Image by Kristin Beeler

Steam rises. My clothes begin to freeze. Those damned coin-operated dryers at the dormitory never do the job.

I save quarters for cigarettes and dollars for beer and never have enough for more than one dryer cycle. Soon I’m frozen solid as the Tin Man. Other students, well bundled for the downhill walk to class, don’t notice.

Dormitories of brick stand silent and brown. The river is choked with ice and the ice is piled with snow. Trees stand naked and the sun sleeps, buried by clouds. Boots whisper over the snow and words turn to smoke. The white wall of the campus chapel is defaced by the black, spray-painted words of Nietzsche: God is Dead.

Am I dead, too?

In developmental psychology class, I begin to thaw. Twenty minutes into the lecture, I might have just climbed out of a swimming pool. But nobody looks. Not even when a small puddle forms beneath the hems of my jeans. My sleeves drip onto my blank notebook. Even the little, gray-haired professor, who has no choice but to look, doesn’t.

A woman in a denim jacket palms me a menthol. I hate menthols, but beggars can’t be choosers. As pathetic as this looks, bumming isn’t as bad as digging through ashtrays in the dormitory. And I’ve wandered the student union so long that my clothes are nearly dry. Ten more cigarettes and my empty pack will be full again.

A few more empty beer cans from the wastebaskets in the dormitory and I’ll skip my afternoon philosophy class and carry them to the recycling machine on Water Street. This benevolent, cast-iron monster spits quarters. I hope it spits enough for me to buy a twelve-pack of cheap, local beer—but even twelve beers don’t get me drunk enough. Not anymore.

I’ll have to use my knife.

It’s a bread knife, serrated, bent and blunt, but not too blunt to cut a hole in a can of beer. Warm beer works best. It’s easier to swallow. So I split my stash in half: six cans for the refrigerator and six for the ledge. Then I set the first can at an angle on my writing desk, prop the bottom of it with a psychology book, drive the crooked knife through the aluminum, fold back the sharp edges, seal the hole with my mouth as I lift the can and pop the top.

Five seconds and the beer is gone.

I shove the can under my desk like I shoved empty vodka bottles under my bed before I went away to college, where I planned to quit drinking— right after my 20^th birthday.

When I’m drinking, my roommate stays away.

Popping another beer open, I feel a good buzz start. After “shooting” three more I can relax and drink the cold ones that I crammed into my roommate’s little refrigerator in place of his sodas.

Finally, I’m a little drunk. Only two cans remain from the twelve-pack. The news starts. Outside, far beyond the women’s residence hall, red lights flash from a radio tower. Red…. Black…. Red…. Black…. Red…. Black….

The beer is gone. I feel dull all over. This knife is dull, too. I press harder, running the serrated blade across my palm. The stinging sensation isn’t mine—I’m simply aware it is there. I press harder…. The blood is mine. I use it to write on the blue wall of the dormitory room using the words of the Beatles: “HELTER SKELTER.”

I wonder if anyone will notice.

Craig Boyer started writing in the mid-1980s by recording his nightmares and sharing them with Dr. J. Allan Hobson of Harvard, one of the world’s foremost dream researchers.  Since that time he has published essays in Blueline, Breakaway Books, Nostalgia Press, and The Bellevue Literary Review, where in 2005 he published The Devil and a Pocketful of Glass about his lifelong struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder.  In 2003 he was admitted to the MFA program at the University of Iowa, but chose instead to keep his full-time job and start a family.  He now works as a behavioral specialist with Emotionally/Behaviorally Disturbed high-school students and has a beautiful wife (Liz) and two beautiful children: (Ellie-6 and Alex-2).  1984 is an excerpt from his memoir-in-progress, Deja Vu: snapshots from the journey of an obsessive-compulsive. Visit his website at: Deja Vu

Read our interview with Craig here.

Image by Kristin Beeler

She grips the lectern. Her eyes are steady. She has Rasputin eyes. Steve McQueen eyes.

My father is transfixed, leaning forward in his chair to meet her stare. She starts with “The world is what you make of it,” and the next forty minutes is about the law of survival, how you have to be ruthless, how nothing can stop you from getting what you want if you never back down.

“Why do one percent of Americans possess ninety percent of America’s wealth?” she calls out, and the crowd shouts back “Because they deserve it,” which surprises me. These people aren’t rich. We’re in a hotel ballroom, not Madison Square Garden. The chair I am sitting on is badly cushioned and poorly upholstered.

How did they know to yell that? My father yells it too, which makes me look at him, but he shrugs. When she finishes, there are testimonials from people who lost everything and how great it was to be left with nothing. How the end of welfare made this woman start her business, and how not having health care made this man take responsibility for his diet.

We’re getting to the question and answer section, which seems stupid to me, since this day seems all about not helping other people. I want to ask a question, but I don’t know how to say what I want to know.

Everyone is talking about money, and I want to ask about gratitude or grace. I want to ask about care and about need. I want to ask about how I have better dental care than the Feudal lords of medieval Europe and how that makes me appreciate this long line of dentists and anesthesiologists going all the way back to Ancient Egypt. I want to ask about how the rose bush in my backyard was developed by botanists, and how much I need them when I go outside. Or how magical it is to me that my trash gets picked up every Monday and Thursday, or how even in their ruthlessness, everyone in this room seems to want to help each other out.

I want to ask about value and I want to ask about family. My dad looks kind of hopeful when I get in line to ask a question, but when my question comes out, not.

It doesn’t come out like I had thought it would. It comes out, “Do you have to love someone to want them to be OK?”

She looks puzzled, then angry. She takes a breath, says, “Get a job.”

Jason Schneiderman is the author of Sublimation Point, a Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books, and Striking Surface, winner of the 2009 Richard Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press.  His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Story Quarterly, and Tin House. He has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.  He was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2004.  He currently directs the Writing Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Read our interview with Jason here.

Image by Kristin Beeler

After my morning workout and shower at the YMCA, I finish drying my hair then pause at the mirror, looking for one more wrinkle or blemish to cover. That is when I notice her.

She is older, perhaps early eighties, naked, and she wanders around the lockers holding a towel to her breasts. Her hair is the kind of red that wants to be gray but is chemically constrained. Her eyebrows are fading, almost hairless, and her back is slightly humped. Another naked woman, about her age, towel tied around her chest, face long, eyes alert, follows her.

“What’s in it, Betty?” the woman with alert eyes says. “What were you wearing today?”

Betty doesn’t respond, keeps walking.

“My pants are blue,” she finally says as she stops and waves a hand at a row of lockers. “I know it was right here when I left. It was one of these.”

Betty’s friend opens several lockers–all empty.

Another naked elderly woman, a towel tied tightly around her chest, appears. Her hair is a lovely poof of yellow, so fine I imagine if I blew, it would fly away like dandelion fur.

“Dark blue?” the yellow haired lady asks.

“No, Ann. Light blue,” says Betty, still walking, now over by another set of lockers. She leans in to study the number. She moves on. The women follow.

Ann opens the lockers with fury, pushing clothes around before slamming the door shut again. She is faster than the long faced woman, more efficient. She goes through several lockers, before marching into the adjoining room.

“Betty, you didn’t change in that room,” Ann says. “You changed in here. You get confused when you leave the showers because of all the turns.”

They wander about the room, opening lockers. I decide to help out.

I hear Ann again in the distance. “Here it is Betty! Right here. Blue pants. This must be your locker.”

Betty looks inside. “No.” She steps away and stares off into space. “Ann, I don’t have blue pants.”

Ann says nothing. We all wait, not knowing what to look for.

“No,” Betty says again. “Not blue. I think my pants were beige, actually.”

Ann calls out. “Andrea, we are looking for beige pants. Betty’s pants are beige.”  They haven’t noticed me because I work quietly, peaking into lockers and closing them quickly. I pause before closing one door to touch a lavender silk blouse; the smooth, light feel reassures me its authentic. The pants are black linen and the black heeled sandals have just that trace of lavender that says the woman not only has taste but time and patience to synchronize her clothes. The locker behind me slams shut.

“Is that your locker, or are you checking it?” Ann says.

“Sorry, I’m slow. I’ve checked most of this row. No beige.”

Ann walks past me, towel still to chest. “I liked that shirt too,” she says.

Andrea is in the other room, checking the dressing rooms. When she returns to the lockers I hear her open one, shuffle clothes around, then step back.

“Here we are,” Andrea shouts. She pulls out worsted wool beige pants with black specks and holds them up. Betty is saved. She does not have to go home naked.

Back at my locker I turn to Andrea, now getting dressed near me. I say, “You know, I lose my car in the parking lot all the time, so I can relate.” Her smile is weak and she looks at me in a way that implies, at your age we call that mentally ill. I quickly add, “But I always find my car!” She laughs and I feel sane.

I overhear Ann talking to Betty, now seated on the bench, as if exhausted with the trauma of a lost locker.

“What I do?” Ann says. “Is this– I always place myself wherever I go. I notice things. Where I am in relation to other objects in the room. I find this helps.”

Betty thanks Ann and says she will try to remember to do that. She pauses a moment then drops her head. “Gene did so much for me. This past year I realized how much he did. My brain can’t hold it all.”

“Yes, it can,” Ann says, now walking to a dressing room, looking straight ahead, not back at Betty.  “And don’t think Gene didn’t place himself, too. He’s up there placing himself right now.”

WHEN I DRIVE out of the parking lot, I can’t stop thinking about Betty. I imagine she is leaning over her steering wheel, heading home. I wonder if she is alone. Where are her children right now at 9 am in the morning? Perhaps she has a daughter with children off at college. Perhaps this daughter has an important job. She’s a lawyer in New York, now seated at a conference table, its periphery filled with important people who have come to close a “deal.” They are making small talk. One asks her where she’s from. And maybe at the precise moment Betty parks the car in her garage, her daughter tells the man she is from Darien, Connecticut.

Betty turns the ignition, gets out of the car, leaving the keys inside. She pauses at the front door, trying to remember what it is she needs to get inside.

Someone at the table in New York asks Betty’s daughter if her family is still there. She says, well, her mother is there, her father passed away last year.

Betty turns and faces her car. She regards its fender peaking out of the garage. Her azalea bushes are now in full bloom and the splash of red and white gives her house a certain vigor. She is proud of her flowers. She steps back into the yard, and the colors, her home, the car, are before her.

The daughter falls silent after she says “mother,” her past meeting her present quick like a camera flash. Someone asks her a question, but the flash comes again, and she is back with her mother.

It works, this placement of herself. Betty thinks keys! The keys are in her car!

The daughter smiles, sips her coffee, looks at the papers before her, the men and women at her side. The meeting begins.

Debbie Ann Ice has been published in numerous online and print journals such as Storyglossia, Night Train, Fence Magazine, and others. Like the entire universe, she has written a few novels and is constantly editing them. She is originally from Savannah, Georgia but has lived in New England so long that the sultry, humid days by a river seem like a dream. She loves her family–one husband, two teenage boys, two girls( who happen to be English bulldogs but are treated like humans). She has learned to love New England– the tough as nails women, the matter-of-fact, sometimes abrupt, way of facing people and life, the genuine strength of character, the ability to walk around in 15 degree temperature with a stiff smile and straight back. But when she dreams, it’s always about humid days by a river.

Read our interview with Deb here.

Image by Kristin Beeler

My mom, my son, and I went to dinner at a place called Margarita’s. My mom ordered herself a peach one.

I agreed to share until I remembered once waking to see who I’d called the night before, through the history of my cell phone, seeing a new picture, the screen saver. I thought it was my son in the picture. You couldn’t really tell who it was, laying face down in the kitchen. But then I looked in his room and he was sleeping. I looked in the mirror, looked again at the picture. It started to dawn on me, how things progressed, but it was mostly black out.  I still remembered the smell, my hair stuck from the vomit. My son said if I did that again, he’d never see me again, ever. That was just last year. Now, he’d just flown in, his first visit here from college.

We sat there, under the umbrella, eating chips and salsa. My son jumped over the rail, going to smoke in the lot. Two ladies said he must be an athlete.

My mom sipped her drink, and said maybe later we could take a drive to see her brother’s campsite. It would take an hour to get there. I asked her what we’d do. My uncle was completely pleasant. I told my mom I wasn’t sure. I remembered my son and me when he was little. We’d rent these silly movies. We’d drive to find a sunset. We’d color with our noses. We’d make a pie and put it on a doorstep. We’d turn up the tape and dance like hoodlums.

By the time the food came, my mom was on her second happy hour special. I got a seafood salad, skipping all the stuff like sour cream and the big fried shell. My mom got a steak meal, which looked better than mine. I don’t remember what my son got. It started to rain, and then my mom said the campsite was out of the question.

Finally, we all ran to the car, saying the last one there is a raincoat.

Kim Chinquee is the author of the collections Oh Baby and Pretty. She lives in Buffalo, New York.