Marana Thalia King
Marana Thalia King 
Marana Thalia King The Literary Arts Department Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12, A Creative and Performing Arts Magnet  
CopyrightŠ2019 Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12, A Creative and Performing Arts Magnet Pittsburgh, PA The copyright to the individual pieces remains the property of each individual. Reproduction in any form by any means without specific written permission from the individual is prohibited. For copies or inquiries: Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12 Literary Arts Department Mara Cregan 111 Ninth Street Pittsburgh, PA 15222 mcregan1@pghschools.org Ms. Melissa A. Pearlman, Principal
For Lucia and Penelope

Table of contents 1. Mary Anna and the Creek of Youth 2. Baby Kisser, There are Twenty-Six Things You Don’t Know 3. Prayers from Marana 4. Daughter of the Desert 5. Stay-at-home Mother 6. Following the setting sun 7. Choked 8. Gila Monsters 9. City Girl 
Mary Anna and the Creek of Youth Long ago, many people began to journey West. Sometimes, they made it all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Other times, they stopped along the way and made towns along the trail. As time passed, the trails became roads, and the roads became highways. Eventually, the towns grew into big cities. The trails were hot and dry during the day, so many people travelled at night. One night, a teenager named Mary Anna wandered away from her family in the dark. She didn’t realize she was lost until she came upon a small, crystal clear creek, which wound through the desert. Thirsty, Mary Anna stopped and drank at the creek. The water was so cold that she drank and drank until she felt she was full of water, and could not drink any more. Suddenly, Mary Anna heard the voices of her family in the distance, calling her name. She ran to them, and led them back to the creek she had discovered. As her family drank the water, Mary Anna noticed that the fine wrinkles on her mother’s face were gone, miraculously replaced by a youthful glow. The family called it a creek of youth, and Mary Anna’s father insisted the family camp by the creek for the night. The nights turned into weeks and months, and eventually, the family decided to create their own town by the creek. The town was called Marana, after Mary Anna who found the creek of youth. The people who created the homes in Marana refused to destroy the natural landscape. They built houses around cacti and trees, which resulted in most houses being very far apart. In the center of the town, a church and school were built, as well as a few small shops.
Over the years, few people wandered through that part of the desert, but those who did found a place to stay, food to eat, and cool creek water to drink in the town. Eventually, they fell so in love with the landscape and the beauty of the town that they didn’t want to leave. Due to the creek water, the people of Marana still grew old, but their faces remained young and their bodies energetic. After so many years, the creek eventually became dried up. By now, Mary Anna herself was old, but looked the same as she did the night she arrived in Marana. The people of Marana held a meeting to decide if they should abandon the town, but they loved their town, and so only a few decided to continue their ancestor’s journey West. Throughout the years, Marana has not grown bigger, despite being close to the large city of Tucson. Still, the people remaining there are loyal to it, and children love listening to the stories of the creek bed, their great grandparents, and the discovery of the town of Marana.
Baby Kisser, There are Twenty-Six Things You Don’t Know after Matthew Burnside, “38 things you’ll never know.” 1. When you were young, your mother made you flush your beloved goldfish down the toilet. He would be fished out of the reservoir a week later. It wasn’t you who killed him, but the filtration system. 2. The snack shack by the pool is a money laundering front. There is no way anybody could make that much from just otter pops and Cheetos. 3. The lifeguards at the pool despise you because you’re the one who suggested the snack shack serve Cheetos. Wiping orange fingerprints from the rusting white lawn chairs wasn’t the job they applied for, but that seems to be all they do these days. Given the chance, they wouldCheetos call you baby kisser to your face. 4. When he is seven, your son tells you he’s watching Power Rangers, but late at night your wife hears the My Little Pony theme song faintly enter her dreams. In the morning, the only signs of the night’s activities are a large amount of missing crackers and the fact that the volume is on an odd seven, while you always leave it on an even twelve. 5. Your secretary, Deborah, doesn’t see you as the assistant mayor, but as the teenager who lost his sister, Katie, in a car accident while he was at home, asleep. 6. Your son failed his driving test the first time because he forgot to use his turn signal, but your wife gave the instructor 30 dollars and a free massage coupon to look the other way. 7. The sunroof of your car has been stuck open for the past 4 months. Next time it rains in Arizona, it will be a thunderstorm, and the plush interior of your car will cost $11,000 to fix. Your wife will suggest you start taking the bus. 8. Katie was driving drunk. Your father, a police officer, was the first on the scene. He was the one who detected alcohol on her last breath, and he did not tell anyone because he knew you wanted to go Ivy League, and having a dead sister looked better than having a dead drunk sister. 9. Your Cornell acceptance letter was lost in the mail. You wouldn’t have been able to afford it anyway. 10. Old Ms. Greene, your second grade teacher, murdered her husband for his life insurance policy. She told everyone she was moving to Nebraska to be closer to her kids.
11. Every December 26, your parents would go to the department stores to buy discounted presents for next year. If you asked them, they would say that wanting a rubix cube for a whole year made you appreciate it more. 12. Assistant mayor is a position created by your friend Jeff, the mayor, because he felt bad that Katie died after his party in high school. 13. It’s no coincidence that you kiss the babies while Jeff makes speeches. You are not seen as the real mayor by anyone except your own kids. Sometimes, on the playground, parents will smile as their children call you baby kisser. 14. Not a single child is paying attention while you lecture them about the dangers of desert animals. Jeff is out playing golf. The only real reason you visit schools is to take a selfie for your twitter feed. Nothing gets more likes than visiting school children. 15. There are no Gila monsters for a hundred miles. Even if there were, they are not venomous enough to kill humans. The last reported Gila monster death was in 1930, when a drunk man stuck his thumb into the mouth of a lizard. 16. You would have been invited to Jeff’s party, but you weren't because you were dating his ex-girlfriend, Becky Crawford. If you had been there, you would have been Katie’s designated driver. 17. When Jeff goes out to dinner with his family, people offer to pay for their meals. He always declines, because he is a perfect citizen. 18. Your son joined the football team because he is worried about disappointing you. He doesn’t even like football, but he’s willing to stick with it until it gets him through college. 19. Speaking of college, he’s looking on the East coast. 20. Ms. Greene’s kids received invitations to her funeral last November. It was a closed casket. They were the only ones in attendance, because she is not actually dead. 21. Your funeral will be attended as a formality. The only people who will cry real tears will be your wife and Becky Crawford, who still remembers when you kissed her in high school. 22. Becky Crawford always planned on winning you back. If you had paid attention, you would have seen the way she dressed at Jeff’s campaign dinners. You were too focused on the open bar to pay attention to anyone, even Becky Crawford. 23. You assumed your son didn’t come to the dinners either, but he did. The more you drank, the more afraid he became to approach you.
24. The paperboy knows where Ms. Greene is, but she sends him monthly checks of $27.99 to keep quiet. His silence is cheaper than a yearly subscription to People magazine. The envelopes she uses always contain a message written in code. If life were a mystery novel, the paperboy would stay up until dawn decoding her messages by the light of a single bulb. In reality, Ms. Greene’s code is sprinkled throughout the dump. 25. The men who work at the dump have formed a group lottery team. In 4 years, they will win $6.2 million each, and you will be left without garbage men. This will happen while Jeff is on vacation, so the people will blame you. 26. The town is going bankrupt. Jeff knows, but he has not told anybody. He’s always been embarrassed to admit when he fails. This is why he hired you, not because he felt bad, but because he can’t blame Deborah for his mistakes. This is why you are the baby kisser.
Prayers from Marana “The casket sits in the front of the church, and all you can see of a body is the tip of the nose, sticking into the air like it’s testing the smell of the white orchids in large baskets on the floor.” —from Look at the Sky and Tell Me what you See by Aimee La Brie
The church in Marana isn’t even big enough to hold the whole town. I know because, when William Lee Smith’s grandpa died, they had to have the ceremony out on the front lawn. After the funeral, kids as school made fun of Willy Lee. They said his family was too poor to afford a proper funeral, that they were disrespecting his grandfather by not laying him to rest properly in the church. Willy Lee didn’t say anything, but I wish I had the courage to tell those kids that the only reason the funeral was outside was that Willy Lee’s family was too polite to tell anyone they couldn’t come. I’ll admit, it was the most beautiful funeral I’ve ever seen. The weather was perfect, and the casket was surrounded by white orchids so bright that it hurt my eyes to look at them too long. Not too many people died in Marana, but when they did, everyone always made a big ordeal out of preparing the church the day before. I didn’t get why we couldn’t have just had the church prepared all the time, but Mama said people liked to make a big deal every once in a while. We didn’t even regularly go to church, except for funerals. Nobody did. Mama said the Lord could reach you in your own home, so every Sunday she would roll out the worn rug her grandma made her, and we’d kneel and say our prayers. I didn’t know
what everybody else said, but I mainly told God about the kids being bullied at school, like Willy Lee when his grandpa died. I told Him to make sure they got some extra kindness this week. I don’t know if he listened, but I sure hope he wasn’t too busy.
Daughter of the Desert I’m thirteen and I’m crouched in a bathroom stall, watching my blood pool and mix with water in the porcelain bowl. My left hand clutches a wrapped tampon, my knuckles growing white. I’ve grown accustomed to smuggling them in my pockets, their pink packaging too loud for my classrooms.
The water swirls under and around me, and I stare as it turns to red dust. The dust pours over the floor, coating the tiles, thick and dry, encasing my feet. Dust is born from rocks, and I am the eroding wind.
I taught myself how to shave, stealing blades from my mother. She doesn’t know, or at least she pretends not to. I relish the secrecy more than I do the smoothness of my legs against my sheets. Occasionally, I slip, and leave my knee scraped and bloody. I pretend I don’t notice, and I let blood-tinged water pool in the drain.
Covered in scales, the average gila monster doesn’t know any different. They have never felt the rough sand against their smooth skin. Removing its scales would leave the gila covered in blood and scabs. I imagine the scabs peeling in salt water to reveal a soft pink belly. That is how I describe shaving to my friends who have never tried it: like peeling off scabs in salt water.
At the drugstore, my mother searches for diapers as I wander down the makeup aisle. I find a magnifying mirror, and I peer into it while poking at my skin. Up close, I can see craters and blemishes the size of canyons, swollen red as sunsets that kiss the desert.
Coyotes are ripping at my skin, pulling pieces until they’re raw and bloody. I try to smooth over the spots with war paint, but the canyons still stretch, now taking on a different shade of sand. I am afraid a rainstorm will hit, and the paint will run downstream with the rivers. Before I leave, I wash the paint off, watching it swirl down the drain.
Sometimes, I let myself enjoy the feeling of dipping my toes in hot water. I know the water burns my feet, leaving them scalding red, but still I let it fold and lap over my ankles. When the water grows cool again, I take my feet out, not wanting them to get used to cold water.
My mother has painted one of the walls in my bedroom a clean, crisp white. In pencil, she measures me and my sisters, then lightly writes our names just above the line. Every 6 months, she calls us back and redraws the lines, keeping the previous marks. As I step back from the wall, my back still straight, she makes me look closer at the fresh line.
“Look,” she says, pointing with the tip of the pencil. “Look how much you’ve grown.” It’s funny, I think. I don’t feel taller.
Cacti in the desert grow against all odds. The ground is dusty rock, there is not room for roots to properly disperse. Sometimes, they go months without a drop of water. Despite this, they grow taller than predicted, thick and long. They are still dwarfed by redwoods, but they know that they surpassed the expectations.
I’m thirteen and I’m evolving at an accelerated rate. My body is changing quicker than seasons, faster than the tides. Every day I notice something new, a birthmark here or a pimple there. I feel like I have just been discovered.
I want to pretend as if nothing has changed. I want to be the same person I was before I was discovered, the same desert girl who wandered away from her mother in the drugstore. But I know I will never be the same. I know my classmates will notice as I smuggle cotton into my pockets.
I wish nothing had changed. I wish I was allowed to remain the same species, but the desert is changing too fast for me to keep up with. Some days, I hear the calls and whistles of birds that I have never heard before. I am scared of the new birds. I know the old birds, I trust the old birds. My mother says that anything new is always frightening.
Now, I feel I am a rattlesnake. I am destined to spend the next thirty years looking the same, shaking my tail, trying my hardest to shed my skin behind me. But I am also scared to lose my skin, because I know I can’t survive without it. People tell me to let go of my skin, and I want to tell them that there is a reason snakes wear skins: what’s inside is too vulnerable.
Even the other species on the island notice my evolution. My mother said everyone evolves, but I know I am doing it first, I am doing it faster. But this doesn’t mean I am doing it better.
Sometimes, I’m afraid of the small things. I am always afraid of evolving, but only sometimes I worry about dust seeping through my skin. It doesn't form rock, but it stains. Then, everyone will look at me, and they will know I am a dust storm.
On windy days, the world is covered in red, hazy smoke. It is so hard to navigate that I wish I could close my eyes and sleep until it settles. But I know everyone is watching me, everyone is counting on me to make it through the clouds. Why, I do not know.
Stay-At-Home Mother after Dipika Mukherjee, ”Bangkok, 1965” My parents wed at nineteen. My mother would tell me that’s what happens when you live in a town with two stoplights. Throughout high school, all she wanted was to escape. She wanted to go to college, to be anywhere but Marana, to come home for Christmas only every other year. When I met your father, she’d say, everything changed. He convinced her to stay in Marana, told her the world was not meant for people like her. “People like who?” People who were so oblivious to the outside world. Instead, he built her a house made of logs and caged her there until she became a prisoner of her own mind, until she truly believed that she would never live to see the world. Still, he brought her postcards from places she longed to go. Seeing the world exist without her made her so angry that she let the postcards grow thin and worn in a shoebox under her bed. That’s when I came along. My mother raised me free, raised me believing I would escape. But I didn’t want to. I loved the safety of Marana, of our town. I loved knowing everybody by name, the ins and outs of their lives even better than they did. I loved that, in Marana, every day was the same. The instability of travel, I told her, would drive me crazy.
So the shoebox filled with postcards remained under my mother’s bed. When I was old enough, I gave it to my daughter, who was the first in our family to leave. When she came back, she acted the same, but something about her seemed off. When I asked my mother about her, she told me to stop worrying. “She knows more now,” she said. “She’s seen the world.”
Following the Setting Sun After Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters, “Don’t Fence Me In” When I was four, my father picked me and my sister, Maria, up from school early. We climbed into the back of his pick-up truck and he drove us into the desert. The sun set ahead of us, illuminating the desert and turning the sand to gold. Maria, a third grader, told me that meant we were driving West. I didn’t know what she meant, but I didn’t care. I was glad to be leaving Carrizozo. My family had lived in Carrizozo, New Mexico since Maria was born. I’d never left the town, but I’d heard stories from Maria about when they took a road trip to California. She said she even saw the ocean. I didn’t know where dad was taking us now, but hoped I would see the ocean. Soon, the summer night grew colder than I expected. Maria and I wrapped ourselves in the wool blankets Dad used to keep his truck bed free of scratches. The blankets were itchy and covered in small sticks, but it was better than being cold. Eventually, I fell asleep with my head on Maria’s lap. When I awoke a few hours later, we were pulling into a town straight out of a cowboy movie. The town was only a block long, with desert surrounding it on all sides. A few horses grazed in the fields behind the houses. I wondered why they didn’t run away. It didn’t look like anyone was watching them. If they wanted, they could run all the way to the ocean.
Even today, twelve years after we moved to Marana, I find myself thinking about those horses, wishing I was one of them. Now, though, I understand them better. They had everything they could want in Marana, enough wilting grass to eat and water to drink. They even had sheds to sleep in, and they could see the stars though the holes in the roof. Of course they chose to stay. If they ran away, they might never eat a meal again, but if they stayed, at least that was guaranteed. The same could be said for my life, too. I was happy in Marana, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that had settled in my stomach on the night we arrived; that something more lay just another hour West. For the first few years, I begged Dad daily to let us go to California. Eventually, he stopped answering me, so instead, I watched the sun set out my bedroom window every night and wished I could follow it all the way to the ocean. At night, I used to dream I was a horse, running towards the setting sun until I collapsed from exhaustion. I’d wake up to the feeling of water lapping against my face, and I’d be a human again. Finally, I thought to myself just before I woke up, I had reached the ocean.
Choked My mother always told me not to fear anyone more popular than me. She said I should only be afraid of the people who didn’t have any friends, who sat alone at lunch and worked alone during group projects. She said those were the type of people more likely to do drugs or drop out, so I should stay as far away as possible. My dad saw things a different way. He told me to be nice to everybody, even the people who nobody liked. He thought that, maybe, I could save one of them from the lives they were destined to, the world of drugs and dropouts. Someone from the outside might say that my parents were smothering me, that they were blowing a problem way out of proportion. But that’s the way life is in a small town; who you’re friends with is very important. Nobody will trust you unless they know where you fit in, and that includes your friends. My parents fought a lot about this. When I brought friends home after school, Mom would question us about other friends, friends we had in common, saying things like “and who do you girls sit with at lunch?” Dad always stayed quiet during dinner, but when my friend would go home, he’d start to yell. “What is your problem, Mary?” Usually, he called Mom honey or sweetie. He only called her Mary when he was really mad. “I’m just curious about her friends, that’s all.” “Well I’m sure you embarrassed that poor girl.” “Don’t you dare tell me how to raise my child. I’m the one who carried her in my own womb for almost ten months, need I remind you.” Mom always did that, always guilted dad by reminding him of just how long she had to carry me. I used to apologize for being born late, but she would always tell me it wasn’t my fault, and besides, the more time I spent developing, the better off I would be. Dad told
her about a woman in China who was pregnant for 20 years, and eventually the baby turned into a tumor. Mom told him that was impossible, and he would never understand the female body. My parents fought a lot about other things, too. Mom said Dad spent too much money at the bar with his friends, and Dad thought she was being too uptight. He always said that the tighter leash you put something on, the more likely it is to choke, like a dog being held back. I guess he thought the same thing about me, that I could one day choke. I sure hope I don’t. I worry nobody will be able to help me breathe again.
Choked My mother always told me not to fear anyone more popular than me. She said I should only be afraid of the people who didn’t have any friends. She said those were the type of people more likely to do drugs or drop out, so I should stay as far away as possible. My dad saw things a different way. He told me to be nice to everybody, even the people who nobody liked. He thought that, maybe, I could save one of them from the lives they were destined to, the world of drugs and dropouts. That’s the way life is in a small town; who you’re friends with is very important. Nobody will trust you unless they know where you fit in, and that includes your friends. My parents fought a lot about this. When I brought friends home after school, Mom would question us about friends we had in common, saying things like “and who do you girls sit with at lunch?” Dad always stayed quiet during dinner, but when my friend would go home, he’d start to yell. “What is your problem, Mary?” “Don’t you dare tell me how to raise my child. I’m the one who carried her in my own womb for almost ten months, need I remind you.” Mom always guilted dad by reminding him of just how long she had to carry me. I used to apologize for being born late, but she would always tell me the more time I spent developing, the better off I would be. Dad told her about a woman in China who was pregnant for 20 years, and eventually the baby turned into a tumor. Mom told him that was impossible, and he would never understand the female body. My parents fought a lot about other things, too. Dad always said that the tighter leash you put something on, the more likely it is to choke, like a dog being held back. I guess he thought the same thing about me, that I could one day choke. I sure hope I don’t. I worry nobody will be able to help me breathe again.
Choked My mother always told me not to fear anyone more popular than me. She said I should only be afraid of the people likely to do drugs or drop out. My dad saw things a different way. He told me to be nice to everybody. He thought that, maybe, I could save one of them from the lives they were destined to, the world of drugs and dropouts. That’s the way life is in a small town; who you’re friends with is very important. Nobody will trust you unless they know where you fit in, and that includes your friends. My parents fought a lot about this. When I brought friends home after school, Mom would question us about friends we had in common. Dad always stayed quiet during dinner, but when my friend would go home, he’d start to yell. “What is your problem, Mary?” “Don’t you dare tell me how to raise my child. I’m the one who carried her in my own womb for almost ten months, need I remind you.” Mom always guilted dad by reminding him of just how long she had to carry me. I used to apologize for being born late. Dad told her about a woman in China who was pregnant for 20 years, and eventually the baby turned into a tumor. Mom told him that was impossible, and he would never understand the female body. My parents fought a lot about other things, too. Dad always said that the tighter leash you put something on, the more likely it is to choke, like a dog being held back. I guess he thought the same thing about me, that I could one day choke. I sure hope I don’t. I worry nobody will be able to help me breathe again.
Gila Monsters In a land where the sun touches the earth, a small town sat at the foot of a hill. On the hill lived a colony of gila monsters. They had fiery orange and black scales and pointed heads. Their teeth were filled with enough poison to kill a single person in one bite. In the town, legend had it that one day, a swarm of venomous gila monsters would come down the hill, poisoning the livestock with their deadly fangs and killing the people. The townspeople have lived in fear of gila monsters ever since. Every day, a young boy walked his horse to the top of the hill. The boy sat under the shade of a tree, shielding himself from the hot sun while his horse grazed on the sparse grass. Once, to amuse himself, the boy left his horse tied to the tree. Then, he ran down the hill to the town, warning people to lock their doors and board their windows. The townspeople quickly obeyed. the women and children closed their shutters and retreated indoors. Next, the boy asked for five of the toughest men to come up the hill with him carry his horse back down. Soon, he was followed back up the hill by the group of men. When they reached the top, the men discovered that the boy had been lying all along. His horse was grazing near the tree, and there were no gila monsters in sight. The men were angry at the boy, but he just laughed and laughed, rolling in the dust until he was coated in it. Furious at the boy, the men walked back down the hill, grumbling to each other. “That boy should never lie,� they said. When they reached the town, they told everybody that the boy was lying, and life continued as usual.
A few months later, the boy again found himself on the top of the hill with nothing to do. The villagers have all forgotten about my prank by now, he thought, surely they will fall for it again. Again, the boy tied his horse to the tree so he wouldn’t run off, then ran down the hill to the town, screaming, “help, help, a gila monster has bitten my horse!” Again, the townspeople rushed into their houses, closing their windows and locking their doors. And again, a group of strong men followed the boy up the hill to carry his horse down. Instead, they found his horse peacefully grazing on the grass. Even angrier than before, they muttered insults to the boy as they walked back down the hill. “We will never fall for his tricks again,” they vowed. The rest of the townspeople agreed; never again would they listen to the boy. Not more than a month later, the boy was sitting atop the hill with his horse, whittling a stick. Suddenly, his horse let out a sharp cry, and reared onto its hind legs. The boy looked up, dropping his stick and whittling knife onto the dusty ground. The horse sank to his knees. The boy looked to the ground and saw an orange spotted gila monster scurrying away from his horse. The boy looked out over the field, and saw that there were numerous gila monsters watching him. The boy ran down the hill, yelling, “Help! Gila monsters have bitten my horse!” As he ran, a trail of dust rose up behind his feet. As he reached the town, the people ignored his cries. He told them to lock themselves indoors, but they acted as if he wasn’t there. Eventually, the boy realized that nobody was going to help him. He ran back up the hill alone, desperate to help his horse. When he got to the top, he discovered his
horse lying on the ground, nearly dead. he sank to the ground and wept bitterly, his tears mixing with the dust and turning to mud. Later that night, when the boy didn’t return home, the townspeople went out in search of him. They discovered him at the top of the hill, sobbing over his dead horse. He told them that gila monsters had killed his horse, and everyone in the town had refused to help him. The townspeople were sympathetic to the boy, but they told him that if he had not lied about the gila monsters before, they would have believed him when he was telling the truth. From that day forward, the boy never told another lie.  
City Girl After Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice, “Second Base” The first time I left Marana, I didn’t let myself turn around. Instead, I kept my eyes peeled on the road ahead of me, watched as my dad swerved to avoid potholes and the occasional rabbit scurrying across the road. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I turned around to catch a fading glimpse of the town, of my town, but the steeple of the church had already faded from sight, and the back windshield was so choked with dust that I couldn’t have seen out of it even if there was anything to see. My dad told me we were moving to Tucson. He said he’d got some huge job offer from a publishing house there, and he wanted to move the whole family instead of just commuting an hour every day. For once, my mother agreed. She thought our family could use a fresh start, somewhere where my sister and I would have more opportunities. At first, I called my dad selfish. I told him that if he really loved us, he’d just commute. Dad told me that maybe this would be a good opportunity, maybe I could learn to see the world a different way. Tucson was bigger than I expected. There were more people in the lobby of our apartment building than I’d ever seen in one place before. In Marana, people only gathered for school and funerals, but there were only fifteen kids in my class, and the tiny church only sat twenty-five. In school, Jimmy Dean told me that big cities were for people who had something to hide. I told him that he was named after a packaged breakfast burrito.
Still, maybe Jimmy Dean was right. After two months in Tucson, we moved out of our apartment building, and a week later I found myself struggling to remember the names of the people who’d lived next to us. I missed the gossip we shared every day during lunch, about how Miss Sarah May’s baby was from another man, or, our favorite, rumors about the mysterious Allen family, who disappeared out of the blue a few years back. Years later, I found myself back in Marana. I tried reconnecting with my old friends, but I felt so disconnected from everyone’s lives that I couldn’t find myself caring about the gossip anymore. So what if Ruthie Jo had a baby out of wedlock? That didn’t make her any better than me. When I left, I know they told stories about me. They called me city girl with the taste of bile in their mouths. They said that living in the city had ruined me.