fossils

by gaby smith

When you live a long way out, you make your own fun.

strawberry ice cream I moved out of my dorm for the summer on Friday, May 13th, 2022. During the long car ride among hills of dry brush, my father told me a story.

A childhood friend of his, Bill Deane, had discovered that his girlfriend (heavily pregnant at the time) was being beaten by her sleazy druggie stepdad. My dad was asleep when Bill called his house, so my uncle answered. The two broke into the stepdad’s house and beat the shit out of him in the middle of the night. My uncle got away, but the cops arrested Bill.

So he did a few months’ time in jail, picking up trash on the side of the freeway in an orange vest.

On one of these occasions, not unlike any other day, Bill was picking up the vibrant plastic that littered the gutters of San Leandro’s Interstate 880 when he received a call. His girlfriend was in labor. He was permitted to leave the freeway to witness the longawaited birth of his daughter, who he promised to raise with love and tenderness once he served his time. His brother quickly came to pick him up, young niece in car.

Meanwhile, a milk truck driver, high on Valium and methamphetamine and marijuana and sleep deprivation, was dozing off in the fast lane. He considered taking a sick day but was pressured to finish off the drive after being on the road for four days straight. Falling asleep at the wheel, he veered across four lanes of rush-hour traffic at seventy miles per hour. The forty-ton machine first made impact with a pickup truck, then a van, then a bus, and finally hit the sound wall on the rightmost side of the freeway, where orange vests and the Deanes happened to be standing.

The milk and blood made pink on the road. It looked like strawberry ice cream left in the sun.

In an instant, five lives extinguished like a candle’s flame in the wind. Fourteen more fought, battered and bleeding in their smashed-up cars. Only ten would survive. The Deanes never stood a chance.

Off one exit of the freeway, at St. Rose Hospital, Bill’s daughter was born. The day was confusing for Bill’s girlfriend and the Deanes - joyous and lachrymose.

The baby girl knew nothing but to scream and cry, not because of the tragedy, but because of instinct. Her family mimicked her, quietly, grieving the sudden loss of Bill, his brother, and his niece.

That was March 27th, 1994. Bill was twenty. He missed the birth of his daughter, all of her birthdays, and all her graduations. She’s twenty-eight now. She has his nose, and they laugh just the same, so she’s been told.

The Apple Man He gave me a slice of Fuji apple years ago, cutting it with his dull pocket knife, tucked neatly away in his apron pocket.

It was the sweetest apple I had ever tasted, scarlet red like his ruddy face and lush flesh sweating with each bite.

I never saw him again, but I bought Fuji apples nearly every time I returned to his store in hopes that we might reconnect to strike up a conversation.

Eventually, his curly brown tresses and calloused fingers and apron that swayed with each grand step escaped the forefront of my memory.

But nearly six years later, his warm face returns to me with the first bite of each crimson Fuji apple.

No moment is quite as tender as silently sharing fruit with a stranger.

TRACY, CA I was born and raised in Tracy, California, a place of inbetweens. Not quite Bay Area but hardly included in the San Joaquin Valley, it’s unclear where exactly Tracy lies.

It’s a “small town” of over 100,000 people with nothing to do except hang out in Target and complain about how boring it is to live here. Tracy’s key features are the West Valley Mall (with more and more shops closing every year), the downtown area (with a few cutesy restaurants and shops that are ultimately nothing to write home to), and dozens of chains littering the three freeways that enclose it. These freeways give my not-so-little hometown its motto, “Think Inside the Triangle,” a phrase sarcastically uttered by blasé teenagers like myself when discussing how nothing Tracy really is. With no reliable public transportation system to surrounding cities, it becomes impossible to escape the triangle without a car of your own. I’ve taken to biking my way through town, but manpower can only get you so far. I haven’t gone outside city limits in weeks.

A few years ago, a Tumblr user from Tracy posted about an outdated permanent retainer she got from the main orthodontics office here, which jarred orthodontists in another metropolitan area, along with some other comments about Tracy in what is now known as “The Dentist Story.” A niche group of Tumblr users took this story and ran with it, researching all of the sketchiest local news stories and history. I’ll list some of them here for ease: A tire fire burned for over two years straight, and a family went blind because of the smoke.

A bear once roamed the streets for a day.

A teenage boy was tortured by a couple in their basement for nearly a year before he escaped to the nearby InShape, naked and emaciated. (Side note: the woman was a Girl Scouts leader until her arrest, and, had this happened a year or two later, she would have been my Girl Scout leader.)

A man was gored by a bull while at a car dealership.

A Sunday school teacher murdered a young girl, stuffed her in a suitcase, and threw it into an irrigation canal.

The infamous 1969 Altamont Speedway concert, the failed “Woodstock of the West” where Hells Angels spilled blood and thousands of hippies fled down the hills on foot, took place between Tracy and neighboring city Livermore.

MC Hammer, once a millionaire and now a bankrupt preacher, lives here, less than a mile away from my house.

A five-minute stroll from my house is San Joaquin’s military distribution center, which has security so tight you’d think it was the president’s summer home.

Just outside city limits is an allegedly non-nuclear explosives test site.

All this being said, it’s no wonder why so many Tumblr users have wet dreams about Tracy, their real-life Night Vale, the Twilight Zone nestled deep in sunny California. Those pledging to road trip out to this “creepy little town” will be sorely disappointed to find acres upon acres of farmland and dead grass in place of aliens and serial killers. Many jaded Tracy residents have heard about the post and sneered - this was no government psy-op or dark, mysterious town full of secrets. Tracy really is nothing but a once-affordable false suburbia for people to commute to the Bay Area with too many people and too little to do. I wish I could entertain the notion that my hometown is cool in any way, but after living here for eighteen years, I can’t knowingly lie to myself. No amount of cherry-picked fun facts and news stories can make me glad I grew up here.

So, because of the complete lack of anything, Tracy youth have had to make do with what we have - a vape shop right next to the high school, a mall with air conditioning, a playground with swings, a convenience store around the block. I can’t say it’s been entirely miserable growing up in such a highly populated yet somehow desolate place, but I also can’t say I’m heartbroken over the fact that this will be my last summer in Tracy. I don’t think I could ever be completely satisfied with my adolescence, regardless of where I grew up. Having spent my entire life here (save my first year of college in Berkeley), I’m more than ready to conquer new territories and expand my horizons past the rolling hills of my hometown.

But I know that, sure as spring, she’ll always be waiting for me, same as ever.

good regret i was watching how the monster was going a stray man it’s a big muddy shape it seems like he’s lost in time elevator many heavens arrive off the taxi something like gods death it looks like a maze there was a very beautiful statue walking in the city the townspeople are fragrant i finally got lost in the timeline

I hope you think of me when you hear a funny word, and when my face becomes a gray splotch in your distant memory, you look at the moon, waning and waxing clean, and remember pulchritudinous an ugly word for beauty.

In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment.

In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.

JOAN DIDION

MUSEUM They say that the death of a grandparent is a young person’s first experience of mortality.

November 26th, 2020. Thanksgiving Day. Without warning, the lymphoma that had laid dormant within her since before I was born had spread. It only took three weeks from the diagnosis for the metastasis to transmute her breath into air. Hearing the news at midnight from my father, I didn’t know what to do but lay in bed and go to sleep.

It’s been almost two years now.

There was that October afternoon, when I tried to drive her car away from the sprinklers. I could hardly even pull forward without hitting the curb. I’ve since improved my driving skills, but she’d never know that.

I’d never see her again after that afternoon.

The very last time I saw my grandmother in flesh and bone was a week after Thanksgiving, for a small open-casket visitation. She had on a bright red lipstick that I knew she’d never wear. It didn’t look like her.

It wasn’t her. Or maybe I was still in denial, the lesion still fresh.

It took a while to suture the lesion. To come to terms with the fact that someone who was always present in my life had suddenly ceased to be. Shortly after the visitation, we went on with tying all the loose ends - deep cleaning her house, selling it, holding estate sales, canceling subscriptions, filing final taxes. For a weekend, we rented a huge dumpster to put in the driveway and fill it with whatever was deemed nonvaluable. It was overflowing by Sunday night.

Who were we to determine what was and wasn’t valuable? Why were we throwing away so much? Why couldn’t we just leave everything as it was, as if she was still here? As if she was just gone on vacation and gave us a spare key to water her plants?

But even if it had been kept exactly the same as it was when she left it, it still wouldn’t bring her back.

Stale Drumsticks in the freezer, the Post-It note with the ESPN channel number scrawled on it stuck to the TV, the moths fluttering among dust and landing on the ceiling.

And now it was empty, as if no one ever even lived in it. Like my mother and her sister hadn’t grown up there. You’d never know that annual Easter egg hunts took place in the yard, unless you found a years-old egg full of quarters hidden in a rose bush. And you’d never know how the Christmas tree would glimmer with lights and ornaments covering every inch of its foliage, suffocating the leaves with colorful glass and silver. Now it was just rooms with floors and walls, a garden, trees, and a red “FOR SALE” sign.

Uninhabited.

While cleaning, we were able to claim whatever we wanted, like soldiers at war taking souvenirs from a city bombed to ruins. I took sweaters, a dress, jewelry, a camera, trinkets, photos. They don’t belong to me - I’m just holding onto them for her. As if she would ever come back for them. “This is my grandmother’s camera.” Not was. Is. Just like how the house on 15725 Via Esmond is my grandmother’s house, even though another family lives there, and even though the paint is different, and even though her car isn’t there anymore. That, too, is in someone else’s possession now.

Retrieving all of her things from the landfill, the Goodwill, and every relative’s and estate sale shopper’s home wouldn’t resurrect her either. She wasn’t made of Drumsticks or Post-It notes or moths or jewelry or Nikon cameras or sweaters or garden decor. She was made of flesh and bone and blood, and now she’s ash stowed in a granite wall next to other ashes of people who left behind houses and photos and taxes just like she did.

The death of a grandparent is a young person’s first experience of mortality.

Meaning there are many more to come. Meaning that, from here on out, it only gets worse.

Eventually, every friend, every cousin, every sibling, and every parent will join them in the great nothingness. Leaving you with an entire person’s life in items, until your home is a museum of dead people in a desperate attempt to keep their memory alive however you can.

A stack of engraved albums full of faded pictures of my grandmother in Europe collecting dust. A cardboard box of my grandfather’s miscellaneous papers that were taken home years ago and have yet to be sorted through. Floral wedding invitations for couples whose names are unfamiliar to me and who are either divorced or dead. A phone book like a graveyard. Birthday/Christmas/Easter/First Communion/Confirmation cards signed with the curlicue cursive of relatives long gone.

But you can’t bring them back.

At least you have your precious memories.

This is my grandmother’s camera. It still has her pictures on it.

These mementos serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.

We couldn’t have a funeral service until July 29th, 2021. She had always said (in typical morbid fashion) that she wanted each of her grandchildren to speak at her funeral. I was the only one who delivered a eulogy, to a small crowd of remaining friends and family in St. Felicitas Church. A purple urn was sealed in a granite wall, lunch was eaten, and that was that. The ten-month long burial of my grandmother had come to a close.

Her funeral was the day after my eighteenth birthday. The first one I didn’t get a call from her, singing Happy Birthday over the phone.

On July 28th, 2020, she called me while my phone was off. So she left a voicemail:

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you! Happy birthday, dear Gaby!

Happy birthday to you! Okay, where are you? I just talked to your mom and I asked her, ‘Is she up?’ She said ‘yeah.’ Okay… you mean to tell me I sang this song for nothing, and you’re not there? (laughs). Okay, I hope you have a good day. I cannot believe you, that you’re seventeen. I thought you - I thought you were gonna be sixteen, and Melissa said ‘no, she’s gonna be seventeen!’ That makes me so old, old, old, old (laughs). Okay then, have a good one. Love you.”

I’m glad I missed the call. Every year on my birthday, I play that voicemail.

supernova Some of my best friends happen to be sixty years older than me.

The smell of nonenal and porcelain smiles and waving hands, gnarled with time, greet me absentmindedly.

Who knows if they remember me?

What’s your name, dear?

How humiliating it must feel to know that the salad days are gone, that every day, more and more nerve cells burn out like dying stars.

To have lived long enough to see a world changed, one in which you no longer fit and in which you must return to the beginning.

“They bring us here when we become too much to bear, but I understand.”

So every weekday, dozens of seniors are dumped off in a little building by the tennis courts, usually against their will.

Wrinkled faces ignite with emotion as they recount high school swim meets, winters in Tennessee, raucous middle school students.

They remember.

The atrophy slows.

The past and present, stitched together at last, complete you.

You are a culmination of every minute that you have survived.

I return, sometimes soon, sometimes weeks pass.

What was your name again?

I learn to play chess from an old man in a pink corduroy shirt.

He doesn’t recall teaching me, but beams with pride upon discovering this.

During my last visit, after a long break, I am asked by a friend: Where have you been?

They remember me.

And I talk to them.

Over stale bingo cards and greasy plastic chips, I ask: So where did you grow up?

The floodgates open.

They were once teachers, engineers, raised in Harlem, Oakland, Maryland, Hong Kong, their fathers were doctors, and, decades ago, they sat on the same hard metal bleachers of Memorial Stadium that I sit on now.

The largest stars refuse to burn out silently, instead creating a beautiful, powerful explosion.