Fellowship by Susan McCarty

Fellowship by Susan McCarty

EVERY FRIDAY AROUND FIVE, we stack the sun chairs in the pump room of the Maple Hills Country Club and watch the servers from the restaurant roll giant table rounds down the paved walk between the tennis courts, past the gazebo where we sit in black, regulation one-piece suits, and down to the pebbled pool deck. It takes three servers to handle a single round-to bang the rusted legs into place and hoist the table upright, to toss a white polyblend covering over the entire surface with one snap. The buffets are brought down, the Sterno lit below them. And then: steaming steel trays filled with buttered corn cobs, the garlicky reek of Oysters Rockefeller, yawning mussels and pink whole lobsters, the faint bleachy tang of cooked mollusk shell. Never mind that the nearest body of water is the catfished Iowa River. Every Friday from five to nine, the club is a Cape Cod beach, and we-who have never seen the ocean, but find ourselves drawn toward water on some cellular level-perch on our lifeguard towers as if they are crow’s-nests, keeping our eyes on the water not for whales or land, but for children whose fearlessness makes them susceptible to sinking.

We dream nightly of escape. We would like nothing more than to see Iowa rolling out its infinity in the rearviews of our farm trucks, our Civics or Metros (all shamed to street-parking blocks away, to make room for the Lincolns and Caddies of the club guests). We rip through each National Geographic our grandfathers’ yearly subscriptions provide. We pay attention to television and the news. Beautiful, violent things are happening a thousand miles east. And if the water inside us draws us to the water outside, in search of equilibrium, this is also true of our dark selves, the mystery of our desires, which can find nothing external to match the pressures they produce in us-not here, in the friendly width of these streets, these fields, these grocery aisles.

THE POOL OPENS AT TEN, but I’m supposed to be there at eight to set up deck chairs and check the garbage cans and test the water and fix the mix, if it’s off, so the pool can open. today, I arrive at seven. I haven’t really slept since last night, when Mom and Dad called a “family meeting.” It was pretty goddamned obvious what they were going to tell us. It’s why James has been wetting his bed lately, and why I stole the Titanic picture from the family photo album in the living room and hid it in my old copy of A Wrinkle in Time.

Ian shows up at nine, late and stoned. He’s a swimmer on the college team and always has his shirt off, even when, like today,, it’s too cold. His back is ridiculous, an inverted triangle-shoulders wide and pronounced from all his hunching through the water. I always get a little nervous when he’s on the pool deck, on first position, on the stand by himself.

“Hey kid,” he says with an easy smile. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know my name.

“Ian,” I say, “pH levels are good. I didn’t get to the cans yet though, so. . .”

“No problemo, chica.” He waves and wanders across the pool deck to the first garbage can. It’s not that I haven’t checked the cans-in fact, before Ian showed up, I walked around kicking the trash cans, making sure to take all the pressure on the hard rubber toe of my tennies and yelling “Fuck you!” every time, imagining my father’s soft, bearded face. He seemed the unhappiest of all of us, and this made it easy to blame him.

In one of the cans, the one by the wading pool, something shifted inside when I kicked. I drew the hinged top back and found two stupid eyes peering up at me. The thing hissed and I flipped the lid back down. I have kind of forgotten about it until I see Ian’s shadow fall long into the concrete slab of the women’s bathroom, where I’m stocking the toil.et paper with shaking hands, wondering what’s going to happen to my brother who isn’t yet old enough to realize what huge assholes his parents have become.

“Critter alert,” Ian says.

The philosophy of work at the pool is smelt it/dealt it. I let Ian think he’s found the raccoon. I grab the skimmer off its hook on the perimeter fence and follow him across the deck and through the little wooden gate to the baby pool area. He kicks the garbage can and there’s a skittering, claws on the heavy plastic lining. He’ll have to lay the an gently on its side and then get out of the way quickly, in case the coon is angry or rabid. I tell him I have his back and hold the skimmer defensively in front of me like a hockey goalie.

“Shit,” he grunts, and squats the can to the ground.

“Get out of the way.” I wave the net at the can.

“Jesus, get closer,” he says. “I think it’s coming out.”

As if we’re watching some sunny-day, rich-people horror movie, paws grasp the plastic lip and the raccoon emerges, spiky and damp and humping itself onto the length of the can, I an sort of frozen, watching it. I try to shake my head free of the buzz I haven’t noticed all morning until now, but my reaction time is messed up.

The coon seems to be checking out Ian, lookin him up and down in a leisurely, half-interest way, and then it lunges toward him. Ian makes a kind of hoarse squawk and jumps backwards. Unstuck by his yell, I leap forward, brandishing the aluminum pole, and get the raccoon’s head in the net, while it latches itself, all paws and teeth, onto the skimmer. I run to the baby pool and plunge the thing into two feet of water. The raccoon thrashes and I-or not me, but some reptilian part of me I have never met before-smash the skimmer to the bottom again and again, until I feel a brittle, twiggy snap. The coon goes limp in the netting, its neck probably broken. I feel like I might throw up.

Ian comes up beside me. He cranes his neck to look into the pool. He doesn’t want to get too close to me.

“Holy fuck,” I pant.

“You killed it.”

My chin is starting to do this involuntary crumple that means I’m about to cry. “I didn’t mean to.”

“You looked like you meant to.”

I drop the skimmer and it’s so loud on the pavement I have to bring my teeth together to settle the vibration in my head. The coon looks small underwater-no way it was an adult. I look at it and think, I killed that. Ian offers to clean up and I go sit in the gazebo, at the pool entrance, where people sign in and pay their guest fees.

When he comes up later and asks if I want to go home, the question makes me cry harder. And when I shake my head and wipe my nose on the sleeve of my lifeguard sweatshirt, he says. “Come to the pump room,” and I do because he looks confused and afraid, like I too might rise up and claw him, and I realize he thinks I’m crazy, all fucked-up over a baby raccoon, and so, when we squat on two bulbous gray metal meters growing out of the pump room floor, I tell him about last night, about my parents. I use the word they kept using-separation-a word that is pointedly not divorce. l I would rather it not be Ian who knows this before anyone else, but there is no one else. .He doesn’t say anything. In the dank, chlorine reek of the room, his lighter glows under the joint he’s brought for us, and the pain in my chest as I suck in smoke feels like something to be thankful for.

TWO HOURS LATER I’M STILL RED-EYED and dry-mouthed, but tear-free, sitting in the club gazebo in a manner I hope conveys both alertness and innocence. To the club mothers of Maple Hills, I want to look like the opposite of a person who would smoke weed on her guard shift. The reflective lenses in my sunglasses help-in my face the mothers see only themselves-but I realize I’m conveying too much alertness when Wendy Comstock glances up while she’s signing in and then edges the clipboard nearer to herself as if to protect the privacy of her signature and club number. As if there’d be anything to do with her club number if I did steal it. Maybe a lesson with the golden tennis pro, a tan Swede straight off the cover of a romance novel. I’m imagining him bending me over the net and spanking me lightly with a racket, when a tall boy with large, rubbery features and long eyelashes wanders up to the gazebo and signs in himself and his little brother, who looks like he’s about the same age as my brother James. The older one smiles and that’s all it takes. The heat, the weed, the thoughts of the tennis racket, and probably, perversely, even the new of the separation have all undone me and I feel hazy and discombobulated and like the only thing that will make it all better is to be pressed against this guy as soon as possible. Phallically, I need a single point of focus. When the boys and their hairless and tawny bare chests have swept past the gazebo, I pull the sign-in sheet towards me and spin open the Rolodex to find their family info: Wychensky, Wayne and Donna. Ted and Liam.

I must have given off some pheromone, because when the third guard shows up at noon and Ian relieves me at the gazebo for my snack bar rotation, the older brother-Ted or Liam?-buys a pack of M&Ms, but manages to look, somehow, like he couldn’t give a shit about actually eating them.

“You have to eat them fast, or they’ll melt all over you.” I try to say this in a suggestive way.

“Actually, M&Ms were invented not to melt. For soldiers in World War II. The candy shell?”

Simultaneously I feel like, You’ve got to be kidding me, and, I totally want to fuck you. And somehow he gets it, because he blushes, then grins an sticks the bag of candy in the pocket of his damp trunks and walks away. Hours later, I’m on the first position and the little brother comes up to the stand with his hand cupped over his eyes like a sailor. I make him stand there because my whistle and sunglasses and my great height on the lifeguard stand tens to scare kids and I’m not above enjoying that.

Finally, I acknowledge him with a nod.

“I’m Liam,” he says.

“Hi, Liam. I’m Sarah.”

He’s brown as an almond and his hair is curly and dark. He looks like Disney’s Aladdin and I’m sure someday he’ll be as hot as his brother. Hotter, probably.

“My brother says he thinks you’re pretty.”

I make no expression and don’t even move my head, but I find Ted with my eyes.. He’s rubbing sunscreen on his stomach like it’s the most interesting and difficult thing he’s ever done.

TED PICKS ME UP FROM WORK THAT NIGHT in his Chrysler LeBaron, and some time later, but perhaps not enough time, his chewed-at finger tips are fumbling their way past my underwear, and the smell of chlorine is all around us, and all of sudden I have a new summer project which doesn’t involve sitting around feeling sorry for myself.

In the next few weeks, we establish a routine: on my nights off we got to a movie, maybe for pizza and then we motor out somewhere more or less deserted and take off our clothes. Soon Ted has nuzzled, licked and put his finger s on and in almost every fevered part of me, but he refuses intercourse.

One night, I bring out a joint after we pull into a fallow field off the gravel road that winds behind a half-finished housing development. The cicada chatter around us and hundred of lightning bugs hand chest-high, at the top of the seeded grass, flashing their semaphore. I bop Ted gently on his beautiful Roman nose with a red Bic and twiddle the joint at him from my other hand. He takes the lighter and throws it out the window. “I’m not down with chicks who use.”

“What?” I pull back the joint before he can chuck it too.

“No drugs, babe. Them’s the rules.”

“Why are you talking like that? Whose rules?”

He looks less sure of himself, his huge Adam’s apple bobbing. “Pastor John’s.”

“Really? That guy?”

Pastor John is a balding twenty-something who specializes in Pear Jam covers on his acoustic guitar and speaks motivationally at our high school once a year. He runs a popular cross-town evangelical ministry for the kinds of kids who have great skin and expensive cars and brand of stupid, beautiful arrogance that almost takes your breath away. They get high on life and go to Very Good State Schools. Ted’s one of them-he’ll be off to Madison in the fall, which is close enough to pain me with a glimmer of hope that our summer thing might outlast the summer.

“Are you in his. . .teen group or whatever?”

“Youth group, and yes, I go to his Friends and Fellowship Fridays.”

Ted sounds defensive and he should be.

This is Pastor John we’re talking about. During last year’s all-school assembly about self-respect, he preformed a country version of “Ice, Ice Baby,” in which he changed the lyrics to Nice, nice baby. He frequently organizes long and awkward trust falls, preaches abstinence whenever he gets the chance. I am mortified for both of us, Ted and me. Pastor John’s biggest message is that intercourse is disrespectful of a girl’s body and the holy sanctity of marriage. Thank weeping baby Jesus, Ted follows only the letter of this law.

I try, I try, I do. I beg and plead and prance and suck and tease, but Ted is adamant. We seem to reach some sort of stalemate about sex, but I manage to disappear into him anyway. His LeBaron my salvation. Most nights of the week, I slide into my mother’s dark house late and pretend not to hear her weeping through her bedroom door and imagine a future for myself full of adult things without adults.

2. Trial Separation

IN THE EARLY DAYS OF DIVORCE, when it’s still being referred to as a trial separation, it seems that everyone does everything wrong. After swearing we won’t, we bring up custody. Some of us wake at night in a cold wet beds and cry out, and other of us ignore those cries, which seem to come from a planet we don’t want to inhabit, and which sound to our cringing ears like a symptom of some infectious disease we don’t want to come down with. Decisions are made and boxes are packed. Some of us are upset that others of us are taking all the records and hi-fi equipment, but these complaints are deftly turned inside out and become reasons to visit the new place, the new living situation, the new beige and black leather townhouse monstrosity with Berber wall-to-wall and white plastic vertical blinds that hang like blades and dissect the view of the spewing water feature in the center of the pond behind the development.

We seem to be unbecoming a we. We seem to be becoming an us and a them, but even on either side of this dividing line we each stand alone, tucked into ourselves, the distance between us-even those of us on the same side, those of us who did not royally fuck up and irrevocably ruin it for the rest of us-enormous and growing with each passing, teary day. We hear each other’s clotted breaths in the night. We no longer eat dinner together. We sit in the basement pushing our injection-molded He-Men against each other (in love or hate we don’t know) and wait for the rest of us to join in, but we are scattered and wounded, and in our pain turn away from each other. Others of us see the slinking about and the downward cast of the eyes, and we understand at once. We try to sound patient and convincing: No one has every died from this. Lots of people go through this. We’ll all be okay. What we really want is to run away. What we really want is for those of us who are children to stop acting like children, even though this is impossible and, in itself, a childish wish.

For the first time in years, we are truly alone. We clip our nails and toenails carefully-there seems to be all the time in the world, now, for personal grooming. we feel happy for a few days, to finally be free of the dog hair, but after a few more days we realize how awfully we miss the dog. It’s the dog that finally sends us to our knees, our hands to our heads in front of the vertical blinds in the long, dogless night. When we look up again, we realize we are staring at the light on the water feature and that the color of the light is changing as we stare. We watch it go from green to blue to purple to pink to red to orange to yellow to green to purple until our lashes dry and our fists unclench.

THE SUMMER’S A LONG SLOW YAWN. James and I are at Dad’s two-bedroom apartment every weekend, which is actually more family time that any of us have ever spent together. It feels like prison.

Dad doesn’t have a couch, just a low glass coffee table in front of the TV, an ancient half-ton wood monstrosity with side panels and knobs, which sits on the floor, like us. James and I eat Cheetos off the coffee table from a family-sized bag. We’ve already watched our old pirated copies of Beauty and the Beast and Clue. Halfway through Tucker: A Man and His Dream, the TV screen fuzzes over and when the picture returns, there’s a topless woman with sky-high blond bangs, kneeling between the legs of a hairy man with his pants around his ankles. The man places one big mitt on her head, crushing the anemone-like structure of her hair. Dad flies up, blocking the screen, and fiddles at the control panel of the TV. A wet smacking sound precedes the silence.

“What was that lady doing?” James asks.

I can feel Dad looking at me for help. He’s always been short with us, impatient. His temper was a force that filled our house with its sound and fury, and it seems to me he’s been the chief composer of our misery. I do not want to help him, but I feel protective of my little brother, so I ask James if he wants to watch Clue again, which is his favorite movie, and he says yes yes like the six-year-old he is, and when I settle back next to him, Dad gets off the floor and retreats to the kitchen. I don’t know exactly what he’s doing back there. Pots rumble and the kitchen faucet runs. I hear the fridge smack open, twice. It’s not enough though-even from the other room, Dad’s shame fills the apartment like a gas leak. I look at the TV screen and narrow my focus to the wavering, over-red images. It’s a kind of meditation, except instead of calm and peace. I allow myself to fill with a rage so heavy it pins me to the ground.

It’s a long time before I can stand again, and when I do, I find the rage has not abated. I grab my keys and stomp to the door. I tell them not to wait up and snarl that I’ll sleep in my own bed, in my own fucking house. James is a perfect replica of my father: the “O”s of their mouths and their eyes like wounds. I open the door and no one stops me, so I slam it hard and feel, for one second, like I have won.

An hour later Ted and I are parked at the spillway. Ted is doing this thing in my vagina where he rubs one finger up and down the other, producing what I imagine is supposed to be some sort of crickety vibrato. I don’t know where he gets his fancy ideas, but I don’t want to hurt his feelings either. I arch my head back toward the half-open window to get a sniff of the barbeque smoke coming from a campsite downwind. All day, I’ve only eaten Cheetos. Ted takes my contortions as encouragement and the cricket quickens.

“Hey,” I say after a few more minutes of this. “Let’s go outside and look at the tube.” The tube is a mad explosion of water that rushes over the dam gate at 3,500 cubic feet per second, and though our car is parked slightly upstream, it’s a fairly easy walk, even in the dark, up the hill to the banked bridge directly over the outflow. Standing there, you feel as though you might be sucked into its deafening fishy roil.

Recently, before the announcement, but when things were already bad, when Mom and Dad stomped around their bedroom every night and bellowed at each other like a couple of cows about to be slaughtered, I was picking through a family photo album, trying to remember a time when their anger hadn’t rumbled every wall in the house, and I found a snapshot of them standing above the tube in a the golden light of an early autumn afternoon, the day we all went fishing together-maybe three or four years ago. I remember James was fascinated by the way Dad hooked the worm and the grieving worm families they’d left behind.

In the snapshot, my mother’s leaning against the chest-high chain-link that surrounds the damn gate. Her arms are spread at the shoulders like wings, her hair, longer then and maybe darker, ripples behind her. My dad’s hands are at her hips. They’re doing Titanic at the top of the tube. I didn’t realize how bad things had gotten, until I saw that photo. And now, I can’t even be here, can’t pretend to enjoy my boyfriend’s mediocre fingerbang, without thinking about my parents and wondering what’s to become of us all. I sigh and push Ted’s hand away.

“Did you hear me?” I say. “Let’s go up and watch the water.”

“It’s dark out-we could trip and hurt ourselves. Anyway, it smells.”

In an instant, the rage is back and I am ready to push this thing to the brink. I know what it takes to hurt us both. “Why can’t we just have sex like normal people?” I say. “I feel like a fucking freak out here.”

Ted frowns. “You know I can’t.”

“Oh right. Your pledge of chastity.”

“It’s important to me. You said you’d support me.” He turns away, his modest erection wilting in his jeans, and starts the car. I pull up my shorts and thrust my pelvis as high in the air as I can to button them.

“I was just trying to get you to fuck me.”

“Pastor John said you sounded like someone who’d resort to pressure tactics. And that I should be careful.”

“You talked to him about me?”

“I didn’t want it to be true, but now I see he was right-“

“What did you say about me?”

“-and I think. . .I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”

For the millionth time, I imagine Ted’s legs spread out before me as I ride him like a combine; Ted’s farm-boy bulk squashing me into the crumb-sharp fabric of his back seat in an ironic missionary; Ted’s ass tightening as he rams into me again and again. But now I see something else too: that asshole Pastor John staring at us with heaven’s disapproval souring his face.

I elbow the door open and start walking toward the top of the tube, which looks like someplace furtive and ugly in Ted’s headlights. Gravel, broken glass. I climb the steep spillway embankment and don’t look back. He yells for me twice, then backs his car out and drives away.

Up here, at the top of the hundred-foot drop down to the churning, angry water, is the last place I saw my mother smile at my father. The Iowa River races furiously toward me. Beyond the dam, the reservoir is placid and has the rotten fertilizer smell of something dead.

3. Youth Group

IN PLACE OF DARKNESS, there was the fluorescence of junior high hallways. In place of demons, Zach Hellerman’s man-sized fist sank into our stomachs. His spit hung, chrysalis-like, from the fringe of our bangs. Our glasses: bow-broken and skittered beneath a locker; our non-existent breasts: shamed; our prematurely large breast: shamed; our ball: kicked back into the cavity of our bodies before they’d even had the chance to fully descend..

After the darkness of our daily existence, the bread of our pain, who among us does not feel a huge unclenching inside, a sobbing relief, as we stare into the linoleum of the church basement floor and hear the stories rushing wild and full from each other like the river across the dam? We feel bathed in light. The peace we’ve been promised, for years, by parents and various administrators, most likely erstwhile bullies themselves, finally arrives in this unlikely and alien place which smells like the hospitalish rooms in which our grandmothers moan out the ends of their lives. How unlikely seems the bringer of our peace. His mousy goatee, the shaved head that we would later understand as an answer to balding, the way his voice twangs over the top of his acoustic guitar: too precise, show-choir trained, a hickish put-on. How fitting that our savior here on earth, the man who would tell us about our savior up in heaven, would the sort of head we would want to see punched, the kid of cringing attitude that would make us understand, finally, what was so hateful about ourselves.

And so, we have learned to speak forcefully, to repulse the twin evils of drugs and sex-although many of us are still waiting, just waiting, for someone, anyone, to offer either. We’ve traded our skin-care secrets and exfoliated ourselves to a rosy, Christian glow. We’ve kissed each other during church lock-ins, and at Camp Galilee, where we also learned that Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi worship Satan, a lesson which Pastor John later encourages us to laugh off, but which nevertheless continues to freak us out. We have begun, some of us, to understand the price that such fellowship is asking-nothing less than our soul at the expense of our bodies. We have begun to fail each other.

One of us, just last weekend, tasted, finally, the seawater tang of his girlfriend’s vagina-the Southern Comfort still hot in his belly-and ejaculated into his wrinkle-resistant Dockers. Another welcomed the sweet curl of methamphetamine into her lungs. We have turned eighteen and visited the Pleasure Palace with our non-youth group friends and masturbated furtively into socks. There is, suddenly, a new vocabulary; bong, dank, nug, DP, creampie, money shot, crystal, crank, tweak. Something inside us hungrily expands until we feel larger than our homes and schools and even, or especially, the basement of this church. We wake at night and touch our arms and legs and heads, certain they must have flown from us in sleep. We long to ask each other: Are we being devoured by lions or are we becoming them?

THE CORN IS NOSE-HIGH and I’m on my way to a church basement on the other side of town to eat crustless sandwiches and fraternize with the enemy. It’s embarrassing, this sudden obsession. I’ve always prided myself on being cool with guys, less interested in a relationship then they were. The best thing about hooking up was the total-freedom feeling it gave me. Sex was something parents and school couldn’t access or control. But Ted has beaten me; he’s kept more of himself in reserve than me, has more secret rooms to which he could deny me access. He wouldn’t let me in, but he would let in Pastor John. I wanted to talk it out, but my calls went unanswered. I imagined he could hear my anger and desperation ringing out from under the bed, where he kept his phone, and that it repulsed him. He’d stopped showing up at the pool, though his brother still came. I was thinking about sending a note home with Liam, carrier pigeon style, when I realized I could confront Ted, and possibly (in my fantasy) also Pastor John at a Friends and Fellowship Friday meeting. I would expose John as a weirdo and convince Ted to take me back. Dénouement night sex would follow in the pond at my dad’s condo development. I got aa sub for my Seafood Night shift and set out to win back Ted.

But Ted has stopped coming to youth group, at least that’s what Pastor John tells me when I walk into the basement and interrupt a jam session between him and three groupies. The bongos guy I recognize from school, but the other two kids are strangers, though the girl on the guitar smiles at me. The friendliness of the group flusters me. Instead of introducing myself and calling out Pastor John for being a fraud, I say, “Um. . .where’s Ted?” and they look confused.

John rises, his puka-shell necklace slapping against the collar of his T-shirt, and says, “Haven’t seen him in a few weeks. What’s you name?”

I tell him and think I see a squint of recognition.

He says, “God’s casa es su casa, Sarah. Have some snacks. we usually jam until most of the group gets here. Then I call everyone to fellowship.”

I nod and walk toward the spread of drinks and food on the other side of the room, trying to avoid talking to anyone while the sunny creeps behind me sing, “I don’t need no doctor, all I need is Jesus love.” I drink cranberry juice from a Dixie cup and separate a long stick of mozzarella from itself, string by awkward string, as more eager kids file in and take up the joyful noise. When the music stops, I have just dragged a large piece of cauliflower through the dip in the center of the vegetable tray and put the whole thing in my mouth. In this new silence, it feels as if the protective covering around me has been torn away. A tambourine jangles faintly as its master puts it down. Pastor John yells into the calm and heavy air, “My Lord, lift me up to be with you! My Lord, call me and I will answer!”

I try to slow my stuttering heart as I turn from the buffet towards the youth group. They’re all sitting there with eyes closed, smiling. John’s hands are extended to the ceiling and they jitter, as if he’s been struck with a neurological disorder.

“Tonight we thank you for bringing us a new lamb, named for the wife of Abraham! Sarah! Sarah, come here Sarah, and say the Lord’s name with us!”

They open their eyes and look at me like puppies, and I realize they’ve left a notch in their prayer circle open for me on the mat. I point to my bulging cheek and keep chewing as though answering a question no one has asked. They keep looking and I keep standing there, pointing at my face, finger like the barrel of a gun, chewing, chewing, unable now to swallow as they stare, the creamy dip curdling against my tongue. My head is filled with the noise of my mouth, but I can tell the silence that binds us together is very awkward indeed.

“Sarah!” yells John, and a piece of cauliflower lodges itself in my windpipe. There’s a long moment, as I try to draw my breath to cough, when nothing happens. My body feels as though it has always been here and always will be and I’ll spend the rest of my life in this basement being stared at by Christian youth, me staring back-curiosities to each other, zoo animals watching zoo animals. The guitar girl’s mouth moves, and from a distance and sever seconds delayed, I hear the words, “She’s choking?” and then I’m on my knees, the cauliflower paste coming out of my mouth as I open it to the ground, and then someone strong and hippie-fragrant is kneeling behind me, enfolding me in a great hug, and the cauliflower is cutting a path back up my throat, and there’s the sound of my own wheezing life and pain in my knees and my lonely sinner’s blood pulsing hot in my ears. Like a newborn, I breathe and then I cry. The group makes noises around me and someone asks if they should call an ambulance, and then I uncurl myself from the cement floor, clear my throat, and walk out of the worship room like Lazarus from his cave.

I think about driving to Ted’s house, but I know what I will find: a big happy family playing Yahtzee, the Rolexed arm of Ted’s father slung around his tastefully small mother, their slippers, in the loafer style, parked side by side. Liam would say something child-wise and they’d laugh together like the stars of their own sitcom, like they were on their own cloud up in heaven and had forgotten the rest of us, down here, in our weird, hungry bodies on earth.

JAMES IS ALREADY IN BED and Dad’s bent awkwardly over the dishwasher when I let myself into the apartment. I take a beer from the fridge and sip it at the kitchen bar. It burns my throat. Dad doesn’t say anything about the beer so I tell him about Ted and how we broke up and I say I even went to his youth group, but it’s like he’s just disappeared from my life. And is this always going to happen, this disappearing? And what about you? Are you going to disappear too?

Really, I don’t ask that, even though I want to manufacture a father-daughter moment. I want things to all feel okay again, just for a minute. But I also know this would be a lie.

“Better luck next time,” says Dad as he closes the dishwasher door. “I’m going to bed.”

Does anything sound cozier than a dishwasher at night? Even in this sad bachelor wreck of a place, where each of us is tucked into our own separate corner like water molecules-bonded for a moment, but always breaking apart.

I open another beer. The VHS tape marked “Tucker” is still sitting on top of the TV. I let the slow motor of the VCR suck the tape into its broad, flat mouth. I turn the volume all the way down. I sit on the floor and listen to the rhythmic slosh and hiss of the dishwasher. I watch through to the end.

Bird Girls by Jill Christman

issue681

Found in Willow Springs 68

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Bird Girls by Jill Christman

I WAKE UP, a wife and mother, at five a.m. on a July morning in the middle of Indiana, not because my baby cries or my husband snores, but because the birds are going wild. Early bird nothing. They’re all early-and their racket shakes memory down from the maple trees in my mortgaged backyard like seeds from a feeder hit by a marauding squirrel. Everything shivers and trills. I’m in a Proustian moment, fifteen years ago, zipped into a tent with my then-boyfriend, Stevie, listening to this same cacophony of whistles and peeps, breathing in the smell of wood smoke and coffee.

Still dark on a late spring morning in Oregon, not much past four and the professor of Stevie’s birding class is about to take us on a trek through the woods. I know nothing about birds. Ignorant and cold, I shrug into the requisite Patagonia fleece jacket, duck through the nylon flap at the front of the tent, and join the others following the bearded ornithologist into the dawning forest.

Soft stepping over brown needles, he is our Pied Piper and we his captivated children. When he hears a particular bird noise, he holds his hand up to halt us, twenty or so bleary-eyed college students. Pointing to his ear, then to the source of the sound-sometimes visible, more often not-Bird Man whispers the name of the singer to us: Hammond’s Flycatcher, Lesser Goldfinch, Mountain Chickadee, American Dipper, Bushtit. Stevie, and the other students, scribble these names down in birding notebooks. I listen, impressed, and shuffle along behind the group.

I cheated just now with the names, of course, although I did remember Bushtit and Flycatcher and also seeing the spellings of the bird sounds-pzrrt, pip-pip, treip-and thinking, Huh. Bird words. (Stevie majored in biology; I didn’t wander far from the English department.) I remember riding in a university van to our campsite and I remember that early morning walk, but the thing that wedges in my brain between Bushtit and pip-pip is the sticky feeling that I didn’t belong, the black-tar goo of old insecurity.

I wasn’t in the class. I was a girlfriend tag-along, but there was more to it than that. I was the prissy one. I was too much lipstick, and not enough crunch. All of Stevie’s bird class friends were of the outdoorsier-that-thou category and I had brought along an inflatable sleeping pad and tiny jar of half-and-half for my coffee. I can’t remember anybody ever saying anything, just this sense that somehow I had been mismatched with my dreadlocked, kayak-paddling, pottery-throwing, Teva-wearing boyfriend. I felt girly in a bad way, as if my painted toenails and snug jeans were a romantic liability-no, worse, an identity liability.

MY LOVE OF BIRDS hadn’t brought me to that twittering Oregon glen: Stevie had to be watched. My adversaries were young women in tie-dyed shirts, hemp bracelets and baggy cargo pants, pockets stuffed with hand blown pipes an big-belled goddess figurines, and I wanted to say, You know what? You want to know oudoorsy? You want to know hippie chick? When I was a teenager I lived on a mountain in a plastic house, okay? I rode a horse to school. We weren’t camping. Yeah, I shaved my armpits, but I melted snow in a bucket on the wood stove to do it. 

This was all true. I had come to appreciate the pleasure of a soft bed and creamy coffee the hard, cold way when I was thirteen and my mother packed all our worldly belongings into a Chevy pickup tied down with fishing twine and moved us to a mountaintop in northeastern Washington. We were so far off the grid that in the winter, when the roads were impassable, we pulled orange sleds loaded with our groceries and pack animals. My mother claimed this was the kind of activity that built character, but another lasting effect of those frigid hikes was my reduced tolerance for those who thought a weekend in the woods was roughing it.

Stevie knew my mountain-girl history, of course, but I felt I needed to remind him of the tough girl that lurked beneath my feminine exterior. I wanted him to know that I could feather a soft nest and still hold off the egg snatchers with my piercing beak. Or something like that. Maybe I missed the day in biology where we learned that the females choose the males in the bird world. The males are the pretty ones. Think peacocks. Think the blue bower bird posing on his well-decorated threshold. In retrospect, some careful consideration of the actual facts might have saved me a few proprietary pre-dawn treks into the trilling woods. But like the Bird Girls, and like Stevie himself, mine was an identity in the process of becoming, and we were all involved in the awkward process of molting and feathering, craning our necks to check out our butts and see how our plumes were shaping up.

With more than a little shame, I recognized that the lessons I’d been learning in Women’s Studies 101 about the patriarchy perpetuating woman-to-woman competition hadn’t exactly sunk in. The Bird Girls weren’t my only rivals, and they certainly weren’t the crunchiest. The Ceramics Girls got dirtier, the Ultimate Frisbee Girls ran faster, the Kayak Girls, well, the Kayak Girls were tough-even I gave them that.

I tried to be the girl Stevie could love. I listened for birds in the woods, I straddled the pottery wheel and let it spray my jeans with clay juice, and I developed a mean (but ultimately ineffectual) forehand on the Ultimate field. I even paddled a small plastic boat into crushing rapids and thanked all the appropriate earth goddesses that I’d been born bottom-heavy and therefore managed to roll back up to breathe again. But I never felt tough. Worse, I never felt like the girl I was pretending to be.

YOU KNOW HOW this story ends. Not long after the bird trip, Stevie moved out, and when he left, as I predicted, he paired up with one of those gritty girls. Her name was Jill. This new Jill was everything that I was not: the anti-Jill Jill. In one of those too-honest, unnecessarily painful, post-breakup conversations, Stevie confessed that he’d felt smothered by my girliness-with me, he said, that was too much feminine energy.

A couple of months after we broke up, the Other Jill approached me on campus-baggy pants splattered with mud, shaggy hair not unattractively mussed, square hands holding a rope leash attached to a giant, drooling St. Bernard. She asked me if I’d seen Stevie. He hadn’t called in weeks, she said. Unsuccessfully, I fought the urge to feel pleased.

I shrugged. Nope, haven’t seen him. Poor Jill.

WHERE ARE YOU, Bird Girls, on this dawning Indiana day? The raucous songs of morning send me back to you, fifteen years and two thousand miles away. Settled, finally, in a nest I know to be mine, do I miss the parts of me that were you in those restless years of feathering and refeathering? Of never really landing?

Where are you, Bird Girls? Are you still sleeping? Perhaps you’re lying awake, like me, remembering walks in the woods with birds and boys, all long gone. Maybe you’re already up or haven’t yet slept-rocking babies, typing reports, finishing shifts.

On this morning in Indiana, the sun colors the sky pink and my baby girl rolls over in her sleep. Having learned to hear my daughter’s every shift and sigh, I know how I could have behaved on that forest path, tuning my ears rather than my jealous eyes. On the sidewalk with sad-eyed Jill, I might have said, “No, I haven’t seen him. But it isn’t you, you know. You’re okay just the way you are.” But I didn’t, and of course, I couldn’t. Sometimes we take our whole lives to feel safe in our nests, sometimes we miss that chance entirely. I am lucky.

Hey, Bird Girls, where are you now? Mine was a failure of empathy-for you, and for myself. Where are you?

I am here.

Hello out there. Pzrrt. Pip-pip. 

Issue 93: Meg Kelleher

Meg Kelleher
Meg Kelleher

About Meg Kelleher

Meg Kelleher is an English Literature Ph.D. dropout and licensed clinical social worker who specializes in creativity and trauma. Her work has been published in The Shore, The Broadkill Review, and elsewhere, and she was Fellow for Kaveh Akbar at StoryBoard 2021 and a 2022 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Contributor. She is currently at work on a novel and a book of nonfiction, and she lives in her birthplace of Chicago. You can find her on Instagram.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Nokomis Groves”

“Nokomis Groves” is named after a defunct citrus operation in Sarasota County, the coastal Florida community where I lived from age 7 to 21. After beginning this poem years ago, some shadowy subliminal force drove me to finally complete and submit it to the contest at the last minute. It’s been a dream to win.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

I should have expected the news that Nokomis Groves is being converted into a gated housing development of single family homes. I should have expected that the orange trees would be torn out, the ones that scented the winters of my childhood with their dissolute blossoms. This is a place where prehistoric shark teeth litter the beaches, antediluvian monsters prowl waterways, and over-55 restricted retirement communities spread like exotic creepers, strangling more fragile life. 

I should have known. As a child in Florida, I learned to fit myself into the preexisting order and accept the absolute dominion of the old regime. The fact that it grows relentlessly, ever proliferating in conch-white high rise complexes and eel-blue swimming pools, does not make it any less the old regime.

Yet it’s easy to take for granted that a home is yours and always will be.

After my father retired from the Chicago police in the 1980’s, we moved to Sarasota, where he worked as a sheriff’s deputy. For years he was assigned to oversee evictions, reporting to rental properties on the precise day that tenants’ time had run out. My father said that he never had to force anyone to go, that he’d just knock on the tenants’ doors in his uniform and they would step away from their homes willingly—albeit in some disbelief, a sort of daze. They’d frequently leave behind their televisions and stereos and abandon boxes of clothes and records on the lawn.

That was my father’s day job. But the seat of his true vocation lay in our garage, where he fixed things in his off time. No car, computer or appliance repair was beyond his ken. Sometimes he’d rehabilitate the broken things the tenants had left behind.

After my father retired for good, my parents developed an unconventional streak counter to the currents of more common snowbirds. They sold our home in Sarasota and moved near me in Chicago, where I’d previously relocated. My mother retired shortly before the pandemic began and increasingly devoted herself to caring for my father.

But a few months ago my mother admitted that my father’s needs now exceeded her capacity. She placed him in the secure memory unit of an assisted living facility near us both in the Chicago suburbs. 

The facility is called Saratoga Grove. We slip up and call it Sarasota Grove all the time. Just before we moved my father into the facility, I traveled to Sicily, to the Kolymbethra Gardens in Agrigento. Between the ruins of Greek and Roman temples, near a quarry that served as a prison for the slaves who spent their lives carving out limestone for their captors, there are citrus groves. Today the 2,500 year-old aqueduct system still flows, and ancient varieties of oranges and other fruits are irrigated in the classical Arab tradition.

The staff at Saratoga Grove reassure us that they want to help my father be comfortable but not to “snow” him—in other words, not to use unnecessary sedation. They want him to remain as much himself as he can be—still funny, charming, amiable—for as long as he can be. 

But sometimes my father wriggles out of the electronic monitoring bands on his wrist and ankle, hacks the elevator keypad code, and watches for the perfect moment to run for it. He attempts to arrest the staff who try to curtail his escape and keep him from returning home. He’s made it as far as the parking lot. 

Does “home” for my father refer to Florida, or to Chicago? Based on my experience, I’d say it just means not here.

.

Surrealist Prize Finalists

Surrealist Prize Finalists Winner Finalists Nokomis Groves by Meg Kelleher Who would I be if fear were not my twin? Still me, still dreaming of wasted oranges? Sore & sour as sweet long untouched, but for the branch and its pinched calculations-each limb here cups an untapped sun. Daughter of red tides, of coasts painted … Read more

Issue 93: Nance Van Winckel

Nance Van Winckle Headshot

Found in Willow Springs 93

JULY 7, 2023

POLLY BUCKINGHAM, KURTIS ELBING, ORAN BORDWELL, ELIZABETH GRAVES & KEELY LEIM

A TALK WITH NANCE VAN WINCKEL

Found in Willow Springs 93


EMBRACING IMAGE AND PERSONA, surreality and realism, form and disparate form, Nance Van Winckel’s poetry, fiction, memoir, collage, photomontage, and everything in between is as engaging an experience on the page as it is moving emotionally and intellectually. Throughout her work, Van Winckel contends with the personal, cultural, and political histories that shape people and the environments they occupy, the nature of memory and grief, and the nuances of familial relationships. As Herman Asarnow writes of Wan Winckel’s No Starling for The Cincinnati Review, her poems “sure-handedly carry out a thoughtful examination of mortality, of the pioneering spirit, of injustices caused by nature and by humanity, and of a sense of having to live this life in our own laughably frail and painfully desiring bodies.”

Nance Van Winckel has published seventeen books of poetry, fiction, and hybrid works including The Many Beds of Martha Washington (2021), chosen for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series; Our Foreigner (2017), winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series; Book of No Ledge (2016); Pacific Walkers (2014), a finalist for the Washington State Book Award; Ever Yrs (2014); Boneland (2013), recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship; No Starling (2007); and her first full collection of poetry, Bad Girl, with Hawk (1987). Van Winckel has also been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, three Pushcart Prizes, and awards from both Poetry Magazine and the Poetry Society of America. She is currently teaching in the MFA in creative writing at Eastern Washington University, and once served as the editor of Willow Springs magazine.

Nance Van Winckel kindly invited us to her home in Spokane where we gathered on the back porch, overlooking the Spokane River, on July 7th, 2023. We discussed the roles of imagery, persona, intuition, and politics in poetry, and the benefits of joys and writing across genres and forms.

KURTIS EBELING

There are moments in you work in which arresting images seem to emerge from extreme emotion or felling. “They Flee From Me” in Pacific Walkers comes to mind. I’m also curious about your thoughts on the role of imagery in poetry generally. And, particularly, what are your feelings about the relationship between imagery and the expression of feeling on the page?

NANCE VAN WINCKEL

There’s something the image can create for the reader: an entrance into enchantment. As a reader, I like to be drawn into a place where I’m completely thrown out of my life, lost in language and tone, the mind behind the material. I don’t think so much when I’m tooling the image about the emotional resonance—that’s going to be a test that comes later. I’m focused on exploring image and putting images next to each other in different ways that maybe charge them in unexpected ways. I’ve gotten so interested in putting images together that now that I’m doing it physically with collage and photomontage and all sorts of visual methods because they all do that same thing for me when I’m making them, that sense of enchantment.

POLLY BUCKINGHAM

I love that term tooling the image. That’s great. What are some of the techniques of tooling the image?

VAN WINCKEL

The poet Charles Wright cam to visit a college where I was teaching, so I was driving him back and forth to the airport, and, oh my god, the poor man, I was pumping him the whole way there, the whole way back, with my little questions. One of the things he does, he told me, is “commit a stanza or two of a draft—a poem that’s in process—to memory, and then when he’s driving around doing errands, he starts to move the stanzas around. And then he starts to move the lines in the stanzas around. And then to move the words in the lines around.” He said, “I turn it over to my ear.” That’s the kind of tooling I’m most interested in. I wrote an essay about Wright’s work, and a phrase I wrote about him that stays with me because I have to think about it for myself a lot, too, is, “the hand of the image in the glove of sound.”

BUCKINGHAM

That’s beautiful. I know you’re a fan of surrealist poetry. Can you talk about its influence on your work and what you love about it?

VAN WINCKEL

Right. I do, I like a lot of the surrealists. I feel like I’m a hodgepodge of influences. One of the things that was helpful to me about reading some of the surrealist poets was how little narrative scaffolding the poems need and how much they really depend on what we were talking about, that juxtaposition of imagery, depending on the reader to make other kinds of connections besides narrative connections. Narrative seems less an expectation for the reader with the surrealists, ,so good. Instead we get a sort of sense of what the locus of the poem may be.

ORAN BORDWELL

Even in their titles, like Bad Girl, with Hawk and The Dirt, there’s this consistent recognition of the earth and of natural imagery accompanying, though seldom overshadowing, humanity and the human experience. I’m curious about how you might describe your relationship with nature, what role it plays in your writing process and the work itself.

VAN WINCKEL

I’m not that picky about what aspects of the natural world appear in my poems, but I do feel like the poems need to be IN a world. As Dick Hugo says, “You can’t go nowhere if you ain’t nowhere.” I don’t think of myself as a nature poet by any stretch, but I do like to know where I am. It’s hard to draw people without drawing the space around them, too.

I was a journalist before I went to grad school to study poetry, and what we learn in journalism is the who, what, when, where, how, and why. I still think about those issues in writing a poem. Where we are: reminding us of the physicality that we’re in; what’s going on, give us some action. I can’t stand poetry that doesn’t have something going on in it. I don’t care what, but I need action, baby. And then, who. Who’s the consciousness? That’s all about tonality. Personality equals tonality. Getting a good interplay of those aspects can really energize a poem.

Also it’s hard to draw people in poems, or any writing really, without drawing the space around them, too. When I was working on Limited Lifetime Warranty and Boneland, we drove out to freaking North Dakota and Montana. My husband and I went on a dinosaur dig, so I could convey an accurate physical description. People need to sense—okay, yeah, this is a real place. I’ve lately been liking urban poetry, cityscapes—have you read Alex Dimitrov? His poems are all set in New York City, and they’re just full of bustling and cab rides. Oh, and Singer’s Today in the Taxi. Every poem starts, “Today in the Taxi.” He was a cab driver for years in New York, and you get the sights and sounds of the physical world.

BUCKINGHAM

We were talking a bit about persona in your work. About Pacific Walkers and the persona being the journalist and to what extent that persona is fictionalized. How important is the notion of persona to work?

VAN WINCKEL

That’s what made the whole book come together—finding that tonal way into it. In that job I had, they sent me out to do a story on all these bodies they would find in the spring around Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Mostly they were homeless people who had died, had too much of something, passed out, and froze. And when the coroner got called out to pick up the bodies, the newspaper would send me, too. It was really hard.

BUCKINGHAM

So you actually saw the bodies.

VAN WINCKEL

I did. I saw them being put in the plastic bags. And it stayed with me, but I moved it to Spokane in the book because I could access the Spokane Coroner’s website, where there is detailed information and because this place was fresher in my mind and that gave me a little bit of distance from “factuality.”

BUCKINGHAM

In Ever Yrs, there’s the persona of Nance with the letter at the beginning that’s to you. It seems like it’s a real letter, and then you get reading, and it’s like, oh, this isn’t a real letter. That’s playing with persona, too.

VAN WINCKEL

That was super fun to do. I loved working on that book so much. Finding the voice of that grandmother, I really loved her. I miss her sometimes. I wish she’d come back and talk to me again.

BORDWELL

I noticed a focus on children and their perspectives, as well as on animals, in some of your books. Often, they’re abused, neglected, lost, injured, or otherwise oppressed, though some are ultimately adopted. How and why do you choose to write about children, from the child’s point of view or otherwise, and what about animals?

VAN WINCKEL

The child’s point of view and childhood in general are compelling because children witness us as adults, and that means they’re seeing a lot of fucked-up-ed-ness, and it’s, I’m sure, very mystifying. I remember the first time I saw my grandmother’s breasts and I though, “Oh, am I going to have those?” You’re trying to figure out how to read the world, and they’re your guides, such as they are. The whole dynamic is really interesting to me.

I remember when I was in tenth grade of so, and this social studies teacher was telling us this story about growing up in North Dakota and how his family lived so far out of town, as did a lot of the farming community there, that their kids couldn’t get to school in the wintertime. So they sent the kids to live in a hotel during the weekdays so they could go to school, and then they’d come and get them and bring them home on the weekends. Years later when I was working on that book I remember thinking, that’s fantastic. What a way to grow up. You’re living in a hotel with a bunch of children with very little supervision just so you can go to school. I put my narrator in Limited Lifetime Warranty in such a hotel with children. She’s just starting out as a veterinarian. At the time, my husband and I were raising a few sheep. When you raise animals like that, you do a lot of your own veterinary stuff, like the hoof-trimming and tail-docking. I had a friend who lived on a sheep farm, and she showed me the ropes. My way of catching lambs so that we could use the tool called the emasculator—I kid you not, this is an actual tool—was to throw myself upon them. They were so fast. I did have a shepherd’s crook, but I could never get the hang of it.

Anyway, I did spend a lot of time with animals, and I’ve had experiences in the woods with cougars, and, you know, wild creatures are about. I was just remembering that cougar experience. I was walking on some dirt road out by Liberty Lake, and there was this cougar right in front of me on the road. Oh my God, I was so afraid. And then we stared each other down for the longest time. Big stare down, me and the cougar. And then he just walked on across the road, very slowly, watching me. And he went on up, high, to this big ridge that overlooked the road, and he watched me as I walked, backwards, all the way to my car.

KEELY LEIM

Yes, that features in Curtain Creek. It’s a terrifying cougar scene.

VAN WINCKEL

Is that in there? Right, right, I did not bring the cougar back for that.

BUCKINGHAM

We realized a lot of the images come up over and over again. The fox stole is one of them, and I noticed textiles repeating themselves.

VAN WINCKEL

God, that’s so cool, I hadn’t really even thought about that.

ELIZABETH GRAVES

Zero comes up a lot, as well. What’s your interest in zero?

VAN WINCKEL

I like the sound of that word, zero. .But when writing Sister Zero, I was thinking about writing code—solid ones and zeros. Those were my only thoughts. Things kind of matriculate out of a poem and into a story, or out of a story and into a poem. And the stole, I just think it’s a riot that women used to wear those with the little mouths that opened and closed and hooked onto the tail. It’s kind of a moebius image. The poor fox can’t stay dead. I think my grandmother had one of those, and I remember buying one at a flea market and wearing it as a Halloween costume.

BUCKINGHAM

It’s interesting that these stories and images that are part of your consciousness and your subconscious have no bounds of form. It’s in a poem, it’s in a story, it’s in a digital thing—it’s not like, here’s this image, and therefore I have to write a poem. My question is about choosing a genre. It almost seems like the image, or the obsessions, are about the form, more important than the form.

VAN WINCKEL

I think that’s really true. They get in my deep subconscious somehow and emerge later. But it’s that question about how things decide if they want to be poems or stories that I often wrestle with. Oh my god, lately if I sense something’s trying to be a story, I’m like, please, don’t be a story, please, don’t, because it takes over my life for such a long, long time. I’ve got notes for one in my office right now. It’s so much energy, and I know if I start writing it, I have to just close off the rest of the world completely. It sucks everything out of me.

I’m deep back into poems again, but, going back to persona, when I was in grad school all the poets were required to take a fiction writing class and vice-versa. And as a poet when I took my fiction workshop, oh my god, the story I wrote was terrible, and I was pretty much laughed out of the fiction workshop. Mine was all, like, deep image stuff. It makes me cringe to think about how awful it was. It wasn’t until I started teaching Introduction to Creative Writing, and I’d be walking to class trying to think, was DOES this person’s story need? I was teaching myself to write stories, and I had no clue that was happening. And then persona in poems finally blew the door open for me to be more fully in a character’s perspective. Then shit started happening. This first book of linked stories I wrote, Limited Lifetime Warranty, I began on my drive from where I lived in northern Illinois into Chicago—an hour-and-a-half drive. On the passenger seat I jotted on a piece of paper five little sentences that became the first five stories in that book. They all came just like that: the situation, the character—the same character, the young woman who becomes a veterinarian, her coming of age.

EBELING

Could you talk a little more about how writing fiction has informed your poetry and vice-versa, and do you feel like the composition of one genre informs the other?

VAN WINCKEL

Okay, let me take your first question first, and then we’ll go back, because that’s my favorite question. Thank you. When I started writing stories, what happened was they sucked a lot of the narrativity out of my poetry, and I really like that. I appreciated that I didn’t feel I need so much “story” in the poems anymore, that stories could be their own thing and fleshed out, more imaginatively alive, and I didn’t have to drag all that into a poem. It was very freeing. I guess as an old person now, one of the ways I feel like I’ve kept going is that I keep finding ways to change up what I’m doing. The experiments I’ve done lately with visual stuff—Ever Yrs, for instance, opened up a whole other door, giving me permission to learn and experiment in a new discipline. I loved the challenge of that. It helps that I work in an environment where I have other writers around me all the time, and I go to their lectures. It’s great. I’m learning so much. For instance, I was out at Vermont College one summer, and a writer I really like, Pam Painter, who’s especially known for her flash fiction, was giving a lecture. She said, “If you’re writing flashbacks, try not to let them go on for more than two pages. Any more than that, we lose the momentum of where we were before flashback.” That’s a kind of boneheaded place I was in with my own fiction back then, and I so needed to learn exactly that. Just being around that kind of information feed all the time has been such a privilege.

BUCKINGHAM

Not only do you write in a bunch of different genres, but almost every book of yours I’ve read is cross-genre. Pacific Walkers is journalism and poetry, and Boneland is linked stories. There’s a crossover everywhere. Ever Yrs is a novel but also visual. And it reads like Book of No Ledge—it goes so many different places that the story line of novel feels less important than some of the other stuff.

VAN WINCKEL

Yes, the big challenge for me in that scrapbook novel, Ever Yrs, was the through-line.

BUCKINGHAM

Oh, that interesting that you had to think about that—so your instinct was kind of to play.

VAN WINCKEL

Exactly. Exactly. I think every book has presented its own “experiment” for me. For instance, with the linked story collections, each one has had really different linkages. That’s been part of what was fun about making those books—discovering how I was going to link them up. Especially the one with the woman who is getting cataract surgery.

BORDWELL

Boneland.

VAN WINCKEL

Yes. Those pieces where she’s up in Canada and she’s had the botched surgery were their own little story and published as such. So I ripped them all apart and made them into little flash pieces to go in between the other longer stories. I liked what happened when I spliced them; they gave the book a sort of grounding, “a looking-back” perspective that helped me think through the longer stories as I revised them.

BORDWELL

In that book, Buster has this incredible persona, and he’s there and then gone and we hear about him a couple times, but he gets that much depth even though he’s just one fragment of the whole narrative.

VAN WINCKEL

I love what you’re saying. Later, though, I wondered if what I had done with him was okay in terms of appropriation, since he seems like an autistic character.

BORDWELL

I think he was my favorite. As an autistic person, I found that story so poignant and accurate. It wasn’t just, oh, he’s good at math, and let’s talk about how he goes into a career in science. The dude becomes an ice skater and is the Beast in Beauty and the Beast on ice. That’s not the standard autistic narrative that gets pushed around. I found it really, really endearing.

VAN WINCKEL

I can’t tell you how much that means to me that you think that’s okay. Because I worried about that so much. This whole issue of appropriation. I have to remind myself, Nance, you can’t just take other people’s worlds and issues they’re dealing with. But then I think, well, shouldn’t people who have those issues, shouldn’t they get to be a part of fiction, too? I struggle with this.

BORDWELL

I found myself really moved by poems about or in reference to indigenous people such as the Inuit and the Apache in Bad Girl, with Hawk. Many early poets in my generation are afraid for very justifiable reasons to write about any people who aren’t their own, but I also see this as being its own kind of erasure or silencing. Can you speak to why you chose to write about cultures beyond your own, how you did so, and perhaps offer guidance to this new generation of anxious poets?

VAN WINCKEL

It’s hard to navigate when that inclusion thing steps over the line and you’re appropriating other people’s troubles as if you know what that life is like. I think it’s a tonal thing sometimes where one assumes an authority one does not have over the material. I guess my instinct has been to presence them in the work, to bring them in. It’s not about judgement or trying to suggest I know their lives, but rather that they are with us, part of the family, the larger family.

BORDWELL

Like the way Robert or Robbie in Boneland ends up being gay at the end. It’s that tiny bit of inclusion thrown in at the end that enriches the narrative and contextualizes his life, but he doesn’t have to be gay. Just like nobody in the book has to be straight.

VAN WINCKEL

Exactly, it just is. That’s one of the reasons I liked the grandmother in Ever Yrs. Her grown son is gay, and she is so accepting of that even though she’s been raised in the Christian church, and in a way her trajectory in that book is really my own, which is away from Christianity towards more acceptance of, let’s say, more humanistic teachings. She’s me when I’m a hundred. Getting there.

LEIM

On the subject of you and your life and how it intersects with your writing, how do you view your incorporation of certain autobiographical elements into your work? For example, the last chapter of Curtain Creek Farm with Francine features a mother who doesn’t always remember her daughter.

VAN WINCKEL

Interestingly, when I wrote that story about Francine and her mother. . .do they go to a strip club?

LEIM

The Elvis show.

VAN WINCKEL

The Elvis show, yeah! There’s a part in there when the mother says the ginger root looks like a penis. Yeah, that came from my mother. Definitely. There are a lot of things that I’ve taken from my family and from my friends. The whole Curtain Creek Farm book in so many ways. I don’t know if you guys have ever been out to Tolstoy Farm, the commune just west of Spokane. It’s one of the oldest communes in the US. It started in the early 60s, and one of my friends moved there around 1968, had a kid there, and when she comes to visit me, we trek out of there. I remember coming home from Tolstoy Farm with her, and I turned to her, she’s a writer too, and asked, “Do you think you’re ever going to use this place in your work?” She just looked at me and said, “You may have it.” So because I’m writing fiction, I moved it to a different location. But back to Francine for a second. When I wrote that story, my own mom was fine. She didn’t have Alzheimer’s. Not yet. I know. Kind of eerie.

BUCKINGHAM

Well, it seems pretty clear to me that writers have that prescience.

VAN WINCKEL

Okay, I’ll tell you a scarier one, then. So that book Quake. You know that last story where there’s that earthquake? I wrote that story and then my husband came home and I said, “Okay, I finished the book today,” and I gave him that story to read, and there’s an earthquake. A bridge collapses. And later that night we turned on the TV, and there had just been that earthquake in Northridge, California. That was rather scary actually. It feels sometimes like I’m in a dream space when I’m writing, like I wasn’t expecting to write about an earthquake. And then there it was. Complete with visuals. Then there it was on the nightly news.

BUCKINGHAM

The way you talk about fiction seems like that, too. “I don’t want to, I don’t want to, but it’s here at the door, and I have to.”

VAN WINCKEL

It wakes me up. In the morning when I’m working on fiction, I wake up, and there are people talking in my head. I tell my husband, “Don’t speak to me. Don’t speak to me. I have to go write this down.” It’s like your subconscious is still on the job while you’re trying to freaking sleep.

BUCKINGHAM

I wonder what role the mythic plays in your work because I see it all over the place, and it always surprises me. Even in Ever Yrs, that minotaur. It’s kind of misplaced. There is this super contemporary stuff on top of these old pictures, and then there’s this minotaur. And in Pacific Walkers there are archetypal characters.

VAN WINCKEL

I do like when that happens. I don’t think I consciously go there, but when I see that it’s percolating up, I may investigate its potential. That book is set in Butte. The whole minotaur thing seemed so apt. The city is set on top of a maze of intersecting mine tunnels. And then I saw that minotaur figure in some piece of graffiti, so I moved him into the book, too. It’s like when you’re working on something, poem or fiction, you’re in a mode where things around you are suddenly magnetized and pulled into the work. I’ve always liked being in that place. I feel like I have my antennae up, there’s things I’m looking for, but I don’t know what they are, and I’m in a waiting mode. I’ll never start writing a story until I have at least three or four fields of action, I call them, things I know that are going on simultaneously. Like different balls thrown in the air. I don’t even start writing until I have these balls to move between. If there’s only one ball in the air, anybody can do that. Two balls, still easy. But when you get three or four or five, things start to be really interesting, and that’s where I want to be before I write a single word. I need to have that sense of dynamic—of moving back and forth. Same for a poem, too, that sense of place, action, who’s speaking. Who is this person? I don’t work from the idea that it’s me, my own life. I’m just a suburban housewife, please. My life is boring, but my life in poems is way more interesting.

GRAVES

I was thinking about your visual poems. Can you talk a little bit about the process of those? Is it similar to having a whole bunch of balls in the air? They feel very intuitive.

VAN WINCKEL

I love that word intuitive, yes. I’ve moved ever so gradually into the visual realm: visual poems, erasure poems, collage poems. I think it’s because I love images so much, I realize, oh, these are actual, physical images. I want them! I must have them. But I need to be loyal to poetry and to literature because that sort of brung me to the dance. And I’m still a reader. I read all the time. The challenge in that, and what’s been fun about it, is to figure out how to integrate text into that visual space that feels more my own.

GRAVES

In your work, I was reminded of something that William Stafford wrote in Writing the Australian Crawl. “Writing is a reckless encounter with whatever comes along. We have to earn any moon we present. The only real poems are found poems, found when we stumble on things around us.” What do you think about serendipity in writing and art? Or what is the role of intuition or willingness to be open to receive the world around you?

VAN WINCKEL

Oh, I love that so much. Yes, I agree, and I think that’s part of what led me down the road to visual poems. My husband loves graffiti. He’s a visual artist, that’s how he makes his actual living, and so whenever we’ve traveled someplace together, I think because I had the purse—this is just so sexist—I carried the camera. “Nance, get the camera out, shoot this, shoot this.” Mostly he wanted me to shoot images of graffiti. He loves the bold vibrance of them, and I really came to appreciate them, too. So I would take all these shots of graffiti, but there would be text mixed in with it, and I love that, too. I remember one of the first ones I shot. I think it’s somewhere in Spokane. I started packing along the camera, even sans husband, just for myself when I was out doing my urban walking. And there was “Roo ‘n Boom love more than you.” I thought, okay, that’s a perfect little poem. So when I took that photograph I didn’t add any text because I loved that language it already had. To make it mine, to make that wall, that brick wall with graffiti on it belong to me, I needed to enter the conversation. So, instead, I added some imagery, a scene from the 1890’s of women in big hats, and then I made it look like it had been on the wall for a really long time. That was one of my first stabs at interacting with the graffiti. Usually, however, I try to add a few words just to be a part of the conversation on the wall, which is another thing that I like about graffiti. It’s a place for anybody. You don’t have to be famous to have your say. I can send you a copy. Is this going to be online? You can put it up with the interview. [See the bottom of the page for the image.]

BORDWELL

I’m fascinated by how The Many Beds of Martha Washington began as a single poem in Bad Girl, with Hawk. Can you speak to how and why the ideas of that piece stuck with you? How do some pieces or ideas sit with us for so long, and how do you know when to further explore them?

VAN WINCKEL

One of the things that’s influenced me is American history and folklore—folk stories. The stories of the folks. I grew up as a kid in rural Virginia. I remember taking the school bus, and there were all these signs around. “Martha Washington slept here.” I was just learning to read. And I thought, who is this person? And who cares? What is this about? Later, I found out who she was and that she and George had lived down the road from where I started school in Mount Vernon, Virginia. It felt like history was already kind of inside me. I spent a lot of time with my grandfather. He was the only reader I had as a model growing up. My mom read ladies’ magazine, and my dad, my stepdad, was not a reader. But I remember seeing my grandfather reading history books all the time. And when I went to college, he sent me all these letters that were often three, single-spaced, typed pages about our family and the battles they had fought in during the Civil War. We were one of those families that had people on both sides of the Civil War. And my grandfather, I think, was really torn by that. He wanted me to know who these people were.

BORDWELL

I’m curious about the role you see Martha Washington and other historical figures playing in your work and why there’s a drive to write about them so consistently. For lack of a better way to phrase it, why do we become obsessed with people?

VAN WINCKEL

Yeah. God, I don’t know. They enter your deep psyche somehow. They’re like dream figures. Especially people and stories that you read as children.

LEIM

Are there other historical figures who won’t lose their hold on you?

VAN WINCKEL

It’s more the wild, outlandish stories, the sort of manifest destiny idea we learned in junior high. I remember thinking, wow it would have been cool to be a part of a wagon train and travel across the country. I remember thinking that. The older I got, the more I thought, that would be terrible! To think you could just go into some other part of the world and say, “Okay, this place is nice. I like this spot on the river here. I’m going to call it mine.” So it’s more like talking back to some of those ideas that were shoveled into us as kids, especially these kinds of folk myths, that if you were strong and deserving and lived a good life you were owed X, Y, and Z. You had a right to it. The Butte story in a way is that same story.

BUCKINGHAM

All the mining going on.

VAN WINCKEL

The mining. Between Minneapolis and San Francisco, that was the most populated US town in the early 1900s. Butte, Montana. And now look at it. It’s a superfund clean-up site.

BUCKINGHAM

I have a question that relates to what you’re saying. When I read your work, I think of it as very subversive. I wonder how you see the role of politics in poetry.

VAN WINCKEL

I think a lot of poetry talks back to politics. As a writer, I can’t have an agenda going into it. The work needs to surprise me. But what you’re asking is definitely one of the things I use as a test. Does this have any relevance outside my own imagination, my own little life? What’s it speaking back to, or what does it call into question that maybe need to b called into question? Often I think I’m just raising questions.

Right now, for instance, an issue that confronts me daily and something I’m writing about is homelessness. We have campers all around, right? They’ve adopted my shed out back. They’re here, , really close. And it presents a very complicated issue for me. Because I’m afraid of them sometimes, and sometimes I take them a Coke. Seriously, I do. They want to use my hose to take a bath. I say, “Okay.” Fear vs. empathy. It’s hard to figure this out. So I simply ask questions, stay focused on the questions. But in terms of writing about it, I had to move it to another place. I had to move it to the city, New York City, where my husband and I used to rent a little B&B before or after my teaching stints at Vermont College. Homelessness there is really interesting, too. Homeless New Yorkers: if you don’t get out of their way, they’ll just give you a shove. My imagination seems able to work the questions better if I don’t use my own backyard. I feel like I can’t be as imaginative if I’m stuck too much in my own life.

BORDWELL

Since many of us are writing our first poetry collections, can you speak to your experience writing your first books? What guidance might you give to early writers, specifically today? How do you think first collections have changed since your own?

VAN WINCKEL

First collections have changed a lot. When I was starting out, a lot of people’s first books of poems were, much like my own, about their lives growing up and becoming adults: the struggles that one has with family, with family dynamics, charting one’s own path out of the first books I’m seeing, and I think maybe this is to the betterment really, are organized more as kind of project books. You will see some childhood issues and maturation, but with more of a through-line or central concept. It’s gotten harder than ever to get that first book out. Competition is really stiff now, thanks to all these writing programs. So a person has to have a very distinctive voice and style to set themselves apart, more than ever. And that’s good. If you can find that, that’s what you need to do.

My favorite thing to do with graduating MFA students is to help them make their book. In a poetry book, one approach is to find say four or five poems that are the main punchy poems and then make those central to a section, configuring the other poems in that section around that central poem. That’s just one way. As opposed to the student who years ago wanted to organize her book fall, winter, spring, summer, and I said, “No, please.”

Let’s make it interesting. Just get out of those clichéd traps. Find a line from a poem to be the title of the next poem—just little things like that give the book more cohesion. And I’m sensing that’s happening more in first books. They used to be like, “Here’re all the poems I wrote in graduate school, all the experiments that I did, and I learned so much. Here’s a sonnet, and here’s a villanelle, and then oh, here’s a five-page narrative poem in the middle here,” and oh my god.

BORDWELL

The way you describe it makes it sound like a very good change has occurred.

VAN WINCKEL

Yes, higher expectations. When I published Bad Girl, with Hawk, my first book, there wasn’t a single poem that I’d written in graduate school. Not one. And someone I went to grad school with—I’m not going to say her name, published her first book about the same time I did, and I recognized about half her poems from our workshop. She’s done fine though. She’s doing fine.

EBELING

We often talk about the emotional resonance of speakers and characters in both poetry and fiction. And since you compose both, I’m wondering if would you talk about the role of emotional investment in your readers across these genres.

VAN WINCKEL

Emotional investment, yes. Okay, I’m going cop to this because it’s true: the thing that makes me happiest is when I look out at the audience and see they’re crying. I’m pleased someone has been moved by something. That I’ve touched a nerve. I really think that sadness connects us in a much more deep-down way that happiness. About this new memoir book, Sister Zero, people have been saying to me, “Oh this happened to me, too. I know just what you mean.” Wow, connection. But you can’t just do sad. Nobody wants that. You need to have a range. And it’s the range that makes it work. For instance, in my memoir, since it was mostly so sad, I had to make myself put in Mr. Ed, the talking horse. It needed that counterpointing. I’ve noticed when I read things, if I read something humorous first and then I read a sad thing, the sad gets much sadder—probably because you weren’t expecting it. It’s because you went from an UP place into some down deep place. That’s the only way I know how to make emotionality work. I know I’m writing emotional stuff when I’m crying as I’m writing. this is a test. And I can’t tell you how often that happens. But I know I’m in a good place then. I know I’m hitting that nerve. I like funny though, too. I really like funny.

GRAVES

I wanted to ask about your experience working with or accessing memory. In Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, she writes, “Memory is a pinball in a machine. It messily ricochets around between image, idea, fragments of scenes, stories we’ve heard. Then the machine goes tilt and snaps off. But most of the time we keep memories packed away. I sometimes liken that moment of sudden unpacking to circus clowns pouring out of a miniature car trunk. How did so much fit into such small a space?” Throughout this conversation, you’ve been reminiscing about things, too. I don’t know if you takes notes or keep a journal, or if these little memories just come back to you at the right time. How are you accessing them?

VAN WINCKEL

No, I don’t take notes, I don’t do journaling. I work on a yellow legal tablet, lined paper. It’s what I was talking about before with the antenna. I write down fragments. I’m not trying to write a poem. I’m just writing down some lines I like the sound of. Maybe two or three. Then I’ll go back, and I’ll read some more Charlie Simic—oh yeah, that line of his reminds me of something. Then I write that down. I’m not even going to put that line close to these lines. I’m going to start a whole other column and put that over there. To my mind that’s what Karr’s idea sounds like: that ricocheting. Then what I have is this giant freaking mess of lines: columns of them, nothing really connecting to anything else. But then, later, things start to forge connections. My antennae are up. As if on their own. I cannot write a poem if I give myself an assignment. I don’t like those. People have asked if I want to part of some, I don’t know, poem-a-day, or if I want to write a poem to go with a painting. I can’t stand that shit. Please. Poems do not come from assignments. A poem is its own little creature, and it grows. My lines are like molecules waiting to attach to other molecules. This sounds too weird, doesn’t it?

BUCKINGHAM

No, it’s very ricochet-y.

VAN WINCKEL

I love that ricochet word. Mary Karr is great. Reading is such a big part of it. I need to have somebody I’m reading who just gets my language synapses all fizzy. That’s what makes me write. And what I’m writing has nothing in common with who I’m reading except for I like their fizziness. I want to steal that fizziness.

BORDWELL

I discovered, upon my finishing the book, that of the 400 published copies of A Measure of Heaven that exist, I happen to own the 314th. This happens to be one of the only poems I’ve committed to memory, by Emily Dickinson. Number 314 begins, “Hope is the thing with feathers / that perches in the soul / and sings the tune without the words / and never stops at all.” When I saw that number, I thought of how often faith seemed to weave its way into your work, not just with the obvious A Measure of Heaven, but even in your fiction. I don’t mean faith in the traditional, religious sense, although it has that, too; instead, I’m thinking of an understanding of our place in the world, of hope in it. What role does hop and/or faith play in your writing? Does creative work change your own hope and faith? Does it reaffirm your own faith in humanity, or the Earth?

VAN WINCKEL

That’s just beautiful, Oran. What a great question. Yeah, definitely not religious faith, but faith in each other—the human family. That we’ll get through. We’re not going to all burn up. And you’re right. It’s really the work that pushes me to that feeling. Just the fact that people still want to read and go to literature for exactly that reason. Especially those of us who maybe don’t have a religious faith but have faith in each other. That we want to reach each other, and we want to share stories that somehow make the hard stuff beautiful.

LEIM

As a follow up to that, how do you retain that sort of faith in a post-2016 world?

VAN WINCKEL

I really struggle with that. I feel like I’ve gone increasingly to a really pure, imaginative space when I read and when I’m writing too. Something that’s not about endings. That doesn’t have endings. I come back to that idea of enchantment again. That’s sustaining somehow. That we can still be enchanted.

BORDWELL

It’s rare, in fact I don’t know if we’ve ever gotten to do this, that we get to interview someone who worked at Eastern and someone who ran our magazine. What do you think of as your favorite memory, moment, lesson that you gained or received, or taught even, at Eastern Washington University? Or specifically in the magazine.

VAN WINCKEL

One of the things that I loved doing when I was editing was the magazine layout and finding the cover art and art for the inside pages. That was such a delight. That was when I think I realized I could be lost for hours doing freaking Photoshop. The student taught me it. I didn’t know how to do any layout when I got there. And I loved our editorial meetings.

LEIM

I’d love to hear some of the name of writers who’ve companioned you, dead or alive, and what they’ve meant to you.

VAN WINCKEL

Yes. I definitely have my writers. People I return to. I’ve mentioned Charlie Simic, since I’m rereading him right now. Oh god, I love Dennis Nurkse, Norman Dubie. Dubie has really helped me think about persona. He goes into these other headspaces, like, who is this person. I really, really like Norman Dubie. I remember we were reading some of Dubie in one of my classes and I said, “Yeah, I like to haave a little Dubie each morning with my coffee.” They went, “Yeah, Nance we’ve heard that.” I’ve been reading James Baldwin. Laura Kasischke. Wallace Stevens. Oh my god, Wally. He’s somebody who’s pure imagination. Here’s this guy who’s a vice president of Hartford Insurance Company, and he writes these poems while he’s walking back and forth to the office. In his head. Gets to to the office. Writes them down. Those poems are full of sound. Talk about the fizz of language. That’s what Stevens was. That’s what drove him to poetry. Fuck insurance. Really, I mean, the guy had a bazillion dollars. He didn’t need to write poetry. It sustained his inner life. The life of the imagination. That’s what he wrote about. Because that was the thing I think was so worried he was going to lose. It was going to get sucked out of him by Hartford Insurance Company. So, yeah, the sustaining. We have to find out peeps. I remember when I was a freshman in college, where I was when I read some of these poets for the first time. My life felt altered. I remember lying in the top bunk reading a poem by John Berryman called “The Stewardess,” where she falls out of an airplane and dies.

BUCKINGHAM

That’s really funny.

VAN WINCKEL

Yeah, it’s funny in the poem! The poem is funny. It’s weird—her gloves are here, part of her is there. And then, there’s this poem of James Dickey’s called “The Sheep Child” where a guy is looking at something like in Barnum & Bailey, in a jar.

BUCKINGHAM

Oh, no.

VAN WINCKEL

He’s being told, “Don’t have sex with animals, this could happen to you.” But then, Dickey lets the sheep child speak. Oh my god, it’s amazing. That sense of otherness. Of being not this earthly realm, but of another realm. I remember what if felt like to go there with Berryman. Anyway, I remember all these people and where I was and how the world felt changed afterwards. I hope you guys have that same experience.

Two Poems by David Keplinger

Willow Springs issue 93 cover

The Immoral Jellyfish

A whorl of hair locked in the bristles of the hundred-year-old hairbrush: a
sculpture the brush is chiseling, in the shape of the dead woman’s ear

The cicada floating over salvia touches on the surfaces, sifting through its
files, everything in order, a competent desk clerk of the 19th century.

*

The prestige, that it happens, that death comes and swept away a
personality, made us talkative in the hospital waiting room, like children
during a field trip.

*

My shoeboxes were my first poems, houses for my disconnected objects.
Crickets chirped loudly in the forests of shirts and dress pants in the closet.

*

And in the winter the silverfish takes rule of my tub, circling. White sea. The
morning will be dark for five more hours. Much accrues as loneliness.
Pictographs of ice on glass. Bad plumbing of old regime.

*

The scary thing about losing everything, including consciousness, is that you
can really believe right to the end that you are the thing you are losing.

*

In his old secretary desk I find a camera with film inside, set to take the next
shot from his childhood, and a text on the immortal jellyfish, which ages
backwards to its birth, to be the youngest thing on earth, again and again.

*

The earth is my body, I am the tooth, eternity a doorknob, and time is the
string it’s looped to. My life, the instant it takes the door to slam shut.


Deduction

In order to deduct the costs of his office

he had to measure it well and he did,

starting with the window where the sun

shines through the winter trees, spoked

with branches. The sun was one centimeter

thereabouts, and the square of the window

it shined through, the size of a picture

frame. Under the window was a desk

which would have been about the shape

of a six-month old Polish elk, its head lowered

in the carpet’s scythed grass, but the desk

was red, a kind of unnatural cherry red,

so it would have to be called a large

stripped carcass on the tax form. A lamp,

the only artificial fluorescence in the room.

It had two small columns like the portico

of the Temple of Minerva. It was the size

of the end of a tiny harpoon. The chair

could not be mistaken for anything

but tombstone from the back. From the front

it was a child pushing two hands on the ground,

about to stand up for the first tie.

And he deducted himself, the size of

a man at the beginning of the end of

a story, the part where the thing inside him

is given shape in how he describes the sound

of a flute being played by a neighbor, the

cubit or so that held the breath, the fathoms

of the workings of that instrument.

Two Poems by Carol Potter

Willow Springs issue 93 cover

Found in Willow Springs 93

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Glass Eggs, or They Like to Eat Same as You

Some farmers put glass eggs in their nesting boxes.
Snakes slide in, swallow those eggs. Die
when the glass inside them breaks.
You can understand it from the hen’s point of view,
from the farmer’s point of view. I was the farmer, the daughter of,
and my job was collecting the eggs, washing them, sorting them.
I never found a snake in a nesting box. Sometimes long black
polished ropes of them lay out in front of the hen-house.
Sunning themselves. Other places they put ping pong balls
in the hens’ nests. Same principle. Swallow, then choke.
I’d never hear of that before today, but it’s something
Michael Ondaatje witnessed as a child. That
and the family shooting the snakes when they came into the house.
Cobra on a desk. In a chair. In the corner of the kitchen.
Someone might be loading a gun. Sometimes the action freezes.
Sometimes I wish for a glass egg I could make what’s eating me eat.
How useful when the thing you can’t stand takes the form of a fat snake.
When it’s there on the desk whisking its head back and forth when it sees you.
Glad you’ve arrived. Glad you’re pulling back your chair.


Good God Damn

The man under the broken pick-up, snow-plow attached,
was not visible but we could hear him fuck, fuck, oh
shit! trying to fix whatever it was by the side of the road—
thirty-eight degrees, light rain falling, snow on its way his
friend handing the wrong tool though no one of the two
had what they needed. He was down on his back in the wet
fuck of fall at the side of the road and the fuck of it all
traveling down the street to the pup at nine months who
just wanted to sit there and listen as he could not see
the man but he could feel what fuck this shit meant and
oh good god damned motherfucker and seemed to get
what that tremor in the voice meant as well as the clunk of
metal on metal one more thing to learn about us humans I
suppose pup looking at me knowing something about my
current undercurrents but not so much that he thought it
necessary to get the fuck up, c’mon, not your business, me
tugging at the least the man under the truck out of luck
deep inside the machine of it all the rust my little dog just
now suspecting maybe there was something not quite right
in the world he’d found himself leashed to my hands like small
supplicants smile on my lip little clip at the end of the least
treats in my pockets bits of old hot dog random kibble.

Three Poems by Liana Roux

Found in Willow Springs 93

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81/2 Marina

for Risden

As we sit on the dock
and press frozen shrimp
into fish hooks
and cast the lines
into the dark, a single lamp
bobs out over the bay,
turned down into the shallows
which seem murky even from here,
a shifting cloud
of seagrass and sand.
He’s looking for flounder,
you explain. Gigging:
a long spear,
a flat boat, a bucket.
A flounder
looks like a dinner plate,
wide and dim.
It buries itself in the sand.
The motor hums the boat closer,
following the shore.
Something keeps eating the shrimp
clean off our hooks,
but we keep trying.
We’re drinking wine
the same color as the water,
which drinks light.
Homer’s wine-dark sea.
The bay is dredged
every few years,
this island unsustainable
and not unlike your love
of useless things,
of Huysmans’ bejeweled tortoise,
of this place, a jut of concrete
built out of the water.
Our hooks return empty
again and again.


Gnash

I’m grinding my teeth straight through the enamel.
The dental hygienist asks if I’m experiencing any stress.

Has my wife noticed anything?
Does she hear tumbling rocks?

Gnashing, from Middle English from Old Norse,
may be onomatopoeic, grown—ground?—from sound.

On the tip of my left canine tooth is a divot,
a deepening pit that catches my tongue.

The dentist on YouTube says I don’t need a mouth guard.
I just need to practice relaxing my jaw.

A ball of yarn unwinds. A spring snaps it coil.
Don’t smile. Instead imagine it.

I can’t blame my sleeping body.
We all want to hurt ourselves a little bit.


Spring, Loring Pond

The first week the ice melts,
plastic bags and newspapers
float up like ghosts,
drifting and gray
near the softening bank.

*

I keep seeing a body
wrapped in a sheet.
On TV it’s always a woman with a dog
who finds it—the waterlogged arm
emerging from the reeds, the barking terrier,
the mud and the blue morning light.

*

In the ’70s men would cruise here.
One was beaten to death with a pipe.
So many places where it could have happened—
the dandelion fountain, the bridge,
the tree growing sideways,
skimming the pond.

*

Who remembers? Each year
men in yellow vest wade to their stomachs
and cut the cattails back.
The dry wind hushes
the water, cold and deep
and full of figures rising almost to the shore.

Stricken by Matthew Baker

Willow Springs issue 93 cover

Found in Willow Springs 93

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I HIDE IN THE BATHROOM, sitting on the floor next to a wicker wastebasket heaped with crumpled-up toilet paper and tampon wrappers and makeup-caked cotton swabs, until the pounding on the door becomes insistent, and the urgent, and a voice shouts a plea through the door. Scented candles flicker over on the counter, perfuming in the air with a rosy fragrance. A hand tries twisting the knob, forcefully, then raps on the door again. Standing back up, I’m confronted by my reflection in the mirror over the sink. My skin is disgusting. My nose is hideous. My eyebrows are grotesque. I am a beautiful human being. I wash my hands.

Back out in the party all of the painting on the walls glow neon under the black lights and people are dancing to the thumping beat of the music, some gross hiphop song about pussy. Somebody’s wearing a deodorant that smells abominable, repulsive, nastier than any sweat ever could, memorable, and certainly unique. I tentatively move toward the dancing, but the thought of trying to a fake a feeling of joy suddenly seems unbearable, and just before reaching the edge of the crowd, I awkwardly veer away. I’m still carrying my drink, I I realize, a plastic cup of some unidentified chardonnay that tastes cheaper than box wine. that was generously provided by the hosts free of charge. I wander through rooms of people chatting happily together, reclining on the sofas, leaning against cupboards, standing clustered between leafy houseplants, relaxing in a whirlpool tub with underwater lighting. People recording a video. People passing a joint. Nobody notices me. I have no friends, which shouldn’t surprise me. I’m not funny. I’m not smart. I have no personality. I contribute nothing to human society. I don’t deserve to be loved. I don’t deserve to be liked. I can’t even have fun at a party. Every person here is my friend. Every person here is an acquaintance who pretends to be my friend out of politeness, or sheer pity. Nobody wants me to be here. I’m such an idiot. I shouldn’t have come. I walk out.

Frogs are croaking quietly. The wind is frigid. I drift into a park down the road, sitting alone on a boulder, hunched and shivering, sipping terrible wine and trying not to cry. I’m such a freak. I haven’t even drunk enough to feel tipsy.

“You okay?” says a shadowy figure standing on the path.

“I’ll stab you in the throat with a switchblade if you speak another word to me,” I say, and the figure ambles away.

I manage to strip off my cardigan and my dress and tug on a baggy t-shirt before collapsing into bed and falling asleep, but there’s no sense of rest upon waking the next morning, just blurry memories of nightmares and a damp patch of drool on my pillow, pressing into my face. I grimace, rolling over. Daybreak glows pale blue in the sky. Dust floats through the light by the window. I knuckle some crusted flakes of dried drool from the corners of my mouth, feeling a sense of horror remembers the party the night before. I don’t know how long my brain has been like this. I wonder if maybe my brain has always been like this. Judging, criticizing, suspecting, hating. I can’t remember the world ever seeming beautiful instead of ugly. Sage says that my mind is stuck in a routine, a certain method of processing information, that for some reason my mind automatically thinks in negatives—negative impressions, negative reactions, negative assumptions, negative expectations—but that with a conscious effort, my mind can be conditioned to think in positives. I can experience reality from a new perspective. To live in a beautiful world, I just need to recognize the beauty already around me.

I’m failing. I’m trying.

Bluebird are chirping in the branches of the maple tree out the window. I masturbate for a while, watching some hentai, a yaoi scenario, lying in bed with my phone propped against a mound in my comforter, close to my face, and my underwear pushed down onto my thighs. Subtitles flash innuendos. Focusing on a sexual encounter between imaginary characters, releasing my body to the primal pleasures of the clit, I experience briefly the infinite bliss of nonthinking, a state of pure existence, but after a couple of orgasms the porn gradually ceases to interest me, and self-awareness returns to my body like a shadow. I‘m such a fucking weeaboo. I am a beautiful human being. I’m pathetic. I flip my phone down and kick off my underwear and then flop over onto my back with my arms thrown out, staring up at the ceiling. I can hear one of my housemates gargling mouthwash in the bathroom down the hall. My bedroom has a faint lingering odor of cat urine and mothballs from prior tenants. I live in a dump. I live in a hovel. I’m lucky to have a home, somewhere safe to sleep at night, sheltered from the elements, warm enough during the winter to walk around barefoot as snow flurries out the windows, cool enough to wear a sweatshirt during the summer as heat shimmers over the road, a house furnished with all of the wonders of modernity, electricity and plumbing and supersonic internet. The fridge is janky, the toilets are shoddy, and the carpeting is vile. This house should be condemned based on the color of the carpeting alone. I’d rather die in a gutter than have to spend another night here. Above there’s a water stain on the ceiling, a depressing brown blotch, a disgusting brown smear, a wavy brown shape that upon further inspection is composed of so many overlapping ripples of beige and chestnut and taupe and umber with such subtly varying degrees of translucency that the composition would be impossible for a painter to replicate by hand. An abstract masterpiece created by the secret movements of water dripping through hidden spaces. I like remembering that sometimes ceilings are also floors and that sometimes floors are also ceilings and that every wall in every house conceals a hidden space containing wooden beams and fluffy insulation and squirrel nests and wandering ants and maybe gold bars stashed there a century ago by a former owner. That nature will always be the greates artist. The water stain is actually maybe the best feature of the bedroom.

One of my house mates peeks in through my door.

“You leave dishes in the sink again?” Zadie says.

“Can you knock before barging in here?” I say.

“Oh, totally, sorry,” Zadie says.

Motherfucker.

“I’m barely even awake yet,” I say, dragging my hands over my face.

“Sorry, just have to, like, make some breakfast,” Zadie says, smiling apologetically.

I wash the dishes, standing barefoot at the sink in the kitchen. I fucking hate washing dishes. Zadie has never like me. She’s always harassing me about dirty dishes, always, and only me. She actually seems to enjoy persecuting me. She’s heartless. She’s sadistic. Zadie offers to cook me some eggs and bacon, and just then my other housemates wander into the kitchen, yawning and scratching and cracking a joke about zombies, Nisha in a torn hoodie, Chloe in some silk pajamas, and suddenly we’re all eating breakfast together, sitting out on the stoop with eggs and bacon and grapefruit juice and mismatched mugs of coffee as the sunrise bursts orange in the sky. Puffy clouds float over the neighborhood. Goldfinches flit twittering through the yard. The grapefruit juice is too pulpy. The grapefruit juice is pleasantly tart. I fucking hate when there’s pulp. The coffee tastes almost chocolaty and the yolks of the eggs are like buttery gushes of cream in my mouth and the crisp savory meat of the bacon is marbled with strips of fat so rich that the lard seems to melt on my tongue. My housemates hardly ever eat breakfast all together like this. Zadie cracks up at the punchline to a story, laughing so hard she’s crying, collapsing into me, resting her head on my shoulder and squeezing my arm with her hand for support. Just then a dog comes scurrying down the sidewalk, a puppy with blond fur and dark eyes and a bright pink tongue hanging out, wearing a collar but no leash. Noticing me and my housemates sitting over on the steps, the dog yips and hesitates and then bounds across the yard, and my housemates exclaim in delight, coaxing the dog over with squeals and coos and then reaching down to pet the puppy, to scratch the puppy behind the ears. Zadie grins happily, letting the dog lick her fingers. That dog probably just ate feces off the sidewalk, or licked a festering puddle of rot leaking from a bag of garbage, or attempted to chew the brittle putrid corpse of a chipmunk that had been crushed by the tire of a car.

“That’s so disgusting,” I say, pulling my feet up onto the stoop with my arms around my legs.

That dog probably has fleas.

“I don’t want that mutt anywhere near me,” I say.

The owner of the puppy finally appears, strolling down the road with a coiled-up leash in hand, yet another asshole in this town who’s too entitled to keep his dog on a leash as required by local ordinance. The law should be punishable by imprisonment. Motherfuckers like him deserve to be arrested, to get stungunned and handcuffed and tossed into the back of a van with a bag over his head. He should have to beg a judge for mercy, should have to cry with remorse before ever seeing daylight again. Gelled hair slicked straight back. Glancing over, he smiles and me and my housemates as if he’s performing some wonderful service from the community by allowing his dog to run wild. I hope a hawk swoops down talons out and rips his puppy straight from this world into the afterlife. I want to watch him fall to his knees and weep in despair as a hawk tears into the belly of his dog in the sky. Afterward, after spurts of blood and chunks of intestine and gristly lumps of flesh have rained down onto the pavement around him, after the hawk has finally eaten to satisfaction and released the limp carcass and flapped away and what remains of his puppy has hit the pavement just in front of him with a wet slap, I’d like to walk across the yard, knell down close beside him, wrap an arm around him, comfortingly, and then whisper in his ear, “Maybe you’d have been able to save your dog if you’d had your dog on a leash, huh?”

Maybe he volunteer to walk the dog as a favor for a sick friend or an elderly neighbor and honestly just couldn’t figure out how the leash worked.

After the puppy has scampered away, hurrying off down the road after the stranger with the leash, my housemates rise from the stoop, carrying empty mugs and plates and cups back through the door. I’m suddenly gripped by a crushing sense of regret. I’d been desperate to spend more time with my housemates, been secretly longing to hang out with them more often, and an opportunity finally arrived, and I ruined everything, fucking idiot, sitting here scowling because of some grapefruit pulp and a stray dog, because of having to wash some dirty dishes that should’ve been washed the night before. I’ll have other chances. Fuck. I’m going to have other chances to spend time with my housemates. I’m such a fucking monster. I am a beautiful human being. I’m such a bitch. I am a beautiful human being. I don’t deserve housemates this amazing. My mouth is quivering, I realize. My body is hunched with shame.

I’m still brooding about the incident standing under a drizzle of water in the shower, and putting on eyeliner at the mirror in my bedroom, and getting dressed in a rush, and then walking to work, hurrying down the sidewalk in jeans and boots and a black turtle-neck, wearing a tan wool coat against the chill of the breeze. The sky has suddenly darkened with cloud. Michigan springs. Across from the taqueria there’s a sandwich wrapper spattered with what looks like mayonnaise lying in the gutter, dropped there by some asshole too lazy to walk the wrapper over to the thrash container that’s mere steps away, maybe dropped there on accident after slipping from a tote or a purse. I almost trip over the curb crossing the road. Sage says not to block out objective facts, that an awareness of objective facts is healthy, but that how you respond to an objective fact is a choice, and if you’re going to attach a value to an objective fact, or make a subjective interpretation, then there’s always a way to think of a positive. She was wearing this cute romper, sitting against a rusted barrel in the desert, that time she talked about objectivity. Back when her hair was still dyed ombre. I wish we could be friends. I’m so fucking lame. I am a beautiful human being. I deserve to get dragged through the streets and pelted with moldy tomatoes. The town should build a public urinal that’s just a bust of my head. I’m almost to work. I wasn’t paying attention getting dressed. I’ve never washed these jeans before, an attempt to preserve the color, but by now the denim is so washed-out from thunderstorms and snowmelt and spilled glasses of water that the rich black dye has faded down the front of the legs, and my skin pokes through rips in the knees, and the black leather of my boots is all scuffed at the toes, and bleach spots are flecked across one of the cuffs of my turtleneck. My outfit looks fucking raggedy. My outfit is perfectly fine. Motherfucker. I’m such an idiot. I should’ve worn something different. Shaking keys out of a coat pocket, I flip the deadbolt and twist the lock in the door and then slip into the flower shop.

The coolers of flora glowing at the back of the shop suddenly seem to dim as the pendants hang over the counter flare with light. I clock in. Draping my coat over the table in the storeroom, I’m confronted by the reflection of my face glimmering in the acrylic seat on the stool. My chin looks fat and saggy, like a sac of blubber drooping from my face. I am a beautiful human being. I work through the morning checklist, lugging out crates of inventory, counting through the cash reserve in the drawer, switching on the neon sign in the windows, and then standing at the counter, arranging flowers into bouquets to fulfill new orders, carefully examining each configuration from different ables, attempting to create a sense of harmony without symmetry, a natural splendor. The constant humming sound the humidifier makes is extremely irritating to listen to, usually quiet enough to ignore. I’m lucky to have a job here, to get to work in the presence of so many vibrant plants, in the lush fusion of scents bursting forth from fresh poppies and orchids and tulips and roses. Clusters of bundled daises. Lilies glistening with dew. I’m probably developing a permanent respiratory condition from constantly having to breathe in all of this pollen. Mom labored for years to save enough money to cover my college tuition. I have a university diploma and get paid minimum wage to wrap flowers in tissue paper. I’m an embarrassment. I’m a failure. I’ve learned a lot of amazing facts from this job, like that honey bracelet grows on cliffs, or that marigolds are edible and taste almost citrusy but buttercups are poisonous enough to lister the tongue. I’m so pathetic. Ikebana is a noble art form, treasured as a powerful medium for the expression of spiritual truths, profound emotions. This isn’t ikebana, and these arrangements are garbage in comparison. Any idiot who can operate a pair of scissors could do this shit. I dropped some gyps on the floor. Squatting for the sprig, I can feel my jeans straining against my thighs. I’m worthless. I have no talents. I have no purpose. I don’t deserve to live on this planet. The bell hanging over the door jangles as my problem customer enters the shop.

“Good morning, how are you, what a pleasure to see your wonderful face.” Roberto says.

He lumbers toward the counter in a wool fedora, stocky and bearded, here for the weekly pickup of flowers for the vase by the register at the antique store he owns by the river. He’s despicably cheap, amusingly cheap, often tries to negotiate a discount based on supposed defects in the flowers, once attempting to barter for flowers with coupons for a local car wash. He looks like the type of person who’d probably smoke a cigarette but from a motel ashtray just for the free hit of stale nicotine surprisingly distinguished in a fedora. I think he’s actually mentioned before that he’s not a smoked. I bring out the bouquet for him. He makes me put in some extra poms.

“It’s a tragic mistake for this place not to have a customer loyalty program,” Roberto says.

“Does the antique store have a customer loyalty program?” I say.

“Absolutely not,” Roberto says.

I tentatively attempt to make some casual chitchat with him, but he only responds with grunts and nods, probably because he dreads this brief period of each week when he’s forced to interact with me, the incompetent weirdo at the flower shop. maybe distracted by affairs back at the antique store, or suddenly remembering a dream from the night before. After him there’s a rush of business, requiring me to focus on routine tasks, just reacting to requests and commands as the bell over the door rings with every entrance and departure. I fumble a glass vase full of water and have to quick mop up the counter with rags and then throw away the sopping wad of blank tags destroyed by the spill while handling an order over the phone. I forgot to restock the gardening seeds. I misplaced the jar of rubber bands. I don’t deserve to work here. I’m not even capable of doing tasks this simple without completely fucking up. I’m trying. I messed up a custom order of daffodils for an anniversary and have to remake the bouquet on the spot as a baby cries in a carrier over on the counter. I press the tip of my tongue into the crooked nook of snake behind my snaggletooth, concentrating. Fuck. I’m such an idiot. I’m useless. I ruin everything. I wanted so desperately to be good at this. I should’ve known that would never happen. I’m just handing over the receipt when my boss arrives, striding into the shop with an authoritative air, which alarms me. Today was supposed to be her day off.

“What’s up?” Hilary says.

“Uh, somebody called about the delivery for next week, saying that there isn’t going to be any eucalyptus, but that there are ferns available as a replacement,” I say.

“What’d you say?” Hilary says.

“That you’d probably rather have some extra myrtle but he should call back to be sure,” I say.

“Okay, so, that’s actually the opposite of what you should’ve told him, ” Hilary says, laughing, pressing her hand to her forehead with her eyes shut.

I’m so dumb. I’m still learning. This is why she hates me. She doesn’t hate me. She hates me. She has a brusque personality. I shouldn’t have worn the turtleneck. The expression she’s making terrifies me.

“Are you hungry?”

“Um,” I say.

“I’m buying you lunch.”

Hilary hangs a sign in the door cheerily advising customers the staff will return soon, and then she leads me across the street and down an alley that emerges on a vast asphalt lot shimmering with parked cars. She’s dressed in a tight scarlet skirt with a blouse and a blazer and patent-leather pumps, carrying a stylish clutch, with a dash of burgundy lipstick that makes her face look strikingly pretty, and her hair arranged into an elegant golden bun. I look homely in comparison. She’s heading toward a strip mall across the lot, chattering pleasantly about the weather. Strip malls are the greatest atrocity in the history of architecture. America should be charged with crimes against humanity for creating such a blight. I follow her into a bustling restaurant, some trendy pasta chain, ordering at the counter and then sitting across from her in a booth with pleather cushioning. The fluorescent lighting is distressingly bright overhead, obliterating every shadow in the restaurant, all sense of contour and depth, and the pattern on the carpeting is a nightmarish perversion of geometry, and the strips of wall framing the windows are painted an unsightly shade of green, and the sugar pop blaring over the speakers is sickening. Utterly vapid lyrics yapped by some corporate product in a shrill pitch. I hope that a grease fire burns this monstrosity to the ground. I’m in a well-lit space with a comfortable temperature and plush seating, being fed succulent shrimp caught in a faraway ocean and sweet butter and aged cheese produced from the milk of cows raised on distant farms and garlic cultivated in secluded fields and wheat harvested in remote plains and the oil squeezed from rip olives grow in orchards far overseas, transported to this location by the choreographed movements of magnificent fleets of airplanes and freight trains and container ships and semis and then transformed by the trained cooks in the kitchen into a dish of steaming scampi, all for the purpose of nourishing my body. I’d rather die of starvation than have to eat here. I should be grateful. Hilary has never treated me to lunch before. She’s going to fire me. She’s not going to fire me. She’s definitely going to fire me. She has plenty of legitimate reasons. She brought me here because she didn’t want me to make a scene in front of customers. My palms suddenly feel sweaty. My heart is pounding. Fuck.

“So,” Hilary says.

I try to raise some noodles to my mouth but my hands are trembling so much that the noodles fall of the fork.

“The shop is entering a transitional period, and we to talk about your job,” Hilary says.

I might vomit.

“I want to promote you to manager,” Hilary says.

I stare at her in confusion.

“But you’re the manager,” I say.

Hilary is launching a new company. She’s still going to own the flower shop, so she’ll still technically the boss, but she won’t have time anymore to manage the flower shop personally. I’d have a salary instead of being paid hourly. I’d have a retirement fund. I’d have actual health insurance. I’d even have business cards. She can’t be serious. She’s making a terrible mistake.

“You should promote somebody else,” I say.

“You’re absolutely the best person for the job,” Hilary says.

“I suck, at the bouquets,” I say.

“You’re an artist,” Hilary says.

“I’m so awkward with customers,” I say, burying my face in my hands.

I feel her grip me by the shoulder.

“Em, you’re responsible, and you’re organized, and you’re knowledgeable. Nobody works harder than you. And you’re great with customers. I’ve had multiple customers mention you by name, telling me how helpful you are,” Hilary says.

I glance up, looking at her in astonishment.

“You’re serious?” I say.

She nods. The flush of pride bursting through me is so overpowering that tears are suddenly shimmering in my eyes. I’m a valuable employee. I have worth. I have to swallow a lump in my throat.

“Okay, I’ll be manager,” I say.

Hilary cheers. I blink back the blur of the tears, feeling a smile break out across my face, and then stuff noodles in my mouth in a daze as she talks about the details of the new position. This is so awesome. I can’t wait to tell somebody. Nobody with care. It’s pathetic that for a moment this actually seemed exciting to me. Like anybody would ever be impressed by this. It’s not like somebody’s hiring me to be president of some fancy multinational. I’m not going to be doing cancer research. I’m not going to be doing constitutional law. I’m going to be manager of a flower shop, that’s all. A dead end job for me to grow old and wither away in, trimming the stems off flowers. What a loser. Fucking pitiful. I’ll always be a failure. Mom will always be ashamed of me.

Hilary gives me the rest of the afternoon off to celebrate the promotions, as if that was anything to celebrate. Back out on the street a rainstorms has blown in from the lake. The rain is so gloomy. The sound of the rain drizzling is beautiful, a steady pattering of water on awnings and leaves and bike racks and pavement and the roofs of cars, and in the chill my breath becomes visible, bursts of steam in the air, and my cheeks are tingling, and although the clouds in the sky are dark, in among all the gray the clouds contain marvelous ripples of color, violets and indigos and lavenders. I drift down the sidewalk with my head tipped back, feeling the touch of the rain on my nose and my brow and my lips. I’m almost to the intersection when a dog suddenly runs up to me, barking and panting and obstructing the path ahead of me, startling me, and then abruptly slinking forward with a bend head, brushing up against my jeans with damp matted fur.

“The fuck is the matter with you?” I shout, gesturing at the owner, who’s standing across the street holding a rolled-up leash, and then shove past the dog with my hands stuffed in the pockets of my coat, carrying on down the sidewalk as the dog yaps at me. My heart is pounding. Cocksucking bitchass motherfucker. There’s wet fur on my jeans. I hope she gets botulism from a bent can of stew. A metallic gum wrapper is lying by a fire hydrant. Paper is sogging on a laundromat hanger abandoned in the gutter. I hate this fucking city. This is a beautiful city with a charming main street and quaint lampposts. Robins are warbling in the branches of the leafy oak trees soaring above the brick sidewalk. Colorful umbrellas bob through the rain. Standing down at the traffic light there’s some preppy college kid wearing a flashy mountaineering parka, as if he might have to scale a frozen peak somewhere between here and whatever liquor store he’s heavy to. as if he’s ever climbed a fucking mountain. as if he’s even capable of summiting a moderately steep hill. Maybe the parka once belonged to his grandfather, an accomplished mountaineer, and now that his grandfather is dead he wears the parka everywhere, just to feel close to his grandfather again, somehow. He looks fucking ridiculous. His grandfather probably didn’t even like him. Fucking poser. The electrician sitting in the truck across the street looks like the type of person who probably tortures cats for fun. is probably a kind and wonderful person with some super cute hobby, like stamp collecting. Sage was sitting on a rickety wooden dock, occasionally grinning with fondness at butterflies fluttering past, gently blwoing away mosquitoes with puffs of air, somewhere out under the hanging moss in a swamp, that first time she talked about exaggerations. This had been a struggle for her personally, she said, but if you want to learn to love the world, then you have to refrain from making negative exaggerations. No cynicism. No persecution. Be honest about your experiences. I can’t remember exactly how she phrased the metaphor about the hurricane. I daydream about meeting her, telling her how much she means to me, showing her the treehouse in my backyard, my collection of bird feathers gathered on weekends as a child. Relaxing with her in the steaming turquoise waters of a mountainside onsen, laughing together over some joke. I’m so fucking lame. I am a beautiful human being. I’ll always be the person who walked into algebra class with a splatter of guan on my shoulder, too dumb to notice until the teacher told me. Every person on this planet has been in embarrassing situations. There’s smoothie leaking from a takeout cup in the gutter.

I slip into the coffee shop, easing the door shut behind me. The coolers of beverages glowing at the back of the shop seem radiant in the dim light of the bulbs hanging over the bar. Customers wearing pleather backpacks are browsing the pastries. My promoter is thumbing through receipts behind the counter.

“Em, you look fabulous, good afternoon, how wonderful to be graced with your presence,” Fatima says.

She zips on a nylon windbreaker, slender and dainty, apparently clocking out for the day soon. She’s cringingly superstitious, intriguingly superstitious, often references horscope predictions at the coffee shop in a reverent tone, once declared the coffee shop to be located at auspicious coordinates geographically. She looks like the type of person who’d probably consult a psychic before committing to switching to a new brand of toothpaste surprisingly hip in the windbreaker. I glance at the exhibit of sculptures on the shelves over by the couches, wondering how much money she might have for me for the weekly payout, but only a single sculpture has sold. Fuck. I’m such an idiot. I’m useless. She hands me the cash without commentary and then wraps on a scarf. I tentatively attempt to make some casual chitchat with he, but she only responds with smiles and grunts, probably because she loathes this brief period of each week when she’s forced to interact with me, the incompetent misfit responsible for the sculptures. maybe preoccupied by some recent drama at the coffee shop, or remembering an incident from the night before. I should’ve never told her about the project. She probably regrets ever inviting me to exhibit. I don’t deserve to show here. I’m not even capable of making work this simple without completely fucking up. I’m trying. I’m worthless. I have no ability. I have no skills. I don’t deserve to live on this planet. I ruin everything.

“Today whatever you want is on the house,” Fatima says.

“Are you serious?” I say.

“Grab some supper here ifyou’re feeling hungry,” Fatima says.

The bell hanging over the door jingles as she exits the shop. Standing at the counter, I’m confronted by the reflection of my face glimmering in the chrome on the espresso machine. My jaw looks gargantuan and pointy, a disproportioned lump of bone protruding from my face. I am a beautiful human being. I order some supper and then sit at a marble table by the windows, stuffing chili into my mouth in a daze as the bell over the door rings with every entrance and departure. The shrill whirring sound of the grinder makes is extremely aggravating to listen to. only a rare disturbance. I’m lucky to have a gig here, to get to exhibit work in a venue with this much traffic. I started out making the sculptures soley for pleasure, each an arrangement of seeds on a foundation of soil, carefully enclosed in a glass vessel. Pine cones on sandy loam. Maple samaras on chalky gravel. The myriad manifestations of texture on dried beech burrs and elm husks and cottonwood fluff and bird pods. The concept is obviously derivative of karesansui, and is utter trash in comparison. Although inspired by karesansui, the sculptures are a unique form of expression, profoundly person in design. Any idiot with a garden spade could make this shit. A dead end hobby, for me to grow old and wither away while pointlessly sticking seeds into boxes. Mom labored for years to save enough money to pay my college tuition. I earn minimum wage and spend a substantial portion of that income on supplies for sculptures. I’m a disappointment. I’m a failure. I’ve learned a lot of interesting facts from this project, like that acorns can float clear across a river after falling, or that grape pips are edible and taste intensely bitter but cherry pits are poisonous enough to dizzy the head. I’m so pathetic. Chewing some cornbread, I take a handful of hickory nuts out of my coat, looking down at the jumble of shells, skimming a fingertip over the faint bumps. I still can’t decide what type of soil would be best for pairing. I press the tip of my tongue into the crooked nook of space behind my snaggletooth, concentrating. I’m probably developing a permanent spine condition from constantly sitting hunched over prospective materials. I wanted so desperately to be good at this. I should’ve known that would never happen. I’m just slipping the seed back into a pocket when a new customer arrives, bustling into the shop in a brisk manner. As the barista hands him a latte, murmuring to him, he turns to stare at me, raising his eyebrows, which alarms me. My palms suddenly feel sweaty. He strides directly over to me, gazing down at me intently.

“You’re the artist?”

“Um,” I say.

“I’m so astonished to meet you.”

He offers me a handshake before sitting. He’s wearing a dapper navy suit with a pocket square and a dress shirt and a fuchsia bow tie, carrying a chic leather portfolio, with a pair of horn-rimmed eyeglasses that make his face appear strikingly refined, and the silver strands of his hair trimmed in a neat crewcut. I look shabby in comparison. He’s probably disgusted by how clammy my hand was.

“What do you call those creations of yours?” Vincent says.

“Uh, sculptures,” I say.

“I think actually that is not the appropriate term to use here,” Vincent says, laughing, tilting his head with his fingers splayed across his brow.

“Oh, yeah, probably,” I say.

I’m so dumb. I’m still learning. He already hates me. There’s no indication he hates me. He hates me. The expression he’s making terrifies me. Fuck.

“I acquired one of the pieces earlier this month,” Vincent say.

He probably wants a refund.

“I’ve had the piece on display at the office,” Vincent says.

I reach for the spoon to take a bite of chili as a way to occupy my mouth but then realize the bowl is empty and there’s a spoon in my hands for no reason.

“Would you be willing to sign the piece for me?” Vincent says.

I stare at him in bewilderment.

“You want me to sign the sculpture?” I say.

Vincent is a collector of fine art. Over the past month the sculpture that he bought has become his most treasured belonging. He’s been asking about me at the coffee shop, hoping to meet me. He’s my biggest fan. He’d love if the sculpture could be signed somehow. He can’t be serious. He’s made a terrible mistake.

“It’s just a weird hobby,” I say, covering my face with my hands.

“I’d be truly honored,” Vincent says.

“I suck at the sculptures,” I say.

“I’d be grateful to you for all of eternity,” Vincent says.

“I literally have no training,” I say.

He’s clasping his hands together in a gesture of begging, faintly pouting.

“Okay, I can sign,” I say.

Vincent calls out a pleasant farewell to the staff at the door, and ten he leads me down the street and through an alley that emerges onto a gigantic concrete lot shimmering with parked cars. I shouldn’t have word the turtleneck. He has a bubbly personality. He’s heading toward an office complex across the lot, chattering cheerfully about the weather. Office complexes are an architectural scourge. America should be subjected to international sanctions for designing such depraved environments for human occupancy. I follow him into a busy firm, some ritzy investment eterprise, avoiding eye contact as he waves at the receptionist and then applauds an intern for stapling some papers. The walls in the waiting area are painted a disturbing shade of red, and the fluorescent lighting is upsettingly bright overhead, obliterating every shadow in the office, all sense of contour and gradation, and the melodramatic rock song blaring over the stero is utterly nauseating, and the pattern on the carpeting is an affliction of nightmarish geometry. A horrifying mess of pixelated forms pasted together by some corporate drone. I hope that a gas leak blows this monstrosity to the sky. Future archeologists will fantasize about walking among such cubicles. I’d rather die of asphyxiation than have to breathe this air. I’m in a well-lit space with a comfortable temperature and abundant seating, strolling past workstations where expert financiers are diligently murmuring into headsets, orchestrating the movements of sensational cashes of wealth, granting funding to courageous entrepreneurs establishing new ventures on faraway islands and across distant valleys and in lush verdant forests overseas, all for the purpose of producing new riches, faithfully nurturing the economy that sustains my body. Vincent occupies a luxurious suite lined by windows at the back of the firm. the sculpture is displayed prominently, the lone object on a shelf directly behind the desk. An arrangement of sassafras stones on a vibrant powdery clay. I didn’t expect to feel this emotional at the sight of the sculpture.

“I’ve never seen one on display like this before,” I say.

The rush of the accomplishment shimmering through me is so overpowering that lump suddenly forms in my throat. I have to blink back the tears in my eyes. I’m a valued creator. I have worth.

“You shape the dirt so attractively on the glass, and you place the seeds in such a fascinating configurations, and you somehow always manage to select the perfect color of dirt to both complement and contrast against the shade of the seeds you’ve chosen as subjects of contemplation. I’ve already received compliments from so many clients. Yesterday nearly an hour in the here was spent discussing the meaning of the piece. The various implications of the absence of water imposed by the container,” Vincent says.

I glance over, looking at him in shock.

“You have a rare talent,” Vincent says.

Vincent hands me a marker. I swallow the lump down, feeling a smile break out across my face, and then twist off the cap as he carefully lifts the sculpture from the shelf. This is so amazing. I can’t wait to tell somebody. Crouching to sign the bottom of the vessel, I can feel my jeans straining against my thighs. Like anybody would ever be excited by this. It’s not like somebod’s awarded me a prize at an international exhibition. I haven’t been discovered by some famous critic. I haven’t been discovered by some prestigious curator. I’ve been discovered by a local collector, that’s all. It’s pitiful that for a moment this actually seemed impressive to me. Fucking pathetic. What a loser. Nobody will care. Mom will always be disappointed by me. I’ll always be a failure.

Vincent takes a selfie with me to commemorate the signing, as if that was something to commemorate. Back out on the street a fog-bank has drifted in from the lake. Fog is so gloomy. the look of the fog rolling in is beautiful, a haze of mist swirling through bike racks and benches and signs and leaves and the alleys between buildings, and in the wind my hair becomes animate, wisps fluttering in the air, and the rims of my ears are tingling, and although the clouds in the sky are gray, the edges of the clouds are brightening now with spectacular ripples of color, oranges and yellows and corals. I roam down the sidewalk with my arms stretched out, feeling the touch of the fog on my palms and my fingers and my wrists. Wiper fluid is leaking from a carton abandoned in the gutter. A ripped condom wrapper is lying in the storm drain. I hate this fucking city. This is a beautiful city with quaint lampposts and a charming main street. Cardinals are whistling in the branches of the leafy oak trees soaring above the brick sidewalk. Glowing headlights float through the fog. Standing down at the intersection there’s some hippie college kid wearing a camouflage hunting jacket, as if she might have the opportunity to bag an elk on the way back from the convenience store. as if she’s ever been on a fucking hunt. as if she’s capable of distinguishing a shotgun from a rifle. Maybe she borrowed the jacket from her brother, because her brother was moving somewhere, temporarily, and she wanted to wear the jacket while her brother was gone, just to feel closer. Her brother probably isn’t a hunter either. She looks fucking preposterous. Fucking imposter. The medic sitting in the ambulance across the street looks like the type of person who probably wipes snot onto library books. is probably a thoughtful and wonderful person with some super endearing quirk, like loving pickles. I’ll always be the person who got caught cheating during a trigonometry quiz, dumb enough to think that the teacher wouldn’t spot me looking at my notes. Every person on this planet has made some regrettable decisions. There’s lipstick smeared across a to-go lid in the gutter. I’m just approaching the traffic light when a dog suddenly trots up to me, huffing and snorting and blocking the path ahead of me, and then abruptly rearing back on hind legs, pawing against my jeans with clawed muddy feet, staggering me.

“Are you seriously just that fucking lazy?” I shout, kicking the dog back with my hands stuffed in the pockets of my coat, glaring at the owner, who’s standing up the block holding a rolled-up leash, and then carry on down the sidewalk with the dog whimpering after me. Shiteating dickhead motherfucker. There’s mud streaked down my jeans. I hope he gets bitten in the neck by a brown recluse. Sage was sitting against a wooden fence spotted with lichen, out somewhere in a meadow, smiling with contentment at fireflies flickering past, blowing away gnats with puffs of air, that time she first talked about fantasies. This had been such an obstacle for her, she said, but if you want to learn to love the world, then you need to be honest about your experiences. Refrain from inventing negative fantasies. No fatalism. No hostility. I daydream about being introduced to her, showing her the hideout in my attic, my band posters collected at shows as a teenager, telling her how much she’s given to me. Chatting with her, sipping from cups of steaming emerald tea on the balcony of some countryside ryokan. I’m so fucking lame. I am a beautiful human being. I can remember exactly how she enunciated the analogy about the glacier. My body shook in recognition.

The ice cream stand is shaped like an ice cream cone and has pink picnic tables with bright cyan umbrellas overlooks the sparkling water in the bay. My date isn’t here yet. He probably won’t even show. I’m early. I check the app for any new messages from him, but the only new messages are from bots and creeps. I slip my phone back into a pocket. The fog has suddenly vanished in the warming air, and the sky is blazing gold as the sun sinks toward the lake, and the breeze carries the tart fragrant scent of tart fragrant scent of the cedar trees swaying across the street. I’m so nervous that my stomach feels clenched up like a muscle. I’m biting my thumbnail, I realize. I stuff my hands into the pockets of my coat. I’m standing close enough to the ice cream stand to see my reflection shimmering in one of the windows as bicyclists blur past on the path behind me. I haven’t been on a date in months. My hair looks greasy. I am a beautiful human being. My face looks bloated. I am a beautiful human being. I wish my nose was normal. I wish my nose was any other nose. I look away from the glass, trying not to think, and then glance back over again. Wrinkles have recently formed in the skin on my face. Faint ridges in the skin on my forehead, and rayed creases in the skin at the corners of my eyes, and curved furrows in the skin about the corners of my lips, arcing along the border between my cheeks and my mouth. I don’t remember exactly when the wrinkles first appeared, but the wrinkles are repulsive, the wrinkles are frightening, the wrinkles are truly horrible, maybe the wrinkles could be considered attractive. Even alluring. I like wearing gemstones and precious metals, the diamonds pinned to my earlobes, the platinum ring in my septum, the platinum stud in my labret, the bands of gold on my fingers, rare materials of special properties pried from glittering rocks in shadowy caverns deep in the earth, and my wrists are tattooed with black triangles of ink. I’ve always loved the feeling of wearing ink, that legendary elixir that transformed human civilization, granting a physical form to millennia of human thinking, the material substance of love letters and ransom notes and treasure maps and poetry and the coded messages of revolutionaries, of the weathered logbooks of ship captains, and the journal of prisoners, and the memoirs of refugees, and the leather-bound prophecies of mystics, of religious scrolls and astronomical codices and travelogue incunabula and the conspiracy theories on tattered leaflets stapled to telephone poles on the street, of the far-reaching laws of monarchs and dictators and representatives, of newspaper headlines declaring earth-shattering events, and the vibrant illustrations in atlases, and the vivid entries in encyclopedias, and artistic manifestos, and philosophical treaties, and psychological compendiums, and the most coveted recipes, of mathematical proofs and chemistry equations and biological theories and geological discoveries, of the forbidden magic in grimoires, of the fanciful creatures in bestiaries, of fairy tales and swashbucklers and erotic novels, and sheet music, and dance choreography, and stage plays, and the diagrams for innovative architecture, and the designs for groundbreaking inventions, and the secret diaries of emperors and farmers and merchants and bankers and sooty-cheeked freighth9oppers and broad-shoulder factory workers and circus performers and nightclub entertainers and socialites and tycoons and cabbies and detectives and mail carriers and homemakers and teachers and nurses and bedridden bird-watchers and star-crossed soldiers and fur trappers and polar explorers and windswept bedouin and lamplit geisha and cologned mafiosi and grizzled lighthouse keepers with busy eyebrows dripping salty sea spray onto paper between strokes of the pen. A drop in ink contains tremendous power, the potential to become knowledge incarnate, memory incarnate, imagination incarnate, and glancing down to see that ink on my wrists does make me feel empowered with a certain vibrance. But all those materials, diamond and platinum and gold, even ink, seem like modest ornaments compared to time. This is the supreme force in the universe, reigning over the complex mechanics of every interaction in physics, from the ice burning in the comets to the volcanoes erupting on asteroids to the solar winds swirling through fluorescent nebulas in the farthest reaches of interstellar space. There’s no force in the universe as powerful or breathtaking or mysterious, and wrinkles are the mark of time on a body. Wearable chronos. The ultimate jewelry, becoming increasingly eyecatching with every orbit around the sun. The wrinkles on my face suddenly look sexy to me. Majestic. Behind the glass, a hand dips a ladle into a pot of hot fudge, and then my date suddenly appears beside me.

“Hey,” Kyle says, waving to me with a friendly grin.

“Oh, um, hi,” I say.

“You want to get some ice cream?” Kyle says.

I stand in line with him. He’s wearing jean cutoffs and a threadbare sweatshirt that’s ripped along the seam of the collar, exposing the shadowed dip of a clavicle and a pale shock of skin, with the sleeves pushed up onto his forearms. Canvas sneakers duct-taped at the toes. If he was actually interested in me then he would have worn better clothes. Maybe he’s such an inherently honest person that the idea of dressing up for a date would never occur to him. Maybe this outfit is an authentic representation of how he typically dresses. He’s younger than me, still in college, with a flushed tan face, gripping the skateboard that he arrived on by the axle. His face doesn’t look as handsome in person. is handsome. Dark brown eyes and a snub nose and wide plump lips in a proportionally pleasing arrangement, with a jawline that makes me feel a heat in my cheeks. In his profile his face looks weirdly flat. His buzzcut makes his forehead appear freakishly large. would probably feel satisfying to rub. He’s shorter thane expected which is disappointing. taller than me, which is attractive. He has a spatter of moles on the side of his neck, which bothers me. repulses me. is a constellation of pigment unique to his body. I could be the one to name that constellation, tracing the shape with my fingertip. I wish his name was different. His names is perfectly normal. I’d be embarrassed to have to introduce him to other people. His name is perfectly fine. My name is just as bland. Uninspiring. As commonplace as a paperclip. As everyday as a napkin. My name is profoundly special, a title bestowed upon me at birth by my mother, cradling me to her chest as she uttered the melodic sequence of syllables over my head. He’s probably appalled by how boring my name is. He’s talking to me.

“What?” I say.

“I was just asking if you want to walk down to the beach later,” Kyle says.

“Oh, uh, definitely,” I say.

Salted caramel for me, chocolate hazelnut for him. I stroll with him down the boardwalk as seagulls drift through the sky, crying out with annoying shrieks, adorable squawks, and sunlight glitters on the sailboats anchored at the marinas. In a flash of silver a fish leaps from the surface of the water, probably attempting to escape all of the pollution in the bay, a habitat contaminated by gasoline and diesel and runoff fertilizer and industrial chemicals and plastic wrappers tossed overboard by passing boaters. just having some fun. The ice cream is too sweet. artificially sugary. pleasantly cold on my tongue. I haven’t had ice cream since last autumn, that day at the mall with my mom. Kyle drops the skateboard onto the boardwalk and hops aboard, coasting next to me for a while, chattering about the weather as the wheels rattle over the slats. When he asks, I admit to having never been on a skateboard before, and he steps down and convinces me to get on. The skateboard trembles under the soles of my boots. I like the feel of his palm on my back, steadying me while simultaneously propelling me down the boardwalk. I’m probably going to crash. I try to focus on not falling. He want to have kids someday. I can’t believe he just volunteered the information like that, with such a cheerful confidence. He dreams of carrying kids around on his shoulders, of helping kids with math homework, of teaching kids to cook pancakes, nursing kids through the flu. Little bambini, he says. Italian apparently, by ancestry. He actually seems interested in me, asking all of these questions about my childhood, my political inclinations, my religious beliefs, my tattoos, my opinion about violence in video games, my experience in college. The sex will probably be disappointing. The sex might be incredible. He probably has a weird smell when he’s sweaty, like an expired package of bologna that’s been sitting out int he sun. He probably has a flabby stomach. He probably has a limp ass. Based on how fit that he seems, on the defined musculature in his calves and his thighs, on the pronounced veins in his wrists and his hands, he probably actually has tight abs and firm buttocks that would be extremely pleasurable to touch and squeeze. Walking beside me, he parts his lips, tilting his head for a better angle, and licks a soft wet groove into the ice cream melting in the cone in his fist. I briefly imagine his tongue moving like that over my neck, across my nipples, around my hipbones, between my legs, and then suddenly sway on the skateboard, almost losing my balance. I’m not talking enough. I probably seem so creepy so mysterious to him. I probably seem so old so sophisticated to him. He’s telling me a story about some documentary he recently saw, a movie about graffiti. Feeling self-conscious about being so quiet, I blurt out something about recently rewatching my favorite anime, and when he actually seems curious about the show, I’m overcome by the urge to plunge into a detailed synopsis, eagerly explaining the layout of the world, and the tragic origins of each of the core characters, and the complicated dynamics of the rivalries, and the beguiling motivations of the villains, and then rambling on about my favorite arc from the series, getting goosebumps down the back of my neck describing the sudden betrayal of the final battle. My voice is literally quivering, I realize. I trail off mid-sentence. I’m so fucking lame. I shouldn’t have told him all of that. I shouldn’t have told him any of that. He’s laughing seeing how emotional the memory of the battle makes me. I don’t seem mysterious to him. I don’t seem sophisticated to him. I’m a glorified cashier and an amateur sculptor who’s pathetically obsessed with a shojō anime. A creepy old shinnichi who’s probably visibly desperate for attention. He’s a coder, already earns astounding sums of money on the weekends by making websites freelance. Fuck. I’m so pitiful in comparison. I am a beautiful human being. I shouldn’t have worn the turtleneck.

“You want to sit?” Kyle says.

I step down onto the boardwalk, and he stomps the skateboard, flipping the skateboard up, and catches the skateboard by the axle, and then he hikes off down the beach past the scattered cinders and ashes from recent bonfires. Beachgrass ripples in the dunes. I sit with him on a hulking piece of driftwood, the gnarled sunbleached trunk of some ancient tree brought to this shore by the cryptic currents of the lake. Out of the lighthouse, anglers are casting from the pier. An orange kite flies far above the beach and farther down the beach a violet kite soars as the sunset burns pink in the sky, tinting the clouds, and waves crash ashore and then rush back to the shallows. Carrying hightops, loafers, sandals, a family hunts for petoskeys barefoot in the foaming surf. Kyle chews a last bite of cone, licking some ice cream from his fingers, and then swallows. I stare at my boots in the sand, trying to imagine what a relationship with him would be like. He seems so easygoing. He’d probably cheat on me. He might be profoundly loyal. He’d probably mostly ignore me. He might be exceptionally attentive. He probably smokes too much weed and gets mean when he’s drunk. He might smoke just enough weed, get affectionately sentimental when he’s drunk. Mom would probably hate him, would despise the skateboarding and the buzzcut and the tattered clothing, the rambling monologues peppered with slang. Mom will probably never even meet him. He’s probably not even interested in dating me, just fucking me once for the novelty. After seeing me in the flesh, he’s probably not even interested in fucking me. He’s probably only going through with the date to be nice, or to avoid the awkwardness of bailing on me.

“I love the sunsets here,” Kyle says.

This sunset is mediocre at best. Anticlimactic. A monochromatic ooze of pink light dulled by the depressing haze of clouds in the sky. I’m ruining the moment. He’d be miserable being in a relationship with me. Being around me would make him miserable. I’m already making him miserable. I ruin everything. I don’t deserve to be loved. I don’t deserve to be liked. I don’t deserve to be sitting here with him. He deserves somebody who’s as optimistic and caring and fun as he is.

“I’m really glad you decided to meet up with me,” Kyle says.

“I actually need to go,” I say.

“Oh, okay, gotcha,” Kyle says.

I rise from the driftwood, gripped by a sense of distress.

“I don’t have any plans tomorrow night, if you want to meet up again,” Kyle says.

“I’d only disappoint you,” I say.

“I’ve never had a crush like this before, to be honest,” Kyle says.

“I don’t deserve that,” I say helplessly, glancing away from him with my hands stuffed in the pockets of my coat.

There’s an aluminum beer tab in the sand and a plastic soda cap farther down the beach and a tattered magazine fluttering in a clump of beachgrass back by the dunes and some fluorescent litter bobbing in the boulders over the pier and a shopping bag blowing around and a crumpled water bottle that keeps washing onto the sand and then back out into the lake with every wave and fuck every person who’s ever left trash on the beach. I’d rather die than have to live in a world with all of this garbage.

“Why does there have to be so much trash everywhere?” I murmur, staring at the beach in despair.

“I’ve honestly never really noticed all the trash before,” Kyle says, glancing around the beach.

Fuck.

“You’re right though, the beach experience would be better without the trash,” Kyle says.

Fuck.

“Let’s try again. Meet me here tomorrow, same time. Tomorrow, when you get here, I promise, there won’t be a single piece of trash in sight,” Kyle says.

“But there’s trash in the dunes, and in the water, and in the cracks between the rocks on the sides of the pier, and up and down the beach for miles in either direction,” I say.

“Yeah,” Kyle says.

“Nobody can pick up that much trash,” I say.

“I can,” Kyle says.

“Picking up all that trash would take hours,” I say.

He stares at the beach with a serious expression.

“Tomorrow, when you get here, the beach will be perfect,” Kyle says.

He actually likes me. He deserves so much better.

“Okay, tomorrow,” I say, otherwise too overwhelmed to speak.

Kyle nods and salutes me in farewell, and then he turns away, squatting to retrieve a plastic bottle from the sand. I hike back to the boardwalk without glancing back at him. Fuck. I’m such a freak. I am a beautiful human being. The temperature is plunging. I drift into town, feeling vaguely hopeless. That date was a disaster. But that shouldn’t surprise me. I’m an empty person. I’m a void personality. Dating me would be like being in a relationship with a cardboard box. A decaying cardboard box that’s so rotted with mildew and mold and putrefied mouse droppings that prolonged exposer would be harmful. Mom texted me, a while ago now. I feel a crushing wave of shame. I’m going to have to tell her eventually. I stand in the street wavering. The lampposts switch on. I get on a bus.

I swipe my pass, lurching as the bus swings away from the curb, and then shuffle down the aisle and sit slouched in a seat at the back with my hands stuffed in the pockets of my coat and my head slumped against the window. I’m hungry. I don’t deserve to eat. I deserve to suffer. I deserve to starve. Somebody’s wearing a a perfume that reeks of synthetic chemicals, like what a mango might smell like in a nightmare about a tropical hellscape where the palm trees drip blood. The twilight tonight is the richest shade of violet, and the spruce trees in the woods along the highway are becoming silhouettes in the darkness, but the view is ruined by the billboards looming over the road, steel monstrosities featuring crudely designed advertisements with hackneyed slogans displayed in wretched fonts, illuminated by painfully bright floodlights that drown out all the stars, and topped with savage metal spikes to prevent birds from roosting. I hope whoever profits from those billboards dies in agony, burned alive in a house fire, a charred corpse with brittle fingers reaching in vain toward the safe heaped with money. I want to call in bomb threats to every business advertised. Looking away from the window is futile. The view in the bus is just as abysmal. Vile advertisements glare down from the gutters along the sides of the ceiling, and the upholstery on the seats is abhorrent, and the floor is wrecked by muddy shoeprints, and every passenger on the bus is dressed in utterly repugnant clothing. Fake leopard print, obnoxious paisley and tartan and argyle patterns, and gaudy hoodies and crewnecks and tees that flaunt the names and logos of multinational corporations. Human billboards, cursed to walk the planet believing that being branded by a corporate overlord is empowering rather than exploitative. Eyesores in every direction. My reflection is becoming clearer in the window as dusk falls. I’m biting my thumbnail, I realize. I need a distraction. I take out my phone, scrolling through random posts on an app. Everybody looks so beautiful and I’m so ugly in comparison. I can’t remember ever feeling despair this absolute before. Sage just posted a new video. her first in weeks. I click play and her face appears on the scree, talking, but even though her mouth is moving, nothing reaches me. Tonight her words just seem like meaningless noises. I was so amazed that time she mentioned that she’d hated having to speak in front of other people when she was a kid, because she’d been ashamed of her lisp, because she’d been embarrassed by her accent, because she’d been convinced that the pitch of her voice was annoying. I was so stunned. To me the sound of her voice had always been the most enchanting music. A military brat who got dragged to a different region of the country every couple years. I used to wish there was a military base nearby just so that there’d be a chance that someday she might get moved here.. I hoped maybe she’d move here for college, but she went on that hitchhiking trip instead, and now she’s still just traveling the globe, seeking enlightenment. I’ll never be as strong as she is. She’s so incredible. I’ll never be as brave as she is. Ever since randomly chancing onto one of her videos, that chilly spring night as a freshman, lying on the rug in my bedroom as hail pounded the roof. I’ve thought of her as a role model for so many years. If not a sensei, then definitely as senpai. A heroic figure worthy of respect, admiration. The first video she ever posted was just a minute straight of her crying in the darkness. She’s been so vulnerable, shared every detail of her life over the course of her journey. Her most humiliating fears. Her most mortifying insecurities. Every setback, and every triumph. I wanted so desperately to be worthy of being her follower, but that’s never going to happen. even as she’s flourished over the years, I’ve just kept on struggling. She’d only be disappointed if she ever met me. I’m not worthy of the things she’s shared with me. I’ve made no progress. I’ve made no improvements. I’ve learned nothing. I’m such a weakling. I’m such a coward. I’ll never be like her. I’m a failure. The psychological scum festering of the surface of a toxic pond. A poisoned mind. A poisonous mind. A burden on all of human society. I’ll always be the person who got lost on the field trip to the art museum, eventually getting led back onto the school bus in tears. I’ll always be the person who was too spineless to audition for drama club. I’ll always be the person who got cut from the soccer team after choking. I’ll always be the person who was distracted during driver’s training, panicked and cried out and missed the brake and hit the deer in the road and afterward waiting for a tow truck had to stand over the body as the deer bled out on the side of the highway, shrieking and grunting and twitching horribly. I’ll always be the person who almost flunked out of college, too overwhelmed by the pressure of exams to study. Nailbitten freak staring helplessly at the textbooks in the library. A hack florist. A sham sculptor. Too boring to carry conversation. Too superficial. A moody dumb bitch with a grotesque hideous face and a fat chin and a pointy jaw and a repulsively shaped body, perfectly complemented by a petty, craven, vindictive, hateful psychology. I’ll always be the person who glares at strangers, who hurls curses at telemarketers and jackhammers and dogwalkers and hovering flies. Who freaked out after misplacing a receipt for a present, sitting hunched on the floor in the lobby of a hotel with my hands in my hair, trembling. Who freaked out after confusing the date of a festival, sitting slumped against a bale of hay with my hands pressed to my face, screaming out of frustration. Who ruins what should have been special moments. There’s no hope for me. There’s no hope. I’m the ugliest thing in this town. I’m the ugliest thing on the planet. I deserve to be executed by firing squad, a corpse dumped in the river. Fuck, I’m spiraling. Pour some gasoline over my head and strike a match. I’ll always be the person who spat at a pharmacist. A mound of trash wearing some diamond earrings. Just stop thinking. A pile of garbage dressed in a snazzy coat. I’ll always be the person who slapped a babysitter. Drop a sack over my head and flip the switch. Just stop thinking. I’m never going to be happy. I’ll always be the person crying at the back of the bus. Lip quivering pathetically. There’s a disgusting puddle of dried soda that keeps sticking to the soles of my boots, this revolting smacking sensation, and the bus jolts horrifically every time that the tires bump over a pothole, and a foul noxious stench is contaminating the air, the fetid fumes of diesel exhaust seeping in whenever the bus grinds to a halt at a stoplight, brakes screeching at a spinetingling pitch, and other passengers are cackling madly, while out in the dusk on the street in decaying strip malls discolored posters promote stomachchurning hairstyles in the windows of a salon and dilapidated signs peddle bloodcurdling furniture in the windows of a boutique and a monstrously deformed inflatable mascot convulses above gruesome vehicles at a dealership and a menacing sinister light flickers across the desolate cubicles in the windows of the deserted office complex looming beyond a cracking ruined sidewalk disfigured by dog seat and weeds and oil stains and skid marks and grimy shopping bags that were once briefly used to hold hideous merchandise before being cast aside. I want to live in a beautiful world. I live in a beautiful world. I fail to recognize the beauty. keep trying fail to recognize the beauty. keep trying fail to recognize the beauty. keep trying will always fail to recognize the beauty. I’ve been fighting this battle for so many years and I’m still losing. I don’t know if winning the battle is even possible. I can reject the negative thoughts when the negative thoughts come by can’t prevent the negative thoughts from ever coming. I want to taste the delicious flavors of the food in my mouth instead of chewing meals without tasting, distracted by the frenzy of negative thoughts in my mind. I want to hear the chimes tinkling on porches instead of walking past without hearing. I want to smell the smoke wafting from chimneys instead of walking past without smelling. I want to see the steam rising from manholes, the spiderwebs glistening beneath mailboxes, instead of walking past without seeing. I want to discover the beauty of a pimple, of moldy shoes hanging from a power line, of a shredded tarp fluttering from barbed wire, vomit spattered across a sidewalk, a car alarm blaring nearby. The joy of a bee sting. Of searching for lost keys. Sweeping a floor. All of my life, I could have enjoyed washing dishes. The sensations of squeezing a wet sponge, of foamy suds gushing between my fingers. All of those hours spent standing at sinks, hating life instead of savoring the experience of that unique moment. What a waste. I am still learning. I’ll always be the person who feels miserable in crowds. I am still developing. I’ll always be the person who feels terrified of chatter. I am still growing. I’ll always be the person who hides in the bathroom at parties. I am a beautiful human being, a miraculous creature with the astonishing power to perceive light sound scent flavor texture gravity temperature to move through the world and freely interact with reality, to explore and to discover and to experiment and to reason, to remember the past, to imagine the future, a singular beloved person with a unique vibrant personality who contains so many hidden gifts, so many secret wonders. I don’t deserve to exist.

Once, on a day when she was sick, so ill that she could barely stand, I threw a tantrum because my mom had heated a can of tomato soup for supper instead of cooking a homemade meal. I wasn’t even that young. I was almost a teenage. I was so angry and spiteful that although she’d initially insisted she was too tired to prepare anything else for me, eventually she grimaced and sighed and then shuffled back to the stove in her pajamas. Weaken by whatever virus she had, and exhausted from working overtime at the post office the night before, she stood hunched over the stove, grilling me a cheese sandwich, gripping the side of the stove for balance as she flipped the slices of bread, squinting at the pain of some ache in her head or her throat, until she suddenly became dizzy, and she swayed and grunted and dropped the spatula with a clatter and then turned away from the stove and sank down onto the linoleum with her back to the oven, blinking at the kitchen around her without seeing, too disoriented to understand where she was.

I’m such a monster.

Carrying an heirloom crock that she’d trusted me to walk over to the counter, I tripped and fumbled the pottery, shatter the pottery on the floor.

I’m such a fuckup.

She spent months saving up enough money to bring me to an amusement park, only for me to be too scared to board any of the rides.

I’m an embarrassment.

She spent months saving up enough money to get me a piano, only for me to be too timid to grasp even the most basic of chords.

I’m a disappointment.

She could have had a daughter who was an architect, a doctor, a lawyer, a mayor.

I don’t deserve to exist.

I’m crying out on the porch as she switches on the light in the entryway, opening the door.

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

“What’s wrong?” Mom says.

“You deserve a better daughter,” I say, choking the words out between sobs.

She hesitates and frowns and then she steps across the porch and raises her arms and wraps me in a tight embrace.

“Hush,” she says, stroking the back of my head. My body is limp against her, shaking with every sob. After a moment she murmurs, “You’re the only daughter I’ve ever wanted.”

She waits until the crying has finished, and then she releases me, stepping back with the damp imprint of my face in the shoulder of her t-shirt, and she thumbs some tears from my cheeks, and then she brings me into the house and holds a tissue to my nose and tells me to blow and plucks another tissue from the box to dab some mucus from my nostrils, dropping the tissues into the wastebasket, and then she has me sit in a chair in the kitchen, where she promptly sets to work mixing a bowl of batter over at the counter. A pleasant shudder passes through my body, aftershocks of the crying. I breathe in, looking around. This house will always smell exactly the same, like pinewood and lemons. She has a new photo of me magneted to the fridge, from that day she took me apple-picking at the orchard last autumn. She’s chattering about the neighbors now, some kind deed. Her herbs are thriving. I’m salivating suddenly. The scent of the batter cooking in the waffle iron. She still has that apron she got from me for that birthday like a decade ago. Spattered with sauce stains, smudged with grease marks, a safety pin holding the strap together, and still that’s the apron she wears. Her socks are mismatched, a periwinkle with a magenta. Tucking some hair behind her ears, she bend to slip a tray of marshmallows into the oven. Tears are shimmering in my eyes again, but this time tears of joy.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Mom says.

“You’re just so beautiful,” I say.

She laughs, raising a wrist to wipe some sweat away, whisking cocoa into a pot of steaming milk.

“I didn’t eve shower today,” Mom says.

Her wrinkles are even better than mine.

She serves me a plate of waffles dolloped with whipped cream and drizzled with maple syrup and a mug of hot cocoa bobbing with toasted marshmallows, and then she hangs the apron from the hook on the wall and sits down across from me with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, watching me eat. My tongue curls in reflex at the taste of the cocoa, tingling with pleasure. The waffles are gloriously crisp, the exterior a satisfying crunch between my teeth, and yet fluffy almost even gooey, on the interior. A burst of rich and savory flavors. She wants to know about my day. Hesitantly, I tell her about getting to eat breakfast with my housemates. She looks so happy, hearing about my housemates wanting to spend time with me. I tentatively tell her about getting promoted to manager at the flower shop, and she exclaims in surprise, clapping her hands together. I tell her about getting begged to sign a sculpture for a fan, and she literally gasps in awe, widening her eyes. She wants all of the details, cheering when she hears about the new salary, marveling when she hears about the commemorative selfie. She’s even excited about my date. I tell her everything, about how much younger he is, about the skateboarding and the buzzcut and the duct-taped toes on his sneakers, and she still looks excited, leaning back in her chair, laughing and shaking her head in amazement.

“Em, this is all so wonderful,” Mom says.

She’s glowing.

“I’m so proud of you,” Mom says, reaching over to give me a squeeze on the wrist.

I chew a bite of waffle, too overwhelmed to respond. Once the plate is empty aside from some streaks of syrup and the mug just some dregs of cocoa at the bottom, she leads me into the living room, sinking onto the couch and then patting her legs, letting me sprawl out across the couch with my head in her lap, lying there on the cushions in the soft amber glow of the lamps. She strokes my forehead for a while. Her sweatpants smell faintly of detergent. Crickets are chirping out in the yard. The swing of the porch creaks occasionally. The breeze drifting in through the screens in the windows is the perfect temperature. She’s still stroking my forehead. I love this. This is the most peaceful feeling in the world. The headlights of a car shimmer across al of the glass in the living room.

“What aa day you’ve had,” Mom murmurs.

She’s looking drowsy, gazing off toward the windows.

“I guess it’s almost bedtime,” I say.

She still has that photo of me from graduation day on the mantle.

“You want to sleep here tonight?” Mom says.

“I should go,” I say.

“You sure?” Mom says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“You want a ride back?” Mom says.

“I’ll be fine,” I say.

I rise from her lap.

“Thanks for letting me just barge in here,” I say, glancing at her.

“No matter whatever else happens, this will always be your home,” Mom says.

She says goodnight to me at the door, hugging me and giving me a kiss on the forehead, and then the door clicks shut behind me. I tuck my hands into the pockets of my coat, walking toward the road. I feel so calm. The scent of the pine trees is breathtakingly sweet. The fragrance of the grass. The aroma of the dirt. The moon is dazzling. What a beautiful planet. An owl is hooting somewhere nearby. She’s probably so glad to be rid of me. Relieve to see me finally walk out the door, so she doesn’t have to pretend anymore. I’m worthless, pitiful, pathetic, and always will be. Failure incarnate. I am not a beautiful human being. I’m trash. I’m garbage. A walking heap of waste in some cheap eyeliner. There’s no hope for me. I deserve to be burned alive. I deserve to be beaten. I deserve to be stoned. Crowds should cheer while I die. I hope that a car hits me on the way home.


Lift by Yessica Martinez

Willow Springs issue 93 cover

In San Pacho, my mother holds my hand.
They shoot a man.

We’re walking from our grocery
“La Familiar” when

a fledgling
baby
bird
of a man

fumbles in flight towards us.

His wing-mouth widens.
He dawns on us.

we pale transparent,
see-through as the air

he launches for and
falls.

At my feet. I’m the one my
mother picks up from the ground.

She shuttered. This story is a
Snapshot from her mind.

When she tells it, as though not to
me, she asks:

“I always wonder if she remembers.”

Watch:

memory, a pebble launched
from the Y of my slingshot.


Fire, Our Lady of Paradise by Annika T.

Willow Springs issue 93 cover

Fire, Our Lady of Paradise by Annika T.

Blood son
snatched from an undersea wave
Earthshape tied to the door
with shoulders pointed into the hazy caldera bloom

of night’s paradise

Spiral arms still have a few worlds to say
stirring from their outpost
Enlivened by half fallen zones of slanting sunds
Heads beating like poison wells
Phosphenes
Brute radiance
will rattle you without mercy
bringing the symphonic web of some new tragedy underground
Mouth shaped fog waiting inside columns
Ride them into the hot gates!
Lean forward into the next neighborhood
Wingless clock bludgeoning on
Its hooked string comes to make you sell
like a snakebite from the future
Yet sleep still stands
near the great avenues and capricious domains of street lamps

and frozen fire