Incomplete

~

This semester is almost over. I have turned in grades for two classes and have one to go. I mark days off on my calendar, like a prisoner chalking days on his cell wall. I will pick up some essays at school and read them tonight or tomorrow morning. I will experience momentary happiness giving students who have done a good job an A or B and momentary unhappiness giving students who did a less than stellar job a C or less. Even when the latter is accurate, it is never satisfying. It leaves the taste of incompleteness in my mouth--like biscuits not cooked through completely.

I recently heard from a couple of friends that they hoped one day to read all the books on their shelves which they have started and not finished or had intended to read but have not cracked. That sounded like something I ought to understand, but I realized I did not have this problem, as I have enough of a driving need to finish what I have started or know why. A book I have not finished does not go back on my shelf, but into the Goodwill box--because it seems to me not worth finishing. There's another feeling of incompleteness.

Once I pick a book to read, I generally read it through. And I generally pick a book knowing a little bit about it. I have usually read or heard something about it, or, more often, read a few pages or a chapter in the book store, enough so I know whether or not I want to read it. A lot of people loved The Lovely Bones, but after a few pages of stomach turning prose I knew I would never be able to finish what seemed essentially a book for young girls. I think the word that tipped me off was skeezy, though I may be botching that word. The young girl who was clearly about to be molested and killed said that something made her feel all skeezy. I put the book back on the shelf. There was enough in that word usage to let me know I had nothing to gain there: morbid sentimentalism and false youth.

There is not much better than finishing a book knowing that it has satisfied you in many of the ways a book can satisfy. I can name things that beat it on the fingers of one hand, though, to be honest, I use all the fingers. In the pitch of the last weeks of a semester, I am usually unable to read something not required of me, as I must reread the books I have assigned, and student papers and stories, perhaps a thesis or two, keeping up and finishing off as grandly as possible. So as soon as I had attended my last class of the semester, and even though I still had plenty of work to complete myself, I picked up a book my dear Lisa recently bought and began to look at it.

When she bought it, it seemed like a book I would pick out; it had been niggling at the back of my mind since she put it on the shelf unread. As soon as I got home from the last class, I pulled it out and gave a look. It looked short enough I thought I might finish it in time to get back to what the world required of me. Two hundred pages of pleasantly produced text, a handsome cover with a photo of lissom grass on a sand dune, obviously near the ocean--inviting and forbidding under the title Being Dead. The writer was a Brit named Jim Crace, who looked pleasantly like he had spent some time on such a dune. Also on the cover, a small gold seal which claimed this novel had won the National Book Critics Circle Award, which had no effect on me whatsoever until I finished the book and felt this was a pretty good choice for such an award.

One thing I noticed right away: each 'chapter' of the book was short, generally of the same length as all of the chapters. This matched the gentle and generous tone of the novel, and made it more pleasant to read, as it seemed to open before me. In the very first chapter we understand that a pair of married zoologists have been rather brutally murdered on a sand dune much like the one on the cover, that Celice is naked from the waist down, and her husband Joseph is totally naked and holding on to her ankle.

Throughout the novel, the couple remains dead, though they are visited by various insects and birds and small mammals, and, finally, by their human counterparts. You might say that the entire novel is a meditation on their being dead, though we go back to the momentous and very unspectacular day they met, and several days in between, but that doesn't really account for how engrossing the book became for me.

Why does it strike me as a small miracle that the two main characters, though dead, were in their fifties? And not entirely attractive. She is built a little like like a satyr, a lovely, small-breasted torso from the waist up, and the large butt and thighs of a normal woman. He is too short for most things, as he often points out, and certainly shorter than her. Their lives, though intense and dedicated to their science, are really common, moderate, usual. And the natural processes of death to which they become susceptible are also completely normal, though often shied away from in the course of our lives.

I want to note that I am sixty-three years old at this writing. I have had a heart attack, which I like to call minor, and have two stainless steel bits in my chest to keep arteries from occluding once more, so thoughts of death, while sometimes as inviting to me as to anyone else, are not entirely welcome. I do not like to take long walks through graveyards--which I take to be the reason I chose not to read The Lovely Bones. In addition to this, sentimentality often seems to me like a way to invite death to your doorstep; please don't ask me to elaborate. But this death I enjoyed reading about. It left me unfrightened, accepting, acknowledging.

Perhaps this is because Crace is something of a naturalist in his understanding of the processes of senescence and thanatology, which are the basis of the study to which the deceased couple gave themselves in life. How, you might ask, can such a gentle novel of death keep the reader's attention? I think the answer is balance. He balances this discussion of death with scenes from life, and just when it seems impossible that Crace could keep my attention alive through his meditations, we get a new character--the daughter of the deceased couple who becomes involved in discovering what has happened to her parents.

Even with her rebellious nature (she has left home, shaved her head, and gone to work as a waitress at a hot spot called MetroGnome) she manages to charge the prose without taking over. In the course of the novel, she discovers her place in this world, and a little about her parents, even if only that they were born to die; much more isn't required of children, is it? Children of decent parents, let's say. That should be enough to cause them to be loved by the child who took life from them and will yet take it further than she or they could have imagined.

But now, alas, I must leave this discussion unfinished, as my duties call me back. I must finish, submit grades, a hundred other little things--some of them large and heart-breaking in their smallness. But let me say this much: the life in Jim Crace's book is real, unadorned by dreams or falsity, yet touched by the grace of decency, of respect for life, such as it is, such as it will be, in this world. And finally, it is touching. Because, at last, the novel is as beautifully complete as their lives.

A Few Words about "Flip Cards"

~
I am going to say a few words about my personal essay "Flip Cards" for my friend Steve Smith, who asked me to. An English class he teaches at Manchester High School will be reading it in the Fall of 2009. When I think of what to say about it, I first think about the experience of getting it published, and only after that what it was like writing it, so that's the way I'll go here. I think these notes will be best after you have read the personal essay.

"Flip Cards" first appeared in The Georgia Review, was reprinted in The Pushcart Prize and then again in my book of stories, Private Acts. I never really thought much about whether it was a story or an essay, and when I first sent it to Stanley Lindberg, at The Georgia Review, I didn't identify it. Stanley told me he first thought it was a story, but then it lit up when he realized it was a personal essay. I had sent him a few things before, and he had published an essay of mine already, but this time he sent me a rejection saying he wanted to publish it but felt the ending needed to capture and reflect the whole essay. I had ended with an image of my friend Danny's father wandering around their house playing the accordion, which seemed to me to do everything I wanted, but then I am strongly oriented toward the visual image rather than excess talk or reflection.

This rejection found me at the end of my rope. It exasperated me more than I could say, enough to write out, by hand, a rather frustrated response that stated that I thought the reflection and any conclusions that could be made were already obvious from what was there. I told him what these reflections and conclusions might be under the force of my anger that even my best work, which this seemed to be, was being tested like someone sticking their toe in the ocean. I laid it out for him. What did I have to do, walk on water? I let him have it. And this is a testament to how frustrating it can be to send out your work, because he was the smartest, kindest, most gentle editor with whom I have ever had the privilege to communicate.

A few days later I got a phone call that I never expected. Stanley asked me if I had a copy of the note I sent him, and I said I did not, a little embarrassed that I had sent it at all. He said, "Let me read it to you," and then I felt like pure crap. But he read it to me, and then he said, "Bob, this is what you need at the end of your essay. Now, I'm going to send this back to you and you see if you think you could work it in. Don't do it if you don't want to, but I think this is exactly what you need." As he said it a light came on in my mind. I could see exactly what he was saying, and that what I had sent him was in fact the true end of the essay. I could not wait to get the note back, but by the time it had arrived I had already been working on the end. I rewrote it and sent it back to him, knowing this was the right way to end the essay. You can see how it ends now, and this is the result of Stanley feeding me back the note I sent him.

Once he had the finished essay in his hands, he called me on the telephone, at a time he had already set up, and we read the essay to each other over the phone. He said he wanted to hear it. He asked me questions about the essay and we talked about it for over an hour--he had a meter on his phone. We didn't change the essay, just read it aloud, perhaps the best experience I have had with an editor. I did make one change from the conversation. For some reason, I had decided to make one of my paragraphs one long sentence. I had seen writers try to make long sentences before, and I always thought they weren't really sentences, that the reader knew most of the time that this one had been patched together for effect. I wanted to write a really long sentence that worked perfectly and that no one would notice. Don't ask me why. Probably pride.

Anyway, Stanley was reading at this point, and when he reached the end of the sentence he paused. "I just noticed," he said, "that sentence is one, two, three....thirteen lines long." I told him what I had tried and he said, "You did it. Now, can we put some periods and commas in there?" I laughed. "Sure," I said, "now that I know I did it." The paragraph was just a little better, and there were no splashy effects after that one was removed.

And then, some time after the essay appeared, Stanley called again. "The Pushcart wants to use it. This is firm. They want to publish it." He was very happy about it, almost as happy as I was, it seemed to me. But all this took place after the essay had been written.

When I wrote it, I experienced delight, not so common for me. I can't remember how the idea entered my mind, but the first thing I did was to describe a game we played when I was a kid, involving baseball cards, and how much I loved these cards, and how they smelled, and how good I was at playing flip cards. Sometimes you discover a talent you didn't know you have and you have no reason for possessing, and it's a high experience, so you go with it. Asked once why she wrote, Flannery O'Connor said she wrote because she was good at it. I played flip cards because I was good at it, and because it became the mode of the day, the thing we did, the expression of our desire.

I spent a very long time one bright morning writing that first section and then I went home. I wrote it at my office at the university, and I didn't think there was anything more, until I returned the next morning and started thinking about my childhood friend Danny Gary, and his parents, and where they lived. I thought, there is more to this, and so I wrote the next section. Every morning I returned I had something more to say, more to remember about this time in my life. What a wonderful period this was, living on the edge of the ocean! Delight filled me as I wrote, and then I spent some time putting it all together. I just laughed when I finished it, a little embarrassed about the way I had been spending my time, feeling foolish about writing so much about my own childhood.

When asked to give a reading on my own campus, I decided to try it out. This seemed like a safe forum, but I was deeply embarrassed to be sharing such private moments, and to talk about who I was at that young age. But I read it aloud and the response was overwhelming. My colleagues might be polite a great deal of the time, but this went beyond politeness, and it surprised the hell out of me. I went back to my office, put it in an envelope, and sent it to Stanley Lindberg with my heart beating. So when I got that first rejection I was dashed.

This was the process of writing, a pure joy, an exploration of memories. In an earlier story, "Beth," I had discovered that once you began to remember a period of time, the memories came back with greater fluidity. You remember what happened before and after, and then before and after again. It spreads, it opens up, before it finally closes again, and the story is finished. This happened with "Flip Cards." And the memories were so bright, and so filled with delight for me, that even the darkest moments were mitigated. The essay made me happy like a piece of music, and it had taken two weeks to complete!

I immediately started another autobiographical piece, one that I had been thinking of for some time, about the year I was seventeen and a paper boy in Maryland. Six months later, worn out, pleased, and still engaged, I sent out a completely different kind of personal essay that had come in three parts. The first, "The Friends of a Stranger," appeared in The Missouri Review, again the first place I sent it, and the third part appeared in the alumni magazine under the title, "Lucky Bob." All three appeared as the last entry in my book of stories, under the title "A Million Billion Trillion Stars," a title taken from an e.e. cummings poem about the good Samaritan. This one was darker, but, I thought, in the long run richer, but readers have always like "Flip Cards" best.

I wondered why this one made such a hit, and for a while I thought it might be the baseball stuff, with the baseball card material, and then I thought it might be the delight with which it was written, the glow of light from another time. Finally, I just let it be and stopped rereading and revisiting it. I moved on, but it was back there, the spot of light, that landscape and seascape with the sun rising or setting over it. It was there just a surely as that time in my life had been there, as magical in the experience as it had been in the writing.
~

"The fairy tale...takes these existential anxieties and dilemmas very seriously and addresses itself to them: the need to be loved and the fear that one is thought worthless; the love of life, and the fear of death."
--Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment

My first experience of fairy tales was my mother reading at night before we went to sleep. She read other stories, recited poems, but nothing in a fairy tale stopped surprising. I'd like to know your take on any fairy tales that sticks with you: essay, story, poem. Send to rpope@uakron.edu, whatever form it takes.

~

Contents:
Steve Smith, "black dreams and blue thieves"

Dave Materna, "Boondockle"
Robert Pope, "The Tailor's Boy"Mary Biddinger, "Show Pony"
Shurice Gross, "The Princess of Building 4"
Tony Bradford, "Slumbering Siren"
Alex Cox, "The Edge and the Other Side"
Dave Materna, "Pre-Mortem"
Gillian Trownson, "True Love Waits"
Tara Kaloz, "Mr. Horner's Heads"
Brittany Stone, "In Support of the Little Guy"
Two by Kristina von Held, "Transformation," "The Pull of the Water"
Nick Elder, "Sandy"

!

Steve Smith

black dreams and blue thieves

~

a pregnant wife should dream of

willows and cotton and children

pattering across blanched linoleum

~

mine dreamt that construction was

going on across the street at 4 am;

the elementary school—crews had been

there for summer weeks.

but nowthe school was vacant and black

~

so her mind's rattle of saber saws and

clanging scaffolding had to be

the work of a sinister imagination.

REMs spinning like a cockeyed phonograph

they buzzed and screamed in her

wee hour ears and

she thought someone sawing and

grinding and sawing through chains.

~

she awoke.

~

sat up, belly full, upright and

cautious—stole a glance

through the window gauze

like deer at leafy branches

watching evening shadows

fall across fallen corn

~

there, in the back yard, were

the workers that had been laboring—

at least in the black electric dream of hers.

now they'd come back to life

as thieves in midnight blue

wheeling her gas grill noisily through

wet grass—a broken security

chain dragging behind like a brat

by the hand.

~

for the man next to her side

half nude, open-mouthed and

exhaling dryly like fine sand,

for him

summertime poverty

whispers a strange psalm

that the killing verse

should follow a blue thief to

the grave. final.

~

here’s the shotgun loaded

in my hands and i pull back

sleep's webbing and

whoosh through

the front door in underwear

boiling blood

~

Harrington & Richardson is a

tunnel that does not change course or

bird shot in the chamber

and low-brass in the hand.

~

when you draw a bead

on another man you decide

right then—if you take a chunk of

the criminal mind, you just might

blast something else from the midnight sky.

!

Dave Materna

Boondockle

Gary from Indiana was way outta his league by then. Poor and busted again. He had an old car that looked the part and a handful of little foam footballs in the backseat. He even gave one of them away once without his autograph on it. A shame. Still he drove on through the mountains toward Tennessee. He had a case of exotic perfume that he swiped from the Burgundy Motel in Plainsworth the day before and he could damn well use the money.

By the time Gary got to Tennessee he was out of footballs and hungry. He had a trap in the trunk and caught a raccoon with it before sunup. The pelt and guts were worth $26.50 and he bought three nights in half a house trailer down by the river and still had $4.75 left over. Gary slept till dusk and woke up starvin’. He knocked on the door of the other half of the place and when no one came he went in and stole a whole raw catfish and some bread to make a sandwich. He hid the case of exotic perfume under the bed to wait until tomorrow.


Donny was one of those guys who went to the gym. He didn’t go there to workout necessarily, but he did like to stand around the locker room naked, maybe just wearing matching tube socks in Green Bay Packer colors, and talk to the guys, maybe stand by the blow dryer and show off a little bit. It was his excuse to get out and to fool himself that he was working-out somehow. Nobody ever really spoke to Donny in the locker room except to say fag or queer. It was usually really nobody’s fault. Donny kept warm beer in his locker.

When Gary went to the free clinic he had to wait. For a pretty long time. His stomach was killing him. He started to look around. There wasn’t much to read unless you liked pamphlets. And boy oh boy there were lots of those. Urinary tract infections, gonorrhea, syphilis, genital warts, tooth decay and heart disease, cigarettes and blood platelets, perfume and cigarettes, ringworm, HIV, the dangers of dating older guys, dating older guys who might be HIV positive, they covered the most horrific ailments to be found by mankind. Then they called Gary’s number.


Donny was watching TV at four o’clock in the morning in his little room at the Bennington Motel when an infomercial about girls with acne came on for a whole half hour. I’d like a girl like that, Donny thought, but I wouldn’t know what to do with her slipper kiss.


Looks like October, feels like March. In the middle of February. It was so early it was still dark but the doctor was smiling. Gary told him about the catfish he’d eaten and how he was now poisoned. The doctor smiled some more and gave Gary some Tums and sent him on his way. Gary drove his old car back toward the trailer and thought about what he should do with all that exotic perfume. His guts were on fire and he saw a light so he stopped at this little bar for a drink. Gary spent two dollars of the $4.75 he had left on a tall glass of ice cold draft beer. Donny walked in at precisely 6:23 AM and sat down next to Gary. He ordered a can of oyster juice with a side of horseradish and a vodka chaser. “How ya doin’,” he said to Gary.

“That’s gotta hurt,” said Gary.

“Nah,” said Donny, “but it is an acquired taste, I’ll admit.” The tired bartender watched as the tired early risers filed in and ordered their morning drinks. Donny said, “how’d ya like to be them?” He pushed the dark hair from his face. Gary said. “No way man.” They sipped their drinks in silence. Then Gary said,” I got a big case of exotic perfume that I’m willing to sell for cheap.” Donny shot his vodka and put down a dollar for a tip. “Let’s go,” he said. Donny had a dream, to be the best he could be, and not be like everyone else. It hadn’t quite come through yet, but he was a bettin’ man and he’d been bettin’ on this you’d better believe it. One chance in Hell.


By the time Gary and Donny got back to the trailer the little family from the other half sat outside their half of it staring at their campfire. “Someone stole our catfish” the littlest girl explained. “and now we’ve nothing for our supper tonight.”

“Fuck,” said Gary.

Donny said, “Go in and get the godddamn exotic perfume.” Gary got the case from beneath the bed. Donny said open it up and let’s have a look. Gary opened the case on the steps of his half of the trailer. The little family looked on from their fire with a certain hunger in their eyes.

“I should give them a bottle. For the catfish that’s killin’ me,” Gary reasoned. He twisted his moustache. “They could sell it maybe...”

“Hey you dumbass,” Donny said as he held one of the little sparkling bottles of bubbles. “This ain’t perfume. These are potions. Witches potions.”

Gary looked at the labels. They were written upside-down and backwards. “I thought it was some sorta French,” Gary explained. Donny flipped the black case around and read the various labels. “Plague, Lovesnorts, Ima-bima-bee, Precious-nice, Babble, a dozen or more in all. On the back of each ornate and elaborate bottle was a yellowed paper label with tiny handwriting. Donny inspected the one he held, Zombie Dance it was called, holding the tiny bottle with his fingers. It was round and curved and flowing without shape yet somehow square where it should be with dozens of glass spines jutting sharply from the surface. He squinted to read the label.

“It’s the directions,” they both said.

“You take our fish?” the apparent father asked quietly a few safe paces from Donny and Gary. Gary turned to look at the guy.

“Well, to be honest, yes sir I did and if it makes you feel any better, the damn thing nearly poisoned me.”

“Well mister, I got to feed my family.”

“Here. Take one of these bottles of perfume. You can sell it in town. Or somethin’.

“Oh well...” the little man sighed, “What they smell like?” Without really looking he plucked the one called

Plague from the silk case, pulled out the glass stopper and took a whiff. He dropped to the ground, dead.

“What’d ya let him go and do that for?” Donny hissed. “That was the “Plague” one for Christ’s sake.”

“Whoa—that shit really works,” Gary said. “We better scram-olla.” The little family ran to their poppa and each fell dead from the lingering poison. Gary and Donny tore off in the ’73 Pontiac leaving the family and the fire and the trailer door swinging wide open. But Donny had the case of potions resting on his quivering thighs. Blue smoke rattled from the motor as the duo sped the thirty-six miles to Kentucky. Three miles on the other side they pulled into a gas station with four little log cabins arranged neatly about the grounds—and Donny offered to pay for a night so they could figger out what to do with this chance of a lifetime setting in his lap.


“We could rule the world,” Donny laughed looking at the bottles lying on the twin bed of cabin one. “Look at this one, Fear and Flightless. ‘Put a drop in the sleeping ear, your foe cannot run, but he surely will fear...you.’ Looks like some one wrote in the ‘you.’”

“So what good is that?” asked Gary.

“Think, man, think!” Donny picked his nose. “If people fear you but can’t run from you, you can control them. Like Hitler.”

“Man I don’t wanna be Hitler. I wanna play football again.” Gary picked his nose as well.

“Who said you gotta be Hitler? Here’s another one. ‘Run and Jump’—the spell reads, ‘Take a drop with a spoon of honey, your feats of strength will make you money.’”

Gary plucked the ball-shaped bottle from Donny’s hand. “It’s almost empty. Lots of people must like this one.”

“Yeah, probably a lot of pro athletes...Probably paid a lot for a drop of this too. Try it.”

"I’m not tryin’ it. Besides, we ain’t got no honey.”

“That’s just ‘cause it probably tastes bad. Here...”

Donny dripped a drop on Gary’s fingertip and he licked it off. Nothing happened. Not right then, anyway. But when Donny woke up from his nap, Gary was not in the log cabin. Donny opened the door to the pouring rain and a flash went past. Then it flashed past again. Donny watched as Gary ran about the grounds leaping and jumping and running really fast. He looked exhausted.

“I been...doin’this...for a while...” Gary wheezed with each pass, “And I can’t stop...”

“Yeah, but your getting in great shape!” Donny hollered encouragingly. He shut the door and looked at the potions. This shit really does work, he thought. “Jesus.”

When Gary wound down some time later he vomited and passed out on his bed in the cabin. When Donny couldn’t rouse him in the early morning, he decided it was a good time to split up. He left sleeping Gary the rest of the bottle of Run and Jump and threw ten bucks on the bed. Then he took the case and Gary’s keys and shut the cabin door behind him.

The Pontiac smoked and chugged up the mountain road and Donny turned the radio up way loud. He never saw the witch until she landed on the hood with the weight of three days of hatred and a toothy snarl of delight. The car flattened to the road as the huge creature smashed through the windshield with one giant black talon and pulled Donny’s head out by the roots, much like pulling the stopper from a bottle. The witch popped it into her mouth like a peanut and screamed and spit. Then she hooked a red claw through the handle of the case of potions and flew off as the old car caught fire.


Gary limped along the mountain road sore and stiff and angry. He had ten bucks, a few drops of potion, no car, no footballs, and a long way to go. He walked with his thumb out in case some one might pick him up. Gary looked to the sky when he heard the wind of beating wings and never, ever looked at the sky again.

Mary Biddinger

SHOW PONY


Every year the fair came
they let the rhinoceros out
to see if he'd come back.

Boxes of tiny panda
mice, bags of goldfish
and other small prizes.
The girl with the heart
grown outside her body
stayed at the Ramada
for safe-keeping.

In the exhibit hall
ten rows of berry pies,
and that woman who grew
earwigs a finger's length
on a diet of cornstarch
and ground turkey.

The girl with the heart
played cards in her grotto.
I threw fried dough at her
because she was not
lovely, but still caught
every eye. Hourly
she'd unbutton.

The boy raised by
wolves watched harness
racing, greased pig
chases. The heart girl
loved him, but he loved
everyone, and was also
known to bite.

When the rhino arrived,
the concert was underway.
Trophy hunters followed
him closely. The earwigs
left their meal piles
and shuttled up walls.

Should we be happy
our paths crossed
so many times?
The heart girl wept
in the bandstand
as goldfish circled
their plastic bags.
.
.
"Show Pony" appeared in Apalachee Review and Mary's book Prarie Fever
~

Shurice Gross

The Princess of Building 4

Artesia lived in the top floor apartment of building 4. Her father said Arty was the princess of the penthouse, but she knew she was just a small brown girl with knobby knees, ashy elbows and a big puff of kinky curly hair.

Her bedroom overlooked the small, fenced playground sandwiched between buildings 2 and 3. A basketball court, a tetherball pole and one set of swings for all the children in the Alfred Wilshire housing projects to share. There were lots of children, but not very much sharing and Artesia sometimes preferred to stay in the would-be penthouse and watch her friends from the window.

Her two best friends, Kenny and Chevron lived on the third floor of building 3 with their mother, grandmother, three aunts and four cousins. They hated being inside and were almost always at the playground.

One rainy afternoon, they noticed Artesia in the window and waved for her to come down and meet them in the yard.

Artesia waved back. She was not supposed to go outside. Not supposed to leave her room until she’d cleaned it. According to her stepmother, she wasn’t even supposed to touch the doorknob until the room was “spic and span,” whatever that meant.

Standing in the window looking down at her friends, Artesia felt very much like a princess locked away in a tower. She touched her knobby braids and wished they were long enough to toss over the windowsill. Kenny and Chevron could climb up and rescue her.

Artesia could hear her friends’ muffled screams through the glass; Chevron began jumping up and down as she waved her arms in the air. She turned away from the window and stepped towards the door. Her eyebrows furrowed as she concentrated, twisting the knob slowly until she could see down the empty hallway. She could hear her stepmother humming in the shower. She squeezed through the doorway and closed the door behind her before tiptoeing past the bathroom. Artesia ran through the living room, snatching her coat from the couch before she escaped out into the hallway.

She ran down the eight flights, her feet rhythmic against the stairs like her father’s fingers on a bongo drum. Forced open the heavy metal door of the building and ran across the concrete to meet Kenny and Chevron.

“Rainy days are the best days,” Chevron said as they ran for the empty swing set. “Because most everybody stay inside.”

“And we ain’t gotta fight for the swings,” Kenny said. He reached the three swings first and chose the one on the left, and his sister grabbed the one on the right, leaving Artesia the middle swing.

Rain soaked through the seat of her jeans as she sat on the strip of black plastic. She gripped the slick chain links and leaned back in the swing. Her legs stuck out in front of her as she pumped the swing higher and higher, wishing she were brave enough to send the swing all the way around the metal top bar. But no one was ever that brave and she had to settle for the raindrops on her face and the view of her sneakered toes pointing towards the gray sky. The wind buzzed against her ears as she thought about jumping off and soaring through the air, weightless until the ground, sure and sudden, caught and cradled her return to the harsh concrete.

“Arty,” Chevron said, her voice close and then far as their swings rushed past one another. “Slow down.”

Kenny watched as she dragged her shoes against the ground to slow the swing. “Your half-mama calling you,” he said, pointing at building 4.

“She ain’t no parts my mother,” Artesia stood in the bowed earth under the swing and stared at her palms, laced with curved indentions. Her hands smelled of sharp rust and she inhaled, waiting until her pulse slowed.

“Argh-tease-yah!”

All three children looked up towards the window. Artesia’s stepmother leaned out of the window, her heavy arms pressing down on the sill. Even from where they stood on the playground, her gray eyes were like lasers. “Artesia, get your narrow behind up here right now!”

Her stepmother’s words were like a dragon’s angry breath. Artesia imagined the unfortunate raindrops that fell before her had been sizzled into nonexistence; their smoky souls sent back to the clouds they had fallen from.

Kenny pulled his brown jacket hood over his head and looked away from the window. “I keep looking at her I might turn into a statue or something.”

“You already look like a gargoyle, so you halfway there anyway,” Chevron teased. She jumped off her swing as Kenny chased her towards the tetherball pole.

Artesia glanced up at the empty window. “I’ll see y’all later,” she said over her shoulder. She walked slowly towards building 4. Took her time climbing the stairs. When she finally reached the top floor, her stepmother was waiting for her.

She leaned against the doorjamb, her thick arms crossed over her chest. One bare foot tapped against the hallway floor as her eyes narrowed to slits.

“Took your sweet and precious time getting up here, didn’t you?” she moved to the side and let Artesia squeeze inside the apartment. “Get your butt in that room and clean it up.”

Her stepmother followed her down the hallway to the bedroom and pushed her inside. “You got lots of nerve sneaking outside when this room look like this.” She sucked her teeth and flung her arms open, pointing at the floor. “Look at this. Like a toy store blew up. Your daddy got you rotten spoiled, but you’re gonna clean this place up.”

Artesia looked up from the messy floor. “Where’s daddy?”

“Don’t you worry about that,” she said. Her laugh was like a tortured cat. “Daddy can’t help his spoiled little project princess from where he is. You just do like I told you.”

Her stepmother slammed the door behind her and Artesia listened to her mutter as she shuffled down the hall. She sat on a pile of clothes and looked at her room. It was messy, true. But it had always been a mess and she had never cleaned it. She did not like the hard laminate floor and with so many clothes and books and toys tossed about, it was almost as if her bedroom was carpeted. But her stepmother did not understand that she needed some softness, some buffer beneath her feet and the cold floor of their building 4 apartment.

Artesia gathered her books around her, separating them into stacks – picture books she should give to Chevron and Kenny’s baby cousins, library books she’d never returned, and favorite books that had been buried and forgotten. She unearthed Where the Sidewalk Ends from beneath a pile of stuffed animals and began to read. When her stepmother opened the door an hour later, she was still sitting on the floor, reading poetry.

“I guess you just don’t care if you never get out of here,” she said. Her long toes were a swarm of brown cicadas clicking against the floor. “Put the book down, Artesia. If I come back in here and this room still look like this, you’ll be sorry.”

Artesia let the book slide from her fingers as the door closed in front of her. She glanced at the drops of rain streaking the window. She got up from the floor to see if Chevron and Kenny were still at the playground. Kenny dribbled his cousin’s basketball up and down the court and Chevron’s tasseled red hat bobbed up and down as she jumped rope with some kids from building 1.

They had already forgotten her.

She wished the fire escape was outside her window, but it was on the other side of the apartment beneath the living room windows. Artesia went back to the clean spot on the floor, but pushed the book of poetry back under the stuffed animals. She spotted two playing cards, the queen and five of hearts, and thought of finding the rest of the deck so she could play Solitaire. It would have been better if she could play Tonk with her father.

Artesia returned to the other side of the room and opened her window. She stuck one leg outside, straddling the sill. The ground really wasn’t that far down. Lifting her other leg, she balanced herself in the window, using both hands to hold onto the frame. The sky was the same gray as the hairs in her father’s beard. The warm raindrops like his kisses on her forehead. She pointed her toes towards the ground, leaned forward and soared through the air, weightless.

.