Cellar Door Fall 2003

Robert Michael

ey on Syn and Max

Cellar Door Fall

2003

Volume 29 Number

I

www.unc.edulthedoor

Dorothy Ball, co-editor Katharine Cleland, co-editor Brandon Proia. fiction editor Emily Vasquez, art editor

Selena Beckman-Harned, Katie Melville, treasurer

web designer

Michael McFee, faculty advisor

Staff Terry Bruns Lee Cannon Timur Hammond Julia Hansen Sarah Martin Daphne Muller Melissa Williams

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IIIIIIIIIIIIIII'IIl

Cover: Kit by Camelia McCandies

Copyright Cellar Door Š

2003

Cellar Door, the undergraduate literary magazine of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is published twice annually and welcomes submissions from all undergraduate students currently enrolled. Guidelines for submission can be found on the web at www.unc.edu/thedoor.

If you would like to support the arts by patronizing Cellar Door, please contact Michael McFee, the faculty advisor, at mcfee@email.unc.edu or by phone at 919-9623461. Cellar Door gratefully acknowledges the generous financial support of the UNC Student Government, the Blanche Armfield Fund in the Creative Writing Program and the Department of English Gift Fund.

poetry Philip McFee Evan Gurney Rebecca Steele Lauren Moseley gretchen kroncke Erin Fornoff Glenn Hollar Mela Kirkpatrick Jordan Carpenter Rachel Berry

Š /6 On the Death of a Superman / 12 Bridge Swinging at Midnight / '4 Fly Down Maasai /27 Two Poems / 28 Wltitewaslting for a Tarot Reader in Spain / 45 Two Poems /46 Santorini Melons /68 Intentional Flub at the Cirque du Solei! / 80 Two Poems /82

fiction Bekah Brunstetter Erika Kranz Christopher Lamb Zachary Gresham CobyMangum

I dream in Swedish Fish / 9 Perihelion / '7 Indian Bones / 31 Tea with Sophia in the Basement Thaddeus /85

/ 7'

interview Dorothy Ball

Robert Wrigley On Syntax and our Animal Selves /49

art Camelia McCandies Amber Haslup Lindsey Britt Alex Freeman Liz Willter ErinJiroffWatson

Two Photographs / cover, '3 Untitled /7 Two Photographs /8, 84 Lauren wi th Heather / 16 Central Avenue /30 Double Negative /70

___

,,4

2003

fall contest

judges

Michael Collier is the Poet Laureate of Maryland. The Ledge, his fourth collection of poetry, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other honors include two NEA fellowships and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, and Poetry. He is the co-director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Maryland at College Park and has served as director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference since 1994- He was interviewed for the Spring 2003 issue of the Cellar Door.

Max Steele is a former head of the Creative Writing Department at UNC-Chapel Hill and currently presides over the Mini-Max short short story competition. His books include Debby, a novel, and The Hat of My Mother, a collection of short stories. He has been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harpers, Story and The Paris Review, which he helped to found.

poetry First Place Erin Fornoff Whitewashing

for a Tarot Reader in Spain

Second Place gretchen

kroncke Running at Night

Third Place Jordan Carpenter Intentional

Flub at the Cirque du Solei!

Rebecca Steele Bridge Swinging at Midnight

fiction First Place CobyMangum Thaddeus Second Place Christopher Lamb Indian Bones Third Place Erika Kranz Perihelion

Š

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Philip McFee

6

Amber Haslup

7

..

Lindsey Britt

8

I dream in Swedish Fish 'My eyes are killing me,' Janet bitches, holding half the wire basket. She hands me the romaine lettuce.

Do you have any coupons?

No, bitch.' I've got to get]anet

home in ten in time to

makethe deposit by two, and I don't need another reminder that money and me and coupons and me are practically postdivorced. Scratch. Never married. Never even met.

'Don't be rude, J

She says, and touches a finger to Finish and Pay. I can tell by the way she says it that in her head, the word is italicizedand underlined twice, and purple.

'It's a voice. It's not even a person.

J

Pleasescan your Harris Teeter VIC Card now.

'We already scanned it,' Janet tells me.

'We already scanned it,' Janet tells the screen.

I hate you, I'm saying to her. I'm imagining swinging the bag, the heavy one with the frozen peas, at her knees. No, her head.I hate you, and I hate every time I've ever touched you.

We Finish and Pay. 'You saved three dollars and ten cents with your Harris

TeeterVIC Card,' Janet says in the car, perusing the receipt likea willshe's not in. Looking down sideways, her thighs are stillbeautiful, and her toes are the perfect size. We're stuck in a turn lane behind this jackass who yields on green, and its 1:48,and the check is burning through my pocket.

9

'Goddammit, my eyes are killing me .. .' Janet takes a pack of thawing leaf spinach and lays it against her face and reclines. 'Goddammit.'

The jackass is driving this old dodge minivan with the wood stripe. The kind that was good for soccer moms circa

'993. Ours was this hird hlue, with a shitty front right tire, second hand. Before the money. We'd go house hunting, window shopping, we'd do it instead of eating or sleeping. And I'd be sick as shit, with the flu, and my mom wouldn't want to

leave me home alone, so she'd set me up this little hed in the back seat with a 'vomit station/

a big plastic bowl, and candy.

To get the bad taste out of my mouth.

'What're you thinking about?' Janet speaks from behind the spinach.

'Throwing up.'

'Goddarnmit. Goddarnmit!' She hurls the spinach, at the dashboard, and starts rubbing at her eyes with her open palms, hard, faster and faster, like she's jacking them off, like she's try to rub out everything they'd ever seen.

'GODDAMMIT!' It slows to deep circles. 'They're killing me. They're killing me.'

The light is perpetually red, and I'm starting to see dead presidents in the wood strip of the dodge. I look over, and Janet has taken out her eyes, and is holding them in her hands like two dead grape tomatoes.

'What do they look like? Do they look infected? Do they look red" I hate you. 'They look like eyes to me.'

'They feel much better now.'

'Good.'

Green, and Go. I turn, and

OUf

house is a point finally

closer, and the check cools. Janet holds her eyes in one hand like harmony balls, and fiddles with the CD with the other.

And as we turn on our street, I look over at her, and she doesn't look back, and I start to think of all the things I've wanted to do to her when she's not even looking. AlI the thing she does when I'm not looking.

The chance just swells there. It's this uncut watermelon in the backseat. The air vents blow juice and

opportunity. I move my hand.

IO

'Much better now,'Janet contests, and puts her eyes back, where they belong.

Ilove you. 'Good.'

The check is cool as calm now, next to my leg, deep in my pocket, where it's safe and unsigned. I think of the Visine I'll buy her, and how she'll like it.

Bekah Brunstetter

II

On the Death of a Superman

They found him frozen, locked into a fetal curl, dead in the far corner of his icebox cocoon.

His Superman tights failed him, the brilliant reds and yellows and blues frosted over by the cruel cold.

The elements

have no imagination.

Neighbors would ofren spy him sprinting across the apartment roof

arms outstretched

like bird or plane.

The callous wind never took the man,

nor did the slate propel him upwards.

Earth and sun mocked him together: such elements

have no imagination.

He chased villains into the freezer

and fixed the lock fast behind.

There against the frigid walls he pinioned demons in a death grip until the world stopped up his blood.

And which is finally more tragic: the elements

or his imagination?

Evan Gurney

12

Kit by Camelia McCandies

'3

Bridge Swinging at Midnight

The boys secure a thick climbing rope to the metal underskeleton of a bridge spanning the Tennessee River,

flowing so far below it's silent.

They cinch knots while Mack trucks rattle the bridges' bones and echo an oblivious world above.

The first boy clips his carabiner to the umbilical lifeline, dangling his body out from a beam till he loosens his grip from the night-told steel and vanishes into the dark below, becoming only the slicing whish and descending groan of rope tugged under his weight, rocking him over the water

until he is just a distant splash on the still surface of the river.

Chill-bumped and brazen, long hair light against my back, I clip my harness to the rope and sidestep into the darkweighing nothing, gliding, resisted only by wind flooding into my ears, tugging the tips of my hair, the hem of my shorts.

r4

The cord curs rhe air like a whip waiting to crack. and I sink down, so fast that its quick catch is sudden, surprising and

jerks me back up, with no time to remember

the free fear of falling.

Swinging skyward, resurrected into the dry womb of air, stars scattered haphazardly pulse like the warm of blood in my toes and eyebrows.

On the backswing, I stretch long to let my feet scrape the river

and stir a smell of muddied barge: Slowing down, I look up to the boys, only lit cigarettes, red dots puncturing the dark, then drop from the rope like a fish just off the line thrashing into the murky cold.

The boys hear my splash and look down as the ripples whisper my presence.

My stiff limbs begin to tread water, and the silent river laps at my side, lazily reflecting the stars.

Rebecca Steele

'5

Lauren with Heather byAJexFreemaR

16

Perihelion I hate Isaac Newton for not warning me. He got hit on the head by an apple and discovered gravity, that mysteriously obvious force that keeps things in order. He should have predicted that Leelah and I would have a second

go around;don't comets always come back?

I'm in fourth grade and norma!. I meet Leelah on the bus to the Academic Resource Center one week-something about how we both go to the gifted school and we both don't believe in God makes us perfect best friends. She has a Nickelodeon magazine and wire-frame glasses; I have blond hairandread every page. We're partners for everything; in our computerclass we sit together working on our best attempt at an X-rated comic strip in rri-color bitmap. The main charactersare Frogman (green with aJamaican accent and beanie) and his girlfriend Francesca (green with big lips and short skirt) and they kiss a lot.

Back at the regular school we start the Clue Club. It's just me and her. We have secret agent numbers (53 and 182) and notebooks filled with our codes-it looks like gibberish to everyoneelse, but we know how to turn it into the names of the boys we like and stories about our fat teacher's boyfriend, and then of Course some of it really is just gibberish, just to

17

throw the spies off We make a voodoo doll out of sticks and some things we find on the playground, which we use against people who deserve it, and then we end up feeling guiltyand bury it ten steps from the oak tree along a fence by the road.

We hate these other girls, the Bead Club, because all they do at recess is make ugly necklaces and bracelets and stuff for themselves and their dumb friends and our teacher. So sometimes we crawl underneath the wooden stairs where they

sit and we reach up between the steps when they're not looking and snatch handfuls of beads and then stuff them in our desks back in the classroom. When I clean out my desk I throw them out and laugh with Leelah.

I sleep over at her house a lot. It's way more fun than having her over at mine, because over there we can play in the

creek and get muddy and soaked and not get yelled at, and we can watch cable because she has it, and we can pick the roses

her mom grows and pull off their petals one at a time, and we can push each other down the stairs in her sleeping bag. I come home with bruises and my mom asks what they're from but of course "I don't know;"

This one day at my house my mom tells my whole Girl Scout ttOOPthat they can have Rice Krispy treats that are supposed to be just for me. I say there aren't any left, and of course they find out I lied and Leelah rolls her eyes and tells me to grow up.

It's the spring of my sophomore effort in college. I love to sit in the shade and watch gravity at work. Pecans fall downward without fail. There are cold ashes on the floor of my bedroom.

On this particular day in Savannah the cucumber-salt breeze has me by the throat; the sun beats me till a wet line runs down my back. I'm at the river walk trying to be bohemian, whatever that is, by reading facing the water.

Seventeen blocks away, my computer is basking in the humble glow of the flames that have spread from my roommate's

halogen to his tapestry to the ceding and are slithering and darting like salamanders across my walls and sheets.

r8

Later, between breakdowns, I will laugh, "My bed isn't used to that kind of heat."

I'm in sixth grade and awkward. We're in middle school now, changing classes, changing friends weekly. But Leelah and I are here to stay. We've learned the word "atheist" so we no longer go around telling everyone

we're "heathens."

We stop going to the gifted school because it's not cool anymore.

My hair is still frizzy and blond; hers is brown and getting smoother. She shaves her legs; my shorts are too long.

In September we tell each other we will never carry a minihackpack purse like all those girls (that we're not cool enough to hang out with). In October I get one for my birthday from a girl I don't really like, and Leelah squeezes my leg since of course she's sitting next to me at my party. In November

she's

got nne herself, and the short little dress, and shoes, and she's got those girls as friends, too.

I've got friends though-one girl who used to be in the Bead Club but reformed, some others who are in my classes,a girl in my neighborhood. We have big sleepovers, and Leelah always comes because she's my best friend, and she curses and brings the best CDs. Sleepovers at her house are alwayson Friday nights because Saturday is her mom and Eddie's sex night. We watch R-rated movies and make concoctions of ice cream and Tabasco

and spit, and we make

each other call boys we like (which we all do, since the consequence of refusing is having your head shoved in a flUshing toilet), and one time when it's just me and her, we put Wud Turkey whiskey in Our Sprite and dance around her room to the goat song from The Sound of Music forever.

I' With a fire goes everything. By the time the boys who rvenext door smell the char-grilled polyester fumes of carpet and mattress and acrylic paints on canvas, there

is nothing

to

19

the apartment save the key to the front door that is scratching at my leg through my jeans at the waterfront.

I look along the low wall where I'm perched, kneesat my chest, leaning hard against my hand that's propped behind me with brick grinding at my palm; a man and two little girls with ruffly socks aren't watching me. The man isn't watching anything, really, he's just trying to stay out of the sun and pretend the kids either aren't with him or aren't doing anything wrong. He's got doughy eyes, so he's got the look of mydog when he's trying to be discreet about shitting on the back porch. And he's got the most hideous brown paisley and diamonds shirt I've ever seen, and a pink and green fannypack.

Gravity works on him too--his hair looks young, but belowhis eyes, his face is stretched downward. I turn away; I'd like to paint him and then splatter black paint on the canvas like Jackson Pollock, but ugliness like that just kills the art major in me.

I stop at a library on campus to print out slides for a test on early Netherlandish Renaissance art-s-Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, Bruegel's Landscape with the Fa//of Icarus, Christus's Death of the Virgin, and on and on. There is an email from Leelah: "Hey; Abbe)'," it begins. Then, "I've been making music," and, "was bummed about losing touch with you, didn't really give a shit about the rest of them" and "where are you?"

She signs it, "Lee." No one but me used' to cair her that. I read

through three times to make sure I've got it, and then I head home to my smoldering mess.

.

I'm in eighth grade and tired. We're starting school :gam and Leelah makes me Swear not to tell a single person Disr she Jacked some guy off this summer when she went to rsney World WIth his family. She says that she puked in the hotel bathroom afterward . I'm thmk.ing hi" that ' . ow coo It IS ~he s telling me this, and also I'm thinking that I had better at least hold hands with a boy or something, hurryupI ,and tough ve got sam' " e rtrne since she's a few months older and sh e got h er period aI b most a year efore me. Two weeks later

20

everyone at school knows, and she knows I didn't tell. He wasn't even her boyfriend.

We go swimming at my friend Kelly's house and I notice how big Leelah's boobs are, even though she is just a little chubby, like me. We talk about this girl we know who smoked cigarettes in a church (Leelah and I laugh at the church part, Kelly is shocked). Leelah says she would probably do it too. She must notice that I don't agree, because she starts flirting with Kelly's little brother. That night we play truth or dare in the front yard and she gets caught in headlights as she crosses the road topless.

At her house one night, she is suddenly interested in this guy I've liked since fifth grade. All it takes is a phone call, and they'regoing out. I Liethat it doesn't matter to me, but the next day I crash rollerblading down this hill and scrape my knee up really bad, and honestly, I'm a bit glad to go home early. When I arrive at school with a limp the next day, she kicks me in the leg and calls me a puss. I can't say "fuck you" to mybest friend because I remember one time I watched her cry because she thought I was mad at her.

In May there's the eighth grade dance, and Leelah has this cool leopard print dress and heels and declares that she doesn'treallywant to go, and tries to get me to go with her boyfriend (the second one she's had named Michael) instead.

Then she gets her boyfriend's friends to ask me-I won't go with anyone who asks me just because Leelah flashed them or whatever. No one really understands what's going on, but finallyshe backs down and says she'll go since everyone is begging her to. I go stag; we don't really talk at the dance. A few days later her boyfriend calls me and asks if I know if anything happened between her and another guy named Michael on the end of rhe year chorus trip. I lie for her, like any loyal friend would.

Ifind that my key to the apartment isn't necessary when I arrive home dusry and tired to l"gh I ts and a gaping hole where " the door had been A firefighter holds me back by a shoulder as I try

even find flashing when I left. to step closer

21

to the rising steam, shattered glass, charred floorboards. Water drips from broken windows-a dirty drizzle of smoke and ash.

I start a talIy of what must be lost and wonder at how the place can smell so disgustingly burnt when there was plenty of incense and sweet scented candles and marijuana that must have gone up in flames, not to mention all the food, slowcooked in its boxes and cans. I would love to think that the kitchen has produced a fantastic casserole out of the remnants of my snacks.

"It's not safe to go in yet. Voices form a collage.

My art is toast. My laptop will be fried. My photographs cauterized.

My life is a crematorium.

"Oh, Abbey, I'm so sorry" A crash from inside reminds me that gravity is still at work. People are milling around the parking lot like cows-all these fucking art students taking pictures and leaning up on their toes and saying all these things that are just so needless and non-aesthetic that I want them thrown out of school.

"Oh my God that sucks so bad."

A homeless woman is lingering in the crowd. Her cardboard sign is folded neatly in her left hand; her right is pushed deep into the pocket of her loose jeans. I hate her for everything that's in that pocket that's not in mine.

A policeman jots down my name and my roommate's.

Proper procedure is for him to fill out a report after the fire department is finished. It seems to have been caused by a halogen bulb corning in centacr with a flammable material. Is there anyone I'd like to call' No. "You're okay, you're okay."

I ask if! can leave, and head back to the library ro read up on inventive ways to kill my roommate.

J)

I'm a senior in high school and relieved. I expect to feel a kind of liberation at graduation, not for someone to pop my balloon of tension, but rather to just open me up and release me to the wind like a widows ashes. My art is hanging up in a gallery at the mall; I'll be able to take it down and stash It away, no longer obliged to allow my art teacher to show me

22

off with the rest of the fold. And my favorite word is perihelion.

School starts again in two months-rwo months and a five-hourdrive is far too far away. Reds will be redder, when I'm there, surrounded by artists. 1 know this from the hrochuresfor Savannah College of Art and Design, just like 1 know from my yearbook

that there's no reason to hesitate

in

leaving.Little notes in colored pens are just another way for peopleto write you off and not feel guilty. But there is the exboyfriend,who is so fucking sorry that 1 can't stand him, and so not sorry about anything at all. We fight, and then snuggle together to get over it, and are back again by the time I'm crawlingout of his bed. I'd love to not miss him.

There're a few others I'll wave to on the way out-a guywhohelped me steal pin flags from every golf course in town not because we like golf but because we hate the people who playit, and the teacher who spoke candidly about the ClRs mind control experiments and the Mafia's role in US attitude towards Cuba. I'll have good intentions of keeping in touch.

It's only when 1 have a chance to sit down and cry that I realizethere's no way 1 can finish the semester. Too much has been lost; design work on the computer was backed up on a CD-now a slightly interesting coaster, at best. Every hrushstroke is now laced with fire, every portrait a hellish dIStOrtionof the face it once was. I can see each undeveloped toll of film being cracked open by heat, untwirled, writhing Withflamesearing its edges, the acetate bubbling and melting down into nothing, or so little I can never claim it was art.

It is now that 1 know 1 have to leave. 1 have a car and an addressfor an old friend whose voice 1 haven't heard in years, a credit card with my parents name on it, and no reason

to stay. I leave Savannah in the middle of the night; 1 haven't been sleepinganyway. South on 1-95 to ]acksonvill~ as the Starsfade~Weston I-tO as the sun creeps up, blinding-orange in myrear-VIew1 stop twice for gas, buy tea with the hope that the steamwill clear my head, splash water on dust -dry eyes.

This does little but remind me that steam is just glorified water; dust plus water is no more refreshing than mud.

I roll into Tallahassee midmorning on this spring Sunday and turn south instead of the north that would take me to my parents' house. In front of the First Assembly of God on Thomasville Road, a sheriff's car with Lghts flashing blocks traffic to let the stream of decent churchgoers filter out in the most orderly of manners. SunLght floods the dashboard of my car and my cheeks ache from squinting; I lean my head against the window and try to ignore the vibration while makeup-ed old white women in Cadillacs file past me like a great kitschy Easter parade.

Leelah is not up at ten in the morning, but the door is open like she said it would be. It's on her tan corduroy couch that I finally rest.

Weed is free because she sells it. Her business is blossoming, in fact, so much that when she gets a call while she's in class, she sends it back to me and lets me handle the deal.

My cell phone rings almost daily with my parents' number on the caller ID and I never pick it up. One day I drive up to my house when I'm sure they're at work. Irs a humid cement-colored day, and my first breath of their AC is like sucking down a cloud. Leelah just has fans. My room is the same as always-high school art that I hate, bedspread that my mom picked out, volumes of sketches stacked in a trunk. I take a bottle of Jim Bean with me when I leave.

Leelah and I go to vintage stores and buy all the clothes I might have gotten if I'd never cared about money. I pick up electronic music on vinyl that I pretend to like, and foot the bill for records she Wants to tryout on her new turntables. On the way home I see this guy on the side of the road. He's old-ish, Vietnam vet age, and he doesn't have any arms. He's cutting the grass in front of the public library, pushing the mower with only his hips, and tugging it back ard to:v him With a rope tied around his waist when it gets gOing too fast On the slight hill. He looks like a clown because he's a Lttle fat and a lot sweary and I think, "work it b~b)l I Want to see you work those hips, n before the light changes and

I driveaway. That night we pump the bass while we bump oxycodonesin oppressive candlelit heat.

Art has left me. I don't allow myself to think that Leelah'smusic sucks and that the incense she burns isn't really from India. I forget that her friends are all bums and that her sexlifeplacesher somewhere between slut and whore in my book. When we smoke, the joint is passed in a circle that alwayscomesback to her. I wonder why the stars don't fall towardher when she smiles.

Autumn takes me to a lake in town where I used to walkwithmy friends when I was in high school. I laugh becausethey seem so immature compared to my new friends here, Leelah'sfriends. My ex won't even sleep with me anymore,so fuck him. This evening in Ocrober I watch a duck try Overand over to get a fast enough take-off from the lake to makeit up to a high branch to spend the night; he faIls down into the dark water every time. It's his ugliness that makes me feelsorryfor him-black and white mottled feathers, cherryred eyes. I am completely relaxed on this bench, just enjoying the struggle;his splashing and anxious quacks are the perfect soundtrackto my night.

It is a stunning realization when I see that I am the reasonforall of his troubles. He's arcing around me, muttering,torn between being deterred by my very presence, and hisducky-need for a safe place to spend the night. I'm Sittingtoo close for his comfon, and my resting spot is his pnme take-offlocation. I smile at the thought that I can fix this;I standand give him some space-he is tentative, shufflingthrough the dried leaves I've stirred on the ground.

Andthen,success. He wiggles his taillike a puppy, thrilled at hisperch,no longer seeming so repulsive.

I return home, my new home, and Leelah, sitting on herknees,asks me if I Want to try SOmesmack. "That's herOin" h lik fi ' s e says,u e a lve-year-old who can read. h Mybag slips from my hand and falls with a clunk to t e flooras she pushes and leans back back back down to the rug~llin路路 " . .ra g In love with everything behind her closed eyes. I ~magmethe orgasm she must be having-so good that she's ,orgottenrhe eo-, . d e synnge and It hangs out of her vein like a angerouslyuselessappendage. In my eyes the candle burning

on the table seems for a moment to be surrounded by flames and I wonder if that's how my apartment looked in the moment before the orange wax melted down all over my dresser and carpet. I have never seen her look so hideous, and I wish I had my camera to show her to the world. I want to warn them.

I leave the records scattered across the floor next to her when I grab my stuff and get gone.

The drive horne has never seemed so short. My birthday is coming soon and I know my parents will get me new canvases if I ask, though not before I tell them where I've been for six months. They'll pet my head and let me sleep. I won't use wax when I sculpt new wings.

Erika Kranz

26

Fly Down Maasai

As we stepped off the bus, the Maasai met us Withyellow stares and sun-strained smiles, robust In looming stone-still stances like columns Of an obsidian Pantheon. With solemn Bobs like bows, we tiptoed around dung piles And gnomon children pissing sundials In the sand. Exquisite beaded rainbows arced Each lanky ankle, wrist, and neck; they sparked Besotted gawks at ache red warriors' legs, Sagging breasts, heads shaved smooth as ostrich eggs And midnight skin that gleamed much brighter than Their crimson togas. All the Maasai clans Depend on cattle, which bring food and blood They sip like nectar, and auspicious floods Of flies that cover babies thickly enough To carry them away. Babies don't bluff, And though dense-swarmed, these do not cry, so I Let a God land on my eyelash as a fly.

Lauren Moseley

'Do you mind if I take my top off?'

We shrug to say we don't, the three of us, stretched out on the sand,

bikinied between her and the sailboats down the beach, children wading and splashing, squealing at the goo of the lake bottom between their toes, like sea monster slime, not yet noticing her

pink nipples peaking up at the SUfi, or me straining up on my elbows to see, over my shoulder, the women-mothers glaring at OUf bodies and her bare breasts,

their husband-fathers smiling.

Turning from them to the thread grains of my towel, I don't want her

to think I want to look at the soft spread of hers, wider, more relaxed than mine,

blended shades of pink, peach, brown over the white of her skin,

like sloppy Iipsticked kiss prints on baby cheeks, marking her and each of us women, one distinct from the other.

Men walk along the line of us basking and the lake's lapping waves, and we three, covered, giggle like we're fourteen, but she, eyes closed under over-sized tortoise shell sunglasses, doesn't notice or mind, baring her chest between, only, her and the sun.

gretchen kronell 28

Running at Night

It wasn't the cool air on my just-shaved legs, or the way the blue, quickly-fading light hid the pavement from my feet so I could run more freely, barely seeing my hips move clumsily out of sync with the rhythm of my shoulders, as if only the daytime kept them, a pair, together.

It wasn't how, in the dark, kitchen and living room windows became blocked-off scenes for my entertainment) how the old man washing dishes looked just like my roommate's girlfriend's father, Big Ed, or how, when I ran by a house tucked back in the woods, I heard a voice, I thought, twigs snapping, that quickened my invisible stride, turning around

towardhome much earlier than usual; but, the feel of running into a cool pocket of air space, like swimming alone through a cold patch in warm ocean water, knowing without seeing that some other thing, alive and unwanted, is there.

gretchen kroncke

Central Avenue by Liz Winter

30

Indian Bones Standingat the lip of the shallow pit that had just beena mnund,Billy Pickett could not believe bones could be whiteafterso many centuries-the ossified strata set off from the redclaylike the fat in a raw slab of marble-cut beef The teeth nf the backhoe's bucket left the back wall of the pit corrugated,and bones and fragments ripped free lay at the bonom. The dirt piles beside the pit sparkled with bone.

Beyondthe dug earth lay another fifty yards of brush and thistleandthen miles more of pine forest, a swath of which wouldhaveto be cleared, too, for the runway extension.

Though he had handled them in classes, Billy had neverseenbones in situ. Human bones belonged to anthropology,not archaeology. But for Billy, all that had attractedhim to commercial archaeology was encapsulated in the clayin front of him: while his former classmates dusted splintersof petrified wood month after month at a dig they Wouldbe forcedto abandon to the anthropologists if it r~vealedhumanremains, Billy would be moving at a rate of a dIgaweek,working almost exclusively with Native American Sitesandgetting to handle anything from hand-tools to human bones. And,yeah, we'll be working with the appropriate tribe at eachdig,SamDavie of Davie Archaeologists had said. We m~ Sureour Workis done under their auspices. We're gettingpaidto preserve cultural heritage.

Billy looked at Sam Davie, his crew leader and boss of two days. Mustachioed, balding beneath a Braves hat, vaguely walrus-like-Sam spat and stared at the bones while too-eager Major Bowery kept squeaking on with the questions.

'1\re we sure this is human? Could be arumals? What are we dealing with here?"

Sam looked at Bowery, then back at the bones.

"Definitely human."

"Indian?"

"Definitely Indian."

"Shee-ir." Bowery kicked a rock into the pit, and walked off.

"Tuscarora. From the looks of it."

Billy knew that already. Anything buried more than two hundred years ago around here tended to be Tuscarora.

The bones started two feet below the surface of what had been a small mound at the end of the runway. They were visible to the bottom of the pit, and probably went further down than that. There was enough clay packed among the bones to suggest perhaps a half-millennium spent at the mercy of tectonics, but bones abounded such that Sam and his entire crew-Kyle and Vernon the Fat Mexican and even the novitiate Billy Pickett, two weeks removed from his college graduation-knew this was a burial mound, and that the remains probably went another ten feet down and ten yards out in alI directions.

Who knows how many already paved beneath the decrepit asphalt. When Fort Holcomb was built fifty years ago, artifacts wound up on officers' desks or in shadow boxes mounted behind them. and bones were considered bovine and reburied. Growing up around the base, Billy had many friends whose military fathers brought them arrowheads as presents, so he knew this well. Those arrowheads were the start of a childhood love affair with Indians that later became with ~ultural awareness and the understatement of maturity, an Interest in Native American archaeology. all h But the Army changed with the times, and yesterday hearth-moVIng work had lurched to a halt per protocol W en t e Civilian backh " oe operator digging at the end of the 32

airstrip noticed the chalky white he was tearing from the back wall of the incipient hole. Major Bowery, the supervisor of the project,was called. He insisted the bones were animal, and demanded that the operator, one Bryce Barth, keep going.

Bryce Barth said no sir, I'll lose my license and it already took me two years' work to get this license, sir, an amount of time I am not presently having in order to get another one. Those bones are probably Indian, sir, pretty much any bones we dig up around here are, and I will lose my license if! touch them any further. Sir. Bowery knew Barth was right, and he called the Colonel, who cursed. ASSESS, EXCAVATE, BLESS, COMMEMORATE, you know the drill, Major. Call the archaeologists, and let's be quick about this. Two weeks till the first shipments.

Bowery saw the hundred yards of grass and trees ahead-yet to be cleared, graded, paved-and he saw the silent machines, against which leaned their operators diffidently smoking, and knew that time was marching along with or without him. He knew "Davie Archaeology" was the only listing under "Archaeologists" in the Yellow Pages, right between "Appraisers" and "Architects."

Bowery returned with some papers in hand. ASSESS, EXCAVATE, BLESS, COMMEMORATE constituted the Army's official Policy on Previously Unknown Native Heritage Sites on Government Land. He checked off the first subsection; Mr. Davie had just ASSESSED the site and it was "definitely Indian." Bowery was not new at this.

Nor was Sam. He turned to Kyle and Vernon the Fat Mexican. "We can get started with spades and brushes.

They've done most of the work for us. pickett, you just follow them."

Kyle and Vernon and Billy walked back to the truck to start unloading. Billy heard Bowery say they need~d thing~t done in forty-eight hours. Sam stopped and said t ey rrug r B fid eted with his ear. need to renegotiate the ree. owery 1 g That could be arranged. d "And while you EXCAVATE, I'm going to ne",e to id .

BLESS this.

OU Sal notify the tribe and get them In here t~ we're dealing with the Tuscarora here.

33

"Tuscarora, yeah."

"Shee-it." Bowery sucked sweat from his lip. A crow alighted on one of the piles. It shone in the sun. "I had ~o~et the Tuscarora in here for some pottery we found out behin the hospital last spring back. Took two weeks to get them out here."

Sam smoothed his mustache. "They're not the best for blessing, no. Tribe's kind of scattered." Billy was puzzled~ The headquarters for the Tuscarora Nation were in Livingsto , twenty minutes away.

"I've got to have all this graded by this weekend, . paved by next, with round-the-clock cargo flights commg III by the end of the month. Can't be waiting around."

Vernon the Fat Mexican and Kyle returned from the truck with a toolbox and some spades; Billy followed. Vernon threw a rock at the crow and missed. The crow flew off Sam looked at Bowery carefully. "Thing is, I may be able to help you. I got a friend who's like half Tuscarora, and he's somewhat of a shaman. He could be here tomorrow morning."

Bowery took off his sunglasses. '~shaman?

So he could do the BLESSING, officially>" Bowery was squinting hard at Sam. NOdding, "He could do it and notify the tribe officials after. I've worked with him before. He's good. Very spiritual." ''This is good this is good. And you could be done by tomorrow morning before the shaman comes?"

"For five hundred dollars on top of our standard fee, sure. We finish by ten, he blesses and takes some bones for the tribe, then we re-inter the rest off to the side. You're back to work by noon tomorrow."

"This is good this is good."

"We gor twenty-four "Put the brushes away. II

hours" Sam iruformed the crew. '

They stepped down into the pit. Kyle got on his knees and hacked at the clay between the bones with a spade. Billy did the same. Vernon the Fat Mexican hewed through the dirt :ith a shovel from atop the back wall of the pit, peeling off the op two feet to get down to the bones at the crest of the mound.

34

Vernon the Fat Mexican was fat but was neither Mexican nor an archaeologist. Sam Davie was an archaeologist, or at least had a degree in archaeology, and Vernon had come to work with him fifteen years before because he could dig drunk-s-commercial archaeology is ninety-percent shovel work. He picked up more delicate brush techniques as years passed. and learned about strata and substrata and the finer points of excavation generally. But he left grid work and things involving paper and diagrams to Sam. Everyone called him the Fat Mexican because he'd been called that since he was ten, when there were no Mexicans in North Carolina. Now that there were, no one thought he actually looked Mexican, but names stick.

Kyle was Sam's twenty year-old nephew. At a rate of six credits per year, he was at the community college working towards a transfer to State, where he would study archaeology, he promised. Sam had his doubts. Kyle wanted to go straight back into business with Sam once he got a BS. No graduate school, no year-long fellowships on exotic cligs, none of the bullshit glory and low pay of academic archaeology. Davie Archaeological Associates, they'd be. Kyle would bring it up, sometimes, and Sam would shalee his head and suck from his beer, looking away from Kyle inscrutably until he could think of some way to change the subject.

Growing up around Sam, Kyle knew that the archaeology of UNESCO and the Smithsonian and underfunded university departments was for pencil-necked, pussyassed motherfuckers who took so many years on an excavatIOn because they couldn't dig for shit. What Kyle knew from Sam, and what Sam would tell to anyone who would listen, was that PhD archaeologists were culture snobs, who thought the only things worth digging up were things worth pubhshing glossy pictures of. For them it was all about holding fragments of late Minoan steatite vase above one's head and saying, "Once I have epoxy-resined these back together, and fabricated pieces to fill in the gaps I'm missing, this will sit in a museum and validate my existence!"

For Sam, digging was about Hnding. It was about seeing what had been hidden, and about malcing concrete an . h d h b finding somewhere me, oate vision of the past, an t en a out

35

But there wasn't much preservation and restoration to be done, since most people were looking to get the things he dug up out of their way.

"Shovels into the office," Sam said, and Kyleand Billy carried them towards the taupe cinder-block building. Vernon put miscellaneous tools in the toolbox and locked it.

"We only got one ritual with this job," Sarn told Billy, with a clumsy pat to the back, after Billy had placed the shovels inside the door and Kyle had locked it. "Every day when we get back from a dig, we have a drink at Pete's."

Pete's was on a corner on Eagle, up the street from the office. That morning, passing it before pulling into the office parking lot, he had seen it and remembered a story his father told him as a boy. His father and mother, in younger days, went with another couple to a bar in a part of town they shouldn't have been in, and upon leaving, three men in the bar followed them out, one still holding darts from their garne, and said give us what's in your wallets and we'll leave you be, with, looks suggesting that something would happen to their wives If they didn't, presumably while the husbands watched. That's why it's asking for trouble to put yourself in situations you shouldn't be in, Billy.

The bar was empty, and Vernon played a country song, nameless but distantly familiar to Billy, on the jukebox. The walls were draped with feathers and dreamcatchers and beads and gaudy electric-colored paintings of weeping Indians or proud Indians or half-wolf/half-Indian Indians. There were quotes from Black Elk and Sitting Bull, and a bumper sticker on the molding of the batluoom doorframe that said Reintroduce the Buffalo. A black-haired man in a threadbare t-shirt towered behind the bar with his bulbous hands, all knuckles, splayed across it. Everyone except Billy greeted him; he nodded back. The four men sat down and ordered: Bud for Kyle, whiskey for Vernon, Bud Light for Sam. And a Bud for Billy. Vernon hooted and told Billy he was buying, but Billy only had a credit card.

Sam put a ten on the bar. "Pickert you need to meet ShamanPt 11Th路 ' . e e. e grant man extended his hand toward Billy. y ::pBi11Pickett," he said, grasping his hand. ere."

38

"ShamanPete does work for us when we need him.

He'sgoingto he out at the base tomorrow to bless that dig.

That skeletonI put together is for him."

"Sowhat are we looking at then, tomorrow?" Pete askedSam. "Tuscaroraburial mound. Fifteenth to sixteenth century.Army'sdoing a big expansion of their main landing strip andthey dug it up yesterday."

"What you got for me?"

"Standard two-fifty and some bones."

"So you're a Tuscarora?" asked Billy.

Pete opened Billy's beer and set it on a napkin in front of him. "I like to think we're all a little bit Indian, deep down."

Billywaited for Pete to finish his answer, but Pete said nothing more.

"Sowhat do you do with the skeleton after the

blessing?" .

Still Pete said nothing, sucking his teeth while he wipedthe bar. Sam had moved to a corner of the room, and wastalkingon his cell phone. Kyle and Vernon shot pool.

Billyturned to watch: they were very good. His beer was halfdone, and he decided to make his move to leave when it was gone.

After several minutes, Pete leaned across and whisperedto Billy. I'll show you. Follow me. Billy followed hun through a doorway to the side of the bar covered by a thin satin sheet, a bald eagle with a beaded headband and ferocious talons swooping across its front.

A pile of bones lay atop a table in the center of the smallroom, and there was a desk lamp and a chair and tools at the end of the table. The bones were clean. The rest of the room was cluttered with empty beer kegs and liquor package boxes,with some of the same Indian kitsch from the main bar up on the walls. The light was fluorescent and clinical. .

"My studio," Pete said, sitting down at the table. ~e picked up a small knife and shook it slowly in his hand. Billy remainedby the doorway while Pete continued. "1 see my ar,~ as a spiritual pursuit. A melding of the past and the prese:.

He handed a femur to Billy. A ravenous eagle, be agapelike its kin in the doorway, was soaring from its nest

39

located in the mountains at the hip joint towards a lake carved near the knee. On the other side of the bone, he had signedit.

Shaman Pete, 2002.

Pete beckoned Billy to the table. "I spent months on this one." He held up a pelvis. Female, Billy noted. A battle scene unfolded across the full curvature of the bone, a story told in scrimshaw. Tiny figures on horses, with spears etched by a single stroke of the blade, rode across a river and over plains toward a hill. The next scene was a cloud of truculent scratches; charging men and rearing horses, in a steel wool ball of warfare. And finally, a close-up of a dying uniformed man with several spears in his chest. This time, it was titled on the back. Battle of Little Big Horn. Shaman Pete, 200r.

Because he could think of nothing else to say,Billy mumbled, "Didn't the Sioux have rifles at Little Big Horn?"

Pete nodded in assent. "I decided spears would be more dramatic. 1 was trying to capture the suffering of Custer, even the recognition of his mistake. Only spears could do it."

The pelvis was slick in Billy's damp palms. He set it back on the table. Pete was running through the catalog of etchings in front of him. Most were femurs or scapulae.

Eagles, horses, wolves, and Indians, of course, predominated.

He saw no other battle scenes. He heard Pete say that pelvises were the best, but that there were few of them because they didn't hold up well over time. Pete got up, went over to a chest, and returned to the table, unwrapping something.

He held up a skull. Billy stepped back. Pete handed it to him, and he nearly dropped it in surprise at its lightness. He had never held a skull before. Archaeology programs at small state schools relied on plastic.

"This is a rare find. Got this one before 1 started working with Sam. Some lady in Benton was adding on to her living room and they dug this up. I read about it in the paper, and I got over there Soon as I could and cIid the blessing.

Don't usually find whole skulls."

The entire cranium was etched in an elaborate montage surrounding a stoic Indian at the crown of the skull.

A mountain scene was set behind his left ear above his head was a ~leeful woman with a baby in a papoose. Another eagle, SWOOPlOg as before but without the gnashing talons, had been

40

etchedat his foot, and buffalo completed the scene, roaming a vastcranialprairie from one temple around the skull to the other.

"I call this one 'Paradise.' It's my most hopeful piece."

Billyhanded it back. His breathing echoed in his own skullandhe felt submerged. "What do you do with the bones you don't. .. n he searched: "carve on?"

"I give them a proper burial, out back. My blessings are very authentic, you'll see tomorrow."

"Right."

"1do it the right way. If these bones are going to be disturbedfrom their proper resting place, they deserve to be in the handsof someone knowledgeable. And spiritual."

"Soyou don't sell these." Billy wanted to leave, but had to ask it.

"No,never, no. That would be an abomination. outright abomination,"

An

When Billy left, he gave a meek smile to Pete-thanks so much, this was really interesting, I'll see you tomorrowand patted Kyle and Vernon on the back on his way out the door. Seeyou in the morning. Sam waved, still talking in the corner, as Billy shot out the front door and ran down the street to his car,in the office parking lot.

Back at his apartment, it took two hours lying on his bed in the dark, fully clothed, before Billy decided to make Somephone calls. He found the offices for the Tuscarora Nation listed in the phone book. But it was almost nine o'clock, and no one answered. According to the answering machine,the youth dance group took first place at the recent Southeast Region Powwow in South Carolina.

At the Holcomb main gate thirty minutes later, they let Billypass right through once he told the MP's he was with the archaeology team. He didn't even need the poorly assembled lie he had thought up to get back in without a pass-ebelieve we left some important tools out at the dig, Captain-because. oh right, some of the other guys just came through a couple of minutes ago. Go right ahead.

He parked the car on the other side of the airtraffic control tower and walked toward the darting flashlightbeams at the end of the runway as if his shoes had downsoles. His head felt submerged again, and there was a ballin histhroat that rose and fell, like mercury in a thermometer,

with every

breath. Why am I doing this.

No one was supposed to be there. He had figuredit out on the drive over; just wrap up the bones from the skeleton in the canvas that covered them and get out. There wasno

way to get all the bones. They would get buried back,andwith a plaque over them, and that would be fine. No needto get anyone in trouble. I'm not coming back for work tomorrow,

and they'll just wonder where the skeleton went and then figure it was me and then they'Uleave it at that and makeupa lie for the Army at the Shaman Pete buUshit tomorrowforwhy there's no remains to hand over symbolically to the Tuscarora.

Take the bones to the Tuscarora, and don't teU them where they came from, or fuck it just leave them on their doorstep.

That's right. But no Shaman Pete. He closed his eyesand could feel little cowboys and Indians being carved into his skull.

But now there were people in the pit and he was walking towards them. Vernon the Fat Mexican's Chevypickup was parked at the very end of the runway, and Billy crouched behind it. Kyle and Vernon were in the hole. They were murmuring to themselves, and putting things into bags.

He knew it was the stuff Vernon had wanted earlier-the beads and arrowheads. We ought to keep digging, he heard Kylesay, They always put the artifacts at the bottom, before they put the bodies on top.

No, said Vernon. Probably another five feet to the bottom of this thing. We wouldn't finish until dawn. They continued picking around at the bottom of the pit amoog the bones, crouched, only their heads visible. We'll go for another hour then, said Vernon. The bones Billy had come for lay covered, between the truck and the hole. So close.

He got on his stomach and crawled beneath the truck towards the canvas. 'WIth his legs still under the truck, he reached under the carp and began pulling OUt bones one by one. being careful not to let them drag on the pavement. He

42

madesurehisshirt was well tucked and began to stuff

vertebrae down the neck of

it,

then ribs. Of arms, there was

onlythe radiusfrom one and the ulna from the other. Thank Godno scapula. There was only a third of the pelvis; he would carrythat.He set it to the side.

Billyhad a femur in one hand when Kyle and Vernon steppedup out of the pit. He scrambled back beneath the truckandlayface-down clutching it like a club, the bones in hisshitt almostpuncturing his chest and stomach, as they climbedinto the truck. Should I get up and run when they backaway,at should I stay still. Stay still stay still. The Cat startedandBillysaw the headlights turn on. The headlights, fuck. He closed his eyes and felt the sky open up above him as the truck backed up, and felt the heat of the lights on his back.

The truck stopped. Get up and run.

A car door opening. Hey. Who the fuek ate you.

What'reyou doing.

Billyjumped down into the pit and waited to face his attackers,gripping the femur. What am I doing. Think up a lie. He wasblinded by the flashlights in his face.

"Pickett? What the fuck are you doing, man?" It was KyleOnthe right. "What the hell is going on?"

He couldn't find a lie. Billy reached into his shirt and pulledout the first thing he felt, the radius. He flung it in the directionof the flashlights. What the fuck, man. He pulled out his shirt and all the bones inside fell to the ground. He pickedthem up one by one, frantic, and threw them. Vertebra, vertebra.Rib, rib, ulna, rib. Vertebra. Later, he would remember only the beam of the flashlight and the stench of whiskeyin the hole and how perfect the vertebrae fit mto his hand.

Kyle was cackling from atop the pit, dodging Billfs throws. Pickett is wigging the fuck out man. Vernon, be s wigging out.

A rib hit Kyle in the neck. Pickett man that hurts.

Vernon came back from the truck with a sbocgun. He pointed it at Billy, who stopped throwing and stood, gaspmg.

The ball in his throat was now in his mouth, and he looked at Vernon'sfeet because he could not look at the gun. He . dropped his last. bone, t.he femur, and it hit the ground WItha thud.

"I don't know what shit you're on or what you're doing in that hole with them motherfucking bones, but if youdon't pick all of them up and put them back under that tarp, I'm going to blow your head ofÂŁ" Kyle was on his knees in laughter.

Billy breathed but could say nothing. He felt his feet sinking in the soft dirt at the floor of the pit.

Vernon lowered the gun. "If you ever want to come down here with us after work, all you have to do is say something.

But if you're going to come here on your own, don't ever fuck with the bones, man. Don't ever fuck with the bones."

Kyle and Vernon the Fat Mexican stood smoking against the truck while Billy searched around the pit for the bones in the illumination of the headlights. He had ceased several minutes before to know who he was or what it washe had done, or what he would be doing tomorrow morning. But he knew where bones went in a skeleton, and when he had found them all and finally put them in their proper places, he threw the canvas back over top and promised himself never to care about anything again.

Christopher Lamo

Whitewashing for a Tarot Reader

in Spain

Powderandwater, like skim-milk, like painting withnothing,dries a brilliant dusty renewal.

Brushessplashanother year on five hundred layers.

Every year a new coat, application a ritual, not replacement,walls grown rigid as cards aligned Ona table,exoskeleton for ancient wood.

Andthen how my modern hands only knew the roughhabits of scraping and peeling, and couldn'tknow the years that held the walls up.

SatisfiedI pulled away five hundred years of whitewash, pried loose sheets as thick

as mypalm, falling to dust on the flagstones.

Left were the flaking beams, raised by the Moors,bare now, beams I could put mythumb through with a touch.

Erin Fornoff

45

Talkin' Perpendicular

Gothic Blues

The tug and draw,the creak of heavyoak, and the gasped hush flowing out like twelfth-century air. The slowstepping shuffle into monumental space.

The skeletal fingers of ribbed vaulting that stretch from floor to unfathomable apex.

Here is the church, here is the steeple,

Open it up and seeall the people.

The insignificance.

The echo of sacraments, vows, dirges, Benedictus qui venit in Nomine Domini.

The body and blood, given for you.

The lily-wlUte marble sarcophagi of stone-faced kings. The history the weight of nine hundred years that arches my back like a buttress.

The breathless exodus from a world that flares in my mind, describing blue like a stained-glass window alive with the setting sun, destined to dim.

Glenn Hollar

'Born in the backcountry, burdened'

Born in the backcountry, burdened with a namelike Lionel Wmchester, it's no wonder he took to books, weaving the silken words into a cocoon.

With a name like Lionel Winchester, howcouldhe not be a misplaced intellectual?

Weavinghis silken words into a cocoon, suffocating.No one understands him.

How Can he not be a misplaced intellectualworkingas a dishwasher, the bleach-white steam suffocating, where no one understands him.

He taught himself Spanish after two years of workingas a dishwasher. The bleach-white is his penance, his mind's oblivion.

He taught himself Spanish after two years becauseit helped him to forget his past.

steam

Is his penance his mind's oblivion?

It's no wonder he took to booksbecause they helped him to forget his past, born in the backcountry,

burdened.

Glenn Hollar

47

Robert Wrigley and Lily

Robert Wrigley on Syntax and our Animal Selves Interview by Dorothy Ball

When I walked into the bar of the Carolina Inn to meet Robert Wrigley, I was all nerves-nervous about the expensive-looking recording equipment I'd borrowed from the SouthernOral History Program, nervous about interviewing a t~e~tedwriter, and most immediately nervous about finding him In the chatty crush of the lunch crowd. I was preparing myself for a sobering loop of the room asking each man, '\\te you the poet I'm looking for?" when I spotted him. He was not one of the dark-suited men in leather chairs, or one of those c~zied up to the bar, but the one camped out at a corner table with a glass of wine and a stack of his own thin books.

The battalion of his awards and fellowships, as well as the sheersk.ill of his latest book, Lives of the Animals, which I'd rereadin one go that morning, made him quite intimidating.

Robert Wrigley grew up in Illinois and received his MFA in poetry from the University of Montana. His In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (r995) won the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and Reign of Snakes won the 2000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a prestigious prize given to writers who are still in the earlier stages of their careers. He's received fellowships from the National Foundation of the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has been given two pushcart Prizes. He directs the MFA program at the University of

49

Idaho. I snagged him on a one-day visit to Chapel Hill in October at the beginning of his tour promoting Lives of the Animals.

Of course, all of my anxiety fell away when the tape rolled and he turned out to be funny, irreverent, and willing to talk about pretty much anything. Here I've printed just a few excerpts of OUf conversation. Wrigley weighed in on the challenges and perks of living with another successful writer, the importance of writing fan letters, and gators as the alpha predator. We traded poetry class nightmares and bear stories, and there simply isn't enough room in this magazine for the whole thing.

ROBERT WRIGLEY I'm ready for any kind of question you can throw There's no question I won't answer-well, I may not tell the truth.

CELLAR DOOR OK, I'll be careful to avoid those questions. So your book just came out this month, right?

WRIGLEY It's two weeks and one day old.

that?

CELLAR DOOR Wow. Have you been doing a lot of running around for

WRIGLEY It actually started, well it's been officially out for two weeks, but there were Copies available last month and I gave a debut readIng tn Missoula, Montana, which is where I went to school many years ago and they have an annual book fest so it was a crowd of six h d d re people. It was great sold a whole bun unch of books and th I' d ' . ' en ve one a couple of other re~dmIgs-sort of local and regional things. This week I started w at guess IS my National Tour.

CELLAR DOOR So big book tour, where else are you goiog?

WRIGLEY Well, I've got four readings in North Carolina, which is great.

CELLAR DOOR We're a big poetry state.

WRIGLEY You are, you've got some terrific poets here, poets I admirea lot, so it's great to come and visit.

I've been emailingandcallingmypublisherbecause.as it turnsout, there's some NPR radio show that's been trying to get a hold of me. They want to interview me, which is wonderful, except they want me to, how did they put it ... the producer said they wanted me on so they could talk about my "naturepoetry;" which, I gotta tell you, just makes my flesh crawl.Ilove nature, obviously, there's a lot of it in my poemsit's the theater of my operations. It's where my images come from, and I'm not apologetic about that. On the other hand, the whole term "nature poetry" is just kind of creepy, it seems to me. It's mostly poems about people goiog out into the open country or listening to the birds and trees, and expressing the grandeur, you know, the awe.

CELLAR DOOR Yeah, it gets so sentimentalized and cheesy. Lost people finding themselves ...

WRIGLEY Well, it's never as good as just actually going there. I mean, why would anybody read a poem about how cool it is to go in the woods instead of just going in the woods' My contention is that when you use those kinds of images, as I do, you'vegot to do something more with them. It's got to have something to do with what it means to be a human being alive on this particular planet within that kind of nature.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll get the chance to say something like that on the radio, not offending the raclio guy, but ...

CELLAR DOOR Yeah, that's kind of scary that they want to talk about Nature.

WRIGLEY Look guy, don't call me a nature poet, or I'll punch you.

CELLAR DOOR Are you in the Sierra Club, or any of those conservation groups?

WRIGLEY No, no. I was a member of the Sierra Club once, but once you join one of those organizations, they're all after you.

And now I send my money to the ACLU, because I think Ashcroft is more dangerous than Mike Leavitt, who's the EPA chair.

CELLAR DOOR What about hunting, do you have any NRA feelings' You spend a lot of time stalking deer and other animals ...

WRIGLEY But I mostly just walk around. I have hunted in the past, I shot a deer once, many years ago, and I felt such horrible remorse. I like meat, I have to tell you, I don't mind eating deer. It's certainly more moral to go out in the woods and kill an animal that you're going to eat than to eat meat that is industrially rendered. Those are truly inhumane conditions, the industrial production of meat, and of course, all that meat gets shot full of antibiotics and growth hormones and all this hideous stuff But I don't hunt anymore. I quit. There carne a moment in my life when I decided I would no longer shoot anything prettier than me, and that pretty much took care of It. An armadillo I might blast, but why would you do that? No, so I don't hunt anymore.

5'2

CELLAR DOOR

No, I had a similar thing-1 killed a duck once and had the whole blood on my forehead thing, and it was kind of sobering. So many people have had that "I shot a squirrel with a b-b-gun" moment and then freaked out. I guess a deer is a big kindof squirrel.

WRIGLEY

As much as anything else, I think my remorse was almostless because my heart kicked in, that I felt bad for shootingthis deer-1 was sort of glad I had the meat-but suddenlyyou're confronted with this large animal, and you can'twaste it. You have to gut it out, you have to skin it, you

haveto quarter or halve it depending on how big it is, and then carryit out. Where I live, if you're three miles from the truck, up and down over a ridge, it's brutal work to do such a thing.

CELLAR DOOR

And you're face

to

face with a dead, bloody ...

WRIGLEY

Right, and the woods are full of guys with guns as opposedto people hunting. I don't mind people hunting. My wife,actually,has hunted more than I have and she's a great shot and a very careful hunter, but a lot of them are just slobs withgunsin the woods, and frankly, that's just what the NRA is, as far as I can tell.

CELLAR DOOR

The most horrifying thing about going hunting was havingto sit through Louisiana Hunter's Certification. They sat us down and made us watch all these NRA, Charlton Heston movies about our Second Amendment rights before they taught us about gun safety, which was kind of frightening.

WRIGLEY

Yeah, that is. Crazy.

53

CELLAR DOOR So you write a lot about nature, even though you don't want to call it "nature poetry" How do you avoid sentimentalizing, all that scary stuff about nature poetry, and do you ever find yourself drifting into it and have to slap your wrist and stop it?

WRIGLEY Yeah, I don't think I ever have to slap my wrist, but every now and then, I recognize that I'm getting dangerously dose to, that part of the emotions where I don't really want to go-not as poet, not as a human being. But I also understand that, as the great Montana writer, Wtlliam Kittredge-he's a remarkable writer--once said, if you're not willing to risk sentimentality, you're probably not going to succeed as a writer anyway. I mean, there's this whole kind of post-modernist ilk that's so frightened of emotional freight in poems, so frightened of the possibility of anything that even resembles sentimentality. that they avoid it. They avoid all references to any kind of emotional or even kind of ethical stance toward the world, and that, I think, is just another way to write badly.

So I impose certain kinds of strictures on myself, but I've got a poem in the new book about a dead dog. As William Stafford said, the hardest subject in the world to actually write about is a dead dog.

CELLAR DOOR I didn't know that.

WRIGLEY Well think about it. This poem is about a friend of mine who hates to admit-he's a scientist-he despises the fact that he has emotions, and would, if he could, or so he thinks, just eXpunge them from his life. On the other hand, I know him well enough to know that he's actually just a rag, he's just the most sentimental sop you can imagine. And he had a dog, a beloved dog. A dog he adored, who hunted with him, and the dog had cancer, the dog was dying, and he thought he should probablyeuthanize the dog himself.

54

interested in the idea of spirituality. I want a spirituallife,I love the idea of faith, I think faith is a gorgeous and beautiful thing. And I have this sense that if there is such a thingas the soul, that it is much more likely that we will discover it, or it's much more likely that it truly exists in what I wouldcallour "animal self" than it does in our human self. The reasonI believe that is because there is this astonishing, beautifulfit,of wild animals in particular, but in some domestic animals,with

the world as we know it-with case of some domestic

the natural world, and in the

animals, the world that is domesticated.

You have to look a long time to find human beings wbo fit that well with this world.

It's also arguable that we fit extremely well,even though we seem to be in the process of destroying the world.

We're just prospering. We're just wiping out the other species because, hey, we need it.

CELLAR DOOR Yeah, that's the animal way.

WRIGLEY

And that I understand. But I also understand that whatever impulses might move us toward that are also probably living in the same place within us as our spirituality.

The rage for survival and perpetuation of the species isgoing to have to include some measure of a kind of spirituality and a kind of responsibWty toward the rest of it, not just ourselves.

CELLAR DOOR

One of my favorite poems of all time is lames Dickey's "Heaven of AnOOals," and I was wondering if you thought about that writing this book.

me.

r

WRIGLEY Yeah, Dickey was an enormously important figure for love that poem, I Jove the "Heaven of Animals." In some

ways, it's a self-serving kind of poem. Dickey was reallywriting hISphilosophy what seemed to hOOto be the way it ought to be, If perhaps nor the way it was. But my new book is not only about arumals, I certainly use animals as subjects, but also it's

56

aboutmortalityin a much larger sense. Animals don't want to die,they'llfight dying. They're not altogether sanguine about dying at all,but on the other hand, they don't spend their wholeliveswondering about what's going to happen to them afiertheydie.They are alive in the moment, and maybe that's whereit is, maybe that's where that human spirituality crosses overandbecomes a kind of fretfulness for the afterlife. I've got apoemcalled"The Afterlife" in the book before this one, the bookReign of Snakes, which is a weird poem, a challenging poem,but I'm also interested in the idea of the afterlife. I mean,I don't think there is one, I think the afterlife is just beingdirt, which is what I aspire to be.

CELLAR DOOR So you're not hopeful for an afterlife.

WRIGLEY Nah, I like this life. I mean, it would be like preferring the afterglowto making love. That's not to say that the afterglowisn'tgreat, incidentally, but it doesn't last. I mean can youimagineafterglow in perpetuity? "I really feel like doing it again,but this afterglow feeling keeps going on and on."

CELLAR DOOR , You have a poem in here, "The Afterlife of Moose." 1 wasthinking about James Dickey in connection with that.

WRIGLEY That is a kind of Dickey-esque poem, dedicated, ironicallyenough to Stephen Dunn who's a friend of mine. I think I come as close to Stephen's philosophy of life and the afterlife as I do my own in this poem. Which is to say, as for the afterlife, I'll take the moose's chances. There's another very strange poem in this book called "Caffeine," which is the preacherssay the black cat has, "of heaven, no hope at all, I andno reason but the flesh to go on," but on the other hand, I don'tthink.we need much reason other than the flesh to go on.

The flesh is a great thing, we're getting these temporary suits--Iet's just wear them, let's just do what we can with them and not worry about what comes after.

57

CELLAR DOOR So morality isn't what you do to get to the afterlife.

Are you a Golden Rule kinda guy?

WRIGLEY Absolutely, I would like to be able to practice it more than I probably do, but then again, I think if we could impose that Golden Rule upon us as a culture-upon ourselves as a nation-we'd be an altogether different country It would be an altogether different world. That would be some interesting way to lead this planet, contrary to the way we're leading it at the moment. Man, I seem terribly political.

CELLAR DOOR Go ahead, spew.

WRIGLEY It's just real important to remember, I have this sense that we are in a battle for this nation's soul. This nation is in a dire predicament.

I guess I don't worry too much about the deficit, it doesn't do me any good to worry about the deficit, ..

CELLAR DOOR The moose doesn't worry about the deficit!

WRIGLEY No, it's true. There is no such thing and the moose is fine.

CELLAR DOOR Sorry I interrupted your train of thought.

WRIGLEY No, that's ok. I needed that train derailed.

58

CELLAR DOOR Besides James Dickey, then, who influenced you when you were young?

WRIGLEY Thefirst poets I fell in love with were contemporary poets,In theeighth grade I had to explicate the "Ode on a GrecianUrn,' and it made me hate poetry. That was not anything that a fourteen-year-old should have been called upon todo,ButJ think the first poet I truly fell in love with was WS, Merwin,So in the early- to mid-ros, I wrote a lot of poe~ withno capital letters, no punctuation, and I fmally

de:1dedit'swonderful for Merwin, he's a magnificent

poet, I

thinkheoughtto win a Nobel Prize, quite honestly, but it doesn'tworkfor me, I need all the tools, I need punctuation, J needall thepossibilities of syntax and structure, Earlyon in my life as a student of poetry, and I'm still astudentof poetry, and always will be, but early on in my life as a matriculatedstudent at an institution I heard Etheridge Knightgivea reading, And Etheridge Knight gave a reading thatJustchanged my life, And it made me understand that, Wat,t aminute, African-American people have been writing, whichmademe go back and discover Langston Hughes and RobertHayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, They were people who werevery important to me then. I feU in love with Jaroes Dickey,eventually, because a couple of my teachers had written dissertationson him and 1 loved what he did with narrative.

Aboutthat same time I got really interested in Sylvia Plath, , I all Plath and Dickey have become sort of pole stars to me, c themboth poets of extremity, and the extremities they representare in so many ways, politically and culturally and as far as gender goes, they're diametrically opposed. In terms?f ne poetics, they're really not that diametrically opposed-o s eye is directed relentlessly outward, which is Dickey, the ' . d b t it seems to me others eye is directed relentlessly mwar . . hu were qmte that neither one of them, bless theu gone earns, did he "I as they 1 ,s whole,That's why they ended as unhappi y . t good .

B h' legacy is no probably more unhappily than hun. ut tS, se hts legacy and his poems are not celebrate d b ecau I

59

overwhelms nitwittery.

his poems, which is the legacy of boorishredneck

CELLAR DOOR Right, Deliveronce.

WRIGLEY

And it's a damn shame. Deliverance is not a bad novel, but that's all anybody knows about James Dickey, and all they remember

is "squeal like a pig."

CELLAR DOOR Yeah, [verbal attempt at "Dueling Banjos"] WRIGLEY Guys! What a terrible thing for Dickey to be remembered by. He's a man who wrote wonderful poems.

CELLAR DOOR What do you feeJ about the, hopefully fading, image of the poet as an unstable, crazy person?

WRIGLEY Well, there's always going to be crazy wildperson poets, just like there's always going to be crazy wildperson singers Orhousepainters or welders, but the idea of that as a kind of cliche as something you have to be, the notion that you have to be such a person in order to be accomplished as a poet is gone, I think. And I think that one of the reasons that it's gone is the institutionalization of the art. There are ways in which we can argue that it's not necessarily a good thing for poetry to have become so widely institutionalized, for there to be creative writing programs everywhere at every college and junior college in the land, to have a poet Or two working there. .

You can make that argument, but the motives for making such an argument strike me as questionable. Mainly, you're complaining that next thing you kno'\짜, Women are going 60

towantto be writing poetry, next thing you know, colored people aregoingto want to be writing poetry, no matter what color youare,andthose kind of things are sort of the dead white menspeakingfrom the grave. We don't need to listen to them anymore, wejust need to listen to everybody. And there's a way thatthedemocratization of poetry that's come with all this studyof creative writing and instruction of creative writing has beenagreatthing. And so 1 think, as the art has gotten more andmore democratized, the dominance, or the predominance, ofthe crazyperson as poet has faded. And good riddance.

CELLAR DOOR Oh, I agree. What about when you started out, did yourfamilyhave a hard time with you deciding you were going to be a poet?

WRIGLEY I actually, 1 thought I'd be a fiction writer. That's what I wantedto do. Quite honestly, 1 wanted to write novels that madea fortune. 1 wanted to drive a British racing-green Aston MartinDB4 and date supermodels and live in the south of France,which seemed like a reasonable aspiration for a young manmyage. And at the time, 1 didn't much like poetry. 1 took a P?etry writing class as a sophomore at Southern Illinois Universityand that was it. That was that. It took about two weeksinto that class and 1 was just thunderstruck.

And the main thing was 1 had not read any poetry by contemporary poets, I hadn't read any poetry by people who spoke the same Englishlanguage I spoke. Yeah, 1 was thunderstruck.

And then I wrote one, and the first poem I ever wrote 1 got published.

CELLAR DOOR Wow, that's a good track record.

WRIGLEY In a literary magazine in Alabama. My roots have alwaysbeen very southern, strangely enough. I hav~a former professorwho wrote an essay about my work in which he . described me as a western poet with-he's a southerner, he 5 fromVirginia-he said Wrigley is a western poet with the soul

6\

of a southerner. And from him, I understood that wasthe highest sort of praise, and I continue to take it aspraise.

Absolutely.

CELLAR DOOR Down here, that will definitelycountas

praise.

WRIGLEY

WelJ it's one of the reasons I'm here. I cometo the South because people like to hear what I have to say,often.

And I like to hear what they're saying.

CELLAR DOOR It's a very complicated place, which is a good thin/} What do you think he meant, saying you have a southernsouU WRIGLEY

WelJ, he meant my tendency toward narrative,you know that sort of hackneyed notion that southerners liveby storytelling. WelJ hell, we ail live by storytelling, you take away Our stories, and we don't know anything. So I believe that, but I also understand that ir was poets like Dickey who taughtn" that you can write narrative poems, or poems that tell stones, that aren't just plot-driven-this happened, then this happened, then this. My first introduction to narrative poetry in something approximating the language I speak was by Robinson Jeffers, and Jeffers' poems, I like some of thema lot, but a lot of them are simply straightforward narrative, this happened, this happened, this happened. It's all plot, and I'm not much interested in that. I'm much more interested in lyric possibilities that exist in the making of the narrative poem. or a poem that's anecdotal, that tells a story, but the Story's not the most important thing. Who's in the story and how the tory is affected, that's what's most important.

me

CELLAR DOOR new book, the poem about washing-your face I here-' th ' ,~ ause t ere s a teeny; mini-narrative almost, but ere s so Ittle actio .

S\veeping k,' d fd n gOlOg on and you get this broad, o 0 escnpoo f' d

. "k re thatIn your IS bee

II\\' SOme.

6.

n 0 It, an

I thought

that was

WRIGLEY Wellthank you. One of the things I like about the poemsI'mdoingnow-there are three poems in this book, I think, thatare all one sentence, and I love writing poems in onesentence.I just love sentences, you can't be a good writer if youcan'twrite good sentences. And students do themselves a disservice by faking poetry as something that's not like prose, therefore,it shouldn't have all these correct sentences.

Hogwash.

That's one of your tools-i-don't throwaway your tools.Especiallywhen you impose upon traditional sophisticatedcomplex syntax, the possibilities, the tensions thathappenwhen you break that into lines. The lines say somethingwithin, outside of, and behind the sentences. And prosewritersjust don't have that tool. When I write prose on a typewriter,on a word-processor, now and then I'll look at the screenandI'll stop and say "what the hell? Oh, I didn't break that line there, that was you, wasn't it?" The word processor.

AndwhenI write poems, I use a mechanical pencil and a lined notebook.And I like the shapes Of the letters as they come off the tipsof my fingers, you know, I like the feel of words in my mouth.Language is candy. I just like to lick it. It tastes good.

CELLAR DOOR Yeah,well you've got a good job, then. There's been a lot of grumbling from teachers I've had all through high school and college about how "kids don't learn grammar these days." I guessit is kind of faIling apart.

WRIGLEY Well I don't think it gets taught in elementary school Of, as they used to call them, grammar schools, anymore, which is a shame.There's this sense that learning the rules of grammarjust got in the way of what you needed to ~~w about writing,you just needed to unlock your inner. .. I diUt know muchabout grammar and usage, I mean, I knew what a subordinateclause was and some things like that when I was a teaching assistant in graduate school, but it was when I real~y had to start teaching composition that I had to know all this stuff. Otherwise I couldn't teach it. And it was then that I got

really interested in how syntax works. I love sentence diagramming, I did that in junior high back in the seventeenth century or sornerhing, whenever that was, but it wasgreatfun to diagram sentences, and I still do that.]ust to see,justtO play.

CELLAR DOOR

Will you do it to a poem you've been writing?

WRIGLEY No, because I'm usually hatching such a thing SO slowly that I'm hyper aware of how things are working syntactically already, but Iwas working on a poem this past. month that my wife, who is my first reader, looked at and said "the syntax is all garbled here." And the more Ilookedat '." the more I understood oh wait a minute, I have co rurnrhi thing completely around. And what it did was completely change the end of the poem, but I mean, there was something about correcting the grammar, strangely enough, or clarifying the syntax of the sentence that took the poem in a wholeother direction than it was otherwise going. So that's what I mean about the tools-you just can't abandon any tools.

We were

talking

about narrative,

and the minimal

narrative in those poems. Basically; I trunk. of those poemsas being lyric poems that possess a kind of mini-narrative.

Basically, that poem "Washing My Face" is about stretching time. It's about taking that nash of a portion of a second and stretching it out through the whole poem. Anyway, it's an absolutely unrealistic and siUy SOrt of poem to believe,bur it means to make you believe it nevertheless.

And Pvc seen Lil~ that's my cat, that's the black cat she is Death Incarnate, and it i her nature, ies whar she does, CELLAR DOOR . Yeah, she kills a lot o(birds Over the course of Liwsl{ thtAn'",aIJ.

Other do

WRIGLEY d . gra uare srudenrs came In the and pinned me down on a bun h of questions .woUI ne of m

Favorit

this book,goodquestions,and fmalJy she said, ever so waggishly, shesaid,sowhy didn't you name this the Deaths of thtAnimail1Which allowedme to talk about the fact that this "a bookverymuchconcerned with mortality and the way the animal selfasopposedto the human self deals with mortality.

Thelastpoeminthe book is sort of about human mortality; theguy" skiingdowna hill, and skis around a corner, true .of):intoabunchof deer, and he's running with the deer.

Nowhe'sluckyhe doesn't get killed.

CELLAR DOOR

Wasit you?

WRIGLEY

It wasactually a friend of mine. I mean, I ski like that, butI'veneverbeen so lucky as to experience that. And he, the speakerin the poem, he's just alive in a way he's never been

before, skiingdown this hill with the deer, and then they run offandhe'ssort of left alone with his own mortality again. And hismortality'sreally no different from theirs, only for a moment,he'ssort of that world that "Other World," which is howthebook starts, You knowFrost said, a book of poems has twenty-fourpoems in it the book itself is the twenty-fifth, and it'ssomethingI believe 'as gospel. I try to assemble my books veryverycarefully to make poems out of them.

CELLAR DOOR . h Are there any questions t at you

'hyouwerease .")

k d

WIS

about poetry that nobody asks you? Or about other thmgs.

WR1GLEY

.

1 t the reader to That's a really good quesuon- wan no the most understand that the most important person, : \ I want a Important animal, .m th'\5 b00 k i103the human anima. d .m als to . . . . b op\e an am kind of dramatic srtuanon erween pc lanted in the k, that sense was p h COmeup early in the boo so t at

reader's mind. that the operative critter here, Lives of the all this wildlife, this bestiarythat you're entering into, if it means to illuminate anything,it means to illuminate the human existence, the human condition, because I don't really know much about the animal condition, other than what's observational, orreportageof somebody else's observational knowledge. Being as I am the human animal.

Animals notwithstanding,

CELLAR DOOR There are some kind of scary portrayals of childrenin Your book, like in "Do You Love Me," and I know it's very z.n In : on the tender because it's your daughter, but how do you ran childhood-being-idyllic scale?

WRIGLEY You think childhood's idyllic?

CELLAR DOOR Oh, no. Absolutely not.

WRIGLEY

Yeah, childhood's a scary damn time. The variousrites of passage, and some of them aren't rites, they're just passages. you're always Sort of falling out of one thing into another, and you're always having to confront some new kind of experience at school or some new SOrt of social thing. and it'sjust, it gives you the wiI.lies. And most kids just do it, I mean, they just hunker down and they do it, or they walk blithely and blandly into it and come what may. The poem, "Do You Love Me," I'll read that one this afternoon, I don't know what to say about that. I think the idea of an animal's love I mean a child wants that animal to love her as much as she loves it, and it seems to require from her that SOrt of verbal affrrmation which, of course. the dog's not capable of .

Anyway, I like that poem, I have to say. Of my poems that book, that's one that I like quite a bit. because, well. I like poems about my kids. My kids~e very interesting people.

My son was (our years old, I was caking a walk with him along the Clearwater River in north Idaho, it's a beautiful river full of In

66

rapids,youknow, it's on the west slope of the Rockies.

We're

walking alongjust having a great time, and he finds the tail featherofared-tailed hawk. It's about sixteen inches long, it's gotthe little puff of down at the bottom, and he holds it up andhe'ssoexcitedand he goes, "Daddy, Daddy, look, it's ... it's... "andyou can see the wheels turning, but he can't come upwiththe word, you know, and he goes, "it's a bird-leaf." I mean,it was a poem. I've been trying to write that poem ever since,andhe's fourteen now. And I can't come up with

anythingthat holds up well enough to "bird-leaf," to his line. So there'sawayin which our children have the language of poetry beforetheyhave the language of communication, and poetry is thisrealseriousattempt at getting back into that knowledge of language,that sort of pre-communication knowledge of language.I hate the fact that the language that we use to make poemsis the same language that our leaders use to either aenesthetize USl or lie to us, or even tell us the truth. It's the same language that Enron uses to cheat people, it's the same

languagethat we're being bombarded with just to get us to buy things we don't need. But it's the same language we use to woo, it's the same language we use to pay tribute to our parents, it's

a beautifulthing, and poets are the keepers of the most importantpart of the language, that which we shall not allow to be introduced. jeez, I feel like I should pass the offertory around here!

Santorini

Melons

It was more than the long bus ride, cruel July heat, and those sleepy waves ebbing there, which urged us to peel off our tops, stretch out barely on two straw mats unrolled at the edge of ocean and hot, red sand: We were women who longed to feel stroked by warm light, who wanted to gather the weight of Apollo into OUI breasts.

Her basket full, we bought melons from an old Greek, who deftly sliced sections for us.

Something between a cantaloupe and honeydew,

68

the sweet juice dripped coolyover our oily skin, and then the dry earth swallowed it: Our succulent libation to the god of Sun and Poetry.

He must have seen that day how much we wanted Him, slightly burning our whitest skin, which we knew then would hold His warmth for days, despite the fresh caress of ocean swells across our breasts as we swam out until we could just discern our sweet, vacant rinds cupped in the folds of fiery sand.

Me/a Kirkpatrick

Double

7째

Negative byEnnJiroJfWi1/JflJ1

Tea with Sophia in the Basement Sophia Waters' mother turned the key and locked her daughterin the basement of their modest Row Boat horne.

"Sophia, darling! Would you fetch the teakettleJor me, dear?It's downstairs!" These were the last words Sophia heard in her mother's voice.

Three days passed and the door remained locked.

Sophiabegan to wonder if something might be terribly wrong.

Shetappedon the door, sometimes softly, sometimes with a bit moredesperation, always hoping for a gentle unlock, open, and realization from her mum and dad that they had made a very sillymistake indeed. They would all have a good chuckle about it. It would become family legend. "That was one of the silliest thingswe've ever done!" her parents would laugh.

None of this occurred. Sophia sat trapped and dumbfounded for several days before real discomfort set in. She was not dim, only optimistic and full of hope. She resigned herself to her faith that her parents knew what they were doing and that whatever decision they had made was probably for her own good.

The basement was one small, square room with smooth concrete walls, no windows, and a little toilet in the south-west corner. One door led to the upstairs and the outside world, and this door stood at the top of a narrow, walled staircase that projected from the basement's west side, very near the north corner. About one-third of the door was visible

7'

from the basement /loor. The top two-thirds werehiddenfrom view by the low ceiling. This left most people ofnormalheight visible only from knees to feet as they entered. Thus,to someone watching from /loor level, parties descendingthe stairs appeared from behind the ceiling as feet aodshins, revealed gradually from the knees up until they weretotally visible. But Sophia wouldn't observe that sort of thingaoymote, for Sophia would have no visitors.

One week earlier less than a month after theWaterses moved to Row Boat, Mrs.' Waters had mentioned casuallyto her husband that maybe they might want to start thinking about locking Sophia, their only child, down in the basement.

Mr. Waters was picking at his zits. He had an acne situation.

Mrs. Waters made very clear that she wishedto keep the boys at bay "We must keep the boys at bay," she insisted."Our daughter is fifteen, and has become very attractive to manya . young suitor, if you haven't noticed. Mr. Waters had not, to fUs memory; noticed. "Many of them in this town are crippled or missing some limb, and few if any of them drink tea. This must be stopped, and it cannot be stopped any other way.This simply MUST be done!"

Sophia was considered quite the catch by the fewRow Boatian boys she had met. Nobody sat like Sophia; she had wonderful posture. She also baked superlative pies. She was not bad looking by most standards, nor was she extraordinarily pretty, but her pies were nothing short of scrumptious, and scrumptious pies exponentially enhance the beauty of any ;:.oung lady, as fae as Suitors are concerned. Sophia's pies were uDerscrumptious, and consequently the boys fortunate enough to have made her acquaintance wanted to marry her.

This matter was of no great concern to Mr. Waters, who '."asquire content with grazing through life, though he occasIonally remarked that a Few more dollars in-pocket would be handy..But the boy issue was a tremendous source of anxiety for Mrs. w'''ers, who hated Mr. Waters quite d I H h d eep y. e a b d 路ok ~ een a rI '~r of tea when they mer. Bur she had married him anyway, desptre numerous warnings from he h about such men. r own mot er J1

7'

'The presence or absence of tea in a man's diet is the onlysure way to know a gentleman from a brute," she would

sar Mrs.Watets had determined never to allow Sophia to makethesame mistake she had. No daughter of hers was going to bethewifeof a brute.

After some mild debate, it had been finally decided thatit wouldbe best to lock Sophia in the basement, provided shewouldspend her time baking fresh scrumptious pies that Mr.andMrs.Waters could then sell. The business was to be called':Arrrrm; .. Scrumptious Pies!" and was to have a pirate theme.That much was easy to agree on.

On her seventh night of captivity, Sophia was, as she slept,equipped with all of the necessities used in the making of herwidevariety of pies. Included was a very impressive and verybigoven with a range. It was a minty green and had a blue hosethat ran out the back and up the wall and through the ceiling to let out the excess gas. Sophia awoke that morning to findher new baking implements, with a note attached. The note read as follows:

Sophia, Wi have lockedyou in the basementfor the rest of your life.

Toavoidpotential heartache, we will not be speaking with you.

Youmay have company if and only if a ~ boy comes explicitly to have Ullwithyou.

Please bake us lots ofpies with this equipment.

Love, Mum & Dad For the long months that followed, Sophia carried on regularly.Waking up, baking pies, and going back to bed every day for months would have been more than most young. girls could have borne, especially without sunlight, but Sophia made the best of the situation.

She slept on the sofa in the northeastern corner of the basement. She could see aU '/3 of the visible door from her . pillow.All of the pie-baking materials lived on the southern SIde of the room near a small sink, which protruded from the wall;

73

the southern side of her entire world. The floor was the same smooth concrete as the walls, so Sophia almost always wore her shoes, the blue ones she had been wearing on the dayshe was originally locked down. The shoes kept the foot chill off,and the floor was too slippery for socks alone.

IMter all," she reasoned to herself, 'who knows if a doctor would be called if I were to slip on this floor and break an arm, or a dentist if I fe!l and bashed in my front teeth!"

Besides the couch and the baking supplies and the sink, all that was in Sophia's basement universe, her home until death, was her small round table and lovely white and blue tea set which included the kettle that never made it back upstairs.

The kettle was chrome, but the teapot, cups, and saucerswere a deep blue at their bases that lightened gradually midwayup their sides until they became a briJ1iant gleaming white that shone at the top like a summer sky. Chairs flanked the table at opposite ends, one facing north and the blank wall, and the other facing south towards the oven and the rest of tbe baking utilities. Sophia thought the table's wormy wood was lovely.

While she baked her pies, Sophia sometimes daydreamt of a tea-seeking young sailor docking at her house.

She dreamt of eating pies and drinking tea with him for hours and hours and hours. She imagined him setting her free, and at these moments her mind sometimes wandered into unknown waters. Who knows what a young girl thinks about when a teadrinking sailor navigates his way into port near the rocky shores of her imagination? She named her baking oven]o!ly Roger.

Months passed and the pie business boomed. Meat pies were particularly popular. The Waterses were becoming quite wealthy seJIing the scrumptious pies out of the new addition to their house, constructed for just that purpose. Soon everyone in Row Boat equated the name Arrrrrrr: .. Scrumptious Pies! with quality. Often a family of four enjoyed a scrumptious meat or chicken pot pie for dinner and then devoured several thick slices of COconut meringue, chocolate mousse. or key lime pie for dessert. .Arrrrrrr .. Scrumptious Pies/was becoming a Row Boat institution, and Mr. and Mrs. Waters were reaping the benefits.

"Ir was

74

a fine idea to Jock our only child in the

basementmakingpies," Mr. Waters would say while he counted hismoney."I believe it has even helped to clear up my acne!"

Somethingcertainly had. He was looking as good as he had in years,andMrs. Waters took notice. She retained most of her animositytowards him, but somehow found him a touch less intolerable.The new financial stability had given their love life thejumpstartit had needed for a long time. Their sheets were hot,theirpockets were full, and their daughter was locked up tightio the basement making scrumdiddlyumptious pies. All wasrightwith the world.

Every morning Sophia would wake to find new sacks of meat,flour,and other ingredients all surrounding Jolly Roger the Oven.She assumed her parents were responsible for this, hut justto be sure, she stayed awake one night and lay in bed with anopen eye. Around no a.m., in crept Mrs. Waters with sacksof supplies. She was plumper than Sophia remembered her.

Probablyfrom a/l of the pies I've been bakingfor ber, she thought.Mrs. Waters had long since lost her taste for even the most scrumptious of Sophia's pies, but had been using much of

her newfound Arrrrrrr. .. Scrumptious Pies' wealth to purchase very expensive rich and fatty foods for herself and Mr. Waters.

Sophia watched her plump mother's head then torso then thighs disappear up the stairs.

"I'm glad she likes my pies so much," she whispered into the darkness.

"THOU SHALT NOT LOCK THINE CHILDREN IN THINE BASEMENTl" cried the alarmingly youthful Brother Bailey. "THIS IS GOD'S LAW!" Allowing the younger Brothers to sermon at Mass was a newphenomenon at St. Barnacle's Church. It was proposed as awayto draw those sinners who craved variety, and it gave Father Frank a break. Brother Bailey was a crowd-pleaser because he was histrionic and he claimed to see visions. He had had an especially large draw on this Sunday. Even the piepular andcorpulently well-to-do Waterses had come out. to listen.

Father Frank. was in the front pew, nearly In tears, wanting desperately to disbelieve what he was hearing spew forth from <he mouth of the zealous Brother Bailey. I hope the

75

congregation knows that that is not a Commandment, he thought. ':'I. MAN AND WOMAN WHO LOCKTHEIR SPAWN IN THEIR HOME WITHOUT REPRIEVE PLAGUE THEIR HOUSEHOLD WITH FIERIEST DAMNATION! THE BASEMENT INCLUDED!" Father Frank shook his head in wonder at whyBrother B had chosen to speak on such an odd doctrine, andparticularly why he had thought it necessary to condemn the basement separately.

The Waterses shifted uncomfortably in theirpew.They gave a bit extra to the offering plate.

Meanwhile, Sophia was busy baking. She had no ideait was Sunday. She knew daytime from nighttime onlybyJnlly Roger's oven timer and the rhythm of her physical fatigue.She rarely thought about it, though. She had been in the basement for nine months and had not seen the SUD, nor had anyvisitors.

Where are the young men of Row Boot who showedsuch on interert upon myarrival2 Sophia, stirring a bowl of crust batter, . addressed Jolly Roger, minty and hot, with his gas hose ponY'arl running up the wall and through the ceiling into the outside world.

"Theyre not in this basement having tea, that's for sure," she said aloud to him, pointing her battered spoon and shaking it at the oven. Some batter dripped off the tip onto the floor. She lay the mixing bowl on the table and squatted to WIpe up the mess, then spotted something unusual under the oven.

She reached her fingers under and pulled out the Arrrrrrt: ..

Scnlmptious Pies.' order form her mother had dropped during one of her nocturnal ingredients deposits. She read it aloud. "One meat pie with extra thick crust. n She remembered the note requesting that pie. She remembered making that pie. She had m~de It WIth extra Love too. "1 wonder who ate that pie," she said,

. .

The grim. discovery that her parents were selling her pres IOste~dof eatmg them infuriated Sophia. It bore upon it a wave of bnterness .inside her not only towards her parents. bur ~e~ Own pre baking, and towards all cbe sailor-bovs who a not VI Ired to have tea. r-:

c:

"If! couldget just one to come have tea with me. Just ONE'" shethought aloud.

Andwith that, Sophia scribbled a note onto the back oftheorderform and slipped it into her freshest and most sinfully scrumptiousmeat pie nn hand. She baked on.

.

"I'd likethat one," said Polk, pointing to a meat pie WIth obviousscrumptious superiority. "That one right there."

Mrs.Waters handed the young man the pie, and commendedhis chnice.

"You'vebecome something of a connoisseur of meat pies, haven't you, Polk?" , ''Thank you, Mrs. Waters," replied squinty-eyed Pnlk..

Howmuchdo lowe you?"

He paid and swaggered down the street to his house, all thewaylooking forward to yet another scrumptious meat Pl~from ''Arrrrrrr... " as the kids were calling it. He could not think of much he would rather put into his mouth.

That night, Polk., his parents and his brother ate all excepting one thin slice of the scrumptious pie.

"May I take this last piece up to my room to study with?"Polk asked.

"Sure,unless your mother would like to save it for some reason?"

"No, it's fine. Just make sure you brush your teeth beforefalling asleep."

"Yes, ma'am. Thank you." Polk. shoveled the meaty goodnessonto his plate and bounded up to his lair.

He had barely been working for an hour, sitting up on his comfortable double bed, when his tummy began to growl for cold meat pie. He almost liked it cold better than hot, but decisions like that are hard to make. Polk. plunged his fork and fmgersinto the last slice and began to devour it. A few bites in, he felt something odd in his mouth. He reached in his fingers, and pulled from berween his lips a small piece of paper. It was stained with meat, but he could still make out the short message:

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I am lonely. Please come have ted with me.

Solitarily Your Piestreu, Sophia "Odd," said Polk. "1 don't know of any Sophia at Amrr ..'

He read the note again. And then he read it again.

Mrs. Waters was not surprised to seeyoungPolkback the next day. He often came two days in a row Manypeople did.

"Well, hello!" she said. f1\re you here for anothermeat,. pie? Or perhaps a nice custard pudding pie for tonight'sdesern She was all piewoman.

.'

's

"No, ma'am. I am here to have tea with Sophia,Ifshe here. Is she here?" f One of Mrs. Waters' wide eyes could have held threea Polk's thin ones. She smiled, then he. " "Honey, would you man the pies for a moment, please.

Mrs. asked Mr. Waters without taking her eyes off Polk or altering her perplexed expression even slightly. "There is a visitor here for Sophia."

Sophia heard a sound she had all but forgotten, the sound of keys in a keyhole, and of the door, opening slowly.She looked up the staircase from her sofa where she had been resting while Waiting for some pies to cool. She saw rwo legs from shoe to shin. They were boy shoes, boy sruns.l canrmel! the ocean, she thought. As the other two-thirds of Polk's body descended, she felt sure she had never seen anything so beauriful. The door shut and locked. Sophia srood up.

"It's him. My sailor is here," she whispered. She was at Jolly Roger when Polk docked at the bottom of the staircase.

She turned and looked at him.

"Would you like Some tear she asked.

"That would be Jove/y."

"Please, have a sear," she said, pulling out the chair nearest to her For her sailor.

r-:

. "Thank Polk felt odd having a girl pull out a chair him. He didn t mention it These were dd . . . .., .' 0 CIrcumstances.

He sat down, fa inS away from the Stove.

For

Sophia immediately went to work on the tea.

"You'reSophia?"he called behind his back. He did not turn his head,afraidit would make his hostess self-conscious if he did.

"Yes. What's your name?"

"Polk. I got your note." He was finding it awkward to carryon a conversation with her behind him.

"I figured." She paused. "I'm glad you're here."

There were a few moments of what felt to Polk like verytense silence until Sophia, finished with her chore at Jolly Roger,shuffled to her end of the table with the tea set and sat down.It was Polk's first good look at her.

"I think you're pretty," he said. They both turned reddishand looked down at the table.

They drank tea for hours and hours and hours, and did not leave the basement.

Zachary Gresham

79

Intentional

Flub at the Cirque de Solei!

Take a moment to be mystified by jumping.

Muscles shove themselves and move with nothing to press against.

Isn't that amazing? Point A and point B, Even with a wall of void between them, can be bridged,

And physics lets our bodies, though briefly, brave the deadlyvacuum So, consider a gymnast confronted with a horde of hoops Through which to leap. If the very atoms of his feat are marvelous, Then what magic remains in the superhuman climax, The intricate volley through an insanely high hole?

His answer: failure. He flipped and tripped and by a millimeter Missed the air and caught the hoop's hook with his foot.

He plopped, and six-hundred heads dropped in vicarious embarrassment.

But there was a greater art in that tumble than a moment later) After the music's continuation and another running start, When the hoop gave perfect birth to both a startling stunt And the whoosh of adrenaline that consumed the audience.

It's the vaudevillian tradition that the moments are what matters The hack adores his punchlines, but the pro, like a Greenlander who loves His whitened island, relishes the rush between, where nothing lurks: The prelude to a magical moment, the planned, perfect mistake

80

Thatsetsup a second attempt for glorious, crystal success; Whenthe eyes know they've seen something spectacular, Butthe hands aren't yet aware they should applaud; Or the moment of magical disconnection at the parabola's peak, When the body's job is done and gravity's hasn't yet begun.

Jordan Carpenter

8r

The Derry Bridge (November I, 2002)

"For such a serious-looking place, a lot of stupid shit goes on here."

Like me riding in this hatchback with four Irishmen through the countryside, listening to songs that already have birthdays back home. Beantin's driving and asks me to can him Martin, but the others insist he gave himself the name, 11\.y, fuckin' did, so it was."

Halloween parry Jast night at Earth, I danced with a tall Mexican boy who wore a huge sombrero and gave himself away with the reminder

that it's the London that makes Derry.

FeU down two /lights of carpeted stairs, stole a cracked watch from the bathroom floor,

ate bad Szechwan with a side of chips.

My second and Jast time here and all think about is the story of the man who jumped off Derry Bridge, hoping for death, but landing in mud, feet stuck, staring up at the gray sky, waiting for someone to pull him out.

r can

Rachel Berry

82

Wearinga Crucifix, Dizzy on Kosher Wine

Twentythirteen-year-olds shaking their pelvises in a mightyup-and-down celehration of genitalia addssuch a ring to the idea of celebrating the start of manhood withonly a dash of acne, my cousin, and the three hour Bar Mitzvah service of hacks and Hebrew and the unknown, I almostdon't notice my father getting a massage in the corner near the hors d'oeuvres table.

The wrinkled hands rubbing circles into his neck areaccented in a violent shade of red, an exact match to the leather bag, heels, and shiny droopy lips.

Approaching the table, I hear her whisper to him, "Youcan'tdo this to me, though. I don't let strange men touch me. And you are definitely strange ... I can tell."

Sheis obviously from Queens. Introductions: Aunt Muriel, Rachel, Rachel, Aunt Muriel.

(The massaging has not stopped.) She continues: "My husband Herb was the shortest guy I'd ever dated. When we met in high school, I told my best friend Sissy about him. She said, "He's kinda short isn't he?" Needless

to say,

Sissywas not in my wedding." Pleasant confusion, as my father and I smile our same closed-mouth smiles.

"Now,where did you all get those cute little accents?"

My father's from Mississippi; I don't have an accent.

I notice Aunt Muriel's wearing a lot of animal print.

I wonder if she thinks my father is older because of his hair.

I wonder what she was like fifty years ago.

Did she wear red and lust after 40 year-old men' Are there any other Catholics in the room?

Will I end up like Aunt Muriel, everywhere leopard andbright rouge to cover the absence of blushing?

Rachel Berry

Lindsey Britt

Thaddeus

.

Thaddeus being wasted isn't the beginning. Thaddeus beIngdrunk going on six hours, it's nothing more than the hook. There to grab everyone's attention; that at least is the hope.

The dog that was with him might have done this even better. It's not to be. The poor old thing, yellow and mangy, was lying under the table where Thaddeus ate. A dog in the restaurant' The real funny thing, though, is that the dog wasn't attracting any attention.

Thaddeus fed this sack of bones half his dinner,passed it right under to the waiting mouth, and still no one seemed to really care. To tell the truth, no one in the restaurantmuch cared that Thaddeus was so gone either.

So some might say to begin with the waitress. She's really quite capable of baiting the hook-a brunette that was far too pretty for the slimy counter-and-four-booth restaurant.

Thaddeus ate and fed the dog and this waitress was pouring coffee all the while. Her uniform was like something from the fifties. And people frequenting that restaurant had often commented on how she never smiled.

Thaddeus had started feeling woozy around lunchtime that day, after just three big gulps from the old man's flask.

From the flask of the wizard, as Thaddeus

would later refer to

him. It was how he had referred to himself, after all, right as he left Thaddeus. out there on the open road where the two nderstand that Thaddeus was as fond of drinking as me.t U

everyone else in that rural Georgia town, which is to sayquite a bit, and wasn't used to feeling woozy after three gulps.

After the old man had gone on his way,within anhour the rain had started, and Thaddeus found himself drivingto a bar. This was on his way home, when he realized his headwas spinning too much for his liking and that his new dogwas getting soaked in the back of the truck.

So we might have even begun with the old mangiving Thaddeus the yellow and mangy dog. It was the sort of thing you don't see every day. A bum saying something like,"You . deserve a reward, please have my dog"-which the old man did say-that wouldn't surprise most. The homeless say crazy things, we all think. But another man, this one not a bum but perhaps a highway worker, him accepting the old man'soffer, weJ1 that's just something else. .

Many found it strange that Thaddeus, who'd never 10 his life left the state of Georgia, used words and a voice that were out of sync with one another. Meaning he did not have a Southern accent. People were always noticing that. When the waitress finally stopped pouring coffee and sat down in the booth, across from Thaddeus, she noticed it.

"You know I don't usually mind the where and why, but you two aren't from around here, are you?"

Thaddeus hadn't spoken a word to anyone in a few hours, not since he'd started throwing his hand up in the bar earlier. He did this to Signal the bartender for another beer.

This instead of just asking for it. So he had one thing in mind to say now; something he'd been thinking about for a while and was going to say to the first person who addressed him. He didn't even look up at her when he started saying it. He didn't even know who he was talking to.

"He said he was a wizard and I deserved a reward."

These are the words Thaddeus couldn't wait to get out, "You pulled the sword from the stone brave knight."

"Don't fu k '_L. " . . , C wrrn me. was his only response.

Iike eh Thaddeus, as anyone would expect, had been feeling '- e rne uruverse was fucking with hr' H ... . m. e was snnng tn a restaurant, at dinnereime in the middle of the week with this old hound dog under the table and .' pretty waitress across fr om hitm , No one really gave him. aa fun I ny oak. The funny

86

thingishoweveryone was so nonchalant about it. Something outtherewanted him to think it all a dream, or else think he wastotallylosing it.

NowThaddeus was modest enough, but knew he was reallyagood-hearted person, and he didn't care for the idea of somethinghigher-up screwing him over. Just that day, he'd giventhe old man half his sandwich and a candy bar. He'd beenpolite to the old man while all the other members of the crewlaughedand said insulting things. Right before proclaiminghimself the last real wizard around, this old man hadtoldThaddeus it was the nicest anyone had ever been to him. Ever! And now Thaddeus was getting fucked by the universe.That was the best he could figure.

Back before he'd started throwing his hand up in the bar,Thaddeus had been talking quite a bit. He'd been the only personthere for a long time, maybe about three hours. His drunkenrunning off at the mouth, directed at the bartender, had mostly been thanking him over and over for allowing the dogto Come in. This wasn't totally uncommon in rural Georgia though,and besides, as the bartender himself said, there was no one else in there anyway.

But when the early evening crowd started to trickle in, Thaddeus, who'd been silent for some time already, was politely askedto leave. If the man had been a better bartender, or maybejust a better person, he'd have called a cab for Thaddeus. Not so. Instead, this horribly drunk guy, still wearing his highway orange pants, had been turned out on his Ownand left to wander down the street. Thaddeus had searched for the first restaurant he could find.

"I'm not fucking with you, promise," this was the next thing the pretty waitress said. "It looks like you've fucked with yourself just about enough." She said it at about the time Thaddeus stopped thinking about how the universe was . screwing him over and started thinking about how beautiful, how incredible this woman in the booth with him really was.

But he was having a hard time keeping her in focus, and . probably needed another three hours or so of silence to decide what he would say next. So he said nothing. .

In the bcief pause before she spoke agam, Thaddeus thought back. to the other crewmen, eating their lunch near

the truck earlier. This they did every day. But on that day, Thaddeus had not gone to the truck but instead remained in the median of the open road, eating half a sandwich and taking drinks from the old man's flask of whiskey. He was later spared from a full afternoon of ridicule by a sudden summer downpour, just about an hour after lunch break had ended.

Before speaking again she looked around the restaurant, this waitress who seemed to be truly fascinatedby Thaddeus. She said, "Maybe everyone thinks you're blind.So they don't want to be caught staring." She reddened a bit, "Dh

god, you're not blind are you?"

Since Thaddeus could think of nothing better to do when he was driving home from work and already feeling . woozy, he had decided to keep drinking. That was a long tune before, of course. So long that he was now too drunk to concentrate on what this waitress in the booth with himwas doing. Anyone else would have noticed that her fear of hinn really being blind was not fear of it making her comment look insensitive, but something else. She was interested in him, this man she considered a traveling stranger.

Really both lived in the same town, had lived there their whole lives.

Thaddeus, unable to listen, was thinking at that moment that he wanted to have sex. Sex with this pretty waitress, who hadn't smiled the whole time. Sex. Not because it had been a while or because he was a bad guy; but because he liked it.

And his wish was actually fulfilled, which is so very obviously the point that most folks would have made the beginning. There's no hook quite like crazy people going at it.

A lot of the small talk leading up to the sex, back in the restaurant, centered on this new dog of Thaddeus's. A few moments after the waitress had asked him if he were blind, Thaddeus had suddenly felt up to talking again. He just went right mro why he'd accepted the poor old thing. To the wa~[ress It seemed ?e was answering the question for himself so It made sense he'd be off on the tangent.

It was this. He had already been feeling a little drunk at the poin~ it happened. plus he had this soft spot for animals.

And really, It was probably h.im still caught up in being the

88

nicest. The nicest anyone had even been to the old man. This isn'tto say Thaddeus did things fer recognition, only that he (andlots of other people who do good deeds) was so unaccustomed to it!

The waitress figured he'd taken the dog just to keep the old man happy. Thaddeus didn't mention anything else about the old man saying: "I'm the only wizard left around here, you know."

Those were the last words the old man spoke before he handed Thaddeus the leather strap attached to the yellow and mangy sack of bones dog and headed off down the road.

He went in the direction Thaddeus and the rest of the crew had already completed. The dog and his new master watched himgo, they stood watching and panting in the August sun.

Thaddeus was just then starting to think that God or something else was messing with him.

The waitress got off work at seven) which means there wasabout a half an hour of talking in the restaurant booth.

They had about thtee quarters of an hour of knowing each other before sex started this story for most people. Her offer had been to drive him home, but she just went straight to her Own apartment without either of them saying anything about it. The whole car ride was silent in fact.

The dog carne inside with them, something that might normally have made Thaddeus feel a little strange, but he was wasted and beginning to get very used to his new dog. He'd not had a dog since his early teens, and never so much of a "dog"dog as this one. This golden something.

Anyway the dog barely batted an eye while Thaddeus and the waitress were going at it on the folded-out sofa bed, like only crazy people could have. It seemed the old sack of bones was rather used to doing jack shit. And Thaddeus, he wasn'tthinking about the dog or the old man or the other men in his crew or the bartender or anything else, not while he and the waitress were going through their whole crazy fuck routine.

He thought briefly about one thing, aside from the task at hand, which was that the woman never smiled.

Beginning with the sex would have gotten to the boyfriend faster, another reason why most woul? be for it.

The pretty waitress, she shared an apartment With her

boyfriend. Never mind where he was supposed to be or why she thought it was okay to bring Thaddeus back with her. This boyfriend came back. His pretty waitress girlfriend wasgoing at it with some other guy, who had bright otange pants around his ankles.

They'd been having problems lately, which is to say always, because this tall and redfaced man ten years older than her wasn't very nice. He never reacted well. While Thaddeus was trying to get his pants up and move at the same time, this boyfriend, who was a hunter, went straight to his gun cabinet.

Thaddeus gave up and stepped out of the pants. Now he was wasted and naked and cursing the universe audibly.

The waitress wasn't superficial, by the way,but Thaddeus being wasted and having a dog and being an outsider had really intrigued her. She'd been wrong about the outsider thing, not that it matters. And besides, Thaddeus hadn't really considered all that anyway. The alcohol probably had him thinking he was just plain hot!

With the boyfriend pointing the gun and this woman, who hadn't screamed once, standing between it and Thaddeus, the old yellow and mangy sack of bones in the corner came to its feet quickly. No real words had been spoken by anyone, not since Thaddeus and the waitress had left the restaurant about an hour earlier. Everyone was scared shitless though, even the guy with the gun, because he didn't really want to have to do it.

He just needed to be a man.

But the dog, who'd been flat on its side most the day, snapped to its feet as soon as the gun was raised. The golden something dog' It bit this boyfriend character right on his backside, square on the ass. The gun hit the 1I00r and Thaddeus quickly grabbed the leather strap, which was still around the dog's neck.

Thaddeus, naked and drunk and still at a loss, like he'd been for so many hours, he just laughed. The dog wasn't about to Jet go. So here was the punch line of the universe's big joke. . "I'll just take these two outside and we'll get everything worked out," Thaddeus said. The waitress stood in the doorway while he pulled the dog and the boyfriend still attached out toward the latter's car. It was the funniest sight

she'dever laid eyes on. Thaddeus was srilliaughing all the while.

And so she smiled, and laughed, and didn't stop.

"Hurry back, dear," she said to the naked champion.

And this beautiful waitress smiling in the doorway was justwhat Thaddeus needed to make sense of it all fmally. He sawit in her smile. Because when he helped that old man

earlier,he'dbeen promised a reward. No one had ever promised him a reward before.

So if you want to say that everything began with a good deed, you can, because probably it did.

CobyMangum

9'

Contributors

Dorothy Ball is a senior English major and Creative Writing minor from New Orleans, Louisiana.

Rachel Berry is a senior English major and Creative Writing minor from all over North Carolina.

Lindsey Britt is a senior Studio Art major from Rutherfordton, North Carolina.

Bekah Brunstetter is a senior Theater major and Creative Writing minor from Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Jordan Carpenter is a senior Psychology major from HiHsborough, North Carolina.

Erin Fornoff is a senior Anthropology North Carolina.

Alex Freeman is a sophomore Crozet, Virginia.

major from Asheville,

Psychology and Art major from

Zachary Gresham is a senior English major and Crearive Writing minor from Wilkesboro, North Carolina.

Evan Gurney is a senior English major and Creative Writing minor from North Canton, Ohio.

Amber Haslup is a senior Psychology and French major from Cary, Norrh Carolina.

Glenn Hollar is a senior English major and Creative Writing minor from Asheville, North Carolina.

Mela Kirkpatrick is a senior Art History major and Creative Wriring minor from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

ErikaKranz is a junior Philosophy major and Creative Writing minor from Tallahassee, Florida. gretchenkroncke is a senior English major and Creative Writingminor from Wmston-Salem, North Carolina.

Christopher Lamb is a senior English and History Burlington,North Carolina.

major from

Coby Mangum is a senior English major and Creative Writing minor from Greenville, North Carolina.

CameliaMcCandies is a sophomore Communications from Durham, North Carolina.

major

Philip McFee is a sophomore English major and Creative Writingminor from Durham, North Carolina.

Lauren Moseley is a junior Euglish and Psychology major and CreativeWriting minor from Burlington, North Carolina, Rebecca Steele is a senior English major from Signal Mountain, Tennessee.

Erin Jiroff Watson is a freshman English major from Charlotte, North Carolina.

Liz Wmter is a sophomore Journalism and Advertising major from Charlotte, North Carolina.

93

The

Bull's Head