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“My Heart is in the Mouth of Another Heart” and “Suture” by John Sibley Williams

Issue 84
Issue 84

Found in Willow Springs 84

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My Heart is in the Mouth of Another Heart*

 

May the deer navigate              this field of white crosses

                        & tiny windless flags

as if no one buried beneath has ever taken from them.

 

May we join the mice nesting               in our bones

Like rotten logs

 

& raise our children safely shadowed

                                                  in grief.

 

 

May the children we've chosen for sacrifice climb

so high in these elms the light            that rarely reaches us

trembles at their coming.

Trembles & comes to them.

 

Someday the need to sing will become the song

& the song grow into another need.

 

Not for blood this time. Not oil. Otherness.

Among the burning crosses, churches, refineries at dusk, a bridge that

shouldn't be there. May we say we see it through the smoke.

Like forgiveness. All this impossible forgiveness.

May the dead believe us when we say it.

 

 

Suture

 

Until it no longer held,           the bridge was eternal.

 

& even after its dissolution

into the concept of a bridge,

 

into stories handed down generations

of how once there was a way

across,

 

we say we can taste the rust

& hear

 

{when the river shuts up for a night)

 

the feet of children

(who must be long dead

by now)

 

stampeding barefoot across it.

 

They sound like matches dropped in water.

 

They sound like parables

told so often we confuse them

with memories.

 

When the water is clear enough to see the bottom,

we say we can see the bottom. We fish it for ruin

& come up empty-handed. Tonight

the whole town is coming together (again) to discuss

 

rebuilding a bridge no one remembers having ever been there

 

(but must have, once,

 

if we're to call the other side

 

a shore).

*Line from Michael Springs' "rock wall"

Five Poems by Bruce Bond

Issue 84
Issue 84

Found in Willow Springs 84

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THE LOST LANGUAGE #11

 

If you are searching for a friend online,

an insomniac to break the bread

of misery and silence, look no farther.

Trust me, says anonymous, the voice

in rivers after dark is no illusion.

It is an angel. And who can resist.

If I am broken just enough, I fly.

I suspend my physical heart, alive,

among the saints and champion banners.

I never met an angel, but I saw one

once in a painting, in one hand poppies,

the other a harp, and though it made no music,

it seemed so finely strung in the fire

of a child's hair, it nearly played itself.

 

NARCISSUS IN THE UNDERWORLD #9

 

It's not all bad. Hell has its comforts,

threnodies, charms in the shapes of cups.

But imagine what it takes to make

a life's work there, with only your powers

of invention to sustain you. Think of

the focus it takes to complete the journey.

I do not envy a creator that devoted,

divided, but here I am, on the edge

of the river. A lighter craft will carry you,

says the boatman, because I am that light.

I take his reasoning on faith. After all,

his Italian is so lovely, and the world so

full of weightless things, here a boat,

there a fly drinking from the open eye.

 

NARCISSUS IN THE UNDERWORLD #26

 

The creak of boats in swells of the harbor

sounds a warning like hinges of a forest

or failed estate. So difficult to get

news from news, history from history,

by which I mean writing and the written

off. The auguries of smoke and wind

blow dust from the glass of eyes that sting.

Earth keeps spinning the storm surge north,

and mountains sink, and refugees come,

and foreign words for home in the distance.

When a shoreline breaks, it breaks open,

and in flow the pixels too small to see,

stars of neither cruelty nor grace, but

a sorrow so deep its name has not arrived.

 

NARCISSUS IN THE UNDERWORLD #28

 

When a high wind tears down the power

and it's you and me and the emptiness

that gives us license to move, we do not move.

We gather our cats in the pantry, we listen,

we hear in heaven the enormous sigh

of an iron lung exhaling, the storm eye

passing, the terrible burden coming to rest.

One part of every wind is trembling.

The other the stillness the trembling moves aside.

The future, as we know it, is never true.

Never false. It is here in the quiet turn

of every breath, the little death a singer breathes.

One part of each departure is a mirror,

the other the wall to which a mirror turns.

 

NARCISSUS IN THE UNDERWORLD #29

 

Panoptes, the god with a hundred eyes,

became a captive of the prison that bore

his name, the circle with guards in the center

and inmates on all sides who saw no one.

All that dark out there, and the hundred

fears to take a hundred points of view.

Why else does a man grow so many.

Misery, we know, is too much company.

Or too little. No one sees you, or no

one appears. When I see a prisoner in hell,

I see those eyes. I see a flock of grackles.

They break into the shrapnel of applause.

And then, nothing. I am alone. Just me

and a hundred sorrows. None of them mine.

 

 

Comfort on the Death of an Ancient Oak by Carolyn Williams-Noren

Willow Springs Issue 80
Issue 80

Found in Willow Springs 80

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EVERY TIME I SEE A WOMAN with a baby I wonder if she wants to throw down one drinking glass after another into her kitchen sink, or stomp out her back door with a stack of dinner plates and hurl them, one by one, onto the concrete walk. For a long time I wondered, if she did feel this, what would allow her to say so. What would convince her that she was not the only one-that she had no reason for shame?

One time I threw Ingrid's red leather shoe in frustration-hard, cursing­ and it was lost for fifteen minutes in the drifts of toddler toys on the floor. She cried the whole time I searched for it. So did her baby sister.

One time, unable to find a matching pair of mittens, I went outside and hit the side of the house with my flat hand so hard it left a dent I can still see in the siding. All the while, my husband patiently helped our daughters with their boots.

Once in the kitchen, while Iris was crying in the living room and I was trying to cook dinner, I slammed my fist onto the counter so hard my arm throbbed for hours.

Most of the time, though, I behaved peacefully, softly. My body did not look, and my voice did not sound, usually, full of rage. I took good care of our baby, our babies. I'm sure now that there are no better cared for children in the world. They had my milk, my sleep, my time, my eyes, my words. All the time.

Today they are nine and seven. Ingrid is capable, wryly funny, hard to rattle. She loves to run, loves her gray and green running shoes. She loves a dozen different friends. She's learning to play the trombone. She still jumps into my arms-seventy pounds-to hug and hang and grin at me with her new big front teeth. Iris is philosophical, wondering, sensitive. Begged me last week to take her cross-country skiing in the school field on the year's first inch of snow, and I did. Our family is at ease these days. We make each other laugh. We help each other. Stretched, yes: work and house projects and school and fun. But we have contentment, a constant, filling stream of it. Nobody hits anything.

Fact: I had longed for babies.

The summer I felt whole again, the summer they were three and five, the oldest tree in our city died. I hadn't thought before about a tree dying in a given season-I'd envisioned a slow death, year after year fewer leaves, then maybe a fall in a windstorm. But this was in the newspaper: The oldest tree in Minneapolis, an oak on a broad terrace above the river, in the sound wave of the interstate, failed to leaf out this spring.

The tree was three hundred years old, maybe four hundred. It had stood through the building of the city, the coming of the highway, the years of children in the field, the houses rising, other trees swelling and ebbing back. The city park department planned to cut the tree down-its trunk had rotted and was beginning to split from the weight of its branches. It was no longer safe to let stand.

I thought about the grass in the shade of the oak's canopy, how for the first summer in three hundred years the sun would be able to touch those places at every hour. How long would the shape of the roots stay-that complicated, fleshy watershed-underground, invisible?

When I tell you about my worst moments, do you want an explana­tion, a story? I can tell several, but how will you know which is true?

Story: We had one baby, and she needed to be held all the time. She wouldn't ride in the car without screaming. I couldn't breathe right while she screamed. Once, trying to drive to the post office, I stopped every two blocks to soothe her, which meant nurse her. It was summer; I was sweaty and too big for my clothes. I held her in the back seat, my shirt up, the door open, my legs dangling into the neighborhood avenue.

She needed to be held all the time. She needed to be held all night, to nurse all night.

Fact: I walked every morning carrying Ingrid in the sling. While I walked I whispered stories to her, even while she slept. I wanted to show her the whole world. The cottonwood fluff is falling. In the grass it looks like snow. You'll see snow in winter. You'll see so many beautiful things. We'll see so much together.

Her breath smelled like butter. Her first laugh was a low, sneaky chuckle.

Facts: I was the one with the milk, the one with a long maternity leave and, after that, a part-time job. I was the one in the house, the one always nearest. My husband worked more than full-time, traveled for work, and came home to our daughter's overjoyed squeals.

Fact: We did it that way on purpose. We chose it.

I nursed her to sleep for every nap, for every bedtime, for many dark hours in the middle of every night. For eighteen months.

The same month she began to sleep most of the night without waking, I discovered I was pregnant again.

One time I punched my own leg so hard I made a bruise. One time I tried to hit my own forehead against the wall. My husband stopped me. This was on nights when Ingrid wanted to nurse for hours.

Afternoons filled with the feeling of waiting for my husband to come home. Waiting for him to lift something off me. The baby. The heat of the day. The guilt of wanting to set the baby down and walk away.

I developed a bump on the side of my wrist, the size of a fat green pea. For two hours the afternoon I noticed it, I wept: It was cancer. I would die, and I would miss the golden privilege of seeing this beautiful child grow up.

The doctor took one look and told me it was a librarian's cyst. Benign. Caused by carrying heavy things, like books. Or babies.

Story: I couldn't handle as much as other people can. I wasn't cut out for it.

I didn't want to do us all in myself, but one night I stared out at the trees rustling in hot wind and hoped a tornado would blow all four of us away. How tragic that story would be a promising young family, taken too soon.

Fast objects seemed faster than usual. A truck speeding beside the sidewalk was a weapon.

My mother-in-law told a story of a baby killed by a flying rock thrown by a neighbor's lawnmower. She told me this while I was sitting on our front porch cradling the baby. While the neighbor was mowing his lawn.

Lying on the bed nursing the baby to sleep, still aching where I'd torn open and been sewn back together, I wept over how perfect she was, and how much she'd already changed. Three days old.

Every time I tell a story that says every time, my husband reminds me, not every time.

The article about the tree had stories from neighbors--old people who'd played in the tree's shade as children. They said how tall and broad the canopy had been. People left prayers on paper, folded and tucked between ridges of bark. One said, I don't know how to raise my daughter.

Our children's preschool was near the oak about four blocks-walk, just on the other side of Franklin Avenue. One day that summer, the kids and their teachers walked there, Ingrid's class, the Penguins, holding hands in pairs.

This was five years ago, and I haven't stopped thinking about a woman saying to a tree, I don't know how to raise my daughter.

That's the past, but it doesn't have to be the center. We're fine now. I'm fine now.

When they both started sleeping well, it all felt better.

When they were both weaned, it all felt better. When they were both old enough to walk and talk well, it all felt better.

When I started taking a pill the doctor said would make it all feel better, it all felt better.

Rage wasn't constant, not even in the worst times. But it was inside my skin all the time, waiting.

Here's a story: Everyone is sad and miserable when her babies are young, but everybody lies about it.

Here's another: I had an illness cured by serotonin.

And another: Everybody's sad and miserable caring for babies, but only the brave admit it.

And a few more: Most people enjoy every minute of their babies. Only bad mothers feel like crawling out of their skin. Those days are so precious. Enjoy every minute.

When Ingrid was a baby, I wrote a whole year's book of beautiful moments. It was a tiny journal addressed to my daughter, one page each day, each day a precious thing: How beautiful you are-how you seem to glow; and, You laugh along whenever you hear someone laugh; and, You talked in your sleep last night: Bubbles! Bubbles! Bubbles!

But there was no grasping any moment. Every month a new size of clothing folded up and put away. Try to catch the world's rarest butterfly without moving your feet.

Names for a baby: Fat gold watch that rearranges time. Tyrant, terrorist, bowl of applesauce. Grocery store cake with loads of white frosting. Dumpling, terrible kitten.

I've lost the chronology. From here it all seems like one time, but it was years-from one child to two-from aloneness to help to complaint to peace. Where is the right moment from which to tell the story? The moment my fist hit the counter I was without words. There were years of not knowing the story because I was too deep in it. Now are the years that fade the story. It loses its timeline, loses its sense.

But as I began to feel better, I became less ashamed of having felt miserable.

As I grew less ashamed of how unhappy I felt, I began to feel better.

It was as though an invisible third eyelid reopened. My hands, relieved of the weight of dragging myself along, were free to work-free, sometimes, to rest.

I first told close friends and then others: This is no picnic. People say it's hard, but it is really hard. What I told them, I could say only in the past tense and only in a whisper: Sometimes I thought if I could go back, I would I'd have unmade them if I could I told about the fist on the counter, the dent in the siding, the shoe.

There needs to be a kind, fierce guardian at the gate of motherhood. Beware. It will ruin you. It's not for everyone. I was that guardian for a while.

I wanted to talk about it, to complain. More than that, I wished something, somehow had prepared me. I wished someone had said, This is really no joke. You might hate your days.

Story told at the natural baby store: Every object in your baby's life can be clean and soft.

Same story: Look at the garden in May, and expect it to stay neat and weedless.

All the time, I wondered why I hadn't known; I made lists, doodled cartoons of the truth wrapped in impermeable layers. We are ashamed not to like the work of motherhood. Even if we can admit unhappiness to ourselves, telling others takes more bravery. And if we say it, who will listen? Of those who listen, who will believe it's not hyperbole? Who can believe it will be the same for them?

It's not the same for everyone. Not even close.

During those years of babies and toddlers, our friends John and Kate were the outside world in our house. We went in together on a share of vegetables from a farm, and every week we met to split up the box and cook a meal. They were newly married and on the fence about children; to us, their childlessness was tonic.

The nights they came for dinner, my husband and I would chop vegetables side by side while John opened beers and Kate played a dancing game with the kids. Or I'd nurse the baby and chat with Kate while my husband and John roasted turnips and tossed a mizuna salad and grilled meat. The two of them had energy for our daughters, could see the humor and loveliness that my husband and I could only trudge through.

On regular nights I fixed our family's dinner one-armed, a baby or toddler on my hip more often than not, and we ate and cleared the table, moved on quickly through dishes and the kids' bedtime and collapse.

On the nights John and Kate came, we ate slowly, enough grownups around to keep up lively conversation while one at a time tended to a child. They stayed after the kids went to bed, and brought honest interest in what to us was terribly ordinary. How do you know how to handle this? How do you decide that? How does it feel? They were the first friends I trusted with the rage and fatigue and shame about the rage and fatigue. They listened. Sympathetic, interested.

Imagine that woman leaving her note. I don't know how to raise my daughter. The paper she left behind would eventually become brittle, then soggy, disintegrate with fall's brown leather, be washed into the soil, drawn up through the roots, made part of the wood. Her unknowing, rewritten in one cylinder of fiber.

That summer it all felt better, a bag of grapes and a bottle of water, a tube of sunscreen and a stack of library books were all we needed to be out and about for hours. My girls' hair was always glowing in the sun.

The summer it all felt better, people in the news kept digging things up. In New York, in the middle of construction at the World Trade Center site, they unearthed a wooden ship a hundred years old, ruined to a skeleton but holding its shape. The image of it swinging from a crane has stayed in my mind, lodged in that summer of emerging.

As I began to be able to see and think again, I spoke more openly about the lies we tell about babies. I was sarcastic, or serious, or both. Petal pink and baby blue, flannel, tiny T-shirts embroidered with the words, If they could just stay little. Wherever I could, I pointed out hardness. Harder than a marathon, harder than a dissertation, harder than the flu, those months of not-sleep, of don't-know, of terror-of­ dropping, of stepping-on, of starving, of overfeeding, of failing the baby. The wail that might start any time. I ridiculed photos of babies with feathery wings, downy yellow chicks, any suggestion of purity. Babies aren't angels or little birds; they are tiny people we love to the point of pain, who can't say what they need, who make noises our military-no lie-records for torture. Tiny people who wake and wake and wake, who are so fragile, who it seems could disappear by accident.

Just when I became the most vocal about this, John and Kate announced they were expecting a baby.

Throughout Kate's pregnancy, I kept up flippant talk about how hard it would be. I'm writing a poem for you, I told her. It's called, Lament for a Newly Pregnant Friend. I was thinking that I'd be the safe one to complain to. That by refusing to succumb to simple, nice celebration, I'd let Kate know she could say to me what I had been alone with.

I threw them a baby shower. I ordered a giant cake and cut up fruit and cleaned the house and put the leaf in the table, and another friend brought salads and punch. Their families and other friends filled our house. When I wasn't attending to drinks or cutting cake, I remember not knowing what to say, where to stand, which story to tell myself Kate sat on our sofa, opening gifts, looking teary and grateful and glowing.

The tornado sirens went off that afternoon, the yellow-gray sky raining fat drops. I thought of ushering everyone into our musty basement, but that didn't seem necessary; the sirens go off for thunderstorms, real or anticipated, and so seldom do they mean real danger. We stayed in the living room, an eye on the radar. Later we learned a tornado had touched down just a couple of miles away. While we ate cake, tree upon tree was torn up at the roots.

I remember wondering, as my friend opened packages wrapped in pastel tissue and tied with light blue raffia, why is nobody saying that our friend is about to do the impossible, is heading into years of isolation and hardness, fatigue and frustration and loss of the stars?

Word of the ancient oak's demise circulated. On the neighborhood's online discussion board, people began to protest that the tree, even dead and leafless, should be left to stand. City officials countered that it was too dangerous; the weight of the limbs could easily split the hollow trunk; it might fall at any time.

Kate and John's baby was born in June, and during that summer I went to their house many times to take their dog for a run. I brought them food, cut up parsnips and turnips from their farm box so they could snack easily, one-handed.

It took me months to see how little they needed from me. One day as I arrived, I met Kate's sister on the front porch; she was just leaving, having vacuumed the stairs. My friend----during the baby's naps, I guess-was energetically contemplating a career change, making a spreadsheet of grocery prices at various stores. Every time I saw her, she said how happy and blessed she felt. She didn't seem to be lying.

Facts: Some babies sleep more than others. Some babies cry more than others. Some adults need more sleep than others. Some mothers roll with everything better than others.

Story: Motherhood transforms us, makes us large-hearted and beautiful in ways we never imagined.

Fact: No sister came over to vacuum my fucking stairs.

Fact: The word blessed, in this context, makes me want to barf.

Story: Some mothers bounce back right away. It's amazing.

Another story: There's no sense comparing.

I was a beast of jealousy. I crushed myself against the difference between us like a bird at a window, trying to fly through. Was this friend hiding from me, denying me the frankness I thought we'd keep as she became a mother? Was she truly as overjoyed as she appeared? Don't we all have reasons to hide our darkest sides, even when a friend is ready to hear? Had I been a bad friend, done something to lose her trust? Was I just plain wrong about the hardness? Was it really only my own illness or weakness that made the baby years so hard for me?

I made my husband discuss it with me-this difference-over and over. These were battering, teary, bitter conversations: what happened in those years, how we each remembered them, whether it mattered that-in addition to sometimes hitting things and often feeling like I was fighting for every step through a day-I had also often smiled and laughed. The conversation seemed to have no end: Was I seeing Kate clearly? Was my memory of those years right? Had I seemed, in those hard years, from the outside, as glowing and happy as Kate did now?

Light travels through air, through glass, through water, through the other side of the glass, altered by each layer. Memory is like this, and it's like this to speak across motherhood. Even one color-the baby's hair, the baby's eyes, my bruise-we can't be sure we all see the same. How strange is it, what happened to me? How bad? Who's telling the truth? Who can hear it?

And what can be compared? Who's to say what's sick and what's just unhappy? Who's to say what's a cure and what's time? Who's to warn anyone, through the butter-vision of baby?

My husband and I retold the story, rehashed the difference, until we were finished. The last conversation ended with my exhausted tears, the two of us leaning into each other: We won't ever know what that time was. We can't know. It happened, and we didn't understand it then, and we don't now.

I don't know how to raise my daughter. Of course the years-ago mother wrote that on paper, rolled it in a tube, left it in a fold of bark. We want to say a thing like that to someone old and quiet, someone who will hold our helplessness and not tell. We aren't asking a question or making a request. We're not quite praying; we're telling a secret. We're saying to the tree: Hold this. Take I don't know and stretch it toward the sky, build a canopy of it.

It's an act of faith, that telling. A wild confidence that not knowing knows something that we don't know. A desire to see not knowing become sheltering, enduring-no longer just confusion that flies by ungrabbed, but a monument.

The tree seems to know something, but nobody expects to hear what it knows.

The tree is made of the past, doesn't leave each year behind, but buries it inside itself, keeps inside what's new. Each year is thin, hidden, solid, present.

A tree is good at giving us silence and memory at once.

For months, I could hardly look at Kate and her baby. My friend's alertness, her laughter, her happy weepiness.

I stopped trying to be so close to Kate. And when I backed away, I noticed she had stepped away, too-stopped sharing, stopped ask­ing what I thought. I deserved this distance. I'd overcompensated for the oversweet world, brought too much bitter to a time that she, like everyone, wanted to keep sweet.

I don't know how to raise my daughter. I picture this mother returning years later to the tree. Whatever mistakes she'd been afraid to make, she's made them now-or not-already. Her not knowing is no longer important. But she can still stand under the tree, the holder of that time, hollow at the center, and hear the rush of the highway, the voices of children in the field.

I'm not lying anymore when I say I'm glad that the baby year, for Kate, was golden, simple, and cherished. Now I believe her.

I have a story, too, about what my vegetable-chopping was for: to give what I thought my friends would need, yes. But more than that, I wanted to live that hard time again, but from the outside, from nearby. I wanted to be close to such an experience, to see it with­ out being pulled down by it. I wanted-impossibly-to be with that hardness again, but from an angle where I could think, could speak.

When I see a woman with a baby now, I say very little. I'm learning to give quiet without forgetting. I try to imagine I'm meeting her under a tree--its articulate leaves-their green, spiked corners casting shadows on the grass.

Ultimately the city sent workers to swing up and cut off the ancient oak's limbs. They left the trunk standing, open to one cut of sky, and the roots still reaching into the dark under the field. We have our monument. Not a plaque on a patch of bare ground, but a standing column, built of what we've left in its folds.

“That the Deer Tick is The Pilot Light of the Universe” and “4 AM” by Michael McGriff

issue 85 back
issue 85 back

Found in Willow Springs 85

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"THAT THE DEER TICK IS THE PILOT LIGHT OF THE UNIVERSE"

for Tim Johnson

 

Or let me be
reborn as that small mountain
of broken glass
you mistook for a snowdrift
in the Salvation Army's parking lot.

 

Or as the billboard
on the edge of Deronville, Alabama,
that since 1983 has announced
The Future Home of the World's
Largest Rocking Chair.

 

The defense offers this, your honor:
I was born in 1968 in Rockford, Illinois,
and followed the tip of God's cigarette
until I ended up in Oregon,
so let me come to in the ditch
with leaves plastered to my face,
but this time let me start out
all synced-up with the knowledge
of the body's irrelevance.

 

There's a cistern that says what I say
just seconds before I start to say it.
The gray threads I mistook for clouds
answer back, pretending I'm not even here.
They're not even clouds. And they're not
not the stringy guts pulled from an animal
with the head of the future
and the body of the past.

 

I'd be just fine coming back
as all the money lost salting
the clouds of West Texas.

 

And I'm more than happy
to watch myself again
earn an entry in The Horses' Big Book
of Human Disappointments.

 

My arms are too long.
I'm missing 2 ½ ribs
and my heart's a torn
grocery sack in the rain.

 

Let's say I return as the knife
and you come back as the needle
and the moon
shaking its head
comes back as the thread.

 

When I plunge the blade of an oar
into green water I am reborn,
and that should be enough.

 

When I float my name out in a paper boat.
When I unscrew the stars from their sockets
or hear coffee percolate above the fire.
That, too, should be enough.

 

But instead I feel the deer tick
move deeper into me
and complain about the neighborhood.
This used to be such a great place.
Now, just look at it. Look at what it's become.

 

"4 AM"

 

I am more
than a little tired
of this parable
where I walk
old roads
careful of snakes
stretched across
warm August gravel,
where the moon finds
a perfect copy of me
in the fields
and surrounds him
with something
akin to fire.
I greet him only
at a distance.
We're suspicious
as new neighbors.
He raises a hand
to greet me
as I raise mine.
No, he's attaching
a clothespin to a line,
or stringing lights
among the trees.
Or he's choosing
a name to erase
from the monument
this hour has become.
As my tongue becomes
a fish packed in salt
and hung from a low star
to sing until it dries.

“Saturday Night Special” by J. Stilwell Powers

Issue 81 Cover shows Chris Bovey print of Spokane's famous garbage goat in teal and yellow with Willow Springs in decorative font.
Issue 81 Cover shows Chris Bovey print of Spokane's famous garbage goat in teal and yellow with Willow Springs in decorative font.

Found in Willow Springs 81

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PRESTON DASHED THROUGH THE GRASS toward the barn, which stood paper-gray in the fading light, the color of a hornet's nest. Barking echoed inside like rifle reports. "She ain't here," Uncle Eli said when Preston reached the door. "But don't worry. She'll slink home when the money runs out."

Preston's mom had been gone for six nights. One more would be an entire week, the longest he'd been without her. The night she left, she took Uncle Eli's cordless drill, his Skilsaw, and the 6,000-watt generator he used to power the barn. Uncle Eli was mad because he needed the generator for the show that night.

"I don't care," Preston said.

"That's good," Uncle Eli said. "Wouldn't change anything if you did."

Together, they crossed the meadow toward the truck parked in the driveway. The wind picked up, unruly in the open space, and lifted the tarp covering the front section of the house's roof. At night, Preston could hear the tarp snap in the wind, could feel the drafts reaching through the bedroom's cracked ceiling plaster. Uncle Eli planned to buy new shingles after the show. Or maybe he'd just pay someone to fix the roof-the payout would be good enough, he said.

Three coils of orange extension cord rested in the truck's bed. Uncle Eli told Preston to wait by the kitchen window. He took one of the coils inside, plugged it into the outlet by the sink, and threw the rest out the window.

They unraveled the cords over the grass. While he worked, Preston wondered how his mom had gotten away with the generator, the Skilsaw, and the cordless drill. He helped Uncle Eli move the gen­erator-he knew how heavy it was. And where would she sell it? When­ ever she sold things, she took them to the junk store in Prescott, but the man there only ever bought things his mom could carry-jewelry, cameras, video games, DVDs.

They hadn't gone to the junk store since the day before Uncle Eli drove Preston's mom to the hospital. That morning, she'd sold the television. It wouldn't matter, she said, since he'd be staying with Grandma. After the junk store, they walked to Singer's trailer in Wheeler Court. The air inside smelled like matches and rotting fruit. His mom gave Singer the television money, and Singer handed over her medicine. Preston watched Singer move in slow motion on the couch while his mom took her medicine in the bathroom. Singer was sicker than his mom. His ribs showed beneath his skin.

"Let's go," Uncle Eli yelled across the meadow, and he vanished into the barn.

Preston paused before going inside, and bit the back of his hand. The pain lingered, took his mind away from his mom. She'd come back, like Uncle Eli said, when the money ran out.

Uncle Eli plugged in the string of construction lights tacked to the barn's rafters, flooding the dusty interior of the barn with light. The dogs bayed in their pens. The tow chains around their necks rattled as they lifted square jaws toward the ceiling to catch the scent of November.

Preston made his way along the chicken wire gates, saying the dogs' names aloud as he passed. Loose Cannon, Southpaw, Trigger, Sister Savage, Medusa, Pretty Nickel, and Saturday Night Special. He paused before Saturday's pen, and stuck his hand through the gap in the twisted wire. Saturday leaned his head against Preston's hand.

In July, a few days before his mom came home from the hospital, Preston had learned he couldn't trust the other dogs the way he trusted Saturday. Uncle Eli was gone, and while Grandma napped in her recliner, he'd snuck out to the barn with a box of frosted flakes. He slipped through a gap in the barn's sideboards. Pen to pen, he let the dogs lick the cereal from his hand. All of them were happy to see him, except Pretty Nickel, who limped across the dirt floor and sat heavily in front of the gate. A rotten smell hung on her coat. Pretty Nickel sniffed the cereal in his hand, but did not take it. And as she slung her knotted head toward the ground, something glistened on her snout. In the dusk of the barn, Preston could barely see the blood-matted fur around the wound. He reached out and touched it. Pretty Nickel snarled, and as Preston pulled away, she bit the back­ side of his forearm, and jerked her head until his flesh gave.

Now, Preston had a purple scar below his elbow. The skin had been torn in the shape of an L, like a shirt caught on a nail, leaving muscle exposed beneath the flap of skin. He didn't mind the scar­ when kids at school asked about it, he said it came from a wolf he'd fought in the woods- but Grandma screamed when she found Uncle Eli in the bathroom, stitching the wound closed with a sewing needle and a length of dental floss. "His mom's going to kill you," Grandma said. But his mom just cried when she came home from the hospital. She apologized for being gone and kissed the wound.

Uncle Eli pushed Preston aside and opened Saturday's pen. He slid the canvas muzzle over the dog's snout and jerked him by the collar toward the pit at the rear of the barn. Saturday didn't need a muzzle. At night, Preston snuck out and brought him treats. Some­ times, he sat behind Saturday in the dirt and pulled him close. He'd rub his muscles, tight since Uncle Eli had start ed Saturday's keep­ running him three hours a day on the treadmill, strapping him to forty-five pound weights and driving him across the meadow, making him leap and hang from the tires strung to the barn's rafters.

"Put some weight on him," Uncle Eli said.

Preston grabbed the dog's collar and straddled him the way Uncle Eli had taught him, one leg on either side of Saturday's ribs, pressure at the knees. Uncle Eli had been teaching Preston how to handle the dogs since Pretty Nickel bit him. Saturday's ribs expanded and collapsed between Preston's legs. He tipped his head back and sniffed the underside of Preston's jaw through the muzzle. Preston leaned forward and rubbed his nose on Saturday's head, quickly, before Uncle Eli turned.

Uncle Eli flicked the syringe between his fingers. Down on one knee, he slapped Saturday's shoulder. The dog tensed below Preston's weight and tugged against his collar when Uncle Eli slid the needle in.

"Saturday's ready for the show, isn't he?" Preston said.

Uncle Eli forced the plunger, and when the chamber was empty, pulled the needle out. "Saturday was born for the show," he said.

Preston rubbed the dog's muscles the way Uncle Eli had shown him.

"Everything's got a purpose," Uncle Eli said. "You figure out your purpose, you've figured out something important. That's your mom's problem--no purpose."

"What's my purpose?" Preston asked.

"To stand on your own two feet," Uncle Eli said.

Uncle Eli had already shown Preston how to do this. At the start of the school year, one of the 6th grade boys had pulled Preston's pants down at the bus stop. The boy and his friends laughed because Preston wasn't wearing underwear. That afternoon Preston came home cry­ing. His mom hugged him, but Uncle Eli took him by the shoulder into the backyard. He turned Preston around and pushed him to the ground. "Get up," he said. And when Preston was standing, Uncle Eli pushed him again. "Quit crying and get up." Uncle Eli pushed him over and over until Preston got up on his own and punched Uncle Eli in the stomach. "Good," Uncle Eli said and patted Preston on the shoulder. "Don't let anyone push you around."

Uncle Eli pulled Saturday by the collar toward his pen. He un­clipped the muzzle and shoved the dog inside with his boot. Sat­urday turned and sat, square chested in his pen. Saturday knew his purpose.

 

THE INSIDE OF GRANDMA'S HOUSE smelled like dog chow. Uncle Eli brewed the food in big saucepans, a blend of discount animal scraps, eggs, brown rice, carrots, fish oil, whey protein, and Red Cell Vitamin-Iron-Mineral supplement. Two saucepans stood on the range, the third on the wood stove with steam rising from the interior. The smell pawed at Preston's stomach. He poured himself a bowl of cereal and took a seat at the kitchen table.

In the living room, Grandma yelled at Uncle Eli. She was sick of hearing the dogs yapping in the barn, tired of people coming to her home to partake in sin.

"You want your roof fixed?" Uncle Eli said as he passed through the kitchen.

Preston's binder rested open on the table. He'd left it that way so anyone could see the stickers on the inside of the cover.

"Look," he said to Uncle Eli.

Mrs. Karas had given Preston the binder at the beginning of the school year, and told him to keep track of his homework. He'd lost it too many times. Now, each time he handed in his worksheet, she put a sticker inside the binder's front cover.

"I get a prize when I earn thirty," he said.

"That's good, pal," Uncle Eli said, opening the back door. "Work and you get paid."

"Can I come to the show?" Preston asked.

Uncle Eli had promised Preston he could come to the show when he was twelve years old, which was longer than Preston wanted to wait. Before closing the door, Uncle Eli said, "You're in charge of the house tonight. Stay inside and look after your grandma."

Preston took his homework and bowl of cereal into the living room. Grandma sat in her recliner, watching a man praise Jesus on the television.

His homework was about planets and stars and why everything moved through space the way it did. That afternoon in school, he'd tried to focus as Mrs. Karas stood at the front of class, pointing at a diagram of the solar system with a yardstick, but he couldn't stop thinking about  his mom. Sometimes he imagined her at  the  front of class, wearing Mrs. Karas's dress, with Mrs. Karas's haircut and round glasses. Mrs. Karas had warm brown eyes. At school, he'd wanted to tell her that his mom was missing, but he was afraid of what she'd think.

"Grandma?" Preston said, leaning into the couch cushions. "Why does the earth move around the sun?"

She squinted at the television. Grandma saw things Preston couldn't see. Angels and miracles. Her prayers had power, she told Preston, because she was a true believer.

"Grandma?" Preston said again.

"What are you asking me?" Grandma said. "Why does the earth move around the sun?"

"Gravity," Grandma said. Preston leaned forward and wrote gravity in the blank. Grandma pointed at the television screen, as the preacher paced to the far side of the empty stage.

"Like God's love," Grandma said. "Holds everything together."

Preston looked back at his worksheet, but he didn't want to think about things he couldn't see. He didn't like to think about the earth spinning through empty space. He didn't like to think about God because God made things happen, even though you couldn't see Him.

"Uncle Eli says my mom has no purpose," Preston said.

"You keep asking God to show her mercy," Grandma said. “God’s love triumphs."

Grandma coughed into the crook of her arm, a cough like rocks colliding inside her chest. Preston pushed himself up and darted into the kitchen. He pulled a chair from the kitchen table to the sink. As he began filling a glass of water, a white Cadillac pulled into the driveway.

In the floodlight, Preston saw the blue and yellow Pennsylvania license plate. His heart rose for a moment. God's love triumphs. He ran the water to his grandma. She drank, and coughed some more into her hankie before tucking it back into the pouch on the recliner's arm.

The knock on the door rattled the windowpanes. Preston ran and pulled the door open. A man in a cowboy hat and leather boots stood in the porch light. His white T-shirt, tucked into blue jeans, was so clean it glowed against the dark. At his waist, the porch light splintered against the metal of a holstered pistol.

In the living room, the recliner's foot rest retracted and clicked into place. Preston heard Grandma grunt under her breath.

"No need to get up, ma'am." The man leaned inside and looked toward the living room. "I'm looking for Eli Dumphy."

"He's in the barn," Preston said. "I'll take you."

"Don't you leave this house," Grandma shouted as Preston closed the door and followed the man to his car. The inside smelled like cigarettes and air freshener, a blend that reminded Preston of the apartment in town where they lived before his mom went to the hospital. In the back seat, a dog sniffed at the gaps in the wire kennel. Preston pointed toward the barn. The Cadillac's engine growled when the man turned the key, and the frame bounced over divots in the meadow.

"What's your dog's name?" Preston asked. "She doesn't have one," the man said. "Why not?" Preston said.

The man glanced at Preston, dark-eyed beneath the brim of his hat. In the light from the dashboard his face looked knotted, like an old piece of hardwood.

Uncle Eli stood in front of the barn with a cigarette burning. The man parked, and the driver's side door tripped the dome light when the man opened it. Preston looked over the seat at the kennel. The dog inside licked her paws, her face and chest spangled with pale scars.

All of Uncle Eli's dogs had names.

The man opened the back door and leaned in. "Don't tempt her," he said.

Preston stepped out and stood beside Uncle Eli. The man's dog tugged at his arm as he led her toward the barn. She stopped to sniff at the meadow grass, but he wrenched her inside. Uncle Eli's dogs erupted in their pens.

"Where do you want her?" the man said.

"There's an empty pen in back," Uncle Eli shouted over the barking. After the dog was in her pen, Uncle Eli and the man counted money on the workbench in the rear of the barn. Two big stacks of bills and two bottles of beer rested on the surface. Uncle Eli kept his pistol beside the money, long and black with a wooden handle. The man kept his in the holster at his waist.

"Is that the money for the roof?" Preston said.

"Not if I can help it," the man in cowboy boots said. He laughed, patted Uncle Eli on the shoulder.

"Go on inside and finish your homework," Uncle Eli said.

Preston stomped his foot. He'd helped Uncle Eli with Saturday's keep, cleaned pens, hauled buckets of chow. Uncle Eli slid a five dollar bill from the bench and handed it to Preston.

"For helping out," Uncle Eli said. "Go on now."

 

WITHIN AN HOUR, eight more cars, five trucks, and four motor­ cycles had parked in the meadow. From the kitchen, Preston watched shadows pass through the dark to the barn's door. He rubbed the five dollar bill between his fingers. He knew better than to go back to the barn. Uncle Eli meant what he said.

Preston imagined Saturday pacing in his pen, getting ready. If Preston were there, he would whisper into Saturday's ear, tell him he could run faster and pull more weight than any dog. Tomorrow, he'd buy Saturday a treat with the money, a prize for his work.

In the living room, the footrest of Grandma's chair clicked into place. "Come help your grandma," she said.

Preston gripped her free hand with both of his, and leaned back with all his weight until she was upright. He handed over her cane and lifted the oxygen tank. She put her hand on his shoulder, distrib­uting her weight between his shoulder and the cane. Up the stairs, she took shallow breaths and paused often. Preston paused with her, leaning against the rail to relieve the weight of the tank.

At the top of the stairs, Grandma sighed, then slid her hand along the wall the rest of the way to her bedroom. The walls were covered in faded floral paper. Above her bed hung a framed picture of Jesus staring toward some light. The bed creaked as she lowered herself, and Preston waited until she was settled to place her oxygen tank beside her. He pulled the blanket over her body.

"Pray with me," she said.

Preston took her hand. He wished he could crawl into the bed beside her, but her body left no room on the twin mattress. He closed his eyes, the way she'd taught him, and heard the breath rattle in her lungs. He didn't know what God looked like, or where God lived, so he imagined the earth swinging around the sun, tethered by God's love. Grandma thanked God for giving her another day to serve Him. She prayed for protection. The sin surrounding this house, she said, was more than she could handle. Have mercy upon her children for their sins, she prayed. And bless Preston with the wisdom to choose God's love. Amen.

"You leave your uncle alone tonight," Grandma said.

Preston said goodnight and took himself to the bathroom. Each night since his mom had come home from the hospital, she made him shower and brush his teeth before bed, and he'd done both each night since she'd been gone again. When she came home, he'd tell her that. He stepped onto the scale, and the dial spun to sixty-five pounds. Saturday weighed sixty-nine. Preston looked into the mirror. He flexed the muscles in his arms before getting into the shower.

In the bedroom, his mom's clothes were still in the duffel bag by the closet door. He buried his face in the fabric. Wherever she was, she didn't have any clean clothes. He pictured her in the woods, sleeping on a bed of leaves.

Downstairs, he flipped through the channels twice before turning the television off. He went to the window, pulled the curtain aside, and looked out at the slats of light shining through the breaks in the barn's rough-cut siding.

 

PRESTON WOKE ON THE COUCH, unsure of how long he'd slept. Something moved through the room. He lay still, held his breath. He could smell cigarettes and hairspray on the cold air moving through the front door. Moonlight spilled through the window, pooled on the carpeted floor. He rubbed his eyes and saw the shadow, leaned in behind the television. He could hear the fidgeting of fingers working the cords.

"Momma?" Preston said.

Her shadow uncoiled, and Preston turned the television on, saw his mom in the blue light with her arms wrapped around her torso.

"Sweet Jesus," she said. "You scared me."

Her eyes darted, lingered in the room's empty spaces before settling on Preston. She came toward him, in slow motion, hands out the way people in television churches reached toward the ceiling. Once she lowered herself onto the couch, he pulled his legs in against hers. He held her as she moved her fingers through his hair.

The burnt smell of her hands startled him. He wanted to call out to Grandma, but knew he might scare his mom away if he did.

"Are you home now?" Preston said. "Go back to sleep," she said.

Preston pushed himself up and grabbed his binder from the kitchen table. When he returned, his mom had her head in her hands. He opened the binder and slid it onto her lap. He pointed to the stickers. "How wonderful," his mom said. She closed the  binder, grabbed the blanket from the back of Grandma's recliner, and spread it over him. She brushed his hair back from his forehead and kissed him with dry lips. Her fever was back.

"Do you know why the earth moves around the sun?" Preston said.

"I don't, baby," she said.

"Gravity," Preston said. "It's like when you have a purpose, or when you love something."

He'd gotten it wrong, he knew. He fumbled for the words, tried to say it again.

"It's not always so simple," his mom said.

She pulled the television's plug from the wall. With her arms hugging the wood-paneled sides, she struggled toward the kitchen door. Preston followed. When he reached the kitchen, he flipped on the light.

"Go back to sleep, Preston," she said through her teeth. She squinted and sighed. The weight of the television pulled her forward. "I'll be home in the morning."

Preston held out the five dollar bill Uncle Eli had given him. His mom paused, staring at the bill in his hand.  Her lip trembled. "Put it in my pocket," she said.

From the porch, Preston watched the headlights of a car recede down the driveway. He was supposed to be in charge of the house, but he couldn't stop her from leaving. Uncle Eli would yell at him for letting her get away. The frost bit at his bare feet as he ran toward the barn. The snarling and baying of dogs met him before he reached the door. From the outside, the dogs sounded wild in a way he'd never heard. The door was locked, so he bolted to the gap in the back.

Inside, the air smelled of piss and metal, hissed with bright light. Men crowded the pit, leaned forward shouting, waving bottles, blow­ing smoke into the air. In the pens along the wall, the dogs paced, panted with tongues unfurled over teeth. They reared against the chicken wire.

On all fours, Preston edged around jean-clad legs and dirty work boots. When he reached the plywood wall of the pit, he pulled himself up. Inside, Uncle Eli stood with the man in the cowboy hat, both forward-bent and shouting. At their feet, the dogs thrashed. The air around them shivered. Preston felt burning in his fingernails, tasted dirt. He couldn't tell where one dog ended and the other began. Just a bloody mess of sinew and teeth, with a sound pouring out like chainsaws and sirens.

 

BEFORE THE SUN BROKE THE HILLS, the growl of motor­ cycle engines pulled Preston upright. He left the couch, and watched through the living room window as men staggered through the meadow, dropped into their cars, and drove away.

The man in the cowboy hat stepped from the barn, carrying his dog. Its head hung limp over his arm. He put it in the trunk of his car and slammed the lid. As the Cadillac rocked over the meadow, the barn's lights flickered and died. A moment later, Uncle Eli stepped into the moonlight, lit a cigarette, and started toward the house. Preston slipped back onto the couch and pulled the blanket over his head. When the front door scraped over the linoleum floor, he closed his eyes. Uncle Eli lurched through the room, whistling some tune Preston had heard before, but couldn't remember where. The smell of liquor and smoke followed Uncle Eli like a shadow. He paused in the center of the room. The whistling stopped. Preston peeked around the blanket. Uncle Eli's back was turned. A paper bag hung from his right hand, and his pistol was tucked into the waist of his pants. He was staring at the space where the television used to be.

When Uncle Eli closed his bedroom door, Preston crept through the kitchen. The cold rushed in when he eased open the door.
In the moonlight, the meadow was scarred by tire tracks.
He walked barefoot through the grass, wondering whether Saturday would be waiting for him, and found the barn door unlocked. The air inside felt thick, strange now with silence. He walked with his hands outstretched, feeling his way through the seamless dark. Eyes closed. Eyes open. It made no difference. He kept them shut, felt his way by the dampness of the dirt beneath his feet, by the breathing of sleeping dogs in their pens. He was careful not to wake them.

In front of Saturday's pen, he lowered himself to his knees, opened his eyes. He whispered the dog's name and saw nothing, so leaned in closer. He lifted his hand to the cage, but before his fin­gers reached the wire, warm breath brushed his fingertips. His hand snapped back. Before him, the darkness went on forever. There were things inside of it he could not see.

On the way back to the house, Preston edged along the criss­crossing tire tracks. The forest loomed on the far side of the meadow, empty as far back as the hills and farther. Morning light had smudged away a thin layer of night above the ridges, but overhead the stars were still bright. He paused, leaned back to stare into the sky. Nobody could see him here, nobody watched. He could feel it in his chest as he stood there, the force of the earth spinning away from the sun.

“When Hamburger Station is Busy” by Andrew Farkas

Willow Springs 88
Willow Springs 88

Found in Willow Springs 88

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When Hamburger Station is Busy

 

THOUGHT PROBLEM

Whenever I go to Hamburger Station for lunch with my dad and I point out there’s nobody there, he says, “It’s busier at dinnertime.”

Whenever I go to Hamburger Station for dinner with my dad and I point out there’s nobody there, he says, “It’s busier at lunchtime.”

So, when is Hamburger Station busy?

Solution #1

Hamburger Station is never busy.

When I think about Hamburger Station, what comes to mind is the eight-foot fiberglass horse (named American Red), the covered wagon, the font on the sign that could be called Clapboard Bold, the interior that looks like a combination of a Wild West saloon and a 1950s’ diner: some of the linoleum counter’s stools are actually saddles, there are burlap sacks of potatoes, burlap sacks of onions, a rough wooden floor, inconceivably no one’s ever been thrown through the front window at the end of a brawl (a fact that’s always bothered me), a stainless steel flattop grill covered in mouth-watering grease, deep fryers for the fresh-cut fries, a wall menu with those plastic letters and numbers, employees in white T-shirts, an old cash register, booths, the malt vinegar for the fresh-cut fries, and the burgers. The burgers. These aren’t those lousy meatloaf-tasting sliders from White Castle or Krystal. No way. White Castle and Krystal are the elementary school cafeteria version. Hamburger Station burgers. They’re two-and-a-half inch squares. Piled high with onions, pickles, mustard. Dinner roll for a bun. Get yourself a Speed Pack (two burgers, fries, lemonade). Yeah. That right there. That right there . . .

That’s what I think about.

But, uh, right. Not much in the way of other patrons, I mention to my dad.

He takes a sip of lemonade.

He responds in an unconcerned deadpan.

Solution #2

Hamburger Station is only busy when I’m not there.

Although the Menches Brothers, Frank and Charles, invented the hamburger (which is what Northeast Ohioans actually believe, even if the Akron Hamburger Hearings of 2006 graciously awarded that honor to Charles Nagreen of Seymour, Wisconsin), others perfected what no one calls a plain old sandwich anymore. In other words, the Menches were like the Titans in Greek mythology. Interesting, sure. But what we really want are the Olympians. The line of succession, then, goes like this: the fabled Peppy Service Lunch begat Marvin “Pop” Thacker, who went on to create the exalted Thacker’s Hamburgs; Thacker’s Hamburgs begat Jim Lowe, who went on to found the renowned Hamburger Station.

With such an illustrious history, you can imagine that Jim Lowe, in his incongruous cowboy hat of immeasurable gallons, his inexplicable shitkicker boots (having spent most of his life in burger joints in the Buckeye State, not pastures in Texas), his large glasses that helped him see more than the normal human, well, you can imagine that Jim Lowe had the power of prophesy. And it could be that when, as a little kid, I met him, a meeting I do not remember, a meeting only related to me by my dad, a man who once said, “When I told you honesty was the best policy, I was lying,” during this supposed meeting, the legendary founder of Hamburger Station perhaps had this to say to me:

“Son, don’t be skeered, but I can see the future. Yessiree Bob. And what I see off there in the heretofore, and this is the Simon pure, is twenty Hamburger Stations, son, twenty Hamburger Stations spanning Northeast Ohio. A purty thought. Yet somehow, and now, I don’t rightly know why, somehow, and I don’t mind jawin’ at you like this on account of no-way will you recollect what I’m clapping down, somehow, anytime you come in, ya little varmint, a fandango it will not be. Fact a business, it’ll be a ghost town. Me, I won’t be afeared. When all you can hear are the winds a-howlin’, the sand a-blowin’, the tumbleweeds a-rollin’, whereas my friendly fellers will be full of flusteration, I won’t be because I’ll know what’s a-comin’—you. It’ll be you. Maybe you and yer paw. Maybe you and one of them scalawags in yer posse. But that’s all. Hain’t no one else will be here. And for the rest of yer dadgummed life, you’ll wonder how this could be. Hamburger Stations far as the eye can see; nobody inside. Whipper-snapper, that there’s yer fate. Why’s for the folks up the doxology works to know.”

I tell Scott Schulman, a friend of mine, about me and my dad’s routine.

He says that can’t be. It can’t just be the fate of Farkas. Because him and his dad, they have the same routine.

Solution #3

Hamburger Station is busy at an undisclosed,  perhaps undisclosable time.

The grease on the flattop grill sizzles and I am enthralled not only by the savory smell, but by the mystery. . . .

In this hipster-dominated era, when people try to one-up each other by being the first to adopt that which will become a trend, either by finding something brand new or by reviving something old (thus the reason for Pabst Blue Ribbon’s re-ascendancy once upon a time), you might think my dad and I fit right in, that we’re trailblazers, that we’re tastemakers. The grease, oh that smell making my mouth water, does not agree. To explain, some Hamburger Station lore:

For years, Hamburger Station didn’t carry ketchup. The burgers were served “neat,” which meant pickles and (lots of) onions, with squeeze bottles of mustard throughout the restaurant and malt vinegar for the fresh-cut fries. But no ketchup. Jim Lowe liked to tell a story about a customer who would come in always asking for that red garbage. Finally, Lowe put it on a burger, and supposedly the man said he’d never ask for ketchup again. According to Lowe, ketchup and the grease Hamburger Station uses on the burgers do not mix well because the tomato product screws up the pH balance making the whole thing taste bad. Being so important, it’s probably no surprise then that the grease recipe is a closely guarded secret.

In fact, during his lifetime, Lowe was the only one who knew how to make it.

(But who knows how to make it now . . . ?)

And so, the reason my dad and I can’t claim membership in an exclusive club is because a place like Hamburger Station, that bases the taste of its primary product on a secret recipe grease, that refuses to change how the burgers are dressed even once they started carrying ketchup and mayonnaise (treating the bottles like they’re full of some infectious disease), meaning Hamburger Station has willfully accepted losing customers in order to adhere to their ideal of what a burger ought to be, well a place like that isn’t interested in being busy, and asking when Hamburger Station is immediately proves I just don’t get it. Likely, then, the people who do get it are initiated into the secret society, the real Hamburger Station, where the mysteries are revealed (obviously one of which is the recipe for the grease), the adepts later entering their perhaps underground chapter room, full to capacity (a capacity that won’t be giving McDonald’s a run for its money, but who would want to, you?! then what in the world are you doing here?!), where they gawk at flatscreens depicting these lunkheads (Farkas? What kind of name is that anyway?!) who think they know what it means to be dedicated to Hamburger Station.

But if this is the case, if Hamburger Station is merely a front for the Ancient Western Order of the Buckeroos of the Mystic Grease, then my family is a splinter faction that hides in plain sight. After all, my mom, dad, sister, and yours truly all hate ketchup, and since, when we’re there, no one else ever appears to be, that means the restaurant itself serves as our own private (one might even say secret) chapter room, and perhaps, when we have quorum, that’s when Hamburger Station is busy.

Solution #4

Hamburger Station is only “busy” relative to other times.

My dad holds up an onion ring and comments on the fact that it’s bigger than one of the hamburgers. This comparison seems important to him, so important he often brings it up. But me, I’m thinking of another comparison, a comparison that focuses on the word “busier.”

It could be that my question, “When is Hamburger Station busy?” is the wrong one. After all, when my dad says, “It’s busier at [lunchtime/dinnertime],” he might just be speaking comparatively. For instance, if I go to Hamburger Station with my dad for lunch one day, and then go there with my friends John Schloman and Scott Schulman for dinner the next day, then technically my dad is right: it’s busier (though not necessarily “busy”).

But a different problem rears its head here. As teenagers, John, Scott, and I often ate with our families, met up later on, and then ate again. Contrarily, we sometimes knew that we’d be eating with our families later and that there wouldn’t be time afterwards, so we went before we were to rendezvous with our families. In each instance, what meal were John, Scott, and I having? If it was neither lunch, nor dinner, then could we justifiably call when we were eating lunchtime or dinnertime?

This confusion reminds me of a story. One day, at school, John was asked how his brother was doing. Since John’s brother, Bill, is considerably older than John, and since the person who had inquired about his brother was younger than John, John wondered how this person knew his brother. Anyway, John said that Bill was fine. “No, not Bill. The other one.” Having no other brother, John was confused. “What’s his name? With the sideburns. Scott! How’s Scott?” It was then that he realized what’d happened. John’s last name being Schloman, Scott’s last name being Schulman, both names being a collision of “shhh” and “el” and “man” sounds, they must be the same: Schuloman. Yeah, that’s right. Or, anyway, close enough.

But close enough isn’t good enough here. So much as John and Scott aren’t brothers, the meals we were eating were neither lunch, nor dinner, meaning for us the times weren’t lunchtime or dinnertime.

Of course, the fact that teenage boys eat a lot isn’t news. So, maybe it doesn’t matter what meal we happened to be having. Instead, what matters is the time. And whereas those times, lunch and dinner, may be variable (in my adult years, I’ve lived and continue to live on a much different schedule than others), we have a general idea of when they are.

I don’t think my dad’s thought problem is semantic, however. If it were, he probably wouldn’t care when Hamburger Station was busy, or if it were ever busy at all. Seeing as how Jim Lowe’s legacy is one of my dad’s favorite restaurants, though, he does care. Since he cares, his fun can’t be nihilistic, ultimately auguring Hamburger Station’s doom. Yeah, I’ve let myself get bogged down in meals and times, when something else is at work. . . .

Again, my dad holds up an onion ring and I finally understand that his constant observation is connected to his thought problem. The reason my dad always references the other time, the time when we’re not there, is to create a kind of circular logic, as round as the onion ring, the onion ring that isn’t just physically bigger than the burgers (which are square), but also figuratively, since within that ring, though we will never truly learn when Hamburger Station is busy, Jim Lowe’s restaurant will go on forever.

Solution #5

Hamburger Station is simultaneously always busy and never busy.

Whereas I do not recall meeting Jim Lowe, I do remember, when I was a little kid, meeting and befriending a different employee, someone I always looked forward to talking to whenever we went to Hamburger Station, a really, really great guy, you could just tell by his name. His name was Andy. Later, of course, Andy would go on to collect college degrees at Kent State University, the University of Tennessee, the University of Alabama, and the University of Illinois at Chicago and become a creative writing professor at Washburn University. Later, of course, Andy would go on to move up in the ranks at Hamburger Station, from order taker to cook to trainer to assistant manager to manager to general manager, before retiring. Whenever they met, the two Andys got along wonderfully, each time happy to engage in their favorite activity: comparing burger bellies. Who could eat more Hamburger Station burgers? They didn’t know, but they were going to find out.

This unadulterated love for Hamburger Station leads me to the fact that just about everyone I know loves the place. And, often, just about everyone they know loves the place. Even the famous rock band The Black Keys, who hail from Akron, when loading the cover of their third studio album, Rubber Factory (2004), with as many hometown landmarks as they could, included Hamburger Station. Not Swenson’s or Skyway or Bob’s Hamburg or Mr. Hero (home of the Romanburger, which comes on a sub roll, has two patties next to each other, both atop slices of salami) or any of the root beer stands or any of the historic joints like Manner’s Big Boy, Lujan’s, Pogo, The Varsity, Dilly’s, The Flame, or Kamper’s, no, The Black Keys chose Hamburger Station (well, they also chose The Corral, home of the NiteMare, a burger that includes a thick slice of chipped chopped ham, but still).

And yet, every time my dad and I go, we have no problem running through our routine. Hamburger Station appears to have taken Yogi Berra’s absurdity and turned it into reality: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

From the world of physics, then, I offer two possibilities. First, Erwin Schrödinger famously used a box, a cat, and a poison trap that has a fifty percent chance of triggering in order to explain the problem of measuring a photon. With the box closed, you’re not sure if the cat is alive or dead and therefore it is simultaneously alive and dead, though that is impossible. What is the point of this thought experiment? The point is that the same is the case for photons: without measuring them (the metaphorical opening of the box), they act like both particles and waves, even though that is as impossible as a cat being both alive and dead. But when you measure photons as if they were particles, they act like particles; when you measure photons as if they were waves, they act like waves. I argue, then, that Hamburger Station, with its many confessed fans, is constantly simultaneously busy and not busy. My own experience, being a drop in the bucket, is irrelevant.

Much as I find that previous argument unsatisfying, Hugh Everett III found the Copenhagen interpretation of physics unsatisfying, since it’s impossible for light to be both a particle and a wave simultaneously. And so, my second argument comes from Dr. Everett: the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of physics. In the MWI, every time a particular action could have multiple outcomes, all of those outcomes take place in separate universes. For instance, anytime my dad and I go to Hamburger Station, it could either be busy or not busy, and therefore it is both, though in separate, unbridgeable realities. When my dad says that Hamburger Station is busier at lunchtime, or that it’s busier at dinnertime, since I cannot access those times in the moment, what he is actually telling me is that in some other reality, Hamburger Station is, indeed, busy, but neither of us can experience that universe. Maybe that’s for the better. Here, we get our Speed Packs quicker.

Back in a less theoretical version of Jim Lowe’s legacy, after eating many, many hamburgers, Andy and Andy, to determine who indeed has the bigger burger belly, turn to an outside judge: my dad. My dad, accepting this solemn duty, rules that both Andys have won. The prize, of course, is a hamburger.

Solution #6

Hamburger Station is always busy.

At the writing of this essay, I admit, I’m afraid Hamburger Station isn’t long for this world. Whereas I knew of six locations, there may have been as many as ten at one point (Jim Lowe never reaching the twenty he predicted). But now there are two. The ones my dad and I went to the most, near Midway Plaza on Britain Road in East Akron and on State Road in Cuyahoga Falls, are both gone. Whenever I’m back in town, we head to Ellet, a neighborhood in Southeast Akron, for our Hamburger Station fix. It doesn’t have a counter to sit at, just booths, like any other fast food joint (the building possibly being a defunct Wendy’s franchise). It does have one saddle stool probably to remind people like me about the excitement we felt sitting on them as kids. But none of the other accouterments are to be found.

Of course, after getting our Speed Packs, my dad and I go through our routine.

Honestly, I wish, on occasion at least, we weren’t able to. Then I wouldn’t have to feat the end of Hamburger Station.

But perhaps I don’t have to worry after all. Perhaps the problem isn’t that there are fewer Hamburger Stations now, or that there are fewer customers. Instead, the problem is that I’m approaching time the wrong way. According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Max Tegmark, time is an illusion brought on by perception, not something fundamental to the universe:

“We can portray our reality as either a three-dimensional place where stuff happens over time, or as a four-dimensional place where nothing happens – and if it really is the second picture, then change really is an illusion, because there’s nothing that’s changing; it’s all just there – past, present, future.

“So life is like a movie, and space-time is like the DVD [. . .] There’s nothing about the DVD itself that is changing in any way, even though there’s all this drama unfolding in the movie.”

If Professor Tegmark is right, then we have found the solution to the thought problem. To celebrate I propose a shindig that will require almost nothing of the partiers, because, having been there before, my attendance is already guaranteed – and my dad will be there, and my mom will be there, and my sister, Stefanie, will be there, and the not-brothers John Schloman and Scott Schulman, will be there, and Jim Lowe will definitely be there, as will the other Andy, and even if you’ve never been, as long as you plan to go sometime in the future, then you will be there, too. And when we meet, finally, we will meet at the time when Hamburger Station is busy.

 

“Have You Eaten?” by Ira Sukrungruang

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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

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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

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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

issue 85 back
issue 85 back

Found in Willow Springs 85

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"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

 

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.

 

 

II

 

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. 

 

 

IV

 

For eternity we’re a house on fire.

 

 

V

 

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.

 

 

VI

 

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.

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