

### Small Town Glory

### by Eli Godbolt

### Copyright 2012 Eli Godbolt

### Smashwords Edition

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Original cover artwork by Matt Cory:

A Note to the Reader

About the Author

Contact Information

Sample of The Specters in Books

## Stories

Let me be very clear. I need you to understand this.

I write stories to cope. To wrap around my neck in the midnight ink. I hold stories tightly and they breathe slow against my chest and whisper like constellations. Their strength seeps and permeates skin.

I tell stories because if I don't, I spend half the night smoothing out my blankets while gazing at the moon and wishing I could scoop it out of the sky and place it in my ribs.

I am eighteen and a senior and I don't know you.

I want you to see things through my eyes, because it's the only way I know to speak. I want you to _feel_ the weight of my words.

I want you to feel these stories work through your veins. Like the words have mass and can pound their fins desperately upstream to your heart. I want to tell you about a town in the middle of a yawning countryside, a speck on a map, a place that smells like pungent manure and diesel. It is 1998. I am an eighteen-year-old boy with tree bark eyes.

Can you see me when you close your eyes?

Walk with me for a little while.

_Please_.

## Eleanor

There is one stoplight in Millbury. One.

It isn't even a stoplight, really. Just a flashing red light that reminds Bobby O'Shaye to slow the hell down when he comes to the only four-way stop in this town that smells like straw and honey-rain-atmosphere. Bobby is in his blue rusted out Ford pickup truck that has slashed seats with cottony stuffing throwing up out of the slats. It smells like a gym sock on the inside. It's like his skin has melded with the flannelled seats. Like the man and machine joined for one hot minute and smoked a menthol cigarette afterwards.

I see Bobby every day, and I know he sees me. Waves. Bastard. Sees me through the bakery window wearing my floured apron fishing out raised glazed and apple fritters by the dozen. Waves and grins through his greasy stubble-face and even tips his camouflaged baseball cap at me, as if he never touched my sister five years ago when she was ten and he sure as shit should have known better. Double bastard.

But this isn't about Bobby, the police chief's son. Not yet.

Keep a finger pinned on him though. He might slip away from you, with his buttery face and sweat that smells like beef jerky and malted hops and failure. Might just snake his way right out from underneath your palm that is steady and doesn't move. Your hand that is cool and rock-granite and cupping the scuffed-up cheek of your sister who is shaking so damn hard you'd swear a crack will split wild in the abandoned parking lot beneath you and swallow you both up. She's quaking and sputtering and whispering to the darkening night _oh god, oh god, oh god_ and pleading to the stars that shimmer beautiful but remind her all the same. In the years to come, she won't be able to look at the moon all white and large like young love, at the sky that is flecked and sparkling, at anything that is beautiful and not see Bobby O'Shaye. His oily face. His awkward fourteen-year-old whiskers. Whispering how it wouldn't hurt. Promising. And not letting go even when the delicate fists are formed.

But like I said, this isn't about Bobby.

It's about my sister.

She's ten and terrified and turns her face up to the black horizon with her eyes squeezed into tight stars. She has on the shirt I bought her for Christmas. It is the one-hundred percent cotton shirt with the fabric and the tin-silver buttons that were just so. "Perfect," she had said. She had pointed to it with a slender finger through a smudged mall window and I had pretended to be disinterested, but I wasn't. She's wearing that shirt, with its silver snap buttons fastened all the way up, one left open at the top, the way she always wears it. Modest little thing with her feather-hair.

She is trembling in the night.

Ten-years-old and collapsed on me like her bones have dissolved. Hiccups in the chest so deep they rack her whole body. She's wearing jeans streaked brown with oil stains and worn through the knees. Frayed. Dotted with blood. Her blood.

"Oh God, Eli, God, Jesus." A broken record skipping over and over. She is clutching my shirt with fingers forever fumbling around on the fabric. She holds me close and pushes and squeezes, squeezes her eyes tighter. Her hands grapple at my sweater, fistfuls of Jersy-knit security. Grabbing and pushing and she can't look at me. Not even close.

All the while "God, Eli, don't let go. Please. _Please_."

In the beautiful-ugly night I found her. Ten years old, shivering in an abandoned lot by the feed store. The same one Bobby works at. Luck. On my way home from Ryan's house. Just fabric and skin and breathy whispers to God in the powdered light of the moon.

So don't for a damn second think this is about Bobby O'Shaye. He will come back, believe me.

It's about a ten year old girl in a Christmas shirt and bloody jeans calling out quiet to God at 1 a.m. on a frosty Tuesday morning. About how it feels when her bones shiver through her slight frame. How she buries and buries her face and breathes moisture onto my shoulder. How she turns her head and looks up at the sky which is shining dark just for her. Never looking at me. Never.

The asphalt digs into my skin, but I stay there all uncomfortable and trembling in the parking lot and whisper gentle to her; "I'm sorry, Ellie. It's ok. It's going to be all right." Again. And again.

And I mean it. I sure as hell do.

Eleanor, or Ellie for short. In my arms. Terrible convulsions and near throwing up. Breaths coming out in short smoky gusts that wisp madly into the black air. And she can't look at me. And God, I want her to.

## Scotty

There are many ways you can die in a small town.

People like to think because of the location, how the foothills are all majestic and green with young fir trees jutting soldier-straight and needled into the gray sky, that somehow they're invulnerable to death here. Like living in this town scares it. Makes death run away, all whimpering and limp-legged. Because beauty like this could never coexist with something that horrific and broken.

Tell that to Scotty Charleston.

I am at the bridge and shivering when the police find him. When Chief O'Shaye and Vincent Landon pull his body, which is ballooned up horribly and purpled and near-bursting, onto the riverbed while his mother doubles over with galaxy-tears that I can see from far away. Crying over her nearly-bursting blueberry-son.

He is eighteen years old. _Just like me._

You see, I am there. I hear the sickening slosh as Scotty comes onto the shore. See his lungs that erupt between his teeth like gelatin. I see his fingers that are sausages. They point eerily at the opposite shore, like there's something he sees and we're all missing it. I am eighteen and holding my breath squeezed tight in my chest because I know this person.

Scotty Charleston is a quiet boy. More so now than ever. He is the one who comes to school in black with slick hair that is combed straight back with grease. "Hey vampire. You find yourself a nice boyfriend this weekend? Drink their blood and kill them and then rape them? Did you like it? I bet you did. I bet you enjoyed every minute of it, you faggot." Voices that float in the hallways and are all garble and radio-static. I hear them and it makes my shoulders sag. For Scotty.

Because I know him. His mother helps my parents at the bakery. Lovely woman with dark satin hair and soft, pink hands that feel like sunsets. A woman who goes home at night and wonders silently to the ceiling about many things. I see her some nights when I am walking home late and the world is quiet. Nights when Eleanor is at home because it is dark and she remembers and shakes all silent and involuntary.

What does Olivia Charleston think about when the night is dark and her living room lamp is a dusty veil on her face?

About the voices that loom large and menacing at school? How they float about in her house and flutter in occasionally from her open windows when the weather is hot and sticks to pinked skin?

About her son who comes home after school and stays in his room and never opens his mouth except to eat?

About her husband who held a chainsaw as it chewed its way through a massive trunk, slipped near the end, and opened up his leg like it was hungry for more? Does she think about the femoral artery that bled and bled even though he shoved in sawdust and a sweaty red handkerchief that looked like the kind a cowboy drapes on his neck? About how he sat there in the woods, blood pooling and pooling all thick like corn syrup, and all he ever thought about was her and how sorry he was and how could he ever have been so careless?

Because she's right there. In front of me. Like she has been so many times before when I walk home late at night. She's doubled over and is choking on her words. She is cradling a son who is elastic and near exploding. Scotty is blue and disfigured now and cannot hear the voices any more. She is sitting on the polished river rock, the mud streaking her thrift-store jeans, and is clutching and rocking and smoothing out wet and matted hair.

Chief O'Shaye tells her, "It's all right. We're right here, Olivia. It's going to be-"

And then she shakes her head emphatically. Her dark curls are springing about her pale fine-china face as she shakes and shakes her head and wails low.

The officers step away and let her rock gentle on the gray riverbed which touches murky liquid with a delicate hand. The river cascades cloudy and babbling. She is cradling the blueberry-boy and moaning soft as she looks off into the distance and not at her son. The officers can't quite understand why, but I do.

She can see what his sausage fingers are pointing at.

## Origami Skin

Something about Scotty spooked us. Bad.

Maybe it was the way he went. No note scrawled out in the middle of the night all riddled with tears. No cryptic comments at school said in passing that would float like mist and haunt for days. Nothing.

He just went. Jumped.

Skin and warm blood and the brief feel of the elusive September sun and then he hit. I can imagine the sound too, the exact moment when his body pummeled the water. How it must have sounded like raw marbled steak slapping down on a wood cutting board.

But here we are, in Ryan's house. His parents are gone. They are always gone. Always building and callusing their hands at a property I've never seen. This Elysian field that Ryan swears to God is real. And the way he tells it, with his eyes all fired yellow and dreamy and focused on something in the distance, I _want_ to believe him. I can see the grass and the mountain view and the creek that winds around the back of the house like a translucent snake and sounds like silver. And I want it to be real. More than I've wanted anything before in my life.

" _We have to do something,"_ Ryan says.

Nels agrees. His name sounds Norwegian, but he's not. His parents are just big fans.

I am sitting on Ryan's itchy couch, flannel and knife rips. I want you to see Nels, because he is laughing now. He does that when he is nervous. But when he laughs, his round face stretches tight and is magnetic. You can't help but look. Toothy grin that looks like ivory and peaches, and it makes you feel satisfied. Satiated. Can you feel it, in your stomach? It sounds crazy, but if you look at him, at just the right angle, in just the right light, he can help unwind the tangled day.

Riley is there. Ian. Donnie. Nels. Ryan. And me.

Six boys who are freaked out, because death came close. And now we have to make sense of it, somehow.

"We should write a column for the newspaper. For the school newspaper, you know?" Ian says. He is practical. Has farmer's hands that are rough and stained brown. He knows the dirt and the smell of green. The smell of water. Long hair that is pulled back tight and curls down the nape of his neck. Tall and skinny. A rail that would blow away in the wind. But he speaks straight and has eyes that are softer than his words. We know what he says is sensible.

"Nobody will read it." Donnie says. He is white-fire and blister-emotion. Head shaved clean and rubbed down with oil. People see Donnie and bury their chins down deep into their chests. Pass on the other side of the hallway and stare intently at nothing. But we see Donnie and know the softness. The vulnerable belly that pulsates beneath.

"A song. My band could have a concert or something. We could dedicate a song to him." Riley says. He is large – a massive square shaped man-child. All tattooed and pierced and shiny. Sits with his black clothes and boots laced up to mid-calf. He talks and you are enraptured. A storyteller with golden silk erupting from his mouth. He talks and you stare and open your mouth slightly at the dust and the gold and the glow that forms in front of your eyes, and it is amazing to behold.

Too clichéd, they say. Way too normal. And then they look to me.

What would you do, Eli?

Ten eyes are on me. Waiting.

And what can you do? You are sitting there with five people who are not people. They are family, and you would cut out pieces of your anatomy for them. People who are close. So damn closer than anything you've ever known. They're looking at you and their eyes are expecting the impossible – for you to say something that will make them turn to each other and smile and nod their heads slowly and say _yes_.

"A movie," I say. "We can make a movie. Interview people in Millbury? Kind of like a documentary? Damn it. I don't know."

As I shake my head, they nod theirs. They look at each other. Nodding like bobble-heads.

But I'm not there with them anymore. My mind has shot off. See, I looked at Ryan's eyes. The yellow flame. The billowy grass and the mountains that loom shadowy and whisper of peace. The silver water. How it feels tangible and breathes against my fingers. And Ellie is there, all smiles and dainty-lipped and origami-thin skin.

## Ryan

He is alone all the time.

He will tell you he likes it that way. That it suits him just fine because then the house is quiet and there's something peaceful about waking up on a Saturday with the sun knifing its way to your face. Something so right about the dusty slivered sun being your alarm clock. And I have seen it before. I'm not perverted or creepy or any other stalker-related adjective that you can throw out there. I've spent the night before because sometimes being alone gets old. Sprawled out on the couch with its fabric that itches you to sleep, left arm dangling off and brushing the brown shag carpet. The occasional cat or nuzzle of a wet-nosed dog.

I wake up in the morning to floating specks in the sunshine and quiet. As if the world has stopped turning and someone has encased everything in glass. The canary grass out back bending slight in the ten-o'clock breeze and letting out an audible _shush_. Like it's longing for silence.

Ryan is there, in his room. It's a tiny little square at the back right corner of his double-wide manufactured home which has paint peeling off in great flakey strips because the sun beats hot and glaring on it. A room you get to by walking down an uneven and thinly carpeted hallway. But he's there on his bed and the whole place is a sun-splash _glow_. Fake wood walls yawning in the warmth and the margarine-glory of the morning, and he's there, on his bed, cheek all swathed in sunshine.

And I feel an intense twinge of envy at that moment. Not because he is alone. Not because he has a freedom he never asked for.

No. Not that at all.

It's the way his mouth, which has awkward stubble and always looks a little crooked, curls up at the corners. I know he's dreaming. In the heat of the gold morning, he is dreaming.

And I'm happy for him.

But at the same time, I want it too.

## Tuesdays

Ellie is on the couch and has shriveled into herself.

Again.

I see her there after I walk through the huge oak door. It is the door that we tattooed our names and other hieroglyphics into with thick silver butter knives when we were young and smiled wide. It is a door that looks like a coffee stain and sighs heavy on its hinges.

I see her lying on our couch. She is a deflated balloon, the latex once expansive and proud and tight, now just sad wrinkles that stick together and powder-puff onto your fingers. My little sister, now fifteen and still trying like mad to look at my eyes without shaking.

"I threw it away again, Eli." She says this as I sit down by her head. Scoots. Scalp just against my thigh.

She needs the contact.

She is talking about dad's pipe. Not a corncob one that is stuffed with tobacco and smells like vanilla and convalescent homes. A stone pipe. A pipe that looks like a cold eraser. Hole burrowed in the top and then one down the middle. It looks like something a caveman would use to smoke, and it smells like molded grass and stomach-turns and nights where I lay sleepless. She says those words and I am glad. Put my hand which is warm, always warm even in winter, on her shoulder.

We sit in the living room with its pillow-soft light from the hippie-bead lamp and the orange corduroy easy chair and the fire that licks yellow and lazy. Sit there and say nothing. Silent. Ellie sighs deep and I feel it in my bones. The untwisting of her insides.

"Do you remember our swimming pools when we were young?" I say to her scalp.

"The holes we would dig?"

"And cover over with a plastic tarp. Yes." I smile. She does too. I can feel it. Can see it in the way the back of her head seems to glow harmonious with the room.

"I remember how we would jump. How the water was so clear. Remember that? It was clear until one of us eventually ripped the tarp." Her body is unfolding and it makes my smile stretch. Makes it consume my face.

"And even then, Ellie, even when the water was getting all dingy, we wouldn't stop."

"No. We didn't." She sighs again. The afternoon is lazy-wonderful with sun-dust and the whispers of the outside and Ellie's balloon is stretching out again.

"Ellie, what day is it?"

"Tuesday. I hate Tuesdays." And I don't have to ask her why. I remember. I was there.

"You know what, Ellie? I'm going to promise you something, ok?"

She is silent. She has heard many people profess promises. I am sure they must sound hollow and echo canyon-large in her ribs. But I continue anyway.

"I will be here on Tuesdays."

She arches her neck, head sliding backwards, and looks upside-down at me. "Why?"

"Because Tuesdays are for you."

And I mean it.

And she knows it.

In the dust that hangs yellow and lethargic, we sit on a garage sale couch that is more comfortable than it has any right to be. We are silence and wide eyes. Ellie smiles at me in a way that betrays the melancholy she has bottled in her chest, and then looks away. It is passing, but it is enough. For today. For Tuesday.

## Baristas

Eddie Kludtz is a jittery man in his mid thirties. He has a receding hairline and a cleft chin that looks like a geometry problem.

I am sitting across from him at a coffee shop, the one with cute hand-painted specials gawking all wonderful and neon-loud on the windows. Watery espresso that is pale and ferociously frothed. People drink it because decent coffee stands are miles and miles away, and besides, Mary the barista has a smile like a fish hook. The floors are deep mahogany and have grooves scraped into them from sliding chairs. The walls are littered with little league baseball team pictures that were taken by an amateur photographer. But listen, I didn't come here for that.

I'm here because Eddie Kludtz likes Mary the barista. Because he sees the way her body curves when she steams the milk, and it makes something twist up peaceful inside of him. How her eyes are soft and seem to reach out all dainty and touch his cheek. Just his. Always ever his.

I'm here because Eddie spent all day and the better part of a misty water-curtain night looking for Zack Tallman.

I'm here because Eddie held Zack in his arms as he died.

"You have to understand, Eli. You've got to get this part of the story right, ok? Zack was careful. So goddamn careful that he was borderline crazy, you know? It was downright infuriating hiking with him sometimes."

Eddie is shaking his right knee, bobbing it up and down in a vigorous fashion. The camera makes him nervous. And Mary makes his heart slam against his ribcage.

"That Thursday we were up there, it was foggy. You'd step out onto the trail and you couldn't see two feet in any direction. Thick. Like trudging through mashed potatoes or something like that, you know? I remember it, because it was like nine in the morning and the crows were cawing like mad. Must've been close to a nest or something. I hate those birds, I really do."

His hand goes to his nose, which is slightly greasy and shines in the low light like a polished bowling ball. He thumbs the side of his nose absentmindedly and rubs his temples, licking his lips before he starts again.

"Now, I told you that Zack was careful. He had our hike all plotted out. He'd gone it alone before. He was like that; just liked to be alone in the woods and hear everything that was around him, I guess. Anyway, the fog is there and it's spooking me a little. A bit. A lot, ok? I've never been here before, and I don't have any idea where it's safe for me to step. My foot could slip, boom. Done. Game over, right? So Zack is in front of me. Right on the edge of the white curtain, you know? Walking the trail that he was so sure of. So careful about mapping out."

He stops and looks dead at me.

"You ever seen someone disappear? Like clean away from where you can see them?"

I shake my head slow. And I can tell. He wants me to appreciate the gravity of this picture that he is trying to paint. For me to be there. To see what he saw.

"He was there, Eli. Right there in front of me. One minute there. Then all I saw was white. All I heard was a little puff of something. Like paper rubbing on paper or something quiet like that. No scream. No pitiful cry. Just a whisper. And, you know, I just couldn't wrap my head around it. I stood there for a solid five minutes looking in front of me, waiting, just waiting for Zack's head to pop back up. For him to smile and just say he was bullshitting me. Because no way, no way in hell did he just fall. No goddamn way was I alone."

And here is Eddie Kludtz. He is shaking very slight now. Almost imperceptible, but I see it. He has watery espresso with thick cinnamon foam resting on top. He has the dark, vacant eyes of one who is lost in a memory that he doesn't want and can't escape. The camera whirs beside me. A mug clangs heavy on the sink behind the mammoth coffee machine and sounds like an anvil. Eddie Kludtz remembering now. How he is walking blind in the white-smear. The ghost atmosphere that makes his shirt weep with moisture. And even when the fog lifts, when the sun is hot and prideful and winking down on the craggy mountainside, how he still can't see Zack.

"I looked all day," he says with his chin cleft just so. "All fucking day. And I-" Stops. Chokes. Drinks coffee again and clears his throat and swallows the lump back down.

And as he speaks, I can see it – the mountain and the trail and the fog that is soup and clings, clings. It is nighttime when Eddie finds Zack. His hands are shaking like guilty men walking death row. He plants his jeans down into the mossy mud and feels the water soak clean through. The sludge and the green and the night filling his nostrils. Zack is there with his eyes half open, little slats that are filling up with mist-water, all slick and shiny.

"I wanted it to be like the movies, Eli. Because, God, I was there and his head was on my left elbow, right here, you know? He was looking up at me and I was saying his name and cussing under my breath. I was whispering, and I wanted it to be like a movie. I wanted him to look at me with steady eyes and say something back to me that was meaningful. Something that let me know how everything was going to be ok and I didn't need to worry. Just, anything. Anything, you understand? I just wanted his lips to move and to hear words come out."

But the words never come. Zack's skull is cracked and he is bleeding internally, one lung completely collapsed and the other slowly filling up with liquid. The words never come, and Eddie Kludtz is cradling a man who is so very careful, yet is choking to death. The thick gurgle sounds of blood in the throat ring out in the damp night.

And now Eddie looks at Mary once again. At her curves that grab his chest tightly. The dark eyes are still there. Still in the middle of the watery curtain. Still looking for a way out and hoping, hoping, God, _hoping_ that the fish-hook smile will bring about what a man choking on his own blood could not.

## Ian

He has curly hair that looks like how a river laughs.

Ian with his whiskered face. Infant-skin and cheeks that are prepubescent and dotted over with freckles. Baby face that sits in the dark wood living room of his house and breezes through calculus problems. Shirks them off like they are feathers that rarely touch skin.

His parents are planets in perpetual orbit. Mother that flits from the kitchen to the craft room to the study to the patio without even a "Hell of a rainstorm today," or "Your hair makes me think of my uncle Earl. Did you know that Ian? How he would let it down wild in the field as he turned the earth, which was all sun-saturated and hungry for hands." No. None of those things.

She flutters about, a parallel shadow of the frenzied trees outside, and Ian sighs. Audibly. He scrawls out the last answer and wrinkles his nose at the calculus book. He has found the area under a curve, but he doesn't care. He won't see the arc in real life. Won't be able to run his finger down its pencil-thin spine. Won't be able to cradle himself in its vertex or take comfort in the tangent line that shows, definitively, where the derivative kisses it.

All bullshit. Numbers that explain the way life works but never how to live it.

The lines on the paper can never explain why his heart races when he stands outside in the torrential rain that feels like a river. Why he feels that he must, must unhinge his mouth wide and squint at the clay-sky when it canyons open for him. Water and sky and atmosphere congealing and being solid for one moment. One moment. To feel like he could be driven into the earth and nothing, nothing, not even a mother who flits and never speaks, goddamn _nothing_ could take that away from him.

Ian has curly milk-hair that flows and flows. Hands that turn the earth and are cedar-strong like his uncle's. A mind that understands abstractions but prefers rain that is heated and smells like September sky. Like it has been sun-baked and is waiting to unleash. To rip down and drive him into the earth. A laughing river. Infant cheeks and love.

## Anvil Hands

My father is a drinker.

Hard and heavy. It takes a six-pack to get him close to glassy-eyed, and another six-pack to get to where he wants to be – black out drunk and being drug to bed by me.

It is standard. Come home from school, scraping sneakers that are worn down at the back right of the sole (always the back right – just the way I walk, I guess) all the snap-pop way down the powdery quarter-mile driveway. Round the corner, the lazy one that swings over to the right like a metal hook, past the rhododendron bush that towers twiggy and massive and blood red. Father is on the deck with his signature flannel shirt wrapped around his thick torso. Silver malt-liquor can in his right hand. Swig. Glassy eyed otherworldly stare. Swig. He notices me approaching.

And it's always the same.

"Good day at school?"

"Yes, dad. Just fine."

"Good. Have any math tests today?"

"Math was last semester, Dad."

"Really?"

"Yes, really."

And so on. So forth. Until I unfold myself into the kitchen, slapping marbled hamburger and pungent onions and croutons and my dehydrated heart onto the cutting board and mash all of everything together. Patties that will be thrown onto the barbeque, to sizzle and char under intense heat as the silver cans continued to disappear.

I am sitting in front of the barbeque, red-lick flames skating across the burgers that are shrinking, shrinking on the grill, and I feel the anvil-hand of my father resting steady on my shoulder. I look over to his grizzled face, granite features etched by chisel and love, and see a softness there. An attentiveness. Lucidity, if only for a moment.

"I love you. You know that?" I do. And I nod. Once. Twice. Continually. Slow and steady. And always staring at the fire.

"Eli. I'm sorry. Do you understand?" He says this even as the metallic-cold silver can caresses his lips again.

I do not understand. I will not. I shake my head, not daring to look at his granitic cheeks. Not wanting to look at his weepy malt-eyes. Not wanting to admit that there is a part of me that _does_ understand and leap ecstatic at the warm timbre in his confession; that I have a reservoir of love for this man who drinks everything in his life chalk-dry.

Against my will and my clenched jaw, teeth wanting to grind to dust, I reach up my slight left hand and cradle his cracked, dried, leathery fingers. Brief pressure. But it is all he needs, I think. Just the lightning brush, quick and intentional. Just to know that my reservoir is still pumping fluid.

The burning embers, sizzle of meat, and my chest sighing as my feet crunch back to the house. Dad still cradling his can. Still searching for the moment when he can black out. Lucid eyes glassed over.

## Antebellum

I am sitting in fourth period and the same thing keeps rolling around in my head.

My creative writing teacher is full of shit.

"Write what you know," he says. "You are the definitive voice for your life and experience. Nobody sees things like you do."

I don't buy it. He is forty and pot-bellied and knows donut shops. He knows traffic jams caused by Holstein cows. He knows how to write stories that get published in piss-puddle newspapers like the Tribune and the Gazette. Oh holy fuck. The Gazette. There are a million and one of those around the country, no?

He doesn't get it. He looks at Whitman and sees potpourri-scented prose that tickles earlobes and sounds nice when you say it out loud to the opposite sex. He uses it as a punch-line. The end to a bad joke. He sees Shakespeare and feels safe. Sonnets that have meter and rhyme and a set pattern that you can tap out with a yellow Ticonderoga pencil while you're daydreaming.

I read Whitman and then take in large gulps of air through my nostrils. Like I haven't breathed in days. Like the atmosphere is all filled with God-fingers and wind-gush and I can hardly contain it. Like I will rip at the seams.

My creative writing teacher writes to get noticed. To have students read his limp prose and bombastic drivel. He talks about living and writing what you know and being unique like your fingerprints. Touchy-feely lovey-dovey hipster malarkey. All of it. He smiles and you can almost hear the plastic squeak.

Because he doesn't know life. He knows how to throw fancy words out there and sound frou-frou. He knows what the period before the Civil War was called, and he can write a poem about it that sounds flowery but is wooden. It is a silk rose. A cheap imitation that no girl in her right mind would ever display in her window.

Can you see him? See him at his desk, tapping out the rhythm on a yellow legal pad? Ginseng tea just to the right and stubbled face scrunched into a look of concentration. He wants you to see him. Wants you to look at him all hunched over the paper. To nod your head silently and think to yourself about how lovely he really is.

My creative writing teacher is full of shit.

## The Kindred

Andy Steadman is twenty-nine and bald. I can't see a polite way around it.

His head is shiny, and there's something comforting about that. Something about the way it catches the spidery sunshine and reflects light like an imploded super nova and starlight and late night laughter with friends. He's sitting at a park bench down by the Brandy Bend in the river. We call it that because the winos come here every night to drink syrupy bottles and look at the ignited-fire night that, dappled with stars, is beautiful-black. And who can blame them?

Andy is rubbing his hands together. Strong hands. Hands that are calloused and split wood and build the frames of houses. Hands that know the feel of a gouged and well frequented oak table top bar and just how much tequila to put in a margarita during happy hour. Hands that are so much more steady than mine are on any given day of the week. I envy him in that moment, as I realize that I am jealous of this quality. And I wonder how the hell it could be this way, how he could be so dead-rock calm.

He saw Kyle Taggert die. One second alive. The next, bloody face and bone fragments in scrambled egg brain.

"How do I start, Eli?" He fidgets a bit and rubs his hands together again as if for warmth, even though it is hot and muggy like the inside of a mouth. He is a steady man, one that has seen much. But he is quiet. He must be like me. Must have picked this spot on the river because the water sounds like bones sighing, and that soothes him. He must go outside on spring mornings when the sun has exploded buttery and bold and he must breathe until he feels drunk and swirl-headed. Yes, Andy Steadman is bald and gentle by the river and is a kindred. Yes.

"Joseph VanDyke was meaner than usual that night. You went to school with him, right?"

"Joe? Yeah. He was a senior when I was a freshman. Hell of a short fuse." And it's true. I remember the neck that was a tree trunk. The blood that would scald easy. The words that he would shoot like shards of a broken windshield at Bobby O'Shaye, and how I secretly loved them and sometimes wished they had come from my lips. And how I would be confused by the twinge of pity that jabbed directly afterwards when I saw Bobby's face.

"Well, Joe had been coming into the bar every Friday and Saturday like clockwork, ever since he turned twenty-one. I could set my watch by him. Eight-forty-six on the nose. Every damn time. Don't know how he did it."

Andy is looking out at the water. Always the water. The ripple and the gray-soup and the rocks that jut out occasionally like snag-teeth.

"Why would a guy be like that, Eli? So damn punctual for a place like this? And always the same thing. He'd slap down a wadded up five dollar bill that was sweaty and came from the back pocket of his jeans and order three cheap cans."

He stops and is waiting for an answer. I shrug my shoulders and fill my nose with air that is perfumed slightly by the river water and hangs in the nose all earthy and makes me think of summers and swimming pools dug in the earth and Ellie's smile that flares white-hot. I'm lost for a minute, and Andy nudges my shoulder.

"You ok?"

"Yeah."

"You sure? Looks like you were zoning there for a second."

"I'm sure. Just got caught in my head for a bit. That's all. You know?"

Andy smiles, chuckles soft, and nods. Kindred, remember?

"Why would a guy be so damn predictable?" He is stuck on this. Licking his lips against the breeze and scrunching his forehead. Wrinkles and skin and the soft splash of blue and sun.

"Predictability is safe, Andy. Makes a guy feel good, right?"

"I guess so." He is hesitant. Because he is a man who knows routines and silently hates them. Open up shop and check the liquor levels. Turn on the fryers that pop and hiss occasionally like angry cats. Lights. Ventilation fans. Sweep the back floor that slopes up in the right corner with the peeling linoleum. Sweep the front. Slog out the mop and clean whatever crusted over nastiness is left as a gift in the restrooms. Predictability is safe, and it is a steady dirge into the blinded night.

The camera is whirring beside me. And the water is shushing silent. Ian is behind the lens, wondering when we will get on with it. It was lunchtime half an hour ago and he is anticipating a greasy bag of food when we are done.

"So...what set Joe off that night?"

Andy's soft eyes are focused once again.

"Nothing. Everything. I don't know. He was irritated. Drunk. He'd come in with ten dollars that night. That should have been my first clue. Six beers, one right after the other. It could have been anything, you know? Bad day at work, fight with his girl Cathy – you know her, right?"

I nod. Everybody in town knows Cathy. I don't know her the way a lot of guys know her. Nels knew her that way. No way a freshman rejects a senior cheerleader who is all hands and lonely and has a belly full of peppermint Schnapps. He was just walking and she was out on her feathery lawn with an empty bottle, smiling at him like liquid sunshine. I don't blame him, but I know I couldn't have done it. Not even close.

"Well, anyway. He's six beers down and getting pretty hot. He's loud and in everybody's face. Shouting about how he 'hates this fucking town and all the shitty manure faggots that go along with it,' or something like that. Real poetical stuff, you know?"

I nod. Joe was equally as eloquent when he was in school. That much I remember. He was the first one to call Scotty Charleston a vampire and a faggot. A veritable Wordsworth.

"So Kyle Taggert comes up to him and puts his hand on Joe's shoulder. Right in the middle of his screaming vein-bulging rant, you know? Just comes up and puts his hand real gentle on the guy's shoulder."

He stops again. He is collecting himself for what is next, that much is obvious.

And then we are both torn out of the moment. There is a fish that jumps, all arched and silver and looking like a metal rainbow. Huge. Gorgeous and slippery like petroleum jelly. Angled and frozen in the air like a scaly apostrophe. Our breaths release when the gray splash snaps us back.

"Eli?" Andy is still looking out at the water, streaked with sun and the electric air.

"Yeah?"

"How could Joe do it? How? Just whirl around like a damn top, like someone had wound a rope around him, and punch Kyle square in the nose? So hard, Eli. So hard that his...I mean...it looked like his nose just split down the middle. Like a plum that got opened up. Oh God. I can see it, you know?"

And I can too. Kyle Taggert with his denim pants and white undershirt. He had been wearing a button-up Hawaiian print, but had taken it off. The bar is muggy and reeks of skin-sweat and salty odors and soft murmurs of how large and how scary Joe is getting. And after the fist lands square on his nose and splits his face wide, Kyle is on the floor instantly. Blood pooling thick, rivers that cascade all rubied down his cheeks. Nose split like a Christmas walnut. White jagged bone fragments lodge like slivers in his brain.

No pain. No shock. No writhing.

Just gone. Out.

Kyle breathes once before placing his hand on Joe's tensed shoulder, and then never again after. Split nose and mouth opened as if in shock at the whole spectacle.

Andy takes his hands, which are steady and calm and still make me envious, and cups them over his mouth. Still fixed on the river. The water that babbles with softness and comfort. He is looking for another set of fins, slick scales, and arching beauty. I know it.

I am too.

## Riley

His parents have hyperbolic drinks.

Drinks that defy the imagination with their color and creativity. A blueberry daiquiri that looks like it might as well glow in the dark. Splotches of color and ice and intricate paper umbrellas. _Clinkity-clink_ , the drinks say.

His parents drink these by the blue zombie-light of the television. Where their skin slips from reality. Where the separation between the two of them doesn't seem to matter. There is happiness on the screen, after all. An electric shadow of what should be solid like a delicate ceramic bowl formed by arthritic thumbs that know nothing but the feel of earth and love, love, love.

Riley hates the television. Hates the colorful drinks that sing their watery music-box tunes. Hates that the flash and the clink and the static are eating away steady: a cancer that won't slow down and won't be incinerated by radiation. He hates all of it, madly, deeply, without reservation.

Riley with his square frame and shirts with the sleeves cut out. Glasses shining darkly in his room as he fishes out another battery for his reading lamp. How he dissolves into the pages of graphic novels where people tattoo feelings on their foreheads and passion never fizzles like a sparkler in mud-puddle water. Where love is a constant palm-pressure. Worlds where the heroes are Herculean and obvious and so very, very steadfast. He folds himself neatly, neatly into those pages. He would condense himself down to concentrated powder and live between letters and ink-splotched pictures if he could.

I am there with him the night that his mother says, "It's over. There's no love. I know it. You know it. We're just killing time here, and I can't do that anymore. I can't. Okay? You hear me?"

Just like that.

And I could hear it in her voice. In his father's voice. Sad and disconnected like sparks that tried to leap across a vast black chasm towards each other and only made it half way. Close enough to see the other one pulse like a heated heartbeat and wisp away all billowy into the black.

Riley blinks a tear out of each eye, wiping them away with his thumb and forefinger, and keeps reading. Keeps wanting to dissolve into the page as concentrated powder.

"Go home," he says.

"Why?" I say, staring at the popcorn ceiling.

"You don't understand this. Any of it. Just go home."

He is folding rapidly in upon himself. A giant collapsing. An exploding star and the subsequent black hole being formed. And so I set my mouth and shake my head.

"No," I say. I yawn wide, swallowing air and sucking all the tension of the house into my stomach. Releasing it slow and methodical.

"No?"

"No." I repeat.

Riley is taken aback and turns his boxy face towards me. His eyes are rivers during a drought, all dust and lightning-crack surface. They can remember moisture and life and comfort. It was only a season ago, remember?

" _Why won't you go?"_

He is waiting. Not for me to leave. No. Not for that.

"Because I'm not leaving. Ok? I'm not."

"I could make you go."

"You could. But you won't."

"Why won't I?" he says and tosses his book on the floor, all sprawled out so the pages will fold upon themselves. I hate that.

"Because that would be a prick thing to do. And you're not a prick. And I want to stay. I'm too lazy to drive home."

"You're always lazy," he says and puffs out air.

"I'd punch you in the sack for saying that if it didn't require me getting up. An upper-cut too. Send your testicles straight to your lungs."

The slow wave comes. Silver and curled and white-tipped. Laps and licks Riley's legs and he begins a soft chuckle. A heated heartbeat spark. It animates his body and softens his edges. Brings mellow-fire and atmosphere into his bones.

In the muted air of a zombie-lit house, in the midst of a family that is fracturing, Riley lies on his bed and giggles with a hand over his mouth to muffle. He is sixty-watt-warm light splashing on popcorn ceilings. I am silent and stay constant by his bed, my fingers burrowing in the shag carpet, because it is what he needs right now.

Constancy and fire.

## Magnetic

Eleanor touches her face with fingers that are kitten paws.

Fingers that have to feel like Saturday mornings in bed and dizzied-up heads. Like if she touched you once, just _once_ , your insides would unpretzel and feel simple.

Ellie with her smile that spills and drips over silly things. Over reading Little Women. Again and again. "It's a familiar face," she will say. She reads the pages and says _hello_ , as if it's the first time. And in a strange way, it is.

I can see her face crack wide and her lips stretch like arms. Teeth. Head back and cascade-hair down her back. A chocolate rippled river. Cackle that erupts all _electric_ out of her throat. Like a blue-eyed summer dust-day was somehow shoved into her lungs and then puffed back out again more shimmer-gorgeous than before.

I watch her there at the dinner table, shoveling food. She is beautiful and a woman – a magnet that pulls all life to her. Food and chew and consonant-speak mid-bite followed by giggles that sing of July-sun and are infectious.

Can it be so simple? To layer over pain with routine and simplicity and love?

I want to believe that Bobby O'Shaye and his oily face aren't festering right behind her bubble-laughs. That the knee-gouge pebbles that dug and dug into my skin are blurring out of focus. I want to believe. _God, so much,_ I mouth to my dinner plate.

But I know what I hear in the blue-black air. After midnight when the world is gape-mouthed and snoring. I can hear the soft hiccoughs. The nose sniffles that are muted static. I can hear Bobby O'Shaye in my house, and my blood rises to scalding. He is there in the black sheen of night, terrible and tipping his sweat-stained camouflaged hat. Just like it never happened.

The morning comes and she is the sunrise. Calm and slow and meaningful and kissing the mountains with infinite grace and tenderness. Fingers that are kitten paws and unfurl all everything like summer days. Leeching on to the simple things.

"There is a tree lit on fire by the sun, Eli."

It does that because God wants you to see him.

"The trees bend so slowly. Like they're about to fall asleep."

It's because they want to be beautiful. Because they have forgotten how to dance.

"Eli, it's blustery and sunny and slick outside. There's mud puddles all around. Walk with me?"

I can't say no. How can I? Her eyes are lunar eclipse large and haunting and plead, plead, plead. She is a life-magnet and I am pulled in. Every day.

Because she needs it.

And because I do too.

## Ryan and Kate

I have never seen it before, but I imagine their fingers intertwine like cobwebs. Like you can't tell where one strand stops and the other begins. All feathery and intricate and impossible to separate without ending up in a mess.

They steal away behind closed doors and shadows because Riley and Donnie are loud and stare with envy-eyes. I pretend never to notice them. Pretend that I never want it for myself. You see, the ache of being awkward is always too much for me. It's not that I want Kate to look at me and catch her breath all billowed and sudden in her lungs and for a second feel suspended and floating in the sunlight. I don't want that.

I just want someone to see me.

To look at me the way she stares at Ryan. Like he has mass and his gravity pulls her in. Two planets that can't help but collide in the frozen black lake of space.

Because I can see it in my mind. Those Saturday mornings when his parents are gone and they wake up lazy-slow together. The sun that toasts the skin and makes him squint, and how she shields his forehead with a hand that is almost translucent. Like her skin contains all the smiles that will ever explode on her face. She is there with her flashlight hand on his temple, and the sun is kept at bay, and they stare, stare, drink enormous gasping gulps of each other in. Just quiet. A frozen moment of lucidity and how you know it will be ripped away eventually.

So they cling.

Strong hands and elastic arms that stretch and condense everything, everything, goddamn-it, _everything_ – even the yawning, smoldering sun that dangles like a solid promise in the sky – all of it down, down, into their embrace. Fingers that spider together and are cobwebs. Her head firm and secure and searing adoration into his collarbone.

I can see it all too clearly. A promise of _someday, someday._

Please, God. Someday.

## Love

When something is too depressing, you shut down. Raisin up into yourself and curl your knees to your chest. I know it, you know it. So here is a distraction for you.

There is a tree outside my house that looks exactly like an old man laughing. Warted and gnarled horribly. Branches that sag and wave steady at the earth as if they are always saying goodbye. Always saying _I'll see you soon_ , and then finding it impossible to leave. A lover who looks into the eyes that enrapture and can't escape.

When I was young I wanted to climb to the top of that mess of branches and sap that dripped, dripped heavy in the summer. Like beads of sweat leaking out of pulpy skin. Now I am older and want the same thing but for different reasons. The atmosphere is thinner at the top. Purified. More defined and charged. Like you could feast off of the air for hours.

It is simple at the top. The tree will sway all frenetic and the wind will explode upon your face. I imagine it that way. The rocking and wind-explosion. The impossible blue and razored contrast of the dark green tips of firs.

It is love, and I roll that over and over in my mind. It is a pinked and cradling God-palm. It is the just-out-of-reach and the continual stretching of hands.

"Eli, will you walk with me?"

Yellow sunlight that melts fantastical. Autumn leaf that sears burnt-orange into the iris.

"It's so clean and crisp out here, Eli. Please, just for a little while?"

Yes, Eleanor. Always.

The world will be sharp and cold with edges that look like razor cuts. And I will walk with you in it. Mash and organic decay feed the earth just beneath our sneakers. The same sneakers that peel away at the seams because the glue is dissolving. Everything cyclical and rounded and purposeful. I will breathe and nod my head and smile warm alongside you.

## Instincts

"Thomas Vanderbuilt was stabbed through the throat. Nine times."

Vincent Landon looks down at his yellow legal pad and taps absentmindedly while his badges wink incessantly in the florescent light. He doesn't like this memory, and it shows on his face. How his mouth seems to shrink. How his lips curl down at the ends and turn his chin to granite. Like a bouldered cliff of a man.

"Violent, yes, but in Stephen Vanderbuilt's mind it was necessary."

"Necessary?"

"You never heard this part of it, Eli?"

I shake my head. Thomas was a kid. Eight years old and dusty haired. He loved football and potato bugs. He loved to watch chickens scuttle across their pens and paw at the dirt just so. Loved to see the cakey soil fly and the feathers shimmy when an orange beak swallowed an earthworm. He was a handful, yes. Scraped knees and legs like motorized wind-up toys and quickly, quickly down the sidewalk he went just as free as a spongy April morning. His mother was disinterested, sedated by valium, lived two states away, and only visited on Christmas and Columbus Day. If at all.

But his father. Stephen. The kind of quiet that is disquieting. The otherworldly eyes that bulged and looked too watery. Too much like lakes. Too black and too piteous for his own good. All of the neighborhood knew that he was strange.

"Eli?"

My eyes must be fixed on the far-off, because Vincent Landon has his head cocked to the side. Brow furrowed slight. He wants me to hear. To understand.

"Sorry Mr. Landon. My brain went a little sideways there for a second."

"Mr. Landon is my dad. Cut that shit out. Just call me Vince. All right?"

"Sure." I manage a grin. A stretching of my face that is all too forced. The camera is whirring on a tripod next to me. None of the guys could come with me today, and I can't say I blame them. The sky feels like it could jumpstart your heart.

"You've never heard how all of it went down?"

"Bits and pieces, I guess."

"But never about _why_ he did it?"

"No. I guess I never thought that much about it. It just...seemed too sad to think about that. You know?"

Vincent coughs and clears his throat. A deep sound that reminds me of my grandfather. A man who rose up in the morning with its softened and delicate edges. The time of day when it feels like everything is made of glass and must be treated with a certain degree of reverence. It's a dark, silent, feather-reverie now that I think about it.

"Nobody likes to think about those things, Eli. They're just there. That's all. Stephen Vanderbuilt was a certified whack-job and he thought there was a damn demon in his son. Took a hunting knife to the boy's trachea because of it. No other reason than that. Wasn't mad at the kid. Didn't ever haul off and beat him with a belt. Hell. I don't think Stephen felt much of anything to be perfectly honest with you."

"What makes you say that?"

Vincent can see it, in his mind. His own children. Blond and galaxy-smear eyes that open wide and wild in the outdoors. Pinked feet that are skin and swallow the softness of grass with fierce appetites. Arms that know spinning and counterclockwise cloud swirls and blue that is deep and distant and forever.

"Have you ever wanted to fold someone up and wrap them in your arms Eli? Have you ever wanted to protect someone like that?"

I nod. I know all too well what that feels like. How you can gather up someone into your arms and hold firm as they sprawl their octopus arms around on your back.

"I look at my kids, Eli. My oldest, Charlie, he's nine. Nine." His jaw sets again and he looks out the window. Vincent Landon is a man lost in emotions that he can't unwind. Not even close.

"Nine times, Eli. Nine goddamn times in the throat. Right to his jugular. I...I can't even tell you what it was like when I got there. Because this dad, this ugly, ugly monster is there in the kitchen: He's soaked from armpit to index finger in blood. Covered. And he's cradling his son. Cradling him, do you get me? Rocking him back and forth and..."

He trails off. Sees the picture of his kids and feels the piece of his chest, the ghost that has been scooped out years earlier. The lonely canyon that is imprinted on the left side of his bed. Breast cancer and long nights and sterile stainless steel hospital beds and chemo and _condolences, Mr. Landon_. All this runs through his head and his eyes lose their focus.

"How could he do it, Eli?"

And how can I answer? He is looking for the light switch in a tar-black room. Hands groping clumsily on the wall. Feeling the grooves and spanning the surface with strokes that are wide, but feeble.

How do you speak when the answers scare the shit out of you?

I think about this as I shake my head slow in the low, dusty light of the afternoon and say softly to no one in particular, "I don't know. I...just don't know."

## Ocean Shoulders

I want you to feel this.

You wake up in the morning with the fog of sleep still hazing behind your eyes. Crack your lids and see the sun that blazes incessant behind the doughy clouds. Rub your face and stretch until your spine shakes and you begin to understand why animals shudder in ecstasy when they arch their backs.

You put your feet on floor. Solid floor. Floor that groans when you step on just the right board. Floor that is splintered in parts, but never bites your feet with sliver-teeth.

You walk past your dad's room that is empty because a baker wakes up in the ink of midnight and comes home at precisely one in the afternoon looking like he's been rolling-pinned over five times or so. A room that has its windows flung open wide, even in the dead of winter, because dad loves to hear the trees and it pisses you off a little that you share that quality with him.

If you are me, you see my mother in the kitchen. She is sitting at the dining table and has black coffee in front of her. No cream or sugar. Straight.

She is silent and has hair that looks like silver straw. An ice sculpture face that is almost too beautiful to look at. Timeless. It makes jaws drop and waggle low.

"Eli. Can I talk to you for a second?"

We are a quiet family. We open our mouths to eat and to laugh soft. We talk of weather and homemade vinaigrette dressing and the varied thrushes that shuffle along the dead leaves. Slow words that are weighed on tongues with much deliberation. Always the inconsequential things of life. But I can feel it: a heaviness that is palpable in the room.

"I was at the doctor's office yesterday afternoon for my yearly check up."

The next string of words come sloshing in my ears. Soup words. Thick and gelatinous and hot. It is a slow-motion swirl of _lump_ and _biopsy_ and _won't know the results for at least_...

I can't look at her. Her gorgeous eyes that remind me of winter and the first snow when the world is blanket-hush-silent. And the virulent hate that steams steady out of my ears when I think of the word. _Cancer_. How I want to grab it by the throat and shake the hell out of it.

Because how dare it. She is silvered and majestic and rainbow-prism beautiful. How dare it try to _touch_ her with its cell-devouring hand.

She is the one that weeps soft when she thinks the house is asleep. Weeps for Ellie. For the husband that drinks and stumbles into the kitchen and shoves chicken carcasses in his maw until he throws his arm over my shoulder and I help him unfold into his bed. She is the one that cracks open her chest and pours and pours out all over.

And I love her.

And how _dare_ cancer try to touch her.

"Don't tell Eleanor," she says and pleads with her thin lips and watery eyes. "She'll only worry herself silly."

She thinks I am strong. That my shoulders are wide and can support oceans.

Mom. I'm not. Do you hear me? Do you understand? I'm not as strong as you think I am. My knees go _clackity-clack_ when I think of losing you. My mouth shrinks down to a period. My head shakes and shakes and I can't steady myself to think straight. My spine curves like an S when I think of a house devoid of your midnight tears. No mother. Not strong, see?

"I love you, Eli."

"Mom, don't."

"Don't what?" She takes my hand and stares out the window at her rhododendron bush. It is nothing more than a waxy green shrub in the October air, but it is something to fix eyes on.

"Don't talk like you won't be here a year from now."

"But I don't say it enough, Eli. And I do. You know that, right?"

Yes, mom. I do. You have no idea how much I see the vastness of your empathy. Your leagues-deep compassion. In every hiccough in the dark.

And I love you too. Biopsy be damned.

## Donnie

His house is full of _goddamn you_ and belt buckles and welts that rise like loaves of bread.

Do I need to say more?

I wish to hell it was different. Donnie with his polished head that he rubs down with baby oil. Donnie with his walk that says _Don't fuck with me_. Donnie who has, on occasion, been wedged to the floor with a steel toed boot against his neck.

He is leather. And he wants it that way.

He doesn't cry in the night. Doesn't shed lake-tears and blubber silently to himself. He only puffs his chest up large to bursting and shouts at his step-father, Travis. Tells him that he's glad he's not his son. Says that if Travis ever touches his little brother that he'll kill him.

Donnie doesn't love his mother, and it breaks him a little. She is the one who invited the alcohol-breath in. She is the one who sits numb in the corner. Strung out. Mumbling. Eyes distant and fumbling for memories.

Memories of when it was simple. Summer days and curly dirt-hair and gummy toddler smiles and sprinklers that cascade in jeweled prisms.

Not this.

Not the screaming and the tea pots whistling shrill and Ethan, who is nine and crying, cowering behind Donnie who is puffed up massive. Breathing heavy. Being a shield and concrete bones and a fleshy wall for a child that he loves so fiercely it makes him shake. Veins that pop like tiny rivers out of his skull. Purpled spider-webs that pulse and frighten little Ethan but calm him at the same time.

A cacophonous symphony of _Get out_ and _punk-ass-kid_ and _lucky your friend is here_ and a wide arcing fist that connects to Travis's mouth and sounds like a muffled cough.

I am two-dimensional. Against the wall. Awed and terrified.

Donnie, the one who shaves his head and rubs it down with oil. Watching his deadbeat stepfather stumble out the door, lip split wide. Travis will crawl away and shrivel somewhere. He could die and no eyes would shimmer sad. Poof. Gone.

And Donnie, who is leather, wraps up Ethan in his tree-trunk arms and doesn't flinch when the boy grapples with octopus arms at his back all desperate like he's grabbing at sand. Donnie gives him big handfuls of it and shakes a little as he cries into his brother's thin shoulder.

## Ventriloquist

I put words in people's mouths. I can't help it.

It's reactionary. An impulse even. The mouth stops moving and my eyes glaze over and I imagine just what _could_ come out.

Ellie sits there at the couch and hugs her legs with arms that are fleshy sticks. She looks off at the window, out at the trees that bend and moan and are a pulpy reflection of her stomach.

I put words in her mouth, because she is distant in the waning October light and I know that on some days it is better just to sit and be still. We have a silent conversation as the trees are hissing and shushing at the sky.

"If I hold your hand just so and squeeze, then the pressure in your shoulder blades will hiss out, right?" I say in my mind as I cradle Ellie's hand on a Tuesday.

And I can see it, clear and lucid like a mountain creek. The words that tumble out like so much river-rush rock-water. How she wants to leave and spread her wings wide all over the continental U.S. The world. How she wants to wake up to the sun breaking the mountain's back and breathe in like the air is honey. To not feel Bobby's palm against her neck. To not see a gray rock-pipe around every corner. To not close her eyes and weep warm lakes. To be able to look at me, square in the face, at my nose that is bent slight like my mother's, to look and to not blink or turn away.

The day outside is blustery and gorgeous. A promise of the blanketed winter. And Ellie sighs and does not speak. Not with words, anyway.

## Synchronized

Friday night.

The lights are dim and there is a flash and crackle that buzz spastic from the television. Ryan and Riley, Ian and Nels, Donnie and me. We want to squirm out of our skin because Ryan's house is stone-still and breathing slow. The ramen bubbling and the static and the horrible off-sync speech of the dubbed Bruce Lee movie and the fluff-whisper of the Himalayan cat.

The Beatles are pinging about in my head. How Jude shouldn't make it bad and those strawberry fields that stretch out forever. Songs that congeal and merge solid and roll about and ricochet.

"I need to drive." I say. Mumbling. Groans. Heads that don't turn and are glued to the static and lives that are dead and wheezing electric. Everyone but Nels. He nods as if I have uttered the most brilliant phrase to ever grace his ears. I am grateful, because Nels understands even without words.

His truck is not like Bobby's. It is red and waxy-clean like a proper apple. All metal muscle and knobby tires and windows that you roll down with your hands.

You have to feel it. Just once in your life. The bone-jar buzz that shakes and shakes up through your feet when you place them on the floorboards because Nels likes to gun it hard and heavy down the county roads that stretch to infinity. Roads that come alive after dark. The tar and pebble and rubber speaking in tongues to each other. The moon that splashes ghost-milk over the rows of corn that will be harvested any day now. The satisfying tension that comes with rolling down your window by hand. The heater from the dashboard spewing oven-heat out and the bite of the night air mingling. A dance, you see.

And the sky. Oh, God, the sky. Stretched out and winking wild. All jeweled black velvet.

You put your head out the window and close your eyes because the wind lashes and it is instinctual. Nels is there and the radio hums low and the dash glows like a Saturday night. Perfect synchronicity.

"That moon is huge. Jesus Christ." Nels breathes above the low moan of the car.

But I can't see it. My head is jutting out the window. An awkward flesh-tumor on a metallic giant. Air blasting my face and lungs swallowing large. Barreling down the endless roads that speak in friction-tongues.

## Rebuilding

The metal is cold and the metal is gray and the metal is impersonal and opening its horrible black maw.

The barrel of a gun. Pointed straight at William Tanner. Staring him down all icy and sleek and glinting from the freckled night sky. Aimed right at the ridge where nose meets eyebrow-bone and skin is bunched together as if it is being pinched.

Billy Tanner is thirteen and has a gun in his face.

And Leo Martin's twelve year old hand is shaking as it cradles a revolver that is too heavy for it. A weight of metal and powder and friction that will spark and ignite and tear flesh, rupture bone, and scramble brain.

I am not there, of course.

No, I am in a stuffy one bedroom house. The same one that groans under the mass of Billy Tanner's mother who is overflowing out of her flowered summer dress. Her dress rolls like hills in Ireland, at least, the hills that I have seen in pictures. I am pulling at my collar which sticks to my neck and sweats and stains and sweats some more.

"It was nine o'clock on a Friday night, Eli. The kid never listened to me. I told him not to be outside that late. All kinds of hell breaks loose at that time of day. All kinds. But would he listen to me? No. Goddamn stubborn kid. Like his idiot father if you ask me."

She is stone. A great ponderous boulder that has been set before the foundations of the earth. Before God laid the first fleck of granite in the ground and pulled the rib out of Adam and breathed that gush of air into his elastic lungs. She is hard and unwilling to soften her face. And even as she recounts and the camera purrs and Donnie moves for another angle, I can see the hardness that is learned. In her face. Her voice.

She feels, but only under miles of fossilized rock.

"Leo Martin wasn't no saint neither. Believe you me. Had a father that would sooner reach for the belt than speak. Like it was a nervous tick with him. Leo looked like a damn clown on most days. Face all colored up and blue. Tragic and sad really. But I told him. I _told_ Billy to stay away from him. To not stay out at night. You don't go out that late and expect _good_ things to happen, right?"

I shrink a little in my chair. It's reactionary, believe me. Mrs. Tanner gives off an aura that is all sun-fire and red-bump irritation. As if her eyes narrow to slits and slice right through the cracks.

I know why Billy went out at night. How the sky would call to him. How the billowed wind would whisper in his ears. Whisper. Do you get me? I can see him, twelve years old and right ear flaming red from being used as a leash. How could he _not_ go out in the evening and look at the horizon and imagine a house filled with gentle hands and voices that never knifed through paper thin walls.

"Are you listening to me, Eli? Jesus. You ask me to talk about my son and then can't even look at my face? You listen to me, you hear? Look me in the face. What? Can't even look at me straight in the eye? Christ."

"No, no Mrs. Tanner. I'm sorry. I was just thinking about that night. If...if you don't mind me asking, how did they know each other?" I squirm a little, and Donnie is tense. He wants to give Mrs. Tanner a piece of his leathered mind. His arms bend a little at the elbows and I can almost feel the shiver-heat that permeates the air.

"How does anyone know each other? School, of course. They would do everything together there. Get in trouble together there. Always the phone calls in the afternoon. I never forgot. Billy's teacher would call at three-thirty, every other day, and give me a steaming plate of guilt. How Billy and Leo wouldn't stop talking. Laughing. _Fighting_ , Eli. But Billy was never like that before Leo. No sir."

I shift, stretch and clear my throat deliberately. I wait for Mrs. Tanner to go on, but her face is set. Stone.

"This interview is over, Eli. I'll have no more of it. This is a damn foolish thing. All that you're doing is making people dig up dirt that's best left untouched. Leo Martin shot my son in the forehead. Point blank. Left gunpowder burns on his skin because he was so close. And now he's in Juvie. Gets a parole hearing when he's 18. It's not fair, and it's not right, and there's not a goddamn thing you or I or anyone can do about that. Not a thing. So you can just get the hell out. Leave me be."

And this statue of a woman, this Irish hillside that rolls expansive, sits in her easy chair and rocks with her face tilted towards the streaked window. Granite.

But I can't leave it. Even as Donnie, who is puffed up and on a razor's edge, packs up the camera and nods goodbye to the flowered summer dress. Even as we walk outside, Billy Tanner is still in my head. Still a specter and standing in front of cold steel and gunpowder for no good reason.

I can see him. So clear that it frightens me. His eyes that are a blue and frosted December. All the lights that wink on houses, all the presents, all the joy that flits under skin and wakes jittery on Christmas. It's all there in his face. And I have to make sense of it. I have to. Have to stop shaking my head at people like Officer Landon and mumble that I don't know. And so I begin to weave it together in my mind.

Billy Tanner is thirteen and letting his ears breathe. Letting the fire subside because his mother has, once again, flowed magma onto them. The city park is next to his splintering house. It is nine o'clock and the moon looks like a dollop of mashed potatoes. Billy thinks about these things as he walks and walks and doesn't care that the air is all summer-muggy.

He misses his father. The man who would sweat scotch and was always quiet. It vexed his mother to see a quiet man in her house, one that worked and lumbered home and sat in the muted light of the living room. But Billy admired his father for this. Quiet constancy. Always the Friday nights home at five and the soft blue buzz of the television that drowned out the needle-words. And how Billy would sit next to him and let his tiny palm be swallowed in his father's giant paw.

Heart attack. Gone.

Billy thinks about this silent giant as the shadows in the park play like dark taffy stretching out over his skin. And then he sees Leo. Standing. Just standing with his back to the giant maple that juts up and brushes the sky with gentle strokes.

Leo is bruised, like always. Angry. It's not uncommon, but tonight is different. Leo watched as his father put out a cigar on his sister's delicate wrist, and could do nothing. Glowing ember and charred pink skin. And goddamn how it burned Leo's insides to blackened ashes.

And so Leo palms the gun clumsily, because he is twisted and doesn't know how to reach inside himself with surgeon hands and untie his stomach. And Billy, Billy who sits with him at school and laughs at his doodles and teases him about Cindy Batista and is more like a brother and blood than anyone in Leo's life, Billy is the one who is there. And he will do, Leo thinks to himself.

I can't say that it's right, this whole night that I've painted. But I have to build something. I have to. Otherwise the moon hangs enormous in the sky and I want to pull it down with greedy hands and stuff it in my ribs. I have to rebuild that night because Billy Tanner's December face stares unblinking back at me whenever I close my eyes.

## Nels

His family is a warm oil painting.

You can sit at their table and drink it in for hours. Look at the textured strokes and marvel at the mixture of colors that look like a weeping sunrise. Beautiful. It really is.

And it's not fake. Not some cheap poem splattered all over a greeting card that has a modest house and tire swing on the front of it. These people smile and they mean it. They laugh together and throw their heads back and let the soft chandelier light cascade down their throats.

How does that work, Nels? To laugh like your heart is full to bursting and your skin is itching to explode? Because your face is red and rosy and heated as you grapple for air, suck it down swift, and chortle some more. Your whole family. Everyone. Mom, dad, sister, awkward-puberty-squawk brother, everyone. Laughing and drinking in the light.

And if I close my eyes, Nels, would I be able to imitate those same brush strokes in my own life?

"Eli, you tell one now."

A joke. They want me to tell a story that will make their pupils light up and explode supernova large. But I don't know how. I don't know how to turn the valve and open that part of me. Let black ink out of my lungs and let chandelier light in.

But Nels is there, looking at me with his cheeks that are red, red, rosy red.

And a story comes. An image. It is faint, but it is there. Solid like a iridescent-blue marble.

"Do you remember last summer, Nels? When Ryan's rooster needed to be put down? Squawking at god-awful hours and pecking the hens all to pieces?"

The chandelier dust shimmers golden in the evening.

"And Donnie, Donnie has the brilliant idea of giving the rooster an honorable death. Remember that? Comes out of the bedroom carrying that huge samurai sword that Ryan bought at the mall for forty dollars?"

And as I tell the story I'm brought back there. The waning August sunlight playing on the top of Donnie's head. Glinting, I'm telling you. Donnie with the curved sword that was cheaply made and sounded like tin cans when you accidentally knocked it on the wall.

"He has this rooster, this annoying pile of feathers, by the claws. I swear to God, he was more scared of that rooster than anything. And he takes the sword and...well...he flinches. Panicks. Lets go of the rooster and screams."

And there is Donnie, running, sweating, huffing, katana sword bobbing up and down as he pumps his arms and is chased around the yard by an angry rooster. All feathers and clucking and _he's gonna get me, you fucking jerks! Stop laughing!_

My face stretches there at Nels table. Not wide and red and chortling. His family is exploding again, and I am glad. Even if my face cannot stretch rubbery and be reddened with laughter, it is enough.

## Ellie at the Football Game

You can't help but look at her when the Friday-lights pour white-washed on her shoulders.

Ellie is a cheerleader. I tried to discourage it last year, when she was a freshman and Bobby O'Shaye was a senior. Told her it wasn't the best idea. Not pleading. Nothing that desperate. But she knew why I wasn't thrilled.

He was there for every game. Camouflaged baseball hat and the smile that was stained by cigarette smoke and weak coffee doctored with sugar.

And then he graduated.

But he still comes. Every damn game. Looking at her in that way that digs under my skin.

I _hate_ him. Hate the way he sweats. Hate the way he wrings his hands and thumbs the left side of his nose. Hate the air around his body. Hate that he has a piece of my sister that he takes around with him at all times. That he can conjure up her face and be there with her in his mind. I don't hate many things in this world, but I'll tell you what; I hate the hell out of Bobby O'Shaye.

The November air bites and bites like it is ravenous for warm skin. It can't get enough of it. The air soaks through my fleece pullover and nips. Ellie wears her woolly mittens and claps and kicks and is so damn brilliant you almost have to squint when you look straight at her.

She is not like the cheerleader you picture when you close your eyes. Different. Skewed in a way that is mysterious. A confidence in her that makes my spine stretch straight. Intelligence and sugar-Saturdays and late nights staying up reciting dumb movie lines to each other. But Bobby doesn't see all that.

No. Bobby just sits and stares and chews his tobacco. Spits right on the concrete. Drinks his water bottle that I'm sure is filled with vodka. Slurs something to his friend, squints at the solar-flare lights hovering above the field like UFOs.

I want him to die.

And even as the thought crosses my mind, I feel the steam-rush of red in my cheeks. Embarrassment. All these people are flashing hot in my skull, looking at me disapprovingly. Billy Tanner and Scotty Charleston and Zack Tallman. All of them. All looking straight at me and shaking their heads because they know. They _know_ how easy it is to die in a small town.

## Geometry

Yumi Makinato is in my geometry class and has a smile that is otherworldly. Her English is fractured. A broken-winged bird of paradise that is always tripping clumsy. Cloth words that summersault off the tongue.

I have conversations with her that are on the brink of sign language. She asks, "How to proof this? Angle sigh angle? Yes?" Her mouth is painted on. Precise. I admire her, but from a distance. As if I'm looking at a canvas with oil streaks and impossible sunsets from behind a crushed red velvet rope.

She can't understand me. I talk about the interior angles of parallel lines while her face is nodding but not receiving. She is back in Kyoto. Back where her parents have a garden that is balanced and sounds like breathing. Back where she can ask someone what they are doing for the weekend and flare up excited and say that she wants to go too.

"Yumi, do you like movies?" I ask as we finish a proof that serves no other purpose but as a catalyst for our conversation.

"Movie? Oh yes. Berry much." She smiles, happy to cling to some kind of universal.

My mouth wants to move, but I have a cement jaw. She is lovely and meticulous in the way that she carries herself. Pink highlighter all over textbook pages and notes scrawled by a hand that makes all strokes identical. Exact and sweet and innocent.

I don't know those things. I am a kid who has grown used to crushed velvet ropes and paintings that stir up pangs of longing in the chest.

She doesn't know that. She knows manicured gardens and waterfalls that speak like distant dreams. And how it must be all the more painful to think on those things while she's here for a year, in a town that smells stagnant.

"You like movie, Eli? What you like?"

I don't have to think hard. "Funny movies, Yumi. Movies that make me laugh."

"Oh," she says excitedly, "I go to funny movie Saturday. Host sister. She take me."

I would like to tell a different story right here. About how Yumi looks at me, right at me. Through me. X-ray eyes that burrow right into my chest and see how pruned up my heart is. And she feels something then. Not pity. Just an understanding. Sees it and sucks her breath in a little bit and then asks in her broken English, "You come? You come too, Eli?" She is nervous and lets her precise-painted mouth crack wide into a grin. Beautiful and golden-warm and flesh that you can touch and not oil streaks on canvas from ten yards away behind a soft, spongy rope.

It could never be that way. We smile at each other as we pack up our papers. I tell her to have fun this weekend and she nods in her slight and polite way. Riley shakes his head at me from the corner of the room and does not understand. Does not understand that Yumi is delicate and lovely and only here for a year. How I don't want to smudge gray oil all over her delicate surface.

Riley will say that I'm full of shit, and maybe he's right.

Or maybe I will go to the movies this weekend and try to throw back my head and laugh like Nels and search for Yumi's hand that is thin and must feel beautiful like an equilateral triangle.

## Chemistry

Eddie Kludtz. Thinning hair and chin that is straight like old-fashioned movies. He sways a little and fumbles around for change in his pocket as he tries hard to look Mary the Barista in the eye.

"I love you Mary. Every day. Every day that I see you and come in here to drink my caramel café latte. When I see you make it, I love you. When I hand you my two dollars that is wrinkled like my Grandfather's forehead, I love you."

He says these things with his eyes. I am across the room and stirring my tea which swirls and reminds me of the Milky Way, but I can see the electricity crackle blue in his fingertips.

And Eddie is right there. Slight brush of skin as the change is exchanged and the room muffles down to cotton-ball sounds.

In the low light of the afternoon with the paint on the windows that shouts all neon and bold, with the floor that is gouged and the tea kettles that screech high, with the tables that have moisture rings and notches that people trace absentmindedly with their fingers, in the midst of all this stands Eddie who palms the back of his head with his right hand and says _thanks Mary_ in a voice that doesn't betray the fury and tumult in his stomach.

Because he is like me, after all. A great stained counter separating him from the rest of his life.

Eddie Kludtz sits and sips thoughtfully. Smiles at Mary and winces almost invisibly as his stomach twists in that familiar way. It is, after all, why he comes here every day.

## Powder

I don't want to tell this story. Let me start by saying that.

I don't want you to see the river. The pillowcase that is soaked through and through and tumbles against great clumps of shale and goes around and around like a washing machine. I don't want you to see the lone hand that juts through the ripped cotton and reaches out fingertips to a heaven that has turned away for a few dark minutes.

Chief O'Shaye is silhouetted by the dying afternoon light that bleeds in through single-paned storm windows. We are in his office at the police station because I vehemently refuse to set foot in his house.

He is a silent lump of marbled flesh. Shut down because the memory is too recent and too raw and too close. Because, you see, Chief O'Shaye's niece is the reason I am here. His own blood morphed into something too monstrous to even contemplate.

Twin babies. Two weeks old. Stuffed in a pillowcase that was tied up at the top. Just cloth with floral patterns and limbs that beat and lungs that hiccough-cried and the shock of the January river. Unforgiving water. Chilled by the arctic wind snaking its way out of the Frasier Valley.

"What do you want from me, Eli? An explanation?"

"No, sir."

"Then what?" O'Shaye's eyes are dark and distant and narrowed. He feels cornered, and I guess I can understand why.

"Well, what more can I say than what you know? Why are you making this film, anyway? What's your angle?"

"My angle, sir?"

His frown is constant. Set solid in his flesh. He is a scrapper of a dog, backed into a corner. The hair on his spine is raised, all frizzled and snarling.

"Your angle, Eli. What are you getting out of this?"

I have to think for a minute. Have to sit and breathe and be quiet so I can get this just right. I am always like this: quiet to a point of people perceiving disinterest. But it's not that. I'm _thinking_ , because I don't want to have something stupid spew from my lips. Awkward speak that tumbles through the air like a crippled shooting star.

"I'm not getting anything out of this, Mr. O'Shaye. It's not for me."

He is confused. Suspicious. Shrinks his lips and looks away at the deepening November light. A softness comes to his face right then, and it is difficult for me to pinpoint exactly _where_ it is coming from. In the silence that is tangible and opaque around us both, I begin to construct. Maybe he is sitting there whispering silently to himself, little lilting shadows in his brain. _It will be Thanksgiving soon_ , he thinks to himself. Chief O'Shaye wets his lips and sighs audibly. He closes his eyes and can see the dinner that steams and the smells and the love that all waft in his nose.

Or maybe he thinks on his son. Bobby and his late nights and buttoned flannel shirts that smell like deep fried food and sour beer. How it is that he could love and loathe someone simultaneously.

Or maybe his mind is shooting back to being a boy. The modest house that sat like a snag-tooth at the base of the Millbury foothills. Riddleridge creek that chortled in his backyard and what it felt like to be barefoot on river-rock. A passing sigh. A temporary and fleeting Eden.

Or maybe his mind is quiet. Maybe he needs to sit and breathe. Just so he can find the words that are _meant_ to come out at this precise moment. Destiny-words and the November light that cups everything like ashy palms.

"Mr. O'Shaye, have you ever felt compelled to do something just because it felt like the right thing to do?"

He does not look at me. Eyes plastered solid to the window. But his lips move.

"Yes. Yes, Eli, I have."

"That's what this is, ok? I can't fully explain why I'm doing it, because I don't rightly know. I keep seeing Scotty on the riverbed. I keep hearing the scrape of the rocks. It's echoing in the back of my head, you know?"

I pause, and look out the window. We are quiet together, and we are not uncomfortable.

"You are trying to make sense of death." He says. It is not a question. Not in the least.

"I suppose." I wring my hands gently, a habit my sister hates. Says it dries them out. "But..."

"But what?" Chief O'Shaye looks at me and is searching for something. I don't know what, but his body is tense.

"But that's not the only reason. I think...I think I don't want to forget. I don't want anyone to forget."

"Forget what?"

I try to stick the words together that are lumped in my throat. I want it to be profound and beautiful, because so few things _are_ in a small town. I want my words to burn like a flare. Flare-words. Yes.

"I don't want people to forget that there are things that are delicate. And that we don't ever appreciate just how beautiful they make our lives until they are gone."

Silence again.

And then the hum of the copy machine in the next room and the receptionist typing frenetic on her keyboard and the front door bell jangling as Mrs. Kirkpatrick ambles in to complain, once again, that her neighbor's dog is shitting in her yard and how she'll shoot the damn thing in the head the next time it happens. Life all large and boisterous is breathing in the next room.

A strange thing happens. Chief O'Shaye looks up at me and sighs and nods his head. Because he understands or because he is weary and wants to head home soon or because there is something in my face that pulls the words slow and methodical out of him.

"Eli, you don't have to make sense of everything. Do you understand? This horribleness that my niece Karen did...I don't understand it. I don't want to. Do you get it? Because if I understood it, then somewhere in my mind I would be saying, 'Ok, I get why she did it'. I don't get it, and I don't ever want to. There's a lot of things in life that we're not supposed to understand. And to be there – to get the call that morning from a hysterical Mr. Porter who was jogging alongside the riverbed – I mean, can you imagine?"

I don't want to. And even as my mind goes there I am fighting it. So hard. But I can't stop myself. My mind is shooting off to that morning and I am screaming at it to stop.

Mr. Porter is a lonely man with a barrel-drum stomach. Ex-military. Bomb squad. Steel nerves and even demeanor, because it had to be that way. Because the shakes were never an option. Divorced and forty-five with a son in college and always putting on the strong face so that no one would worry about him.

He is crouching by the water's edge, rocking on his heels. Reaching for blue-skinned babies and recoiling his hand each time. Wanting to cradle the tiny hands in his because they remind him of the ones he never gets to hold enough. He is a steel wall that is collapsing with great grinding, screeching, tearing sounds. Wail-screams and tensed abdominal muscles and sucking in the frosty early March air.

Chief O'Shaye is right. I don't want to understand it. Even as I am sitting across from him and hear the confessional timbre in his voice, I can hear the hysterical gasps of a weak strong-man. And it tears me down the middle.

Mr. Porter. Chief O'Shaye. They understand all too well about the delicate things that get ground down to powder.

## Ellie and the Ocean

The water at Boundary Bay looks like frothed up clay, but Ellie doesn't care.

Her feet dangle, dangle off the pier that has knots and splinters and split-ends and has been soaked by salt and showers and is faded because it has been crackle-baked by the elusive Washington sun.

Bare feet in November.

She is slightly skewed, remember? I never really understood it when I was younger. Could never skate my finger over the tissue-thin pages of a dictionary and point to a definition that could wrap itself around her frame. It frustrated me then, but I love it now.

My sister who is strange and beautiful. My sister who cries at sunrises and sleeping cats and breezes that smell like summer and movies that are silly but romantic and fantastical. My sister who is my mother's strength-beauty and my father's humor.

My sister who sits on the pier at Boundary Bay, barefoot in the air that holds the promises of winter.

Can you see her there? The gray mist of the water swirling about in her hair. The gulls that circle lazy overhead and screech long and melancholy because they seem to understand the sadness that comes about in Washington when the winter drags and the sun goes away for months at a time behind the soup-clouds. The water that is chopped about by brittle winds and sounds like television static.

I want you to see her. I want you to understand why it is that every time, _every time_ her hand stretches out for mine, I take it. Clasped all firm and secure in my palm that is warm despite the weather.

She is porcelain-strong. Simply intricate. And how could I not sit down next to her and let my stomach untangle? How could I do anything except cradle her hand and let the cold November air bite at my bare feet that dangle, dangle alongside hers?

## Trust

I am awake at 2:15 in the black-tar night when I get the call from Riley.

His voice is a falsetto that mixes with gasps and throat catches and oh God I can almost hear his heart thumping through the receiver. "Nels, Nels, Jesus Christ Eli he wrapped his truck, his goddamn truck around a telephone pole just outside my house. I just called 911 and they said soon they'll be here, but Oh Christ they said not to touch him or anything and Eli they're not here yet, they're not here."

There is a certain floating feeling you get in moments like these. Adrenaline and clothes that somehow find their way onto your body. Driving in your car and feeling disembodied and in slow motion and nothing, no nothing is fast enough and everything is so very far from where it should be. The stars blazing diamonds and the moon that hangs its slivered body smack in the middle of the horizon and smiles sideways at you. Stars winking and the sideways smile of the moon as if the cosmos and God are saying _trust me, trust me_. The corn fields that pass by with stalks hanging their heads slight because they seem to _know_.

A cacophony of sounds and record-player-lights that spin, spin and the mashed up static of walkie-talkies and Riley and his mother who stand with eyes that are wet and wide. His square frame holding hers with two hands that are large and will not let go. She is clutching a cloth blanket tightly to her chin. They both look straight ahead at everything and nothing.

Nels on a stretcher. Eyes narrow slats that the paramedics keep forcing open with latex-hands as they shine pencil flashlights into his pupils.

He is alive. A grand concussion and some broken bones. Ghastly lacerations and purpling bruises.

Vincent Landon is there with his cowboy hat pulled down over his eyes, just so. I am glad, because when I try to advance on the stretcher and the medics make a flesh-wall, he comes up and separates the waters for me.

And as Vincent argues with the paramedic from Bellingham about how an eighteen year old kid won't hurt nothing here, I put my right hand on Nels' right shoulder and look at his face that is bruised and beginning to swell like a ripe plum. I think there is a smile that is cracking on his lips, and all I can think about at that moment is how Nels is the one who will split his mouth open wide and laugh until his cheeks look like Christmas.

Nels disappears into the white maw of the ambulance. The buck-tooth doors close on him and the spiraling lights flash and flash on the trees and on our faces. Riley and his mother who has not had a neon colored drink in weeks stand and stare as the ambulance shrinks down the road.

I nod at the sideways moon and the stars that wink like Yumi's exchange-student eyes. _Trust me, trust me._

I do.

## Coyotes

Hospitals smell like sorrow all dolled up in disinfectant.

I think about this as I sit in the waiting room with Ian, Donnie, Ryan, and Riley. Our eyes don't meet. There is a TV and gaudy magazines and nurses with hair pulled tightly, tightly against the nape of their necks and red digital numbers that count the minutes we have been here. So much around to distract, and yet our eyes are firmly stitched to the floor. Counting the black-pepper flecks in each tiled square. Anything, anything to lose ourselves in.

Ryan did not bring Kate. "She had to work," he says, but I know better. She has been intimate with him, but has never seen him vulnerable. Has never looked at the soft underbelly. He has never _wanted_ her to see that part of him, and I scratch my head trying to figure out why. Because if love is love is love, then the cracking open of a chest should be all inclusive. Every damn portion of him.

I imagine it that way for myself. That when the girl comes along who will look sideways at me and suddenly seize a breath in her lungs and crack an invisible smile – when that girl comes and glides like an aching mountain all swathed in a sunrise – I know that I won't be able to help myself. I'll unhinge my jaw and unfurl everything.

I think about these things as the nurse calls us back down narrow hallways that look all marbled and whitewashed. Too sterile and squeaky clean. Too shiny for their own good.

Nels looks microscopic in the cavernous hospital room. Monitor blips and IV drips and a thin-lipped smile that warms my spine straight through. He is exhausted and alive and saturated in florescent light.

Nels. Busted collarbone. Compound-fractured tibia. Bone bruises. Skin bruises. Face scratched to hell by glass and debris, but no arteries were nicked, thank God.

"He's lucky," the nurse says. We nod. If the truck had been going just a little faster. If the metal had groaned and bent another way. If the stubborn tree limb hadn't impaled straight through the window and seat six inches from where he was sitting. If the airbag hadn't deployed.

There are too many ifs. Too many stories that smash together in my brain. They are a wild flying whirligig in my head. The pictures and sounds and emotion and how I want to crush them all down to a pebble and throw them at the stars.

Because the truth is very simple.

Nels Hendleman is driving home after watching a movie at Ryan's house.

There is a long stretch of road that he is driving down. A road that is straight like a mother's backbone. White milk-light from the moon and pebbles that pop under knobby tires. Nels loves to drive at this time of night because it is quiet and the farmers have turned off many of their lights to save energy. Just road, cherry-apple truck, and the moon that smiles with dusty teeth.

And for a second, for a split second that I can always and forever relate to, he turns off his lights. Just long enough to see the muted-light world rushing by. Just long enough to feel the naked night shoot alongside his window. He is not drunk. He is not high. He isn't anything other than lucky at one particular starlit moment in time.

The lights flash back on because Nels is close to Riley's house. The lights flash on because if Vincent Landon saw him driving through town that way he'd pull Nels over and give him hell.

A dog darting on the road. A phantom with paws.

And Nels swerves because his heart is large, even though he would never admit it. He swerves and spins figure eights after he hits a rogue patch of ice. Spinning and spinning and the tree kisses the front of his truck and crumples its nose. Bones crack. Metal buckles and gives. A calamitous crash.

Moonlight milk. The hiss of water steaming and metal moaning and the car, oh the car slowly exhaling in sizzling pop-sounds. Everything slows. Everything winds down.

Silence.

And now Nels lays in front of me on a bed that looks mathematical and cold. Lips trying to smile. Body aching. And as I come back to the room I can hear Riley saying things like, "You're not around the house to keep an eye on your sister. I might make a move on that." A strategic hand from Ian that swats Riley straight in the crotch. Howls from the boys. All of them.

We are coyotes in a sterilized hospital room, throwing our heads back and swallowing oceans of air.

## The Pearl

We sit and let the hospital drip off of us. We sit in the food court of the Worthington Shopping Center.

I inherited a loathing of shopping from my father. I can't say that I'm disappointed by this.

The mall disgusts me.

The stores are tiny cubes that are infinitely cloned. I hear and hate the cavernous echo-pop of high heels. Hate the neon lights that hum like insects and yowl at shoppers to come in, come in.

The stores are tombs that have been pillaged by grave-robbers.

I am being over dramatic. It happens sometimes. And when I scour down and dig at what the issue really is, I see it clear. It is a question of the heart.

_I am not meant for the city_.

It is very simple. My insides unfold in the tangled weave of my forest. When I can smell wet leaf and touch tree bark and needled ground. When my bare feet can massage chlorophylled energy out of the grass.

Yumi understands this. Her gardens and the balancing act that goes on when she walks through them. The mathematical precision and clarity and peace that she finds there.

Ian, Donnie, and Ryan are off buying greasy pizza that is too expensive but sits like jewelry in a glass display case. Riley pulls at my arm. There is a group of girls that stare and stare at us. They speak into their hands and whisper and it sounds like sighing.

"Talk to them." Riley says.

"I can't." I shake my head and feel my right knee shake. It is jittery and reminds me of Eddie Kludtz.

"What the hell is your problem, Eli?" Riley throws a straw at my head. The girls giggle. The mall swirls. The lights and the stores and the cloned cubes are pounding hot and my cheeks are red and on fire.

I want to be bold. I want to shine white-hot and blind people when they look straight at me. I want to be so damn beautiful, a giant white pearl that vacuums all attention towards it.

But I'm me. Muted. Mousy. Unimpressive and awkward.

I play those words over and over in my head as the girls leave. Heads thrown back playfully. Curls springing on their backs like so many feathers. Mouths outlined in gloss and unreachable. Unreachable because, in my heart, I know that they are like the city. All lights and glitz and noise. _Look at me, look straight at me and don't you dare blink_.

They aren't like a quiet girl who sees symmetry in gardens and can turn her ear towards running water and smile as if it is music. Not at all. But in a year, the lip gloss will be here, and the garden-girl will only be an empty seat in a boxy classroom.

A half-grin smears across my face as I realize that the bright-light-girls, the hand-whisperers, will never understand me. How could they?

I am not meant for the city.

## Implosion

Kenneth Ortiz is my neighbor. A man who smiles with his whole face.

He has been married for twelve years. He has twin ten-year-old girls who laugh like snowflakes. A wife who wipes her dishwater hands on gingham aprons. A dog with hair that is long and must be brushed, brushed, and stroked and looks like feather-gold out in the early December sun that is timid and hides more often than not.

Kenny is forty five, is surrounded by ballooning life, and is being eaten from the inside.

"The doctors told me a month ago, Eli. I was in for a routine physical and complained to them about these nasty headaches I was having. I had that drafty tablecloth on and I was sitting all uncomfortable on that table-bed thing. Cold as hell. I remember squirming, because I hate the thought of other people's asses being on those things. I mean, I know they sterilize the bejezus out of those rooms after each visit, but still. You're sitting on a table where another butt-crack was not even thirty minutes before. There's just something damn unsettling about that."

I smile wide. Kenny Ortiz has a black-cloud tumor in his brain, but his humor has not left him. Not yet.

The December day is crisp, but Kenny wants to be outside. He wants to feel the excited air on his skin. The sun is a lemon in frosting, almost breaking through the thinly veiled mid-afternoon fog. He looks up at the fir trees that jut up soldier straight and he breathes deep like Whitman would have wanted him to.

"He showed it to me, on a computer screen. Right back here, apparently." He points with an index finger that is skinny and shivers in the sunlight. "It's a funny thing, Eli. To be able to see the thing that's slowly killing you. To be able to look it in the eye and understand that it isn't going to flinch. It's going to take you down."

There is a glaring star of sun bouncing off the video camera and Kenny is squinting, so I get up and reposition the tripod. I sit down and he shoots a sideways glance at me.

"How long have you known me, Eli?"

I have to think. To crawl in my brain and access the internal calendar. "Ten years." I say. "Ever since I was eight and accidently shot your rooster with a pellet gun."

Kenny laughs deep in his throat. It is a laugh that he tries to muffle at first, like he is surprised at his own reaction. Then it explodes. Makes his shoulders shake and his eyes squeeze into tight stars. Tears that run all jeweled down his cheeks.

"Accidentally shot him? Oh hell, Eli. I hated that rooster. Would've liked to have shot him myself if I had the chance. He was ornery, would peck the hell out of my shins if I tried to get too close, and had taken to crowing at 5 a.m. right outside my damn bedroom window. God damn, I hated that bird. I only gave you hell when you were eight because I could see how torn up you were about it. You remember that turkey noodle soup I brought over to your house the day after it happened?"

His eyes are shining with the joy of remembrance. Like twin satellites in the sky.

"How could I forget? You scared the piss out of me the day before. I thought you were coming over to take a shot at me with the pellet gun."

Kenny about chokes on his glee.

"It wasn't turkey."

Even though I had figured it out way before the punch line, his face is joy and Christmas and family and orange-coal-fires and thin-tissued-presents all rolled into a set of blinding teeth. He erupts all wild and unfettered, laughter rolling and shaking the tips of the evergreens, laughter that separates the fog that hangs with desperate fingernails to the frosty blue.

He needs this right now. Because I can see where the story takes him when I go away and he goes back into his immaculate log cabin home.

Kenny Ortiz will shake my hand in a very solid manner, and I will feel the calluses that have built up over a twenty-five year career of logging. Hands that feel like sandpaper and tree bark and the good of the earth. I will shake his hand firmly, knowing full well that a week from now he will be skinnier. The vomiting and the midnight migraines and his wife wiping at his sweaty brow with a near-transparent pocket handkerchief that Kenny has had since his aunt Sylvia gave it to him for high school graduation.

I will leave his front yard, and Kenny will begin to think on his life. How he wishes Rachel would have come along ten, fifteen years earlier. How he would give anything to walk on the powder-white sands of Lanikai beach with her again, to hold her in the tropical afternoon when it is weeping rain and sounds like television static in their ears and the leaves that tremble all wet and slick and the sky has cracked open and is waterfalling all around.

He will sit there on his porch and hate the lump that is inside his skull, but only silently. Only ever silently. He will never let Rachel know how terrified he really is. He will stay steady like dogwood for her. Even as his body shrinks down to a skin-skeleton and the vomiting becomes all inclusive at all hours of the day, even when he feels internally wasted as if his bones have become gelatin and he wants nothing more than to just let go with both hands and tumble soft into the night, even _then_ he will not flinch. He will stare his tumor down, unblinking, and know in his core that this thing cannot rule him.

I will leave and he will set his shoulders and go back into the house where Rachel waits and is ready to break down again for the fourth time today, which is three breakdowns better than where she was yesterday. His daughters, Kalie and Jessie, will be upstairs practicing their solos for their Christmas choir concert. They know. They understand that when they are on those risers that echo like mountain caves and creak under the weight of so many middle school children, they _understand_ the intangible weight that their solos carry that night out into the audience. And so they have to be _perfect_. They must sound like silvery tongues and holiday fires.

Kenny Ortiz will hold his wife in the kitchen bathed in the near-solstice sunlight. It will be a fleeting and aching memory for her. A moment that she will want to dig her fingernails into and refuse to release. She will grapple at his flannelled shirt that smells like sawdust and sweat, because Kenny refuses to stop working outside. Refuses to stop splitting wood to bring inside for Rachel, although she begs him every day to hire me to split and stack it for him. He will have none of it. He wants her to feel him every time there is warmth in the house. In the middle of the night when the razor-teeth of winter are frosting their windows and her skin is comfortable and smiling, he wants his face to be behind her eyelids.

And as I pack up the camera and shake Kenny's hand that feels like sandpaper and earth, I can see a man who has lived so fiercely. A man whose only regret is that he is leaving his family much too soon. He is imploding in upon himself, and he knows it. He has accepted death, but will not let it ruin him. It is why he can smile with his whole face even as he stares down the very thing that is killing him.

And as I leave his house that is built with logs that fit together like lovers, I cannot help but want his confidence. I cannot help but hope that when my own body collapses, it will be with half of the grace I see in him.

## Good Man

My father has lucid eyes that are waxy evergreen needles.

He stares at my mother who is nearly fifty, silvered, and still beautiful to him. He tells her this and kisses her forehead with lips that do not smell like hops. Not today. No, today they are waiting for the doctor to come in with his clipboard and say, very clear and freeing like honeysuckle-winds, one single word. _Benign._ Not malignant. That is not even a possibility for my father.

I have heard the story many times. My father is twenty and at a party where everything is glowing otherworldly – all black light and sweat and the moldy stink of marijuana – a college party that has swallowed everyone whole. He is not high. Not loaded to bursting. There are friends around him that are hyenas and are tripping madly in the dark over nothing. But not him.

He is shy. Terribly shy and looking around for any reason to stay. For any trace of knifing god-finger light in the midst of a throng of shit-sludge.

And he sees her.

Mom.

It is not like the movies. Not a sudden beam of light and angels belting out choruses and hallelujahs and lightning-love and a wild, chaotic, spastic falling, falling motion. It is none of that. It is a pull. Magnetic and gentle, but constant. A lock of eyes for a second. Not fireworks and blue-crackle electricity and hot-magma lust.

Inevitability. Gravity. Curiosity.

In all his stories that my father has either said or slurred, he never once romanticized things. The pull was real. The courting was slow and intentional.

Dad, you've woven stories about grandma, and I've listened. The woman that told you to pick a switch every other day. The woman who passed out once on her bed while smoking a cigarette and nearly burned down your house. You're from a childhood of a father who drank and shot guns and died young from scarlet fever. You're from a childhood where you had to be the man of the house at thirteen. And I know you're scarred. God, I know it.

Dad, the doctor will come in here in two minutes and tell you and mom that the tests came back negative. That you will get to keep her and keep her for many more years. And what will you do?

You will go home and drink cheap beer until mom cries and I sling you over my shoulder that is shaped like your elbow and I will flop you into bed.

That is what you will do.

My stomach always is conflicted when I see my father sober. Because he is a _good man_. A good man with a patient and forgiving wife.

A good man that breaks me down every damn day.

## Ouroboros

Ellie says that grass feels like eyelashes against her feet. I am about to tell her that I would never let anyone's face get that close to my foot to ever validate her simile, but I remember that it is Tuesday.

We are sitting on the couch that is itchy like the inside of a cheap blazer, sitting and talking about spring. It is Ellie's favorite season, and who am I to argue. She has a monopoly on the direction of our Tuesday discussions.

The limbs outside whip violently and are untamed toddler tantrum-arms. Ellie looks at them and sighs through her bangs.

"I like that in April, it smells like the woods are waking up."

They _are_ waking. The sun is chasing winter out of their skin. Pulpy-pores that yawn and shudder and you can hear the cracking-stretch-spring-snap of the woods waking. A mist-song that your ears secretly know and when you hear it your heart swells a little.

"I like that too," I say as I look outside and wonder why it is that frenetic tree limbs never fail to reach inside my stomach and untwist all of my knots.

"I want to tell you about my perfect day," she says without looking at me. I set down my history book and am glad for the distraction from the Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction. She sees me do this, grins because she has my whole head, and turns cross-legged towards me.

"The end of April last year. The temperature spiked to 68 and it almost felt like summer for half a day. Remember that? It was a gorgeous Friday and you came to me at the end of lunch, pulled me aside, and said 'Ellie, we're going.' Just like that. No sixth or seventh period, because the sky was...what did you call it? A baby smiling or something like that? You're such a geek sometimes. You know that Eli?"

She punches my arm lightly. I look straight ahead and grin faint like creases in skin.

"How could I say no to you? I was a freshman and felt like such a badass skipping school with my older brother. And where do you take me?"

And she doesn't have to say any more. We are both there. Both of our brains tuned into that April day that was butter and impossible blue. The camel-hump hill by our house that had the lone crabapple tree with its arthritic limbs. The blossoms that were all pinked and exploding loud – feathery reflections of Independence Day.

It was simple. Wool army blanket on the ground that was still spongy and would have soaked through our clothes. Me tightroping my way through trigonometry problems and unit circles and ellipsis. Ellie weaving buttercup bracelets and giving me hell about not asking Heather Snyder out because, clearly, she had been giving me signals all over the place.

The sky that was Hawaiian ocean-water. The overly-ripe sun that made me squint at the white textbook pages and silently curse Mr. Austin for assigning every odd problem.

"That was your perfect day?" I say and get distracted again by the lashing limbs and the December clay-sky and I sigh deep from my toes.

"Was, is, and will be."

"Will be?"

"Absolutely."

"That's a very bold statement. There's a lot of life left for 'will be'." I say and give her knee a nudge with my elbow.

"It's not that bold. It's not that outlandish, Eli."

"Yeah it is, Ellie. Graduation. First job. Marriage. Children. There are tons of perfect days that could happen, you know."

"Not like that one." She smiles, all winsome and distant. A strange half-smile and I can only assume that she is still locked in to the memory. And it is at that moment I realize that I can't argue with her about how you can't possibly quantify perfection. It's a paradoxical situation that stacks and stacks upon itself. A snake eating its own tail or something like that.

I don't want to argue with her. Not at all.

Because I want it to be true.

## Tardy

Nels rolls up to me on wheels that sound like my grandfather breathing. Compound fracture in his right tibia and hairline fracture in his left femur. Two casts and a wheelchair that was given to him by the nurse at school. A chair that has a tin can shine and a thinly padded leather seat.

The hallway at school is busy. Restless. Kids floating to class because the holiday break is a few days away. Heads that seem to be pulled by invisible silk threads and they never turn, never turn, never look and see Nels fumbling with awkward metal wheels and a backpack that is cumbersome.

I do what anyone who is closer than relative-blood would do. I take both of the wheelchair handlebars in my palms and begin to part the waters for Nels.

"God damn it, Eli, I can take care of myself." Nels does not stretch his face. He is tight lipped and stewing in his chair. He is too used to night drives in his cherry-truck. A free-spirited wisp of cirrus cloud that has been bogged down in a heavy-cream-nimbus.

"Let go of me. Let me have just a little dignity." He insists and does not look at me.

I say nothing and keep pushing.

"I swear to God, I will wail on you if you don't stop."

"Fine." I say and let up on the handles.

We go quietly down the hallway. Nels traveling in a wobbly scribble. His hands cracking dry and aching just a little, but he doesn't care. He is glad that the heads around him aren't snapping sideways. Glad that the girls in the hallway aren't tilting their heads to the side, softening their eyes, and breathing quiet little squeaks of sympathy under their breath. Glad that I have let go of him.

Glad that I continue to walk next to him, all the scribble-line way down the hall that is thinning out and the passing bell clangs electronic and jarring. Glad that I will be tardy alongside of him.

## The One

Donnie's cousin, Anna, is twenty-three and refracting light like a prism. In the middle of a family that is tearing stitches apart at the seams, she is grabbing handfuls of fabric and constructing her own quilt.

It is her wedding day, and she is desperately, madly, deeply in love. You can see it. The day is chaotic around her, a maddening rush of relatives and handshakes and sideways hugs and _is it an open bar?_ and people that mutter under their syrupy breath that it will never last more than a year because they can just feel it in their bones – that this family can never keep anything together and it's just a stupid thing to ever get married because the odds are stacked up so high and they can't help but topple down on top of her.

But Donnie and I can see it.

She has found _the one_. The way he leans over to her ear and puts his hand on her cheek just so. The way they are drawn to each other slowly, not a desperate grappling of hands and clothing and a thick haze of jealousy that hangs and hangs and drips off their skin.

It is simple. Quiet. Like they can feel it without words.

They are locked in on each other as they sit and eat fruit together. Strawberries that are out of season but have been shipped in from California and are rubied and look like hearts. They are not oblivious to the clumped flesh around them. Anna smiles at the naysayers. A dazzling white-enamel middle finger right into their inebriated faces.

Donnie and I offer our congratulations, and Anna holds on to his hand, and looks straight at his knuckles.

"Is it true, Donnie? Did you really hit him and make him leave? I only heard second hand from Cousin Marcia, and you know how reliable she is."

Donnie looks down at his hands and nods his head slowly.

"Yeah. It's true. Son-of-a-bitch made like he was going to hit Ethan."

Anna looks at Donnie's face, which is twisted a little and hardening around his chin. Her own lips purse a little, and she nods.

"I'm glad. Do you hear me?"

"Yeah."

Donnie begins to pull away, but Anna squeezes his wrist gently. It is enough to stop him. Enough to make him look at her.

"You and Ethan are ok now?"

"We're fine."

"You're sure?"

And Donnie remembers the summers when he was eight and Anna was thirteen and babysitting him and the infant Ethan. How she was gentility and yellow-sun and so very foreign but strangely familiar to him. A song you had forgotten and want to remember so desperately.

"Yeah. I'm sure. We're fine, Anna. It's been a month or so and he hasn't been back."

"Because...if you ever need a place..."

She is white-refracted light and holding onto his hand in a way that almost makes me catch my breath.

Donnie nods his head and cannot say anything more. Because he is leather and knows no other way of being. He cannot soften himself enough to feel what he once did ten years ago.

But he knows. I know. This marriage will not be like the movies. Not happily ever after with a shiny gloss finish. None of our lives are. But it will be happy more often than not. They will be simple and quiet together and wake up to the sun knifing lazily through their bedroom window and smile at each other in the dusty dark and remember the slow-coal fire that burns in each of their bellies.

## Serpentine

Ian's driveway is serpentine. An endless pebble path that seems to fold in upon itself in places and feel as if you've seen that rock before, that stump, that patch of lichen-encrusted organic mush.

I am walking because it is what I do. Because when my feet are moving, the gears in my head do the same. Ellie is with me because she needs the fresh air and loves how the vine maple trees bend over the driveway like arms. Every now and then she waves to them and hooks her arm around my elbow and smiles with white, white teeth at the sky.

The lazy loop just before Ian's house. The road opens its mouth wide and there is Ian, in front of his house that is round and looks like half of an ice cream scoop.

Something is wrong. My stomach drops to my knees and throbs emphatically.

Ian. On his knees. Jeans lapping up the water from the grass and the mud and the dirty puddles. Streaked blue material that shoots my mind back to that night, that cold night with the powdery moon. His river hair is cascading down over his shoulders and rippling in spastic waves. Hands grabbing for large clumps of grass that is saturated and slippery. He is breathing in the sky and the clouds and the mist that is prevalent in the haunting morning.

He cannot speak. Just hiccoughs and lurches with his torso and pounds with his right hand that is balled up into a fist and is smashing the ground, grinding the soil to pudding. His body tenses and the dry heaves come, the gagging and near hyperventilating.

I put my hand on his back and Ian swats it away almost instantly, shaking his head and sending his curly hair into grand swooping arcs that flay at the air desperately.

I shake my head and breathe with eyes that are wide and feel Ellie's constant hand on my right shoulder and clasp it tightly.

Ian yells and curses then. A tangled yowl that unfurls from a dark place inside of him. Mangled and mashed in the middle of it all he manages to tell me to go away. That it's too messed up and too much and too ugly and that Ellie shouldn't be there and for me to get the hell out.

I pull on Ellie's hand, because Ian is folded in upon himself like his driveway. Because there are times when you need those who are closest to you to leave, and leave quickly before the world splinters to pieces right before their eyes.

## Seattle

Oliver Hastings opened his mouth for a cherry bomb. He lit the fuse, felt the sulfur burn on his tongue, and after four seconds, did not feel any more.

Oliver was Ian's father.

I could tell you stories about Ian playing with him as a child. How Oliver would take Ian in his arms and spin until the world turned clockwise as they lay on the ground taking in giant gasping breaths. About how he would take Ian up to the second floor patio in their house and take the telescope that was as long as Ian was tall and point it at the moon and look at the canyons and dried up seas on its surface. Ian saw his first lunar eclipse from that patio, his father sitting beside him on a wicker chair that snapped every time pressure was put on it, and Ian remembers how the moon looked rusty and so very much like an alien planet just hanging large and lonely in the night. He remembers how it seemed to reach down and touch his lungs, caught his breath, and made him smile.

I could tell you many things about Oliver Hastings. How his favorite time of the week was seven o'clock on Saturday nights, because that's when his wife Nancy would put on their Beatles vinyl records and the house would be alive with the warmth of analog sounds that filled the house like liquid. She would pour their favorite Muscat wine from a little vineyard that sat nestled up against the foothills and Riddleridge Creek. In the dark of the winter months their house, on Saturdays, would be full of candlelight and dusty records and glasses of white wine that would shine supernova bright.

But all the stories, all the background and warm photographs that I can paint here won't make the shock of it any easier to swallow. Not for me. Not for Ian. Not for his mother, Nancy, who hasn't flitted around the house in many, many days. Just sits and sits at her kitchen table as if she is waiting for life to change before her eyes. For the world to spin backwards and for fires to bring wood back to life.

Because I never told you about the other half of Oliver's life. The days that he would spend wrapped up in his bed sheets. The nights when he would sit with his back against the stainless steel refrigerator in the kitchen, body naked and shivering in the dark, staring off into nothing and wishing that the sickness in him would subside. How it frustrated and infuriated him that he could swing so quickly and so violently between ecstasy and the miry bottom of a stone well.

Ian always saved him. Always made him climb the craggy walls of the well and scrape his knuckles and come out into the daylight once again. Ian was this beautiful part of Oliver and had innocent eyes and a heart that pumped so wild for his pendulum-father.

I want to offer Ian hope. I want to offer you hope as well. But I'm looking at these words and am continually brought back to the facts.

I do not know _why_ Oliver Hastings killed himself.

It is a Friday night and Ian has a band concert. His mother is there, watching him slide his trombone and bend notes that sound like Saturday night records. Oliver is at home. Maybe because he is tired from a week of farming. Maybe because he could not pull himself out of bed today. Whatever the reason he is there at the house by himself.

I do not know what pushed him to the kitchen, but that is where they found the body, all crooked and oddly angled limbs: a labyrinthine crack in a windshield. Maybe the thought of Ian being gone in four months was too much for Oliver to handle. The beautiful and innocent part of him waving and smiling in the setting sun, leaving for Seattle and only coming back to visit on Thanksgiving and Christmas. He knows. Knows that once his son is gone the world will be large and exciting and will swallow Ian up with gusto and never want to let him go. No more wicker-chair nights. No more telescopes and icy stars.

Oliver Hasting can see it in his mind: Ian in the city with its neon lights and cafes that are open late into the night. He will find a girl there. One that loves the way his hair flows and she will laugh with shiny teeth and will talk like a lullaby. All of this is too much for Oliver Hastings to handle. Too much for him to wrap his head around, and so he wraps his mouth around lethal explosives, because that's how his insides feel.

And who am I to try and postulate anything? Who am I to try and make sense of his life and his love and his thoughts? Because they are inscrutable. The human heart is too wild and too much like a serpentine road. And goddamn, how I wish I could just accept that.

How I wish I could just look at Ian, who sits on the wicker chair on the second floor patio and looks at the stars and moon with watery eyes, and tell him exactly what he needs to hear. How I understand there is a gaping hole that has opened and is continuing to grow in breadth and depth square in the middle of his chest. I get that. I get that he has a sorrow growing inside of him that no one could accurately measure.

But I want Seattle for him. I want the lights and the late nights at the cafes and for him to catch the darling eye of a girl who laughs with her eyes closed and looks at him like he is a mid-winter fire. He will always carry around the ghost of his father, always have that hole inside of him, but I do not want it to define him.

I want him to sit in that wicker chair and remember what it felt like the first time he saw the moon, all ruddy and otherworldly and titan-large in the sky.

## Ripples

A friend of mine who lives in the city and only knows cars and towering buildings and noise, noise, noise once told me, "It must be so nice to live in a small town. I mean, everyone knows everyone else. It's like a show from the fifties, yeah? You know; the perfect lawns and the white fences? I bet it's really nice where you are."

But my friend didn't know the truth of the matter. How interconnected everything is in a small town. A ripple over here shakes and sends frothy waves over there. Waves that rock your bones and shake up your marrow.

Yes, everyone knows everyone else, and it's a grand and marvelous world when things go right.

But when a father blows the back of his goddamn head off with homemade explosives? When a friend is being eaten alive by cancer? When the inconsistencies of life come clanging loud at your door at midnight?

Yes. It's really nice where I am.

And Yumi and Ellie and Nels' family who swallow chandelier light and all the beautiful things that glow so damn warm and bright are trying desperately to fight off the deepening black.

## Quirks

We all have little quirks that make our edges well defined.

Take Ryan for instance. He refuses to twirl his noodles around his fork. Just stabs the metal straight into the bowl and scoops out waterfalls of pasta. Has noodle-beards accenting his grinning cheeks.

Donnie has a soft spot for kittens. Cats are just fine, thank you, but kittens, kittens with their cotton ball fur and eyes that are steely blue and their mews that are tiny and sound like water drips – kittens with their miniature paws and bodies that curl, curl into a cinnamon roll on your chest and purr with lungs that are motors. A kitten comes by and the leather fades from Donnie's chin and a warmth comes to his cheeks.

Riley can't get enough of cottage cheese and pears. Together. Just the thought of it makes my esophagus constrict, but he insists that it is a wonderful concoction and I'm just being unreasonably squeamish about such things. But I can't get over it. The squeak, squeak of the cottage cheese on teeth is enough to make my nose wrinkle. He grabs mouthfuls of it and always eats it with a spoon. Has to be a spoon, apparently.

Nels, who is hobbling around Ryan's house on crutches, is a smeller. He smells food before eating it. He smells clothes before putting them on. He smells the morning as he steps out his door. He smells the evening as the sun oozes orange-cream in the sky. He even smells the hair on his sister's head whenever she gives him a hug, which has been much more often since the accident. She knows precisely how many inches away she was to losing her brother.

Mine is easy. I always flick the light switch on, off, and on again when I come into a room. I don't know why, but it's there. It always makes me smile for some reason because I only ever notice it after. Eleanor gives me hell for it sometimes. Tells me it's bad for the bulbs. I am confusing them or overworking them or teasing them. I grin and tell her that she's bat-shit crazy, but I love her all the same for the concern about something so inconsequential as a light bulb. And then she puffs her bangs away from her face and throws couch pillows that are green and glossy at my face and we are hyenas in the yellow light of the living room.

I think about all these things tonight because I need to get outside my head. Because I can see Ian in the back of my mind. Ian who always folds up his potato chip bags into neat squares before he throws them away. Ian who grabs fistfuls of slippery grass and yowls deep and painful when life is too furious and disorienting.

Ryan slurps his noodles, Riley squeaks another bite of cottage cheese, Donnie grins gently and dreams of kittens, and Nels sniffs the air with his eyes closed and could tell you that it's Friday night even without looking at a calendar.

Me? I am looking for a light switch, fumbling along the hallway of my mind with palm spread ocean-large.

I am looking for the rooms with the gorgeous and sad oil paintings.

## Glossy Finish

A lone man who I don't know stands at the front of a church I have never been to and squeezes the flannelled pouch of a set of bagpipes – an instrument I've never heard except on the radio and movies.

There is a casket behind him that is closed. It is black and has a matte finish, which seems only fitting. Who would want to be buried in something that was sleek and shiny?

A photograph of Oliver Hastings sits atop the casket. His hair is thinning on the top of his head, and he looks off to the left as if the future is there. His face is a cloud and his face is smiling like April and his face is embossed in my brain.

I saw this man only a week ago. I shook his right hand and felt his left palm lay like a blanket on my shoulder. He told me then how proud he was of Ian, of me, of the men we were turning into. And the more I think about it, the more I want to sneak off to the bathroom and deposit my breakfast into the toilet. Because the truth of the matter is that he may have been proud, but was shaking violent inside when he told these cavernous words to me.

Ian sits in front of me, his back all tangent-line-straight. His face is set and all the moisture has been drained out of his eyes.

He will not weep for his father today. Not once. He is done with that.

Today he will be strong for his mother. His family.

All the rage that he felt the day of, the day after, two days after, it is only a ghost in his bones now. The residual shakes I saw that morning, they left in an exponential decay from his body. The toxicity of the event is palatable now. No radiation from the fallout will melt his bones to liquid.

There are many people who knew Oliver. Many who stand up at the front and labor their shaky voices through speeches about the man. How they remember his kindness and optimism. How they remember seeing him working in his fields with the sun baking his back. His hands that were always stained brown and smelled like life. Lovely little stories that tie everything up in high gloss sheen. Polite stories that paint everything in warm hues and they will make people grin and sleep easier tonight.

But Ian will have none of that.

He stands up and his mother sucks in air and holds it close to her heart as her son, who is tall and straight and has hair that looks just like uncle Earl's, her son who has dreams of Seattle and sees the rusted moon in his dreams, goes to the front of the church and speaks without a microphone. His voice is large and calm like buttery summer days.

"I loved my father. What son in his right mind wouldn't? I've...I've heard some wonderful stories today. Stories that remind me just what I've lost this week. I...just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for coming here and loving this man as much as I do. You all are lending a lot of strength to my mom and me by being here. So...thanks again."

He sits down and keeps his body straight.

And maybe it's all in my head. Maybe I'm the one who wants to look at the matte-finish and ignore the rosy bits of life. Maybe I've had it wrong all this time and I've been too mired down to see it.

Ian's mother leans over to him and whispers into his right ear, "Thank you. Thank you for not saying what I would have."

I understand then. I understand how Chief O'Shaye could love and loathe his son at the same time. How the duality of life and the complexities of the heart are thrumming violent and wild. How the rawness of everyday is too close and too unsightly sometimes, and we must pull back and put a polished shine on things so that the sun can glint off of it and make us lose our breath and whisper awed noises to ourselves.

Brilliant little flashes of deception.

## Aunt Patty's Tulips

They are a fireworks explosion ensconced in a glass vase. They are spongy and colored vibrant like cheek rouges and lipstick and peaches that are in season and syrupy-ripe and sticky-sweet. They look like you could bite into a petal and taste the wax of crayons.

They stand solitary in the middle of a reception table that has been clothed with what looks like an overlarge doily.

My plate is there. Buttery crackers that dissolve in your mouth and meats that are tissue-paper thin and touch the tongue with a sugar-salt kiss.

Our hands are around the table as well. Mine are small and know their way around the neck of a guitar. There is a ruby scratch on my knuckle from Ryan's cat.

I have to think on the little things.

The ray of sun that slices like an exhaled breath from God through the atmosphere that is speckled with dust that looks like galaxy snow. As if the universe has been condensed down to a tiny fireside room in a church that has floorboards that moan at our feet.

The candles that burn and bubble wax down their sides like frozen rivers.

Ryan's face that is dry and stares at nothing except food.

Aunt Patty's tulips that explode like a late summer sunset.

Yes. I have to think on the little things.

For now.

## Have You Forgotten...

Who this story is really about?

I keep asking myself that question as I sift through the footage that spills and spills out of the video camera. The faces that are nervous and look off at familiar objects as they recount the events in life that they wish they could forget. Their cheeks that crease with lines like folded paper.

But I remember. I can never forget.

Ellie on the dark asphalt with pebbles digging into her shins, and she's shaking, oh God, she's shaking so hard. The night air that frosted and felt like needles on the tongue.

Scotty being pulled up on the shore and the sickening slosh and the pop, pop, pop of the rocks as he was drug up.

And all the rest is just me trying to get my bearings. Do you understand? I am just a boy, just a kid who is dizzy from being spun around and has been set down in a town that is tiny and intricate and beautiful and so damn connected that it burns every single time skin splits and bleeds. I'm stumbling around with the world going clockwise right before my eyes and all I'm trying to do is find something solid for my fingers. Do you get me?

Ellie, I can see you on the porch. It is calm outside and sunny. Your feet are bare in December and the air cannot touch your skin. You are too tough and too smart and too much like a blossoming dogwood tree to let it.

And here I am in the house, sifting through people's memories and images that they wish would just leave them the hell alone. I'm putting both my hands on sturdy rails and am trying to steady myself long enough so that when the world has stopped its spiraly-spin, I will be able to walk without tripping over my own two feet.

But in the meantime Eleanor, please stay there. Warm your skin in the sun that might blink away in a few minutes. Wave hello to the vine maples that hang low for you. Just for you.

Please.

## Pendulum

I want you to feel this. Again.

I am walking home down Goodwin road at eleven o'clock on a Sunday night. I love country roads because they never waver like the roads in a city. They are boxes and grids and so very predictable. It is sticky-tar-dark and the Christmas Eve air is sluggish. It hasn't snowed this year, just forty degree weather and rain that soaks clothes and makes bones clack together. But tonight. Tonight it is clear and the frost is beginning to settle because the blanket of clouds has been peeled back. I breathe and it is billowed and curls tightly and mutes a patch of stars.

I stand with my hands in my pockets. The air is alive and electric and all around. The roads are beginning to slick over and all molecules are slowing, slowing, taking long breaths.

And for a few seconds it is perfect.

A wild and careening truck that is rusted out and smells like a dirty gym sock on the inside. It's headlights are open wide and it has a hungry grill. Metal and rubber and pistons pumping mad and fiery explosions under the hood.

Bobby O'Shaye slides sideways past me. His hat flannelled and his face stretched tight. Whites of his eyes large as the moon. He is frozen and terrified and praying loudly through clenched teeth as his truck skates wild.

The right two wheels of his truck slip into the ditch that is wide and floods easily in April. The blue truck gives out then. Somersaults and flies as if flicked by a giant index finger and folds itself neatly around the truck of a massive fir tree. Neatly like the way my dad folds his ties every Easter and puts on facades for people he doesn't really care about.

And I stand there, shocked, mouth pried open and hanging low.

In front of me.

Right in front of me.

It happened _right in front of me._

He is screaming, and Francis Keeler tears open her door, puts both hands over her mouth, and steadies herself with her shoulder on the doorframe. Because she knows that truck. She knows that boy. She was at the doula who stood diligently by Sara O'Shaye's side for ten hours of labor. She held a baby who was three weeks early and slathered with vernix. Saw his eyes open for the first time and wondered at the way they shined like tiny marbles. And to see the truck that is folded over like that and to hear me yelling across the ditch to her to call the police and to make sure that Chief O'Shaye comes and hurry, hurry Mrs. Keeler _please_.

The truck is upside down with the driver's side door hugging the pulpy bark. Engine that smokes and smokes. There are sounds like water hissing and clicks and repetitive pings and the steam that rises all angry into the darkness. The engine sighs and says over and over that it is done. Finished.

My feet make their way over the grass that is shining silver like my mother's hair in the pale wash of the moon. I get to the passenger door and, without knowing why, stoop down and look into the window, into the cab that has been squashed down to half its normal size.

There is Bobby O'Shaye. Looking at me. He is hunched with his shoulders pressing down against the metal of the truck's ceiling, and his eyes are watery. His bones are snapped, too many to count, and later I will find out that his lungs are filling up with liquid.

He cannot speak. His voice is gone and his eyes are watery and move slow, but I believe he can see me. I believe he knows that it is me. That mine will be the last face that he sees. Ever. That his insides are shattered and shutting down on him. He knows all these things as he looks at my face that is frozen-shock and haunting in the moonlight.

He is crying.

Giant tears that could flood Riddleridge Creek. Tears that shine so damn bright in the crystalline night. Tears that, despite all this boy has done to my sister, to me, grab at my ribs.

They are silent tears, because his lungs are only giving him short breaths. Hiccoughs really. He has only seconds left, and he knows it. I know it. When the police get here, when Chief O'Shaye pulls up his car and drops down to his knees and the marshy soil saturates and soaks his knees through his government-issued pants, Bobby will be gone and staring with tears falling the wrong way up his face.

And all the alcohol, all the cigarettes and chewing tobacco and coffee-stained smiles and sweaty skin and the hands that touched my sister and never cared when she fought back, all of it is softening before me.

And I hate it.

I am feeling pity for this boy who is dying before me, and it is burning a hole in my stomach.

No, Bobby.

I will not cry.

Not for you.

No. Goddamnit, no.

But even as I say this, I can see the vernix-baby and the first steps and the face that smiled and smiled when it learned how to ride a bike and all of the small and gorgeous things that are inconsequential but so very weighty.

He is a monster. But my chest constricts and the chokes come and seize my lungs and catch my breath and I exhale in short rasps and cry hot and angry in the middle of the marshy grass. I am ripping up blades and throwing them at the tree trunk and sobbing through my throat and yelling at Bobby. Because I hate him and pity him and wish to hell that it had been different for him. That I am sorry Bobby, so damn sorry that I ever wished you would die. That I didn't mean for this to happen.

And Bobby looks and can barely see me anymore. He is still and his body is losing its color and heat.

Do you hear me Bobby? Because here is your eulogy right now. Right now as I'm shoving my fist into the pasty ground. You were broken. Fractured and sliced into a million jagged pieces. You may have been a darling baby with eyes that were perfect and shiny, but something broke inside of you later in life. And I want to hate you for that. I want to put all that is wrong with me and heap it elephant-large and ponderous directly on your chest that is now crushed to pulp.

But I can't do that.

You have done wrong to my family. I look at Ellie every day and hear her cry soft in the night and I know that you took something priceless from her. I want to hate you for that and want your bones to grind to powder for that.

But Ellie would shake her head at me for saying such things.

Bobby, can you see? I can't hate you. You are fragile and broken and damn you and your eyes and your tears.

So I sit there. I am a pendulum swinging wide to extremities. Marshy moisture soaking up through my jeans and grabbing at grass and kicking a blue rusted truck, beating my fists on the solid trunk of a fir tree. Because I wanted Bobby to hurt like I did. Like Ellie did. I didn't want him to die. Just to hurt. Understand?

The night explodes into blue and red swirls and the radios crackle sharp. Vincent Landon pulls me from the ground and wraps a wool blanket that is scratchy and smells like camping around my shoulders. Places his strong hands on my shoulders and looks at my nose.

"Eli, get in the car. I'll take you home."

I look at Vincent, who is tall like truth, and scrunch my face a little.

"Don't...don't you need a statement? I was just there on the road and I was walking and-"

"Eli." He stops me with his voice. "It's _Christmas Eve_. You need to be at home."

I nod and begin to walk away from the upside down truck. Chief O'Shaye with his face swallowed whole by his palms. The tree that has been scarred.

The night that is flecked and sparkling and the moon that is large and looks like young love. And how I want to desperately grab that orb with both hands and hold it to my chest.

## Cement Feet

The day after Christmas and it is snowing. Flakes that are large and lazy and are cotton drifting dizzy in the sky.

I am inside and watching Ellie. She was a blank page when I told her the news that night. She cried silently at two in the morning, and I know that it was for the same reasons that I did.

Christmas passed and presents were opened with a chorus of _thank you_ and _I love it_ and many things that were sincere and hollow at the same time. There is a ghost that hangs in the air and it is so very tangible as I make my way out onto the porch and walk out to where Ellie is.

The snow is flurrying and tracing graceful arcs and pasting itself to everything it can. It is hungry for contact.

My thin gloves that are black and are embossed with flakes.

Ellie's head that is uncovered and is brown curls and is magnetizing the weather and melting the crystals back to water.

The world that is silent. The gray of the sky and the trees that have been dipped in frosting and the hush of it all that is so deafening.

A year ago I would have been able to tell you that Ellie grabbed my hand and told me that I was going to walk with her. Snow makes her grin wide until her lips crack and the first snow of the year makes her tear up a little.

But not this year.

There is a heaviness that is hanging and it keeps her arms by her sides. She does not reach for my hand. She does not look sideways at me and ask me to walk in the snow that is yawning wide like a cat in the morning.

And I can't say that I blame her. But at the same time, I cement my feet to the ground and stand there with a straight back, just like Ian had. And it is enough.

For a Tuesday.

## Fusion

We sit around and think about wounds that we want to heal.

We make resolutions that we hope will tattoo themselves onto our bones and become a part of our DNA.

We laugh hesitant laughs because of all that has transpired. Because it all seems too recent and too much like thin glass-bones.

We make jokes about the safe things. About Riley's car that broke down again for the third time this month. About how curvy Nel's sister is getting. About how shiny and like a cue-ball Donnie's head is.

We lean and we support and we say to hell with those who would look sideways at us.

And through it all we knit and fuse our bones and blood and make all things internally strong.

## Circles

I am sitting in my English class and cannot focus on _Ethan Frome_. No. My mind is shot off elsewhere.

On Donnie, who is strong and works on the weekends to make sure that his brother has new clothes and food on the table and can do his multiplication tables from memory, because Donnie was never that good at math but wants his brother to have many doors that are flung open wide, wide, wide.

On Nels, who will have his casts off in a few weeks and is always getting hugged at home. His cherry truck that has a crooked smile and is up on blocks at his house.

On Ryan, who never talks about Kate anymore and is always alone on the weekends until we come over. About how the isolation is getting to him and how I want to grab him as lunch is ending and tell him that we should get out, with Ellie, and just go drive up in foothills for the afternoon.

On Ian, who still breezes through his calculus problems, but has a canyon that gapes large and craggy inside of him. He is brave and straight and never lets on, but I know that the wicker chair is empty and how it smolders inside of him.

On Riley, who goes home at night to a house where the drinks do not speak or clink loudly, but has to go to sleep every night with the white noise of his mother's tears in the background.

On Eddie Kludtz, who ran into Mary the barista the other day outside of the coffee house and talked to her about the weather, what happened during the holidays, and how he doesn't like fish. I smiled at them as I wandered into the grocery store that has changed management and names three times in the past five years.

On how things are cyclical and sometimes glossy-finished and the ripples stretch to the very edges of the pond.

## Night Walkers

Ellie, I see you there on the couch that is sometimes scratchy but so comfortable and familiar that it is hard to leave.

"Eli, look at it outside. The moon is out and the snow looks like it is milk."

It's like that because God wants you to know that there are still things that are beautiful and can make you ache with longing when you look at them.

"The tree branches are huge and sagging. See them? Do you think that school will be canceled tomorrow? Do you think that the trees are going to crack under the weight of it all?"

Some trees might, Ellie. Not the dogwood. They never get weighed down and snap in two. They are elastic and snap, snap back.

"It's like porcelain outside, or fine china, or grandma's flowery cups. Remember those?"

"Yes, Ellie. You always wanted to drink out of them, and grandma would pour you air and you would slurp it. Loudly. I could hear you in the other room." I smile.

Ellie, I understand now. Redemption isn't a lump of sugar that sits and shrinks on your tongue. It isn't a sweet phantom. It is a polished river-rock smoothed over by time and friction. A rock that you put in your front pocket and rub between your thumb and forefinger when the world is too muddled and furious. Do you hear me?

The ugliness of everything, it all washes off. Give it time and love and quiet nights where you open up your bedroom window and can hear the proud chirp-chorus of tree frogs singing throatily to the stars. They sing like that because they know of no other way to be - an audible heart being plunged into the dappled sky. I tell myself these things, because my hand reaches for the window sill on many nights when the moon dangles like a dusty medallion and I _remember_.

Don't you see? Because it's rolling around in my head now, and it is comfortable and warm like Friday nights in July - how all we can ever do is rub salves on scars and hope to God they soften with time. That in the years to come we will trace them with fingers that are steady and do not shake.

Ellie, I want you to walk with me. The night is quiet and the world has feathery teeth and no one, no, not any one will touch you. We can put one foot in front of the other and leave footprints in the snow that are straight and unafraid. We can be brave and bold and know that sometimes stories can have a matte-finish and still be pleasing to the eye.

"Walk with me Ellie? Please?"

The night is black, frosted and gorgeous. It is flecked with galaxy-holes and is a pristine china cup. It is beautiful and is waiting for her.

Just for her.

## A Note to the Reader

The events in this story are kind of horrific. I get that. But please know that these stories were born out of truths. Little pebbles of truth that lie at the core. So if the question of "how much of this really happened?" is spiraling all dizzy in your head, then just know that. I didn't come to decieve or sugarcoat. So yes, portions of these stories did happen. Certainly not in the chronology or extent that you see on the page, but then again, it all goes back to Tim O'Brien and "story truth". So if you ask, I'll grin slightly and tell you that there is truth in here, but to tell you what is factual and what is fabrication would detract from anything and everything. Just know that names have been changed and events slightly skewed to protect those involved. And that is all.

## About the Author

Eli Godbolt grew up in the small town of Everson, Washington. Like many other kids in the middle of nowhere, he went to school. On most days, this was out of sheer boredom. He attended school, read books, made friends, shot off illegal fireworks on occasion, and was normal in a slightly tweaked-sort-of-way. He wouldn't have had it any other way, really.

He attended college at WWU in Bellngham, WA and discovered that despite his best efforts, he really loved school. He received his teaching certificate and has been teaching English, mathematics, and creative writing to high school students in Federal Way, Washington.

_Small Town Glory_ is his first "complete" book. His post-apocalyptic novel _The Specters in Books_ is yet unpublished, but may come to see the light of day very soon.

## Contact Me Online:

Facebook

Author Website

Small Town Glory Website

## Sample Of THE SPECTERS IN BOOKS

A mumble of incoherent wake-up-speech. A sputtering of leathery eyelids. Clipper's face coming into fog-view and snapping clear. A movement of cracked lips.

" _Who..._ " Breathless. Nearly inaudible.

And downy softness in reply. "You are safe. My name is Clipper, and I won't hurt you."

" _Why?"_

"What?"

" _Please."_

"Yes? What do you need? Here. Drink this water."

The inky eyes closed and the leathery head slowly bobbed from side to side. As if it had no other movement. A skull on an uncontrolled spring. The water came to the cracked lips and the eyes snapped open. Wild. Desperate.

" _No...please no."_

"What is it?"

" _No water. Please, don't help me."_

"You're delirious. Please, just lie down and rest. I'll get something for you to eat and-"

" _NO..._ " Forceful and sad. Mountain large and pregnant with loathing. He was becoming more coherent with each breath. He was not violent, she could tell. But he was not harmless. He had been twisted, and had not wanted to be. Bent against his will. Broken and fractured and still the hollow and ghostly breaths rasped out.

"You must eat. Do you understand? You must get your strength back."

" _I don't...want it back."_

"Nonsense. Look at me."

And for the first time, she _saw_ him. The black pools looked at her storm-sea eyes. The same eyes that had seen something human in him. Beyond teeth and an all consuming cavernous stomach. He was wild and unpredictable, she could see. The glint of the one who howls long and low and eats ravenous and greedy. But she could not deny the softness that was there beneath the exterior that she imagined would reverberate an audible _thunk_ if a finger tapped lightly upon it.

"You _must_ eat." There could be no argument. But he would not hear. The tangle of his leather-brain clicked ruthless and he snarled low in his stomach and flashed his black tar eyes angry and stubborn.

" _Listen to me_ ," he said. He had pooled all his collective strength, focused it into menace, and gripped the sheets with talon-hands. " _Don't help me._ "

"I can't oblige that. Not even close."

He growled and moaned low, thrashing slightly.

"What's your name? You know mine. Extend me the same courtesy and tell me yours."

" _No,_ " he turned slightly away towards the window.

"You're quite the ungrateful guest. You know that?"

He snarled and rolled back to her. " _I have no name anymore._ "

"Nonsense." She repeated and clucked her tongue as she picked at her fingernails. "It's still there. Buried beneath leather-scars, no doubt. But it's there."

" _Has been ripped out._ "

"No," Clipper smiled thin and soft. "Nothing is ever erased. There are always ghosts. Impressions on the opposite side of the bed that will never go away. That you don't want to go away. Hands that you will reach for in the middle of the night when you know full well that what you are reaching for isn't there. Your name hasn't been taken away. Just buried and condensed down. Do you understand? It is still there."

" _No. It is lost._ "

"Listen to me," delicate hand placed gingerly on leathered face. Slight flinch at the sensation of skin on skin that had not been felt for years. And something so familiar, like a distant tenderness. An open wound scabbed over green and nerve-raw. "You are not lost."

Black pool eyes closed tight. So tight that it seemed his entire face would begin shrinking into his sockets. Hand-talons now unclenched and the sheets trembled. Her right hand cupping his face and left hand resting slightly on his.

" _My name is Jaq,_ " he said, paused, and looked into her eyes, " _and you must kill me_."

The air was frozen and shuddered outside the window.

The moon hung enormous and cratered and full and cast a pale veil on all everything and put on the sheen of the netherworld.

