Frontier Mosaic 1
Frontier Mosaic 2
Frontier Mosaic Issue One Spring 2015
Frontier Mosaic 3
Frontier Mosaic EDITOR Callie Kirk
ASSISTANT EDITOR
EDITORIAL BOARD
Katy Sanderlin
Saleah Blancaflor Amanda Bueno Teresa Coffey Kelsey Ford Amanda Hays Brenda King Ashton C. Patton Ellen Ricks Eric Robinson Jordan Thomas Mickayla Waldrup
FICTION COORDINATOR Meagan Burns
NONFICTION COORDINATOR Alex Webb
POETRY COORDINATOR Jenny Ancik
ART COORDINATOR Emma Shore
Frontier Mosaic 4
Table of Contents Spring 2015
Fiction AMANDA BUENO
Wasabi………………………………………………………………………………………………….7 JASON CHRISTIAN
American Waste……………………………………………………………………………………56 SHAWN FINLEY
Dust in the Blood………………………………………………………………………….........19 KRISTEN VALENSKI
喪家 (Homeless)…………………………………………………………………………………..70 ALEX WEBB
Money Trees………………………………………………………………………………………..37
Nonfiction SHAWN FINLEY
The Hatred of Sound.………………………………………………………………………….30 MATTHEW MITCHELL
The Pennies…………………………………………………………………………………………48 SHANLEY WELLS-RAU
Lady in Nude………………………………………………………………………………………..82
Poetry NEKE CAREY
Cemetery of Stars………………………………………………………………………………...35 KELSEY FORD
Praying to the Pigskin……………………………………………………………………………51 AMANDA HAYS
The Moon………………………………….…………………………………………………………36 CAROLINE JENNINGS
Kenosis in the Spring…………………..………………………………………………………..91 RYAN RICKS
Anything Else…..……………………………………………………………………………………6 A Beach in Ibiza (Our Honeymoon)………………………………………………………67 Home Videos……………………………………………………………………………………….69
Frontier Mosaic 5 RACHAEL ROSS
Underworld………………………………………………………………………………………16 201 Hazel Valley Ranch…………………………………………………………………….17 KRISTEN VALENSKI
Nemophilist………………………………………………………………………………………93 SHANLEY WELLS-RAU
PICK-CHURES AND PHOTOS………………………………………………………………52 WASH YOUR HANDS………………………………………………………………………….54
Art ELLE DENYER
Bullseye……………………………………………………………………………………………..29 Misty Vision……………………………………………………………………………………….90 LIZ DUECK
Spots………………………………………………………………………………………………….18 Disconnected (Front Cover).………………………………………………………………81 EMMA SHORE
Broken Down……………………………………………………………………………………..34 Glass Floats…………………………………………………………………………………………47 E is for Endangered…………………………………………………………………………….55 A lot On My Mind (Back Cover).………………………………………………………….92 Contributors……………………………………………………………………………………….94
Frontier Mosaic 6 RYAN RICKS
anything else when we rode bicycles under blanketing suburban streetlights when we tucked plastic whisky into elastic summer waistbands and the red traffic light bloom decorated our bile like Christmas when we bought two SAT prep books three scantrons four ACT bibles when we traded our solar system wallpaper for dormitory asbestos and the entire cafeteria sang 18th birthday nervous breakdowns when we read Gatsby and labeled Fitzgerald The Best Author Ever when we donned black suits white shirts suffocating windsor knots and saw each other cry for the first time at the suicidal kid’s funeral when we formed basement bands and played Jazzmasters and hi-hats when we penned confessional high school hallway loner anthems and spit cornball truths through retainers into rusty old microphones when we skipped lacrosse practice and failed geometrical proofs did any of us even begin to realize that it was just like anything else
Frontier Mosaic 7 FICTION
Wasabi AMANDA BUENO
Jen ordered a Guinness because the choice was safe. Truthfully, she wanted something
sugary and mixed, but under Armin’s scrutiny, real or imagined, she began to wonder if such an
order would come off as inexperienced. Standing at the bar next to him, everything she said and did was first subject to an obsessive once-over. Despite the vigilance, she fumbled with her
wallet, awkwardly trying to find the correct bill. He said he would get the drink, but she insisted otherwise, not because she had any statutes on the matter of which gender pays for what, but because she feared what easy acquiescence would say.
She forked over a ten-dollar bill because wads of ones were getting in the way, and she
didn’t want to embarrass herself by rummaging further. Armin led them to a secluded booth at the far end of the room that wasn’t immediately visible. She could see he came here often,
observing how he wound confidently through the crowd; she followed closely behind, making
sure not to hit anyone’s shoulders on the way. The bar was clearly a popular place in Manhattan, and everything about the venue seemed trendy to her, although she certainly wasn’t an expert on
what was or wasn’t cool. They had already exchanged pleasantries at the door and now, sitting in
Frontier Mosaic 8 a quieter area, looking at him, she was at a loss. He asked how Cleveland was. What was there to
say?
“It’s Cleveland,” she said. Whenever she told anyone where she was from, they said “Ohio?” but it wasn’t Ohio.
Less than two days ago, Jen was in Cleveland, Oklahoma, a town of 3,200 and the only place
she’d ever lived. She rarely went on trips and now, for the first time, she was in a big city. She felt like an American foreigner in America. When she was little, she talked all the time about going to China after watching Mulan for the first time.
China has over a billion people with many dialects. If America was a relatively
homogeneous country compared to China, then she was screwed for international travel. Here,
just 1,400 miles away, she felt different and exposed. She thought, hoped, Armin understood, or at least felt the same way at some point. They grew up together, used to be close, but he got out almost ten years ago when he went to college. The truth was, sitting in front of her now, he seemed like a stranger.
“Do I stick out like a sore thumb?” she asked. On the subway ride to meet him, an elderly
couple asked if she needed directions. She wondered if everything about her appeared
unsophisticated. He said no and looked surprised, but she didn’t feel better. They were once
peers, but now she felt nervous and inadequate. But more especially, she felt a barrier between them.
“How’s work?” he asked. A shithole.
“Fine, thanks.”
She worked at the local Hallmark store. Her whole life was a vortex of platitudes and pleasantries. Often, she composed little derisive cards in her head, centered on herself and what
she was doing, usually overly bitter to counteract the saccharine quality of the real cards. She was already working on one for tonight, imagining a large, floral cover. Congratulations
You’ve escaped Podunk Hollow for the weekend We’re so proud of your accomplishments
Try not to look like a complete idiot in front of Armin
Frontier Mosaic 9 And inside the card would be a ten-dollar bill, for her one beer. Jen was aware that she
should now ask how his work was, but she would rather choke on one of the pretzels sitting in a bowl at their table. Listening to him talk about his fabulous job as an architect at a successful firm, right after the mention of her own job, was humiliating. Now she wondered if he was
humoring her by being there. Did she seem totally moronic? She did another mental check of her clothes.
At Cleveland, even at work, sweats were acceptable everyday wear. And in the summer,
everywhere you went you could hear the flip-flopping of flip-flops. Before coming on this trip, she browsed outfits on the Anthropologie website; she needed to see complete outfits because she was not confident in her ability to piece one together herself and not look like she just
strolled down from the Appalachian Mountains. The real task after picking a picture was trying to put together a similar one from her choices at Super Wal-Mart.
Jen didn’t know what to say, so she tried a pretzel, then really did choke on the snack. “Good god, what is this crap?”
Armin laughed then, a full, familiar laugh that she never realized she’d missed.
“They’re wasabi flavored, made in-house,” he said through lingering, deep chuckles. “Wasabi?”
“The green stuff you eat with sushi.” Jen was thankful that he didn’t sound irritated or condescending. Her only real familiarity with ethnic food was Taco Bell, food Armin’s Syrian mom would cook, and Josie’s Express, the one stop diner for American, Asian, and Mexican
cuisine. Jen and Armin used to walk there sometimes on Friday nights after they caught a movie. “Do you remember Josie’s?” she asked.
“I would never forget chicken fried steak tacos, extra gravy, after a Double C premiere.” Double C was what they called the Cleveland Cinemark. She felt warm with his
remembrance. Before meeting him tonight, she wondered whether to even bring up middle
school and high school. When Armin left, when anyone from their town left, the departure was tinged with a sense of desperation. And knowing that he’d visited his parents only a handful of times, never staying long, communicated to her that he wanted nothing to do with Cleveland. And maybe, he wanted nothing to do with her. They never talked.
Frontier Mosaic 10 Now, thinking over these details, she realized Facebook did the talking for them. She
knew where he worked, where he vacationed, restaurants where he liked to eat, and the faces of his friends, and yet, the information was nothing they shared personally. “I was a little surprised you called me,” Armin said.
She felt embarrassed, and maybe sensing that, he quickly followed with, “but I’m glad
you did. I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time how much I’ve missed you.” Jen shoved more
pretzels in her mouth. Too many. The wasabi burned, and the pain was a welcomed diversion. Did he miss her? For some years after he left, she would send him messages, occasionally call,
but most would go unanswered, and after a while she quit trying. Now when she saw an update from him on Twitter or Instagram, there was a slight bitter twinge. As she sat there, throat
cooking, Armin got her another Guinness. She thought of a card, this one small and humble, with a sweetly cursive font.
Thinking of you on this special day I just wanted to remind you that I miss you But probably won’t ever speak to you again With Love
He said he felt terrible. And she was a little glad.
“Should I have come?” she asked, needing a subject change, and feeling emboldened and protected by a hint of self-righteous resentment. He looked at her for a moment. She noticed he
kept his dark, messy curls longer than he used to; she used to love his hair. Finally, he responded. “Do you remember that day the CBG threw a can at you?” he asked. She said of course.
Most days after school, Jen and Armin would walk to the local library. Spending the afternoon leafing through YA novels and browsing the internet at the computers, they would stay until
closing at 6 p.m. It was only a mile away from school, and that walk was her favorite part of the day. They would wind through the neighborhood, always ending up on Chester Street, where the prettiest houses were.
They would pass the First Nazarene Church and make fun of the sign and its alternating
sayings. In the wintertime they were known for simply putting up “How about that global
warming?” She remembered that day it simply said “Happy new year from god.” That day in particular, sometime in their junior year of high school, it began to rain on their walk to the library. They started to make a run for it.
Frontier Mosaic 11 Then the CBG came: The Cleveland Bike Gang. They were a group of middle-school
students on squat bikes, and they rode around town terrorizing people, or at least trying to.
Mostly their antics were typical juvenile stuff; they spray-painted crude and oversized depictions of male genitalia on buildings, or TP’ed houses. Occasionally they threw empty soda cans at people. And Armin’s brother Faheem was part of the group.
Armin always said he didn’t mind Faheem being a CBGer. To high school students and
adults, they were a harmless, bored group of boys just becoming enamored with their penises. But Armin considered the association a protective barrier for his little brother. As the only Middle Eastern family in Cleveland, and one of only two immigrant families, school was
sometimes tough on them. Armin was bullied for years. But Faheem was born with a naturally light complexion, and Armin said lately his brother had started going by Fred and refusing to speak Arabic at home.
That day the CBG rode past them in the rain, and one of them, not Faheem, threw a can
at Jen. But this time the can was full, and the beverage hit her hard and heavy in the knee. This caused a chain reaction and she twisted her ankle, falling into the puddled pavement. Later,
Armin would beat Faheem, but at that time, he attended to Jen. Her entire leg, from foot to
thigh, angrily pulsed in pain, and she couldn’t step on that side. He carried her on his back to her house a half-mile away, both soaked with rain. They didn’t talk at all. When they got to her
home, both her parents were still at work. Armin helped her onto the couch, propped her leg up onto a pile of cushions, and put bags of ice on both her swelling ankle and knee.
Now, Jen asked why he brought the incident up. She didn’t see how it related.
“I knew two things that day. I loved you, and I had to leave Cleveland,” Armin said. She
felt with that sentence he was trying to explain everything, not only why he left but why they
stopped being close. Jen heard what he didn’t say: “And you are a part of that place. That’s why we were never close again. You are Cleveland.”
Jen knew he had feelings for her throughout high school, though they were never
explicitly revealed. Some people wondered why they were never a couple. Mostly because she was overwhelmingly in love with Craig Mueller and everyone knew it, including Craig. But another reason was petty and small. Part of her found Armin’s shyness and hesitancy off-putting. He
knew and she knew how he felt, but he would never say. Now he was saying it, but the words exposed her deepest insecurity.
Frontier Mosaic 12 “Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll never leave,” she said.
“But you’re here now.” That was true. Starting several years before, Jen began putting
10% of every paycheck into a special account, an account especially for travel. Often on the
weekends, friends would try to convince her to use that money on beer. But she stayed strong, resolute that she would go somewhere.
“I didn’t come because I had to see New York. I came because I wanted to want to see
New York,” she said. She put more pretzels in her mouth. If she wasn’t crazy, they were starting to taste good. Part of her wanted him to hear what she wasn’t saying, that she wanted to feel
what he felt about getting out, about becoming something, whatever that meant. She wanted him to know that she was proud of him for being nothing like her.
Maybe that was why she came to see him; if he could teach her how to be more like him,
maybe going back home would be harder. Maybe she wouldn’t long for the comfort of the
colorful Hallmark aisles that she claimed to hate, wouldn’t miss safe afternoons spent at the Cleveland Public Library. Maybe she wouldn’t be satisfied with Craig’s tepid affections. Jen didn’t love Craig anymore (of course, she never truly did), and he wasn’t her
boyfriend. She had a huge crush on him throughout high school, mostly because she thought he looked exactly like Orlando Bloom. But occasionally they hung out and hooked up.
Relationships in Cleveland were like revolving doors, everything and everyone were too close together and you couldn’t help but run in circles with people. Nothing was new. Sometimes you were with someone just because you were bored (which would explain one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the state).
Jen was surprised when Armin stood up.
“You used to say you wanted to go to China, right?” he said. When she nodded, confused, he held out his hand for her. They got in a cab and Armin said “East Broadway” to the driver. In minutes they stood outside Chinatown. It was only nine and a huge, brightly lit street
buzzed with life, though some vendors were closing up shop. As Jen walked through the barrage
of people, a cacophony of colors, music, and sights opened up around her, engulfing her. Signs lit
the path and delicious scents seemed to roll in from every direction. For a moment, she forgot Armin was even there.
But he led her to a small food truck. For eighty-five cents each he bought something
called cheung fun, apparently Cantonese rice noodle rolls. Folded noodles were nestled in a spicy
Frontier Mosaic 13 ginger soy sauce and topped with ground pork, shrimp, and sliced scallions and it was the most
delicious thing she’d ever had. Standing aside the foot traffic, they watched people go by as they ate. The night air was cool and a little breezy. asked.
“Some of these street food places will close soon. Do you want anything else?” Armin So they had steamed pork and vegetable siopao from the same truck. Then they went to a
kebab cart a few feet away and had cumin-lamb skewers, followed by Malaysian beef jerky across the road, and ended with salty sweet egg yolk buns. Truthfully, she ended up eating alone as he watched in amazement. But her appetite thrilled her; it wasn’t just the craving for food, but for something new. She wanted to try absolutely everything she could. By the end, she was so full that her stomach twisted in painful cramps.
“I’m ruined for Josie’s,” she said, leaning her forehead against a cool brick wall. They still
stood in the street. Before today she honestly thought Josie’s sesame chicken was good.
“One more drink?” he suggested, laughing, apparently finding her gluttony amusing. But
both his suggestion and his amusement excited her; this whole time she worried her company
would disappoint him. She imagined all the interesting and smart people he must know in the city and knew she could never be a part of that. But here he was, wanting to spend more time
with her. So even though doing so risked her vomiting an amalgam of Chinese sludge, he took her to a club.
The room was dark and smoky, Mandarin dubstep playing loudly. People were dancing,
but Jen and Armin sat at the bar and drank Korean soju and plum wine cocktails. She felt
comfortable by then and wondered if she blended in yet, wondered if anyone could tell her dress came from Wal-Mart and she got her hair cut at ValueCuts. The tension had also disappeared between her and Armin, as they sat laughing and drinking. That was until he leaned over, grabbed her hand, and said seriously, perhaps drunkenly, one word. “Stay.”
He didn’t explain further, just looked at her with hooded, dark eyes. Although he didn’t
say stay at the bar, stay the night, stay at my place, stay longer, she understood him. He wasn’t
even saying stay with me. He was saying don’t go back. Going back would be a mistake. It’s not
escaping if you return to captivity. Do you really want to go back after being here? Could you be happy? Maybe he was saying everything she wanted him to, even more. Wasn’t she worried he
Frontier Mosaic 14 would be indifferent? And yet, inexplicably, she pulled back from him, something like fear
coiling in her stomach. Just like that, his back straightened and the vulnerable moment was over. They silently finished their drinks and took another cab, first dropping her off at her hotel, and then Armin left.
Jen was rearranging the anniversary cards. There was a strange phenomenon in which
people who look at a card and decide they don’t want it feel no need to put it back properly, as if the card doesn’t exist anymore, or is undeserving. Occasionally, as she corrected this
phenomenon, she would glance at the contents. One in particular caught her attention, attention that had been increasingly wandering over the last few days since she’d returned from her trip. I can’t believe so many years have passed
You have truly been my best friend, my confidant, my light How can I express my
She closed the card. They all ended the same way.
After work she stopped by the grocery store to pick up a few items. When she returned
home, Craig called, asking to come over. She could guess what he wanted and even though she wasn’t in the mood, she invited him over anyway. But when Jen answered the door, she found herself immediately pulling him in for a hard kiss, hard enough the pressure hurt her lips. He seemed to like it, guffawing a little when they pulled apart.
“What’s up, baby? Did you have fun in California?” he asked.
Jen looked him in the eyes, looking for something. She reached out and tousled his fine,
blonde hair, looking for an image. Unsatisfied, she gave up, allowing him to undress her in record time, acquiescing easily.
Later, when Craig turned on the TV, she went into the kitchen and pulled out the
packages she bought at Wal-Mart: a tube of wasabi paste and a bag of Snyder’s pretzels. She
tossed the ingredients together and baked them for ten minutes. When they were finished, Jen put the green dusted pretzels in a bowl and let Craig try them. “What is this shit?” he said.
“They’re made with wasabi.”
Frontier Mosaic 15 He spit the bite out into a napkin and set it on the coffee table, then said they should go
to Josie’s later. She wasn’t offended. What he thought wasn’t important. Sitting down at the
dining room table, she looked into the bowl. Part of her was afraid to try them. She picked one up and ate the morsel, chewing carefully, closing her eyes.
The pretzels were gross, like the ones at the bar were. And yet, they were still missing
something.
Frontier Mosaic 16
RACHAEL ROSS
Underworld Blue crystals crunch underneath her feet. Breathless daffodils make their way Up the tree. She admires the veins running Through the leaves. Breaks a shimmering leaf And gold spills out onto her dirt covered Hands. She feels a drop on her head and She looks up to see. The sun was dripping Yellow and orange flames. Her hair caught On fire. Sweating in her silk sheets she reaches for him. Only feeling pillows and the empty space makes Her curl into a ball. She had forgotten. Her sleeping Thoughts had dissimulated reality. She can Smell him, but he hasn’t been there in weeks. He took her hand and spun her as the water started to Boil. The oven was set at 375 and it would only be a few Minutes until she would begin to make dinner. Otis was Playing, their favorite singer. Dropping hard pasta into The water as he turned up the music. She was on the Phone with her mom when he left. He had forgotten The bottle of wine. Dinner was done and she had Put the spaghetti and bread on their fine china.
Frontier Mosaic 17
201 Hazel Valley Ranch Hands caked with dirt, the cracks in her fingers quench moisture after a long morning planting the sage & mint. The trees leak light through their branches & decorate the acreage with golden puddles of sun. The ivy has climbed the walls of their house. The hose has rusted and the patio chairs have lost their pillows. Her hands shake as she picks up paint chips that have fallen from the back of the house. Squirrels chase on the fading roof. The packing boxes litter the floor of her living room. She stares out into the yard that raised her children and hugs her old dogs deep in their homey graves. She sees the eastern white pines who have been her friends. The barn that took her 23 days to finish painting a deep red. She wonders if the trees will groan when she’s gone.
Frontier Mosaic 18
Spots LIZ DUECK
Frontier Mosaic 19 FICTION
Dust in the Blood SHAWN FINLEY
I am again crammed into the back of my parents’ van; the smell of electrical grease and
the streaming sagebrush are not helping my mood. My favorite part of our yearly pilgrimage to Midland is leaving.
“John, stop frowning. It won’t be that bad,” Mom says.
“It’s always worse,” I say. “Do we really have to go see them every year?”
“Yes. They’re family. Now, I expect you to be on your best behavior,” Mom says. “You
too, Allen.”
“We’ll be on ours as long as they are,” Allen says.
“I know you don’t like them and they can sometimes be draining, but we’ll just have to
deal with it,” Mom says. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
We had already passed the Red River and most of the signs selling pornography, much
to my mother’s relief. She would always avert her eyes and tell us to do the same, like Allen and I had never seen porn before. Outside of Fort Worth, we passed the Arby’s where I lost a tooth
every summer for three years. I wish Texas had claimed only my teeth and not a child’s wonder or my mother’s happiness.
South of Midland, we pass forests of pump jacks and wagon wheel gates before pulling in
front of George’s barn. We never park in the crescent drive with the green grass and shading
Frontier Mosaic 20 pecan trees. The trees are fluttering with pigeons, doves, and grackles. The green is out of place
in this blasted waste of sand, heat, and twanging accents. The water bill must be huge. We walk through the blistering shade and past the wrought iron gate with its dried lotus pods like wasps’ nests.
George always takes his sweet time answering the door, and of course, he will not let
anyone else do it either. All he ever does is complain about the heat, the dust, and that we never call. He never calls. George is approaching obesity from the other side, not through any hard
work on his part, but through the cocktail of drugs he is on—all failing to stop his cancer. I think he is addicted to annoying me. He always asks questions like why I do not have a girlfriend or if my moustache makes me a pedo.
“Maddi, James,” George says, opening the door. “You’re late.”
“We’re a day early,” Dad says. “You know that.”
“Panda, you glue a dead rat to your face?” George says. “Ha ha, very funny, Grandpa. I’ve never heard that one before. And please don’t call me
panda.” I wore a shirt with a panda on it when I was nine, and he still calls me panda nine years later. He called Mom bird turd until she was in kindergarten.
“Hippie, why don’t you get a job?” George says. Allen ignores him.
We walk into the house where my mother lived some thirty years ago. Not much has changed. The house is frigid as always; George keeps the temperature at sixty-two and mutters about the cold. Only the tinge of urine among the potpourri is new. Mom had said in the car that grandpa was suffering from incontinence, and now it seemed we would all suffer as well.
Mom also said that George had refused rubber sheets as they would “flood the room.” Like a soggy, stinking mattress is any better.
Allen and I take our bags to the sunroom, an enclosed patio filled with sunflowers:
thousand piece puzzles, pictures, dried flowers, plastic petals, and the wallpaper to match. As
usual, the floor is largely invisible underneath plastic tubs filled with worthless crap. My aunts and uncles broke anything of value long ago with their bickering. Allen and I move the tubs
filled with broken toasters and boxes with big “As Seen on TV” logos. Grandpa must have done the Christmas shopping early.
“Don’t we already have a Slap Chop?” Allen says, carrying a stack of boxes to the back. “Yeah, and enough ShamWows to make a quilt.”
Frontier Mosaic 21 We take the air mattress and begin to inflate it in the clearing. The thing is a queen size
and stands a foot and a half off the ground when full. It is too soft and any movements will
continuously reverberate, but it beats the folding couch. The mattress inflates; we head back to the living room. George watches CNN and argues with the news casters. Tonight might not be that bad.
The door from the garage opens and Aunt Michelle comes in, Mason trailing behind.
Michelle is a few years younger than Mom, but with her smoking it is hard to tell. Michelle is so
un-like Mom. She’s more like George, short and round with sunken brown eyes. Mom may have tattooed lip liner and soft eye shadow, but Michelle has “Chris” in curvy letters, flanked by
butterflies on the small of her back; a “tramp stamp” of her ex-pro-wrestler ex-husband and Mason’s father.
“Oh hey, I didn’t know y’all were coming down,” Michelle says. “We called you last week about it,” Mom says. “Yeah, but you didn’t tell me.”
Allen and I look at each other before heading back into the sunroom. Mom can hold her
own. Allen moves more boxes to clear a space in front of a small TV, one of those with the VCR built into it. TV time. The sound of footsteps on the plywood ramp pushes that idea away.
Mason follows us into the sunroom. Mason is nine or ten, I do not really care which, and he looks more like his father than Michelle—lucky bastard.
Mason goes over to the TV and turns it on, flipping through channels until it lands on
Comedy Central. The show is some stand up by Jeff Dunham, his endlessly reiterated routines and puppets blending seamlessly together in a swirl of stereotypes.
“Hey, Mason, John and I were going to watch Adult Swim,” Allen says. “Too bad, this is my TV,” Mason says.
“Don’t you have a TV in your room back at your house though?” I say. “So? You expect me to walk all the way back there?”
“Yeah, like fifty yards is all that far,” Allen says. Spoiled brat.
Allen takes out his Zune and starts watching a movie. I take out my laptop and let the opening of “Losing My Religion” wash away the inane laughter.
Frontier Mosaic 22 The day starts an hour before dawn as the grackles chatter in the backyard, their calls like
the whistling Jupiter rockets we shot off one Fourth of July. I check my sandals for scorpions and head to one of the French style doors that open onto the back patio. Turning off the door alarm, I pull on the door that doesn’t stick as much. The air outside is already hot, but feels refreshing before the heat soaks into my skin. The back patio is paving stones; thin weeds sprouting
between the cracks. Several chairs are arranged around a cracked glass table, every inch crusted in bird droppings. Two large pecan trees grow in the yard. The trees used to shade an above-
ground pool when I was younger. When George got fed up with fishing pecans out, he had it removed. That was when I started hating Midland.
I walk off to where Great-Grandpa’s house stood until a month ago. The house where
George’s father lived had been set on fire and bulldozed, a series of actions intended to prevent
another fight. A few years back, my parents salvaged Great-Grandpa’s weather-worn antique ice
chest from the dilapidated home and, after asking if any one objected (there were no objections), took it back with us. Mom and Dad spent something like three months in the garage refinishing the ice chest and building a shadow box for the ice tongs, ticket, and pick, sending pictures of it when they were done. Michelle immediately accused Mom of stealing away the inheritance.
In the early light, I pick over the foundation and twisted char, picking up old brown glass
medicine bottles and wire insulators, the reflections of glass and ceramic giving them away.
Something large glitters under splintered wood: a pineapple marmalade jar full of silver dollars. I guess Great-Grandpa never trusted banks. The jar is in fairly good shape. The label is even legible; one of the few benefits of living where it never rains.
Setting the jar down carefully, I pore over the pile, my collection steadily growing: six
brown bottles, a dozen or so small white ceramic insulators, a large blue-green insulator, and an old fashioned RC bottle with a painted label. With so many treasures, I start sequestering them away. I stash the RC, marmalade jar, and large insulator in a rusted out combine harvester, one
of many such monuments to tetanus that had belonged to Great-Grandpa. I carry the medicine bottles and the small insulators in my shirt to the back door. It is locked. I knock on the door with my elbow in an attempt to wake Allen and not summon George.
I watch as Allen rolls over and looks to me. He swings his legs over and plods to the
door. As he unlocks it, I jerk my head up to where the small beeper alarm is, no doubt turned on again by George. Allen turns it off and opens the door.
Frontier Mosaic 23 “Bottles?” Allen says, his voice groggy. It is before noon after all.
I nod yes and carefully unload the clinking bottles and insulators while Allen walks back
to bed. I stash the treasures in a small Styrofoam cooler, one of dozens discarded back here when Grandpa gets his insulin. Using plastic bags, I cushion my prizes like eggs. The container
hidden, I head to the kitchen, creeping carefully, watching for the scorpions that love to hide in
the brown shag carpet of the living room. The kitchen pantry is loaded with cans of green beans, corn, pickles, applesauce, and out of date cereal. I pour myself a bowl of stale Crispix with one percent milk. I do not like white calcium water. Dad comes into the kitchen. “Wouldn’t you rather have an omelet?”
“I would if the only eggs they have weren’t those Egg Beaters crap.” “Language.”
Dad looks in the fridge for a moment. “How about we wake Allen and go get donuts?” I pour the milk down the sink, using my spoon to sieve out the soggy cereal.
Allen and I sit in the sunroom, quietly eating apple fritters while watching Cartoon
Network. Dad has taken the van and gone to his job site. A day of climbing around in the hot
confined spaces of a substation transformer is like paradise compared with staying here. On TV, some annoying sailor fails to do anything entertaining. I go into the living room and open the
entertainment center. Dozens of dusty VHS tapes are stacked here. Home recordings of A Goof Troop Christmas and Merlin are stacked alphabetically among others. I find a tape labeled “Popeye” and head back to the room. If I am going to watch a sailor, it will be funny.
The sounds and smells of cooking come from the kitchen as Pop Eye fights Sinbad in
Arabia. Allen has dozed off again and I go see if Mom needs any help. Mom is in the kitchen prepping breakfast: French toast for her and George.
“Grandpa has a doctor’s appointment tomorrow to follow up on some blood work,” Mom
says. “It would be nice if you helped out with the laundry today.” “It would be, wouldn’t it?”
“John,” Mom says, looking at me while beating egg stuff with milk. “Fine,” I say, getting out plates and silverware. George comes into the kitchen.
Frontier Mosaic 24 “You got my coffee yet Maddi?” George says. “Yes, your decaf is in the pot.”
“I don’t want decaf,” George says. “I want coffee.” “You know you can’t have caffeine, George,” Mom says. “The doctor said it’s not good
for your heart.”
“I’ve been drinking coffee since I was twelve. It gives you grit.”
George has enough grit to sand wood.
“Okay, okay. I’ll brew you another pot.” Mom says. George does not know that I helped
Mom put decaf in the regular canister.
Mom is vacuuming the living room and Allen is doing the dishes. George has gone out
to the barn, probably to fiddle with the scroll saw. I walk down the hall to my grandparents’
room, the smell of urine growing stronger. The bed is a disheveled mess, a white humidifier and a breathing thing for sleep apnea sit atop the low dresser, the remaining space covered with pill
calendars and prescription bottles. The stench and dampness make me gag as I pull off the sheets and carry them to the laundry room. I shove the filthy bundle into the washer. Shower time.
The warm water and lavender soap are relaxing, the water running down my back and the
smell driving away the lingering acrid scent of urine. A loud thud jars me from the moment. I
rinse out the last of the shampoo and turn off the water. I pull a towel through the curtain as the drizzle stops. The water here sucks. The water softener makes me feel soapy. As I get dressed, someone knocks on the bathroom door.
“Panda, get the mop. You’ve got a mess to clean up, boy,” George says. “The detergent
fell.”
“Just give me a minute,” I say as I dry off. “Now, young man.”
In the laundry room I see the puddle of creeping blue soap and small blobs of the stuff all
over the base board. George could not even be bothered to start cleaning. The strong smell of
fertilizer in the garage makes my nose burn as I look for the mop amongst cases of peach Fresca and freezers full of bitter pecans.
Frontier Mosaic 25 Allen and I sit in the sunroom watching Samurai Jack on Boomerang. I feel old; the show
came out like only a decade ago. Mason comes into the sunroom, grabs the remote off the top of the TV and starts flicking through channels.
“We were watching that,” Allen says. “That show is old.”
“So? Jack is voiced by Phil LaMarr,” I say.
“I’ve never heard of him. Anyway, the show’s on Boomerang and all they show is old crap,” Mason says, stopping the channel on Cartoon Network. “Now this is a good show.” The blurb in the bottom corner says Total Drama Island.
“John, let’s go outside,” Allen says. I get up and follow Allen through the back door and
outside again. “It’s like he does that on purpose.”
“I’m pretty sure he does,” I say. “Remember how he always invites us to play video games
only to sit there playing single player and never handing off the controller?”
We walk along the dirt road next to the barn and follow the property line where the
fences of a new housing development stand. We pass by the place where Great-Grandpa’s car was stuck in the sand and Dad, Allen, and I used shovels and paving stones to get it loose. A
concrete retaining cistern sits next to the rusted housing of an irrigation pump. Allen and I climb up the low wall and sit on the edge, feet dangling inside. The outlet is clogged with sand and a couple of tumbleweeds stand to one side.
Allen and I watch as a lizard scurries about in the bottom, unable to get any grip on the
relative smoothness of the walls.
“This cistern is kind of like that idea of the small world from that book I had to read,”
Allen says.
“A microcosm?” I say.
“Yeah. That lizard is like Piggy, trapped in a kind of hell with no escape.”
“I don’t really think so Allen. Piggy was trying to maintain order and goodness. That
lizard is just stuck.” Allen drops down onto the sand and sets about catching the lizard. Moments later, Allen lifts the lizard in his cupped hands before releasing it into the desert. A lizard-less tail wiggles in Allen’s hand, flecks of dust in the blood.
Frontier Mosaic 26 I climb a small dune in the back lot. There used to be nothing behind Grandpa’s house
except flat heat from here to the horizon, not these endless cookie-cutter houses and stunted
trees. Something hits my shin: a dirt clod. I look down to see Mason with another clod in his fist.
“Don’t throw things at me. You could hurt someone,” I say.
“You’re not special,” Mason says. “This is my back yard. You don’t live here.”
“Neither do you,” Allen says, coming from behind the dune. “You live next door.” Mason throws his dirt clod at me; dirt explodes over my shirt. “I’ll get you for that,” I say, picking a clod. “He’s not worth it, Allen says.” I drop the clod; Allen is right.
“I’m telling,” Mason shouts, turning to run to his house. Aunt Michelle comes out of the garage and launches into her tirade like one of the news
reporters George watches. I catch something about knowing better and Mason is only a child. Michelle does not like me pointing out that Mason hit me with a dirt clod; I should not lie. Allen steps in, says he saw Mason hit me. Michelle ignores him. “Apologize,” Michelle says. “Fine.”
I’m sitting in the kitchen at the computer, checking my e-mail. Dishes of spaghetti and
French bread with too much butter and salt stand uncovered on the island even though we
finished dinner hours ago. Food poisoning waiting to happen. Michelle enters from the living room.
“Does your Mom know you’re on the internet?” Michelle says. “Yes, Aunt Michelle.”
Michelle goes into the living room. I hit the start button and begin shutting the computer down. I wish they had Wi-Fi so I could just connect with my laptop. I head to the sunroom.
“Does John have permission to go on the internet?” Michelle calls to Mom.
Frontier Mosaic 27 “Of course I do. I’m eighteen,” I say.
“I asked your mom, and besides you could be looking at obscene material,” Michelle says.
“Yes, because that’s the kind of thing I’d do in my grandparent’s kitchen,” I say.
“Don’t sass me,” Michelle says. “I’m older. You have to respect me, I don’t care what shit
Maddi filled you with.”
“I’m sick of your fucking bullshit Aunt Michelle. While you go out and get smashed on
box wine, Mom’s here cooking, cleaning, and taking care of your father. And you feel entitled to my respect?”
Michelle sneers and leaves through the garage; the house shakes with her exit. Mom
comes into the kitchen and opens one of the canned strawberry margaritas Dad brought back the other night. Mom waves me over to the table.
“Can I have one of those?” I say hesitatingly, trying to lighten my punishment for
swearing, and at my aunt no less.
“Sure,” Mom says, surprisingly. I open a can and take a sip, the sweetness cut a little by
the alcohol. “It’s weird. I used to pray every night.” “For Grandpa’s health?” I say.
“No. As a kid I didn’t get to spend time with friends or have a life really. I was always
here taking care of the house,” Mom says, taking a drink. “James doesn’t understand. He didn’t miss out on going to prom just because he didn’t have a date. He didn’t have to be home by
seven on weeknights or nine on weekends. He never fought with his brother. It was miserable. “I guess it still is. Dad’s cancer is getting worse. As a kid I used to pray that The Lord
would take me away and end my suffering.” We sit quietly at the table. Mom crumples her can and puts it in the recycling bag.
“You said yourself that the Lord works in mysterious ways.” I say, looking at my can on
the table.
“I don’t know what to do. James is distant when it comes to things like this. I’m not even
sure why I’m telling you all this.”
“Probably the alcohol,” I say. Mom looks at me sharply. “And because I’m here. You have
spent many nights up listening to my problems, like when Dad and I don’t get along or when I’m feeling down. Besides, what kind of family would we be if you couldn’t share a drunken
Frontier Mosaic 28 confession with us? Everyone’s a product of their upbringing and you did a pretty good job with Allen and me.”
“I guess you’re right. I don’t know what to do about Michelle though.” “I don’t either. We’ll just have to deal with it,” I say. Mom stands up and walks down the
hall toward Grandpa’s room. I drink the rest of the margarita; my head feels fuzzy and not from underage drinking.
The van is packed, the bottles, insulators, RC, and marmalade jar securely wrapped in my
duffel bag in the back with everyone else’s luggage, most of a case of strawberry margaritas, and a
dozen Ziploc bags of pecans. Michelle is not standing in the driveway with Grandpa George; she went to drop off Mason for Chris’s weekend of custody. We pull out of the driveway, waving at Grandpa.
“Be stranger,” Grandpa George says, waving at us.
We turn onto Rankin Highway, white wagon wheel gates standing brightly in the
morning sun. Allen is snoring, his head on a pillow against the window. Dad is driving, a cup of decaf in his hand while Mom looks back at the house. I sit in the back of the van and watch the streaming sagebrush as we leave Midland.
Frontier Mosaic 29
Bullseye ELLE DENYER
Frontier Mosaic 30 NONFICTION
The Hatred of Sound SHAWN FINLEY
The sound repeats, a three-second song bite looped imperfectly—my girlfriend’s phone alarm. I want to leap out of bed and dash the phone to the ground and grind it under my heel. In my apartment in Stillwater, Oklahoma, the alarm never gets to the second loop. At home, I
unfold from bed and hit my alarm’s reset button, never the snooze—not once in twelve years did I hit the snooze. Elizabeth, pinning me against the wall in her Chickasha apartment, has her
phone set to auto-snooze after five minutes. Her body heat is unfamiliar: at home, I sleep in my underwear, covered by only a sheet. I inch my way off the foot of Elizabeth’s bed. Sometimes, when I wake around dawn, I watch dust float in the morning light and listen to car doors and
distant train horns pierce the monotony of Elizabeth’s faint snoring. Then comes the alarm and I sneak off the bed and slink off to somewhere quiet.
When I was in high school, years before I woke in Elizabeth’s bed, I remember the heavy
groan of the hinges as my door swung open, the click of the light-switch, and the sound of the ceiling fan straining against static friction as it began turning.
“Are you going to sleep all day?” Dad said on those Saturdays.
I curled into my blankets and swaddled my head in a pillow. Dad told me again of
waking at dawn all his life. Mom was usually in the kitchen with cinnamon rolls or pancakes, her voice like ice water.
Frontier Mosaic 31 “Quiet, please,” I said. “No voices, too early.”
“Been in the liquor cabinet again?” Mom said.
Less than five miles away from the room where my father woke me, there is a landing strip for Tinker Air Force Base. The large planes with radar dishes on their back, the A.W.A.C.s land there at all times, their engine noise loud, angry, and familiar. The planes never bothered
me, not once in the eighteen-some-odd years I lived there. My parents telling me to wake up or
asking what I wanted for breakfast sets me on edge.
Zippers zipping, bacon crackling, heaters whirring. The crunch of frost caked grass and
wind howling through the trees. The fleeting cries of distant owls and the ever-present planes are
the sounds of my adolescent winters. I walk up the road from our neighborhood in my winter jacket and across the intersection to sit on the red benches outside Carl Albert Junior High.
Solitary cars drive by in the cold. No one is here except the janitors inside, and me sitting outside with the frost. The doors are locked; they open in half an hour. The best hours of February are these half-hours of frozen silence.
There were mornings when Mom woke around four or five and sat at the kitchen table,
reading in a pool of yellow light. At six a.m., I would eat breakfast at the table at Mom’s
insistence, food and drink long since banned elsewhere. Mom’s voice would be scratchy, a combination of tired and exasperated. Her voice then is my voice now on less than ideal
mornings when someone knocks on the door at eight a.m. and I answer, wrapped in a blanket.
In my apartment that overlooks the bars of Washington Street, “The Strip” as locals call
it, the trash truck rumbles past at four in the morning. The truck does not bother me when it
makes the rounds, not even in the summer when the new drivers blast Ramble On loud enough
for me to sing along through three walls. I only know of the trash trucks and their penchant for Led Zeppelin from summer mornings when I was nocturnal, in the days after Elizabeth and I stopped speaking to each other.
The fraternities and sororities of Oklahoma State Greek Life are out again, singing
country and pop music at eight in the evening as the late summer sun arcs through my living
room window. The crowds in front of the house across the street sing mechanically, more of a chanted half-song than music. In my room, I can hear their music, distorted by the surrounding buildings. I can hear their music through my sound-canceling headphones and my classic rock.
Frontier Mosaic 32 Sometimes, the whole of their house is turned out on the lawn, watching football on TVs
in tents. I can hear the scores easily in my kitchen and the Greek Life cheering anywhere in my apartment. Later, in the fall, the sounds of country are pierced by angle grinders and the faint
fizzing of arc welders as groups of men build towering monuments to tetanus from pipe as the
rest of the houses spend hours poking tissue paper through plastic netting, “pomping” they call
it, to create the murals of school and life in Oklahoma that will hang from those steel frames. I
don’t understand their school spirit or their excitement over homecoming football. One year, our team won Bedlam, the match between Oklahoma State University and our supposed rival,
University of Oklahoma, and the crowds tore down the goal post and filled the bars I can see
from my bedroom window. Living with Greek Life housing is not a problem. I filter much of the noise, but at these times, they sift into my life.
July fourth fireworks and the panicked dogs they bring; nothing. Overloud drunks in the
alley behind my apartment, stadium cheers, and hooligan’s four a.m. fireworks; awful. Gum
smacking, throat clearing, and toenail clippers. “Good morning,” in a level tone. At my parents’
house near Oklahoma City, the tornado sirens test every Sunday and Wednesday at noon and
sound when the town is under tornado alert. In Stillwater, the town tests the sirens once a week and only sounds them when a tornado touches down. The sirens of my parents’ house were
predictable, the differences in volume and pitch could tell you if Norman, Edmond, or Del City were under alert. I knew where danger was and how long I had to hide in the bathtub with pillows and a flashlight.
Fingernails on blackboards, sniffles, and slurping bother most people. Others have odder
sounds such as humming, hard consonants, or loose change in a pocket. Some people find
certain sounds annoying, other people experience tensed muscles, increased heart rate, or disgust. It’s called misophonia—the hatred of sound.
One morning, summers ago when the rain refused to fall, crickets in droves littered the
short stretch of walkway outside my apartment. Opening the door let in dozens who scurried along the baseboards or dove beneath the fridge. Outside footsteps met with crunching. At
night, one or two would chirp, sometimes outside my window or along my baseboard. Instead of the near constant hum of crickets while camping or the long, sharp drone of summer cicadas, the crickets would chirp only a few at a time. My roommate took out insecticide and washed the
Frontier Mosaic 33 walls in poison. I still see the hundreds of legless crickets as my roommate swept them from our balcony and onto the cars below, hitting the concrete with a sound like rain.
Frontier Mosaic 34
Broken Down EMMA SHORE
Frontier Mosaic 35 NEKE CAREY
Cemetery of Stars I stare into my grandmother’s stub-stuffed ashtray Taken to a place of stars;
My own memories stutter and decay And I sink into her world, before the wars.
My grandmother, nineteen, standing in the doorway Of the house scored with battle scars.
Her eyes have not earned wrinkles to display
Yet she smiles with solemn heart, ready to bleed memoirs Recounting nights now slipped away,
Drinking on the moon. She sang melodies, the boys strummed guitars, Doe eyed, they begged her to stay
For one more song, a few more cigars. Then I see her, sitting careful in a wooden chair Her bones frail, her lungs burned.
She snuffs another stub in the pile, her face shifts to the sky. I look up too. We smile at the cemetery of stars.
Frontier Mosaic 36 AMANDA HAYS
The Moon Ethereal moon, Pregnant and pale With frosted luminosity. She has heard Millions of pleas, I-love-yous and Desperate wishes. A rounded flashlight bulb Buried in its enormous socket, Radiating glimmers of Lunar fluorescence. Fingernail clipping In the glittering blanket of ink, Which swaddles the infantile world. She watches the tiny Pocket of a universe Seen From the muted yellow lights of Shuttered windows. The giant eyeball of God, Pupil-less and vacant As its human counterpart. God has stopped Watching, The world has stopped Caring, And yet the universe Goes on.
Frontier Mosaic 37 FICTION
Money Trees ALEX WEBB
Rob fished through the cup holder of his dinged-up, dirty-white, ‘98 Cavalier. He
rummaged through fifty or so pennies looking for the glint of a quarter, nickel, or dime. He knew the pennies wouldn’t buy much, but he still didn’t like throwing out money. The end result was a cup holder full of mostly useless copper. He needed a little over a dollar to buy a two-liter, and he was pretty sure there was enough in the pile. He sat in his car counting out what he
scrounged. It came to $1.35. He had about five dollars in his checking account, but he would
need the money for gas to pick up Paul and head out to Steven’s friend’s house later that night. He wouldn’t have enough for the round trip, but Paul usually helped out on their way home. As he got out of his car, parked in the dark Walmart parking lot, he could see an old
homeless man he’d nicknamed “Dinero” making a long arching path to his car. Dinero had been begging around Rob’s neighborhood for a couple of weeks now, and Rob recognized him
immediately. He was meth-skinny and maybe five-foot-five. He had an angular jaw, but his skin retreated into his cheekbones leaving shadows that looked like empty space throughout his tanned, scarred face. Rob guessed Dinero probably had a few decades worth of good looks
starved out of him. He wore the same yellowing crew length tube socks every day, and his pants
were cut at an odd length that split the difference between shorts and capris. Around his mouth was a copper brown stain in his moldy, white beard. Dinero moved in a jerky half-skip with his
Frontier Mosaic 38 chest out, almost like he was approaching to fight, pulling up his pants every few steps without stopping.
“What’s up man, you got any money? My car ran out of gas a few miles away and I’m
trying to get home to my wife and kids in Muskogee.”
Either Dinero had spent the last few weeks begging around Tulsa in an Odyssean
struggle to return home, or he was lying for beer money. Rob suspected the latter. In all other
previous encounters, Rob pulled out his empty wallet and showed the man that he didn’t have
anything to give, but tonight he had a fist full of change. There’s some moral code that dictates that you can’t turn down a beggar while carrying a handful of change, Rob thought, so he
dumped his dollar thirty-five into the outstretched palm of the beggar. Not only was Rob pissed
that he’d felt obligated to hand over twentyish percent of his liquid net worth, but he recognized
Dinero while the old man counted the money and picked at scabs on his elbows. Rob could have been anyone to him. He treated Rob as if he were a faulty ATM. At least this guy needs it more than I do, Rob thought.
“The fuck, man? Come on. I know you’ve got more than that. Gas is expensive,” the old
man said. He jutted his expectant hand out for more money — money that Rob didn’t have.
“I gotta pay for gas too, asshole. I’m not Bill Gates,” Rob said. The old man saw another
car pull up a few hundred feet away and skirted off to go beg at someone else. “You’re welcome, motherfucker!” Rob shouted after him.
Rob walked into Walmart to find the Coke that would pair with Paul’s Jack Daniel’s.
Paul and Rob had not been invited to Steven’s friend’s party, but Steven knew the people pretty
well, and knew that by midnight either the house would be too crowded, or the people too drunk to be able to tell who was invited and who had wandered in. Steven’s philosophy was show up with whiskey for the guys and mixer for the girls, leaving everyone drunk and happy.
Steven’s recently graduated private school friends acted like they lived for this time of
year. Back from college for summer with rich parents who always seemed to be summering
somewhere else. The parents left their massive houses and equally expansive liquor cabinets unattended. The parties got rowdy and anonymous, and Steven and Paul loved them.
Rob hated the parties. His gratification came, not from booze or drugs or girls, but the
small treasures he found in the houses. Rob nicked little things from the houses: a few rings,
bracelets, and a pair of salt and pepper shakers once. He took anything that he could slip into his
Frontier Mosaic 39 pocket. He liked to have the weight of the object in his hands. He felt empowered skimming the excess off the over-privileged. As far as Rob knew no one noticed other than Paul. Paul never
joined in, but was usually sober enough to catch on. Rob was certain that Steven never noticed. Steven usually drank until he blacked-out. Rob didn’t think the owners would miss what he took,
but even if they did, they could always buy another of whatever it was that Rob made disappear. Rob swiped his card, nearly emptying his checking account for a two-liter of Coke he
probably wouldn’t even drink.
The “check engine” light blinked on as Rob pulled up to Paul’s Mom’s decaying house. A
massive overgrown leafless tree in the front yard obscured most of the porch. Under the
streetlight, the parts of the house visible through the branches looked like they had originally
been painted white, but had degraded to an off-green. Compared to the sterile hallways of Rob’s ticky-tacky apartment complex, Paul’s house looked as if it were decomposing into the ground upon which it was built.
Rob parked the car and unhooked the loose latch on Paul’s rusty front gate. A
thickheaded pit bull from the yard next door sprinted out, snarling and barking, teeth bared. The thick shouldered dog pressed its wide face into the slack of the leaning chain link fence. Ducking under branches and pushing tall weeds aside, Rob climbed the steps to Paul’s porch and knocked on the door.
Paul emerged carrying a three-quarters full bottle of Jack Daniel’s that he’d bought a few
weeks ago but hadn’t drunk yet.
“How broke are you today?” Rob asked.
“I had ramen for breakfast.” Paul stepped out of his house and handed his friend the
bottle. “You got the Coke, right?”
“Better believe it. Can you pitch in for some gas coming home?” Rob asked. “I don’t
know if I’ll be able to make it back to my place.” Paul nodded.
Paul led the way, pushing back the dead branches that grabbed at him like bony fingers
through the front yard forest, returning to the driveway where Rob’s car was parked.
They rode together, Paul’s favorite heavy metal blaring. Rob tolerated the music.
Rob pulled into a gas station and turned off the car. He filled his tank up with what was
left in his checking account. He climbed back into the car.
Frontier Mosaic 40 “I saw Dinero tonight. That methy bastard got my savings account.”
“You emptied your cup holder for him?” Paul asked. “What could have moved you to
such a charitable act?”
“Well, shit, man, I don’t know. I had a hand full of change. I couldn’t say I didn’t have
any,” Rob said.
“But no one made you hand it over. He didn’t threaten you, did he?”
right?”
“I mean he needed it more than I did, right? Poor people gotta look out for each other, Paul turned the music back on and cancelled out Rob’s voice. Rob realized he wasn’t even
sure why he’d given Dinero the money. He’d told himself that he was obligated to hand it over morally or socially, but, Paul was right, he did have a choice. Dinero didn’t pull out a
switchblade. He wasn’t starving on the side of the road. Rob thought he really hadn’t helped or
hurt the old man in any real way. If he’d rejected him, the result would be the same—he’d still be out there panhandling. Maybe the old man bought another beer; maybe he was actually stranded and no one believed him. But, even if he were lost and trying to find his way home, the gas he could have bought with $1.35 wouldn’t have gotten him more than a few feet down the road.
Rob and Paul pulled up to the house. They assumed this was the right place because the
street was littered with Mercedes and Lexus. The house looked like the capital building of a
small wealthy nation. A collage of stone made a meandering path which led from the mail box to the porch steps. The grass was thick and clipped evenly at a uniform height. They could see flashing lights through the windows and heard vague rumbles of bass as they stepped out of
Rob’s parked car. Paul carried the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and the two-liter of Coke. Rob called Steven to make sure they weren’t about to crash the wrong party. The phone rang and went
straight to voicemail. They called again. Steven spilled out the front door stumbling as he yelled “Where are you?” into the phone.
“Where have you been man? It’s crazy in there,” Steven said as he steadied himself against
one of the columns on the portico. “The girls in there are unbelievable. I’m talking to this girl right now who said she’s a model. A fuckin’ model, man!”
The doors opened to a rolling smell of stale flowers and tobacco. Heat poured out of the
room as if it was chemically bonded to the waves of bass. Sweat evaporated off bare perfumed
skin carrying the small vaporous drops of erotic scents through the air, diffusing into the hazy
Frontier Mosaic 41 cloud of tobacco smoke that hovered above the perspiring bodies packed too tightly across the makeshift living room dance floor. The lamps in the room were augmented with black-light
bulbs. From the entrance to the dim white light outline of what looked like a sliding door across the expansive living room, there was a pulsating neon mass of bodies.
Paul handed Rob the bottles of Jack and the two-liter Coke and dissipated into the
crowd. Steven pointed across the dance floor.
“Put the drinks in the kitchen over there,” Steven yelled. Rob moved toward the kitchen
sliding through the mass of moist bodies.
Under the black light, the skin of the partygoers looked dim and purple with their eyes
and teeth illuminated. Inside the undulating mass, the group looked like disembodied eyes and
mouths bouncing through the sweaty perfumed haze. As Rob shuffled through the bodies, a girl
in a neon pink striped top grabbed the bottle of whiskey from him, unscrewed the top and took a shot directly from the bottle. She wrapped her arms around him, dropping the bottle cap on the floor and sloshing whiskey onto the back of Rob’s shirt. She yelled into his ear, “I fuckin’ love
you! Jack is my favorite!” She grabbed the back of Rob’s head with her free hand and leaned in to kiss him, but in the claustrophobic mess she missed his lips and landed on the corner of his
mouth. Rob put the two-liter under his arm and unwrapped her from his body. He took back the bottle of whiskey and the girl melted back into the crowd.
As Rob entered the comforting white light of the kitchen through a sliding door, he
wiped the girl’s whiskey spit from the corner of his mouth. There were a lot of people in the
kitchen, but the music wasn’t quite as deafening and the people at least looked human under the white lighting. The heavy granite island was packed with bottles of liquor. Rob put the cap-less
bottle of Jack with the other bottles of Jack and opened the chrome refrigerator to place the sealed two-liter of Coke with the rest of the mixers and chasers. He felt like he’d brought a pocket full of sand to the beach.
Rob stayed away from the dance floor and drank by himself in the kitchen, wondering
what treasures he might find in the house.
Steven rematerialized from the crowd and lurched into the kitchen.
“Have you seen her?” Steven asked as he wiped sweat from his face.
Rob didn’t know who he was talking about and responded with a derisive “who?” He
hated talking to Steven when Steven was this wasted.
Frontier Mosaic 42 “Dude, the model. The fuckin’ model. The fucking model. By far the hottest girl here.
You can’t tell me you haven’t seen her.” Rob hadn’t really talked to anyone and the people
seemed pretty interchangeable. Steven’s eyes didn’t open all the way anymore which meant he was not only faded, but had been pretty far gone for a while now. Rob tried to change the subject to relocating Paul.
“I don’t know where she is man, but have you seen Paul?” Rob asked.
“No, I’m looking for a model. A girl model. Not Paul. Paul’s not a girl model at all.”
Rob didn’t want to talk to Steven anymore, or even be at the party. He wanted to take something, find Paul and get out. He mentioned seeing the model somewhere out on the dance floor to get rid of Steven. Steven dove back into the black light to find her.
Rob wandered through the house trying to get as far away from the mob as possible.
The house looked large from the street and was even larger inside. Though he knew the house was home for an entire family, he couldn’t help comparing the vaulted ceilings and hardwood
floors to his studio efficiency apartment where the front door opened into the bedroom/kitchen. On the far side of the house, Rob found the master bedroom. He lay down on the king
size bed. The mattress stretched out further than his arm’s length and he sank into the thick down comforter.
Rob got off the bed. Soon he was rummaging through the drawers of the dresser. He
wanted to touch everything. He wanted to have everything. He thought about how unfair it was
that Paul couldn’t have the things that Steven’s friend’s parents had. They had such a nice house with so many nice things, why couldn’t they share? Rob remembered Dinero and knew why he gave him his money. Dinero wanted the money, and Rob had the money. That’s what good
people do, Rob thought. Good people share what they have with others. I’m a good person, Rob thought, I deserve whatever I can find.
As he searched through the room, ignoring the banalities of socks and white undershirts,
Rob found a silver money clip. The money clip was still in its packaging—a plastic sleeve
wrapped in dark blue tissue paper and placed in a small gift box. The silver was engraved with
“CS.” It was a perfect find. Valuable and small enough to slip into his pocket. He tucked it away and headed back to the party to find Paul.
Frontier Mosaic 43 Rob found Paul in the backyard sharing a joint with a few of Steven’s friends. He pulled
Paul away to show him the money clip he just pinched. Rob snuck the clip out of his pocket trying to act smooth while showing off his loot.
“Did you fucking steal that?” Paul asked.
“Shit, man. Calm down. No one saw me take it,” Rob said.
“Do you even know whose house this is? His name is Cameron Schwab and he’s five feet
behind me,” Paul said. Paul motioned to one of the guys he was smoking with outside. Cameron
had smoked enough that his eyes looked like marble. Rob darted his hand with the clip back into his pocket.
“What’ll he care? You think his Dad can’t afford a new way to hold all his money?” Who
can afford a gardener, but can’t buy another money clip? Rob thought.
“Who cares if his Dad can afford another? It’s not yours,” Paul said. Paul stopped talking
in hushed tones. “Give it back.”
Rob could see Cameron and the group of Steven’s friends take notice behind them. Paul
never joined in, but he’d seen Rob steal enough that Rob assumed Paul understood, or at least didn’t mind, the theft.
“Well it’s good that someone’s looking out for all these rich assholes,” Rob said.
“Paul, who’s that? He with you?” Cameron called from over Paul’s shoulder. “Give what back?” Cameron asked. Paul turned toward Cameron, while Rob slipped back into the party to
try and escape through the crowd. Looking back, he saw Paul talking to Cameron. Rob pushed his way through the crowded living room dance floor. The dubstep screeching out of the
speakers pounded heavy bass hits with the sound of an air raid siren in a rhythmic scream over the top of the synth. The glowing eyes and teeth all seemed to turn to him while he pushed
through the dark purple bodies. Making a beeline to the door he bumped into the girl with the pink striped top, knocking the drink out of her hand.
“Who the fuck are you?” she tried to yell over the music. She pushed him in the chest
knocking him into another person. The guy he hit pushed Rob back hard, making him collide
with the body in front of him in a wild flail. The group erupted into a tightly packed mosh pit. Rob fell out of the mass onto a coffee table that had been pushed to the edge of the makeshift
dance floor. A sharp corner snagged on his shirt and ripped part of the sleeve. Rob couldn’t quite
Frontier Mosaic 44 tell, but it looked like Cameron and Paul were coming back in from outside. Closer to freedom, Rob bolted out the door.
Steven was hunched over on the porch puking into the bushes. Rob bent over next to
him.
“We gotta roll out of here right now,” Rob said. He didn’t want to explain why he
needed to leave so fast, but he figured Steven was too drunk to notice.
“Naw, I’m already home,” Steven said. He lay down in the grass.
Rob left without argument and sped out of the neighborhood. When the “check gauges” light lit up on his dashboard, Rob remembered he’d planned to have Paul pay for gas on the
return trip. He didn’t have enough in the tank to make it home, but he did have enough to drive to Paul’s Mom’s house. He pulled up to the house with the massive dead tree hanging over the entrance.
How could Paul side with those jerks? Rob thought. He pulled out the money clip that
was still in his pocket and ran his fingers across the “CS” etched in the silver. Rob didn’t know what Cameron’s father’s name was, but he guessed that the clip was a gift for his son—a one-
percenter handing down the tools of their class to his over-privileged progeny. There was a cold
karma to the silver and Rob enjoyed the feel of the gift in his hands. Without exploited silver
miners, the materials would still be underground anyway, Rob thought. At least now the clip was in the hands of someone who could really appreciate it.
Rob worked his way through the branches and weeds and sat outside on Paul’s Mom’s
porch waiting for Paul to get home. He knew Steven would be too drunk to drive and that Paul would drive Steven’s Lexus back to his Mom’s house where they’d both crash for the night.
Soon, Rob spotted Steven’s silver Lexus. The underbelly of the car scratched against the
incline of the driveway as Paul pulled in.
“Thanks for bailing on me,” Paul yelled.
“You heard them. They were coming after me. What was I supposed to do?” Rob said. “Asshole, I covered for you. Cameron didn’t hear what you were trying to steal,” Paul
explained. “I told him you were trying to take your whiskey home, but I thought it was rude to leave with the gift you brought.” Paul stepped out of the car. “Not only did Cameron give you
your fucked up cap-less bottle back,” Paul said, “but he gave you a new bottle too because he felt bad that you had to leave so early.” Paul pulled an unopened bottle of Jack out of the Lexus.
Frontier Mosaic 45 “What’s it matter to him anyway, he can just go buy another one,” Rob said. Rob had
seen Paul upset before, but usually when they’d fight Paul would look angrily at the ground. Now Paul made direct, hard eye contact.
“Why’s it always about money with you? I know you look at Steven as ‘your rich friend.’
Does that make me your poor friend?”
The front yard was silent except for Steven dry-heaving in his Lexus. Rob and Paul
sprinted back to the car to pull Steven out before he threw up on his leather seats. They carried his limp body to the porch. Paul grabbed a trash can from the curb and positioned Steven over
the stinking bin. Steven cringed and pulled back. He heaved an alcoholic splattering onto Paul’s shoes.
“Drunk motherfucker,” Rob said. “They just don’t give a shit about us Paul. Even Matt.
Rich people don’t hate us, or plot against us, they just don’t give a shit about us.” “Who’s rich, though?” Paul asked. “What?” Rob said.
“Who’s rich? To me, you’re pretty rich. You have a car. You have an apartment. I’m
living with my Mom and eating microwave noodles every day. But compared to people like
Dinero, begging in Wal-Mart parking lots, I’m living large.” Paul slid his shoes and socks off
leaving them by the front door so he didn’t track puke through his house. “And what about Bill Gates or whoever runs Apple now that Steve Jobs died. You don’t think they look at Steven like he’s living in poverty?” Steven gurgled next to Rob, but didn’t throw up this time. “We’re not rich, and we’re not poor. Everybody wants more than what they’ve got.”
Paul went inside and came back with a few dollars in coins from an old cracked jar his
mom collected change in. She took the jar to the grocery store once a week to convert the coins to whatever small amount of bills they were worth.
“That should be enough to get you home,” Paul said. “Steven’ll wander inside when he
sobers up enough to stop puking. I’m done for the night.”
Paul locked the door behind him. Rob sat on the porch looking out across the street
through the branches of the dead tree wrapped around Paul’s house. The branches crisscrossed each other at odd unpredictable angles making Rob feel claustrophobic. Rob thought about how Paul walks through the branches every morning. He just pushes them aside like the flimsy
Frontier Mosaic 46 switches that they are, but when Rob tries to navigate them, he ends up scratched like his sleeve caught on the coffee table.
Rob felt the money clip in his pocket. The silver felt worthless. The justice he felt from
taking the clip crumpled up and blew down the street like the last leaves off Paul’s dead tree. Rob pulled a branch aside to get a clearer view of the street, but the branch snapped back. Rob took the money clip and clipped together the two offending branches opening a small window
through which he could watch the cars drive by. Rob sat staring through his makeshift window
for a long while, and when he left, he left the clip clamped down on the branches. It didn’t really make much of a difference, but it was one less thicket to navigate through for Paul when he left in the morning.
Frontier Mosaic 47
Glass Floats EMMA SHORE
Frontier Mosaic 48 NONFICTION
The Pennies MATTHEW MITCHELL
It was the weekend after I got my first car. I was seventeen and I spent my time driving
around excited with newfound freedom. I stopped at random places that caught my attention because I could. That’s how I found myself at the estate sale.
I never found out whose estate it was, only that the sale was being conducted by the
owner’s children and they wanted everything gone. Only the big stuff was priced: furniture, major appliances, and the car—everything else just said “make an offer.”
All the cabinet doors were wide open; boxes sat gap-mouthed all over the garage. It was
an antiquarian playground and digging through this absent stranger’s life was a treasure hunt amongst the junk.
I found an old typewriter with a carrying case that they were thrilled to sell for ten
dollars, an old corded jigsaw that they gave away for seven bucks, and a large bucket filled with pennies that they gave me for free. It’s ironic really, because this bucket was where all the real treasures were hiding.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by coins. Little pieces of history you could
hold in your hand. I loved to sort through them, arranging them by date. As I got older, the
Frontier Mosaic 49 collecting became more refined, and begging my parents for spare change became begging them to take me to a coin store. Pennies were always my favorites.
I was giddy with excitement. I abandoned all the thoughts of exploring the town in my
new car and raced home with my bucket of pennies. I settled at my desk, my lamp and magnifying glass ready in case any dates were difficult to read.
To start off, I didn’t even look at the face. I sorted the pennies by reverse design—wheat
ear or memorial. Surprisingly, most were of the wheat ear, and there were even a few older
designs as well. There was one that really stuck out; the penny didn’t look copper. I set it aside for further study later and continued sorting.
I organized all the memorial pennies by decade and put them with the others in my
collection. I already had memorial coins from each year and mint in my collection, and the
wheat ears from the forties and fifties swiftly joined them. The thirties were skimmed through; I was looking for any coins from thirty-one. While already in my collection, the coin is still
valuable. The San Francisco mint produced less than a million of the coins that year. Finding none, I moved on to the twenties and slowed down.
I whooped out loud when I found an elusive twenty-four D, a low mintage year that
eluded me for ages. And I nearly cried when I found a twenty-two, only to be crushed when I squinted in and spied the barest ghost of a Denver mint-mark—that knocked somewhere
between $20,000.00 and $30,000.00 off its value. I finished with the twenties, a few other
somewhat valuable coins popped up, but my heart wasn’t really in it. It was over a week before I sat back down to finish the sorting.
The small pile of pennies from the teens stared me down, but I refused to get my hopes
up—still apprehensive after the near miss with the twenty-two. The first few coins had no real value. But then I found them. The two coins I never thought I would own: a 1909 San
Francisco and a 1914 Denver. The fourteen spoke well enough on its own, miserly mintage
numbers that year spiking its value, but the ‘09 had one more secret to hide. I flipped it over and
there, in small letters, was the ever elusive V.D.B. The tribute to Victor David Brenner, the man who designed the Lincoln cent.
Nothing else of interest was found amongst the remaining pennies; a few equally
disappointing wheat ears and Indian heads. But then I remembered that one coin that I pulled
aside due to its odd coloring. The back of the penny looked similar to that of an Indian Head,
Frontier Mosaic 50 though when I flipped it over everything stopped at the sight of the eagle with wings spread in
flight. The flying eagle penny isn’t my oldest coin; that honor belongs to an ancient Roman coin that I found at a store, but it is by far my favorite. Its date, 1856, marks it as not only a flying eagle penny, but The Flying Eagle Penny, the very first American penny.
Since I found it, that penny has held a special place in my heart. It’s neither the oldest
nor the most valuable coin in my collection, but it’s the most valuable to me. It wasn’t
something that I just picked up from a store, or at an auction. I found it, amidst a sea of its kin through sheer luck. Now, I always keep it with me in hopes the luck continues to flow. It’s my good luck charm, it’s a sign of my first freedom; it’s my penny. The penny.
Frontier Mosaic 51 KELSEY FORD
Praying to the Pigskin Saturday is the Sabbath for those who file into the concrete sanctuary, several thousand strong. They face the pulpit to receive the sermon: the promise of fair competition with a side of ass kicking. Eyes of the young and old alike are turned to watch the stories of David and Daniel unfold. They cheer on their Lord and Savior the Heisman winner as he defeats tigers and bears and horned frogs. They take the communion of nachos and Bud Light as the choir tries to rattle their aluminum pews with the intensity of their hymns. Voices of the congregation join in the praise, hands raised towards the blue heavens, skin left pink from the touch of the sun. The Bible story is finished, good vanquishing evil, and the most loyal have the satisfaction of witnessing a sight to behold: their sins being washed away as the unsuspecting preacher is baptized in icy colored waters.
Frontier Mosaic 52 SHANLEY WELLS-RAU
PICK-CHURES AND PHOTOS I was 48 the year I learned the word picture is not pitcher. Photo sounds different from baseball man. Kelsey asked, “How did you just say that?!” Amusement freckled her face. She could be my daughter if I’d reproduced, our ages are just so. We lunch. We text. Zombie shows, backyard chickens, husbands. She receives my editorial wisdom and advice even though she’s grown two humans inside her own body. Her: “Can you proof this for me? What else should I say? Should I take the job? Ask for a raise? Take a different job? How should I live, be, exist?” I tell her from mistakes, suffering, more years working than she’s lived. But this? I couldn’t hear the “k” in the pick-ture. A picture. Pitcher. Pich-ur. Such a small sound. The not hearing of it shocked me a little, like the day last summer I learned there’s a U.S. president named Arthur. A joke, I thought at first. President Arthur? Or a mistake. A stroke in my head maybe? How could I not know a president? A U.S. fricking president? I don’t need to name them all, but shouldn’t we recognize the names when heard? Or hear the kuh inside a word I’ve used a thousand, million times? A jolt, burning electric with shame and confusion, like back in the pot smoking days when something seemed amiss. One plus one equaled Cheetos. “The 7-11 guy totally knows we’re stoned,” words tangling inside cotton mouths. Giggling Reefer Madness style. Pit-chore. Pick. Sure. Pich. Urh. TV talking heads say the words quickly. I pause, rewatch. Listen hard for the difference. Me: “I took a pitcher—pick-ture—uh, photo, for you.” Pick-ture. There’s a “kuh” between those syllables. A brief sound in the back of the throat, tongue meat pushing up fast against the roof of the mouth near the back of the cave before the tip bounces up front for “chure,” just behind the teeth. Pick-ture. Pick. Chure. Pick. Chore. Pitch-errrr. Pitch. Urh. A photo. A vessel for holding iced-tea, unsweetened please. A Cardinal standing on a mound, staring, eyes squinting at his catcher, head shakes sharp, side to side, until a nod.
Frontier Mosaic 53 None of these things are the same. Pen. Pin. Supposedly. Supposably. Pasghetti. A man I know says coll-yewms for columns. A long lost boyfriend said “chester drawers” like there’s a man laying claim to all bedroom dressers. He also said “I seen it” and “We was” as if subjects and verbs don’t need to get along. And we didn’t. Teaching your tongue is just another muscle memory. A rookie cop practicing the draw of his weapon. Put ‘em up! Tap dancers working that shim sham, double time step. I say to myself, “Pick-chure. Pickchure. Pick. Chure.” In the shower. In the car. In conversation I say, “photo.” My routine is not ready for its debut. My tongue and I, we’re still working on re-holstering our shuffle step. President Chester A. Arthur was #21 between Garfield and Clevelend. Was he ready for his debut, stepping up after an assassination? His photo shows a jowly face cradled by mutton chops, 1881 when photography belonged to professionals, big boxed contraptions on stands, and no one smiled.
Frontier Mosaic 54
WASH YOUR HANDS It starts where spindly legged boys run and laugh, their bellies pregnant with hunger, flies nibbling the tear duct of a long-lashed eye. It blossoms among the fluids of life: spit and piss, weeping wives, grandfathers shitting themselves, long watery streaks of bloody mucous. Monogrammed towels are useless where single twigs mark graves like my asparagus crowns out back in the garden, bundles of spring green flavor sunk into the red earth with an oak twig staked upright to show me where to look later. The twigs in Ghana Guinea Zaire mark bodies where villagers fear contamination and no one attends burials but hero volunteers risking their own lives to save Liberia. Warrior doctors say the germs may live for days, we think, in the dirt, in the earth. We think. Ashes to ashes, Ebola to dust? Perhaps mourners with tears not yet bloody sneak to the twig yard and sing a song of loss and despair under the same moon where I step out barefoot on the porch listening for who-who from a barred owl perched on the twig-giving oak.
Frontier Mosaic 55
E is for Endangered EMMA SHORE
Frontier Mosaic 56 FICTION
American Waste JASON CHRISTIAN
I had decided it was time to grow up, whatever that meant, so I cut off my dreadlocks
and talked to this guy about a job. The guy went by the name of Hippie. He was an acquaintance of another guy I used to sell speed to, someone who owed me a favor.
Hippie worked with a crew of framers that built houses all over the suburbs. He said the
boss was looking for a new hand. That’s how he put it, a hand, somebody to carry boards to the other guys and clean up the jobsite. Piddly shit. I said okay. I needed the money and it would come weekly and under the table: seven bucks an hour, which was good in 2002.
The first day I showed up to the jobsite in my friend Ernie’s puke-brown car. The place
was way in the outskirts down west I-40, where some rich man was building a house in the middle of a fresh clearing surrounded by scrubby woods and flanked by two large piles of
bulldozed trees, just asking to become bonfires. Stacks of lumber pushed into sand damp from a rare July rain. Tire ruts crisscrossed the inevitable red clay. Trash lay everywhere in sight.
The other guys’ trucks—all of them had trucks—were parked in a crooked line off the
main driveway, wedged haphazardly between pathetic stunted trees that constituted our woods. The clearing was large enough for the mansion we were building and a yard that somebody would roll out after we were gone.
Frontier Mosaic 57 As I parked I killed the radio and saw through the cracked glass a short stocky man
walking straight at me as though ready for a fistfight. He began speaking even before I left the car.
“You the new guy?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “My name’s Rice.”
“What kinda fucking name is that? I won’t remember that.” This must be the boss. He
turned toward the others who were moving quickly, carrying tools, unrolling cords and hoses,
setting up for the day. I looked at my watch: five minutes early. The boss looked back at me and spat tobacco on the ground beside my boots. “Got any tools?” he said.
“I brought a hammer, a tool bag, a tape measure, and a square. That’s what Hippie told
me to bring.” I was hoping Hippie used that name around the boss. I was also thinking that I
was lucky that I had a friend to borrow tools from. Of course I didn’t know how to use them, but that I wouldn’t admit. I was used to being judged by my exterior: black clothes, tattoos, and
bright-colored hair invited stares. Anyway, I figured he’d act somewhat friendly since he’d gone
to the trouble of recruiting a new worker. Besides, I’d cleaned up my appearance for his sake, for the job’s sake. But I kept quiet and played it cool. I had no doubt construction sites were unforgiving.
“Pick up all the trash,” the boss said. “Anybody yells, do what he asks.” He turned around
and walked toward his dented gray Dodge dually with red mud smeared all the way to the
windows. I began picking up trash. The rest of the crew finished unloading tools, setting up saws and compressors and other contraptions I had no idea of their use.
It was eight a.m. and the other guys were already laughing and chitchatting about
women. Despite my best intentions, I was anxious and someone noticed. He said his name was Kurt, and he wore nothing but frayed cut-off jean shorts that barely reached mid-thigh, and a tool belt that seemed to enhance his round over-sunned belly. His skin was dark brown and
leathery like an old catcher’s mitt, his feet shod with formerly white Wal-Mart-looking shoes. Somehow, despite the belly, he ran across the top of the two-by-four walls as graceful as a
ballerina. Real precision. Kurt said I looked as nervous as a whore in church. I asked him what I should be doing.
Frontier Mosaic 58 “Boss already said pick up all the cut ends and make a pile. There’s the dumpster for the
shorties.” He pointed to the green roll-off dumpster across the yard. The side of the dumpster
had the words “American Waste” stamped on it. I thought of that Black Flag song I used to like in my younger, idealistic days.
“Yeah, but after that,” I said.
“You know how to cut straight?” Kurt said. “Lost our cut-man. Quit last week.” He
turned away from me and flipped off the sky as if everything was God’s fault. I noticed he had a blurred tattoo of Wile E. Coyote on his right shoulder.
“I learn fast if somebody wants to show me,” I said to Kurt.
“New guy!” the boss roared from behind me. I spun around.
“What the fuck are you talking for,” he said. “I thought you were working. You’re just
standing there with your goddamn teeth in your mouth.” I said nothing.
“Cut that stack down to ninety-two and five eighths. We got the wrong order.”
I had worked jobs where men barked orders but this was “slaves building pyramids” work.
It was one thing to be told to wash a pile of dishes or pick up trash or shovel dirt all day, but
another to quickly do skilled labor under a tyrant’s watch. It’s hard to explain why, but I needed
the job to last, it was important for me to finish something that I had started for once, so I tried. I wrote the dimensions the boss gave me down on a scrap of wood, while he stood beside
me staring, his nostrils flaring as he breathed. I couldn’t tell if he was older or younger than Hippie, who I had guessed to be about forty-five. “I think I can do it,” I said.
“Goddammit new guy, you better fucking know.” “Okay,” I said. “No problem.” I skittered over to the stack of lumber and noticed Hippie
gazing at me from the second story floor where he was building walls. He had a guilty look on his face, probably realizing I was scared and trying to hide it.
“Hippie, come down here and show this new guy how to do it,” the boss said, still
planted in the same place. “Tell by looking at him he don’t know shit.” He was pointing at me with the wooden handle of a framing hammer, nearly as big as an ax handle. “All right, Junior,” Hippie said. Now I knew the boss’s name.
Frontier Mosaic 59 I let him help me, did the job, and then they left me alone. Every instinct in me told me
to flee. I struggled against the urge to drive away until lunchtime came. All six guys, besides the boss, smoked weed, ate gas station food, and joked around. Lunch break was more than a break, it was a relief. At some point in the afternoon, boss left for some errands and never returned. I
finished out the day with less worries, even allowing myself to stop to pet Hippie’s young brindle pit bull that lay all day in the shade of Hippie’s beat up Toyota. Hippie said he always brought the dog to work. He called him Brutus.
Day two was easier. By easier I mean the boss wasn’t there most of the day. The work
itself was backbreaking. They made me carry about a hundred four-by-eight-foot pieces of
plywood up a rickety wooden chickenwalk to the second floor. One after another, all day long, each feeling heavier than the last.
At lunch, like the day before, we all piled into somebody’s truck and drove to the gas
station at the interchange down the road. They had a hot box full of chicken strips, potato
wedges, fried chicken, onion rings and other fried foods, the kind of food that won’t kill you but you don’t want to live on. I didn’t complain and, of course, no one else did either. We each
bought our lunch and a 32 oz. soda pop. Then we went back for what they called “lunchtime entertainment.”
“What’s that?” I asked Hippie in the truck on the way back, thinking that he was
somehow closer to me than them. He said nothing. I didn’t want to repeat myself so I let it go. When we got back to the jobsite, everyone exited the truck and began setting his own
personal lawn chairs into a straight line facing away from the house. I didn’t have a chair. I
thought I’d just stand to eat or stack boards to make a seat. The heat was sweltering and the
humidity was high. There was a dead quality to the air, that deadness you find in Oklahoma summers.
“Got a coon for Brutus today,” Hippie said to no one in particular. “Missed one
yesterday, but caught one last night.”
Everyone laughed or began chattering in a knowing way. I still didn’t understand what
was happening until he picked up a steel box from the back of his truck. It had been there all
Frontier Mosaic 60 along. Inside the box an animal frantically clawed and shuffled from side to side. Brutus stood on two legs, whining, licking at the box.
Hippie set the box on the dirt. Brutus began clawing at it and barking. The barks were
shrill. He was still young.
“What is this?” I said.
“This fucking dog will learn to run off varmints, yet,” Hippie said. “I live fifty mile south
of here in the country. I need a good coon killer. Those sonsabitches get into my food all the goddamn time.”
“Let that sumbitch go, Hippie,” one of them said.
“Tear up the walls of my trailer,” Hippie continued. “Last week they ripped out all the
insulation. Decorated my house like a goddamn Christmas tree.”
He released a little metal door, a full-sized raccoon burst from the cage like a bull from a
rodeo chute. The dog and raccoon instantly began fighting in a death-like dance—rolling,
scratching, biting. The growl of the dog was familiar, but the raccoon sounded like an angry
tomcat slowed down and deepened in pitch, something like an otherworldly lion’s roar, or maybe a lion in heat, sounds of rage, rabid sounds.
The raccoon was vicious, ruthless. After a minute it managed to break away from the dog
and run toward the trees, but the dog caught up quick and the dance began anew. Behind me the crew cheered, made a commotion. It felt like being at a bar, watching a featherweight
championship on HBO.
The dirt was torn up where the animals had been. Spots of blood here and there marked
the animals’ paths. Eventually the raccoon broke away yet again and ran fast enough to lunge up a tree. Brutus went hysterical, barking and yipping and whining at the base of the tree, trying to jump into it and climb it, circling like a shark. Hippie skipped over to him, grabbed him by the collar and lifted him in the air, then walked back to the jobsite while Brutus looked back hard over Hippie’s shoulder toward the raccoon in the tree.
“That’s a good boy, Brutus,” Hippie said. “Kill that fucking beast.”
“Man, that bastard was tearing him up good,” someone yelled. I didn’t look to see who it was. So far, only one or two of them were separate people.
“Varmint’s tougher than the damn dog,” another said. I didn’t look up that time either.
Like Brutus, I stared at the raccoon in the tree.
Frontier Mosaic 61 “Bullshit,” Hippie said. “Coon just got lucky. Dog’s still a pup, you know.”
We went back to work. I finished lugging the stack of plywood, one board at a time, fifty
pounds each, fifty-seven more trips up the chickenwalk—I counted. I almost fell a couple of
times. I tried not to think of anything but holding on to the board stretched across my shoulders. I was drenched in sweat and muttered under my breath like a mad man as I hunched up the chickenwalk over and over until five o’clock finally came.
That night at the house my friends were indignant.
“You gotta quit that job,” Ernie said. “Fuck those rednecks!” He was vegan then, and had
a dog of his own that he found in a dumpster one night while out looking for food behind the
Homeland grocery store. It was a tiny puppy someone had wrapped up in a black trash bag and thrown away. He called it Yelp because it was yelping through the plastic when he found it. Then Dee chimed in: “You should sabotage their shit first. Slash their tires, or
something. Or steal their tools and pawn them.”
“Man, they know my name,” I said. “That would be really stupid.”
We were drinking Side Pocket forties. Drunk for a buck, we used to say. Except I was
trying to pull my life together, so I just poured myself a cup.
“You want a bump?” Ernie said. His hair was spiky on top and dyed black. The sides
were shaved revealing a tattoo of a screaming skull. “Man, I’ve gotta work in the morning.”
“All right. Be boring,” Ernie said. “Just don’t forget whose car you’re using.” His eyes
darted everywhere as though following a fly around the room. “Turn up the music,” Dee said.
All conversation was shut down by Napalm Death or something in that vein. Heavy,
dark, violent music, an assault on our ears. Not the political punk that got us into this lifestyle in the first place.
This was normal. We talked sometimes, but music and drinking was usually better. If I
wanted intellectual stimulation I could go to my room and read.
I had lived in that house off and on for three years. The house was Ernie’s, technically,
though everyone thought of it as our own. Ernie inherited the house from his dad, who passed
Frontier Mosaic 62 out one night drunk and fell into the swimming pool of some lady he was fucking, and drowned. He was the lady’s lawn man and somehow had breached her glittery world. Her rich husband
was out of town when the accident happened. It was some kind of scandal on the news. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. We called the house “The Crack House,” which was supposed to be ironic but the front windows were boarded up from a party that had gotten out of hand, and we had definitely smoked crack there more than a couple of times. I had moved back in when my
girlfriend Abby kicked me out. Ernie was happy to have me there, liked to tell me about every five minutes Abby was a stupid stuck-up college girl. “Out of your league, man,” he’d say.
“Probably be a lawyer or something, someday.” I deflected this talk or sometimes turned it back at him.
“Maybe, if you’re lucky, she’ll save your ass from prison.”
The next morning was hell. I was so sore I could barely move. Somehow I had ended up
drinking a Side Pocket after all, and then some whiskey, staying up half the night. By some
miracle I managed to roll out of bed and make it out the door on time. I bought a barrel full of
coffee on the way to our half-built mansion.
That day was like the one before: same rednecks, same yelling boss, same dog-raccoon
fight at lunch. We worked fast, the hot summer air echoed with rapid-fire nail gun sounds,
hammering, men’s murmuring and swearing voices. It sounded like war. Everyone was in a hurry and the boss yelled “hurry up, ladies” about once an hour.
I was told to cut some boards and given a list of dimensions so somebody could make
some headers. As I cut the boards my mind was somewhere else, thinking about how I shouldn’t have drunk so much last night, wondering why I was working at a place where I belonged even
less than my normal jobs, when I cut right through the air-hose. The hose wiggled and flopped
in the air and I couldn’t catch it. The boss screamed at me, but somebody quickly fixed the problem and put me back on cleaning up and running boards to whoever yelled “new guy.”
The week passed and the dog and raccoon scrapped every day. On Friday two raccoons
were caught and, though they were on the small side, I thought they might get the upper hand
on Hippie’s pit bull. On that day more blood splashed than usual. I wondered how much longer the carnage would last.
Frontier Mosaic 63 My second week of work, on Monday, Brutus finally triumphed. Hippie had trapped a
young raccoon the night before, and that day at lunch it fought just as hard for its life as the rest
of them, but it wasn’t quite tough enough to hold its own. The raccoon nearly reached the trees, and I was secretly rooting for it even when Brutus clamped down on its neck and wouldn’t let go. He thrashed it in every direction, in spasms, whipping it like a Teddy bear around and around.
Then he carried it to his master and dropped it at his feet. It lay there soaked in dirty saliva and blood, a ruddy ring around its neck, its fur spiked out with moisture. Its coat had a sheen to it, kind of like punk hair. The men slapped Hippie’s back and pet Brutus, who was prancing and wiggling his butt as though he’d won a prize.
“All right, ladies, you’ve had your fun,” the boss yelled, as he came out of the port-a-john.
I hadn’t known he was there. “Let’s get back to it. Throw that motherfucker in the woods before the customer shows up.”
Hippie picked up the raccoon by the tail and walked to the edge of the woods and tossed
it onto the tangled underbrush of briars. It lay there atop springy vines, several feet from the ground, swaying in the wind. I watched Hippie as he strolled back toward us, seemingly following the thread-like trail of blood. It was all I could do to keep quiet.
“What the fuck are you staring at, new guy?” the boss screamed from behind my ear. “Huh?” I said, without thinking.
“Goddammit! Only faggots say huh. Are you a faggot, new guy?”
The day was warm, but my neck was a volcano. I was powerless. I was enraged. I wanted
to take a hammer and bury the claw in his forehead. But of course I did nothing. There was nothing to do.
“No.” I said. “Good, cause I wouldn’t have one on my crew. Bring those studs upstairs, stud.” He
pointed with a nod of his square sunbaked head. I hated him, hated his kind. I pictured his
thrashed bloody body lying next to the raccoon’s on the briars, his tongue hanging out, his
clothes in tatters. It wouldn’t do me any good to dwell though, so I put everything out of my mind and did what the boss wanted.
For hours I hauled a pile of boards upstairs and stacked them for the walls the others
would make. The whole place looked like a multi-tiered jungle gym with diagonal braces going
every which way, holding the walls in place until we could put a roof over all of it. It looked
Frontier Mosaic 64 strong, but I knew it was still vulnerable without the braces. A strong wind might topple the whole thing over.
“Oh my god. Somebody should call animal welfare on those fuckers,” Ernie said that
night at home.
“I don’t think they give a shit about raccoons,” Dee said.
“I was talking about the dog,” Ernie said. “That’s animal abuse.” “Yeah, but we don’t call the cops, remember?” I said. It was true. We always said calling
the cops was cooperating with the state, and the state was a bunch of murderers. I remember
being shit-faced one time and arguing about it with some liberal college girl who was dating a friend of mine. I was out of my mind on speed, chewing my face off, not backing down in the argument.
“What if there was a dead body in your house,” she had said at the end of our drawn out
debate, as though saving it as her final trump card.
“We’d compost the bastard,” I said. I knew that was a lie, but I said it anyway. The girl
wouldn’t let my answer suffice, so I finally admitted we’d probably take the body and drop it off
at the morgue or something. All of it was a moot point anyway because there wasn’t going to be a dead body.
“Animal welfare isn’t the cops, dumbass,” Ernie said. “I think we should ambush that
fucker and kick his teeth in and steal his dog. I’ll volunteer to take care of him,” he said. “The dog, I mean.”
“I can’t do that, besides the boss is a bigger problem. I haven’t told you what he said to
me.”
“Why are you working there, man?” Ernie said. “Are you that desperate?”
“Dude, get a job at a coffee shop or something,” said Dee. “Or sell weed again. It’s not
like it’s speed.”
“Sell your plasma till something better comes along,” Ernie said. I knew he was just
trying to help. What they didn’t understand is that I was growing weary with all of this, the allnight drinking, the filthy, squalid living, the gratuitous bumps of speed, not knowing where my next dollar would come from.
Frontier Mosaic 65 “I feel like I need to learn a skill,” I said. “I’m twenty-five-years-old. I should be trying to
figure shit out, right?”
The next day I came to work prepared. I had plotted during the night. I bought a
summer sausage and stabbed holes all over its surface and pushed rat poison into each hole. It would be a toxic weapon.
At lunch Brutus had his daily fight for Hippie’s pride and honor. The raccoon was
normal sized and fought like the rest of them, and survived, which was a comfort. I didn’t want to kill the dog but I didn’t see any other way. Wasn’t it okay to kill something to stop further bloodshed?
When the fight was over the guys went back to wall building and I cleaned up the yard
until I had a load to throw in the dumpster. I had cut up the summer sausage into four pieces,
each exposing green pellets that resembled broken jagged Pez candy, the color of chalkboard. I
squatted on the other side of the dumpster, the sausage stuffed down in my tool bag, waiting for the dog to approach.
While I waited I thought of Abby. She loved animals and would be horrified if she knew
what I was planning to do. She’d want me to call the cops on Hippie, but that fucker would sell me out in a second. He’d tell them I sold speed. It didn’t matter that I had quit. A house raid
was a house raid. They’d find something there to put us all away. I couldn’t explain any of this to
Abby.
I wanted to call her again; it had been two months since she kicked me out. I wanted to
tell her that I was making changes, that I was working toward goals and learning things, that this job wasn’t much, but it might lead to better opportunities. Only now, as I write this, do I know
how far from the truth I was in those longing moments. I thought I might call her that night and see if we could talk sometime soon. Have a coffee or something. Maybe work something out between us. She would be back from her parents’ house soon to get ready for school to start.
I peeked from behind the dumpster and noticed the dog lying on the dirt in his usual spot
beside Hippie’s truck. I pictured him poisoned, walking in circles, licking the air, foaming at the
mouth. I pictured him bloated and whimpering at his master. I knew then that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill an innocent, even a dog. Especially a dog. I might have killed Hippie in that
Frontier Mosaic 66 moment, or the boss, but I didn’t do that either. I did nothing. I threw the sausage in the
dumpster and stared at the trees for a while until I was yelled at to pick up the trash around the yard.
I didn’t go back to work after that day. Seven days wasn’t much, but it was the longest I’d
worked in a while. I called Hippie a week later to tell him where to have the boss mail my check. At first he was irritated that I hadn’t shown up, but then perked up and told me Brutus finally
killed a full-grown raccoon. He planned to buy another dog, too, to train him to fight. He said
he’d keep a weight around his neck so he could beef up and kill other dogs. I hung up the phone before I could give him my address.
I went back to selling weed for a while, just to get on my feet. I never talked about Brutus
or the job again to Ernie or Dee. It was easier that way, to let the memory disappear into
oblivion. The summer clapped to a close with me drunk every night, staying away from speed but still not winning any awards for success. I tried calling Abby a few times when I knew for sure she’d be back in town. I don’t know what happened, but she never picked up the phone.
Frontier Mosaic 67 RYAN RICKS
A Beach in Ibiza (Our Honeymoon) I.
We boarded a propeller plane. We lugged suitcases up stairs. We drank chile-infused tequila. We smoked on a beach in Ibiza. We saw a couple’s shelf life expire Under neon and four-four rhythms. We snuck into the festival grounds And Jitterbug’d on a beach in Ibiza. We laughed at the shaman preaching Apocalyptic salvation at the jetty’s tip. His dashiki contradicted his condemnation. I became glass on a beach in Ibiza. We used to imagine Sisyphus smiling;
II.
now we pray for his dying.
Idly stargazing from the hotel room balcony: I tried finding Orion’s Belt—I needed something new to slip around my neck before Thanksgiving— but how weary, stale, flat, and stupid I was to search for that galactic accessory in October! So baby, I’ll be home for the holidays! The main dish: my severed smiling head, Asleep with its Cheshire grin. “Adela” brought us coffee and migas underneath a grass roof On a beach in Ibiza. She had a tattoo of Orion’s Belt on her inner-thigh. I slipped it around my neck and wished Orion went beltless.
Frontier Mosaic 68 III.
We played footsie under the covers. We microwaved the leftover migas. We caught the last half of Volver. We used the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign. We tossed our dirty clothes into big Cocoa portmanteaus and handbags. We boarded a commercial plane and Flew back to Liberty and Prosperity. We watched the spiraling baggage Incessantly spin in continuous circles. Its centerpiece broadcasted equations. Muzak gave me a splitting headache. We used to imagine Sisyphus smiling; now we pray for his dying.
IV. Upon returning home from my first day back at the office: I opened the door and Wagner screamed into My ears !!! screech of orchestral catharsis that I only heard during bad arguments. You threw a shoe, a piece of china, and the Vase I bought in Ibiza—one of them drew blood. Orion’s belt sat atop our dryer, vibrating with its Cheshire grin.
Months later, after the lawn sale, I bumped into you at a lawn sale. You were holding a Wagner record. I had an old globe in my hands. An antique phonograph rested near the elderly salespeople and you tested the album. V.
im sorry
we danced
Frontier Mosaic 69
Home Videos She wanted me to buy a Canon GL1 to record the kids pounding on kitchen cabinets. My RCA camcorder with the bulging VHS dock “didn’t capture with clarity.” I told the kids, “the drawer below the sink is off limits” but they couldn’t help it. She put my t-shirt with Nietzsche on it in the washer with red and pink garments. Our Ansel Adams coffee table book drowned in a sea of celebrity weight catastrophe. She wanted me to buy a Canon GL1 to record the kids pounding on kitchen cabinets. The dog—before he got out—would nip at skinny monochrome legs in the dinette. The kids stopped the running and the wailing and the kisses on the boo-boos at 13. I told the kids, “the drawer below the sink is off limits” but they couldn’t help it. She watched The Sopranos and we went to see a doctor and she got a red corvette. Then she blew a tire and I didn’t rush to the turnpike and roll my flannel’s sleeves. She wanted me to buy a Canon GL1 to record the kids pounding on kitchen cabinets. When the kids turned 23, one studied law and the other faced grand indictment. I carved my own epitaph and inked “This Be The Verse” upon the cap of my knee. I told the kids, “the drawer below the sink is off limits” but they couldn’t help it. Sometimes I’d read In Touch and wear my Nietzsche shirt even though it was scarlet and I do wish I knew how to use a tire iron and enjoy housewives of New Jersey. She wanted me to buy a Canon GL1 to record the kids pounding on kitchen cabinets. I told the kids, “the drawer below the sink is off limits” but they couldn’t help it.
Frontier Mosaic 70 FICTION
喪家 (Homeless) KRISTEN VALENSKI
It was 2:13 a.m., four minutes before the next train on the Yamenote Line would screech
into the station, when she saw the woman on the tracks. Elvis always told her to never talk to the crazies. He'd say, "livin’ on the street, we don't got time for them loose folk, gotta slip by, move
on. All they do is steal them bags of cans you got to make them weird aluminum caps to contact their mothership or smooch pity from your coin purse."
It was obvious to Kai the woman was a bit off the second she noticed the cap of tussled,
greasy hair bobbing across the platform on the tracks. No one was at this platform at Shinjuku Station this early, but Kai carried her sack anyway. In her sack she had stuffed a freshly dug
hoard of shiny energy drinks she discovered behind the convenience store on 83rd along with an unsealed bento box and thermos cup. She was able to snag them while Haru, the manager, wasn't looking.
She knew he knew her well enough to recognize when her fingerless gloved hands were
itching for a meal by the way her haggard appearance would slump further forward. She had
caught glimpses of her reflection before in front of store windows in Harajuku Station when she
Frontier Mosaic 71 hadn't eaten a true meal for over three days. Haru told her one evening, the first week the
convenience store he owned became a regular stop for her along her dumpster diving rounds, her pale pink lips reminded him of the sakura blossoms that had been late to bloom that spring. Kai
had found this strangely sweet and a little disturbing, so she snatched a bag of chips, two bottles
of Ramune and a pack of cigarettes before returning to her large battered bag outside.
She stopped at the marked safety line at the edge of the platform, setting the bag beside
her and peering to her right. She spotted a pale figure flitting back and forth between the metal beams separating the subway lanes. The woman was humming softly into her arms which were wrapped around a blanketed bundle. The small chirps that faintly echoed from the direction of the unbalanced woman reminded Kai of the tiny kitten she used to own as a child. Kai's chest grew heavy at the thought of the woman carrying such a small creature while on the tracks,
endangering its life. She squatted down and called out to the woman, cupping her hands around her mouth.
"Oiiii, Okaa-san! Get off the tracks. You're not allowed down there."
The woman tripped over a buckled metal plank and stubbed her toe underneath it. She
crumpled forward, clutching the bundle to her chest. Kai cried out, startled as the crying from the bundle erupted into boisterous wails. What is that woman carrying, she wondered.
Kai hopped off the ledge and stumbled over towards the woman, her lanky legs getting
caught around her massive cargo pants that were five sizes too large. She stopped beside the
woman not touching her still body as she quietly panicked. If word got out this woman had died the cops may blame her, she was a runaway, souka, a homeless person. Going to jail and disappearing off the streets is all they wanted.
Kai focused back on the woman as she groaned softly and nudged her elbow at Kai’s
knee.
“Akachan,” the woman whispered, worming her way towards Kai along the rusty tracks
and dirt. Kai helped the woman to her feet and began to guide her towards the edge of the
platform. The crying had ceased from the dirty bundle stained from landing in a rusty cesspool of old engine oil. Kai peered at the blanket and noticed tiny star and rabbit patterns swirling along the soft fabric.
Kai leapt onto the ledge, checking the safety of her bag of valuables before she reached
for the woman below. She yanked the hem of Kai’s coat until a tear erupted at the seams. Kai
Frontier Mosaic 72 clutched at the woman’s firm grip as the blanket roll was thrust at her chest. The woman stared
up at Kai fiercely as the reverberating tremors from an oncoming train began to shake the tracks. “For me, take care. Please.”
Kai opened up the bundle, the woman’s grip still tight on her arm, keeping her in place at
the edge of the platform. A set of rich brown eyes opened up, the baby awakened from its
shallow sleep. The woman released Kai from her grasp. Kai stumbled to the ground cradling the
squirming baby.
“What do you expect me to do with this? Watashi wa kore de nani—” Kai called after the
woman and stopped as the rumbling from the tunnel crescendoed, the train’s lights flooding the tunnel and the woman still on the tracks. She stared at the oncoming train erupting from the tunnel’s mouth as she darted along the tracks and out of view. The subway’s brakes shrieked against the tracks.
Kai sat on the ground and watched as the doors slid open and the cool yellow fluorescent
lights shone on her and her new kicking parcel. The automated voice from the train informed
her the upcoming station would soon be Harajuku, her stop, but she barely noticed. Kai stared
down at the baby. Its blubbering mouth and silky black tufts of hair peeked out from under the
blanket. The voice called out one last time. Kai hurled her bag into the car and stumbled aboard.
Kai had never been a woman that attained a fondness for babies, but here she was
clutching the swaddled cooing bundle against her chest like it was her own. She hid at the back
of the subway car traveling to Harajuku Station and Meiji's pent. The tiny face was round, plump from its mother's milk and its small dark eyes watched Kai.
The train shuddered over a new set of tracks and launched Kai into the air several inches.
The baby cried out excitedly and Kai shushed the baby with her finger, feeling its smooth skin.
She poked its cheek, the baby giggling at her touch. Its round cheek bounced back, a small patch of pink and a sooty fingerprint from Kai's index finger imprinted on the baby's face.
"Pushy," Kai cooed to the baby, "pushy, pushy, pushy." She tickled its other cheek and
the baby's arms unwrapped themselves from underneath the fleece blanket it had been cocooned in.
"Pusheen-chan," Kai whispered, holding the baby closer to her chest. Its lips smacked
Frontier Mosaic 73 together, spittle wetting them. Its fleshy fingers pulled at her right breast. "Eh! Eh! No, Pushy," Kai commanded.
The baby ignored her, demanding food. Kai would have to talk to Elvis about this. It’s not every day a stranger hands a souka an infant instead of the police.
The police, Kai thought. If they found out they could charge her with kidnapping.
Would it really be considered kidnapping if it was given to her though? How is a souka supposed to take care of a child anyway?
The train barreled into Harajuku Station’s tunnel, then eased to a complete stop. Kai
hoisted the bag over her shoulder and tucked Pusheen-chan underneath her coat, careful to use the one button still hanging on her coat flap to shield the baby from suspicious onlookers.
Kai had been living in an abandoned apartment stationed over a small local noodle shop
beyond the busy shopping streets in Harajuku. A letter of condemnation had been sealed over
the rotting door, describing the residence as a safety issue for the citizens of Japan. The perfect place for three cold and tired souka to crash.
Kai skipped up the steps. She kept away from the light leaking out from the noodle shop,
away from the owner’s eyes. She slipped through the half broken doorframe into their pent. Elvis’s back was to her and his hips were shaking back and forth violently. His deep voice
rumbled in his chest as he hummed “Jailhouse Rock.”
Kai lowered the bag to the ground carefully in hopes it wouldn’t make too much noise,
but the cans rattled. Elvis stopped his gyrations.
“Kai, it’s late. Where you been? What’s under coat?”
Elvis pointed to the large swollen lump that was the baby underneath her coat. Kai, still
hiding the baby, hoped if she didn’t talk about it maybe there wasn’t something strange about a homeless person raising a child. The baby hiccupped and giggled; its arms waved out from the top of her coat.
“You stole a baby?” Elvis asked as he kicked up the duct taped mic stand with his cheap
flashy white boots. He gyrated his hips.
“Iie, no. Okaa-san gave Pusheen-chan to me.”
“Pusheen? Akachan has a name?” Elvis asked, wiggling his grimy fingers into his thick
black beard, scratching at an unknown source around his chin. “Oba, you hear Kai? She got a baby,” Elvis yelled into the dark the room.
Frontier Mosaic 74 Kai hoped Oba would be out when she got back. He was not as relaxed when it came to
their living situation as Elvis. Oba refused to sleep in the parks or huddle in cardboard boxes like
an animal—he was too old for that. Abandoned buildings filled with asbestos and mold were the next best thing.
A small glimmer flickered from across the room and the wick of a candle lit, illuminating
the face of an elderly man whose cheeks had begun to sag like the forgotten drapes hanging around the pent.
He ignored the two of them, stomping over towards the broken basin they used as their
sink, fidgeting with some of the old pots and metal scraps flooding the broken porcelain’s rim. “Oi, Oba you see new baby or not?” Elvis called again. “There is no baby,” Oba muttered to the ground.
Elvis worked his greasy hands some more underneath his beard, saying, “Baby right here
Oba, what do you mean?”
He spun around, hand gripping the edge of the sink, the thin robe draped around his
skinny body twirling from a sudden breeze blasting from underneath the doorway. Kai took the green tarp from the ground and wrapped it around her back as she stationed herself in front of the drafty door, blocking the wind from entering.
“You want to be souka, there is no baby,” Oba said to Elvis, ignoring Kai. “We can’t just leave her, Oba,” Kai said, gently rocking her back and forth. She
remembered from back home how her mother had done that with her brother as an infant to help him sleep.
“You try to fit in with us,” Oba called from the sink, scrubbing at an old rusty pot he had
been soaking with rainwater from the night before with a broken brush, “but you speak too much English. Too much, too much, everyone know you not Japanese.”
Kai sat curled up in the tarp, blocking the draft that leaked through the bottom of the
rotting door. She found herself absentmindedly caressing the temple of Pusheen-chan calming
both of their restlessness. Kai knew she couldn’t provide for Pusheen-chan, not in conditions like these, but bringing her to the police could get her involved in ways she’d rather not be.
Oba and Elvis began to banter back and forth about the ethics of homelessness etiquette
and Elvis’s lack of participation in finding a new building to crash for the upcoming month.
Pusheen-chan’s hand wrapped around Kai’s finger, pulling it towards her face where she nuzzled
Frontier Mosaic 75 the finger before closing her eyes. Kai couldn’t help but smile. There had never been a fondness for children within her before; perhaps that was changing.
A swift slap on the back of Kai’s head knocked her to the side, bringing her attention
back to Oba and Elvis. “You can’t keep baby. You make no money. We are homeless, souka.
Unless you work for gang or Hajime no way we can help her,” Oba said. He crossed his arms, the dripping broken brush in one hand.
“We can’t just give her up, Oba. She has no mother.”
“Like you can be her new Okaa-san. You are souka. You choose how you are to live. Give
up your life or get job, work for gang or Hajime. You want out of souka, here is chance.”
The baby went through the milk and diapers Kai had stolen faster than she anticipated. It
had been several days and she had been unable to leave the pent to help Elvis and Oba scour
dumpsters, lift from tourist’s pockets, or find a new place to sleep. Oba stopped talking to her
after he had singed the tip of his long thin beard over the open flame on the stove while cooking noodles Elvis had borrowed from downstairs. He did not admit it, but she had seen him staring
at her and Pusheen-chan from across the room, watching them angrily and it was this distraction that caused him to lose two inches of his beloved beard. Elvis had quit singing his “Hound Dog” cover since Pusheen-chan grew overly excited, squealing at his thick drawls mixed in with a strong Japanese accent.
Kai left the pent later that night after Oba had disappeared for the tunnels and Elvis had
fallen asleep along the green tarp next to Pusheen-chan’s cardboard box crib. She wound her way through the alleys until she hit the main vein in Harajuku Station, Takeshita Street. The neon
strobe lights were still flickering, beckoning tourists and fashion addicts to enter their store and
sort through their wares. Beyond the hair salon and gothic Lolita store was a small convenience shop that sold minimal necessities.
Kai skirted the end of the aisles, her head lowered away from the cashier. She ducked
into the row she needed and scooped several boxes of baby formula. The young girl was too busy flipping through a teen magazine to notice Kai slip back outside with the baby food. She was
lucky it was not the girl’s mother there that night or she wouldn’t have been able to set foot in the shop.
Frontier Mosaic 76 Tucking the boxes beneath her coat, Kai turned the corner of the street to make her way
back to the pent house when a man violently bumped into her. The boxes exploded from underneath her coat, landing around their feet.
“I didn’t know you had a kid, Kai. Congratulations,” Hajime said, grinning as he
removed his sleek sunglasses from around his tan, slender face. This was the last person Kai had wanted to see.
“She’s not mine, I’m just taking care of her.” Kai dropped down to the ground, grabbing
the boxes hurriedly, hoping Hajime had somewhere else to be.
“That’s good. Wouldn’t want to ruin that cute figure of yours.” Kai could imagine
Hajime’s face at the moment, smirking down at her, imagining her in one of those outfits his
girls wear every night. She could never sink low enough to sell herself like that; she’d rather be a souka the rest of her life.
Hajime’s hand lightly touched the top of Kai’s as he passed a box of the formula to her.
His eyes reminded her of Pusheen-chan’s, soft brown, like the chocolate she used to eat before
she ran away. She did not like thinking of her baby as being similar to Hajime. She lowered her eyes to the ground, searching for more stray boxes she had dropped.
“You know I can make sure you make enough money to support that kid of yours,”
Hajime said, taking the last box of formula from the ground and holding it just out of Kai’s reach. She stood up from her knees, keeping her eyes to the ground and avoiding Hajime’s.
Maybe if she ignored him long enough he’d leave her alone so she could get back to Pusheenchan.
Hajime fingered the end of some of Kai’s hair, rubbing the course texture between his
fingertips like he was testing its purity or potential for future cash.
“There is no point in dying your hair black to fit in, Hakujin. We all know you’re a
Gaijin, an outsider here. Your English is too good, your figure and face too shallow and lean, and
your hair too light. Why not use what makes you different,” Hajime took a step closer to Kai, pressing the box to her chest gently, “to make some money?”
Kai had known it would be pointless to disappear in a place so foreign to her and be
treated like everyone else. But that did not mean she would be one of Hajime’s girls.
Frontier Mosaic 77 As if sensing Kai’s desperation to leave and her sudden possibility of flight, he slid his
arm around hers, leading her away from the direction of their pent and Pusheen-chan and further down Takeshita Street.
“Why don’t I show you the place, it’s much nicer than you think. We treat all of our
women with the greatest respect.” Kai was sure that the women would disagree but she did not pull away from him. Some part of her wanted to see what it was like to be a dancer.
A car was parked in front of a cigarette dispenser, the driver smoking, waiting for
Hajime’s return. He opened the door for them and drove out of Harajuku towards Shinjuku district.
In the cramped vehicle, Kai caught whiffs of herself. She wondered how Hajime could
stand her stench of garbage and baby formula or her greasy hair and frumpy clothes. He put his
sunglasses back on, even though it was nighttime, and stared ahead. Kai hadn’t noticed the slim
fitting suit he had been wearing and the sleek black shoes adorning his feet. They both cost more than the rent would have been at the pent house for over a year. But she didn’t want money from a business such as his, she reminded herself.
The car slowed to a halt in front of a black store, red lights flooding the street. A large
red cushioned door opened for Hajime and Kai and a thick man greeted them, giving them
permission to enter. The inside was dimly lit, small candles lighting the tables speckled across the room. Several women walked back and forth between tables before settling at one to join in conversation with elderly businessmen, their slinky dresses revealing just enough. But center stage was where the money was being made.
“Her name is Pixie for her haircut. She’s one of our most popular girls,” Hajime told Kai
next to the bar. He ordered a small clear drink and watched her perform on stage, dancing underneath the smoky lighting, the layers of her red and black dress gradually being shed.
“Pixie makes over 50,000 yen a night, and has a family,” Hajime continued. Kai had been
sitting at one of the stools in front of the bar but slid off, walking away from the dancing woman and Hajime. Hajime opened up Kai’s coat and took the baby formula boxes out, lining them up on the counter in front of her.
He caught her arm, pulling her over to him. “I know this isn’t the line of work you want.
It’s not what any of these girls want, not really. But it gets them by for now.” He released her and brushed some dirt away from her coat. “If you’re going to take care of that baby you need to start
Frontier Mosaic 78 thinking of it before you. The souka life is no life for a child, here you can provide for it. Even if
it’s temporary.” Kai wondered how Hajime had been able to drop his Japanese accent. He spoke
in clear English then switched to Japanese and ordered one of the men to bring something from the back.
“Think about it. You don’t have to dance right away if you don’t want to. But it makes
the most money and you’ll need cash to make a deposit if you’re gonna find a place to live. I can
help you with that too.” He reached inside his suit pocket and handed her a personal business card. The name of his business was not etched in it, but had his home address along with his
cellphone number scrawled in a romantic font. Kai couldn’t help but blush. She wondered why
he would give her something as personal as his phone number and home address when he had only ever been interested in her working for him.
The man appeared from the back with a small shopping bag filled with tissue. Hajime
slid the formula boxes into the already stuffed bag and handed it to Kai saying, “Here’s
something in case you change your mind. You know how to contact me. If you or your baby ever needs anything, give me a call.”
Hajime escorted Kai back outside to the car. He opened her door once more and helped
her inside. He did not join her in the ride back and she was grateful. She needed some time to think about what Hajime had said. She knew she could not raise Pusheen-chan alone, and
homeless. There was no way to provide shelter, food and an education for her. But dancing for
money? Kai thought. There must be something about her that made Hajime so desperate to have her work for him, and that would mean even more money, more than 50,000 yen a night—
maybe enough to raise Pusheen-chan.
Kai shook the idea from her head. She was a souka, homeless, and there was no way out
of her life. She chose it and now she had to figure something else out. She wouldn’t be able to make that much money a night anyway; she didn’t even know how to dance. At least she had Elvis and Oba, she wasn’t completely alone.
The car pulled in front of the noodle shop, its doors closed and barred for the night. Kai
waved the man away, nervous as to how he knew where she was staying. Kai sluggishly climbed the steps thinking of how she should have ordered food while she was with Hajime, she hadn’t eaten anything since finding Pusheen-chan. Kai stopped her ascent as she heard shrill cries
Frontier Mosaic 79 escaping from her pent. She dashed up the rest of the stairs, slamming the already open door to the side.
The condemned room was torn to pieces. The green tarp and Elvis’s belongings were
gone. Oba’s pots and candles and slippers no longer occupied the kitchen. Pusheen-chan’s
cardboard box was upturned. The baby lay on the cold dirty ground for who knows how long.
Kai picked up the baby, shushing her quietly, bouncing her up and down as she searched
the apartment for Oba and Elvis. They were gone and so was her bag. They had left to find a new place to sleep while she had been with Hajime.
Kai could feel her chest tighten. Her heart grew heavy as she sat down on the broken
couch. A plume of dust and dirt leaked out from where she sat and Pusheen-chan coughed,
calming down as Kai continued to rock her. She had forgotten to get diapers. She was out of diapers.
Kai looked towards the name brand shopping bag Hajime had given to her. She lowered
the baby onto the couch and removed the tissues and formula boxes to the ground. She pulled
out another box, this one with a Japanese woman on the front and sleek light hair, and a piece of clothing that was deep red and much too short for her figure. She threw them back in the bag and paced the room, staring at Hajime’s business card.
It wasn’t safe for her to be here alone, not without Oba and Elvis, and she was not going
to a shelter. Pusheen-chan sighed as she drifted back to sleep.
You have to think about the baby before yourself. But did she have to? She had lived on
her own for a long time and had learned she was the most important person out there. Did a baby have to change that?
Kai looked back towards the shopping bag, reading the instructions on the back of the
hair dye box she found tucked underneath the tissue.
Kai shifted the shopping bag uneasily in her hand, balancing the heavy baby in her other
arm. She felt the smooth tips of her blonde hair, the natural color shining bright underneath the subway station’s lights. She had tucked it underneath a cap she had picked up from a newspaper
stand, trying to keep attention away from the homeless girl with a baby and a designer shopping bag. She waited impatiently for the train to appear at Yamenote Station as Pusheen-chan slept
Frontier Mosaic 80 underneath her coat. She pulled the business card out from her pocket again, memorizing Hajime’s address. He lived only a couple of stations away from Harajuku.
Kai flicked the card with her fingers down into the tunnel and looked ahead at the tracks
imagining the cap of a woman’s head bobbing up and down along the tracks as she waited for the train to approach. She waited for the train to decide which stop would be her new home.
Frontier Mosaic 81
Disconnected LIZ DUECK
Frontier Mosaic 82 NONFICTION
Lady in Nude SHANLEY WELLS-RAU
“There’s a naked woman on the sixth floor. Can you go see what’s happening?” crackled
my radio. The male security guards didn’t want to go up, and I was the only female supervisor on property during swing shift.
It was my favorite shift to work at the Peppermill Hotel & Casino, becoming a lifestyle
after my promotion to shift manager. Start work at five p.m., get off at one a.m. with plenty of
time to hook up with friends and party after work. I had the days to take care of business, go to Tahoe, smoke pot at the river, or sleep late. Sure, there were a couple of times when I woke up looking outside at that in-between light of twilight or dawn in a panic, not sure if I was simply
“almost late” or an entire day late for work, but generally the five to one fit my circadian rhythms and social life perfectly.
“How do you know there’s a naked woman?” I asked a couple minutes later as I stepped
into the security office.
“Come look at the screen,” said Larry, the monitor-watcher on shift that night. I walked
around the desk to peer into the black-and-white security feed showing what was, yes indeed, a
naked woman walking around the hotel hallway. She didn’t look how a naked woman in a hotel casino should look—rather, she wasn’t doing what I expected a naked woman would be doing.
Frontier Mosaic 83 She just seemed lost. She was ambling, not drunk, not trouble-making, just walking; shuffling a few steps one way, stopping, then turning around and walking back.
“The guys just don’t want to go up there, but we’ll be watching in case you need help,” he
winked. “Just call on the radio if you need us.”
I took the service elevator up to the sixth floor stopping by the housekeeping storage area
to grab a clean bed sheet. This was my first naked person. I’d had dead people. People fucking. Crazy people. Angry people. Horny people. Vomiters. People who wanted to know who took
their marijuana. “Would you like to file a police report on that, sir?” Rich people trying to buy my, uh, time. Germans. French. Brits. Southerners. Drunks. Asians. Aussies. Thieves. A guy
who covered every surface in his room with aluminum foil. Pro athletes. Joan Jett. Billy Idol. But I’d never had a naked person.
“Hello, ma’am? Can I give you this?” I said as I approached her, holding out the opened
bed sheet in each hand like a curtain to fold around her. “I don’t want you to get cold.”
As she accepted the sheet, warm embarrassment spread through my chest. She was an
older woman, probably in her 70s. She could be my grandmother. I could see that she was in fact not naked. She was wearing a nude-colored bra and large underwear, covered with flesh-colored
panty hose and no shoes. The colors, or lack of, made her appear naked on the crappy black-andwhite security feed. My eye fell on the thick strap of her industrial bra, a grandma’s bra. I turned around to look up at the camera at the end of the hallway and give the security guys a nod.
“So what’s going on tonight, ma’am? Are you staying here?” I asked quietly. I should not
know that her breasts did not fill out the cups of the cheap bra, leaving puckered wrinkles above the nipples. She did not respond. Surely this woman didn’t wander in from the street with no
clothes on. Someone would have tracked her before this. She had to be a guest or visiting a guest. Maybe someone brought her up here. “Is this your floor?” Again, no response. I quickly scanned the 30-room floor for any open doors, luggage, purses, bags, clothing, or shoes. There was
nothing. All doors were closed up tight, and the only squatters in the hallway were a couple of room service trays with dinner remnants and empty wine bottles.
“Are you staying here with someone? Your family? Your husband?” Nothing. “Your
children, maybe? Girlfriends?” Nothing. She wasn’t speaking. Just looking at me. Maybe the
questions were too hard. Let’s go back to basics and start with something easier. “Ma’am, what’s
Frontier Mosaic 84 your name?” Nothing. “Ma’am, your name? What do people call you? Your first name?” No response.
“Okay, let’s go down here and get some privacy,” I coaxed, putting my arm on her
shoulder to steer her towards the staff staging area at the end of the floor. Inside the enclosed
housekeeping room, I motioned towards a bar stool, its orange velvet seat looking out of place
among the stark white towels and bedding. She climbed up, hugging the crisp bed sheet around
her like a victim from a cruise line disaster.
I picked up the wall phone and buzzed security. “Okay guys, I’ve got her. I don’t know
what’s going on, but I think she’s staying here or might be visiting someone here. There are no clothes in the hallway, no open doors. No indication of anything and she’s not talking,” I said quietly, not wanting her to think I was speaking disrespectfully about her.
“Is she drunk?” was the obvious question from the other end. Dealing with drunks was
part of the daily life of anyone working in the business.
“No, I don’t think so.” I looked over at her. She didn’t smell like booze. She wasn’t any
more wobbly than an older lady without clothes should be. She didn’t seem like she was on drugs
or anything. I began to suspect dementia. Could she be foreign? Language issue?
“Put me through to the Front Desk,” I said. Maybe someone had called looking for their
older lady with no clothes. Maybe someone had found a pile of clothing somewhere. But no such luck. The Front Desk had no leads.
Antonia popped her head around the door. “Hi Shar-lee. Do you need me?” she asked,
her thick black hair shiny even under the fluorescent lights. I smiled. Most of my employees couldn’t say my name, but their attempts always cracked me up. And God bless them for
speaking more than one language. Antonia was a bright faced young woman from Guatemala. What she had gone through in her home country and all those in-between to get to the United
States I didn’t know. Her journey through war zones as a woman alone was being revealed to me
in little drips of stories as she grew to trust me more through the years. The men called “coyotes” were expensive and dishonest. Guatemala was not safe for her. She had her American
citizenship, though I wasn’t sure how, but not even her husband knew about that. He was Mexican—they’d met in the US—and she never wanted him to know for fear he married her or was staying with her for her citizenship. An American ID with a Hispanic name on it could
Frontier Mosaic 85 bring “mucho dinero” on the black market, so even though they had been married for five or six years, he still didn’t know.
“Hey Antonia,” I said to her. “Thanks for coming up, but I’m good.” That was code for,
this lady speaks English, I don’t need translation, but thanks. Even though I had no idea if this lady even spoke.
“Where are you on the dirty rooms?” I asked as she stepped closer to show me the night’s
list of vacant and occupied rooms that were dirty. Trying not to look at the woman, she told me
which ones were VC or SC, vacant clean or stay clean, and which had yet to be done. “Okay, go back and take Virgil over to Building C to help you finish over there,” I said, relieved that the always happy Filipino was on shift. He probably couldn’t do anything helpful if a wandering
drunk got too pushy, but if I couldn’t be with the crew, at least having a male with them made me feel better when they had to go to an outlying building.
Virgil was the only male in my little United Nations of employees. I had no idea how old
he was. He could have been anywhere from 35 to 65. His English was terrible, but he
understood a lot and spoke Spanish in addition to his native Tagalog. Throw in my Spanglish skills and we did all right, me and Virgil. He was always smiling. He never walked, always
trotted in a run-walk everywhere, and could be counted on for anything. Big puddle of vomit in
the hallway on four? Call Virgil. Diapers clogged up a toilet in 1232? Virgil’s there with the wet vac. His name was really pronounced Vur-heel-ee-oh, and I called him that from time-to-time.
He called me “boss lay-dee” through his big smiling teeth, and he never let me carry anything
heavier than a clipboard. I got the impression he was alone in this country, but he never revealed anything about family. But, one year, when Antonia was pregnant, he brought out a chain and
pendant to swing over her belly to determine if the baby would be male or female based on the direction of the swing. He predicted correctly. We were having a girl.
The heavy door closed behind Antonia as she left to go find Virgil. I turned back to my
sheet-wrapped dilemma still perched on the wayward bar stool.
“Okay ma’am. We have a problem here, you and me. I don’t know how to help you
unless you start talking to me,” I said. I started to think I was out of my depth. But if I couldn’t fix this, what would happen then? She didn’t even have on shoes. “Where are you from? Do you live here in Reno?” I asked hoping she would trust me and speak. She looked at me and said very quietly, “California.”
Frontier Mosaic 86 “Oh! Okay! See that’s good. That’s helpful.” Most of our weeknight customers were from
California, usually from the mid and northern parts. The Reno-Tahoe area was a short drive and
a convenient place for our neighbors in California to get away for some debauchery.
“Where abouts in California?” She looked at me and said nothing more. Damn it. We
looked at each other. Her eyes were wide open looking at me in amazement and what was that—
possibly fear? One eye was a little glazed like my elderly dog’s. Cataracts possibly. She really didn’t give off the vibe of a hooker or drug dealer. Not sharp enough for a card counter or professional gambler. Not smooth enough to be a thief. Where the fuck would she put
anything—unless she was a distraction for something bigger. But a distraction would need to be
chatty and disarming. This woman was just … nothing. It was as if she were trying to disappear. “Ma’am. Please tell me where in California you are from. What city do you live in?” I
tried again.
“Modesto,” was the mumbled reply as she looked away. Again with the disappearing
thing.
“Okay! That’s good! Central Valley, huh? Did you come here on a bus?” thinking maybe
she was on one of the old-lady gambling buses traversing the Sierras every week to bring in
Californians hungry to gamble. No response. No eye contact. I started to ramble, “It’s nice over
there in the Central Valley, huh? Have you always lived there?” thinking I could get her to start opening up. She looked at me and blinked.
I reached over for the black wall phone again. “Yeah, Front Desk.” As I’m transferred I
look at her wondering what was going to happen to this nude-colored lady. “Yeah, Rick, got any
buses in from Modesto?” I heard clickety clack through the earpiece as my counterpart at the Front Desk checked the hotel reservation system. “Uhhhh, let’s see here,” he said. “Nope, nothing.”
Dammit. “How about Merced or Stockton?” I asked. Gawd those places are shitholes.
“Fresno?” It’s a long shot. More clackety clacks. Nope, nothing. “Hey Susan,” I heard Rick
speaking to one of his desk clerks. “We don’t have any busses in from Modesto do we?” All I
heard of the response was a mumbling underlying the bings and dings of slot machines out on the casino floor next to the front desk. “Shanley, no. There’s nothing.” Good lord. “Okay, Rick, you guys start looking through guest records to see if there’s anyone from Modesto staying on six. Or wait, make it the whole North Tower. And look for Stockton and Merced too.”
Frontier Mosaic 87 We hung up. A clerk would have to page through each guest record individually and note
the address given and room checked into. Many people who come to a hotel in Nevada do not always give their correct address, or even name for that matter. Many of the financial
transactions were conducted in cash, so a name couldn’t be matched with a credit card record.
This was long before cyberspace and handheld devices made tracking people so easy. The hotel casino business had no world wide web in the late 1980s.
“How did you get here? Did you drive by car?” I tried again. “Maybe you rode with a
friend or a family member?” Nothing. “Do you know anyone in Reno? Maybe you came to see someone?” Her eyes were fixed on the wall, her face turned away from me. It was as if she
wanted one of us to disappear.
People disappearing, death squads, civil war, desperate poverty—that’s what Antonia had
fled in Guatemala to live out her American Dream working at a crappy job as a maid cleaning up
after drunks, skiers, and gamblers. What was this woman in front of me fleeing? Clearly her clothing, but what else? It was time to get tough.
“Ma’am, if you can’t help me help you, I’m going to have to turn you over to Security.
We’ll need to go down to their office,” I said, in what I hoped was a stern tone. She blanched.
Okay, then. We’ll keep heading in this direction, I thought. “There are no female employees in our Security Department; I’m the only woman supervisor on shift. The guys down there will
have to involve the Reno Police Department because you can’t stay here if you’re not a guest. I really don’t want the police to take you away.”
Fear, embarrassment, nerves all skittered across her face. We looked at each other for a
long minute. Such a long minute that I thought I was back to square one, dammit. But then she swallowed, paused, and inhaled a large gulp of air, for courage I thought, and began to slowly reveal herself to me in little puzzle pieces that didn’t make sense at first. Another hour of
questioning, listening, cajoling, more listening—these were the cost of those one- and two-word
bits and pieces. As I received more and more of them, I was able to put together a story.
She was here with a man. “No,” she said, when I asked if it was her husband. She was a
widow. Oh, a romantic overnight in Reno. She was in a hotel with a man who was not her
husband. She didn’t want us to know that. They weren’t married to each other, but she was a
widow and he was not married to anyone else from what I could gather. They were of consenting age. Footloose and fancy free. But she carried so much shame for being caught in a hotel with a
Frontier Mosaic 88 man to whom she was not married—that was the cloak of invisibility I’d been detecting as she kept trying to disappear.
They had checked in and gone to the room together. She went into the bathroom to
“take a bath” she whispered. Did people really take baths in hotel bathtubs, I wondered. A flash of an errant pubic hair from guests past caused me to cringe. Instead of taking off her under
things, she stepped from the bathroom. For this she gave no reason, but I imagined her opening the bathroom door to present herself to him in her granny panties, panty hose, and nude bra.
What a scary step for this widow, who had probably never been naked with another man but her husband. I imagined a youthful version of her with tight skin, laughing and confident in her 1940s thigh-high stockings, garters affixed to a steel-trap of a girdle, pointy bra patriotically
hoisting her breasts like torpedoes. Of course, she left her panty hose on over her panties. That’s how she did it the last time she offered herself to a man—except 1980s thick crotch-reinforced
L’eggs panty hose were not sexy like those coveted wartime silk thigh-highs. She said, “turned right.”
I said, “You turned right? From the bathroom?” She nodded, her eyes resting on mine
briefly before shifting back to the wall. As she left the bathroom, she turned right towards the outer door instead of making a left turn into the hotel room. “And you opened the door and
walked out?” She nodded. I leaned back, imagining her opening the bathroom ready to make her big reveal to the man who was not and could never be her dead husband. Taking a deep breath, she turned in the wrong direction and accidentally opened the outer door to the room. “When
you stepped into the hallway, the door closed behind you, didn’t it?” She nodded, looking down at her panty-hose reinforced toes.
As soon as she stepped into the hallway, she probably froze with panic, but the room
door closed hard behind her and locked. One or two turns the wrong way and boom—she was
lost with no clue which room was hers. That’s when Security saw her wandering around and I entered the picture.
After another hour coaxing out the name of her gentleman friend, I was able to confirm
his existence and room number with the Front Desk staff. They were glad to be able to stop leafing through guest records. When I let her back into the guest room, I could see an older gentleman sitting in a chair by the window watching TV. The Sierra Mountains made a
gorgeous view out that window, though they were unseen at the moment in the dark. She’ll like
Frontier Mosaic 89 the view in the sunlight tomorrow, I thought. Her friend looked up as she entered, but he didn’t seem concerned. He probably thought she was taking too long in the bathroom. “Shar-lee?” hissed my radio.
“Yes, Antonia,” I replied to the mouthpiece as I let the door to room 619 close behind my
nude-colored rescue.
“We ready for you inspect these,” she said.
“Yeah, okay, be there in a sec,” I said, pausing outside the closed door. I imagined the
1940s version of this woman, her hair coiled up in confidence, fingernails painted fire engine red. In my mind, she laughed as she leaned in for a handsome soldier to light her cigarette resting suggestively between her fingers.
Frontier Mosaic 90
Misty Vision ELLE DENYER
Frontier Mosaic 91 CAROLINE JENNINGS
Kenosis in the Spring Like the sightless apostle, I lay near the ground in communion with beetles, ferns, and bulbs. My ear to the dust, expectant for the gossiping waves underneath, cocked low to the Underworld, listening for the discourse of snails, wind-chiseled egg shells, and dissipated moths. My fingers intercede for me, and I wonder of my kinship with dolls, of their anesthetized pupils. I know the gentle lift of ether and the fibrous, cotton bandages recessed into my face, moldering into my skin. And the graduations of shadows, the waxing and waning of umber, the receding of my people, wraith-like and disobedient. The books were put before me, the Braille like sand-shrouded seashells with their soft, Phrygian rhythms. I consider the curvature of the text across the page, the lettering as city ruins or the wilted backs of pilgrims in snow. So my hands interfere with the spiders stringing their wind harps, their hollowed liturgies. I stumble to Damascus, hands extended. I have coffers to empty, yet no sight of Him. Then, I think, is this the loneliness of the Holy Ghost, to be perceived, but never seen? I know a fellow by the faltering of wind, the careless pivot of a shoe. God’s known less than me. I decide to continue in the dusk where double-minded faith, borne with ash and dove, is the chiaroscuro, where the Light endures all things.
Frontier Mosaic 92
A Lot on My Mind EMMA SHORE
Frontier Mosaic 93 KRISTEN VALENSKI
Nemophilist Temples, Cathedral arches entwining branches together bent upwards, A bow is raised; a hand is clasped together, kneeling beneath silent oaks, Resting their contrite knees upon a bed of moss, littered decaying leaves. My religion is amongst bark Conifers, spruce, Black poplars, Ash, beech, holly, Conundrums layered beneath thick sap, Tucked between chips of wooden tissue. Repentance is never found wrapped along a holly branch, or wound Like a chord of prayer beads along a wrist, It shivers over shaking limbs, Dribbles over newborn’s lips, drowning you slowly. The rainwater washes over you, sprinkles through the trees clasped fingers, Like a shaking aspen, aspergillium A baptism Among trees.
Frontier Mosaic 94
Amanda Bueno
Contributors
Amanda Bueno lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma and graduated magna cum laude from Oklahoma State University in 2014. Her degree is in English with an option in Creative Writing. Next to writing, her passion is working with international populations and her favorite job has been teaching English as a Second Language. She also enjoys volunteering to help the community. In the future, she plans to keep traveling the world, writing, and teaching.
Neke Carey
Neke is a double major in Strategic Communications and Multimedia Journalism. She is obsessed with spoken word poetry and anything written by Lang Leav. Writing has led her everywhere she’s needed to go. It will always be her favorite adventure.
Jason Christian
Jason Christian traveled for more than a decade, first with a carnival, and later in search of adventure. He is currently studying creative writing at Oklahoma State University and plans to pursue an MFA after that. He has published in This Land Press, Mask Magazine, Liquid Journal, Oklahoma Review, and Burningword Literary Journal.
Elle Denyer
Elizabeth Jett Denyer is a freshman studying Studio Art in the Arts Department at Oklahoma State University. She has always been captured by painting and drawing and it has become one of her favorite past-times. She recognizes that it is a huge privilege to seek higher education for something that she loves doing. She feels it has been a joy to even see growth in her craft just after a semester of being under some stellar professors that challenge her to become a vibrant artist in all aspects.
Frontier Mosaic 95
Liz Dueck
Liz Dueck is a sophomore from Tulsa studying at Oklahoma State University to receive a BFA in Studio Art as well as a teaching certification. She plans on working on a master’s degree after her undergraduate and would like to one day become an art professor or high school art teacher.
Shawn Finley
Originally from Midwest City, Oklahoma, Shawn Finley came to OSU to learn Architectural Engineering before changing his major to Civil Engineering and finally to Creative Writing. Shawn’s passion is storytelling, not just the story being told, but the way the story is told. Instead of struggling with numbers, he now struggles with understanding his characters and, in turn, himself. Shawn hopes to be a successful enough author to be able to live under prestigious bridges in the Pacific Northwest.
Kelsey Ford
Kelsey is a senior creative writing major from Snyder, Oklahoma. Her plan for after graduation this May is to find a job where she can pursue her passion for writing.
Amanda Hays
Amanda is a freshman majoring in creative writing. She was born in Plano, Texas and is 19 years old. Amanda has been previously published in her high school literary magazine.
Frontier Mosaic 96
Caroline Jennings
Caroline Jennings is a senior English major and member of the honors college at Oklahoma State University. She won the 2014 Ruby N. Courtney Writer’s Scholarship for her short story, “The Wedding Ring.” After she graduates with her bachelor’s degree, she intends to earn an MA in composition and rhetoric and teach undergraduate composition and literature courses. Her scholarly interests include early American women’s novels, Puritan poetry, and research detailing the writing experiences of first year composition students. Caroline plays the piano and composes pieces for her own enjoyment. Her other interests include church history, music
composition, and opera.
Matthew Mitchell
Matthew Mitchell is a Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Student at Oklahoma State University. He is on the Executive Board of the OSU Paddle People and is known for wearing an orange tuxedo to OSU sporting events. Matthew is an avid coin collector, a hobby that he has pursued throughout his life.
Ryan Ricks
Ryan Ricks is a junior studying English at Oklahoma State. He is twentyone years old and interested in poetry that disrupts the preconceived notions of poetry. Ryan believes that sometimes, a Britney Spears interview contains more “poetry” than the works within a Norton Anthology.
Rachael Ross
Rachael started writing poetry while in high school. Poetry, to her, is like making dream worlds that she has only imagined in her mind. She finds it incredible that people are able to have certain emotions towards literature because of words on a page. She wants to create that emotion for people. She wants people to show their feelings when they read her work. She wants a human to separate his or her self from reality and fall into the poem. She wants them to read poems while listening to music and lying in their bed. She honestly wants people to read her poems when there is fog on the ground and rain falling from the sky. She wants to make people cry.
Frontier Mosaic 97
Emma Shore
produce her own art.
Emma Shore is a junior working toward a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art at OSU. Her focus is in watercolor and sculpture. She studied painting in Italy while participating in a two-week study abroad course. Most of her pieces revolve around nature in some way. She has always loved art but didn't actually take an art class until her freshman year at OSU. After graduating, she hopes to work in an art museum while continuing to
Kristen Valenski
Since high school, Kristen has held a strong passion for English especially in the field of creative writing. She has translated, modernized and rewritten scripts for the opera’s performed by her Opera Workshop in high school, The Magic Flute and The Bat. During her coursework through the English department at OSU she has discovered a newfound love for short stories and especially poetry.
Alex Webb
Alex Webb was a political science major who dropped out to write bad poetry while sitting on balconies in broken Walmart fold out chairs. Now, he’s a creative writing major who overfills the “notes” app of his iPhone with ten thousand short story opening lines for every one that gets finished. He’s set to graduate December 2015.
Shanley Wells-Rau
Shanley spent the past couple decades in Corporate America writing brilliant press releases, crafting stunning copy for employee magazines and newsletters, and wordsmithing the crap out of websites and emails. While Corporate America does not appreciate the occasional internal rhyme as much as it should, it did teach her to churn out copy on deadline and gracefully take “writing help” from engineers, accountants, and lawyers. Shanley lives on a hill outside Ponca City, Okla., with her husband and a trio of ungrateful dogs, where she now writes about things other than the oil industry, when she’s not freaking about access problems in D2L.
Frontier Mosaic 98
Donations are accepted and appreciated. Donations should be addressed to: Frontier Mosaic 205 Morrill Hall Oklahoma State University Stillwater, Oklahoma 74078-4069
Frontier Mosaic 99