Detour: Writers in the Attic, 2013

DETOUR

DETOUR

writers in the attic

DETOUR

writers in the attic

Selected by BRUCE BALLENGER Edited by JOCELYN ROBERTSON With an introduction by BRUCE BALLENGER

This is a Log Cabin Book, an imprint of THE CABIN 801 South Capitol Boulevard, Boise, Idaho 83702 (208) 331-8000 www.thecabinidaho.org Š 2013 The Cabin All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-881850-04-5 Book design by Jocelyn Robertson.

Printed and bound in the USA in an edition of 400 copies.

The Cabin would like to thank Bruce Ballenger and Stacie Rice.

No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher except in the context of reviews.

CONTENTS Introduction • 1

BYPASS

HEIDI NAYLOR Mack and Natalie Have Gotten Very Comfortable in Idaho • 7 KELLY HARWOD Smoke and Mirrors • 9

JEANNE ROGERS Instructions for a Bed Sheet Parachute • 12

GROVE KOGER The Upstairs Room • 16 ELIZABETH BEAMAN Night Shift • 20

ROUNDABOUT

CHRISTIAN A WINN The Last Summer • 35

JERRI BENSON Concrete Angel • 39 ANNA WILHELM The Process • 43 JEANNETTE THOMAS DIKE Low Tide • 43 MARGARET KOGER The Lost Sheep • 43

DIVERSION

CHRIS DEVORE Corn • 51 SUSAN H SWETNAM The Lost Coast • 55

MICHAEL PHILLEY Tex • 59 JANET SCHLICHT Querencia • 63 JAMES SEVERSON The Ride of Shame • 67

ROADBLOCK

ERIC E WALLACE Road Work • 71 CHRISTY G THOMAS Minute • 75 BILL COPE Bridge Out • 93

DEVIATION

CHRISTOPHER WATTS Phoenix • 109 NICOLE SHARP Ithaca • 113

GABRIEL CARDOSO White Noise Vows • 117 EL DESVIO (DETOUR) Michael Philley • 121 ROBERT HANNON Black Tar: Heaven and Hell • 125

INTRODUCTION Prepare yourself, your mind, your imagination. You are about to embark on a journey through rooms – of refuge, shelter, territory, space, realm and reliquary – conjured by twenty-nine of Idaho’s finest writers. Some memoir. Some fiction. Some fantasy. Some real. Some not. In many, cold facts collide with the heat of memory and generate literary lightning. These stories seep through a crack in reality and tumble to earth in rooms you have never seen before, where uneven streams of light illuminate both beauty and beast.

You are about to open the door to Rooms: Writers in the Attic. Turn the doorknob as you turn the page.

— BRUCE BALLENGER

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DETOUR

writers in the attic

BYPASS Thanksgiving was nothing more than a pilgrim-created obstacle in the way of Christmas; a dead bird in the street that forced a brief detour. — AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS

MOLLY E REED

MY STUDIO Behind the blue pine bookcase, up the stair into the light. Escape. Sanctuary. Potential. Possibilities. Expansion, and contraction.

In this room I am surrounded by a few of my treasured friends – books old and new, classic and contemporary, read and not yet read. Boccaccio, Dickens, Undset, Kerouac, Le Guin, Ondaatje, Proulx. Rilke, Neruda. Old friends and new ones I have yet to come to know. Spines of leather, carved, stamped, gold leaf, cloth boards, paper. Simple elegance of Arts & Crafts; sensual elegance of Art Nouveau. The curve of a leaf with stylized flower, intricate Celtic knots, restrained horizontal bars, fleur-de-lis, medallion. The austere utility of library retirees. The art of book making, or the splash of modern expedience. Each silently asking to be opened, to be held in the hands, to be read. Thirtyseven dictionaries: Oxford, Webster’s, Roget’s, classical, rhyming, symbols, browser’s, thoughts, words, phrases, fables, Black’s Law, cultural literacy, quotations, science, gnomes and fairies, clichés, more words. English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Latin. Just in case.

Notebooks, journals, paste-board folders of childhood writings.

Four walls. Five bookcases. Five teetering piles of yet more books on the floor. Four windows – a cathedral of light and warmth, two of them ten-feet-tall, big enough to let the mind take flight. To let the sunlight in from wherever it happens to be at the time. To let in the joy of

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flickering leaves and capricious wind.

Capacious oak desk, scuffed and worn, its drawers so deep they just keep going. Quartersawn barrister chair, its brass plate still declaring it seat #20 of the Santa Barbara County Courthouse. Enigmatic pictures plucked from serendipitous yard sales. Silent djembes, awaiting their time to sing. Cozy tall back chair sized for curling up with a book; a reading lamp just so.

One more oak barrister, adding up to enough chairs to invite a friend or two to tea. Turkish rug that speaks of time and other places. One of the costume trunks – just because its colors add to the harmony of golden walls and Brazilian cherry floor. Electronics corralled into one space below the west window, balanced by drawers disguised as a stack of old leather trunks.

Beauty and peace, belied by an expectant hush.

Frustration and wistfulness. Bits of 3-D memories – the onyx my mother collected, the azure swan shaped from clay by my daughter, the carved teak incense box.

Framed photos of husband, children: lovesnaps. A ceiling high enough to aspire to; a fan to ease my increasing intolerance for summer heat. A stone and iron fireplace to warm at the touch of a switch.

A place to balance checkbooks, to pay the bills, to read. To read. To dream. And perhaps, someday, when I am willing to be selfless enough to exercise the selfishness required – to write.

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RAE ANN NORELL

MY SANCTUARY The room was small and painted a dark gray. It had one rectangular window covered with a black curtain.

The window was closed and the curtain was drawn. I constructed this room about a month after my mother died at age seventy-nine. The room provided a sanctuary into which my heart and mind could escape. In this room I could hide my mourning from friends who thought I should move on quickly, be over it, since one expects one’s parents to die. In the room I could block out their unsolicited advice.

I retreated to the room to be alone with my thoughts, my anger, my sorrow. Mom was a very active woman who led a fulfilling life. She was healthy – except for cancer. I hate that disease. In my room I could cry and no one would notice. No one would ask questions.

But I was asking questions, such as: why did Mom die half an hour before my plane touched the tarmac at the Denver Airport? That wasn’t fair.

In this room I could cry because I felt Mom and I had unfinished business. At the time of her death, that unfinished business seemed more encompassing than the fact that during the fifty-three years I shared with her, we had a relatively good relationship, as relationships go between mothers and daughters.

Gradually the curtain in the room began to open, yet the window remained opaque. I could see a bit of sunlight filtering through, but not much. The room was a paler shade of gray though I took steps forward and

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steps backward in my grief journey. But as time went on, I entered the room less frequently. Eventually, I began to remember the details of her life – her accomplishments, her pride in me and her other children, a life well-lived. With this step forward, the room became brighter. Finally the window was no longer opaque and I could see green grass, a blue sky, flowers, and children playing outside.

Until one day, a year and a half after I constructed this room. This time the walls weren’t pale gray, they weren’t dark gray. They were black. The window didn’t have a closed curtain on it, but it had a locked, metal shade drawn securely over the window. This was the day my 24-year-old son died suddenly and unexpectedly.

One week after his memorial, when all my friends and family left and their lives returned to normal, I entered the room again. I told Mom, “I can’t grieve for you any more, I have to grieve for my son now.”

For months I retreated to this black room. I tried lifting the heavy metal shade, but outside the room the sky was gray and dreary, so I retreated again. One day I opened the shade halfway and it was sunny – but the bright, blue sky made me angry. My son should have been out there enjoying this beautiful day; he would have been, but death had taken him away. So I closed the curtain again. I spent so much time weeping in this room.

As the first year progressed, the room faded from a black to a dark gray as I ventured out for longer periods.

Eventually I was able to remember the exciting life my son enjoyed, and think less about the details of his death and the unfairness of it all. The more I could focus on his smile, his laughter, his friends, his life, the lighter 10

the room became and the more I could stay out of the room. This room will always be with me, though never a lighter shade than a medium gray.

Seven years later, the room darkened once again when my dad died. I missed him deeply. I used the room but not as frequently as I had for my son. My dad lived a long, full life, and I expected him to die eventually.

After the first few weeks I could focus on his life instead of his death. I could envision Dad, Mom, and my son together, laughing, happy, and watching over me, waiting for me to join them. When that day comes, this gray room will be demolished. It will be replaced by a huge, bright yellow room with many windows enhanced by colorful, transparent curtains. There will be very large, double French doors, open to the inviting outdoors, calling us to come out and enjoy.

On that day, I will leave the dark room forever.

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ELAINE AMBROSE

THE WINE ROOM Sylvia Templeton loved her Wine Room, and that is where she lived during most of her waking hours for more than ten years. This wasn’t just any ordinary space with crates of dusty bottles, a wobbly pub table, and faux stone walls. No, this was a Wine Room custom built in a cool cellar under her house.

Sylvia designed the room after Max, her husband of thirty years, ran away with the head cheerleader from the junior college where he taught English literature and creative writing. The ensuing scandal in their small community proved to be too much for Sylvia, so she chose to remain inside, ordering groceries and movies delivered to her home. That was so much better than buying a gun, which had been her first thought as she watched Max throw his clothes into a suitcase and bound out of the door like an eager school boy with not even a wave goodbye. She was mortified that he so easily closed the door on thirty years of marriage in exchange for a giggling, fake-boobed tart.

After the divorce, Sylvia met with her financial advisor and purchased an annuity to guarantee a regular income. Then she consulted an architect, and they worked together to design the perfect room. The cellar was twelve feet square, dug ten feet underground, and included a small bathroom. Heavy vapor barriers were installed on all sides, roof and ceiling, then concrete was poured for the floor and covered with custom chiseled stones. Rich cedar wood lined the walls, and the ceiling

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was plastered with stucco. Rope lighting illuminated the space and the temperature remained at 60° F with the humidity set at sixty percent. Mahogany racks held 500 bottles of wine, most of them premium reserve releases of fine cabernet sauvignon. A stone archway led from Sylvia’s living room down a winding staircase into the Wine Room.

To protect against the chill in the room, Sylvia loaded a wooden rack with various fur coats, shawls, and blankets. The furniture consisted of a solid wood bistro table, a side table, and a leather recliner. The only noticeable clash with the intended Old World feeling was a flat screen television and DVD player mounted on the wall over a cabinet full of movies and a small refrigerator stocked with imported cheese, olives, and crackers. After the room was finished, Sylvia threw out her high-heeled shoes and fashionable suits, organized a wardrobe of long skirts and sweater vests, grabbed her wine opener and retreated down the stairs.

Over many years, Sylvia continued to consume wine and watch movies. She didn’t seem to notice or care when her vocabulary began to mimic the words she heard. During one delivery, the grocery boy asked how she was doing.

“You talkin’ to me?” she asked, using her best Robert De Niro accent.

“N-N-Never mind,” the boy stuttered and backed out of the door.

A wine distributor arrived with several cases of cabernet, and Sylvia raised a bottle to inspect the label.

“The stuff that dreams are made of,” she whispered, imitating Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon.

“Yes, ma’am,” the man said. “Are you paying with a 13

check today?”

“Show me the money!” Sylvia hollered like Cuba Gooding, Jr., as she wrote a check. Then she added as she took a bottle, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night!” She loved Bette Davis.

“Do you want to try some merlot or pinot noir?” the wine man asked.

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate!”

Sylvia answered, using her favorite line from Cool Hand Luke. Then she switched to Jack Nicholson from A Few Good Men. “You can’t handle the truth!” she snarled.

The delivery man correctly assumed that the order would remain cabernet, so he took the check and hurried out of the door.

One afternoon, Sylvia’s banker stopped to review her financial situation. The annuity was still making monthly payments to her bank account, but he wondered if she wanted to review her investments.

“You don’t understand,” she replied, thinking of Marlon Brando from On the Waterfront. “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I could’ve been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.”

“Yes, Mrs. Templeton,” said the banker. “But we need to think about what you’ll get in the future.”

Sylvia took a long swallow from her glass of wine and then looked him in the eye.

“Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” She had watched Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump at least fifty times.

“Well, please think about your plans and goals,” the banker said as he turned to leave. “You need to take care of yourself.”

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“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” hissed Sylvia as the banker closed the door. Clark Gable’s final words in Gone with the Wind always made her cry.

A few more years elapsed when Sylvia finally caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror. She hardly recognized the white, wrinkled skin on her face. She looked at her hands, now covered with age spots. Her hair hung down her back in gray dreadlocks and her eyes were almost blurry. She also had a nagging cough that only could be silenced with another glass of wine. The sound of the doorbell interrupted her thoughts.

“I want to be alone,” she mumbled, imitating Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel.

She shuffled to the door and opened it. There stood Max, disheveled and sorry.

“Go ahead, make my day,” Sylvia muttered, wishing Clint Eastwood could jump out of the movie Sudden Impact and help her.

“Sylvia, please,” whispered Max. “My life has been hell. And you don’t look so good, either. Can we talk?”

“Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” she mimicked Patrick Swayze from Dirty Dancing. With that, she led him to the Wine Room and closed the door.

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GROVE KOGER

THE UPSTAIRS ROOM When I was young I spent a summer in Tennessee.

It was a birthday gift, Mother explained, and as Aunt Bonnie and Uncle Arnold had no children of their own, they would be overjoyed to have me live with them for a time. Later I realized that the former statement was a subterfuge and the latter untrue. My parents were going through one of their rough patches, as Mother admitted toward the end of her short life, and whatever reasons lay behind my relative’s lack of offspring, the pair did not seem to take any particular pleasure in my company.

I flew east a week after I turned ten, entrusted to the care of a distracted stewardess. The motion of the plane was worrying, and while the airline food tasted exotic, it nevertheless settled in as a lump in my stomach.

At the Nashville airport a vaguely familiar, heavily perfumed woman hugged me and her balding companion shook my hand in a very formal way. That, as far as I remember, was the last time that Arnold paid any attention to me. I sat in the back seat of their blue Buick while he drove away with great care and Bonnie, sitting beside him, talked on and on in a sharp voice.

Bonnie and Arnold’s brick house was built on a low rise set back from the street. After easing the car into a garage in back, Arnold vanished and Bonnie led me in and up two flights of stairs.

“We don’t use this floor often,” she said as she opened a door, “but Maid has dusted your room thoroughly. I’m sure you miss your parents, but you’re going

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to have a wonderful time here. Now if you’d like to rest,” here she glanced at a clock that ticked away on a chest of drawers, “we’ll have dinner in an hour.”

Then she set my suitcase down inside the door and I was alone. But not quite. Never before had a room welcomed me, but as I looked around a kind of tingling joy rose up my spine and down my arms to my finger tips.

The room was shaped like an L in reverse and had a window at each end. One looked out through the limbs of a luxuriant tree and down the street, the other into the crowns of two other trees shading the garage.

A twin bed sat near the corner of the L, and beside it and the chest of drawers, the room contained a straight back chair and a standing closet. I sat down on the bed, bathed in green light from the windows. As I breathed in and out, the room seemed to breathe with me. *** I had brought several books with me that summer, but for once, words on the page seemed less real to me than my surroundings. Although I spent much of my time outdoors, afternoons after lunch and evenings after dinner were reserved for the room. During the day, muffled footfalls and murmured conversations reached me from below, but upstairs there were never-ending bird songs and the smell of summer flowers on the warm breeze. As evening came on, the frogs in a nearby pond joined the chorus. Moths batted gently against the screens until I turned out the lights. *** When I got home late that summer I was torn between wanting to explain and being afraid to, but under Mother’s questioning I made an effort to tell her about Aunt and Uncle and the house and, especially, my 17

room. “I wasn’t a bit lonely there,” I finally blurted out, and tried to find words to describe the way the room had made me feel.

“My goodness,” Mother said with a smile, “you make it sound like your room was haunted!” Then she went on to talk of other things. *** As it turned out, I didn’t see Tennessee again for another three decades, and as time went by I visited the upstairs room less and less in my memory.

Mother died a few years after that summer, a war came and went, and Father remarried. I was moderately successful in business, a little less so in life. Then one afternoon a certified letter reached me from Tennessee.

Arnold must have grown careless in his old age, for one evening he had driven Bonnie and himself off the road into a river. I must have made a better impression than I realized, because the house was now mine.

At this point you can probably anticipate the end of my story. When I pulled up in front of the house a few weeks later, it seemed to have shrunk. Its bricks were stained and the trees around it had grown ragged and weedy. Staring up from the street, I realized that my room must once have been an attic.

The attorney waiting for me at the door suggested that I would want to take a careful look around the house before making any decisions. Perhaps I would, I thought, but I told him that I might not be long. Then with trepidation I made my way up the creaking stairs — to a door that stuck and a room that was low-ceilinged and dusty. There was no furniture, and the window screens were choked with years of debris.

Aside from the room’s appearance, I was over18

whelmed by a negative quality as I stood in the doorway — the utter absence of something. Despite Mother’s offhand comment so many years before, I had never thought that there had been some unnatural presence in the room. But now, I realized quite clearly that there had been something here, once, and that it was no more. Whatever — no, whoever — had once dwelt here had long since departed.

I closed the door softly and headed back down the stairs to tell the attorney my decision.

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MARILYNN JACKSON

ON THE ROAD Would you like one room key or two? One, I say, knowing I will probably still get two. Another hotel room, another road trip. I have stayed in countless hotel rooms across the country, traveling for years as part of my business. Although I took a break from business travel for a couple of years, I now find myself back on the road more frequently by choice, deliberately seeking diversion from a too settled life.

My dad loved hotel and motel rooms with an intensity that irritated my mother. She hated hotels (afraid of fires), and insisted on staying only in motels where there was an outdoor access. She limited our stays to one night, grudgingly made necessary because the road trip from Colorado to Minnesota for our summer vacation at Grandma’s was longer than a day’s drive. Being the only driver, Dad would always try to stop early in the afternoon to make the most of his one night minivacation before heading to the in-laws. The challenge was always to find a clean place with a swimming pool so my brother and I could splash away the crazies from being cooped up in the back seat of the Plymouth for more than eight hours. Mom would sigh when Dad told her the price, roll her eyes when we entered the room and discovered the dingy bedspreads and the blackout curtains over the window filled with a box unit air conditioner. Dad would set the air conditioner on freezing, delight in the color television and the little bottles of shampoo and conditioner; open only one bar of soap

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so we could take the other with us. He would fill the ice bucket right after unloading the car, buy soft drinks for all of us and make a drink for him and mom. Finally settled, it was time for swimsuits and the pool!

To this day I still feel my mother’s suspended disapproval as I open the door to my room. It could be the cheapest three-star hotel the company expense report will allow or the finest Four Seasons has to offer, and I still hold my breath, hoping the place passes some imaginary muster left over from childhood memories.

After awhile the rooms really are all the same, despite upgraded carpet, wall treatment and draperies. There is the bed, a chair or two, some sort of desk, a window, and, of course, the TV. Warm and cozy design if you are lucky, barely clean and utilitarian if you are frugal by necessity. While I share some of my dad’s joy in staying in a temporary room, delighting in the varied array of toiletries, I confess to a bit of my mother’s disdain at the prospect of sharing blankets and bedspreads that may not be changed often enough, a mattress that has seen more bodies than a stadium on play-off day, and bathroom sinks that might have just been missed in the wipe down. Yet despite the competing emotions, I enjoy the anticipation of new surroundings, a sense of peace at the prospect of a little solitude. I unpack, putting clothes away in the dresser, stowing the suitcase in the closet to dispel any sense of temporary, and unpack the makeup bag in the bathroom. With my special pillow tossed on the bed, all evidence of travel carefully stowed, I have made the room a little bit my own.

For a few years I carried a couple of framed family photos on the road with me, having read some article about strategies to make business travel seem more 21

personal and friendly. I even had a fragrant candle to burn, until the fire alarm went off in the bathroom of the room I was staying at the Hyatt Regency. These days the kids are grown, my husband is busy working, and more often than not, when I am traveling alone, I want to be just that. I tell myself as I book the trip, say yes to the contract, it will be great to get away for a while, see some new city, relax in the evening and watch a frivolous chick flick on the cable TV. I pack books I have not had time to read, imagining curling up in the one easy chair, glass of wine in hand, perusing the latest best-seller. I make plans to write an article that is due next month, cart along some research ideas, and envision a completed outline in hand as I head home pleased with my progress.

In reality? I am back in my room by five o’clock, finished with the day’s work, and looking forward to a little evening time. I surf the channels, check in with email, make the phone call to the husband, pour a glass of wine to go with the Lean Cuisine dinner in the microwave and am bored by seven pm. I take a bath, plan the next day, call one or two of the kids who may or may not be home, read a page or two of the book I thought was so interesting and decide eight o’clock is too early for bed. I am lonely, knowing I wanted to be alone. The refuge of this hotel room closes in and I am anxious to return home. Perhaps that is the point, a rekindled appreciation for that “settled life,” the one that needed shaking up a bit. Perhaps home is the place to be after all, and no matter what sense of departure and adventure the idea of a hotel room serves up, it is only a transient respite from a more permanent way of being, one that resides in the comfort of the familiar and loved.

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HEIDI KRAAY

A SACRED CONNECTION When I was seventeen, my dad and I moved into the Densmore Street house, our first house without a basement. Basements are more qualified than any other room when seeking a hiding place – even more than treetops. Seventeen-year-olds cherish hiding places.

Without a basement at Densmore, my bedroom had to suffice.

By evening, when my dad came home from work and I no longer had the house to myself, at least I had my bedroom. There was peaceful, grainy forgiveness there for as long as I stayed.

A bedroom is sacred. Growing up, it is the one place where a kid can claim ownership. There, even a grown-up knocks before entering. Beyond being sacred, however, bedrooms have secrets. The idea of privacy is first instilled there. Respect is paid to whoever sleeps in the bed squatting in the corner.

The Densmore bedroom was where I kept my books, music, movies, and especially, my secrets. I listened to new records, tapes and CDs from new friends at my new school. Explicit songs stayed at low volume so that nobody else could hear the lyrics. I wrote angry poetry in the yellow notebook Sandy gave me before we left New York, read Kurt Vonnegut and Rumi, scratched out homework and refused to cry – even with the uncontainable weight on my chest from a sadness I couldn’t explain. In that room I hid cigarettes and burned incense, practiced yoga and watched Beatles documentaries; I hid

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from the outside world.

Memorabilia colored the walls. Those four walls were regularly updated with photos, arts clippings, self-made paintings and drawings from my sketchbook.

I needed them that way. The white was bare and frozen as a hospital underneath. With my deconstructed Dali recreation from studio art, postcards from my mom and photos like the one with me and Sandy side-by-side in ice skates plastered from corner to corner to corner to corner, my eyes rested easier.

I watered the plant Lauren gave me, the one she grew in horticulture class I transferred it to the vase I sculpted in ceramics. Its green stems beamed from that spot on the window seat, that precious seat I’d wanted since childhood. Wants like that no longer mattered, however. I had bigger problems, deeply rooted, teenager problems, the-trying-to-cope-with-this-new-rage-festering-inside-of-me kind of problems – but not there.

Problems dissolved in my bedroom, where I kept an eye out for Lauren in her baby blue Saab, on her way to pick me up for school or weekend deviance.

Outside my room, I put on an immediate front, a mask of wildness and mania: I wore Pippi Longstocking socks, rolled up corduroys and bright red, collared shirts. Over those, a “Made In Nepal” brown vest, communist sweater and pair of square red sunglasses that made me feel like John Lennon smashing into Elton John. I was electric outside. In order to survive and fool people into believing I was content, I had to overwhelm them with my wardrobe and wacky jokes.

Inside, I didn’t have to be happy. Inside that room, I could be whatever I wanted. That was where I sought refuge from anyone who cared enough about me to 24

wonder what was going on in my head, to smell the tobacco on my clothes, to investigate my skin for cuts sliced out or to ask whether I had eaten that day. In my room I was safe from questioning. I slept close to the floor under bright red flannel sheets and a black comforter. The red sheets were kind enough to hide the blood that slipped from my legs each night — at least until my skin stuck to their soft cotton. Underneath sheets stinging and clinging to me when I woke; I never wanted to get out of bed. Even so, in the early, still black, when it was cold outside, I felt less lonely under those sheets.

I discovered Beck’s Odelay in that room, which you gave me the morning you came over before zero hour class. After my dad left for work, you showed up with that CD and new cartoons sketched just for me. It was early, so you stretched out on my futon. You feigned falling asleep. I laughed and climbed beside you. I poked at you and you grabbed me. You pulled me on top and wrapped me in your oversized green hoody that smelled salty and spiced like you. When you left, I felt rejuvenated.

Another morning, you promised to come over in the same way, but overslept. I called your cell phone over and over again. Later that day, there was a burnt CD in my locker with a long, enchanting letter filled with sorries and love proclamations. The CD, marked “i w you” with a Sharpie, made me felt like I could live forever when I played its two songs on repeat later that night, Down Together and In Between Days.

Months later from that bedroom, I called you again and again for the final time. I thought something was wrong. I thought you were hurt. I called twenty-four times. When you called back that night and said, “You 25

called a bunch…” with hollowness filling your voice, I felt absolute shame. I didn’t see you after that. That is what love is worth in high school. The act of plainly showing feelings is labeled as obsession, depression and psychosis. The act of keeping feelings bound is normalcy.

Outside my room, I was labeled. Inside, I was normal. I had no one to compare myself against but me.

Even self-hatred was okay in that room. It was my space.

Everything was okay.

The salvation room where I lived in seventeenyear-old secrecy didn’t house me long. We moved to the Densmore Street house in late fall and out again the following summer, to a house with a basement in North Carolina. Even in that short stint, that Densmore bedroom was my security blanket. We had a sacred connection.

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MAUREEN A HARTY

SANCTUARY It’s a day I’ll never forget.

I had snuggled into my cozy velvet chair in my sanctuary. I held a lease in my hand for a grocery chain store for my client’s new strip retail center; the comfy inside and the blue sky outside soothed me. I wasn’t concentrating. That was okay in this room.

I heard a knock on my door. My watch read 11:47 am. I recognized the tentative rap. My stomach lurched.

My peace was about to be fractured. I took a long moment to answer.

We had originally designed this room to be the place I completed my daily legal work from the law firm.

When my boys arrived home from school I was there for them, and when they settled in to play, a quiet place stood ready for me to read contracts. Over the years, as the boys grew older, the room meant more to me.

I often fled my glass cage at the law firm, glass doors, glass shelves, glass vases, to work at home. Over time my home office had morphed into my sanctuary, a place to be if I liked for an hour or two, under stern rules of no interruptions.

I glanced around at the dark stained walnut bookcases above lighter stained wainscoting. In these days of computer research, many libraries had rid themselves of volumes of Supreme Court decisions and secondary source books. I’d claimed as many as I could stuff onto my shelves. Sniffing the odor of old paper, I wondered if I was the only one who missed the aroma.

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“Come on in.” I said.

“I can’t do it anymore.” My son stood there, his broad shoulders sagging, his backpack hanging from his hand. He didn’t have to share with me the source of his pain. It bleated from his soul.

Tom attended the local high school. He couldn’t go back.

I rose from my chair and enveloped him in my arms, my heart a sodden mess of hurt. How had Tom come to this? We’d been working with him all his school life.

He’d had support from the schools and psychologists.

Yet nothing had helped him with mainstream school.

I had no answers for Tom. We’d come to a dead end with our search regarding affordable schools.

Tom didn’t enjoy being touched. The fact that he let me hold him spoke volumes about the roar of his internal ache.

My peace hadn’t been merely fractured, it had exploded.

I didn’t cry. I never cried in front of Tom. I pulled back from him and brushed his blond bangs off his face.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “we’ll figure it out. Get yourself some lunch while I think.”

I crossed to my antique oak desk, a gift from my late father, breathed deeply, lifted my cell phone and punched eight on speed dial. Tom’s counselor, Sharon, agreed to meet with me at four o’clock.

After a thirty minute appointment, I left Sharon with clenched teeth and tight shoulders. At home, I shut myself in my office. My sense of harmony had disappeared. I sat and Googled “Asperger’s.”

Two hours later my eyes glistened with tears. Sharon 28

had suggested Tom’s behavior, his inability to socialize, the fact that he sometimes wore a winter coat in warm weather, that he couldn’t understand the emotions expressed by others and that he didn’t want to be touched, all suggested he had Asperger’s. She’d explained it was a form of autism and that autistic persons fell on a continuum. People with Asperger’s landed at the high functioning end of the continuum. Now that I’d studied as much as I could on the internet, I believed that Sharon had at long last found a diagnosis for my son.

Sharon had said that medications and support groups existed to help him and to help us. She was right. My tears flowed, a combination of joy at having a diagnosis and deep sadness at having that particular diagnosis.

Sharon also recommended an alternative school for Tom. I didn’t like the idea, had no faith that Tom would want to do an “alternative” school. But I’d been fooled before.

Once dry-eyed, I asked Tom to join me in my office.

Having moved the chairs so that Tom and I sat face-toface, knees inches apart, I explained to him about the alternative school.

“It’s a self-study program,” I explained.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s part of our school district. Many people who attend are working students or adults going back to school. You will meet with your teacher once a week for only one hour. During the hour, you will hand in the prior week’s homework assignment and the teacher will go over it with you. Then the teacher will review the upcoming week’s homework. You’re required to study twenty hours per week.”

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“I want to do that, Mom.” “You have to turn in all your homework on time.”

“I will.”

“You’re sure you want to go to school alone?”

“Yes.” That confirmed what I’d learned about Asperger’s Syndrome, especially for those who aren’t diagnosed as young children. It explained why he had no friends.

Tom suffered social anxiety, a fear of being in social groups. This, the research showed, became worse each year as his classmates matured and he was left further and further behind.

“Every day must have been quite painful for you at Lakeside.”

He shrugged and nodded.

I reached out for him, but his hands were tucked under his thighs and he kept them there.

I dropped my hand and swallowed.

“We’re going to get you help. By the time you graduate high school, things will be better.”

“Am I sick?”

“No.” Explanations about Asperger’s could wait until he’d been diagnosed by a neuropsychologist. “But you need special instructions to navigate this world.”

“That’d be good,” he said.

His reaction surprised me.

I smiled and glanced around my sanctuary.

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ROADBLOCK Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities, indeed. — SUSAN SONTAG

BARBARA MARTIN-SPARROW

A ROOM WITH A SINK “Well, this is certainly humiliating,” I said to myself as I perched on my throne. “How am I going to get out of this predicament?”

Having not felt well all day, as we finished lunch at the restaurant, I thought I would go to the ladies restroom before we left for the airport to catch our plane home. I didn’t want to be sick in one of those tiny toilets on the plane, so I asked the waiter where the restroom was and he pointed to a hall full of people. “This can’t be right,” I thought as I struggled to enter. Traffic was flooding from the kitchen, with many servers rushing to deliver their huge trays of food. I didn’t believe the bathrooms would be in the same area. Returning to the table, my husband and my mom in her wheelchair were speaking to the manager about their lovely meal. I asked the manager where the restroom was and he said, “follow me and I will show you.” Again we entered the hall with waiters running out of the kitchen and a person talking at a phone on the wall. Struggling to miss being hit by trays, I saw the manager enter a door and wave me on. I entered the door to his right.

“At least it was quieter in here,” I thought to myself, “but what an odd bathroom!” The stall was in the very center of the room, looking a bit like an inquisition chamber, lit from above by a single light. The cubicle’s sides did not come together and had almost one inch gaps between them that anyone could see in.

“Well, I’d better hurry with only one toilet,” I

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thought and hung my purse on the door. That was a stupid mistake, I soon found out, as my often erratic period had started and I would need my feminine equipment up in that bag.

As I sat there perched on the commode in absolute misery, I heard someone come in. “Oh no,” I thought, they will have to wait with only one stall. I was just about to apologize and explain that I would be a few minutes when I heard a tinkling sound. “What’s that?” I thought, “It doesn’t sound like the faucet, what are they doing? Peeing in the sink?”

I leaned over and looked out between the wide cracks in the panels, and there stood the ponytailed head and backside of our handsome waiter. Suddenly I knew where I really was in that restaurant. I was in the most feminine of situations in the most male of institutions!

I struggled to hide behind the walls with the light illuminating the throne and put my head down – hoping the he would not see me.

My waiter left – and I thought out my plan of escape – including reaching my purse at least three feet away.

This being lunchtime in a busy restaurant, there was a steady “stream” of male customers coming in the door, often in groups and often talking business. I was afraid one would need to use the stall and practiced lowering my voice saying “Sorry! It’s busy,” but luckily they were all in too big of a hurry.

It took me three tries to get the purse, but then I had to balance it on my lap, making it more difficult to get finished. I did not want to set it on the sticky floor where it could be seen. I also realized that my feminine high heels were showing; I managed to hold them up 36

way of the floor.

As I sat scrunched up on the toilet, purse on lap, head down, and feet up, I wondered how my family was doing. I knew my husband wouldn’t chance in here because he couldn’t leave my mom in her wheelchair, and I was sure he would be worrying about the drive to the airport. It had now been thirty-three minutes since I’d left the table. Cell phones had not been invented so I couldn’t call him to rescue me. Still the traffic kept coming in the door. “I’ll wait a bit more,” I thought to myself.

Finally the restaurant got quieter as the businessmen started returning to work, and the door opened less and less often. Twice I tried to escape but heard a male voice coming down the hall. Finally I started, eyes closed, tiptoeing step by step. I got to the door, took a big breath, and looked out. “Yes! No one is here! I made it,” I thought as I jumped out the door. Then, suddenly revealed, the man on the phone in the hall, looked up, grinned, pointed at me and said, “Gotcha!”

After forty-five minutes I had returned to the table, embarrassed to look our waiter in the face. Of course we were now late and I needed to take my mom in her wheelchair to the women’s room. At least now I knew where I was going. This time I saw the janitor’s closet door the manager had entered earlier, located between the ladies’ and men’s rooms.

As I waited I thought back to the many times I had stood and guarded the men’s room, letting women use them in venues where the bathrooms were inadequate and the female lines were long.

My first time was in an Air Force building we were touring with my group. Then it didn’t have ANY wom37

en’s rooms. Being six-year-olds, several girls giggled at the sight of urinals and the hard toilets without seats.

Funny, none of those times ever flustered me.

However, in the restaurant, I had entered the male bastion and taken it over with my female needs. I was much more exposed on this throne. And if found, men would have thought I was the voyeur. Yet they didn’t even realize it, except that guy on the telephone.

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KATHY JO LYNNE

THE NECESSARY ROOM Bathrooms – not usually a room of consequence – except when the toilet overflows or you use the bathroom mirror to check out the latest gash on your forehead from crashing your bike on the gravel drive. But my grandparent’s bathroom had stories to tell. Every single nook and cranny of their house held a story.

Their bathroom was your standard eight-by-fivefoot room, tub, sink, toilet, hamper. The door had a twisty lock that was sometimes difficult for tiny hands to manage. More than one cousin had to be rescued through the bathroom window because they were locked in. However, no state of panic accompanied this moment. We knew my grandfather was capable of solving any problem whatsoever. It was just a matter of how to occupy yourself while you waited. One option might be to pick up the latest copy of the Upper Room or Guideposts that were always stacked on the toilet tank lid. Both magazines contained difficult concepts for elementary children; however, we knew this material held importance in the household. After all, it was ordained “bathroom” material!

I remember being sent to the bathroom to await the results of the remedy of “Castoria” after being served this treatment on a giant tablespoon when I complained of a stomachache. Luckily, we grandchildren had moved beyond the era of castor oil, the remedy of choice when my mother was a child. I have early memories of “tooting” as they called it, and when I looked up with a red

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face, my grandmother said, “Honey, there’s more room on the outside than there is on the in!” This comment portrayed my grandmother, practical and matter of fact.

The bathroom went through changes over the years, but only in the pastel paint on the walls. I remember the pink of the 50s, the turquoise of the 60s, and the lavender of the 70s. The only decorations were a set of ceramic fish (gifted to them, like all ornamentation in the house) that hung on the wall. There was a calendar on another wall with the local drugstore advertisement across the top and a red hot water bottle hung with its tangle of hoses from a hook on the bathroom door. This was in the days before the Home Decorating Network. The drawers weren’t very exciting to snoop through. They held your standard hair brushes, toilet paper, and medical remedies, including Vicks, my grandfather’s hemorrhoid “salve.”

The bathtub was white porcelain and on Sunday afternoon, if you arrived early enough, you could see that it was still sprinkled with water droplets from my grandfather’s grudging weekly tub bath. He detested bathing.

He was raised in the south, one of fourteen children, and he and his siblings bathed in the washtub once a week in time for Sunday Meetin’. He was clean to greet the Lord but he didn’t have any reason to believe that anyone else deserved the same respect! My grandmother was the quiet task master. She insisted on the Sunday bath even though he didn’t attend church regularly for most of my memory. After she died, either my aunt or my mother would phone my grandfather on Sunday to “remind” him to take a bath before they came for their Sunday visit. My grandfather was caught more than once sneakily wetting down the tub as they stepped in the back 40

door for the visit.

I took a bath on occasion when I spent the night.

When I was little it was pretty much a no-nonsense affair, just ivory soap and a fluffy white towel. As I grew older there was a little bath oil to sprinkle in the water (another gift no doubt from one of the sixteen grandchildren). My grandmother had endless hankies, bath products, stationery, and headscarves. She could have had her own “Gift Shop of Gifts.” Anyway, I digress… back to the bathroom.

The bathroom was the all important “secret” place.

The whole house was no more than about 1,000 square feet, so where do you go to tell a secret or plan mischief?

Why, the bathroom, of course. During one visit, my cousin and I decided to tie a string around the bathroom door knob, hide under the bed in the adjacent room and wait, giggling in the summer heat, for nature to call my very pregnant aunt to the bathroom. As she stepped into the room, we pulled the door shut on her swollen belly. Success! She hollered loudly in surprise.

We laughed uncontrollably. We were admonished. And, we added this to the list of successful childhood pranks!

The bathroom was also used as a place of privacy for discipline by one of my aunts. She was a soft-spoken Christian woman. We loved her dearly. If one of her children acted up while visiting my grandparent’s house, they were whisked off to the bathroom for their reprimand. We sniggered about it, but secretly we always wondered what exactly took place in the bathroom. It remains a mystery today, unspoken of by her children.

My cousin and I were always a little jealous because our mothers’ method of discipline was to scream at us on the spot. But, we actually loved getting into trouble at 41

my grandmother’s house because you could always count on her to come to your defense. Every time we acted up (usually it was our “smart mouth” that got us into trouble), she came to our rescue with a comment such as, “Oh, honey, she is just tired (or sick).” How wonderful to have your grandmother as your judge and jury!

Yes, my grandparents’ bathroom was a “necessary room” for sure, necessary for the molding of childhood.

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KERRY LINDORFER

THE INTERVIEW ROOM I was terrified. I thought we’d be going to an office building. Pulling up to the address I said, “this can’t be the place.”

As we walked to the door Mom reminded me, “Well, when he gave me the directions he told me I’d think this couldn’t be the place.” From the outside it was an old, run-down house. Why would my judge send me to this place? Wasn’t I supposed to be meeting with a doctor, psychologist or something? Stepping up to the porch we noticed the front door open. Mom opened the screen door and began to enter.

“Come on up,” a voiced echoed down the stairwell.

To the right was a waiting room, once a living room.

Behind the open door to the left were stairs, an old fashioned wooden banister bordering the first flight. At the second floor a short hallway went left, to the right the room.

“Come in, I’m Joe,” he said. I nearly swallowed my tongue as my mother shook his hand and introduced herself. I didn’t want to open my mouth. This doctor, or whatever, wasn’t dressed up, he was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. I heard him correct my mom, telling her he wasn’t a doctor, but a therapist. Odd, the judge called him a doctor and everyone else said he was some kind of psychologist. But how could it be, this room, his clothes, none of it made sense?

“Sit anywhere you like,” he said. I stared out the large window at the front of the room. It overlooked

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the yard and the street. On each side were double hung windows. The one on the right was held open by a rock.

The other looked like it’d been stuck shut for years.

There was a chair in front of the big window, a cheap glider. In front of the open window was a plain metal framed chair with arms, beige cloth, and next to that two worn church chairs, also metal frames but without arms. To the right, trapped behind the chairs, was a closet with books and boxes. The door was missing. I sunk down in the worn brown leather couch with large armrests.

“How old are you,” he asked?

“Fifteen,” I answered. The room had a musty smell.

On the floor was a worn straw mat that covered most of the carpet. Behind his chair lay a set of small barbells.

He sat in a wooden chair, the kind you see in old movies, no padding, slats supporting the back and armrest.

Against the wall to the left was his desk, an antique roll top, so cluttered I almost laughed.

“What brings you here,” he asked? I looked at him, at Mom, as I sat there frozen. Mom started to answer when he gently raised his hand, “I asked him and he needs to tell me.” My mouth opened, but I quickly closed it, trying not to cry.

“You have to be able to talk to me about what you’ve done and why you’re here today. If not, you can go back and tell the judge you don’t want to do this and wait in detention until I come visit you there, your choice.”

“Asshole,” I thought, “he doesn’t care about me.”

“I touched this girl in a way I shouldn’t have and she complained.” I still don’t know how that came out of my mouth, but it did, as tears streamed down my face. He began to talk calmly, but firmly, as much to Mom as me, 44

explaining what would happen over the next three to four hours. I couldn’t imagine being in that room for so long. He gave Mom papers to fill out. She hugged me and said to be honest, that he could help me. Was she nuts? The door closed as she left.

“You ready to get down to the nitty gritty,” he asked?

I nodded. He began to ask simple questions. I wasn’t really paying attention, but somehow answered most of them. It helped to stare at the pictures. Near the closet was an old picture of a young man. It didn’t fit the frame properly. Next to the open window, above the beige chair, was a sunny beach scene with a boat next to a palm tree. I wished I was there at that beach, alone, no one near me. Above the desk there were four pictures, all scenes of outdoors. The two smaller ones in the middle had grey skies. One was a picture of frozen grass with snow on the ground. Next to that another beach, a small sand dune where a boy in a hooded shirt dragged a large stick through tall grass, his face invisible.

“Tell me about the first time you did any touching,” he said. I imagined being invisible. I looked at the other two pictures, both of mountains. The one nearest was of a lake, bordered by granite boulders, and the picture farthest away was a close up of a big mountain top. Huge boulders were on the mountain and it looked like little specks of people climbing it. I wanted to be a speck on that mountain, somewhere, anywhere, so small I’d go unnoticed, someway to have escaped that room, those questions.

Then I noticed it. On top of his desk. It was surrounded by pictures and a goofy stick. He held it out to me, “This was made by a young man I worked with for over three years. Know what it is?” It was a metal sculp45

ture, a square base with brick walls on two sides, about four inches high. There was something inside, leaning against the walls. Joe told me, “it’s a person holding up a brick wall, so no one knows what’s inside.”

“Three years?”

“He didn’t trust anyone, he wanted to hide.”

That was me. I knew it right away.

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BYPASS Thanksgiving was nothing more than a pilgrim-created obstacle in the way of Christmas; a dead bird in the street that forced a brief detour. — AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS

EMILY SIMNITT

ROOM FOR EXPLORING We are in Kyoto, hungry, alone, the only Americans we’ve seen for days.

We followed the map of our hearts to this tiny room in a paper house on a hill above the cherry blossoms.

I have in my pocket a small bun with red bean paste; we have poured the tea and are waiting silently on the tatami; the centuries break open; we are waiting for the sun, to bathe us in its light.

It took us two days to get to this room. We are travelers, after all, not tourists. And this is why, an hour ago, we found ourselves on the wrong bus, heading deep into 51

the heart of Kyoto, armed with a single page of directions to this room, an email from our host that included no street names or numbers, just a bus route, a scanned-in hand-drawn map and instructions to “turn right at the house with the red door, then left at the stand of bamboo trees.”

You know the end of the story: we made it to the room. But not before panic, breathlessness, and the beginnings of the kind of fight we lean forward into, like those between tired, stressed out partners on the Amazing Race. When we arrived at the bus station in Kyoto, after taking the train from Tokyo, after spending most of the night wide awake in our blue and white striped hotel room robes, after flying nine hours across the yawning Pacific, we were in no shape to figure out which bus to take, to notice the difference between bus #5 and another bus with the numeral 5 and a kanji symbol.

This became known in our parlance as dread Kanji 5, the evil bus, the transport from hell – typical of the kind of hyped up exaggeration I generate for stories told later (and, truth be told, not entirely fair to the polite and tidy Japanese denizens of a bus heading away from tourist areas and to the part of town where real people lived – the real people we always say we want to be with when we travel).

This is what we asked for: a trip to someplace new, with only our Lonely Planet and a wrinkled, whimsical email as our tour guides. As we’ve experienced time and again in our travels, it was more than we bargained for. And thank goodness for that. If everything goes as planned, if you can tell the story before you live it, that’s not much. The memories we treasure, the ones we return to in less colorful rooms built within the walls of 52

routine, are the ones we can’t know ahead of time. Even when the ending is happy, the narrative arc as expected, the pleasure and the meaning is in the details, the unpredicted, the kanji 5 bus heading in the wrong direction.

I’d like to report that I managed to stay calm and collected. I’d like to say I didn’t freak out, my voice gaining altitude and volume as it became clear that kanji 5 was not heading to the bus stop within walking distance of this room. I’d like to say I was polite as I tried to ask the bus driver where he was going and how far that was from this lovely room described, completely in English, on the now worn and tear-stained email. A single piece of paper seems awfully flimsy when all of your hopes of warmth, safety, and the ability to successfully return to Idaho are depending on it. For a moment I honestly pictured us trapped in Japan, an ungraceful American couple wandering from Starbucks to Starbucks, growing more ragged and incoherent by the day, living on off-tasting pastries and coffee when the green tea and sushi breakfasts lost their novelty.

In the end, the solution was simple: when in doubt, retrace your steps. We got off the bus and waited at the stop across the street and returned to the train station.

Our second attempt was more successful and we eventually landed in this room. No sooner had we poured the tea set out by our hosts than our next adventure presented itself: finding food. We sat on the tatami mat in this paper-walled room, watched over by a Samurai warrior on one wall, considering how best to address our hunger, feeling overwhelmed by the loneliness of being the only Americans, the only white people, that we’d seen all day, the frightening experience of the kanji 5 53

bus. How often hunger has paralyzed us! And how often has it propelled us forward into experience, the kind we said we sought when we hit bought the plane tickets to Asia two months prior.

Because we refuse to eat at McDonalds or Denny’s, because we are exhausted at the prospect of trying to figure out which of the plastic dishes crammed into the restaurant window is delicious instead of disgusting, we become one with the city and head to the grocery store.

We wander the aisles of the market, marveling at how the Japanese package and process food. We marvel at what counts for candy. We settled on an Asian snack mix resembling those at World Market back home and an assortment of plastic wrapped buns. Buying what would be our dinner, to eat hungrily in this perfect room in this perfect traditional Japanese house, turned out to be as simple as presenting it to the cashier and passing her a handful of yen. Who knows how much those tiny buns filled with red bean paste really cost? The point was, we were about to eat. We had conquered the kanji 5, we had successfully grocery shopped in Kyoto, and this allowed us to continue, more comfortable, in this room, in this city I rank up there with my favorites, because we were together, because we had to huddle together next to the propane-burning heater as the sun came up over the cherry blossoms, bathing us in its light.

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DEE BOWLING

THE UNWELCOME GUEST Before traveling to Africa, my perception of its wildlife included the stampeding herds of large animals such as wildebeests or zebras as seen on television. Yet during my first journey to Ghana in 2003, the most potentially dangerous encounter I experienced in Africa resulted from something much smaller that sought sanctuary in my room, it was every bit as wild.

MolĂŠ National Park is a West African reserve for elephants, but also a refuge for baboons, warthogs, antelope, monkeys, and crocodiles. Our traveling group of seven high school students and four adult chaperones from Boise was looking forward to this greatly anticipated retreat following a week of working in the rural village of Bamboi.

On the first night at the reserve, I stayed with the students in a dormitory-type structure. A generator provided electricity, including a ceiling fan, but only until ten pm nightly. I silently said a prayer of thanks for the working toilet, sink and bathtub, luxuries none of us had enjoyed during the past week. However, I made the mistake of bathing after the generator had shut down. The water in the tub turned brown as it began filling with sediment that was barely visible in the dim light of a lantern. At first I thought it was the dirt from a body that had not seen a shower in five days, but quickly realized the dark water was dribbling from the spigot.

A variety of undetectable sounds filtered in from the shadowy environment outside. It was too hot to close the

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windows but, fortunately, securely-fitted screens kept the malaria-carrying mosquitoes at bay.

The next morning, while the students shopped in a nearby village, I moved my belongings up the hill to a one room cottage overlooking the savannah where the elephants romped in their watering holes. I was thrilled to see the adjacent patio and made a mental note to carry my sketch pad and journal outside once I had everything settled in the new space.

Entering the tiny cottage, I deposited my bag on one of the twin beds then scanned the bathroom area, relieved to see an authentic flushing toilet in front of the window. I was astonished at my luck in securing such cozy accommodations as I grabbed my drawing pad and relaxed on the patio where I could observe the elephants. When I later reminisced about this eventful day, I was intensely grateful for having utilized the toilet in my previous quarters right before moving to the cottage, especially upon learning what was sleeping just beyond my bed.

From the patio, I was startled by loud banging on the door. Before I could move inside, a park employee came rushing around the side of the cottage and said, “Come with me!” I recognized her as Afua, one of the clerks in the office. She said there was something in the room needing immediate attention, and she obviously didn’t want me to see it. I attempted to put my drawing materials inside the room before accompanying her, but her voice screeched just short of a holler, “Oh no, do not go inside. Come with me NOW!” I must have become a bit obstinate because Afua relented and said, “Set everything just inside the door, quickly.” My imagination ran rampant as I envisioned 56

scorpions, mice, insects the size of meerkats, or possibly some cleaning detail overlooked by the maid.

Two male employees arrived, one carrying a can of Raid and the other a pot of steaming water. It was suggested I take a little walk, so I wandered around the grounds waiting for permission to return to my room.

A short time later, as I turned the corner near the cottage, I saw Afua holding a large burlap sack. When I approached her and asked what was inside my room, she smiled as she answered, “Come see me before you leave in the morning and I’ll tell you.”

Following a night of restless dreams starring an array of creepy crawlers scurrying into a burlap bag, I awoke early, dressed and finished packing. While delivering my bag to the van, I caught a glimpse of Afua and ran to catch up with her.

“Will you tell me what you found in my room yesterday?” I pleaded.

“Oh, it was a little mamba,” she replied with a sigh.

Having no knowledge of this particular African creature, I innocently asked, “What’s a mamba?”

“That would be the snake that curled up on the window ledge behind the toilet,” and she held up her arms to reveal the length of the reptile and remarked, “about this long.” Then her eyes twinkled and she laughed, as she continued spreading her arms to their maximum width.

Afua explained that someone walking past the cottage had spotted the mamba coiled inside the screen and alerted the park staff, who initially hoped I had not yet made the move from my former lodging.

To immobilize the snake, one employee poured boiling water on it while another saturated the reptile 57

with Raid. Once the snake was dead, the workers placed it inside the burlap bag, hoping no guests would see it.

Perhaps in response to my shocked expression, Afua rationalized that she wanted me to have a good night’s rest; consequently, she waited until my departure to provide, as radio commentator Paul Harvey would say, “the rest of the story.” Only later did I learn that the green mamba is one of the most feared and poisonous reptiles in Africa, along with its deadly cousin, the black mamba.

Without a doubt, I would have experienced little or no sleep had the news of my room’s uninvited guest been shared with me earlier. Today, the memory of the charming cottage and its unwelcome visitor has become intertwined with my original expectations of the vast African wilderness, previously imagined but now experienced.

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MICHAEL PHILLEY

THE CONGO ROOM You’re thinking, Lord, don’t let a tire go flat, not now, not when it’s so cold my eyes are stinging, weeping, icing shut so I can barely see. So you pedal harder, guide the bicycle across crusts of snow that crunch and pop like bubble wrap. Your mittens are frozen to the handlebars, fingers going numb. Car tailpipes stream ghostly vapors in the frigid air.

Ahead, the Panda Express, bathed in incandescent light. Two workers sweep floors and stack chairs on tables, sidestep a solitary customer. A darkened, deserted Burger King looms almost invisible across the road from the 24-hour Walgreens. A woman in a pink ski jacket exits a restaurant and walks toward a pickup truck, its engine idling. The short cut through Walmart’s parking lot is blocked by snow. Lord, don’t let me be late, don’t let me be late!

The first truck arrives. Boxes and cartons of electronics – computers, printers, scanners, fax machines, plasma screen TVs. You slit cardboard with your boxcutter – precise, firm strokes, like when you were a butcher’s apprentice in Brazaville, in the Congo. You remember bleeding seven goats for your wedding in the village, and a manioc-fattened calf after the birth of your daughter on All Saints’ Day. You remember carrying Keicha in your arms along a muddy path beside the Great River, shielding her from the pelting rain, entering the hushed whitewashed church as the choir begins to sway. Gospel hymns flood your mind as you wield the

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box-cutter, your hands calloused and strong.

Lord, protect me and hold me, let me persevere. Not far from your village, you watch the rebel encampment, the world still and wet at sunrise. You creep beside Jean-Claude and Evard across the harvested cane field and come out near a tall mahogany tree, its bark the color of congealed blood. You’re the first to see the boy – a Russian manufactured assault rifle cradled in his arms – only twenty meters from where you stand. Before you can think, the boy opens fire and empties his clip. Jean-Claude and Evard fall on their backs, into the cane.

Your limbs tremble. A nighthawk screams from the mahogany. A miracle, Lord, a miracle! Not a single bullet has touched you. He’s just a boy, maybe twelve or thirteen, and you see that he is missing a leg; supports himself on a makeshift crutch. You grip your machete and look down at the boy’s face, his eyes staring into yours, his mouth gaping open to show perfect white teeth.

Years of brutal war, never knowing which militia might seize you and make you theirs, the Angolans joining the fight to secure the oil fields. Your family believes you are dead; the village priest will conduct funeral rites.

At midnight you unload the second truck. Heavy boxes of dog food, fifty-pound bags of cat litter, cartons containing pet snacks, treats, and playthings. You assemble a display of carpet-lined towers, stairs, tunnels and bridges and try to imagine how a cat might feel – to be king of such a magnificent structure. You think of ruined bridges, burned out villages, starving dogs prowling the night, howling even in your dreams.

One morning you find a dog lying on its side in a mound of stink, scarcely breathing, riddled with mange.

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You pray silently as you slit its throat.

Lord, have mercy on my soul. A French physician wearing lenses as thick as glass bottles examines you at the refugee camp in Ghana. Her eyes tell you that she is kind and knows your story even before you speak. “Oudry,” she says, “your mind is like a house with many rooms.

There can be a room that you are afraid to enter, but don’t close it off from the rest of the house. You must have courage. You must go into the room, feel its dust on your fingers, smell its odor, rearrange the broken furniture. Only then, Oudry, will you be free.”

Seven years at the refugee camp, and then one day, Boise. You look out the window over Idaho and see a patchwork of fields sloping toward hills that turn into mountains, everything barren and brown. All your life you’ve lived by green farmland and thick forests. Lord, you ask, where are the trees?

The floor of the produce section is slick and shiny where you’ve mopped away boot prints and bits of lettuce. Soon you’ll clock out and pedal five miles in early morning darkness, braced against the bitter cold, back to the apartment you share with two other men, one from Somalia, the other an Iraqi. You need sleep during the day, but they always have the TV turned loud to cartoons and soap operas. They say that they learn English from the TV, or so they claim. You bury your head in the pillow as if it could quiet your mind.

You’ll never know who or how many raped your wife. You only know that Keicha, now fifteen, lives in the home of her uncle, your wife’s brother, in the north. There have been letters, and twice you’ve spoken with Keicha by phone. She is proud that her father is in America. She thinks you have money. There are school 61

fees to pay, and she would like new clothes, even a laptop computer. You learn that she loves music, that she is the youngest member of a church choir. Lord, if it’s only once, please let me hear her sing.

The bicycle tires hold air. A dusting of snow covers all signs of yesterday’s traffic. Faint streaks of pink and orange paint the horizon. You walk the bicycle up a long hill, stopping to catch your breath. A school bus passes, its rear view mirror flashes a miniature image of yourself, and you marvel that you are here at all. Those kind eyes behind thick lenses still looking at you, the voice distant, like an echo. Only then, Oudry, will you be free.

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ELIZABETH BEAMAN

THE GROUP “What happened?” first soprano Ann asks Ellen.

“I left him there,” Ellen says, “there” referring to Philadelphia.

It is the first Tuesday of November 1986, and the early music ensemble Lily of the Fields is meeting in the family room of Ellen’s home near the San Tomas Expressway. It is their first time in Ellen’s home since her return a month ago. The five women practice every Tuesday evening. Once in a while they hold a concert or have a church gig. They’ve been doing this since meeting each other in a vocal ensemble class at West Valley Community College in 1980. They used to be seven with two men, Frank and Ernest. Ernest sang tenor and played lute. Frank sang bass and played bass recorder. But that was a year ago, before the big problem with Ellen, the director of the group, and Frank.

The room is a mess. Dust drifts across the surfaces of the room: the fireplace mantel, the upright piano, the bulging back of the vinyl couch, the dark drapes over the patio door, and the chairs arranged in a circle for the group in the middle of the room. Sheets of handwritten music flow in a river of paper from a brass music stand in front of the fireplace and across the gray carpet to the piano bench. The counter separating the kitchen nook from the room is covered with plates of food in varying stages of decomposition.

The group breathes the air shimmering with whiffs of rotting food, as they brush off their chairs and take

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their seats. A television sits in the far corner of the room. The set is turned off.

Ellen says, “The funniest thing happened to my TV. A rat bit into the power cord. I found him fried behind the set this morning. He was still smoking! Now, the TV’s not working.”

The women shift uncomfortably in their chairs looking for other evidence of rats in the room.

Second soprano Marjorie says, “It could have burnt the place down!” The women rummage in their bags for sheet music and recorders, glancing sideways at each other.

Ellen wears black spandex to accommodate her increasing obesity; her burgeoning figure balloons over slim ankles and feet, developing jowls fill out her face.

She has pulled her bright red curls into a Puritanical knot at the back of her head. She wears no makeup to cover the red splotches marring her once clear complexion.

“Why did you leave Frank?” asks Ann. “I ran out of money,” Ellen says, “When he was transferred to Philadelphia, I begged him to take me.

But he said he had to work things out with Betty and the kids first. I mortgaged the house to follow him.”

First alto Susan says, “Betty had the upper hand.”

Susan is the most taciturn member of the group, so her comment surprises everyone.

Ellen trains a set of beady eyes on her and continues, “You’re right. He never committed. He vacillated, living with me, living with her. It turns out she had family close to Philadelphia, and they pressured him to give me up. The final straw was blowing through what Sam had left me. I sold the stocks, bonds, everything. Love 64

ends, no money.” Ellen is Sam’s widow. Sam died when their daughter Arielle was only two.

“What’re you going to do now?” rumbles the second alto, Sally.

“Ha, get a job!” exclaims Ellen. The splotches on her face darken.

No one understands what job that would be — Ellen is talented in many obsolete occupations, like calligraphy and blackwork embroidery. Trained at Julliard, she has a particular genius for vocal arranging, but Ellen won’t take money for anything she loves doing. So, there is the quandary.

Ellen pauses a moment and says, “I think Frank asked for that transfer.”

The group remains silent. Ann has thought this for a long time.

Arielle enters the room, a slight figure against the gloom of the hallway. A frizz of light brown hair frames her pale face. “I’m going out, Mother,” she tells Ellen.

“When are you coming back?” Ellen asks.

“Not soon. I’m eating dinner there and will probably stay the night.” Arielle has been staying over at her friend’s house a lot since their return to California.

Arielle leaves the room, and they all hear the front door shut.

Ellen remembers when Frank joined the ensemble at West Valley, shortly before they formed Lily of the Fields, how he complained about his wife Betty, who wanted to buy a new couch, when he wanted to buy a bass recorder with that money, which he did. Naturally, Ellen applauded his decision. She remembers their first eye contact, his eyes sparkling blue, hers deep like an ocean for drowning in. He was tall and thin, a satisfying 65

counterpoint to her short, plump figure. Their passion broke her bed when they were new lovers. And then there was the music. Her music professor had warned: “Watch out. It is too easy to fall in love when you are making music.”

“We’ve decided, Ellen. No more men in the group.

Sex ruins a group,” says Ann. Ann is the one who has been holding the ensemble together while Ellen has been away. Everyone titters, even Ellen.

“Here, here!” Marjorie says, and the others join in.

Something pops in the kitchen.

Ellen asks, “Does anyone want anything before we start?”

No one does.

Ellen says, “Well, let’s get out the Byrd ‘Five Voice Mass.’ We’ll have to figure out how to do it without men.” The chairs creak as the women search for their Byrd Mass scores. Ellen goes to the piano to play their parts, which she can do.

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RAMONA S NEAL

THE CONFERENCE ROOM Regina is striding to a remote corner of the building, balancing her laptop, power cords, a binder and twenty-five copies of a stapled presentation – an entire ream of paper, on her right forearm and against her belly. In her left hand, she holds a cup of steaming coffee which she sips as she works through the cubicle maze to the hallway on the building’s perimeter. Here the sun streams through the windows, warming her. Her bare arms are cold. She forgot to put on her jacket before stacking the items on her arm and she refused to put them down and go through the whole balancing exercise again.

Regina reaches the conference room and adds her coffee onto the pile. “Just for a second,” she thinks. This room has no lock; she will just need to turn the knob.

She does so and pushes the door open with her hip, expecting it to open easily. It does initially, but then, it is pushed back against her without warning and with surprising finality. She screams as the searing coffee hits the tender skin of her chest and runs down to her stomach.

“What the hell! Damn it!”

She spins around, wondering who may have heard.

She curses again, under her breath, as she loses the struggle and the coffee, laptop, cords, presentation copies and binder hit the floor. She grabs the presentations as the remainder of the coffee drips onto them.

She holds them up to let the coffee drip off, leans them

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against the wall, coffee side to the bottom, to avoid further damage as gravity exerts its inevitable force.

Regina peers into the conference room through the small window in the door. She can see two men seated at a table near the door. She double-checks the reservation list on the outside of the door. Her reservation is there – twenty people, ninety minutes; an important meeting to review the year-end financials, the gap between projections and reality, and the plan to fix the gap.

She gasps.

“Crossed out? You can’t just cross it out! Gaw-dd!”

She opens the door again, sliding her foot against the doorjamb like she has seen people do in movies.

The door is slammed against her toes and she pulls back in pain. Now she knows there are three people in the room; someone is on the other side of the door.

“Hey!” she says, “Open this door! I reserved this room. It’s mine for the next ninety minutes.”

He turns and speaks to her through the glass.

“Find another room.”

“What? You can’t just scratch out my reservation – it doesn’t work that way. I need this room!”

He opens the door a crack. “Look, we need to fire someone, we need privacy.”

“Like that makes it right? You can’t jack my room for that!”

“You need to find another room.”

“Seriously! I’ll report you to your manager.”

“Go ahead.”

She rolls her eyes. “You can’t just override my reservation – I’ve got twenty people coming” – she checks her watch – “in fifteen minutes. And I need a runthrough.”

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“Then hurry and find another room.”

“No. You need to get out of my room. I RESERVED it.”

He shuts the door.

“Sycophant,” she mutters. She tries the knob and finds that she can’t turn it. He has hold of it on the other side. Regina stomps her foot.

“This can’t be happening to me. Who does that?

Just crosses out a reservation and takes the room?”

Regina tries again. “Look, you can have my room for ten minutes, but at the top of the hour, it’s mine.”

“We’ll be here longer. Find another room.”

“No, YOU go find another room. I reserved this room. It’s MINE.” Silence.

“You need to leave MY room, NOW.” Silence.

Regina tries to see him through the window. Suddenly, she sees black. He has put his back against the window. She pounds on the door and growls, “Give me back my room, you dirtball.”

She leans against the door and puts her hand on her head, her fingers spread as if to comb the hair away from her face. Instead they grip her scalp like talons, digging in to her skull, countering the pressure from within. There is no other conference room available.

They are all booked. She knows this because she, unlike others, made a reservation.

She pounds her fist on the door. “Open up, butthead. Give me back my room.”

He turns and stares at her through the glass. She shows him her wrist and taps her watch. He shakes his head. He mouths, “Find another room.” She sees his 69

black back again.

Regina makes fists in her hair at the sides of her head and pulls. A guttural sound comes from her.

“You son of a...you big man, big man, big man BOSS!” She kicks at the door with each word, “GIVE...

ME… BACK...MY…ROOM!” He looks at her once more through the window. She narrows her eyes, shows him her fists. He puts a finger to his lips, purses them against it.

“Oh, that’s rich! You dare shush me! That’s abuse, you horse’s ass! That’s workplace bullying and I will have your job for it. It’s sexist, it’s discriminatory. As soon as I figure out who you are, I’m going to report you to HR. This whole thing – it’s abuse – conference room abuse, that’s what it is.”

“Regina!” It’s her manager. “I could hear you halfway across the building! Why are you behaving like this?

What is the problem?” He stares at her, arms crossed, raising his eyebrows as he takes in her appearance – front stained with coffee, armpits drenched, and hair tousled like she just got out of bed.

“HE jacked MY ROOM! That’s what is going on.”

She gesticulates with her hands – the problem is obvious.

“Well now, Regina. That’s no big deal,” he says.

“Find another room.”

70

BARBARA C BROWN

PERFECT BALLS The next step was to mix the virgin olive oil, one tablespoon, with the fine dry bread crumbs. Rebekah stirred the bread crumbs and olive oil and then lifted and formed the first croquette ball and began rolling it in the mixture. She rolled it forward until it started to grow. Then she rolled it sideways and watched the bread and oil mixture adhere to the sides of the croquette.

Her hands rolled and patted. Two inch wide lines ran across the plate in every direction. The croquette tracks reminded Rebekah of making a snowman: when that first big ball pulls the snow up off the ground and leaves a wide track.

Rebekah’s mother had taught her how to make a snowman. “You start with a small ball and roll it in the snow until it starts to grow. Then you change directions in order to get new snow to stick to the ball.” Mother demonstrated and made a very big ball. Rebekah made three balls the exact same way and made sure each succeeding ball was slightly smaller than the first. She set the next largest ball on top of the biggest ball and then set the smallest ball on the middle ball. The snowman waited.

“Hello Miss, looks like you’ve made you a mighty nice snowman. Wha’cha gonna use for eyes?”

Rebekah turned to see Stanley, the apartment janitor. She didn’t know him except to have been with her mother when they chatted. He wore the same thick, blue denim jacket with a rank odor she didn’t recognize.

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“Dun’no.”

“Want some help?”

“Okay.”

“I’ve got something for you. Come with me.”

“Okay,” she told the janitor.

Rebekah looked up to the apartment window to see if her mother was watching. Sometimes, Mother got mad because Rebekah did stuff without thinking. Like taking shortcuts in the southside alleys. She wondered if it was okay with Mother to go with the janitor. Rebekah looked up to the first floor window where Mother often sat and watched for cardinals in the trees. Now that Father traveled so much, Mother spent a lot of time alone.

Mother wasn’t at the window.

Rebekah followed Stanley through the side door into the basement of the apartment building. Everything was dark grey cement except for green wooden doors separating the storage areas. She glanced to the left where her family’s storage room was located. Their storage room had blue velveteen pillows and a colorful rag rug on the floor. Mother often went to the basement to have some quiet time.

At the end of the long open basement area there was a green, wooden door that was never open. The words BOILER ROOM were painted in black across the top of the door. She dared not imagine what lay on the other side.

“What does that say?”

“Boiler Room,” Stanley replied.

“What’s a boiler?’ she wanted to know.

“Well, here it is the room where we stoke the furnace.”

Things were getting more complicated, Rebekah 72

just said,“Oh.” Stanley walked toward the Boiler Room door and took out a bunch of dangling keys on a gold circle.

Rebekah stared at the keys. She couldn’t imagine he had that many places to lock and unlock. Stanley found the key he wanted and put it in the lock. Stanley turned the dark, brass knob. Inside the room there were white shelves that went around the perimeter. Each shelf had a bottle that was kind of a rose color or more like a soft, old brick color. The bottles weren’t glass, but looked to Rebekah like they were made of clay.

“What’s L…A…N…C…E…R…S?” she asked.

Stanley shot her a quick glance. “Just some bottles I collect.”

There was a separate space on the right side of the room, about ten feet by four feet. It was surrounded by a wooden wall that was taller than Rebekah. Stanley ushered Rebekah over to the space and said, “Pick out some eyeballs.” There was a huge pile of small, uneven, pieces of black rock sloping toward the cement floor. Rebekah had never seen anything like this dark rock.

“It’s coal,” Stanley explained. “That’s what I put in the furnace to keep you and your mom warm.”

“My father gets cold too,” Rebekah reminded Stanley.

“I’m sure he does.”

Rebekah heard the Illinois Central’s 8:15 whistle blow as it rushed down the tracks near her house. She grabbed two pieces of coal and shoved them in her pocket.

“Oh no, I’m late.” She ran out and didn’t even have a chance to say thank you to Stanley. She got halfway to school when she realized her lunchbox was in the Boiler 73

Room. She ran home.

Out of breath and cold, Rebekah ran into the basement and headed for the Boiler Room. The door was closed and she hoped it wasn’t locked. She reached out to turn the dirty brass knob when she heard her mother’s laughter on the other side of the door, “Rebekah made a lovely snowman, didn’t she? She’s a perfectionist. She rolled such lovely balls.”

“I’ll show you some lovely balls.” Stanley replied and they both started laughing again.

“Pour me some more wine,” Mother requested.

Rebekah’s husband kissed her on the back of her neck. “Black bean croquettes? How do you make such perfect balls?”

“Family secret.”

74

SUE NIXON

WHAT I GLEANED FROM THE MEN’S ROOM Clarence was a former college professor who had long ago lost the ability to reason; however, he retained a dignified demeanor that was only tarnished by the erection he proudly displayed through unzipped pants.

Having never seen one, I tried not to stare.

The basement of the Holiday House nursing home was the men’s floor where the smell of urine, indigestion, and dirty ashtrays pooled with fumes of Pine-Sol and Clorox. I was assigned to the floor by the home’s director, Dirk, a big intimidating guy with a curt German accent and a dismissive manner. Dirk said that I would do just fine among the men because I was a “big girl” and looked strong enough to pick a grown man off the floor or out of the bathtub. I was, in fact, just that — all five-feet-ten-inches and 150 pounds of me. At seventeen, the nurse’s aide position was my first job ever.

Nola was an LPN and my designated trainer. She was a recently divorced thirty-something, who used terms like “Honey” and “Sweetie” rather than one’s name. The old men loved Nola. She treated them with a familiarity that made them think she might be available.

In contrast, I was a wide-eyed oafish virgin girl who had no idea what I was in for.

Nola taught me how to shave, sometimes feed, and generally care for the men, most of whom were in the latter stages of dementia or were just plain old and crazy. Every day they congregated in the basement “rec room” to get shaved, eat breakfast, smoke, and stare

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at the television. No actual recreation went on in the room. Boredom ruled. All but a few had lost the blessing of concentration, so reading, playing cards, or even conversing was out of the question. Some blatantly masturbated. No one interfered. It was the men’s room after all, and everyone, especially the nurses, was just trying to get through the day.

Steve, who suffered from schizophrenia, was also unfortunate enough to be my first attempt at shaving.

That morning, the gluey oatmeal stuck to his scruffy whiskers was replaced with droplets of blood and his ensuing terror. Steve, one cheek covered with shaving cream and the other oozing red, quickly wrestled my arm and the offending razor away from his face, exited the rec room through an unlocked sliding glass window, jumped the chain link fence, and ran until his ancient body collapsed in the parking lot of a nearby grocery store. Later on, Steve and I came to an understanding of sorts, though he never lost his wariness of me. From him, I learned that a little patience and a soft touch can actually save time.

There was Carl, a former railroad conductor, who had lost his sight in a work-related accident. Carl was also missing most of his teeth, and below his cheekbones, his sunken face lost all form except for the big white coated tongue that he constantly chewed on with his gums. Despite everything, Carl was always happy and polite. He was one of the few truly social individuals in the room. Head half-cocked, he absorbed much of his surroundings, to the point of knowing just why Clarence was a constant source of giggles and disgusted sighs. Tongue smacking against gums, he’d say “Ah, poor guy, he just doesn’t know anymore!”

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Carl loved to smoke, but his stash was doled sporadically on the premise that he snuffed his smokes out on the floor or worse onto the couch, though I’d never seen it. In any event, Carl had it all figured out by the time I arrived on the scene. In his most charming gravelly, toothless voice Carl would yell, “NURSE, I HAVE AN ASHTRAY! CAN I HAVE A CIGARETTE?!” Carl’s words of wisdom on the value of preparedness and keeping first things first, however, never trumped his choosing to be pleasant. He had every reason not to be.

Jesse’s old-age affliction was extreme obsessive compulsive disorder. I’d known him personally before he got sick and old. He’d been a leader in my family’s church and a big shot at the savings and loan that had refinanced my childhood home. Jesse sat in the same chair every day only because he was literally tied to it.

He had a sort of glazed look in his eyes that told you the ‘good’ Jesse had departed his body long ago and left behind his most unattractive and, perhaps, most dominant self. Jesse twiddled his thumbs for hours saying, “Give me some. Give me some. Give me some.” His chant was usually drowned out by the drone of the rec room television but, nonetheless, added to the room’s overall ambiance. Jesse’s restraints had to be double checked before each meal, so that he did not jump to his feet and feast on everyone else’s food before they had even smelled it. Jesse was in hell with greed, or at least it seemed that way. And he could not have been a better warning of the need for temperance. Thank you, Jesse.

And there was Jimmy, a spry little man with intensely blue eyes who, whenever I tried to shave him, got my attention by punching me harder than any of my brothers ever had. Every day Jimmy paced the rec room 77

and the hallways with purpose – searching and waiting.

One day, Jimmy walked with that same purpose from the rec room to his cot where hours later I held his hand and impatiently waited for him to die. My teenaged callousness haunts me still, and from Jimmy I learned to practice compassion until it comes naturally.

My memories of the Holiday House rec room have not dulled with time. Instead, they’ve grown more vivid and meaningful as I enter into my own dotage. Though unappreciated at seventeen, the men there taught me about the common humanity we all share. I am grateful.

78

GREG HEINZMAN

HOW TO TEACH IN PRISON An inmate named Danny hung himself in my classroom today. He wasn’t one of my students or anyone I had met. Somehow that makes it easier to deal with.

My classroom is a collection of four tiers of maximum security, single-man cells, twenty-five to a tier. My office, about six feet by ten feet, is slightly larger than the six feet by nine feet cells. It was a janitor’s closet when I moved in, and not exactly clean. I wiped all the walls and swept the floor, but nothing in prison ever truly feels clean. The “stank,” as it is called, comes home on your hands.

Occasionally I sit and listen to the noises of the Segregation Unit – a.k.a. “The Hole” – outside my office door. I cannot lock the door from inside, and officers sometimes stop by and say hi. Other times they don’t look in, locking the door from the outside. I bang on the door until someone realizes that they “just locked the fuckin’ teacher in the closet,” which usually leads to jokes about my sexuality. To many of them, I must be gay because I don’t like to fight and I do like to teach poetry to inmates. It wears on me, even as I dismiss the comments as good-natured ribbing.

On the outside, I find myself wanting to get into a bar fight that I don’t start, just to prove my toughness.

Sometimes I fall asleep with my head on my desk while reading student writing. The officers are loud enough – with jangling keys, heavy boots, and foul mouths – to wake me up just before they peek in, either

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to mess with me or just say hi. I’m sure they can see the red lines on my forehead from the creases of my sleeve.

I think they envy my freedom.

Outside my door, I hear the officers banging the chow cart down the hall, cramming six-inch keys into the locks on the sliding, Plexiglas-covered tier doors.

The Plexiglas was added to the bars to protect officers – and the occasional GED teacher – from being pelted with bodily fluids or blow darts infected with hepatitis made from sharpened staples and wadded up tissue. Or so the stories go. No one ever tries to spit or piss on me, but they’d figure out a way to do it if it was that important. It takes ingenuity to hang yourself in a cell.

An officer pops his head in, a guy I played football against in high school. He’s kind of an asshole most of the time, but shows an unusual curiosity in why the hell I would want to “teach these motherfuckers how to read.” I tell him that I do it for the same three reasons he’s an officer: good at it, might help make society safer, pay and benefits aren’t too shabby. He accepts the answer and then tells me about his last hunting trip and how he and his dad bond over hunting and smoking weed together. He’s a lively storyteller, but I get tired of the racial slurs and the air of physical superiority he projects. He knows he could “whoop my ass” in about five seconds. He knows he – and his extra seventy-five pounds – once crushed me for a two yard loss on a crisp Friday night in fall, knocking the wind out of me. He knows that if shit ever goes down, he’ll be the one protecting me.

And I know that he’s the one who had to cut the sheet Danny used to hang himself. So, I listen to his stories.

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He hands me a tray of prison food, and I eat while he goes on about high school football shit that happened eight years ago and doesn’t matter to me now. But I listen, and I hand him my tray when I’m done eating, which gets rid of him. But as he leaves, an unexpected longing creeps in. A longing to keep listening instead of reading the crusty – all prison paper feels crusty – descriptive essays I have just collected from my students on B-tier, the tier where it happened. I want to ask him what it felt like to catch Danny before he fell to the floor. For some reason, I can’t.

Today, I’m tired of reading bad writing. I select an essay by a bright student, hoping it will trick me into reading more. He’s nineteen, resourceful, and clever.

He fashions intricate dream catchers out of rolled up pieces of writing paper and the orange and blue threads he painstakingly extracts one by one from the elastic band in his prison issue underwear.

His essay describes what it feels like reading 1984 in prison. To him, it feels like an enormous hand, grimy and calloused, smacking him, open-palmed, against the wall of his cell repeatedly, relentlessly. He ends the essay by writing that it’s his new favorite book because it’s the first one he’s ever truly related to. There is no mention of death. He must have written it before the guy in the cell next to him dropped from his bed and never hit the floor.

Sometimes, when I’m tired of teaching, I daydream about being back on the outside, as if I can’t just get up and leave. I daydream about being forced to stay in my little office for years on end. I daydream about how I would survive in prison. These thoughts are comforting because I know I can leave. I can leave the yelling, 81

the clanking, the banging behind me and admire the well-kept rose garden, planted years ago by well-behaved minimum security inmates, just outside the entrance to the prison. Sometimes, I pause to smell them, hoping an officer is not watching.

When I arrive home, I immediately wash the prison stank from my hands and carefully clip a few Anaheim peppers from the plant outside my back door. They do not hit the ground, and they do not struggle.

82

ERIC E WALLACE

BIRDS OF PREY The room, small and windowless, could be claustrophobic. But Bryce has found it to be stimulating, a place from which he can command the earth.

The dream, open and limitless, should be freeing.

But for Bryce, inevitably, it turns frightening, suffocating.

Day after day, the two – the room and the dream – come together, feed upon each other.

Bryce’s room is far out in the desert, part of a cluster of trailers eyed only by the relentless sun and a few covert satellites. Blank-faced boxes, blotchy with camouflage paint. Some little more than shipping crates perched on jackwheels.

None have a window. But inside, monitors reveal the world. Inside, men and women change the world.

If you spend long hours in these dark rooms, no matter how ordinary your own home when you return to it, you may twist and turn in your sleep, hunting for daylight, for air. If you spend long hours in these rooms doing what you excel at, it’s very possible your dreams may try to shred your soul.

Bryce’s dreams forever plummet into nightmares.

Almost always they begin with the same magnificent prelude, the same startling transformation.

A great blue heron, first a huge silent shadow, then a sudden soft fuselage, slate grey and flashing rust, drops over the roof and commands the pond, shoving aside astonished lilies, spearing aghast goldfish one by one, 83

taking leisurely, insolent flight when Bryce opens the door.

Instantly Bryce becomes the heron, soaring freely over rugged Idaho rangelands, with slow sensuous beating of long wings, following a weary stream, sharp eyes patrolling smudgy dots of sage on the cracked brown earth.

When exhilaration shatters, Bryce is the drone, the predator, the reaper. The sere and bumpy landscape, resolutely mountainous, is now very much like Afghanistan or Pakistan. He flies with terrible speed and singular, deadly purpose, controlled by some power far behind his unflinching eyes.

Sometimes he is lucky and awakes before the hellfire in his belly shoots forward on a pitiless trajectory of devastation. Sometimes.

His wife isn’t very sympathetic. “It’s no dream, Bry. We gotta take care of that damn heron.” She fondles his top uniform button. “And it’s your job to fly those pretend planes. You’re keeping us all safe. Go get ‘em, tiger.”

Bryce knows the party line. Mostly he subscribes to it. With his superb aviation and computer skills, piloting unmanneds is second nature to him. He flies them from a soft leather chair in an air-conditioned trailer overflowing with high-tech gear. The only attempts at décor: a frayed sports banner and a melancholy rubber plant. No masks, no chutes, no ejection systems. And no hostile fire.

Except for the dreams. They are the enemy, firing at him nightly. They tear into him brutally, making him gasp and sweat. Making him doubt.

This morning, no dream, the real heron descended 84

at dawn, performed a reconnaissance, stabbed a fleeing frog, flipped it into the air and gulletted it with unblinking indifference, moments later rising to the west with serene majesty, Bryce frozen in place at the kitchen window. He thinks it fortunate that his wife is still asleep.

The image still lingers as Bryce leaves the late afternoon briefing and settles into the cramped trailer cockpit beside his sensor operator, a redheaded captain. She nods to him and continues muttering into her headset microphone. There’s no smile on her freckled face.

She’s already awash in data. The room flickers wanly from banks of computer screens. It smells of ozone and cheap industrial cleaner. Humming uneasily together, the electronics and air conditioning achieve a low and dissonant chord.

Bryce’s UAV, launched by controllers overseas, is waiting to speed over the mountains towards a village believed to be hiding an important figure, a ‘really big fish.’ Intel has spoken.

Bryce takes control of the Predator. Joystick, throttle, readouts, radios, computers, GPS, satellites – he has all the technology he needs, but foremost is pure instinct. He streaks over sullen crags, swoops down long, ancient gorges with grace and ease, arcing up for the next sharp ridge, banking, dropping lower as the target nears, an insignificant enclave sleeping at the end of a sloping valley. The plane’s amazing cameras reveal lazy smoke in the thin dawn light.

My dusk is your daybreak, my power your weakness, my knowledge your death. Where did that come from? Bryce wonders, readying to fire.

Headsets vibrate a crisp command. “Take out the 85

center structures. That’s affirmative.”

Bryce sees rough, sand-colored buildings, sagging tents, tiny moving figures. Women carrying water, his brain screeches, three, a detached voice counts down, those can’t be kids and goats, two, surely a trick of light, one, a small flock of birds arises, veers abruptly, fire! Bryce launches the missiles, someone yells a triumphant “splash!” The village erupts in flaming dust, pixilated chaos, and Bryce pulls up and away, his temples pounding, impossibly hearing screams, smelling bloodstench, seeing shredded flesh, tasting gritty bile, feeling searing agony.

Bryce wants to believe he’s only a force of nature, merciless yet dispassionate, only a great blue heron doing what he knows to do: fly, kill, fly.

But what, Bryce wonders, does a heron know of human error, of collateral damage?

“Awesome flying, Major!” mutters the captain. Her face has lost its ruddiness but her eyes maintain their steeled obedience.

Bryce nods, removes his fat, sweat-stained headsets, scribbles at his paperwork, creaks open the door of the olive and gray shipping container. Outside, he quickly jams on dark glasses against the accusing glare of the desert. He’s assailed by an incongruous blend of smells: the stink of frying hamburgers and the earthy overtones of sage. Grease and sadness, he thinks, hold the fries.

Swallowing dust and bile, he swims through the heat and the sand towards the central trailer.

What does a heron know of nightmares?

Bryce clinks up the metal stairs, enters another sightless room, prepares to report.

And tonight another dream awaits, ready to close its dark-feathered walls around him.

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MARISA DALLAS

PATHS THAT LIGHT CAN TAKE Crawdads live in fecundity on the second stair of the murky swimming pool. She wishes her husband could have seen the frog, the size of her open hand, jumping into the deep end. Its legs unfurl behind it before it lands with a practiced lazy plop. With it being so damn humid, she goes inside the house they just bought together. The air conditioning is on so low that droplets of icy condensation are forming on the vents overhead.

The house smells stale and there are mouse droppings in the kitchen cupboards. Her husband wants to start moving in the furniture before the black tumultuous clouds of the approaching lightening storm get any closer.

The room she settles on for their bedroom is morose maroon. Jokes about the fresh water habitat of the pool aside, this rectangular room with two small windows is the least of their worries. One of the windows looks out to the back porch and the other faces the interstate ramp, blocked from view by the thick trunk of a sprawling oak. She grabs a chair from outside and goes over the room, top to bottom, with a bucket of bleach water. Above the doorless closets are cupboards with greasy knobs. Opening one, she finds a forgotten dime bag.

White curtains close the closet in the pale blue bedroom. Window blinds allow cloudy light to filter into the room. The paint could have had more silver but it is still a far cry from the angry muddy red it was.

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She makes the bed, pulls the airy down comforter over the pillows and picks up the clothes strewn on the floor from the night before. Her husband pokes his head into the room and she tells him how a chandelier from the ceiling would be whimsical. He smiles at her naĂŻvetĂŠ.

They live with her childhood dog. It sleeps on a pillow in the corner of their bedroom. She relies on the dog for protection; to warn her of bad people or threatening situations, to guide her home. Only a friend is welcome within the circumference of the leash. She does her best to give her dog comfort and courage through the pains of age. When the time comes, it dies on its pillow before she makes it home from class. She gazes out to the gardenia they planted over her body and notices a long crack in the corner of the window pane.

She throws a house party to celebrate their wedding anniversary and (as an afterthought) her best friend’s birthday. They invite everyone. Kegs are lifted in new garbage cans filled with ice, and a table of liquor is laid out on the back porch. The chlorinated pool water expectant as the floats were blown up and thrown in.

Later, a friend too drunk to know where the bathroom is pisses on the dresser. The only intruder they ever had.

While falling in love with her husband, she manages to be close with her best friend. Repetitive conversations about parents and boyfriends are tedious but she tries to understand. Not everyone marries their high school sweetheart. She never let it bother her that her best friend must always be perceived as the sexiest when out together. It is exhausting to hope that her friend learns virginity is not a title of self-loathing but of self respect.

She passes the window overlooking the back porch and sees her best friend place her hand on her husbands 88

arm.

Everyone’s been drinking but not enough to mask the shame. Her best friend finds her sitting alone on the bed. Her friend smiles and asks if she wants something to drink. She is told she misunderstands. To keep her best friend safe from driving, she sleeps with her while her husband, turned off by the overture, sleeps on the couch. The next morning a long friendship is severed with severe judgments and harsh words; ugly truths to speak.

The map is laminated and intact with its original folds. She opens the glossy cover to find the exit number. The print is too small to read in the desert red orange light given by the setting sun, shining directly into the windshield. She closes the map and looks at the profile of her husband. Without taking his eyes from the road he reaches out to hold her hand.

A toddler jumps with his arms raised above his head on her bed while she is folding their clothes. She sees the intention in his mischievous eyes and catches the toddler before he dives into the folded pile. Some of the laundry lands on the floor. Laughing, forgetting the game, he holds onto the headboard and jumps even higher while facing the brackish blue wall. She looks out the window and smiles to herself at the sage against the yellow hillside under a blue sky. The quaking aspens clap in the breeze.

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DEVIATION Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive. — DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

EDVIN SUBASIC

FROM THE OUTSIDE IN

We all grow up thinking that our world will never change; our families, friends, even our places. I grew up in a house of permanence. In the country where I was born and raised – I’ll call it the country of my origin here – houses grew like children in the 70s and 80s.

People worked diligently to build, add, change. They built bigger and newer, they built for forever. Families were going to stay closer than ever, eternally bound to their places.

Before I turned eleven I shared my room with my older brother. Our bedroom was in the attic with honey pine paneling. Each room had an electric heater and a woodstove. We mostly used the woodstove because electric was expensive. Then my brother moved away; across the hallway. He now had a new room with brand new furniture. It smelled of freshly worked wood, new paint and clean sheets. I stayed in the old room with my desk covered with cartoon stickers, a dresser full of my brother’s ugly clothes forcefully handed down to me and one new pair of Levis. But there were no shoes, for the shoes would never make their way inside – another Muslim tradition that had a hold on the people in the country of my origin.

I was blessed that the books accumulated over the years with my mom’s help stayed in the room. She bought hardcover collections of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, Dickens, Twain, Hemingway, and domestic writers. She never really read any of them. I am still not sure 93

if she bought them with the intention of enlightening her family or just to decorate the empty shelves. Nonetheless, I was truly grateful to her.

The room grew bigger as our house expanded every year. But my room grew differently. Every time I opened new books, it opened its window overlooking the field and houses in the back. It led to the infinite and crisp Russian steps, old German cities with colorful roofs and cobblestones, and British fogs. I added a stereo later and recorded the newest songs from the radio station – the Irish boys, the dreamy Brits, or the grungy Americans.

When I was almost sixteen years old, the room closed its windows. Every night we made sure our window blinds were shut. With time we left them mostly closed. The music was out. The power was cut. My country of origin was falling apart, burning and rotting at the same time and at the same pace its people did.

The room grew smaller and smaller. Its walls suffocated me before sleep. I would sleep it off and get up ready to carry on the rest of the day, until one day the sleep didn’t help. Dreaming of another place was wrong at the time, an impossible dream. Running in dreams and swimming across the river was in vain. They would always catch me. They would always return me to my room. And then they would visit. It was our turn.

Two years later I found myself with my whole family among hundreds of bodies lying on bunk beds. There weren’t enough beds so I ended up sitting outside on the balcony. The first several days I wasn’t sleeping at all. The big two-story nightclub that closed years ago was now a transit center for refugees. It was in a small town in the neighboring country that also used to be 94

my country of origin. Now it was a transit country on the way to the new host country, somewhere up north.

North was hope. Santa Claus lived there. We were the newborns.

People smelled from the inside. The big old room smelled of moths, of diapers, socks, sweat, and cries. It reeked of silent distress, anger, and helplessness. The smells were trapped and brewing under the pressure.

The beds were loud and small, some of them lacking mattresses. The broken coils were hanging stubbornly; threatening in the dark. Every night before sleep, the residents would gather around the old TV set next to the entrance and watch the news from the south. They would start arguing with the TV anchor, swear and spit at the screen. At 10 pm someone would turn off the TV and ask everyone to go to their beds. I would leave the room then. Even if there was a bed for me, I couldn’t bear the room and its people who looked like my family, like me. I wasn’t ready for it. Here, I had finally made it across the river, and I hated it. I longed for my room.

Strangely, I remembered it only as it was a long time ago. I tried to lie between my mom and my grandma.

The iron bar edged between my ribs and I finally gave up and crawled away. I told them I just couldn’t sleep.

At last, six days later, I fell asleep. By then I was delirious. Our house was shrinking. The window of my room now was just a little square of the Rubik’s cube in my hand. Its dark brown blinds kept shut as I was looking at it, from outside in.

I woke up. It was dawn. An old man’s foot hovered over my head. His wool sock stunk of fermented sweat.

I went outside. I sat on the balcony again. It was dawn.

I looked down at the courtyard. The clothes hanging 95

on the lines were peacefully oscillating in the breeze. I could hear snoring and coughing from inside the room.

A baby cried and I heard a loud, “Shush!” I walked inside and I found an old book with a ripped cover and wrinkled pages lying behind the TV set. It was Huckleberry Finn. I went back outside and it felt different this time.

I was immersed in the fresh and cool air – perhaps the northern winds. At that moment it was clear to me. I knew this time I wasn’t going back.

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BILL ENGLISH

ROOMY BEYOND MEASURE A room is always a space, but a space is not always a room. At what dimension does a space become a room?

A closet has four walls, a floor, a ceiling, and sometimes even a window, but is it an actual room? The same can be said about a barn. It is an enclosed space, one of the definitions of a room, but do we ever say: “Put the goat in his room?” Clearly, there is an element beyond dimension and space that creates something we can all agree is a room. We all know a room when we see one.

Or do we?

Because when you’re standing in any room, what are you actually standing in? Your mind tells you there are limits to your surroundings, but if you really think about it, isn’t what you perceive just interior space created by your so-called Self? It’s your brain creating the room you think you’re standing in. It does this by utilizing input from all five senses to create exterior space. These five senses are created by nothing more than electrical impulses. Therefore, the room, as you conceptualize it, is really only defined by these impulses. The room you are aware of only exists inside your head. There is no such thing as a passive act of looking. Your brain is like an Italian film director controlling all the camera angles.

You see only what your brain wants you to see. And, as they say in the movie business: “It’s a closed set.” The problem is, your brain isn’t all that trustworthy. Take the well-documented case of a woman who went completely blind but had no idea she’d lost her sight. Her brain

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created a complete and convincing hallucination of her apartment. She thought she could still see everything around her. She didn’t even think she needed to go to the doctor until she started bumping into her furniture.

Of course, this begs the obvious question: Is the inside of your head a room? Is the skull a wall separating one space from another? What if one day you decided that this relatively thin barrier of bone needed to be torn down like the wall that used to separate your kitchen from your dining room before you did the remodel?

Now what are you dealing with?

What if everything you think is “You” is nothing more than a room you’ve locked yourself up in for no good reason? Why are you confining yourself to such a small space? It has been said for centuries that all the walls of our individual selves are nothing more than a persistent illusion. In truth, there is nothing separating you from all that is except your brain’s delusions. Therefore, enlightenment is nothing more than expanding your floor plan.

Tear down those walls.

But how do we live comfortably in total expansion?

If there are no walls, where are we going to hang our art? If we remove the floor and ceiling how will we know the difference between up and down? Can we really live without borders?

In 1949, the great architect Philip Johnson, created the Glass House as an exercise in simple scale. The concept of a normal room was reinvented and expanded by walls of transparent glass – destroying scale by removing the barrier between inside and outside. The room had become something other than what it once was. Privacy was done away with. Johnson left us with nowhere to 98

hide. The result was a sudden and dramatic expansion of consciousness.

Stepping outside your own room, getting beyond the illusion of separateness, will land you in a space that feels much more roomy. In fact, the great Persian mystic poet Rumi once asked: “Why do you stay in prison when the door is wide open?”

Once the walls of the individual Self are removed you begin to reside in a space of infinite possibilities. You have checked into a room where you can live in peace and harmony. In the words of the great James Joyce: “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”

Get out of your room. Go out and play.

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WILLIAM F FERREE

WAITING ROOMS I have been in this room before.

Or rooms like it.

Many times.

Having lived in this area for most of my life and being the father of four kids and several foster children and the odd stray, the odds of being here were pretty good.

It is the closest hospital to home and having kids it was a safe bet that one of them would need attention at one point.

And they did.

All of them, actually, in turn.

With surprising regularity.

The room hasn’t really changed much in the twentyfive years we have been coming here. Although the hospital has undergone several major renovations, rendering the entire building a grand and glowing example of how a major regional medical center should look, with improvements that to all who passed on the street would know that this is the place to go to get better, a place for care, for compassion, for the latest in modern medical science, the waiting room had remained basically unchanged.

Same well-used hard plastic chairs.

Same blue/orange/green/something colored carpet.

Same awful coffee, but now it is some sort of instant stuff that comes out of a space-age machine, brewed (a better word is scalded) with water, that although well

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above boiling, is somehow still liquid and a coffee “concentrate” that is, well, nasty.

I don’t even believe the stuff in the little packets marked “sugar” is really sugar.

It leaves me with indigestion and the desire for a cup of coffee.

Same aquarium, but the fish have changed, haven’t they?

Fish, especially those in tanks, don’t live that long, do they? Had I been paying attention in previous visits I could probably tell you which of them were new.

That was funny, thinking about the life span of a fish while waiting to hear from a doctor.

Or a nurse.

At this point I would have settled for the security guard or a custodian to tell us something, even if it were news about a backed up toilet on the third floor or a fender bender in the parking lot.

That is because I am bored.

Don’t get me wrong, I am concerned, but also bored.

At one point in my life going to the EMERGENCY ROOM! was serious. It was an EMERGENCY! after all. Time was of the essence! We had to go NOW! We couldn’t wait for an office visit two weeks from next Thursday!

This was serious blood and guts stuff!

Someone was injured!

He ran into a barbed wire fence and cut his lip!

He’s bleeding!

But after many years and many visits, even though it was still an “emergency” the “urgency” part had been diluted by facts: 101

“He did what?”

“Really?”

“How bad does it look?”

“Really?”

“Can he move it?”

“Really?”

Sigh.

“Okay, I guess we should go. I’ll get my keys. Let me set the TiVo...”

The point is when you have children, more than one, anyway, and they get injured, the first time is traumatic. With each additional injury, with each additional child the crises is somehow lessened, the drama is reduced when you finally realize that they are not going to die.

At least not this time.

We have been here for hours.

Or for what seems like hours.

My watch tells me “hours” is forty minutes.

Still seems like hours.

The magazines here are always years old.

While here I never know if I should start to read one. I like reading and read a lot. But if I start an article, say about a new science break through or cool new computer system, whether I’d be able to finish it is a mystery, can I before someone comes out with news? Or if I do have the time I may not be able to finish it when I discover that the page with the end of the article is on has been torn out because there was a blueprint for a solar powered dog house on the other side.

Confidentially: I have taken magazines from waiting rooms simply because I had to leave, but still wanted to finish the article I was reading.

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I have never been arrested, or even questioned for this petty larceny. I don’t think this crime is high on the local authority’s to-do list.

Waiting rooms are all alike.

It’s true.

I was, in fact in a similar room in Hawaii a few years ago.

It wasn’t a hospital but a medical clinic in Maui, directly across the street from the beach. You could see it from the window where I waited.

Sun, sand, surf, bikinis, sailboats. The whole deal.

But still a waiting room.

Only this time it was on the last day of a vacation. The magazines were about buying condos on the island, restaurants and local dive shops and it was me that needed assistance, awaiting the diagnosis of what I already knew: ear infections.

“Infections,” as in both ears.

A little souvenir of an afternoon snorkeling and chasing sea turtles and clown fish.

They looked me over, asked some questions and gave me two prescriptions, but what they didn’t tell me how awful the six hour flight home would be.

As I heard someone once describe, “a new definition of the word pain.”

But I digress.

This trip is because of a toothpick, stuck into the bottom of my daughter’s foot.

It was acquired at a friend’s house during a sleepover. She stepped on a grade school art project and jammed it into her foot, right between the toes.

She is fine.

They gave her a wheelchair and she has spent the 103

forty minutes we have been waiting rolling from one end of the room to the other, making laps around the chairs.

The doctor took all of two minutes to yank it out, slap on a bandage and send us a bill.

This time, I guess, I didn’t mind the wait.

Don’t tell, but I took a magazine.

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ROUNDABOUT Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué.

The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route.

— GEORGE SAND

JANET SCHLICHT

THE PORCH It was a room unencumbered by walls, spacious and open to the wideness of the universe, and the days there rose and fell in the rhythms of childhood. On the kitchen porch, my sister and I were steeped in the ordinariness of our days, in games of imagination now long forgotten among the clutter of later years. In truth, it is an almost shameful extravagance to call it a porch.

It was a kitchen stoop, really; a concrete slab outside the kitchen door. There were none of the fine trappings one associates with the image of a porch – no defining railing, no wicker rocker, no awning for shelter. All this was no matter to us, as we passed an uncomplicated childhood in the sanctuary and refuge of that space, where we could simultaneously reach out and touch our world, and in the same moment be cocooned from it.

The porch was, of course, attached to a house, where surely much of life was conducted. In my memory, though, the rooms of the interior are gauzy reminiscences with no attached emotion, none of the dynamism of the kitchen step. The days on the porch, the seeming ephemera of childhood, inhabit a completely different layer of memory – the hard feel of the concrete, the way the sand sometimes swirled up into dust devils and caught the sunlight just so, the way our childish laughter would rise to join the vastness around us. At night, enclosed by the warm desert air and the enormous starry sky, we would sit on that porch and watch for the headlights of the occasional passing car. We called these lights

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bogeymen, and shrieked when they came close, with partially feigned yet thrillingly tangible terror. Inside, the adults carried on with the business of their more complicated lives; this was of no concern to us.

The most strikingly vivid memory I have of being on that porch exists as a frozen tableau. I would have been about four years old, and absorbed in the simple predictabilities of my young life. Though in our family we never spoke of this moment, it marks the exact time when we were all, in some way, forced to live the life that was rather than the life that might have been.

On this particular afternoon, the day was unspinning itself on the porch in much the same way as any other, or so I suppose. My grandmother would have been in the kitchen. She had come from Oregon to take care of my sister and me while our mother went to the hospital to have her twins. Did I know that it was twins? Could I possibly have known anything of the concept of life or death? As my parents walked toward the porch, arm in arm, I think I heard my father speak the words: both babies had died. If my mother had words, I do not remember them. In my memory, she stands expressionless, and I can sense that her arms are weighed down by their emptiness. Though death surely had no meaning for me, the babies lurked in the shadowlands just beyond the porch, their faces never to find their way into the photo albums.

In a breath, our brief encounter was over. I suppose my parents would have walked inside then; taken their sorrows through the kitchen door and placed them on the shelf of sadnesses so that they could begin to carry on with that day and all the others to come. I suppose also that my sister and I would have gone on 110

with the business of childhood. Yet I can still feel the way the desert air whispered around us then, how it felt to be the four of us in the spacious confinement of that porch, how I was somehow aware of an intrusion in the narrative of our lives to that moment; of a subversion of faith in the invariable solidity of the world. Although this jarring forced entry of a previously unknown darkness in the world was folded back over by the protective “walls” of our porch, such a moment cannot truly be unlearned.

Our lives, over time, spilled beyond the borders of the porch into the wider world. Still, that moment and the porch persist in memory sixty years on. I now know, or think I know (for I have learned that “knowing” is malleable and difficult to hold onto), that in that moment, a gossamer thread of the sandy air around the porch was pulled loose, and that it began to gather other strands together into the beginning of a new story line for our lives where impossible loss was not only possible but very real.

I asked my mother years later how it had been for her, losing her babies. By this time, my mother would have been in her late 50s, but as she began to try to express her feelings about that time of her life, she dissolved in the hot tears that come from long sequestered pain. I know that she stored away her pain because she had to, and I know, too, that the bit of sand that broke loose from the desert walls of that porch on that day so long ago lodged itself in her. In the last years of her life, she lost her voice, and could speak only in a whisper.

She found great pleasure in life as it went forward, but the sadness and sorrow still were deeply held. In some very real way, because she could not speak her sor111

row, the sorrow took her voice. I wish that I could ask her, had thought to ask while she was still living, if she remembered in any way that moment on the porch.

Did she feel the disturbance and shift of the world, or was the time only mine because the porch was more my world than hers?

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MAGGIE KOGER

THE KINGDOM You may have heard enough about a bedroom wardrobe with doors that lead to a world where a tyrannical witch and a kind lion live, and you may also have heard enough about rabbit holes sinking into a Wonderland where a Mad Hatter leads you on a dreadful (and exhilarating) journey. You may doubt that wolves in grandmothers’ nightgowns or shoes with heels that click you home actually exist, but in all these stories there is some unexpected bit of truth.

Such a room with a hidden portal is always as close as your imagination and as far away as an enchanted lamp. But if you grew up hearing the forest witch cackle as she prepared Hansel and Gretel for her dinner, or if you danced along with the bluebirds as they swooped their needles and thread through Cinderella’s ball gown, you might live on the threshold of just such an extraordinary room. A room spinning like an electromagnetic field pulls you into an adventure that sharpens your senses, tests your character, and convinces you with absolute certainty of the alternate heavens and earths swirling through our everyday lives.

My brother and I called ours the “snap-room.” In winter, currents of electrical static grew fierce in the house as the air dried, and we would rub our sweaters with grocery sacks until the fibers stuck to our arms.

Then we would throw open the door to the special room and wave our arms wildly. As the sparks flew between us, we snapped our fingers and our dream world plumed

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open like an erupting column of molten rock, flushing up colors and sounds more vivid than in the Saturday matinee movies we so rarely went to. And the room we went through into the Kingdom always landed us in the same place.

As the rush of action melted the dark walls of the snap-room, we’d find ourselves huddled in an old-fashioned garden with rock walls. These were the only rock walls we knew of outside of the movies, and we couldn’t imagine that we had made them up because in Idaho we had only barbed wire or lodgepole fences. Even the picket fences in Tom Sawyer seemed outlandish to farm kids like us.

I still remember the gritty stone and the slick green moss in the shady corner where we crouched behind a small boulder on our first visit. As our eyes adjusted to the light, we saw that the garden held two impossible things – a tree with golden apples and an obscenely large giant. We knew about Jack tricking his beanstalk giant and so we thought this one couldn’t be too terribly dangerous. He had a thick chest and long hair, but his boots laced normally without those fusty leggings and he wasn’t holding a club. “You’re biggest, you to talk to him,” my brother said.

I thought that if I approached him bravely, the great lummox would turn out to be like Oscar Wilde’s Selfish Giant who had to learn to share before his garden could again grow flowers, host butterflies and bees, or be rewarded with hungry chickens scratching in the dirt.

Wilde’s giant even died nicely soon after he let the children play in his garden. However, before I could make my move, I heard the huge fellow let out a great snore and we were able to slip by him. We explored the strange 114

green valley for hours and when we returned, he was gone! Still, we didn’t have enough courage to pick the apples, and you know, they might have been pure gold.

After that we ventured into the Kingdom frequently, and my brother and I were constantly on the lookout for dwarves, leprechauns, and trolls; we were more often surprised by bears, bulls, and wooly beasts that looked like mammoths. These hefty creatures would frequently be accompanied by Native American children who would whoop and holler to divert their attention until we could get away. On other occasions we would be stuck on lonely paths leading us through lava fields or into mountain caves – their floors gooey with bat droppings and their ceilings dripping with seep water. In these circumstances we would hold the crosses dangling from our necks and repeat the Lord’s Prayer until we found our way back to the garden.

The most surprising and difficult time came when the garden was transformed into a backstreet playground filled with city children. I met my own twin there. Her name was Elizabeth and she hated me so much that I could feel her bitterness stinging me. I weakened, sinking down like a shriveled prune, and my brother stepped up and demanded that she learn to share or leave. Thank heavens a very large and dirty-faced boy threatened to beat her up if she didn’t let us go, so we escaped. We never knew who he was, really, but we thought perhaps he would grow up to be nice giant.

Summers we entered the Kingdom from under the green canopy of an apricot tree in our back yard.

We constructed a room beneath the tree by lining up old boards and bits of rock to represent walls. Then we climbed up into the tree and settled on two branches 115

that grew out almost parallel to the ground. Each of us held a fistful of dry sticks gathered from the woodpile.

Because we were outdoors, I also brought my doll Ruthie and my brother brought his cap gun. When ready, we would chant, “King-dom, King-dom, King-dom,” and then we would noisily snap the twigs into pieces. When enough snaps had gone off, we would suddenly be in the garden and off on another adventure. Summers we played late into the twilight, returning only when mother called us in for bed. “Where on earth have you two been all this time?” she would ask.

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CHRISTY G THOMAS

THE BASEMENT STAGE Liver-spotted hands dance in musty basement air, sunlight slowly wading through clouded window panes, illuminating the moves of the master. His right hand, held rigid with his forearm, pivots effortlessly from the elbow as nimble fingers tickle invisible ivories that hang mid-air, summoning power with his fingertips.

“When I was a young boy...” So the magician’s story begins.

He learned his craft in the basement of Mr. Hinkson’s house, the way any trade worth learning is passed from calloused hands to silken palms. “We kids in the neighborhood knew him as Wilfred the Great,” he explains to his eager audience. The old man’s basement of the past, filled with boxes to saw a woman in half, color changing scarves and the like, now gives way to the apprentice’s temporary show of “The Amazing Grampini.”

A towering man over six feet tall, wisps of silverthread hair combed back in distinguished manner, he sits behind his table in a folding chair, no cape adorning his body, merely a cardigan of steel-blue wool hugging his broad shoulders. His glasses glint in the dim midmorning light, his bright eyes illuminating the frames from within. Mischief and delight meld in his gaze – a playful wink escaping to one of the onlookers.

Beneath the dark cloth covering the card table, secrets lie hidden – alligators submerged up to their eyeballs, ready to snap if someone gets too close.

Something’s there, yes. But what lurks beneath the dark

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swamp of velvet cloth?

“Come here a minute. I think you have something in your ear,” he beckons to the row of children anxiously kneeling, jittering on the carpet before the slight stage of wonder. The magician speaks in his voice for children – a lilt in his tone, not the foreboding phrasings of dark magicians of the Victorian stage.

Eyes widen and mouths drift agape as not one, but two coins are plucked from the bashful boy’s ears! Smiling shyly, he trots to his mother’s side, clumsily attempting to shove his prize into his pocket, chubby fingers thwarting progress.

The Amazing Grampini’s assistant steps over to the young boy, guiding him to the unlit fireplace to retrieve his candy cane from the dangling Christmas sock.

Whose turn next? The kids wait in silent wonder.

Another coin trick?

A sleight of hand?

A candy cane for me, too?

Beneath the velvet screen emerges the wand, magician’s traditional black and white, guiding the children’s gazes as a conductor directs his symphony. The Amazing Grampini deftly swings the wand in his left hand, invisible electricity spitting from its tip, the incandescent rainbow of imagination. He could entrance and tame the most ravenous lion with this weapon.

“What are the magic words?” he quizzes his eager audience.

The youngest look on with faces unsure of the answer, but several who have a few years of school under their belts eagerly raise their arms, stretching their hands as though they can reach the swirls of magic which collect at the basement’s tiled ceiling.

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“Ooo-ooo-ooo!”

“Me, me, me!”

All calls from the dancing, hopping children.

Grampini surveys his audience as though paying no heed to the pleas of his eager audience members and turns to his oldest grandson who watches with arms crossed at the perimeter of the group. He gives a wink, “What do you say?”

The preteen with dirty blonde hair cracks a dimpled smile and he shrugs his shoulders as though Grampini’s question is as simple as asking the color of the sky. “Abracadabra, of course.”

“Aha!” Grampini shouts, raising his index finger in the air. The crowd is filled with understanding, nodding, and a few grumbles of “I knew that.” But all is hushed with the wave of his wand.

In the winter’s afternoon chill, the master plays on – magical coloring books, color-changing cloths, and disappearing coins. Prizes for all – candy canes, a strip of fabric that zips up into a purse – but the grandest reward of all, the chance to be part of the show. Stepping across the red shag carpet and standing next to the master is akin to being in the presence of celebrity. All eyes are on the child volunteer who bashfully grins during her moment in the sparkling sun.

Parents stand as observers against the walls of the family room, whispering of their own memories watching Dad perform such feats when they too were attentive children, enthralled by his dresser drawer filled with magic. In time, they too join in with the groups’ shouts of “Abracadabra!”

One final flick of the wrist and a bouquet of flowers explode from nowhere like a fireworks show, and The 119

Amazing Grampini takes his final bow, children applauding until they are ushered back upstairs to finish opening Christmas presents.

“That was awesome!”

“Did you see my quarter?”

“I got a rainbow candy cane!”

Shouts echo up the stairs with the tromping of feet.

Alone in the quiet basement, Grampini looks around at stillness, eyes moving as though the space is still filled with laughs and cheers of the crowd. He folds the velvet blanket, tucking it in his wooden box with care and hums as he puts away his tricks. Secrets safe after the final bow.

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JANET SHERRILL

A SUMMER LEGACY Grandma and I stood at the end of the long drive and watched my mother’s car disappear in a cloud of dust. I had just finished fifth grade when my parents separated two days into my summer vacation. Mama cried for three days. Then she told me I was going to spend my summer vacation at my grandmother’s house.

Three hundred miles from home.

Grandma took my hand and we walked in silence up the long drive. Her two-story farm house loomed in front of me. The tears started in my eyes when I realized this was my first visit without my parents. I was inconsolable.

She led me into her spacious kitchen where the heavenly aroma of fresh baked bread eased the ache in my heart. Grandma cut me off a heel, just like Mama always did and slathered it with hand-churned butter and golden honey.

If my grandmother had any worries about keeping me entertained I soon put them to rest. I was content being her shadow. The lessons I learned as I watched her live her daily life became her legacy to me.

Grandmother expressed her love through cooking.

In doing so, the food prepared by her hands nourished both body and soul.

Before the old rooster croaked his morning song, breakfast was on the table. Grandpa and the hired hands quickly emptied platters of ham and eggs, melt-inyour-mouth buttermilk biscuits and bowls of oatmeal

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drenched in heavy cream. This was all done and cleaned up before I climbed out of bed. I often wondered if she went to bed. Otherwise, how did she get all the cooking done before the rooster crowed?

Baking was an all day job for Grandma. In her kitchen was a beautiful Majestic wood burning stove.

Even though she had an electric range, she still baked her bread in the Majestic. Grandma told me she learned to make bread standing on an apple crate. She was the eldest of nine children. She was eight when she made her first loaf of bread.

The scent of baking bread permeated the summer air. Pie day in her kitchen was a heady heaven of cinnamon; lard crusts flaky and tender baked to perfection.

My favorite baking day was cookie day. Her snickerdoodles were my favorite. Grandma called me her cookie monster.

Although she had plenty of people to feed on the farm, she extended her hands to the sick and those down on their luck. Fridays we delivered our food baskets. I rarely saw Grandma without her apron on. But on delivery day, she laid her apron aside and put on her Sunday dress.

I helped her prepare the baskets for delivery. We placed a bright, checkered linen towel in two or three large wicker baskets. I fetched jars of fruit and preserves from the cellar. Grandma added a glass jar of handchurned butter, a loaf of crusty golden bread, pie or cookies and a chunk of bacon or ham. My final job on delivery day was to personally carry the eggs I gathered earlier from grumpy hens.

After we finished our deliveries, my heart was full of admiration and love for my grandma. She touched so 122

many lives and never asked for anything in return. She planted seeds of kindness and compassion in my heart.

When the day was over and silence filled the night her kitchen became her quiet place. Many times, I found her reading her Bible by candlelight. Other times she prayed, her hands in her lap, head bowed. She looked so small sitting alone at her long kitchen table.

Sometimes I crawled up next to her. She put her arm around my shoulder and pulled me close. She was not one of many words. That was okay with me; neither was I. When she pulled me close, the silence cocooned us together. I knew I was loved.

Grandma received three letters from my mother and then a phone call. Three days later, we walked hand in hand down to the road. Soon my mother’s car came into view. She opened her door and I ran into her arms. She then hugged my grandmother. I heard her say my father wasn’t coming home. She planned to stay two weeks before we left for home.

The hot days of August brought another activity to Grandma’s kitchen. The bounty from the garden, orchard and farm were gathered and “put up.” Mama and Grandma toiled side by side from morning until suppertime. I shucked corn and snapped green beans.

When the day was over, we surveyed the colorful array of jars on the kitchen counter and breathed a sigh of relief.

After supper, I was sent to bed. Tomorrow was another canning day.

As I watched my mother and grandmother work together, I realized how much they were alike. My heart swelled with pride. I asked my mother how she learned to cook like Grandma. She said, “your grandmother told me you reminded her of me when I was your age. I 123

loved the kitchen and I watched everything she did until I was old enough to do some of the cooking on my own.�

Two weeks passed quickly and it was time to go home. Grandma hugged the stuffing out of me. She made me an apron to wear when I helped my mother in the kitchen.

As a child, I thought summer could be placed in a jar and kept forever. But winter touched my heart when God took my grandmother home. I still see her wiping my tears and calming my fears in her country kitchen.

She understood the spirit of a child, when it needed reined in and when it needed to be set free. Her memory will always bring summer to a little girl’s heart.

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MARILYNN JACKSON

GRANDMA’S KITCHEN There is always something magical about a kitchen.

The hub of the house, the heartbeat of the home, the reflection of every woman everywhere. No one escapes the kitchen, even guys who hate to cook, who live alone and store their socks in the oven along with yesterday’s newspaper. Kitchens are as necessary as bathrooms, functional, essential, and deliberate. But beyond that, no matter if the pot is over the fire in an outdoor pit, the cook on her knees smashing grain into flour on a rock slab, the chef using the finest Cuisinart, we all find our way to this room some time each day. A number of us, if we are really lucky, discover a kitchen that exudes love and warmth, fun, family, and laughter, and creates a gathering space where we want to stay to savor all that is part of this very essential room in our lives. I have been so lucky once, and just maybe, if the universe allows, some of my family will say the same about my kitchen someday.

“What happens if I poke the dough down Grandma?

Will it make the bread not turn out?” I was eight years old, and my brother and I were blessed to be spending the summer at our grandparents’ lake resort in northern Minnesota. “You just leave that be – don’t be messin’ with that bowl. Just finish your breakfast so you two kids can get down to the lake and help your Grandpa with the mowin’.”

“Aw, Grandma, you know I hate to mow – I want to stay here with you and learn how to make bread

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rolls and stuff. Are you gonna make some cookies too?

I could help!” Grandma wiped her hands on her red gingham apron and sighed. I could tell I was winning this round.

“Well, I guess if your brother wants to have all the fun on the mower, you can stay with me in this hot ol’ kitchen and do some real work for a change.” She winked at me as she headed my brother out the screen door.

My grandmother’s kitchen in their old white twostory farmhouse on top of a hill could never have been described as grand. There was black and white speckled linoleum on the floor, white clapboard walls and a real wood-burning stove, black with four burner covers, a side door for the wood and a large oven. How Grandma turned out the best bread, pies and cinnamon rolls was a mystery when all she had was wood burning to keep the oven hot. A white cupboard with an enamel top, a pie safe and a bread drawer with a sliding tin top that was used to store Grandma’s homemade loaves, took up one corner of the main room. A black phone hung on the side wall near the table, ringing three short and one long when the call was for us. It was a simple country room and I loved it.

Around the corner in an alcove of sorts was the big wash sink, holding court with the cast iron red-handled pump that supplied the only water in the house. I can still hear the squoosh sound of the pump as we raised the handle up and down, my brother seeing how fast he could get the water to stream out by pumping furiously, face red, puffing away as the water rushed out of the spout, splashing in the big bowl of the sink. Saturday nights we took turns sitting on the cupboard shelf next 126

to that sink, taking a bath with water pumped in the tea kettle, warmed on the stove and then poured into a large white enamel dishpan trimmed in red. Grandma loved red, so Grandpa painted the pump faithfully every spring with a new coat of fire engine red paint. With no bathroom in the house, we had a mirror over the sink and that’s where we brushed our teeth, washed hands, combed hair. I know Grandma was grateful for that alcove and the sink in the corner away from the rest of the kitchen. “Lands sake, you shouldn’t have to stare at a wash sink, watchin’ someone wash up when you are fixin’ food or getting’ ready to eat dinner!”

My favorite place was sitting at the big white painted table that was placed under the wide picture window just across from the stove. Summer mornings the sun splashed across the yellow and white checked oilcloth cover, bread dough rising in the warmth from the window, and Grandma singing hymns as she mixed up a coffee cake. The smells of cinnamon, brown sugar, and yeast filled the room, instilling forever the connection between spice and love, the bread of kindness. And that’s just where I was this particular morning, hanging out with Grandma and not wanting to leave.

I remember spending so many mornings like that first one, basking in the warmth of the sunshine from the window, cheeks glowing pink, my entire being wrapped in a cozy feeling of simple love. No worries, no place to be, no more serious concern than making sure I sprinkled enough cinnamon sugar on the cookies before Grandma put the sheet in the oven. It was at that table, in that room, I learned the meaning of family, the loving expression of caring for others as you sifted the flour, patted the dough and greased the pans.

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I sit at my own white farm table now, looking through the big picture window of time, lost in those childhood memories. Coffee cup in hand, sunshine washes across the scene of countless family gatherings, the mealtime chatter, the joy of many evening domino games, the warmth of a kitchen that spans the generations, filled with love and light. I can feel Grandma smiling. She would be pleased.

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RELIQUARY Where glowing embers through the room Teach light to counterfeit a gloom. — JOHN MILTON

E D REA

THE RED BOX My wife’s grandfather emigrated from South Africa in the 1920s and became a well-known medical doctor in San Diego and Spokane. Practicing medicine into his early eighties, he was noted for his knowledge and wisdom in diagnosing diseases that younger doctors had never seen, or even heard of. His patients loved him because he would actually listen to what they were saying when they complained of various ailments. Yet, when it came to money, he was inept.

When he died at the age of ninety-seven, he was living with our family and had very little to show for the life he had lived. What few things he did have went into a faded red, forty foot container unit that sits on a small plot of land that my wife and I inherited from my mother.

The Red Box (as we call it) was purchased for the purpose of storing construction items, but many of the first items that went in to the Red Box had nothing to do with building a house. They were the left over bits of things from our lives before we were married - text books from college, bedding for dorm rooms, a lava lamp, and a file of old school papers that should have been disposed of years ago.

When my mother died, much of what she had accumulated over her lifetime had already been given out to her sons and other relatives. She knew the end was coming – cancer. Because I was the only son living nearby, and because I had the storage unit, I was chosen to be

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the keeper of items which my brothers wanted to keep but could not take at the time of our mother’s death.

A small, potbelly stove and a brass bed frame belong to my older brother who is in the process of moving to a place that makes it unlikely he will soon come to collect his belongings. A bag of winter clothes, a gray pinstriped suit, and a .22 rifle belong to my younger brother who now lives in South Africa.

My wife’s mother passed away a year after mine – cancer as well – and because my wife was an only child, there was no one to share her belongings with. More stuff we didn’t need went in the Red Box. Aside from an occasional visit, the Red Box now stands unopened for long periods of time. Life outside goes on at a breakneck pace, with work, children, and community obligations. The spare time I once used for building the house has dwindled away to nearly nothing.

Inside the red container unit that once floated across the sea, to and from China, Japan, and other exotic places, time...stands...still...

In the farthest, darkest corner, there is a gray wooden box, filled with my attempts at becoming a famous songwriter. Halfway in, on the top shelf, is a rolled up futon mattress that served as our first bed together. A cardboard box on top of my mother’s piano holds a half dozen small dolls, each carefully wrapped in newspaper, collected by my wife when she was a little girl.

The tall, white enamel cabinet that stand just inside the front doors has an old leather case that holds a pellet pistol with a brass pump arm. Once, during a modified game of tag, my younger brother used the pistol to tag me out. The pellet hit in a very sensitive location, and my brother and my friends miraculously learned a new 134

word.

The construction items are neatly (or nearly so) arranged along the left side. On the floor is our collection of tile – large, small, slate, ceramic, terracotta, some purchased, some given to us by friends – all of it waiting to be walked upon someday in a bathroom or a kitchen, around a fireplace or at the front steps. Above the tile, on a green, metal shelf is a wind generator. We bought it, along with some solar panels, with the youthful enthusiasm of having a totally self-sufficient home.

Tools of various kinds lie in boxes, some opened, some not, all perfectly useable if one only had a few moments to get their hands dirty. And there, directly across from the wood chisels, hammers, and saws, is all the time in the world – a clock, purchased in Switzerland just before our daughter was born.

The clock sits, unassembled, in its original box, waiting like everything else, to tick its first tick and tock its first tock. Below it is a blue plastic container full of toys our children have long outgrown. They should be given away to some other children, but I suppose we think, we hope, we might have grandchildren someday.

Though it may not look pretty on the outside, our faded red storage unit is full of memories and dreams, some of which may yet come to pass, and some which never will. We sometimes lie in our bed together and talk about pulling everything out of the Red Box to have a yard sale or an auction. Sell off all those unused items that only cause us to dream of places we can no longer go. Sell off the things that will cause our children to curse us for keeping them.

We find, however, that the doors on the Red Box are difficult to open, and there so many other things we 135

must do while the sun is up and snow is not yet on the ground. It is hard on the woman who smiles at me in the morning (at least most mornings). She desires to see those memories and dreams out in the light of day, filling a house built with love or being used by someone, anyone.

I, on the other hand, am content to wait for that perfect moment to open the red metal doors, remember, and dream once again.

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ERIC E WALLACE

ROOM ENOUGH Crickets sang to a cloudless night. Garth, smoking, perched on a stubborn stump near the edge of his pasture and stared up at the Milky Way. Except for a guardian battalion of sharp white starpoints, it was blurred, ambiguous. A shroud, he thought, a coffin liner, its soft, infinite folds ready for unambiguous death.

He exhaled slowly, pensively. The smoke curled close, reluctant to drift into the dark. A frog queried the shadows.

Garth smelled of tobacco, maple syrup and musky cologne. At supper, he’d indulged in creamy pancakes, swirling them with slow, golden sweetness, and the syrup still teased his tongue. The cologne was a habit.

Or maybe clinging to something. It made him laugh, if harshly, when he thought about it. His wife said the scent turned her on. The same wife who, one dazzling winter morning, took off with their minister, leaving the small town in great confusion.

A shocked flock, Garth liked to joke to ease his pain.

God had run off too, he thought. God no longer hung around here. Life kept proving that. As for the cologne, well, some remained in the bottle, so Garth still slapped it on, defiant. Maybe the wind would sweep the fragrance all the way across Idaho to Wyoming or Montana, where Sara would sniff, wrinkle her nose, remember, yearn, return.

Once more the frog heralded desire, startling the crickets into a brief silence. Carefully, Garth tamped

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the remains of his cigarette against his boot and field stripped the butt. For a final moment, he stared at the stars, then he turned and trudged towards the work shed, where his current project awaited.

He’d been making coffins for many years. Kinda funny, he’d say to anyone who inquired, but the whole deal came from my teenage stint as a supermarket stock boy. I often had to break up wooden crates and pallets, and for some reason I started reshaping them into coffins. Dunno why exactly. The things just fascinated me.

Maybe I was already thinking about mortality. It seems I was a natural, so I apprenticed to Old Man Sloane. I became darn good at it. Much better than him, better even than folk in the bigger towns.

Garth’s parents had visions of his becoming a doctor. They wanted to get him off the ranch, away from hardscrabble, into white collar. But the shingle he hung out was Garth McCready, Coffin Maker. Master builder of small, thoughtful rooms for the last great transition.

In time, Garth became a specialist in unique, artistic coffins, crafted with fine woods, distinctive fittings and embellishments, enhanced with unusual engravings, each built with an unerringly singular eye.

There was one irony. Garth discovered he had a phobia. Whenever he drew close to finishing a coffin, he had to fight harder and harder not to imagine himself inside, trapped in suffocating eternity. Shuddering, he would rush outdoors to take breaks, gasping, blinking for light, breathing in the whole wide Idaho sky, before forcing himself back to the task.

Tonight, Garth switched on the bright work shed spotlights. Cradled on a padded gurney was an elegant mahogany coffin, almost finished. It was perfectly 138

milled, painstakingly edge-glued, meticulously grainaligned. Beautifully incised on the long perimeter was a motif of tiny animals and birds – rabbits, deer, wolves, foxes, eagles, hawks, and here and there, lovingly incongruous, some teddy bears.

The coffin was full-sized, not for a child. But in it soon would lie the once-child of his dreams, Garth’s only son Trevor, grown to manhood in this desert, slain in another desert far across the world. For what purpose Garth had no idea. Freedom, democracy, greed, stupidity, insanity. He supposed war was all of those things.

For sure it was always false glory, real loss.

Garth breathed in deeply. He loved the smell of fine woods, lacquers, oils. At this moment, linseed held the high notes, riding on the somber baritones of curing oak. Slowly shaking a tin of varnish, he moved around the coffin, inspecting.

The two immaculate military officers who had driven in to see him, trailing dust, nudging tumbleweeds, had shown no surprise when this tall, rangy, sad-eyed man, hearing their news, had sagged just a little, quickly straightened, and responded, “Then I’ll make his coffin.”

Garth put down the tin. He caressed the smooth, gleaming sides of the coffin, ran his fingers lightly over the line of animals, remembered Trevor in his dress uniform, so smart, so slim, so young, so full of – what?

Promise? Optimism? Idealism?

Garth knew those things well from his own youth.

They’d been honed, whittled, chiseled, turned on the lathe of years, fashioned into some form of acceptance.

You watched the family acreage slowly diminish. You woke up to learn your wife had run off with the preach139

er. You made coffins, knowing what each signified, no matter how great your artistry. And now you were building a coffin for your son. What does all that amount to?

What size does a box have to be to contain a life? How big does a heart need to be to hold all its grief?

In the barn next door, a goat bleated vigorously.

Two sheep fussed back. The wisdom of ruminants, Garth thought, smiling faintly.

On impulse, he unlocked the gurney wheels and rolled the coffin outside. In the center of the yard, he reset the wheels, paused and took a long, slow breath.

He shucked off his boots, hesitated again, then climbed up into the coffin, lay back and looked up.

Claustrophobia squeezed, pressed, threatened, but the sight of the stars released him, kept him unrestrained.

A slight breeze wrapped him in the poignancy of wood smoke. Crickets and frogs chirred and croaked in selfish syncopation.

Garth cushioned his hands under his head, sighed, and gazed steadily skyward.

Unnoticed, a small curl of wood nestled beside him in the coffin. Into this stowaway slid one lone, heavy teardrop, glistening and mute.

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SHEILA ROBERTSON

FLASH POINT The door is warped and unwelcoming, stuck tight in its weathered frame. I lean my shotgun against the jamb, wade through the drifted snow to the window and swing over the sash. My boots rasp through broken glass that lies beneath the skiff of snow inside. In the cold, rising light of morning the room glistens with frost.

My hunt started in the dark where I left my truck three miles back on the road. These hills are a topography of my past and every fall when I chukar hunt; my path leads me this way.

I drop my backpack onto a dresser that is missing two of its drawers and despite the debasement of the room; childhood memories crush in through the cold.

I remember the freshness of the wallpaper, pale green with a tiny tracery of yellow roses, the day my mother pasted it to the plank walls. My memory can reconstruct this whole room…the cast iron cook stove, the piles of quilts on my parents’ bed and the soft glow of gas lamps on winter evenings when we all played Monopoly. But this morning I stand in a crystalline silence letting my mind move over sharper, sadder details. The wallpaper, now faded, is curled and peeling. More of the furniture is broken up and more windows shot out since I was here last fall. Budweiser cans and shell casings are scattered over the floor. The sink is clogged with coffee grounds and someone’s blue enameled cup is rusting in the bottom. The cupboards have been left open and are filled with litter from a bird’s nest. I pull down a

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broken cupboard door hanging by one hinge and put it on the floor.

Walking across the buckled linoleum, I reach through a gap in the Masonite ceiling where the roof has warped downward. I can make out where my bed used to be in the crawl space above. A little snow has sifted in and is pillowed in a drift where the splitting rafters are wedged against the wooden ladder I used to climb every night. An old quilt is jammed in the stringers and I pull it down. It rips with rot and I let it drop onto a tangle of trash on the floor.

Where the wallboards have sprung under the shifting roof, I see newspaper stuffed in for insulation. I pull it out and try to smooth the larger pieces on the Formica-topped table near the front window. The papers date back through the 20s to 1899. Pulling up a broken chair, I pour coffee from my thermos and read old news‌what was news when my grandfather insulated the place. He built it, one big rectangular room with an oversized attic crawl space for five kids. My dad inherited the place when I was about eight. I remember that summer I helped him pipe in water from the creek and install the gas lamps.

The morning light shifts through the window and collects on a glass vase standing on the sill. A cracked vase, left behind by my mother, holds yellowed plastic daisies, the traces of some occasion I have forgotten. It waits in the cold light like the shell of this room; waits for me to remember it back to life. The remembering wrestles in my mind with the same energy that once centered on our robust comings and goings here‌the early mornings when we busted ice to get water out of the creek for the wash and for the cows. The rhythm of 142

days when we hauled hay, wormed horses, fed chickens, repaired harnesses and sharpened tools by the fireplace in the evenings. We pored over seed catalogues at that kitchen counter all winter and watched for deer in the garden from this window all summer. We ate around this table and cherished newsy suppers with any friends that stayed the night. We canned elk meat on the wood stove and I tooled a leather belt for my dad on that old chopping block.

I also close my eyes and hear the despair leaking up through the ceiling as I lay tucked in my attic bed. My father’s voice catching as he counts the cost of most of his herd lost in two spring ice storms. The year before, he’d worried over withered crops and the sadness of my mother at losing the few friends she had. Women, who lived in the neighboring valleys and who, one by one as their families gave up, moved on. My parent’s realization that the money was gone finally meant we would leave this place.

I look around at what is left; hating how broken glass, beer cans and packrat dung defiles its goodness.

I crumble the newspaper and pull down the ragged lace curtains from their warping rods over the table. Breathing hard, I bust up the wooden chair, pull over the dresser and heap it up along with the cupboard door.

Grabbing the quilt, I swipe the tears from my eyes and throw it on the pile. Then before I can change my mind, I pull a can of white gas out of my pack and pour it over the pile, then splash the walls with another. As it vaporizes, I climb out of the window and walk back towards my truck. I load a tracer into my shotgun and from fifty feet I turn and fire through the window.

As the hot missile explodes the vaporized gas, I turn 143

away for the last time, my final memories of it all incinerating in the frozen light.

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JANET SCHLICHT

IN THIS ROOM This is the room which contains my death. I can look back at it now, that September day, with an intensity of seeing not available to me at the time. I fought with death, you know; hated the idea of it, railed against it. It was fine as an abstraction, but I had never really supposed it would apply in my case. And certainly not at this time, when there was so much left to do. A convincing illusion it was; I had myself fooled well enough.

I simply refused to talk about the possibility of death for me. When they first brought the hospital bed into the room, though, I began to know. My living room, a place where I had known such a great deal of peace and beauty, was to be turned into the place I would die. I listened in those first days, when I could still hold onto the present, to the anodyne rustlings and murmurings of my wife and the people who came to help her care for me, to the gentle staccato of pills being measured into plastic cups, to the sounds of everyday life around me as my own was dwindling away. I was both there and not there, for my consciousness began its gradual departure days before the end actually came.

In those days of waiting, I became aware of how beauty makes the soul happy. It sounds sappy, I know.

Hear me through it though. As I lay in that bed, at the end of my life, in such a familiar place, I was transported with exquisite care and with exceptional clarity of detail, to another September day – just a year before, or was it more? It doesn’t matter. On that day, in this

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room, I sat in my favorite chair. My Samoyed, Vanya, lay with absolute content nearby. I was, by that time, approaching the end of my life, though I did not know it at the time. In all I regarded my life as a good one, but I had grown through some adversity to arrive at this particular day.

When I was ten, within a single year, my mother died in childbirth and my father was bankrupted by the Great Depression. With five children to raise and no job, you can imagine how much my father was able to tend to the broken heart of a ten-year-old boy. We scrabbled around from here to there while my father looked for any work. I had one older sister, Olive, and I loved her deeply. She died at the age of nineteen, of tuberculosis. Another big hole in my young heart.

When the Second World War came along, I joined the Navy and spent the next four years in the Pacific seeing things no man should have to see. I came home, though, and got married, and my wife and I had two lovely girls. We lost three babies, too, all dead before they could get home from the hospital. Such a deep and intractable sadness in our otherwise happy, if ordinary, lives. I went from a jaunty young man playing tuba in a dance band to an old man in the whisper of a breath.

But I want to get back to the day I mentioned. It’s the point of the story, and the whole reason for this room enduring and hovering in memory. Vanya was settled in beside me, as I said. Late summer light came through the window at a steep angle onto the page of my book, creating a wistful, dreamy silhouette of the gently moving leaves of the ash tree just outside, and the grid of the screen. On the table nearby, a giant sunflower spread its flamboyance through the room. Framed by 146

the picture window, just beyond the vegetable garden ripe with summer tastes, the pink Simplicity rose hedge bloomed with the fervor that seemed to come from certain knowledge about the end of the season. The summer was reaching its crescendo, and that melody came together as a symphony for me on that day, flawless and finely tuned. Images from my life filed past in my mind, memories of all varieties surfacing one after another and tumbling along. At this lingering still point, I experienced tremendous clarity about the absolute significance of beauty in my life. It was as if the universe had chosen this moment, in my presence, to reflect on itself.

Just that morning, my wife had spoken to me about taking a trip, going somewhere lively and interesting, shaking a leg while we still could. It was not so much that I disliked the idea of travel as that I realized I had no need of it. This feeling was amplified by the way the afternoon came to me in all its extravagance. The way the colors and certain essences from my life met together in that room created such a fundamental contentedness that the entire trajectory of my life seemed to have been destined for this moment. “Why would you need to go anywhere when you have a home like this?� I asked my wife. All that had seemed elusive now seemed not just attainable but obtained, present with me in this simple space.

By the time I came back to the room for the last time, after the accident and the failed chemotherapy, after the tender solaces of the doctor, I thought of it as sacred ground. It was where I had come to understand that the perfection and pure elation of the moment, the fleeting light catching the blossom just so, well, this was a gift; a wild and luxurious gift in an often capricious 147

world. It was as if every sadness and happiness of my life were joined in the particular fullness of that September day to pull me into a place of deep and sustaining satisfaction. Right here in this room.

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