Excerpts

Fiction

From “Instead of Therapy”

I remember the tiny ‘o’ of her mouth everyday. I wake up with my lips open and curved in her ring of silent surprise. I see her yellow hat with the brim turned up in front and her small bag of autumn leaves, mid-swing. It flew up in the air and the leaves rained down like confetti. I remember that, but I don’t remember the impact.

I’ve been going to therapy; it was recommended by the court. I go and talk about my car, how the windshield is getting replaced, and the grill. How I’ll sell it when it’s finished. When the therapist asks why in an obvious attempt to make me talk about her, I tell him it’s because I can never drive that car again. He asks why again, and I say, “You know why.” He tells me I have to talk about it sometime, about how I feel. I tell him that she can’t talk about how she feels about it, so why should I? “Because you’re alive,” he says. “Not really,” I say.

From Death Goes to High School

Death didn’t like high school. He hadn’t liked middle school either.

He didn’t like football players. He didn’t like cheerleaders. He didn’t like teachers or backpacks or going up to the board or bells or eye contact or pep rallies or dry erase markers or gym uniforms or lunch tables. He also didn’t like his name.

The regular teachers knew better than to use it. Word had spread. But substitute teachers did not know.

When they took attendance and got to Death’s name, at least one kid in the class would say, “Who’s that?”

The teacher would repeat Death’s name. The kids would look at Death. Repeat. Look. Repeat.

Death would croak, “I am Death.”

The sub would always ask, “What?”

“Death,” he’d say again. Sometimes. Or he wouldn’t answer.

And then he’d be sent to the office. Someone in the office who was not too busy would tell him to stop messing with substitutes and just use his real name it’s a perfectly good name and saying Death is your name will not make things any easier that was for sure.

Then he’d go back to class. He’d put his head down so his hair would make a curtain around his face. His breath would make a little terrarium and he’d think about gopher tortoises and his bass guitar and the blackest black in the universe and the bell would ring.

From Skye Blue

Next to the album was a photo of my mother, my sister, and me on our last family vacation, a year after Dad died. That actually made me smile. I had convinced them to go whale watching in Baja about three years ago. I’d always wanted to do it, and Jeanie wasn’t a boat person. Nor were my family members Jeanie people. To be fair, they were never comfortable about my being gay at all, but they especially hadn’t liked Jeanie. I’d come out when I was in college, and my family hadn’t wanted to talk about it. They claimed they were fine with it, but all of my girlfriends were non-entities unless they were at a family gathering, inescapably in their faces. After Dad died, though, things had changed. We needed each other. Mom being sick only made that need stronger.

And Baja was a good time. We’d had a lot of fun, the three of us, getting giggly drunk at dinner like old girlfriends and reliving happy memories. It had been long enough that we could talk about Dad and not get weepy just thinking about him. When we were on the boat, though, and a humpbacked whale spyhopped right next to us, we all started crying. We never talked about what had made us cry, or acknowledged that we had cried at all.  For me it was that huge, dark eye. For a moment, it was a miniature of the whole world, staring right at me, seeing all the way inside, and it was so serene and so devoid of fear and the whole ocean was its home and its lonely songs were so sad but its eye was as placid as my father’s when he had finally stopped breathing.

From “When You Seek, You Shall Find”

“Herzhog told my father that he wanted to pass on his secrets, especially those of his incredible wealth, and since his own son had died in some sort of accident, my father was the only one he could trust. In fact, Herzhog made a point to say that my father was the closest thing to a son without being of the bloodline, and this seemed very important to him. So, from within a grandfather clock, Herzhog withdrew some coiled parchment. My father could not see exactly from where, as Herzhog’s body blocked his view. The paper looked impossibly old and Herzhog took great pains to open it carefully. On the parchment was a map, but not a map of the hills or secret mines, as my father had expected. Instead, the map seemed to reveal a secret passage that began within the house and went downward, into the earth itself. In the center of the map there was a drawing of a figure, and of this, my father would only say the drawing was crude and yet, it frightened him.”

Essays

From “Lab Rat Find Love”

Trust is a curious thing. I had only met Ben a few minutes ago, and he was now bending over me, ready to put heated plastic over my entire face. I was about to let him though he may have just snuck in the window and appropriated this side office as his own personal torture chamber, sidelining study participants into his lair, hoping to become the “Blue Mask Killer.”

Ben was only a few inches away, close enough to kiss, if the mask weren’t in the way. Despite the clinical setting, the strangeness, there was suddenly something so human in the room with us. Between us. We were trying to figure out this whole pain thing together, so whatever would have separated us outside of that room brought us very close together inside of it.

From “All I Need Is Love?”

I think I have this shell for reasons other than my scarred past or fear of intimacy. I think my fellow humans are the people I look to with longing. I yearn for kindness in anonymity, without hope of any reward but a smile and the knowledge that someone’s day might be brighter. I have similar reactions when students pick up my dropped essays in the hall or hold the door for me. It gets me. It pushes through my bubble of business so that my chest aches and my eyes clear. In that moment I see another person’s beauty vividly, and my own selfish preoccupations are diminished. We are bound, for that moment, in hope—in the belief and proof that we can be pack animals, that we can lick each other’s wounds and clean the mites out of each other’s ears, that Simon from The Lord of the Flies does not have to die, that maybe this time, they’ll listen to him, and learn.

From “The Whistle Guy”

I am not a guy.  I am a woman with a whistle around her neck. I wear the whistle in service to the safety of children. My whistle stays at the ready on its green lanyard. Sometimes children admire my whistle—how shiny it is—but I think they are mostly enthralled with its potential power.

Duty begins at noon. On good days I am on the yard a minute before the bell. It’s quiet then. I have a few seconds to admire how well the sun, wind, and leaves play together, making shifting patterns on the pavement. But then the screaming begins.

It comes from a distance, catching corners and echoing. At first, to the untrained ear, it can begin a reverie about Sundays at the swimming pool or ice cream truck pursuits. I am no longer distracted by this kind of misplaced daydreaming. The screaming gets closer and louder. Small bodies come around the corner at high speeds, sometimes bouncing off of each other. At this moment, I’m Godzilla in a revenge movie, where tiny adults dressed in Gap clothes finally attack back, and I brace myself against that energy tsunami, my height the only oasis.

Poetry

Grief

We stayed quiet because there was so much to say.

Our safety depended on the click of a light switch and the definitive locking of a door

the key sliding notch by notch precisely into place with airless friction

like the metallic love of a family forged by grief, each member lying in a drawer discarded

with twist ties and dry pens and a piece of rubber that once protected something, lost long ago.

There are no holes the right size and shape, no doors to open

by turning or jiggling or rotating slowly in a circle to end where it began.

There are no perfect slots, no fitting words or gestures to release the hinge

of our silence, echoing through the rooms of our locked and darkened house.

Up and Out

A white bird in South Africa works its way into a mound of elephant dung.

It can stay inside, eating seeds, for days.

Sometimes safari guides slice off the top for tourists

Startling the bird into flight.

I want to be released like that, rising swiftly from what’s left behind

Into expansive light.

I want to be nourished by the leavings and come away full

emerging like a new thing, inspiring onlookers

who gasp at hope they did not expect to find.