Shinnery Review

Shinnery Review

Abilene Christian University Literary Magazine Spring 2009

Table of Contents 5 7 8 11 14 15 16 17 18 19 22 23 24 25 29 31 32 34 37 38 39 40 3

Aspen Yellow

Rebecca Schaffen

Celluloid Lessons

Erin Bracken Bedford Boys Ranch / Falling Sadie Barton Jessica George Inkblots 1-3 Yolanda Romanelli Austere at, throught the ceiling!

Tanner Hadfield Heart Paul Knettel Lukewarm Parade / Changing Seasons Jordan Smith Erin Bracken Chinatown Erin Bracken Estate Sale Dresser / Legacy Lydia Melby Beach Luke Ramsey Clash of Red on Pink Mary Hardegree Summer Afternoon Bethany Bradshaw Sour Grapes Jordan Smith Popsicles and Cigarettes Jessica George Jam Sessions / Swans Mary Hardegree Tanner Hadfield First Night Danielle Besch Voice Lessons Melanie Rebecca Schaffer Laundry Day Danielle Besch Matthew 27:46 Danielle Besch Smoke Mary Hardegree Twinkle and a Gleam Blues / Violet Beauregarde Blues Tanner Hadfield We don’t talk about it Erin Bracken

41 Words of Destruction Daniel Barecky 44 Words have no inherent meaning Melanie Rebecca Schaffer 45 The S Word Danielle Besch 54 Dog Story Lydia Melby

Writing

Photography

ART 6

by Zach Linge Stranger Lady

13 Untitled 9 10 17 20 21 30 33 35 36 42 43 49 50 53 61 62 63

Clingy

51 Self Portrait-Regressions

David McMichael

52 Cocaine

David McMichael Untitled Kelsey Evans Reaching Joshua Alkire Doors of every size Kelli Jutras If walls could speak Kendell Wilson Suspicious David McMichael Inspired Ashley Bredin St Peters Light Kelsey Evans And so I urge you brothers text without ceasing David McMichael Lifestyles of the middle class and the jagged David McMichael Happiness is spelled with a (piercing in the)I. David McMichael Espera David McMichael America Joshua Alkire Wait...oh yeap.Bill there’s poop in your hair again David McMichael Westminister Gate Kelsey Evans Bridge near Port Meadow Elizabeth McClellan

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Cyra-Portrait of the Beginning

65

Jack of Spades

Glory

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Aspen Yellow

by Rebecca Schaffer

I stop on the steep slope to catch a breath of fall, my eyes raking ground the color of a cornucopia spilling melted Indian corn and pumpkin pie then taking a legato swoop to view the canopy above, to aspens the color of a yellow I can’t concretely capture--fitting every definition yet belying them all Primary in its unadulterated hue, the color complexion of the alpine elite not a slur of the autumnal race, but endearing Primary in its domination of the forest palette the color of fully saturated butterscotch pudding not a wavelength of five hundred eighty, but edible Primary, the first golden Russian domes quivering down color of the secrets held behind the sky not synonymous with yolk or lemon, but a living, veined ornament Primary as the leader of proud death color the personality of an unassuming beauty queen not shy or cowardly, but the rippling mane of a lioness Primary as the infanthood of winter color the healthy blush of fall not jealous or jaundiced, but the sigh of a contented lover Aspen yellow leaves shivering out of categorization hushing the strain to define with its rustling lullaby I rest in the color of its song

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Stranger Lady by Zach Linge 6

Celluloid Lessons

by Erin Bracken

My mother used to take us to movies when we were little At ten o’ clock on sleepy summer mornings we drove across town to the musty old theater.

She would stuff plastic bags of popcorn and sweet, sticky candy into pockets and backpacks.

Two fidgety boys, a baby in a mother’s arms and me, staring at the screen, taking in every nuance of the pretty actress saying impossible things and moving in ways that I could not comprehend Afterwards we would walk out into the sunshine, blinking like newborns.

I would sashay to the car and look over my shoulder mouthing beautiful phrases to the invisible cameraman.

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f

al ing

by Jessica George

Bedford Boys Ranch

by Sadie Barton

In fits of rage and peace, we left ourselves behind.

In attempts to seek release we left words undefined.

We left marks to remind any unified two, that with every love comes a venetian blind that covers you, and anything that’s deemed untrue.

The overlapping folds serve to save face, as to prevent an inclination.

For such feelings might rob you of grace when indulging in the elation of creating a new-found combination of selective candor and warming kisses.

The marks we left are to warn you of obligation, to keep you fresh on the endless misses that occur with every coherent tap into your temptation, and result in shattered reminisces.

We left each other behind, to prevent you from masking our mistakes as something acceptable and refined.

My tired black tires take me away from temporary memories and as they tread along this quite street of hopefulness the evidence of our love waits in puddles to be splashed across my windshield.

We always loved the rain.

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Clingy by David McMichael

9

Glory by David McMichael

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M

y grandma told me once that my dad knew when someone was about to die--just like an episode of the Twilight Zone. She said he sees a type of aura or halo surrounding someone’s head. This serves as a sort of “Stop” sign my dad recognizes as their soon-to-come death. He has predicted two deaths correctly so far. The first one was a friend he saw at the mall when he was in high school. He asked to borrow fifteen dollars from my dad. This was the first time my dad saw the aura, didn’t know what it meant, but had a very uneasy feeling that his friend was going to die.

My dad never saw his fifteen dollars--nor did he see he friend who committed suicide a week later.

The second time my dad saw this aura was around my grandpa’s head. We went to visit him at the hospital right before he was getting a heart transplant.

I remember seeing my grandpa’s gray, shriveled body; he looked so small for his bed and nightgown. He was at the mercy of a complex network or tubes and machines. He wrote us a note that said, “I’m next for a heart.” We were all so happy--and hopeful. But not my dad. He saw the aura and told my grandma he didn’t think he was going to see grandpa again. And he didn’t; we didn’t. My grandpa’s arteries failed that night. I always wondered if one day my dad will look in the mirror and see his own death. Would he tell us?

My grandma told me this story when I was sixteen. I wondered at the time if maybe, I too had this power. I kept trying to picture my grandpa the last time we saw him. I convinced myself that I also saw the aura.

Around this time, the only dog I’ve ever had was dying, slowly. His name was Lucky on the account of us finding him during a thunderstorm. I wanted to name him Midnight because I thought it sounded mysterious and romantic, but Lucky won in the end.

He had terrible heart murmurs. As he became older, he became so sick and skinny that I could see every bone on his body; his fur became dull and clung to him in defiance of his decaying skin. He was always trembling, and his nose was always running. I began to hate him--wished he was dead already. I loved this dog more than I loved myself, but I couldn’t wait for this pathetic image to disappear. I ignored him, pretended he was already gone. We were going to put him down, but by some miracle of God he became healthy again his last few days. We were all so happy--and hopeful.

My dad decided to take Lucky to the vet for a checkup.

My brother and I were getting ready for school, but my dad made a really big deal about us saying good-bye to the dog. So we did. It was a sad goodbye, like we were never going to see him again. I’m not sure why, but both my brother and I had a very uneasy feeling he wasn’t coming back. And he didn’t. He collapsed in the grass in front of the vet’s office. His heart finally gave in. Just like grandpa’s. I think my dad saw the aura around Lucky that morning. And we, our father’s children, felt it.

Inkblots 1-3

by Yolanda Romanelli

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II. I have a white dot in the center of my left eye. I used to think that’s where my soul lived. I’ve heard that eyes were windows to the soul. That’s such a beautiful concept I’ve always wanted to be true. I’ve also heard that every time you have sex before marriage, you lose a little bit of your soul each time. In high school, whenever I heard the latest rumor about someone losing their virginity, I would become completely fascinated by them. I would pay attention to their every movement, looking for some sign that a small part of them was missing. I would stare deeply into their eyes when I talked to them, waiting to see a dullness of life. I almost wanted to see it, but I never did. The day I lost my virginity I expected to lost part of my soul. But that didn’t happen either--or maybe I just never had it to begin with. I would stare in the mirror at the white speck in my eye, waiting for it to disappear. It never happened. Shakespeare described orgasms as dying and sex as death. He must have seen something I missed. I want some semblance that my life still has magic. I’m willing to lose my soul just to feel I ever had one.

III. My dad likes to pick up random pennies from the floor, any floor. He says they’re a sign from grandpa. He knows this because he only finds pennies when he’s thinking about him. One of my dad’s best friends died a couple of weeks ago. My dad found a penny outside the church immediately after his friend’s memorial services. My dad keeps a photo of him sitting on an end table in the living room. There’s something uncanny about looking into the eyes of a dead man through a photo. It’s watching life frozen in time.

When people come over, they think my dad’s friend is his brother or some other relative, because adults don’t normally frame their friends.

Every now and again I’ll walk by a penny. I’ll consider picking it up, feeling the cold metal that stings my finger into consciousness. I never pick them up though.

I know a boy who likes to throw pennies everywhere. He thinks its amusing when children find them thinking they found gold. I tell him about my dad believing pennies were a sign from the dead to comfort us. He laughs. I laugh. We don’t believe in magic.

Untitled by Zach Linge 13

and for once, i wish the clock would eat itself. let each successive hour, able bodied, be devoured. oh, how I wish to turn you against one another!

It seems only fitting… swing low, sweet ceiling fan! oh mutiny! lashes to lashes, some eye crust. so make for plums, settle soft on my cheek. does a good man sleep? when all one sees scrapesss against all one can’t? when all is picturesque and nothing enchants? when consistency isn’t rest? only rest is rest. so I play with form and color, so I chew your metal memories in my teeth, the few within reach. yes, we’re all still reeling, why, you were fishing with anchors, how do you think my mouth got so big? and OH! how i am brilliant! see how i am SHINY! oh how silvertwinkle COLORS in my linings! see! or i will SCRAPE myself on the backs of your eyelids. crafting controlled burns out of shadowfrost, i wander, strange thoughts concerning my general architecture, and how there is no way to describe a perfect peach in an un-sensual manner. lo, i lay, waste to hours and address the matter at hand: that secretly i still hope the best for you.

Austere at, through the ceiling!

by Tanner Hadfield

14 4

Heart

By Paul Knettel

Two hours I wait And the city swells around me Still I see the sweat And the blood And there's ringing in my ears Never ceasing

Two years are gone And I go inside now So they can commend me For my wounds And the medal dangling from my neck Starts to burn

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Changing Seasons

by Erin Bracken

It was fall again and yellow light illuminated our little town, dripping off trees and making everything look warm.

Lukewarm Parade

by Jordan Smith

A bible untouched; A burden within Motions contrived and heads hung in deep sin I find we are searching for life in song, Departing from joy, we’ve got it all wrong.

And here I stand selfish, gaze at me now!

My hands will not fold; my knees will not bow For fear of my kin, they’re staring me down They look on and scowl, they toss me their frowns Tradition has raped my life to a shell My spiritual conscience somewhere in hell, For this charade, God will soon spit me out This lukewarm parade, this source of all doubt.

Leah’s parents went to Florida, so we all slept over, even though most of us had to be at work early the next morning, pouring coffee at the café or taking groceries to cars, and when you showed up with your casual arrogance, I watched what I said and was careful not to talk too fast.

We made a fort under the pool table, and when you quietly crawled in to go to sleep, the radio light shone on your clean, white socks.

The only sound that night was your quiet breathing and the explosive laughter from downstairs.

But saints and sinners oft’ are paired as one, I cannot tell which side of heav’n has won...

4

16

Chinatown

by Erin Bracken

Untitled by Kelsy Evans

17

We were at the Tower of Babel Languages rolled off tongues like water rushing over rocks in a stream Tiny women glided silently by on filthy sidewalks as if strolling under cherry trees shaded by silk umbrellas and skyscrapers Barrels of slimy creatures made me jump off the sidewalk and walk on the street next to old men on bicycles I was hot and conspicuous in my Nike flip flops next to the graceful women bartering for fish and eggplant I took pictures of yellow awnings and wrinkled men in doorways and wondered about the Yangtze River

Legacy

by Lydia Melby

Open a vein and feed the gaping mouthYou’ve nothing left: your breast milk has run out.

She is young, she will take anything to fill an empty gut, And, if you let her, she will take too much.

But don’t let your stomach turn, not even a little, Just cover her white china cheeks with your love.

And don’t pull away, don’t start with surprise The oily black smear will dry into rust, And that’s not understanding in those small blue eyes, Not a sick comprehension growing, but trust.

Estate Sale Dresser

by Lydia Melby

She looks elsewhere now for her blame, not in Her own entrails, still soft and spilling out, A record of the blood-bath that announced What would become her greatest failingNativity gone horribly awry.

The daughter lives but will not be remade With Lilith’s scales; I am your whipping girl, But will not let my soul be dashed against Your pride, like when you took my hair and swung My head, full force, into the chocolate oak Oblivion you bought with years in mind.

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Beach

A drifter Wearing but rags Dirt and grime Shuffles along On the shore Gasping for air Waves beating Wind blowing Sand swirling The sun beats down He cannot see Cannot hope All that is All he can hear, smell, see Is the ocean The endless abyss It’s cold, infinite wisdom Everywhere It draws him to it As a Father He turns, faces The endless, the all He falls Lets go Of the pain Of the world Embraces the water “No more! No more!”

He cries His head Slips beneath All he can see All there is Is the Light Slowly surely drifting away Finally Dark

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by Luke Ramsey

4

Reaching by Joshua Alkire

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Doors of Every Size by Kelli Jutras

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I

wait till they’ve all gone to bed for they’d never understand

Clash of Red on Pink

by Mary Hardegree

it has been a long day

and my mind has been pacing up and down my case telling me what a screw-up I am I’ll teach my mind to talk to me like that I’ll show it who is boss of my body with this pin I roll back my sleeves revealing the bare skin

The mark starts slowly gradually getting greater until I start drawing blood up to the surface then overflowing onto the surrounding skin

The release of blood conjures up a release of emotions I feel in control of myself and the voices in my head cannot yell over the searing line dripping onto my pink towel

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Summer

by Bethany Bradshaw

This is desire: to run barefoot in wide circles to wrestle in tall grass to be naked and freckled and warm.

Dazed by the sunlight That glows through eyelids Across backs Dripping down chests Like pendants of liquid crystal To adorn our golden bodies Smelling deeply of earth and heat and reckless abandon.

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Sour Grapes!

by Jordan Smith While traversing down a path In the midst of massive vines, My stomach yearns for comfort As hunger stalks close behind.

Casting eyes around the site That I have known forever, I think what’s best is a treat For my endless endeavors.

Off this path I walk, To the nearest healthy vine.

The precious thought of goodness Is in my mouth and in my mind.

I raise a weathered hand To pick this treasure from its home, To prepare it for a journey In my tummy to roam.

I cast it into the pit of doom, And end its life so quickly.

And yet my eyes begin to water And I gasp ever so sickly.

“This is not a treat,” says I, “To be indulged in by someone.”

My head starts spinning, my stomach cries, My innards begin to run.

Alas, it’s far too late To spew this vessel from my head.

Two more seconds in my mouth And I’m sure I would be dead.

So this I say, and heed me well, ‘Lest you are an ape: Take your stomach elsewhere, And beware of sour grapes.

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d n a s e l c pPo si

Cigarettes

By Jessica George

It was a summer embedded in the time when hymns were still sung at church to move the congregation. You didn’t sit still, watching the song leader’s mouth open and close on meaningless mouthfuls of syllables, you jumped up out of your pew and spouted the praise of Jesus. Dad always brought these praises home to us, leading our family in a scattered choir, voices coming from every room. It didn’t matter that my mom couldn’t carry a tune; he led us anyway through the chorus and every verse of the old worship songs. I remember clearly these mornings in our home, but even more, I can remember the summer when my dad stopped leading.

We started that summer on the high of freedom. We ate Jolly Ranchers all day because there was no one to give us oral vocabulary quizzes. We conquered every tree we came across with our jumbled messes of uncombed hair, teeth still holding on to the candy from last night escapades and the sticky afterthought of lemonade on our hands.

We were discovering new things that summer. That willow trees made great clubhouses for boys that want to escape the laundry filled arms of our mothers and the fake marriage ceremonies of the girls in the neighborhood. That the older couple a few houses down had a zip line in their back yard that they would let us ride. That Randy Wieb could get cigarettes from his dad’s car one at a time, building our collection till all five of us had one to smoke. We were 12, but as the prospect of smoking came to us we began to see ourselves as much older. Cigarettes carried an unprecedented weight in the tiny rolled up paper. Between the tobacco and the filter there was enough rebellion that we began to wonder what we needed our parents for anyway.

That summer was, like most others, devoid of dads and some moms, like ours who had jobs other than teaching school.

We thought we were all the same. We all liked the Rangers,

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hated the Redskins, and thought the farther you could spit the more of a man you were. I was quieter than the rest. Most of the time when an argument boiled about whether or not the Cowboys would win any games this year I would sit and listen to the statistics rattled off faster than the multiplication table ever would be and wondered at the speed with which my best friend could close an argument. Josh lived a street over in a twostory house that had been built more than 50 years ago. It had really cool trap doors in the side of the walls that, to our disappointment, had been pointed out by the real estate agent to his parents and were therefore now off limits.

It seems grossly under thought to me now, but back then I judged wealth by the literal temperature of a person’s house. If their house was extremely cold on a day when the high was 101°, I assumed they were rich. Our family’s houses were always lukewarm. Not uncomfortably hot, but not unnecessarily cool.

We all went to church together, too. Ridgecrest Church of Christ. It was an extremely conservative congregation and most of the members were what our preacher condemned as “Sunday Christians.” All of our families attended church, but I’m not sure if all of us sitting there on the pews believed in it. The five of us managed to stay fairly silent during service, but during Bible class we made spitballs, gave wet willies and passed vicious “I wouldn’t go out with you even if…” notes to all the girls. My parents, of course, loved church. They dressed up, my dad in corduroys and tassled dress shoes and my mom in broom skirts and Sunday sandals. They played gospel songs on the way to church in our gray Plymouth van and sang the songs from service on the way home. My family was never really without some singing going on.

Randy was the leader of our group, I suppose. We never would

have admitted it then, but we all looked up to him. He was smart but he was starting to find more functional ways to use his intelligence other than state mandated standardized tests. He’s the one that found out about the zip line and the one that convinced Mr. and Mrs. Elleger that we should be able to use it. He was also the one that told Garrett not to try it one-handed right before Garrett broke his left arm.

Garrett was the closest to a bully that we had in our group.

He usually saved it for the girls or a few boys that lived on the edge of our neighborhood who dared to show up at our hangouts every once in a while. Sometimes, though, we had to shove him out of the willow tree after he called someone a putz one too many times that day or gave an uncalled for dead-leg.

We all had been friends for so long that we saw nothing unusual about our group even though we had Kyle in our midst. Kyle was tall. Freakishly tall. He ran slow and always ducked his head as if there was always something over him that he might hit if he stood up straight.

He smelled like herbs constantly and no matter how many new pairs of glasses he got they always seemed crooked. We responded to his strange stories and unusual comments with a flippant, “Aw, shut up Kyle.”

That day we had been walking down the alley searching for girly magazines in the dumpsters down the street where the college guys lived. Our search turned up only thirst in more ways than one, so we headed to my house to see if my mom had remembered to make KoolAid that morning. As we neared the corner I was lagging behind, walking next to Kyle. Josh stopped when he reached the corner and turned around accusingly.

“You didn’t tell us your dad would be home.”

My stride broke a bit as I paused to realize he was talking to me.

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know, dimwit.”

“Well you go first to find out why he’s home. If he’s sick or something I don’t want to get reamed out for no reason.”

Everyone mumbled a cowardly agreement with Randy.

I headed up the driveway towards our light blue house and pulled open the screen door, surprised that the front door was open.

Our house was one story with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, one of the latter for my parents and one for my sister and me to share.

Our house was always clean and bright. When we were looking for a house my mom insisted over and over that we have “natural light.” It wasn’t enough that it had the fireplace that she wanted, or the large bedrooms, or lots of shelving to display her numerous trinkets. She needed windows. Lots of windows.

I began to make my way down the hall, the wooden floorboards giving away my whereabouts in the house.

“Dad?” It seemed a feeble way to begin my quest to secure the house for our own rowdy pleasures, but my confusion at the circumstances kept me from being inquisitive too quickly.

He was sitting at the kitchen table in his Saturday clothes which featured gray drawstring shorts like the kind they made us buy for P.E. at school. He didn’t have a shirt on, and it was when I saw the sweat drops threatening to drip from his forehead to the papers scattered around him that I took first note of how hot it was in the house.

“Hey, Pops. What are you doing home?”

“I don’t have lunch ready. Your mother told me you boys would scrounge something up yourself.” His voice wasn’t impatient yet, but there was something in it that I wasn’t used to hearing. The voice wasn’t sad or angry; it sounded like how I felt when my team had counted on me to get a good hit to win the baseball game and I struck out. It’s the same voice I now use when I fail to do something that I know my wife or kids really want from me. It’s that voice that carries the weight of

disappointing those around you that you care about.

I wanted to test a little further, seeing as he wasn’t angry with my questions this far.

“Will you be home all day?”

This seemed to trigger something in him that I had not wanted to awaken. He looked up from his papers and saw me this time and his tongue sharpened his words as they formed.

“Yes, Ryan. Now go, I have too much to do to keep answering these questions. Go!” I walked dejectedly outside, and I could tell the guys knew right away that we were banned from the house that day.

“Cool. Everyone search your pockets for change and we’ll walk over to Superette and get something from the machine. We can just split it.”

Josh’s mention of the small grocery store cheered us up. Sometimes if we went over to buy something the owner, and older man, who was freakishly tall like Kyle, would give us popsicles for free.

We began walking and Josh waited to walk beside me.

“So what did he say? I mean did he yell at you? Was he asleep or something?”

I knew Josh wasn’t asking to be nosey; he was just opening up the conversation so I could tell him if I wanted.

I concentrated for a minute on the scabs on the back of Garrett’s legs, listening to the sounds of our Chucks on the street, deciding if I wanted to talk.

“Nah, he wasn’t sleeping or sick or nothing. He was just there.

Home. Weird huh?”

My steps got quicker and I could feel Josh hesitate beside me and then speed up, making a joke about Garrett’s cast loud enough for him to hear and I knew he considered the conversation was over.

We got our Dr. Peppers and our free popsicles and sat on the curb, using the syrupy state of the melting popsicles to drown ants in puddles of bright green and orange.

Randy threw his popsicle stick across the street and stood up quickly, the look in his eyes telling us that something big was coming.

“Well, boys, I did it.”

We stared at him expectantly, not wanting to be the first to ask “What?” for fear of looking too eager.

Kyle spoke first. “Well, captain, out with the news.”

“I’ve got something hidden and I think you’ll like it. Today, we smoke.”

We didn’t smoke that day. On our way to the hiding place of the cigarettes we all got called in for dinner and that night Kyle’s parents went to the hospital. His mom had gone into labor with his little sister who then died during birth. It seemed so strange to us that she would be carrying that baby around for so many months to bring nothing home wrapped in a pink blanket. Nothing alive and crying to show for all the waiting and the big fuss.

The temperature in my house hadn’t gotten any cooler. My dad had been home every day and pretty soon it became obvious to my friends that he wasn’t working. Our house was no longer the safe haven for play that it had been. Without the air conditioner running it was hot and my dad was short tempered. In the mornings he slept and it was around noon before I would see him walk outside to get the paper in his Saturday clothes. There was no use anymore in him keeping track of the days, they all went the same way for him. I heard my parents talking at night, not fighting, but not the tender voices I was used to either. The house felt like it had been cut up into small pieces. We woke up in the mornings and there was no “Our God is an Awesome God” resounding from the walls. My sister had dance and my mom had work and I had

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willow trees and zip lines and my dad had his newspapers and his talk radio.

My mom worked later and later that summer, telling us that dinner was my dad’s job now because she needed more hours to keep us floating. As a kid that idea sounded so strange to me. Floating through our life. It seemed like my parents weren’t the kind of people to float, they were the kind to swim ferociously. They were they kind to build a boat and throw parties with their friends. But I began to see us floating.

A few days before the Fourth of July I decided to talk to my mom about our plans for the holiday. Usually we had a huge celebration in our backyard, but I knew my mom hadn’t been feeling festive.

“Hey, Mom. What’re we doin’ for the Fourth? I was hoping we could go over to Garrett’s house. They’re gonna have a cookout and all that, Mom.”

She pushed her glasses up into her hair and rubbed her eyes, giving them a break from reading the fine print on the back of the credit card statements.

“Ryan, I don’t know that we will feel like celebrating.”

I knew that she wasn’t going to feel like hosting a party, but it came as a surprise to me that she didn’t want to celebrate at all. Not only did she like parties, she was incredibly patriotic, so I knew that things were worse off in her life than I had imagined.

There were a few days that summer when I felt like my friends couldn’t understand. Like if I tried to talk about it I would get the face that appeared when grown-ups tried to talk to us about personal responsibility, self discipline or the need for dress shoes. On those days I escaped my house before the Josh showed up on my front lawn. It must have been three times that I went to Mr. Elleger’s house alone before he came out to talk to me.

I was sitting in his backyard, humming church songs under my breath and shredding the green leaves lying on the ground, their green life leaking out in bits of juice all over my hands. He walked through the back door and stood for a minute. I knew he was there, but I just waited. Adults always liked to talk first.

“Where’s your group of buddies?”

Mr. Elleger was a nice man. He and his wife were in their early sixties with grown kids and growing grandkids. They liked to have us in their backyard, they told our parents that when we faced skepticism about using their zip line. They attended Ridgecrest, too.

“Dunno. Didn’t feel like playin home-run derby this morning.”

“I see. Haven’t seen you and your folks at church the past few Sundays. Everything going alright, Ryan?”

“Yes, sir.”

He didn’t say anything, just stood there, asking me everything without asking me anything else, just like Josh did.

“I mean Dad lost that job and all. It’s not like he ain’t looking. He tells us that all day. He tells us that it wasn’t right, him getting fired so the boss’ nephew could work there. And it wasn’t you know? I just think if he would sing again, it would get better. He used to sing, in the mornings, in the shower, cleaning up after dinner. We all sang Jesus songs together. I just think if he sang again, maybe he would be okay. It would get better.”

I guess I knew Mr. Elleger wouldn’t know what to say. I guess I just needed to say it to someone, to tell someone what I wanted from this summer. I didn’t want to win the most races, stick the most spitballs in Sadie Starkey’s hair or even smoke my first cigarette as

27

much as I wanted my family to sing together again.

“You’re right son. I bet a few songs is all it would take.”

He hooked his left thumb into his belt loop and offered me his right hand. I grabbed it and stood up next to him. He stood for a moment, just looking at the yard as if he expected it to be different now than it was yesterday.

“You know I built this yard with its contraption for my grandkids. Only, they’ve only been out here once in the past five years.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you plan on in your life, son. You just have to build what you can and wait for something good to come of it.”

I shrugged, knowing that a kid didn’t have answers to an adult problem. I began to look around the yard, noticing for the first time all the details that a kid would enjoy. There was a plastic turtle shaped sandbox, a swing set, a tire swing. He had even nailed pieces of rubber on the edges of the wooden stairs leading to the front door so the kids wouldn’t get hurt if they fell. There were never any stickers in the green grass, which was a feat for a west Texas yard, and the trees gave the perfect amount of shade. Mr. Elleger had spent a lot of time on this yard. I wondered when his grandkids would have the chance to see it.

The walk back to my house didn’t seem long enough to give me time to clear my head. Before I knew it I was combating Garrett’s claims that he was ahead in our summer-long home run derby contest.

I left it all behind me when I was with the guys. It didn’t seem like it was important enough to talk about yet, and I knew they got the big picture. Dad wasn’t working.

Garrett had attempted to bring up the subject once during the entire summer.

“Do you remember when Esteban’s dad started staying home during the day? Wouldn’t it be shitty if all that stuff happened to you?”

I knew what he was getting at and had been thinking along the same lines recently, but Josh’s anger at the question surprised me.

“Don’t be a putz, Garrett. Do you wanna get another broken arm?”

Esteban had been one of our buddies two years ago, but his family had moved away when his dad lost his job. He wasn’t one of our core group members, but he had lizards for pets and his mom always gave us a package of Oreos to take back to our clubhouse.

When he moved it was the first time we ever grasped the concept of our group being broken apart. Parents could say one word and there would be no more Kyle, no more Garrett, no more willow trees. ***

A few days later we all met in front of the Superette to buy Cokes and some candy. We bought one for each guy in the group with whatever money we had talked out of our parents that morning. We walked down the street and stopped in front of Kyle’s house. We had been walking by every day, just in case, but he hadn’t been out yet. Today he sat on the porch steps, peeling the paint off of the metal pillars that held up the porch.

We didn’t say anything, Randy just whistled and Kyle stood up, clomping over to our pack.

“Alright,” Randy announced. “It’s our last week of summer.

I say we go smoke those cigs. In?”

We all laughed in approval and out of relief that there was not going to be a need for an icebreaker with Kyle.

Our journey down the street remains in my head today.

Randy was in front, his brown hair buzzed close to his head, the sweat beads visible through the tiny hairs. His orange “And One” shirt hung

limp on his skinny frame and he was yanking his jean shorts up by the belt loops. He, like the rest of us, wore the same pair of black Chucks every day. Garrett walked a little behind Randy. He had thick blonde hair that, once we got to middle school, he couldn’t keep his hands from running through. He was wearing his dad’s old camo hunting shirt and jean cargo shorts. Kyle was next. He wore athletic shorts almost every day, and shirts with strange school logos on them that were hand-me-downs from his cousins. Today’s shirt featured a Trojan on a horse. Josh and I were both wearing jean shorts with striped shirts. Our mothers shopped together so often that the last one of us to be picked up by the group sometimes had to go back in and change shirts so we didn’t look like sissies. Today my shirt was red and black and his was green and yellow.

We finally arrived at the Elleger’s house. Their house was perfect for our first smoke because it was away from any of our houses and the outside of the fence was surrounded by big bamboo type stalks that made for good cover. We all followed Randy as he made his way through the plants and then began counting boards on the fence. He stopped at the seventh board from the corner and stooped down. He had covered a small crayon box with some leaves. He picked it up and dusted it off. We all stood, not watching too closely as he opened it with a flourish to show us that he really did have the cigarettes.

“And I remembered to steal a lighter, too.”

“Way to go, genius.” My voice carried sarcasm, but I had a feeling that all the other guys felt a relief at Randy’s thinking ahead. I certainly hadn’t thought about stealing a lighter.

“Who’s gonna go first?” Kyle asked.

“I got ‘em, I’ll smoke ‘em.” Randy took the first cigarette out of the box and held it up to his lips.

“I’ve seen dad do this plenty. You just gotta hold the flame up to it and suck on the end to get it lit. Then it’s all sucking and puffing.”

We watched, this time not caring how intent our stares were.

Randy flicked the lighter and it flamed up, catching the end of the cigarette. He puffed once, blowing the smoke out and coughing a little.

We all laughed and Josh began to make a crack when we heard Mr. Elleger’s voice.

“Boys, what are you doing back there? You getting into some kind of trouble on my property?”

Our eyes widened and we all tossed our cigarettes down. Randy took one more drag off of the cigarette, assuring some bonafide bragging rights for later, then he threw his down too and ran.

We hightailed it outta there. We stopped only when we got to my house, collapsing in the driveway, half laughing and half panting.

We joked for a few minutes, ragging on each other about who got scared first and most. That’s when we saw the smoke. It was not much at first, just a thin black snake curling up into the sky. Within minutes it became a billowing black colunm and we decided we better go check it out.

The fire truck barely beat us there and we watched the men unravel the hoses and begin to blast the flames with strong pulses of water. The fire was out in a matter of minutes, but the damage was the kind that lasts. As the smoke and people cleared we saw the backyard.

The fire burned the fence first, then the bamboo-like stalks, then the trees that held up the zip line and all the bushes and other trees in the backyard.

The firefighters got to it before it reached the house.

It was shocking to see so much black in the daytime, such darkness in the sunlight. Everything was charred. The swing set was just melted plastic, the sandbox was gone, the soft green grass was burnt into nothing. All of Mr. Elleger’s hard work was gone.

We made our way back to our houses, each of us going to our

own home. It wasn’t something we talked about, I just think we all felt like something big had happened to us, like part of our friendship had been tainted. I walked up to my front door and it was closed. I opened it, confused, and walked inside to see my dad dressed in khakis and a dark blue polo.

“Dad? You have a job interview?”

“Even better. I have a job.” The smile on his face kicked my imagination into gear, wondering he had gotten the job at the hospital that he had wanted for so long. It was hard to imagine an accountant’s dream job back then, but I knew being the CFO of a hospital was his.

“Hold on.” He walked out of the room and came back, his arms spread wide as if he were wearing the trendiest suit on the market. My face must have fallen a bit when my eyes landed on the bright orange Ace Hardware vest. Dad came over to the couch and sat down.

“Bubba, I needed a job. Mr. Elleger is the manager at Ace’s and he knew I needed something, so he gave me this graveyard shift in the stockroom. I’m gonna find something better. Everything will be okay now. Everything will be normal again, soon.”

These words did the opposite of comfort me. I had just burned down the backyard of the man who was giving my father a job. Guilt pressed on my chest like a football team dog pile.

But then as he walked out the door to begin his first day at the hardware store I heard something that excited me more than the crack of a bat or the screaming of spitball covered girls. My dad was humming a familiar church hymn under his breath, one that spoke to me in more ways than one.

I turned around, feeling hopeful for the first time and wanting to share that quietly victorious moment with my mom. She was sitting at the kitchen table, eyes glazed over as she stared at the newspaper, completely unaware of the newfound atmosphere that I was sure was making its way back into our home.

That fall I went to Mr. Elleger’s house every day after school with my friends to help clean up their back yard and put up the new zip line. When I drive down that street now I still remember that summer for everything it was and for everything it wasn’t, for its heat and its silence, for its popsicles and cigarettes.

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Jam Sessions

by Mary Hardegree

The bass pumps through my veins the beat pounds out my feet the guitar slides up and down my spine of jello the piano notes stir my insides like I’m filled with bees the mic is feeding right into my brain

I feel a funk coming over me it’s taking control and I just can’t sit still, every ounce of my body moves in time with the music like this is the last day I’ll ever be able to move the itch starts at the tip of my fingers and the ends of my toes then it slowly grooves to bob -bin’ my head up and down, back and forth

the music comes alive in me and no thought can permeate the impervious powers of the jams all I feel is the happiness created by the sound waves

Swans

by Tanner Hadfield

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Some day I hope to Transfer you Spectacularly to paper.

It would be easier If you were a swan, Whose each and every Feather I would pluck.

And each and every Quill would produce A perfect, concise, word.

And when all of Your feathers were finished, I would have a beautiful, Visual rendering of words On crisp cardstock.

As for your plucked feathers, I would stuff them into A pillowcase And recline in its Watertight words, Smug with my Masterpiece and Laughing at your New, stark, ugly Skin.

If walls could speak by Kendell Wilson

30 4

First Night “See Mumbai the beautiful, with this map being helpful!”

- from a tourist map

The Hotel Grant is crumbling on your first night in Mumbai.

The taxi wallah kept your change, but you don’t know that yet.

It will be weeks before you understand the exchange rate, the way things work here where the chai does not come iced or sweet, and the rickshaws crowd even your sleep.

On your first night in Mumbai, you weep in the shower, beat your fists against the geyser, and repeat: “It’s not bad, just different.

Not bad, just different.”

Not bad like the curry that scorches your tongue, or the deadly stench of fish and beggars, or the Delhi Belly that ravages your body.

Not bad like the mattresses, as flat as the nasal voices of Bollywood actresses, or the assaulting scent of Ganapati flowers, and the popping skulls on funeral pyres on your first night in Mumbai.

You don’t know this yet, but on your last night in Mumbai, you will cry as you miss fairytale elephants in the street, naan dripping with ghee, the barefoot children who greeted you with happy Namastes, brilliant saris and sparkling bhindis, tablas and finger cymbals, all of it dancing with you on the trains on your first night in Mumbai.

by Danielle Besch

31

Voice Lessons

by Melanie Rebecca Schaffer

Entering Dr. Pruett’s studio I kick the frog with a Grinch-wrinkled grin away from its Atlas like hold on the door, whose shutting click is my lesson’s downbeat

You are a skeleton suspended from the ceiling, Julie instructs You are a choking octopus You have a triangle in your mouth Which way is the pointy end?

No, It’s farther up It’s farther back It’s skinny It’s small Smile!

You’re having fun on the F, aren’t you?

Have more fun!

Breathe like a snore Every sound is square Why does this surprisingly make sense?

It’s like talking It’s in the front It’s in the middle It’s coming from the back of your neck I need more pelvis!

Feel it between your thighs!

But I don’t know how!

Feel the notes play on the keyboard in the roof of your mouth Don’t have a taco tongue Let it be fuzzy Stop listening to yourself!

The hour flies with the sound in the room and suddenly I’m reinstating the frog as sentinel to the insanity of learning to sing 32

Suspicious by David McMichael

33

Laundry Day

by Danielle Besch

I stretch nightgowns across the line, one pin on each shoulder, to be hung out to dry in the heat of midday, and buried at the bottom of the basket, I find that I miss my mother, and wonder if she ever pictured me as a young woman, with my feet bare, pulling clothes taut along a length of rope in the backyard, in the same spot where I used to flit between her legs as she performed the daily chore, my arms becoming wings painted with shades of fuchsia and violet, lifting me from flower to flower as I swirled a gilded trail of pollen in my wake. I could never land, and even now I flutter inside the folds of nightgowns that billow in the breeze because they smell just like her.

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Inspired by Ashley Bredin

35

St. Peters Light by Kelseay Evans

36 4

Matthew 27:46

by Danielle Besch

She makes sacrifices at the kitchen sink, scrubbing away last night’s leftovers that we carelessly left caked to dinner plates.

She wipes our transgressions clean from pure white china, and lets them run down the drain with nothing to say. No reprimand issued, though we promised just the day before to always rinse away the remains, the mealy crumbs of communion and the congealed grease of our gluttony. She would be justified to lash out in anger at us, to point her finger in blame. Instead, she just scrubs and seeing her there, with varicose veins on the calves of her legs, and her shoulders thrust

37

back against the inevitable weariness, I decide that tomorrow, I will wash the dishes for once.

The flame clicks on and licks the end of a cigar I hold between my teeth.

I take short puffs bringing small clouds through the cigar into my mouth and out the creases between the corners of upturned lips.

The flame lowers until only the embers light the back porch where I sit alone brooding over the day.

I inhale deeply letting the heat burn away the harshness my emotions have created.

Smoke

by Mary Hardegree

Slowly I let it out of my body ridding myself of the smoke along with the ashes of my dead sentiments.

As I watch the smoke rising, curling, whisping, and turning on itself in the darkness, the hate and sadness float away.

38

Twinkle and a Gleam Blues

by Tanner Hadfield

PULL me near! PUSH the rest to disappear! in each of your knuckles i am the tiny heartbeat tying skinny hands in knots. tie them into makeshift hammocks! lift your godfingers to rearrange the sky craft for yourself constellations!

TRUMPETS! TRUMPETS! Now the FRENCH HORN! and lo! medium dippers. mine will always mysteriously end up resembling the freckles sprinkled, crumbs in white milk, perfectly across the back of your left shoulder. as of late, i have been thinking only on moonlight, and how the worst part of finally is the finality. and i know how a few simple chords hang heavy on your breast, some big, wet albatross. but i mean what i mean, when i tell you everything is more beautiful there as on an old three-legged piano. punchless, but somehow poignant it sings: hold on for good luck. hold on for good, love. ah, and parkbenches are bringing me down: hearts and initials, plus signs and equals, make grains and grooves, nuts and bolts, locking and logging, i leave my teeth as a poem.

39

i repeat my words as we often do, to make some meaning, but repeated words, as they will do, paint themselves funny, and before they dry i’ll be roaming, crying, “erring is not eroding!”

Our bodies are marvels, SEE! We are ANTI-GRAVITY!

Or at least not pro-gravity!

But we are almost there!

I swear it!

We’ll never get caught.

I swear it.

Excessive Celebration!

Figure out that you want!

Yes, you! Even you! they will write songs about us, sprawling songs with no chorus, specklesplash sensations suiting only the sweetest of mouths. and today will be poetry; tomorrow: prose. and we are spinning, splintered and splintering, splintered and splintering

Violet Beauregarde Blues

by Tanner Hadfield

We Don’t Talk About It

by Erin Bracken

I was ten when I knew that my sister was going to die.

Mom told me she wasn’t dying, she was just sick.

She laid down on the green couch the one I wasn’t allowed to sit on and she didn’t move for weeks but I watched her from the tan couches I prayed for her at Sunday School and I wished I knew what I was praying for.

I had created all sorts of dramatic diseases in my mind a brain tumor the size of a yellow onion or cancer but I wasn’t sure if 18 year olds got cancer since the only person I knew with cancer was someone’s mom Finally, dad took me out to dinner and over a plate of barbeque told me things I didn’t want to hear.

Things about bad choices and nine months.

I crept into my sister’s room where she lay huddled in bed and crawled in next to her I tip-toed my fingers up to her belly and tried to feel for faint kicks She reached for my hand and I told her that I’d be the best aunt the world had ever seen.

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Words of destruction

by Daniel Barecky

Why must you run when horror is at the end?

Lo, darkness and pain are my only friends.

Why do your “true” words seem so cold and dull?

Please, there is no need to console.

You wear a mask and your intentions are corrupted; Please don’t degrade her as you are falsely uplifted.

No more, no more will I and she listen to your Words that make us cringe.

Lo, darkness and pain are our only friends . . . again and again.

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And so I urge you brothers text without ceasing by David McMichael

42

Lifestyles of the middle class and the jaded by David McMichael

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[1] Your eyes are like coffee strained through an emerald The moon was as big and blinding as the headlight of a car about to crush you A grasshopper is a turbo-prop plane in the African bush The sunset is like a Rothko everyone appreciates Her smile is a carton of eggs The blackbird’s song is like a lifelong smoker’s grating cords Cheesecake is a snowman at Christmas His words are like a mother’s hug and a father’s proud eyes [2] If A=B and C is like D What does this mean?

[3] Your eyes must drip out of your head You sit down every morning with the paper and eyeballs Hide every night from the moon!

Cars are made out of cheese You should be afraid of huge machinery jumping through your door crack Poor Africans who can’t fit in their planes!

You should collect sunsets You spend every evening in a museum Don’t kiss her, you’ll scramble her!

Don’t break those eggs or they’ll frown!

The bird outside your window just lit up a Marlboro Uncle Earl sounds like he swallowed a bird Don’t you wish cheesecake didn’t come dressed with a scarf and pipe?

Come inside, you’re sticky from playing in the snow Your words are staring at me!

Careful, you might be buried in letters when you see your parents at Thanksgiving [4] If A = B and C is like D then A-B-C = B-A-D and poets must be crazy to express all the somethings as some other somethings rendering them nothings in the end

Words have no inherent meaning

by Melanie Rebecca Schaffer

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The

Sword

by Danielle Besch

I suppose every young person goes through a time of silence, a time in his or her life when communication between child and parent is virtually impossible, and never pleasant. For most of my adolescence, my silence was directed towards my dad.

I have tried to figure out how it happened, to sift through my shoebox of memories and pick out the one with the caption, “And here, the silence began.” I have imagined that the still-frame would depict a dramatic scene of dissension between my dad and I, but the best I can do is trace it back to the first night I said, “Shit.”

In true loyalty to the immature child who still lives in some corner of my body (probably behind my spleen), I have tried to figure out who taught me the word, and thus, blame all of the subsequent difficulties on the perpetrator. I have taken myself back to the second grade, placed myself at the desk I shared with Aaron Kiehler during math, and strained to hear him utter it. To my frustration, it appears that Aaron’s second-grade mouth was not as bold as his high-school mouth. So I sit patiently in front of the television at age five and sneak peeks at such violent, and therefore banned, programs as The Power Rangers.

Still, no luck - shocker! The psychological community (the “community” being my roommate, Erica, who happens to be a fourth-year psych student) says that our minds can invent memories so vivid and realistic that we are convinced of their veracity; I find even this phenomenon failing me. I cannot remember the first time I heard someone utter the word.

I can recall the first time I uttered it. To be truthful, “uttered” is too light a word to describe the way I entered the forbidden new world of swearing. I was born into this world with celebratory displays of fireworks on a humid Fourth of July.

I was about eight years old, obviously naive and very cute, with my red curls bouncing around my face and my big brown eyes, innocent as a cow’s. Certainly not the kind of girl who swore. We were gathered at my Granny’s house in Alleyton, Texas to celebrate the Fourth with my dad’s side of the family. The event was, as were most with my family, marked by barbecue, Budweiser, and my only boy cousin experimenting with firearms and birds in the backyard. When night finally came, I stood at the gate watching my older 45

cousins shoot Roman candles at each other with my lame sparkler in hand, dejectedly spewing red-hot ashes around my feet. It was around this time that some neighbor decided it would be a super idea to show his appreciation for American independence by shooting a gun. Well, at least my memory remembers that it was a gun. I’m pretty positive we found shotgun shells littering the street the following morning (at least now the previously mentioned phenomenon is proving itself useful). Anyhow, when the shot rang out and lodged itself in the corner stop sign just behind the house, I screeched, “SHHIIIIIITT!”

My cousins, assorted aunts and uncles, and mom stared at me in astonishment. At the time, I did not understand the weight of the word. I did not know that years of the use of French in England had banished “common” words into the land of immoral language. All I knew was that people said it when they were surprised. My family told me I was lucky that my dad was inside and had not heard me swear so passionately. But suddenly, my mom was yanking me into the bathroom by my elbow, and my mouth was being stuffed with a bar of Dial.

I cried as she told me never to say that word again, and especially not to let my dad hear me say it.

She may have washed my mouth out with soap, but daddy would surely give me a good spanking. * * *

Over time, I learned not to let my dad hear me say a lot of things; my silence was not limited to the use of dirty words, which, I can assure you, I continued to use like my new favorite toy. As a third grader, I delighted in swearing in front of my best friends, mixing these shiny, new words in with the sand I threw around on the playground. I felt daring, and somehow, disillusioned with the secrets adults kept from us.

Yet, as I grew out of that phase, the list of things I could not say to my dad grew longer. Through most of elementary school, the list mostly consisted of the names of boys I liked (Nick, Adam, Aaron Kiehler), the mean things I may have done to my classmates (or had done to me), and, in the case that we were in the car, the fact that I had to pee (he always

tried to hit potholes if I divulged this information).

By the time I reached high school, the list included more serious topics. As freshmen, my girlfriends and I were pleased to find ourselves in the company of an older, more mature group of junior guys. In the recounting of this story, I am tempted to classify them as boys, for that is what they were. Yet, my friends and I felt the time had come for us to stop hanging around with “boys.” Being that “men” were our dads, we decided to call them “guys.” They were in Pre-Calculus, they could drive, and they could grow goatees. Well, some of them could. Almost.

It became our Friday night ritual to plan a big group outing. We would spend hours on the phone, deciding which movie we would see, which restaurant we would eat at, which guys would drive, which girls would ride with whom. Whitney had to ride with Todd, because they were like, talking. The other Danielle wanted to ride with Josh because she was totally into him, and I couldn’t ride with Brent because he liked me, but I didn’t like him. And so it went.

When we were returning from one of these such events, I ended up alone in the truck with the guy I had a crush on at the time. Oh, how lady luck was toying with me. I was excited to be alone with him, but as we drew nearer to my house, I started to freak out.

We did not live in a particularly affluent part of town, which was not the problem, because neither did he.

Our house, however, was in poor physical condition.

The faded paint was peeling in most places, and, thanks to the outrageous Gulf Coast humidity, one side had grown to be covered with obnoxiously green mildew.

For years, my dad had been promising my mom that re-painting it was next on the list of things to do, but a demanding job that never seemed to pay quite enough and a nearly debilitating thyroid problem kept this promise unfulfilled. I could tell that she held it against him, which I pretended to find unfair, but in truth, I did as well. I felt that my friends looked at my house, and therefore me, with an unpleasant taste in their mouths. It was the same taste we all got when, if we were honest with ourselves, we drove through the “bad” part of town, one mixed with pity, disdain, and disrespect.

As the truck got closer to my house, my mind was racing to find a solution to the insurmountable problem. I considered the old “just drop me off here” trick, the one where you get the guy to drop you off a few houses before, wait till he drives off, then walk.

If one approached it from the north side of town, like he was, my house was situated at the first corner of the first block. I would have him bypass it. However, I must have forgotten that he had been by my house before, probably with a more trusted, less-cute friend of ours, and vaguely knew where I lived.

“This is it, right?” He had stopped right in front of it, too soon. I panicked.

“Oh, umm... yeah.” I groped helplessly for the door handle and yanked it open. “Okay, bye,” I mumbled as I hung my head in shame and ran inside.

He knew where I lived. He knew this ramshackle house was mine. And I knew he would never ask me out. The next day, I could not look my dad in the eye. All I felt towards him was bitterness and shame, and the silence grew.

As a matter of fact, it continued through the rest of high school, all the way up to my freshman year at college. As the move to college approached, I could tell that something was wrong between my parents. In fact, I had sensed it for a few years. I forgot to mention it before, but not only was I a cute child (I feel that most of my high school portraits will prove that I had grown out of that phase as well by this time), I was also intuitive. But, as was the custom in our family, we never talked about it. My mom and dad had been taking turns snoring on the living room couch for some time, and we never did anything as a family any more. At one point, I even tried to take this into my own hands. I foolishly attempted to institute one of those “family game nights” you sometimes see annoyingly happy Milton-Bradley families participate in during commercial breaks from CSI. Never mind that I was well past the age when playing games with your parents on a Friday night is acceptable. It did not go over well.

Anyhow, when it came time for me to move into my first dorm room, they united to make this 46

transition smooth. After a last breakfast together the Sunday before student orientation was to begin, they dropped me off at my dorm, placed a wad of money in my hand, and hugged me goodbye. I watched them get into the same car, and thought that maybe now, with me out of the house, their marriage might improve.

With their only child gone and an empty nest, they may have to find solace in each other, fall back in love with each other, and all those other things that happen in romantic comedies about middle-aged men and women.

Every time I called home, though, it seemed that my parents never talked. I would recount a funny anecdote about my exciting college life to my mom one day, only to find that, when I spoke to my dad the next day, he had no idea what was going on with me. My parents still were not communicating. This realization really hit me when, as hurricane Katrina was approaching the Gulf Coast, I called home to find out what my parents were planning to do. Families all over the coast were boarding up windows, packing their cars, and hitting the poorly designed evacuation routes.

I was hoping my parents would follow suit, because even though the hurricane was not expected to hit my hometown nearly as hard as it was expected to hit the areas north of us, I was still nervous about it. My dad answered the phone, and told me that he was going to stay home.

“Well, what about mom? Isn’t she worried?”

“Oh, I think you’re mother is going to Houston to stay with her mom.”

I was shocked to discover that my parents would not be staying together for this predicted disaster. What if my mom and grandmother were in danger in Houston? Why would my dad stay at home and allow that possibility?

As worried as I was, I still could not bring myself to break the silence and ask such awkward questions. The hurricane, as we now know, was a disaster, but it did not hit my home or Houston with 47

any serious damage, and I dismissed the situation from mind.

A few weeks later, though, I went home for my first visit since starting school, and as families in New Orleans were laying their dead loved ones and their dead homes to rest, my own personal hurricane hit.

On the Sunday morning that I was to return to school, my mom climbed into my bed with me and told me that she and my dad were separating. She ran her fingers lightly over the inside of my forearm, a gentle tickling that had always soothed me, and I noticed just how much my fingers looked like hers. We had the same stubby thumbs and square cuticles. I laid there, unmoving, as she stuttered through her sobbing while I played with the frayed edges of my bed sheets. They were soft, and they were perfect. They were not made of Egyptian cotton, and they were not 500-threadcount, but they were worn threadbare from years of use, and they smelled like home. Each home has that scent which is unique to each particular household.

Ours was something like a mix of dryer sheets, cold porcelain, and lemon-scented PineSol. Or maybe that’s just what my mom smelled like.

After the news had been delivered, my dad came home and realized what had transpired. He was upset; he thought they had agreed to tell me about this at a later date. I pretended like I was okay. Actually, I probably was, but not because the news had failed to upset me. I was already entering a state of denial. I packed my bag, ate a quick meal of chicken my dad had grilled. It was his special recipe, a robust marinade of butter and spices, and it was my favorite. That much I remember. I cannot remember what kind of side dishes there were. Probably mashed potatoes. I was always a meat-and-potatoes kind of girl.

My parents sat at the dinner table watching me closely in case (I suppose) I flew into a violent rage. I was calm, though, as I told them that I did not want to talk about the details of the situation. All I said to them was that I wanted them to work it out peacefully, without putting me in the middle. Then I robotically hugged them goodbye, climbed into my car, and drove

up to Houston to pick up one my friends from school, who had also gone home to visit that weekend. I do not remember much of that drive, either. I am sure I listened to upbeat music, probably some terribly peppy crap about the goodness of God, in efforts to cheer myself up and ignore the drastic turn my life had just taken. I guess I forgot to say so earlier, but I had been raised in the church for most of my life, raised to believe in things like the goodness and holiness of God, which I really did believe at the time. In fact, I still do. It just looks different now.

I do remember one thing about the drive very clearly. I was entering the north side of Houston, a part of the city tangled in tollways with which I was unfamiliar, and in my ignorance, pulled into the “exact change only” lane. In fairness to myself, I did have exact change--just not in change. When my turn came to toss my coins into the basket, I searched in vain for a slot to feed my dollar bill into, and realized that the coin basket was the only available option. I promptly broke my (almost always) ban on swearing.

“SHIT! Shit, shit, fucking shit!”

I was mad at the Houston toll system, I was mad at my parents, I was mad at God, but I was especially mad at the growing line of cars behind me who kept honking incessantly, as if that was going to help me figure out how to get out of this predicament.

I sat in the car for what felt like ten minutes (but was probably more like thirty seconds) stared at the open road in front of me, and the gate blocking my way.

I considered crashing through it, nearly convinced myself that my car could handle the impact and that my dad would not mind paying for the damages, especially considering the events that had taken place earlier that morning. After a few moments, I came to my senses and realized that that was a bad plan. Cops would probably chase me. But I could out run them, right? No. I still knew it was a bad idea, so I climbed across the console, frantically fumbled with the passenger door (there was not enough room between the driver door and the toll booth to climb out... I had

already tried), and ran to the car immediately behind me. I knocked on the back window where the young couple who sat in the front seat had safely tucked away their young son. He looked up at me, his eyes wide with fright, and shook his head in confusion. His mom rolled down her window. I offered a my handful of dollar bills, which that bitch toll booth refused to accept, and tried to explain my situation. I think I even told her about the bombshell my parents had just dropped in efforts to make her understand how truly dire my need was. She shoved the change into my hands and rolled her window up. I must have looked like a madwoman. I ran back to my car, threw the change into the basket, and the blessed gate rose and allowed me to pass. I laid rubber peeling out of there.

When I got back to school, I called my parents to let them know I had made it back safely. I did not talk to them about the separation, or the coming divorce, and I wouldn’t for a long time. When I finally did, it was with my father on the way home from a visit to my Granny’s. He sat in the passenger seat next to me as I drove us home. The silence had been heavy, and when he opened his mouth, and he made that sticky sound mouths make after they have been shut for too long, I knew it was coming. I breathed in deeply, and the scent of the earth my dad worked in rose off of his work clothes and into my nose. I had never noticed it so intensely before. It was so strong I could taste it on my tongue, like mudpies in my grandma’s backyard, or carrots so fresh you can still taste the dirt they grew in.

He told me that he had tried to save their marriage. He had done everything he knew how to do.

He had not wanted a divorce. And he told me he was sorry. I had already known that.

I did not say much, but not because I was angry. I just did not know what to say. I still don’t.

But I do know I can tell him far more than I ever could when I was growing up, and now, when I drop something fragile, or stub my toe, I can say, “Shit!” without eating a bar of soap.

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Happiness is spelled with a (piercing in the) I. by David McMichael

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Espera by David McMichael

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Self Portrait -Regressions by Zach Linge

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Cocaine by Zach Linge

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America by Joshua Alkire

Dog Story

by Lydia Melby

Beginning #1: I’ve heard that some people measure their life with the different eras that lovers bring. My old roommate did. My mother divides her life into ‘pre-children’ and ‘post-children’ halves, and then sub-divides the second half into five different slices of pregnancy, diapers, and potty-training, with each child layering onto the succeeding one, until the grad-slam-bang finale of the twins, two girls following the only boy, God’s way of saying “One male child is enough for you. Cease and desist, Fisherman’s wife.”

A man I dated for a while in high-school would refer to different periods in his past as “the firebird days,” or “back when I was driving the truck.” He was twenty-nine, and a reckless driver, so he had had quite a few cars. I, however, measure my short life in pets. (I hate this beginning, now that I’m done. And I don’t really do this. I don’t measure my life with anything, which is why I can never remember how old I was when something happened.)

Beginning #2: Does every person remember their first love? Does every animal lover remember the one that forever changed them?

(Dammit. I hate this now too) Beginning #3: First memories, actual, real auditory and visual memories, say so much about a person. What occurrence meant so much to their 1, 2 or 3 year old mind that it decided “This one I should keep.”? My first memory is of me holding a small, smelly puppy in the back of our cornflower blue Volvo station wagon (the one that would convince my parents to only ever buy Volvo station wagons, which is why I never had any friends at my rich private high school). My mom must be driving, which would explain why I’m holding the puppy, since it means that my arms have slipped the bounds of my car-seat straps, and that is something only my dad would allow me to do. Perhaps my young, barely speaking consciousness held onto this memory because the moment I held that puppy, my fate-path re-centered and lengthened, and I was

marked to live. However, I had no idea of any of this cosmic readjustment at the time, I just knew that I was hungry, and in asking for my then-favorite snack, my parents thought I named the new puppy. Thus, though she would have carried a name like “Artemis” or “Freya” or even “Minotaur” well, she masqueraded under the misleading name of “Muffin” for her 13 years.

Shit. I’m sorry, I really don’t know what’s wrong with me today. Everything I write is meant to come out down-to-earth yet subtly profound, but it all just ends up being grandiose over-thetop dreck. See what I mean? I chose to use the word ‘dreck’ when ‘shit’ would have been so much more efficient and expressive.

And all because I had just used it a few sentences up.

So really, the question is, how does one write about her first dog without being cheesy, sentimental or boring the hell out of their readers?, I want to write something that isn’t just for those select few ‘dog people,’ because this isn’t a ‘dog story.’ This isn’t “Marley & Me,” or “Lady and the Tramp,” and I’m not trying to anthropomorphize her or anything. I understand that she was only an animal. But she was also my first and greatest friend (not that, as a homeschooled child, I had a lot to compare her to).

I don’t know what possessed my parents to buy two medium-sized slightly destructive dogs, when Reta was pregnant with a third child and the first two were still dependent on her, but something caught ahold of them and they took my older sister and I out and we bought two dogs. Two Labrador retrievers, though one was a purebred, and one was part Lab, part something that got into the backyard one night, as the breeder put it. My dad later tried to explain to me the mind-boggling concept that the two puppies, who supposedly were from the same litter, had the same mother but different fathers. Remember, I was only three, so while I didn’t understand, I took his word as law. Now that I’m older, I partially doubt this, but it’s funny because one the twins, my youngest two sisters, looks just like me and the rest of my family, and the other one looks vaguely like my mother, and mostly like someone I’ve never met. I wonder now if my dad thinks of Muffin and Ged and the something that got into the

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backyard one night when he looks at Sarah and Abby?

I suspect it was my dad, who after all loves animals almost as much as I do, that got this ridiculous idea. He was more spontaneous, more forceful then. He had seen a few setbacks, but he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps in the true American fashion, and was well on his way to conquering the world.

My mom still claims that we never meant to get two dogs, but that she and Peter were in the midst of negotiating for the perfect black Lab puppy when I slipped away and came back with something that very obviously wasn’t the nice pure-bred they had in mind. My dad was delighted with my runty, undersized mongrel puppy (who was cute too, despite her sketchy parentage and lack of puppy fat), and he said he’d pay half-price for her as well. He still claims that he planned all along to get two dogs, so they wouldn’t ever be lonely, and that he just hadn’t picked the second one out yet. I like this part of the story, because if they hadn’t actually bought the second dog, the runt, the mutt, the one I chose, I probably wouldn’t be writing this story. ** We took them home. As I mentioned before, taking them home is the first memory I have. I asked for a muffin, but I guess I mumbled and it came out “Can I name her Muffin?” They said yes, and we were all pleased in our own ways, until we got home and they realized their mistake and I didn’t get a muffin and Muffin didn’t get a new name, because apparently, one car ride home is a long enough period of time to get used to a name, so her awful cliché name became irreversible.

(I guess at this point that I should explain how Ged got his name too- in reality, it was short for Gedigree, which was my older sister’s bastardized way of saying Pedigree, like the dog food commercials, and I don’t know why I grew up spelling Ged’s name with a ‘G’ in my head, and it was only when I saw Peter write Ged’s name with a ‘J’ on a vet form that I knew to correct his mistake. But there it is. I should be nicer about Ged- he was, perhaps the world’s second greatest dog, and I loved him almost as much, and in fact I spent about a year pretending to love him more after I saw Muffin rip the head off a neighbor’s cat when I was 9).

This is where my memory leaves again. I do remember lying in the grass in the backyard of the Snowhouse (named so on account of the fake snow that covered the roof even during a San Antonio July- I don’t know who thought that would be a good idea, but we loved it when we were little) and watching Peter romp through the yard with two eight-inch high puppies nipping at his ankles as Reta yelled from the house that they would scuff his good leather shoes and that if he didn’t leave now he would be late for work, but honestly, that’s the last memory of the puppies I have because about a month or two later, we somehow lost the house and sent the dogs away to friends with Land while we remained in homeless purgatory- not quite on the streets, but not quite safe from their grasp.

By the time we found a new house and went to the ranch to get them back, they didn’t look like any dogs I had ever seen, and I remember asking my dad if we could take home a beautiful black and silver husky since I thought we were picking out new dogs anyways. My dad looked hurt that and explained to me that these dogs were Muffin and Ged, just grown up doggies now, and then he let me sit in the trunk of the station wagon with Muffin and Ged making the windows comfortably foggy all the way home. I put my arm around Muffin’s neck and tipped my forehead against the window to watch the tops of the pine trees cut dark swaths in the pale blue sky.

I grew up in the backyard, running across the yard from one pool of tree shadow to the next, with my second-in-command loping along with me. It was years before I began to hate the slippery,

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thick feeling of dirt and grease that coated my hands after playing with her. Muffin was smaller than Ged, but she had more of a personality. One of my favorite past-times for a while was making up different cocktail-mixes of every kind of breed of dog I had seen or could imagine to impress Reta’s friends. And from the beginning, everyone knew she was my dog. She grew into something that was part Lab, part Chow, part German Shepherd and part tank. She was a horror to walk, and killed every kind of snake, possum, squirrel and escaped pet rabbit that came within reach. Of course the animal lover in me revolted every time I found the broken body of a little mouse or baby squirrel, and once, my mom thought she heard a baby crying in the backyard, so we all ran outside. As soon as the back door was open, the crying sound exploded in my ears to a banshee wail, the kind you would imagine a newborn would make if dropped or hit, or in the case of our worst fears, bitten by a dog. I beat my sisters and mother out the door and around the side of the house, and was greeted with the sight of my two dogs crouching over the oddlybent body of a small brown and white cat. Ged looked up at me as I skidded to a stop, his black muzzle was sticky and wet. Muffin didn’t look up, only pinned the cat’s body down with her paw and took the cat’s head in her jaws (inherited from her German ancestors) and wrenched. The head came free with more blood than you can imagine and I screamed. She ducked, and took the head and ran behind the shed in the back of the yard and I didn’t follow. Our next-door neighbor, a sweet older retired man named Mr. Bless, came over and buried the cat’s body. We never found the cat’s head, but since it was taken by the dog who chewed through rocks and ate wooden croquet balls, we didn’t really expect to find it either. ** There was a family across the street, the Arrandas, who were a nice, sprawling mixed up family whose different branches were forever in and out of the house and we were never sure how many lived there or how many cars would be parked in the driveway that night. This was not a rich neighborhood and the houses weren’t huge, which made the circus even more entertaining. The best part though, was how different they were from their prim and neat neighbors, the Phillips, and how much those differences mattered to them. This Hatfield-McCoy dynamic has gone on for as long as I can remember, but the best part was when the Arranda matriarch decided that she wanted to keep chickens, city-ordinance laws be damned. These chickens weren’t well kept and I don’t think they were ever contained and they fed the possums and raccoons for years, but they were well loved.

The saga began with passive-aggressive requests for the chickens to be better fenced-in and less noisy. Then the words ‘snooty’ and ‘annoying’ and ‘trash’ started getting tossed around. Then the chickens started getting shooed into the Phillips front yard, where they might be sprayed with a garden hose, which led to Mrs. Arranda feeding the chickens in Mrs. Phillips’ prized flower beds, and this led to Mrs. Phillips taking pictures and reporting them to our city management. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my mom laugh quite as hard as she did the day we all stood at our front window and watched Mrs. Arranda throw chicken feed on the low part of the Phillips’ garage roof, for her chickens to then follow and desecrate the roof with their chicken poop. Mr. Phillips got home from work early and when he saw the flock of chickens on his roof, he ran inside and raced back out holding the family cat, which he then threw onto the roof. The cat chased the chickens, the chickens fell and flew off the roof and Mr. Phillips and Mrs. Arranda had a contest to see who could yell loudest.

The Great Chicken Wars were all very funny until the dogs got out one day. Reta saw them milling around in the front yard, and she walked outside to make them come back. Then they saw

the chickens that were scratching for bugs in our flowerbeds, and it was all over. The chickens fled and my dogs chased the chickens and my mom chased the dogs. They were all fast but the chickens got away into their henhouse and the dogs got away into the woods and my mom didn’t give chase, since the chickens had escaped intact. Or so she thought until the dogs came back hours later and Muffin dropped the body of Mrs. Arrandas’ prized Banty rooster, Poltergeist, at her feet. Poor Muffin. She was expecting praise for a retrieval well-performed, but Reta screamed dramatically and started hitting her. The dogs ran into the backyard, and Reta ran into the house to call the vet (again, this was her prized rooster) and brought the cordless phone out to poke at the chicken corpse while vet walked her through it.

By the time she got back to the front porch she saw Poltergeist limping his way back to his own yard. Luckily, Muffin’s German and Chinese heritage weren’t always the dominant instincts, and she had only ‘retrieved’ the chicken and had not harmed it much. Poltergeist lived for years later, but became a bit of a homebody, and Muffin gave us all one less chicken to worry about. Incidentally, she never chased chickens again, just watched disdainfully whenever Ged did. ** Sometimes I would construct a ‘steeplechase course’ out of cinderblocks and the unexplained pile of railroad ties that lay just inside our fence. I made them just high enough for me to get over, which meant that Muffin had no problem. She would go over the jumps just to follow me, and because I think she liked jumping over random crap as much as I did (like the time I went out of my way to leap over the reclining legs of a homeless man when I was six. Reta was horrified and apologized profusely, but the man just winked at me and we shared a secret smile).

Once we tried to goad Ged into going through the course too, and my older sister waved a handful of dog food under his nose for incentive. He caught on fast enough and ran through the course all right- plowing through fence after fence in his unstoppable quest for food, while I yelled at my idiot sister to stop. She didn’t, and he didn’t, and those fences took the rest of the afternoon to reconstruct.

Muffin couldn’t be let out when there were other children around. Our across-the-street neighbor, Lorraina, used to come over to play, until once, only a few weeks after she saved my life, Muffin inexplicably turned on her and knocked her down, snarling, and bit her face. Maybe I’ve painted on the blood I remember, but I think there was at least a little. Muffin had great teeth. In retrospect, I don’t know how Reta kept the Phillips from suing us. Maybe they were too kind, too forgiving. Mr. Phillips is a Catholic priest. Muffin wasn’t allowed out of the pen to play with our friends for months after that. I never doubted her though (because secretly, Muffin hated all the same people I did), and only two days after the attack, Mrs. Phillips made Lorraina return a baby doll and some clothes she had stolen from our house. My dog and I were justified, though I learned to watch her lips while we were playing with other kids, because I had figured out that her mouth would tremble right before a sneak attack.

She was still too aggressive, too Shepherd-looking to for my mom’s friends to tolerate her presence around their little angels.

Ged was purebred and goofy enough to lie on the ground and allow (even enjoy) the sitting upon and tugging of the ears. I don’t think Muffin would have minded, but she never got a chance to prove herself. I would stay in the pen with the fearsome dog and we would sit perched on top of the doghouse that Peter had built with a slightly sloping top, and we would watch the purebreds and the angels play. ** I guess the most important story, the one you’re actually

waiting for and the one I keep meaning to get around to, is the story of how she saved my life. None of that destiny or fate shit, she just was the right dog at the right time when no one else was there. I was five and a precocious, sunny child with cute little brown ringlets and a tiny white china face filled with blue eyes and lots of freckles. Also, I had never quite grasped the concept of the word ‘stranger.’ I talked to everyone, and usually had related my life story to the checkout girl by the time my mom was done paying for her family of five’s groceries.

This day, I was five and adorable and stupid, playing in the back yard with my mutt best-friend, who was pretty cute as well, with her hound-dog brown eyes and chow’s mane and funny perked up ears. My older and younger sisters were there too, six and three respectively, and we were playing Robin Hood or The Land Before Time while my mom was inside taking a shower.

Our fence, I should note, was a six foot chain link fence, the kind that encouraged friendly neighbors and was open to the viewer’s pleasure. You could see straight into the backyard from the road. I imagine we were just too great of an opportunity to pass up, three pretty girls, in the sunshine with our pretty hair and our pretty dogs on our pretty grass. He couldn’t resist.

The man parked his car, a gold sedan of some sort (my mom tells me that it was a nice car, probably a Lincoln), and, seeing no car in our front drive, probably assumed that Reta had left us while she ran to the corner store. This was, after all, a quiet little neighborhood. I imagine he smiled grimly. He walked around the side of the house, the side farthest from the front door that was sheltered by young trees and bushes, and he stood at the back gate and watched us for a moment, such beautiful, perfect little children with their wispy brown hair and white fairy limbs, and then he carefully lifted the horseshoe latch and opened the unlocked gate. The hinges made a metallic clang, and five pairs of eyes looked up. He paused, but one of the girls smiled and waved, and one of the dogs wagged its tail, so he smiled broadly, waved back, and walked confidently in.

I don’t know how long he had been standing there, I just remember looking up and seeing the man, dressed in a shortsleeved button-down plaid shirt and brown slacks, but he had a mustache that looked like my dad’s. For some reason, I automatically assumed he was Armando Arranda, one of the sons of our across-the-street neighbors who was vaguely the same height and also Hispanic. I was only five and had been very sheltered. I smiled and waved, and said “Hi Armando!” and Ged thumped his tail on the ground, and the man came inside the fence. We talked for a minute, he probably asked me where my mother was. I didn’t know any better- it wasn’t that Reta had never told us not to talk to strangers, he just didn’t look like what a stranger looked like. So we talked, and then I realized several things all at once: that my sisters were no longer standing next to me; that Ged had stopped wagging his tail and was looking at Muffin, who was standing next to me; that Muffin had been growling since the man had appeared, that her Chow’s ruff was standing on end and that her lips pulled back as her growl escalated into a snarl and showcased beautiful long white teeth, her Shepherd’s inheritance, and a frightening black tongue from her Chinese side. I ran my hands over her neck and asked her what was wrong, and as she started barking, I looked up to tell Armando that I was sorry, that she did this sometimes.

He was standing right over me.

He reached for me, and I don’t remember what exactly happened, but it ended with him pinned in the corner against the gate clutching the hand that had reached, as my dogs tried to rip him apart. Well, Reta says that’s how she found us, and claims that Ged looked just as fearsome and was snarling just as loud, but I don’t remember that part. At the end, after the man had escaped

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out the gate and Reta had examined me and found me whole, there was no argument over whose muzzle it was that had blood smeared on it, and there was no argument over which dog it was that bowled me over in an attempt to make sure I was fine and then lick my face off. She got the man’s blood on my face too, and my mom shuddered, and quickly pulled me inside to wipe it off. ** There are stories every year in San Antonio about the latest Pit Bull, Shepherd, Rottweiler, Doberman or Chow that’s torn apart someone’s smaller dog or livestock or, all too often, someone’s child. It’s reasonable to fear dogs in a city that can’t control them. It’s reasonable to fear what’s been given a precedent.

We had plumbing problems one summer. I was eleven, and the dogs were getting old, at nine. The plumbing problems involved a team of men digging a trench from the backyard to the street in front of our house. This project took two months, though my memory makes it stretch on for a year. The first day, a nice clean man came and inspected. He looked around the backyard, he patted the dogs, who liked him because I liked him, and he left. A team of men came out the next day. They didn’t speak much English, but they were polite and smiled a lot. Reta still wouldn’t let us eat our lunches outside unsupervised though.

I was sitting on the deck after my Reta and the kids had all gone inside, watching the men dig, making sure my dogs didn’t bark at them. They hadn’t shown any signs of minding them so far, and Ged even relished the extra attention. I watched one of the workers, a little boy really, who didn’t speak and seemed scared all the time, dropping strips of tortilla off the side of our trampoline to Ged, who stood below, wriggling with delight. I looked around to see where Muffin was, and sure enough, she had sensed someone was getting treats and was trotting over to be included. As she passed by the foreman, where he was digging in his trench, he straightened up and casually swung his shovel over his head and, hard as he could, brought the flat part of it down on the back of her skull. She dropped like a stone and didn’t get up.

It had happened so fast that I only made a sort of “Uah” noise, until the foreman looked up and his face told me that he had forgotten I was out there. I screamed for my mom and jumped off the deck and ran and pulled as much of my dog into my lap as I could, weeping, because I thought he had killed her.

When she didn’t move, I grabbed a big dirt clod from the edge of the trench and threw it at him, then grabbed another and threw that one and again and again until Reta heard me screaming and ran outside. She told my dad later that night that she thought he was killing me, and that when she saw Muffin, she thought he had killed her when she tried to protect me. That would have been more justified than what he had really done.

We joke about our familial hate for plumbers, now. This story gets referenced, but never retold in detail, but we do like to remember the story of Abby and her vindication of our dog.

A little over a year later, when she was around four, we had a plumber coming in to look at some piping. He went out into the laundry room, to look at it from a different wall, and Abby, who believed she was a dog back then, followed him out there, on all fours. He heard something, and turned around and saw a tiny little bird-like child, with feathery blonde hair in pigtails and a pink jumper, crouched at his feet, growling at him.

“Well, hello there cutie!” he said. “What’s your name?”

She answered by barking twice and then she bit him, locking her jaws on what loose skin she could grip (he was wearing shorts) and biting as hard as she could. He yelled. Loudly. What was he supposed to do? He couldn’t very well hit her, and pulling her off wasn’t working, and she was hurting him, believe it or not. Reta

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finally came out to see what he was hollering about, and called her off.

Roger, the plumber, has been our family plumber for years now, and Abby, who is now fourteen, is embarrassed every time he says “how’s my favorite Pit Bull?” She told my mom at the time, as best we could understand through her tears of frustration, that she was trying to protect us. This story has a happy ending at least.

The foreman didn’t come back, because Reta took my word over his and called the company and yelled for three hours until they promised her he would be fired immediately. I heard my first racial slurs that day, both from the foreman and from my mother.

I wish I could tell you that one of my dirt clods had hit him, but to be honest, I didn’t see. I wonder if this man even remembers this day, and I wonder if he wonders if he killed my dog. We never found out why he did it, but I assume it was for the same reasons Reta never let us eat outside alone: she didn’t look like a trustworthy breed of dog. ** I don’t know how to begin this next story. It isn’t one we retell and laugh about, like ‘The Great Chicken Wars,’ or ‘When Abby Bit the Plumber,’ or even the story of how we got the puppies and how that led to Reta scrubbing white paint out of our hair for the next two weeks because we had to help my dad paint the doghouse. It isn’t a story that’s really about Muffin, though once again, she saves me. Humor me, as I stagger through.

I was homeschooled. I was also the second oldest of six children. The fact that my mom had so many children and wanted them to all be involved in so much all the time meant that she was gone a lot, and took the kids with her, because she needed to do school with them and because, for various reasons, valid and not, she didn’t trust me to be a good babysitter and she didn’t like bringing me along in the car because, let’s be honest, I was a pain.

I went through my angsty stage early, though I guess it couldn’t be classified as angst, but I should just say that around the time I turned 13, I started getting depressed a lot. Not debilitatingly depressed, just upset and sad and frustrated for reasons that I didn’t even understand until much later.

I remember this day, because I was excruciatingly bored. I had finished my school, and Reta had left with all the kids yet again and told me that she wouldn’t be home until 6ish.

She called me from the church where Daniel was taking classes, and told me to have the soup started and all the cheese for the sandwiches grated by the time she got home. I spent the afternoon reading, watching movie previews online (since I wasn’t allowed to see the real things), and then eating bites of whatever leftovers I could find in the fridge. I remember kneeling on the couch, pulling back the plastic wand to our venetian blinds, listening to the sound it made as it bounced against the metal blinds, tap, tap, tap, like dripping water. An hour went by, and I wished I could go to sleep and never wake up.

I didn’t know how to cook, but when the time rolled around to start the soup, I thought I would make it better. It was just a boring old family sized can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup, so I dumped the soup in the pot with a can of mushrooms and then read the soup label and added a can-full of milk. The milk didn’t mix in well, and the soup just kind of floated in the milk in gooey red clumps, while the mushrooms all sank to the bottom. I felt uneasy, but turned the heat on the burner and began to grate the cheese, trying not to eat most of it as I did.

Reta got home late, and she was already stressed. She had had to pay for the next month of classes that day, and since it was just after tax season, we already felt the strain on our money. We had just had to buy a new car to replace our trusty old Volvo that had died. She was afraid that my dad would be home soon too,

Cyra- Portrait of the beginning by Zach Linge

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and wanted to make sure dinner was on the table for him at least.

She came into the kitchen and as I turned to ask her which loaf of bread I should use for the cheese toast, she looked into the soup pot.

“You IDIOT!” she yelled. “Why didn’t you mix it up right?

This is RUINED!” I tried to explain that I had done what the can said to do, but she grabbed my hair and jerked me over to the stove.

“Stir it up! You’re supposed to mix in the milk SLOWLY and your dad will be home soon and dinner isn’t ready! STIR!” I was crying by now. I tried to take the handle of the pot and turn it to where I could reach it to stir it but my mom hadn’t let go yet and she tried to shove it towards me. She was angry, I was crying, and neither of us was paying attention, and the pot tipped onto it’s side and everything spilled out. Reta screamed at me to put it back, and then screamed that we didn’t have the money for me to be wasting our food and then screamed at me for using up the mushrooms she had bought for stroganoff. The smell of scorched milk filled the room as the mess hit the edge of the hot burner. She hit me, twice, across the face, and screamed more while I cried harder and then she went into the other room to make the twins change clothes. I got a paper towel and started mopping up the milk, which still hadn’t mixed in with the soup.

I thought that I could save the milk at least, and squeezed the paper towel out over the pot, and then mopped up more milk, and repeated. I had gotten almost all of it back into the pot when Reta came in and screamed at me for being so stupid as to think that we would want to eat soup that had gotten squeezed out of a paper towel. You can eat paper-towel soup, but that’s all you get tonight, she yelled. She slapped me across the face again, and called me an idiot again and then told me to just get the hell out of her house.

I ran into the backyard to get away. I had spent most of my childhood there and in the winter when it was too cold to stay outside but we weren’t allowed back inside yet, I would crawl into

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the doghouse with the dogs. The others thought it smelled bad. I would stay in there, singing the children’s praise songs I knew, and sometimes the dogs would howl with me if I was loud enough. I slept in there more than once. It was comfortable.

I crawled in there now, still bawling and my nose running like a clogged showerhead. The dogs were in there, too old to brave even cool spring weather, and Muffin put her nose up to my face and licked me. I kept crying, for a long time, and she kept licking me. Eventually I stopped and whispered to her and to myself, going over all the things I would say the day I moved out.

I stayed out there until Peter got home and came out to find me.

I wish I could say that that was the last time I cried in front of my mom, but it was years before I learned that trick. There are any number of episodes I could relate like that one.

I wish I could say I thanked my dogs for all they gave, but as they got older, I started spending less and less time outside, with them. I got older too. ** I don’t remember Muffin aging. It seems like one day, suddenly, I noticed she was old. One day she tried to jump up on the roof of the doghouse for her food (Ged would eat hers too if I didn’t feed her up there) and when she slipped and didn’t make it and fell off, I looked at her in surprise. She looked back at me.

Ashamed? Surprised? I couldn’t tell. I started feeding her on the ground and just closed the gate to the pen.

When she was younger, she liked to get up on our Jump-King giant trampoline, mainly because she could and Ged couldn’t, but maybe because she liked to bounce too. She would leap up there with all of us after we had eaten lunch and half-bounce half-slide around with us, and for all I could ever tell, she liked it. However, when she was older and had inherited the hip dysplasia that came from her pure-bred side, she resigned herself to the ground, though she would still park her rotund self by the edge of the trampoline to make sure we were still safe while flying around up there.

Once, my brother picked her up and put her on the

trampoline. This might have been well intended, since she was too old to get up there with us anymore, and she was lonely because the rest of us were inside and Ged was asleep. However, his inner-demon took over when he saw her grizzled smile falter as she scrabbled for balance on stiff legs and a slick, moving surface.

Her fright was too much temptation for him and he began to “bounce” her, jumping up into the air and aiming his landing close enough to transfer all the momentum of his 12 year old weight to her 13 year old arthritic body. She whined pitifully as she bounced on her side, legs flailing, but this only goaded him further. He jumped higher and higher and she flopped closer and closer to the edge each time he came down, until finally, on a particularly vicious bounce, she flipped off her side and would have gone over the edge if one of her back legs hadn’t caught in one of the gaps between the springs.

It would have been better for her if she had gone over the edge.

She howled as my brother tried to stop bouncing, because the moving springs pinched and tore the skin and muscle of the leg that was already supporting the rest of her stiff body. That is one of the four screams in my life that I will never forget what it sounded like, as much as I wish I could.

To my shame, I had been standing inside the sliding glass door that looked out onto the backyard. I could tell you that I banged on the door loud enough for Daniel to hear me once I saw she was scared, I could tell you that as soon as I realized she would be bounced off, I slid the door open hard enough for the resulting “bang” to bring both Peter and Reta running, I could tell you that I screamed with her as ran across the yard and lifted her out of the springs and laid her on the ground while my brother stood there, frozen and scared. I could tell you that I held her head in my lap while Peter drove us to the vet, that she lived for two years after this, that this horrible thing wasn’t my fault, and that’s all true, but none of that changes the fact that I had watched from inside as my brother lifted her onto the trampoline, and that I had laughed at her comical look when he had first put her up there.

** Ged died three weeks after my sixteenth birthday. He lay on his bed in the garage and cried the entire night, until around 4:30 in the morning, when he stopped. My bedroom shared a wall with the garage, and I stayed awake listening to him. I will never forget what his cries sounded like as some unknown body part pained him. I didn’t see him the next morning before my dad took his body to our vet.

Muffin died about seven months later. She couldn’t even walk in the last month or two, but had to be carried outside every morning, where she could hobble to the grass to pee and hobble back to her bed, and then carried into the garage every night. She didn’t cry the night she died, like Ged had. I don’t know how I knew she was going to die that night, but she seemed like she was breathing differently. I sat on her bed with her and cried a little bit, smoothing the fur between her eyes like she loved, ashamed that this was the first time I had spent more than ten minutes with her. My mouth felt coated and dry from the dusty air and rubbing my face with hands filthy from touching her, but I didn’t go wash them. Finally, around one a.m., she fell asleep and I went inside and went to bed. ** I should have made this more organized. I should have created some compelling scene of redemption, where I realized what new chance at life I had been given years before. I should have glamorized some of the stories, I shouldn’t have told you some of the others. I should have compressed the two dogs into one. I should have fabricated some form of reconciliation between my mom and me. I should have been more politically correct. I should have told you that the dogs aged gracefully, that we allowed them inside the house until it was time to put them down to save them the misery of their slow, lonely deaths. I wish I had left out my shame.

There’s a quote in one of Stephen King’s books, where he says “I never had any friends again like the ones I had when I was twelve.” For me, I’ve never been the same sort of friend that I was when I was twelve, and sometimes, I wish I had never gotten older.

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Wait...oh yep.Bill there’s poop in your hair again.

By David McMichael

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Westminister Gate by Kelsey Evans

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Bridge Near Port Meadow by Elizabeth McClellan 63

Jack of Spades by Zach Linge

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Editor: Jessica George

Assistant Editors: Lydia Melby Megan Faver Mary Hardegree

Staff:

Bethany Bradshaw David McMichael Paul Knettel Tanner Hadfield

Faculty Advisors: Dr. Shelly Sanders Dr. Steven Moore

Designer: Leriam Gonzalez