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"