egg nog

I'm drinking egg nog in the kitchen, thinking about the old woman whose snow I helped brush off of her car earlier today, and I am wondering if she is thinking of me.

I'm remembering how pretty she was when she looked up, how I hopped out of the car without my bible and asked if she would like some help. It was snowing gently and kindly, and the little brown birds were landing gracefully out of the soft gray sky, all in the same tree, and she asked me where I lived. I answered simply with, "I'm one of Jehovah's Witnesses," arms out, palms up, waiting, and she nodded, handing me her scraper with an understanding nod of yes, this is your job.

Her eyes were blue, but not bright, and I lean against the counter top, listening to the cartoon my little sisters are watching together. I'm wondering if the woman -- Mary, her name was, Mary Montgomery, or something with a movie-star ring to it -- made it to Fort Lupton safely. I am remembering the clean swift swipe of powder falling on asphalt, the little silences it made, and I wonder quite suddenly what Charlotte will look like when she is old enough for young people to get out of their cars to help her. I am wondering if her eyes will lose their color, like the moth in my dream.

And I remember, much later, when the egg nog is forgotten, the laughter in Martensen's voice in the marching band closet, when he said, "You were meant to grow old," as if a great number were simply not. I am wondering where they end up, those who do not wear hairnets in the snow and shuffle around their cars, and who are not excited to see their families in Fort Lupton for the holidays. I wonder of the grace with which they handle their wheelchairs, spinning above stagelights and snowflake decorations, like naughty children who drink their fathers' liquor and do not believe in Santa Clause.

And I don't think to see him old.

I half-jogged back to the car in skirt and snowy boots, astounded at my strength, as if I had never noticed it before. The snow was young, and had fallen easily from the roof and windows as I maneuvered the simple tool in my arms across the windshield with eager ease and alacrity, asking about her family and stealing quick glances at her eyes, surprised at their beauty and surprised at my youth, reminding myself to smile.

sodium citrate

The garage door slammed shut, and my mother threw a white bottle of shampoo into my lap without warning. "This is what your father smelled like when I met him," she said, and walked into the kitchen to put away the rest of the groceries.

"I - but - what is it?"

"It just smells like herbs."

"Oh. But - so now I'm just going to smell like my dad?"

"Well fine, if you don't appreciate the gift --"

"No no, I do. Thank you for getting it, it's - it's lovely."

She gasped suddenly, opening the fridge. "So last night at the wine tasting," she said, "I went a little nuts, and ordered some sodium citrate online."

"Sodium citrate?"

"It's an ionic compound," she began, plunging into a long explanation of the chemical bonding process of sodium citrate, which I eventually stopped listening to. She ended her speech with, "...and it makes nacho cheese sauce. Do you understand what that means? We can make any kind of cheese into nacho cheese. Swiss nacho cheese. Mozzarella nacho cheese. The possibilities are endless."

I imagined something Breaking-Bad-ish was about to happen. She would give up midwifery and start some sort of nacho cheese chemical processing plant, selling it through secret vendors without a license. 

When it finally arrived in the mail, though, it was just a packet of salt. A pan of cheese bubbled on the stove, and my mother poured chilis into it from a jar as I watched the cheese with skeptical fascination and doubt. "How much sodium citrate did you put in?"

"I don't know. Some."

"You didn't follow a recipe?"

"Nah. It's probably okay. I think."

"Looks sort of mucousy."

"Yeah."

"I heard if you get sodium citrate in your hand, it will react to the fats in your skin and turn them into soap."

"Oh, so that's why it does this to cheese. Huh."

We were hungry, so we ate it, and it was good.

I was hoping for a better story.

pacifist

"I'll hold him down if you really want to punch him," Thomas said.

"Oh, I wouldn't really do it, I'm a pacifist," I responded. "Wait, why would you help me? What'd he do to you?"

"Nothing."

"You trust my sense of justice that much?"

"No, I trust your sense of vengeance."

"Why?"

"You're a pacifist. If you want to punch someone, they probably deserve it."

remembering

I tell stories.

It's what I do.

I tell what happened and how it felt and why it matters, what it meant. I explain jokes I never told.

Sara the freshman calls it vulnerability, Martensen calls it authenticity. There's strategy to it, I suppose. You want somebody's trust, you want them to open up the curtains over their eyes and knock down their walls, you've got to earn it. You earn it through your own stories. The bad ones. The ones you don't want to tell.

It's a trade. It's money. You take everything that's ever happened to you and weigh it into categories of worth and bargain it away for the trust of others. It's sales practices.

It's what I do.

I am cut into pieces, ready to give away, choosing customers with strategy and predetermined intention. It took a while to realize I don't tell stories because I want to tell them.

You start with a syllable. You stop, and start again. You finish the word this time. It's not a stutter, it's getting a hold on the weight of what you are about to say before you say it.

You tell it all, just how it happened. You say how it went from warm rocks to cold water. You feel it rise in your chest, as if raised from the dead. You raise it again and again. It's your money. It's your worth. You buy trust with vulnerability. You wear your heart on your sleeve because you know everyone else has one and you want them to feel safe with that fact.

Or maybe you just don't care about your own heart all that much. Maybe it's just live bait.

The stories don't leave when you tell them. The weight doesn't go away. You either feel it or you bury it, but it's always inside you, and it never leaves. It is only a matter of resurfacing. Then you lie awake in the cold of the dark and feel the remembering in your chest. It is worn and faded and pulsing like an unhealed wound. You breathe it in and breathe it out and wait to forget it again.

You don't.

It's your money, and you spent it, and it never left.

You want it to. That's why you sell it.

The remembering has its own weight, its own worth, its own pain, as tangible as oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide, and it sits in your lungs and presses against the walls. You remember me, it says. But it is quieter now, less agonizing, more bearable. You can breathe around the remembering. The more you awaken it, and stir it around, the sooner it remembers how to settle.

It seeps back into the marrow as you fall asleep in its arms.

tribute

We're lying in the dark, under the rickety tables in the back of the drama room.

It's the simplest of all drills. Fire drills and tornado drills, we have to march, you know? We have to crowd in the bathrooms, or line up in the parking lots. There's effort. There's movement. Lockdowns, though, you just sit. You turn off the lights, and you sit, and wait.

Lockdowns stress the hell out of me. Nothing else really does. It's the peace and quiet, you know? You're sitting there hiding and you can't make a sound, you can't laugh it off, can't joke it away. Because then the imaginary gunman will hear you. Whether he hears you or not, though, he knows most of the classrooms have kids in them. He is not fooled by the dark.

It's the beginning of the Shakespeare class, in the morning, and we're lying way in the back of the room, against the wall, on our backs, staring up at the bottoms of tables. The doors are closed, and the lights are off, and I'm thinking about last year's lockdown drill, how I had volunteered to be the "classroom ninja," standing guard at the door by the scissors drawer, and how I didn't know how to fight a gunman with scissors, so I had to google it, and the teacher thought that was funny. I didn't tell anyone I was so useless. They trusted me with their lives every day in that class, or they just didn't think about it.

I'm lying on my back, staring up at the table, with one knee raised in the illusion that I could get up and run if I had to, and Charlotte is lying next to me, on her side. Her heart isn't like mine, it panics and worries, but this time it is slow and sleepy and peaceful. Mine is typically steadier and calmer than hers, but just this once, I'm scared. I'm not scared of an imaginary gunman, I'm scared of the world we live in, and Charlotte reaches out and wraps her hand around my rib cage.

She is the safest thing in the entire building. We are in the safest room, with the best hiding corner, and the thickest walls. We are also in the back of this room, with at least twenty kids in front of us, curled up on the floor, sitting against the walls, whispering to each other and playing games on their phones. Charlotte's optimism is like handmade armor. She melted that metal. She welded it. She put it on herself.

She buries her face in my shoulder.

It's been fifteen minutes or so, and I'm thinking about the editorial I wrote last year about how lockdowns are like duck-and-cover drills. I'm remembering how one kid asked the cop pointed questions about locks and bullets and bricks and backs. I'm remembering how the cop looked sad. I have my hand on her elbow, and I'm thinking about bombs dropping, hiding under tables like this, and how all it really takes to kill a bunch of people is wanting to. That's all it really takes. There's nothing else we can do. Of course they'll know to shoot towards the floor. Of course they'll know we're in the classrooms, even though the lights are off. Of course they'll be able to open the door.

I'm remembering how Mr. Wood told me I should get that editorial published.

I'm remembering how I never did.

Someone somewhere is snoring very loudly, and Charlotte plays with the fabric of my shirt absent-mindedly, and it is dark, but not that dark. It is quiet, but not that quiet. Someone near me lashes out in the dark, and there is a sudden bang, like a high-pitched explosion, something hard hitting the metal leg of the table. No one is snoring anymore. "Oh, crap," someone whispers. "I think I got coffee in your hair, Shady."

"It's okay," I whisper back. "I've had kids throw up in my hair. Now I just get to smell like coffee." A few kids giggle appreciatively as I reach back and feel the completely underestimated sticky wetness at the back of my head. It is dark, but not that dark, and the snoring starts again. The floor is comfortable and I am tired but I am too scared of the world we live in to sleep.

No one asks the cop any questions this time. We just keep lying in the dark.

The floor is terrifically dirty, but we aren't thinking about that, and one of my hands is on Charlotte's knee and the other is on her elbow and she is the safest thing in the entire building because I googled how to stab a gunman with scissors almost a year ago. "Most schools in America won't have to use these drills," she will tell me later. "Most husbands don't kill their wives."

In the margin of a used copy of The Things They Carried, on page 31, after the sentence, "But the war wasn't all that way,"  there is a single written note which states, simply, "But enough of it was."

Enough of them will. Enough of them do.

So we lie in the dark and we think about dying. The drama teacher pulls on the ends of his shirt collar, which is what he does when he is nervous or bored, and I can't reach the Snapple cap in my pocket, which I pop when I am nervous or bored. It is dark, but not that dark, and I crane my neck backwards towards the door, which is locked, but which might as well be unlocked, because we don't play rock-paper-scissors with guns, do we?

We don't know how.

Most husbands don't kill their wives.

She welded her own optimism and she buries her face in my shoulder.

It is dark, but not that dark.

leafbug

We had sweet potato fries for dinner last night.

My mother had worked pretty hard on the meal, harder than she had in weeks, and cooking meals is sort of her creative platform. There was chicken and salad and a big bowl of avocado sauce: not guacamole, but avocado sauce.

None of us had ever seen anything like it, but my mother's leaps of creativity are almost always successful, so we trust them. If not, it is only for having gone too far, which, in the art world, is usually a good thing.

She was in a fairly bad mood, because no one had been brave enough to pour enough of the green foamy sauce onto their food, and because she had worked hard on it. My siblings and stepfather and I were eagerly reassuring her of her talent and heart, and our love and appreciation for her and all that she does. She pouted and rolled her eyes and passive-aggressively stabbed at her plate with her fork.

"I found a bullet," my brother said suddenly and unexpectedly, producing out of his breast pocket a small round copper object of significant size and shape.

"Where did you find that?!" my stepdad asked, suddenly offended at its presence.

"On Green Street," he said, turning the bullet around in his fingers, searching desperately for affirmation and praise for his discovery. "It makes me wonder, you know, why was it there? What size is it, what gun, you know? Who fired it? Why?"

"Put it away!"

"Okay." He tucked it back into his pocket, with all the shame and sorrow in his eyes of a child whose refreshingly strange excitement has been shot down.

The dog was scratching at the backdoor, and my stepdad opened it and spoke to her in his special dog voice, which I have always found demeaning, even though most people do it. He walked out and closed the door, while my mother glared at the bowl half full of avocado sauce which would not be eaten.

My stepdad returned a few moments later with his hands cupped together, face filled with childish excitement as the dog slipped into the house from behind him. "Guys, guess what I found!"

"What?!" The kids kicked their little legs under the table, grinning and laughing.

"A leafbug!" he said, holding onto the edge of its wings with his fingers so it didn't fly away.

The three children cheered. "A leafbug?" my mom said, turning around. "Hey, I wanna hold it!" He placed it into her hands, and the kids climbed off the benches and crowded around her.

They marveled at its smallness and color, its delicate wings, the unbelievable sureness of life in its little green frame. My brother reached his hand out to pick it up, and my mother told him, "Hey, it's my turn!" They were all just six years old again, fighting over holding a bug at the dinner table.

"Come on, Heather," my stepdad said. "It might fly off."

Right as he said that, the bug spread its leaves and flew clumsily and noisily into the air over the table. The girls screamed, and the boy shouted, and my stepdad scoffed, "Heather!" and the bug landed in the middle of the almost-empty pan of fries, folding its wings, embarrassed.

"See?" my mother said. "It didn't go very far."

No one did anything but sit back down and finish eating. We watched the insect wander around the pan for a while. "I think it's missing a leg," my stepdad said, because it was limping like a cripple, and we all turned our heads to look it over. Sure enough, one of its back legs was missing. We made small sympathetic sounds, watching it limp around the pan, and I made a joke about having a leafbug over for dinner, and my stepdad said I should take it outside.

"Grab it by the wings," he said.

"I'm not going to do that," I apologized, and scooped it into my hands, explaining about damaging moths' wings and how maybe leafbugs are similar in that regard, and he nodded.

I sat outside and opened my hands, letting the leafbug wander around my fingers. It was an impressive little beast, really. Its tiny body heaved in and out, catching its breath from the adventure, twitching its antennae to taste the sweet outdoor air again. It crawled to the tips of my fingers and nibbled the potato grease off of its little hands and feet, one by one, taking its time before lifting off  over the fence and away.

streetlamp

My sister and I were walking home in the dark, coming from the worser side of town.

We had stopped at the gas station and got coffee. This was not because we did not have coffee at home, or because the coffee from the gas station was appealing in the slightest, but just because we like the walk. The cracked gray asphalt, the barking one-eyed dogs, the drooping sunflowers and rich sunset on our backs. Dusk settled before we even realized it.

Then it was just dark.

Televisions hummed. The paper sleeves warmed our hands in the summer night air. I zipped up my hoodie and stuffed a hand in my pocket, trying to make my shadow as big as possible, and failing pretty badly. My sister did not seem to notice either where she was or who she was. I am not even sure she knew where she was going. I watched her shadow wander like a drunken ghost behind me.

I worried.

In the light of a streetlamp in front of us, a parked car sat sentry over a group of neighborhood children. Neighborhood children, in their grasp of the greatly familial pack mentality, have no concept of age. Teenagers still with toddlers, all together, all playing the same games in the dark.

The younger ones giggle and shout in the distance, broken bits of spanish bouncing off the cars. They tickle and wrestle and ride tiny bicycles around each other, tumbling over and laughing and crying. They skip stones across the road as if it were an endless black lake.

The cars cannot touch them.

A boy and a girl, older than the others but not old enough, leaned against the car like the paperback cover of a really bad novel. The cheap romance kind that thrift stores crawl with. The kind that make you wonder if literature and graphic design were things people ever even went to college for.

The boy folded his thick arms over his thick chest, a shiver blowing through his striped blue shirt. The girl, arm around his, ankles crossed, leaned against the door of the second-hand civic like she was selling it. She gazed up at his crooked-toothed grin like he was the sun, moon, and all the stars which we could not see.

She laughed like something that makes you want to cringe. She laughed like sixth grade lunches, and crickets under your bed. As I passed, we regarded each other with the caution of strangers in the dark, and for a moment I forgot that I was no officer and no one's mother.

The girl and boy looked at me, as embarrassed as mismatched socks under a suit.

But you are only children... The thought settled in the street before I could help it. The girl fidgeted uncomfortably, and the boy looked at his feet. I forced myself to smile an apology, for they were only playing pretend.

A chubby young boy of about six started talking to my dog, and smiled up at me, streetlight warm and bright upon his face. He asked if he could pet her. "Of course," I said. Then, under my breath, somehow embarrassed that my sister might hear me, "Por supuesto. She won't bite you."

My dog wanted to be home. I motioned for her to come up to the boy, but she backed away, cowering into the dark. "Hey, it's okay," I told her.

"I'm sorry," I told the boy. "She's afraid of the dark."

I knelt down and held her steady, and the boy cautiously and gently moved a small, soft hand over her head. My dog is very soft, and children often ask to pet her. She is very good with kids most of the time. This was one of those times.

My sister was, by this time, in front of me, and wondering where I had gone. "Goodnight," I said to the boy, and waved to the unspecified space behind me.

"Goodnight," the kids called back.

I talked about the kids and the streetlight while lying in the grass with Charlotte and Sally a few days later, watching softball practice. It was one of the sleepy cloudy times in life when you don't have anywhere you'd rather be and no one you would rather be beside. These are the times I fill with telling badly constructed stories about beautiful moments, trying to piece the images together and put color and movement and meaning to them. But in the end it is not the image or the words that stick with you in that moment; it is the head on your chest and the hand in yours and the shoes all leaning against each other in a lazy tangle of affection, very much like the children against the car.

We, too, are only children in the dark, while the televisions hum, and it is only a matter of time before a child a few years older passes by and casts us a look of shame before we begin to question our place under the streetlamp.

frightening

The most frightening thing is to be nothing at all like someone - to be absolutely nothing alike, with nothing in common. And then, about a year later, to be told, "You remind me of him."

But this may be called progress.

visual hello

It was one of the very few times I was actually supposed to be on the stage.

I recently enrolled in a literature and theater class, which is a sort of experimental curriculum, I guess, since the state hasn't ever done it before. The class is filled with actors and writers, all embarrassingly stoked to be there. It was my first acting lesson, all these strangers standing in a circle on the black and empty stage I had spent so much stolen time with.

All we had to do was look the person next to us in the eyes, and clap in unison. They would then turn, look the other person next to them in the eyes, and clap again. The single clap would move wordlessly down the circle, passed from gaze to gaze, one intense moment after another.

It was about rhythm, reaction, and connection. Connection among strangers.

And it all hung upon the look.

Cautious, careful eye contact passed itself around the circle, voiced in a four-handed clap. The walls people live behind were noticed as if for the first time, these papery things we fold over our faces so as not to see, not to perceive. People often forgot to look. Their eyes were there, open, staring, but they did not see. They did not reflect the movement of the Other, this delicate and dangerous dance played out in milliseconds of survival reflex. It was clumsy, off, separate. Hesitant and disconnected. I watched it grow as it moved towards Charlotte and me.

Charlotte is the kind of beautiful to make a heart afraid. There isn't much else to describe. She's the designated driver of the friend group we share, the junior who mostly just hangs with the sophomores and never has to explain why. Her rhythm is like the wind ripples on the surface of a smooth and slow-moving river: flawless grace with a shattered screen. A sort of silent poetry in the ancient fluidity of her movement, layered beneath a childish giddiness and inability to keep still. She held her focus there beside me, caught it, stood and turned and looked and clapped, right, exactly when we were supposed to.

Eyes are frightfully beautiful things when the walls go down. When you look, really look, look at someone who knows you are looking, trying to memorize them and react to them as quickly as possible. Time slows then. You both internalize the pulse of the stage, thankful to be standing beside someone who knows music, and you're waiting there with your hands apart but you're not waiting for the hands, you're waiting for the eyes.

They linger and connect like a time-bending landline telephone dialer, like a lightning-fast morse code telegraph. Indecipherable little beeps and buttons, waiting for you to answer. The eyes then hold each other softly and firmly, like hands on the shoulders before a solemn compliment or concern.

It isn't the eyes that touch you, though. Some part of the invisible person must reach out while you are distracted by the richness of the iris, a color so deep and so terrifyingly blue, like the color of the sky when you'd lean your head back on the swings as a kid and feel your heart stop with fear of falling in. But it is not the color that touches you. No, it is something else, some power exchange through the dark depths of the pupil, where all the light gets lost.

The presense of another person there, in the moment when you stare, feels sort of like how a car would feel getting jump-started, or jump-starting another car. Connected.

Locking eyes is one of the surest ways to connect with others without the bothersomeness of speech getting in the way. You tap into each other's ancient rhythmic heartbeat and beat back, like scared and voiceless animals who do not always want to be alone. You look and you listen and run your fingers over the surface of the water and, for only a moment, give and get a decent hello.

tactile hello

The words were difficult, and the hand was desperate. Warm, familiar, and not entirly unlike the touch of family, or, what family ought to be.

It wasn' a completely pleasant exchange, except for the hardened and cautiously desperate relief of being near again. Like a sigh of athsmatic lungs; a hug of a distant father, squeezing too tightly.

The communication went along the lines of a mutual irritation and frustration with the other, a few barking, hurt words spoken through the shaking grasp of hands as if they were strangers meeting for the first time. Then there was the tiredness, the understanding, the forlorn intensity of a steady gaze across a crowded room. The thumb moving over the back of the hand, remembering it like the streets of a town. The acknowledging lapse of tightened muscles releasing beneath it, in a careful simple quiet I have missed you.

The distance in the initial style of holding hands, palm to palm, fingers held around the back of the hand (instead of intertwined, between, over, under, playing with them in content absent-mindedness of the simple joy of the action), reminded me of a side-hug. It wasn't forced, nor completely uncomfortable, and those who noticed saw merely two distant mild frowns and two hands held too tightly for too long, beside a basket of fruit snacks.

If the touch were a phonecall, I would have hung up first. The palm stretched itself open, sweaty and stiff, and moved all its fingers, one at a time, making sure they still worked. Mine reached up to scratch at my arm.

The hands seemed to know each other, which was funny and strange, because each had changed, and could feel it. "Your pinky didn't used to bend this way," "This freckle wasn't there last time," "You've gotten colder, your blood pressure has gone down," "Your fingernails are so much shorter." But they recognize, and hold on, and re-map each other in frightening disappointment and honest recollection.

Hands have amazing skill at memory, observation, and expression. Words are frustratingly difficult to communicate with. The silliest part of all this is that I practice in words, and often politely turn down hugs. It just drives me insane. That's when I get to stuttering, and touching people's buttons and collars, and avoiding eye contact.

Emojis are currently at the top of my list of fears.

growing moss

RECEIVED MON, JUL 21, 3:44 PM

"Hello. I have taken to growing moss. I no longer drink tea because it is summer and though I enjoy iced tea it reminds me of my father who laughs to loud in such a way it makes me think he needs attention or that he is really sad and lonely but can't ask for affection because he is simply addicted to his childhood. And that is not how things should seem but it is how they operate in my head. My mother despises this part of me. When she does work and I don't offer my aid she takes great offenses and I'm afraid I am a Yankee in the way I give now. Mostly because it is safe for they and I. I don't give unless I am asked in which case I am more than happy. But this isn't affectionate...
My mother drinks coffee, and my father too. Black, bitterly sour coffee that gives them yellow teeth with which they use to bark not smile.

My grandparents drink espresso which gives them an air of finesse. The dark pools are charcoal tasting but not bitter and they both mix their drinks. My grand mother with milk and vanilla or almond. The screaming sound the milk frother makes is comforting. My grandfather takes his with water and a sugar substitute because he is remarkably diabetic. I pity his sweet tooth."

3:50 PM

"I don't grow flowers anymore because they die. I hurt everywhere. My breathing is labored not matter what amount of albuterol I inhale...  My muscles are either wooden or strings recently. I thought that eating would make it all better. I was wrong. My stomach refuses to accept food and my mind has given up thinking clearly. As though this strike can end my hunger. What would I leave behind here if I were to die suddenly? I asked this morning sitting in the mist left just after a shower."

3:51 PM

"We have moss growing in the foam seat of a riding mower.
I was sitting there mostly because I couldn't stand up but also because I enjoy the cold."

3:52 PM

"I took the moss and planted it in a pot that once was filled with colored rocks."

3:52 PM

"I hope it grows through the winter"

Big Questions

We're staying in a cabin of sorts, me and my family and distant relatives I didn't know existed, kids crawling everywhere, yelling at each other.

It was very late, the fire had died out, and my two-year-old sister Saraiah told me she was tired. It is something difficult to notice, when it is late and there are so many other children to go to sleep, so I picked her up and took her to our parents' room, where a big soft blanket was folded in half with a pillow on the floor, waiting for her.

The room was empty and quiet, adults still talking and children still playing all over the rest of the house. I looked around for her pajamas, and considered taking off one of my shirts and giving it to her, but she seemed comfortable enough with what she wore already. She got under the covers as I looked around for her water cup. The house we are staying in belongs to mormons, delightful family folk with beautiful homes.

A tiny clay statue of an angel holding a baby rested on the nightstand. I knew my stepdad didn't like sleeping with statues, so I picked it up and put it in a dresser drawer.

"That an angel?" Saraiah asked.

"Yeah, it's an angel," I said. She patted the blanket beside her, and I lied down next to her.

"Was it a good day?"

"Yeah, good day," she said.

"It's nice, having family?"

"Yeah. Shady, remember that movie? Remember Rio?"

"Yeah, I remember Rio."

"Rio 2?"

"Yes."

"Remember Stitch?"

"Yeah, I remember Stitch."

"Stitch 2? "

I was staring at the dresser drawer, thinking in that terrible way our brains think. "Saraiah, do you know where the angels are?"

"Nope."

"Where are they?"

"Um, I don't know. Shady, remember Epic? That tiny movie? Tiny bugs?"

"Yes, I remember." We watched the ceiling. "Saraiah, do you know where God is?"

"Shady," she whispered. "See that TV?" She pointed at a television in the room that I had failed to notice. She was quiet for a while, thinking about movies, describing to me the ones I hadn't seen. "Remember that house? Boy fall down? Oh, he so funny!"

Then the conversation slowed, and she ran out of movies. I listened to the wind in the mountains outside.

"What's gonna happen to us?" The question floated to the ceiling, a quiet and pitiful exhale.

"Shady," Saraiah whispered, placing a small and loving hand on the side of my face. She looked into my eyes. "It's okay. It's okay, Shady. Remember the fire? Remember marshmallows? I want go back fire, get warm." She almost got up, but I stopped her.

"The fire's all gone, Raiah, it's dark now."

"We have more marshmallows tomorrow?"

"Yes."

She layed herself back down and held my hand. I thought about fire and I thought about Elmer and how he called me that night when we were thirteen, when Sally first came out, and I thought about his voice on the phone when it broke and I thought about fire and I thought about Elmer and his little pudgy six-year-old hands in the snow. I thought about hands in a church and hands in a locker room and hands in the fire and how Elmer is getting baptized this Sunday, what hands would hold him, and then I thought about marshmallows.

It suddenly occurred to me that Saraiah hadn't brushed her teeth.

Orange Juice John

We set up the band downtown again, in the doorway of a fire exit.

The pianos were covered in tarps like dead bodies, because the clouds looked like rain, and my sister's friend Steven opened the guitar case as I took out my ukulele and we started to tune. Steven and my sister are technically a band, both good-looking and talented kids with absolutely no romantic interest in each other, but with enough staged chemistry to get the public to think so.

Steven had brought his roommate Jonah, a fairly decent singer who bought into the 'confidence attracts' belief to an unfortunate degree. Steven's a "hardcore tenor" with substantial musical ability and knowledge, and a rare and wonderful habit of treating girls like human beings. So when he drove down here for the convention, my sister, her friend, and myself, decided to bring my mom's guitar (and my ukulele) back downtown and open the case and see what would happen.

I was the only one who had bothered to change into street clothes, the rest wore suits and dresses and badges, tweed and bowtie, vintage sheet-music-patterned dress and bow.

As soon as Steven and I opened our cases, a strange, seemingly schizophrenic and homeless-looking man approached and volunteered to tune us.

"That's no average Martin," he said, regarding my mother's guitar, which Steven held with enormous authority and appreciation. "What year is it?"

"Uhh, '73?" Steven said, pick between his teeth, tuning.

"Oh boy, how long you been playing?"

"Four years."

"You got one of these?" The man showed an impressively horrific black cyst on his middle finger.

"Oh no, but I have a friend who does."

The man wore a backwards batman baseball cap, a tie-dye t-shirt, basketball shorts, and Nike's. He shuffled off after a while of talking, Steven giving me looks of "oh boy" and "when will he leave?" Only a moment or two later, as we begun to play, the man returned, dropping a jug of orange juice into the open guitar case: our first tip.

We laughed, and thanked him, and continued playing as he shuffled off to Jonah and talked to him non-stop for the next hour.

I did not immediately feel bad for Jonah, I have to admit. But eventually I didn't know the songs Steven and Story were playing anymore, and I knew the kid was a better singer than I, and he obviously wanted to join, but was held against his will by a stranger who would not leave.

Eventually, I fell to mercy. I decided to take one for the team.

So I walked over to where they stood, nodded, listening as the man ranted about Billy Joel and human memory, handed Jonah my ukulele, nodded again, and took over. Jonah looked at me gratefully, took the uke, and left hurriedly without a word.

My plan to get rid of the man was based around a single solid truth: the only people no one wants to talk to even more than crazy strangers downtown, are Jehovah's Witnesses. I figured I would listen, steer the conversation around religion, mention who we were, and wait for him to get uncomfortable and leave. I calculated it would take around five minutes, if things went as expected.

That was my plan: preach until he leaves. That was it.

"The human brain," he said, "has infinite capacity of knowledge. Put a song on the radio, three chords in, I know it. Told my friends, they didn't believe me, but then-"

"Isn't that interesting? How our minds are capable of living forever, yet we die after 70 years?"

"That rhetorical, or you want my answer?" He nibbled at the straw of his Big Gulp, looking off into the street.

"Well, what do you think?"

"I think, I think there's a purpose to that. That mankind has the capacity to live forever and yet he dies. You look at a tree, that tree comes from a seed, and you say, 'well, where'd that seed come from?' I say it comes from a tree. But then that's the chicken and the egg question, and you ask me THAT one I say, well what came first, a man or a baby? Hahaha!"

"So do you believe you were created?"

"Well I know I came from my parents, that's for sure. I didn't come from no fish, if that's what you're asking." A man walked by holding a bright yellow sign, big black letters reading JESUS SAVES. "JESUS SAVES YOU FIFTEEN PERCENT OR MORE ON CAR INSURANCE!" the man in the baseball cap shouted, then tapped my arm with the side of his hand, "That's comedy right there," he said, and I laughed genuinely.

The message in itself was funny, these downtown sign preachers always are. It left more questions than answers. I was glad we shared a sense of humor in it, but I needed to rejoin the band.

"You know, isn't it funny, the Bible's scientifically accurate about this stuff? Even at the time it was written. You know it even said the earth was a circle, while the main belief of the time was--"

"Isaiah 40:22, Job 26:7. 'There is one who dwells above the circle of the earth'; 'He stretches out the northern sky over empty space, suspending the earth upon nothing.'"

He nibbled his straw, and stared down the street. His eyes were dark and watery, quick and wide and wonderful. His feet shuffled on the sidewalk as he spoke. I knew right then, something was about to either go horribly wrong, or terrifically right.

"Whoa," I said. "You've - you've got a terrific memory." I asked for his name, and he said it was John.

"You know, my friends and I," I said, gesturing to the kids singing in the street beside us, "We're all Jehovah's Witnesses."

And, for the first time, John stopped talking. John stopped nibbling his straw. John looked down. He swallowed. "Oh that's - that's funny," he said quietly.

"Funny?"

"Ironic I mean, not funny, it's just ironic, that's all. It's ironic." John laughed a sorry sort of laugh.

I waited for the discomfort to kick in. A biting word or two as he shuffled off, a puff of tobacco breath and a cutting opinion before he left. Then I would go back to my band, having successfully scared away a stranger the only way I knew how.

John smiled at me, quickly and honestly, eyes a flash of kindness and then a blur of scattered thought. He took a swig of his Big Gulp. "What book you people studying now?"

If it hadn't been for the strangeness of the smile, I would have said the Bible. I would have asked what he meant. But I rolled up my sleeves, looked at him sideways with a slight and suspicious frown, and said with an air of false confidence, "The Draw Close book..."

"Ah. An oldie. Published 2002, it was?"

"I, uh. I don't know the publishing dates, actually." I didn't know a lot, actually. "So I take it you've studied the bible?"

"I read the bible cover to cover about twice a year now, actually. Probably read it 30, 40 times total in my life."

"WHOA! That's - that's really impressive!"

"No, it's not. It's shameful." John's eyes darkened, cigarette limp at his side, fingers clutching his cup.

"Why is it shameful?"

He looked at me, for a fraction of a second, like I knew he wasn't crazy. He spoke each word slowly and painfully, as if etching them into stone. "To be the same man at 45 as you were at 25 is to have lived a shameful life." He was staring, I realized, at the orange juice jug in the guitar case.

I said nothing. John went on, not exactly speaking to me, but to someone else not present. "It is written, 'Become doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves with false reasoning. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, this one is like a man looking at his own face in a mirror. For he looks at himself, and he goes away and immediately forgets what sort of person he is. But the one who peers into the perfect law that belongs to freedom and continues in it has become, not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work; and he will be happy in what he does.'"

John recited James like a childhood lullaby. He practically sang the words in iambic, like a classroom poem rehearsed and read aloud. He took his pauses at liberty, retrieving the verses from file folders of an infinite memory. I realized right then, John was not an average person, and I had no place standing among the likes of him.

And then the irony kicked in. People didn't get knowledge like this from church on Sundays. John was taught to teach. "Have you ever studied?"

"I've studied with the witnesses for about twenty years now. I talk to Jehovah all the time. Never ask him for anything, though. I don't expect him to help me, it's not my place to ask for it. Not with how I've been living. I know what's true, I'm just retarded." He gestured with his cigarette, as if it agreed with him.

I didn't correct him. I hadn't the right. This wasn't the usual encounter with strangers: a word, a glance, a short feeling of unity, a far-off exchange of question marks never to be resolved. My original low and shameful intention seemed far away, and I felt like I'd known John for an eternity. There was nothing we didn't understand about each other, no distant small talk or unnecessary pretenses. I spoke to him like a brother now. He was on my side. "You've got a remarkable mind, John. You know that, don't you?"

A group of druggies closed in, which was our cue to start packing up. I zipped up my ukulele, slipped it over my shoulder. Story and Stephen picked up the tips and placed the Martin into its case.

"Could I play it?" John asked sheepishly. "Oh, I haven't touched a guitar in so long."

"I don't know if I can do that..." Story apologized, wincing.

"Don't you trust me?"

I trusted John enormously. And it broke my heart. "If it wasn't our parents', we would, I promise we would," I told him.

"Oh, it's no matter." He grinned. "I can always play in my head, just like normal. See? Listen." We listened. He smiled, eyes shining, twitching just a little, beaming with music none of us could hear. "See that? That was great!"

My heart was almost entirely broken. John walked with us down the street, limping on both feet. "What's your favorite book?" he asked.

"Proverbs, for sure," Steven said, guitar case in hand. I argued for Ecclesiastes. John just grinned.

"People try to talk to me like they know you people," he said, "I just let 'em. Pretend I don't know nothing. Let them spew their hatred all they want, they don't know a thing. Then they're obligated to listen, see? And I just lay it down, those fools speaking with the voices of frogs-"

"Ribbet," Steven grinned, and we laughed. John picked up a penny. "53 more of these'll buy you a cup of coffee! Me and my buddy, we call these little coppers spoonfuls of coffee. Look, there's another one!" He spoke of pennies on the sidewalk as if they were a wonder of the natural world. The edges of night were dusting the skies, and John beamed like sunrise on a bride's wedding day. Eyes dark and shining beyond what is scientific, smile wide and honest and child-like. For some reason, I could not find my hand capable of reaching for the change in my pocket. I somehow could not give the man anything he didn't already possess.

After hearing a bit about where he came from, Steven told him, in an effort to make a doer from a hearer, "You know, the apostle Paul said he had to pummel-"

"'I pummel my body and lead it as a slave, so that after I have preached to others, I myself should not become disapproved somehow.' 1 Corinthians 9:27. I'm not retarded."

"That's a strong word!" Steven laughed.

When we reached the parking lot and shook hands, it was almost dark. John grinned proudly.  "That was real brave of you, Shady, telling me who you all were. Those were brave words." I shrunk inside. "I haven't been doing what I know I should, and even though I don't deserve it, Jehovah's protected me from plenty in this city. I know a kick in the pants when I receive one, and I know you kids were just what I needed to pick myself back up. Know when I tell ya, I'm going back to my congregation tomorrow." Something about the authority with which he spoke made it impossible for him to be lying.

"You're a good man, John," Steven said.

"Goodnight, John," I said.

I didn't know it was possible to feel so thankful and so sorry, so priviledged and unworthy and remorseful. We were just cocky kids on a street corner with a handful of talent and a few words. He had pockets filled with pennies and a bible in his mind, shelves inside him full of records and a life he lived in vain, all with a faith I don't believe I will ever reach. Who am I to be called brave? He smiled at me in my dirty street clothes, stars penned onto the side of my hand, second-hand ukulele slung over my sweaty back, as if I were sent by angels.

He looked at me like I was sent by angels. I looked at him like there were wings behind his back.

He skipped away singing, off into the great beyond, where his streets were paved in pennies and his head was filled with song.

And I didn't know why I cried as we drove away.

Probably because Steven called the orange juice.

to take in the cancers like complimemts

It came from the sky.

It fell upon a twelve-year-old's trampoline as the sun lit up the clouds something unbelievable, each quadrant of the sky a different color, texture, and feeling. The west held awe and strength and beauty, beams of light washing over the tops of towering clouds. North was fear, a hazy orange, brush strokes of chalk like the smoke of a forest fire. East was a powerful sort of gray; east knew, east dreaded, east was the feeling in your gut every morning when you can't get out of bed and you know you should eat but can't because you feel it there, the clouds inside. A threatening sort of thunder. South though, south was the sort of tickled love in your fingertips, a pink fluffy giggling feeling that makes you want to run as fast as you can through an astroturf football field in the snow.

The tree branches spread out against the sky, clear blue just in the center. The sun reached down and sank into my skin with the same pleasant discomfort that comes with holding hands. I squeezed my eyes shut and watched the blackness slowly redden, each cell of my skin filled with the warmth of a setting sun.

Wind whipped through my shirt, tickling and taunting the threadbare button-down and I laughed, opening my eyes. It was then that it came to me, right down from the sky above:

"Take in the cancers like compliments."

It was January when he said it. Worrying I don't get enough vitamin D, which is true, I don't lie in the sun enough. It feels like being touched. It brushes its hands over your arms and face, feels beneath your clothes. The sun is intrusive, it touches you in a way that makes you seen. I never used to let myself be touched, but now I hug everyone. Now I lie in the sun.

I knew the words of course, I had them memorized like textbook flashcards, but it was only then I realized what they meant.

Take in the cancers like compliments. 

The sun emits UV rays that are harmful to the skin, that build tumors that eat up your life source.

Go outside and soak them up. Soak them up like the sweetest of poisons, and when you are freckled and sunburned, when you are aged and brown, do not look upon the marks as insults. Touch the sun back.

The question implied is this: What greater compliment is there than to be touched by life? To be burned, cut open, eaten alive? Take it all in stride, take it in like medicine, the bad alongside the good. It may hurt but at least you feel something. What greater compliment is there than to be shined down upon?

I laughed on the trampoline as the clouds closed in. Laughed as the rain fell in big fat tears, plopping onto my nose, my glasses. Laughed as the twelve-year-old laughed with me, not because I told her why I was laughing, but because it felt good to be a part of something. Cancer runs in her family. Her grandmother is dead.

So I didn't tell her about the compliment of sorrow because she knows more than me. She knows how to laugh back at the sun that kills us. She knows how to laugh as the rain turns to hail, as we run back inside and the sky thunders and bellows, as the sirens start and the clouds clap and flash, as the streets turn to rivers of whitewater. She knows.

The sun went down and the storm fell like an omen, the eastern sky growing so great it dropped down upon us, a sorrow so heavy it could not be held. A sorrow so heavy it could not stay in bed, it had to get up. It had to make coffee.

The importance of the revelation from the sky is that it takes away the bitterness of storms, of sunburnt skin, of the things that eat away and kill. These things are made easier to swallow, through the warmth of sunlight and the beauty of clouds. The sorrow and suffering of this world is a terrible truth, it really is. But there is love in this world, and hatred is a choice, and I hadn't realized that before. A bad life is still living.

Maybe it's all bullcrap optimism, but it feels good. And I'd rather feel good than bad.

Sin City

The pianos sat situated like streetlights, one on every block or so, stretching down the road downtown between buses and bicycles. They stood like sentries of art, hand-painted portraits with lids nailed shut. Kids and bums would sit and strum the worn-away keys like they remembered something they knew, tapping carefully and courageously as if there were someone to impress. They asked no permission. Neither did the pianos.

Nothing quite reminds a teenage girl of her age and gender like a city can. It was just me, my sister, and her friend; 15, 17, 19; cargo cut-offs and pull over, sleeveless romper and flats, heels and shoulder-sloping short black dress. We walked like soldiers pretending there was no battle, dodging whistles of grenades and chatter of machine gun shouts, watching everyone and making no eye contact.

It is a singular and unquestioned law of the universe that my sister does not pay for food. I, when with her, often forget this law, and try to pay the hot dog man, who smiles and waves his hand kindly, "Don't worry about it," they all say, and blush. My sister consumes very little of the free food society gifts her with, and I use her like a coupon the universe has granted us: pretty girls eat free.

Pianos light the soul of a musician like a lamp does to a moth. The empty seat drew my sister in, and her shaking hands moved over the keys like something which belonged. Plastic nails plastered over bloody bitten fingertips clicked against splintered wood, tapping out a morse-code beat beneath the tune.

I leaned against the wooden frame and ate the unpaid-for hot dog hurriedly and hungrily, my well-known position in the world being one to watch, lean against pianos, and protect those playing at them. The song floated out into the bustling city, over bells and horns and radios, but to my sister, she was alone.

She sang. Chords shook and bounced unsteadily, but her voice made up for it, thick and strong like muscle and sinew, not like bleached hair and tanned skin. She sang like someone whose ancestors hurt. She sang like a pretty girl in the middle of a city. And oh, the people listened.

A small crowd moved in and around as she and her friend sang songs my sister wrote, shamelessly and whole-heartedly. The people took their phones out. A scavenger hunt party asked her for a serenade, to which she happily obliged, belting half of a Taylor Swift song beside a to-be bride before they marked it off their list and flitted away like butterflies.

The sun was setting in the reflections of buildings, darkened windows lit on fire, clouds air-brushed in silver linings like a God in a world which has forgotten him. The fireworks were getting ready for nightfall, and the people were filing into the park as I sat on the bench beside my sister.

The next song she chose was nostalgic. It carried the air of the childhood we shared, a sort of sorrow that cannot be spoken, stretching around the earth and back again and curling around the sleeping forms in cribs. We knew sorrow when we were born, these songs were our lullabies.

So I sat and I sang. I knew the song. She pounded the soul of that piano and shook the concrete, lifted the steam from the streets. It was mournful and candid and true. The people came, the people left, eyes of bicycles lingered and fell away, crosswalks brought crowds and dispersed them until the only one left listening was a homeless man sitting against a concrete block with his eyes closed.

He breathed the song. Whispered it, murmured it, wrestled it within his chest. He was a strange sort of handsome, with clear blue eyes and a youngish beard, not quite done living yet. It was the kind of handsome one would fail to notice if they were not looking for it, if he did not look them in the eyes.

It was a blues country piano concerto and we sung the sun down and the fireworks popped and fluttered to the skies at the end of the last chorus, when she held each line out just as it sounds when you know the curtains will soon close,

On the thirty-first floor
Your gold-plated door
Won't keep out the Lord's burning rain

There were tears in the man's eyes. He looked like he wanted to shake our hands, but we could not look him in the eyes, and we could not spare more than a thank you, for the sun was going down and the fireworks were going up and the town popped and fizzled like a champagne bottle as we walked back to the car, heads down and shoulders tensed, reminded of age and gender by the strange men who shouted and whistled but did not offer any food.

The city is a strange place, and the rules it runs by are not always written. People lose. People win. People run out of coupons and some never had any in the first place because though all men may be created equal, this world doesn't treat them that way, we deal our own cards and the decks aren't dealt fair.

But the music always plays, and the people always listen.

And you know what's rad?

FREE HOT DOGS.

The Time My Mother Found Out She's Not Straight: An Epic Car Drive of Reversed Roles

My relationship with my mother consists mainly of intellectual conversation.

We never yell, because there is rarely anything to yell about. I don't typically try anything crazy, and she typically lets me do whatever I want, which isn't much. Sometimes she talks about getting a sleeve tattoo, or dying her hair blue, and I say, "Mom, no," and she says, "Whatever, Shady."

We talk mostly in the car. I don't remember where we were going, but one day, we started discussing an article she had read on facebook.

"Being gay is totally a choice," she decided at a red light. I had an idea where the argument would go, and I sighed, disappointed that my mother was about to be wrong in such a stereotypically-parental way. My mother, however, did not disappoint.

"Like, I had this roommate," she began. "And she was really hot. I mean, she was beautiful. We traveled through Europe together when I was 18, you know? We saw each other naked. We, like, showered together, and stuff."

This was getting weird. "What?"

"You know," she said, waving her hand. "Europe." The explanation seemed to satisfy her. I didn't press the matter any further. "Anyways, I remember there were times I'd think, yeah, I want to kiss your face. I would have sex with you. But I'm not going to!"

"...What?"

"I mean, I just chose not to, you know? I could have. I totally could have. But I didn't."

A moment of silence filled the car as she turned through an intersection. No one spoke, for longer than what is comfortable. "And that doesn't mean I'm gay," she continued. "Just, you know, everybody is attracted to girls sometimes. They're hot."

"Huh," I said, nodding, trying desperately for the conversation to continue intellectually. "Well, you know, to be completely honest, I have to say I have never been attracted to girls."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I know. I mean, girls are pretty, I just, you know, never feel like kissing them. Personally."

"Huh."

We drove in silence. She narrowed her eyes, slowly, and then said, decidedly, "Well, then I think I might be a little gay..."

Moment of Normalcy in an Abnormal Situation

He answered the door with the dog in his arms, a dark, furry, wriggling thing with shining eyes and wagging foxtail.

I typically pay more attention to the dog than the person, at least when the door is answered. It's a strange work, volunteer door-to-door bible education, and in this particular situation we weren't looking for the usual face-to-face, in-depth discussion, we were just handing out invitations to as many doors as possible.

It starts with the hand on the screen doorknob, watching it turn, realizing you are going to have to piece words together, then looking quickly and desperately up the arm to the chest to the head, searching in a frantic half-second for a judge of character among strangers. In the first second when the door is open and the screen is removed, you regard each other's faces the way dogs touch noses at a park: a slight panic, a quick survival instinct, holding each other's defensive gaze in a world where strangers touch strangers in newspaper stories of guns and knives and bombs, in neighborhoods of signs and dogs.

He smiled. He wore a clean white shirt and red plaid pajama pants, almost-matching nondescript socks, more than what most men answer the door wearing. The words I pieced together in my head so frantically at the turn of the doorknob were delayed, not exactly uncomfortably, but in the way some dogs hold noses together longer than others. They have more of each other to smell.

I stared, the air still held in my lungs, still cautious, still careful not to offend, impose, or interrupt more than necessary. Nothing moved. There was a softness to his edges like the air around a child after a nap. I quickly explained my reason for being there, placed the folded paper in his hand as quickly as possible - the hand soft and warm and intentional - and when he spoke he had the kind of voice that makes it easier to exhale, the voice of understanding.

The work is strange because it involves people finding people. It's not a podcast, not a pamphlet in the door or mailbox, not a television show. It's dogs touching noses. It's personal. And, every once in a while, people on porches meet people in doorways and find it easier to breathe, as if the work itself, the reason, were erased, and all that was left was the people and the breathing and the smiling.

He, in his rarely human peaceful softness, sock-footed and dog-holding, wanted to keep talking. It's not difficult to tell when you are wanted around or not. But the work this day was quick, in and out, a paper trading hands and then we're off to the next door. Two seconds of prolonged eye contact, an overly genuine, "Thank you" and "Have a nice day," drawing out the pleasantries in as many words as possible: "Thanks, thank you," "You're welcome, and thank you too," "Alright, you have a nice day," "Thank you, you too."

And then the door was closed and the smile was dangerously difficult to erase as I stumbled off the porch like a very real and typical teenage girl. Very rarely do I ever stumble upon accidental crushes on strangers. Rarely as in never. This is because of a conscious effort not to smile, not to exhale too deeply, not to look for too long or too meaningfully, not to accept compliments. Not to look up.

This lack of silly frivolousness is actually quite silly and frivolous. Sometimes young men in pajamas are soft and make speaking more difficult than usual. It happens. It happens regardless of situation or intention. Carrying a bible makes it no less probable, though probably more embarrassing, which is why I'm blogging the story. The image of a volunteer preacher blushing at a door, stumbling over words, giggling. I mean, come on, it's hilarious, especially since it actually happens.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Smiling sometimes is not a choice, and five soft seconds with a stranger can cure five hard months at once.

The Bigmouth Frog Joke

My older sister Story was a very bright child.

Borderline prodigy, it turns out. She skipped kindergarten and took most elementary school classes in the attic, by herself. She could spell her name and sing (and write) entire songs when she was 2 years old, but her best trick at the time was the bigmouth frog joke.

She told this joke to everybody. She knew how to be charming about it, too. Soft little blonde curls and bright, shining blue eyes. People loved it. They loved her. She tried to teach it to me, pass it on like a family trade, but I couldn't do it like she did. No one could. The joke is a legacy.

At dinner the other night, my sister was at work and my stepdad was gone, and it was just my mom and the kids and I. We were eating corn and vaguely burnt sweet potatoes, and my mother said to my five-year-old sister, out of the blue, "Hey, do you wanna show Shady the joke I taught you today?"

It was surprising, that she still taught her kids frivolous things like jokes. But there was my little sister, stuffing corn in her mouth, saying in the incredibly loud voice that can only come from the fourth out of five children, "Okay. So. Um. There was a frog, and she said -- 'HI I'M A BIGMOUTH FROG AND I DON'T HAVE ANY BABIES!'"

"No, it goes, 'Mother Bigmouth Frog didn't know what to feed her babies."

"Oh. HAHA! Okay. So, um, mother bigmouth frog did not know what to feed her babies. And she said -- um, so she went to a, um. A, um."

Like I said, no one could tell this joke like Story.

"Let me tell it," my mom said. My mother's parenting involves little involvement and few hugs, but it works well. (Correction: used to. There have been noticeably more hugs recently, or at least since Martensen showed up in a suit and taught the kids how to hold hands.) Her sentimentality is usually well-hidden, but in this case, I was reminded that she does have the same heart and memory I have. And I realized, as she told the joke to the table of messy eaters, if her heart were a pie chart of all that she cares about most tenderly, there would be a substantial section reserved for this joke alone.

"Mother Bigmouth Frog," she began softly, "didn't know what to feed her babies. So she went to the fish! And she said," she cleared her throat, looked at my brother out of the corner of her eye, and, opening her mouth as wide as possible, stretching the words over each other, said, "HI, MISTER FISH! WHAT DO YOU FEED YOUR BABIES?"

My brother, always the slapstick comedian, collapsed out of his chair. The girls laughed, and my mom ignored him. "The fish said, 'I feed my babies moss from the bottom of the pond.' And the bigmouth frog thought, I don't want to feed my babies moss, so she hopped away. Then, she went to the..."

"Turtle?" I said, leaning on my elbow, waiting for it to be over. I knew this joke better than anything I had ever been taught. It was my alphabet song, first ten numbers, how to spell my name.

"Yes! Mother Bigmouth Frog went to the turtle. And she said..." my brother braced himself, "...'HI, MISTER TURTLE! WHAT DO YOU FEED YOUR BABIES?'" My mother is very good at this joke. The boy fell under the table, his sisters erupted into giggles, and the joke continued. "The turtle said, 'I feed my babies little crawdads.'"

"Turtles eat lettuce," I interrupted. She frowned.

"No one asked. SO," she turned to the kids, "the bigmouth frog thought, I don't want to feed my babies little crawdads. So, she went to the..." leaning forward, eyebrows raised, "crocodile. And she said, 'HI, MISTER CROCODILE! WHAT DO YOU FEED YOUR BABIES???" The question was quieter this time, equally big-mouthed, and my brother was too enthralled to remember his self-appointed cue. "And the crocodile said..." Her voice wasn't lowered comically like it was for the fish and the turtle. This time it was just her own, quiet and cool and eerily dangerous. "'I feed my babies bigmouth frogs.'

"And the bigmouth frog said..." Her mouth closed around itself, a tiny pinhole just big enough to release the small, high-pitched words, "Oh. Thank you very much."

The kids laughed and laughed, pounding the table, mouths full of corn. I frowned at the plate, contemplating. "Wait..." I said, old gears beginning to turn.

They looked at me.

And, for the first time in all my life, it clicked into place. I dropped the fork. "OH! THE BIGMOUTH FROG WAS TALKING WITH A SMALL MOUTH TO DISGUISE HERSELF FROM BEING A BIGMOUTH FROG SO THE CROCODILE WOULDN'T EAT HER!"

The kids stopped laughing. The two-year-old looked disappointed. "Wait," my mom said. "You mean all this time, you didn't get the joke?"

"NO! I just thought it was funny because your mouth did that funny thing! I DIDN'T THINK THERE WAS AN INTELLIGENCE TO IT!"

She turned to my brother. They were still laughing. "Toby, did you get it?"

"Uhh, yeah." My brother is barely above average. This is below average for my mom, dad, sister, and I. Plus he does really stupid stuff all the time, like light things on fire and stick the hose in the heating vent. And he has the kind of social skills that got him shanked in the neck with a pencil twice in kindergarten. I didn't believe him.

"At least I was smart enough not to get STABBED in KINDERGARTEN."

But by then everyone was laughing, loud, big-family laughs of spewed corn and uneaten sweet potatoes. My mother rolled her eyes and the dog climbed out from under the table, waiting for plates to clean. "Story should've been here. This was a very big moment. My life has come full circle. The stars have aligned."

Even though my moments of revelation only ever remind me how behind I am in the world, it feels good to finally get it, you know? To realize stuff for yourself, even if it's already been realized before. To hold the air still and line up the world in words. And it's nice to be reminded that my mother cares a lot more than the average person, though she hides it more than most, and it's nice to hear children laugh as the dog eats more sweet potatoes than anyone I've ever known.

surroundings: the exposed process of a blog post

There is a kitten in my lap.

I'm in a Dad Office, house-sitting for a strangely put-together-looking family of four. There's a corgi with separation anxiety and a fat orange cat who never shows up and a "rambunctious" calico kitten whose softness can only be described by a drawing rubbed down with the backend of a pencil, or a photograph pulled up on Photoshop with the contrast brought down a whole lot.

It smells good in here. Like Good Dad. It's a strange smell: comfort and safety, combined with middle-aged man. Kind of moth-y. There's a swivel chair and a closet of old coats and a notepad and jar of paper clips and pens. It's extremely stereotypical, with files and folders and Post-it notes. A book about volcanoes. Why is th... what...?

Cats are so warm. I'm bad at drawing cats. They're too fluid, the line of them is too continuous. I can't draw women, either. But I can draw dogs! And men. Even self-portrait-ish stuff, I draw myself as a dude just because their lines are easier. That paragraph has too many short sentences. Christie would be disappointed.

The kitten is mewing in its sleep, and I'm worried the keyboard is too loud. (That's a compound sentence, but it wasn't before I added the comma.)

I just realized I can't move. I have nothing profound to say today. I already made a post this morning about Victoria's Secret and mirrors and the patriarchy but decided against posting it. I keep doing that... not posting stuff. I do make the posts, they're just too much to publish. It's like I'm stuck in this spiral, where no matter what I talk about, or how long I talk about it, I always end up on the same subject. And I don't want to blog about that subject.

So I will blog about my surroundings. If you're still reading this, congratulations on dedication. Every window is open and this morning two guys were yelling outside and one of them said, "AT LEAST I'M NOT A RAGING ALCOHOLIC!" but he yelled it in a way and at a volume decibel that made him sound a lot like a raging alcoholic.

The trees look sick. All of them. The corgi is under the desk, with infinite enthusiasm to see me at any given moment.

The cat's just really sleepy, still sprawled across my lap. I can't move. She's so small, and delicate... I should figure out how to draw cats. And women. Nah, women are scary. Um, hm. Something profound about cats... They're animals, with teeth, and instincts. So are dogs. Without size and circumstance, they'd just eat each other. And us. Worth reading? Something to think about?

Oh, I'm not a prophet. I've got nothing new to say, I'm fifteen, you could do better. It's a beautiful day. The cat is awake, and watching me type. I don't think she likes me, I'm just warm. Wait. That's it! THAT'S THE PROFOUND CONCLUSION! THE RELATIVE ANSWER I'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR! Oh, it's like when people touch me meaning to touch someone else, it's got nothing to do with me, I'm just easily available! Oh! Oh.

Is that sad?

I don't think so... I mean, I like kittens sleeping on my lap. They're warm too. But... they don't really, love me, they just sleep with me.

There ya have it, revelation. Brought to you by yours truly. Now I have to wrap it up with the punchline that ties everything together:

Thank you for caring enough about the life of Shady to read something this mindless. But the art is always better than the artist, unless you happen to do it right.

An Open Letter to Coffee (from February)

Dearest coffee,

     You seem to be the only reason I get out of bed in the mornings anymore. Lying sideways, checking for the monsters who must have crawled in and whispered memories of childhood trauma into the aches in my shoulders and back. Staring at the time, thinking of all the things I need to do, all the people to talk to, books to return, jobs to get done as sorrow curls up in bed next to me, none of those get me up anymore. It's just you. The thought of you, patiently existing, waiting for me to wake the house up with the smell of you. Not sunrise, not hope. Just you. You.

     You make me sick, you know. I thought it would get better eventually, thought it would wear off over the years. Thought time would heal me, like they say. Thought maybe if I ignored it, the sick, it would go away, get tired, but it didn't. It didn't. It stayed and I stayed and you stayed and I think maybe "loyalty" is a godly term for "addict" because you tear my gut up, coffee, you hurt me inside. I'm sorry.

     I love you, coffee. You know that, don't you? Maybe that's the worst part of all this. I do though, I love you. I love the smell of you, the sound of you, the warmth in my hands just to hold you. To kiss the surface of the mug. I love it. I love the touch of you before even taking a sip, just resting there in my hands, nothing getting accomplished, just a placid sigh released of another dream forgotten as the steam fogs up my glasses.

     You wash the dreams away, coffee. The voices and hands, monsters and men, ghosts of cruelly kind words which should never have been spoken, you wash them away like sunrise does to night. You make me forget. You make me think in a higher vocabulary. You warm me, you wake me, you align my scattered thoughts.

     It shouldn't worry you, should it? Every human being, as a fact, is driven by the burning plea at the core of their heart spelling "Love me. Love me, damn it." You are no different, are you? Of course you wanted to be loved, otherwise you wouldn't have tried so awfully hard. You would have started black and bitter. You would have stained my teeth. But you didn't, not until it was too late. If I give you a piece of my small, angry heart, you'll appreciate it, won't you? You'll treat me kindly? You'll soften my insides, make the day more bearable by the thought of you?

     I know you're bad for me, coffee, but you're just so good. Tea won't cut it anymore, I don't care what the hipster poets say, they don't know love until they know you. Or -- wait, was that Jesus? I don't remember, through your grace of forgetfulness. Take the memories, please. Test my greatness. Take the softness from the voice, take the truth from the answers. Make it mean. Make it purposeful. Make it want me to hurt and then make me forget, please, coffee.

     You're the only reason I get out of bed anymore.

     You make me sick.

     I love you.

     Yours, still addicted, unfortunately,                

February          

PS: This is really only addressed to coffee, I could never love a human like this.

Observations From The Orthodontist

Every kid in the county has the same orthodontist.

It's the only piece of 'community' we really all share; this isn't a small town. I'm sure there are other orthodontists around, but you never hear about them. You just assume everyone has this one thing in common. Like how there's only one downtown, only one bike shop, only one dome-shaped cathedral.

This orthodontist office is an extremely peculiar place, as far as orthodontist offices go. I only just realized this today. I've been going there since my sister got braces like four years ago, but it always just seemed normal.

It isn't. Not anymore.

The first time you go in, it doesn't seem all that strange. America's Funniest Home Videos on the televisions, strange little sculptures scattered here and there around the waiting room. Some photographs on the walls of the doctor with patients, teeth newly straightened. It's no big deal the first time you see him, the orthodontist, in some sort of strangely colored silk shirt, a shadowy beard as if his wife had forgotten to remind him to shave for a few days. Looking just a little off. Maybe just having a bad week or something.

You don't think too hard about it the first time, when it's just your sister getting her teeth tied together.

Years go by. You get your own braces.

And every visit, AFV still plays, on every single television. The televisions multiply. The photographs sprawl, you wonder if there is room enough on the walls for all the sets of straightened teeth, and you realize the rows and rows of patients are like a timeline and you wonder exactly how long this doctor has been doing this. You realize he never really shaves. And it's not even that he grows a beard from it, a nice, purposeful-looking, working-man beard, it just always looks like an accident. Forgotten and neglected. Like if depression were a beard instead of a clinical condition. Every shirt he wears is silk or striped or rainbow-tinted or polka-dotted. Anything you would see in a thrift store and pick up just to laugh at, he's wearing it.

It gets worse.

The sculptures multiply. I heard his wife makes them, it's the only explanation as to why there are close to one hundred paper-mache monsters crammed in the small building of dentist chairs and televisions. Strange, ugly, uncomfortable sea monsters of bright neon green and purple and pink and blue, with wide mouths and comical teeth, creepy frog fingers and wires hanging them from the ceilings, from the walls, they multiply. The monsters. They are everywhere. As if some sick artist decided to make a statement, something to comfort the kids who are about to be made ugly, telling them, hey, it's okay. You know why? You're all ugly anyway!

And it's true, each of the thousands of photographs proves it. Each kid looks just a little more proud of themselves, arm around a man in a depressed-looking beard and silk shirt, teeth straight, but still awkward. Still uncomfortable. Still sweaty or pimply or slouchy or nervous. As if the braces had not only straightened their teeth, but had left a permanent dent in their self-esteem, something not regained with the braces' removal. They take something from you, braces. It's in the eyes. All the eyes. Not just the monster eyes, the photograph eyes too, sprawling from the walls onto the ceiling, every square inch, eyes and names and dates.

It gets worse. The televisions. The home videos. The same host, same host, same host, you know he's done laughing by now, this is a lifetime of the same slapstick fall and lack of catch. Same torture. Same torture. Same torture. It's in the eyes, in his eyes, he's tired, he's sick, he ages eons with each show, it's only a matter of time before he straps a bomb to himself on live television. But then there is the question of time in the boxes. The people, they all look so old, so ancient. The show itself is old. Has it gotten cancelled yet? Do people still take home videos? Are they still alive?

It's almost like the televisions are stuck in a time warp, where each episode is older than the last. Time moves backwards through film quality. Slow, monotonous, repetitive. A kid is falling. There's another kid falling. Another kid falling. Another dog falling. Another mom falling. Another kid falling, kid falling, kid falling, your palms are sweating and you don't know why the audience is smiling when the child is crying and the people in the waiting room chuckle to themselves and then cough and feel ashamed.

Oh, and the sculptures, you know some nurse is going to hit her head on them one day. They crawl the place at night, you can tell. Small, palm-sized ones, tissue-box-sized, child-sized, bicycle-sized. They occupy every foot of the place, floor to ceiling. Huge plastic eyes and wire fingers with circular, colored discs at the tips, lips wide and curled in inhuman expression; constant, static, locked in time. Watching. They move somewhere, you know they move, you know they can't stay locked up here forever like the AFV movies and the photographs and the doctor, they are wild things with snaggled mouths and teeth and fingers and there are no windows. It's a trap. A cage. The sea monsters are trapped and they growl like a dentist chair. They rip each other's teeth out.

But then of course you know you are just being paranoid, and the beard can't help being depressed, it just feels like maybe it's taken a turn for the worst and needs to be locked up in a white-paneled room because maybe this life is too much to bear, maybe it didn't want to live in a room locked in time and AFV and sea monsters and silk shirts and ugly teenagers in and out and in and out and maybe the beard just wants to stay in bed for a few years until someone kind comes along and drills a hole through its head.

The beard seems to have more personality than the man who wears the silk shirts.

It is then, right when the nurse with the mask over her nose pushes the button where the seat goes whirrrrrrr and leans back ever so slowly, right when she asks you, "How are you, Shady?" you realize the only thing you know for certain is that you are not an okay person and this is not an okay place to be. You are one of the sea monsters now, one of the cats on the TV, and you will not be smiling when they take the photograph if they ever let you out again. But you say, "Good, how are you?" and then you surrender your mouth.

It's okay to tell him, when the orthodontist asks, and your mouth is already held open with all the stuff inside, cotton and fingers and metal things and whatnot, making speech impossible. When he asks, "How are you?" you look him in the eyes and say clearly, "I would like to bleed, sir," and he laughs at his own stupid question. The photographs stare and the sea monsters stare and the television laughs because someone fell out of a boat again, someone fell out of a boat.

A monster fell out of a boat in an orthodontist's office and I really hope I am not the only one who saw it.

saving miller moths

Saving miller moths is a very sad thing.

You see one there, struggling against the window, and you think, I can't let you die in here, slamming your head into a dimension you can't understand. So you say, "Here, come into my hand, I'll take you outside," and the moth flies away, shouting, "I CAN DO IT ALL BY MYSELF." And then it slams itself into glass again.

But this time you don't have a choice, you've already invested time into this moth, so you chase after it with your hand over the glass, saying, "I'm trying to help you, moth, I don't want to hurt your wings," but the moth doesn't listen and doesn't stop and doesn't see the open door.

And you're in this terrible war between good intent and desperation, the moth fighting for independence and you fighting for the moth. There are no glasses or cups in sight, nothing to help you help him, and eventually you just grab him as carefully as possible, tiny heartbeat pounding furiously into your fingertips as you run outside and let go.

You watch him fly away, and then you look at your hands, and see the wing dust on them, and you're crying, "I'M SORRY, MILLER MOTH! I DIDN'T MEAN TO HURT YOU, I JUST WANTED YOU SAFE, YOUR WINGS WERE SO BEAUTIFUL, AND NOW YOU'RE GOING TO DIE OUT THERE BECAUSE OF THE DUST ON MY HANDS I STOLE FROM YOU AND IT'S MY FAULT, IT'S MY FAULT, IT'S MY FAULT"

And this is why miller moths are a sad thing to save.

Adventures with the Ghost of Self-Pity

Knight in Tie-Dye -- PART 2 [the piano]

The piano was rolled out of the big practice room at the beginning of the night, before the house was open, while the halls were still empty save for a few hippies and hobbits. Men's choir wheeled it down the hall to a corner by the auditorium doors, in front of the windows, with a ledge to sit at and play.

Tommy Marcus is the most talented pianist at the school. I wouldn't call him one of the prodigies, like the violinist who serenades the stage during lunch, or the Harvard to-be graduate, but he's got a way with the stand-up box of strings. It becomes him. As good as his is with the piano, the voice alongside it beats all else, and I knew before I ever saw him he was, if not prodigy, an extremely talented kid.

He's accepted as if a prodigy, though. The other talented pianists wordlessly regard him as their superior, making room at the center of the ledge for his choice of song, the same way the other musicians let the violinist own the stage whenever she so desires. It's out of respect for the song, and all songs, and music everywhere -- the better musician plays first.

So, as the audience members began to file in, standing in line and getting their tickets marked, Tommy played and he sang and his friends circled around the piano, leaning on their elbows (like bicycles), and sang with him, entertaining themselves before showtime, eventually abandoning the piano in the hallway before the curtain rose.

After the concert was over, and after the terrifying but good-natured hug, Thomas (the cellist) and I were looking for my costume in the band room. It was easier then, after all the other bags had been picked up and gone home, but all we found was an empty floor. To greet us when we left, a song floated down the hallway, just around the bend where the borrowed piano rested.

By this time, Thomas was beginning to notice my entire demeanor becoming substantially less like myself and more like Martensen. I glided instead of slouched, I twirled instead of turned. I no longer had to worry about being too shy or too awkward or too much like myself, watching things happen and recording them for later. In the tie-dye and Levis, beads and bandanna, I was now a performer, a participant, and a part of the world around me. By wearing his clothes, I took on his place in the world, wore his masks, and could no longer stand to observe without participating.

And I knew this song.

I knew it from Lyssa, who, during a passing period before science one day, decided to rock me back and forth and sing it to me like a lullaby. Lyssa is shorter than me by a little under a foot, and has a very powerful and passionate voice with a habit of changing keys at unplanned bars. She sang "Hallelujah," the Leonard Cohen one. After a few lines, I noted that the song had obviously touched her in some way, so I went home that night and listened to it 36 times before I went to sleep.

I knew this song.

As this fact slowly clicked within, I ran barefoot down the hallway as it neared the first chorus, which timed my arrival so perfectly I (Martensen) could not help but meet it halfway. I belted the word as loud as I could, before realizing I (Shady) cannot sing very well. 

I sing like a cellist, which means I hear notes and can mimic them eventually, but my voice is not well-trained enough to hit on the notes right away. I did not hit a single syllable correctly at the hallelujah I slid in singing with all I had. The singers turned and looked at me, all dressed in black, Tommy and his friend at the piano, a couple leaning against the lid and two girls at the other end, sitting or standing by the windows. They had obviously rehearsed this, with well-planned harmonies and practiced melodies. Or they were just naturally talented.

The song continued, and I, in an effort to save face, continued singing. I, Shady, dressed in brightly colored seventies-themed apparel, still smelling like a gay boy, continued singing, reaching pitch and holding it best I could as the chorus rose. They smiled at me, considerably amused, and a few of the smiles stitched themselves into giggles between notes, and I joined the ensemble.

I couldn't leave.

I knew this song, and no one was coming to save me, and there was no way I could leave. So I just kept going. There were instances in the song when some kids forgot the words, or didn't know them, or couldn't see them from the phone Tommy's friend was reading off of from the music rack. The two girls left halfway through the song, a bass vocalist joined at one point and hummed harmonies, and I sat down on the ledge and sang with all I had (which is not as much as Martensen does).

By the time it ended, and it began to sink in what exactly I had done, Tommy leaned across his friend, looked me in the eye, and gave me a fist-bump. Which was exactly the moment I realized I was still myself and had just accomplished a horrendous thing, and succeeded. The pros to wearing a choir boy's clothes had evened out alongside the cons.

Before another song started and I embarrassed myself all over again, my phone rang, and Roonie saved me.

"Shady."
"Yes?"
"Did your mom come to pick you up yet?"
"No, I think her phone is turned off..."
"Oh. Sorry. You're still at the school though?"
"Yeah, participating in the experience of life. Why?"
"I left my makeup bag in the choir room, by the water fountain. Is there any way you could get it for me, and bring it to school tomorrow?"
"Yes! I'll go do that now."
"Oh thank you! Thank you so much!"
"No problem."

Just before I hung up, like a nostalgic afterthought of a dream in the morning right as you forget it, she said, "Wait. Shady. Shady."

"Yes?"

"Thank you for being my knight in tie-dye."

Thank you for being my knight in tie-dye.

So I found Roonie's bag and didn't find mine, and sat and listened to Tommy's piano as I quietly thanked Brady for the hug and Martensen for the clothes and Lyssa for the song and Roonie for the phone call, like prayers to humans I know cannot hear me, and I showered twice that night and still smelled like sweat and sunrise the next morning.

MORAL: It is best not to ask about the four-minute hallway exchange of rolled-up Levis and a single sock which took place the morning after, and sometimes losing things makes for good memories.