Where Nobody Is

Last weekend, a friend asked to go for a walk—
somewhere without people, she said
She doesn’t want to see people:
hiking trails are packed,
so I suggest our town’s cemetery.

There are people, you know, but not really.
She agrees.
We meet at the entrance.
What a beautiful place to be put to rest—
overlooking the pacific.

We walk up and down the hills,
reading tombstones, sharing stories.
It’s all too familiar. I spent my childhood there:
my Austrian mother obsessed with death.

My friend spoke of her mother’s passing,
and her ashes are in the closet
under a fake candle, and how each day,
she whispers good night.

No wind in this cemetery; trees are still.
Something in the distance beside a gravestone
caught our eye—a balloon on a stick in ground,
gently swaying back and forth. flowers beside.

We glance at one another and walk in its direction.
We arrive to gravestone of Jose Garcia:
January 13, 1989 - April 1, 2016.
A photo of his truck in the lower corner:
gone but never forgotten. joined the twenty-seven club.

I glance at my watch.
It’s his birthday.
He called us to sing to him and we did:
we wished him a peaceful journey

I still ask if a cemetery
is really an empty place.

The Gasconade

— for M

---

We make Southern Missouri by dusk,
arrive at your river, park, & walk
along your shy, thin corpse.
I come to you by firefly tonight
to do what children do with mothers
and rivers: to take from you
without asking & have you pass
again from my life. You will not
remember that you are dead.
That your body & blood went bad
on alcohol & grief. But this is before
all that. Before recompense &
Lethe, & your final command
that we not do as you had
and carry it with us like a glacial pressure
and wound. This is what the dead know.
Do not tarry on the two miscarried &
the one child taken by fall. I will not so much
as whisper it in the eddy of your ear.
For I come to you now before that agony.
Even before I was born, when we met
in that neither space, when your heart
stopped for minutes during the final push.
As if you or I or something could not decide.
This time, it is before I existed, unless
we always are & were & will be again.
The river seems to imply. You may not
know me. But you will know my voice
because you live within it. It is before
your courtship with the boy, my father,
who would take you off the farm to Chicago
and Palo Alto, the unenvied edges
of the world. Before even the trip to Tulsa
or your wedding in the little Chetopa church
or your honeymoon at the Bob Cummings
Motor Lodge in Joplin. Before your sister
introduced you to the river that would change
your course. The transaction of rivers is
transactional. One becomes another.
They are less noun & more verb. Such that
the plate-on-plate New Madrid quake
caused the Mississippi to run backwards
for three days straight & reversed time.
I come to you now by broken light.
By the heather atop a field of wheat.
By the immortal moan of cicada.
By shadow of the co-op grain elevator.
By the last cow into the barn for milking.
By the kittens drowned in a burlap sack.
The little skip in your heart when you ran
too fast along the irrigation ditch.
That was you, or me, the voice inside you.
The Irish in the wind & the expanse
of the large that pares us down to seed
and lifts us into confluence. Though
I am doubtful you found peace,
frantic as you were in the letting
and the loss & cautious not to offend.
I want to tell you what your river says to me.
It boasts of nothing or grand nothingness.
Fanann muid. We wait.
Leanann muid ar aghaidh. We abide.

An Interview with Chioma Urama

The following is a transcription from an in-depth interview with the poet and professor, Chioma Urama, and Co- Editorial Director Tyra Douyon. Some portions have been excised from the transcript at Tyra’s discretion, or condensed for clarity and content.

Chioma Urama is a storyteller of Igbo and African American heritage. She creates and grounds channels through painting, poetry, prose, and oral storytelling. Using these mediums she creates pieces that question what has been shattered, exploded, and transformed in the cultural traditions of African American and Indigenous people. Her creations are the result of a deeply meditative process, connecting people, patterns, and ideas in efforts to heal herself and the collective.

A Body of Water is Chioma Urama's debut collection of poetry. Her poetry and fiction have been published in the Southern Humanities Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Paper Darts, the Normal School, and Prairie Schooner. She received a Fred Shaw Fiction Prize and an honorable mention from the Lindenwood Review Lyric Essay Contest. Urama is a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship alumna and a graduate of the University of Miami MFA program, where she was a Michener Fellow. She taught creative writing and English composition at the University of New Orleans. Her writing has been described as intuitive, intentional, and heart connected. Please visit her website https://www.chiomaurama.com for more information.

Tyra: When did you start writing A Body of Water and how long did it take you?

Chioma: So I started writing the poems around 2016 when I was still in my MFA. I was in my last year of my MFA, but a lot of the different poems that are in this collection have been answering questions that have been circling me my entire life. I started organizing the book around 2017 after I left Miami. I did my MFA in Miami and I moved to New Orleans which is a place where I have no connections and I didn't know anyone. I started writing because I wanted a better understanding of where I was heading. Most of my family stayed— I’m from the DMV area, from Virginia and a lot of my family is from Maryland and D.C. as well— and they stayed in that area for the majority of their lives. But I continued to move and leave and go to different states. I wasn’t really sure what I was searching for or what was missing, but I know that a lot of wisdom can be mined from the past, so I started looking back on my own past to examine where I was in the present.

Tyra: Okay, so you started it in 2016 and then it was published a few years later in 2021?

Chioma: Yes, I received the award in 2020 and then it was published in 2021.

Tyra: Okay. I think a lot of people go in with this idea that to write a book, if you really dedicate yourself, it can take 6 months to a year. You can get it out and published. But it’s a process too and you have to live while you write through it and you might take breaks. I think it's important for our readers to know that because sometimes you can go in with the mindset that you should just be rushing this or by the time you graduate you should have something published. I know people push that narrative a lot.

Chioma: Yeah, yeah, to publish around graduation for sure. My intention with this collection wasn’t publishing. For me it was to better understand myself and my own life. And I was thinking wouldn’t it be wonderful if this was organized in some cohesive way that I could look at my entire life and for any generations that are coming after me, they wouldn’t have to do this kind of searching to find certain ancestors or certain recipes, or places, people… we’ll have one place where our information is collected. So that was why I started organizing it. It’s important to think about why you want to put a book together. And not just because it’s a thing that you feel like you have to do, but what is causing you to want to arrange these things in a specific way? And I think that can really support you in creating something that is your authentic self and really something that you’re excited about creating. I think a lot of times you can get so caught up in doing what you feel like you need to or or what you’re supposed to do. You don’t actually care about what you’re creating. And so that’s something that gets lost in the artistry a lot.

Tyra: Absolutely. Like you said… [people] can get so caught up in wanting to publish and being known. Just to pause and ask yourself ‘hey, what are you doing and why are you doing this’ is so important. A second question off of that. You had all these individual poems written and then you found a cohesive theme and that’s how you put together the collection?

Chioma: Yeah, I had all these poems that I put together. I was trying to better understand myself by understanding my family, my lineage, and my heritage. And so that’s why I started organizing these pieces. I know a lot of time with Black or African-American families you get told different things in pieces. You get pieces of stories. Pieces of things. As I moved to New Orleans I started doing a lot of ancestral work. Working with my ancestors and learning how to hear them and how to channel their voices. I wanted to organize this information. I wanted to figure out what it looked like when I wrote it down and put it in one place and how that can create meaning for where I am in my life.

Tyra: I know when I read A Body of Water I could feel that energy in the pages.

Chioma: (laughs, goodnaturedly) I’m so glad.

Tyra: A Body of Water includes poems that celebrate your African American heritage and others that reflect on traumatic experiences such as the history of enslavement. What inspired you to include these difficult topics in your collection?

Chioma: So, one of the things that I understand now from creating this collection is how connected we all are. When my grandmother was pregnant with my mother she's not only creating my mother but she was also creating the cells that would later become who I am. So everything that happened to my grandmother, the good and the bad, before and after conception I was also a recipient of in some way. And I knew I needed to look at that history in order to better understand the way that they lived and I lived. The way that I loved. The way that I leave things. And how I behave. And so that’s what inspired me to include a lot of those ideas.

Tyra: I think we don’t realize how much of who we are is a part of other people. It goes from your mom, to your grandmother, to your great-grandparents, father… all of these people that build that puzzle then there’s a column of just you that you pass on to your next generation. That interconnectedness is so prevalent. Sometimes people think they’re walking through this world alone, but they really aren’t. Even if you don’t think they have a strong connection with your family they are still very much with you in the way you think and do things and you might not even realize it.

Chiome: You said it perfectly. All those things are woven into who we are and we have to look back to unpack it or we’ll continue to carry these things without really understanding why we are behaving or moving in certain ways.

Tyra: So unpacking… writing about these traumas in your family and in African American history… why specifically did you want to have poems about that and not make it a celebration of joy? I know that’s something more people are saying– ‘We want black joy, Black boy joy, Black girl magic…’ What does it mean for you to include things that we don’t want to talk about as much, especially right now.

Chioma: That’s a good question. I was talking to a friend earlier this week and they were saying how with their depression comes joy. And it’s like their joy is like this guardian of some of their lower states of consciousness right? It’s pointing to where their attention needs to be given and how joy can better flow, right? If we tend to these sadder, more traumatic moments. So for me, getting to my joy, like writing this collection, was a big part of moving to my joy and learning what I do know, what is pleasurable and what is good for me. Sometimes we want to skip over the difficult part and that is something I never found to be realistic or practical or healthy for me. It’s important to dive into those heavy emotions because the more that we’re able to feel that sadness, the more pleasure we’re able to open up to and actually feel, right?

Tyra: Yeah

Chioma: You can’t selectively numb an emotion. You numb yourself to sadness, you’re also numbing yourself to certain parts of pleasure and joy. And that’s one thing I learned through this process of writing.

Tyra: Yeah, that’s a really great point. We stop ourselves sometimes from going in that direction. It’s like that quote, you won’t know true joy unless you know true pain… unless you embrace that part that you want to hide from. I totally get that. What is your writing process—do you have a certain environment that helps you access memory, a certain routine?

Chioma: My writing process is deeply informed by Maureen Seaton who is one of my beloved professors and mentors and she’s such a beautiful teacher. One of the things she had us do is to take an unruled notebook and within that unruled notebook you kind of have the freedom to be yourself on the page. You can add stickers or pieces of magazines or just like words you’ve heard, dreams… I have so many things. Just phrases that I enjoy, songs that I enjoy. I’m also an artist so sometimes I just start sketching something or illustrating something that I want to be on the page. So, I really give myself a lot of freedom to play within my writing process. I flip the book upside down. Nothing is linear, everything is all over the place. Completely chaotic.

Tyra & Chioma: (laughing, good naturedly)

Chioma: But when you really zoom out and look at it, it really begins to make sense in a really interesting way. You start to notice different patterns in your own writing. So this process allows you to see ‘What are my patterns? Why are things that I care about? What are words that keep coming back to me? What are places I continue to revisit?’ A large part of my process is being outside and putting my feet in the grass, you know, sitting beneath the trees and communing with them. Being present with flowers and things like that. Just being out in nature and allowing myself to receive. It easily puts me in a state of receptivity.

Tyra: Yeah, Yeah Chioma: That’s what it looks like for me. Nothing linear. Lots of freedom. And lots of play.

Tyra: Yeah, I love that. [As you were sharing] I was thinking about my own writing process too because I’m a poet. I wanted to create a memory box. I’m working on poems about my grandmother and my family as well. To fill it up with pictures… and a lot of things are food related because my family is all about food and dancing and different types of laughter. The sound of dominoes clinking together… all these different memories… and I was thinking, how do I put this all together? So, I like the concept of doodling in a journal. I also like tangible things too. That might be a cool concept to get into.

Chioma: Yeah, a memory box sounds super special. I haven’t made one of those in a long time.

Tyra: (laughs, goodnaturedly)

Chioma: That sounds like a lot of fun and I think that a lot of writers, the younger generation, they aren't writing with their hands anymore which I think is really interesting because you think in a different way when you have a pen in your hand versus when you’re typing on a computer.

Tyra: Sure, sure.

Chioma: So, you know whatever that means to each individual, like that's what it means to you, but I think it’s something to consider. You think differently when you have a pen in your hand, when you have a crayon in your hand, when you have something tangible. When you’re touching physical objects and items. For me it’s important to get back to those practices.

Tyra: I love that. The world is so increasingly digital. I personally write, you know, my poems on a computer (laughs), but getting back to the paper and pen definitely is like a new experience for sure. You talked about being in nature and finding inspiration from the things that are around you. I think that’s so important too… to just get outside of your usual place. Some people really thrive on routines like [they say], ‘I wake up everyday at 5 AM and write for an hour.’ It doesn’t seem like you work within the confines of that. You’re kind of like, ‘I take from here and I take from here. I go outside. I sit by the window…’ and you let it come to you. I really like that approach. You never know what is going to inspire you. It can lead to something really beautiful.

Chioma: Uhh humm, yeah like I take my notebook everywhere. Like I don’t adhere to that 5 AM practice at all.

Chioma & Tyra: (laughing)

Chioma: It’s like if somebody's talking and I’m enjoying what they’re saying, sometimes I whip out my notebook and start doodling or writing what they’re saying.

Tyra: Yeah?

Chioma: Because you know, I feel like writing is about living. And I think it’s important to get back to that. To make sure you are living and having experiences to write about.

Tyra: I think with poetry it’s a totally different beast, right? I did the 5 AM thing when I was working on a novel.

Chioma: Me too. (laughs)

Tyra: I think it works really well for fiction or nonfiction, but poetry lives and breathes in such a different way. You really have to be outside of yourself because you’re really telling the truth, right? From beginning to end… so it’s like how can you say your truth… I don’t know, just for me… how can you say your truth within the confines of a schedule or a system? It’s almost like the truth doesn’t want to live within that. You have to be a little bit more free so you can see it from different angles. Poetry is just… different.

Chioma: I like how you said that. Poetry does need more room to move and breath. I agree.

Tyra: So, we kinda talked about this a little bit already. Family is a prevalent theme throughout the collection; what drew you to this subject matter?

Chioma: I think, especially in the U.S., we’re encouraged to believe that the past doesn’t matter. That’s the whole idea of the American Dream, that you can start here and it’s a fresh start and nothing else matters. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. I see my life as a point on a timeline that extends both forwards and backwards and we talked about this, but all the events that have happened to my family have shaped everything about me. And until we consciously engage with those events they’ll continue to shape the choices that we make, the behaviors that we have and we can respond from a place of trauma or reactivity versus actually being present with what’s happening. And that’s not to say that every choice my family has made has been an ill one, but I do recognize that was family has lived through the trauma of war and famine and enslavement and displacement and if we don’t address these truths within ourselves and examine how they impact our behavior we’ll continue to pass on these patterns that no longer serve us.

Tyra: Absolutely. Everyone has been talking about generational trauma and childhood trauma and how do we address that, how do we overcome it? So, I love the conversations that people are having and how it’s being pushed more to the forefront. Your collection really talks about that and gets to the root of that. Have you ever been hesitant to talk about your family and talk about the things you weren’t present for, like someone else’s story?

Chioma: Yeah, that’s a good question. So, when I was initially writing this, I was writing for myself and I wasn’t really thinking of publishing at all. I did my MFA in fiction. And so I wrote poetry, but I never saw myself as a poet. These were completely for myself, so I think I had a lot of freedom in that aspect of the writing. I was never thinking about an audience other than myself and maybe like one other person in the future that would come across it. And what was the second question that you had?

Tyra: Umm, how… were you ever hesitant to write about someone else’s story? You said the audience wasn’t on your mind and these poems were just for yourself, but what about the poems that you weren’t present for, you weren’t alive for. Did you ever feel weird about writing someone else’s life?

Chioma: Yeah! Yeah, I think you always want to make sure that you get it right, but I think as I began to, umm, as I began to like commune with my ancestors more deeply and understand some of the things that they live through, I think it’s important to give voice to things. Things are meant to be said and we’re never going to get rid of the lens that is ourself. So, whatever I say is always going to be filtered through me and I’m going to touch those things. Uhh, there’s no way to sanitize myself out of that experience and I don’t think I wanted to. So, I did come to a point where I did feel comfortable with working with different voices and telling different stories.

Tyra: I wanted to speak about that specifically because I’ve been grappling with that myself like ‘How much can you say? Do you want their name [in the poem]? Should you change their name? Should you have a conversation before you try and publish?’... things like that. So I always try and ask people how they approach that in their own work.

Chioma: Yeah, so another thing I want to say to that point is, when doing ancestral work, I think a lot of times we forget we can ask for permission directly. There have been a lot of poems I’ve written, not about my ancestors… sometimes you just know things… and umm there’s a difference between knowing information and having the permission to share that information. So, I would just go direct and ask if it’s okay for me to share this information? Is this something you want me to lend my voice to? Because there’s a lot of things we know knowledge of but it’s important to ask. I think that can be lost a lot of the time in western culture— asking permission. Especially asking for permission from our ancestors, consulting them and letting them know this is my intention. My intention is pure, my heat is pure, is it okay for me to tell this story?

Tyra: Have you ever been told no?

Chioma: Yes. But that one poem it wasn’t my ancestor, this was just information that I had and I wanted to share this poem in a certain way. And it was a really good poem, but it was like ‘You need to stop telling this poem. You need to stop reading that. You know it’s not for you.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, okay!’ (laughs, goodnaturedly)

Tyra: I love that practice and I think that is so important. It will make you feel better as an artist, but also [you need to ask yourself]... Why are you saying this? Why are you bringing this up? It comes back to that reason you were talking about earlier… Why are you doing this? Why are you writing?

Chioma: Uhh huh, intention is important.

Tyra: Yeah, it is. Okay, let me ask some specific questions. The collection is split into three parts: Bridge, Groom, and Witness. What was the reason behind this separation and the titles?

Chioma: So, I was examining my family through the lens of my grandparents' marriage. My grandmother was a 15-year-old bride and my grandfather was a 19-year-old groom and I felt I needed to understand the experience of both of these blood lines to situate myself. So, in each section I’m examining their unique bloodlines, their unique experiences. And then in the section “Witness” I focus on the experiences of the children that were the result of these unions. So, I included pieces about my brothers and sisters and myself. And how the dissolution of my own parents' marriage made an impact on me.

Tyra: I love that separation. I know in other collections [authors] separate it just based on time or the progression of things… like summer, fall, winter… or how they got through things [referring to how Rupi Kaur separates her poems in her two published collections Milk and Honey and the sun and her flowers]. But to have two separate people and the result [of their union] coming down the middle? That definitely caught my intention. I was like ‘Oh she’s doing something different here.’ That was pretty unique.

Chioma: Thank you! It started with my grandmother and asking questions about her experience. She started having children when she was 14 and she wasn’t able to raise that child. Then she got married at 15 right away. So I began to ask her questions and that is what gave the entire collection shape.

Tyra: Yeah, having those stories is a goldmine. You know, being able to speak with your grandparents about their life and how things were. I mean, it's priceless information.

Chioma: Both of my grandparents, all of my grandparents are passed so it was a little bit trickier to get some of the facts, but it was a really enjoyable experience to learn how to communicate with them. For me I don’t see death as a final destination. I see death as a transition, so if it is a transition to another form, [I’ve asked] ‘How can I still communicate?’

Tyra: Yeah, I know with some things that I’ve done— my grandmother is alive, but she doesn’t speak English— and she’s lived with me my entire life. She speaks Creole. I’m Haitian and—

Chioma: (excitedly) Ohhh! I love Haitian people. I have so much respect for Haiti.

Tyra: (smiles, laughs goodnaturedly) Thank you! So, all my life— I write that in my poems— that we speak in laughter, clapping hands… I talk about how we communicated over time and it’s not with words most of the time and I let that live in the poems and just write about her and the things I’ve been approaching. I have to go through my dad and then go through her. So, I get what you mean when you have to figure out how to get the information and how to get the language because you want to be authentic in your work and you want to tell the story as truthfully as possible. I just understand that. Your poem “A Google Search for my Ancestor “John Best,” “Plantation,” and “North Carolina” reminded me of the recent news story about a cabin that once housed slaves that was turned into an AirBnB. What significance did you hope to draw upon for your reader by including a poem about the missing sanctity of southern plantations?Airbnb Removed ‘Slave Cabin’ Listing In Mississippi Following Viral TikTok Takedown.

Chioma: That’s a good question. So, John Best was one of the names that I came across. He’s an ancestor born in 1867, right after the abolition of slavery. So, when I saw his name I was so excited. I thought there would be some record of him doing something, or him living somewhere. So I thought, let me Google him. I went to Google and I naively put in that name thinking I was going to find my ancestral line and what came back to me were those search results. And in that moment I just cried; I was so upset. And I think it’s important to allow ourselves the space to cry for the things our ancestors have moved through and the constant erasure they’ve experienced in America— in American history and in America’s present. It’s very painful and it’s hard that we don’t always have the names of our loved ones or even a place that we can go to to pay our respects. At that moment, that absence just really just broke me open. I think now though that absence of a specific place allows me to be present with my ancestors wherever they are. Whenever I need them it allows me to go in nature and connect with them on a daily basis. But, I’m not surprised at the way America treats plantations. I’m definitely upset and enraged about it at times, but that disregard is present in all that they do. You can see that disharmony in every aspect of our society. We live in a society that is largely unwell. And if we were to pause and take a moment and trace it back… you can’t disregard the history, the genocide, and enslavement and expect a nation to thrive.

Tyra: Yes

Chioma: It’s not realistic. It’s not going to happen and we see that. Those atrocities impact the direction of your entire life so no matter how much you want to wipe that slate clean and pretend that we can stand on a place where none of that existed is just not true. And it’s not only African American people that are affected by it, but everyone in this nation. Everyone in this nation is touched by that history and they’re touched by that disconnection and disharmony. I don’t hold onto it anymore. It definitely still makes me angry, but I see that there is nothing I need to hold onto because the impacts are alive and well. And they will be alive and well until people are ready to address that history.

Tyra: There’s so much that has happened. When the Black Lives Matter protests started again in the quarantine and distinctly when the backlash of that happened in schools… what they wanted to take out of the curriculum, who they were targeting, why they were targeting these people… people don’t even realize the full scope of the effect of that. And I just remember when I saw that Tik Tok [video] I wasn’t surprised. I don’t know why anyone was surprised that they did that because like you said American history, true American history, African American history, is not taught in schools. It’s not revered anywhere. I mean, you have the African American Museum in Washington, D.C., specific things like that, but it’s just not talked about. And there’s always some kind of backlash when you do want to bring it to the forefront and you just want to say, ‘We’re talking about Black history today. We’re talking about Black people.’ It’s always an issue. It’s always, ‘What can we do to stop this’? I wasn’t surprised by that video.

Editor’s Note: In her statement above, Tyra is referring to the formation of special interest groups and passing laws that targeted the educational sector following the BLM protests in 2020. These groups (in collaboration with politicians around the country) have tried to ban over 2,000 books from American schools in several states. Over 40% of those books featured people of color as the protagonists and these books included topics about race, racism, discrimination, equity, and the LGBTQIA+ community. Additionally, numerous U.S. states have tried to outlaw an educational pedagogy called Critical Race Theory that has never been legally sanctioned (or widely used by educators) for use in K-12 public schools. The ideas around banning CRT escalated from banning teachers from discussing racism as a modern societal construct permeating American society (i.e., institutionalized racism, generational wealth gaps, and mass incarceration of Black and brown people), to try to ban the teaching of racism and the effect this has had on Black and brown communities in the past and in the present.

For additional sources please read the following articles:

https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-dei-crt-schools-parents

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/whos-behind-the-push-to-ban-books-in-schools-180980818/

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/07/02/why-are-states-banning-critical-race-theory/

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/states-that-have-banned-critical-race-theory

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/05/09/florida-banned-textbooks-math-desantis/

https://www.npr.org/2022/04/28/1095042273/ron-desantis-florida-textbooks-social-emotional-learning

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/us/florida-rejected-textbooks.html

Chioma: Yeah, it’s important for us to keep talking about our own history and not to minimize our own experience. Even in the way that our history is talked about it still feels minimized, to me in a lot of respects. Sometimes I feel that we should be sobbing. I remember in my MFA experience, especially in a lot of these literature courses, I was just angry… pissed off. And there was no regard for the sadness and anger that comes to brew. And a lot of the work that I’m doing now is about creating the spaces where we can move through those emotions together. Because it’s one thing to talk about those situations and intellectualize it and another to [work through it] together in a group setting. Being in a group and allowing someone to witness you [can help you to] move through those emotions a lot easier.

Tyra: I really commend you for even approaching these topics because I have tried to do that before and it was just an angry poem. (laughs). Maybe that’s it. Maybe the title is just “Angry Poem” and you keep going but I felt like, even though the anger is justified, there has to be a different way to talk about it and maybe I’m not the one. Anyone that approaches these topics I commend them for that because it’s a lot of work and emotional labor.

Chioma: Yeah, it is a lot of work and I think it’s interesting because you said you wrote an angry poem, but why can’t we be angry? You know? Why can’t we be angry? Why can’t we be sad?

Tyra: Yeah… yeah

Chioma: There is space for those severe emotions as well and honestly those are the emotions that are begging to be seen and heard and validated. And like I said, we talked about this at the beginning, but there’s so much joy, there’s so much pleasure available but we can not get there if we continue to minimize our anger, minimize our saddness, and minimize our depression. Those are valid too. So yeah, I think ya know, you said you’re writing the angry piece, those pieces are so important to the entire picture of this experience.

Tyra: Yeah, I agree with you because the concept of moving forward and having harmony is great, but not everyone is quite there. And some people are there and also at the same time they have this duplicity of feeling this full range of emotions and that should be championed as well, just right along beside it.

Chioma: Yeahhh

Tyra: Here’s the next question. You use many poetic techniques in your collection. From lyrical free verse, to prose, and erasures; how does the formatting for each piece work to tell another narrative or reinforce your central theme?

Chioma: So, working with different forms I wanted the freedom to bring in the different voices and the different experiences of my ancestors and also a lot of the different voices that I hear culturally. And a lot of the different voices that I’m experiencing when [I’m] walking down the street or talking with my friends. I realized I would need a lot of freedom when I’m dealing with form because all of those people express [themselves] in different ways. And so when I was working with different forms I was thinking, ‘What is the best way to bring forth this voice? How do they want to be represented on this page?’ And so I think it was a lot of fun as well. I think sometimes when you’re working on projects things can start to feel stale but it never really felt stale for me because I was jumping in and out from all these different voices and experimenting with different forms as well.

Tyra: I think that’s great. So you just let the voice tell you how it wants to be written? Because I know some people get stuck [and ask themselves] ‘Should this be prose? Should I rhyme here? Should I do some lyrics?’ You kind of, again, feel from your ancestors and that’s a main part of your creative process when it comes to the content and when it comes to the actual technique of writing it. It seems like you just have a lot of inspiration from others in your work.

Chioma: Yeah, for sure! I think with the way that I write as well, in the journal… on the pages with no lines, a lot of the pieces came out exactly the way that they were written on the page. And I think writing in that way is a lot of fun as well. When I went back and was looking at those different voices, it was interesting to see the way that they came in on different ideas. What was interacting on each page. Whether it was an image that I drew or a certain shape the words were taking and thinking about what that means for each piece and how I might continue to explore that. Tyra: Hmmm, yes, that’s great… That's amazing.

Tyra: You reference your Nigerian Igbo heritage in several poems such as “Recipe for Jollof Rice” and “Ka Chi Fo!”. Why were adding those parts of your identity so pivotal to the collections theme?

Chioma: So, those are also pieces of who I am. I am Nigerian and African American and both of those cultural experiences shape who I am, how I write, and how I move. And in this collection, I was collecting a lot of the things that have been lost. The dissolution of my parents' marriage led me to lose connection with a lot of the Nigerian side of my family so through those pieces I was going back and acknowledging what was lost and what I found. For me knowing how to make Jollof rice and knowing how to make it well is a very important part of Nigerian culture so when I learned how to make it I wanted to add it to this so it wouldn’t be forgotten by me or anyone else. I was taking a breathwork class recently and the instructor in this course was talking about how we need to revisit the moments of trauma to regain our breath and in that traumatic moment that’s where our breath gets stuck.

Tyra: Right!

Chioma: And we continue to breathe from that moment. A lot of the time it’s a shallow breath because our breath gets stuck. So, you have to revisit that moment and breathe life into it. And so that’s what these poems were doing for me. Going back and breathing life into these moments.

Tyra: I love that! And it can be hard to go back to that place where you felt the most low and everything was falling apart. Even sometimes when [you’re] thinking about it like– ‘Oh my gosh, I could never even think about approaching that situation again.’ You kind of dance around it. Maybe you go down the street, but you’re never right in that exact space so doing that work is so important. And I love what you said about learning how to cook Jollof rice. Food is such a big part of our culture and how we commune together.

Chioma: Yes!

Tyra: I’ve been doing that too. I recently texted my mom. I was like ‘Please send me some family recipes.’ My mom is from Nevis which is right next to St.Kitts in the Caribbean. [I said] please send me some recipes because as I’m writing I want to go back to that place and feel those emotions. I recently found the recipe for Haitian spaghetti that my grandma used to make. I wanted to learn how to make it myself after all this time.

Chioma: Yes, it’s so special and so important to be able to make that food because that's how we nourish ourselves. Including that brings a different layer to a collection. When you’re including pieces that [explain] this is how you nourish yourself, this is how you take care of yourself, this is how you treat yourself and others. And the Haitian spaghetti is very good!

Tyra & Chioma: (laughing)

Tyra: Yes, absolutely. And I think when you don’t have the words or when your or your ancestors don’t have the words, they have the food. They have the songs. They have dance. They communicate in so many other ways and take that because they might not be able to sit down and tell you everything that they went through, but they’ll show you what they ate when they were a child. They’ll show you what they danced to, what they listened to growing up. They’ll show you how they sang. Those things are so important too.

Chioma: Yes, for a lot of women food was the art. They didn’t have paintbrushes or maybe even pencils and pens, but you were in that kitchen and what you were creating, that was your art form. And you’re passing it down. I’m glad that you’re including it in your work as well.

Tyra: (enthusiastically) Yeahhh, I love that; ‘food is the art’. Yeah, for sure. Tyra: I appreciate your poems that question and push back against religion and conservatism. The poem “Jehovah’s People” includes the powerful lines “...there would be no hymns, no ecstasy, no healing touch, only organized religion wrestling my child body into an unnatural quiet…” What is the message you are trying to convey to the reader in these poems? Why was that important to include in A Body of Water?

Chioma: I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness and I was the first generation in my family to be raised that way. In reflecting and questioning my family, I began to examine my own experience with religion. And growing up in that faith was always challenging for me from a young age. I knew that experience wasn’t for me because of how controlled it felt. And I intuitively knew that that level of control had nothing to do with God and everything to do with something else. And so as I grew up I started going to churches and temples with my friends and seeing what their faith was and what they believed… and seeing how they lived and what they practiced. And I was a little jealous going into different sects of Christianity and seeing the ecstasy and the fainting and the shouting and the dramatics, all of which were influenced by the Africans who were practicing Christianity. And I felt like if I had those religious experiences I would have felt more at home at church and in my body as well. I feel like now I know that’s not true. But that’s how I felt when exploring some of those different faiths. It was important to include spirituality because faith felt so restrictive to me. And it was chosen by my family because it felt like safety and it felt like love and it provided a contrast from the terror and the trauma that they experienced in the home. That allowed me to understand a bigger picture. Understanding how a religion that was so restrictive for me could feel like safety to someone else. And so through that process of understanding how that religion would be chosen I think I gained a greater respect for the different religious choices that people make.

Tyra: That’s really profound. Just the fact that for you it can be one thing and for someone who is so close to you, your mom, the rest of your family, it can mean something completely different. I totally understand that. While I’m not a Jehovah’s Witness I grew up Seventh-Day Adventist and it’s extremely restrictive as well.

Chioma: I heard they branched off of each other.

Tyra: Yeah, they are really closely related. We are kindred spirits here.

Chioma and Tyra: (laughing)

Tyra: So, when I read that in A Body of Water, I was like ‘I have to talk to her about this. This is— I just understood so much of what you were saying. The restrictive part but also seeing it as a home in some ways or a routine, a habit, whatever. You know it’s a part of you that needs to be rooted out, but it’s also so engrained at the same time. With Christianity, with some of the denominations, people are discouraged from questioning. You go a lot of your life having these small moments of wanting to question things, but you’re not “supposed” to do that. It’s very interesting and it’s hard to even come to terms with how you feel about it when your family is within that religion and you have all these thoughts, but who do you speak with if the person you are speaking to is saying, ‘Don’t have these thoughts because if you questions things too much than you’ll lose your faith.”

Chioma: Yeah, it’s very conflicting and a challenging way to grow up. I don’t know, and I was trying to think with some friends who were also raised as Jehovah's Witnesses, as a child I just knew. I don’t know if it was an angel or what, I just knew this is not right. And there was something in my brain and my body that shut me off to what people were saying within that space. I think those experiences within the Jehovah’s Witness faith, those were my first experiences with disassociation because I knew something was not connecting. And I knew this wasn’t for me. And I knew this was not right. And so I just began to disassociate from those experiences a little bit and ummm yeah, dissociation is something challenging to work through. To be present in my body now and I can also see how it served its purpose.

Tyra: Yes.

Chioma: From protecting me from certain ideas and individuals probably as well.

Tyra: The fact that you can call back and know this is the time that I started to think something was different and then to go so far as… ‘Let me see how other people do it. How do they worship?’ … and trying to glean some information from them… I think people push away from religion and Christianity but they never really come back and say, ‘Is there another way? How are my friends doing it or even looking at different faiths?’ I think that’s exceptional because a lot of people don’t take that approach. I know for me I went to a mosque with my friend one time when we were in a different country and it was Ramadan. She wanted to go and she needed someone to go with. And it just opened my eyes completely. [I said to myself], Wow, this is totally different from anything I had growing up. [I started to think] there really is another way. You understand and you know there are other religions, but it’s different]when you’re invited in. It was a total switch for me.

Chioma: Yeah, it’s really beautiful to witness other faiths as well.

Tyra: We’re all connected. We’re all connected at some point.

Chioma: Yes, on some level.

Tyra: There is a connection between African American enslavement and the Black church. Are poems like “Jehovah’s People” meant to question the rigidity of the church and/or call for reform?

Chioma: So, I needed to question the rigidity of religion to understand how that could feel safe for someone else. If you’re growing up in a household where you feel unsafe, where you’re experiencing abuse or assault– whether that spiritually, physically, emotionally– a rigid religion might feel like a breath of fresh air, right? Because you go to church and you know exactly what’s going to happen. This book has the songs and we’re going to sing at these times and this is when church starts and stops.

Tyra: Yeah.

Chioma: I know some churches are orderly about time. I know that some other Christians have different experiences around time, but umm, yeah, you get information on who you can talk to, who you can befriend and that rigidity can feel like safety to someone who is coming from a disorganized or chaotic environment. I can understand why it can feel good to some members of my family. I don’t think we can really reform anything if we don’t understand the choices that we’re making. A lot of time, more than reform, what we need is respect. And I say that knowing how challenging that can feel, but I think that religion is exactly perfect for some members of my family. It answers questions that arise from their experience. It meets needs for them that are important for them and I can respect that. I can also acknowledge and respect that that religion is not in alignment with my soul and my experiences and my unique sets of needs. So, it’s something that is definitely still challenging for me. I don’t want to say that I just move with so much respect for this faith because I’ve had traumatic experiences within it [too], but I know that in the larger picture– especially when we look at what’s happening with religion around the world, wars being created over religion– I think it’s really important to move with a lot more respect and understanding.

Tyra: Yeah, that’s really important and a mature way to think about it especially if it doesn’t align with who you are and you’re not going to continue with it. Just to realize that some people need a map. Some people like to know this is where I can go and this is where I can’t go. This is the time that I should be there and the time I should not be here. Just realizing hey it might not be for you, but it’s for someone else and that’s okay and as long as they’re not causing horrible harms– and I know like you said there are still things about Christianity that are harmful, about all religions that are harmful– but if they are acting with pure intentions and aren’t causing psychological or physically harm intentionally to anyone I think that you leave it.

Chioma: I think needing to know who you can talk to and who you can’t [for example]... that safety is also an illusion, right?

Tyra: Yeah

Chioma: That’s not real safety. It’s the illusion of safety, but I understand how that can be confronting to believe that… this is a safe environment and this is okay. And we see that happen all the time in different religions. People are giving their trust to individuals who don’t necessarily deserve it, but they’re within the same faith. I think it’s about understanding and respecting the choice which leads someone there. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I agree with what's happening there or that everyone there has pure intentions. I don’t think I always have pure intentions, right? We’re human, but… religion tries to create control around that human experience. But you can’t control what everyone is going to do and how they are going to behave in certain situations. But I understand how people can be confronted moving in certain spaces where everyone is holding the same ideas as them.

Tyra: Right, because that pattern, that rigidity maybe is not so rigid to someone that thinks, ‘Well this is just my life and this is how it goes.’ And that’s okay in some situations, but I get what you’re saying. What are you working on now? Can you give us a glimpse into your next project?

Chioma: Yes! I’m not a fan of labels, but I’m wearing the label of storyteller and I feel like that gives me the space to create what I want to create. Umm, so within that label I feel like I can do the things that I do naturally which is prose, poetry, painting… Right now I’m thinking more about oral storytelling and how sound is important in expression. There are certain things that are only available sonically that are important to a message. So, I’ve been thinking a lot about oral storytelling and how to tell some of those stories within our communities where we don’t often hear and how do we hone in on voices that we’re not cognizant of or always listening to. I just finished a studio artist residency in July and in that residency I was exploring Ibo art more deeply and looking at symbolism and different things like that. There are a lot of things that I’m balancing right now. I think my main priority is nourishment as we talked about and really making sure that my body is really present and grounded and available for life. I think in the stretch of the last two years my body has been pushed to the limits of stress, so it’s really important for me to go back and make sure I’m really nourishing myself with the things that I’m eating. With the relationships that I’m in, with the places that I spend time in. So, I’ve been writing a lot less– which is not to say that I’m still not writing a lot— but umm, it’s more so venting, journaling, like this needs to get out vs like consciously creative writing, but who knows? Sometimes that venting turns into something creative.

Tyra: Yes, yes, you’re doing the living right now. There’s this quote that I read a couple of years ago. And it said sometimes you write and sometimes you’re doing the living to do the art. It’s an eb and flow. Some people, ya know, live and do the art at the same time and that’s their process, but for some [they] need a moment or two, years, to just live and feel things and do things. Then [they] come back around. I’m trying to figure that out myself. Like what kind of artist am I? Do I live and do my art at the same time or do I live and come back to it. It sounds like you’re in the living phase. (laughs)

Chioma: Definitely in the living phase, being present phase. Umm, but yeah, as I was thinking about these different questions I was saying, ‘I want to write again. I want to have this experience again. I know I’m working my way back to writing more poetry again.”

Tyra: Yes, and we want to hear from you! We’re looking for that next publication. Your loyal fans, your readers, I’m one of them! (laughs, goodnaturedly)

Chioma: Aww, thank you so much! I think the next thing that I’m putting out for sure is umm I don’t want to call it a podcast, but essentially it is a podcast, but that’s something I’m potentially putting out soon.

Tyra: I can’t wait to see that. I’ll definitely be listening!

Chioma: Awesome!

Tyra: Well, that is the end of my question set. Chioma, thank you so much for coming to this interview. We really appreciate it and I’m excited to get this posted.

Chioma: Awesome and thank you for your beautiful questions. This was a really good experience.

Tyra: I’m so glad!

Chioma: Thank you so much, Tyra.

Tyra: Have a good rest of your day.

Thank you for reading!

Three Pieces

Indifference

Snake Charmer

The Middle of the Other Side

Uncertainty

Uncertainty

Art by Marvin Hollman

Journey (cover)

Algorithm

Artist’s Statement:

The piece titled “Journey” is an abstract narrative painting created by me over the course of several years. It is done in acrylic on canvas and displays a series of figures arranged in a composition along with elements that suggest a voyage or great adventure. One interpretation of the imagery could be that of spiritual perspective. The diving man, the boat, angel or elephant could represent biblical references And illustrate the connection between heaven and Earth. My inspiration is not limited to one particular idea. Just as the boat in the background carries a “roll with the punches theme,” knowledge changes, inspiration changes.

Real Change

My cousin told me he found
Jesus, which was the easy part
since he couldn’t find his way
out of Brooklyn. Then this morning
it was so quiet you could hear
a cat walking. By noon the wind
kicked in making the trees swing
like Count Basie and the traffic
sounded like his horn section.
There is a mystery in all of this
I could never understand even if
I took it all apart, examined it
and put it back together, replacing
Brooklyn with Queens, put tap
shoes on cats paws and took Basie’s
horns away and replaced them with
strings. Sometimes it’s best just to let
them burn like my friend’s cigarettes
he kept smoking as he sat in his dark
kitchen after losing another job.
When he inhaled, the tip
of his Marlboro turned orange
like the moon in the window behind him.
The next month the surgeon removed
most of midnight from his lung.
The next year will mean a lot more
than the last 45 ever did. I wished
he had read the article I did that
said real change starts as soon as
you find yourself. I wasted no time.
That same night I took a red eye, then
an Amtrak to find where I am now.
It took awhile but it was worth the trip.

To Deserve

If you were to step inside Mary’s home, you would think to yourself that she is a person broken. Not that it was disorderly, not that it reeked of non-maintenance, not that there was rotting food and unclean clothes—but there might as well have been. No furniture in Mary’s house looked to be non-store-bought, no carpet made of non-synthetic fibers, no room any less than a perfect square. If you were to step inside Mary’s house, you would be dizzied by how geometrical it felt—every room the inside of a perfect box, edges sharp and defined. Each stair on the steps seemed capable of cutting cloth at its lip. The walls were decorated with paints and textures which seemed to come from an anonymous, clean factory somewhere far away. She couldn’t save herself from occasionally hearing the floorboards creak, a fact which infuriated her, but in all other measures, her house was made as if from a perfect plastic mold.

Mary once read somewhere that her developer had built hundreds of homes across the country with an identical frame and floor plan as this one. But out of all those hundreds of copies, Mary told herself that hers must be the most appealing. She lived in a neighborhood somewhere in the middle of Illinois whose name was decided upon by a marketing company, and somewhere hidden away upon each decorative item in her house, you’d find a serial number.

Mary worked at a health insurance firm and lived alone. She watched TV dramas about police officers while tucked beneath bedsheets she had ordered from a magazine delivered in the mail. Her brother was a police officer in the city, and she worried about him. That added to the thrill of her shows, in a way: that trace of something real. Every morning, she went to a gym whose CEO lived somewhere in Texas—not that she knew that or even knew his face or name. She did Pilates there and bought smoothies with appealing names like Berry Blast.

When she watched her crime shows and grew fearful, she’d remember the shotgun in her safe, given to her by her grandfather when she turned 15. She once read a story online about protests happening in the city, and she took it out just to feel safer. You could see the twisting fibers of a once-growing tree in its wooden frame, smell a liquor on it which her grandfather used to drink, which to this day she isn’t able to identify. He’d sit on a leather recliner called Grandpa’s Chair after Thanksgiving dinner, sipping it as he grumbled curses at the news.

This very house would become the scene of a crime—or, at the least, she called it a crime because it was the exact sort of thing they talked about on the news. Here, there would be a robbery.

Maggie Orlin was a 23-year-old gambling addict who lived in the city. Maggie owed $5,000 to a woman who lived a couple floors above her, a woman who usually wouldn’t demand it back if it wasn’t for the fact her daughter had to stay overnight at the hospital after an unexpected bee sting revealed a serious allergy. Ms. Taylor was now in debt herself and demanded the money back from Maggie.

Maggie once stole from a boy she was dating.

When the fight reached that fragile, unspeakable line of a breakup, she had bravely said, “I can’t date you right now because I’m not a good person. I lie, I steal, I will cheat on you. I will be a good person one day, but I can’t be one now. It’s not worth it to date me, but one day it will be.”

He accused her of throwing herself a pity party and left. This was three weeks before.

But she did mean it. She would be a good person. She would quit and never steal another dollar again. While taking exit 76, turning onto a road that would eventually reach a suburb, she wrung the steering wheel in her hands passionately, as she listened to songs from a playlist she entitled Crying Music.

She couldn’t steal from anyone she knew. Her first step on a long moral path would be doing the risky and more just thing: taking from someone far away instead, someone who could afford it. She was willing to risk her safety—in truth, her very life—to save those who might be most devastatingly hurt by her actions, by this disease she had been given. She thought it a small moral victory, and when the quiet, tinny music played from her phone, banked within the car console’s stained cup holder, she let herself think for a moment with a rage that this boy would miss her and regret the breakup once he saw how much she had changed.

The neighborhood was called Pleasant Prairies, and only a house or two had been constructed along its singular road. The developer seemed to have only recently cleared out the land to make a residential area. Maggie was looking for a place like this—expensive, but where people would be isolated from one another in case this robbery was to end poorly. This was her third time breaking into a place where people lived, but her first time breaking into a house. She didn’t feel guilty about stealing the money, but she confessed that she hated the possibility that she might cause even a single nightmare in another human being.

Oh well, she said to herself. I will be a shocking story for them, told at dinner parties.

She drove around at two in the morning in search of a house in Pleasant Prairies that looked like it didn’t have children within it. Out here where no crimes could ever happen, where no morsel of land is untouched by funding of one kind or another, people park their cars in their driveways, out in the open next to a white garage door. She thought she could tell something about these people within the great houses made of cream-colored wood based on their cars. From her perch parked down the street, she saw a pink punch buggy parked in a driveway with concrete that looked designer-made. The squares of concrete in the driveway had subtle, curved bezels and a smooth texture. Out here, it was still 1991, so she knew this had to be a woman’s car based on its color. If this woman had parked out in the driveway, then certainly any husband would have as well. But no other car was in sight. This, she thought, is how she would pay Ms. Taylor back.

There was a soccer field’s length of earth between this house and the second nearest, bulldozed to make preparations for houses yet to be built so that the grass had died and left a muddy heap stretching in all directions once the smooth grass of the lawn reached an edge. Maggie knew about the people out here. They wouldn’t traverse that mud unless absolutely necessary, even if things did go poorly, and even if they heard anything from that distance.

Before entering the home, she couldn’t resist giving three gentle knocks to the white wood on the outside, just to see if she was right. She felt like a woodpecker or a squirrel.

“How about that,” she whispered. The wood was fake.

She took some electronics, some trinkets, things that seemed expensive but non-sentimental. She carried a backpack that once went with her every day to high school, which now held pink and white decorative cutlery, a painting of a sunflower, a hair dryer that seemed expensive, some door knobs, a signed poster of a movie about Italian gangsters—odds and ends. She would only have about a thousand dollars total at this rate, and her bag was beginning to grow full.

She had three choices. A jewelry box with but two or three diamonds could lightly and quickly put her over the edge—but certainly such a prize rested in the master bedroom, where the owner of the house slept. Her second choice was to leave and steal again from someone else, but her conscience couldn’t cut it.

If you’re serious about quitting, she told herself, this has to be the last time, and this way, only one person will face any consequences.

That left option number three: the car. This would mean stealing the keys which hung on a key rack in the first-floor kitchen, driving the car away to someplace safe, walking back to where she had parked her own car, leaving, then Ubering back to the hidden pink car to bring it someplace where she could sell it for, easily, five-thousand dollars or more. No car alarm would go off, no sentimental thing would be stolen, and Ms. Taylor would no longer be in debt because of Maggie.

She held the key in her hand. The smell of dinner still lingered in the dark air, olive oil and garlic. There in the pitch-black kitchen, she felt, for the first time, perverse. The key was attached to a small, black plastic square that was lukewarm to touch, whose lock button had been smoothed and left paintless by someone else’s finger. A thing like a car key—a thing which this person carried with her in her pocket every day—had too much of another person’s life on it to steal.

~

Mary had often thought about what it would one day feel like to point a gun at another human being. She had, almost as if by accident, seen this moment so many times in her head that, when the fantasy finally came true, she was surprised at how non-glorious it felt to order this intruder to stand absolutely still.

Here was a girl who hadn’t showered in at least a week, with tattoos and piercings and all of these other things Mary had always expected a criminal to have. Held up against her cheek, she smelled the gun in her hands and thought of how proud people would be of her for this. Mary had often imagined—with an embarrassing kind of excitement—that in this moment the criminal would try to run, lunge at her, pull out a gun or a knife, and that she would be forced, tragically, to fire. But Maggie did no such thing. Instead, she tried to explain herself.

“I don’t have a weapon. Please lower it,” Maggie said. “Please. I’ll drop everything and leave. This is the last time I’ll ever try to steal. I don’t need this money for me. Someone I know, their kid got sick, and they couldn’t afford it.”

Mary wondered if she should still fire, since it was legal to do so—she wouldn’t need to feel any guilt—but she had no desire to kill anything. It’s just that she imagined this moment feeling different, and she wondered if firing the gun would fix that. She always imagined that she would be forced to fire, and a harrowing scene would follow as she wept for having taken a life lost. But still, how proud her coworkers would be when they heard, how thrilled her family would be, how wide the smile of her grandfather shining down on her from heaven. But she had always imagined that she, herself, would feel pride too during this moment—that she would be able to feel all the strength and justice she’d wanted to see in the world manifest in the texture of that hair trigger. But she felt no such thing. Something about this intrusion needed to be fixed.

“Drop the bag and turn your pockets inside out,” Mary said.

Maggie complied, petrified. Maggie’s cell phone screen turned on when it hit the floor, dully illuminating the room. This woman pointing a gun at her should be trembling too, flushed with adrenaline and emotion, but she seemed to have the distant and intellectual look of a person solving a puzzle.

Mary was embarrassed—the weight of the gun was beginning to fatigue the muscles in her shoulder. It hurt, and that frustrated her. But she had to keep the criminal still until the police came. She knew that if she lowered her gun to pull out her phone and call 911, this girl would take her chance while the gun was lowered and lunge at her. But she wasn’t strong enough to hold this twenty-pound gun with one hand—and if any injustice did happen, Mary wouldn’t have been able to bear it.

“I have an attic,” Mary said. “With one of those swing-down ladders from the ceiling. It’s at the top of the stairs. You’ll walk up there with me behind you the whole time. Then I’ll close you up there, and then I’ll call the police. You’ll stay up there until they arrive.”

Maggie was in tears but nodded and stayed silent. There was no escape now.

She had always imagined building a relationship with someone she loved during her twenties. She thought about characters in TV shows with lives like the one this woman lived; how they talked about being anxious about letting even one year slip by in which life wasn’t lived to the fullest. She knew a couple people in prisons, but no one close to her, so that when they went, they vanished to Maggie, plucked from the face of the earth as if they were figments of her imagination who never truly existed at all.

Once locked in the attic, she swallowed a horrible thought. Maggie wanted to hate something, but she couldn’t bring herself to hate this woman. Maggie let herself hate her parents, her high school, her boss, but more than anything she wanted to hate this woman and yet she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Envious and desperate, she couldn’t let herself hate this woman because all the stories she had ever heard told her that she was utterly guilty and deserved this fate.

Mary locked the attic and let her arms rest. She sat crisscrossed on the carpeted ground of the second floor like a child as she stared up at the attic door. And when she looked down at her brother’s contact information on her phone—the policeman—she realized that calling him would feel wrong. The police escorting this girl out of her house, dispassionately delving out justice on her behalf, would feel wrong. The image of this girl somewhere in some jail petrified Mary. The idea that she would wake up every day wondering about where the girl was, what she was doing, eating, what conversations she was having, love she was building, letters writing, lies telling: and Mary would know none of it.

Now, Mary cried. Crisscrossed on the carpet, she shook and put down her phone, ran her hands across her shotgun like she was petting an animal, as the uncertainty weighed heavy against her spine. She didn’t know what this girl was doing up there in her attic, and it terrified her. Mary was a person broken, every muscle of her body seeming to grow rigid and immovable as she looked up at the attic door on the ceiling. Face red, she could hardly remember to breathe.

Mary looked up the average sentence for a home burglary. Depending, it could be anywhere between one year and thirty.

~

At first, Mary said she would only keep this girl up in her attic for as long as it would take for her to find an answer that felt right. She read blog posts about people who were victims of home invasion like her, about how they felt when the criminal was caught and locked away. She would consider calling her brother every day, but upon each attempt, a brief and sharp pain that lasted no more than a handful of seconds prevented her from making the call. Mary spent hours upon hours of hard labor preparing to transform the attic with Maggie inside, and despite how much energy was expended in keeping her, none of the energy stung sharply like calling the police would.

It first started the day after the burglary, when Maggie saw a piece of notebook paper wiggle its way between the attic door’s cracks. In letters which looped and swirled.

Do you have any dietary restrictions?

Maggie was starved. She had fallen asleep in the attic expecting the police to wake her up. In their place, she received this message.

The thought was too horrible. It had to be that the police were delayed. It had to be that not as much time had passed as Maggie had thought. It had to be something else.

Later that day, Mary came up with the gun and put Maggie in handcuffs. Maggie watched as Mary, first, brought up an elegant plate of food—which Maggie ate. Next, a small bed that could be wiggled through the attic’s door piece-by-piece. Then a television, for entertainment. She brought up plants to filter the air, lighting to make the space sparkle, books, a carpet, an air freshener, toiletries and sanitation products, a large litter box, a notebook, packs and packs of bottled water, shampoo, soap, and conditioner, sound-proofing tiles, art supplies, and a chair. By the end of it, after a process of multiple weeks of renovations, the room was truly beautiful: walls painted, well-decorated, and adorned with as many pass-times as could be included, given that they wouldn’t make it possible for Maggie to escape. After a distraught first week in which Maggie lived in decent but less-than-ideal conditions—a necessary road bump which nevertheless upset Mary—Maggie’s room looked, in one word, expensive. Maggie remained bound when Mary was transforming the attic, but before and after this, Maggie moved as she pleased. Whenever Mary entered the attic to perform maintenance, she would bring her grandfather’s shotgun.

Mary never interacted with Maggie. She was left to her own devices. The two never made contact with one another, spoke, exchanged pleasantries, nor did they discuss their lives. After a month, Mary realized that, although she had asked for Maggie’s name, Mary had never shared her own. She thought that this wasn’t something to fret over.

Mary felt so safe once Maggie was secured in her attic, aware via the creaking of the ceiling above of every movement she made. It wasn’t perfect, but it was closer to perfect than calling her brother.

Even so, although she found the arrangement just, Mary didn’t find it fair that Maggie couldn’t speak to her family or loved ones, if she had such things. As such, after a month, Mary spoke with Maggie for the first time since her capture.

“I’ve come up with a system,” Mary said, annunciating. “No, please don’t try to speak to me. Just let me explain. Please let me explain. Please don’t try to speak to me. Maggie, you will want to hear what I have to say. Yes. I wanted to tell you that I’ve come up with a system. It isn’t fair that you’re unable to communicate with the outside world. If you write messages on this notebook paper, I’ll review them to ensure they’re appropriate, and send them to wherever you’d like. I’ve chosen the return address, and it isn’t this residence, of course, but I’ll check that return address in case you get any messages in the mail. I’m sorry for not allowing you to make contact with the outside world—that was unfair of me.”

Maggie felt ill at the suggestion. To write such a letter would feel like submitting to this woman’s depravity. If it truly did upset Mary that she wasn’t able to communicate with the outside world, perhaps she could refuse to write any letters in protest.

Maggie came up with a plan. She would write letters detailing the genuine and chasmic pain she felt as a result of being separated from those she loved, but she would fail to include an address for it to be sent off to. Mary might read it and somehow remember what she was doing to Maggie.

Mary prepared the first couple of paragraphs of the letter, detailing a false story about running away to a commune somewhere in rural Nebraska. Mary was preparing Maggie’s dinner upon a speckled, black-granite countertop as she read the letter. She purchased organic food and experimented with new recipes weekly. As opposed to a passive chore, she saw preparing Maggie’s meals as an activity that required utter concentration and craftsmanship. Plates would be decorated, spices measured, broths sampled, meats temperature-checked, fruits and vegetables locally sourced, menus designed with care; and calories would never be counted, as Mary was certain that no girl in all of Illinois ate as fully and as well as Maggie.

In the spiced, warm clouds of dinner preparation, there on the granite countertop, Mary sipped broth, stirred a gravy, and licked her fingers in between reading paragraphs of Maggie’s writing.

Dear Mom and Dad,

It’s been a couple of years since we’ve spoken. I wish my apology didn’t have to take this form. I wish I didn’t have to send it under these conditions. I should be saying these words to you, out loud, in our kitchen. You should hear these words and we should make dinner afterward and watch Star Trek together like we did a million years ago together. I wish I could explain more of my situation, but while I’m in it, I know that you reading these words, even if the circumstances are so far from ideal, is better than me having never written them.

Dad, you got addicted. Maybe you still are. And then slowly but surely, I did too, but in a different way. And Mom, you had to live with us and love us. Every day I think about how you never deserved any of this, Mom. You don’t deserve to have a daughter who doesn’t speak to you. You didn’t deserve to live in a house with the two of us. I’ve heard you say a million times how you wanted better for me than what I got. But you deserve someone who tells you: I wanted better for you. I want better for you every day.

Dad, I’ve never had a teacher, coach, or boss talk to me one-on-one if they weren’t telling me how I’m failing at something. I’m so angry at you for everything you did. I don’t even know if you’re sorry, but I’m writing this because the older I get the more I’m realizing that I’m not like Mom. I’m like you. I’ve fought with you so many times in my head. And when I did, I couldn’t admit it to myself, but I knew the parts of you I would fight with—the parts of you I hated the most—are the same parts you passed down to me. I feel awful for everything I’ve done, and if I’m really like you, you do too. The older I get the more I realize that everyone around you would rather see you die than fail, because you could be replaced, but a failure can’t be undone. You weren’t measured by who you were but by your distance from failure. And then you failed. I know it might be hard to believe, but I know a shred of how awful that feels. I need forgiveness so badly. So please let me tell you: no matter what happens, I forgive you.

We didn’t deserve this. We don’t deserve this. We deserved to talk to one another every day. We deserved to build a life together. We deserved to go out to dinners together, talk about who I’m dating, invite friends over during Thanksgiving. Neither of you deserved this. I will always miss you.

I love you, Maggie.

Mary had to read the letter over to ensure it was safe to send, but she was not inhuman. She felt feelings, which were real, when she read it. She served Maggie dinner that day, and for the second time, she spoke to her. Maggie hadn’t included a delivery address, and if it wasn’t for that, Mary wouldn’t have opened her mouth as she set the steaming plate down with one hand, shotgun in the other.

Mary said, “That was a nice note. Put the delivery address on it, and I’ll send it out.”

This time, as she closed the attic door, more softly, behind her, Mary heard the voice of a child screaming, as if from another world, I don’t deserve this. Maggie demanded the voice to be quiet, and silence did follow, but afterward, she was petrified by a new uncertainty. She wasn’t sure if the sound of that voice truly came from the attic.

~

One day, Mary received a call from her brother Mike, the police officer. He asked if he could stop by her house for dinner.

“No,” Mary said, “I’d like to go out to eat tonight. It’s been too long. I’d like to see you too, but we should go out to eat elsewhere.”

“Last year we would talk to one another almost every day. I miss that.”

“I miss it too.”

“And your cooking is second to none, Mary. It’s been ages since I’ve visited. I like to see where you’re living, how things are going—and all.”

“I have no groceries,” she said. “It might be a hassle to prepare it all.”

“I’ll just order whatever you need ahead of time, that’s no worry.”

She thought that it was so silly that if she were to be caught, she would go to jail. But then again, her brother was always so much like Mary herself. Maybe he would understand.

“Okay,” Mary said. “Sure, stop by. How about this, I’ll go grab groceries now, and then I’ll pick you up from the jail on my way back. You have to go back there tonight, right?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll pick you up, we’ll have dinner, and then I’ll drop you back off at the jail.”

“Perfect,” he said.

“Can I come in?”

“Into the jail?”

“I’ve never seen where you work before,” Mary said. “I visited a jail once when I was a child. It’s been ages. I like to see where you’re working.”

“Sure, come take a peek,” he said. “It’s interesting.”

~

She was escorted in by her brother and another officer. She touched her hands to the bulletproof glass of Mike’s office, entranced by her view of the jail. The glass was warm and plasticky. As Mike changed into civilian clothing, stored away his gun, hung up his baton, took off his badge, Mary gazed at the rows and rows of identical cells. She looked at a four-story, cavernous expanse of white bars and concrete floors, patrolled by watchful guardians that looked to her like angels circling the mouth of the inferno. She wanted to hold a baton. She wanted to orbit the cages, like these angels circling these halls of just consequence. She didn’t know who among them, but she knew that someone in her field of view, someone in one of these cells, had certainly broken into a home before. She felt something perfect, blissful, the closest she’s ever felt to being in love, when she realized that everyone in here deserves this. She loved this place, just like her brother.

Reparated Tombstone

♱

GONE BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN

• • •

A tombstone is heavier than one might think.

Turning right on Broadus Coker Street—the sunglint blindness splays across the windshield—casting a sightless void into which shadowed recollections of his past begin to purge. It comes to him stealthily, no, sneakily, no, cunningly.

Weathered Army-store combat boots charging into the oblique night. Blind hands drag the monument loose off its footing, with a dull grind of stone on stone. Then the heaving. Fingers tucking under into the paste of dew and milled granite. The slab’s wet pressure on the chest. Those first feeling steps forward into the gloom.

Only in this part of Livingston, seldom-visited and Georgia-clay poor, may this long-interred memory be brought to light, a memory elsewhere ever unremembered. He can’t think it away, for undoubtedly he will be nearing Superba Street . . . and the house . . . the one he abandoned it in.

His mind’s eye blurs into myriad questions: Was it a prank? An excuse to indulge in the taboo? Or was it just random evil? Sin as if by chance might’ve beckoned to him, like a long unseen ex-lover calling up unexpectedly and asking for a place to stay; first the kittenish coyness, then the stray’s intimacy. Despite this interrogative ambiguity, these declaratives are clear: He wasn’t dared or goaded. It wasn’t planned. It was as compulsive as compulsory. It came to him on such a ruinous whim, and he’s borne the deadweight of ever-unremembrance over this past quarter century. Why did he have to see this through?

♱

IN LOVING MEMORY

• • •

Summer 1994. He was living in the dank basement of his drummer’s house, a then necrose Craftsman built in the twenties on what would become the further ungentrified Superba Street; a place he ingeniously fled to from his middle-class upbringing in the suburbia of Northridge Estates. The basement in which he stayed stood partially finished, or somewhat less than partially, as did most of the rest of the house. His only source of electricity was from a plug in a light-socket adapter; the shower was made from painted roofing tin; mushrooms grew out of the carpet. But he didn’t care because he lived unsupervised for the first time, which gave way to his sense of right and wrong, or rather, the amorality of youth.

Despite his unreconstructed side of town feeling so hazardous that he kept a shotgun tucked in the rafters above the couch he made his bed, he decided that the ideal graveyard for possible larceny was in the even more dangerous segment, Rock Black Bottom. For Rock Black Bottom residents, he surmised, wouldn’t be so civic-minded as to watch over the yard of the last plots of land one owns, making the stealing of a headstone go likely unnoticed or even disregarded. With a plan hatched, his drummer drove them out in his pickup, he did the deed, and they hauled it, all 120 pounds of it, back home.

Surreal is the only way to describe the scene of a fourteen-year-old girl’s headstone sitting on a living room floor. The fact that this basement living room doubles as a bedroom and kitchen only enhances the stark uncanniness. There—among the band equipment, the couch/makeshift bed, the antique microwave, the mandatory empty liquor bottle collection, the clock stopped at 4:20, and the stacks of Ramen noodles—it lay with a combination of eeriness yet attraction, like a cursed artifact to a skeptic, totemistic yet a mere object. Alva Freeman was her name. She died in 1901. He had no sense at the time of the significance of that last name, of what he had done.

♱

A LIFE MEASURED IN MEMORIES

• • •

Continuing down Broadus Coker, he passes through the intersection of Flannery Street, the reflection of his 7-Series glides down the windowed wall of Sporty’s Barber Shop. It's there the nausea of it all hits. In the unmoored morals of youth, such an event as grave robbery is almost trivial, and though he has since skirted the line that divides sin from sainthood several times under the pressure of getting ahead, he has found himself to be an overall decent middle-aged man. Not quite righteous but definitely not base. Educated. Successful. Accomplished. Married with children with an American-Dream home. It sickens him to think about what he did that night. The middle-aged perspective indeed damns what were mere follies of youth. But, worst of all, there is . . . how he simply abandoned that girl's headstone to that condemned house on Superba . . . in hopes his acts would be forgotten and discarded . . . carted off with the trash.

Stopping his sedan at the five points with the Hop ‘N Shop, he seizes up. Being late, he has chosen this rarely-taken shortcut, all while knowing that from the five points, right and two streets up, lies Superba Street. Go left at the five points . . . down Myrtle . . . take the quick cutoff to the boulevard and his errand at Ledbetter’s Jewelry . . . he won’t even have to see the Superba street sign. But he is drawn to the right of the five points, to Superba. Something wants to at least glance down Superba. The turn signal signals, the car turns, slows, stops at the old address. It still stands.

He blushes red from white guilt as he peers out of his BMW at the elderly black man on the porch swing and at a home that he expected to be a vacant lot. Pansies grow in window boxes, and the palette of the shutters and trim goes well with the siding. This man has resurrected the domicile from doom. As he focuses from the broad tableau back to the man’s face, the man looks at him with only slightly squinted eyes, an expression akin to half-recognizing an old acquaintance, or clandestinely noting the presence of a potential enemy. Hidden inside the dark tint of the Beemer’s window, he cringes into his seat from envisioning the scene of what he is about to do, of what he feels compelled to do. How does one begin to ask about such a thing?

Deep breaths breathed deeply. Deep breaths breathed deeply. The mantra repeats and repeats. Calmer, he finds the resolve to ask after the whereabouts of the tombstone.

The man from the porch swing meets him at the fence gate and with a broad hand on an outstretched arm greets him.

“Reverend Luther Pines, but people call me ‘Pine Box,’ for I’ve laid so many down low,” the preacher calls to him.

When he responds with his name said aloud, it sounds impotent in comparison. After the handshake, his gaze adverts down to his shuffling shoes, noticing the four matching brogues of his and those of the preacher’s steady shoes; then, his gaze returns to the preacher in time for him to say. And there really is no way to say what he must say next. But he’ll say it nonetheless.

“Is there a tombstone in your basement?”

A cycle of expressions courses through the preacher’s face: the church-door smile solidifies into funeral solemnity; then, with a cock and upward tilt of the head that makes the eyes look on askance, the expression morphs to one judicial but piteous. Finally, with eyebrows rising and with a slap of his thigh, the preacher bellows joyfully up into the air.

“I knew you’d one day come! I knew a man wouldn’t live his whole life long having done what you did and not seek penance! Holy is the rod and the staff!”

The preacher runs his thumbs under his suspenders and leans back, his tie bowing around a heaving chest, as if he is about to announce an altar call, right here at thefence line. Will anyone answer it? Instead, he says rather softly as his head levels and his eyebrows lower to a concerned ridge:

“Come with me.”

The gate is opened for him. Must he go to the pastor’s study for a devotional?

♱

UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN . . .

• • •

The basement is not the same; he is not the same. The tombstone is the same. Its permanence equal to its heft, immutable among the many seasons. The two stand before it.

“I can’t believe you kept it so long.”

The pastor looks up to the ceiling. “Let’s just say that I prophesied that someone would return. I knew someone would have to want to make this right again.” He turns abruptly. “But, tell me, why did you steal it?”

Shrug. “I don’t know. I’ve never been able to tell.” Shrug.

“Hm-mm. It is a question that I have pondered for some time.”

He nods his head, as a child eager to learn the Sunday school lesson.

“In my line of work, I often think of things in terms of how they affect others,” interlacing his fingers, “for don’t we all wish so badly for neighbors to treat neighbors as themselves?” The hands spread apart as if to embrace.

Another childishly eager nod.

“When you did it, how did you think it would affect others?”

“I didn’t care about others. It was all . . . internal . . . I guess . . . I wanted to rebel . . . Rebel, against myself in a way.”

Nearing him, “But nonetheless, how did it affect others?”

“I mean, it didn’t really affect anyone.”  He raises his hand in a sign of surrender and innocence. “The graveyard was overgrown; the church was shuttered long ago.”

Bowing his head slightly, as if to equalize the difference in height, “Would you say, then, that you thought no one would care?”

Nod.

More softly spoken, “After all these years, did you prove it to yourself . . . that no one cared?”

Nod. Tear.

Hand-on-shoulder, “Now, that’s how you treated your neighbor. Did you treat yourself that way . . . feel that no one cared about you?”

Nod. Tears.

Eye-to-eye, “You proved that as little as you mattered, so did this awful act.”

Nod. Tears. The first gasp of a sob; then, the onrush of a bawl. “I’ve been.” Gasp. “I’ve been looking for an answer for so long.” Gasp. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

A moment for composure is allowed. Then the hand on the shoulder. He clenches. “But . . .”

“But what?”

The clench releases. Stepping away, beginning to pace, “But what you must realize is that this little teenage prank mattered. It had a larger impact in a larger system. It’s not just about you and your own self-forgiveness. It’s about your neighbor’s forgiveness.”

“But . . . but I didn’t harm anyone.”

“No one? Let me ask you this: why did you choose this graveyard, among these neighbors?”

“I . . . I . . . I don’t know. Because it was the roughest part of town. I thought no one would care.” As he says the words while standing in such a part of town, the irony of his flippancy begins to creep in. Sucking up a sniffle, “Listen, I know where you're going with this. It's . . . it's not what you think." The childish nod becomes an indignant shake.

Turning to face him and standing erect, “It’s not about just you or what you’ve personally experienced. It’s about how it affects others too. Others you don’t even know. The church shuttering, the overgrowth of the graves, the plight of the neighborhood—those were the actions of a system. A system you supported with this deed.”

Waving off the implications with his hands, “I wasn’t thinking like that at all. I wasn’t even thinking at all. I’m not a racist.” His face hardens. “I’m not a racist.”

The baritone resonates, elbows cross, “You have to be honest. We’re in the small-town South. You chose the blackest part of town. In doing so, you chose to steal the only marker of this Freeman girl. Free-man: the first free-born daughter of a freed slave from the oldest black church in the county. Not only is our history condemned; it is literally taken piece by piece. You erased the only memory of her. You contributed heftily to—" The preacher catches himself, realizing he is beginning to sermonize.

The head shake ceased, he gives only a glare.

A tone bittersweet with resignation, arms by his side, “Look, whether you believe this personal or systemic, spiritual or moral, a penance or a pardon, there’s nothing you can say, but there’s what you can do, my neighbor.” A breezy sigh with relaxed shoulders, “Let’s pray over it first.” In the dimming sunset streaming through the hopper window, the whispered words echo with quick decay on the basement blocks.

♱

BELOVED FATHER AND HUSBAND

• • •

DISPATCH: 371, we have multiple reports of suspicious activity in Freedom Memorial Church Graveyard. Gray, late model, BMW, parked with driver out of car.

Car 371: 10-4. That’s that restored church on Pennington?

DISPATCH: 10-4

Car 371: En route.

♱

REST IN PEACE

• • •

The trunk of a 7-series could easily fit several tombstones, and it pops from a button on the fob. The figure of his cemetery streetlamp shadow looks surrealistic with a rectangle in place of the normal tubby torso, like a phantasmagoric sketch in dark charcoal. The stone feels parched from its years kept unweathered, and an eerie chill pervades its surface.

Just as he begins to lumber, the silhouette of his labor in the yellow glow of the streetlamp is abruptly scattered by brightly flashing blue. The sound of two car doors opening. Footsteps. How to explain this inexplicable act?

The blue strobing leaves traces of images in the intermittent dimness, traces of the figures before him, traces of the object in his hands. These glimmers of the outward world shuffle to an array of inner ones, a slideshow terrible and ominous: BLUE FLASH. BLUE FLASH.—The degrading mugshot—Blue Flash. Blue Flash.—The licensure board meeting—Blue flash. Blue flash.—The last time locking the practice—Blue flash. Blue flash.— Gale packing—Blue flash. Blue flash.—Grocery store—Blue Flash. Blue Flash.—ALONE.—Blue Flash.— PORCH.—Blue—BOTTLE.—Flash.

Pistols pointed at him. “Put down the headstone and show me your hands! Do it now! Do it now!”

Utterly entranced now by the strobe, he teeters, trembling. He’s never fallen as an adult.

No slips, trips, or trust falls. The strange sensations of a backward collapse. The smack of pavement. The slab’s smoosh. Crushing rib cage on compressing heart. The forced expiration of final breath with the shock of intense weight. The flickers of blue swelling to flickers of white, interposing on the blackness, he sees himself from the outside for the first and final time. The tombstone is still heavier than one might think.

♱

HIS DUTY DONE, HIS HONOR WON.

• • •

Brother from Another

You moved next door the first year I got left back, a month after someone clocked me in the eye with a rock. Someone called my name, and when I turned, half the world went dark. My little brother from another, I still see you in that bright half. Though three years apart, we fixed into orbit around each other like binary stars. It wasn’t long before we were wailing on each other. You’d sock me in the cheek just below my eyepatch, and I’d wrench you into headlock. I’d throw haymakers after a shove, the bullied becoming the bully. Before you,

I was the ragdoll of the block, there to absorb the rage of bigger boys. Unable to sever fists from love, I hit you harder than I meant to, and you went sobbing to your mom. Like an avenging gunslinger, she cut me off at the pass, that small space between sidewalk and the steps to my porch. This was in the days

of belts and the backs of hands, wet washcloths, and even extension cords drawing welt lines across ours backs and asses. I readied myself for all four. You know how far a kid neck had to crane just to see her face, so high up she may as well have been Christ on his cross—an oak to a blade of grass. I didn’t cry. The pain to come was my pain to take because pain is what I deserved. Instead,

she took a knee to look me in the eye, squeezed me by the shoulders to hold me in place, and said big brothers don’t hit little brothers. She waited until recognition dawned in my face. It did, then she kissed me on the forehead. I never laid hands on you again. Not even if you puffed up and stepped to me. Not even after you left-crossed me in my bad eye after your alchy pops disappeared for good. You swung, I blocked. You kicked, so I dodged. Then we played wallball. Remember

those Christmas times? You always came over to see the lights my pops put up, rainbowed blinking from front door to back? He was a beater, not a drinker. You didn’t want to play, just wanted to look. Sometimes you’d sleep over and bust on me because I wouldn’t let you turn off the lamp in my room. I’d try to describe how the dark wasn’t just on the outside but inside, too. I didn’t have the words, so all you saw was a boy too old for a nightlight.

I wasn’t there when you killed that dude. I had moved away before your teen growl set in. What thought flashed in the flash of the shot as you squeezed that single second into forever? The last time I saw you,

you were fifteen. You seemed to be waiting for some words I didn’t have. I could’ve told you about the time I went looking for Bobby Moran with a sharpened screwdriver. He sucker-punched me in the back of the head while sitting in the bleachers at Hetzel’s Field. Me and the crew I ran with stalked the neighborhood looking for him. Visions of the shiv

disappearing into his belly clawed my insides out. Somewhere between here and there, George, my only friend in that place, leaned to my ear and whispered, Dude, jet! We spotted Bobby alone in Newt’s Playground. I took off in the other direction instead, and they chased until I got too far away. If I had reached to pull you back, little brother,

would you have taken my hand? Your moms tried, sending you every summer to your granny. Your brother tried, too, before vanishing into his girl and college. There’s some things only your boys can do. Thirty-years too late, I stare at the lamp in my twilit room. All night it’s on, brother. All night.

Pea Notes

Hey, fancy this: Clyde Barrow had a thing
for sweet peas (creamed) and Buck’s wife
Blanche did shampoos and perms and cuts 
at The Cinderella Beauty Shoppe in Denton. 
In Blanche’s My Life with Bonnie & Clyde, 
written in prison, the juice is in the sides. 

This morning, I saw Upstairs LeeAnn off 
to Germany. (There’s a Downstairs one, too.)
Upstairs LeeAnn, the way she looks (auburn)
and cooks (cakes) and trails a heavenly scent:
Yum. No, scent is too strong. When she’s near, 
you know and feel warm. In Blanche Barrow’s 

autobio, there’s a lot of crooning over husband 
Buck (honestly, gets to be a bit much). But the
editor’s notes (hot chocolate) and flourishes (with
marshmallows) swoon me. End of the day, it’s
the tiny treats I keep. Seeing Loretta Lynn live 

in Honolulu and, back in high school, friend
Mike and I chirping, “I’m raising black-eyed peas 
and blue-eyed babies . . . prayin’ for weather” 
down in the rec room on Rainbow View Drive. 
(Mike’s dead before I catch the sweet irony 

of his growing up on a rainbow.) Mike, 
his parental units, and dog Ginger. Tupperware 
soaking in the sink for hours. Dad working at the P.O., 
packing Mike’s peanut butter and jellies. If bibles 
have a smell, there’s that mixed in as well. 

And somewhere the secret sadnesses 
absorbed in green shag carpet, parents who dote 
on their only child (the idea of him) though 
they never really see him. Whole. 

When Mike’s grown, out of the closet,  
his mom once impulsively asked, 
“Are you ever tempted to cut it right off?” 
(A lot to unpack, huh . . . ) 

After that, he stayed away for a while. 
But all our lives, Mike and me, we’re full 
of guffaws and squelched guffaws 
that happen when you should absolutely NOT
guffaw. Sitting shiva for his partner Paul, to
name one. Good God, the rabbi’s high strung 

“May the Hebrews gather . . .” before heading 
full-tilt nasal into the Kaddish. Horrified, we
bit our cheeks, eyes spilled water, mouths 
contorted with explosive snorts. Oh well, it’s
the flamingoes that open the dance, 

right? Did I mention: Mr. Clyde also liked French 
fries? (peas, no peas—who knows). BTW, Mike 
would love both my LeeAnns. (There’s always 
room for more.) Tonight I munch perfect
strawberries Upstairs gifted me before a white Uber 
whisked her and her three black suitcases away.

Ode to Grief Bacon

Weeks after the pills folded
my grief like an omelet,
I opened a cookbook to taste  

the hollandaise sauce, buttery
and beaming from a spoon
and asked Alexa to turn

the volume up so Sam Cooke
could croon against the cast-irons,
and for the first time

in months, I whisked
three eggs while shuffling
in my socks. I hummed “A Change

Is Gonna Come,” while considering
the elegance of toast,
how the char makes even

the stalest wheat dissolve
on our tongues
in a quick burst of caramel.

Then I opened the package
of thick-cut bacon
as if it were a letter written

in sodium and fatback,
its cursive sizzling in strips
and sopping in grease

that bubbled against my knuckles
which, friends, was a pain
I too toasted into joy—and harried

by heat, I remembered the Germans
have a word for eating
out of despair: kummerspeck,

meaning “grief bacon,” so I sliced
the entire package and watched
the porky sadness shrink

until Sam’s voice grew heavy
with salt, the strips splitting
and spitting and saying only

kummerspeck, kummerspeck,
which is another way
of saying I glided

with a wooden spoon,
dripping yolk across
the canvas of the floor.

Banished

Whigham, GA, August 3, 1907

I looked up at Nettie. Studied her sharply angled face, her high cheekbones, those autumn brown, almond-shaped eyes. Her dark skin glistened in the heat as we walked. She stared straight ahead, her eyes focused on some point far down the dusty dirt road.

Noah was with us. Distracted by everything he saw, stumbling because he wanted to stop and examine things, anything. But Nettie kept dragging him along. It felt like she was in a hurry to get me to Olive’s house. I didn’t understand why. Maybe Noah felt it too. Maybe his antics were his way of trying to slow us down.

I was on Nettie’s right side, Noah on her left. We were all holding hands. I was carrying a small burlap sack that contained everything I could call mine. We were walking away from our cabin. The only place I knew to call home.

Yesterday, Nettie asked me to come and sit on the front porch steps with her. After we sat down, she announced that she was going to take me to live with my grandmother Olive.

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, the other day, I ran into your Grandma Olive in front of Chapman’s store. She told me that she wants you to start school in the fall. She wants you to move in with her before it starts. I’m taking you to her tomorrow.”

The school was just across the street from Chapman’s Dry Goods. When we went for groceries, Noah and I stood along the side of the building and looked across the street at children playing in the yard. There were two swings under a big oak in the middle of the school yard. I always wanted to try swinging on one. Nettie wouldn’t ever let us do it, even when the kids weren’t there. Going to school sounded like an adventure, but I couldn’t see what it had to do with moving to Olive’s house. “School sounds okay. I want to go to school, but I don’t need to live with Olive. I’ll stay here. That way Noah and I can walk to school together.”

Nettie shook her head. “You ever see colored children at the school Roy? Noah won’t be going with you. School is for white children. Colored children aren’t allowed.”

White, colored, what did that have to do with going to school? We had a small mirror in our cabin. Nettie used it from time to time, but Noah and I weren’t supposed to mess with it. Nettie worried we might break it. Awhile back, she left it out when she went to the privy. I found it and held it up to my face. I was shocked. I couldn’t believe what I saw. My face was so white, and there were little brown dots all over it. I was ugly. I didn’t look anything like Noah or Nettie. When she came back in, I showed her, and she explained that I was white, and she and Noah were brown. “What white folks in town call colored,” she said. 

I stared at her face. She was beautiful, even with sad eyes. “That doesn’t make sense. It can’t be true.”

She put her arm around me and pulled me close. “Roy, I’ve known this day was coming since Olive brought you to me. I done told you part of this story plenty of times. When you was just two days old, your mama died and you was starving to death. Olive, well she begged me to take you in, feed you—so I did. Early on, all I could think was, soon as you was off the breast, I’d send you back. And I meant to, but the longer I had you, the more that thought faded. I started thinking of you as mine, you was such a precious thing.” She squeezed me. “You still is. But I knew I couldn’t keep you. I kept telling myself I needed to tell you, so that when the time came, you’d be ready. I’m sorry Roy, so sorry. I just couldn’t never do it. We’ve been so happy together and I guess I just pretended if I didn’t tell you, then we could stay happy longer. But the time has come, and you must go.”

“But why Nettie, why can’t I stay here?”

She sighed. “The real world doesn’t allow for white boys to live in a colored home to be raised by a colored woman. Now with you growing up, folks are already starting to talk. I hear it behind our backs. Lately, I’ve been leaving you and Noah at home when I go to town because it could cause trouble. White folk and colored folk just don’t mingle. I even think there may be some laws against it.”

I didn’t understand. It made no sense. I kept asking why and Nettie kept trying to explain it. No matter what she said, or how hard I tried to grasp what she was saying, I couldn’t. 

After a hundred whys, Nettie finally gave up in exasperation and told me to hush, but I wouldn’t. I told her that I didn’t want to go and live with Olive. I didn’t want to be away from Noah. I was terrified at the thought of leaving my home, of leaving her.

The more I begged, the more I pleaded, the more resolute she became. Finally, when she couldn’t bear it any longer, she yelled. She said things that I knew were true, but I could not accept. “Roy, stop being such a pest! You aren’t my child. I didn’t adopt you, and I was never meant to raise you! You don’t belong here. I’m not your mother, and Noah is not your brother!”

Her words made me cry—loud, uncontrollable wailing with rivers of tears streaming down my face. Nettie had always been there to console me, to hug me, to dry my eyes and reassure me that I was going to be ok. But this time, she didn’t. She grabbed a laundry basket and went out the back door. She began gathering clothes from the clothesline. Noah came out onto the porch and sat beside me.

I don’t know how long I cried. I got so tired that I stopped for a little while, but then I looked at Noah and he looked at me and I started crying again. Noah joined in. We hugged and rocked back and forth. It was almost as good as a hug from Nettie. We finally quit crying and just sat there until the sun went down.

Later, when we went to bed, Nettie wrapped her arms around me and whispered in my ear. She told me over and over that everything was going to be fine. Grandma Olive and Uncle Thomas were family. They’d take care of me. I’d be happy there. Starting school next fall would open a whole new world for me. After what seemed like forever, she fell asleep. But I didn’t.

I lay in bed with Nettie breathing softly next to me. Noah was on her other side, sleeping soundly. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t imagine that it was going to be fine. I belonged with Nettie and Noah. I had shared a bed with them my whole life. When it was cold, we would huddle together in a tight knot. I liked being in the middle, but so did Noah. Noah was a heavy sleeper, so I’d let him have the middle and then lay awake until he was very still, and his breathing was deep and slow. That’s when I’d make my move, tunneling under the quilt and squirming in between him and Nettie. I’d fall asleep in seconds. In the morning, Noah would profess outrage at having been displaced. The confrontation usually ended with a wrestling match until Nettie lost her patience and threw us both out of the bed.

I tried to imagine what it would be like at Olive’s. Where would I sleep? Who would I sleep with? Noah and I were afraid to go to the privy at night. So, if one of us had to go, we both went. Would I have to go by myself now? Would Noah have to go alone as well? In my heart, I knew that Nettie would go with him.

There was so much to figure out, and I didn’t want to have to do that. Maybe when we got there, we would all sit around a table at Olive’s and talk it through. Nettie could explain everything. Once she finished telling Olive and Thomas what I would need, well, maybe everyone would decide that it was best if I just stayed with her. Or maybe Olive and Thomas would be so happy to see me, they would fall all over themselves trying to make everything just right. We’d even work out a plan where I could spend lots of time with Noah.

The heat and a long stretch of road with no shade pulled me back to the moment. It was a dry, hot August. Cornfields stretched out on either side. The leaves were drooping and the tassels on husks were withered. I could see a line of trees in the distance. I knew we were getting close.

When we reached Olive’s cabin, we were drenched in sweat. We approached just close enough to stand under an enormous live oak that stretched across the yard. The shade was a relief. Nettie stopped unexpectedly and still holding hands, Noah and I were jolted to a stop. I looked up at her and followed her gaze to Olive’s cabin. It looked about the same as ours, except it was rundown and ill kept. Nettie was obsessed with keeping our place spotless. In the spring, she’d spend hours pulling weeds and grass from the yard, all the way to the road. Once the ground was naked, she’d regularly sweep it. A few years ago, she hired a man to repair the siding and put a new metal roof on. She’d been painstakingly saving for years, and it had taken every penny we had.

Olive’s yard was deep in weeds and bushes. To see the whole cabin, you had to stand right where we were, on the narrow path that led from the road to the porch. The siding was gray and weathered. The roof was rusty. I watched Nettie scan her surroundings. I could sense her thoughts. She wanted to get on her hands and knees and start pulling weeds. I half expected her to do it and enlist us to help. That’s when Olive came out the front door.

Nettie locked her eyes on Olive. She placed her hand between my shoulder blades and gave me a gentle push. When I resisted, she moved her hand to my chin and turned my face toward hers. “It’s time to go Roy. You got family waiting. Don’t make your grandmother have to stand out in this heat. Go on now.”

I had never seen Nettie cry, and I wasn’t sure she was crying now. But her eyes seemed like deep pools, and she was blinking faster than seemed normal. I wrapped my arms around her leg.

Olive was squinting at us. “Roy, come on up now. I’m sure Miss Nettie has other business to attend to.” She gave a nod toward Nettie, but Nettie didn’t respond. 

That’s when Thomas limped out of the house. He was dirty and disheveled. He had a long gray beard that was stained at the corners of his mouth. Despite the heat, he wore a long-sleeved, heavy cotton shirt. He was skinny, and his threadbare pants were held up by thick suspenders. He offered a toothless grin. “Why howdy Miss Nettie. Ain’t you just looking fine! Why I know it’s been years since we last saw each other and yet you ain’t changed one bit. Say, you ever find yourself another man after that fella of yours up and left you? Willie was his name as I recall.”

A look came over Nettie’s face that I had never seen before. Without looking away from Olive and Thomas, she pulled me off her leg and put her hand back between my shoulder blades. But this time she shoved me, hard. I stumbled forward, and before I could recover, Nettie yanked Noah around and hurried away without a word. I wanted to run after them, get away from this place, but I knew I couldn’t. Nettie would just drag me back.

Bewildered, I looked back at the porch. Olive was motioning to me. “Come on child, get on up here and let me take a closer look at you. I haven’t seen you in what seems like forever, and I think you must be a foot taller than that last time; don’t you think so Thomas?”

Thomas leaned forward on his cane so that his head was just beyond the edge of the porch. He cleared his throat and spit. Brown spittle spiraled through the air. Some of it caught in his beard. He leered. “What are you now boy, five, six maybe? You a stunted little thing even for that age. I reckon you’ll be a dwarf your whole life—taking after your mother I suppose. Why, a stiff wind coulda blowed her all the way to the Carolinas.” His eyes brightened. “Or maybe you never got enough to eat, that Nettie making sure she and her boy always got their fill before you got any. That could explain it—or you need wormin', maybe both.”

Olive scowled. “You leave the boy alone Thomas and stop saying such awful things. Go on and get yourself back inside.” Thomas glared at Olive without moving. She stepped closer. “Do as I say or so help me, I’m gonna shove you off this porch and if the fall don’t kill you, I’ll come down and finish the job.”

Thomas turned and dragged himself toward the door. “No need to get all upset Olive. I’m just funnin’ with the boy. He got to be some use.”

I was paralyzed. I had no idea what was happening. Without speaking, Olive came down from the porch and ushered me into the cabin, my new home.

There was a front door and a back door. Both were open and a gentle breeze ran through the house. There were no windows. A canopy of live oaks sent branches above the roof that blocked out most of the sunlight. Even though it was only mid-afternoon, inside it felt like the sun was about to set.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Thomas was sitting in a chair near the back door. There was a cast iron stove five feet from him. Its chimney barely cleared the top of the stove before turning ninety degrees and passing through the wall.

Olive took me to the stove and pointed to a pile of neatly folded quilts lying on the floor behind it. “This is where you’ll sleep Roy. We don’t light the stove much in the summer, but we try to keep it going all the time when the weather starts turning cold. It’ll be a blessing if you could see to it that the fire stays lit when we need it. We keep a stack of wood just outside the back door there. Its right hard on us if we have to get up at night to tend it.”

Thomas turned in his chair and glared. “What Olive is saying boy, if you’re going to live in this house, sleep here, eat our food, why then we expect you to earn it. You turn out to be a slackard, or you get contrary about what we tell you to do, then you’ll end up sleeping on the bare floor.”

I crouched under the stovepipe and crawled to my new bed. The quilts were old and worn, but clean. I ran my hand over the topmost. It was soft and thick.

“I sewed those quilts from flour sacks.” Olive announced from behind me. “Not much to look at and they surely wouldn’t win a prize at the fair, but they’ll keep you warm, even in February.” 

I turned and looked at her. “Miss Olive, will I be sleeping here all by myself?”

She must have seen the desperate look on my face. Her eyes widened and a tender smile crossed her lips. “I never knew until just this moment how much you look like your daddy. We call him Little John, even nowadays when he’s all grown up. When he was a babe, he had trouble with the ‘M’ sound, so when I tried to teach him to say mama, it always came out nana.” She shrugged her shoulders. “The name just stuck. Why don’t you call me Nana too?” She pointed to a narrow bed pushed against the far wall. “I sleep over there, it’s too narrow for two. Thomas sleeps in his chair. Besides, we’re way too old and stiff to be climbing down there with you. This can be your special place.”

Without another word, Olive walked to the table and started shelling peas. Thomas began snoring. I felt the sudden urge to pee, so I went out the backdoor looking for the privy. A narrow path from the cabin led to it. It seemed a long way off. I’d have to make sure I never needed to go there after dark.

Further on from the privy, there was a chicken coop with a run. Half a dozen hungry looking hens scratched in the bare earth. Not far from the coop, was a smoke house. I peaked in. It was empty. Behind the smoke house, was an area with large, blackened timbers jutting up at odd angles. Kicking through the debris, I found a rusted hay fork and some enormous hinges. There must have been a barn that burned down.

The path ended at a tiny stream. The water was clear and cool. As I walked along the edge, I spooked a frog that was sunning on a log. It arced through the air and splashed into the water. A few minnows darted around the commotion. At Nettie’s, we got our water from a tiny brook that fed the Sweetwater Branch. With the path coming back this far, I figured this is where Olive and Thomas got their water.

Dinner was a meager affair. The food was alright, but the portions were small, half an ear of boiled corn, a few chunks of new potato, a tiny slice of some sort of potted meat. No one spoke as we ate. Dinner with Nettie and Noah could be raucous. Noah and I were always in competition, vying for the most elaborate adventure story of the day. Nettie would listen attentively and always laugh when something was supposed to be funny.

I helped Olive wash the dishes and put them away. Thomas returned to his roost. There was a stool with a big pillow on it in front of the chair.  I watched as he struggled to get his left leg up onto it. When he saw me staring, he frowned. “I shouldn’t have to say something boy. Get over here and help me.”

While I helped Thomas get comfortable, Olive sat back down at the table. She lit a candle and pulled some knitting needles out of a bag at her side. She examined the results of her previous effort, then she began knitting. Without looking up, she announced, “I’m making a sweater for you Roy. It’s likely to take me a month or two. It should be ready by the time you need it.”

I watched, transfixed, as her plump, gnarled fingers effortlessly guided the needles around the thread. The hypnotic movement cast a spell on me, and in a few moments, I felt my eyelids getting heavy. A yawn escaped my lips.

“It’s been a long day Roy, why don’t you go crawl into your new bed?” Olive said without looking up from her work.

I nodded and crawled under the stovepipe. It was too warm to get under the quilts, so I laid on top. I rolled onto my back and stared at the rafters. A second ago, I was falling asleep standing up, and now, lying here, I was suddenly wide awake.

I tried to understand the day. It was impossible. Perhaps in the morning I would ask Olive what the trouble was between them and Nettie. It sure seemed to me that something had happened that caused a divide. But then I thought better of it. It might make Olive mad. She wasn’t anything like Nettie, but she seemed nice enough. She was kind when she talked to me and now, she was making a sweater for me. If I got the chance, I could share stories about what it was like being with Nettie and Noah. Once she got a better picture, she’d have to like them. Then they would become friends.

Thomas was different. Always seemed angry. Maybe it was his leg. Maybe it pained him so much that it colored his whole world, made him angry with everything and everyone. That had to be it. I can work on that. Make sure he has as little discomfort as possible. Do what I can to soothe his misery.

I rolled onto my side and wiggled into the quilts. I tossed and turned. I tried leaning against the wall, but it was hard and straight. I started to cry. Just tears at first, then sniffles, then long soft wails punctuated with sobs.

I heard Thomas shift in his chair. Then his voice rang out. “I expect you to quit that caterwauling right now. We won’t have it. Quit it now or I’ll take my cane to you.”

I rolled onto my hands and knees. I crawled under the stovepipe and scurried to the front door. It was still open. There was a halfmoon that made the yard brighter than the dark cabin. I ran down the path and onto the road.

An hour later, exhausted, I stumbled into our yard and called out to Nettie. Sleepy-eyed, she met me on the porch dressed in her nightgown. Noah was standing behind her. He was holding onto Nettie’s gown. His eyes were wide and there was a faint smile on his face. He looked happy to see me.

“What on earth you doing back here, Roy?”

I hadn’t planned on having to explain it. She had to know. I looked down at the floor. Nettie’s bare feet peaked out from under her gown. Her toes were curled like she was trying to hold on. I looked back up, trying to read her face in the darkness. “They made me sleep by myself on the floor. I don’t like it there. Please let me stay, please.”

Nettie’s shoulders slumped. She reached out, put her hand behind my head, and pulled me to her. I grabbed her leg and put an arm around Noah. We stood like that for a while, Nettie softly running her fingers through my hair.

“You can stay the night. But in the morning, you’re going back and this time you’re staying.” We went into the house and climbed into bed. Curled up beside Nettie and Noah, I was asleep in seconds.

Nettie was all business in the morning. We had a hasty breakfast and then she grabbed my hand and pulled me out the door. Noah started to follow, but Nettie shook her head. “You stay inside ‘til I get back Noah. I won’t be gone long.”

It was early, and the air wasn’t hot yet. Nettie walked so fast that I almost had to run to keep up with her. If I fell behind, she pulled on my arm. We got to the corn fields, and I could see the tree line that was just before Olive’s cabin. Nettie stopped and kneeled so that we were eye to eye. Her face was stern. “This is a far as I’m going Roy. I’m going back. You’re going on to Olive’s, and you’re going to stay. I’m done fighting with you. I got better things to do. If you come back to my house, why I’ll get Sheriff Martin to arrest you for trespass. You ain’t welcome anymore.” She stood up. Now get on, get out of my sight.”

She pushed me toward Olive’s. I stumbled a few steps, stopped and looked back. Nettie was standing with her hands on her hips. She looked angry, but tears were running down her cheeks. She whispered goodbye, turned, and started back down the road as fast as she could go.

Coming Full Circle

Imagine the magic a circle holds, its infinite points—dotted or passing through. Imagine my Tagalog and accent erased, so that I could pass.

I uncovered my mother’s dictionaries in the towel cabinet, her scribbles: proof of definition and memorization. Perfecting English helped her pass.

For the sixth-grade spelling bee, I studied intensely, circling only unfamiliar words, burning them into my brain. My mother, orbiting me. And I passed.

Imagine the power of a trophy or a medal, to a child, the rounded
glory beaming from the walls. My wild and free daughter, wanting to pass.

Is she yours? people say to me. Is that your mom? children ask her, studying her coils and caramel skin. From my womb, you grew. Through my body, you passed.

My anxiety rises like a rocket flare, brief but real, being in a fully
Filipino space. Even in a white space. Oh, but you’ll be fine. You pass.

Pass me courage, make us all balls of limitless love and identity. Here is the open field. Pull back, do a double roulette, and pass.

Have we come full circle? Are we still fishing out words and phrases from the stream, afraid to awake the sleeping eye and ashamed of the past?

There is a description for identity confusion, this lostness: Ang Pilipinong nawawala sa sarili. To not always belong or pass.

---

This poem—a loose ghazal—echoes concepts and Tagalog phrases from Leny Mendoza Strobel’s book Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization Among Post-1965 Filipino Americans (2nd edition). The “sleeping eye” references page 6 where Strobel discusses the Filipino American community’s “identity crisis,” traditional Filipino values versus modern American values,” and the “invisible minority and the sleeping giant.” The loss of language guilt and shame is further contextualized on page 130 (“Why didn’t you maintain the language? Why didn’t you teach me?”).

Where the Wild Goose Goes

As soon as he heard the first cool breezes of autumn rustling through the dry leaves, Philip Ryan imagined himself flying point in one of those southbound Vs of Canadians he’d seen moving across the sky. The sight of those flawless formations always excited him so much that he’d feel like answering their distant call with a good honk or two of his own. The feeling was so strong that sometimes he wondered if he’d been one of those soaring birds in a past life and had been reincarnated into his flightless form by some horrible mistake.

He figured he might not be able to fly like a goose, but he damned sure knew where the highway was. And one morning he would look over at the aging woman sleeping beside him and slip from her bed as quiet as a cat burglar. He’d pack his duffle, he’d take all the cash in the house, and he’d be down the road by sunrise, looking for something better, or at least something different, leaving nothing of himself behind save a few stray hairs and the imprint of his head on the pillow.

But this stay had been so long he felt like one of those fat geese whose wild spirit has been drained by the lush grazing around lakes and farm ponds. Instead of a pond, he found his easy pickings in a McMansion that sprawled across a tiny suburban lot south of Birmingham. By his standards, the place was luxurious. But he had grown weary of hearing how Carol’s ex had paid for it.

"Made the son-of-a-bitch pay through the nose," she would say after too many glasses of Chablis, pointing to what Philip thought was her best feature, her little button of a nose. "Through the fucking nose."

Tough talk, he thought. And about as much at home on her tongue as a ring would be through that cute nose.

She often came home from her job as the district sales manager for Wilmot Pharmaceuticals, packing some kind of bauble for his pleasure. She’d bought him more clothes than he would ever wear and a membership to Gold's Gym so he could keep his long, lean body tight and fit. And she bought a new car, a blue BMW Z4 convertible, for him to drive all the time as long as he promised to cruise by her ex-husband's place every day or so.

"Remind that cheating son-of-a-bitch that I don’t need him or his fucking money anymore," she said, a weak snarl masking the cracking of her voice and the tears welling in her eyes every time she mentioned her ex.

On a scale of looks, Philip thought she had probably always been several notches down from pretty. But with that button nose and those soft lips, she could’ve been recognized at one time as cute. He imagined her in high school as a perky cheerleader with her cheeks firm and dimpled, her brown hair long and ponytailed. She had never told him how old she was, but she now looked to be in her late forties, knocking hard on fifty. He could see a double chin collecting around her neck like slowly rising bread dough, with gravity doing its treacherous thing to the skin around her eyes. A shiver trickled up his spine as he thought, time is damn sure hell on the cute and perky.

He hadn’t thought of his own age since his birthday back in May. He remembered how old he was and bit his tongue before the dreaded number could pass through his lips. He walked over to the dresser mirror, stroked his blond hair that grew in a riot of curly tangles.

“Hell, kid, you don’t look a day over twenty-five.” He shrugged. “Eh, maybe twenty-six.” But he could do the math. Twelve autumns had blown by since that had been the correct answer.

That morning, as Carol scrambled around the house getting ready for work, he leaned back into the pillows bunched behind him on the headboard and sipped the coffee she brought him, wiping sleep from his eyes and thinking he had to get the hell out of there pretty soon. He could feel his wildness draining from him amid all that freedom-sucking domesticity.

“Would you mind taking a damp mop and going over these floors today?" she called from somewhere down the hall.

Instead of answering he stared at the door, telling himself to just walk through it as he had all the others. She could boss those toads at work around all she wanted, but he wasn't a man who took orders. He had no intention of mopping a damn floor. What bothered him was she suddenly dared to ask him. She had become too comfortable with him, leading her to talk about him to some of her girlfriends. He was sure those bitches had put her up to asking him to do fucking housework.

"And the kitchen," she said, now standing in the door. "I don't mind cooking when I come in. Really, I don't. I love to cook. But it would help me a lot if you'd have everything kind of cleaned up and ready. If you could do that, it'd really be great, baby."

She walked over to the bed, bent over and tagged his cheek with a quick peck. "Gotta go," she said, glancing at her watch.

As she walked away, he thought that if he left today, the swell of her hips in that tweedy brown suit would be his last sight of her. He listened to the familiar sound of her heels punishing the hardwood in the hallway, the front door opening and closing, the growl of her Mercedes' diesel turning over in the garage. By the time the scent of her hairspray and cologne faded from the bedroom, his coffee had grown cold.

Before her, all the older women he had lived with had at first been satisfied with having a young man sleeping in their beds. But they eventually wanted more, and it was this more thing that always scared the hell out of him. Their mores—usually: get a job, meet her family, go back to school, or some shit. It had never taken much of this to get him packed and down the road. But this was his second autumn in Birmingham, and Carol had already dumped a truckload of mores on him.

His experience led him to understand the unhealed wound of a broken marriage at this stage in a woman’s life, all those dreams and expectations crushed by an egomaniacal husband's need for something younger, leaving her to feel like a formerly cute puppy, grown into a fat, ugly mutt. That wound was his stock-in-trade, and he understood that he would have to listen to them lashing out at their exes. He knew he would have to hold them and make them believe his imaginary bond with them would get them through another night.

But with Carol, it wasn't just her ex-husband. It was her weight, her job, her intelligence, or lack of it as she sometimes thought. To him, her job sounded like a total train wreck. The night before, she spent hours glued to her computer and yakking on the phone, suddenly pushing herself away, shouting to the ceiling, "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing."

Listening to this kind of shit was the last thing he ever wanted to do. But the strong impulse he felt to leave at the sound of it was soon overcome by the horror of crawling on another Greyhound bus.

"Baby, you sure look like you know what you're doing," he said, moving in behind her, rubbing her shoulders, feeling her taut muscles melt under his fingertips.

"I don't, though," she whined, giving in to his ministrations.

"Of course you do, and you know it. Hell, you're the smartest woman I've ever known."

It was easy to compliment her because she really was smart. But she didn't always believe it. She curled up in his arms, content after his reassurances, but he knew she would be good only till the next office crisis, the next dip in her confidence which could be set off by anything, especially her weekly telephone call to her mother. Then she would look as if she'd been kicked in the gut by an NFL punter.

"That bitch," she said, pointing at the phone one day as if the old lady were curled up in it. "How did she get to be a mother, anyway?”

He’d had enough of her emotional meltdowns. He sprang from the bed and found his canvas duffle in the corner of the closet, crumpled under the parade of shirts, pants, and sport coats, all cleaned and lined up in neat rows. He pulled the frayed old bag out, brushed a couple of dust balls from its stiff folds, and watched them float to the floor. The thing wouldn't hold a fraction of the stuff Carol had bought him. Before he split, he'd have to get a suitcase or something.

He ran his finger across the rod that held his shirts, contemplating his choices, caressing the hanger hooks as if he were strumming harp strings, already missing the things he would have to leave behind. Then he thought the whole thing was too much of a decision to make before breakfast.

~

Phillip headed out to Joe Bean's Coffee shop. Remembering the fifteen hundred bucks he'd squirreled away, he figured it might be a good time to get out while he was ahead. As he gripped the wheel, he envisioned how good it would feel to have the highway crushing under his tires with trees and cities whizzing by his windows. But as he pulled into the coffee shop's lot, he released his grip with a sigh. He’d been spending Carol's money these days and doubted how long fifteen hundred dollars would stay in his pocket. Besides, the damned car was in her name. He knew he couldn't take it. With all the vindictiveness she targeted toward her ex-husband, he knew if he pissed her off by leaving in the Beemer, he'd be swimming in cops before he hit the county line. That meant he would be back on the Greyhound like the old days, and as he leaned back into the firm leather, he could almost hear the lonesome moan of the bus's engine, the hiss of its brake, the pungent scent of diesel, and the usual unwashed passenger sitting beside him, giving him a gap-toothed grin before taking a ragged pull from a half pint of cheap whiskey.

He sat in the coffee shop parking lot while everything he had come to know moved farther and farther away from him. His daily excursions here to the coffee shop, the gym, the track, the mall, and the TV shows he watched on the sixty-five incher in Carol's den every night. He shuddered at some of the things he'd done to get where he was now and wondered if he would ever have another set-up like this again.

Even before he climbed out of the car, he knew the blonde barista would greet him with a toothy smile, her face all scrunched up as if she were trying to beam at him.  She always giggled at everything he said and caressed the hair on the back of his hand after she handed him his coffee. When no one was looking, she would refill his cup and slip him some of the pastries she was supposed to chop up for customer samples.

She saw him coming and cooed. "Philip. Grande house blend.”

He reached for it. "Something extra for you,” she whispered. “Our new pumpkin coffee cake."

"Thanks," he whispered back. "You know. I'm going to have to do something nice for you one of these days."

"Yes, you are," she said.

He snatched a newspaper from the rack, and wended his way through a gauntlet of lattes and laptops, laying claim to an empty table next to one of the east-facing windows. Some classical piece seeped from the speakers hanging from the walls, soft violins and cellos, mingling with the gurgling cappuccino machine and the hum of conversation. 

He'd never given the barista a second thought, but as he sipped his coffee and rustled through the newspaper, he thought of her tits peeking at him under her short black apron. Carol's tits on the other hand—well, Carol's tits were fast surrendering to the law of gravity. They’d done all the peeking they were ever going to do. Those nights when she wasn't harried by work, depressed over her failed marriage, or inflamed by some backhand comment her mother made, he managed to talk her into making love. He often thought it was a mistake because they always ended up with her lying under him like a lump, breathlessly whispering for him to slow down. Slow down? He was already moving so slowly, like one of those shapeless globs wiggling in her stupid lava lamp in the den.

The barista surprised him, refilling his coffee and plopping another slice of cake on the table.

"Nice day, huh?" she said.

"Nice day?" he said, lowering the paper and looking out the window as if seeing the October sunshine for the first time. "Yeah," he said. "Damn, I think you're right. Kinda crisp or something like that. You know what I'm saying?"

"Crisp?" she said with a little giggle in her voice. "Yeah, I think I do."

"Hey, how long have I been coming in here?"

"I don't know," she said. "I've been here a little over four months. You've been in every day I've been here."

"That's what I'm getting at. You got my name when I ordered coffee on the first day. But I don't know yours."

"No. I don't guess you do, do you?"

"Oh, you're not going to tell me?"

"I don't know," she said. "Maybe I will."

"Well, whoever you are, you know what we ought to do on this nice, crisp day?"

"What?"

"Go on a picnic."

"A picnic? You mean like, together?"

"No, we should go on two separate picnics. Of course, together. I could jam some sandwiches into a cooler, grab a bottle of wine . . . Hey, I may have to check your ID."

"I'll show you my mine if you show me yours," she said.

"Got yourself a deal," he said. "What time you get off?"

"I get off at one today. But I'm supposed to go to the dentist."

"Blow it off. Let's go out to the park, have lunch by the lake, and, you know, chill with Mother Nature for a while."

"For real?" she said, cocking her eyebrow, a smile trickling across her lips.

"I’m always for real, baby," he said, pushing up from the table. "You up for some picnic or what?"

"I don't know. I guess.” A haze of doubt before her face broke into that beaming smile.

"See you out front at one.”

~

After driving back to Carol's, he nestled into his favorite spot on the couch for a little TV. Judge Judy talked him into a deep sleep, and when he woke it was a little past noon. Excited by the thought of getting his hands on someone young and firm with her full allotment of estrogen, he packed up a blanket, the cooler, and a couple of Carol’s fancy wine glasses along with the Chablis she had cooling in the fridge. He stopped by the local deli for a couple of roasted chicken sandwiches and got back to the coffee shop to find the barista standing at the curb, her black apron tossed over her shoulder, checking out her phone.

He screeched to a halt in front of her.

"I didn't know if you'd actually come or not," she said.

"You kidding? Who in his right mind would ever stand you up?"

"Well, I wasn't really sure about all that ‘right mind’ stuff.” She opened the door. "Nice car."

He wheeled up on the interstate with the wind whipping through his hair. "Let's get some tunes going up in here.” He cued the Foo Fighter's CD with Grohl belting out "The Pretender."

"You like this?" he asked over the roaring wind, the moaning traffic, and the driving guitars.

She looked up from her phone and shouted back, "It's okay. I kinda like old music sometimes."

"Yeah, me too.”

~

There were only a few cars scattered around the lake. He parked the Beemer, got out, and snatched up the cooler and the blanket. "This way."

The tall grass slapping against their legs. "You come out here a lot?" she asked.

"Not a lot," he said. Carol brought him out here once with the intention of picnicking. She had wept like a bereaved widow when she told him that it had been her favorite place to go with her ex.

He spread the blanket in the shade of a sycamore and motioned for the barista to sit. He dropped down beside her, opening the wine and filled the glasses.

"Wow," she said, looking at him with one eye through the pale liquid. "This is so cool. I feel like a girl in a TV commercial or something."

"You look like a girl in a TV commercial.” He raised his glass." Bottoms up." Drained it.

She followed his lead and swallowed her wine. She came up gasping, giggling, and dribbling wine down her chin.

"One more time," he said.

"I thought you were supposed to sip this stuff with your pinkie finger poked out," she said.

"We'll pinkie the shit out of it after we get us a little buzz going," he said, refilling her glass.

By the time he gulped down a second glass, the alcohol had him floating. He poured them another glass, and they sat sipping it without talking, the air nutty and sweet smelling. Across the lake, the hardwoods on the mountain shimmered red, gold, and purple among the green pines.

“So, what is your name?"

"Kirsten," she said. "My friends call me Kirsty."

"Want to hear a secret, Kirsty?"

"I totally want to hear a secret."

"I've been wanting to kiss you since the first time I saw you."

She smirked and shook her head. "You must not have wanted to very bad."

"Why do you say that?"

 She shrugged. "Took you four months to ask me out."

"My life's been kinda complicated.”.

"You probably stay all jammed up with a lot of women and all."

 "Well, not so many. I'm mostly jammed up with work."

"Work?" she said. "You mean you work somewhere?"

"What do you think I am, some kind of bum?"

"No," she said. "I just thought you were rich or something. You know, you drive a cool car, and you have a buncha time to hang around the coffee shop in the morning."

"I wouldn't say I'm rich, but I do all right.”

"Who do you work for?"

 "Actually, I'm self-employed,” he said. “You might say, I'm sort of a consultant."

"I guess you have to be really smart to do that kind of stuff, huh."

"Oh, not so smart," he said. "But you have to do a lot of listening. I mean a lot of goddamn listening."

"Well?" she said, scooting closer to him.

"Well, what?"

"You going to kiss me or not?"

"Yes," he said, slowly leaning into her. "Yes I am."

 He didn't see her toss her glass, but he heard it shatter on a rock. Her breasts crushing against him, tipping his own glass over, wine splashing on his blazer and spilling across his lap.

It didn't take him long to forget about Carol's blanket, her fancy glasses, his blazer, and even his wet jeans because Kirstin's hair smelled like sweet coffee, and her lips surrendered to his as they lay facing each other while his hand roamed from her breasts down her back to the curve of her ass.

Her breathing was so heavy, he wondered for a second if she were having an asthma attack. She sucked in a deep breath and rolled on top of him, clinging to him like a wrestler trying to pin an opponent to the mat. Her mouth moving down his face like some wet little animal. What would Carol would say if she saw a hickey the size of a drink coaster on his neck?

Her hand snaked down to his crotch, and he worried that there was nothing much going on down there. This had happened to him a few times with Carol in the past several months. She had held him and told him not to worry, to take his time, and he always recovered.

He untangled himself and sat up, gasping. "Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Goddamn! Slow down!" Kirsty tumbled back on the blanket, looking at him like he’d slapped her.

"Look," he said. "This may not be such a good idea."

"Not a good idea?" she said, blinking her eyes as if she were coming out of a trance.

"No, I mean. I just got to thinking. You're kinda young and all . . ."

"I'm twenty-two," she said.

"Well, see . . . that's a little . . . and I'm . . ."

"Whatever," she said, and for a moment she looked at him as if he were a birthday present she hadn't really wanted in the first place.

"Hey. I was just thinking it'd be better if we had some lunch first," he said, fumbling in the cooler. "I got these great sandwiches."

"I don't want any great sandwiches," she grumbled. By the time he raised up, sandwiches in his hand, she was already standing, staring down at her phone. She was just going to stand there, flipping her finger across the phone’s screen.

"You want some more wine?" he asked.

"I hate wine," she snapped without looking at him. "Shit. I missed my dental appointment."

~

He left Kirsty at the curb in front of the coffee shop, watching in his rearview mirror as she thumbed messages into her phone as if she were keying in a code that would delete the whole miserable afternoon from her life. He might have disappointed a few women in his time, but this had to be the first time he'd made one long for the medieval torture of a dentist's drill.

The barista had surprised him with that tsunami of passion. It wasn’t just surprise, he admitted to himself.  She’d scared the shit out of him. No wonder. He'd been hustling aging divorcees for so long his days had become nothing but a constant parade of the moods, fragrances, and special lubricants of menopausal women.

He drove for hours, thinking how he needed to move out and start dating young women. Of course, he would have to pick up on some other hustle. He didn’t think that would be any problem. He'd been such a wiz at pimping timeshares down in that Orlando the owner had begged him to go over and help him unload some properties in Boca. That was back when he’d latched onto that chunky red-head divorcee from Tallahassee. And here he was, eight years later, cruising around Birmingham watching the sun leave a pink stain in the western sky. 

He trembled with the thought of getting a job and going through an episode like this afternoon again. He'd always been able to talk any self-doubt away by giving himself a little pep talk. He drove into a Shell convenience store and pulled down the visor to look at himself in the vanity mirror.  If he ever wondered where those eight years since Tallahassee had gone, he'd just found them on his face. There was no use telling this reflection that it was the sun lightening his hair. The gray mingled in made it more taupe than blond, and it looked as if it were eroding into a peninsula in front. 

~

"Where have you been?" Carol asked when he walked in the back door, her voice so desperate she sounded as if she'd just organized a search party.

"Oh, you expect me to account for every second I'm out of your sight?" he snapped.

"No. You didn't answer your phone. I was worried."

"The battery on that new iPhone won't stay charged," he said.

"I'll see about it tomorrow," she said. "You hungry? I thought we'd have the leftover roast."

"Aww," he whined, deciding to see if he was still the leader in this little dance. "I don't want any old leftover roast."

"What if I fixed you an omelet," she said. "The way you like it. With ham and peppers."

That might make him feel a little better. He decided to raise the stakes. "Could we have those spicy potatoes you make along with it?"

"Whatever you want," she said. 

"And biscuits," he said, upping the ante. "We could have biscuits, couldn't we?"

"Of course, baby," she said. "And you can sit in the kitchen while I cook and tell you about my day."

While she baked the biscuits and sautéed the onions and peppers, he sat and listened.

"Mother called," she said with a groan. "That woman won't just come out and tell me I'm fat. Oh! Hell no. She sneaks it into a conversation like someone slipping poison in your drink. She knows weight's my sore spot because she made it sore when I was a girl. And she never misses a chance to peel the scab off. She just told me she hoped I was staying away from Twinkies. Then she chuckled like we were sharing a fond memory of my high school days or something. I swear, I've eaten only two Twinkies in my entire life. In the eleventh grade, she had me on nothing but carrot sticks and lettuce so I'd be thin and popular. I didn't have enough energy for cheer practice, so I ate everything in sight when she wasn't looking. I got those damn Twinkies from a friend. Mom found the wrappers in my room and made fun of me, pointing out that I had sucked all the sticky white stuff off the cellophane like a drug addict."

Without even thinking about it, he knew what to do because he'd done it at least a hundred times before. He held her and reminded her how smart and beautiful she was.

“Your mama?” he said. “Just a cranky old voice from a long time ago. This is what's happening now. You and me."

After eating, instead of taking up his station in front of the TV, he handed her the plates and glasses while she loaded the dishwasher.

“You want to listen to some music or something?” he asked when they finished.

“Who are you?” she said. “And what did you do with my boyfriend?”

In bed that night, she took him inside her, and he fell right into that dreamy rhythm she favored as if he'd mastered a dance he'd been practicing for a long time.  It may have been a far cry from the heat and passion of the barista, but it had been worth enduring once it was over and she held him in her arms with his face nestled in the hollow of her breasts. And sleep came easy to him there in all that warmth, smelling the damp, grassy scent of her skin and feeling the gentle thumping of her heart. He knew that if he ever did leave, he would miss this most of all.

Black Light

When she got home from the movie and her daddy hit her, Ivy’s feelings for him broke into a thousand pieces—like a souvenir that fell from its special place high on a shelf where she had been saving it to take down one day and cherish. He made clear he had washed his hands of her. She was not so lucky with Mama.

In the morning, she woke to the smell of fried eggs and bacon grease. Mama was on her way to the cotton mill. They would talk when she got home. Ivy was not to set foot outside the house. She spent the rest of her Saturday morning in bed staring up at the black-light poster on her wall—the wormhole hidden inside the ringed planet. All this time she had imagined Barry’s gift to be a doorway to another dimension, when, in fact, it was no better than all the junk she had hoarded from the flea market.

Mee-Maw and Aunt Tina let themselves in. Ivy peeked through her door at them sitting at the kitchen table, drinking sweet tea and filling the air with smoke. Then Mama came home and, still in her mill uniform, busied herself with refilling their glasses.

Ivy stepped out to face them, and Mee-Maw just stared, letting the smoke seep out of her lips and up into her nostrils. They were all dressed up, like they wanted you to think they had come from church. But it was Saturday. And Tina’s miniskirt was too short for church.

“I blame Hollywood,” said Mee-Maw. She adjusted her brassiere. It was evidently aggravating her eczema. Mama pressed her lips together and sat up straight in her chair. Ivy braced herself. If Mama cried, it always made Ivy’s tears come, too.

“She is just going through a phase,” Mama said and reached for the cigarettes. “Some boy has paid her attention, and she’s intrigued, I guess.”

“Are you intrigued?” asked Mee-Maw.

Ivy shrugged. That’s all they’d get out of her. Here in front of them, she did not even want to let herself remember the feel of his pleather jacket smooth against her cheek, his strong shoulder underneath.

“What is it you find so fascinating?” asked Tina. “I’m curious. I want to try to understand.”

“He’s nice,” Ivy said. “And smart.”

Mee-Maw sipped her tea and said how she knew when they integrated the schools, this was where they’d end up. When children started riding the bus together, it was only one little step further to hopping in a car and riding off to the movies. And now, she said, they had these Moonies everywhere, in their silk robes, with their Chinaman messiah and their gospel of interracial marriage. Mee-Maw asked Ivy if she had been approached by any Moonies. But, so far as Ivy knew, Moonies existed only on TV and in all of their minds.

“There won’t be a white boy to go out with you now,” said Aunt Tina, a note of triumph in her voice. “Or, if he does, he’ll expect you to put out.” Tina tugged at her miniskirt, but her panties still showed.

Mama went to the sink and reached up high to the cupboard, opening the door hanging by a single hinge. She took down a packet of aspirin powders and mixed them in her tea.

“I have tried and tried to tell her,” Mama said, “how hard it is to be a girl growing up in this neighborhood.”

“Don’t I know it,” said Tina, sucking her cigarette down to the filter.

“And I just cannot believe,” said Mama, “that she is so determined to make it impossible.” 

~

She had met Barry and his sister on the bus a month earlier, her first week at the consolidated high school. Consolidation was a four-letter word in her home. The preacher at the Pentecostal church her Mama’s family attended had been run off because he supported consolidation, just like the preacher who had been run off a decade earlier for supporting desegregation. Hailey Creek High School had joined with Crawford High, which was halfway to Charlotte and a lot more “urban.” Ivy had looked forward to the consolidated high school. New people. But the new people were harder to meet than she’d expected. Most of the kids clumped together with the same old friends. On her school bus, nothing had changed. Whites claimed the back, and the dozen or so kids from Double Springs sat up front. Usually two or three empty seats in between. But instead of riding the mile to the school in Hailey Creek, they all rode segregated together past seven miles of kudzu to the consolidated high school.

It turned out there were two new kids from Double Springs: a cute boy and a girl who looked a lot like him except half a head taller and no trace of a smile. The girl clearly did not want to be on this bus. Brother and sister sat together in one of the empty seats near the center. Ivy picked up her backpack and moved to the seat behind them. She saw the book the boy was reading, 2001: A Space Odyssey. She leaned forward and said she had tried to read that book but hadn’t gotten far before she had to give it back to the library. The boy smiled. The sister made a point of staring straight ahead.

After that first week, the sister moved up front with a friend. Barry and Ivy kept occupying two seats near the center. And every day he would give her an update on the novel, which was about a man trapped on board a spaceship with a paranoid computer. Barry got around to explaining how his family had moved to Hailey Creek to take care of his grandmama, after the death of his granddaddy earlier that summer. Maybe Ivy had heard of his granddaddy? No? He had served as the principal of the Double Springs School for three whole decades, until desegregation. “Ask your parents about him,” the boy said, but of course, Ivy was not about to do that.

~

While the church was looking for a new minister, men from the congregation took turns in the pulpit. Mr. Breedlove acted like he was a real preacher. Red in the face, battling the fires of hell. Pacing back and forth in front of the altar, he sounded like he had a fishbone stuck in his throat and he was trying to cough it up.

“Satan has been turned aloose in this community, A-ha! I say we need a Savior to protect us from Satan’s dark power! A-ha-ha!”

She was pouring sweat, smothered by Mee-Maw’s flesh on the one side and poked and prodded by Aunt Tina’s raw bones on the other.

At the end of the sermon, Mr. Breedlove launched into his altar call, pleading with sinners to step forward and be washed in the blood of the Lamb. She had sat through altar calls her whole life, terrified to step down that aisle alone and finally discover whether she was worthy of salvation.

When she slid out of the pew, the sweaty jeans stuck to her thighs. If Mama had been home instead of work, she would have made Ivy put on a dress. At the altar, the preacher knelt with her on velvet cushions. He laid one hand on her shoulder while he prayed into a microphone. She closed her eyes and waited for the magic, tried to make herself believe it was Jesus himself with his hand on her shoulder, his hand strong from years of gripping a hammer, a hand that wanted nothing but her wellbeing.

 ~

On the way home, Mee-Maw and Tina lit up, and Ivy had to breathe their smoke. Mee-Maw talked on and on about how she had never been prouder. You would have thought Ivy had won the spelling bee.

“It’s such a shame your mama couldn’t be there,” Tina said.

Ivy rolled down her window for air. At the edge of town, they passed the old Double Springs School, where Barry’s grandfather had served as principal for three decades. The windows were covered in plywood, and spray-painted onto the boards were some cuss words and a Confederate flag.

“Honey, you ain’t said a word.” Mee-Maw pulled off onto the gravel road that led to her house. She glanced back at Ivy. “I been running my mouth and ain’t give you a chance to tell us what it felt like?”

“What what felt like?”

“Why, being filled with the Spirit of God! I still remember being saved like it was yesterday. When the shackles of sin fell away, I could hear them crash.”

“It was a physical sensation,” Tina agreed. “The nearest I can describe it is being covered in filth from the swamp and then being hosed down with cold water. I get goosepimples still today just remembering.”

Ivy pushed her head out the window to breathe, but her chest still hurt. She wondered if her daddy was awake yet.

“Are you going to talk to us?” Mee-Maw said.

“I didn’t feel nothing,” Ivy shouted, as if the lack of sensation was their fault. “No magic. Not a thing. I guess I must be going to hell, after all!”

~

At home, Mama and Daddy were arguing again about rumors that the mill was due to close. Mama paced the room, while Daddy sat at the table in his plaid pajamas.

He said if they wanted his job that bad in Mexico, they could have it. He had about decided he wasn’t cut out for the regimentation of factory life.

Ivy stepped by them to her bedroom, but before she could close and lock the door, her mother was there asking about church.

“I don’t have to work next Sunday,” Mama said, “We’ll be done with this inventory. And maybe after church, we can stop by Tastee Freez.”

“I’m not going next Sunday. In fact, yeah, I’m not going ever again.”

“What!”

“I found out today what I needed to know. Like Aunt Tina is always saying, there’s only two kinds of people in the world. Well, I found out which kind I am.”

When her mama finally left her alone, she unscrewed the white light from the desk lamp and replaced it with the black one from her desk drawer. She pulled the window curtains closed and then twisted the knob. A faint purple light shined out from the lamp. Well, that was disappointing. She held the light right up against the new poster on her wall, but you could hardly tell. Too much sunlight came pouring through the window. If there was a wormhole in the center of the planet like Barry had said, she couldn’t see it. She felt just as trapped in her life as ever. Maybe later, after dark, she could try again.

In the kitchen, she heard her name. Daddy was taking her side. He said she was old enough to decide whether or not she wanted to attend church.

“She’s beyond the age of accountability,” said Mama, dead serious. “And she ain’t never been saved. If something was to happen . . .None of us knows about the Rapture. It could come tomorrow, like a thief in the night.”

“Shit fire,” said Daddy, “Ivy’s just like me, too ornery for the Devil to handle.”

 ~

The following Sunday morning it was a knock-down-drag-out, but Ivy had made up her mind she was not going. After the service, Mee-Maw and Aunt Tina came over for lunch. They had banana pudding for dessert, and then when they started smoking, Ivy asked to be excused and locked herself in her bedroom. She knew they were talking about her, so she cracked the door to hear.

Mama said it was a rebellion that most girls went through.

Mee-Maw said maybe Ivy was too young to properly feel the conviction of sin.

Aunt Tina said, “Not so. I got saved right after I had my first period.”

Ivy laced up her sneakers and, without making eye contact, stepped through the kitchen choked with cigarette fumes. She walked around to the backyard where Daddy was busy with his bees.  He had the hive torn apart and he was working the bellows on his smoker to calm the bees. Daddy was still wearing his plaid pajamas, but he had on his bonnet to protect his face. He always said he didn’t mind if he got stung on the hands, but he believed in protecting his face. Mama didn’t like him to work the bees on Sundays. He said it was his way of worshipping Nature, which was his God. Ivy figured a man who could look into a hive crawling with thousands of bees and not be afraid could also make up his mind not to fear hellfire. Daddy said to rob that sweet honey, he had to put every worry out of his mind. Bees could smell fear.

Ivy walked to the other side of the house and removed the hatch to the crawl space. She stepped down into the dark and musty air and moved across the mud on all fours until she came to Daddy’s stash of homebrew and behind that his stash of honey. Through the floorboards above her, she could hear the murmur of her Mama and Mee-Maw and Aunt Tina. She pulled a quart out of the box and then moved back to the rectangle of daylight. She stuck her head outside to make sure nobody was coming. With the jar of honey hidden inside her T-shirt, she stepped across the yard to the driveway and on down the gravel road until she came to the woods and the trail that led to the creek.

The current was running fast and high. The water splashed against her shins and soaked her jeans clear to her thighs. Kids from her neighborhood had claimed the creek as their own, but they hardly ever climbed this bank on the far side. Holding tight to the honey, she dug her free hand into red clay. She reached for an exposed root and pulled herself up and rolled over onto a carpet of brown leaves that crunched beneath her. These leaves belonged to Double Springs, a place she was strictly forbidden to go. She looked back across the water toward home, feeling like she had traveled through a wormhole to some distant part of the galaxy.

She didn’t have to walk far before she could see the backs of old houses, most of them needing a coat of paint as bad as hers. But there were a couple of brick homes and on top of the hill one two-story sparkling white with a veranda that wrapped all the way around and a million flowers in tended beds. On the bus, Barry had told her how his grandmama was obsessed with flowers. Ivy waded through broom straw until she came to the edge of the yard. Nearby, there was a fence with chickens inside. Up on the hill, all the windows in the house were dark, and she didn’t want to trespass.

She lay down in the soft broom straw that smelled so clean baking in the sun. Overhead, a jet plane crept tiny and slow, leaving two thin trails of vapor. To be so far away, the plane’s roar shook the heavens. It would be a day like this, a clear sky, when the Rapture came. Supposedly all she had to do to be saved was invite Jesus into her heart. She focused on the fleck of light way up there and thought about the spaceship in Barry’s book, what it would feel like to be trapped alone in outer space. She was just about to give up and walk home when she heard the rooster crow.

She rolled over onto her elbows and looked up from the broom straw. There was Barry, carrying a pail. Inside the fence, orange chickens pecked the dirt. Barry unlatched the gate, and the rooster crowed again, flapped its wings.

Ivy raised a hand to wave, but Barry didn’t see. He upended the pail, dumped scraps for the birds. The rooster charged him, and Barry jumped back and latched the gate. When he turned, Ivy saw the tie strung around his neck. His white collar looked starched, and his slacks were stylish and new. Church clothes. For the first time, she felt ashamed that she had stayed home today, ashamed of the mud on her knees. It was almost enough to make her sink down in the broom straw and hide. But there was the honey in her hand.

“Hola!” she shouted and stepped out of the field and across the yard. “Cómo estás?”

“Huh?” He looked as shocked to see her as she felt to be here.

“My daddy says if we all learn to talk like Mexicans, then maybe we can fool the boss into believing he already moved to Mexico, and the mill won’t close.” 

“Okay?” He laughed.

She passed him the honey and told him how she had tacked up the poster on the wall by her bed and how she planned to try the black light again tonight when it got dark enough. She asked if he had ever found any arrowheads down by the creek. She had two in her rock collection and plenty of rosy quartz. She could show him the best places to look.

He glanced over his shoulder toward the house. There on the veranda stood the sister in a white dress. A hundred feet away, and Ivy could feel her judgment.

“I’ll have to take a rain check,” he said. “We got family visiting.”

 ~

Back at the creek, she found a better place to cross, where the water was wide and shallow, with stones flat and dry. She didn’t see the man until she had crossed back over. He squatted in the water upstream. His hair and clothes were soaked. He dipped his hands into the water and brought them to his face. When he looked up, fear surged through her like an electric current. The man’s face was swollen with pink whelps that ran from his hairline down his jaw and neck. His lips and nose were lopsided. He looked like a monster, like a demon set loose from hell. The man stared hard at her. She wanted to run, to look away, but there was something familiar about him that scared her and that held her gaze, and then she recognized the plaid pattern of her daddy’s pajamas.

He explained that the bees had gotten into his bonnet and he had panicked. Then he’d bumped the bee box and the whole hive swarmed him. She dipped her hands into the creek and poured water onto his bald spot, covered in knots. The swollen scalp and the way his hands trembled made her ashamed she had stolen his honey. Corpses of bees eddied around him, and live ones crawled on the netting of the bonnet on shore. She stayed with him there at the creek until the light in the woods changed and he said he was ready to go home and face her mama. She reached a hand to help him up, and he turned his swollen face on her. His puffy eyes narrowed, and he stared at her like she was the stranger in the woods. In a tone of voice she had not heard in a long time, he asked her what she had been doing across the creek in Double Springs. Except he didn’t say Double Springs. He used the word he always used, the word everybody in her family and on her street used. The word she often heard at school and at church. A word she herself had sometimes used until only recently, when she had met Barry.

Ivy didn’t like to lie, but there was no way she could tell Daddy she had taken a quart of his honey to her friend in Double Springs. It was easier to say she was chasing a baby deer.

 ~

In the days to come, she and Barry would agree to meet by the creek, on his side. They hunted for quartz and skipped rocks on still water. They raced sticks at the stretch of rapids she called the racetrack. They stood together in the treehouse his granddaddy had built for him when Barry was still a child. She wondered if he might try to kiss her. She had never kissed a boy. She had spent a lot of years ashamed of wanting to be kissed, but now she told herself she was not ashamed, and whatever that said about her, she didn’t care. 

Every morning on the bus, Barry told her what was happening in his novel, which kept getting weirder and weirder. The spaceman had been transported to a far corner of the galaxy, where he had a vision of ancient civilizations populated by alien beings. Barry said one thing he was looking forward to about living out here in the country was learning the constellations.

“When you learn them,” she said, “maybe you’ll teach me.”

~ 

Ivy had grown up playing in the woods, and after she finished her homework, Mama didn’t mind her spending time down by the creek. No need to mention Barry. Daddy was still on second shift, so at supper, it was just her and Mama. One night, when the two of them fixed Ivy’s favorites, barbecued chicken and baked beans, Mama said she wanted Ivy to consider coming back to church. They had a new minister now, and she wanted Ivy to give him a try.

She shook her head, and when Mama pressed her case, Ivy dropped the half-eaten drumstick onto the plate and went to her room. She lay on her bed and thought about the new minister. She knew everything he would say without having to hear a single word. She turned on the black light and tried to relax in a purple room, concentrate on her poster of the ringed planet and its portal to an alternate universe. She tried to make the wormhole open and suck her through. But the doorway was shut. And, as she always did while lying in bed, she got to dividing everybody she knew into two groups, the wheat and the chaff, those who would be taken up with the Rapture and those who would be left behind with her while evil conquered and ruled a lonely planet. Seven years of Tribulation. Plagues. War. Daddy would be there, too. Neither of them had been saved. But Daddy was already so distant, so what help could he give her to resist the mark of the Beast?

 ~

Ivy saw the movie advertisement in the Gastonia Gazette and couldn’t wait to tell Barry. 2001: A Space Odyssey had been re-released and was playing at the Webb Theatre. She was speaking her fantasy. She would never have dreamed of asking either of her parents for a ride, even if Mama hadn’t already been moved back to second shift. 

“My sister can drive,” Barry said and, the next day, confirmed the date. Friday night. Ivy offered to meet him at his grandmama’s. It would be easier for her to walk through the woods, she said, than for his sister to have to find her house.

She arrived just before dusk, picking beggar’s lice from her jeans. It was clear in an instant his sister had not been expecting her. Barry tried to smooth things over. The sister shook her head.

“You said a friend. I thought you meant Boone or Jomo.”

“Well. You should have asked.”

Ivy did not get much out of the movie. From that opening scene with the apes and the bone they tossed into the air that turned into a spinning spaceship, she knew her mama would find the story somehow blasphemous. The movie was slow, not much action, but her mind was not on the movie. With his sister sitting on the other side, Barry reached out and took Ivy’s hand, their fingers slick with butter from the popcorn.

Back in Hailey Creek, Barry’s sister was not about to let Ivy walk through the woods, even with a flashlight. When they pulled into Ivy’s driveway, a fire in the backyard burn barrel was pumping out black smoke, chased by a whole galaxy of sparks. From the way it stank, plastic. Her daddy, who was supposed to be at work, came out onto the porch barefooted, without a shirt. He shouted her name and stepped down the cinder blocks. Backlit by the bare porch light, he marched directly toward the car.

~

The morning after the movie, she woke and rubbed her sore jaw where Daddy had smacked her. Mama made her leave her bedroom and come eat breakfast. Daddy woke early and went out to work his bees. He didn’t even glance in her direction. Mama was on her way to the mill. Ivy had never understood why Mama had to work Saturday mornings and Daddy didn’t.

Mee-Maw and Aunt Tina arrived and filled the kitchen with cigarette smoke. After Mama got home, Ivy left her bedroom to face their interrogation. The movie. Her friendship with Barry. Mee-Maw pulled a fine-toothed comb through her hair, checking for lice. Aunt Tina insisted that Ivy open herself to salvation.

“You need to get this done,” said Tina. “You’re very clearly beyond the age of accountability. I understand you might think it exciting to live dangerously—”

“She’s playing with fire,” said Mee-Maw.

“Like playing Russian roulette with her soul,” said Tina.

“You never know what tomorrow will bring,” said Mee-Maw.

“If not the Rapture,” said Tina, “then maybe a fatal car crash.”

“Your appendix could burst,” said Mee-Maw.

“You could contract some exotic, incurable illness,” said Tina.

“Maybe you already have it,” said Mee-Maw. “Some people are born with the thing that will kill them.”

“And then, like that,” Tina said, snapping her fingers, “your soul will be cast into hellfire for all of eternity.”

“Why risk it?” said Mee-Maw.

“She likes living dangerously.” Tina took the cigarettes from her purse and thumped them against her palm. She luxuriated in the ritual of lighting the cigarette and taking that long first drag.

 ~

The next morning was Sunday. Ivy woke while it was still dark. She turned on her bedside lamp and tried to read the novel she had borrowed from Barry. They both figured that after hearing him summarize, chapter by chapter, the entire space odyssey, it would be easier.  But the sentences still resisted her. The book made her feel defeated and dumb. She tossed it to the floor and flopped back on her bed. Still another two hours until it grew light. And then she would have to dress for church. She turned off the lamp and lay still, imagining herself the prisoner of a computer in a spaceship—in suspended animation.

When the bulb had cooled to her touch, she unscrewed it, then replaced it with the black light bulb she kept hidden in her dresser drawer. She removed the lamp shade so the purple light could fill the room. Stretched out on top of her quilt, she stared at the poster on the wall. It was a trick she kept practicing without success. Focus on the tiny pink cubes that made up the ringed planet. Blink and, presto, if the trick ever worked, Barry had explained that the planet was supposed to reveal the eyeball, which then transformed into a 3-D wormhole. Just relax her body, starting down at her toes and moving upward to her knees. Empty her mind. Breathe. When she got to her belly, she felt again the panic that had buzzed through her and that had filled the car, there with Barry in the backseat and his sister up front behind the wheel, when Daddy had stepped out onto the porch and shouted her name. She could not stop smelling the hot smoke from the burn barrel or stop seeing the way Barry’s sister had stared into the back seat, signaling for her to get out. And Barry, how while Daddy moved through the dark, shouting obscenities, hunched forward and carrying what might only have been a rolled-up newspaper, Barry had tried to smile but could not hide the fear on his face. Maybe everything her family said was true, that hell was a real place. Pain and punishment beyond her wildest imagination.

But this morning, she was still free to create the world she wanted to inhabit. Long, slow breaths. She set the lamp on the bed and held it between her knees so that the purple light bathed the poster and the pinks popped from the wall. She stared at that planet and blinked. Stared and blinked again. She could keep doing this as long as it took. Her eyes found the rhythm until she forgot where she was and found herself empty, floating in a trance. And then, blink, yes! There it was! Not a planet but an eyeball, the pupil dilating until it became a wormhole through space, a door to another dimension. And then the door opened and out stepped Barry wearing a shiny blue spaceman suit. His shoes flashed in the light of an alien sun. He paced back and forth across some cratered surface, sliding his feet like he did when they waded the creek and came to the stretch of flat rock covered in slick algae. He held out a hand and fixed her with an unwavering gaze, waiting. All she had to do was take his hand and step through that doorway. But understand, once it closed behind them, there was no coming back to Earth.

Faster

What if you were the boy
who gave me his gym shorts all those years ago

that time my best friend wanted to go skinny dipping
with a bunch of strange guys from a band

and i said are you crazy?
and we jumped in the black 

Atlantic fully dressed
and later, watching us drip

head to toe across his (your?) pale 
linoleum, offered to throw

our clothes in the dryer while we listened 
to (his?) your unplugged version of Kryptonite

that still plucks goosebumps when 
it comes up in my running playlist

// what if your grin 
is a secret handshake remembering 

the hungry tone of those
apartment walls & the comforting

smell of the dryer 
underneath the pulse

of the drums // what if 
the cling of my ocean-soaked dress

sometimes 
wakes you up at night— 

what if you grew up, too, with a fist 
full of regrets only answerable

in the next mile, the next doubtful
song you fall in love with?

Another Evening Lowdown

Dangling between
         Mom and Dad,
a ripe fig ready to drop,
         we walked
from ride to ride
         at Clementon Park:

Tea Cups, the Tile-a-whirl—
         roller coaster snaking
toward blue blank space.
         From fear to joy
and back. What else
         to know but this?

Ars Poetica

Black pepper lathered
into brisket, lines like bark—
charred, hickory ripe.

Buffalo Plaid

Lucy stubbed out her cigarette on a bench near the portico of the Douglas Memorial emergency room. They wouldn’t think to look for her here. Then she marched to the main entrance and rode to the third floor. The hallway smelled of something strange, maybe sick people. She buried her nose in the day-old bouquet. The florist had given her a break on the price. She thought of last week and the perfume that hung so heavy in the funeral home. She suspected that it covered the smell of dead bodies in the basement. Half of Atwater, which was nearby and not much of a town, had come to church to pay their respects to her mama. Half the men had probably fucked her. Lucy wondered if the funeral guys had left her mama’s heart inside, at least the pieces. That’s what the Egyptians did, she was pretty sure. She thought the Vikings had it right. She was sure there was still some part of her mama they hadn’t buried, something in the house.

She wore the same dress they had given her for the funeral. Maybe it was bad luck to wear it when you visit someone in the hospital. The overheads bathed the hallway in soft light. While everyone spoke in hushed voices, her sneakers kept squawking on the vinyl floor. A man in baby-blue scrubs told her that Mr. Hutchinson was expecting her. He took the bouquet and observed that her backpack looked mighty heavy. She shrugged it away from him. He directed her to Hutchinson’s room. She glanced back and found him staring at her. 

She leaned into the room. A picture of some water lilies hung on the wall. The Cubs were playing somebody on the silent TV. A reading lamp recoiled on its hinge. Hutchinson’s eyes were open. Bandages swaddled much of his head. His right leg and left arm were cased in fiberglass and pulled taut by weights hung from pulleys on a metal frame over the bed. Lucy cleared her throat. She caught the flicker of his near eye. 

“So you’re Janey Walker’s kid,” he said. “Come over here.”

She did, slowly. 

He was sweating. The left side of his face below the eye had caved into a purple hollow. 

“Not much to look at, huh?” His smile dragged the rest of his face with it. 

Her eyes hurt. Her mama had left him lying in a ditch. She put her hand to his cheek. 

He grabbed her wrist with his good hand, hard enough to make her gasp. 

“Don’t do that.” He released her. “They’ll build me a new face when they get around to it.”

“Course they will.” She smiled and nodded.

“I can do without the powdered sugar, thanks. And do your crying somewheres else.” 

She turned her face. 

“Look at you,” he said. “You’re a mess. There’s Kleenex on that table.”

“I’m just sorry what my mama did.” She blew her nose. She focused on her feet and the fading blue diamonds in the floor.

“And that jacket. Thing’s bigger than you are. Anybody tell you it’s still summer?”

“It’s my daddy’s,” she said, pulling it tight. It was red and black, and she wore it all the time.

His voice softened. “How you doing?” 

“Better than you.” She cleared her throat. How did he pee and poop?

“Maybe not,” he said. “When I get out of here, I’ll still have a mama.”

Neither spoke for a while.

“I’m sorry what happened,” Lucy said again.

“I don’t recall you driving,” he said. “Matter of fact, I don’t recall much. I know I bought a chicken from Paul Krieger.” His eyes grew blank. “I guess I didn’t look both ways before crossing.” He grinned and jerked a little. “Can’t laugh much.” His smile faded. “Crawled quite a ways to get back to the road. Your mama must’ve put her foot down.”

“She was upset. She didn’t get a job.”

“I would’ve gladly gave her mine,” he said. He stayed quiet awhile. “I think I worked with your daddy once.” Hutchinson eyed her. “He with the Park Service?”

“Was,” she said. “Been gone a year.” This guy knew more than he let on, she thought.

“Oh? Where to?”

“California. He’s gonna send for us when he gets settled.” 

“Taking his time, is he?” 

“I’m going to find him.”

“What if he doesn’t want to be—”

“—I’ll find him.”

Her daddy’s hair was so blond it looked white in the summer. He was built wide and strong. Head came right out of his shoulders. When she was little, he would pick her up and balance her butt on his hand. He’d walk around with her, all frantic like she was a wobbly stack of plates. “Whoa!” he would say, and he’d stagger around the house like it was all he could do to keep her from falling on her head. “Whoa!”  Of course, he never dropped her. Except this once.

Hutchinson stared at her. “You on your own?”

Lucy glanced at her backpack. “I guess. They put me in a home, but it’s not a home home.”

Hutchinson angled his body toward her with a grunt. “I am sorry about your mama. Folks say she was right on the edge. Must be hell on you.”

She nodded. Hell would be a nice place.

The room grew quiet again. Hutchinson’s head gradually sank forward. His nostrils flared and his forehead shone with sweat. He pushed a button, and a nurse appeared with a needle. His head gradually nested back in the pillow. He closed his eyes for a time. “I’ll be a junkie by the time I get out of here.” He could chuckle now. “Glad it’s the end of the season.”

The attendant appeared with Lucy’s bouquet in a plastic vase. He smiled at her. She pulled the jacket tight.

“Why, thank you,” said Hutchinson.

She nodded. They were the only flowers in the room. She leaned forward a little, widened her eyes, and dropped her jaw just enough to part her lips.

“You carry a gun?” 

He frowned. “What kind of question is that?” 

She shrugged.

“Not when I’m leading a bunch of day-trippers on a nature hike. But I sure do when I’m on patrol.” 

She asked how come. 

“Let’s say you was running a trap line in the Park, maybe doing some shooting too and making good money at it, and I catch you with your side-by-side and a bag of birds again. Now you’re looking at hard time. What would you do? Reach for the sky or leave me in the mud somewheres?” He cocked his head. “Why?”

She didn’t know the why of it yet. “Can I come back and see you some more?”

“Hell,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“You going to come out of this all right?”

“So they say. Might not look as handsome. Once my guts start up and the bones grow together, they’ll move me to some place, teach me how to walk. Sounds like fun.” He eased himself to look at her square. “You’re good to talk to. Kind of sharp. Come back any time.”

She sat on the bench again and watched them unload an ambulance. Everybody looked so serious. A cigarette hung from her lips while she searched for a match. She scratched it with her thumbnail, something her daddy taught her when she was eleven. She smiled. Never got tired of lighting his cigarettes. It was easy to steal smokes because the two of them were always so involved. She remembered the old daydream where they caught her smoking and spanked her and lectured her about the dangers of tobacco and took away her library privileges. She liked the spanking and lecturing parts, but not the library part.

She checked her watch. Minnie’s hand was on four. She rode to the third floor.

Hutchinson looked at her out the corner of his eye. “When I said come back any time, I didn’t mean all the time.”

“I won’t come back,” she said. She spat a shred of tobacco off the tip of her tongue. “Can I ask you some more?”

Hutchinson glanced at the pack. “Shoot.”

She blinked. “You know where my daddy is?”

“Girl, I hardly knew the man. It was years ago.” He ran his hand across his forehead.

“There is something you can tell me about him.” She looked him in the eye. “Tell me.” 

He presented the show side of his face. “I doubt you’d want to know.”

“Go on.”

“I never could understand it. He wasn’t good-looking.”

It stung. She nodded with a smile of pity.

“And to tell you the truth, on the job he was more show than go.” Hutchinson was feeling her out, she thought, trying to figure what she could take. “I picked up a lot of his slack. Quite the ladies’ man, if you know what I mean.” He was still searching. “Do you know what I mean?” 

She sighed. “I’m almost fifteen.”

She would curl up under the covers while they screamed at each other because he couldn’t keep his dick in his pants and she was sucking the life out of him and it was her house so he could just leave don’t leave and things would break. It would end in tears and whispers, then soft laughter like they were in cahoots. She could close her eyes when the bed springs started to creak. 

“He’d take a group out on a nature walk, find some girl he liked, and that’d be the last I’d see of him. One day he plain didn’t show up. I can’t say as I missed him.” 

She pulled up some brass and gave him a grin. “I’ll say one thing for him—he sure knows how to disappear.” Then she cleared her throat. She widened her eyes again. 

“How much does a park ranger make?” 

He smiled. “You from the IRS?”

“You make enough to raise kids and all?”

He nodded. His smile went away. “I’d be obliged if they keep paying me.”

She glanced at his ring. “You got kids?”

He hesitated, too long she thought, then said, “No.”

“You ever meet my mama?”

“Not too long ago, they tell me.”

She put on her puzzled look.

“I met her once,” he said. “A real looker. You take after her—looks, I mean.” He squinted. “But you don’t spend much time dolling yourself up.” 

She stiffened. 

His eyes wandered off. “She was kind of loose put together.” 

Her mama had large ice-blue eyes and caramel-colored hair cut short as a farm boy’s. She wore a pink tube top under her jean jacket and white polyester shorts tight enough to follow her creases. She often smelled of sex, more so between jobs, and she had trouble with jobs.

“My daddy left his gun. Why do you suppose he’d do that?”

Hutchinson hesitated. “I’m sure I don’t know. Protection?”

“From poachers.” She stood up. “My mama’s loose put together. So, he takes off and forgets his gun? How stupid is that?”

Her mama had brought a stranger home one night, both of them drunk. Lucy sat with her back braced against her bedroom door, hearing them grunt, then finally crawled into bed when it got quiet. She awoke to find her mama gone and the stranger still there, naked save for her mama’s nightie, scraping his teeth with a fingernail. He smiled and crooked his finger. She pointed her daddy’s gun at him, wobbling in both hands, and when he came at her, she closed her eyes and squeezed. It hurt her ears something terrible. When she opened her eyes, the stranger had vanished. Poof! She found a hole in the ceiling over the kitchen sink. Her mama wouldn’t notice. She pulled the spent shell from the cylinder and replaced it with a new one from the box. Then she fit the casing carefully into the space where the cartridge had been. Her teeth chattered even though it was plenty hot out. She pawed through the closet and found her daddy’s old jacket. Then she wore it to the beach.

Hutchinson was eyeing her backpack. “What all’s in there?”

“Everything.”

“You’re set to go, aren’t you?”

“You going to call them on me?”

“I don’t know who ‘them’ is.” He raised the eyebrow on his good side and lowered his voice just above a whisper. “Why on earth do you want to find that man?”

“He’s alive, isn’t he?”

“Darlin’, he threw you away.” Hutchinson coughed carefully. “Go on back to that home. Stay a few weeks, see what you think. You can run later.” He was sweating again. “You got brains. You read everything you can get hold of. You got looks. Get on with it.”  

“Don’t call me darling,” she said, “I’m not your darling. I’m not anybody’s darling.” She slung the pack over her shoulder. Then she caught herself. “How do you know what I read?”

Hutchinson hit the nurse button like it was a telegraph key.

“You were fucking my mama.” Tears came to her at the worst times.

He opened his mouth, but said nothing.

“You look like a stupid person.”

“It was a long time ago,” he said. "I wasn’t married.”

She slipped past the nurse and heard him say, “I’m not like him.”

~

Hitching to her house, Lucy passed on the first two rides. Then a big woman in overalls picked her up.

“You on the run?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t care, really. I ran away when I was your age. How old are you?”

She said nothing.

“All right,” the woman said. “I don’t need to know. Your folks mean to you?”

“They’re dead.”

“Yeah? I ran a couple of times. They didn’t call the cops, nothing. That cured me.” She laughed. The woman glanced at her. “What’s your name, Hon?”

“Mary.”

“Mary what?”

“Gonzales.” 

The woman let her off where a gravel road climbed the woods to the house. She hadn’t seen it since the day they pulled her out of Algebra to tell her that her mama had fallen ill. Her grandpa had built the house when her mama was a little girl. Why he had built it so far from anywhere, her mama couldn’t say.

The sun had set, and the katydids were revving up. The air was thick. It could rain. She tossed the dress into the bushes and pulled on her jeans. As she walked on, the night chorus grew so loud she couldn’t hear her own footsteps.

A couple weeks ago, her mama had pounded on the front door as though it were locked and said the bastard who promised her a job gave it to some cunt he hardly knew and after she had given him everything. Lucy ushered her to the couch, crooning that everything would be all right. She held her mama to her breast, whispering “Poor Mama,” and stroked her head. Then she pulled her up and walked her to the bedroom where she helped her into her nightie. She tapped out the pill, set it on the tip of her mama’s tongue, and handed her the glass of water. Then she tucked her in. Her mama raised her head. “He’s gone,” she said in the darkness. “I can’t do it anymore.” Lucy mouthed the words along with her. “No father, no mother, no brother, no sister, not even a goddamned cousin. I’m alone.” She kissed her, lifted a couple of cigarettes from her purse, and closed the door. 

Now she wondered, had she listened to her mama instead of making fun of her, if she might still be alive.

The insect noise stopped when she shut the door behind her. She toggled the switch and found the electricity had been turned off again. Whenever the power company turned off their lights, her daddy would play “Haunted House.” He would hide in the darkness—how could a man big as that hide in a house so small?—and when she drew near enough, he would scream “Ghost!” It wasn’t much fun, and she always had to change her underpants. 

She groped for the flashlight under the sink, then checked out the livingroom and kitchen. No ghosts. On the counter sat the last stack of books from the Douglas Public Library. “Lucy’s List.” She swallowed. No matter what shitstorm raged through the house, her mama delivered the books. They were overdue. She ground a knuckle in her eye.

She stood at the door to her mother’s room. She had read you shouldn’t hyperventilate because it only makes things worse. Her lips were growing numb. Ghost. She turned the knob, then lost her nerve and released it. She focused on the patterns in the raw plywood walls, fragments of wood exploding in every direction, frozen like fossils. She shut her eyes and leaned against the door, which gave way. Ghost. She screamed and sprawled into the room, the flashlight rolling before her, lighting up the clumps of dust under her mama's rumpled bed. She pounced on the light and swept the room, but found nothing to be afraid of. 

She gathered the top sheet, lifted it with a snap, and sent it billowing over the mattress. She tucked it in, and covered it with the rose chenille spread, leaving enough slack to fold under the pillow. With both hands, she brushed the bedspread so that the ribbing ran straight from the foot of the bed to the pillow. There.

Then she stared across the hallway at the door to her room. Soon she was panting again but barged in as though it were the last thing in the world that would ever frighten her. The door banged against the wall and swung back toward her. She trained her light on the floor, the ceiling, the walls. The bed.

It was a coagulated pool, as though someone had poured it from a pitcher, dull like dried paint. She sat next to it and folded her hands in her lap. Then she leaned over and sniffed cautiously. It had no smell. She spread her fingers and, as though unsure if a fry pan was still hot, settled her hand on it. In a while, out of some distant curiosity, she began to pick at it until she broke loose a crumb. She tumbled it between her thumb and forefinger. Then she placed it on the tip of her tongue. It tasted of rust and salt. She began to rock, holding it in her mouth until it disintegrated. When she swallowed, everything slowed and she felt awfully tired. She curled on her side—just for a minute, she told herself. 

She awoke hungry. The moon had set and the flashlight beam had faded to yellow. She opened the nightstand drawer to retrieve a half pack of cigarettes, then wandered through the darkness to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator from which rolled a stink that made her gag. She could make out a carton of milk bulging like an ominous football and slammed the door. She cranked open the faucet, but they had turned off the water as well. 

In the cupboard above the sink, she found a dented can of stew, which she opened and wolfed down while she stood. Then she sat on the couch—"Poor Mama”—and cleaned the SpaghettiOs out of a can that was dented as well. They were always dented or their labels torn or the sell-by had passed. Fake Newtons washed down with Flavor Aid. Days-old bread and Velveeta with a rind. Bologna and bologna and bologna. The food at that home was pretty good. So was the lunch program at school until somebody ratted on her daddy for having a job. It was a good job even if he didn’t do a good job. They had the money. She struck a match. No, he had the money. She stared at the flame, then blew it out. “Taking his time, is he?” She bashed the empty can against her forehead and wandered back to her room. 

Her mama put up with anything so long as he didn’t leave. That crybaby. “Loose put together.” That smell. She glanced over her shoulder. “Lucy’s List.” She laid her head on the crusted sheets and cried without a sound, as though the two of them were still brawling in the next room. Then she gathered the bedding into a bundle and set it against the floorboard in the hall.

She heard a distant rumble and wrapped the books in her mother’s old rain shell, tying the sleeves into a grip, and carried them across the road. She hunted in the weeds for the gas can they kept out back and lugged it into the house where she emptied it on the last part of her mother. Then she struck a match and tossed it. That’s what the Vikings did, she was pretty sure. It flickered out. She stepped closer and struck another. It had barely left her fingers when a flash and whump knocked her down. She scrambled out of the house on her hands and knees and sprinted across the road, skidding and falling, running her fingers over her face and hair, patting herself frantically. 

A glow within the house grew brighter until it blazed brilliant yellow, and the flames and black smoke blew out the windows and ate the siding to the roof. Then, above the flashover’s roar, she heard her father’s bullets cook off like popcorn. She stood and brought her hand to her throat. He had given her mama the gun. Maybe he even showed her how to use it. The uprights gave way and the roof collapsed. 

Lucy drifted around the edges of the fire, occasionally startled by a raindrop the size of a dime. The flames cooled to embers that flickered and cracked in the gray dawn. 

She slipped a cigarette into her mouth and patted her pockets for a match, then realized that her pack had gone up with the house. As her shoulders fell, her daddy’s jacket slid to the ground. She slung it into the wreckage where it melted and caught fire. 

Lightning crashed close enough to drop her to her knees. She hung her head and listened to the random puffs of steam that rose from the rubble. Then the rain came hard, and she closed her eyes and lifted her face. She heard a siren in the distance.