Jacob lay on the forest floor with something broken inside him. When he tried to sit up, his pelvis shifted and released a moist popping sound, filled with pain, so he kept still, listening to the wind whisper through the trees and scatter the last leaves from their branches.

At first he felt cold. Then a hot ache spread from his middle and leaked all the way to his fingertips. He imagined himself lying there, how he would look to whoever found him. With his white hair and rheumy eyes, with his soft belly, his bowed legs, with his liver-spotted skin and the veins beneath it looking like the burned-out filaments of a light bulb, he decided he would look exactly like a stupid old man who had fallen out of a tree.

He tried distracting himself. Thinking about the Ducks-their so far 5-and-7 season-though he couldn’t remember a single game. Thinking about his wife, though he could imagine her face only from a distance, as if through the wrong end of a scope. Every time his mind seemed ready to latch down on something, it escaped him, swept aside by a wave of pain.

A long twenty minutes passed. During this time he felt his stomach and legs swelling with blood, growing tight against his jeans, and he wondered how long it would be, a day, maybe two, before they found him, his body.

He had been sitting in his tree-stand when it happened, when the wood gave out beneath him and he fell the fifteen feet to the forest floor and broke. He had built it some thirty years ago, a kind of roofless tree-house braced by the Y-junction of an oak’s lower limbs. The wood must have rotted or the nails must have come loose and now here he was, fading, like a photograph left too long in the sun. His rifle lay beside him, within reach. He ran a finger along its stock. For a second he considered using it, but only for a second.

Words like old and stupid and I wish cycled endlessly through his head and he began to shiver and rock with the pain, and when he did, the bone splinters branched out into his body like frost across a window. An artery snipped in half. His skin stretched suddenly and painfully against the pressure of blood trying to find a way out, his scrotum swelling to the size of an infant’s skull.

He noticed the weight of flannel against his chest, the smell of leaves. He rolled his head around-his eyeballs wild-as if seeking someone to blame. His brother, Orland. They had fought the other day. About what he could not recall. Something. It was always something between the two of them.

Not long ago they had spoken of death, when trout fishing, when they joked about how the worms they impaled on their hooks would one day get revenge, sooner than later, tunneling into their old bodies once laid to rest.

Jacob could no longer feel his left leg, but above it, all throughout his groin, his skin pulsed as if from the stirrings of some terrible love. Then this hotness transformed into numbness-and the sensation was a quick and refreshing thing, like flipping his face to the cool side of a pillow.

He watched the branches move, the leaves tumbling down, shades of gold and red, lipstick red, riding the breeze, their motion in tune to the passage of time-quick, slow-pausing against the breath of an updraft, then falling, falling all around him. He tried to snatch one. Against the sky his hand looked as pale and crooked as a winter tree.

This was the way he died. And the next day his brother found his body tucked under an afghan of leaves, his eyes open and staring and cracked from the freeze the night before.

xxx

Two days later, Orland sat in his Lay-Z-Boy recliner, staring through a scope. He had long ago detached it from his rifle and now kept it handy mainly for bird watching. Out the window, across the mowed space of lawn, he could see the vegetable garden, with its sunken pumpkins and browned vines, edged by the barbed-wire fence, and beyond this, the pasture, where a heifer was fresh. He wanted to watch the birth.

He had a difficult time focusing because of his hand. It had begun to shake two years ago and since then the shaking had grown steadily worse. He suspected it was the beginnings of Parkinson’s, but preferred not knowing.

Though it was getting difficult to ignore. Sometimes, when he drank coffee, it dribbled over the lip of the mug and burned his fingers. A few months ago he had given up eating anything with a spoon.

The palsy nested in his right wrist. Last Saturday he dropped the offering plate during mass. “Goddamn it,” he yelled when the quarters and bills spilled beneath the pews and the congregation turned to stare at him, their faces pinched with concern.

Now, through the scope, the world shook. The unsteadiness began to nauseate him. When his vision went white, as if from some sudden glaucoma, he pulled his face away from the scope and the world came into focus and he spotted the peacock. It strutted past the window, its head bobbing, its feathers as white as teeth. Five years ago Orland bought Jacob and his wife, Gertie, two white peacocks as a 50th anniversary gift. “They represent love,” he told them. Though theirs was a habitual love, he knew. Even if they said, “Love you,” each night before bed, it was a tired phrase, devoid of feeling, as normal and easy as “Sure” or “So long.”

So different than what he felt-a pressing heat-even now, gray-headed and dotted with age-spots and hunched over with arthritis. “They represent love,” he had told them, while looking at her, as he had for so many years.

This was before a clot came loose and traveled through her veins like a tiny dry wasp whose stinger latched itself to her brain and rendered her dumb, her left side immobile. Before Jacob sold his cottage to help pay for the hospital bills, the lengthy stay at the Mt. Angel rehabilitation center, the medicine she required. Before they moved into the farmhouse with Orland, who told his brother, “Come. Please. That way we can all look after each other.”

The peacock let out a warbling scream-eeyaw-eeyaw-eeyaw-and with one flap of its wings lifted itself into the low branches of an oak tree, some fifteen feet off the ground, the distance his brother had descended.

He didn’t want to think about it. But he couldn’t not think about it. The body sprawled out on the ground, the bones broken inside it like the shards of a plate knocked off a table by a careless elbow. The body now drained of blood and filled with formaldehyde, lying on a metal tray in a refrigerated locker.

Orland searched around inside himself and tried to find some emotion, whether happiness or sadness or guilt, but found only a black space, like a closet with a busted light. He didn’t know what was in it, not for certain.

In the kitchen, his niece, Jackie, molded the crusts of apple pies. He listened to her bang some pots around, hum an old-time polka tune he used to dance to. Used to, he thought. These days everything is used to.

Now Orland raised the scope to his eye again and watched the heifer turn around in a circle, lowing in pain. He wondered if his brother had made a similar sound in his final moments.

The heifer slowed in its turning, finally pausing to lower its snout to the pasture. It began to graze, chewing at the browned clover, seemingly unconcerned as a two spindly legs sprouted from her backside, groping for purchase. Blood and embryonic fluid leaked down her hindquarters. A contraction made the heifer stiffen her neck and wall her eyes. There was a surge of fluid. Now half a calf hung from its mother, the two of them appearing in profile like some Siamese creature.

Another minute and the calf slipped out completely, falling to the pasture, a wet and bony heap with a placenta hanging around its neck like a muddy shawl. A shower of blood and excrement followed.

Orland yelled, “Jackie,” but his voice was weak and the word fluttered down the hall to die. A minute later and he tried again. “Jackie?”

“Yes?”

“She done birthed another one.”

“What?” He heard water running and what sounded like a wooden spoon put down on the counter.

“Why don’t you come in here when I’m talking to you?” Outside the heifer licked the calf and the calf tried to make sense of its muscles, struggling in the grass like a tangled marionette.

He heard heavy footsteps on the linoleum, and then a whispering on the carpet announced her presence. His scope filled up with her checkered apron and he put it down to see her standing before him. She kept her hair short, combed up in a brown poof maintained by a lot of hairspray. “What, Orland? What’s the fuss?”

He handed her the scope. “Look, that’s what.”

She did—and promptly passed it back. “Another cow. How many hundreds of cows?” She frowned and folded her hands over her poochy belly like some disapproving schoolteacher. “I don’t have time for this. I have to hurry and have the pies ready for the wake.”

“Should we tell Gertie?”

She cocked her head. “Tell her what?”

“About the cow, of course,” he said.

“You’d think you’d have more important things on your mind besides cows.” Her eyes grew moist and her mouth began to quiver and she turned to go, saying over her shoulder, “My father is dead. Your brother. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

She retreated from Orland, who sat frowning in his chair, listening to the wail of the white peacocks, that wavering cry he had always likened to the sound of suffering women.

xxx

The wake was about to begin and the kitchen was full of stout old ladies, all of them with hair like dandelions gone to seed. They hovered over the food they had brought, rearranging it and warming it and sneaking tastes of it. On the counter the percolator hissed and popped with fresh coffee. Next to it the crock pot simmered with pulled pork for sandwiches. There were stacks of whole wheat buns. Jars of pickles and pickled garlic and pickled beets. Cheese plates. Slices of onion, green pepper, summer sausage. Radishes. Jell-O salad. Silverware clattered as it was arranged into cups. On the kitchen table, a legion of pies-apple and pumpkin and blackberry-the blackberry looking a little like congealed blood.

An hour ago Orland had trucked in a load of aluminum folding chairs from St. Anthony’s and positioned them in the living room. This was where the men sat, waiting for their wives, speaking in low voices about the weather and the alfalfa crop and Jacob. “A hell of a thing,” they said. “Hell of a thing.” They fell silent when Orland negotiated his way through them, helping Gertie to the couch.

He was wearing a black suit and she was wearing a black dress and they had their arms wrapped tightly around each other. Essentially he carried her. It wasn’t grief that immobilized her, but the stroke. Her face appeared molten on one side, the eye half-shuttered, the mouth drooping as if arranged in a permanent scowl. The muscles had gone slack there and all along her left side, her leg a dead branch that dragged behind her.

“Here’s a place,” Orland said and lowered her onto the couch. “There now. This is just the place.” When he uncoupled his arms from her, he noticed the warmth of her body fading from his.

With her good eye she observed him moistly. “Cookie,” she said. It was all she could say. At first, when she came home from Mt. Angel, everyone thought she meant she wanted a cookie. Jacob would bring back from the grocery store Chips Ahoy, Oreos, Tollhouse, Mrs. Fields, pressing each variety to her lips only to have her turn her head away like a sullen child. “Cookie,” she would say and he would say, “That’s what I’m trying to give you. A cookie. Don’t you want it?” until he understood this was the only sound her mouth recalled. It meant nothing and it meant everything. “Cookie,” she would say. “Cookie.” And her audience would nod encouragingly as if on the verge of understanding the word and its repetition, like some code that could be translated if only studied long enough.

“Cookie,” she said now to Orland-in thankfulness or accusation, he didn’t know.

Soon the room filled up with the remainder of the family and friends invited, maybe thirty of them, all of them bowing their heads as Father Armstrong began his prayer.

Orland didn’t listen to a word the father said. He concentrated instead on Gertie breathing next to him. And the walls, their vine-patterned wallpaper cluttered with clocks and photographs. Most of the people in the color photographs, he noticed, now sat in the room, whereas the grainy black-and-white images mainly contained the dead. His parents, smiling in their Sunday best, probably the same clothes they wore now, buried in the Moccasin Hollow Cemetery, a spattering of tombstones on the outskirts of town, a place where teenagers went to smoke and kiss. The Bobcat would be at work there tomorrow, its shovel peeling back the earth in the shape of a rectangle only a little bigger than a casket.

The prayer finished and Father Armstrong asked if anyone wanted to share anything about Jacob. It was quiet for a time. Then Sam Ritchie raised his hand. The father called on him and he stood up and in his nervousness rubbed his palms together in a way that sounded like sandpaper hissing. He was a big man and the flannel shirt he wore barely surrounded his bulk. “I remember when Jacob and I was kids,” he said and brought his lips together tightly as if he had swallowed something bitter. “When we was kids, we used to go down and catch pollywogs together in Jasmine Crick.” All of a sudden he released a doglike yelp and put his hands to his face and wept into them and everyone concentrated on their shoes, embarrassed to see a large man look so small.

Father Armstrong walked over and patted Sam on the shoulder and Sam said, “I’m okay, I’m okay. Just a second. You’ve just got to give me a second. All right?”

“Of course,” the father said.

All around them the clocks ticked away the seconds it took for Sam to rough the tears from his eyes and take a deep steadying breath. When he finally opened his mouth to say something more, Gertie filled the silence for him. “Cookie,” she said. And then again: “Cookie.”

From her place on the couch she observed them all with her good eye, repeating the word in an even tone-perhaps speaking in a ciphered tongue about her late husband, perhaps speaking nonsense, no one knew for sure. But as she continued to speak they all bowed their heads, pretending her words into a kind of prayer.

You can read the rest of this story in the Fall 2007 issue of the Cream City Review

What a sad winter, my God! What a sad winter! An orange petticoat hangs a pink dust cloth and it’s raining.
- Miltos Sachtouris

Recalling how whole Cincinnatis slept while we wandered around in the so-late-it-was-early-again new snow smother of January. January, cold to the bone, January. I confided I know he’s left town because the city feels like a collapsed lung. I pointed to the tree in the row of trees needle-bare and paired off with streetlights as if they were waiting for a square dance to begin. I was there when I knew he’d be in the corner store. I was there, then I felt him before I saw him.

You talked about the novelist, the one you’d written a hundred poems or more for and on St. Valentine’s Day I’ll see you talking to him and your face will look like a young girl face-open and hopeful as your name, Pearl. But I grow ahead of myself now. Because it’s still January and the street is as stopped and serene as a snowglobe village and there’s no one wide awake as we are and we’re laughing like we might have laughed before Eve found a tree not dissimilar to this and before she or God or the whole world bit us and before we learned to bite back. I’m alone now, Pearl. Alone the way you are after you find what you love most in the world and then lose it. I’ve lost it, Pearl. Cities and scripts and they’re asking me to make them laugh, my Lord, isn’t that a riot, though?

Hear me out, Pearl, you with your dead gathered-up like flowers, this will be our winter, coldest cold and pressing. That tree won’t soon forget us–not the low branch where we pressed our foreheads side by each and you said we’re winter fruits, we’re the smoking apples of winter while our breath hung washcloths for ghosts and that eyelash snow blinked in our hair and we hung by our foreheads while no one walked by unaware and I didn’t write his name in the fresh paper snow and you didn’t erase it away and it wasn’t sad just then, and your book of names was growing and the things you loved out-numbered what you didn’t trust for a minute or two. Tonight I’ll stare at a motel room wall in Sandusky, and wonder where you’ve gone, where you, Pearl, cousin to no small well of snowbanks, kin to no glass-eyed gaze from a frozen fountain, think you’re going. High-step-ten-cents-a-dance-Pearl, you’re the girl with the leather-tough, weatherbeaten heart. Your name bends moonlight to its will, turns satin the milk-thistle. You’re about to stumble forward into new forgettings, but how can you know that now? If you see your cousin somewhere between here and where he left me last, tell him I’m more wide-awake than I ever meant to be. Tell him I’ll see him his lost sleep. I’ll be staring this dead-eyed at the motel walls in Abilene, in coldest St. Cloud. You’ll be sweeping the floor of the dairy into the next day and everything’s still sweet and frozen around us and the light this hour will come up clean and pure as skim milk, thin as an angel’s curse. I’m starring in a show no one would ever audition for and I can’t for the life of me, step off-stage. Pearl, your lines are a kick-line of footlights and broken bones, a perfect choreography of sky-spit and half-belief, the residue of prayer and the certain sin of love. Whoever reads you reads you wrong if they don’t know that when you say mouth you mean wound and when you say wound you mean father and when you say father you mean dead and when you say dead you mean him again, but when you write love you mean it as a question, when you are mean you are risking little which is your way of saying something about a garden and the hands that grow there like a good crop and the stones that mark them with the names you haven’t been able to read aloud for fear of waking the birds who sleep in the slim alphabet of branches where one serene January two ripe winter apples hung for a second smoking and burning, burning and unhurt.

The year of my first kiss, ninety-nine people were murdered in Little Rock. Danger hovered over our lives like a cloud, and violence was in the air we breathed. I was playing shortstop in a 14-and-under coed fall softball league, and occasionally a spray of distant gunshots mingled with the infield chatter. We pounded our gloves and spat in the dirt and pulled our caps low to shield our eyes from the glare of the lights. Sometimes on the way home I’d see the big sedans gliding like sharks down city streets, their headlights sweeping across yards and alleys, flushing out small animals with glittering eyes. Weekends I ran with my brother Mac and his friends. After dark we’d hike to the quarry behind my house, where we’d sit around getting high and telling lies and tossing empty bottles down into the bauxite pits. Once we walked all the way out to the overpass and Mac dropped a rock onto a car passing below, just for the hell of it. The rock crashed through the windshield with a sick crunch, and the car skidded and fishtailed into the median. It was a good year to be bad; life seemed brutal and sexy and short, and we rushed to drink it down. When I got a chance to sneak under the bleachers with a big-hipped brunette eating a purple snow cone, life exploded into something else entirely.

This was September. After a summer of baseball, the softball seemed unnaturally large in my hand, and I had trouble wrapping my fingers around it. My throws across the infield were hard and wild, often coming up short, but our first baseman could dig them out of the dirt. Angela knew how to stretch and scoop, how to keep her head down and stay with the low ball. She lived right across the street from the ballpark, and so, like me, she was more at home on the diamond than in her own house. She had those big thighs that are singular to the type of athletic girls who play soccer and softball, and years later I would find myself roaming the intramural fields at the local University, looking for those same thighs on other girls. In the dugout between innings, Angela would brush off her jersey and re-apply her mascara and lipstick, something the other girls made fun of her for. I recall two in particular, skinny girls both named Sarah, who sat at the end of the bench and giggled in a conspiratorial manner. Slut, they whispered, and looked to me for confirmation. But I liked the ruby-colored lips, the dark lashes, the blue with a hint of silver around the eyes, like the sky just before dawn. I leaned against the chain link fence and concentrated on the game.

I’ve always loved community ballparks, the unsupervised kids who play in the sandbox and suck down pixie sticks, the cheap hot dogs and nachos with canned cheese sauce, the pounding of feet on metal bleachers when the team needs a rally. After our games, I usually didn’t feel like walking home alone, so I would hang around the ballpark until it closed, watching the adult league games. Those teams were filled with fat, tattooed men who kept packs of cigarettes in rolled in their shirt sleeves. They blasted long foul balls that sailed into the woods behind the left field line, and the concession shack gave a free snow cone to anyone who shagged one down. I usually got two or three a night.

One night I had gotten my snow cone and was walking away from the shack when a hand tapped me on the shoulder. I’d been on cloud nine all evening, because our team had won a tight game on a two-out double that I hit in the seventh. I turned around and saw Angela standing there. She had changed into blue jeans and a black halter, and she’d put on dangly silver earrings that girls weren’t allowed to wear during the game. “You going to share that with me?” she asked.

“Take the whole thing,” I said. “I’ve already had one tonight.”

We walked down the right field fence, towards the empty little league field. I reached down and picked up a piece of gravel, tossed it idly from hand to hand. The whole park was dirt and little chunks of granite gravel except for the fields. Behind us, the ping! of an aluminum bat, then an eruption of shouts and cheers.

“Does your dad play here or something?” Angela asked.

“No. My dad’s at work,” I said.

“My dad’s in left field,” she said. “He’s the one who makes me play in this stupid league.”

“You’re pretty good,” I said, but she just shrugged.

I was close enough to smell the baby powder on her skin, along with a hint of vanilla. Our arms brushed a couple of times as we walked; she didn’t smile but didn’t make space either. It occurred to me that Mac would know what to do. He was sixteen, and had done things with girls that I hadn’t even thought of yet. I knew because sometimes I could hear his girlfriends through the thin walls, a high pitched-laugh or a sharp gasp or the rhythmic creaking of a mattress. He loved all girls, black white, short or tall, thin or fat, as long as they gave him what he wanted, and they always did. He was as concerned as I was about my lack of experience with the opposite sex, probably more. I felt lucky to have him as a brother.

Angela and I stopped walking when we were parallel with the right fielder. We shouldn’t have stopped, I thought, because now I didn’t know how to start us walking again.

“Some of the other girls on the team are jealous of you,” I said.

“The Sarahs don’t know anything,” she said. “They’re still virgins, just babies. I’ve had sex twice.”

She pushed her hair behind her ear and looked out at the field as she said this. I didn’t have an answer for that one, so we stood silently for a couple of minutes before Angela walked away with my snow cone. “See you around,” she said. I wondered if I’d done something wrong.

<hr>

For several years, Mac and I had been sneaking out to the quarry after midnight. I suppose there wasn’t really much sneaky about it, since our father worked third shift at a plant making ball bearings, and Mac and I were home alone six nights a week. Perhaps part of the pleasure of these adventures came from the illusion that we were getting away with something. We took a shortcut through the woods because there was always trouble prowling the streets, and we kept our flashlights turned off most of the way to save batteries, and because it was more fun in the dark. On moonless nights we stumbled over fallen branches and protruding rocks, waving our hats in front of us to knock down the spider webs.

Sometimes we’d meet up with a couple of other guys from the neighborhood to play a game called flashlights. The game went like this: At the beginning, everyone scattered into the dark. Each of us had a flashlight, and the object was to catch someone else in your flashlight’s beam. Of course, as soon as you turned on your flashlight, everyone knew where you were, so the trick was to keep moving, and click your flashlight on only briefly, only when you were certain you knew where someone was. It was basically a souped-up version of hide-and-seek, with everyone constantly hiding and seeking. We ran full out over dirt and rocks, leaping over divots and skirting the ridges of steep embankments of blast zones where the earth opened below like a giant mouth. The landscape was dotted with small mountains of rocks that were great for climbing or hiding in, basins that we could dive into and sprawl flat out in to avoid detection, and bulldozers and backhoes that had always looked as if they had been vacated in the middle of a job. The game always left me sweaty, covered in dirt, and physically exhausted. Sometimes I stopped midway through and climbed a pile of rocks while the others were still playing, so that I could sit and watch as little pieces of the world around me blinked in and out of existence.

Mac and I went to the quarry alone on the night that I gave Angela my snow cone. We sat above a large bauxite pit smoking cigarettes and then flicking the butts down without extinguishing them, so that we could watch the glowing cherries’ long dance to the bottom. Mac was telling me about Jack Kerouac’s trip across the country, and wouldn’t it be great if he and I could get in a car and drive to California some day. “Just think if we had a van,” I said. I hadn’t mentioned Angela yet; I was waiting for the right moment.

After we’d exhausted the topic of Kerouac and cross country trips, I did finally tell Mac about Angela, to ask him what I should have done. He made me recount every thing that happened, stopping every few sentences to ascertain some detail I hadn’t mentioned, like was she wearing lip gloss, and did she lick the snow cone or bite it. “You have to learn to keep a tally of these things in your head,” he told me. When I got to the part where she said she’d had sex twice, Mac whistled. He remained silent for a moment, then put a hand on my shoulder.

“Listen, Bro. Sounds like you did all right, except maybe you shouldn’t have let her take your snow cone. Rule number one: you’re better than her. You’re always better than her, no matter who she is. You want to hook up with this Angela girl, it has to be that you’re doing her a favor, not the other way around. Establish that, then just get her alone.”

“What if I don’t get another chance?” I asked.

“She’ll be back,” Mac said.

The next week, I didn’t say hello to Angela before our game, I didn’t smile at her or look at her during warm-ups, I sat on the other end of the bench in the dugout. I tried to convince myself I was better than her, but this made me feel like a fraud. So I just did my best to ignore her, and concentrated on my own performance. I noticed that the other team had made the mistake of putting their weakest player in right field. That worked okay in baseball, but a smart softball coach would put a big slow girl behind the plate, where nobody could hit the ball past her and then take extra bases while she chased it down. I closed my stance and hit two triples down the right field line. After the game, I hung around the ballpark to watch the adults as was my habit. I pretended not to notice that Angela, who had went home and changed clothes since the game, continually hovered somewhere in front of me , never behind. Her father’s team was not even playing that night. After I got my first free snow cone of the night, I caught her looking at me. I nodded, and she came and sat next to me on the bleachers.

“I’ll be back. Hold this, but don’t eat any of it,” I said, handing her the snow cone. I trotted off to the bathroom and tried to piss, even though I didn’t need to. I would’ve stayed away longer, but the bathroom carried that peculiar stench characteristic of public restroom facilities, the odor of damp cinderblock mixed with a few decades’ accumulation of stale urine. When I returned to my seat, Angela was still there with my snowcone, though I couldn’t tell if she had eaten any of it or not. She tried to hand it back to me.

“Oh, just keep it,” I said. “I don’t want it anymore.”

We sat in silence for several seconds, but it felt okay, like it was my silence. When it got awkward, Angela spoke up.

“You really smoked that right fielder tonight. Was that on purpose?”

“Of course,” I said, keeping my eyes on the field. Then I turned to her. “Do you have any cigarettes?”

We went out to the woods behind left field, as if we were searching for a foul ball. I checked behind us to make sure her father wasn’t around. Everyone knew why kids went to the woods. Angela said little and nibbled at her snow cone. A freckle-faced boy of about ten was kicking around the weeds out there. “Don’t get snake bit,” I told him. He continued to poke and prod the weeds in our vicinity, and I could see he wasn’t going to leave us alone, so we began circling around the outfield in the woods, towards the smaller baseball field that squatted behind the right field fence of the adult field.

We were about halfway around the outfield when a loud crash resounded through the air. It was one of those late summer storms that drops down out of nowhere and blows open the sky. The thunder was so close we could feel it, and in the instant it took for us to recognize what was going on, Angela grabbed my arm. Suddenly we were being pelted by big pellets of water.

“Come on!” I said, taking her hand. We jogged around behind the outfield fence, then emerged from the bushes behind center field and ran in the alley between the small field and the large field. The players and umpires had all made for the dugouts, and the fans were huddled together beneath the overhang of the concession shack. By the time we made it to the bleachers by the kiddy field, we were soaked to the bone. We hunkered beneath the bleachers all the same, where we were hidden from view of the adult field by a large sign on the right field fence that advertised a local construction company. A flash of lightning backlit a cloud above us, and for an instant it looked like something solid, like a great floating lantern tethered to the Earth by a thread of blue fire.

Angela was still holding her snow cone. The water plastered her hair to her head, which made her face appear disproportionately large. Her mascara and eye shadow were bleeding down her face, and her lipstick was smudged and stained from the snow cone. “Oh, god,” she said, putting her free hand to her face.

I laughed and took her wrist. “You look beautiful,” I said, which was the truth. This seemed to startle her. She spread her lips in an open-mouth smile, and we drew close.

I didn’t know where to put my hands, and I cursed Mac for not having told me. He’d taught me other things I didn’t need to know yet – he’d drawn diagrams of female anatomy and showed me where to rub or lick, and he’d stolen one of our grandmother’s bras and made me practice unsnapping it until I could do it blindfolded with one hand behind my back. But he’d never told me where to put my hands when kissing a girl, and as many times as I’d imagined this moment, I’d never thought of that detail. I rubbed my hands up and down her back for a few seconds before moving one hand up the back of her neck and into her hair, and resting the other on the small of her back.

I remember the surprise of her tongue, frozen and purple, like a slippery grape popsicle inside my mouth. And there was the strangeness of feeling someone else’s teeth with my own tongue, like little pieces of undercooked corn. I delighted in this discovery, but even as the moment was passing, I felt a tinge of sadness at the thought that I would never have another first kiss; this was it. The rain thudded down onto the bleachers above us in huge droplets, exploding into a fine spray that came through the slats between the benches and fizzled down around us. I shut my eyes. I wished I could step outside of myself, to see what we looked like.

I wanted the night to last forever, so I invited Angela over to our house. After the rain stopped and the skies cleared, she went home and told her parents she was staying the night with a girlfriend. I strolled home alone, thinking about my life. The clouds thinned, and a few glimmering stars poked through the night sky. On the way home, a golden retriever loped across someone’s lawn to meet me, then returned to the yard and rolled over onto its back so that it could wriggle in the wet grass. In the house behind the dog, the windows flickered in a blue glow from a television inside, where someone was probably curled on the couch, having a perfectly ordinary night. Somewhere in the distance, a barrage of gunshots went off. When I got home, I told Mac everything that had happened. I told him that Angela was coming over. He winked.

“High five little bro,” he said.

I don’t know what my expectations were for that night – I hadn’t imagined exactly what would happen when Angela came over, only that it would be somehow magical, something special. When she did arrive an hour later, I saw that she had changed clothes again. For some reason I couldn’t quite put my finger on, this disappointed me.

“Got anything to eat?” she asked.

I microwaved us all some frozen burritos and made a pitcher of purple kool-aid with extra sugar. She only ate half of her burrito, so Mac took the rest without asking. I was eager to get his opinion of her, but if he was impressed, he didn’t show it. I suggested we all play Yahtzee!, but Mac said that was a lame idea, so instead I looked for a movie to watch. I popped in The Natural, which I’d recorded from television one Sunday afternoon a couple of years earlier. Mac sat in Dad’s old recliner, where he leaned back and tossed a Nerf football up in the air repeatedly. I cozied up next to Angela on the couch and put my arm around her.

I never knew what a boring movie The Natural could be until that night. I had watched it several times before and had loved it, but that night, I found myself impatient. This was made worse by the fact that I had recorded it on TV, so the movie was interrupted by two-year-old commercials and promos for the ‘91 Series between the Braves and Twins (which the Twins won, 4-3). This rekindled my anger at Lonnie Smith for blowing the series with a base-running error in the eighth inning of game seven. I vented my fury anew, and Angela sighed. Mac gave me a look that said cut it out. We’d lost the remote to the VCR some months ago, so I found myself walking across the room to fast-forward through the commercials. The pace still seemed too slow, however, and soon I was fast-forwarding through the boring parts of the movie as well, explaining the plot as I went. After a few minutes, I just turned the damn thing off.

“This is boring,” I said. “Let’s go to the bauxite pits.”

“The quarry? What for?” Angela asked.

Mac slapped the football in his palm. “Man, little bro, you sure know how to impress a lady. I can’t think of a better place for a first date than a giant hole in the ground surrounded by piles of rocks.”

“I’ll get the flashlights,” I said. “We’ll have a game.”

I gathered the flashlights. We had two nice Maglights, the sleek and heavy flashlights favored by policeman for their reliability and their dual function as a blunt clubbing instrument. One of the Maglights was a Christmas present from dad, the other Mac had stolen from a security guard at a Def Leppard concert a couple of years earlier. I gave my Maglight to Angela and brought a large and clunky yellow plastic flashlight of Dad’s for myself. This would be the first and only time that I took a girl to the quarry. Looking back, I suppose I was excited to share a place that was so important to me, that it was a little like sharing a piece of myself. Mac led the way down the path through the woods, and I followed with flashlight on for Angela’s sake, explaining the rules of the game on the way there. When we came to the clearing at the edge of the quarry, Mac reached up and shook an overhanging branch, and a shower of water rained off the leaves and down onto our heads. “Game on!” he shouted, then there was the soft thudding of his footsteps racing away. I leaned over and kissed Angela’s cheek. “Be careful,” I whispered, and then I scrambled through the mud into the darkness.

Of course, Mac and I had no trouble lighting her up. Here she was trying creep behind a heap of rocks, and there she was crouching behind the tread of a Caterpillar machine, still slick with water from the recent rain. It seemed a little like the Angela show, where a spotlight flickered on her every thirty seconds or so, while Mac and I ran circles around her in the dark, the beam of her flashlight only able to find the empty space we had occupied a second before. With our years of experience, it was a little too easy. We knew where all the best places to hide were, and how to create a misdirection by turning on our flashlights and swinging them one way with our arm while moving our bodies in the opposite direction. After a few minutes, Mac let himself appear in Angela’s beam.

“Got me,” he said. “You’re getting better.”

I was circling behind them both, running full speed along the edge of one of the smaller pits closest to the highway when I turned my ankle in the mud and slipped down. I let out a sharp cry, something like a yelp, and then I tumbling down into the hole, the tiny rocks biting into my shoulders and arms as I rolled. The pit was not very deep, but I was still surprised when I stretched out and found my body intact after I rolled to a stop. Above, Mac shouted my name.

“I’m down here!” I cried.

It was pitch black in the hole, and I had dropped my flashlight. I began feeling around for it, running my hands over the wet rock around me. I stopped when I felt a strange lump in the rock around me, something cold and greasy and oddly sticky beneath my fingers. The synapses fired and in an instant of nightmarish recognition, something stirred in the deep haunts of my subconscious and I shuddered. I knew what I was touching before I believed it.

I jerked my hand back, wiped it on my jeans, then immediately wished I hadn’t. Two lights flashed on above me, and I looked up and saw the silhouettes of Mac and Angela against a night sky sparsely dotted with stars. Angela screamed.

“Holy shit,” Mac said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

I looked over and saw, curled up beside me, a black boy in a Chicago Bulls jersey, his face frozen in astonishment. The back of his head had been blown off, and my probing fingers had found the mess of hair and brains and congealed blood that now glistened in light Mac was shining down on us. The dead kid was about my age. I jumped to my feet but immediately my ankle gave out and I fell back down again. This time I got up slower, testing my weak ankle, thinking only of climbing out, of what was above me.

“Help me get out!” I called.

Mac carefully scaled down the slope that I had tumbled down. He kept his back to me as he climbed down, foot first, searching for something to grab onto with his hands. When he got to the bottom, he walked over and squatted above the body. He reached out and touched the adam’s apple with his fingers, and for a second I was afraid he was going to lift the gold chain the kid wore around his neck.

“You know him?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Some gangbanger.” When he turned and looked me in the eyes, I could already sense the distance that would open between us, as if he were already receding into the future, leaving me forever hobbling behind. I wanted to reach out to him, but I didn’t know how.

“We should get out of here,” he said.

The climb was slow and arduous. I had to keep one arm around Mac’s shoulders, and each time I planted my left foot a surge of pain tore through my ankle. It was twenty-five feet up to the top of the hole, but my ankle was useless after the first fifteen. I willed it to be strong, to carry me out, but it was like Jello beneath my weight. I wrapped my muddy arms around his Mac’s neck and he hoisted me onto his back, and inch by inch he pushed us up with his legs. Where he found the strength for this task, I don’t know. Maybe he knew that the only way I was getting out of that hole was on his back. I clenched my jaw and hung on.

For those moments, my world shrunk down to the ten feet between us and the top of the hole, where the jittery light shone down from Angela’s shaking hand. The next day, I would learn that the dead kid in the pit wasn’t a gangbanger at all, but an honor student named Vincent Walker who sat three seats behind me in Algebra class, and who was unlucky enough to be the brother of a petty drug lord involved in a turf war with some members of a gang called Hoover Nation. I would feel bad for not recognizing him, and wonder if he would have recognized me if our roles were reversed. In two weeks, I would come home and find Mac and Angela in bed together, her shirtless, and I would bludgeon Mac across the face with a Trophy, breaking his nose, and then he would spring right back up and pin me down and lean over me, dripping his blood all over my face, screaming Are you happy now! This is my blood – are you happy? – And things would never be quite the same between us. But that all came later. Right then, at the mouth of that poor kid’s grave, all I knew was that I was hanging on to my brother, that it was his sweat I tasted on my lips, and that slowly, somehow, we were rising.

Her dresser top reminds me of a beautiful shopping mall. Make-up that will work magic, arranged in neat rows according to color.

“This will make the boys notice your eyes,” my older sister says.

The blusher and eye shadow with sparkles are carefully painted on my face, then washed off before Mom or Dad gets home. Make-up with names like Deep Sea Blue Coral and Hint of Spice. Nicole holds up the picture of a model, ripped out from her favorite magazine.

“This will define your cheekbones.”

Nicole gives me a makeover every Saturday in front of her dresser mirror. She calls it Nicole’s School of Beauty, and tells me I am her only customer.

“I mean, my favorite customer,” Nicole corrects herself as she combs my hair and parts it perfectly down the middle. Taking some clips, she twists them around and makes me look older. The medals on her high school letter jacket jingle as she selects my lipstick: shiny gold and silver for running and soccer. Nicole holds up a mirror when she is done.

“Do I look like I’m in high school?” Because being in high school would mean that fourth grade is finally over.

“You look perfect,” says Nicole. “Like a model.”

My sister likes to exercise in sets of fifty; push-ups, sit-ups, and squats.

“You have to do things over and over again to get any results,” Nicole says, pinching skin and looking in the mirror. “Look, Brandy. I do all that and I’m still a cow.”

I stare at her reflection, trying to see what she sees. Her body looks see through, like she wants to float away and leave me behind.

“But Nicole, you are not fat,” I tell her. She turns and pats me on the head.

“Brandy, you are too young to know fat when you see it,” she says, turning back to face the mirror.

At dinner Mom brings out pork chops in cream corn and sets it out on the table. There is a moment of silence, as we all wait for what will happen next. Dad looks at the pork chops swimming in the cream corn and says,

“What is this? First you break the washing machine, then serve this up for dinner. Come on, Kathy. I can’t eat this crap again.”

They yell back and forth. The dinner slows down to a crawl, even though I am eating as fast as I can. Mom stops in the middle of telling Dad that he can make dinner from now on to turn and look at Nicole’s plate. She is just pushing food around. Everything that was on her plate at the beginning of dinner is still there.

“Nic, eat something,” Mom says quietly, “Please?”

Dad looks over at Nicole and begins eating as she looks down at her plate. My stomach hurts.

Emma Bradley and Carmen Mezera at school say they think Nicole is pretty.

“Your sister is reeeeeally gorgeous,” Carmen announces in front of Emma during recess.

“You aren’t. How did that happen, Brandy? Did your mama do an ugly milkman?”

Emma begins laughing as I shrug.

“I don’t think so, Carmen,” I say, looking at the dirt under my fingernails. “I think he was too busy doing your mom to get to anyone else’s house.”

“Hey,” Carmen says, “Let me see your Luci Love t-shirt.”

I casually turn and pull it away from my body slightly, so she can see it. It shows Luci holding a microphone and wiggling her hips.

“Well, at least it hides your fat ,” Carmen says. Emma laughs.

I roll my eyes, then say, “Are we done? Can I go now?”

“You need to be more like that,” Carmen says as she points to my dancing t-shirt.

“Because right now, Brandy, you aren’t anything.”

Carmen hisses these words like a snake. I turn and walk away.

Saturday afternoon Mom turns to me and tries to talk as if her voice isn’t hoarse from yelling at Dad. I am watching T.V., hoping that I get to see Luci Love sing Hot Love. It’s her most famous song and I wish I could sing it.

I’m a hot love beauty queen.

Number one on the scene.

“Don’t they wear clothes anymore?” Mom asks, nodding her head toward the television. I hear her take a deep breath.

“We need to go to the laundromat,” she says.

“I don’t want to go,” I tell her without looking away from the television. Folding clothes is dumb. They end up wrinkly anyway.

“Sometimes we have to do what we don’t want to,” she says to me. Except it sounds more like she is saying it to herself.

“Honey, please,” she says, turning the T.V. off. “Go get my laundry soap, would you?”

In the garage I see the soap sitting on Dad’s shelf, next to a paper cigar box. My arm reaches up for the soap and accidentally knocks the cigar box off the shelf. It is full of cuff links and shiny rings, which spill out onto the floor. I don’t understand why they are all there.

“Hurry up, Brandy!” Mom shouts from the living room.

I quickly pick up the rings and put them back in the box. Some of them have initials carved on the inside. I see a red one that matches the sweater Mom bought Nicole. The ring slips inside my pocket: I will give it to Nicole as a present.

“Brandy! Honest to god…” Mom says. I pick up the rest of the rings and put them back in the box. My heart beat echoes in my ears. When I walk back in the house, I make it seem like I never touched anything at all.

The laundromat is full of people that looked like moles or weevils. Little beady eyes, sparkling from washer to dryer.

“Put the basket there, in front of the big washer,” Mom says to me, pointing to an empty space, a dirty green tile with footprints all over it.

I am staring at this lady’s big underwear, hanging on a rack. Her underwear looks like it was made out of that shiny, waterproof stuff that people use to make kites. She shuffles from washer to dryer, and doesn’t notice me looking at her. After awhile I have to look away, because it is too gross to watch. But no matter where I am in the laundromat, I can hear her ragged breathing, as if she is going to fall over and die right there, on the cracked tile. I hear her trying to breathe in my head even as I leave the laundromat with Mom, go home, eat dinner. I stare at my open math book for a while, think about the rings in the garage, and realize I am going to flunk the test tomorrow.

That night I tell Nicole how much I hate Carmen and Emma.

“You should just ignore them,” Nicole says, sitting up perfectly straight on her bed reading Teen Style.

“I can’t,” I say. “We are in the same class. How am I supposed to ignore them?”

Nicole begins combing her long hair fifty times on each side. Her brush rapidly becomes a clump of hair. She stops and looks at me.

“I ignore people all the time,” she says.

“Do you ignore your track coach?” I say before I can stop myself.

“What do you mean?”

I shouldn’t bring it up, but I now I have to say something. So she knows I know, and will stop treating me like such a baby.

“I know you can’t go back to track practice until you gain some weight,” I say, repeating what Mom told Dad last night. Nicole’s jaw tightens.

“Please leave my room,” she says without looking at me.

At school my mind starts to float away while the teacher is talking about division. I look out the window for what feels like a minute and then hear the bell ring.

“So, everyone, I hope that helps you understand divisions with decimals,” Mrs. Lind says. My eyes blink and I look at the clock: math class is over. As I turn the corner to my locker Carmen and Emma are waiting.

“Did you know,” Carmen says, “that you are the only person in our class who is not going to Six Flags next week?”

My heart beat speeds up when Carmen says this. My Mom told me she didn’t have the money for me to go.

“And don’t ask Dad,” Mom warned me. “He has a lot on his mind.”

So I didn’t ask. I lied and told Mrs. Lind that I didn’t like roller coasters.

“What’s the deal, Brandy?” Carmen says. There is a mean smile in her voice, like she knows what really happened.

“Are you afraid of roller coasters, or is your family too poor to pay the forty dollars?”

I can’t just ignore Carmen’s voice the way Nicole would. Not when someone is standing so close, hating you.

“I don’t really care about Six Flags,” I say, “because my dad is taking me to the Luci Love concert.”

That night I am in bed, thinking about my lie. It didn’t feel like I was making it up, when I said it. It felt like the tickets were in my hand. I stare at the wallpaper in my bedroom from the light of a street lamp through my window.

“Those bastards knew I would be the first to go,” Dad says. “They were smiling in my face while stabbing me in the back.”

Dad is talking loudly to Mom about his old job.

“That whole company is rotten,” he says as ice clinks in his glass. “Rotten to the core. I had nothing to do with their problems. I was just sick of managing pawn shops.”

Then I hear nothing.

Right before I fall asleep Dad says to Mom, “If I had them, don’t you think I would have told you by now?”

Now Nicole won’t let me hang out with her, or use her make-up. I ask through the keyhole of her bedroom door if we can act like I am in high school. I want to dress up in her clothes, and practice what I will say when a boy asks me out.

“Brandy, I don’t feel like it,” Nicole says.

I want things to be like they were before.

“I swear, I won’t mess up anything in your room,” I whisper through the locked door.

“Brandy, back off!” Nicole shouts. My arms cross and I lower my head.

This is how dinner goes now: Dad orders us take out from Firzelli’s Pizza, because Mom has been working late. I watch Nicole pick off all the onions from her piece of pizza and put them in a pile on the edge of her plate. Then she does the same with the sausage, and then the olives. By the time she is done taking apart one piece, I have eaten three without even knowing it until Dad says,

“Slow it down, Brandy! Leave some for your sister.”

And then he mumbles under his breath, “You are going to eat us out of house and home.”

“I am not. I am NOT.”

My face gets hot and my throat is tight and scratchy.

“Leave her alone,” Nicole says, so quietly that Dad almost can’t hear her.

“That’s great, girls. Gang up on me,” Dad hunches over his pizza in a way that makes him look scared. “I am trying my best.”

Nicole and I look down at our plates. I really hate my own guts right now.

On Monday my class finds out that the Six Flags trip has been cancelled.

“I can’t believe it!” I hear Carmen wail after Mrs. Lind announces it in front of the class.

“Sorry, everyone,” says Mrs. Lind. “We are trying to reschedule it for next month.”

I turn and face the wall so no one will see me smile.

The bus drops me off in front of my house before rumbling down the road, belching brown smoke out of its tailpipe. I open the door to find the neighbor lady, Mrs. Kearney, waiting for me.

“It’s your sister,” she says.

I look out the window during the entire drive to the hospital. My chest feels like Dad has thrown one of his cigarette matches down my throat. The burning is stuck above my lungs. I have to remind myself to take in air by taking the deepest breaths possible. Otherwise I might forget, and stop breathing and just drop dead right there. The burning match in my chest might spread through my lungs and melt my heart.

“Brandy,” Mom says when I turn the corner to the waiting room. Her hair looks like she has not combed it and her face is all puffy. “Nicole is awake now.”

“What was wrong with her?” I ask.

“She was dehydrated,” Mom says. “She needed water.”

“How did that happen?”

Mom’s face changes, as if a terrible truth rolls over her eyes and mouth and makes them look bleary.

“The doctor says she has an eating disorder,” Mom finally says.

“I want to see her.”

“She - she isn’t speaking to anyone, honey,” Mom says. “I don’t know why.”

I pictured Nicole, her angelic face lying on a white hospital bed. She must not like it, with all those people in her room. They probably touch all of her things without asking. You can’t do sit-ups when you are attached to tubes.

“She’s ignoring you,” I tell her, my voice matter-of-fact.

Mom and Dad take turns going to the hospital, then the treatment center. Dinner is always pizza. Now Dad lets me eat as many pieces as I want and doesn’t say anything. It makes me feel worse when Dad tells me a couple of days later that he is taking me to see Luci Love.

“This is all you’ve been asking for,” he says, “for a long time.”

Dad is blocking my view of the T.V., so I have nowhere to look. I begin checking out my toenails. I feel nothing , nothing, nothing.

“Remember,” he says, “when you wore that t-shirt for a week until Mom told you to put it in the clothes hamper?”

“Yeah,” I shrug. “But I was little then. I didn’t know any better.”

Dad leans in, inches from my face.

“What is with this new attitude of yours?” He asks.
He thinks I am stupid, or a baby. I leave the couch and go to my room.

“I am talking to you, young lady,” he calls after me.

I go into my top dresser drawer and take the red ring out of its hiding place. My hands are shaking.

“You will come back here and finish this conversation, Brandy,”

I walk into the living room and hand him the ring. Dad stands there for a moment, in shock.

“You shouldn’t take things from my shelf,” he says in a near whisper. Dad’s large hand wraps around the piece of jewelry. He leaves the room, and I know I have done something awful. Something I can’t fix. Now the thought of going to the Luci Love concert makes me sick to my stomach. I don’t even have a comeback for Carmen when she asks me about it at school.

“You’re not saying anything because you aren’t going,” she says.

I try to think of Nicole at my side, saying Ignore her.

“O.K., class,” says Mrs. Lind, “here is the test from last week.”

When I get my math test back, I hold my breath before I turn it over: 62 percent. Carmen reads my score over my shoulder.

“Nice,” she whispers. Emma begins to giggle, and that’s when I grab Carmen’s hand. Her small fingers bend back easily.

“Brandy!” Mrs. Lind rushes over to my desk. She has to pull our hands apart before she can send me to the office. I won’t let go on my own.

“Hello, Brandy,” says the lady with glasses I that I don’t know.

I have figured out that she is a counselor. Last year she came to my classroom when Keith Landon’s dad died. He had to move to another school and she helped him clean out his desk.

“My name is Mrs. Schmidt. We can talk about anything you want.”

She is kind of fat but not really. I mean, not really rolls of fat. Not that you can tell under her oversize black turtleneck.

“Your teacher told me you have been having a hard time in class lately.”

I am nervous. I don’t want to talk about anything. We sit and wait for what seems like a long time.

“I’m sorry about your sister,” Mrs. Schmidt says softly.

My face feels like I am going to cry. But I don’t.

“My sister,” I hear myself say, “is a lot skinnier than you.”

Nicole is still at the treatment center. Sometimes she is doing better, sometimes worse. I ask Mom if we will have a party for my sister when she finally comes home.

“Not here,” she says.

When I ask her why, she says, “Because we are moving out of the house at the end of next month.”

I swallow hard. Dad needs to pay people back. I know that’s why we can’t live here.

“Nicole will be mad,” I say.

When my sister comes home, we won’t be here. We will have to touch all her things, take them out of straight rows and put them into boxes.

“I am sure your new school will have field trips to Six Flags,” Mom says.

I don’t even care about Six Flags anymore. I decide that I never want to go to Six Flags again. Baby stuff. Stupid.

Dad comes in, looking down at his shoes. He acts embarrassed to see me since I gave him that ring. I wish I had never done it, that I had just slipped it back into the box without a word to anyone.

“How are things going with Mrs. Schmidt?” he asks me at dinner. I see her every Tuesday after lunch.

“She gave me a test and says I am a future psycho killer,” I say, tired of his questions.

Dad laughs nervously.

“You are such a cut-up,” he says, like he doesn’t know who I am.

When I call Nicole on the phone every Thursday, I am not allowed to bring up food unless she does first.

“Hi, Nic,” I say. I can hear her quiet breathing on the phone. “I miss you.”

Last weekend we all went up to the center to visit. Nicole was happy to see us. She hugged all of us, even me. We are moving, I almost say, but I realize it might upset her. How can you leave me all alone?

“When I get back,” Nicole promises, “I will give you the best makeover anyone has ever had. No one will recognize you.”

That night my dreams are as bright and fast as a cartoon movie. I am riding on a float in a parade, hair and make-up just like Luci Love. The parade is being held in my honor, because I am leaving this town, and they will miss me. My hands wave at everyone lining Main Street. The parade slows down near Firzelli’s Pizza, so I can smell my favorite sauce and the tubs of rising dough.

Nicole is on the float with me. She closes her eyes and smells the air. She gives me something brand new; a magic ring that makes me smarter, stronger, faster. It makes her body new and shiny, so she doesn’t hate it anymore. She is suddenly hungry again, for everything.

You’ve got that shiny boxcar
painted Rage-on-Wheels in fire letters on the side
& you’ve been driving for years
& you zip through town on just your own
heidy-ho and I’ll tear you down.

You carjack me and carjack my sister,
carjack my baby sister and my baby girl
& drag us around by the long brown hair
shot with gold that we got from you,
heidy-ho, toodle-oo, names spelt out in fire.

No engine, no motor,
just a little boxcar jacked to the hilt
& its speedy missus, shooting off gold
from the crowns in our teeth, jaws cocked wide
as we’re dragged around, heidy-ho, years on end, end in flame.

Stephanie Bedford, the Fall 2007 local feature, will read from her nonfiction.

The party starts at 7:30 PM at Woodland Pattern and continues until further notice.

Catch & Release

Wisconsin Authors Night, Monday 8 October, Weasler Auditorioum, Marquette Unviersity.

The reading features cream city review writers Ben Percy (Fall 2007), Susan Firer (Spring 2007), and CJ Hribal (2006 fiction contest judge), as well as many great Milwaukee writers. Click here for more info.

Generations Panel, Thursday 4 October, Hefter Center, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.

Established writers, UWM faculty, and past contributors Susan Firer (ccr Spring 2007), James Hazard, John Koethe, and Kim Blaeser (ccr Fall 2006) introduce the work of artists at the beginning of their career, including cream city review’s current poetry editor, Ellen Elder. Click here for more info.

Thanks for your patience during the transition.