There Are Distances Between Us
The interstate highway system in the United States is the largest and most sophisticated in the world. It is named for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. There are two points and between them, a distance between you and me. These two points are connected in ways we will never fully understand but they are connected. You are there...
Some Space
1. A month ago I was tying a red polka-dotted, pink ribbon and white satin bow to the trunk of a cherry tree. The viewing of the cherry blossoms, sakura, was waning, the petals left on the bloom ragged, muscled aside by the surging green leaves, the sublime and melancholy image of a fall in...
Zuill Bailey and a 1693 Matteo Gofriller Cello
Fairbanks, Alaska, September 16, 2010 Prelude: black leather piano bench gleams softly in a single spotlight. In the background, organ pipes stagger toward heaven. Black shirt, black jacket, black hair—the cellist strides across the stage. Slight nod and he’s seated, his instrument settled, caressed. His eyes close as his bow draws out the first notes...
Come Back, Jimmy Dean
At my hometown community theater, there is a staircase that goes nowhere. Two separate theater boyfriends have promised—threatened?—to have sex with me in that stairwell, and I put both off with excuses: those steps are filthy; we’ll get caught; I’m wearing a skirt; I’m not wearing a skirt. My living boyfriend, as distinct from my...
Dogs in the Dark
I lie in bed, breath suspended. In the darkness, something is moving. It’s not that I don’t know the source of the noise–it’s that I do. My border collie mix is just making his watchdog rounds, checking each room, working the graveyard shift. His job for fifteen years. Only for the last year Cal’s rhythm...
The Role of Fiction in Suicidal Ideations
I get ten new suicidal adolescents a week in my creative writing class at the psych hospital where I work. Their arms are mutilated. Their minds tortured with self-hate. Some are gothic, others only misfits who are picked on at school. They’ve been taken from their homes by DHR, betrayed by drug-addicted parents. It exposes...
The Drowning
In July a boy drowns in the lake. * There is a picture window above our kitchen table and through it a view of the lake. At noon, when we sit to eat sandwiches, the water is glassy and green, fracturing only when unseen fish rise and retreat. The sand on the shore is pale. ...
Cherry Red
John Gravely was our neighborhood house painter. He was never John, or Mr. Gravely. Just John-Gravely. He was always cheerful and whistled when he worked. Sometimes, while he scraped and painted, I’d climb the creaky wood stairs to the attic, where my parents kept an old office typewriter on an old metal stand that made...
Things are Meted Out to People and Then They Leave
At fourteen I got my first real job from a woman named Cia. When she spoke she lisped a little and gutted her words with curses; on breaks she sat outside the kitchen on a milk crate, long legs planted far apart, bright mouth pulling on a cigarette like it was keeping her alive. Cia...
All the Forces at Work Here
First thing in the morning Willie Murnion turns his welding rig onto our road and comes raising a rooster tail of dust fast down the gravel and bangs on the screen door with his ham of a fist and announces to my mother that he’ll go ahead and fix the basketball hoop. My mother, in...
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