In Newness of Life, Naomi Mo

Leland Quarterly | Fall 2022

Naomi Mo

I think of the aftermaths: rebirthed holy under blue, shedding skin made antiquated by sanctification, in supplication rising from the font with feathers draping my backside, testimony shifting on my tongue. The congregation applauds and I smile, feel God smile from that newfound space he has woven between the pilasters of my soul.

Two and a half years later I witness baptism of a different kind. I think of the aftermaths: feet nailed to the shore of a silence shattered by emergency sirens and shaking shoulders, tightroping the precipice of a grief that laps my spirit in imitation of the waves gnawing at my toes. The body is drawn from the lake and I scream, feel him smile:

that which has taken residence in the wake of God’s eviction.

I now ponder the precursors: the divergence that occurs for one

Leland Quarterly | Fall 2022

to emerge breathing newness of life, the other without breath at all. I sink even as I turn heavenward— watch the sun fade to stained glass, feel a kiss of unknown current, let the threads creep across my lungs until the last prayer on my lips loses itself in the bubbles.

Leland Quarterly | Fall 2022

Untitled Sarah Yao M

Leland Quarterly | Fall 2022

Brennecke Gale

After Jenn Alandy Trahan.

All the white boys in our high school could really ski. They could play hockey, too, and lacrosse, and go to back-to-back practices every day and still outrun us during passing period pick-up basketball. They learned to skate before they could walk and did backflips in their sleep and dreamt of dropping out of high school to ski professionally. We smoothed our oversized Colorado Avalanche hockey sweaters and tried to be sporty and funny and cool and hot, and we prayed every night that one of them would choose us to wear their away jersey during home lacrosse games.

Phillip and I finna huck it at Vail this weekend, Alex Grady told us at lunch. Alex Grady lived in Eagle. All the white boys did, in houses on golf courses with big, sprawling basements. On Fridays, they hosted parties in those basements while their parents sipped Coors Light and watched Broncos football upstairs. Our high school was in Gypsum, ten miles down the road, where single story houses squeezed together on narrow streets. Gypsum boys spoke Spanish at home and played soccer and basketball because you only needed a ball and maybe some shoes. Eagle boys played lacrosse and hockey. They had garages full of expensive equipment, and their parents could drive them upvalley to the ice rinks in Vail for hockey practice because they got off work earlier, or they didn’t work at all. Eagle is closer than Gypsum to the ski mountains by fifteen minutes, but it made a world of difference when it came to varsity rosters and street cred and homecoming kisses and the attention they got from us.

Locals | Brennecke Gale

Us girls were from Gypsum and Eagle, but we vied for the attention of the Eagle boys equally even though we, too, could rip tricks and skate fast and pull our own weight at the keg on rodeo weekend. In tenth grade, Zach Mason asked Riley Glutova to homecoming after the volleyball game where she broke the school record for most kills in a single season. For the rest of the week, no one talked about Riley’s game. They only talked about how Zach had eased up to her, pants low, and asked her to the dance in as few words as possible. Who cared if he could barely spell and kissed three different girls every weekend night? He skated circles around every hockey team this side of the Continental Divide and was the first boy to throw a cork-7 on the ski mountain, baked out of his mind. At the homecoming dance, we gathered in shadowy corners and watched Zach put his hands on Riley’s waist during the first slow song and felt something small in our hearts like pride.

A lot of us went to college. Some of them did, but they usually made it only a year or two at Colorado State or CU Boulder before dropping out. Sometimes they stayed in those cities, squatting in their frat houses or shitty apartments with mattresses on the floor. Usually they went home to Eagle, to their parents’ basements, and they skied big, dangerous lines and drank heavily at the Brush Creek Saloon and drove past the lacrosse fields where they used to be somebody.

We got good grades. We made friends. Most of us stayed in-state, but some of us went further, to liberal arts schools the Eagle boys had sneered at when we graduated. We played sports better and tougher than anyone else at our coastal colleges. We called our parents often, and sometimes, we thought about little Eagle and little Gypsum and those little boys we’d worshipped. We laughed at them, and we shook our heads at the altar of hockey pads and lacrosse jerseys and crumpled beer cans we built for them out of curse words and playing dumb and looking the other way when they’d smoke weed off the side of the main ski run in a circle of lodgepole pines. We laughed at them, but we also worried about them when we saw that one by one by one, they were leaving college and partying more. Online, we saw videos of them

Leland Quarterly | Fall 2022

egging each other over bigger ski jumps, doing riskier tricks. Quietly, feeling far from Gypsum and Eagle, we worried about what they were doing offline. And then we got the calls—three in nine months—that they were gone. Alex. Phillip. Zach. Suicide. Overdose. Suicide. We felt strangely blank, unsure of how to feel, like our childhood house had burned down even though we hadn’t lived there in years. We hung up the phone and stared outside at the sunlight straining through the green leaves of the California oaks.

When did we first lose them? Was it in the science wing bathroom, freshman year, when they passed chewing tobacco to each other under the stall doors? Was it earlier, in middle school, when they pushed each other to try bigger jumps in the halfpipe, choruses of expletives and name-calling bouncing off the aspens? Was it much later, at graduation parties, in dark corners, when they came up to us and gripped our shoulders and told us that we could be something, something big and real and important out there in the world? The boy who holds us now, so far from home, tells us that we cannot blame ourselves, but we’ve been worried about those Eagle boys for as long as we’ve known them, and we never said anything. Who might be next? How can you even ask that? How do you reach through four years and two thousand miles to try and grab hold of someone?

And how do you explain to the people at your coastal liberal arts college that these boys mean so much to you when you’re not sure why they do? What does it mean that the dead is always someone’s teammate, someone’s older brother, someone’s date to the junior prom? How do we collect grief together, picking it up through the truck windows driving along the slow highway between Eagle and Gypsum?

There’s a wide, flat field halfway between the two towns. In the winter, the dads of the neighborhood lay down tarps and wooden siding and flood the field with hose water until, after a few cold nights below freezing, we have a homemade ice rink. They set up goals and smooth the ice with a homemade Zamboni and stock a big box with spare skates and firewood. I spent almost every weekend night there in high school, skating around with friends. Sometimes I’d go with my dad and watch

Locals | Brennecke Gale

him reach for the memory of the hockey player he used to be.

I remember one night in February, two years before we even knew to think about college, five years before my high school friend Camilla called me, tearfully asking, Is this what growing up is? More people you know die? It was snowing such thick, fast flakes that the night was warm and glowing. On this night, I showed up to the rink alone. As I laced my skates, I searched the skaters on the ice, blurred by the firelight and falling snow. It was the Eagle boys—Phillip, Alex, Zach, and more—catapulting their bodies across the ice, dancing and weaving, passing the puck to each other like they were born to do it, like they would do it forever. And they were laughing, a high, clear laugh that hung in the air with the snow for a long second before floating up towards the moon and whatever is beyond.