Original Thoughts Are Dead

Important Package

2010-08-07T13:02:00.000-07:00

The following is inspired by the brilliant writings of one Edith A. Zimmerman (I don't actually know her middle name, but I hope it starts with an 'A' because it flows quite nicely).

Today at work I was supposed to take a really important package across the street to have it mailed, but as soon as I stepped outside I remembered that just that morning I’d run out of toilet paper, so I decided to stop by the store on the way so I could replenish. But as I was making my way to the store, I passed a bakery that was handing out free samples, so I went inside to see if the free samples included any gingersnap cookies because they’d been on my mind since last week when I saw a dead rat on the street it and it reminded me of the time my pet hamster Hari-kiri’d himself in his wheel. He had light brown fur so I’d named him Nutmeg, which is a type of spice, like ginger, and that made me think of gingersnap cookies. But the bakery was only giving out tiny samples of their day-old bagels, and everyone knows only street people and graduate students eat day-olds. Blech. But now I was thinking about food, so I walked over to the Vietnamese place on 5th so I could get some Pho. It’s really hard for me to order it because I feel like I’m telling the order taker an incomplete thought instead of what I want to eat. What I usually do is whisper the rest of the sentence under my breath like, ‘Yes, could I please have the vegetarian Pho (nny you should say that, I too was wondering if that man’s hair is on backward), or ‘I’ll have the large Pho (ll moon tonight, eh? Better keep the women and children inside and lock the doors tight). This time I went with ‘One Pho (dge is my favorite dessert because you can eat the whole tray and not feel guilty), please!’ But I could only eat half of it because I swear I saw some meat giblets floating around with the noodles, and I became vegetarian when the woman who signed off my court-ordered community service hours at the local VFW made me taste rancid meat to see if it was still ok to serve to the vets. We served it, and no one seemed to be affected, but I spend 20 minutes in the bathroom and went through two cans of deodorizing spray before I could get back to washing the dishes.

I took one more slurp of my Thai iced tea and left the restaurant. I felt like I’d been gone for awhile, and my boss might be wondering where I was since you could actually see the mail place from the office, it was that close, so I decided to head back. But on my way I spotted an abandoned kitten huddled up in a dirty doorway. I crouched down and slowly waddled toward the little guy with my hand out cooing, ‘It’s ok, there, there.’ The kitten didn’t seem to be moving much, so I frantically dialed animal services. I have their number programmed into my phone from that time I saw a black bear outside my window, but later turned out to be some shrubs that had been trimmed in a very convincing shape. I sat down by the little orphan and waited for the rescue team to arrive. I finally saw the animal services van turn the corner about 45 minutes later, and I ran into the street wildly waving my arms so he would know where to unload the stretcher and the IV’s and all that other medical equipment they use to save lives. I guess he wanted to assess the situation before he started unloading things, because the driver just slid out of the seat and followed me back to the kitten. I pointed to the little trembling ball of fur and told the animal services man he needed to act quick, I didn’t think the little guy was going to be able to hold on much longer, but the guy just looked at me like I was crazy. It turns out it was actually just a wadded up piece of trash, but boy did it look like a kitten to me.

By this time, I figured I had definitely been gone too long, so I scurried back to the office with my head down so I couldn’t get distracted by anything else, like a horrific car accident or a penny that had fallen on the sidewalk heads up (if it’s tails up, I avoid that thing like the plague, because everyone knows ‘tails’ rhymes with ‘fails’ and I plan on going far in my life).

When I got back to the office, my boss asked me where I’d been for the last four hours. I told her just as I was arriving at the mailing center, the delivery truck was pulling away, and since I knew how important it was to get the package out, I decided I had to follow the truck to try to get the package to the driver. I told her I lost him when he crossed Market and the light changed, but I gauged the flow of traffic and was able to weave my way through. At one point, I even had to slide across the hood of a Toyota Corolla, just like when Luke slides across the hood of The General Lee, only my skirt got stuck and part of it ripped off, exposing my underwear. I told her that luckily the skirt was the reversible kind where the inside looked exactly like the outside, so I was able to just flip it before I came back to the office. I explained about my chronic asthma and how dangerous it was for me to be exerting my self like that. ‘I was doubled over, nearly wheezing myself to death!, I told her, ‘I sounded like an accordion with a hole punched in the side!’ But she had entrusted me with a important job, and collapsed lungs or not, I was going to get that package delivered!

But really by the time I remembered about the package, I’d missed the last delivery, so I just threw the package into a trashcan on the street.

2010-08-05T22:28:00.000-07:00

When I was young, I used to lie on my bed with my head hanging off the edge so it nearly swept the floor. I would stare up at the glossy paint on the ceiling and let my mind go as blood rushed to my brain. I was thinking about how calming it used to feel and wondered why I stopped doing it. I wanted to see if I could reach that same place now, so I stretched across my bed and let my head dangle over the edge. But it wasn't the same. This ceiling is cracked, and the bulbs in the light are completely burnt out.

2010-07-14T23:02:00.000-07:00

I thrive on conflict. I feast on the edge of disaster.

From whence we came

2010-07-13T22:04:00.000-07:00

This gravity, this weight,
bears down on my bones and holds me here
Pushing my face into the sheets
These sheets where birth and death hold hands
These sheets that smell of bleach.
These fibers laced like tangled webs,
hold fast to memories
They fade, fade faster even than me.
Between these threads, my arm
across your hollow chest
And inside a disease
its raspy voice heard through your mouth
A threat with every breath.
The cords and wires strung across our bodies
Yours bone wrapped in flesh.
And these machines gave one last sigh
And cowered in the corners
Their eyes cast down
Their breathing ceased
Looking to you to be the last one to speak.

I beg this heaviness, crush my bones.
Let it grind them into carbon.

These tears run heavy down my face
so hot they burn my skin
And in their wake a permanent scar
a mark of my infinite sadness.

A Scissor, A Sunset

2010-05-11T22:27:00.000-07:00

'What does it feel like,' he asked, 'to be so sad?'
'It feels like your heart is made of lead,' she explained, 'and it's suspended on a thin fraying rope that's trying to keep it from disappearing into the black hole inside your stomach.'
'I don't want you to feel that way any more,' he said, 'what can I do?'
'You can love me as hard as you can,' she said, 'and you can never go away, no matter what.'
'But I'm scared that won't be enough,' he said.

This life is but a woken dream (WIP:work in progress)

2010-05-06T00:36:00.000-07:00

The ants showed up the day after Collin moved out. At first, it was just 3 or 4 that carefully made their way across the green tile above the sink, but now as she stood brushing her teeth, she watched a steady line moving one after the other across her bathroom wall. She couldn’t figure out where they were coming from, or where they seemed to be going. They appeared somewhere out of the floor by the bathroom door and made their way up the wall, past the toilet paper, across the tile above the sink, along the base of the window that opened to the air shaft, and disappeared into the far corner of the window where the wood failed to meet up, leaving a tiny, ant-sized hole. She’d thought about getting some Raid or an ant trap, but the ants didn’t seem to be interested in anything else but getting where they were going, so she decided to leave them alone. They’d been trekking through the apartment for about two weeks now, and she’d spent hours leaned against the sink watching them interact. One ant seemed to be the messenger for the group and he would run against the stream, stopping to touch antennae with whoever he came across. She imagined he was giving them directions to wherever they were headed. She couldn’t get anywhere without a detailed map, but these tiny creatures were moving worlds away with only an energetic tour guide leading. She was happy to have any diversion, even if it was what some people might consider pests running across the walls. The ants were also a good reason to keep from looking at herself in the mirror. She knew the bags under her eyes had started to darken and the fullness in her face had melted away, leaving a sunken space beneath her cheek bone. At night, it was hard for her to tell if she was awake or still asleep. The night before, a storm perched over the city, blowing trees over and dumping rain in tremendous amounts. She’d woken up suddenly, convinced the force from the wind was going to shatter the windows and the rain would get in, ruining everything. She got out of bed and went to the window, her hands frantically wiping across the glass searching for cracks, leaving smudge marks against the dark night and the fuzzy street lamps. Then she suddenly snapped out of it and quickly pulled her hands from the cold glass.

Many nights she spent sitting on the edge of her windowsill, back resting against the window and legs stretched out on the fire escape. Collin hated smoking and although it didn’t give her great pleasure, it seemed to be one of the few things she could take comfort in lately. She would sit, wrapped in a winter coat, listening to the heels on the sidewalk and the voices coming up from below. Couples and groups of friends on their way home after a night out at the bar. She’d smoke cigarette after cigarette, inhaling deeply. When she exhaled, she imagined it was a little bit of Collin breaking free from somewhere inside her and finding its way out in a gentle puff of smoke.

She felt a constant draft in the apartment and went around checking all the windows to make sure they were shut tight. They always were, and she could never figure out where the cold was coming from. She drank endless cups of tea, but still felt as if her bones were made from frigid metal. She dried her skin out by standing directly in front of the heater with her sweatshirt pulled up, letting the hot air move over her pale skin, up and down every ridge of her back bone and settle in the soft skin between her ribs. She hadn’t been to the store for days. When her headache got too bad, she would eat a handful of the nuts her mom sent her from her home town farmer’s market. There was nothing else in the apartment to eat, but she didn’t really seem to notice.

On her way home from work the other day, she came up behind an old woman carrying a plastic shopping bag, shuffling down the sidewalk with the help of a cane. Em didn’t want to scare the woman, so she dragged her feet a few times, her tennis shoes scraped across the sidewalk in what Em hoped was an efficient announcement of her approach. The woman couldn’t have been more than 5 feet tall and less, now that she was hunched over her cane. Em tried to see what was in the plastic bag, what was so important it warranted a laborious trip to the store late in the evening, but the bag was too thick and she was left with only suggestive outlines. As she passed the old woman, still dragging her feet, she noticed the faint outline of a urine stain on the seat of the old woman’s pants. She imagined her arriving home to her apartment, the kitchen counters and rugs coated in a layer of filth the old woman could no longer see, or at least no longer had the ability to do anything about. She’d unload three bottles of vitamins, a pack of batteries to be used in the television remote and a chocolate bar from the plastic grocery sack. She’d stuff the sack in another big bag among dozens of other grocery sacks. Living through the Depression had taught the old woman to let nothing go to waste. She would place the vitamin bottles on the counter with all her other medicines. Tomorrow she would drop one pill into each of the seven little boxes on her pill organizer. When the bottles were in their place, the old woman would ease into her recliner and change the batteries in the remote, making sure they worked by punching in the number for her favorite channel. Then she would eat half her candy bar and fall asleep in her chair, the sound from the television and the ticking of the clock on the wall the only things keeping her company as her chest rose and fell. Em wondered if that would be her one day, shuffling down the street alone and falling asleep in a worn chair in the middle of an empty apartment.

Collin had been gone for weeks, and even though she’d changed the sheets, wanting to get rid of his smell, when she climbed into bed at night, she still slept on only the right side.

Figment

2010-04-25T23:07:00.000-07:00

The unpolluted night air was a welcome feeling compared to the complicated atmosphere inside the bar. The bartenders were yelling for people to get moving. Tonight just became this morning. She leaned up against the building, the tip of her heel scraping into the gritty brick wall. She took a drag from her cigarette and wondered how it could be so hot in a city surrounded by freezing Pacific waters. She could hear her friends spilling out of the bar, trying to coordinate who would go home in a cab with whom. She kept her head down, not wanting them to know she was still there. Her empty apartment waited patiently for her, but it was too much right now; if she went back, the loneliness might completely envelop her, finding its way into her lungs, into her heart, until she couldn't take it anymore, and she would give in to it in one final sigh. The glowing end of her cigarette was dangerously close to her mouth when she felt her phone buzz. She took another drag and slipped the phone out of her pocket. She'd seen the text a thousand times in her head, but the words still seemed foreign glowing back at her from the screen. She flicked her cigarette into the trash can and walked into the street, hand raised.

She'd never been to the apartment building, but as the cab pulled up, it felt familiar, somewhere she'd spent hours in. She gave the driver double what was deserved, because this trip meant more to her than the standard tip. She paused at the top of the stairs, looking on to the quiet street, considering disappearing back into the night. But she turned, reached out to the call box and punched the memorized number into the machine. A shrill, solid buzz immediately greeted her.

The building smelled of history. Of heavy, complicated, familial stories she knew she was about to add a chapter to. A nervous chill ran through her body as she followed the numbers, watching them get higher and higher. She reached the door and stood for a moment, taking in the brush stokes in the thick, glossy paint. She wanted to commit every inch of it to memory. Her fist made a tiny, muffled sound on the wood, but the handle turned and the door slowly opened. She lifted her eyes to his, light meeting dark, unblinking. She reached for him, her hand on his neck, forcing his face to hers. She heard the door slam shut as her bag hit the floor.

It was too much. It wasn't fast enough. She was lying on the stark white sheets naked, her chest rapidly moving up and down. Her hands spread out beside her, reaching for something, reaching for anything. He moved away from her and made his way toward the windows. 'I have to close all the curtains,' he said, 'I don't want the neighbors to see what I'm going to do to you.'

No such thing as a full recovery

2010-04-02T00:13:00.000-07:00

She could feel the imprint of the wood against her cheek, her skin seeping down into each little crevice, memorizing the shape of the wood, the makeup of the granules, so when she finally pulled herself from the floor, the texture would be transposed in detailed red blotches, and hang there for perhaps a few minutes, until it slowly disappeared, finding its way into her skin. She dug her fingertip into a nick beside her head. She liked to lie on the floor and think about who created all the marks and chips in the walls and the hardwood. She hated the saying, 'If only these walls could talk,' but she couldn't stop it from scampering across her thoughts every time she played this game. She would make up stories to explain what may have caused the scars. The particular piece of damage she was currently digging her finger into happened over 40 years ago when a young couple occupied the apartment. The winter had been extraordinarily cold and the newlyweds were bringing back armloads of firewood to warm the frigid room. Henry had insisted on carrying an enormous load and just as he was about to set the logs down on a tarp, a large one escaped from his grasp and came crashing down onto the hardwood, taking out a chunk of the floor. His wife was angry at first, that his clumsiness had marred their first home together, but years from that day she would look at the chip and think about their first winter together, huddled by the fire, sifting through the coin jar to see if they had enough money for a cheap bottle of wine. The notch in the wood signified the simplest of times, when their love was pure and new.

She always played this game when she felt nervous. It calmed her to be able to create and control other people's stories when she felt she had little control over her own. Her hand felt heavy as she ran it over the smooth wood. Her stomach felt small and dried up. She hadn't been able to eat all day, and the cups of black coffee she brewed and consumed steadily throughout the afternoon were only helping to add to her anxiety. She turned over on her back, resting her hands on her sharp hip bones. Dust swirled and dipped in the fading sunlight, as if dancing an un-choreographed number to a silent symphony. She watched a sparrow land on a branch just outside the window and remembered reading somewhere how difficult sparrows were to keep as pets because of their constant nervous movement and severe objection to being caged. She was thinking about what it would be like to hold a sparrow in her hands when she heard the key in the lock. She remained motionless in the middle of the floor, listening to his footsteps getting louder and louder, concentrating on the downy feathers covering the jerky sparrow's tiny body. His hand came into her view and the bird darted off, frightened by the movement he sensed out of the corner of his eye.

'What are you doing down there on the floor?' he said, still holding his hand out, patiently waiting for her to offer her own hand. 'Nothing,' she said, allowing herself to be pulled from the ground. They stood before each other for a second, she looked up at him, concentrating on the uneven gray circles that ringed his dark pupils. He broke her stare and turned away. 'Come into the kitchen,' he said, 'I'll make tea and we can talk.' She glanced out the window again, hoping the sparrow had worked up enough courage to return to his perch, but all that was on the branch was a brown leaf, shaking and struggling to hold onto the branch as cold air tugged at its every surface. She turned toward the kitchen, digging her bare toe into the chipped hardwood as she went.

He'd already filled the kettle with water and set it on the stove by the time she sat down at the worn kitchen table. Nothing in the apartment was new. They'd spend months at thrift stores, garage sales and flea markets collecting just the right furniture to fill their new space. The table was one of their first finds, and as they carried it in to the tiny kitchen, they were amazed at how well it fit and joked that perhaps the table had belonged to previous tenants who had it specially made to fit perfectly between the pantry and the sink. He moved around the kitchen, grabbing mugs and tea bags. He started fixing her cup exactly the way she liked it. One bag of peppermint, one bag of cinnamon, one teaspoon of honey now, another drizzled into the boiling water. The kettle began to whistle and he twisted the knob to turn the heat off. She knew how much he hated to hear the high pitched scream longer than he had to. She cupped her hands around the ceramic mug as he carefully poured the steaming water in. She wanted to feel the heat overcome the cup and make its way into her freezing hands. He drizzled another teaspoon of honey into her water and gave it five gentle stirs -- enough to dissolve the honey in, but not too much as to disrupt the tea bags, causing spices to break free and float to the top. She watched bubbles from the teabags rise to the surface of the water as he settled into the chair across from her.

He sighed, and spread his hands on the table. She'd always loved his hands. She would ball her fists as tight and small as they would go and make him wrap his hands around them. It made her feel safe knowing that if she made her self small enough, she could fit inside, just like that, where no one would be able to touch her. 'Em,' he said, looking at the top of her bent head, 'we can't say we didn't try.' She concentrated on her tea, watching the heat vapors curl off the water. She blinked slowly, using as much effort to open her eyes as she was using to close them. 'I really thought getting an apartment together was going to do it for us, ' he said, 'I thought there was no way we wouldn't work if it was just you and me, nothing to distract us from each other. But it's been two years, Em, and I feel like I'm sitting in a car stuck in traffic looking out the window, and all of a sudden I think I'm moving, but it turns out to be the car next to me pulling away, and I actually haven't gone anywhere, forward or backward, I'm still in the same place, stuck.' She raised her head and looked into his eyes. The gray seemed darker and the uneven lines that rimmed his pupils seemed to be moving, humming just slightly, like the ink line made by a seismograph. 'I've tried so hard. I've literally exhausted myself, but no matter what I do, I feel like I don't know you any better than I did four years ago. I know all about you, how you like to listen to Iron and Wine on mornings when you're hungover, and how you swear you can taste the difference between food cooked in the microwave and food cooked in the oven, and how you have to triple check your alarm before you can peacefully fall asleep, but those are all things I know about you. You refuse to let me in, Em, despite how hard I try and how patient I am with you. I don't even know what to think any more. I don't know what to do. I feel like we're just living side by side, in a common existence. I can't do it any more, Em, I'm sorry.'

She closed her eyes and forced herself into that space where she felt she was floating and falling at the same time. She tried to push herself deeper, as deep as she could, like when she was a little girl and she would slide down to the very bottom of the bed where the sheets were tucked in as tight as they would go, and she'd yank the blankets over her head, feeling the weight of the comforter and the pile of handmade quilts pressing down on her. 'You're not a bad person,' he said, brushing away the strands of hair that had fallen across her face, 'just an empty one.'

Rio Negro Lane

2010-03-29T22:09:00.000-07:00

I spent over a year living in what my friends described as a commune on the Central Coast of California. Although I’m from Boulder, I don't consider myself a crunchy hippie, so I felt the description of my living situation was somewhat extreme, but never made an effort to refute it. The house had 6ish bedrooms and a whole other guest house out back. The bottom floor was occupied by the owners of the house, Cynthia and Dennis, a married couple in their mid-50's who fit together about as nicely as a cask of gun powder and a lit match. The main house was a sprawling 4,000 square feet, so it was often hard to tell if you were the only one home. Cynthia and Dennis had what is best described as their own wing. Their living room was large enough to fit a widescreen TV and the largest home office desk and shelving unit they could find at Office Max as well as a couch coated with a protective layer of fur from their barely living Pug, Whisper. Her name perfectly described her because by the time I met her, there was only about a whisper of life left in her stinky little body. There was another TV in the bedroom in case you didn't have enough energy to hoist yourself 10 feet into the living room to watch the latest episode of 'Big Brother' waiting to be watched on the Tivo. The shower in Cynthia and Dennis's wing could easily have housed an entire football team and then some. On New Year's Eve Cynthia had a few too many champagnes and and head butted the shower wall while getting ready for bed, but I still can't figure out how she managed to reach the wall with her face since both of the dual shower heads were positioned at least 10 feet from every wall. Maybe Cynthia was extremely tall, but I never noticed because she was always folded up into her wheelchair. Cynthia spent most of her time rolling around the bottom floor of the house as a result of a back injury 'from a fall at the hot tubs at Sycamore Springs,' but I suspect it was more a combination of laziness, Taco Bell and extra large Meatlover's Domino's pizzas. I visited her in her bedroom one time when she came home from the hospital after hip surgery and she was snacking on an entire rotisserie chicken from Safeway. After she got done sucking every piece of gristle off a leg bone, she nonchalantly tossed it onto the carpet for Whisper to wrap her ancient little gums around. My face must have twisted into shock and disgust, but Cynthia didn't seem to catch it as the grease from a wing slid down her chins. Dennis was a psychologist at the Men's Colony, which is really just California's liberal way of saying minimum security prison for nutcases. Dennis was an intelligent man, but I wondered if maybe he was starting to identify with some of his patients. He had a little half ring of hair around the back of his head and was constantly shoving a pair of what looked like prison-issue glasses back up the bridge of his nose. He was also a nervous laugher, which I find particularly unsettling. He would squish his shoulders up and emit a high pitched hee hee hee hee after I told him I had to wait 10 minutes to use the treadmill at the gym. I would find myself staring back at him with a forced smile on my face and a foreign ha ha ha coming out of my mouth. Dennis spent most of his time in the garage where he worked on stained glass. It was originally a hobby Cynthia got into, but like most things, she abandoned it and the $5,000 kiln was left to collect dust until Dennis swooped in with visions of grandeur and ideas for a jewelry making business rattling around in his head like a loose penny in a dryer. He made everything from earrings to belt buckles. On weekends he liked to enjoy his handicraft with his shirt off, exposing his thin, pale old man body to everyone in the neighborhood. Dennis must have the metabolism of a cheetah because he could polish off an entire pizza for dinner and his ribs would still be sticking out. It's really no wonder Cynthia was so gargantuan, she probably just mirrored what Dennis ate and before she knew it she was wondering which wall the fire department could cut a rescue hole through without compromising the structural integrity of the house. I'm not really sure if Cynthia and Dennis loved each other. They had a photo on the desk near their computer of a much younger them on a skiing trip, and they looked genuinely happy standing arm in arm at the top of the run, skis in hand, but the look on their faces in the photo wasn't something I ever saw during my time in their house. Maybe they were sad their only son was in South America with Peace Corp for two years instead of at home petting Whisper and showing them how to use YouTube. Or maybe they were just tired of each other.

Sandy and Cynthia met in some community college class and after Cynthia learned about Sandy’s husband’s tendency to get drunk and hit her, Cynthia invited her to come live in the house so Sandy could get away from him and his greasy mechanic’s hands. Sandy lived in an upstairs bedroom with her own bathroom when she was paying rent, and the downstairs bedroom, which only fit her king size bed and put her at the mercy of Cynthia’s nagging, when she wasn’t paying. During my stay in the house, Sandy spent most of her time downstairs. She would often stay up all night watching her free cable on a tiny TV she managed to squeeze on a table jammed in the corner of the room. I would go downstairs at midnight to head to the news station and see the light from the screen bouncing around under the door. Her life reminded me of the last summer I spent at home before college, only I had been 17 and she was in her 40’s. Despite her life of leisure, she always seemed stressed out or put out despite getting free room and board and unemployment checks. Instead of using the money for rent, she would spend it on hoards of groceries and packs of Marlboros. I would come home from producing the morning show all night and find Sandy and Cynthia relaxing in the pool, trashy romance novels in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It might seem like they were living the good life at first, but I sure never envied them. Sandy thought it was a persistent black cloud that had caused her life to turn to shit, but I think it was her attitude and laziness. She’d often tell me how lucky I was to have parents who paid for me to go to college and that’s why I had a great job in news. She was right, I was fortunate that I had parents that cared about me and sacrificed to ensure I never had to struggle, but Sandy’s only daughter only came around once a year to see her own mother because that was all she could stand of her. So based on Sandy’s own parenting skills, I imagine it was the money that made her jealous of me, not my great parents. It was difficult to get to know Sandy because she quickly wavered from living in a fantasy world in which she was going to start her own business, to complaining about how hard it was to find a job and how every job listed on the county’s website wasn’t something she could ever see herself doing. Sandy started and quit three jobs in the time I knew her. At the first job, the manager didn’t respect her and gave her menial, administrative tasks to do. At the second job, the people that worked there were unfriendly and ignored her. The third job involved doing things she just wasn’t interested in. If there was some sort of company that based its business model on doing nothing but complaining about everything, she would have been the CEO.

Art worked for the postal office and had the best room in the house. He had a deck off his bedroom, a huge walk-in closet and connected, private bathroom with a tub that overlooked the expansive backyard. When he moved out, I would later occupy the room for 3 months before moving to San Francisco. Sadly, I only got to use the tub once. Art was in his early 40’s and lived his life shrouded in dark mystery. He had a tiny, red, fuel-efficient car he would use during the week, and a loud, badass Harley that would roar down the country roads on the weekend. I imagined him as a 20-something pounding Coors Original in a dive bar with his Hell’s Angels friends, but more likely he was once a family man who would do anything for his son and he bought the bike as an affirmation that he was still young at heart, despite the stories the creases in his face might be trying to tell. Most women would describe Art as tall, dark and handsome, but despite his good looks, I was suspicious of him. Whenever he was at home, he would be in his room with the door shut. He never even left it slightly ajar while he ran to the kitchen for a soda. This made me wonder what he was trying to hide. Was he lying on his bed, hand on his crotch, watching ‘Remember The Tight Ones’ or some other movie from his extensive porno collection? Or worse, while I was at work, did he place tiny cameras around my room to film me undressing? When I was in the shower, I would inspect the grout in between the tiles for anything suspicious. He could easily drill out a space to slip a waterproof video camera in to and be going to town on himself over me lathering up with my Dove Deep Moisture Body Wash For Dry Skin. I guess I’ll never know why Art was so secretive about his room, but I have to admit I didn’t find any weird stains on the walls or carpet when I took over the room.

Irinea and her daughter, Irinea, came to live with us a few months after I got to the house. Irinea, or Irene, had lived with Cynthia when she was younger and getting her degree at a local college, but moved back to Mexico and got a job on a cruise ship shortly after graduation. She always told fantastic stories and punctuated the most important parts with a classic Spanish over-dramatization. She dressed fairly simply except when she would go to her daughter’s school for performances or conferences. She took on the role of housekeeper during her stay at Rio Negro Lane, so her outfits mirrored her duties. She had full lips and a broad smile and eyes her daughter said looked like Whisper’s since they stuck out of her head a fair amount. Little Irinea, or Iri, or ‘Edie’ if said with the correct Spanish pronunciation, had bravely come to the U.S.
with her mother to spend 3rd grade in an English speaking school so she could learn to speak like an American. She went from barely being able to say ‘Hello, how are you?’ to reading me English books at a 4th grade reading level. When I was working in marketing and advertising, I would come home at night to find Irene in the kitchen with no fewer than 3 pots on the stove and a pan of something in the oven. Iri would be bent over her homework sounding English words out and asking for help in Spanish. A Spanish-English dictionary found a permanent home on the kitchen island in case a curveball came up in the homework and a consultation was needed. Whisper was constantly underfoot, using her nose, one of the few functions that hadn’t given up on her yet, to search out any little piece of food that may have hit the ground. Irene would look down at Whisper’s cloudy, rheumy eyes and tell her, ‘Ay, Wheespur. Get outta here. You are so astinky.’ Iri would laugh and ask her mom if she could be done with la comida and have galletas y leche for dessert. She would enjoy the end of the meal with an English cartoon. Cartoons really are universal. One of the first nights Irene and Iri came to stay with us, Iri was watching ‘The Simpsons,’ which I remember watching when I first moved to Mexico, and she was laughing at all their slapstick antics and enjoying it as much as a young American kid would, all the adult humor flying right over their heads. Irene and Iri shared a room upstairs just down the hall from mine. My room was enormous compared to theirs and I felt guilty for taking up all that space for just one person. I shared a bathroom with them and would often find every shampoo, lotion, face wash, you name it bottle arranged in neat little rows across the counter. I guess you make do when you’re forced to leave all your good toys in another country.

My room was actually my rooms. When you first entered, you were in an office with a desk and a closet and and large clothes bureau. The walls were painted in gold diamonds that looked like someone may have slapped up at the end of a long coke bender. Through another door was the bedroom that was built over the 3 car garage and stretched over nearly all of it. There were 2 gorgeous skylights that, after moving in and realizing what an extraordinary amount of light they let in, I would end up covering with removable pieces of cardboard so I could get to bed by 4 pm and get up at midnight to head in to the news station. The day I quit news was celebrated by a violent ripping down of the cardboard pieces. As it turned out, the room was too large. I pushed the bed up against the farthest wall from the door and put the TV at the opposite wall, but when I would put ‘Seinfeld’ on before bed, Jerry looked like he was raving about man hands on a 10 inch, not the 42 inch I had invested over a half a paycheck on. The room also had odd little storage cubbies that ran the length of two walls. The ceiling was sloped because it followed the shape of the roof of the house, so a grown man would have to crawl through the cubby doors, but I think that made them even creepier. I often woke up in the middle of the night thinking I’d heard one of the doors creaking open. I finally got smart and put bells on each of the doorknobs. At least that would give me more time to jab a finger into my attacker’s eyes or roll away from the shiv before it could pierce through my sternum.

But it wasn’t through the creepy elfin doors that my potential assassin would come. It was through the heating vent, or a cracked window or perhaps the faucet in the tub, but surely not the faucet in the sink, unless this thing was some sort of contortionist, which, looking back, I wouldn’t put past him, so perhaps that should also be included as means for how he gained entrance (and a means that subsequently should have been plugged up with arsenic pellets and industrial strength cement).

I had come back from a weekend trip in some exotic location, no doubt, and decided to get in bed early and fall asleep to the TV. Like a metaphorical poem comparing the sun set to death, so too appeared this dark villain as dusk slipped in to night. It may have been instinct, or possibly tremors caused by his thick, hairy legs, but I woke up suddenly to find the light from the TV bouncing off the white walls, but getting lost in a dark shadow in the corner. Without my glasses, the dark spot looked harmless, until I started squinting and it slowly took on a shape I once saw behind plate glass in the Arachnid House at the zoo. I leaped from my bed, never taking my eyes off the figure and uttering a quick thanks that the light switch was on the other side of the room and not under the shadow, being protected like an angry bum’s only sleeping bag. I thought spiders the size of dinner plates only existed in the Amazon and Jurassic Park, so this one was either hopelessly lost, or he’d been feeding on neighborhood children and was now looking to graduate into adult prey, starting with me. My mind raced as I stood glued to the wall. What was that statistic I had heard somewhere about people swallowing an average of seven spiders in a lifetime? What if this little fucker had managed to ball himself up enough to get me to swallow? Surely each one of the thousands of hairs on his body was filled with poison. He would have died in my stomach and as he decomposed the poison would seep out and into my bloodstream. Doctor after doctor would run tests on me, diagnosing me with obscure diseases but offering no solutions for how to cure my ailments, until finally I would die and the coroner would slice me open only to find one shriveled, bristly leg bobbing around the remnants of a grilled cheese sandwich. I imagined him, clinging to the wall three feet from where I was deep in dreamland, my sleeping image dancing in the light of the TV on his many eyes. Surely his chest rose and fell with anticipation until he focused on his sniper breathing technique to prepare for the attack. This was no one-shoe job. Especially not a women’s size 5, which was the only thing available to me within arm’s reach. The spider would likely catch it using just one leg, leap off the wall onto my face, and use the shoe to beat me senseless and teach me a lesson before sinking his fangs into me. This thing needed a good solid book I would be willing to dispose of following the murder, or some sort of small, heat seeking missile. The biggest book I could see was Don Quixote, but it was only the paperback version, and I knew it sorely lacked the girth I needed to take this tufted beast down. My options were limited since I refused to take my eye off the spider and give him a chance to dart under a piece of furniture laughing, assuming I would live in fear for the next several months while he planned another fang-filled attack. Had he managed that, I would have vacated the room with only the pajamas on my back, and promptly set fire to the house. Two can play this game, sucker.

Out of the corner of my eyes I scanned the room for possible provisions: CDs, flimsy books, socks, running shoes, dirty clothes, and there I saw it resting against the wall in the corner - a curtain rod that had been there since the day I moved into the room. I didn’t question then why there would be an extra curtain rod resting in the corner, and I won’t question it now. I slowly inched over to my new bludgeoning device, the spider’s neck turning as it followed my every move. I picked it up in my sweaty hand and held it like a baseball bat, taking a few practice swings and envisioning me taking it down in one fell swoop and then billy clubbing it to death, bits of spider flesh and splashes of blood flying up into my face as I laughed maniacally. But then I realized with how severely my arms had started to tremble just thinking about getting 4 feet from the spider, I would be lucky to hit the wall at all, let alone do actual damage to the spider. I couldn’t risk him drafting the air from my missed swing and using it to propel his body on to mine. I decided to combine the running shoe and the curtain rod to create a weapon that would allow me a large, steady impact zone, and gain some leverage and force through my swing, but also allow me to stay a slightly less than reasonable distance away from what were likely rows of razor sharp teeth. The problem with the shoe-rod, however, was that I couldn’t get the shoe tied to the rod securely, so instead, it just sort of hung there and threatened to fall off every time I moved the rod. At this point I had to abandon my visions of heroically toppling the spider and standing atop his defeated carcass. So I did the next best thing, I called for help.

My rescue crew, in the form of Irene, arrived in about 30 seconds. She spotted the spider immediately and simply whispered, ‘Ay. Dios mio.’ She disappeared from my room and returned with a large broom, her bright yellow rubber gloves, paper towels, 409 and a plastic grocery sack - the murder weapon, and the crime scene cleanup. I was glad she thought to put the gloves on before any actual cleaning needed to be done; they seemed thick enough to repel a bite, and they would protect her shirt from any blood spatter, and I was sure there would be a deluge based on the size of this thing. Irene approached the spider from the side, as I vigorously waved my hands, hoping to distract him from his impending death. I didn’t see the broom actually make contact with his ill-fated body since I was squeezing my eyes shut, but the entrails smeared across the wall told me it was over. It took the September issue of Cosmo to scoop the rest of the spider’s remains off the carpet and about half a bottle of 409 to get every little hair off the wall, but I was saved. After a 15 minute standoff, in which several scenes from my short life passed before my eyes, I was free to go back to bed, unmolested by things on eight legs.

Unless I was wrong, and the spider was a she and before I woke up she had been scurrying around the room discretely tucking eggs into safe locations. In that case, I would have to move. I should move, just to be safe.

Bridger National Forest

2010-03-24T23:28:00.000-07:00

The fire danger was high that summer, so our campfire was a full Nalgene bottle with a Petzl headlamp pressed to it. We sat in a circle around the makeshift flame, heads down, blades of grass twisting between our fingers. Trails of lightning streaked across the sky as a summer storm moved toward our quiet bluff.

Sara pulled her North Face jacket over her tiny knees and rocked back and forth. She moved her red scarf away from her mouth, ‘It started last year,’ she said, ‘I was in four college prep classes and working 25 hours a week at a part time job. I felt like I had no control over anything. I was studying all the time and getting good grades, but I felt like that came naturally and it wasn’t something I really had to work that hard for, so that’s when I started counting every calorie that went into my mouth. It was the easiest thing to control and the easiest thing to think up excuses for since my schedule was so busy.’ She paused, her eyes unblinking and fixed on the glowing bottle of water. ‘Days would go by and I would have eaten a handful of saltine crackers and endless cups of black coffee and I would feel happier about that than the perfect I got on my English paper. It took my parents quite awhile to figure out what was going on, but by that time I was passing out on a regular basis and weighed about 25 pounds less than I should have. My parents immediately put me into therapy and hired a nutritionist and a trainer as a support team. I don’t work nearly as hard making myself healthy as I do in school. On days when I’m really stressed out, I’ll lie to everyone about what I ate that day. I still count every calorie and at the end of a day when I’ve managed to eat very little, I can’t help but feel a small bit of triumph in my heart. So that’s what I’m struggling with right now.’

I sat with my hands jammed into my pockets. I’d let my core temperature drop too low before thinking to put more layers on, and my body was struggling to heat itself back up. The winds were getting stronger as the storm swiftly made its way to us. Suddenly my mouth went dry and I could feel my hands start to sweat inside my cotton gloves. No one else was speaking, and I knew it was my turn to go. ‘What I’m dealing with right now,’ I said, not taking my eyes off the illuminated water, ‘and what I’ve been dealing with my entire life, is my father. I know almost nothing about him, and he knows almost nothing about me despite seeing him every week. He’s so focused on ‘winning at life’ and having the newest car and the biggest house and money to send his kids to a school that costs more than what a lot of people make in a year. But at the end of all this, when he’s on his deathbed, his cars won’t be there, and his big screen TV won’t be there.’ A tear rolls off my cheek and makes its way down the front of my coat. ‘Only I will be there, and I’ll have no words of comfort to give him as he slips away. I try to put myself out there to him but always end up limping back home, more hurt and more removed than when I started. I can’t comprehend looking at my father and seeing him as a total stranger. So that’s what I’m dealing with right now.’

A flash of lightning electrified the sky above our heads and we scrambled to get into our tents before the rain started. We folded our sleeping pads as many times as we could manage and balanced on the balls of our feet on top of them. We tucked our heads between our knees and clasped our hands behind our necks. If you do get struck by lightning, you want it to go in and out as fast as possible. Hail pelted the tent and I heard someone start counting, trying to time if the storm was still approaching, or moving away.

‘One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand -- CRACK.’

‘One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-th -- CRACK.’

‘One one-thousand, two one-thousand -- CRACK.’

‘One one-thousand -- CRACK.’

‘One one-thous -- CRACK.’

‘One -- CRACK.’

‘One one-thousand -- CRACK.’

‘One one-thousand, two one-thousand -- CRACK.’

‘One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand -- CRACK.’

‘One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, four one-thousand -- crack.’

We untwisted ourselves from our impromptu yoga poses and arranged our sleeping mats inside the tiny tent. We crawled deep into our sleeping bags and I pulled mine over my head until all I had was a tiny hole to breathe. No one said goodnight as we drifted off into a disconnected, unsettled sleep.

We got up just before dawn in order to ascend enough miles to the next campsite by dusk. Everyone was silent as we stuffed our sleeping bags into the bottom of our packs and rolled the tents up. We struggled to make our eyes adjust as we headed across the wild grass to the base of the mountain where the trail picked up. There was just enough light to argue for leaving our headlamps off, so we trudged west in a gray darkness. As we walked, it continued to get lighter and I noticed we were walking through a field of tall white flowers. The white petals sprang out of a thick, foot-high stem. In the dark, the tops of the flowers looked as if they were glowing. ‘It’s like walking through a field of stars,’ I said. Heads down, we walked on, carefully picking our paths so as not to disturb the tiny, floating orbs. As the sun made its way closer the horizon, the stars transformed themselves into ordinary-looking weeds growing in a grassy field in Bridger National Forest.