Demond Blake

from Slackass

          We finished our beers just as we got to Pepito’s a former dive bar where all the old time lushes and aspiring whatevers used to drink until the weekends when they were pushed out for this crowd and the covers the bar could charge to hear some shitty bar bands doing Doors and Stones covers.   Now Pepito’s was trying to cater to the downtown crowd by having DJ nights during the week and local/out of town indie/punk bands play on the weekends. Sometimes it worked sometimes it didn’t. The downtown kids were a fickle bunch. One week this was the place to be, the next week someplace else. All they really wanted to do was party out in the city but gas prices, traffic and their simply being scared to take the subway at night anywhere usually kept them around here.
           I didn’t like how Pepito’s had changed. It used to be dark in here even in the daytime. You could get a booth drink your beer munch on stale tortilla chips and greasy salsa and not be bothered. Now there were no booths. Just tables and chairs all spread out facing the stage that was now the centerpiece of the bar. There were lights all over the place. I put on my shades the moment I walked in.   The female bartenders were aggressively friendly and wore small tight tops pushing up shagging tits and showing off old cleavage. The male barkeeps were young studly types, wore trucker caps and Atticus shirts. They worked out and walked around like they could fuck any pussy and kick anyone’s ass. They catered to their friends when they were at the bar and made strangers wait. I didn’t like the scene very much.
           They weren’t charging so we walked right in. Before anyone we knew could spot us I found a couple of empty pint mugs on a table. Benny and I went to the restroom cleaned them out and filled them up with the other two tall boys. We tossed the cans walked back out. Bruce ran up us and hugged then drug us to his table we other people we knew were. Benny went around high-fiving and smooching people.   I kept my distance and waved at everyone. Frantic had just finished a song and everyone was clapping. The singer saw Benny and a grin came on his face.
           “Hey everybody it’s my favorite weed connect Benny-boy!”
           Everyone cheered. Benny threw his arms up in the air and flashed his dead tooth. Some beer spilled out of his mug. Someone refilled it.
           “This song’s for you Ben” The singer said. “because I forget what’s it’s originally supposed to be about.”
           The band kicked in, the singer started singing in Spanish. For some reason they sounded like a Mexican version of Oasis to me. Benny held his beer up as they played his song. I was bored, I went to the front patio to have a smoke and watch the traffic. Out there were some older smokers mixed with the younger ones. The older ones smoked Marlboros and younger smoked generic brands like 1st Class cigarettes. I smoked 1st Class cigs. I saw my friend Marquis across the way talking to some girl. She didn’t look too interested in what he had to say and kept waving away the smoke from his cancer stick. The girl had on a blue Modest Mouse t-shirt just a little too small so she could show off her pierced belly button. Her dyed black hair almost came down to her shoulders and her jeans had one well-placed hole at the knee. Her chucks were spotless. Marquis kept talking to her but he wasn’t really looking at her. He kept staring at the ground brushing his hair behind his ears and hitting his cig. I’m not even sure he noticed when she walked away and I walked up.
           He didn’t like being called Marquis because he thought it sounded gay. He told everyone called him Marc. He was right it did sound gay but his name had a melody to it that most names like ‘Jim’ don’t so I called him Marquis. I was one of the few non-females he let get away with that. Kinda why I thought he was a decent guy, well that and he always had pills.
           “Hey Marquis the girl’s gone”
           “I know Jim I was just…I don’t even know.”
           Marquis was from Hemet, a city known for two things: it’s retirement community and it’s meth. All of kids down there lived with their grandparents who were oblivious to damn near everything while the kids started meth labs and sold the shit and did the shit. Marquis told me he didn’t tweak but his eyes were always bugged out. He wasn’t twitchy or anything so I couldn’t tell one way or the other.
           “What were you guys talking about?”
           “I don’t know the band, people we had in common shit like that. I wanted to take the conversation in a different um direction you know, to find out whether she had a boy or a girl or if she was interested in doing some shit but she always found a way to steer it back to shitty small talk.”
           “You should’ve put the cig out.”
           “Why?”
           “She was waving the smoke away the whole time you two were talking.”
           “Shit Jim how did I miss it?”
           “You have to stop looking down when you talk to girls, hell to people in general.”
           “But if I don’t look down then I end up staring them right in the eyes and you know how my eyes look.”
           “Have you ever tried not staring period?”
           “Yeah but if I’m not staring right at them or at the ground I have a hard time listening to them.”
           “Okay well you could always stare at some other part of a person.”
           “What part?”
           “Um…stare at the shoulders. It’s not too obvious and you’re not looking at anyone directly.”
           “But then I’m staring at their shoulders and that’s weird.”
           “Don’t just stare at the shoulders! In fact don’t stare at any part in particular. Act like you’re connecting dots. Go from foot to foot, elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder and glance at the eyes. It’ll be some cute thing that you do. Some girl will find it interesting. Then you’ll date her and after a while she’ll find it annoying. In between though you’ll be getting laid so who cares right?”
           “Yeah.”
           “There you go.”
           “And if it doesn’t work?”
           “Try talking to blind people.”
           “Jim I can never tell if you’re bullshitting or not.”
           “Me neither.”
           “You just get here?”
           “A little bit ago. How long you been here?”
           “A few minutes. I was across the street. There’s bands playing at Rob’s Vintique”
           “A lot of people there?”
           “A lot of teenage girls. I was just going back you should come too.”
           “I don’t like teenage girls. I didn’t even like them when I was a teenager.”
           “None of them will talk to me cause I look too old.”
           “You are too old.”
           “But you look you just graduated last year or something. They see me with you it won’t be like I’m some gross older guy.”
           “Yeah it’ll be like we’re both some gross older guy.”
           “Just come on.”
           “Got any vics?”
           “Like ten or fifteen.”
           “You should give me a few.”
           “You should come to Rob’s with me.”
           “Bastard.”
           Marquis grinned and gave me a couple. I chased them down with the rest of my beer then we went across the street to Rob’s.
          Rob’s Vintique was a clothing store specializing in vintage clothes and knickknacks that the indie kids around town were into. Noticing that a lot of these kids were underage and couldn’t see their fave bands at the bars Rob started having shows at his store every week. In between Rob would get in on mic and encourage everyone to browse, announce sales and the next week’s show. There was never a cover but the kids always bought a lot of shit. I had known Rob for a year or so. He was a shrewd business man as they say. It was between sets and Rob had just got off the mic when Marquis and I walked in.
           “Jimmy jazz what’s up” Rob said bear hugging me.
           His breath smelled of wine. He was probably drunk. People liked me a lot more when they were drunk. I’m not sure whether I liked them that way but at least they laugh more. What I really wanted to know was if Rob had anymore wine.
           “Robby-Rob how’s business?”
           “Kick fucking ass Jim! Marc didn’t tell me you’d be wanderin’ over here otherwise I would’ve saved you some wine.”
           “You mean you don’t have an extra bottle?”
           “Ah look at this fuckin kid” Rob said putting his arm around my shoulder and squeezing me.
           “Biggest wino I know. He could be stuck in the Sahara and given a choose of wine or water this fucker would choose wine.”
           “If I’m stuck in the Sahara and can’t get any food, might as well get drunk.”
           “Fucking Jim. Come on I got some more wine in the back. You want some Marc?”
           “Nah I’m going wait around for the next band.”
           “Fuckin liar! I see you scopin those teenie boppers. Better watch it Marky-boy they’re twice as hard as they look.”
           “That’s why I brought Jim over to break the ice and make me look less creepy.”
           “You don’t need this asshole around. He’ll open his mouth and fuck all your game up.”
          Marc nodded then drifted outside to smoke a cig. Once out he started a conversation with a little white girl in a black hoodie. She looked like she was fifteen, but she was smoking so they had that in common. I kinda wanted to see if Marquis was going to do that connect the dots thing. But I really wanted some wine so I followed Rob through the crowd and into the storage area where he had the Chucky Shaw Merlot $1.99. Some people do have class. He gave me a paper cup topped me off. I took a sip. The vics were starting to kick in and I felt tingly. Everything got a bit more tolerable until Rob starting talking. He was having trouble with his girl and was thinking about breaking up with her before she broke up with him. He wasn’t sure what to do. On one hand he thought if he broke up with her then he’d look like ‘THE MAN’ throwing a bitch to the curb. He’d look great to the fellas but not so much to the females which means he’d have to work for rebound sex. Now he thought if she broke up with him then he’d look pathetic in front of the guys but it would make getting rebound sex easy as pie. Such a dilemma. I didn’t know what to tell Rob. Didn’t really care either. I just kept refilling my cup and nodding. Most people don’t want advice, they simply want someone to throw words at who’ll agree with whatever they say.
           Rob shut up once the next band started playing. I finished my drink and followed him back up front. We worked our way to the front of the crowd. I recognized the band. They were called Child Pornography. Most people called them Child P for short. It sort of rolled off the tongue. The group had a sort of disco punk sound that was popular right now. They were a three piece group. The guitarist Natalie (Natty for short) who was on the methadone plan trying to kick heroin, Aaron on keys who was straight-edge and seemed to be concentrating way too much on his simple keyboard parts and the singer Jamie was dressed in a diaper, chucks and horn rim glasses. He was skinny but for some reason had a big ass. When he wasn’t shaking it in someone’s face he ran around in circles and sang off key. Some of the kids moved along absent mindedly to the beat. Others stood around. If you weren’t moving (or if he knew you) Jamie ran up to you and started dry humping. If it was a friend then there was laughter and everyone stared. If it wasn’t then the humpee looked around nervously, didn’t laugh and everyone still stared.
          He spotted me. I wasn’t in the groove. He ran up knocked me down and started humping my leg while singing ‘Jimmy-Jim why won’t you sleep on my couch. Jimmy-Jim gay sex on my couch.’ I didn’t laugh, I didn’t look around nervously, I didn’t know if people were staring, I just felt stupid and wanted another drink. He humped me for a minute for so longer then got up and started running in circles again. Then the song was over. There was applause. I clapped too. It was most action my left leg had gotten in months. My right leg felt jealous. I felt bad for my right leg. It never got any action. I walked outside. Marquis was still out there smoking. The girl in the black hoodie was gone.
           “You headin’ back to Pepito’s?”
           “Yeah I need a drink.”
           “I’ll come too. You want another vic?”
           “I’m good. What happened to the girl in the hoodie.”
           “I sold her a couple of vics for five bucks.”
           “That’s all you did?”
           “Yeah she wasn’t my type.”
           “Too young?”
           “No I don’t like girls who wear hoodies. Makes me nervous.”
           “That doesn’t begin to make any sense.”
           “Does it have to?”
           “Guess not.”
           “Sure you don’t want another?”
           “Is it free?”
           “Of course.”
           “I’ll take a couple more.”
          He dropped two in my hand. I put them in my pocket for later.

Kathleen Alcalá

La Otra

She had never thought of herself as “la otra,” the Other Woman. All she knew was that she had loved him better, and it was only natural that he should leave his fiance and marry her.

“But that was a long time ago,” she would laugh when telling this story to Sirena, who seemed fascinated by her abuela’s past. “Back when the animals could talk.”

Anita had not been looking for a husband in those days. She already had too many men in her life – five brothers and a widowed father. She cooked and washed from dawn to night, then got up and did it all over again. When the house burned down along with half of the town, it was a relief – there was nothing to wash and nothing to cook. They had no choice but to join up with all the other refugees and walk north.

Some of the men stayed to fight. Her oldest brother, Manuel, stayed with his sweetheart’s family to defend what was left of the town. But the soldiers did not want the town. They wanted more soldiers. Both sides. Men and boys were compelled, forced, conscripted and dragooned, so that brother ended up fighting brother, father fighting son, uncles fighting nephews. It was all mixed up. The crops were deliberately destroyed three years in a row, and finally they had eaten all the seed corn. Better to walk north, where the Americanos were paying good wages.

“Bring extra money, and bring extra shoes,” was the advise Celso, who led the travellers out of town, gave to them. People brought a lot more than that, but most of it was lost along the way.

The first place of any size the family came to was Guanajuato. Los Guanejuatensos were not know for their friendliness to outsiders. In fact, the last time people had come to try to make themselves at home, they were herded into the granary and set on fire. This was in colonial times, when the Spanish rule had become unbearable. But the worker who had carried a stone on his back to deflect the bullets so he could set fire to the door of the granary was still a hero, El Pípila. No one remembered his name, just his pock-marked face.

Introspective people, used to the darkness of the mines and the insulated feel of their valley, they did not speak unless spoken to, offer information or help unless asked directly. It was here that the bedraggled Don Barcielego dragged his exhausted sons and daughter. By then one of Anita’s brothers had developed an infection. He had cut his foot on the walk, and the laceration refused to close and had begun to smell. The other members of the group said to leave him, that he would die of gangrene. Out of desperation, as she saw her brother get sicker and sicker, and her father begin to despair, Anita inquired if there was a curandera who could help him. A gnarled old woman, for Anita was at the age when she assumed gnarled people were old, came and cleaned the wound and wrapped it in a poultice made of local herbs. Then she suggested that the family pray to el Señor de Villa Seca for intervention on behalf of the ailing brother. No one in the family had heard of this Señor, but they prayed, nevertheless.

Whether it was the prayers or the poultice, the brother got well. Her father would not allow Anita to go to the church of Villa Seca to give thanks, but when he understood that it was in the mountains going north, he agreed that they could all stop on their way. The brother who had been cured, who had a gift, painted a retablo of thanks on a broken piece of wood and left it there.

Sirena’s abuela claimed not to remember much more of the trip. She said she remembered going into towns and begging people for water. She remembered falling asleep while walking, she was so tired. She remembered hiding for hours in the ruins of buildings, all of them trying not to make a sound, while armed men – soldiers or policemen, were around. She remembered a town up north that seemed almost deserted, until they found an old woman who showed them a fountain with water. How good it felt to wash her hands and face, her hair, let the water run down the front of her dress. Thirty-eight people started the trek, and thirty-two finished it. Anita remembered that one person died in his sleep, and they found him cold the next morning. Another began to panic during a time of needed silence, and was held down until he no longer moved. She does not remember what happened to the others. Maybe they stayed in some of the towns along the way, or died, or were carried away by a flock of birds.

Sirena watched her grandmother intently when she told these stories, trying to glean from her grandmother’s face and hands what she did not understand in words. When Anita got to the part where she described the missing as possibly being carried away to heaven by a flock of birds, the little girl’s mouth would go slack with amazement. When she got older, that expression was replaced by a sorrowful smile, the trademark expression of the Diamantes.

By the time they crossed the border, they were all as thin as could be – puro hueso – all bone, Anita would say, holding her fingers a quarter inch apart to show how thin they were. Not like I am now, she would add, patting her comfortable belly fat.

Sirena would just laugh at her tiny grandmother. Next to her, Sirena felt large and awkward. It was hard to imagine her abuela surviving the long walk, the hunger and thirst, the uncertainty of death waiting for them at every crossroads. But Anita Diamante greeted every dawn with the cautious optimism of a survivor, throwing water on her front steps and sweeping her walkway down to the sidewalk. Let the day bring what it will, she seemed to say – God willing, it will find me here.

As hard as it was to get her grandmother to tell the story of their migration to the United States, it was even harder to get her to tell about how she met her husband, and took him away from his intended. She did not tell this story to Sirena until she was older – old enough to know better, old enough to have gained the sorrowful smile.

After all their travails, and several false starts, Anita’s family went to work picking oranges in Southern California. They settled with other refugees on ground too high and rocky to cultivate, but close enough to meet the foreman at dawn in the orange groves. Anita’s father and brothers built a one room stone house with a cooking shed on the back. Anita asked for one window on the wall facing the street that was a little larger than the small, high windows on the other walls. This had a piece of tin that fitted inside of it to close, fastened by a piece of wire. In summer, Anita took down this shutter and sold aguas frescas to people walking by. Later, she began to sell a few canned goods, and after a year she had a small store where the orange pickers and farmworkers could obtain a few goods near their homes from someone who spoke Spanish. By extending a little credit until payday, “Anita’s Tiendita” became popular in the neighborhood.

At first, her father was nervous about Anita being home alone all day with cash in the house, but she assured him that she knew how to handle things. He got her a dog they named Flojo, after the mayor of their town in Mexico. When her father saw how much she was able to make, enough to save, he allowed her to handle all of the finances for the family. Anita was the only one who could make change and count to ten in English. On Fridays, she was accompanied to the bank by her four brothers, where the American clerk nervously counted the small bills and wrote out a receipt under their watchful eyes.

With all of this brotherly love and attention, Anita despaired that she would ever marry and start a household of her own.

Whenever her grandmother got to this part, Sirena grew pensive, staring deep into the pattern on the carpet to hide the feelings she knew would show in her eyes.

“Pero ya, mira,” her abuela would say, drawing Sirena’s attention back to the story. “One day a car drove up and parked across the road. A Model A. A man was driving, and he got out to help a girl from the other side. She was well-dressed, but she acted completely helpless in climbing out of the car.”

Here her grandmother would flop her arms, like a rag doll. “But once she got on her feet, she grabbed the man’s arm like he was the big prize. I could tell that he was embarrassed by her, and I knew then that I would make a better life mate than she!”
Abuela would cackle in remembrance at this point, and Sirena would smile in anticipation of the rest of the story.

“It turns out that they had come to our place in the woods to tell us about hygiene. Hygiene! As though, just because we were poor, we didn’t know how to take baths. She talked to the women, and he talked to the men. But she was so embarrassed, and used such funny language, that no one knew what she was talking about!”

“You went to the talk?”

“Seguro que si! Of course! I had to find out what was going on.”

Sirena squirmed in delight. Anita was fully animated now.

“Afterwards, I went up to that man – and I could see that he was handsome, too – and I told him that I could do a better job than that girl.

“He gave me this look – the way you look at something to see if it has more value than it appears to have.

“You think so? He said. All right then. Here is the address of the next talk. It is right next door here, in Corona. And here are some of the brochures that we give people. Take them home and read them, and if you still think you can do a better job, come to the next talk.

“And so I started going around with him, giving the talks. I was from the people, so I knew how to talk to them in their own language. And then we got married.”
Sirena knew there had to be more to the story than that. Like how her father let her go. And what happened to the store, and all her brothers. But she also knew that was all she was going to get out of her grandmother today.

“Bueno,” said her grandmother. “Let’s go to Pancha’s for lunch.” Pancha’s Comida Mexicana was about two blocks away, on a busy commercial street, but they could walk. And her grandmother could order anything she wanted, on the menu or not, and get it. Sirena never turned down a chance to go to Pancha’s with her grandmother. Pancha’s offered tamales and hope.

The scuffed linoleum floor, a fake brick design, held six small tables and a counter. Sirena’s grandmother favored a table by the window, not too far from the kitchen. Settled with sugary hot teas, Sirena ventured another question.

“What was he like?”

“Your abuelo?”

“Yes.”

Anita looked outside to the parking lot, as though she could see the Model A on the hot pavement. “Like I said, he was very handsome. You have seen his pictures. But he was handsome enough that people admired him when we passed.”

“They weren’t admiring you, too?” Sirena teased.

“No, of course not. You see how I am. Maybe they admired me for having him.” Anita held up her hand as though she had something important to say.

“But he was also kind. He was very good to me, not like some other men were to their wives.” She stirred her tea for a minute. “In those days, no one said anything if a man hit his wife. It was his right.”

“Some people still think so,” said Sirena.

“I know. But it is not right. At least now, women can ask for help, can get protection if they need to. Then, if a woman had children to protect, her parents might take her back, at least for awhile.”

“Otherwise?”

Anita looked at her sharply. “Otherwise, she put up with it, or had to survive on her own.”

Panchita came out from behind the counter to greet her grandmother.

“Como estas, Anita?”

“Bien, bien gracias. Recuerdas mi nieta, Sirena?”

Sirena nodded and smiled. “Hola,” she said.

The older ladies had a ritual they had to go through each time, no matter how many times Sirena had been introduced. They would continue to discuss her as though she was not present.

“Ay si, La Sirena! Que guapa esta! Como movie star!”

“Si como no. Y su hermano tambien.”

“De veras que si? Y donde viva?”

“En otro estado, muy lejos. Ya tiene esposa.”

“Y Sirena? ya tiene novio?”

“No, todavia no,” said Sirena, jumping into the conversation before her grandmother could say anything.

“Bueno,” said Panchita. “No se importa. No te preocupas.”

After taking their order, Panchita left the table, and Anita could see that Sirena was, nevertheless, distressed.

“Take your time,” she said, patting her hand. “You will know when the right one comes along.”

“I hope so,” said Sirena.

“In the meantime, enjoy being young. Don’t let viejas tell you what to do.”

Sirena smiled, her first genuine smile all day. “I won’t,” she said, “except for you.”

“Andale,” said her grandmother, laughing, as their steaming bowls of menudo arrived. Both stopped talking to eat.

When she had her fill, Sirena’s grandmother sat back in her chair, patting her mouth with her paper napkin. “She tried to have me killed, you know.”

“Who?”

“La muchacha. La otra.”

“The fiancé? The one you took him away from?”

“Yes. But that is another story.”

Ruth Nolan

Freezer Burn

Palm Springs, 117 degrees

september isn’t
for ice cream

august cripples
the dogs

july sticks
to itself

june, a time
to lower blinds

we lived on
cool tile floors

four months
in a row last year

grocery shopping
at midnight,

sleeping
through the day

our love
boiled over

when the air
conditioner broke

down and the
frozen pizza thawed

you took my
car keys and

in slow-mo you
knocked over

three  orange  cones
then melted  into the road

Volume I Issue 3 – Summer 2011 – Contributor Bios

Kathleen Alcalá is the author of five books of fiction and nonfiction, based on her family history in Mexico and the U.S., and teaches creative writing at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts in Washington State. She was born in Compton and grew up in San Bernardino, and has work in the original Inlandia anthology edited by Gayle Wattawa. She was recently a guest at Writers Week at UC Riverside.

Cynthia Anderson is a writer and editor living in Yucca Valley, California. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, and she has received poetry awards from the Santa Barbara Arts Council and the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. Her collaborations with photographer Bill Dahl are published in the book Shared Visions, available at http://www.rainbear.com.

While visiting Palm Springs a decade ago, Alaina Bixon became enchanted with the desert landscape and soon afterwards transplanted herself from San Francisco. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts at UC-Riverside, Palm Desert, with an emphasis on creative nonfiction. This poem was composed in an Inlandia writing workshop. Ms. Bixon is a freelance writer, teacher and editor, currently working on profiles of local personalities and helping clients with their memoirs.

With their girls grown and independent, Marcyn Clements and her husband, Richard, have more time to pursue their favorite activities: birding, butterfly and dragonfly watching and fly- fishing.

Marcy’s been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Appalachia, Eureka Literary Magazine, Flyway, frogpond, Hollins Critic, Literary Review, Lyric, Sijo West, Snowy Egret, Wind, and was accepted by Yankee Magazine, before they eliminated poetry from their pages. She was very excited to be included in the anthology: Ravishing Disunities, Real Ghazals in English, edited by the late Agha Shahid Ali.

Myra Dutton lives in Idyllwild, CA with her husband. She is the author of Healing Ground: A Visionary Union of Earth and Spirit, published by Celestial Arts in Berkeley, CA.

Maureen Foley is a writer and artist who grew up on an avocado ranch in Carpinteria. She has an MFA in Prose from Naropa University. Her chapbook, Epileptic, won the 2002 Dead Metaphor Press Award. Also, her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Santa Barbara Magazine, Bombay Gin, Skanky Possum and elsewhere.

Lucia Galloway has published a full-length collection of poems, Venus and Other Losses (Plain View, 2010), and a chapbook, Playing Outside (Finishing Line, 2005). Recent work appears or are forthcoming in Comstock Review, The Dirty Napkin, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Poemeleon, Red River Review, and Untitled Country Review. She is the recipient of several awards and prizes, and she curates a monthly poetry reading series in Claremont, California.

liz gonzález grew up in Rialto. Her family has been in Inlandia for 5 generations, since early 1900. liz’s work has most recently appeared in BorderSenses Literary Art Magazine and Don’t Blame the Ugly Mug Anthology and has been honored with the Arts Council for Long Beach’s 2005 Professional Artist Fellowship, an artistic grant from The Elizabeth George Foundation, and a residency at Hedgebrook: A Retreat for Women Writers. She is also a member of the Macondo Writer’s Workshop. liz teaches comp. at Long Beach City College and creative writing at community workshops and through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. For more info: lizgonzalez.com

Karen Greenbaum-Maya is, among other things, a clinical psychologist in California. In another life, she was a German Lit major, and read poetry for credit. She reviewed restaurants for the Claremont Courier from 1999 to 2005, sometimes in heroic couplets, sometimes imitating Hemingway. She has placed poems and photographs in many publications, most recently Off the Coast, qarrtsiluni, In Posse Review, Statushat Artzine, Tipton Poetry Journal, Inlandia Journal, dotdotdash, Waccamaw, and Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. She was nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize. Her first chapbook, Eggs Satori, received Honorable Mention in Pudding House Publications’ 2010 competition, and will be published in 2011.

Hillary Gravendyk is an Assistant Professor of English at Pomona College in Claremont, CA. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as American Letters & Commentary, The Bellingham Review, The Colorado Review, The Eleventh Muse, Fourteen Hills, MARY, 1913: A Journal of Forms, Octopus Magazine, Tarpaulin Sky and other venues. Her chapbook, The Naturalist, was published by Achiote Press in 2008. Her book, Harm, will be out this fall from Omnidawn Press. She lives on the eastern edge of LA county.

Yi Shun Lai is a freelance writer and editor. She grew up in the Inland Valley and now lives near New York City. She is an MFA candidate at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts.

Richard Nester has twice been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and has published poetry in a number of journals including Ploughshares, Callaloo, and Floyd County Moonshine.

Robbie Nester has lived in Southern California for 31 years, but publishes hither and yon. Besides publishing poems in California publications, such as Caesura, she also frequently publishes in the online journal Qarrtsiluni, writing to order for their thematically-oriented issues. Other recent publications include a poem in Floyd County Moonshine, and two non-fiction pieces in anthologies, Flashlight Memories and Hard to Raise But Easy to Love, the latter of which will be forthcoming in November from DRT Press.

Ruth Nolan, M.A, is Professor of English at College of the Desert, where she teaches California desert Indian literature and creative writing. A native of the Mojave Desert and former BLM wildland firefighter, she is also a writer and lecturer whose poetry and prose article related to the California desert is widely published, and is editor of No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California’s deserts (Heyday, 2009.) As a writer, she collaborated on a film about Joshua Tree, “Escape to Reality: 24 hrs @ 24 fps,” produced by the UC Riverside-California Museum of Photography (2008.) She was a featured speaker at the 2010 Western Wilderness Conference held in Berkeley, and is featured on the 2010-11 California Legacy “Nature Dreaming” radio project, sponsored by Santa Clara University.

Cindy Rinne has lived in the Inland Empire for 29 years. She is an artist and poet. Her poetry includes nature inspiration, parts of overheard conversations, observations on walks, life events and my response to my own artwork and the works of others.

Jacqueline Mantz Rodriguez was born in Great Falls, Montana but immigrated to the Inland Empire as a young child growing up in Ontario, California. She resides in Rancho Mirage and works as a special education teacher for Palm Springs High. She is working on her collection of short stories and poetry while preparing a documentary on her special education students. Jacqueline received her B.A. in literature and creative writing from Cal State San Bernardino and her Masters degree and teaching credentials from National University. Jacqueline’s loves are her new husband Joe and her Boston Terrier Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Ana Maria Spagna grew up in Riverside, California and now lives in Stehekin, Washington. Her books include Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey, winner of the 2009 River Teeth literary nonfiction prize, and Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw, named a Seattle Times Best Book of 2004.

Dr. Harki Dhillon

Featured Inlandia Writers Workshop Participant
Nominated by workshop leader Ruth Nolan, M.A.
Downtown Riverside Workshop

The Desert Flower

I am parched
Let it rain
But
Not too much
I want to flower
And bloom
Not die

–originally published in Phantom Seed magazine, issue #4, 2010

Surgery

Hands move
In controlled ecstasy
Immersed in
Nature’s beauty gone wrong.

The depths are exposed
Illuminated by
Artificial light,
The wisdom of years.

The dance of the fingers
Choreographed by experience,
Synchronous
With the aim
Of initiating
A cure
For a malady
Inflicting this
Unfortunate body
Farewell

–originally published in Slouching Towards Mt. Rubidoux Manor, Issue #3, 2010

* * *

Dr. Harki Dhillon, a prominent Orthopedic Surgeon practicing in Riverside, and a Riverside resident, has been attending the Inlandia Riverside Writers Workshop since early 2009, and is cherished by his associates as a highly valued member of the group to this day. He was introduced to the workshop by his friend/associate and noted local writer/historian Mary Curtin, another workshop attendee, to work on his memoir, which focuses on his life’s journey starting in India and continuing with his work as a physician there and in the United States/Inland Empire area. Soon after joining the writer’s workshop, he was inspired by the synergy of the workshop and his peers to begin writing poetry for the first time. His poetry takes an in-depth look at his personal and professional life, and he has recently published his first full-length book of poems, Invisible Hands: A Book of Poetry, published on Amazon Books in July, 2011 (www.amazon.com.) Perhaps the words of local, highly-respected poet and Professor of Creative Writing at University of California, Riverside Maurya Simon, gives the best overview of the scope and magic of Dhillon’s work:

Spare and direct, Dr. Harki Dhillon’s poems in his debut book address a broad spectrum of compelling subjects related to being alive in the 21st century. Whether he’s contemplating the mysteries of the divine or of the Universe, lamenting the ubiquitous suffering in the world, or celebrating daily pleasures, his deeply personal poems resonate with pathos. Dr Dhillon’s experience as an eminent surgeon imbues many of these poems with a sense of the fragility and vulnerability of the human body, while they also emphasize our resiliency and capacity to overcome pain and adversity. Feelings of love, despair, desire, remorse, angst, nostalgia, disillusionment, hope, loneliness and joy pervade these poems – reminding us of the heart’s complexity and endurance.

Dr. Dhillon is continuing to work on his memoir, which he hopes to publish in the near future, as well as generating more poetry for publication.

Yi Shun Lai

Rerun

They called it “Squaremont,” and they called me a “townie,” but I didn’t know enough to be insulted.

At college, in a small, eucalyptus-scented, no-man’s-land bordered by a quarry pit and a considerably more venerable institution, I was less than a mile from where I went to high school and about a half-mile from where I went to elementary school.

At college, they asked questions a local should know, and I answered like a newcomer. I grew up in a deliberate fog of commerce and consumption: Malls and modeling school; Range Rovers and baby Bimmers in the high school parking lot, with my parents’ Merc or Lexus crouched among them.

My classmates wanted to know where to go mountain biking; where the best hiking trails were; where they could, as minors, buy beer.
I didn’t know.

One day at track practice, I was bundled into a van and driven up the hill to the local mountain, where I’d only been to ski once over a decade and a half of residence. (Far more mountainous pastures could be found two hours to the east, and an outlet mall was on the way.)

Practice was hard that day. The constant elevation was grueling. I never knew such a hill could be found there. And yet, I remember it just barely.

A scant six months later, some college friends and I took to the mountain again, this time for a day-long backpacking trip. I was way out of my element, struggling to look confident in my off-market hiking boots. My trailmates stood loose and strong as they slid down a hillside made entirely of scree, and I fought to control my limbs and my panic.

That day, too, zipped quickly out of memory.

But it must have made a difference: Over the ensuing years, I logged countless miles in other states and countries, from Paris to Maine and Taipei, and ran races on the trails of New York City and the streets of Washington, D.C. I rode my bicycle across Montana, and from Boston to New York.

And then, one day, on a bi-annual visit back to Squaremont from my new home on the east coast, I laced up my tired running shoes and went for a run. On a lark, I followed some buried memory up a long asphalt hill and around a gentle banking right hand turn, and a muscular memory took over.

My legs turned over and over, and the lactic acid beginning to pool in my calves and quads reminded me I’d been there before. But where? I breathed deeply of eucalyptus and cedar; had to refrain from slowing down to touch the firm paddles of the succulents growing by my feet, although I’d never noticed them before.

I ran my palm through tall laurel bushes as I passed them, relishing the whip and snap of branches against my skin; ground pink and black peppercorns under my feet and regretted not taking more time to smell them as I left them. Soft, unruly groundcover spilled onto the sidewalk from otherwise well manicured yards, and I remembered the wild strawberries that passed for groundcover in my own childhood backyard and stepped gingerly through it, although I had no real way of knowing if there were strawberries in it or not.

Just across the street, the black markings of a wildfire added insult to injury—I could smell the burned onion grass and sage, although the thing had happened months before this particular jog.

I stepped into a deep wide swath of gravel, the chosen material for someone’s new driveway, and my ankles wobbled with the mostly forgotten memory of loose scree in my boots.

My legs took me to the false top of the hill, and I jogged in place there for a moment. I could choose to continue up the hill, or I could make the right-hand turn, downhill, and make it an easy loop back home.

Either way, it didn’t matter. It was all new territory.

Ana Maria Spagna

Breathe

It’s not the inhalation; it’s the exhalation. You can pull oxygen in, but your lungs are already full with the wrong stuff, with all that C02 you haven’t expelled. So you sip air. That’s what the doctors call it, sipping. But that doesn’t come close. Sipping is modest and moderate, shy, wise, sometimes coy, but never desperate. When you can’t breathe, you’re desperate. Coaxing air in through a sick fluttering wheeze and forcing it out in a staccato series of coughs. Then trying again. Not sipping air. Sucking.

I’d come home from fighting a forest fire coughing hard. Nothing new about that; you always come home from fighting a forest fire coughing, everyone does. Once I fought a fire in November, in sub-freezing temperatures, where crews slept packed wall to wall on the floor of the local National Guard Armory—like displaced disaster victims, like contagious napping pre-schoolers—and came home with an annoying phelgmy cough that lasted until March. The TB fire, we called it, for tuberculosis. For years, whenever we ran into the grunts we met there on the line, we said: Remember the TB fire? And we laughed. Coughing, back then, was a laughing matter. Now I coughed from the core of me, an unworldly croak, like an elk cow in search of her calf, and it wasn’t funny.

“Go see a doctor,” Laurie, my partner, told me.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t intend to go. I’d already decided there was little to be done, that I’d make a long expensive trip to the doctor—we lived in a remote corner of the Pacific Northwest and I had lousy health insurance to boot—only to be told to sit tight and wait it out. Take two aspirin. See you in the morning. That’s what I expected. No solution I could imagine seemed workable. No solution seemed worth the cost. Wheezing, at any rate, did not seem the biggest problem the world was facing.

While I was off fighting that fire, airplanes had careened into buildings 3,000 miles away, and the world shifted like continental plates beneath us. At home, too, the rules seemed to have shifted. This was now more than an annoying cough; my body was not recovering, not kicking back into gear. On the fire line we’d been digging in a frenzy miles from the fire itself, on a dusty dry grass hillside, overturning sod. When I stepped off the line to pee, from twenty feet away, I couldn’t see the rest of the crew, but since it wasn’t smoke but dust that was the problem I didn’t tie my bandanna around my mouth and nose. No one else was doing it. Still, when visibility drops below twenty feet, you ought to take that as a warning. Right then, on the fire line and at home, as in the world, all the important signs were missed. What would come next no one knew.

The average respiration rate for humans is 44 breaths per minute. Multiply that times 1440 minutes per day, and you get 63,360 breaths per day. Or attempted breaths. From where I sat, that seemed like an awful lot of work, an unfathomable struggle. It was best to stay calm, I knew, to conserve energy, not force your muscles to work and drain the blood of oxygen rich cells and make it worse. Not even your heart. Don’t work your heart, I told myself. But how can you stop that? You can’t. By day, I went to work, hauling my pack and tools up the trails I maintained—firefighting was just a part-time money-making deal for trail workers like me—and stopping too often to catch my breath. By night, I sat pillow-propped in bed staring out at the dark, not sleeping, not reading, not dreaming or philosophizing or even complaining. Just sucking air.

“You could die,” Laurie cried, exasperated.

“No one dies of asthma,” I said.

A week later, a doctor stood before me, hands on his hips:

“You could’ve died,” he said.

I looked away.

“I had a twelve year-old patient die of asthma last week. What the hell were you thinking? Way up there in the boonies? With no medical help? In a heartbeat, you could’ve died.”

Asthma affects 300 million people world wide. Every day in the U.S. 40,000 people miss work, 5,000 go to the emergency room, 11 people die. Eleven die! Every day! That means that since 9/11 tens of thousands of Americans have died a horrible can’t-breathe death. If we’re going to bother with war, why not war on asthma? It’d be hard, I admit, in that wearyingly familiar way: Who’s the enemy exactly? Where can we point the bombs? Who the fuck is to blame?

Me, probably. That’s what I thought as I sat in the clinic: this is my fault. Weren’t kids with asthma milky-cheeked and soft palmed? Weren’t they the ones in grade school who had to sit out dodge ball? This I did not want to be. Never show weakness, my trail crew boss always said. By god, I did not intend to. If fire was no good for my lungs—a likely culprit in this whole rotty mess—it wasn’t the only one. From down the hall, I overheard the doctors having fun with my x-rays while I sat half-dressed on the examination table.

“Ever seen this?”

I leaned out to peek past the door at a small crowd of white-coated doctors gathered around the light screen in the central area for a little med school quiz.

“What do you call a lung mass like that?” my doctor asked, tapping the screen.

The doctors leaned forward and struggled with grade school eagerness: Oh I know that one. I know. It’s on the tip of my tongue.

I tensed. Cancer? Please Jesus don’t say cancer.

“Valley fever!”

The doctor returned to me.

“Where did you grow up?” he asked.

In Southern California. In the 1970s. When we were kids, the air quality gauge would drop below unhealthy and we’d get smog days the way Northerners got snow days.

Smog, then.

Except that Valley Fever isn’t caused by smog, but by a fungus spore in the earth that, once soil is disturbed, rides the Southwest wind. More prevalent in inland places like Phoenix or Fresno, the spore can make it as far west as Riverside, apparently, but no further. Not Los Angeles. Not even Pasadena. The sea air, the doctor explained, dilutes the dust, disarms it. And it didn’t matter any way. The valley fever damage was done years ago, only the scarring remained, he said. Now the problem was asthma. Plain and simple.

But what had caused it? Was it dust or smoke or smog? Was it the cigarettes my parents smoked when I was a kid? Or the fires I fought as an adult? Was it our cat, Daisy, who I loved inordinately but to whom I was deathly allergic? Was it congenital weakness or plain dumb luck?

The doctor shrugged and prescribed inhaled steroids. Two puffs a day: morning and night. Two bucks a day. The wheezing, he said, should subside. The coughing should stop cold.

I wrote a check and came home, crumbled newspaper in the woodstove, laid in straight split slices of cedar, crisscrossed, and lit the match. The familiar orange glow reflected off the pine floors of my cabin and the pine board ceiling and the log walls, the flame and the tinder ridiculously close as always. I picked up Daisy and held her in my lap. I went back to work on the dusty trails. And despite it all, within a few days, my lungs were clear. I might as well have started smoking cigarettes.

By the time we’d gone to war with Iraq I’d inhaled steroids every day for two years. So what if it was a habit started with dubious motives, a problem with an uncertain cause, the solution, at least, seemed to be working. That statue of Saddam toppled; my lungs fell into step. I could run even. Run! If it took two dollars a day, that was cheaper than a beer or pot or coffee habit. It was also less than what I personally was paying for the wars in the Middle East.

So I sucked on my inhaler. My huffer, I called it. I used it morning and night. Sure, I tried quitting a few times, but the sick squeeze in my chest, the watery wheeze, the inevitable croaking cough always sent me scurrying back. I knew I should try acupuncture or yoga. I should quit coffee and sugar and alcohol. Instead, I took a fistful of vitamins and exercised fanatically. I avoided stress, living in a gorgeous woodsy place, free of traffic and crime, with no boss, no children. Such low stress I should’ve just keeled over from boredom. Still, I couldn’t breathe without that huffer. With it, I could go running day after day along the dusty dirt road near our home.

When I was a teenager I ran cross country. The air hung brown as the sweat ring on a collar, omnipresent, the same dirty brown as the drought-scarred foothills. But they told us: it’s not what you can see but what you can’t see that causes the trouble. Not the particulates, but the gases. Particulates, particulars, it didn’t matter to us a whit. We ran up Mary Street on the sidewalk, under the freeway, into the orange groves, then back, heading downhill toward school, toward snow-dusted Mt. Baldy on the horizon—big beautiful Baldy—omnipresent, too. Even when you couldn’t see it.

Now there are summer days when you can’t see the high jagged peaks that surround my cabin-home for the smoke. Wildfires burn more often and more acres than ever, and the experts say it’s a good thing they do. From my window, I can see an army of straight-trunked firs. Firs, firs, everywhere—not a single native Ponderosa pine since pines require wildfire to regenerate—grey-trunked firs with dead limbs outstretched inelegantly as if in supplication. Many of them are dying, bug-eaten or disease-infested. Mistletoe hangs in whorls large as haystacks. Witches brooms, they’re called, and even in imagination these would be awfully big witches. The forest is unhealthy. For lack of fire. We suppressed fire for too long, so now we have to let it back in. Fire is good! Fire is good! cry the forest managers. Problem is, for me, for my lungs, fire is bad.

It’s all or nothing. That’s the hell of it, isn’t it? Win the war or bring the troops home. Put the fire out or let it burn. Use the huffer or wheeze yourself to death. Not because of politics or preference, but because that’s reality. We want to live as we always have. We’ll do our damnedest, yes, to parse the problems and do what’s right. To a point. In the end we just want to breathe.

Truth is, in high school, I was a lousy runner. I performed more respectably on the swim team. I joined as a ninth grader who had spent hours splashing, diving, flailing, body surfing, even, in the California summers, but who had never actually learned the technique required to swim competitively. The first time I tried to swim fifty yards, I came up panting, gripping the concrete lip of the pool at the YMCA, incredulous. How could people do this? How on earth did they breathe? By pacing themselves, of course, by pulling the air in and holding it for a long steady stroke, two, three, then expelling it slowly underwater before coming up again. The kids who’d been on swim teams their whole lives did this with ease. I was agog. They did not even seem out of breath at the end of 500 yards let alone 50. Not for the first time in my life, I was wowed by what patience and practice, time and training, could engender. I was humbled. After a year on JV, I moved up to varsity, swimming butterfly of all things, a stroke I’d admired since 1972, since watching Mark Spitz rise orca-like from the green chlorine depths on TV, then submerge, undulating. By the end of my sophomore year I could swim 100 yards butterfly. Not only that. I could swim it faster than I could swim 100 yards crawl.

If you’re patient, you hold your breath and you can survive anything. You can thrive. Maybe it’s not all or nothing. Maybe it’s pacing and practice, trial and error, plenty of error. The air is cleaner now, thirty years later, in Riverside. You can run the wide sidewalk down Mary Street for a mile with a calendar view of Mt. Baldy snow-dusted and brilliant. Even the evil unseen gases, researchers say, have dissipated. They fixed it with laws and science, research and regulation, a shift of behavior. Up here in the woods, there are prescribed fires, set in the shoulder seasons, in spring or fall when the conditions are right, that can mimic the work of wildfires, clearing underbrush, setting pine seeds free, making the forest healthier and less likely to get blackened in a catastrophic burn. In the wider world, there are diplomatic negotiations, tedious and trying, requiring humility and compromise, heartburn and exhaustion on a grand scale, that have brought tenuous peace in Ireland, in the Balkans, maybe someday in the Middle East. I try to be hopeful, I do.

The label on my steroid prescription warns me that it might cause the following: headaches, dry throat, infection, depression. Some of my friends believe that’s not the worst of it, just the tip of the iceberg, what the drug companies are willing to admit.

I called a doctor friend to ask outright: “Is the inhaler going to kill me?”

“Wheezing will kill you faster,” he said.

Maybe, I think. Maybe not. I have no way to know. I only know that I remember those nights awake sucking air—the terror, the desperation—and those memories haunt me.

Another memory. I stand waiting for the gun. One hundred yards butterfly. At take your marks, I’ll bend forward and clutch the slanted platform at my feet. At the gunshot, I’ll arch up then dive shallow and surface in motion. But for now, in the interminable seconds atop the starting block, I’m terrified. Nothing short of that. I’m convinced that I won’t make the full one hundred yards. The sheer physical feat seems impossible—implausible!—even though I’ve done it a thousand times, and I’m certain, absolutely sure, that I’ll flail gasping, and have to call for help in shame. I can conjure that whole scene more easily, much more easily, than I can imagine what will really happen, which is this: I’ll dive then take two strokes head down, one head up. The head-up stroke will take more energy, since I’ll have to pull my torso out of the water. For the first fifty yards it’s not hard, not at all, but as the race goes on, and my lungs burn, I’ll try to breathe too soon, jerking my head up a millisecond before my abs have lifted my shoulders, and I’ll take water into my windpipe. I’ll choke. I choke—actually, literally—every single time I race butterfly in high school. And once I begin to choke, I swim much faster. In the end, that’s the only reason I am worth a damn at all on the team: because I am swimming for my life. Swimming freestyle I am trying hard, but I am sated; it’s too easy, nothing at stake but a plastic trophy and my pride. Swimming butterfly I crave air, and I’ll do anything to get it. Turns out, if you want to win races, that’s a good thing.

Just recently I made some progress. I cut my steroid dose in half. I tried quitting whole hog again with predictably bad results, so I scaled back to mornings only – one buck instead of two – and wheezed some at first, then less over time, until any more there’s only a hint of struggle when I linger too long in bad air: shoveling ashes from the woodstove, say, or jogging behind a school bus on a gravel road or idling in traffic. Laurie is, so far, wary. The doctor advises against it. Me, I want to stick with the experiment not so much because I believe things will get back to how they were—breathing free—but because it feels right. For so long I’ve been trying to tell myself that everything is fine, just fine, that we are, all of us, doing the very best we can, but there is, in me, beneath the salve of the huffer, a hint of uncertainty. There is always, with every inhalation, 63,360 times a day, an edge of panic. I’m thinking that’s a good thing.

Jacqueline Mantz Rodriguez

The Three Little Girls

A Sea of Brassy Day

There was a chlorinated sea once upon a time. A turquoise pool infused with slants of golden sunlight. The strokes of a little girl’s browned flesh flapped against the water, lap after lap; a foamy background to the day. Her curly head moved to the left to breathe, to the right to breathe, and to the left again, like some nursery rhyme yet unwritten. Another little girl almost a mirror replica of the first one except a little chubbier, lay buried in bubbles, battling in the Jacuzzi against dragons of steam. The little girl’s toes sworded through the water as she held onto the edge of the pool floating on her back. The third little girl, the youngest, floated across that same water making animals from clouds in a bubble above her head. Her long dark hair fanned out, an ode to Ophelia in her watery grave.

Their father, dear father, sizzled thick steaks on the grill, a cigarette in one hand a spatula in the other, smoke filling the air. The florescent yellow potato salad and  rolls sat quietly on the scarred picnic table, paper plates and the plastic tub of  margarine keeping them company. The three little girls, for some reason, at the same moment, all took a deep breath and inhaled Kool menthol cigarettes mixed with charred flesh, a deeply satisfying dysfunctional potion.

Just then their mother, dear mother suddenly appeared in a Chinese red smock soiled with bits of greasy foo young and shrimp. Her eyes tabulated magically, with one look, the empty Budweiser cans. The mother frowned then her eyes moved to the three little girls. Ordering them out of their sea of fun; to lie one after the other on blue and white faded striped bath towels; lying, drying baking. Three little girls with waiting tummies growling for rib eyes steaks and mustardy onion infested potato salad that even now they taste and savor.

Once upon a time this azul rectangular sea would hold the middle girl, the chubby twin, during the day and soothe her at night. Just knowing it lay outside her window gave the little girl; all the three little girls most likely, courage to face the dawning night. This simple body of water gave the girls the strength to survive the nights of shadows making puppet monsters on the ceiling and closet door, nights reeking of rising words in a Holly Hobby oven of hate.

The three little girls never knew when their slumber would be transformed into dense forests of fear, when their father, dear father, would wander away from home into bars. Then, only then, would those three little girls be thrown into a nightmare of hiding on the roof or running underneath tears of stars. Sometimes, more than once, they would flee to the park, but a block away… Yet this land could not be the same as the one they lived in during the day; it could not be. They were somewhere else, a Nightmare Never Neverland. The girls would stay in the pool in the glittering day as long as they could. Under the covers in the darkening night they would try to do the same; trying to remember the pool was out there. Trying to remember, that tomorrow no matter what happened, they would all be there in the land of turquoise sea, in the sun, alive and well.  

Dawning Night

 John Wayne’s last film The Shootist was on the television. The three little girls played Monopoly in the living room as their dear father watched television smoking cigarette after cigarette as “The Duke” played a dying man with cancer. If the three little girls could time travel they would see their father ironically playing that same story out in thirty years, wheezing out his last breath, the dark magician of death waving the wand of pancreatic cancer to seal their father’s fate, two months after diagnosis. Maybe, if the wife had access to this crystal ball she would have been kinder, more loving and less sharp with words to her dear husband. Maybe if the mother would have gazed back into that crystal ball she might have seen the damage she would cause the three little girls with her fits of chaotic rage.

nbsp; Maybe is a hideous word, ugly in its hope. There were no maybes as the night dawned dark and heavy with tension curtaining the house with every throw of the dice. The twins fought over a move in the game. The older twin cheated, the younger twin threw the board. The youngest sat there calmly as the two bickered, made up, and the game resumed. It was Saturday night and cleaning time for their dear mother. She washed clothes, picked up the mess left by cyclones of childhood, and cussed the entire time. The three little girls paid it no mind, they knew danger, but it had not yet appeared. The father’s show ended. Now it was night. Darkness settled over the land as did the flight in the father’s soul.

“I’ll be right back girls,” the father slurred, “I need cigarettes and more Budweiser. I’ll bring you each back a present. I shall get you a Payday, you a Big Hunk and you a Twix.” He patted each girl’s head as he walked slowly out the door.

“Daddy hurry home ok,” said the youngest. The father walked out into the night. The night filled with plenty of maybes. Maybe I’ll just stop for one drink at The Palomino, one game of pool. The mother heard the blue Ford pick up truck’s engine as she moved the clothes into the dryer. She walked into the house with a plastic basket filled with clothes.

“Stop playing that game. Help me fold these clothes,” the mom ordered. The girls silently began folding the clothes their sibling bickering done. They were one now. A climate of fear pervaded the house.

“Where did your dad go,” the mother asked. She was already different, the metamorphosis had begun.  

“He went to go get beer and cigarettes,” the eldest answered, “and he will be right back, he said so.” There was no answer from the mom. The minutes ticked by each longer than the last. Five minutes turned into ten minutes, ten minutes to eleven, to twelve, to thirty. The Monopoly game was put away as were the clothes. The three girls took their baths. Still the father did not reappear. Thirty minutes became an hour. The hand of the clock shoved and pushed the mom’s rage higher, now cuss words were dangerous blows. They fled from them, from the TV, into the middle twin’s room as it was the furthest away from their once dear mother who changed, with warning even, into the darkest of witches. One whose wild curly hair and words made them cringe. They sat in the middle girl’s room and looked at the pool reflecting on the day.

“We had so much fun today. We should go to sleep,” the eldest girl said. The words made sense logically but words of logic did not rule this dark land. 

“I want to look at the pool,” said the youngest, I don’t want to go to sleep. We might have to get up.” They sat on the bed quietly, the door closed against the spells of rage and the curses against them and their dear father…Then, the roar of the witch’s car. How long did they have? How many minutes would it take the witch to drive from their home to the bar and back? What if he was at a different bar? How long to the next bar? Experts they were at grabbing blankets, pillows and jackets. Out into the night they went hoping no one would see their shame. What fairytale law had they broken to take away their kingdom and transport them to this one? Their footsteps were almost silent. They knew way to the park. They knew their way back it was only over the corner to the right. The park was their night fortress. The park was their mother now that the witch had taken oven their dear mother’s form.

They made it in five minutes, and lay inside the stinky pee king of cheese. They lay together, feet in sneakers, with their pajama bottoms poking out of their jackets. The twins had Wonder Woman pajamas on. They loved The Justice League. The youngest girl’s Snow White long nightgown shone in the moonlight. A long time they slept, awakened by the calls of the witch out the car screaming for them.

“Not yet, he’s not home yet. I can tell by the sound of her voice,” whispered the youngest. The three little girls fell back into a non-deep sleep for what seemed like days, the longest of nights. The middle girl, the chubby twin, dreamt of the sea outside her window. In her dream she and her sisters swam in slants of golden sunlight surrounded by the azul waves created by the strokes of their arms in unison stroke after stroke.

The Darkest Night Fled Suddenly As Did The Witch.

“Girls come home. Girls come home. Girls come home,” called a voice. The dear mother returned with the retrieval of the drunken father found finally in the bar of The Palomino

“Come get him. He was fast asleep on the toilet, good thing I clean the restrooms before locking up.” The owner had called the house at 2 am just when the witch was throwing out all of the father’s clothes on the front lawn.

“Girls come home. Girls come home…” No more words best left to the devil. The three little girls were no longer hated. They were loved and even though it was night they could once again feel the sun’s rays upon them. They came willingly into the car. They walked like puppets, strings pulled by the mother’s fingers; into the house where on the table lay a Payday, a Big Hunk and a Twix.  

liz gonzález

Sparkling

Tonight, at the ten-kegger, Antonio is mine. I don’t know how I’m going to make it happen, but I’m finally going to be with him. And by the big Halloween party in a few weeks, we’ll be a couple. I just know it.

Antonio Gutierrrrrrez is a super-foxy guy with copper-flecked, wavy Breck-girl hair and hazel eyes rimmed by long lashes. I daydream a lot about those lashes brushing my neck. He lives in San Berdoo, the next city over, in the Westside, an old barrio, where teenage boys are either Mama-whooped pew warmers, choloed out gun-slingers, slur-tongued porcupine-arm junkies, or enlightened militant or mellow Chicanos. Antonio is a mellow Chicano who likes to read Ché, Malcolm X, Neruda, and Chicano poetry and listen to Hendrix. Coolest of all is that he calls me Raquel instead of Rachel. I wish I had the guts to tell him, “Move over rover, let Raquel take over. Let me stand next your fire.”

Ever since I met Antonio at a party two months ago, I’ve had a crush on him. I only get to talk to him at parties on the weekends, but I know he’s the one for me. Whenever I see him or think about him, the slow wah wah guitar in Bloodstone’s “Natural High” starts playing in my head and my guts twirl like a pinwheel.

Why do I feel this way
thinking about you every day?
And I don’t even know you

* * *

Chris pulls up to the front of my place and honks the horn. Lucky Chris. She turned 16 last January, so she already has a driver’s license. Her older brother is letting her drive one of the beat up cars he bought to fix up and sell, a primered ‘70 Cougar.

I shake my hips and stick out my chichis as I strut down the front walk to her car. The unusually hot weather is perfect for my outfit: a brown spaghetti strap dress with a turquoise and teal geometric print. Except, I had to wear my two-inch chocolate platform sandals instead of my cuter four-inch Carmen Miranda wedgies because Antonio isn’t much taller than me.

“Antonio’s gonna fall in love for sure!” Chris’s Southern drawl is just as thick as it was a year ago, when she first moved to town.

Sliding into the passenger bucket seat, I purr like Eartha Kitt, “He won’t be able to resist me.” I flutter my eyelashes, coated with five coats of navy blue mascara to make my ebony eyes stand out.

“Too bad Minerva can’t see us all purday,” Chris says, checking her make-up in the visor mirror as she pulls away from the curb.

“She’ll see us after the party. We’ll be wilted, but we’ll still look pretty.”

Although Minerva is the one who got her brothers to take us to these parties all summer long, once school started, she got all about the books and getting a high score on her SAT’s. Boring.

“It’s sad that Minerva doesn’t go out with us anymore,” Chris says. “I miss us three Mousesketeers.”

“I don’t want to sound mean, but I’m glad Minerva isn’t going. She’d bring us down with her feminist talk, saying that we don’t have to doll up like Barbie to get a guy. And I’m tired of her geek lectures about how partying is a waste of time. What a hypocrite.”

“Oh my, I didn’t realize you were mad at her.”

“Just shut-up Chris.” I squint my eyes at her, letting her know that I’m not mad, but she’ll get me there. “Crank up KCAL. I need some rock.”

“I love that we bicker like sisters.” Chris says, turning on the radio.

“Ramblin’ Man!” We both scream and start singing with the Allman Brothers band.

Chris and I have everything planned out. Since it’s Sunday and we’re not allowed to go out on a school night, we told our Mamas that we need to stay the night at Minerva’s to get help with a big algebra test tomorrow. It’s not a whole lie. We do need help, and we are going to Minerva’s: after the party.

Mama doesn’t care anyway. She took my baby sister Nat the Brat to stay at Grandma and Grandpa’s, so “she won’t be home alone.” Mama usually spends Saturday and Sunday evenings with her boyfriend Tom, dubbed Too-Good-Tom by Nat and me, and comes home real late, but tonight she’s going to stay over at his house. She thinks I don’t know, but I saw her put her overnight bag in a grocery bag and sneak it in the trunk of her car before she left.

Mama met Too-Good-Tom at Sears five months ago when he went up to her at the customer convenience counter to ask for directions to the bathroom. Romantic. It’s bad enough that my mother has a boyfriend, but he’s a jerk. Nat and I only met him once: the first and last time he picked up Mama for a date. He barely smiled when Mama introduced us, like we annoyed him or something. Mama thinks he looks like Lloyd Bridges in the reruns of Sea Hunt, which gets her all creamy. To me and Nat, he’s pale, skinny, and snooty. His nose is even turned up. We think he hates kids. But we do like having the house to ourselves on weekend nights.

Chris parks across the street from the party. She turns off the car and checks her watch. “5:45. Right on time.”

We planned to get here after the party started, when some people have already arrived so we’re not the first ones, but early enough to find parking. The street is steep and unpaved, and we didn’t want to hike in our heels.

The party is at a small ranch in Devore that belongs to the family of the Salazar boys: seven brothers and cousins who are in their twenties and popular in this party scene. After we pay the $5 cover at the gate to the backyard, we head across the dirt yard, straight for the kegs.

“We should have worn our overalls and farmin’ boots,” Chris says, looking down at the dust on her shoes. “I’m sweatin’ like a pig ‘n heat as it is.”

“I thought it would be fancy, like Bonanza, but this place looks like it’s been here since the 1800s,” I say, looking around the rustic and rusted ranchito. A rain and sun warped wooden fence, high enough that I’d need a stepstool to see over it, surrounds the yard. Red, fuchsia, and orange bougainvillea that looks like it’s never been trimmed is exploding from different sections of the fence. On one side of the yard, two goats and a kid stand beside each other in their pen, oblivious to the people, chewing on a pile of dry grass. At the other end, a patch of corn stalks, tomatoes, and other vegetables swollen and ready to pick are fenced off with chicken wire and wooden stakes. Cactus, the kind Grandma uses to make nopal scrambled eggs and nopal salad, fans out fat and tall against the back fence. The band is set up in front of the cactus and they start jamming Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “Mighty, Mighty.”

Standing in the beer line, Chris and I dance to the beat, singing, “In our heart lies all the answers to the truth you can’t run from.” About 30 people are here, standing in line and clustered in little groups around the yard, drinking and getting high. We scope out the crowd for Antonio and Elias, Chris’s crush, or anyone else we know. Nobody. Not even Minerva’s brothers, who always come early to help set-up. Most everyone in this party scene is from San Berdoo and Colton, in high school or older, Chicano and Chicana. Some are white or black. Not many are from our town although it’s just fifteen minutes away. I guess they’re just not as cool as us.

The sun baking the ground makes the hay and animal stink rise from the dirt. Good thing the guys in front of us in the beer line light up: automatic incense.

I spot Antonio walking in with his buddies. He’s got on my favorite outfit: a white v-neck t under an unbuttoned blue and green plaid western shirt with the sleeves folded up to his elbows, showing his tanned push-up-muscle forearms, brown Levi cords, and brand-new wallabies. Bloodstone starts crooning in my ears and my stomach somersaults so fast I can’t breathe.
“You’re wearing matching colors, just like an old couple,” Chris teases. “But I don’t get why he’s wearing cords. His you-know-whats must be melting. Y’all won’t be able to have babies.”

“Get your mind out of his pants,” I push my side into hers. “He came prepared for the cold after it gets dark.”

Just then, the band finishes the song, and Chris and I clap and howl. Charles Montero, the lead singer and guitarist, is a good friend of Minerva’s brothers, so he’s become our friend, too. I love Charles’ band. They have horn and percussion sections and sound as good, sometimes better, than the bands they cover. The musicians are brown, black, Chinese, and white, so they named their band “Colours of Funk.” Terry, the sax player with a beach ball sized afro, picks up his flute and starts playing Tower of Power’s “Sparkling in the Sand.” Charles winks at me and announces, “This one is for Rachel.” I give him my big Bozo smile and mouth thank you.

“Ask Antonio to dance with you.” Chris nudges me with her elbow. A bunch of people walk into the party, and she straightens up and poses like a Seventeen model, scanning the crowd for Elias. She’s too dressed up for him, in a silver-blue satin halter-dress and four-inch matching suede wedgies that she bought with money her grandma in Mississippi sent her, money she’s supposed to put in her college savings account.

“But he hasn’t even noticed me, yet,” I whisper so the people around us can’t hear. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Antonio and his friends stop by a eucalyptus tree across the yard and light up.

“Tell him you have to dance because the song was dedicated to you.”

We reach the front of the line and each hand two bucks to the scruffy faced biker guy serving the beer. He pours cold Coors from a pitcher into two large waxed paper cups.

“Why do y’all put a slice of white bread in the pitcher?” Chris asks, using her slow, sweet drawl.

He gives her the funny look that everyone makes the first time they hear her southern accent. Then his face turns into a growl. “It keeps the froth down.”

We step aside, and Chris talks loud enough for him to hear. “It’s bad enough this beer looks and smells like piss; I have to taste wonder-why-it-doesn’t-kill-you-bread, too?”

“Mellow out,” I whisper without moving my lips, smiling at the biker guy. “You sound like Minerva.”

Antonio sees me and waves. His eyes squint the cute way they do when he smiles. I wave back, all excited, trying not to drop my purse and beer.

“Okay, I’m going to do it.” I turn my back to Antonio, chug my beer, grab Chris’s cup, chug it, and hand her my purse and the empty cups. “How’s my lipstick?”

Chris dabs the corners of my mouth with her fingertips. “Fine. Now get!” She gently smacks my butt.

I don’t know if it’s the beer or the way Antonio watches me cross the uneven dirt yard or that I’m scared he might turn me down and scared he might accept, but my platforms get heavy and wobbly with each step I take, and my head is ready to flap away, like a startled crow. I hope I don’t trip on a rock and fall and give a show of my panties to everyone.

“Hey, Rrrraquel.” He hands me a roach on the end of a feather clip.

I love the way he says my name. It’s all I can do to keep my stomach from shooting out of my belly. “No, thanks.” I take a deep breath. “Would you like to dance?”

“Sure,” he says. Just like that. So easy. He hands his beer and the roach to one of his buddies, takes my hand, and walks me past the two couples on the dirt dance floor, to the front of the band.

Lucky for me, the song is long, with flute and trumpet solos, and is still playing. Charles winks at me. I wink back and smile big because I finally have my man. Antonio twines his arms around my waist, and I wrap my arms around his neck, as though we slow dance all the time. I lay my head on his shoulder and inhale deep, finding comfort in the scents of pot and detergent in his Mama-washed clothes. His chest is hard against mine. Hermano works out. I wish I could check my pits. I get bad b.o. when I’m hot and nervous.

“You look really good in that dress.” His breath tickles my ear. “Did you go to a fancy party or something?”

I’m dressed up for you, I want to say. “Chris and I were at her aunt’s birthday dinner close by, so we stopped by to check out the band.” I manage to get the words out smoothly, like Chris and I had rehearsed on our way to the party.

“That guy your boyfriend?” Antonio points his chin toward Charles. His voice sharpens. “That why he dedicated a song to you?”

“You sound jealous. I like it.” I can’t believe I said that. My face feels hot. I hope it’s not turning red. I explain that Charles is a friend. “And he dedicated the song to me because he knows I love Tower of Power.”

“Okay then.” Antonio pulls me closer. We slowly rock back and forth, like a baby’s cradle. Charles sings the final, “You’re a diamond sparkling in the sand,” and the music stops. But Antonio doesn’t let me go.

“Want to see what the next song is?” He looks directly in my eyes.

I must have a beer buzz because I feel calm and can hold eye contact. “Sure.”

The keyboard player starts playing Chicago’s “Colour My World.” Antonio and I hug tight. I shut my eyes and thank Our Lady of Guadalupe for such a slow song.

“I’m glad you’re not dating that guy, or I’d have to kick his ass,” he chuckles.

“You’re kidding, right?” My stupid voice is high pitched and girly.

“About kicking his ass. But I’m glad you’re single. You are single, right?”

“Yeah,” I say, trying to sound cool, like I’m not about to break out singing: “And I’ll take to the sky on a natural high.”

“Because I’ve been wanting to ask you out for a while.” He gently lifts my chin with his fingertips; his lips are less than an inch from mine. His beer-pot breath wafts up my nose, like a love potion. “What do you think about that?”

“I like it.”

Our lips squish together and we start making out. Hermano knows what he’s doing. He doesn’t swab my teeth and the inside of my cheeks, like Arthur Cantu, my first kiss, or shove his tongue down my throat and smash his teeth into my lips, tearing my skin, like Johnny Montoya, my second kiss. Antonio’s kiss is smooth as tripe in a fresh bowl of menudo.

We turn round and round, like a 33 on the record player, through two more long slow songs, our mouths connected suction cups. I’m glad the Santa Anas aren’t blowing and bothering my allergies, clogging my nose.

The sun is almost finished slipping out of the sky when the band starts jamming Led Zepplin’s, “Heartbreaker.” Some spastic guy bumps into us and jabs us loose with his elbow. I feel like I just woke up, and it’s gotten cold. The backyard is packed now. We decide to get another beer and head for the line, where I find Chris looking like she’s ready to cry.

“He’s with O-livia.” Chris shakes her head. “She’s so pretty!”

Olivia is one of the prettiest white girls that come to these parties. She looks like a real Seventeen model with waist length yellow hair and seafoam green eyes.

“I’ll get the beers,” Antonio says and moves up with the line.

The next thing I know, Chris lurches her head forward and splashes a gallon of throw up onto the ground in front of us. I can’t help myself and look. It’s a mess of chunks of food they’re serving here—salad, refried beans, and barbecued goat—doused with some pink-orange liquid that smells like rotting oranges.

“Eeew,” the crowd cries and steps back.

Antonio rushes over with a hand full of napkins. “Is she alright?”

“I better take her home.” I wrap my arm in hers. “Will you help me take her to the car?”

He puts his arm in her free arm and we walk Chris out of the party.

“How’d you get so sick?” I ask.

“Tommy brought in a big bottle of tequila sunrise. When I saw Elias and Olivia walking in holding hands, I grabbed the bottle and chugged it all.”

We pass Patsy Rodriguez and her rough-edged girls, paying to get in at the gate. Patsy hollers, “Bitch!”

Patsy, or Queen Kong as everyone calls her behind her back, is diesel truck wide, skyscraper high, and angry. For no reason, she’ll decide she doesn’t like a pretty girl at a party and will drag the girl by her hair to the street and slam her head on the asphalt. Irene, the chola who was after me last year at school, is like a baby duck compared to Patsy. Even guys won’t mess with her. About a month ago, Patsy decided that she doesn’t like Chris. So far we’ve been able to ditch her.

“Get me out of here.” Chris swallows hard to keep from throwing up. The three of us pick up speed and are almost running.

Patsy yells behind us, “You better leave. I’ll tear your ass up!” Her girls laugh that we-can-snap-you-in-half laugh.

“She won’t jump you. Your vomit is a weapon,” I joke, but goose bumps are shooting up all over my body.

Chris splashes another gallon of throw up in the gutter beside the Cougar. Good thing her brother hasn’t painted it yet. I open the passenger door and Antonio helps her in.

“I can’t be in a moving car right now.” Chris gasps. “Let me sleep a while.”

“Are you sure?” I wipe her mouth with a tissue from my purse. I don’t know what to do. She’s never gotten sick before, let alone at a party.

“Yes, and get out of my face. Your beer breath makes me want to puke.”

We give her a large Jack in the Box cup Antonio found in the bushes to throw up in. She takes a whiff, says she likes the cola smell, and closes the car door.

I don’t feel comfortable leaving Chris alone in the car, so Antonio goes back inside to get us some beers and the keys to his buddy’s cherry sky blue ‘68 Camaro SS parked across the street from the Cougar. We’re going to sit inside until Chris is ready to go. A hot car and my man: my dreams have come true.

Now that it’s almost dark, the air is giving me a chill, so I get my jacket out of the trunk and put it on. Then, I start thinking too much and get nervous. I’ve never been alone with a guy before. Arthur kissed me in the Convention Center lobby during a dance. And Johnny surprised me. He grabbed me at the Swing Auditorium while I was rocking out to Robin Trower playing “Too Rolling Stoned.” Those kisses ended fast, and then I shined on the guys.

What if I burp in Antonio’s mouth or fart on accident? What if he thinks I want to do it and gets nasty? I’m ready to get in the Cougar and take off when Antonio comes walking up the street, holding a beer in each hand. My stomach starts twirling, and I can’t wait to kiss him again.

“Sorry it took so long,” Antonio says.

“No problem. Can I have one?” I reach out and he hands me a cup. I take a big chug.

“Hey, save some for later.”

“I’m so thirsty,” I say and take another big chug.

We check on Chris through the passenger window and laugh. She’s passed out with her mouth open wide, snoring.

After pushing in the Isley Brothers eight-track and adjusting the volume, Antonio climbs between the bucket front seats and slides across the tuck and roll leather backseat, into my arms. I’m feeling woozy and warm and take off my jacket. My stomach must be happy, too, because it stays still. Ronald Isley croons “I wanna be living for the love of you,” and we tangle together like weeds in an open field on a spring day. Antonio rubs his hands up and down my sides, on the outside of my dress. I’m ready to push him away if his hands get too close to my chichis or butt, or if they try to slip under my dress, but they don’t. Nice. I can trust him not to go too far. He wraps my legs around him, and we rub our crotches together, hard. I’m out of breath. I’m sparkling from the inside out. The inside of the car is sparkling, even the music. Antonio pulls my hair back and sucks a chain of hickeys around my neck. It hurts bad, but I clench my fists and take the pain because I want his mark, happy that I’m his girlfriend now.

It’s 11:46 when I pull the Cougar up to the front of Minerva’s house, and I hope she’s still up. Chris turns her face from the opened passenger window and says she feels better. She takes a swig of the mouthwash we keep in the glove compartment in case the cops stop us, spits it out in the gutter, and sips the last of ginger ale I stopped and bought her. Carrying our backpacks heavy with our books and clothes, we tap on Minerva’s bedroom door on the side of the house. I’m shivering it’s so cold now.

Minerva’s wearing her favorite old flannel shirt opened over an extra large t-shirt from her dad’s business. “AzTech Electric Company: Serving So Cali since 1965” is printed across the front in big black letters. Her hair is especially wild tonight, like when the Santa Anas gush through it.

“You guys are late.” She snaps, turns her back to us, and walks to her desk. Pages of notebook paper filled with algebra symbols are scattered on her desktop. Minerva is in calculus. If it weren’t for her, Chris and I wouldn’t be passing Algebra II. “What the fuck happened to you two? You said you’d be here by ten?”

“Sorry,” we both say and mumble.

“You stink like mouthwash and throw-up Chris,” Minerva shakes her head at us. “Man, I’m only awake because I was worried about you.” She picks up two packets of stapled notebook paper.

“Here’s your study sheet for your test. A lot of good it’ll do you now.”

“Sorry, we just…” I say, but Minerva cuts me off.

“Spare me the lies. I’m not your mom.” Minerva goes to her desk and starts picking up.

I haven’t been here since that night before school started and she announced that she was giving up partying to focus on her future. Her room looks the same. The Janis Joplin posters are still tacked on every wall. The purple glass bong I got her at the swap meet is still on her night stand. It’s filled with fresh white and peach roses from her garden, and an orange-haired troll is stuck on the bowl. The macramé roach clips she made dangle from her curtain. She wears them as hair decorations, now. Minerva doesn’t throw anything away. That’s the hippie recycler in her.

I flop into the purple bean bag loveseat beside her record player, where a Lola Beltran album is spinning. Minerva thinks that listening to her mom’s old records brings her spirit back. Last summer, whenever “Cucurrucucú Paloma” played, Minerva and I would jump up and sing loud and act dramatic, like we were nightclub singers in a Mexican movie. Minerva said her mother would love our show. Too bad those days are over.

“Vampires at the party?” Minerva gets up to take a closer look at my neck.

“I didn’t see those before. They must hurt.” Chris flinches.

They both lean over me and inspect my neck like doctors. I get up, pushing them out of the way, and step in front of Minerva’s full length mirror on the back of her door. My neck has a chain of purple robin-egg-sized hickeys. That’s why it felt so sore.

They both walk over and stand on either side of me.

“You didn’t do it did you?” Minerva talks to my reflection.

“No. She wouldn’t,” Chris says to Minerva’s reflection, and then she gawks at my reflection.

“Would you?”

“I’m not a slut.” I turn and say it to Chris’s face.

Minerva reaches out to touch my neck. I smack her hand away and head to her bunk bed.

“Who did that to you?” Minerva scolds.

“Damn. You sound like a mother now.” I sit on the bottom bunk bed, ignoring their stares, and change into my t-shirt and boxers. “Antonio. And no, I…we didn’t do anything. He’s a perfect gentleman. You should have seen how good he took care of Chris.”

“I hate to tell you,” Chris says, “but gentlemen don’t give hickeys.”

“You’re just jealous because Elias likes Olivia instead of you.”

“You’re a bitch.” Chris stomps into the bathroom and slams the door behind her.

Minerva raises her arms. “Shshshsh! You’ll wake up my dad.” Then, she sits beside me and softens her voice. “Chris is right. Dudes don’t give girls they respect hickeys.”

“Dudes? What are you? Dirty Harry?”

“Rachel…”

“I thought that with all your feminist bullshit you’d be cool about it.”

“I’m trying to protect you. I hear what my brothers and their friends say about girls.”

“Well, I don’t need your protection.” I climb up to the top bunk and pull the sheet over my head.

Chris opens the bathroom door. “Rachel, tell me you’re sorry.”

“Let her sleep,” Minerva says. “Maybe it’ll bring some sense in her head.”

The next morning, I leave before they wake up and take the city bus to school. No way I’m letting them ruin my happiness.

The whole day, I proudly parade my octopus-bruise necklace down the halls of my high school, telling anyone who asks that they’re from my boyfriend Antonio.

Later that evening, I come to the table wearing my only turtleneck: an itchy wool sweater that Mama got me for trips to the snow. I hope I can pull it off, but it’s still hot inside and Mama’s baking pigs in a blanket in the oven.

“We’re not at the north pole.” Nat-the-brat rolls her eyes at me from across the table.

Luckily, Mama doesn’t hear her. She’s got the fan on over the stove and is busy stirring her green beans and onion dish in a pan with a spatula in one hand and sipping from her glass of generic 7-Up and cheap wine cocktail in the other.

“That barrette is cute,” I say, hoping to shut her up. “Did you get it at Kmart?”

“Mama, please tell her to change.” Nat shouts and fans herself with her paper napkin. “I’m getting hot just looking at her.”

“I have a sore throat,” I say and cough, “and Grandma always says to avoid getting a chill.”

Suddenly, without saying a word, Mama sets down the spatula and her glass on the kitchen counter and walks toward me, glaring at me. I usually tease her about how she looks like a Mexican-housewife-super hero in the big blue Mexican muumuu she changes into after work, with her hairspray-plastered “Wonder-Woman” do, cinnamon support hose thick as tights, and black ballet style slippers. But tonight I just sit quietly in my chair, watching her, my blood pumping so hard my veins feel like they’re going to burst.

When she reaches me, she yanks the fabric back from my neck, and shrieks. Next thing I know, she’s pulling me by the ear up the stairs.

“You’re hurting me.” I try to peel her fingers off my ear, and she digs her nails into my skin, so I let go.

Mama shoves me inside my bedroom and runs to the nightstand and unplugs the handset to the Princess phone she gave me for my last birthday. She waves it in my face.

“What the hell have you been doing?”

“Nothing, Mama. I promise.” My teeth are chattering I’m so scared.

Nat is standing in the doorway, her eyes and mouth opened wide, like when she watches a scary movie.

“Go eat your dinner.” Mama slams the door in her face. She turns to me, points the handset at my neck like it’s a knife, and pushes me against the wall. Her eyes are red and spit bubbles in the corners of her mouth.

“It was an accident. It’ll never happen again.”

She puts her face so close to mine that I can smell the wine going sour on her breath. “You’re damn right it’ll never happen again. You’re on restriction for a month.” She unplugs my box record player, puts it under her arm, stuffs the handset in her armpit, and heads for the door.

I remember that Antonio and I planned to meet at the Fleetwood Mac concert next Saturday. I’ll die if I can’t go. “But Mama.” I swallow to stop from sounding whiney. “I already paid $4.75 for that ticket. You said I could go. Remember?” Then I come up with a lie, fast. “I’m writing an essay on it for my English class.”

“You should have thought of that before you let a boy ring your neck like a chicken.” She slams the door behind her so hard the walls rattle.

* * *

Are you talking to me? I write on notebook paper. Mr. Martin, our cool, blonde surfer-dude science teacher has his back to the class as he goes over the periodic table. I fold the note into a triangle and pass it to Chris, sitting in the desk beside me. We haven’t spoken to each other since the other night at Minerva’s.

Moments later, Chris hands the triangle to me under the desk. Are you sorry for what you said?

I nod yes.

When the bell rings we leave class together.

“Your mom called my house last night. She and my mom talked for an hour.” Chris sighs as we walk toward the PE building. “I’m grounded until after Halloween.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, “for what I said about Elias and for getting you into trouble.”

“It’s okay.” Chris hangs her head. “You’re lucky your dad isn’t around.”

“I can’t believe you said that.” My family hasn’t heard from my father since last Christmas when he called to tell us he was living in Missouri. Mama has to work overtime because he still hasn’t sent her money for us girls.

“I didn’t mean it that way.” Chris rubs my back. “You know how ornery my dad is. He’s talking about sending me to live with my grandma in Mississippi until I graduate. She’s ornerier than him, real strict, and particular.”

Minerva passes us without saying hi.

“What’s her problem?” I ask.

“Your mom called her dad, too.”

“So, she can still talk to us at school.”

“I think she’s sick of us, Rachel.”

“Forget about her. She’ll get over it.” I wave my hand in her direction. “Help me figure out how to get a hold of Antonio to tell him I won’t be at the concert.”

“I’m staying out of it. I’m in enough trouble.”

“C’mon, best friends are there for each other.” I put my arm around her and smile my Bozo smile. That always gets her.

“Let things calm down. Your mom’s really upset. She told my mom she’s afraid you’re having sex.”

“Ugh! Why do you all think that?” I stomp off.

Mama’s been driving me to school every morning and having Grandpa pick me up in front of the administration building the minute school lets out and take me to his house. I thought she wanted to make sure I didn’t have fun. I can’t believe it’s to keep me from having sex. My eyes start to blur with tears, but I can’t deal with that now; I have to figure out how to get to Antonio.

After dinner, I’m in my bedroom, sitting in front of my vanity mirror, admiring my hickeys, replaying my night with Antonio in my mind. I hear the phone ring downstairs and crack open my door.

“Hello.” Mama answers it downstairs. “Who’s this?” she says in her angry voice. “Well, Antonio, are you the boy who disgraced my daughter?”

I sprint down the stairs to the kitchen and grab the phone out of Mama’s hand. She shoves me against the wall, and I freeze. Nat jumps up from where she’s lying in front of the TV and runs over to us.

“Go to your room,” Mama yells at her. Mama yanks the phone from my hand and slams it on the receiver. Then, she presses her hands into my chest and pins me to the wall.

“Are you having sex with this boy?” She spits in my face. Her breath smells like sour wine again.

“No. No,” I sob. I want her to believe me, but she glares at me with that disgusted look she gets when she sees women in the mall, showing too much leg or chi chi. Her left eye is twitching, and she’s breathing heavy out of her mouth. I can’t stand her looking at me this way, so I turn my eyes down to her hands.

“Damnit, Rachel. Tell me!” She pushes me harder against the wall.

Then it hits me that I’m fed up with her and everyone else thinking so lowly of me. “Yeah, I’m a big slut.”

She slaps my face hard. This just makes me madder.

“Why don’t you leave Nat and me alone again to go have sex with your stuck up boyfriend?”

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” She grabs my shoulders and shakes me.

I jerk sideways, break free of her, and run toward the front door.

“Come back here.” Mama runs after me.

I glance at Nat, watching us from the top of the stairs, fling open the door, and run outside.
“Rachel. You better get back here.” Mama chases me. “Rachel.”

There aren’t many streetlights on my street. It’s dark and hard to see. I don’t know where I’m going. I just run as fast as I can, until I can’t hear Mama anymore. When I reach Baseline Avenue, I wonder if I should call Antonio from a pay phone at my high school across the street. Then I realize I don’t have my wallet. I don’t have anything but what I’m wearing. Without thinking, I stick my thumb out in the direction of Antonio’s.

A dirty station wagon pulls over. A gray, creepy white man offers me a ride, and I tell him my mom is picking me up. Next, a lady in a flimsy yellow mailman-like jeep pulls over. She looks mid-thirties, about Mama’s age and has plain bobbed hair and librarian glasses. She seems safe.

“Where are you going?” She says in flat tone. No friendly smile.

“To the Westside. Fifth and Pico.”

“I’m going to the train station and can drop you off on the way,” she says without any personality.

I take a quick check of the inside of her jeep. It’s bare except for her purse sitting beside her. There isn’t even a backseat. I decide she’s okay and get in.

We head east down Baseline. I scan the street for Mama’s Charger, ready to duck. The jeep rattles, breaking up the silence. I’m ready for her to ask my name, ask me what I’m doing hitchhiking, but she doesn’t even look my way. So, I keep my eyes on the street, thinking about what I’ll say to Antonio when I get to his house. I don’t even know his address; I only know that he lives on Pico, three blocks north of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. That’s what he told me the night he gave me the hickeys.

The lady drops me off in front of the church and drives off before I can thank her.

The church bells ring nine times as I walk up Pico. The street is dark, empty. Only a thin slice of moon shines from the black sky. It’s cooler now, too. I suddenly remember that this is a rough neighborhood. Cholos and druggies roam here like rats. Goosebumps rise on my bare legs and arms. I wish I were wearing more than tennis, a t-shirt, and jeans.

I stand beneath a flickering streetlamp, in the middle of what I think is Antonio’s block, trying to tell which house is his. That night in the car, he said he liked to sit on his porch beneath the light at night and read. So far, the light is out on every front porch. Headlights turn onto Pico and slowly move toward me. As it gets closer, I can tell that it’s an Impala lowrider. I hope Antonio is inside.

Maureen Foley

Tuesday

Door slams, I’m walking. Loss a kind of insanity. Lee left out a glass of lime juice. Still sitting on the counter by the sink. I can’t wash it.

Last week, my husband Lee squeezed a bowl full of limes from off our tree. Said they were about to rot. Said freeze the juice for future margaritas. Futures. But I left out the juice, overslept, he drove off to New Mexico with no goodbye. 80 percent of catastrophes are weather-related.

But let’s not confuse facts with statistics. Here’s an alternative to the facts:

I drive to Santa Cruz to search for Lee.

I find him smoking out with his college bros.

I confront him with the facts.

He says he loves me.

I say it’s not enough.

He begs to drive home with me.

I throw everything, his bong, writing papers, screenplay drafts, worn-in Levis, avocado green Karmann Ghia, his affair and Queen Charlotta, all of it, I toss them into the Pacific.

I move to Italy and marry a dashing ex-pat jeweler named James.
Or maybe Lee’s in Mexico. Definitely an affair. He took the high road. Who is irrelevant. Or one day he’ll walk into my punk rock club, Elevator, while that night’s band is warming up and we’ll have a scene and call it quits.

I sipped the lime juice right when I woke up. Fizzy. Fermented. I failed miserably. Whatever. Another jet plane, another con trail.

In the Grinder, no one says a word, they all know. Roxy, feisty barista with large Mexican jewelry, foams me up my usual and I’m out of there before I get caught in those endless returns.

Another sip of my latte hold in the only hand I have left after the accident, looking for a place to sit. Outside I can see the ranch where my California pioneer ancestor James Blood was an apricot grower on fertile land here in Carpinteria, California. My grandfather farmed the same land until he died. Along the foothilss, above The Grinder’s sign. Blue silhouettes and stalks of trees. Hey there’s Queen Charlotta. She’s fingering a napkin out front. Sit by her. Best not to be alone at the moment.

Charlotta’s balancing the weekly newspaper, a cup of coffee, a cigarette and lighter in one hand, while she picks a rock out of the bottom of her flip-flop. Four inches of brown roots grown into flyaway dyed blonde. Her crowning scalp, tilting up. Hello girl with the face. Strange.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey Olive, my pumpkin chicken noodle, boss extroidinairre. What’s up?” Queen Charlotta says, English accent lilting.

“It’s my birthday,” I say.

“You look like shit,” she says.

“Thanks. Just found out you’re engaged to Jan,” I say.

“Oh. Insanity, right?” she says.

“Totally. Jan and I go way back. You know we dated in high school?” I say.

“No,” she says.

“A million years ago,” I say.

I stare into dissolving milk foam and look up. She’s wearing a pink cardigan sweater over a tank top, jeans. Pink cardigan. Pink cardigan that I found in the trunk of the Lee’s Ghia two weeks ago, forgot about. Maroon lipstick stain on inside of collar. Wondered whose sweater. Left it there and forgot. Let’s see how this one plays out, just for fun.

“You’ve heard the latest with me, right?” I ask.

“No,” she says.

“Lee’s gone,” I say.

“What do you mean gone,” she says.

“Missing. Got a call from the sheriffs this morning. He never got back from New Mexico. Found a car, no body. Out in the California desert,” I say.

“Shit,” and her face says it all. Even her blush pales. “I mean, you must be totally disturbed–”

“Some prick cop from Needles told me at four this morning. Lee called from a pay phone at one last night, said he’d be back by this morning.” Tears. Easy to get lost in it. “Charlotte. It’s like– they. They. They don’t just disappear. People. They don’t just poof. You know?”

“That’s fucking insane– He– I just talked to him. And. And I dreamt about him last night. Lee. I woke up and–” Staring off into space. She fingers the buttons on her pink sweater. Pink sweater, fucking pink cutsie-tootsy sweater with little fucking pearlite buttons.

“How long have you and he been-” My elbow knocks over my latte. Dive under table to grab fallen cup. Take a last swig as I stand, hurl the cup at Charlotte’s head. She ducks, cup misses, rolls into gutter. I collapse into a chair. “You left that sweater in the trunk. What a fucking–”

“Olive- He was just giving me a ride home from work-” she says.

“Don’t even. No. Don’t. Not today,” I yell.

“He told me you knew. That things were open between you,” she says.

“They were. Are,” I say.

“Is he dead?” she asks.

“Don’t know,” I say.

Hey over there. I know that skinny guy walking up the street. Six years later and nothing changes. Not really. Jan wears huge retro sunglasses pushed back on his head, a button-up white linen shirt, green shark skin slacks. Dark circles under eyes, so skinny its like he’s losing himself behind ribs. Or could be heroin. Skinnier than last time I saw him, even.

Charlotte smiles. “Hey Jan.”

But he ignores her, wraps me into a hug and says, “Hey stranger. So good to see you.”

“You, too.” I close my eyes.

“How are you holding up?” he asks.

I look up at him, on the verge of bawling,“Okay?”

“I want to hear all about it. But, hey, on a happier note I’ve got some news, too. I just got engaged.”

“To who?” We’re staring intensely now.

“Queen Charlotta?”

“Her?” I look over. She’s smiling. Does he know about her and Lee? “How long.” I can’t stand it.

“Together? Just a month. Engaged two days ago,” he says.

“And how long have you been back?” I ask.

“A month,” he says.

“Shit,” I whisper.

And in one breath we lose our shit. Right there. On Linden Ave. Make a scene that gristles through the local rumor mill for weeks. I tear out landscaping. I yell. Jump the fountain. Stop cars. Screams. Charlotte’s crying and Jan is bellowing at her to shut up. And there. That’s me. That’s my girl.

Screaming, eyes closed, I see my amputated arm floating. No, dancing. Salsa moves across the floor with Lee. Missing husband, stolen arm. What’s that one song about being lost and loving it? Birds navigate the earth by reading electric currents.

Open eyes. Insults. Incantations. Apologies. Threats spill out so loudly I dull the sound of Raymond playing mariachi rifts on his trumpet at the barber shop up the street. Flailing body, cursing like a sailor.