Be sure to check out Strom’s poetry, too, and other fabulous writing by Jessica Powers, Alison Hicks and Becca Deysach, as well as managing editor Ashawnta Jackson’s shop-talk with cover artist Heather McQueen.

Also new around these parts is Shane Danaher, our talented assistant nonfiction editor! If you haven’t already, stop by the RC blog to read what Bonnie Jo Campbell told Shane about a former professor’s mean-spirited take on her writing. (spoiler alert! Bonnie Jo gets the last laugh.)

And for the last bit of “new” news: we couldn’t be more thrilled to announce our First-Ever Fiction Contest! Details and deadlines are on our Contests page, but don’t hesitate to contact us with questions.

As always, thanks for reading!

***

Four days out of college, I entered the redbrick canyon of Main Street, Bozeman and came home to a dream I had held since I first placed Montana’s profile-shaped piece into my wooden puzzle of the United States. As if a different version of myself had preceded me, I slipped into a life there. I got a job at the food co-op, rented a room in a log cabin five miles out of town, and spent my afternoons picking armloads of sunflowers and lupine. Everything was exactly as I had dreamed it would be.

Mornings were cold then, and I usually drove the five miles to work, savoring a gritty cup of coffee and the warmth of my truck. But that high-June day was different-I had an evening shift, for once, and didn’t need to head to work until the sun had warmed up the valley. The air hinted at summer, and I wore a sundress in celebration of it. A blue-plaid, knee-length dress that I had bought for an Urban Hillbilly party several years before. I was giddy and alive with all my pale, bare skin finally touching the world. I decided to let it touch the world at the rate of twelve miles per hour on a bike ride to town. To spend a few hours wandering around in it before work, stocky legs and all.

My first stop in town was the mountaineering store. There, I bought a topographical map of the Bridger Range and the Rocky Mountain Guide to Wildflowers and zipped them into my backpack, anxious for the intimacy with the mountains they would allow. I was positively glowing until my bike fell against my leg and pierced the skin above my left ankle, leaving a bloody puncture wound. It was the first prick in the fabric of a perfect day.

After a brief bout of cursing and tending to my small cut, I contemplated buying a new rear bike light to replace the one that had fallen off my pack and gotten smashed by a car the day before. Eh, forget it, I decided. It would still be light when I got out of work at 10 pm, and sitting in the sun with a cup of coffee sounded like a much better use of my time. I spent the next hour at the coffeehouse writing a letter to a friend. Telling her how terribly dreamy my new life was.

After work that night, a cashier from the co-op and I chatted for a while before hopping on our bikes and heading up Babcock Avenue. I wanted those six blocks with him to last all night. Ren was cute, made my stomach drop when he walked by the deli counter as I sliced organic roast beef, and was the reason I had allowed dusk to descend before heading home. I thought about asking him out for a beer, but held back, thinking, He’s too cute for you, Bex. He wants nothing to do with those hairy tree-stump legs and shaved head. Besides, it’s almost dark.  So we parted ways on Bridger Canyon Road, my road home, without so much as an awkward hug.

For the first few blocks north, I chastised myself for not inviting Ren out for a drink. I wanted to believe my insecurities were stupid, and the quaintness of the country highway I lived up suddenly made my fear of darkness seem unwarranted. But self-deprecation soon gave way to the awe that had defined my thirty Montana days as I looked west towards the Tobacco Root Mountains, the popsicle-blue sky hanging just above it, and the valley that lay between us all.

I was ebullient, riding the brilliance of my freedom, the possibility of the unknown, and the pure joy of being a twenty-two-year-old on a purple bicycle in the middle of a Montana June, with just one mile to go.

***

I was confused when the car hit me from behind. I had been riding so smoothly, so effortlessly, that I had no reference point for the washing-machine-like feeling I was now experiencing. For minutes, it felt, I was a part of the spin cycle. Time slowed until I was certain that this was the only reality I had ever known. I thought in full sentences to myself, bemused. This is weird. What is happening? Oohhhh, I am being hit by a car. Hmmm. And there was nothing I could do about it.

The car riding my rear wheel finally swerved left and tossed me into the ditch on the side of the road. There, I lay in soft young grass, already moist from the night’s condensation. Wow, I thought to myself, I’m okay. And I can think! I just got a bit of wind knocked out of me. All I need to do is catch my breath and walk the mile home. I’ll worry about the bike later. Instinctively, I patted my body from head to toe to make sure I was fine to get up. When I reached the bottom of my left leg, however, I realized I was not. Although my bare foot pointed towards the earth, the top half of my tibia stabbed the night in jagged white. 

I would not be walking home.

Just as I was making sense of my cleaved leg and the warm liquid gushing out of it, a mustached man approached me.  “Help,” I yelled, “over here!  Help!” The man in tight Wranglers and a grimy undershirt stumbled toward me and grabbed my shoulder and arm as if to hoist me onto his small frame.

“No!” I said. “I have a compound fracture. Call 911!”

 ”I’m from Billings, I don’t know where you are,”  he said through breath that smelled like compost and beer.

“I am r i g h t  h e r e. Get in your car and call 9 1 1!”

“Where should I go?”

“I don’t care! Go to the nearest house. Go back to town. Just find the nearest phone and tell them I have a compound fracture!”

“Ok, ok,” he nodded.  And continued to stare at me.

Again, I urged him. “Please go. Please. Go. Call 911. Can you do that? Can you do that?!”

Yes, he nodded, as he got into his car and screeched up canyon.

Okay, I thought. All I have to do is wait here a few minutes. I realized then how woozy I felt, so I lifted my leg up high and brought my heart down to the grass. Just a few minutes until the ambulance gets here and it’s okay to pass out. I hoped he would return before the ambulance arrived so they knew where to find me. But when a few minutes had passed with no siren sounds, I felt a tinge of worry.

Having been trained and retrained to as a Wilderness First Responder, I decided it was time to respond to the bloody bone-ends poking out of my skin the way I would to anybody else’s. I went over the ABC’s impressed upon all first responders. I definitely had an unobstructed A, airway, and I was B, breathing. That left C for circulation. My heart was doing its job fine, but my severed vessels made it hard for my blood to return to my heart.  I had to stop the bleeding before I passed out.

Before getting a handle on the blood loss, though, I wanted to set my bone. Still lifting my leg above my heart with my right hand, I pulled my ankle forward with my left in attempt to line up the exposed pieces of bone, resting what I could of them on my forearm. With my fingertips, I touched the exposed fracture in effort to reconnect my skeletal shards, but there was no precision in the break, no puzzle pieces to fit together. The angle of the break had cut off the circulation to my foot and numbed it, so I used instead the return of sensation to that extremity as a guide to setting my bone. I knew I had done something right when I could wiggle my toes again.

Next step, control the bleeding. I remembered that one could directly pinch the ends of a vein or artery to stop blood loss, but the darkness of the night and the thinness of the blood vessels so far down my leg made that option impossible. So I went for the next best thing-direct pressure. Still pulling traction with my left arm, I grabbed the hem of my dress with my right and pressed its worn threads onto my gaping wound. As far as I could tell, my flesh was ripped open at least halfway around my leg, my small hand barely able to cover the bloody mess. Phew, at least I’ve got the creepy part taken care of.

Uncomfortably settled into my traction-pulling position, I was no longer distracted from the reality of my situation. It was dark out now, for-real dark, the stars-were-on-fire dark. I was in a ditch four feet below a country highway with a 75-mile-per-hour speed limit, and my bones were sticking out of my own skin. There were no houses in visual or auditory vicinity, and the young grass toppled over me, stalk by stalk. My dress was dark and I had nothing with which to signal my presence. Lightning danced in the distance. And it was clear that the man in the white station wagon would not be returning.

Now is the time to scream bloody murder, Bex, I instructed myself, the way you’ve always wanted to. So I did my best to send a scream as shrill and cold as glacier water across the road and into the houses beyond the bend in the highway where I lay. To no avail. Warm cars filled with people with perfectly in-tact bodies sped by with painful regularity. It was such a bitter tease to be just a few feet away from rescue, holding my bones in the palm of my hand.

I had to do something else. Of course, I could pull myself out of the ditch and flag down a car on the side of the road. But all that I could imagine coming of such a move was my body smashed flat on the shoulderless highway, fatally marked with tire treads. I played that scene over and over in my head, laughing at the ironic ending to my story that would make. No, there had to be another way. What would I do with a patient in the backcountry? I’d make a splint, evacuate them. I went over the contents of my backpack in my head. A topographical map, a field guide, my Kryptonite bike lock. My lock! I could stabilize my leg with that and… And what? Hop a half-mile to the nearest house? Let my bones grate together and slice into my veins, my lifelines? Maybe I should just sit tight after all. Maybe somebody else was bicycling up the road right now, would hear my screams when they passed. Maybe I would think of something else.

And I did think of something else. I thought about the lightning in the distance, and wondered how long it would take before it crackled above me. I thought about the sassy new shoes the car had blown off when it hit my leg. I sang the word crepitus, crepitus, crepitus like a mantra. I thought about how weird it was that the only pain I felt was in the muscles of my leg-elevating and traction-pulling arms. And I thought about the amputation I was sure to have, came to grips with it. By the time help came, if it ever did, my leg would be too far gone, would have lost too much blood to be saved. Yes, from tomorrow on, I would be an amputee. I wondered how it would feel to wake up one leg lighter, to reach down to scratch an itch on a limb that wasn’t there. I had never much liked my short, stout legs, but I already missed the one that would soon be gone.  I mourned all the mountains I wouldn’t climb and the lovers I wouldn’t have for the creepiness of making love to a one-and-a-half-stumpy-legged woman. And then I remembered Tom Whittaker, a professor from my college who, with a prosthetic foot, had climbed Mt. Everest, big walls in Yosemite, and paddled rapids so fierce I cringed just thinking about them. He had a wife and two kids. Maybe my adventure life, my sex life, wasn’t quite over yet.

The traffic on Bridger Canyon Road had thinned out considerably as I mused on my impending legless life, and it struck me that I could either hang out in this ditch until I passed out only to be found the next morning under the blades of a John Deere, or I could get the hell out and to the hospital. Since my leg was going to be amputated anyway, a little rubbing of sharp bone on soft flesh wouldn’t really matter. Just in case my leg was salvageable, though, I wanted to stabilize it for my journey out of the ditch. But, with what?

Standing behind the co-op deli case on my tiptoes earlier that day, I had noticed that a seam in the bodice of my blue dress was wearing thin and made a mental note to put it in my mending pile at the end of the day. Huddled below the road that night, my hand remembered that earlier discovery before my brain did. Without thought, I fingered the weakness in the stitching with my right hand, the scarlet hand that had been holding pressure on my open leg, and tugged. The fabric tore hesitantly, ripped with a grind as grating as my bone-on-bone friction felt. Determined not to compromise the careful alignment job I had done, I fought the woven cloth off with just one hand while my other held my broken leg.  I was triumphant when I finally held the bundle of blue fabric in my hand. Ha! Look at me, I thought. A scantily-clad woman on the side of the road on a Saturday night. I wondered if my new outfit would help-or hinder-the likelihood of rescue.

I wrapped the dress around my open break and gave the responsibility of blood-loss control to it. Using my now-free hand and good leg, I made two scoots up the slope towards the highway in a half-crabwalk. The slight movement exhausted me, made my head wooze and my breathing fast and heavy. Just catch your breath, Bex, then you can move a little more. You’re almost there. But just as I finished my pep talk, I heard the familiar whoosh of an approaching car. I didn’t know if I could handle the disappointment of screaming in vain yet again, but scream I did. I gave it all I had, gave it my childhood dreams of being an actress, the loss of a mountain summer, the anguish of my looming amputation, and the sedentary and celibate life that surely lay before me. I gave it all my hope of being saved. I waved my free arm above my head as a little red Porches sped past. Dammit. True despair sank in for the first time that night.

Until I saw its taillights come back towards me. They had heard me!

The Porches stopped several yards behind where I sat. A man and a woman hesitantly stepped out of their car. “Help! Help! I’ve got a broken leg! Over here!” I screamed. The couple made their way over to me in slow motion, pulled out a giant cell phone, and, like that, an ambulance was on its way.  Only then did I feel how cold the night was, how agonizing my pain.

It was hard to release myself to the paramedics’ tentative hands. It was harder still to do as they told me-let go of my blue-plaid dress and perfectly pulled traction. The bottom half of my leg flopped about as they laid me in the ambulance. I was certain that the weight of it would tear what flesh remained and make surgical amputation unnecessary.

As soon as I got to the hospital, a needle found its way into my upper arm and I melted into the opiates. Even better were the hot towels they placed on me from neck to toe. While the heat did little to quell my seismic shivers, it did calm my skin, my heart. Calming my heart, also, were the words of the young feathered-hair surgeon: “We’ll clean you up tonight, straighten out your leg,” like it was no big deal. I couldn’t believe it. Nothing more than a baby toe would be left behind.

A few minutes later, one of the nurses handed me the phone with my far-away mother on it. “I’ll be there tomorrow,” she said, and the weight of my world was lifted off my shoulders. I was a daughter again, a broken girl to be mended.

***

Three years later, I think about my accident daily. I have to. A titanium screw, cerulean, hangs from a strand of purple beads around my neck. It was one of four screwed into my tibia that night to hold a corrective rod in place. An elegant piece of hardware, I keep it close to my heart. Don’t forget your bike light, it vibrates, and wear your helmet. You are a lucky woman. Welcome every curve on those legs that get you everywhere you want to go. That piece of jewelry whispers to me that strength is sexy, and that believing otherwise can be truly dangerous. You would not be wearing this necklace if you had asked Ren out that night, it reminds me.

Smoothing lotion over my newly-shaved calves in today’s early morning sun, I am shocked by the subtle contours of sinew lying just below my skin. They are beautiful.  I tighten and release the extensor, peroneal, and flexor muscles of my now-healed leg just to see what they can do. To remember what they have been through. I trace the long ridges and deep furrows of my bare leg with my fingertips, and am reminded by my musculature, by nine tenacious scars, how blessed I am to have this life, stocky legs and all.

Ashawnta Jackson:  So, tell me a bit about your background, and the kind of work you do.

Heather McQueen:  I always did art as a kid, and eventually went to art school, but when I hit my mid twenties, I felt a lot of discouragement with art.  It’s been about 18-20 months ago that I’ve picked it up again.  I realized that I like doing this, it’s important to me.  When I wasn’t doing art, there was always this vague sense that something was missing.

The work that I chose to do when I returned to art incorporates my love of gardening and antiques.  I love digging through antique stores for objects, digging through the flotsam and jetsam of people’s lives.  And I’ve found that these types of objects really suit the type of work I’m doing. 

AJ:  You mentioned that you felt discouraged with art.  Was that from the art world?  Your personal work?

HM:  I guess I never felt part of the art world.  When I was first starting there was a lack of the online support you see now.  But through my personal growth, I understand how things are, and the ways to put yourself out there.

AJ:  So was it a question of lack of community?

HM:  It wasn’t so much a lack of community, but more a sense that what was important was doing art with a sense of purpose, and that’s what I missed.  Art making is a very solitary activity, though.  But, it’s helpful to share ideas with people, and I’m just at a point in my life where it’s easier for me to be open to that.

AJ:  I understand that you’re working with linocuts lately.  Can you talk a bit about that? 

HM:  Well, I did some printmaking in school, and was always interested in the idea of reproduction.  Linocuts have a similar look to woodcuts, which I’d worked with before.  I tried a few botanical objects and when I started looking through my sketches, the egg beater just seemed like a perfect subject. 

Playing around with the drawing, I just really got into its shape and structure.  I had to simplify the drawing a bit to work graphically, though.  I did the eggbeater and a few others that didn’t work out as well.  My break from art and maturity have helped me deal with the ones that don’t work.  I remember hearing Ira Glass talk about the stories on This American Life, and he said that “for every story we put on the radio there are seven we don’t use.”  I’ve accepted that you have to go through a few sometimes.

The next series I’m doing is vintage cookie cutters.  I’m looking at one I’m going to do right now, it’s a pig.

AJ: [Laughs] A pig cookie cutter?

HM: [Laughs]  I know!  Can you imagine that someone said, “I’d really like a pig cookie!” and made this?  I really love the silhouette of it though.

AJ:  Could you explain the technical process of linocuts?

HM:  Sure.  So, it’s a linoleum block that’s soft enough to cut and it’s mounted on a wooden block.  I do a bunch of drawings first.  Clear, strong lines work best and it’s best to work out the details ahead of time, as it’s difficult to fix mistakes on the block.  I try to work a lot out in the drawing, and trace it on tone the block, cut a few test prints, then refine. 

AJ:  So what do you usually press it on?  Fabric?  Paper?

HM:  I haven’t been doing fabric, but that would be good [laughs].  A line of eggbeater tote bags!

AJ:  They’d be a hit in Portland, I guarantee it [laughs].  So, what’s next for you?

HM:  Well, my husband, Chris, is also an artist and we’re starting a business together called Banana Watercolor.

AJ:  That’s an interesting name.  What’s the story?

HM: Chris keeps an art blog.  We both followed similar paths with our art and picked it up again together.  He was doing Northampton scenes at first, and posting them, and at one point he did a painting of a banana, and that painting is the most frequent hit on the site. 

AJ:  Going way back to one of the first questions, I’m really curious about botanical drawings.  They’re so precise, so scientific-

HM:  It is scientific.  The parts. the names.  I’m working on a kiwi fruit drawing now- the structure of it, the hairs, the seeds.  The function and the form go hand in hand, there’s nothing that’s there for no reason.  It’s amazing how much is happening in something that isn’t particularly remarkable- getting lost in that little world is appealing.  The best botanical painting brings that world into focus.

AJ:  Have you been working on anything else?

HM:  I’ve been playing with cyanotype.  I took a class called “The Chemistry of Art Objects” and learned about them.  It was originally how blueprints were made.  I was looking into it from a historical perspective, and fell into the alternative photography community.  The process needs the sun to work, so right now it’s a seasonal, summertime thing, which is appealing on some level, but I would like to have a setup eventually.

He showered over there and he pointed to a stall and said he went
running during lunch breaks.

He said she was the first to arrive. “One’s still on leave,” he told
her, and said he had big plans for what he called his clinic, and
finally took her to the room that would be her lab. “Such a mess, I
know,” he said. “It’ll be a while before we’re open.”

He left her alone, said to look around some, so she looked through
some of the papers left over from war, maybe some belonging to her husband.
He was here, he’d been there. There were signatures and checks.

Temperatures and values, needles and tubes way past their expiration.
Junk. Half a pair of crutches. Some old dusty chairs, a wheelchair
without its seat, a boot without a heel, a shoe without its laces.
Nothing belonging to her husband.

A radio. She turned it on and the British voice spoke of a martini,
then of an unfortunate explosion. She found a spectra, an instrument
she’d learned how to use in tech school, and hadn’t used one since
then.

She went down to the doctor, who was sitting at his desk, reciting
Shakespeare, and she asked what he expected.

“Just show up for now,” he said. He smiled nice. The sun shone in and
on their faces. He said, “Just wait.” He got up, tall, and said he was
going running. She’d run from her husband, after he came back from the
war, his hands shaking like her father’s.

The doctor was already in his sneakers. She had sneakers like him.
She smiled, said ok, and went back to her lab, feeling overwhelmed
with what to do with everything, so she went back to the bunker, which
reminded her of childhood. The smell, that scent of mildew, death, her
marriage, the sound of banging, pipes, her father. She thought she
heard that old piano. There were freezers and ashes. She’d come so
far.

She took off her boots and dusted off a cot, climbing up and clearing
out the cobwebs. She lay back and closed her eyes and imagined the
dreams that filtered through there. Soldiers. Airmen, possibly the
dead ones. She was a sergeant. She lay, still, just trying to listen.

The sea of spuming thought foists up again
The radiant bubble that she was.  And then
A deep up-pouring from some saltier well
Within me, bursts its watery syllable.
–Wallace Stevens, “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”

This morning, my husband yells at me.  There’s nothing to do, I say.  You could try doing the dishes, he says.  He goes.  I cry. Mary Ann tells me, Stop it. She’s angry, says he shouldn’t have done that.

Mary Ann switches on the TV. We watch.  Horrors streak across the screen and the words at the bottom.  I watch it go. A warning, sports scores. Neither of use to me.

Pieces come and go. I am almost used to it.  I’ll never be used to it.  I had a life. A thief stole it. I can’t remember the details. He crept in at night and knelt by my bed and whispered and a part of my brain walked out to him, cat lured with a bowl of milk.

I try to bring the pieces closer but they don’t want to move. I try to make them fit.  They don’t.  I’m tired. I don’t want to live.  I say this and they say I have to. My husband, his pale face, in the lab all day, never gets enough sun. The others.  Psychiatrist, neurologist. I used to be an ist, too. I can’t anymore. The pieces grow bigger in my clumsy hands. I drop them.

I lost myself. I did something bad thought something bad and the thief came and took all the not-bad things. I am broken and they don’t know how to fix me.

They tell me regardless I must work with the pieces and so I do I do I do.  I remember that I have a husband.  Nick. I recognize him.  My boy, my girl.  I swallow pills so that I will want to live and so I won’t forget them.  I don’t, though I do lose track.

They say I must get out of bed. They say I should do something but there is nothing to do. They’re afraid to give me anything. I might contaminate it.

I used to do the laundry. But I forgot.  Towels in the kitchen, they showed me, underwear on the windowsill. I failed to perceive the problem.

This is a problem. When I see their faces it’s obvious, but when they’re not there I can’t see it.

I did something wrong, I say.  No, you’re not doing anything wrong, my husband says, but I see his look, before he covers it over.

I used to have a sense of order but the thief took that too. I would like to interrogate this person but he will not submit himself.  I used to do experiments. I used to tell people how to be orderly. Why didn’t I keep notes?

Outside the window I watch the birds.  The little brown sparrows who move in a flock and hop around on the bushes.  The red cardinal who sometimes swoops in.

Mary Ann fixes me something to eat. I sense she’s no longer annoyed.  Maybe because I stopped crying.  Did I?  Was I crying?  This piece grows multi-sided as I turn it in my hands.  My big, clumsy hands. I am tired, please. It is too hard. Don’t make me.

I eat. My little boy says, Mommy, you’re eating my dinner. I believe him, but I don’t understand.

Eat, Mary Ann says, not unkindly.  It will help.  At these times I like her best, when she is gentle and tender with me.  My husband has a soft voice.  He said something hard.

No more crying, Mary Ann says.

I don’t want to live but they tell me I must. They say it is my duty, they lecture me as if I am a child.

I am a child.  Playing in the grass.  I want to stay here, in this place, but it is breaking apart, I lose it.

I don’t want to live, losing things.  The thief is an experimenter, like my husband, like I used to be. I think that’s how he found me. Maybe I even met him, before.  I didn’t realize who he was and he came into my house and he took something. He left something, too, to confuse me, throw me off his scent. Smells like the lab.  Formaldehyde.

If I knew what he took I might defend myself.  He confused me. It is confusing. I watch the TV, the images that flow one into the other. Horrors, but they go.

I live here.  Not bliss. They tell me I am needed, damaged like this. Should I believe them?  I don’t know. Maybe they are not really they and it’s the thief all along.

I think in the moment of my death I will grab the thief and throttle him.

If I knew exactly what was taken. They tell me, they explain the results. Don’t talk down to me, I want to say, but I can’t remember how to move my lips to make those sounds.

How I wish there was something really to do.  I used to do things. I used to do so many things!  That was good.  That’s what the thief took. Why did he need that, the things I used to do, had a previous thief taken that from him?  I don’t want to sneak into people’s houses taking things.  I would rather die.

Maybe the thief wanted to die and they wouldn’t let him.  I would.  I’d say, Die, you son of a bitch, die.

Only I’d never get back what he took. There are rules.  They can’t fix.  I can take pills. I am an experiment in the laboratory of a thief. He infiltrated me.

My girl tells me to stop repeating things.  Stop stop stop. I want this to stop.  I try to tell her but my tongue grows big and she stomps out of the room.

I must have cut myself.  Blood. Something I’m supposed to do. I’m sure of this, but I don’t know what it is.  There is supposed to be blood, I remember something about that, but it can’t be right to let it just drip like that.

Do you need help? my husband says. Do I?  I can’t connect. I think the blood is okay, but how can that be right?  Not okay to let it drip, I’m sure of that.

My girl closes the door to her room. It bangs.  I can’t speak. Nothing fits. He tells me what to do. Hands me things.  I don’t remember but I follow instructions. I was right that it shouldn’t drip. 

He’s gone now and Mary Ann is humming a tune.  We’re sitting outside, she’s knitting.  Click click, the sound, click clack.  I repeat that for a while, because it amuses me.  Making a scarf in the middle of summer. That would make a good song, I try to tell Mary Ann but she’s got something on her mind.

I used to be able to knit but then the holes got bigger and bigger. The thief released moths into the laboratory and they are eating my brain.  The thief is studying me. He wants results.

I had results myself, once. The thief stole those, too.  He erased my name on the paper, and scribbled in his own.

Mary Ann’s deft brown fingers cut a tomato. First in halves, then in quarters.  She puts the plate in front of me.  Eat, she says.  I smell the fresh fruit. It is warm and gloppy between my fingers. Red.  The blood I forgot. Am I dripping?  I start to stand but Mary Ann places her hands on my shoulders. Is she an agent of the thief?  I hate to think so but it’s possible.

We struggle.  I struggle with the thief in her. Every day I am pulled into a struggle with him. What does he want, that he hasn’t taken?  What possible use am I to him?

Mary Ann pushes me down in my seat, into the blood.

Finish your tomatoes, she says, picking up the plate and going inside.

The thief has it figured out. He will torture me until I die.  What use, what possible use?  This piece no one can fit.

My husband, my children, the -ist’s don’t know about the thief. He is my secret.  Maybe I am his too, like we are looking into a mirror.

If you mention me I’ll kill you, he whispers. I should go ahead and shout Thief! In the loudest voice I can and let him.  I don’t want to live.  Not like this. But I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. I would rather kill myself but they say I mustn’t.  If I do something bad to myself, I will be punished. Don’t ask me how.

Karen, they call. My name.  I know it by shape, by feel.  A small pleasure the thief still allows me.  If he hadn’t taken quite so much, I might interrogate him, and we could engage in a battle of wits. He took that from me but left me my name.  For now.

They don’t say that but I read it on their faces.  Why doesn’t my husband go out and hunt him down, this thief?  He looks hopeless and tells me to do the dishes. I would break them over both their heads.

Karen, he says, in his soft voice, strokes my cheek.  I will not cry. His body is warm. Things inside, whirring. I remember the blood then forget about it. He is good to me.  Not his fault the thief got in.  I lean my head against his shoulder, close my eyes.

My mother’s voice, singing. How could I have forgotten her singing? I’m crying again. I try to put it in a place the thief can’t get it but he has left me no secret compartments, and it goes.

Before the thief came, I made children.  My girl has long fine hair. She sits on the edge of the chair and leans against me, strokes my hair.  My boy will not sit, runs away.  I reach for the curl behind my ear. I wish someone would say my name.

This is what it is to live.  Whether I want or not.  The thief gets to say.  He is letting me in on this.  It’s not just me, he’s got everyone’s number, I’m just one of the ones he’s focusing on at the moment.

Air across my skin.  Days of moments where nothing happens. My name.  Karen. K-a-r-e-n.

I was working on numbers, adding them up.  They didn’t. They kept telling me, Yes, they do. They are tricky, numbers.  They do one thing in front of them, another in front of me.  It’s the thief, he controls them.  Plays with me.

Was there supposed to be blood?  I was supposed to tell my girl. It’s all become so complicated.

Food in my mouth.  We are talking. I am moving my mouth, but I don’t know what I’m saying.

Karen.  Karen. His cheek against mine, wet.  I will not cry.  I want to warn him about the thief, that he will come for him. Shh, he says, it’s all right.

I dream that I am a young girl. I dream a whole life in an instant. I can’t tell you now, it’s gone.

I can do it, I tell him. I can do it. Why does he doubt me?  The thief has been speaking to him, setting him against me. The thief tells him I’m incompetent. Liar.  I can do things. I’ve done things. Why can’t he remember?

In the dark, his hands across my belly.  I rub myself against him. He steps into me like a warm bath.

I can tell you a story. The thief plays with time.  He juggles balls in the air.  One by one he catches them. Oh, so clever.

Outside, katydids. Karen-did, Karen-did.  I like the long light.  Turning dirt over in my hands.  I will hide a seed.  Keep it underground, away from the thief.

Nick takes me to the -ist. He puts tests in front of me.  Pieces to move.  A string of words to remember. They mean nothing and I lose them.  Something comes into my head, a story from school, the word, labors.  I repeat it.  Labors.  Then it goes.  They watch me fail. The thief laughs.

I can do things.  They have given me the wrong tasks, they are in league with the thief.  I am getting worse, they are saying. They are wrong, the thief has turned them against me.  I try to tell them.  I don’t want to live, when I have to fight like this.  They refuse to hear me.

I dig into the dirt with my fingernails. It smells good.  Mint. 

Every day I repeat things, to keep myself here.

I go in the car a long way, and there are my parents, who made me. My mother who used to sing. 

We go swimming.  I push my hands through the water. It runs through.  My body cuts through. The water holds me up. It whispers to me, not like the thief.  He is silent, for once. I can’t hear him.  Fingers in ears.  I-can’t-hear-you, I-can’t-hear-you, the water sings and I sing along. I-can’t-hear-you.  The water smoothes past my hips.  They tilt from side to side.  A dance.  Something I can do.  More intimate than with a person.  The water dances with me.  So little I can do now.  Thief’s fault.  This is easy, just step in.

I raise my head, air whooshes into my nostrils, down my throat, into my lungs. I turn my face to the water.  My eyes sting.  I close them.  When I reach the side I turn around. Easy. Turn around, go back.  Don’t get lost.  Lost, lost. Lost.  Don’t need help. Just the water and we are friends.  It holds me up, holds me, holds.  Won’t let me sink.  My arms move over my head in a circle. Down through the water.  I push myself ahead. It lets me move through.  My feet flap at the end of the legs.  I keep them moving. Water flows around them.  I like that.  Flow, flow, flow, the water sings.  Like me, it repeats things.

My boy squirms away if I try to hug him. Unless he’s asleep. But my girl, she sits next to me, puts a hand on my shoulder, strokes my hair.  How I like it when she strokes my hair.

The thief is there as always and he laughs. I don’t listen.  I-can’t-hear-you.

I hear the water. Gurgles and bubbles.  I hear the splash.  I like the way it sounds underwater. I would like to live here. Away from the thief and his nasty words.  I could live with this pulse-pulse-pulse, pulse-pulse-pulse.

My husband Nick would give me a look, if I told him, he would think I don’t understand but I do, he would be trying to look one way but I would see the other look underneath.  He hides, thinks I don’t see.  Maybe that’s noble of him but I don’t like it.  I forget what I’ve said, but not the feeling.  I leave this behind in the water.

My little boy feeds me cherries. He scurries away when I try to catch him.  He digs out the pit and laughs at the juice on his fingers.  I laugh too.  Funny.  Then he presses the rest into my mouth.  I feel the stain in my mouth. Good.  He takes one himself and spits out the seed.

My mother says to have hope. I repeat this every day.  I have hope, I have hope, I have hope.  My mother says the -ists are doing all sorts of things, in the labs.  I swallow their pills.  I repeat the words but the thief is talking to me all the time underneath.  He’s in the labs too, reeks of formaldehyde.  Sometimes he talks so fast I can’t follow, he’s a blur of noise.  Every day, now, I strain to hear the words of others over his. He is telling me now that he has unwound my brain onto needles and is knitting it into a new pattern.  He’s so proud of his work, he can’t resist boasting.  I want to rip out his stitches but I can’t. He’s seen to that.

My husband’s friend named Amy visits, with the boy that she made. I tell him I remember her, and he looks at me.  Isn’t that what he wants me to say?  She brings a box with crinkly red paper inside. I tear through it and there is a ball.  Light green with bubbles on the surface, but smooth and cool in my hands.  A gazing ball, she says.   I like that, and repeat it, gazing, gazing.  I hold it and run my hands over and over.  I stare down at pieces of my face.  My nose long, my eyes scrunched, my mouth smudged.  For the garden, they say.  There is a metal pole and stand.  We go outside.   Nick twists the pole into the dirt by the mint.  You can see it from the window, she says.  I like that. She takes me back inside so we can test. 

I can see it, I say.  I can see.  Green bubbles in the glass.  Something to watch. With the birds.

Yes, she says.

She brings airplanes for the little boys. We sit on the steps and watch them fly them over the ball, over the mint.  The boys run back and forth.  Boys, boys, always running.  Won’t sit still until they’re asleep.  The airplanes go up, up, up.  Then down. They crash into the mint, smash onto the driveway. 

She brings bubbles.  A big ring to make large ones.  We dip it in and run, and the bubbles form behind us, then pop their goo all over us.  We use little rings to make the bubbles that cluster on the bushes. Sometimes they hold for a moment before they pop and they shine, blue and green and pink.

We leave the boys and go in and have a glass of wine.  I have hope, I say.  My husband’s friend Amy says, Yes.

Nick says nothing, his back to us.  He is cooking dinner, preparing the roast.  He likes to cook.  I do too.  There are still things I can do. Crack eggs.  I take one and tap it on the edge. Nick’s fingers on my elbow.  The clear glop and the yellow drop into the bowl. I laugh.  I always like that.  It’s funny the way it is so sloopy, the way it just plops out.  Plop, I say, plop. Funny word, plop.

The thief has been quiet all this while.  He is shy in front of guests.  Prefers to watch and keep his counsel.

My girl comes down from her room and stands eating crackers.  There is a little white box on the table.  I pick it up and open it.  Inside is a little blue ball on a black string.  It is pretty and I hold it up, but they say it is not for me.  I hold it up.  My husband Nick puts a hand on my shoulder, eases it out of my fingers.  My girl takes it, holds it up, murmurs Thank you.  Hard to keep straight what belongs to whom.  I don’t understand why this matters so much.  The necklace is pretty.  I would like to put it on and wear it.

Look, Amy says, points to the garden, the gazing ball.  The light winks off it and I smile.

Do you like swimming? I say.  There is a pool inside the gazing ball.  Green light. Looking out, the bumps and bubbles break everything into pieces.  They don’t fit.  But looking out from there, they aren’t supposed to.

Mary Ann gives me a crayon and a piece of paper. Blue of swimming pools.  I press it onto the paper. The pool forms in front of me.  I smell the pool smell.  I want to go swimming. It is winter, Mary Ann tells me. The pool drained and covered up.  I have to wait.  I press the crayon onto the paper.  My pool. I swim back and forth. The thief is hovering over my shoulder.  Ha, he says, ha.  I scribble over him, I cover him in swimming pool blue.  Ha, he says, ha ha.  I don’t mind. Blue fills up the page.

My show comes on TV.  Kids trapped inside a computer. They are supposed to protect the motherboard from the hacker.  There’s a parrot that helps them.  Clever.  More clever than the hacker. They figure things out.  See, see, I say to the thief.  I shouldn’t speak to him, but I do.

Ha, he says, ha ha ha.

I scribble with my crayon.

Clever, clever, clever. The parrot and the children solve the problem.

I need a parrot.  He could help me figure out things.  Then we could swim.  In my swimming pool.

The show is over. The page is full of color.  Blue,  blue, blue.

Ha, the thief says. You will break that crayon, and I do.

Pieces.  Pieces.  Water spreading on the page, filling my swimming pool. I touch my face.  I broke it.  Did something wrong and the thief came into the house, he whispered in my ear, and a piece of my brain came crawling out to him.  He took it and put it on a plate like a piece of cake.

Careless, careless.  I broke the crayon, broke myself.  I try to tell my girl, but I can’t put the pieces in order. They are mixed up in the box.  I need a magic parrot to help me sort them.  To fight the thief.

I decide to rat him out.  Even if he makes good on his threat and kills me.  Let him, I don’t care.  In the morning, first thing. 

I come down to the kitchen when everyone is there.  I open my mouth and I explode.  Heat, then nothing. 

I am yolk sloshing out of the egg.  I jiggle and bounce.  I am a bubble shining green and pink, blowing toward the bushes. The slightest touch and I will pop.

I wake up in a car.  I am not dead. The thief wants me alive for his experiments. I scream that he has taken me, and the people he has sent hold me down. 

My husband talking. I don’t understand. But the thief comes in clearly.  You see, he says. See?

See, see.  Seizure, they say.  I know better, but I go along.  I repeat, seizure, seizure.  Every day I repeat, to placate them, No seizures today.

My girl sits on the edge of the chair, stroking my hair.  My husband Nick, making dinner. My little boy makes noises as he plays.  The thief is quiet for a moment, and it is like swimming, I hear them, as if I’m the thief, crouched at their ears and can hear into their brains, I can hear what’s inside of them, the accusation they hold back, clear as if they just spoke it aloud, Why are you leaving us?  I’m crying but they don’t understand, I want to explain about the thief and the -ists, the explosion and the egg and the bubbles, the broken crayon and the knitting, the parrot and water, but they say, You didn’t do anything wrong.  I’m trying to tell them about the water, how it flows around my skin, how it drowns out the thief and how badly I want to hear my name before the thief knits it up in his tangles and it disappears.

Sometimes I see the future
& it looks alright
to a man who’s been waiting
his whole long life
to be returned to that land
it was north of somewhere

it was cold and
oh so bright

((& everyone was happy there))

I’ve memorized
every promise
that was gave on that night
we were told
we’d have to go
and had better learn
to travel light

across a sea that would disappear

once we reached
its other shore
& there we’d wear
our hearts
inside
no longer easy for us
to find
for we could not yet be
beings of light
& we were no longer

men

like the ones who walked before
innocent
of wrong or right

. . .

Father oh now I know why
you moved so far away
but your poor mother
she waited
for your return
till her last day

Didn’t you once believe in art?
Didn’t you once have a beating heart?

when you told me the story of a poet
& her friends who went to see a king

but he wouldn’t let them in
except for her fine eyes

she told him of the troubles
throughout their country

she told him of her worries
for all their people

she told him this in rhyme
& in the rhythms of her song

she told him this in rhyme
& with the poetry of her tongue

& that’s when he began to see …

((                                 ))

Mother, you once watched a monk
light his robes on fire

in 1963 when you thought fire might
say more than a gun

or all the bombs over Viet Nam
but his ashes contradicted him

he was burning himself for peace
it was that kind of world

so you sent me away to an ivory tower
& in the hills where gold lay

I grew into a princess
I never learned to sing

in my rightful language
I only learned to choke

on all the beautiful English
that still burns my throat today …

((                                 ))

Didn’t you once believe in art?
didn’t you promise to fight with your words?

well fight with words we did
stumbling over our own tongues

Mother you were the child
that I failed to love

& I’m sorry if I did

for now you praise the warfare
& the flags of our follies

& I am just an innocent
who knows nothing of history

I only know the stories
about the old poets who once

you dreamed of following
bringing the world to reason

as I still dream today …

((                                 ))

II.  The War After the War
a dialogue (in acappella) between generations

MOTHER:
You don’t know what it’s like
to live under a tyrannical regime
You come here
with your ideals
and you know nothing
of Reality

DAUGHTER:
But Mother what about compassion?

MOTHER:
Compassion is but a luxury
for those who have known
nothing
but Democracy
You know not
the chains round your legs
nor the absence of
your voice

DAUGHTER:
But Mother must our hate
last as long as the wars
you thought would never end?

MOTHER:
What they dared call Peace
brought not but death
What they dared call Liberation
brought not but death
so how can I forget?
how can I forgive?

((two rivers meet where the water is warm))
((blackberries stain my childish hands))

- a tapestry of memory of temperature
that I can nary forget nor Remember
(we saw) two rivers cross
one from the valley
one from up on the rocks
one streamed cold, one streamed hot
in a blackberry forest
I saw the two rivers join into one

((father killed a snake with his bare hands))
((blackberries on my tongue under the sun))

 it must’ve been the sun on the hill in Montana
the grass under my hands
and my mother, and my father
it reminded me of the blackberries
& the Washington
midlands
I remember when-
               the blackberries stained my hands
& the water that I washed in then
was Cold on one hand was Hot on the other
you were angry; you were angry-

               but the memory is only blackberries

my father the fire
               my mother the earth
my father the water
               my mother the earth
my father the shadow
               my mother the earth

                              …

if I could sing this to the boy in Washington,
he might understand better the mountain.

II.  New Earth

((the trees are indifferent
to boys and girls who tried to put up a fight
but were too bereft of soul))

                              …

I watched the dust settle
then I ran for the trees
in the dark cave
mother bear embraced me
it wasn’t easy to shed what I believed
               but I did

I don’t believe in a Christ that I can see
weren’t u the one who said-
if you meet me
kill me on the spot?
for if you don’t you will fall for trickery
               & they did

you were the torrent
in the forest
I was the ice
that carved the language
(of love)
in the rock bed
of the valley where we met

& what about the aftermath?
the placement of the wedding mat?
the grief & heaving
as the earth lay bleeding

(what was lost)

to build a new earth
doesn’t mean we have to shoot first

                              …

((will you murder me?))
((will u murder me?))

An adventure! my mother said. Why, if you want to go to Mexico, you just walk across a bridge, and there you are!

We learned how to count in Spanish, celebrated Christmas, packed the U-Haul, and moved south during the worst snow-storm the area had seen in decades. My parents rented a house with aqua blue and pink shag rugs in a Mexican-American neighborhood and, just after the New Year, I entered third grade at my new school.

As the classroom door clanged on my mother’s departing back, I glanced shyly at my classmates, an ache in my chest, the kind of ache you have when you haven’t slept long enough. I shrugged my red coat closer and tried to sort through the excited chatter, Spanish and English mixing into one glorious smattering of unintelligible sound as the classroom absorbed the presence of this white girl, the only one in the class.

Boys sauntered by my desk. Most pretended to ignore me but one, a handsome boy with a cocky grin, offered me a pencil. He told me I was pretty and called me Laura, which I didn’t mind because the person I most wanted to be in the world was Laura Ingalls Wilder. Marylou, the girl sitting across from me, filled me in on the classroom gossip, informing me that I shouldn’t, on any account, talk to Maria, a large lumbering girl wearing a slightly soiled pink satin dress, even as Maria lurched over to my desk and whispered that we could be friends.

“Don’t you want to take your coat off?” kids whispered as they passed by.

I shook my head and kept it zipped all the way up, even though the classroom was stuffy.

Soon the bell rang and we piled books back into desks and lined up at the door to go to lunch. I grabbed my Snow White lunchbox and followed Marylou gratefully as she issued orders to the other girls in the class. “Tisha can sit with us, and Elena can sit with us,” she said. “But Elsa, you have to eat lunch alone.”

Marylou had big curly pigtails and yellow ribbons that matched her yellow blouse and yellow socks. She looked like she was going to church while the rest of us looked frumpy, put together with odds and ends that didn’t match, jeans too short or too small, and dirty t-shirts.  

We marched through the halls behind Mr. Busby, the teacher, who led us through a maze of hallways, through a dark corridor, and into the cafeteria. There, I waited at the table while everybody else went through the line to buy their lunch. I opened my lunchbox and carefully removed my peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, orange, and homemade oatmeal cookies.

Elsa flitted by the table. “Do you want a milk?” she asked.

“I don’t have any money,” I mumbled.

“It’s free,” she said in a sing-song voice.

I didn’t believe her but watched as she walked to the counter, spoke to the lady, and came back with a small red-and-white carton of milk. “See?” she said.

Marylou flounced over, placing her tray beside mine. “What are you doing here, Elsa?”

Elsa slunk away.

I popped orange slices in my mouth while Marylou, Tisha, and Elena told me all about the boys in the class-Giovanni, the boy who had called me “Laura”, was their favorite-and then about the other girls, who were mostly persona non grata in Marylou’s opinion. The girls preened in front of the boys but whenever Maria or Elsa wandered by, they would jeer or stick their noses in the air, pretending that the other girls didn’t exist.

On the playground, we played hopscotch while the girls asked me about my tennis shoes. None of them had heard about the friendship pin craze-a few beads slipped onto a safety pin in a variety of patterns and then fastened to your shoelaces. I showed them the friendship pin that my best friend Cory had given me back in Albuquerque, and slipped three off my shoe, offering one to each girl in turn. Marylou, who wore Sunday-style black shoes, didn’t have anywhere to put hers, but she pocketed it, saying she had tennis shoes at home. Maybe she did but I never saw that friendship pin again.

The first bell rang and we ran towards a side door where our class was supposed to line up to wait for Mr. Busby. I jogged towards the wall, trying not to stumble in front of my new friends, and ran towards a clump of boys from our class. They were whispering and watching me as I approached.

As I passed, several of them pushed Giovanni towards me, into my backside. His arms closed around me, his groin pumped up against me, he whispered, you’re so pretty, so pretty, and the boys yelled, Yeah! Hump her! Hump her!

Face hot, I unraveled out of Giovanni’s arms and hurried to catch up with the girls, sinking into place towards the back, refusing to turn around so I wouldn’t have to face the boys.

Elsa stood behind me, and I broke Marylou’s prohibition on speaking to her. “What were the boys doing?” I whispered.

“It’s just what they do when they like someone,” she whispered back.

No boy had ever done anything like that to me before, and I hadn’t seen a boy do it to any girls at my old school in Albuquerque either.

The whole day had been weird. Weird weird weird.

“Marylou is not a nice person,” Elsa continued, still whispering. “You wait. She’ll stop talking to you someday, too.”

Elsa’s words turned out to be prophetic, of course.

I knew what sex was, though my knowledge of it was recent. Just before we moved from Albuquerque, a classmate asked me if I knew what “humping” was. I didn’t, and, with glee, she proceeded to tell me a litany of dirty jokes. In one joke, the word “cookie” secretly meant “sex.” Somebody kept asking, innocently, for a “cookie” and getting quite a surprise when they got a cookie indeed. Another joke had a mother eating a wiener in a bun that she enjoyed so much, she demanded another from her husband, who chopped off his penis and then their son’s penis to satisfy her insatiable appetite. As she chewed, she kept saying they were the best wieners she’d ever eaten.

I listened to the dirty jokes, my private parts raging, a desire I’d never felt before creeping all over my body. In first grade, a girl named Debbie had spent the night. She’d whispered that we should pretend she was the husband, I was the wife, and she fell asleep on top of me. Confused, I asked my mom about it the next day, and she drew me diagrams of a female uterus and a baby growing inside. I promptly forgot the talk, only to remember it when the dirty jokes reminded me. At night, I started whispering the dirty jokes to myself, letting my body flame up hot and red, and touching myself in a way that felt astronomically delightful but which I somehow knew was too private to mention to anybody.

When we moved to El Paso, we were caught in that unexpected snow storm and had to stay the night in a motel in Las Cruces. Alone on my cot, I waited until my family was asleep. Breathing low, trying not to make any noise, I rubbed my private parts with a pillow until it felt like something inside me rose up, clawing, and then melted, suddenly, unexpectedly, sweetly. The feeling was both completely new and, somehow, oddly familiar, comforting and warm and strange all at once.

But it also made me feel…sullied…in a way I couldn’t explain. At eight, I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain what I was doing. Masturbation, an ugly word. Orgasm, a creepy word. Had I known these words, neither would have made me feel better about myself, about what I was doing.

Now, with the advent of a real-life sexual situation that I encountered every day, I developed an insatiable desire for that sweet melty feeling, almost a need for it, followed by intense self-hatred. Like eating half a dozen warm cookies fresh from the oven and then feeling sick immediately afterwards.

School became a nightmare.

Students sidled past my desk, suggesting that the only reason the teacher gave me an “S” (”Satisfactory) or an “S+” on all my papers was because I was the new girl.

Mr. Busby, a tall man with a bush of blonde curly hair, would often call students to his desk and look at them, unsmiling, across that vast space before issuing various threats. One time, he called me over. Even though he was sitting and I was standing, he was taller than me, and I gazed into his cold blue eyes, afraid.

“Jessica,” he said, “if you don’t learn your capital letters by Monday morning, I’m going to bring a pair of pliers to school and rip your fingernails out.”

I slunk back to my seat, whispering questions to the girls who’d been his students all year. “Has he ever done that before?”

“No,” Marylou said. “But there’s a first time for everything.”

And so I was relieved when, on Monday morning, I’d apparently learned my capitals well enough to satisfy him because there was no mention of the pliers.

No matter how hot it got in that classroom, I kept myself wrapped up in that red coat. It grew ragged and dirty, ripped on one side, but I didn’t care. I needed to wear it.

At recess, I dealt with the boys and their hormones. Sometimes I’d complain to one of the playground monitors that the boys were chasing me. Their response-”well, if you don’t run, they can’t chase you”-failed to comfort me. But how could I explain to the playground monitors, or my teachers, or my parents that the boys were dry-humping me in a group every day?

And throughout the day, whether in class or at recess, life was all about discerning Marylou’s shifting alliances.

Who are we speaking to today? I’d jut my chin out at a particular girl and look for Marylou’s sorrowful shake of her head, meaning no, or her small smile and the benevolent nod, signifying yes. On rare occasions, Tisha and Marylou went to war; Tisha would gather some girls around her, and Marylou would gather the rest, and we all would march in tune to their commands. This usually meant sailing by, head held high, ignoring members of the opposing faction. Sometimes it meant verbal sparring and an exchange of biting insults. Very rarely, it led to an actual physical brawl.

One time only, the entire class of girls, even Elsa, stopped speaking to me altogether. For a reason I can’t remember, I had summoned all my courage and decided not to join Marylou and the gang up on the track field, where they were playing and gossiping. I told Maria and Elena that I wanted to play soccer instead. Some boys in another class had said I could play halfback, my favorite position, and so I ran the length of the soccer field, passing the ball, defending the goal, relieved to be free…

…until I saw Tisha beckoning me to the side. Behind her, Marylou, Maria, Elena, Elsa, faces fierce and ugly.

I ran over. This is going to be bad.

“Maria and Elena said that you said we were all stupid,” Tisha screamed at me.

“No,” I protested. “I didn’t say that.” Instead of anger at their lie, I felt only the quick sinking into social muck.  

“You’re dead,” Marylou said, between clenched teeth. “You’re dead to us.”

I hunched deep in my red coat and returned to my position on the soccer field, watching the girls go back to the track field, casting angry glances back my way as they walked. I’d be ignored, at least for the rest of the day, possibly for a week, maybe longer. Who knew how long they’d stay mad about something I hadn’t said?

It was that day that I lost my Snow White lunch box. I put it against the fence to play soccer and when I went back to retrieve it, it was gone. Whenever I lost belongings at school, even something small and simple like a bobby pin, it brought a wave of sudden, sharp homesickness. Things just didn’t feel right until I found the item or enough time passed that I forgot about it.

My parents didn’t have enough money for a new lunchbox immediately, so I started bringing my lunch to school in a plastic bag. I was the only girl in my class who brought a lunch to school, anyway, which made me feel poor since we didn’t have enough money for me to buy a hot lunch every day. I didn’t understand then that most of my classmates received a free lunch, paid for by the federal government. This was also the source of the free milk.

Weeks later, I saw my Snow White lunchbox lined up with other lost items on the wall outside the principal’s office. I wanted to retrieve it so badly, I felt a big lump in my throat. But I didn’t dare leave the line and go get it. Marylou was there. Tisha was there. I couldn’t let them know that there was something I wanted, wanted badly enough to leave their side and rescue it.

I didn’t talk about school at home. Instead, I started lying all the time, even when I didn’t have to. Once, I stole my brother’s Halloween candy and then told my mother I’d seen the daughter of the woman who came to clean our house once a week taking it. Even when Margarita said her daughter hadn’t done it, I insisted that I’d seen her, I’d seen her do it.

My mother was a ghost, limp and tired all the time, her body worn out with a prolapsed uterus and undiagnosed thyroid problems. My father, working hard at his new job as a university professor, was rarely home.

So we amused ourselves a lot.

The house my parents had rented jutted up against an arroyo and an expanse of flat land, acres and acres of creosote bush and small, scrubby prickly pear cacti. After school, my brothers and I would explore the desert, jittery about rattlesnakes but on the hunt for jackrabbits, which bounded up from bushes when we approached, skittering dirt and rocks with their powerful hind legs. We’d laugh at the way they ran away. Then we’d collect dirt clods and battle with each other, usually my older brother pitted against me and my little brother, to make things fair.

My parents bought chickens, which we cooped up in a small fenced area in the back of the house. I hated it when it was my turn to feed them or to search for eggs. The roosters seemed enormous and threatening as they’d strut towards me and attack my legs. I marveled at my grandfather’s calm expression, and the way he’d stride inside, ignoring the vicious advances of the little red-eyed demons.

When we wanted to scare ourselves, my brothers and I would take a small whip-like rope and thrash the ground near the roosters’ feet. Then we’d scream and run away as they charged, clambering up the wire fence and scraping our arms and legs on the thin wires that protruded at the top.

There was a pool, too, and as soon as the water grew warm, which was early in El Paso, we filled it with water and spent our afternoons swimming and tanning dark brown, so we didn’t feel as out of place in our classrooms full of Latinos who talked about us in Spanish, behind our backs.

Marylou lived only a few blocks away, as did Giovanni. To get to Marylou’s house, I had to pass his, unless I went the long way around.

I’d ride my bike, circling close, peering at his house with the statue of the Virgin Mary in the front yard, her blue robe chipped and fading. If I caught a glimpse of movement, I’d turn around. I’d go the long way or return home and say I didn’t feel like playing, after all.

For a long time, I didn’t realize that Maria lived on Marylou’s street, until the day she and her sister threw rocks at me as I pedaled past.

In my memory, Marylou’s house was pink. She lived there with her parents, her older sisters, her baby brother, and her grandmother. We played on the swing set in the back, where I’d search my freckled arms, pestering Marylou with questions-”Does this look like a flea to you?”-possessed by an irrational fear of tiny bugs. “I don’t know, maybe,” she’d say. I’d try to pinch or scrape freckles off, wondering if they could be ticks.

Or, we sat outside under the Mulberry tree, watching her dad work on his old blue Chevy truck. We’d suck on packets of chile-sugar that Marylou’s mother had bought in Mexico until her father would pass his Coors to Marylou and watch her throw her head back, guzzling the warm beer.

“Do you like beer?” he asked me one time.

I shook my head. My dad would let me taste his, the cold sour bubbles filling my mouth. Every time, I’d spit it out, saying, Ewww.

“That’s good,” he said. “Marylou loves it.”

I spent the night once or twice. I remember nuzzling into a warm blanket on the floor of her mother’s bedroom, watching The Last American Virgin, and feeling that hot flood of desire in my vagina when the movie portrayed the boys watching each other have sex with an older woman through a keyhole.

Those were the times when Marylou was talking to me, of course.

Though I didn’t tell my parents about any of it, my grandmother remembers picking up the phone once when Marylou called, and seeing the desperate shake of my head. No, I don’t want to talk to her.

My grandparents were staying with us for a month or two while they searched for an apartment or trailer to rent. Each morning, I’d get up early, while the house was still dark and everybody was still asleep. I’d creep out into the kitchen and sit alone at the table until my grandmother got up. She’d braid my hair, which I was growing long, trying to be like the pioneer girls, Laura Ingalls Wilder and her sister Mary. Their lives on the prairie a century earlier were lovely, and innocent, and sweet, and kind.

I tried to imagine Laura Ingalls Wilder with an obsessive need to masturbate every day, and I couldn’t.

I tried to imagine Laura watching dirty movies with her best friend, and I couldn’t.

I tried to imagine the boys in Laura’s stories surrounding her and dry humping her through her long, calico dresses and hoop skirts, and I just couldn’t.

I started wearing dresses every day, as soon as the weather was warm enough, long dresses that I called “calico” dresses, even if they weren’t. Marylou wore pink jeans, pink socks, and pink blouses. “Are dresses all you ever wear?” she asked me.

My hair grew longer and longer. It reached my waist and then my covered my butt and still I refused to cut it, even to chop off the dry scraggly ends. I basked in the swift movements of my grandmother’s fingers weaving through my hair each morning as she braided ribbons into it.

I still wore the red coat to school, over my long dresses. I wore the coat inside and outside the classroom, until it grew too unbearably hot, and then finally I started leaving it at home, missing it terribly.

But by mid-March, it was too hot to wear much clothing at all, much less a coat. El Paso’s springtime is a whirlwind of heat and sand. The winds whistle up and blow dust across the street like swirls of snow. Dirt grits against your skin. If you don’t close your eyes, sand cuts into them, like glass. By May, the wind has stopped gusting and the days are just hot, hot, stifling hot. The classroom was unbearable. We all wore shorts every day, which made me wonder if Mr. Busby was looking down our pants at our underwear when we did calisthenics after lunch. He’d wander in and out among the rows of children, pausing to glance down at us as we lay on our backs, legs in the air, pumping an imaginary bike.

Sometime in May, the school arranged for all the third and fourth graders to go to the community pool for the day. This was a big outing in a school too poor for field trips. Like all of us, Maria was excited. She came to school dressed up in a lime green satin dress, which had an unfortunate stain on the back. Nobody wanted to sit next to her on the bus.

Marylou and Tisha were friends that day, and had decided, inexplicably, to ignore the rest of us. We were free to hang out with whomever we wanted, and I chose to hang out alone.

But Marylou’s ghost was right there with me.

Waiting in line at the diving board, one of the boys in another class-a very dark-skinned Mexican American-shoved me, claiming I had cut into line. I had been waiting patiently, like everybody, for a long time, and here he was, taking my place in line when he hadn’t been waiting at all.

I tried to reason with him and a teacher, his teacher, came over, grabbed my arm, and hustled me away. “It’s not nice to cut into line,” she hissed at me.

I waited by the side of the pool, watching as that dark boy jumped off the diving board. Something inside me, broken and wet.

When he came up for air and climbed out of the pool, I was waiting. “You’re a liar and a cheat,” I said between clenched teeth.

Who was he? What was his name? It didn’t matter. I hated him. I hated him. I hated everything about him. I hated his dark skin. I hated his Mexican accent. I hated his skinny body. I hated, hated, hated him, I reeked of hatred, I let it seethe out of me, like the scent of garlic from the body’s pores.

He glared back at me. “You’re a liar and a cheat,” he said, and matched me stare for stare.

A teacher hustled us apart. I went to a far corner and sulked. My archenemy jostled his way towards the front of the line. Within minutes, he was jumping off the diving board again, clutching his knees together to make a cannonball and splashing some girls standing on the side. They squealed and ran away, their bodies freshly wet and glistening in the sun.

I shifted my whole body so I couldn’t see him and scanned the pool for classmates-filled with a lost, lonely feeling, familiar and comforting and dirty all at once, like the first time I had masturbated. Giovanni swaggered past a blonde girl in another class, and she cut her eyes at him, giggling. Marylou and Tisha were in the shallow end of the pool, whispering together like they were the only two people in the world. Who were they talking about? Were they talking about me?

I shuffled out of my chair and walked slowly towards them, the pavement burning the soles of my feet. As I approached, Marylou looked up, her arm across her forehead, squinting in the bright desert sun. For just a second, her face looked old, old, old- shriveled in the sun-and suddenly it felt like I could walk and walk and walk, forever, but I was never going to reach her.

Third grade ended soon after. Marylou flunked, so I moved on into fourth grade without her. Yet-almost three decades later-memories of Marylou and Giovanni still haunt me.

A few years ago, just as I was beginning to withdraw from my marriage for reasons I still don’t completely understand, my first husband and I bought a house just off of Borderland, that old neighborhood where I’d spent so many miserable days-just a year, really, a year that felt like ten.

I imagined writing a story about a woman who moves into her childhood home, the home where she’d been sexually molested while her parents remodeled it. During the course of re-remodeling the house as an adult, my imagined character discovered notes she’d written when she was a child. In those notes, she garbled about her experiences and wondered why somebody-God, her parents, a teacher-didn’t help her. She threw the notes inside the unfinished walls and there they piled up, waiting for years, only to be rediscovered at a time when the now-grown-up child was ready to face her past. Though I never wrote the story, I imagined a happy ending for her, where she found healing and hope by reading those old notes she’d written as a child. The act of moving into her childhood home and remodeling became symbolic, a metaphor, for the state of her soul.

The fantasy of that imagined character stayed with me, even as my marriage started to unravel.

One day shortly after we moved into our new home, I walked the length of Borderland. First I went to our old house, the one we’d rented. It was white, stucco crumbling. It looked sad and lonely, set so far off the road like that, nothing but desert on two sides. I turned around and walked the other direction, trying to find Giovanni’s house and failing. Then I turned onto Marylou’s road, wondering if I’d even recognize her place. Though it was painted a different color, and looked smaller, shabbier, and closer to the road than my memory indicated, it was her house, all-right. The front yard was cluttered with weeds and things-a broken cement fountain, a small shrine to a saint I didn’t recognize, and an old car that hadn’t moved in twenty years.

I kept walking. I didn’t want to look at her house too closely. But I stopped long enough to notice the wooden plaque over the door, containing the names of Marylou’s parents, Marylou, and her brother. Though Marylou’s sisters had clearly moved on, and weren’t living at home anymore, Marylou was still there, living with her parents.

I couldn’t help smiling to myself as I moved on down the road.

Please click on her artwork below for a full size image.