infestation; the state of being invaded or overru

infestation; the state of being invaded or overrun Emma Steckline

infestation; the state of being invaded or overrun Emma Steckline

“I catch as many flies as I can / rub them to dust / then to nothing / between my fingers” - John Allen Taylor, Anyway For My Dad, Brad Steckline

infestation; the state of being invaded or overrun

by Emma Steckline The Literary Arts Department Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12, A Creative and Performing Arts Magnet

Copyright Š2019 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

Table Of Contents This Is How to Remember Sinking The House 28 Things You Don’t Know on Wednesday Night, the 2nd of December, 2005 If You See Her Only Because We Have To Wasting Away Meltdown Movies End Happy

This is How to Remember after Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl” This is how I feel my pulse, like this, I put my index finger on my wrist; you know, now more than ever I’m aware that I’m alive; this is how I want you to talk about me at my funeral, don’t be sappy, tell the truth; this is the cheap ceramic you should give to Goodwill; this is what you need to keep in the family; this is where I keep my—; this is how you and your brothers should use my money; this is how you won’t need a mom anymore; I guess I haven't been a mom in awhile; don’t take my car; I don’t need to live in a home; stop arguing so much with your father; tell him to crawl out of his grave and be a part of the family again; he never does the dishes even when I ask; this pie didn’t seem to turn out—; who gave it to me?; oh; when you pick out my casket, get one made of wood; don’t put me in metal, nothing fancy either; don’t spend all your money on me; how old is your daughter?; remember to take your medicine, I know how you get nervous; did I take my medicine; feel my pulse—; take medicine while you can, go on long walks; I got you a birthday present—; oh sorry, my days get mixed up; I forgot to take my pills; can you bring me my pill case I put it on—; this is how I remember things; this is how I forget them; this is how I look at photo albums like flash cards; this is how I won’t let you take my car; this is how I won’t go into a home; this is how I’m fine; don’t forget to take my trash out, the dump truck comes every—;

when you fold my quilts and put them in boxes, take your time, fold them into perfect squares; I’ve sewn a quilt for you; your birthday is coming up right? hospitals are exhausting; this is how I keep my mind going; here’s the kind of coloring books that help me feel young again; here’s the crayons I use when I want to drift off; this is how I feel my pulse; feel it, put your finger on my wrist; put me in a metal casket, wood is cheap; tell your father to come visit me; tell your brother to be kind; tell your father to call me; tell your brother—; tell your children—; I’m telling you—; feel my pulse; this is how you count back from 100 by 7’s; 100, 93, 85, 73, 64—;

Sinking after Monica Wood, “Disappearing” I have terrible nightmares. I’ll wake up, struck still in bed as I watch monsters rear up on me. My parents send me to a sleep doctor when I am seven. The doctor runs tests and says You're Very Healthy and I say Thanks. She gives me a recommendation to some kind of therapy and gives me pills to take before sleep. I am scared the first night I have to take them. Mom says Shut Up and Swallow the Goddam Thing. I do.

Mom drives me to the first day of group therapy for insomnia. She says It Will Help. We start by saying our names, ages, why we’re here. The last part is too painful for some kids. My mouth dries out from the lemon cleaning solution that coats the windows of the building.

That night when I go to bed I hear gargoyles screaming at me, scraping across my bed frame. I try to cover my eyes but my arms feel sewn down by wool thread.

I tell my doctor this at my next appointment. He ups my dosage and Mom sighs.

I become a master of therapy over time. I learn how to feel what other people feel and how to say things so the volunteers don’t mess with me too much. The medicine slowly begins to work, I can fall into my sheets like they are my saviors. After six weeks I get a certificate that says I’ve completed the program. I give it to Mom to hold for me.

She loses it on the train home. A week later, I lose her.

I begin to fall in love with sleeping. I don’t wake up to people calling me. I skip lunch at school to sleep in the bathroom. This scares my dad and he calls my doctor to get me off the pills. I save the last five left in the bottle for the funeral.

When we walk up to the casket where my mom has become a stone, I take the extra pills and slip them in next to her. I say I Hope You Sleep Well.

When I go to sleep tonight, I hope that I will finally melt into my mattress. I push all my weight into my spine, let myself fall. My dad knocks on my door, my arms mould into yellow foam. I wonder how much farther I need to sink before I am completely submerged.

The House The house was deep, plunged into the grass and standing. The first family living there was large, a mother and father with two sets of twin brothers and four sisters.

They filled the house with the smell of paint and cinnamon rolls. When the first daughter left for university, her room turned into a storage area, brown boxes piling up, weighed down by dust. Soon, more and more of the children started to leave. The mother and father grew old and withered, dried out like flowers. The father died in his arm chair, reading the Bible. The mother started to wander around the house more as she was alone. On a trip to the attic, she heard buzzing upstairs. She told herself she was crazy.

She died a couple months later.

The next family that moved in was young, the father just out of school and the mother working as a teacher in town. They had only an idea of a kid and saw the house as the perfect place to start their life together. The old couple had left the house drab and dusty, so the two worked together to fix it up. They painted the walls inside lovely pastel colors and the banisters white. They didn’t go up into the attic where a sticky tumor grew on the supports of the roof. Within several weeks of buying the house, the woman was with child. When her belly had swollen to the size of a honey pot she stopped work. While at home, she kept the house tidy and bright. The baby came one night in the middle of a snowstorm. The winter was cold that year and the buzzing in the attic grew louder from those trying to escape the cold. They could not make it to the hospital and so the little boy was born in the bathtub of the upstairs bathroom. The mother cried. The father thought this was out of happiness. Weeks passed, and the mother retreated to her room, except to give bottles of milk she’d breast pumped to the

father. The mother would never hold the baby after that. She left a month later, never to see her husband and child again. Then the father and baby left, moved closer to the city, closer to the bustle of industry so they could keep themselves distracted from feeling too much. To not drive themselves crazy from the insects in the walls.

He had sold the house to an elderly couple. The two had been married for 50 years already. The wife liked the house because of the gardening space. The husband liked the house because it was far from busy streets. Their one reservation was the color of the walls, but they soon fixed that with a new coat of light beige paint, not bothering to remove the pastel shell underneath. They kept their house up nice, but the two hated each other. They yelled at each other every night. Their words were bee stings, killing themselves as they hurt each other. The man slept upstairs and the woman slept in the finished basement. The man thought he saw little bugs flying around everywhere and was certain they had a fly problem. He kept a swatter in his belt most times. Both of them had awful eyesight, and one day as the man was swatting flies on the upstairs walls he felt a sting in his leg. The man yelled and screamed as his throat swelled up, but the wife didn’t care, she thought he was just yelling as usual. Later that night, when he didn’t come down to get a beer, she went upstairs and found his body, face red and swollen, lying on the floor. She decided she wanted to sell the house the next day. As she was leaving a bee stung her in the thigh. In the taxi she pulled the stinger out and threw it into the garden.

The house was vacant for a few months, but then bought by the state and made into an orphanage. The construction workers put up wall paper and scrubbed the floors until their fingernails splintered. The kids who were sent to the house were of all

demeanors. Some were tiny, still forming tastes and could pretend a blade of grass was a knight. Some were older, stayed up screaming all night for their parents, or for God, or for the devil. Both the shrieks of joy and wails of agony clung to the walls, rose like hot air and sat. The tumor was the size of a fat deer and hung off the wood in the attic like a sloth. The kids who had rooms upstairs were used to the buzzing, thought it was just the lights. The noise stayed there even when the lights were turned off. The orphanage was shut down after ten years due to low funds.

The house is abandoned now, scrap wood covers the windows. The house stands condemned. The walls of the interior are covered in clots, tumors of honey and wax. It is said if you get close you can hear it hum, that there is a haze around it, bees hovering in smoky clouds.

28 Things You Don’t Know on Wednesday Night, the 2nd of December, 2005 after Matthew Burnside, “28 Things You Don’t Know” 1. What your mom was trying to say before she died was “be careful”.

2. Jeanie doesn’t take dance lessons after school. She just doesn't want to come home.

3. You sold your former house to a psychopath. He keeps ripped up animal skin and bones where your daughters' room used to be. The walls are still yellow from when you and your wife painted it together.

4. The sound you hear through the insulation isn’t the pipes.

5. You didn’t misplace your favorite pen at school. Mary Louanne stole it because she was obsessed with you. She still has it on her desk but has never told her husband where she got it.

6. You believe your dad was murdered when he really died from heart failure. Your mom told that story to everyone because she loved having someone else to blame. She thought it would help you grieve if his death reminded you of a hero. She never regretted this once.

7. Back in September of 1995, your wife wasn’t visiting her sister-in-law. She was staying with her friend while she got rid of a baby. The baby wasn’t yours. She never saw the other man again.

8. The kid who copied everything from you in middle school got into Harvard. He has been nominated for the Noble Peace prize in science. Every night he comes home and thanks God for his luck. When he is asked by interviewers how he’s accomplished so much, he says it’s all from hard work.

9. Fun fact: people swallow eight spiders in their sleep every year. So far, you’ve swallowed thirteen.

10. The first part of your house that will crumble will be the upstairs banister. Jeanie will lean against it and fall right through.

11. The reason your wife begged to stop going to church was because she didn’t want you and the pastor in the same room.

12. If you went back to your elementary school, you could still find the dent in the wall where you threw that chair in the fifth grade. Your mom meant to take you to the psychiatrist after that incident.

13. You will die on Friday the thirteenth. On the ten year anniversary of your death, your children will laugh about this.

14. In fifteen months your house will have about 3,000 termites living inside it.

15. In sixteen months your daughter Jeanie will go missing for a week. You will cry more than you ever have. She will come back, dirty and tear streaked, and tell you she ran away. You yell at her. She will leave again the very next day.

16. You have a bad temper because for the first two years of your life, your parents never held you. The way you learned to sleep through the night as a child is because when you woke up and cried, nobody came to get you.

17. Before your fathers autopsy was released, the cops thought your mother had killed him.

18. Your youngest child, Maria, isn’t stupid. She just has trouble reading.

19. Missy Hawthorne, who said she was too good for you in the tenth grade, now works late shifts at the bar downtown. She stores her tips under her bra strap. She bought your wife’s old shirt at the Salvation Army about two weeks ago.

20. Your wife will remember she loves you when she sees you save a choking man on the bus.

21. In two days you will get food poisoning from your favorite restaurant, the greasy diner on Laybard Street.

22. By the time the exterminators start to work, it’ll be too late.

23. Your house would’ve sold for a hefty price if not for the infestation.

24. Diet Coke isn’t actually healthy for you. It’s just a marketing trick.

25. If you wish upon a star, not much happens. You will have much more luck if you throw a coin into a wishing well.

26. Maria thinks you give the best hugs. Even if she's out a lot, she’s not like Jeanie, she’ll always come home.

27. When your wife was up late working at her desk, she was drafting letters to the pastor. She never sent them. She didn’t throw them away either, she burned them into smoke.

28. The concussions you got playing football will take about four years off of your life. In the first year after your death, your wife will spend all your money at a casino. In the second year, worms and beetles will find their way into your casket. In the third year,

your wife will die of natural causes. In the fourth year, your house will still be uninhabitable, as it has been for a long time.

If You See Her When Leanna says Hello to me she sounds like she is possessed by an unborn ghost. What I mean is— she looks burned through, a piece of ash. We work until five PM (post mortem). She walks by me again in the break room. Two men, Max and Colin, laugh. They are the kind of men who wear too tight pants and laugh at things that aren’t at all funny. They watch her as she leaves the room and then tells me in hushed voices She’s Knocked Up and by who, who knows. But either way it is hilarious to them. Then they say some awful things about her, laugh. I say something slightly less awful back.

The day after she comes in late, of course everybody notices. She is all anybody seems to notice now. At this point I want to stay out of it, but don’t. Linda told me she was a hooker on the side. Glen tells me she was gone this morning to get an abortion. She talks to the boss and we all watch the office even though we cannot see through the shuttered curtains. When she comes out we spin around, pretending badly we are ignorant. On her lunch break I see her go into the bathroom. She doesn’t come out for twenty minutes, which isn’t crazy long but seems strange. Then she goes back to her desk and Max and Colin giggle. I focus on my power point. She sits diagonal from me, so every once in awhile I will glance up. It seems that every key-click makes her nervous right now. I hear Glen tell Colin that the rumors aren’t true, that she’s not pretty enough to get knocked up anyways. She goes to the bathroom again and a crowd of people run to her computer, look for something, all together. The friction of their shoes on the carpet almost makes the room hum it is so loud. They find what they are looking for quickly, and as she walks out of the bathroom they dart back to their desks, barely even pretending anymore. From the carpet where they left their footprints, waves of

heat seem to rise around her, every time I look at her, she becomes even more distorted. The next day, she is gone. She leaves her photos, pens, and notepads. Her desk sits vacant for a week. She never comes back. She is just gone, burned through. 

Only Because We Have To I will tell you this only because I do not want you to lose your eyes. When I walk into the village, the static fizz sun is just beginning to set. Flies buzz around in the heat.

The ground is massacred, filled with holes. I look down at my feet so I don’t trip.

We go into town only because we have to. We need more to eat. We’ve only been able to eat rice since the soldiers took our knives. You will wonder why they did this. I will not. It starts like this; screams torn in half. I dive behind a hut. I don't remember where my daughter goes after this. I black out.

When I resurface I see soldiers standing around fires. They wear uniforms to camouflage, but it is us who need to hide. I hear them laugh, call us dirty. See as they line us up, we are sardines. This is what it is to witness extermination. I see a woman, her side splayed open, she runs with cloth wrapped around her, clutching something to her chest. A tiny and calloused foot peaks out from the bundle. The soldier farthest away from the fire sees it, tears away the child. Tendons snap in flames. The fire spits out bones so small they look like a monkey’s. The woman screams, she coughs up her throat onto the scarlet flecked ground. Something in us will always be broken. They stick pins in us, right through our shells. This is how we become cockroaches. We are pushed to the ground. If you prod me I will not bend, I will snap into shards. Do not look me in the eye because you do not know this. I wish I wasn’t able to tell you this story.

The air erupts in stale blood and muddy shrapnel. I duck again, almost praying that I’m not seen. I stop myself from doing this. This is what it is to be a pest. They exterminate everything, kill until they dig out the roots. Military cars roll over the wreckage like

vacuums to clean up the mess. I see this and start to run. Branches hit my eyes and legs like flying bullet shells.

Wasting Away After Lori McKenna, “The Time I’ve Wasted” I could measure the ocean by quarts and pour it back into the desert in the time I’ve spent trying to make this work. Tonight I sit, barely sentient in the plastic chair on our porch. She is busy inside, sinking into the couch as she downs episodes of reality TV. The house is covered in water spots and mold. It is getting worse by the day. The first sign was the bread, I’d bring it home and within a week it would grow spots of white and squid ink purple. Probably something in the air. Soon it was everything, the fruit, dairy, vegetables. She started trying to eat it all before it went bad.

Mildew began to squirm across the walls. As I went to sleep I’d stare at sickly spots on our ceiling, convinced I could see them growing. I would tell her to call somebody about it. The line was always busy. She asked me if I didn’t kiss her anymore because of her weight. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was because I wasn’t in love with her anymore.

Eating mushy fruits and stale bread became easy. We learned how to pinch our noses closed so we’d subdue our tastebuds into complacency. I’d tell her we lived in decay. She would say it gave the house character.

Life is about fixing, over and over again. She'd tell me it wasn’t worth it to give up, then we’d spend the night moving vases around and painting over spots of mold. It was this kind of thing that’d keep us busy. The walls were almost toxic, we stayed away from anything, threw most furniture away as it dampened and sagged. We were putting ourselves to waste, I’d tell her this and she’d tell me she hates me and I’d tell her she’s

wasting her life. She turned back to the TV, where a fly was buzzing around and landing on the faces of reality show mothers, eccentric. She sat so close to the screen I don’t know how the light didn’t give her a headache.

I tried to make faces out of the brown lines coming from the corner of the eggshell wall in the kitchen. Later that night I heard her crying as she showered. We’d go to sleep in complete silence.

There was some strange kind of safety in this way of living, this justification of being irresponsible with myself. I could go to sleep telling myself there wasn’t much point to it, love is pain, at this point only pain. What do you tell a two year old when trying to explain the relativity of time? These things are impossible.

It is times like tonight, sitting on the shaky porch, when I consider just walking away. without anything but my slippers on. It is times like tonight when I want to drag myself by my clammy hands down the street, just to escape.

Meltdown after William Lessard, “The Old Woman” Silence If you go back to our house, you will find everything as we left it. Messy.

Uranium-235 You cannot separate work from home. A town that surrounds a nuclear power plant is meant to be unstable. When I heard the sirens start, I almost forgot my kids in the house. I will never be selfish again. My wife kept a sack of food and necessities under the bed in case of emergency. We prepare for then worst because usually that is what happens.

I remember staring at a pamphlet taped to our refrigerator every morning that told me if you have a dose of radiation as low as 0.35 Gy you will feel flu-like symptoms.

I Don’t Expect to Live More Than Ten Years After This I am expecting my cells to turn chaotic one of these days.

Has Your Body Been Compromised?

1. How long were you in town after the blast?

2. If you shoot two atoms at each other, how many shadows can you catch on the back of your hand?

3. When your ear rings does it sound more like a jingle bell or an alarm clock?

4. Comprehension test.

- If you have two red marbles and three green marbles in a bag, what is the chance of pulling out a shard of glass?

Ghost Town Crescendo

I wonder if people will ever go back. An invisible ghoul now hangs on our walls, family pictures fouled with radiation. We build things and hope they will last, we work against the laws of time and nature. I can imagine the rats crawling through, not knowing any better. I remember the neighbors’ dog barking as we ran away, howling to get out. I imagine how silent it must be, how still, like you could scream as loud as you possibly could but it wouldn’t leave your mouth. I imagine it like how I left it, decaying.

Movies End Happy It started a few months ago, sometime around December. Dad was sick and didn’t seem to care too much about getting better. He’d come home late at night and cough up mucus and earwigs on the kitchen counter. We had to get rid of our shag rug because it was impossible to get all the wings and pincers out of it. Dad would stay out way past when we went to sleep and wake us up by slamming the door when he came home. After that Momma would yell at him for about ten minutes, then she’d go upstairs and he’d pass out on the Lay-Z-Boy. *** When Momma was away at work, Dad and I used to stay up and watch movies together. We’d watch things like The Sound of Music, The Wizard of Oz, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Love, Actually. We loved all those kitschy kinds of things that ended happy. Dad always said he didn’t like movies with sad endings.

“When I sit down to a movie, I like to escape reality. I want my movies to end happy ‘cause it’s nice to believe that's how life is.” He said.

Momma hated the way Dad was with that kind of stuff. She told him to grow up.

Momma was always realistic, as kids we never believed in Santa Clause. *** It was around 11:30 at night that first time I heard him retching in the doorway. I came down the stairs and saw him throwing up cockroaches and grasshoppers. Mom was patting his back and wiping the bug guts off the floor when she had the chance.

She was breathing heavily and staring at the back of Dad’s head.

After a couple weeks he’d barely make it in the door before keeling over. The house got a kind of smell in it, every where seemed to be littered in insect carcasses.

Mom sent me to the store to buy Febreze like it was milk. Every time I asked what was wrong with Dad she’d mumble something and then start scrubbing the kitchen counter furiously. *** We really were close, him and I. One night, I had gone over to my friends house for a sleepover with some other girls. It was around 11:30 when I started feeling bad. My stomach lurched and I felt alone in the house. I was sleeping away from home for the first time. I went down to the kitchen and dialed our land line, the only number I knew.

Dad picked up. In only ten minutes he was waiting outside to take me home. I climbed into the back of the car and smiled at him, he looked back at me and smiled, with his teeth. Dad always smiled with his teeth. *** I’ve heard that people tend to marry those who remind them of their parents. I’d ask Momma if she did that and she’d reply that she and Dad were orphans, so she doesn’t know. *** After a bit Momma had started keeping buckets all around the house. It was my job at the end of the week to empty all the grime and antennae collected in there at the end of the week. Momma told me to put them in the dumpster behind the bar behind our house. I would ask her why we threw our trash somewhere that wasn’t ours and she’d

tell me that she didn’t want people to question why our trash reeked. She said that the bar’s dumpster already smelled horrendous so it wouldn’t cause any suspicion.

When I saw him lurking around the house he’d try to smile at me, bug legs stuck in his teeth. He made a habit of picking them out and tossing them across the room.

When he’d hug me he felt gaunt, his jacket hanging off of him like jellyfish guts. He smelled like clothing left in the washing machine too long.

Most times when he’d regurgitate bugs they'd be dead, often in multiple pieces.

However sometimes a live one would pop out and we would all have to catch the little menace and slam it with a magazine. It was kind of like a game, now it is a ritual. *** He is getting worse. Tonight we get a call from the Crown Royale Casino that he is out of control and we need to come pick him up. I take the car and go get him because Mom has a cold and needs to rest. He crawls out of the casino when I get there, almost on all fours as he retches out worms and beetles and tarantulas. When he gets in the back of the car he smiles at me, centipede legs in his gums. I try not to look at him. I help him up to the doorway when we get home. His eyes are yellow, lips cracked and peeling. His skin a molting exoskeleton. I can almost see his veins bulge with little legs and abdomens scurrying around.

I look him dead in his eyes and tell him I hate what our life has become. I tell him I hate going to the bar dumpsters and getting calls late at night from places I don’t know.

I tell him this and he looks over me, says he’s sorry.

We go inside and he crashes down on the sofa. He picks up the bucket by the coffee table and it begins again; the expelling of maggots, flies, cockroaches, beetles,

lady bugs, and moths. I go upstairs so I don’t hear him so loudly. When I walk past Momma’s room I see her laying on the ground, face up. She hums “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”