The Meeting

She pulled up to the café and saw that the lights inside were on still. It was past nine and all the other small cafes along the street were dark. The corner café was spilling its yellowness onto the sidewalk and into the dark night. Even though the lights were on, she could tell it was closed. It had that feeling, something that was finished, but still lingering. She pulled her car alongside the plate glass windows that acted as a wall. She shut the engine off and looked inside. There were two people inside behind the counter, both of them almost blocked from view by the large industrial coffee grinders and stacks of cups.
She put her purse in the trunk, put her cell phone and car keys in her pocket and then got out of the car. She shoved three twenties into her corduroy jacket pocket. She looked again through the café windows and saw Ronnie inside. The barista, now she could tell it was a young woman with long dark hair, was handing him two white paper cups of coffee over the cappuccino maker.
Suza walked away from the front glass door and strolled the length of the café, the entire front wall was made of plate glass windows. With her hands in her jacket pockets, she looked into the empty seating area at the far end of the narrow building. There were wooden tables and chairs and wooden bench seating built into the walls. On the wall above the bench seating were framed pieces of art arranged in a single row.
She turned to the left, towards the registers and the coffee grinders and equipment and saw Ronni standing in front of a narrow table against the window by the front door, fixing his coffee with cream and sugar. He looked up and they made eye contact. He smiled at her in recognition. She looked again towards the paintings on the wall, semi- abstract mountain scenes painted in a neutral orange and red palette. There was a small cork bulletin board just a few feet from her on the wall. It was crowded with so many paper signs, ads and posters that it seemed more like an interactive collage layered with old announcements and flyers.
She heard the sound of the glass door fifteen feet away and she looked towards it, towards Ronnie coming out of the door with two coffee cups in his hands. She walked towards him and he handed her a cup. “They’re closed but they still had some decaf,” he said.
“That was sweet of you,” she brought the cup to her chest, a source of warmth in the cold misty night. “I can’t even drink decaf, I still feel jittery when I drink it, but that was nice of you.”
She felt a mixture of sadness and harshness inside as she rejected his offering, his thoughtful token of affection.
He walked slightly ahead of her, walking towards a row of tables along the wall of the café perpendicular to the front and the street she had parked along. They sat for less than a minute. A wild gust of wind picked up and she felt the wind go inside her jacket, torturing her chest with an icy touch.
“It’s cold,” she said, grimacing slightly. “Maybe there’s somewhere else we can go.”
She looked around at the darkened neighborhood.
“We can go to my car.”
He led her back around the block to the front of the café. His car was parked about ten feet behind hers, leaving a space between them just big enough for another car to fit in. As they were walking he turned around towards her.
“You look really good,” he said with a smile.
She smiled, “You look skinnier.”
“Yeah, I’ve lost a lot of weight.”
It had been a year since they last met at the same café. He was the same, but different.
He opened the passenger door to his tan Volvo and she slipped inside. Inside was the dog she remembered from the time before, a pug with slightly glazed eyes and stinky fur. She avoided touching it. The last time she pet the dog, over a year ago, the smell had not come off her hands for hours. She had washed her hand with soap, poured Listerine and rubbing alcohol on it, nothing worked immediately. This time she avoided touching him, though he leaned his head towards her, practically begging for affection.
The dog kept his skinny hind legs on the back seat and reached towards the front seats by putting his two front legs on the console between the driver and passenger seat.
Ronnie walked around to the driver’s side and got in. Once inside he handed her a small, folded-up piece of aluminum foil.
“There are two five-strips in there, you’ll need to cut them yourself.”
“Oh, they’re not all cut up?”
“No, it looks like this.”
He opened the glove compartment, pulled out a ziplock bag and procured another small folded-up piece of aluminum. He opened the folds of foil and then moved it towards her. There were three strips of paper inside, each about an inch long and an eighth of an inch thick. Ronnie and Suza both peered in, as though they were looking into a doorway or a flashing tv set.
“Shit,” Ronnie muttered as he lost his grip on the feather-light foil and a little strip fell into the nether-region by the car’s gear shift. She let out a little chuckle, wondering to herself how many illicit substances were lost in the caves of his car. Ronnie pulled up the fake walnut veneer that housed the gear shift and found the white little strip (it looked like cardstock or paper used for watercolors) and put it back into the foil.
“Don’t do what I just did,” he said with a smile, “when you’re cutting them, put on some gloves, you’d be surprised how fast it gets absorbed into your skin.”
She nodded. She was a little surprised by how small the strips were. How could such a small thing produce such profound changes in the person that puts it in their mouth?
“So, cut those into five equal strips…”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“How many do you usually take?”
“I take one.”
He said it with such finality and seriousness, looking into her eyes directly with a slightly tilted head, as though he had to make the point and underline it. She was surprised. He had told her stories of taking 5-10 hits of whatever substance he could find, it made her a little nervous that he limited himself to one tab, how strong were they?
“I haven’t tried these ones, but I took some that looked like this a few weeks ago and within an hour, an hour and a half, I was on the floor. I was glad I only took one because I wouldn’t have been able to handle any more."
They’re strong, she thought. She felt a little nervous, her stomach started to turn, her body finding something to worry about.
“I met someone that is interested in DMT, can I give him your number?” she asked.
“I don’t really want to deal with people I don’t know. I would probably deal with him through you, but I’ve never seen DMT commercially available. I’ve made it, synthesizing it from plants, but I’ve never seen it out there in big quantities.”
He leaned over her and reached into the glove compartment again, it was still open. He got a small bit of folded foil and opened it. He turned on the overhead light, which illuminated the substance in his hand, a small crystal, it was smaller than a grain of rice.
“You do speed?” he asked.
She laughed, “No, do you?”
“Yeah," he said.
Now she understood why he was so skinny. She thought she heard him say something about smoking.
“If you are going to smoke that, I should probably go,” she said looking at the door handle by her left knee.
“No, I’m not going to smoke it now,” he said laughing.
She started to feel a slight sense of nausa.
“Speed is something, I mean, if you can’t just do it once or twice a month, you really shouldn’t do it. It can really mess with you.”
She looked at him moving around all jittery. He kept on looking in his rear view mirror and then looking at her and then looking ahead out through the car’s windshield. There was a stoplight twenty feet away, green light beamed towards them. She started to feel paranoid, like at any moment, a car could pull up next to them and turn on its sirens. They were just sitting there talking, but the glove compartment was full of different baggies and any cop would have been following his right instincts to stop and search them.
Avoiding the dog, she sat slightly tilted in her seat.
“Right now,” he said, “the doors are open. We can get coke, heroin, crack, which is just a few blocks from here. There’s molly. Whatever you want. But not DMT. I’m looking to get a big mimosa tree, the bark has DMT in it. Then I can synthesize my own.”
“I’m sure they have one at the nursery on Water Street.”
“Yeah, I’m sure they do, I just don’t want to attract too much attention, you know? I’ve got a garden full of psychedelic plants already. Did you know that the moment you die, your body releases dmt?”
Through an unlit cigarette in his mouth he said, “I think that’s very interesting.”
He pulled a lighter out of his jacket pocket and lit his cigarette.
“I think I am going to step outside,” she said.
“Oh. Does this bother you? I can put it out.”
“Really, you sure?”
“Yeah, I can wait.”
"I think Valaris has DMT in it. I’ve been looking to find that plant.”
“We have valaris. The variegated kind.”
“Which kind is it, there are lots of varieties.”
“You know,” she said, “I’m not sure, it’s variegated. It’s in my friend’s yard, he planted it, not me.”
“The other day I found some really pure molly. See, me and my girl took some hits, they were ok, but they didn’t quite take us there, and once you start, you really want to get there, so we went down to the Falcon Bar and I started asking different people if they had seen my friend mollie. Some girl said, ‘yeah, I know mollie.’ It was this candy raver girl. You know the Falcon Bar? It’s a raver bar. It was such a clean roll. It was exactly what I’d been looking for. I found her later and asked if she could get some more, she had major quantity. We had a big old-fashioned ecstasy orgy at my house a few days later.”
She started to feel something in her stomach. A general sense of ill ease, like something bad would be drawn towards them. Maybe it was the memories of an old life in Santa Barbara, but sitting with Ronnie in the car, his glove compartment full of enough evidence to warrant years of jail time, it just reminded her of a particular level of existence where you were always scared of the cops, or at least looking for them at every moment.
She wondered if it was just her that was paranoid. He had not been paranoid several weeks before when he was comfortable arranging the substance and payment for it over the phone. No code words, no disguise. ‘It’s white on white, 5 bucks a hit.’
She was the one that was worried about the cops, she who remembered so viscerally her life ten years before. As she sat there, her body tilted avoiding not just the dog, but the situation, she realized she was pulling in, not pushing out. She tried to imitate him a little. She realized she was getting fearful. She reminded herself not to pull in or else she would absorb his atmosphere into herself.
She pushed out. She tried to imitate him a little, but she forgot her intent soon after.
He said “You know, I’m not a drug dealer, I’m not trying to make money off this, I just want people to get high and have a good time. When I do LSD, I do it spiritually. I go into the woods and take it. I don’t fuck around."
“Ronnie, I need to go now, I need to go pick up my goddaughters.”
He looked at her very sweetly, he stared at her like he liked looking at her face. She smiled at him and got out of the car. She checked her pocket to make sure the foil was there, then drove her car around the darkened lake, back to her house.

The Bird

Light comes in, bursting through the colored landscape with speckled dots of brightness. Moves in like the unwanted visitors who stalk restful sleep. Soon she will remember where she is. The little white room, the single bed with a tri-colored crocheted quilt over her naked body. The little stars of light break through the story of her dark dream. Images of hillsides and trees and a rusted red car leak from her memory, fading fast, spilling, spilling as the light gets stronger. She cannot fight it, it is day and with day comes a bright reality. Four white walls, a single sized bed, a narrow window that looks out into the long, narrow garden. As the colors of her dream drip back into the unconscious, as she fights the tide of consciousness that rushes in, she finds herself too tired to reach for her pen and notebook just inches from her bed on the wooden nightstand. She cannot will her arm to move. It is all right there, but she lets the dreams slip, just like so many other things that have washed back into the dark unruly waves of her nighttime voyages.

Minutes pass, maybe more. Her eyes are open widely surveying the room. The sky outside is cloudy, a thick blanket of white, the same as most mornings here by the sea. Maybe soon, as all things are temporal, the fog will come in full gusts, will water the plants in her backyard with its fine stingy spray. She pushes the quilt off her body with a shove of impatience, the move, though coming from her own limbs, startles her. The impatience seems foreign, though it is all her own. Suddenly, her skin, all warm from a night of thermal incubation meets the cooler air of the small white walled-room. The meeting of two worlds are like tiny alarm clocks on her skin, a thousand little electric needles to her fleshy whiteness. She tosses her legs off the bed and reaches for the sweatpants and oversized white t-shirt on the carpet, the small pile of clothes she wiggled out of more than eight hours before. The t-shirt is thin and white and soft from bleach and time and washings. The tiny alarm clocks begin to fade as the clothes wrap around the contours of her body, all full of curves and roundness, each one calling out in its own voice for touch.

She stands up and looks at herself in the long mirror nailed to the back of her bedroom door. An image familiar, an image that looks like a vision from a dream. Wild shoulder length hair of dark waves that have taken on a medusa madness in the night. Her brown eyeliner is smudged below her eyes and she looks like she should be on her way to some hole in the wall industrial show in the depths of San Francisco, not waking up in her small white walled room, a ceiling of clouds speaking to her through the window. She is different. A different animal than the one who closed her eyes and fell asleep on a flattened pillow. She searches for what has changed, something beyond the mess of hair and piercing eyes, eyes that saw other worlds during the long dark hours. She looks deeper, but realizes suddenly it is not just her, it has all changed. A new layer of dust added to the bookshelf, the slowly dying geranium outside her window, it was all new and different, as altered as she had become by the dream of a rusty red car that would come for her on the street where she lived.

She walks to her bedroom window. The window is narrow, entry or exit from it barred by a crosshatch of decorative iron bars coated in a whitish oxidation along certain edges. The garden outside is lush. Bright bushes of blue hydrangeas are in full bloom which compete with overgrown weeds competing for the same sun. Along all edges of the wooden fence are bushes of deep red geraniums she planted a few months before and a tiny morning glory in a little plastic container that she hopes will one day cover the yard in its curious creeping vines and purplish blue flowers, though right now, the plant is just a few inches tall. Along the back fence, more than a hundred feet away from her window is a massive black walnut tree whose canopy is so wide it covers much of her yard and much of her neighbor’s too. She stares out into the garden many times a day, her patience sometimes rewarded and surprised by the iridescent green shimmer of hummingbirds as they dart quickly among the azaleas, poking their long beaks into the heart of each flower face. More often though, she watches the tiny song birds, more frequent visitors to the garden. Their little brown bodies and fat breasts make her smile with their constant play.

She’s looking out the window and sees a slight movement along the back fence, just a vibration really against the wooden planks but then two pale hands reach up from the neighbor’s yard and grab onto the fence, within seconds a man easily draws himself over the boundary between the two yards. She is startled and still, her mind actively remembering each lock in the house she secured in the night before she slipped out of her clothes and into her soft bed. She does not make any move, her breathing slows. He looks up into the wide canopy of the black walnut tree, his hands on his hips. He is a white man, thin but not frail, though nowhere close to fit. He’s wearing brown slacks and a short sleeved white button up shirt, his clothes reminding her of a mid-level bureaucrat from the fifties or perhaps a director of a small funeral home in the middle of the country where time and fashion is still decades behind. She has never seen him before, is startled and alarmed at first by his presence, but her fear turns into curiosity when he does not walk towards the house but instead, climbs the black walnut tree along the back fence. He perches on one of the lower branches, squatting slightly. She notices his feet are bare and very white.

Her attention is diverted from the man as a fat songbird flies close to her window, circling in front of a small geranium bush with deep red flowers and then makes a straight line to the man in the tree. The man watches as the bird approaches and he opens up his hands as it flies nearer. The bird lands in his cupped hands and stays for a few moments. Both the man and bird are still, looking at each other until suddenly the bird takes off and flies up, landing on a near vertical branch at the top of the tree.

The man closes his eyes. He stays like that for a while, though she cannot see his slightly creased forehead, she can sense his intense concentration, his stillness, he seems to both expand and contract, yet is still, getting lighter, lifting as though the wind were picking him up in a gentle embrace. Wind full of summer jasmine and the threat of seaweed-scented fog. She watches him through changed eyes, sight altered by dreams and time. She notices his white shirt, the way his chest begins to protrude just a bit more, pushing against the plastic buttons along the front, the same sort of movement she has seen the little brown songbirds doing in the puddles of her concrete patio after a rainstorm. As she watches, his pale white skin turns a pale shade of blue while thin, long blue and brown speckled feathers sprout on his thin arms. His bare feet turn darker, then become black and claw-like. A weak breeze moves through the leaves of the tree, the tiny song bird at the top takes flight. In a moment the man is covered in feathers. He opens his arms wide, ducks below the lowest hanging branch of the black walnut tree and flies away in the direction of the ocean, his blue and brown feathers becoming a dot, then vanishing completely against the white overcast sky.

Dinner For Alice

The hunger was undeniable. Alice would awaken in the dead of the night, stomach growling, feeling stretched as though it might break into pieces. At first, always at first, she would try to be quiet, she would try not to wake up Ben, then she would remember that Ben was gone. She was alone.
It was the cold hard fact of this singularity that drove Alice into the yard, into the victory garden that had fallen into fecund disrepair since his departure. After a day spent in tears and rotating cycles of hair tearing and screaming, she would fall, utterly spent upon the bed and almost forget his absence in the dark desperation of sleep. Until her stomach called her awake, gurgling, forgotten and denied during the regularly scheduled emotional storms of the daylight hours.
In the endless torrent of wishes for her own death, for the death of Ben’s new flaxen haired lover, for Ben’s death, there was no time or motive to take sustenance. But in the darkness, after the exhausted blackouts, her appetite would take control and lead her barefoot into the yard. Under the pale white face of the moon Alice would kneel in the dark soil between the bug eaten chard and rhubarb. With one trembling hand she would scoop up a hand full of dirt and greedily thrust it into her mouth, wriggling worms and all. Turning over rocks she would lick at the scurrying surface, swallowing things that were still moving.
She fed with urgency and abandon, alternating between unturned bricks or stone and fistfuls of cool moist dirt. And when she was satiated she would return to the house, crawl with dirty fingernails back into bed and sleep until dawn, whence the appetites of the night would give way to the convulsive grieving of the day.
The nighttime excursions came to be extended. Rather than returning to bed Alice spent the rest of the night walking through the neighbors' yards, skirting around the edges of houses and tool sheds and compost bins, sometimes stopping to feed in a freshly tilled flower bed. In the early hours of morning before sunrise she would creep home, entering through the side gate, back into the yard, through the back door.
Pleasantly tired, she could sleep away the hours of the day. She tacked cardboard over the windows to keep the light out. As long as the sun was barred from the house, grieving could be suspended. Alice rested peacefully in her dirty bed, a layer of soil accumulating between the sheets. Waking after dark, her stomach crying with pain, she came to rise instantly with the knowledge that she was alone, that there was no one who could see her, no one who could stop her from doing what she wanted to do, no one to stop her from eating what she most craved. And what she craved for a time was the earth itself and the things that hid within it.
The change was gradual. Her skin first developed a certain sheen. It darkened. Then it began to harden. Her legs and arms had grown just a little longer. Her movements during her nightly excursions were quicker. There was a sound that her altered feet made over the concrete and asphalt, a soft skittering as she moved fleetly into the shadows along the walls.
Alice herself, resigned weeks ago to dying, accepted the changes unquestioningly. With a goal as simple as death, anything that happened in between was superfluous. As the changes came, however, as Alice pursued her appetites without regret, the death wish diminished, even vanished. Alice no longer thought of herself at all. She simply followed her instincts.
Her new form demanded greater sustenance. Neighborhood cats began to disappear. Soon the power lines bore pitiful photocopied announcements of reward for the safe return of a handful of different family dogs. One night Alice went out into the garden and spread her new pair of shiny black wings. In the city she kept to the alleys, terrifying the homeless drunks hidden beneath papers and soiled sleeping bags.
They had nothing to fear however, Alice had a hankering for something particular. She found it around the corner from a popular new nightclub; a young man laughing and wobbly with intoxication tugging a pretty young woman into the alley with him.
“What was that?” the young woman asked sharply peering into the darkness ahead of them.
“Nothing, nothing baby.” he cooed. Alice shuffled closer.
“Uh uh, no way, I’m out of here.” The woman broke free and hurried out of the alley, back to the street and its lights.
“Mary hold on.”
He called after her, but only managed to lean against the wall catching his breath. He laughed a little as he started towards the street and lost his footing. Alice scurried forward and took hold of him, mandibles sinking into his soft pink flesh as he screamed. The sound was drowned out by the beat from the club next door. Soon it ceased entirely, transformed into the gurgling of his own crimson internal fluids as they spilled from his lips.
Alice thought that he reminded her of something called Ben, although she could no longer quite recall what Ben was. Nonetheless, she felt sure that Ben was what she wanted, and this was almost it. She found it deeply satisfying.

Under Cloudy Skies

The day was overcast, a day like so many I have moved through, bundled beneath layers of wool and cotton. Glancing at my calendar on the way out the door in the morning, I had seen the linguistic indication that it should be sunny and warm. Through years of silent, deliberate encoding, those lines and black curves had come to mean something quite particular meteorologically, I should be leaving the house in my worn and favorite thin tank top and sandals, I should come back from a day outside sun-browned, sweaty, and smelling of sun, but this was not a place of things that were supposed to be. Not just this city of thick clouds and sheets of gray mist, but this house where garages were music studios and living rooms transformed into silent work spaces. This life, the one I had come to walk in a house and city I could never have imagined being part of ten years before was the opposite of what was supposed to be. It was fitting that I should carry a flask of hot milk tea and wrap a scarf around my neck in mid-July.
Hours later, after the tea was gone, I was still outdoors. I had been outdoors since the early morning when I had covered a plastic folding table with a worn maroon tablecloth and loaded it up with fresh baked thick-crusted breads. Through the morning, while the sun made little effort to break through a blanket of uniform, stubborn clouds, I stood mostly in one place, variation coming only as I walked around the table, adjusting baskets of bread as they sold one by one, trying with an artful eye to keep the display looking bountiful.
After my alarm rang, I paused for a moment to let the space come into me, then I took a short break and walked around the outdoor market. I meandered among the artisans selling brightly-glazed pottery, the fruit vendors whose peaches had just started to finally sweeten up after a summer of clouds. I stopped in front of the salami booth, a place I had first stopped after discovering their one vegetarian item for sale, a mustard spread made with whole seed of the plant. It was staffed, as always, by Bill and his sidekick.
Bill, the older of the two, was in his mid-forties. He had a head that appeared to have once been sandy blond but was almost white now. He had a somewhat relaxed air about him. But after talking for just a few minutes, he revealed his insecurities with a mix of wonder, ease and annoyance,
“I wish I could stop waking up in the middle of the night and hearing voices that say, ‘you’re nothing,’ those stupid voices that keep coming back.”
He had a grown daughter, almost my age, and the only way I could imagine her was as a single colored brush stroke against a sky blue canvas. She was a word only, “daughter,” a black pigment against the sky. Bill was thick and tall, his form, without fat that I could see, reminded me of a sturdy tree, the bulk and determination of it alone able to withstand a night of wind. His blue-gray eyes held a spark of mischief and each sentence was a joke, an astute quip or some form of self-deprecation, mixed and jumbled together in sentence after sentence to produce what he called the “Bill experience.”
“So, you forgot about us, huh?” Bill asked with a sideways smile. “I can’t believe you fucking forgot about us!”
I hadn’t visited in several weeks and when I was confronted by Max, the younger of the salami peddlers, in the early morning about my absence (he had come over to my booth) I had simply been honest.
I stammered with a smile, looking down like an ashamed dog finally caught rooting through the garbage. Although I knew that Bill was joking, I found it necessary to lay out the reasons for my long absence, covering over my initial morning honesty with reasons.
“Yeah, you know, the person who used to come watch my booth, well, she’s been coming later and later and then when I finally get a chance I-”
“Boobs, big fake boobs,” Bill interrupted.
His gaze was set several feet behind me. I turned reflexively, looking at chests, searching as though the clue I had been waiting for had finally arrived. “I don’t-”
“The blond,” he hinted.
I scanned the crowd and after several seconds I heard: “you missed her.”
I saw him staring in a direction I had not been eyeing. I turned back toward them, the gauze now gone, seeing them as they were- two men.
“You guys just check out ass and butts and boobs all day, huh?”
For a second I heard those words reverberating in my mind and I started kicking myself internally, ass and butt were same thing.
“Yeah, you finally understand us,” Bill said nodding.
I turned towards the younger of the two, a thick pile of black hair moussed into a formation on his head which vaguely reminded me of frosting on a cupcake. He was handsome in an emaciated heroin-rocker type of way. Olive skin, an easy smile and big white teeth. Dark jeans and t-shirt and black jeans jacket. Four months before Max had invited me to a party he was hosting. A party featuring as its piece de resistance, the barbecue of an entire pig. The flier had indicated there would be homemade beer, loud music, drunkenness, and rabble-rowsing. Maybe if it had been 10 years ago I would have been interested, but I was no longer what I was then.
“I’m mostly over it,” Bill confessed, looking down into his plate of salami samples.
“Over what?” I asked.
“Bill calls it freenis,” Max said, sitting down on a plastic cooler beside their table.
“Freenis?”
“Yeah. I am not into it as much as I used to be. Boobs, women. I am free from the penis…freenis.”
“Like, you just don’t care anymore?”
“I’m just not as horny as I used to be. I can relax more now. I’m freenis.”
I nodded.
An older man’s voice came from behind me, “you guy’s sellin’ salami?”
I turned to see a man in his late fifties, with a big round tummy and khaki pants and white stretched polo shirt.
“Sure are, try a piece,” Bill said handing the man a thin sample.
I waved goodbye at them and stepped away. I walked back past the vendors selling oils and pasta, past the pie lady and chocolate seller. Back to my booth, back to the fresh-baked thick crusted bread I had yet to sell.

The Girl Who Could Not Be

There was a room with a small source of light coming in from a narrow window facing east. It was six in the evening but the sun was still shining out there strongly, as though it refused, just like my children, to go to bed. There was too much to see out there, and the plants needed the light too. Lydia liked those bright red geraniums blooming in her window box.
My mouth was open, I was laughing or breathing, moving in some way that left my mouth exposed and open. I felt something strange, a particular foreign pressure inside and I knew, I knew a bee had flew in.
It did not fly out. Even though there was no mirror and I couldn’t see it on my tongue, I knew it was there, laying still. I watched myself as though a spectator, aware of every muscular movement and thought. Though I watched from the position of an audience member, seeing and feeling in parallel realities.
I watched myself walk up to the man in light colored pants beside the window. He was holding a small plastic cup filled with dark red wine, the kind of cup used in gallery openings. He had a sweater draped around his shoulders. As I walked to him, I noticed he was talking to a man dressed just as he was, holding his cup in the same way. I walked towards them without hesitation and asked calmly, keeping my mouth open while doing so, to extract the bee.
The man, the first one I had noticed, did so easily, using his thumb and thin pointer finger to dip into the darkness of my mouth. He pulled out the bee and looked at it intently as he held it up to his face, letting it catch the light, though I could not tell if it was alive or dead.
As I turned from him, I wondered aloud how many bees fly in and out of my mouth without my realizing it. As I spoke, I pictured myself in bed in a dark room, only my face exposed while a pile of blankets swamp the rest of my body. I could see my open mouth, my wide mouth like an unguarded fortress. How many things go in and out? How many things fly from its space, those sentences dripping with unintended inflections and complaints? How many things go in and out when I’m not paying attention?
I wondered for a moment, realizing that there were too many to count, and then walked on, forgetting.

The next morning I walked into the sunshine, surprised by its strength. I held my car keys ready in one hand, the bright shiny silver of the key poised, alert, waiting for the perfect fit of the hole, just a moment until it could slip inside and be of use.
I let out a little excited wail as I felt something land on my naked shoulder. I turned to the source of the pressure, finding a bee perched beside me, fully intent on coming for the ride.
“Little bee!” I shouted mildly, “ahh!”
I pushed him off my shoulder with a gentle nudge of my finger, feeling something insect-like on my skin, a kind of cold, pokey sensation that was so small, so soft.
“Have you thought about the ‘word?’” my friend asked as we slid into the car and heard the click of the seatbelts from our trained hands. “Sometimes it’s all about the word, like, maybe you don’t want to ‘be.’”
I stared though the window, turning my wheel with practiced motion, seeing the blur of the neighborhood houses as we began to move.
I nodded, my mind racing. How many times was I afraid to shine? To dance, to sing until the heavens could find me with delight in my eyes? How many times was I afraid of my own absurdity, my thoughts and comments? How many times did I stifle my whims and hide in my room, saving the best parts of myself just for me?
Yes, I thought to myself, I am afraid to be. And yet I could not say it. I couldn't allow my mouth to open and let the words come flying out.

Tomalynn

I listened to the peppy, vivacious voice on the answering machine. A sweet high female voice spilled into my ear, promising she would call back, “just leave a message!” I stared out my window into the overgrown garden of weeds and bright red geranium, knowing she wouldn’t, that the voice could never call me back.
It was a voice I had never heard and I was startled slightly by its ring. I was familiar with the woman. I had been in her house and looked into her blue-gray eyes, had sung along while she played piano and forced a smile at her relentless jokes with punch lines I could never quite grasp.
But I had never heard that voice. It came from a time before, years before cancer had punched through her energy and taken parts of her brain and spine, before her potent sing-song voice turned scratchy, then hoarse, and then, when there were just a few days left, it was gone, leaving a wide hole where song had once been.
It had been a few weeks since I had last seen her. I called her phone on that partially cloudy day and heard the voice of a woman without cancer, a woman whose world was long and stretched for years, filled with music, dreams and dogs that didn’t stop barking, adding to the music with punctuated beats of their own.
I left a message for the woman who was now gone, who had changed, who was turning into something else. Her husband called me back a few minutes later.
“It’s been downhill since the last time you saw her. We have her in a hospital bed in the living room. Her sister is here now. She has a lot of experience with cancer patients.”
“Can I come over to see her? Do you have any idea when she might be up?”
I went over at four-thirty. She lay in her hospital bed with crisp white sheets and a thin pink blanket. She had turned skeletal. In just a few weeks she had transformed from a woman who looked sick to a corpse that was still breathing. Her mouth was agape, breathing loudly. I could see the silver fillings in her back molars. I reached under the pink cover to find her warm hand. She seemed to be asleep.
“She’s refused food and water since yesterday. The nurses say that we should just let nature run its course and I tend to agree. We don’t need to postpone the inevitable.”
I looked up at her husband with his hands gripping the metal rails of her bed. He looked into my eyes nervously, shallowly, with sadness, with a solemn understanding that there would be no more treatment, no hope for cure or remission, that his wife would soon waste away in his living room. It would be the natural end for a disease that had exhausted all his hope in miracles.
His blue eyes held onto flecks of pain, revealing themselves in the way he glanced nervously around the room, as though looking for a safe space to land. My eyes stung with tears and I looked back at her sallow, sunken cheeks, having no words of reassurance.
“We renewed our vows yesterday,” he said looking at me, a smile crossed his mouth for a moment. “It was good for us.”
He nodded to himself, his hands on the sides of his narrow hips.
The TV was on in the background, just a few feet away from where we were. The husband stood on the other side of Tomalynn’s bed. He told me the details of her care, the time shifts of the hospice nurses, the morphine patches that had released all her pain. He glanced every now and then to the TV and then back to me, telling me Tomalynn was not in pain, reassuring me though I did not ask.
I did my best to be polite, to nod in sympathy at his details. As the TV mumbled and as Cary exchanged a few words with his heavy-set sister-in-law, I silently repeated the words I had come to say.
Between the silences, when I saw Cary staring at his dying wife, holding onto her hand as though it were a rope to another life that they were soon leaving, I wanted to tell him how Tomalynn wished he could find peace, how she hoped that he and their daughter would live on, somehow coming to a sense of resolution with her death. I wanted to tell him what she had revealed to me, but I could feel tears riding on the edges of my eyes. So I kept quiet, remembering it was more important for me to be there for Tomalynn, to remain calm and soothing and repeat the words I had come to say.
“You can talk to her, she might be able to hear you,” Tomalynn’s sister said helpfully from the couch against the window.
“Hi, it’s Lydia,” I said awkwardly, “remember to relax.”
All I needed was a bit of quiet, a space to be with Tomalynn without noise or explanations. I wondered why there wasn’t music playing, something beautiful and soft the way Tomalynn had always loved it. But I kept my mouth closed, my eyes on her as much as I could.
Sometimes her hand would twitch or she would take a big gasping breath and then open her eyes, but that vital life force, that thing I recognized as conscious and cognizant, that thing seemed gone.
“I think she has one foot in the other world,” her sister said.
I nodded. Her daughter came out of the back room. A thick teenager with hair dyed into a rich auburn sheen and thin red lips in the middle of a wide moon face. She was pretty and hard, looking a little jaded as she tossed her hair around with a sweep of her hand.
“Hi momma,” she said. She gave Tomalynn a kiss on the protruding cheekbone and a hug. “Momma,” she said.
We all stared silently at the corpse-like body in front of us for a while, a woman who had lost all vigor. It was only the warmth of her hand and the thick, rhythmic breaths that indicated she was alive. I couldn’t bring myself to touch any other part of Tomalynn. I watched as her sister stroked her face, as her daughter kissed her cheek. I knew a part of me was afraid of it, of death, afraid of contamination, of cancer somehow spreading from her to me. I was scared of the finality just a few inches from me.
I wanted to say something to her husband, wished somehow I could ease his pain, perhaps stop death itself. But I refocused, remembering I needed to stay calm, and so I stayed quiet. Holding my words, holding my tears, keeping my energy inside. I got up to leave and saw the catheter bag half full laying on its side against the carpet beside the bed. The dark color burned itself into my mind and I realized, in one bright flash, how serious it all was, like its very presence was the ringing bell, its sound telling me the body was failing, soon she would be gone.
I stepped out of the house, feeling the cool breeze of a partially sunny day. Her sister, with her humpty dumpty figure, her worn skin and teeth, she was outside, twenty feet away from the house, smoking. “Thanks hon, thanks for coming. I know it means a lot to Cary, he’s been a nervous wreck.”
I nodded, smiled a bit, and got into my truck. I knew I needed to work harder, to remain calmer, to work more than I ever had. I drove away and the images flooded me. The hospital bed, the family, Tomalynn’s sunken cheeks and sallow skin. Thoughts turned into words, words into sentences and soon, at home, I began to write.

Raising Men

I watched them through the thin layer of grime on my windshield. The dried yellow goo that had once been some kind of bug, the dried up remains of early morning dew, the fine golden dust of pollen.
There was a wide lawn in front of me. An old fashioned, uneven field full of tiny mounds and clusters of small white flowers that I used to make into garlands and drape over my hair. The square field sat beside an elementary school, partitioned from the collection of single story buildings by several rows of giant eucalyptus.
The day was full of wind and I preferred to remain in the shelter of my car. A 70 year old man jogged along the sidewalk between my car and the field. He had short running shorts on and a wide-strapped baggy white tank top. His face was full of wrinkles and his head was completely white, but his body looked firm and strong. I remembered hearing a 40 year old lithe acrobat saying that the face was the first thing to go. I made eye contact with him as he jogged past and I felt bad about being in my car, sitting on a soft seat, I felt somewhat guilty that I was not exercising too.
In the field were groups of young children led by a few adults. They were spread out, seemingly unaffiliated and congregated in different corners of the field. Closest to me, in the corner to my left, was a group of 20 three year old boys. In charge of them were two men dressed in slightly baggy, yet tailored jeans. The men both looked young, professional, as if this was the place they stopped by on their way home from a high-rise office building.
Two women stood off the side, somehow lending their moral support just with their presence. They talked, angling their bodies towards each other while still mostly facing the group of boys. They were young stay-at-home moms, the type of mothers that proliferated in the tree-lined streets and gated homes of upper-class Hillsborough. They had lovely expensive houses, SUVs, and plenty of time to drive their kids to fields such as this, plenty of time to chat and exchange stories.
A young girl, perhaps four years old, dressed in little shorts and a pink T-shirt, fluttered like a butterfly on the outskirts of the group. No one spoke to her and she spoke to no one. She skipped, jumped, entertained herself entirely while everyone gathered was busy with other things.
The men led the young boys in a series of exercises, each relating to baseball. Each boy had a baseball mitt and matching blue baseball hats that were slightly larger than their heads. The boys were divided into two groups, with one man leading each group. I watched as one man threw the baseball underhanded, practically rolling it along the grass and the little boys, one at a time, would attempt to catch it and throw it back.
The boys were all so short, most of them would fall as they enthusiastically sent a ball flying as high as they could. The would run to the back of the line, jumping into place with the explosive energy that such young children have.
I saw how such mentoring would be applauded by a community and seen as noble. I saw the blind mechanically of it too. These men were teaching the next generation, just as they had been taught. Little boys get pajamas with trucks, cars, hammers and sports equipment. Little girls get flowers. Little boys play baseball, they play soccer, they run, they hit, they jump.
This was the cycle, the process of socialization. The process of turning young boys into men that liked sports and teams and competition.
This process was not only the consequence of being born male. It had happened to them, it had been taught to them by the elders. Blue, gray, black, green, it was part of their conditioning. They were taught by their fathers. By the men that spent time each day teaching them to throw. Those adults in their nice clothes, in their noble position as mentors and teachers, they had once been taught as well.
I watched the young girl try on an oversized catcher’s gear and a helmet. At first I thought she was about to join them, but she danced around for a moment in the large black helmet that wobbled on her head and then put it back on the grass.