Featured Work – Page 14 – Willow Springs Magazine

“Have You Eaten?” by Ira Sukrungruang

When my Aunty Sue arrived in Chicago in 1968—the summer hot and familiar like Thailand—she didn’t know how to cook. This seemed ludicrous. To me, Aunty Sue was born with a pan in her hand. I knew her only as Aunty Sue, not Sumon Intudom, a girl who graduated from Chulalongkorn University’s nursing school, a girl who dreamed of a land far away from her humble roots in the town of Phrae, a girl who didn’t know how to boil an egg.

Aunty Sue recognized she had to learn to cook if she were to survive in this cold land. Nothing tasted right. The burgers were too greasy and made her skin break out. Pizzas overflowed with cheese; Thais weren’t accustomed to dairy. And desserts were too lip-puckeringly sweet.

So she studied the art of cooking by watching her peers in the nurses’ dorm kitchen on the seedy side of the city. She jotted down recipes. She tasted things her Thai tongue had never experienced, like ham. Like mayonnaise. Like a beef tongue taco with spicy salsa. Like salsa. At night, when the dorm was quiet, she tested out recipes. Some were disastrous, like Italian meatballs that always came out flat. She needed tasters and found other Thai nurses willing to try her cooking. My mother, one of them.

My son, Bodhi, doesn’t eat well. He is two. He eats rice—especially Daddy’s fried rice (sometimes); mac and cheese, the powdered yellow kind (sometimes); noodles, the Asian variety, like lo mein or chow fun (sometimes). He devours grapes (always).

I say sometimes because Bodhi has the habit of saying, “I don’t like fried rice anymore,” and then, within minutes, “Daddy, fried rice is my favorite.”

His eating habits make me think he is not my child but one that happened into my world, this found boy, this challenge I am supposed to conquer. How do I make this boy eat a pea? How do I make him try new things? How do I make him love food?

I say to my wife: “He gets this from your white side.”

This past summer I brought Bodhi and my wife, Deedra, to Thailand. Aunty Sue cooked for us every day. Each meal was a feast. I told Aunty that Deedra’s favorite Thai dish was massamun, a southern Thai curry dish that has meat, potatoes, and peanuts. Aunty Sue spent two days making massamun, stewing the beef until it was fork tender, bringing the curry and coconut milk to a slow simmer. When she wasn’t cooking, she was on the floor playing with Bodhi, who clung to her the way I had, who always wanted to be with her, who cried when she left the room.

“I tried my best,” Aunty Sue said. She came in from the outdoor kitchen, her face streaked with sweat. “I’m not sure it’s good.” She always said this when she cooked, always humble, always in doubt of her artistry. Most great artists possess this insecurity.

After one bite, Deedra closed her eyes, and I knew she was elsewhere, the way we were elsewhere on those long days in Chicago, my family missing home, me imagining what their home might be like.

“This is the best,” Deedra said. “It can’t get better than this.”

There are days I find myself searching. Not with eyes or hands. With the mouth. I am trying to locate taste. I cannot name the taste, but it is what sends my mind into overdrive. It is this taste that has halted my daily routine and put me into a state of pondering. What am I looking for? What is it I’m wanting? What is this I’m feeling?

A taste is not an image. It is not animate. The remembered taste is even more illusory. It can only be made real in the mouth.

My mouth is empty.

It is torturous, this feeling.

To want something so badly but not have a name for that want. It is like holding a loved one only to find they have vanished.

The anthropologist John S. Allen writes in The Omnivorous Mind, “We all have our food memories, some good and some bad. The taste, smell, and texture of food can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back memories not just of eating food itself but also of place and setting. Food is an effective trigger of deeper memories of feelings and emotions, internal states of the mind and body.”

Aunty Sue closed her eyes to taste whatever she was concocting. I wanted to crawl into her brain to witness what memory she recalled so she could recreate. A time when I was not yet there. Before she even met my mother. Before transplanting herself. Did she become the girl tasting tom yum, spicy soup, at a noodle cart, the one outside her house in Phrae, under the shadow of a mango tree? Or the sister among four other siblings, relishing her mother’s green curry that was sweet on the tongue with a spice that hugged the back of the throat? Or the nursing student, on a break between classes, savoring coconut ice cream scooped from a large silver barrel cart to stave off the Bangkok heat?

Sometimes when tasting, my aunt shook her head. Sometimes she nodded.

Every time she cooked was a form of remembering.

My mother used to tell me this story:

“We found you in the dumpster in Chinatown, Aunty and me. We heard rustling and crying, so we checked, thinking it was a raccoon or rat. Chicago rats are like dogs. But it wasn’t rat or raccoon. It was you. Eating something. You were always eating something. I said to your Aunty, Should we keep him? She smiled—you know how she is—she smiled and said, Only if we can afford him. He will eat a lot. He will cost a lot of money. He must belong to the restaurant owner. You know the restaurant, don’t you? We used to go there every Sunday. They had the best crab curry. The best black bean spare ribs. You know the restaurant, don’t you? The owner was Chinese but could speak Thai. He had Tourette’s. He would scream. Out of nowhere. It scared you. So yeah, we believed you to be his son. That’s why we went there all the time. So you could visit your Tourette’s father. Aunty said the owner must’ve threw you out because you were eating too much of his food, and he feared the restaurant would go under. We liked the restaurant. You liked the restaurant. You ate all of their fried rice and seafood chow fun, even though you always startled when the owner screamed out of the blue. You hid in Aunty’s arms. Remember? Your Aunty said we should take you. She had a weakness for chubby babies. You were the chubbiest. Look at you now. Still chubby. So we took you in. From that dumpster in Chinatown. From the Chinese man with Tourette’s. Thank your Aunty for saving you.”

I liked this story because I knew it was a story. I liked this story because my mother told it in a way that made me laugh. I liked this story because Aunty never said anything. She just smiled.

I’ve been to too many social gatherings where you stand with a drink in hand among a bunch of strangers and then one of those long awkward silences happens. Often times, I excuse myself to go hide in the bathroom. I find myself in a lot of bathrooms.

Aunty Sue, however, taught me a trick. Simply ask, “So what’s the last great meal you had?” and notice the change that comes over people. Notice the release of tension in the shoulders. Notice the smile that comes on us when we relive a good memory. Notice the emergence of story.

“Food, glorious food!” In high school, I was cast as every main chorus person in the musical Oliver. I was the Long Song Seller (Southside toughies called me the Long Dong Seller), the Drunkard Who Opened Act 2, the Policeman Who Shot Bill Sykes with a Starting Pistol, and the Policeman Who Carried the Dead Body of Nancy Which Was Unexpectedly Heavy and So Was Dropped on Opening Night. Aunty Sue came to every performance. I found her in the same place—house left, top row, against a sidewall. Whenever I looked up, the lights blinding, I would find the silhouette of her. Patting her heart. A sign that she saw me. That she was there.

Every meal is a big deal in Thailand. There are three breakfasts. Two lunches. Maybe an early dinner and a late-night one. That’s what Thais do. They eat. That is why a common greeting in Thailand is Have you eaten?

Every meal is a feast. Every feast full of food and family. This is food, too, this gathering of people. In Thailand, the worst thing to do is eat alone. It is bad luck.

In our Chicago home, Aunty Sue crafted meals that brought Thailand to life, or a version of Thailand. That was what my immigrant family missed most, even beyond the family they left behind. Food and the familiarities of food.

Our home was on the south side of Chicago, in a white bi-level with a detached garage. In a neighborhood of tough Polish and Irish. Aunty Sue did not have the ingredients she needed. Where was she to find kaffir lime leaves? Or holy basil? How do you satiate fruit cravings for mangosteens or durians or rambutans? Nowhere was unripe green papaya. She did not know how to ask for pork neck at the butcher’s shop. She could not find fish heads for stock. How do you cook Thai food without a mortar and pestle? That would come years later.

The ingredients of home were not available to her. At least not yet, not in the ’70s, the beginning of the influx of Southeast Asian immigrants. The first Thai grocery store in Chicago would open sometime in the early ’80s, and even then, the produce arrived withered, the fruit browned.

So Aunty Sue improvised. She re-imagined. She couldn’t give us Thailand, but she could give us something that was like Thailand.

Spicy Oscar Meyer Hot Dog Salad, with slivers of raw onion and jalapeño peppers. Ground pork and shrimp burgers, slathered in hot sauce and dilled cucumbers. Phad Thai with ketchup instead of tamarind paste. Thick brown gravy from a McCormick packet over ramen noodles. Shredded carrot spicy salad.

This was Thai food—our version of Thai food—and it was home.

“I went to Thai restaurants all over Chicago,” Aunty Sue said, “and the food didn’t taste like home. It tasted like America.”

I spend a lot of time talking about food. I am dramatic about it. It’s my favorite subject. Because I teach, many of my lessons involve food in one way or another. At the start of every semester, I ask my students about their last great meal, and at the end of every class, I tell my students: “Now go eat something delicious.”

In terms of food, we are experts. Many times, when we describe food, we stop and swallow, our imaginations taking us to the point of salivating. Sometimes, we qualify our food. It isn’t just lasagna—it’s Grandma’s lasagna. It isn’t just ribs—it’s Father’s applewood smoked ribs. It’s not just a grilled cheese—it’s Aunty Sue’s grilled cheese.

I would see Aunty Sue pat her chest at other places, too. When I competed in tennis and golf tournaments. At Thai temple events, like Halloween costume contests. We left Thailand this past year—Deedra, Bodhi, and I going through security—and when we looked back, Aunty was patting her chest.

Food says a lot about who we are. Look at the divisions of BBQ in our country—Memphis, Texas, Kansas City, Carolina, Alabama. Look at the war between NYC and Chicago about which city has the superior pizza. (FYI: Chicago pizza. Southsider 4 life.) Name a region and there emerges a food. Rochester’s Garbage Plate, Hawaii’s obsession with Spam. Fast food corporations like McDonald’s understand this. In Thailand, McDonald’s has on their menu the Pork Samurai Burger because beef is considered a luxury. In Maine, the McLobster roll. In Japan the Ebi Filet-O shrimp burger. Food is a reflection of the priorities of a culture. What is Texas without beef? Or Iowa without corn? Or Thailand if not for jasmine rice and fish sauce? Food is an announcement of place, a connection to home.

Another story, one Aunty Sue liked to tell:

“Your mother’s milk had gone dry, so we started you on formula. You couldn’t tolerate it. You would drink a couple of mouthfuls and spit it out. You weren’t eating at all and cried non-stop, which set your mother on edge. For weeks you didn’t stop crying. You barely ate, which is hard to believe now. Because you eat all the time. My fault, I’m sure. Then in a moment of desperateness, I spooned a bit of rice and fish sauce into your mouth. You quieted. You smiled. A miracle! Then you reached into my mouth and ate what I ate. For rice. For noodles. For my grilled cheese. And I knew. I knew I created a boy who loved food. I knew you were mine.”

This semester, a student: “My grandmother used to make these homemade pierogis. She only made them once a year. On my birthday. It was a major production. Rolling out the dough. Perfecting the filling. When I bit into her pierogi, butter salted the lips, and there would be this crunch and chew. Not like a chip. Not like the snap of a carrot. But like the break of leather left too long in the sun. That’s the sound. Or something like that. I would eat and eat and eat until I was sick. No pierogi left behind, she said. She said weird things like that.”

“When’s your birthday?” I said.

“In a couple of months.”

“Will she make those pierogis?”

“No,” he said. “She passed away.”

This summer: Aunty Sue passed away.

Deedra had massamun at a Thai restaurant on her birthday, the first time since my aunt’s passing. “It’s not good. It’s not fair.”

This is not about food.

Let me tell you about Aunty Sue’s grilled cheese. There is nothing particularly special about the sandwich. She made it the way others made it. Butter. Cheap white Wonder bread. Kraft American cheese. Sometimes some garlic powder on the bread. Only if I asked. Sometimes she put in slices of tomatoes from her garden. Sometimes ham. But that grilled cheese. That taste of it. It has followed me for years. I’ve eaten many grilled cheeses in my lifetime. Some with fancy cheeses. Some with fancy bread. Some with mayonnaise instead of butter. But none like Aunty Sue’s.

Aunty Sue’s grilled cheese became part of the family menu, and because it became part of the family menu, it became Thai. That’s what I want.

There are pictures of Bodhi and Aunty Sue together, and most of them are in the kitchen. In all the pictures, joy paints her face, a laugh frozen, a wide-open mouth of elation. And my son, too, smiling and doing what one-year-olds do. This is his Grandma Sue—this white-haired woman he clings to, who makes five versions of fried rice to appease his finicky taste buds, this woman he met only once in a stretch of two weeks one summer. A year after that visit, he will discover these photos, and his father will ask, “Do you remember her? Do you remember Grandma Sue? She loved you so much. Greatest cook on earth. Do you remember her?”

He will shake his head. He will say no.

Something inside the father breaks.

I keep searching for that taste, that grilled cheese. I search for other tastes, too—Aunty Sue’s Phad Thai, her macaroni stir-fry, her coconut milk soup.

What I am really searching for is her.

When he was not yet a year old, Bodhi reached into my mouth and ate the fried rice I was eating. He couldn’t form words, but my wife and I taught him the sign for “more,” putting his fingers together in both hands then repeatedly touching them against each other. With that first taste of fried rice, he signed for more. He signed for more after every bite. When I was too slow to feed, he put his little fingers into my mouth, searching.

We wish. We yearn. We search. Whatever memory that tickles the tongue is only memory, which means it is loss. We are losing every second. That grilled cheese is a memory. That massamun, a memory. Aunty Sue, a memory. This is what we face. And yet we keep recalling. We keep searching for that elusive taste. What was your last great meal? And we are off, losing ourselves in sensorial ecstasy, and at times, in a bubble of memory that contains not so much the food but the people the food comes to represent, the people who have become memory, too. And we hold on. We keep looking. We keep hoping. A hand touching the heart.

“Three Finnish Scenes” by Eric Altemus

Found in Willow Springs 85

Back to Author Profile

KOTIPIZZA

Yes! We put strips of all-natural reindeer meat on the Berlusconi. Thank God you asked. It’s named after the Italian Prime Minister. You know, the same one who believed Finland would lose at the Pizza Olympics. Now look at him: A shell of his former self. Expelled from politics. A tax criminal reduced to mere billions.

Our best-selling product.

Imagine a farm somewhere up north. Lapland. The more remote, the better. Winters are harsh, but our reindeer are well fed and properly sheltered, thanks to the efforts of our Reindeer Maintenance Team. State-of-the-art technology, too: they can’t even feel the temperature falling through the triple-glazed windows at night. Go ahead, peer into their eyes, black and glistening. Look at those antlers, so gracefully manicured. Squint hard. See how happy they are? You can touch them if you want. Stroke their fur.

As if there were any doubt that we only use the finest reindeer on our pizza.

I cannot actually tell you where we acquire our animals, however. That is a company secret. I could lose my job. And then what? Ask the government to pay my rent so I could sit here telling reindeer stories all afternoon for free? No. I have a family to feed.

The reverse applies for how we process the meat, though. We refer to it as “initiation.”

Again, think of all our happy reindeer. Select one from the stable and lead it outside, into the darkness. If it cries out, shush it. Normally, they comply. But sometimes they don’t. In that case, you have to act fast. Nobody wants a hysterical reindeer on their hands. So do something. Sing a song. Tell a story from your childhood. Put a knife to the reindeer’s throat and threaten to sell it to Russia. Anything you want. Just make sure the fucking thing dies.

HESBURGER

I Yes! We put strips of all-natural reindeer meat on the Berlusconi. Thank God you asked. It’s named after the Italian Prime Minister. You know, the same one who believed Finland would lose at the Pizza Olympics. Now look at him: A shell of his former self. Expelled from politics. A tax criminal reduced to mere billions.
Our best-selling product.
Imagine a farm somewhere up north. Lapland. The more remote, the better. Winters are harsh, but our reindeer are well fed and properly sheltered, thanks to the efforts of our Reindeer Maintenance Team. State-of-the-art technology, too: they can’t even feel the temperature falling through the triple-glazed windows at night. Go ahead, peer into their eyes, black and glistening. Look at those antlers, so gracefully manicured. Squint hard. See how happy they are? You can touch them if you want. Stroke their fur.
As if there were any doubt that we only use the finest reindeer on our pizza.
I cannot actually tell you where we acquire our animals, however. That is a company secret. I could lose my job. And then what? Ask the government to pay my rent so I could sit here telling reindeer stories all afternoon for free? No. I have a family to feed.
The reverse applies for how we process the meat, though. We refer to it as “initiation.”
Again, think of all our happy reindeer. Select one from the stable and lead it outside, into the darkness. If it cries out, shush it. Normally, they comply. But sometimes they don’t. In that case, you have to act fast. Nobody wants a hysterical reindeer on their hands. So do something. Sing a song. Tell a story from your childhood. Put a knife to the reindeer’s throat and threaten to sell it to Russia. Anything you want. Just make sure the fucking thing dies.

FESTIVAALI

Dead. That’s Vaasa in the middle of July, except for a bunch of metalheads who think they run the place for the week the music festival’s in town. They’re not hard to miss: filthy kids pounding Lapin Kulta, reeking of pot, and throwing rocks at the cars crossing the gulf bridge in between sets. Last night, they tipped over all the portable toilets, and someone finally called the cops. When they arrived, they lined the length of the island road, lights flashing across the water. I was watching from a friend’s apartment balcony, waiting for a riot to break out. But then the bands started back up again.
We watched the police drive away from the island. Everyone left it at that.
All my friends think Vaasa’s the best town in Finland. Nothing happens here, they say. Everyone’s all talk. Pohjalainen runs the same thing in the paper: stocks, weather, the non-issue news about Sauli Niinistö, five hours away.
Summers here never seem to end. Most businesses close for the month, so I wandered aimlessly through the city streets, looking for signs of life: a lone ice cream stand parked in front of the H&M; fresh seagull shit on the statue of a tsar. I started staying up most nights, just to hear the street noise, the same cars racing down deserted streets, past my apartment window, chirping tires and mufflers coughing in the endless light.
I was smoking outside the rokkibaari the night the festival ended when a fight spilled into the street. Some intern at YLE started it. The metalheads beat him so badly, he started snoring on the pavement. He survived but walked with a limp for a while. People started avoiding him in the supermarket or in the square after that. In the morning, Pohjalainen reported on the festival: the record attendance, the cleanup efforts well in hand. Everything went without a hitch.

“Mushroom Boys” by Bridget Adams

Found in Willow Springs 85

Back to Author Profile

Lydia and Jools and RJ were very drunk and walking home, and the streetlamps made the sidewalk, the apartment buildings sprouting up, fuzzy and golden. Fat snowflakes drifted and found their lazy way onto the girls’ cheeks, their eyelashes, into the necks of their coats and onto the exposed skin of their feet in their high heels. It was fifteen degrees, finally warm enough to snow, after almost a week of frigid nights in their withering Rust Belt city.
“Remember baby ducks?” said Lydia, “Taking care of them in kindergarten?” The soft round penumbras of the streetlamps reminded her of them.

“Baby animals are so cute,” said Jools, weaving as she walked, her face glued to her cell phone screen.

“Why don’t we get a dog!” She thought of puppies filling up her bedroom, too many, she could sleep in a pile of them.

The building that the girls lived in had two apartments on the first floor, facing the street. The one to the right of the door was dark, with the blinds drawn. The one to the left had its blinds up. The girls walked up the stairs and saw that the window was wide open to the cold air. The lights were on, and music with a deep, crushing bass played. It made the hearts of the girls hurt, each muscle aching as it tried to keep its own rhythm. There was a couch facing the window, and three boys, about their age, sat in it. Their heads were down.

“Hey! Hey! Hey!” RJ said. It seemed like a good idea. It seemed like maybe they should meet the three boys. All of the girls’ boyfriends were kind of like dads, the way they took the check at dinner and paid it without even showing the girls, wore collared shirts to work, disappeared mysteriously into rooms together and on trips and to the golf club, had a baby they saw on weekends or more than one dog. All of the boyfriends were on a trip now, a bachelor weekend in Cabo. The girls said things like this: “Why don’t you ever take me to Cabo?” and, “Who is even getting married?” and, “How can you afford this?” And the boyfriends sighed and smiled and kissed them on their cheeks and left. RJ and Jools and Lydia had gotten very drunk, in a retaliatory way. They were so bored when the first bartender told them about his house party, when a lost-looking punk with a ketamine drawl told them about his show that night, when they danced in a circle in a dark club and hands attached to unseen bodies crawled up their stomachs, their thighs. Being bored was worse than anything. It was worse than being sad, than being angry, than puking. “Being bored is the worst,” Jools said as they left the club. RJ and Lydia nodded. Lydia worked nights as a receptionist at a hotel, so she knew a lot about being bored.

Now, the girls looked through their neighbors’ window and wondered what it would be like to hang out with boys again, their own age, boys who talked about video games and didn’t pay child support. They couldn’t see the boys’ faces, because they were all sitting upright, their elbows on their knees, their heads down. They looked like they were thinking very deeply. You could see their shoulders, their biceps; six big arms, good manly arms.

“Hey boys!” Jools said, then started laughing so hard, through hiccups.

“Boys!” Lydia said. “Boys!” Lydia started yelling louder, but even though she pushed her face against the window screen, they didn't stir. Lydia started to feel queasy. “Boys! Boys! Boys!”

The fan swung in a wild white buzz above their heads. They were like mushroom boys, growing from the couch, swaying wordlessly.

“They’re on drugs they don’t know how to do,” RJ said. “They’re fucking losers.” Jools was back on her phone, her face pinched into a worried shape, blue in the glow. She was swiping through possible new boyfriends on an app, her cheeks a little damp. She had cried off and on all night, and no one had asked her about it.

Lydia was scared and she didn’t know why. “Let’s go home,” she said, and opened the door, and ran up the stairs. Once a cat had followed her up the stairs from the street. He was hugely fat, and his collar said, “Hello! I’m Leonard! I’m an outdoor cat!” He had climbed in her bed and slept voluptuously next to Lydia all night—sprawled like a king, purring, low and indecent, when she scratched the striped balloon of his belly. He left in the morning when she went for a run. Lydia wondered where he was now. It was too cold now to be an outdoor cat. RJ stomped each step behind her, purposeful, hard, like she was trying to punch her foot through the worn, shabby carpet, through the wood, all the way into the boys’ apartment. “Wake. Up. Boys.”
The girls flopped on the twin bed they pretended was a couch in the living room. Everyone had had sex with their boyfriends on the bed, because sometimes they just wanted to do it somewhere other than their rooms. Friends from all over had slept there, and the girls had never washed the sheets. They actually didn’t clean much at all, except for when Jools became possessed like a demon three days before her erratic period and scrubbed the bathroom, collecting hair and dirt and dead silverfish and mold. “It’s like an owl pellet, but for girls,” she said the last time, dangling it in Lydia’s face.

The girls put Celine Dion on the music channel on the TV. They screamed the lyrics and laughed halfway through. The apartment building was three stories high and built in 1929 and so quiet, and they almost never saw anyone, anywhere, no matter how loud they screamed—at Celine Dion, at a joke, at the boyfriends. Sometimes figures appeared in the dark hallway, round and bulky in hats, scarves, puffy coats, but they swept quickly into their own rooms, swinging the doors shut.

The sheets beneath the girls were hot pink and stained. RJ had been the last to start dating one of the boyfriends—the chain went Lydia with her boyfriend, then Lydia introduced Jools to one of his friends and they started dating, and then RJ hung around enough to meet their other friend. RJ’s boyfriend was an attorney and a famous local drunk and when he fucked RJ on the twin bed, he said he felt like he was back in college and RJ said that made sense because she graduated last year. Before him, RJ was having sex with the woman who managed the 7-Eleven a block away but she never told anyone that, and she never laid out the manager of the 7-Eleven on the hot pink sheets, and actually she still had sex with her sometimes but she didn’t tell anyone that either.

Red lights flashed outside the window. A siren in the distance came closer. The girls ignored it. RJ knew about things that Jools and Lydia had never heard of, and so she found a YouTube video of a performance artist who sat behind glass like she was a prisoner meeting family, and people would come and sit in the chair on the other side of the glass. The performance artist begged each person to touch her, and she would lie and tell them that if they tried hard enough it was possible to get through the glass, so people would try to touch her, but of course they couldn’t. They’d just press their hands against hers with the strip of glass between them, and sometimes the performance artist would kiss her side of the glass and the person viewing her would kiss the other side and their mouths would be open, like the sucker fish at the bottom of the aquarium. The video showed stranger after stranger, and sometimes they cried and one lady started calling for her mother. At the end of the video, the glass was covered in snot and fingerprints and spit and tears. The glass ended up being preserved and displayed in the museum after the installation was over.

“Oh Lyddy, Lyddy don’t cry,” Jools said. She hugged her with one arm; she looked at her phone over her shoulder, crying a little herself. Everyone was so ugly in the app.

RJ stopped the video. “Are you sad?” RJ asked, a nail file appearing. She sawed at her fingernails, bright red and shaped into points. Each girl had a tumbler of whiskey but couldn’t remember when she’d gotten it. They all liked looking at RJ’s nails when she held a glass of liquor or wine, at the sharpness and the shine of the ice and the nails. It was sexy and grown up. RJ had to have nice nails because she was a receptionist at a car dealership and she had to point at things all day. People looked at her nails constantly.

“Yes,” Lydia said. “I’m kind of sad. I liked that guy at the bar tonight.” Lydia had found herself on the porch smoking a cigarette with a stranger.

“What about your boyfriend.”

“He was obese.”

“He wore a fedora.”

“He had a goatee.”

“He was a tollbooth operator.”

He also had deep gray fillings lining all of his back teeth. He had a little lisp too and when Lydia said she had never left the US except to go to Canada, of course, which was only ten miles away, he told her she was fascinating, like a newborn or an alien. He put a Camel Menthol in between her fingers and said, “There are three types of kisses; I learned that in Vienna. I’ll show you one here and two back at your place.” Lydia wanted to learn something. She wanted someone to want to teach her something new. RJ had come outside. “JESUS,” she said, and grabbed Lydia’s hand, spinning her from him. She had looked deep into Lydia’s eyes and held both her hands. “If you fuck him you will hate yourself in the morning.” RJ knew this because she would hate herself in the morning if she fucked him.

On the couch now, RJ and Jools knew they were right to tear her away. Lydia blew her nose. Lights flashed in a rhythm across RJ and Jools’ faces. Lydia’s father always used to say that her mother’s ancestors ate the soup. What he meant was that even though all of her ancestors were Irish immigrants, her father’s parents came from Catholic people who refused to convert, even though it meant starvation and displacement, and her mother came from people who converted when the British came over and got to keep their land, their food, their animals. Even though this story was not true, a fabrication made to enhance an already quite vivid history of degradation and oppression, Lydia knew that what her father meant was that she was from a long line of craven women, operators, people who choose to feed, feed, feed, and always choose to live, their principles shuffled like dice every day, hour, at every decision. That was how she felt when her boyfriend gave her some money for rent, and when she wanted to learn the tollbooth operator’s kisses; instead of feeling ashamed, she felt excited, alive.

A silverfish darted across the floor. The girls screamed. They all had nightmares about silverfish. In Lydia’s nightmare, the silverfish live in a nest like birds, and the nest is under the bed. One morning, Lydia told Jools about her nightmare, and Jools said that all the girls in the whole world have horrible dreams about bugs, even if they don’t remember in the morning, because of evolution. The silverfish were biological but somehow robotic, and that’s how you know they might have a disease. RJ moved so quickly and smacked it with her shoe. A thick soupy gunk stuck to the shoe, to the floor. The girls knew that this was the price of murdering something that needed to die. The girls felt an absurd urge to pray, and they stared silently at the goop. A single leg stuck in the air. They noticed because they were staring really hard. It was late. They had been home for hours, they realized.

RJ didn’t like the sound of the sirens which suddenly sounded so loud. She got up to close the door to the porch—it had been swinging open. None of the girls noticed how cold the apartment was with the door open because they were all so warm after dancing, and with more whiskey slithering into their bellies. They never remembered to lock anything, and Jools didn’t know this yet but one of the neighbors had snuck in one day, a woman, and stolen her grandmother’s emerald ring, a small part of her inheritance, from the bottom of her jewelry box. Everything else in the apartment was worthless. The neighbor sold it and used the money to fill her veins up with heroin, just a few feet away, sighing and relaxing and feeling so fucking good and thanking God that she lived next to careless girls.

“Oh, fuck,” RJ said. Lydia came to the door and Jools followed. Beneath the porch they could see the ambulance, with its lights going. A silent police car. A firetruck. RJ had a secret history, of cousins and aunts and neighbors and grandparents dying in the neighborhood where she grew up, of hoping that people always moved quickly, urgently, of believing with a superstitious fervor that it meant something if the lights were on or off.

The girls watched people file into the boys’ apartment below them. They didn’t come out for a long time. The girls breathed in the cold air and their lungs hurt and the tendrils of hangover headaches crept up from the cervical curve of their spines to the crowns of their heads. “I’m going to bed,” Jools said. All of the girls yawned. “We should all go to bed,” they said to each other. They shut the door to the porch behind them, and this time they locked it.
RJ fell asleep as soon as her head hit her pillow, because she had the superpower of sleeping when she didn’t want to think. Jools stayed awake. She was talking to the men she had swiped yes on, telling one that she was an astronaut, another that she was a spy, another that she was a dominatrix. She deleted the app before she went to sleep, because then it was like it didn’t happen.

Only Lydia couldn’t sleep. She wondered if the boys had heard them calling out to them tonight, before they stopped hearing anything. One night her boyfriend slept on the couch bed. A few nights. She remembered yelling, so angry at him, to get the fuck out, get the fuck out right now. The night before her birthday. Why had she felt that way? It was impossible to remember. Had the boys downstairs heard? Had they wondered about her then, like she wondered about them now?

The window downstairs was never open again. When the girls walked by, every day, they shivered, even when the snow melted and it was warm and the piles of dog shit revealed themselves, sprinkled on lawns. They shivered even when they were older, and walked their children in strollers past their old apartment, when they got matching divorces from different former boyfriends and drove by trying to access the feeling of being in their twenties, when they were much older and Jools died and RJ and Lydia went to see what that old dump looked like, and cried at the stupid brilliant beauty of the young girls in yoga pants and long ponytails walking in and out. Sometimes they imagined the boys still there, never moving, their bones and muscle and skin growing, becoming roots that burst through the floor of the apartment. Their bodies became part of the dirt; their arms, those nice, muscly arms grew and grew and twisted up into the corners of the room, split into many fingers, cracking the ceiling, and someday they would crack the floors of the places the girls lived, and then they wouldn’t be able to ignore the girls anymore.

Three Poems by Andrea Jurjević

Found in Willow Springs 85

Back to Author Profile

"Nastic Movements"

Sweetness, back home

the Adriatic tightens around the shore

like a snake around a hot rock.

in each house on the island

there’s a table. on every table,

a loaf, round like a Slavic face.

ashes in the oven.

ashes on the domes of the bread.

ashes on the roof of one’s mouth.

last year my cousin died

alone in his house. our family—

scattered around the world—

got caught in a phone web,

catching up with each other,

and we forgot his body.

but things were funny: phone in hand,

someone picked her nose,

and pulled out a bloody fingernail.

another drew a hair—tough, tar-black—

from between her teeth, a pubic curl,

and wondered whose it was.

and, listen, in Sarajevo,

the fit ones ran through the Sniper Alley.

the rest took up dying.

longing is a trick, baby.

go inside a rock, a ringtone, the red coal of my tongue,

and you’ll only taste yourself.

babe. keep the curtains parted.

see the moon tossing her long white hair

across the ocean.

hear its steady, back-arching roar.

look at the chenilled strip of black sand,

that fool walking with a flashlight.

listen to the ocean and come apart

like a letter in rain. babe. even dandelions

lose their faces at night.

"Department Of Dream Justice"

I return home, sit on the pier and listen to rocks suck the sea like Frank Booth on blue velvet.

At dawn my sister yanks me awake, and the oval shell of the world cracks open. Boats gape like a line of polished funeral shoes.

A cortège of animals gallops fluently by our house, their muscular architecture covered with lush white wool.

The garden beds are dry, laundry lines bare.

Sister says, Come back soon.

We close our eyes, wish for rain

and wake in another dream: on streets of distant towns, each of us, alone, carries keys from our old house, looks to unlock a door

that fits the key.

Your palms close around the book of my hips. The minor tongue my hips are inscribed in.

Your palms, two walls within which I sing.

III

For years I spent nights drifting over wheat fields and vacant parking decks, and the wind whistled, whistled, whistled a long narcotic tune.

On the sandbank tonight shards of broken glass,

the river licking its shore clean, like a dog nursing its wound, and the moon, translucent, is a soap bubble on your glistening back.

My bones are hollow. There’s a quick flutter of wingbeats.

You turn, holding back the curtain of the night, and say, Baby. Don’t you see you’re home.

For eternity we’re a house on fire.

The man with a boat on a leash. The bailaor dancing naked in my living room.

The man eating sea urchins in his bathtub, spray-painting eels into silver bedroom whips, singing of hollow canyons.

The man with two pistols against his skinny waist. The man rapping about white knuckles.

My father eating goulash his mother fixed from his pet pigeons. How he sobbed in our sea-splashed house after she died.

The man with a horse torso digging a trench of doubt. American outage.

I have a fondness for tight spaces. I tell you about each one I tucked myself into.

The addict on the waterfront who always almost returned. The man who smelled of autumn. The man tearing along on his guitar like an overnight train, singing El dolor que tengo yo, el dolor que tengo yo.

The swallows didn’t return this year, Sister writes. Their nests still line the eaves of the roof.

VII

Baby. I want to be a swallow. Smallest, bluest of them. Skim the surface of the sea at sunset. Feed in flight. Build a cup of warm mud in the cover of someone’s large house, wake up in the mornings, and while my children still sleep, feel like it is me who keeps them safe.

"Nevada Augury"

Because the desert renders everything boundless and bare,

undeserving of existence—like the self-loathing types you fall for—

you delight in it. The lone, sun-drowned shack doubling as Goldfield’s Radio Museum, its toilet planters, and P. K. yapping about spy transmitters.

Oasis Avenue. Car Forest. The Dinky Diner.

Chip driving by in a giant truck, just off the testing site.

Wild Cat Ranch! Someone whispering, What can I do for you, sweetie, 100s of miles from anyone’s ears. Isn’t that what all of us want?

You adore what remains of Mina’s homes, its padlocks and boarded-up windows, bars across doors, No Trespassing signs.

And the mines, also abandoned, also disused, yet somehow like homecoming.

The Death Valley. Oh, the Death Valley. Its hot grip, its erotic grandeur, its golden skin, and—

Look! In all that flax and rust, the two of us, sipping gas station coffee, small as two fools of Breughel’s, turning into desert sand.

“The Hive”and “I Wake”by Michael Hettich

Found in Willow Springs 85

Back to Author Profile

The Hive

Someone else’s loss, buzzing through the garden

like the bee that got under your shirt and landed

in your chest hair but didn’t sting; someone’s grief

right there like a stone in the almost-raining afternoon

with the smell of horse-sweat and mowed grass and hot

asphalt. You held my hand as we stood

at the fence and called out to those horses, and felt

the first raindrops and smelled the cooling road.

Someone else’s tragedy passing like an awkward truck

climbing our dirt road, unbalanced by the dead woman’s

bulky furniture, and the potholes. Someone else

looking out her window at the strangers standing

on the road squinting at her door as though

expecting it to open, then walking slowly on.

Down the hill, trucks rip out the clear-cut tree-stumps

and we think of the coyote who slunk across our yard

with a squirrel in its jaws, and we think of the bears

at our garbage. There were birds calling out like children

playing hide-and-seek, pretending to be hurt

somewhere deeper in the woods, and you tell me you love me

like fingernails, like hair; you love me like breath

when you’re sleeping, wrapped up in dust while the crows

in our closets make darkness from the clothes we never wear,

and the walls of our bedroom hum like swarming wasps.

I Wake

in the middle of the night to something moving

across the porch outside our bedroom,

sliding furniture around

and muttering. It’s raining, but I’m sure I hear footsteps,

so I hold myself still. The sprigs of flowering

dogwood my wife has collected glow

in the moonlight by the window; she snores peacefully

beside me. I’m naked. Today a red-tailed hawk

swooped across our garden, to vanish in the woods

before I was sure what I saw, so

I didn’t say anything. Later, we had dinner

with a friend who’s grown suddenly old, and as

we said our goodbyes, she told us again

about the day her husband left her,

out of the blue, when her adult children

were toddlers. It hasn’t stopped hurting she said

as she closed her front door. Driving home, I noticed

my wife was crying, face turned to the window.

I thought of pulling over, reaching out, asking her

to tell me what was wrong, but that road is difficult

to follow at night, and I wasn’t even sure

she was crying, after all, when I looked over again,

so I drove on in silence, keeping my eyes

on the road, respecting that darkness.

“Medicine” by Jackson Burgess

Found in Willow Springs 85

Back to Author Profile

You could spend half a lifetime trying to learn what another body needs, and believe me, I have, making eyes at the showerhead, poking holes in water balloons. My bad times brought me to Mercy Hospital, where I watched doctors flush saline through my veins and tasted nauseous ocean. Bad times fingering the hole in my neck where they threaded a tube to my belly, bad times grieving the veins they killed. Last night in a dream, I let the doctors catch my best friend because it meant I could escape, and then I watched through a window as they opened his brain. With each prod in a different place, a new part of him squirmed, until they’d learned to work him like a marionette. He looked at me in my window and said, Now look what you’ve done, and laughed. One time, I found my bad times in an orange bottle of codeine and discovered the funhouse behind my eyes. Rabbits and opossums congregated at my doorstep, bar backs looked at me like I was diseased. And in all my bad times, you were watching—I could feel you in the walls. I missed you like a hole misses its shovel, empty, full of air.

“Introductory Element Comma Independent Clause: A Study of the Moon and Bees” By Tom McCauley

Found in Willow Springs 86

Back to Author Profile

In the open parenthesis beside a conjunction, two commas nest. An independent clause, on its way to the apiary, spies them: two direct objects, of the mirror-tested species, building a home in the branches of a sentence.

Somewhere, a vacuum roars. Afternoon crickets crick in the ear. At night, when the world quiets down, every room vibrates deeply like a turbine, so that if you stand comma-wise on an otherwise blank page, a low moon throbs in your head.

Replacing external sound with ceaseless inner noise is called tinnitus.

When the independent clause considers a comma, it pictures a bird lying on its side. Then, the unclear referent adds more noise: the click of a predicate against subject, or a suddenly desexualized wailing under the moon after which we named the lunatics.

Lunatic, from Latin lunaticus, originally referred to diseases people ascribed to the moon. It’s easy to blame things on the moon. For instance: madness, epilepsy, fever, rheumatism, tinnitus—often felt as an unending ringing, buzzing, chirping, whooshing and/or vibrating in the skull—and love—an unending same.

Diseases rarely thought to be caused by the moon: melanoma, sunburn.

Between 1765 and 1813, members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham called themselves lunaticks. Who were they? A dinner club of industrialists, natural philosophers, intellectuals, illustrious figures, and other nonrestrictive appositives in an age with little street lighting.

It is no longer polite to call someone a lunatic.

Occasionally, let’s say after no sleep, the buzz of tinnitus may be mistaken for bees. This has caused at least one independent clause, walking past a leaf that grazed his cheek, to startle, suddenly cold in the summer, and look all around him for a predator.

Anyone who’s ever been stung knows politeness is not the domain of honeybees.

The propolis they produce, when mixed with wood, gives redness to the violin.

Honeybees exhibit chronic despair after being shaken.

Through pheromones and the dance language, honeybees invert this reaction to reintroduce a kind of prelapsarian bliss to the hive. Sadparty is their grammar. Like the moon, they have grown less successful over time; they make fewer nutrients; they get harder to see in the dark.

This is mostly our fault, we who invented politeness.

10.

“The Method of Lunar Distance”: in celestial navigation, the angular distance between the moon and another celestial body. Combine this angle and a nautical almanac to calculate Greenwich mean time. By comparing your calculated time to local time, the navigator may determine longitude. (Bees do something similar when they fan their wingpieces for landing.)

11.

The average ambient noise of cities has grown by about thirty decibels. Every three decibels represents a doubling of sound pressure. Cities are therefore one thousand times louder than the soft, grassy world we knew before language.

Long-term exposure to environmental noise may cause high blood pressure, headaches, insomnia, tinnitus, and hyperacusis—a kind of colony collapse syndrome of the ear. Hyperacusis amplifies everyday sound. The clinking of silverware on a dinner plate may cause the sufferer’s ear to spasm painfully; a lover’s laughter may hurt purely for physical reasons; semicolons keep various facts about the world from bumbling into one another.

12.

Beethoven suffered from both tinnitus and hyperacusis. During the Siege of Vienna, the unbearable loudness of faraway bombs drove him crying to his brother’s basement, where the famous composer jammed pillows against his ears to stop himself from exploding.

Several years earlier, he wrote the Moonlight Sonata.

13.

Ringing in the ears may be a warning sign of glioblastoma, a rare and aggressive cancer born in the brain. Average age of onset is sixty-four. In coronal MRIs the tumor may resemble a hive. Mean survival time is three months without treatment; treatment adds an additional nine to twelve months to this sentence. Imagine what you could do one year from now.

14.

The wooden sign saying Do Not Shake the Bees is sad.

How many bees had to be shaken for the dispassionate researcher to notice the chronic despair reaction, record it, and then puzzle over whether it was even worth mentioning? Sadder still: think of all the people who will disobey a sign because it’s there.

15.

All things can be related to one another given enough semicolons and time, the careful combination of which may add up to one independent clause containing everything: magpies and manta rays—the only nonmammals who understand a mirror; Beethoven and honeybees—doomed musicians who ceaselessly buzz; the moon and other distances. This phenomenon, known as grammar, was invented many years ago by self-aware birds who lost their feathers and out of unquenchable necessity built loud hives in the grass, called cities. According to laws these birds invented, every independent clause, no matter how complex, must end with a period, a question mark, or an exclamation point, the latter also known as a bang.

16.

Ending an independent clause with an ellipses is considered nonstandard, ungrammatical, uncool, against the rules, implying as it does a wish not to end, to leave things unsaid, to return at some indefinable point to itself . . .

17.

( . . . )

18.

Dear indispensable, unforgettable, independent clause,

Please do not shake the bees.

Sincerely, the moon

“Dani Bloom” by Andrew Furman

Found in Willow Springs 86

Back to Author Profile

SOMETHING STRANGE HAPPENED to Dani Bloom the spring of her sophomore year at Keys High. She became popular. Not popular in the general sense, like Katie MacAvoy (who decided to be Kate MacAvoy freshman year), or like Peter Button (who modeled designer jeans for the Burdines catalog), or like Dani’s pretty sister (who now attended the U of M on a swimming scholarship) had been popular. Dani, instead, gained credibility, which seemed to be what popularity was all about, amongst one of the smaller cliques. Its loose organizing principle, as far as she could determine, involved an aversion to athletic endeavor, aquatic or otherwise, and a predilection for long-sleeved and -panted clothing, plaid patterned and dark hued, totally ill-suited to the subtropics.

Dani hadn’t intended to fall in with this group. She was content enough in her lazy orbit at the periphery of the band-kid galaxy. But then one day in the caf she overheard a boy’s voice from the long-sleeved and -panted table across the narrow aisle behind her. If we only knew how to get out there it’d be so frickin’ gnarly. Which made her perk up her ears as she devoured her second bite of the bean and cheese burrito that everyone said was grody, but that Dani secretly savored. She recognized the voice. Roger Siefert, leader of the long-sleeved and -panted. A junior. Dani didn’t really know him. Just knew him in the sense that she knew everyone who’d grown up here. Knew him well enough to know that he combed his straight sandy hair over his left eye, because a fishhook punctured the pupil a while back and turned the black circle into a strange square. Fuckin’ way I’m going out there middle of the woods those mosquitoes, a girl’s voice chimed in, leaving out an awful lot of words. Pam Mohlief. Dani thought she knew the place they were talking about—there weren’t so many places of solid ground necklaced between bay and ocean in the nation’s southernmost county—but waited and listened as she sipped chocolate milk straight from the carton, wiped the dark foam from her upper lip. But it would be so frickin’ gnarly, Roger said. Whole building’s empty. Just sittin’ out there.

Yes, Dani knew where they were talking about, the abandoned five-story apartment building in the hardwood hammock north end of the island. When most locals thought about the finger of woods between the ocean and the highway, they thought about the drug-runners and their square-grouper cargoes, the “illegals” from Haiti and Cuba and wherever. So a lot of their neighbors didn’t mind the idea of a fancy housing development and a bunch of fancy new people on the scruffy site. But her mother had fought hard years ago to keep all construction away, had gone to court up in Miami and everything. Nina Bloom, leader of Concerned Citizens, owner of Native Blooms, the nursery bordering the proposed development. They had lost the case against the “concrete coalition,” as her mother called the greedy jerks—another thing she called them. Only reason Hibiscus Bay never materialized was that the developer went bankrupt after bulldozing a swath of hardwoods for a single construction road and putting up that one structure in the building plan. It had been years since Dani trekked out there with her mother to see the spooky building, years since she spent much time outdoors. Yet she found herself curious once again about the hammock and the abandoned building, perhaps only because Roger was curious about it, so maybe she was mostly curious about Roger.

“I know how to get there,” Dani heard herself say across the aisle. Roger swiveled on his bench and trained his good eye on her, the eyebrow above squinching like a caterpillar, as if he had just heard a miraculous thing he couldn’t quite believe, a dolphin or bear speaking rather than just a pudgy girl a year younger than him.

“Who are you again?” Roger asked. She could smell the spice riding along his breath from the clove cigarettes he wasn’t supposed to smoke.

Surely he knew who she was, just as Dani knew who he was.

“I’m Dani Bloom.”

THEY DITCHED SCHOOL the next day after lunch, Joey and Carrie and Kevin and Pam squeezed into the open bed of Roger’s Subaru Brat while Dani rode in the cab to tell Roger where to turn off the highway into the hammock. The hammock trees either side of the road lashed the asphalt with their darker shadows once they reached the north end of the island. She kept one eye on the opposing traffic in case her mom was driving down from the nursery, in which case she’d duck beneath the dashboard. Music without a discernible melody thumped from the speakers, featured violent guitars and wounded vocals. Dani didn’t mind the music as it took pressure off having to think of what to say to Roger. He tapped the inside knuckle of his thumb against the stick to what Dani supposed was the beat. He seemed to have bitten his nails right down to the nub, leaving angry red crescents where more nail should have been.

“You like the song!?” Roger shouted to be heard.

“Sure!” She could only pick up isolated words and phrases above the instruments—I just don’t care no more . . . midnight sun . . . drinking whiskey baby . . . I don’t care no more—but sensed that the actual words weren’t really so important.

“It’s Cat Butt!”

Dani nodded to hint that she knew the band without having to lie outright that she knew the band.

“Yo! Put my Screaming Trees tape in!” Kevin shouted bossy-like over the wind and music through the cab’s small rear window, slid open. This was another organizing principle of the clique, Dani soon learned: an appreciation for obscure rock bands featuring violent instrumentals and wounded vocals, and a principled aversion toward any music that a DJ might actually play across the staticky FM airwaves from Miami.

She told Roger to turn when they got to Loquat rather than stop earlier beside the narrow asphalt road carved directly into the hammock, the road laid by the developers for their heavy construction equipment and already halfway greened over, hardly visible from the highway. She had Roger drive down Loquat pretty far before parking on the scruffy berm. It would be a long trek from there through the hammock to get to the abandoned building. This way, though, Sheriff Hansen or the DEA or Border Security police or whatever wouldn’t spot the suspicious pickup parked alongside the main highway, and this way the hike to the abandoned building would seem more impressive.

“Follow me,” she said after her new friends spilled down the sides of the truck bed. (The tailgate latch was frozen shut.) She blazed a trail between the stopper and gumbo limbo and pigeon plum and ironwood and strangler fig and the other trees she once knew but wasn’t sure of anymore. The trees were tall, but spindly on the whole, competing for space and light. The air was still inside the hammock, the thicket cutting whatever sea breeze there might have been. There wasn’t much birdsong, hot as it was middle of the day, just the sizzle of cicadas and stuff. The bugs and the quiet sounded a lot better to Dani than the Cat Butt or Screaming Trees music.

“Rad,” Joey said just a few minutes into their walk, as if he’d never been outside before. Joey dyed his hair black, which made his pale skin seem even paler, made Joey seem even stranger for a Keys kid. Roger seemed to be saving his breath. She could hear him sort of huffing behind her.

It was actually easier to blaze a trail through the hammock than most people figured, the few people, anyway, who thought about the hammock at all. There wasn’t too much undergrowth since there wasn’t too much soil, Dani’s mother had once explained. Just a thin crust of limestone and marl and sand beneath the leaf litter, which crunched beneath their feet. She knew there must be white stopper around someplace, because she could smell its skunky smell, a smell she liked and didn’t realize she missed until now. When did her mother stop pestering her about joining her at the nursery on weekends, about joining her on her scouts through the hammock for seeds and cuttings? She waited for Roger or one of the others to ask about the skunk smell, because it sort of smelled like pot, but no one did. Then she heard from somewhere high in the canopy the loopy sentence of a vireo, like it was beer-buzzed. She remembered what vireos sounded like. Cool.

“Anyone bring the frickin Cutter?” Kevin asked, just a moment after Dani heard the smack against his neck.

“Shit, no, forgot.” Joey.

“Fuckin Joey.” Kevin again, as if bringing bug spray was assigned special to Joey. “You suck.”

Kevin was a dick-weed, Dani decided. It seemed like lots of people with red hair were dick-weeds, which couldn’t be true as a general thing, which was why she didn’t let herself believe that Kevin was actually a dick-weed until just now.

“Here, hold up a sec.” Dani strayed off her northeast line to tear off a few broad leaves from a beauty berry shrub, trotted back to hand them out to everyone. “Scrunch up the leaf a bit and rub its juices up and down your arms and stuff. Works almost as good as DEET.” Her friends obeyed, even if they were a bit slow about it.

“Stinks like cat piss,” Kevin said.

“You watch, like, Mutual of Omaha or something?” Which might have been a compliment, but not the way Carrie said it. Her lip curled to flash her dog-tooth. Pink blotches with erratic outlines had erupted across Carrie’s neck right up to her cheeks, as if she was allergic to the outdoors. Carrie must have dyed her stringy hair to make it darker, too, like Joey, because the dappled sunlight brought out the brown in her eyebrows below her overgrown, side-swipe bangs.

“Shut your face, Carrie,” Roger defended Dani as he stirred up froth on his arm from the rising sweat and the beauty berry goo. She could see the veins bulging from his forearm, either from being strong or just skinny. He flashed a smile at her below his sandy mop of hair thrown over his bad eye. Some of the hair was darker now from his sweat and stuck to his skin.

They blazed on. It took only a matter of minutes tromping through the foliage for Dani to solve the social calculus of the clique. Joey liked Pam (because he walked just in front of her along the path Dani blazed and held the branches rather than let them snap in her face), but Pam liked Roger (because she never said thank you to Joey and only seemed to call up ahead to Roger), and Carrie liked Roger too (because Pam liked Roger), which was interesting because dick-weed Kevin liked Carrie (he’d been scoping out her butt ever since they started walking and used the mosquitoes as an excuse to smack her thighs and calves now and again through her ratty 501s). Dani couldn’t tell who Roger liked. She heard the loopy sentence of a vireo again, wondered if it was the same bird following them.

Then she heard a human noise that startled her, a thwacking through foliage up ahead. They all crouched in catcher’s stances. Roger’s furry calf (he wore shorts today and a normal-looking T-shirt on account of their hike) brushed up against Dani’s smoother thigh. Along with his beauty berry smell, she could smell his soap or deodorant or whatever mixed up with his natural Roger smells, which reminded her of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup, which wasn’t such a bad thing for your B.O. to smell like, she decided.

“Is it the cops?” Pam sort of shout-whispered, crouched behind Kevin.

“Shh . . . no,” Roger shout-whispered back, peering toward the old woman wearing binoculars and a ridiculous straw hat. Dani could see the lady through the thin understory. She had stopped in her tracks, scanned the canopy.

“It’s just an old bag,” Kevin said, sort of below his normal voice but not in a whisper, as if he didn’t know how to whisper. “A frickin old bag with binoculars. What the fuck she got binoculars for?”

“Shh, she’s bird-watching,” Dani whispered. It was Mrs. Holtkamp. Joy Holtkamp. She’d been the secretary for her father back when he lived at home and worked at the community college. She lived with a homosexual nephew down on Big Pine, because she never had any children and her husband had pitched his car over the Seven-Mile Bridge a long time ago. Her father never liked Mrs. Holtkamp much—the students called her Joyless, he told Dani—but she was always nice to Dani the few times she had to go to her dad’s work, rifled through her desk for butterscotch candies Dani didn’t much like. Mrs. Holtkamp couldn’t have been much more than thirty yards up ahead. She seemed to be looking up into an enormous strangler fig, in particular, lifted her binoculars to her eyes now and again. The binoculars had strange straps that went around her neck and shoulders and back.

Some leaves and sand crunched behind Dani. “For fuck’s sake, Carrie,” Kevin said in his strange low voice that wasn’t a whisper. Mrs. Holtkamp heard the crunch, or maybe heard Kevin’s stupid voice, or saw his stupid red hair, because she lowered the binoculars and swiveled her head toward them. “We’re screwed,” Kevin said. Dani could see Mrs. Holtkamp gazing toward them, though it was tough to know exactly what she could see through the branches and stuff. Then Mrs. Holtkamp did a funny thing. Rather than walk toward them and find out their names or something, she turned back around and walked away, veered westward sort of back toward the highway.

“Lucky,” Pam said in her normal voice as they all rose, Mrs. Holtkamp having vanished into the woods.

For reasons not altogether clear to her, Dani wouldn’t reveal Mrs. Holtkamp’s identity. She led them onward. Before long, the hardwoods gave way to shorter thickets of mangrove and buttonwood, discernible trails of hard sand and limestone between. The sun seared Dani’s flesh on her face and forearms, no longer protected by the mottled shade of the canopy. Dani and the others swatted the air in front of them as they walked to shoo the chaos of sand flies, which danced whirligig all about. Instead of stopper-spice, the thick air smelled mostly of sulfur now from the mangroves.

“Who cut the cheese?” Kevin.

“P.U.” Carrie.

Roger still didn’t say much of anything, seemed to concentrate extra special on his steps as if he was worried about fire-ant holes. He wore black canvas Chuck Taylors below his shorts, the laces all shredded.

“I like the smell,” Joey said, which made Kevin rag on Joey with a series of all-purpose, nasally ragging phrases. Dani wouldn’t tell them that she liked the mangrove smell, too, which smelled like rotten eggs, and which she wouldn’t have liked if it was actually rotten eggs and not the mangroves. Which was weird, maybe.

It seemed to Dani that they ought to have reached the building by now. She was just starting to worry that they were lost when the cinderblock peeked out from around the mangroves, blotting out the sky, freezing them all in their tracks. The builders hadn’t gotten around to covering the concrete siding with stucco or whatever before they went bankrupt, which made the ugly building middle of the mangroves look even stranger. Her mother and most everyone wanted the eyesore demolished and removed, but who was going to pay for that?

“Dani, you’re amazing!” Roger said, speaking finally through his huffing breath. His words made something shift inside her. When was the last time someone had paid her an actual compliment?

Plywood sealed all the first floor openings—KEEP OUT! DANGER! painted orange across most of the sheets—but it didn’t take long for them to find a way inside. Someone had torn a seam out of one of the coverings with what might have been an axe or crowbar. It was dim but not dark inside on account of the light streaming in from the torn-open plywood and from other gaps in the openings that Dani hadn’t noticed from the outside, twinkling like stars. It was oddly cool and damp and smelled bad. They gazed about, silent, at the large space they had entered, accented by metal piping and spindly planks of wood that might have framed discrete rooms. The builders hadn’t completed as much of the inside as Dani thought. They surveyed the entire level between the maze of wood and metal, the smooth concrete floor accented by archipelagoes of dented beer cans, ash from whatever it was that other intruders had smoked, and dark turds from whatever animals had sought refuge inside, which sort of explained the bad smell. Rats and raccoons, mostly, Dani guessed from the scat. Bats, maybe.

“Who wants to check out the upstairs?” Kevin asked once they reached the concrete stairwell near the center.

“I’ll go,” Pam said, and Kevin said cool, so maybe she’d been wrong about Kevin liking Carrie and Pam liking Roger. Dani wondered whether they’d make out up there, or even go all the way, because what else was there to do all alone up there? Carrie and Joey wondered too, because that’s what they ragged Kevin and Pam about once they were gone, lighting up their clove cigarettes as they sat against a wall in one of the cleaner corners.

Joey called kissing sucking face.

Carrie called it Frenching, which was sort of a prude thing to say. Roger just called it kissing.

“You want one?” Roger asked, holding open his pack of cloves before Dani.

“Sure,” she answered, plucking one of the dark cigarettes from the pouch more awkwardly than she had planned.

“You don’t have to smoke, Dani, if you don’t want to.”

“I know.”

DANI NOW SAT at the long-sleeved and -panted lunch table in the caf instead of at one of the band tables, unsurprised that none of the other clarinets, or any of the woodwinds for that matter, asked her what her deal was. During the too-short lunches, she quietly chewed her burrito or shepherd’s pie or chicken a la king and listened as her new friends nattered on about this or that. Every once in a while, she located a small space to merge onto the traffic, but mostly she just listened, like the rag-tag other sophomores and freshmen at the table, who seemed like wannabes to Dani. They occupied positions of lesser credibility than Dani, it was somehow clear, even though they wore long-sleeves and pants, plaid-patterned and dark hued, while she still wore short-sleeve T-shirts and shorts—mostly solids—in brighter hues. Roger frequently sat next to her and spoke to her (so maybe this was why she ranked above the wannabes), and she learned a few things about him. He packed his own lunches, because he hated the food in the caf and his mom left for work really early. She worked behind the lobby desk at the Lodge in Islamorada. He liked mayonnaise on his roast beef, which was sort of gross. It was his father who cast back his line at the Seven-Mile Bridge and caught Roger’s eye with his baited hook when Roger was eight. Roger’s father lived in Miami now, like Dani’s father. Roger was allergic to strawberries. He could still see out of his bad eye. He and Joey were re-taking Composition this year with Mrs. Pavich, because they turned in the exact same final paper on Lord of the Flies last year. Joey had been the one who actually wrote the paper. Roger’s favorite TV show was Beavis and Butt-Head. Roger, Dani learned, wasn’t very smart. But that was okay.

His favorite band was Gruntruck. And Cat Butt.

Pam liked 7 Year Bitch and Hole.

Kevin liked Screaming Trees, and ragged on Dani when she called them The Screaming Trees. Because he was a dick-weed.

Carrie liked Dickless.

Joey didn’t seem to have a favorite band.

WHEN THEY DECIDED to ditch school next to hang out in the abandoned building, Roger carried his boom box with him, and Pam and Carrie toted a few beach towels over their shoulders so they wouldn’t have to sit right on the damp and dirty concrete, and Kevin somehow got his hands on two six-packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon, which was a really good beer, he said, and Joey remembered the Cutter so the mosquitoes and sand flies didn’t bother them so much in the hammock. She was glad when Roger sat next to her on a towel against the wall after clicking down the PLAY button on the boom box.

“Cool, Dickless,” Carrie said, sitting cross-legged near Joey, squinting her eyes funny as she inhaled her clove. Dani couldn’t understand one word of whatever song it was, couldn’t really tell if it was a boy or a girl screaming the lyrics, but guessed it was a girl-band, because what sort of boys would call themselves Dickless? She didn’t really like the taste of the too-warm beer, its harsh fizz against her tongue and throat, but she liked the way it felt to hold the sweaty can and the lit clove in the same hand, the cigarette jutting from between her fingers, her pinkie tapping the sweaty can to the beat of the music. It occurred to Dani that even though she couldn’t understand any of the words, she liked the violent rhythm of the guitars and drums, which might have been because of the beer. As she sipped her Pabst and smoked her clove (you had to inhale pretty hard), she gazed over at Pam, folded inside the nest of Kevin’s arm (he wasn’t such a dick-weed to Pam), watched as Pam reached across Kevin’s plaid belly to scratch the fur of his other arm with her black nails while Kevin sipped his beer. The gesture struck Dani as so tender that it made her throat thick, but that might have been the beer too, which was starting to fuzz up her eyes. They were definitely doing it, Dani decided, even before they picked up their beach towel and walked off upstairs.

Then, Joey and Carrie rose silently from their towel and walked off into the shadows, as well. Next thing Dani knew Roger was kissing her and she was kissing him back. She could taste the cloves and beer stronger on their tongues as they kissed. Which was weird. He sort of lowered her down onto the towel, his face looming over her face. It felt good to rest her neck on the hard floor. Perched over her, Roger’s sandy hair floated away from his funny eye, which didn’t look any different to Dani than his good eye, maybe because both eyes were so black with his pupils in the near-dark. Then he did some things to Dani that she hadn’t let anyone do before, and she did some things to him that she also hadn’t done before, and then she had to tell him that she wasn’t ready yet to do the next thing he had in mind, which didn’t seem to disappoint him very much. Maybe because he wasn’t a dick-weed like Kevin. And maybe because she’d said “yet.”

IT FELT GOOD to walk off her buzz when they finally headed back to Roger’s pickup. Egrets or herons gossiped invisibly from the mangroves, squawking and making stranger clacking noises—spoonbills?—rousing her further. The sun painted her lips with its hot brush, the lips raw from Roger’s grown-up bristles, which was probably why she felt the sun so strong on them. The hammock air when they reached the hardwood canopy felt thinner and lighter in her chest. She walked at a steady pace, sort of zoned-out, or maybe she was zoned-in—“wait the fuck up,” she heard Kevin’s voice from the rear—savored the spicy air in her nostrils filling up her lungs, the rising warmth in the muscles of her thighs and calves, which she decided were strong and not so chubby, after all. It was sort of a game she played with herself to see if she could blaze a path through the spindly trees without breaking her stride. She watched out for poisonwoods and machineel trees and snakes, although she didn’t think there should be cottonmouths so far away from the water. And then a human voice from up ahead startled her.

“Danielle? Is that you?”

Her friends skidded their sneakers across the leaf litter to hold up behind her. Carrie, or maybe it was Pam, let out a little yelp, as if they’d just been confronted by a skunk ape.

“Yeah. It’s me,” Dani replied. Her eyes trained arms-length to part the dense foliage, she only now noticed the person farther off attached to the voice. It was Mrs. Holtkamp again, wearing that same stupid straw hat and the binoculars with the complicated straps. There seemed to be some sort of paste smeared across her nose too that wasn’t rubbed in all the way. Mrs. Holtkamp asked if she might have a word with Danielle alone so Dani told her friends to walk the rest of the way to Loquat without her. She’d meet them at the pickup. Mrs. Holtkamp waited until the others were well clear before saying anything.

“I thought I recognized you, Danielle.” Dani nodded. “The other day, too.”

“Oh.” So Mrs. Holtkamp had seen them. “Yeah. I guess.” Dani didn’t see any point in lying about it. She glanced at the old woman’s eyes, then glanced away. She wasn’t sure where she ought to look, settled on a millipede creeping across the leaf litter, crossed her arms beneath her chest.

“So . . .” Mrs. Holtkamp let the so hang up in the air between them for an awfully long time, inflated her lungs with a gulp of spiced hammock air and exhaled loud before her next words . . . “this is what you’re doing with yourself these days?”

Something about the way Mrs. Holtkamp spoke the words told Dani that she wasn’t trying to be all judgy or anything, that she was asking an actual question. She truly wanted to know if this was what Dani was doing with herself these days, ditching school and tromping through the hammock to smoke cloves and drink beer (both of which Mrs. Holtkamp could surely smell on her) and fool around with boys (which Mrs. Holtkamp could probably guess).

“I don’t know,” Dani answered, uncrossing her arms, but keeping her eyes mostly on the leaf litter. “Maybe . . . . It’s not, like, every day or anything.” A gnatcatcher wheezed from up in the canopy, as if to scold them for trespassing.

“So you’re okay then?” the old woman asked. “Those are your friends?” Dani lifted her eyes and told her yes, that she was fine, that they were her friends, while the gnatcatcher continued to wheeze, above. She lowered her eyes again to the leaf litter, but could see Mrs. Holtkamp’s straw hat bobbing as she nodded, weighing Dani’s words.

“You have to be careful, you know,” Mrs. Holtkamp stated more than asked, waved a thin hand before her pasted nose to shoo away an insect. She was talking about sex, Dani knew.

“I know,” Dani answered.

This seemed to satisfy Mrs. Holtkamp, because she looked up into the canopy for the gnatcatcher and asked in a brighter voice how her father was doing in Miami. Dani told Mrs. Holtkamp that her father was fine. “I wonder about him sometimes,” the old woman continued, looking through her binoculars now, so Dani told her this time that he was doing good, upgrading his status.

“And your mother?”

Dani told her that her that her mom was good too. Busy. Then Mrs. Holtkamp lowered her binoculars, told her that she saw her mother time to time at the nursery, which might have been a threat, but sounded more like it was just something to say. Even so.

“You gonna tell her you saw me out here?” Dani folded her arms again beneath her chest, looked into Mrs. Holtkamp’s eyes to see what she could see.

“No, Danielle.” Mrs. Holtkamp sighed. “I don’t think so.”

FOR SUPPER THAT NIGHT, Dani and her mother sifted through the layers of Stouffer’s lasagna, Dani collecting as much ground meat on her fork as she could and shedding the flavorless, pasty cheese. The table didn’t seem so big back when Dani’s father and sister lived at home.

Her mom still smelled like plants and dirt from the nursery, redolent above the supper odors. She smelled just like the hammock, it occurred to Dani. Between bites, her mother asked “how was school?” because that’s what she always asked, and Dani told her it was “fine,” because that’s how she always answered. Then her mom asked if Dani would be okay doing homework on her own later for a couple hours so she could “go out” and Dani said “sure,” and then asked where her mom had to go, and her mom said “just out,” flipping through one of her nature-y magazines, and then Dani knew it wasn’t a Concerned Citizens meeting so asked “with who?” and her mom said, “just a friend.” Which meant it wasn’t Mr. Conrad, anyway. Then her mom told her to eat some of her salad, too, not just the lasagna, maybe because she didn’t want Dani to get any chubbier, or maybe just to keep her from asking any more questions.

Dani was glad that her mom wasn’t seeing Mr. Conrad anymore because he’d been Dani’s sixth grade teacher, which made it totally creepy, and there was no way she was ever going to call him Bruce, like he suggested. But Dani’s mom was seeing someone new now. Because she was going out on a weeknight, which she hardly ever did, and she’d gone out the last two Friday nights with “just a friend,” too. (Saturday nights her mother still took her bowling.) Her mom had dated at least three men now since the divorce who Dani knew about, the first two of whom had been “just a friend” for an awful long time before Dani had met them and learned their names. Dani didn’t really hate them, but didn’t like them, either, because they acted too nice to her, which wasn’t really the same as being nice.

Dani speared three crescents of celery onto her fork and swished them around in the Ranch dressing on the bottom of the plate, lifted the morsel to her mouth. Sometimes her mom got angry at her for dousing her salad with too much Ranch dressing, but she didn’t seem to notice tonight, even though she’d stopped reading her nature-y magazine. Her mind was probably on her date. Dani tried not to think about it, but sometimes she wondered about her mom and her men and the sex stuff. The logistics. Like, did grownups even bother with second base? That sort of thing.

Pam called sex bumping hairs, which was disgusting.

Roger called sex the bone dance, which was also disgusting. But funny.

Kevin called sex screwing, like most everyone.

Joey called sex the horizontal lambada, which he must have picked up from that stupid movie.

Carrie called sex sex, which was boring. Sort of like Carrie.

Dani’s mom cleared her plate and started rinsing it in the sink and scrubbing it with the sponge all brisk-like, brisker than usual, probably because Dani had said it was okay for her to go see her “just a friend” and she needed to shower off all her plant and dirt smells, maybe spray on her Vanilla Fields or Sunflowers perfume.

“We’re still bowling Saturday night, right?” Dani asked.

“Of course, Dani.” Her mother turned from the sink to answer, twisted off the fizzy stream from the faucet. “You sure you’re okay, sweetie?” she asked, parentheses rising between her eyebrows.

Which sounded sort of strange, because Dani didn’t remember her mother asking if she was okay the first time, not exactly, but Dani told her yes, she was okay, because that’s how she always answered when her mother did ask her if she was okay, and because she was okay. Mostly.

THE NEXT TIME DANI DITCHED SCHOOL and blazed a trail through the hammock with her new friends, she found herself scanning the foliage for Mrs. Holtkamp’s goofy straw hat. Not because she was hoping to avoid her, but because she hoped she might see her again, which was sort of a surprising feeling to feel. It bummed her out when they got to the abandoned building without spotting her. She didn’t want to smoke cloves today (no one had brought any beer or anything), maybe because she was bummed about not seeing Mrs. Holtkamp, and maybe because she found herself having less and less to say to Roger and the others at lunch in the caf the last couple of weeks.

She let Roger kiss her and stuff today, but she wasn’t too into it. Roger could tell, because he stopped sort of in the middle of feeling her up and said, “You’re not too into it, I can tell,” and so she explained that she was just distracted over stuff (not mentioning Mrs. Holtkamp, which he’d find totally lame), and then she started saying a bunch of stuff to make him feel better, stuff she’d never had to say to anyone before. Roger just lifted his palm and said, “It’s chill,” leaned back up against the damp cinderblock wall, turned up the volume on the Gruntruck song—It’s alright I’m doing fine, as long as you’re above me, it’s okay I’m doing fine, as long as I’m below you—and felt around on the concrete floor for the clove cigarette he’d left somewhere. She leaned over and started kissing him again, because it was nice of him to be chill about it instead of sulk or whine or, worse, whip out his boner and pressure her to finish what they started, like dick-weed Kevin would probably do. The more they kissed the better it felt, even down there, but not really because she was so into Roger, anymore, which sort of bummed her out. She wondered, as his breath got all panty between his kissing and pawing at her, whether she ought to just let him go all the way and get it over with, realized the next instant that this was probably a stupid reason to do it even before it occurred to her that Roger probably didn’t have any rubbers with him, anyway.

It’s alright I’m doing fine, as long as you’re above me, it’s okay I’m doing fine, as long as I’m below you.

DANI SORT OF HAD A FEELING Roger had brought along rubbers the next time they ditched school for the hammock, because he’d worked in rubbers as a general topic of conversation three times that week at the caf, and because the third time he made sure to mention that he carried “at least” one rubber in his wallet, to which Dani replied, “Noted,” which was a pretty killer response—and which made Joey and the wannabes laugh—but which might have been a bit too encouraging to Roger.

So it was probably a good thing that Dani spotted Mrs. Holtkamp’s straw hat a good distance away before they made it to the mangroves and the building. Dani told the others to go on up ahead, that if she didn’t meet up with them not to worry. She’d get a ride. Roger sort of made a farting noise through his lips. She didn’t quite know how to read the farting noise, but it didn’t sound very nice, didn’t sound very Roger, and only stiffened her resolve.

“You all know the way now,” she said. “You don’t need me anymore.”

Roger and the others shuffled off across the leaf litter, parting the thin hardwoods more violently than necessary. Watching after them, she was relieved that she could stay outside in the hammock today rather than go inside the dank building to make out with Roger. The hammock, she realized, was where she wanted to be.

Mrs. Holtkamp lowered her binoculars upon Dani’s approach, didn’t seem the least bit surprised to see her, maybe because she’d already spotted Dani from a ways off, even though she’d been mostly gazing up into the trees. Or maybe because when you got so old nothing really surprised you anymore. Which was sort of sad.

“Hey,” Dani said, lifting her palm, her voice piercing the sizzle of the cicadas and the sweeter Morse code chips of the little birds up there in the canopy.

“Hello, Danielle,” Mrs. Holtkamp flashed mossy teeth, then covered them up just as quickly with her thin lips, trained her binoculars back up into the foliage blocking most of the direct sunlight. Every once in a while, Dani heard a raspy zheep that interrupted the sizzle of the cicadas and the sweeter Morse code chips of the warblers or whatever. Some sort of flycatcher, Dani knew enough to know.

“What do you see up there?” she asked.

Mrs. Holtkamp lowered her binoculars again, rubbed the back of her thin neck with her hand. “Great-crested Flycatcher. Some yellow-rumped warblers. Don’t you have to catch up with your friends?” It hurt Dani’s feelings that Mrs. Holtkamp seemed to be shooing her off, that she wasn’t more interested in Dani than she might have been. That’s what the students at college and even Dani’s father didn’t like about Mrs. Holtkamp, she remembered. She wasn’t very friendly or nice. Joyless. Yet her frostiness somehow made Dani more interested in the old woman. She asked if she might tag along with her for a while—“I like birds too”—decided she’d wait till later before asking Mrs. Holtkamp for a ride to the end of her block along the highway.

“Of course,” Mrs. Holtkamp replied, more friendly than unfriendly, and so Dani followed the old woman as they ambled through the hammock, the two of them glancing up from time to time, but mostly walking. Mrs. Holtkamp didn’t say anything for a while. She seemed sort of out of it, actually. New bugs—or frogs, maybe—burped from the trees, joining the cicada sizzle. She was about to ask Mrs. Holtkamp about the new noise, but swallowed her words. Maybe because Mrs. Holtkamp didn’t seem like she felt like talking, and maybe because Dani didn’t want to admit that she didn’t know the animal to attach to those burping sounds.

“I have a backcountry permit with me,” Mrs. Holtkamp finally uttered over her shoulder, “just in case we get stopped.”

“Oh,” Dani said. “Good.”

Dani felt her sweat pearling on her forehead and upper lip as they walked, felt the warmth in her thighs and even in her lungs as she worked to keep Mrs. Holtkamp’s modest pace. Along with the burping sounds, there was an awful lot of birdsong up there in the canopy that the old woman seemed not to hear, because she didn’t stop and look for them with her binoculars.

“So why do you come out here, Mrs. Holtkamp?”

“I’m bird-watching.”

“Yeah, but why else?”

Here, the old woman halted in her tracks, turned toward Dani and flashed her teeth, which weren’t so mossy after all, Dani decided. “You were always a smart girl, weren’t you Danielle?”

Dani sort of half-nodded and licked the sweat of her lip rather than tell Mrs. Holtkamp that she wasn’t the smart one, that Lisa was the smart one. Dani was the one who didn’t like to do her homework and had to take Algebra twice and made her parents yell at her, and at each other, an awful lot.

“I suppose I come out here to think,” Mrs. Holtkamp continued. “Hammock’s a good place to be for that sort of thing.” Dani wondered what it was that Mrs. Holtkamp had to think about—her homosexual nephew? her husband who drove his car off the Seven-Mile Bridge a long time ago?—but before she could ask they were interrupted by the unignorable call of a new bird sounding several times from up in the pigeon plum foliage. Queep . . . queep . . . queep . . . queep. Mrs. Holtkamp raised her binoculars to her eyes and scanned the canopy. Queep . . . queep. The raspy notes sounded flycatchery to Dani, but higher and clearer than the flycatcher they had just heard.

“That’s a flycatcher, right?”

“Yes, Danielle. A La Sagra’s, I think. Rare. From the tropics somewhere. There! I see it. I’m fairly certain that’s what it is. Must be lost, poor thing.” Mrs. Holtkamp lowered her binoculars and unclipped them somehow from the complicated strap. She handed them to Dani, who looked up at the bird, which looked mostly plain and gray and not very special at all.

Then the flycatcher got real quiet all of a sudden, which seemed strange, the all-of-a-suddenness. Which made Dani lower her binoculars, and that’s when she saw something more interesting than the plain and gray bird. Four coal-black figures clad in colorless clothing, who walked steadily, if not quite fast, northward across the hammock leaf litter just twenty yards or so east of them, the two in the middle shorter than the ones in front and behind. One of the shorter people glanced Dani’s way, slowed her stride. Dani only knew she looked her way because she glimpsed the whites of her eyes flashing between the leaves and branches and stuff. And she only guessed that she was a girl, a child, who might have been younger than Dani. The girl was jostled from behind, it seemed, by her taller companion (her father?), redirected her gaze as her party continued through the hammock.

“Uh . . .” Mrs. Holtkamp uttered, as if she felt that words were required, yet had no idea what to say. “Um . . .”

So it was something of a relief when the rare flycatcher from the tropics picked up its queeping call once again, as the human migrants from the tropics slipped out of view, as Mrs. Holtkamp finally gathered her wits enough to say, “Well, Danielle, let’s keep moving,” as they trekked onward through the hammock away from the rare flycatcher in its pigeon plum, away from the coal-black family—yes, Dani decided that they were a family, having decided earlier that they must have been human migrants from the tropics—as Mrs. Holtkamp probably started thinking again about her thoughts, as Roger and the others smoked and screwed around in the creepy building not very far away that might have housed all sorts of fancy people had things turned out just a little bit different. Dani wondered what would happen to the family, who walked with such purpose, as zillions of unheard, unseen bugs, birds, mammals, and reptiles went about their own hammock business. She wondered whether the family would be okay, whether she and Mrs. Holtkamp ought to have pursued them and helped them in some way, whether someone was meeting them with a car on the highway up near the Card Sound Bridge to the mainland. Although new creatures sounded now from the trees closer by, Dani found herself listening hard after the rare flycatcher, who queeped more faintly from behind each step they took. She wondered who or what the poor bird was queeping for so deep in the hammock, so high in the pigeon plum foliage, so alone and so far from home.

“Flew It All Around” by Matthew Lippman

Found in Willow Springs 86

Back to Author Profile

My kid did my hair this morning.

She got her fingers in my mop

and fucked it up.

Made all these spikes and railroads trestles.

Threw in some twirls and blue paint.

I had spent an hour with the brush. Didn’t matter.

She came upstairs and got her hands in there,

did some modern dance acrobatics on it.

When she was done

it was a garbage dump,

a forest of brutalized pines.

She said, Your head’s a forest.

She was right. She’s nine.

I wanted to say,

This is a metaphor for the world, the house,

the whole neighborhood,

but she already knows.

Everything she knows, she knows.

Honestly, I thought I was a cool dad

for being cool

with the cool kid

messing up daddio’s hair.

This was just me feeling good about myself, hot stuff cool.

Honestly, I wish a morning like this for everyone, for everything—

the parking lots and the playgrounds,

the school yards and classrooms,

the boardrooms,

the forests and the streams.

That we all can wake up and have someone come upstairs to fuck up our hair

for fun.

All that good stuff right before breakfast,

right before we step outside into the sunshine

and it smashes our face to pieces.

“Hawks” by David Dodd Lee

Found in Willow Springs 84

Back to Author Profile

He was shooting me from across the street, me in my priest’s collar, my black gown. St. Sebastian’s was a flood of electric light. I could see the outer fringes of my hair all lit up, like an aura between the curls.

He’d already used the Steadicam. Now the street was snow in patches and a series of black sedans rolling past.

The movie was for a millionaire, who wanted priests and things with black wings projected on a wall behind his altar and his “fornication chair.” That’s what he told Gregory, a local director of music videos, a soft porn adaptation of Rent, PSAs for the Humane Society, and who, in fact, himself adopted and rehabilitated abused greyhounds. We’d gone to college together.

It’s crazy trying to make something of your days. I was in an Alice Cooper tribute band in the 1980s and early ’90s, but I kept seeing pictures of Cooper swinging golf clubs instead of scowling under blood-red skies filled with bats, and it just didn’t feel the same anymore. I felt like I was living a lie. . . .

I was now instructed to stand at the door of the church, to pretend I was locking up for the night.

“Wouldn’t I just walk through a hallway and into my residence?”

“You’re an adulterous priest. You’ve got a hot date with a female parishioner named Veronica.”

“I can do that.” I liked playing it straight, plus I’d be throwing in a bit of a sexy snarl for the millionaire. I’ve got large teeth in my mouth, including incisors. I played a vampire in another music video, from my Welcome to My Nightmare days.

I was further instructed to walk—slowly—down the wide (golden in the floodlights) staircase.

“Gladly,” I said, because walking’s my specialty.

I was wearing black shoes.

I didn’t need much more than the clothes. I put in some eye drops so one eye was dilated. A touch of mascara. I watched the black cars on the road.

Pigeons kept rising over the roofs of nearby houses and circling the church’s bell tower. I liked that I was high up against enormous wood doors, while in the house next door I could see a man watching TV and eating popcorn out of a blue or green bowl. His wife or girlfriend was curled up beside him. It made me feel a little sad. But it also felt good to be towering above them.

Gregory’s assistant moved downwind from us. He’d be standing there. Then he’d disappear or I’d only see half of him for a couple of seconds. He looked like the Black Dahlia woman, cut in half the way she was, but then Victor’d suddenly be walking toward us, or only half of him would be.

In the woods, just beyond the surrounding homes, a bonfire raged, staining the night’s low-flying clouds a peculiar shade of orange.

It was all in how you lived your life. I wasn’t much of a drinker myself, and I ate a lot of yogurt and blueberries and hardboiled eggs. But I could stand along an avenue with the skies aflame and talk to Jesus Christ, and the blackbirds would burst out of the trees.

The millionaire, it was said, threw big parties that included big orgies. People would come to town from Hawaii and Austria. Nude women wearing headgear fashioned to look like hawks carried trays of hors d’oeuvres and glasses of champagne.

“He thinks the help seem more nude that way, that it enhances their role as aphrodisiacs,” Gregory said.

All of us chuckled at that, except for Alphonso, whose wife had recently left him for some guy who frequented sex clubs in Chicago.

I’ve been there. I only snorted amyl nitrate twice, though—and it was great; smoke slithered over black floorboards and my partners felt dry and smooth, like anacondas.

Nowadays, I run on an elliptical most evenings. My last boyfriend left me when, for several weeks, he couldn’t stop staring at the ceiling and asking me why I was so damn annoying.

“I’m just lying here, Michael.”

“That’s not true, Stephen. For one thing you’re fucking breathing.”

I do love my cat, a svelte tabby runt. She is ten years old and has never weighed an ounce over five pounds.

When Gregory yelled, “Action,” I pretended to wrestle with a skeleton key. I knew he and the boys were rolling their eyes. What a drama queen.

I also knew they felt a chill run down their spines when I turned and floated about an inch off the concrete, my face white as the moon.

“Fuck,” I heard Victor say.

Then came the part in the scene where I begin to walk.