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“Dumplings” by Mary McLaughlin Slechta

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My sister The Beautiful One has always eaten our parents’ food like an indiscriminate tourist. Not only obvious dishes either, like meat patties that get the lines started at cultural fairs. Even food no sensible child would like she still hankers for in adulthood. For example, a dumpling, no matter its origin, should not rap like a brick against a counter top.

But for every major American holiday, The Beautiful One would like them made exactly this way: too much flour, too little water, a stingy pinch of baking powder, and frayed strings of salty cod fish. Our father’s dumplings. The Beautiful One insists on tradition, even if she has to create and sustain it single-handedly.

I contemplated writing my father’s mother. Were there actual, living Jamaican children who had to gnaw like puppies on their dumplings? I thought of asking her help in securing an accurate recipe, but loyalty to my parents prevented this. A child intuits plenty from overheard conversation and rambling aerogrammes. I suspected Grandma-in-Jamaica would have felt my father’s dumpling was a good-enough dumpling for a family that stole her only son.

“Let them feel a heavy load in them chest,” she might have grumbled of us, “and think of me aching heart.”

My father tried too hard. There’s no other explanation for the overworked dough. Like my Southern-born mother, I know a dumpling doesn’t require kneading and stretching.  The perfect dumpling swells like a golden orb below the oil. It has the good sense to turn itself over and pop up like a ball to sit on the surface. My mother’s dumpling nicely waits, as she lines a platter with paper napkins, to be lifted and drained. It’s mostly round like a little head, but there are extra limbs and bumps to make it more giraffe and elephant than human. Inside is airy with tiny chips of fish.

The Beautiful One is not opposed to our mother’s dumplings. The trouble is she doesn’t
discern. She wants these too, and as often as the others. But how many dumplings can
one household tolerate? How many cooks in a kitchen on a busy holiday morning? If any
particular dumplings are to be eliminated, one ought to begin with those raised for
sentimental reasons. Or so I once believed.

My father is incapacitated now. No taste, save minted mouth swaps and minuscule portions of toothpaste, crosses his lips. If he somehow swallowed that one single tear that
sometimes squeezes from his remaining eye, it could cause him to aspirate. The skin above his navel has hardened around a feeding tube. He couldn’t use his left hand to make the right one dust the counter with flour.  With a recipe he concocted from imperfect memory, he made The Beautiful One’s dumplings and even this he never wrote down. And the other family dumpling?  Before my father’s accident, in the period now remembered as laden with omens, my mother’s last pot turned against her.  Unblended water exploded in the oil, shooting up a pasty comet trailed by grease.  The instant my mother saw it sticking to the ceiling, it dropped back down and stuck to her face.  Mercifully, the fleshy, pink scars have disappeared, but she too is done with making dumplings.

So in the end, all our dumplings are leavened by memory as well as sentiment: the light ones as well as the leaden.  Someone has found the very last one, hidden under an inverted plate, and eaten it for appetite or meanness.  Something is over for all time, but it takes months or maybe years for this fact to be understood.  From feast to slow-growing famine, you might say.

The Beautiful One has no one left to prepare her dumplings.  I won’t make them for her, but I see she doesn’t starve from their absence.  She’s moved into other people’s households: Chinese, Thai, Czech.  She continues to eat anyone’s dumplings, that one.  She has no particular allegiance, no devotion to good taste.  I give her credit for one thing.  She makes our father happy when she reminisces about his cooking adventures with dumplings.  She describes a gold I can’t personally recollect, a softness inside the crunchy outer crust, the tingle of spring water rinsing the salty tastes.  She reinvents holiday mornings waiting for the juices to run clear in some heavenly pheasant or turkey. Munching a dumpling, she insists, could keep your stomach from tearing itself apart.

The truth is my father’s dumplings sheared the roof of my mouth like rocks. I watch him in The Home, rolling his tongue round and round in his mouth. His struggle revives in my own mouth the pain that followed each bite after the injurious one. Round and round goes his tongue, reenacting my own compulsion to explore the contours of the inflammation. Of course, I never completely stopped eating. The pleasure of any good food was mixed with the pain of reinjuring the bump at the roof of my mouth and a brief memory of what had initially caused it. I promised myself over and over, “never again,” “eat more slowly,” “be
cautious.” Lessons I haven’t learned to this day.

I worry about my father. I worry that his tongue reminds him of the tastes of metal, glass, and plastic collapsing around him at tremendous speed. I worry because there can be only pain in whatever memory he locates in his mouth. I’m afraid that each time his tongue surveys its shattered cave, he returns to the intersection of two familiar roads. And crosses.

The Beautiful One thinks she knows everything. She says our father’s tongue is trying to
remember the good taste of things.

“You were the best dumpling maker in the world,” she assures him, as though he was wondering just that.  She’s a good storyteller.  She almost convinces me that I too enjoyed our father’s rock hard dumplings: I gobbled so quickly they tore my mouth; as girls we wrestled for the last ones; I, not she, was The Greedy One; I still haven’t learned to share.

That last is an out and out lie. I always give The Beautiful One what she most wants from
our father.  What we all miss more than dumplings. When she smooths his hair behind his ears and tells him her lies, his eye widens in something like disbelief. I open my own bruised mouth and laugh.

 

 

Mary McLaughlin Slechta‘s fiction has appeared most recently in The Gihon River Review, and it
represents Connecticut in Ballyhoo: Fifty States Project.  She’s published a book of poetry about grief, Wreckage On a Watery Moon (FootHills Publishing) and two chapbooks.  She’s also an associate editor for The Comstock Review in Syracuse, New York.  This is her first appearance in r.kv.r.y. and we welcome her with great enthusiasm.

“Further Down Lincoln Street, Stambaugh, Michigan: summer 1977” by Chad Faries

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The house was mustard yellow, and the wood smelled of it.  From the front porch I could
look up the hill and see the Lincoln Street house on top where we used to live, the house
where I put Lisa Gasperini on the back of my big wheel and we coasted down until we
stopped about right here in front of the stinking mustard house that I would live in.

I was spending most of my weekends at The Roller Rink in Caspian where I regularly won
candy bars during the pee-wee speed skate. It was the perfect opportunity to practice
flying and close my eyes while getting lost in a music I wasn’t accompanied too, the
BeeGees and Disco. The music was good for flying because it was full of heavy string
orchestras and regular beats. It made everything fold into each other and told simple
stories of people surviving and getting the person of their dreams. The mirror ball in the
center of the rink threw stars and lights that rocketed off my polyester clothing and I was
a solar system on wheels racing around a galaxy I had created every weekend night,
while Mother’s world was still revolving around not being alone, and trying to keep her
mind of off drugs and drinking—

Back at home the Man-Worth-Mentioning was coming over a little more often and the
sound of a mantis rubbing its legs together behind the bedroom door was back again.
This time I wasn’t as worried about Mother as I was The-Man-Worth-Mentioning.  With
Mother was riding him, full and heaving, he was poised to suffer the same fate as
Grandpa Boyd had recently encountered, death by drowning in two inches of water after
being thrown from a car wreck as he lay unconscious in a puddle contemplating but not
doing.  Just simply passive and noetic with his head placed silently in dream fluid, red and
emergency flavored—

I was taking diggers at The Roller Rink and “Staying Alive” for hours during the Jerry Lewis
skate-a-thon. I had to skate thirty hours without stopping.  This coupled with the pledges
Mother had gotten in her month of sober bartending at TJT’s would get me the Raleigh ten-
speed Budzack’s Bikeshop had donated. I was dodging boys twice my size during the
speed skate because I had a purpose.  The trick was to zone in on a mirror ball reflection
on the rink floor and just skate your ass off trying to catch it—

Mother had been out of treatment a couple of months when she received the notice about
Boyd. I met Grampa Boyd twice and was named after him, at least my middle and last
name. That’s all I can say about that. There was no father’s name on my birth certificate
because Mother couldn’t figure out if it was the short and stocky biker turned preacher,
Dale, or if it was the one night fling with the tall and slender photographer/global playboy,
Earl.  She settled for Alan Faries, but couldn’t resist “Chad” as a first name since it was
really Chad Everett, the new apostle of drama T.V., who kept her alive while she was in
labor at the hospital. He was a real life saint healing with his sexual eyes and the orbic
flex of his mouth.  Boyd had a build like Chad.  Both Chads.  A little too slender, but fit.  In
a couple of years it would be obvious who my real father was, but no one really cared
about seeking him out.  There was always The-Man-Worth-Mentioning who occupied his
place—

Molly and Ally skated out into the circle and gave me half-filled cups of Mr. Pibb so I wouldn’
t sleep. After awhile I just closed my eyes and had them pull me while I slept on my feet.
They pulled and pulled until my body went completely limp and I collapsed in the center of
the floor and snuck a sleep while the masses of people skated around me at the
perimeter.

“Get your ass up!  You gotta get that fucking ten-speed you little fucker!” Molly was
shaking me, “Your Mom’s gonna beat our asses if she thinks she wasted all that time and
money getting all those pledges. 100 bucks of it was her money she got from her dad
getting killed! Come on, just a couple of more hours—”

Mom and Hope—Boyd’s daughters—and their half brother Tim who lived down in Texas,
each received a couple of thousand dollars.  After thirty hours, a reporter cam and took my
picture. I won the ten-speed, but never received it. It went up in flames with the rink the
night after the skate-a-thon. In a Texas newspaper there was a picture of a car accident
and a photo of Grampa Boyd.  In the Iron River Reporter there was a picture of me with
my eyes closed, resting my chin on the seat of a ten-speed while I held a certificate that
said I had raised 500 dollars and skated thirty hours. Small spots of light were all over me.

Mother bought me a record player and a new girlfriend as consolation

* * *

Mother didn’t like being alone anymore, especially in her newfound sobriety that would
last a couple of months She needed a sounding board so took in a roommate, Linda from
Alcoholics Anonymous, who had a daughter a couple of years younger than me. Shelly
was her name, and her mother let her swear all the time.   The easiest way for our
mothers to take care of us was by letting us live a pseudo-adult existence so that we
were responsible for ourselves.  Shelly and I sat around listening to music and swearing
about friends that we didn’t have while we ate burnt macaroni and cheese that we
cooked over the gas stove.  We roasted hot-dogs over the flames and chopped them up
with a rusty butter knife.

The Man-Worth-Mentioning was coming over more often. I knew he had visited Mother in
treatment because Mother’s new habit was drinking coffee twenty-four a day and she
never stopped talking.  She said he had a nice dick and that she saw it in the woods
because that was where he brought her to screw since they only had two visiting hours
and he was a student so he was poor and didn’t have money for a hotel room.  He drove
up there in a 1968 white Thunderbird that got five miles to the gallon with white leather
seats that gave light to all his brown earth tones. He had a bottle of cheap wine and a
dime bag of weed. She went on and on and on and I knew where I had gotten the
endurance to finish the skate-a-thon

“I mean, can you believe it?  I’m in fucking treatment and he shows up with booze, pot,
and a hard on telling me that I’m a natural spiritual woman and he thinks he loves me.
Three hours earlier I was in a group session getting railed for being addicted to sex, on
top of drugs, and that I was a no-good parent being raised by my child.  I was fucking
crying so bad my eyes were swollen like the bellies of the dead fish I won at the fair and
forgot to feed.  I couldn’t even take care of fish.  Fucking goldfish and Eddy.  Damn
summer heat up here.  I left those fish on the windowsill and at the end of the day they
were almost boiling.  All I could see was the scales peeling off their white bellies that
poked out of the grayish murk that was their water.  There was no more gold left in them.
And there was no more gold in my eyes anymore either.  So I just kept saying ‘yes’ to
everything those counselors were dishing out, ‘yes I’m a bad mother, I’m an alcoholic, a
whore, manipulative, selfish,’ and so on.  And after all my admissions to being the devil’s
personal bitch, my fellow addicts in the circle started hugging me and saying ‘We love you
Kate, keep coming back.’ And the counselors, after getting me to admit all those things
about myself said that I really wasn’t those things, that was the booze and such.

Then I was so fucking confused I cried more and then my eyes were like bloated bellies of
road kill.  Porcupines, skunks, and white rabbits. And the whole time all I wanted to do
was hug Chad and be some mother that I had seen on T.V. I wanted to make him a nice
square sandwich with square slices and not that commodity welfare shit with the big black
letters on the white packaging that said ‘government issue.’ I wanted a bright yellow
package with smiling kids on it that said ‘Velveeta.’ I wanted to be that image because I
couldn’t figure out on my own what a good mother should be.

‘Fake it till you make it’ is what they would tell us. So then everybody gets in a circle and
hugs.  For the first time I think maybe I can at least go without the alcohol.  I’m not so
sure about smoking pot, but I’m thinking maybe that will come next week.  We’re there in
that circle and I’ve got both arms braided with someone else’s on either side of me and I
feel that same warmth from the bodies as I do when I’m making love riding on the top,
and blood and friction is so great I feel it all over down there, hot, you know.  I am a big
girl and can really make some heat! I figure this circle is what I’m after, not coming and
coming all the time with my feet stuck into the ass-cheeks of clouds.  I want this warmth.
I’m all dizzy and it’s like, you know, ‘ecstasy,’ but with a different kind of penetration.  It’s
not like smoke in the lungs or White Russians going down your throat—I’m gonna miss
those—it’s more like a ray of sun shining on your back as your sitting near a window doing
something and the sun is the last thing your thinking of until its heat seeps into your
shoulder and you feel better but you haven’t figured out yet that it’s the light that’s
calmed you.  It’s subtle, you know, you gotta be a little patient.  So I’m having all these
‘epiphanies’ I guess you call them and forget about Greg coming to visit…”

For the first time I had a name for The-Man-Worth-Mentioning.

“I leave group with my fish eyes, warm sunned body, and head to my room feeling the best and worst I have ever
felt.  So then I’m napping and have a wild dream that I’m flying, although it’s not so incredible in the dream.

t’s just natural, all that flying.  I’m way up over the city, but I must have some eagle-vision or something because I can see the color of people’s eyes, and my hearing is perfect too because I hear all this talking.  Some of the languages I don’t even understand, but one language really comes to me, ‘resonates’ is what Greg would later say.  I understood the language, though I couldn’t speak it to you right now.

It was a mixture of slogans, song lyrics, scientific texts, and children’s stories all mixed together.  It said something like ‘I think I can, I think I can shake dreams from your hair my pretty child by symbioses through keeping it simple stupid.’ You know, it’s The Little Train that Could with The Doors, AA, and scientific shit I don’t even get totally.  It doesn’t sound or mean much now, but you should have heard it in that dream language! It had some rhythm like a train that made numerous stops and changed its speed frequently.

And get this, I’m looking toward this voice which is coming out from the middle of a park that has old castle buildings on one side, a desert on the other, and then some Rivers and oceans and stuff on the backside, and I swear it was Chad, though he’s a little older.

Then he starts calling me Kate.  ‘Kate!  Kate!’ he says, ‘You have visitors,’ and I’m looking around to see if anyone is flying next to me and there’s nobody so I start gliding a little toward Chad to get a closer look to see if I’m really right.  I decide at that moment, if it is Chad, I’m gonna grab him in my talons and pick him up and never let him go.  When I think this, I have an eagle head because the smirk of my face and beak reflects the intensity of the decision I’ve made.

He’s still calling me “Kate” and I want him to stop because I want to be Mom again.  I’m almost close enough to make out the exact details of his nose and small ears—because he’s a little older you know, about 30— and then he yells ‘Kate’ one more time and I open my eyes to Mary, my roommate standing over me saying I have a visitor.  ‘No Shit.’ I said,  ‘I was flying.’

‘Relapse dream,’ she said convinced.

‘No, not that kind of flying.  This was natural I guess. I turned into an eagle.’

‘Me too, after taking a sheet of acid at a Supertramp concert in Tiger Stadium under the grandstands.  I jumped off what I thought to be the top of the grandstands and fell on my face.  It must have looked fucking stupid, jumping into the air and diving on your face.  Nobody saw it happen, thank God.’

“I go to see the visitor. I don’t put makeup on or anything, just a pair of jeans and a wife beater with no bra.  On my way to the visiting room one of the care workers tells me it’s not appropriate attire so I go back and throw a dark t-shirt over it so you can’t see my nipples because I didn’t want to lose my daily points and be short of cigarette money at the end of the week.

Greg’s in the waiting room.  His hair is all frazzled and you’d swear he was part black with that afro, and that bulge in his brown hip-hugger corduroys.  His glasses are tinted purple, but everything else on him is brown.  He’s smiling really big like he’s already stoned and says ‘Hello Goddess.’ and that’s about better than the group telling me that they loved me.

We hop into his car and we just sit there for a minute looking out the front windshield.  I guess we are both thinking.  I’m thinking that goddesses must be able to fly, and if they are always good, but I knew they were bad sometimes.  They had been preaching to us in treatment about finding some “higher power” and I didn’t give it much thought until I found this book called “The Masks of God” which was really hip and covered all times and all places in the whole world, not just Jesus and a bunch of guys—this was about women and stuff.

But the thing was, nothing was really clear.  I mean I couldn’t tell what was good and what was bad.  All these ceremonies and sacrifices seemed to cancel themselves out.  It was about killing a bad chicken to have good eggs.  Then there was this part about earth goddesses, which Greg said I was.  Goddesses were almost always mothers and usually had some child at their breast which was supposed to be an enduring force, and the goddess and child together were like one thing, one unit inseparable.  Both the mother and child felt the same things through ‘symbioses,’ both physical and psychic.

I always knew I was psychic.  A gypsy woman told me that once. So this unit of goddess and child was like a universe all tending toward the good of itself and bliss, which is like ecstasy, an orgasm. So that’s the good part. But that bad part, like always, is that not even goddesses can anticipate everything and there are times when the universe doesn’t correspond with what is really needed.

This happens when that little child starts remembering how we was pushed out of a black vaginal hole all bloody and screaming.  At this point the child forgets everything, his mother, the universe, the bliss of sucking on mother’s boob and then the mother is identified with the kids destruction. I was reading it under the covers in the middle of the night with a Zippo and started crying because I’m thinking Chad realized this a long time ago and I was never gonna have him back at my breast again so I realize that’s why I’m sticking my tit in everybody else’s mouth and that’s why the counselors are on my ass about being promiscuous and stuff like that.

So the goddess is beatitude on the one hand, and terrible destruction on the other. Damn.  And if that’s not heavy enough, the book starts getting really specific and talking about a Hindu goddess named ‘Kali’ which looks a little like ‘Kate’ when it’s written out, and she has a long tongue, which licks up the lives and blood of children just like a pig sometimes eats her little piggies.  And yet this goddess is not bad, she’s often portrayed with a child at her breast.

So you’ve got heaven and hell and what’s in between is this fucking treatment center so I start thinking that I am a goddess,  good and bad and I tell Greg to start the car because I’m waiting for something at my breast and bliss. I’m ready to be a cannibal too, if you know what I mean girl! Next thing you know we’re at the end of Forestville Road surrounded by woods and a little house where a chainsaw sculptor lives and he’s got huge carvings of Eagles and Bear and old men smoking pipes and the Madonna. We park and get out. There’s a big ‘slam because the door is so heavy and I shudder a little because I’m still sensitive to loud sounds. Reminds me of fists and all that stuff, you know what I mean.

“‘Cool,’ I say as I stop and really take a good look at the art.  Greg takes my hand and pulls a little, but then he stops too and we have another moment where we are just staring together and that’s when it felt like we were talking the most.  Then he pulls again after a couple minutes and we go off into the windows and strip down buck-naked, but its fun.  It’s not really just about sex.  Things were always a little different with Greg.  He had some kind of special wits, though they weren’t always there. He’s completely naked except for a backpack and I ask him what’s in it.  He says a good bottle of wine and some weed. Then I question his wits.

‘What the hell is that for?’ I say,  ‘You know where I am?’

‘With our Mother,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘With our Mother, you know, the goddess Mother Earth,’ and then he starts quoting the bible for justification, “Genesis 1:29.  And god said behold, I have given you every plant bearing seed and tree bearing fruit which is upon the face of the whole earth.  To you it shall be meat.”  It sounded good to me, but I just didn’t think it was right.  I could tell he wasn’t so sure either so he didn’t pressure me much after that, but he did take some for himself and rejoiced with the goddesses.  Next thing you know  he’s got the open bottle in one hand, a joint in the other, and I’m bent over a tree getting it full throttle.  I’m flying again, thinking about Chad, and thinking that Greg’s got some downfalls, but he’s getting educated and loves Chad so I give in and let myself really go and the ecstasy come, and come if you know what I mean, girl! We get dressed and time has really passed so he speeds me back to the treatment center.

“So I get this idea that I’m a goddess and tell everybody at treatment that I’m a goddess and that’s my spirituality and then they say that won’t work because you can’t be your own higher power, you need to have a power greater than yourself and then you can be restored to sanity.  Well Jesus fucking Christ.  I had never thought that hard before about anything, and it was all for nothing.  ‘But I feel good about myself now,’ I said.  ‘I’ve got a man who calls me a goddess, I’ve got these huge life-giving breasts full of bliss, child-bearing hips…what the hell?’

‘Right on Kate! Johnny W. says I’m with you baby! You’re my Higher Power!’  The counselors just shake their heads and tell me to keep coming back which means I’m supposed to stick with the program and these twelve steps that tell me I’m powerless and pretty soon things will be revealed.”

The conversation was long and I was taking notes the whole time by assigning stories to various toys as mnemonic devices.  The bionic man was the dream.  My Charlie McCarthy puppet was Greg.  My Legos were the treatment center, and the weeble-wobble people filled in the rest of the gaps.  I built the story right in the middle of the bedroom and then asked Shelly if she wanted to really play.

“I mean really play,” I said emphatically. I stripped Shelly down to her panties and went over to my new Fischer Price record player in the corner.  I swung the purple plastic arm around and dug the needle into a 45 of Heart’s “Barracuda” and turned it up until the cheap speakers were distorting.

“Fuck yea” I said at 6.  I floated over to Shelly in my birthday suit, bent her over and jammed to “Barracuda” as I faked adult ecstasy the best I could while gyrating all over her emulating Greg and Mother’s story. I reached around to grab her breasts that wouldn’t be there for another ten year.  I just couldn’t fly like Mother.  My wings were clipped. I had become The-Boy-Worth-Mentioning in Shelly’s private mythology, full of knowledge and lacking sense.  That’s what ecstasy does to you.  I bent her all over the bedroom and Greg came over and joined-in in the other room filling Mother full of compliments and weed. Her complexion flushed and the familiar warmth that drugs brought heaved in her breasts.

She forgot she was supposed to be powerless and let the goddess run wild.  She poured wine into her mouth and let it run down her chin into her cleavage.  It was beatitude and it was devastating. We all dug each other.

And then we moved.

 

 

Chad Faries has published poems, essays, photographs, interviews, and creative non-fiction in Exquisite Corpse, Mudfish, New American Writing, Barrow Street, The Cream City Review, Afterimage, Post Road, and others. His book, The Border Will Be Soon: Meditations from the Other Side was a winner of Emergency Press’s open genre book competition. It chronicles his visits to Yugoslavia between 1995-2000 and will be published in May 2006. He has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and was a Fulbright Fellow in Budapest. His memoir, Some Houses, is seeking a publisher. When not traveling he is a carpenter and professor. He recently purchased an old Victorian home and now is planning his next Triumph motorcycle in order to solidify his artificial existence as a renaissance man.

“Listen: I Have Long Kept Silent” by Stacy Thieszen

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1. The last two horses died in their traces and we left the wagon behind.

2. Walking with slow weary steps through grasses high as our throats, searching for water.

3. The wind flapping our clothing as it shakes the leaves of aspens so they show their white bellies.

4. This was a land of few trees, unreliable water, great heat, gold-green grasses without end.

5. The land of grass became a land of blood.

6.  Your mission is to listen, or not.

7.  Our mission is to thrive.

8.  After so many years, I speak because I see the past circling by my window, because I believe you will understand.

9.  This time is not so different from that time, the land, the hunger, the mission of our people.

10.  The herds of monstrous, untenable beasts we have called buffalo.

11. A woman, this woman, myself, I can swim through grass as fish swim through water and I swam until I could swim no more and this became our home, my husband and I as alone as if capsized on any desert isle.

12. Except for the savages.

~

1. I have held the truth in my belly these many years.

2. Your mission is to hear the truth this time. You may choose to listen or you may hum and look away.

3. The wind and successive disasters which left my husband and myself the only survivors had driven us far from the trail; we could expect no rescue.

4. We marked the days by scratching in the dirt, and the wind erased our timekeeping.

5. The buffalo had shoulders like mountains, eyes like stones.

6. We prevailed because we believed it would be so.

7. We learned that the flesh of the savage is good.

8. Our mission is to grow and prosper.

9. Our mission is to clear the land of darkness.

10. My eyes never became accustomed to the red rush of blood, my hands to the feel of the skin parting from flesh, sucking and then ripping free.

~

1. When it finally rained, I lay on flattened grass and let the water wash my skin, my great shining wheel of hair.

2. You have heard stories of savage and settler, but it was not then as you have now heard, not here.

3. My husband and I ate a nation.

4. By the Grace of God. How else could two kill two-thousand?

5. This homestead is a testament to the gun and the keen blue eye.

6. I have held my tongue all these years.

7. Your mission is to listen to what was hidden.

8. We ate the meat of their bodies, made supple clothes of their skin, wove blankets of their long, dark hair, used their bones as tools and crushed them into mortar.

9. Between you and me is the difference of an hour or a year or a hundred miles, no more.

~

1. Our mission is to build sturdy and pleasant houses that keep out the bats and snakes and haunting insinuation of the wind.

2. I only followed my husband’s will. I could make that claim.

3. After more than ten years, the faces of civilization caught up with us.

4. My husband emphasized our industry, the neat rows of corn and potatoes, the clean and sturdy house. The absence of savages.

5. The truth was right before their eyes, but their mouths said buffalo skins, bones of buffalo—how amazing!

6. Did they not see how fine my shoes were, how soft?

7. From then on we had to hunt rabbit, deer and buffalo with our new neighbors, slicing open those alien four-legged bodies, roasting that exotic meat.

8. Our mission is to triumph over those unlike ourselves.

9. Still, our mission is to feed upon the savages to build a stronger country.

10.  This prairie is an ocean where I’ve had to learn to swim.

11. It was not at first my idea or desire.

 

 

Stacy Thieszen‘s short stories have appeared in the anthology Blink, Clackamas Literary Review, South Dakota Review, and other small journals. She has completed two novels, one of which was a finalist for the Bellwether Prize last year. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and son and works as a writer for a large nonprofit organization.

“To Be Like Him” by Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb

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To hell with the apple–at her core,
Eve simply wanted to explore paradise
before converting it to Eden.
But she sought advice
from the problematic tree–the only tree
that would ever cut down a human.

Yet the scarlet, fertile fruit seduced her
as knowledge is hot, and once inflamed
the sassy lass snaked her way to Adam;
with each kiss, offered her hypothesis
on why she so desperately desired
the mind of the creator.

I know how she felt,
for the fateful flame was
not the type one holds for a lover;
still, it glows with want, blue
in the center with sin-red heat
inspiring the heart into submission.

But it is the psyche that fans the fire
and which designed Eve’s descent–the fall
rendered as a consequence of some savage
angel extending his residence from heaven
to earthly woods, rather than being depicted
as merely a woman’s addiction to theory.

Clearly, how could Eve’s craving forbidden
frameworks hidden in that hot-bed garden,
that is, her heady attraction to abstractions
sired first by some admired other,
be portrayed as depraved or as betrayal
when it feels so much like love?

 

 

Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb’s poetry has appeared in Blueline, Pinyon, Wild Earth, Red River Review, Terrain.org, The Pedestal Magazine, The Midwest Quarterly, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Poem, Karamu, and many other journals. She is co-editor of the Sustainable Ways Newsletter and co-founder of Native West Press. She holds an interdisciplinary MA in Ecosemantics and is currently assisting Terril Shorb, Coordinator of the Sustainable Community Development track at Prescott College, with research related to human perceptions and behavior toward the natural environment.

“My New Life” by Dee Shapiro

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My new life fills my head
Every moment it tells me
I will be fine

Pulled through the past
and through each day
what do I want to remember
when memory fails?

These few things:

impending darkness
repelled by an evening clearly lit
by lamplight

a conversation connubial
with the promise of passion

waking
to a cool morning
after a heat wave.

 

 

Dee Shapiro is a poet, painter, and writer. Her poems and essays have appeared in Chiron Review, Small Pond Magazine, Black Bear, Blue Line, Adirondack Review, New Press Literary Quarterly, Aught, The Bark, Heresies Connecticut River Review, Rhapsoidia and Confrontation. She teaches art history and studio art at Empire State College, Old Westbury, NY.

“Sobriety, Year One” by Victoria Pynchon

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Echo Park, 1994

It’s time for me to grow
impatient now, time to worry
I fertilized too hard
or seeded too deep,

time to think
the scarlet sage
and French marigolds,
the peonies and pansies

and phlox I buried
like treasure against
the uncertain future
will never grow for me.

The weeds in my back yard grow
hard and fast as weeds
do, crab grass pushing
its tough blades up against

the stone paving leading
to the compost heap.
I’m always down
on my knees pulling

at the roots, building
burial mounds of limp
green grass, stacking
like cord wood the purple

stalks of the wicked
weeds, sweating,
wiping dirt
from my face.

I was just hoping.

If I planted knowingly
a profusion of color
a wealth of delicate flowers
might also grow for me.

 

 

Victoria Pynchon is the founder and editor-in-chief of this journal. Her poetry has been published in Poet Lore, The Ledge, and, Transformation and her short fiction and literary non-fiction in the Southern New Hampshire Literary Journal and Kudzu.  After a twenty-five year commercial litigation career, Victoria now mediates and arbitrates business disputes through Judicate West and her own ADR firm, Settle It Now Dispute Resolution Services.  She shamelessly self-publishes here from time to time but has turned 99.9% of her writing energy over to her new neutral practice.  She blogs obsessively about anything that crosses her mind at the Settle It Now Negotiation Blog.  She has also been fooling around with video poetry on YouTube here.

“At the Cemetery” by Greg McBryde

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Two men, suited black
and broad:  Their shoulders
buckle.  Their arms and hands

scissor up then down along
the back of each, slow
as the priest’s blessing hand,

like wounded butterflies
joined in air, one right-,
one left-winged.  Their hands

carve and crush terrain
along the ridge, the bone,
the hump of human time:

the shoulder cracked
by a pitch in ’48,
the Korean bullet,

its knot between ribs,
the hard bend his wife
hammered on him

that day she died.

 

 

Greg McBryde‘s poems, essays, and reviews appear in 32 Poems, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Connecticut Review, Folio, Gettysburg Review, Hollins Critic, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.  His work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005 and 2006. A former member of the Senior Executive Service at the U.S. Department of Transportation, he practiced law for 30 years and now edits The
Innisfree Poetry Journal, consults on transportation issues, and works as a freelance editor. He was a high school and college wrestler and an Army photographer in the Vietnam War. The father of three and grandfather of four, he lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife Lois, also a writer.

“At the Cemetery” first appeared in Poet Lore

“Tunnel of Cloistered Refuge” by Dan Masterson

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~after Anselm Kiefer‘s painting, “Sulamith,” 1983~

“Once again, reports have surfaced of a holy woman sequestered in the city’s subterranean world of storm drains and tunnels. The location of her heavily guarded sanctum, a haven for hundreds of homeless, is unknown to authorities, who debunk her existence.” –The Underground Weekly, 1999

Mother Shulamite, her ashen hair in shroud,
Dismisses the threats, but those she tends
Make sure she’s never alone. They are
The throwaways found in alleys, bent
Against crack-vents & curled atop gratings:
The Croakers, the Grunts, the Crattles,
Geezers & Floppers, dozens of Loogans,

Bawdies & Scavengers tucked in with
Tipplers & Hooligans, Snarlers & Bumpers,
A flail of a Rager here, a Defrockee there,
A Prophet who once straddled the curbs for
Bands of minstrels stomping their muddy time
For the only Elegante tapping his wooden way
On a dog-headed cane. All finding themselves

Here thanks to her main runners led by Yves
& Catherine & Fournet who brought them to this
Baggage tunnel long dead beneath Park & 72nd.
Brought here for their greatest comfort,
Bundled up for safekeeping far below blizzards
Overhead, together in awe of the woman who
Raises her hands in a hint of blessing,

Enthroned in a lanterned perch of steel fencing
Strung flush with sponge-rubber slabs,
The high-back Cathedra, its armrest removed
To make way for bench slats & struts & hinged
Relies cut into blocks & screwed to stump-wood
To receive & support her sprawling weight beneath
Layers of burlap robes gathered & draped & sewn

To enhance the dignity she wears as lithely
As a princess at a garden party, but the only
Gardens here grow limestone rosettes arranged
By seepage bubbling up along the jagged curves
Of decaying walls enclosing the shallow platform
Where she sits over damp ground kept warm by
The steam pipes that do their hissing only inches

Away, while she intones her prayers of her waking
Hours for those in her care, fondling the rubbed
& knobby beads she reveres, carved from knuckles
Of nuns long dead in the Convent of Lost Emilia.
This evening she has the company of those most
In need, who watch as she watches over them,
Her lips forming the prayers they feel healing

Their sores, bringing them back from the frigid
Gutters of their dreams. Thirty in all, laid out
Before her, the canvas slings of their pallets
Propped above the wet floor, layered with plastic
Sheets wrapped with newspaper batting: a warmth
Unknown on the streets overhead. She rises &
Descends the ramp to the suffering, allowing

The beads of her rosary to drift across each body,
Her own hands emitting light as soft & blue
As that seen in a child’s eye, leaving a halo
Hovering in place above the brow of those touched,
A sound like muted litany flowing from their throats
In praise of the woman moving about them, her
Fingers magnified to splendor, knuckles inexplicably
Flayed, sculpting themselves into rosary beads left
Unstrung, the gasp of prayers as quiet & holy as bone.

 

Dan Masterson, professor and poet,  was elected to membership in Pen International in 1986. He is a recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and the Bullis, Borestone, and Fels awards. His fifth volume is nearing completion. The Dan Masterson Papers are housed at Syracuse University.

“Letter from Haiti: ‘Jesus Was a Zombie?'” by Annie Nocenti

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Jesus is dragging his feet. It’s not his fault; his legs are long and the beast he rides is squat. It’s scorched-earth hot, and hard walking for a mule in wet sand, weight of Christ on his back. They say mules are stubborn, but maybe they’re just resigned. Draped in a white sheet, slumped bareback on the burro, Jesus sweats.

“Who’s that on the donkey?” Caco asks.

“It’s Jesus,” I answer, but my thought is: Black Jesus. Down here in Haiti, kids see a white Christ in their Christian missionary picture books, but a black one in Haitian paintings and processions like the one that drifts by us now. I want to ask Caco what he thinks of this black/white Jesus thing, but it might be rude. We’re on a beach south of Jacmel, watching the lazy parade stumble by: a flock of girls in pink dresses, a litter of boys in blue uniforms.

“Who’s Jesus?” demands Caco.

“You know Jesus,” I insist. Then I wonder. “Don’t you know who Jesus is?” Caco looks glum. He’s only eleven years old. I love how he can fold his limbs up and collapse his body like a folding chair. “The son of God,” I explain.

“God has a kid?” Caco’s amazed.

“He had one,” I say, “but his kid is dead now.” My Kreyol is pathetic, Caco’s English not much better, so even passing my Kreyol/English dictionary back and forth, we end each sentence with a headache. There’s a guy next to us pattering away on a small drum, sliding his thumb hard on the drumskin, bending notes. His English is decent, and he tries to help us communicate, but mostly I think he gets his kicks laughing at our gibberish.

A woman on high, fat green heels, in a green dress, probably a teacher, walks at the end of the crucifixion procession. We watch her and she watches us. A few of the girls from the flock of pink dresses pause before us, whispering. One breaks away, runs at us, hesitates, reaches down, touches my toe, dashes back to her girlfriends. They squeal at her bravery. A soccer game is in the direct path of the procession, and the parade cuts
right through the middle, but no one seems to notices. The boys adapt their kicks and passes, the two groups mix together then pull apart and move on. The kids dragging the cross stumble and drop it, splashing Jesus but he barely looks up. The burro steps over the cross and keeps going.

“Yeah, that’s the story, God had a son,” I say, piecing together a halting sentence that’s half pantomime. “He died for the sins of man, whatever that means. They nailed him to a cross till he was dead, buried him, but he rose out of his tomb on Easter. That’s what this parade is about. It’s Palm Sunday, or something like that.”

“Jesus was a zombie?”

A zombie is no B-movie undead joke sticking pins in dolls; a zombie is a real deal in Haiti. Apparently people do get cursed and die and rise undead from the dead, but a zombie can be kept at bay with rhymes and incantations. Religion in Haiti is deceptive. Vodou worshippers were persecuted, and so they cloaked their worship in a veil of Christianity to hide their real beliefs. Now it’s hard to tell who believes what. But zombies attained a terrifying status when the tyrannical duet of Papa and then Baby Doc Duvalier had their personal militia, their death squad ghouls, the Tonton Macouté, wear dark clothes, dark sunglasses to hide their eyes, and speak few words- a kind of zombie mystique, a murderous dictatorial fashion statement.

“Yeah,” I tell Caco, “Jesus is a zombie. They put his body in a cave with a rock as big as a house blocking the entrance, and he rose from the dead and rolled that rock away like it was nothing.”

“Zombie!” Caco is up and kicking aside imaginary boulders. I’ve been teaching Caco and his friends karate on the beach, and they’ve been teaching me such Haitian essentials as proper machete hacking technique when splitting a coconut. Caco’s buddy Jean Bernard joins us. Jean Bernard is pissed at me. I’ve been painting their watercolor portraits, and Jean Bernard says I got his nose wrong. He took a pen and drew himself a bigger nose, but he’s still insulted. I think my mistake was painting him as a boy when he wants to see himself as a man.

The boys leap into a karate zombie game- their spinning kicks are right out of chopchop movies, but they kick with such gusto they topple with each kick. I’m trying to teach them balance, but they think falling is a small price for high drama. I lurch toward them, ghoulish and undead; my zombie based on American ’40s horror films like “I Walked with a Zombie,” but the boys scream and run anyway.

I like hanging with the Haitian kids because they haven’t quite figured out yet that us pale-skins that jet in from imperialist countries are somehow the source of all their problems, which are overwhelming. Haiti was country founded on the only successful slave rebellion in history, and yet, or maybe because of that, small acts of opposition are squashed and bravery is considered suicidal. Caco doesn’t connect all this with US sanctions and coups and hundreds of years of European colonialism but the older Haitians, sometimes they stare at us “blancs” with open hatred. Or perhaps I’m just paranoid. It’s hard telling not knowing.

Now Caco and Jean Bernard are holding hands and laughing, and the beach drummer explains “They’re making fun of your date.”

“I don’t have a date,” I protest.

The drummer and Caco talk in fast Kreyol, which makes them impossible to understand since they’re also laughing so hard. Finally the drummer translates: “You made a date with the old man that’s fixing the roof.”

I remember the roofer, a sturdy Haitian, somewhere in his sixties or seventies; so weatherworn it’s hard to tell. He was on the roof all day, laying palm or banana or coconut fronds, I don’t know which, in beautiful, fanning rows. I watched him casually use his machete to scratch his back. Once, he used it to swat a fly on his cheek. I told him how much I admired his skill. I do remember saying “oui” a lot, but “yes” is the new linguistic  tick that peppers my speech whenever someone rattles Kreyol at me so fast it whizzes by in an unintelligible stream. Apparently, with one of those polite “yeses” I agreed to a date.

“When did I say I’d do this?” I ask the drummer. “You’ll know it when it happens,” he shrugs, as if to say, whenever. This is Haitian time, it’s not that different from slacker or surfer boy time. Whenever.

~

Jessica struts out to the beach in camo capri pants, blond hair tucked into a red kerchief. The boys stare at her bandana. It’s only later that I read in a book that a red kerchief signifies a vodou worshiper.

Jessica is perfect. Cultured, funny, beautiful. Everywhere we go Haitians gaze at her. With what emotions, I don’t know. Lust and disgust? Awe or intimidation? Curiosity? Jessica’s a fashion photographer, just in from a Miami shoot, on a detour jaunt to Haiti for “artistic inspiration,” on her way to New York. I met her poolside at the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince.

Port-au-Prince is a city built for 200 thousand that holds millions. The rich Haitians speak Parisian French and live in gated mansions with sniper security guards on their roofs and attack dogs on their grounds. There seems to be a small middle-class, but the majority live in slums; crowded acres of cinderblock, tarpaper, and corrugated tin shacks with no electric, water or sewers. Even where there is electricity, it’s only for a few hours a night, so people buy food frozen. That’s their refrigeration.

Flying into the Port-au-Prince airport is nightmarish, a gauntlet. First, you have to navigate through a swarm of men with “official” badges that want to carry your bags and get you a taxi. Then there is an exit-area, a green-metal rod pen, a kind of holding tank, with a mass of men pressing against the fence bidding for you to choose their taxi. Like a goat in a livestock pen, up for sale. Luckily, I see the friend I came to visit waving from his jeep. The drive into town is over so much rubble, with so many men at work piling rocks, pounding rocks, dragging wood, it’s hard to tell if the city is being built or destroyed. There is garbage burning everywhere, and kids squat roadside selling gasoline by the gallon out of plastic jugs. A tap tap, one of the beautifully colorful buses of Haiti, almost plows us off the road, and as it drives off I see the smile of Tupac Shakur, painted on its backend.

The Oloffson is a great hotel to stop at just long enough to get confused. The Rhum Barbancourt flows, the country’s insanely hopeless political situation is discussed and plans are made to go into town and mix with “the people” or go to the disco, but in the heat of the day no one wants to leave the oasis of the hotel. There are few tourists. Mostly the bar crowd is journalists, health workers, embassy officials, missionaries, art dealers, drug
dealers, white hippie women pretending to be vodou priestesses, and men who are hiding from something. There are displaced, angry foreigners who lurk in the hotel for months at a time, ostensibly to do “good things” for Haiti, like bring in shipments of condoms. Everyone sits out on the veranda, where the walls surrounding the hotel are just high enough that all that can be seen of the city’s chaos is the occasional bundle that floats by, balanced on the head of an unseen woman, or the tip on an uzi from passing military.

The waiters at the Oloffson are wise sadists. They make you wait too long, then bring you the wrong drink, to see if you will get rude. They test you. If you are fine with whatever they bring you, whenever they bring it, they become excellent waiters . One American has become so bitter and entrenched at the hotel, and is so rude to the waiters, that everyone’s convinced they piss in his drinks. Even he knows this, but he doesn’t care. “I’ve drunk worse,” he claims.

Strangers meet at the bar and talk easily. Conversation swings from hope to hopelessness and back again, over and over. The malaise and intense heat breeds rumor and distortion and fear. Any news is nurtured until it’s “true” and then later dismissed as a “lie.” News ripples through the hotel: a woman was killed, a riot started. Paranoia rises. There’s a rumor that the airport is closed, no one can leave town. They’re burning tires in the street, making blockades. When will it be safe? The embassy is closed, Thursday will be bad. Oh, fuck it, have another drink. Sunday will be a good day to fly the hell out of Haiti.

Aristede, now exiled but then still president of Haiti, is discussed endlessly. He’s beloved, he’s inept. He’s a poet, he’s corrupt. He speaks in wise but futile parables. He sold out. He’s built a swimming pool and taken a light-skinned mulatto wife. It’s all lies, he doesn’t have a swimming pool, he’s a savior. He’s taken money from the wrong people, he poses for pictures with Duvalierists, he’s the best the people can hope for. Whatever is true, at least Aristede believed people should have a say in their own affairs, something no other leader allowed.

In a few crazy days, one can learn just enough about Haiti to know you’ll never understand anything. I get drunk with a so-called missionary until he pulls out his standard repertoire of “missionary position” jokes. I meet a handsome man who casually “spills” the contents of his wallet, taking his time before picking up his many I.D.s, each showing a different identity, just so I’ll know “he isn’t who he seems to be.” This must be something that gets
him laid a lot or he wouldn’t be doing it every time a pretty girl joins the table. I meet a beautiful young botanist who tells everyone how some sharks have two penises and two uteruses and the babies eat each other in the womb until there is only one left. She holds the attention of all the men at the table with that story, the journalists musing at the metaphoric possibilities of incorporating self-devouring shark babies into the stories they were supposed to file about Haiti months ago. As the night gets later and drunker, the guys start talking about going to town; there’s a new military-themed brothel, where one can do it airborne, ground combat style, or choose naval-op sex. Everyone speculates on what kind of props and rigs the brothel could have to accomplish all this.

The terrific vodou/rock house band RAM plays, led by the hotel owner and his wife, which someone brings us to a hungover dawn. I travel south with my friend, a filmmaker, and the fashionable Jessica, bouncing with the bad roads, in the loud jeep. We pass stores with names like “There for the Grace of God Haircuts” and “Wait for the Lord Cleaners Expedient Laundry.” Last night, sweat slick from dancing, I remember taking air on the veranda and meeting a little girl who introduced herself as “God Willing.”

~

We spend a few days in huts on the beach, getting to know Caco and all the other boys. I want to meet some of the girls, but while the boys seem to have time to hang out, the girls have chores and are shy. Jessica, gazing out at the ocean, decides her upcoming New York shoot will have a sexy revolutionary theme: tattered Che Guevera T-shirts with red brassieres showing underneath, red kerchiefs and low-slung hip-hugging camo pants. She
demonstrates all this by pulling and tugging at her clothes and vamping with her body until Caco’s jaw drop like a cartoon. I turn away to watch a woman drag a brown pig into the ocean and wash it. I don’t want to go anywhere in the heat, but Jessica keeps chirping: “Come on, let’s go to market and shop for lingerie! I want red, pink, crimson, I want magenta! It’ll be fun!”

The outdoor marketplace is wonderful and disgusting and seems to sprawl for miles. A bustle and stench of life, a mass of swarming, haggling. Everything for sale, from gasoline to pineapples, garlic to shoes. Hunks of uncooked meat lie in the scorching heat; red slabs covered in flies. At the edges of the market, men stand in the shade with wheelbarrows, offering to cart anything anywhere. I see a little boy in a dress, a girl wearing a sandal on one foot, a sneaker on the other. Jessica takes it all in, and I imagine these fashion accidents transformed into fashion statements in the pages of Vogue next month.

We buy some fruit. The paper money has been in circulation so long it feels made of dirt. Bargaining is expected, it’s a sport, and a way to get to know people. Jessica, of course, speaks French, so she can understand a bit of Kreyol. A woman with enormous breasts sells root lumps; she squats on the ground in a “Hooters” T-shirt, her twisty roots neatly wrapped in newspapers and spread around her like rubble. I’m on a mission to find the  right herbs for a neighbor’s bad blood pressure, but I’ve forgotten to ask if it’s too high or too low blood, and the herbalist woman laughs at me and tells me to come back tomorrow. A girl who looks to be no saint wears a New Orleans’ Saints shirt. A skinny schoolboy slouches against a pole in an FBI T-shirt. Sparse electricity, few roads, no clean water, but plenty of American T-shirts, the flotsam of some defunct relief program.

Jessica and I are the only whites as far as the eye can see and we’re shopping for leopard underwear. Jessica is so self-possessed she seems oblivious to the irony. I’m in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere shopping for candy-red push-up bras.

~

Dinner is always an event, and Jessica sure can throw a dinner party. That night she whips up mango margaritas, makes a yellow pepper and melted anchovy sauce for pasta, then adds beets and the whol e dish turns a brilliant orange. She has the boys drag the long dinner table right into the ocean, where we eat with the waves lapping at our feet, red lanterns in glittering competition with the stars above. She tells a fabulous rags-to-riches story about a Vietnamese busboy who rose to the top of the trendy NYC restaurant scene by swallowing gold and bringing it into the US. When Jessica breaks into song, belting out titillating lyrics from Eartha Kitt’s “It’s Fun to be Evil”, out come the drums.

The boys pour rum onto their hands, rub it on the drums and strike a match; the blue flame dances in their palms and as the liquor burns off it somehow tightens and tunes the leather skin of the drum. Little Man, nicknamed for his small stature and mature face, writhes in what seems to be possession by a good spirit, while the rest of the boys play bandito, taking turns trying on Jessica’s red kerchief. Little Man has loose limbs, and they dangle and jitter as he shuffles, swing as if broken or boneless. He wears a huge white shirt and nothing else, and when he moves it billows like a sail against the dark ocean. He puts one hand on his belly, the other  outstretched wide, begins to lurch and careen as if tugged by invisible strings, flinging himself to the sky, to the earth, into the water,
crawling in the sand, then springing up to spin some more. All the while his eyes are closed, but somehow, with the aspect of being open wide. The thin-boned blond dogs writhe in the sand, the ecstasy of possession contagious. The boys use sticks on wine glasses for added percussion. They play so hard the glasses shatter.

That night, the little boys crawl onto my mattress with me, and soon their limbs jerk and kick from chase dreams that in turn cause the stray dogs that prowl outside to howl. The moon is high when I see a Haitian cowboy standing silhouetted in the doorway of the thatched, open-air hut, beckoning.

It’s the old roofer. My “date” is wearing a cowboy hat and boots, machete holstered to hip. He nods and turns his back to allow me to pull on more clothes.

We walk east along the coast for a long time, then head into the hills. I wonder where he’s taking me, but conversation is impossible without my Kreyol phrase book. We climb until we top a mountain, as I try to remember the course home in reverse: down mountain, find the ocean, turn right.

I hear drumming, and eventually we step into a clearing ringed with chairs. There’s a makeshift structure like half a gazebo, an altar wrapped in white cloth, with a center pole. Trees bloom with colorful red papers and hanging lanterns. Women in red kerchiefs holding red flags and wearing red and blue dresses squat on the ground with bags of cornstarch, drawing delicate, lacey white curlicue patterns on dark ground-vévé, they call it. I try to make myself as invisible as possible, and watch the quiet, industrious preparations for what I assume will be a ritual or party. Everyone is busy decorating the clearing, but stop when they see me, I hear the familiar whisper: “blanc, blanc,” and know something isn’t right.

The Cowboy Roofer gets into a fight with a few elders; it is clear that he should not have brought me. I make an apologizing gesture, and turn to leave. Two men block my way. Finally, a man who knows a bit of English explains to me what I suspected; whites are not really permitted at vodou ceremonies; I have to leave. I tell him I’m sorry, I’m happy to go. He tells me it’s not safe for me to go back alone. He glances at some mountain homeboys-on-the-plateau slouched in the corner. I take this to mean he doesn’t want to point fingers, but alone in the woods I might become prey.

The drumming starts, hypnotic. Abruptly, violently, the Cowboy Roofer is spinning and flailing with what seems to be premature possession. Unlike Little Man’s visiting spirit, this one doesn’t appear benevolent. At first the others just keep an eye on him, but when he angrily un-holsters his machete and begins slicing the air around him, the men jump on him, restrain him, and take him away. It’s not his fault; I learn later that when a spirit  inhabits a prepared vessel, the actions of the possessed are not theirs, but the spirit’s. I assume it was a violent spirit that entered my date, perhaps Baron Samudi, who I later read is one of the first to show up at a vodou ritual, and tends toward violence. A long conversation follows, with much pointing at me. They tell me that the roofer has been “thrown off the mountain,” and I hope that’s just a figure of speech. I try to make it clear  that I can find my way home and will take my chances with banditos, but again I’m blocked from leaving. They tell me I’m to stay for two hours, then I must go. It’s clear that once I stepped into their domain, I handed over my free will.

I’m not afraid. There are women and children here. The ritual builds slowly, but build it does, the drumming, the swaying, the electricity in the air. Women saunter around carrying sex in their eyes. Everyone writhes and sweats. I see a woman dance low until she is rubbing her face in the sweat of a man’s chest. They slap each other, spin, dance again. When someone falls out of possession, they are hugged and cradled as the spirit leaves.
An ancient woman who looks like a collapsed bundle of sticks, so brittle if she were to move she’d break, does move. But then, she surprises me by rising, not like an old woman but graceful as Martha Graham, with a youth and power that is startling. She is given great berth and respect, and as she swirls into possession, she sees me.

Our eyes lock. I panic. Of course she can see deep into my soul, I think, and she’ll see whatever rot is there. I’ve been unsettled this week by how the children won’t believe I don’t have my own kids, and how sad they get about it. They tell me the only women they know with no babies are witches. I imagine the grand mambo sees all this, my missing babies, what a fuck-up I am for forgetting to have kids. She dances over to me, clutching a bottle of yellowish water. None too gently, she yanks my head back and pours. I gulp down the sweet honeyed liquor, which must be clarin, the sugarcane moonshine everyone drinks. I think of dysentery and dengue and dyspepsia and dystopia or whatever microbes lurk in the water. I drink obediently, knowing it’s an insult not to. To my total shock, she kisses me full and hard on the mouth. Then she smiles.

Suddenly the mood shifts, as if I’ve gotten the kiss of acceptance by the mother of all mambos, which I hope is what just happened. A chair is brought for me. Someone offers me some seeds cupped in their palm. People are shoved out of my line of vision, so I can see the dancing. Every once in a while someone approaches with a bottle. They jerk their chins up, over and over, till I tilt my head back and accept a drink. There is an intoxicating
fear and ecstasy one can experience in this country, often in the same moment. I decide I’d better resist nothing, not even abuse. Children come up to me and pinch my arms till I give them a few gourdes. Men begin to collect, one puts his arm around me and I see some women snicker. I’m getting drunk. I want the man to take his arm off me, but I’m scared to ask. He keeps saying “fouk” or “defouk” and I think he means fuck, but later someone tells me he was probably saying something like “crotch, open-crotch.” Which I guess is the same thing. One of the women comes over and tells me that when a man touches me, just hit him. She demonstrates by hitting whatever men happen to be standing around her. It works, they back off quickly. In the distance I can see new Haitians arrive, protest my presence, then relax when they are whispered something. I never find out what. All through the night various kind Haitians come up to me with offers of food or drink, or to ask if I am okay. “Mwem kontan, mwem kontan,” I say, over and over. I’m content, I’m happy. Bel, bel, everything is beautiful.

A great sound comes up the mountain. A ra ra approaching, a music parade that travels the countryside in the spring, blessing the land. The band and all its followers move like a sinuous centipede. If you encounter a ra ra on the road, they swarm your car and won’t let you pass without giving some money. Now they seem to be swarming over the whole mountain. The cowbells, drums, scrapers, long bamboo horns like digeridoos, and  whistles all combine to make a crazy sound as the procession slithers up the mountainside. They undulate. Every body movement seems to echo and ripple and repeat in all who follow. The bells and whistles give the music the aspect of a disco. The two ritual dances, ra ra and vodou, intersect in libidinous waves, mix, take hours to finally part and
move on. By now I’ve been forgotten. Something larger sweeps over the night, and I can move about as I please.

The devil arrives in a red sequined jacket, all hip swagger and cocky eyed, possessed by the sexiest of spirits, and the dancing gets downright dirty. There is a fight, the devil is subdued. I’m lifted into a dance, and the rest of the night is a blur that seems to go on for five years or a minute. I wake up very late, in my bed. Someone made sure I got home safely.

The next day a big wind rises. The smell of charcoal cooling and the dark clouds that cover the sky create a foreboding uncertainty in the air. During the night, a dog got accidentally closed in a room, and he has eaten his way out, leaving a hole in the hut. The rum hangover, a rumor of civil war, blockades made from piles of burning tires, it all descends like a shroud. I know I’ve fallen in love with Haiti, a country of terror and ecstasy,  mystery misery and joy, even though it is a country that I could never hope to understand.

I go to the beach and see a little boy dragging a tiny puppy by a palm leaf leash. The puppy is shivering. The boy digs a hole and buries the puppy in the sand. I squat next to them and try to tell the boy the puppy is sad, tris, sad. The boy smiles, unburies the dog, only to drag it down the beach and bury it, again, far away from me.

When I leave Haiti I will leave my hat on the bed. It’s bad luck everywhere else, but in Haiti, it means you’ll be back some day.

 

Annie Nocenti is a writer and editor living in New York. “Jesus is a Zombie?” was previously published by Counter-Punch.

“The Color, The Brain, The Heart” by Tara DaPra

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“I will definitely quit smoking,” I told Linda, as I struggled to match her pace. It was my
second day in Montana and the first time I had seen a mountain. Linda kept her strides
long, her calves flexing and contracting with ease through the unmarked path.

“Isn’t this amazing!”  Linda’s gentle voice shone contentment. “I never get tired of hiking
the Beartooths. Little different than Green Bay, huh?”  She looked back, cheeks flushed
through her olive skin. “How ya doing?”

I paused, leaning against a boulder. “Uh, I’m hanging in there.” Linda smiled and kept
moving.

Though my heart beat double time, my lungs wouldn’t open any wider. I kept climbing
anyway, scrambling on all fours, pulling myself up with tree roots, watching carefully for
which rocks were suitable footholds and which were better to send me tumbling down
the mountain, if tomorrow that were more to my liking. Despite my wheezy lungs, my
heart spread warmth I hadn’t felt in months. Sweat cleansed my body of last night’s beer
and began to release the last six months of grief.

In truth, I was relieved not to be accommodated. Since December my friends had been
walking on eggshells, careful not to mention Matthew’s name. As if saying it would
remind me of what happened. Remind me?  That’s all I thought about. I breathed it in
and out all day long, my heart reminding me with every weak beat. I was tired of
changing therapists, trying to find one that fit. I was tired of my family’s frustration that I
wasn’t better yet. I was tired of being that girl whose boyfriend had killed himself.

When my Aunt Linda heard the news, she sent a condolence note on a thin white card
with an orange and yellow nature scene. After the tidbits of family info and the customary
“I’m so sorry,” she closed with the first exchange to raise my interest in months. “If you’d
like to come to Montana for the summer, we have an extra room for you. New scenery
might be nice.”

I had never been to Montana, and since I was spending most days buried in my down
comforter, I accepted.

My first summer home from college, Matthew and I waited tables together at a pasta
restaurant. We fell in love over the Spicy Garlic and spent the summer drinking wine on
his roof. Every morning, Matthew played songs on his guitar, and every night we made
love before falling asleep, limbs entwined. Come fall, I returned to college in Iowa.
Matthew struggled against his tendency to fade with the seasons. I gave him emotional
mouth-to-mouth for three months from 300 miles away.

December 3rd, the anniversary of his engagement approached. Matthew became
overwhelmed with his patterns of self-destruction. This time he sank beneath the surface
and did not come up for air. His last words to me, in a suicide note I received through the
mail, read I love this world and the people in it, but I cannot love myself. I dropped out of
school, drank more beer, smoked more pot. Summer was approaching again. Time for a
change.

“What do you want to do after this?” Linda paused, waiting for me to catch up.

“Have a beer.”

People like to believe, “If only I didn’t have to work/go to school/take care of my kids, I
would watch more movies and read more books.”  After three weeks of a fruitless job
search in a state where I only knew three people, renting one or two movies every night,
reading one or two books each week, I was no longer under that delusion.

Just as I considered serving unlimited salad bowls at the Olive Garden, I got an
interview at Walker’s Grill. Walker’s occupied the garden level of a historic landmark, the
old Chamber of Commerce building. Bill, the owner, toured France every year, sampling
wines and sending cases home. (“Before I die, I’m going to drink a five-figure bottle of
wine,” he told me once.)  I wore a button-down, light cotton shirt with my dark-rimmed
glasses to the interview. The shirt’s shade of blue soothed my nerves and the glasses
made me feel smart. I entered the restaurant with a Midwest work ethic, an eagerness
to learn, and an air of fake confidence.

“How long do think you can commit to this job?” Bill asked.

“Indefinitely,” I replied, blinking slowly.

“I’m the only one who’s here indefinitely,” Bill squinted. I shifted my gaze. “My point is,
we don’t hire people who will only be here for six months.”

“Um, at least a year,” I offered, which wasn’t totally a lie. I had no plans past the
summer, as I was incapable of looking that far into the future.

After the interview, I returned to the cozy 1940’s bungalow on one of the “tree streets,”
a few blocks from Montana State University. Linda sat at the dining room table, head
bowed, sorting through stacks of paper. Her dark hair was clipped in short waves, curved
neatly around her nape. She looked up from the mess. “How’d it go?”

My brain buzzed with clips of the interview. “I think it went well but it’s hard to say. They
asked me a lot of questions and I remembered to ask questions back so I looked
interested. I tried to make a lot of eye contact to seem confident but I just don’t know.”
I took a deep breath and exhaled. I could feel my heart beat through my fingertips.

“You should send a thank you note.”  She rummaged through the pile and found a stack
of cards. “Here you go.”

Three days later, I got a phone call.

“Hello?”

“Hi Tara, this is Gala from Walker’s Grill. If you’re still interested, we’d like to offer you a
job.”

I had mornings to myself at Linda’s house. I’d come up from the basement, eyes blurry
with sleep, and pour a cup from the French press my Uncle Paul had made that morning
before riding his bike to work, off to fight the polluting oil companies. I splashed in some
water and microwaved the mug for a few minutes, added cream, then sat down at the
antique oak table. Sunlight streamed in the east windows as I read the Billings Gazette.

Montana was run by large landholders, and the state had only voted for one Democratic
president since 1968. I tortured myself every day reading the opinion page. Misguided
souls preached “no state sales tax” despite Montana’s poverty ranking as the highest
outside the Deep South. They called for an amendment to privatize public ownership of
water, one the state Constitution’s founding principles. And they loved their guns.

“Teddy, weeeee!  One, two, three . . . teddy, wee!”  Linda and Paul’s son sat on my bed
sending a brown teddy bear spiraling above his head. My dad had given me that bear for
Christmas two years ago—the annual present he picked out on his own, apart from the
meticulously foolproof list. When I started spending most nights at Matthew’s
apartment—much to my father’s dismay who promptly kicked me out of the house—I
brought it along. Matthew’s parents found the bear when he was in the hospital, and
they tucked it under his arm as he died.
“Dante, it’s time to get ready for swim lessons. Can you put Teddy back please?”

It was Tuesday, one of the afternoons I watched my six-year-old cousin. Dante ran to
retrieve the bear from its crash landing on a pile of dirty laundry. “Ooga-booga,” he
replied, giving Teddy one last spin onto the bed.

“Dante. March.”

“Okay, Tara-tory,” he replied, racing up the stairs. He pulled off his shirt, discarding it the
hallway before he reached his room. Dante was quite proud of his clever nickname. A few
years later, picking up on a buzzword in the media, I would become “Tara-rism.”

With Dante buckled in the backseat, we made the short trip to Rocky Mountain College.
After I secured a parking space, Dante slipped his soft warm fingers in my hand, and we
trekked across the blacktop. The sight of brick buildings and lush green lawns invoked a
twinge of sadness that I was no longer in school.

Inside the pool, the smell of chlorine recalled the excitement of summer vacation. Dante
joined his swimming group, and I sat on the bleachers with a copy of Utne Reader,
content reading to the hum of echoing voices, splashing water, and tweeting whistles.
Between paragraphs of “Four Weeks Vacation: a Campaign to Give Americans more Free
Time,” I glanced around at the other responsible adult figures. I wondered what they
thought of me. Did I look like a single mother?  The nanny?  The depressed niece whose
aunt pitied and brought into her home?  Dante waved from the sidelines, shivering in his
green and orange trunks, lips blue. I smiled back, happy to be the important figure in
someone’s life, if only for a few hours each week.

On other afternoons, I explored the parks near the house, soaking in Montana’s brown,
rocky landscape. Jagged bluffs surrounded Billings. Up the steep hill towards the airport,
I climbed car-sized boulders comfortably positioned at the edge of the cliffs. Wildflowers
grew between the cracks. Twisted pine tree roots grappled through the rocks in search
of water and security. I sunbathed nude in the protection of the rock’s walls, reading
Prozac Nation. Ninety degrees of dry heat beat down from the sun, radiated off the
rocks, and soaked into my tender flesh. The sun—steady, enduring, optimistic—relaxed
the tension grief had twisted through my muscles. My mind went mercifully blank.

At the Yoga Center on one of Billing’s oldest streets, I learned how to breathe. The
space circulated calm, gentle energy between its polished wood floors, uneven brick
walls, and slow chanting music. At the end of each class, in Shiva Sana, the instructor
would tuck blankets under our chins, lay an eye pillow across our brow, and gently
squeeze our shoulders, forearms, calves, and feet. During one particular meditation,
between gentle deep breaths, a bright blue image flashed under my eye pillow. I was
back between the sky blue sheets lying next to the searching blue eyes. My lashes
dampened, and my heart began to pound. Before I could grasp hold, the moment passed.

What took me from that memory?  Since Matthew’s death, I had wished, hoped, prayed,
pleaded, demanded, and bargained to recapture the sensation of Matthew. If he must
stay dead and I couldn’t find the energy to quit living, at the very least, let us meet
somewhere in the middle. I read books with titles like Hello from Heaven! filled with
testimonials of the bereaved communicating with loved ones. I stopped reading them
when the book claimed communication with suicide victims was not likely. Suicide deaths,
it explained, were trapped between this world and the next for leaving the earth before
“their time.”  I crossed “books written by psychics” off the list of helpful things to read in
moments of desperation. I wiped my eyes and disciplined my breath.

On free nights, I had dinner with Linda, Paul, and Dante. Linda would make curried
chicken in a clay adobe pot or polenta with saltissa, the sausage you could only buy at
Stan’s Big Dollar in my parents’ Upper Michigan hometown. We often had dinner guests,
which kept the household fresh: Kane, the son of a family friend, a medical student with
whom I had a one-week fling; Jeanne, Paul’s sister who was running for State
Representative and lived on a grasshopper-infested ranch (as discovered from behind
the safety of a car window); Marjorie, Paul’s mother who was unhappily transitioning to
assisted living. She was entering early stage Alzheimer’s but still had many sharp
moments.

“I heard you lost someone you loved,” Marjorie said to me one night at dinner. I was
taken aback, so used to people avoiding the death topic, suicide especially, at all costs.
“I buried two husbands but nothing like that . . .” she said. Her milky blue eyes searched
my face without pity, without judgment. Marjorie just looked sad.

During my training at Walker’s, Bill catalogued each ingredient in every dish on the
menu, describing the origin, kitchen prep, and cooking technique. I learned the five wine
regions in France and how the grapes transformed when planted in the US, then
Australia, then Argentina and Chile. I made a list of food description words and mixed
and matched them to the salmon, lamb, and pasta specials each night. Tangy and sweet
pork chop chutney; halibut in buttery, rich buerre blanc; bright, tart, blood orange crème
brulee. Our patrons were fierce regulars in the fourteen days morels were in season,
summer vacationers driving cross-country sent by the Sheraton, ranchers requesting
specially cut twenty-four ounce steaks. They listened intently to my descriptions and
trusted my recommendations.

“Hi Bill,” I greeted my boss early in the dinner rush. Conversation buzzed between
patrons among the dimmed lights, white linen, and elaborate floral arrangements. I
placed my tray on the bar and began arranging drinks in a circle. Bill leaned against the
bar, one cowboy boot crossed over the other.

“Not yet,” he quipped. “But I will be after a few more Martinis.”  He swallowed the rest
of his Cosmo and raised the empty toward the bartender. “I’ll take a Mandarin this time,
Jed.”

Two rounds of tables later, the night began to wind down. “Do you wanna go out after
this?” I asked Corrie. She looked up from the order she was punching into the
computer. “I was thinking about the Brew Pub.”

“I have to get Jake from my mom’s,” she hesitated, brushing back a dark curl.  “But I
guess I could have one drink.”

Corrie was a great mother, but she was still young. After working as a nude model for
art students in Missoula, she dropped out of college and moved to LA. By her second
waitressing job, Corrie was picked up by an agent who worked with after-school
specials and made-for-TV-movies. “I was the only fair-skinned brunette in a city of sun-
soaked blonds,” she told me. The week she met her agent, Corrie discovered she was
pregnant. Two months later and one boyfriend lighter, she drove home to Montana,
stopping every thirty minutes to throw up.

After work we drove the three blocks to the Brew Pub. Late night Billings was crawling
with drunken homeless people, most harmless, but it didn’t feel safe to walk. The Brew
Pub was a long space, with a polished oak bar in the center and high tops radiating
around it. We drank pints of Blond Ale. Corrie had one and left. I stayed for four more
as others from work joined the table.

As high as Bill, I climbed into my car and started the engine, paying special attention
not to fasten my seatbelt. I drove a coppery-brown Toyota which badly needed new
brakes, shocks, and a muffler. Driving a beater was liberating. I had no fear of an
oversized pickup parking too close and dinging the door or the stereo getting ripped
off since the tape deck only played on one side.

Pulling out of the parking lot, I made a wrong turn off Third Ave. “Fuck,” I muttered. I
think I can go this way, I thought, avoiding the effort of a U-turn. I rummaged through
my purse to find a light for my Kamel Red and didn’t notice the orange cones
approaching. The car dropped off the edge of solid road into torn up construction
gravel, bouncing roughly. I continued to rummage through my purse until I found the
light, flicked the fuse, and inhaled the incense, before gunning the Toyota back onto
solid road.

“I’ve got the day off tomorrow,” Linda said as we each chose a page from the
Mandala coloring book. Her Eastern European immigrant/lesbian/artist friend designed
the books. This one was a compilation of Mandalas created by children around the
world. “I was thinking about going for a hike. You wanna come?”

“Sure, I’ll set my alarm for seven or so. Can you pass me the orange and blue,
please?”  Walker’s was closed on Sundays. It was good for me to have something
planned on those days – otherwise I might miss the daylight hours.

“I’ll knock on your door around eight,” Linda replied.

By 8:30 the next morning we were buckling into the black leather seats of Linda’s 88
Saab. “Where are we headed?”  I glanced over at Linda. She was replacing her
delicate metal-framed glasses with multi-colored, bug-eyed sunglasses.

She gauged my expression. “I thought the frames were fun at the time.  Now I’m
stuck with them.”  She laughed. “We’re going to the Beartooths but not through Red
Lodge. This spot is along the Wyoming border. It’s much more secluded….
Peaceful.”

We drove south past the smoke stacks of sugar beet refineries. There were only
about three towns between Billings and the Wyoming border, but there was plenty of
earth, the color of deep pumpkin, faded by wind and dust that stretched out to an
invisible horizon. When the two met, they melted perfectly into each other, creating a
soft purple haze you could only see if you relaxed your eyes, breathing into the beauty
of perfect union.

“So how are things going?”  Linda glanced at my copy of Veronika Decides to Die. “You’
ve been napping a lot lately.”

I finished my sentence and put the book down. “Okay, I guess.”  I paused. “Work is
going really well. I’ve been hanging out with Corrie a lot lately. Jacob is such a fun
baby – he loves going out to lunch with us.”  I paused and picked at my fingernails.

“Linda, what would you do if Paul died?”

Linda adjusted the volume on the stereo and thought for a moment. “Well, I’m sure I’
d be very sad. I would probably put a lot of energy into Dante, but I like to think I
could find another partner someday.”

“But what if he’s your soul mate?”

“I guess I hope there’s more than one match for each of us. Why should there only be
one?  Anyway, who says a soul mate has to be your spouse?  Can’t you find that in a
child or a friend or more than one match?”

“I guess I never thought of that.”  As I let her words soak into my brain, I stared at
the mountains slowly rising through the windshield. “Linda, do you know that when I
was young, you were the only adult who spoke to me like a person and not a little
kid?”

She patted my knee and we drove on in silence.

Two hours later we pulled onto a gravel road. The Saab bounced roughly between
potholes. Long pine tree arms brushed the car windows and scented the air. A few
minutes later, the trees receded and the skyline opened. Linda pulled along the edge
of the gravel opening, took the key from the ignition, and turned towards me.

“This is it.”  Her dark eyes sparkled in anticipation.

As we stepped out of the car, I strained my neck to soak in the mountains. Island arc,
continental collision, convergent plate, subduction zone, compression, reverse thrust
fault during the Late Permian to the Miocene describe how these mountains rose from
the earth; understanding those things made them no less magnificent. The brown
giants lined with pines sat quietly as monuments of endurance. The ground around the
mountains was dusty and dry, covered with sage and other tough brush. My heart
jumped as a small pinkish-gray lizard shot out its tongue and captured a cricket.

We began our hike through a field of tall grasses. Pickers tangled into the laces of my
tennis shoes; twigs and rough groundcover scraped my unprotected legs. I narrowly
missed stepping in a huge pile of dung. “This is also a horse trail,” Linda said.

As we ascended the trail, the landscape changed quickly from an open grass field to
thick mountain forest. The dirt path forked and Linda led me through a narrow ledge.
Holding tightly to rocks for security, we crawled under a narrow arch toward the smell
of moisture. The scattered sagebrush gradually transformed into bright green moss.
Fresh mint and lavender perfumed the air, and I heard the rush of moving water. Then
I saw our destination: a tall and delicate waterfall splashed over a boulder, trickled
down the rock wall, and landed gracefully in a small pool. The mountain walls on three
sides created a private sanctuary. Long smooth grass covered patches of earth, and
tiny flowers in purple, white, and orange bordered the edge of the pool.

Linda and I stripped down and stood under the waterfall’s shockingly cold shower.
The water washed the salty sweat from our hands, hair, and backs. Under the
waterfall, a thick cushion of moss carpeted the rocks. I inhaled the sharp, clean
mountain air, sending fresh oxygen to my brain. Linda took pictures of me from across
the pool, legs crossed, knees hugged to my chest, head turned toward the camera.
The pictures revealed a grin I recognized from another lifetime.

The basement steps at Linda and Paul’s house opened to a ceramic tile landing, with
doors radiating in all directions. My bedroom was across from the laundry room and
shared the floor with Linda’s massage room, the office where they were launching a
bike tour business, and a sauna. The morning of my birthday, I was buried in navy
flannel sheets and a gray-blue down comforter when I was unhappily awakened by
Dante’s voice.

“See you!  See you!” he chimed to the opening and closing of the sauna door.

He seemed to be playing with some imaginary Pokémon friends or maybe his guinea
pig, but after a few more refrains, Linda’s calm voice, neither irritated nor neglectful,
called out, “Dante, can you please keep the sauna door shut. You’re letting the heat
out.”

It was silent for a few moments before Dante began again. “See you!  See you!”

At this point I was wide awake, pissed to be roused so early on my birthday. I lay in
bed thinking of all the torturous ways I could get back at my cousin when to my
surprise, my anger quietly dissipated.

Late June. Humid. Matthew’s second story apartment, upstairs of a 1920s house. One
oscillating fan struggling to cool the room. “There’s something I want to play for you.”
Matthew watched me carefully as he slipped the reddish-orange disk into the stereo.
“I love this song. It always makes me think of you. I play it a lot when you’re not
around.”  I sat on the honey-colored couch, hugging my knees to my chest. Strumming
acoustic guitar vibrated from the speakers:

These notes are marked return to sender
I’ll save this letter for myself
One thing is always true
How good it is to see you
See you . . . See you . . .

I’ve heard that the dead sometimes communicate through the living:  the young, the
infirm, the insane. They are more pure, more base, closer to the elements. I never liked
that idea. It’s too Hollywood-meets-Sylvia Browne. On my twentieth birthday, I began
to understand that like most things in life, it was simpler than that. More subtle. At six
years old, Dante was open to suggestion. He didn’t self-censor the way we do as
insecure teenagers and anxious adults. He said the first thing that popped into his
head, and that day it happened to be a birthday hello from his cousin’s dead boyfriend.

As the sugar maples turned crimson and began dropping their leaves, December 3rd
crept closer – the anniversary of the day Matthew pulled his car into the garage,
blocked the doors, and let the engine run. All he had to do was breathe in and out. A
neighbor heard music blaring from the garage and broke in the door. Doctors stabilized
Matthew’s body only to discover his brain would never regain any upper level function
– no memory, no consciousness – what the doctors called a persistent vegetative
state. We had to remove his feeding tubes and watch his body slip into physical death.
Death by starvation. His mind, his essence was gone, but his heart still beat and his
lungs pumped air. “His soul is trapped,” my sister said after seeing him in the hospital.
“You’re doing the right thing by letting him die.”

I wanted to do something on the anniversary of that day, to not file Matthew’s
memory into the catalog of under-celebrated events in my life. But I could think of
nothing special that was creative and meaningful and understated enough to honor
the life I lost.

I made no plans that day and accepted an invitation from Corrie to find a Christmas
tree. She picked me up in her black Pathfinder with the bumper sticker Well Behaved
Women Rarely Make History on the tailgate. Jacob was strapped in tightly behind me,
red fleece bulging out of his car seat. He smiled and flailed his arms while I buckled in
the front.

We drove towards Red Lodge, my last trip to the mountains, in search of Corrie and
Jacob’s Christmas tree. As the Beartooths wound tighter, Corrie pulled onto the
shoulder near a flat patch of earth. Scraggly pines scattered the rocky ground.
As we searched the area, I thought about the lore associated with pines trees. In my
sorority, the pine tree had been a symbol of the present, its enduring green needles,
its roots that find water where no other trees can live, its one straight stem pointing
towards the heavens. In Chinese art, the pine tree represents longevity,
steadfastness, and discipline. Early New Englanders adorned militia flags with the pine
to symbolize hardiness and fortitude.

“How about this one?”  Corrie stood next to a tree not much taller than herself. The
tree’s branches were thin and few but its trunk was straight and its color strong. I
steadied the tree while Corrie worked the saw. After tying it to the roof, we climbed
back into the truck.

I glanced at Corrie in the fading light as the sun set behind us. “I’m glad I did this
today. I feel like I should be sad, but I’m not. I can’t really explain it. Maybe I’ve been
sad for so long that I don’t have anything left.”

Corrie searched my face, not sure what to say. “I wish I had known what day this is. I
would have done something.”  She leaned across the seat and hugged me tightly.
“There’s nothing to do,” I said into her hair. I let go of her grip and settled into my
seat. “I guess it’s just another day I have to live through.”

As the one year anniversary of Matthew’s death approached, I felt drawn to the place
we had shared our life, the place he was now buried. I wanted to be with my family for
Christmas, to celebrate my progress from the sad, tired girl whose heart pumped very
slowly to a girl who was reintegrating to the land of the living.

“I’ve decided on Minneapolis,” I told Linda. She stacked books into a box while I
packed away my summer tanks. “It’s close enough to Green Bay that I can visit when I
want but not too close that my mother can pop over uninvited. I want to live in the
city. I need a place that’s big enough to keep me interested. And Minneapolis is nice
because there’s a lot of green space.”

“You’ll love Minneapolis,” Linda said. “I lived there right out of college, on 34th and
Grand. Can’t you get reciprocal tuition in Minnesota?”

For my long journey home, Linda packed snacks of trail mix, hard-boiled eggs, and
dried dates (“I always get irregular when I travel,” she told me). As I pulled onto the
freeway, I soaked in the foggy blue mountains one more time, tiny in the distance, and
cranked up the Foo Fighters. It was warm for early December. Most of the October
snow had melted, and the smell of wet earth entered my cracked window. “And I
wonder . . . when I sing along with you . . .” I sang along with Dave Grohl’s angry,
nostalgic, mournful tune, “If everything could ever feel this real forever / If anything
could ever be this good again / The only thing I’ll ever ask of you, you gotta promise
not to stop when I say when . . . ”

“Shit!”  My car’s back wheels slid in slow motion, rocking to the left, rocking to the
right. I held my breath, as if to suspend the laws of physics, though my racing heart
told me it wasn’t working. I turned off the music and struggled to keep my car on the
road, praying a semi was not sitting around the turn. The shady curve along one of
Montana’s signature rocky buttes had blocked the sun from a lingering patch of icy
freeway. I had not noticed the ice until I felt a shadow cast over the sunroof.

A moment later, I was back in the rhythmic pulse of safe highway passage. For a time,
my shoulders remained tense, teeth clenched, brain on alert. But deeper inside my
chest, my heart gradually returned to its steady, enduring, optimistic effort. I had felt
afraid. I continued driving east.

 

 

Tara DaPra is an MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota, Managing Editor for the literary magazine Dislocate,  and a freelance writer for the Rake.  She enjoys equal parts alone time to social interaction, traveling to places new and familiar, and petting her dog Sally.