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Past EditorsIssue # 44 Spring 2021
Prose
Edited by Dorian Gossy
Dan A. Cardoza
The WoodshedTobias sat in freshman physics. He did his best to resist the higher mathematics of turning into a Gaussian waveform. The definition of a Gaussian waveform is how physicists imagine white noise.
Doer sat next to his best friend Tobias and smirked. He shot him a little side-eye. He then chuckled at himself, as he squinted through the electronic vapor that once was Tobias. He imagined his friend Tobias a half-baked electronic.gif.
Plague fatigue was enough for the other students to allow them to believe they were seeing things. In truth, Tobias was kinetic and wavy, not unlike the old-school-beam-me-up-Scotty TV shows.
He’d become this Fourth of July sparkler of anger. Just thinking about his stepdaddy’s antics, at home and at the Black Butte, had more than pissed him off, and fried the delicate circuitry of his synapse.
That day, Tobias didn’t exist unless he was a digital stutter. He was so much more than any aberration. Somehow, he’d removed himself from our three-dimensional world. He was entering a world where a slate-scaled dragon could truly live and thrive.
Later the same day, Tobias was ordered by the Dungeon Master to chop some wood logs and kindling out in this cave-like structure. The woodshed had a single paned window, a window that faced inclement weather, and purposely pointed away from the sunshine.
It was the beginning of spring. The early morning had been forecasted to dip into the twenties. The dragon clawed, cast-iron stove in his stepfather’s house needed feeding.
Tobias had worked up an honest sweat. He was growing so fast that his dorsal and caudal fins raked against the Douglas fir walls and the heavy planked ceiling. Fortunately, the flames he emitted hadn’t engulfed him or Doer in the confines of the woodshed.
His best friend was a young man who’d caught the name Evil-Doer at school. Don’t ask? He comfortably sat in his crumpled pants and plaid shirt. He appeared chill, a stoop-shouldered mouse in a slivery corner. He mostly watched and listened, as his friend Tobias ranted and raged and burned kindling.
Posture aside, Doer was the fashizzle. He generated multiple wattage of charisma up on Davis Street, next to the high school. He’d been created with equal parts intelligence and rugged handsomeness. You could say he was photogenic. He was as photogenic as a black-and-white Marlon Brando, the long-dead actor who won’t die in his great grandfather’s eight-track cassettes. The Hollywood classic is Rebel Without a Cause.
According to Doer, great friendships were not all about keeping up with the Kardashians, or hanging out with the most popular kids of the day. It had more to do with heart and soul.
Though Tobias needed some maturing, Doer thought surely he’d eventually evolve into the skin of a man. Tobias was classically good looking, with fiery red hair and a chiseled chin, a whisker shy of the edge of a hatchet.
But for the longest time that day, the day in the woodshed, Tobias wasn’t even human. Hell, he’d nearly caught fire at school, and now this hot anger. Tobias was headed toward spontaneously combustion.
“Let it go,” Doer had said.
“Let it go, my F-ing stepfather Jack is basically paying forward so you can go to college?”
Dragon turned, and torched the bolted cedar door in a shade of cinnamon. It’s then Doer spoke. “Tobias, it’s not exactly like that, but I get where you’re going with this!”
“Yup, sure, live in my skin, Doer?”
The axe fell. It was shiny. At first appearance it looked like titanium fire. The scythe cut the top of the stump and blurred into this crazy gothic blade. It glinted and vibrated before the papery pine exploded into kindling.
Doer shouted, “What the F-- ”
“That’s his skull,” flamed the rusty-haired boy.
The veins in his neck bulged and pulsed. An honest man’s sweat spattered and dampened the rustic floor.
Doer could see the truth through all of the white noise, the photoelectric digital scramble. He observed a tall dragon child. He watched in frustration at this strapping young man. This dragon boy whose oversized heart throbbed and burned in his chest.
Doer knew the dragon’s heart to be infected with passion, perhaps too much passion? But it wasn’t too much to cause Doer to suggest compromise. Sure, Tobias had sharp scales, and razor claws, and a beak as proud as a falcon. But Doer knew how common this was in growing dragons, cutting tools rarely used as weapons.
Doer had never shed a tear in his life. Don’t get me wrong, he didn’t see that as any particular kind flaw in his friend’s character. The two simply looked at the world differently.
Doer was an only child. He was the son of a young single mother, a woman who’d flunked out of high school. Those days, she worked part-time as a bartender down at the Black Butte. She performed her full-time job after hours. It involved keeping the company of strangers and taking good care of the regulars, as well as the weekday married men. They were married men, the ones who carried steep tabs down at the alt-named Mos Eisley Cantina. It wasn’t above Merissa to sleep with an occasional Jabba the Hutt or a creature from Dune, or someone’s filthy stepfather.
Merissa saved every single spare penny she earned. Her gifted boy would damned will attend college someday. She was hell-bent on making sure that the sum total of all her mistakes equaled something right.
In Doer’s mind, shedding a single tear would be the equivalent of a master jeweler accidently shattering a most exquisite diamond. Surely, this would cause him to blur, and he’d quickly disappear like a dusty fart, he thought. Not in this damned life, he’d mused. Though there were times he felt glued together with barbed wire, sutures, and discarded gum. But this Doer character was a survivor, and in the long run, he was destined to go places.
His close friendship with Tobias helped keep things in perspective. It made living on the peripheral of the mill town culture worth living.
“You are a soft-hearted wussy, buddy. You’re not going to burn, ‘em, or hurt anyone. You’re not built that way.”
“Watch me, Doer!”
“Right, so I guess we’ll be having our future heart to hearts at San Quinton, in the visitation room?”
Tobias wiped his forehead with his gloved fist, grimaced, and unstuck the sunken axe. He then cocked it, and shot it across the length of the shed. The winged axe struck with a pointed thud against the thick boarded wall.
“You’re correct, Doer. His empty skull isn’t worth splitting or dulling a sharp blade on. He has nothing to show for his miserable life except for the despair he’s caused others.”
Doer got up and fist-bumped Tobias and flopped back on the wooden stool he’d put together, on top of the saw dust floor.
“You know I’m just kidding, Doer, right?”
“You could have fooled me, but I sure in the hell love the mental picture, cold steel bars, and prison food.”
“I’m sure Doer, if/when you throw shade, and you really mean it, you follow through, unlike me. Am I correct?”
“That would be yes and yes, Tobias.”
“I wish I were like you.”
“No you don’t,” said Doer.
Doer, Cody Williams on his birth certificate, wasn’t into any sanctimonious bullshit. He gave back more than he took, ten times fold. Fortunately, very few crossed him.
And Cody would indeed grow into a well-respected and successful man one day. He’d make his mother proud. But, unlike Tobias, Cody’s tender heart had a limited holding capacity. Like any good measuring cup, scant room remained for any emotional larceny, gaslighting, or psychological hanky-panky. Concepts he’d attributed to Tobias’s stepdad often enough.
Like most dragon boys, you have to command respect. Tobias was thankful that his tears blended into the sweat as it ran down his face. But even in the claustrophobic darkness of the shed, he wasn’t fooling anyone.
Doer knew better about hiding feelings. He’d heard and seen his mother attempt to hide her tears plenty of times before. But she was stubborn, and by God committed to keeping her agony a secret. She was tough like that. Her pain was something he’d only gotten glimpses of now and again.
In order to send her only son off to college, she’d long ago committed to do any damned thing she needed to do. Her son’s college diploma was certainly worth more than the sum total of her self-esteem.
The young dragon’s lungs slowly bellowed, until the flames began to fan out. Doer observed the natural, healthy rhythm of his friend’s chest. Tobias was changing back into a young man. At the end of the calmness, Tobias would be all boy again, a young boy hell-bent on reaching manhood. Next, Tobias shut off his afterburners.
“I wish I were you sometimes, Doer. At least you don’t have a wicked stepfather. One who takes turns humiliating you and your mother.”
“Hello fire head, remember? My stupid father was in that senseless war over there in Afghanistan. Hello—he was freaking blown into pieces. You want him dude, you can have him.”
“That’s gross.”
“Bull-crap, Tobias, stay strong. One day you will be able to flap those big clumsy wings, and fly off into the sunset.”
“How about my mother, Doer? What about her?”
“From my vantage point over here in the corner, Mr. Basilisk, I believe your mother’s going to develop her own special set of wings, perhaps like the beautiful wings those Avatars used, in the James Cameron movie? Maybe sooner than you think, dude? And then watch the hell out, Tobias, she’ll be the one to burn your house down.”
“Jesus, Tobias, that’s so damned graphic.”
“Sometimes, reality isn’t pretty, Mr. Dragon.”
“No shit,” exhaled Tobias, his long tail wagging to and fro, scraping the ceiling, scraping the floor. He appeared relaxed though, like a dreaming dog in front of a fire.
“Don’t forget, your mother gave birth to you, Tobias, you carry her blood. Dragons can only take so much crap!”
Not long after, the shed door burst open. Tobias and Doer appeared iridescent in the bath of early evening light. Just the two of them, arms full of wood. It was springtime. It had quit raining. They shimmered and glistened in the wash of golden-scaled sunlight. The day was ending. The skies dragon God began to slowly glide over the rim of the Cascade Mountains, as far as its mighty wings could pull it into tomorrow.
They both stared off into the distance, as if preparing for some sort of transformation. And then everything blurred. And after, night fell.
Kathie Giorgio
Let Us Go Then, You & I
When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead…
Grace Slick, “White Rabbit”
There were babies scattered all around Karen’s house. On the couch, loveseat and the rocking chair on the front porch. Seated at the kitchen table, stuffed into high chairs lined along the walls. In two of her three bedrooms, they were on the beds and propped on the dressers and desks, and standing shoulder to shoulder and front to back in several playpens. One bedroom was reserved as Karen’s sewing and craft room, where she made the babies, over and over and over. Cloth heads, cloth bodies, stitched toes and fingers. Karen even made the babies anatomically correct, with hard knots for nipples and skillfully sewed and sculpted tiny penises and tucked-in vaginas. Each baby had its name embroidered where its heart should be. Karen was working her way through a dictionary of baby names, using a complex system of combining and reusing them for first and middle so that no baby was the same. She called her sewing room The Incubator; her house was The Nursery. The babies were conceived there, slowly developed, and then born, to join all the others. She considered calling the house The Orphanage, but her babies were not parentless. She was always there.
Karen couldn’t say how many babies there were. She just kept making them. She had to move some aside wherever she sat and whenever she went to sleep. One was always on her lap, even as she sewed another.
But Karen knew she would give them all up, adopt them all out, for the chance to have back that one baby who never breathed, that one baby who she conceived, that one baby who she aborted because of Jack.
*
When Karen was ten years old, she told her classmate Jack on the playground that she liked him. He took her behind the school and showed her what’s what before she even knew there was a what to know. At seventeen, after seven confusing years of coupling with Jack, Jack breaking up with her, watching him be with others, hoping he would be with her, and agreeing to be with him while he was with others, she became pregnant with his baby. Within a week of telling him about it, the baby was gone. When Karen returned to school, Jack seemed completely gone too, although he was still there. It was as if she aborted them both, when she didn’t want to abort either. He didn’t sit next to her in English or in the cafeteria anymore. He crossed to the other side of the hallway between classes. He didn’t meet her at her locker. She walked home alone with no detour to his bedroom on the way. He gave her a wink every now and then, his lowered eyelid raising her hopes, but then he’d be off with yet another girl. And another. And another.
The day of the abortion, Karen told herself the usual things. It was better this way. There would be other children. She and Jack would be fine and they’d grow into parenthood the way they were supposed to, at the appropriate time, when they were no longer children themselves. She thought she was special to Jack; she was the first to carry his child, though she heard rumors of others later. But Jack took care of Karen that day.
And then he didn’t.
Karen, though there were a few men here and there, none of whom ever made her feel the way she felt about Jack, never became pregnant again.
So she sewed babies instead. Baby after baby after baby. She used to craft after work and on weekends. Now, she was retired, and so she made babies all day. She stood sometimes in the middle of her living room and wondered when enough was enough. But then she’d go to her room and make another. She tried making other things: teddy bears and wall hangings and even detailed clothes, but those ended up having their stitches ripped out and the scraps fashioned into more babies, dressed in homemade onesies.
Babies were all she ever wanted. Her bedroom in her childhood home was filled with dolls, a new one arriving every birthday and Christmas. Her mother donated them all to Goodwill when Karen moved away to college and Karen was sad, but okay with that. She figured there would be babies on the way soon enough, when she reunited with Jack or when she met a man just like him. But she found that most men were like Jack in the worst way – off to another woman. And another. And another.
She tried to tell herself that her babies kept her from being alone. But when she spoke in her house, the only voice she heard was hers.
Now, she was sixty-four years old.
Jack would be too. She wondered where he was.
*
When Karen went to bed that night, she lay awake for a while, thinking backwards to Jack in high school and forwards to what he must be like now. He told her often that she was his first kiss, his first grope, his first lay, his first girl. The morning of the abortion, he told her he loved her more than anyone, even though Karen knew for sure that he was dating at least three other girls right then. Still, he said he loved her the most, and now a unique bit of him was tucked inside her, curled like a kidney bean against her abdominal wall, though she knew she couldn’t keep it. When the abortion was over, he drove her home, opened her car door, helped her out and up the porch steps, and kissed her gently on the cheek. He told her she was his first abortion.
“I’m sorry about this,” he said.
She pressed into him, her aching belly against his. She thought about what she carried that morning, and what she no longer carried now. But there would be more, she thought. More. When they were older. Baby after baby after baby.
Jack kissed her on the forehead and told her to take care of herself.
Those were the last words he ever said to her. There was just the every now and then wink. Then they both graduated and were off to college. He stayed in-state, she went out, and then she stayed out, living in the Indiana dunes, admiring Lake Michigan, and rarely returning to her hometown in Wisconsin. The few times she did, she drove past Jack’s mother’s house, but she never saw Jack. She tried to put him out of her mind, even as she compared every man she met to him.
She picked up a baby now, one that was always on her bed, and held him tightly. On his heart was embroidered the name Jack Junior. He wasn’t the first baby she made; she needed one of particular perfection to be Jack’s namesake. Three years in to her baby-making, she felt something special when she worked on this little boy. His face, his eyes. His hair, made out of yarn, tousled just right. She stitched Jack Junior’s name with deep purple thread. On the night of his birth, she carried him in to her bed, and he stayed there ever since.
Cradling Jack Junior now, Karen thought of all the television programming she saw where someone was seeking another person out. Private detectives were used. Those had to be costly. Karen fell asleep, counting dollars. She wondered, if necessary, what she could sell her babies for. All her babies, with the exception of Jack Junior.
In the morning, after her coffee and oatmeal, Karen went to her computer instead of her sewing machine. She discovered just how easy it was these days to find someone.
Google. Facebook.
“There you are,” she breathed. Jack was still in their old hometown. He was no longer with his mother, but in a new subdivision, near the edge of town.
Karen wondered how private detectives made a living these days. She was relieved she wouldn’t have to sacrifice her babies to find Jack Junior’s father.
*
Karen began spending her evenings on her computer, following Jack from site to site. He was very active on social media. There were his Facebook posts, his tweets on Twitter, his Instagram photos. She particularly studied his profile pictures. Karen discovered that his wife, Deb, had passed and he was a recent widower. He didn’t have any children.
But Karen knew of one. Jack, she believed, would remember, too.
When she scrolled through his friends to see if there was anyone she recognized, she realized that the majority of them were women. Woman after woman after woman. Karen created her own Facebook page, and carefully, only a few a day, she sent out friend invitations to the women on Jack’s list. She sent them private messages, asking them how they knew Jack.
Most replied. Karen began to put it all together. There were so many women like Karen, women who discovered they weren’t the only one in Jack’s life, in Jack’s bed, but who wanted to be. Who still hoped to be. Women who were hurt. Another after another and another.
Karen never thought of herself as hurt; she thought of herself as hopeful, and hopelessly in love. She always harbored a dream for a mighty reunion, walking into the diner in their hometown, Jack standing to meet her, pulling out her chair, and then grabbing her hands and telling her how he always loved her. How he always loved her more than anyone. And how he regretted, regretted so much, that their baby was lost. On the night she recognized the women’s hurt in herself, she cried, and then she cried every night she went on her computer and saw all the women who felt just the same. Hurt after hurt after hurt.
But the weeks went on, and the conversations with Jack’s women went on. She typed Jack’s name into the Google bar and found him on a variety of dating sites with names like Ashley Madison, Young And Ready, Once You’ve Had Black, Secret and Sexy. Several of the Facebook friends said that they met Jack through ads on CraigsList.
Each night, Karen felt herself disintegrating. There seemed to be nothing but tears. But then, the hope which changed to hurt began to morph again, into heat.
She never posted on her Facebook page, but she read and set aside new messages from the women. She noted when a new one was added to Jack’s page and she friended her as well. Her focus sharpened on Jack as she discovered him in more and more places. Tumblr. WeChat. TikTok. Snapchat. She read the Missed Connections posts on her hometown’s CraigsList. She picked them apart, deciphering them, selecting the ones she thought might be Jack. Jack on the hunt.
Another. And then another.
Karen realized she was on the hunt too.
In front of her computer, Karen held Jack Junior and showed him pictures of his father. She began to burn.
*
About three months in, Karen finally sent Jack a friend request on Facebook. Simultaneously, she sent him a private message. “Hey,” she typed, “remember me? Your first kiss on the playground when we were ten?”
He took less than an hour to accept her friendship and to answer her message. “Karen!” he sent. “Oh my gosh, how wonderful to hear from you! I’ve thought of you so many times. How are you?”
For a second, Karen allowed her hope to rise, like it did with his high school winks, but then she remembered the women. All the women. Woman after woman after woman. She hugged Jack Junior as she tapped out an answer. “I’m just fine. I’ve been thinking about you too. I’m actually coming home for a visit in two weeks. Could we get together? Maybe at the diner? Is it still there?”
Jack sent a laughing face. “Of course it’s still there, and it still has the best grilled-cheese sandwich and chili fries! See, I remember what you like!”
Karen shuddered. But she typed, “I’m sure you do. You taught me what I like, remember?”
He answered with a yellow face with hearts for eyes and a protruding tongue.
They set up a date and a time. Home was three hours away and her parents had passed, so Karen booked a room in the closest hotel. While the heat within her was steady, she felt her mind cool as she began preparing for her date. Her first date in years. Her first date with Jack in decades.
*
After loading the car, it took Karen about a half hour to leave the house. She went through each room and planted a kiss on each chubby cloth cheek. When she was sure she’d said goodbye to them all, she took one more last look around, making sure the babies would be safe while she was gone, and then she left the house, checking the lock three times. She put Jack Junior in the front seat, though she knew it was safer for babies to be in the back. She didn’t have a car seat, so she buckled him in as best she could. He would be her copilot and keep her company. Just as he had been for years.
The drive from Indiana to Wisconsin wasn’t bad, though traveling around Chicago left her white-knuckled. Karen was relieved when she found her hotel and checked in. She wouldn’t see Jack until the next day. She tucked Jack Junior safely into the middle of the big bed and she set off for a trip down memory lane. She figured tomorrow would be filled with Jack and only Jack, so she wanted this evening to remember other things.
Her parents’ house, now owned by someone else.
The elementary school, middle school, high school.
The cemetery where her parents were buried. She left flowers.
The house where Linda, her best friend since kindergarten, lived. She dated Jack too. She disappeared after she became one of the rumors Karen heard about. Karen never saw her again.
Which led her back to Jack. She drove past his mother’s house.
Then Jack’s house. She got his address from the internet. She didn’t see him. The house was dark.
The diner, where she would see him tomorrow.
His house again. She parked across the street for a while and studied it. She imagined what it would be like to live there with him. How a child would have loved that yard! There was an expansive front porch, where she would sit and watch their son play. Keeping him safe. Keeping him alive. Waiting for Jack to come home so they could make another baby. And another. And another.
With the vision of that little boy in her mind, a vision of the cloth baby come to life, complete with tousled hair, she pulled away and went to a town a few miles away. She found the clinic where her baby died. She watched as a few women went in, a few women came out. One had her arms wrapped around her flat belly.
Karen remembered that ache. The ache which lessened as she leaned against Jack, but then grew when he avoided her at school. Karen knew that the ache wasn’t just in the cradled belly, but in the arms that wrapped around it. The empty arms. The arms that wanted to hold a baby who was there that morning, gone in the afternoon.
Karen’s fingers on her steering wheel turned as knuckle-white as Chicago.
*
When Karen carried Jack Junior into the diner the next day, she saw Jack’s eyes drop to the baby. But then he looked at her and gave his wink, before embracing her soundly. The baby squished between them.
She sat Jack Junior on a chair and then accepted the seat Jack held out for her.
“God, it’s good to see you,” he said, and he took her hands just like she pictured. What she hadn’t pictured was what she saw behind him. Row after row of women, standing just like the babies in the playpens back home. Shoulder to shoulder, front to back. All with their eyes on the back of Jack’s head. All watching the subtle rise and fall of his every breath.
“It’s good to see you too,” she said. She nodded toward Jack Junior. “Remember?”
He glanced at the baby. “‘Remember’?” He touched Jack Junior’s cheek, patted his hair. “Cute. Did you make him?”
“We did,” she said. “I call him Jack Junior.”
Jack’s eyes widened and his hand jerked back. “Oh, Karen. Karen, that’s not nice to think about. Really, that was so many years ago.”
Karen picked up Jack Junior, held him on her lap. “I remember,” she said. “You weren’t with me in the exam room. I remember when he died, Jack. Our son. They scraped him out of me.” She looked at the baby. “I wanted him. I wanted him so much. Just like I wanted you.”
Jack tried to tug the baby out of her arms, but Karen refused. “Let’s not talk about that. It’s over. We did what was necessary. You know what? I already ordered for you. A grilled-cheese sandwich with bacon and tomato. Chili fries. A large Coke.”
Karen smiled. It was good that he remembered her favorite meal. Why couldn’t he remember their baby? Why couldn’t he remember their pain?
Because it wasn’t theirs. It was hers. He didn’t share it at all.
She looked at the women behind him. They were hurt too. She spotted Linda in the third row. She looked just the same.
Karen brought her attention back to the table. “Were you sad over the baby, Jack? You said you were sorry.” She leaned back as the waitress delivered their food, looking askance at Jack Junior. Karen wondered if Jack ordered his usual too. A double cheeseburger with extra pickles. Cheese fries. A Dr. Pepper. When the waitress went away, Karen checked Jack’s plate. It was all there. Just like it was the night before their baby died.
Just the same as then. And just like it would have been. If the baby on her lap was real.
Jack sighed. “I didn’t really think of it as a baby, sweetheart. It was just the start of a baby. And we were only seventeen. I didn’t let it become real because it just wasn’t possible.” He picked up his glass. “Come on. Let’s toast. Let’s toast to fifty-four years of friendship. Can you believe we became a thing when we were ten?”
Karen allowed her glass to clink against Jack’s. Just the way they would have at their wedding. Champagne flutes then. Bride etched on hers. Groom on his. Golden bubbles. The baby still on the way, hidden beneath yards of white tulle and silk, tiny buttons going up her back, filigree lace coming to a point on the backs of her hands.
Jack Junior.
She breathed deeply, picked up her sandwich, took a bite. It tasted just like she remembered. A smudge of chili from her fries caught on the corner of the toasted bread and it all blended to perfection. She was across from Jack. She was seventeen. But she was eighteen, sitting across from him with their child on her lap. She was twenty-five, sitting across from Jack and a baby was in her lap and their son was in a chair between them. She was sixty-four. She had Jack Junior on her lap. But he was made of cloth and her lap was empty.
The women lined up behind Jack shifted their eyes to hers. They winked at her. A slow wink. Just like Jack. Linda raised her hand.
“We’ve known each other for fifty-nine years,” she said. “We met in kindergarten.” Karen could still remember him on that first day. He wore blue overalls. A red and white striped t-shirt. Rubber-toed blue sneakers. She wore a pink dress and her socks had ruffles. White shoes. Linda wore shorts with flowers and butterflies and a matching pink t-shirt.
On that day, so long ago, Jack looked just like their son. What he should have looked like, if he’d been born.
The women behind Jack cradled their arms around their flat bellies. They swayed.
“Well, that’s true.” Jack laughed. “But I meant since we became a thing.” He arched his eyebrows at her. “Remember how you told me you liked me?”
A thing. Is that what they were? Is that what all the women were?
She set down her sandwich. Enjoyed one fry. Then she set Jack Junior back into his chair. Jack visibly relaxed. “How many women, Jack?” she asked.
He looked confused. “What?”
“How many women have you had? All told? How many girls did you see when you were with me? Did you go to someone’s house after you dropped me off, on the day we lost our son? How many women are you seeing right now?” Her eyes roved over his shoulder, meeting the gaze of each woman as she began to recite their names, one after the other. “Sharon, Susan, Sandy, Cindy, Shyla, Sissy—”
“Karen,” he said, his voice sharp. Not the voice he’d used with her. Not behind the school. Not in his bedroom.
“Sally, Sarah, Sophie, Sadie, Stella, Savannah, Samant—”
“Karen, stop.”
“Stephanie, Sabrina, Serena, Skylar, Sienna…but that’s only the S’s. Only some of the S’s.”
“Okay, I don’t know how you know this—”
“Oh, there’s more. Before the S’s. Deb, Christine, Jackie, Mary, Linda, Carrie, Julie—”
“Stop!” he roared and stood up, his chair shrieking across the tile.
The women stepped back. Karen heard the silence fall on the diner like a thick fog. She struggled to see through it to Jack.
“What kind of nutcase are you?” he shouted. “Is that what you’re here for? Have you memorized them somehow?”
“Anne, Leslie, Diane, Kathy, Michele, Nancy, Elizabeth—” The names were a song, a litany, in her head. The women nodded with each name, like roll call in school, one after the other. Another. And another.
“That’s enough, Karen. Are you pointing out every woman who wasn’t you?” He grabbed his jacket. “I’m done here. Get help. You need serious help. You always were a little screwball.” He shoved one arm into a sleeve. “I knew I shouldn’t have come.”
Karen stood and reached into her back pocket. She pulled out a pistol and pointed it at Jack. “Sit down,” she said.
He froze. The diner, already silent, staring at their spectacle, froze too. Karen felt like a spotlight suddenly descended, circling them in a bright white light. Everyone else, even the women, fell into darkness. But Karen knew they were there. Their eyes glowed.
“You’re right, Jack. That is enough,” she said. “I love you. I always have. But I know now. Enough is enough.” She fired and the diner was no longer silent.
The spotlight shattered and Karen saw customers and staff running out the doors. A few came toward her and she waved the gun at them, causing them to fall back. She glanced at Jack, saw his eyes open and blank. She’d shot for his heart and that’s where the blood pooled.
The women, all of them, applauded.
Picking up Jack Junior, Karen gave him a solid kiss on his forehead. Then she turned him, facing out, and hugged him with one arm just below her chest. “I love you, Jack,” she said again. “I love you, Jack Junior.” She twisted her wrist and pointed the barrel of the pistol over the deep purple ‘J’ in Junior, centered on his heart. She fired. She held onto the baby as she dropped. She heard the women whisper their gratitude as she fell. Young voices. Old. Another. And another. Then they fell quiet. A soft silence. Freedom.
Enough was enough.
Lisa Lebduska
Confessions in Canyonlands
All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it.Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.Joy Harjo, "Remember"
We sped from Salt Lake City in a rented car, gnawing on Twizzlers and searching the horizon for spectacle or calamity, but spotting only dusty cows tearing at dusty grass. My husband, Steven, drove along the fast, searing highway, arguing with the GPS while I speculated about roadkill. We had rejected podcasts and books-on-tape, but I realized, with guilt, that I was hoping a creature would descend from the sky or burst from the land. Before we returned home, I would get my wish, but not in the form I envisioned.
When we reached Arches National Park in Moab, the Memorial Day line of cars at the entrance gave it a Disneyland feel that intensified once we hiked to the top of the trail, where haphazard rows of visitors stood like cactus in the wild. They were waiting to snap photos under Delicate Arch, the giant orange stone crescent of desktop wallpaper fame. Everyone took a turn capturing the moment on their phones, back-bending to mimic the curve of the ancient arch and leaping to be caught in planned spontaneity. We watched the scene from a sandstone perch a hundred yards away, listening to a man whose pink face glistened as he patted his round belly and joked, "This is actually a fat-suit I wore so everyone else wouldn't feel bad about themselves." I half-smiled, impatient to leave Arches for the lesser-known Horseshoe Canyon and its rock paintings of large, ghostly figures that Edward Abbey had described as "sinister and supernatural." The pictographs were nothing like the dancing kokopelli of pop culture and nothing like the ancient art I'd seen anywhere else. They beckoned me to my childhood.
On the high maple dresser in my dead grandmother's bedroom, her photograph and three statues stood guard: the Virgin Mary, Saint Anthony, and Saint Michael, who pressed his spear against the torso of the angry red Devil lying at his feet. My mother told me that Mary and the saints, along with my grandmother, would watch over me, no matter what life threw my way. When I was eight, she instructed me in tending to this bureau altar, which held a white votive candle in a blood-red glass that rested on a small square of marble. The candle burned out every two days, and it was my responsibility to discard the candle's tiny foil base, scrape accumulated wax from the glass, and install a fresh candle. As I set up the candle, I said hello to my grandmother, then recited a quick Hail Mary, all the while peeking at the vanquished Devil, knowing that that Grandma and Mary would protect me from his poisonous evil.
In graduate school, I held on to my grandmother's presence, even as I allowed Marx and his disciples to persuade me that religion anesthetized the masses. Over a dinner of spaghetti and chianti at my dissertation adviser's house, I laughed along as we passed around a nun doll that boxed, never daring to confess that I still talked to my grandmother, wherever she was, and that I had experienced, firsthand, the grace of hospice nuns who had nursed my dying grandfather. The words to say such things to the sharp, critical thinkers I wanted to join aborted themselves in my throat. Such a confession, I feared, would have gotten me bounced and branded a naïve victim trapped in a homely, kitchen orbit that blinded me to the conditions of my oppression. I felt trapped by the possibility that faith had bound women in my family to impossible conditions, preventing them from rising up.
Thousands of years before my mother held her own mother's hand for the last time, before Georgia O'Keefe glimpsed a desert flower, and before Sandro Botticelli dreamt about Venus, people sought out caves and alcoves to communicate with life beyond flesh, abrading the walls to create sheltered canvases of stone. They crushed rocks into powder and mixed it with blood to make paint that they applied with strips of yucca and the tips of their fingers. Some hollowed out the bones of birds and blew the paint through the bones, creating a veil of color. Some used stone knives to carve into the paint; others chiseled first and then painted into the etchings to make antelope, mountain sheep, snakes, hunters, and kaleidoscopic circles. In Horseshoe Canyon, they fashioned figures that were human-like, "anthropomorphs," as Western outsiders called them, with giant circle eyes peering out from skull-shaped heads and appendage-less bodies draped in long robes.
They did all this well before European invaders would murder their descendants, turn land into "property," and attempt to erase all trace of their descendants' culture and language and life.
These blood-and-stone pictographs (paint only) and petroglyphs (etched) withstood assaults from sun and wind for thousands of years, protected by the same arid air that parched throats and dried eyes into sandy blinking. Without debate or ecclesiastical corruption, the air preserved the pictographs, consecrating land into space that was neither church nor museum. In 1971, the ancient paintings attracted the attention of those who declared Horseshoe Canyon an additional unit of Canyonlands, making it a national park. The images that had guarded the canyon for centuries protected it, to a point. Even now vandals graffiti and hurl stones at them, the sun drains them of color, and sand-strewn wind beats at their shapes, calling them back to their particle origins. Slowly, the pictographs are succumbing to nature's stubborn insistence on the world's mutability and colonizers' quest to make their mark by destruction.
Steven and I thought only about getting there before it all disappeared in a pilgrimage to bear witness.
When we visit a national park, we embrace a collective sense of vanishing. Signs plead with hikers to stay on the trail, to refrain from taking anything (rocks, feathers, flowers), to bring out whatever they bring in, and not to touch. In the desert these admonitions carry additional urgency. A single, off-trail bootstep crushes fragile desert crust that could take decades to rebuild; a scintilla of oil from the fingertips destroys the paint of an ancient epoch. We hike the parks to achieve the impossible: to observe a place and leave it unchanged, as if we had never been there, to see without disrupting, to tell Heisenberg and his heirs that they were wrong. We wander as ghosts, rendering self-effacement our greatest sign of care, an odd gesture in an age of self-circulation.
As we drove, I read about the trail leading to the pictographs and fought the pony kicks of my heart. All the guides classified it as "Difficult," detailing long slogs through sand, rocky terrain, and steep climbs with little shelter. While Steven is an avid mountain biker with the cardio capacity of an Iditarod malamute, I will never cry, "Feel the Burn!" outside of a kitchen. But I am a saver, a compulsive protector of objects from the past, and I wanted to see the images that had survived without someone tending their altar. More than that, I wanted to pay respects to a place that had fused nature, culture, and a painful history that beats on.
Once we arrived at the Horseshoe Canyon trailhead by car, we needed to hike a 700-foot descent across slickrock to the canyon floor and then slog an additional three-and-a-half miles through sand. If I could complete the journey without quitting because I was dehydrated or scared or just plain tired, I would see the pictographs as close as the people who had created them. I would witness the creations of people who lived thousands of years ago, people to whom my air-conditioned life would be alien. What had they wanted to say? Could I ever know? Could I ever understand?
The closer we got to our destination, the bigger the IF grew, as is the case with most travel, which strips us of the identity-camouflage that routine and home provide, where we no longer need to see our surroundings or ponder our decisions because we have made our choices, and find it easier to continue, without stopping to reflect. Routine provides the comforting embrace of a well-worn chair. We sink into its cushion knowing there will be no surprises, no scorpion question of "Have I made the right choices?" that reflection insists we grasp, sting be damned.
Travelling forces our gaze to a giant mirror that intensifies its watch when we hike, where we confront a moment-by-moment examination of choices. We navigate unfamiliar surroundings, propel ourselves through them, pay attention to the immediate needs of our bodies and our minds, and stay alert to the unknown. Distracted hiking can kill you. Each step is chosen. We look for the place that offers the firmest footing, look ahead to see where the trail leads at the same time we look at what surrounds us—an ankle-wrenching rock or gully; ball bearing pebble that slides like a possessed skateboard; fire ants hungry for flesh. Miss these and break a leg, wound your pride, curse your own burning skin. But exercise caution to the exclusion of all else and starve the spirit, miss the mottled ground squirrel snatching a grasshopper, the neon pink blaze of cactus flower, the iridescent lapis flickering on the tail of a Steller’s jay. Fear blinds, on the trail and in life. I wished to shed that fear, an exhausted carapace.
*
After an overnight stay in a cabin in Hanksville, most famous for being a supply stopover for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, we headed out just as pale light from the sun washed everything in shell pink. Awakened too early, the Prius groaned and struggled to negotiate the first unpaved road leading to the canyon. Ridged sand had drifted too high, and the risk of our getting stuck, without cell service, increased with each minute. We turned back and headed for Route 24, the only other road that would take us to the canyon. It had been graded, enough, we hoped, to allow us to pass. But thirty-two miles of sand lay ahead of us, and its gritty fingers swirled in the air, seeking out the vents, menacing the straining engine. A pronghorn raced past on the side as we steered through the bumps and ridges of the washboard, throwing torrents of dust and pebble that ricocheted off the windows and doors. With each bounce I ducked and grabbed the passenger handle, as if I were sitting atop a jackhammer. We were getting closer to the trailhead, to paintings that someone had left to the world—time capsules that were thousands of years old.
After thirty minutes of rumble riding, we pulled into a parking area holding only two other cars, a privy, and an information kiosk with a registry that asked us to list our names, place of origin, number of people in our party, and comments. Key information if we did not make it back. I signed in, perused the list of hikers, and saw that "Sandy" had registered as a party of one, along with the comment "Happy Birthday!" I wanted to meet the woman who would hike seven miles roundtrip, alone in an empty canyon in a daring act of celebration. I felt courageous for having come this far, though Steven carried all of our water and navigated us through the twists of the canyon. My internal compass is permanently set on wander, and this time we needed to arrive. The destination mattered more than the journey.
We inventoried the supplies that Steven would lug: two gallons of water, dried cranberries and peanuts, Band-Aids, sunscreen, compass, matches, and a flashlight in case we got trapped in the canyon after sunset. It felt like light travel, but I was not carrying anything.
After snaking our way through the zigzag trailhead fencing, which consisted of three splintering wooden posts of twisted juniper and a metal gate—remnants from the days when ranchers drove cattle into the canyon for water—we stopped at a large wood-burned sign: "Help protect your archeological resources” and “Please don’t touch." Human oils can destroy what human hands have wrought, and the sign's author must have known the seductive power of ancient art, because next to the first warning, neatly tacked to the bottom right corner, was a separate sign warning, "Not even once." Unlike pictographs in other areas, the pictographs of Horseshoe Canyon are entirely exposed, unprotected by plexiglass or fencing. Only the better angels of our nature guard this ancient gallery, but even better angels tend to stray.
Following one final slather of sunscreen, I feigned courage and led us down the dirt footpath, then scrambled across the slickrock, skittering skinny lizards as sun bounced off every hard surface in gradations of beige and gray, dotted with green. After a few minutes, a lone, long-legged hiker came into view. She wore wide cargo shorts and carried a tall staff that she gripped with fingers ringed with serpentine silver. A broad-brimmed olive hat shaded a tanned, lined face that smiled in greeting. Having spent hours breaking in my own ankle boots, I winced when I looked at the sandals on her feet, and the single toe that sported a ring with a dot of turquoise.
"Is today your birthday?" I asked.
"It is," she said.
"Happy Birthday, Sandy!" I had been dying to say that.
She thanked me, then asked if it was our first time in the canyon. Looking out and down across the rugged terrain, she said, "It’s worth it. I was here for Christmas, eight years ago, after I had my first knee replacement."
It's worth it. She had spoken the Utah incantation, which we'd heard from others as they returned from hikes that we’d just begun. The first time someone said, "it's worth it," I worried that they'd read me as a quitter, betrayed by flushed cheeks suggesting I would soon throw it all in for a tall one at the Rusty Spur. They wanted, I guessed, to encourage a weakling. But as we covered more miles of trails, I heard people saying it to hikers with muscled glutes and easy breathing. It was worth it falls now on my ears as a benediction. I take no offense. No twisted ankle, bruised back or broken heart can diminish a journey of meaning, on the trail and in life.
We bid Sandy farewell and continued our scramble down into the canyon, slogging our way through the mostly dry bed of Barrier Creek, winding around deep-green junipers that send their roots hundreds of feet below us in search of water, their twisted gray bark a contortion concession to the arid air.
"There it is." Steven had spotted the High Gallery, the first panel of pictographs. Well beyond our reach, twenty or so elongated figures painted in translucent russet floated high above on the rock wall in long, dark robes. They had hairless, skull-shaped heads, no arms, and shoulders that sloped down into triangular bodies. One shorter, rounder figure had an oval torso with an upside-down U painted on it, an intestinal loop, providing a glimpse into its mysterious insides. A bee, a dog, and a fading sheep frolicked around them as a paramecium-shaped figure with ten legs and a tail sat suspended in the middle.
Whose visions, whose dreams, whose prayers were these? What whispers, what tears, what imploring had they received? The mouthless figures stared out silently and self-contained, their arms missing or hidden under their blanket-cloaks—no gesture of embracing or reaching out—headed perhaps on some lonely journey, together but alone. I smiled at the thought of my grandmother, who no doubt would have said that they needed some bread, whose life in the next world I had always pictured filled with people and laughter and just a lecture or two for my grandfather about not spilling sauce on his shirt.
I searched the inscrutable stone faces for a sign or clue; I looked at the sky, hoping that a whispered spirit message in the form of a bird or movement in the clouds would arrive, affirming that my grandmother was there. None came. Looking at the paintings, I understood that I would never understand, though they filled me with a wistfulness to reach someone who was no longer here. I could have stared up at the figures for the rest of the day, but The Great Gallery, the largest of the pictograph panels, awaited as did the return trip and inevitable darkness.
As we walked I thought about the painters who had lived in the canyon—shaman, maybe—who took spiritual journeys or as some suppose, acted as threshold guardians between this life and the next. The act of painting itself might have been a ceremony, a way of communicating with the spirit world or of calling it forth. Perhaps they created something that they visited each day, or maybe they had made images that they visited only on pilgrimages or during times of trouble and sorrow.
I wondered how the painters had managed—likely with fewer calories in a day than I had consumed in ten minutes—and with far more weight to carry as they selected the right rocks, made paint, and traveled from their own immediate senses to contact a world beyond the flesh. Did they plan their painting, sketch in sand the possibilities, beg the gods to steady their hands and guide their minds? Did they talk with others of what they might do or share with them the visions of their nights? I saw them sleeping soundly against the sun-worn rock each night, knowing that they had made something that would assure them and their kin passage into the next life, that now watched over them, an eternal legacy for the generations to follow. Did they speak about what they had created? Perhaps they had no words for what they knew. Or perhaps they did not need them. That I could understand. My body posed its own question: did they ever stop to rest?
My back and legs ached as my feet burned from hot sand that poured into my hiking shoes, and I could not slake the thirst or stubborn heat that sat on me. As we rounded a bend, my body continued to assert itself, but I saw something that made me stop caring about the limits of my own physicality.
Spread across 300 feet of sandstone, eighty anthropomorphic figures floated in contemplation, their bodies draped in cloaks of elaborate lined patterns, snakes and turtles. Some looked like the figures in the High Gallery, with giant round eyes and skull-shaped heads. Some had no facial features at all. A small pair of human figures with arms and legs faced a spear poised between them. The bodies stretched out across the length of the panel, an elaborate mural of humans, spirits and animals.
Toward the left of the panel, stoic and silent, an eight-foot-tall anthropomorph, dubbed by White descendants the Holy Ghost, towered above all the other figures, which were a good two feet shorter. A crown sat on his head and he looked out with large circle eyes. Four long lines ran from his head to the middle of his torso, beard-like. Small snakes, birds, and four-legged animals hovered around the cluster. Other shorter, more elongated figures clustered around him, and in the background more elongated figures seem to float toward him. To the right, more cloaked figures with sloping shoulders stretched out across the panel. One figure had a head balanced on four lines instead of a neck, a small white animal figure resting on one of his broad white shoulders, and a corresponding black figure resting on the other.
Dozens of figures draped in cloaks patterned with stripes and dots and zigzags stretched out across the panel, and here, in the sunbeaten rock, with faded browns and russets, the figures somehow dazzled, a stone tapestry of human belief.
My academic training evaporated in the canyon sun, under the heat of the drama before me, and I could think only of the bureau altar in my grandmother's bedroom. Like the serpents in a shaman's hands, my curiosity should have traveled to or emanated from my mind, yet all I could do, in the moment of standing there, was to feel a tightness in my throat that I recognized. There, in front of that alcove, I wanted simply to sit and take it all in, and I hoped that thousands of people for thousands of years before me had felt the same way.
Eighty feet from the panel rested a long log, cut in half and planed to make a rustic bench in the patchy shade of a cottonwood. Two latched steel boxes sat within reach of the bench, one of which was stenciled with the words "OPEN ME. BINOCULARS." If it had said DRINK ME I would have gulped the elixir down in a single swig. I reached in and pulled out a set of heavy binoculars with "U.S. Navy 1943" stamped on them, attached to the box with a long steel chain. Seventy-five years ago, someone had intended for others to share the sublime power of these images.
Lifting the binoculars to my eyes and pointing at the figures, I dialed the magnification until I could see the figures even more clearly and then focus on faint etching that my naked eye could not decipher. I scowled as I made out printed letters: "Albert Weber Aug 8 1920" and "Bud Vance 1904." Cowboys who traveled through the canyon, watering their steer, had graffitied the wall. I doubted they would have carved their names into a church door and yet here they were. They had hijacked a visual prayer in their own bid for eternity.
Later, as I searched for answers about Albert and Vance, I at first felt vindicated by a German blogger who wrote, "Albert Weber, Schäm dich!" Shame on you, Albert Weber. As I dug, I learned that Weber’s family owned a campground and restaurant in nearby Hanksville, and he worked a variety of trail jobs that included helping to survey the canyon. I thought for a long while about them, what it must have felt riding long hot days with little or no human company. I can't know what they thought any more than I can know the intentions of the peoples who painted the immortals onto the face of the canyon. What did Albert and Bud wish to claim by placing their names here, among the spirits? They must have understood that they were in the presence of something extraordinary, something that would outlast life as they knew it. They left the paintings intact, adding their names as a coda. How did they differ from the successive tribes who had painted over the pictographs with their own images? And how did they differ from me? Albert’s and Bud's lives were as unknowable to me, in any deep sense, as the native peoples'. I had to make my peace with that. The miracle I witnessed was a miracle of human communication, of a desire to say something that outlasted these beautiful fragile bodies of ours. But it could not erase the brutal history that Albert, Bud and I inherited.
To place this panel within the context of Western understanding, David Sucec called this largest panel The Sistine Chapel of Utah. It would have been more accurate, though, to refer to the Sistine Chapel as "The Great Gallery of Rome." The beleaguered Michelangelo, tormented by his patron Pope Julius II, also held a vision of life beyond the flesh and made a world as much as he represented one. The pilgrims descend on Rome without hiking boots or water bottles, but like hikers in the canyon they seek evidence of people transcending their earthly limits and imagining what lies ahead of us all. Yet we cannot allow the quest for beyond to blind us to the ground of the before.
In 1941, the Museum of Modern Art staged its own form of heresy by hosting three floors of Indian Art, with a full-scale replica of the Great Gallery as its centerpiece—at a time when few in the Anglo art world considered works by native peoples art. The curator attempted to recreate the experience of seeing the Great Gallery by placing the replica on a large curved wall, in its own space, and the exhibit was well received. But to take the figures from their living context reduces them to lines and figures and pigments. Gallery exhibits wilt next to the experience of this panel in its canyon home among the pinon pines. This is no museum of stale steady light and filtered air. Dappled sun, yucca spikes and raven song surround the figures. No guards wearing navy jackets, headsets and bland smiles; no restless school children or well-informed seniors wearing stylish spectacles as they peer at glossy brochures; no gift shops stuffed with refrigerator magnets and puzzles. The paintings must be seen—no, experienced—exactly where they are. No replica, no photograph, nor essay, even, can convey them. They must remain, just where they are, changing as they are, with each passing tribe or individual or ray of light. And there are those, I imagine, who would argue that they should not be seen at all.
Can we ever see or read or touch or glimpse without objectifying? Should we even try? To what purpose?
Later I discovered that western anthropologists refer to the figures, unique in their other-worldliness, as Barrier Canyon style, after the canyon's former name. The images, miraculously, are perfectly symmetrical. If they were folded in half, one side would match to the other in heavenly balance. No one agrees about who made the paintings, though most agree that several groups associated with the canyon, Desert Archaic, Fremont and Ute, contributed. We know that more than one group or individual painted the panel, that some figures have been painted over with newer figures, and that other figures were added, in their own spaces, creating a layered mural of spiritual humanity.
In a mystery that delights me, no one can say, definitively, why the paintings were made or what they are trying to say. Even the most straightforward of all questions—how old are they?—remains unanswered because of carbon contamination from the bedrock beneath it. While some geologists have turned to dating rock fall events as proof that the panels cannot be more than two thousand years old, others have responded with clay figurines found in nearby caves, in styles similar to the paintings, and dating as far back as ten thousand years ago.
We see what we wish to see, drawing on our own dreams, fears, sciences and catechisms. The possibilities of the pictographs' meaning abound, from mostly utilitarian—marking a territory or recording a night sky event—to more mystical, the work of shamans reporting on hallucinogen-induced journeys to the spirit world.
The canyon had not finished its lesson. Walking out, achy, parched, and dusty, we faced three-and-one-half miles of sand slog in the itchy stickiness of clothing damp with sweat. We followed the trail easily enough, but I did not see what lay in front of us, only what I had seen, until I heard a long, off-key trumpet reverberating off the canyon walls. No other hikers had appeared, so I didn’t know what to think as I whipped around and looked back at an intersection of another spur of the canyon. A plump white burro dotted with chips of black sprinkled across her flanks, stood nursing a hungry white foal. She stared at us, her ears pricked high in indignant triangles. She never ran. She might have brayed to warn others or to ward us off; I think, though, that she wanted to call us back, to say, "Fools! Look what you might have missed." We gazed for a long while as the foal glanced up, unconcerned, and resumed its meal.
Robert Frost’s "Two Look at Two," in which two lovers encounter a doe and a buck in a field, came to me, a whispered memory:
Two had seen two, whichever side you spoke from.
'This must be all.' It was all. Still they stood,
A great wave from it going over them,
As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor
Had made them certain earth returned their love.The senses of the poem broke before me. I would never know the ancient paintings as their creators had, but I could rest my eyes with them.
The paintings defy the tidy confines of starched intellectual boxes. I rue the limits of my own lenses, the Western clouds in my eyes because they prevent me from seeing these paintings as their creators did. I cannot see them, or claim to see them, as modern native peoples do. All I can do is recognize that what they mean to me, they mean through a conquest legacy that my white embodiment can never disinherit. I continue to reach for something beyond that body, beyond that magnificent flesh that burns and aches and grows weary, but also that inhales sweet cedar and hears bubbling creek. This body exists and stays present, in the here and now, written by a history that shapes all that descends from the sky and bursts from the land. I remember.
Harriet Levin Millan
You Drove MeGreasy water seeped across the black and white checkerboard floor, flooding the kitchen with the force of a river overtaking a swamp, steamy heat rising up from beneath it—so much water it seemed like egrets flocked there and spawned their offspring in it.
Not again, Marol said under his breath. “What did you do, Mama?” He was ten years old, tall like his father was.
He hasn’t remembered, she thought.
“Be patient with your mother,” her brother had asked.
She watched Marol spring off the couch. He ran to the linen closet, filled his arms with bath towels and threw the entire heap onto the floor. He clattered open cabinets, grabbing their two biggest pots—gifts from their Immigration sponsors—for wringing out the towels.
After the floor was dry, he helped her load the towels into the washing machine. She was careful not to drip any water on Marol’s school uniform that she’d pressed with a hot iron and folded into a perfect square on top of it. Back home, boys Marol’s age enlisted in the rebel army to receive such a uniform. These were the things that felt impossibly heavy, both the towels saturated with water and the iron when she held it, but also Marol’s clothing, light as it weighed.
She watched him stand in front of the window, looking as far as his eyes could take him. Across the highway was a car dealership. The blue and white Lexus sign shimmered through the night. Car headlights trailed one another on the four-lane, swooshing along the perfectly paved surface.
“You need to get a driver’s license,” Marol said.
The windowpane clattered, the sky a black dissolve. If it weren’t for the road lights and the cars and the Lexus sign, he’d have been looking into his own eyes in his face reflected on the window, which he looked into too, but didn’t see in it the faces of the people he resembled—faces she saw. “I don’t speak with an Australian accent,” she told him.
“You don’t need an Australian accent to learn driving.”
“You need a car to learn driving.”
“You can use Uncle Acheng’s.”
Her brother lived an hour’s ride along the coast, with his one surviving wife he married at Kakuma, where she gave him three children. Used to be that they talked in his hut or under a Kakuma tree. She lived in the camp for five years before he found her squatting on the ground, tending to her roadside patch of kedeke tea. He looked like a lot of the men in the camp, thin and frail, the whites of their eyes speckled red from all the dust, yet still with that lusty gaze, staring and staring at her. Marol had seen him staring too, as if she were his. Then he came toward her, her brother, running from across the road.
Where would she go in a car? As it was, she looked for excuses to use up the time when Marol was at school. She occupied herself with her chores. Buying groceries was one of them. Grolicki’s Deli and Liquor was close enough to go several times in a day. Bells chimed when she opened the door and greeted Mrs. Grolicki, a woman not much older than she was, with thinning red hair, standing behind the counter preening in a skirt and high heel shoes.
A woman like Mrs. Grolicki knew how to drive. The license plate on her red sports car parked in her special spot outside her deli, had the word LUKY written on it, as if all her good luck depended on knowing the secret whereabouts of the missing letter C. This secret instructed her on what clothes to wear and what foods to keep stocked. She believed that Marol knew these things too, knew his mother had no luck and could make no choices, and that he wanted her to be this woman.
Marol reached down and grabbed the two pots and clanged them together. The noise was unbearable. It vibrated in her chest, haunted her that sound. She covered her ears with her hands and asked him to stop. After he did, and after he walked out of the room, she still heard it, heard it as clearly as when the first tanks marched into their fields and the first rifles fired.
She found Marol lying on the couch under the ceiling fan. Tense, not knowing what to say to him, she sat down on the other end, resting her head against the embroidered cloth on the armrest that she stitched herself, finding solace those first days of their arrival in pulling a kurchelei through cloth the same way her mother taught her when she was too small to weave a simple handkerchief without her help.
Marol signaled with his eyes at the driver’s education manual that their caseworker left in a folder on the coffee table with a pamphlet called Sun Smart.
She picked up Sun Smart, turned to a page and read: “The destruction of the ozone layer has been identified as the most important environmental issue facing Australia.” Still holding the pamphlet, she stared up at the stark white ceiling. She didn’t think it was her imagination. The cracks looked wider and she knew the reason. Marol’s teacher had explained to her about the hole in the sky over Brisbane. ‘Marol will not be allowed into the schoolyard without a hat on his head,’ his teacher had told her. She imagined the sun sinking through the ceiling, vultures flying through the opening, carrying flesh in their beaks, as muffled rap music stole into the room.
She glanced at the TV screen where a city lit up at night appeared on Marol’s Xbox game. A man who looked drunk sat with his chest flopped against the wheel of a car. Another man rushed out of a building and ran toward him. Both wore short leather jackets, their faces lean but restless like the faces of men rounding up people to kill. The second guy got into the first guy’s car and took over at the wheel. Car wheels screeched as their car raced through the streets, smashed into other cars to move them out of the way, rammed into the guardrails on bridges, entered a park, drove up on the walkways and knocked down pedestrians.
She screamed.
“It’s not real.” Marol laughed.
“It looks real.”
“It’s not. Come on,” he said, passing her his extra controller. “Play with me. I’ll teach you.”
She gripped the controller and looked at the image of the park on the screen. It resembled Brisbane’s with a river running through it. So many tall buildings on its banks, haunting her with the sensation of people behind their windows watching. It made her think of walking through the bush during the fighting between the North and South, not knowing if militiamen would step out from behind the trees. Sirens wailed and machine gun fire shot across the screen.
She dropped her controller. She never wanted her brother to present Marol with this Xbox. “Where did you get this game?” she asked Marol. As a compromise, she only agreed to Marol playing sports games the day her brother had walked in with a giant carton under his arm.
Her brother pulled off the tape and opened the flaps on the carton and Marol reached in, spilling Styrofoam packing material, along with strips of tape snaking onto the floor that she later needed to sweep up.
“I borrowed it from a kid at school,” Marol said, his eyes fixed on the screen.
“Give it back. Aca kor. It’s violent.”
“Look,” he said, pointing to the orange X on the controller. “That’s the X button, and this one is the triangle button, the square button and the arrows to choose different options like exchanging your machine gun for a pistol.”
“Machine guns? Pistols?” She pointed to the two black buttons on the bottom. “What are these for?”
“That's the joystick. The one on the left can move you and the right changes the camera so you can see from a different angle.”
She picked up her controller. “Joystick? Is that its real name?”
“Yes, why?”
It didn’t seem possible that she could touch a button and joy flow through her fingers. The joy of feeling her first-born’s chubby baby hand resting in the small of her back. Or feeling her husband’s touch. She’d never again hear his foot soles slap down on soil. If she kept her finger on these buttons, would she one day sense joy, a feeling she’d buried?
She pressed a button and her car on the screen bucked forward. She pressed another button and made her car go faster. Her car crashed into a police car. Up ahead was an enormous car crash with at least five cars piled up. She was going too fast to avoid them. Police cars followed behind her. Sirens shrieked amid the rap music. Her car knocked into the other cars to get around them and continue down the road, but fire rose from its rear and slowly spread. Her car exploded into flames as parts flew into the air.
She released the button, threw down her controller and pulled her scarf over her ears. Marol didn’t flinch. The explosion didn’t have the same effect on him. His car zipped around corners and zoomed through tunnels and over bridges. “It’s all right. You’ll get it. Be patient,” he said.
“It’s time to do your homework,” she told him.
“It’s all finished.”
“That’s enough. I don’t want you to play this anymore.”
“It’s not just a game. It’s something to talk about with people at school.” He used the same argument as her brother. “FIFA vs. Pro Evolution Soccer,” her brother assured her. Marol still corresponded with some of his soccer teammates from Kakuma on Facebook. She’d catch him staring at their team photo while his lips moved and he called their names one by one: Reith…Coolkatt… Maker… Thon…PapaJohnny… Icarus…Kuol. At Kakuma, their playing field had been dry cracked earth soiled with camel dung.
Schoolwork took up some of Marol’s time, but he spent most of it alone. Her brother convinced her that playing Xbox would help him make friends faster. “I’m trying to build my friend list,” Marol said. They were people he invited to play with him online. He showed her the Select Friends button and the field on the screen to type in a Friend Request. She watched him type, I'm looking for some chill dudes to play with.”
“What are you doing? You don’t know these people. These people can be murderers.”
“They can’t hurt me on the internet,” he said.
*
She still woke with the sun. She lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and searched for openings. She had done the same under a thatched roof hut during the war, as bombs exploded, and it was still the same with no bomb.
Marol was awake when she walked into the living room in her sleeping gown. He was dressed in his khaki-colored school uniform, lying on the couch with the TV volume turned down low, playing his Xbox. He reminded her of boys back in the village who couldn’t sleep in anticipation of a hunting trip, when she woke to start the tea kettle for her husband in the early days of their marriage, and they’d be spread out around the compound sitting on low wooden stools, sharpening arrows against a piece of stone. Maybe it was normal for a boy’s blood to thicken with the thrill of the game. She suggested to Marol that if he woke early he should be finishing his homework. She filled the kettle with tap water, put the kettle on the stove and turned the knob beneath the fire.
Morning birds chirped in the tops of trees, alien creatures like the cockatoo that opened its mouths to speak to her from the branch outside the door. She clenched her jaw. It was like it grabbed onto that branch to show her something. It had to be the soul of her dead. One morning she offered it a crust of bread, but it flew off, affronting her with its yellow eyes.
Marol had not heard her ask him to take out his schoolbooks. He had that focused look about him again, leaning forward toward the screen, tapping his fingers down on his controller. What was it about that game that made him forget everything? The game was the first thing he ran to in the morning and the last thing at night. When he played he didn’t request food or her attention or complain about living so far from home. She couldn’t think of a single thing except her grief that absorbed her as much as this game absorbed Marol. She’d sob. She’d picture her husband and her first-born son and she’d carry those pictures in her head, having the vague sense that the more grief she felt, the less likely she was to heal. the She was careful to put the fire on the lowest setting, before leaving the room to sit down on the couch beside Marol.
“Are you going to play with me, Mama?” Marol asked.
“No.”
“Just for a bit?”
“First, drink your tea.”
He nodded. She went back into the kitchen, turned off the burner and poured him a mug. She called it tea, but it was mostly milk and sugar.
“Here’s your controller,” he said, when she returned. He sipped from the mug she’d handed him. “Hit the X button,” he said.
She pressed the button and her car’s engine roared. This time three people were in it. They shot pedestrians out the windows and threw grenades into buildings. She watched them explode. A car of people rammed into her car, flipping it over. The people inside crawled out and ran for cover as the other car fired at them with machine guns. Her character escaped and found another car on the highway. He started it up and drove it over a ramp that led to an airfield. She raced onto the airfield and under the wheels of a plane, a police car racing behind her. She quieted her breath, lest the enemy surround her as she stepped forward onto dry grass and leaves.
“You’re doing great,” Marol said.
*
When she entered Grolicki’s Deli, she saw Mrs. Grolicki watching CNN from a television on the wall, the sound turned up so loud she heard the commentator say, “There’re people being mutilated everywhere. Bodies are being thrown around. We’re still uncovering survivors.”
Marol pulled on his mother’s arm. She never got to know whether the broadcast was about Sudan. He darted into an aisle. “Over here, Mama,” he insisted, looking like he might cry and pulling her toward an aisle stacked with colorful cardboard boxes. He reached for a box called Lucky Charms. The picture on the box showed a bowl filled with tiny marshmallow-shaped stars and moons.
She stood in front of the rows of boxes, bewildered. When she walked to the counter to pay Mrs. Grolicki for the cereal with her assistance coupon, Mrs. Grolicki had switched the program. A talk show host interviewed a woman with straight blond hair who sat across from him on a couch and laughed. Mrs. Grolicki asked Marol if this was the first time he was trying Lucky Charms. Marol smiled, the bloodstain on his front tooth exposed from the time back at the camp that a boy from another tribe threw a rock at him. “I’ve wanted to try it myself,” Mrs. Grolicki said. “Let me know how you like it.”
*
Usually she was the only walker. The other mothers drove their children to school, getting out of their cars to escort them from their parking spaces along the curb to the schoolyard. After she dropped off Marol, she took the long way home. As long as she kept walking, she could prolong entering the house alone.
She washed the breakfast dishes and put Marol’s Lucky Charms cereal back in the cabinet. She glanced over at Marol’s empty seat in front of the TV and the blank screen. Maybe Marol would show her more respect if she learned how to play. She was sure there were mothers who played Xbox with their sons. The women she’d seen in the school yard were too involved in their children’s lives to not participate in an activity that absorbed them for so many hours. She picked up the controller and pressed the X. It took her to a menu where the word ‘message’ was lit up. She pressed the X button again and some writing appeared on the screen. At first she thought she put it there herself. Then she realized that she hadn’t. It was from someone named ljl384999. Someone had answered Marol’s friend request. The tightness in her chest released. Why not? Marol played this game for hours. She had nothing else to do. No friends or relatives to visit. Her house cleaning chores were simple. She didn’t need to wait in line at a water tap or tend to a fire. “Rest,” her brother told her. “You can start looking for a job when you feel more comfortable here. Use this time to take care of yourself.”
She hit the play button. Lij284999 was entering a building. Her role was to stay outside and cover him while he went inside. Suddenly a police officer appeared. If she didn’t shoot him, he’d go after them. She pressed a button on the joystick to choose a machine gun and fire a barrage of bullets. Ljl384999 came back outside, his leather jacket opened to the collar, smiling and shaking his head. In that moment, he could have been anyone risen from the dead, remote and grateful, granting her his presence. A car appeared out from nowhere about to run her over. She pressed another button on the joystick and changed the view to a side angle, managing to change her car’s position and save herself.
Marol’s friend, she discovered, logged on every morning at 9:20 a.m. After taking Marol to school, she walked home quickly, getting back in time to clean the breakfast dishes and make the beds before she logged on. She tried to picture what Ljl384999 looked like. At first she gave him blonde hair and blue eyes, then she realized she didn’t need to bestow him with Australian features. She imagined him with the features of her first-born son. When she held the joystick, and made the characters on the screen move, her fingers pulsed with his life. Now, as the hours passed, she was filled with an energy, sitting barefoot on the edge of the couch, warm sunlight shimmering in the corners.
Marol didn’t suspect that she played and she wondered if he could see the change in her. She didn’t want him to tell him. She wanted him to discover it on his own. She wanted him to notice how much happier she was and how much better she was adjusting. No more emergencies. No more water overflowing at the sink or flooding the floor. The next day in the schoolyard she tested herself. She approached Marol’s teacher.
“Hello.”
“Good day, Mrs. Jok. I’ve been meaning to talk with you,” Marol’s teacher said.
“Yes?”
“Parents will be coming to school this afternoon for book club. Marol has told me that he would like you to come.”
She smiled to hide her embarrassment and pulled at the edges of her shawl. “Marol has not mentioned book club to me,” she said.
Marol’s teacher reddened apologetically, opened up a folder and offered her a letter. “I’m sure this exact letter is lying in the bottom of Marol’s backpack. This is why I tell my mothers to go through their children’s backpacks every single night, especially the mothers of my boys.” She handed Mrs. Jok the letter. She reached for it with shaking hands. She opened it and read it. “Please join us this afternoon,” Marol’s teacher said.
Her face burned with shame. “I will. Thank you for your invitation.”
There were all the other mothers. Books in their arms. She rushed past them, blind to the row of cars parked along the curb. She walked two steps at a time, elongating her stride, stealing the final seconds on the cross signals.
She reached the house and opened the door. Not knowing what else to do, she turned on the Xbox. Marol’s teacher was probably correct, she reasoned. He forgot to mention book club. Why would he not want his mother to come to class with the other mothers? He knew how she starved for companionship. Her anxiety faded as the electricity animating the characters on the screen pulled her along and the game absorbed her. She smelled air filled with gunpowder and car exhaust, heard the rattle of car horns. She moved along the streets where she existed in the mind of Ljl384999 playing along beside her, posting their scores, reacting to his moves, moving inside him, with him.
She’d been playing for several hours when the door latch clicked open. Marol walked through.
“Yengo loi? What happened? Where were you? You were supposed to be at my school.”
It was after three o’clock. “Oh my God,” she said. “I totally forgot.” She scrambled up from the couch and walked toward him with the remote controller in her hand.
He laughed. “You’re playing Grand Theft Auto?”
She hurried toward the pantry where she’d saved a piece of kisra bread she’d baked two days ago. She opened the refrigerator where she’d stored lentil and spinach dip in a plastic container. She heated up the dip and spooned it into a bowl and placed it on the table. She asked Marol to sit down.
He switched on the ceiling fan in the living room, then entered the kitchen. His back was drenched in sweat from walking home with his books. He didn’t touch the dip, though it used to be one of his favorites. She’d noticed that he asked for store bought food more and more often. While he tore off pieces of kisra and brought it to his lips, she sat beside him, waiting for him to finish.
“You told my teacher you’d be at book club,” he said.
“I did. I don’t know where the time went. I’m sorry.”
“You were the only mother not there.”
“It was a mistake, one I will not make again. I’ll come next time.”
“What are you doing playing video games?”
“Its absorbing.”
“A mother playing videogames? I don’t want to see that.”
She backed away from him. He pushed out his chair, walked into his bedroom and slammed the door.
*
The next morning, determined not to disappoint Marol, she left the house. When the cockatoo opened its mouth as she walked down the front steps, she pretended she didn’t hear it. Careful not to step off the curb until the light changed to green, in defiance to Sun Smart’s warning, she enjoyed the feel of sunlight warming her head. Cars in both directions waited for her, as if receiving a guest. She took her time, scanning the cars for a familiar face, perhaps one of the mothers she saw in the schoolyard each morning. Women her age, wearing exercise outfits, dangling their car keys, standing at the fence, watching their children disappear inside.
As she passed Grolicki’s Deli, she saw that the lights were out and a typewritten paper posted on the door. It thanked Grolicki’s customers for their loyal business over the years. Why hadn’t Mrs. Grolicki warned her? If she had sold the store, wouldn’t she have bragged? She waited a few minutes to see if any other customers would arrive, and when none showed up, she peered through the glass looking for a clue. The store looked the same as it always did, except the door was locked and it was dark inside.
All that time she had envied Mrs. Grolicki and now she felt ashamed of herself. She hoped she didn’t read about her in the newspaper or see her face on the evening news, her beautiful red car smashed in a head-on, or maybe she’d suffered a heart attack or cancer. Now that she thought about it, her hair was unnaturally thin and she rarely came out from behind the counter. Adior’s own heart began to ache, longing for the musty smell inside Mrs. Grolicki’s grocery and the rows and rows of boxed foods Marol had yet to sample, stacked on the shelves.
If only she had realized that something was troubling Mrs. Grolicki. She’d fallen into the habit of not getting close to people and missed the cues. Yet what could she have done to help her, she reminded herself. Most likely Mrs. Grolicki had friends here and family, people in the position to pitch in. No, if Mrs. Grolicki had sorrows burning through the cloud cover, leaving an emptiness as big as the hole in the ozone layer over Brisbane, she could not help her.
She turned the corner and walked on until she reached the Lexus lot. Flags waved from plastic holders attached to the windows of shiny new cars. She pulled open the big glass door and felt herself being taken to a place of light. Light sparkled from the glass walls all around. The desks where the salesmen sat were empty, some strewn with piles of papers, work that someone left without finishing, as if they’d had to leave in a hurry.
Its doors flung open, its red paint glittering under the florescence, the car nearest the two-story glass wall in the front of the showroom was wrapped in a big gold ribbon. Wouldn’t Marol be happy if she drove home to him in this gift? To pull up in front of the house and beep the horn, calling him outside to see her seated at the wheel? He’d forgive her everything and love her again. They’d take a drive along the lit-up highway he stared at night after night.
She got closer and peered in at the black interior, the seats made of leather. She slid across to the driver’s seat. Marol had once shown her the pedals in her brother’s car, and she remembered which was the gas and which was the brake. She glided her fingers around the wheel. It was sticky from the last person who touched it.
She laughed to herself, maybe Marol had this in mind all along. From steering cars in the in the video game, she felt like she already knew how to drive. It would not be hard for her to get her license. She’d heard about a settlement of Dinka people in Melbourne. She’d drive toward forests and mountains and travel as her ancestors did, escaping drought and flood.
“Great invoice price with two-thousand extended warranty. If you’re buying with a trade-in, we offer financing.” A young, white salesman with long blond hair slicked back off his face stood at the open door, leaned in and smiled.
She didn’t look at him and she didn’t smile back. His breath of smelly cigarette tobacco reached her. Left with her silence, he extended his arm. “Sam Best,” he said. “Are you interested in buying or selling? I’ll need some identification, if you’d like to take it for a test drive.”
“Adior Jok,” she said. Her accent was a Kenyan accent.
He shrugged and shook his head, “Ma’am, can you repeat that?”
She’d encountered this reaction before. She showed him her identity card with her picture and name for him to read the letters and pronounce them any way he liked. He waved it away with the Lexus brochure he had picked up before talking to her. “Ma’am, I need a driver’s license.”
Instead of answering him, she felt herself being sucked into the dark interior.
The night of the attack, she ran toward the swamp with her first-born. He’d been sleeping beside her curled up on the goatskin that covered their sleeping platform. Her husband had not been sleeping in her hut that night. They were four wives total. It was not her turn. Her mother had taught her to show the other wives respect. When their hut caught fire, she ran toward the swamp with her first-born son. She didn’t lift him into her arms. He was lighter and faster than she was.
She ran behind him, looking back for soldiers. It looked like they were going to make it. They crossed her husband’s father’s fields, rutted with rotting stalks. The ragged shadows of the mangroves in sight, leaves flickered with tiny pulses. The sour odor of the swamp was near. Then she heard a quiet, whistling sound. Her son was now a good distance ahead of her.
“Run,” she shouted. He was far ahead now, almost there. The whistling grew closer.
“Run!” She screamed it again as her foot slammed against the sharp edge of a stalk. She caught herself. She didn’t fall, but the earth began to vibrate and the sound grew shrill. It was not a whistling anymore. It was a louder noise and then she knew. Earth splattered upward and fire rose between them, exploding in the air where he had stood.
Her son was too far ahead for her to swoop down and pick him up in her arms, but he had heard her voice. Even if she had been carrying him, she’d have put him down, because you can only hold onto someone for so long.
She hugged the steering wheel, clutching it tighter. Sam Best watched, allowing her this final embrace. She repeated her own words in her mind, run! and without thinking of where she could possibly run to, reached over and closed the door on the passenger side and after that, she closed the driver’s side door where Sam Best stood.
Sam Best shouted, rapped on the window, pulled the locked handle too late. It was an especially clear morning. The windshield like a gap through trees, granted her vision. She pressed the start button and pushed down on the gas pedal. As she inched forward, her fingers gripped the wheel, aching to the point of strain. She calibrated the weight with the balls of her foot and pressed down on the gas pedal through her big toe, trying not to breathe. The skin on her hands burned against the wheel, clammy and hot at the same time. The wheels squealed, lost traction, flew, and, even as she jolted the brake, smashed through the glass wall. The crash collided with her screams.
The car stopped moving. All at once, huge sheets of broken glass slipped down the windshield and shattered across the hood. The cry the glass made shrieked, not like a child who refuses sleep, but haunted, like his spirit. Not daring to move, lest more glass shatter, she lifted only her eyes, her first-born’s name on her lips in a moment of recognition that matched the one she experienced ten years ago after she called him and he could not respond. She leaned into the steering wheel with the metal Lexus emblem engraved in the center—the same symbol that had mesmerized Marol as it spun through air, boomeranged back and forward and back again, having come to rest finally, utterly exhausted, at her chest. And now with her eyes half-closed, she remembered what it felt like to bend over her first-born, when her breasts were engorged with milk, herself a young mother. Overwhelmed at what she sensed and remembered, her own breath came back to her in the short pants of someone recovering themselves after having expected to die. She had done it, the thing Marol was helping her to do all along. She had broken through the glass.
Sam Best shouted for her to come out of the car. He pulled on the door handle, motioning at her with his hands to unlock it. Other salesmen, dressed in suits, who should have showered her with attention when she first entered the showroom, looking for someone to assist her, ran forward and yelled at Sam Best to stand back from the car.
“Get back,” they shouted at him and surrounded it. “Stay still,” they whispered through the glass. “We are going to call an ambulance.”
More voices whispered, soft but formidable. She closed her eyes, not daring to move.
Babak Movahed
Salton SeaIt’s quiet, more than James remembers. There is only the rattle of the train slowly trudging along, cutting through the breeze. The boxcar’s rumble, a little massage, is the sole comfort in his otherwise long and exhausting journey. That’s to be expected, no one says jumping the cars is easy. James carefully stands up and walks over to the open panel. The horizon bleeds reds and oranges of a sun-drenched desert. Its heat creating waves of illusionary oceans, nonexistent waves, but still a soothing spectacle. Does it do that at the actual sea? He hadn’t noticed. James made the trip before, many times before, and never again since. In the 1970s, it was a calm drive in his oversized station wagon that he inevitably filled up: coolers, towels, chairs, umbrellas, and his family. James turns back and looks at the umbrella. Held up pretty well.
On the drives down, they’d listen to talk radio. The signals were shoddy, but Sarah and Max enjoyed performing their own lines between the static. Max was gifted, could’ve made a career as a commentator. And after laughing their heads off, they’d pull into the same parking lot, the one by a massive palm tree that had the best view of the Salton Sea. The kids would rush out of the car and toward their favorite spot. James and Vanessa always took their time, enjoying the blend of voices and sounds framed by a sun shining against a placid sea. They looked at each other and kissed before joining the kids on the beach.
James rubs his eyes. Aren’t what they use to be. His thumbs are damp from either the sweat forming in his wrinkles, or tears; he’s not sure. The train and vista are lulling James to sleep, but he fights it, he has to jump soon and needs his strength to withstand the fall. Pacing the car, James sees shades of the past flicker by. The snapshots are fading and despite his efforts to recall, he can only discern hazy abstractions of images from his once-cherished life.
Max stood in their usual spot. It wasn’t hard to find because it was sandwiched between the lifeguard booth and a misshapen rock. He never waited for James to set things down, just grabbed his board and darted into the water. Just like his favorite hero, the Flash, Max would be gone in an instant. Vanessa said that he couldn’t wait to get away from his mom and dad. Sarah would play in the sand at first, but that changed too. She wouldn’t rush into the water, but she’d still disappear, usually in a search for her friends, and even though it wasn’t the same, she too couldn’t wait to get away.
James would’ve kept drifting, but the smell brings him back. He’d read about it before starting this trek, but reading isn’t the same. The air rife with a stagnant sulfur odor, foul and ripe with decomposition, is the only unfamiliar feature to James. It was an aroma like saltwater and family. He pokes his head out, gazes down the tracks, and shudders at the vast expanse of blue. The sea has an aura of afterlife calm, a past miracle reduced to a facade masking a barren present.
There it is, the palm tree he’d grown so accustomed to seeing. James has never jumped off a moving train, but he figures he’s got a minute to take the plunge. He quickly tosses his few items and watches them crash into the dirt. James isn’t afraid of the drop. What’s there to fear anymore? And in a misguided attempt to roll out, James falls in a heap. A cloud of dust rises and settles on his inert body staring up into the sky. The clouds look beautiful passing overhead. When Max was a boy, he’d lie next to James on the beach and gaze up at the sky. They’d play their usual game of who can recognize the strangest animal. A giraffe with wings. A rabbit with a hat. And so on until Max’s imagination changed. He stopped seeing what wasn’t in the clouds and started dreaming about what he wanted. Maybe that was the beginning of it?
James didn’t see any fictional animals, no revelations from God, just an empty sky. He slowly rises and feels his shoulder. It’s throbbing and appears to be out of place, possibly dislocated, but that doesn’t matter. James grabs his pack and umbrella. He brushes the dust off the umbrella and walks over to the lifeguard booth. There’s a faint echo of cars in the distance, families going to Palm Springs or just the drifters that live out here. But the Salton Sea is abandoned, no place for even a vagrant passing through, no place for anyone.
James steps onto the beach and the smell fills his nostrils like a cartoon hand beckoning a character over to a delicious pie, but there’s nothing sweet on the other end, and the hand is a claw clutching James towards the putrid sulfur. He moves towards it nonetheless. There’s no returning, nothing to go back to, and nowhere else to be. Nostalgia is white noise in James’s mind, but his muscle memory senses its surroundings and leads the way. He passes the dead bushes and rattlesnake holes to the road directly adjacent to the Salton Sea Yacht Club. Hard to even fathom a yacht zipping around these forsaken waters. The face of the building is mostly intact, maybe one of the final vestiges of an era long deceased. There’s only a couple of broken windows and a few tags along the side walls. One is barely legible proclamation, “fuck life.” James nods his head.
He goes to the left toward what remains of the lifeguard booth. The path is littered with once-used objects of bygone beachgoers. There isn’t any trash of food or drinks. In its prime, the park rangers took pristine care to place numerous trash cans, but more importantly, all those that came to this idyllic oasis respected it enough to properly dispose of their garbage. James notices a deflated innertube, red, yellow, and white striped, still maintaining most of its color, but now speckled with soot. Sarah had one just like it. Her face was adorable whenever she did her best to inflate it. Those tiny lungs couldn’t completely fill it, but she would go on huffing and puffing the best she could. Sarah wasn’t even big enough for the damn tube! Didn’t matter though because it was her favorite and no matter how difficult, she was going into the water with it. Whatever happened to it? Must’ve been another thing that Sarah just tossed as she got older. It started with inconsequential things like innertubes, but with the lethal cocktail of time and contempt (a lot of it), Sarah had no problem leaving behind the belongings she loved.
James picks up the deflated tube, hooks his arm through its center, and continues towards the lifeguard tower. He glances over at the other beach items scattered about. Each of them is a story, but with every story there is an end and James doesn’t like any of their endings, so he continues on. Although the last stop is riddled with painful recollections, it’s the only place he needs to be, for himself, and for the few lingering vignettes from years gone.
He crosses the threshold from concrete road and parking lot into the beach. The stench of death is everywhere, but it’s nothing in comparison to the sights. The sand is a canvas brushed by innumerable bones, bones, and bones. They’re mostly of the fish, which unlike the people, couldn’t escape the sea’s inexorable end. James initially tries to avoid stepping on them, but a mere few feet make it apparent that avoiding the remains is a fruitless endeavor. James reaches a point close to the misshapen rock, the end of his travels. He runs his hand across the surface of the rock. James leans in and presses his head against it. He sees, not sure if he wanted to, but he sees Max: two years old, playing with the sand and a pail; six years old, throwing a Frisbee; nine years old, eating the sandwiches they bought from his favorite restaurant down the road; eleven years old, chasing after his sister with a handful of sand crabs—twelve, running into the water, twelve, swimming far out (so excited to show his improvement), a dot in the sea, an arm waving, a bobbing head—twelve dragged out, CPR—twelve carried off motionless, pale even against the white of the gurney.
James leaves the tears in his eyes, it’s harder to see, but he’s seen enough. He places down the umbrella and the innertube, takes off his shirt and shoes. Still. There’s a melody in the waves, a comfort in the decay, a home not for the living, but needing a life. James walks away from his family’s favorite spot and into water.
Heather Whited
James, My Wife TodayToday, James is my wife.
She looks good how she woke up today: fluffy black curls that spill down her back and amber eyes that sparkle even in the dark of a November morning. Her legs are long and lithe. She’s going to like this body, I think.
“Morning,” I say. She rolls over and turns to have a good look at me with her currently leonine eyes. Our bed is plush, a luxury we haven’t skimped on, and she looks over at me from the swells of a soft, white comforter.
“You’re a dude again,” she says.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Three days in a row.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s boring.”
This new body came with eyes that need glasses. I roll over and search the drawer on the bedside table until I find a pair that works for me. When I can see, I pull myself out of bed and head to the mirror, where James is already parked, her eyes bright with glee at what she sees. Today, I have hair almost to my shoulders, black and lush, though graying a bit. I don’t hate that though. An unexpected shock of elegance. A quick inspection of my feet shows me that today my second toes are longer than the big ones, which always sort of annoys me. The arches on these are flat too. At least the hair is fun.
The two of us move fast, especially when it comes to food, which we take very seriously. Soon, James is making coffee in the kitchen, wrapped in a long blue robe, still studying her new, cute face in the reflection of the toaster while the coffee percolates. Tongue out, elegant eyebrows raised, a grimace to inspect the teeth, which are slightly crooked, charming in that way a slight imperfection in what is otherwise a masterpiece often is. The toast pops up, and she grabs at it, like an animal that has been stalking prey and found its moment, slathering a mound of butter on and handing me the other piece as I approach.
Stretching and yawning as I take my first bites of food, I look out the window. It will still be dark for a few hours yet. The rain from last night has tapered off to a pleasant drizzle sparkling in the light that spills from the window out into the yard. It’s going to be a good day. I can feel it.
We eat a huge breakfast together, same as every morning. Getting a new body every day eats up a lot of energy and we often wake up dizzy from hunger, ravenous. I dream of food nearly every night. Burgers and bloody steaks, the crisp crunch of a fresh apple, the perfect amount of bitterness in a roasted Brussels sprout.
Breakfast is the meal we’re most eager for after hours of sleep. Sitting for meals isn’t necessary since it’s just the two of us, so we stand in the kitchen, backs against the counter, buttering slice after slice of toast, and guzzling glasses of milk. I pour the coffee. Today, James is a bit taller than I am and grins down at me and when I turn, she smacks me on the butt and calls me cute.
“I’m not arguing,” I say. I take a swig of sweet, milky coffee. “Have you seen this hair?”
James approaches me and takes a few thick fistfuls of that currently lustrous hair in her hands and gently tugs me toward her with a kiss. She tastes of butter.
I’m in charge of frying some bacon when the worst of hunger is satiated. James plucks bacon straight from the pan when it’s crisp and smiles as she eats, grease dribbling down her chin.
“That’s better,” she says after several slices of bacon, burping and giggling at herself, pert nose wrinkling. God, I really do love this face on her. I hope it’s one that comes back later. That doesn’t happen often, but it’s not unheard of. It’s happened twice to her and once to me. James always loves her days as a woman, no matter what body and face she ends up with. She’s slowly getting more and more of them. Usually it’s only one or two days a week as a man now, any more and she starts to get fidgety. The joy she shows makes every woman she’s ever been gorgeous. I’m not particular, I’d guess, mostly happy with whatever body I wind up with, especially the more experience I get with changing mine every day, but I have a special preference for a nice head of hair and an interesting pair of eyes. I appreciate aesthetics.
Before work, we snap pictures of each other with the old instant camera we keep around for this routine and put the snaps of our new faces in the box where we keep them. Thousands upon thousands, a pile of people we get to be one day at a time.
Keeping a job is hard when you change faces every day, but we’re able to work over our computers, so no one sees us, and we work selling things, or editing things, or writing code. We work to keep busy and for extras like vacations and nice food and designer clothes, but money has always appeared in our bank accounts for as long as we can remember, which for both of us is about twelve years ago, a few months before we met.
I remember waking up in a hotel room, wearing a set of silk pajamas. Bird chirped outside the window and the air smelled of the city below, cars and trash, but also of the budding trees on the street. That day, I was a woman with a shaved head, nothing but vaguely auburn stubble covering my scalp, and a lot of freckles. Tiny ears. Eyebrows so light they almost blended into my pale skin. Next to me on the pillow was a piece of paper with a few essentials written out. I was told where I was and that travel would be hard for me, but not impossible, and that if I wanted to go somewhere to leave a note and a ticket and passport would be arranged. There was a name on the paper too, which I adopted as my own from the moment I saw it, because it instantly felt perfect; Red.
The final thing the note said was that the room was mine for as long as I needed it, which turned out to be a month. I ate room service every day and drank myself silly and there was never any trouble with money. The first few times I woke up with a new body and face, I screamed in terror. That first day was especially bad. My freckles, the ones I had spent so long studying the day before as I tried to bring forward even the first, faintest memory of who I was, the sprinkle across the bridge of my nose, the garden of them on my arms, were gone. I had a gangly male body, complete with a big, stupid beard I immediately shaved off. I caught on to the situation though after a few days and also realized that I was safe, so I was able to relax. It even became pretty fun. I wrote a note that I wanted to go to New Zealand and waited a week. One day I was having my first lunch of the day at a pizza place near my hotel when a waiter approached with an envelope. I was incredibly handsome that day and basked when I saw him watching me. Inside was a ticket, a passport, and a note that said to leave now and that I wasn’t under any circumstance to sleep on the plane, otherwise I might change. I had received some drugs to help with that.
A few months later, I met James at a bar in New Orleans and knew instantly that she was like me. It was love at first sight. She had woken up at a hotel in Rome around ten weeks before that and had been traveling almost from the beginning, moving as fast as arrangements could be made for her. James said she’d always felt like she was looking for something and after meeting me, she guessed I was it. She had quickly tested the limits of the name she’d been given by getting a credit card, which was approved for a high limit that she always maxed out, and was always paid for her in full, but she said that one day she came to her room at night to a note that told her to cool it. We pooled the money we found in our accounts and bought a home. James thinks we’re government experiments. I don’t have a better explanation, and I admit it’s pretty likely, but we’ve never seen the people who’ve watched out for us and they’ve never told us who they are.
I order us a pile of Indian food for lunch, box after greasy box of it, which we eat while working. Lunch breaks make work go on longer and bleed into the evening, which is our favorite time of day, when we both feel we really come alive. I watch the lovely head of curls James has been graced with today bob against her shoulders as she types, and study her new frown as she nibbles on a samosa and types with one finger. She tosses the lush curls behind her shoulder as she scoops spicy curry into her mouth and downs it with lemon lime soda.
“I need a smoke,” she says, unfurling her long limbs. I follow her outside where she has three cigarettes and we plan our night.
Just after the early fall sunset, we finish up at our jobs, and run upstairs to shower together, scrubbing for ages under the scalding water. Wrapped in towels, hair dripping down our backs, we choose our clothes. Our closets are huge, full of clothes for every type of body we might encounter, and we take our time choosing outfits. I end up in a suit with a blue silk shirt. James puts on a short, red dress to make the most of her endless legs and pairs it with a black jacket and an ostentatious watch that is the perfect touch.
I call us a ride and we step out into the night. James takes my hand and I lace our fingers together. We live half an hour outside of the city for privacy and we spend the ride quiet, James studying the attractive young driver. He watches her back in the rearview mirror, and blushes the longer she stares. She squeezes my hand and I can feel her excitement rising. Each time we pass under a street light, the backseat momentarily lights up and James is illuminated for a flashing second. She toys with the hem of her dress.
Tonight’s dinner is Japanese. We feast at one restaurant, then another, piling pillowy sushi into our mouth, sipping miso, and downing sake. The third restaurant finally fills us up.
James meets someone when we go dancing after dinner, a cute girl with huge eyes who barely comes up to James’s shoulder. They start to dance and soon, my beautiful wife is running her fingers through this woman’s hair, then caressing her back. It isn’t long before James is kissing her in the shadows of the club, the two of them laughing and moaning, the small woman proclaiming that she never does this. This girl is a find for sure, delicate and shivering with longing. Her cheekbones are a work of art. James is going to eat her alive. Lights of different colors flash in my eyes and I can feel music through the floor. I am not a fan of all the people pressing against me.
The women slip away together and I go outside for a bit of cold fresh air, spending a little while looking at myself in the camera of my phone while I blow puffs of cold breath to my own image. When I’ve cooled down, I head back inside and James is drinking at the bar, her hair damp and sweaty, sipping on a drink while she strokes her tiny paramour’s neck. This one of James appetites that I don’t particularly share, but sometimes we meet someone we both enjoy, and a few years ago I was drawn to a neighbor and we ended up in bed once. We had to move after, orders from whomever is in charge of us.
James emerges from the crowd and gives me a peck on the forehead. “Time to go home,” she says, wrapping an arm around me.
We arrive back to the house shortly before midnight, ready for the ritual.
The wind has picked up tonight and we sway a bit on the roof. Hand in hand, we jump.
The ringing of my morning alarm snaps my eyes open. I roll over.
A compact and graceful red-haired man is looking at me.
“Morning,” says James.
Virgens de Guadalupe by Lynda Schor