What You Heard - Maria Robinson

How can you really trust yourself? Impossible. You heard that people can sleep walk through life for at least a year before realizing that they are at risk for accident couplings and eating bad meals that they had not planned. You wanted to know more about this temporal space where you do know what you're doing but think you do and even that you might be in love.

You heard that the possibility of missing out on your real life is more certain than is normally calculated and you wondered about how you could miss out on something that you had not planned. Even so, you wanted to know who exactly had told you about the contingency of life experience and why they had not made clear that life was more certain. Perhaps, that had not heard about the people who insure that life will be clean and well thought out even though therapy is more expensive than anyone really thought would be possible. You know that you can trust yourself with a shrink because you can sleep on the couch and never realize that you have clarified anything until you see it later.

What I Heard - Melody Cryns

Darkness enveloped us quickly at Plaskett Creek Park down at Big Sur where I’d gone for Burning Uke 8 – it was a Thursday night, so no big community music jammed was planned, just a group of people getting together to sing and play by the campfire. I fumbled around in the tent I got help setting up for stuff – it was so dark and I couldn’t really see anything. I could hear rustling outside and hear the ocean tide, though. I managed to find a flashlight and the special LED light, and the black case that had my purple music stand in it…and of course the Uke and the songbooks.

I just followed the music as I tripped a couple of times on uneven ground and a small hill towards the people playing and singing by a huge roaring fire. As I approached, suddenly a glowing set of lights in the shape of a ukulele high up on a tree lit up and everyone cheered.

“Welcome to Burning Uke!” I could hear someone say. Everyone cheered again – I saw shadows of people, most with ukes. Oh and there was that hyperactive hippie guy, Pat, whom I’d seen at the Santa Cruz Beach jams on Saturday mornings before – I couldn’t miss him even in the darkness with his bright-colored tie-dye on. He had this huge upright bass he’d made and he never stopped moving and dancing while he played. People sat on benches and folding chairs, some stood, music stands with yellow lights shined dully, and then there were the headlights that people wore on their heads that constantly moved. I didn’t feel comfortable with one of those headlights. Somehow my LED light and my books ended up sitting on a wooden picnic table and when it got completely dark, I couldn’t find them again – I hoped they wouldn’t get mixed with others. I finally stood up with my uke strapped on – thankful that I had a shoulder strap for it and looked on with a couple of other people huddled around a music stand, with someone’s head light (literally on people’s heads) guiding us as someone would call out a song number from our Santa Cruz ukulele songbooks.

Amid the campfire smoke blended with sea air, we sang and sang – and I played even when my hands felt too cold to strum or finger the chords, feeling the strings of the uke against me – I could see some of the ladies, two of them called “the Hula girls” whom I thought I recognized from Santa Cruz, dancing close to the campfire as we played song after song – some songs I knew and some I didn’t. I played them all and I didn’t care if my fingers got sore. I thought of my special friend Mike H. This was all because of him – he gave me a ukulele and now here I was surrounded by all these people at a campsite playing music. Who knew this would happen?

Mike H. had showed up at the monthly second Monday ukulele jam that I’d stumbled upon in July at my favorite coffee shop in Mountain View – I was thrilled to see the sign because I was still learning the ukulele chords from diagrams I downloaded from this website – amid having to move from Mountain View to San Jose and all the craziness of my life. Of course he dominated the entire jam of 40 to 50 people when he started to sing in his wonderfully loud booming voice, and he even grabbed my uke and strummed a couple of chords loudly and distinctly – those he could still finger even after the stroke paralyzed the left side of his body.

Dave F., who was running the jam shouted, “Why don’t you lead us on the next song? C’mon up!”

Mike, who had gone through a lot of trouble to wedge in right next to me, between me and this other guy who was trying to look at my songbook, maneuvering his cane, just smiled and waved and said, “It’s a lot of trouble for me to get up there. I’ll just lead from here.”

And so Mike H. led the whole group in the next song – I believe it was Stand by Me, and I strummed the rhythm on the uke as close to the way Mike H. strummed it as I could, thinking of how cool it would be if I could reach behind him and be his left hand and finger the chords while he strummed.

I thought of Mike H. while sitting there at the campsite in the darkness playing and singing – and I wished that he could be there with me. But he said he can’t camp anymore, that it’s too hard, and besides, it’s so hard because it bugs him that he can’t just pick up an instrument and play it.

This guy named Andy, who apparently was one of the founders of Burning Uke, played some really cool stuff on his tiny ukulele – he and his wife had traveled all the way from Hawaii to be here. It was so much fun – I wasn’t a spectator, I was playing right along with everyone else. When everyone finally decided it was time to go back to their tents to get ready for a long, serious weekend of workshops, jams and playing. With the fire going down and people with headlights and flashlights heading down the hill to their tents, I became a little frightened – I didn’t want to say anything to anyone, but how the heck was I going to find my stuff, get down the hill and find my tent? I could feel the dampness in the air as I managed to find my books which had become damp and my LED light. Carrying all of my things, I slowly made my way down the hill, trying to keep hold of my flashlight – towards the tents. I could hear people laughing and talking in the dark.

What She Heard - Kent Wright

-Best thing for a cold is to let it run its course, Alice’s mother told her.

–And, I’m telling you right now missy if you aren’t running a fever, I’m not running up here every five minutes. I’ve got this house to clean.

Alice heard her mother walk away from her door. The floor made its voice heard just before the stairs. Then Alice didn’t hear her mother. She just heard the murmuring like a crowd reciting the Pledge of Allegiance when you are too far away to make out the words. Alice didn’t have a cold. She told her mother that so she could stay in her room. She hadn’t slept except in snatches, but she was not tired. She couldn’t sleep because she had to plan for something and go somewhere to do it. She had to prove that they were there, the things inside.

Before it was anywhere close to light outside Alice fixed her hair nice, and put on make up then took her mother’s black fur coat out of the closet in the spare room. Just like she was told.

She started the car. Her father had left it out front because of the snow. Alice switched on the lights and eased into the street. She had never driven in snow before, and this was not just snow on the road, it was snow in the air too, a storm. They said it would be fine and for her to just do it. She knew she was going south. That was the word she had understood. On the highway south she gripped the steering wheel and stared into the snow storming in the headlights.
It came rushing at the car in a vortex of white faces. They spun towards her and were swept smoothly aside by the sides and top of the car. She could see the snow people screaming but their wind language was a whistling she could not understand. The voices inside were no longer just a murmur. They spoke in a mean, shrill frenzy, stacked on each other commanding, demanding, Alice to drive, to go there. They didn’t say where, but she knew, and she drove through the raging white.

A Secret Life - Barbara Jordan

" I wish I were more incendiary."

"Tell me about the dream, "he replied. His eyes were lazy,
like a southern drawl and the early light played with his grey whiskers. He looked like Grizzly Adams ready to go outside and chop some wood. He smelled like smoke and peat moss.

"I was standing in a parking lot, yelling at these people carrying big signs that said, "Global Warming is a Hoax." I was so mad ! then I noticed I was actually standing there naked. "

"Nice"

"Shut up…. Then I got scared, so I reached in my oversized purse and grabbed a handful of condoms and threw them at the crowd. "

"You've been working at Planned Parenthood to long. " his voice trailed off as he stared at my naked body under the sheet.

"I wish I were more like that Jet Blue Man at JFK recently---ya know-- activate the emergency system, grab two beers, say "FUCK YOU", and jump. But what do I do instead? I posted some lame comment on Facebook, all calm and reasonable, not inflammatory at all. Besides, I'd probably land in the dumpster outside my office anyway. "

Writing it Down - Judy Albietz

Lily hunched her cell phone up on her left shoulder as she looked around for a pen or pencil and a piece of paper. She wanted to write down the hotel contact information. For some reason she didn’t feel comfortable entering the information on her cell phone or even on her new ITouch. What if these devices crashed? Ever since she got the new ITouch last week, she had kept it separate from her Blackberry. As if she didn’t want them to contaminate each other. If one died at least the other would be working. But ever since she saw that the website for the Leadership Conference had gone down, she had a bad feeling about Internet communication. What if none of these things worked? So she would just write down the information. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about an electricity outage or servers being hacked. She found an old envelope on the kitchen table and fished a ballpoint pen out of the corner of the drawer where the phone book was kept. Yes, that was another thing people didn’t use anymore.

Before he left for Chicago, she and Josh made plans to keep up with each other. He loved to text, even better than talking. He complained she didn’t check her incoming texts often enough. She promised to return his texts as soon as she could. But she couldn’t guarantee she would stay glued to her phone like he did.

As Lily jotted down the hotel address on the back of the envelope, she thought how she liked the feel of the pen in her hand—pressing against her fingers. No, she’d probably never get as good a callous on the third finger of her right hand as her mother’s. Her mom had told her how it used to be blue-stained with all those years of fountain pens. Now even her mother was thumb-typing notes to herself on her cell phone.

Writing it Down - John Fetto

Hawley wrote in the garage on the table he built from two by fours and topped with half inch ply wood, setting the beaten wire bound school book between the skill saw and the vice. The plywood was unfinished and needed more sanding, but he didn’t touch any of the machinery anymore. He took the notes from his pockets, arranged them on the table, then took out the chipped plastic pen and wrote the dates, the times of every time the van rolled up. He wrote it all in on the wide lines of the school book, trying to write slowly, but his fingers would speed up when he’d think about the men who carried the boxes, the smug looks and grins, his fingers would tighten and the pen would dig into the page. He’d have to stop, cross it and start over. He wanted people to read this, no matter what happened.

Writing it Down - E. D. James

Andrei sat by the flickering light of the candle and took down the story that Maxim whispered through his cracked and bleeding lips.

When I was a child we were taught to never talk. My mother and my grandmother would tell me over and over that anyone could be an informer. When we saw a policeman we crossed to the other side of the street. My father was just quiet. Carefully making his way through his days as if walking through fields planted with bombs. I kept to these lessons throughout my life. My wife was raised the same as me. We worked hard, we are scientists, we wanted only to do the research the State thought important and have a simple life. We had no money. We didn’t care. Then I was assigned to work on breaking codes of the Americans. I didn’t want this work. I knew that anything that had to do with State secrets was dangerous. But I had no choice. I was given the formulas and told to run them on the intercepted messages and report the results no matter what they said, whether they made sense or not. One day last fall a message I translated read, “Beria is plotting against Stalin. The change will come next spring.” I began to tremble. I knew that if I passed this to my supervisor there would be consequences. Beria was the head of the service I was working in after all. He would know everything that went on. My stomach cramped and my head ached. I translated more messages than ever before on that day. I worked as hard and fast as I could hoping that I could bury the message in a tall stack that that my supervisor might miss it in the pile of minutia. At the end of the day I handed him my stack of messages. He asked if there was anything interesting. I told him it was all routine.

That night the door of our apartment was broken in at three in the morning. They grabbed my wife and I and brought us to the Lubyanka. I was put into a room with a one way mirror looking into the room where they held my wife. They showed me the message and asked if I remembered it. I told them no, that I had been translating so quickly that day that I hadn’t really read any of the messages. First they beat me. Then they made me watch as they beat my wife. I told them I had translated the message, that it meant nothing to me. They told me I had translated it incorrectly. That I must have been trying to create anti-Soviet propoganda. They showed me what they thought the true translation should be, “Beria is in full support of Stalin. No anti-Soviet activities are contemplated.” Then they made me watch while several men raped my wife.

I am not afraid to die. I am only unhappy that it has taken so long.

The last sentence seemed to be all that Maxim had the energy to say. He lapsed into silence and his breathing became rapid. Andrei was beginning the end stages of his data point in the experiment. Andrei’s hand was tired. He pulled the sheets up to Maxim’s neck in the only gesture of comfort he could offer. Then he picked up the clipboard and headed towards the office to add the story to the others he kept in the tin in the space he had hollowed out beneath the floorboards.