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.