The Hunted

           1959. The night was blacker than cats-a-fightin’ as Tommy Ringer and I rolled along the deserted back roads of Citrus County in the old Model-A Ford pickup truck we had converted to a swamp buggy. We were headed for trouble and didn’t know it.

          Gone were the Model-A’s original 21” rims. We bounced along on four airplane tires that gave us height and mobility in the woods. By attaching chains we could go just about anywhere. The old headlights barely swallowed up more than fifteen yards of darkness at a time, and that’s assuming they worked at all. Every jounce along the cracked macadam road jiggled the connecting wires, but we forged ahead, safe in knowing nobody else was fool enough to sacrifice precious sleep-time so as to train dogs to hunt raccoons in the middle of the night.

          Between Lake Panasofkee and the little town of Inverness lay an expanse of some of the best hunting land in Florida, especially for a couple of ‘coon hunters. It was a paradise of lakes and ponds, studded with oak and pine and cabbage palm. Interspersed through it all were open expanses of palmetto. Every kind of game was there — deer, turkey, bear, wildcat, quail, and dove. Even a few panthers still roamed that area of the state. But ‘coon hides were a cash crop and it was ‘coons we were after. 

          High above each front fender, welded to the buggy’s frame, were a couple of “shooter’s-seats,” metal seats we’d salvaged from derelict John Deere tractors. In daylight they provided grandstand views of whatever we hunted. At night we sat up high enough to keep our night vision.  

          I rode in the seat above the right fender, my .22 rifle cradled across my lap. The humid September night tugged warm against my face and arms. On either side of the road, barely visible in the poor light, a rancher’s hog-wire fence stretched for miles, a blurred honeycomb of pewter wire punctuated by cypress fence posts.

          It was Tommy, staring straight ahead through the windshield, who saw the ‘coons dart across the road in front of us from left to right. 

          “Hot damn, hang on,” he yelled as he braked onto the right shoulder. “Did you seem ‘em?”

          “See what?” I asked, grabbing the edge of my seat.

          “A mama coon and six or seven young’uns.” The engine hadn’t coughed and sputtered to a full stop before Tommy unlatched the first dog cage at the rear of the buggy. The three coon-hounds caught the excitement of the coming hunt and began baying. 

          “Get on the other side of the fence and I’ll hand ‘em over to you.” Tommy held a full-grown dog in his arms.

          Small game can easily scoot through the five inch squares of a hog-wire fence, but it’ll stop a dog and strangle him. A hound follows scent without worrying about wire. But with his head poking through, he fights it and gets tangled. It can cut him badly or kill him before you know it.

          I unloaded my rifle and laid it on the front seat. I clipped the battery of my hunting light to my cartridge belt and adjusted the headlamp band around my head so the miner’s light shone from the middle of my forehead.

          “Hurry up,” Tommy urged, hoisting the dog before I was ready. “Those ‘coons will be all the way to Lake Okeechobee before you know it.”

          I took my time. The fence was about shoulder high, too high to jump. I rested my hand on the post and came forward with a springing step, then shifted my weight to the top of the post and rolled over the top.

          What happened next remains a blur. I cleared the wire and my 180 pounds thudded into the tall palmettos. To my left, nearly beneath my feet, an explosion. High-pitched buzzing. Like a thousand angry bees. Not bees. Rattlesnake. I froze. Knees bent, arms outstretched. The head-lamp snapped loose and dangled alongside my left jawbone, its beam playing back and forth across the toes of my boots.

          Time crawled. Tommy dropped the dog and reached for his shotgun. The hound rammed its head through the hog-wire and strained against the fence, baying as if he’d treed every ‘coon in Florida. Tommy cocked the twelve-gauge and adjusted his miner’s lamp.

          Light flooded me.

          “Hot damn,” he swore. “Don’t flinch, or he’ll get you.”

          I never so much as rolled an eyeball. But I oozed fear. Oozed it like a rabbit caught in a snake’s trance.

          “I mean it. Don’t move. I’m gonna fire right in front of your face. Lean forward you’ll get hit.” Tommy rested the shotgun on the fence post where my hand had been. The eye of the barrel widened as it moved closer, above and to the right of my head. 

          “Just kill him, dammit,” I muttered through my teeth. Crouched as low as I was the fangs could easily strike me anywhere – arm, leg, or worse. Poison hitting my neck or head, I was dead. “Shoot the damn thing!”

          Tommy squeezed the trigger. The muzzle flashed. Buckshot blew past my face. My right ear deafened, my cheek burned. 

          “Got him,” he yelled. But I already knew it. The frenzied rattling subsided with each convulsion of the dying snake, like a child’s metal toy winding down to a quiet clatter, only to spring to life with brief, final spasms. 

          I stood up slowly, testing my jellied knees. 

          “I told you I got him,” Tommy said, as he pulled the hound away from the fence.

          “I know,” I replied, adjusting my headlamp and shining it all around me. “Just checking.” Snakes traveled in pairs and another one couldn’t miss the dead rattler’s gangrenous musk that choked the air like a morning fog.

          I managed to cross the fence again before Tommy remembered the dead diamondback. 

          “How about grabbing the rattler while I get this dog back in the cage?”

          “Tommy, I thank you for saving my butt, but I’m not touching that damned snake. You want him, you go get him.”

          He did, hoisting it up by the rattles. The head twirled from the few strands of skin keeping it attached. The mouth gaped open and the pearl-white fangs glistened in the light of our headlamps. Tommy tried handing the snake to me, but the best I’d do was hold open a burlap bag for him to drop it into. Even without the head the snake measured six feet long. Since a rattler can strike a distance two-thirds its length, the entire time I remained crouched there in the palmettos, I felt I was the hunted.

          As I cranked the Model-A, Tommy glanced at his watch. “Hey, we still got some time left before the moon comes up. What do you say we turn the dogs loose?”

          “That snake said it all,” I told him. “I’m done hunting for tonight.” Actually, I was pretty much finished with it altogether. That was the third time within weeks that a rattlesnake had nearly bitten me. Two months later, in November, I met a girl on a blind date and married her in March. Shortly after that I sold my purebred Redbone hound to a feed salesman who broke him of hunting ‘coons and made a deer-dog out of him.

          Tommy was happy with his new rattlesnake belt and hatband, and sported them everywhere. He was welcome to them. He even dried the snake’s skull with the fangs extended in the strike position. He mounted it on the dashboard of the hunting buggy.

          I didn’t need any souvenirs. Escaping death that night in Citrus County was the only memento I needed.

Money Art, Valerie Brown Woven Photograph

Seasonable Desires

White Cotton Shirt

She picks a peasant shirt from the rack and looks for her size. There are 2 smalls, 3 larges, and 1 medium. Her fingertips pass over black paisley embroidered borders. The hanger dangles over her arm like a compass pointing southeast in the direction of its country of origin. She slides her bra straps off her shoulders, unties and reties the ebony satin ribbon into a bow. Spring ahead, longer daylight hours, summer not far off.

Did you find what you were looking for? Russian or Eastern European accent, to her ear both sound similar. Only the shirt, for now.

She gets into the Japanese hybrid redolent with cumin, cardamom, turmeric, and sumac. The driver’s lunch, half-eaten, in a foil puddle on the front seat beside him. Her destination given (forty-fourth and second) she repeats it in single digits, 4-4—and 2.

Argentinean Malbec bought at the liquor store a block from her apartment. She buys Italian Gorgonzola (dolce), Greek olives, and sundried tomatoes in Tuscan olive oil from the gourmet grocer next door, and stops at the Korean market on the corner for baby lettuce, and blueberries imported from Chile, a container of milk. A north wind off the Hudson; winter still hangs on.

She puts the bags on the glass top table. Uncorks the wine, shakes the baby lettuce into the salad spinner, the blueberries in a bowl. She lays the white cotton shirt embroidered with black paisley borders and ebony satin bow wrapped in tissue across her bed.

Washington Square Park

The cloud hovers in a space between treetops. The cloud hovers on top of a building with a red tile roof. The cloud drifts lazily in the breeze touching her arm. A cloud between treetops, over a building with a red tile roof, leaves lush after a rainy spring—verdant at the start of a new season. Bird song, traffic slush, and children chirping—a breeze on her skin. Two women in black and white—the space between two strangers—almost astride, skirts dance around bare legs. One in a black dress beneath a white pinafore, thick straps crisscross at her back tie in a bow at her waist, a second behind, in a white sleeveless blouse over a black trumpet skirt, gussets fan open with her leg’s movement.

A red brick circle— in spots yellow tipped grass breaks through the cement mortar. A chick, a babe, and a girl sunbathe, lounge around the circle, roasting their flesh to a perfect hue, sits on blue jean legs eats crumbs from the bottom of the brown paper bag and reads—sits up, reties her bathing suit, tote bag on peach towel spread over red brick, rearranges the tote pillow, reclines—a straight leg flat to the ground, a leg bent at the knee, (stems), coral jean skirt, frayed hemline, black rubber sole flip-flops point north and south, head east, and body west, her fingertips travel her firm belly. Two leave. Tanning is tedious work.

The trees lush after a rainy spring—verdant in their infancy at the start of a new season before the onslaught of July and August heat. Bird song, traffic, voices of chirping children carried on the breeze. Dope dealers, chess players, and rats in the vegetation around the brick housed public bathrooms. Aware of my surrounding—never let my guard down—I am a New Yorker.

Six Floor Walk-Up

She sits at the open window. A rind hangs from her hand. Pulp—red and fleshy—slips from her chin onto the front of her white t-shirt. Black seeds (watermelon) drop to the street below. Kids in bathing suits splash in hydrant surf on asphalt sand. 

A Fish Story 

Day slips into dusk. The air turns cool. She walks along the shore, her face damp with fog. A dark shape huddles close to the dunes. Driftwood dragged off the beach, chained behind a pickup truck and set on a deck. Buff skin like chamois. Tree trunks churned in ocean waves and sun bleached, wind silenced in absent branches.

Wind through the hollow trunk—nothing more. Day after, Labor Day, sea glare blind windows squint into the thickening mist. You know how she responds. So much had happened, if not to her then to other women. A gust lifts party streamers like Isadora’s chiffon scarf tangled in spokes. She moves without hesitation.

Where You Are Now

     You are leaning over me, holding a noisemaker, clutching my arm. Your eyes are shadowed by a false drunkenness, convincingly posed behind the green glass of an O’Doul’s bottle, the label carefully removed. Your purple dress, speckled with sunflowers, rests across your legs. You are the most important object in the room. Everything else is brown leather and brown wall paneling and grey marble, which I am told is very expensive. I don’t remember who took the picture. I do remember someone saying your eyelashes steal everything away, being encouraged to accept the metaphorical red ribbon.

    A child, you are already trained in the art of seduction; lips curled up, a teaser of a smile. I am your little boy-girl cousin, sitting next to you, left without enough room on the edge of the couch. My arms are crossed, a failed effort to cover those cruel and useless tits, cloaked by an oversized Miami Dolphins jersey, an orange turtleneck, and tattered, open hair shafts.

     It is New Year’s Eve. The ball is just about to drop, or already has.

     Your grandfather’s too-loud projection television, quite literally the length of the kitchen wall at my house, is just out of the frame. Dick Clark is on, and a room full of overweight family members are eating slabs of lasagna, of eggplant parmesan. They’re devouring mounds of salad drenched with oily dressing that will inevitably wind up on their clothes. The evening always culminates with a mad dash to the sink, and frantic, flawed attempts to remove stains that have already set. With plates on their laps, zoning out underneath the glow of the screen, they sip iced champagne, always Dom Pérignon. A sharp contrast from my five-liter boxed-wine parents.

     We are the only people who know that, on other days, when there are no guests but us, your grandfather watches porn on that television, yells, “Stay out of my bedroom. Later. I’m having sex with my woman tonight.” The kind of man whose wealth came almost directly from his brashness and frugality, he is the type of person who brings home cartons of maxi pads from liquidation centers tied to the roof of his Cadillac, screaming at us to unload them. He keeps an inhaler for his asthma in every room. All the time, he says he will die soon.         

     His “woman,” Margot, the mistress whom everyone pretended was his wife for the sake of convenience, didn’t leave her house for three years after you left, and wouldn’t let anyone in. Then, she just arrived at Belmont Lake for our annual Fourth of July picnic, sat down at the table, and made herself a plate. Two hamburgers and a generous side of baked beans. “It’s nobody’s business, what I do,” she said, perpetually defensive, angry, when anyone asked her why she’d done what she did.  “Because I felt like it,” she’d say, other times.

     Nothing in that house ever changes, or grows. Margot’s oldest daughter, Suzanne, still lives in her childhood bedroom at the end of the hall, still wears the same hairdo; a sweeping wave of bangs brushed back over her fluffed, stiff mane. A Brooklyn bouffant, my mother calls it. Suzanne is fifty-four years old. She has over one hundred teddy bears facing her bed, which we were forced to take naps in on New Years Eve. My mother constantly worried that I would fall apart from fatigue. I never slept. Suzanne still has a fake boyfriend named Nick whom no one has ever met. She tells people, “I pity anyone who doesn’t have satin sheets.”

     I chose her as the sponsor for my Confirmation, thumbing my nose at my family’s God. It was this move that provoked my father − botanist, teacher, skeptic— to ask me if I didn’t believe anymore. A scientist, he always sought clarity, evidence. I was twelve. I said no, I just don’t.

     Nodding, he said, “Good for you.” Then, “Don’t tell your mother.”

***

     Really, it is unbelievable, the things you don’t know.  How it has come to this, that this picture of some insignificant evening is the only photograph I have of us together.

     I used to keep so many photos of us I couldn’t even begin to count. And they weren’t crushed into the bottom of a nightstand drawer, like this one is, laden with white marks and accidentally torn, the edges warped from the heat. They were in quilted photo albums, labeled with glue pens, the years written in my mother’s cursive. I remember looking through them often, even after I gave the books to my grandmother, who displayed them on her coffee table as if our memories were ones anyone else would want to look through. Now, those albums are in her attic, per my request, stacked behind the gigantic yellow teddy bear I cannot imagine my mother once loving. They are covered with dust and bits of sawdust that fall from the ceiling during thunderstorms, and the only reason I don’t wipe it off (because, despite not wanting to open the books, I always open the books) is because it would feel like telling a lie.

     The attic was legendary, a revealer of false bravery. Both of my grandparents discouraged us from going up there. My grandfather — World War Two veteran, Greek bull — said it was dangerous; was infested with wasps, had poor ventilation, and an unreliable floor. My grandmother — Brooklyn-born Italian, chronic worrier, believer of miracles — said she’d heard people up there at night; ghosts sliding their feet across the pine planks, never daring to make the trip down the five steps into her bedroom. They feared the crucifix, she’d said, which was affixed to her door. \

     “Why are they afraid?” I’d asked, young, looking at the many crosses that adorned her walls, wondering how she could sleep underneath so many tortured men, some with dried palm still tucked behind their metallic heads.

     “Everyone is afraid of God,” she told me. My grandmother was constantly making statements like this, and even now, after over a decade of my absolute atheism, she stills signs all of her cards “You’re in my prayers.” She is the only person who can get away with things like that. And in her attic, where the fear of God keeps everything in and the fear of bees and asphyxiation keeps everyone out, the albums remain.

     Out of the hundreds of photographs in those books, spanning over at least fourteen years, I can only remember three. In one of them, we’re teenagers, posed on the bed in my mother’s childhood bedroom, which, like much of my grandparents’ house, seems untouched by time. All of the furniture, cloaked in plastic, pictures of dead people and sold houses cluttering the mantle. The carpet is the same hunter green my mother had walked upon when she was in high school — then, the beautiful star in the school musicals, envy of others, now the office manager at a job she is too good for. The rug is so stained and faded, patterns unintentionally emerge from the corners. Her twin sized canopy bed is still in the middle of the room, the comforter properly folded, the pillow aptly fluffed. For thirty-two years, no one has slept in it. In the picture, there we are: giving the peace sign for an undisclosed cause, smiling through too much lipstick. I am wearing a long, maroon skirt and an unflattering white button-down shirt; I am still too shy to show my legs, to accentuate the shape of my breasts with form-fitting sweaters. You come from a family of people who are only comfortable in green velvet and black satin and are dressed accordingly. You stare directly at the camera, and I do too, almost. My eyebrows, now too thin, where then too thick. I was a blonde, and so were you.

     In another picture, that is just of you, you’re standing on stage, holding a bouquet of red roses, wearing that peach-colored bridesmaid dress that was left over our Aunt Joanne’s wedding. She hadn’t even asked me to be in the bridal party, and while silently devastated, I still had fun with you, sitting in the suite, stealing sips of champagne and glances in the mirror. I remember you wore your hair pin straight and jet black, bangs swept to the side. My hair, a purposely unnatural red, had been dyed in passive aggressive protest the day before. But in the photo, taken a year later, your hair is honey-brown again and your smile is huge, honest. Your teeth are visible. I remember sitting in the front row at the beauty pageant, bored, watching your full lips mouth thank you; and your mother, next to me, who always smelled like cigarettes and wore too short dresses, pointing to your competitors, and saying, “All those girls would be terrible fucks.” She only clapped for you.

     That was in the days when we used to have sleepovers and watch television all night — usually MTV, back when it was still okay to like it — until we fell asleep on your living room couch, comfortably experimenting with drugs. That living room, all different shades of green. Your mother thought she had it in her to be a designer, but I hated that room, I absolutely hated it. I felt like I was in a forest, somewhere lost in the underbrush with low hung branches scrapping against my skin. It was so dark in there. I don’t know how you stood living in a house that was so dark. But back then we still swam in the fountain in front of city hall at midnight. We squatted, by choice, in the unfinished building we lovingly named The Foundation. That was before you squatted, without choice, strung out, living on scaffolding above the Lincoln Tunnel. That was before I lost you.

     The other photo was taken much earlier, at the Manorville Game Farm out on the east end of Long Island. We must be no more than eight. On the mornings of the long car ride, I recall awaking in a terrible panic, immediately hit with the realization that I would become ill during the journey, forcing my parents to pull over as I threw up onto the side of the parkway, much to my brother’s dismay; because our car had a rust hole on the floor behind the driver’s seat, we were pushed together, buckled into a single seatbelt, far away from the hole. “Pull it,” my mother would say, yanking the belt across our chests, and we’d pull it, covertly seizing the opportunity to dig our elbows and knees into one and other, already learning to fight for the biggest piece of the smallest corner. He was always the kind of kid who was in a rush, even if it was at your expense, begging my parents to continue on, as if oblivious to the events that were presently unfolding. His left foot, severely scarred from an unfortunate accident involving a scalding hot cup of tea, would beat on the back of my father’s seat as he half-cried, “I want to go now.”  But it wasn’t his fault. He was born too soon. There wasn’t enough space between us, and the walls in our house weren’t thick enough to conceal the hushed, late night dinner table conversations about high food bills, no vacations, the lack of money to finish the goddamn basement/leak in the roof/rot on the tool shed, and the endless question of what did we do wrong that everyone else did right?

     There is none of this, though, in that photograph. These gripes are new blues. When it was taken, things were different. My parents were still firmly together, the kind of a couple who held hands in the front seat. My father doesn’t yet live in the basement. My mother doesn’t yet throw her birthday presents into the Atlantic Ocean, or sleep, when she feels like it, at her office. I do not yet hate her and I do not yet forgive her; I do not yet understand that type of loneliness to do either of those things. But in this picture, there is just you and me and my brother, not yet my friend, standing a little off to the side, disgruntled from hanging out with the girls. There is a straw in each of our mouths. We’re sipping soda from a single can.

***

     And now, a letter appears in my mailbox, along with this picture from an unknown New Year’s. The envelope is blue and the handwriting is yours, just as I remembered it, alongside mine, scrawled across walls of abandoned buildings. Judging by the way you shape your letters, the roundness of your vowels, the open circles above your i’s, you are still fourteen years old, the kind of girl who forges love letters you will never have the courage to send. I won’t say the same doesn’t go for me, but I don’t even bother writing them. Not anymore. Always nostalgic about something, the girl (now the woman) who stares out of living room windows during family parties, watching the passing traffic, wondering who’s riding with whom, trying to picture myself in a million lives, quietly trying them on to see which one, if any, would fit.

     Rather than telling me where you’ve been for the past six and a half years, you’re explaining that girls who are married aren’t allowed to compete in the Miss America pageant and you sound profoundly upset, truly disappointed. It seems like you just don’t understand, or don’t want to acknowledge, the fact that you are no longer a kid. No longer a beauty queen, climbing trees and sleeping in the woods, with me, watching the sunrise.

     You do not mention the time you set fire to your bedroom with both of us in it, how you took an X-acto™ knife and sliced up all of the furniture in your mother’s apartment, drawing all of those crazy designs on your walls and mirrors and telling me I couldn’t understand the code. You do not mention us finding your flattened dead kittens laying on the concrete floor of the unfinished basement, the grey one’s tails curled halfway around the rusty leg of your father’s old worktable, forgotten and covered with mildew, left to rot underground. Those are the memories I think of now, when I think of you at all. How the black fleas ran up our legs that night, forcing us, together, crying and naked, into the shower.

     But that’s not what you think of. You have never been the type of person who knows how to look back. You just say, I miss you. That we should have a sleepover. That you hope I’m well. Mockingly, you still call me Ms. Nobel Prize, ask if I’m “still too smart” for you. You use too many exclamation points. You never use a question mark, even when you ask “How are you.” You just end the sentence with a period, with a single flick of your pen. It is more of a line than a dot. Everything you write, it seems, proves why my grandmother was afraid to tell me about you. Because you are too the same. Because you are still a child, now overgrown. At a family wedding a few months ago, she’d come up to me so slowly, her hand crumpled around a piece of paper — your grandfather had given it to her, making my family do the dirty work again. I could tell she didn’t want to give it to me by the way her fingertips lingered around the edges. But there was no drama like I imagine you’d think. There was just a piece of paper, passed from one hand to the other, with your name and phone number scribbled in your handwriting, and nothing more. No conversation about where you’d been, if you were healthy or the kind of sick that you never recover from, or out on bail or on parole, or really free, trying to make an honest go of it again. There was none of that. Your resurgence was so unceremonious, so quiet. My grandmother simply handed me the paper, and asked if I’d tried the cake.

     And in spite of it all, regardless of the fact that I never called you, even after I received this letter in the mail that I hid underneath my mattress for three days after seeing your name on the return address, I finally, late at night, drew the deepest breath I could, exhaled over what felt like a minute, and opened it. And there we are: on the couch getting a second chance, wearing old expressions, yours still self-assured and smiling, and me, right there next to you, uneasy, regretting every second, but lacking the courage to move.

 Alex Straaik is a writer of fiction and thinly veiled non-fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Copyright Alex Straaik. Used with permission of the author.

Pounds

On Monday Dr. Brussels says, “It is a new month. I think it is time.  Do you feel ready to express your anger, and be honest with the people in your life?  When you start to let go of your fury you will shed its physical manifestation …”

She grabs her midsection passionately and squeezes.

“Oh, right. It’s going to be bathing suit season in a couple of months.”

“Lydia.”

Her voice is stern, a reminder to be serious. 

I look away, at the empty sushi tray by her feet. Why does she always eat during my appointment, doesn’t offer to share and leaves her trash sitting out?  I have doubts about Dr. Brussels. 

“If you get this anger out of your belly,” she continues, “I think you will see results right away.”

I want to be healthy.  And hot. At least it’s not a liquid diet.

I look at the clock and then she looks at the clock.

“Time,” she says.

I walk to Washington Square Park because it’s close to Dr. Brussels’ office.  I don’t want to go back to work.  What I really want is a beer, but it’s only one o’ clock so I just sit on a bench in relative isolation from the homeless people and lunching office workers.  I think about Dr. Brussels’ theory.  It was actually my theory first. “I want to lose thirty pounds,” I said, “but I carry my anger in that fat and I don’t know how to get rid of it.”

The extra weight has distributed itself pretty well on my 5’2” frame.  I’m bigger than I was in my twenties but most of it is from the anti-depressants. You get an office job and realize you don’t need to go to the gym every day because you’re not sleeping with as many people as you were in college.  Maybe you’re not sleeping with anyone.  Maybe you find gyms as pleasant to be in as holiday-season shopping malls.

Dr. Brussels loved the challenge.  For a year she made me talk to her footstool. The footstool became my mother, my ex-lovers, my skinny sister, my co-workers.  By the end of the year I was spitting, gesturing, crying, and screaming at that footstool.  Once I threw up.  She was kind enough not to charge me for the re-upholstering because I already pay on a sliding scale.

Pigeons fleck the grass on their lunch-hunt.  I decide to start with my most recent ex-boyfriend because I don’t think an expression of anger will surprise him.  I just hope the public arena will keep me from freaking out. My stomach tightens with anxiety and I remember that I haven’t eaten lunch, but I’m not hungry anymore.  I don’t want the beer either.  My stomach is closed; it is adamant.  Nothing gets in before something comes out.

“Hello,” Justin says. “If this is about your books, Lydia, I don’t have them boxed up yet, okay? I’m a little busy right now.”

“This isn’t about my books,” I say.  “I need to tell you something.”

He sighs.  I can hear other voices in the background, one of them a woman’s.

“I’ve been pissed off at you for most of our relationship, but definitely more so since we broke up, and definitely the most since we started sleeping together again.”

“We slept together, like, three times.  I don’t think it’s something we’re starting.” 

 “You can’t treat me like a convenience,” I squeeze out.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you only call and ask how I am when it’s convenient for you, which is usually when you want to sleep with me.”

“Three times, Lydia.  Three times.”

“For most of our relationship,” I say, my voice getting higher, “I put all the effort into making things work.  We wouldn’t have stayed friends if not for me, and maybe we shouldn’t.”

“Then why do you still call?”

“And one other thing.  Every time we slept together I was thinking about the boyfriend before you.”

He is silent.

“Okay, maybe that’s a lie,” I say, “but even the most amazing sex, which I’ll admit we had on occasion, cannot make up for the way you treat me.”

That’s a lie too.

“I feel like a non-person in your life,” I say.

He takes a deep breath.

“I don’t really know what you want. I think you’re still relying on me for emotional support, but I can’t give you that.  Maybe we shouldn’t talk for a while, just let the air clear out.”

“You’re probably right.  But I still want my books back.  And I have to ask: do you still love me in any way?”

“I’m not in love with you anymore,” he says slowly, “but I still care about you.  I think you’re a good person to know.”

“That last thing,” I say, my voice rising again, “is bullshit. I get mad at you when you say things like that.”

A space the size of a Robin’s egg clears out in my stomach.

I lose five pounds by Wednesday.  The next Monday I feel a little weak.  I try to get out of bed, but my legs wobble when my feet touch the hardwood floor.  I call into work and my boss’ administrative assistant answers the phone.

“Marissa, it’s Lydia,” I say.  “I’m not feeling well. Need to talk to Henry.”

“He’s attending a conference. Would you like me to tell him you won’t be in?”

I think I hear exasperation in her voice.  She’s on my list along with the rest of the office, but not for today.  I feel a clean line of nausea go down my throat and pool at the bottom of my stomach.

“Yes, Marissa, that’s exactly what I’d like you to tell him,” I reply evenly.  “And please tell anyone who needs to get a hold of me that I will check my email today.”

“Sure,” she says in her artificial sweetener tone.  “Feel better.”

I hang up.  Before I worked for a non-profit I thought that everyone would be extra nice.  I mean, when you’re walking around fulfilling some higher mission how can you not smile?  But everyone is fake.  It’s like there’s some kind of invisible Joan of Arc Virtue Pageant taking place at all times, and if they sense you’re even the tiniest bit ahead they have no qualms about elbowing you off the runway.

I try to get out of bed again.  I have to use the furniture to steady myself on the way to the kitchen.  I think I just need to drink some tea and have breakfast.  I’ve noticed that my appetite has been down since I called Justin; honesty is stressful.  I open the refrigerator; there is a block of fine cheese I could eat with bread. My stomach growls, but not in the hungry way. I fix my eyes on every object in the fridge, one at a time, and wait for my stomach to react.  Halfway through I notice a pattern.  My stomach vetoes every item that isn’t green. Strange, but what can I do?  I make a salad for breakfast.  I reach for a cucumber and then remember that they’re white inside.  I consider buying Fruit Loops and only eating the green ones.

I feel alright after eating some broccoli and decide to call my mother.  First I brush my teeth. She can smell bad breath through the phone lines and will ask why I’ve let myself fall into such a slump.  I coil myself around a large pillow in the living room and press the phone against my ear. It’s only 7:00 a.m. on the west coast, but she’ll be up, ahead of the rest of the country.

“Good morning, sweetie, are you calling me from work?” she asks.

“No, I’m at home.  I’m feeling sick today.”

“One is or isn’t sick, Lydia.  If you only think you might be sick you really should go to work.  You don’t want a pattern to develop.”

“A pattern?  Mom, this is pretty much the first sick day I’ve taken in my entire life.”

“Is it very important, darling?  I was just watering my tomato plants.”

“It is,” I say. 

She exaggerates a sigh. 

“Before I tell you, you should know that this is a therapeutic exercise designed and overseen by Dr. Brussels.”

My mother loves my psychiatrist.  She was recommended by a friend of a friend of a friend, but Mom acts like they were college roommates.   

 “She’s been a miracle worker with you,” Mom says.

She thinks I’m such a nut job that anyone who could treat me must be a genius and a hero.

“I’m so happy to hear that you’re cooperating with her.”

“Just listen to me, okay, Mom?”

“I’m listening.”

“Why didn’t you pay more attention to me when I was little? I was your only child.  What was going on in your life that was more important than me?” 

I hold my breath.

“That was a long time ago.  You’re thirty now.  How is it relevant?”

Her voice is high and pinched, which is what it sounds like when she’s trying to stay in control.

“Well, it was a handicap both when I was growing up and into my adult life.  In fact, it’s the experience that I attribute my current unhappiness and trouble with relationships to.”

“Trouble with relationships?” she repeats, an edge coming into her voice.  “I don’t think you can blame that on me.  You pick such terrible men. They’re trouble before the relationship even begins.”

I hug the pillow until I start to lose circulation in my arms.

“Mom, I just want to know why you were hardly around. Can you answer that?  I mean, if you’d only shown me a little more encouragement …”

“I did encourage you,” she interrupts.  “I wasn’t around because I was getting my MBA so I could get a better job and send you to the best schools so you would be encouraged and have the chance to do whatever you wanted with your life.”

“But I didn’t want encouragement from anyone except you and Dad,” I say.

“Lydia, don’t be a baby.  You want to know the truth?  You never had any clear direction. Dance lessons, gymnastics, a drum set, swim team, photography – whatever your interest was that year we made sure you were nurtured in it.  You chose to go to art school in New Mexico over Princeton.  Do you think we were happy about that?  I couldn’t sleep for a month.”

I hold the receiver away from my ear.

“And you still don’t have any clear direction. You went from art to the medical field, but we’re so happy you got that job at the non-profit.  If nothing else, you’ve got to have health insur-“

Click.

I drop the pillow and run to the toilet.  My stomach clamps and sends its juices up my throat.  This is the first time I’ve ever hung up on my mother.  It feels good.

On the last day of the second week I weigh myself.  Ten pounds lighter and I feel like shit.  Weak, achy, sluggish.  The weirdest thing is not being able to eat anything that isn’t green.  I go to friends’ houses for dinner and pray that there will be vegetables.  They think I’m on some kind of fad diet, or maybe starving myself. I tell everyone that I’m trying something new, involving honesty, and swear that I didn’t read it in a book or on the internet. 

“My body’s adjusting,” I say, “and I’m listening and it’s telling me that it only wants to eat green.” 

What can they say?  Luckily, I have supportive friends.

I get naked in front of the mirror.  My body doesn’t look too different.  My boobs have shrunk, and there are places around my stomach where the skin seems to have receded but is still loose. Anyway, ten pounds means I’m one-third of the way there and I haven’t said anything at work yet.

I skip an appointment with Dr. Brussels.

“I’m on a roll and I’d just rather wait to talk about it until it’s all done,” I tell her.

“Why do you think you can dictate a new therapeutic arrangement, Lydia? Don’t you think you pay me to know better?”

“Not this time,” I say.

“Fine,” she says, “but if you don’t come back next week I will not be able to see you anymore.”

I go to work and it’s terrible.  My boss turns in his resignation and everyone is on edge.  Their conversations circle around the empty spot like they’re sniffing out opportunities with words.  No one is qualified to replace him.  Marissa cries after he tells her.  She cries the whole day, doesn’t even bother to wipe her nose before answering the phone, and makes sure everyone can hear that every sentence she utters is forced out mid-wail.

After another lunch of steamed spinach with a side of broccoli I am not in the best mood.

“Shut up!” I finally snap in the 3:00 hour.  “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

She stops crying.  Everyone stops whatever they’re doing.  I’m not an ass-kisser, but I’m usually polite.

“I’m angry because I don’t think you are sincere,” I say to Marissa.

I look around the office.

“No one is being sincere,” I repeat.

Then I switch to the ‘we’ pronoun because I think it will be less threatening.

“We are a selfish, catty, scheming office.”

Marissa starts sniffling.

“And Marissa, I hate to break it to you, but you didn’t even like Henry.  You thought he stared at your chest too much.  So stop the crying already.  No one believes it.”

She stares at me, her mouth slack.   I walk into my office and very calmly shut the door. 

I am getting ready to leave at 4:55 when an unfamiliar woman opens my door.  She identifies herself as someone from HR, a department I didn’t know we had. I know what comes next; they always fire people at the end of the day.

“Ms. Pearson, the outburst you had this afternoon created a hostile environment for your co-workers. I’m afraid that we find this kind of behavior unacceptable.  I have a resignation letter with me; you can sign it right now or we can terminate you.  Whichever option you choose is effective immediately.  Please collect your belongings. You will not be allowed to return to this office tomorrow. See the shipping department if you need boxes.”

She slides a piece of paper across my desk.  They must actually keep resignation letters on hand for a situation like this. I ponder my options.  I have little savings, not even enough to live on for a month.  If I resign I can tell my next employer that my mother suddenly fell ill and I needed to care for her.  As much as I hate its generic language, I sign the letter.

When I come home I go right to sleep.  I don’t wake up until ten the next morning.  I can tell that I have lost even more weight, but I don’t bother to check. My clothes hang with a ghostly emptiness off of my shoulders and hips.  Could it be the flu?  I call Dr. Brussels.

“I need to come in today, if I can get out of bed.  Do you have any openings?” I ask.

“What is the nature of your emergency, Lydia?”

“I wouldn’t call it an emergency, although my whole life is kind of being derailed along with this plan of yours.”

“I can see you at 3:00.”

I feel energy come back into my body.  I drag myself to the bathroom, turn on the shower, take a bar of soap from its holder and begin to lather my skin.

At exactly 3:00 I take a seat in Dr. Brussels’ waiting room.  A small radio plays classical music at an inoffensive volume.  Magazines fan out across end tables, the same four actresses reappearing on the covers. My eyes jump with my stomach, from Lose 10 Lbs Here’s How, to Why Men Cheat and Women Secretly Don’t Care (Because They’re Cheating too), and back to Three Miracle Workouts from Three Oscar Winners. I feel anxious. I check the time on my cell phone: 3:05.  Sometimes when Dr. Brussels is late I think she’s forgotten about me and I knock on the door.  Usually there’s just an especially upset person in the room running over their appointment time.

At 3:08 a middle-aged brunette emerges.  Dr. Brussels gestures for me to come in.  She takes in my appearance, but doesn’t allow her expression to change even slightly.

“Lydia, how are you? It’s been a long time. I am very eager to hear how you’ve made out with the plan.”

“I feel like I’ve had the flu since last week.”

“Why don’t you start from the beginning?”

“Well, I called my ex-boyfriend first. It did feel good to tell him that I was angry about the way he treats me and that I won’t put up with it anymore. He didn’t hang up on me or say he hates me. We just agreed not to talk for a while.”

She nods. “Good, good.”

“And then I talked to my mother.  I told her that I felt like I didn’t get enough attention as a child. I hung up on her and she hasn’t called me since.”

“This could be a huge breakthrough for you,” Dr. Brussels says, “we will begin to focus on your mother as soon as this treatment succeeds.”

“But, I feel terrible.  I’ve lost like 25 lbs this month. I have no appetite, and when I’m hungry my stomach balks at any food that isn’t green.  I lost my job because of your treatment.”
            “Green, green,” Dr. Brussels muses. She looks up at the ceiling as if to ponder a riddle. “What do you think the significance of that color is?” she asks.

I’m exasperated.

“It’s the color of jealousy.  I don’t know.  I’m afraid to talk to my friends, afraid that I’ll suddenly start yelling at them even if I’m not angry.”

“Well, you must stay the course.” She says. “I think your present strife will lead to great rewards in your mental health.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“Emergency sessions are half as long as regularly scheduled appointments.  I had to squeeze you in and I’m afraid our time is up now.”

I leave, feeling more than a little bit sore about the $100 check I handed over.  I feel like an anecdote in an article she will write: “Subject reported feelings of fatigue and isolation, yet progress has been encouraging.  Instructed subject to continue.”

I turn around in the lobby and ride back to the ninth floor.  I knock on her door, even though I know it would inexcusable to interrupt someone else’s session.  She is alone, which makes me even angrier. 

“Listen,” I say, “I’m feeling pretty angry about the check I just left with you.  I don’t feel you really earned it. sYou didn’t give me any emotional support.”

She steps back and turns her head to look at something on her desk.  When she looks at me again she has a huge smile on her face.  Her eyes display the conviction of people holding bibles or guns.

“It’s working,” she whispers, “I knew it, it’s working.”

COVER FROM NOV.-DEC. 2009 

 Above: Chas Ray Krider photo. See more in “Photography”

______________________________________

Danger — Killer Issue Ahead

November-December 2009

 Nunca Triste                            Lynda Barreto

Bring Me Waterlilies

We lay on the damp sand bank of a pond, and when the heat of day threatened to erase us, we dove below the water’s first few feet of warmth, following the tethered stems of waterlilies rooted in mud. We loved oblivion so much, we didn’t want to miss one minute of it.  We fought the nods, our heads bobbing in their wake. We swam, but he went further out than I did, circling the acres of the pond, returning with buds of waterlilies saved from drowning.  I floated on my back, one blossom wedged between my breasts. Night fell.  We saw the true moon float on the pond’s surface, a disk rooted in deep water, its appearance in the sky a mere reflection. We were raised by strangers and we had no blood kin. We heard oblivion calling from our veins. We looked for more. We scored. He fixed me, and then he fixed himself. Near dawn we fell asleep, near waves, his sex slipped like the lily bud inside my sex that opened. The lilies browned and rotted on my window sill. I left when I met my future husband. He left when his high school sweetheart finished rehab. We stayed blood siblings. He lived inside me like a pulse, in dreams of anodynes and ponds. The virus blossoms ‘til we die.  I was like him when we lived like waterlilies, both spawned and drowned by where deep night is.

Morning Star, My Father, Mine

Every soul has its peculiar intelligence. Sometimes the brain, sometimes the body, sometimes both. Sometimes just the second toe of the left foot inching like a worm. The strong man in the freak show knows how to heft, brilliant placing his feet precisely there, knowing precisely where to breathe now and how deeply, knowing too his limit, when to stop lest his inadequate brain and leopard-skin thong get crushed beneath his body’s stupidity. Or the autistic child who speaks only through screams knows who knows what his silences mean and thus with them is silent. The fire that burns, the water that floods, the wind that bends, the girl that loves.

 •••••

The mother’s intelligence was her beautiful body walking, bending, twisting, reaching, waving, posing – living doll selling stuff, nuff said. The father’s too: Clark Gable once saw him stroll into a Hollywood restaurant and exclaimed,startled into truth, “Isn’t it a sin to be that damn good looking?”

If in fact a sin, then the father was the devil himself. Girls and women suspected him of being a movie star, stared trying to place the face with a name they didn’t know, couldn’t, never would. And he could’ve been in movies save for his dim-witted arrogance. Pissed off all the powersthatbe with his scratchy-wool blanket statements:

“Nobody in charge knows a damn thing about making movies.”

“A monkey could do a better job of acting/directing/writing.”

“Give me a million bucks and I’ll be in your little movie.”

“I wouldn’t give him/her the time of day if my life depended on it, and it doesn’t, so there you have it in a nutshell, how ‘bout them apples, sport.”

Said to agents, producers, directors who raised one eyebrow, paused to stare at the sinfully handsome man, thinking, What a goddamn waste of meat, sighed through the nose, said, “Thanks, we’ll call you.” Didn’t. And he didn’t get it so much he didn’t even give a shit.

 “What a bunch of dummies,” he’d laugh, stick a Lucky Strike between his amazing lips, flame a match against a manicured thumbnail, think about lunch, a drink, the satisfactory ass of the secretary who slipped him her phone number before he walk-strutted out the door. Peacock. Cock o’ the walk. Cocksure. Cock and bull and bull’s cock between his legs so there was no doubt ever, no way no shame, no vengeance, no how. His unwavering belief in himself.  In he.  In being.

 Simple.

 The devil himself he was on plenty occasions – incubus between the damp dreaming creaming thighs of pretty girls who wanted: the house, the car, the kids, the knight-in-shining husband bringing home the Wonderbread and homogenized milk to their homogenized neighborhood, and on those forever-spring years of the Fifties of having-getting-owning, waving to Mrs. Jones envying across the white picket fence, I’m a real woman, honey, see what I got, the swellest of the swell!  Yet nowhere in that postwar equation fine fucking and lots of it for fucking’s dirty-bad like the letters S-E-X pressed tight and rubbing up against each other – SEX – spelling what’s really just a way to get/have/keep the stuff, ain’t it? No matter if they wanted S-E-X they pretended to not, learned to blush and giggle at the mention, tease the cock, be the virgin liar, Holy Mary Mother of Girls-in-Denial, denied by their own mothers who taught them, The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach: unspoken: cholesterol and saturated fats: make him a meat-and-potatoes-hot-buttered rolls kinda guy who’ll die at 50 of a heart attack while you’re still young enough to feel free and good about widowhood and never by God-in-His-SEXless-Heaven ever have to spread your legs, avail your cunt, knock your skull on the headboard, inhale the sweat, suffer the wet, close your eyes and think of England.

 • • • • •

 But see:  The father knight-in-shining-skin loved to fuck and vowed he’d never marry a gal who didn’t want/do/like the same cause life was short, shorter, shortened, he already saw the curve up ahead and nothing beyond but nothing.

 • • • • • 

And sex’s another color altogether. Colors altogether, that’s creation. To create. To make. Make love. Marvelous. Marvel at these colors beyond your unextraordinary range. You can’t imagine how you can’t imagine these colors nameless except to me in my Language of Right Eye. Synesthetic seeing-sound. Shuhkkht, for example, color of rage. Ahyai, color of sorrow. Kkih! color of the moment the eye catches sight of the rarest bird, the last of its kind, hovering above a new-spring sprung flower. Just that moment. Before the words come to dissect it, splay it with genus and species, categorical classification, stick-on-label box-around-it flatsquishing of the mass that is life, not the idea of life. 

 • • • • •

And fucking’s another word altogether. The cock as knife, as sword, as spear, missile, bomb. Penetrating, stabbing, impaling, exploding, wounding, killing. Gonna fuck her till she can’t walk. Fuck her brains out. Fuck her to death. Fuck the hell out of her – hell evidently a place of infernal internal denial: O what hell he did to me I didn’t like it and liked less my body craving the memory of it: It: IT: S-E-X: my sin I know cause The Bible tells me so. 

Taste of destruction in the creational stew of his-and-her fluids, that’s fucking. Amazing. In its own fashion. Sometimes that pretty girl in the modest skirt and blouse just wanted to watch the world blow up. Feel it detonate right in the center of her wet creation.

But.

In the Victorian era, era of Icky Queen Vicki, era that never ended merely waned then ebbed via the verbal ejaculations of pinched-tweezer dicks of the inconoscenti fanatical fools hiding-shivering in church pews thinking, believing S-E-X’ll go away if they pray long enough, hard enough: Go away hardness between my legs my devil-desire like a leper’s suppurating sores waiting for St. Francis on Jesus’s road to Damascus to kiss me on my pus-pore lips, my piss-poor cock that wants what it wants when it wants, embrace me what repulses you, oh Lord – is it really the Twenty-First Century?

• • • • •

 O how the fashionable father fucked! Took from the givers, the eye-closers, the If this is what I have to do to get the house and car and good-looking kids and oh the television! and oh the color-coordinated appliances! then I will. Determined, those gals. Like the pioneer women rolling across the prairie. Big storms, they were, thundering across history to labor hard pumping out babies and well water, they did. Lifting, hauling, sweeping, hoeing, sewing, cooking, cleaning, feeling . . . something not quite right in their raging river of frontier life over too soon and where/when was it not hard: life, the husband’s cock: I’m tired, Lord, of being torn by him goin in and babies comin out, going and comin and goin so many of those babies dead before their time, before they may say, Momma!

Some young closeted queer (was the Fifties, after all, gay still a mainstream mood) advertising exec on vacation from New York spotted the father single on a beach in Malibu. Dressed barely, the father, touching his toes, jumping jacks, running dry into the surf, running out wet and shining and packed, thin baby blue trunks he’d had tailor-made clinging to his massive cock-and-balls. The ad exec saw what everybody saw: that everybody saw: men, women and children could not stop seeing, gawking, absorbing, savoring, committing to memory the fine way light fell on/around the handsome black-haired blue-eyed man just out of his teens, how he seemed lit from inside – sun going nova – while their ordinary spent-comet faces gazed fearless of being burned, rather aching for burn, burning to memory every devilish devil-may-care inch of him they would later and frequently dredge to clean their plate of so much banality it hurt, hurt to look at him, really, though they could not not, indulging themselves nevertheless, never to forget, the moment the father was there there there in all his glory and their seeing what it was to see beyond flat-imagination live myriad dimensions of possibility.

Do you remember that guy on the beach in Malibu way back in, what was it, 1951? who was so . . . oh! Well he took your breath away, that’s what. Remember? On that sunny beach in California? Wonder whatever happened to him?

Whatever: Became an underwear model. The too-handsome-for-words guy in the tightie-whities. Copywriters need not apply! Skin and bumps said it all, man. 

That day at the beach the ad exec summoned his courage and gave the father his card:  “Call me, I’ll make you rich.”

The father bit the card between his smiling teeth, shook the exec’s hand, held it longer than etiquette demanded – until the exec flushed red down to his nipples.

Rich, thought the father, nodding. Now that’s more like it!

• • • • •

Narcissus. Such an old improbable tale, you’d think it would’ve vanished in the mythological past where gods and goddesses toyed with humans as if humans were ants under a magnifying glass on a hot-sunny day. But no. Myths are forever. Earthbound gods and goddesses do toy with ordinary humans. Narcissus reborn every generation to gloomily gaze gaga into the water at his unembraceable reflection dissolving to ripples when kissed. Narcissus the manifestation of the universe’s amore de profundis that keeps the planet spinning, black holes devouring, gas clouds spitting out new stars to light new planets spinning toward a new genesis, new beauty to come to new love. And if not love, then what? And if not beauty, then why love?

 • • • • •

That amazing graced face grinning above tan pecs and overstuffed genitals stuffed in snuggies posed for some of the advertising industry’s first photos of a near-naked man, crotch intact, ballsy magazines printing full-page brazen blazing-color ads instead of simple illustrations of men neutered by an artist’s brush or pen keeping it clean, they thought, IT, cleanliness next to godliness, godliness next to emasculinity. “Tarzan of the Cosmopolitan Jungle,” wrote a gossip columnist who made the father famous, eventually, briefly (ha ha) in queer circles and later sewing circles where the only thing sewn were seeds of sexual desire, undomesticated housewives basting themselves in martinis and putting each other in stitches over catty remarks, nasty rumors, sexual confessions and lascivious declarations of lust for “Captain Kielbasa,” they called him, “Sergeant Salami,” they said, “Root Toot Tootie,” they giggled. They and a hundred others stole posters of him from every underwear section of every department store in L.A. until one Pentecostal mother caught her son jacking off to “The Jack of Jewels” and formed a coalition of sexually repressed mothers (metaphorical clitoridectomies complete) coalesced to ban images of the father everywhere and eternally lest their children all go wart-handed and blind.

So much for rich.

His career lasted three photo shoots for which he was paid fifty dollars each. The advertising industry caved to conservatives, tucking its tail – and cock – between its legs, reverting to watercolors and pencil drawings of button-nosed guys with pubis mons smooth and sexless as a flatworm.  And the Pentecostal snake handlers saw that it was good: The serpent had been squish-squash-quashed, Satan had surrendered once again to immaculate intercourse, and the father was out of a job.

• • • • •

Lucifer was not Satan was not the Devil. He was the bringer of light, Phosphor, the lump on the end of a matchstick, morning star, planet Venus, escort of each dawn. Stolen by Christians from the Romans, Lucifer came to [mis]represent the descending demise of the most shimmering angel of all, all asparkle, for beauty of course must be punished, damned to eternal hell: Do not shine too brightly or we shall douse you with our bitter piss and smother. The world full of dark-ugly so big it swallows light-pretty whole.

O my bringer of sunrise and life, my morning star, my father! 

Later years those sphincter-lips-they would say my real father was Lucifer, my name Lucy eponymous, that I was born of the loins of the most magnificent fallen angel fornicating with the daughters of men on his way down, just stopping by for a sex-snack, said they, so to speak, to sow his seed, wild oat hybrid me rockinrollin among the cultivated tame.

And sure I’d be the antichrist if I’d been born a boy: girls evidently incapable of attaining such eminent evil.

So then.

Debra DiBlasi can be contacted through her web site: www.debradiblasi.com

The Litchfields, Lynda Barreto