Category: Riverside

Shery Dameron

Lupe

     Her name was Guadalupe, Lupe for short. She was born to an eighteen-year-old migrant farm worker thirty-eight years ago. She was a small fragile baby. The smallest of the six charges in my care at the home for handicapped children where I was working my first job out of high school. The room, which was the only home she ever knew, was large and bright, painted in a light yellow with paintings of nursery rhythm characters on the walls. There were five more cribs just like hers and shelves filled with toys for the other children who shared the room. She was always dressed in a little pink tee-shirt and wrapped in bright floral blankets, but her small body hardly filled the corner of her large chrome crib. I remember her eyes the most. They were a soft, fluid, brown, but not dark or deep, just gentle and doe-like, flecked with small spots of gold that seemed to dance. Maybe I remember her eyes so well because her face ended just below them, leaving them her only truly human feature. Below her eyes, there were two open holes where her nose should have been. I can imagine it would have been a small little button nose if it had formed. And where her sweet plump rosebud lips should have been, was a gaping cavern. Her upper lip was split and exposed soft pink gums. Her lower lip was gone completely. Her jawbone had not formed. Nor had her vertebrae that would have been her neck, forcing all the organs of the throat into her chest cavity, and leaving her mute; unable to even cry out in protest to the pain and suffering that was her short life. The devastation of her body went beyond her face. Her little arms and legs were bent and bowed. The doctors had broken them each in three places and she wore a plaster cast on each in an effort to straighten them. Between each of her long thin fingers was a webbing of skin that made her hands look like flippers.

     Each day while she was forming her mother had worked the fields, back breaking work; I can’t even imagine doing while pregnant. And every day she breathed in the toxic fumes of the pesticides that give us our unblemished fruits and vegetables. These pesticides worked their way to her womb, where they could not tell fetus from fungus, embryo from insect. Her mother didn’t get to hold her after she was born, and only got to see her briefly before she was forced to leave her behind, as she was sent back to Mexico two days after giving birth. What did she think when she saw her baby so malformed? All I know is she called for a priest to give last rites, assuming Lupe would not live. Whether or not he came, I do not know.

     Lupe lived three months. On Cinco De Mayo thirty-eight years ago she died. And thirty-eight years later, her eyes still haunt me. They were just beginning to learn to laugh. Each time someone would show her any kindness, a soft rubbing of her little back, a gentle stroking of her hair, her eyes would light up, even though her mouth was silent. Her mother was allowed to come and see her after she died, and she held her for the first time then. She was not however allowed to take her back home to the churchyard where all of her ancestors lay at rest. Lupe was an American citizen, and so she was buried in an unmarked grave in a public cemetery. There was no service, no graveside mourners, but I mourned her passing. All these years later, every time I pick out the best fruits and vegetables at the market, I think of her, and the many others like her, their bodies bent and broken for our food.

Stephanie Barbé Hammer

Round Table

           We four bought it unfinished.  He – the roommate’s boyfriend – showed us  — her, me and my boyfriend — how to sand it down. And then finish it.  There were 2 kinds of – I want to call them emery boards – but what I mean is sandpaper, I guess. It was hard work but fun work, and we couldn’t screw up too bad because we didn’t have to cut anything or shape anything.  Just wear it down.

           The boyfriend was an annoying person. He belonged to her of the big brain and the even bigger breasts that she always smashed into too small bras.   We other two  — me of the B cup and he of the big but humble mind — came to dislike her as well but that came later.  For now it was all sweetness and light and the joy of sharing an apartment amongst surprising trees in SoCal just off the 60.   That’s how I remember it.

           So let’s not get to the irritation yet, lets stay with the sanding. The surprising pleasure of it. Its complexity: how you have to do the legs and the underbelly of the table – all the secret parts of furniture, even the simplest kind.    And the sound like a cough of the sanded wood:  persistent, dry but healthy.  We worked, and the boyfriend supervised.

           Then the surprise: we were going to put on the stain with the brushes and the tin of clear liquid and he said wait.  Let’s put a backgammon board on it. I didn’t like the idea. I wanted the table plain and smooth like we’d planned it and I wanted the lightwoods; always I have loved the look of that.  But he insisted and he was pushy – ok already he is beginning to get on my nerves I can see that – but she of the tiny bra and big breasts beamed at him, and we – I and he, the other much quieter boyfriend – said ok. The pushy boyfriend began to draw the outline of the board. He used magic marker I think – I can’t remember.  But I can see us filling in the points for the pieces – the long triangles and I found the fun again.  And then the finishing.

           We kept that table a long time. She graduated, and the boyfriend — still a drop out — kept promising to marry her.  I soldiered on in school with the quieter boyfriend, who was silently brilliant, and in the end it was us – the doubtful and the soft ones – who got the table, for the others didn’t want it.

           We two sat at that table in a new apartment near bigger trees filled with herons, and we played the game with pieces and we played the game with bodies.  Holding off on the finish.  Sanding ourselves down.

Debbie Graber

That Which Is Inevitable

           Mary Margaret struts towards Ron’s cubicle in a pair of backless high heeled sandals. She read in Self magazine years ago, back when she was still reading Self magazine, that high heels make a person’s legs look longer. Mary Margaret believes that long legs make the right impression on the right people.
           Mary Margaret wears a royal blue embroidered knit top and a matching ruched skirt that purposely rides up her pale thigh. Her hair is colored from a box, a color called Medium Ash Brown/Suede.
          Mary Margaret buys both her Medium Ash Brown/Suede hair color and her clothes from Target. Mary Margaret finds that Target’s clothes are inexpensive, stylish, and just plus-sized enough to fit her. Mary Margaret is on the lean side of the plus-size market. This makes Mary Margaret feel good about herself when she dresses for work in the mornings.
          Earlier, Mary Margaret heard Ron utter “big ‘ole titties” under his breath as she passed by him in the hallway.
          Mary Margaret hears at a higher frequency than most people, higher even than most dogs. Sometimes at night, Mary Margaret hears wailing outside her bedroom window, and holds out hope that a werewolf will steal her away into the brush and make her the queen of his pack.
          Mary Margaret buys all her bras at Target. They are called “Sunset Minimizers.” They are lacey, come in a variety of colors, and are one of the few bras sold at Target that cover most of Mary Margaret’s breasts. Mary Margaret hates to hear her breasts being referred to as “titties.” Employees have titties – Directors have full, voluptuous creamy breasts. Mary Margaret bought a “Sunset Minimizer” black corset with scarlet embroidery and matching boyshorts that she plans to wear to the company Halloween party later. She told anyone who asked that she is dressing up as a sexy witch. Mary Margaret wouldn’t be surprised to find out that she is related to one or to several of the Salem witches. She has powers.
          Mary Margaret uses her superhuman hearing to discern snippets of whispered conversations that her employees think they are having in private.  Strutting towards Ron’s cubicle, she overhears another employee whisper “Mary Margaret is a cocksucker.” Earlier in the week, she heard the words “viper,” and “lazy” while passing by employees who were out on the patio, taking one of their state-mandated fifteen minute breaks.  Mary Margaret is a Director. She is practically everyone’s boss, except for the CEO who is her boss.
          Mary Margaret believes that she is fulfilling her destiny. She believes that she has always been a Director, ever since she came out of the womb, even though her promotion just came through last year.
          Mary Margaret keeps an excel spreadsheet on her computer desktop to keep track of the employee comments she hears. Updating the spreadsheet can take up most of Mary Margaret’s work day, when she isn’t in meetings discussing client pain points, important goals and agenda templates. If Mary Margaret’s spreadsheet indicates that an employee has made a disparaging comment about her more than three times, the employee is called into Mary Margaret’s office and written up for something unrelated.
          Mary Margaret peeks in Ron’s cubicle, which is bare and undecorated. Mary Margaret’s office, by contrast, is decorated in a Zen theme. She had Operations install a fountain with a smiling sun face that she purchased at Target using her company credit card. The sound of the water drowns out the employee voices humming in Mary Margaret’s ears. Ron appears to be working on a software project. He doesn’t look up.
          “Ron, will you please join me in my office for a moment?” Mary Margaret asks. She speaks in a low, affectless tone. Her inflection hardly wavers in any conversation. Mary Margaret struts towards her office. She can sense that Ron is following behind her. Mary Margaret has heightened senses, like those of a clairvoyant.
          Mary Margaret closes her office door once Ron has entered. She situates herself in her chair, and makes sure that her ruched skirt is not riding up so high so that Ron would be able to look up her skirt without trying. If Ron wants to look up her skirt, Mary Margaret would like to see him be proactive about it. If Mary Margaret can prove using an excel spreadsheet and accompanying graphs that fifty percent or more of her employees are showing initiative, she gets an extra thousand dollar bonus.
          “It’s been determined that you have not been taking your state-mandated fifteen minute breaks.” Mary Margaret says, in her low, affectless tone. She doesn’t know or care whether Ron is taking his breaks or not. Mary Margaret uses the state-mandated breaks as an excuse to write up employees who have said shit about her.
          She tries not to abuse the state-mandated break excuse too much, but it is getting more difficult. Mary Margaret is constantly catching her employees savaging her work ethic, managerial style and personal appearance. Mary Margaret has had to get very creative about write-ups. Last week, she wrote up an employee for changing a computer administrator password before the allotted forty-five days had passed.
          Mary Margaret overheard that employee saying to a friend that the only reason Mary Margaret had been promoted was that she let the CEO teabag her repeatedly. That employee was adamant about the teabagging. When Mary Margaret called that employee into her office, she used her special powers to make that employee cry.
          Mary Margaret speaks to Ron in a direct, yet non-threatening way. She crinkles up her face so that she appears warm and concerned and non-threatening.
          While Ron explains that there must be some mix-up, that he always takes his breaks, Mary Margaret’s mind wanders. She thinks about productivity strategies and Role Based Quick Start Guides and System Setup capabilities. She suddenly remembers an old X-Files episode, one of the episodes early on in the run of the show when it seemed that Mulder and Scully might get together until their mutual attraction was thwarted by an alien or by Mulder’s obsessing over his missing sister who was abducted by a UFO. Mary Margaret can’t remember what exactly thwarted Scully and Mulder’s budding love affair in the particular episode she is remembering, only that their love was indeed thwarted.
          When Ron finishes speaking, Mary Margaret modulates her voice to take on a harder edge. It is a conscious shift in tone, and one that Mary Margaret has honed to perfection.
          Mary Margaret can speak extemporaneously about many specific topics, including marketing strategies and communications, disaster recovery protocols, product end of life timelines and added value mapping. This is what she talks about when the CEO teabags her, only in a sexier way. She is a professional.
          Mary Margaret breathes deeply, inching herself into an extremely focused state. She believes that she can, if she concentrates hard enough, slow her breathing down to the rate equivalent to that of an Alaskan brown bear in hibernation. On weekends, Mary Margaret tries to bend spoons using only her mind.
          Mary Margaret notices an emanation enter her office through the air conditioning vent overhead. Only in a state of extreme concentration can she sense the emanation. The emanation is colorless and smells of cotton. Mary Margaret believes that the emanation is something she calls That Which Is Inevitable. Mary Margaret notices it circling around her office like a large but invisible bird, flying lower and lower, until it lands directly on the shoulder of her royal blue knit top and pecks lightly at the embroidery. Mary Margaret has tried on many occasions to commune with That Which Is Inevitable, but it seems to purposely elude communicating with her. Mary Margaret tried to contact That Which Is Inevitable with her Ouija board one weekend, but she ended up contacting someone who spelled out that he was a friend of her great Uncle Pat’s.
          After Ron finishes defending himself, Mary Margaret says, “Ron, in the future, I’ll expect you to follow the company’s published processes and procedures.”
          Mary Margaret employs this sentence for when her employees fail to live up to her expectations. She likes to call the employee by their proper name because it makes her disappointment appear more personal.
          Mary Margaret finds satisfaction when Ron’s face turns beet red and he stammers, reaching for a comeback. Ron tries to explain, this time in louder, more exacting detail, about how he can be found smoking out on the patio between 2PM and 2:15PM every workday, and then again, while eating a snack from 7-11 between 4PM-4:15PM.
          Mary Margaret relishes this type of cat and mouse game. She puts on a new face, one of consternation and discord and a touch of sadness. Mary Margaret practices this face in front of her bathroom mirror on weekends.  The face indicates to Ron that she regrets that they have to have this conversation, as Ron is a perfectly average individual with a clean shaven face and a nondescript manner, but that she has no choice given his insubordination. Ron needs to be dealt with quickly. Directors do not have “titties.” Mary Margaret narrows her eyes and squints, trying to permanently wipe the image of Ron’s clean shaven face and his blue Dockers off her retinas.
          As she squints, Mary Margaret realizes that she can see into Ron’s heart, into his leached bones and overcaffeinated bloodstream. She imagines Ron’s penis engorged with blood.  She has a vision of Ron suckling at her full, creamy voluptuous breasts. Mary Margaret wonders when she acquired X-Ray vision but is unphased by the discovery of this heretofore unexplored phenomena. She is reminded of another X-Files episode, one wherein Mulder discovered heretofore unexplored phenomena before getting distracted by thoughts of his missing sister.
          Mary Margaret straddles two separate planes of existence. That is why she is a Director, while Ron is merely an employee. It also explains why That Which Is Inevitable comes to visit her occasionally.
          Mary Margaret imagines That Which Is Inevitable resting on her shoulder, pulling locks of her Medium Ash Brown/Suede hair out to the side, so that they resemble Medusa’s snakes. Mary Margaret’s thoughts wander to community forum feedback, the failure of babies to thrive, the meanings behind crop circles and the role of ancient astronauts in the creation of the statues on Easter Island. Mary Margaret watches the spittle fly from Ron’s full, thick mouth.
          “Ron, in the future, I’ll expect you to follow the company’s published processes and procedures. Consider yourself written-up.”
          Mary Margaret knows what will happen once she throws out the write-up. All employees know that getting written up causes a myriad of problems, including but not limited to the addition of a permanent black mark on their HR record. As expected, Ron is finally rendered impotent. Mary Margaret has a vision of Ron’s engorged penis deflating and sagging towards the right.
          Ron leaves Mary Margaret’s office in a huff, slamming the door behind him harder than he should. That Which Is Inevitable leaves the office behind Ron and dissipates over the call center.
          Mary Margaret hears Ron say, “fucking bitch.” She updates her spreadsheet to reflect this new comment. Then she leaves her office for lunch.
          Lately, Mary Margaret dreams of being burned at the stake. She wonders if these dreams portend a day in the near future when she will spontaneously combust.
          After lunch, Mary Margaret attends meetings. Mary Margaret discusses Quick Tip Marketing materials and the upcoming interdepartmental company potluck and Cost Transaction Report errors. If she concentrates hard enough, she finds that she can float effortlessly above herself. She is hoping to one day use her powers to travel through time with the werewolf who scratches and whines under her bedroom window at night.
          At home after work, Mary Margaret readies herself for the company Halloween party. She touches up her roots with a special root wand included in the Medium Ash Brown/Suede hair color box. She applies white powder to make her face appear otherworldy, and lines her eyes with black eyeliner. Mary Margaret makes herself up this way on weekends before going on Skype to play board games with a group she met on Craigslist.
          That Which Is Inevitable sits on the toilet seat and watches Mary Margaret get ready for the party. When she was young, Mary Margaret used to sit on the toilet seat and watch her mother get ready for parties, before Mary Margaret’s mother stopped going to parties. At a certain point, her mother stopped leaving the house altogether and put tin foil on all the windows to purposely shut out any sunlight.
          That night, the company Halloween party is held at a sports bar near the office. Mary Margaret arrives, dressed in her corset, boyshorts, fishnet stockings, a velvet cape and backless high heels. She passes employees dressed as zombies, vampires, ghosts and notices Ron in a toga. The DJ is playing “Monster Mash.” She orders a rum punch from the bartender, who has a plastic second head coming out from his shoulder. She notices the bartender and his second head checking out her cleavage. The bartender hands her the change, and Mary Margaret puts the change in his tip jar. He smiles with his one good mouth. Mary Margaret drinks the rum punch, feeling that the evening is off to a very interesting start.
          Mary Margaret notices some of her employees staring at her. Her eardrums vibrate faster to listen in on their internal dialogue. She hears comments like “Can you believe she wore that?” and “totally inappropriate.” Mary Margaret knows she looks extremely appropriate for a Halloween party, and wishes, not for the first time, that her employees weren’t such hateful assholes who hated her with such a white, hot hatred. She drinks five rum punches in a row, and is feeling breezier than she ever does in the office. Mary Margaret is too tipsy to figure out who said what so that she can update her spreadsheet on Monday, but she doesn’t care. The party is in full swing, and Mary Margaret wants to dance. She pushes her way onto the dance floor, out into the center, and starts to spin.
          Mary Margaret used to spin in place for hours and hours when she was a child. Spinning on her slippery basement floor, it felt to Mary Margaret as though the space time continuum was suspended. Even as a child, Mary Margaret suspected that the laws of physics did not apply to her. At a certain point, she would stop spinning abruptly. Mary Margaret would achieve a kind of liftoff, and for an unspecified period of time afterward, she was propelled out towards space, through the galaxies and solar systems and into the heavens. Dazzling sights flew by – shooting stars, black holes, planets being born and suns dying in a final burst of energy. But after a while, Mary Margaret would always find herself back on earth, sitting cross-legged on the concrete basement floor, inspecting the cuts and abrasions on her body, a probable result of her extraterrestrial space travel.
          Mary Margaret’s father used to make jokes about how he needed to build a padded room for her to play in. After Mary Margaret fractured her arm during one of these space outings, her mother locked the door of the basement with a padlock.
          Mary Margaret is spinning in place at the party, her cape whipping around her with centrifugal force, until it unties from around her neck and flies onto the dance floor. Through the din, Mary Margaret notices that a crowd has formed around her, although standing back to give her room. Mary Margaret feels a pang of gratitude that her colleagues and employees have given her this freedom. She whips around, faster and faster. She hears voices as she spins –
          “Look at that!”
          “What the hell is she doing?”
          “Oh, man, did you see the CEO’s face?”
          But Mary Margaret is beyond all caring about her hateful employees. She focuses her energy on spinning.
          She is focused on a tiny bright light that she sees directly in front of her, growing brighter and larger. Mary Margaret’s spinning intensifies. Mary Margaret feels that this time, she might actually breach the boundaries between her and That Which Is Inevitable. A feeling of power surges within her, and she believes that she will be flung out into the stratosphere in a blaze of glory, destroying the bar and all of her co-workers in a cleansing fire. She will finally meet the time-traveling werewolf so that they can be together for eternity.  But then the music stops abruptly. Mary Margaret feels someone grasp her shoulders to stop her from spinning. She tries to focus on the face of the person who has stopped her, but whoever they are, they have stepped away, leaving her to trip over her backless heels. Mary Margaret cannot keep her balance and falls on her behind with a hard thump. Mary Margaret suddenly feels dizzy and pukes down the front of her cleavage, soiling her “Sunset Minimizer” corset and matching boyshorts. She sits on the dance floor in a puddle of her own vomit, listening to the crowd roar. Faces contorted with laughter stream by, roiling like waves that wash over her again and again and again.
          Then Mary Margaret feels a hand touch hers. The hand feels cool and smooth, as though made from a wax mold. On weekends, Mary Margaret makes molds of her own hands and feet with paraffin wax.
          The hand pulls Mary Margaret gently to her feet and leads her out of the center of the room. When Mary Margaret looks up, she sees that it is Ron who is attached to the cool, smooth hand. His toga is stained, and his face is shiny with sweat.  He finds a clean towel and helps Mary Margaret wipe off the vomit from her costume. He lets her wipe off her own cleavage, even though her hand eye coordination is a little off from spinning and she misses some of it. He gives her a glass of water, and helps her drink it. Then Ron ties Mary Margaret’s cape around her neck. It is damp from splashed beer and footprints have been scuffed into it. Mary Margaret is grateful that Ron found her cape, even though it is ruined.
          “Good as new,” he says.
          Ron pats her on the shoulder and walks away before Mary Margaret can utter a word. She notices That Which Is Inevitable hanging on Ron’s shoulder, like a lover, whispering into Ron’s ear. She can’t make out what it is saying before it disappears completely, merging into Ron’s corporeal being.
          Mary Margaret is reminded of an X-Files episode where the balance of sexual power shifted from Scully to Mulder, just before both of them were distracted by a mysterious extraterrestrial object glinting in the snow.
          Mary Margaret stumbles into the ladies room where two of her employees are freshening up. Mary Margaret cannot discern what they are saying to each other in low, hushed tones. She has no idea what they are thinking as they wash their hands and reapply their lip gloss, conspicuously avoiding her gaze. Mary Margaret tries to focus by breathing in and out, attempting to slow her heartbeat down to that of a lamprey swimming in frigid Arctic Ocean temperatures, but her mind is a complete and total blank. Mary Margaret fears that she has heard the last of the werewolf’s lovelorn cries.
          As her thoughts wander to client resource management, user acceptance testing and risk assessment, Mary Margaret stares in the mirror. In the harsh florescent lights, she cannot recognize herself.  She realizes that this is what it means to be earthbound.  This is what it is like to be an employee.

Charlotte Davidson

Just Taste

           “So, don’t touch the stuff, Elizabeth, and whatever you do, don’t put it in your mouth.”  That’s what Dad said to me before the guys came with the trucks.  After I saw the ground in the orange grove covered with all those little white pebbles, I thought they looked just like salt – the kind we use to make ice-cream.  But when I told Dad that, and asked if I could taste to see if those pebbles were salty, he shouted: “Hell no! That’s super-foss-fate.  It’s fertilizer, for crying out loud.”  Then he caught sight of my little brother, Bebop, who was playing in the dog dish and had crumbs of K-9 Crunchies all over his shirt.  “Phyllis,” he called my mom, real loud.  “You gotta’ watch these kids!”  To me, he said, “That stuff’s poison!”
           Mom didn’t hear him, of course, because she was in the cellar sorting out canned goods and making way for all that strawberry jam she’d made.  She’s always putting food in jars in order to save money and she likes to give jam away to her friends like Gary’s family.  Gary loves to eat, and he loves jam.  But so as my dad wouldn’t feel worried about me tasting the white pebbles, I said, “Just kiddin’ Daddo.”  Then I got Bepop’s crumbs brushed off, took him inside, gave him a Zwiebach cookie, and showed him his favorite picture book.  Mom doesn’t have time to read to him or do anything-at-all-for-herself, she says.

*                    *                    *

           It doesn’t rain too often where we live, and even though our town is called Riverside, the river here isn’t more than a little trickle through some sand and old dusty bushes.  And since the weather is mostly always dry, Mom and Dad have to spend a lot of time watering plants.  Soon we’ll have a vegetable garden to water too, only there’s not much but straight lines dug in the dirt for the time being.   They’re called furrows.   I’ll put in some big seeds myself.  Squash seeds.  Dad’ll put in the carrot seeds because they’re too small for me to get in right.  I love carrots because I’m skinny like a carrot, and Mom and Dad always want to put meat-on-my-bones, but boy do I hate squash, even with tons of fattening-me-up butter and lot of salt on it.  Besides squash and carrots, our garden will have watermelon, beans, radishes, and tomatoes.  Then all we’ll have to do is keep Bebop out and our dog, Klutz, too.  They both like to dig.  After all the seeds are in, we water and pull up those little weeds, and by the time school’s out, we’ll be eating homegrown vegetables.

*                    *                    *

           It’s hot, and we’re not even in summer.  As soon as I get home from school, I take my sandwich and go sit in the orange grove under a tree.  That’s the coolest place to go when it’s hot like it is now, but I remember last year when it got hotter’n blue blazes, Mom filled up the wash tub for me to sit in.  I don’t know why she calls it the ‘wash tub’ because she finally has a machine with a wringer and everything.  But this year, now that I’m eight, I don’t fit in the tub anymore, so I want a plastic pool like I saw at Builder’s Emporium this weekend.  Dad says it’ll kill the grass.  He thinks everything has to be beautiful at our house.  Not like Gary’s house which has dead grass in the back yard and no nice trees.

*                    *                *

           Under my orange tree is the only place to be right now though.  In the branches I keep lots of stuff.   I have a rock collection and a collection of animal bones.  Plus I have little knick-knacks and gadgets, and my collections of shiny black seeds that I call aspirin and bigger red seeds I call vitamins.  There is a nutcracker for breaking open the seed pods where I find my aspirin and vitamins.  I just swallow some feathery cassia vitamin seeds when I need to feel strong, like when I have to carry Bebop inside when he gets out; and the pit-us-poor-‘em bush aspirin seeds when I get a headache like when Mom screams at me when I try to help her sometimes.  Once I asked Mom if I could eat those seeds, and she said that it wasn’t a good idea to just eat things like that, but I don’t think they hurt me.  Anyway, my tree is a very secret place.
           I love the smell under my tree.  It’s all kind of rotty but not like the garbage dump.  It’s dry leaves mixed with dirt, and an old orange can add a good smell, too.  But sometimes when those oranges turn that really pretty color of blue and green, I have to throw them against the fence because the smell is just too strong.  They make a great splat sound when they hit.
           What’s the best smell right now though is the blossoms.  It’s funny because when I get out of the car after school, the air smells so strong like orange blossoms, but when I go and put my nose right up against the flower it doesn’t smell like anything but dust and tree branch.  Mom says that ladies getting married like to use orange blossoms at their weddings.  I wonder if I smell these blossoms all the time that I’ll be getting married one day, too.   But not to Gary Bert.  No way.
           My mother likes Gary’s mother.  I don’t know why.  Gary’s mom is dumb.  I want Mom to like Jenny’s mom best, or Sheila’s.  We’re all in a car pool which means that my mom drives Monday and Friday.  She says it’s practical.  I’d rather she picked me up every day herself – just her and Bebop because I miss him when I’m at school all day.  Mom says she does enough by driving twice a week.  She drives extra because Sheila has a sick brother and Mom has to drive more often so that Sheila’s mom can take the kid to the doctor.
           My favorite carpool day is when Jenny’s dad gets us.  He takes the windy road and goes fast.  When Sheila’s mom drives, she’s funny and makes me laugh and gives all of us Juicy Fruit gum.  But Gary’s mom isn’t funny and doesn’t drive fast and Gary is always right there next to her in the front seat.  His brother, who’s littler than mine, takes up space in the back seat.  He’s a ratty kid, always with a dirty sun-suit and smelling like barf.
           When Mrs. Bert is coming to a stop sign Sheila and Jenny and I yell “STOP SIGN” and then I give the baby a pinch – just with the ends of my fingernails, and he screams, too.  Of course, Mrs. Bert thinks he’s screaming because we’re screaming and she tries to comfort Baby by goo-gooing to him and telling us that it’s not nice to scream.  No one but Baby knows that I pinched, but I think Gary’s happy that Baby’s sad.  Gary wants to be mommy’s own boy.  Not like me.  I can take care of myself.

*                    *                    *

           Now Gary’s going to move far away, across the ocean.  Mom’s never been there, but Dad was there once when he was in the army.  They’re not moving right away, but when school’s out – Dad says about the time we pick our first squash which Mom will try to force me to eat, like always.  I don’t know what will be better – no school or no more Gary.  Until they go, Mom says that Gary’s mom has lots to do and my mom has offered to help out by inviting Gary over to our house on the days that we carpool.

*                    *                    *

           I don’t know what’s worst about having Gary here.  First, we always have to have jam sandwiches because Gary doesn’t like tuna or even peanut butter.  Gary’s allergic to milk, so we can’t have ice-cream for dessert to cool off.  We have to have banana popsicles.  I hate bananas, and I hate popsicles.   Klutz has to be locked up in the tool shed because Gary’s afraid of dogs.  Klutz cries and scratches to get out and Dad’s mad because she scratched up the wood.  Plus Gary won’t swim with me in the wash tub because his dad bought him a plastic pool from Builder’s Emporium.  Gary says a wash tub is not a pool, and his dad doesn’t care about the dead grass in their backyard because they’re moving.
           Maybe the very worst thing is not being able to go under my tree.  If I want Gary to eat an orange after his sandwich, I tell him to stay where he’s put and not to move a muscle so that I can run to a tree that’s close to mine and get us each a good orange.  Of course, he doesn’t like to peel his orange himself because his hands get dirty, so I have to run my thumbnail all around under the orange’s thick skin without letting a drop of juice jump in my eye.  The sections come apart easy, and I tell Gary to eat his, and he does.  But when his mom comes to get him, just before Dad comes home from work, I can see little tears in his eyes.  He’s real happy to see his mom.  She’s happy to see him too.  Stupid lady.

*                    *                    *

           “It’s poison.  Don’t eat it.”  That’s what Dad told me about the little white pebbles.  Now every time the phone rings, I feel kind of sick hoping it’s Mrs. Bert telling my mom that Gary’s OK.  But when I ask Mom if she’s heard from Gary’s mom and if Gary’s sick or anything, she just looks at me funny and says that Gary’s family moved far away right when school was done and school’s almost ready to start again, and she doubts that we’ll ever see the Bert family again.  Then she wants to know why I care about Gary when I was so mean to him.  And I say I wasn’t mean to him, but he was mean to me and didn’t like my pool, or my dog, and he wanted to grow up and get married which was dumb, and he wouldn’t do stuff I told him to do which was also dumb.
           It’s just that when I finally decided to show Gary my tree and wanted him to take some aspirin and vitamins –  which I told him were really good for him –  he said that he didn’t like to eat seeds, and his mom wouldn’t let him.  And I said that my mom let me.  And he said my mom was crazy.  So I showed him the pebbles on the ground in the grove and told him it was salt like to make ice cream, and it made the trees grow.  He said that my dad wouldn’t put salt all over the ground just to make trees grow bigger, so I said, “Sure he would.”   I picked up a little white pebble and held it close to his mouth. “It’s salty,” I said.  “Come on.  Just taste.”

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.


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.

Cynthia Anderson

The I-10

Born in 1897, a San Bernardino native son,
my grandfather lived to be 100. Late in life,
when we would take him out for a drive,
he would point to some shopping mall
off the I-10 and say, We used to hunt
rabbits there.

When he retired from title insurance,
he had a farm in Cherry Valley,
fruit trees and eggs. Then, in Yucaipa,
he looked after my grandmother
who hung on 22 years after a crippling
stroke, with a will to live she learned
as an only child in Randsburg,
where her father worked for the mines.

Time and again, I would drive down the coast,
pick up the I-10 in Santa Monica,
take it straight through the polluted heart
of L.A. to the hinterlands, find my way
to the Yucaipa house by memory,
never using a map, never thinking
about how much the freeway
had changed the land in its short life.

My grandfather spent his last days
in a convalescent hospital in Riverside.
He remembered when the palm trees
along on Magnolia Drive were planted,
recalled Sunday drives before the first
world war. He and my grandmother are buried
in Desert Lawn, hardly a resting place,
the I-10 a noisy witness to the end
of their lives and the world they knew.

Cynthia Anderson lives in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree National Park. Her award-winning poems have appeared in journals such as Askew, Dark Matter, Apercus Quarterly, Whale Road, Knot Magazine, and Origami Poems Project. She is the author of five collections—”In the Mojave,” “Desert Dweller,” “Mythic Rockscapes,” and “Shared Visions I” and “Shared Visions II.” She frequently collaborates with her husband, photographer Bill Dahl. Cynthia co-edited the anthology A Bird Black As the Sun: California Poets on Crows & Ravens.

E.J. Jones

Cheating


          It was early Saturday and my son, Wesley was already at the park with his friends.  Like everyone around Blythe, he started his October mornings when it was still cool, before the desert heat set in.  Tanya, my wife, was in her garden doing the same.  The house was all mine.  I picked up the paper grinning about having the morning to myself.  No honey-do’s, just me and twenty-four hours till the next football game.

          Yesterday’s mail was on the counter next to the coffee machine.  Under a refinancing mortgage flyer, there was a letter with Georgia on the return address.  I didn’t dare touch it, but nudged the flyer away with my coffee cup.  I hoped the letter was either a mistake or a bad joke because up until then I was having a good day.

It’s weird how things jump in my head.  A bad pass interference call will make me remember I left a fountain pen in my favorite shirt.  My home address written in my mother’s hand reminded me I’d hid a bottle of good bourbon in the garage two years ago.  It was a gift from my boss, and I could give a million reasons why I’d kept it, but the truth was that Ten High was good liquor.  I was taught to never throw things like that away.

Staring at the envelope made me sweat, so I dumped my coffee and poured me some of Tanya’s grapefruit juice.  I didn’t want to touch the letter, but poked at it with a spatula like it was something that might bite.  After flipping it like a pancake, I saw red lipstick where the ‘V’ sealed it shut.  I knew those lips; I’d wiped the same imprint from my forehead and cheek a hundred times as a kid.  Momma was big on kisses before school.

The juice didn’t help my sweat or the cotton in my mouth, and I figured I better do something before Tanya came in asking questions.  It was dumb, I know, but I went to get the bourbon.  Tanya nodded as I walked by.  I hadn’t had a drink without her for more than fifteen years.

The bottle was in my tool box, somewhere Wes would never be without me, and somewhere Tanya’d only be if I died.  It was a bonus from winning the company football pool, close to six-hundred dollars that went mostly to a BMX bike and pearl earrings.  I bought socks and underwear for myself because you can never really have enough.  My regional manager, Keith had tossed a lump of rubber-banded twenties on my desk and put the bourbon down next to the money.  Enjoy it, you lucky bastard was written on a post-it stuck to the bottle.  Keith was a good guy, but he was the dummy that bet Seattle every year.  Him giving me the bottle made me realize no one at work really knew me.  I thought about giving it away, but only real friends deserve quality and Tanya was my best friend.

I sat on my tool box and rested the bottle horizontal across my knee, whacking it on the ass a few times.  I’d never liked the smell of liquor and took a swig without putting it to my nose.  The heat in my stomach gave me courage I didn’t really have, and I went back for the letter.

Tanya barely looked up at me on my way back inside, so I hid behind a bush to watch her.  Turning over top soil and clearing weeds was what she loved most next to me.  She dug into the ground hard, stabbing into it like she’d been wronged.  And then real gentle she spread fresh soil around her marigolds like she was putting on a band aid.

Her braided hair was away from her face and wrapped inside my old UC Riverside cap.  We always joked that her two years there plus my two made us an educated couple.  Standing there with the bottle in my hand was stupid because if Tanya saw me peeking around the bush at her, she’d have known something was wrong, even at a glance.  I loved watching her though, especially if she didn’t know I was looking.  Whenever she felt she was alone, her beauty was effortless, coincidental.  Hell, maybe even accidental.  I was never smooth with women, but when I saw her at The Getaway, the campus bar, nursing a Jack and coke with that all alone look, I had to talk to her.  We both had a few more drinks, and I asked if we could do it again sometime.  She leaned towards me and put her hand over mine, her smooth dark skin covering my pale knuckles.  “I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”  I couldn’t accept her saying no; I was hooked.  Tanya claims she didn’t know it, but I’m sure she did.

It was hard a first:  black guys looked at her like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’  White girls glaring at me asking, “Why would you even do that?”  Not Georgia bad, but it did start fights.  We’d worked through a lot.

Seeing Tanya in her garden made me want to get on my knees beside her, bury the letter unopened, spray it with weed killer and wait to see if something beautiful would grow.  If I’d had the courage to pick up the letter earlier, I might have done just that.  But she’d smell the bourbon now.  Her nose was a good as mine.  There was a fight coming, but I didn’t want to have it just then.

Our house was a modest three bedroom, most in Blythe are.  Wes’ room is closest to the front door, but he’d never seen me take a drink and I aimed for him to never have to.  The master bedroom was at the end of the hall, but it seemed a long ways off.  The office was in between and the coolest anyway.  His and her desks were pushed up against the walls.  I sat the bottle on the floor next to mine in case I decided to try and hide it if Tanya came in.  When the silver blade slit the crease in the envelope, I saw sweat beads racing down my temple in the reflection.

The letter was only one page.  I turned it over and the back was white, blank.  If there were words that could make up for sixteen years of silence, I knew damn well they couldn’t fit on a single page.  The very first word was, Son, and it was the worst word to start with.  I dropped the letter in my lap and took a good swig.

My parents never called me, Son.  Hey You, maybe.  Boy, I heard several times, but not a word that tied us together as family.  Not since I showed up with Tanya and a wedding ring on my finger.

The third line said my father was alive, but doctors couldn’t say for how long.  I don’t understand why, but I sympathized, a lot.  I knew he was afraid to die.  And neither one of us faced our fears very well.

There was a big ink splotch in the L of We Love You.  The pen bled ink while they wondered whether love was the right word.  Momma wrote it, but I knew my father was looking over her shoulder, dictating.  She’d stopped, and then looked at him for approval.  Who knows how long before he answered.  I took my time, too, had a few drinks before reading on.

If you want to see him, it will have to be soon.  The words were supposed to be an invitation. Leaving the front door open was as far as he was willing to go.  I wasn’t sure how far I’d go.  I put the letter and the bourbon in my lap.  Looking at them, I couldn’t tell which was worse.

*

          “Hun?”  Tanya’s voice was still outside, but close.  “You didn’t turn on the AC.”
One of the things I’d hated most about drinking heavy was that time slipped.  Heat had invaded the house, and I was sure it was almost afternoon, but it felt like only minutes had passed.  I hadn’t moved except to lift the bottle to my mouth. She was beating the dirt off her sneakers before coming inside, something neither one of us could get Wes to do regularly.  I didn’t run, but I wanted to.

“You in there, Babe?”

I took one more good swig and capped the bottle; not much could have made the situation better and nothing could have made it any worse.  Tanya stared at me from the doorway, her arms pressed against the arches like she was bracing for an earthquake.

“What happened?”

She was asking whether she should hug or kill me.  I blinked and she’d covered the ten feet from the doorway to my side.  She snatched the bottle when I didn’t answer.

“My fathers dying,” I said, pointing to the letter.  “Wants to see me.”

“We’ll send a card.”

Tanya had a way of closing herself off when things got bad.  It was how she coped with her father’s drinking.  Everything about her became rigid, stone.  Nothing could penetrate and hurt her then.  She’s a good cop because of it, but I swear I don’t know her when she gets like that.  She knew she was hurting me.

“I’m going.”

“Bye.”

There was no hesitation in her response, just a reaction, concrete bouncing back a rubber ball.  She walked out with the bottle, and I heard her pour the rest in the toilet, flushing it twice, and then running water inside and pouring that out.  Without the liquor, it was just a bottle.  We both knew that.

“He’s my father,” I said when she came back.

“I’m your wife.”

I couldn’t explain what I was feeling.  She saw the confusion in my face, sighed and left.  I didn’t tell her that I was thinking about taking Wes with me.  That was for the best; she’d have handcuffed him to the frame of the house.

Looking out the office window, across Seventh Street to the hard and hilly dirt where Wes practices his bike jumps, I saw the melon fields, honey-dew.  I tried to think about something else, but couldn’t get away from the smell of alcohol on my own breath.  The tiny skeleton-like trees beyond the melon fields made me think about sitting on my porch in Georgia, listening to my father.  Funny how things pop up, huh?

You know that Nigra round over there got a piano in his house?  People nowadays rather pay a monkey a quarter what they should pay a real man to do for fifty cents.  My father was never happier than when he had someone to blame for something he’d done.  He never kept any job very long, and the reason was always the same:  Niggers.  I loved him, but he was an average man.  He couldn’t accept it and spent half his time pretending he was rich, and the other half making damn sure everyone knew he wasn’t as poor as a nigger.  It made him drink.  And drinking made him mean.  I’d never told Tanya, but until high school when I got a job and saw how easy is was to keep it, I blamed them, too.

When I walked into the kitchen, there was an empty Jack Daniels bottle on the counter, probably a gift to Tanya from someone who didn’t know any better.  I couldn’t imagine where she’d hid it, but I knew she’d been faithful and hadn’t drunk hers.

“What are you thinking?” Tanya said softly, rolling a baby tomato around the salad in front of her.  She didn’t look at me, and I knew that meant she was giving me a chance to apologize for breaking our sacred vow.

“No brain cells left?”

I tried to walk out, but something hit me in my back.  Not a big something, but an attention getter.  If it wasn’t her wedding ring, it was a hell of a bluff.  I stopped dead in my tracks.

“You don’t like it, I know, but I’ve got an obligation to–”

“You made a promise!” she screamed.  “And you have an obligation to me, to Wes!”

I couldn’t get past not seeing my father before he died.  I saw how much it hurt him when his father passed, saw how hard he drank and how it never helped.  I owed him that much.

“I just wanna see him, okay?”

“Not okay.  No drinking without one another,” Tanya said.  “No Georgia…remember?”

“I know what I said, but try and understand.”

“Every mile of that three-thousand on the way back, I cried, and you promised.  You swore.”

My father’d called Tanya things we never repeated.  Tanya’d never been to the South, and I’d convinced her it wouldn’t be that bad; she believed me and wasn’t ready for it.  The trip back from Georgia was rough.  We didn’t really talk until the car overheated near Blythe, eight miles into California.  In the seventy-two hours we waited for a new radiator, we went from being a zebra-couple to just Warren and Tanya:  steak eaters, iced tea drinkers, good tippers, two polite and quiet people, that’s all.  People stopped staring and started waving.  The Gas Company and the city police were both hiring.  We dropped out after the semester ended and moved.  Blythe seemed like a good place, and we both needed someplace good.

I wasn’t sure what else to say, so I told her what I thought was the truth. “He’s still my Daddy.  I love him.”

“He’s not worth it!”

For some reason, probably the alcohol, hopefully the alcohol, I turned and looked at her, hard.  Everyone in my family knew how to look down at black people.  The Hughes glare, my father called it; he said I had it better than most.  I leaned my head back, so she had to look up into my nose, gave her an ugly sideways frown.  Her eyes grew wide with pain.

“Don’t…look at me like that.”

I was wrong, but I was mad.  And drunk.  “Look at you how?”

“Like you just noticed what color I am.”

I’d broken through the wall her father and the hoodlums she arrested couldn’t get through.  I’d hurt her with her defense up.  My backbone went limp and all I saw was the floor.  Tanya disappeared.  It didn’t matter if I’d looked how she said.  I’d hurt her.  If I could have, I would have swallowed a match and burned from the inside out.  Shame hurts, and I was as ashamed as I’d ever been from what I’d done.  But I still wanted to believe that my father felt my kind of shame, not the shame forced onto you by other people, the shame that makes you sorry, makes you change.

Blythe isn’t an easy place to hide.  Anybody can be found with a few phone calls and a description of what they drive, so I made the forty mile drive to Parker, Arizona.  Keith sent me there two years ago to oversee the construction of a gas line.  The crew always talked about a local bar called Bruce’s, and that regulars could bring in their own bottle.  It was down the street from Quicker Liquor on the corner of Choctaw and Main.  Funny how things come back.

The clerk at Quicker Liquor was a fat bald man, the kind you see buying alcohol, not selling it.  I found what I was looking for and put it on the counter.

“Good choice,” he said.  He held up the bottle like he was asking for an invite then slipped it into a brown bag.  “Occasion?”

“Reunion of sorts.”

“Ahhh, catching up on old times, huh?  Good memories, good times.”  His voice was scratchy from smoking, but I could tell he loved to talk.  I grabbed the bottle and walked out.

Bruce’s wouldn’t let me in with the bottle, but someone at the bar gestured to go around back.  Five people, three old couches, one big cactus and a steel barrel bonfire was all it was.  But it looked like a place cops tolerated rather than disturbed.  I sat down on an empty couch and made the mistake of pulling my expensive bottle from the brown bag.  It drew the attention of an old Indian woman, a mustache above her lip and what looked like a five-O’clock shadow.

“White man,” she said, pointing.  “Give Crazy Lucy some.  You drink on my land, you pay tax!”  Drinkers like to talk, but drunks like to be left alone.  I was surprised this drunk didn’t know the rules.  “All of this,” Lucy said holding her arms up and spinning around, “is mine.  Mine!”  She held out a Styrofoam cup.  I looked at a man and a woman sharing a cigarette for what to do, but they minded their business.  After I poured her about three fingers, she gave a toothless grin and danced away.  It reminded me of my father’s drunken dance and how at times, he was good.

*

          I don’t remember driving home, but I woke up parked in front of my house.  It scared me to think that driving drunk was something I couldn’t unlearn, a stain.  The moon’s glow lit a brown-bearded face peeking into my car window.

“You okay?”  It was Juan from next door.  He had a dog leash in one hand and a cigarillo in the other, an average night for him.  “Want me to get Tanya?”

I shook no, and he walked away.  The alcohol was wearing off, and my back was killing me.  I couldn’t have gone back to sleep in the car, not without another bottle.  I had to face Tanya.

The porch light was out, and I got the feeling I wasn’t welcome because at night it always glows.  The house was pitch-black, but Tanya wasn’t asleep.  She snores something awful, and the only sound was the big oscillating fan rattling the blinds in the living room.

I checked on Wes.  He was asleep, but he’d left his TV on again.  I’d told him about the electric bill as many times as Tanya’d told him about washing and not just rinsing the dishes, but I smiled turning it off.  He was a good kid.  I tip-toed in the bedroom.

“If you start drinking heavy, I’ll divorce you.  I swear to God!”

Tanya’s father was Jack Daniels man before he died.  She hated being close to him.  Even in the hospital right before the end, she said she could still smell it on him.  In the dark, Tanya probably saw her father, not me.  Since we’d been together we only drank with one another, and never too much, wine at a friend’s party, a beer a piece watching the Super-bowl.  It kept both of us sober.  We called it ‘really small group therapy’.

I sat on the bed and used my feet to peel my shoes off, hoping the silence would last.  But cheating’s cheating.  I didn’t blame her for being mad.

“Say something.”

I was facing the wall, and she came up behind me and hugged me tight.  The shame I was carrying was too heavy, and I had to let it go.

“In junior high I was suspended for throwing a rock.”

“What?”

“Her name was Kenya.”  Tanya didn’t stop hugging when she heard the name, but I felt her grip loosen.  “I didn’t know it was a girl.  I just saw black.  Daddy’d been saying all week how it wasn’t right…integrating my school…”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Walking home I couldn’t think about anything else but how I’d done wrong.  Mama always told me to never hit a girl.  But Daddy was so happy.  Waited for me on the steps with a bottle in one hand and two small Dixie cups in the other.  Held out the bottle to me and said, ‘Well, spank that som’ bitch.  You drinking wit’ me or not.’  I hit the bottle; he laughed.  I hit it again, and he laughed harder.  We sat on paint cans by the garage and got drunk.”

“Warren, I’m not sure this–”

“And then he was good…for a while.  Kept a job almost a year.  We played catch in front of the house.  He kissed Mama before breakfast and after dinner.  He told me he loved me all the time.  ‘Proud’ he said, ‘damn proud.’  It ain’t right, but a lot of stuff ain’t right.”

Tanya was still hugging, but I could tell she didn’t know what to do.  I turned around, looked her in the eye and rubbed her cheek with my hand.  “I know I made a promise,” I said.  “But I’m making another one right now.  Two days and I’m coming back.”

She kissed me soft, and I felt her relax in my arms.  “You better.”

“I will, Darling.  This city, this house…this is home.”

Judy Kronenfeld

Blue Bowl of Sky

How we feel about where we are, what our mental image is of the weather and landscape of our days, depends on where we were before, and how we arrived.

I first saw the West of small towns and desert spaces when, very young, and only a few months married, my husband and I drove from the East Coast to start graduate school in Northern California which we approached circuitously, via the Southwest, where he had already been, and where there were ruins he wanted me to see and friends he wanted me to meet. New York City, the densest, most highly urban landscape in the U.S., had been the seemingly infinite center of my childhood and young adult world; when we drove West I left behind my entire family—parents, aunts, uncles and cousins—in the Bronx, Queens, Manhattan and “the Island.” Though the generation above me were almost all immigrants from Europe, only one of them or their children had been as far as Michigan; most hadn’t been west of Pennsylvania.

My husband and I were in that stage of life when buying Melmac plates in beige and aqua at a drugstore—our first dinner service!—was exciting. An only child, marrying and venturing to the edge of the continent, I was shaking off the yoke and protection of my loving but intensely close mother and father (which I had begun to loosen when I chose to go to college in Massachusetts, though my mother had preferred that I stay in “the city.”) All that first year of graduate school, my dad—in those pre-email, pre-cell phone days, when long distance calls (considered too expensive for everyday talk) meant someone had died—sent tapes for me to play on a cheap tape recorder, lugubrious tapes about how much he and mom missed me, his voice thick with incipient tears.

On that first trip to the far West, it was both strange and exhilarating to see towns whose beginnings and endings were visible—compared to the seeming endlessness of building-crowded New York avenues—towns whose dusty streets dropped off into the desert, vulnerable, unprotected, yet brave towns, rubbing up on vast silences. I first saw forests with solitary, articulate pines in receding rows, no fuzzy, obscuring understory—only pine needles—on the ground between them; I liked that independence and clarity. And most of all in that September, once we’d crossed the Rockies, I saw an unobscured horizon; even the suburban and rural parts of the Northeast were so much less panascopic than Western vistas; I saw sky. This was a sky no longer white, close, and hovering; it was as if a great gauze bandage had been lifted from my sight. This sky was an enormous bowl of blue turned over, drenching us in light, dropping out a bit of horizontal detritus: a town, a gas station on an empty road, a collection of rocks.

Of course there had been days in New York when the ocean breezes cleansed the air and it was brisk and crystalline. And, of course, every kind of New York weather was the weather of my childhood and therefore, in my childhood, weather as weather should be. But the horizon in Manhattan (where I went to high school) is devoured by and textured with buildings; the eye is drawn to detail opening onto more detail: walls of glass reflecting sky and cloud, windows capturing and throwing the discus sun. Even outside Manhattan, in the provincial Bronx where I was raised, apartment houses crowd the sky; the eye alights on their crenellated tops, on the aerials stuck like haphazard pins in the pincushions of their tarry roofs. The buildings hold one in like the walls of slot canyons; vistas plunge down them. The sky may be infinitely melancholy at dusk, but it seems to be made that way by the lights coming on in innumerable apartment windows. It is juxtaposed, always, for me, to the mass and might of human architecture, to the vast collection of human souls buzzing tightly in one place. My young husband and I had driven out under a sky that was boss, or god, under an enormous blue bowl where the wind blows without restriction. And after that first trip across the United States, I lived in a new mental space, a new psychological weather, even though the Northern California town near our University, where we rented an apartment during our first year, looked surprisingly seedy for blue and golden California. That unconfined wind seemed to sweep even the slightly cloying familiarity of my natal family from me. I was new when I stepped off the plane on the next summer visit East, into the white haze of air, air palpable on my shoulders as my mother’s hand—which I would now tolerate—brushing some lint from my jacket that I hadn’t asked to be brushed.

I lived in that space, even if—when my husband got a job in Riverside—I was shocked by the aridity and heat of September in Southern California, the sky- and mountain-obscuring smog, especially because he had given me an idyllic verbal scratch ’n sniff with greenery and orange blossoms after his visit the previous May. And I continued to live in that psychological weather system, a blue-gold near desert sparkle, during all the years I drove weekly on the 215 between Iowa Avenue and Mill Street to do my shopping at Fedco—that nude expanse of dusty freeway blowing with trash, unsoftened by trees or grassy median, and, like many Southern California freeways, much uglier than many Eastern highways.

Now I have lived here for decades; my parents have grown old and died; my children have grown up and flown. And even now, when there are more and wider freeways—certainly no prettier—there are days of sky, perhaps especially in the early spring when it is not yet too hot and orange blossom is in the air (at least on the UCR campus), when my mental weather, that Platonic ideal, is realized in the actual, sublunary world. I feel exalted, unleashed, grateful, lost in that cloudless blue that makes me crane my head back to take it in, as if I could never get tired of it, never want argosies of cumulus, or sky-texturing cirrus. It has depth and no depth at the same time. It is a blue so profound it seems to burn, so pure it seems the archetype of the celestial. My head so far back I am dizzy, I look at and into the sky, feeling unadulterated joy, however briefly feeling free.

Rachelle Cruz

Notes On the Round of Return
2/18/11 9:19 pm, Riverside, CA

after Ahmed Abdel Mu’ti Hijazi and Romeo Cruz

Last night I fought cobwebs from my eyes / Last night ‘the House strips funding from Planned Parenthood’

Pearl Square Bahrain/ Tahir Square Egypt / Madison Wisconsin / rained faces call for more than a word /change to land on

The song of mouths / Coyotes yowl outside near the 60 freeway/ I click the button / type my name address email phone number / forward to others / Read/ Write/ Read / The song of mouths

This mouth / Ahmed Abdel Mu’ti Hijazi / A prison is not always a fence and a metal door / It might even be spacious, unbounded…

Prison Is / Prison Is /In Cairo / a father’s left eye blind / his son / a voice crackling against the prison of sky and silence / In Riverside / Silence in the hallways / Silence in the notebook / The freeway rumbles on…

Prison might be an eyelid with dark lashes that we close and tuck under the skin / as we ruminate a dream of life in silences / and hiddeness.

I am singing his round of return / his papyrus song /As if a voice of some kind were calling / My father sends me a poem about Egypt / the father I write about who writes me

Will their cries be more dire/ than their muzzein up that mosque that calls the millions to prayer / to kneel and bow to the ground / looking to the East?

My father’s hand writing / breathing into a Naga sunset window / signs carried above earth to the sky / In Manila / crying Marcos Down! / the night yellow with tear gas / My father’s hands stained / the ink from newspapers he wrote / I am writing this / he has written this / we will write / As if a voice of some kind were calling

Another pharaoh fell to the ground / like the crows but still the pyramids stood mocking us / that we should hold the ground / otherwise they will come tumbling down / if we keep talking of new ideas