My brother told me that performing at the Entry means you’ve made it. Then, a few days later, someone recognized me while showering in the woman’s locker room at the YMCA. Thanks Punch Out Poetry!
Alice-Wanderlust from Alice Shindelar on Vimeo.
Archive for the 'Creative Writing' Category
When she offers you that dangerous pleasure,
the kind that pretends you don’t owe each other anything,
accept.
Accept,
or she’ll realize that she’s been walking in your shadow all along.
Accept,
or we’ll say that you are no man.
Accept,
you’ll regret it either way.
Perhaps she is the devil
dangling dirty panties like collectables.
But you were born to undress mysteries
and she was born to teach us how to be still.
Though,
you will never know her nudity
and she will never stop vibrating.
Here are some videos from the last Punch Out Poetry slam.
Lolita’s Revenge
The Hunt
Don’t Ask
They’re not the happiest couple.
They steal kisses between ten hour shifts,
accidentally brush hands in the grocery store aisle.
Somehow he always tickles her hips
when her fingertips are too wrinkled from dishwater to sense his heat.
She sleeps plank style.
It’s too hard to swallow the bush fire he ignites
so she exhales the tension between the pages of pillow talk novels,
that only a moment of stolen attention from his tumbledown body could release.
She daydreams she knew him when he climbed female bodies like jungle gyms,
when the next stroke and the next toke where the only things worth living for.
But I was there
when she divided each morsel of life
between four children without a table crumb for herself.
Her fitful eyes never let me forget
that a mother’s fading light
is her daughters richest nourishment.
She once told me, on a balcony over Vancouver Bay,
that she’d already found and let slip
in a previous marriage
what most of us spend our whole lives in search of.
In a boy who descended her body like the tide.
Now
she’s no longer alone,
and they may not be the happiest couple,
but sometimes
that’s enough.
We’d had it up to here with this self-destructing paradise, so we began to take down the city today.
It started close to sun break on a Monday, when a woman on Washington and 3rd unhinged the east facing wall of her office building. The wall trumpeted against the asphalt, sent river wind through the cubicles to tussle us desk junkies down to the ground.
We all leapt from our levels and skipped bare foot loose in the streets.
This inspired a few taciturn transit riders to pull out the cotton in their ears, step down from their bus seats, and let the tired iron wheels roll free.
Just down the block a kindergarden teacher put down her weapons, surrendered her students to a lesson in seduction, she taught them how to peel up hot asphalt. and carpet roll her supine body into the street.
By this time, we had uncovered the keystone in our skyscraper, formed a chain of nine to fivers
to pull it free.
As that tower fell, for the first time, everyone dropped what they where doing to listen to the way glass sings as it dies and metal finally let out its weary sigh.
We did nothing as a mother of four took her willing children with her and stepped off the sidewalk’s end.
It was a penny pincher who broke the silence, dropped the first dime smile into the blind mans can that sent the construction worker’s hard hats high in the air as we all broke out in applause to commend their escape.
But it ain’t a good show if it don’t leave you hungry for more.So we rushed around town, pulled free every keystone ever cut, passed down our last and greatest command as monarchs of this paradise by returning all we’d plundered, threw crumpled cash over our shoulders like bread crumbs to remind us that we never wanted to find our way back.
Even those who’d long since forgotten every man’s proclivity for recreation readily let their death grip on life loose. Instead of risk the urge to rebuild, along with centuries of industry they crumpled back to earth.
Now we’re somersaulting towards the sunset, a mountain of urban ash at our backs, and you may find this too cliché to be true, but I know that this riot and I we’re no longer willing to live in a world where we can’t even imagine this.
Postman
When they told me how you also
spent fifteen years as a Postman
trapped in the belly of a train,
thousands of miles from your family,
I guess I finally understood why
there was nothing gentle about your hands.
I imagine it was because of how many countless stories slipped through them
licked, gummed shut, paper cut and postmarked
to adventures you would never get to taste.
But still, you held so much:
parachute pull strings, pilot control boards, defeated brother’s metals.
What happened to the candy maker that use to shape
peanut brittle, and Christmas canes, and yards of perfectly kneaded multi-colored taffy with those hands? You held nine children for as long as they would let you.
I wish I didn’t know with the memory of my own skin
how you hands turned dirty, leathered, and tanned
across the perfect smooth hide
of three generations of women,
two the fruit of your own desire,
the other the woman you swore to protect
in sickness and in health.
Did you not realize
that meant even if you were the disease that had to be destroyed?
I wonder if anyone every asked you the way.
Or, if like me, your eyes were always downcast
to track footprints in the dust.
You gave in.
At night, on the trains
your only palatable ration came to you polluted.
Your lungs filled with clouds of opaque coal dust
that layered over and over
until they forgot their true color.
Between every breath stolen in an effort
to cough up and hack up and throw up
your malignant tar crusted capillaries,
you had to take five more in, just to survive.
I want you to know
I don’t believe anyone can ever be all one thing or the other.
I understand
It is so much easier to drown
than to swim.
When they told me how you used to return home
your hands too raw to hold the baby,
too rough to gently run along your young wife’s back,
I understood, like you did,
that sometimes to protect
can also mean to make promises you know you can’t keep,
to learn to breath in the coal dust
so that between breaths you can look up
to see all that burning color.
When you died, I did not cry because my heart was breaking.
I cried because it sighed with relief
to see your weary fist finally drop
just so I could loosen my grip.
I can’t believe I wrote this when I was 18. I don’t know if I could write something like this now. That’s a scary thought for a writer.
A Road Out Across the Water
Three days we would drive before we hit the shore.
Empty hotel rooms and gas pumps would blur by.
At night on the road,
while he lay in the back seat
mapping intergalactic travel
through my rear window,
I would light up a spark behind the wheel and
cover the ceiling with eddies of dense smoke.
We’d drive fast!
Out onto the water,
chasing the moon over the horizon,
never stopping to let the sun catch up.
Using some sort of
concept he had derived from
an extraterrestrial theory
we would keep our tires skimming the surface.
We would drive four days!
Hail down the occasional cruise ship
or oil tanker, pay them
double or triple the price to fill ‘er up.
At some point we would stall,
empty tank
in the middle of the ocean,
no where in the world.
I would suggest that we take a swim to
stretch our legs.
He would suggest that we take off our clothes.
There’s no law out here, natural or instituted.
No one to chase us down for indecency
or defying the properties of water.
We would climb out the window and
dive off the roof.
Then standing up, our vertebrae all aligned,
we would flatten our souls out on the surface of the water.
I would stand there for a moment and then
crouch down, tense up my calves and leap off the surface,
arrow into the silent water.
Later I would lay stretched out on the hood,
sunburn in the moonlight,
blinded by the stars that were invisible from land
while he rigged up a contraption to distill salt water
for drinking and pouring into our radiator.
“Will moon light make it work?” I would ask.
“Only this once,” he would say.
It’s ok,
we’re almost there.
The day you came home with the news
a tree began to grow in our living room.
You told me your body could no longer take it,
that we’d better hold fast to the days we still had left.
Like the Mayfly,
you believed we only ever get one sunset.
I told you
that life, like anything else, can be trapped, chained, tamed.
For weeks before the walls of our bedroom
absorbed screams and rained plaster.
It was a sound these walls,
so familiar with the cries of love-making,
had never heard before.
On those nights, a silhouetted stranger
crowded your side of the bed.
By dinner time the tree was already four feet tall.
It’s bark a rusty color red, it’s branches heavy with buds.
So that night we moved our bed in under it.
We gazed up through its branches,
two wild creatures that
watched the spry leaves push free of their cocoons,
unfurl their wings, and dry on gusts of our flesh and sweat breath.
That night I swore I would not let you pass from this life so easily.
I would not rest till I solved this.
I would lead you to the fountain
and together we would drink from her lip.
Death is a disease like any other! There is a cure!
I followed every path till its end,
turned every coin,
opened every chest.
They were all empty.
I even sacrificed myself to the auric gate
shut tight with impossible moral combinations.
but my key, rusty and twisted, could not turn in the lock.
I fought until my hands grew too numb to feel your flesh beneath them.
I dove into veins, swam through the blues and reds
of a nervous system web.
All this, but still
When I reached
I could not touch it.
When I lifted my brush
I could not paint it.
Tree rings wrap themselves around my left arm.
Thick bands for every year I have spent
drenched and saturated by your rainstorm.
Thin for every year I have stood lonely in the desert.
The harder I search for the answer
the thinner they become.
One night the tree begins to bloom.
It is so beautiful.
I almost mistake your hand on my face
for her weeping branches.
But you tell me,
lips sanguine with awe,
that you are no longer afraid.
As our bodies cling and tense and pulse together
the bark on our tree begins to crack and curl back.
When her golden flowers drop and decay on our sweaty backs
we do not notice.
Afterwards, even has my heart slows to its normal rhythm,
I begin to search again,
and while my back is turned
you slip away.
I wish there had been someone to tell me,
It’s ok
You’re already there.
He said “if you can’t be a poet then be a poem”
Can’t I be both?
I would like to be,
but I’m not sure I’m brave enough.
So I watch you sail your very small boat astern of mine
not because I am the better sailor
but because I don’t know how to describe the wind.
I am just a thief in clever disguise.
I rise and fall every day with the same question.
If I can see and feel and know the mountains
then why can’t I be them?
It’s blue sunday
and you’ve just left me
raw, exhausted, and too full.
My feet itch.
I’m looking at my book of places
and all I want to do is let those feet carry me away.
throw all my possessions curbside
to just get the hell out of here!
Each page I flip is a place I haven’t been to yet,
a sight that hasn’t filled my eyes with contented wonder and awe yet,
a scent that hasn’t teased and tantalized my pheromones yet.
Each page I flip is a place,
foreign and beautiful,
that I have not possessed yet.
I want to lay my hands all over this earth.
To stare down the vistas of Central America
till she trembles under my lecherous gaze.
I want to walk my finger tips round bare
thousand year old alphabets
on ancient libyan desert cave walls,
like faded tattoos needled into their skin.
Then gently press my parted lips to every last freckle
in the mosaic tiled floors of Morocco.
I want to lick that addictive sweet nectar
from the poppy petals of Khanpur’s valley
and pleasure every last glacier to their final days
as they melt beneath my tongue.
I want to tongue the scars of Manchu Pichuu.
Dirty dance with Venezuela.
Sit on Cannon Mountain’s Great Stone Face
Caress the swollen, aching, hills of Scotland
and clamp my teeth down hard at their tip.
I want to strip southeast asia down
and walk her stretch marks round China
Erected brick by brick from the labors of her body.
I want to keep Paris, and London, and Berlin, and Istanbul, and Rio de Jeniro up aaallll night!
I want to wrap Beruit up in my arms
and kiss away his wounds
and know him deep and hard
as he is in my blood.
Than float on the Indian Ocean’s buoyancy
as he yanks my hair between his finger tips
and thrusts his salty fluid down my open throat.
I want to learn the language of ancient greek symbols,
alpha and omega and crazy eights
spell them out with my hips on Athens tip.
Feel the head waters of the nile
gush free between my thighs.
And finally, to climb, and pant, and force, my way through thinning air
to release
at Nepal’s peak
where together we stretch our bodies
ridged and tense
as close to nirvana as they’ll reach.
But I’m still here,
sitting on my couch,
my book of places dog-eared and coffee stained in my lap.
And there’s something about you that tells me to stay in this place.
What reminds me is the way
I, sometimes, want to inhale you
like the exhausted sticky aroma of another county
that comes from my suitcase
only after I’ve returned home.
I wrote this for the Floating World Literary Magazine that a few friends and I founded last year before graduating. I was recently happy to hear that it is still going strong and the two most recent issues are in the hands of the postman on the way to my mail box. In the span of a year we went from an 5 X 8 1/5 black and white format to an 8 1/2 X 11 full colored cover with colored visual art throughout. I’m excited to see how far it’s come since we left. I am posting this piece with an all new title as well!
Modify of Die
By the time she was twenty-three Catherine could already see the change through her own eyes and it took no time to make that decision. From the first time that she took off her clothes she knew it wasn’t right. Every moment was absorbed with the thought that she overwhelmed, showed too much, was seen from the wrong angle. All those noises were forced, not fake, but not for her either. That started young, and everyone knows that there’s no getting any younger. So when she reached twenty-three she decided to take control.
The operation was painful, and the bottle of white chalky tablets was empty. She kept looking around for something else to relieve the pressure, the pain that was still there.
Now, every night that he reaches for her she closes her eyes and as he disappears inside of her. Her mind goes to the old woman.
The girl sits there while the old woman speaks, upright straight back, chest out, and belly pulled thin. She knows that a clean white smile stretches across her face and she pulls her shoulders back at the thought. Every once and a while her chin tips forward and her eyes gaze down the front of her figure.
The old woman sits hunched with her spine exposed through the thin fabric of an old white t-shirt. Her belly and chest seem to fall into her hips, feeble to their inevitable pull towards the ground. Her face appears deeply etched around the corners of her eyes and mouth.
“I think I saw a ghost that night.” The old woman is telling the girl.
“I saw your grandfather that night” she says. “I heard him. It was so vivid. He woke me up. I got right up. I didn’t have to think. He shouted out like he always does. He needed me.”
The girl reaches out for the old woman’s hand, she pauses and than takes it. She pushes the woman’s exposed veins over the hidden boney surface of the top of her skin.
“When did you start to get these?” she says in a low mumble. The woman continues to talk.
“He used to yell for me. You know how sick he was. I must have heard him that night.”
“There’s so many.”
“I’m old. So I got up and came into here. I went straight to that chair he used to sleep in.”
The girl’s eyes wander across the walls. They stop on a picture of a tall strong looking woman whose face and full lips are dominated by a head of thick black hair.
“There is none of me in there,” she says. “When I got out here I just stared at the chair and tried to figure it out.”
The girl stares at the picture, then back at the woman, then at the picture again. Her head rotates back and forth. She misses every word of the story. There is no resemblance! Where has that woman gone?! For fine soft skin she now has scales! For long silken hair she now has straw! For soft childish hands she now has claws! She drones on.
“Then I remembered, I had to tell myself, ‘He’s not here Josephine’ I said. I had to say it out loud.”
This woman is at least a head shorten than the beauty in the photos. The girl’s eyes are fixed on one of her hands, the one that covers the top of the old woman’s. Her vision swims. She feels a single sensation of one rock forward, one back. As she stares, her fingers begin to curl and the color of her nails distorts. She watches and cannot pull her eyes away as her hand becomes lost in that of the old woman.
The boy next to Catherine shifts in the bed. Her right side aches in the cold. She is awake and gets up to find the bathroom.
She explained her decision to her friends this way. “A big chest seems to be a huge factor in our makeup of society these days—to get through doors, or get things open, or get paid, really.” She remembers she tilted her head while she said that last part.”You would buy a nice new suit for that job interview or a dress for your date wouldn’t you? Why not make it something permanent?”
Catherine walks naked down the hall, her back stiff and hunched over. She hugs her abdomen in an attempt to ward off chills. As she reaches the bathroom the lights come on.
There she is in the mirror. There is a scream that pushes through it all. Out in the warmth of the bedroom the boy shoots straight up in bed. It is not the upright, straight back, chest out, belly pulled thin, Catherine with her permanent change that stares back at her. No. Catherine feels her insides turn and she falls over the sink, her throat is sour and her chest heaves. It is the exposed spine, etched skin, and weary breasts of the old woman that fixes her gaze in the glass of the mirror.
I’m just your ordinary run of the mill fucker. At least I’m not the fucktard of this story, hahaha.
Yeah I’ve been around the block, but no block that you wouldn’t think I’ve been around. I’m only in it for myself and if being your friend means I’ll get something out of it than you can bet I’ll be right there holding your hand and wiping your tears while you cry, you can take that however you want. It’s true though, who harbors and nurtures relationships they don’t get anything from? In this world you have to take and only give if you’re getting back something bigger.
I’m telling you this now because it’s essential for you to understand who I am before I tell you about Gerry. These thoughts run through my head everyday. It’s how I justify who I am and how I go about surviving. There’s something underneath it all that gives me the need to justify though and I’ve pushed that something of myself back so far that I don’t even know what it is anymore.
And than there’s Tima. I guess you could say he’s my sidekick, like as if we were super heroes or something. Tima lives like an animal, on pure instinct and immediate need.
Tima is very precise.
I’m standing here telling myself who I am and trying not to look suspicious and Tima’s over there performing grand theft auto like he’s a surgeon.
He pulls a coat hanger out of his jacket, it’s untwisted and bent into an L shape with a small hook on the long end. He presses his sweaty palms against the glass of the passenger side window and works it around, applying pressure until the window shifts down into the door just a bit.
“Keep em’ open man,” he says to me. “Don’t let Gerry wander off either.”
Gerry, he hasn’t been around for that long, for the longest time it’d been just me and Tima living off each other, taking and taking, and only giving so we could take again. Then we found him, scrounging in a dumpster in the back of a McDonalds, clearly drugged up. Tima’s instincts flared up and he quickly realized Gerry’s potential. Gerry hardly responded to us. In fact I don’t think he even really saw us. I remember thinking he must be blind, the way he looked right through me. He didn’t run when we approached him, he didn’t twitch, he didn’t shake, he hardly moved. Tima held me off as he watched Gerry look over his shoulder and just go right back to digging in the dumpster. He should have run from us, we were predators and he was extremely vulnerable.
This guys got commodity written all over him.” Tima was so sure he already had Gerry on a leash.
It’s true, Tima can read people, it hardly took him five seconds to size up Gerry and he was right. Though he was missing out on one small little truth. Gerry has a brain on him, even if his neurons aren’t firing quite right.
Gerry was sitting on the curb dunking his feet, shoes and all, into the stream of water that gathered in the gutter. I watched him from back on the sidewalk as Tima pushed the coat hanger into the car and down the inside of the window. He was always doing that, messing himself up in someway and it didn’t seem to make him uncomfortable at all. Gerry followed us like a hungry puppy and we fed him, knowing his company would pay up eventually.
It would have been easy to just smash the window with a bat. A smashed window would make the three of us look awfully suspicious though. We had to be clean and careful if we planned on getting away with this car.
Tima hooked the lock and it popped up. He pulled the door open.
“Oh yeah! That’s right.,” he said. “Love you baby,” He said as he scooted into the car and patted the dash. Tima bent down under the driver’s side seat and yanked off a panel under the steering column. A mess of wires fell out onto the floor.
I was getting nervous now. This was taking way too long. Three cars had already passed by; luckily, I didn’t think they could make out what we were doing.
A few days ago we’d walked down this street tripping all over the place. Tima kept screaming about how light was burning out his eyeballs. Straight through the socket and down to the brain in a spiral of hot flame bound on inflicting justice. It was the most poetic, honest thing I’d ever heard him say. That’s when we saw this car rotting here in the street, it hadn’t moved since than.
After that Tima ran out of cash and we decided it was time to get out of town. We had to get out quick. Before people found out we didn’t have money anymore.
The car fired up and Tima hooted victory.
“Get in!” he yelled. “Lets get the fuck out of here.”
I grabbed Gerry off the curb and nudged him into the back seat. The kid was so slow he could hardly speak coherently, he couldn’t hold his hand still enough to form letters, and he couldn’t even read. Tima kept him around as a safety precaution. A sort of decoy I guess, and now it was time for him to pay up.
Just than a cop car came creeping down the street with its headlights turned off.
“Fuck.” Tima whispered as he glared at it through the rear view mirror. “Thought he could creep up on us from behind.” Tima looked over at me where I sat frozen in my seat. “Get going!”
We both bolted out of that car and ran. Our legs pumping as fast as they could. Tima grabbed my sleeve and pulled me behind a building. I smacked right into the brick as I swung around the corner. I wanted to go back, but Tima was gripping my sleeve like an animal. I pulled back on my sleeve and kept Tima from continuing to run off. The cop had gotten out of his car and was yelling at Gerry to get out. I could see how he rocked in his seat nervously, staring straight ahead and muttering to himself as the cop shone his flash light in through the window. He’d grab him, and cuff him, and Gerry wouldn’t make a sound. Hopefully he’d be able to see through him as easily as we could and know that Gerry was just a tool. What common sense did he have though? That cop probably lived like Gerry did, doing what people told him to do and only to survive.
Alice Shindelar 2004
I called my sister before I even left.
“Could you walk out a few miles to meet me? I’m heading home now.”
Even just talking to her was comforting. I grabbed my bag and slung it over my shoulder. As Samantha walked me to the door I pulled my red gloves over my fingers and my brown loafers onto my feet.
The distance wasn’t to far, and walking, well I didn’t mind that. It was just that almost three times on the way there I’d felt like I was being followed. Now, on my way back cars seemed to slow down as they passed me by and I would watch their headlights as I walked along the shoulder of the road. The lights would illuminate my feet and I would slow down, fall back, to stay out of the blinding paths cast across the road and into the ditch. My heart would speed up and after the car passed I would walk faster. I wouldn’t allow myself to run. Don’t give in, there’s nothing there. Then once, there was, and I guess I’ll never be able to make up for that.
-
The car slowed down, turned off its headlights and parked on the side of the highway, just ten feet behind me. I could hear the gravel crunching under the tires and I didn’t turn around.
“Hey! Hey!” a man. How typical.
“Do you need a ride? Where you going”
“I didn’t turn around I just kept going.
“Hey!”
He was right there behind me and I could sense his hand reaching out for my shoulder. I swung around and lunged a fist straight into his nose. It crunched beneath my fingers and made a sickening sound that turned my stomach. His face, I can see it now in the moonlight, and he was not happy. He growled at me and grabbed the collar of my jacket.
“You little bitch! I just. . .arrgg!” He was a bear, a wolf, more wild then a living, breathing, hunter of real live pray. Pictures of Zebra carcasses and mauled antelope that I’d seen in National Geographic passed thorough my mind.
He picked me up and swung me under his arm. It was not hard for him, though I struggled with all my strength. I kicked and screamed and apparently my sister had not made it far enough down the road to hear my voice echoing down the highway.
We reached his car and he opened a door. He tried to push me into the back seat as I struggled. The door slammed shut on my head and I heard the crunch through my own bleeding ears. Everything was black, and there was no time of black, no moment of black. It was just there.
I rolled and fell and couldn’t stop. There was sand in my eyes and my mouth and it grated between my teeth as my face rolled over and over. I was in a bowl of sand. My head screamed profanities at me. Get! Run! Push!
I couldn’t see. I couldn’t stand. My ears were warm and dripping down the sides of my neck. I moved my tongue around in my mouth and a tooth fell loose on top of it. The nerve endings under the tooth shot messages of pain to my brain but my body could not jerk or shout out.
There he was. An animal. Crawling, marching, over the lip of the sand bowl. His pants were rolled up above his knees. His knees, my knees they were all scrapped up and bleeding. Blood, maybe the blood I tasted wasn’t my own. He had a rock in his hand.
Not a smooth rock, but a rough sand rock that had probably never been kissed by the hands of flowing waters.
“What’d you go and hit me for? Probably wasn’t a good idea.”
I could hear him, but I couldn’t answer. I felt numb. I felt far away.
“Vicky, that’s your name isn’t it?” He crouched down next to me and moved a sticky warm thread of hair out of my eyes. “You’re going to regret the day you raised that fist against me.”
I could smell his breath. It smelt of beer and pizza, it hadn’t been long sense his dinner. My stomach growled, my dinner waited for me, getting cold.
He picked up my right hand. My knuckles were raw where they had slapped against the skin on his face and the cartilage of his nose. He kissed it and laid it down in the sand.
The rock was above his head.
It moved.
Then stopped.
He smiled.
The rock.
It came slamming down. That body that I knew crunched and split and screamed in my dripping ears. I sprung to life in a flash of hot red pain. I kicked out twice, three times, over and over, and found contact. Sand. Air. Soft, fat stomach. I kicked harder. He groaned. Pizza and beer came gushing out of his throat and streamed down next to my head.
“You little bitch! You’re not getting away with that. Look at this, you’ve made me waste me entire dinner. We don’t waste and we don’t treat friends so poorly.”
The rock was up in the air again. This time there was no hesitation. It came down and sprung right back up, over and over. On my skull, my face. I went blind. I couldn’t breath right. I couldn’t move. My body quit reacting to the pain. I could feel the rock sinking into my flesh. Then he stopped. There was silence. I could feel my heart beating against my chest. “I’m still alive” I told myself, but there was nothing. I didn’t care when he pulled my shirt down to my waist, and my bra along with it. He bent his head down to my chest, pressing his ear against my left breast. If you could even call it that, the small budding little flower was hardly visible yet.
“Still beating.” He said. I didn’t care if he was talking to me. “I’ll still you yet!” He bit into the soft flesh around my nipple and gnawed and shook his head back and forth with the flesh gripped between his teeth.
Then the rock was up again and all I could think about was, “This again? This is getting so old. I just want out,” and my heart it was still beating out its rhythm beneath my breast. I could hear it and feel it and I was embodied in it as the rock pounded into my skull, burrowing deeper and deeper. If I could still see I would have seen his wide-open white eyes. I would have seen white gum and dark red spray all around me, in the sand and on his face and arms and clothing. I only knew my heart though and it was getting quitter. I worked so hard at continuing to beat out that rhythm, and then I grew tired and wanted to give up. I had no reason not to, I slowed down my pace and stopped caring and my heart gave in and stopped dead silent and still.
Vicky floated away above the sand bowl and knew nothing of her killer or her brains splattered around the ground, caking the rock, the animal, the instrument of her death.
Bit by bit, with out making a sound, I crane my head around the corner of the bathroom door. She pokes her head out of the shower as I strain to see through the heavy wet air that weighs down my breath and pours almost visibly into the hallway. The scent of her shampoo strikes against my face. I can’t wait any longer. I have to go now!
“Mommie?”
“The door’s open!” she calls. “Get in here, you’re letting out all the hot air!”
I slip in, slam the door behind me and run over to plop my pink rear down on the toilet. As I balance myself on the edge, one hand on either side of the bowl to keep myself from slipping in I stare at her through a screen of hot air. She bends over in the tub, roughly towel drying her naked body with an expertise that I have not yet understood. I grimace at each stroke she takes. I know exactly what it felt like to have her hands forcing that rough towel over the surface of warm water tendered skin, yet she doesn’t hesitate or flinch. She casually wraps her hair in another towel. As the air starts to settle she lifts her head and steps out of the tub. She catches me looking at her and shots me an irritated look as she turns towards the wall. I scramble to pull up my pants before she turns away.
“Don’t forget to flush!”
“I didn’t tried to. . .”
“Well try not to!” I pause and let my stomach fill up with that sour familiar phrase. My chest tenses up, then I throw it away, forget about it. I am loose again and I scramble up on the counter, plant my two feet in the sink and turn towards the mirror. That’s when I notice it. A fine coat of some sort of mystery stuff clings to the glass. I can’t make out my features. There is only the deception of some shape and shadow. As I put my hand up to touch it my skin slips across the surface. I pull away and an imprint of my hand is left in place.
“What is it?”
“I dunno.” She is just quiet. I inch my face closer to the mirror.
“What makes it happen?” She continues to get dressed, her clothing resting on the back of the toilet and her damp towel discarded at her feet. I inch closer.
“But how did it get there?” My head whips around, she is still bent over to pull on her pants. I take my opportunity. My tongue runs up the glass, just enough to really taste it. It tastes like nothing. I whip my head back around, she has turned towards the wall to button her jeans shut. I grab a washcloth and run it under the faucet, ringing it out over my feet that sit so comfortable against the cool ceramic of the sink basin.
“Should I wash it?” I start to move the washcloth in large arches across the surface of the glass before she even replies. Teardrops form in its trail.
“It’s just water, that’s not going to make any difference, just let it dry off.”
She flings open the door and rushes out of the bathroom. As she leaves cool air rushes in and the room clears out. Goose bumps cling to my chest and arms. I can breath clearly again. As I watch, my eyes fixed on what is left of that strange, unfamiliar curtain that clings to the mirror, everything begins to fade. Foreign features slowly become clear, shapes and shadow become distinct, I don’t recognize what is there looking back at me.
“You said you didn’t know what it was.” I whisper to the stranger.
Her skin spreads soft and fine and pink across her cheek with the exception of the area down by her chin where the fine skin is interrupted by an irritating patch of blemishes. Scraped knees hid beneath her clothes and her lips rest parted, eyes focused without a blink, on the glowing screen in front of her. The screen reflects faultlessly back into her blue eyes.
If you looked at that reflection you would see her words laid over his. As she reads them her back straightens and her chest pushes out and a smile stretches across her face.
“U know if u ever feel like you’re gonna let it go, that you just can’t wait any longer and it’s wrong just call me.” His words appear as simple black text.
“Ok, thank you. I have to go to bed.”
“K, bye.”
“Bye”
“Don’t forget”
“What” She sits up and inches to the edge of her seat.
“UR beautiful” She slumps back again and sighs.
“Thank you.” She is ashamed at the awkwardness of it.
“Sleep well Red, I hope I see you in my dreams.”
“Me too.”
“lol, you’re sweat. Now get to bed. Tell me about what you wore tomorrow.”
As she closes the window and steps up from her chair Lolita’s lags shake a little. She shuts herself in her bedroom and ignores her mother’s voice at the door as she searches her closet.
“Ok, good night Lolita,” Her mother whispers in one last effort as Lolita pulls one pair of cotton underwear after another out of her dresser and throws them on the floor, pink, white, yellow, all rejected, blue flowers and stripes, end up next to them crumpled and over and done. Her drawer is emptied and she peels off her clothing. It’s all gone and she is standing in front of the bathroom mirror in her skin. She stares hard and long.
“Who are you? What is this thing?”
As she enters the cafeteria Lolita walks directly to the table where the same people sit each day and eat their cookies and a slice for a buck. A few girls brusquely greet her as she sits down with her brown paper bag lunch.
“Hey.” She says the three girls that sit around her continue their conversation.
“Marina, what happened on Halloween?” A girl with energetic brown hair says.
“Nothing really. I dunno.”
” We waited for you.”
“I dunno, I met Chris up on the train tracks” Snickers and smiles pass back and forth as chocolate is licked off of finger tips.
“Chris Lind?” Lolita says.
“Yeah.”
“What happened?” Another girl who chews bubble gum and didn’t buy anything for lunch asks. Lolita sits silently.
“Nothing really.” Marina says
“Oh come on! That isn’t true.” The girl with brown hair interrupts.
Marina pushes out her chair and leaves the table.
“They must have been making out.” Pink globs of gum smack between her teeth.
“They were, down on the play ground”
“Really? What happened?” Lolita asks.
“Oh man, it’s hilarious.” The bouncy brown girl demonstrates. She makes a crude gesture with her fingers and starts signing. “I wanna lick-lick-lick-lick you from your head to your toes.” Lolita giggles a little and their other companion screams with laughter.
“What! Oh my god.” A pink bubble pops.
“Who’s that? What’s that song?” Lolita reddens as she asks.
“Oh come on you know it.” The brown girl says.
“That’s awesome.” The other girl says
Her mother’s bedroom is spotless almost sterile. Instead of magazine articles, CD inserts, and rows and rows of pictures of her friends from back before she moved covering the walls her mom has just a few simple paintings and framed photographs of family. She walks straight across the room and opens the bottom drawer of the dresser. There amongst mounds of silk slips and tights is a smaller stack of lace, satin, and silk, simple colors without patterns. Black, ivory, soft pink, nude. Lolita dips her hands into the pile of panties and rummages through them. Her face grows hot. She picks through and takes a black lacy pair from the bottom with the tag still on them.
Lolita stares at her reflection, the tag torn off, crumpled, and discarded on the floor, the elastic loose around her thighs and the waist band almost over her belly button. The black lace turns her pale skin dead. Even with the waist rolled they hang off her body. She peels them off and throws them under her bed.
There is a party with family and friends and not a single person her own age. She wears a yellow beach dress, cut low in the back and painted with big maroon lilies. She remembers wearing this when her brother told her if she got any skinnier he would kill her. She feels sexy in it. Her mother’s boyfriend grills chicken on the deck, humming and snapping his fingers to the music that empties out of their living room. When he comes in with a platter full of steaming wings and drummies that let off a smell of garlic and chili he grabs her mother by the waist and presses his body into hers. Lolita can see them reflected in the glass of the door from where she sits on the couch sipping her ginger ale
People trickle in with familiar faces and elusive names. The lovers pull apart and smile at their guests, exchanging hand sakes and back pats all around. He picks her out and smiles at her when he comes in the back door.
“Hi Red.
“Hi” She shreds the label on the ginger beer bottle as they talk.
“Long time no see.” She laughs forcibly at this. Her chest is tight and her face hot, yet she composes her body, imitates the way her mother looked in the door just a few minutes ago.
Grilled chicken, shrimp, artichoke dip, olives, cheese, chips and guacamole drape the counter, but only for an instant before disappearing into the bellies of the hoards that now fill their kitchen. Everything is washed down with beer, tequila, chardonnay. The music gets louder and the lights come on as dark falls outside and cools the air. More people step out onto the deck to smoke and appreciate the breeze. The voice of her mother’s boyfriend echoes back into the kitchen.
“Gonna do the fireworks!”
Lolita gets off the couch to go stand at the door where she can look off the deck into the yard below. Everyone is crowded onto the deck, or on the edges of the yard. The boyfriend throws a rope up over a low hanging telephone line and strings up a paper lantern that cringles and swings in the breeze.
He comes up from behind out of the bathroom and stands in the doorway next to her. He holds a beer in his left hand and his right arm brushes against hers. She moves away and leans into the door frame.
Her mother’s boyfriend reaches for the lantern and lights a wick that extends out of the bottom of its fragile frame. It catches and hisses in the dark, all eyes are drawn to the light that burns at the end of the lawn. Bang!
He puts his right hand on her bare back as the lantern bangs out its song, green, red, and blue sparks flying as the lantern spins in wild, violent, circles. Bang! The boy friend lights a smaller rocket beneath the lantern and his hand brushes against her spine.
“You look beautiful tonight Red.” He whispers in her ear as he slips his hand further down her back, leaving a hot trail with the tips of his fingers. She can feel the tips brushing the waistband of her underwear and she tries to picture what they look like. Little blue flowers if she remembers correctly.
Wssshhhh, the sound of the lantern fizzles out and all that can be seen in the dark is a cloud of smoke that fritters away with the smell of sulfur.
“U were gorgeous tonight. Does anyone ever tell u that? I dreamed of u all week.”
“Thanks”
“I mean it. How come u weren’t born 10 years ago?”
“It sux”
“Well in four years, when you’re finally 18, if you’re still available I’ll be the first knocking down your door.” She sits slumped in her chair and sighs tiredly at every line that comes after her own. “Don’t forget what I told you. Never settle. If you’re ever going to settle call me. We’ll figure somethin out.”
“Chris Lind and I are dating.” Marina says the next day. “We’re probably going to do it next week or something. I mean, why wait. It’s not like I’m a virgin anymore.
What ever happened between you and Alex? Or did Ava really sweep him away from you?”
“Nothing happened really,” Lolita said.
“Oh, lame.”
That night she sent the email. “I don’t know what I am going to do. I might just give it up. I need to feel like I am doing something with myself. All my friends are, and there’s this guy that they keep telling me I should really get with but I don’t even know him. Not like I know you.” Her inbox sat empty.
Later, Lolita was stood amongst the boxes and bags of old clothing discarded because of too many bright colors, grinning animals, or unflattering cuts, and piles of photographs ripped from magazines like National Geographic and Seventeen that were all pushed into the center of her room. The day before she had stripped the floral wall paper and scrubbed at the glue until the skin on her hands was raw and dry. She went to the wall with a white rag and a bucket of red paint and stretched high onto her toe tips to dab the corner of the room with the paint, creating a erratic pattern of red splotches that gave the wall a violent texture. He walked in while she was painting.
“Hi Red.” Her heart sped up and made her face hot. “Looks like you’re hard at work.” He stared down at her red stained hands and splattered clothing.
“Uh, yeah. Let me go wash up.”
“Ok, so how you doing?”
“Fine, fine thanks. Help yourself to something to drink in the fridge.” Lolita rushed out of the room and down the basement where the cool air eased the tenseness in her chest. At the laundry room sink she stripped off her paint stained shorts. There were her blue flowered cotton underwear again, they came off to. Her mother’s laundry basket held no promising alternatives. Instead, she wrapped her bare hips in a long green sarong that hung to her ankles and split up the side.
“You know, I just can’t” he said to her after she had come upstairs.
“Why?”
“Because they’d never forgive me.”
“No one has to know but me and you.” Lolita said.
“It just doesn’t work that way Red.” Her face burned, she sat, shoulders wrapped in, attempting to pull the folds of her sarong over her bare legs. “Look me up in five years.” And then he left, only his cool beer remained on the table. Lolita picked it up, took a sip, and slammed it down. A mess of sticky foam and bubbles poured over the long neck of the bottle, and the red hand print of paint left behind, onto the clean surface of the table top.
Weeks later at the next get together he brings a tall woman in tow, with blond hair, flawlessly rounded breasts that popped out over the top of a black tank-top, and perfectly manicured nails. Lolita stands alone in the doorway as the sparks of a pink and orange lantern fills the darkness of the yard.
Three days we would drive before we hit the shore.
Empty hotel rooms and gas pumps would blur by.
At night on the road, while he lay in the back seat
mapping intergalactic travel through my rear window,
I would light up a spark behind the wheel
and cover the ceiling with eddies of dense smoke.
We’d drive fast!
Out onto the water.
Chasing the moon over the horizon
never stopping to let the sun catch up.
Using some sort of concept he had derived
from an extraterrestrial theory,
we would keep our tires skimming the surface.
We would drive four days!
Hailing down the occasional cruise ship or oil tanker, paying them
double or triple the price to fill ‘er up.
At some point we would stall,
empty tank
in the middle of the ocean,
no where in the world.
I would suggest that we take a swim to
stretch our legs.
He would suggest that we take off our clothes.
There’s no law out here, natural or instituted.
No one to chase us down for indecent exposure
or defying the properties of water.
We would climb out the window and dive off the roof.
Then standing up, our vertebrae all aligned,
we would flatten our souls out on the surface.
I would stand there for a moment
and then crouch down, tense up my calves, and leap off the surface;
arrow into the silent water.
Later I would lay stretched out on the hood
burning in the moonlight,
blinded by the stars that were invisible from land.
While he rigged up a contraption to distill salt water
for drinking and pouring into our radiator.
“Will the moon light make it work,” I would ask.
“Only this once,” he would say.
A bubbly big breasted woman, a flight attendant,
met my aunt, another flight attendant and me at the airport, a colorful map dotted with museums and monuments,
and took off through a crowd of welcome signs.
The metro was crowded and the tunnel walls were faded red brick, little boys played accordion music and stuck out their sweaty palms for spare coins.
Our hotel, with its narrow twisted staircase
We carried our suitcases up five flights to our room in the
attic. A room with a slanted ceiling and red painted walls
You couldn’t stand up straight in the bathroom.
We took off for the night and wore out our shoes.
In the morning I woke up to company downstairs.
The bubbly big-breasted woman was back.
She brought. . .
A boy, with beautiful chocolate milk skin,
and his uncle, old hunched talkative company.
The company stood-up and smiled and shook my hand.
The friendly old man hugged the bubbly woman
and they sat with my aunt. I sat with beautiful chocolate milk. He was from Washington. We buttered croissants with sweet cream and jelly. The coffee was little blue cups of espresso with sugar cubes.
We went, and the chocolate milk followed me
we visited the wide blue marble staircases leading up to a Winged Victory where I tripped on the slippery marble and steadied myself on chocolate milk. we visited the crowded courts of Versailles and waited in a ten-mile line to pay for a piss.
Squished in-between the talkative man and chocolate milk.
The man told me his life story and it was the saddest
he told me he was there December 10th on Normandy beach
only something like thirteen Americans survived
He hasn’t left France since. He had a daughter with
the bubbly woman half his age. His daughter
is a bit of milk chocolate and the boy
her cousin.
That night somewhere out on the Seine, the river surrounding the bell towers, there was a cocktail party, there was my cocktail dress with sequences of the moon through its stages, and there was music and flight attendants and champagne lots of champagne the chocolate milk had a gallon I had none, I was in a consensual state.
We crossed a bridge guarded by ten-foot tall Greek woman
to the remains of a ferries wheel from a legendary fair.
We sat right under that symbol of Paris my legs crossed
as I leaned close to him. His arm around my shoulders and hand on my leg.
A man tried to sell us lighters and key chains
in the likeness of the tower. He pretended he didn’t understand “no” and kept on hassling us.
Chocolate Milk breathed his champagne breath on my face
I closed his mouth with mine when he tried to talk.
He was to unintelligible to stand.
“I was just about to ask you how you felt about making-out in public,” He said.
I shrugged and we went to a park, behind the tower.
I still felt under it, it towered so high.
I sat on his lap, he folded back my cocktail dress
and told me I was “a hot girl.” while he rubbed my thighs.
I snorted and held back a burst of giggles.
That boy was so beautiful, but he did yoga
and dressed to damn well and had been with too many girls.
My aunt, the flight attendant had invited him along
on to the valley. I told her I’d rather not.
Leave it behind and it will all be just as
sweet and manipulative as it started out.
He let me wear his black jean jacket while we walked back
to the party and was very disappointed when I said, “I won’t be coming back, chocolate milk.”
It was a pretty useless old shed, useless to me at least. My dad found plenty of ways to put it to use. The workbench that my grandfather built out of the side of the shed was another story entirely. I remember the workbench was high enough that a grown man didn’t have to bend over it as he worked, and high enough that my siblings and I used it as our “double secret hideout.” When my mother’s back was turned we would drape blankets from the couch over the sides to shade out the rest of the yard. In that shade little people would dance and attend school amongst the hornet’s nests and ant farms. To mom the entire shed and everything remotely related to it “a danger trap.” So when she outlawed our hideout we turned it into a parking garage for our Tonka trucks and avoided our desire to crawl beneath it and bath in the cool shade.
Her hatred for that shed wasn’t without incentive. My father’s obvious dependency on that shed wasn’t either. It is his dependency that drove her towards these repulsions. He built the shed when he knocked down the original garage on that property, promising that he would knock it down too as soon as he got around to building a new garage. This didn’t happen until eight years later. The garage he built took an entire summer to build and filled our back yard with tons of limestone. You couldn’t dig three feet deep in our yard without hitting a solid layer of limestone that seemed to penetrate further then the earth’s core. The limestone lined the long abandoned grooves dug by the glacier that passed through millions of years prior to the building of the new garage. The glacier dug the bed for the St. Croix River, the river that is just a trickle in the bottom of a huge furrow in the earth. This is where our home was built, and this rut is what we built the new garage into. I say into, not on, because the excavator we hired with a bank loan of $20,000 literally dug into the side of the valley. He hit rock, and when he dug out a boulder bigger than the two-door Toyota Celica my mother gave to our babysitter instead of her wages, he smiled with relief because mom told him to just roll it to the end of the driveway.
“We’re gonna keep this one,” she said.
After that two-story garage was built on a loan that wasn’t paid off until we sold the house, the shed still stood as tipsy as ever. My father’s main purpose for this shed, it would appear, was to shack up his booze. When my mother would venture in to find a monkey wrench or hammer to try to hold together our crumbling house she would get lost amongst the bottles, empty and full. It is probably these bottles that attracted the multitude of hornets nesting in the corners of the shed. I hardly ever ventured into the dark musty building because of the thought of hundreds of little yellow jackets buzzing around my face, their spindly black legs trailing behind their invisible wings as they land in my hair.
Mom likes to use a certain not so well known proverb to describe my parent’s decisions as the antithesis of what the proverb entails. Back then, when people referred to a particularly brutal procrastinator they would often say “He won’t spin on a dime,” or “when hell freezes over.” Meaning that he would put things off over and over, creating a vicious cycle for himself. In my parent’s case, they spun on that dime till it rendered them dizzy, hell froze over and over and icicles formed on the ceiling in the family room. Then, after much procrastination, they rushed through their decisions without considering much of an outcome. My father didn’t wait to give my mother another chance when he asked for a divorce and a few weeks later my mother was already knocking down the shed.
My mother’s sister Kitty was up from Iowa for the weekend when she did it. There was a dumpster in our yard just waiting for her to fill it and she knew just what to do with it. She gathered up all of the tools and bike parts my father hadn’t been able to part with over the years but had left behind when he moved out, and threw them in first. Then she grabbed a fiery orange extension cord from the garage and plugged in the Skil saw. She hacked at the workbench that had endangered her children’s lives. She sawed off the legs and threw them on top of the bike parts. The tabletop broke into pieces beneath her sweating palms and she almost believed she could tear it all down with her bare hands. Piles of sawdust and hornets nests littered the ground by her feet, and she laughed at the thought. She abandoned the saw for a sledgehammer when she was done with the workbench, stepping closer to her beliefs. She heaved metal over her shoulder before she crashed it down into the side of the shed. The thin insulation-lacking walls cracked beneath her swings and the roof came crashing down between them. Dust billowed up from the indistinguishable pile of lumber and my mother carried it away to the dumpster. The dime continued to spin.
I remember I cried before and during and even after. Sometimes I feel like I am still crying. Huge wet rolling tears that make veins grow in my eyes and the skin around my nose turn chap and peel.
I cried all the way home for no reason. I felt no pain, no remorse. I just felt numb. My mom laid me down in my bed and I was all ready to go back to sleep when I realized there was still gauze in my mouth.
My tongue is plastered to the gauze.
I am still bleeding.
A lot.
All over.
All over my mouth, my hair, my pillow. The blood is hot and sweet on my tongue. I can feel it pooling in the back of my throat. Where is all this blood coming from? My brain? Am I bleeding out my mind, my memories? My vision was swimming and I couldn’t hold up my head.
This is the instance where my childhood is erased, where my memories become scratched out film, and the numbness sets in. When my oral surgeon reached in and touched the surface of my mind.
My mom applied pressure to the incision with her fingertips to stopper the flow of memories. Plugging up the pool and letting the warm memories slosh around, lost, indecipherable, inside my head. Hot dusty images of boulders, limestone, and an old stain red house splash around in the pool. Lemonade stands swim beside sand castles and best friends in dark blood. Responsibilities drown evenings spent discussing forever and my mother presses down harder. Causing the warm pool of memories to splash against the inside walls of my head.
It didn’t stop. The blood continued to seep past her fingertips. It trickled around the grooves in her nails and ran down the length of her fingers in thin dark lines. She called the surgeon, who told her to plug me up with Lipton Tea bags, something about the acidic quality of the black tea base numbing my gums and speeding up the healing process.
The surgeon had cut open my pallet as if he were dissecting a frog. He sliced a little door into the roof of my mouth. Leaving long tender hinges on either side. Then using the blunt edge of his scalpel he peeled them back and gazed through the frame.
I imagine he could see everything, and the lamp he kept a firm grip on just above my head furthered his rang of sight, past my ridged pallet, through the marrow of my bone and the gray spaghetti mass of my brain. He laughed at my young brain and dipped his hands into a well that was only beginning to fill with liquid dark memories. He drank from his palms. Innate wisdom and innocence fell from between his fingers. Ignorance ran dark red down his chin. After a long moment he straightened out his spine and smiled in a small, forgiving way. He stumbled back and fell into his plush white chair, leaving dark red handprints behind when he lifted his hands from the arms.
Later he sewed me back together, slowly and with a precision that was not present before. An affinity had grown between us a he drank my youth from my innocent body.
My mother plugged me up with Lipton Tea an hour later. With acid, and numbness. My blood soaked the dry herbs inside the tea bag and little twigs and leaves fell out of the seams in the bag into my blood stream. The bag leaked unwanted responsibilities but my memories didn’t come back with the twigs and leaves. When I asked my mother about what had happened to them she squeezed my shoulder and handed me a powdery white pill and a glass of water.
“Take this,” she said, “it will help you with the pain.”
“I’ve already forgotten it.” I said.