Leaning Into It – by Doug Canter

We’re kicking off the Spring 2019 online issue with something that is really worth the read.

We hope you find Doug’s story as stirring as we did.

Here it comes:

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Leaning Into It

Days after I decided to travel to the Blue Ridge Mountains on a motorcycle, I bought a new bike after years of thinking about and preparing for it. Surrounded by flashy motorcycles on a commercial strip in the Washington D.C. suburbs, I lifted my left leg over the fuselage of a shiny white one. Pasted prominently on the tank’s top, a disclosure warned that “Improper weight on the rear of the bike could cause serious injury or death.” Why in the world would anyone put themselves at such risk? Having ridden two-wheel motorized machines off and on for about fourteen of the last forty years or so of my adult life, I thought I knew the answer. But at sixty, I felt unsure of my decision to buy the 500 cc machine that waited silently and patiently beneath me for my test ride. I swallowed hard, straightened the handlebars and looked over the motorcycle’s windscreen through the large doors of the dealership onto a parking lot and a busy suburban road.

 

Reaching for Passion

“You did pretty good,” Scott said to me after the test drive. “You stayed with me the whole time.” I mumbled something about jerky starts and being a little rusty and thanked him, but I didn’t reveal the discomfort I had felt in both hands as I manipulated the clutch with my left and the front brake with my right. The opening and closing of my fingers caused soreness after only ten minutes. I wasn’t sure how I’d manage riding two and a half hours. This whole idea for a motorcycle trip to the Shenandoah National Park, where I would spend a week at a conference, seemed like a way to develop a story. But if I had been honest with myself, the trip two weeks before my daughter’s wedding had more to do with my recent change of law firm jobs and dissatisfaction with the direction my life had taken.

The next morning, after buying the Honda CB 500X, I woke dreaming about crashing it on the highway. As a college student I had ridden a Yamaha 350 cc motorcycle all around and through central Pennsylvania. I seldom felt frightened while riding back then. Maybe I had felt spurts of fear during moments on Route 15, the major secondary road that wound through central Pennsylvania and passed Bucknell, where I attended college. The whole bike would vibrate while traveling 65 miles an hour. I understood the consequences of hitting the pavement at highway speed. But mostly I had ridden with complete confidence back then, ironically, before I had a motorcycle license, before I even had taken a motorcycle safety course.

Now, the anxiety occurred sporadically. Mostly, it sprouted to the surface when I thought about riding, not while actually riding. The doubt had started in earnest a year earlier after an SUV almost ran directly into me as I rode my Vespa, travelling on two-lane Route 355 north of Rockville. At the time, I was riding to the Triumph motorcycle dealership in Fredericksburg. The driver of the SUV apparently hadn’t seen me until the last several seconds before impact. Fortunately several seconds was all he and I needed to avoid the crash but it got me thinking.

Crashes and accidents killed 4,957 motorcyclists during 2012, two years before I bought the motorcycle, a seven percent increase from the prior year, according to the then most recent recorded data of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. During the several weeks preceding my motorcycle purchase, I had heard a multitude of stories about the dangers of motorcycle riding from people responding spontaneously at the sight of my Shoei helmet.

During the days I waited for the installation of a top rack and crash bar on my new Honda. I suffered the abrupt realization that I might not have enough storage capacity for the week-long trip. I started to perform internet searches for packing Honda CB500X’s, packing motorcycles, and motorcycle luggage. One site warned about distorting the center of gravity. Low hanging and centrally located luggage seemed to create less potential for handling problems. This information dashed my vision of simply wearing a large hiking backpack on my back during the trip. The logistics were daunting. I absolutely had to travel with a CPAP machine for my sleep apnea. That alone weighed 20 pounds and occupied a large bag. I needed to bring a laptop, power cord, camera, telephone and chargers. Together they probably weighed ten to fifteen pounds. I also needed medicine, toiletries and some clothes. I had no idea how I would load everything up for the trip, I thought in a panic.

The deliberation, calibration, and risk-weighing I performed during this packing and planning phase of my journey resembled familiar characteristics that had marked my adult life. For over two decades, I had considered a job change, from law firm back to the public sector, from law firm to a corporate setting, a lateral switch to another practice area, and even to a non-legal job. This latter option always seemed inaccessible. In truth, I was afraid, and, in a way, this trip to the Shenandoah National Park felt like I was doing more than riding to a conference on a motorcycle. It felt like I was breaking a self-imposed barrier of fear.

Taking the Risk

After waiting two weeks for the dealership to install crash bars, which protect the turn signals and other exterior accessories from damage caused by a parking lot fall, and a top box, which provide a locked storage container to keep my helmet or other light baggage when not riding, I picked up the bike. It looked bigger than the day I bought it. Scott, my twenty-something year old salesman, provided a superficial overview of key features. He then checked about ten small square boxes on a delivery invoice before handing it to me to sign. I started asking him for explanations about a number of items on the checklist and jotted notes of key service and maintenance requirements that seemed important to monitor. I had to check the oil once a month, lubricate the chain twice a month, change the brake fluid every two years, and change the coolant every two years. I began to wonder why I purchased the motorcycle to begin with.

Handling the hand clutch and foot gears, working the hand and foot brakes, and adjusting to the greater engine acceleration came relatively quickly after a few days, although I was a little rusty. However, the psychological aspect of riding a two wheel machine at high speeds did not feel the same as it had when I was twenty. On occasion, I found myself rubbing my knees and legs, feeling acutely aware of the comfort, no pains or aches, and I suddenly felt simultaneously both grateful for my health and well being, and anxious about sacrificing all that I had. At the same time, I started checking MapQuest directions, researching one and two piece rain gear, and thinking about packing, committed to follow through on this long-held dream.

At Battley Motorcycle in Rockville, a Harley and Ducati dealership, scores of leather clad people, mostly men with gray beards like me, milled around the parking lot against the backdrop of parked Harleys and other large cruisers. A band played at the far end as two people danced alone near them. Vendors sold motorcycle memorabilia under a white tent at the other end of the lot. I parked my adventure bike, which was built for on and off road use. Adventure bikes sit higher than cruisers and have a more slanted frame towards the back of the bike that gives them a racier look than the cruiser, which is reminiscent of the motorcycles we used to see in photos of biker gangs like the Hell’s Angel’s when I was a boy in the 1960s.

Craig, a thin short guy, helped me find equipment. As it turned out my red Shoei helmet was seven years old, about two years older than desirable. He explained that after about five years the interior starts to decompose and lose its effectiveness. I bought a new similar Shoei, this one black. Craig showed me an Asai that fit well, but it was not Snell approved. I remembered from my motorcycle safety course that helmets should be DOT and Snell approved. The Snell Memorial Foundation, a non-profit organization established in 1957 after the motorcycle death of Pete “William” Snell, certifies motorcycle helmets based on independently developed standards supported by scientific and medical research. After buying the helmet, waterproof rain gear, which included a jacket, pants and pull over rubber boots, and a black motorcycle jacket, which had padding in strategic places, I paid the almost $1,000 bill and left for the Honda dealership. I rode out of Battley’s parking lot wearing my motorcycle jacket and helmet, trying to smoothly shift gears and quickly accelerate as I rounded the turn onto the road from the lot under the watchful eyes of two couples standing behind their Harleys on the other side of the two-lane road across from the dealership.

The Shenandoah National Park, established in 1935, covers 200,000 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a corner of Appalachia and Virginia, rich with history and folklore. My trip to the Park started the day before I departed. I rode to Bethesda on a partly sunny summer day to check tire pressure. The breeze blew gently in my face, and I glided on the two wheel machine through a natural world of air and clouds and sun and earth. As I waited for my tires to cool before filling them with air, I sipped a decaffeinated coffee, savored a chocolate croissant, and listened to chirping birds.

When I initially saw my first motorcycle at twenty, the red 350 cc Yamaha sitting idly on an old brick patio of the owner’s small two-story house in Lewisburg, a dot of a Pennsylvania town with a couple of bars and a pizzeria on its single main street that extended from a two-lane bridge over the Susquehanna River on the northern edge of town to an interconnection with Route 15, near the high school, at a point about half way between a federal prison and the pockmarked barren hilltops of empty, strip coal mines further south, on the way to Harrisburg. My closest college buddy, Bob Wentz, who coincidentally owned the identical make and model motorcycle, came with me. The owner wheeled the bike onto the narrow street in front of his house. After several failed attempts, the Yamaha coughed its way to life. It was a carburetor problem that plagued the bike for the entire time I owned it. It was the spring of 1975.

I struggled to test drive the 350 cc Yamaha in the nearby high school parking lot. After judging my capability, the owner offered to show me how to stop and turn the bike. He didn’t appear too concerned with the fact that I had never ridden a motorcycle before and had neither a learner’s permit or motorcycle license. I bought the motorcycle the next day, after a failed attempt to borrow money from the local bank, with most of my semester’s food money.

For those of you who have never ridden a motorcycle, the operating mechanics, especially the handlebar clutch, may seem strange. Certainly, at the time, the front wheel handbrake and rear wheel left foot brake felt unnatural to me. I learned how to shift the gears with the left foot pedal fairly quickly, although, the coughing carburetor punctuated each attempt to shift from neutral to first, a slight downward notch on the left foot pedal together with a squeeze of the left handbrake, which serves as the clutch. But the rapid coordination of both my right hand and left foot on both brakes simultaneously proved more difficult. It took several weeks for me to feel comfortable riding on the roads around Lewisburg.

It might be important to express the feeling of loneliness and desperation that lurked beneath the surface of my consciousness back then which I’ve spent a lifetime trying to understand. I tell you this not for sympathy or concern, but for appreciation of what I feel is a celebration when I think of motorcycle riding. For me, it represents the independence of adolescence, the confidence of youth, the joy of first love, the hope of young adulthood, the dreams of middle age and, increasingly, the reality of growing old.  Looking back as an adult, the yearning for the thrill of those turns, the rush of air on my face, the roar of the engine was always there. But I didn’t act on it for fifteen or twenty years. In the beginning, I was too busy enjoying fatherhood. However, as my three children started getting older, I felt the yearn for that motorcycle grow intensely. My trip to the Shenandoah National Park felt like a leap of faith, a return to myself. As I searched for direction I began to trust my feelings – that I needed to make a change even as the fear of falling continued to hold me back.

As my departure approached, the most daunting task was packing the long list of necessary school, hiking, and motorcycle supplies. At the time, I had been practicing law for over thirty five years. Yet, even I had trouble harmonizing the gross weight limit specified in the owner’s manual with the packing and weight information posted on the bike’s fuselage, which cautioned about complying with the net limit. Another thing was figuring out just how much 6.5 pounds allowed in the top box where I wanted to store my laptop. I guess I could have looked it up on the internet, but I was too involved deciding how to cram everything into the saddlebags and tank top.

Finally, after practicing the day before my departure, I felt I could fit everything into one of the several bags or storage areas. During that practice session, I loaded the saddlebags, including the CPAP machine and other gear, onto the bike, which involved removing the seat, laying the connecting strips of the saddle bag across the bike, and strapping the bags onto the bike with bungee cords. This was my first time performing this task with the saddlebags fully loaded and I had made a rookie mistake. I left the key in the bike under the seat where it opens the lock and allows the seat to come out. The saddlebag on that side was so heavy that it bent the key. At least it happened at home where I had a spare key, I thought. I now knew not to leave that key in the receptacle while loading the packed side saddlebags.

I rode a mile to the local high school parking lot and practiced figure eights using the parking space lines to mark loosely a forty by forty foot area in which to ride. The bike felt sluggish with the heavy bags, which I guessed weighed at least sixty pounds. The objective of doing the figure eights was to control the bike well enough to ride inside the outer parameter of the small rectangle, and to perform the maneuver without placing my feet on the pavement or falling. My first few attempts were moderately, but not completely successful, because I either drove outside the square or, on occasion, needed to put my foot on the ground to keep from falling. My marked areas kept migrating and after a few minutes, I barely missed riding over broken glass. All my effort to prepare would not help if I punctured my tire, I thought, so I drove home without further practice, wondering if I really was ready for this journey.

After a fitful night sleep, I woke early and somewhat systematically packed all my gear and supplies on the bike. With all my practice, I had not spent any time trying to balance the weight in the two side saddle bags. This required some slight repacking. After loading the bike and strapping all the bags and packs tightly to it, I slipped on my knee supports and football pads under my jeans. Craig from Battley Cycle had suggested this possible substitute for motorcycle pants. The knee pads slipped on easily even though they produced a tightness around my knees. The high school football pads were stitched into a nylon girdle that hung to me tightly and created bulk under my jeans on my thighs, back, and pelvis. But I felt it useful to wear them in light of the highway portion of my journey. I kissed my wife goodbye, placed my arms inside my black leather motorcycle jacket, tapped my pocket to confirm I had my clip on sunglasses and keys, and one last time felt the anguish of making this trip so close to my daughter’s wedding. At the time, I thought my wife had given her approval, but I eventually learned that I had not read her response properly.

With all the risk I assumed with this trip, I would never forgive myself if I were to die or were injured two weeks before Libbie’s wedding. What possessed me to take this risk? I thought briefly, but put it out of my mind as something else, a sense of desperation for a dream, selfishly outweighed my concerns. Within minutes, I turned onto Route 495 (the eight lane beltway that surrounds D.C.) and began the first part of the hour and a half drive. This was the portion of the route on major highway roads that required me to drive the fully loaded motorcycle at over sixty-five miles per hour. Straddling an engine travelling that fast on an asphalt road balanced on two wheels in the midst of merging and lane-changing cars and trucks scared the hell out me. I didn’t remember feeling this way before, although highway driving never had been my favorite, but my memories and the feeling of riding a motorcycle had always been strong and positive.

Making a Leap of Faith

Back in 1975, I would ride my Yamaha on winding, two-lane roads around Bucknell near Lewisburg with Wentz. We traveled under canopies of reds and oranges with the air splashing into our faces, the sun striking our chrome handlebars, and the high pitched rrrrrmmmm of the engine drowning out the small quiet country sounds that surrounded us. We passed apple stands, Amish farms, former strip mine towns, state parks, and miles of the Susquehanna River. Sometimes, we’d stop in the small Union County localities to drink Genesee Cream Ale. These were mostly worn towns with a solitary bar and single gas station, empty tracks on rusted bridges and fewer jobs than motorcycles. When I rode, I leaned into turns on empty country roads with the breeze in my face and pulled back the throttle on the open blacktop under the sun with nothing on my mind.

With some of that same feeling reemerging, I approached Sperryville, Virginia, a one-street town with a bakery that does not serve decaffeinated coffee, which lies in the lowlands of a corner of Appalachia below Old Ragg Mountain, and only a short drive on curvy mountain roads to the Shenandoah National Park’s Thornton Gap entrance. These roads to the park were high motorcycle accident areas, according to the road signs, yet here in the forest on these turns near the park I saw more motorcycles than cars. The wind in my face and the beauty of densely packed trees evoked a sense of self: a kind of oneness with the world around me and completeness with the person within.

Back when I was a pudgy, black haired, brown eyed twelve-year old, I felt free when I rode my bicycle away from the stony silence of my step-father’s inattention and the suffocating anxiety of my mother’s glare. Let me pause and say here that before my stepfather died several years ago, he and I had exchanged unspoken apologies to one another, and I began to view my mother’s tireless efforts to raise me with the respect it deserved. But before all that, in 1966, I was playing street football with my schoolmates, throwing dirt bombs in pretend army raids with friends, fantasizing about unbuttoning the blouse of the girl next door – and riding my bicycle.

I rode my bicycle miles away to visit friends, to reconnoiter downtown Richfield, a quaint Connecticut town, which back then was a four-block community with a dime store, old Italian barbershop, and Fourth of July parades. Richfield was nestled along Route 7 between the larger Danbury and the cluster of similar small commuter towns further south on the way to New York City. It was a time of simplicity and complexity as my adolescence unleashed a long search for meaning and identity – and, I think, also peace.

There I stood almost fifty years later straddling the new white Honda CB 500X at the Thornton Gap entrance to the Park, nine miles from Skyland Resort where I would be staying at a week-long writing residency, hiking the trails in the national park land that once belonged to others, reading about Appalachia by women writers from the region, and trying to contemplate changes to my life. During the week stay, we hiked Stony Man trail, which leads up to a rocky overlook that exceeds 4,000 feet, one of the highest in the Park. We walked segments of the Appalachian Trail and saw deer, snakes, and black bears. The Skyland Resort accommodations nested on the ridge of the mountains along Skyline Drive. Although we were not completely removed from automobiles, plastic bottles, noise, and the excessive waste of human consumption, they were limited and contrasted with the dense forests, picturesque views, and numerous hiking trails.

Dreams

Handling a fully loaded motorcycle on a highway in crowded traffic can be a drain. I rode through stop-and-go traffic on a six lane road packed with cars and trucks on my return trip. Machines on asphalt surrounded me in the humid June heat. My black motorcycle helmet and black leather padded jacket retained, and seemed to amplify, the heat. The birds, deer, and bear of the forest all had disappeared. As I accessed the highway back towards Washington, D.C., I felt the contrast between development and the National Park, between suburbia and the Blue Ridge Mountains.

I rode across the Virginia-Maryland line feeling relieved that I was almost home and began looking for my exit. As I travelled under the strong sun, I turned to check my left lane for traffic, and the wind ripped my clip-on sunglasses off my lens and onto the highway behind me. It was an ominous sign, but I had neither the patience nor energy to dwell on it. Hot air pressed through the open visor against my face as I leaned into the turn off River Road several miles from home.

The blossomed flowers and green shrubs cast a freshness to the frames that passed, and I struggled to concentrate, all the while thinking of my family as I rested my left shoe on the ground in front of a stop sign near home. It was the weight of the saddlebags, I think. Maybe I had been in third gear instead of first. It is possible I didn’t accelerate enough. Whether lack of motion or excessive weight or some combination, the 500 plus pound motorcycle struggled to keep its feet as I attempted to round the turn onto Bradley Boulevard two blocks from my destination. The engine sputtered and stalled with suddenness. I felt the heavy frame tilt, weighted down by packed saddle bags, a loaded top tank bag, and a backpack strapped to the rear of the seat full of books and other items.

Some things happen in milliseconds. I knew I did not have sufficient time to restart the bike. Instinctively, I tried to pull the right handle bar up to stabilize the frame. It was a futile attempt to fight gravity. My new motorcycle fell to the pavement like a wounded animal, and gasoline leaked over the pavement under it like blood. Unable to lift the new Honda off the road, I started to unload the packs and bags. But within seconds, a young woman driving a pick-up truck offered to help. Then, two boys pulled their car to the side, and the four of us lifted the Honda on to her feet.

The balance, the motion, the feel of the air, the lean into a turn on a motorcycle and the acceleration out of it constitutes one of those interminable good feelings, yet taking those turns too fast can be dangerous. I learned that years earlier in a near wipe out on my used Yamaha. The sound of gravel as one’s two-wheeled machine slides towards the edge of a highway is not easily forgotten. The trip to the Shenandoah National Park had inspired my confidence in dreams. Mindful of the dangerous portions of road ahead, I decided to pursue my long-held desire to teach English. Less than two years after my trip I retired from my law practice, giving up my hard-earned partnership and I began a two-year teaching residency in Baltimore. Now, in my second year teaching World Literature at Western High School, I feel the wind in my face every day at school, even as my motorcycle awaits my return home.

The hour commute to Baltimore and day-to-day responsibilities of teaching in an urban school can deplete. But like the glide in a turn on a motorcycle under a canopy of fall trees with cool air caressing your cheeks, there is a fragile beauty and vulnerable satisfaction that comes from achieving a dream. I woke this morning on my sixty-fourth birthday at the end of a vivid dream in which I saw my oldest son, Ted, and his wife walking arm in arm with an old college friend on the streets of what looked like New York City. As consciousness crystallized, I realized how little time I have left, how much I may not accomplish, and what little I actually have accomplished; and I thanked God for my dreams, the dreams of youth, the passion of a lifetime, and, hopefully, the wisdom to choose wisely which dreams to pursue for tomorrow.

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Doug Canter’s writing has previously appeared in the Evansville Review, Talking Writing, 20-Something Magazine, and Public Utilities Fortnightly, among others, as well as on the websites of the American Bar Association, Discovery Channel Tech, and Danya Institute. Doug currently teaches English in Baltimore City. When he is not preparing lesson plans or writing, Doug is walking the C&O Canal in suburban Washington, D.C., or hiking the trails in the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. In 2011, Doug received a Master of Arts in Nonfiction Writing from Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.

New Editors & Themed Issues for Spring 2019

Hedge Apple Magazine Spil Your Guts Theme
Hey there, everyone.

Spring has yet to come (in the northern hemisphere at least,) but winter’s breadth has done little to stop the slew of exciting ideas pouring from our elated hearts. Because the Hedge Apple is continuously spun with the preferences of student-interns, editors change with the seasons. That cycle of change results in an unebbing tide of fresh ideas each and every magazine. Mr. Garlock and Ms. Hogue have ascended into the hall of records to join hands with all editors preceding. The great unity that is locally known as “finishing the English program” is before them.

Meet this Spring’s editors: Elijah Rokos, Ryan Jordan, and Jake Kemman.

Now that we’ve introduced ourselves, we’re going to pick up where the last issue ended. To continue the glasnost begun by our esteemed predecessors, we are still accepting submissions from the wide, wide world and all the people in it–so keep ’em comin’, world.

With that said, we can also formally introduce the first of this Spring’s themes, so keep reading. It’s a goodie.

Spill Your Guts

Hedge Apple Magazine Spil Your Guts Theme

Society doesn’t want you to believe that your secrets matter. Hiding away your true selves and making it through the day with ingenuine smiles gets exhausting, but that was yesterday. Today, allow this digest to dive into your gutsy stories–sans reflux. Remove the protective layers of secrets and give in to the seduction of nakedness: loss, grief, love, need, poverty, addiction, obsession, social depravity, depression, mental health, oppression, sickness, heartache, detachment, dissociation, mind-numbing stress, and that which evades description. Regurgitate the ugly monsters from within, exfoliate the things that make you itch, strip your skin, and send those skeletons lurching into the light of day. We want the things that scare you, hold you, lift you up and drag you down. This February, air out your intestines between the pages of the Hedge Apple.

Submissions can be anonymous or not–that part is up to you. Quit your itchin’, start bitchin’.

Submission period ends March 16.

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Before you go, set a reminder to keep checking back. We’ll update this page as the rest of our themes roll in. If you plan to submit for a theme, make sure to let us know in your cover letter. For more information, refer to our Submission Guidelines.

Thanks for reading,

The (Spring ’19) Editors.

The Hedge Apple Is In Print!

Hey, everyone! The wait is over, the Fall 2018 edition of the Hedge Apple is officially available on Amazon!

It’s been an awesome semester, and we are excited to share this amazing collection of work from a very talented group of contributors. In this edition of the Hedge Apple, you can expect to encounter top-of-line original pieces of art, fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

For anyone who contributed to the magazine, keep an eye on your mailbox; in the next several weeks a free contributor’s copy will be headed your way. Also, for anyone else looking to enjoy the Hedge Apple, follow the link to purchase a copy of your own!

Again, we can’t thank everyone enough for all of the support we have received this semester. Without our contributors and readers the Hedge Apple would not exist. Keep writing, everyone, and we look forward to reading and reviewing all of your creative work for the Spring semester!

The Beast by Lauren Trail

She is given a task that morning, one that is not grand or unique. She has carried it out a hundred times before, but today her thoughts get muddled and bleak.

Some days it seems she floats on a breeze, her mind at ease, no troubled sleep. She carries with her woes and strife from days gone by, pain that cut so deep its internal scars might never heal. Yet everyday she wakes and stands and moves her feet, paints on a smile with cracked teeth, and dons her armor even though it is weak. She does not allow herself to mope and weep, but pulls back her shoulders and struts down the street.

Today is the day, she always thinks. Today is the day I conquer the beast.

She surges towards her goal, determined to fulfill her task, courageous and strong and happily content. She knows where she’s going, she knows what needs done, but halfway there, there’s a bump in the path. She sees it coming and tries to avoid it, but she’s thrown off course and now everything is ruined.

That’s when she feels it, a shiver running down her spine unbidden, and though she cannot see it, she knows that the beast is coming for her. She looks down at her armor, all battered and cheap, and she thinks about fighting, but her mind is too weak. Where before she had been confident, so sure and so strong, now her plans have been altered and her whole body has gone numb.

The beast is coming fast and hard, she can hear its thundering feet. Her heart leaps into her throat, fear coiling in her chest as her lungs constrict. Her body is slow to respond, even though she is desperate to run, and the first few steps she takes are tremulous and clumsy. She grits her teeth and forces her stiff muscles to obey, and soon she is sprinting for her life, desperate to outrun the beast, desperate to escape what fate has thrust upon her, even though she knows she is too late.

The beast comes for her nearly every day with no rhyme or reason to its scheme. Its arrival is seldom anticipated or planned, but she can always sense it the second it grows near. Though it is never an early enough warning for her to truly escape, and she knows that she never will, she still tries, again and again, each time hoping for a different result. Some days, she is too tired to run, so she bargains and pleads. Some days she turns to face the beast and tries to fight back, but the beast overpowers her every time, leaving her bloody and weak. Some days she runs until she thinks that she has won, only to turn around and see that the entire day is gone and she is far from home, and the beast slinks back into the shadows with a broad smile of glee.

Today is another sort of day. It is the type of day when she knows, no matter what she decides, that the beast will capture her in its teeth before she can even think. Still, she attempts to flee, but she does not make it far when she feels the beast’s warm breath tingling on the back of her neck. She pushes herself harder, arms and legs swinging, head ducked down as if to increase her pace. Sweat forms on her flesh, races down her spine, pools between her breasts. Her knees nearly buckle, and her legs are spent. When she gasps for breath, the air gets trapped somewhere in her chest. Nausea coils in the pit of her stomach, the world spins and her head feels dizzy.

As she runs, she tries to remember a time when the beast did not chase her. It has been so long now that she cannot truly recall. She remembers fighting other beasts, beasts that still haunt her at times, but they are only nightmares now, past woes she tramples on and scrapes from the bottom of her feet.

As she runs, she sees other people passing by, and they look at her as if she has lost her mind. She covets those who do not suffer the same. She looks at them hard as she’s racing by, out of breath and full of misery, and she wonders how they can gaze upon the beast so blankly and without fright. She notices, too, that some of them have beasts of their own. She can see it in the twitch of their eye, the flinch in their shoulders, the stutter in their speech. She wishes to commiserate, to seek comfort in their comparable fates, but when she is ensnared in the claws of her own beast, she loses the ability to speak. How can she come to know theirs when she is so deeply scared?

As the beast comes nearer, she makes one last desperate leap. She outstretches her arm, in the direction of her original goal, but everything is distorted now, and she does not know where to go. It feels as though she is reaching for something she cannot grasp, always so close, yet so far. She tries to swallow, but the air is too thick. She tries to keep going, but she’s too far off her path. No amount of reaching will get her there.

Then the beast catches up to her, wraps its weighty, gargantuan palm around her waist, and she is jolted to a stop, her stomach heaving a little from the force. The beast’s claws stab through her abdomen, and her mouth opens in a silent scream. Her feet are lifted from the ground and she is suspended there, with nothing but time to think. The sharp daggers in her stomach twist and cleave. She closes her eyes tight, tries to breathe through the pain, but the more she focuses on it, the worse it seems to become.

The beast’s mouth is close to her ear, and it whispers to her softly, filling her head with more worries and fears. “What good are connections when they only bring strife? What good are your words when they have no design? There is nothing for you here, no reason to fight. You can run, and you can hide, but you’ll never defeat me, so why even try?”

In the midst of her agony, she finds her voice enough to hopelessly query, “Why? Why me?”

As per usual, the beast has no sympathy. “Our fates are intertwined,” it says simply. “We are forever linked, you and I. Come rain or shine, no matter where your life leads, there I shall always be.”

She has no fight left within her, now her thoughts are just bitter. Her task is not forgotten, but it’s too heavy a burden. She wants to sulk and complain, even though nothing will change. What is the use? She will not defeat the beast today.

The beast eventually lowers her back down to the ground, loosens its grip on her wounded middle, though not entirely, and she takes the moment to breathe, to even her breaths as she hadn’t been able to before. She takes one shaky step forward, swallows the nausea, and forces herself to push forward. The beast does not inflict further pain, but it follows close behind her, mimicking her every step, its heavy body wrapped tight around her back and chest. With no choice but to accept its frequent presence, she tries to carry on. The beast always lurks in the shadows or presses against her spine. It is always enshrouding her like a heavy cloak, always waiting to strike, always weighing heavily on her mind. Some days she makes it through with little trouble from the beast. Some days she is dragged so far from the trail that she makes it nowhere. Yet still she struggles, still she fights, even when the beast comes for her, day or night.

Each morning she wakes, to do it all over again, and each morning she thinks, Today is the day. Today is the day I conquer my beast.

 

Lauren Trail is an English major at Hagerstown Community College. She enjoys margaritas and long walks on the beach.

My Name is Laura By Laura Sweeney

from Dr. Zhivago, or the 40’s film noir epic.

It means victorious, like laurel wreaths.  An overcomer.  Epic.

 

I could have been Holly or Angela or Christina because I was born

on Christmas Day.  The doctor was out skiing, or so the epic

 

goes.  The nurse delivered me.  Placed me on a mantle in front

of the nativity in Avera Holy Family Hospital.  The first epic

 

I knew was the Bible story, but my name isn’t in the Book.  Neither is

Laurie, which isn’t my nickname, nor Lauren, Lorraine, or the epic

 

“Laura Sweeney in a bikini,” like they teased in school.  I call myself

‘laurita gringita the hip hipporita.’ I hope they name an epic

 

constellation after me, a shimmying hippotenuese, kicking up my heels

in the night sky.  If I could choose another name it needn’t be epic,

 

just Jasmine, like the flowers Mike DeMarco pinned in my hair

in the street in Mysore to drown the epic

 

stench of urine, cow dung, incense and rotten fruit.

But, too late to change my name, whether or not epic.

 

I’m already a published writer. Here’s hoping

Irish in the Literary World is both lucky and epic.

 

 

Laura Sweeney facilitates Writers for Life in central Iowa.  She represented the Iowa Arts Council at the First International Teaching Artist’s Conference in Oslo, Norway. She is the associate editor for Eastern Iowa Review.

Searching for Him Via Facebook I Discover His Family Portrait By Laura Sweeney

I was teaching but I went to the movie

Mamma Mia, ten times, just to get him off my mind.

 

My mind was on the porch where he said, you will be back

you are mine. But I didn’t want to be owned,

 

not like his aunt in El Paso who said

if she could do it over, she wouldn’t.

 

Or his friend in Matagalpa, she will devote

her life to service, he said, describing her love

 

for a married man. This was before

that wretched call that wretched rain when

 

he confessed he got a teen girl pregnant,

said we can still stay friends.

 

Now, he looks matured, the wife the boy

the girl the reading glasses the tiled floor.

 

He told me I need to appreciate Nicaragua’s

beauty, and I’m trying.  You don’t know your place, he said.

 

He wanted a woman groomed for the kitchen

and the bedroom.  I wanted room to grow and to roam.

 

Laura Sweeney facilitates Writers for Life in central Iowa.  She represented the Iowa Arts Council at the First International Teaching Artist’s Conference in Oslo, Norway. She is the associate editor for Eastern Iowa Review.

Miss Laura Considers What Kind of Woman She Is By Laura Sweeney

I have been her kind.  – Anne Sexton

 

 

Who doesn’t trade her scholarship for cucumber facials,

herbal essences, or swap recipes and gossip.

 

Whose wrist doesn’t drip with bling and grandmother’s

wedding ring is worn on her right hand.

 

Who trades sapphires for Cape Cod

earrings she buys antiquing.

 

Who does it wrong all wrong, like clumsy freshman

fingers on a manual typewriter.

 

Who immortalizes lines like, It’s a woo-hoo day,

I don’t have time for green bananas.

 

Who knows that to write is to transgress,

which means that some artists draft on phonebooks.

 

Who doesn’t go from her father’s to her

husband’s house but makes a different bargain.

 

Whose car breaks down, a boyfriend leaves,

a miscalculation means eviction.

 

Who knows it takes a helluva good man

to be better than none.

 

Laura Sweeney facilitates Writers for Life in central Iowa.  She represented the Iowa Arts Council at the First International Teaching Artist’s Conference in Oslo, Norway. She is the associate editor for Eastern Iowa Review.

30 Yards By Bob Chikos

At 13, I learned that quitting is a solo act, but success is a team effort.

In 1988 I entered high school an obese, unpopular, D student. I wasn’t interested in high school for the intellectual discourse, as a route to college and career, or to explore different subject areas. I just wanted to play football.

I had been picked on throughout junior high. Boys grabbed my flabby pecs and told me I had bigger boobs than any of the girls. Bob became Blob. A teacher, exasperated with my lack of progress, told the class, “We have millions of dollars’ worth of brains in this class, except for one or two people.” She had been looking at me.

I’ll show them! I thought, Football’s going to change all of that!

Beyond my own stardom, it would make my dad proud. His parents had forbidden his playing football. I hadn’t given him much to be proud of. But that would soon change.

Twice-daily pre-season practices started in early August at the World War I-era campus where they stored freshmen. The field was bare in the middle from decades of use, and the ground was rock hard from that year’s drought, a terrible summer in which 47 of the 90 days claimed new heat records.

On the first day, we lined up on the field. Our last names had been written in marker on athletic tape, applied to the front of our helmets.

Coach walked among us, his clipboard hidden behind his back. “My goal” he yelled, “Is to turn you from boys into men.”

That’s why I’m here.

He continued. “We are not allowed to cut players. That said, we will do everything in our power to get you to quit. We only want survivors on our team.”

He stopped in front of me. “Hey Chikos, you like coffee with your roll?”

I removed my mouth guard. “What?”

He jabbed me in my gut with his clipboard. “Your roll. Your roll. Do you like coffee with your roll?”

Everyone but me laughed.

That August was the closest thing to hell I’d experienced up to that point. Each morning’s temperatures started in the 80’s and rose throughout the day. Practice consisted of calisthenics, group drills, and conditioning, over and over and over.

I remember one particular drill, which was typical:

Two tackling dummies lay on the ground, ten feet apart. I hunkered in a stance between the two dummies. Evans lined up facing me, three feet away. Wolnik cradled a football, ten feet behind Evans. When Coach blew the whistle, Wolnik was to get past me, while staying between the dummies, and I was to tackle him.

“Remember boys,” Coach said, “butt down, head up!”

Coach blew the whistle. Evans and I lunged toward each other like two bighorn sheep battling for supremacy. He threw a forearm toward my chest as I tucked my head in. His forearm landed on my facemask, which jerked my head backwards. Everything went black, except for a cucumber-shaped flash. I don’t remember hitting the ground, but when I opened my eyes, I was on my back, facing the sky.

“That’ll teach you to put your head down, Chikos!” Coach laughed.

After morning practice, we showered, but immediately began to sweat again. Those of us who couldn’t go home sat in the shade of the gym’s north side steps and ate our musty sack lunches, which had baked in our septuagenarian lockers all morning.

One day someone played a Guns N’ Roses cassette on a boom box. It was the first time I had listened to hard rock. Before then, I listened only to oldies; I had an idealization of the 1950s, that everything modern was leading society away from that perceived innocent time.

I felt sinister enjoying it, like a prude who finally allows himself to laugh at a dirty joke, many of which I also learned from those guys. I felt liberated, like I was finally becoming a part of something.

Since we were called by our last names, I became Chikos and, later, Cheeks. I stopped thinking of myself as an individual and started thinking of myself as a representative of my family. I was carrying on the tradition of people who went before me: people who survived war, depression (both economic and emotional), immigration, and working every day at rough jobs so they could support their families and offer a better life for those who came after them. Being a Chikos became something to be proud of and I needed to be worthy of the honor.

Afternoon practice was like crawling through the desert. Our oasis was a pipe, six feet long, bolted to the side of the gym. It had holes drilled in it, like a flute. During our break, when the assistant coach turned it on, water shot out. We waited our turns, throats dry, mouths encrusted with dried saliva, tasting dirt and salt.

Once, the water wouldn’t come on. The coach wasn’t unsympathetic, but wouldn’t suspend practice on account of our thirst.

“I don’t know what to tell you, boys. The best I can say is to just grin and bear it until it comes back on”.

Easy for you to say, old man. I thought, you’re not the one dying out here!

Minutes later, during drills, the water shot several feet in the air like Old Faithful. The precious water trickled all over the unappreciative sidewalk. We sighed with relief, like prisoners of war who just heard the cavalry bugle. The coach turned his head at the sound of the water splashing, shrugged, then faced back to the drills.

We thought of worse things to call him than “old man”.

Conditioning came at the end when we had nothing left in the tank. We ran sprints, strained push-ups, gutted out sit-ups, plus many others I’ve managed to block from memory, all while wearing 20 pounds of equipment. Every muscle ached and I strained to breathe. No matter how hard we tried, it wasn’t enough to satisfy the coaches. A voice in my mind asked the unthinkable, Is this worth it?

I had no true rest. Even in my sleep, I dreamt I was sweltering at practice. At home, we couldn’t afford air conditioning so I’d wake up several times throughout the night, my sheets clinging to my body. One night I woke up screaming with my first charley horse. Every morning I woke with aching muscles and new bruises replacing the old fading ones. I was never ready to go out there again, but I always did.

One day, as practice ended, I took off my helmet. I was overheated, parched, filthy, and my eyes stung. I started toward the water pipe.

“Put your helmets back on, boys!” Coach yelled. “Two of your teammates decided to come late to practice today. As a result, they will watch the rest of you bear crawl until they learn their lesson!”

What?! We have to be punished for their mistake? This doesn’t make any sense!

Coach ordered the offending players to sit on a tackling dummy.

The rest of were to bear crawl the length of the field, akin to climbing a horizontal mountain. As I started, I looked 100 yards in the distance to see the goalposts wave in the heat.

Behind the goalposts, two girls from our class, team managers, sat, fanning themselves with clipboards. I was clueless about girls, but I knew one thing about them: they talked. Beyond wanting to make the team, I wanted word to get out among their tribe.

I imagined the talk if I were to quit:

Who’s this Bob Chikos guy in my class?

He was a loser in my junior high. He still is. He quit football during preseason.

But if I survived:

Who’s this Bob Chikos guy in my class?

He was this fat guy at my junior high, but he’s changed! He made the football team. He’s actually pretty good!

My hamstrings were so tight, I couldn’t bend my knees. Since I had little upper body strength, I locked my arms to keep from falling. When I looked down, all I could see were drops of sweat landing on my filthy hands and an occasional bee threatening to sting.

After 100 yards of crawling, Coach blew his whistle.

“Get back here!” he screamed. “If you don’t make it in time, you’re all doing more!”

We sprinted across the field, toward the goal line, where Coach stood like the only girl in port.

As the last of us limped to the end, he announced, “Not everybody made it back in time. I guess our two friends haven’t learned their lesson yet. Go again.”

Again, we crawled. Because I was exhausted, I had to put in more exertion just to cover the same distance.

At midfield, I looked to my left. Someone had taken off his helmet and was on his hands and knees, vomiting. Twenty yards later, I looked to my right. Four others were walking toward the locker room.

Not me – football is all I’ve got!

Ten yards from reaching the end, Coach’s whistle blew. I scrambled to my feet. My ankles locked. Unable to push off the ball of my foot, I ran off my heels. At the worst possible moment, I had forgotten how to run.

Through my facemask, I saw everyone finish ahead of me. Everyone will have to go again because of me. 

I was the last one in, but I made it. Coach looked at his watch in mock surprise. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t start my stopwatch so I don’t know if you made it back in time or not. Looks like you’ll have to go again.”

Worse than the abuse in junior high, worse than the physical treatment in practice, worse than the incinerating heat, now my spirit had been broken.

I crouched back into my stance. This time, tears, not sweat, dripped onto my hands.

Forty yards down the field, I muttered, “You’re a bastard! I hate you, you bastard!”

I heard an assistant coach behind me, “You can go home any time, Chikos. Take a nice cool shower, sit in the air conditioning. Mama will feed you cookies.”

How long will this go on?! I thought. Even if I make it through this round, how many more will there be?

Twenty yards from the end, I accepted that I’d probably have to quit. I didn’t have what it took and I was dragging everyone else down. I wasn’t sure how I could live with the humiliation at school, being both a loser and a quitter, but I mostly dreaded having to tell my dad.

I heard the echo of the distant whistle. I fell to my knees, then climbed to my feet. Running, I inhaled wheezes as I saw people who had started behind me pass me up.

Forty yards from the end, I slowed to a walk. After 10 more yards, I stopped and doubled over.

I looked at everyone who was already at the end, just 30 yards away.

It was no longer a matter of will. I couldn’t do it. Those 30 remaining yards might as well have been 30 miles.

I felt someone grab my jersey. It was Casey, a fellow lineman.

I hadn’t known Casey before football. We had gone to different feeder schools. As someone who played the same position as I did, had I quit, he’d have less competition. He had nothing to gain if I stayed on the team.

I violated the most grievous sin among adolescent boys: I publicly cried. “I can’t do it!”

“Yes, you can, brother! I’m not doing any more bear crawling and neither are you!” He barked through his mouth guard. He dragged me as my legs moved from habit.

“Let me go! I’m quitting!” I begged.

“No, you’re not!”

Wheezing, we sounded like two bagpipes running down the field. His hand slipped from my jersey but he grabbed my wrist and continued to pull.

Hand in hand, we crossed the goal line.

Coach took off his hat and wiped his forehead with his forearm. “Ok, that’s enough, boys. Take a knee.”

I unsnapped my chinstrap and pried my helmet. Now that it was off, everybody could see me cry.

“I’m quitting.” I said to Casey, as I sniffed my runny nose.

“Dude, you’re not quitting.” He said, gasping between words.

“I just can’t take it anymore.” I said, in a high-pitched squeal. “And I hate Coach.”

“It’s over. We made it.”

“I can’t do another day like this.”

“It’ll get easier, brother.” He said. “Just don’t quit.”

I didn’t quit. I’d like to say this was the breakthrough of a stellar football career, but I didn’t have any game day success. It didn’t matter – no victory could have been as meaningful as finishing that day of practice. And Casey was right, it did get easier. Or, rather, we got stronger.

After two seasons, I stopped playing due to waning interest. As I learned more about my dad, I realized that playing football wasn’t the issue. What made him proud was that his son had the opportunity to do what he couldn’t.

I had learned my most important lesson from high school: football doesn’t make you a winner, but being a good teammate does.

But the story doesn’t end on the football field.

Twenty-six years later, Casey and I reconnected via the miracle of Facebook. He told me about a stomach issue that baffled his doctors. He had already undergone several surgeries, none of which worked. They scheduled one last major surgery as a Hail Mary.

Then, one of the toughest guys I’d ever met, said he was scared.

I said, “Casey, you might not remember this,” and proceeded to remind him in detail about that day. How, even though he was drained, he wouldn’t let me quit. I ended with, “And that’s the tough bastard who’s going to make it through surgery.” After 26 years, it was finally my turn to pull Casey 30 yards.

After the surgery, I saw pictures of a mummified Casey in the hospital. I replied, “Yeah, but you should have seen the train that he took on!” He recovered and, within a few weeks, he was back on the football field – coaching his son. His legend grew.

In 1988, Coach had said he wanted to turn us from boys into men. He did. Being a man has nothing to do with being muscular and fearsome – it has everything to do with helping each other.

All around us, so many are trying to make it through adversity, thinking they’ll never make it through. They need to go just 30 more yards, but they can’t do it themselves.

Will you be their Casey?

 

Bob is a 22-year veteran of working with people with special needs. In his third stage of life, he has finally reflected on his life lessons in order to advocate for change. Bob lives in Cary, Illinois with his wife Aileen and son Martin.

Deadfall By Paul Lamb

 

How could it have been worse? Not only the three-hour drive, mostly into the setting sun, and their wooden conversation, mostly about nothing, but in the last half mile of forest, just before they finally got to the cabin, a tree lay fallen across their road.

David had watched the tree for a few years, a hackberry. He watched it die limb by limb and drop branches slowly, watched it shed bark in sheets, watched new pileated woodpecker holes appear in the bare white trunk, watched the tree and wondered if it might do exactly what it had finally done.

Had watched and done nothing because this was the natural course. A snag like this served its own purposes in the forest. After it had dropped its leaves for the last time, it became a home to furred and feathered cavity nesters taking their turn. It allowed sunlight to return to the forest floor. And then finally, when it came down, it began to merge with the ground again, returning its decades of enrichment to the soil. To David, a fallen tree wasn’t bad it was just, well, next.

Curt saw none of this however. To his green eyes the fallen tree was a roadblock, a new chore to hijack their weekend, a bad start to a difficult visit that needed to be a good one or else everything would be wrong for all time.

David shut off the truck’s engine, and both of them stepped out at the same time. The tree was a blowdown, its withered roots heaved from the ground and coated with the rocky Ozark soil the trunk had risen from, the hole it left behind still holding water from the storm that had toppled it. His father had once said – had he said it, Curt wondered, or was it just a story he liked to believe? – that it would be among the roots of such a fallen tree that he could ever hope to find an arrowhead, and Curt scrutinized the rocks there, looking for a worked stone lost by a hunter centuries before and then entwined in the roots of a sapling begun as an acorn or nut that had fallen beside it. He wasn’t sure what kind of tree it had been, but his father would know.

“A snag like this could have stood for another twenty years or fallen in a day,” David said. “Our tough luck that it came down now and across the road.”

“Must have made a lot of noise when it fell.” Curt paused, waiting for a response that didn’t come. Then, “I guess we need to walk the rest of the way to the cabin and bring back the chainsaws.”

“Maybe not.” David broke off a branch as thick as Curt’s arm and tossed it aside. “C’mon.” He returned to the truck, and Curt followed. David shifted the truck into four-wheel drive and steered into the trees, picking his way, pushing down or pushing aside the scrub and saplings, bumping over rocks hidden in the damp leaf litter, finding a path through all of it that would fit his truck and get the two of them past the problem and back on the gravel road that lead to the family cabin. Branches scraped the side of the truck, stuttered across the roof of the cab, slapped the windshield and plucked the antenna. But David did not relent, and as they crept, Curt watched in silence as his father found a way that was invisible to him. When they bumped onto the road once again, David didn’t pause to relish his success but stepped on the gas and continued to the cabin.

The cabin waited, waited to welcome them, waited as it had for decades past and would, they all hoped, for decades more, its own roots sunk deep in the Ozark hardpan. For David the cabin was the most evocative memory he had of his father, who had built it; for Curt the feeling was more diffuse. It was family and memory and stories and a sanctuary that would always be ready, both safe and sacred. As it needed to be most of all for him, for them, this weekend. All that was wrong could seem right, seem fixable, when he was at the cabin.

The fallen snag, they both knew unspoken, would wait for the next day. They would return rested, with the tools they needed and when the day was fresh. An hour or two of harsh noise and heavy lifting, then the road would be clear again, showing remnants of the fall and their clean up, but all of that would soon be absorbed by the living forest that would keep to its eternal cycles. Before them now, though, was the work of getting settled in the cabin and a fire built before the summer sun had set. Chores practiced through the years, both together and alone, that were simple to Curt. Simple and clear compared to his real, his dreaded task for their weekend. This complicated and conflicted son of a good but possibly not good enough father. He would soon know.

“Talk to your father,” Kathy told him. She had watched her boy in the days and weeks following his graduation from medical school, saw how the completion of this one great thing had now meant that another, greater thing took its turn and lay before him, no longer to be shunted and put off. “Say what you need to say to him,” she said as the two of them sat at the kitchen table and picked at the threads of Curt’s next life. Kathy knowing, without having been told, what her son needed to tell his father, and also knowing, better than her son could, what his father would say in response.

“Do you think maybe you underestimate him?” Kelly had said, his turn to press counsel on Curt, unasked but not, he knew, unwelcome. “Has he ever given you any sign that he is not broad-minded? Or at least incapable of being so?” Kelly knew, guessed, with an objectivity Curt did not have, that the picture Curt had painted of his father was incomplete, even unfair, and further, suspected that this most important conversation of their two lives would finally breach that false barrier, and Curt could begin to see the depth in his father that he hadn’t allowed himself to across most of his life.

And so here he was, in the place that was refuge for both of them. Where, Curt knew, he had always felt most clearly the love of his father, a man who was not so good with words but who had an eloquence of both action and stillness that better expressed his heart. But if his love was unspoken it was also, Curt believed, unguarded. As natural and boundless as the blue summer sky above them. All that remained was for Curt to say three small words. But his life would not be the same after he spoke them. Nor would his father’s. And he cared deeply about both. So, Curt asked himself as he built the fire he would certainly light with a single match, should he upend their entire weekend at the cabin, or wait for the last possible moment so he, they, could relish most of this time they had together just as they had countless weekends of their past?

Yet if Kelly was right, then so many of those uncounted visits – most of Curt’s life as a son really – had been incomplete, not as fully or as deeply lived as they should have been. If Kelly was right, then Curt had cheated his father and had cheated himself. And if his mother was right – there was no question of this to Curt – then he shouldn’t wait a moment longer.

Still, nothing would be the same afterward. Who would think that it could? Each moment of each day for the rest of their lives would be filtered through this new knowledge. And it was this aftermath that Curt feared the most. Even the best outcome would mean a subtle but permanent difference in how they saw one another.

Curt’s fire burned brightly, pushing back the falling darkness, and he readied the larger pieces of wood to add so they would have flickering flames and coals for conversation and quiet musing. He wondered how many of these fires he had built in his life and wished he had kept some record of it, some record beyond the deep build up of mute ash in the ring. David came from the cabin with two beers in hand, giving one to Curt, and they both popped them open. The night sounds of the forest were beginning. A barred owl had been calling across the lake below them, and they hoped, as they always did, to hear a whippoorwill, their totem sound and one David had commented that he’d seemed to hear less frequently than he had in his boyhood memories. Even with the regular cycles of the forest, some things changed. This simple, even pure delight of theirs might go missing some day, and he was glad Curt had known of it, had experienced it.

Doctor Clark! It’s easy to be proud of you, Curt.”

Stop, Curt thought. You’re making this harder. He dropped a chunk of split oak onto his fire. Orange sparks spiraled into the air and winked out.

“Maybe so,” Curt said. “But maybe med school was the easy part. Being a doctor, a resident in the real world might not be so easy.”

David pulled a chair closer to the fire; its feet ground through the gravel. He sat, and in a moment, Curt did the same, across the fire from his father. Once on an evening much like this, a screech owl had pierced the forest with its call. Sudden silence had followed; every other creature had ceased its noise in awe or terror. Curt remembered that.

On this night they were instead gifted with the three notes of a whippoorwill, somewhere in a tree beyond the firelight. Both men sat in silence, savoring the sound, and Curt recalled another now long-ago time when he had tried to count the repetitions of the bird’s call, giving up somewhere in the thirties.

The whippoorwill had spoken. Curt would as well.

“Dad,” Curt said, not lifting his eyes from the orange glow of the consuming flames between them, and David knew from Curt’s use of that word, this less formal name for him he rarely used, that important words were about to come, words he thought he could guess.

He tried again. “Dad, I’m gay.”

And now the aftermath.

Curt did not know how long his father had been waiting to hear these three small and so hugely complex words from his boy. Curt had always been a clever boy. The depth of his compassion had led him down the path to becoming a doctor. But for all of the range in his heart and mind, Curt had never seemed able, or perhaps willing, to grant sufficient humanity to his own father. Early on he had formed a concept of who the man was, what his essential nature was, and he had been so busy hiding his own essential nature, that he missed all of the evidence that David Clark was the one person on the whole planet who loved him most of all.

David hadn’t understood, at first, why his son had cultivated an uncrossable distance between them. They could joke and laugh and discuss most things and even skinny dip in the lake together without hesitation, but he knew there was always something in the way. As his realization of what this must be slowly came to him, and he stopped joking about girlfriends and stopped speaking about grandchildren, he understood that if it ever were to be broached, it would have to be on Curt’s terms. His boy grew, never giving him a single moment of rebellion or cause for grief that he could remember. He finished high school well. He went to college and came back a man of insight and achievement. Then he went to medical school and came back a doctor. And yet during all of this, Curt had not found the opportunity – or was it maybe the desire? – to be fully open with him.

David never knew why, just as he didn’t know why this time, this visit to their cabin, was when it had finally happened. What about the universe had changed?

And then it struck him. He pulled on his beer then cleared his throat, wanting to say the right thing and not realizing how even the short time the took for this reflection was rending Curt’s heart, filling him with a certain fear of an outcome that he had been equally certain wouldn’t come.

“So is there someone special?” David asked, not yet ready to meet his son’s eyes. He would follow Curt’s lead in the moments ahead.

Curt slumped into the most immense relief he had felt in his life. David’s question told him that his father, whose opinion most counted in all the world, had jumped past objection or rejection or confusion or whatever wrong might have been, had even jumped past immediate acceptance, and had effortlessly moved on to opening his heart to Curt’s fuller life. Someone special! Someone his father would greet and hug and welcome as a second son and bring to the cabin and their forest because this was his way of expressing love.

The part of Curt that had known this all along pushed aside his unfounded fears, sidestepped the more obvious subject for discussion, and joined his father on the other side.

“Yes, actually. His name is Kelly.” Then a moment later, “I met him on the running trail.”

“A runner like you! That’s great.”

“Yeah,” he said, barely able to suppress a chuckle of giddiness.

David was about to ask when he would get to meet this Kelly person, this person who loved his son, but another thought pressed itself ahead.

“I don’t suppose you even need to tell Mom.”

“She can see right through me, Dad!”

“I know. Me too.” And he’d heard that word “Dad” again. “Still, you should tell her anyway. Just to get it in the open.”

Maybe they were exhausted by their achievement because they let a comfortable silence fall between then, filled, mercifully, by the chirring forest around them. Each man had been unprepared for the other’s words but each man had been relieved and released by them. David finally attempted.

“Curt.” He scuffed the toe of his boot in the gravel. “I’m not very good with these things. With speaking my mind. I don’t know the right things to say, the right way to say them. All I can say is that I love you. I always have. I always will. You’re my perfect boy and I’ve always been proud of you.” He paused and set his beer on the gravel then clasped his hands. “I don’t know what else to say, son.”

In a husky voice Curt said, “You don’t have to say anything else. What you said is perfect.” And then, “Thanks, Dad.”

And so for a while neither of them said anything. The fire between them snapped and sizzled. The insects and frogs sang in the trees. Faraway owls hooted. A breeze came from the other side of the cabin and blew smoke into Curt’s face. He closed his eyes for a moment, but when he opened them again, the smoke was still coming at him.

“Well, if that’s they way it’s going to be,” he said, rising from his chair and dragging it through the gravel to the other side of the fire beside his father. His dad. Dad.

In the orange of the firelight David reached across and rested his hand on Curt’s bare forearm.

“You know what I don’t see a lot of out here?”

Curt, not expecting to be confronted with such an odd question and unable to imagine where it might lead said simply, “What’s that?”

“Mosquitos. I guess the dragonflies and the bats take care of that for us.”

What could he say in response to that? Curt wondered. Was any response necessary? His father had eased right back into common cabin conversation, into the mundane they shared as though Curt’s monumental words were now well behind them and maybe even not so monumental at all. More importantly though, when, beyond a perfunctory handshake or a clap on the shoulder, was the last time his father had touched him, touched his skin? When had he let him? His arm tingled.

They both knew, each at his own level, that what had passed between them at this campfire would need more thought, more slow absorption into their lives. That their few words to each other would eventually be followed by other words, mostly good words surely, but words that would pick and poke at their changed relationship, furthering it, deepening it, and discovering what it would mean going forward.

David was already beginning to sense this. Now that he had his son back – and he was back, wasn’t he? After more than a decade of holding himself at his distance Curt had finally spoken his truth and together they had pushed aside or left behind what had been between them, right? – David realized that he was also losing him. Soon he would no longer have Curt to himself, at least as wholly to himself as he might have before and now could only for the rest of their weekend while they were together in this place. Because Curt was going to give himself to another. To Kelly. David would have to learn to share him, to accept – once again, ironically – whatever bits of Curt were allowed to him. He held this bittersweet tension in his heart, feeling it but not understanding it.

Curt, in turn, tried to find his own new equilibrium. It wasn’t so much that his father’s automatic acceptance of his son’s life had been unexpected. He realized how he should have seen this, should have seen it years before. No, it was that so much time had been wasted, so much love had been tempered, so much chill had been cultivated and then endured. So much needless waste! Why had he allowed himself to create such a mess? To let it last for so long? His diagnosis: he hadn’t been a very good son to a very good father. No, he had not been very good; merely good enough. Never mind that the cure had come easily or that they could both now be healthy again. That the affliction had existed at all was his real shame.

The whippoorwill had ceased its call. David thought he had heard one across the lake, up on the far ridge, but it was too distant to hear clearly. The air had stilled. A thread of smoke rose unmolested from the few coals still glowing in the ring. Time to spread them so they could burn out. Maybe quench them with whatever liquids the two men had at hand. And then to the cabin for the night. The usual routines before going to sleep.

David screwed his half empty beer can into the gravel and pushed up from his chair. He prodded the coals with a stick and considered whether they needed further attention or could burn themselves out overnight. The recent rain meant the forest was wet, so he wasn’t too worried, but he also knew he would rise in the night, more than once likely, and he could check on the coals then.

Curt had watched in silence, thinking much of the same thoughts as his father, the result of having shared countless campfires with him in this place.

David said, “I’m turning in.”

“Be right there,” Curt said, rising from his chair and stepping closer to the coals. “One thing first.”

As David walked the familiar path to the cabin he heard Curt quenching the coals.

When Curt reached the cabin, David had already turned on the lantern that hung from a hook in the ceiling. The light was dazzling to his dark-adapted eyes and he looked to the floor at first as David opened the windows to ensure that whatever breeze passed before the cabin would also pass through it and keep them cool as they slept.

And it was in this moment that Curt was overcome with the realization of how fully his three words had changed his life.

Before him his father was undressing, getting ready for falling into bed. He would strip to his briefs, unabashedly before his son and move about the room nearly naked. Curt would do them same, peeling down to his boxers with nothing left but to say a few words and then get into bed himself.

Together, the summer before, they had added a second bedroom to the cabin, which was his dad’s big indulgence. His grandfather had built the cabin, and Curt saw that putting on that second bedroom was important to David, a way of leaving his own mark. More than anything, David wanted the little cabin and their hundred acres to be a part of the family forever. He was preparing it for further life that he wanted to be lived there, for further perfect moments.

Yet Curt feared that the second bedroom would soon be witness to a different kind of moment. One that would forever evoke its own memories. This sudden realization tainted his outlook for the whole weekend ahead. On the face of it, a perfectly sensible, even inevitable consequence of his three words, yet harrowing because nothing could speak more clearly of a new and irreparable sunder with his father. It was this: that no longer could they share the old bed in the old cabin. No longer could these two men in nothing more than their underwear curl under the single quilt as they had hundreds of times and fall asleep side by side. For despite the love he knew his father felt for him, Curt was certain that the man could never again sleep beside his son, his son who was now an openly gay man. It tainted his whole life ahead.

Curt stood beside the bed, hesitating. He was waiting. Waiting for a word from his father or the will in himself. Waiting for direction.

“It will be good to get some sleep before we tackle that fallen tree tomorrow,” Curt offered as innocuously as he could, trying to fill the empty air between them and maybe prod the right words – or even the wrong ones – from his father.

“I’d completely forgotten about that!” David chuckled at his own forgetfulness. “Yeah, that will be quick work for the two of us.”

Left with nothing, Curt paused for a hopeless moment then grabbed the second pillow from the bed and turned to march off to the other bedroom.

“Hey, where are you going?”

Curt stopped but didn’t turn.

“Aren’t you going to sleep here with me?”

Curt spun around did not try to hide his smile as he threw the pillow at his father. He shook off his clothes and hurried under the quilt with his dad.

David in his briefs and Curt in his boxers. Two grown men, nearly naked, happily in bed together. And would they slip into the lake fully naked the next day, to wash off the grit and grime of their work on the deadfall, just as they had so many times before.

 

Paul Lamb lives near Kansas City but escapes to his little cabin in the Missouri Ozarks whenever he gets the chance. He keeps a blog of his writing and other oddments at Lucky Rabbit’s Foot. He rarely strays far from his laptop.

The Collection By Danielle Davis

“I’m not too sure about this,” Suzanne said. She stood just inside the threshold of the front door, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and glancing around like she was expecting something bad to happen. The hallway smelled like old people and boiled eggs, and just faintly underneath it all, a hint of bleach. It was like someone woke up, made breakfast, and set about cleaning right away.

“Oh, come on. It’ll be ok. Besides, we’re coming right out again in a minute.” This was from Mark, who was already out of sight around the corner into the living room. It was his house, but his parents weren’t home yet, and this was the first time Suzanne had gone to a friend’s house when their parents weren’t there. She was pretty sure she’d be grounded if her dad found out, so she was anxious to get back to the safety of the street and get home.

A tabby cat poked its head from underneath a love seat in the entrance way and meowed at her. She stepped forward to pet it, glancing around again as her fingers rubbed the soft fur at the back of its ears. It leaned into her touch and closed its eyes in bliss, purring like a small motor. “If my parents find out that I’m over here…” She didn’t quite want to admit that she wasn’t supposed to be there. The Brewster twins, Mary and Mark, had only been at her school for a week, but she’d already developed a crush on Mark that her parents probably wouldn’t approve of. They told her sister, Marianne, that she was too young to be interested in boys and she was a year and a half older. Suzanne was still a little thrilled that Mark had invited her to his house at all—the last thing she wanted to do was act like she was scared of breaking the rules. That wasn’t how cool kids acted at all.

“What, they don’t let you visit friends’ houses?” Mark’s head popped out from behind the corner, frowning. The cat gave a venomous hiss and darted back under the love seat, startling Suzanne. Mark rolled his eyes. “That cat hates people. I’m surprised she let you touch her. You coming?”

She followed him into the living room and down a long hallway. The house looked ordinary, with a few boxes stacked neatly against the wall in the hallway. “We’re still unpacking,” he tossed back over his shoulder. It was eerie to be in someone else’s house without their parents being home. He stopped in front of a bedroom door that had a poster of Spiderman clumsily taped on it. Inside, the room was mostly boxes, with the rumpled sheets of a bed against one wall and a lonely chest of drawers across from it. There were bumper stickers stuck to the fronts of the drawers, but the print was too small for her to make them out without staring.

He darted around the bed, snagged something from the ground and held it out to her. “Isn’t this cool? My dad bought it for me when we moved here. Said it might help me make friends.” It was a remote-controlled helicopter with blades that sounded like a hive of bees buzzing when it hovered. He demonstrated how lights on the side flashed when it made machine gun noises, and she tried to pretend she was interested. But she was acutely aware of the time shown on the digital clock next to his bed. Her own skin started to feel itchy with the sense that every minute that she stayed put her one minute closer to being grounded.

“Can we hurry? I’m supposed to be home in ten minutes.” It embarrassed her to admit she had a curfew, but she decided nothing was worth risking getting grounded for, not even a visit to Mark Brewster’s room.

“Do you always have to go straight home?”

“Not usually. Just since…” She glanced at the doorway and lowered her voice. “Just since the murders. My Dad said it’s not safe to dawdle after school until they catch whoever did it.”

“Oh, yeah. I kinda heard about that.”

“You kinda heard? Wasn’t Terrence Latrell in your English class?” She was surprised—she thought everyone was taking the murders as seriously as her Dad was.

“Wait, that’s why he’s been out this week? He got killed?” Mark’s eyes were very wide, and his mouth hung open as he stared at the carpet. “Oh man. I just thought, well, that he’d been sick or something. But killed?”

Suzanne unconsciously straightened a little, pleased to be able to show off her knowledge on a subject he obviously didn’t know much about. “There’ve been three so far,” she confided. “All kids.” She cocked her head. “Well,” she amended, “the first was a high school kid. But the last two were from our school.” Her voice dropped even lower and when she leaned toward him, he leaned forward, too, to hear her better. “My Dad says there’s a serial killer on the loose.” She allowed a gloating smile when Mark’s eyes got even wider. “My mom got real mad when he said that, because it was at the dinner table. But I heard them talking later that night about it, and she thinks it’s one, too.”

Mark frowned and fidgeted with the edge of his shirt. “Yeah, my mom and dad mentioned that earlier, too.” Suzanne’s shoulders slumped a bit–she’d thought her parents were pretty smart to have come up with that–but Mark didn’t notice. “They were worried about my sister.”

“They were worried she’d be killed?”

“No, not that. Worried that…” He looked up at her, and she was surprised to see that he looked uncertain, as if he were struggling to decide what to tell her. “Do you know why we came to Woodbury?” She shook her head. “My sister kept getting into… She had some trouble at our last school.” He looked at his shirt again. “It got so bad that we had to move.”

Suzanne stared at him, unsure how to respond. “That’s…terrible.”

Mark gave an angry glance to the side. “It wasn’t fair!” he burst out. “One day stuff started happening and everyone thought it was her. People all over town kept harassing us. The teachers whispered things behind our backs. Folks tried to pretend they weren’t staring at us when we went to the grocery store. The neighborhood kids, kids at school—they started with the names. Calling her ‘Bloody Mary’ and ‘Mary the Maniac.’ It was awful! She’d come home crying every day. It wasn’t even her fault.” He glared at his shirt. Suzanne thought she saw a shine of tears collecting along his lower eyelid. “This is our chance to start over.”

“What kind of stuff happened?” Suzanne asked in a soft voice.

He blinked quickly and frowned at her. “What?”

“You said stuff started happening. What kind of stuff? Was it the same kind of stuff as here?” Goosebumps rose along her arms and she felt her scalp tighten. The room felt colder, though she knew it probably wasn’t. It was her that was getting colder as she listened.

Mark opened his mouth, but before he could answer, a door slammed shut somewhere back the way they’d come. Suzanne jumped and whirled to face the hallway beyond the door. “Hello!” a woman’s voice called out. “Hello? Anybody home yet?”

Mark stepped quickly past her to the door and leaned his head out of the room. “I’m here, Mom!” he yelled down the hall. “And I’ve got a friend, Suzanne.” It seemed so strange for him to be calling down the hall instead of going to meet his mother to talk. Suzanne’s mom always got on to her for yelling in the house, when she could just as easily walk down the hall and talk in a normal voice like a civilized young lady.

“Oh lovely!” the voice shrilled back. But even though his mother sounded cheerful, Suzanne thought it felt wrong, somehow. She supposed it was just because of what she and Mark had been talking about. “From school?”

Mark glanced back at Suzanne and gave a theatrical roll of his eyes. She giggled. “Of course, from school, Mom! I was just showing her my pets.”

“Well, don’t get too messy, love. You don’t want to ruin your school clothes.”

Suzanne moved forward to touch Mark’s arm. “No, wait. I can’t. I need to get home, remember?”

“It won’t take very long,” he assured her. He smiled. “They’re just in the closet. Don’t you want to see?”

“But…” She glanced between Mark and the doorway, torn. “If my Dad finds out, I’ll be grounded for li—”

“Relax.” He smiled at her, the same cute smile that he’d given her the first time she saw him in class and pointed at the door. “One quick glance and we’re gone. Besides, it’s probably best if you’re not here when Mary gets home. She doesn’t like it when I have friends over.” As he moved toward the closet door, she realized there was no trace of the tears he’d been close to shedding moments before. In fact, his eyes were clear and alert, and he grinned like her sister did when she rode her bike down a very steep hill.

He put one hand on the doorknob to his closet and then paused. With a glance over his shoulder at her, he said, “I only show this to my friends. But we are friends now…aren’t we?”

She couldn’t help but nod, though the way the sunlight slanted through the curtains in his room told her it was way too late for her to be out.

“On second thought,” Mark said, stepping back. “You open it. It’ll be even cooler that way.”

He straightened in a motion that made his shoes click together at the heels, the way a doorman might stand at attention for a rich lady in a movie. She moved forward, feeling like some other girl in a dream, and put her hand on the knob. Though she expected it to be cold, the brass was warm from Mark’s hand. She pulled it open.

Inside were small glass aquariums, the kind she’d seen in pet stores for lizards or snakes. Three were side-by-side on a shelf, with another three perched on top of those. Each one held a head, in various stages of decomposition, floating gently in a clear liquid that looked too thick to be water. She stared at the heads that stared back at her, feeling empty as her brain struggled to make sense of what she saw. The three on the bottom row were obviously the farthest gone, with milky orbs for eyes and small bits of flesh like sediment floating around the faces. But the ones on top were the freshest. She registered Terrence’s head bobbing, frozen in an expression of surprise.

Suzanne opened her mouth to scream, but only a low huh huh huh noise came out. She turned, slowly, to look at Mark. He stood where she’d last seen him with the same feral grin as before. But now he held an empty aquarium. She hadn’t even heard him move to get it.

He held it out to her and said, “We’re going to need this.” She took it like a robot, unable to keep from looking down into the bottom with a glassy-eyed gaze that didn’t really see anything. Don’t get too messy, his mother had said.

“Now the fun part begins.”