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Vo l . 5 N o . 1
I cracked wood and stoked the embers. I was going to break my fast today and make my old man skillet potatoes and some good old Bratwurst and share with him. I had requisitioned a hearty German mustard from my mom’s pantry. A few apples would be sliced with the brats. Onions and tomatoes and chile peppers. Hot coffee. All that German stuff simmering in those US Army pots and pans in the middle of a strangulated Apache reservation. Bly was right. The moment the war lifted from my heart, I saw my old man. Just a guy waiting for daylight, waiting for fish. and waiting for the day he’d say goodbye to Arizona and say oh fuck to his war. Our war. The war in those Apaches’ blood. The war trapped in ArabianSpanish-English Paints. The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness. - Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Michael Kleven
Kate Quick
Money Trees Sweat dripped from my temples into my ears and my eyes, over the tip of my nose and onto my sandals and toes. At one o’clock, before work, First National Bank’s thermometer read one hundred two degrees, Fahrenheit. My shoulders were sunburned; I could have sworn my bra straps were on fire. Sweat gathered at the tip of my braid and weighed down my scalp, making my head hurt. Loose pieces of hair were stuck to my forehead, my jaw, my neck. I had been working Lincoln, Nebraska’s streets for two hours. In another three, the sun would start fading, and one hour after that, the hard part of the day would be done. If it were a Wednesday, we’d go across the street after work to Lazlo’s Brewery and Pub for nachos and beer, or, in my twenty-year-old case, soda. On Fridays, we’d go for pizza – vegetarian only - up the street at Old Chicago. The nachos and pizza was always after ten pm, when all of the paper work was done and the money was in the safe. The other three work nights, I drove home and slept until I drove myself back to the office by noon the next day. I worked ten-hour days, sometimes twelve, five days a week. When there was a community event – a jazz festival or the Hay Market Heydays – we spent our weekends, clipboards in hand, interrupting conversations to gather postcard signatures and distribute fliers. I was a campaign manager for the Sierra Club. Following the instruction of my boss, Gail, I traced neighborhoods on maps for four of my co-workers and myself to follow, trying to determine how many houses might be on a street so that I didn’t assign too much territory, or too little. I was supposed to be practical about this drawing of neighborhoods—each person got three blocks, or eight, depending on the street sizes. Ideally, the five people in my car would all have areas sketched next to one another. Some of them might even pass each other on opposite sides of the street if I planned it out right. When three o’clock came, we split into several carloads, and I was in charge of my car. I explained the neighborhood to the other canvassers as we drove there: “wealthy, large houses,” “lower middle class,” “helpful to us in the past,” “Republican.” I dropped each person at the corner designated on his or her map, got out of the car each time, and offered individual suggestions for