Blackwater Review aims to encourage student writing, student art, and intellectual and creative life at Okaloosa-Walton College by providing a showcase for meritorious work. Blackwater Review is published annually at Okaloosa-Walton College and is funded by the college.
Editors:
Vickie Hunt, Julie Nichols, Amy Riddell
Art Director: Benjamin Gillham
Editorial Advisory Board:
Jan Faubel, Jack Gill
Charles Myers, Deidre Price
Art Advisory Board:
J.B. Cobbs, Benjamin Gillham, Stephen Phillips
Lyn Rackley, Karen Valdes, Ann Waters
Graphic Design and Photography: Candice Joslin, James Melvin
Web Design: Riotta Scott
All selections published in this issue are the work of students; they do not necessarily reflect the views of members of the administration, faculty, staff, District Board of Trustees, or Foundation Board of Okaloosa-Walton College.
The editors and staff extend their sincere appreciation to Dr. James R. Richburg, President, and Dr. Jill White, Senior Vice President, Okaloosa-Walton College, for their support of Blackwater Review.
We are also grateful to Frederic LaRoche, sponsor of the James and Christian LaRoche Distinguished Endowed Teaching Chair in Poetry and Literature, which funds the annual James and Christian LaRoche Memorial Poetry Contest, whose winner is included in this issue.
Don’t Suffer
Matt Tucker
Since I’ve been alive, the earth has flown around the sun twenty times. Spun on its axis more times than I can count without becoming dizzy. I’ve learned some cold and often hard facts, but I’ve also found that some things must be taken on faith or whatever you call that stuff.
I believe that humor makes everything better. (I’d like to add that to the fact list, but some people won’t let me.)
Corny is cathartic. Not to digress, but I believe all British people are naturally funny…except Henry VIII: he really knew how to kill a party.
“Always eat the crust, no matter what it is,” says my belief stuff. “Those who don’t, suffer.”
It also promises that coffee is good for you. And who am I to question? Who am I to question that sunshine is a food group, or that most everything tastes like chicken? Though the latter sounds fishy.
I talk to strangers because I believe in it. And because if I don’t, no one else will. They’re only strangers because no one talks to them. You should never try to blend in—most people do it with no effort at all.
I never wear hair gel. I believe it was invented so you can spot idiots from farther away.
I don’t always wear clothes that match for much the same reason.
Walk whenever you can, but be prepared to run.
Louie Ray Willcox
I hated Pépe. I made it all the way to the fourth grade not hating anyone or anything before I met Pépe. I still hate him and I’m glad that he’s dead although it’s now been so many years that he would have died long ago anyway.
Pépe lived next door to Joey Menant’s cousins, Terry and Caroline Brousard. Joey was a year younger than I and a year older than my brother Alan. All of us except Caroline were in the same classroom at East End Elementary School in Metairie. Mrs. Garity taught first through fifth grades in that one room, and she didn’t mess around.
One morning on the school bus Joey pulled up his pant leg and showed us where Pépe had bitten him. “Dat dog done bite me good,” he had said. He talked with a thick Cajun accent, as did his parents and most of the kids in school. Alan and I had a hard time understanding them even though it had been over a year since moving from Seattle. My dad said they talked coon ass. I said that once too, but Mom popped me across the chops and I became considerably more circumspect in describing local dialects, especially when she was within arm’s reach.
“What did he say?” Alan asked.
“Looky dere,” Joey said pointing to the punctures in his leg. “Dat where he bite me.”
We’d never seen evidence of a dog bite before and were impressed. “Dat dog a Mexican Chihuahua and he a mean little bastard,” Joey explained.
Alan and I smirked at one another. We still weren’t used to hearing our contemporaries use cuss words. A few days after Joey showed us the bite marks, I rode my bike half a block over to Terry and Caroline’s house to see if they wanted to come over and play kickball in our back yard. I rode fast because I liked the little dust trail that the bike made in the crushed oyster shells. I got off my bike and was going up the steps to the porch when Pépe streaked across the yard, yapping like a banshee. I
Willcox / 3
probably could have just run into the house, but that thought never entered my mind. You just didn’t go into somebody’s house uninvited. I tried to get back to the bike and escape. Pépe cut me off before I could get aboard and nailed me a couple of good ones on the back of the leg just above the ankle. I could keep him at bay as long as I faced him and kicked at him when he charged, and I backed most of the way home before he finally lost interest and trotted away. I later came to understand that we had reached a Mexican standoff.
After that I developed a way to torture Pépe. Joey told us that Pépe got you on the down stroke if you were peddling your bike so I would get going as fast as I could and then come zipping past Pépe’s house. When he came charging out, I’d lift my legs to the handlebars and coast while he yapped and jumped, trying to get me. He must have thought that I could coast forever because he always turned back for home before I had to peddle.
I told Alan about the game, and he wanted to give it a try. The next day the two of us came flying by the front of Pépe’s house. I don’t know if Pépe got smarter overnight or if— since there were two of us— he decided he should chase us twice as far. Unlucky for Alan, he was behind me when we coasted to a stop with Pépe right on our tail. Alan was able to keep him at bay for a few seconds by putting one foot down and then the other as Pépe ran around the bike to try and get at him. He looked like a dancing chicken until Pépe got even smarter and ran under the bike to nail him.
I grabbed a stick that was lying on the side of the road and we were able to keep Pépe at bay while we backed our way beyond his sphere of interest. Alan, always dramatic, began to wail and sob about his injuries as we neared our house. Mom came running out, and we told her that the mad dog up the street had attacked us. We skipped over our part in teasing him.
Mom washed Alan’s wounds and put peroxide on them. Peroxide doesn’t hurt but when it fizzed up Alan was sure that anything that looked like that must hurt, and he howled all
the more. Mom finally told him to pipe down or she’d give him something to howl about. Miraculous words: he stopped in mid-tizzy and toned down to a whimper.
Our backyard baseball games gave way to football as cooler weather replaced the early autumn heat, and we didn’t tease Pépe anymore since he learned to chase us farther. With the advent of nicer weather, Pépe was walked once around the block as Miss Maime, the LaForte’s maid, pushed the baby buggy. I didn’t even know the LaForte’s had any kids until that began.
Joey told us about Miss Maime long before we ever saw her. No one else had a maid, so she was something of a novelty. Joey said that she did all the work around the place and when she hung out the wash she dipped snuff and could spit hard and straight enough to nail a grasshopper in flight. I never saw her do that, but he swore on his grandma’s grave it was true. That’s a serious oath, especially for a Cajun.
Most of the time we played in the back yard, but on this particular day we were on the front porch playing army men. In addition to Joey and Alan, our little brother Jeff was there, too. Even though he was only four, we had to let him play too or Mom would get after us. When Miss Maime came along, we waved and spoke because it was good manners for kids to speak to adults regardless of color. Failure to be mannerly would get you a whipping just as fast as hitting a brother.
I don’t know what got into Pépe, but he suddenly ran right up onto the porch and bit Jeff on the hand. He didn’t even bark, just ran up there and bit. I jumped up and had the satisfaction of giving Pépe a good kick even though I was bare footed, and he ran back to Miss Maime. It really wasn’t all that much of a bite, and Jeff didn’t squall nearly as much as Alan had. Nevertheless, Mom was pretty mad and that was serious, but that wasn’t Pépe’s worst problem. Pépe made the mistake of making Louie mad.
Louie was our cat. Actually, we were his family and he thought Jeff belonged to him. His mother lost all nine of her lives in an ill-advised decision to run across Canal Street. His
Willcox / 5
brothers and sisters were adopted right away, but Louie was kind of scraggly looking and didn’t have a lot of curb appeal. Somehow my tenderhearted mother heard of his plight and brought him home for us to become his family. My dad named him Louis in honor of Louis XIV since we lived near New Orleans. My brothers and I called him Louie. He wasn’t weaned yet, so we fed him with a toy baby bottle, and Jeff loved to feed him. Even though he was only three, Jeff could fill that little bottle with milk and not spill a drop, feed Louie, then fill the bottle again and feed him again. Louie loved the cold milk and the life of a fat cat and he loved Jeff.
Louie was over a year old when Pépe bit Jeff, and he’d grown from a scraggly runt of a kitten to a hefty male tabby. We didn’t call him a tabby even though that’s what he was because he seemed to think it sounded kind of swish. He had the run of the house, and could come and go as he pleased because he knew how to use the screen door. Going out was a no-brainer since all he had to do was lean against the door. If the door was latched for some reason, he would climb up the screen and meow at the latch until one of us undid the hook. He used us like a voice activated unlatching service. From the outside he would hook his toes under the door and pull it back far enough to get his nose into the opening and then push on into the house.
The day after Jeff was bitten, Mom had put me on room confinement. Apparently I’d had a tone in my reply to some request she’d made. “You take that smart mouth upstairs, young man. You are on confinement until I tell you to come down, and you just think about the proper way to speak to me.”
There was no point is asking her what I’d said; that could turn an hour’s worth of confinement into a life sentence. The smart thing to do would have been to apologize on the spot, but I stomped my way to the room Alan and I shared. When I got upstairs I heard Miss Maime coming along for their late afternoon walk.
Our bedroom was at the north end of the house, and I watched Pépe, Miss Maime and carriage go by the front. When I went to the side to watch them go up the street, I caught a
glimpse of Louie. He was paralleling them in the weeds on the other side of the dry ditch from them. The grass and brush was too thick to keep him in sight, but every now and then I would see some movement in the weeds and I knew it was him. They were about twenty-five yards up the street when all of a sudden Pépe started barking wildly and charged across the dry ditch into the weeds.
Pépe’s frenzied barking abruptly ended with a shrill yelp that may well have been the Chihuahua equivalent of “Oh Shit!!” That was followed by a lot of growling and thrashing and crashing in the brush. My attention was diverted from the movement in the brush to Miss Maime. She howled and it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
She knew beyond a shadow of doubt that a Hoodah had grabbed Pépe. They were known to come out in the early evening and create all manner of mayhem, especially for animals, children, and people of color. Then after that howl, which would have caused a demon to defecate, she ran up the road with a speed that was nothing short of astounding. If I hadn’t seen it myself, I would have never believed a person with that mass could cover so much ground so quickly. I would estimate that before I lost sight of her when she turned the corner, she had covered about a quarter of a mile in slightly less than ten seconds.
By the time Jeff and Alan came over to see what the noise was about, she was out of sight. Her reaction had an unnerving effect on me. Things were now death-still where the thrashing in the brush had been going on. I told my brothers the awful, unvarnished truth: Miss Maime had seen a Hoodah, and it got Louie and Pépe. I tried to get Alan to go out and check since I was on confinement, but he wasn’t having any of that. Nor could we get normally gullible Jeff to go out either. Hoodahs have that effect on you, a tendency to want to stay indoors and in groups.
We were eating supper when we heard Pépe’s owner walking down the street calling for him. I told the rest of the family about what I’d seen that afternoon and wondered if we
Willcox / 7
should tell Pépe’s family that a Hoodah had got him. Of course, my mom and dad launched on the “there’s no such thing as hoodahs and ghosts” speech. My brothers and I just exchanged glances. How do you figure adults? They tell you that there is a Santa Claus, and we all knew that there was not, and they tell you that there are no spooks when all the evidence clearly says that there are.
It was my job to take out the trash after supper. Our burn barrel was way out in back of the house, and I was in the process of negotiating with Alan for him to go with me when we heard Louie mewing outside. He’d escaped from the Hoodah! We looked out and there he was at the bottom of the back door steps. His tongue was out and he was panting. We’d never seen him do that before. Then we saw why. Just outside the splash of light from the kitchen, there was Pépe…dead as a doornail. I think that the penny dropped for Alan and me in the same instant, and we realized that Louie had done in Pépe and dragged him home.
Other than the look on his face and the fact that his bulgy eyes were even bulgier, Pépe didn’t look all that bad. There were some marks where Louie jumped on him and teeth marks on his neck where he’d been choked, but all and all not too bad. After a hurried whispered conference, we went and got Dad, and the three of us buried Pépe behind the garage back into the brush. We thought it best to not tell Mom and Jeff although I suspect Dad told Mom after we’d gone to bed.
Louie got a long drink of water and then assumed his normal spot on the living room windowsill where he could keep an eye on the universe. Jeff was blubbering with happiness at his return while Louie acted as if nothing had happened at all. A little while later we heard Mr. LaForte coming down the road calling for Pépe. Dad just gave us a little negative shake of his head. People can be funny about their dogs, even nasty little dogs like Pépe.
Louie was sitting on the windowsill the next afternoon when Miss Maime came by on the usual walk. We were playing on the porch, and I was going to comment on how fast she can
run, but she spoke first and asked us if we had seen Pépe.
“No, Ma’am,” I replied honestly. “The last time I saw Pépe, he was out there in the brush.”
Alan nearly wet himself. And when I looked over at Louie, I thought he had a smirk on his face.
/ 9
Willcox
I-10
Kendall Marsh
I’ve seen these trees a thousand times
And this billboard that I love so much, The flashing lights are quite obnoxious But they signal that there’s only a few miles left.
One day I’d like to steal
The Florida Highway 69 sign
To make the drive worth the trouble.
Time passes like an old couple
In a Buick stuffed with suitcases. I let them mosey by me
I have nowhere to be in a hurry.
I’m used to steady movement And solid pace.
Same old shit, different day.
Three hours is a long time to be still,
My back aches from slouching in the seat
Like I’ve been lifting your burden And supporting the weight.
I keep thinking that you’re worth the trip But like this road you’ll never change I know you like my tires know the ride home.
Asphalt Moon
Maria Geneve Steele
Jesus shouted over the sound of my truck and said that, as far as the state of Florida and other law enforcement officials are concerned, his last name is Martinez. From the driver’s seat I could see only his head and long, wavy brown hair. He was mid-twenties, my age, maybe younger, with light brown skin, wide-set black eyes, and what looked to be the beginnings of a scraggly goatee. A migrant worker, I was sure.
I’d seen him just outside Orlando at dusk, carrying what appeared to be a large gym bag, walking too close to the edge of the highway. He was hitching but not seriously: his back was to oncoming traffic and he held his thumb out next to his body, like it was a little flesh branch sprouted from his thigh. The Hope Orchard Trucking Company trusted me with their brand new refrigerated big rig. It was a cushy perk after two years of loyal service (not bad for a recovering meth addict). I wish I could say that I don’t normally pick up hitchhikers, but that wouldn’t be true. I like the company, simple as that. And I’ve heard all kinds of fake names: Siga Rhettes, Jimmy A. Fondler, Brad Pitt, Buck Tooth, Diddly Squat, Grahamington Fairweather and on and on.
Jesus climbed into my cab and despite the warm night, he was wearing a shiny green jacket over a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and baggy jeans. He was clean, with no evidence of the road on his person, and he had a tangy citrus smell to him that filled the cab. What he was carrying was not a gym bag but more like a carpet bag, covered in the kind of floral print usually reserved for window dressings and English nannies. I told him my name was Milo–pronounced mee-low–and, as far as he was concerned, I didn’t have a last name. He quickly glanced at my commercial trucker’s license posted on the sun visor (clever bastard), pointed to it, and told me my own last name. I let off the brakes and we were down the road with me feeling like a bum.
Steele / 11
“Mee-low rhymes with philo, like the pastry. Have you thought of that?” asked Jesus. He pronounced his words so carefully that it was difficult to detect an accent.
“No, I guess I haven’t.”
“I like baklava. It is a Mediterranean dessert. Do you like it?”
“Yes,” I answered though I think I had it just once, on a date I couldn’t afford with a girl who would figure that out.
“At the next stop I’ll get us some.”
“Sure,” I said and wondered if Jesus Martinez had ever set foot in a truck stop.
A few miles down the road and we were silent. He was already inspecting the dash and buttons on his armrest with his delicate fingers. It was a nice rig, all bells and whistles. What with all the talk of pastries, I forgot to ask Jesus Martinez where he was headed. I tried to ask where, but he wouldn’t say exactly, only that he wanted to “see north.” He yawned and stretched his arms, nearly touching me and settled back in, leaning against the door.
I explained to Jesus that, for his information, my trailer was carrying the finest Florida produce on a long-haul to New York. Furthermore, in case he’s interested, the New Yorkers pay top-dollar for Florida produce. That’s why we can’t get shit for citrus in our own state, assuming Florida is your state. Perhaps if you’re from elsewhere, like the Dakotas, you’re used to puny fruit. But if you want the most delicious grapefruit you’ve ever tasted–I’m talking a grapefruit the size of a baby’s head–then you have to go to New York City.
Jesus yawned and then disagreed. He said that the fruit is picked too early to tell if it was going to be the best and so, one can never know. It’s a mystery. This was my point exactly, I said, they never let it develop. Maybe the best fruit–the cream of the goddamn crop–is going north, picked too early. Then, in a way, I said, we’re all getting shitty fruit. Jesus said that it’s not that we all get shitty fruit . . . it’s that we don’t know what we’re getting, but we eat it and we live. Sometimes, we come across something sweeter. How nice, he added. The philosopher yawned again and snuggled into the door and I dropped the topic.
I told Jesus that I wouldn’t be a trucker for long. Yes, that’s right, I’m going to pilot training, Buddy. I’m going to be one of those cats in the sky. Not even the Hope Orchard Trucking Company knows I’m on the way out but good riddance. I’ve saved $31,000 so far, and this trip will take me to $32,000—and that’s how much it will cost to get myself through pilot training and pay my bills and with a couple grand left to start brand new. I figured it out exact, like a goddamned accountant or something.
But even as I said this, I felt detached from my own dream, as if it had fragmented and I was just pulling down bits of information for conversation. I neglected to tell Jesus that just yesterday, for reasons I couldn’t work out, I withdrew all my savings, wrapped it in a clean flannel shirt and tucked it beneath my sleeper just behind me.
I bragged to Jesus that, while I’m not prone to fancy purchases, I did buy a pair of Ray-Ban aviator shades for myself. They were on sale. They’re still new in the case in the glove box in case he’s interested in seeing them. I looked over and wouldn’t you know it, Jesus Martinez was completely out, asleep with a thickening dollop of droll suspended from the corner of his mouth, like it hadn’t quite decided which path it would take to his chin. Also in the course of Jesus’ being bored to sleep by my conversation, his head had slipped down the window, leaving an oily trail on the glass to trap individual strands of his long hippie hair, making him look electrified. Some company.
For three hundred miles Jesus Martinez didn’t stir, not when I hummed the songs from the radio, not when I honked at a school bus load of brats doing that sort of perverse pumping thing with their arms, not when I swerved to miss a drifting Volkswagen and almost fishtailed a church van, not when I gave a young woman in a convertible a whistle (actually, the window was up and I hoped she didn’t hear me, since that’s a rude thing to do, especially at night when a woman is alone), not even when I switched on the CB and loudly pretended to agree with a band of Rush Limbaugh enthusiasts. At one point I nearly ran off the road concentrating on Jesus’ abdomen to make sure he was still breathing. I even poked him. Nothing.
Steele / 13
Just as I was getting used to the silent sleep of Jesus Martinez, it was time for a stop. The moment the engine was cut at the Speedy Truck Stop near Savannah, Jesus sprang to life. He wiped his mouth and unglued his hair from the window, gently combing it out with his fingertips, which was something I’d seen only women do. I stared at him, trying to catch his attention, because I thought he deserved the stink eye. But without looking at me or so much as a word, he opened the door and hopped down. I couldn’t see him for a moment, and then he appeared again, sprinting into the store. From the back, with his long hair bouncing like he was in a shampoo commercial, Jesus looked like a slender girl in baggy clothes. The other truckers who hadn’t seen Jesus Martinez from the front thought he was a girl too; one even whistled at him. Run, Jesus, run. Good riddance.
While I was pumping fuel I saw three truckers walk behind the building. This had to be drugs, not girls, since the girls don’t hang around nice stops like this. The drugs, though, are everywhere. Meth, most likely. At least, that was my choice back when I worked for Snidely’s Home Decor, hauling furniture and quilts from the Carolinas to Los Angeles, where the prices were jacked sky high so actresses could feel like they were back home in the South. Then I would do the reverse, taking bizarre art and modern furniture back to the Carolinas for nouveau rich hill folk.
It must’ve been good shit the guy was selling for three truckers to go back in a matter of minutes. They’d best be careful. I like to see guys get away with it. Maybe I like to see it because I didn’t get away with it. I had gotten to the point where I was filtering my own urine, keeping it in a jug right next to me, sipping it on my way across the U.S. with fancy furniture and quilts in tow, driving hard to make the whole country feel like they were someplace else.
As it turned out, when I spilled a jug of meth-urine on a cop who’d pulled me over for excessive speeding, it didn’t go over well. My life was put on stop, as a matter of fact, and I endured hours with a sad-faced counselor –a former meth addict himself –named Hal, who quietly said that I could tell him everything. Everything. Since I
was in for a mandatory ninety days and had nothing better to do, I told him that I used because an extra day awake sometimes meant an extra grand in my pocket and then my mother could keep her shitbox of a house another month and my sister–God bless that poor slut –could have her third bastard in a decent hospital before handing it over to grateful strangers.
Hal nodded his head and said he understood and said he believed I could be anything. Anything. He called out various professions, like I was in goddamned grade school, and wanted me to pick one best suited. Being a trucker suits me fine, I told Hal, but he insisted on the game and he had such sorrowful brown eyes that I felt low for not playing along. So I listened as Hal said doctor, lawyer, businessman (an obscure profession, even Hal admitted, and then he promised to be more specific), construction crew chief, corporate paralegal, cargo ship captain, mulling spice salesman, FedEx delivery man, commercial pilot, counselor for recovering meth addicts, unarmed security guard…
“Pilot,” I said and meant it. Immediately Hal’s eyes looked a little less sad and I could tell he needed a winner, just one, and he’d be okay too. Hal was so enthusiastic that he even managed to help clear my record, on account of it being a first offense and also, I suspected, on account of their only evidence being a jug of urine.
Hal clipped out one of those standard pilot pictures he found in a magazine: a handsome cat in a bomber jacket, looking skyward with purpose, his shades reflecting the passing clouds. Like a kid I taped the clipping inside my spiral-bound recovery journal, which if I tried to read today I likely could not understand.
I got out of rehab with a plan and Hal hooked me up with the Hope Orchard Trucking Co., and for two years I did nothing but drive, never missing a day of work, sending some money back home like a good man, putting the rest in savings, and spending hour after hour imagining myself in the air. I gained nearly one hundred pounds because–every addict knows this–you’ve got to replace something with something.
I called Hal every couple of weeks to let him know how I was getting along since, really, it was his dream as well as mine, I
Steele / 15
thought. He listened to my stories from the road. Except, for the past several weeks he hadn’t answered my calls and when I finally got a hold of someone, they told me Hal, God rest his soul, had a heart attack a couple weeks back. An overdose–or didn’t I know he was using again? No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t. I wasn’t on Hal’s roster of people to contact if he cranked back up, but then, addicts aren’t that organized.
Before I knew it I was feeling around the sleeper and withdrawing several hundred dollars from my private flannel ATM. I walked to the back of the building, following a small fellow in a dirty red cap. I stopped short before turning the corner and listened for the code. Apparently, the code was silence. The red-capped fellow came around and I startled him–his eyes bulged and he stepped back and smiled, showing a mouthful of rot. He hurried away and it was my turn. Sure enough, the dealer was there, standing just outside a ring of light, smoking a cigarette. I startled him too–it was like I was a goddamn ghost or something-–and stepped around the ring of light until I was standing in front of him, breathing in his years of cooking dope, his chemical sweetness.
The dealer reached in his pocket and for some reason, I thought of the sound of Hal’s voice on the telephone, the way he sounded like he was always about to burst into tears. His voice matched his eyes, though I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that before. I ran like hell.
I was met at the corner by the womanly silhouette of Jesus Martinez, carrying a handful of tightly-wrapped pastries. I tumbled back and dropped the money I was carrying.
Jesus held the desserts out with both hands for me to see. Baklava, warmed, he said. He saw that I was trying to gather my money and bent to help me. No, thanks, I told him.
In the low light behind the Speedy Truck Stop, Jesus Martinez looked like the saddest person in the world. He looked a bit like Hal, though this could be my imagination. Besides, Hal was not keen on Mediterranean desserts, at least not that I know of. Jesus said he gave someone in a red cap a piece. He looked like he could use it. There’s plenty left for us, he added. I
walked past Jesus and climbed into the rig. Before I let out the brakes, Jesus scampered in, balancing his desserts in one hand, and just managed to shut the door as we lurched forward.
“Were jew going to leave me?” he wasn’t pleading, exactly, but he was definitely upset, and his accent crept back through.
“The thought had crossed my mind.”
“But my bag? My tings are still here.”
“Oops. Well, welcome to the road. Besides, you’re not much company, sleeping beauty.”
“I did no come to entertain jew,” he said flatly, folding his arms, and we were silent again with nothing but the baklava between us.
We were just outside of Savannah when Jesus was so taken by the full moon that he gasped. I agreed that it was nice, one of those moons that rises above the asphalt and gives you the feeling that you’re going to drive right into it. It made Jesus glow. He looked like he’d been dipped in a bluish light. Even the tips of his sparse facial hair were illuminated.
“We call it the Asphalt Moon,” I explained. “The full moon. It makes us do crazy things.” And I tried to smile an apology.
“Why is the moon at fault?” he asked.
“No, no. Asphalt. The pavement.”
“I see,” he said. “Payment. You have debt to pay. We all do.”
I wanted to explain to the philosopher our full moon theory but there was someone passing and honking on my left. I looked to see the small trucker in the dirty red cap, smiling and waving his half-eaten pastry like we were all best pals. He was high up, lucky fellow. I dropped the topic and reached for a piece of baklava.
I ate three pieces before Jesus said he had more. He reached into his carpet bag, pulled out a large thermos and poured me a cup of what he said was the most delicious coffee in the world: Kopi Luwak from Indonesia. I took a sip and agreed that I’d not ever had coffee like that. It had a strong flavor without being bitter. I was taking a second gulp when he told me that the coffee was made from beans eaten, partly digested
Steele / 17
So, we’re drinking weasel turd coffee? But really, I didn’t care. It was that good.
Through the Carolinas Jesus Martinez talked almost non-stop, describing the parade of carefully-wrapped delicacies as he pulled them from his carpet bag. His voice had a Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom quality. He told me about the elderly woman who fed him and helped him with his English. She would try anything. One time, according to Jesus, she roasted a cockroach and dipped it in chocolate. He still had one left but politely said he wanted to keep it. For memories, he said.
He had a story for exotic nuts, gold-flecked dark chocolates from Belgium, dried cod from Canada, frog legs, a turtle’s egg, morel mushrooms, Mississippi spicy caviar, and finally, a slice of quiche Lorraine. We nibbled our way north, and when we were done with each item he took care to wrap what remained and put it back in his carpet bag.
Suddenly it hit me. Here I was, eating whatever this stranger–an illegal–fed me. I had gained so much weight that it wouldn’t be hard for someone to guess my weakness. And he kept feeding me. And he knew I had a pile of money–he had offered to help pick some of it up. He may have discovered the real stash as I was stuffing my face. I braced myself. I was silent. Poison, I thought.
I tried to sort it out: Jesus was just some thief who had expensive taste in food. Or perhaps he purchased the food from a regular grocery store, wrapped up the goodies and made up some stories. Which, actually, would be impressive. Even worse, perhaps the elderly woman was real and he had killed her and made off with her goodies and her floral print carpet bag. I imagined Jesus sneaking up behind a grandmotherly woman as she lovingly cut slices of baklava and then bashing her over the head with a club.
This was my punishment for needing company all the time, for needing someone to constantly watch over me.
18 / Blackwater Review and then excreted by a weasel-like animal called a civet. Then he took a sip and smiled.
Jesus continued to talk and, apparently having picked up some slang, said “I half had to piss for a coon’s age.” We were in the middle of Richmond and I pulled into the Trucker’s Last Stop. I didn’t say a word.
Jesus took his bag and did a sideways run to the bathroom, which was locked, so then he ran in to see the cashier and got the key, which was attached to a small hub cap, then ran back to the bathroom. This all look dramatized to me.
From the back of the building a young woman emerged and Jesus stopped to give her a look. She was dressed in a short jean skirt with purple fishnet stockings and a small fur jacket. She had nice features but even from my cab I could see crank craters on her face. Someone needed to tell her to get in the dim light, the more flattering light, on the other side of the building.
I immediately began feeling around the sleeper for my flannel shirt. Sure enough, it was gone. I flew out of the truck and made my way to the bathroom to wait for that son of a bitch Jesus Martinez. It’s one thing to make a conscious effort to throw away your own dreams, it’s another to watch them being stolen from you. It does something. It makes you crazy.
Before I knew it, the prostitute was in front of me. You’ll get caught, sweetheart, I told her, and I was condescending about it, since she was braver than most. Stupid, in fact. Her lips were dark pink. Not tonight, she said and walked me backwards, clinging to my shirt with her painted claws. I had a thought, a thought that she was working with him.
“Is he paying you to do this? Did you coordinate this?” I pointed in her face.
“What the hell did you just say, trucker? Are you threatening me?” She had her hands on her hips and suddenly looked tough. I wondered what her name was.
I saw Jesus Martinez come out of the bathroom and I ran past the prostitute as fast as I could, weighted down by the evening snacks. The poison is working, I thought. I grabbed his skinny bird arm, pinned him against the wall and punched
Steele / 19
I snatched his carpet bag, tore it open and flipped it upside down, shaking out the contents. As I did this I thought about crushing the quiche Lorraine which, despite the situation, was admittedly quite delicious.
I studied the contents of the bag: half eaten treats, tenderly wrapped; two pair of jeans and three shirts which, until that moment, had been folded; a comb, a small travel shaving kit, new, judging by its unshaven owner; and two prescription pill bottles. There was no money. I kept looking and looking but there was no money.
For some reason, I remembered telling Hal about the mobile my sister had made for her second kid. She planned on keeping the kid and had cut Budweiser cans and suspended them from fishing line that belonged to her boyfriend, the kid’s supposed father. When social workers came because neighbors suspected abuse, they saw the mobile and noted it in their report. I kept the mobile in a little box beneath my bed at home, to remember the poor kid. These are the kinds of things I cling to, was what I told Hal. This is my life, summed up.
In response, Hal silently showed me a smoothed worry stone, a chewed pencil from grade-school, a frayed photo of a dark-headed girl, his girlfriend, whose name I forgot. She was pretty, one of those artistic girls who wear their hair in a pixie cut with large colorful barrettes. He was waiting on her to recover, spending month after month, watching addicts fly into rages, patiently dispensing advice, always with watery eyes, and sitting in an office, becoming part of its mildew smell. He must have tired of waiting.
This was what I thought of as I looked on the ground at the contents of one man’s life.
The prostitute was hitting me, and her tiny fists felt almost like a massage. When I looked up Jesus was holding out his wallet, and he swayed a little, woozy. I grabbed him and hugged him and began to shake. I heard the clicking of the prostitute’s heels as she made her way back to the shadows.
20 / Blackwater Review him square in the nose. I heard the crack of his head on the wall and blood ran down his nose and over his mouth.
Jesus’ small body was frozen and, looking back, this is exactly the kind of reaction I would have. I finally let go and wondered how to apologize. I couldn’t say anything.
“You have payment,” he said, looking terrified. “You are not at fault. It is the moon.”
The store clerk saw us and locked the front door. His face was pressed against the glass and he looked grateful that there was something solid between him and the scuffle. The cab lights of other trucks started to come on, and I quickly knelt to help Jesus with his things. He said “no, no please” and gathered his own things. I offered him a ride but he refused, naturally. Please, I begged, please let me take you. I told him he needed medical attention and that I would pay for it. Besides, I said, the police will probably come here.
We raced towards the Hope Orchard Trucking Company’s rig. I leapt in through the passenger’s side. I looked again to make sure and my flannel bank roll had shifted and was in plain sight on the other side of the sleeper.
Though there’s nothing fast about starting an 18-wheeler, I did the best I could. Jesus stood on the rail holding his things wrapped in clothing. The blood on his face was beginning to dry and darken. He wouldn’t get in. I couldn’t blame him. “Here’s your bag,” I told him. “Keep it,” he said. “You need it more than I do.”
“I hope you fly” was the last thing he said, and I’m not sure whether this was a reference to my becoming a pilot or whether he meant immediately, to escape justice. And then he stepped down and shut the door on his way. In the rearview mirror I saw the prostitute peering from behind the building, giving me the finger. Jesus had disappeared.
My heart was still beating too quickly when I pulled in to unload in New York. I called the Hope Orchard Trucking Company and told them that I couldn’t drive back. I just couldn’t do it anymore. Goodbye. And good riddance.
I did what I had wanted to do since I let Jesus Martinez in my cab fourteen hours prior: I looked in his carpet bag, into vacuous space. I reached my arm in to see how far it would go. I
Steele / 21
sort of cringed, thinking something might bite me and laughed out loud at myself.
I took the Greyhound back south. I found a nice spot on the side where the sun was shining and heating the glass. I let the heat and the vibrations from the bus rock me to sleep. I held my new floral-print carpet bag on my lap, knowing not many people would take a chance to bother a sleeping cat clinging to a floral-print carpet bag the way I was clinging to this one.
The Ground is So Proud Just to Hold the Sun
Matthew Pierson
He was sitting at a table, close to the punch bowl, closer to the dance floor. The whole room was roughly square, with two sets of matching double doors opening away from each other on opposite sides of the room. It was really a gym, in all stereotypical nature, complete with raised basketball goals on each end, darkened for mood, with the sounds of portable A/C units hanging from the roof and a band hoping for cash in more ways than one by the end of the night. He was definitely alone at the table, aside from the couple who were twenty minutes from acting as one in a dark room. He was definitely the only one at the table who didn’t have thoughts as clouded by hormones as the rest because, after all, he was still a teenager. He was still at the prom. His date had still left him to go talk to her friends, both male and female. He was still estranged, an ugly duckling in a room full of social butterflies. His thoughts, had anyone paid any attention or cared about them, were entirely depressing, existential, and unforgiving. He was a typical male, unseeing to half the world, and completely focused on the other quarter. He was unhappy, just as the band burst into a terrible rendition of some song he had never heard before by some band called Linird Skinird. At least, that’s how he thought it was spelled. It was probably spelled with an umlaut and half a dozen x’s and y’s added in at random points in order to make it appear hardcore. “hXc” he would have added in a mocking tone. How was he the only person here who wasn’t thinking with his other head? How was he the only person not crying because their date had left them to go find just how far their hormones would carry them? He thought all this and much more. Most of it was incredibly cynical and should have made him an insufferable person. He was an insufferable person; there is no doubt of that. But, his thoughts and judgments on most everyone else were entirely wrong.
It is true that a good bit of the room had a plan for the rest of the night involving some alone time with someone else. But quite a few had rather pure intentions on this time. At least, they did when they started. But their dates had entirely different minds about the phrase “getting to know you.” Of those who were crying, there were many who were crying not for the lack of their date, not for the fact that they might have felt something for those whom they brought, but for the practical joke of watering down the punch with another clear liquid that when drunk quite quickly, for those who never drink, would cause them to tear up. Of course, this might also explain the number of children conceived on this night, but that is an entirely different story.
She, however, had not taken a sip of punch and was sneaking as many glances from under, around, above, and through the arms of her date, who was definitely intoxicated. The cute boy at the table who seemed to be ignoring the whole world on sheer force of will and principle was somehow attractive to her. He was not as much physically attractive, but emotionally. It was that intense kind of interest, that wholesome, unfettered, unbridled attraction that has nothing to do with hormones and more to do with something buried deep inside someone, that only gets unlocked from time to time. Call it Arête, call it Nirvana, call it insanity, call it anything you want, but that is what it was, at that moment, for her. This is nothing like what her thoughts were. She was too simpleminded to think of such high ideas, and besides, she never paid any attention in any of her classes. She just tried to suffer through them like, she imagined, the rest of the world did. This, though, was the defining moment, the absolutely wonderful, horrible, terrible, and powerful idea that jumped into her brain and echoed out of her actions and voice. The manifestation of the idea to her was relatively simple. It went something like “I wonder what he’s thinking about.” This thought was immediately followed by “Did I just say that out loud?” The acknowledging grunt of her partner told her three things. The first was that yes, she did say it out loud, the second was that this song was too long and
that he wanted to skip romance and go straight for the jugular (though, with tongue firmly in check, the jugular was a bit higher than his intentions). The last was that he resented her diffused thoughts and that she had better either start playing hard to get or dispose of this body as quietly as possible. She decided for the latter, and performed a perfunctory “I need to go to the bathroom” type maneuver. Entirely skipping the bathroom, she went over, ignored the engrossed couple who were now about fifteen minutes from “getting to know each other.” This hopeful scene entirely intruded upon his cynicism and proved quite a shock. Her apparent arrival as someone who showed interest in his being, whether it be good or not, was entirely unnatural for her, being a semi-popular girl who had the acquaintance of all the popular kids. With all the falseness that she was used to, and all the darkness that he was used to, the conversation got off to a remarkably good start. In fact, by the end of the night, their friendship had started, and his Emersonian, narcissistic nature had already dulled to her bubbly joyous falsity. It was, overall, a match made for that moment. In fact, their son would look back to that night many times.
Pierson / 25
Composing with you
This sensuous samba.
Counting tempo
Movement
Jeni Senter
By the allegretto drumbeat
Of our hearts.
The resonance of our love Crescendos Into passionate heat. The earth trembles As we begin. Moving legato. The soft rise and fall Of our bodies.
Obbligato, You lead, I follow.
The polyrhythmic flow, Uninterrupted.
Breathing in perfect Synchronicity; Until sforzando, The trembling climax. We clasp hands, Touching Lip to lip.
Pianissimo - softly
Dolce - sweetly
Finale – it is finished.
Heartache
Deborah R. Majors
No Knife Sharpened with mercy
Only this blunt Spoon Hacking Your throbbing target Until Venom Voices halt.
Still, Hope cradles In stainless steel Smoothness
Rocking Pumped blood In curved boundaries
Overwhelmed
As thick Drops ( ) ( ) ( ) Ladle Between my breasts And linger
Among the liquid White Diamonds You gave me Last Summer.
Majors / 27
Tiles
Ray Willcox
The mind covers a lot of territory in the five minutes it takes for the radiation treatment. Then the thought occurs that these wide-ranging notions might indicate a truncated IQ evidenced by a short attention span. So I try to focus on something substantial. I don’t know how much the techs put in the chart, but it would be embarrassing to have “Appears to have developed a fixation for small, shiny objects.”
This is treatment number ten of forty-two. Forty-two is such an awkward number. That means as of today, I will be 23.8 percent complete, and tomorrow it will be 28.57.
I’m never going to be 25 percent complete. Still, it could be worse, like 43 treatments.
When the technicians go to the adjacent control room out of the way of the radiation, things are about to begin. The gantry swings down and to the right from directly over me. I call it the blaster although it is properly called a linear accelerator. Then I can see all the ceiling tile artwork.
Patients have painted twenty five of the tiles. This tradition started about five years ago when an artistic patient offered to paint a couple of the tiles so others would have something to look at during treatment. Patients are offered a new ceiling tile to decorate as they please. When it is returned, it becomes part of the collection and Mark, one of the techs who also serves as the curator, may eventually put it up as he changes the display from time to time.
I think it was during my second treatment when I was only 4.47 percent complete that I asked, “Hey, Mark. Do you take a person’s tile down if they die?”
He gave me an appraising look to see if I was serious. I was, as a matter of fact.
“As far as I know, all of our patients are alive and doing well.”
That made me laugh. “Nice answer, Mark. The next time I see the doc, I’m going to tell Sweet Baby James what a loyal employee you are.”
Mark was nonplussed. “This part of the collection is fairly new. We had some new equipment installed, and they changed the suspended ceiling. The old tiles wouldn’t fit any more. We’ve still got them but just can’t put them up.”
I’ve been meaning to take a look at those since he said that, but I never remember to when I am there. It’s too early in the morning for any intricate two-step thoughts. As the first patient of the day, I have a 7:30 appointment. I get there about twenty after, shuck down to my underwear in the men’s dressing room, put on two of their too-small-for-normal humans backless gowns, one on backwards and the other frontwards, and stand by for the tech du jour to summon me. I asked about the two-gown routine and was told that it was for the patient’s modesty. My theory is that it is a power thing: it’s hard to deal from a position of power when you are dressed in hospital drag, your bony white legs hanging out and wearing sneakers.
Brandy, Sherry, and Mark are three techs that I’ve worked with. I don’t know if there are any others. I asked them at the appointment before radiation started, when they check all the calculations and angles and then tattoo alignment marks on your body, if you had to be named after an alcoholic beverage in order to work there. Perhaps they had heard that before. None of them reacted, so I withheld my equal opportunity suggestions about Margarita, Mai Tai, and Ripple. The tattoos are used to put you in the same spot every time you come for treatment.
The first thing they do when I lie down on the treatment table is pull my boxers down to border line indecent to expose the tattoo dots and start aligning me with the radiation machine. Red laser looking light beams are used for the initial alignment. The fine alignment is kind of kinky, and I might have really enjoyed that under different circumstances. One of the techs, usually Brandy or Sherry, squirts some warm lotion
Willcox / 29
Today I concentrate on the tile directly in my line of vision and decide that it is my favorite. It has been painted a light shade of purple and is evenly although not geometrically decorated with little pink flowers and bows. Nice complementary colors.
Then, written in a large simple script across it is this quotation from Psalms 46:1: “God is our refuge and strength.” I like that. I believed it before and I know it now.
The full quotation from the Bible is “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in times of trouble.” This line and psalm were Martin Luther’s inspiration to write the hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Funny to be recalling all of this as the machine begins a twenty five second burst of radiation from the lower right side. Protestant martyrs often sang this hymn prior to execution.
“Damn!” I say to myself. “Let’s see if you can get a little more morbid.” Then I quickly apologize, “Sorry, Lord. You know I’m trying to quit cussing.”
I must have said that part aloud. One of the girls comes over the intercom, “Did you say something, Mr. Willcox?”
Rather than try to explain, I answer, “Did you know Johann Strauss wrote the arrangement for ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’ about two hundred years after Luther wrote the original hymn?” That ought to hold them for a while.
Mark is older but the other techs are about the same age as most of the students in my writing class. Incredible. I’m being microwaved by a bunch of kids. I already am as motionless as a statue, and now I hold even more still.
I frequently pray while I’m alone in the treatment room, but usually not for myself. I prayed for myself in September when the doctor told me that I had an advanced case of prostate cancer. I told the Lord that I was scared and would sure appreciate it if He got rid of this thing, but it was His call and I was good with it no matter what. What I pray for in these times
30 / Blackwater Review on my lower abdomen in preparation for an ultrasound. Nice. The ultrasound locates the prostate, tells the computer, and I may be moved a millimeter or two. Then the lotion is wiped off, they leave, and it’s show time.
is for my daughter-in-law Laurie or sister-in-law Peggy or our friend Jeri, all fighting their own battles with cancer. Or I pray for Kelly and Patty who are fighting cancer of the soul since finding that their closest family friend has been molesting their two little daughters. I pray for Paula. She’s been my partner for nearly 38 years, and watching this is hard on her. There are lots more needing prayers than me to pester the Lord with my petty self-interests although I still do occasionally.
A few of the other tiles have a spiritual flavor to them but not the majority. The biggest theme is the beach or water: a sunrise, dolphins jumping, and sand dunes. The artistic talent evidenced is very impressive. I realize that I’m seeing what the curator has chosen for the exhibit, but it is nonetheless impressive.
The machine hums softly and the blaster moves from its position even with my waist to a 45-degree angle up to the right for zap number three. That blocks almost half the decorated tiles from view. Light fixtures, fire detectors, and vents keep all the tiles from being available for artwork. Another of my favorites is a smiley-face that uses the black circle of one of the laser aimers for the nose. That makes the face a little off center and the artist gave it a wry looking smile. I love it.
Another hum and smiley face and Psalm 46 are hidden as the blaster looks straight down at me. Intellectually, I know that you can’t feel the radiation even though each of these seven doses is about one hundred times as strong as a chest x-ray. But sometimes when he is straight above me, I think I can feel a tingle. I asked my doctor during the first visit if anything in the treatment was sensible, and he said “No, impossible.”
All the potential side effects are limited to the site of the radiation. So far things are going well. I can’t give the doctor a good answer to increased urination frequency because I drink coffee and pee all day as a matter of course. In answer to his next question I do respond, “Why yes, doctor, I have noticed an increase in flatulence and a bit of loosening of the stool.”
I answer him back in that kind of doctor talk, but the nurse is there along with a nurse in training. What I really want to tell him is “Sweet ma-mau, Doc! I have been ripping
Willcox / 31
off some incredible farts! I’m talking about getting 10s from the North Korean judges for these beauties. It creates a zone of death out to about 20 feet on a no-wind day. Awesome. The only thing that keeps me from going out for the Olympics is the loose stool business. I think they disqualify you if you shit in your pants.”
Since I can’t tell him that, I just sit there thinking about it for a few seconds with tears in my eyes, trying not to laugh out loud. When he asks if I’m okay, I just ask him again if anyone has ever reported feeling the radiation.
“No, impossible.”
The machine moves to the left to give blasts four, five, and six in a mirror image of what he did on the right side. After the last zap he hums his way back up to the vertical. Goodbye smiley face and Psalms 46. I pull up my boxers and try to modestly reposition my dueling gowns. I hate getting off that table because there is no way to do so modestly, much less gracefully. Well, I suppose I could roll off like a log coming off a flatbed truck. No one has indicated any interest in my inability to modestly dismount, but it’s the principle of the thing.
Mark is adjusting the computer for the next patient and asks me again if I’m going to do a tile. I tell him that I’m still thinking about it, and I really am. I’ve been thinking of a few different passages from the Bible. John 3:16 has always been a favorite of mine, but I think you have to be sitting in the end zone of a televised football game to cite that one. I love the “faith, hope, and love” conclusion to 1 Corinthians 13. That would be a good one. It would be nice to do something encouraging for others who will be lying here. Some of those folks have a hard road in front of them. Part of me wants to hook up with a graphic artist and explore the possibilities of illustrating a lethal cloud but I’m having a hard time making that encouraging.
Maybe when I get to treatment 40 and am 95.24 per cent complete, I’ll have a better idea.
Displaced
Matt Tucker
We live in a big white matchbox, just like everyone else in the water’s path. All those in our matchbox neighborhood talk of what was lost, what was saved— who was lost, who was saved.
Most eyes are moist.
We’ve been displaced, Mom says. Moved again like a puzzle piece that doesn’t quite fit anywhere. Maybe we’re in the wrong puzzle.
The water evicted us this time: An impatient landlord who gives no extensions. So we float upon the floods in our matchbox ark, looking for dry land.
The ground is never firm when you’ve been displaced.
Herculean
Marie Liberty
Shaking the brown Cavendish
Like rustling leaves
From the relic oak
He sits in the depression
Where pieces of stuffing
Poke from the holes
As he puffs on his pipe
Posing as though
Pugilist the Boxer
Ready to battle demons
But finding instead
Time has turned
His tobacco stained hands
To stone.
A Poet’s Flight of Fancy
Deborah R. Majors
The Thought comes and rests behind my eyes. It is pleasing and profound, vivid and wise as a chin-rub followed by a head-nod. This perfect phrase will chalk a sketch and lead the few (maybe more) to whisper the secrets of this pastel vision.
Where’s paper?
Any kind will do: napkin, movie ticket, tampon wrapper, grocery list, a dollar bill—
I plunge my eager hand inside the black hole, shoulder slung, where the coldness of sunglasses, leather Buxton wallet, and plastic makeup pouch scolds me for tidying up the night before, banishing lint, pennies, Tic-Tacs, and all paper (even gum foil).
I should know better.
One more dive retrieves a Bic hiding in the seam—Ah!
I’ll use my skin to canvas the words! But I’m arrogant; I blink (once). And in the thought’s place, Grief sits behind my eyes on a straight-backed Shaker chair, head bowed low, soaking her feet in a metal foot tub, pink, yellow, and blue chalk dust slow ly swirl ing upon the surface of the water, tinting her swollen ankles.
Sandpaper
Kyra Candell
You hold onto your qualifications
Your pride and insecurity
Your works built on sand, waiting for high tide
You keep your judgments, the sterile reservations they’re keeping you from love
Like a couch restrained by its plastic cover you can’t break the barrier to let others be comfortable It risks having to patch up some tears in the future
If you could give grace like you’ve been shown accept that we are messy, all of us bruised like overripe fruit flawed like unrefined silver rough on the edges like old sandpaper, and know there is nothing wrong with that
Name Day
Marie Liberty
I was small then, a rail child
Mere tumbleweed, the wind
Rattled my lungs and left me
Gasping for air, like love
A silent emotion moving
Through the tracks, a train
With no passengers, No
Los Angeles was there
A place to call home, Daddy
Capital D, not like mommy
Lower case m, you were
Important, my iron jawed
Father, God among men
Creator of my dimpled chin
And my name, Laura
Child of laurels, sorrowful
One, not as holy as Mary
The virgin, a name given
By my mother, whispered
To her by the angels, written
The day of my birth, a name
To keep me clean, washed
In the pure blood of Jesus.
Tortured Bliss II / Blue Boy
Denielle Bergens-Harmon
acrylic
Mack Bayou Patricia Castelain
The First Time I Made Sushi
Abstract #1
Melba Thompson
watercolor
Cana Lily Sharon D. James acrylic
Cinched Anita Hester
raku / dyed silk
Endless Power
black and white photography
Maria B. Morekis
Reflections Mo Dao
Milo Joan Kordich pastel
Sherry, Seated in Profile
Dara North charcoal and white conte
Blossoms Ray Stuber
Dreaming of Childhood in a Time of War
Adam Thair Stevens
digital image
Transformation
Candice Joslin
digital image
Sequoias I Becky Word collage
The Matter at Hand
Reid Tucker
In the mornin’ you go gunnin’
For the man who stole your water
And you fire till he’s done in
But they catch you at the border.
And the mourners are all singin
As they drag you by your feet,
But the hangman isn’t hangin’
And they put you on the street.
- “Do it Again” Steely Dan
It was hot in the desert. We stood apart from each other, and I had my eyes on his head, his hat slid down low. He looked up at me with his brown-on-brown, flat-nosed and stubbly peasant’s face. He looked older than his twenty-six years. I’m sure I did too. I could see him sweat, a waste he could no longer afford. I could hardly believe what I had said. It was a real piss cutter of a spot we were in, and I would do what I had to, but after it was all said and done with, we were friends. More than that: partners.
“C’mon now, Frank, y’know it’s the only way,” I mumbled.
“I c-can’t b’lieve that, Eli. It-it aint nobody’s fault that them fornicating horses ran off in the night like they did… but they did, an’ we gotta work together on this or it’s gon’ get muy mal out here.” He sort of blushed, not that I cared. He was always real careful to mask over his ma’s half of who he was when he spoke, though it was plainer than hell to anyone his name was rightly Francisco. Sometimes when he got excited Frank would start to run his words together, like it did this time, and that last “here” got drug high up in his mouth into a “heeeer.” I guess I was the only person Frank ever met that didn’t get bothered by him being a half-breed, and when you’re half Mexican that really makes you at least a quarter Indian and a quarter Catholic. You’re superstitious by course of nature, whether you like it that way or not.
“Work together! You were the one supposed to have covered Ish when he went up to the door!” I screamed through my splitting lips.
“Th, that’s a whole different deal, Eli. You weren’t supposed to go in first. The kid was to hold everyone down while you was in the back getting the money, but you went and changed the plan on me. How could I cover him? I didn’t have a clear shot without hittin’ one of the people in the bank! I didn’t know what was goin’ on…till, till it was over with.” He always had excuses, even when we was kids. Now it was different.
Frank got this real sullen look about him. He was the best rifle I knew, but that didn’t stop him from not covering my kid brother Ishmael back at the bank. The kid wanted to be the one to kick in the door, wanted to prove, to me, I guess, that he was just as much some kind of hard case as his big brother. Yeah. He wasn’t even supposed to have been there in the first place, but when I came home to make peace with Pa about all the years between us, it didn’t go nowhere. It never did with the old man. Slap drunk as always, he was half-dead looking now. I hadn’t seen my old man in six years. I got right hot and stormed back to the hotel where Frank had gotten us some rooms. Ish had went ahead of me; he’d run away, just like I had.
“Pa’s a drunk,” he had kept saying; God knows the wind wouldn’t let me forget his eyes staring at his toes. “I hate him on account of what he put you through with all the drinkin’, Eli, and how he treated me after you left.”
That had just about killed me there. Sure, our old man had beaten me good more time’n I’d care to count, but what had he done to my brother over the span of those six years that I’d been gone? It was one of those things where a man don’t think and can’t think. I didn’t know what was worse, to tell the kid that there was nothin’ for him riding with us, nothin’ for ourselves, really, or to bring him along. Frank was well past run down drunk and had spilled the plan to Ish before I got there, and when my kid brother, barely sixteen, looked me straight in the eyes like a man and said that he was in for the bank because he was in with me, I couldn’t help but grab his skinny back and cling to him. I held my brother
close to me, not since he was little had I hugged him like that. I clapped Ish on the back. I saw him wince. Frank smiled and pulled out a brace of tumblers and a bottle, and we made our plans to hit the bank.
I stared off, squinting at the sun and could feel the itching dryness start to grow in my throat. We were still a long way from Mexico, and not far enough out of the reach of the territory’s lawmen.
“Eli, you all right? The sun’s getting high and . . . ” He trailed off.
He knew I wanted him dead because he had let my brother get killed but couldn’t do it just yet. There was still too much ground to cover, and without the horses there wasn’t much we could do. Not much I could do, that is. Frank was the damn local boy; he’d grown up around the pueblos south of the desert. It’d been two days without the horses, since they had run off with all the food and my rifle and Frank’s and most all the water. We only had left whatever was in the canteens and I had give most of mine to Ish while he lay there dying, his guts shot through. I don’t want to go that way. It wasn’t a pretty thing to see.
I turned back around on Frank; I had gotten over my spell for the moment. I looked him dead in the eyes, said, “I guess we don’t have much of a choice, here. Looks like you’re right, Frank.” I turned around and put my hand to my brow, as if I expected to see every deputy sheriff in two territories ride over the hill. “I guess we have to keep on going.”
He looked a little better, his eyes a little less rheumy and a little wider. He still spoke haltingly. “I know, Eli. It’s this desert and that sun. It’s getting to me, too. We just have to keep on for the border. That storm threw ‘em off our trail for sure. Once we get to Mexico, to Los Conches, then we’ll be all right.” He smiled a little at me. The sun made it look more like a sneer. Just as well with me.
He moved over a little closer to me and clapped me on the back, like he used to when we were twelve and had just met. Frank and I made fast friends. It was better that way; I had always thought don’t sweat the details. Ish had shown me all about the details.
“Ish was like a brother to me too, Eli. You can’t kill yourself over it; it was just one of them things. There wasn’t nothing you could’ve done. He was so excited, cierto ? He didn’t know what was at stake. He didn’t keep his nose clean, didn’t look out for trouble. You got to watch your back, Muchacho . Es la verdad .”
I looked up at him and he could see the red around my eyes. “That was your job . . . mine,” I whispered more than said out loud. It hurts so bad for your eyes to water out here, even a little. That sun is just awful, almost white it was so hot in the sky, and I could feel my eyelids burn. When that happens your eyes got no choice but to water; it’s just how a man is made. It was the sun. Nothing else.
“Let’s go.”
I smiled at him, only half meaning it, and my lip started to bleed a little. It dried almost instantly, caked on over the dust. He turned around slowly and grabbed his sleeping bag from the ground beside the acacias we had slept under, and I could see that his brow was still a little crooked. I had gotten to him bad when I had told him what would have to happen when one of us ran out of water. He still wore that deer-horn handled knife, and I recalled he wasn’t one to share. After Ish died, I find I’m not no Good Samaritan, neither.
We put that trouble behind us for the moment and walked into the hellish midmorning light, gathered up what little provisions we had left and just started walking. Just like we had for two days. Thank God I still had my compass. It did get a little cracked, though, but it still worked. We were headed in a southeasterly direction, but I’d catch myself start to drift to one side or the other after a while, almost like I was nodding off while I was still walking. Frank was somewhere to my left, I wasn’t sure exactly, but I had a feeling that after this morning I would want him to be in front of me and to the right, and I think he would just as soon have me in the same spot, but it wasn’t going to happen, I would make sure he stayed in front. I had to stay upright, awake, or else he might get nervous, and I didn’t need that right now; I had too much to think about, or
so I thought. I shook my head, tried to throw off some of the tiredness, but it was down in my bones so it stayed and turned to lead inside me.
It’s funny how the sun dances like a little white needle in your eyes, even when you lower your head. It’s just like a nail from a bucket of ice water only it’s in between your eyebrows and there’s no hammer’ll pull it out. Water. Now that sounded good. I’d even drink around the nails. The desert makes you taste things; it’s a funny deal, really. It starts with a little grit in your throat, back beyond where your fingers can reach, and when you go to swallow, you realize you can’t and then it stops playing its little tickling game, and then you dry-gag until you snort some snot in the roof of your mouth and then it tastes just as awful as you might imagine. It tasted like the sun had melted and had let itself mix together with all the dirt and rock and blood in the world all rolled in a ball down to that spot you can’t reach and then it stays there. I thought I might die. Looking up, I saw him there, not swaying half so bad, and knew I couldn’t. Not yet.
You hear things out here too. We stopped about dusk under the burnt orange shade of the one rock outcropping we could find and moved with the shadow. We just kind of lay there and rolled over to the newly darkened spots. When red things get shadowed over at dusk they turn purple, like a chancre. We didn’t say nothing to each other. I tried to sleep a bit, though I knew I shouldn’t. My concerns won out and so I lay there on the baked but cooling orange sand with a little rock in my back. I was too tired to move and watched through eyes like slits in canvas what my old buddy Frank was doing. He only snored and didn’t seem all that bad off, leastways not worried about much, it seemed. His lips didn’t look quite as swollen as mine. The brim of his hat bounced a bit when he exhaled and his earth-bleached poncho floated in the air like a windowsill hummingbird around the edges of the hem. So I listened to what the sun and the dust were trying to tell me.
Some of it sounded like my old man slamming down a flagon or a board across my back or my own nightly screams as
Tucker / 59
a child when he’d been drinking. The wind played a little breeze for me, and I could almost hear the hushed, smiling whispers of a girl I knew one time, not long after I left home. We had looked at each other after we were done, and she put her hand on my chest and swirled the sweat around and gotten right close up against me and told me she loved me. Her hair was on my chest and it smelt like cinnamon and autumn leaves. I knew I didn’t feel the same way, that it was just too good an afternoon and too nice a shade tree with grass beneath it too cool to pass up. I had left town the next day, and she had cried for me and I still didn’t never look back. A man don’t get anyplace looking over his shoulder, though that was just what we had been doing, Frank and I. We hid from our own pasts. He never knew his old man, but knew he was white. We was always on the run from something. This was supposed to be the big breakout job.
The plan was a simple one, it seemed at the time: we would wait for the wagon from back east to come with the gold bars and new fresh-pressed money for the safe. It only came to town every few months, though I tried to hide these reasons for my homecoming from Ish. Once the gold and money was unloaded, it usually took the bank workers at least three hours to get everything straight, and on those days they didn’t open until the goods was all locked up. Basically, we hit them when the doors first opened: 12:00, straight up noon. Hell, it was perfect, the confusion and all. Even Ish was excited, though it may have been because that was the first time he’d ever been drunk. Hell, we was all drunk. We could count the money already, me most of all, now that Ish was with me again. I would head down to Mexico, buy me up a nice hacienda by the coast and find a woman who knew how to cook and was worth being faithful to and give my brother a home he could love.
Thinking about my brother got the sun’s attention, and it drummed up the wind to howl in my ear like my brother’s voice in the night when he was little and had a nightmare. He’d come to me and I would take him back to bed, tuck him in. That was before I left home. It was Frank’s idea, though I had thought about it plenty. That was back before Ma died of
the fever and Pa took to seeing the world in various shades of amber from out the bottom of a tumbler. It’s no wonder that Ish wanted to get out. I did. The old man was meaner than a scalded dog when he was in the mash and he tended to stay that way. I guess we all grieve differently. Mostly what it is, is that when you lose something that’s a part of you, you fill it up with something else. Unfortunately for me and Ish that happened to be whiskey for Pa. For me, it was the plains and the sky and a gun. For Ish it was nothing, because he never got the chance to really hold nothin’ dear and close and tight against his heart. The man whose fault it was lay snoring near to me in the eddying twilight. I watched him again.
Frank just kept on lying there, and the sun started to go down earnestly, and I decided I might as well see if there wasn’t a rabbit or a bird or a snake or anything around that could be eaten. I still had my gun, at least. I could still kill something. The horses had Frank’s rifle. I think he must’ve been born with that thing in his hands; it was a pristine Henry lever .45. He had worn it on his back the day I first met him, along with that crazy shaman-knife. He probably killed whoever he took it from; you don’t just find stuff like that when you’re twelve. He never missed, excepting when he didn’t shoot at all. I turned back to look at him and he was still asleep, though he had rolled over to the left some and he had stuffed a little more of his poncho underneath his head. I still had my gun and Frank still had his poncho, so I guess we were even. I left my coat in the desert a long way back. I couldn’t stand the smell of it with my brother’s blood all over it, especially in the desert where you can’t even smell your own self rot, which by now must’ve surely been underway. I reached up and rubbed my chin, noticed my nails were jagged and two on my left hand were bleeding from being cracked in the sun.
I looked around the little copse ahead and saw a pretty good sized jackrabbit leap up from under a burnt-out bush and saw it dash across the rocks to a hole near where I was standing. My hand went for the revolver and I pivoted on my right, stiffened up my left foot and slipped a little. The dying
Tucker / 61
sun came down and smacked my eyeballs like an anvil, and the rabbit took his chance and ran straight between my legs to the little hole in the boulder. Oh, well, other rabbits out there, and I hadn’t had to waste a shot. Only had five left after the bank. We had to fight our way out. That’s one reason why I usually don’t get too drunk; when a man’s drunk, he tends to not hear how loud his voice carries. It was an ambush at the bank, though Frank didn’t want to believe it. I put the gun back in the holster and started to walk off when I heard an unusual sound: coins against a countertop. It sounded hollow and full, like an apple, maybe. My eyes narrowed and I ducked behind the rock the rabbit had run underneath, ducked down and watched Frank roll over, I could hear it in the stillness of the sunset, a faint tinkling, like metal against the stone underneath him. The knife? I crouched and waited and he did not move. I didn’t hear the sound again. My stomach growled and I got up to look for another rabbit. I found one, blew his head clean off.
Frank woke up when he heard the shot. A thought occurred to me later as I watched Frank eat the rabbit’s left leg how ridiculously uncomfortable he looked in that big poncho. He was never without that poncho; it looked pretty out of place on him, since he didn’t have a sombrero like a proper caballero, I had always ribbed him about that, that he only had an old slouch hat and all proper Mexicans have sombreros. Only I could say something like that to Frank. I told him he could hide a mama bear in that thing it was so big and brown and stinky, why, I bet you could hide anything in it. That tinkling sounded again as he moved to poke the fire. He froze up and he winced like he hurt himself slightly and I didn’t say anything, just chewed on a piece of meat, but I knew and he knew.
We had, as of that evening, one whole coffee cup worth of water left, and we were still somewhere in the desert, no idea where, just nowhere near to the river or consequently the border. There was still no sign of the horses. All that work was for nothing, I guess, since the horses had all the money we had managed to lift from the bank just thrown up in bags and strapped across their backs, plain as day for the whole world to
see. I would kill to see those horses again. I’d kill to see anyone again, anything, to feel anything other than that empty copper coin in my mouth telling me that if we didn’t find water we were as good as dead. Mostly, though, I just wanted to be out of this desert. I didn’t speak to Frank. He knew I hadn’t forgotten, only that I suspected what he was hiding. I hadn’t seen it, nor did I have any real proof for that matter, only that you’d think that two men who’d grown up together and rode together for so long and been through so much would have a little something to say to each other, since it appeared as though we were as good as dead as you could legally be. Any half-decent excuse, God. Please. Just let me know for sure, and that’s all, even more than the horses or water or money or anything else, just let me know for sure.
We walked on a ways more, since we had rested most of the afternoon and the night was as relatively comfortable as it could be. The desert was still bad, but it was just bearable enough to taunt a man with his life and how thin the string that kept his backside out of the devil’s teeth. Maybe. I sipped the tiniest thimbleful of water into my parchment dry throat, swollen now so that I felt like some kind of bullfrog puffing himself up. I had to stop thinking like that, all these things to do with water. It was how I knew I was dying.
I could see in the mid-dusk haze that Frank was indeed ahead of me and slightly off center. All right, but I must’ve been walking the same way, a plodding lope. It had to have been this way for a long time but I never thought about it till now, how little a man has to actually think about walking. He just sort of does it, on and on forever, past the blisters on his little toes and the loss of feeling in his ankles and that same icepick piss-cutting sun. I looked up and saw the clouds at night, and there were no stars, no bright spots in that black quilt, just rows and rows of phantom whispers that hid our shapes as we made our way through the desert calm. It was dim in the night with no moon, and the world was a strange shade of gray that seeped down into your bones and lumped together with the tiredness that was already and always there, and together
Tucker / 63
they slogged into the sand that clung at our feet as we walked. I tried to swallow. It didn’t work and I stopped, gagging, retched, fell to my knees and hacked, hacked till blood heaved up on the ground. The dust didn’t begin to swirl. I could feel Frank standing there, and as he got closer I could see his boot there in front of me. In the darkness it looked like everything was the same color, a deadened, dusty gray-brown. His boot looked like the frayed maw of a tomb.
“Eli,” was all he said, and I looked up slowly at him. He had a nervous look on his face, the worst I’d ever seen him, the worst way a man can look when things get bad. I’d never seen him this bad.
“Yeah,” I croaked, again with the frogs. Water. I retched again, but he just stood there. I think he must’ve known that if he bent over to help me up, he might never stand up again. It was exactly what I was thinking. Unless . . . unless my suspicions were true. I might almost forgive him for all that had happened if he would help me up. God, at least don’t let me die on my knees. I stood up as best I could, trembling in the warmth of the evening before my oldest and best friend in the world. “What. Were. You. Gonna. Say?”
“I just, you fell and, well . . . ” I saw his hand move hesitantly toward his waist, but stopped at the hem of his poncho and gripped it, like he was holding on for dear life. I guess he was, but my life too. “We’ve been walking most of the night, Eli. The sun’ll be up in an hour or two. Maybe you better rest some.”
“Rest!” I coughed. I wiped more blood off the back of my hand. “For what? Why lay down and die in your sleep when I could die walking?” His eyes darted down to his boots. His hand still gripped his poncho. I wiped the blood on my pants and dust puffed up. He was right, though; you could see the sun starting to wake up across the flat. I hoped it was good and rested up. I had a feeling today would be the day. I glanced up at the sky. “None yet, but they’ll be here soon.”
“W-what’s that, Eli?”
I laughed. It hurt bad, and he broke a little smile on
his face, a little secret-keeping smile, and his lips were barely chapped. I could see it now clearly, despite the wind and the dimness of the coming dawn. Did he think I was that stupid? “What’s that?” I hacked. “The buzzards, Hermano.”
He blanched, got even duskier, said, “Why did you go and say that? It’s not enough that I have to think it, too.” What, Frank, Ish or the buzzards? Christ.
“What’s the problem, Camarada?” I said, finally recovered enough to stand up straight. I looked him in the eye again, like I hadn’t since we were kids, and there was nothing between us except a trust you only have when you’re a boy that your best friend is more than your blood; he’s other people’s blood to you and that, I had learned, was stronger than anything, that trust. Shame I didn’t have that kind of faith any longer. “You got some kind of problem with things living? The buzzards’ got to eat,” I said shooting a glance at the ground and then glaring in his face, “same as the worms.”
His hand came away from his poncho. “What exactly do you mean?”
“What I mean exactly is that I’m going to die. Or you are, too. We’ve been three days without the horses, and the whole plan went to hell, and that’s a shame, a real shame, because we could’ve made off like bandits.” I thought bitterly that anyone who would’ve heard me say that just now might have laughed. I saw my brother’s face in the haze. I didn’t think it was funny.
Frank got a little bolder, yelled, and spit, honest to the gentle Jesus, spit hit my jaw. “And what? What? It’s my fault you didn’t grab all the money? That we got away at all after the kid messed everything up is a miracle. Who ever heard of just running in the door someplace, not even looking around? I could see the shine on that deputy’s badge from the hill through naked sights!”
That did it for me, right there. The sky was beginning to see a tinge of color, and I narrowed my eyes. “I knew you could see the deputy, that you just didn’t shoot. You could’ve saved my brother’s life! He looked up to you, Frank; he trusted you.”
/
“He was dead already when he took up with you, Cabron!” He screamed, spittle that I couldn’t muster flying in my face, and his voice spilled into a stream of Spanish I couldn’t follow, then, “Why don’t you heap a little of this blame on yourself, Eli? He was your brother, sabes? Not that that meant much to you, Cobarde, you—you coward. Back there with all the money, you didn’t even come running at the sound of a shot! He was laying on the floor and you were in the vault and you still didn’t get all the money! Whose fault is all this?”
I hated that he was right. The wind let me know it, too. It moaned beyond the line of the desert, and I felt for my compass, saw Frank tense up. Not yet, you dog, not yet. I’ll not draw yet. I’m not through with you. I was fast, and he knew.
“Why don’t you show me what you got under that poncho, Frank? Maybe I’ll help,” I said as I fished in my pocket for the compass. Where was it? I averted my eyes from Frank, peered down at my desert-blasted pants and opened the pocket as wide as it would go. The compass wasn’t there. No telling how long we’d walked through the night, no telling where it might have fallen out, but it clearly wasn’t here anymore. That made the situation all the better. Now I had no idea where we were. Not a soul in creation for who knows how far in any direction except me and Frank and looking up I got the feeling that the count was going to be down by one. And fast.
Frank had this crazy look to him. Like he had seen something ugly but couldn’t look away. He knew for sure what it meant, now, that there was no compass. But he still must’ve thought he had an edge, the edge that I was dying to get a hold of myself. I stared him down as the first rays of the sun crept over the top of the hills. The sun was in my eyes and I squinted, spat. That was the first spit I’d had in days. It hurt like hell –sandpaper and salt.
“What happened to the compass, Eli?”
“What have you got under that poncho?”
He didn’t say anything. Neither did I.
“It’s not what you think…”
My eyes opened wide, took in the full breadth of the
sun, a rail iron in my eye. He moved slowly and threw the poncho back, like he would do if he was drawing a gun, only I knew he didn’t have one; it was back on the horse, wherever in hell that was. I saw it there, just as I had thought, the big leather water pouch with the fat tin mouthpiece, the one that had laid across the back of the horse. “It’s exactly what I thought, Frank. You were waiting for me to die so you could take the compass and get out. You let the horses go, didn’t you?” His eyes went wide. “I knew it was too much to believe that the wind had just blown over that limb they was tied off to. The same reason why you let Ish die, and the same reason why you were going to let me rot alive out here, while you nursed that skin and got out of the desert. You’d never have to split the money with a soul, assuming you could find the horses, but you knew right where they would go; you’re from around here, after all. You probably met up with some of your old pals before we met back at the hotel, didn’t you? You might have had to share some of the gold with them, but you’re too good a shot for that, and too fast with that knife. Everyone has to sleep, is that it?” He kept staring, like he expected me to say, “What happened to you, Frank?” like I still cared about the condition of his soul. Francisco Juan Pacifico-Ramirez was a dead man.
His mouth quavered a little in the heat and he started to speak, but didn’t. It was time to settle the matter at hand. I could see a tear beginning to form in the corner of his right eye. What a foolish waste.
His mouth contorted in an awful sneer, and he got a worse look in his eyes and he leapt at my throat with a snarl, swung out his knife, wide, missed me by a good deal. I ducked back and he lunged forward. My hand went to the handle of the revolver, and I brought it up from the hip; it shone dull and dead in the sun, and I held my arm at a firm right angle with my finger along the barrel, pointed square at his chest, and in one swift motion cocked the gun back, pulled the trigger. The gun bucked in my hand, and I fanned the hammer two quick times with the trigger held down and the cordite flew in my face and the sun came up fully and though I squinted I couldn’t see Frank anymore, only heard him land with a hiss on the sand in front of me.
When the smoke and dust cleared I saw Frank on his knees, still gripping his knife, his mouth frothing over with reddened spittle and his lower lip quivered while he mouthed something unintelligible, sounded like “Uno mas, Cabron.” One more, bastard.
He was quiet, quit shaking. The three shots had torn a rough triangle out of his stomach and chest big enough to see through. Blood had mixed with the dirt all in front of him. My .45 had done the trick.
I smirked, confident despite my exhaustion, and my lips bled. I only held the smirk for a second, and then I stopped. Because through the hole in him I saw the sand get wet behind him and it wasn’t red. Then I looked at him, gasped, not believing it, looked at the gun in my hand, saw the one bullet left and looked back at him. His eyes rolled over and looked like eggs in his sockets. Then he smiled with his bad teeth like the devil must smile and he died.
From Beyond a Cobalt Sun
Reid Tucker
Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark: Let it look for light, but have none; neither let it behold the eyelids of the morning. – Job 3:9
Far past the deep dimness of the morning we knew, There is a stirring along the wind we call a dream, A twinkling light in the folds of sleep, A spark, a crackling caress, and I awake. The peristaltic shiver of untold heats and pressures Are nothing here in this coffin-enclosure Hurtling down unknown roads away from you.
I’m sweating. I gasp for breath, shivering in the void. It’s quiet and cold without, but it’s the silence inside that hurts,
The quiet in the dark that kills, strapped against the speed. Here I am; me and the rest of the sleeping ones. Dreams don’t come out here so neither does rest. Even if you change, even if I’m somehow different by the end of this
I still need you, love.
More than duty, more than peace or breath, more than the earth that was; Because you’re everything. And so I close my eyes and float along the wind we call a dream,
Down into circling, wakeful sleep.
Like the staring eyelids of morning that was I glare into a future of necessity
Beyond the distant, cobalt-shaded sun.
Last Call
Thomas Leighton
Raise your glass, friend, before you go
To twilight at the Golden Horn
Our days are always like this
Endless hours merging seamlessly with one another like grains of sand
Filtered through cracked, yellowed glass and trailing dust
In the haze of afternoon sunlight, and in shadow
Vestiges drifting beneath the door to mingle like ghosts in the night
Comfort wears like weathered oak on my fingertips
Unvarnished by the passing of ages and careless transients
Spilling, carving, restless, always on their way
Or the regulars who’ve traded their tomorrows for today
Never look too closely at the faces in the crowd
Drink with us; be with us, live as we do before everything melts away again
And there are only desperate souls seeking answers to the questions that plague them
We are of a mind, those of us who drink together in this place
Together in laughter, in easy camaraderie
Together in destruction, each of us dying privately, quietly
United under smoke and solitude, the brotherhood of the bar
The distance in our eyes as cold and vast as the space around the stars
We are all just marking time
Searing, falling, remembering halcyon days we can never reach again
The lights wink out one by one at the Golden Horn
But the music plays on in my mind, trailing haunting chords like weeping angels
Such joy, such boundless sorrow
The endless, rapturous noise of all my murdered tomorrows I’ll wait till sunlight spills through those narrow, broken windows again
Counting the hours and days, tracing forever the fraying thread of conversation
The scarred and battered wood beneath my fingertips And the song, the beautiful song that echoes always in my mind
The voices of angels, despairing of lost Eden, and the knowledge that I am never alone
So raise your glass, friend, and drink to eternity
Drink to you and me, to the times we’ve had and all those yet to come
To easy days, to long nights in the company of fellows
*First place, James and Christian LaRoche Memorial Poetry Contest, 2008
Leighton / 71
We Live by the Sparkling Sea
Maria Geneve Steele
Not twenty yards from Ms. Luci’s beach house poor Aaron splashed in the water, letting the filth from his body form oily rings around him, like rings of Saturn. He leapt from the water to grasp at things invisible and in doing so, revealed his nakedness. He waved with both hands above his head and imitating him exactly, Ms. Luci waved back.
Aaron was striking, with skin like dark honey poured over lean musculature, long dreadlocks and gray eyes that reflected the passive green of our water, or the cool Caribbean blue of our sky, or the sugary blond of our beaches.
But these physical attributes did not impress the Luci Company Caterers who, despite the early morning hour, were already setting up for Ms. Luci’s eightieth birthday party, to take place that evening. Thinking of the summer tourists and Ms. Luci’s house guests, the caterers called the police.
Officer Beal, a large pasty man in his mid-forties, arrived and greeted the Luci Company Caterers with a nod and a somber look in the direction of poor naked Aaron. The officer’s rayon blue suit stretched across his ever-expanding midsection. He talked very seriously, but he still had flecks of powdered donut on his lips. As he spoke, bits of donut fell down his wobbly chin, onto his suit, onto the ground. Like many people who cannot afford to properly feed their sense of entitlement, Officer Beal ate copious amounts of tasty junk. He ate to release the same chemicals that might be released on an expensive vacation or walking through the entrance into one’s own lavish home.
The officer’s presence did not seem to detour Aaron; he continued to splash and throw his head back to laugh, though no sound emerged. The officer looked at Ms. Luci in her wheelchair; she was swaddled in a white nightgown. He stood akimbo, all but forgetting his purpose. He began talking to the caterers about his boyhood, about his days spent in Ms. Luci’s house when she was a handsome woman, a tall solid brunette
who looked strong enough for farm work, even in a silk dress. He said that his own father knew Ms. Luci well and he paused to add quietly, “In the Biblical sense.”
At her society parties a young and then-wiry Beal was left alone to crawl beneath furniture and to eat whatever he liked and to throw fits until an adult would let him sip their bourbon or gin. The officer chuckled to himself remembering these things.
Officer Beal thought of himself as a kind of rambunctious Opie turned reliable Andy in our sandy Mayberry. No one else thought of him this way.
Seeing that the officer was otherwise absorbed, Aaron squatted in the shallow water, defecated, and then rolled himself to shore, plastering his body with saltwater foam and sand. He stood up and gave the group an eyeful, thrusting his hips back and forth, wildly gyrating and swinging his arms left and right to get momentum going. His sand-caked private part seemed like a thing detached from him, something that attacked him violently. At this Officer Beal gave chase.
The two ran along the beach for several minutes with increasing distance between them until finally the officer slowed to a stop, looked left and right and then took something from his pocket and began to chew.
Officer Beal returned to Ms. Luci’s house and leaned against—guarded—the telephone post, which he knew to be a favorite spot for Aaron. A year earlier, Ms. Luci had protested the telephone post, which came within inches of her front lawn and was by all accounts aesthetically stale. This argument was, at least publicly, our town’s greatest embarrassment. A terrible disgrace for me who has done so much for all of you, she had said, her words forming around us like black tar.
But in her physical and influential decline, she lost.
To make things worse for the old woman, troubled Aaron took a liking to the new post, rubbing himself against it so often that much of the bottom portion was stained with his seed. This, of course, was unacceptable. Still, his cries when hauled away–disparaging moans–made many onlookers envious. Love, it seems, needs none of our logic.
Steele / 73
Later in the morning Ms. Luci’s house guests woke slowly and came to say hello, giving her quick kisses on the cheek and running to the beach, wiping her old smell from their noses. They first appeared several months ago, when Ms. Luci went still: chatty aunties and drowsy uncles, first, second and third cousins, distant cousins of cousins and twice removed persons of people once known.
If the guests behaved well it was only because Ms. Luci’s doctor said that more often than not and especially with new medicines, catatonics wake up. So the family tiptoed around her as if her eyes were video cameras, filming things that would surely be played back.
Still, when there were no adults in sight, the smaller children would climb on Ms. Luci like a jungle gym. They grabbed her frizzy hair to help themselves up; they clutched at her breasts and found them far too loose for support. They poked and pinched at her craggy skin and stared at her for a long time, playing a game. They pointed at objects far in the distance and tried to turn her head to look. Sometimes, if a little one was tired, they fell asleep on her lap, rested their heads on her chest and snored gently for a few minutes before a parent snatched them up, leaving a film of perspiration that cooled as it dried.
The older children were not so kind. They took advantage of the fact that the only movements or sounds Ms. Luci made were imitations. There are medical terms for these symptoms–echopraxia, echolalia–but the children did not know this, or care.
Occasionally an adolescent boy would stand before Ms. Luci and throw a punch, coming so close to her nose that his knuckles tingled. Just as suddenly, Ms. Luci would throw her fist forward. The boy would add to his repertoire, saying loudly, “Hi-ya!...Hi-ya!” and be met with a predictable response: the old woman, yelling like Bruce Lee. This sent the boy and his friends howling, rolling on the ground.
If Ms. Luci would not play this game, then they would pose her extremities, making her give a military salute with
right hand to forehead or worship the Almighty with both hands thrown up. More commonly, though, they made her say Fuck You to the world with both gnarled middle fingers upright. If the children were not run off by Ms. Luci’s caretaker or a sober adult, the old woman was liable to stay in these poses for hours at a time.
Most days, though, were quiet, with Ms. Luci parked at the edge of the lanai, in the shade of a live oak, her gray hair like Spanish moss falling past her shoulders, her bare feet planted in the sand. Surrounding her were neatly trimmed shrubs of juniper, prickly pear and American beautyberry. Above her was an arch of coral vine and hanging lantana. Oxblood lilies bloomed. Ms. Luci’s head was tilted to the side as if she was always listening to the ground, but her eyes remained fixed on the sea.
Tourists strolled by to admire her beautiful home. They did not know that she once owned a bank, that much of the town was named for her: Rue d’ Luci, Luci Mart, Luci’s Gas-NGo, Salon Luci` and so on and so forth. This naming scheme was a way for locals to offer her thanks for loaning them money and, too, a testament of the would-be businessmen who knew her, in the Biblical sense.
In the afternoon a storm formed just offshore, and the leaves of the live oak flipped to reveal their pale underside. The Luci Company Caterers put the meat on an outside fire, and the thick scent filled the air. Saliva pooled in Ms. Luci’s mouth and dripped leisurely down her cheek.
Ms. Luci’s caretaker, a middle-aged woman called Lila, who scheduled her days–and thus Ms. Luci’s days–around the latest reality television shows, came to feed her a thin soup. As Lila worked she whispered the latest gossip:
“Aaron was here this morning, naked. You know, he’s been ordered to stay away from your property and the telephone pole. But you can’t tell a schizoid to stay away. I mean, it’s not like the telephone pole can get a restraining order.” And Lila laughed out loud at her own joke.
Lila began to comb the old woman’s hair and told her the same story again, about how last week Aaron had found the
Steele / 75
telephone pole plastered with flyers advertising local bands, bars, strip joints and, strangely, Ms. Luci’s eightieth birthday party. Some of the local kids caught news of the party and planned to crash it, calling it LollapaLuci, what else? But Aaron raged, tearing the flyers from the pole and shredding them, making a mess all over Ms. Luci’s front lawn. Aaron had punched and kicked the telephone pole and then pushed against it for a solid hour and then, in what seemed to be a guilt-ridden apology, knelt beside it and wept.
“Poor thing,” added Lila, which was her way of acknowledging both Ms. Luci and Aaron.
She was tying Ms. Luci’s hair in a loose bun when she heard a raspy voice behind her. “Aren’t you two the picture of loveliness?” he said, and Lila felt a wet kiss on the back of her neck. A chilly tongue like a snake’s flickered twice. Amo, Ms. Luci’s attorney, was making his visit. “How is it that I could have let such a pretty woman go all those years ago?” says Amo to Lila, trying to catch her eye and give her a wink. He seated himself on the bench beside Ms. Luci.
“Maybe it’s because I turned twenty,” said Lila, and with this she gathered the bowl, spoon and hairbrush and quickly left.
Amo chuckled to himself, leaned into Ms. Luci and said, “Before you, old girl, I was a good man.” If this is true, no evidence exists.
He had come as always to ensure things were in good order, that the so called family members were quietly enjoying their stay and not making claims to M. Luci’s property. Not that they could: in her will Ms. Luci provided only for her own meticulous upkeep and then, after her death, for the meticulous upkeep of her property.
Amo felt age gnawing at him and was the one to suggest a birthday party for Ms. Luci, for all our residents. Amo remembered the days when he was inculpable by association, when he swam in a steady stream of fleshy, experimental girls. His old worm rose slightly to pay homage to these memories but then, predictably, flopped back down. It is precisely this predicament that started Amo wishing
for Ms. Luci to wake again, as if he might reclaim his former virility with her consciousness.
Ms. Luci groaned, like she could hear his thoughts, and he put his hand over hers to quiet her. The storm was still off a good distance; he could see sheets of rain falling over the ocean to the west. It rarely rains here. The sea churns up weather, lifts it up and up and then over us to the small towns and forests to the north.
The afternoon heat had made Amo drowsy, and he took a handkerchief from his jacket to wipe his forehead. He wished Lila liked him enough to bring him iced tea. The winds stopped and the smoke from cooking meat covered them and soaked into his suit. Amo removed his jacket and folded it next to him. He covered his mouth to cough.
In the distance through the smoke he saw a wild-looking Aaron wearing a pair of stolen Hawaiian-print shorts, too baggy for his thin frame. He was making his way down the beach, sniffing the air. Amo knew the young man well since they once lived in the same neighborhood. This was when Aaron was then only son of a nice family, before his disease bore wormholes through his brain.
Aaron approached quickly, ten yards away, then five. Amo stood and shouted, as if to a stray dog, “Get outta here. Scat!” but already Aaron was standing in front of him.
They stood so close that Amo could smell the patchouli in his hair. There was an earthy woman who fed our few homeless downtown. She took a special liking to beautiful Aaron, tenderly rolling his dreadlocks with oil whenever he came around for a meal.
When Aaron first made lucky with the telephone post, Ms. Luci purchased a small pistol and confided in Amo her full intentions “to blow out the brains of that filthy mulatto mutt.” Amo tried to imagine the pistol and wished he knew where it was. In fact, he was terrified. The young man was full grown and stood a foot above him.
“I’m calling the cops,” said Amo finally, but even he did not believe these words. Aaron threw his head back to laugh,
Steele / 77
but no sound emerged. Ms. Luci did the same. Amo turned to her and when he turned back Aaron had snatched his jacket and was running down the beach, waving it high above his head as if flying a kite. Ms. Luci, clutching something invisible in her hands, did the same.
“Aren’t you a pair!” said Amo and he brought the handkerchief to his mouth to cough. “See you tonight, old girl.”
On the horizon towering clouds blocked the sun.
In the early evening Lila wheeled Ms. Luci into the house, humming a theme song from a television show that ended satisfactorily, in Lila’s opinion. In the bedroom she sniffed the old woman’s armpits. She was ripe. There was no time for a bath, and so Lila peeled off Ms. Luci’s gown and sprayed a thick layer of Lysol.
The Luci Company Caterers lit torches and laid out a buffet. Ms. Luci was wheeled back to the edge of the lanai, a blue taffeta dress slipping from her shoulders. The first guests to filter in were well-dressed acquaintances. They whispered in Ms. Luci’s ear, “My, you look lovely!” and took an opportunity to tour her expansive house, leaving her alone again.
At first they sipped their cocktails politely. Then the smell of meat and the free liquor and the storm brought out the more unruly, like little water bugs waiting until dark.
Officer Beal, off duty and loudly toasting this fact, wedged himself beneath the formal dining table and from this vantage tormented guests by batting at their legs, as would a playful cat. Three women tried to coax him out with cooing and chintickling and giggling. This attention made the situation worse and the officer began to fake a baby’s cry. Only when he realized that he was truly stuck did he throw an adult tantrum.
Several men took matters into their own hands and used a rusty chainsaw to cut the dining table in half. This noise, and the destruction, did something to the crowd. Something shifted, broke loose.
Ms. Luci’s doctor was there too and in the commotion managed to swipe a silver fork, three China saucers and one teaspoon. What a thrill, he thought.
/ Blackwater Review
Amo was chatting-up a young woman with a homely face and stupendous breasts. His comb over came unglued and hung to one side, like a broken wing. Subsequently, the young woman giggled at everything Amo said, even if it was not particularly funny. This imbued him with confidence. He leaned into her and pried open her teeth with his tongue and squeezed her breast tightly with one hand. It felt like warming jello.
“Now if you’ll excuse me,” she said, spitting, “I’ve got to go wash this taste out of my mouth.”
Amo, looking for some distraction, began opening drawers to the dining hutch. He walked into the living room and searched beneath each piece of furniture. He did this calmly, knowing that if he actually located the pistol he would certainly not use it. Perhaps he would just swipe it, or perhaps not. Just knowing where it was would satisfy him; it would give him some hint of the old woman’s thoughts before she slipped away. He went to Ms. Luci’s bedroom, shooed away two frisky locals and began searching through her closet. Where would an old woman hide her pistol?
He would not find it. The day Ms. Luci intended to use it on Aaron was the day she tossed it into the sea. She had set a trap of food for the amorous young man and waited until he visited his post. She watched from her window as he stepped onto her lawn and picked through the melon and slices of roast beef and French bread. He was without shirt or shoes. Rather than shoot him, Ms. Luci opened her door and invited him in. Aaron let himself be led back to her room where, without warning, she pointed the gun at him and jerked down his shorts. He froze and could not move as the old woman tickled him until she had her way. She tied him up, even, keeping him for the entire day and into the night. She released him finally into custody, and he was hauled away in silence.
It was 3 a.m. and the lightening storm brought the crowd outside. Ms. Luci’s birthday cake looked as though it had been pounded with a fist. Someone had put a paper birthday hat on her, tilted sideways. She was covered in party streamers and a whistle had been placed in her mouth.
Steele / 79
Aaron stood before Ms. Luci, swathed in a variety of clothes he’d found throughout the day: the Hawaiian print shorts were tied with a small rope; he wore Amo’s jacket and a polka-dot neck tie, but no shirt. He held a large turkey leg in one hand and with the other pointed at Ms. Luci. She pointed back.
They remained this way for some time, until the old woman made a guttural moan, like an old crocodile waking. A thin film from her eyes peeled back.
Aaron turned to see what everyone could see: the moon and stars were covered over. In fact, a large cloud was building quickly but in the dark it looked like a tidal wave. This illusion was so convincing that the drunken revelers fled the house, screaming. Several people broke their limbs in the scramble. Some squatted and braced themselves. Aaron, too, fled to the telephone post, which he clung to. When the post was struck by lightening, he died instantly.
Then Ms. Luci, with no one beside her, woke and just as suddenly was seized with terror. Her heart squeezed until it stopped.
A misty rain passed and moved north by morning. The Luci Company Caterers began cleaning the mess in silence, stopping only to watch the new beachgoers spread their blankets to make themselves at home by our sparkling sea.
Walking Blues
Matt Tucker
An empty pair of shoes rests forlornly on the tracks. Between the rails they lie, unoccupied quite suddenly. Still warm inside, laces tied, in mid-step, one in front of the other. Soles full of grit from the brisk clip of strolling over gravel, dust clinging to the beaten leather. Dusk falls as the whistle of a train resonates in the distance.
I-10 East: Escape Route
Deborah R. Majors
Holding her breath, she plunges deeper and deeper into liquid peace. Her Class-of-2005 Roll-Tide T-shirt floats waterlogged above her new Victoria’s Secret red-lace bra. One at a time, bubbles like perfect little pearls escape her nostrils, while her wavy blonde hair abandons its shoulder perch and dances a slow dance with itself. Her eyes are closed, then slowly open to the sting of salty water as she’s weightless and alone.
I wonder how deep the water is? Tires drum a rhythmic mantra over the gaps in the concrete bridge: die-dum, die-dum, die-dum. Her Honda gives a much smoother ride than that old Falcon. Andrea remembers counting the gaps as a child, but she and her best friend, Julie, never got to the end of the bridge before they lost count; their giggling made concentration impossible. Never mind that Julie’s grandmother was no help at all—she would holler out random numbers to throw them off, but they didn’t mind. The eleven year olds just liked to hear themselves laugh and actually enjoyed the cramps in their cheeks—it was their physical proof of a fun day. They probably buried her in that old Falcon.
The speed limit increases again to 70 as she leaves Pensacola behind. Noticing a slight pull to the left in the steering, she makes a mental note to take her CRV for a maintenance check that is long overdue according to the check engine light. High Maintenance. How could he say that to me?
She sits up straight, takes a deep breath, blows out as much air as she can, slowly, consciously, feeling her warm breath dry her freshly licked lips as it tunnels through the puckered oval created to give the soothing sound she needed to hear. She stretches first the left, then the right shoulder to her ears, then wills her back muscles to relax as she lowers her shoulders.
Andrea forces herself to make up stories about the people in the passing vehicles, for today, neither the interstate’s monotony nor the radio’s predictable variety is
There goes a truck driver hauling desperate illegals hiding in Maytag refrigerators, washers and dryers. The manifest reads: Working appliances on board. Like new. Make an offer. Must sell. Moving to Iceland.
In her mind’s eye, Andrea sees herself punching the gas and passing the Wal-Mart semi that’s just ahead. She darts in its lane and slams on brakes. Will I black out? No, I’ll probably hang in the twilight between life and death, waiting for Jaws-of-Life to snip me free, only to be bound on a gurney, exalted through the heavens by Medivac, then probed and prodded like those claiming to be kidnapped by little-greenaliens with bug eyes, big heads, and shapeless naked bodies—so shapeless that nobody even cares they’re naked, or that none of them have penises!
“They must be an advanced race,” she says out loud, smiles, then winks at herself in the rearview mirror.
Gas. McDonald’s. Stuckey’s. Next exit. Blue signs. Sad, sad blue signs —“Blue on blue, heartache on heartache…”
She stops singing her mother’s favorite song midphrase to exit hard. Not slowing. Not noticing the faint squeal of her tires. Not even noticing how dangerously close she’s following a pink Mary Kay caddy with Texas plates. A manila folder leaves the passenger seat and spreads its contents on the rubber floor-mat. A business card is stapled to the documents and a tiny, clean shaven face donning perfect hair and teeth smiles with capped confidence from the tiny corner picture, as she wills him a tiny Hitler mustache, tiny horns, and an extra-large machete through his lawyerish skull in blood-red Sharpie ink.
She pulls up to the pumps, puts the Honda in P, turns off the ignition, and presses her forehead to the steering
Majors / 83 distracting enough. One woman is a sequin-clad aerialist eloping to Vegas with the county’s coroner. They drive a yellow Mini Cooper with six red-shoed-clowns sardined in the back seat, waiting for their cue to exit at the next rest stop to the laughter and applause of tired adult travelers and hyper are-we-there-yet children.
wheel, letting her arms dangle alongside her knees until her neck hurts and her fingertips tingle.
While filling her Honda with unleaded, she detects a faint aroma of the state forest’s pines mingled with the recognizable smell of petrol, windshield cleaner, and hot French fries. Avoiding her reflection in the tinted black window, she tastes the salty corners of her mouth and is reminded that she hasn’t cried in over twenty minutes but can feel the next wave of tears building up like overheated milk.
She wishes her cell phone would ring, spark the gas fumes and bring the fire department, an ambulance and WEAR’s cameras. She has just enough time to make the 6:00 news.
After replacing the nozzle, fumbling with the gas cap and pressing the No Receipt button, she looks around to weigh her options. McDonald’s or Stuckey’s? Stuckey’s or McDonald’s? McDonald’s, she decides, not being in the mood for Elvis, John Deere, or Florida-is-for-lovers souvenirs, pecan logs, or big-haired smiling Mary Kay ladies with flawless skin and flamingo-pink lipstick.
Parking closest to the entrance, next to the blue lined handicapped spaces, she climbs out and opens the back door. “Come on, Sweetie,” she whispers as she lifts the sleeping toddler from his car seat, “Let’s go get us a Happy Meal.”
I Am My iTunes Account
Matt Haemmerle
It’s that time of my life when I must complete all of those pesky college applications. This means that I also need to answer difficult essay prompts. Though there are many different essay questions, there is one ultimate question that underlies each of these superficial questions–“Who am I?” Can I really answer this?! I am a human, something more complex than any short essay is capable of depicting. There can’t possibly be a way of elegantly, concisely, and accurately showing who I truly am. As I ponder this, I glance up at the incandescent glow of the computer screen on the desk before me and open my iTunes account. All of this college application stuff is beginning to get to me. I need to listen to The Beatles to cheer myself up. As the mellifluous sounds of “Here Comes the Sun” gently trickle from the speakers of my computer, the answer to this ultimate question strikes me in a flash of clarity. It sounds absurd, but it is true. I am my iTunes account.
As I scroll down my iTunes account, it becomes apparent that I am an avid listener of The Who, Boston, The Doobie Brothers, Bruce Springsteen, and The Rolling Stones. The euphoric, head-jerking anthems of classic rock are the motor of my daily life. After a long day of distressing tests, befuddling lectures on inverse trigonometric functions, and extracurricular activities, I can’t wait to hop in my car and drive home, jamming to the music that keeps me moving. Classic rock motivates me, gives me a surge of life, is the impetus to come home from school, and somehow harness the energy to tackle all of my homework. Classic rock represents my determination.
Midway down my iTunes account, highlighted by the cool blue bar of my cursor, wafts the intimate musical flow of Miles Davis. Here swirls an ambience composed of the ring of the piano, the penetrating, resounding, yet soothing cry of the trumpet, and the pulsating ripples of drums and cymbals. Jazz is free, spontaneous, and introspective. Sometimes, at night,
the pulse of jazz will trigger random thoughts. I remember vocabulary words I read days ago but didn’t know the meaning of, or things I heard on NPR or in philosophy class that I didn’t understand or yet have an opinion on. I find myself going to the Internet out of curiosity, a habit of mind prompted by jazz. Miles Davis is the epitome of adaptation, improvisation, and extemporaneity. I was faced with the challenge of adaptation three years ago when I moved from Chicago to Florida. I had to readjust to a new environment and rebuild my life. Adaptation, I discovered, took time and the will to change. Moving was making a rhythm with no sheet music, something that both Miles Davis and I have mastered. Jazz represents my loose screws and quirks, as well as my ability to adapt and improvise.
Scrolling further down my iTunes account, I see the music I listen to late at night on the way home from forensics tournaments. Except for the glow of my iPod, the inside of the charter bus is always pitch black. The effervescent chatter of students can be heard throughout the bus, but not by me. I prefer to reflect in the solace of the music of U2, Coldplay, and Pink Floyd. This is my “thinking music.” With placid sounds simmering in the back of my mind, I attempt to discover esoteric wisdom, transcendental knowledge, whatever strikes me as profound. I contemplate long, progressive chains of thought, and play out arguments in my head. Sometimes on clear nights while driving home, I’ll gaze out the window at the stars, billions of white specs frozen in place, scattered across the boundless night sky. Above are planets, constellations, galaxies. I shiver and am enraptured by some unknown anxiety. Maybe it’s my reaction to the anguished voice of U2’s Bono straining my ears. Or perhaps it is the fact that I am not as eternal as the night sky, where under it our planet seems so trivial, each individual’s life even more so. On a night like this, I made up my mind that I would seize every opportunity, see all I can see, and do all I can do. My place on earth is temporary. My spirit, though, is perennial, just like the voices and melodies of so many musicians. It will live through the people I meet and have an impact on, and the people they meet, and so on.
This is why I want to be sure that the difference I make, the imprint I leave behind on earth, no matter how small, is a good one. These are the sort of thoughts that are drawn out by my “thinking music,” which represents my reflective nature. My iTunes account is fully representative of me, my personality, my intentions, and my life experiences. It is the epitome of my self. I am what I eat, and I am also what I listen to. My iTunes account holds the soundtrack to my life.
Waltz
Janis Hannon
Eyes of gray stare unseeing; I avert my own, unable to meet the icy glare, Knowing they will not blink first. I am a coward full.
Silver tongued, always whispering, she speaks of darkness unending—or is it eternal light? Pressing my flesh, urging me to the great unknown. Come, she says. There’s nothing to fear there, for I will be with you. Always. All ways.
Stroking fingers pull me to the edge, laces forming a net to stay my fall. We will catch you, they assure me, whether your eyes are closed against the whiteness or useless wide against the darkness. We will be there, surround you.
A nameless vamp leads this dance, swallowing me with her long throat, wrapping my foot, dragging me to the edge so that I stare into the abyss, hearing her vaudeville song over and over. Step here, she plays. Step here.
On boxed toes I sway, bouncing over the gaping wound below, thin quivering shank my only support, a single, thin line between breath and none.
Aglets of fear surround me, binding me, stifling my breath. I look closer; might they be aglets of courage, so that I might not unravel? I do not know. I can not ask; I fear the answer.
Our souls are one, hers battered and hard, melded to mine. She pushes- no! - kicks me, to the edge and into the hole and I am set free, dragging her with me.
Will I be no more, never to wear shoes again? Will she be no more, never to carry another traveler? Or will we return, dancing again the Waltz of Life?
My Son
Jeni Senter
My son’s conception was not intended. No one planned for the perfect day to conceive him. No one took prenatal vitamins and followed all of the rules with a longing hope and a sweet anticipation that a precious life would be created from a union of true love. He was exposed to crack cocaine, nicotine, and alcohol before he was even born. He never received any prenatal care, and there was no one to be excited about the thump-thump of his little heart on the ultrasound machine. There was no one to lovingly tape the grainy little pictures from the sonogram into a baby book. No one made plans for his future, no one bought a layette, and no one started a college fund. There were no baby showers for my son, and there were no gifts carefully wrapped in pretty blue ribbons.
My son was born on a cracked, dirty linoleum floor with a clogged toilet and a scummy sink as witnesses. His umbilical cord was torn from his body and twisted shut with a dirty bread tie. He didn’t initiate his first breath, probably in protest to his tainted introduction to this world. He was given CPR by a neighbor who had the smell of pot on his breath. My son was flown by a rescue helicopter from his birthplace, a dilapidated trailer with cracked windows and a rotten porch, to the hospital, where he was fed peanut butter by his biological mother before he had even been alive for 24 hours. He had a team of social workers assigned to him before he was three days old.
My son was discharged from the hospital into the care and supervision of his grandmother, who liked to smoke crack, take pills, and ride a Harley. He never went for a wellbaby checkup at pediatrician’s office, and he didn’t have his two-month immunizations. My son has a large pale scar on his neck; I am not sure how it got there. The doctor says that it is a burn scar. The social worker says that he has seen this type of scar before, mothers who can’t get the baby to stop crying, well, things get out of hand. My son had pneumonia when he
was one month old, but he didn’t get any medication to make it go away. He had to fight for every breath that he took for the first 45 days of his life.
At eight weeks old, my son found his family. He found the family that he was destined to become a part of. He found a mother, a father, and three siblings that love him unconditionally. He went to the doctor, and he received his immunizations. Gifts poured in by the bagful: cards, clothes, and a brand new baby book filled with details about his new teeth, when he smiled for the first time, and what day he first said “da-da.” He was visited by friends, family, and neighbors. He had his first portrait made with his new family, and even the largest package didn’t contain enough pictures for all who wanted one. He was loved, wanted, and welcomed by the loving arms and warm hearts of an entire community. I hope that he has no memories of his life prior to coming to live with us. I pray that he doesn’t recall the turmoil of his introduction to the world; it is surely buried somewhere deep in his subconscious.
My son is a blessing to me. Although the financial burden placed on our family was difficult to bear, the blessings that our son brings to us every day make us wealthy. I am so thankful to have been given the opportunity to embrace this child, to look into his soft, brown eyes and to see the potential that he holds. One day, when he is older, I will explain to him how I became his mother. I pray that he will understand how he has changed my life and that I couldn’t imagine life without him. It is my strongest wish that he will always be surrounded by love, trust, and honesty. I dream of him growing up in a world of tolerance, acceptance, and hope. I pray that he never dwells on where he came from but always rejoices in where he can go from here.
November is not only the month that we celebrate Thanksgiving, but it is also Adoption Awareness Month. This year, as I tell my adoption story, I will pause to give thanks to my son. We are all given opportunities to change the world, to do something to make the universe a better place. I want to say “thank you” to my son James, for making a difference in my life and making my world a better place.
Senter / 91
Wishes
David Fleming
It was July, and the morning sun hung like a small yellow moth in the cloudless sky above my head. The lawn was freshly mowed–level, except for the stray blade here and there standing inches above his brethren, no doubt recounting the harrowing tale of his survival. The trees swayed back and forth in a gentle breeze. Fluttering leaves glittered emerald against an azure blue. Two wagon-red picnic tables sat alone in the middle of the yard under the shade of a large beech tree. The tables were draped with plastic featuring balloons and cake and party hats, all in pink, blue, and yellow pastels. In the corner of the yard sat a bright new swing set next to a tall slide; the pair appeared as a mass of mirrored metal and shiny red plastic. Even the old wooden fence seemed less weathered and sullen, as if the contrasting play set reminded it of what it was like to be young. I smelled the faint scent of pine mixed with the grass clippings and gasoline. Somewhere, a leaf blower cleared a driveway and a mower hit a rock; a dog barked, and then another. I could almost hear the water running collectively into pools and showers and glasses full of ice, water like blood pumping in and out of a small, suburban heart.
I stood alone that mid-summer morning, and closed my eyes. I could feel my heart beat in my fingertips, and I felt the Earth take a breath. Everything was alive.
My little sister, Jamie, had turned seven earlier that week, but my parents were swamped at work, so the party had to wait. Our family would all gather to watch Jamie open her gifts. It’s not a large family, just my mother, father, Jamie, and me. Our relatives, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, would all be there later. The barbecue would be working all afternoon to feed the multitude of extended family, and we’d be eating leftover birthday cake for weeks. However, we liked having a small pre-party; it was tradition. That way, the gifts from the ones who love you are each assigned a face and given
meaning before they get lost in the flood of cheap plastic from a dozen nameless relations.
Jamie’s face lit up with each present, but when she unwrapped the pink toy stroller my parents had given me the money for, she jumped up and gave me the biggest hug a sevenyear-old girl can give. We were all so happy.
I picture that afternoon every day, and I see it so clearly, even after all these years. I can’t imagine anything so perfect. I live for that single moment.
My alarm is screeching like a television left on the test channel. It’s been going for hours, but I don’t move. Mom or Dad will come in eventually to shut it off. It’s three in the afternoon, but the pale white sunlight fails to fill the room; it just manages to slip through in small white dots that seem to only make the rest of the room darker by comparison.
It’s always dark here lately; the curtains never seem to let in enough light no matter what time of day it is. There isn’t really much to look at anyway. It isn’t a messy room, but it isn’t particularly clean either. I just want to be able to walk from my bed to the door without fear of tripping.
The walls are a dull light grey, unbroken by posters or calendars. My bed sits in the corner, kept company by a small wooden dresser and a cheap, black, plastic computer desk. The monitor sits blank on top of the desk, and a thin layer of dust gathers around the line I swiped my finger across. I imagine the dust amassing forces, preparing an assault on that thin streak to take back what was theirs. I also have a small table and two padded chairs for when friends come by. The only other thing in my room is a waist-high bookcase, filled with the recommendations of pastors and parishioners, family and friends. Most of the furniture is pressed up against the walls, leaving the center a placid, navy blue lake, interrupted by the occasional ball of lint or wayward sock.
It brings back memories from younger years, when the lake was an ocean. I’d arrange the furniture into little islands and turn my bed into a fort. My sister and I went on hundreds
Fleming / 93
of voyages and adventures that were launched from the foot of my bed: charting unexplored territory, battling pirates, searching for treasure. We were home-schooled, so she was really my only classmate and my only friend. Even though I was two years older than Jamie, I never treated her like a little kid. My parents were very protective, but I’m still not sure of what. Jamie and I had a special game. I would pretend I was a Spanish missionary, bringing Christianity to the unenlightened peoples I met in my travels. I’d stand on my dresser reading lines out of my children’s Bible to my little sister’s stuffed animals. Jamie would set them up and sit with them, listening intently to every word I said. When I was finished, she would jump up and hug me tight, thanking me for bringing her and her tribe such a wonderful gift. After a while, it was no longer a game, but a ritual. Every time ended the same way; we would hold each other for a long time with tears streaming down our faces because we knew, right then, that God loved us.
I see my old Bible tucked presently between books with titles like Loving Jesus, A Guide to Simple Prayer, and A Sinner’s Guide to Accepting Christ. Those books are about the only things that don’t gather dust in my room these days. I can’t count the nights I’ve spent reading and re-reading page after page, line after line. Post-It Notes almost outnumber pages in some, and ear marks have almost destroyed others. All those nights, all those sleepless nights, and still, I can’t come to terms with “Him.” I can’t come to terms with Christianity. I can’t even come to terms with myself. On all these nights I wonder what happened between then and now. What happened to the boycaptain of the St. Teresa who saved all those Cabbage Patch kids? The one who sat crying with his sister, knowing that they were warm centers of God’s loving universe? The answer is always the same.
* * *
It was July, and the afternoon sun hung menacingly behind a dark gray cloud above our heads. The tendrils of light reaching down from the outskirts of the cloud seemed like the tentacles of a giant, luminous octopus, and the cloud a spray
of jet black ink diluted in the water. Jamie had turned seven earlier that week, but my parents were swamped at work, so the party had to wait.
After a long time, Jamie finally let go. She turned around, and walked back to her seat of honor across from the cake, next to Mom. My present was the last family gift, so it was time to blow out the candles. It was getting late, and our other relatives would begin arriving at any time. Mom had already lit the candles by the time Jamie sat back down.
This wasn’t the big supermarket cake sitting in the fridge with Disney characters printed all over, and “Happy Seventh Birthday” written in perfect cursive. This was a small cake, just big enough for seven candles and four people. White frosting was spread unevenly around the sides, and there were still some spots where the chocolate color of the cake showed through. In sloppy red letters, all crunched together due to lack of space, “Happy Birthday Jamie” was my contribution. Mom and Dad had baked it that morning, but they let me help spread the frosting, and Mom showed me how to hold the colored frosting tube just right. This was our Family Cake.
Jamie was sitting across the table from me, her head hovering just in front the cake. My parents started singing “Happy Birthday” and Jamie looked up at me, singing along. She asked me what she should wish for. As the song finished, she took a deep breath. She stared at me as she blew out the candles, and I knew exactly what she wished for.
Her face dropped into the cake, and the world went silent. Both Mom and Dad leaned back and started laughing, until Mom’s mouth opened to scream when she noticed the thin red line trickling out of Jamie’s ear. My father jumped up, knocking me from my seat to the ground, and flew to Jamie’s side, pulling her head from the cake. Her body fell limp into his arms. I lay unmoving in the freshly cut grass. A long, uncut blade left a paperthin slice on my right cheek. An ant walked bewildered circles around my face. I just stared straight up, thinking about Jamie’s wish, as the sun disappeared completely behind the clouds, and a drop of rain landed like her warm breath on my cheek.
Fleming / 95
* * *
The doctors said it was a blood clot, that she died instantly and felt no pain. I don’t care. It isn’t about pain. It’s about God, and it has been ever since.
* * *
Now I sit in my room, and Jamie’s pale blue eyes are pasted on every surface by my mind. Every night I sit and think about that day, and I think of a wish each time I close my eyes and see her blow out the candles. Sometimes it’s happiness…or love…or friendship…or peace…or family…or justice…or cake… or God…or Freedom…or toys……or life. I like to think that she’s with God now. I like to think she’s happy. But it’s a lie I tell myself, and it’s thinking I hate worst of all.
When I really think, I see myself. I see a hypocrite, a liar. Worst of all, I see the truth. It wasn’t losing my sister that really hurt. I lost God that day. And it makes me sick that I’d be so selfish, caring about a lie so much that I turn my life into one. How could a just and loving God do something so terrible? “God has a reason,” they tell me, or “We can’t know what higher purpose your sister’s death served.” I look at them, friends, family, relatives, pastors, parishioners, kindly, and say thank you as the words pass through me. I want to believe them. I’ve spent the last seven years trying. I’ve been a good Christian. I go to church at least twice a week. I don’t swear, or do drugs, or have premarital sex, or anything.
I walk the same path my parents prodded me down, the path my sister tied me to. I have a Christian mindset, but not the beliefs. When I look at myself, I have two visions, and both are revolted by what they see. Whenever someone looks at me, I imagine they see me as I see myself, and it taints their every word and action. Every kind word is a mask for their contempt, and every kind gesture a masquerade for their disgust.
* * *
The two boxes of sleeping pills sit by the bed. I count them myself: one hundred total. I hold them cupped in my hands just to feel the weight of my mortality, and realize a blood clot must have weighed much less. I swallow them one at
a time, but every time I get four or five down, I start gagging. Half way through and I throw up. Fifty pale blue beads come spilling from my throat, spreading like a mosaic across the dark floor. I pick up every last one, and start over. It takes a long time to get them all to stay down.
At last, I lie back in my bed, and think about Jamie and God. For seven years, I’ve wanted them both back. Seven birthdays I’ve blown out candles only to get smoke and tears. In seven years, I really only learned one thing: not to wish for more than smoke. I told my parents I loved them before I went to bed, and I feel sorry for whichever of them comes to turn my alarm clock off in the morning. It isn’t fair to them, but it isn’t fair to me either, to have to live the lie they forced me to believe. At least they have God.
I picture Jamie for the last time. I see her eyes still looking into me and hear her ask me what she should wish for. I loved her. I look into her eyes, into that beautiful face. Together, we take one last breath. Together, we make a wish. Together, we blow out the candles.
It is July, and the morning sun hangs lightly in the cloudless sky above my head, and Jamie is holding my hand. We both close our eyes and see the beauty around us. I can feel the heartbeat in her fingertips, and we both breathe with the Earth. Everything is alive, and so are we.
Broken Jerry Leafgreen
Suspended on the wall hangs a broken clock; stationary moments slumber Unmoving hands point accusingly at numbers, guilty of counting time passed, time lost, and time forgotten.
Dust has settled on the clock’s ancient tattooed face like a burial shroud. The somber veil masks the luster of gold numerals that are set adrift, on an endless, placid sea of obsidian ink.
Quiet is the heart that paced each passing second with a depressing tick-tock dirge. Derelict cogs and gears lie at rest, entombed, rusting in silent decay until there is no more.
Pull No Punches
Matt Tucker
“The bird is on the wing,” said Francis, with an air of overzealous urgency. “C’mon, we don’t have much time. The bird, Bernie…it’s on the wing.”
Bernadette rubbed her eyes, vigorously trying to get them to open on their own, with little success. She had been in the throes of a rock hard sleep, only one level away from comatose, the realms of “nap” and “snooze” far behind her. A gigantic floating cup containing forty-six shots of premium Espresso Roast from Starbucks had filled her already unsettling dreams and taken her to a place where no one slept for even one minute per day and caffeine was taken intravenously. This was not a restful dream. And to make it worse, Francis was now shouting gibberish into her ear without any signs of letting up soon.
“Wake up, Bernie, we gotta get movin’. Movin’ and shakin’! The bird is on the wing. There’s gonna be a—”
“What…is…it?” she growled, slowly forming the words, each one more hate-filled than the last. Her mood was bordering on foul. “Would you please stop with that stupid code talk? I don’t have the first clue as to what you could possibly be yakking about at this wretched hour.” She pitched an empty Red Bull can in the direction of the voice that had roused her so inconsiderately.
“General Benzedrine!” Francis wailed. “He’s escaping into the Phallusian Black Hole, and I can’t catch him alone. I need you to play co-op with me. You’re really good, I know you are. Please?”
Caught in the dreaded sway of a nasty caffeine hangover, Bernadette was comprehending very little of this plea for assistance from her kid brother. She heard the words “escaping” and “black hole” and hoped that Francis was planning a trip.
“Yeah, that’s fine, Francis. Escape whenever you want to,” she said, punching her pillow a few times. She forcefully
Tucker / 99
inserted her face into the indention she had made and tried to absorb any last remnant of sleep that might be lingering within the downy softness.
Francis had come to live with her two weeks ago as their parents were engaged in the ultimate test of willpower and obstinacy—a divorce settlement—and didn’t want him underfoot. She had rented the miniscule studio apartment to get away from home and the repugnant presence of her father. To put it mildly, things were strained between them. When Bernadette was nine, she had caught him with another woman…
It was a Wednesday and her mother was at Marceau Park, working on an oil painting of some rocks—or at least that’s all Bernadette and Francis could make of it. Jack had tumbled through the front door with his hands full of a young, blonde receptionist giggling about how she had forgotten to wear underwear that day. Her father was completely unaware that Bernadette had stayed home sick from school with a torrential runny nose. Wondering how someone could simply forget to wear underwear, she heard the girl’s giggles turn into moans. Perplexed, Bernadette had peeked through her parents’ bedroom door, which had been left slightly ajar. There she got an eyeful of what she would later come to know as the reverse horseshoe position. “Daddy, stop it!” she had blurted out in her confusion and horror. At the sound of his daughter’s voice, Jack froze and went completely flaccid right before climax. Before she had time to react, he was already upon her, pinning her to the floor, his sweaty hands like vices on her quivering shoulders. His eyes were full of rage and fear as he told her that she could never say a word about this to anyone. “I’ll send you away” were his words. “To a boarding school in Alaska. You’ll never see Mom or Francis again.” Terrified, she had sobbed her promise of silence through the deluge of snot and tears. Bernadette had never forgotten the foreignness of her father’s face as his naked body crouched over her, pressing her into the cracks in the cold tile floor. His hot, putrid breath in her face would linger in her nostrils for days.
100 / Blackwater Review
She had extricated herself from her parents’ residence, their reign, and their issues as soon as she could afford it, which wasn’t until her twenty-second birthday. Her boss Max at Club Shiner had noticed her timeliness, work ethic, and her ability to deal with drunk, horny patrons effectively and had given her a substantial raise. He wondered occasionally if Bernadette would be better suited as the bouncer, but decided that the smell of drunk, horny, dead patrons in a pile outside the door might cut into business.
“Do you have anything to eat in this converted doghouse besides Red Bull and Ramen noodles?” whined Francis. “I need some breakfast.”
Bernadette abandoned the quest for a little more shuteye and glanced at the pretentious little clock-radio on the floor beside her mattress. It always seemed to mock her by telling exactly how swiftly time was passing, screaming how her fast life really was consuming her, bit by ever-larger bit, just like her mother always did. The days seemed so short.
“I take it back,” Francis added. “I think that would insult some of the middle class working dogs. This is like the dilapidated east wing of a converted doghouse.”
“It’s three in the afternoon. Why do you need breakfast?” groaned Bernadette.
“I always have breakfast; it doesn’t matter how late it is. I feel weird if I don’t.”
“Welcome to the real world, Bud,” Bernie chuckled. “You’re probably always going to feel weird. It’s not like living with Jack and Inez in the big cushy house.” Bernadette had taken to calling her parents by their first names as a way to further detach herself from them. It felt good to address them as people that had once been part of her life but were no longer.
After Bernadette left, things had gotten more intense. There were more arguments, more crises, more drama in general. It seemed to have become a sort of deranged competition between their parents. First it was little things: leaving the toilet seat up, cross-threading the jar lids; it kicked up a notch when Jack started letting the air out of Inez’s tires. She was a
Tucker / 101
cool, collected woman, rarely fazed and mostly expressionless, but the sight of her new, glossy, once-formidable Range Rover wallowing helplessly in four little puddles of rubber enraged her like nothing else could, especially after it happened the third time in a week. There was retaliatory Blackberry sabotage, then a burglary, and, shortly after, a fire. Then came the inevitable divorce settlement that both of them knew would never come to an agreeable end, though Jack had suggested an officiated boxing match between them for all the marbles. Inez had agreed, but the lawyers were staunchly opposed to the idea.
Bernadette showered slowly, letting the cool water seep into her pores and cleanse her body of the sweat, smoke, liquor, and caffeine that saturated the air she breathed on a normal night at work. Her long, dark brown hair hung over her face like an opaque veil, shielding her from the hollow stare of the world that made her feel so alone. She always let her hair grow long; it was something she could take pride in and hide in at the same time. Fear of her father had taught to hide. It had become instinctive.
“C’mon, Francis,” she called to her brother as she dressed. “Let’s go get a bite before I have to go to work. Got any preferences?”
“Denny’s?” came the tentative reply. “I could still use some breakfast . . . . ”
“Denny’s it is.”
The heavy atmospheric wave of sensory stimuli washed over Bernadette as she walked into Club Shiner. It took several seconds for her pupils to adjust to the dim lighting since the sun hadn’t quite sunk below the city skyline yet. The colored lights had just sparked to life and were beginning to whirl across the graffiti-covered concrete dance floor in time with the jarring bass throb that stuffed itself into her ears and traveled down her body, replacing her pulse with one of its own. Her adrenaline didn’t rush quite like it used to when she came in here, but she still felt more alert and vigilant than she had before.
“Hey, Bernie,” came a voice from the long curved bar on the left side of the building. Alvin, the bartender, was setting up for a busy Friday night: hundred reflections of the dizzying
102 / Blackwater Review
Groan. She had forgotten about that. DJ Zombie was supposed to arrive around eight, and there had been a lot of hype generated over it. Allegedly, every club was filled to beyond max capacity when he showed up.
“Thanks for the heads-up, Al.” she sighed. “Blast it all. And I was looking forward to a nice quiet evening at the club.” One corner of her mouth angled up and denoted sarcasm; the other corner remained where it was, indicating dismay.
“C’mon, try to enjoy your job for once, hon,” said Alvin, examining his shock of bleach blonde hair in the reflection of a shot glass. “I hear this Zombie bloke really knows how to get a crowd going.”
Bernadette’s mind seemed like it had been over-clocked for the last few days; her motherboard was dangerously close to frying. Working late nights, paying the bills, taking care of her brother, maintaining the stone wall she’d built between her and her parents: it was a battle keeping everything in the air. The last thing she needed was more input. Especially in the form of a wild disc jockey and a pumped up crowd.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of,” she said wearily. “I don’t have the luxury of cowering behind a protective barrier, like you. While you hand out booze from your cozy little spot back here, I’m ricocheting from one hammered frat boy to the next like some manic pinball.”
“True enough. I’ll save you a spot back here if you find yourself seeking refuge from the insanity. Maybe you can pour the shots tonight, and I can go dance, eh?”
“For one, you can’t dance, Alvin. And I’ll be drinking any shots I pour tonight, I think.” Bernadette was completely serious when she said this, even though she cracked a smile at Alvin. She didn’t think she would survive this night sober.
Doors opened at seven, and a steady stream of clubbers marched in and mellowed out. Some crowded around the bar
Tucker / 103 light show shimmered in the obsessively polished glasses that hung from the racks above the bar. “Best be on you’re A-game tonight. That DJ from Atlanta is supposed to be here tonight. The place might get a little tight.”
to get the buzz on early, some populated the dance floor to get the sweat on early, and some just mingled, hoping the DJ would get there early.
Bernadette noticed that the volume of people was already a lot higher than normal, and it was a more diverse crowd. It wasn’t just the regulars tonight—it was the irregulars, too. But not until she saw her own father, Jack, stroll in, sultry female in tow, did she realize just how bizarre this evening would be.
A knot formed in her stomach as the trauma of Jack’s previous escapades of infidelity came pounding into her memory. He knew where she worked; he was taunting her. This was Jack’s way of saying, “You can run, but you can’t hide.” Bernadette was fed up with this kind of harassment. Tonight her fury told her to fight back, and she was sure as hell not going to pull her punches.
She picked up a tray of Bombay Sapphire from the bar and headed straight for the booth where Jack was brashly fondling his date’s breasts, commenting on what fine work they were. Nearing the table she quickened her pace, dodging and weaving through the swarms of inebriated people swaying to the crackling synth wash, zeroing in on her target. As Bernadette barreled past her father, she jettisoned her cargo and let gravity have its way with it. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed Jack’s face suddenly register concern as an unmanned tray of gin hurtled through the air toward him. There was a crash and a shriek and a yell. She ducked into the restroom to let the commotion die down and let her heartbeat level out.
He definitely deserved that but probably more, thought Bernadette. Too bad it wasn’t a rich Merlot on the tray. Or a live octopus. But there was always next time.
She had dealt him a pretty stiff blow, but was it enough, she wondered? Would he still be out there when she decided to come out of her ladies room fortress? She hoped not; she didn’t know how many drinks she could dump on him without being fired.
/ Blackwater Review
Bernadette nervously glanced at her watch. She’d been in the restroom for about five minutes, but she wasn’t confident that it was safe to emerge quite yet. Actually, she wasn’t even sure if Jack had seen her approaching with the payload or bee-lining for the restroom, but she knew Jack. And one could never be too careful with Jack. He was the sort of man who put revenge at the top of his to-do list—breathing could wait. Jack always knew the score and never settled until it was a hundred to one in his favor.
She carefully opened the door a crack to survey the aftermath of her assault. A twinge of déjà vu drifted through her consciousness. Jack was on his feet, sopping, and livid. Max, the manager had come out and was trying vainly to calm him down and explain exactly what had occurred.
“I want to see someone fired,” roared Jack. “This place is a travesty. I’d never been treated like shit until I came here!”
Watching her boss valiantly try to clean up her mess only to be insulted and disparaged by the man she no longer called father was too much for Bernadette to sit and watch. She flung open the door of the restroom and strode through the dancing lights to her surprised manager’s side. Jack glared at her with every ounce of hatred and malice he could pack into one expression, but it was battered and smashed to bits by Bernadette’s own stone wall of a glare.
“I can handle this, Bernadette,” said Max. “Just go grab a mop and—“
“No,” interjected Bernadette firmly. “He’s here for me.”
“Are you responsible for this, Bernadette? This embarrassment?” demanded Jack. “Because you’re still my daughter, and I can still punish you.” His eyes flashed menacingly.
“Yes, Jack. It was me. And I meant to do it,” replied Bernadette, her voice rising. “And you’re wrong. There is nothing you can do to me, absolutely nothing. I don’t know why I ever thought there was.”
“I can think of several things I can do to you right now, you little whore,” spat Jack, taking a step forward. He was
Tucker / 105
quickly countered by Max who stepped in front of Bernadette and Alvin who appeared at her side.
“I don’t think so, sir,” said Max, sharply. “Not in my establishment. Do I need to call the police?”
“See, Jack? You could never touch me,” Bernadette laughed derisively. “But I can touch you.” Jack’s expression faltered for a moment. “I can sing. I can tell Inez about all the years that you’ve been cheating on her, and you’ll never win your divorce settlement with that kind of dirt on you.” The idea of having leverage against Jack, threatening him even, was the most liberating feeling Bernadette had ever felt. It was like the steel chains that bound her had turned into spaghetti noodles.
“Lies, that’s all that ever came out of your mouth,” retorted Jack. His fight was waning.
“No, no lies, Jack. And you know it. The only reason I haven’t told her already is because I was always afraid of you. But not any more. I’ll sing, now. If I ever see you again, I’ll sing.”
106 / Blackwater Review
In My Skin
Jeni Senter
My feet hurt. I can barely walk but there are still rough spots that have to go. I have this infuriating habit of peeling the skin from my fingers and feet. Sometimes they bleed. Sometimes the throbbing and itching keep me up at night. When I am sleeping, my hand or my foot will slide across satin that snags on the shingled skin. I have to wake up and peel until it doesn’t snag anymore. Right now I am trying to write and my fingers are calling out to me; Demanding the scrape of nail Against sandpaper skin. The skin that has surrounded me Since birth is my curse. Skin is supposed to protect and support, but I despise it, I want to tear it and clip it and bite it until it submits to me.
I have cut back On ripping the skin
From my scalp— picking until scabs form leaving a comfortable pattern like Braille under the hair for my fingers to find when I need comfort. Now I only turn to my scalp when my hands and feet are too painful to touch or when my husband is watching me closely guarding my flesh; trying uselessly to distract me from my self mutilation. It only makes me angry. This skin is mine, Regardless of my contempt for it. At times I have countless bloody raw spots. Often I am ashamed Of my hands and feet. People stare— Like at lepers in Jerusalem. But sometimes I feel powerful Looking at the external Manifestation of my internal pain. There are shiny pink and red scars On my feet
Sometimes faint like a Delicate Carnation
Pinned to a prom dress Sometimes blooming In crimson
108 / Blackwater Review
Dripping onto the tile, Leaving Rorschach blots
In the bathroom floor.
What do you see in this image? I see a scared little girl.
Senter / 109
My sorrow runs deep
Metaphorical quicksand
Pa-ho-ja
Marie Liberty
Moving through my body
Preparing me for burial
In the roots, my blood
One-sixteenth indigenous
Three sisters of life
Grown upon the earth
Bark huts in the summer
Woven cattail leaves
For winter lodges, Ita-hos
The language of my ancestors
Traces of French and Omaha
Ta way a hay, Ta way a hay
Like particles of energy
Removed from the body
Returning to the Earth
The womb of death
Where all men are one
The Shoe
Jessica Borsi
The left shoe had seen better days
It was torn, worn, and was missing its mate It was far past the time it should be replaced
Still, the girl held it as if it were a priceless chalice “See this stain?” she mused to no one and explained though no one was listening. She knew every scar
It was coffee. He wasn’t supposed to have coffee A chain-link fence had torn a hole in the side He had hopped over that fence. No one was sure why
The treads on the bottom had long since worn away
The rubber toe was stained orange with dust
The sole was worn down to a thin line
No padding was left in that thin leather sole He had stood on it too long, waiting He had ground his heel into the dirt too much
Now the sole was just a thin layer of cloth
Tattered, torn, and stained
The shoe should be replaced
The cloth had given up
The rubber had given in The shoe’s mate had already left
It was time to move on
Time to forgive, forget
But she would keep that shoe
After all, the body is mostly gone
But the soul still remained
Lucky Star Quilt
Janis Hannon
We fold, scatter, and refold— delightfully different quilts stitched from a common pair of threads. One quilted to the engineer’s exacting squares, another a rugged fireman’s denim, still another a rainbow of artists’ colors.
We tease, picking at the edges, unraveling the mysterious family fabrics to see who’s a shiny satin circle, a fuzzy flannel square, or a colorful calico triangle. See— here’s a tear! There’s a missed stitch. Oh, the colors don’t match, but— what fine muslin backs we have!
In the rainbow quilt called Me, I spy a maternal warp, DNA unyielding, unchanging— humorous stitches hold vibrant twists of yellow in sunny smiles, long lines of laughing stitches. Laughs line my quilt, my face, my life.
Yet another maternal twist of fate has woven into me long yards of ticking, endless stripes of merciless memory for fighting unfair. Cloaking shoulders, the warm yellow becomes a raging red mantle. I will have the last word, biting as far as I can reach. It isn’t far, thank you, Mother, but it is farther than you can bite!
Sweet squares of diabetes, gray circles of sleepless nights and black strips of perpetual fatigue shade my Star, woven by generations of errant endocrine systems. Ripping them out will only disintegrate me, shredding me into tiny, useless strings, a bolt of burlap.
112 / Blackwater Review
Look closely—it is a stellar collection, this quilt. Bunnies and hobbies collect, quivering under the quilted bed, hiding like all the good intentions I hoard. My first collection the C chromosomes, one from each parent— a double dose of that, no doubt!
I pluck the fabric of this quilt called Me. There— a woof of my father— faithful, lover of plants and animals. My first spoken word reflects that same animal attraction. Dogs—and faith—form a lapped border as does that paternally-endowed stubborn green stripe I sport.
I draw the quilt closer still, seeking yet more from the stitched squares, the keeper of my code. Ah, there, fingers not my own, left to me by chance, creating, sewing, painting, interpreting their owner’s world. I thank the contributors to my Lucky Star Quilt for that!
I am a calico quilt, shiny new spots here, stubborn tear stains there, as able to rearrange my quilted points as a leopard can sport zebra stripes, but, as long as I live, so shall my parents. As long as my son breathes… so shall I, an endless patch in a quilted sky.
Hannon / 113
Dirt Road
Janis Hannon
Noses upturned, the unbelieving drip derision. A dirt road? You live on a dirt road! How nasty— why don’t “they” pave it?
“They” don’t own it; the dirt is mine alone, a path that cuts through thick woods and ends at my brick abode.
Pavement pales in comparison, left in a trail of dust. Deer dance, unhindered by careening cars, leaving signature vees in supple sand.
Children play in the dust— hopscotch, marbles, a trusty canvas, a single swipe do-over, and over, again. A perpetual slate, unmatched in asphalt.
Stories are inscribed there for all who take time to read, line after line written by all who pass— on my dirt road.
Contributors
Jessica Borsi is a senior at the Collegiate High School. She plans to attend the University of Florida and pursue a degree in creative writing.
Denielle Bergens-Harmon is an ongoing art student and has had the privilege to study at the Art Institutes in Chicago and New Orleans. She considers her education and expression of art to be a life-long journey rather than a destination.
Kyra Candell is a junior at OWC’s Collegiate High School. She hopes to study psychology and learn about others. Also, she loves writing and singing along to her favorite music in the car.
Mo Dao is a graduate of Emory University with a B.A. in philosophy and plans to study textile design in the Fall of 2008.
David Fleming is an OWC student studying nothing in particular. He plans to attend the University of Florida where he will continue his studies.
Matt Haemmerle is a Collegiate High School student who will be attending a major university in the fall of 2008. He enjoys traveling and outdoor activities.
Janis Hannon has a BA in business management and is an artist. She enjoys her family, martial arts and painting.
Candice Joslin has entirely too many ideas. However, she plans to accomplish them all... some day.
Contributors / 115
Danielle Kelly is a student in OWC’s graphic design department. She is an aspiring professional photographer.
Jerry Leafgreen is a part-time student studying life. He plans to attend the University of Florida to study art history.
Thomas Leighton is a communications major at OkaloosaWalton College.
Marie Liberty is enrolled in the EPI program and plans to become a teacher. She also has a master’s degree in psychology and is currently writing her second book.
Deborah R. Majors is the mother of two teenagers and hopes to obtain her AA from OWC before she is a grandmother!
Kendall Marsh is relatively new to creative writing. She first started OWC going for a degree in business but is currently majoring in awesome.
Jane Montgomery is a retired software professional whose interest in photography includes digital imaging. Her primary focus is on fine art and nature photography.
Matt Pierson is a Collegiate High School student studying English. He doesn’t have any plans. He likes that just how it is.
Jeni Senter is a wife and mother of four who lives in the Blackwater River State Forest. She is studying elementary education and continues to pursue her lifelong passion, writing.
116 / Blackwater Review
Maria Geneve Steele works in Destin and enjoys taking classes at OWC and UWF.
Adam Thair Stevens is a native Floridian artist who practices drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and digital media.
Matt Tucker is an aspiring humorist whose top priority is making a reader laugh–a silent laugh is acceptable. Matt is striving for a degree in journalism, but his path is yet undecided.
Reid Tucker is a class of ‘07 OWC alumnus and currently a journalism student at the University of Central Florida. He likes reading, writing, watching classic movies, and practicing Muay Thai. He enjoys the love and support of his family.
Ray Willcox is trying to improve upon his limited writing ability by taking advantage of the great courses and instructors at OWC
Contributors / 117
www.owc.edu
Okaloosa-Walton College is an equal access, equal opportunity institution.
