looking into Kaya’s eyes stroking her arm, the last cockroach, who had been clinging to the fabric of her dress, waiting in the fold inside her shift between her breasts, crawled upwards and popped his little head up over her collar and looked at me. My eyes betrayed me as I looked back at him. Kaya’s eyes followed mine down.

That was it. She screamed. She really screamed. She ripped her dress off. It flew away so fast that it just disappeared as she truly lost it, went totally hysterical, shaking, jumping, waving...

And there she was, the most naked person I have ever seen or known, naked of clothes, naked of trust, naked of hope, naked and utterly vulnerable.

And suddenly desperate for anything, anyone to offer her safety, comfort, reassurance, contact. And there I was, standing in front of her, the closest human being on the planet, and she just threw herself at me, her fears, her tears, her body, her brain, the whole person, mind and spirit. What was there to do but what any human being would do, but just hug her back, just wrap my arms around this naked human being and hug her back, giving what could be given, a human moment.

So there I was, hugging this thick bodied, naked woman. She was not only without clothes, she was without everything: pretense, games, dreams, all the illusions we depend on, stripped down to a base nudity beyond visual. I don’t remember the feel of her breasts, what we said afterwards or how long it lasted. What I remember is her thick shoulders. I remember her shaking, and sharing a place with her that was very private and far away. I remember

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she wildly pointed at her suitcase where it became instantly clear. Cockroaches.

She had brought some cockroaches from her hut with her in her suitcase and, when she had dug a little deeper into her clothes, maybe to get some underwear or something, they bailed.

A couple ran straight at her. The others, maybe six or eight in all, scattered in different directions according to insect logic, trying to not get stomped during Kaya’s dance. At once Mary and I started to catch them. They weren’t professionals like the one in the bathroom (which I would never tell Kaya about), and we quickly caught them one at a time. Kaya stood trembling in the middle of her room, holding herself, trying to be small. It took a few minutes with a few more seconds of high drama as the last one or two made a run for it and were caught and removed. Then we searched her suitcase, shook all her clothes and made sure there were no more — made sure it was all clear.

Kaya was still shaking, and I felt bad. I moved over in front of her, saying they were all gone, and she looked at me with those big brown eyes, as I just kept saying, “It’s OK , it’s OK, We got ’em. No more.” Shaking my head, I reached out to touch her arm, just to reassure her. Slowly, she believed me, looking around a bit, and then looking back at me, relaxing as I kept looking into her eyes, nodding. I still remember it now, her trust. I remember that still moment. I remember how fragile it was, how fragile she was, that these simple wayward cockroaches could cause her such distress, how delicate this seemingly tough German woman really was. I remember watching the fear subsiding in her eyes, looking at

45

a helplessness...

About the cockroach, he disappeared with the dress. My girlfriend watched this whole episode though we actually didn’t talk about it much afterwards that I can remember.

I don’t know what we would have really said, what could be said. And I have no idea what happened to Kaya when she returned to Germany. I know she went through it, whatever her destiny was, and that I was just a small moment in her very intense life. I also know I carry a small part of her in me, and think about her from time to time, even after these years. She left something in me, a footprint in my soul, an internal echo I hear sometimes, her curious gift.

by JuniDillard

The Rise

He would howl to the moon even if it was a fresh one that touched him.

This is why Emily would chase him around the house, diaper in hand, taunting that she was going to “put it on his face.” Amanda, who wanted to be just like her big sister, thought it would be funny to do it too. But her diaper was full. Mom doesn’t ask for his help anymore, unless it is to bake cookies.

Baking cookies was one of those Saturday afternoon events the family tried to do at least once a month. Mom would set out two glass bowls on the kitchen island with grey with red speckles. Emily would put on her “Lil’ Chef” apron that she got for Christmas the year before, and Rascal would cover himself in towels so that he wouldn’t get dough on him.

Amanda didn’t need to cover up because she would need to be in the tub before the first batch was out of the oven. The kids would play a game of who could count the most red speckles in the bottom of their bowl, while Mom would get out the flour and sugar. Rascal always won, even though he was four years younger than Emily.

“Rascal,” Mom said. “We are doubling this recipe. What is threefourths plus three-fourths?”

“One and a half” he quickly answered. “Can I measure? Can I? Can I?”

“Bring the measuring cups over here and you can,” Mom replied.

Up went his hand, out went his tongue and the cups were on the counter. Mom decided that Amanda

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He looked like a normal kid.

Short brown hair, with a cowlick in the back that earned him the nickname Rascal. Big blue eyes that gleamed at the sight of trouble. Buck teeth that would one day be covered with metal. His tiny backhand that curls its fingers into a ball of knuckles which swings up to his face where his tongue acted like a toad catching a mid-day snack. You might not have noticed it at first because he did it with such stealth, but if you had to hang out with him as much as Emily did, you’d see it. There, he did it again. Mom just asked him to put on his shoes.

Emily thought he was so gross. She was glad she didn’t have to hold his hand anymore. Who knows what could be on there?

It started around the time Amanda was born. Everyone started to give her all of the attention. How could they not, though? She was so cute. People said she looked like Emily, with her blond hair that wisped around those plump cheeks, her pout lips that are now starting to make out words and the adorable dresses that matched her mouth — pink and very loud. The only difference was her eyes. They looked like Rascal’s, ready for action.

Mom would ask the kids to help with Amanda, so they would feel like good big brothers and sisters.

Rascal didn’t fall for it though. He would plant himself on the floor and flop his arms and legs in the air, howling like a monster. All Mom asked was to go get a diaper out of the closet, but Rascal didn’t want to have anything to do with diapers.

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could have a bowl of her own to destroy this time, to hopefully keep her mitts out of the flour.

“If we have three bowls and 1 1/2 cups of flour to use, how many cups of flour go into each bowl?” Mom asked.

“One-half cup,” Rascal piped.

Emily wondered how he could answer so fast. She had just started learning fractions in school that year, but Rascal, who just finished Kindergarten, knew all the answers to her math problems. He did it again as he carefully leveled off the white heap, dumping the contents of the cup into the bowls.

“One – two – three,” Mom said as he completed the other bowls.

“

that summer. Rascal rushed over to see it once he heard. Through the glass he could see the crooked paper ocean scenery that was taped to the back with blue tape, shiny rocks in an aura of colors that sunk to the bottom, the plastic plant life that swayed like a flag in the breeze and the slobber mark on the glass, where he tried to touch the water. They didn’t have fish yet because the water had to set for a couple of days to acclimate.

“Mom, I want to go to Walmart,” said Rascal, taking his hand down from his mouth.

“No, we don’t need anything from Walmart,” Mom replied.

“But I want to go. Why can’t I go?” he whined, following Mom

No one went after him anymore. They were so used to his tantrums that they just seemed part of life.

”

“Four, five,” Rascal finished.

“Oh no. Amanda got into the baking soda,” Emily exclaimed, running into the cloud of white dust that was going to be chocolate chip cookies. Amanda sat on her stool next to the torn up yellow box, looking pleased at her contribution.

“WHAAAA! IT’S ALL RUNIED!” Rascal wailed, leaving Emily and Mom to clean up the mess that made the black and white checkered floor look solid.

No one went after him anymore. They were so used to his tantrums that they just seemed part of life.

The neighbors got an aquarium

around the house as she did the dishes, folded a load of laundry and played with Amanda. When Dad got home Rascal was sent to his room.

Dad does not put up with his whining over every little thing.

“He was told millions of times that we aren’t going to Walmart. That kid just does not listen,” Dad said.

All Rascal could think about that night was Walmart, Walmart, Walmart. He couldn’t get the thought out of his head, and he didn’t even know what he wanted there. All he knew was that he wanted to go there — real bad.

The next day the neighbor kid came over to see if Rascal and Emily wanted to check out the new fish he

in front of the window with baseball curtains to match his sheets, was his prized possession — his baseball card collection. He knew every card that was in there and exactly what order they were in. Rascal wondered where a giant picture of the ocean was going to go. It would not match anything in his room.

“Come with me,” Dad said, knowing that Rascal did not like his present.

“Alright,” he moped, not being able to take his hand out of his mouth because of the thought of that poster in his room.

“Here is your real present,” Dad boasted, as he opened the back door to let in a grey and white wiry mutt that tackled Rascal to the kitchen floor and licked off the remaining blue frosting from his face.

“Thanks! This is the best birthday present ever,” Rascal giggled as the mutt started licking Rascal’s hand.

“The people who owned him last named him Buddy. Is that name OK with you?” Dad asked.

“Buddy is my favorite name,” he replied as the two rolled around on the floor.

When Rascal first got Buddy he was as tall as him on all fours, but soon Rascal became taller than him, even when he stood on his hind legs.

Everyday Rascal would brush Buddy’s long, grey coat and take him for walks around the neighborhood. Before he went to bed, Rascal would check the gate over and over to make sure that Buddy couldn’t get out. They were inseparable. Buddy needed a home, and Rascal needed a “Buddy.”

Rascal was late to school

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got at Walmart day before.

“So that’s why you wanted to there?” Emily asked Rascal as they walked across the street. “Why didn’t you just say so? I know Mom would’ve let you go.”

“Dunno,” Rascal replied. “I just couldn’t get it out.”

The fish were beautiful. There were orange clown fish, sparkly neons and a couple of big blue ones that acted like the leaders of the tank.

Rascal decided that day that he loved fish.

“I wanna fish. I wanna fish. I wanna fish,” he would go on.

“Rascal, fish tanks are a lot of work. You have to change out the water, clean the glass and feed them every day. Do you think that you can handle that kind of responsibility?”

Mom would say.

“I wanna fish. I wanna fish,” he would answer.

For his birthday Rascal got a wall sized poster of the ocean, with schools of colorful fish and a shark on it.

“Now you can make your entire room look like a fish tank. How cool is that?” Dad said as Rascal unrolled the ocean on the living room floor.

“Oh, thanks Dad,” he mumbled disappointingly as he took his hand away from his lips.

Rascal liked his room the way it was. His bed was covered with baseball sheets and a blue blanket that faced the door so that he could see out at night. His baseball lamp was on the nightstand, right under the poster of Sammy Sosa, his favorite player. In the corner, there were two bats and his mitt that he used when it was tee-ball season. On his desk,

“

They were inseparable. Buddy needed a home and, Rascal needed a “Buddy.”

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”

almost every day. He would be in the bathroom forever. Emily would pound on the door making the house shake like an earthquake. She had just turned 14 and needed the mirror to cake on her black eyeliner and slick her hair straight to her face. Mom told her to leave him alone because he was trying to “go”. After what seemed like an eternity of silence to Emily, he would finally brush his teeth until they looked like those peppermint candies at restaurants. One – two - three – four - five, the tap of the toothbrush went against the sink. He put on his “smellies” and was finally Emily’s turn. After her “process” became more complex by adding pink lipstick and blue or green eye shadow, Emily moved her operation into her bedroom. They were still always late though because Rascal had to check Buddy’s cage, make sure his bedroom door was shut and put everything in his backpack – all five times.

The school would send letters home with Rascal all the time.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Tanner,

Your son is a very bright and hard working student, but I have been having problems with him having meltdowns in the middle of class.

Today, one of his classmates asked if she could borrow one of his pencils, and he would not let her. I asked him to share with her and that she would give it back to him at the end of class.

He still would not give her one and proceeded to run out in the hallway to explode.

I really thought you should know about this incident and please let me know if there is anything that I can do to help.

Sincerely, Mrs. Mandigo

Mom thought that he just didn’t like to share, and the letters were never talked about. No one really knew what the tantrums were about because anything could set him off.

“Slide,” he would cry.

“ What about the slide?” Emily would ask.

“Slide.”

“Did you fall off the slide?”

“Slide.”

The family quit asking after awhile because he could go on saying the same word for hours. Emily thought he acted like this to get attention. She was tired of it.

Emily was so embarrassed to have Rascal as a brother. He would always have dried slobber marks on his hand, be counting to five or stacking things into piles. She didn’t blame the other kids for picking on him. She did it too. She would go into his room and knock over all of his toys that he just picked up — for the fifth time that day. Rascal would tell Mom, so Emily started tormenting him in sneakier ways. After he cleaned his room top to bottom, she would send him out on an adventure. While he was gone, Emily would mix up his baseball cards or rearrange the clothes in his closet. Only crazy people would notice something like this, she would tell herself after sliding the baseball cards into the “wrong” plastic slot.

He noticed every time, though. After screams were heard throughout the neighborhood, Rascal would have to clean his room all over again. It didn’t feel right to him if something was out of place. Emily thought this was hilarious.

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She started calling him “lollipop” and got the kids at school to join in. This made his classmates start to notice his issues, which only made it worse.

“Hey lollipop,” the kids would tease on the playground. “What’s it taste like today, strawberry?”

“No, it’s grape. Wanna lick?” he slammed back.

This time all the kids were laughing with him, not at him. Right then he decided to start making fun of himself, that way no one could make fun of him. This almost made his actions seem deliberate and normal. He knew he couldn’t help that he needed five pencils in his backpack and that he had to run five laps while the other kids only ran four. He would joke that he was training for the majors. Baseball made him seem normal too. His jersey number was, you guessed it, five. When he went up to bat he would get in his stance, lift his hand to his tongue, tap the bat on the plate, one – two – three – four – five and knock it out of the park. His habits became more like superstitions than problems.

Looking for Change

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by MichelleDyer

Things started getting darker, slower, heavier. My breathing, more noticeable, now geriatric. My limbs were tensing, relaxing, then tensing again. I was comfortable, on the very edge of the unconscious abyss. But then I heard something.

I heard something, but it wasn’t what I saw. What I saw came later. What I heard was a duck. Maybe a few ducks. They were quacking.

Quack, quack, quacking. Long quacks, short quacks, there they were, right in my ear. It interrupted all hope of rest. It agitated me, making my limbs jerk and twitch, but not in the way they do right when sleep is nigh.

I squirmed, quivered, felt something.

Then I opened my eyes.

The sun was shining, but I could only see its rays — its rays around the head of a man. Dark, spotted skin, dark eyes, no teeth. No teeth, but he was smiling a whole smile, not one of those half smiles some people do. His silhouette was jarring. I lunged back as best as I could, but the hill was too steep to help me in any way. Erecting, I put my hands out in defense, hoping this man was nothing more than just a terribly realistic figment of my imagination.

“Excuse me, Sir,” he whistled through his toothless mouth.

I didn’t say anything. I grasped the grass beneath me and searched for a weapon.

“Sir?” He bent down lower, this time about to suck the air out of my mouth. I darted my glance, trying to

find a witness, anything, to take care of this pestilence.

“Anybody in there?” He knocked on my head. “Hello?”

I pushed his grotesque breath from the bridge between our mouths and leaned backward even more.

“What are you doing?” I accused.

“I’m looking for some change.

Do you have change?”

My body fell back on the hill, exhausted. I covered my face with my hands. “No, I don’t have any change.

That’s what you woke me up for?” I fired.

“I need some change.”

“Well I don’t have any.” I rolled over, now in fetal position, hoping silently he’d get the message.

“You don’t have change?” He crept down next to me, in front of my face.

“No.” I rolled over.

“How can you not have any change?” He jumped over my body and laid on his stomach parallel to mine, looking me in the eye.

“I just don’t.”

He knocked on my head again, only this time harder.

“Ow! What’d you do that for?”

“To see if any change was up there.”

“Obviously not.” I began taking off my sweatshirt. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need some sleep, and I have class in an hour.” I scrunched the sweatshirt into a nice, round ball and put it under my head.

My eyes closed, but he didn’t budge. I could see the outline of his

“

body through my eyelids, still lying there, staring straight at me. He didn’t move a muscle, he didn’t even breathe. I wished him gone.

I tried to think of any chant, any mantra I could to make crazy, smelly men disappear, but it didn’t work. After a while, I thought something had happened to him, that he had died or something. So I opened my one eye, peeking, as if opening my eye lid would cause the

“Even if I did have change, I wouldn’t give it to you! ” I yelled.

The man stood in his tracks and faced me again. He pointed to his head then tapped his heart. He smiled. Then he disappeared.

”

I tried to think of any chant, any mantra I could to make crazy, smelly men disappear

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world to shake. He was still there, looking at me, smiling his gapped smile. My eyes rolled into the back of my head and I sat up.

“What do you want, really?

I already told you—I don’t have change!”

He sat up on his knees in the praying position and leaned to me. He knocked on my chest and held his ear up against my heart. He knocked again.

“Nope, don’t hear any change in there,” he said, standing up, dusting off the grass blades from his torn clothes.

“What do you mean I don’t have any change in there?”

“You don’t have any change.”

“How could I? It’s change!

Coins, nickels, dimes!” I threw my hands up in the air. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

He turned around and started walking away, limping with each step.

Refuge of Being (Chapter 1)

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by R.L.Steele What is that smell? Bleach?

Alcohol? It was crisp and clean but somehow made my stomach turn. I struggled to open my eyes but quickly shut them tight again, bright light piercing through my raw aching head. Why is it so bright?

I need a drink, I thought.

I wonder if I have any left. What day is it? That smell. She must be cleaning the apartment. Why can’t she let me sleep?

I slowly opened my eyes again, trying to adjust to the light. This didn’t look like my bedroom or any other room in my apartment. Rhythmic pulses of pain seemed to split my skull, like daggers tearing through my brain tissue. I began to notice the bed. It wasn’t mine. I could see one edge right in front of me, and I could feel the other right behind. It was small, almost like a child’s. I was covered by a single, white sheet.

Where am I?

Fear swept over me. It was tangible, starting in my gut and spreading outward in all directions, a tingling, tight feeling. Coldness in my feet and hands. My heart felt like it was struggling to beat through my chest. Tension reached my face and head, and I squeezed my eyes shut again, overwhelmed by the daggers in my brain.

Am I in prison? Did I do something stupid? Am I in a hospital again?

I struggled to remember. The last day or night. The last week.

Anything. Images came. I recalled

walking to the store for a bottle.

Was that yesterday? Today? Last week? I had no sense of time. I had no way of knowing whether it was day or night. Forcing my eyes to open, I turned my head and looked around. The room was plain and sterile, solid white walls and ceiling. The bed was in the middle of the room, with a small metal table on one side.

Beyond the table was an entry without a door to what looked like a bathroom. I could see a sink and a badly scratched mirror. Next to the bathroom was a closed door with a thin vertical window in it.

That tight feeling rose in my gut again. I looked to the other side of the room, where there was a single, small window with a row of vertical bars over it. With each labored heartbeat my eyelids grew heavier, slowly clouding my vision and my thoughts. I was aware of blackness and then…

*** I felt her breath in my ear, slow and deep. Comforting. Arousing. I felt her heart keeping time with mine.

I loved when she held me while we slept. I turned my head to look at her. So beautiful. Strange, the power of a sleeping face. I loved to watch her sleep. Her lips turned into the slightest smile as her eyelids parted, revealing the tiniest glimpse of her soul.

“Mr. Kallen,” she said, soft and sweet, like an invitation.

Before I could respond, she repeated, “Mr. Kallen.”

“

”

I remember the very first drink. Gagging and choking as it burned my throat. to move them. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared toward the mirror across from me in the tiny bathroom.

Maybe I was still dreaming. My skin looked greenish-yellow, dark around the eyes, which seemed to retreat into my skull. My lips were broken and dry, streaked with white and red. My brain felt heavy, and I worried about standing, lest it should tip me over. I don’t know how long I sat there, but eventually I found the will to move my wasted body toward the bathroom. I felt dry and cracked, inside and out.

I didn’t feel like I needed to piss, so I just turned on cold water, splashed some in my face and just stared at myself.

“What did you do?” I whispered. *** I remember the very first drink.

Gagging and choking as it burned my throat. Heat moving down through my chest and merging with my insides. It was nothing like I expected. Harsh and bitter and completely unpleasant. Yet I took another gulp. And another. And another. My companion egged me on, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t do it to fit in. I didn’t do it for any reason, really. I did it for no reason. I had no reason. For anything. At that moment there was nothing in the world for me to care about. I took poison, not meaning to hurt myself, but to show myself just exactly how much I didn’t care. About anything. Anyone. And then, the rush… *** I struggled to move my lifeless legs toward the door. It wasn’t painful, just unreal. Like my legs weren’t real.

I felt like I was falling, and I pushed

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Her lips were flat. Her eyes widened slightly.

“Mr. Kallen,” she said, slightly raising her head, eyes wider, brows turning downward. I felt myself pulling away slightly, tightness forming in my chest.

“Mr. Kallen,” louder now.

Angry? Her head raised higher, her eyes growing unnaturally wide and her chin pulling down toward her chest as she stared at me. Choking on my own breath, I pulled away, searching with my hands for the edge of the bed.

“Mr. Kallen,” a voice not her own coming from her mouth. It was deeper, not masculine, but not feminine either. Not human? She moved suddenly, turning over and crawling toward me on hands and knees. Her eyes bled black, and her skin seemed to melt from her face. Her jaw opened wider until it seemed to break off and dangle at her chest. She let loose a sound that seemed to enter my head and claw at me from the inside.

“Mr. Kallen.” Light broke through as I opened my eyes and audibly gasped. “Mr. Kallen,” said the woman in white scrubs standing by my bed, “It’s almost breakfast time. I bet you’re very hungry.” She turned and walked out the door, propping it open with the kickdown holder.

As my mind cleared and I caught my breath, I remembered the room. White walls and ceiling. What looked like a bathroom by the door.

Why did I see her that way? Where is she? Where am I? I started moving to sit up. So weak. My limbs seemed light, weightless, yet my will struggled

up against the floor with every movement, leaning forward like a novice skater trying not to fall down.

Each step seemed to send a shockwave of tension up my legs, through my guts to my head. At once I felt like I might pass out but also hot-wired like a hit of good rock.

From the doorway to my room, I saw a long hallway with a number of doors just like mine, heavy solid white with a thin vertical window.

Most doors were propped open, but a few were shut, one with the window covered from the inside. I heard a man yell. Or did I feel it? Did I yell? Was I

“

and pretend this wasn’t happening. A shock wave blasted through me as the white scrubs lady turned the corner and almost ran me over.

“Mr. Kallen! I’m so glad you’re up and about! There’s fruit and muffins in the dining room,” She gestured behind her and brushed past me.

The hallway opened up into a large room with several tables and chairs. A countertop ran the length of one wall and held several bowls of fruit and trays of muffins and pastries.

A row of juiceboxes and water bottles sat at the end where the countertop

”

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At once I felt like I might pass out but also hot-wired like a hit of good rock.

thinking about yelling?

At the near end of the hallway was a plain metal desk occupied by a boredlooking man in blue scrubs. His bald temples throbbed rhythmically to his open-mouthed gum chewing.

He shook his head with disgust and turned the page in his magazine.

Behind him I saw a control pad on the wall next to beige double doors with no handles.

I turned and began my slow shuffle in the other direction. I thought I heard voices and even a few laughs from beyond the far end of the hall.

I passed another man in blue scrubs holding up the wall with his back.

This one wasn’t bored. His face oozed disgust as he watched me. His sleeves pulled up as he crossed his arms. I saw a tattoo on his bicep. I think it said “REGULATOR.” I was exhausted when I reached the end of the hallway. I wanted to sleep

met the next wall, a floor-to-ceiling mural of mountainside landscape: trees, waterfalls, and soaring eagles.

Several people sat around the tables, some in t-shirts and sweatpants, others in hospital gowns. One table seemed to be full of smiles and laughter. Another looked like some kind of sick county fair eating contest with muffin wrappers, banana and orange peels piling up in between a pair of bovines in hospital gowns. A third unhappy blue-shirted man stood watch against the far wall, half-eaten apple in one hand, the other punching the channel buttons on a TV that hung in the corner of the ceiling. A lady wrapped in a purple scarf sat watching the TV, rocking back and forth and pulling on one side of her ratty gray hair.

Before anyone could notice me, I shuffled back to my room and into the tiny bathroom. I stumbled over the

“

”

I put my hands in my pockets to hide the trembling and mentally searched the room for a hidden bottle.

I was awakened once again, this time by a knock at the door.

“Mr. Kallen?”

I turned toward the voice.

A middle-aged man in a white lab coat stood at the doorway. He smiled as he came and stood at the foot of the bed and stared at me through blue-green eyes that stood out from his clean-shaven tan face.

His short black hair faded to gray around his temples.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

I mumbled something even I didn’t understand.

“Do you know where you are?”

“No,” my voice cracked like a pubescent boy.

“This is the Good Samaritan Specialty Hospital. My name is Dr. Rule. You’ve been with us for almost two days now.”

“Two…days…How did I get here?”

“We’ll get to that. Right now we need to make sure you have a safe detox. Do you know how much you had to drink?”

I didn’t even know how to answer that question. It was like being asked how much air you breathed.

When I said nothing he continued, “Mr. Kallen, your body has suffered some serious damage. We’re going to do all we can to help you, but you’ll need to decide for yourself that you want to get well. Honestly, I wasn’t sure you’d make it, but here you are. Your blood alcohol should be bottoming out by now, and then you’re going to feel extremely sick.

But you’ve probably been through this before, right?”

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sink and retched. I gasped for air as I slumped to the floor, cradling my aching sides. I sat there on the cold floor breathing deep and trying to swallow away the burning acid in my mouth. Again I thought of her. I hope she knows where I am. I need to find a phone.

I pulled myself up on the sink and scooped some cold water into my mouth. I swallowed a little but stopped as my guts squeezed up toward my throat again. I stumbled to the bed and collapsed, pondering the end of me.

***

She wasn’t speaking to me. It might have been a few days since we fought, but I wasn’t sure how long. Minutes, hours, days, all blended into a disjointed mesh that was my reality. I found her sitting motionless at the kitchen table with some kind of lost look in her eyes.

I put my hands in my pockets to hide the trembling and mentally searched the room for a hidden bottle. I wanted to touch her, to hold her. She probably hated me. I have no idea what we had been fighting about. I never did. It was easier to just crawl inside a bottle and hide.

Disappear.

“Hey,” I said weakly. She looked up at me, brought back from

wherever she was.

“Hi.” Soft. Gentle. Inviting.

“Are you mad?”

“No.”

“Maybe we could…” Before I could finish she was on her feet and standing just inches in front of me, cradling my face in her hands.

“I’m pregnant.” ***

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“I…I don’t know…Can I call my wife?”

His lips pressed thin, and he looked down, fidgeting with his clipboard. “Mr. Kallen, you need to focus on healing and recovery.” He looked up at me. “You should rest for a few more hours, then we’ll talk again.” He turned and walked toward the door.

“Doctor…” He paused and turned to look at me. “Can’t I make a phone call?”

His eyes glazed with sadness, shoulders slumping with a long sigh.

“You deserve to know. She brought you here early yesterday morning.

She told us she was leaving town and didn’t want us or you to know where she’s going.”

EAT ‘EM

By Miiky JulianCola had already devoured his son from his feet to his waist, for the blankets were soaked in blood, and his pajama pants were torn into tiny pieces by the repulsive monster’s razor sharp, horrendous teeth.

How could such a horrific beast enter my home? — Oliver pondered haplessly. Festooned with anger, he brazenly recalled the many times he’d preached over and over again to his wife about the virtue of locking all doors and windows prior to going to bed and to activate the burglar alarm for an added layer of protection. On any given day or night, lesser this night, the same night a horrific beast intruded his home to devour little Tim, a burglar could have entered their home and stolen everything with the greatest of ease — plasma tv, laptop computers, his precious collection of model trains, well worth more than $17,000 and other personal items of comfort and value.

A thought inauspiciously rambled through Oliver’s mind — check to see if a door or window was left unlocked. Also, check to see if the batteries in the alarm system had expired. An intruder had invaded their home — their beloved private property. A logical explanation had to be forthcoming. Just as Oliver started to move away from the door he noticed that the beast made an upward movement. Maybe it had eaten yet another piece of Timothy. Action had to be taken! Intervention could wait no longer! But how? Punching the lizardtype beast? Just then Oliver recalled conversations with his cousin Frank, a long time member of the NRA who, much more often than frequently, exalted upon the virtue of being strapped 24/7 with strong preferences

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The room became ever so hot around 1 o’clock in the morning. Oliver, the everyday, common man, stepped out of his bedroom to get a glass of water to relieve his parched throat.

The house was very quiet, quieter than normal. Oliver and his family lived in the suburbs, distant from the sudden, unpredictable upheaval of loud noises and countless other nuisances plaguing the inner city. As Oliver passed through the hallway, he decided to peek into the bedroom where little Timothy, his only child of the tender age of 2, lay sound asleep. He quietly pushed the door completely open. Immediately he saw a wild, unidentified animal eating his beloved child! The beast appeared to be a gigantic, human-sized lizardlike monster — one of which Oliver had never seen in real life nor in any animal book, encyclopedia or the animal channel!!

Paralyzed, Oliver was uncertain if he should quickly enter the room, attempt to frighten the wild beast and save his son, or flee in search for help.

The brute strength of this wild beast could not be ascertained by mere sight.

Nonetheless, Oliver assumed, defacto, that it was extremely powerful — or at least much more powerful than himself, a measly, stout postal worker who hadn’t exercised since high school P.E. class. For a brief moment, Oliver thought that if he turned on the hallway light he could determine exactly what type of animal was slowly devouring his beloved son. Maybe he could even detect what species it was and what race it belonged to.

A swift rubbing of his eyes, acclimatizing his vision to the horrific sight that he was bearing witness to, revealed that the lizard-type beast

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towards a loaded Mosberg rifle under the bed for personal, home protection and a Glock 9mm loaded with hollowpoint tips for potential street combat.

You never know what could happen, cousin Frank preached. And packing heat is the name of the game in this life. Alas, there was proof — a wild, lizard-type beast was devouring little Tim, and Oliver had no firearms in his house to protect his family, private property or himself. Buoyed on stupid, Oliver imagined the verbal lambasting awaiting him the day that he would tell Frank that a wild lizard-like, humansized beast had entered his house undetected. Then too, cousin Frank just might bet two cold beers that such

“

remembered all of the wonderful times those little arms hugged him when he returned home from work late at night.

Could a kitchen knife plunged into the back of the lizard beast wedge it from Timothy? Would the monstrous, human-sized beast allow anyone to even get close enough to apply a mortal blow? Oliver was frightened that the lizard would attack him. Nonetheless, he had to impede the beast from reaching Timothy’s heart. A healthy child can survive without the use of his bodily functions, maybe even without chunks of his intestines, but it’s an absolute must that the beast, regardless of its super-human, brute strength, be prevented from eating Timothy’s heart

Then too, cousin Frank just might bet two cold beers that such a wild, lizardbeast doesn’t even exist.

a wild, lizard-beast doesn’t even exist.

Oliver continued to watch his son being devoured from the waist up. He quickly concluded that a lizard-type animal eating a toddler wasn’t your everyday, normal spectacle. For a brief moment, Oliver thought that he was hallucinating, as if he was amidst yet another recurrence effect from the two times he’d foolishly experimented with a psychologically lethal mixture of peyote, magic shrooms and weed during his turbulent teenage years. Or maybe he was sleepwalking, and at any given moment, he would awake from the dreadful nightmare. He rubbed his eyes once again. He pinched himself — but to no avail.

Just then the beast ate one of Timothy’s little arms. Saddened, Oliver

”

and his head.

Determination had set in.

Timothy had to be rescued from the chest upward or else all was lost. Maybe it was the first sane thought Oliver had since leaving his room. However, despite the rationale accompanied by sane thoughts, immobilization gripped Oliver’s will to act. Albeit terribly worried and concerned for the well being of little Tim, he felt not an ounce of guilt.

Just then, as if he hadn’t felt hot and decided to get a glass of water only moments earlier, Oliver wished he had never seen the lizard-type beast or little Tim’s pajama’s soaked in blood. He imagined his son being kidnapped. Timothy, being the victim of an organized, criminal kidnapping,

“

”

This incident would most certainly make him late for work. slowly devoured his petite body. Oliver was happy to know that his son didn’t suffer a painful death, and he would never suffer in this world like he and so many others. Maybe little Tim had experienced the best case scenario to end the short span of his existence on this earth.

Oliver returned to his room.

Unscathed by the flashes of guilt flickering sporadically in his mind, he quickly felt a sense of redemption, a fainting hope to save his son at the break of dawn. Yes! Maybe the buzz of the alarm clock would frighten the lizard-beast away. He said nothing to his wife as he snuggled back into his side of the bed. Just before going to sleep, he remembered that he had a full-day’s work ahead of him. It was the holiday season and there was twice as many deliveries to be made.

BRRRRRRRIIIIIIINNNNGGGG! Oliver awoke to the sound of the alarm clock and a ghastly odor. He opened his eyes and immediately saw the foot and tail of the human-sized lizard-beast dangling at the foot of his bed. His wife was no longer lying beside him. In fact, she was nowhere in the room. Frightened, not knowing what to do, Oliver didn’t have a clue whether he should attempt to frighten the lizard-monster or try to leap from his bed and run for help. By the sheer weight of the beast, he assumed that it was very powerful— or at least much more powerful than him, a measly postal worker who had not exercised since high school P.E. class. Buzzwords and thoughts he had pondered just hours before he’d gone back to sleep siphoned aimlessly through his mind.

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was much more believable, more real.

No one would believe that a lizard ate Timothy. No one would believe that his father was pathetic enough to do nothing to prevent his son from being massacred by ingestion. The police investigating the disappearance of little Tim would quickly conclude that the father was the last person to see his son alive, subsequently making him the main suspect in the possible murder of his own son. To avoid prosecution followed by a lengthy prison term, maybe even the death penalty, Oliver decided that he would make a solid case for kidnapping when being questioned by authorities. Amidst a myriad of thoughts ranging from self vilification to public condemnation, Oliver recalled, to his benefit, that there was a clause in his son’s life insurance policy that covered kidnapping.

Oliver continued to deliberate quietly and motionlessly. If I just yell the lizard-beast might just go away, he pondered. Oliver continued to think, think, think, think until his wife yelled for him to return to bed. He ignored her for a moment, wanting to see exactly how close the lizard-monster had made it to Timothy’s face, for the beast appeared to be taking in the final length of little Tim’s neck. His wife screamed his name again and again. Oliver decided that it was time to return to bed. Strangely, he felt a sense of relief. Finally there was a legitimate reason to leave the entrance to little Tim’s bedroom without knowing precisely how much of his son the lizard had devoured. Just then a comforting thought came to Oliver — little Tim didn’t scream. He was sound asleep while the lizard-monster

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He struggled to ignore them, focusing his thoughts on the most pertinent aspect of all the possibility of being eaten alive by a huge lizard beast.

This incident would most certainly make him late for work and Oliver was sure that his boss would not believe that he was unable to punch in on time because a giant, humansized lizard-monster had entered his home undetected. Oliver couldn’t bear to think of the rage and verbal lambasting he would receive from his overly arrogant superior. But maybe not. Maybe not today or tomorrow.

Maybe not for a long time. As Oliver raised the cover from over his legs he saw that the lizard-beast’s mouth was already up to his waist.

Strands

by KatlynMcKinney is dark, there is more melanin. If hair color is light, there is less melanin.

The images in my book are clinical. I don’t think of hair in terms of close-up drawings of follicles and layers of skin.

I only know hair as something that gets split ends and doesn’t hold a curl very well, for me at least. The artist who drew these images pays particular attention to the layer of dermis, epidermis, and so on. I think that’s the right order. Maybe not. I know the skeletal system better.

*** “Hold still, Nat,” Mom tells my sister. My 4-year-old sister knows that after bath time things aren’t pleasant.

I watch them in the living room as mom tries to detangle Natalie’s hair.

She squirms and cries, sitting on the floor with her back to the couch.

Mom’s frame hovers over her.

“Don’t move, it’ll make it worse,” mom says.

Squirm. Cry. Squirm.

“Nat, you have got to be still!”

More squirming. More crying.

“I can’t do this!” Mom throws the comb into my 7-year, old hands and gives up. I take over the task. If left unkempt, Natalie’s hair becomes tangled, and the clumps take half an hour to comb out. Her hair is thick — so thick I lose my fingers in it whenever I help comb it. She sits at my feet with her back to the couch and I hunch over her back in concentration. We each become quiet as I cautiously navigate through tangles. The sound of the comb separating each strand replaces Natalie’s fussing. My fingers disappear in her golden brown hair still wet

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The bathroom with a red sink is small but big enough for her petite frame. I stumble upon her walking to the bedroom where I stay when I visit Colorado. Her hair, a mix of gray and white, is a silver lightning bolt down her back. It curls at the ends like the flourishes of cursive writing. The window is an overexposed blotch of light as it illuminates her reflection in the mirror. Her arms fly about her as she brushes her hair.

“Well, hello. I’m just finishing up, Katie,” Gramma ‘Kinney says as she glances at me.

“Oh.” That’s all I’m able to say.

I have only seen her with her hair down three times — twice as a child and now as an adult. In all my memories, her hair is in an eloquent bun, and her bangs are tightly curled.

I’ve forgotten she even has long hair.

If it were measured, it would be longer than her height. It envelopes her and I keep staring. She has transformed into a person I don’t know—an unrecognizable beauty. Her hands clasp chunks of hair and she twists and manipulates it into the familiar bun. Bobby pins clink in a container as she gingerly picks them up and makes them disappear into the mass.

She does this quickly with precise direction, stabbing them into place.

I decide her hair must’ve been the reason Grampa married her. *** Hair grows slowly. This is my basic understanding from my anatomy book in high school. The process of keratinization begins with the follicle, where cells build up and are pushed out as new cells develop. If hair color

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after her bath. The soothing motion of stroking her hair is interrupted when she gets up to leave. I’m left with the comb and strands of her hair woven between the teeth.

*** When visiting a friend’s house I take notice of hair products in his or her bathroom. Shampoos, leave-in conditioner, hair spray for touchable curls, mousse for lift and volume, hair clips and ties, hair dryer, curling irons, flat irons. The placement of products has meaning, too. Items behind cabinets

“

light brown hair and made comparisons between Clairol and Neutrogena brands.

The options on the boxes ranged from “Warm Cinnamon” to “Spiced Berry.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

Mom asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Mom helped me with the whole process one night, and we were both eager to see the result. It was difficult to tell how it looked at first, but once my hair was dry, I looked like a different person, felt like someone else.

“Well, are you happy with it?”

I like to look at the evidence and wonder about how they want to change... how they mold a frame to their face.

or in drawers tell me one of two things: my friend is neat or, like me, doesn’t know how to use the products and hides the various name brands. If products are dispersed throughout the counter, spilling out of drawers, clumped together in the shower, I know two things: my friend isn’t bothered by clutter and they have hair styling knowledge. I like to look at the evidence and wonder about how they want to change, how they want others to view the final equation of their morning routine, how they mold a frame to their face.

*** I dyed my hair for the first time when I was a senior in high school and less than a month away from graduating.

I needed a change to represent the one I was making by leaving high school and becoming a college student. I wanted to try a shade of red, and mom helped me pick out the right color in the Smith’s beauty aisle. She held the boxes up to my

”

Mom asked.

I nodded slowly, unable to keep my hands from touching my auburn hair.

*** “My sister has had the same hair style since college,” mom tells me. Photos reveal the intense black color of my aunt’s hair, but in person it’s different. It’s as calm and assuring as her demeanor.

Once, at a family reunion, I watched her get ready for the day in a relative’s bedroom. I was a child and wanted to spend every minute I could with my aunt, and this opportunity provided me a glimpse of how she crafted her hair. I can’t remember if she said anything to me, but she let me watch. She teased a wave of short, ear-length black hair and strategically sprayed it with squirts of hair spray. The light from the window caught flecks of the spray in mid-air as it dispersed over her head and about the room. She molded it into a “C” about her face and over her head. Her hands

“

”

Her hair became an ebony crown, contrasting against her collected, relaxed face.

ruins his future attempts at heroic deeds, saving his people. Aren’t haircuts supposed to be good, don’t they make people look nice? Why couldn’t Samson’s strength be in muscle mass, problem solving or war strategies? I sit with my questions, too embarrassed to speak up about my wonderings. Everyone else has their opinion. I nervously twist the ends of my hair and accept that the Bible is elusive and hair loss is bad, just like Rogaine commercials advertise. Just like Pantene ads that claim its their shampoos are a savior to any woman with less than attractive hair.

*** I’m sitting in my fourth-grade classroom, and my classmates are having their hair put up in traditional buns, or tsiiyeel, by my teacher.

Kayenta Elementary School is hosting a cultural week and students are supposed to be proud of their Navajo heritage. Each student goes up one by one. My teacher gathers their hair in her hands and folds it into a loop.

She ties the bun off with white yarn.

I’m in my desk. I want my hair to be fixed, and I don’t want it to be. I don’t know what to do, so I sit. I debate. I want to belong, to feel a connection with my classmates—more than an occasional acknowledgment in the hallway, more than being teased about my skin color, my straight leg jeans. I’m too nervous to get out of my seat and stand in front of my teacher and classmates and announce that I’m going to take part in their culture. Once everyone has their bun, we walk as a class to the gym. There is presentation or a speaker for the students. I face the

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followed a routine: brush, hair spray, brush, repeat. Her hair became an ebony crown, contrasting against her collected, relaxed face. I think she smiled at me when our gazes met.

If this moment were a photo, a low exposure would show blurry arms crossing about her body as her face shines clear in the silver mirror. My small frame would be sitting on the bed, off-set in the background and caught between the blurs.

*** My friend Deb has more hair product than a salon. The bathroom apartment feels like a shampoo commercial and upon entering I am bombarded with multitudes of bottles and containers. The counter doesn’t have much space for the usual and familiar bathroom trinkets.

Everything is overrun with leave-in conditioners, travel-size shampoo, huge bottles of shampoo, styling creams and sample-size gel. The inside of the shower is amazingly sparse, maybe a few bottles of shampoo and a bar of Dove soap.

Deb’s bathroom consumes me, and I can spend a ridiculous amount of time noticing duplicates of the same brand, reading every label, smelling each product to see if it matches the ingredients. Deb’s hair would make anyone envious—the amount of product worked into that mass of thick, black hair is more beautiful than my favorite poem.

*** In middle school, my church youth group discusses the story of Samson. I can’t grasp the meaning of it. I don’t understand why God gives Samson powerful hair in the first place if Delilah cuts it anyway and

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I imagine cemeteries with caskets about to burst because they can’t contain the massive amount of hair and curled nails.

”

backs of my classmates and their buns.

No one mentions my hair about my shoulders.

*** As a child I learn from some unknown source that hair and nails grow keep growing on a deceased person. I think about this in depth for a length of time. I imagine cemeteries with caskets about to burst because they can’t contain the massive amount of hair and curled nails. The bodies are mummified in hair. Hair seeps out in every crack it can find. Hair reaches the top and grows like grass. I’m overrun with these images, disgusted — disgusted with dead bodies. This leads me to decide that cremation is the best way to go. No physical remnant can grow out of my ashes. I want to be really gone when I’m gone.

*** Mom, Natalie, and I have moved into a New Mexico neighborhood after leaving Arizona.

I’m in the fifth grade and Natalie is in second. Alexis and I meet in the new neighborhood. Alexis and her sister invite Natalie and me to see their rabbits they raise for 4-H. In their backyard I admire Alexis’s hair, ignoring what she tells me about her rabbits and their names. As she talks I imagine myself with hair like hers, a mass of golden-brown shimmering with blonde highlights, strong and thick like a horse’s mane. It cascades past her lower back and sways gently

when she walks from one rabbit cage to the next. Compared to her, my hair is short. Compared to me, she’s gorgeous. I want to show her how enamored I am with her image by growing my hair like hers. I rush home when it’s time for us to leave.

“Mom!” I exclaim. “Did you see Alexis’s hair? I want to grow mine like that!”

“I don’t think you could grow it that long. You’d get horrible split ends,” she tells me.

I’m crushed. My aspiration to become Gorgeous Girl with Really Long Hair is replaced with my current hair position: Pining Girl with Average Length Hair. I settle with this fact and resort to my continual veneration of her hair.

*** My mother has volumes and volumes of hair clips. She organizes the clips in an easy-to-reach manner and has a drawer in her downstairs bathroom dedicated to them. One Christmas Natalie and I bought her a red Oriental-style bamboo basket to decorate her bathroom, hoping she’d find a special place for it or accent the color scheme — it’s filled with clips now. She keeps brushes for particular ways of styling her hair in a specific drawer. There is a black, wide-tooth comb she’s had since college, a round brush, a vent brush, a boar brush and a regular brush. If I visit her in the morning while she’s getting ready, I

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can tell how her hair will look based on what brush she’s holding. The round brush means she’s going to have curly hair. The vent brush means her hair will have volume. And if she’s styling with the regular brush, she’ll probably put her hair up in a classy fashion. She doesn’t like when I borrow her clips or brushes and mix them up in the drawers. When I’m finished with them, I carelessly toss them in the drawers. When she finds that I’ve messed up her organization, she gets frustrated with me and places each item deliberately in the correct place.

*** In my sophomore English class, Mr. Fierke has us read a poem about an author braiding her daughter’s hair. She remembers her mother braiding her hair as a child, her mother’s mother braiding hair and so on. The women become giant hands plaiting generation after generation of hair. All the women in this family aren’t connected by blood, but by hair.

They recognize their importance as females with braids—tight braids, long braids, French braids. The women in the poem transform from people to ideas, concepts, an idea of genealogy recounted in a mother’s hands touching her daughter’s hair. As we read, I find myself out of my seat and in the poem, mixed in with words and hair. I fold and turn with each strand and plait and find myself in a woman’s hands as she caresses me into a tradition. After I read that poem, hair became more than hair. It became words, people, love, and appreciation.

The Last Gift

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by WendyMeek He was a man of short stature with a few strands of hair wrapped around his balding head, and you could see that time had written wisdom across his tired face.

As he sat rocking in his burgundy colored recliner, I could hear the squeaky noise coming from the springs that also had revealed its age. He was in a deep stare, and my mind raced, searching for clues as to what he was thinking. He seemed to notice that I was standing close, but he made no movements, for he seemed entranced by his own mind in deep thought. I cleared my throat to make some noise, any noise, just to let him know that I was there in his presence. It was then that he suddenly jerked, as if someone had jumped out of empty space and startled him.

“Grandpa, are you alright?”

I asked. He looked up at me with an astonishing look of surprise, and I could see that whatever he was thinking about had taken over every part of his brain and then his body all at one time.

“Well, sure,” he said, as his speech was limited. I watched him slowly rise up from his old chair, and he hobbled precariously across the room. I noticed how the impairing stroke that he had 17 years ago clung to him like a bad dream that would never end.

“Come here,” he sputtered out, and pointed sharply toward the hall. The words he spoke were always few, but his body language made up for the lack of verbal expressions that he constantly

thought and could never articulate.

The look on his face was persistent, and I instantly knew he needed something. As I followed him to the back room, I noticed that all of his woodworking tools and paints were in disarray. I was surprised to see his little workshop in such disorganization. His tools were not in their maroon-colored box.

They were sporadically placed in different spaces. His hammer was left on the table, and his pliers were placed on an old, rickety, dusty shelf. There were pieces of tinfoil strewn about, and his labels and many colored paints that uniquely defined each piece of work were misplaced loosely about on the table and shelves. They all had a special place, and this behavior was not the norm. He always had things completely organized and was very meticulous about his belongings.

“Grandpa, is there something you need, is everything alright?”

I asked, with gentle curiosity. He turned to look at me, and I saw the determined look dissipate to an unfamiliar state of distress. It seemed as though his thoughts invoked an intense pain. He pointed to two airplanes that lay partially disassembled. He had made these planes slowly over time with his one good hand. Countless times I watched him take his time with tedious efforts, taking minute wooden pieces that reminded me of small broken Popsicle sticks and creating something out of nothing. His creations of these planes were a small symbol of his

“

“Grandpa, don’t talk like that, you’re not going to die any time soon,” I said intently. I waited slowly for a reply, but all that came was silence, and I knew. I knew he was right, for it was only one month ago that his twin brother had passed away. I knew that whatever happened to his twin, the same awful event would always happen to him within a short time span. After all, that is what happened with his stroke. I started to scream the words in my head, “NO, NO, NO!” As memories flushed my mind all at once, I could see reminiscences of my childhood with him. I remembered the way he picked me up from day care, the place that I despised and took me to get a big persons hamburger at A&W. I remembered him pushing me on the swings. I remembered him

I knew what he was telling me with his silent body language, but I couldn’t understand why.

”

planes. It bewilders me to think how difficult this process is. And more, even I could not build them with my own two working hands. These were more than just craft airplanes. They were symbols to all of us in our family.

We could do anything if we just put our minds to it, even if our minds had become damaged. As I started to ask my question that contained only one word, he interrupted me with a short simple response that took my breath away.

“Die,” he said wearily. As I tried to process what that one powerful word meant to me, I could feel the tears choke me violently as I swallowed down the bitter pain.

holding me on his lap. I remembered scratching his back while watching football together, and I remembered him tucking me in at night when I was scared. I remembered all of these things in an instant and thought to myself, he can’t die. He was the only consistent man in my life. He had been there for every event that was important to me: my baptism, my father’s abandonment, my high school graduation, my wedding, the birth of my children, my college graduation.

He was there every moment I suffered through cancer, and he was there when I survived. What would I do without him? I wanted to scream, cry and do whatever I could do to keep

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accomplishments and were truly his works of art.

“Grandpa, why are your planes scattered around like this?” I asked astounded. I waited for him to give me another short answer, but this time he didn’t reply. He only pointed to the planes and then to me. I knew what he was telling me with his silent body language, but I couldn’t understand why.

“Do you want me to have this?” I asked with surprise. His eyes looked intensely at me and with determination as he managed to mutter a single simple word.

“Yes.” I knew how important these planes were to him, despite all he had been through and all of his disabilities. He overcame them by building these intricate and delicate

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him just a little longer.

I felt a small tear run across my dry, hot cheek. I looked at him with pleading eyes, and it almost seemed, for a brief moment, that he could read my thoughts. “I love you,� were the only words that he spoke. He gently reached towards me to wipe the single tear away from my flushed face. There were no more words that he spoke, only a gentle hug and a small kiss on my tear stained cheek.

I kissed him goodbye, and my arms felt mushy like wet overcooked spaghetti noodles, and I managed to give him one more hug goodbye.

As I was walking towards my car, I observed that I was holding the last accomplishment that he would ever make, and it was his final gift to me.

Crack

by by AlyssaMohon on that particularly named finger, but it’s not a wedding ring. It’s not even an engagement ring. The thin, yellow gold band fits around my finger snuggly. The deep-green emerald is surrounded on all sides by 12 miniature diamonds, some hugging the sides of the gem and others embedded in the band.

I chose the ring when I was in fifth grade. My mom pulled into the parking lot of Crescent Jewelers and I went inside, excited for what was going to happen. I pressed my pudgy little hands to the glass cases as I peered inside. My nose was inches away from beautiful rings, necklaces and earrings. My mom helped me as I looked at the vast selection of rings before me. I narrowed it down by deciding that I wanted a setting that included my May birthstone. We looked at the collection of emerald rings, and my eyes fell on what I thought was the most beautiful ring in the whole store. I look down at my hand now and laugh at the ring that I thought was so beautiful when I was young. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s not my taste at all. I don’t like yellow gold, and the shape of the ring, with its marquise-shaped gem and thin band, is unflattering to my short, stubby fingers. The ring was ordered, sized and picked up a few days later. I put it on my finger, knowing it would remain there until my wedding day, when my husband would take it off and replace it with my wedding band.

What I didn’t mention about the trip to the ring store is the drive that preceded it. I sat in the

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The service ends, and I walk through the foyer with too big a smile on my face. So big that I’m sure everyone knows it’s fake. A few people yell to grab my attention, but rather than pausing for small talk, I simply wave and continue, keeping up a fairly quick pace until I reach the doors. I walk out of First Family Church and into the parking lot. It is the first Thursday in June and the warm summer air surrounds me. It doesn’t comfort me tonight. When I feel uneasy, the first thing to go is my breathing, so as I walk to my car at the end of the lot, I try to keep it steady. In. And out. In. And out.

Slow. And steady. I reach for the door handle on my white Corolla, and my composed exterior cracks before I can force my body into the seat. For every three inhales, I force out about half of an exhale. I pull the door closed behind me and drop my head to the steering wheel. I try to calm down and reestablish my breathing pattern, but I fail. Lifting my head, I wipe the wetness from my cheeks with the backs of my hands. “I can’t do this,” I whisper, as if whispering makes it harder for Him to hear me. “God, I can’t do this. You picked the wrong one.” The tears come harder and faster, wetting the legs of my jeans as they fall.

For the last month, I’ve been planning this bible study. I’ve read the curriculum, I’ve made the lessons, I’ve organized the logistics for each event.

Everything is ready. Except for me.

*** On my left hand, I wear a ring

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car with my mother as she slowly gained the courage to speak and explain to me that God created sex to be a beautiful thing within the boundaries of marriage. I had never even thought about sex, until that day. Hope Christian School didn’t place too much of an emphasis on sex education for elementary students.

We continued for hours, talking about how sex is sacred, how God created it to be shared only between husband and wife, how it is a special gift that I should treasure. I was young. Too young to truly understand what sex was and why God cared about it. We didn’t discuss these things in great detail. It was an easy decision to make when it sounded simple. I didn’t know then what I know now.

Temptation and desire weren’t things that I expected to encounter because I didn’t know what they were. My mind as a little girl leapt directly to the rings in the glass cases. I made a promise, to my parents and to God, that I would stay pure. That’s when we pulled into the parking lot. That ring symbolizes the promise that I made when I was only ten years old.

I don’t think I could have possibly understood, at such a young age, what I was committing myself to.

Looking back, I’m almost convinced that I wanted a pretty ring, and my commitment to purity was something overlooked in my quest for gold. Did I even think about it before I said yes? If I did, I didn’t think very long or hard, because I was nowhere near prepared for the coming years, trials

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and heartaches.

Middle school marked the beginning of my trials. On the last day of sixth grade, I was invited to an end-of-year swim party with my boyfriend. We started talking when he started coming to Bible Club. We had been dating for nine days. We swam for a while, ate chips and drank soda.

The middle school drama heated up as couples argued in the hallway bathroom, people made-out in the hot tub, and we laughed about the passing year. As time passed, people got bored with the pool and the gossip. It was time. Truth or Dare: a necessity at all good middle school parties.

As everyone slowly began to congregate in the living room, I heard it, “Frankie wants to mack you in Truth or Dare. Do you want to?”

I froze. What did this mean?

Was I really ready to kiss a boy? Was it against the rules of my promise?

“Tell him that I don’t want to be his girlfriend anymore.” I walked away to stand with some friends that were uninterested in playing, the chills in my spine forcing my body to shiver.

I heard later that he was upset, but I never talked to him myself to find out.

Upon dropping me off at Jamie’s house that night, my parents learned that Jamie was a boy, not a girl, and that I was, in fact, going to a boy-girl party. When they picked me up early from his house, I knew they were worried about me. I was bothered that they didn’t trust me enough to be at a party with boys, but mostly I was glad to be away from the

”

My commitment to purity was something overlooked in my quest for gold.

“

”

I want to get my first kiss at my wedding! Wouldn’t that be cute?

sophomore year, I had Saturdaymorning weight training for cheerleading. One day during our three-mile warm-up run, I thought a lot about how I had never kissed a boy.

Earlier that week, I had gone to the mall with a friend from church, and she told me about a wedding she had gone to where the bride and groom kissed for the very first time after they said their vows. The thought of it had plastered a smile to my face for the rest of the day, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. We finished our run and went into the weight room. I started my ten-pound bicep curls with Taylor, my workout partner.

“I decided a long time ago that I wouldn’t have sex ‘til I’m married, but I think I’m gonna wait for my first kiss too. I want to get my first kiss at my wedding! Wouldn’t that be cute?”

Taylor dropped the dumbbells in her hands and looked at me, her eyes wide and her mouth open. The idea seemed brilliant to my 14-year-old mind.

“What if he is a bad kisser, Alyssa? He could kiss like a fish! That would suck! I would never do that.

Ever.” I ignored her, convinced that I wouldn’t know the difference between good kissing and bad kissing anyway.

My inner chick-flick broke through, and I promised myself that I would receive my first kiss on my wedding day.

About four months later, I started dating Andrew. He was extremely patient with me. He knew that I had never kissed anyone, and he wanted to make it special for me.

When I told him I was waiting until marriage to have sex, he told me about

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embarrassment of what I had done.

That night, all I thought about, lying in bed, was my silently declared status as a prude. I didn’t tell my parents what happened. I wasn’t really sure at that point what I thought of the situation, and I didn’t want to know what my parents would have to say about it.

Part of me wished I had just given in and kissed him. I couldn’t decide how big that part of me was.

Through the remainder of middle school, I never really had to deal with the kissing issue. I liked boys, and I had a few short, insignificant relationships, but I didn’t feel that pressure again until high school. I had two boyfriends my freshman year and several almost-boyfriends, creating more than a couple advances on my lips. I was determined to save my first kiss. I wanted it to mean something.

Chris, an almost-boyfriend that I had been talking to for a couple weeks, pinned me down onto the floor on the side of my bed one night after meeting my parents. He leaned in for a kiss, and I gave him my cheek.

He stopped talking to me a few days later. I told myself that he just wasn’t good enough for me, but I doubted it.

I didn’t have a very important reason for saving something as small as a first kiss. I knew it wasn’t the same as my virginity, but it seemed like a less significant form of the same thing — something I could only give to one person. The romantic chick-flick inside of me wanted it to be something sweet and memorable, unlike the cheap spin-the-bottle first kisses my friends had experienced.

The summer before my

“

How could I keep myself from breaking my promise to God if I couldn’t even keep a small promise to myself?

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”

his single experience with sex and how much he regretted it. I thought he was perfect. He took his time, careful to not move in on me too quickly. He seemed so amazing, giving me flowers and telling me I was beautiful. On Christmas Eve, about two months into our relationship, he told me those three fateful words, “I love you.” I said the same words back, unsure whether I meant them. I knew I liked him, but I didn’t know what love meant. I was scared and naïve, and I didn’t want to push him away. I figured it was only a matter of time before I meant the words that I had said anyway. Two days later, on Dec. 26, 2003, I had my first kiss. Andrew walked me to my car after ice skating and watching a movie at his friend’s house. I had a 10 p.m. curfew and it was 9:40. We stopped at the door to my car, and I looked into his eyes. I knew it was coming. I had a hunch all night that tonight was the night. He leaned in slowly, making me even more nervous. He took hold of my face with his hands and pulled me closer. Our lips brushed slightly, and I couldn’t feel by body beneath me. His tongue pressed against my lips until they parted. I unwillingly held my breath. “Wow,” he said as he pulled away from me. It lasted for only a second, but I smiled for hours after. I didn’t even think about the ring on my finger. I was satisfied with my first kiss, sure that I had saved it for someone special.

Six months prior, I was convinced that I would save my first kiss for my husband. In such a short time, I did exactly what I swore I wouldn’t do. My first kiss with Andrew was not simply something I allowed to happen, but something I wanted to

happen. I didn’t regret it, and there was nothing wrong with the act of kissing him, but how could I keep myself from breaking my promise to God if I couldn’t even keep a small promise to myself?

This kiss with this boy soon led to another kiss with another boy. And another. And another. The problem with starting kissing is that you don’t want to stop.

Later my sophomore year, I started dating Eddie. He wasn’t the greatest guy and I knew it, but after an ugly break-up with Andrew, I was fed up with good guys. I was ready for different, and Eddie was definitely different. He kissed me within an hour of meeting me, and I let him. Making out was the basis of our relationship.

Beyond that, we had no connection.

I quickly learned that in his typical relationships, sex was a daily act.

He knew from the beginning that I wouldn’t have sex with him, and he told me it was overrated anyway. Our relationship sprouted from there. My parents loved him, and we had fun. He had a history with drugs and alcohol, but he promised he was quitting. We spent a lot of time together, but he lived on the west side of town so we spent a lot of time apart too. It all seemed innocent enough. We were only kissing, after all. One afternoon, he took me to meet his family. I visited with his family for a while before he led me to his bedroom. He finished off his glass of champagne, and I consented as he eased me down onto his quilted bed. He leaned down and kissed me hard on the mouth. My tongue began to tingle from the taste of champagne in his mouth. He gently pushed me back further and laid on

top of me. Feeling my stiff body, my discomfort, he slowly slid to the side, lying next to me on the bed. He kissed my forehead, implying that everything was okay. After four months of dating, I learned he had been sleeping around for the entirety of our relationship, usually while he was drunk and high.

I didn’t date much after Eddie until senior year when I got my first job. My attraction to Dustin was undeniable. He was a busser at Twisters, and the first time I saw his crooked smile and his cool-green eyes at work, I knew I was going to fall for him. At seventeen, I felt that I had a pretty good grasp of what my purity

”

Every Sunday, I hid behind my bible and prayed that no one could see through it.

meant and what the rules were. Worry was the last thing to enter my mind when Dustin asked me to come over while his parents were out of town.

We’d already kissed a few times, and I knew better than to let things go too far. I felt sure that I could control myself.

Excitedly, I drove to his house, ready to kiss him again. I arrived and quickly learned how unprepared I was.

He gently pushed me back onto the dark-blue couch and laid on top of me.

He slid his clothed body firmly against mine. He slid back again and again.

It felt good, so I tried to tell myself it was innocent, but it felt wrong. I didn’t stop him but closed my eyes, trying to hide my actions from myself.

After some time passed, we started watching a movie. I readjusted my clothes and sat quietly, still

forgotten to fix. We didn’t have sex, but from my appearance you would have thought we had. I couldn’t face God in my prayers for weeks. I tried not to think about it, because I knew He could hear my thoughts, and I didn’t want Him to feel my shame. My guilt consumed every ounce of me.

Every Sunday, I hid behind my bible and prayed that no one could see through it. I knew He would forgive me, but I didn’t feel like I deserved it, so I didn’t bother asking for it.

When I started college, my purity became a much larger challenge. Increased freedom accompanied less self-control. I met a guy named David at a party during my second semester of freshman year.

Some mutual friends set us up a few days later, and we started talking a lot. We got together a few times, and I

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“

thinking about what had happened, unsure of what exactly I had done.

He asked me if I was still a virgin and I told him yes. I asked him the same question, and he smirked as he shook his head no. “Well, you sure don’t ride like a virgin.” I said thanks, but was immediately appalled by my reply.

Thanks? How could I take what he said as a compliment? I left that night, and we never kissed again. As he walked me to the door, I could see in his eyes that he had already moved on. He didn’t want a girl that wouldn’t give him what he craved. I drove straight to work, where my best friend, Katie, commented on the “sex hair” I’d

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The zipper on my jeans wasn’t a strong enough barrier to hold back his hands.

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”

started to like him a lot. It didn’t take long for us to develop a routine: David called me late at night, and I crawled through his bedroom window while his parents slept. We pretended to watch a movie and made out for a few hours instead. We weren’t dating, which made me feel weird about the consistency of our make-out system, but I liked him and hoped he would eventually make our relationship official. One night, things started to heat up. We laid down on the pile of mismatched blankets and colorful pillows on his floor. He slowly pulled up on the bottom of my shirt, and I didn’t make any attempt to stop him.

I didn’t stop to consider what was happening as the shirt came up over my head. Before I could comprehend what was happening, he loosened the button on my jeans. Just as he was about to push them down off my hips, I grabbed his hands. My eyes flicked open, and I tried to catch my breath while I rubbed his bony knuckles.

The temptation was overwhelming. I breathed, and all I could smell was the cologne on his bare chest. I wanted it, and I didn’t. He slid his body off of mine, and we both pretended to be interested in the movie. I left his house thinking that I couldn’t do it again. It was too close a call.

Even knowing that it was wrong, I continued answering his late-night calls for several weeks.

We encountered the same situation almost every night. He tried to go too far, and I barely found the strength to stop him. Finally, he started to realize that I wouldn’t let him get as far as he wanted to go. Each time his hand reached toward my zipper, he knew he wouldn’t break the barrier, but he

tried anyway. My feelings for him were strong, but I wasn’t prepared to make that sacrifice. It didn’t take him long to find someone else that would crawl through his window and do exactly what he wanted them to do.

I knew what I was doing wasn’t sex. I was still a virgin, and I was still keeping my promise. But why get so close? Was the point of my promise to save sex but do everything I could to get as close as possible without breaking? I didn’t think it was supposed to work that way. With each new encounter, the cracks in my purity deepened.

When I started dating Ryan the following year, I thought things would be better. I’d become more involved in a new church, and I hoped it would be enough to keep me from screwing up. Ryan knew about my promise. I wanted to avoid beating around the bush about it, so I told him right away.

We sat on the couch in his apartment as I told him all about my beliefs. He smiled and told me he was so proud.

He respected me for being so strong.

He wished he had waited too. I would have never guessed when we met that he would put the largest and deepest crack in my purity. The zipper on my jeans wasn’t a strong enough barrier to hold back his hands. At least it was only his hands. But I let it get too close. The hardest part was learning that he wasn’t worth a kiss on my feet.

He slept with multiple girls during our short relationship.

Sometimes I lost sight of why I was waiting. In reality, I wasn’t entirely sure why. I had never looked into the bible to see what it said for myself. My promise was based entirely on a conversation that I had

by being nice. I avoided talking about anything that could lead into a discussion about dating. He, however, had no qualms about the subject.

During one such conversation, I looked down at the vibrating phone in my hand, “Doug” illuminated on the screen. I opened the text and read, “So I’ve got a question. What are your feelings on sex before marriage? I’m arguing with a buddy about it, and I want your input.” He wasn’t arguing with a buddy. He knew it, and I knew it. He just wanted to know what his chances were.

I hit the reply button and gave him a quick summary of my beliefs on the subject, telling him that I’m waiting for marriage. I also let him know that I don’t hold anything against people that don’t wait. It is, after all, their decision. His reply came back quickly.

“I think that sex is just a really important part of a loving relationship.

Plus, how much would it suck to wait all that time and then what if the sex isn’t even good?” I laughed as my eyes scanned the words again and again. “Do you really think that God would punish me with terrible sex for following His word and doing as He has asked me to do? No. He is gonna bless me with sex that is way more fantastic than anyone else’s. I have no doubt.” That conversation caused Doug to lose interest in me entirely, and I didn’t care.

*** About a month before the bible study began, Dustin, our youth pastor, met with me to discuss my desires for ministry. I had grown up in church, but over the preceding months, I’d grown a heart for ministering and

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with my mom in elementary school.

And how much could I really trust her in that area? I was born just five months after my parents’ wedding.

My mom, who helped me make my promise and told me how important it was, didn’t even wait herself. My dad wasn’t her one and only. She turned out perfectly fine. She and my father have an incredible marriage. They have more love for each other than any married couple I’ve ever seen.

They were married earlier than they had expected, but there was never a moment that they doubted their love. They knew from the first date that they would be together forever.

And they didn’t wait until they were married. The thing that kept me going for so many years, despite learning that my parents didn’t wait, was the feeling God placed inside me. He wasn’t afraid to let me know when I was messing up, but He was also there to pick me up when I fell. Thinking of my wedding night with my husband, knowing he would be the only one to ever have me, kept me seeking purity.

After Ryan, I decided that I was in need of a break. At twenty years of age, I couldn’t afford any more mistakes. Doug, a guy that I graduated high school with, found me on Facebook and started talking to me during my junior year. I could tell he was interested in me. He wasn’t the kind of guy I wanted to date, so I tried to push him into the “friend zone.”

I didn’t want him getting the wrong idea. I invited him to church, but he was struggling with hatred for God. We texted all the time, and I tried to keep it simple. He asked me questions about church, and I was hoping to make a breakthrough at some point

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serving. When I told him that I had a special place in my heart for working with the girls in our youth, I expected nothing. I especially didn’t expect him to put me in charge of a summer bible study for the high school girls.

I accepted, although hesitant about my ability to succeed in something so big. The topic of the study made me feel even more inadequate. Sex. And everything sex entails: desire, modesty, resisting temptation, going too far, and all the boundaries.

The night before the first meeting, I sat in my car in the parking lot at church for several minutes, crying. I had so many jumbled thoughts and unanswered questions: You have placed me at the head of a bible study discussing sexual issues. But how could that be right? I mean, God, are You sure this is something I should be doing?

I’ve messed up time and time again.

You’ve had to pull me out of more than one ditch. I don’t feel at all suited for this position. How can You use someone as messed up as me? How can I lead girls that struggle with the issues I’ve stumbled over? How can I talk to them about not going too far, when I feel like I’ve already gone too far?

As my tears soaked through my jeans, I prayed that my perfect God would speak through my imperfect self.

Looking back on the summer now, I probably learned more than I taught. After too many years, I finally looked for what God actually says about sex. I was forced to challenge myself each week with the lesson material and the questions the girls asked. I didn’t openly offer information about my past sexual

mistakes during lessons, but if they asked, I told them. Maybe that’s why God picked me. Maybe my mistakes suit me for this. Maybe I need these experiences to really be able to understand what they go through.

Maybe they weren’t mistakes at all but simply God’s way of preparing me for something bigger than myself. When I made my promise, it was about me.

It was about my virginity, my promise, my gift to my husband. Even when I messed up, it was about my guilt and my mistakes. It took me ten years to realize that it was never about me. It was always about God. And now, God has made it into something so much bigger. It’s not just about Him, and it’s not just about me, and it’s not even just about sex. It’s about God using me to be someone those girls can relate to. It’s about them having someone to come to that can truly understand them and can sincerely feel their confusion and hurt, because I’ve been there too. I’m 21 years old, and I’m still waiting for my husband, virginity still intact. God is holding together the cracks in my purity, keeping it from breaking, and He’s using me and my experiences to show other girls that there is hope for their cracks as well.

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R.L. Steele Fiction R.L. Steele was born in El Paso, Texas, and has lived in the Southwest for most of his life. He is working on his debut novel “Refuge of Being,” while studying psychology and political science at UNM.

Miiky Julian Cola

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Miiky Julian Cola writes in English occasionally and for his English classes. He loves boa constrictors and would love to raise one.

Joseph Trisolini Joseph Trisolini has been photographing in Palagiano, Italy, for four years. His work has become concerned with the industrialization of southern Italy as the younger generation looks outside of its traditional farming lifestyles.

Bios

Nancy Bennett Nancy Bennett works in Parish Library. She is a Dadaist at heart — with a dog named Feeney McDobbin. Her toe is not a Russian poet.

Rachel Tucker Rachel Tucker is currently a graduate student in the Linguistics Department at UNM. She hopes to one day find a place in the publishing industry.

Katlyn McKinney Katlyn McKinney began writing poetry at the age of 13. For her, the visual impact of words on paper is just as important as what the words are communicating. She has been published in “Perspectives” and “In Other Words.”

Mara K. Pierce Mara K. Pierce Through the practice of exploration and discovery, Mara had come to understand the limitless boundaries of printmaking as a wandering and a finding. Her works are symbolic of learning about who she is and has the potential to be.

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Kayla Hofius Kayla Hofius recently earned her B.A. in English and woman’s studies from UNM and hopes to attend graduate school in the same fields. Her work has been published in UNM’s Best Student Essays, and she is a two-time winner of the the Women’s Studies Department’s yearly Best Undergraduate “Student Essay Contest.”

Bios

Elaine Soto Elaine Soto is an artist and psychologist who works at Counseling Assistance and Referral Services. A nonfiction short story was published in Conceptions Southwest last year, and she won second prize in the Southwest Writer’s Memoir Writing Contest. She had a solo exhibit of her paintings on the “Black Madonna” at the Gallery of Mesa Public Library in Las Alamos in 2009.

Emma Difani Emma Difani is a sophomore at UNM, doublemajoring in studio art and anthropology. She works in a variety of mediums, including photography, painting, drawing and sculpture.

Gabriela Campos Gabriela Campos was born is Santa Fe. Living there has shaped the way she views the world and sparked her passion for photography. She now lives a life of intrigue while exploring abandoned buildings and capturing the lives of others for the Daily Lobo.

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Gregory L. Candela Gregory L. Candela is professor emeritus at UNM. Editor of six books, author of five produced plays, one volume of poetry and a handful of scholarly articles, Candela continues to write and perform poetry and music.

Susan Thiele

Bios

Susan Thiele Adventure is the inspiration for Thiele’s watercolors. Nature, wilderness hikes and foreign travel are her reference material. She is an award-winning artist, teaches at UNM Continuing Education and is a signature member of the New Mexico Watercolor Society.

Alexandra Jirik Alexandra Jirik has been writing all her life. She only recently found her way back to loving it — thanks to a wonderful teacher guiding her back to writing. She has discovered many new things about herself and her work.

Alyssa Mohan Alyssa Mohan lives in Albuquerque, N.M. She is a senior and plans to pursue teaching after graduation.

Joni Dillard is working toward her M.A. in Secondary Education at UNM to become a high school language arts teacher. She is originally from Greeley, Co.

Dean Wyse Dean Wyse is a freshman, majoring in English. He is a writer for “Tea Party Comics.”

Bios

Perry Penick Perry Penick is a student at UNM working on his B.U.S degree, survey of writing studies. Of all the writing styles he works in, from technical to creative, his greatest interest is fiction writing.

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Joni Dillard

Michelle Dyer Michelle Dyer, a creative writing major, has loved writing for years. Her main interests are short fiction and creative nonfiction, but she also loves to write plays. She is inspired by people, life experiences, adventures and Albuquerque.

M.A. Goodman

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M.A. Goodman worked social service for 20 years — especially with the homeless. He’s written this poem based on his experience with street based homeless in a large midwestern city.

Michael Gay Michael Gay was born in New York and grew up in New Mexico. He spent more than six years on active duty in the army before becoming a student. He lives in Albuquerque with his wife and daughter.

Bios

Matthew Skeets Matthew Skeets is a freshman, majoring in English with a creative writing concentration. A Navajo boy from Gallup, he can’t really describe his love for poetry or how he writes it. The words just spill on the page. He has been published twice in the Gallup Journey, a free community newsletter in his home community. His future is pretty much open, but you can surely count on poems, poems and more poems from him.

Chris Quintana Martinez Chris Quintana Martinez’s full name has 36 letters, and it sure was difficult to format. He writes about barber shop quartets, sacred clowns and cats with class in addition to snarky columns complaining about complaining at the Daily Lobo. He is happy to listen to your rants and praise should you see him on campus.

Wendy Meek

Bios

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Wendy Meek is married with four children, and is a junior at the University of New Mexico. She is working on her B.S. in secondary education, endorsing English. Her talents include, singing jazz music, teaching children’s choir, and creating short stories and poetry.