Heather
Mornings in high school, I would wake up in a dark room, too early for the sun to be out, but time for me to be up. Pulling myself from the numbness of my bed, half-read books (The Awakening and Rip Van Winkle…really) and dull flashlights with dying Duracells crashed to the floor, remnants of one day’s unfinished work as I awoke to another’s. I faced the day with debt: Already calculating how many hours it would be till I could re-enter the womb, a reverse birth. I kicked my legs out from under the covers – wrapped like a mess of unfurled sail – and let my feet touch the sea foam green carpet, as though I had slept on a dock. I put my head in my hands – half for effect and half to brace myself. Sometimes minutes would pass before I realized that my right eye was still tightly closed, shielding at least part of my face from the yellow light of the Big Bird lamp that somehow managed to survive the adolescent purging of my room. I made it to the bathroom and the cold tile seeped up my legs and pulled the warmth from my body. Out the window, the lawn was still a black mass, but the tree limbs touched off streaks of gray sun, the backlight for seeing your wide red taillights wind down the driveway in the dimness. That’s when it would hit me each morning: As I went to pull the bathroom window shade to watch you leave, I realized you were gone for good and wouldn’t be leaving anymore; your Cadillac was parked in the driveway and hadn’t been driven in weeks. The loss grew through me like a root – a kick to the gut, lava flowing backwards into the earth. That explained the rising pain. It was a grief as commonplace as brushing teeth and washing hair. Run out of toothpaste and buy more. Run out of grief and look out the 6am window and all that you don’t see reminds you of what should be there. Then the day really began. Then I was really awake. I opened my other eye and in the brackish light of the pre-dawn bathroom, you died your daily death.
Lcooper
The wind forgot to wake up that morning and so we motored through the impossible stillness, straining our eyes to distinguish passing boats from fog drawn illusion.
I have never seen the ocean so calm. So quiet. So solemn and sleepy.
So naked.
Molly
So, one day in 8th grade, I arrived to school stoned and two hours late, and decided that junior high was a clown factory. My brother Joe and I had just taken a breezy mile-long walk through our north Phoenix neighborhood and it seemed like any time we wanted to look at something—the leather-skinned geezers jogging through the park in 100-degree heat, the pale sky, the yellow fall leaves shaped like little sardines—we could stop the frame. Time waited. It was ten a.m. by the time we yanked open the steel door of the admin office.
I watched the secretaries and other administrators with my eyes spoiled by TV—I saw only flaws: jowls, double-chins, and skin-tag moles. Lumpy noses, elephantine ears, and stooped shoulders. A man in a brown polyester suit jacket slouched over the light brown IBM selectric, a woman with a pocked face held a brown phone against her ear and used her finger to wipe lipstick off her teeth. Brown ties. Brown shoes. Brown bag lunches. Mr. Ritchie the principal bobbed by us with his blotchy sausage neck and bald bulb head, following the brown accent arrow painted on the wall.
Brown. Clown. Factory. The realization had been seeping in a little at a time for the last year. My school was a stampede of 1,000 kids, five-hundred in each grade. Teachers were regularly bullied by students. Kids in plaid shorts harangued substitutes until they admitted how little they were paid for the day. One time the lesbian math teacher in the brown vinyl jacket nervously explained that the term “homosexual” meant nothing more than “same sex” as she got called that over and over by the preppy girl who finally paused, listened to the definition, and replied, “I’ll just call you ‘homo’ then.”
Something about the early morning high made me feel strong and unafraid of these kids who often aimed their sights at me. I stood there that day as I waved goodbye to my seventh-grade brother, my eyes bloodshot, my androgynous shoulder-length haircut flat as usual, my pop-rocker t-shirt tight around my potbelly, my hands on hips in a swayback slouch–I looked out at the dirt and dry grass and sad, squat buildings of my junior high, gave a grandiose nod, and decided that human civilization was a lame-ass joke. At age thirteen, this was short-cut spirituality. Philosophy. It got me through the next five years.
dg
Wake:
“It’s just like a shell, Dar.”
Uncle number one takes my hand.
And, The Other Uncle from whom I’ve gotten more Hallmark cards than times I’ve heard his voice.
There she was, the distinct profile of a woman who was my model for modesty.
Her plastic 1960s jewelry gets passed down and I ride in a limo for the first time in my life.
Wake:
A piece of my heart belongs in the Yucatan. I know because I compare moments of happiness to riding in that motorboat through the mangroves while eating homemade ceviche.
Some day, water won’t look like this. It’s so simple today getting pumped through this little boat while the exotic birds cluster in the sun on bird island.
Wake:
I’ve bought a pair of sunglasses again. They cost me $5, as usual, but this time there are two things that make them problematic:
1. They make me look like the hipster I try not to be.
2. I can’t remember the events that occupy my day for the duration that I wear them.
Well, not very well at least. It’s like sleepwalking.
I bought them in Washington DC and the next day I saw the Sea Monsters IMAX at the Smithsonian. I have a strange floating sort of memory of the museum that day as well as the library of congress and the two cross-dressed men who wished me a “good evening” at 10 o’clock am at the bus stop. It was shady, or shaded- that I recall, but not dark enough to be mistook for night. Since that day it’s been hard to recall any particular chocolate milkshake or walk to the BART station. Summertime has become the equivalent to a classroom daydream.
Last night I dreamt there were IMAX sea monsters in the Berkeley Marina. I could see them swimming through the surface of the water with their dinner-plate-sized eyeballs and their razor-sharp under-bites.
Bryan
towards hope and away from terror?
Plastic men, evanescent dreams
Anonymous
I hadn’t seen him for over a year, not since his 77th birthday lunch at the Chinese restaurant across the street. Not since the days of his forever grip, legs locked around my seven year old torso, squirming to escape his muscled legs, formerly belonging to the U.S. Navy. Not since the days he pretended “Osh Kosh B’gosh,” my overalls, was impossible to pronounce and I had to tug the words out of his mouth. Not since the day he touched you and fractured the entire family fifteen years later, when you finally let his touch out.
Now I see him, lying in his bed, where the nurses say he’s been for three months straight. His feet estranged from the tiled floor of the Home, the one haunted by war stories and failing, purple hearts. I stand there next to you, staring at the frailty before us, his face in a constant expression of shock with wide blue eyes and a mouth agape and chapped, used mostly to suck down his red medicine. I wonder how you feel, standing in the same room as him, standing in the same room as your loved ones who stood silently before, who now nearly shout to get him to hear.
The volume isn’t the issue. His brain has stopped processing words that come in through his ears anyway, so they write it down for him. Chocolate or vanilla? No, he couldn’t come today, he’s at college. There’s supposed to be a heat stroke this week. This works and he shouts back his answers with the same surprised face. You grip The New York Times in your hands, burying yourself in the op-eds, allowing yourself to be consumed by the politics and Maureen Dowd’s witty criticism. I stare at the brown scabs on top of his head, wondering how they got there. Does he talk to the man on the other side of the curtain, his roommate? Does he even know he shares a room with someone?
After an hour everyone is sufficiently uncomfortable and filled with ice cream. We both walk out with little more than a wave, and I wonder if we both want that to be goodbye.
Rebecca
At the patio table Diana had told Kate’s parents that she liked cheese and they gone inside to get something that they wondered if she would like. “I don’t like it,” Kate announced in front of her parents and Diana assured her friend that she probably would. The Kate’s nose pulled up to thin her hazel eyes to a squint and Diana looked away, embarrassed at how much she knew of the shape of the green set in brown. One of Kate’s eyes like a seven-pointed star and the other like a handful of stones, dense at the center and fading outward. As soon as Kate’s mother had shut the door she rose and moved to the edge of the deck. Diana followed her, sitting down a few feet apart, hesitant to touch the ground. Below them the June grass rolled down a steep slope and a group of fir trees rose sharply, cut by the fresh plane of grass so the trees appeared to be only four feet tall. Until dinner the yard had been a child-sized world with miniature Christmas trees and grass-green knees and not looking in each others’ faces too much. Diana tugged at the jade square of napkin in her lap, hoping it would conceal more of her guilt. Even though the grownups had left them, Kate and Diana knew the day could not be restored and kicked their legs wistfully into the open air and waited like strangers.
The parents returned with a piece of cloth which furled open to drop a chunk of brown cheese onto Diana’s plate. She nibbled and then bit and told the grownups that she did like the cheese and they produced more and Kate didn’t know her anymore.
Upstairs, later, Kate wanted to show Diana how she could play “Norwegian Wood” on the keyboard but needed a moment to get ready. Diana paced around the upstairs and finally went into her friend’s very own bathroom and sat down on the floor to cool off. She spread her toes against the celadon tiles and leaned back against the matching tub. The counter was green. The porcelain fixtures were green. She got up for a moment and stood in the tub behind the frosted glass door, watching her body move against the green wall. She pulled off her shirt and wanted to turn on the water to get a better idea of How Kate Must Have Looked. Below the mirror was a dish of flat little candies meant to look like rocks in moss, myrtle, and emerald. She slipped one of each color into her mouth so that her friend might not notice the depletion in case she was watching the color-proportions. The candies were almost certainly there for only for decoration. She crunched one of the candies desperately between her teeth and protected the other two on her tongue. In the mirror she checked to see if her tongue was green but it was as pink as before. She rubbed her taste buds furiously against the other two hoping for two green stripes but accomplishing only a slightly whiter patch at the center. From the other room Kate called that she was ready and Diana slipped the dinner napkin out of her waist band and opened it over the toilet. The waxy brown cheese fell into the bowl and she jammed the napkin into a corner underneath the sink.
“Your shirt’s on backwards,” Kate said with her fingers poised above opening notes and then played and sang, quiclkly.
That December, when Kate’s father died she locked herself into her bathroom, Diana heard, and didn’t accept food. Diana imagined lying on the white carpet and slipping her fingers through the crack under the door to touch the cold tile. She thought about her friend slumped against the same green bath tub, filling every basin up so that she could be surrounded by pools of clear green water. Diana imagined it so many times that later she thought it was true and told her friends about how she lost her first girl friend that winter but had tried to retrieve her, waiting patiently outside the door with a tray of cheese. If Only She Had Known, Diana thought, she would not have eaten those little rocks.
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