After Dinner

After Dinner

Jacob Voelker

After Dinner Jacob Voelker


After Dinner Jacob Voelker The Literary Arts Department Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12, A Creative and Performing Arts Magnet

CopyrightŠ 2019 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 only: Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12 Literary Arts Department Mara Cregan 111 Ninth Street Pittsburgh, PA 15222 mcregan1@pghschools.org Ms. Melissa A. Pearlman, Principal 

For Mum You defined what family was to me

Table of Contents 1. Handling a Tire Swing Accident 2. Working for a Home 3. After Dinner 4. Motivator 5. The Boy With No Eyes 6. Twenty-seven things your mother never told you‌ 7. Confessions of a Psychic 8. New Addition 9. Rain 

Handling a Tire Swing Accident “It would be the type of thing you would laugh about under different circumstances.”

-Samantha Schoech, “Why You Shouldn’t Have Gone In The First Place”

Don't forget to double-check that the knot connecting the tire swing to the branch is tied tight enough.

Even if you were a Boy Scout when you were his age, and even though you’ve never tied a faulty knot in your life. Just double-check.

When you hear him crying all the way from the kitchen, go check on him immediately. If he’s crying that intensely, there must be a good reason for it. When you finally give in and go out the back, the sound of the door reverberating as you slam it, don’t tell him to stop being such a wuss. Don’t tell him to get the hell up, and certainly don’t tell him to rub some dirt on it, because that could lead to an infection.

Don’t wait for three weeks to take him to the hospital, especially when he’s been complaining so much about how badly his head has been hurting. Don’t dismiss your wife when she tells you she thinks this is serious, and don’t get mad at her for “taking his side.” Don’t ignore his teachers when they tell you they’ve noticed a lack of focus lately. Don’t tell him that it’s fine when you don’t know if it is, and don’t tell him it’s probably just a big bruise when you aren’t qualified to diagnose him.

When he vomits for the third night in a row, take it as a symptom, not a coincidence. Tell him that as soon as he feels good enough for a quick shower and a car ride, you’re going to get him to the hospital so the nice people can make it all better.

Don’t play down the story to the doctor; tell her exactly what happened and don’t leave anything out because you think letting your son cry makes you less of a father.

Don’t make light of the situation, because it’s anything but that.

Don’t be surprised when the doctor tells you your son has serious brain trauma, and don’t be surprised to learn that it might become permanent because of how long it’s been left untreated.

Make sure to thank the doctor for her expertise before you burst out the room.

Make sure to apologize to your wife for letting your pride get in the way of her son’s health, and make certain to apologize to him for everything. Promise him that you’ll do everything in your power to make this right, even though you know it’s no longer in your control.

Finally, don’t blame anyone but yourself.

Working for a Home After To Build A Home, Cinematic Orchestra Right out of college, I knew what I wanted was a family, and before that, I needed a home. It’s what I’d wanted ever since before I could write cursive letters— a place of my own, for me and the people I held closest to my heart. A place to spend my life, to start a family of my own. I wanted a family.

Luke told me that’s what he wanted, too. We had a small wedding with immediate family only and skipped the honeymoon. All the money went into our savings. I started working at a local bakery, and we rented out a small apartment in the complex above. Luke took long day shifts at the hospital working as a nurse and bartended nights.

After three year of working, we saved up enough for a small house two streets over from the bakery. It was a three bedroom with a big yard in a really nice neighborhood, and the most remarkable wooden furniture. The minute the realtor left, I took Luke’s hand and squeezed. This was where we were going to start our family.

Three days before we scheduled to sign for the mortgage, Luke got a call from his sister. I watched as his face twisted and a tear fell from the right side of his cheek. His father just found out he had leukemia, and needed help with money for the chemotherapy treatment.

“I’m sorry, Anne.”

I stood and clung onto him, letting him cry into my shoulder as his tears smudged against the skin on my neck. We moved to the couch and sat for hours in silence, in the main room of our tiny apartment. The next day I requested more shifts and looked for a second job.

Luke’s father began his chemotherapy treatment. We worked through the pain, and visited him as frequently as we could. His chemo sessions lasted a little over seven months. At the end of August he was in remission, the doctors determined.

When he got the call, the first thing he said to me was that he was going to buy me that house.

“We figured it out,” I said. “Now it’s time for us.”

We continued working. Luke worked overtime at the hospital and got an extra day at the pub. I got a second job as an assistant at a law firm downtown. We didn’t see much of each other, but we both knew what we were working towards.

Luke thought to start a change jar, and we watched it rise with the passing months. It wasn’t much, but everything helped.

Within eight months, we matched the amount we’d had to start. I called the realty agency to check on the status of the house we’d seen almost a year and a half previously, and let out a yelp when they said it was still up for sale. After a quick call with Luke, who was potentially in more disbelief than me, I called the agency back and made our second appointment to sign for the house.

Before the turn of the month, Luke and I were moving the boxes from the truck to our new living room. I thought back to the first time I’d stepped into the house, when the smell of hickory wood first hit, and I knew it would be the place where Luke and I would start our family.

After Dinner After Robert Olen Butler, excerpt from “Intercourse”

Frank it’s amazing to me that someone so intelligent doesn’t know when to shut up and just listen, because she is smart, she really is, but how does she not know when to stop and think, yeah, I should probably stop fighting this so hard, he’s obviously going to be right, because I do have a little bit of real world experience; with me not everything is so centered around feelings, I am a man of logic and I’m pretty sure I’ve got a good sense of what makes logical sense, if I didn’t I think we’d have a very different life that she’d be pretty ungrateful for, and she most certainly wouldn’t want that, so maybe next time we talk politics she could at least acknowledge that I have a bit of an upper hand— I mean come on, these things actually affect me now, whereas she still has years to factor in things like taxation and the economy, and not being focused on preserving the feelings of every person around you, so maybe before she comes down so hard on me for the way I put myself politically, maybe she should be a little bit more open-minded about how harshly she judges people, meaning just because her friends at school (also in the ninth grade) tell her that one thing is right and one thing is wrong, doesn’t mean she has to live by that, maybe she could consider that I’m not evil just because Jarod from school says that his fathers can’t get married because of people like her daddy, but what do I know, I’m just a filthy republican

Nevaeh funny how he thinks I’m always the one who’s wrong without even hearing what I have to say, isn’t it, because I just don’t see the “logic” he always goes on and on about being applied to keeping women and minorities so far under, I don’t, unless of course, his logic is keeping people who look just like him in office so that they’ll shape the legislation to benefit people who look just like him, in which case, his logic is airtight, but it’s sickening and it makes him a pig, and I know if, even for just a minute or two, he listened to what I had to say, he would see that his way isn’t the only way, and that age doesn’t really matter as much as he claims it does, because you can be old as dirt but if you’re a racist you’re still a racist; I hate how he tries to undermine what I have to say just because I’m still in high school, because newsflash: decent morals don’t have an age restriction, and he can’t convince me that two men cannot love each other the same way because logic and the bible say otherwise, and he can’t assume that if I don’t agree with his perspective verbatim I’m immediately ignorant and inexperienced and it's just not fair at all because who’s to say that those men cannot love each other, him of all people, who reminds everyone enough that he has absolutely no idea what it’s like to be in the situation where you want to be with a man, like yeah, of course you don’t, so who are you to tell them that their love is forbidden, and just the whole immigration thing too just kills me, because those people need a home too and we have a home so he wouldn’t know the first thing about what it feels like to need

Motivator After Kim Church, “Bullet” If I could force the words out of my mouth, I’d tell her I was unhappy, and that it was her fault. I would tell her it all didn’t work out the way she said it would.

“Oh, you’re just being dramatic. You need to work harder,” she’d say through her especially white teeth, eyes closed and rolled all the way up in her sockets.

Easy for her to say— she’s not $350,000 in debt and in a field of work she has absolutely no real interest in pursuing. “Medical school isn’t supposed to be easy,” she’d remind me.

“No Mom, you’re right,” I’d say, my fists beginning to tense and my body becoming stiff.

“It’s not supposed to be easy, but I should at least enjoy it right?”

She’d shake her head like she always did, and tensed her jaw, teeth grinding, like she did when she was angry. “You don’t have to enjoy it. Work isn’t something you’re supposed to enjoy, it’s where you make money. And you will make the most money you can, because you’re not going to end up like me.”

I could go one of two ways. I could give her a hug and tell her that she was a great mother and that she did the best she could for Steven and me, and I could remind her that doing it alone doesn’t make it any easier.

Or I could tell her that she wouldn’t be so miserable if she’d just found something she was passionate about, and that maybe there wasn’t as big of a difference between being a doctor or a security guard if you weren’t happy with it.

In every case, even in my fantasies, I’d choose the former.

The Boy With No Eyes There once was a boy who was born without eyes. In the place where they should have been, two gaping holes sat in their place.

When the boy’s mother first saw him, she cried for three moons. When the boy's father saw him, he didn’t speak for four. The caretakers said that they’d never seen anything like it, and would not go near the boy. After the sun rose on the fifth day, they decided to take the boy in and treat him as they would any other child they’d bore.

“We will give him the best life he can have,” the mother said. She wiped a tear off of her cheek and hugged her husband.

“Yes,” he said. “We will raise him as if he were a normal boy. If we do this, he will turn out fine.”

And that’s exactly what they did. They took him home and raised him as they would any other child. At first, it was easy. But then he grew older, and as he did, things became harder for his mother and father. Teaching the boy to read and write proved to be very difficult, and helping him learn to walk by himself wasn’t any easier. When he turned eight, they began having to explain to the boy why he had to wear a mask that covered his gaping holes when they went to the Town Square to fetch groceries.

“Why do I have to wear this silly mask?” he asked, and began to pull it off. The mother slapped his hand away and readjusted his mask.

“Everyone has to wear it, sweetie. You just don’t see! It makes you look cool, anyway.”

He giggled, and continued on.

The father pulled her aside. “You shouldn’t lie to him like that. He deserves to know the truth.”

The mother shrugged. “We will tell him, eventually. We will.”

Two years passed, and it was finally time for the boy to begin attending the academy, an education system for young boys and girls from around the town. His parents had dreaded the day since they took him home, for it would be his first time interacting with other children. They had never mentioned the academy to him, but instead chose to wait as long as they could.

The mother began to grow worried for her son. One night while lying in bed with her husband, she told him about her concerns.

“I don’t think we should send him to the academy. I think we should keep him at home, with us.”

“We cannot,” the father said. “He has to go to the academy so that he can learn, just like all of the other children.”

She shook her head, because she knew that he wasn’t like all of the other children. But, reluctantly, she agreed to send the boy away, per her husband’s request. When they told the boy about the academy, his face lit up. It didn’t falter once, even when he found out for the first time that all the others had eyes and didn’t have to wear masks. He was so excited to finally be with children his own age, even if they were different then he was. Eight moons later, the boy waved goodbye to his mother and father as he joined the large group of kids on their way to their first day of the academy.

For the forty moons that the boy was gone, his mother never stopped thinking about him.

She worried that the mean kids would ask why he had the mask over his eyes, and that they

would ridicule him and take off his mask and be scared of him. She worried nobody would like her son, and she regretted sending him to the academy.

“Why did you make him go?” she asked her husband, not long after he had left.

He stood up and embraced her in a hug. “He needed to do this. You will see, I promise. I am scared too, but he needed to go.”

Upon his return, the boy hugged his mother and father. “I missed you so much!” he said.

His mother began to cry, and the boy asked her what was wrong.

“I was just so worried about you,” she said. “I was worried the other children would make fun of you for your mask and your holes.”

The boy laughed. He told his mother that they were all very nice to him, and that they thought his holes were really cool. He said that he made a lot of friends, and that he looked forward to going back next year.

The mother, relieved, kissed him on his forehead and told him that she was happy he had such a good time.

Later that night, she was lying in bed with her husband and the boy, who was fast asleep.

Her husband turned and spoke to her. “Do you see?” he whispered, rubbing the top of the boy’s head. “He had a great time. He needed this.”

“You’re right,” she said, laughing quietly. "We did a pretty good job of raising him like the other kids, didn’t we?”

She drifted off to sleep, and learned that she has to let the boy live his life. She cannot go on afraid of what might happen to him, or he will never be treated like a normal boy.

Twenty-seven things your mother never told you…

After Matthew Burnside, Something

1. She never wished it was you instead of Sara.

2. Before marrying your father, she sometimes doubted whether he was mature enough to help raise a family.

3. Your father was always the fun one, and your mother couldn’t really compete with him. She felt discouraged a lot of the time, because you and Sara gravitated more to him. She never blamed you, though.

4. It was his idea to take you and Sara whitewater rafting. Not that it matters now, but she never thought it was a good idea.

5. When she went grocery shopping, she always made sure to get two boxes of Fruit by the Foot, because she knew you’d want to pack them in your lunch for school and you went through one box in days.

6. When your mother was young, your grandmother was very particular about what she was allowed to eat. She was told that if she didn’t eat properly, she would never be able to find anyone who would want to marry her. That’s why she let you have an extra cookie once in a while.

7. Even though her family went to church a lot as a kid, your mother was never one for religion. She only ever took you and Sara to the services on Easter, and sometimes Christmas, and when you turned eleven she stopped taking you entirely.

8. The morning before the funeral, while you were watching a Youtube video on how to tie the black tie your father picked out for you, your mother, in prayer, thanked God for keeping you there with her. She said if you were gone, she would’ve lost everything.

9. She considered divorcing your father. She almost did it too, but she wanted the two of you to grow up believing that love was forever.

10. When Sara brought that boy to dinner, your mother couldn’t bring herself to ask him to stay for dessert. He acted way too much like your father, even for fourteen.

11. Your mother often said that the best part of her day was reading a chapter from a Magic Treehouse book to you and Sara every night before bed.

12. Your mother would videotape you and Sara playing outside in the backyard. She bragged to her friends at work about how wonderful it was to have two kids who may as well have been best friends.

13. That one Christmas when you didn’t get what you’d asked for had nothing to do with how much she loved you.

14. She hid your Easter basket on top of the bookcase in the living room every single year and waited for you to catch on. You didn’t until you were twelve.

15. When she held you that night and told you that soon life would go back to normal, she was lying. She knew things would never be the same.

16. Those art classes your mother attended on Tuesday nights were actually counseling sessions.

Your father didn’t know about them, either.

17. When you and Sara were younger, you would paint pictures and make cards for your parents on their birthdays and holidays. Each time, your mother would prop them up onto her mirror for a few weeks before putting them in a cardboard box for preservation. The box still sits in the attic, although no one has opened it in years.

18. Even though she made it seem like she was emotionally invested in every episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles you’d ask her to watch with you, your mother hated that show with every fiber in her body.

19. For a while, your father was out of work. Your mother picked up a second job at the corner store, and things were tight for a few months. You weren’t old enough to understand, but Sara was.

20. The few weeks after you shut her out were the worst of her life. She felt like she didn’t have either of you, and that was when she needed you most. She doesn’t blame you, though.

21. There wasn’t a day your father hadn’t blamed himself for what happened. She never told him, but your mother blamed him too.

22. Your mother fell out of love with your father before your seventh birthday.

23. Every time you skipped class in high school, your mother received a phone call from the school. She excused you and let you think you’d gotten away with it, because it was infrequent enough and she didn’t want to ruin your fun. She never told your father.

24. When your mother was in her teens, she was a bit of a rebel. One time in high school, she set off the fire alarms and convinced half of her grade to walk home instead of going back inside.

25. She regrets not showing how proud she was of you for doing well in school. Even when you were just starting kindergarten, she always knew you’d amount to something big.

26. When people asked her how she was able to get past it and be happy again, she always cited you. She said if you had died that day too, she wouldn’t have had anything pushing her forward.

27. That spring when your family moved across town, it had nothing to do with the neighborhood. Your mother couldn’t live in that house anymore, and it was getting hard for your father too. She remembered to grab the box from the attic, thankfully.

Confessions of a Psychic “The same synchronicity that allows me to hear his next words before he says them.”

-Kit Coyne Irwin, “Parrot Talk”

Derrick didn’t believe me when I told him I was a psychic.

In fact, he went to great lengths to let me know how ridiculous he thought I was. He said people like me didn’t exist, and that I needed to get my nose out of those astrology books and stop being ridiculous.

He also said that if we had our kids believing in some psychic mumbo jumbo, they’d turn out to be freaks that didn’t have a real idea of the way the world worked. I told him that I didn’t plan on sharing with Timmy and Jennifer, but it didn’t matter to him. It was all the same.

He was telling his mother about it at the family party on Christmas day. He had a hoot, telling everyone how in over my own head I was.

“I’m telling you guys, she’s a psychic. Trust me, she even says so!”

The laugher that ensued stung more than anyone probably intended it to. In a moment of anger and impulsiveness, I pointed to the cross at the door. “What do you make of that?”

Everyone looked at the door, confused. “Make of what, Sweetie?” His teeth snuck out as he tried to contain a smirk. “Is this one of your psychic readings?”

“Prove to me that the bible is any more factual to you all than my silly psychiatric readings are to me.”

The room fell silent. Everyone looked at me, with looks of horror spread across their faces, their chins sunken to their knees. Derrick, the most surprised of anyone, stood up and left the room, hanging me out to dry again— only this time, it was much worse. 

New Addition After Robert Owen Butler, “Intercourse”

Gabriel When I was told I’d been chosen to be adopted by a family in New Hampshire and would be flying out to live with them, I broke down crying right there in the office. I’d been in that orphanage as far back as I could remember, although they’d told me I had lived with my biological parents for the first few years of my life. I can remember certain rooms in the house we lived, and a brown couch with holes under the cushions. Since then, in all those years in the orphanage, I never stopping thinking once about why they gave me up, what made them decide they didn’t want me anymore. I didn’t have to think that anymore, because I had a new family, and they treated me like I was their own from the second they picked me up from the airport.

Mom and Dad (they asked if I felt comfortable calling them that, and I said of course I was) were so nice to me, and my older brother Elliot was so cool! I couldn’t wait until we become closer. I was happy with my new family. I finally knew what it felt like to be wanted.

Elliot The summer before we adopted Gabriel was the last time I felt loved by my mother and father. It was late August when my mother got the phone call, and I’d never seen her so happy. She leapt into my father’s arms and tears rolled from her eyes, and she couldn’t stop smiling. They turned to me and told me I’d be getting a little brother after all, just like I’d wanted. I gave her a hug and fought back tears, though mine weren’t quite the same as hers. I didn’t want a little brother

anymore. I didn’t understand why they needed anything more than me, why I suddenly wasn’t enough for them. I’d been everything they’ve ever asked— I was a good student, I was respectful to adults, I read for pleasure, which I knew most kids don’t do. I played soccer and I knew how to ride a bike really well. I didn’t get what he was that I wasn’t. When he arrived the following month, my parents forgot about me almost entirely. Our lives began to revolve around Gabriel, mine included. He was only two years younger than I was (he was seven when I was nine), but you’d have thought he was a toddler, the way they coddled him. Nothing I did was worthy of their attention anymore. They didn’t care that I read for pleasure, and they didn’t watch me play soccer in the backyard anymore. Even after the initial excitement set in, nothing changed. I was still never more than a small fraction of their worries again.

Rain It’s been thirty-six days since the rain first started falling, and Emmett hasn’t taken to it very well. He’s having a hard time adapting to the new lifestyle we’ve been forced to live. He hasn’t left the house, other than the two times he went to the laundromat a few blocks over to switch out his pairs of wrinkled blue jumpsuits that fit him a little too tight these days.

He left both times wishing he didn’t have to, and returned wishing he hadn’t. It’s hard to say whether it comes down entirely to the rain, or if there’s more to the story that my mother and I keep missing during our phone calls. She reassures me, tells me that it’s completely normal for men his age to be going through a period like this. But I just can’t bring myself to believe her.

Everyday it feels like I lose him to the rain a little more.

When I leave for work at the bakery, I pinch a little fabric from his jumpsuit and give him a kiss on the cheek, and promise to bring him home a dozen of whatever we have left. His unkept face scratches at me every time (sometimes I think he does it intentionally, just to spite me) but that doesn’t concern me as much as the absence of life that grows with each kiss.

Nobody knows why it started raining. Tonopah isn’t particularly known for its heavy levels of precipitation, but one day it started raining and never stopped. The streets have constantly flooded. The only vehicles you ever really see on the road are emergency vehicles or ambulances, and that’s limited as is. The vegetation has been drowned out completely, not that there was entirely much to begin with. Nobody leaves the house without wearing something with a hood, and each family unit holds an average of three umbrellas. The rain took us all by surprise. Some of us just adapted better than others.

Emmett never liked the water. We’ve never taken a trip to the ocean, even though I’m always telling him how much I’d love to see the seashells from the West Coast. When we travel, he always manages to find the one hotel that doesn’t offer an indoor pool.

It’s just not my thing, honey. We all have our things, this isn’t mine. Why can’t you just accept that?

I don’t say this much, because it’s a bit of a sore subject in our town, but I don’t mind the rain nearly as much as everyone else does. In fact, sometimes it’s kind of comforting. I grew up in a small town near Tallahassee, and you got a lot of rainfall. I was surrounded by water from when I was born until the day I went off to college, where I met Emmett.

Emmett has been in Tonopah his entire life. He grew up here, went to the high school, said he’d stay here forever if he could. We went to college in Vegas, but he said he only left because there were no worthwhile schools in or directly surrounding Tonopah.

When we fell in love, he told me we’d find a way to get home to see my family. He promised me that if I came with him back to Tonopah, we’d fly to Florida for holidays and a few weeks during the summer for my birthday. He said things would be better off this way.

Most of the people in town have already evacuated. After the third week, more than half were gone, and by the fourth, a quarter more. Many of them are staying with relatives from upstate, and others are staying in hotels in hopes that the rain will pass with time.

I tried to persuade Emmett to fly us out and stay with my family in Tallahassee for a little while, until the rain stopped. He told me that he’d rather drown right here in Tonopah than leave behind his life for the sun in Florida. He told me that if we leave, I’m never going to want to come back, and that I’ll get too attached to the life I lived before him.

I reminded him that I haven’t seen my own mother in two and a half years, and I told him that we need to get away from this town before everything’s swept away and we’re up to our necks in water. He laughed, picked up his glass, and took a swig.

Amy, this town’ll outlast you. It’ll outlast all of us.

The longer we stay tethered to the West, the more I’ve come to resent Emmett for tying the knot. His refusal to leave signifies one of two things— that he loves Tonopah too much, or that he doesn’t love me enough.