Desire - Robin Michelle Jean

Have you ever tasted
anything
in your life
more delicious
than a slice of Chloe’s
chocolate cake,
so warm and soft,
it calls your name from the table
and when you smell the sweet bitter fudge,
it’s like you smell
for the very first time,
and when you cut—

cut into the blanket of dark brown silk and
open it up with delight,
still smelling -
still wanting -
like a child on Christmas
ready to reveal what’s inside-

you see the perfect layers
stacked neatly with care-
with love-
you wonder if there is
anything in the world that matters more,
more
than this thing,
this cake,
this piece of satisfaction,
this ball of brilliant bliss-
with its perfect texture soft like satin
so sweet and unforgiving
it just melts upon your lips?

In the Garden - Vicki Rubini

First day of summer. I jiggle hard the door, then duck my head under the cob-webbed eaves to enter the garden. Foxgloves push through the ivy, aspiring to heights unseen, banner flags of blue and yellow above brown snails sneaking along in old primroses.

I get out my pen and gather some fallen leaves as a cushion from the morning dew. The rusty watering can lies on its side. A yellow cactus cries for more sunshine. Wind -whipped roses have dropped red petals, but a few inner buds stay tightly intact. Cherry tomatoes are popping back up from seed explosions last fall when, unpicked, they burst. Already their little red bodies are seasoned with spicy pollen. Music in both major and minor keys comes from a song bird and a crow performing on their airy stage, all at once.

Back to that pen. Yes, I have paper as well. The last entry was six months ago.

I plop a tomato in my mouth, and drip some juice. Then I start my scribbling…..

In the Garden - Julie Farrar

It’s 92° at ten o’clock in the morning. Sweat drips from the band of my straw gardening hat, my eyes into my eyes and runs down my neck to soak the back of my shirt. I’m being swarmed by mosquitoes, sweat bees, and gnats. A thin layer of dirt clings to my arms and legs like a light dusting of cocoa powder on a vanilla-iced cake. I plunge the Garden Hog into an expanse of weeds, stomp down on the top of the prongs to force it down to the roots, and wrench it to the right. Grab the clump of dirt just loosened and knock it against the ground to send the good dirt and worms back where they belong. Toss the weedy remains in the yard bag to be hauled away for mulch. Repeat a thousand times.

Gardening in St. Louis in the summer is an exercise in futility. A natural hothouse for beefy tomatoes, it’s also a paradise for mugwort, Bermuda grass, wild garlic, field violets, and giant dandelions that have to be remnants of the Jurrasic Age. They fill a garden bed overnight. Constant vigilance to keep nature under control in June gives way, incrementally, to mild neglect during the 100% humidity in July, and then complete abandonment in the searing sun and at least one 100°+ week of August.

But a gardener can’t help it. When lilacs and forsythia wave their long, welcoming arms at you in May and the evening air is scented by viburnum blossoms, a gardener thinks not of the oppressive heat of the summer garden. Instead, visions bloom of her own personal Jardin du Luxembourg. She dreams of a riotous bed of color rising above a deep emerald expanse of lawn, woven through with meandering pebble paths that transport her to the 6th arrondissement of Paris’ Latin Quarter. Her own concrete birdbath sitting forlornly in the midst of the heat-zapped daylilies should rival Marie de Médici’s dancing fountain under the shade of giant oaks. Hummingbirds should flit in and out of the tangle of blossoms gathering their nectar, with weightless butterflies resting on the long branches of Russian sage. She will pull up her own moss green metal chair just like the hundreds that invite a visitor to the Paris garden to sit and read or chat or dream (mosquito-free) on a Sunday morning.

But somewhere during the heat of August, a gardener will remember her visit to Jardin du Luxembourg in the autumn. A team of workmen, a back hoe, and a Bobcat were busy lifting the last of the summer annuals out of the earth. Nearby sat a small truck with mulch, dirt, and an already-blooming load of plants that would convert it from a summer garden to an autumn one in just a matter of days. Any weeds that had tried to set up permanent residence would be disposed of as easily as the summer annuals were. Alas, this gardener has no option, though, but to put her knees and back into the slow process of taming nature, one mauvaise herbe at a time.

In the Garden - Melody Cryns

Sunflower seeds are planted in our garden and we are excited because we’ve all got our own designated spot of land in the garden which stretches out behind the flat we live at on Second Avenue. The back yards are like a whole alternate universe from the front of the house – separated by wooden fences which we’d climb, some fences taller than others – a complex world of rectangle and square plots of land – some of the land all grass, some filled with flowers, some overrun by nasturtiums and weeds. Above all the backyards behind our flat are the clothes lines. It seems that there are dozens and dozens of clothes lines. They’re not just your normal every day clothes lines either – they’re the ones where the ropes run through this round metal crank that the moms would use to move the rope and allow them to put more clothes on the lines from way high up without having to reach. We had one going from our dining room window and even the people upstairs had them. I remember when I was a young kid, a lot of the moms used those clothes lines to hang their clothes – and they’d even shout out to each other from across the yards through the windows as they were hanging their clothes, moving the round wheel thing that allowed them to keep the clothes line moving. All these clothes, towels and sheets would wave in the afternoon breeze above us as we played in the yard, usually climbing over fences when we weren’t supposed to.

Then it seemed less and less moms hung their clothes out to dry because they managed to get dryers and they didn’t need to do it, and besides, it doesn’t get hot in San Francisco and it’s damp so it’s hard for the clothes to dry on a line unless you time it just right.

Our garden was kind of a magical place because the couple who lived downstairs from us made it so – they lived in what was called the garden apartment because it was a small apartment that overlooked the garden – much, much smaller than our flat. Mr. and Mrs. Fentley lived there – and Mr. Fentley was a mad scientist who had a lab up near U.C. Hospital and was always doing experiments out in our back yard. Like one time he brought home a sheep skull and put it out in the yard to see what kind of fly larvae would grow on it and then he’d write about it on a clipboard. Mr. Fentley would show us all the different bugs on the bushes that we didn’t even know existed, like the “spittle bug” that would literally live inside what looked like his own spit so that nobody would bother him – and all these different types of beetles that lived on the plants as well. He didn’t like snails though because they ate all the flowers and leaves, so he’d pay us a nickel for every snail we’d find and smash against this one side of the fence.

Then for a while we had two white rabbits living in our back yard as well. We kids named them Herman and Big Mama even though later we found out they were both male rabbits. Those rabbits ate anything and everything that was green in our backyard leaving a sort of barren wasteland…so finally the rabbits had to go away. Mr. Fentley said they went to a farm someplace, and we all liked to believe that was true. Mr. Fentley got me my first pet guinea pig and even built a cage for him. He rang the doorbell on my birthday and when I answered, only the guinea pig in the cage remained – I never forgot that. I loved Timmy and found out later that Mr. Fentley had all kinds of mice and guinea pigs, etc., at his lab. Supposedly they were on vacation there.

So after the bunnies left, the yard began to turn green again. My brother brought home three nasturtium plant seeds – those green plants with the round green leaves and the orange flowers that spread like wildfire all over parts of Golden Gate Park and Sigmund Stern Grove. Those three little leaves spread through about a quarter of the back yard, but it was good because we could pick the orange flowers that grew endlessly in the yard now. There were fuchsia bushes and sometimes we’d pop the buds because we liked the popping noise, and that bush that had those huge flowers that we found out later were called chrysanthemums.

So, Mr. Fentley decided to give each of us a plot of land – me, my brother and sister and David and Barry around the corner. We marked off our land and even put name tags on it. Then he gave us sun flower seeds to plant – imagine that, sun flower seeds.

So we all planted our seeds, and every day we’d run into the garden and see if our seeds had grown, and soon enough we saw the green shoots pop out of the ground – we were so excited! Those green shoots grew into huge stalks that were taller than us – and huge yellow sun flowers with sun flower seeds galore in the middle – the guinea pig loved the seeds.

In the Garden - John Fetto

Johanna’s mother’s garden was nearly dead. The roses, her mother’s prize barely bloomed along the walkway, just a few flowers, nothing like the colors which raged when Johanna was going to high school. During that time Johanna used to clip the blooms on the way out and wear them, first pinned to her blouse, then, as her dates advanced, other places… Now there were so few, each spring, seemed but an echo of an increasingly distant past.

The hedges in the front of the house grew out of control, obscuring half her mother’s bedroom window with leaves. Her mother didn’t care; there was nothing she could do about it. She moved from the television in the living room to the television in her bedroom with the same gritted indifference she traveled from her bedroom to the bathroom and kitchen. Except for those days she climbed into Johanna’s small car, complaining bitterly about the uselessness of another doctor’s visit, her life consisted of these small trips, ten to twenty feet, five or six rolls of the wheel of her chair, challenged only be the folds between carpet and linoleum and the deadly monotony of it all. She would never get back out to tend her garden; all she could do is watch it struggling, like her, to grasp the few tendrils of life which still held her to the earth, hoping they did not yet break.

In the Garden - Bonnie Smetts

I could see Randy sitting in the little garden outside the classroom window. She’s waiting for me, waiting to take me home after my test. And I’m starring at her curls like they’re little lifeboats, each one. I don’t remember ever being so nervous. My counselor at school said I was the best typist she’d ever had, and she certainly acted as amazed by that as if I were walking on air. But for some reason I’m as peaceful as a baby when I’m typing. Something about that tap tapping that makes me content. That’s why counselor had recommended I try out for this school for becoming a Court Reporter. He’d warned me that I’d have to improve my grammar, but again they all were surprised that I could write a bit better than I talk.

I’m not the one who thought I wrote better than I talked, though. I didn’t see any difference. But I don’t have to take that test until later so all I’m thinking about today is typing. We got a dozen or more girls in this room, moving back and forth in their seats, looking as nervous as me, each of us sitting at a monitor and a keyboard. I see the other girls running their fingers across the keyboards as they were warning up. That’s when I see that the keyboard is ever so different from what I’m sued to. Newer, ever so different and that makes me feel more uncertain than I had been until that very minute and I wished I hadn’t spent that time looking at Randy’s head outside.

So I slide my fingers over the indentations in the keys, passing over the letters I know so well, like I’m blind with eyes only on my fingertips. That’s when I see that the spacing’s really no different, just little dips where you put your fingertips are a little deeper than I’m sued to and the keys themselves are shallower. A few passes, like a bee over a picnic table, and my fingers are getting comfortable and I’m starting to feel that maybe this will be OK.

“Ladies, I see we’ve only got ladies today. Ladies, here are the rules of the test. You will be asked to type first from dictation. You will listen through the headphones—does everyone see your headphones? The first part of the test will last five minutes. You will then stop when the dictation stops. You will get a fifteen-minute break, you can go outside, you can use the ladies room, whatever you want. Then you will be back here, in your seats, and ready at 10:30. Then we begin the typing from manuscript part of the test.”

“Any questions?” the test-giver asks us. I swear he took the time to look at every single one of us.

“Can we adjust the volume of our headphones?” a girl asks. I can’t imagine how she’d even known to ask that. But I couldn’t concentrate on the answer because all I was hearing was my heartbeat booming in my head and I hoped that I’d be able to hear the voice inside the headphones over all that noise. I’m just trying to push out my breath to get some room inside my chest so as I could breath. And that’s when I realize that everyone’s picking up their headphones and is getting them comfortable on their heads. And that’s when I realize I shouldn’t have worn earrings but I got no time to take them off so move the headphones around as best I can. Inside I hear test, test, test.

Temptation - Jackie Davis Martin

The woman, the writer--amend that: the so-called writer--was sick of writing to one word. Confessing, shame, temptation, infidelity, resurrection. Just sick of it. She saw the point, or part of the point, of touching emotions deeply—or deeply touching emotions—or getting in touch with deep emotions—but it was a difficult task to prepare coffee and sit down at her computer to stare at a word: temptation.

Well.

She was old. Which temptation should she choose? The temptation when she was a kid to play with the car seat that tilted, the temptation to show it off to her friends Sharon and Francine next door? The Nash was blue, two-tones of blue, and featured a front seat that could tilt back to make, when it joined the wide plush expanse of backseat, a big double bed.

Her dad loved the concept, had demonstrated it proudly several times and she and her sister had bounced over the interior. This was long before those inflatable little houses one sees on city streets for a kid’s party, where kids can bounce inside. Anyway, she—our old lady, the writer---was too old to bounce, maybe ten, but old enough to be tempted to fiddle with the mechanism herself. She showed Sharon and Francine the car-turned-bed, and they oh-ed and ah-ed , but then she couldn’t get the seat back up. She never confessed this transgression to her dad, just listened to him curse the mechanism for the next few years.

Here the writer paused.

She had used the word confessed and that probably counted, too, as addressing one of the words meant to inspire writing. So: she had yielded to temptation and not confessed.

Was anyone even vaguely interested?

It was the way the story was told, of course. She knew that. Basically, though, people didn’t want to read stories of others who made strong personal choices, who made righteous choices, unless, of course, they were reading some moral guidebook. And virtue is fun for a while. Take food, for instance. The old lady’s stepson (whom she adored, but she’d take that up when “love” was thrown her way) was recently making almost a cult of good health, of vigor. Gyms, wholesome food, liquids, rest: for over a year. So: when the writer-old lady—oh, let’s give her a name! let’s call her Miriam! “Miriam” was an answer on Jeopardy last night—the name of Moses’ sister—and Miriam thought then, oh, good, another name, I will use Miriam. Where was she? Oh yes, when Miriam and her husband, the man’s father, were driving to visit, they welcomed the discipline the son might impose on their own unrestrained eating habits.

Here Miriam paused. Readers didn’t care about temptations of pie, which is where she intended to go with the story. It was an anecdote really, an anecdote being easier to write because it was just there, doing nothing: what happened, no theme.

So: what happened is this. The son cooked or assembled great meals and Miriam and her husband didn’t even ask about dessert. But, driving home from San Diego they went entirely out of their way to get a Razzleberry pie at Marie Callender’s somewhere near Pismo Beach and ate the pie when they got home in two sittings. What did they learn from this?

They learned that Razzleberry pie—which they hadn’t actually asked for, they’d asked for Blueberry, but Razzleberry was in the box—was fine eating except for all the seeds. They learned that they’d double-check next time.

So: temptations. Those of youth, those of age.

It’s what’s in between. It’s the standing in the copier room alone, eying all the reams of paper--or bottles of white-out or boxes of paper clips or anything else that seems to be in surplus—and thinking one of these won’t be missed. Or thinking, it is wrong. Which is more interesting? Actually neither, unless of course, a person—Miriam (Miriam almost forgot)—bumps into the boss or the principal or even a colleague exiting the room, hands full. Something at risk. Or unless there’s a hidden camera testing moral decisions made when no one is looking. That’d be a lousy premise, too, although in this case Miriam would get a cash prize for not taking the white-out and that would be an ironic turn. She could buy all the white-out she wanted, distribute it to friends.

It’s the temptations of sex that were compelling. Most compelling. Yielding—or not—to the high school boyfriend, a decision easy enough, really, in the fifties when the very atmosphere of the air was highly moral. People—young people-- just didn’t. How did society accomplish this, Miriam wondered, years later. Miriam and her young man panted and heaved and even partially undressed, tempted by each other relentlessly, in parked cars or—just once—in her bedroom when her parents weren’t at home—but still never went all the way. Was this a matter of personal choice? Hardly. They were fixated on the subject and contrived to meet years later, married to other people, and talk about what they should have done. But they didn’t do anything that time, either, beyond talk because by then they didn’t care about each other—or Miriam didn’t care at all about him, more the idea of him—and so they went their separate ways.

Not a story. Another anecdote. Although, if we really look at that last one, there was a risk. Either of those people could have been found out in the lie, and they had yielded to the temptation of meeting up with each other, as ridiculous as it turned out. Miriam was a writer—somewhat anyway—and she could adjust all this to be more than it was; she could call her characters Laurie and Alan and detach herself totally from what she saw now as rather stupid personal choices, and attempt to give Laurie or Alan an intensity, a sadness, a longing, a sense of something always unfulfilled.

Were people fulfilled? Miriam wondered. The woman, now old, wondered. What did it all mean? Maybe that would be the next word for her to stare at: fulfillment.

She was tempted to get more coffee. And so did.

Temptation - Chris Callaghan

It’s just a little yellow box, 2” x 3” x 1”, but it calls out to her as though it was broadcasting Bert Parks from the old TV show, “The Price is Right.”

“Come On Down!” Kate can hear him screaming at her every time she walks past the coffee table. She manages to avoid the living room and the voice in the box until almost noon. But while she’s running the vacuum cleaner in there, her hand reaches out, grabs the pack of cigarettes and shoves it into her shirt pocket. Why, it’s almost as if it’s someone else’s hand.

Most of her had vowed to quit smoking this morning but the determined smoker in her might not have heard the news. “I’ll just keep the pack in my pocket then I’ll feel more secure. I don’t have to take one out and smoke it.” She told her self. And that worked for another two hours, but Kate caught her self patting that pocket right over her heart again and again.

So she took off the shirt and draped it over the back of a kitchen chair and made a late lunch in her tank-top and shorts. She took her lunch out onto the back porch so she wouldn’t have to look at the shirt. Her apple juice tasted so good today.

But after she’d eaten her sandwich and picked the last bits of potato chip up off the plate with her moistened fingertip, the voice was back. Maybe it was that Pavlovian lull right after every meal when she usually savored a cigarette. “Oh hell!” Kate said, slammed her chair back and marched into the kitchen for her shirt.

Pulling the pack out of the pocket, she held the box and flipped the lid up and down, up and down with her thumb for a good fifteen minutes. Finally she pulled out one cigarette and stuck it between her lips, but didn’t light it. She gnawed on the filter while she went over all the arguments she’d had with her self last night. All the reasons why she wanted to quit smoking, needed to quit, would quit.

Deciding that it was the readily available pack in her hand that was the problem, she marched out to the garbage can by the curb. She made a little ceremony of lifting the lid and jamming the pack deep into the garbage knowing that today was trash day and the temptation would soon be gone. Back in the house she felt so virtuous and strong until about six pm, when she started thinking, “I may have to make a run to the store later. Damn!”

Shame - Darcy Vebber

Alice was sorting through the mail, dropping the requests for money - all or almost all from animal protection groups - into a dark green metal waste basket. She kept the coupons for the big box stores that had opened up outside Pinetop in one hand and she put the condolence cards, unopened, on the table in the entry where the family had been putting mail as long as they had been in this house. She thought the girls might want to open the cards. She wasn't sure what she wanted with the coupons but there was something. She had been thinking about it only the day before.

She had a list of things that needed to be done. Most of them involved a death certificate -- taking the certificate from place to place to show, to leave behind, to be placed in files. The funeral home gave her multiples. It seemed crazy at the time. Multiple death certificates and a flag. Mark was in the Army Courier Service, she had explained to the girls. During the Korean war. It wasn't a secret. Sometimes he mentioned that he had once lived in D.C. That was then, what he had been referring to. He was in the Army, served the requisite time, was discharged, came back to Arizona. They helped him pay for law school.

He had done nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes the grief rose in her like bile and sometimes it was like a wave of pain crashing in to her from behind. Often it was this, the memory of this serious boy out of the Courier service and on his way to law school, unaware of so much even after his years in D.C. that brought it on. He was thin then and wore glasses because he was terribly near sighted. He had thick dark hair, deliciously soft to the touch, and full lips. She knew a thousand things he did not and she was only nineteen.

She felt Lisa behind her just before she heard Kathy coming up the walk. Caught, she thought, quickly putting down the coupons. At what? she wondered. Her heart was bumping in her chest. The thing about the coupons was that she saw ads in the Republic for new things, new furniture, new appliances, things untouched, fresh and she wanted those things. If she had her way she would have set this whole beautiful old house on fire and let it burn. She imagined the three of them on the street out front, watching. Warming themselves. Then she turned to see what Lisa wanted, what Kathy was bringing in.

Shame - Maggie Wooll

He hadn’t wanted to hurt Chase Riley, hadn’t wanted to run into him in the parking lot, hadn’t wanted ever to have anything to do with that prick in fact. Willow Boy was beyond wondering how that evening had gone downhill so fast—he had been in places where things happened faster, worse things. To say he didn’t regret hitting that cocky, drunken bastard was wrong, if only because Chase took an unlucky fall, if only because it made such a mess of Willow Boy’s brief homecoming. He just didn’t waste much time on regret.

Besides, he would do the same thing again, more or less. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so quick to let Jenny Long slide her chilly hand into his, interlocking fingers the way she did that felt so familiar he was suddenly back in 9th grade and lucky, back before Jenny Long and every other freshman girl discovered their worth to upperclassmen. He might’ve asked Jenny a few more questions when she said she and Chase had split or that Chase had some “troubles.” But it wouldn’t have mattered. Willow Boy didn’t feel duped. He would’ve taken Jenny’s hand and the way she leaned into his shoulder so that he could smell that red-blond hair without barely bending his head no matter. What he should’ve done was been more alert, maybe a little faster and he could’ve gotten Jenny to the truck and not messed with Chase at all.

Willow Boy was taken off guard when Chase Riley pulled up in his big red F150 all tricked out with chrome and tinted windows, blocking their path and leaping down with the engine still running and the door open, but it had all seemed inevitable. Maybe it was: the half-empty parking lot, the distant sounds of the crowd, Chase with his sour breath and reddened eyes, Willow Boy’s own mouth sour and his head fuzzy, Jenny trembling at his side and whispering “meth”—it had all seemed as inevitable as the velvet night. Then Chase let loose on Jenny calling her every name in the book that revolved around being a whore or a bitch or having female body parts and hopping around the whole time, twitching and jerking like some kind of puppet so that it made Willow Boy’s stomach turn just to track him.

Willow Boy had felt Jenny stop trembling, had known she was ready to reply, and he just didn’t want to hear it. Suddenly he was so tired and he just didn’t want to know if Jenny Long had anything that ugly inside her. He’d looked up at the Milky Way blazing above and yielded to the inevitability of it all. His stomach stopped churning and his head cleared and when Chase Riley neared again, he hit him. And it was a lucky hit because Chase’s drug-crazed eyes were only for Jenny. He hit him again and now he had his attention. Hit him again and Chase was hitting back and Willow Boy knew he’d underestimated the other man’s strength and knew he might be in real trouble except for the curb got in the way, upset Chase’s footing, the truck getting in the way of his head before it hit hard on the asphalt. Willow Boy regretted only that he’d continued kicking him, over and over again, after he was down.

Summer Vacation - Camilla Basham

My family never went on summer vacation as a kid; there was no place to go. At least that’s what my mother would tell us. So, after dragging through a winter where the temperature never got below sixty degrees and a spring that stayed around eighty, we would brace ourselves to withstand a summer in the hundreds with the added ingredients of stifling humidity and mosquitoes that were so large they could have registered for their own zip code.

Our old wooden house was on the edge of a lake, but the lake was so filthy that one would never dream of entering it. Well, some did, but I could never bring myself to voluntarily submerge myself in liquid the color of feces, and pretty close to the odor of it as well.

One day while my brother and I were fishing for catfish, he pushed me off the old rickety wooden pier and I hit the water with my heart in my throat. Completely submerged I opened my eyes and could see nothing but darkness and raising my head out of the water to catch my breath, could smell nothing but rotting algae and the exhaust from the shrimp boats. It was like entering some other world of unknown darkness that I could not climb out of quickly enough.

After bracing myself against the cypress trees I grabbed the edge of the pier, hoisted myself back up and ran barefoot back to the house, trying to make it safely inside before the evening mosquito truck made it’s rounds spraying a mist of pesticide that would settle sickeningly with the humid evening stench.

Once safely inside I stood in my lake drenched clothes and pressed my face against the window waiting for the flashing orange lights and the warning siren to round the corner, all along wondering if mom was right and there really was no place to go.

Summer Vacation - Anne Wright

Summers in southern New Mexico were brutal. Hot. A filmy layer of gritty dust settled on the tiled living room floor but I laid down on it anyway, just to feel something cooler than the air. This way I could see the spider webs in the corners where the walls met the ceiling. Even they were coated with bits of dust.

I looked forward to the evening when I could sit outside, under the roofed patio and watch the rain move across the desert, throwing up billows of dust in its path, flashes of lightening streaking the pastel violet sky.

Once I sat on the patio in the rain and I saw a dog walk toward me on long skinny legs. His paws were oversized and his eyes shone amber, or was it the setting sun reflecting sparks of yellow light? The dog plodded across the yard and sat in front of me, his long red tongue drooping from between white teeth, and sat his skinny haunches not ten feet from me. I’d been drinking a beer from a glass and the sight of this dog froze me, my elbow bent, my lips wet with the sour beer taste. I thought I heard him say something but he was a dog, or was he a coyote, and I was a person, and I didn’t understand it. He lowered his head, and licked his paw, and I could see a spot of bright red blood between his toes. I set my glass on the table and got up from my lounge, and a step at a time approached him. He let me come near and as I bent down, my hand outstretched palm down to stroke him under his chin, he settled with a plop on his side and showed me his belly. Oh poor boy you have a thorn. I smoothed his paw in mine and picked with my nails until the shark cactus spike fell onto the ground. The rain closed in on us, pellets of heavy water everywhere, and I watched him walk away until I could only see the white tip of his tail, disappearing into the dark.

It's Not a Work of Art - Elizabeth Weld Nolan

It’s not a work of art if the wind carves it,
if water pours down the lower path and tumbles
stones along the wall of rock. It’s not a work
of art if a mountain goat bunches four thin legs
to balance on the precipice as you go by.
It is a work of art if someone wants to keep
the sight of great curving horns and paints it,
writes it, sculpts it, makes a film. It is a work of art
when we pull it out of the drawer of memory
to live it again, feel it again. It is artifice to step
out of the moment and back in time. It is artificial,
but, oh, we need it. We are so very good at it.

The Hospital - Camilla Basham

I spent a majority of my childhood in hospitals, not as a patient, but as the sidekick of my mother as she made her martyred rounds visiting every patient in the Jennings American Legion Hospital. She would hold her rosary and kneel before them praying. I once took a bite of my cookie while she was praying only to have it slapped out of my hand and told, it was rude to eat while someone was speaking to God. I told her I was chewing quietly and was sure he could still hear her. I got evil eyes for that and had to say a dozen Hail Mary’s.

I grew up in a small southern town of just over one thousand people. My mom knew most, if not all of the inhabitants. I always thought growing up in a hospital was strange, but not as strange as when mom decided to bring the sick and elderly who were without family home with her to allow them to die, not alone in a hospital bed, but in the warmth of the house my grandfather built for my mom and dad when they got married.

My brothers, who were both carpenters, built on an addition to the back of our house. There my mom went to work installing handrails, ramps, special toilets, sit down showers, and began furnishing it with donated hospital beds and wheelchairs. She did none of this for profit but simply because, as she put it, "There but for the grace of God go I." I must have heard that phrase a dozen times a day.

A stream of the dying made their way through that room: grandparents, distant cousins, the local mail carrier's dying mother, the neighbor's aunt, you name it. I often set next to them reading my homework out loud because mom said that hearing was the last thing to go and it would be nice for them to hear the voice of a child if they still could.

If they were well enough my mom would wheel them to the dinner table, colostomy bags, IV's, oxygen tanks, whatever was attached to them came along and became as much a part of the table as the place settings. It wasn't all that odd for someone to keel over and die before desert. The first time it happened was a little shocking, but soon we all knew the drill: A moment of silence as mom called the coroner on the old rotary phone, then I would collect their belongings, dad would prop open the front door and clear a path for a stretcher, my brothers would carry the body back to the bed which they would roll near the front door while covering the face with a blanket and mom would call the next of kin if there were any.

The coroner, a big fat man with a red face and a blaze of messy white hair would walk in patting his belly and say with the deepest of southern drawls, "Well, I got to tell you, Dorothy Duhon, something smells mighty good." I had to assume he was talking about my mom's cooking and not dead old Mrs. Thibodeaux lying just a foot away from him. My mom in her gentile southern voice, with not an inkling of awkwardness at having dinner on the table, a dead body in the room and the coroner presumable inviting himself for dinner, would say, "You come sit down Cleveland and I'll fix ya a plate. I made plenty." He would scratch his head and say, "Oh, I'd love to but I guess I'd better go, you know, with the body and all." At this my mom would smile, pat him on the back and say, "You wait just one second, hon." She would run off to the kitchen and return with one of at least a hundred huge old margarine tins she had saved to reuse and hand it to him. "There's a little bit of everything in there for you, Cleve. Enjoy." With that he would thank her, bid us all farewell and leave with the body. Mom would return to the table, say a prayer for the deceased, reheat our food and in her southern drawl say, "Now let's get back to the business of dinner and no one gets up until they've eaten everything on their plate because..."

"I know mom, it's a sin to leave food on your plate."

The Hospital - Donna Shomer

So what is it that we expect?
Because the walls are white
or light green
or some other pastel
every time.
There is always
a woman from another country
dozing off
behind the computer
or at the bedside
and they serve
French fries or white bread
or something else
that is at direct odds
with your cardiovascular health.

The Hospital - Chris Callaghan

This is the view from the cockpit of my sailboat. A high black ridge runs along my right, its jagged peaks are topped with steel mesh towers, like something built from a child’s giant erector set. The thin cables strung between them carry electricity from Hoover Dam to the Las Vegas Valley. The sloping feet of this ridge rest in the lake, green scrub bushes dot the slopes.

Lake Mead cradles my hull and stretches out around me – past the break-water built of truck tires, to the Boulder Islands and the lower basin beyond them. The lake extends further into canyons I can’t see, but I’m not sailing there today.

Two small toes on my left foot are broken and I am ensconced in my cockpit surrounded by pillows, recuperating. A small breeze ruffles the surface of the water and the sun reflects off each ripple, specks of glitter strewn across the bay.

The green-gray of the lake is deceiving; it can change as quickly as the wind. Yesterday it was howling and the water frothed with white caps and turned gray. Waves smacked into the stern of my boat and splattered the cushions in the cockpit –gusts were up to 41 mph.

Today a mama duck escorts her five teenagers to my stern. I toss them stale crackers and dog kibble, which they gobble up as though they’re starving. Then they glide two boats over to the next handout. I imagine the mama telling them which boats in the marina can be relied on for regular meals. Fat two-foot carp lurk in the water just below the duck’s feet to catch the scraps.

The breeze picks up and dies, picks up and dies and the song of the water hitting the bottom of my dinghy changes accordingly: blues, rap, rock and roll, blues.

Its 88 degrees at noon in the middle of June, an unheard of temperature for us, we’re normally into triple digits by now. If it was 110 and I was down below in the AC, I’d miss the Great Blue heron just gliding into a landing on the shore, or the turkey buzzards riding the thermals off the ridge. I wouldn’t hear the wind set the halyards ticking on the sailboat masts around me. And I wouldn’t be sitting in my underwear in the cockpit reading Amy Tan and healing.

The Hospital - Julie Farrar

If you look up “doll hospitals” on the internet, all the search results seems to trend toward antique doll collectors, Madame Alexander dolls, and the like. I guess no one bothers to fix any old doll anymore just because it went bald being dragged around by its hair. On second thought, do little girls have dolls anymore? I’m not talking about Barbies or American Girl dolls that teach females the ins and outs of conspicuous consumption with the ten thousand outfits and accessories they’re encouraged to buy. No, I’m talking about those soft-bodied dolls with plastic appendages and a plastic bottle for milk. They come with one or two outfits and your mother sews the rest of the limited wardrobe.

My favorite was named “Tootsie” . . . you know, after the Al Jolson song “Toot, Toot, Tootsie good-bye; Toot, Toot, Tootsie don’t cry” (I was always a fan of the big band jazz my dad loved). She had blue eyes and short blonde wavy hair. Her torso was stuffed with shredded nylons. Her soft, molded plastic arms and legs in a life-like peach color gently curved like a baby reaching out to grasp my hand. Her chubby little toes curved up and down like the toes of a baby who had not yet learned to walk. She arrived on my birthday with a navy blue dress and flannel nightgown. Momma knitted her a winter sweater and hat.

I loved that baby doll to death. Literally. She burst at the seams so that I’d wake up in the morning with shredded bits of nylons in my bed. Her hair began to disappear, but I was never certain where it went. It’s not like it came out by the handful as I brushed it. Each day, however, there was less of it. All she had remaining were the rows of holes across her skull where the hair plugs had been glued. The soft peach skin of her plump cheeks and chubby fists were covered with streaks of dirt impossible to wash off with my little doll washcloth.

So Mom and I drove downtown to the doll hospital to see if she could be saved. I put her on the tall wooden counter and they promised to take care of her. And I learned to sleep alone while she was in recovery. When I went to pick her up, she was her chubby self again, having been re-stuffed and with all seams sewn up tight. I again had hair to comb and her skin had been restored to its pink luster.

She was once again loved to death until I grew up and put her on the top shelf of my closet, where I found her again when cleaning out my dad’s house to sell it when he was too old to stay there alone. I was tempted to keep her, but I knew that it was pointless to hold on to every physical touchstone of my life. If Dad could let the house go, I could let Tootsie go. So I sang one last time “Toot, Toot, Tootsie good-bye . . . .”

The Hospital - Melody Cryns

Its shadow loomed over us each and every day as we played in the neighborhood on 2nd Avenue in San Francisco. It was an exciting, mysterious place that always fascinated us and beckoned us. Our parents warned us that we should never go up there to play, that it was dangerous and off limits. Yet how could we ignore this place that we saw each and every day because the massive, far-reaching buildings towered over us, the buildings of U.C. Hospital in San Francisco. Even when we played at the tiny patch of Golden Gate Park we called the Greens, we could see U.C. Hospital. It seemed that no matter where we went, that hospital was always there, with Sutro Forest jutting out behind it.

We had the neighborhoods to play in, and Golden Gate Park, but there were two places that were off-limits for us – U.C. Hospital and Whiskey Hill in Golden Gate Park, a hilly area where supposedly all the bums hung out – it was dangerous, our parents warned us. And they were doing all this construction around U.C. Hospital which meant there were ditches to fall into – and the doctors and the nurses and all the students up there at the hospital wouldn’t like it if a bunch of kids ran around its perimeters.

So that’s why U.C. Hospital and the surrounding grounds fascinated us, and drew us in like a magnet. The more dangerous our parents said the place was, the more we wanted to go.

I remember we started with the Medical Center across the street from the hospital. All we had to do to get to the Medical Center was walk up to Irving Street – just two short blocks, walk into this seven-story parking structure and take an elevator to the top floor – we felt as if we owned the place, and we could get ice cream cones for a nickel at the cafeteria up there and even watch a color TV. It was probably the only time I ever even saw a color TV – we only had a big-screen black and white. There was a lounge with pool and ping pong tables for the doctors we guessed, or these people called “residents.”

I remember the first day we all decided to venture across the street to the actual hospital.

“Let’s do it – let’s go over there,” my brother Michael had said.

“But Mom said…” my little sister, who everyone in the neighborhood called Jenny Pooh said.

“Oh, c’mon,” said Barry Hirrell, the crazy little boy from around the corner said. “You’re not scared, are ya?”

“Yes, let’s go over there!” David Hirrell, the biggest kid in the neighborhood who everyone listened to, maybe because if they didn’t, he could beat them up.

So we ventured across Parnassus and into the massive building that loomed over us each and every day – into its expansive lobby ooohhhing and ahhing as if we were in a museum – even though we’d been to the Natural History Museum in Golden Gate Park as well as the Aquarium dozens of times because they were free back then. When we talked, our voices, made an echo.

Then we saw the elevators and our eyes twinkled because elevators were like fun rides for kids like us. We wondered how far they would go up. These elevators looked much more fancy than the ones we took in the parking structure which were old and cumbersome.

So we pushed a button and when David Hirrell pushed it, it lit up as if by magic! You didn’t even have to press the button, just lightly touch it, and it lit up.

“Wow, this is like on Star Trek!” Barry Hirrell said.

“Yeah!” we all agreed.

There were six elevators, three on each side, facing each other. We’d never seen so many of them. When one opened, we all got on, fascinated – and then we saw that there were well over 20 floors to choose from – where should we go? I pushed a button, Number 7 – and it magically lit up.

“Wow!” everyone said. We were so fascinated by the way the numbers lit up, so modern reminding us that the spaceship age could be just around the corner.

Next thing we knew, almost all the buttons were pushed because well, we just couldn’t help it.

So the elevator opened on each and every floor. We watched the doors slide open and then close again, and as they did the light would go out for that floor. It was wonderful! That is, it was wonderful until a doctor in a white coat strode on to the elevator. He became agitated when he saw that all the buttons were pushed, and he looked down at all us kids who looked at him with wide eyes.

“What are you doing here? What did you do?” he shouted in a scary, booming voice, as the elevator stopped at the next floor up and the doors slid open. “What the…?”

He looked at the lit-up buttons and shook his head. “There should be a law against you being here.”

We were all so scared that we ran off the elevator on the next floor because we could tell that doctor guy was pretty mad. We found ourselves on a hospital ward of some kind…and even though we were curious kids, somehow wandering around the wards filled with sick people just took things a little too far.

So we pushed the down button and headed back down to the first floor – and we just couldn’t help it. We had to push all the buttons.

Slow Dancing - Bonnie Smetts

Shit, I’m up running around my little room looking for my uniform, I’d laid it out all nice the night before, but I don’t remember doing that and now I’m wondering where it is. As I’ve said a few times, I’m not at my best first thing. Especially now that I’d volunteered to take care of the diner until Richard is out of danger, that’s what Shirley said to me, and that’s what the doctors had said to her.

And so there’s me, trying to run the diner all on my own, me an Roalo, him cooking and me taking the order and delivering the food when it’s ready, when he’s hit the little domed with the bell inside letting me know I gotta hurry again.

But this morning, the third morning in a row I gotta get up, I set an alarm. I took the little clock from Shirley’s desk to the side of the kitchen where she makes up the order for food. I had to borrow the clock because I had to have somebody tell me to wake up. And today it had been especially hard.

I’d been drifting along in sleep, slowing dancing with somebody that I love, with a feeling I’d never felt in real life. I’d had this dream a few times, and I’m not one to remember dreams, but this one, I remember every single one. A soft feeling, a feeling that I’m all filled up with this softness, a feeling that I’m sure is better than going to heaven. And I never know who’s the person that’s loving me so sweetly, just rocking me back and forth, and last night we were dancing to a slow waltz, at least that’s what I’d like to think it was. And we weren’t even holding on too tightly, just resting together like laundry blowing into each other in the wind.

And suddenly I’m up, this buzzer screaming in my ear. At first I can’t figure out what the damn noise is. Buzzing, buzzing into my dream. Then both eyes open, I see it’s dark and then I remember that I got to crack the eggs, grate two million potatoes and all the rest. And I forget that I’d tried to help myself out by laying out my dress at the end of my bed.

And that wasted me a few precious minutes, getting put together to clomp on down the stairs, turn the key to the diner, and light up the place so that we can get to work. Roalo’s waiting at the back door. We do our little bows,

“Good morning,” I say.

He nods, “Good morning.”

“Here we go again, huh?” I say, and he nods again. And so we’re off, pulling the buckets out from under the kitchen counter, seems like we’d just washed them and put them away. And I’m washing the potatoes in the big sink before I realize I haven’t put my apron on the cover up my pink uniform. I’m already wet and I’m already tired. That’s when I realize I haven’t made the coffee and that’s when I know I got a good place to start to make me a better day.

Slow Dancing - Darcy Vebber

In the dark, in the space of the gym, which was small but high ceilinged, it seemed safe to pretend. Her chin was at the exact height of the boy named Jerry's shoulder and she rested it there, her chin and then her cheek because that seemed like it would be nice. To pretend that she liked him.

She didn't think about him except in her vague assumption that everyone likes to be liked. She couldn't really think about him, a boy she knew by sight, thick and not quite as tall as she was. A guy, she would have said if someone had asked. Normal, mysterious.

He had brothers, he lived in town, he was like everyone else. She thought about the way things were supposed to be, liking the boy she danced with and having a boyfriend and the strange roughness of his shirt against her skin. She tried closing her eyes for a moment but she lost her balance and had to lean more into the boy to stop from falling. He didn't respond. His body didn't respond except where he clutched her hand and the place in the small of her back where he pressed his open palm. She could feel the heat of that hand through the her t shirt.

The music was old fashioned and urgent, something her mother might have listened to on the car radio and suddenly she missed her mother and her sister and the house in Window Rock where she could be alone. Left alone. The music ended and he released her, nodding at her in the darkness, moving quickly away, back to where the other boys were, on the other side.

Nice. He was nice, she would have gone on dancing with him but as the air closed around her, her tall, awkward body her own again, she was relieved even as she knew that this sweet relief was the heart of some problem. Some difficulty. She stood with her back against the gym wall, her shoulders pressed into the plaster, waiting to be asked again.

Slow Dancing - Maggie Wooll

Willow Boy saw Ephraim Haines the minute he stepped out of the shadow at the edge of the aspen, not that he’d figured out who it was yet. All he saw was the blaze orange of his cap and the thick padding of camouflage and hoped there weren’t half a dozen other good old boys in the thicket to contend with. The hunter stood still, blinking in the sudden light, his head swiveling and nostrils flaring for all the world like some old bear roused from his slumber.

Willow Boy slunk down lower behind the basalt outcropping, dropping imperceptibly half-inch at a time until his belly was pressed tight on the black sun-warmed rock, never taking his eyes off the lone hunter at the edge of the trees. The basalt had been blown clear of the earth during some million years ago volcanic eruption and its jagged, cratered surface was sharp despite his fatigues. He shifted his forearm clear of one knife-edged knuckle. The hunter again turned in his direction, and his finger twitched at his side, feeling for the long sniper’s rifle he’d left standing against the tree he’d been camping under, two hundred yards away.

The figure turned to look up-slope, and this time Willow Boy caught the curving glint of the bow he carried over his shoulder, the sun winking off the telescopic sight on top. He relaxed a little. Bow hunters were loners, especially considering the bow season was already over and this joker was tracking game in the middle of the afternoon. Willow Boy started inching backwards, moving his feet carefully to avoid any small landslides of loose shale on the dry crumbly earth. His wiry length rested only on his fingers and toes until he had dropped well back on the slope, and he finally dared move into a crouch and steal, silent as the breeze, back through the trees to his camp.

He thought he heard the crack, the pure sweating adrenaline already on his forehead before he heard the whir in his ear, felt the thud of impact, and the sickening crunch of bone. His shoulder burned. He whipped around, instinctively calling out for his men, covering, dizzy as the burn went to his core.

He felt himself spinning. It was the opposite of slow dancing, the fast-fast-slow, fast-fast-slow of two-stepping around The Rose with some long-limbed, pony-tailed barrel racer while the band covered Garth Brooks for the 100th time because they didn’t have the chops for Alan Jackson now that the crowd was deep in their long necks and 7-and-7s and their own handle had run dry.

A figure emerged, a white face, strange angle. “Oh, hella jesus, oh fuck man, I thought you was a deer. Oh jesus.” And suddenly Willow Boy recognized the old classmate, not a friend, and thought Ephraim Haines you’re still a fucking moron, and then he passed out.

What I Want To Say About My Father - John Fetto

Imagine you’re a really shy kid, say 14. Not good with girls, a nerd, a skinny guy, with thick glasses with black rims, coke bottle lenses. You’ll only be popular if you’re stranded on a desert island and someone needs to start a fire and spring forward, whip off your glasses, hold it above the dry grass, slowly bringing forth flame. It was before cool wire rim, in the middle sixties, which was really closer to the fifties. You’re in the chess club and the chemistry club and the photography club. Every day, you wear blue button shirt, long sleeve, like the blond haired kids (and you’re not blond) that you rolled up twice, even though it’s summer in Los Angeles, with blue shorts, and white socks, wanting not to stand out as desperately as you wanted to fit in, just like everyone else, but now you have to go to the store for some reason---with your father.

Your father doesn’t want to fit in. He wants to stand out. Why else would he have dragged the whole family from the east coast so he could ‘star’ in television and movies? He doesn’t wear a long sleeve shirt with a button down collar. Remember it’s summer in Los Angeles. In the summer, and all but two weeks of winter, your father goes to the supermarket, the post office, the gas station, everywhere, wearing a bathing suit and flip flops so that everyone could admire his fabulous bronze body, a middle weight in the army if anyone wanted to know, so that he could thrill his fans who saw him murder several people last night on the Untouchables, before being machine gunned at the end. He puffs his chest out, sucks in his gut as he walks down the aisle, flip-flop, flip-flop, looking not really for products but for someone, anyone, who recognizes him. Slowly you let him get a few steps ahead, then ten feet, so you can pretend you don’t know him when he does what comes next, dreading it the way a French aristocrat dreaded the guillotine. As you walk, you think maybe, just maybe, this time he won’t do it, but then it comes, and you feel your head pulling inside your button down collar like a turtle as he begins to sing. Sinatra, of course: My Way. His voice resonates through the aisles stacked with potato chips, detergent, and laundry soap.

What I Want To Say About My Father - Jackie Davis-Martin

My father gave me a tool box to take to college. He assembled it himself, selected and packed the hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, the screws and tacks and nails I might need, even levels and an adze. Most of the tools had my initials carved in their handles, because my initials were his initials, a fact that I loved telling people. I'm telling it now, forty or so years later.

The tools had been selected and culled from the workbench he'd built himself in the back of the garage. The wooden work surface was rimmed along the back wall with Maxwell House coffee cans. These held old hinges or rusty nails or other pieces of metal—scraps he had salvaged that “might come in handy” sometime. Above these, attached to a wooden ledge, hung lids of mustard jars screwed into the wood, the scrubbed glass containers screwed into them displaying nails of various sizes. Vises and grips and drills served as bookends more or less to the workspace; hammers and mallets and cleavers and the like hung from wooden slings my father had made solely to serve as homes for them. Screwdrivers rented like pen quills in holes drilled in little platforms just for them. A shelf under the workbench held bigger machines that gathered dust.

What my father built at his workbench was his workbench. He never had time to actually construct anything. He was a man with too many things he wanted to pursue, but he never had enough time to enjoy what he'd assembled the gear for.

He worked two jobs all of my teenage years to keep me and my sister in lessons and clothes and, finally college. We rarely saw him. He rarely saw us or his workbench.

“A toolbox?” I had said of his last-minute gift to me as we got into the car for the three-hour drive to my first year of college. He had tucked the red metal box—my own name painted on top—next to the boxes of bedspreads and curtains, baskets and bulletin boards, books and file cases. ”What will I need with a toolbox?”

A year later I asked, “What will I need with a teaching degree?” My father, proud of my choice to study drama, pleased with my enthusiasm over set construction and costume design and choreographing children's theater, was also straining to enable me to pursue these frivolous choices. He suggested maybe I might consider a back-up plan to drama, that I might consider teaching as a career, “in case” I had to support myself.

Four years after that question (and armed with a diploma and a teaching credential), I asked my father, “Why are you telling me this?” We were standing in front of the little house I had grown up in; I was visiting from out of state for my grandmother's funeral. He said he wanted to thank me for being a good daughter; he said he wanted me to know he loved me. I asked the question because I thought I could have been a better daughter; because I already knew about the love.

Three weeks after that last conversation my father died.

I don't know what became of the toolbox. In my first dorm room I hung up my own curtain rods, screwed together the bulletin board and hung it, measured the angle of the floor for assembling a bookcase. The freshman girls on my floor tapped on my door: “I heard you have a toolbox! Do you happen to have a ____?” My toolbox became part of my college gear, like my Royal typewriter. It followed me into the first marriage at least, the one I was involved with when my father died. He never knew that I went on to teach for the next thirty-five years, that I was always financially independent, (in case), that I worked on the sets, the costumes of the school plays I choreographed, that I repaired and repainted my house as a single mother.

“'What will I need with a toolbox?'” Right.

Not About My Father - Anne Wright

“My dream has always been to sail into the sunset,” Sam said.

He was a dreamer, I thought, because how on earth do you expect to do that when you don’t even have a job, and now you are married and we have a baby, and I don’t even like boats. Actually I never have been on one except the rowboat in Stow Lake that my dad used to take me out on and show me how to row, sitting backwards, when I was little.

Whenever I heard that saying, “You marry someone exactly like your father,” I laughed, because Sam was a big dreamer who never followed through on anything. When we met he was going to art school to be an art teacher. Then he quit that when we got married so he could support me and the new baby, and took a job driving cab in the city. I don’t think he ever supported us, though. It was the house his grandmother let us live in for free. It was the money he got from his mother. And it was the start of the end when he met another taxi driver who turned him on to the drugs.

Actually the start of the end for me was the day I set foot in the church, the day of our wedding. If only I had known enough, if only I had been defiant enough, I would have run the other way, never stopping until I got to the south pole where I would have lived in an ice hut carved out of a glacier, and dressed in polar bear skins, and rocked my baby in a cradle made from whale baleen. He did sail off into the sunset, but it was only after the course of my own life shifted away, and I got to stand on the hard ground with my toes spread, gripping the earth with all my might.

What's Forbidden:The Attic - Elizabeth Weld Nolan

You’d think going inside
The doorway black as velvet,
Fuzzy with summer dust,
Would be cooler.
Without the huge fan
To whip stale air
Into froths of breath,
Two girl cousins
Pad on boards
Splintered by time.

From there, we children peer
Through their bedroom vent,
Watching our grandmother,
Tiny and naked, bicycle
Her legs around him,
Our grandfather, large,
and naked. What
Are they doing? Helpless
To understand, we run.

Two decades pass.
I find his letters
In the musty trunk,
The father I never saw.
Typewritten, yellow, to her,
Our mother. I see the path
he took away from us.
I was always helpless to find
him. Now. Too late.

Back-Up Plan - Donna Shomer

God, obviously.

My Back-Up Plan - Bonnie Smetts

I was standing behind a lady at the pharmacy. Randy’d invited me to take a vacation with her and her too nice husband. I hadn’t decided but I thought I’d at least buy some sunscreen and see if that helped me along with my decision. I’ve never been on a vacation, and I swear Randy hasn’t either but she was pretending that she knew what that was like. So any anyway I’m standing in line to buy the lotion when I hear the lady say, “If you got a Plan B, then you don’t have god.”

That made me think that I got no back-up plan going forward but I am not so sure I got god either. But when I got back to the diner, not even all the way back, just down the block and I see an ambulance and a fire truck and the sheriff’s car in front, I realize maybe I should have a Plan B, god or no.

I run down the block to the mess, people and firemen everywhere. I push on in to the diner, nobody even sees I’m there. And there he is, Richard’s on the floor, actually they got him with a big heave onto the stretcher.

“Shirley, what’s going on?” I take hold of Shirley’s arm and then realize I’m holding on too tight. She’s not seeing straight but she hears me and I gotta hug her, but she’s hugging me and leaning into me but she’s sure not taking her eyes off Richard. They got the stretcher up on its wheels now, and they got an emergency guy working on him, listening to his chest and putting a mask for air over his mouth. Their radios are echoing all over the diner. Poor Roalo peeking from the kitchen, looking scared to death.

“Heart attack, they think maybe a heart attack,” Shirley says, still not turning her face to me. I just hold her up, hold her straight. And then they start to roll Richard out the door and they got people waiting for him at the ambulance. And like magic, they get the stretcher thing into the ambulance. I’m guiding Shirley right behind following so they don’t let Richard get away with out Shirley.

“She can go with him? She wants to go. She’s gotta go with him,” I’m not sure what to ask but I just keep it up.

“Yes, lady. His wife can accompany him to the hospital. But only his wife,” the man in the ambulance says.

And that’s when I realize that I can’t go too, not that I was even thinking about it. And that when I finally start thinking. “Shirley, I’ll take care of the diner. Don’t worry. Me and Raolo, we’ll clean up and take care of everything. OK?” And I hand Shirley off to one of the ambulance people and they guide her up the stairs with a little push from me. And then I gotta cover my ears because they start up the siren and all I can see through the window as they go off toward Manville is Shirley’s pink sweater.

My Back-Up Plan - Melody Cryns

It was with great regret that I reluctantly trudged through the security gate at the airport in Maui last night, saying good-bye to the most special, magical place I’ve ever been to. I could hear singing and ukulele and guitar ringing through the airport, saying good-bye…music was everywhere in Maui – it seemed that everywhere I went, to Hana up in the lush green hills overlooking the most amazing part of the ocean I met a girl people in town call “Ukelele Donna” because she always serenades the people who come through town, either on their own or via tour – playing and singing. She showed me a few ukulele chords and she showed me her small four-string ukulele, which she plays left-handed and upside down even though she’s right-handed because she’d watch her Grandma play and mirror her…

She also laughed about how Grandma went through a lot of ukuleles because she sometimes smashed them when she got mad – and you had to watch out or Grandma would hit you with one of them. I laughed and said it sounded like something a rock star would do or something… She sang beautifully. Then, there were the dudes sitting at a picnic table overlooking the ocean, singing in harmony and playing guitar and ukulele…

We were constantly surrounded by the beauty and the music, enveloped…it was so hard to leave… and sometimes things don’t work out the way you plan it because I had to take a plane from Maui to Salt Lake City, Utah, then another plane to Seattle, Washington, change airlines and then catch yet one more plane down to San Francisco – the plane was late and they put my luggage on the wrong plane. I’d already been traveling all night, so I didn’t need to have to wait an extra hour and a half at the airport for my suitcase to arrive… so the backup plan was that Jeremy would have to leave and come back to the airport, and I’d just get as much done as I can before heading off to New York late tonight on the red-eye…right now I’m so tired I feel as if I could just lie down and fall asleep…but there’s places to go and things to do.

And the reality of life has hit me in the face. Last night at this time, I sat at a picnic table looking at the ocean…and I swam one last night and rode the waves and felt the warm water lap against my feet – one more time. I’ve vowed to get a ukulele and learn to play it, so I can just whip it out wherever I go and sing along… like those kids at Ioe Valley who sang to bless the water before they swam in it…

This Time Last Year - Maggie Wooll

The snow came early to the high country. The aspen leaves black with frost almost before they turned, then coated in the heavy stuff that only hits in freak storms, the early fall, the late spring. It made for a good deer season, even if the Texans bitched about freezing their asses off; by late October the deer had all come down to 8000, 7000 feet where the snow wasn’t too crusty and the grass not yet brittle. That snow had lasted all season, the rare promise kept of a deep and brutal Colorado winter, storm upon storm through December, January, February with a hellish cold that dashed any hopes of reprieve in between, blue sky or no.

There hadn’t been a winter like that since the early 90s, back before all the retirees moved in and bragged about the climate and the 10-month golf season and built custom 3000-foot homes on the sage-covered lower slopes. That winter Willow Boy and his mom had been living up north in a fifth-wheel trailer with a space heater and an extension cord and a dingo/collie mutt named Corky that seemed to have ducked either breed’s intelligence but retained the desire to meddle. Every night Willow Boy lay awake wondering if he’d freeze to death or be consumed by fire before morning. His mom laughed at his 10-year old fears, told him he worried too much, as if every year the Independent didn’t have a story about some trailer or another going up in flames and the whole family with it.

The snow piled up well above the wheels, the 50 yards to the road as good as a mile, the path he scraped icy and treacherous. What he remembered most about that winter was how the light was always blue, from twilight to dawn, the blue coming from somewhere deep under the surface.

This Time Last Year - Julie Farrar

Summer is the best time of year for a country music fan. That’s when the artists climb on their custom-outfitted buses and log 100,000 miles or more hitting every county and state fair, casino, shed amphitheater, and college arena in the country. And their hardcore fans are with them every mile of the way. They’ll take vacation days to see six shows in seven days at every sweltering river town in the Plains states or drive a thousand miles one way to see The Big Show – Fan Fair (CMAFest), held every June in Nashville.

I’ve traveled from St. Louis via Chicago to pick up a friend then on to Syracuse in one shot, windows rolled down and singing at the top of our lungs at 2 a.m. to keep ourselves shooting down Interstate 90 until we could roll into our hotel at 4 a.m. to meet up with other music friends at the Erie County Fair to see Keith Urban knock our socks off, just to be told by a gas station attendant “You’re just like Dead Heads, only you smell better.” I’ve crowded into a Nashville hotel room with three friends from Germany and one native New Yorker transplanted to the Midwest for a week in the Mecca city for all music lovers. We heard “the next big thing” on parking lot stages with our shirts soaked from sweat, were rained on along with 50,000 other fans at the nighttime stadium show, and had the ultimate fan experience when modern legend Alan Jackson showed up unannounced to meet people and give autographs at the downtown convention center. It was Greta’s only trip to America and probably would be her only trip for at least the next decade, but her idol made her country music dreams come true with a hastily scribbled name and a his arm around her for a picture.

I’ve sat on hay bales on a July 4th in Warrenton, MO to watch fireworks and hear the twanging tenor of John Anderson squeezing out the unnatural dipthongs of “blames her broken heart on every man in saaa-yt” in the heartbreak anthem “Straight Tequila Night.” And I’ve felt the chills as Martina McBride’s power vocals filled a football stadium with the no-nonsense chorus of the take-no-prisoner anthem against domestic violence, “Independence Day” – “Let freedom ring/Let the white dove sing/Let the whole world know that today is the day of reckoning.”

For many summer is baseball and barbeque, swimming and the smell of freshly mowed grass. For me, though, it’s knowing that somewhere out there a bus full of music is rolling down the highway, enticing me to follow it straight to where the blacktop ends.

This Time Last Year - Jackie Davis-Martin

This time last year had been the wonderbread of their relationship. That’s what Gordon had called it, leaning against one of the railings of the Brooklyn Bridge, looking back at Manhattan, then at her. “I can’t get over the wonderment of how we get along!” he’d said. “The wonderbread of it.” He’d emphasized it, as though their love was beyond exclaiming—or even explaining.

Sharon had laughed, leaning next to him, pressed against him, both of them watching the view of a city, a future, that seemed limitlessly exciting. Who’d have thought, in addition, there would also be on this bridge such a weaving of lines and cables that fanned out from arches as grand as a cathedral’s? From their angle, one of the stanchions of the bridge, Manhattan was seen as an Escher drawing, a complex mesh screen through which the city itself, the array of buildings, was arranged as artistically as some of the canvases they had viewed the previous day at the MOMA.

This time this year Sharon couldn’t even ask for a picture. There must have been one. Gordon had handed his camera to one of the couples walking those planks, the sky above, the cars passing below, and posed the two of them, him behind her and arms around her, her hair stirring in the breeze. She’d had on a turquoise blouse with short sleeves and was thinking how nice it would look in the photo, next to his white polo, his tanned hairy arms wrapped in front, leaning forward so their cheeks, hot from the sun, the walk, touched, too.

She had a calendar in front of her, the big one her college sent her every year, the one she could write in the squares on. It was been this exact day, really, that they had stood on the bridge, June 16.

“Bloomsday,” she had said to Gordon and he’d been delighted to know there was a holiday out there for them, until she explained about James Joyce and he was—not annoyed—but disappointed. Maybe she did that too much, she thought now, blurted out bits of poems and credits that had first had charmed him (“You’re such a wonder!”—and he’d kiss the top of her head), but then had had him saying things such as “Oh, that’s something,” or “Really? Who would know that?” or maybe just grunting before she wasn’t saying anything at all because he wasn’t there any more.

But surely that was more a symptom than the cause.

A year ago last night they had lain in the hotel bed, cuddled into the soft sheets, staring at the tops of buildings, partially visible and made crooked from their position, the position they sought as much as they could, making love as much as they could, part of the wonderbread of what they’d had. They wanted to do the same things--bike the park, row the lake, walk the bridge, see the world. “I can’t get enough of you,” Gordon had said. “I can’t take you all in.”

Last night she had seen him—seen Gordon-- at a Singles discussion group. Her friend Madge had insisted Sharon go, to get her out of her doldrums. (Doldrums was Madge’s word, which made Sharon’s situation seem temporary and almost funny, like wading through a bit of muck.)

The Singles Social took place on a pleasant campus of a Unitarian church where people would sign up for topics they wanted to explore. It was stultifyingly contrived, but one had to start somewhere. They all started there; there was a mixer afterward, punch and cookies and eying each other. That’s where Sharon spotted Gordon. He was sitting on a wall, directly outside the refreshment room, his arm around a woman—pretty, dark hair pulled into a pony tail--the two of them with their heads close together. Sharon realized they had come in together—they hadn’t just met here—they had come to a singles mixer on a date, to do what? Laugh at the others still trying? They were laughing then, on the wall. Sharon was so sick with it she asked Madge for her keys and waited out in the lot, hidden in the car.

Now, a year later, staring at her calendar, so filled with adventures for a while—a year’s worth, almost—she saw metaphors in everything in the New York Trip a year ago. She saw the entangling structures of the Brooklyn Bridge; she saw the remoteness of the city, of any real meaning from where they were, and of course she saw the lack of wonder in wonderbread, of all things, and she wondered whether that’s the way her life would be counted: a year ago, two years ago, five years ago at this time. And so on.

This Time Last Year - John Fetto

Johanna kept working, not wanting to think. The hospital was an inexhaustible warehouse of things to do, people wanting help, things to straighten, clean, sort out, and she pushed herself, faster and faster. Filing her shift was almost over, and she sat down to do her charts. But on each chart she had to write the date, October 17, 1986, and each time she did, she thought of how different it was a year ago. This time last year, Hawley would be waiting for her outside the hospital. He’d smile at her as she walked through the glass doors, kiss her and they’d do something together. He’d take her sailing or walking along the foothills or to a movie. She wouldn’t have to spend the whole evening with her mother watching television, listening to her mother complain about everything she saw on the television. This time last year she had a future with someone. There were plans, dreams, not huge, but not alone. Hawley wasn’t ambitious; he wouldn’t make millions, but when she was with him, she didn’t feel alone. And he was patient, even kind. But what good did it do him?

Another chart. She wrote quickly, entering the medication given, everything that had been done, so that the nurse who took over her shift would know what had been done. She waited till everything was filled out before she entered the date, and this time she did it wrong. October 17, 1985. She sat back and looked at it, wondering what she had done. Her mind had turned back the clock, and for a mad moment she was transported to a year ago; the shooting, the fire, the explosion at the warehouse where Hawley worked, none of it had happened. Her mind stretched further and she wondered if she wrote the name on all the charts, on all the places---if she did all that, maybe Hawley would be resurrected and she’d find standing out on the sidewalk. Then her mind snapped back. And she started to erase the date, quickly. Hoping no one had noticed what she’d done.

This Time Last Year - Camilla Basham

My name is Liz, I was named after my grandmother Elizabeth Ann Keener, she died of Alzheimer’s disease this time last year. I remember her lying in the back room of my aunt’s house during her last days, listening to Hank Williams and being fed one of those protein drinks that Auntie had blended up with a Snickers bar. Auntie would sit patiently brushing Grammy's hair getting her ready for the date she swore she was going on as soon as Bill got back from the war. Seems Bill was Grammy’s first love and had been shipped off during WWII back in the day. She had loved Bill but could never find the voice to tell him. Grammy had been married to Grandpa Joe for forty years before he passed away the year before, so she had hung her confused dreams on the hopes she once had as a young girl growing up in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Grammy died that night at the dinner table. We were having Auntie's Meatballs and spaghetti, with a salad made with tomatoes from Grandpa's old garden in the back, sweet tea and hot corn bread. Why do I remember what I had for dinner a year ago, because that night sitting at the dinner table, when Grammy stood for the first time in two years and found her voice to shout "Bill" at the top of her weakened lungs, she collapsed onto the table sending all of the above contents violently onto my lavender Sunday dress, the one mother warned me not to get a stain on, and landing silently onto the cracked green linoleum of the kitchen floor.

I didn't want to look at Grammy dead, her hair caked in tomato sauce, cornbread and sweet tea, so I did what any kid would do and made time stand still, I stared at the mess on the floor memorizing every ingredient as they formed a sickening soup that spread to my mary janes.

And I just sat there and sang a song in my head. The next thing I remember was mom telling me in her stern voice, "Snap out of it, Liz. People die everyday. She had her life." And there I was sitting in a car with mom, who it seems had picked me up from Auntie's house to take me home. I woke from a kind of dream just then and as I watched the wind shield wipers dance back and forth on the wet glass, I asked God under my breath if it was a sin to not want to grow up to be like my mom and I prayed that empathy just sometimes skipped a generation.

This Time Last Year - Anne Wright

The effort of driving away from them exhausted Lindy. Patrick and the twins behaved as if she would never be back, not as if she only needed to get to the store before it closed, to buy milk for breakfast. And it was always like this. They all dragged her down, pulling at her, adding their enormous weight to her thin shoulders, especially Patrick.

Lindy pulled into the parking lot of the store, jamming the brakes as the tires bounced off the curb. The farther she drove from the house, the more energized she’d become, and as she drove faster, her lethargy became a kind of sizzle of anger.

She stepped out of the car and grabbed for her purse, then realized that she had left it at home on the kitchen table when the twins started crying and fighting over the stuffed rabbit.

“Goddammit!” She slammed the car door and leaned against it. She wasn’t going to go back home for the money because by the time she got back to the store it would be closed for the night. Maybe the clerk would take an IOU, or let her come back in the morning with the money.

When Lindy stepped from the darkness into the store’s white light she didn’t see the clerk behind the counter. As she walked toward the glass doors of the refrigerators she checked to see if the clerk was down the aisles of cookies and chips and pretzels and beer, but he wasn’t. She turned to look into the large circular convex mirror up at the top of the wall, and saw that she was the only person in the store, and the only sound she heard was the hum of the fluorescent light tubes.

That was when she decided to take the milk and walk out the door. It wasn’t like the store would miss it. They charged so much more for the milk here than the grocery store she usually shopped at. She reached into the glass door and chose the quart size of whole milk, not feeling the soft coldness of the carton as she tucked it into her sweater. She turned and walked out straight and tall, even though there was nobody around to be suspicious.

Lindy got into the car and drove off, the milk on the seat beside her, and she buzzed with excitement. She didn’t see anyone following her when she looked into her rear view mirror, and she took a turn around the block to look at the store again. As she drove by she could see through the window, the clerk at the counter, reading a magazine in the empty store.

What I Want To Say Is - Elizabeth Weld Nolan

Sitting with my brother on the green-painted logs
In the shade of the tin roof of the drive-in stall,
We waited for Lorraine to bring hamburgers,
Our grandfather inside running the business.

At the dinner table: mother, brother, me,
Stepfather who loved us best,
Except he loved our mother more –
And the cats who walked the kitchen tails up.

What I want to say is we know now
That, under toast, inside teapots,
In ice cream brought home once
During the war, love lay waiting,

Reading - Chris Callaghan

I have fifteen bookcases in my house and every single one is stuffed with books. Also every other flat surface has at least a few books on it, some have stacks.

Every couple of years I pull the books off the bookcase shelves and try to get organized, alphabetically, by author. For a month or two it stays tidy but then I keep buying books at thrift stores and garage sales and jamming the ones I can’t bear to part with horizontally onto the shelves.

I don’t just love reading, I’m addicted.

I learned to read before I started kindergarten, egged on by my mother who, although she couldn’t give me her love, gave me her love of books. I will forever be thankful for those weekly trips to the library. The kind librarian introduced me to the children’s section where I discovered that sticking my head in a book and reading gave me unlimited access to lives much better than the one I was stuck in.

Of course reading led me naturally to writing. The old “I could do that” syndrome popped up in me when I read my first Dr. Suess book. So I did, I think I was ten or maybe eight.

I started keeping a journal when I was twelve and haven’t been able to put my pen down since. Thank God.

Reading has gotten me through many a tough time in my life, and writing is still the cheapest therapy I know of. For me, they go together like cookies and milk. I never go anywhere without a book and something to write on.

For years I believed that this love of reading was a common human denominator, but alas it just ain’t so. Now I ask every new person I meet, “Do you read?” with a maniacal gleam in my eye and the fantasy in my mind that if I can just give them the right book they’ll be hooked. Sometimes I succeed. I had a 35 year old sailor friend once who told me he had never read a book all the way through, never. So I went on a mission to find him a book that would keep his interest. I gave him ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ which he finished even though it took him six months. I was so thrilled for him; I gave him the other two books of that trilogy.

I can’t imagine existing without reading. Books are my friends, teachers, travel guides, and treasure. Sometimes I just sit in front of the bookcases and look at all my wealth. Sometimes I look at the titles on the spines and plan a trip, where will I go today?

Right now I have to go to the thrift store. Why? Because I need more books.

Marriage - Jackie Davis-Martin

Adam and Eve: once out of the garden, did they quibble over who’d pulled the weeds last or trekked to the stream to lug water in gourds or disagree on when it’d be fitting to insist Cain and Abel wear fig leaves too? Or did they just lapse into a silence, a faultfinding punishing day-to-day thing like a cloud, If it weren’t for you, we’d be far better off; it was your fault too.

Jo and Eddie: did they have nicknames, a playful life where they’d sit on stone benches outside the large castle watching the children making smaller ones in sand, their children, the little girls, the boys who must have laughed and run around and chased each other. Did he, Oedipus, think for a moment, she’s lovely even with the laugh wrinkles around her eyes? Did she, Jocasta, doubt his fidelity with the servant girls his age tempting him? Or was the union one that startled their neighbors to say it won’t last, how could it? until rumors were silenced with the absoluteness of the truth.

And before the King came to town, before he honored the Macbeths with his presence, all those years before—or maybe not that many, maybe they were really a young couple named Ethan and Emily—they must have shared secrets (she knew his) whispering in a bed hung with tapestries; he must have consoled her, the hint of lost children, they wanted so desperately to make each other happy in some way, to stave up what couldn’t be, unless it could. Murder must have seemed easy—a gradual accustoming oneself from one pain to another, numbed with it, loving in spite of it, until there they were, both of them trying, incapable, murdering anyway, murdering what they’d had left.

And Percy and Mary flitting about Italy with toddlers in tow: did she wake next to him, his fine features, his fantastic mind, and smooth his fine hair, his thin limbs, thinking how lucky she was? Or was she nagged by a guilt: what of her, what of Harriet, your other kids, do you think of them? Is poetry worth it? They all hate us. And he later, shuffling through papers, slumped over a desk, said yes, yes, pick up Dad’s money, pay the rent, take the kids out of here, until she, in love with his beautiful genius, heard of Harriet’s suicide and, aware of the intimacy and insanity of their lives, created her own monster. Maybe Frankenstein was a metaphor for the marriage they had wrought?

No one knows, really, what goes on in a marriage. The beautiful young woman, so faultless in her complexion, her tumbling hair, her sweetness that it comes as a shock when she laments to you after a Meeting, Why can’t I live like my friends, in peace, planning babies? Why do I have to be here, dealing with his addiction? And tears fill in her blue eyes, vibrant without makeup, nothing to detect from the outside. Or the old friends—they’re all old now—the couple who always hold hands when they’re sitting next to each other—an affectation? or a genuine reassurance, one to the other, we’ve made it to this point?

Because after the silences induced by arguments over who wrote the directions or made the arrangements and what went wrong or who heard what or didn’t hear what was certainly essential, there are the other times, the public times of dressing up and presenting oneself, or both selves to the world, a marriage: this is ours, right now.

Marriage - Maggie Wooll

Marriage? How could she hear the word and not hear the lisping “mawwage is what bwings us togedder” of the Princess Bride? And having heard that in her mind, how could she take him seriously, at all? Because back when she was watching movies like the Princess Bride (in the middle of Friday afternoon, the roommates all sprawled about an artificially-darkened dorm room, simultaneously hung over and drunk with the giddiness of being 19 and far from home with life still, more or less, served up on a platter before them) marriage was so far from the point as to be not even in the discussion. Marriage was what their parents had, and being smart women but of a generation that took their opportunities for granted, they found nothing wrong with it as a concept (no need to discuss it ad nausum), one of many things to be attained somewhere in a vague and distant future. There was so much to be done first.

She had not wanted marriage, only to know that someday she would in fact be married, to know the ending in advance, as if marriage really were just the happy ending that came on the last page. If the tale went any further than that, it was only in condensed version to tell the reader that the couple ruled wisely, a young prince was born, and peace and prosperity descended on the kingdom for the next many years.

So when he dropped on one knee with a ring and a smile, she conjured up swashbuckling giants and devious dwarfs, ivy-covered towers and endless afternoons—the world was not quite so much on a platter before her, and so she smiled back.

Marriage - Chris Callaghan

Tom and his wife had been married fifty years, and then she died. Their friends brought him casseroles, sympathy, and willing ears for two years. Then they started bringing relatives, widows, and divorcees as potential replacement material.

Tom was having none of it.

The only thing he wanted to talk about was his dead wife. Her name had been Joyce, but he called her Joy. His Joy.

He told the same stories of their perfect life together over and over and at first the friends clucked and nodded in sympathy. The widows patted his arm and the divorcees shifted subtly closer to him on the couch.

“Oh you poor man,” they said. “She must have been lovely,” they said. And Tom would say, “Yes, she was.” Smile sadly, and stare off into the past.

Then came Jewel. She was a spunky 68 year old woman who bought the bungalow next to Tom’s. She wore shorts, t shirts, and baseball caps, and moved in with only one small truck full of furniture and a few boxes. Tom watched the unpacking from his living room crammed with fifty years of furniture and felt sorry for her.

Jewel heckled the movers in a loud voice and when they were done she handed them each a cold soda and a big tip.

In the ensuing weeks Tom watched Jewel tackle the neglected yard, ripping out overgrown ivy, and pruning the rose bushes with no mercy. Half the time she forgot to put on her gloves. Joy would never have forgotten, she had taken such pride in her white hands and immaculate fingernails.

When Tom finally introduced himself, Jewel stuck out her hand to shake and said, “Hi neighbor, like a beer?” So Tom started to tell her all about how he and Joy didn’t drink.
“Joy. That your wife? She inside?”

Tom leapt into the opportunity to tell his tale of Joy again, but Jewel interrupted him.

“Oh, she’s passed on then. Sorry to hear it. So’s my Phil. Well, nice to know Phil’s got good company up there,” she glanced up at the sky and grinned.

“Got to get back to the yard now, that philodendram needs serious cutting back. Got company coming on Saturday and we’ll need the space.”

“Why?” Tom asked. The yard seemed big enough to him for a few tables and chairs.

“Have to have the room to set up the Croquette set. Nothing like the sound of one croquette ball smacking another one out of play. You’re welcome to come on over and join in, always room for one more.” She laughed so clear and loose.

Tom didn’t go; he sat in his den going over old pictures of him and Joy. Jewels friends asked her about the new neighbors, were they nice, did she invite them?

Jewel looked up from her croquette ball and said, “Got a nice one over there, but it’s gonna take him some time to come on over.”

“Here?” some one asked her.

“Nope,” she said. “To the present.” Then she smacked the shit out of that ball.

Marriage - Andrew Hamilton

“This is the part of the job I hate the most”

“Yeah, I know what you mean, what is it about slimy warm ketchup that grosses me out?”

“Well, it’s slimy and dried for one!” Kathy exclaimed as she took another two bottles of half used ketchup and began the process of marrying them into one. The rest were splayed in around her on the table as if she were embroiled in a carnival game trying to win a big stuffed animal.

“So, are you working a double this weekend,” Kathy asked.

“I don’t know. Johnny is supposed to cover for me but he ain’t called me yet.”

“Yeah, good luck with that.”

“Ha! I know, right. Like, he is such a douche sometimes.”

Kathy ignored this last comment. She tilted her head slightly and her brunette hair fell from behind her ear, covering the dangly silver earring that Johnny had given her just last week.

“Well, that’s maybe a bit harsh. I just mean that he isn’t good at keeping a schedule.”

Cheryl looked at her. When she did, some ketchup missed its aim and slid down the bottle onto her finger. “Shit!”

Kathy laughed and when she did, her ketchup slipped the opening and ran down into the crevices between her thumb and forefinger.

“Ewww!” Cheryl yelled, and the girls laughed.

“We can’t do this for shit!” Kathy said.

“Yeah, what happens when we have to marry for real?”

Cheryl’s phone rang just then.

“Well speak of the devil.”

Marriage - Randy Wong

Ralph turned to his right and stared at his bride. Chloe had never looked lovelier. She had just pulled back her veil. Her beautiful green eyes sparkled as she smiled and stared straight ahead at the minister. Ralph smiled and face forward. The moment of truth had finally arrived.

The minister paused for a moment and adjusted his glasses. He cleared his throat, and stared at Ralph.

“Do you have the ring?”

Ralph smiled and nodded. “The best man has it. Dibbs, if you would?”

There was a low murmuring in the small audience of attendees as Ralph walked over to the side of the stage and picked up the ventriloquist dummy that had been placed there. “Dibbs” was formerly dressed in a tuxedo, as it was modeled after Edgar Bergen’s Charlie McCarthy dummy. Ralph picked Dibbs up his left hand. Ralph used his free right hand to pull on the loop of string that controlled Dibbs’ mouth.

Chloe continued to smile and stare straight ahead. The minister stared at the ventriloquist dummy for a long moment. Ralph cleared his throat.

“So, Dibbs – do you have the ring?’

Ralph then changed his voice and began to talk out the side of his mouth. As he talked, he pulled the loop of string that caused the dummy’s mouth to open and close. He also used his left hand to animate the dummy.

“Do I have the ring?” replied Dibbs/Ralph. “Of course I do! This is your most important day! What do you think I am? A dummy? !”

Chloe continued to smile and stare ahead. Her eyebrows did go up a bit, however.

“Well? Where is it? Where is the ring?” demanded Ralph.

“Why, it’s in my pants pocket!” replied Dibbs. “Go ahead and get it. But, be careful! Your hands are kind of rough!”

Ralph pinned Dibbs against his body with his right forearm, and proceeded to dig out the ring with his left hand.

“Ah! There it is!”

Dibbs bristled. “Ouch! You really should use some hand lotion.”

Ralph nodded towards the minister. “Okay. Don’t mind him. We’re ready here.”

The minister continued to stare at Ralph. He finally sighed and looked over at Chloe.

“If you want out, just raise your hand during the ‘if anyone has any reason why these two people shouldn’t get married’ part, alright?”