Embodied Effigies, Issue Four

Embodied Effigies

Summer 2014

(PERGLHG (IÀJLHV Summer

2014

Embodied Effigies, a creative nonfiction literary magazine, publishes truth in all forms. The magazine proudly gathers work from around the world, thanks to the curiosity, interest, and sharing of our contributors.

Information regarding future issues, submission guidelines, and featured writing of Embodied Effigies can be found at: http://effigiesmag.com Please email us with any questions or comments at: embodied.effigies@gmail.com

Copyright Š 2014 Embodied Effigies, John Carter, and Catherine Roberts.

All rights revert to author after publication.

The views and opinions expressed by authors featured in Embodied Effigies do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the editors.

Publication of Embodied Effigies is made possible by the out-of-pocket, not-our-day-job workings of John Carter and Catherine Roberts.

We would also like to extend our unending thanks to everyone who made this issue possible: our contributors, our advisors, our families, our friends—Thank you.

Embodied Effigies Masthead Managing Co-Editors John Carter Catherine Roberts

John Carter is a 2013 graduate of Ball State University, where he earned his B.A. in English: Creative Writing. Native to the cornfields of East-Central Indiana, his work focuses on matters of family, farming, and the issues of Place that surround them. His most recent chapbook, At the Edge of the Fence, was completed in 2013, and his work can also be found in Volumes One and Two of The Ball State Writers’ Community Chapbook Series, as well as The Broken Plate. A more extensive list of his writing blood, sweat, and tears can be found on his website-- jekcarter.com

Catherine Roberts holds a BA in Eng-

lish: Creative Writing from Ball State University and is currently pursuing her MFA degree in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Ashland University. She works part-time in her hometown’s library and balances family, school, and writing during the rest of the day. Her work has appeared in The Prompt.

Her current projects include continuing work with form and experimentation as well as a renewed focus on language and detail.

Table of Contents

The Perfect Mother

001

Julia Hones

Azure

003 Daniel Aristi

My Affair With Hair

005

Mark Lewandowski

Her

Jaime Wise

017

The Tale of Stop (And Not) Frisk

019

The Guide to Grief

023

Wintergreen

027

Lightly Salted, Cooked Medium-足Rare

037

Sprawlers

043

The Gospel of the 34th Street Laundromat

047

Eugene Durante

Lorraine Berry

Calvin Mills

Suzanne McWhorter

Chelsea Catherine

Michael Palmer

The Perfect Mother Julia Hones

Julia has been going to this coffee shop in Walnut Street, Philadelphia, every Friday for almost a year. After a month of absence, she is coming back to her routine today and wonders if Bella, her server, will ask her any questions.

It is drizzling and Julia feels the weather expresses her own emotions, reflecting them like a mirror. She is impervious to the bustling of the city, indifferent to the people scurrying along the street.

“Good morning…same juice and sandwich?” Bella asks.

She nods. Julia’s heart begins to race. Her gaze reaches the window and gets lost among the passers-by scuttling under the gentle rain.

“Boy or girl?”

Julia hesitates for a few seconds then simpers at Bella.

“Boy.” “Congratulations! He must be keeping you busy.” Bella’s round hazel eyes stare at her in awe, her smile wide and fresh; she looks more upbeat than ever.

“Today I’ll eat it in my office instead.”

It is still raining when she steps out of the coffee shop. Julia does not mind wetting her hair as she strolls to her office. The rain becomes more intense. It drenches her hair, flattening it, and her moist clothes stick to her body, delineating a figure she no longer recognizes as her own.

There is no need to rush, she repeats to herself. The street is already awash with people rushing. She wonders why everybody is in such a hurry. Life has its own rhythm and people should embrace it. Everything looks absurd to her now.

One month ago she woke up to a severe pain and by the time she got to the hospital the doctors found there was no heart beat.

Nine months of bliss ended with a future that nobody had predicted.

Embodied Effigies | 1

Hones

Her doctors told her she’d done everything the right way.

The night before the demise, when life was still normal, she’d sung lullabies to her baby and she’d felt Noel’s feet kicking her in response to her soft voice while she took her shower. He had been alive and happy inside her body.

Every evening, after work, she would sit on the couch with Henry and they would talk to Noel and make plans together. Now the plans are like a bad memory, but she still tries to revive the glory of those days. People think it’s all about sorrow, but sometimes she needs to cling to the blissful memories.

Julia inhales the cool humid air. She knows she has been a good mother to baby Noel. There is nothing that she did not do for him.

The image of her baby comes back to her in a flash: his dainty features, his peaceful eternal sleep, his little body enfolded by her arms. Julia remembers Bella’s smile now and blinks her tears. At least baby Noel is still alive in somebody’s mind. Not just in hers. And this becomes a source of consolation.

2 | Embodied Effigies

Azure Daniel Aristi

Success is 10,000 gallons of water in intensive care, well chlorinated, eternally young.

Mumbai, India, 12 October 2012 “Success is a swimming pool.”

Uncle Vishwas under the influence trumpets this beloved tautology at birthday parties and Diwali celebrations. No fickle subjectivity, no room for qualitative interpretation, but like the good ole Britishers, an objectively measurable parameter: gallons of water. So, under the skies ablaze of Solapur, a glinting swimming pool as the yardstick for one’s accomplishments.

Success level = f (water quantity) Uncle imagines that, before they are born, the rich live for nine months in a swimming pool-like uterus complete with mosaicked walls and waters limpid like Karakoram breeze. Later on, after they have become barristers in Liverpool, they fly back and carve parallelepipeds in the land that they then fill up with indigo.

“And if misfortune visits,” Uncle likes to warn with apocalyptic finger before retiring to bed, “nothing tells the tale like a desiccated swimming pool left for dead somewhere in your backyard, two goats down at the bottom. Absolutely nothing.”

Embodied Effigies | 3

My Affair with Hair Mark Lewandowski

A few days before the start of each school year, my mother dragged me, kicking and screaming, to a barbershop. A whirling red and white striped sign hung next to the door, just like Floyd’s on The Andy Griffith Show, and inside slumped old men reading newspapers and smoking cigars. Never mind your preconceived notions about the weather of Buffalo, New York. When I got a haircut, the air shimmered with heat. The barber himself seemed immune to it. He wore a white frock shirt buttoned up to his neck and he never broke a sweat. No fans circulated the air, and he wouldn’t hear of keeping the front door open. The wait was always interminable, even if only ten minutes. The barber did not even have the wherewithal to stock the place with pictured magazines. All he subscribed to was Reader’s Digest.

So I sweated and fidgeted, in dread anticipation of this stranger with coke bottle glasses and a haircut like my grandfather’s, ripping through the knots of my hair with a metal comb that resembled, and felt like, a Klingon instrument of torture. My mother always escaped into the drug store down the street. Even though she was a registered nurse, there were some forms of carnage she couldn’t stomach.

“Woooh, boy,” the barber invariably said, “that’s some mop you’re wearing there, son.”

He tussled my hair a bit, ran his skeletal fingers across my scalp. All the time I kept thinking, “Didn’t my parents warn me about allowing strange men to do this very thing to me?”

Then he parachuted an apron around my neck, its whiteness soiled by the mysterious blue liquid with which he sanitized the combs and, if his breath was any indication, used as a mouthwash, and pulled the collar so tight around my neck that all the blood was cut off from my ears. Throughout the massacre of my hair, I reached Embodied Effigies | 5

Lewandowski

up to rub the pinprick sensation out of my lobes.

The barber wielded the same long-bladed scissors indigenous to even modern day stylists, but this man used them like pruning shears, loping off huge chunks of hair that tumbled into my lap, all the time keeping a conversation going, usually about the prospect of a decent season for the Buffalo Bills, with the reading, smoking men in front of me, as if he were indeed looking over a hedge during his Saturday chores.

A mirror hung behind the counter holding sinks and the tools of his trade, but this barber swung the chair around so my only view was the peeling paint of the wall and yellowed posters advertising car part stores. Of course, he didn’t want me to witness what was happening to my physical identity. Occasionally, an “oops” would escape from his lips, and a section of hair the size of a throw pillow skirted down my arm.

“Well, we can fix that right up,” he said, his scissors clattering away with even greater gusto.

By the time he finished with the cut, enough hair lay on the ground to stuff a queen size mattress. I still wasn’t free to escape, however. Next came another mysterious liquid that he dumped all over my head. It smelled worse than the tuna fish sandwich I once left under my bed for two months. The barber scraped my scalp raw with his metal comb, doing his best to flatten down the hair to hide all the imperfections of his job. If a stubborn piece of hair popped up, more foul liquid would be poured on to my head, and the blood curdling scraping began all over again.

In what felt like years later, I was finally set free. If I behaved, that is, if I didn’t squeal too hard when he stabbed me in the neck with the points of the scissors, the barber gave me a loop-handled lollypop. These he kept in a large glass jar. If the whole jar contained ninety-percent heavenly red lollypops, he managed to pick for me the stale yellow one buried deep at the bottom.

Completely demoralized, I counted away the minutes it took to get home. I couldn’t wait to wash out the gunk and push my hair back into a reasonable facsimile of its original self. It’s the same impulse one feels to jump into a mud puddle with a pair of brand new, blindingly white sneakers. We never went straight home though.

Instead, my mother insisted on stopping at the supermarket for a 6 | Embodied Effigies

My Affair with Hair

gallon of milk or a couple pounds of ground beef. She paraded me around the store while I did my best to scratch away the fallen hairs in the back of my shirt. All the women in the place knew that I must have just gotten a haircut.

“Oh, he’s so darling,” they said. “Just look at him. All ready for school.”

“Fuck off!” I said.

Well, I didn’t really say that. But I would have, had I been older, wiser and more articulate.

My view of haircuts took a dramatic turn one fateful spring day in the drug store near the barber’s. I wasn’t bothering anyone, just perusing the candy aisle, trying to decide if I should steal a small box of Russell Stover’s chocolates or a package of Chuckles, when the pharmacist tapped on my shoulder.

“Could I help you, young lady?”

My mortification made me forget entirely my planned crime spree. I ran all the way home and demanded that my mother take me for a haircut.

“But it’s only April,” she said.

I don’t care, I told her.

Manhood lay on the horizon, you see. I kept getting boners at inopportune moments, and for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom, I had taken to grabbing Melanie Martesz’s crotch during lunch hour, even though just weeks before she was nothing to me but a nice target for the opened paper clips I zipped across the classroom, using a rubber band as means of propulsion. I didn’t want her to mistake me for a girl, let alone a faggot, whatever that was.

“But not the barber,” I said. “Please, not the barber!”

“Why not?” my mother asked.

“I’m too old for the barber,” I pleaded.

“Very well,” she said.

My victory was not a sweet one. The next day, my mother drove me to her sister’s house.

“Aunt Janie!” I cried. “She doesn’t cut hair.”

“Who do you think cuts your cousins’ hair?” my mother said.

“We can always go back to the old place.”

“Aunt Janie’s then,” I grumbled.

I didn’t want my aunt cutting my hair any more than I wanted Embodied Effigies | 7

Lewandowski

her bathing me. She probably gave me the best cut I’d had up to that point, but if such a personal procedure at the hands of a complete stranger lacks decency, it’s downright obscene when your blood relative is running her hands all over your head.

Luckily for me, the stripmalling of America was underway.

Cosmetology schools began meeting the needs of the multitudes of young women who got knocked up in the back seat of a Ford Mustang and dropped out of high school. By the end of the 1970s, new hair stylist joints offering prices my mother could live with invaded the suburbs and kicked all those family run barbershops out of business. Hair salons, what with their fancy-schmancy shampoos and conditioner, many tentacled hair teasers, and high-powered blowers bespattered with a rainbow array of colored switches and buttons, were no longer the secret Bat Caves of prom queen wannabes armed with Daddy’s AmEx, or of married women with same-said card prepping for a cocktail party. Liberation was here, Baby, and I wanted to eat my slice of the pie.

Free of the barber’s reign of terror, I cased out the hair salons of Overland Park, Kansas, where my family now lived. The girl cutting my hair had to be pretty, with big breasts and a skimpy skirt, for I was under the impression that the bigger the breasts, the more likely the stylist would experiment with herb-infused mousses and thinning shears. Besides, such a girl would never grow too attached to my business; there were so many heads in the world to cut. She’d always have a plethora of customers fighting to get into her chair.

Subconsciously, I hoped for a girl my mother would not approve of. I was young and foolish. I wanted to play the field. A long-term relationship didn’t interest me. The more stylists I patronized, the greater variety of looks and attitudes I would accumulate. Normal for a fourteen year old, you might say, but this went on for years, all the way through graduate school. It got worse when I began to drive, for then I roamed all over town, even neighboring ones, peeking through salon windows hoping to spot a heavily made-up gum chomper idly thumbing a Cosmo and waiting, no, yearning to deliver me up the haircut to end all haircuts.

When I found a stylist sufficiently pretty and breasted, I charged into the salon and did my best to contain my expectations.

The stylist would start by poking her delicious fingers into 8 | Embodied Effigies

My Affair with Hair

my mane.

“Uh,” she’d say, already bored, “Pretty thick. How do you want it cut?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” I’d say coquettishly, “Why don’t you cut it the way you like it?”

The reply would usually be a sigh, or an eye-roll. But sometimes the stylist played along, suggested a Harrison Ford cut, or feathered bangs. One woman insisted that I go against the very nature of my hair and part it in the middle. For at least an hour she combed and combed away, forcing my part inches from where it really wanted to be. I thought of protesting, but all her labor consistently brought her breasts into my shoulders and jaw.

Afterwards, sweat sprinkled on her forehead, she gingerly placed a hand-held mirror into my trembling fingers and said: “How cute you look!”

For a number of years I meticulously forced my part to the middle every morning. But then another suggested a right-sided part. When that didn’t pan out, I tried the middle again, than back to the left. By the time I entered college, I felt like a constipated politician. There was the occasional spot perm, the shag cut, and the broccoli top where the sides and back were cut close, with crown left virtually untouched. Nothing worked; that is, not one hairstyle made me attractive to cheerleaders.

I stand ashamed of this period in my life. Instead of fostering meaningful relationships with stylists, I jumped from chair to chair, never returning to the same salon twice. I often left the salon with a good feeling in my heart, having every intention to return when the need arose again, but by the time I awoke the next morning, the bed had taken its toll on my head. Another cookie-cutter haircut, I thought. Feeling cheated, I slipped the stylist’s card out of my wallet and tossed it in the trash, feeling vaguely guilty that I wouldn’t be calling her again Not until I went to Poland as a Peace Corps Volunteer did I realize how wonderful a monogamous relationship could be. Fear at my inability to communicate well in the local lingo had kept me out of the Chair for four months. By then, my hair had gone to seed, splayed out to all corners of the compass, a male medusa, with my equally shaggy beard, a modern day Rasputin. When a new salon Embodied Effigies | 9

Lewandowski

opened just minutes from my flat, I sucked in my gut, pocketed my Polish-English dictionary, and took the plunge.

As it turned out, I didn’t need the dictionary. The stylist never asked what I wanted. As soon as I entered the salon, a young woman with cherubic smile took my hand and led me to the sink. I knew then that I had matured, for even though she was pretty, her breasts were small. She worked away at the wash for a good fifteen minutes, never speaking, only whistling melodies that sounded like a cross between Chopin and ZZ Top, occasionally breaking off her tune to chirp like a bird.

Wash completed, she guided me to another chair and immediately set to work. I stuttered out a few sentences in broken Polish, but she paid them no heed, just clipped and combed, combed and clipped. Realizing that all direction was superfluous, I settled back in the chair and let her nature take me where it may.

After an hour and twenty minutes, she tugged the plastic from my body and shyly asked for two dollars’ worth of Polish currency. These were the only words she spoke my entire visit. I tried to tip her, but she refused the offer, just tucked the necessary zlotys into a hidden drawer. Like most American salons, there was no big, clanging cash register, each payment signaling that yet another angel has earned his wings. Such intimacy passes between stylist and client that payment is downplayed, a necessary evil subtly dealt with.

When I awoke the next morning, I hurried through my shower, only momentarily alarmed that something was different, that so much weight had been lifted from my head. I perfunctorily brushed through what remained then peeked into the mirror.

Perfect! The cut looked no different from what it had moments after leaving the salon. I had found my woman.

For two years I was devoted. With one exception that is, and how I rue the day. My little hummer began drawing customers from all over town. Because her cuts took so long, waits could be endless.

One winter day I peered into the window only to see six men waiting, all eyeing the one in the chair with envy. I could have gone back the next day, but no, I wanted instant gratification. I caught a bus downtown and stopped at a salon I often passed on the way to work.

This stylist demanded direction. When I croaked out what I wanted, she sighed and huffed. She didn’t even bother washing my hair, just 10 | Embodied Effigies

My Affair with Hair

soaked it as best she could with a spray bottle. After a ten minute cut, “the slam bam, thank you, man” variety I had to put up with in the States, she raised her eyebrows.

“Just a little more,” I tried to say, holding up thumb and finger as if attempting to catch a fly by its wing.

She sighed and huffed once again, her scissors clattering away ferociously, bringing back horrible memories of my childhood barber. After a few moments it was clear she thought my “just a little more” meant that I only wanted a little left standing. By the time she was done, my head looked like a tennis ball freshly popped out of its Pringles can.

I deserve it, I thought as I paid. I’ll never be unfaithful to my chosen again.

After my two-year stint in Poland, I returned to America and steadily declined back into my old ways. I hit all the salons and cosmetology schools in Northern Kentucky that I could find. When students arrived in my Composition class with a nice cut, I surreptitiously pulled them aside and asked them where they got the job done. I thought the going would be easier, since I no longer cared about the look of the stylist. My little Hummer had made me realize that good things often come in small packages. However hard I tried, though, a decent cut still eluded me.

Finally, in Richmond, Indiana, I found a match. A colleague of mine led me to a “Mr. Franz.” I’d been off men for years but, distraught with my overall experience with women, I decided to experiment and call him up.

“Ja, I can fit you in,” he said, in a clipped, German accent. In complete disregard of all the stereotypes of his native language, his voice was also soft and gentle.

For some reason, his voice put in mind a guy who had that child molester look going, you know, Ralph Reed with jodhpurs and a pocket protector stuffed with licorice sticks. As it turned out, he looked more like an overgrown Shirley Temple, circa “The Good Ship Lollipop” years. My fears weren’t completely alleviated, however, for as soon as I sat down he began stropping a gleaming straight razor on a band of frayed leather hanging from the chair.

My first impulse was to jump and run, mumble out an apology, tell him I thought this was a pizza joint. Anticipating my fears, Embodied Effigies | 11

Lewandowski

Mr. Franz patted my shoulder.

“Ach, don’t vorry,” he said gently. “Dis is de best vay. Say ‘auf Wiedersehen’ to your split ends.”

Oh, the wondrous crinkle of razor slicing through hair. The tingles rippling through my body as he worked the back of my neck.

That delicious danger of a sudden error in judgment taking out one of my appendages.

After, my head never felt so alive, my hair so silky. Was it really true that only another man knows the needs of man?

But alas, my gig at Indiana University-East lasted only one year. I experienced one last great cut with Mr. Franz, slipping him a ten-dollar tip on my way out. How sad my goodbye was, and how sickened I felt for offering him money.

A week later, I moved to the Hair Hell that is the state of Louisiana. The constant, ruthless humidity makes every day a bad one for a ‘do. I learned quickly that I had to wear my hair short, otherwise I’d wake up in the morning to find that my head looked like a giant mushroom. I once again roamed the streets of a new city, looking in vain for a Cajun “Mr. Franz.”

A few years into my Louisiana stint, when I received notification that my grant proposal for a Fulbright was accepted, my anticipation of finding, if not another Mr. Franz, a Lithuanian Hummer, boiled to the surface. I never expected that I’d find something better, the Holy Grail of Haircuts, the Mother of all Stylists.

The salon perched majestically four floors above my favorite bar, right across the street from my university’s Humanities building. I trudged up the flights of stairs thinking cynically that no way would the cut be worth it. There was so much disappointment in my past.

As soon as I stepped through the door, the receptionist broke into a smile. My mouth opened and I butchered the Lithuanian word for “haircut.” The smile of the receptionist grew even larger.

She called out, “Agne, the American is here!” as if she had been waiting for me her whole life.

Agne appeared out of a forest of hair dryers and tall, slinky bottles of fluorescent hair gels and immediately led me to a mirrorenshrouded alcove in the back of the salon.

“We see you from our window,” Agne said in English. “We 12 | Embodied Effigies

My Affair with Hair

wonder if you come to us.”

Thus began a two and a half hour odyssey. Oh, if only my simple words could give justice to Agne’s magic! She sat me in the chair, and started the cut by examining my head, from all angles, in the mirrors that surrounded us. She placed her warm hands on me, gently swerving my head this way and that, considering what approach would be most suitable. Her plan of attack nearing theory, she sifted through my hair with her fingers, running her tips behind my ears and across the hairline on my neck. After finding my hidden part, she split open my substantial growth with the tiniest edge of a garishly painted fingernail.

“How you like?” she asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” I said, my thoughts and perceptions groping for completion.

“I think I know,” she said. “You don’t like, we try something different. We have all day.”

She reached below the plastic sheet covering me and pumped, up and down, up and down a hidden knob until my body lay horizontal. Panic followed, for I felt her presence leave me for a second, but then her fingers were on the back of my head, lifting awkwardly.

I repositioned myself, and together, we eased my head into the secret wonders of her sink. A gush of warm water immediately enveloped me. Agne worked the water in and around every tendril of hair.

When she started on the shampoo, I imagined the rivulets of white foam swirling with water, splashing together against white porcelain walls. I closed my eyes, gave myself over to her completely.

The shampooing ended, too soon, I thought, but Agne wasn’t finished. She doused my head with the clear fluid of conditioner, working yet again to bring my hair alive.

“It is so thick,” she crooned, her fingernails biting into my scalp.

Once this phase of the cut was complete, Agne wrapped me in a towel and pumped me back up into a sitting position. I could have gone home then a happy man.

“Would you like a cup of tea,” she asked, and then lit a cigarette. “Or perhaps some brandy?”

When I refused, she quipped: “Americans, so busy all the time.”

Embodied Effigies | 13

Lewandowski

Fearing a cultural faux pas, I reneged, accepted a cup of tea.

While I sipped it, Agne removed the towel and circled my chair, her narrowed eyes examining me.

“Yes, I know what is good for you,” she said. She took the cup from my hands and began applying various clamps and pins to one side of my head. With every pinpoint tug of scalp, a different point of my body responded. Once one side of hair stood in myriad directions, half my body crying silently, “Yes, yes! Now do the rest!” Agne took up her shears and went to work. She didn’t lop off sections, no.

Instead, she clipped microcosmic-sized pieces of hair, which slowly drifted into my lap like fine down. Every few minutes she released a clamp or pin. A toe or elbow, grown accustomed to the stimulation, would protest momentarily, but once the bit of hair settled back into place, a cool breeze passed over the insulted area, bringing it to temporary acquiescence.

Agne applied clamp and pin to other areas, arousing the formerly neglected parts of my body. The subtle tug and pull, first the tingle, then the letdown, made me jumpy in the chair. I squirmed and struggled, forcing Agne to occasionally pat my shoulder to get me to relax, to be patient.

Finally, all the pins were removed. I examined myself in a mirror. Wow, I thought, I look pretty good. I began pulling away the plastic covering, even while my body said, “Idiot! Where are you going?”

“No, not finished,” Agne said, squeezing my wrist. She once again reached below the casing and pumped me back into a horizontal position. Before I could dumbly protest, my head was back in the sink, tenderly caressed and massaged by Agne’s unrelenting grip.

All the pent up parts of my body that had been teased by the clamps and pins reawakened. I arched my back, forcing my head deeper into the sink. First came the warm rush of water, then the white foam of shampoo, the clearer suds of conditioner. Finally, as water mingled with all the other fluids assiduously applied to my head, Agne gradually slowed her efforts until my hair was completely drained.

After she removed the sink my body did not want to leave its prostrate position. My arms dangled, fingers brushing the floor, and my head bobbed back and forth on its stem like a Weeble-Wobble.

Not until Agne began blow-drying my hair, and trimming my ears 14 | Embodied Effigies

My Affair with Hair

and neck did I regain my senses.

“I hope you will come again,” Agne said, as she slipped the five dollars’ worth of Lithuanian Litas into a clandestine drawer.

“When?” I blurted out.

“I am here all Wednesdays,” she said, handing me her card.

I stumbled out the door and went downstairs for a beer and smoke. Two and a half hours in the chair left me lightheaded, made my body feel beaten and bruised. Even with the post haircut discomfort, I thought only about how many more visits I could work in during my remaining time in Lithuania.

But what’s the point, I reasoned. Why get involved, when I have to leave eventually? It will only lead to heartache.

I went to bed that night praying my hair would look awful in the morning. Of course, it didn’t. It looked better than the day before. When I dropped by the English office before my first class, the secretary’s eyes opened wide.

“Wow,” she said. “You look like a model!”

“Dammit!” I said, storming out of the office.

I knew then that I’d be going back to Agne, as much as possible, up to the day before I’d leave Lithuania, and that I was working towards the most gut-wrenching goodbye of my life.

Embodied Effigies | 15

Her Jaime Wise

She hears the alarm in the morning, and doesn’t bother to shut it off. Instead, she waits fifteen minutes for the repetitious cycle to end of its own volition, then relaxes back into half-sleep. She lists all the reasons she has to wake up: class, friends, chores, breakfast; but they bounce off her consciousness like stones skipped across the surface of a lake, too light and fast to sink in. The back-up alarm goes off an hour later, and she slowly drops her feet off the edge of the bed and onto the floor. The coldness of the floor starts a shiver that gets lost on its trip up her spine, fading before it can be fully realized. She shuffles across her room, flicking the alarm clock on her desk off, and stands there for five more minutes waiting for her brain to issue another command. Eventually, she drags herself out to the kitchen and mechanically pours cereal and milk into a plastic bowl. She eats standing up, feeling like she’s watching someone else who will notice her any minute and demand an explanation for her intrusion. The feeling used to alarm her, but now it just occurs and runs its course, like a cold.

After breakfast, she wanders into the bathroom and runs the shower. She waits till the water gets at hot as possible, till steam fills the whole room. She steps in, and stays till her skin is as red as a lobster, hoping that the heat will dissolve they layer of ice around her brain. When the water starts to run cold again, she shuts it off and dresses quickly, trying to hide from the comparative chill in the air.

Later, on the bus to class, she catches the reflection of her face in the window. The transparency of the image bothers her, and she shifts her attention to her textbooks. In her first class, they talk about a group of settlers who do terrible things to natives because the settles are out of touch with their bodies and the natives aren’t. They speculate as to whether the settlers are evil or envious. Her classmates can’t agree, but they all seem to concede that readers are supposed to hate Embodied Effigies | 17

Wise

them. She wants to, but can’t make herself.

At lunch, she listens to her friends talk and tries to match their enthusiasm for their lives. She knows that her own life isn’t bad, that she has just as much to be happy about, but the fact doesn’t register. A friend laughs at a comment she made, and touches her arm affectionately. She feels nothing but pressure, and wonders why she can’t reciprocate. She excuses herself from the table. At her next class, the sleeve of the girl sitting next to her slips, showing a faded series of self-inflicted scars. For a brief moment, her body and mind connect. She feels a shock of sympathy and understanding break the ice in her head. She wants to tell the girl that she understands how it can happen, that she doesn’t think she’s crazy, and that she doesn’t have to hide or be alone. Before any words can come, the girl catches her looking at her arm. Without making eye contact, she pulls her sleeve back up and moves her arm under the desk. The girl doesn’t look at her for the rest of class, and leaves quickly when it’s over.

She goes home, does her homework, and eats dinner in her room. She gets ready for bed early, having nothing else to do. She slips under the covers, and feels warm for the first time that day. She thinks of the girl in class, and looks thoughtfully at her own arms.

It occurs to her that if someone were to ask her why she didn’t have scars of her own, she couldn’t tell them, and the thought scares her even more than the thought of how many days she’s spent in this state. As she drifts to sleep, she remembers a story she read as a child, about a boy who crashed through the ice. He knew he couldn’t wait the hours he needed for help, so he kept telling himself “One minute longer” over and over again until the townspeople came to pull him out. The memory evokes a smile.

“One more day.” She whispers to herself. “I can do this.”

18 | Embodied Effigies

A Tale of Stop (And Not) Frisk Eugene Durante

I’m on a Manhattan bound train staring out the window as it leaves Brighton Beach. The train is nearly empty after midnight, and I’m positioned by the door in what would, over years, become my “patrol stance”- standing sideways, facing the length of the car, right elbow resting on my firearm, and left boot heel wedged into the door partition.

I’m on the left side of the train as it lurches northbound picking up passengers either en route to a night shift, or a New York night out.

The crisp air rushes in the door at every stop as I embrace the silent effect of the late night/cold weather radio. With exactly one year on the job I haven’t yet learned how the best crime fighting efforts are not attributed to police brass or politicians, but rather the cold and rainy tendencies of mother nature.

My assignment to late night train patrol was precipitated earlier that winter by a ‘lushworker.’ He was cutting open the pockets of sleeping passengers to remove personal items while they slept. The crime was not atypical for the hour or area, and the perpetrator’s description from eyewitness accounts was a black male, 18-30 years old, wearing a black jacket, black pants, and armed with a box cutter. My platoon had been briefed numerous times about the robbery pattern, and with rookie ambition we certainly contributed our share of the stop and frisk reports generated that year by the NYPD. As the train pulled into the Neck Road station I noticed an unusual figure across the way. He furtively moved on the Coney Island platform. His back was towards me, but in just a few seconds I had him locked in my vision. He was a tall black male with braided hair. He Embodied Effigies | 19

Durante

wore a full length black jacket and black pants. His hands were in front of him and he was awkwardly walking left to right while facing the wall. I could not tell if he was kicking the wall, marking it with paint, or moving back and forth while urinating. I quickly sprung from my leaning position, and off the train.

Utilizing the advice of veteran train patrol officers, I tactically stepped out of view down a few exit stairs and surveyed the cloaked figure.

Fortunately his train had also just left and I knew I had plenty of observation time before I would move in. His behavior persisted, so I crossed over for a closer look. While sneaking up the far staircase on his side, I made a common rookie mistake.

My radio had come screeching alive and I quickly muffled it with my hands. The male froze, then looked around. I was surprised he picked up the noise from the distance, but Neck Road is an eerily silent and creepy place late at night. Prior to renovation the station was a spawning ground for rats and pigeons. Even today there isn’t enough revenue to justify staffing the token booth after sunset.

Broad shouldered, the curious figure turned my way and stood silent as I slowly approached. His hands were at his sides and his fingers were spread apart. He looked about 40 years old from the sporadic gray hair at the base of his braids. I sensed he was no stranger to being stopped by the police.

“How you doing,” I casually stated, utilizing a common New York greeting.

“I’m lost,” he said, “I fell asleep on the train.”

Getting closer, I noticed his black dress shoes and black suit beneath the trench coat, and I let my guard down a bit “Must have been a good sleep,” I said, “You’ve drooled on yourself.”

He started wiping is outer coat with a handkerchief as he awkwardly looked away and not at the stain as most people would. Then I no20 | Embodied Effigies

Stop (And Not) Frisk

ticed his walking stick and backpack on the floor next to the garbage pail.

“I know my home station perfectly,” he said, gathering his articles, “but I have no idea where I am now. Thank you very much for being here.”

“Just check your belongings, Sir. Unattended items grow legs quickly in Brooklyn. These scummers will steal your walking stick if you didn’t pay attention.”

He smiled, and with that we broke the ice.

Escorting the gentleman to the other platform, he quickly reminded me of a forgotten lesson from the police academy, let the blind person grab your arm for better guidance. We exchanged names as I led him back to a bench and awaited the next train.

He asked how long I was on the job. I replied, and I then inquired if he was born blind or lost his vision over time.

“I lost my sight in the last decade, but I can still see silhouettes,” he said.

“That’s very fortunate,” I encouraged.

“Sometimes I wish I never had vision though,” he said while adjusting his long coat in the seat. “I think I’d have less anxiety overall.”

Not understanding his point, he went on to explain…

“Instead of becoming a man and earning my independence in the world, I have to live with my mother and sister for support. I’m blessed that I still have family, but I always dreamed of moving out of the ghetto after college. It’s sad enough that I’ve changed, but I have witnessed myself become a different person to others. To the outside world I’ve become a “He,” as in, would “He” like a chair or a booth, or would “He” like another cup of coffee… as if I never existed.”

Embodied Effigies | 21

Durante

His voice cracked a bit now, “You have no idea what it feels like when I go shopping and I ask the salesman if a shirt is a light or darker tone of black, and he answers me, “Does it really matter?”

“You know, I used to always date hot women, and now I’m alone.

Heck, I don’t even know what the Spice Girls look like!”

Becoming reflective for a moment, the blind man stared toward the darkness saying nothing. Then the rattle of a train in the distance started vibrating the tracks. We boarded the next train together arm in arm to his home station. On our way we discussed our experiences growing up in Brooklyn and how the city was changing. Stepping off the train he softly pushed my arm away. “I got this,” he said, and he breezed up the stairs and out to street level in no time. I offered to walk him home, but he insisted I should not.

“I understand. We both have reputations to protect in these parts.”

I joked. We extended a meaningful hand shake and that half-a-hug gesture that men do so well.

“Hey, Durante,” he said, ”Thanks again for being there, and more importantly, thank you for treating me like a regular guy.”

I watched him walk away as my rookie radio reverberated off the walk-up buildings along Marlborough Road.

22 | Embodied Effigies

The Guide to Grief Lorraine Berry

My father died six weeks ago today. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

1. Don’t expect to have long, cathartic cries in which you are able to release your feelings. Since my father breathed his last, my midsection has been paralyzed. I walk around wondering when I will finally begin to start grieving. It’s only become clear to me in the past week or so that this sensation of numbness is grieving. It’s just not showing up in the ways that I expected.

2. Writing my father’s obituary and a eulogy for him were not ways for me to work out whatever issues that my father and I still had when he died. They were, rather, intended to comfort those who knew my father and wanted to remember all the various ways that my father had been a loveable, honorable man. My private stuff with my father needed to remain private, even if I did toy with the idea of writing an “honest” eulogy in which I talked about my father’s faults. Funerals are not the place for working out your issues with your father. They are, rather, a public coming together of individuals who want to be told funny stories and loving tributes. Thank goodness a friend pointed this out to me before I gave the sort of eulogy that would have made me feel better, but which would have caused my family all sorts of pain.

3. If you do post the news about your loved one’s death on Facebook, do not expect your friends to do anything more than leave a comment on your post. This will comprise the extent of their reaching out to you to let you know how sorry they are about your loss. I returned home from three weeks spent with my mother to find exactly two condolence cards.

Embodied Effigies | 23

Berry

Some of my closest friends left “sorry for your loss” comments on my Facebook page, but made no other effort to check in with me and see how I was doing. Welcome to the digital age.

4. Do expect that time will lose all meaning. Between the beginning of April, when my father became ill, and now, the end of July, it feels as if years have passed. While today is the six-week anniversary of my father’s death, time has been elastic. In some ways, it feels as if my father has been dead for years, except for those moments when it occurs to me that my father has just died and I take a punch to my numb gut. You will think that those moments, when you are reminded that your father has died, would be perfect opportunities for the floodgates to open and for that long-awaited weeping toshow up so that you can begin to clear your system of the grief pneumonia in your chest. Alas, it won’t happen. Instead, anxiety will overwhelm you, and you will end up taking a walk to try to clear your head of the thoughts that pachinko off the walls of your brain. You can’t seem to latch onto a thought or a feeling long enough to process it, so you will do your “relaxation” exercises or seek relief in physical movement … unless, of course, you opt for a nap so that when you wake up, the feelings will be gone.

5. You will discover that afternoon marathons on the cable channels you have never heard of will become your best friend. You will look forward to one p.m., when they begin, and you will lay on the couch watching television until six p.m. when your partner gets home. You will scold yourself for watching five hours of television, but you will be grateful that you experienced five hours of not thinking about your loss. You will wonder if this is what your life is going to be like from now on. You will notice that afternoon television comprises dozens of ads for prescription medicines, and you wonder if you are watching television with millions of people who are on disability. You wonder if what you are going through counts as temporary disability, and will check your work balances to make sure that you can afford to take yet another day off as you struggle to motivate yourself to get any kind of work done.

24 | Embodied Effigies

The Guide to Grief

6. You will find yourself getting up earlier and earlier in the morning. At five a.m., you can get out of bed, make yourself a cup of coffee, and begin working on the computer. You will be able to work for four to five hours before lethargy sets in. At that point, you will take the dogs for a walk, and make a to-do list for the rest of the day that looks something like this: 1. take dogs for a walk. 2. take a shower. 3. do a load of laundry. Upon completion of these three basic tasks, you will feel that turning the television on at one p.m. is something you have earned.

You wonder how long this inability to get work done will last, and whether there is something seriously wrong with you.

7. It will dawn on you that you are depressed, and you will call your shrink and make an appointment, convinced that you need to have your meds adjusted. Your shrink will explain to you—in a kind and steady manner—that you are grieving, that people grieve in different ways, and that there is no timetable for grief.

8. You will wake up one morning a couple of weeks after your father died and will get through a good portion of the day without thinking of him. You will think this means that you are “over” your grief, and that life will return to the status quo ante. You will string together a few good days where you are getting work done and thinking that you are moving on. Then, you will wake up a few mornings later and feel as if you are starting the grieving process all over again. You will be pleased to discover your favorite police procedural will be on at one p.m. You will plan your day accordingly: 1. take dogs for a walk. 2. take a shower. 3. take a nap.

9. The reason taking a shower will be on your list of things to do is that you have no desire to take a shower. It seems to take so much energy to start the water, to wash and condition your hair, to soap your body and face, and to dry off, that you will wrestle with whether the effort is worth it. The only thing that will force you into the shower is that you will recognize that not wanting to shower is a symptom of the kind of depression that you don’t want to fall into. You will tell yourself that the fact that you are maintaining daily hygiene habits is a sign that you have not hit rock bottom.

Embodied Effigies | 25

Berry

As long as you are still showering, your depression is manageable.

10. If you are a writer, you will make many attempts to get some writing done. You will find that there seems to be only one topic that you feel capable of writing about, and you will churn out thousands of words about the death of your father, none of them usable. You will remind yourself that writers write, and that even if the only things you are writing are pieces that you don’t want to share with anyone else, at least you are maintaining the muscle memory of what it feels like to sit at your computer and write. You hope that new topics will come into your head so that you might resume your writing career. You are panicked that, like your devotion to police procedurals and your baby lists of things to do, that the not-writing portion of your life is not a temporary condition, and you are afraid that this is where you’ll be stuck for a long time.

11. You will remind yourself every day that you must be patient with yourself. You have suffered the loss of your father. You will remind yourself that it has only been six weeks, even if it feels as if it happened a lifetime ago. You will remind yourself that everyone you have spoken to has told you that you have to be both gentle and patient with yourself, and that this whole process takes a lot of time. But, since time has lost its shape, you wonder on what day you will get to say that you have officially moved on from your father’s death.

12. You will miss your father. And still, you will not be able to cry.

26 | Embodied Effigies

Wintergreen Calvin Mills

Tina had connections. She arranged for an older girl who had her driver’s license to pick up Josh Goldman and me and to deliver us just after ten o’clock to the spot on the dark beach where she and Debbie had started a bonfire and stashed a six-pack of beer. I had just turned fifteen and didn’t yet have my learner’s permit, let alone my driver’s license. Josh was even farther away from freedom, at fourteen. Neither of us had ever really kissed a girl.

The older girl, Dee Dee, disappeared after letting us out of her Datsun B-210 and touching base with Tina. Why Dee Dee was running errands for her, I didn’t know. That was the thing about Tina.

Jason was with the girls when we showed up. He wore silk pants and lipstick to school and used egg whites to create a tangled nest in his hair.

Tina had recently given me a goth punk makeover. She pierced my ear by numbing it with an ice cube and poking through my lobe with a safety pin she “sterilized” over the flame of a scented candle. She loaned me a baggy, black, moth-eaten sweater and cut my hair, pulling it away from my face and twisting the short dark locks into tangled spikes, alleviating me of the feathered bangs that had been my mainstay since the sixth grade.

The five of us tucked our hands into our pockets against the cold onshore wind. Jason had a little boom box. Jason played DJ, popping tapes in and out, fast forwarding them, only playing the best songs. When the Cure’s “The Kiss,” came on, we all narrowed our eyes and swayed in our seats. We nodded our heads, through the four-minute instrumental intro, thinking the song smooth but almost boring, until the first hypnotic lyrics slid out of Robert Smith’s lips.

Embodied Effigies | 27

Mills

Kiss me kiss me kiss me Your tongue is like poison So swollen it fills up my mouth We listened so intently that we forgot to sip from the beers we could hardly stomach, or to take drags from the cigarettes we weren’t really inhaling. None of us smoked very well, with the exception of Tina. The rest of us would puff on the cigarette or suck smoke into our mouths, holding our breath a second, before exhaling. But Tina was a real smoker. She had been for years. Her parents chainsmoked, and she openly stole entire packs of Marlboros from them.

They’d yell at her, and she’d yell back, only louder and more viciously, “What the fuck do you care? You’ll die of cancer long before you’ll have to worry about me getting it!”

Most times I’d get a call from her. I’d be sitting around the house doing nothing, so an invite to a girl’s house was always a worthy excursion. She’d tell me, not ask me, to come over. Then, when I got there, she’d sit on the mattress in her attic bedroom and smoke, talking to other people on the telephone. She’d have the radio playing low, waiting for songs she liked to come on. If “Boys Don’t Cry” or “With or Without You” came on, she’d tell the person on the other end of the line to hold on. She’d put the phone down and remain sitting. She’d rock back and forth to the music with her eyes half closed. She never stood up to dance to those tunes nor did anyone else I knew. It was way cooler just to feel the music. Dancing seemed backward in our goth punk circle.

During most visits to Tina’s house, I was a piece of furniture.

I’d sit on the floor by her bed, breathing in a cloud of her secondhand smoke. I’d listen to the music she listened to, and I’d listen to her blabbing. I’d watch her precariously piling butts onto a mountainous ashtray. I’d fear the inevitable announcement from her mother that dinner was ready, because I knew it’d lead to another screaming match.

Tina’s mother stopped me one day as I was trying to hurry past where she was sitting alone with her own ashtray at the kitchen table. The back door, the one I usually used, was just feet away when she caught me. I grimaced, waiting for some kind of browbeating.

28 | Embodied Effigies

Wintergreen

“I wish you’d hang around Tina more,” her mom said.

“Huh?” I stuttered. I was caught off guard by her warmth, by her smile.

“You’re a nice boy. I think you’re a good influence on Tina.

Those other friends, I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head and smashing out her cigarette. “That boy with the lipstick, for starters.”

I didn’t know what to say. I just sat there feeling dumbfounded.

The recent makeover was an exception to the general rule of Tina ignoring me on my visits to her house. When I managed to get her out of the house, she was better. Out in the streets, we’d jump our skateboards off high curbs. We’d spit. We’d curse and she’d pick fights with kids, boys mostly. One time she took me along on a joy ride in her neighbor’s Mustang. She drove leaning forward to get a good view of the streets. When she got to the parking lot of the Bayshore Mall, she sank back in the seat, found an empty corner of the lot, and stomped on the gas. She twisted the steering wheel all the way to one side, then to the other. She accelerated until the car tilted, then slid, throwing off smoke and little black flecks of rubber that stained the blacktop. After five or six spins, in anticipation of the mall security chasing us down, she took the back way out of the mall, through the industrial park and headed for home. She was giddy then, with her ever-present cigarette clenched between her fingers, one hand dangling out the open window, the other firm on the wheel.

But something changed the week before the beach party, after Tina invited me pool hopping with a cute hippie girl called Debbie. Josh was at my house that night, so he came along. We all met at Tina’s and walked downtown, where we wandered from hotel-tohotel in our swimsuits, looking for the most accessible pools. There were only a handful of hotels in Eureka that had pools, and we hit the majority of them, picking a number off a room that had a light on first, so we could lie and say our parents were in there if anyone from the hotel approached us.

We didn’t couple up that night, but I’m sure it was no coincidence that the very next weekend Tina orchestrated the goth rock bonfire beach party. I only had to take one look at Debbie–fully Embodied Effigies | 29

Mills

clothed, let alone in her swimsuit–to know that I wanted her. Her blonde hair was cut in a flattering bob. She wore a tight, faded jeanjacket over a long, thin hippie skirt with Birkenstocks–before I knew what Birkenstocks were. Her lips and eyes were bright and round, full of possibilities. She was smooth-skinned femininity. I don’t know that Josh was all that crazy about Tina, but we were girl-crazy in those days period. We were so hard up that we spent hours drawing pictures of naked girls, imagining what they would look like. I hid my drawings in a little box with some pieces of a nudie magazine I had found that somebody had half-burned at the beach. The box was full of charred-edged images of nude women that stirred my teenage blood and smelled strongly of a campfire.

“The Kiss” ended, tuning out in an orchestral, Phantom-ofthe-Opera, keyboard fade. The cassette tape rolled on in silence for a few seconds. I noticed the sound of the wind and the waves and the fire crackling. Bonfire smoke blew toward me, and the smell stirred something in me. I looked at the girls. Then the second song, “Catch” came on. One of the band members quietly counted off “One, two,” before the upbeat poppy deliciousness of wire brushes on a snare drum. A sweet hollow bass riff was followed by Robert’s whispering voice lapping, then smoothed over with ephemeral string-like keyboards and plucky, moaning guitars. We all zoned-out and listened to the song without saying much. We got over the initial zombie-like state induced by our gothic-love anthem and worked at our mostly full beers again. We listened patiently to the rest of the album. I was anxious to hear “Just Like Heaven.”

When it finally came on, with its infectious, steady tat-tatting drumbeat, dancing bass line, and hooky guitar riff, we were all lost again.

Spinning on that dizzy edge I kissed her face and kissed her head and dreamed of all the different ways I had to make her glow…strange as angels dancing in the deepest oceans twisting in the water you’re just like a dream.

30 | Embodied Effigies

Wintergreen

next.

A moment later, it seemed we all knew what we had to do

Tina stood up abruptly and nodded to Josh and I. We followed Tina and Debbie into the dunes, where we split off into pairs.

We didn’t say anything. I figured Debbie and Tina had already worked things out as far as who wanted whom.

When Debbie came at me in slow motion, all sweet, wet lips and clumsy, thrashing tongue, I was shaking because of the surreal nature of the moment. It was happening–but it was too good to be true. For the first time in my life, the present moment felt more like a fuzzy memory. It took me a long time to be able to wrangle my emotional self back into my tangible body, combining the dreamlike state with my waking experience and melding the two together again. I noticed that she was shaking too. I focused in on the fine sensations of holding another body: its breath, its movements, its completely unpredictable separateness. Still shaking, and surprised by what was happening, she and I fell from sitting to lying in the soft belly of the dune, where we were somewhat shielded from the wind, and where I tried to convince myself that what I was experiencing was a tangible thing.

Toward the tail end of the struggle to regain my wits, with our mouths consuming and bouncing off each other and our cheeks rouged with cold, I noticed the taste. The scent was all wet lips and salt air–in the foreground, flowered perfume, in the distance, beer and smoke tinted hair–a blend as erotic as any smell I’d ever taken in.

I looked over, peeking through our make-out embrace and saw Josh lying alongside Tina. Seeing Tina like that, making out with Josh, expanded my understanding of her. I had always known somehow, that we were all sexual beings, but there was something transcendent about unveiling the undeniably girlish part of her, the part that was hidden behind her aggression, her spitting, fighting, skateboarding, and joy rides.

I was able to grasp another portion of reality then, though I still wondered if I wasn’t just vividly imagining an encounter like the ones I’d seen on TV. I was overcome by the feeling that I had somehow come to exist on celluloid and that my life now was a movie–the kind they only played on HBO after 9 p.m.

Embodied Effigies | 31

Mills

Debbie and I fell into each other for a long while, only breaking apart for fractions of seconds before mingling our mouths and stray strands of her hair together in a tangled set of wet movements.

We wriggled dents in the sand in the shapes of our bodies and, after a while, everything felt real and unbelievably good. Eventually, when all four of us had tender lips, tired tongues, and runny noses from the cold, we raised ourselves slowly from the indentations we’d made. As soon as we stood, without our resistance, billions of grains of sand shifted and encouraged by gravity and the ocean breeze, returned to more static formations, leaving only vague outlines of where we had been and what we had done.

The girls walked side-by-side, away from us. Josh and I fell into step, following them. We looked at each other, briefly, closely, as if to ask, “Can you believe it?”

Back at the bonfire, Jason had thrown more damp driftwood on the fire. The gray wood smoldered and smoked. The dancing orange light was too bright at first, like staring into the sun. It cast long shadows out toward all points away from itself, across the driftwood logs and down the beach. It touched the tips of waves as they broke, reflecting back on us.

After a few minutes of everyone sitting and staring into the fire, the girls got up and walked away. I sat on a log, smelling and licking my lips when no one was looking. Josh sat on the log a few feet away, holding his hands out to warm them near the fire. It reminded me of the time when he was twelve and I was thirteen, and he and I camped out in the fort in my backyard. I woke up in the middle of the night to find him sitting up in his sleeping bag, shivering with his hands cupped around a lit candle.

Now Jason was sitting by the fire with his back resting against the same log Josh and I sat on. He glanced back at the girls, who were walking away, then stared out at the ocean.

I had never been high, but I imagined it would feel exactly like I felt at that moment.

When the girls came back, Tina pulled me aside. She looked over my shoulder toward the others, as if she were telling me a secret.

She had a look of concern on her face, but I wasn’t alarmed. Whatever she had to say couldn’t possibly put a dent in what I felt.

32 | Embodied Effigies

Wintergreen

“Jason feels left out,” she said.

I looked at Jason. He was pouting, but trying not to let on that he was pouting. His hair, which normally looked like a clump of weeds growing high in the corner of a yard, fell forward over his face.

His arms were wrapped around his knees. I must have been reeling after my make-out session because I had sensed something was wrong with Jason, but I hadn’t really recognized it for what it was, a pain that went beyond the brooding cynicism of his gothic scowl. I suddenly felt bad for him. We had all hung around together at school after Tina initiated me to “the row,” a simple line of benches between two hallways where the Eureka High punks, skaters, and goth kids congregated at lunch.

A few minutes later, Tina and I were locked in a rough set of kisses, and Debbie was kneeling in the sand between Jason and the fire. Josh sat on the log, beer in hand, and watched Debbie and Jason make out. I felt better then, knowing Jason wasn’t depressed, knowing that we were all friends. I don’t know about the others, but for me, getting to make out with two girls was exciting enough to allow me to transcend jealousy that night. Then, there was my luck to consider. I was glad I wasn’t the one who was left out the second time around.

We switched again after a little while. Debbie and I were together one last time, as were Josh and Tina.

The fire slowly died down. Jason showed no signs of stoking it again. A figure in silhouette approached us from the dunes some time around two a.m. It was Dee Dee, who showed up in her Datsun.

We all reluctantly broke off our make-out craze at that point. Tina, Debbie, and Jason got into Dee Dee’s car and drove away.

I held no delusions of having any kind of dibs on Debbie. It was the only time in my life that I kissed a girl and didn’t worry about what she’d be up to next. I was happy existing in the moment. Josh and I took our skateboards under our arms and began the three-mile walk back to my house. It was hard to believe we had snuck out just a few hours before. It was so long ago, so far away.

We traversed the three, arching bridges that touched down briefly on Indian and Woodley Islands and spanned Humboldt Bay Embodied Effigies | 33

Mills

between Samoa and downtown Eureka. We rode the downhill portions sitting on our boards as late night chip trucks howled by on their way to and from the pulp mills. We said little, but everything we did say was energized, electric, tip-toes and tingling. We were tight breathed and contented.

The next day I had a dentist’s appointment. I didn’t want to shower, or brush my teeth. I wanted to conserve every molecule of Debbie that’d rubbed off on me. I sang through bits of Cure lyrics.

And sometimes we would spend the night Just rolling about on the floor And I remember Even though it felt soft at the time I always used to wake up sore The dental hygienist asked me if I smoked. I told her I didn’t.

I smiled thinking how I must have smelled like Debbie’s cigarette smoke. When the assistant forced me to use mouthwash, I was sorry.

I was sorry to let those little particles go, those little pieces of who I’d become.

On the walk home, I licked my lips and sniffed. The smell was gone. It had been sanitized away by the too fresh scent of wintergreen. The only thing I could think to do was to try to see Debbie again. I didn’t have her number, and Tina wouldn’t give it to me.

Eventually, I found her house–a two-story, yellow Queen Anne Victorian–four blocks up from the high school. I met her only once, alone–without Josh, or Jason, or Tina.

In her room upstairs, we spoke awkwardly, wanting each other, but not knowing how to make it happen without Tina there to call the shots. We slid into mundane chatter, sadly avoiding anything lustier, or more beautiful. The next time I got the nerve to walk to her house, the blinds were pulled up all across the eye-like windows of her empty house. I looked up to her second-story room, which I remembered only then–had contained an inordinate number of cardboard boxes the week before. Her window was empty, surrounded by sterile walls and white gingerbread trim. I recalled clearly, the shape of her face, the cut of her hair, the faded jean jacket, the places it had 34 | Embodied Effigies

Wintergreen

grown threadbare, and her glorious stumbling kisses.

Slowly her details began to disappear. For a long while, I punished myself because I didn’t get a photograph of Debbie. If only I’d asked her for one, I was sure she would have given me the best one she had. If only I had given Debbie my phone number.

Strange reminders of my first kiss came to me intermittently and unexpectedly after that. I could be somewhere, anywhere, and catch a bit of the scent I’d held on my lips that night. Long after Tina set me up with Dee Dee–then dropped acid and made out with me and confessed to Dee Dee about it, effectively ending my involvement with her entire circle of friends forever– I caught a faint scent of something that reminded me of Debbie. I was standing in the check-out line at Safeway.

Where the scent came from, where it comes from still, I will never know, but it is enough. It is more powerful than a photograph, more succinct than a song lyric long loved. A scent, even after it has been erased, can find its way back to you on a shift of the wind. It can find you long after you yourself have grown up, packed your things, and left your hometown forever.

Embodied Effigies | 35

Lightly Salted, Cooked Medium-­Rare Suzanne McWhorter

996 West 4th Street The little girl in that kitchen is three years old. Her golden hair is untouched by chemicals, blue eyes not yet jaded by experience, and a heart that has yet to break. I close my eyes and watch her sometimes, remembering only at the end that her life is mine.

She’s three, and she’s too small to see over the counter, but on tiptoes, little fingers can just curl around the edge. There’s a glass by the sink, one with red roses and green vines winding all around it. It is still dirty from the morning’s NesQuik chocolate milk. On the window sill over the sink, there is a bottle of Maalox. It’s always there.

She doesn’t know what it is for, but she knows that it is Grandpa’s and that he takes it every day. The door frame leading to the living room is cluttered with stickers, all the same, smiley faces saying “I’ve been Krogering.” But she stares past them, into the next room where Grandpa is on the floor. He looks like he doesn’t feel good, but she’s too small to reach that bottle. Mommy is on the phone, and she’s scared. And sad. And Grandpa stopped moving. A bunch of other men come in to the house, and she has to move out of the way now. She watches them put Grandpa on a bed with wheels and take him away. They tell Mommy they were too late. She stares back into the living room. She thinks about going in there, just to make sure Grandpa isn’t hiding somewhere, but she thinks better of it.

Somehow she knows that it’s the last time she’ll ever see him, and quietly wonders who will make her chocolate milk tomorrow. She looks down at the rug in front of the lower cabinets and remembers Grandpa saying, “Snug as a bug in a rug,” and decides that the kitchen is as good a place as any to stay.

Embodied Effigies | 37

McWhorter

Ausdale: Yellow and brown patterned laminate, when the cabinets were yellow I had no idea what we were doing with a pot of water if we were grilling the ribs. But Daddy says you have to boil them first, makes them tender. And they’re always yummy, so boil before flame.

Daddy knows these things best, and I know he’ll teach me right.

Ausdale: Same laminate, same cabinets There was a grease stain on the carpet. Ugly striped carpet, it’s not there anymore. The stain was from the deep fryer Gadu always used for chicken. It had been knocked over once, I don’t remember why or how, but it left a stain and for some reason we never covered with a rug. I was standing on it. Not intentionally, not even consciously. I only realized it after the fact. In that moment my eyes only saw straight forward, into the depths of another pair very similar to my own. I was—am—his spitting image; the only one of the three of us to wholly embody the family name. But he’d called my mother a whore. And he’d threatened the life of someone I cared about. And the last vein holding my leaf to his branch of the family tree snapped. I could hear the police sirens down the street. I had no idea how it could have ever come to this. The wooden hilt was hot in my hand, I was holding on way too tight. I don’t know if I could have used it. I’m glad I didn’t have to. I never looked away from his eyes. What bothers me the most is that I can still see the sadness in them, and knowing that mine must have looked the same. There was a photo of us on the refrigerator behind him and I realized I would never be Daddy’s girl again. We had both made our choices. There was a sense of rage in the air, but only sorrow in the soul. When they took him away, I knew a bridge was burning, one that neither of us has ever been able to rebuild.

38 | Embodied Effigies

Lightly Salted

Pizza Hut: Stainless steel Fuck. You. There were other words spoken that night. I don’t remember them. I leaned to the cold, shiny surface for support. Too much grease. Pepperoni is a bitch. So is blind adoration. Scattered scraps of mushroom and onion invited me down to join them. So I sank to their level, gravity giving way to the heaviness of my wounded heart.

Fuck. You. And I was broken.

Woodhill: Puke green and cheap Your first apartment isn’t supposed to be glamorous. It’s a rite of passage to live in a rundown, one bedroom drab place on the outskirts of town. And it’s a rite I accepted with open arms. I would have had to work hard to find a less aesthetically pleasing place, and even as I signed the lease, I knew I was doomed to a life of take-out; the kitchen managed to be both hideous and nearly non-functioning. It was really nothing more than a strip of counter space with a loud refrigerator and a pre-clogged sink. But none of that mattered that first night. We didn’t need food, or electricity apparently since I had yet to get it turned on. The only piece of furniture we’d managed to relocate was an old recliner, along with a change of clothes, a salt shaker and a six pack. We weren’t very productive. We had other things in mind.

The lack of electricity necessitated candles, and we put them on the counter because it seemed like the least likely fire hazard. We never made it past the stove. Even the drab green and fake wood came alive in the glow. You touched my lips and burned yourself into my history. I had no idea that in six months the only proof of you left in my life would be faint white scars and another permanent resident in my abandonment complex…who knows. But I didn’t know, and you never said. We had no food, no power, no money, nothing, and life was planning its sneak attack, but in that cheap apartment you told Embodied Effigies | 39

McWhorter

me you loved me, and I was home.

Maple Lane: Light stone gray, sharper edges I took you in. That’s what best friends do. When there was nowhere else for you, when your choice that night came down to the street or the psych ward, I took you in. You’d have done the same for me then. We’d shared so much that I knew, deep in my soul, that you could not be defined by the things they said you were, or the pills they put in your hand to “fix” you. The men who broke your heart were idiots; the family that put you down was blind; the acquaintances that enabled you were evil. But I was there. Always. Ten long years. You were my oldest friend. Maybe not my best anymore, but my oldest and most storied without comparison. We were supposed to take the world by storm together. Funny how things turn around.

You said it was too much. Called it my Messiah complex. Said you needed distance. I never saw you again.

Corner of Parkwood and Park: Cream colored with gray flecks; rounded edges Weddings and inner turmoil do not mix. Alcohol doesn’t really help much, either. Sitting there, laughing hysterically, feigning amusement as the remnants of rejection carried cheap eyeliner down my sunburned cheek, my best friend promised me that things were going to turn out just fine. I was a good person, she said. I had empathy and kindness. I was always there when needed. I was capable of sublime love. And because of these things, I would eventually find everything I was hoping for. But not there. Not that city. Not ever. It wasn’t quite an epiphany, more like an acceptance of verity, while the cool cream surface supported my drunken weight, heavy with demons and Merlot. My metaphorical closet was pretty damn full; there were too many bones to salt and burn, and it would just be easier to run.

40 | Embodied Effigies

Lightly Salted

Barrington; Marbled browns and green-grays, green and white tile My first meals prepared here were done so with great trepidation. I had asked for help. Not just for assistance with some task or request for information. I had, in essence, asked for sanctuary. To say I had nowhere else to go would be untruthful, I could have always moved back home. But that would have rattled the chains of ghosts I had no desire to be haunted by. So I had choices, just not good ones.

And they took me in. Without hesitation or judgment. And for that, I wanted everything to be perfect. But that perfection didn’t need to be served on a platter. The perfection was experience. I have learned so much about myself from the disintegrating cakes, cocktail sauce disasters, mystery seafood soup, and salt-lick pasta sauce. Tiramisu overload and cheese fiascos are exquisite in their sincerity. Nights spent sitting on the chest freezer, brainstorming and scheming have led to discoveries about people I’ve come to care so much for. We’re not rich, sometimes it’s hard. But we’re never hungry and we’re never alone. It has been said that a clean kitchen is the sign of a wasted life.

If that’s the case, I guess mine hasn’t measured out so bad.

Ausdale: The cabinets are green now She’s 90. I don’t know quite when that happened, but it did; a testament to the trickery of time. I know that every time I go home to visit I will find her in her spot there in the corner of the kitchen, reading a book, or playing the Nintendo DS my brother got her for Christmas. She loves it. Every piece of her mind is still there, exactly in place, and more vivid than should be possible. The stories she can tell are amazing: of a childhood full of loss, a life of hard work, Austria during the war, and everything that came after. For me they are larger than life. She is larger than life. But she’s 90. And while my heart knows that every time I visit home, she’ll be sitting in the corner of the kitchen, really, I know better. She’s 90 and life is a fickle, fragile beast. Someday, sooner than any of us would like, that chair will be empty. She will be ready, and she will have had no regrets. I can’t say the same. She worked hard for everything she possessed and she loved totally and unconditionally. I can only hope to make Embodied Effigies | 41

McWhorter

that claim someday. We always want to believe that our heroes will live forever. But comic books and fairy tales don’t tell you that the forever isn’t literal. It’s a responsibility passed on to those who are left behind, to keep a memory and spirit from dying. No pressure there.

So I will keep visiting, braving the fog of the past that descends over me within Mansfield city limits. I will keep standing in that kitchen with her (though it is not as often as it should be) hoping I can latch on to every moment and not lose a single memory. I hope I can capture the spirit with which she lives, and remember every lesson she had to teach. And I won’t dwell too much on the future day; the one where she’s gone. She’s 90. But then again, 90 is not what it used to be.

42 | Embodied Effigies

Sprawlers Chelsea Catherine

I prep in the morning for a job interview in the New York City. It is summer and I am fresh from the shower but already my skin grows sticky with perspiration. I would like to appear shiny and new but it is 105 degrees and I live on the top floor.

The heat rises. It drifts in image bending vapors, in silver apparitions.

My apartment walls grow sticky with the polluted, heated mist. Angry voices echo from downstairs.

I am angry as well but have no one to shout at.

Hot air and anger cloud the apartment buildings here, the urban sprawl just south of the city. The people that live here are angry because we want to garner admiration; we want to be successful but success doesn’t live in filth, it lives in a high rise on the Upper East Side.

I leave the interview. Unsuccessful.

But thanks so much for your interest.

After exiting the train back, I go to the Newark Bay. It rests a grey, stilted color, the smell reminiscent of heated garbage, but sharper, and discarded condom wrappers swim in the sludge. Last week a man’s withered body was found here. He was homeless and died of a stroke. His body rotted here for three days before anyone noticed.

The bay waters lap at my feet.

Embodied Effigies | 43

Catherine

I lie in the dirty sand and search for the key to success, caressed by cold exhalations of water that nip like tinny bells at my flesh. The tide thrusts with jets of rabid foam and I taste sunbaked grains. My eyes sting; I inspect the sky.

Still, no key.

Perhaps it floated over from the city long ago, on waters cleaner and clearer than these, and waddled ashore. I imagine it looking around in displeasure before scurrying into the sand and burying itself deep.

When I get home I look in the mirror. I examine every inch of skin, as if to find a physical indicator of prosperity. Maybe it is the looping frown of my lips. Or the thin, bent bridge of my nose. Maybe it is the way I smell, the melancholy that clings to me like smoke.

Your desperation is appalling, the mirror says.

But I like my desperation, because at least it is something real.

My dearest friend works and lives in New York City. She sunbathes on the beaches of Long Island and the Hamptons and spends hundreds of dollars on social brunches every month. When she visits late in the afternoon, just after my hundredth job rejection, she looks at me with her nose crinkling, nostrils widening. Her lips draw back in a grimace, like breathing in a bad smell. She picks at a manicured nail.

“You’re still working at the warehouse?”

Dear friend, I write the letter in my mind. I can no longer see you because your success and fame drive me mad. Sincerely, a New Jersey sprawler.

But she can’t help it, really.

44 | Embodied Effigies

Sprawlers

If I didn’t live here, work here, bleed here, how different would I be?

After my ex-friend leaves, I venture into the city and sit on the sidewalk along Bowery Street. The pavement pounds, simmering with heat. I sweat. Beads pebble above my top lip and drop, distended, to the cement.

People pass. I stare. My eyes grow sore. How painful it is to see.

Near evening, I lumber back to the train, back to the bay. I sit on the banks and stare out at the murky water. Withered strands of grass tickle my hands, my neck. The sky blanches pink with evening.

I lean back and roll my bare feet in the sand, surveying my vast dominion, the skyline of microwave apartments. It smells of the birth of night. Lights dance in front of me, skimming across the surface of the blackened water.

Embodied Effigies | 45

The Gospel of the 34th Street Laundromat Michael Palmer

At this moment you are alive, you breathe, you move about or work.

You may be living in comfort or existing in misery. The sun rises and sets; somewhere a child is being born; but also somewhere, someone is always dying.

The dawn breaks and there is the laundromat, as if waiting Dear reader, to be really happy in life, to be at peace with yourself and God, you must come into fellowship with Him. Recognize and confess that you are a sinner and believe that Jesus died on the cross Embodied Effigies | 47

Palmer

bearing your guilt. Victory is awaiting you!

I can read on airplanes and on the bus but not more than a page or two at a time in the laundromat. Maybe it is because the chairs are stained or because I have the freedom to walk around or because the rumbles of the washing machines switch every so often which makes me think something in the building has shifted. Before I moved to Texas I had my own laundry machine in the basement and left my clothes down there while I cooked or cleaned but now I’m in the thick of the laundry once a week. I enjoy the swirl of color of other people’s clothes. My clothes are mostly gray and black I don’t think I have anything purple or even blue (except jeans) There are Christian tracts on top of the vending machine. I am encouraged to take one they are free and I do. And then another. I develop a plan to read them all one tract at a time. Even the ones in Spanish I plan to read though my Spanish is very poor. Tracts are the perfect reading material for this setting because they are short and invite the type of self-reflection that is well-suited to wandering the aisles of shiny machines Do you know God? Maybe you ask, ‘Who is God? Where is He? Do you really want to know? Yes, you do. Deep inside you want to know.

Because I was young when I stopped going to church I do not remember the theology as much as the calming feeling of church music as I settled into the pew Even though I protested having to go I always felt a warm sense of purpose The laundromat is the first place I have thought a lot about my eternal salvation since that red brick church of my youth It’s a fair point that I might merely be seduced by the colors of the 48 | Embodied Effigies

The Gospel of the 34th Street Laundromat

tracts and the spinning laundry Fear enters our minds so slowly and silently that we hardly realize we are becoming victims of its damaging influence. Even a little fear, like a drop of dye in a glass of water, discolors everything. When this thin stream of fear is not stopped, it cuts a channel into which other thoughts are diverted.

I don’t know if I believe in confession but I confess that when I quit going to church I would panic at night that I was going to die and go nowhere and lose consciousness I rarely bring this up because it is a common human panic that we don’t like to be reminded of and I don’t like to give the religious an occasion for pity or to open a door for proselytizing By trusting the future into God’s hands, we can surrender to Him the burden of the unknown. Try it and see!

A young woman named Heather walks up to me and asks if I am from out of town. When I ask why she asks, she says that I look sad and out of place. It’s true I am new to Texas and I don’t quite feel in place yet. Heather says she does her laundry on Thursdays at 2 and when I show up at that time a week later she’s there Maybe, sometime when you were very still, you were thinking, ‘What shall I do with all my troubles and burdens? I wish I could be good. I wish I would be at a place where I’d never be hungry or sick anymore.

What will happen to me when I die?

Many patrons of the laundromat wait in their cars while their laundry spins but not me. They probably like to listen to music or they want to avoid being spoken to I can relate to both but I don’t want to leave my car running nor do I want to sit still Embodied Effigies | 49

Palmer

Q. What harm is there in believing the theory of evolution?

A. Evolution renders God unnecessary. It has provided society with a way to dispose of the notion that there is a God. When we have dispensed with the Supreme Being, we’ve also dispensed with the supreme moral Authority. If there is no God to tell man what is right or wrong, then man is free to decide for himself. Throughout history we see the tragic consequences of humans living and doing according to their own self-centered standards.

Heather is easy to talk to although by that I mean she will just talk she does not pause for example at the laundromat she says she doesn’t care who you are, small animals washing themselves with their hands is just adorable The kid has not yet learned that the laundromat is a place of quiet desperation where one reflects on the Lord. He is three feet of anarchy running through the store and opening machines I am grateful that my clothes are in a washing machine and not a dryer the washing machines are out of his reach

50 | Embodied Effigies

The Gospel of the 34th Street Laundromat

Listen, a voice is calling you. YOU! Who are you? What is your name?

Where did you come from? Where do you live? Where are you going?

I feel inspired to buy a Pepsi from the Pepsi machine. I tell myself I have given up soda but the machine is bright and beautiful and when you are prompted, you should listen Although informed by a torn piece of paper that the price of a Pepsi had been raised from $.50 to $.75 I purchased one anyway and opened it with a whisper outside. Behind the laundromat there are smokers it is as if we don’t want to be seen Some facts about the laundromat: 1) open 5 am to 11 pm except when it snows 2) there is no note on the door on snow days like most things in the city it is just presumed closed 3) crowded on Sundays 4) bathrooms in the back behind the attendant desk 5) attendant desk unoccupied at night 6) the chairs are badly stained one reason perhaps why people wait in their cars 7) sometimes the machine which converts dollars to quarters takes your dollar and gives nothing in return the attendant is never present when this happens you are on your own 8) the candy compartment in the game of sliding quarters is always empty 9) the sliding quarters game is for those 18 years old and older only 9) the price of a Pepsi used to be $.50 per can but it has been raised to $.75 Consider one of the fish of the sea. Who put the map in the brain of the salmon that tells it how to leave its ocean home and find the river and the very stream where its life began? There it lays its eggs, and soon after dies, making room in the cycle of life for its offspring who will follow the exact pattern of all its ancestors. Do you think this all just happened by chance?

The snow didn’t last mostly the winter looked the same as the fall except with cold wind Embodied Effigies | 51

Palmer

On the way to the Laundromat I am tricked by the radio I find a catchy beat and prepare to hear a new party song but instead receive an autotuned message about the Lord. I am surprised by how easy it is to pull that trick you can add a parenthesis to any pop song and Christianize it, keeping the fun beat even in a song about hell Jesus said He was the Good Shepherd and gave His life for the sheep.

We are the sheep. The ones that are His sheep know His voice. He calls them by name. A stranger they will not follow. Who is that stranger, the one from whom we shall flee? Oh, he is a thief! He cares nothing for the sheep. He is a liar. There is no truth in him. He is the devil. He is our enemy, Satan.

Outside a jet cuts the sky in half with its trailing cloudline it takes a long time to make it from one end of the west Texas sky to the other I watch it the whole way and notice how side by side one side of the sky looks bluer than the other it is sky blue vs. the darker blue of deep water by the time I walk back inside my clothes are ready to dry We have the example of the Apostle Peter, as Jesus bade him walk on the stormy waves of the Sea of Galilee. Peter was unafraid until he took his eyes off the Lord, and began to look at the fearful waves. Then he began to sink.

The laundromat is generous it provides not only free tracts but left behind books and articles of clothing if you choose to take them instead of donating them to the lost and found which is a plastic bin behind the attendant’s desk. I once found a Bible which I did donate to the lost and found though not before rummaging through it a little not many comments in the margins 52 | Embodied Effigies

The Gospel of the 34th Street Laundromat

Heather a graduate student complains of what she calls the sorority uniform which is running shorts and tank-tops which her students wear to class she is upset by the lack of professionalism she does not understand that this is the last thing about Texas I will ever complain about or she doesn’t consider that Passions, physical attractions, and infatuations are a poor beginning for a marriage. When these are the basis for our attraction to each other, there may be frustration and conflict after marriage. As we trust the Lord to guide our choice, His divine wisdom foresees the helpmate we will need, not only for today but for the years ahead. The Lord may choose different tastes and temperaments, which will complement each other, resulting in a more balanced unit.

I love the way my clothing feels as I remove it from the dryer it reminds me of the heat generated when you fold a piece of paper fast Sexual immorality does not quench the fire of lust—it fuels it. Illicit sexual activity is no more a cure for lust than whiskey is a treatment for alcoholism. The truth is that we need to deal with our lust.

I have been on good terms with my Christian neighbor since I moved in though I can’t remember her name. She brought me cookies early on and since I couldn’t think of a way to reciprocate I brought her cookies that I made later. Her cookies were better but I feel the expectations for boys in such matters are lower. I even went to Sunday dinner with her once her parents were there they seemed as confused as I was as to what I was doing there After the flood the Lord made a covenant with Noah and his posterity that He would not destroy all flesh by a flood again. He put the beautiful rainbow in the sky, which we often see when it rains and reminds Embodied Effigies | 53

Palmer

us of the promise. He has been true and faithful to His Word and the earth has not again experienced such a calamity. But it will some day be destroyed by fire.

In the afternoon the sky is dust without sky-breaks. At work the building reads the dust as smoke and a robot voice activates and tells us to evacuate the building outside. It is only after doing this that I notice it isn’t dark outside it’s just dust But OH! The pit of doom and unending fire awaiting those who in this lifetime reject the redeeming love of Jesus. There will be no turning or saving after death. ‘Then shall he say unto them no the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into every lasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels’ If the Lord returns with a burning vengeance the grass is ready for it it is dried out and tired and asking to be burned clean

Once I shared a cab home from the airport with a man from California who said Lubbock looked as though it had survived a nuclear attack and was rebuilding I had to disagree with him there, I said maybe if the attack occurred in 1965 and the rebuilding was slow and indifferent I was new to the city and lonely Measured in cigarette butts it has been a busy day at the laundromat but it’s currently quiet I am bored with the tracts. In the parking lot I call my mom who tells me to always cook food in an oven and eat at a table with a plate as a gift to myself it is solid mom advice I tell her I’ll try

Of all the machines in the laundromat the sticker machine is least enticing most of the stickers are designs that resemble regretted an54 | Embodied Effigies

The Gospel of the 34th Street Laundromat

kle tattoos a few of them feature sayings such as Shut up and Drive!

I am not sure that’s a message I want to send to everyone without context I will stick to the wonders of the Pepsi machine and the mysteries of the quarters game A certain lady believed it was a dose of medicine she was taking from the medicine cabinet. It turned out to be poison and she died. Sincerity will not save your soul if you believe the wrong thing. It may be even more dangerous to believe the wrong thing than to drink poison by mistake.

To see the sky you have to look through poles and electric wires they look like spiderwebs in the sunlight

Let us face the facts. The awful monsters—alcohol, drugs and immorality—are threatening and destroying that which God created noble and good. Like the tentacles of a mighty octopus, they grasp and draw both young and old into their embrace.

It is always a temptation to get drunk in the laundromat but I don’t do so because I have to drive home. It isn’t a far drive but still. At the same time I would enjoy the Pepsi more with whiskey and I wish it were easier to carry my laundry so that I could get plastered and walk home.

Embodied Effigies | 55

Palmer

I debate asking Heather to be my designated driver home from the laundromat but I determine she might stop answering my texts if I do so With iniquity increasing and love growing cold, many evils are manifesting themselves. Fornication, adultery, divorce and remarriage, homosexuality and adult and juvenile delinquency are rapidly increasing and have become widely prevalent. All these and other sins are hastening the return of the Lord.

It is too late to learn the name of my Christian neighbor but thankfully I don’t think she knows mine and I think it is too late for her also.

She invites me over to a party where I’m surprised to see religious people drinking openly. Christian neighbor gives me a look that inspires confidence Sometimes Satan makes us think: ‘Everybody tells lies, so I can, too.

Dirty thoughts are not so bad—nobody knows what I’m thinking.

Dirty words—they’re good for a big laugh.’

A conversation (slightly altered due to memory and intoxication but mostly accurate) which occurred during the time I came over to Christian neighbor’s house and drank too much Me: How did you find Jesus?

Her: Jesus is in the breath of the sea and the sky He is the air I breathe I don’t know how to not find Him

56 | Embodied Effigies

The Gospel of the 34th Street Laundromat

Embodied Effigies | 57

Palmer

Rules and messages of the rotating quarters game: 1) “Candy $.25 and receive one free play. Movement of machine voids free play and alarm will sound.” 2) “This Machine is anchored to the floor and under surveillance. All vandals will be caught and prosecuted to the maximum extent.” 3) “Must be 18 years or older to play this machine” 4) “BUY A PIECE OF CANDY AND GET A FREE PLAY!!”

The candy compartment is always empty.

I find the contrast of the warning that you must be 18 years old to play and the candy to be a mixed message. Then again I am older than 18 and would probably try the game if candy were ever in there.

Often the first thing I do when I walk into the laundromat is see if the candy in the machine has been replenished which it never has been I do not believe that an alarm will sound if you move the quarter machine I was six weeks out in the desert, 180 miles away from any town in any direction. I suppose my thought was absolutely true that those who were listening to me had probably never once heard the name of Jesus Christ. Let me say that there is a certain sense of tremendous responsibility, accompanied with a certain profound gladness, when you feel that those who are listening are absolutely hungry, famine-stricken without the Word of God.

Names of towns in West Texas: Levelland, Brownfield, Shallowater, Littlefield, Plainview, Lubbock, Ropesville, Sundown, Whiteface, Muleshoe, Seagraves, Turkey, Hart, Earth, Happy, Slaton, Tulia I ask Heather her stance on the Lord she says she is not a huge fan she finds it ironic that Jesus is most popular in shitholes like Lubbock 58 | Embodied Effigies

The Gospel of the 34th Street Laundromat

which are so terrible it is as though their very reality disproves the existence of God. I do not love this answer even if it’s right and make a mental note to place anonymous tracts in her bag All have sinned. I have—you have. We are like the man who was lost in the woods. He was finally so confused that he had to sit down and wait for someone to find him. Are you lost? Do you know where to go?

Should Jesus return, West Texas would be a great place to come back he would be so warmly welcomed and invited in for sweet tea and snacks everyone would confess their mistakes but feel validated that Jesus had chosen us even I might be happy to see Him although I’m afraid of Him and although His presence has not always signified promising things in the past The Lord is waiting to bless your heart and home. Turn to Him with all your heart and remain faithful. Some day He will open the door of that heavenly home for you, where happiness and perfect peace will welcome you forever.

The Texas sky is made for divine re-entry look at it when the sun is behind the clouds lighting them up like lanterns and then later shining up at them from underneath you never see clouds in that kind of reverse lighting where I’m from the sun goes behind the mountains and then its light is gone When you feel restless and uneasy, when a still small voice seems to say you have done wrong, when you cannot sleep, when you are afraid to die, when you are serving other gods or idols—Jesus is calling you to come to Him. Usually I am a sound sleeper but not tonight I find myself kept up by Embodied Effigies | 59

Palmer

anxiety I try to sleep for a few hours then I quit trying. For a moment I think of calling Heather but then I don’t. I use a ladder to climb onto my roof with a bag of rotten tangerines which I throw as far as I can northward. I can see stars from up there stars have never been this bright from a house I’ve lived in. It is like looking up at a busy freeway. I will not sleep so I prepare for the day. I am so far behind on laundry that the last clean shirt is one I don’t even remember I have it advertises a band I can’t recall I think they might have been local. I will have to do laundry early. In my head the laundromat has been open since five but when I arrive the sign says it opens at six so I wait in the parking lot in the purple dark as if in anticipation I can smell the tangerine residue on my hands I wait for someone to turn on the lights

60 | Embodied Effigies

Contributors’ Notes

Daniel Aristi was born in Spain. He studied French Literature as an undergrad, then Economics, then he moved to Indonesia. He now lives in Botswana with his wife and two children, and two cats. Daniel’s work has been featured in Berkeley Poetry Review, Falling Star Magazine , and Asymptote; it is also forthcoming in Cactus Heart.

Lorraine Berry has taught at a small college in the Finger Lakes region of New York for over a decade. She is Senior Editor at Talking Writing and has published work at Salon, Diagram, Dame, Flavorwire and a number of other literary journals. Her unpublished memoir, Word Lovers, has been optioned, and she is concurrently writing a novel, other essays, and honing her teaching skills. (And looking for an agent.)

When not writing, she can be found exploring the woods with her two dogs, hanging out with her daughters, or talking and taking on the world with her partner, Rob. Chelsea Catherine is an MFA candidate and barista living in NJ. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Eugene Durante is a Police Officer for the NYPD. He is a keen observer of the off-beat and a world class smarty-pants. A New York archetype, “Gino” is well known for not stroking others and not getting stroked in the process.

Julia Hones suffers from an incurable addiction to literature and writing and is involved in an eternal love affair with words. Her works have appeared in different literary anthologies and journals such as Gadfly Online, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, TRIVIA: Voices 62 | Embodied Effigies

of Feminism, Epiphany Magazine, The Voices Project, Black Mirror Magazine, The GreenSilk Journal, Vox Poetica, The Artistic Muse, The mindful word, Skive Magazine, “You, Me & a Bit of We” Anthology and Coffee Shop Poems. She is the poetry editor of Southern Pacific Review. To learn more details about her published material you can visit her blog: http://juliahoneswritinglife.blogspot.com Mark Lewandowski is the author of the story collection, Halibut Rodeo. His essays and stories have appeared in many journals, and have been listed as “Notable” in The Best American Travel Writing, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and twice in The Best American Essays. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of English at Indiana State University.

Suzanne McWhorter is currently pursuing a Master of Arts Degree in Creative Writing from Cleveland State University. While fiction is her area of focus, she enjoys working in all genres, and her poetry has previously appeared in Pea River Journal.

Calvin Mills is a writer of short stories, creative nonfiction essays, and plays. His work has appeared in Short Story, Weird Tales, Tales from the South, Happily Never After, and other magazines and anthologies. His musical, “Freak Like Me”, premiered in 2012. Mills grew up behind the Redwood Curtain in Eureka, California, and lived for a decade in Little Rock, Arkansas. He currently teaches at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, Washington, where he is the faculty advisor for Tidepools Magazine.

Michael Palmer earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Utah. He is currently working on a PhD in English at Texas Tech University, where he is the Managing Editor of Iron Horse Literary Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Georgetown Review, NANO Fiction, The Collagist, and other journals. He has been awarded writing residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and the Edward F. Albee Foundation.

Embodied Effigies | 63

Jaime Wise is a Northern Michigan native and advocate for mental health awareness. She received a BA in Creative Writing from Grand Valley State University in 2012, with an emphasis on fiction.

Since then, she’s begun exploring how attributes of multiple genres can blend together to communicate idiosyncratic experience. “Her” is her first published work of nonfiction.

64 | Embodied Effigies