Pat McSpadden visual art
Charlie Parker
Emitted Waves
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Fabrice Poussin visual art
Tea Time, Is It?
Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University in Rome, Georgia. An author of novels and poetry, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, etc., and his photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, the San Pedro River Review and more than one hundred other publications.
John Grey poetry
SAGAMORE
The sun is out at last,
the lake surface is warming,
its shoreline towels off.
Flowers find aspiration
where once was all survival,
splay their petals
frank and bold.
I lie on the bank,
content to absorb,
no eyes
but a collection of sights,
no flesh,
but foam-board
tacked with invitations.
Bluebird in the distance,
rabbit in the near,
gauzed light
through furze and fern…
in a fresh-opened heart,
a moment applies
for permanent residence.
“Quaquaversal” by Mathias B. Freese
I feel compelled, as a writer, to introduce you to my own idiosyncratic ways of going about writing a story. The creative process, as I observe, might prove of worth to reveal as I experience it. After finishing and publishing Tesserae: A Memoir of Two Summers I lie fallow. I never know what the next book will be about, but I do know that I will begin something as my need to write has not been stifled by age or an arthritic mind. I observe myself or, as Krishnamurti wrote, “the observer is the observed.” Chew on that for a while. So, over the past few weeks an amorphous idea began to gestate. In fact, I wrote a few pages called “The White Parasol.” But I get ahead of myself. What I want to explore here is my own creative process with the hope you may find it of note.
A few weeks back I was invited to a local institute to speak about memoir writing. In preparation I looked up Mr. Bernstein’s magnificent soliloquy in Citizen Kane, a scene that Welles believed was the best he had ever filmed. In that sequence Bernstein speaks of a young girl with a white parasol he had seen as a young man decades ago. All this is in response to the reporter’s quest to discover what or who Kane’s “Rosebud” was. Bernstein says that not a day has gone by that he has not thought about the girl with the white parasol. Memory and time are condensed in that observation, and it has a gravitas that needs time to be grasped or pondered. It is a valid cliché as we grow older that images from the past grow brighter with a concomitant feeling, at times, of nostalgia, sentimentality, pathos, and loss and attachment.
And so all this was floating about in my mind when I came across “quaquaversal,” a word I discovered serendipitously while looking up another word in the dictionary. Briefly, it is defined as being in all directions, emanating from a common center. I liked that immediately, and I thought of myself as a writer who tends to turn inwardly, deeply, profoundly, as if in search of the geode that may be the heart of any new story. David Herrle reviewed my book, Tesserae, and observed:
Anyone familiar with his other work isn’t surprised by Freese’s ability to always dig deeper through apparent bottom after bottom of self-analysis. “Fearlessness makes for authenticity in writing, so I can measure myself and not be a crybaby about it,” he writes near the end of the book. (In fact, he outdoes himself when he faces and reveals the truly tragic suicide of his daughter Caryn.) I’m reminded of what Orson Welles admitted to Henry Jaglom: “I’m dark as hell. My films are as black as the black hole.” This also is true of much of Freese’s literary output, but despite that darkness, that tendency to descend into the psyche’s hell, there is illumination and even rejuvenating sunlight. Frankfurters, root beer, ice cream and cotton candy at Coney Island glow alongside “tumultuous sex” with fantasy-come-to-life lover Marlene. In contrast to a fundamental sense of shame and ominous Rorschach perceptions, there are “non-maudlin memories”: childhood movies and radio shows, makeshift slingshots and scooters, the unintentional comedy of territorial, scolding adults.
Leave it to another writer to say it best. As the days went on with these story pieces floating about in mind, I came upon the idea of following the spine of Citizen Kane by having a deceased character (me) be deciphered by his survivors as they guess about this artifact they find or the last words he has to say upon his deathbed. I intended to break rules and do things with the structure of the story, as yet undefined, so that all the tesserae might come together into some visible mosaic.
In fact, this essay was written before I finished “The White Parasol.” This essay may help me to finish this story. I am writing to explain to myself – and to you – the process by which I noodle out a story. I created two Rosebuds for the story, one which is shared while the main character is alive, and another which is cryptic to his son who hears these words directly. The dying man utters Kaye-Halbert (the hyphen is of importance). The son mistakenly assumes that it is the name of a girlfriend, or some girl with a white parasol from the past. He asks relatives and friends if they have ever heard that name and he comes up zero. He goes online and discovers that Kaye-Halbert was a TV set from the early Fifties: a vintage TV set, probably 19 inches with knobs for volume, horizontal and vertical in the front, jammed with tubes. With this information he begins to consider. He recalls –freely associating – that his father told him that he ran home from school in 1951 and was able to catch the last inning in which Bobby Thompson hit a classic homerun off Ralph Branca to win the World Series. Truly memorable. And now he had it: Kaye-Halbert was his father’s Rosebud, a dying one, an image from his childhood for some reason that resonated within. Indeed, his grandmother had died, and her last words, his father shared with him, were “Father Knickbocker.” So, now, in my mind I have two Rosebuds to incorporate into my story.
What is the motive for my writing this Wellesian jigsaw puzzle like Susan Alexander’s lonely hobby? I think I want to self-discover myself once again. All my writing is about my navigation. I am the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. I want to access my core, and from that I want to achieve quaquaversal. And so it is a search, constructed through the artifice of a story. Citizen Kane looms large in several of my essays and stories, for there is something to that film which I experienced as a very young boy which grabs me, throttles my sensibilities and draws me close to it. I think it has to deal with loss. Kane reeks of loss: his mother, his sled, his mistress, his wife, his close friends. And, in a way, he loses whatever self he had. I will say boldly that he has lost love, and I identify with that, for, in a way, it happened to me.
When I was a young boy I visited a manufacturing plant run by my uncles, Seymour and Bernie. My father was in charge of plating. The Freeses made rhinestone jewelry of a high order. I used to wander about and simply observe. One black woman enjoyed me as a young boy and was most affectionate to me. I watched as she opened a tissue packet filled with stones (imported from Czechoslovakia, I think). With a bracelet that had been plated and designed by Bernie, plated by my father in rhodium, she embedded stone after stone by hand, craftily pressing down on the facets with a knife. It was hard work, often tedious, but the outcome was beautiful. On other sites workers would work on a clay tablet in which pieces were put together to make a pin, a necklace or earrings. They soldered brass pieces, and the odor of resin remains in my mind. After that they were taken to my father’s site in which they were plated and then returned to the room where rhinestones were placed into them. Here you have an association as I construct this small essay, for what I take from all this is infinite care and infinite details.
Details! All my stories and essays are embedded like a stone into a setting with details. “The White Parasol” will succeed or not on the careful placement of details. And so I will share some of the details I may or may not incorporate into the story. They are a buzzing mentation in me at this moment.
After his father’s (my) death, the son, Daniel, goes through his belongings, as we all must do eventually. What he comes upon are items from my own life that I will use for the story, so they really do exist. (The irony is that these will be artifacts for my actual son to collect, assess and metabolize. Oh, the psychological permutations are manifold.) So, like Kane’s sled, Rosebud, what I own and what I describe are condensations of many different layers of meaning. Call it gravitas, if you will. A tie clasp from the Fifties has a bluish square stone attached to it, given to me by my cousin Irving: a favorite of mine and a reminder of Irving himself. Daniel comes upon two maroon prayer bags for my tallis and phylacteries, which I was given by my Grandma Fanny for my bar mitzvah (I have asked my son, Jordan, to do bury this tallis with me when the time comes.) Daniel comes upon Jewish Tales and Legends, the first book I ever owned, with an inscription from my Grandma Flora, given to me when I was about seven or eight years old. I devoured this book and many years later used some of it in a story I was writing, to good effect.
Then Daniel finds a very thick album containing many photographs of his father’s family, his mother and father, his uncles, aunts, et al. The album has a page in it on which his father identifies each and every relative because he knows no one else would. His father is a saver, an observer, loyal, a rememberer – or the rememberer is the remembered. As Daniel scours and prowls the remains of his father’s artifacts, he comes across a gold mezuzah, a picture of his sister at age one, and, of all things, an ancient Duncan yo-yo from the Fifties. And there is one old shoe tree that his grandfather passed on to his father, who was a hoofer and used to be in Vaudeville. In a jewelry box he unearths a Queens College school ring from 1962, his grandmother’s silver marriage band and the tenderest finding of all: a ring with a soldered-on heart, which his father made for his mother in a shop class during junior high school. Some of these I will distill and take only the best details I can. After all, artifacts are our leavings, the cloaca of having been.
There is a primordial, perhaps genetic, tear in all of us. Some don’t know it exists and cannot palpate it. I feel it; I am a writer. It is in Bernstein’s tale of the white parasol. So, I will put the story of “The White Parasol” on my blog in the near future, when it has coalesced, and, hopefully, it has become quaquaversal.
Matt is a writer who lives in Nevada. He’s the author of The i Tetralogy, Down to a Sunless Sea, This Mobius Strip of Ifs , I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust and Tesserae: A Memoir of Two Summers. Visit his blog. His major works are now available in Kindle format.
Hascy Tarbox art
Born in St. Paul, Minneapolis in 1918, Hascy O. Tarbox attended the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois in 1929. He married Joanne Hill, daughter of Todd headmaster Roger “Skipper” Hill in 1939, while he was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago. After several years of working as an artist and designer for several magazines, Hascy returned to Todd with Joanne so that they both could teach there. Both remained at Todd until the school closed in 1954. Shortly before he died, Hascy was asked to reflect on his past and the role art in his life.
His response: While attending the Art Institute of Chicago, I realized I couldn’t afford to be a painter, but needed to earn a living. I began working as an illustrator at Esquire magazine. During the War, I was seduced by Roger to return to Todd. While there, I abandoned professional artwork and helped run the school. When the school closed in 1954, I returned to the advertising, illustrating and art directing. Now, long-in-the-tooth and seared and yellowed with age, I’ve returned to painting. I have been doing a lot of wildlife illustration. I don’t have a thing to look back to and try to do better today than I did yesterday.
One of the wonderful things about being a painter is that you are all by yourself. You don’t need crews, writers, and script people. You are wallowing in your own ignorance. There is some sort of goal you work toward, and if you’re lucky you might just get there. Of course, you never will. But that isn’t the point. It is the chase, the hunt that is the spur, the impetus. I have piled up a lot of paintings, some of them relatively good, most of them very ho-hum. There are a couple of galleries in Tucson who are handling my paintings, but I am still reluctant – I think it has something to do with giving up a part of oneself if I sell my work.
Chief Plenty Coups of the Mountain Crow Tribe
Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce speaking in Washington, D.C. in 1879
Young Chief of the Cayuse Nation at the 1855 Walla Walla Treaty Council, expressing the importance of the Earth to the Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla peoples
Chief Crowfoot of the Canadian Blackfoot Tribe
David Herrle interviews Bunny Goodjohn, author of THE BEGINNING THINGS
David: Your sense of and knack for character depth is excellent, enough to make me wonder if your cast is composited autobiographically, particularly in the case of Elaine – and even Tot’s, Elaine’s daughter’s, case. Please tell us about your characterization process. Where did this book come from?
Bunny: It came from unfinished business, from the questions raised by alcoholism and recovery, and from, shall we say, my own somewhat premature entry into the world of sex-masquerading-as-love. And I was lucky: I already had a cast of characters just begging to be given some new lines and situations. My first novel, Sticklebacks and Snow Globes, opened up the lives of the Thompson family, and its final chapter, while offering a resolution of sorts, seemed to leave a door open for deeper examination of family dynamics. So I handed Tot a box full of secrets and had her alcoholic grandfather move into the dining room. Then I just wrote what happened. I think I’m Elaine at heart.
David: The Beginning Things contains a good number of clever similes, which is obviously owed to your basic nature as a poet. (Or am I wrong about that?) Favorite examples: “[S]he gobbled up his sweet interest like a diabetic,” “she felt cold and pathetic, like an iceberg about to lose a chunk of itself,” “the smoke like a canopy of crows against the roof of her mouth,” and (one that belongs in the land of comedic author Tom Robbins or Douglas Adams) “the living room looked embarrassed, like a fat woman wearing a bikini and wishing she had packed her one-piece.” Does prose come to you more easily than poetry, or vice versa?
Bunny: And I can’t answer this without going back to metaphor. Both forms terrify me in too many ways. But it’s terror that forces me to the page, and it’s terror that makes me go to the spaces in my imagination that have to be explored. Poetry is the benevolent straitjacket. It’s the idea pinned down by form and wrapped up so tight in language it can’t help but confess. Prose is the padded room, a host of ideas bouncing off fiction’s walls: they collide, shatter and then heal into some kind of new cohesion. Neither come easily. But sometimes the experience of the padded room is heightened by slipping on a strait jacket.
David: Tot and Dan, who are granddaughter and grandfather, share a rather cute recurring inside joke of speaking in spoonerisms to each other. (“Tug of me” for mug of tea, “Dummy and Maddy” for Mummy and Daddy, “duddy bled” for bloody dead, “dittle larling” for little darling, “Dangrad” for Granddad – with the bonus of “Dan”.) While this gag by nature teeters on the line between clever and tedious, I think it’s part of the book’s charming abnormalcy and more proof of your own linguistic playfulness. Why the spoonerisms, and do they have a particular significance in Tot’s and Dan’s relationship?
Bunny: They’re the author’s indulgence. My father harnessed spoonerisms as affection. He isn’t a hugely demonstrative man and back then in the 1970s, he was almost remote. It was as if he struggled to find a way of communicating with his daughters. He relied on humor…but he wasn’t very funny. So when he began to spoon, I leapt on it as a form of shared intimacy. We could talk without the fear of talking. I could say, “I Yuv Loo” and he could say it back. With Tot and Dan, we have two unlikelies struggling to make sense of love and life. Tot is isolated by secrets, and Dan is lonely and scared inside his alcoholism. They lack intimacy in their lives, and out of necessity, they lean on each other as they struggle towards new ways of being. Spoonerisms are tedious. I think everyone else in the family were bored to tears by them.
David: While 12-year-old Tot holds her grandmother’s (Dan’s dead wife Millicent’s) cremated remains in a tea caddy, Dan tells her that there’s a set of words that can’t be spoonerized: “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Some things just can’t spoon, and there’s no getting around it.” This causes Tot to ponder the logistics of cremation and how it’s possible for fire to “turn a damp body into dust and ashes.”
She could accept the crematorium’s fire turning old skin and hair – even bones – to dust, but what about the dampness of flesh, of blood? And what about those really big bones? Like the pelvis? What about Grandma’s gold tooth? What about the screws from Grandma’s hip replacement? And the hip itself? Would it have melted and smooshes pink all over the ashes like plastic bottles did in the garden incinerator?
Unlike Hamlet’s fixation on the personalities and social statuses of the dusty dead, Tot focuses on the radical alteration of the dead body itself, giving the passage a very materialistic vibe. I always say that the blunt corpse is the best argument for nihilism, but Moby-Dick’s Ishmael insists that “Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope,” contrasting Baudelaire’s final “the worm shall gnaw thy cheek.” Talk of corpses turned to dust, faith feeding in graveyards and hope in spite of gnawing worms.
Bunny: We’re such liars when it comes to death. We keep kids from funerals and placate ourselves with images of Rainbow Bridges and Pearly Gates. The dead are wrapped in white shrouds and graduate to angelic robes and wings. I’m not sure where I stand on the idea of what comes next, but whatever comes next, it comes after the reality of death: hard-fleshed, black-and-blue death. The body falls down and unlike the animals who walk away from or feed upon it, we hide it in boxes and cover it in flowers. If we knew death, we might love life more.
David: Dan’s foot phobia makes the fourth chapter stand out for me. Even the feet of his late wife horrified him. In fact, his disgust for feet is wrapped up in her cruel nature and apparent sadism. Now, I doubt that such a specific and odd detail isn’t cut from whole cloth, so where did it come from? Your own aversion, perhaps? As an outspoken female-foot fetishist (only visually, mind you) who finds intense sexiness in a woman’s feet, has made pedal lust a central part of his latest book and considers the feet to be the hands of the legs, I need to know.
Bunny: (Smile!) I hate all adult feet. Hate them with a vengeance. I bet I’d hate even Jude Law’s feet. My sister used to pin me down on the stairs with her feet. She would trap my skinny little neck between her big toe and the next one. I can see her with her pale legs and freckly calves. It makes me want to slap her – even today. I like paws and claws, and I even quite like little baby feet, but grownup feet make me heave. And we’re moving into summer and the season for flip-flops and cargo shorts and I just want to throw up. So, yes. My own aversion.
David: In chapter 17 you reveal the reason behind the novel’s title, the concept of “The Beginning Things,” which refers to the evolutionary process of romantic human intimacy: Asking Questions about Unimportant Things, Paying of Compliments, Asker Pays, the 90-day Walking Away and Thinking About Everything (which Tot truncates to The Month of Walking Backwards) – and, finally, Walking Back. Tell us how you devised this relationship primer.
Bunny: I’m ten years clean and sober and owe much of that to my following (obsessively, of course) a 12-step program. I was intrigued by the idea of clear directions and how they can be useful when we attempt to master new things. I mean, recipes have numbered steps; Google directions have numbered steps; in a way, each of our birthdays is a numbered step. And look at the havoc caused by assembly instructions for bookcases that rely on stupid exploded views and letters rather than on good old numbered steps. I knew Dan would be heading into the rooms of AA, and I wanted Tot’s “recovery” to mirror his experience somehow. So I had them both follow “steps.” Hence the dedication to “Bill” at the beginning of the book. Bill Wilson is a huge part of my own recovery.
David: Dan advises Tot to never “let [boys] know what you want up front” and to “never say ‘love’ to a boy.” I can’t help but link this to Elaine’s disgusted summation of men in the previous chapter, following Dan’s very inappropriate drunken sexual advances: “All of them fools, a waste of bloody space.” Often, a decent person’s fall from grace nauseates more than the predictable offenses of a jerk. That chapter ends with these telling lines: “It was easier this way. No arguments. No men in the game. No complications.” This contrasts the rather pleasant chemistry between Elaine and Simon, and, more starkly, your portrayal of kind, virginal, doting Keesal and his longing for Tot. For a long time Tot doesn’t reciprocate Keesal’s feelings: “[S]he had never thought of him as boyfriend material. Never. Never. Ever.” Oh, the agony of the world’s Keesals! Rakish Gareth Strands tend to be favored by Eros. In my experience, more men seek exclusive love, while more women tend to avoid monogamous – let alone matrimonial – situations. I found some validation for this insight when I read Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men a few years ago:
To put it crudely, now feminist progress is largely dependent on hook-up culture. To a surprising degree, it is women – not men – who are perpetuating the culture…Today’s college girl likens a serious suitor to an accidental pregnancy in the nineteenth century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it thwart a promising future.
Though the aversion for the “good guy” has always been a bane for good guys (just as bimbos and femmes fatales have always outshined girls next door), is the non-monogamous thing a matter of only perspective, or has there really been a table-turning in men’s and women’s romantic sensitivities?
Bunny: I think this is just the natural swinging of the sexual pendulum. I was a teenager of the 1970s. I saw the pill not as a liberation from sexual repression but a liberation from potential pregnancy. I saw feminism and its fight for equal rights as a new and shiny possibility. I was sexually active because it was expected of me by men, and even with Germaine Greer in my corner, I couldn’t work out how to say no. “Seen and not heard”: that was the yoke placed upon me by family and working class sensibilities. As an educator in the early 2000s, I saw young women demanding equal billing with men on the sexual playbill. I think they got it. The pendulum swings. But it swings back, too: I fear feminism is now seen by young women as somehow unnecessary, an anachronism, an odd thing their grandmothers fought about back in the day. That scares me, that women might have sexual liberation today without the enduring benefits of equality.
I think I was a Bimbo Fatales. I knew nothing.
David: In A Short History of England G.K. Chesterton says “the past is not what it was,” and that line is the first thing I thought of after reading the following aphoristic line from the eleventh chapter of The Beginning Things: “Only those who have travelled too far from childhood define it as a place of simple innocence.” This is one of those statements that become more complex once they’re really considered. Is this similar to the still-popular myth of the 1950s as some golden and pure-snowy social era? Tell us more about this concept.
Bunny: By the time I was ten, I had learned many things:
How to avoid being singled out in the school playground and beaten with sticks and fists.
How to beat others with sticks and fists in order to escape being beaten with sticks and fists.
That women have to force small human beings out from between their legs.
That women bleed every month.
That boys wanted to touch my body and that some would do so whether I wanted them to or not.
That “almost-men” wanted to touch my body and that some would do so whether I wanted them to or not.
That the people I loved most in the world would die horrible and tragic deaths.
That the answers to the questions I needed answering would be given to me only when I had “grown up” and that until then, I would have to soldier on in silence and ignorance.
There is precious little innocence in childhood. I think it resides in adulthood under the pseudonym Denial.
“Things That Flew at Us” by Sarah Batcheller
Sarah is currently earning her MFA in Fiction at George Mason University, where she also serves as Social Media Manager for Phoebe Literary Journal. She tweets @Sarahhh1251.
In the beginning, I loved hearing the cicadas sing. High in the trees, reverberating, their melodic laughter buzzed. It was like they were all in on something.
I imagined them shaking the maple leaves as they balanced on the petioles and cackled, high-fiving and dancing jigs with each inside joke. Instead of soda spraying through a nostril, a paper-thin casing would slip off, exposing a shiny, raw body surprised in its new nakedness. A pause, then an eruption of more laughter from all around. It warmed me to think of how happy they must be together.
It was the year that special swarm of Magicicada paraded the East Coast, rising from the cold ground after seventeen years. I was in the fifth grade, and enjoyed swatting their abandoned exoskeletons off of the maple trunks. The tree where I first learned to climb usually harbored the most shells, which I imagined the fat insects were doing for me. Once, in the early days of the swarm, I stole a small Tupperware container from the Lazy Susan, and filled it with seven whole shells. When I brought it inside, my mother gasped, and in trying to snatch it from my small hand, let it fall to the ground. I hadn’t closed it tight, so the top fell off, unleashing the remains onto the carpet. My dog Falcon gobbled them up before my mom could return with the dustpan and brush. When she came from the kitchen to see him munching she laughed so hard I thought her casing would slip off too.
Then, the D.C. Sniper began terrorizing the DMV, and they locked all the children indoors. I’d wondered, now and then, if the cicadas had driven him so mad with their incessant humming and shedding and dive-bombing that he just lost it. But when I offered this explanation to my father, he waved me away from where he sat in front of the computer screen, and shut the basement door behind me as I climbed back upstairs. I meandered through the house, my mother opening her mouth to say something to me but deciding against it, and landed in my bedroom at the top level.
My tulip-print curtains hung lifelessly, with no crack in the window to let in a persuasive breeze. An alien song emanated from the other side of the glass. I peeled back one curtain and spotted the ribbed belly of a cicada. The bug was stamped to my window, its lacy wings collecting the sunset. I put my forefinger to the glass where it sat, careful not to make too much noise. Finally, I pulled up my desk chair, and remained there with my new friend until I nodded off.
I’d only just gotten used to the Dogwoods reaching out to tap on my shoulders, and the scent of fresh-cut grass dancing in my nose, when the heat settled in, and with it the masses of tree roaches soaring in from the horizon. And with them, the ammo. For three weeks I hadn’t played kickball, or Capture the Flag, or anything rapid and daring in the smiling-down sun at all. My knees ached each time I peered out of my classroom window. I couldn’t un-see the Windex streaks between me and the golden outdoors. Zombie Hunters became an indoor game, for fear that if children played outside, we’d be the hunted. I recalled the echo of rustling pines that lined the blacktop at school, and the tingle of the sun.
I’d grown so used to shuffling in and out of my mom’s Honda Civic, and in and out of the Huntsman Elementary foyer, and in and out of my cream-sided townhouse, that I had never paused to listen. I’d been sitting in our front windowsill while talking on the phone with Kendra, who stared back at me from her own front windowsill up the street, when our next-door neighbor knocked on the door to borrow a Phillip’s head. During the few moments that my mom left the door open, and Mr. Douglas grinned his dorky grin and waved his dorky wave, Kendra’s voice was drowned out by the choir of sucking and vibrating torsos in the trees. It was a harmony of lust and flight and freedom so unlike the lonely cicada on my window. While his banter warmed me, the sound of the swarm was captivating.
“Lody? Lody? Are you listening?” snapped Kendra, who had been reporting news of her boyfriend Deonte passing an adulterous note to Vanessa Greeneridge during Social Studies. But I wasn’t listening to her, or Mr. Douglas’s inquiries of my subjects, or my mother insisting I answer Mr. Douglas. I was mesmerized by the cicadas’ tribal song.
“Please, mom,” I begged for days after. “I just want to sit on the porch and listen to them.”
“Not with that sicko out there, Melody.”
“He won’t come here, he could never make it all the way through the neighborhood without someone seeing the van and calling the cops, right?”
“Not quite.”
“He hasn’t shot anyone in days. He’s probably scared of all the cicadas flying into him.”
A pause.
“Mom I just –”
“Mel, I haven’t slept at all. Let’s talk about it later.” She ran an index finger absently through a tangled strand of my hair.
My father entered the room then. “Tell you what, Melody, soon as he’s caught, we’re all taking a trip to Boom Lake. Good riddance.”
My mother forged a weak smile.
We compromised on leaving my bedroom window cracked. He was a shooter, not a climber, after all. I hadn’t seen my buzzing friend, so I also left the curtains parted slightly, just so he could see that I was still here. I scribbled away at my homework each day to the sound of his kin’s chanting.
On the news the next day, we learned that a boy my age had been killed in the next school district while he was turning around to say goodbye to his mom as she dropped him off late. No one saw him go down but her. No one saw the van.
I kept my window shut that night. Before crawling into my twin-sized bed, I left a note taped to it that read, “I’m here if you feel like talking,” and left the curtains parted an inch. Later, I woke to the familiar crash of glass on hardwood, and tiptoed to my bedroom door. The lock turned itself between my thumb and forefinger. The adjacent room, the one my mother adopted after my brother went off to college, uttered the same click from its doorknob. Downstairs, the television blazed before my father’s bloodshot eyes. Tomorrow, she would polish away rings burnt into the table by the caravan of his Heineken bottles.
That morning my window dweller woke me. In school that day, I fought against dozing off to the droning of the School Resource Officer presenting safety tips to our class. He sent pamphlets home with us.
After that, each day when my dad picked me up from school, he’d stop every block or so to peer around the corner of an end unit, or past the brick grocery store. We’d stop so often that sky beetles would blaze past my cheeks, or ricochet off of my backpack. Once, one with orbs for eyes landed right on my butt, and he brushed it away. Later, when he made me wait at the corner by the swimming pool behind a parked car to inspect the intersection, I called to him, “Do you think if I stood in the street with my arms out like Jesus, a cicada would hit me first, or a bullet?”
“Why would you ask me that?” he said.
“Do you know the answer?”
“No one thinks like that.”
I remained still behind the car.
“But I wouldn’t let him get you, anyway,” he added.
I couldn’t sleep anymore. The cicadas’ siren blared on, interrupting my dreams. I opened the window back up, and each strum and pluck of the song suddenly rattled throughout the trees. But even with a song so clear, their pearly bodies were hidden in the shadowy maple leaves.
I tailored statistics in my head: since my mother and father slept in different rooms, then one would be less likely to wake if the other one did upon heading my footsteps, so I’d have less of a chance of being caught, and if the sniper had already attacked nearby, then my chances of getting shot were practically impossible. I slipped pajamas over my cotton panties.
The rush of their buzz mimicked my own ears’ when the cool air jumped my skin. Kendra’s window was dark. I traveled up the hard sidewalk to the maple tree, and performed the same acrobatics that got me up the very first time: A pull-up onto the lowest branch and a swing of my right leg over it, sitting upright. Then I’d use the exact same method to lift myself in between the next two highest branches, which were conjoined like a narrow wishbone, then nestle into them (pretty basic, but effective when escaping a loose black lab). Surrounded by bark and leaves, I could spot five or six cicadas resting like I was. My head fit perfectly in the cupped hands of the branches.
I originally imagined the cicadas would dance and celebrate like fireflies when they saw me, but I now saw them in their true form. They were still and sure as statues. The radiance they gave the world came all the way from within, no frills, no glitz. I massaged my shoulders deeper into the tree’s prongs. The sound of a thousand güiros pushed and pulled my breath like a tide. Plateaus in the bark pressed into my palms. Moonlight softened behind my eyelids. A hum boiled in my chest, spilling down my spine and into my knees. I thought of a movement I learned in Modern Dance class, in which the dancer is flat on their back, and lifts their torso from the ground from the center of their chest. “Like a meat hook,” my instructor would say. I thought if I did this now, I would leave my skin behind. The humming continued as I lifted my solar plexus, but I almost slipped through the branches when my shoulder blades squeezed inward. My eyes tore open when I caught myself on one branch, then I sat upright.
I caught my breath and looked down. I was barely off the ground. Other kids in the neighborhood would call me a baby for only ever going that high. Another rationalization occurred: if cicadas can do it, so can I. But before I could begin to plan a higher excursion, I spotted a white van parallel parked at the end of my court. My body grew rigid. Black tinted windows grimaced against the dirty white paint, just like the images on the news. My limbs kicked like a spider’s, dragging me back against the tree trunk. I wondered if he would shoot me just so I couldn’t tell anyone.
My ears played back the panicked breath of a little girl. Two scabby knees were tied tight to my chest by stringy arms. I was sure he’d seen me and was only waiting. If I made a run for it now, he’d shoot as soon as my thin body flailed past the parked cars toward my doorstep. A vision of my mother finding my leaking abdomen in the morning made me nauseous. So I stayed in the tree until the black sky blushed indigo, and the stars opened the curtains for the luscious morning clouds. By the time a man in khaki overalls whom I’d never seen before exited Ms. Frish’s end unit, unlocked the van with a snappy beep, and climbed in, my eyes were red as chicken blood.
It was still early enough that none of my neighbors witnessed my climb back down. Shreds of bark and leaves clung to my frizzy hair. Tears gathered in my eyelids as I pitied myself and imagined the way my parents would pity me when I entered the house. On my way up our concrete doorsteps, I picked up the day’s paper in its dewy, plastic bag. I knocked on the door and was welcomed to the sight of my father’s bewildered gaze. He looked at me like I’d brought a dead squirrel home. Then he looked past me, once to the right and once to the left, curled his grip around my small elbow, and dragged me inside.
“How long have you been out there?” he snapped, causing my mother’s footsteps above to quiet.
“I’m sorry, I was scared.”
“When did you leave the house?”
“I was in the tree all night.”
“All night?”
My mother’s pitter-patter retreated back into my brother’s room.
“I thought I saw the Sniper. I didn’t want him to see me.”
“The Sniper? When did you leave the house?” His hot breath hissed.
“I don’t know…”
“You don’t know?”
My voice wavered, “It was last night. I only meant to go out for a second –”
“You snuck outside last night? With that bastard out there?”
I looked up at him, shaky in all my smallness.
“For what? To look at those bugs, Mel? Jesus. Go upstairs.”
I dropped the paper. When I passed my brother’s room in the upstairs hallway I could feel the weight of her body on the other side of the door. I tried to imagine her crying, but didn’t want to give her the benefit of the doubt. I entered my room, where an intruding buzz penetrated the walls. I grabbed a history textbook from my desk, pushed the window open, and smashed the bug.
John D. Robinson poetry
John is the author of When You Hear The Bell, There’s Nowhere To Hide (Holy&Intoxicated Publications, 2016) and Cowboy Hats & Railways (Scars Publications, 2016). He lives in the UK.
Charity
I watched as this kid of
13 or 14 rolled slowly by
me on a bmx;
I looked on as he slowed,
looking all around as if
expecting someone as he
neared a charity shop;
I saw him move in close
to the outside display,
he put a boxed-toy
under an arm and then
cycled away quite
casually;
I walked into the shop
and told the old guy
inside what had just
happened and he silently
shook his head;
“If that kid had come in
here and said ’hey
mister I would really
like that toy but I
haven’t the money to
buy it but I may get some
pocket money next week
and I could give you some’
what would you have said?”
I asked the old fellow;
“I’d have said
‘just take it kid, we’re
a charity’”
he said smiling
“’just take it’”
