Creative Writing Student Portfolio 2020-2021

PRODIGAL ELI TIMONER (AB’22)

Mother nature had been gracious this year - we got all the way to December unscathed. But she has finally turned on us. It’s so cold my silk red scarf has me underdressed. Cold dead toes inside my go-go boots, out of juice and a little too loose on rye shots, after I got the call, this night does not have to go well to go right. The bus will take me back to the warmth, that’s all I ask, though I whisper secretly my hopes for a pillow and a bigger closet, for more time in my memories, for a ride to some distant home I have always known but has never been seen or heard aloud.

A place can be sterile and unsterile, neither and absolutely both. The medical tile floor sweats out slush, the corners collect layer-cakes of mud, piss, and bleach, and we sit on regularly cleaned benches. This is the ugly truth of the terminal, revealed in the exacting holy light of the fluorescent tracks. The light of God or scientific man burns past my retinas so brightly I stand and move for the dim and beckoning corner with the water fountain.

With every clack of my boots, a head turns. The passengers stare unmasked and unashamed, sleeping or belching or staring at their hands. Some sit neatly. Some sit stretched-legged across the aisle, muddy rubber soles in the seat designed for conversation, for a friend. Their eyes track me as I pass. Who’s they? You’d be surprised, even the bus driver, paid to shuttle people from dead-end to dead-end, to underpaying jobs or to Grandmother’s house for the holidays, who sees all the rest of them all in the exacting light of the terminal, he spends a moment too long with his eyes, at my face, my concealed head, glassy eyes, angular starved cheeks, bony broad shoulders tight in a maxi dress, down my chest, down to my waist, down there for much too long. I bend for the faucet, for a chorus of eyes, for a steadying sip of water.

We travel over snowy fields, through rolling green hills with gurgling streams and wildlife, then red rock land where water dries up, sand pits, salt flats, rubble mountains and dead beds where fish lived once when this desert was covered in ferns and snakelike roots born out of rich mud. Every treeless mile, another mile closer to the gaggle of loose ends that awaits: seventy people whose texts I haven’t returned (and dozens more who were sent to voicemail), old bosses waiting for the day I come crawling back again, my dad and my sister and her husband and child, the appearances I’ll have to answer for with an identity talk and a new language of pronouns (the alien singular alienating they), an estate to settle, and a funeral to arrange.

I shut my eyes. The vibrations of the motor, the uneven road, oscillate me to sleep. On the bus, I dream of my mother, beyond the bright fluorescent ads for Jesus and the brothels surrounding Vegas. ~~~

In my dream I descend down to Earth, approaching what at first seems like a memory, then like a dream I had before— until I descend below the clouds of faulty memory, diving beneath the veil of what I thought had happened to reveal a world that might have happened and never will. Here, in this dream, I am with her. My mother and I walk through the hazy beauty of late afternoon sun, down a street of my childhood, brushing past bougainvillea bushes with their thorny, bright pink paper-delicate flowers encroaching onto the sidewalk. Golden hour. The shallow canyon of whitewashed stucco homes reflects soft pink light and laughter back at each other. Windows lit by candles and pendant lamps are opened to the street below, a trumpeter trumpets, kids yap, voices meet each other with great excitement and then receded into the gentle warm sounds of full-hearted contentment. The city around us is full of unknown friends, one drink in, savoring precious moments of hope and reunion, prepared to descend far into the night. Our steps crunch on the pink paper flowers. Mama and I, our silks blowing in the wind, walk in step. “Where we going, Mama?” I ask.

We walk in silence, down several blocks past the park until we are not walking anymore. Before us, on a side street strung with string lights and sycamore trees, my mother’s surprise for me. An unassuming Spanish Revival with a thick warm wooden door, worn tiles descending to the street, with a balcony and a set-back lot. In the yard, a big live oak tree, otherwise sage and sagebrush, lavender and succulents, arranged 12