It Was Like A Door

This is the word.
Wow- yeah,
It was like a door.
The word.
I was born.
And on the other side, where I exit,
It’s about being a good girl or a bad girl.
I felt like I could not go back.
It is this sharp light,
like when the sky is very clear and blue and it's noon.
There is so much beauty.
And bliss, bliss and fear, both. 
It was impossible to go back.
It’s the in-between, between ocean and land.
Now this time seems to be a time where things appear in a clear light.
I like to walk there.
Like a door,
she said: ‘you are most welcome to stay and be with us.’
At noon the shadows are very small
On the firm earth, feeling the water touching my feet.
There is wind, birds, and the sun.
Wow- yeah,
this ritual had been made for me.
It is land and it is water.
It is wind and it is fire,
come together right at my feet,
and it is possible.
It is good to walk there.
A door.
This is the word
Very light and very dark.
There are many possibilities.
I had been born
And I am still feeling very much alive now.

Doodle

Two little Asian girls sat between their older cousin, a slender teenager with cropped silky black hair and a gentle manner. The girls were twins, both with small pink lips, the same silky black hair as their cousin, and smooth delicate skin over soft feminine features.  They looked like idealized dolls you could find in a gift shop, only they wore shorts and t-shirts instead of a colorful kimono. One girl sat by the window of the airplane, the other by the aisle. They looked so sweet and sugary, the way an expectant parent might hope a little girl would be.
The girl sitting by the aisle was overflowing with curiosity. She leaned her little body over the armrest to watch the male airplane attendant talk about the emergency procedure. I made eye contact with her.  She pursed her lips habitually and I imitated the small movement. She perceived what I was doing immediately, though she still looked at me with a bit of caution. She made another habitual shift of her face and I imitated that one as well. She started to smile, now consciously moving her eyebrows and lips and eyes.  Each time she did something I imitated it as best I could. She laughed each time I wiggled my forehead or pursed my lips, when she burst into a brilliant smile, I would laugh as well.
I took the notebook and pen from my large purse and started drawing. I let my hand move, creating swirling psychedelic doodles quickly that shifted across the small lined page. I tore the drawing from the notebook and reached across the narrow carpeted aisle. She opened her hand instinctively. As she saw what was there, her face brightened like a sun moving across a cloudy sky, instantly lighting the world. She seemed to inhale the pen strokes and then without a second thought, held it up for her cousin to see.  He looked through it like water, like there was no paper in front of him with a succession of dots and lines and liquidy flow. His disinterest struck me, it had such an absence of curiosity and interest and I wondered if we all eventually became a muted surface which nothing could touch. 
She looked back and me and smiled. She held up the drawing for her twin to see. Immediately I started working on another doodle, intending it for her sister.  When I looked back at them, the girls had taken out their little notebooks and were drawing. The girl by the window drew on the back of the doodle I had just made.  Every now and then she turned it over to look at what had come through my hand onto the page.
When I was finished with the second drawing I handed it to the girl closest to me.  She opened her hand and accepted it, but didn’t look at it.  She tucked it under the notebook and continued drawing with intense focused attention. I worked on a third doodle.
The airline attendants came through the long, narrow aisle with their trays full of beverages and small packaged peanuts. When I was almost done with the drawing I could sense that the girl by the aisle was attempting to get my attention, we shared no language but I could feel her trying not to look at me in her shy childlike way. The quiet gestures summoned me.  I turned towards her and she held the drawing up over her head and looked at it for a second before abruptly thrusting it towards me. A smile burst onto my face and she squirmed in her seat when she saw my excitement.
The drawing was of an airplane with bubbly clouds and human figures floating among them.  I turned towards her and waited for her to look at me again.  When she did, I nodded with a smile on my face and said, “I like it.”  She cowered again and shrunk into her seat, smiling. 
I worked on the third drawing and when I turned back, I saw that the older cousin had a glue stick in his hand. He helped the girls glue the doodles I had made into their notebooks. Since the girl by the window had drawn on the reverse side of the drawing I originally made, she had to choose which side to put the glue on. I saw them rolling the glue over the psychedelic swirls and dots.
Then the girl close to me fell asleep.

Until The End

The law would not bend to her will.  She wished to reverse time, to stop decay in its path, to find the fountain.  Her bones were made of steel. The taste of metal lingered in her mouth; even after brushing her shiny teeth she could sense the elements and polished earth.
The years since her birth had flown like a blue feather on a hurricane gust. Childhood had at first been painfully slow, but the moment her breasts were upright and singing, the years gathered strength and momentum, rolling faster and faster until she came to the edge and her pulse slowed. She grew out her hair in an attempt to capture what had been.

Now, her white mane long and clean, her hair had become a symbol of the past, like some sort of guiding line attached to a place she could not quite remember. The girl that had been, she had never known her.
She had watched herself from a distance, seeing the movements and thoughts of a skinny girl from an outsider’s perspective. Her dancing and singing was put under scrutiny, not by all those teachers and fellow students, but by the loud voice in her own mind that beat its comments into an ever-present rhythm she confused with the body’s pulse.
Her hair was long now, longer than it had even been.  When naked she could feel the soft ends of her white waves rubbing against the back of her thighs. 

Sprouting life seemed to grow unabated just beyond her fingertips.  The tree outside the window, once a sapling she had planted with her own hands, had grown into a massive fruit bearing vine.  It had pushed its way through the cracks in the house foundation, had climbed up the interior wall in her bedroom and spread along the ceiling. 
There were flocks of bright colored birds perched along the ledges of her roof and in the garden. A once carefully tended plot of vegetables had exploded into a new life form.  The tentacles of squash plants covered the land, expanding outwards, resolutely mounting wooden fences in its path, winding its way over forgotten toys and sun-chairs in the neighbor’s yard. 

She wished she could bend that universal law into a pretzel, making time into a new shape so that she could experience it all again in a different way, perhaps with more clarity, perhaps with more wisdom.
She was old and her bones were metallic.  Little walks around the block towards the park sent sparks through her, sometimes igniting the dried up lawns beside the path.
If only the proliferation of vines and thick weeds and the sun could wait for her, could keep her in their company.  She would like to see it all to the end, every moment of existence before it all went up in a colossal puff of smoke. 
She swung her hips as best she could, leaving a trail of embers on the sidewalk.

Phoenix

He had grown old, his wrinkled hands leathery, his hair thin and white. Once he had been strong and swift. He had been legend, born in the fire, a man of destiny. Living by the gun, he had no reservations about dying by the gun. And yet somehow he was still here, haunting a sagging ranch house adrift in an endless sea of yellow grass; the ghost of a legend.
It had been a long time since he had first come to this house and fallen in love with its occupant, a lovely young widow with flaxen hair and freckled cheeks. Somehow he had married her and stayed, and it had been a long time since then, a long time since he took off his guns and hung them in the closet, trading them for a hoe.

She died and his unborn child died with her. He buried them not far from the house. What few neighbors they had came to lay their hands on his shoulder in silence, one at a time before drifting back out into the golden abyss.
He might have left then, he had still been young enough. He could have taken up his guns and forgotten this almost life in a glorious blaze of gunfire. Instead he stayed. He hitched his horse to a plow and tore through the unforgiving earth as if in a trance.

He could no longer  live, and yet he did not die. His days played out in an uninterrupted flow of monotony under a cloudless blue sky. Like the hands of a clock, he moved as if propelled by hidden gears, a prisoner of time frozen in a story that had ended prematurely. The days bled one into the other, each indistinguishable from the last. Only the occasional visit from a neighbor, once or twice a year, punctuated the seemingly endless single day that sucked his youth away.

A  tanned old man with pale blue eyes, he stood on the porch staring out at the prairie grass, watching a figure approach from the distance. It seemed to be a child, coming in at a good clip. He stood and watched as the details emerged.
Yes a child, a girl, with soot on her hands, face and apron. Red hair, streaks in the sooty cheeks to mark the passage of tears. Maybe it was nothing that he could see, maybe it was something that he felt radiating from her, or the simple fact that she was a break in the endless predictability, but when she was near enough for the details to become apparent, he felt swept up by a wave of emotion and ran out to meet her in the field. He dropped to his knees and took her by the shoulders.

“Child, what happened?”
She gasped, and sobbed,
“Bad men. Bad men came. Bad men with guns.”

He looked over her head at the hills and could see the wisps of smoke dissolving in the sky beyond the hills. Then he looked back into her face, into her eyes, into all that must have happened written in the burning eyes of a child. He looked into the fire in her eyes and felt something quicken inside of him.
Standing, he scooped her up and carried her swiftly to the house and up the porch steps. It was the way he had carried his wife up those same steps after their wedding, but now it was a child and the feeling in his chest was different. He set her down on her feet inside the door and went to the closet.
His whole body was steadily flooding with heat, he could feel it in his limbs, his chest, his face. Opening the closet door he reached inside and took up his guns. He strapped them on without hesitation. It had been many years, but his fingers moved deftly as he opened the barrels, checking that they were loaded. He gave them a spin.

He stood in front of her then.
“What’s your name?”
“Margaret. Benson.”
A flash of recognition. Benson.  They raised  horses over the hill. Or they had until today.
“Can you count?“
She nodded.
“How many men were there? Take a minute, think about it.”
“Six.”
“You’re sure?”
She nodded.
“What about your kin…anybody hurt?”
Again she nodded but this time her freckled face crumpled to expel the fresh tears that welled up in her eyes.
He laid his hand on her shoulder,
“You get yourself over to Doc Hoverstad’s place. You know where that is?”
She sniffed, “No.”
He motioned toward the back of the house.
“That way, north, across the creek. ”
They locked eyes again. He lifted his hand from her shoulder. Then he passed through the doorway and down the steps, eyes trained on the faint bluish curl of smoke in the distance.

He found the girl's parents together, Mr. Benson with three wounds in his chest, Mrs. Benson draped over his legs, half her skull missing. A young cow hand lay dead further from the house.
By the smoldering barn he found a man still breathing, a bullet lodged in his belly. Gasping like a  fish out of water, the dying man didn’t seem to see the other at first. He was older with a grizzled chin, beads of perspiration all over his forehead.
The man with the gun knelt beside him and the dying man whispered:
“Don’t worry about me none. They took the oldest girl, Lizzie. Left an hour ago I think. You’ll catch them… you’ll catch them, I can tell, I know it, you have the look. Go on. Go…on…go…”

Another familiar feeling had come over him, replacing all the heat. Now he was cold, as if his heart could pump a blizzard through his veins. Everything was crystal clear, every slow steady thought, each strong quick motion.
It took him no time to recognize their tracks and follow them through the pass and out of the valley. They’d taken 20 or so horses with them, making them easy to follow. 20 horses and one girl.
How many years had it been since he put down his guns? It could have been no time at all. It could have been yesterday, except that he felt old in his bones, a bit stiff, slower than he had once been.
As the terrain leveled out and the grass gave way to dusty earth and brittle bramble the answer registered with clarity; 15 years. 15 years, six men, 20 horses, 1 girl. The world could be distilled into these figures.

They appeared to him as a cloud of trail dust. He stayed just near enough to follow them, far enough away that they wouldn’t notice him in pursuit. As dusk approached they made camp around an outcropping of large boulders. Thankfully, the terrain was littered with such groupings of stones.
The man with the gun left his own horse behind  and approached in the descending darkness, just as they were lighting their fires, arguing about who would cook and  who would stand guard while the others used the girl. He waited to see how the quarrel would go, if  one or two might die before he descended on them.
One was already wounded from the raid on the Bensons and sat slumped against the rocks ignoring the others. The girl was laying  where they had dropped her, on her side with her hands tied behind her back, a gag in her mouth, 15 feet from the wounded man, seven feet from the rest of the gang.

One bandit did pull his gun and point it at another, two more moved to restrain him. In that moment the girl wriggled up to her feet and started running. Someone gave a shout and all their attention turned to her.
The man with the gun took the opportunity, first firing on the bandit who had already drawn his weapon in the argument.  Five. That one fell dead and another whirled, reaching for his guns. The horses had begun to scream and tug against their ropes. He dropped the bandit who was closest to catching the girl before turning  his gun on the bandit who was drawing. 4.
Here he missed and had to duck behind a boulder as the bullets came screaming after him. Then he took a second shot and landed it in his opponents throat. 3.
The two bandits left standing gave up chasing the girl as their companion fell gurgling, grasping at the geyser of blood.  They peered searchingly into the darkness, but the man with the gun ducked behind the boulder and waited, listening to their exclamations.

“Shit. Shit. They got us.“
“How many are out there?”
“Shit.”
“Hey, shut up, how many of them?”
And then a third voice, a lot fainter, the wounded man,
“Just one I think.”
“I ain’t waiting to find out. I’m tearing out of here.”
“No you ain’t!”

The man with the gun seized the new opportunity, rose swiftly and fired on the bandit who had put a restraining hand on his cowardly companion. 2.
The coward spun wildly around drawing his gun and firing before the man with the gun could react. He caught a bullet in his shoulder and stumbled backward. The bandit fired again but missed giving the man a chance to recover. He rushed forward gun blazing until the coward hit the dirt with a thud. 1.
There was a momentary quiet. Then a single shot. The man felt the hot blood spilling out of his gut. Much too slowly he turned to the man who had killed him, the wounded bandit slumped against the boulder. They looked at each other silently, firelight dancing over their faces. Then the man with the gun took aim and shot the man who killed him in the head. 0.

He fell to his knees then, still holding his gun. 15 years and six men gone. 20 horses and one girl.
“Lizzie!” he shouted, “Lizzie Benson!”
It took a while, but the girl returned from the darkness and crept carefully over the bodies, kicking one that was still breathing. She came and stood in front of the man on his knees who was struggling to breathe.
“Lizzie.” he said.
She stared at him, the dirty gag still in her mouth. He motioned her closer and she got down on her knees in front of him. Letting go of his gun, he reached around her head and untied the gag.
He pulled a knife out of his boot and cut the rope that bound her hands.
Wincing in pain he dropped the knife and placed a hand on his blood-soaked belly.

“Who are you?” she asked.
“I met you when you were a baby.” he managed to say. “You must be 12 now.”
“13.” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember you.”
“Doesn’t matter.”  he said. It was getting hard to see her, shadows were bleeding over her face, green eyes, red hair, freckled cheeks. “Your sister Margarette came and got me. She’s at Doc Hoverstad’s now. You know the place?”
“Yes, I do.” she answered.
“She’ll be needing you now. You better take those horses. Those are your horses.”
He couldn’t see her at all now, just the front steps of the farm house, the door slightly ajar. He must have fallen over because he could feel the hard earth against his shoulder. Her hand was resting delicately on the other shoulder.
“You know the way home?”
“I think so.” She was crying, he could hear it in her voice, but he was looking at that door, slightly ajar.
“North east. You can wait till the sun comes up, follow your own tracks back. You can take my belt, take my guns.”
“Mister, won't you come with me?” she sniffled.
“Not this time.”

He turned away from the door, heard it shut behind him, and looked out at the wide blue sky. His guns were hanging at his side, his horse was saddled and waiting. He smiled at the sun  from under the brim of his hat and mounted in a swift fluid motion. Feeling young and feather light, swifter than lightning, he gave a little kick and was off, riding into an unfamiliar landscape, strangely beautiful, eternally uncertain, overflowing with terror and delight.

Worlds

The body is alive.
How many moons have I in this skin?
Looking out, the night sky is littered with light.
Other stars, other worlds. 
The celestial is within, flowing through each limb. 

The body is alive.
The dark pattern of galaxies, the rings of Saturn illuminated by the sun.

The body is alive. 
A young girl in a bed, naked and reading. 
For the moment of one inhalation she can feel the enormity of the cosmos. 
Space stretching further than the mind could touch.
Endless endlessness
dark and speckled with light and solar flares. 

She looks out the window and sees a palette of greens and shifting leaves. 
Blue skies and the faint wisps of clouds.
Beyond the atmosphere, it is all there, as ephemeral as her own body. 
We shift together.  The body on earth, the earth around the sun, the sun around the galaxy. 
Shifting together as one massive entity.

How blind!
Caught up in shopping trips and career plans and the dinner menu. 
The furthest stars shine, exposing themselves as worlds unto themselves. 

I know them. 
The wormhole is here taking me from one state to the other. 
The mind opens with many doors,
I step through the threshold over and over,
finding myself a little ahead,
sometimes many steps behind.

The body is alive. 
The leaves shine, letting in speckles of light and creating layers of shade and shape. 
I am a universe unto myself, a uterus of creation eating the blood that lines me. 
The stars are fed, they cannibalize the glory.

Super Ball

Who sits with me this morning?
My grandmother is here with bare feet, even though in life I never saw her stand on bare feet but always shod in fur lined booties, boxes of which were stockpiled in the guestroom closet. I saw her feet bare only if she lay down on her bed to watch talk shows on the beautiful old Zenith on her dresser.
That television had a special smell about it and of course it looked different from our televisions at home, even though I can barely remember the precise details of its form. I can remember that it looked stylish. This was a television set from the old school, a television built with a modern luxurious look in mind. A television that was good to look at even when it was shut off. I used to get close to it and press my nose against it to smell its special smell.
My grandparents had a way of preserving everything as if their house were a comfortable museum. Nothing ever got dirty or wore out. Things maintained the smell they came out of the box with and contributed that odor to the mix so that a new Zenith television set mingled with vanilla and licorice and coffee and wood and clean linens and sand.
Did you know that the sand of the desert has a smell? That even inside of the house you can smell the desert beyond the four walls? You can. It has its own special smell, clean and dusty all at once. Maybe the only way for you to understand what I’m talking about is for you to get into your car and drive to Phoenix.
I loved it there, not only in the house and yard which, against nature's desire, was a lush green paradise, but also on the streets. I loved the stark nakedness of everything, the sun tormenting all surfaces with its unashamed glare, the cacti and sand in center dividers and planters boxes, the hundred plus degree heat bouncing back up from asphalt and concrete, making waves in the view of the world and warming scrawny little girls like me so that I could never feel cold again, never as long as I could recall Phoenix.
My grandmother is here with her bare feet, perhaps to remind me of that warmth that saturated me to the bone.
When I was very young she would come out onto the porch carpeted with Astroturf and furnished with an electric reclining lounge. There was a lovely wooden shelf fashioned by my grandfather especially for holding a collection of little painted pots.
Inside of the pots we kept an assortment of small round super balls, the kind you could get for a quarter out of those red toped machines that lay in wait at the front of every grocery store. I had hot pink and electric green super balls and rainbow swirled super balls. We played with several at once, in no particular way that I can recall, because those little balls were so unpredictable. Once they had been released from the pots there was no stopping them, they bounced around like popping corn and there could be no joy in trying to catch them or pass them, only in setting them free to bounce like mad, then rescuing them once gravity had at last gotten the best of them. I would scramble around on hands and knees to retrieve them when nature had beaten them. I rescued them, my little friends who needed just a little help to begin their wild dancing again.
I never felt that I was too hot out there on the porch or in the yard. It was always too hot for my grandmother and she was very careful to take me back inside after a reasonable amount of time had passed and there re-hydrate me with a mixture of apple cider vinegar in water.
No one could ever reproduce my grandmother's apple cider vinegar and honey. I remember returning home and feeling the desire for one. I asked my mother to prepare it. The taste was awful. Being an honest child I told her, so that she could try again, and she did, again and again, to no avail. At last I stopped asking.
It must be terrible to discover that there is something that someone else can do for your child which you cannot emulate, especially when that someone is the mother of your husband and comes to your house for the holidays to complain of everything.
My grandparents could not be satisfied by my mother's pathetic efforts at home making. Unconvinced of her ability to even launder linens properly, they packed their own wash cloths and towels when they came to visit. Certain that they liked the expensive apple turnovers from the town's only doughnut shop, my mother bought them for breakfast every time they were with us, until at last my grandparents complained that she only ever gave them one thing. She was stung. I can remember her saying that they couldn’t be satisfied.
After that she no longer wished to go along when my father and sister and I visited them in their desert. She said that they made her feel unwelcome in their home. She told me once that they insinuated that they didn’t have room for all of us.
In retrospect, now that I can eat and bath myself without my family’s assistance, I feel that I would not invite my mother to my house either, nor my father for that matter. Most days I think that I would not invite my grandmother either, but now she is here, barefoot.
I feel that I have to explain.
In the early days when we played super ball on the back porch or turned the barstools over inside the kitchen to make me a doggie house, my grandmother and I were bosom buddies. My grandfather seemed rather too grouchy for my taste during that time and if I had had to pick just one to keep and one to throw away, I would have kept my grandmother.
As I grew older this changed. As little breasts budded on my chest and acne swallowed my face, my grandmother could no longer bear the heat outside at all. If I wanted to go out I went out alone. Her favorite thing to do with me now was to discuss awkward subjects such as premarital sex and homosexuality and the use of condoms.
My grandfather now enlisted my help in running errands. He enjoyed leaving early before the heat had fully come to settle on things and preferred to visit various different specialty stores to obtain all of the things my grandparents required to maintain their existence.
I soon intuited that part of his motive in getting one thing here and another there had less to do with the quality of this or that item and more to do with the interactions he had with each of the shop keepers. Even in the chain grocery store the manager would come out to say hello and the clerks could call him by his first name.
One day as we cruised down those scorching streets in his white Buick, my grandfather asked if I enjoyed running errands with him. I told him heartily that I did which put him into a great state of peace and contentment.
My grandmother could rarely be coaxed out of the house. This had been going on since before I was born. My father later revealed to me that back during my super ball days my grandfather had come to him in a shambles. He told my father that he wanted to kill himself because he was so lonely. My grandmother would never leave the house with him, not for dinner, not for a movie, not for dancing or ice cream or to watch sunrises. She gave the same strange excuse for every occasion; she was afraid of picking up fleas. My father begged my grandfather not to do it. He suggested that my grandfather try having affairs with other women before he turned to such a drastic measure. My father was always glad to conclude the story by saying that his suggestion had done the trick.
Slowly it was my grandmother who began to appear to my adolescent eyes as a grouch. Now that I was at an age to understand, she could do little more than tell sad stories again and again, and ask those same awkward questions suggested to her by day time talk shows.
My grandfather, on the other hand, could now interact with me in ways that he had been unable to interact with a connoisseur of super ball and games of doggie. He taught me to bake, and tried to show me how mechanical things worked. He took me to a vineyard to pick grapes, and to a sandy place where we watched people fly remote control gliders. And he introduced me to all of the little casual acquaintances that made his life worth bearing. He beseeched me not to reflect on the dark side of life but to embrace beauty while it was there to be had.
“Dark times always come. They will find you. So don’t go looking for them, enjoy the sun while it is here.” Then, with difficulty, he told me a little of his experiences in WWII as a young German fighting on the Eastern front.
“We were just kids. We didn’t want to be there. We would have preferred to be dancing, listening to music…people here don’t understand, we had no choice. Dark times.” He shook his head and looked out the window, gazing far away, into a place beyond the scope of the window, a place I couldn’t see. “Maybe you‘ll be lucky and never see such times.”
I was much closer to him by the time that he passed away, whereas by the time my grandmother left the world I hardly recognized her. Confined to a wheelchair, she unable to do more than grunt and exhibit behaviors that seemed selfish and cruel.
That was how I last saw her before she died sequestered in that house with my uncle as her keeper. At that time both house and yard had fell into terrible disrepair.
But now my grandmother is here again, standing with bare feet in the yard where green grass is beginning to push up through the old yellow stuff. She is standing and talking, just as she could when I was a child, and she is asking me if I will help her by playing with tennis balls on the porch. I feel that this will make her stronger but it is difficult for me to hold the tennis balls in my hands. They are too large and I can not juggle them.
Slowly it dawns on me… I know what we need. If my grandmother is to be fully restored, what we need to pass between us is not these furry offish tennis balls. We need super balls, tiny, lively, uncontrollable super balls. Then I will have my grandmother again. Then, at last we will be reunited. This is why she has come to sit with me this morning, unshod, to be alive again. Like a super ball that was lost under the recliner and now waits for me to set it free, my grandmother is here with bare feet.

The Knife

A strange senseless thing, Annette giving her that knife that night. Annette had barely had it for a month herself, it was a gift from Tom and Tom had gotten it from his younger brother Jules six months earlier. Where did Jules get it? A fascinating question beyond the scope of this particular exploration. It is only relevant to note that Jules had hardly looked at the knife during the time that it was in his possession, and Tom had only practiced opening and closing it before giving it to Annette. Why did Tom give the knife to Annette?
It was a very simple stainless steel blade that folded into a black handle, the sort of thing that could be purchased in a sporting goods store, or a gun shop, or even at an army surplus store. Tom personally had no practical use for a knife, his chief interests being theater, literature, theater, and other boys. Looking at the knife, several times, he had thought it could be used to slit his own wrists or to cut his chauvinistic father's throat while the sweaty old man slept, but he had sharp razors to do the first job and too much sensitivity to do the second.
Annette was tall and lean and had blonde hair that had been shorn irregularly by her own hand in a self destructive rage. She wore cut off blue jeans and polyester shirts found in the thrift stores of San Jacinto and Sun City, which as everyone knew was where senior citizens were sent to die in sardine cans with white quartz lawns. If you needed a gaudy polyester shirt, you were sure to find one there.
Tom gave Annette the knife because he hoped that she really did possess all of the conviction he lacked. If he said idly, bitterly, that they should climb to the rooftop of the theater department and spill bags of animal blood over the kids in the quad while shouting that it was Tom’s AIDS infected blood, Annette seemed to consider it a valid pursuit. Whether she really would have done it or not, Tom was never brave or desperate enough to find out. The two were engaged in perpetual games of intellectual chicken, and Annette rarely backed down.
She was very touched by the gift of the knife. It felt as if, for the first time in her life, she was being given power rather than having it taken away. One night after her parents had administered the usual dose of psychological abuse, Annette crawled behind her dresser and, using the knife, carved something like a poem into the soft pine.
Three nights later, after work at the cinema, Annette gave the knife to Lisa. They were sitting in Annette’s room on the white day bed with porcelain balls on the posts. Lisa explained that she planned to move to New York within the month to go to broadcasting school. Annette’s blue eyes grew wide with wonder and empathy as Lisa confessed her fear of that distant Metropolis in which she planned to meet or make her destiny. Annette retrieved the knife from behind the dresser and pressed it into Lisa's hand.
Lisa had only four fingers on her right hand. The middle finger had been cutoff at the knuckle by a rusty antique farm implement in the lot behind her parents' trailer. Both of her hands, her arms, her face, her entire body was covered with pale freckles. They littered her milky white skin like stars in the night sky viewed from a high place beyond the smog and light pollution of the Inland Empire. Her hair was shockingly orange and curly.
What did she feel as Annette pressed the knife into her hand? Did she feel the force of the desires of all the knife's previous owners, who, like her, dreamed in their own way of an end to this small suffocating world? A strange senseless thing, Annette giving her that knife that night. A small gesture in a chain of gestures, heavy with significance.

Details and Simplicity

I had returned from the Land of Many Wonders, a distant place which had been difficult to get to and to which I might never return. Suffering Girl was with me. She was sitting up on her rumpled bed, wearing only a thin white T-shirt and very thin white panties that distinctly outlined the shape of her crotch. I found the vision delightful and immensely desirable.
We were sitting by the tall half open windows of her room. A yellow light streamed through the glass and the thin brown curtains, turning everything in the room into a twilight shade of sepia. I could feel the soft cushion of her futon underneath me. My right hand was on her naked thigh, my left hand was pressing down against the white sheets that were crushed underneath my own weight.
I was looking into her eyes and she was doing her best to maintain her eyes on mine. Every so often she would look away, as if forced to do so by a force greater than her own will. She would then look towards the windows, towards the bookshelves where all her school books were waiting, to the notebooks that were still lying open in the middle of the room.
Her black hair was uncombed and a few strands were draped over her forehead and her eyes, in a way that made her even more desirable. When she spoke, her voice was soft and cautious, as if she was also aware of the delicacy of the moment, as if she knew how easy it would be to make it all go away.
“I really do need to understand it… I want you to listen to me and take what I say as seriously as you can… because I really do need to understand…men are like a strange mystery to me… for all the years that I have been around them, I can’t bring myself to a place where I feel safe in knowing what they really want…what are the thoughts that go on behind their eyes… I feel like I can never know their true hidden intentions…”
I looked at her eyes which were shifting again. For a moment her attention was lost outside as a car drove by, covering the tall windows in bright white light. The light splashed over us, and for a moment we seemed to be frozen white statues, captured for eternity in this second of tentative contact.
“The first time I ever felt like I could grasp the masculine point of view… it was when my friend told me about a friend of hers… an older man… I may have met him once… he wore overalls and drove a large pickup truck… maybe it was someone else…she said that he had slowly progressed from being just a man… a sometimes happy man… a regular man… he had progressed from being what I had known… what I had maybe known… he had gone from that to a state of total impotence and insecurity…a state where he couldn’t do anything, where he didn’t have any strength or power of his own…and it had all happened because of his relationships with women… women had done this to him…that was the first time I understood that just like men can destroy women, so can women destroy men…”
Her black eyes opened up wide and she tried to explore my thoughts without asking, silently begging me to say something, to make a comment, to agree with or contradict what she was saying. I let my eyes remain on hers and I waited for her to continue.
“I need you to tell me the details of what happens… I need to know what it’s like from your perspective… I need to know how things truly work behind your eyes… do you understand?… I need to go deep beneath the surface to find out what it is that you are hiding… what it is that you are all hiding. “
She took a deep breath and her small breasts rose up towards me. Her dark thick nipples poked against the fabric. My hand moved up her thigh and came to rest on her hip. I pushed my fingers under the elastic band of her panties and felt the softness of her soft flesh against my hand. She shifted on the bed slightly and the weight of her right leg came to rest on my knee.
Her eyes looked back at the window for a moment. A car drove by again, but this one was further away so the light didn’t hit us like before. We could only hear the sound of the motor as it approached and then faded away.
“I need you to tell me the details… you have to talk to me in a very clear and direct language… it is only through details and through simplicity that one can arrive at a complete and full comprehension of the spiritual state of another being.”
Her last sentence echoed through the room like a big brass bell. Her voice had changed as she said it, it had become thicker and stronger and much more precise. I took a deep breath myself, sensing that something else had entered the room and that it was now my turn to speak at last.
“I believe that the way in which you are now speaking contradicts what you are apparently saying.”
As soon as I said it, she got very flustered. Her head shook and her eyes darted from one corner of the room to another. Her mouth opened and her white teeth pushed out between her thin lips, in a kind of nervous smile that begged for a kind of underlying sympathy. I stayed still and watched her. I couldn’t say why my words had the effect they were having but it was clear that something had been stirred within her.
“What was wrong with the last sentence I spoke? What was wrong with it?”
Her whole face was now a mask of fear and insecurity. It slipped through her black eyes like cold water pouring softly onto the bed where we sat.
“It was not just the last sentence… it was the last several sentences that you spoke…”
I looked down at her naked thighs and my fingers traced a curved shape around her hips, trailing slowly towards her buttocks. Her brown nipples were distinctly outlined under her white T-shirt and I felt a strong urge to pull it over her head to reveal them in their complete nakedness, to make them vulnerable to my hungry mouth.
“Please explain what you just said… please explain it to me… I need to understand it…it is very important for me that I understand…”
I shook my head slowly, with a sense of finality that she immediately recognized.
“I would rather kiss you,” I said and, before I was finished saying it, my face was moving slowly towards hers, as my right hand fingers closed around the soft flesh of her upper thigh.
She nodded just as slowly, lowering her eyes, as if resigned to the invisible cage of our mutual desire.
“Ok, then kiss me…”
I pressed my lips against her mouth and my tongue sneaked out to meet hers in a no-man’s land of shared saliva and burning lust. But then I felt a certain taste that I didn’t recognize, it was on her lips, on her tongue, on her teeth.
I pulled away and looked at her. Here, in this quiet space of flowing words and effortless movement, the taste had been a warning, a clear message from places I couldn’t yet reach.
My thoughts suddenly turned back to the Land Of Many Wonders. I traveled back to the one moment when, staring at a barren cliff made of broken silver stone, I had decided to return to this place, to this city where I now found myself.
I knew then that, notwithstanding any other reasons I may have said to myself in that one moment of cold monumental darkness, the real reason I had returned was here before me, it was sitting across from me on her rumpled bed, wearing only two small pieces of clothing that she was eager for me to remove, looking at me with wide black eyes and wondering why I had stopped kissing her.
I had wanted to return. I had left behind all the many possibilities of that far away land to which I might never return. I had done it all for her, for the dream that was her, for the unresolved story that was her, for the flesh and the bones and the generous open wounds that were her. I had wanted to return so I could hold her and kiss her and penetrate her and dissolve myself in her, for as long as I could imagine doing so.
Now I was doing what I wanted. She was here, she was mine, she was ready to give herself to me in any way I decided. And I suddenly knew that I had made a terrible mistake.
I reached towards her again. I kissed her neck and her cheeks and her collarbone. I told myself that here she was, what I had wanted then, what I had wanted before, what I had always wanted. Here she was. Here it was. I couldn’t have asked for anything more.
But the sudden understanding would not go away. It had come to settle upon me like a big black bird that opens his wings in a clear majestic gesture before coming to rest on the peak of a mountain. It was here within me and it was here to stay.
I eventually kissed her again, and her tongue ran over mine and my own ran deep into her open mouth, licking at her cheeks from the inside, at her teeth, at her thin pale lips. The choice had been made, and the Land Of Many Wonders had vanished behind a veil made of soft white flesh and moist pink desire. It was too late to turn back. It was too soon to move forward. For now I could only love her. For now I could only enjoy all that would soon go away.

Moments

Thad stood by the wall waiting for her. His dark hair hung around his pale face making his blue eyes blaze as though they were lighted stained glass. When she came he watched every detail of her, the jaunty walk that carried her, the long dirty blond hair swaying, the fingers that pushed it back, the smile that flashed across her face to greet him. He was so absorbed in all of these details, drawing them in like a plant drinking up sunshine, that he hardly moved. His smile was brief and only skin deep, his eyes blazed on like deep blue wounds, unaffected by the momentary twitch of his lips. She had the camera in her hands and was already raising it to take his photo. Now he moved, raising a hand.
“Wait a minute, your taking my picture?”
“Yeah.” She said looking at him above the camera, still smiling.
“Why?” he asked, and she shrugged in response,
“Because you look good.”
“I mean what are you going to do with it? It’s not for a project or something, is it? I don’t want to see myself on flicker.”
Now it was her turn to ask,
“Why?” she let the camera drop a little.
“Because I don’t want other people looking at me, I don’t like feeling like I’m on display. You’ve been taking all these pictures. What are you doing with them?”
“Well,” she said, lowering the camera entirely, “Nothing yet. What’s the matter? I thought we were having fun?”
“We have been, it’s just that I want the fun to be between us. These are our moments. I don’t want to share them.”
Her cheeks flushed with color. He watched the smile and the warmth flee from her eyes. When it went away he felt as though he was being stabbed in the heart. She was drawing it back into herself, refusing to share.
“Nothing is ours, Thad. We’re borrowing time from death.” She said coolly.
She was being philosophical, as she was prone to be. So beautiful, so warm and open and then so cold and incomprehensible. Why? Why couldn’t she just enjoy being together? Why did she have to constantly take pictures and say things that baffled him?
“What do you mean?” he asked her.
“I mean that we don’t own anything. We are temporary occupants of these bodies, and this world. These aren’t our moments, these are just moments that we are a part of.”
These words pushing him away, he struggled for a foothold.
“It’s like you don’t even want to be in the moment. You’re just hiding behind the camera. What are you hiding from?”
Now her eyes seemed to be screaming, icy gusts of wind howling around his bones. Her voice was rigid, measured.
“I’m not hiding.” She said, “I am here. I see the moment as precious too. And I know that it’s temporary, that it will vanish, so I seize it, I do something with it, instead of letting it wash passively over me. I engage it. Because I care. Because it isn’t just about me.”
The sun was sinking behind the buildings at her back, tucking its light safely away.
“You’re trying to capture it, but then it’s just dead.” He said.
Shadowy coolness kissed their skin.
“Don’t tell me what I’m trying to do.” She answered. She didn’t yell, but the words were severe, punishing. “I know what I’m doing. And I can do it somewhere else, with someone else if you don’t want to.”
She stared at him and their eyes locked in a silent battle, a tug of war between souls. Then she turned her back on him and walked away, a breeze catching her hair as she went.
He watched her details receding, drew them into himself greedily, stoking the green fires in his gut, wanting, and hating simultaneously. She disappeared out of the gate and around the corner, leaving him alone, standing by the wall in the diminishing light, a picture that would never be taken.

A Walk Under Moonlight

She stepped out the front door and into the warm summer night. Behind her was a cream colored condo, consisting of the same shapes and lines as the hundreds identical to it along the street. Above, there was the white shape that greeted her each night. Always there, always present, whether she looked or not.
Tonight, it was full and shadowed lightly by just a few transparent clouds that glowed in its light. She could still feel the yellow light of her house, the florescent bulbs of the kitchen, the deep gold of the lamps in the living room, she could see more coming from the windows of her neighbors, but with each step she took, she shed it just a little more, like soft filament falling from her skin.
The world beyond the walls of her small house were alive, illuminated by another type of light. She heard frogs somewhere close by. The night was electric with stars, each competing for the brightest twinkle. She brought the long tail of her headscarf around her neck with a gentle tug. In the moonlight, no one could tell its color, but it was her favorite silk scarf, a mixture of orange, gold and pink.
She was not sure what compelled her to paint her lips and wrap her favorite, most exquisite possession around her head, especially when she just needed to walk three blocks to the small store on the corner for a gallon of milk, but she had felt the urge and didn’t stop herself.
The wind was soft and rippled the edges of her scarf with a delicate hand. She felt something that night, something so light and ephemeral it could have just blown past her, like a crumpled leaf forever drifting to the edges of the world. But though it was soft and delicate, she felt it so strong that it sunk in deep, it buried itself in memories and held on.
That night, more than any other before it, she felt relaxed in her pale white skin, beautiful and alive and open to anything that might come her way. The dark bushes along the sidewalk edges looked inviting and beautiful, like they were ready to play. She took her steps carefully and slowly, savoring the breeze and her time alone in the night. She allowed her feet to feel each step along the uneven sidewalk.
She smiled at the tree roots, claiming their dominance over concrete. She nodded, it was how it should be. She smiled faintly to herself, so happy to be outdoors, so happy in the night, so relaxed and beautiful and under a white moon.
It was her calm, easy breaths that made her pretty, her openness to the dark sky and the colorless leaves and the sidewalk on its way to destruction. Briefly she wondered if her inner change was brought by the orgasms she had had in the afternoon, or the warm bath, or the hours alone in her room with a comforting cigarette and plenty of water and apples.
In those hours alone, in the light of the afternoon that slowly shifted to blue, and then black, she had looked into the mirror and she saw what others could never see, perhaps what she did not allow them to see. But now, on her way to the store, she allowed her insides to pour out.
“Here I am,” her body shouted, only there was no one there.
She longed for conversation, for something meaningful and enchanted to spring from the bushes or emerge from the cracks in the sidewalk, but no one stopped, no lips, no man, no pulsing fairy. It was just her, and the trees and the bushes, the sidewalk and the stars. The darkness, and the walk to the store.
She was there, as pretty as the most masterful painting, and she walked, with her head up and looking towards the moon. With each step, her gaze softened just a bit more and her smile grew with seduction. Only, there was no one there. No person. So she let the night rub at the edges of her body, she let the moon invade her as it wished. The night was hers and she belonged to the night.

Dancer

Curls of smoke lifted and writhed their way to the yellowed ceiling to leave their own contribution to the collected stain. Morgan watched them as though they were spirits, the agonized souls of the girls around her, seated at their lighted mirrors applying lip gloss and gluing on feathery lashes, their spirits dancing around them begging for attention and as always being ignored.
“What’s got into you?”
Darla breathed out a stream of smoke as she asked. It was she that puffed and puffed on the little Virginia slims giving a pale wispy shape to their souls. Her hair was glossy and black, her lips eternally pouty, her voice deep and sultry.
“Nothing.” Morgan answered dismally and Darla snorted and flicked ashes right onto the top of the vanity, disregarding the green glass ash tray all together.
“It’s not nothing babe. Something’s eating you. You’ve been sitting there staring at the ceiling like the blessed virgin was up there having a clam bake.”
“It’s nothing.” Morgan repeated and shook her head to clear the cobwebs, to clear the curls of smoke.
“Mmm,” Darla pursed her lip and snuffed the cigarette out on the table top leaving an ugly burn on the white Formica. She began to peel her lashes off and put them away in a little acrylic container.
“Well that was your last set. You gonna get dressed or are you planning to walk home that way?”
Morgan looked down at her bare leg peaking out of the crack of her silk robe. Her panties and hose were still clamped in a tight fist at her side. She jammed them into her purse, which was sitting on the counter in front of her and she dared to face herself in the mirror. Hurriedly she wiped the make up away and peeled her own lashes off and took the lift out of her hair. She let the robe fall over the chair and reached under the counter for her duffle bag and pulled out the valure sweat suit stored there, a nice anonymous black number. Having slipped into the bottoms and zipped herself into the top, she tied her hair back with a cloth band and sighed at the pile of crumpled green bills still laying out on the vanity top. She grabbed them up and jammed them unceremoniously into her open purse. She was aware of Darla watching her out of the corner of her eye. She grabbed her purse and put it over her shoulder as she stood.
“Hang on.” Darla said putting the last two finishing strokes into her sleek black hair. “I’ll walk out with you.”
Jack escorted the two ladies to their cars, his massive hands poised protectively high in the center of their backs, one lady on each side of him. Hanging around the back corner of the building on the edge, where the light from the lamp faded, a man in a sweaty white T-shirt under a flimsy windbreaker stood with hands in his pockets. One look from big black Jack sent him scurrying off, away from the girls and into the darkness like an oversized roach. When Darla was installed in her blue Toyota and Morgan was unlocking her own car door the Jack of Spades, as they liked to call him, said,
“Good Night Miss Morgan. You take care.” And he smiled warmly. His voice was so velvety soft with brotherly concern that Morgan had to smile genuinely, not one of those fake smiles that she rained on the gentlemen in the club like plastic Mardi Gras beads all night. Then she slipped into the open door of her battered white Nissan and Jack closed the door for her.
Driving home, she took a detour, a long open ended far out of her way detour. It took her through a quiet little neighborhood with yards and bike paths and windows aglow with light. It reminded her somewhat of the tract of houses where she had been raised hundreds of miles away. She could nearly see herself running barefoot through the yards and skipping rope, and later climbing out of back windows and hitchhiking as far out of town as she could get before a state trooper picker her up and brought her back to her mortified parents. At that time, the idea of escape had been all consuming, getting away from the nowhere and the life that her mother lived, that of an uninteresting housewife whom no one thanked or loved. Eventually she had escaped from the suburbs, when she was old enough to drive herself out and make her way to a big old city. And maybe at first she had felt free, before the electricity was shut off and the realization that she couldn’t make rent on waitressing tips set in. Then she had scrambled to find a gig that made better money. Her parents thought that she was employed with a modern dance company in Oakland.
Parked in front of some stranger’s house, the tears began to flow. Watching the ghost of herself playing ballerina in a driveway. This was escape? This was escaping the fate of her mother? Alone in a huge violent mysterious place where only a handful of slobs knew she existed for a few moments when she was under the lights and they were cramming their filthy money into her g-string. The girl in her railed against the bars of her chest, demanding an escape. Demanding to be noticed, to be freed. Morgan choked back the tears and started the engine of her car again. Her headlights swept over the road ahead wavering as she left the ghost ballerina to dance to an empty street, twirling towards the abyss.

First Blood

“Elizabeth.”
Even before she opened her eyes, she could see the contradiction. The softness of her mother’s hazel eyes that mixed like a winding snake through the stern tone that only slightly dimmed the sparkle in her gaze.
“Elizabeth. It is time to wake from your dreams. Let the colors rest, they will reappear once again when the sky turns dark. Elizabeth, I want you to listen to me. Today is a new day, yesterday on the eve of the solstice you began your first blood. Now is the time of change. It will never again be as it was.”
With sleepy eyes, she looked at her mother, regal in her flowing gown of black and gold satin. Yards and yards of fabric draped from her shoulders. Her large breasts bulged slightly beneath the dress, but those were the only clothes the eye could see. every other inch of her, even her ankles and toes were buried beneath her soft gown. An inch tall golden crown ringed the top of her head and a ruby stud stood like a drop of blood atop each earlobe.
Her mother walked towards her bed from the open arc of the doorway she had stood beneath.
“These are yours now Elizabeth, these are the earrings of blood. The gift your grandmother left to you, the gift you will one day leave to your granddaughter, for the blood is the gift of all women. It is the river of life, the red current that flows from your legs.”
She looked into the eyes of her mother, the eyes which were so soft and green, the eyes that smiled at her with the ever-flowing love of a glimmering waterfall. But there was something else, perhaps a sadness, something that Elizabeth had never seen, a sort of pain that leaked from the deepest cracks and fell into her open eyes. She looked from her mother’s eyes to her open hand. In it were two ruby stud earrings, the same as her mother now wore. A lone red stone on a simple gold pin. Red the color of blood, of fresh cut life.
“Wear them,” her mother said. “They are a symbol of what you now carry, of what you can now do, of the power you now have. They are the symbols of a new time. You are new, not as you once were. You are different and the court will now see you as such. Your dolls must be put away, today, all the things of your girlhood will go, you are now an empress.”
The words stung and prickled the place between her own growing breasts, she looked up and saw the weight of them in her mother’s eyes, then she looked around the room.
It was a girl’s chamber, the only place in the entire walled compound that was entirely her own. Pink curtains hung from the series of tall glass windows that overlooked a green countryside. In the corners of her room were the mountains of stuffed animals she still played with and occasionally cuddled at night. There was her collection of dolls on the wooden shelves. Her eyes scanned the room until they settled on the dress hanging over the back of a chair. Her mother looked at her, then to the chair with the pink velvet dress draped over it.
“The dress will have to go too.”
She turned to look at her mother, turning her head more slowly than she ever had.
“No,” she said in a careful tone, “please, not the party dress. It’s the only thing I want. You can take everything else, just please, do not take it away.”
There was absolute pleading in her eyes. A desperation in which her mother would never be able to forget. And though her heart hurt, she pulled the words out.
“It’s a symbol of your girlhood, Elizabeth. How will you be an empress, how will you learn to rule if you cannot separate yourself from the things of girlhood?”
“I’ll be able to do everything, as you have told me before, much of what we do comes from the inside, not from what we wear.”
“It is both Elizabeth. It is how others see us, as well as how we see ourselves. As you begin this new path, there cannot be any confusion within you. You must be clear of your purpose. The dress might only confuse you. You are now a woman and an empress.”
They both turned to the dress, a mess of pink fabric and layer upon layer of a lacy white petticoat. Her mother spoke without turning her head.
“Your first blood has come Elizabeth. It is time for you to understand the change as deeply as the rest of us understand it. The dress is of your girlhood, as are the toys. This is a new phase, the true change will come from within you, you must understand it and come willingly to your destiny.”

The Chariot And The Wheel Of Fortune

The desert landscape stretched out on either side of the black tongue of road in expanses of flat tan earth and distant purple peaks interrupted by the occasional sequoia. The old Dodge Dart rumbled along that line, a streak of pale banana yellow with chrome fenders and black wheels and white letters spinning so that they were a white line racing around and around on the surface of dark rubber.
Inside it was difficult to hear the radio over the roar of the air outside engulfing and rattling the old vehicle as it sped along. It was now picking up mostly static anyway. With one hand on the wheel, Daniel reached for the silver knob of the radio tuner, a burning cigarette poised between his index and middle finger so that he manipulated the dial between his thumb and ring finger. More static rose, some talk, then he tried the AM and at last clicked it off.
The wind roared in through the open window and he put the cigarette in his mouth and inhaled and switched hands so that he could let one arm rest on the open window and the other could cling to the wheel. His black hair rose in a wave at the crown of his head, rippling in the chaotic current of air. A green rectangle appeared on the right shoulder and grew in size as he approached it. It informed him in neat white letters that Phoenix was 250 miles away.
The sun was beginning to descend behind those distant peaks leaving a purple and orange band in the sky. He estimated that in another three or four hours he would arrive. And then what? Well he would get a room, of course, and then dial the most precious number in the little black book residing in the back pocket of his blue jeans. Or maybe he’d just find his way straight to the address that was written in wavering blue ink under the phone number, all of which was scrawled under the name “Sue” on the first page marked by the tab labeled “Q, R, S”. He would park against the curb in front of a house with a lawn of white quartz rock glittering under the moonlight and make his way up the Astroturf carpeted front walk. With the hand that was now on the steering wheel, he would then rap on the door and there would be shuffling inside and the sound of muffled voices as her grandparents wondered who it could be. Then the door would open a crack and blue eyes would peer out and widen in disbelief and the door would be opened wider and Sue would cry,
“Daniel!” and then she would at last know that he loved her because he had crossed the Mojave to find her.
As the desert air cooled he took a last drag off the cigarette and dropped the glowing butt out the window so that it hit the asphalt and showered tiny red sparks into the darkness.
The sun finally disappeared entirely and purple night wrapped itself around the lone vehicle cruising over the endless road. Now he turned on the headlights and they illuminated only the small patch of highway ahead of him. Chilled by the impending desert night, Daniel rolled the window up, and it was then, just as it closed, that there was a tremendous POP! And a thunka, thunka, thunka, and he had to grab the wheel with both hands to maintain control of the Dart and pull it over onto the dusty shoulder of the road.
He sat quietly with both hands on the steering wheel after the engine had been turned off. The silence cloaked him under the emergent twinkling of stars and deepening of night. The full knowledge that the spare tire wasn’t there crept over him and he continued to sit still feeling the vision of Susan fade away to be replaced by a small nagging creature; a little thing that was formless and faceless and caused goose bumps to form on his forearms. A thing called dread. Dread, bathed in isolation and the splendor of an awakening black night.

The New World Of Sticks

The sun shines down on the little garden, bathing it in a strong heat that would bring small buds to bloom. The narrow rectangular yard is enclosed by a tall wooden fence and stuffed with young gardenia trees and a hedge of rosemary and lavender. It is a garden for smelling above all else, the shrubbery was planted with the nose in mind and not the eyes. Jasmine covers the back fence, transforming the wooden planks of the border into a wall of green and white speckles.
Beneath the lavender blooms, nearly hidden from sight below the thicket of pale green and purple is a young girl. Her bare feet are caked in dust, creating the look of a pale brown shoe that is corrected only by looking at the small toes tipped in pink nail polish. She squats close to the ground and her long brown braided hair sweeps along the soil like the tender caress of a broom.
The girl does not notice her hair, tipped with the earth’s dust, nor the shoes of soil she wears, all her attention is on the ground before her. She has arranged a series of vertical sticks in a circle and some tender green leaves from the jasmine bush have been impaled on thin twigs, creating flags for her city beneath the lavender canopy.
She has been in the same spot for hours, missing the lunch of macaroni and cheese her mother prepared and also the visit from her friend Dave from next door. She didn’t hear them calling or feel the pangs of hunger. Nothing distracted her from creation. She created a world, and she could feel nothing but the rush of excitement as the small city of wood and leaves came together.
She sits still, adding the last touches of thin sticks and then places one solitary lavender stem in the center of the city-circle. The metal latch of the back gate slams closes and she looks up. Through the fragrant stems she sees her brother walking along the back side of the house, approaching the door that leads to his bedroom in the converted garage.
“Sean!!” she cries excitedly. She jumps up, her pigtails gathering a few yellowed leafs as she runs through a hedge of geraniums. “Sean, come look at what I made. It’s a whole city. A whole world!”
He looks at her, at the little girl whose feet are covered in dirt, this little girl that smells of salt and sun and flowers. She’s running towards him, about to grab onto him as she always has.
“Mattie! Stop! You’re all dirty and I’m on my way somewhere. Don’t get me dirty, I don’t have time to change.”
“Sean! Come look at what I made,” she squeals excitedly, not hearing him.
“Don’t get me dirty Mattie, I’ll come look, but don’t get me all dirty.”
“Okay” she says, slowing down and turning in the direction of the lavender bush, “It’s this way. It’s in here.”
Sean walks towards the bushes and comes to the edge where the purple stalks become a wall. Mattie steps into the narrow path she has created among the lavender. She turns to him, “you have to come in to see it.”
Sean rolls his eyes. “Mattie, I told you…I can’t go in there, I’m going to get all messed up, I’m on my way somewhere. I’m going to get covered in that stuff.”
“Please, it’s so cool. I don’t want anyone to see it but you, it’s a whole world. It’s such a special place.”
“Look, I can’t get in there now, but I’ll look at it later, okay?”
She looks at him, wearing his clean jeans and crisp black blazer. He looks nice, and she wonders who he is going to see.
“Okay, you look nice. I guess you shouldn’t get all dirty, it’s just a little world. Maybe you can see it tomorrow.”
“Yeah, I’ll check it out tomorrow. I gotta go grab my stuff and leave now, okay?”
She nods and then Sean turns and walks towards his bedroom door. She takes another five steps and then kneels, her hair sweeping the soil once more. She takes a deep breath, then starts to breathe into the circle of the new world. Her breath becomes a slight wind and all the flags of leaves begin to flutter.

The Emperor And The Moon

Sara bent over the bucket of foaming suds and dipped the over sized sponge into the warm wetness. As she did so, the daisy dukes tightened and strained around her apple shaped ass. Her father, who had just come outside, blushed at the site of his 15 year old daughter’s figure poised so accidentally alluring. Immediately, a wall of words was raised between his forward consciousness, the “I” that he presented to the world, and the desire that had surged in the darkness of his heart and loins.
“Sara, telephone.” He called gruffly from behind his black beard and she started at the sound of his voice, then smiled and dropped the sponge into the bucket and hurried up the driveway. Her youthful breasts bobbed under the thin tank top as she lopped over to him, sandals click clacking on the concrete. He noticed that the white straps of her cotton bra were exposed over her bare shoulders.
“Who is it?” she asked breathily, chest heaving gently from the mild exertion.
“Somebody named AJ.” He told her, his voice still bear-like. Something in the tone made her feel guilty, although there was no spoken rule that had been broken. She reached for the phone, but he withheld it and said,
“You need to get inside and put something on. Those shorts are way too short.” The tone was accusing.
“All of my shorts are like these.” She protested in bewilderment.
“Well,” he said wagging his head, “You need to get in here and figure something out, because those are totally inappropriate.” And then he relinquished the phone and turning his back on her, he stomped back inside.
Sara clutched the phone in her hand and fought back hot tears. Guilt and rage and sorrow welled up in her chest and constricted her throat. Her mind howled with questions that danced around a central point: regret for having earned his disapproval. The intelligence in her struggled with the emotional storm of self loathing, reasoning that she had not done anything wrong, she was not trying to be “inappropriate”, which she knew really meant “sexual”, that others were defiling her with their inappropriate response to the sight of, what? Her bare legs? The parts of her body left exposed for comfort in the summer heat while she washed her father’s car?
The great excitement that had fluttered briefly through her belly upon hearing that a boy was calling for her had transformed entirely into a lead weight. This boy calling her also confirmed for her father her “inapropriatness”. Her overactive mind wrestling with her turbulent emotions churned out a suspicion that now that she had become the subject of this “inappropriate” attention. Her father no longer loved her and this in turn became a rage directed at herself, at her own body. At last she sniffed a constricted,
“Hello?” into the receiver.

Leaving

A small leather suitcase sits open-faced on a purple and white floral bedspread. Just a little over half full, there are neatly folded shorts and colorful T-shirts stacked in neat little squares. Along the edges are soft balls of black and white socks. A young girl stands close to the bedside. In her arms is a striped sun dress. She presses the garment to her body and folds it, placing it carefully into the suitcase that sits like an open mouth, waiting to take whatever she gives.
The room hold the remnants of a recent childhood. The walls are painted a pale shade of pink. A stack of teddy bears sit in the corner close to a near-empty closet and the dark light of the night is blocked by a red velvet window shade. It is a girl’s room, but the girl in front of the suitcase is no longer a girl.
She is slender and tall, just over 5’8. Long brown wavy hair cascades down her back, looking like the rushing movement of a waterfall. The girl wears a long flowing nightgown with a yellow floral print on a white background. It is an old fashioned nightgown, covering her arms and legs and reaching her collar, but even beneath the yards of flowing cotton fabric, the body of a young woman pushes through, pushing itself outward like a daisy meeting the sun. The fabric below the lacy neckline is bulging with pointed breasts, but she stands in her bare feet beside the bed, next to the collection of little dolls on her dresser, the new woman still swimming through the child-like waves of time.
An older man with a weathered face and graying hair stands in the doorway, it is a threshold he cannot cross. But he stands staring in, looking at the girl he can barely recognize. Who is this woman in a girl’s room? He clears his throat and finally gives voice to his thoughts.
“Gloria, I really don’t know what you’re doing. You just can’t take a bus and get dropped off in the middle of the city. They’ll eat you alive there out there! Come on! You know better than this. You don’t know anybody there, you don’t have any friends there, you don’t even have a place to stay for Christ’s sake! What do you think you’re doing? Are you trying to kill your old man?”
The young girl holds still, then tucks another folded sun dress into her suitcase. She turns to her father. The gray hair by his ears, the sagging skin below his chin, the lines around his eyes, he looks older than he had at dinner. Wherever there was skin, there were worry lines etched into his face, but they had been there for years, slowly getting more and more defined. She looked at him with a small smile, a little bit of sympathy welling in her heart, giving him the smile of the truly innocent.
“You don’t need to worry. I know what I’m doing-”
“How can you possibly know what you’re doing?” he interrupted. “You’ve never been there, you have no place to stay. This is a half-baked plan at best.”
“Look, I’m almost eighteen, I can take care of myself.” She heard a small snort come from him. “I do. I told you already, I’m going to get a hotel room until I can find a place.”
“Do you have any idea how expensive hotel rooms are in New York? Your birthday money is going to disappear like that!” he snapped his fingers and tried to look out the window, but it was covered in a red shade.
“Look, I got to do this. My teacher said I have talent. What better place to go? I’m going to get a job and an apartment and it’s all going to be fine.”
The old man shook his head. He was powerless, unable to stop his daughter with force or words. She just had no idea…no idea at all. He shook his head and looked at his shoes, unsure of what to do next. She turned away from him, picking up another cotton T-shirt and folding it, tucking it neatly into the suitcase, it alone was going with her, into the heart of the city.

Bunny Suit

The small storage room is crowded with large cardboard boxes of paper plates. Small boxes with white napkins and plastic drinking cups are scattered among the cartons of household cleaners and milk crates of packaged snack foods. Along the walls are old wooden shelves assembled by a forgotten handyman, each level stuffed with dusty unlabeled boxes that have been left for time to dispose of. The floor is a peeling particleboard that promises a new life within its cracks, a world of pressed fissures and lost landscapes, but there is no time to explore, the revelers are already outside and their sounds seep through the metal door that separates the storage room from the greater world. The cries from outside speak of shapes not yet seen and of laughter without reason. The room of many boxes shakes and rolls with the burden of forms. Circles, folded rectangles, plastic forks, spilled sugar packets. Used to quiet afternoons and the slow gathering of dust, the room with its lost inventory has a rarified stillness about it. Despite the noise seeping through the cracks, despite the vibrating walls, despite the four girls sitting among the piles of cardboard boxes. There is stillness, the all-encompassing silence before the orgasm. The moment of held breath, just the singular beat of life making its subtle music. The girls sit for lack of choice, there is no space but the one path in front of the door. It reaches through the heart of the space, crossing it like a path through the forest, then disappears into the mess of spilled boxes excreting their white paper blood.
Three of the girls are small and slender, just a few years over twenty. Norma lets her body melt into the unexplored floor, her eyes linger on the long strips of pressed wood beside her shoe, but she looks up and lets her back push into the forgiving wall of a worn box. Her head tilts slightly back, her eyes on the only thing moving. In the dim light it is hard to see, there are no windows. Somewhere far above, connected to the ground only with a long thin cord, is a lone light bulb.
Shouts of joy come in quick intervals from outside. The quiet neighborhood is alive with the bubbling of a growing celebration. The three slender girls are ready, but they are still and sit on the ground like relaxed statues. Three sets of eyes focus on Sheena, the largest of the four. She stands in the center of the small path through the room, wrestling with yards of furry fabric. The roundness of her thighs, the bulging ass and layers of stomach make it difficult for her to fit in the suit, but she pulls and zips and squeezes herself into the costume. She pulls the oversized head on and they are finally ready. Three young women and one gigantic gray bunny.
The fur is a welcome second skin. The streets are crowded and she would rather no one sees her pale wide flesh. Its just easier this way. Three pretty girls and one gray bunny. The people on the street will look at her, and for once, she will not be afraid to stare into their eyes. Only no one meets her stare. The street is full of revelers, only she is so strange, no one even turns their head in her direction. She wonders if they can tell she is inside. Do they know someone is inside? Do they care? “Hey, I’m human!” she wants to scream, but no one looks up. The frail looking couple, the old man, the skater boy, not one looks up from the sidewalk, not one looks into the plastic eyes of the bunny suit, no one searches for her own smaller pair seeking theirs. The corner of the street is packed with people, the crowd stands awkwardly at a street light, waiting for the signal to move. The big bunny face looks down, into the seat of a small gray stroller. A baby looks up, into the false plastic eyes that point in its own direction. The small face stares, a deadpan expression on its face for two seconds, then it erupts into a large smile.

Cathedral

Three girls walk down a wide sidewalk. The day is fresh and the sun shines calmly through the thin gauzy haze that lingers in the atmosphere and mutes the strength of the rays of light. There are a few single-story houses on their left and across the street on their right, a few small shops sit in the shade of mature maple trees that are just beginning to yellow. There is the invisible bubbling of activity-to-come. The air and pale light seems loaded and ready for a day of commerce and movement, but now, the street lays still and fresh. The air is moist as the wet and recently cleaned sidewalks begin the process of evaporation. The girls walk down the sidewalk in a horizontal line, taking up the walkway completely, but there is no competition for space. The world is theirs. They share the sun with the trees and birds and the evaporating dew. The girls have on a similar dress style and pattern, just the color of the floral cotton is varied. The dresses are slightly outdated, designed with a mixed inspiration from Little House on the Prairie and the simple cotton dresses of the late sixties. The skirts reach to the girl’s calves. Their arms are covered with thin cotton sleeves. The neckline reaches high above their collarbones and is ruffled, which adds just a little more fabric to cover their pale flesh. Each dress has a simple floral pattern on it made of very small bouquets of purple and yellow flowers.

The blond girl walks closest to the green lawns of the houses beside them. Her hair is pulled back in a loose bun and it matches the pale yellow cotton of her dress. She is the most confident of the three in their task and she walks with her eyes decidedly placed ahead of her. In front of them is a large cathedral. It is made of gray stones and has three peaks that each have a circular stained glass piece embedded in the stone peak. The blond girl walks just a fraction of a second faster than her two friends. In the center of the group is the girl with brown hair. Her cotton dress is white, but still matches her friend’s dress in style and pattern. The brunette has a long pale face and a long nose which reveals her Semitic ancestry. On her right is another friend, the girl with cropped black hair. The girls walk calmly and silently, but with slight smiles on their faces. Their silence is not rooted in fear, but in comfort. The massive stone cathedral stands before them, the sidewalk ends at the church’s wooden door and the three girls enter. The church seems to open into a large dark space before them and the Semitic girl wonders what is ahead. It is pitch black and blocked slightly by a few gauzy pieces of furniture. The three turn and walk to the right, to a yellow lit square area. It is not quite a separate room, because there is no wall to separate it from the main entryway of the cathedral, but the light and the space feels very distinct, like a gift shop. The Semitic girl has never been to mass before and she follows her blond friend’s lead. The black haired girl follows them.

The room is set up the same way that amusement parks use to contain the people waiting in line for rides, but instead of metal poles and ropes, the space is sectioned off using long rectangular tables. Although they have just begun the maze-like walk to the front, the brunette can see that at the end is the priest and six other high officials within the church. They sit behind a four-foot wall that has been created by removing the top park of the wall. The priest is in the center, with three officials on either side of him. The brunette puts her attention on the walk and on the blond friend in front of her that she is supposed to imitate. The tables used to cut the space are all covered in glittering jewelry. Not an inch of the tabletops can be seen below pearls and faux silver and gold. The gemstones are fake and give off exaggerated color and sparkle, as though trying to compensate for their falseness with their appearance. The brunette looks at them mildly as they walk through the mazelike formation of tables. A neon green gemstone necklace catches her eye as she turns to the left and around the table’s corner. On the periphery of the tables are a dozen women standing next to their strollers and attending to the children inside. The sound of unhappy babies coats the space in a slightly frantic energy. The three girls walk through the maze, turning left, then right, then left again. Finally they reach the front. Behind the hip-high wall, a priest in a white robe sits on a chair. He is old, everything about him is white. His skin, hair, robe and hat. The other officials beside him are all men. A few of them are wearing red robes, a few others are in black, two of them are in white.

The Semitic girl is immediately nervous, she is sure the priest will be able to tell that she is from a different heritage, that she has no business in this church. But as her friend steps out of the walkway of tables and into the open space before the officials, she does too. The brunette walks calmly, sandwiched between her two friends. The blond girl moves slowly, she knows her Semitic friend is watching and following her lead, just a split second behind. Sitting on a table is a long rectangular tray that has dozens of incense sticks on it. The smoke coming from the powdered sticks twists and curls as it makes its journey up into the higher levels of the room. The blond girl puts her hands into the movement of smoke, she turns them around and around, as though she was washing her hands with the water of a faucet. The Semitic girl does the same, letting the smoke bathe her skin in scent. Then the blond girl stands directly in front of the men, bending her knees and dropping to the floor in a show of devotion. The brunette does the same, just slightly out of unison. She bends her knees and kneels on the floor, then she folds her torso over her thighs and brings her face to the red carpet. Her black haired friend does the same beside her. In this position of obedience to authority, the girls are hidden from the priest by the short wooden wall that separates them. The blond begins to rise, as do the other two. The blond girl turns towards the door and before she leaves, she grabs a small cookie that sits in a multi-leveled altar space. The brunette sees the cookies and the adorned bookcase which holds them, but she does not grab one. She knows she should, that it is part of the ritual, but something does not connect her mind to her body and she exits the cathedral without accepting the body of Christ into her.

The blond and brunette stand close to each other on the sidewalk just outside of the church in the shadow of the massive peaked roof. The day is still bright and new. The black haired girl approaches them, “Here, you forgot this, I brought you one.” Her hand extends with a small chocolate chip cookie. The Semitic girl smiles and puts it into her mouth.