Creative Writing Award-Winning Pieces

Mojave Whiskey Weather

We usually start the game by turning up the heat too high in our cramped off­campus apartment. What we choose to eat before we play Mojave really depends on the night we’re having and how many guests are at our party/gathering.

According to Mark who I don’t trust, a social gathering becomes a party when a beer­pong table comes into play. However, party games are still allowed at social gatherings, we just don’t call them “gathering games” because it makes us sound like we belong to a Young Adult apocalyptic fiction evil society. So they’re still party games.

Mojave is a drinking game we play, obviously, since that’s a component of any party game. We used to call it Mojave Whiskey Weather, but that was too much of a mouthful and Anais invented the name and she’s working now so we don’t say the full name anymore. At least I don’t.

Me and Mark and Alexa and Will are the only ones who play it, though we’ve tried to teach Sam but he falls asleep after eating so he isn’t very good at Mojave. And it isn’t really a fun game anymore since we know each other so well, so we need to find a bunch of people we don’t know to make the game work. Plus I live with enough people as it is, so I don’t need people coming over every other week to eat my stash of Ruffles. Another thing that’s tough about the game is that we have to play it every other Friday night, cause that’s how the rules work.

Anais mentioned that’s how it has to work two years ago. She invented the game so she knows better. But like I said, she works now. So we play every other Friday because of Anais who’s out in the real world now and doesn’t really check in that often. Alexa keeps complaining that the heat is shrinking her tracksuits but otherwise the game hasn’t changed from when we played it freshman year in Jack’s place in Chelsea.

Alexa sat me down and asked if I want to play Mojave anymore cause I usually mope when we play it, and I just say I’m tired because I am but there’s other stuff too. I’m not lying when I say I’m tired, nobody is, people just say they’re tired when something else is causing them to lose sleep so we don’t have to talk about our problems to people we don’t like anymore.

I’m tired means we ate some bad guac and threw up last night.

I’m tired means our professor is giving us too much work and we should be doing it but we’re not and just watching Simpsons reruns.

I’m tired means our girlfriend or boyfriend hooked up with someone else and we’re pretending to be okay with it since we never had the conversation that said we’re dating exclusively.

Mojave helps get rid of the “I’m tireds” since it gets you drunk and when you’re drunk you can talk about your problems and not just say I’m tired. We learn that we all hated the same professor who is somehow an integral part of our studies, for example.

But again, it’s not a fun game anymore, at least for me, since we just play it as a formality now. We should invite new people, but I’m set in my ways and Mark doesn’t like anyone and Will cancels pretty much every day now and Alexa works too much and talks too little. And Anais and Quentin and Ray don’t talk about playing it when they stop by either.

Mark called out sick, so just me and Alexa are playing Mojave tonight. I sit on my couch and she sits on chair we found in a dumpster behind a Raymour and Flanigan. We’ve been here awhile but we don’t say anything for a long time and then we go to our rooms and go to sleep.

Hemingway and John Wayne Walk into a Bar

Hemingway has shot a wild boar in some almost empty place.

Wayne has shot a wild film in an equally almost empty place.

Each man holds a taxidermied dead trophy of their art and their presence in an almost empty place. Hemingway and his wild boar and Wayne and his wild…..movie poster.

Hemingway does not think to offer the boar head a drink of whiskey; Wayne does not think to offer his poster a drink of whiskey.

In the bar where Hemingway and John Wayne drink, there are thousands of trophies on the wall behind the bar. A few deer mounted on plaques, a full stuffed jack rabbit, a pay-phone booth with a pin up girl on the side, license plates, so many crumpled pieces of metal.

Common décor elements of the honky-tonk bar. You hear about them in the songs. Where the homesteader, the hunter, the oil man sit down to relieve the weight on their broad shoulders, the weight of feeling like they have to go on and fill spaces.

But back to the bar where Hemingway and John Wayne drink. Men have shot holes in the walls and filled them with snap-shots and shots of whiskey. Other deep voices affirm them from the juke box.

Hemingway and John Wayne are sitting at this bar with a boar’s head and a movie poster.

Now I forgot where I was headed with this joke.

To the Cemetery Voices—

Dead men, don’t mischaracterize me.

That is a form of conquest. I’m sure you haven’t thought about it that way yet.

You inhabit six square feet of earth thanklessly.

And I am luckless standing talking to graves because they cannot talk over me, and finally I can step foot on the spaces you claimed.

Mapmaking Trying to make a map, a few men with compasses searched for the longitude.

The latitude, the light source, the law even.

Trying to make a map, they measure the direction and speed of the wind.

Trying to make a map, they carry two guns, a little bag of gold coins, and a 14 year old who does not speak their language.

Trying to make a map, they hang a man.

Trying still to make a map, they write country songs, naming all the cities and their roads and lakes. Trying still to make a map, they make a dictionary. Trying still to make a map, they make history. One day, trying still to make a map, they send a man to the moon.

Trying to make a map, I crawl on my belly like snakes must only slow. Trying to make a map, I draw with my little pencil every time I go up some hills. Rather than cross the river I follow it down, back up, all the way up. By the time I’m done I don’t know where those hills went. By the time I’m done I don’t remember east or west. Rivers go to the ocean but I don’t know where the ocean was, if it was up or down, if it still is.

Suddenly what’s in front of me is behind me, and so how can I make a map? The land is changing with the wind.

Inventory

Glancing down at a hand with only four fingers, you knew how the fifth one got lobbed off or caught. Knowing bits of that finger are probably still in Oklahoma, wedged into the pulley of the auger.

Glancing up and seeing a face with only one eye, you knew under the patch there might be some burns from the rifle backfiring, and that maybe if he closed the good one he could still see what the other one was seeing—bloody grass, or the shoes of a doctor.

Glancing at those missing teeth, one or two replaced with gold, you knew that horse probably ran right off with them, with blood still staining the hoof.

I try to look at myself to put my finger on what’s missing, where it went, how it was lost. There are subtle signs—faded bruises in the dark clouds, some gentle handfuls of grass pulled out from me, and if you can make it up to the rocky knees and brush off the snow, jagged small scars and splinters.

“Between-ness” 184. Writing is, in fact, an astonishing equalizer. I could have written half of these propositions drunk or high, for instance, and half sober; I could have written half in agonized tears, and half in a state of clinical detachment. But now that they have been shuffled around countless times— now that they have been made to appear, at long last, running forward as one river—how could either of us tell the difference?

-Maggie Nelson, Bluets 1 1. “Something” 2 happens between two people thinking about different things in the same space. Perhaps I’m finding what this “something” is. Perhaps I’m finding how to approach this “something”: how to get closer to you without emptying the space between us of its valuable emptiness.

2. I share a classroom with another student. Me reading; her writing. She listens to music, which she offers to turn off. I tell her it’s fine. I don’t notice the music as I read.

3. I’m reading Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious. It’s a library copy, so I don’t annotate it. A previous borrower allowed himself this luxury; his annotations are scrunched and messy, written in faded pencil. I only read some of them.

4. The other student packs her things to leave. As she nears me, I look up, gauging if this situation requires parting words. We don’t make eye contact, but I cannot re-start reading until she leaves. Opening the door, she says “goodbye”; I say, “Have a good night.” This situation required parting words. I begin reading, again. After she leaves, I make my first annotation. I write the word ‘Affect’ next to Jameson’s words: “The increasing abstraction of visual art … constitutes a Utopian compensation for everything lost in the process of the development of capitalism—the place of quality in an increasingly quantified world, the place of the archaic and of feeling…” 3 5. While reading in a library, I often look up from my book to the others around me. Looking away from a book enhances its qualitative material presence. Seldom do I return to the page and pick up exactly where I left. My thoughts admit other people, parting words, scrunched pencil lines, drawing me towards or away from the printed words. I fixate on the others around me, but I also fixate on the words on the page.

6. I annotated in miniscule letters. As I find them just now, to cite Jameson here, my handwriting blends into text and other annotations. But my annotation felt like human contact.

7. We annotate in the past tense.

1

Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. 74.

Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. 2.

3 Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. 236.

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8. Two people sit at the same table reading the same books. There is a relationship between the content of these two books.

9. Two people sit at the same table reading different books. There is a relationship between the content of these two books.

10. We say “the same,” as in “the same books,” but we don’t say “the different,” as in “the different books.” “The different books” means “the different” thing.

11. As a young child, I lie in bed with my mother. I’m reading, but I sneak glances at her book.

This is the first time I remember reading a swear word in a printed book. In her book, one character calls another a “bastard.” Several pages later, one character calls another (the same? the different?) a “son of a bitch.” I do not remember anything in particular about the book I read at the time.

12. I write this alone in bed. In the next room, a roommate watches a movie. I hear a woman’s voice, her French accent, ominous music, movement, but I don’t know what’s happening.

Writing this in that room, I might know what she’s doing.

13. Libraries are places where people do serious academic work. They are also places where people go for free wifi. Free wifi allows people to do serious academic work.

14. Writing this in a library, I might have written the same things, or I might have written the different things. “[H]ow could either of us tell the differen[ts]?”

15. The materiality of a printed book establishes a shared space for readers in libraries and used bookstores. They may find the leftover annotations of previous readers, faded or legible; they may leave their own annotations for future readers.

16. I bought a used copy of Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely because a previous user boxed these lines: Define loneliness?

Yes It’s what we can’t do for each other. 4 I felt emptiness—but not loneliness—as I read those lines. I wanted to fill this emptiness I bought the book. The previous owner boxed those words, and I read her box. (Was the box empty?) Weeks later, I showed the book to a friend. He pointed out that she excluded the page’s other stanza from her box: What do we mean to each other?

What does a life mean?

Why are we here if not for each other?

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Rankine, Claudia. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. 62.

17. In a library, I imagine the different people often think the same thoughts about the different books. Some of these thoughts may be: “This is an interesting book”; “This is a boring book”; or “Thank God for this free wifi.”

18. Is a library a lonely place? How many people feel lonely in a library? If loneliness is “what we can’t do for each other,” what do we “do for each other” in a library?

19. To Rankine, what occurs between each other? Is it love? Does love inhabit the library? Am I in love with the people in the room with me as I read? Do I imagine meeting a soul mate, partner, or hook-up in a library? How do these differ from reading a book in the same room as someone?

20. If I cite Fredric Jameson in an essay, should I also cite the previous borrower who annotated the copy I read? Am I in love with this previous borrower?

21. I’m in the same classroom. The same student is here. Now, I write. She does math problems. She doesn’t know I’m writing about her. If I did math problems, would I do math problems about her? Do we always write about somebody when we are in the same room as them?

22. I direct these questions towards the intimacy inherent in sharing a table, room, or library with an other. The material presence of a human body shares space like the material presence of a book. When the free wifi breaks down, we turn away from our loneliness and do something for each other.

23. Claudia Rankine writes in an interview with Lauren Berlant: “What happens when I stand close to you? What’s your body going to do? What’s my body going to do? On myriad levels, we are both going to fail, fail, fail each other and ourselves.” 5 They conducted this interview via email; presumably at least one of them used free wifi. Between them, the space, opened by the interview, causes Rankine’s ‘you’ to engorge itself on their readers.

Who fails, fails, fails? The tripled action encompasses both Rankine and Berlant, but the third failure invites readers into their intimate failure. Two people fail to fail sufficiently for Rankine’s fail, fail, failure. In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, her ‘We’ feels more intimate than her interviewed ‘You.’ She exists in the same space with ‘We,’ yet ‘You’ expands in the published interview.

24. In Bluets, Nelson explores eroticism between lovers, but that’s not what primarily concerns Rankine. I think they explore some of the same thing, though.

25. Hoping for conclusions, I return to that classroom, seeking that other student. After I open the door, I see that she’s not there.

26. To Nelson, “Writing is, in fact, an astonishing equalizer.” Nelson realizes this after recalling Goethe’s worries about “the destructive effects of writing.” 6 As I write this,

5 6

http://bombmagazine.org/article/10096/claudia-rankine Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. 74.

maybe I’m “equalizing” me and that other student: to show that something happened between me and her, but also between her and me.

27. I can write down certain events of significance, but I can also leave others out. I create a coherent narrative, destroying memories that don’t fit.

28. Writing creates intimacy, but intimacy does not only result from writing. Instead, this written intimacy illuminates the intimacy we feel when we don’t write, read, or leave space between us.

29. Inevitably, we turn back to our books (when did we turn to them in the first place?). We begin reading, again. This ‘we’ only accumulates specific plurals I’ve shared with you. I only remember the times I, I, I fail, fail, fail you, you, you. We are always the different you. We always fail the different way. We always turn back to the different place in the different book, our cumulative failures weighing the pages down.

Word count: 1447

The Distance Between Two Skins She remembered the hard pavement wedged against the base of her skull. She remembered choking on copper-tinted gasoline, the smell pooling into the back of her throat and that made no sense, she had ordered pasta. In her peripheral vision she thought she saw a flickering light, but when she tried to turn her head she felt a wetness behind her ear. It must be sweat. It was hot, the news had said it would be hot, Paavo had worked out shirtless because— and then there were voices and a screeching noise like a broken violin. She felt herself lifted onto something soft, and she remembered she looked up at a black heavens and was surprised by the stars. Just like the lights on the freeway, she thought. Just like Paavo’s eyes.

*****

Marion arrived before the first snowfall. Her feet creaked on the soil, and ice splintered off the front railing at the touch of her bare fingertip. Olga opened the door with a warm ‘ello.

Marion carried her boxes to the second bedroom, and when dinnertime rolled around there was hot soup and a cherry pie. Marion ate the soup, but when she looked at the pie she saw trees at the pinnacle of spring, the ground frosted by pale pink petals. Paavo had been careful not to step on them. She put her fork down and tried not to remember his high cheekbones, his blush under a setting sun, his hair soft against her cheek.

Instead she remembered her mother in Olga’s handsome face. Twice a day there was a knock at her bedroom door, and Olga offered Marion a glass of milk. It makes you strong, Marion remembered each time she put the glass to her lips. Her mother had said so every

morning at breakfast. Marion dreamed one night of the wooden church, clutching at her mother’s hand during the homily and peering curiously at Mr. Fred in the first row. Mother had never talked to Mr. Fred—no one ever talked to Mr. Fred. But Marion remembered him because he always had a gallon of milk in his lap and a Vietnam Vet cap on his head. All through the homily he went glug, glug, glug. He seemed the strongest man in the world, drinking milk beneath the eyes of God. Marion unpacked her last box halfway through February. For a long moment she stared at the cardboard bottom and wondered when she’d decided to move into her new room. The house was deathly quiet; Olga had gone to the grocery store. Marion put her head in the box and listened to the way the air staled around her ears, her pulse thrumming against her eardrum. Padum, pa-dum, pa-dum. Only in the maddening quiet the noise sounded wrong, like the last dum sputtered out into an oh, and suddenly Marion was sure her heart was whispering Paa-vo, Paavo, Paa-vo.

Olga found her curled up on the floor of the bedroom, laughing hysterically into the empty box. With a tsk, she chivvied Marion off the floor and tossed the boxes to the side of the road for pick-up the next morning. Marion apologized and, embarrassed, she volunteered to make the salad. But Olga shooed her away and told her to sit by the fireplace. As Marion watched the flames flicker in the grate, a tightness grew at the base of her skull. Had there been flames at the accident? She couldn’t remember. She went to bed early that evening, but once she was under the covers she found herself staring restlessly at the ceiling. Were there flames? Did I burn? At midnight she got up and let herself out of the house, retrieving a box that hadn’t disintegrated in the slush. She carried it up the steps and placed it at the end of her bed, where she sat across from it in the dark and stared into its maw by the scant moonlight. That is not me,

Marion told herself as she peered into the box’s depths. In the silence her heart replied: Paa-vo, Paa-vo, Paa-vo.

The soil thawed as leaves crept back to the treetops. Marion refused to open her window, for fear the scent of a new flower would upend her daily routine. Each morning she cooked breakfast, wiped the counters, and set off with Olga to the bakery. Hour after hour she filled a plastic tube with white frosting and inserted it into a steaming cupcake. The frosting entered the cake with a wet squelch, the hollow center bulging until it nearly burst. Don’t overfill the cakes, Olga constantly reminded her. But to Marion, they never seemed full enough.

In early April Marion stopped by the carpenter’s shop. The moment she stepped through the door, she knew she’d made a mistake. Her shopping list fluttered to the floor as the man at the counter offered her a discount on figurines. He had dark hair and broad palms, the skin around his nails toughened by labor, and dizzily Marion remembered Paavo promising her the kid won’t have to work like I do. She had wanted a sailboat for the baby’s room, she told the shopkeeper in a trembling voice. He grinned and offered her congratulations, insisting she pay half price. Before she understood what she was doing she had put cash on the counter, and then the wooden ship was safe in her palm; it had cotton sails and a tiny anchor on a blue string. It occurred to Marion that she would never know what color to paint the baby’s room. That’s what she told Olga when she stumbled through the front door. She would never know.

It got worse after that. The ship stayed on her windowsill, and Marion started to wish she had a second room. Rain swept in with the spring, and the house creaked under the onslaught.

Some days Marion thought it must have its own ghosts, a skeleton mourning a half-baked family.

She had never asked about Olga’s children; she didn’t know if they had lived here, if any child had slept in her bed. The roof leaked even in the lightest downpour. Marion often watched, dry-

eyed, as the water splashed into a rusted bucket. Plip, plip, plip. Sometimes she thought the house was in tears.

Sometimes at night she saw her—or maybe it was him—or maybe it was a her, she’d always secretly hoped for a girl—sitting at the wooden table. Standing next to Olga in the kitchen. Crawling into the bed that Marion slept in. Leaping into the arms of her father, who must know her, somewhere, wherever dead fathers could hold dead babies. In these moments Marion would simply put her hands against her belly and walk outside.

The due date had been April thirtieth. When the day dawned, Marion accidentally knocked the sailboat off her windowsill while trying to open the curtains. She picked the boat up with trembling fingers and discovered that the wooden anchor had wrenched free of the blue string. Stupid, Marion thought to herself wildly. I should have worn the seatbelt.

There was an odd, tight feeling in her ribcage, so Marion let herself out of the house and began to walk.

And walk.

And walk.

She kept going for a long time, through the uniform fields of corn. When the sun went down she looked up at the dark sky, and even here, where the city could be nothing but a bloodwashed memory, the stars looked like gravestones—lighted rafts in an eternal ocean, too stubborn to accept that one day they would impale on the rocks of time, blink into supernovas, and disappear.

They were separated by nothing but space—space the width of Marion’s thumb. She held up her hand and placed it carefully between two bright lights. You have no right, Marion thought, glaring at the black abyss between the stars. But of course the sky would go on being as the sky

had always been, the lights separated by a distance that seemed trivial at a glance. Only Marion knew better now. The stars seemed close enough to touch one another—they could see and be seen, but they would implode alone, surrounded by a distance impossible to comprehend, the distance between two skins.

She made it back to the house by midnight. The living room windows waited for her, beckoning her out of the gloom. Marion put her hand to the doorknob, but it twisted beneath her grasp and opened, the light bleeding from the doorway into the dark night. Come in, Olga said gently as she ushered Marion inside, and have a glass of milk.

Female Perversion

In heated steam, I look at myself through his eyes

Danni Hu-Yang My hair in a stranger’s hands At a beauty salon on the end of Canal Street Comfort water Silently touched My mind whirls into a bath in heated steam where I become Him he retells,

My hair in her hands First time my hair being washed Slowly in time Her hands pressed down the sides of my head Strong fingers Tenderly lifted Strange rhythm Familiarly run Scent of the gingery shampoo Weaved into each of my long Curls I become a tiny little ball in her hands She plays with it in Any way she likes When I was a child I could wear mama’s dress I grow up into a man Waiting for Her to come And force me into a girl again

These golden threads turn soft across my hands I am a woman without finger nails I kneaded his temples till his eyelashes quivered Above my senses My tiny little ball Slowly utters each word into my ear like a child I held his waist There we fight in our Playground Both at the age of fiftytwo We become Childhood best friends

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It is 1967, and the Cultural Revolution in China is purging suspected anti­communist sentiment at every level, from Party leaders to the common people. Communal farms are experiencing influxes of city­folk that arrive as farmhands. Some of the city­dwellers have volunteered out of patriotism and solidarity; others have been ousted from the cities for 'harboring bourgeois sentiments.' Either way, the farmers regard them as incompetent at best.

Mo Yun doesn't pay much attention to politics, and the rest of the commune is dealing with the newcomers. Mo Yun has been busy with her patients, and her current case is puzzling her. She plops a toddler's legs on her lap, using one of her calloused hands to hold up the sick child's stiff neck. The girl has stopped crying only because she has lost consciousness. Mo Yun lets out a sigh of relief: the strange, high­pitched crying made it hard to think.

Mo Yun has long had a gift for taking care of the things around her.

She and her older brother Mo Zi survived the Great Leap Forward, but their parents did not. They died within weeks of each other in 1958, in the midst of the Three Year Famine. She was very young at the time, and there were many things she did not understand. If she were older, she might have known that the potatoes her mother cooked for them were hoarded illegally, that her parents were not eating for their children's sakes. If she had seen other villages, she might have known that hers was only one of thousands of farm communes across China facing massive starvation. If she were privy to the cycles of history, she might have known that the Famine was the consequence of a few policymakers' short­sighted effort to exploit farm labor to make cities into socialist utopias, that similar man­made famines had occurred in lands far from her own. She might have been angry like her brother was, who, in spite of the censorship and propaganda, was old enough to understand that there was something unjust in their parents' deaths.

Mo Zi had already been helping with the farm, but at age 16 he found himself entirely responsible for the farm and his 10­year­old sister. He found that bitterness without hope for retribution made life impossible to

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bear, so he tried to protect his sister from such feelings. He encouraged her to do well in school and to accept the propaganda presented to her, and he taught her to think only about things in her life that she had some control over. She grew up a happy child, and she managed to finish her schooling years early while still helping her brother farm. She thought that the death of one’s parents was a natural part of growing up, especially since many other children in the commune had the same experience.

For their commune, 1965 was a year of disease. A fungal infection was ravaging the potatoes. On the human side, a few of the villagers, including Mo Zi, contracted a bowel disease. Mo Yun took over her brother's farming duties and organized the villagers to raise enough money to send the sick farmers to the closest hospital. That harvest, the commune's potatoes grew more bountifully than they ever had. Her brother returned from the hospital quickly, explaining that he only needed to take a pill to recover from the snail parasite.

A city bureaucrat came to the commune, advertising a program that would train farmers in basic paramedical services. The commune put its support behind Mo Yun. After six months of training at the nearby army hospital, she aced the certification test and returned to the commune a 'barefoot doctor,’ the term for farmer­paramedics.

By 1967, she had only been a barefoot doctor for a year, but it had been an eventful year: she taught the commune classes on hygiene in her tent, she delivered a few babies, including her brother's wife's, and she organized the effort to line the communal well with bricks to prevent water contamination. Her tent is stocked with herbal remedies, and she finds herself spending more time in the tent than on the farm.

Earlier today, Liu Qi, a sweet but nervous neighbor, presented to Mo Yun her 2­year­old niece visiting from the city. The girl, nicknamed Nana, has a high fever, a bump on her head, an unusually shrill cry that sometimes turns into a moan, and a stiff neck. Mo Yun had to request for the aunt to leave, for her nervous ramblings seem to make Nana cry even more.

Mo Yun remembers that in training the city doctor taught them all sorts of precautionary measures to

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protect themselves from the contagions of their patients. Letting a coughing child sit in her lap certainly would have been unacceptable to the city doctor. But she hated the idea of being separated from her patients; she believes that tenderness is essential to good health and should not be forgotten. Furthermore, she has always had a hardy immune system, and seasonal illnesses never affected her. So she keeps Nana in her lap as she determines her next course of action. Nana is small even for her age and has thin, pale skin, and Mo Yun imagines that she will likely retain this skin if she continues to grow up in the city.

Mo Yun does not often reminisce (her brother trained her to think that thinking about the past is dangerous for the healthy mind), but the crying actually reminds her of the shadow puppet plays that occasionally came to her village as a child. A troupe would set up a screen and a light, and the puppets behind the screen acted out Chinese folktales. She loved these plays for the most part, but she found the men's use of falsetto to sing as female characters to be quite grating. Nana's crying sounds exactly like those female characters, especially when wailing after a death.

C.I.A. analysts from the other half of the world are tracking the 1967 meningitis epidemic, suspecting that its spread is due to recent surge of revolutionaries, who have been moving from city to city. It is a matter of international diplomacy: the United States will attempt to improve relations with Red China by opening the trade of antibiotics, but China will snub the offer, instead asking for help from European and other Asian countries. At the same time, Chinese officials are trying to suppress reports about an outbreak to prevent a panic, and they are fairly successful, considering that all media is state­controlled.

Mo Yun has little awareness of her role in the currents of history. She does not even know what diagnosis to make for Nana. All she knows is that her arsenal of herbal remedies will not work, and she has to take her to the army hospital in a nearby village. She borrows one of the commune's horses and sets off, toddler strapped against her back.

The People's Liberation Army runs the hospital; the personnel wear military caps with their white coats.

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The hospital is full of children with the same illness: the diagnosis is meningitis, and it is treatable. But the hospital is in chaos. Nana's shrill, mournful cry is compounded twentyfold. The crying pierces from every direction. Mo Yun feels trapped, as though she is in the world behind the puppet theater screen.

Mo Yun has been at this hospital before—in fact, she did her six months of training here—but this time she feels deeply and viscerally unsettled. The unbearable crying takes her mind places it had not gone before.

The People's Liberation Army insignia on a nurse's cap reminds her of the soldiers who used to come to the commune every harvest during the Great Leap Forward and take a share of the commune's crops. She remembers propaganda posters of the time that featured farmers carrying giant baskets of crops to cities bustling with industry. Now the propaganda posters go the other way: city­folk are directed to be farmhands in the countryside. For what purpose? Solidarity? The city­folk who have arrived on her commune are too delicate for farm labor, and some of them don't even want to be there. A good portion of them, lacking the typical farmer's immune system, will likely get sick before the next harvest, much like Nana. She realizes how much of life is out of her control.

She imagines Chairman Mao, who in posters is always enormous and glowing in the sky, playing with the hundreds of millions of people below him as though they were shadow puppets. For the first time in her life, Mo Yun feels bitterness.

Washing Jean Jackets in West Jeff Bo Fisher

“Cotton washes his jean jackets with rocks. He told me always to wait for the

Laundromat lady to go out for her cigarette before going in. There’s a deli across the street from the Laundromat on Lewis that you can wait outside, he says. But it has to be the one on Lewis. Cotton says that when he washed his jean jacket at the

Laundromat on Forte, the man who runs the place called Dad, and I don’t know what Dad did but I know Cotton didn’t go to school for the rest of the week. I know mom left not long after that.

“When Aunt Denise gave me my jean jacket for Christmas, Dad told me not to

wash it like Cotton does. If I did, he said, I’d meet God just as Cotton did. I said that sounded boring, but Cotton told me I didn’t know who God was. He said that He

wasn’t a person I wanted to meet. He told me all of this the night before he left for Wyoming.

“My name’s Quinn. Dad is Cotton Morris Sr. and that girl who ran away is,

well, I don’t know her name. She don’t go to my school. But I can help you find her if you promise not to tell Dad. She didn’t do nothing, anyway. She was just curious, is all. She’d seen my pockets sinking all heavy and stuff and I guess thought I was

funny looking. That’s what she said, anyway, that I was funny looking, standing there with rocks in my pockets and my jean jacket slung over my arm.

“I wanted my jean jacket to look just like Cotton’s. He said it was important,

too. If I went to school wearing that thing the way it was, all dark blue and stiff and

stuff, he said I’d get beat up, that nobody wore them like that. If I was lucky, he said,

they’d just steal it. Cotton told me it was stupid to ask Aunt Denise for a jacket, said

he was going to get me one anyway, that the Goodwill was just out of them, is all. He said he was just waiting for the right opportunity.

“But anyways, I was standing there at the deli on Lewis waiting for the Laun-

dromat lady to go outside for her cigarette, when this girl comes up and tells me I look funny. Wants to know about the rocks. And I tell her, and now she wants to

help, or at least to watch, I don’t remember which. She told me I looked stupid not

wearing the jacket and I told her I didn’t want to, that something bad would happen

if I put it on. So she took it from me and put it on herself. She said nothing bad ever happens to her, so I figured she’d be fine wearing it. Underneath my jean jacket she wore a long sleeve, white turtle neck and she had on these tan shorts. Her hair was

really long and she didn’t wear it in a ponytail like most the girls at our school. Cotton always told me that the ones that didn’t wear their hair in ponytails were the ones that would get you in trouble. She didn’t do nothing wrong, though.

“After standing around for another few minutes or so, the lady finally came

out for her cigarette, and like Cotton said she would, she walked down to the back

alley to smoke. So we went in. Cotton always said to pick a washing machine close

to the door so that it doesn’t take so long to run out when the Laundromat lady

comes back in. We went to the second row of machines, though, because the girl

wanted to. She didn’t say why, but Cotton always told me not to ask a girl why she does the things she does. He said if she’s still around you’re still winning.

“She couldn’t get the jacket off by herself, though, and so I helped her with it.

She was a little red in the face then and sighed, said maybe she should just leave. I

shrugged, didn’t ask her why, and so she stayed.

“Once it was in the machine I put two big rocks inside the jacket and four lit-

tler ones on top of it. Before I could turn the machine on, though, she stopped me

and asked if I’d hold her hand. Cotton never said anything about holding hands, but

he did tell me that if a girl like her, who doesn’t wear her hair in a ponytail, ever asks me to do anything for her, to say, No. So I said, No. She got red in the face again and this time started to leave. But right when I turned the machine on, and after I

thought she was gone, I felt her latch onto my arm and pull me back from the noise.

I thought the glass on the machine might break. Cotton said that if that ever hap-

pened, he told me to just run, and that he’d get me a new jean jacket. Do they have

jean jackets in Wyoming? He’d have to come home to give it to me, don’t you think?

“She asked me if that was enough, and I said I didn’t know, that Cotton said it

would always depend on how big the rocks were or how many I used. She asked

who Cotton was, and just as soon as I got ready to answer, I remembered Cotton told

me to never tell anyone who didn’t already know, that he was my older brother. He never told me why, and I don’t think she would’ve known him anyway. Like I told

you already, she don’t go to our school, my school.

“I was ready to tell her to forget it, when she let go my arm and grabbed my

hand with both of hers. Cotton always told me not to let Dad find out about any

girls, neither. He snuck one in one night through his bedroom window and when

Dad caught them, well, I don’t know what happened, but Cotton didn’t go to school again for another week. Didn’t come out of his room that long, neither. Mom just

brought him his dinners and came out covering her face. Cotton told me that now that he was gone, I had to be extra careful because now dad would actually start

paying attention to me. I thought this was a good thing until I remembered what he

said to me about meeting God, and all of a sudden I imagined a small room and hours of reading scripture with no break.

“But I didn’t let go of her hand. I looked down at her and saw her looking at

the machine, saw her jump a little every time one of the rocks hit the glass, her

mouth open a little bit, sweat collecting at her forehead. I remembered what Cotton

said about kissing girls. He never mentioned kissing girls who didn’t wear their hair in ponytails, but he did say that when I did, it was more fun to catch them off guard.

More fun for them, too. He also told me never to ask them permission neither, that

they didn’t like that. But I wondered if girls without ponytails expected to be asked for permission first.

“She asked me if I knew when the Laundromat lady was coming back in.

When I didn’t answer, she looked up at me and stopped shaking for a little second. I

thought that as good a time as any. Then I heard the screaming. I stuck my head

around the corner of the row, and there I saw the Laundromat lady, her eyes big and

scared. The girl opened the machine door and grabbed my jean jacket and ran. I followed her outside and that’s when I ran into you. I guess she still has it. I didn’t

even get to see if it worked. Cotton said it would, but that I’d have to do it once a week until it gets as good as his. I won’t, though. I promise.

“Cotton always told me that if this happened you guys would understand. He

always told me to tell the truth and to tell you who Dad was, and he said you guys

would understand. I’m sorry. I’ll try to pay for the machine. But Cotton said you’d

understand. He said you wouldn’t tell Dad. Was he right? Will you not? Was he right?”