Issue 19: Sustaining

PO ET RY FICT I O N VISUA L A RT +

because I’m tired of topsoil • Brian Baumgart trying to see where we were going • Jessica Smith keepers of this garden planet • Bruce Herman 2011 William Van DYke Short Story Prize “Oasis” by AllYson Armistead

19 ISSUE

spring

$

9

ruminate?

ru’mi-nate: to chew the cud; to muse; to meditate; to think again; to ponder Ruminate is a quarterly magazine of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art that resonates with the complexity and truth of the Christian faith. Each issue is a forum for literature and art that speaks to the existence of our daily lives while nudging us toward a greater hope. Because of this, we strive to publish quality work that accounts for the grappling pleas, as well as the quiet assurances of an authentic faith. Ruminate was created for every person who has paused over a good word, a real story, a perfect brushstroke—longing for the significance they point us toward.

Richard Cummings. Recomposition : Wedge Form [with Stick and PVC].

Stone, metal, glazed and unglazed pottery, glass, polyurethane foam, wood, paint, pumpkin stems. 9 x 16 inches.

Please join us.

FRONT COVER Richard Cummings. A Dustbuster Named Rocket. Metal, stone, graphite, plastic, foam, glazed clay, wood,

raku, toner transfer. 10.75 x 21.75 inches.

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contents

Ruminate Magazine (ISSN 1932-6130) is published quarterly on FSC-certified paper by: Ruminate Magazine, Inc., 140 North Roosevelt Avenue, Fort Collins, Colorado 80521.

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notes Editor’s From You Artist’s Contributor’s Last

4 6 26 54 56

poetry

review Melanie Springer Mock 22 Walking Gently on the Earth

F R IENDS OF RUMINATE

This issue was made possible by the Friends of Ruminate, whose generous Winter 2010/2011 financial support has helped establish Ruminate at the intersection of faith, literature, and art. To become a friend, write us at editor@ruminatemagazine.org.

Benefactors Steve & Kim Franchini, Kelly & Sara McCabe, Ralph & Lisa Wegner, John Zeilstra & Janice Van Dyke-Zeilstra Patrons Dan & Kate Bolt, Imagined Design, Judith Dupree, Bruce & Cindy Jenkins, Ryan & Katie Jenkins, Tim & Katie Koblenz, Chris & Barb Melby, Jerry Mossberg & Jan SherrodMossberg, Brian & Anne Pageau, Chris & Becky Pittoti, Josh & Nicole Roloff, Neal & Becky Stephens, Troy & Kelly Suto, Ben & Morgan Van Dyke, Matt & Lisa Willis, Sponsors Syndey Avey, Alan Bauer, Michael & Alexa Behmer, Melissa Bingham, Suzanne Brock, William Cass, Devon Miller-Dugan, Corrine Fisher, John Fitzpatrick, Becky Haigler, David Harrity, Brad & Keira Havens, Karen Luke Jackson, Elanie Jordan, Laurie Klein, Matthew Koh, Manfred Kory, Nathaniel Lawrence, Rob Lee, Paulette Lein, Patrick McGee, Gary Mason & Amy Womack, Ellen Olinger, Janet Penhall, Rachel Roberts, Cheryl Russell, Dave & Kathy Schuurman, Luci Shaw, Janos & Margaret Shoemyen, Lucy Selzer, Margaret Selzer, Gwen Solien, Mary Van Denend, Kelly & Brandon Van Dyke, Robert Van Lugt, David Weldon, Steve West Copyright © 2011 Ruminate Magazine. All rights reserved.

staff extraordinaire senior editor associate editors ST E P H A N I E WA L K E R

review editor PAUL WILLIS

ALEXA BEHMER • W H I T N EY H A L E • P H I L L I P H E N RY • M A R C I J O H N SO N STEPHANIE MIKKE LSO N • N I C H O LAS P R I C E • W H I T R E F V E M • J O N AT H A N VA N DY K E

interns •

E R I KA L EW I S

•

ST E P H A N I E V I SSC H E R

marketing and outreach KEIRA HAVENS

design ANNE PAGEAU

•

Donovan McAbee Sister Evangelyne 31 Luci Shaw Invasion 32

associate readers

MATTHEW KOH

Jane Lebak The Next Lesson 20

Joey Locicero Seventy Times Seven 25

AMY LOWE

•

Gretchen Fletcher On the Hillsboro River 19

Allyson Armistead 12 Oasis

Amy Pechukas 33 Sam Kenneth Jones

Jessica Smith 41 Something Quick and Bright

Sara Burant All Flesh 24

BRIANNA VAN DYK E

STEFANI ROSSI

F I CT I O N

CJ Giroux Peonies 11

Brian Baumgart Southwestern Minnesota, Springtime 21

editor-in-chief

by Lisa Graham McMinn and Megan Neff

Charity Gingerich Walking, with Blackberries 10

annepageau.com

Paul Willis Baker Creek Campground 39 Kendra Langdon Juskus Still Life 51

V I S UA L A RT FRONT COVER INSIDE FRONT COVER BACK COVER

Richard Cummings A Dustbuster Named Rocket Recomposition: Wedge Form [with Stick and PVC] Prehistoric Camera Cole Thompson

18 Contrail — Death Valley, CA 40 Lone Man No. 20 — La Jolla, CA INSIDE BACK COVER Monolith No. 22 — Bandon, OR

27 28 29 30

Bruce Herman Witness (Adamah) Prospero’s Tempest Tide at Walker Creek Time & Tide at Walker Creek

editor’s note

Dear Readers, Welcome to Ruminate’s 19th issue! The theme for this issue, “Sustaining,” has been a wonderfully thought-provoking one, personally and for our entire staff. Sustaining in the sense of preserving natural resources was the original impetus for the theme and something that is close to our hearts and often discussed around the coffee pot in one another’s kitchens. Things like, “Do you buy in bulk? How is composting going?” Or admissions of guilt over the recycling we threw out in the rush to get the house clean or how hard it is to remember to bring our own grocery bags. And then even questions about what really counts, works, or matters in the whole big mess of things. All of these personal practices and how they affect our society now and in the future are ways we feel we can personally be responsible for the community around us and the natural resources we have been given.

Leif Enger judged our short story prize this year (of which the winners are in this very issue), and his comments on the finalists were beautiful and made me think about writing and sustaining in a new way. He says that through the art of writing we are participating in what Wendell Berry calls to “practice resurrection.” This is the last line of Berry’s poem “Manifesto: the Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” A poem of warnings: If you “Love the quick profit . . . Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer” and exhortations: “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”

And I love this idea. Because Jesus is alive, will be alive, and all of heaven and earth will be renewed, we have the power to be about sustaining and resurrecting right now—resurrecting the small patch of garden in my back yard or the many things I bring into my house that my son insists can always be used again for something else. And not only the power but the freedom to rightly practice the job given in the original garden—to work it and take care of it—and as God later tells the Israelites—to not overwork the land, “the land itself must observe a Sabbath to the Lord.” We do this not out of fear, but out of joy in the amazing goodness of a family supper, a comforting shade tree, and the sheer pleasure of participating in our Father’s creative work.

Neff. Mock says that as a working mother “with a moderate income, a barren yard, and poor cooking skills,” she is often skeptical of books on sustainability, but what she found in Walking Gently was different—the book’s challenge to live sustainably is “measured by the sense that [it] should not create a heavy burden to be suffered through, but instead provide a richer existence, one worth celebrating.” I think you’ll find the review both compelling and refreshing.

And we are proud to feature artist Bruce Herman and his most recent collection Presence/Absence.

He says of his work that he has tried to “bear witness to something impossible to articulate.” And much of his work in this collection is a witness to the weather-worn peninsula north of Boston— Cape Ann, a place also loved and witnessed by T.S. Eliot, in whom Herman finds a kindred verse: “You are not here to verify . . . You are here to kneel.” (The Four Quartets) We at Ruminate hope to be a part of this kneeling, this witnessing of sustaining words and visual images, as well as the resurrecting of the physical world around us. We invite you to “hotpinked and over-perfumed” peonies (Giroux, p.7) and screeching out of a school parking lot in the middle of the school day wearing a Big Bird head (Smith, p. 19), hoping you find your own sense of resurrection.

With peace and hope,

This issue also contains Ruminate’s first book review (p. 46). Melanie Springer Mock reviews Walking Gently on the Earth—a recently published book by Lisa Graham McMinn and Megan

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From You

Below are Ruminate readers’ thoughts on Sustaining.

When I lived in Bangladesh, public garbage bins were three-sided concrete walls about four feet high. The garbage spilled out and rubbish lay strewn about, an inch or two deep. The garbage was truly trash—small bits of paper and plastic, rotting banana and potato peels, stray bottle lids. Garbage of the privileged—tin cans, glass or plastic bottles, plastic bags, cardboard, used envelopes, torn fabric, and edible food—never made it to the bin, but was handed to a street child, who picked through it for prizes to sell, keep, or use themselves. Once the rest made it to the bin, it was picked over again by destitute women and children who literally waded through it, ankle deep, prying for edible or saleable tidbits left behind, competing with cats, dogs, rats, and, of course, flies. I’ve considered myself a conservationist for years—choosing to recycle, buy the least-packaged alternatives, use cloth grocery bags, compost. So many in Bangladesh don’t even generate garbage. They “recycle” for survival; for me, it is a privilege.

Carol Jones

Fort Collins, COLORADO

Six years ago I dug and chopped two miles of trail in the poison oak canyons of my campus. I wasn’t thinking much beyond my own use, but of course students and neighbors and kids and dogs began to walk the trails too. Now I spend a lot of my time both wandering and maintaining these paths, grateful that I don’t have to drive to them. What I’ve learned is that wilderness can be more local than I ever imagined.

Paul Willis

santa barbara, california

I show the short video to a church group and see the shock on people’s faces. I’m convinced that it’s impossible to see a mountain being blown up and judge that as acceptable in God’s eyes. Yet much of Appalachia is being decimated by mountaintop removal mining. It’s a cheaper method of mining, but the cost—to scenic beauty, tourism, local economies, the water supply and human health—is staggering.

So I volunteer with LEAF, a creation care fellowship of Tennesseans. Our efforts range from education to political action. Lobbying state legislators is, for me, an ultimate case of faith in action. Many days I’d rather just conserve and recycle and say I’ve done my part. But as we say at LEAF, God is big. So I write that letter; make that phone call; request that meeting. Thankful for the bigness of God and the hope of all creation.

Kory Wells

On the same ground my wife’s parents worked, we enrich the soil, we plant and we cultivate.

We witness the continuing miracle of growth, death, and decay that keeps the earth fertile. We know we are gathered in a circle that includes the dead and the living, a circle that contains our knowledge and our limits, a circle wherein we bow to our parents and join hands with our daughter to carry on the sustaining work of the farm. Because of what we have been given and what we give in return, this work impels us to be responsible caretakers of a heritage that is established in the ground and sets our feet always toward the making of a better home here on earth where the rewards were pre-established by God’s work in creation and made available to any willing to carry on the sustaining work of a servant steward.

Brian Lowry

Scottsburg, indiana

This Easter, the word ‘repurposed’ has gripped the hearts of our congregation. We’ll take the concept forward in our Easter services with spoken word—a piece with a woman talking about her old, used up self and then making the turn toward the newness God brings to our lives, repurposed in Him. The music will be a mixture of very old songs and new contemporary selections supported with dance. And the artists of our ministry are thinking about what could be created from worthless trash for an art show over the three weeks surrounding Easter. This art show will be a silent auction with all proceeds going to the Cambodian orphanage we support. Ultimately, something worthless (us without God) being taken all the way to Eternal treasure.

Lori Biddle

Mansfield, ohio

I sketched coop designs while sitting at the local coffee shop drinking chai from my compostable cup, feeling guilty that I hadn’t brought my own re-useable mug. In our culture, sustainability is a loaded term and my compostable cup was no longer cutting edge. Hindsight wishes myself more compassion in that moment. Our family then spent three frenzied months at the library, borrowing as many chicken books as possible, and another three frenzied months turning recycled building materials into a real home for our first flock of chickens. Now, we count the steps to the coop; my three-year-old son thanks Huevos (our black australorp) and Easter (our araucana) for laying his breakfast. Before the ‘girls’, I thought sustainability was limited to controlling my consumption; I never realized it was about connection.

Melissa Kimball

Fort Collins, COLORADO

murfreesboro, tennessee

Send us your notes for Issue 20 on “Eat and Drink” to editor@ruminatemagazine.org.

We love hearing from you!

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generously supported by the van dyke family charitable foundation

pri z e winner Allyson Armistead, “Oasis” Leif Enger writes: “Allyson Armistead’s ‘Oasis’ is a straightforward narrative that relies for its power on clean language and two of our most common motivations—the will to live and the urge to take care of our people. When those two conflict, a sacrifice is necessary. Someone's going on the altar, and the narrator has to decide who it'll be. There are plenty of ways to go wrong with a story like this one—overwriting, sentimentality or its too-ambiguous flipside—but this narrator holds our interest, resists self-pity, and delivers restrained paragraphs as clear as the desert air.”

finalists Sally Bellerose, “Mouth to Mouth” Linda McCullough Moore, “Contracting Obligations” Lance Nixon, “War” Amy Pechukas, “Sam Kenneth Jones” Lyle Roebuck, “The Crab”

runner up Jessica Smith, “Something Quick and Bright” Enger writes: “One of the reasons I've gravitated away from short fiction in recent years is that so much of it is humorless and enervated, but ‘Something Quick and Bright’ by Jessica Smith is a story that goes the opposite way to fine effect. Ms. Smith is not only unafraid of silly imagery, she uses it to illustrate a school environment that's devolved into deep silliness and must be changed or escaped at any cost. (Who, having endured high school, could disagree?) This one depends for its success on overstatement and gentle satire, and dares to gives us what so few short stories do, an ending of joyous satisfaction.”

Rebecca Schwartz, “The Last Brisket”

F I N A L I ST J U D G E , Leif E nger Leif Enger was raised in Osakis, MN, and worked as a reporter and producer for Minnesota Public Radio for nearly twenty years. He lives on a farm in Minnesota with his wife and two sons. He is the author of Peace Like a River, one of Time magazine’s top-five novels of the year and So Brave, Young, and Handsome, a Rocky Mountain News Best Book of the Year and a Ruminate staff favorite.

2011

CJ Giroux

Peonies Drawn by heat, tongues of flame emerge, sinuous, stilled in northern shadows, like starlets in their form-fitting dresses captured, in black and white, by paparazzi.

Charity Gingerich

Walking, with Blackberries There’s nothing like walking in June in an aching body, discovering blackberries.

Like a fox swallowed by brush they hide, but light finds them out, no less lovely for their wild abandonment in a burned-out lot, my greedy hands reaching, reaching. If you insert the tongue just so there’s a surprising end to looking and grasping: seeds tiny as sand, soft as new calf chin fuzz. The tongue, perplexed, withdraws, but always wanders back for more: a lovely question never answered quite like this.

Tinged blood-red, stalks lift skyward, trailing green. Leaves, like fists, emerge, unclench, revealing magicians’ balls that open only under the pinpricks of incisors.

Shameless in magenta, hot-pinked and over-perfumed, they flash their golden headdresses, like crowned queens, beauty pageant contestants primping for portrait shots.

Weighted down by beauty, they flirt with the earth, a come-hither look, ‘til rains come.

We pluck these beauties, enjoy them a few weeks each spring.

We beat them on the ground to drive away the ants, leave them to lie, waning, on sandy flagstones.

Brown-edged, their feathers fall, like yellowing bruises, around weighted vases.

Stalks, unpicked, bleed red on green, exposed, poised, posed for an O’Keeffe print.

We kneel before them to cut them down.

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Oasis Allyson Armistead

In her letter Alexie professes a newfound love of squirrels. Not just any squirrels, but the fat

white ones—A-L-B-I-N-O ones—which she spells in gargantuan letters. She’s included a drawing of the creature, a blank sheet of paper with a single caption up top—“DEAR GRANDPA: ALBINO SQUIRREL. LOVE YOU, ALEXIE”—and then I can’t figure out what shocks me more: this sudden onset of comic genius or that she’s learned to spell so beautifully in the time I’ve been gone.

I display her invisible squirrel among the rest of her animal menagerie, her astounding evolution of language framing my window. Outside, the expanse of sand is bland and monotonous next to Alexie’s brilliant locomotive life. One day she’ll graduate college, write articles with four-syllable words, marry a lawyer in Chicago. For now, she’s only seven years old and madly in love with bleached rodents—but even if she isn’t, I can’t know for sure, everything she’s becoming.

When she asks why I can’t leave the desert, I tell her I’m a newborn turtle following the moon to the sea.

“Why does it follow the moon,” she says.

“It follows the moon, Alexie, because it wants to live.”

When I came here a year ago, I hadn’t expected to survive, only to temper the symptoms of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—a last stretch at life, however short, in whatever comfort the climate could provide me. Back in New York, I’d fought for oxygen through sixty-percent humidity, pedestrians and pigeons and crowds of tourists. I’d panted at windowsills and air conditioning units, opening and closing freezer doors for whatever relief I could muster. In July, I began collapsing on sidewalks—purple, deranged, my tongue sore from beckoning air—and when I hit my head on the bathroom sink, unconscious and bleeding, my doctor suggested the desert. I said yes, the desert, because I wanted to breathe.

“Dad, that’s a thousand miles away,” Marcie had said, “Alexie and me—her school, my job, Darron’s business. I can’t—I don’t want you to be alone.”

“It’s a five-hour plane ride. We’ll have trips. The Grand Canyon. Letters. Phone calls. And when it gets close, at the end—” “Dad—” “I’ll call you.”

Marcie took a week off to move me into a one-bedroom trailer a hundred miles south of Phoenix.

She set up pictures of Alexie on the built-in bookshelves, plugged the charger for my oxygen tank into a convenient outlet, and made a list of emergency contact numbers that included my new neighbor, Joe—“he’s about your age, Dad”—who was willing, he said, to drive me anywhere so long as I watched Monday night football.

“Don’t much like people who don’t like football,” he said, and when I said football was fine—even the Cardinals—he said “well alright then.”

When Marcie said goodbye, she wrapped her arms around my middle the way she did as a child when she was afraid of thunderstorms or monsters or telling me something awful she’d done—or was afraid of doing.

“It’s okay,” I’d said, “I’m okay. Are you okay?”

“Okay,” she said, “I’m okay,” and smiled and wiped her eyes.

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At first, the desert seemed a mistake. I’d collapsed in the bathroom the first week and called Joe the second—a night in the ER with full blood work and an oxygen mask and prednisone to jump-start my lungs.

“You want to call Marcie?” Joe had said, “I’ve got her number here.”

“No,” I said, “no use worrying her, nothing to be done.”

I slept each night waiting for the fluid in my lungs to suffocate me, a tidal wave of breath and panic as my lining gave way, snapping limp like a shot-out pair of Fruit of the Looms. I kept Marcie’s number by my bedside, ready to call, nearing the end.

And then, without warning, I found I could breathe. It happened one morning, breaths deep and glorious and burning like peppermint, sharp as Listerine.

“Something’s happened,” I said to Joe. “Something good or something bad.”

“My lungs. They burn.”

“Like they’re on fire?”

“Like they’re working.”

I slept for twelve hours that night, uninterrupted by cough or breathlessness or the wheeze of my oxygen tank, and when I’d had enough of sleeping, I went for a walk in the wide open landscape, my chest full and fat, stinging like iodine slapped fresh in a cut.

Weeks went by. And months. And a year, and I began to wonder if I was cured. If it was a miracle, or if the desert was merely prolonging the inevitable. I was afraid of probing—breaking the spell, nosing around

i slept each night waiting for the fluid in my lungs to suffocate me . . . x-rays and doctors and exams. Unsettling the mysterious equilibrium going on inside me. But when the end never came, I just kept right on breathing, gulping down the glorious, arid air.

Joe says my lungs are like the Egyptians, thousand-year-old mummies. He says you can even crystallize honey here, serve it up on pancakes fifty years later and the stuff will run golden like a river— “sweartogod,” he says, “stuff’s good as anything”—and I tell Marcie about this, how maybe the desert is a kind of cryogenic freezing.

“But what do the doctors say?” she wants to know. “Maybe it’s a fluke, maybe there’s nothing wrong with you at all. Maybe there never was,” but I tell her there’s something here I don’t want to disrupt.

“I don’t want to rock the boat,” I say, “whatever it is,” and that’s what I do—I don’t rock the boat. I go on living just fine until Alexie’s letters arrive in the mail and I remember everything outside the desert, how it’s thriving without me.

For this reason the most beautiful object in my trailer is my telephone. Sometimes I sit beside it and wait for it to ring, so when—like today—it bursts into song and Alexie and her mother are on the other end,

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I’m elated. Their voices are familiar and unfamiliar. Marcie sounds like Alexie and Alexie like Marcie, so I have to ask how old Alexie is again.

“Seven, Grandpa, I’m SEVEN.” “Well how about that,” I say, “you’re getting so old I can’t even recognize you.”

“You get my squirrel?”

“I did, yes. A very clever squirrel.”

There’s other news, too, a string of developments that leave me satisfied and jittery, squirming like a half-dead fish with the bait still inside my mouth. Marcie fires them off in sequence: Alexie has a new friend named Tommy; King George has a boil behind his ear; Alexie lost another tooth; King George is too fat again; Marcie’s divorce papers are finally going through after weeks of paper-shuffling.

“Divorce.”

“Yes. Not yet, but soon,” and the week after next, when she calls again, there’s a new man in the picture: “There’s Steve to consider in all this, you know,” as if I should have known, all along, about Steve.

“Who’s Steve?” I ask.

“Dad, I told you. The man in my law firm.”

“You love him.”

“Why else would I consider all this.”

“Of course,” because affirmation of something you don’t know is far better than the alternative.

Joe, on the other hand, is cued into every detail of my existence—and I his—because there’s nothing else to do in a hundred miles of sterile dirt but draw out the everyday events of two old men and watch the occasional dust storm kick up flecks of brilliant aluminum across the horizon.

I tell him I can’t keep up with Alexie and Marcie.

“It’s like that old Donald Duck cartoon,” I say, “Donald versus four corners of a tent.”

He tells me to book a flight home.

“What’s the big fuss,” he says. “Take a day. Sweartogod. What can happen,” and the way he slurps his Guinness—sloshing it on the ground, his shirt, the heady foam dissolving in the gray hair of his goatee—I want to believe in the casualness of it all.

my telephone is black and maddening and all the more desirable because it isn’t ringing.

“I can’t,” I say, “what if it comes back, if I can’t breathe,” but Joe doesn’t hear me, distracted by a scorpion he’s squished with the tip of his boot. “Should’ve stayed out there, buddy,” he says, and tosses its body back to the desert.

In spring there’s a wedding invitation in the mail—a beautiful fuchsia tri-fold with a tulip border.

Marcie’s getting married. At first I worry about attire—olive, tweed, stripe—but I put these notions aside when I see ALBANY, NEW YORK beneath a score of calligraphy.

I call Marcie that afternoon.

“I thought it would be here,” I say.

“Steve only has three days off from work. I thought you might be open to coming home for a day or two, with how well you’ve been doing.”

“I’ll drown.”

“There’s oxygen in New York, Dad, same as anywhere else. It’d mean the world to me. To Alexie. To Steve, too. Maybe you’re not sick anymore—have you been to the doctor?” And when I tell her I haven’t, that I can’t, that I love her, I hang up the phone and buy the most beautiful Hallmark card I can find.

I tell myself it’s the best I can do.

In her letter a few months later Alexie tells me the wedding was LUXURIANT, and I have to do the math to confirm she’s nine years old. When I call home, I can only assume the man’s voice on the machine is Steve, a baritone raw and scratched from nicotine. In a return letter I write: “Alexie, your stepdaddy needs to watch his smoking. He’ll find himself in the desert like me,” but in her next letter she says Steve has gone to Florida INDEFINITELY and isn’t that MELANCHOLIC, Grandpa, how things work out.

Our next phone call is Sunday and Alexie whispers so I can barely make out what she’s saying.

“What’s with the voice,” I say.

“We should come live with you.”

“Where’s your mother, let me have a word at her.”

“Grandpa?”

“What is it, Alexie.”

“Mom says there’s nothing wrong with you. She says you’re scared there is but there isn’t.”

“What do you think?”

“I think mom needs you here.”

The nearest clinic is twenty-five miles away. Joe drives me in his SUV and we bounce across the uneven, cracked pavement of a highway I can’t name. The outskirts have changed without notice, clusters of newborn dunes rising from the desert like pinched, dehydrated skin. Miles of sterile ground, purer than hospital blankets. I roll down the window to breathe in the sharp slap of sky and cough from the burn.

When the doctor pins my MRI to a light box, there’s nothing wrong with me.

“There was something wrong,” I tell the doctor, “before.”

“There’s not now,” he says, and I tell Joe you can slice just about anything two ways.

“How’s that?” he says.

“I’m certifiable or the desert’s keeping me alive.”

Alexie stops writing. A drought of letters. Calls. My telephone is black and maddening and all the more desirable because it isn’t ringing. The voicemail is voice-less, clicks to a long hum and then emptiness I fill with messages for Marcie and Alexie.

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I write my own letters.

I draw a self-portrait and leave it blank: “DEAR ALEXIE: THE DISEASE IN GRANDPA’S LUNGS. LOVE, GRANDPA.” The desert, Alexie, is keeping me alive.

On Monday a woman calls, a neighbor.

“I’m a friend of Marcie and Alexie’s,” she says. Her name is Gloria. She tells me Marcie’s checked herself into a clinic, voluntarily. “I’m sure you’ve heard about Steve? Just ran off, that one.

No rhyme or reason.”

“I haven’t,” I say, “I haven’t heard anything,” of Steve, of this, of Marcie.

Alexie is on the line now—“Grandpa? you there?”—and her tenor has the calm, silver manicure of a girl accustomed to crisis.

“Alexie, is that you? Where’s your mother.

“She’s sick, Grandpa.”

“Sick?”

“Grandpa?”

“I’m here, Alexie.”

“We need you.”

I cough. my pants are tight. i wonder if i’m imagining things: the desert leaving my body.

to force the oxygen down my bronchial lining. I cough. My pants are tight. I wonder if I’m imagining things: the desert leaving my body.

At the airport, Alexie is taller than I remember. Her hair is brown—not blonde—swept up in a bun too tight for her. She has to call out to me before I recognize her, and when I do I hold her unfamiliar frame.

“You’re huge,” I say, “when did you get so big?”

“I sent you photos,” she says.

“Never as good as the real thing,” and I tell her about the animal menagerie I’ve made, all her drawings and letters framing the window that looks out onto the desert.

“I love rocks now,” she says, “GEODES,” and she cups one in the pink of her palm, a cross section of gray and black with purple crystals at its center.

“A geologist now,” I say, and her eyes—more green than I remember—spiral and widen at the compliment, this milestone I’m here to witness.

At the hospital Marcie is in a corner room, white without windows or pictures. I pull at my collar. I yawn to push the air down inside my lungs. I cough over my shoulder, the phlegm not moving. I am dizzy. Faint. The bed and walls and Marcie’s IV. The room asthmatic. Marcie’s eyes are closed and moist with Vaseline. Her mouth is blistered with tiny red sores that, from a distance, remind me of the fruit punch stains she wore as a child. I pat her wrist, stroke the finger where a ring is absent. The doctors say a nervous breakdown, stress. Three weeks, she’ll be here.

Alexie and I sit on the bed next to Marcie whose fingernails are pink. Toenails, too. Like the paws of a cat. I smile, then cough. Alexie rests her head against my chest, places her pet rock in my palm which I squeeze along with her tiny shoulder. I sit between us: Marcie, me, Alexie. Together.

“Grandpa?” Alexie says.

“What is it, Alexie.”

“Will everything be okay?”

“Everything will be okay,” I say, and let out the last of the desert air.

Joe takes me to the airport in Phoenix.

“You book a flight?” he says.

“Not yet,” I say. “I will when I get there.”

I roll down the window and the desert whips my face and teeth and gums. I’m greedy, sucking oxygen, filling my cheeks until they stretch thin and ache and I massage them back to life.

“Figure I’ll pocket some while I can,” I say.

Joe smiles at the dust-fogged windshield.

“Shame they don’t make Ziploc baggies for that.”

“It is,” I say.

At 30,000 feet the desert recedes at the Colorado border, evergreen replacing sand. Pine tops sprouting like tufts of chemo patients. The bleach of Arizona fades in the periphery, my window filling with olive and jungle, green constricting brown. I loosen my collar, untuck my Polo. I yawn

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2011

17

Gretchen Fletcher

On the Hillsboro River Under a sky the color of lichen hung with Spanish moss clouds we canoe through silent stands of Cypress, their height doubled by the trompe l’oeil of black water, a mirror broken by knees of the next generation and trunks of the past one fallen into decay to feed the future. Nothing here is wasted.

The air is green with oxygen, and we fuel the vegetation with our exhaled breaths in turn. Turtles peek through a lily pad carpet and herons tiptoe on prissy legs to the water’s edge.

Perplexed, they watch us pass through their private world.

Our paddles push aside hyacinths that slap the sides of our canoe before they slide beneath it with sucking sounds that call us ever farther along this artery away from the heart of civilization.

Cole Thompson. “Contrail — Death Valley, CA.” Digital Photograph.

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19

Jane Lebak

Brian Baumgart

The Next Lesson

Southwestern Minnesota, Springtime

For Madeline

After the ice storm smeared glass on the forsythias, I found a finch.

Encased in ice beneath a leafless bush, she seemed a ceramic bird, Ice on the outside, body warmth beneath, she couldn’t move but lived and waited, maybe to die and maybe to fly again.

I cupped her in my hands only the size of a beating heart and marveled at the balance of fire and ice, of blood and water held together by feathers while shining eyes shifted in fear and sunlight glinted off fiber-optic branches.

To flake off that ice would break the bird too.

So instead I cradled her in the sunlight until warmth and time undid pain and frost.

When droplets collected in my palms, moistened leaf bits and clay, I expected her to flex her feathers.

Instead she had learned that tears from the angry frigid sky gave no way, so still she remained.

And I stood, breathing into my hands, while she sat, rapid heart banging against my fingertips.

She shifted her head, clenched her sharp toes through the thin weave of my gloves, then burst from my hands toward the bush, her past prison, only now to sit at its top, frightened of me, her rescuer, but no longer afraid of herself.

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It’s May, and the wind still blows across the plains. I’m waiting for the wind to become breathless because I’m tired of topsoil, the way I have to comb it from my hair. Little trails of black dirt lining my bathroom floor like the river that carves its way through the low bluffs in a zigzag near farms and tiny towns with European names—mostly saints. It’s May, and I’m still sweeping dust from my garage; its door faces south, though the west winds send everything into its gaping maw.

I’ve collected inches of dirt, spider webs, plastic tricycles with flowing streamers whipping from the handles in sharp cracks, newly cut grass from my neighbors— probably miles away. And of course: topsoil. In thick clumps everywhere. Even while it travels on breeze, topsoil moves in layers as if it knows something will grow wherever it lands. I search my hair for signs of corn and soy, the most local of crops. Fields just across the way because nothing is measured so approximately out here where nothingness is all around. But it’s not nothing; it’s everything in the most absolute way, like a mother growing a child: month by month by month.

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Reviews

Walking Gently on the Earth: Making Faithful Choices About Food, Energy, Shelter and More

by Lisa Graham McMinn and Megan Neff (InterVarsity Press, 2010) reviewed by melanie springer mock

Several

years ago, the local book group I attend was analyzing one of those currently popular book-length manifestos about food, in which the aggressively dogmatic author argues that people should eat locally grown produce, avoid meat products, and make far more sustainable choices about what’s for dinner. I left my book group’s discussion feeling utterly discouraged, certain my decision to buy granola bars—rather than making them from raw oats and honey I harvested from my own bees—was destroying not only my sons’ health, but the very well-being of our planet, too.

This has been my problem with most recent books on sustainability: those I’ve attempted to read leave me feeling extraordinarily guilty, as if I can’t really care about the earth until I change all my habits, buy some backyard chickens, and give up my once-a-year Burger King treat. The thing is, I want to make environmentally sound choices: but as a working mother with a moderate income, a barren yard, and poor cooking skills, books about sustainability have often been far too overwhelming in their advice, and far too judgmental in their tone.

For that reason, I approached Walking Gently on the Earth with a healthy sense of skepticism, ready to be preached at again regarding the choices I’ve made about my family and lifestyle. Yet a few pages into Lisa Graham McMinn’s new book, I knew this exploration of sustainability would be different: more gentle, as the title itself suggests. McMinn, along with her daughter and co-writer Megan Anna Neff, examines the ways we can more readily nurture “God’s good gift”—that is, the earth and everything in it—through what McMinn calls “an ethic of care.” Although McMinn and Neff challenge readers to be more considerate of the earth and its people, their challenge is measured by the sense that living sustainably should not create a heavy burden to be suffered through, but instead provide a richer existence, one worth celebrating. This message of hope alone separates Walking Gently on the Earth from other harsher eco-books now in circulation.

In many ways, McMinn and Neff cover ground that will be familiar to those who have read widely in sustainability. Chapters on the destruction wrought by contemporary agribusiness, the need for alternative farming methods, and the importance of eating locally produced food that is primarily vegetable-based echo the work of Michael Pollan and (perhaps more implicitly) Wendell Berry. Yet while Pollan focuses his research almost solely on food and eating, Walking Gently on the Earth provides a much more expansive view of sustainability; McMinn and Neff also explore the ways our purchasing decisions, our use of nonrenewable energy sources, and our choices about family size inevitably impact the globe and its people.

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Still, it is the evangelical Christian lens both McMinn and Neff carry to the subject of sustainability that distinguishes their book from others in the genre. McMinn admits in her introduction that discussions about the environment are often difficult in evangelical circles, where “Earth has been seen as God’s gift to sustain us until we reach our final destination, where a new heaven and earth await. This separation of the spiritual from the physical has meant that we’ve sometimes pitted caring for creation against caring for people.” As McMinn rightly argues, though, given the precarious nature of our planet, the limited resources available to us, the byproducts of overpopulation and overconsumption, caring for people means that Christians must also care for the planet that allows us to live. Walking Gently on the Earth works hard at reframing the argument for sustainability with this core principle in mind—and in doing so, makes a much more compelling case that Christians will need to consider how their choices about food, energy, and material goods influence the wellbeing of all God’s children.

The “preludes” Neff provides for each chapter help to connect the practical aspects of the book’s message to the stories of people struggling to survive in the global community. In a chapter on consumerism and the marketplace, for example, Neff’s prelude narrates her experiences in a busy Thai market, where she encounters a girl begging. The dissonance—a hungry child in the midst of so much commerce—compels Neff to ask some challenging questions about her own consumerism, her Western wealth, and the ways her purchasing choices might in some way affect children like this one girl. Neff’s preludes do well to humanize the message the book carries: that we need to more intentionally consider how our own life choices might affect the least of these about whom Neff writes.

Perhaps the most compelling piece of Walking Gently on the Earth—and its most controversial—has to do with the ways our own choices about family size might also impact the planet. Family planning may be considered off-limits for discussion by some Christians, but McMinn argues that these are discussions Christians very much need to have, especially if they want to consider sharing the earth’s resources now—and in the future. McMinn considers the radiating impact a large family might have on the world, showing how large families who beget large families consume significant resources. And thus, in addition to limiting our dependence on oil, eating lower on the food chain, and buying fewer goods, we may need to limit the size of our families if we want future generations in the United States and elsewhere to survive.

It is here, in their discussion on family planning, where McMinn and Neff most earn my respect.

Rather than resorting to simplistic sustainable solutions like growing a garden, recycling, and buying locally, McMinn and Neff grapple with the complex issues that complicate our ability to care for the earth and its people. They acknowledge that there are no easy answers, and that they often fall short of their own ideals. But, Walking Gently on the Earth also provides the hope that we can all do a little more to work toward shalom: “that is, the perfection of God’s creation, universal flourishing, wholeness, peace.” Such is a goal to which I can readily aspire, even if I continue to buy—rather than make—the granola bars my family eats.

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Joey Locicero

Seventy Times Seven

Sara Burant

All Flesh Unless I’m seeing things in this brilliant light the orange still lies on the sidewalk’s edge.

I’ve walked many miles since I first saw it, someone having peeled then dropped it here, or perhaps it fell from the roof of a car, coming apart as it hit the ground, two half-moons in the dust.

Just yesterday, settled in its body, the orange quivered inwardly, juicy and sweet, and shone outwardly, the sun’s own child.

Now the sun-parched membrane has drawn away from the flesh which nonetheless glows when a stray spark of sunlight strikes it.

Once I dreamed of my death. Someone had taken great care, wrapping me in linen the way a fruit is tucked inside its skin and setting me gently upon the pyre. I woke in tears over the kindness shown my body, for the flames I became, the heat, the rising, shards of bone left for the earth to hold the way God held a hazelnut in Julian’s vision.

And wasn’t she shown in a clear light, without words, that all flesh, all matter, is ever cupped like a nut, a fruit, a seed in God’s own hand? Think of it: everything seen and unseen, even the slow rot at the edges of our days.

Because there weren’t enough chairs to call it ‘home.’ And an array of dust that shelled the dark in.

No need for drapes or curtains.

Ottomans gutted, tables sleeved with mildew.

He was so estranged in his skin.

His mind a wine cellar of disposition.

Would never watch a variety show on a salmon colored couch.

Often played hide-and-seek in hopes the night would find him first.

The wind breathed by like a crow in the ear, as he safety-pinned his shirts together.

The needle pierced through: it adhered one side to another. The way the ends didn’t quite match. It should have stopped there, didn’t need to be a metaphor.

A bit of flour in the back of the cabinet.

And cracks under the doors. Cracks that varnished a litany of light.

When he would throw his arms up, sing panic to the sky.

This should have depicted dancing, not surrender. The sunset stitched by barbwire fence.

These, the remnants of a house on the frontline, without the fixings of an invasion. Sometimes invasion is less callous than retreat.

But sometimes that retreat is new life.

The leaves swallow and swallow the yard.

It’s as if they dance to eruption. Green caving into an auburn resurrection.

Always the leaves. Keep him coming back. It wasn’t the memories of a paisley Christmas. It was the winds.

How they lifted tragedy as cinder blocks from the hands, to take them east of a carotid childhood.

It’s that breath that liberates us from fences, crows. Leads us in a silhouetted dance through everything that remains

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artist’s note

Bruce Herman (American, b. 1953) completed both undergraduate and graduate fine arts degrees at Boston University School for the Arts.

He studied under Philip Guston, James Weeks, David Aronson, Reed Kay, and Arthur Polonsky. Herman lectures widely and has had work published in many books, journals, and popular magazines. His artwork has been exhibited in more than twenty solo and one hundred group exhibitions in eleven major cities. His work has been shown internationally, including in England, Italy, Canada, and Israel. His art is featured in many public and private collections including the Vatican Museum of Modern Religious Art in Rome; The Cincinnati Museum of Fine Arts; DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts; and the Hammer Museum, Grunwald Print Collection, Los Angeles.

Presence / Absence I live in Gloucester, on Cape Ann, a peninsula north of Boston, where the land has been scoured by the retreat of the great Laurentide glaciers over twenty thousand years ago, leaving behind a deposit of granite boulders and dramatic palisades along the Atlantic coast. Since first visiting the cape, I’ve felt a tug on my imagination by the raw beauty of the land, the sea and sky, and the ever-changing weather. A tidal estuary at the end of our street, Walker Creek, marks time with its tides as it laps against the Great Ledge—a massive granite outcropping (which itself marks a different time—geologic time).

T. S. Eliot, who spent many summers here on Cape Ann, says in The Four Quartets: “You are not here to verify, / Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity / Or carry report. You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid.”

After more than thirty-five years here in Gloucester, and after walking these woods and coastlands every day of the year, in all seasons, there is an irresistible, almost tidal pull for me in Gloucester; there’s a stability in the midst of the constant change. The ancient rocks and slow-growing lichens; the reliable coming and going of seasons and sea have set in motion something in me, even as I’ve remained.

I’ve tried and failed countless times to capture this place in straightforward landscape painting, but like Eliot, I’ve discovered that I am not here to simply record or verify or instruct. I am here to pray, to witness. And I’ve tried to bear witness to something impossible to articulate—even for a great poet, much less a painter.

It’s that presence which marks our lives and our land, and also a feeling of great absence—of eons and all living things passing, yet the persistent hope that comes from this underlying permanence, this solid truth: the beauty of this place has its origin in a living God. We have our own origin in the land—the dust from which we were created. The name of the first human being, Adamah (Adam), is literally translated as “earth” or “dirt.” That should signal to us that the land must be preserved and protected—because when it is harmed, we are harmed. (“ . . . for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return . . . ” Genesis 2:7 and 3:19). The following four paintings from Presence/Absence are an attempt to bear witness to our connection to the earth and the vocation we have received to be “keepers” of this garden planet. If we refuse again the call to care for the creation over which we’ve been given stewardship we not only reap the whirlwind but our own demise. Yet the reverse is true as well: if we accept the divine ordination as gardeners rather than exploiters, we will reap the wonderful fruitfulness of this generous planet garden.

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Bruce Herman. Witness (Adamah). Oil on wood with silver leaf and gold. 75 x 47 inches.

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Bruce Herman. Prospero’s Tempest. Oil on wood with silver leaf; diptych. 60 x 70 inches.

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Bruce Herman. Tide at Walker Creek. Oil on wood; diptych. 60 x 70 inches.

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Donovan McAbee

Sister Evangelyne I still don’t know how that hat, the one with a sprig of juniper berries, managed to cling to the top of her head through all that. Her heels hammered against the sanctuary’s wooden floor, double time with the kick drum. Each beat, an indention in the boards, scoring a remembrance of fitful grace.

She wiped away the sweat streaming down her face.

She spoke in tongues too strained to understand, rattled off accusations at angels, muttered doxologies in a minor key. To that point in my life, I’d never seen heartache gather like a storm. I’d never seen someone shake loose their troubles from the inside out.

Bruce Herman. Time & Tide at Walker Creek. Oil on wood. 23 x 23 inches.

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31

Sam Kenneth Jones Luci Shaw

Invasion Like swoops of dark birds settling, folding huge wings, anxieties and doubts weigh the branches.

Heavy, broody and fidgeting, they’ve moved in, building their awkward nests like clots in the trees, black twigs jutting. Worse than clouds that will pass, they screen the sky, the stars, any heavenly body.

A clatter rises, intensifies, dense as rifle fire in a war zone, clogging the air with stabbing, sooty accusations and arguments that sound irrefutable. It’s evident the intruders plan to take over, reproducing their own dark-feathered kind, ravenous and predatory, with orange claws, curved beaks and no wing sheen.

They’ve driven out the nesting doves, colonizing all the trees. The whole forest could be next.

I try a clap, and a loud shout, to dislodge them.

Either they can’t hear it or they take it for applause.

Their harsh voices promote anarchy, disruption.

They join the local militia. To clear the air, to see the sun again, all I can do is cry for an invasion of a different kind from beyond far, deeper than in.

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2011

AMY PECHUKAS

I am Sam Kenneth Jones. I am forty-six. I go from the kitchen to the back porch, to the kitchen

again, to the front porch. My house feels like it doesn’t fit right all of a sudden. I can’t find a place to sit down. It is like a pair of jeans that got too tight in the dryer.

Finally, I go out to the barn and climb up to the hayloft and lie down on a bale. I can see Eddy, the cat in the window, at the other end. He lives up here all the time, never goes down, except when he slips and falls out the window. He hasn’t got good traction, came to us declawed from the animal shelter.

Can you imagine having all your fingers and toes chopped off? No wonder he never goes outside.

I am trying not to think about the letter, but my fingers want to open it. It’s a thick envelope. That doesn’t mean anything, I tell my fingers, but they are moving, tearing through the envelope, holding up the thick embossed paper for me to see. My fingers know the truth of who I am becoming before I read it with my eyes.

Dear Mr. Jones, After a thorough and meticulous review of applications, we are pleased to offer you admission to Yale University’s undergraduate program in drama.

Then my fingers drop the letter and begin rifling through the catalog, which shows baby-faced freshman out in the city. Who am I to start college at forty-six? Who am I to go to school for drama?

Eddy jumps down from the window and comes over to sit on my stomach, kneading my chest. I have never felt so grateful for a cat in my whole life. People never realize how hard good things are, how much it is a blow to have life hand you a golden egg.

At the bottom of the letter were the words full scholarship and stipend. All I did was play parts in town theater? Hamlet, Fences, a one-man comedy act. . . . It was my hobby when Hannah went on business trips and the kids were teenagers and I was still working boring hours at the VA. It was that part that got me admission. I wrote that comedy piece about myself and the parts about the war and the PTSD—I think that’s why they let me in. Every audience loved that. Laughing and crying.

“Who am I, Eddy?” I ask him, but he just purrs while I scratch his head and I wonder then how we’ll get this cat out of the barn to Yale, if he’ll go, and if we leave him, how long it will be before no one remembers he is here.

“Wanna come to Yale, Eddy?” He doesn’t say anything. He’s over it and jumps down from the nest he made on me to start meowing and purring by his food dish. Eddy has a stomach the size of our Landrover.

I stare up at the barn’s eaves. We moved this barn here. It originally sat on a piece of land four miles west and is over one hundred years old. My wife and I fell in love with it.

Then I get up. There is nowhere to go but up, and I begin to climb back down the ladder, Eddy still purring and rubbing on me till I get down so I am eye to eye with him, and then he gets mad cause he sees I am leaving and starts swatting at me. He gets truly mad every time as though he thinks this time finally I have given up the outside world and decided to live here with him. He hisses and hits the top of my head as I disappear and then I am down again, letter folded in my back jean pocket as though it wasn’t anything but an overdue bill, and I tend to the other critters.

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Chancellor, our one gelding, knickers and scuffs the dust and hay on the floor with his hooves. He eats a few oats from my hand, snuffling them up gently with his large soft lips. He is as impassive as Eddy is skittish. The mares are next and far more interested in their hay than my whistles and pats.

Babs, the pig, butts my boots with her large snout and nips gently. She loves men and when she really goes after someone and tries to take a hunk out of them, it is always a woman. My wife calls her SheDevil. I scratch her behind the ears.

And our two female alpacas are wary—as always—of me, watchful with their large brown eyes. We bought them both six months ago, a little foray into alpaca breeding and selling that we had imagined for years and never quite put together until now. One we bought to breed and paid what you would for a nice car since the crimp of her hair and her stature put her in prime breeding category. The other was a pal—she had refused to let a male mount her for three consecutive seasons and as the former owner put it, “If they don’t produce, the cost is reduced.” My wife insisted that this one simply hadn’t

hannah has a good way of saying sorry. she always means it even if she has done the same thing a million times before. met her man yet and although it sounds ignorant, I kind of agreed. She seemed like a haughty, shy but secretly sensitive type, the genius in your math class who you could only, in a far corner of your brain, imagine naked, hair down, staring at you. In reality, she had never met your eyes, and you would rather sink your head in ice water than try to talk to her. She is my Molly, my wife’s favorite, and I try again to pat her nose tonight, but she shies away.

When the chores are done, I go back inside, relieved to find the house has assumed its normal shape, feels like home and smells again like soap, since Kate, our youngest, the sixteen-year-old, has been making batches for the 4–H fair for weeks now. I don’t knock at the basement door—she just likes her time alone down there. I go instead to start supper, and I cut red bell peppers into thin strips, drain tofu, slice mushrooms and asparagus—another passion of the lonely man: stir-fry.

And I think about it, of course, how to tell them. I have not mentioned it in any serious way to Hannah. I only said, “I applied to some drama programs for the fall,” later one evening as we sat drinking a glass of port on the back porch swing, and she—already fading—had asked, “What did you do today?” “Take my mind off the meltdown at work,” I said to explain it. “The meltdown” referred to

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an integration of the services, not along racial lines. Basically, until now, we had effectively excluded women vets. The Veterans Health Administration had no female doctors, and we had no support groups for the trauma they went through. I am only a file clerk, so I bear witness in the most mundane way, but even I noticed the uptick in files marked “needing immediate care” and how many of the names were female. My mind—even on that night—never believed acting was anything more than a hobby. “Awesome,” was what Hannah said.

I begged off the live interview part, citing single fatherhood—more and more often true—as my reason. Hannah works for a pharmaceutical company as a nurse manager. She was a navy nurse before that, and the higher she goes, the more she is gone. I said I didn’t mind it when she took this job, and I didn’t. I just had to learn to go my own way too. And now I have done, I thought.

I plate the stir-fry—covering one dish for later—and knock at the basement door for Kate. “Give me a minute. I’m almost done,” she calls. “Ok!” I call back. I pour us each seltzer water. She comes up with her hair in a ponytail on top of her head, dressed in her sister’s Notre Dame sweatshirt (she didn’t go there but was obsessed), and her soap jeans, which have enough residue to cause the washing machine to drool out bubbles every time she washes them. “Cool, thanks,” she says, taking her plate, sitting on a stool at the counter and reaching for the bottle of soy sauce. She adds four to five ounces to her dish and smiles at me. “One day it’s gonna catch up with you,” I say. “Not yet!” she says cheerfully and starts eating. Kate is the only one who also really loves stir-fry. We watch a trivia show she loves and call out answers. I try not to tell myself I am a bad father for wanting to change these routines, but the feeling is starting to pull at me, a hand of doubt creeping icy fingers under my shirt along my warm belly, making me shiver.

I tell Kate I’ll do the dishes and she says thanks and goes back to her soap. I’m loading them in when Hannah opens the door. The dogs run to her. She is still their favorite even though I feed them.

“Hi, hi, hi,” she says, letting our blind cocker lovingly lick her chin and our lab paw at her expensive shoes and sniff the grocery bag she carries hungrily. “How’s your day?” I ask as she kisses me, dumps the bag and climbs up on a stool. She unbuttons her jacket and kicks her heels down onto the floor.

“Long and boring,” she says. “Internal audits?” I ask. “No, the FDA again. How was the VA?” “We were off today,” I remind her. “That’s right, sorry.”

Hannah has a good way of saying sorry. She really always means it even if she has done the same thing a million times before. When she used to draw blood at the VA, the guys all loved her.

“She always apologizes, but she never hurts me!”

I want to tell her right away before I can stop myself.

“I got into a school,” I say. “What?” she asks. I knew she had forgotten, but I wanted her not to have, to have waited for it in the back of her mind for months now, so it wouldn’t be so surprising. She looks at me with attention now. Hannah is beautiful, a renaissance woman, a nurse and a painter. You can see it in her face, the warm skin with sunspots from so many weekends doing landscapes every summer, the blond highlights in her brown-gray hair, her non-pharmaceutical, blue glass earrings.

“I applied to some schools back in December for drama,” I explain. She just nods, not saying whether she forgot completely or not. “And I heard back from one today.” I don’t mean to do it this way, but I didn’t rehearse and I don’t have a plan. I pull the letter from my back pocket and hand it to her. She unfolds and reads it. “Oh,” she says at one point, and she reads the entire thing, which even I didn’t do. “Wow,” she says when she finishes and she looks at me. “Wow,” again.

Kate has impeccable timing and chooses this moment to bounce in. “Hola Mami,” she says. She is taking Spanish and my wife speaks fluently. “Hola, m’hija,” says Hannah, and Kate grabs a coke from the refrigerator. “Voy a hacer . . . soap,” she calls. “Che bueno,” says my wife and Kate is gone again, the last in a line of four to become busier and busier and finally fly off like fireflies blinking into the dusk.

Hannah goes and uncovers the dish of stir-fry. She carries it back to her seat. “I guess I didn’t know you were that serious about going to school for acting,” she says. “And that is an amazing offer,

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a really great opportunity.” She begins to eat. “We don’t have to decide right now how to do it,” I say.

Doubt has released me a little, and I pour her a glass of white wine. “I guess you don’t have to let them know right away,” she says.

She is gazing past me a bit as though she is absorbed in a television show to my left, but the TV is not on. “No,” I say and she must have heard it in my voice because she looked right at me. Even I heard it. One gift acting has given me is this: I can hear myself speak and from this know how I am feeling.

For years when we fought, Hannah said, “it wasn’t what you said, it was your tone,” and I never heard what she meant until I started acting. Tonight it is clear as a bell. It says I don’t want to wait. I want to decide now and I want to go.

Hannah is not someone who will try to talk you out of what you want to do. When Derek bought his first motorcycle she didn’t throw a fit like many mothers would. She insisted they take the lessons together and they did every Saturday for six months. When he rode, he was ready. It’s what makes her good with horses—she takes her will and their will and somehow blends the two together. I don’t know how she will do that with this, and I don’t think she does either.

“I think it’s great, love,” she says and she goes and loads her plate into the dish washer and sets it to go. “It’s just I don’t know how it’s gonna work, but it’s wonderful. I’m really proud of you.” She hugs me and Doubt arrives as she pulls away and goes into the living room. He pulls a black hood over my head, so I can’t see, turns me in many directions so I can’t orient myself and stuffs me in the trunk of a car so I can’t breathe. PTSD calls this anxiety or panic. I feel kidnapped from within. It is time to walk the dogs.

Hannah has gone and lain down on the green faded leather couch and switched on a program.

She is fading already. “I’m taking the dogs out,” I call to her. “Ok,” she says. I pull the dogs through the living room and out to the back porch by their collars and snap on leashes.

The choking feeling eases with the cool night air and darkness on the porch. You would think we would let the dogs run wild with a property like this, but they come home smelling of skunk.

Oscar, the Lab, once pounced on a bed of wild bunnies, causing them to scatter, bruised into the underbrush. We searched but didn’t find them, and I’m sure their mother didn’t either. Hannah insisted on leashes after that.

We have lived here since our twenties and this back porch has calmed me at many strange hours of the day and night when, unable to sleep, I sat here wrapped in blankets till it got light, times when dreams woke me up too early or when the kids were little and would cry all night, and whenever I thought of leaving Hannah.

The dogs are eager to walk and we do. We circle the Alpaca grazing pen back to the stone silo that is falling down and that Kate fills with water and lilies in the summer. We walk farther than usual tonight. We go back behind the barn, across our neighbor’s barren field to the line of pine trees that marks the beginning of woods, where the smell of pine sap is strong and the lights of the barn have faded and you can just begin to see by moonlight.

I remember now why I avoided a city when we looked for a place to settle down. The strange noises, the crime, the sense of unsafety, even the nightlife, cafés and bars and whorehouses, all brought back Vietnam.

I have liked 4-H fairs and crab dinners held in gymnasiums because there was no trigger. I could sense the safety even when my pores began to smell danger. I knew it was just me. New Haven would be different, and there was Kate to think of too.

We begin walking back towards the house, the dogs not pulling anymore, walking right beside me, and I am grateful suddenly for life.

People think it is hilarious when I do this routine in my stand-up—the gratitude shtick. But it’s true.

Being between life and death every day, losing your buddies, not sleeping, your resting heart rate is one hundred forty beats per minute, and you know how you feel: grateful. I am grateful I am alive.

This part of the walk is my favorite, back towards the house, the warm lights on. I know Hannah

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will be sleeping on the couch, Kate watching TV up in bed. I prepare for quiet, to make a cup of tea and head to bed. I step onto the back porch, let the dogs off their leashes, and we go back in.

The TV is off in the den, and Hannah in not on the couch. There is no sound of a TV on anywhere, but I hear voices from the kitchen. I go in. Kate and Hannah are side by side on stools at the counter staring at a laptop screen.

“What’s going on?” I ask, setting leashes down on the counter. “Dad,” says Kate, “I can’t believe you didn’t show this to me!” And she flies around the counter waving the letter from Yale and hugs me.

“Did you take the SAT’s?” she asks. “Can you take mine?” I never expected her to be excited and I don’t

we begin walking back towards the house, the dogs not pulling anymore, walking right beside me, and i am suddenly grateful for life. know what to do. The urge to hide is strong, but I smile. “Actually, they didn’t make me,” I tell her.

“What? Cheater!” She stomps back over to Hannah, who is clicking away. “What are you looking at?”

I ask. “The Doctoral Program in Nursing at Yale. They have one of the best programs in the country.”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Kate. “My parents are gonna both go to Yale and I’m gonna get stuck at Connecticut State,” she grouses. Kate is the most inventive of all our kids, but she loves to sell herself short. “You can always make lots of soap,” I tell her. “What?” She throws a dish towel at me.

“So are we going?” She wants to know.

Hannah looks at me. It is just us three now. It is not as hard as it once was. “I don’t know,” I answer quickly, but I hear the tone. It’s not genuine. “We should,” says Kate. “I could make SO much more selling soap on the East Coast.”

“She’s an entrepeneur,” says Hannah to me. “She is a free spirit,” I agree, “and a money grubber,” I add, lifting my eyebrow at Kate. “Someone’s gonna have to support you two aging students,” she quips back at me, raising her own eyebrow. “Let’s visit on your spring break and we’ll decide together,” I suggest. Hannah nods. “Ok,” says Kate, who can also read us better than any of the older ones could having had this extra time alone with us in her teens. “Good idea,” she adds, “I need to see what it costs for a license to sell out there so I can make an informed decision.” “Jesus,” says Hannah, but she is smiling and so am I.

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We close the lights and go up to bed and the stairs creak in just their same comfortable way, and I can’t imagine leaving anymore than I can imagine not leaving and going on like we always have.

It is the same feeling I remember from Vietnam, to say goodbye to the smell of rice, the view of the water, the night rain, the jungle, the café where we ordered soul food cooked by a man from Georgia who had found his own way to make a profit on the war. I didn’t know how I could make myself go and I knew I couldn’t stay.

And I had only been there for just over a year and a half.

We climb onto our tall bed and under the soft warm sheets and Hannah leans her back against my side and sleeps soundly only a few moments after we kiss goodnight. I lie awake and think in images of rich color that cross my mind like an eclectic time traveler. Rudy, my buddy from my first tour. A Vietnamese man with one arm I’d seen one day and the expression on his face when he saw me. A long canoe made for fishing. Our wedding. A child—one of them—asking me what was wrong when they found me weeping in the garage.

Don’t think it won’t happen to you, I always tell my audience though I don’t know where I got the courage to say it. Don’t think something can’t hurt you and change you forever. I will never sleep again the way I did before Vietnam, and I will never again believe that my life cannot be gutted in an instant. You live anyway. You live and all that pain doesn’t make it better, but I think somehow you are richer for it. You learn a little better. You know. You feel grateful. And the audience explodes in applause. I know they get it. And finally I fall asleep.

Paul Willis

Baker Creek Campground Warm tonight for February. The creek flows under bare and moonlit cottonwoods, and the Owens Valley spreads below as if it belongs. Once in a while, distant headlights find us from the other side.

Miles across that winter range are cones and dishes aimed into space, listening for life on other planets.

That’s what a friend told me—a government project—and I haven’t known him to lie.

Another friend, a girl that I knew in college, once made a climb on New Year’s Eve to a lake behind us in the Sierra. It was frozen shut, and the winds had swept the snow aside.

Under the stars, her companions whirled her back and forth across the ice like a broom ball, and she let out a scream that thirty years later the government still can’t hear. She said she would remember that. I would.

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39

Something Quick and Bright JESSICA SMITH

The day Jimmy Carbone showed up to school wearing Big Bird’s head, I knew we were all in trouble.

Cole Thompson. “Lone Man No. 20 — La Jolla, CA.” Digital Photograph.

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I saw him as soon as I got off the bus. He drove to school so he was in the parking lot, leaning against the front end of his Jeep and smoking a cigarette. He had to open his beak with one hand to get the other hand, the one holding the cigarette, inside to his mouth.

I couldn’t imagine where he found that head. It wasn’t a hat or a cheap costume likeness that would make it into stores at Halloween; it was an authentic Big Bird head that looked like it had been severed from the rest of the fat yellow body, like maybe Jimmy had climbed through a window at the PBS studios with a saw in his hand.

I didn’t say anything about what I’d seen. I just went to my locker, to homeroom, and sat still while Mr. Glenn took roll.

He was on the P’s—Pierce, Plourde, Prince—when Aimee Lysecki came into the room, her eyes popping wide.

“Jimmy Carbone,” she said, “is dressed up like a bird.” She leaned against the board, against Mr. Glenn’s chalk diagram of an atom. “I think,” she said, “he is going to kill us.”

Mr. Glenn dropped his roster. All the girls screamed. Except for me. I crossed my arms and stayed put.

The boys started slamming books and pens and notes into their backpacks.

“Now, class,” Mr. Glenn said.

No one was listening.

“Oh give me a break,” I said. I was the only one still sitting, the only one not throwing myself around the room like a lunatic.

“This is the way it starts!” Aimee said. “Some kid plays too much Dungeons and Dragons or watches too much Star Trek and then goes straight off the deep end. He ends up in school with a bird costume and a gun.”

Mr. Glenn, sensing jailbreak, walked to the door, shut it, and locked it. He leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms.

“I don’t believe this!” Michaela Jennings said. She pointed to Mr. Glenn. “We’re targets here!”

“Now, Ms. Jennings,” Mr. Glenn said. “Let’s take a deep breath, alright?”

“Is someone going to call my parents?” Michaela asked. “I want someone to notify my parents that I’ve been locked in school with a kid who has a gun.”

“Jimmy Carbone doesn’t have a gun,” I said.

Everyone in the room turned to look at me. Mr. Glenn seemed particularly interested. He raised his eyebrows in that way only science teachers can—a way that makes them look like they are children, like they will always be children, like they will always be the children who stood out in thunderstorms even after their mothers screamed for them until their voices went raw.

“And just how do you know that, Rachel?” Mr. Glenn asked me.

I was a quiet girl, a good student, smart. I aced his tests and always picked up after everyone else when our labs were over. Maybe he was looking at me now and wondering if I was the ideal accomplice—under the radar, sweet, no-fuss.

But even though I wasn’t an accomplice I still knew enough to be sure about Jimmy Carbone. I wasn’t his friend—Jimmy Carbone only had a few friends, mostly greasy boys who hung out in the computer lab all day—but he’d been in enough of my classes for me to feel like I knew a little bit about him.

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For example, I knew he liked Goldfish crackers. I knew he liked cats. I knew he wore frayed shirts but brand new sneakers. I knew he came into class some days humming the theme to Bewitched— a show my mother used to play for me while she got ready in the morning. None of those things seemed alarming.

“Well, I don’t know for sure,” I said, and that sent everyone fidgeting again.

Michaela Jennings inched toward the door. She looked capable of knocking Mr. Glenn, who coached wrestling, to the ground so she could escape the chemistry room.

“But,” I said, “we’ve all known Jimmy Carbone since we were little, and he’s never done anything to scare us.”

“Except for today,” Aimee Lysecki said.

“He’s always been a freak,” Bryan Lord said. He was standing under the flag, and his backpack was slung over one of his shoulders. He was holding a molecular model of methane in his hand.

“Mr. Lord,” Mr. Glenn said. He uncrossed his arms and held out a hand. “Give me the methane.”

The boys laughed.

“This is my methane,” Bryan Lord said.

The boys laughed again.

Michaela Jennings rolled her eyes and Aimee Lysecki stomped her foot. Both gave up and wilted back into their chairs. The other girls followed.

“Fine,” Michaela said, “but if I die today, someone’s going to get it. My father’s a lawyer.”

Mr. Glenn ripped the methane from Bryan Lord’s hands, and the force of the movement caused the molecules to break apart and go skipping across the floor. Bryan and the other boys went chasing after them and Mr. Glenn went chasing after the boys and just like that things went on the way they had every day since we were five. *

Each morning at 8:05 am, David E. Cummings Central School time, Principal Lutz announced the day’s lunch specials and then he dropped his voice down low, making himself sound like a slick, oldtime DJ announcing the next Elvis record. “And don’t forget,” he’d say, “to stop by Cafeteria B this lunch period. Cafeteria B: where the elite meet to eat.”

Cafeteria B was the overflow cafeteria and was housed in the dank corner by the boys’ side of the gym, where it always smelled like sweat-socks and aerosol deodorant. Cafeteria B was open every day because not everyone could find a seat in Cafeteria A. The football team’s table was in there and so was the cheerleaders’ table and the soccer team’s table, and even though there wasn’t assigned seating, no one dared to sit in those established zones. Everyone else was on their own. They had to jostle and throw elbows to get one of the fifteen other tables in the room or else they had to make the long walk to Cafeteria B. Cafeteria B was where Jimmy Carbone ate his lunch, every day, no exceptions. When I got to lunch the day Jimmy Carbone showed up to school in a bird head, Cafeteria A had already been swarmed, and my friends were in Cafeteria B, holding a seat for me. They waved when I came in.

They had sombreros cocked low over their foreheads. They had just come from Spanish, where they had spent forty-six minutes eating tacos and guacamole and churros. I had just come from French, where I had spent forty-six minutes conjugating irregular verbs.

“Olé!” Brittany shouted.

Jen and Cassie and Bea wiggled their fingers in my direction. “Hola!” they said.

Jimmy Carbone was in the back of the cafeteria, far from my friends and everyone else who had gotten stuck in the room. But Jimmy Carbone was at home there, and it showed. He was still wearing his Big Bird head, but he was reclining against the back wall, under a poster advertising the twenty-four hour Teen Crisis Hotline. He had a pile of oatmeal cream pies stacked in front of

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him. His friends were setting up a game of Battleship and arguing over who got the blue set.

The girls were saving me a seat and they were staring at me and I was staring at Jimmy Carbone. I knew everyone in the room was staring, at Jimmy obviously, but also at me, too—mostly because it was odd to see someone standing in Cafeteria B. No one stood for long there. The strategy for surviving the room was simple: sit down, eat quickly, and pray no one important saw that luck had placed you there.

I looked at the girls and then back at Jimmy.

“Rachel,” Brittany hissed, “don’t even think about it.”

But I was already gone. I stepped around the track team—athletic but not exciting enough to warrant a good seat in A—and the Drama Club and the Christian Coalition and the Vampire Society of Southern Maine, a group of pale kids with hair they dyed Ember or Midnight or Smoldering Ash. Jimmy Carbone’s beak turned in my direction. The other boys stopped squabbling over the boards.

They all stared.

“Rachel,” Jimmy said. His voice was muffled inside the head.

“Hi, boys,” I said. “Can I sit?”

“And don’t forget,” he’d say, “to stop by Cafeteria B this lunch period.

Cafeteria B: where the elite meet to eat.”

“Do you want to play?” one of the boys asked as he brushed a strand of greasy hair out of his eyes.

I took the empty seat next to Jimmy. I set my lunch—chicken salad sandwich, pears, milk—down and tapped my straw from its packaging. “I don’t think I’m up for it,” I said. “You guys go ahead.”

“You in on this, Jimmy?” one of the boys asked.

“I’ll sit this one out, too,” Jimmy said.

The boys shook their heads and bent over their boards.

“So,” Jimmy said, “isn’t this, like, social suicide?”

I sank my straw into my milk and stirred until it was frothy. “Come on,” I said. “It’s not that bad.”

“I’m wearing a bird head.”

I nodded.

“You should see your friends right now,” Jimmy said.

“And you should’ve heard Michaela Jennings and Aimee Lysecki this morning.”

“No, really,” Jimmy said. “I think their heads are going to fall off.”

I rested my fork against the cup holding the pears. “I don’t really care about that right now,” I said.

“Are you going to listen to me or what?”

“Is this about you wanting one of my cream pies?” Jimmy asked. He pointed to the stack in front of him. “Because if you want one, all you have to do is ask.”

I glared.

“Fine,” he said.

“They were running around saying you had a gun, that you’d gone crazy, that you were going to kill us,” I said. “Everyone started freaking out.”

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Jimmy unwrapped one of his pies.

“Mr. Glenn had to lock us in homeroom,” I said. “He locked us in the room because you are wearing a bird head.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

Jimmy shrugged. “So?” “Oh, come on,” I said. “What the hell are you doing? Why are you wearing a bird head?”

Jimmy cracked his beak open so I could see his face for the first time that day. “Are you jealous you didn’t think of it first?” he asked.

“Jealous?” I said. “Please.”

Ms. Vansplunder was giving us notes on postulates, and we were staring at the window, at just the sound of pouring rain.

Jimmy closed his beak and leaned back in his chair. “That’s it,” he said. “I think you’re jealous.

You’re bored too, and you didn’t think of doing something like this to stir things up.”

“This is all because you’re bored?”

Jimmy stretched. “The best you could do to stir things up was come over and sit with me,” he said.

I pinched my lips together in a tight, straight line.

Jimmy laughed. “And besides,” he said, “who cares what Aimee Lysecki and Michaela Jennings think or say or do?”

“A lot of people,” I said. “A lot of people take those girls very seriously.”

Jimmy put his hands at the spot where his bird head met his boy neck. He pretended to strangle himself. “What does that say about the student body?” he asked.

“Are they any worse of a reflection on us than a boy wearing a bird head for no good reason?” I said.

Jimmy reached for my pears, but I swatted his hand away.

“I just don’t think it’s very funny is all,” I said. “No one can take a joke anymore. This stuff could end up on your transcript or in some report from guidance. They might not let you into college because of this.”

“Because they think I’m going to snap and go on a rampage.”

“Yeah, because of that.” I looked over my shoulder, at my friends who were chewing with their mouths agape while they watched me talk to Jimmy Carbone. “Everyone’s a little unhinged these days.”

“Exactly,” Jimmy said.

“He’s on an existential kick,” one of Jimmy’s friends said. He never lifted his eyes from his board.

“Yeah, well,” I said, “have you noticed him scribbling angry poems in the margin of his notes?”

Jimmy laughed. The other boys just stared.

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“Listen, this has been really sweet and all,” Jimmy said, “but you can go back to your table now. No need to worry. You can tell Michaela and Aimee there will be no bloodshed. They won’t get to be on TV talking about how they always knew there was something wrong with me.” Jimmy opened his beak and gave me an exaggerated grin.

“I’m not leaving,” I told him. “I’m staying put. I’m eating my lunch.”

“It’s your funeral.”

“Give me a cream pie,” I said. I cut my sandwich and put one of the halves on a napkin. I slid it over to Jimmy. “Eat this,” I said. “You can’t live on Little Debbies alone.”

Jimmy poked the sandwich with his finger. “A little sloppy for someone who’s in a bird head,” he said.

“You figured out how to sit through class without being asked to take off your bird head,” I said. “I think you’ll be able to figure out how to eat a chicken salad sandwich.”

And Jimmy picked up the sandwich and shredded it into small pieces that could be tossed through his beak opening, and his friends went on and on—Miss, Miss, Hit!—and everyone in the room stared and tried to figure out what the hell was going on, and I sat very still and ate my sandwich and my pears until the bell rang, until Jimmy got up to go off to PE to play floor hockey and I got up to go to home ec to stitch a lopsided sweatshirt, and no one said a single thing about it. * Eighth period I had Math II with Brittany and Bea and Jen and Michaela Jennings. It was raining out, and the room, which was dark in any circumstance because the teacher, Ms. Vansplunder, kept the shades drawn so we could concentrate on geometry proofs instead of the soccer field, seemed even darker than normal.

Ms. Vansplunder was giving us notes on postulates, and we were staring at the window, at just the sound of pouring rain.

I was staring so hard I didn’t see Principal Lutz come in the room. Ms. Vansplunder must not have seen him right away either—she was facing the board and setting up a triangle proof—but when I heard her say, “Oh! Oh! Principal Lutz!” I snapped my attention away from the window and turned to see him standing in front of her desk, in front of the framed picture of her parakeet.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Vansplunder,” Principal Lutz said.

Brittany and Bea and Jen exhaled loudly, and I turned to stare at them. They looked down at their desks. Bea ran her finger across the pencil well over and over and over.

Ms. Vansplunder nodded at Principal Lutz and brushed her chalky hands across her slacks. Streaks of white cut across thighs.

“I need to borrow one of your students,” Principal Lutz said.

Suddenly the class was electric. A low hum swelled out to the walls. Principal Lutz did not summon students himself; he sent people to do that or had the secretary call students over the intercom. He didn’t fetch people himself because he spent most of his days in his office—a dark room set off to the side of the main office—stamping paperwork and frowning against the phone he always had lifted to his ear. He was feared because he seemed too serious, seemed to hold a disproportionate amount of power. No one knew the text of his rubber stamp, but it seemed important—maybe like it was a large NO cut in a menacing font, something he could stamp across the transcripts of any student who displeased him.

“Of course,” Ms. Vansplunder said. She opened her arms and gestured to the class. “Who do you need?”

“Rachel,” he said. He looked directly at me. “Rachel Adamson.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I had never been called to the office in my entire life, not even in fourth grade when I hit Bryan Lord because he called me a virgin. I was eight years old, and I didn’t know what a virgin was, but it didn’t sound good, so I’d insisted I was not any such thing, and when he wouldn’t give up chanting virgin-virgin-virgin in my face, I wound my right arm back and threw a punch that sent him into the mouth of the trash can. When Mrs. Huber came over to see what the fuss was about and I filled

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her in, fully expecting to get sent to the office, Mrs. Huber just hid a smile behind her hand and told Bryan to get back to his seat and keep his mouth shut. She gave me a piece of chocolate from the Good Kids Jar. “Get used to that,” she said and patted me on the shoulder.

But now I was being called to the office, and I hadn’t done anything nearly as dramatic as coldcocking a boy.

Principal Lutz looked concerned about my laughter. His brow furrowed. He looked exactly like he did when he was on the phone: displeased.

“Ms. Adamson?” he said and nodded his head toward the door.

“Yes,” I said. “Okay.” I fumbled with my things. I stuffed my notebook and pen into my backpack and stood.

My friends still would not look at me, but Michaela Jennings would. She stared right at me and smiled as I walked past. She crossed her arms and sat back in her seat.

“Follow me,” Principal Lutz said and stepped with me into the hall. “We’ll go back to my office so we can talk.”

I nodded. I was too terrified to speak, to ask if there was a problem, to guess at what I’d done.

We walked the long corridor of the mathematics wing and then past the social studies classrooms.

When we got to the front office, the secretary, Mrs. Wilson, who was my friend Brittany’s aunt, looked up and inhaled sharply when she saw me with the principal.

“Hold my calls, Virginia,” Principal Lutz said. He held his office door open and waved me inside.

“Take a seat,” he said.

There were three chairs positioned in front of his desk—a chair for a father, a chair for a mother, and a chair for a student. I took the middle one.

He settled in behind his desk, which was a giant piece of mahogany furniture that had the crisp shine of something that was polished every morning.

“Do you know why you’re here?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“This is not a courtesy call,” he said. “This is an intervention.”

I threaded my fingers together in an effort to keep myself still. “An intervention?”

“Some concerns have been raised today,” he said. “Many people have gotten involved. Mr. Glenn. Michaela Jennings. Aimee Lysecki. Brittany Kessler.”

“Brittany Kessler?” I said.

“Yes.” “Brittany Kessler is my best friend,” I said.

“Is that so?” he asked. He leaned into tented fingers, absorbing the news.

I said nothing. I squeezed my fingers together and watched them turn white as the circulation cut off.

Finally, Principal Lutz straightened himself. “Their concerns,” he said, “are about your sudden involvement with Jimmy Carbone and his recent . . . behavior.”

“I’m not involved with Jimmy Carbone,” I said.

“I’ve been told you defended him today in homeroom and that you sat with him in lunch.”

I sighed and nodded.

“Are you friends with Jimmy Carbone?” Principal Lutz asked.

“No.” “You were quick to deny that he was carrying a weapon to school today,” Principal Lutz said. “Some read that quick denial as defensiveness.” He paused and tapped his fingers on the desktop. “Let me ask you a straightforward question, Ms. Adamson. Does Jimmy Carbone have a gun with him?”

Right then, Jimmy Carbone was taking Math II in the classroom next to the one where my math class met. He had Ms. Poweski, who had the habit of making her students—female and male—cry on a regular basis. On more than one occasion after the bell, I’d come into the hall to see Jimmy Carbone

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leaving Ms. Poweski’s class with wet eyes.

I pictured him now, sitting near the windows, running his pencil over the spirals and ziz-zags he’d etched in the margins while Ms. Poweski lectured about congruency. He was doodling and not even imagining that I was in Principal Lutz’s office trying to back out of something he’d started with a bird head. At that moment, there was nothing I wanted more than to tear into Ms. Poweski’s classroom and rip the bird off Jimmy Carbone’s head.

Maybe his parents were mean to him and maybe his teachers thought he was an underachiever and maybe he couldn’t get the girl he loved to give him the time of the day, but I didn’t care. All I’d tried to

I said nothing.

I squeezed my fingers together and watched them turn white as the circulation cut off. do was come to his defense, tell our classmates that we’d known him for years, that he was a good kid, that there was no need to overreact because God knows we all did strange things from time to time, and this was where it landed me.

“Ms. Adamson?” Principal Lutz had raised his eyebrows when I didn’t answer.

“No,” I said finally. “Jimmy Carbone doesn’t have a gun with him today.”

“And will he have a gun with him tomorrow?”

I put my head in my hands.

“This is serious, Ms. Adamson.”

I looked back up at him. “I know it is,” I said. “Everyone’s making it out to be a giant deal when there is absolutely nothing to it.” I exhaled. Loudly. “Jimmy Carbone wore a bird head to school today.

Yes. Yes, that’s absolutely true. He did. But Jimmy Carbone is a good kid, and we’ve all known him for years. He’s fine. He’s not deranged or psychotic or broken. He’s a boy. He’s a sixteen-year-old boy, and sixteen-year-old boys do strange things.”

“Sixteen-year-old boys do not routinely wear bird heads to school,” Principal Lutz said.

“Maybe not,” I said, “but this morning Bryan Lord tried to steal Mr. Glenn’s methane molecules to do God knows what with. Last week I watched Tom Golding stuff a basketball under his shirt and sit through home ec pretending he was nine months pregnant. And for the last month, Ryan Hawthorne has been asking people to call him Steve. Why do any of us do anything we do?”

Principal Lutz smiled, and I realized I’d given him an opportunity. I closed my eyes.

“It’s a good question, Ms. Adamson,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me why you sat with Jimmy Carbone today at lunch?”

I wished I had a good answer. I wished I had any answer, but I didn’t. Maybe I was bored or maybe I was mad or maybe I was sick of girls like Aimee Lysecki and Michaela Jennings being the girls everyone listened to, even if they were hard and stupid and cruel. Or maybe I looked at Jimmy Carbone

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and deep down understood exactly what he was feeling that morning when he decided to duck his face under the ragged edge of the bird head.

Jimmy Carbone had always been nice to me. If we were forced to sit together in study hall, he would lend me his colored pencils, which he always kept sharpened to precise points. If we ended up on the same co-ed kickball team in PE, he would lunge in front of me if one of the soccer players

He looked frantic and wild.

He looked like someone on the verge of a great discovery. let a cannon loose at my head. In eighth grade when we were both on the school’s Literary Olympics team, he lent me a copy of Lolita because I’d never read it.

Maybe I’d sat with Jimmy Carbone at lunch that morning because I’d looked at him and realized for the first time that I wanted to be his friend.

I opened my eyes. “Honestly, Principal Lutz, I don’t think it’s any of your business,” I said.

He blinked fast, as if something quick and bright had just rushed past him and he was trying to get his bearings, find his footing, clear his eyes. It wasn’t very often that people told Principal Lutz that things weren’t his business.

“Well, I have to disagree with you,” he said. “I think why you suddenly chose today of all days to sit with Jimmy Carbone at lunch is entirely my business, and everyone else’s, too. If it’s going to relate to the health and well-being of everyone here at school, then it’s very much my business.”

I couldn’t see a way out of that room. I didn’t know what Principal Lutz wanted me to say. I didn’t know what answer he was seeking or what he would find satisfactory. If he didn’t hear what he was hoping to hear, I wasn’t sure he’d let me out of the room when the next bell rang or when the final bell rang or when we heard the school buses rumble out of the parking lot.

I figured frankness was my only hope. “What do you want me to say?” I asked. “Because I’ll say it.

I’ll tell you whatever you want to hear. But I won’t tell you Jimmy Carbone is a threat, because he’s not. And I won’t tell you that he has a gun, because he doesn’t. And I won’t tell you I sat with him at lunch today because we were arranging a massacre of the student body, because we weren’t.”

Principal Lutz narrowed his eyes.

“I think,” I said, slowing down, speaking carefully, “that people want to feel important. Everyone.

Michaela and Aimee and Brittany wanted to feel important, and making up stories is one way to do that. I think they stitched together a few moments, and, when the opportunity presented itself, they told their stories.”

Principal Lutz crossed his arms. “So you’re saying this is all a case of boy crying wolf?”

“I think it’s a case of everyone overreacting,” I said. “That’s what we’ve been taught to do.”

Principal Lutz looked down at the pile of papers in front of him. He looked at the clock on the wall. He looked back at me. “Well, Ms. Adamson, what I will tell you is simple. I don’t believe in coincidences, and I don’t believe you.” He leaned over to his phone and pressed the intercom.

“Virginia,” he said, “bring me Ms. Adamson’s file, please.”

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ISSUE

19 spring

2011

I cut my eyes to the corner of Principal Lutz’s desk, where his stamp was resting. The design plate was turned toward him. There was no way I could see what it said.

“I’m going to call your parents,” Principal Lutz said. “And we’re going to wait here together until they arrive, and then we’re all going to have a talk.”

I slumped against the back of the chair. My parents had never even heard Jimmy Carbone’s name before, so the phone call Principal Lutz was about to place would make no sense to them.

It would make them panic. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Mrs. Wilson opened the door. She walked in lightly, making sure her heels didn’t puncture the heavy silence of the room. She handed the file to Principal Lutz and turned immediately around.

On her way out, she walked by, close to me, and her wrist grazed the side of my hair as she passed.

It was as supportive a gesture as she could allow in that room.

Principal Lutz picked up the phone as soon as Mrs. Wilson shut the door. He dialed.

As he was dialing, there was a sudden blip of movement over his shoulder, out his window. His shades were half-drawn to keep out the hard glare of the afternoon sun, but just under the bamboo I could see a rustle of yellow. There, outside Principal Lutz’s office window, was Jimmy Carbone’s yellow bird head. The beak came into view. It was cracked open and inside Jimmy Carbone’s eyes and mouth were wide. He jerked his head toward the door.

I shook my head.

He jerked his head toward the door again.

Principal Lutz had gotten the switchboard at my mother’s office, and he was asking the operator if Mrs. Adamson were available.

Jimmy Carbone yanked his bird head off. Static electricity from the feathers and the hot, close air inside the costume made his hair stand straight on end. He looked frantic and wild.

He looked like someone on the verge of a great discovery.

“RUN!” he mouthed and pointed to the door. He jabbed his finger at the window without touching it. “RUN! RUN! RUN!” I prayed that my mother was in a meeting. I prayed Jimmy Carbone would go away. But neither of those things happened. Principal Lutz thanked the operator for transferring him, and Jimmy Carbone started jumping up and down, pointing at the door.

No good would come from the principal’s call, from my parents’ coming to school, from my staying put. I couldn’t imagine a single productive outcome. Which is why I waited until Principal Lutz started searching for something to write on before I locked eyes with Jimmy Carbone and dashed for the door.

I swung it wide and was gone before Principal Lutz could even hang up the phone and call for Mrs. Wilson to stop me.

“Rachel!” Mrs. Wilson called after me, but it was half-hearted. She gave me a wave as I disappeared around her desk and out the office door.

I had never run faster in my life. It wasn’t as though I thought Principal Lutz or Mrs. Wilson or anyone else would catch me; it was that I had never before felt so much like I needed to leave a place. I ran back down the hall, past the social studies rooms, through the mathematics wing, past the classroom where Brittany and Michaela Jennings were looking toward the shaded window, wondering what kind of trouble I was going to get into because of what they’d said.

There was a door at the end of the hallway, and on the other side I could see Jimmy Carbone dashing up the steps, reaching for the handle. He wrenched the door open.

“Let’s go!” he said, holding the door so I could pass through at full speed.

The door slammed shut behind us. Jimmy was soaking now, and his bird head was matted, drowned, melted. It was a wet mess of feathers and thread.

“Hold this, hold this, hold this,” he said as we ran down the steps. He thrust the bird head into my stomach, and I clutched it close.

49

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“We’re leaving,” Jimmy said. He was searching his pocket for his keys. We stopped next to his Jeep, and Jimmy kept patting at his shirt and jeans pockets. “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus!”

I started laughing. For the second time that day, I couldn’t help it. There was no stopping me. My neck went limp. My head fell back. My mouth opened to the sky, and rain sheeted inside. I clutched the bird head tight against my chest.

Jimmy finally found his keys and dragged me toward the passenger side. He unlocked the door and pushed me inside.

He had the Jeep in gear and moving faster than I thought possible. Outside, everything moved by, liquid and dark and slow. Inside, we were laughing. I was resting my chin on the top of the bird head and Jimmy was holding my hand and driving with his knees.

“I saw him take you out of math,” Jimmy said. “I never saw you look so scared.”

I pushed wet strings of hair out of my eyes. “What are we doing?” I asked again, pressing the head against my lungs and heart, hoping it would hold them in because suddenly everything felt too big to be contained in such a small space, under such a close cage of ribs.

Jimmy shook his head and squeezed my hand. He started laughing again, and so did I. We laughed so hard that the windows fogged and Jimmy had to wipe the windshield with his free hand. And that— that moment when we both leaned in close to the window, trying to see where we were going—that was the best moment of my day.

Kendra Langdon Juskus

Still Life When we stepped away from the ledge and the intoxication of height, we settled our bodies quietly, like the shimmered folding of crickets’ wings against obsidian skin.

We molded into the soft earth— back to dust through sweetest death— spreading fingers like roots and springing poppies from our pores.

We were a midday meadow with cicadas in our skin and hair of yellow grass: our stillness the invisible breath of a bluestem, our closeness a wooly milkweed strong-clasped in its stalwart shell.

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ISSUE

19 spring

2011

51

Janet B. Mc C abe Poetry Prize

An American Narnia The Alpine Tales

by Paul J. Willis

592 pages, $28 four novels in one volume Praise for Book One of The Alpine Tales:

with finalist judge Naomi Shihab Nye

W e invite you to enter submission deadline May 1st, 2011

“This is a romance in the best sense of that old word: a tale of strange adventures and a struggle between good and evil in a world where we are never very far from beauty or terror. It invites comparison with both Lewis and Tolkien because they are all drawing water from the same deep spring.” loren wilkinson, Earthkeeping

entry fee

$ 15 (includes a free copy of the Fall 2011 Issue) submit Up to three poems per entry, no longer than 40 lines each. awards $1000 will be awarded to the winner.

Publication in the Fall 2011 Issue will be awarded to the winning poem and runner-up poem. enter online www.ruminatemagazine.org/contests

2011

The best part of any good fantasy world is the promise that you could get there yourself.

In The Alpine Tales, that promise is kept.

The Three Queens Wilderness is only the swing of an ice ax away from the mountains you may think you know. It is a world inhabited by three strange sisters at mortal odds—and by marmots and ouzels and pocket gophers ready to help you find your way.

The dangers you’ll face are ever present. For this alpine world was a place of perfection until, by the bane of the Lava Beast, it crumbled into something sadder. Join the quest to repair the ruins of glistening peaks and endless forests, and discover a land you will dearly love.

Here, for the first time, all four books of The Alpine Tales, newly revised, are collected in a single volume.

Buy at wordfarm.net and get 20% off plus free shipping. Also available online at

contributors

Allyson Armistead is a graduate of the MFA program at George Mason University. She was listed in Narrative Magazine as one of 30 Under 30 exceptional emerging writers, was nominated for the 2010 Best New American Voices anthology, and was the recipient of the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award in 2008. Her short fiction has appeared in Emprise Review, Coal City Review, and Narrative Magazine and was recognized as a finalist in the 2010 New Millennium Writings short fiction contest. She is currently at work on a novel, The Way of Lien, a story set around the events of the 1937 Nanking massacre. Allyson resides in the Washington, DC, area with her husband and cat.

Brian Baumgart teaches at North Hennepin Community College just outside Minneapolis and holds an MFA in creative writing from Minnesota State University, Mankato. In a former life, he was an alternative high school teacher. Although he self-defines as a “transient writer,” having moved around since birth—originally from Texas—, he is now clearly a Minnesotan, and he is comfortable with this. His writing has been published in or is forthcoming from various journals, including Sweet, Tipton Poetry Journal, Blue Earth Review, Orange Coast Review, and Blood & Honey Review.

Sara Burant’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, and The Comstock Review. She eschews plane travel in favor of trains and lives mostly car-free in Eugene, OR, with her husband, a dog and very old cat in a house which is perennially under construction. A small flock of chickens inhabits her garden and a very fine coop.

Richard Cummings is an associate professor of art at College of the Ozarks and is also the director of the college’s Boger Gallery.

He received his MAFA in studio art from the University of Leeds in England and has exhibited work on three continents. His piece “Christ.223 | Locked and Loaded” is touring the country for the next three years in the CIVA exhibition, Work: Curse or Calling, and he will be exhibiting his assemblage work at Asbury University in late August. Richard is the husband of the beautiful and talented Alana Trueblood Cummings and the father of two energetic and amazing boys. He writes: “The three works featured in this issue of Ruminate are composed of the discarded and forgotten pieces of our culture and the fractured, decayed elements of nature.

Sticks, stones, and quirky objects (like pumpkin stems) unite with oxidized metals, bits of worn plastic and broken pottery. The process is redemptive and becomes a physical metaphor for the spiritual truth that Christ redeems us back into a wholeness and unity with God. ”

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2011

Gretchen Fletcher’s second chapbook, The Scent of Oranges: poems from the tropics, is being released by Finishing Line Press in the spring of 2011. The poems in the collection are set in South Florida where she lives and suffers from wanderlust. Fortunately, her poetry gives her ample opportunities to travel for readings, book signings, and award ceremonies. The most exciting of those was in Times Square where she was projected on the JumboTron while reading her poem that won the Poetry Society of America’s Bright Lights/Big Verse competition.

CJ Giroux is a lifelong resident of Michigan who continues to be inspired by the peninsulas that surround him. Born and raised in the metropolitan Detroit area, he is an instructor of English at Saginaw Valley State University. He has been published in Bear River Review, Thema, Relief, San Pedro River Review, The ProsePoem Project, and The Ambassador Poetry Project, among other publications.

Charity Gingerich is originally from Northeast Ohio and is anticipating the completion of her MFA in poetry from West Virginia University in May. She will be teaching creative writing and composition this spring, and finishing her thesis! Gingerich is excited to share that her essay “Of the Meadow,” which appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 18, was nominated for a Pushcart.

She is especially thankful for the gift of love in her life.

Kendra Langdon Juskus is the editor of Flourish magazine, which inspires and informs Christians in stewarding and enjoying creation. Her poetry was a mostly private passion until she won the first annual Prairie Light Review poetry contest in 2009, and now she is gradually releasing it into the wilds of the world. Originally from New York’s Hudson River Valley, Kendra is enjoying the wide skies and fertile gardening ground of Illinois, where she lives with her husband, Ryan.

Jane Lebak wrote her first book at age three, in magenta crayon, on green-bar computer paper. Her writing has improved since 1975, but the passion remains. Her first publication was her novel The Guardian (Thomas Nelson, 1994 under the name Jane Hamilton). Her second novel, Seven Archangels: Annihilation is currently in-print with Double-Edged Publishing, a small press.

She’s had shorter pieces published in New Christian Voices, Mothering, Muse, and The Wittenburg Door, among others. She has an MA in English from SUNY Brockport.

Joey Locicero lives in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. He is a recent graduate of The University of Akron where he studied English, with an emphasis on film literature and creative writing. Along with Ruminate, his work has also appeared in the Penwood Review.

Donovan McAbee loves long drives on mountain roads, kudzucovered forests, and his currently inanimate 1969 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. Originally from a small town in the foothills region of South Carolina, he moved to Nashville, TN, in 2009 after completing his PhD in contemporary poetry at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Melanie Springer Mock has two eight-year-old sons, Benjamin and Samuel, and two stepchildren, Melissa (30) and Ryan (26). She is an associate professor at George Fox University and has written for a number of publications. Her book, Writing Peace: The Unheard Voices of Great War Mennonite Objectors, was published in 2002. Even though her kids stopped naps five years ago, Melanie still takes one every afternoon, even at her office.

Amy Pechukas is originally from Brooklyn, NY, and now lives in Watertown, MA. She has loved to write since she was a kid, and in 2005, she was serendipitously invited to join a wonderful writing group led by a fabulous facilitator, Deborah Bluestein of Juicebox Artists in Somerville, MA. The group followed the Amherst Writers & Artists Method, and all participants simultaneously wrote short unedited pieces in class based on prompts. Amy participated on and off in the group for the next five years and her story, “Sam Kenneth Jones,” grew out of one of these prompts.

Cole Thompson lives in Laporte, CO, where he creates black and white photography that has appeared in hundreds of exhibitions numerous publications, and has received many awards. His work also appeared in Ruminate’s innagural issue. He writes: “I am often asked, ‘Why black and white?’. I think it’s because I grew up in a black-and-white world. Television, movies and the news were all in black and white. My heroes were in black and white and even the nation was segregated into black and white. My images are an extension of the world in which I grew up. Darkness in my images represents the trials of our human existence while the light represents the strength and power that comes from the realization that we are the captains of our souls. For me color records the image, but black and white captures the feelings that lie beneath the surface.”

Paul J. Willis is a professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, Visiting Home (Pecan Grove Press, 2008) and Rosing from the Dead (WordFarm, 2009) as well as Bright Shoots of Everlastingness: Essays on Faith and the American Wild (WordFarm, 2005). His most recent book is a four-part eco-fantasy novel, The Alpine Tales (WordFarm, 2010). He and his wife, Sharon, met in the Sierra Nevada and still enjoy hiking there.

Luci Shaw is a poet and essayist who lives in Bellingham, WA, and spends her summers fending off the hungry deer who nibble at her garden. She is working on her thirty-first book. Her most recent books are Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination & Spirit, What the Light Was Like, and Harvesting Fog: New Poems.

Jessica Smith was born just outside Buffalo, NY, (which explains her love of pierogi, bleu cheese, and the Buffalo Sabres) and has lived and taught in Minnesota and Maine. She currently teaches writing and literature at Central Maine Community College and has had work published in Permafrost, Louisville Review, Portland Review, and the Berkeley Review. She lives near the coast with a boyfriend who can do a mean Maine accent and a cat who thinks she’s a human.

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last note

I touch

things. A sort of “laying on of hands,” but literally and solely for me. There’s a sofa with gaudy pink flower print, and I lean against it, dropping hands to the surface of the fabric—perhaps in gesture no one notices, but perhaps not—and I close my eyes to allow my fingers to feel the twists and turns, the rough and smooth. This is, of course, not limited to furniture; coffee mugs, staplers, sweaters, book jackets, pencil erasers, my children’s hair, etc., all are subject to touch. This touch, this feeling, this focus on the sensory and tangible world around that is so often neglected, connects me—as a writer, as a father, as a husband, as a living being. This is breath. This is sustenance.

Brian Baumgart

Poetry

The sustain peddle on the piano is a metaphor for life, I think. When pressed, it keeps a note alive for a long time—trailing almost imperceptibly into silence.

Having recently lost both my parents to aging and finally to dying, I watched the sustain peddle slowly allow them to blend into the silence that comes before resurrection.

For me this present silence feels long—but memory allows me to hear the notes still. I recently completed portraits of my folks from photos I took of them about three or four months before they died. There’s a presence, a hum almost, in these paintings . . . almost as though the sustain peddle is still allowing soft echoes of their forms to breathe into our visual memory.

Bruce Herman

I find that the things I assume I am sustaining are, in fact, sustaining me. Friendships, for instance, that I neglect for far too long and finally decide to try and keep up, reveal themselves to be a steady pulse of nourishment that sustains me in spite of my success or failure at keeping in touch. And then there is the garden.

The effort I put into “maintaining” it can’t possibly produce the kind of life in that little square of ground that it cultivates in me each time I put my hands in the dirt.

Kendra Langdon Juskus

ISSUE

There are mornings, like now, in February, where the sky and trees and houses are one flat black, and it’s too cold to get out of bed, too cold to move, and I think “I can’t, I just can’t,” and then my husband, from the kitchen, fires up the stove and a pan of those Pillsbury cinnamon rolls— “hungry?” he says—and somewhere between the smell of the burner, the shuffling of slippers, the half-awake tenderness in his voice, I find myself moving.

Allyson Armistead

fiction

What sustains me most is music. I think it has the power to drown out the outside world, and when it grows a little bit dimmer, is when life gets a little bit brighter for me.

Joey Locicero

poetry

Sitting before a layer of beautiful, broken debris, I notice, discover, connect. Frustrated as I am, I stay the course in anticipation of the next electric, epiphanic moment. I yearn for that instant two pieces mystically reveal that they were Providentially designed to be joined together. This moment is my food, my living water and still small voice, the substance of of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. It is jazz and opera, God and Wallace Stevens all rolled into one.

Richard Cummings

visual art

visual art

Quite often

56

Ruminate Contributors on Sustaining

19 spring

poetry

2011

What sustains me? Perhaps repetition. As much as I/we complain about repetition, I often find solace in performing those simple acts that supply a sense of joy, a feeling of accomplishment, a connection to the past: the draft that I’ve revisited a gazillion times, the laundry baskets in the basement that are (for a few hours) empty, looking for petoskey stones in the town where my grandparents once lived, learning that the perennials have survived another winter.

CJ Giroux

poetry

Cole Thompson. “Monolith No. 22 — Bandon, OR.” Digital Photograph.

Richard Cummings. Prehistoric Camera. Stone, metal, silicon. 5 x 5 inches.