Claire Danny Morales

from Mirage 2020

Calle Fortaleza Fernando Bocanegra

“Yep,” she said as she gulped. I felt the cold, milky ice swim down my throat, as I momentarily stopped eating my chilly treat. “Row, row, row your boat…” I comically sang, moving my arms in a circular motion to match the rowing of an imaginary boat. Claire sat there, staring at me with a stone face. She dropped her popsicle to the ground in front of us. She didn’t even consider reaching down to pick it up. It didn’t faze her. She was too busy hugging me, her little arms wrapped tightly around my rib cage. “Don’t die!” her little voice squeaked. “Sweetie, I’m not going to die,” I said, struggling to say the words, since her hug was strong. Still, I was able to reciprocate the hug. “It scares me,” she said, crying. “I know, I know it does,” I said patting her little back. “You don’t have to worry. I’m going to be A-Okay.” “Promise?” she said, squeezing tighter. “I promise,” I said, still struggling to combine an adequate amount of oxygen into my words. I tapped my right foot in rapid succession. My hands, which were woven across her champagne colored hair, were drenched with perspiration. I couldn’t stand to sit there any longer. I needed a break from it all. If only Claire knew I was just as afraid. I never told her. I knew I couldn’t. Thankfully, she wasn’t able to fully comprehend the meaning behind the dream. She was the lucky one. Sadly, I wasn’t. We got back home, quiet from our day at the park. The sun had already gone down, and the house was quiet. The only light that was on in the house was the one in the living room. I walked Claire back to her room. I hung up her jacket in the closet, and I helped her get dressed into her pajamas. Then, I tucked her into bed. I stood there in the hallway, with the door almost shut, watching her from the small crack. That was when it really hit me. My heart felt like it had been weighed down to the deepest point in the ocean. I felt like it could burst at any minute, due to the imaginary pressure from the chilly waters my imagination decided to invent. I wished more than anything that I could be there to comfort her. To see her grow up. To see her finish elementary school, and go on to middle school, high school, and then on to graduation. To see her get her degree at some prestigious college institution. To see her get married and have a family of her own. I wished more than anything that I would be able to be a part of that reality. However, it didn’t matter. I knew that I couldn’t. I knew that it would come to an end sooner or later. It was just the way things were. As I continued to stand in the hallway, my mind returned back to when we were still at the park. Right after we had gotten our ice cream and sat down on the same bench. “Here,” I said, as I remembered bending down to pick up her popsicle. It was covered in specks of dirt, small pebbles, and grass. I held it up to her face. “I don’t think you want to finish this,” I chuckled.

M I R A G E 2 0 2 0

Claire wiped her red eyes. She sniffled. Her little nose twitched and flared. Slowly, her little crescent smile stretched across her small face, highlighting her rosy cheeks. “You’re funny daddy,” she laughed back a few seconds later.

“I know, I got it!” I said, digging into my flannel shirt pocket. I pulled out an assortment of tissues from a plastic package. I wiped the muck off of the popsicle stick. I handed the stick back to her. Claire looked puzzled and tilted her head to the side like a confused puppy. I reached into my other pocket and pulled out a black permanent marker. Taking off the cap, I handed it to her. “Write your name.” Although she was confused, she obliged and wrote her name in big capital letters across the wooden stick. I swiped it from her little fingers, and I placed the stick into my jean pocket. “My stick?” said Claire, tilting her head to the side like a confused

puppy.

“Wherever I go, I will always carry this stick with me.” I pointed to her heart. “That way, you will never be away from me.” Claire caught me off guard again with another surprise hug of hers. “I love you, daddy,” she said. “Love you too,” I said, as I embraced her. I returned back to resting on the door frame, staring through the slight crack. My hand reached into my pocket. The wooden popsicle stick was still tucked away below my assortment of keys. I must’ve been there, lost in my thoughts, for a few minutes. I could tell because my legs were a bit wobbly. Lub, dub...lub! My heart was beating rapidly. I could hear the thumping noises vibrating through my eyes, and I could feel the pulse in my arm. There was a slight, sharp pain in my head. Not painful, but not pleasant either. I closed my eyes, exhaling through my mouth. “You okay?” said Claire, as she realized I was still there, standing idle at the door. I opened my eyes. Lub, dub…...lub, dub…...lub, dub. My heartbeat was normal. I looked over. My eyes were relaxed. The tension around my head subsided. “Yes, I’m fine, love,” I said, “just fine.” She paused for a moment. Then, she sat up in bed, moving a few of the light strands of hair that were in her face. “I can’t fall asleep,” she said, “can you help me?” “Sure,” I smiled. I laid in her princess bed, my feet dangling off the end because of how small it was. Claire laid her head on my right shoulder; surprisingly, it wasn’t uncomfortable. She rested her right hand on my chest. I could feel the warmth from her hand, the heat pushing past the fabric of my whitetank top. I could hear the little breaths she took when she would inhale and then exhale through her nose. Claire would smack her lips from time to time, and then she would nudge her head up and down, all in the hopes of sleeping comfortably.

M I R A G E 2 0 2 0

My spot on the bed was cold, but I was immediately welcomed by the warmth from the blankets, after I nestled underneath them. I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a proper rest. To anyone else, it would’ve felt bizarre to live many lives. At this point, it was already normal to me. Life had given me the short end. I didn’t know how long I was going to stick around this time. As I laid in her bed, my mind trailed back to another moment. A few months back, before first grade, when Claire had gotten her own room. It was her bedtime. I had rubbed her back, a common sleepy time remedy that would put her out in minutes. I thought she was asleep, since she didn’t say anything when I stopped, and she faced the opposite direction on her right side, so I couldn’t tell if she was awake or not. I got up to shut the door and leave. “Daddy?” said Claire in a low voice. “Yes?” I said back with the same volume. I reverted my gaze to face her staring back at me. “I don’t like the dark,” she said, as she grasped the blankets into her balled up fists. “I’ll help you with that,” I said, shutting the door behind me. I walked a few steps forward over to the side of Claire’s bed. The room was darker than the feathers of a black crow. “I told you I don’t like it!” said Claire with the last words being higher in pitch, indicating that she was annoyed. “That’s why you don’t have to be alone,” I said, lightly pushing her away. “Move, missy,” I joked, while tickling her. “Aah!” squealed Claire, “I hate being tickled!” She moved over, closer to the wall, laughing in the process. The nostalgia only lasted for a while. Soon, I found myself back in the present. “I’ll never leave you,” I whispered. I knew she couldn’t hear me. “I promise.” I lightly kissed her forehead. She didn’t move. In conjunction with her lip smacking, her breathing, her body heat, and the constant ticking, coming from the pink clock in front of us, hung up on the wall, I eventually dozed off. I woke up in the morning. I could hear the trickling of water. My back ached. I had been sleeping on something rough. There were ridges underneath me. I looked up and saw the bright, orange morning sky. I sat up, trying to stabilize myself, as I bellowed from side to side. There were trees scattered around in every direction. I realized I was floating downstream in a kayak. It was then that I grew into a panic. My hands shuffled around, as I quickly searched everywhere for it. Because of my slow recovery from the drowsiness, it took me a few seconds, but there, next to my legs, was a paddle. I felt relieved. I continued downstream. The huge trees waved their branches in the breeze, almost as if they were wishing me a safe voyage. The sun beamed down on the orange water that I was in. I heard squawking from above. I looked up. Hundreds of migrating birds flew into the peach

M I R A G E 2 0 2 0

colored sky. I inhaled deeply. That natural pine scent was unmistakable. The whole scene looked like it had been ripped straight out of a postcard. A few minutes later, I reached land and exited the kayak, leaving the oar behind. The sounds of birds chirping, the snapping of the twigs I stepped on, and the buzzing of bees entered the airwaves. I stumbled around a bit, until I finally rested the side of my arm on the branch of a tall, slender tree. Surprisingly, I wasn’t panicked at all. I remember I stood there motionless, lost in the beautiful outdoors, alone with the magical notes from the forest. I could remember my name. I could remember how to do small things, like tie my shoes and drive a car. It was a miracle my memory hadn’t tossed the important task of breathing out the window, or I’d be history. While I could remember almost everything, there was something I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember my life. In that moment, my demeanor changed. There was no recollection of memories. Childhood birthday parties didn’t ring any bells in my mind. I couldn’t remember the first girl I had ever kissed. I couldn’t even remember if I had ever graduated from college. A swarm of uncertainty hit me. My mind raced from question to question. Answers were not a want, they were a need. I felt a dull pain in my stomach. I pulled away from the branch. The once peaceful melodies that sprang from mother nature were now taunting me. The buzzing from the bees grew louder. The wind whistled sharply in my ear, forcing me to cover them, almost as if I was a mad man in an asylum. I turned around and around in circles. I swear that, for one moment, the trees had grotesque faces, and their branches shook towards me in the air, rooting for my own peril. I couldn’t handle it. I gravitated towards a log that was nearby. I sat on the log with my eyes shut closed. My body was shaking. To take my mind off of it, I started to tap my toe in a rapid succession. I took a deep breath and exhaled, repeating the process again and again. I couldn’t remember how long I sat there, attempting to calm myself down. There’s got to be something, I thought to myself. My hands were dripping with sweat. All I need is a memory. Just a single memory will do. I rested my chin on my right fist and pouted in defeat. I grabbed a few leaves in my hands and threw them in the air, and they were carried away by the wind. Just as I did that, my hands fell back down and slapped my legs. It was then that I felt it. There was an object in my jean pocket. I pulled it out and studied it in my hands. It was a popsicle stick with a name written in marker. It looked like a child had written their name. “Claire,” I read out loud. Where have I heard that name before? It sounds familiar, but I just can’t remember. As I held the stick, a gust of wind knocked it out of my hand. The popsicle stick fell to the ground, but it was facing the opposite side. There was a ten-digit number on the back, written in permanent marker; though, the writing for the numbers looked different than the

M I R A G E 2 0 2 0

name. I picked it up and stared at the numbers. It was a phone number. My eyes grew wide, and my mouth opened up like a cartoon character. In an instant, a memory was ingrained into my head. My mind travelled back in time to when Claire and I were at the park. Claire had just written her name in big capital letters across the popsicle stick. I swiped it from her little fingers, and I placed the stick into my jean pocket. After we hugged, Claire ran to a nearby water fountain to have a drink. I took out the stick from my pocket and flipped it over. Maybe, I should write down the house phone number, I thought to myself. I wrote down the ten-digit number in marker and placed it back into my pocket, as Claire came running back from the fountain. My mind returned to staring at the phone number, while sitting on the log. I jumped up from the log. The adrenaline coursed through every single vein in my body. I held my arms out high. “I remember!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. In that moment, I heard a bell ring in the distance, and what sounded like a door being shut after it. It didn’t seem far away. I dashed into the direction of the sound, and I was amazed to see a little convenient store. There was a bell hanging on the door, which would alert the arrival of customers. From where I left the kayak, I couldn’t see the store because it was hidden behind a large group of trees. I made it to the front door and the bell echoed. “Can I help you?” asked a female employee behind the desk. She looked on edge because I almost flew through the glass of the door. “May I use your phone?” I answered back. “Uh, sure, it’s right there on the wall,” she pointed behind me. “Thank you,” I smiled back. The employee offered a little smile that quickly faded. I walked up to the phone. The adrenaline in my body was disappearing, but my heart was beating out of control. I gripped the handle of the phone with immense pressure in my right hand, as I lifted it up to my ear. I licked my lips out of nervous habit. My finger was shaking up and down, as I slowly pushed down the buttons, entering the entire phone number. A tear trickled down my face. I rested my hand on the wall and put my head down. I could hear the phone ringing. There was a slight chance it would work. Before I had met Claire, I had tried to contact the other people through the phone, but the numbers either didn’t exist or someone completely different answered on the other end. The phone had already rung a few times now. No one had answered yet. It was early morning, and Claire’s mother was usually in bed up until noon. If anyone would answer, it would be Claire. I exhaled, as the phone continued to ring. Come on, pick up the phone, pick up the phone! My eyes were shut the entire time. Waiting to hear the next ring on the phone felt like an eternity. I put my shoulders down. I was discouraged. All of my hope had almost been depleted. Please…someone… answer for me. A second later, someone picked up the phone. I opened my eyes. I heard that unmistakable, little voice on the other end of the phone. I smiled a joy I had never felt before.

M I R A G E 2 0 2 0

The Battle of the Bar Jay Melzer 2nd Place, Prose, Student Contest

Twenty-five is probably too young to be writing memoirs, but I figure that if by that age you’ve already got stories that might belong in one someday, you’re probably living life well, so there’s no harm in practicing. My first job in Arizona was as a dishwasher at a bar (name and location undisclosed), and I quit for a number of reasons. Late paychecks and stiffed tips were two, inconsistent managements after another. The decapitated bobcat head may also have been a factor, but it ultimately came down to cockroaches. Despite all these pitfalls of the job, I liked working on weekends. It meant I had free admission to live music every shift, and drunk show-goers can always be counted on to order fries and a burger and never so much as touch them. I wasn’t too proud. Maybe not sanitary, but this was a step above a dive, and the hygienic questionability of the few fries a customer might have stuck their fingers in couldn’t compare to that final night before I gave it up for good. As a note, I wrote this before coronavirus – dive bar or no, I would no longer advise eating strange, second-hand food. It was a Sunday night – a Monday morning, really. Closing time, and the cook and I were cleaning the kitchen while the bartender wiped things down in the dining area. We had been seeing roaches crawling around all night. One or two were unavoidable in this location, but I had spotted half a dozen over the course of the shift. The cook and I decided early on that at the end of the night we would take some extra time to bleach-mop the floors, because we knew the boss would never shell out for an exterminator and were both too nice for our own good. The least we could do was try to get ahead of the problem and clean up after the little bastards. Two a.m. came around, and we had everything else squared away – time to break out the mop. Five-foot-three and reasonably aware of my shortcomings, I went for the bucket and left it to the cook to move around all the heavy appliances for me. We got behind the fryer and under the oven, bleached down the walls while we were at it, and with perfect comedic timing, I made a crack about the roaches only appearing when we were too busy to do anything about it. Then the cook moved the deli box. And with the zeal of Moses leading the Jews forth out of Egypt, a biblical exodus of cockroaches surged out over our feet. I, of course, screamed, and the pole-vaulting jig I pulled as I white-knuckled the mop handle was an acrobatic feat I have never replicated before or since. When the bartender barreled through the doorway to find out what the hell was happening back there, this was the scene she walked in on: the cook, river dancing Michael Flatley’s reputation to pieces on top of a carpet of cockroaches; me, the lifelong entomophobe, ululating and smacking at the walls with a mop, skipping from piece to piece of bare tile across a wet floor, determined that I’d rather slip and break my neck than allow so much as a single antenna to touch me. She immediately turned around and walked right back out. Her betrayal stung me to the core. We were abandoned to our fate by a sister-in-arms, but as despair broke over me like a wave and the riptide of panic sucked at my feet, she returned. Like a battle-maiden out of legend, her foes parted before her, a nasty, brown, skittering sea. Dual-wielding cans of Raid like Lara Croft irresponsibly executing an endangered tiger, the bartender emerged into the kitchen. For fifteen minutes we swatted, sprayed, and stomped – the bartender and I with Raid in hand, the cook snapping a wet towel to knock down the roaches clinging to the ceiling. All told, the Battle of the Bar lasted about half an hour, and in our moment of triumph we stood atop a pile of corpses wide enough to fill four foot-square tiles. Actually, we stood very far away from it. And then we took pictures, which we texted to our boss. After coming down from a good panic attack I informed the cook that if we didn’t get some kind of bonus for this, I was leaving. Did I have another job ready? Nope. Did I care? Absolutely not. I had faced my worst nightmare in righteous combat; the fear of social conflict was nothing to me now. For the next week the boss managed by some black sacrament to avoid being in the bar longer than a few minutes at a time, always when the staff were too busy to pin her down for a confrontation. Knowing my father would be spinning in his future grave, I tendered my resignation by text message, and within a week I was replaced by some other poor schmo willing to put up with the job for a few months. A week after that, I discovered that having made cornbread at a bar was apparently enough experience to get in at a real bakery, and four years later I now hold the senior position there. For those of you who stuck with me this far because you wanted to hear about the decapitated bobcat, that incident was oddly less dramatic. Some guy left it on the bar in a paper sack on a Thursday afternoon, and a different bartender had the misfortune of checking to see what was inside. As far as we could tell it was fresh, but the strange part was that the boss seemed knowingly exasperated rather than surprised. I never did get the full story there – she left it on the enigmatic phrase, “I’ll take care of this” – but it makes for a good hook. Granted, playing Dances-With-Roaches wasn’t particularly funny at the time, but given the benefits I derived from it after the fact, I have the bizarre honor of being happy for the experience. In order to be an interesting person, you have to experience interesting things. You don’t grow a good life out of unbroken, sterile soil, and the future becomes pretty unintimidating when you’ve already handled worse.