Tiny Lights Contest 2010

Tiny Lights A Journal of Personal Narrative $5

Contest 2010

Vol. 16 No. 1

In This Issue: 1 Just Fifteen Minutes

by Sandy McPheron 3 Cutting the Cord

by C. Lill Ahrens 5 The Other Walk

by Richard Jay Goldstein 7 Married by a Monk

by Suzanne Farrell Smith 9 Summer Swim

by David W. Berner 12 The Watch

by Rom Orem 14 Pressed Pants, Grosgrain Ribbon

by Donna L. Emerson 15 Ghost Dust

by Pat Pomerleau-Chavez Deborah Garber

In Addition: Heather Seggel Don Edgers Jodi Hottel Shirley Johnson Cameo Archer David Kashimba Laura Blatt

The stars are silver tubes of light going back endlessly, years and light-years into themselves.

Alexandra Fuller  Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight

Tiny Lights celebrates the power of personal voice with a biannual journal devoted to narrative essay. The annual essay contest winners, recipients of more than $1,400 in prizes, provide the material for the summer issue. The winter issue is by invitation only. www.tiny-lights.com is a venue for additional voices, information about Tiny Lights and resources for writers. TL is a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. [clmp] Karin Kascher

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label. If it says ―Contest 2010,‖ this is your last issue. Those receiving ―Complimentary‖ copies have earned a subscription with your work in the writing community, but I‘d never refuse your money! If your label says ―Lifetime,‖ you are in the category of blood relative. You will never get away, no matter what you do.

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his non-fiction may have first appeared on a napkin, in a journal or as a dream. 500 words or less, impossible to categorize, equally impossible to forget. Gems will be posted in Lights Online as a Flash in the Pan. Www.tiny-lights.com for guidelines.

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An Online writers’ exchange at www.tiny-lights.com Here is an opportunity to support and be supported by a community of writers, to let a flash of your own light be seen and shared. Answers to questions will be published online. Here are some upcoming topics and deadlines: Who sees your work in progress? (01/15/11) What's your idea of an effective cover letter? ( 02/15/11) How do you deal with writer‘s envy? (03/15/11) See website for additional prompts!

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Artwork: Kamil Dawson: supergirl150@hotmail.com Deborah Garber: www.deborahgarber.com Connie Mygatt: maye123@comcast.net

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Thanks to Betty Winslow, Donna Zahl, and World of Quotes for supplying quotes for this issue.

Contest 2010

Tiny Lights

page one

Time is a river that carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire."  Jorge Luis Borges

W

ith so many time and labor-saving devices at my disposal, why is it taking me forever to get anything done? This issue of Tiny Lights took about six months longer than anticipated, with delays that never ceased to amaze and aggravate me.

I‘ve only just now figured out I‘ve been integrating some major life changes at about the same rate of speed as my ancestors who viewed fountain pens and flush toilets as miracles of technology. I might have made faster progress with only a broom and a washboard to distract me.

No shortcut yet exists to greater understanding, and with the blessings of hindsight I see I needed to grapple with every lesson and challenge the last year has handed me. It doesn't take a wise woman to know there are more lessons to come. But I apologize for making you wait for these prize-winning essays, full as they are of hard-won wisdom.

Susan Bono, Editor December 2010

First Prize: $350

Connie Mygatt

Just Fifteen Minutes by Sandy McPheron

I

stand on the deck of our new home in the mountains of Southern California, holding a brand new pair of pruning shears in one hand and a book on how to prune fruit trees in the other. It is a particularly warm sunny day, considering it is February. I stare out over our tiny orchard feeling completely overwhelmed.

Why have we bought this house? I didn‘t even remember that it had an orchard until we moved in. I had been going through electric shock therapy for crippling depression during the hunt for a house, so this place wasn‘t even in my memory bank. But here I am, there are the trees, and it is my job to do something about them.

This house is supposed to be part of the therapy for my

new life. A new start: electric shock to ease the depression, new doctors to find fresh answers, new medications to rinse away the depression and anxiety from my fragile mind, and this new home. It‘s time to shed our old family home, a home filled with years of happy childrearing and what is now the sadness of our grown children‘s empty bedrooms.

Time to shed a suburban neighborhood that has become increasingly hectic. This is an escape to a quiet mountain community of orchards and clean air, a place to heal.

My feet feel bolted to the deck. I am tempted to abandon the daunting task before me, crawl back into my depression and the comfort of my blanket on the sofa. I know depression; I know how to do depression. What do I know about fruit trees?

My dog, Callie, is having a grand time loping easily through the trees. Might as well check out the apple tree and let Callie play for a while. As I trudge across the lawn into the orchard, the smell of the grass wafts up and tickles my nose with the scent of . . . green. The sun warms my widebrimmed hat. A red-tailed hawk comes flapping out of a huge oak tree, startling me as it goes screeching out over the adjoining canyon.

Once beside the apple tree, I realize that it is considerably larger then I had anticipated. Oh God, I’m going to need a ladder. I look back toward the beckoning comfort of my home, but I want to be able to tell my husband, John, that I have done something constructive for the day. There have been so many days when all I could report was that I had gotten out of bed, and praise the skies if I had taken a shower. So I have decided that I will spend fifteen minutes pruning. Fifteen minutes; then I can say I have pruned without lying. I also want to be able to rack up one small victory over the depression. The monster has won too often for too long.

Five years. Doesn‘t sound like a long time in the grand scope of a middle-aged woman‘s life, but it seems like the darkness has been surrounding me forever. I have been caught in a riptide struggling desperately to reach the shore of sanity, but keep getting pulled farther and farther out, no matter how hard I swim. I‘m tired.

Memories of my happy life are still there but dance just out of my reach, just far enough away that I can‘t quite pull them in to replenish my current existence. I want my life filled once more with the explosive energy and sparkling light of the past, that sparkle of the years overflowing with raising happy kids, giggly sex with John, satisfying work for the community and a successful career.

The monster of depression seeks out those types of dreams, pounces on them, grinding them into dust. The harder I try to fight the terrible weight, the harder the depression leans on the millstone.

A bee buzzes my face, snapping me out of my ruminating. Better get the ladder. Leaning the pruning shears and book against the trunk of the tree, I walk to the tiny barn at the edge of the orchard, empty except for an assortment of dusty flowerpots, the ladder and an old papery hornet‘s nest. I pick up the ladder—damn it’s heavy— and clumsily crash it through the doorway, banging my shoulder.

Tiny Lights

Contest 2010

page two

Never did man see the sun unless it had first become sunlike, and never can the Soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.

 Plotinus Once at the tree, I battle to get the ladder open and level on the ground. I‘m starting to get frustrated, tired and hot. I hate this. I hate this stupid house and this stupid orchard.

Tears start to prick the back of my eyes. Why can’t I do anything right? Why am I so stupid? Why is everything so hard?

The monster crawls into my thoughts and begins to scratch around.

Fifteen minutes, I remind myself. Just fifteen minutes. I snatch up the pruning shears and gardening book angrily, determined to get the whole thing over as quickly as possible.

I climb the rungs of the ladder and take a seat at the top nestled among the bare limbs. I pause a minute to catch my breath. A trickle of sweat runs down my back. Glancing around, my eyes fall on the vista of the surrounding foothills. Normally brown under the heat of the California sun, they have become an undulating blanket of green, thanks to the winter rains. A canyon breeze springs to life, stroking and cooling my sweaty face. The tears behind my eyes evaporate. I touch the warm bark. Something familiar, something good, stirs inside me, but is quickly gone.

I turn back to the surrounding branches. Okay, here I go. I open the book to the general pruning information, look at the illustrations, then compare them to the branches in front of me. Turning to the pages on apple trees, I read about their specific needs.

The moment of truth. With shears in hand I pause. I‘m afraid. What if I completely screw this up and we end up with no apples?

Okay, do the thing that is the simplest to understand: cut away the deadwood first. I look at the branches around me. I begin to cut. Next come the branches that are rubbing against each other, also simple. I move from branch to branch, section to section. I finally glance at my watch. I have been outside for two hours. The dog is sprawled out in the sun having a nice nap. I climb off the ladder, smiling. A nap sounds good.

Over the coming weeks, I move from tree to tree, learning as I go. Snip here for apple, there for peach. I even talk to the trees when the neighbors aren‘t looking. I figure it can‘t hurt.

The pruning has to be done before the first bloom, so I am pressed by nature to get out to the orchard almost daily to get the job done. Depression prefers to keep its own schedule, so there is a fight between the orchard and the sofa, but finally the pruning is complete.

I wait apprehensively for the first spring blossoms, hoping I haven‘t hacked off all the fruiting wood the book talks about. Each morning I get my cup of tea and cautiously look through the picture window, hoping for something, anything.

Nothing, nothing, nothing. One morning I see something very tiny and white tucked in a groove of the pear tree. I stumble over the dog as I race out to look more closely. There it is: a beautiful miniature flower with a petite spot of pink in its center.

Overnight the orchard explodes. Each morning brings a mantle of new blooms on a different tree. First come the white flowers of the pear, next the pink of the peach trees,

the cherries like cotton balls, and finally, my first friend, the apple, white and touched with red. Why does this bursting forth of life make me cry?

As the fruit begins to swell within each blossom, the petals fall like snow upon the ground. More and more often I find myself venturing out of the cocoon of my blanket, drawn like a proud mother to hover over the different developing fruit.

I marvel at the delicate fuzz on the baby peaches, each no bigger than the tip of my finger, the lime green of the tiny cherries with clusters the size of a silver dollar, pears blushing burgundy on green, working so hard to shape themselves, and my wonderful apples, dangling from their delicate stems by the dozens, perfect and round.

Damn, I‘m proud of myself, and for the first time in what seems like forever, I want to shout, ―Hey, look what I did!‖ The orchard changes daily as the fruit sucks up the sun and fresh air. The faint familiar feeling I experienced that first day I touched the bark begins to visit me more and more often. It feels good. I hold my breath, fearful it will slip away.

Have I found my old self among these trees? Am I blooming again, too? I‘m afraid to believe it, afraid that the depression will hear me. I‘m fearful that the monster will come thundering around the barn to bowl me over, sending me crawling back into the house, making me wonder why I‘ve been foolish enough to think I actually have control over my life again.

Harvest time. I race the birds, chasing them away from my ripe fruit. I pick as fast as I can. My kitchen counters are a tidal wave of produce. I stagger around under armloads of fruit, pressing it upon family, friends and neighbors.

I bake pies. My rail-thin frame, which had collapsed under the weight of the depression, begins to fill out. I become tan and grow stronger and stronger as I climb among the branches, picking the bounty.

This is not a fairy tale ending. Some days still find me laid low, my face turned away from the picture window, not wanting the orchard to see my failure that day.

But more and more days are filled with a desire to touch the blue of the sky and wink back at the glint of sunlight on a leaf.

As summer ends, the trees and I lean back against the rising autumn breezes with deep sighs of satisfaction in a job well done.

When my depression and anxiety began, it so muddled my mind I couldn‘t sort out what was most important. I couldn‘t figure out where to begin to find my way back.

Could it all have been as easy as starting with an apple tree and a new pair of pruning shears? Snip here for depression. Snip there for anxiety. Deadwood first.

Sandy McPheron lives with her husband and dog in the mountains of Southern California. In a long ago former life she was the director of a graphic design college, but is now happily retired from the 9-5 and working on a career in the crafting of words.

Tiny Lights

Contest 2010

page three

Flamma fumo est proxima. [Flame is very near to smoke.]  Plautus

Second Prize: $250

Cutting the Cord by C. Lill Ahrens

Kamil Dawson

A

fter days of scavenger hunting, I thought I was settled in Seoul, Korea. As my young guide and translator climbed into a taxi, I knew I‘d miss her, but I felt like I had when my mother first left me at kindergarten— ready to cut the cord.

Miss Yu rolled down the taxi window. ―You sure you be okay?‖ ―I‘m sure!‖ I said. Especially since we had found a kindly grocer, Mrs. Kim, who spoke English. Mrs. Kim had offered to help me in any way she could during my six month‘s sojourn. ―Telephone if something come up,‖ said Miss Yu. ―I promise,‖ I said, confident I wouldn‘t need to call.

A few days later, something came up.

Starting with Mrs. Kim‘s, I had searched the myriad of little groceries and general stores in my neighborhood without finding a single tampon. ―What is ‗tampon‘?‖ Mrs. Kim had said. I‘d checked my Berlitz Korean for Travelers, but ―tampon‖ wasn‘t in it. I didn‘t know her well enough to want to explain. ―Maybe next grocery,‖ she‘d said.

The groceries did stock Kotex, but I‘d already adjusted to so many things in this new culture, when it came to my body, I had to draw the line. Where there were Kotex there had to be tampons. Somewhere. After all, Seoul was hosting the 1988 Summer Olympics. The Olympic Committee, I reasoned, wouldn‘t choose a city that lacked tampons.

In humble desperation, I called Miss Yu. ―Okay,‖ she said. ―What is ‗tampon‘?‖ ―Um,‖ I stumbled, caught off guard, uneasy with the subject. ―You‘d know it if you saw it . . .‖ ―I come tomorrow,‖ she said. ―A cup of tea before we start, Miss Yu?‖ ―Maybe next time, please. Show me what you call ‗tampon.‘‖ Dear Miss Yu, all business as always, so mature for a

college freshman. It was a comfort having her at my kitchen table again. Her sleek bob shone like a shampoo ad, her Levis held a sharp crease, her Adidas shone bright white.

I handed her a tampon, still in its wrapper. ―Okay,‖ she squinted at it. ―What is tampon?‖ ―Go ahead and unwrap it. Then you‘ll see.‖ She read the wrapper aloud, practicing her English. ―Open this end. Grasp cord and pull from wrapper.‖ ―I could only fit one box in my luggage,‖ I said as she tore it open, ―and you know how it is when you run out.‖ She nodded agreeably, dangling the tampon by the cord like a dead lab rat. ―What is tampon?‖ Ignoring my sinking feeling, I forged ahead with a hot -cheeked, fumbling explanation. She looked blank. Silently I cursed our language barrier; I didn‘t know her well enough to want to mime it. ―I know!‖ I reached for my sketchbook. ―I‘ll draw a diagram.‖ She watched intently as I drew. I had to admit it was a pretty good sketch. I labeled the body parts. For good measure, I added a directional arrow. Finished, I leaned back proudly in my chair.

Miss Yu was looking more poker-faced than usual.

With a hot stab of embarrassment, I wondered if I‘d just taught her the facts of tampons, but was afraid to ask. I hoped she wasn‘t as shocked as I‘d been when my big sister informed me where it was supposed to go. But I‘d been thirteen at the time; surely a college woman like Miss Yu would already know. Had I broken some cultural taboo?! I was about to apologize when Miss Yu said in her usual businesslike way, ―Okay. We go to yak.‖ I grinned with relief. ―What is a ‗yak’?‖ Miss Yu consulted her Korean-to-English dictionary and read phonetically, "Fah–mah–see." ―Of course! A pharmacy!‖ I‘d have thought of it myself if I‘d seen one. Pondering the cultural difference of pharmacies having an exclusive on tampons, I hoped I wouldn‘t need a prescription.

To my surprise, right next to Mrs. Kim‘s grocery was the yak. I hadn‘t recognized it because of the prominent display of Camel cigarettes in the window.

The yak had plain white walls, an empty white counter spanning its width, and smelled of disinfectant—a nononsense atmosphere very different from my frilly gift shop/pharmacy back home that pushed imported chocolates, my personal addiction, especially at that time of the month. In the back of the yak, shelves stocked with brown glass bottles and plain white boxes rose to the ceiling. A frowning man in crisp lab coat and horn-rimmed glasses waited behind the counter.

I hung back, for the first time glad I had not yet learned Korean. But Miss Yu talked to him as if perfectly at ease. Apparently the subject was less awkward for Koreans.

But he wasn‘t producing tampons. They kept talking.

Maybe she was regaling him with tales of my diagram. But they weren‘t laughing. They hadn‘t even glanced at me. For all I knew, they were discussing the weather.

Gosh, maybe they were. Maybe she was embarrassed

Tiny Lights

Page four

Contest 2010 Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things.

Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth!

The Bible  James III: 5-6

and hadn‘t yet found the nerve to ask him. Poor Miss Yu. She turned to me. ―Okay. Maybe next yak.”

Exiting the fifth yak (after as many mysterious conversations), head aching, heels blistered, tongue like dry toast, I squinted down the long road ahead of us. Above all the grocery awnings, amid the jumble of signs that were gibberish to me, I recognized the green cross symbol for yak after yak after yak until they were lost in the smog.

So many yaks, so little stamina compared to Miss Yu. Her Adidas marched ahead of me at unslackening speed.

How many miles would I walk for a tampon?

Then it hit me. Was Miss Yu‘s dogged determination more about saving face than optimism? I remembered hearing that for Koreans, answering a request with a direct ―no‖ causes loss of face. Was she unable to give up without losing face? Would she lose face if I asked if she was saving face? Did ―Maybe next yak‖ mean ―Please, say uncle!‖? Had I unwittingly plugged us into some sort of Sisyphean crosscultural hell?

My life in Seoul flashed before my eyes: last week‘s fruitless quests for a soft pillow, long-handled broom, cheese—wait a minute—the grocer, Mrs. Kim! She‘d said she used to work at the American Embassy. There had to be tampon dispensers in the women‘s restrooms there. Mrs. Kim might not know the word, but she‘d recognize the thing itself. Maybe she could order tampons! I had to tell Miss Yu to stop the hunt.

I ran to catch up with her. Lying to help her save face, I assured her I could live without tampons after all. ―But maybe next yak,‖ she insisted, straight-faced, probably masking her relief at saving face, or at the hunt being over, or both. I helped her hail a cab and again said goodbye and many heartfelt thank-you‘s.

Unlike the other groceries, Mrs. Kim‘s reminded me of a 7-11, because there were few items of nutritional value.

She stood behind the counter, pricing cans of Coke. Her wrinkled cheeks dimpled when she saw me come in. ―Hi, Mrs. Kim.‖ I slipped the tampon from its wrapper and placed it on the counter. ―This is the tampon I asked about. Can you order them?‖ She tapped the cord thoughtfully, clucking her tongue, then beamed with sudden inspiration. ―Okay!‖ ―Wonderful!‖ I flushed with elation and guilt—what I‘d put Miss Yu through when all I‘d had to do was— ―No order,‖ Mrs. Kim said with a smile.

I collapsed against the counter in defeat, brought down by a hail of realizations: Koreans could just say ―no;‖ ―okay‖ did not always mean ―okay;‖ American brands everywhere in Seoul didn‘t mean Seoul had everything; and I might have been wrong about the Olympic Committee.

From now on, no more assumptions. ―I have here!‖ she exclaimed, and rummaged under the counter. ―Oh!‖ I reinflated with joy. They were behind the counter! With the condoms and Playboys? You had to be over twenty-one? An interesting cultural difference.

―Here we are for you!‖ Mrs. Kim slapped it on the counter.

It was a Korean brand, its cord more of a loose tassel made up of different colored threads, including hot pink and chartreuse. But it wasn‘t a cultural difference. It was a travel sewing kit.

I stifled a laugh of surprise, not wanting her to lose face. She looked so pleased to have helped me. ―Okay!‖ I grinned, not meaning ―okay.‖ I also bought some imported Hershey‘s chocolate.

And a box of Kotex.

C. Lill Ahrens is an editor for Calyx Journal. She‘s also a creative

writing instructor and consulting editor with published and award -winning students and clients. Lill's own award-winning stories are published in literary journals and anthologies, including Best Women’s Travel Writing 2008. Her book-length travel memoir is with her agent.

Tiny Lights’ Personal Essay Contest Spring 2011

16th Annual Personal Essay Competition First Prize: $350 Second Prize: $250 Third Prize: $150 2 Honorable Mentions: $100 each 3 “Flash” prizes: $100 each Prizes include publication All Participants receive copy of the 2011 contest edition

Deadline: postmark February 18, 2011 SASE recommended for feedback/contest notification Entry Word Limit STANDARD length: no more than 2,000 words FLASH length: no more than 1,000 words Entry Fee: $15 first essay, $10 each additional entry Send manuscripts and checks payable to: Susan Bono, Editor Tiny Lights Publications P.O. Box 928 Petaluma, CA 94953 Please consult contest guidelines @www.tiny-lights.com Winners will be posted on the website by April 11, 2011.

D

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Tiny Lights

Contest 2010

page five

I set off by the early morning coach before it was yet light, and was out in the open country where the day came creeping on, halting and whimpering ad shivering, and wrapped in patches of cloud and rags of mist, like a beggar.

Charles Dickens  Great Expectations

Third Prize: $200

The Other Walk by Richard Jay Goldstein

Connie Mygatt

I

can‘t sleep. I‘m awake and it‘s barely morning. I try to write, but it‘s no go. I surrender, lace on boots, and head up the hills behind my house—bony hills, dry, strewn with skeletal rocks, limestone haunted by the ghosts of fish. Light the color of old pearls drifts across the hills. I steer between lizard-barked piñon and juniper, breathing their fragrant breath: dust and sugar.

I turn in midhill and look out over what I have just climbed above. I see a sere oceanic vista of distant mesas, volcanic mountains. Just below my feet is my little brown house, perched amidst it all. I love New Mexico, this dry land, its bright and spare soul, have loved it since I wandered here in 1969 in my smoky hippy van.

I climb on. The rattle of stone under my boots— quartz, feldspars, sandstone, limestone: a rich mix of geologies, sedimentary and metamorphic and igneous. A stew of processes which are mutually exclusive, sea-bed mingling with magma bed. Which would I rather lie down in, impossible heat or darkest cold or unimaginable pressure? Why does transformation require such extremes?

I want none of those. I don‘t want to lie down at all.

This is my hill I‘m climbing. I own it. I have papers to prove it, but I don‘t have them with me. I hope nobody asks.

Of course, this hill of mine appears to be something solid and eternal, but in reality it is slowly slipping down itself and wending its way to the mythic sea.

My goal is the knobby rock outcrop two hills beyond, past my boundaries, so to speak. We call it Castle Rock, and who wouldn‘t? There‘s a view from there, as we say, disregarding the fact there is a view from everywhere, providing there are eyes and a mind. Everything visible is a view.

But my walk is haunted.

What haunts this and every walk I take is that other walk. A walk I didn‘t take, many years ago.

Here‘s the story.

It‘s 1966.

I‘m a hippy, replete with long hair and beard, traveling with Betty, my belovéd du jour, in a VW microbus we have tricked out to live in. The name of the bus is painted on the side in psychedelic-modern day-glo letters: The Collective Unconscious.

There is also a sign in the back window: Turn On, Tune In, and Drop By. We leave San Francisco and wind up in upstate New York via a route unknown to Automobile Club mapmakers.

Looking for gainful fun, we sign on to be extras in a psychedelic movie being filmed at the Hitchcock Estate, which is just outside the village of Millbrook, upstate near Poughkeepsie. The Hitchcock kids are heirs to Gulf Oil and the Mellon Bank. They‘re pretend hippies. Their estate— what seems like thousands of wooded acres, full of streams and deer and mysterious old stone buildings—has been turned into an illusory commune by the League for Spiritual Discovery. The LSD. A kind of bizarre 4-H club for chemical explorers, presided over by psychologist-turnedguru Timothy Leary.

The forests on the estate are interesting because, as you walk through them, every so often you realize the ancient pines are in perfectly straight lines.

The movie falls apart from the weight of its own paisleys, but we‘re invited by the LSD to stay on for a while, so we do.

All the regular hippies live in the estate‘s main mansion, but the Hitchcock sibs live in what they call ―the Bungalow,‖ a huge rambling manor house, a couple of miles away. Separating the two dwellings are two roads, one paved and straight, the other dirt and winding.

One night the Hitchcocks have a party at the Bungalow to which all of us are invited. It‘s a party of the times, with sacraments of the times—brownies of amazing grace, smokes filled with mystic incense, lunatic wine.

Music trembles the air. A silver patina creeps over all things, and time grows languorous. We sing. We read our poetry to each other. Then it‘s time to go.

Inspiration fills me. Instead of catching a ride home on the paved drive, as we‘d planned, I will walk the winding dirt road back to the mansion, just as I am, my mind flapping like a banner in a spiritual wind. Betty will ride, but I will walk, alone. And alone, in the seething night, I will see things, come to know things I do not know. The darkness will come alive with ancient green light. My life will change forever.

A simple transformative walk, such as any seeker of truth might take. All walks have this potential.

I explain my plan to Betty.

Then Ted says, ―Can I walk with you?‖ Ted is a guy who is also staying at the mansion, who happens to be gay, though I don‘t think we‘ve started using that word yet.

I really really don‘t want company. My plan requires solitude. And I don‘t want Ted to think I‘m interested in him sexually. But I hear myself saying, ―Sure.‖ I‘m a very polite person.

Tiny Lights

Contest 2010

page six

I will keep America moving forward, always forward—for a better America, for an endless enduring dream and a thousand points of light.

Speechwriter Peggy Noonan for President George Bush 1988

So we walk, Ted and I. I hurry along. I hardly know this guy. I‘m worried he‘ll come on to me. I‘m worried I‘ll offend him by not being interested.

The shadows are silent. We cross over a muttering creek on a log bridge. No naiads call to me with liquid voices.

That‘s it. We arrive at the mansion in short order. All is safe. Betty is waiting for me. Ted and I hug briefly, and the walk is over. My chance for ecstatic satori is gone.

My life changes anyway, over years and decades, because lives always do.

Betty waits for someone else now, if she‘s still alive. I haven‘t heard tell of her in a long time.

But every walk I take afterwards is a shadow of that walk as it should have been. Oh, some walks these days are powerful enough. Occasionally I even take dangerous walks, in high places, or down deserted alleys. I sometimes catch a glint of how things are. I may hear voices in the wind. But I always wonder: What would I have seen, what would I have heard, on that particular lonely walk I didn‘t take?

I scramble up the last steep slope, and I am on Castle Rock.

Santa Fe spreads out before me like a gas station map.

This other walk that haunts me, what is it now, what has it become, after so many years? An imaginary path overlying the real path I‘m on? A pair of shades too dark for the twilight of these latter years? A goathead in my sock?

Robert Frost knew. Two paths diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

Yogi Berra noticed it too: If you come to a fork in the road, take it!

I toss stones into the windy void. My thoughts are a parallel windy void. I climb down off Castle Rock and head down the back of the saddle. I‘m making a loop, taking the long way home. There‘s a new trail back here, put in by dogooder forest-savers, leading past a little spring, which formerly very few people knew about. Well, this land isn‘t mine, and I don‘t have papers to prove it.

Here‘s the spring. This time of year it doesn‘t flow out, but just curls up in its round rocky nest, a liquid eye watching the spinning sky. The ojo frío sits in a microvalley, the confluence of two arroyos. In springtime the place is thick with horsetails and mint. Right now, if you squint, you can just see the ghost of summer green overlaying the late winter brown. Squint the other way and you can see silent snow lying here, the eye of the spring burning through it. There are ghosts everywhere, always.

We walk dry together through ancient seas.

I so wanted once to be holy, sagacious, poetic. And I knew in my cells that the other walk would lead me there, that somewhere on it wisdom would congeal from the cold shadows and pierce my heart with hot knowledge. Or perhaps it never happens like that. Still, my fear now is that I missed the stellar conjunctions completely and forever which would have powered and incarnated my dreams, and I‘m too old now to hear those mystic voices. Could it be that angels and demons whisper every night beneath my window, and I‘m too settled, too clogged, to hear them?

We need a new science, a physics of memory. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would apply. Analyzing

the meaning of any nostalgic moment alters the meaning even as you analyze. Every memoir contains Schrödinger‘s cat. If I fall over in the forest, and there‘s no one to hear, do I write an essay anyway?

I follow the trail down from the spring, along the edge of the arroyo. The trees here are thick, big piñon, heavy ponderosa, dense willow, a few pioneer cottonwood. It‘s shadowy and smells damp. My wife Polly doesn‘t like this spot. She thinks it‘s creepy here, wonders if there is a body buried nearby, someone who died murdered in fear and dread.

I trust her judgment in such matters. When we were courting, thirty-some years ago, I gave her a beautiful little dried owl wing. In those days I used to collect raptor roadkill, and this was a wing from a young sawwhet owl I found in Colorado. Polly was horrified. In her SpanishIndian tradition owls were often the vehicles for brujos, witches and sorcerers, and even if they weren‘t, they were probably up to no good anyway. Too bad, because owl feathers are the softest things in the world, designed to be silent in the air, so owls can sneak down on creatures who specialize in keen hearing. But Polly knew best, and still does. Thank goodness that wasn‘t the end of our courtship.

She excused my ignorance.

This part of the trail isn‘t public. It crosses private land, and was made years ago by a crazy Vietnam vet named Organic Joseph who used to squat up here. My neighbors and I maintain it. It snakes up over a couple of hills and through a couple of arroyos and winds up at my house. I‘m almost home. Another walk almost accomplished.

I cross an arroyo on a bridge made of a railroad tie.

Polly and I put this in ourselves. If this were the other walk, would a mini-troll emerge from under the mini-bridge, and, in a squeak, demand the answer to an impossible riddle—a kind of troll-booth? And what would I have to fear from a mini-troll, even if I couldn‘t answer the riddle? I have plenty of impossible riddles of my own. I would demand solutions from him.

Yes, I am haunted by the other walk. I will always be haunted by it. Haunted by what it was, and also what it wasn‘t. Being haunted is good. Keeps you from becoming too sure of reality.

I look back out over the rumpled hills I‘ve just crossed, covered with their fuzz of juniper and piñon. There is no other walk. I‘m haunted by illusion. I walked that other walk.

I am still walking it. It led to this moment, and leads on.

Here‘s my house. I‘m home. Polly is waiting.

Transcendence in our lives doesn‘t demand the miraculous, or the intrepid, or even the foolhardy. The inside is bigger than the outside.

Good walk.

Richard Jay Goldstein, retired ER doc, has written fiction and nonfiction for about twenty years, and has published forty-something stories, essays, and poems in the literary and fantasy/sci-fi/horror press. He and his wife, percussionist Polly Tapia Ferber, live in the mountains east of Santa Fe, NM, where it‘s nice and quiet, thanks. He‘s had two Pushcart nominations.

Tiny Lights

Contest 2010

page seven

You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip.  Sir James M. Barrie

Honorable Mention: $100 Summer Swim by David W. Berner

Deborah Garber

I

t‘s early June, a Sunday, and Dad is trying to reassemble the backyard pool, the same one we‘ve had for the last five years. ―Pull the hose around the tree and up close here,‖ he says.

I am ten years old, impatient for summer, impatient for the pool. I‘m already in my royal blue bathing suit, barechest, barefoot, my cherubic belly protruding over the white drawstring tied too tightly at the middle of my waist. ―When you get the hose up here, go back and turn the water on, but only when I tell you.‖ Dad tries to direct this project with the same simple, direct commands.

It‘s a two-man job. You have to stretch out the thin steel outside wall of the pool onto the backyard grass so you can get the kinks out and wash it down with the water from a hose. The metal section of the pool has been rolled up and stored away in the garage for nearly nine months.

I run over the grass and walkway, navigating my sensitive, shoeless feet around the cracks in the stone toward the outside faucet, nearly shivering in anticipation of the first summer swim of the season. I put my hand on the knob and peek around the corner of the house, poised for the next command from Dad. ―Hold on, get back here,‖ he says. ―I still need you to help stretch out the liner onto the grass.‖ How long is this going to take? I slump back to the yard, knowing now this isn‘t going to happen at the speed any young boy would hope for.

The blue liner, nearly matching the color of my bathing suit, is thick, heavy, flexible plastic. It, like the metal, has been rolled up all winter and needs a bath. When we unroll it, there are two or three spiders inside and a dead moth.

―We‘re going to need a little soap on this,‖ Dad says. ―Go ask your mother for a small cup of laundry detergent.‖ Now he needs soap? The pool set-up is becoming a far more laborious job than I would have liked. Not what I expected. And instead of getting closer to a swim, I now seem farther away than ever. I take the long way into the house, stop at the refrigerator for a drink of milk from the bottle, grab a cookie from the cupboard drawer, and pause to pet the dog. ―Mom?‖ I yell from the kitchen, kneeling on the floor, my hand still on the dog‘s head between his ears.

My mother appears from the basement. ―Dad needs soap for the pool,‖ I tell her, my eyes and hand fixed on the dog.

She reaches under the sink and pulls out a large box of Tide, pours about two inches of it into a plastic cup. I give the dog a few more pets, grab another cookie from the cupboard drawer, and walk the soap to the backyard. ―Where‘ve you been, for god‘s sake?‖ Dad is standing near the blue liner with his hands on his hips, the hose hanging over his shoulder. ―You want to swim or not?‖ I don‘t say a thing as he snaps the cup out of my hands. ―Did you bring a scrub brush?‖ ―You want one?‖ Dad rolls his eyes and slaps the palm of his hand on his forehead.

I turn and run to the door to the kitchen. ―Mom?‖ ―Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,‖ I hear my father say in a stiff, staccato beat, shaking his head and launching into a quiet laugh.

I rush out of the kitchen, the screen door slamming behind me, hoping to ease my dad‘s infuriation with my waning lack of focus by quickly retrieving what he needs. ―Scrub brush, Dad,‖ I say, dutifully handing him what my mother had given me, the brush with the large handle and the worn, coarse bristles on one end.

He takes it, says nothing, and looks at me slowly, shaking his head. I don‘t want to make him angry, so I give it a few seconds before I ask the question. ―How long to do you think, Dad?‖ ―Oh, for Christ sake.‖ He laughs in disbelief. ―Go turn on the hose.‖ This time, I don‘t hurry. It seems now that rushing isn‘t helping me get any closer to the cool waters of a backyard pool. I walk to the outside faucet as if I were walking to my school, a slow, meandering pace that‘s interrupted only for a second to kick an early season dandelion. ―Jesus, David, take your finger out of your ass!‖ Finger out of my ass? It’s not in my ass. ―I would like to get this done before August,‖ my father crackles, his voice rougher than before and unsympathetic.

I start half-running, a visceral response. At the same time I feel my face flush. Did I have my finger up my ass? Why would I do that? I have never heard of someone with their finger up their ass.

I turn the faucet knob and wait to hear my father‘s next command.

Tiny Lights

Contest 2010

page eight

The fire i' the flint Shows not till it be struck.

William Shakespeare  The Life of Timon of Athens

―Good,‖ he yells from the yard. ―Stay there until I tell you to turn it off.‖ I stand alone, out of Dad‘s sight, trying to figure out what in the world he meant. Finger up my ass? Obviously, the subtleties of understanding figurative language are still years away. ―Turn it off,‖ Dad yells. ―But don‘t move.‖ Should I ask him? I can’t ask him now, can I? ―Ok, turn it back on.‖ I hear the scrape of the brush and the rush of water on metal. I lean against the aluminum siding of the house, still out of Dad‘s sight.

Who would put their finger up their ass? ―OK, turn it off. We‘re done.‖ The clean-up is over, and when I return to the yard, Dad is already shaping the metal walls of the pool into a circle, snapping the ends together to create a round shape two feet high and twenty feet around. ―Grab that end of the liner and help me lift it over the edges,‖ Dad asks.

The pool is beginning to take form as Dad works his way around the circle, connecting the long plastic rim that holds the liner to the metal. ―How long will it take to fill it up?‖ I ask, hoping somehow my question will give what feels like a plodding, tedious timeline a bit of a boost. ―I don‘t know. Couple hours?‖ Dad says, staying focused on his work, continuing to snap the plastic rim into place.

Couple hours? I say to myself, repeating words my father would say. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I kick another dandelion.

Eventually, Dad falls into a rhythm, snapping his way around the circle with a certain tempo. He even begins to whistle. ―Dad?‖ I ask. ―What‘s up?‖ he says, suspending his version of Johnny Cash‘s ―Ring of Fire‖ just long enough to respond.

I can’t believe I’m actually going to ask this. ―What did you mean about ‗finger up the ass‘?‖ ―What?‖ Dad says, halting the job for a moment to look at me. ―What you said, finger in my ass, what do you mean?‖ Dad stops snapping, and from a crouched position he turns and sits on the grass, puts his hands on his knees and asks, ―You‘re serious?‖ My face flushes just as it did before.

Dad shakes his head, like he‘s done a few times this afternoon. ―It‘s nothing, David,‖ he says, beginning a chuckle and returning to the work of fastening the liner. ―I just got a little frustrated, a little impatient. Forget I said that.‖ I smile to match his chuckle, but not knowing exactly why. ―Well,‖ I say, ―just so you know. I did not have my finger up my ass.‖ His chuckle erupts into to a full, hearty laugh, as if someone just delivered the punch line to his favorite joke.

I smile. Again, not knowing exactly why.

The sun is behind my father now, creating a shadow over his face. He wipes a few beads of sweat from his forehead with the back of his right hand. ―You really are something, David,‖ he says, still laughing.

I think for just a moment. I’m really something; what does that mean? But quickly dismissing the question, I look at the nearly assembled pool in front of me and suddenly believe the first summer swim is truly going to happen. ―Dad?‖ I ask. ―You gonna swim with me later?‖ Through his now waning laughter, in between the final inhales and exhales, he says, ―There isn‘t anything that sounds better. Not a single thing.‖ He snaps the final foot of the liner rim into place. ―Let her rip.‖ I run to the faucet, twisting my body so I can reach my hand behind me and yank the bathing suit bottom out from between the cheeks of my buttocks. Is this what he means?

Finger in my ass? I jump over the walkway stones, keeping my bare feet from the uneven ground, nearly falling from my unbridled eagerness and grab hold of the faucet knob to keep my balance. I use both hands to turn it clockwise and begin to hear the rush of water inside the long green garden hose. Inch by inch, water rises from the bottom of the pool‘s blue liner, creating soft splashes that fill the late afternoon air.

David Berner works in the Chicago area as an associate professor

at Columbia College Chicago, a writer, and a broadcaster. His recent writing has appeared in Perigee (Publication for the Arts), The Write Magazine, Rivulets, Clef Notes, and in a number of other publications—online and in print.

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Tiny Lights

Contest 2010

page nine

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe, and enough shadow to blind those who don’t.  Blaise Pascal

Honorable Mention: $100 Married by a Monk by Suzanne Farrell Smith

A

Kamil Dawson

ngkor Thom, once a majestic walled city enclosing nearly four square miles of the Cambodian jungle, is now a complex of stunning ruins.

Lively markets and inexpensive resort hotels surround the site, so tourists (like me) crowd in close. Angkor Thom‘s monuments, terraces, and temples were erected around the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries by King Jayavarman VII, the Khmer Empire‘s mightiest leader, who, my guidebook says, was known as the groom to this magnificent bride city. She is made of laterite, useful for building because it is both malleable and firm. The groom apparently was made of power and profound Buddhist spirituality. He showed sympathy for his subjects, though his peasant builders likely resented the decades of hard labor. Angkor Thom‘s central feature is the Bayon Temple, where my own King J. perches with enviable balance and I perch with caution and thinning patience. I slip the guidebook into my shoulder bag.

He is sweating. His favorite jeans cling to whatever they can find of his skinny, hairy legs. His navy tee shirt, pinned by his pack, sticks to the center of his back. His hair looks crafted of burnt yarn as it always does when wet. He runs ahead, leaping with long legs onto a short pillar so he can survey the weathered ruins and decide how to avoid other tourists on the climb to the temple‘s highest level. I wonder how he can cut through this early evening humidity.

I wait for him to tell me what to do next. The bags— shoulder, camera, and tote—press my bra straps into my sunned and sensitive shoulders. A tourist nearby ignores a cell phone call, the pop song clanging against the silent temple walls. I think, how stupid to choose such a song for incoming calls, how obnoxious to let the phone ring. But I chastise myself for being so negative here in this quiet place, as if my sourness rings aloud.

He makes his decision, mentally highlighting a route as if it were an Everest ascent, and hops back down from the pillar to retrieve the camera. ―Let‘s go!‖ He smiles, leans forward, rubs his hands together, turns on his heel, and trots to the base of the chosen staircase. I am familiar with

this way of his. I have seen it on every trip we‘ve taken since we started dating ten years ago.

I follow him, again, always. He is quicker than I am at running up stairs, but much slower when taking steps forward. We travel like that. I compel him to change his mind. But he resists mental movement while jumping all around like a child or flea, climbing and jumping. He always moves, always has something to do. His bony knees bounce up and down, even without music. And just when he is ready to rest, I dash ahead. We are a halting couple, one of us perpetually waiting for the other, one of us inevitably dragging behind, never in sync. Our legs are such different lengths anyway, our footsteps terribly mismatched.

He scrambles up the stairs, which are not really stairs, but more like the sides of a mountain. They almost seem inverted. One theory holds that the civilization responsible for Angkor Thom believed the harder to get to a temple‘s apex, the better. Only the worthy few had the nerve and leg strength to climb. Now the Bayon is worn and rounded.

Hundreds of thousands of tourists scale it each year. He climbs now, like a giant spider, right in front of me for a moment, then looking down at me from the top, arms up, fists clenched in victory pose.

Awkwardly I climb. My lips are pressed into an ―O‖ but I don‘t exhale. The skin behind my knees prickles with new hives. Reports on my anxiety churn out like a mental stock ticker: steps I have taken, steps I have to take, years I have waited, times I have almost left, seconds until I will sit on one stair, stuck, and see that he is ahead of me but behind me too, still monkeying around.

I make it, despite the panic. I hope my tears are indistinguishable from sweat droplets. He embraces me and says I did great, I‘m a champion, I climbed all the way up here. ―Good work, sweetie.‖ It is what we always say to each other. I press my cheek against his damp chest and feel comfort.

It is difficult to make out the real shape of the Bayon.

The towers look like rock formations and the narrow courtyards offer the moodiness of a fantasy castle, especially in the approaching dusk. Each tower bears four jumbo faces, all the same, mouths turned up just enough to look serene rather than stern. The faces are, perhaps, of the Buddhist being Avalokitesvara, or perhaps of King Jayavarman, the royal smile carved repeatedly into the bride. Such devotion on both sides.

He has disappeared, undoubtedly to take photographs, his long body splayed on the floor, angling to shoot straight up, or at a particular slant through the columns. I imagine him tearing up a little as the amber light of sunset warms the cold gray stone. He often talks of traveling with his family, of traveling through history, of being a child. He wishes he could go back there, could tumble down the stairs to his youth. I am exhausted by the climb and terrified of falling.

He retrieves me. I follow him through an archway, over a pile of large square stones. We are inside the temple‘s top floor. I trust him but feel lost because I am not leading.

When I go first, I talk so much he always knows where we

Tiny Lights

Contest 2010

page ten

In the light of his vision he has found his freedom: his thoughts are peace, his words are peace and his work is peace.  Dhammapada .

When the monk returns to an upright kneel, he gazes at us with peace and completion.

We turn to each other. For a moment I believe we have been married within the bride city. We had the leg strength and the nerve. We just needed to be still.

Under the monk‘s gaze, he gets up first, gathers his gear, places riel notes in a tray at the foot of the Buddha, and quietly slips out of the room. I linger, breathing the incense and lotus, in and out. I look around. He is already gone. I find the way out on my own.

Suzanne Farrell Smith has essays published or forthcoming in The Writer’s Chronicle, Connotation Press, Muse & Stone, and Hawaii Women's Journal. She‘s finishing her first book, a hybrid of science and memoir that chronicles her attempts to excavate lost memory.

She and King J found synchronization—they are happily married.

Flash Prize: $100

The Watch By Kamil Dawson

are headed, but when he leads, the trail lit up only by the adventure in his eyes and the reflection from his glasses, I worry at every step that I will pitch forward into a pit and despair for centuries with the bone dust of Khmer builders.

We step more carefully through the darkness that has become cooler now that the sun is retreating from the Buddhist Bayon. ―Do you smell that?‖ he asks, and I do, a faint scent of incense, so common to Cambodia, but not common here within these old dead walls. Somewhere incense is burning and once he knows it, he must find it.

I imagine men and women gliding through these passageways, thinking of sacred text, of their next meal of rice and fowl and gingered vegetables, of staying out of trouble, of marrying into power and having babies to marry off into more power. I am thinking some of the same things.

Of marriage. Of putting our decade together, our labor of love, into historical context, not just into history.

The incense smell is stronger now. Its floral layer rides a wave of musk that draws tears from my eyes. We become aware of a red glow. Ahead in a corridor, a bit higher, there is light. I expect it is a red beating heart, the heart of the king, still alive and preserved within Angkor Thom‘s walls. I want my own heart to be preserved, to stop moving around, to stop aching, to just sit and pulse. I want my mouth to look serene.

He leads me into a spherical cavern, what might have been the summit of the thirteenth-century Buddhist universe. In the center of the room, there is an old monk in yellow robes, nodding and swaying on his knees. While he, smiling, peers down at the monk, I peer upwards toward a tiny white dot of light at the top, a seemingly pin-sized hole that attracts and funnels the incense smoke now filling the little room. The white dot blinks several times. There are bats up there, flying back and forth across the hole, resettling on better perches, sensing the strangers who have just arrived.

He squats, looks up into my eyes. We turn to the monk who beckons us to sit down, no, kneel down, and we do.

Next to the monk is a flaking golden Buddha covered in lotus flowers and bat droppings.

For the first time all day we put down our burdens, laying the cases and backpacks behind us. My knees are sweaty and itchy, but I am joyful that we are next to each other with no bags, and that neither of us is leading. I take his hand, hoping that mine feels both malleable and firm.

The monk chants, hovering around one note, close to the E below middle C, I think, just sharp enough to live between the E and the F, a precarious crack in music. The monk‘s voice is clear; he must be inhaling and exhaling in circles. The incense carries the song up through the white hole, up over Angkor, up into the heavens now dotted with stars. And there, in front of the once-radiant Buddha and the aged monk singing, we kneel together with nothing else to do or think about but the proximity of our thighs and shoulders.

The monk‘s voice stops abruptly as he leans forward. I think he is going to tip, to pass out, but he leans deep at the waist, bowing, his bald head kissing the floor in silence.

Ron Orem

I

didn‘t really need a watch. I didn‘t need to know the exact time. The day started when the black of night gradually turned to grey, when forms emerged from the gloom. It ended when darkness returned, usually with a suddenness that is typical of the jungle, of places where there are no lights to disturb the blackness, where the canopy is so thick one cannot see the stars even on the clearest of nights.

During my turns at guard, the radio handset resting in my hand came softly to life every thirty minutes or so with a whispered call to provide a ―sit-rep,‖ or ―situation report,‖ of what was happening at my location. A barely audible ―sitrep negative‖ was all the answer needed. At the fourth call, two hours had passed; time to carefully touch the next soldier for his turn to sit quietly in the dark, his turn to count his heartbeats as a measure of the passing time.

While we slogged through the jungle thickets, time was measured by the counting of paces. Every few hundred meters, we stopped. This may sound like a short distance, a brief stroll to those used to walking on groomed trails or paved sidewalks, but in the tangle of vegetation which we carefully, silently, slid through, watching for any disturbance of pattern that could signal lethality, it was the hard work of imprisoned laborers. A stop was a chance to

Tiny Lights

Contest 2010

page eleven

Two things incline the heart to wonder, the starry sky above and the moral law within.  Immanuel Kant

Without hesitation, I unbuckled the watch, handed it to him. He thanked me, removed the silver bracelet watch he was wearing, put it on the desk, and carefully placed the worn, battered green plastic watch around his wrist. His eyes grew sad, but just for a moment, and then he remembered to smile. I didn‘t need the smile as much as he did. The watch was home.

Ron Orem, who served as an Infantry Rifle Platoon Leader in

Vietnam, now lives in Owings Mills, MD, travels the country on his BMW motorcycle, practices ball room dance, and leads sweat lodges.

Flash Prize: $100

Ghost Dust

Connie Mygatt

take a swallow of warm water; ease the shoulders from the bite of pack straps; smoke a cigarette slowly; look at the map; check our progress with the platoon sergeant and the lead squad leader; measure the distance to the next stopping point.

Midday meal times were measured by how long it took to open and eat a can of rations, for a fire team to make a short cloverleaf around the flank of the platoon, to dry one‘s feet, one foot at a time, to brush a fresh, light coat of oil along the metal parts of the rifle. Then it was time to move on, time to struggle up the next slope, and the one beyond that.

A few men wore watches. Metal bands were discouraged, as the glint of sunlight on them could be seen a good distance, or so it was said. The reality was that little could be seen at any distance, and barely any sunlight found its way down to us. Some men had the broad leather watchbands common to that era. Those rotted away rather quickly. Most watches didn‘t survive long in the jungle, the constant moisture finding its way into the workings, under the crystals, fogging them, stopping the works.

But I had my eye on a watch, a special watch. The company executive officer wore a military issue plastic watch called, of course, a Mickey Mouse watch. It had an olive drab nylon wristband, its housing was plastic, and it didn‘t reflect light. It was an impossible-to-get item, reserved for officers and those in the rear who could skim off supplies before they got to the field soldiers. I wanted one.

One steamy morning we sat by the air strip, waiting for the cargo plane that would carry us into Cambodia. The XO was there to do some administrative tidying before we went, and to see us off. He wore that watch. I badgered him for an hour, reminding him he had no need for it, being in the rear with the gear, the cold beer, clean sheets, radios with music playing loudly enough to hear, and clocks hanging on the walls. I could do a better job running my platoon with that watch; I would take good care of it. I promised to return it to him one day.

He relented, unbuckled the watch from his wrist and handed it to me. I noticed his arm, exposed below his rolledup sleeve, was tanned. There was sunlight back in the rear.

An untanned patch where the watch had been marked its location on his arm.

I wore that watch for the rest of my tour. I set guard watches with it. I used it to decide when to stop the platoon for rest breaks and when to end moving for the day. It was dependable. It didn‘t fog up, and was light on my wrist.

When I returned to the world it stayed with me, a constant reminder.

Then one day I met a soldier working at the local college in the administration office. He had no legs. He had lost them to a mine that had casually tossed his armored personnel carrier, and him, off the road he was patrolling.

When he came to, much later, he was missing his legs, and his watch, which someone along the treatment path had wanted more. He remembered that watch, and told me he missed it a great deal.

by Pat Pomerleau-Chavez

I

t is true, you cannot go home again. A conundrum: You think you left. You never leave, you cannot return. But there are milestones along the road.

Some call them memories. I call them Ghost Dust.

Fragrance of Indian Paint Brush; grains of alkaline soil between my fingers; a full mirage with palm trees; acres of poppies and lupines; oil stench. Ghost Dust blowing tumbleweeds from Buttonwillow. McKittrick, Maricopa.

Ghost Dust blowing through the year of my birth. 1931.

The Great Depression rolling on.

I come back to California in 1955 to Ghost Dust blowing over the wreck at Blackwells Corner. Oil on the road. Oh, Jimmie Dean, Jimmie Dean! Come back now! We love you! Come back before it’s too late! Jimmie Dean…

A recent trip to where I came from: Taft–Ford City.

The lower San Joaquin Valley. The last trip. Desolate towns. But the desert itself not desolate. Not a manmade thing. Beauty lies beneath manmade ugliness. Grasshopperheaded oil wells have replaced the tall wooden derricks.

Some so close together they drink from a common pool. The dregs.

Ford City, a shambles. Abandoned houses. Siding flaps in the wind. I glimpse Tom Joad slinking down an alley.

Gaunt cheeks, hurt eyes. Steinbeck, on my father‘s porch,

Tiny Lights

Contest 2010

page twelve

Lately I’ve been remembering how her room was almost empty and everything was white, how the winter sun washed her slim girlish body in a cool marble light.

Sex With One Woman (My Wife)  John H. Richardson

scribbling. Signs for the Taft High School football team, the only sign of life. Cemetery vast, green and growing.

Liveliest place in town!

On hot evenings, my extended family drinks ice tea beneath Grammie‘s fig tree. Plans, plots. Schemes how to leave. Get out. An endless conversation. The only child, bored, I climb into the fig tree, listen to Hitler‘s rants spewing from Grammie‘s Philco. Oil seeps, demanding attention. Get out of Taft–Ford City. 1939.

Save money. Hope. Save. In time, everyone leaves, one by one, by two, by three. All but the oldest daughter– my young mother. She alone stays. Three years after her death my stepmother (my aunt) gives me a photograph of her. No one has spoken of her; my family believes death, like poverty, does not exist if you do not acknowledge it. I tear up the photograph. Ghost Dust. 1942. We finally leave the great San Joaquin Valley.

2009. I find her worn tombstone. (1907-1937). Place a smooth stone tumbled down the Chetco River to a beach she knew. I do this for myself. Walk away. Grasshoppers continue pumping.

downtown looks as bad as Taft. Oil is black gold, they say.

Water is more precious than either gold or oil.

On TV a thin man looms up from clear across the country. Raises his head camel-like, sniffing for water. Tests which way the wind blows. Happy New Year! The recession is over. I shut off the TV. Tomorrow came and went yesterday.

Soon, I start back to northern California. Under the illusion I am leaving here. I think I am going home.

Pat Pomerleau-Chavez lives in Santa Rosa, California. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and in The Coracle, Sinister Wisdom, The Amazon Quarterly, Turning Wheel, The New Settler and other journals. Several years ago she added Chávez to her name in honor of one of her heroes, César Chávez.

Flash Prize: $100

Pressed Pants, Grosgrain Ribbon

I get onto old Route 66, past the Bagdad Café. That funny movie. The café closed. Motel with doors ajar. Go through Cadiz, Siberia, Klondike. (Someone had a sense of humor!) Past the site of Bagdad. Town gone. Too hot, no water. Sign gone, perhaps a souvenir for someone among so many coming from everywhere, crazy about that movie.

Boarded up schools, empty houses, rusted automobiles.

Looks like Taft-Ford City. The Great Depression. Ghost Dust.

I enter the wondrous Mojave National Preserve. Fills me up. No words good enough. Shifting light over mountains beyond Kelso Dunes. Nothing stays the same.

The gorgeous old Kelso Depot, restored, now a museum.

Used to be you could go by train to Albuquerque and beyond—right through here! Ghost Dust settles on the tracks. At sunset the great cinder cones turn purple, then suddenly a patch of light. Desert instantly turns yellow, turns orange; the mountains turn red. Sandia. I am not on drugs! I am in the fascinating, the unbelievably beautiful eastern Mojave. Please, let no one find oil here!

At the Fenner turnoff an empty pool with fake Greek statuary. One stark figure lifts his arm, pointing towards heaven. All the plumbing is exposed to wind and sun and shifting sand.

I go back to the motel in Needles, my base for visiting the Mojave. Read about the failing dam, the sinking reservoirs on the Colorado. Eighty percent of the river goes to agriculture. Mostly alfalfa. Turns to steak. Needles a larger version of Bagdad. They are running out of water.

They will run out of steak. On every motel a vacancy sign.

Sparse traffic through Needles even in high season. A few cars dribble toward Laughlin casinos. Old Needles

by Donna L. Emerson Deborah Garber

I

used to grab men in uniforms. On train platforms. I ran as fast as my legs could run in their white laced shoes to encircle soldiers‘ legs. During The War. They laughed and patted my head. How little I was. How beautiful my mother‘s smile. We were waiting for Daddy to come home from March Field. Or San Bernardino. Or Fresno. I screamed Daddy! until my voice went hoarse, looking up at men in green gabardine.

I met an Army colonel in Chicago at a conference on children twenty-five years later. Pressed pants, grosgrain ribbons. He offered solutions new to us. He wore green, like the military people I worked with at Letterman Hospital.

He and I did similar mental health work. Trying to make sense out of how families were changing. Divorce now common. Military families moving every two years, trouble at school, drugs, pregnancies. He smiled, laughed a lot and made us feel that he knew best. He charmed every man and woman in the room.

We talked later at the cocktail party, all of us young professionals. I wore my Alvin Duskin three-quarter length beige coatdress, brown buttons to mid-thigh. My stockings were white with the slightest bit of lavender. His green coat

Tiny Lights

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Contest 2010

People press toward the light not in order to see better but in order to shine better.—We are happy to regard the one before whom we shine as light.  Friedrich Nietzsche

decorated with yellow and red grosgrain ribbon and brass. ―You are of high rank,‖ I said, as I touched his medals. I praised his talk. He put his arm around me in the back seat of the cab.

We talked work, we talked theories, we talked all night. We spoke about children going through divorce—did the break-up have to hurt them? Each of us coming out of long term relationships.

After dinner we danced. I could smell his peach-olive cologne as he removed his stiffer military coat. His medals tinkled when he took it off. His shirt stuck to me while we danced after everyone else went home. He fluttered his eyelashes over my closed eyes. You are the fresh air I need, he said to me as I was thinking this about him.

He asked me upstairs. I told him I would not until he was a very single man. He knew I was right, being Catholic, and from my part of Pennsylvania. We walked and talked until the October sun came up and the breakfast crew began their day. Tell me what you do all day, every day, at home, he clasped my hand. We spoke of our favorite foods while he walked me to my hotel room.

I lay in bed an hour and he called to invite me to lunch.

As we walked out of the hotel, he said he had to get something in his room. As I stood outside waiting, he said, Lunch is being served here.

I looked in and there on the white tablecloth were all the foods I‘d described the night before: rare lamb, steamed fresh spinach with garlic butter, Caesar salad, pickled beets, and cherry pie. Each one in porcelain surrounded by silver.

We sat down. He watched me eat every bite.

We wrote, sent poems, called, made plans. I want to tuck you in, he whispered at the end of our phone calls. He moved into his own apartment. I stayed in mine. He couldn‘t continue with me after some months because he had many children, complications with his divorce, military missions, responsibilities. He was the President‘s analyst.

As months passed, I drifted away, married 5 years later. He was still managing a messy divorce. We met on Union Street in San Francisco when I was seven months pregnant. I wore a red velvet maternity dress. He loved my belly, patted it. We ate dinner in warm summer air, walked for two miles until I had to go home. We spoke of our counseling work. He spoke of his missions, his duty to the Pentagon and his country. He loved serving.

Letters, a meeting five years later at Letterman, when he came out for an AMA conference. His divorce was final.

Mine was in process. I drove to the city to see him. He held a party in his room, one of those Victorian houses for generals and commanders that I‘d always wanted to visit.

Old, wooden, three-story clapboards with stories to tell, that I drove by all the years in between our meetings.

I loved him, had loved him for fifteen years; our common pasts tied us together. We wore our morality every day, we were the high standards of our generation, he on one coast, me on the other. Living out our caring of the life we‘d been given through tireless service to children. He pulled me close and said he wanted me on his lap. I moved

back, getting my bearings. I could see what he had in mind and wasn‘t sure any more.

We spoke about our futures. He thought he would likely marry the woman who‘d been his secretary; she understood his military obligations, his marriage to his work, his many responsibilities. She wasn‘t a beauty, he said, it wasn‘t a passionate union. We both knew I would ask more of him.

Let me wash your face. Now your feet. I’ve wanted us all my life, as far back as I can remember. He brushed my hair, all my hair.

We made love for all we‘d shared together, all we‘d lost, all the love that needed saying. He discovered me. He recognized me. He watched me sleep. My cheek felt safe against his broad chest. He left at dawn. He called later to say he‘d found a bus, good thing he‘d done reconnaissance in Vietnam.

As time passed, I imagined him holding up the East Coast as I worked on the West. Puzzled a little at no responses to my letters. Certain we‘d meet again.

I found out twenty years later that two years after our lovemaking he died, parachuting into Central America. His obituary said he returned to his duties that day until abdominal pain sent him to the infirmary. I called his clinic.

His friend told me he had been on his feet, laughing with the younger, injured men. He had to be airlifted out and died on the way to Texas. I wonder what his last thoughts were. I like to think he held glimpses of me, maybe not that day, but a day before, encircling his legs, touching every part of his strong body, telling him, I’ll never forget.

Donna Emerson, college instructor, LCSW, photographer, writes poetry and prose. Recent poetry publications include Eclipse, Phoebe, Paterson Literary Review. Prose and photography publications: L. A. Review, Passager, Stone Canoe. Her chapbooks: This Water, and Body Rhymes (nominated for a California Book Award). Donna lives with her husband and daughter in Petaluma, near her adult sons.

WRITERS FORUM of PETALUMA Third Thursday of the month 7—9 p.m.

Petaluma Community Center (320 N. McDowell Blvd.) $15 each workshop at the door

www.thewritespot.us February 17, 2011: Zoe Fitzgerald Carter March 17, 2011: Verna Dreisbach April 15, 2011: Matt Stewart May 19, 2011: Sheldon Siegal June 16, 2011: Victoria Zachheim

Tiny Lights

page fourteen

Contest 2010 The sun shines not on us, but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing.  John Muir

SEARCHLIGHTS & SIGNAL FLARES Searchlights & Signal Flares, TL’s monthly online column, is written by writers like you.

Join the exchange! Go to www.tiny-lights.com and subscribe to our free monthly email newsletter, Sparks: News & Notes, to keep up with the conversation and get Searchlights prompts delivered to your inbox.

Flares from our August 2010 posting:

When an unexpected memory comes calling, who answers?

I

t would be nice to have access, say on a rental basis as with office furniture, to bomb-defusing equipment for those times when unexpected memories come to call. Even the happy ones tend to leave a smoldering crater in their wake, pointing out as they do that I'm older now, or that blackberries are not in season, or that a relationship that was once caramel-sweet did, as things sometimes do, turn foul and poisonous in the end. A bad memory, of teasing, betrayal, humiliation, loss, or failure, can nag like a mosquito in a hotel room. It's not always convenient, but they can be dispatched effectively by swatting, preferably with a volume of Eckhart Tolle. I would rather they all stayed home and left me out of things, stopped drinking my blood for sport or blasting me out of the here and now into unhealthy comparisons.

The good and bad ones, even those of recent issue, show up dressed as sharp as Mormons and ready to chat. And their approach at the door always reduces me to child size, afraid to talk to strangers or open the door, sensing that they're already oozing in through the screen without my consent. The knob is harder to reach than usual and my movements slow down, as if I'm walking across the bottom of a swimming pool. Light bends and ripples around the cheap film they're projecting on the wall, the short film of my yesterday, losing my temper unflatteringly, the camera giving me fat squirrel cheeks and a drunkard's spongy red nose.

Next time I'll remember to fasten the chain-lock, to offer a note from my mother, to tell them I can't talk to last year or the year before because it's all I can do to make it through today, this moment right now. But of course they'll get in; the past always does, and shrinks me back to helplessness with one push of the bell.

Heather Seggel is frequently unstuck in time; if you come visit her and she doesn't answer the door, don't take it personally. Her work currently appears in the anthology Punk Rock Saved My Ass (Medusa's Muse Press).

A

fter plopping a handful of change on the counter of a coffee shop, I was short a nickel. This triggered the memory of a similar situation many years earlier.

I was five when I began my daily visit to the nearby general store by myself. Once in the store, I would ask for an ice cream cone, Dixie Cup, or Popsicle and tell the proprietor, ―Charge it to the Edgers!‖

Few Fox Islanders paid cash for their groceries; instead, everyone had a charge account, which was kept in an account book stored in a big drawer underneath the cash register. Accounts were payable on a weekly basis. The only thing not chargeable was soda pop. It was in a machine on the store's porch and required a nickel.

I didn't drink pop very often because my dentist-father was an anti-pop zealot who pounded dental propaganda into my young brain. However, on especially hot days, the lure of a cold Coke overpowered the fear of rotten teeth, and I would head to the porch to peruse pop bottle tops. Several flavors of soda were kept icy cold in a refrigerated water cooler that held the pop bottles' necks in tracks. The buyer had to guide the bottle of the chosen flavor from its track to a slot that would release the bottle when a nickel was fed into the coin slot.

The only ‗money‘ I carried in my pocket was a collection of tax tokens I had managed to find. Each token had a hole in its center through which I strung a small chain. I knew that I could swap tokens for real money by asking whoever was behind the counter in the store, ―How many tokens does it take to make a nickel?‖ ―Fifteen!‖ Removing the tokens from my pocket, I unstrung them from the chain, putting them into piles of three. I knew that I needed five piles to equal five cents. ―I only got twelve. Can I bring you three more tomorrow?‖ ―I'll tell you what. Keep yer tax tokens, cuz we got enough already. I'll just lend you a nickel, and then later today or tomorrow you can bring me a nickel to make us even. Okay?‖ ―Okay,‖ I said stringing the tokens back on their chain.

Back to paying for my coffee: Among the pile of coins was a wrapped mint candy. Teasingly, the five-year-old in me asked, ―Could you count the mint as a nickel?‖ The cashier answered, ―Keep the mint. I'll catch you the next time you come.‖

Don Edgers

lives, writes and drinks his coffee in Port Orchard, WA. His website: anislandintime.com.

W

hen an unexpected memory calls, I pick up the phone and listen half-heartedly, bored by the stale tale I've heard so many times before.

When the doorbell rings, I sense the cold water of dread rising in my gut and realize I'm holding stale air in my lungs. I slam the door shut.

Other times, I'm eager for that sunny visitor, whose arrival satisfies a longing I never knew was there, gladness coursing through my veins.

Of late, youthful memories seldom visit or call. Instead, yet-tobe-formed memories keep ringing and ringing. I resist the urge to answer, willing the machine to pick up.

Jodi Hottel keeps trying to live in the present moment in Santa Rosa.

S

hare your own illuminating insights with these upcoming questions:

Who sees your work in progress? (01/15/11) What's your idea of an effective cover letter? (02/15/11) How do you deal with writer’s envy? (03/15/11) Send to editor@tiny-lights.com Responses will be posted @ www.tiny-lights.com the following month.

Tiny Lights

page fifteen

Contest 2010 Nerissa: When the moon shone, we did not see the candle.

Portia: So doth the greater glory dim the less.

Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice

Colin Berry writes fiction, memoirs, and articles about art and visual culture from a sunny space in Silver Lake, a district in north -central Los Angeles. He is finishing a collection of short stories about men at turning points in their lives. You can read more of his writing at www.colinberry.com.

Deborah Garber

This Year’s Contest Judges

FLASH IN THE PAN

Jamie Moore is studying for her MFA in Fiction at Antioch University Los Angeles. She enjoyed interning for Tiny Lights, and loves to help out at the local Sonoma County literary events. She is trying to avoid all those real life responsibilities in order to carve out a writer's life for herself.

Quarterly explosions of brilliance at www.tiny-lights.com.

These pieces are from the 21st Flash:

Ken Rodgers lives in Boise, Idaho. He and his wife, Betty, tend to

be migrants and are making a documentary film about Ken‘s company of Marines in Vietnam. Ken teaches creative writing workshops on ground and online and has an MFA from The University of San Francisco. More about Ken: www.kennethrodgers.com.

Dan Coshnear’s bio has changed very little since last year except

this; he was born again to new parents. Of these new parents, little is known. They seem like his old parents, but younger, slightly wittier. Mom was an Olympic long jumper. Dad has six fingers on each hand and he played clarinet. They met in jail. In Albania. On the winter solstice. Daniel was conceived during a lunar eclipse.

They say they love him. They write often. Constantly.

Email him: dan@coshnear.org

Lakin Khan is the Fiction Director for the Napa Valley Writers Conference, a hat she wears, she‘s been told, with both verve and panache. Her poems, stories and essays have been published locally in zaum, The Dickens, Zebulon Nights and Tiny Lights. Links to her work can be found at her idiosyncratic blog, Rhymes with Bacon: http://lakinkhan.blogspot.com..

Thanks for the courage and patience of all who shared their writing with us. We couldn‘t do this without you. Please try us again.

CONTEST 2010 FINALISTS

Flashpoint Finalists: "No Adults are Home" by Erin Green; "Scopitone" by Melody Gough; "The Gift" by Ana Chavarria Shore Standard Length Finalists: "Rapids Recovery" by B.J. Yudelson; "Blue Ticket" by Shae Abbett Irving; "Midsummer Milkweeds" by Alison Townsend; "Stirrups" by Leslie Tucker; "Swimming" by Molly Knox

ENTRIES OF NOTE "Bannock Street" by Ariel Smart; "The Chili Sauce Gift" by Sandy Carrubba; "A Question of Risk" by Sheila Cotton Robertson; "Artists" by Susan Starbird; "Linda's Litany" by Irene Edwards; "Gone in 60 Seconds"

by Charlie Long; "Christmas Cactus" by Amy Whitcomb; "Sold! On a Small Town Saturday Night" by Ellaraine Lockie; "Of Birds and Bees and Spiders, Too" by Joyce Deming; "Cheers" by Barbara Toboni; "Coal Hollow Ekphrasis" by Floyd Cheung; "Someone Who Looks Like Me" by Michael E. Reid; "The Basement" by Jan Henrikson; "Meditation" by Tomoko Harada Ferguson; "The Taxi Ride" by Margaret Mary Monahan; "The Last Word" by Colleen Craig; "Teddy's Story" by Shiv Dutta; "Visit to David" by Lucille Lang Day; "Ghost Wings" by Catherine Crawford; "The Writing on the Wall" by Sarah Savsky; "Dementia, Word, This" by Lynne Casteel Harper; "Better than 10,000 Ducks" by Jean Wong

Sounds of Childhood by Shirley Johnson

F

irst a distant, high-pitched note far away wailed octaves above the rhythmic rumble that accompanied its approach. Not melodious, but insistent, gaining in force as it came nearer, changing from an announcement to a warning, and from a single note to multiple tones, like a bellows. Soon all the dogs in town howled mournfully, none more than our two Chesapeake retrievers, who heard all the mortal warnings of mankind and dogdom as the heavily loaded cars rumbled through the town.

In the days of my young childhood, seventy-five to a hundred boxcars loaded with hematite ore bound for the steel mills of Gary and Pittsburg thundered along the way to the port of Duluth two or three times a day, leaving the pictures on our walls askew and the keening dogs quiet after their service as town criers.

For those of us who lived in the small northern Minnesota town, the trains became the background noise of our lives, hardly noticed unless a stranger called attention to them. ―Oh, that‘s an ore train from the Iron range,‖ we‘d explain with a certain pride in the reflected glory of being part of the power that fueled the great industries of our country. How mighty those trains were, dangerous and exciting as they declared their importance in that cold land.

The open-pit mines of Minnesota (―the largest open-pit mines in the world‖ we often heard repeated) represented great wealth, like the oil of the Mid-East in the next industrial revolution. My father often said with slightly bitter humor that his grandfather left northern Europe to walk across the state, bypassing the riches of the iron range to settle on swampy forested land. (Golda Maier said something similar when she explained that the Jews couldn‘t be as smart as was claimed having had the whole desert to settle in and choosing a place with no oil.)

I didn‘t realize I had carried the sound of the ore trains in my memory, and for years after I came to live near the Pacific, I accepted the ocean‘s roar as part of the orchestral background of my life without questioning its source. These rhythms were totally different but I didn‘t stop to listen until one cold night, when I paused on my front steps, and hearing the pounding of the waves, at last knew that these were not echoes from my childhood but the sounds of the new world I was to live in from that time forward.

Shirley Johnson currently lives and writes in Santa Rosa, CA.

Sheila Bender’s Writing It Real™: www.writingitreal.com Premium magazine and resource center for writing from personal experience

Tiny Lights

Contest 2010

page sixteen

The sun and stars are mine; if those I prize.  Thomas Traherne

Meditation on Age and Anchovies

by Laura Blatt

I‘

m dining on anchovies. Not the usual, overly salty stuff you get in tins, but big, robust simmered ones, a delicacy here in Manarola, Italy. From my table, I have a splendid view of fishing boats on the blue Mediterranean and brightly-colored flats nestled on steep cliffs.

Small dogs sit at their masters‘ feet, perhaps tasting a special treat before the bill arrives. The dogs are patient. They have learned that good behavior allows them to go anywhere, from bakeries to restaurants. And there‘s no rush, either for humans or canines.

Today is my birthday or “Oggi è il mio compleanno,” as I say to my waiter, having vowed to speak only Italian or to remain silent.

Every night, I memorize a phrase to use the next day.

“Cinquantotto anni,” (58 years) I add, proudly.

This meal marks the ending of a glorious day. In the morning, I ate fruit from my hotel‘s lush garden, At noon, I snacked on pungent cheese. Strolling on the boardwalk of the Via dell‘Amore from Manarola to Riomaggiore and back, I listened to the rush of the waves and the murmurs of tourists. Later, a six-mile hike led me down rough, winding trails along hillsides and vineyards. An old man carrying a loaf of bread smiled as I took his photograph.

Back in the USA, my house gathers dust and noxious weeds grow on my one-acre plot. Reports and documents clutter my office desk. All are urgent. But here by the sea, I take delight in my own good company. As for picking up speed: posso aspettare—I can wait.

For over two decades, Laura Blatt was an editor and manager at Wolters Kluwer publishing (formerly CCH) and a web site writer. Now retired, she lives in Penngrove, California. Recently, her work appeared in Tiny Lights and California Explorer.

Going, Going by Cameo Archer

I

nstead of coming here the last two Saturdays, I visited my grandchildren in Illinois, so it‘s been three weeks since I‘ve helped my dad. All morning I‘ve been puttering around the house, the inside air stale, smelling of old men. I want to run away.

Jerry surprised me by being here when I arrived, although he lives here. He jabbered on about this and that. Finally said, ―You don‘t need to go back to say hello. He refused food this morning. I wouldn‘t even look in there, if I were you.‖ I poke here, poke there, not sure when to do. It‘s too quiet, too different from the days when the kitchen was full of people, when dishes of salad, pitchers of lemonade, plates of chicken, hot dogs, hamburgers floated out the back door to the swimming pool deck where grandchildren cried out, splashed each other, ran back to the bathroom in the house.

There‘s no turquoise water in the pool now—no water at all.

It‘s a ridiculous concrete hole in the ground, taking up most of the back yard, collecting trash in the deep end, the diving board taken away long ago as a safety hazard. In the quiet kitchen the dishwasher‘s broken, the stove has only one burner that works.

Our routine has been: afternoons Dad naps, I take a walk; so after eating some lunch, that‘s what I do. I go quickly up Floral, left on Citrus more slowly, turn steep up towards Honolulu Terrace to steeper still. Will this be the last time I halt at the edge

of the cliff to look at Catalina Island, see purple fluffs of Jacaranda blossoms decorating Whittier?

After my brother leaves, I look in on Dad anyway. Curled up on the hospital bed, he‘s shrunken to nothing, his skin yellow, his bones sticking out.

I stare. Will the next breath come?

It does, a choking, gasping one—a minute or so later, another.

I back away into the next room, hold on to the counter and say to him, to myself, silently, ―Dad, you don't have to stay. We‘ll be all right. You can go to Mother or wherever you expect to go. We‘ll be okay,‖ hoping it‘s so.

Back out on the front steps it's time to relock the door, cross the lawn, the street, start up the car and go. I want to stay, but Jerry insists that I go to this party. From my car I look back at the old place, the flowerbeds weedy, the twenty-five foot tall sweet olive cut down. It‘s well over 50 years since the day we moved here. At least now the windowpanes will stay in, even if the friend who puttied them left fingerprints.

The sky darkens, a cloud or something. My eyes lift to see three black crows flying toward me over the house. They are silent. I have never before seen a crow in Whittier.

I know my Dad is dead.

Cameo Archer lives in Santa Rosa, California, and regularly reads her poetry at the Healdsburg Third Sunday Salon. She’s looking for an agent for her historical novel based on her grandparents’ lives as missionaries in China during the early twentieth century.

Letter to My Father by Dave Kashimba

P

op, I can no longer go fishing with you, yet when I go fishing, you are with me. I can still see you pointing to the watery depths where the big ones are.

I can no longer go mushroom hunting with you, but I'll never forget what you taught me. How the mushroom is only the fruit of a vast network of life beneath the ground which feeds on the dead leaves or decaying branches of white birch trees. I became fascinated by this fungus that turned death into life.

I remember how we walked by a bed of red, orange and yellow leaves under a small forest of well-spaced birch trees. Birds chirped and fluttered from one branch to another. You crouched down and surveyed the area. "There," you finally said pointing under a tree. "Do you see it?"

You crawled under the birch tree and brushed away the leaves weighing down the mushroom's brownish red top. I remember a musty odor as you cut the mushroom's stem at the base with your pocketknife. "I do it this way so the underground life won't be disturbed. If it rains tonight we can come back to this same spot tomorrow morning and find new mushrooms."

"This is a red topper," you said holding the mushroom in a patch of sunlight. "It's the most prized mushroom that grows in Pennsylvania, the firmest and best tasting."

I remember looking at your hands—the fingers swollen and rough from a life of hard work. Then I looked at the mushroom.

The red topper glowed like a flame in the sunlight but was cool and moist to the touch. Like a priest offering a gold chalice at the altar, you offered the mushroom to the light as though this moist flame might cool the burning fires of the summer sun.

David Kashimba lives in Sonoma County, CA, where he can work in his garden and swim in the Russian River every day in the summer.

Tiny Lights

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Tiny Lights

Contest 2010

T

Editor’s Notes

his winter I‘ve started closing the window blinds as soon as darkness falls. I take peculiar comfort in keeping night‘s eyes out of the kitchen, even though this furtive gesture reminds me of my mother and her obsession with privacy in her last years. Is this another glimpse of the old lady I am fated to become? I note the ways my body is slowing, the places I‘ve begun to thicken and sag. Sometimes I glance down and see my mother‘s wrinkled hands attached to my wrists. My stomach has become delicate lately, so I‘m on an old lady‘s regimen of bland foods, no coffee or alcohol. I talk about my digestion the way a new mother discusses her darling infant‘s prowess.

Just before the holidays, a doctor prescribed a pill to soothe my tiresomely fascinating gut.

Every morning I take a capsule that rattles like dice in a cup. It blocks the production of stomach acid, and during our family‘s visit to my in-laws, I was able to eat with the same gusto I enjoyed at eighteen when confronted with all that red wine, garlic and olive oil for the first time. But with every forkful I gulped like a teenager, I could feel my old lady stomach threatening to break through the Prilosec barrier. I knew I‘d be back to brown rice and steamed carrots once we got home.

One of the gifts of our trip south was a Christmas rainstorm that washed the skies of Los Angeles clean. From the cliffs of Palos Verdes, where my husband grew up, I saw Catalina and the Channel Islands to the west, and the snowy San Gabriel Mountains to the northeast. They‘re always there, of course, along with the Santa Monica, San Bernadino, San Jacinto and Santa Ana ranges rising above the sprawl, but without the obscuring brown haze that began building in the basin almost immediately after the rain, it was like slipping back to an era even my husband had a hard time remembering.

When we left for the Long Beach airport a few days later, crisp silhouettes of palm trees still stood against a backdrop of snowy peaks, but by the time we got off the hill around Lomita, we were back down in the smog belt and our mountains were invisible. I wish I could say I continued to feel the presence of those mountains the same way I feel night outside my kitchen windows, but as we blasted along the San Diego Freeway, my stomach and I got busy looking for favorite landmarks, like Western Exterminator‘s Little Man With a Hammer statue. Then we passed a car dealer‘s giant billboard with the cryptic announcement, ―There is nothing in the dark that isn‘t there when the light is on.‖ ―Only in L.A.,‖ I said, but until the next distraction, unseen mountains rose up around me.

Susan Bono Tiny Lights Publications