FUNDAMENTALS– Jugular

At three for a nickel, Atomic Fireballs are a badge of honor. Tom and I face off, inching toward the place where pain numbs the senses.  I toss the molten rock around my mouth, the peppery heat branding the side of my tongue. And, while our mother’s Why do you do it? bounces off our steely resolve, our father levels a direct hit. “I should kick them right in the ass.”

I kneel at Tom’s bedroom window and squash my face against the screen. My father inspects the torn canvas of his lime-green hammock bought at Agway three days before.  The irony that he’ll never actually use the hammock is not lost on me. The closest he comes to relaxing is reading the Daily News, a Labatt’s sweating beside him, cigar puffs punctuating each “Jesus” and “listen to this.” Muhammed Ali pulverizes Joe Frasier in the Thrilla in Manila.  A serial killer is shooting young lovers and taunting police with cryptic notes. I hung on every word, the events connected in a way I can’t yet grasp.

Tom’s sniffling grabs my attention. His brown eyes are huge—panicked—a map of purple veins furiously pumping blood beneath his milky skin.

 “Dad’s going to think I did it. I’m going to get in trouble,” he says.

“Why’s he going to think that?”

“You’re better at talking. He’ll believe you.”

Six belt cracks, the sting like a match strike. Tom stumbles upstairs, his face bloated from crying. I run my fingers over the raised red ropes across his back.

We roll survival in our mouth, hurting those we love and learning to live with the after taste as we inch toward the atomic heat of hell.

FUNDAMENTALS– Worms and maggots

I flick paper plates like a Vegas dealer, sliding them to the edge without sailing off. More often than not, paper towels double for napkins, and they’ve got nothing on shirt sleeves. I look at my plate; creamed chipped beef and peas on toast. “Shit on a shingle,” my father says. “We had it in the army. Eat it.” As I maneuver pea grenades off my toast, the male species lower their heads and shovel shit, and my mother perfects the art of looking pissed at our barbarism. Howard Cosell’s nasal cadence extols Mohammed Ali’s rope-a-dope from the Magnavox. We’re three minutes in, adjusting our ass cheeks and scraping our plates for the last bit of lumpy cream, when our German shepherd, Slider, begins heaving. My father leaps from the table. “Jeee-zus!” he shouts from the living room.

The pile of vomit is rotting woodchuck carcass. It’s a tossup on what’s more disgusting—the puke or the smell—when the vomit starts moving. My brother, the offender who let the dog out, moans at the task before him. I pull my shirt over my nose and go in for a better look. Maggots writhe in the creamy muck. Shit.

Dirt wedges beneath my nails. It’s rained recently and a musty smell rises from the hole. I carefully extract a worm and toss it on the grass. I remove the bird from my pocket and stroke its yellow breast. It’s smaller now, curled into itself. I cover it with dirt and mumble a prayer of ever-lasting salvation and add a flat rock for a tomb stone. It’d be perfect for skipping. I lay on the grass and look at the sky. A sliver moon is silver against a violet sky. Someday I’ll be in the ground, dark, suffocating, eaten by worms.  I smell my bird hands and realize what the vomit smelled like; Death. Life’s a lot like fighting. Float like a butterfly. Sting like a bee.

FUNDAMENTALS – Beauty

            We’re having a teachers’ party. Ice cubes that tinkle around smoky liquid in fat glasses, chips and dip, and cigarette smoke that hovers below the ceiling.  I slap a jar of Ponds cream into my mother’s palm with the precision of a surgical nurse. Tan fingers plunge into thick white cream and sweep across her forehead, cheeks, and neck. She does not use gentle upward strokes as recommended by McCalls, but slathers it with vigor, daring a wrinkle to flaw the landscape of her Sophia Loren bone structure. She tips her head back and coaxes outer lashes into cat eyes with Maybeline’s Blackest Black mascara. She purses her full lips and paints red, starting on the top lip and gliding right and left before finishing along the bottom in a smooth arc.  I put the gold tube in the drawer. The shade is Vixen. I hand her a square of toilet paper. She blots and surveys her reflection. I watch her face in the mirror. Long ebony hair, shimmering blue eyes, cheek bones, lips, something else I can’t define but makes me think of biting into a peach, juice dribbling down my chin.

She brushes my hair into a pony tail, raking the bristles across my scalp and pulling my hair so tightly that my eyes pull back at the corners and blur with tears.  Our eyes meet in the mirror.  If you want to be beautiful, you have to suffer,” she says. 

I tip toe through the living room. Glasses and beer bottles cover every surface. Ash trays overflow with cigarette butts, many with pink and peach rings of lipstick. A man throws up in the kitchen sink. He wipes his mouth and stares at me. His collar wears the same red lips from the toilet paper blot. Vixen.

            Moonlight streams through my window and across my covers. Maybe my mother was wrong. Maybe beauty causes suffering.

FUNDAMENTALS– death in my hand

            Perhaps we remember those events that change everything we thought we knew. Ignorance and truth collide, shifting our reality into a foreign land. Images stare back at me from faded pages—a toddler clutching her father’s leg in one hand, an Easter egg in the other; waiting for the school bus, her knee socks falling short on impossibly long legs; posing by the fire with her brother in matching Christmas pajamas. I run my fingers over her face. Imposter. It’s holding Death in my palm that’s my entry into consciousness.

            Flying! I crouch over the handlebars, purple streamers flapping from rubber grips stained with dirt from digging worms and berries I pick along the river. Wind sucks the moisture from my eyes and flattens them. I am a pilot in the cockpit of a warplane. “Bombardier! Bombardier! 1 – 2 – 3. Do you read?” A blur of cornfields whip by, and I gulp air sweet with hay and Queen Anne’s lace. A flash of yellow catches my eye and I whip my head around. My tire skids on the gravel shoulder, and I barrel down the embankment toward a barbed-wire fence, my teeth clanking. “Eject! Eject!” The tall grass cushions my shoulder. I roll onto my back and catch my breath. Cottony cloud barges cut through a sea of blue. I limp up the bank.

            I squat over a small bird on its side, one black eye watching me. Ripples cut through its yellow breast feathers like wind stirring a wheat field. It’s the most beautiful bird I’ve seen up close. I poke it with a stick. It fits in my palm, still soft and supple. I slip it into my pocket and walk my bike home. The sun sets, a brilliant orange ball on the horizon. Two truths press on me. Death is more powerful than beauty. And hidden inside a perfect shell can be mortal damage. Bombs away.  

Hi and new writing

Hi everyone... well, it has been a long time. A quick update -- now living in Vermont, left the corporate world for a boarding school where I'm Director of Marketing and Communications. An interesting switch with its own challenges and rewards.

Still writing... working on a novel that feels manageable...Light Year 365. Quick synopsis: You meet a woman on the day she decides to kill herself. One unit of time is "That Day" and everything that happens. On that day, she decides she's going to recall every memory she has and determine why she remembers it. She hopes that her memories will shed light on the purpose of her life (hence light year.) Her memories are divided into three time periods and contained by a baseball term: Childhood = fundamentals, the lost middle years = Benched or Sacrifice (can't decide yet) and the previous year that leads up to the decision to kill herself = Full Count.  Every page is a self contained work. I love that I have to consider every word to make what I want to say fit...it's very disciplined. One challenge will be how to order the pages... for now, just writing as it comes.

And you guessed it... there will be 365 pages in the book. I'm trying to write a page a day (you'd think that wouldn't be so hard... LOL.)

I hope you enjoy the pages -- please feel free to leave feedback. This is the "first page" -- but by the time I get to the end I'm sure I'll write it differently. Thanks!!

Full Count – how memories work

            Life breaks away in pieces, shooting us to a distant place until we’re a glimmer in the darkness. Memories wash over my legs, stomach, and chest, lapping against my throat. I tilt my head back on the pillow. My chest rises and falls, heart thumping inside my head. I heave a panicked breath over the hummingbird flutter in my chest, fearing that focusing on the fist-size muscle pumping five quarts of blood a minute through my body may cause it to just as suddenly give out.  

            Being lost is cold and bleak like one of those grainy films from the first moon landing. There is nothing that can help you. You’re on your own. Tears hover, pressing beneath my eyes like stones. In those middle years between then and now, I felt nothing—devoid—every messy realization pushed down so I wouldn’t unravel.  Now, every feeling is magnified. Tears come at will. I see a therapist. She says I’m grieving, that it will take time. I gaze into her comforting brown eyes and resist the urge to take her hand. She has no idea. Time is the great Houdini. We lean in and watch closely for the trick, but its slight of hand is untraceable by mortal man.

            The moon streams through the window and illuminates my dresser; Castle Freeman’s novel, All That I Have, intensive therapy hand lotion, a vanilla bean candle, a pill bottle cast in amber glow. Together, the small blue pills have the power to transport me beyond the stars.

            I clasp my hands across my chest and close my eyes. What if everything we remember—what our brains choose to brand into our memory’s flesh—reveal the reason for our existence?