Northwoods - Jeff Thomas

Northwoods

Sturdy boots slipping in sandy soil
on the old two-track road.
Waist-high ferns like prehistoric trees
Delicately graze my hips.
Where are the miniature native villagers
With their regal kings and queens?
Hiding under the brush?

The weight on my arm of
A 12-gauge shotgun,
My adolescent hands clutching the
Smooth wooden forestock.
Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, fuck, fuck,
It’s exciting to say dirty words

Grandpa’s heavy coat, a rugged red plaid
Keeps me warm.
Its khaki canvas pockets hold
Shotgun shells
Floppy dead bird
Drying droplets of blood.

Dad, can we go home now?

His Pocket - Anne Wright

His pants pockets didn’t jingle. Oh, maybe a thin dime and a quarter would rub together but they didn’t make the tinkly noise of a pocketful of coins. Ed used those coins left over from buying a cup of coffee and a piece of pie to give the girl a dime and some pennies for her effort. The two dollars he handed the cashier were thin and tired. One time he had felt for the quarter and fifty cent piece and found only a frayed seam. He made sure to have Greta sew the holes in the bottom of his pockets. Every morning after he buckled his belt, his fingers searched both pockets for a loose thread, a thinning in the fabric, the surprise of a missing coin. He never wanted that to happen again.

Leaving Home - Vicki Rubini

Darling! I’m here! By the spidery gates
Lit by the barbecued skies.
I’m dressed to the nines – do I not look divine?
In black pearls by Chanel
In Sumptuaries’ hell?

For Promethean pride in my sartorial side,
I dress and redress my wrongs.
The Fork Guy points to the closet Dior.
Silky satins or sable jackets?
Sequined train or studded jacket?
Egret boa – a bit egregious?
Fringed sari? Don’t be facetious.
I’m fat in that, just like the Versace,
And Puntis laugh at my three-legged Puccis.

The Gucci’s not bad….
The Devil loves fads…
I look hot, don’t you think?
Glamorous, chic -
That’s all that I seek!

It’s not quite right. In this eternal night,
In vanity’s flight,
To my closet I go….
In stilettos I stumble,
The boxes I tumble.
Crumbling under the weight
Of my greed driven fate.

A fashion faux pas
The least of God’s laws
Broken.

Leaving Home - Melody Cryns

As I sit here at the kitchen table writing this, I can see bits of the sun peeking through the dense green leaves of the trees – the leaves are still green and fresh looking. But I know it’s only a matter of time before they turn all these brilliant shades of yellows, golds and reds before falling off the tree – it happens later here in California than in most parts of the country, but it always happens.

They’re like the kids, I thought – the kids who were always such a huge part of my life. I was always surrounded and engulfed by them. There were times I wanted to run away from them, but not for long – I even used to joke with my friends that my kids won’t leave home even if I wanted them to.

I’m eerily alone this morning, with only the cat to keep me company – no yelling at Megan to get out of bed, no Megan yelling at me to get off the computer and get ready for work. She’s at her friend’s house for a couple of days, going to school from there. She even took the dog with her – so now I get yet another glimpse of my life without any of the kids around – heck, maybe even without the dog. Megan will probably want to take the dog with her. I don’t know when she’ll move out – but already there’s that sense of independence, that sense of Megan wanting to spread her wings and live her own life as she turns 17 in about a week.

Like all the other kids.

It’s pleasant here this morning, yet quiet. I’ve got the radio on for rockin’ music to keep me company – I breathe in the fresh, crisp, cool air that travels in through the slightly open window. Sometimes it feels downright luxurious to be alone – to know that you can do whatever you want, that you can leave things places and not worrying about it disappearing, that you don’t have to fight for your spot in the bathroom or on the computer because Megan’s laptop broke. I’m thinking okay, I’m going to get the writing and the reading done that always falls between the cracks somehow.

Yet the other part of me feels sad – wondering where those people that were once my children were. Where has my excited little rollerblading cheerleader girl gone? Even as my older kids became moody teenagers, I had a little girl just starting Kindergarten, a kid who still thought I was wonderful and who loved me. I can still picture Megan rollerblading down the street to school with her helmet and knee pads – she was in first grade and she insisted upon rollerblading to school – she would’ve slept in those rollerblades if I had allowed her to. So I would watch Megan as she set out down the street, effortlessly gliding alone, until she got to the crossing guard who would help her across the street to school.

As I watched her, for just one fleeting moment I thought perhaps she would always be my little girl.

Fat - Judy Albietz

Peter jerked his head up to squint at the screen. It was 4:30 a.m. and the game was still running—and killing—all by itself. Hmmm….looks like the game has gone into a loop. He wondered how long he had been asleep, with his face plastered on a page of the open magazine which was being used as a napkin. Brushing off the hard flakes of cheesy tomato sauce from the left side of his face, Peter stood up and stretched. He patted his skinny middle with both hands and thought about eating. Reaching across his desk for one of the remaining slices of pizza, Peter ripped off a slice, folded it and stuffed it into his mouth. The fat which had once dripped from the cheese had now seriously congealed the pizza slices onto the box. It was impossible to tell the difference between that hard once-oily substance and the cardboard it was glued on. There was still one slice left for lunch.

As he ate his rubbery breakfast, Peter studied the screen. The game hadn’t been looping. It had moved up levels independent of his input. Peter looked at his log and saw that he must have fallen asleep at level 23. He saw at the bottom of the scoreboard that another log had been created with no name. That was impossible since he had designed the game in single-player mode only. Flipping to that other log, Peter was hit with the first stages of uneasiness when he saw that “No Name” had moved to level 141, score: 4,512 dead monkeys. The game action in front of him was actually being played by No Name, according to the timer records.

Time to re-boot. First Peter tried to re-start the game. No response. The game just moved to a new level—now level 142, score: 4,544 monkeys killed. Peter decided it was time to shut down the computer and re-start. That didn’t work either. The computer didn’t respond to any of Peter’s commands and the on/off switch was frozen. Still chewing, Peter yelled, “You leave me no choice. I’m pulling the plug.”

Fat - Jennifer Baljko

“Your mama’s so fat, she's got more rolls than a bakery,” my boyfriend Pete chimed in.

“Oh, yeah, your mama’s so fat, she was floating in the ocean, and Spain claimed her as the new world,” answered Pete’s smart-ass friend, Mike. The others practically fell to the floor, holding their stomachs or spitting out their beer.

“Oh, God, kill me now,” I pleaded to the morons sitting on the couch next to me. I’m trapped in an off-campus apartment with a bunch of dumb-asses who like “your mama” jokes and can’t afford anything better than a case of crappy Olympia and stale Foodtown brand cheese puffs. I should have gone out with my girls. At least, we would be drinking pitchers of Bud Light, cheesing on other idiots who at least looked cute when we had our beer goggles on. But my college sweetie won my Thursday night with the promise of out-of-the-oven slices of pizza from the joint a few blocks up.

“You guys are freakin’ idiots,” I moaned, taking a long pull on my can of piss beer. “These jokes, yeah, they’re not funny. Really, they’re horrible. They’re condescending, degrading, and completely insulting to everyone, not just mothers, or women, but everyone. Don’t you ever think about the stupid things that come out of your mouths, and how inappropriate they are.”

Obviously, I was the minority voice in the group. I was the independent, liberal, feminist chick from the other side of the campus where it was common to spell woman as womyn, a rebellious attempt to show we weren’t dependent on that primitive other species. The frat guys found me amusing, and didn’t even try to hide the fact that I was as entertaining as mama.

“Lighten up, honey. What’s all the static,” Pete slurred, flinging his arm over my shoulders. “Gotta love her. She’s so feisty,” he said to the others, while puckering his lips, readying himself for a little loving.

“I’m just saying… they make you sound totally uneducated…” I stammered, letting Pete’s tongue slip into my mouth.

Breaking Somebody's Heart - John Fetto

Hawley got to the house by three a.m. and walked quietly along the driveway to Johanna’s window, and set down his duffle bag. It was open half an inch. He didn’t want to scare her, so he pushed open a bit more and looked inside. The room was dark. Of course she would be asleep. She would be shocked to see him. She wouldn’t believe it at first. He’d have to explain. He’d have to ease into it, tell her not to scream, not to wake her mother. He’d explain, he had to go, and now he had come back. Not for one second of one minute did he ever think that she wouldn’t be happy to see him back, but when he stuck his face close to the window, and called her name, shadows along the bed didn’t move. No one turned toward him. He called her name again, a bit louder. Still nothing, so he pushed open the window and pulled himself up. First one knee, then ducking his head and he was inside, crouching by the window as he looked at the folds of the blankets on the bed, waiting for them to move, for her to see them. Nothing happened. He stood up and walked to the side of the bed, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the light. The white sheets were thrown back. The bed was empty. She wasn’t home. At three a.m. She was sleeping, somewhere else. Sleeping with someone else.

He didn’t remember crawling out. He barely remember going to the garage, and finding the box he left, opening the lock removing what was inside and stuffing it in his duffle. He was almost a mile a way walking through the trees towards Gil’s trailer when his hand reached back and felt the stock of the rifle in his duffle, and started thinking again. It didn’t matter that she was gone. Of course she was gone. She thought he was dead. Why should she have waited for a dead man. It was better this way. After he got done using what was inside the duffle, he’d likely be really dead. So it was all the same, he told himself, over and over again.

Breaking Someone's Heart - Elizabeth Weld Nolan

I practiced in the schoolyard: tossing
my braids as I dared the boys to outrun me.
They couldn’t until they grew taller.
I trampled on the feelings of my boy playmates:
``No, I don’t want to play today.’’
In junior high, I told my friend
at the prom I’d go steady with him
but only part-time. After college,
in New York City, I told my date,
a man who was growing fond of me,
as we sat on a hill in a moonlit garden,
I was in love with a man named Sam,
his name, but that it wasn’t him.
He withdrew into the shadows, his face
closed. I tossed my long hair,
unbraided now, and went home
to the letter bringing me the news
that my heart I’d been keeping safe
and apart was no longer wanted, free
now to break or mend or become
a most careful user of love.

Breaking Somebody's Heart - Bonnie Smetts

Randy ended up sleeping on my couch, falling asleep like a baby, her face going soft and blank. Being here at the beach is having the same effect as it’s had on me. And she’s only been here half a night. I put one of my white covers over her and brush her runaway curls from her eyes. “Good night, Rand.” She doesn’t hear me, she’s already sleeping with the sound of the ocean right here in the room.

I can’t help look out at the curl of the ocean, my ocean, it glows a strange white in the middle of the night. I used to wake up and want to scream at the darkness. But here sometimes I wake up just to make sure the ocean’s still there. Here.

“Honey, honey,” Randy says, waking me up the next morning. “Hey, it’s ten o’clock. I thought maybe something’s wrong with you.” She’s standing at the door to my bedroom, wearing the clothes she showed up in last night.

“Hey, come here,” I say, patting the edge of my bed. “Hey, how are you doing?” And I mean how are you doing in the day. I know things always look different in the sunlight.

“What can that asshole think, breaking somebody’s heart like this, breaking the heart he vowed to cherish from this day forward, the day we got married,” she says.

“Nobody can break your heart, hon,” I say. And I know what I’m talking about. “They can try, and sometimes they don’t even try, but you can stop the breaking. Just stop it. Just stomp around and be mad. Mad is better than sad in this case. I’d stomp right on him, but that’s just me.”

And we laugh. Randy’s not quite as hot as me but I suspect this too-nice husband-turned-somebody-else might change that.

“Don’t let it get you, Rand,” I say, knowing I’m asking her to walk on water, fly to the moon, and be somebody she’s not.

“But Rawl, what am I gonna do?” she’s crying. What is she gonna do? Move away, throw him out, what? And he’s given her the car and the house filled with furniture. What’s she gonna do. There’s no moving in with her mother or sister or anything like that. They all live in places so small they barely fit all the people they’re supposed to fit.

“You gotta do one thing. For me. You’re gonna stay here today and not call that man and not think about him. Anytime your head goes there, you’re gonna think of something else. Like how pretty I am.

She doesn’t laugh, she smiles.

Breaking a Heart - Camilla Basham

Breaking a heart

Is easy
Anyone can do it
Just find a light:
Shining
Promising
Hopeful
Warm
Caring
Compassionate
Knowing
Accepting
Nurturing
And flip it off
It’s as effortless as blinking

What I Remember About Him - Carol Arnold

I don’t remember much about my Pop but more than anything, I remember his feet. They were extra large, sticking out from the end of his legs like big old skis. I used to jump on them for a ride, hanging on to his skinny waist as he limped us around the living room, both of us laughing so hard we’d almost fall over. Groucho would jump up and down in the air yipping like a moonstruck coyote. Delores would come out of the kitchen with a smile on her face, stirring something in a bowl and telling Groucho to shut up. Kiki would laugh too, all of us happy there in the living room, sunlight shining in like heaven.

All of that was before, before Dad’s oil well came up with nothing but smelly brown water, before he took the old Ford and drove it in the river, before Kiki went swimming at Camp Pleasant, before Delores got attached to her Brandy sniffers. I’m trying to write about all this in my song, the one I’m singing to Sally, but I get stuck sometimes, not able to think of the words. And I’m only at the beginning. How will I ever get to the end?

But maybe the end hasn’t happened yet. Maybe I am only in the beginning, that living here with Mr. A and his mother and Bernice, Horace out there in the barn, and Sally, and the turkeys in the yard, maybe this is just the start of things. I still dream like I did with Kiki, telling our dreams to the ceiling stars in our bedroom. I don’t have any ceiling stars, but I can look out my attic window and see real stars. Those will have to do for now.

The one I like best is the Patsy Cline dream, me up there with a big spotlight on my face, my white hair gleaming and my blue eyes shining, singing my heart out. In that dream, I’m bigger than now, I’ve got boobs more than just little bumps and hips that I can stick out from side to side, I’ve got long arms that fly out to the side when I hit the high notes.

I love to sing! It feels so good just opening my mouth and belting it all out, all the heartache, all the scariness, all the dark nights alone in my little bed. But mostly only the tune comes out. The words are having a harder time.

The Thing I Remember About Her - Chris Callaghan

The thing I remember about her is her “boing” hair. Carrie was only three then and her hair would have reached past her shoulders if it hadn’t been so curly. When I could get her to stand still long enough for me to tug on one of those golden sausages, it brushed the third or fourth vertebrae of her spine. But when she raced away from me in the pursuit of her busy morning schedule, it would pull out of my fingers and contract with an audible “boing” into a tight curl.

It was the color of Rapunzel’s dwarf’s gold, shining in the torchlight of the fairy tale castle. Blonde was too dull a word for it. Of course to a three year old the color of her hair was irrelevant. The fact that it interfered with her daily agenda was paramount. It fell in her eyes; the finger paints, and attracted every seedpod and leaf within a square block radius.

Since I could not bring myself to cut even one strand, I gathered it up onto the top of her head in a topknot. And there it stayed; corralled by the elastic band she brought me to contain it.

By mid-afternoon the coiled energy of that topknot demanded release and my daughter would come to me, begging me to take out the elastic, “It hurts mom!” I’d hold her squirming body between my knees while I gently tugged it off.

But the curls, having been commanded to stay put for so long, kept on doing so, and the blossom of hair held its shape for another hour, or until I brushed it out. Pulling didn’t do the trick, because each curl would “boing” right back into place like errant springs.

I loved her hair, but she didn’t. As she grew up, she ironed it, straightened it, and dyed it every other color that Clairol sold. I flinched at the browns and reds and blacks, but missed the “boing” aspect the most.

Luckily, I had enough foresight to take a bunch of pictures and the wisdom to save a few long strands in an envelope when she demanded it be cut. The color is still true, and the “boing” survived. See?

What She Remembered About Him - Christine Whelan

The thing Liz remembered about Sunil most was the way she’d walk away from him feeling vaguely disoriented. On the surface his emphasis on how sexy and smart she was felt good. It was an ego boost – and who didn’t need that from time to time? – but an underlining current of criticism lurked there. He would take something she liked about herself, say her optimism, and call her a Pollyanna, with a subtly dismissive tone. Who called anyone a Pollyanna anyway? She wondered what the opposite of a Pollyanna would be. Debbie Downer maybe. Or in Sunil’s case, Dickie Downer. Actually, that would have been appropriate on so many levels.

Once when they’d been talking about the future, he’d once told her he didn’t think she had the self-discipline and motivation to handle a job, a child, and a husband. When she’d gotten upset, he’d thrown a little fit and said he needed to be honest with her. She could still picture his self-righteous indignation, his voice, raised a pitch higher than normal as it always was when he was angry.

What She Remembers - Darcy Vebber

The two of them didn't do things together --not on purpose -- so the dinner was memorable just for that. Mother and oldest daughter, on either side of the table.. And then, Alice took her to the dark restaurant. Darkness and coolness seemed to always be at a premium in those days -- and food. Not food, which there was plenty of, but food with flavor.

Alice loved the place for its elegance, for the fact of prime rib, for the clear ice in the cocktails and the soft cloth napkins. The food was, as people say, a matter of complete indifference to her. Lisa blamed decades in the kitchen, making do in Window Rock with food trucked up from Phoenix to the old Bayliss market there, making do in Phoenix itself with what was on sale and on offer Sunday afternoons when her mother finally got herself to the supermarket but the truth was Alice always saw food as a problem. Her problem. She had not asked for this, for being responsible in this way, for such a basic, simple thing, a thing everyone, even a small child, could really do for herself. That was the point of the dinner in the dark restaurant. Alice said, in so many ways, across the white tablecloth, in the dim light and under eyes of attentive waiters, Get out. Don't let this happen to you.

Listening, Lisa felt the sting of tears across the bridge of her nose and tried to concentrate on the blue cheese in her salad dressing. There were big bitter chunks of it, creamy and strange on her tongue.

Another World/Sept. 11, 2009 - Vicki Rubini

Why did you sing
“Fly Me to the Moon”?
That’s when it started, Sinatra.
I walked into the kitchen,
Pancakes flying,
bacon sizzling,
coffee percolating.
Where was the radio?
No air waves brought this melody…
How did it happen?
It was you, just you,
Your accapella unneeding of Dorsey,
The richness too much,
Leaving me
Behind
While you went playing with the stars
Seeing life on Jupiter and Mars.

My world became creamless coffee and cold cereal.
The Little People stopped knocking at midnight for you.
My Fairy Wand, the one you gave me from your treasure chest,
Is
Broken
When I wave it.
The jelly rolls and belly laughs don’t abracadabra themselves.
Why couldn’t you have taken the gossamer keys out of your khakis
And left them for me?
Oh, to fly to the moon with you…..

Another World - Chris Callaghan

The quail family
Meanders through my yard
Cutting down on the
Bug population.

Likewise four brown sparrows
Who ignore the cats
Threat almost
Too long.

A fat robin perches
On the wind chimes
Under the porch overhang
Eyeballing the water bowl
And another cat – he declines
The risk.

And I sit, chin on palm
Watching them all
Through the glass
Still wishing
I could fly.

Laboring - Camilla Basham

As a child I was silent, overly sensitive, insecure, secretive. Words scarcely left my mouth, not even when prodded by inquiring adults. However, a constant internal narrative bounced around my brain. At times I wanted to speak, only to find the words stuck in my throat where I would swallow them down like medicine. I was choking to give birth to the thoughts in my head, but they would arrive to my lips stillborn.

When Sister Claire instructed me to stand before class and tell the students what my father did for a living, I stared at my second hand Mary Janes and rolled down white socks with the lace trim. I spit out in a mousy whisper, “He writes on paper.” “Oh, so he’s a writer?” she said. I nodded my head to the giggling class. I went home and cried in my room. I decided silence was indeed the best option.

Before bed I secretly took a yellow legal pad and writing pen from my dad’s desk and propped myself up on my bed behind closed doors. I thought if I could detour the thoughts in my brain right past my mouth and channel them into my twitching fingers maybe they would come out through my fingertips.

I can still remember the feeling of that tiny metal ball point, drenched in indigo, as it touched the yellow surface: the way the ball glided across the page effortlessly, the way the paper absorbed the ink, like a man dying of thirst. Because it was a secret and no one else would ever read it, I wrote without punctuation, capitulation or reservation. I wrote, and I cried and I laughed at the sweet release of everything that had been trapped inside: the labor pains finally ending in sweet release and giving birth to a life long passion.

Hearts - Darcy Vebber

Initially, a pig valve was alarming to the Orthodox. The issue generated much discussion and quickly, because it was a matter of life and death, a rabbinic response. To save a life, the rabbis determined, is always the most important thing and besides, the patient was not eating the thing. Still, a faint unease remained. When Terry explained to her friends the operation her son was going to have, she could see it in their expressions. Maybe it wasn’t the pig, maybe it was the surgery itself but she insisted that it was common. The doctor who is doing it does nothing else, all day long.

She met him, in his office at Phoenix Children's. A surgeon, like all surgeons, she had been told. Don't expect him to be nice the pediatric cardiologist warned them. The pediatric cardiologist was a sweetheart, a tiny Asian lady Terry trusted right away.

Bobby was fourteen but the surgeon talked to him as if he was a man, as if a man were sitting in the chair opposite him, next to his mother instead of this small, frail boy.

And Bobby listened intently, like a man who would be making his own decisions.

The surgeon drew a diagram on a prescription pad and handed it to the boy.

Terry could see that it was a crude pencil drawing of the heart, the real four chambered muscle she had had explained to her so many times. He included arrows, the way people always did. In, out.

Bobby studied the paper for a moment then left it, in his lap. He brushed his hair out of his face -- he was wearing it long that year, like all the boys, long and wild. It was curly and if he wasn't careful, it would fall in ringlets. "I have one question."

His mother held her breath, sucked it in without being exactly aware that she was doing it. There were some questions he had asked once, as a very little boy the first time he was in the hospital, that he never asked again.

"What would happen if I didn't do this?"

Terry waited for the impatient surgeon to bark back an answer but the man took some time and considered, as if the idea interested him. "Specifically?"

"Specifically."

Terry watched while the man drew another diagram with more arrows. Bobby stood, so he could look at it as it was being finished. They talked about electrolytes and oxygen receptors and muscle death while Terry reminded herself to take deep, even breaths. Somehow, no matter how often it was explained to her she couldn't grasp it, the in and out, the transitions, the way air turned to fire in a human body.

Hearts - Carol Arnold

Bernice teaches me how to make Mrs. A’s breakfast. She likes a boiled egg, cracked open on the top, and a special kind of cereal called Mam-o-knee, or something like that. It’s made of wheat hearts, with butter and sugar and lemon juice mixed in. Bernice puts white stuff on top, like milk only harder, and walnuts.

This morning is my first time serving Mrs. A breakfast in her bedroom. Her room is dark and stuffy, packed with old things. Mrs. A looks like a tiny little girl propped up in her big bed, the feather quilt so high around her I can hardly see her. On her bedstead are bottles and jars, Mrs. A’s medicines, and the fresh flowers Bernice puts there every day. A Bible is there too, an old fashioned one, leather with a big blue cross on the front. Another cross hangs over her bed, but it doesn’t look like a regular cross either. Instead of Jesus dripping blood, it’s got swirly things all over it.

As I’m walking in the room I’m thinking serving Mrs. A breakfast will be easier than giving her a bath because I don’t have to touch her, so she won’t scream. But right after I set the breakfast tray on her bed, she grabs my hand. I think, oh no, she’s going to start screaming again, but she doesn’t, she just holds onto my hand, those green eyes staring me down. I don’t know what to do so I just stare back. Next thing I know she’s crying, blubbering all over her Mam-o-knee. So I do what Bernice does, I pat her on the back with my other hand and say “there, there.” She stops crying and lets go.

I pull open the drapes to let the sun in. It’s a beautiful day outside, the sky as wide and blue as it can be, a few clouds floating by. The sycamore trees are putting out leaves, and the blue birds are building a nest in the tree right outside the window. They’re flitting around, busy as can be, flying twigs up to that nest. I’m thinking maybe I’ll go out to the barn this morning and talk to Sally. Maybe I’ll sing her the first verse of my song, the one I’m writing about my life.

I’m watching those blue birds flying around thinking about Sally and my song when hear Mrs. A mumbling. Now Mrs. A hardly ever talks, and never to me, so I turn around surprised like. She says, “Spidee, don’t let those blue birds break your heart.” Her voice is real weak, but those are the words she says, I swear it. I don’t know what to say back so I just say, “I won’t, Mrs. A., I won’t.”

Hearts - Jeff Thomas

Margaret shuffled the deck. She loved the weighty but crisp, ripping sound of it. Then the sharp tap-tap on the table to true it up, followed by the less fun but still pleasant toss and snap of dealing the cards. Finished, she picked up her cards, fanning them. How in the heck did she always end up with the queen of spades? “Three to the right this time, I do believe,” she announced. Deftly she chose three cards and tossed them to the right.

“Yes, dear,” purred Caroline, sitting to Margaret’s left. Without looking up, Caroline slid three cards to Margaret. Margaret smoothly received and blended them into her hand. She pursed her lips. “Mmmmm.”

“Okay, let’s go! Who’s got the two of clubs?” barked Julia, across the table from Margaret. Julia took a long drag from her cigarette and exhaled a blasting stream to the ceiling. Her sharp, dark eyes scanned the group.

To Julia’s left, Theresa mimicked the accusatory scan. Finally her eyes flicked down to her own cards. “Oops! That’s me!” Flustered, she tossed the card into the center of the table.

Margaret closed her eyes briefly to conceal their rolling. She followed suit. As the play went round the table, she reached for her coffee cup and took a sip. Weak. The cup made a slight clinking sound as she set it back in the saucer.

As she continued to play, Margaret’s attention lingered on Theresa. She noticed that coffee had pooled in Theresa’s saucer from an earlier spill. Each time Theresa lifted the cup to her mouth, a small drop or two would land on the table. Each time she would return the cup back to the dirty saucer. Theresa seemed not to notice. Enraged, Margaret bit her lip. She remembered that Theresa’s dimwittedness had been a blessing in many ways. It had allowed relatively easy access to Theresa’s husband for one thing. But since that fire was out, Margaret was back to resenting her. “Oh, well,” she sighed, snapping her card on the table and taking the next trick.

Hearts - Jennifer Baljko

“Playing with the queen of hearts,
knowing it ain't really smart
The joker ain't the only fool
who'll do anything for you.”

My sister and I used to put on wigs, dance around the living room in our pajamas, and belt out this Juice Newton classic. Before our other three siblings were too big to notice and before life got too complicated in our little house, my sister and I were friends. I was the older one, the reader, and the director of our impromptu concerts. My sister was the tough one, the fearless one, and her strength was more than physical. We sang all the hits. Donna Summer’s “Upside Down,” Halls & Oats “Maneater,” and our yuletide favorite, Dr. Elmo’s “Grandma got run over by a reindeer.” We were the stars on our own stage, and, I think, in each other’s lives.

Lately, we almost never speak. Our views of the world, careers, personal experiences, thought processes, and even our values are so vastly different. I find it hard to believe we’re related. I don’t like that we don’t speak anymore, but we’ve both learned it’s easier to have a distant relationship on the fringe where we can keep our defenses down and just stay peripherally involved. At this point, we mostly rely on our siblings for information about the other.

Sometimes I wonder, usually when I hear one of our old songs on the radio, what would happen if found those wigs and started dancing around the living room. I wonder if our innocence would return and our differences melt away. I wonder if we could be friends again.

Heart - Bonnie Smetts

My heart’s had enough battering from Roy for this whole week. I’d rather go to school to see what that might be like, and so I do. I go when I feel like it and last year that wasn’t too much. I hate school.

First of all, I walk. No girl my age waits out here in the woods for a bus, and I got no friends with cars. So I walk, away from my momma’s trailer toward the school. Nothing worse than the first days of school when the front of the place is jammed up and everybody’s hugging and saying how good it is to be back. Never for me. Being with Roy’s made it better, just knowing what most of these people don’t know. Making love with Roy in the summer heat. I got that to carry with me, right past these girls, right past the boys that have always said things about me that even me, in most spitting mood, would say about another person. And I got nobody here at school.

I pass the bathroom and decide to go in, having miscalculated how late I should be. And there she is. Randy. Now me and Randy haven’t had too many words since that time in the shed with Pauley when we were kids. Not that we don’t like each other, we say hi and whatever. It’s just something about that time put a silence between us. But here she is.

“Hey,” I say. And of course she says that back, we’re a kind of friend, at least compared to everyone else.

“I didn’t think you’d be back this year at all,” she says. We both laugh. It’s a crazy miracle that either of us is back this year.

“Thought I’d come in for a while,” I say. “How about you?”

And there we were, friends again. Nothing about that conversation to say why that stole the break between us, but it did. And so I meet her at lunch, we sneak away from school and she smokes.

“I can’t believe you’re smoking,” I say. “You were the goodie one.” She was always the one that thought up things for us to do, but she was the one who’d chicken out too.

“I know, I shouldn’t do it. It’s bad for your skin,” she says, blowing the smoke up through those curls around her big eyes. “But hey, I like it, and it gives me something to do when I can’t think of doing anything else.” We laugh at that and I consider smoking for just a tiny moment. But I got too many reasons not to, doing anything even close to my momma or the boyfriends is beyond thinking for me.

Knowing What You're Doing - John Fetto

Hawley clenched and unclenched his fists, squirming in the witness chair. They didn’t know him. They didn’t know what he wanted. They sat in the audience, watching the spectacle as Firth’s attorney wheedled his way into his brain, turning him around, asking question after question, not wanting to understand any, but wanting to twist his words, into something unrecognizable, absurd, ridiculous.

“I told you, I had to. There wasn’t anything else to do.”

“You had to sit on a roof top, and kill how many men?”

“I don’t remember.”

“But you couldn’t just walk away?”

“No,” said Hawley. “I knew what would happen if I did.”

“And what was that. Explain what was the great evil.”

“There was a village in Nicaragua.”

“And that was evil?”

“No not the village, what they did.”

“Okay,” said the attorney and he threw down his pen. “Tell us what they did.”

“They drove them back, till all that was left was this one building. We had grenades. White phosphorus. They tossed them into the building.”

“So they killed the teachers?”

“Not at first. White phosphorus burns. A couple thousand degrees. Flakes land on you. Can’t wash it off. It burns through to the bone. You could hear them screaming.”

Firth’s attorney rubbed his eyes.“That’s very sad. You killed them because you thought they’d do that again?”

“No,” said Hawley. “I knew they’d do that again.”

“Because they did that in one village?”

“No,” said Hawley. “Because they did it in all the villages.”

Knowing What You're Doing - Elizabeth Weld Nolan

My husband, a political reporter, tells the story of Barry Goldwater who said to a pal as he prepared to enter the men’s room in the Pentagon, ``This is the only room in the Pentagon where they know what they’re doing.’’

Indeed, it’s the body that knows what it’s doing. The moment my leg slides over the saddle and I settle the reins, I don’t need consciousness to feel the horse’s mouth with my hands, for my legs to squeeze my mount forward and for my waist to move with the rhythm of its walk.

When I hear Paul Simon start singing ``Graceland,’’ I don’t think about how to dance; my body starts without me and I follow it onto the dance floor, inviting dancers to join me, or not.

When I begin the movements of tai chi, sometimes I can’t make my planning mind be quiet, and I come to a few minutes later to realize I’ve been doing the movements correctly and am now about one quarter of the way through. Or, conversely, I think nothing conscious but the feel of carving space and raising energy. It’s then that I have a glimpse of the goal our teacher describes: its not you doing tai chi; it’s tai chi doing you.

That’s when I know that I know what I’m doing.

Knowing What You're Doing - Christine Whalen

Liz was good at faking. She faked knowing what she was doing all the time. When she walked into a courtroom, she put on her persona of certitude. She remembered her first trial. She hadn’t known anything. She’d barely been able to control her quivering hands, or the quake in her voice.
She often wondered how many people felt like fakes. Did anybody really know what they were doing?

Some days she’d sit in her favorite café, the one with the warm yellow walls, the worn hardwood floors, and the wide open windows and just watch the people reading, writing, staring at their iPhones. And the barista working her magic behind the counter. Did any of these people really know what they were doing? The only one Liz felt pretty sure about was the barista. There was something satisfying about watching her make the perfect cappuccino.

Knowing What You're Doing - Judith Albietz

“Traveling through paintings…hmmm…how did you know how to do it and what to do once you got there?” Lily asked, as she looked around her at all the paintings which she now knew weren’t just pictures—there were entryways to the past through the Time Portal. The light in the huge cavern was brighter now. Lily thought how tired and grimy she felt after their last battle in the corridor. She sat down again and pushed a dirty red curl behind her ear as she studied one of the paintings. It was a scene of an older blue monkey gesturing with her hands to five smaller and younger monkeys. It looked like a classroom. Lily noticed each monkey’s skin was slightly different. Some had skin the color of the sky and others had darker blue arms and legs.

Sam tried to shake off the dirt on his coat and then he too sat down, cocking his huge brown and golden head to the side. His collar shone with the sparkling pastel colors which Lily had learned to associate with Sam’s process of carefully preparing an answer for her.

Lily had never met a dog like Sam, in fact she had never met anybody like him. She had gotten used to talking to him—telepathically—but she knew she would be constantly surprised by his extraordinary powers, like flying, communicating with his collar, traveling through time, just to name a few.

Sam looked into Lily’s eyes as he spoke up. “The funny thing about dogs—we are just born with that kind of knowing—knowing what to do. We come into the world knowing right from wrong. Unless something intervenes to change that, dogs always want to help others. Obviously, something has happened to Mort to make him so selfish, cruel and angry. I just don’t understand it.

I have to know what I am doing because I was given certain gifts—actually an extra trainload of them—so obviously it is my job to help others. My life has been completely focused on that job ever since I can remember.”

“But Sam, how did you know how to travel through the Time Portal the first time? How did you know what to do--once you were somewhere in the past--where you were supposed to save a life? And what if you put yourself in danger when you try to save a life?” Lily asked.

“I’ve never really thought about it. I have and always will at least try to rescue someone, no matter how risky it is, no matter if I die trying.”

“Great. So if you die…Sam…you won’t be around… to save… anyone,” Lily said with tears creasing the dust on her cheeks.

Sam spoke softly, “Lily, of course I have taken chances…so have you. Right now we both are facing danger and I know how scared you are. I am too. But it’s a good thing that you were born with enough courage for both of us with a lot left over.

Knowing What You're Doing - Melody Cryns

“It’s like riding a bike, you never forget!”

“Yeah, right,” I said looking up at my daughter and my friend Heidi’s grown daughter both staring down at me from the top of the cliff.

It was all my fault I was standing here looking at them, staring at the menacing cliff that did have some ledges jutting out…below the ocean crashed against the rocks, way, way below, what seemed like miles below. All it took was one wrong slip and I would be history.

“C’mon, Mom! You said you used to climb these cliffs all the time!” Megan shouted, her round face looking down on me from above.

Yes, I thought, I had said that I’d climbed all these cliffs when I was a kid and a teenager – yes, it was true. But now I was an out-of-shape 51-year-old and climbing even a small cliff was much more like climbing a huge mountain.

“You can do it!” Julie shouted. “I’ve seen old people in their 50’s run marathons!”

Oh gee, thanks – old people in their 50’s. gimme a break. Where had the years gone, I thought looking out on the bay and the Marin Headlands directly across from Land’s End. Everything looked the same as how I’d remembered it as a kid – the years hadn’t changed the bay or the ocean, or the Golden Gate Bridge which still stood strong and mighty – the same as it always had. No, the bridge had not been destroyed by a giant octopus like I had imagined after watching that monster movie as a young kid. I was so freaked out and traumatized that my dad had to drive me to a point where we could see that the Golden Gate Bridge was still there.

“It’s easy! You can do it!” Megan shouted.

“Okay, okay..gimme a moment!” I had no idea what I was doing – climbing this little cliff all because I’d taken Megan and Julie off the main road to show them a path that I’d taken so many times as a teenager – before they made the path easily accessible to everyone. I wanted them to see how I saw it before when I was young. And now Megan and Julie climbed that cliff and I had to do the same. No way, you’re crazy, one part of me thought.

“C’mon! You can do it!” they shouted from above.

I could smell the salty bay and feel the breeze blowing as I grabbed on to what looked like a tree root and pulled myself up, managing to get a foothold someplace. Don’t look down, I thought over and over, don’t look down. I could smell the dirt and the wild flowers that had managed to grow on the side of the cliff as I slowly made my way up, grabbing on to whatever I could.
I’ve done this so many times before, I thought – but that was like 30 or 40 years ago. I hadn’t been crazy enough to do something like this for a long, long time…

“You’re almost there, Mom…you can do it!”

I looked up at Megan who smiled down on me looking so confident. As I hoisted myself up, I could swear I felt myself slip a little…I grabbed on to the side of the cliff for dear life…wondering if I would make it through this ordeal alive, pulling myself up little by little…

Then I saw their hands reach out and I grabbed them and pulled myself up one more time…

“You did it Mom!”

I looked down at the path below and across the bay and at the wisps of fog that still hung on. I could smell the dirt on my hands – I had done it…I’d made it to the top without slipping and falling and killing myself.

The End of Summer - Anne Wright

Virginia found her father sitting on a park bench under the big oak tree. As she walked up to him she could see that he was carrying on a conversation with some birds that had made a home in its branches.

It was the end of summer, and she could feel a chill in the air. She wondered how he could sit on the bench naked and not feel cold. She wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and helped him stand up. That was the funny thing, how he was so sturdy and thin, she thought as she felt his wiry muscles stringing along his bones beneath the pale sagging skin, yet his mind was lost somewhere in the years before, sometimes looking out a dark window at the scary beasts, other days remembering details of a golden happy life before Virginia was born. And today it appeared to her that there was no connection between his body and his mind. He didn’t feel the chill, and he didn’t even recognize her. This she knew when he looked at her with amazement in his eyes, the look that warned her to talk low and soft lest she turn his mood sour.

“Come on Roland,” Virginia said. She found that he responded to his name better than the word father.

You Can't Force a Story That Doesn't Want to Be Told - Anne Wright

You can tie your imagination up in a chair and slap it silly but it still won’t give up a story that doesn’t want to be told. That story isn’t ready to come out yet. The pieces aren’t in place, and even if your imagination could spit it out of its tight little mouth, who could make sense of upside down words and backward scenes and characters simple as a comic strip?

You know this, as you whittle a sharp point back on your pencil and brush away the crumbs of your soft pink eraser. Sometimes that story has been told so often that you can’t choke out another version no matter how you force your tired imagination to run up and down the canyons, hiding from Indians behind the cliffs; no mater how often you dangle it out of an airplane, threatening to drop it from thousands of miles into an ocean full of the cut up typewriter paper from your discarded ideas.

You just can’t force a story that doesn’t want to be told. Start over. Stop obsessing about a new angle. Stop looking for ideas in overheard conversations in the doctor’s office, listening to old women talk about their sons who went wrong, took drugs, robbed banks, married fallen women. Stop digging around in old family photos, looking into faces of your ancestors and wondering why they look so grim in their homespun shirts and scuffed shoes. Let it go. Drop it down the well and hear it hammer against the hard dry dirt a hundred feet below. It doesn’t want to be told.

You Can't Force a Story That Doesn't Want to Be Told - Rachel de Baere

You can’t force a writer who wants to procrastinate to sit down and write. Oh, yes, you can be clever and fool her. You can tell her she doesn’t deserve that pleasure of sitting down with her most beautiful pen, the one that when she picks it up feels so smooth and easy in her hand. You can tell her that her notebook is too pretty to write crap in so that she doesn’t even want to open it and muss the pages with her oily hand. You can tell her that writing about her deepest, darkest sorrow is only because she feels sorry for herself. No one cares really. No one wants to read her silly little woes, even if she knows how to use fresh, perfectly chosen words. And who wants to hear the same story over and over again? No one. You can remind her of this, and surely she won’t sit down and write.

Another way to keep her from writing is to tell her she needs to prepare to write – have a little ritual before she sits down. This, of course, comes after she had cleaned the kitchen, made the beds, answered the e-mails and cleaned out her closet. In the ten minutes she has to write, she must take a moment to prepare her psyche. She needs to find a candle. It has to be the right one today, the yellow one because she’s a little sad and needs some sunshine to cheer her up. Or maybe she needs the lavender one to be calm and get to her deeper self. She needs to take some time choosing the candle, then of course the pen. Then while she’s looking for the pen, she has to finish listening to the important news story on the radio.

And then, yes, her ten minutes are up and she has to get to her real work…

To be cont…

You Can't Force a Story That Doesn't Want to Be Told - Vicki Rubini

You can’t force a story that doesn’t want to be told.

Mary pondered her life. Not much drama, no heroic adventures. The price of doing things by the book. The book…..that’s where she liked to live, with Huck meeting thieves on the river, with Lear feeling the power of a storm, even with Snowball in Animal Farm. Mary read more about life than live it, but what was wrong with that? She really did not want to face the consequences of a storm; no, she preferred to just know what it might feel like. With her literary companions, this was all possible.

There was nothing better than getting all cozy on a couch with her red and caramel striped velour throw, a book in her hand, a cup of coffee and perhaps a warm poppy seed muffin next to her. Someday she did want to write the Great American Novel – oh, the dream of a book tour, with fans waiting for her signature, critics raving about her genius. Hiding her shyness wouldn’t be necessary – it could be passed off as reflectiveness. And the money! Oh, the money! She could buy a writer’s cottage, cute with white shuttered windows and flower boxes full of red geraniums, a stone’s throw from the beach, where she would take long walks and dream about her next best seller.

She thumbed through the pages of Pride and Prejudice. Great book – only one hundred pages left. What should she read next? There was a biography on Chaucer and a Harry Potter book waiting on the tower by her nightstand. They might be fun. Those writers knew about life; you could feel it and see it in their words. Obviously, they had a lot of experiences, great writers always did, or they wouldn’t have been able to write such great novels. Twain was a riverboat man, Shakespeare was a theatre man. But Austen? She lived a quiet little life in a tiny village. Rawlings was a lower middle class single mother when she carved out her fantasy.

As for Mary, she just couldn’t force a story that didn’t want to be told.

You Can't Force a Story That Doesn't Want to Be Told - Chris Callaghan

A Great Blue Heron flew over my house this morning – his long legs leaving a trail of words behind him in the sky. The words joined the particulate matter from the California fires swirling in the air above me. Several paragraphs worth settled onto the back half acre of desert behind the house. They spread across the landscape like pieces of shredded documents.

I wanted those words.

I equip myself with empty buckets, gloves, hat, and a fine mesh strainer for the shyer consonants. The flat-blade shovel is too big, so I chose a small spade and a hand trowel. Once out there bending to my task, the yard looks enormous and I realize that my verbal archeological dig will take some time. I return to the house for a low, tri-cornered stool with rubber wheels. Sitting will save my back while I sift through imaginary grids in the desert dust.

A flock of grazing mourning doves lifts and settles – lifts and settles just beyond my feet. I tell them that they are welcome to the beetles and the ants, but please do not peck up stray ‘an’s and the’s and but’s.’ I will need those to assemble the sentences. A large Quail swoops down and stabs a phrase. The words overflow on either side of his beak. I can clearly see the beginning of “no part of this story may be reproduced…” on one side, and “except in the case of brief quotations…” on the other. Maybe the Heron will never know.

Each time I fill my buckets, I carry them to the shallow trays I’ve laid out on the table beneath the portico. Here I’ll make my effort to re-assemble the prose. By dusk, I’ve found several pages worth, but the fulcrum and the climax have eluded me. Still I’m determined to bend what I’ve found into shape, knowing I’ve a cache of vowels and punctuation to dip into just beneath the table.

A shadow crosses my yard, re-enforcements for the doves. And the Quail has marshaled his troops. I rush out, flapping my arms and yelling. “The Heron no longer owns those words! I have recovery rights to them as they are on my land.”

The mourning doves chuckle en masse, and the Quail shakes his imposing top knot at me. “It isn’t the Heron that commands us, you fool,” he says. “It’s the story itself that refuses to be told. Don’t you know you can’t force it?”

You Can't Force a Story That Doesn't Want to Be Told - John Fetto

Hawley looked at the bright lights, the senators stared at him, even the bored ones had stopped and watched to see if he would be able to speak. They didn’t want to listen to him twenty years ago. They didn’t want to listen to him forty years before that, but now they looked at him impatiently and Firth’s attorney was whispering to Firth, trying to hide his smile with his hand. You can’t force a story that doesn’t want to be told, or stop when everyone’s listening for it. All he had to do now was speak.

He pulled the microphone closer, “because Firth shouldn’t lead.”

The senators looked confused, still not sure he wasn’t carzy. “Firth is on his own mission,” he said.

Senator Waers leaned forward and asked, “and precisely what is that?”

Hawley looked back at Firth, “Himself.”

You Can't Force a Story That Doesn't Want to Be Told - Christine Whalen

One lawyer Liz knew called the hallways of the fourth floor of 400 McAllister the Trail of Tears. The fourth floor of the Superior Court of San Francisco housed the family law and juvenile dependency courtrooms. She’d seen more people than she cared to remember crying – or screaming – on this floor. Love and children and desperation and hatred for CPS and for ex-partners: these elements combined in dangerous, dramatic ways.

Liz and her fellow dependency lawyers dealt with the stories of child abuse, abandonment, neglect and addiction with a mix of cynicism, sorrow and gallows humor. There were certainly funny moments. During one trial the alleged father had been questioned about his involvement with the child. One of the lawyers had asked him how he’d met the mother. He’d responded with a lengthy discussion of their “booty call.” “Booty call” had made its way into a lot of the subsequent cross examination questions. The appellate lawyers must have had a field day with the transcript.

Once Liz had gone to 850 Bryant, the criminal jail, to visit one of her clients, Maria, who was about to be released and needed a job. She’d been to Liz’s office before, and had noticed there was no receptionist. At the end of their meeting, Maria had made her pitch for the job, saying she’d be on time, Liz and her office mates needed help, and, that she could “answer the phones like a motherfucker.” Liz thought Maria might need some job coaching in the future.

Then there were the stories of going a step too far, after a drink too many. The stories of bruises and broken bones and black eyes. When asking the kids about what happened, Liz was often met by stony silence. She’d worked on finessing the details from her clients, but also recognized on some level that you can’t force a story that doesn’t want to be told.

You Can't Force a Story That Doesn't Want to Be Told - Melody Cryns

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to write children’s books. I fancied myself telling stories that would take kids to other worlds such as the books I read while growing up – from Wind in the Willows to “real” fiction such as The Saturdays and the Four Story Mistake where I traveled with four kids from New York City to New England, and then I was right there with those kids in Half Magic who found that magical coin. Me and the kids in the neighborhood, mostly the boys around the corner and a couple of the Solis boys up the street would pretend we were on the Starship Enterprise, the spaceship from Star Trek, or maybe I was Magda, the gypsy witch from Dark Shadows, the “vampire” soap opera we’d watch after school.

I’ve tried to hide from it – I’ve announced that I will no longer write the day-to-day adventures of a single mom with four kids, that I’m done with it – it’s time for me to be a real writer, time for me to write fiction! It’s what I love to read – yes, I love memoirs as well, but fiction remains close to my heart.

So I’ve etched out the stories about a girl growing up in San Francisco and put her in various situations. My muse has been good to me at times – first, she’s a girl who loses her younger sister in the fog in Golden Gate Park – but recently I read a book called Year of the Fog by Michelle Richmond – it’s been done already. Then she’s off on a quest to retrieve a three-legged guinea pig named Stubs.

Yes, I’ve fought it, I’ve done everything to get around it. I’ve told my muse that I’m done with it – that I’ve written enough about being the stressed out single mom, all of it. But my muse is cunning and she knows how to push me right back into the midst of it all – and the story that needs to be told keeps popping up.

And I’ve tried so hard to make it change. I’ve even yelled at my muse. She doesn’t listen. She’s a precocious little girl who’s going to do whatever she wants. She says, “You can’t force a story that doesn’t want to be told.”

What’s that supposed to mean? I say sitting here in my kitchen writing on my laptop. What the heck?

So the stories keep spilling out – and somehow, some way it needs to be told because until I’m done with it, I can’t seem to move on no matter how hard I try…no matter what I do. I even started turning in my children’s fiction to my Graduate Creative Writing workshop – sure, the class liked it, but in the end…one student said, “I love your Star Cruiser story where you and the kids are riding in that car with no shocks” or “How come Megan isn’t in these stories from when you left Germany?” I explain that Megan wasn’t born yet.

They all want to know – why I have no idea. I’m in a dilemma and there’s no way around it.
I must tell the story that wants to be told…I can’t hide.

It Was Terribly Complicated - Elizabeth Weld Nolan

I hardly know how to tell this. Are you sure you want to listen? Jack and I were just walking home to my house along the back road from school and the wind was howling all through those trees that line the lane. You know he’s a friend of my brother Ernie and he was coming along with me to say Hey to him. They hang around together sometimes, and today they were going to build a little car to race in - what are those things called, when they race down the hills in one they made? Soap boxes. I think they used soap boxes when they started. So the wind was making branches crack and throwing our coats over our heads and we were laughing and running away from the dust blowing all over the lane. I am in love with my brother’s friends. They usually don’t notice me because I’m the little sister, except sometimes they let me play baseball in the outfield or bring them Cokes when they’re sprawled on the porch.

Just as we ran past the Whittakers’ we heard an enormous crack and a great big branch came off the pine tree near where the cows usually cross into the pasture and it whirled and we turned and watched it until it came right over us and dropped on Jack and slammed him in the shoulder and a little on the head and he dropped right under it. I screamed and tried to lift the branch and Mrs. Whittaker came out and Jack just lay there looking at me with his eyes kind of glazed over and she ran in the house to call someone. In a minute, Ernie came galloping down the lane and we managed to lift the branch off him.

``Jack, are you all right?’’ Ernie said in a loud voice as if Jack couldn’t hear him wherever he was, and Jack blinked and didn’t say anything. And then I leaned over and touched him on his face and he still didn’t answer although his eyes were open and that was a good sign. Ernie ran off to get the car to drive him to the hospital so I stayed with him.

``Jack, Jack, it’s Carolee. Can you hear me? Jack!’’ He still didn’t answer and then I got this awful feeling he was really hurt and you’d be mad at me for not taking better care of him because you have a crush on him, so I touched him again and I shook him a little but he screwed up his face as if that hurt. I felt really scared he would die and I felt sick in my stomach, so I put my hand on his face again to hold it still and wiped some blood off his head with my shirt and he felt warm and still and I felt so upset and sad and I got closer and whispered into his ear, ``Jack, wake up, wake up.’’ He turned his head a little and into my mouth and before I knew it I had kissed him on his cheek which had a little soft bit of beard on it and he was warm and then he turned his head and kissed me on the cheek. And then something brand new happened to me and I put my lips on his and they were warm too, and he smelled good, like a fresh pressed shirt so I could picture his mother getting him ready for school, and it wasn’t at all like I’d imagined kissing somebody, and then we just kissed and kissed and he looked like he was feeling better and better and he got some color back in his face and I stayed there on my knees beside him until Ernie came with the car.

When he pulled up beside us, he looked mad. ``Carolee, what are you doing? The guy’s hurt.’’

``Not so bad, now, Ernie,’’ Jack said, and grinned at me. I got really embarrassed because you know if it’s your first time kissing and your older brother is watching you and it’s his friend, it’s really embarrassing. So I jumped up and ran like crazy down the lane to home and Ernie put Jack in the car and took him somewhere to get his head and shoulder looked at. I haven’t seen Ernie yet because they haven’t come back and I don’t know what it will feel like to see Jack again. I’m kind of afraid to. But I also learned something. I can’t send this letter to you because I don’t know if I can count on my best friend to understand. It’s just so terribly complicated.

It Was Terribly Complicated - Camilla Basham

Love has completely filleted me.
I am lying in the market like a
Gutted grouper,

Speechless.
All yearning and resilience absolutely silent.
But I am still unmarked.

All is now the same to me.

The sweep of a man’s hands
As he lifts me near,
Drawing my scent into his nostrils.
He thinks about taking me home.

The brush of a blowfly
Sipping my vital fluids
Through a peculiar fashioned flute.

The sun resting its radiant gaze upon my eyes.
Laughter and the splash from a passing taxi.

All send astounding undercurrents into my world.

Love has split me wide open.
Toss me on a scale.
Wrap me in newsprint.
Bring me home.

For the First Time She Noticed What it Felt Like - Carol Arnold

So this guy who looks like a pear, he says to me, “Where’s your aunt live?”

I say, “She lives out there.” I wave my arm like I’m pointing at something but there’s nothing to point at, just miles of flat dirt. It’s hot, the sun like some little kid’s yellow balloon getting ready to burst, and the sky turning the same color as the sheets before you throw the bleach in. I think about home, that hot night with Horace, us floating naked down Goat Creek, the owls hooting and the town lights twinkling in the distance. I think about Kiki. I think about losing her Cracker Jack ring, finding it again in my pocket like it’d been there all along. I think about Delores and her brandy sniffers, all lined up in a row on the coffee table, the TV blaring. I look out at that flat brown dirt and my stomach turns upside down, like I’m noticing for the first time what loneliness feels like. A tear comes to my eye and rolls down my cheek. I wipe it off real fast.

Horace says to the pear man, “She and I go way back. I’m her uncle.” He fiddles with the jack, making the car go up even more. I try to sit without leaning over too far, but it doesn’t work so I get out. We’re all standing there on the side of the road. Pear man scratches his chin and looks up at the sky. I see a long jagged scar running down his neck. It looks like a bolt of lightening in a comic book.

“You two want some work?” he says.

“What kind of work,” Horace says.

“Farm work, grapes, cattle. Could use a hand around the place. My wife needs help around the house. Thought the girl here could do that.”

“I’m a singer,” I say. I don’t know why I said that, but it just came out. It wasn’t a big whopping lie like some I tell. After all, the old men at the mission tell me I got a voice like an angel. But I never called myself a singer before. It doesn’t feel so bad.

“A singer?” Pear man looks me up and down, squinting up his eyes even more. His mouth goes from upside down U to right side up, but crooked in the corner, where the scar is. He starts to laugh, the crooked part just hanging there like it can’t move with the rest of him.

“Yeah, I sing at the church in town, the mission. Every Sunday. People say I’m pretty good.”

Horace pulls the tire off with one big jerk. “Don’t believe much of what she says. She got a truth problem.”

For the First Time She Noticed What it Felt Like - Judith Albietz

Sam turned around three times to get his tail lined up just right. Then he curled up and immediately fell asleep on the soft floor of the dark hall. Lily sat down on the soft ground, leaning against his warm body. Sleep was the last thing on her mind. It was too creepy in the pitch dark. Squinting her eyes as she searched for even a pinprick of light, Lily imagined that the color in front of her wasn’t really black; maybe it was navy blue, or maybe just the color of her fear. Lily heard Sam’s breathing which had fallen into a calm rhythm. She tried to follow the in and out swishing of her own breath to slow down her heart’s rapid thumping.

The stale air smelled like leftovers from an overstuffed airplane cabin. Lily’s mouth was dry and she swallowed the metallic taste in the back of her throat. She reached out her hands. She remembered the hall being narrow, so she should have felt a wall, but she only felt dead air. To explore further meant getting up and moving away from Sam. Even though death stalked from behind and beckoned them down the hall, Lily felt safe as long as she could feel Sam next to her.

Lily wondered if she had started to take Sam for granted. She absolutely trusted him to take care of her. Of course she trusted her parents, but they were 2000 years away. Besides, parents really don’t count. They had no choice but to protect and defend their children. Lily’s father had said that he would throw his body under a train if it was headed towards her. She had wondered why she might have been in front of a train, but she didn’t interrupt her dad to find out. Similarly, her mother had said that she would give her life to save Lily. She and Josh trusted each other too. None of this made any difference now since she was stuck in 4009.

So what does this feel like, these feelings she has towards Sam? He clearly is devoted to her. When he was injured in the battle with Mort, she had been terrified that she might lose Sam. She loved him but wasn’t sure how to relate to him since he was more than just a sweet, kind, big cute dog. Sam was more like a person than a dog. And it wasn’t just because he was telepathic, could change his shape and had numerous other super powers. She thought how her relationship with Sam was like her friendship with Josh. Maybe that’s it, she thought as she petted his silky mane, Sam and I are friends.

Close Your Eyes - Jeff Thomas

Cackles, screams of laughter fill the room. At regular intervals, gin-soaked witty barbs are lobbed from corner to corner. I sit in my chair, waiting for help from a friend. Tonight she is Tami de Truth, and she obliges. “Okay, close your eyes and take a deep cleansing breath. Now don’t move!”

I feel the presence of a face close to mine. The air is suddenly saturated with panting, slightly sour breath and the smell of booze. The familiar fishy scent of eyelash glue mixes with this raw bouquet. I feel patient, grateful, but repulsed.

After a short suck of fresh air through tight lips, I pray not to have to take another breath until this is over. The cold glue touches my eyelid and I involuntarily wince ever so slightly. “Don’t move!” Startled, I take a breath just as the blast from this command hits my face. “Sorry!” I squeak, like a full balloon leaking air.

I feel the weight of a finger pressing into my eyelid. My internal mantra is “please let this work the first time, please let this work the first time” and so on. Finally, the pressure lifts. “Okay, count to fifteen and open your eyes. Slowly!”

Like a blind man peering into the night, I strain, waiting expectantly, counting. My mind wanders at ten and so I just sit there for a few more moments. Slowly I open my eyes. I see blurry, sparkly figures moving about. As the activity comes into focus, I turn to admire myself in the mirror. What I see causes me to slump, like my marionette strings have just been cut.

“God damn it, Tami! They’re fucking crooked!”

Close Your Eyes - Bonnie Smetts

And then we went to the nicest restaurant, not that far from the Westlake Beach Complex. Right on the water, just like my apartment, but this place sits on rocks right at the edge. From out table at the window, I can see into the water.

“You’re smile, Rawling, I love your smile,” Dean says. He’s grinning at me and making me a bit uncomfortable. “So tell me about yourself.” And he sits back as if I’m gonna do that.

“You’ll just have to find out a little bit at a time,” I say, feeling more unsure as the sun disappears. “You know I just moved here from Nordeen, I’ve told you that much, and that I’m starting a new job here at the county.” That’s about all I want this man to know, I hadn’t intended to bring all that I’d left behind in the woods with me here.

“And you?” I said, feeling awkward about asking and being asked. Everybody I ever knew in Nordeen, I’d known a little bit about them before getting to know them better. And then the few men I’d known without knowing a thing about them, I hadn’t wanted to.

“If you’re not going to tell me all the juicy details of your life, yet,” he said, “I’ll give you a few of mine. Been married a few times, been living here since I got divorced, work in real estate most of the time.” He’s smiling, all shiny and tan. “Now what else? God, I love your smile, Rawling.” He pulls my hands across the table toward him.

I don’t want anybody talking about my smile, not somebody I barely know, not this man I’m getting to know a bit more and I’m not liking being with. But I can’t imagine just leaping up and running home. I gotta sit this one out. And say a few things that make sense and wait to eat.

“Lobster, all the way from Maine,” Dean says, when our animals arrive. “Never had a lobster, hon?”

“Nothing even close,” I say, and I wish I could just close my eyes and be home instead of here with the waitress putting a big bib around my neck and everyone is laughing because half the restaurant’s got bibs. And then I watch Dean as he cracks and pulls and pecks his poor lobster to pieces. I follow along, skipping the butter.

“You sure you won’t have a drink?” he says, raising his glass half full of something deep green.

“I don’t drink,” I say. But I’m not telling him the reason why.

Back to School - Jennifer Baljko

The hour-long expedition down the New Jersey Turnpike to Rutgers University started with great fanfare. My mother began taking photos with her disposable camera early in the morning. My dad couldn’t stop hugging me. The van was stuffed with boxes, relatives, and pets. Everyone wanted to see my dorm room and stroll around campus. They were more excited about my first day of university than I was. Don’t get me wrong. I was thrilled about leaving Jersey City for the immensely more exciting New Brunswick scene (uh, well, not exciting, maybe different is a better word), and even more tickled by the idea of sharing a room with only one other person, as opposed to being cramped in a tiny room with my three sisters. Still, it was quite embarrassing all this buzzing around. I know I blushed when my clan of siblings, grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and the family dog descended from the van like a circus troupe. I tried to stop them from opening random doors, examining other people’s closet space, and sniffing around toilets. I wasn’t very successful. Ok, thanks for coming, thanks for helping me unpack. But, um, can you please go now?

Cooking - Carol Arnold

My father is 97 years old. He wants to die. Not that he has anything particularly wrong with him, other than the fact that his body is bent over and frail. His mind is in many ways sharper than mine. He recently was able to figure out a complicated chart involving the towing capacity of a truck I may buy, and I was not. I rely on him for things like that, and much more.

He lives alone in the ranch house he shared with my mother, who died over 20 years ago. He has had “girlfriends” but never remarried or lived with any one. He is the last of his friends and acquaintances of his generation. It is lonely, he says. But he doesn’t mind that part too much. He just says it’s time for him to go, and he’s getting impatient.

I say to him that I will miss him terribly but I understand how he feels. It took me a long time before I could say the latter. I still try to talk him out of it, or at least do things that might make him change his mind. I cook meals and leave them stacked in his refrigerator. Just today, I left four servings of meat loaf, roast potatoes, broccoli, apple sauce. I reminded him of the meals before I left. It was like saying, “Just look in your refrigerator and you’ll see how much I love you.” Somehow, it’s easier to do that than to actually say it, just as interpreting the truck chart is easier for him.

He appreciates my meals, but I don’t think he cares about food all that much. He doesn’t care about much of anything, except how my sister and I are doing, our families, our dogs. He is up on all news events but it’s like he’s seen it all already, many times over. I do understand his feeling that it’s time to get on his way, but I still want him to see it differently. The next time I’m there I will cook pot roast, scalloped potatoes, green beans and creamed mushrooms, maybe even rhubarb pie. Surely that will convince him to stick around.

Cooking - Jennifer Baljko

If I remember only one thing about my family’s history, it’s that my grandfathers – both of them- ruled their kitchens. While my grandmothers had some memorable dishes, my grandfathers are who always come to mind when I think of the great family gatherings.

Grandpa Bill had it in his southern blood, making the turkey for Thanksgiving Day, making the ham for Christmas. A butcher, originally from Georgia who moved to New Jersey after WWII when he met my grandma, had a certain way with the meat, a caring finesse with a carving knife. An extraordinary feast was coming when Grandpa Bill with his white, finger-splotched apron, would give the sauce a last stir, turn off the gas flame, and shout down the hall dinner was ready.

Dide Krsto, my other grandfather, on my Croatian side, had a different way around the kitchen. He was a baker who left his small village to start a career with Belgian patisserie chefs. When he came to New Jersey to give his family a better life, he traded in time around the oven for time hauling cargo around the docks. Still, he stayed up many nights pouring his TLC into divine desserts and sweet breads like dove-shaped meringues, apple strudels, Napoleons, custards. Baptism, graduation, and holiday meals were topped off with his sugared love.

As we all got older, they both cooked less and less. And, then sadly, stopped cooking altogether. Their recipes, locked in their heads, escaped all of us when they died. Two men from the same generation, from different corners of the earth, sharing the same passion: finding the way to their family’s hearts through their stomachs.

Cooking - Rachel Debaere

I used to love to cook, then I hated it, then I loved it, then I hated it. Now, I am learning to love it again. All this love and hate can be scientifically correlated with my emotional status, otherwise known as the what-is-being-demanded-of-me at-any-given-moment spectrum.

As a two-year-old, I used to sit happily on the brown linoleum kitchen floor of my mother’s kitchen, stirring air in the copper-bottomed Revereware saucepan. I used a wooden spoon and would occasionally raise the air-filled spoon to my lips, blow, so I wouldn’t burn my tongue and then taste my delicious concoction – usually a soup or flan. I never ran out of ingredients and had all the time in the world to make as many dishes as I wished.

As I grew older, say about seven, while my friends played outside on the teeter totter where I wanted to be, I was in the kitchen training. I washed lettuce and peeled carrots. If there was dirt left on a piece of lettuce or it wasn’t dry enough because I hadn’t properly and delicately patted the leaves as thoroughly as I should have, all the while not using too many paper towels, I would have to do it all over again. That was the best way to learn. I learned to beat eggs till they were light yellow, heat milk without letting it boil, and clean the chicken after first removing the gizzard, liver and heart from the bloody paper sack tucked into its belly. My small hands were the perfect size for doing this. As I got a bit older, I was allowed to use sharp knives. While the neighborhood kids were in the backyard playing softball, my mother instructed me in removing fat from the lamb chops, not too much however, because fat gave the meat its flavor and tenderness. I became pro at washing and cutting green beans, one bean at a time. Doing them individually ensured each one was clean and stringless. I learned to set the table, clean the pots and pans, sponge down the counters, remove scrapings and peels from the sink and, after dinner, clear the table and wash the dishes. By then, it was too dark to go outside, except to take the garbage out.

When I got married, I was a skilled bride. My husband, who had grown up in a Swiss household where his mother refused to allow her sons in the kitchen, didn’t know how to make pancakes, toast or scrambled eggs – any eggs really. He said he knew how pour cereal and to boil water, but the first time I saw him boil water, he turned on the wrong burner. His mom had never allowed the boys to clear their plates from the table either and had never permitted them to place their dirty dishes in the dishwasher. It made her too nervous, she said. She didn’t want her plates, cups and saucers getting chipped, and, besides, it was not a man’s place to do any of these domestic tasks. It was his place to remain seated at the table for the duration of the meal, while she practically never even sat down.

Happily moved out of my childhood home and in an apartment with my husband, I was delighted to create new meals for him – dishes he had never experienced, soups I had made and seen made in my mother’s and grandmother’s kitchens; stews improvised with eastern spices; and paellas, salads and soufflés from a variety of cookbooks – The New York Times Cookbook, The Joy of Cooking, The Silver Palate and Julia Child’s, The Art of French Cooking. I made couscous, simmering sweet apricots and prunes with carrots, onions and chicken drenched in savory broth. I made lamb tagines and saffron rice, flan with glazed caramel, and fava bean soup. It was no problem to pick up the ingredients from the local grocer on Solano Avenue on my way home from work. Here in my own home, I could add as much cayenne as I wanted, overcook my eggs, undercook the carrots. I never burned the green beans and I didn’t have to make any hated zucchini tarts, tongue and potatoes, liver with onions, or brains with lemon sauce. I could create the menu, invent the dish and clean-up on my own schedule.

When my husband and I moved to New York, the times and sizes of Manhattan kitchens were such that cooking for friends wasn’t what was done. Going out to restaurants was the Yuppie way. We ate Indian, Thai, Japanese, French, Cuban, Jewish (not my kind of Sephardic Jewish but rather Ashkenazi dishes like gefilte fish, matzah ball soup and brisket), Brazilian and my favorite – Ethiopian.

The big joke at the time was, “You’re going to the Blue Nile? Do they have any food there tonight?” Well, in fact, they did, and it was delicious. We went there almost every week and ate at low, round tables, using our hands to tear sumptuous pieces of spongy bread for scooping lentils and lamb that had been baked in searing ovens with fabulously unidentifiable herbs. Needless to say, I got out of the habit of cooking and almost out of the habit of using utensils. And I didn’t mind in the least not having to shop at those miniscule grocery stores with the narrow aisles that could barely fit one shopping cart at a time. Not to mention not having to walk home without heavy plastic bags that would leave red marks on my palms for hours.

By the time we moved to the suburbs outside of New York, I had three little people to feed in addition to my still virgin-in-the-kitchen husband. The kitchen was bigger, and I was back to cooking, this time it was for my amazingly happy and picky children. While they, two boys and a girl, sat on the floor stirring air with wooden spoons in a soup pot, I would make their meals.
But, now it was different. When I made chicken, it had to be speck-less for Michael. I figured out that I could make it simmered in a broth or baked in a sauce. Then, if I washed one piece, removing every speck of herb or, in the case of the barbecue sauce, if I used a really sharp knife and peeled the outer part, it would be as white as any piece of Wonder bread, and Michael would eat it.

At lunch, Jeremy needed the peanut butter on the top piece of bread with the jelly on the bottom piece only. I could choose between strawberry and blueberry jelly (Thank God, he was flexible.), not jam though, because jam was lumpy. Jelly was smooth. Smooth was good. And as long as the bread didn’t have “things” in it, i.e. grains, I would be fine. I was actually lucky there, because un-lumpy wheat bread was OK. Jeremy didn’t know that white bread even existed. When I mixed up the top and bottom slices, I quickly learned to flip the entire sandwich over, and then all would be well.

Rebecca, a barking, panting, lick-your-leg dog for the majority of her waking hours, was flexible in terms of what she ate, as long as it was served on the floor in a bowl so she could be on all fours and slurp the food, no hands. Often, she had imaginary friends who were hungry and since they were people and not dogs, I had to set a place for them at the table. “Sister,” and that was her name, liked the Beatrix Potter plate. “Amiga” liked the Big Bird plate. I never could tell where they were sitting since they were identically imaginary and so I’d get in trouble for mixing them up and putting the wrong plate in front of the wrong friend. Not to mention the clean-up. A little girl’s nose and mouth are not intended for handless eating.

As teenagers, the kids lightened up, except Michael. The new problem, though, was that they all had different schedules, so meals became more “on the go.” When making food that way, it was easier to fix something short order style, different for each, naturally. I was always in the kitchen though. Michael was, by choice of course, on a pretty strict white food diet – pasta with butter and salt only; pizza, no cheese, no sauce; potatoes, without a doubt, peeled. I didn’t call this cooking, not the happy way I cooked on the kitchen floor as a child before I became a slave to my mother, not the happy way I cooked as a young bride before I became a slave to my children’s taste buds.

Now, I am left with just Rebecca. My husband commutes to London and is home about only about thirty percent of the time. Jeremy is in his last year of college, out of state, where he has an apartment and cooks for himself, and Michael just left on Saturday for his first year of college. He will be eating cafeteria food as part of his dorm’s meal plan. That’s his deal now. So, that first Sunday night, as dinnertime approached, I looked at Rebecca, now seventeen, no longer a dog, with plenty of real friends, and a voracious, flexible appetite. She looked back at me, and, at the very same time, we smiled as we realized we were now free. It was like a hundred thousand cubic foot, sub-zero refrigerator door was magically opening, all by itself. Inside, for miles, we could see possibility, lots and lots of possibility. Time to get cooking.

Cooking - Judith Albietz

Lily was hungry again. It didn’t look like they were going to find food anytime soon in this creepy dark tunnel. She could really use a slice of deep crust pizza with cheese melting off the side. Even a bread stick would be nice. It had been too long since she had eaten that delicious piece of fruit.

Yes, she realized, a real live pizza was not in her future, especially in this future. No one here cooked or baked anything. When she asked Sam about it, he explained that just as all living creatures on the island had become telepathic over 2000 years, the molecular chemistry of the plants had also evolved. Most of the plants on the island were edible fruits and vegetables, eaten raw. They were never cooked and they were always delicious. You could just wander around this island all day, eating fruits and vegetables to your heart’s content, and never even have to turn on a stove or nuke a frozen dinner in the microwave. Sam said the plants provided all the nutrition anyone needed. Not only were they good to eat, but also Lily had noticed a quiet surge of energy each time she ate one.

Sam had taught Lily how to touch a plant to sense whether it was okay to eat. If so, then her contact with the plant would trigger the creation of a sensory link between Lily and the plant. Sam explained how Lily’s desires for taste and smell would be picked up by the plant’s receptors. A vegetable Sam had picked for himself tasted like beef jerky to him while that same vegetable tasted to Lily like tofu with garlic and pea pods. So, when they got back up to the surface, Lily planned to immediately find an edible plant and dream up an artichoke and mushroom pizza.

As she and Sam continued down the tunnel, Lily’s stomach growled. She thought about their last meal, the bright yellow fruit which looked like a fat banana but tasted like another one of Lily’s favorite dishes—spinach lasagna. Even though thinking about food only made her more hungry, it kept her fear under control. Hanging on tight to Sam, Lily remembered yesterday’s breakfast, the orange plant which tasted like it looked: a sweet orange, but it was very filling, like it had protein powder in it.

Continuing to distract herself from the danger ahead of her, Lily thought back to five years ago—or was it 2005 years ago--when she was seven years old. At that age Lily already knew how to scramble eggs and how to read recipes. She asked for a cookbook and her mom gave her one with Julia Child’s round ruddy face smiling back at her. Her first baking success was apple pie, an obvious choice and one her whole family supported. Lily made a lot of apple pies, perfecting the technique of making the top crust puff up high. When Uncle Nate he found out he had lung cancer, he asked Lily for one of her famous apple pies and she made him one which rose over six inches tall in the center. She could still remember the smells of apple and cinnamon.

Cooking - Elizabeth Weld Nolan

Watching Meryl Streep as Julia Child.

The first sight of the cover of ``Mastering the Art of French Cooking’’ in ``Julie and Julia’’ evoked surprise tears in me. The sound of that almost daffy, but so-passionate and practical, voice continued to bring small eruptions of grief throughout the film. I wept for the joy both women, Streep and Child, brought to their work, of making something wonderful – interpreting a part or a dinner.

Forty-one years ago, on a February Saturday afternoon in Beverly, Massachusetts, I put the finishing touches on a recipe from Julia Child. Alas! I can’t remember exactly which one, but it was chicken and vegetables stewed ahead, full of rich butter and wine and onions. We were having a dinner party, and the guests were my husband’s sister and husband and a new couple my husband wanted to get to know.

As I bent to the oven to pull out the yellow Dansk casserole, I realized I would have trouble standing back up because the little ripples of contractions I had felt after lunch were speeding up. My second baby, not due for 10 days, was apparently coming to the party. We cancelled the new people and called the family to come take care of our first daughter. As my brother-in-law drove us to the hospital, I told him I hoped the dinner would be good. He later confirmed it was excellent. I never got to taste it, or to meet the new couple.

When I arrived home from birthing that daughter, my husband’s grandmother arrived at our house with a large wicker basket filled with a freshly roasted chicken, little roasted potatoes and carrots, bread and buttered vegetables and pie for dessert. I thought it was the most wonderful dinner I’d ever seen. All I have to do now is see a generous wicker basket and I feel the promise of treats, being taken care of.

That same daughter, at age 8, when it was her turn to plan and (with help) cook the dinner, made her first hamburgers that turned out too hard and crispy. We all told her they were good, but she knew better. She and I turned to Julia, and we learned how to make Julia Child hamburgers:

Chop onions, lots of onion, saute them in butter, add to hamburger in bowl with bread crumbs and herbs and more butter and salt and pepper and mix with hands. Shape into patties and saute in MORE butter, leaving them a little bit rare.

They were, this time, delicious. The moisture of the onions and the butter keeps the meat moist and the bread crumbs make it rich and crumbly so it falls apart on the plate, making it easy to combine the bits with the mashed potatoes. We ate them forever.

Whenever I was bowed down by the weight of midwinter, small children not napping, laundry up and down the basement stairs and shoveling snow, I’d make a cup of tea and sit at the kitchen table and read Julia, and plan to cook. Chopping and sauteing and swirling sauces restored my self-esteem, took me to Europe and the cosmopolitan world of Paris. Suddenly, I could do anything. I was restored.

So why the tears? I’m still not certain. Something to do with the innocence of such young hope in me, of anyone that age, of the two women in the film following their passion – and because it was lovely to see a portrayal of men as wonderful, loving husbands who were equally passionate eaters.

I gave away my copy of ``Mastering the Art’’ when health considerations required changes. I’m not going to buy another one now because I have a new heroine, Alice Waters, who, in the ``The Art of Simple Cooking,’’ gives me strength and optimistic outlook. I admire her powerful dedication to teaching children about good food and raising it in the Edible Schoolyard. I love her way of teaching, not specific recipes, but ways of preparation, so, as she says, cooking isn’t a treasure hunt to find just the right ingredients, but rather figuring out how to make something wonderful from the ingredients you find. Her food is delicious too, and healthy. But every once in a while, I think it’s good to just give in and make Julia Child hamburgers.

Cooking - Vicki Rubini

Today she’s going to do it. She’s really going to do it. She is going to cook a meal worthy of food magazines.

Mary has been thinking about it all night. Sleep pales to the excitement of a red steaming pot pouring out savory aromas, and her poor mouth waters. She may as well get up, even if it is only 5 AM. Nothing else matters today but cooking this cioppino right, and it will be right, because the recipe is foolproof, and for once Mary is organized. This time there will be no race against time - she is prepared to concentrate and focus on her mission, cooking just one thing beautifully.

She congratulates herself for purchasing the prawns, calamari, clams, mussels, and salmon yesterday after checking to make sure she had all the ingredients on hand for the sauce – tomatoes, olive oil, oregano, onions, garlic, merlot, and celery. Nor does she kid herself about her abilities. Yes, lobster would be great in the sauce, but she doesn’t have the will to kill one or the funds to buy one. Not to worry – to appease the Cooking God for her sin of omission, Mary carefully wraps up spices of rosemary, oregano, and thyme in linen white cheesecloth, and ties the bouquet garni with a string, a present for him to bless her.

Things are looking good and for once they are feeling right. Nothing is black, nothing is stuck, nothing smells but the suggestion of the ocean and Italy. This is her day, she will remember it, the day she simmered red bubbling fish stew to perfection.

If only there were someone to share it with.

She looks up from the table at a box of oatmeal. Old Mister Quaker smiles down at her from his lofty green cabinet. She smiles back from inside herself.

How could she be so ungrateful? Mary is not alone - the Cooking God has been with her all day! She thinks back on the last time she made cioppino, and misplaced the salmon under the couch as she nervously cleaned for her mother’s visit. The salmon didn’t turn up until the odor came out.

Yes, the cioppino is delicious. Mary has done something right. She pulls out the bouquet garni, and lifts it up in benediction towards the green cabinet. Her mission complete, she dreams about tomorrow, which will start with a nice bowl of oatmeal.

Preserving Things - Bonnie Smetts

I’m not sure I should keep the box. The black box that’s got every piece of me that nobody thought to tell me and just let me find out after momma died. If I were stronger here, I’d throw the damn box in the dumpster before I leave the diner and my little room for good. All the bad that momma kept hidden from me lives in the box.

I don’t know why I touch this picture of me with my daddy. Somebody wrote my name along the bottom, somebody thought to do it. Why would my momma have written the name of her baby there, like she’d already known who I was.

My car’s still at Roy’s and I don’t have the stomach to get it. I never want to see him again, and yet I gotta see him to get my car. And then I got this picture of his daddy, my daddy holding me. Roy never knew, he couldn’t have known, either.

And that’s why I look up from where I’m sitting on the floor of my room above the diner. Maybe my momma, my momma with not an ounce of courage inside her, wrote my name along the bottom of this picture but never shared it with no one. No, that’s not right. My daddy’s holding me. And I’m younger than Roy, which means that Roy must have been growing up somewhere with someone when I came along. Somebody in Nordeen had to have known all about me and Roy. And not one single person ever had to sense, the kindness, some kind of heart to tell us we were related?

I’m gonna be sick again. In two days since I found out, sitting in the dark or crawling to the bathroom to throw up again, is all I can do. And I feel it starting all over again. I want to sleep so I can’t think or feel or be alive. I’m just gonna curl up here and pull the blanket down from the bed. I’m gonna stop breathing and keep my eyes closed. If I pull the cover real tight, I can’t hear any think. Air is going in tinier than a bird’s breathing and I’m feeling better and I think sleep’s coming finally. And I can’t know until tomorrow that I’ve finally fallen asleep.