There are secrets to how things are made, and they hold the world together. Learning these is part of what keeps us alive. How to clothe yourself and fry an egg, how to wash your clothes and show up on time. I thought about this today while I hung a pair of folding doors and decided, for once, to follow the directions. Then it was process, not mystery, and soon, I had two doors opening nicely, then closing again.
I had never heard of a trotline or seen one run until my roommate and his fishing buddy, an overmedicated vet, decided to run one in the mud-colored river that cut our town in half more decisively than any set of railroad tracks ever could. In two weeks, they snagged only a few catfish.… ...continue reading
Bleak frozen landscape of a northern U.S. state along the Canadian border, flat and poor, my first job in a county mental health clinic, where teenage mothers sat in the waiting room feeding babies from bottles filled with Coca-Cola and Group 13 was filled with the unluckiest women in the world. I sustained myself by thinking of myself as an artist first and therapist second, but I couldn’t help giving my patients my best self, with little left for anything else. They had so little. The children seemed lost entirely, but the teenagers were hungry and a little attention went a long way in changing the course of a life or so I thought. I wanted to believe I had that kind of power against the elements of the weather and all the other oppression these young women had faced.… ...continue reading
In his wallet, Dixon kept his ticket to the concert Lynyrd Skynyrd was flying to when his plane crashed. When he was home from college he used to ride with his friends to the field where Rick Nelson’s plane crashed on the last night of 1985. They drank beer from coolers, passed joints, tried to turn the music loud enough to fill that empty field and the long silence surrounding it. Beneath whatever moon there was and stars shifting too slowly to track, they felt themselves more alive in a place where others had fallen. Graves and the stone monuments cast for the dead are one thing. The places they fell are another, small territories granted mystery because a treasured spirit vanished there. As though some danger may linger, as though blood lost there might rise from the dirt and stain one’s feet.… ...continue reading
“You know, it really is a horrible death,” Jake said.
Molly cradled her bloody thumb in her lap, watching her blue jeans soak up spots the color of wet rust. She thought if she ignored her brother he’d go back inside the house, but he was intent on smoking a cigarette while their parents weren’t around.
“You know what happens?” Jake went on. “You get these horrible headaches, and you can’t sleep. And then your throat closes up—you can’t eat or even swallow.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “And you start going into convulsions. And then you die.” He grinned at her through the haze of smoke surrounding his head.
“You’re full of shit,” Molly said. He was making it up, trying to scare her so she’d tell their parents about the cat bite.… ...continue reading
It’s hard to say exactly how I ended up in this dreadful situation, although I could easily put all the blame on the Thomas-Cook train schedule. If they had made their timetables were a little easier to read, and their columns more evenly aligned, I may have never ended up on a midnight train to Athens. Yet here I was, sandwiched in among all the dissolute of Southern Europe in a third-class train compartment, trying to figure out how I was going to get some sleep.
It was bench seating only, benches that faced one another, with such little space between them that one had to sit straddling the knees of the person opposite you. There were smells of human body odor and of middle-eastern cooking, zeera and black cumin, the mixture of which was not a pleasant thing.… ...continue reading
