“Standing and Waiting: A Triptych” by Joel Deutsch

Posted on January 16, 2010 by Mary Akers

a block away, the light turns green
and the bus starts forward again,
head sign scrolling route number, name and destination

over and over
like a TV news crawl
with nothing else left to report.

It’s hot, very hot. 85, says a digital thermometer atop a bank.
The afternoon traffic crawls over scorching asphalt
Most windows rolled up tight to hold in the A/C,
the occasional open one blaring some kind of music.

Beside him at the bus stop are Two small, dark-haired women,
identical twins in matching Disneyland T-shirts
that hang untucked over thickening midriffs and the tops of stretch fabric jeans,
one clutching the handles of a supermarket bag
Crammed with rags, sponges and trigger-spray housecleaner, the other
Holding up a yellow umbrella, wide open,
under the bright, cloudless sky.

The twin with the bag smiles and he smiles back,
Glancing sidelong at the other one, crunching his face to ask, wordlessly,
why the umbrella?

Her eyes follow his to the object in question
and back again.

“My sister,” she says with a Spanish accent, a look of resignation
and a small shrug, as if that
explains everything.

Suddenly, there’s a din, the clatter of small hard wheels
and sidewalk cracks. It’s a girl, 18 at the most
Tanned, supple, hair tied back,
clad in a cherry-red tank top, Baggy blue shorts and scuffed white sneakers
Like a skateboarding American flag
She flashes by with careless, ordinary grace, Thin wires trailing from both ears
to some propulsive pop tune in her pocket
and then is gone.

Across the street, a dreadlocked black man in a big straw hat
is arguing about something with a little white lady
whose gray head would scarcely reach his chest
if they were close enough,
but they’re facing each other
from behind nose-to-nose shopping carts,
his covered with cardboard, hers draped in green plastic garbage bags
and then the bus, arriving, blocks them from his view.

The sister thumbs a button, collapsing her umbrella onto its stem
like a wilted sunflower.
He waves the women ahead, hangs back,
looks at the poster on the side of the bus
and there’s the Mayor, in shirtsleeves, cuffs rolled back and necktie pulled loose, brandishing the levered nozzle of a green garden hose
that’s still dripping, as if he’s just now stopped the flow.

Let’s Save Water! it says in big letters
above the Mayor’s head.

The women are aboard now, starting down the aisle. He ascends
into air conditioning,
digging into his pocket for the fare.
II.

It’s hot. Very hot. Vehicular Fragments–dark and light sheet metal, glimmers of chrome, glints of sun struck glass– ratchet across his patchwork view like film frames sputtering through the sprockets of a poorly-threaded projector.
Now and again some kind of music blares,
then dies out.

There are two other people there with him. Short adult shadows, female.
Above one of their heads, something yellow hovers.
An umbrella? , he holds out an upturned palm,just to be sure. No, of course
It’s not raining.

Suddenly, there’s a din, the clatter of small hard wheels
and sidewalk cracks. A youthful figure shoots by,
Bare skin, muscle, flashes of red white and blue,
gone.

The bus, an enormous shadow bodying forth out of nowhere, pulls up.
He hears a click, and what he’s sure now is an umbrella
comes down, disappears.

“Pasele,” says one of the women, with a flicker of deferential arm motion. “You go ahead.”

“Thanks,” he says. “Gracias.” He makes out the doorway
and ascends into air conditioning,
digging into his pocket for the fare.

III.

It’s hot. Very hot. He hears a stop and go stream of traffic sounds and an occasional burst of music.

Then suddenly, there’s a din, the clatter
of a skateboard, if he guesses right,
Coming, going, gone,
its sound sponged up in the general din.

The bus arrives, a bulky presence blocking the weak breeze.
there’s a mechanical click very close beside him.

“Pasele.” You go ahead,” says someone. Female, Latina by the accent, much shorter than him, judging by where the voice is coming from.

“Thanks,” he says, moving forward, sweeping his white cane in short purposeful arcs until its tip touches the curb. “Step up,” calls the driver, and he ascends
into air conditioning,
digging into his pocket for the fare.

Joel Deutsch. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, as the opening scrolls of ancient films would have it, writing confessional narrative poetry seemed to him as close to unfettered space flight as he could ever wish to come. And lo, the flat bluish Olivetti, the solid green Hermes, the upright black Remington from the Mission Street thrift store were fruitful, and the poems multiplied, and were published in many a little mag. Won him a degree, won him awards. “You’re a good poet, Joel,” Charles Bukowski rasped at him over the phone, once. “Not as good as me, but pretty damn good.” Then he started feeling less like Hans Solo or Charlie Parker than a hungover diamond cutter with his glass loupe tightly screwed into one eye, desperately trying to chip beauty out of the already-precious stone beneath a flickering lamp, and it was then that other forms beckoned. Articles and profiles, stories and essays. Which led, eventually, inevitably, to working on the first draft of a first novel (the book of danny), a youth’s apprenticeship in a time of chronollogical seniority. But sometimes the song says it will stick in the throat if you try to sing it any other way. At which point humbling words come to mind, most especially those of poet Charles Olsen in “Maximus, to Himself.”

“Mediators Beyond Borders: Pathways to Peace and Reconciliation” by Kenneth Cloke

Posted on January 1, 2010 by Mary Akers

“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words or actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men … and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.”

~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

While listening to news about the latest disasters from wars to terrorist attacks
around the world, I sometimes fantasize about what would happen if, instead of
dropping bombs on civilian populations, mediators by the tens of thousands
were parachuted into war zones to initiate conversations across battle lines; if,
instead of shooting bullets, we organized public dialogues and shot questions at
each side; if, instead of mourning the loss of children’s lives by visiting equal or
greater losses on the children of the enemy, we became surrogate mourners,
turning every lost life into the name of a school, hospital, library, road, or olive
grove, dedicated to those who died because we lacked the skills to get along.

I realize these are wishful fantasies, yet within their whimsy lies a startling truth
that surfaces when we ask: what would we do after parachuting in once we hit
the ground? We can then begin to see that it is possible for us to have an impact,
even on the willingness of embittered, intransigent opponents to avoid war and
terrorism by building people’s capacity to promote alternative ways of
expressing, negotiating, and resolving their differences. I began referring to this
idea as “Mediators Beyond Borders.”

Conflict as a Border or Boundary

All conflicts take place between people; that is, at the borders or boundaries that
separate individuals, cultures, organizations, and nations. Every conflict can
therefore be regarded as creating or reinforcing a border or boundary that divides
us, drawing a line of demarcation that separates us into opposing sides,
antagonistic positions, alien cultures, foreign experiences, and hostile camps,
isolating and alienating us from one another.

Yet every boundary is also a connection, a potentially unifying element, a place
where two sides can come together. As a result, we can therefore regard
resolution as a consensual crossing of the borders and boundaries that separate
us. Non-consensual border crossings are experienced as boundary violations,
and may be vigorously resisted. Consensual border crossings, on the other hand,
are experienced as acts of empathy and friendship, indicators of love and
affection, and precursors to collaboration, problem solving, forgiveness, and
reconciliation.

Conflict, in this sense, is a chasm cutting us off from our own commonality. It is a
fault line isolating us from our estranged family, a schism within wholeness. As a
result, conflicts can be prevented, resolved, transformed, and transcended by
identifying the boundaries that separate us, and consensually crossing them; by
communicating across the internal and external borders we have erected to keep
ourselves safe; and by using empathy and compassion to dismantle the sources
of opposition to the Other within the Self, and within the systems we have
created to defend ourselves from others.

There are two principal reasons for doing so: first, to create positive, enjoyable
learning relationships; and second, to solve common problems. While the first is
optional, the second is mandatory. The problems we are increasingly forced to
confront have no borders, threaten our very survival, and cannot be solved except
collaboratively, i.e., by crossing social, economic, political, religious, ethnic,
gender, and cultural borders, and by building relationships as a result that allow
us to transcend and move beyond them. As discussed in Chapter 1, some of the
problems that clearly require us to move beyond borders presently include:

• global warming • exhaustion of the oceans
• species extinction • decreasing bio-diversity
• air and water pollution • deforestation
• resort to warfare • nuclear proliferation
• drug-resistant diseases • global pandemics
• overuse of fertilizers • loss of arable land
• religious intolerance • terrorism
• torture • prejudice and intolerance
• genocide • “ethnic cleansing”
• AIDS and bird flu • sexual trafficking and abuse
• narcotics smuggling • organized crime

What would it take to successfully mediate these conflicts? If time, money, laws,
bureaucracy, expertise, and willingness to participate were not obstacles, what
methods and programs might we employ to reduce the bloodshed and return to
peace and unity once upheavals subside? What could the United Nations,
national governments, or non-governmental organizations do to discourage evil,
war, injustice, and terrorism before they begin? [For more on what the United
Nations could do, see Chapter 19 of Mediating Dangerously.]

Political conflicts are simultaneously public and private, intellectual and
emotional, procedural and structural, preventive and reactive, relational and
systemic. Because these disputes are highly complex and multi-layered,
successful resolution efforts will need to focus on supporting diverse local
collaborative initiatives, and on developing a combination of techniques and
approaches democratically, rather than simply importing or blindly imposing USspecific
solutions.

Solving any of these problems will not be simple. In the face of such difficulties,
it is easy to think: we are so few, so isolated, so imperfect, so poorly prepared,
and the problems we face are so vast, universal, multifaceted, and ingrained,
how could we possibly make a difference? The real question, however, is: how
can we stand by and not try to make a difference, no matter how imperfect our
efforts may be?

On a global level, it does not matter whose end of the ship is sinking. We inhabit a
planetary island in a vast, expanding universe. As a result, regardless of who
created these problems, we are all impacted by them, and have no sustainable
option other than to learn to discuss, negotiate, and resolve our conflicts, and
prevent them by acting together.

In truth, we already know – not just intellectually, but in our hearts, as human beings and conflict resolvers – that there are many tangible, practical ways we can make a difference, as imperfect as we are. Over the last few decades, we have developed a number of techniques for successfully communicating across much smaller, less defended interpersonal borders and cultural divides, and resolving disputes in families and communities without warfare or coercion. And it is precisely these skills that the world now needs in order to solve its problems.

An Elicitive Approach to Mediating Between Cultures

In order to achieve these goals, it is necessary first to learn how to work humbly,
ethically, and respectfully across cultural lines. Cultural differences inevitably
exacerbate conflicts, as do prejudices based on nationality, ethnicity, gender,
sexual orientation, religion, personality, and style. It is therefore critical in
working beyond borders that we learn ways of communicating, working
collaboratively, solving problems, and resolving conflicts within, between, and
across cultures that are not our own.

I have found the most effective approach in developing conflict resolution
capacity across diverse cultures is the elicitive, collaborative, democratic
methodology best articulated and practiced by Mennonite mediator John Paul
Lederach. This method focuses on supplementing rather than replacing
indigenous resolution strategies, while simultaneously learning from other
cultures and developing improvements in local methods and practices. Here are
a few of the techniques I have used to bridge cross-cultural gaps, either between
the mediator and the parties, or between the parties themselves:

• Take time to warmly welcome both sides. Serve food or drink and
break bread together. Ask them to create a culturally appropriate
heartfelt context and opening for the conversation they want to
have.

• Ask each person to clarify who they think you are, or how they
define your role, or what they expect of you and the mediation
process.

• Ask each side to identify the ground rules that will make them feel
respected, communicate effectively, and better able to resolve their
problems.

• Elicit a prioritization of conflicts from each side. What are the words for different kinds of conflict? Which are most serious and which are least? What is commonly done in response to each? Compare similarities and differences between cultures, then do the same for conflict styles and resolution techniques.

• Ask people to rank their available options from war to surrender,
and explore the reasons they might choose one over another.

• Ask people to state, pantomime, role-play, draw, or script how
conflicts are resolved in their culture. To whom do they go to for
assistance? What roles do third parties traditionally play? Which
techniques do they use when, and why? How do they mediate,
forgive, and reconcile? Where do they get stuck and why?

• Invite volunteers from opposing cultures to jointly design a
culturally inclusive, enriched, multilayered, comprehensive
conflict resolution system to help them avoid future disputes.

• Ask each side to meet separately and list the words that describe
the communication, negotiation, or conflict style of the opposing
culture and, next to it, the words that describe their own. Exchange
lists and ask each side to respond. Do the same with conflicting
ideas, feelings such as anger, or attitudes toward the issues.

• Establish common points of reference by asking someone from each
culture to indicate their values, or goals for their relationship with
the other culture, or aspirations for the resolution process.

• Ask questions like: “What does that mean to you?” “What does the
word ‘fairness’ indicate or imply to you?” “Can you give an
example?”

• Acknowledge and model respect for differences, and ask questions
if you are not sure what things mean.

• Ask each person to say one thing they are proud of with regard to
their culture, ethnicity, or group, and why.

• If appropriate, ask if there is anything they dislike about their
culture, ethnicity, or group, and why.

• Ask groups in conflict to say what they most appreciate about the
opposing group or culture and why.

• Ask them to bring cultural artifacts, such as poems, music, or
artifacts, and share stories that would help an outsider understand
and appreciate their culture.

• Ask each side to identify a common stereotype regarding their
culture, what it feels like, and why. Then ask them to describe what
their culture is actually like, why the stereotype is inaccurate, and
what they would most like others to know about them.

• Ask what rituals are used in each culture to end conflicts or reach
forgiveness, such as shaking hands, then design combined or
simultaneous rituals for closure and reconciliation.

In many countries that lack significant long-term experience with social,
economic, or political democracy, many ancient indigenous tribal or civil societal
conflict resolution traditions that originally emphasized collaboration, and
democratic, interest-based interactions were gradually supplanted by or
subordinated to conformist, competitive, autocratic, power-based processes that
relied on directives and hierarchical authority from above, rather than on
democratic participation, curiosity, community, and insight from below.

While both of these have proven useful, prevention, resolution, transformation,
and transcendence occur more often when ancient interest-based resolution
processes can be revived and reintegrated using elicitive techniques. An example
is the panchayat system in India and Pakistan, which originally resolved disputes
communally, but in many places became dependent on local political leaders
who had been hierarchically selected from outside. Another example is palaver,
which consists largely of continuous community dialogue, and is still used in
parts of Angola, Mozambique, and other countries in Southern Africa. Yet with
the rise of large, urban centers, the old techniques have been bypassed, or
become institutionalized and less effective in recent years. Yet when revived and
combined with modern methodologies, these ancient practices can invigorate the
process of dispute resolution and help us all learn from one other.

Race, Class, Ethnic, and Cross-Cultural Conflicts

It has become increasingly clear, especially since the devastation of New Orleans
by Hurricane Katrina and a number of disputes alleging police brutality in ethnic
urban communities, that resolving conflicts requires us to learn ways of crossing
the invisible boundaries that separate genders, races, classes, ethnicities, and
cultures.

Indeed, gender, race, class, ethnic, and cross-cultural conflicts are now common
occurrences, not only in the US, but Europe and elsewhere around the world. In
many large cities, poverty, underfunded schools, violence, delinquency, gang
warfare, drive-by shootings, and drugs as big business are everyday events that
have habituated us to the spectacle of people destroying themselves and their
communities. Rapid changes in demographics, cultural rivalries, and economic
inequalities inevitably accentuate these conflicts.

Of course, there have always been conflicts between people living in close
proximity to one another whose cultures, religions, and languages are
fundamentally different. There have been conflicts throughout history between
men and women, white and black, rich and poor, gay and straight, privileged
and dispossessed, hard working and laid back. There have also been conflicts
between people who simply think and behave differently, as for example,
between those who occupy positions of power and those who do not, those who
want to protect natural resources and those who seek to profit by them, those
who advocate change and those who struggle to hold onto traditions.

These conflicts take place within a context, environment, or system that has been
shaped by a wide range of cultural, familial, organizational, social, economic,
and political influences, all of which can dramatically impact the ways people
behave when they are in conflict. We easily recognize, for example, that there are
cultures that actively promote avoidance and obedience while others promote
engagement and dissent. There are family systems that support secrecy and
authority, while others encourage openness and dialogue. There are
organizations that reward individuality and distrust, while others build
teamwork and trust. There are social systems that promote inequality and
inequity, while others try to reduce them. There are economic systems that prize
competition and individual efforts, while others support collaboration and social
engagement. And there are political systems that are dictatorial and corrupt,
while others are more democratic and transparent.

In periods of social chaos, economic crisis, and profound political change,
conflicts between these different orientations and tendencies inevitably increase.
These conflicts are nearly always experienced as personal, emotional, isolating,
and unique, yet it is clear, most often in retrospect, that these are systemic
conflicts that are inspired and influenced by cultural, social, economic, and
political factors.

Five Intervention Strategies

In order to recover from the aftermath of severe conflicts such as war and
genocide, people in divided communities need to develop a broad range of skills,
including Communication skills in order to reduce bias and prejudice and engage
in constructive dialogue; negotiation skills to solve problems and settle
differences; emotional processing skills to work through rage and guilt and
assuage grief and loss; mediation skills to resolve disputes collaboratively;
community building skills to develop interest-based, collaborative leadership and
become productive, functional communities again; heart and spirit enhancing
skills to rebuild empathy and compassion and encourage forgiveness and
reconciliation; and conflict resolution systems design skills to prevent and resolve
future disputes before they become intractable.

In working with diverse cultures, communities, and nations to build local
capacity to resolve conflicts, it is essential to develop skills in each of these areas.
There are dozens of additional ways of assisting people to recover from their
conflicts and to learn practical methods for preventing, resolving, transforming,
and transcending them. Combining these together, we can identify five
fundamental intervention strategies that have proven useful in my experience in
building local capacity to achieve these goals.

1. Responding to Grief and Loss

The first strategy is to actively encourage the open expression of grief and rage
that were triggered by the conflict, but to do so by first creating a context, process,
and setting that are constructive and oriented to resolution and reconciliation,
such as that invented by the South African Truth and Reconciliation
Commission.

Grief, along with denial and rage, are natural emotions in processing loss,
whether it be the loss of a loved one, a way of life, or material goods, position, or
influence. It is normal to blame others for one’s loss and feed enmity and conflict
with accusations and blaming. Yet healing comes when people face their losses,
express profound grief, tell stories about what happened, describe their feelings,
hear each other’s subjective truths, open their hearts to forgiveness and
reconciliation, and collaboratively seek to prevent future clashes.

Modern psychology has created a useful set of tools for responding to grief, loss,
understanding the desire for revenge, and helping people overcome them. Every
culture has its own rituals for handling painful emotions, and these rituals
should be respected and included in the conflict resolution process. Yet there are
times, places, and individuals for whom these rituals will be inapplicable or
ineffective, and all rituals can be creatively improved and supplemented using
insights drawn from experiences in conflict resolution.

Responding to loss can be seen as requiring efforts in four principal stages.

1) Design an environment within which it becomes possible to
encourage and support expressions of grief and rage.

2) Examine prejudicial views being spread about “the enemy” and
explore alternatives such as forgiveness, reconciliation,
collaboration, and heartfelt communication.

3) Develop skills in directing future expressions of grief and rage in
the direction of problem solving, negotiation, collaboration, and
mediation.

4) Use these skills to create a sense of larger community, so that future
conflicts are resolved in ways that do not require the use of
violence.

By way of illustration, I have asked hostile racial, religious, and ethnic groups to
meet in mixed or self-same teams to discuss and answer the following questions:

• What is one thing you lost as a result of this conflict, or one thing
that happened that you are still grieving over?

• What is one thing someone said or did to you or others that you
find it difficult to forgive, and never, ever want to experience
again?

• What is one thing someone said or did that supported you or
others when this happened, or that gave you strength or courage,
or helped you recover?

• What is one thing the people who are here could do right now to
help make sure that what happened to you will never happen
again?

• What is one thing you would be willing to do to help make sure
that occurs?

• What is one wish you have for your future relationship with each
other, or for the relationship between your children and
grandchildren?

• What is one thing you would be willing to do starting now to help
those children have the relationship you would like them to have?

2. Dismantling Prejudice and Bias

A second strategy is to systematically dismantle the prejudices and stereotypes of
the “enemy” through a combination of sensitivity to others, awareness of one’s
own biases and prejudices, storytelling, honest dialogue over differences,
problem solving, collaborative negotiation, conflict resolution, and jointly
planning how to face common problems in the future.

Every community experiences cross-cultural, ethnic, racial, national, and
religious conflicts, and in every community these conflicts interfere with peace
and cooperation, unity and progress. These conflicts grow out of biases and
prejudices regarding culture, ethnicity, gender, religion, politics, nationality,
language skills, handicap, sexual orientation, and countless other differences that
can be surfaced and successfully resolved in open-dialogue sessions that teach
people how to become aware of their biases and prejudices and resolve crosscultural
conflicts.

Creative interventions, techniques, and exercises can assist people in becoming
more aware of their biases and realizing that differences can be a source of
strength and celebration. These exercises encourage pride in one’s culture or
background without denigrating anyone else’s right to feel pride in theirs. They
use storytelling to elicit empathy and person-to-person understanding, and
group presentations to promote learning from each other.

Specific conflicts can then be analyzed through simulations, and alternative
solutions generated through joint analysis of group experiences. For example, I
have used the following exercises, even in large community groups, to reduce
prejudices and cross-cultural conflicts:

• Introductions: Ask people to turn to the person next to them and
introduce themselves by describing their personal history and
cultural background.

• Reclaiming Pride: Ask participants to state their names, the groups
with which they identity, and why they are proud to belong to
them, as in “I am a _____, _____, _____, and _____,” listing different
sources of identity.

• What’s in a Name? In mixed dyads, ask people to describe the origin
and meaning of their names and how they came by them.

• Storytelling: Each person finds someone from a different group or
culture and tells a story about what it felt like to grow up as a
member of their group or culture.

• Assessing Group Identity: Participants discuss what they get by
identifying with a group, and what they give in return.

• Personalizing Discrimination: In mixed dyads or small groups,
participants describe a time when they felt disrespected or
discriminated against for any reason, and compare their
experiences.

• Reframing Stereotypes: In mixed or self-same dyads, people describe
the stereotypes and prejudices others have about their group while
their partners write down key descriptive words and phrases,
which they later compare and reframe as positives.

• Observing Discrimination: In mixed dyads, participants describe a
time when they witnessed discrimination against someone else.

What did they do? How successful was it? What might they have
done instead? What kept them from doing more? How could they
overcome these obstacles?

• Owning Prejudice: Participants in teams write down all the
prejudicial statements they can think of, analyze them, identify
their common elements, and read these elements out to the group.

• Overcoming Prejudice: In dyads, participants describe a personal
prejudice or stereotype they had or have, what they did or are
doing to overcome it, then ask for and receive coaching, preferably
from someone in that group, on what else they might do.

• Which Minority are You?: Participants list all the ways they are a
minority, report on the total number of ways, and discuss them.

• Explaining Prejudice: Participants in self-same groups identify the
prejudices and stereotypes other groups have of them, then explain
the truth about their culture and answer questions others have
about their group but were afraid to ask.

• A Celebration of Differences: Participants are asked to stand and be
applauded for their differences, in age, family backgrounds, skills,
languages, cultures, and personal life experiences.
[Based partly on work by the National Coalition Building Institute]

3. Developing Skills in Interest-Based Processes

A third intervention strategy is to develop skills within local neighborhoods and
communities in implementing these strategies, as well as in interest-based
processes such as group facilitation, public dialogue, strategic planning,
collaborative negotiation, and peer mediation. Teams of volunteers can then
conduct skill-building workshops, not only for conflict resolvers, but for mixed
groups of neighbors, community activists, therapists, clergy, managers, union
leaders, judges, attorneys, government officials, and leaders in civil society.

For example, in Los Angeles following the civil unrest in response to the beating
of Rodney King, I helped train Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
workers to facilitate community dialogues between hostile racial and ethnic
groups, and go door-to-door to de-escalate potentially explosive conflicts. Here
are some of the exercises I used:

• Communication and Miscommunication: Self-same groups identify the
communications, behaviors, and signals they or other groups do
not understand about their culture, and suggest ways to clear up
misunderstandings.

• Mock Conflict: Participants demonstrate a typical cross-cultural
conflict in a fishbowl while observers describe their reactions and
volunteers offer suggestions on how to mediate.

• Offensive Remarks: A volunteer starts to make an offensive comment
or joke, and observers offer coaching on possible ways to respond.

• Observing Cultural Bias: As homework, participants collect
examples of biases and prejudices in the media and share them.

• Social Change: Cross-cultural teams discuss what they could do to
change prejudicial attitudes and behaviors among family, friends,
and peers, brainstorm suggestions, and agree to implement them.

• Institutional Change: Participants discuss what their organizations
and institutions could do to counteract prejudice, and what they
might do together to encourage them to change.

• Breaking Bread: Ask each participant to invite someone from the
other groups or cultures in their community to their home for a
potluck dinner, and exchange food, music, poetry, artifacts, and
stories from their cultures. Then, ask each of them to do the same
next month, and pass it on.

• What I Will Do: Each person indicates one thing they learned and are
willing to do differently in the future to reduce cross-cultural conflict.

4. Encouraging Forgiveness and Reconciliation

A fourth strategy is to encourage forgiveness and reconciliation by creating
profound, spiritual, open-hearted communications and direct, heart-to-heart
dialogue between former antagonists. I discuss these techniques in greater detail
in Mediating Dangerously and The Crossroads of Conflict, but have often found it
useful, for example, to ask adversaries to:

• tell their opponent directly what they most want or need to hear in
order for the conflict to be over for them

• acknowledge the positive intentions or character of the other person or group

• apologize for what they did or did not do in the conflict that was
counterproductive, or allowed the conflict to continue

• clarify through stories the price they have paid for the conflict, and
why it is difficult for them to forgive

• list all the reasons for not forgiving them, then identify what it will
cost them in their lives to hold on to each of those reasons

• say what they most want to say to each other, straight from the
heart, as though this were the last conversation they were ever
going to have

• articulate what they each believe are the most important lessons
they learned from their conflict and what they are willing to do
differently

• design a ritual of release, completion, or closure that expresses their
desire for forgiveness and reconciliation, and agree to execute it

5. Redesigning Systems and Institutionalizing Conflict Resolution

A fifth strategy consists of redesigning systems and institutionalizing conflict
resolution skills so that future disputes can be prevented or resolved without
violence or coercion. This strategy consists of using conflict resolution systems
design principles that have been discussed in earlier chapters to identify what
the organization, institution, or system contributed to the conflict, and work
together to change it.

For example, I have created mixed “conflict audit teams” to identify the systemic
sources of conflict in specific organizations and institutions by asking the
following questions drawn from Resolving Conflicts at Work:

• How much time and money have been spent on lawyers, litigation,
and human resources personnel regarding conflict?

• How much time does the average manager, human resource
personnel, union representative, and employee spend each week
preventing, managing and resolving conflicts? At what salary rate
and total cost?

• What has been lost due to stress-related illnesses and conflict-related
turnovers?

• How much time has been spent on rumors, gossip, lost productivity,
and reduced collaboration due to conflict?

• What impact has conflict had on morale and motivation?

• How many conflicts have recurred because they were never fully
resolved?

What personal and organizational opportunities have been lost due to conflict?

• Where might the organization be by now if it had not experienced these conflicts?

• What are the organization’s unspoken expectations and values
regarding conflict?

• What are the main messages sent by the organizational culture
regarding conflict?

• Are negative conflict behaviors being rewarded? If so, how?

• How do leaders and managers typically respond to conflicts? How
might they respond better?

• Have people been trained in conflict resolution techniques? Why
not?

• What do different people do when they experience conflicts? Where
do they go for help?

• Is there an internal conflict resolution procedure? Who is allowed to
use it? How often is it used? Do people know about it?

• How satisfied are people with existing conflict resolution processes?

• How skilled are they in using those processes?

• What obstacles hinder prevention, resolution, transformation, and
transcendence of conflicts?

• How can people be motivated to resolve their disputes more quickly
and completely?

• What skills do people need to resolve conflicts more successfully?

• What systemic changes would reduce or help to resolve future
conflicts?

Conflict audit teams in communities and countries could easily adapt these
questions, then join with dispute resolvers, organizations, agencies, and others to
design programs that would provide a broad array of resolution alternatives and
strategically integrate the initiatives that are aimed at prevention across social,
economic, political, and cultural lines.

Block-by-Block, House-by-House

In the aftermath of wars, urban riots, and natural disasters, cleaning up the ashes
and debris is the least formidable challenge. Something far more difficult must be
done to heal the fury, mistrust, rage, and sense of loss that prevents healing from
these outbursts, thereby triggering renewed outbreaks. As Israeli novelist David
Grossman eloquently recorded:

I feel the heavy toll that I, and the people I know and see around me, pay
for this ongoing state of war. The shrinking of the “surface area” of the
soul that comes in contact with the bloody and menacing world out there.
The limiting of one’s ability and willingness to identify, even a little, with
the pain of others; the suspension of moral judgment. The despair most of
us experience of possibly understanding our own true thoughts in a state
of affairs that is so terrifying and deceptive and complex, both morally
and practically… Because of the perpetual — and all-too-real — fear of
being hurt, or of death, or of unbearable loss, or even of “mere”
humiliation, each and every one of us, the conflict’s citizens, its prisoners,
trim down our own vivacity, our internal mental and cognitive diaspora,
ever enveloping ourselves with protective layers, which end up
suffocating us.

In response to such overwhelming challenges, what can we possibly do? While
large-scale, long-term solutions to war and catastrophe can only be put in motion
through political action, it is possible for each of us in our communities to begin
the healing process. Most often, this means working locally and preventatively to
resolve on-going conflicts, and simultaneously build the capacity and the skills
needed to interact differently.

This means teaching people ways of communicating effectively across cultural
divides, solving common problems creatively, negotiating collaboratively,
resolving disputes without violence, and encouraging forgiveness and
reconciliation, even after the worst atrocities. Without these skills, the suffering
will simply continue, bringing new suffering in its wake.

It is possible, for example, for local communities to establish an expanding
network of simple, replicable, peer-based community mediation projects in crisis
areas, in which multicultural mediators volunteer, or are elected by their
neighbors in the blocks where they live, given training and hands-on experience,
and develop the capacity to expand outward into new communities on a blockby-
block, house-by-house, community-by-community basis.

A simple “block-by-block” project might begin by selecting a small number of
blocks representing diverse neighborhoods, then bringing hostile or divergent
groups together, asking them to identify the sources of conflict between them,
and analyzing the techniques most needed to resolve them. It would then be
possible to train cross-cultural co-mediation/community facilitation teams to
help prevent, resolve, transform, and transcend local conflicts; reach consensus
on shared cultural values; facilitate open dialogues and problem-solving sessions
on community problems, and design conflict resolution systems for preventing
future conflicts between diverse cultures.

In many US neighborhoods, for example, cross-cultural teams of mediators
representing African-American, Hispanic, Asian Pacific-American and White
communities, might be trained in processing people’s feelings of grief and loss
regarding recent tragedies, or solving problems and negotiating with other
communities, or facilitating community meetings, or reducing prejudice against
people from different cultures who are seen as “enemies,” or using state-of-theart
mediation techniques to resolve community and cross-cultural conflicts, or
reaching forgiveness and reconciliation.

A Twelve-Step Program

These strategies and techniques, in combination and adopted as a whole, suggest
a generic 12-step plan that might be used to increase the capacity of communities
and countries to help prevent, resolve, transform, and transcend their conflicts.
These 12 steps can be modified to match local conditions and used to break the
cycle and addiction to local violence that ultimately impacts all of us:

1. Identify potential partners and allies and convene a cross-cultural team of
experienced trainers to conduct research and deepen understanding of
what is required.

2. Meet with leaders of hostile groups, cultures, or factions to secure
agreement on a common plan, build trust, and encourage ongoing
support.

3. Interview leaders of opposing groups, cultures, and factions, listen
empathetically to their issues, and clarify cultural mores, values, interests,
goals, and concerns.

4. Elicit from each group, culture, or faction the methods currently being
used to resolve disputes, and identify ways of validating, supplementing,
and expanding these core strategies, while introducing new strategies to
adapt and try out to see which are successful.

5. Select or elect a team of volunteers from each group who would like to be
trained as mediators, facilitators, and trainers.

6. Form cross-cultural teams of volunteer mediators and facilitators to work
in communities, schools, workplaces, government offices, and other
locations where conflicts occur.

7. Train volunteer facilitators in techniques for processing grief and loss,
reducing prejudice, facilitating public dialogue, organizing Truth and
Reconciliation Commissions, and similar efforts to build collaborative
relationships and improve trust.

8. Train teams to facilitate public dialogues, arbitrate disputes, encourage
forgiveness and reconciliation, and conduct conflict audits.

9. Form cross-cultural teams to train trainers in these techniques throughout
civil society, and support for them to train others.

10. Conduct periodic feedback, evaluations, audits, and course corrections to
improve the capacity of volunteers and identify where future support may
be required.

11. Develop case studies revealing successes and failures and build ongoing
popular, financial, and institutional support for resolution programs.

12. Design conflict resolution systems for civil society, economic
organizations, political parties, and government agencies that provide
increased opportunities for early intervention, open dialogue, problem
solving, collaborative negotiation mediation, and between adversaries.
Implementing these steps and modifying them to fit each situation will allow us
to substantially reduce the destructiveness of conflict and create a platform on
which deeper social and political changes might take place. By comparison with
the long-term costs of conflict, the most ambitious program imaginable would be
inexpensive and well worth undertaking.

Postscript: A New Organization

Since writing about this idea, Mediators Beyond Borders: Pathways to Peace and
Reconciliation (MBB) has become a reality, and is now a fully functioning
organization working to bring a rich array of conflict resolution techniques to
people internationally. Its goal is to recruit volunteers within the dispute
resolution community to support projects and programs that build conflict
resolution capacity globally.

The work of MBB is principally accomplished through project teams in which
people commit to work in a particular country, community, or region over a
period of several years. Each project team consists of a small, diverse group of
people who travel to a designated area several times a year to learn about
conflicts from local sources and assist in designing and delivering conflict
resolution trainings and services without charge. Members also work in
committees and content groups to deepen our understanding of the field and the
methods and techniques that prove most useful.

MBB is not alone or unique in attempting to assist people in other countries and
cultures to resolve disputes without warfare, and works in partnership with
other individuals, groups and organizations. What is unique about MBB is its
focus on building local capacity in a variety of skills, including mediating family,
community, environmental, and public policy disputes; reducing bias and
prejudice; developing restorative justice and victim-offender programs;
implementing multidoor courthouses; applying conflict resolution systems
design principles; and encouraging forgiveness and reconciliation.

MBB also seeks to improve skills in group facilitation, informal problem-solving,
team building, consensus decision-making, linking leadership, strategic
planning, community building, and organizational development, both
internationally and in the US. It uses computer technology, including the
Internet, blog sites, websites, and audio and video uploads to transfer conflict
resolution information, build networks and ongoing relationships, and allow
people in any country to become directly involved in providing assistance where
it is needed.

MBB chapters and individual members provide ongoing communication,
research, training materials, and Internet support to local mediators, conflict
revolutionists, disputing parties, and project teams. They assist in developing,
refining, and disseminating best practices in dispute resolution, including
training designs, materials, role-plays, and turnkey programs.

MBB is committed to a comprehensive, holistic approach that seeks to integrate
innovative conflict resolution methods with traditional and local techniques, and
develop a strategic methodology for addressing the sources of conflict within
organizations, communities and societies. It is committed to a sustainable, longterm
approach to local capacity building, together with a systems design
orientation that focuses on prevention, transparency and sustainability.

30 Things You Can Do

If you would like to support this work or create your own local projects to
encourage conflict resolution in other communities, countries, and cultures, there
are countless actions you can take, some small and quick, others large and long
lasting, each of which can be immensely helpful. To illustrate, here are 30 ways
you might decide to contribute:

1. Join MBB or similar organizations and help publicize their work. To
contact MBB, visit the website at www.mediatorsbeyondborders.org, or
email mediatorsbeyondborders@gmail.com.

2. Send a donation to MBB or similar organizations and assist them in
locating potential funders and making media contacts in your area.

3. If you have expertise in a particular region, country, language, or conflict
and would like to help or become a member of a project team and work in
that country for a period of several years, contact MBB and specify your
interest.

4. If you have training materials in communication, dialogue, problemsolving,
negotiation, mediation, prejudice reduction, conflict resolution,
and similar topics that might be useful to people in conflict areas,
especially if they are in other languages, send them to the MBB Library.

5. If you have useful information regarding a country or region where
conflicts are occurring, contact MBB and share or coordinate your
information with others through our newly created “conflictpedia”.

6. Select a country or region where conflicts are occurring, form a small
group of like-minded people, or create a local chapter of MBB to study,
think about, and discuss what is happening there.

7. Go online to see what has already been written about the conflict and
synthesize it in a briefing paper that others can supplement online or read
before traveling there.

8. Prepare a summary of the history of a conflict; or description of the
dominant political forces and constituencies, economic factors, or
environmental concerns that impact it; or list the main sources of impasse
and similar information that might be useful in briefing groups or project
teams working there.

9. Adopt one or more pen pals in an area you select and wherever possible
add correspondents from the opposing side.

10. Once you make contact, ask questions to expand your knowledge and
understanding of what is taking place there, then pass it on.

11. Find out what is needed or desired by way of assistance and let MBB or
similar organizations know.

12. Identify important cultural “dos and don’ts” and publicize them.

13. Prepare a list of useful quotations from indigenous authors, including
poetry, stories, folklore, novels, religious tracts, and political ideas and
send them to the MBB Library.

14. Develop a list of stereotypes used by each group against their opponents
and send it to MBB.

15. Start a local area blog, or send information and ideas to MBB’s blog site at
www.mwoborders.blogspot.com.

16. Collect important news articles from media in and around the area,
translate them, and forward them to others.

17. Create a list with useful descriptions and contact information identifying
mediators, facilitators, trainers, and allied professionals in the country or
region who might be willing to assist.

18. List other potentially useful contacts, such as leaders in government and
hostile organizations, for use by groups or project teams in the area.

19. Identify institutions and organizations already contributing to peace,
including descriptions and contact information.

20. Organize a public dialogue in your community to discuss global conflicts,
pass resolutions supporting conflict resolution, and publicize facts and
stories that raise people’s awareness.

21. Send pen pals information about MBB and other organizations, and assist
them in forming chapters or supporting conflict resolution activities in
their area.

22. Send useful books, training materials, and articles to conflict resolvers in
other areas.

23. Assist in preparing or revising training materials targeted to areas you
select.

24. Contact media to increase awareness of conflict resolution, write letters to
the editor, or op-ed pieces advocating meditative approaches to conflict.

25. Contact political representatives to encourage support for conflict
resolution.

26. Write to the United Nations, especially country representatives, and
encourage use of conflict resolution.

27. Contact schools, religious gatherings, etc., and ask to speak about conflict
resolution and conflicted areas.

28. Invite friends from ethnically diverse communities to dinner, ask them to
bring cultural food, artifacts, and materials to share, discuss conflicts in
the area, and agree on ways you can help.

29. Travel to an area to gather information first-hand, but do not intervene in
conflicts without adequate training, preparation, support, and assistance.

30. Make copies of this list and pass it on. If these ideas don’t succeed, invent
others. Don’t give up. Remember that a journey of a thousand miles starts
with a single step.

What is most important in reducing the level of global conflict is for each of us to
recognize that if we cannot learn to resolve our conflicts without war, injustice,
coercion, and catastrophic loss, we will be unable to survive, either as a species
or as a planet.

More profoundly, by responding to global conflicts in these preventative,
heartfelt, systemic ways, we may actually prepare the groundwork for the next
great leap in human history – the leap into international cooperation and
coexistence without war. Through these efforts, we may someday achieve the
transformation promised in a pamphlet issued by the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission:

Instead of revenge, there will be reconciliation.
Instead of forgetfulness, there will be knowledge and acknowledgement.
Instead of rejection, there will be acceptance by a compassionate state.
Instead of violations of human rights, there will be restoration of the
moral order and respect for the rule of law.

Let’s make it happen. Right now. Starting with us.

Kenneth Cloke is Director of the Center for Dispute Resolution and a mediator, arbitrator, attorney, coach, consultant, and trainer. Cloke is a nationally recognized speaker and author of many journal articles and books. His coaching, consulting, facilitation, and training practice includes work with leaders of public, private and non-profit organizations on effective communications, collaborative negotiation, relationship building, conflict resolution, leadership development, strategic planning, team building, and organizational change. He has been an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Law; Harvard University School of Law, Program on Negotiation, Insight Initiative; Global Negotiation Insight Institute; Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Cape Cod Institute; University of Amsterdam ADR Institute; and Saybrook University. He has done conflict resolution work in Austria, Bahamas, Brazil, Canada, China, Cuba, England, Georgia, India, Ireland, Japan, Latin America, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Thailand, Ukraine, former USSR, United Kingdom, and Zimbabwe. He is President of Mediators Beyond Borders.

“Last Call for a Loner” by Tom Sheehan

Posted on October 17, 2009 by Mary Akers

He had never belonged anyplace, and that realization was slowly dawning on him. Of all the places he had been in this whole land, East Coast to West Coast, border to border, foothills or river’s edge, none came charging up in his memory rugged with warmth, none touched longingly at him; no village, no harbor, no vast plain running off to the far horizon, no collection of people near such places.

This time out of the barn he had been moving for close to two months, hitching rides generally north, new stars and the wash of pine trees in April’s breath calling him on. The contradiction came at him again as harsh as a fist: of all the places he had been, he had been no place. His mind kept telling him the same thing the way a canyon echo sounds, distant, muted, out of a deep solace, hollow, near metallic. It was, he was ready to say, as if he had never stopped long enough to listen.

Now, near the foot of this day, the tidal flats wide and enormous, the sun at odds with itself on Earth edges, he could hear something. It was universal. It bore intelligence. It caught at his attention.

As usual he was alone and swore he was the only one attentive to that thing and seeing all this around him, the late sun splattering gold on every surface, moving or still, for as far as his eyes could see. Though he was not unkempt, he was not headed for the boardroom either. A worn but decent dark blue jacket hung on his slight frame, over a red plaid lumberjack shirt buttoned at the collar. The pants were brown corduroy and shiny at the knees and at the thighs. Brown ankle-high boots dipped up under his pant legs. A roadman he obviously was, a hitchhiker, but one apparently who spent his nights abed under cover, his clothes not covered with strange bed residue. This day a shave had been accomplished at some place back down the line. Under his arm he carried his baggy Matilda of sorts, and a vast marshy area spread before him, just a few miles up-river from the ocean. The sea salt and reed grass of the brackish land were stiff as knuckles at his nostrils.

Where he had paused, at the side of Route 107, along the mile-wide marshes, a sign stood its ground as heavy metal. Cast iron most likely, he was thinking as the last of the sun flung itself in reflection. It had a gray field and black letters about two inches high that simply said, “Saugus,” and some part of its beating called upon him. An Indian name, he was convinced in his own reflections, thinking some names have importance, some do not. His name, for that matter, was Chug and he was a loner, acknowledged, as he often said, as the loneliest feeling a man could have. For him there were no roots, no wispy grasp at footholds, no family beachheads he could remember. A loner. It might have been that he had not been long enough in one place, or had never let his past catch up to him. No such determination as yet had fully surfaced on that account.

But now, in the late afternoon, the name Saugus drew him on. It stuck in his mouth. What else was there? Where else? What place could he belong? A trucker‘s horn suddenly startled him. “How far you going, pal?” The rig was a Diamond-T, a monstrous breed of new redness and shiny chrome sitting beside him on the marsh road, and a hum under that giant hood as deep as a cement mixer. The driver, leaning at him from behind the wheel, half filling the cab, presented red hair and big eyes with shaggy brows and a smile as wide as the window. Chug looked again at the cast iron sign. “Saugus,” he said, quixotically, and then with serious conviction added, “To the middle of Saugus, wherever that is.”

“What’s your tag?” the trucker said, re-adjusting the sun visor, shifting gears from the dead start, clutching, gassing, leaning back in his seat. Artistic, thought Chug. “Mine’s O’Malley Fighorn, and ain’t that some moniker,” he laughed. “My mother sure as hell wasn’t letting go her last bit of Irish. My brother’s name is Sullivan, Sullivan Fighorn, Mal and Sully, that’s us.” Deep from his chest rose a laugh as though he was remembering something special, someplace special.

Chug said, “Chug,” like it was a simple flake of rock falling off a cliff face. “Chug it’s been forever. Plain Chug.”

“What’s your real tag?” Mal Fighorn bowed his head and looked at Chug as if something else special was waiting on him. Crows’ feet almost crinkled with sound at his eyes. A bump sat prominently on his nose, proud badge of badges. Looking ahead at the stoplight now green in the distance, he downshifted the rig, then looked again at his rider. He had shared his name and expected, it seemed, his rider to do the same thing for him.

“Tylen,” Chug said, caught by that charge, the depth in the driver’s eyes, the fan of crinkles friendly in its marking. Then he added, his breath coming out of his chest like it had been saved up for a long time, “Tylen Brackus.”

The two grown men looked into each other’s eyes and began to laugh. They laughed all the way up to the red light with an arrow saying “Saugus” beside it. The arrow pointed north. The tears rolled south on Mal Fighorn’s cheeks, and on the cheeks of Chug Brackus.

“Ain’t we the friggin’ pair!” Mal Fighorn said, as he swung the rig into the northbound road, a huge hand pawing the shift lever with adroitness, his feet tap dancing on clutch pedal and gas pedal. “Tylen Chug Brackus, you and me, pal, are having dinner with my dad. Lives here in Saugus, loves his company. And get this,” he added uproariously, shifting again, tap dancing again, his brows heavy over bright eyes, “his name is Montcalm Fighorn. He’s friendly, he likes his beer and wears twenty years of beard.”

They laughed all the way into the Fighorn driveway on the far edge of town, near the Lynnfield line. Laughter had taken them right through Saugus Center, past a veterans’ monument at a green rotary, past a stately old Town Hall bearing late traffic, past a handful of quiet churches.

Tylen Chug Brackus, loner, felt again that unknown sweep of energy come across his chest or across his mind. He could not be sure which avenue, but it swept at him and by him in the long driveway, making him think he was in a kind of wind tunnel. Once, long ago, someplace in his travels, that sweeping might have been known. He could not remember where. Out back of the house was a barn and another truck, looking like its last mile had been run, sat beside the barn. Painted sign letters on the body of the truck had faded to an unreadable point, pale as old scars. Its tires were flat. Chug thought about old elephants going off alone to die. His mind, he thought, could never compute how many miles of service the truck must have delivered. Now it did not seem so important; it was just rusting away as much as the barn was decaying, though not seen the same way.

A bit later a delicate spring evening hovered around them as they sat on the porch, long and screened-in with at least a dozen chairs scattered its length. He’d bet that some evenings every chair was occupied, it was that kind of house and that kind of porch. In the distance clusters of fireflies dominated the dark landscape. Across the road and up a steep hill, in the growing darkness, an owl called out. Chug thought it to be a place called home.

“So you got a name thing, too,” Montcalm Fighorn said, pouring beer from a quart bottle into three frosted mugs still wearing shadowy clouds. “They’ve been calling me Monty since I can remember. Never by my real name. Hell, I never called this boy by his real name. Enda, my good Enda, never called him anything but O’Malley. And Sully had it the same way.” Toward a bit of darkness off the side of the porch, adroitly, in modest ceremony, he tipped his drink, and the tipping was understood by those who saw it done.

Chug drank slowly and deliberately, and the bearded Monty Fighorn watched his guest drink with dainty sips after the healthy meal. “Don’t be bashful, Chug. End of the day’s the time for a good swallow. Have at it.” He raised his mug and drained off the contents. “Best damn part of the day,” he vouched with certainty, poured another full round, and then raised his eyebrows at his son who went to the small icebox at the end of the porch and brought back another imperial quart. “I’m not the real curious type, Chug, but wonder where you’ve been, what you’ve seen. Mal says you spend the winter in Florida. That so?”

“Two or three places down there. Sometimes they put up with me and sometimes they don’t. I have a special delivery box and they hold all my mail. Usually it’s just a few retirement checks from Uncle I use to try to get through the winter.”

“You in the service, Chug?” Even as he asked the question, Monty knew the answer. The signs were there. Besides the bracelet Chug wore, it was written on the man. His clothes might have been second-line, but he was shaved that very day, and his hairline cut half moons high over the ears. The boots, beat up as they were by the road, were not long from a spit shine. He’d bet there was a pair of dry socks in his small bag if not pinned to the inside of his jacket.

“Twenty-six years in the Army.”

“I got me one of those,” Monty said, pointing at the bracelet on Chug’s wrist. “Where’d you get yours?” The wreathed Combat Infantryman’s Badge, its blue field long since faded, curved loosely on Chug’s wrist. A small chain kept it in place. A circular stain was on his wrist.

“Couple of places were good enough. But first with the 31^st in Viet Nam. Then in the desert in the Eighties. You?”

“Nam, too. Four oh first. Caught a bit of hell and was rolled out of there in a hurry. Think I was pinned down for two months then on my way home, on evac. Had one friend, talking about nicknames, who was transferred to first battalion of your outfit. We called him Grunt before we had grunts.”

Perhaps from the dark hill or out of a field now gone into the night, the sweeping energy came on Chug again. Almost electricity, it ran right over the porch as if the fireflies had let everything go. Chug knew a rustling at the screening, a possession of sorts, at the very spot Monty had tipped his mug. “Talking about names, his wasn’t Billy Pigg, was it?” He could not bring back a face, but a piece of it, a nose.

The energy, the sweeping, told him the answer even before Monty Fighorn came up out of his chair. “Damn it, guy, don’t tell me you knew Billy Pigg! Hot damn! Thought about him a thousand times. Old Kentucky Billy Pigg. Great boy he was. Marksman of all marksmen, I tell you. Often wondered about him. Often.” The plea was in his voice and he nodded again at his son sitting there, the son’s mouth agape, his eyes wide in the darkness, wondering what the hell had made him stop and pick up a hitchhiker off the marsh road, the end of the world itself. From the corner of the porch Mal brought back two more imperial quarts of beer and poured the round himself.

“Hate to tell you, Monty,” Chug said, setting down his mug, as if his right to drink had been suddenly halted, perhaps his welcome stopped in place. “Died in my arms, not quick, not slow, but long enough to ask me to bless him with water. I did, from a canteen, and him leaking badly, one of them old sucking chest wounds that’ll never let go. Said his daddy picked him up one day, about to walk into the river with him and do it up proper, when his daddy keeled over from a heart attack and never got him wet. All that time, it seems, it was all he could remember, being on the grass and not wet. But I got it done for him. Boy had a nose been smashed all to hell before he even got in the army. That your Billy Pigg, Monty? That the one you knew as Grunt, nose broke up all to hell?”

Chug was aware again of the spot Monty had tipped his mug to. The unknown sweeping was coming through the same place, the rustling, the net of screen separating sounds and energies, paying them due respects. And he and Monty Fighorn, old soldiers at the pair, had a sharing of lasting memories coming at them in pieces.

Chug said, “Tell me about that old truck out back. Looks like an old soldier in the Old Soldiers’ Home, just waiting to go the last mile. Serve you that good, did it, not letting it go?”

“You’re right on that account, Tylen Brackus,” Monty said, and laughed loudly, his laugh ranging the porch and out into the night. “Was a hell of a rig in its day. Brought us a little freedom, worked so long and good. It ain’t going no place before me, and that’s a given.” Turning to Mal, he said, “Tell him that’s so, son.”

“It’ll turn to rust in that spot long as I’m around. Bet on it.” He tipped his mug, but it was not at the dark space just off the porch. It was more at an idea.

All of it, Chug thought, was measurable.

Monty swung around in his dark red Adirondack chair. Chug heard it creak. “I got an idea I want to run by you, Chug,” Monty said. “No strings attached, as they say. Got lots of room here, most of it going to waste.

Boys here got business I don’t want to get into. They do their thing and I do mine. I’m willing to let you have a room for the summer, go and come as you please, go off as you like when you like, doing your road thing if you have to, and head back down to see your friends come fall or late summer. It’s no charity farm nor the Old Soldiers’ Home. You cut some grass, you do some dishes, make your own bed and do your own laundry, and you got a place to drop your head come of a night. And you don’t plan to drink all my beer. Can’t lose anything from where I sit.” The chair creaked again as he stood up and said, “Want to show you something.” He went into the house and toward the back of the house.

Mal said, “He’s going to show you his,” pointing to Chug’s bracelet. “We had it mounted on a piece of cherry wood a lot of years ago. Sets some store by it, he does. Makes me think you should think real serious about his offer. Doesn’t do something like that very often.”

“I’m just a guy barely out of the tank, Mal. Doesn’t know me from a hole in the wall. Why make me out so special?”

“He knows you a lot better than you think, Chug. You and him, you’re like blood brothers maybe. I’m sure you share something I might never know, though it might be like Sully and me. He’s a good man and he finds stock in you. Hell, man, there must be some of that in me, too. I picked you off the side of the road, could have gone right by. Usually do, these days. I have no idea why I stopped. Something in the air, I guess. Would you believe it?”

Only Chug Brackus heard the rustle at the screen, the promise of sound in a small shrub, with a host of fireflies coming closer to the porch.

And so it was, practically for the first time in his life off a post or station, for more than four months of belonging, Tylen Chug Brackus sat on the porch at night with Monty Fighorn. They listened to the fireflies almost, to the owls on the hill, to the old truck turning to honored rust, and every now and then, from a distance, like down a one-way street, to the limitless, endless charge of energy finding its way to a couple of old souls.

In the dread heat of late August, the heavens at rampage, electricity beating about the skies like a thousand cannons at battle, one bolt of lightning followed another bolt through two aged hearts.

Mal told Sully over the phone, “Damned won’t believe it, Sull. Neither one of them spilled a drop of their beer. It just sat there beside them, waiting to get sipped up like it was last call.”

Tom Sheehan is the author of Brief Cases, Short Spans, a short story collection, from Press 53, 2008, and From the Quickening, another collection, from Pocol Press, 2009. Epic Cures, short stories from Press 53 earned a 2006 IPPY Award. A Collection of Friends, memoirs, Pocol Press, 2004, was nominated for Albrend Memoir Award. He has nominations for ten Pushcart Prizes, three Million Writers nominations, and Noted Story nominations for 2007 and 2008, received the Georges Simenon Award for Fiction from New Works Review, a Silver Rose Award for Excellence in fiction from ART, is included in the Dzanc Best of the Web Anthology, 2009 and nominated for Best of the Web 2010. He appears in the new anthologies from Press 53, Home of the Brave: Stories in Uniform (sharing space with Jim Salter, Tobias Wolfe, Tim O’Brien, Kurt Vonnegut and others) and in Milspeak: Warriors, Veterans, Family and Friends Writing the Military Experience. He served in Korea, 1951-52, and has published 13 books.

“New Year’s Eve” by Cheri Byard

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Mary Akers

“What do you want to burn?” Tara asked as she handed Jack strips of white paper.

He placed them on the kitchen table and said, “I don’t know. I feel stupid doing this.”

“Jack, the idea is to write all the bad things that have happened to us – all the things we want to put behind us – and burn them.” She smiled at him, lightly touching his shoulder.

“Hell, it’s not like it’s gonna change my luck.” Jack said. He waved his hands toward the ceiling, causing the paper to scatter.

“Sweetie, just give it a try for me – for us.” She said as she bent over to pick up the pieces of paper. “It’s symbolic. I think it will help give us a fresh start for next year. A positive state of mind might bring positive results.” Tara’s stomach quivered as she saw Jack pour a glass of Crown Royal over ice.

“Sure. Why the hell not. Guess it can’t hurt. You write ‘em down and let me know when you’re ready to blaze ‘em. I’m gonna relax and watch the game.”

Tara was beginning to regret not accepting an invitation to a New Year’s Eve party at the Eldridge Hotel, an annual event that she attended pre-Jack. She missed those times and wondered why she ever let that tradition slip away.

Well, it’s too late to go now. Just stick with your plan, girlfriend. Everything will be better next year. It’s got to be better than this year! Suck it up and follow through.

It wasn’t just the symbolism of this act that moved Tara. She had convinced herself that she could alter their karma by physically burning the bad events they had experienced, welcoming only good.

Tara walked into the living room and sat next to Jack. “Well, what do you want to purge? If you could eliminate anything that has happened to us, what would that be?”

Jack was flipping the channels, looking at the television. Without turning his gaze, his hand felt for Tara’s knee and patted it, “Whatever you want, babe. I trust you. Write whatever you want.”

Tara sighed and returned to the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of red wine from a box in the refrigerator and sat at the table, staring out the window. She gazed at the sleet illuminated by the alley floodlight.

It’s probably just as well we didn’t get out in this weather. I didn’t really want to go out anyway. Surely Jack will stay awake for the whole game. I just need to keep him up until midnight so we can do this.

Jack poured himself another glass of whiskey and sat beside her.

“Hey, I didn’t mean to blow you off. You know I’m not good at this kind of thing. I trust you to write it down for both of us.

You know what I’d want to write.” Jack hugged her. She could already smell the alcohol on his breath.

“Grab your wine and the papers and come watch the game with me,” Jack said.

Jack knew she couldn’t sit still watching a football game on television, but she was certain that she needed to stick close to him tonight if she wanted him to join her at midnight.

Tara and Jack rarely cuddled on the couch any more. Tonight, however, she thought she would give it a try. After all, it was New Year’s Eve. Most couples were out celebrating together, kissing at midnight, bringing in hopes and dreams for a new year.

She sat close to Jack with her left side touching his right. She consciously sat on that side, knowing he would be using his left hand to control the remote. Jack did not put his arm around her or his hand on her knee, as he had just moments before. She remembered how he used to wrap his arm around her shoulder or weave his fingers into hers. Not tonight. She wondered if they would ever have that tenderness again.

She cocked her head to look at Jack, “Honey…do you want to cuddle like we used to?”

“No, you go ahead and write down your purgings or whatever you called ‘em. I’m good.”

Well, there’s your answer. Dammit. Why do I even try? Tara pulled her body slightly away from Jack’s.

She picked up the pieces of paper and wrote down every awful thing she could think of that had happened to them; not just this year, but in all the years they had been together. Jack’s accident. Infertility. Cloe’s death. She tore two additional pieces of paper to add the rest. Tara covered everything she could think of except for one. Could she sneak that one in without Jack seeing? She shuddered when she imagined him finding it.

No, I can’t do it. Not yet. I want a baby. Besides, if we can adopt, I just know it will change him.

Tara picked up her book, The Bridges of Madison County, and read. Jack had several more drinks and passed out by 10:30. Tara left him to sleep on the couch while she gave herself a facial, took a bubble bath, and drank another glass of wine. After putting on some sweats and a heavy tee-shirt, she sat in bed and recorded all the words she had written on tiny slips of paper earlier in the evening, adding the one she had omitted.

At 11:45 she quietly walked downstairs. The familiar patterns returned. Wet underarms. Dry mouth. Erratic breathing. Quaking stomach. Her pulse beat faster. She could easily turn around and return to bed.

You are such a chicken shit! Go on. Wake him up. You NEED to do this for both of you! Think of the baby we could adopt.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and gently shook Jack’s shoulder. “Jack, honey, it’s almost midnight. I’ve got everything ready for us to burn our bad karma.”

Jack snorted and his body jerked toward the back of the couch. She shook him again, with a little more force. “Jack, it’s time. We need to do this, honey. Please get up.”

Each time she moved him, his snoring increased. He was out for the night. Tara knew if she wanted to do this, she was on her own.

Tears in her eyes, Tara grabbed her coat and put the strips of paper and a lighter in her pocket. She picked up an empty coffee can from the kitchen table before going out. As she opened the back door to the deck, she raised her head; eyes fixed on the sky, and smiled. Despite the freezing temperatures, she was warm inside. God had blessed her. There were stars in the sky and the moon was bright enough she did not even notice the floodlight. With a new resolve, Tara pulled one scrap of paper at a time from her jacket pocket. She read each entry out loud before putting a flame to it, and dropped them one at a time in the coffee tin, allowing one to die out before adding another. After the final piece had burned, she set the can on the ground, looked up at the sky and yelled ALCOHOLISM!

Cheri Byard has been an elementary school special education teacher for over 20 years. A painter, writer and poet, Cheri’s poems and essays have appeared in various publications including Awareness Magazine, Words-Myth Literary Journal, and the anthology Mentor’s Bouquet. She is currently at work on her first novel, from which “New Year’s Eve” is excerpted. Cheri resides in Kansas with her husband and young daughter.

“Invisible Conversation” by Lavonne J. Adams

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Mary Akers

Foliage
Photo by David Navarro

I didn’t understand the indelible nature of lust, how decades later it would mark me like a drunken tattoo—high on grapefruit vodka, the violet lure of the neon sign, the buzzing of the needle before it seared skin. Sometimes, in the hours of night made bleak by solitude, I pull back blinds and imagine—in the empty Adirondack on my deck—a former lover, one of several in the years I’ve been single. Not the most important, just the most recent. Tonight, I will sit with that ghost. Small talk will be irrelevant. I’ll listen for nothing but my own breath: each exhalation a question, each inhalation a precise and unalterable answer. From a distance, the deck will look like a raft on a calm sea. But the solitary bulb will cast shadows like abstract art—intuitive and indecipherable—and the heavens will remain shrouded by clouds. How impossible to navigate without a single star.

Lavonne J. Adams lives in the coastal community of Wilmington, North Carolina, where she teaches as she writes. She received the 2007 Pearl Poetry Prize for Through the Glorieta Pass, “documentary poetry” based on women who travelled the Santa Fe Trail in the mid-1800’s. Her life is a little less adventurous, though she has spiced it up a bit with residencies at the Harwood Museum of Art and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Taos, as well as the Vermont Studio Center. Journal publications include Sojourn, New South, and Missouri Review.

“The Pink Cloud” by Robbie Gamble

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Mary Akers

you can hear
on the phone
his forced euphoria

the spit flecks
in his inflection
“It’s all good”

just one week
removed from rehab
the prodigal son

set back up
in the home
less home, more

like a fishbowl
the family eyeballing
his every twitch

no job leads
girlfriend gone, no
prospects for escape

just a day
reeling out ahead
real and dull

still, he tries
hard to please
“I’m so grateful

for these tools,
to be working
on the program”

it settles, overcast
thickens into dark
no evening star

tonight

Robbie Gamble

“Clear As Snow” by Joseph Mockus

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Mary Akers

As clear as now it is I always
Remember this place in mist
You and I awake inside a dream—
No stars, no moon, only sand
On the deserted beach
What is the memory of what we thought
Was love but love itself

Joseph Mockus is a writer, poet, criminal defense attorney, dad, husband, and rock ‘n roll drummer. Joe has published in the small university press, but generally only when his friends submit his work, which is never rejected. It is only because Joe taught your editor-in-chief how to really read literature (standing in front of a dart-board on Turquoise Street in Pacific Beach sometime in 1975 or 1976) that we have the r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal at all.

“Temerity” by Sue Bernardi

Posted on October 12, 2009 by Mary Akers

Even though it’s summer, the air is cold at two in the morning. “Dammit,” I say through chattering teeth.

Even worse than insomnia, I hate being cold in the summer.

I try to remember helpful hints from old magazine articles, “How to Quiet the Mind”, very Mother Earth, very now, very convenient for wishy-washy naysayers like myself.

I throw on an old Harvard sweatshirt over my stained Hanes T-shirt, both of which I stole from a guy that lived upstairs from me. I can never remember his name, something like Brian or Jeff. He would always wash his car on Thursday afternoons, and I would drink Rolling Rock from his fridge. I slide into my gray flip flops and go for a walk.

I avoid cracks in the sidewalk and dog shit. I half whistle and wonder if I’ll ever remember what sleep feels like. I notice a guy walking cat; I rub my eyes in disbelief. Maybe sleep deprivation has given way to visual hallucinations.

He sees me and does a half-shrug head-nod frat boy greeting. “This is Selma,” he says in a whiskey voice.

“I didn’t know you could walk a cat.”

He digs his free hand in his front jeans pocket and smirks, “I bet there are lots of things you don’t know.”

I grind my teeth. “You know what? You’re absolutely right. And at the top of the list of things unknown to me is why I’m talking to you.” I go back to my apartment, and for the first time in months I feel exhausted. I sleep for 5 hours.

I have a terrible job at the county court house. Actually I work for an independent photocopying shop that needs me to work at the county court house faxing, mailing and, of course, photocopying bankruptcy documents. I have read 10 books this summer because of my shitty job.

The fax machine makes it slow grinding noise; I sigh and put down Slaughterhouse Five. I love fax paper; it has a slight waxy feeling to it and it curls under like a town crier’s bulletin.

“Hey check this out!

–Greg”

I look across the street with my binoculars to see Greg leaning against the counter listening to The Fall. Greg says he used to masturbate to Mark E. Smith when he was in high school. Knowing Greg, it’s probably true.

The New York Times has put out a list of the 100 greatest books of the 20^th century. I put green asterisks next to the books I have fully read and orange asterisks next to the books I have partially read.

I pick up the binoculars again and study the busy people on the street below. I gasp; it’s the cat walker from last night. I rush down the marble stair case just in time. The cat walker has a toothpick in his mouth and is much more attractive than I remembered.

“No cat today,” I say smiling. I’ve been told I have a beautiful smile.

Maybe this time I’ll be lucky, he has an aura of optimism around him. I feel like the 13 year old version of myself. I adore having a crush.

“Knowledge is power,” he says.

I blush and stammer something about loving School House rock.

“Do you also love happy hour?”

“Where can I meet you?”

He takes my hand and walks me to the corner. We stare at each other and he sighs and shakes his head. He leans in close; it feels like we are going to kiss.

He whispers and I swallow hard, “5:30, ‘Palais Royale’.” I stare at his face; he has sleep dirt stuck in the corner of his soft green eyes.

I wander back to work as if in a fugue state. I stare at the clock until it says 4.

I bustle back across the street, bursting to tell Greg about my good luck. Greg stares at his navy blue Chuck Taylor low rise sneakers while I’m babbling about my beautiful new crush.

“Did you see that new X Files movie yet?” Greg asks, unimpressed with my news.

I go in the back and sit with Mamie. If I didn’t know Mamie I would hate her, impossibly thin, impossibly blonde and ageless. When she told me she was 31, I choked on my Nutella and banana sandwich. Mamie knows the Heimlich maneuver too.

Mamie is doing date entry and listening to obscure Brit pop, music is the only thing we have in common.

“Mamie, would you consider a man that walks a cat?

“Oh I know that guy.”

“You’ve dated a man that walked a cat.”

“No, I mean I saw were talking to Hesh on the corner. I spent a weekend with him in the city. Paid for everything and I never called him again.”

I feel sick; a cast off of Mamie’s, no good can come from this.

“Aww don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll be a much better fit for him,” Mamie has slight underbite that makes her seem even more adorable.

“Did you say his name is Hesh?” I ask with a forced breeziness.

Mamie smiles as if she were in a dream. “His real name is Helmut. Hesh’s mother came from Stuttgart. Hesh is short for Hessian, you know like those paid German mercenaries from the Revolutionary War. I think it was rather creative of me.”

The Palais Royale is the type of bar that William S. Burroughs would go to if he had been kicked out of everyplace in all five boroughs of New York and couldn’t score any heroin. It attracts wannabe writers and casual hangers-on. I went there once with a guy that said my eyes looked too hard for someone my age.

Then he left with a girl that had buzz cut.

He is sitting right in the middle of the bar, sipping a beer with a lemon wedge floating in it. I get nervous, what if I start belching or I chip my teeth against the beer bottle.

“I’ll have a whiskey sour, please,” I say blushing.

“My nana likes to drink whiskey sours,” he laughs and shakes his head.

I pretend not to care and stare at his hands. He has dirty fingernails and hairy knuckles.

“I was painting all morning,” he says and picks at his fingernails.

“Houses?”

“No, I’m working on a black and white series.”

I feel stupid and wonder why this guy is interested in me.

The bartender hands me my drink, making the glass smudgy with her greasy fingertips. I take a sip and sigh. The bartender slaps her gnarled hands down on the bar and squeezes.

“Cockroach,” she says in an unapologetic voice.

He brings me tea and toast, neither of which I enjoy but accept with a sheepish smile. He brings his hand to the side of my face and he stares at me with a bemused look on face. As if he couldn’t believe he was going to end up in bed with someone like me. I set the teacup on the floor; we hold each other for a brief moment. I spy a plaid tuxedo in his closet.

We’ve hardly said two words to each other all night. I feel like I’m having drinks with my boss.

“I have to pee,” I say after an age of silence. Hesh nods.

I go to the cruddy bathroom and step over puddles of what I hope is water. I stare in the mirror. When did I start to look so old? I rub my eyes hard and see red splotches.

Hesh is not at our table. I spy him at the bar talking to an ultra cool brunette with a sinister smile. My legs are made of spaghetti as I amble my way over to the happy couple.

The brunette is laughing and tugging on Hesh’s sleeve while he is tearing a paper napkin in half. He’s pretending to be the weakest strong man alive, that’s our private joke.

“You moved,” I say lamely.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Well Leila was all the way over here so, you know,” he mumbles, not really looking at me.

Leila smirks at me. I can read her mind, ‘I’m next, Bitch’.

“Well are you gonna sit down at least or are you going to continue to act like a jealous wife?”

I have vomit in my mouth and I can feel the tears well up. I slink out like I wish I had never been born.

I sit on cheap plastic lawn chair that I have in my living room/bedroom. I fished out of someone’s road side trash one drunken night.

It’s two in the morning, no phone call. My eyes burn but I have not shed one single tear. I go for a walk, back to the scene of the crime. Like magic he appears, like a nightmare he is kissing Leila. I feel like I’ve been sucked through a black hole. I stumble home and pretend to sleep.

I put all of Hesh’s things in a pile in the middle of my unmade bed. Every time I fold his shirts, I stop and breathe in deep. I cry at the scent of paint, sweat and that special Hesh smell. I have run out of tissue and I dry my tears with toilet paper.

I have seven or eight sketches of me Hesh did when he thought I was sleeping, usually after we had sex. I open up the bedroom window and liberate Hesh’s art. Lucky me it rained last night and they all land in a dirty puddle of water. I stare out the window all afternoon and smile every time someone walks by and stomps on the delicate pencil drawings of a contented me.

“Can’t we talk about this like adults?” Hesh asks in a hurt voice.

I am seething; I clench my jaw and try to form words. “Oh no, the onus is on you. Go fuck your hipster friend. Oh wait you can’t. She knows you’re a fucking scumbag.” So much for grace under pressure.

“I’m an artist, I’m unreliable. You knew what I was like when we started this thing,” he looks smug, as if he could burst into the “I told you so” song and dance.

“Don’t put your shortcomings on me!” I sound like a shrieky witch, like the kind of woman that will pick a fight with her husband at the supermarket for no real reason other than to make everyone else feel as bad as she does, the kind of woman that I hate, that I have somehow evolved into.

“I don’t want to argue with you anymore,” I say in a softer voice.

“Then just stop.” He folds me into his arms and I close my eyes.

I am knitting a pair of socks and drinking a brandy Alexander. Greg sits primly on my Naugahyde green recliner.

“What are you doing,” he asks.

“A garter stitch,” I say listlessly.

Hesh has not called in a few days, when I phone him I get his cool, detached voice mail. I feel needy and small.

“That’s it, Anne Frank. We are going out.”

“Can I wear my pajamas?”

Greg smirks at me and pats my head.

“Temerity,” I say out loud and blush. I hadn’t meant to say anything at all; the words crept out of my mouth of their own volition.

“Do even know what temerity means?” he asks, eyebrows twisted up in a mocking knot.

I ignore the line of questioning and concentrate one the bedroom walls. A wave of ambivalence washes over me. I can’t remember why I thought stop sign red would be a choice in wall color. I feel claustrophobic.

“I don’t know how I feel about red,” he says with a frown.

Though I can barely catch my breath, I argue. “Well I love it,” I say, my arms folded around my torso like a frustrated contortionist.

He smiles and squeezes my shoulders, “I have take out in the kitchen and a surprise.”

As if not speaking to each other for two weeks wasn’t surprising enough, I am pretty astounded by the thoughtfulness of a gift.

I rush into my kitchen which now seems gray and flat compared to the bordello like walls in my bedroom. Gerber daises lay in a heap on the table. I paw through my recycling and find six empty Orgina bottles.

“Why do you always do that?” he asks, “Did it ever occur to you to buy vases?”

I fight back hurtful words and line my flowers in the windows of my kitchen.

He eats and I continue to paint until I feel dizzy from the delicious smell.

“Can’t paint fumes cause brain tumors?”

“At least I’ll die happy,” I say sharply.

He pulls me down on the bare mattress and spoons me with a rough gentleness, a trait all of his own, a trait I can help but succumb to. I pick at the red flecks on my legs.

“It looks like I have the plague,” I say.

He is fast asleep.

Sue Bernardi is an almost 34 y/o well fed starving artist. She’s been making a meager living in the world of non-profit whilst dreaming of becoming a professional writer.

summer night

Posted on October 12, 2009 by Mary Akers

Summer night but that’s no excuse I could
Whisper what I think until dawn and still
The misheard words, a distraction, then lost.
Decades on this same beach, but not
Like this, the way it is. After you
Are gone, after dark and then later I
Drop to my knees in the sand and ask
The sand to remember when we were
Here and each wave pronounced our names.

“Keeping Time” by Erik Svehaug

Posted on October 12, 2009 by Mary Akers

When Diskus hoisted his case and stepped outside, he felt late. And Green Bay was out of Super Bowl contention already. Shake it off.

Nancy probably wouldn’t talk to him for a week. Shake that off, too. His sobriety? He’d already shaken that off. The street was filled with black grit and slush. Snow lay like old manna on strips and patches of grass. Up the street, pitch and run. Sell. Tune in. Make it.

“Look, just bear with me a minute,” he told the short, shiny man, wiping the snow from a parked car. “How many ways do you know to boil an egg? One. How many ways to chew it? One. You sleep, you wake up, you chew your eggs the same way every time.”

The little man was listening. He was buying, Diskus knew.

“Break your wife out of the ordinary. Surprise her. No occasion. It’ll mean a lot to her. The gold chain is worth $15.00 by itself.” Diskus proffered a delicate pendant set.

The man’s twenty bucks made almost half of seventy, his goal for this morning. Diskus pocketed his money and headed down the street. He fished for rhythm, pitch, swagger. He imagined himself at the next door.

You sing when you’re by yourself, lady? You used to. What’s it going to take to get that back? Time’s eating you up. Look at yourself. Maybe you don’t feel the teeth yet. Sing or you die like a bug. You used to sing all the goddam time. Couldn’t shut you up.

Nancy had sung a lot. Before they were married, they’d sung together. Mamas and Papas. Yardbirds. Belafonte. All kinds of things. She even knew some Sinatra and Patsy Cline. But she’d closed up as his luck turned; when he lost his shirt and then the storefront on Wabash.

He picked the next door because of the curtains in it, the newish Beamer out front, the frosty but manicured garden. He knew, as he knocked, that he was stuck in his head; he should have waited; should have gotten his pitch back first.

When the door opened, he said: “If you have a moment, ma’am, I want to say change is the main thing.

Quick change. Newness and speed. Absolutely central in a livable life. Curiosity, surprise, variety, excitement, discovery. You’ve got to keep the human eye moving or it won’t last a week.”

His audience was a fragrant woman of about forty. Either a young grandmother or an old mom, he thought, after glimpsing a basket of Legos through the door.

“What’s that?” she said. “I’m sorry, keep going,” she said, with a small smile.

A radio in the background said: “In high school hoops, Independence High meets Roosevelt tonight, it’s Madison at Winona.”

“I mean that Hollywood and television and newspapers don’t just help pass the time. They are time. If it weren’t for them, every minute would be just like every other minute and time would stop. Aging wouldn’t be a problem; people would be too bored to notice. You’d die as old as you were born, for all you’d care or know. Fashions, advertising, reporters; they’re all beating their brains out to keep you alive.”

“I don’t think I quite get it.” She said. Her smile was tentative. She had wrinkles around her eyes, freckles in the usual places. Her eyebrows crowded down. “Really, what do you want? I’m freezing with this door open.”

He took her money. She went for hoop earrings. Ten bucks was ten bucks.

Sure, he was attracted to her. But he had seen himself in the mirror this morning. Guts in a sack. Sloping shoulders. He had a white sickle-shaped scar on his ribs from a Korean bayonet and hard gravel lumps of tissue from sloppy shrapnel repair. Does anyone even know what a sickle is anymore? Shake that off, too.

He and Nancy had an arrangement. He would try to be gone by 7:30 A.M. After that, she’d get made up for her day at her beauty salon, four chairs, with nails. Before last night, he’d been on the wagon for thirteen months. She used to say things to him occasionally when he walked through the bedroom.

He’d gotten married seventeen years ago, at fifty, when he was still skinny and strong, like a wise-but-wired, stud-looking paperboy. So what’s seventeen years in dog years? An eternity. Nancy had her friends and the shop. He ate his own cooking, washed his own dishes, bought his own toothpaste. And he almost used to drink.

He had his case by its big double handles. Shake it off, he told himself. Pick it up. Tune in, here and now. He headed south.

His feet slapped pavement and he hummed a razzy tune. Big flappy feet and the tune was 20’s, 20’s, 20’s, no, by God, 1931. Green and pink tweed jacket, rubble nose, baggy pants and humming 1931. He stopped at the tail of his dirty green Rambler wagon. “So there you are,” he said to the car.

He had drunk hard last night. He had nursed a cranberry and soda and swapped a few stories at the Vets’ Hall, until the TV 4 News Anchor said: “Seventy-one year-old Korean War veteran Frank Cole died today. He was one of only a handful of remaining GI’s who were captured at the fall of Taejeon, almost fifty years ago.”

Diskus hadn’t known the soldier’s name, but he and some of the others knew some guys in the 24^th Infantry and Diskus had seen nearby Osan go down, himself. That is, at seventeen years old, he had been trucked out on his back, bleeding, as it fell. The white office buildings, homes and warehouses billowed black smoke into the sky in the distance. He remembered the grenade blast that got him. No idea about the bayonet though.

That must have come after.

They shared a round for Frank Cole and, then, another for other fallen brothers. As the rounds came and went, his head filled with the whiskey fog. Somehow, he knew that the Timberwolves lost to the Panthers 98 to 108. Before long, he cupped his heavy chin in one hand and propped it on the bar. Bright thoughts gleamed and rolled by him, like pinballs out of reach of the flippers.

Determined to leave, his bar-world whirling, Diskus heaved himself to his feet, hands flat on the counter. He reminded himself to try to remember in the morning to think about where he’d left the station wagon.

“Spring Training is only 58 days away,” said the Ten O’clock News.

Somehow, he had made it home on foot.

From under the front seat of the Rambler, he pulled yesterday’s dented steel thermos of coffee, poured the contents into the shiny top. All the time, pitch and run. He opened the passenger door and sat down. Better get out there. Two cold swallows of coffee. The sun was working its way up and light covered his lap and made him sad. Tired of being an odd-looking joke. From under his feet, he pulled a blanket onto his lap.

To them, I’m always just a peddler. He was already drowsy. He scrunched so his ear was down onto the soft, worn backrest.

Selling jewelry was relaxing at first. But now even the cheap plated junk was getting to him.

Before that, he’d sold Bibles energetically, but he quit when the verses, the heavy scary lines, had started lacing his dreams. God’s angry voice began to voice-over his private life. He felt like a punk teenager getting chewed out by a grownup. Anger, disapproval, guilt.

He decided faith wasn’t slack thinking. It was a grab at hope, set against the pain-hot real impossibility of being loved. That was Hell. Buy my Bible, baby.

He used to drink part-time to keep any sales pitch from taking over his mind full-time.

God, for some whiskey to steady him. He longed to be solid and happy, slow dancing in place with his hands on the hips of some straight, thick tree. Some room above the street, away from everybody, watching night traffic; slowly breathing booze.

He snarled now, asleep. He watched himself, a boy, watching back. Not a care. The blue sky spread out above thirteen year-old summertime him. The farm and the smell of cows and weeds and wheat dust and the caws of crows. As a boy, he had hunted crows, their calls fresh in the air. Boom! The signal from the house that they had company. Ten minutes later, he had a visitor, a family friend: a girl. He showed her how to hunt. They sat on the edge of the field, under the trees, to wait and whittle and watch. They held hands then and kissed; small tight little mouths. He let her hold the shotgun. They would swim for a little. Through the trees, along the stream, in mushing sod, onto the cracking dry logs at the edge of the pond. A pile of clothes by the tree. He swam in his skivvies. She quietly pulled over her shirt. Forever in a day.

Diskus sat up slowly, looked at the Texaco station across the street, rusty pumps, a heap of scuffed bald tires.

Where am I going? How long have I got? The sun had disappeared and rain spattered the windshield.

Windshield wipers clacking, the road shining and splashing, he drove the Business route down between the warehouses. A lighted reader board said: 07-03. Which inning? Had the White Sox won? The Business Route crossed the Burns Bridge toward the liquor store and its shopping center.

On the sidewalk, near the middle of the windy bridge, a woman in a black-and-white cape and wide brim hat stooped over two dress boxes, snatched them up, threw them over the side toward the river. Then, both hands on the railing, she sank to her knees.

It was still raining. He stopped. The woman looked up angrily, swiped him away with her hand. He got out and sat on the hood, ignoring the splash of the raindrops, felt the engine idling under his wet seat.

“I’ve got plenty of room, if you’d care to ride, Miss,” he said.

She looked away through the railing. “Go away.”

He sat for a moment, then got back in his car. His butt was cold and wet and tried to stick to the seat, as he slid in. He drove the rest of the bridge and parked on a side street. He dug a dirty white Bible out from under the back seat. He wiped it on his sleeve as he walked back.

The woman hadn’t moved. He watched her as he approached. Her hands and cheeks and chin and arms were puffy with fat. But she did have a good-natured comely look.

“I want you to have this,” he said, holding out the Bible. “It’s dirty, but it is vinyl covered, so it should clean up. It’s got a concordance and finger-tabbing, a zipper, a place in the middle for a family history…” He paused for her to comment.

She didn’t.

“They say it contains words of strength for those who contemplate the river,” he said. “Not that I’ve read it,” he added. He just held out the Bible and smiled.

“Don’t smile at me like that, you old clown, patting yourself on the back. I’ve got business here, so shove off and take your sermons with you.”

“Alright,” he said. He dropped the Bible over the edge of the bridge like he was tossing it onto a shelf. She jumped up and yelled and leaned over the railing and together they watched it fall for a long time and make a tiny splash.

“You’re a fool,” she said, but she grinned. “Why are you trying to do me this big favor?” she asked.

He kept trying to face her now, but like a gyroscope, his head kept turning away, his eyes to the river.

“Beats working,” he said. They both gave a short laugh, sobered and were silent. Somehow she’d bought it.

Bought what? he thought. They started walking. He maneuvered to be by the railing.

He liked her strutting, overweight walk. They kept the same pace. She was taller than he was, her shoulder swayed level with his ear. She looked morose. He felt the tension in her. Her eyes were steady. The safest people he knew had mobile eyes.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Diskus,” he said.

“First or last?”

“Last. It’s what I go by.”

“I’m Ruth.” She paused. “My husband ran off.”

My god, he thought, is that all?

“He lost his job two months ago. He just waited until we ran up our line of credit and then took off. And what are we supposed to do for food?” She only half looked at him.

“I’m step mom to his three kids. Three! And I don’t want any of them, by myself! Before you came, I was up on the rail. Couldn’t say goodbye, somehow. I don’t know. I’m so stupid. I just came from buying more dresses on another store account! Every other night a guy calls from the bank and tries to give me lip. I was going to jump with those dresses, but I pictured myself hugging them and falling and saw everything soaking in the water and I hated them for meaning so much to me. So I threw them over the side. And then I hated myself for being so touchy and stupid and wasteful.” She glared at him and took his arm like it was a rope.

“At least you’re going to treat us to a meal before you disappear.”

And he followed. “I know a good little Samaritan restaurant…”

She smiled at him and held a twenty-dollar bill at arm’s length in front of his face. He grabbed into his front pocket, but the twenty was gone. “That’s pretty lousy,” he said, “and it was already a lousy day.”

“Look, sweetie, you can leave when you want, but I’m keeping your money. I’m lucky to see this much in a week anymore. Eat with us if you want.”

He stopped outside Jerry’s tavern.

She looked at the tavern door, surprised, then smiled and nodded.

He held the door from well inside.

The TV at the bar was talking Sports: “the San Jose Sharks are in town tonight to take on the …”

He let her lead the way to a small plywood booth in the dark of the back.

He ordered a pitcher and they talked, mostly about her husband. After the second pitcher came, he took her hands, fat with short fingers, in his leathery, baggy-skinned hands. They would both soar into speech at times. She talked about being twenty-one and only 12 pounds too heavy to be a flight attendant and reading biographies of jockeys for weight-loss tips. She told him about the weed she had dreamed she was, that lived in a path and thrived on the crush of hooves and heels and wheels. And he amazed himself by telling her of his dead marriage and his loneliness, of almost dying in Korea and never being sure of the next dollar.

Diskus’ veins pumped with a new pudding.

He blushed in the dark for being of all things out of words. She would look down seeming unable to look at him. He talked about his doll collection. She sought his eyes then, to see if he was serious. He laughed at her. She laughed back and hugged him to his feet.

He held out his hand. They got two pizzas, the largest at the bar, and a carton of Coke and left. One block and across the street, they went up to a cluster of apartments, up worn wooden stairs.

The kids were famished and got both pizzas if they ate in front of the TV in the common room down the hall.

Slumped in front of the apartment’s main window, behind the sofa, they watched first, then clutched arms, then kissed big, old, fat, sloppy lips and wet and strained. Then sideways on the floor in a snarl of legs and an open dress and he eased her breasts out. Her fingers undid his shirt and found the sickle shape on his ribs and followed it gently.

Such breasts she had; they were fat and white and heavy.

Yet he stroked her and she liked him and they were beautiful.

He kissed each one tenderly.

She sensed him pulling back into himself a bit and said: What’s the matter? The kids?”

“No; I was just thinking we should slow down, that’s all.”

“That usually means ‘Goodbye.’ Are you getting ready to leave?”

“You know, you are not the failure here; he is.” He said. “He is.”

She leaned back against the couch and closed her eyes. “Don’t go there,” she said.

“I know him. I am him,” Diskus said. “Impatient. Full of expectations. Waiting for the next burst of feeling.

Lots of disappointments that take even more activity to avoid. A workaholic to fill the spaces between bursts of extra intensity. Always some crisis at work. Crises that are good for his adrenaline. And then he lost his job. He’s spinning now. Add on desertion and theft.” Diskus paused. “I’ll bet he’s a baseball fan.”

“The Reds,” she said dully.

“With me it’s the White Sox. To this very minute.” He was excited now. “Look: when you’re dying inside, time is agony. Like dog whistle pain torture that won’t stop. You try to blot it out. You focus on things that don’t hurt as much.”

She had opened her eyes and was watching his face.

“Take the White Sox. Every game, every score, is like the rung of a ladder. After a while, every trade, every mention on a talk show was another rung of my ladder that led me through time, passed the time. It’s a Pass Time!” He almost shouted. “That’s it!” He was really pleased and smiled at her.

She couldn’t help smiling. “Like shopping?” she asked.

“Probably,” he said. “And it’s exhausting, trying to climb every minute of the day and night. So some people jump.”

They were both quiet a minute.

“I think I do have to go,” he said.

“It’s past time,” she said.

He missed her joke until he was behind the wheel of the Rambler again. He snorted appreciation.

He got to the Salon, “Nancy’s”, as the streetlights still flickered on. The shop had closed twenty minutes ago, so there was parking in front.

As he pulled up, a radio announcer introduced a panel of experts. The British anticipated a scaled-back Olympics with small crowds and big debts. An American caller challenged them. “The sports public is counting on the international diversity and suspense of the games…”

He snapped off the radio. “I’ve got a life,” he said.

He let himself in with his key, rather than pull Nancy away from whatever she was doing.

There was music. Kenny G.?

She was cleaning the mirror at her own station, up on a short stool. She stopped with her rag arm on the glass above her head. “Hello, John,” She pretended a lack of surprise.

“It looks real nice in here, Nance. Feels comfortable,” he said.

“Everybody keeps it up,” she said. “It’s easy with a little teamwork.”

“How’s business? I mean,” he waited because he felt that had come out too cold and too abrupt. “Does it still make you happy?”

She finished spraying and wiping the mirror and got down. She faced him.

“Yes, still. I guess I’d like helping people look good whether they paid me or not. And we’ve got 20-30 regulars.”

She waited for him now. He had come to her.

“Why didn’t you ever leave me?” Diskus asked, suddenly. “I was a beached whale. I wasn’t going anywhere. I had nothing. But you…”

“John.” She said. “When I make a choice, I stick with it. Better or worse.”

He just hung there. Like a watched pot, the next moment just wouldn’t boil. Slowly, he reached an arm out around her shoulder and she shifted gently into his embrace. They hugged for some time.

He had time. For once, he didn’t need to be anywhere else.

Erik Svehaug lives and writes in Santa Cruz, California, a vacation town he created as a child. He has been in Static Movement, Bartleby-Snopes, Linnet’s Wing, and Meta-Zen. His story, Tempeche, is in the Outlaws Chapbook at Bannock Street Books. He will be in the next issue of Ampersand. Flashes he wrote were mentioned honorably in Binnacle UltraShorts competitions in 2008 and 2009.

Rkvry Quarterly Literary Journal

A literary journal that explores recovery.

Category Archives: Archives

“Standing and Waiting: A Triptych” by Joel Deutsch

“Mediators Beyond Borders: Pathways to Peace and Reconciliation” by Kenneth Cloke

“Last Call for a Loner” by Tom Sheehan

“New Year’s Eve” by Cheri Byard

“Invisible Conversation” by Lavonne J. Adams

“The Pink Cloud” by Robbie Gamble

“Clear As Snow” by Joseph Mockus

“Temerity” by Sue Bernardi

summer night

“Keeping Time” by Erik Svehaug