Sie Ist Dumbkopf: School-Sponsored Travel Abroad Ill-Advised for Freshman?

By Tammy Darrah Wenberg

There existed no policy against it. But said travel had never been risked in the known history of our rural Wisconsin high school. Undoubtedly, because the workings of the younger teen brain, as they ignite the awkward body and torpedo off a forked tongue, would be construed as menacing by pretty much anyone.

I’m not sure administration considered the necessity of a no-freshman policy, based solely on the roadmap to potential disaster situated midway between a kid’s ears. But clearly they should’ve.

After all, adolescent cognition mimics a many-tentacled creature of questionable origin, frolicking in its own spittle: outrageous in its deft maneuvering, deadly to prospects for a sound reputation and future employment. The creature can’t help itself, at once skulking in caverns of quiet inertia, amidst the strident sea of pink jelly emotions and spinyass attitude. It’s a thing of breath and stamina, which succumbs to electrical impulses, zip zip, and gives way to intermittent urchin reactions. About once every .2 seconds, its conscience traverses watery chasms of will and good-versus-evil forces, desperate to survive, if only to get away from itself.

        Zip Zip

I did, indeed, embody such a beast. And since “stupid is as stupid does,” I was no different than my counterparts, except chronologically dumber. To add to the list of crimes, our kind was wholly concerned with wearing the attire of stupid as well.

We’re talking spring of ’82, pre Valley Girl, pre Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but in our minds we were trending and about to let loose on another continent. Sperrys were untied, laces knotted, Levi’s cuffs rolled, legwarmers bold. Gold-belted tunics hung off shoulders, and chunky bangles crawled up skinny arms. Guys moussed their spikes, and babes threaded sparkly headbands through stiff, spiral curls.

My look wasn’t quite on par with the jet set crew, but by god I had a shot on foreign soil, sights set on fashion flare that would bespeak my eternal panache. Never mind that I donned a uniform of jeans from Fleet, pastel poly blouses, with matching fabric bows tied snug at the neck, a slinky metal belt, and wedged loafers, or that sadly, just before the trip, Mom got wind of the 110 volt differential and had me permed to the max, to compensate for the mysteries of European circuitry.

Sporting that look, there was no mystery on this side of the ocean about how I managed to appear pulled together enough to meet the approval of requisite adults. I was wearing their clothes and hair! But the flitshit of my medulla remained on warp—a setting far beyond autonomic.

Someone in charge should have guessed I would be the brat, on tilt from excess hair chemicals, bummed we were flying Lufthansa into Frankfurt instead of something wicked awesome like Continental into Paris. As if a Bavarian tour would divert to France to avoid offending me. But who’d ever heard of flippin’ Luftwhatsa? And Frankfurt sounded like a hotdog. Why couldn’t we touch down in Berlin with its super neat wall?

Given my confirmed brain damage, I still wasn’t sure how it’d happened that my parents set aside their propensity for restriction to allow for growth of this magnitude. They’d long since pledged allegiance to ultra conformity and utter obedience, including dictating, to the millimeter, the length of my bangs. No need for that now, with wiry tufts sprouting from my forehead. Unlike the Dorothy Hamill cut, which immediately secured my place among the happening chicklets of Clarington Elementary, my new do, the Shari Lewis, hold the Lamb Chop, served to take my vanity and narcissism down a notch.

But I hid my pouting, because to their credit, they’d garnered an exception from the school to let me travel overseas at fourteen, signed the permission slip for alcohol consumption (educational beer and wine only), and handed over real money that I might afford all manner of debauchery. It was wildly absurd and freakishly cool. Did they know they’d been had?

Never underestimate a teen’s ability to appear normal, while actually being committably crazy inside her head. Sooner or later that dung bomb of biology will crap up the carpet.

The trouble with once-in-a-lifetime travel, for someone who’s saddled with stupid, is I mostly can’t remember the particulars of each time I stepped in it. There remains merely a residue of what my shrink calls, “explicit, declarative memory,” socked away in the trove of my amygdala. Apparently we hang onto the stuff that really makes us feel something.

Sixteen days, hundreds of experiences, and here’s what’s left—I do remember stumbling, jetlagged, off the plane and Frankfurt not being Paris.

In Endorf I became Romantically European, eating pizza, drinking Lambrusco, and playing “American Pie” 27 times on a jukebox, with the evening culminating in jokes about the chaperones “doing it” and an arm-in-arm, drunken sing along, on the way back to the refuge of feather ticks.

There was Ingolstadt, where I stayed with a host family for two days, encountered my first disco, watched Elvis movies dubbed in Deutsch, and embarrassed myself moment to moment by adopting a British accent, fully convinced I was best understood when using the King’s English. Oh, yeah!

Munich offered a beer garden adventure followed by exotic entertainment—a really big clock and dancing statues—or was that a vestige of hangover, after smoking unfiltered cigarettes and pulling bottles of Dunkel from a vending machine on the street? Mmhm.

Neuschwanstein, has stayed with me and had something to say about beauty and majesty. No girl, who ever wished for a prince, forgets her first real castle. But in seeing it, there’s no escaping the voice of reality—“you won’t end up here, so keep your fool head on.”

Dachau was on a gray day. Not even a bozo with brain fire could forget an inch of the savage place. Anguish depicted in life-sized, photographic installations. The starkness of gas chambers, rough brick of ovens. The ritual placing of roses in the blood ditch. A lingering film of despair that never washes away.

When we finally reached Garmisch, exhausted, pretty grown up, and craving any miracle, it snowed on Easter.

The last leg of the trip was cancelled that we’d gain a day to practice straddling our two big worlds—now. And everything that came before.

The weather emerged as admonition that eventually everything scars over, soft and white. You cannot live a thing twice. The balm of happiness, like the wound of wretchedness, can then only be approximated in memory.

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Tammy Darrah Wenberg holds an MFA from Hamline University. She lives and writes in Lowertown, St. Paul, MN.

WHAT WERE OUR MOTHERS THINKING?

By Deborah Keenan

My best friend from age zero, Kristine, had a step-great-grandmother who lived in a doll hospital in a little farm town in western Minnesota.  The step-great-grandmother told Kristine’s mother that Kristine and I could take a little vacation there the summer we were both eleven. We could stay in the old farmhouse that belonged to the second cousin of the step-great-grandmother; we could stay on the second floor of the farmhouse and the family that farmed the land(not the second cousin) would “keep an eye on us.”

And so our mothers told us we could pack our clothes and food supplies in suitcases our dads didn’t use anymore, so we did—packed matching blouse and short sets, socks, tennis shoes, bathing suits, a towel each, our favorite crackers, pasta, three jars of spaghetti sauce, peanut butter, 6 bottles of real coke, and our moms put us on the Greyhound bus and waved as the bus pulled away from the St. Paul station.

There was no one to meet us when we arrived, a brilliant July day, so we walked to Kristine’s step-great-grandmother’s doll hospital at the end of Main Street, but she wasn’t there, so we asked a neighbor how to get to the farmhouse (we had that address and the name of the family written on a piece of paper) and they told us and we started walking.  When we arrived, the man who ran the farm took us upstairs, showed us how the oven worked, how to turn on the gas burners, and left.

Were we exhausted?  I see us trudging down the highway, two miles in the bright sun, carrying our fathers’ suitcases.  I see us setting up our little vacation home, setting out the pasta and sauce, realizing we would have to walk back to town to buy milk if we wanted cereal in the morning, putting our books on the nightstands on either side of the sagging double bed, staring out the windows at the endless rows of corn, the stand of trees at the end of the driveway. I see how completely at ease we were in that freedom.  After we made the space our little home, we walked back to town, spent our allowances on milk and treats, walked back, lit the gas burners, boiled all the pasta that we had, heated the sauce, ate dinner at a little card table, and went to bed when the sun went down.

So many small towns had public swimming pools.  Oh, America, what has happened to you?  We left the next morning for the pool, our swim suits on under our little outfits, our towels folded over our arms.  The pool lives in memory—vast, blue, chlorinated within an inch of our lives, the high diving board, the middle-sized diving board, the baby diving board, a Goldilocks kind of logic that worked for us.  Of course we swam all day. Of course we were in heaven.

Kristine finally said we had to go to her step-great-grandmother’s place and find her, so we pulled on our clothes over our wet bathing suits, walked to the edge of town, pounded on the door, and the step-great-grandmother opened the door, remembered who Kristine was, seemed completely startled to find us there, took us into her doll hospital where we stared at headless dolls, and doll heads without bodies, at tiny stands where doll heads were perched next to boxes of real hair from the local beauty parlor ready for her step-great-grandmother to turn into wigs for the dolls.  There were racks of thread, and needles of every size, and hundreds of dolls who were doing ok and more that were broken, slumped and resting on every surface of the house.  There were rows of porcelain legs, arms, hands; there were tiny tiny teeth to glue back into doll mouths, there were tiny and not tiny outfits on hundreds of miniature hangers.

She gave us a cookie each, and some water, and thanked us for coming.  So we walked back to the farmhouse, ate more spaghetti out of the pot we had left on the stove from the night before, started opening all the closets and cupboards and drawers in our little home, and found, to our great delight and bewilderment, a stash of about a hundred true romance and raunchy detective comic books.  We were such innocents.  The picture of us, taken with Santa when we were five, could have stood for the girls we were then, at eleven.  We started reading and the world shifted a little, then more.  We spread the comics out all over the floor. We read fast, then slow, then we stopped, saying we had to save some for the next day. And so we stopped, our dreams stunned and out of any context we knew, because of what we had seen and read.

Our third and last day we walked to the pool again.  We swam, we dove from the highest diving board,  and then the sky turned gray, then black, then green, a life guard blew a whistle, the other children raced for their homes, and we left the pool, stopped to buy ice cream for our final night of vacation, and began the walk down the highway.  The rain came in torrents, lightning dazzled, thunder exploded.  We were beyond wet, we couldn’t stop laughing. Two cars stopped, one after the other, offering us rides, aghast, I think, at us, how young we were, alone in the storm.  Our mothers had told us never take a ride from strangers, so we turned down their offers.  Another half mile, and we knew enough to be more afraid of the storm than any stranger. A pick-up truck stopped, the man ordered us into the back of his truck, and we obeyed.  At the farmhouse we waved good bye to him in the pounding rain, then ran inside.  Oh, we were so happy, so untouched, so fabulously wet, and then dry, and then into pajamas, and then more spaghetti, still sitting on the stove, day three, then more of those racy, scary, amazing comic books, with plots we had never imagined, with women in dresses we assumed we would never wear, with men pressing women up against walls of houses, and trees in forests, and kissing them in such ferocious ways I am left wondering about these artists.

In the morning our mothers arrived to pick us up.  Why didn’t they have us come home on the bus?  I have no answer.  They were happy, looked around the farm, thanked the family for looking out for us  (insert many exclamation points here!!!, since neither spoke to us after our arrival) and Kristine and I, raised right by these two strong women, had our place so clean, the comic book stash so well hidden, the giant vat of spaghetti thrown away, the pots clean, the bed made, our suitcases packed—we knew how to do all of this.

Why were we allowed to have private lives?  Why this freedom?  Why no sense of danger?  Why no calls to check on us?  But check on us with who?  And again, oh, the bliss and beauty of privacy, of making our own way, our wisdom, our stupidity, our competence, our joy.

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Deborah Keenan is a poet and visual artist living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of several collections, including Good Heart, Happiness, and Willow Room, Green Door. She is a great maker of collages and is a professor in the Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University. FInd more about Deborah at deborahkeenan.com.

A Prairie Skateland Prison

By Sara Aase

With apologies to Sarah Anderson, wherever she may be…

It was 1980 and I was 10, part of a caravan of kids barreling 35 miles west from Barnesville, Minnesota all the way to Skateland. The drive was a familiar commute, Fargo being the home of West Acres Mall and other North Dakotan destinations bigger than a Red Owl grocery or Ben Franklin drug store. That empty stretch of I-94 was so flat it always shimmered, as hypnotic as moving water, squat buildings popping up from the horizon occasionally like bobbers. Then the majestic expanse of sea that was the Skateland parking lot appeared on the horizon, dwarfing the shabby building behind it. The noise of those crammed beside me in the station wagon broke over me like waves as all of us together spied our destination.

I was as excited as everyone else. Of course I wanted to skate, to feel the moment when wobbling eased into confident strides. Once I could coax some momentum from my wheels, the rhythmic clunk would travel upup  up through my legs to the beat of Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls.” There would be roller-rink wind in my face, music in my limbs. Except that, being slower, quieter, and clumsier than your average kid, I dreaded the obstacles standing between me and bliss: The crush from the parking lot, to the door, to the skate rental desk, where I knew I would find myself last in line. I wished myself onto the roller floor, magically – not from the car, but all the way back – straight from my living room sofa, upholstered in a loud aquamarine floral pattern, where I had most recently been ensconced with an apple and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

To an introvert, other people are hell. Of course, nobody tells a kid that. I only knew I wanted the same things as other kids, but just couldn’t seem to do them the same way. My friends skipped, darted, and hurtled around me, standing still, a prisoner inside my own head as I struggled with what to do next. My 10-year-old self responded to the anxiety this caused by rushing, which of course made things worse. On this Saturday, as I fumbled with the laces of my stiff brown ankle skates, heat crept up my neck as my younger sister Laura eased onto the floor. “Hurry,” I thought. “Hurry” was what everyone was always telling me, the word like the flick of a riding crop, a fresh prick of panic. So “hurry” was what I told myself now, automatically, even though there was no actual competition onto the skating floor. “Hurry,” I thought, because even though nobody else noticed my struggle, I did, as if watching myself in a movie. “Hurry,” I thought, for no other reason than to try to escape myself.

I pushed myself gingerly from the bench just as birthday girl Sarah Anderson bumped her wheels over the edge of the carpet strip, her normally pink cheeks flushed to neon. Sarah was my frenemy, though I didn’t have that word to help sort out the confusing feelings of fidelity and enmity she inspired. She was my doppelganger – another pastor’s kid living just down the block, our churches facing off across the street from each other. Blonde to my brunette, Sarah with an ‘h’ to my plain ‘a,’ she was a year younger than me but anxious to show her superiority. By way of introduction, after my family moved to town, she had knocked down my snowman. Later one summer whhhen she tooled past me on her bike, I ditched my training wheels immediately, even though I had to use a tree to stop. Here she was, beating me again.

As I flailed blindly out from the bench, my skate caught on something. I looked down to see my tennis shoes still lolling on the floor. I couldn’t believe it. What were my shoes doing there?! Where were they supposed to be? Looking up, I saw, for the first time, the wall of lockers around the corner and well back from the skating floor. How would I make it over there with both hands full? What if I fell? The expanse of carpet between me and the lockers seemed as long as a football field. I pictured myself picking my way over now, hanging onto benches and pinball machines, my awkward moves broadcasting to every kid in Skateland what it was suddenly so clear I had done wrong — not storing my shoes before donning my skates. Duh.

Horrified by this realization, my brain started to fog over with the absurdity of my situation. I couldn’t just leave my shoes here – someone would steal them, of course. Any 10-year-old knows that. Why was I such an idiot? Tears pricked behind my eyelids and I flopped hopelessly down next to my stupid shoes. Then I noticed the bench’s metal bar, screwed into the floor. Ah-ha. I wiped my eyes, grabbed my shoes and tied them furiously to the bar, making sure to double- and triple-knot them.

As I joined my group on the floor at last, my adrenaline subsided and my shame slowly faded to a feeling of smug triumph. For two hours, gliding around the floor, I could pretend I was just another kid, having fun at a roller skating birthday party. Not just any kid, in fact, but a super-secret extra-smart kid, whose superior intelligence would one day be revealed to the world. I may have been the last one on the roller rink, but I bet I’d be the first one out at the end. In fact, as I gained speed, I imagined my friends crowded around me back on the carpet, admiring my handiwork. “I’m tying my shoes up next time, too,” they would say. While my imagination floated, giving me a warm buzz, a cold, reptilian part of my brain whispered that I had to make sure nobody actually saw what I had done. Deep down, it stored my bumbling truth — that I wasn’t just like everybody else.

Then, it was time to go.

As you can guess, my trial at the foot of the bench went exactly as before, in reverse, as I discovered to my increasing panic that I couldn’t undo the knots in my shoelaces. I could feel people rushing down the carpet behind me as I pulled with all my might. “Wait!” I shouted in my head, too stubborn to yell, desperate to fix myself. No matter — a microphone blaring out commands for the hokey pokey would have drowned me out. Crouched on the floor, nobody could see me.

As the crush of kids reversed itself out the door into the parking lot, I could feel myself being left. It wasn’t a sudden hush, of course, in a noisy roller rink – just that eerie sense you get when you know your people have gone, as if your souls are somehow connected, like an electrical current. I rushed out into the parking lot – no longer a promising seascape, now just a cracked expanse of asphalt. Too big. Too empty. Except for the prairie wind, which hit me with full force, like an ever present bully. Yes, it said, pushing into me. They’ve gone.

They were my people. No matter how much I felt I didn’t fit in, I still needed them. But I hadn’t let them know that. Now they were gone without me, and it was all my fault.

After I told a grownup that I needed to use the phone, I sat back down on my bench. There was nothing to do now but wait, alone. As my thoughts drifted back to Tom, Becky, and Huck, the sounds around me faded away. My fingers traced the double-knotted loops of my shoelaces, and tugged.

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Sara Aase is a writer living in Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in Paper Darts, Minnesota Monthly, Mpls/St. Paul, Utne Reader, and other publications.

The Tickastrophe

By Alicia Catt

When I was 23, I took a few months off from life to hitchhike around the country and sleep in questionable abandoned buildings. I did a lot of stupid things in those months. I ate psilocybin mushrooms and explored a (thankfully) empty bear cave. I got giardia from drinking river water and pooped forty times in four days. I half-climbed, half-jumped off a roof to evade the cops and ended up with a staph-infected gash in my knee that left me barely able to walk. I took up playing the djembe.

None of these things are as stupid as the story I am about to tell you.

After being homeless had begun to lose its appeal, I moved back to Minneapolis and immediately shacked up with Robert—a tall, gentle alcoholic who didn’t mind my aggressive body odor or my neglected rat’s nest of dreadlocks. Robert worked at a bar, and I—because I was too flighty to keep a job—stayed at home, biting my nails and smoking cigarettes, and waited for him to come home at night. He was usually drunk. WHY DO YOU DRINK SO MUCH, I’d whine, as I emptied bottles of schnapps into my mouth. WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME MORE, I’d scream, locking myself in the bathroom and kicking holes in the walls. I’M GOING TO LEAVE YOU, I’d sob, PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME. And later, without fail, we’d have incredible drunken make-up sex.

It was, all things considered, one of my most stable relationships.

Now, you should know: Robert’s family did not like me. It wasn’t their fault. I was insufferable. Robert was close to his relatives in a way I didn’t understand, in a way I hated. His domineering older sister and her husband lived a block away from us. When they invited us over—that is to say, invited Robert over and grudgingly accepted that his crazy girlfriend would come too—I would sit on their couch, eyes stuck in an overdramatic roll, miserable. YOUR SISTER IS A BITCH, I’d hiss at Robert when she was barely out of earshot. He would just shrug. I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would want to see their family as often as he saw his, especially when most of that time was spent watching his sister’s favorite show, Grey’s Anatomy. She only allowed us to talk during commercial breaks.

A winter passed like this, and spring came, then summer. I missed travelling and wrote melodramatic poetry about mistaking car alarms for bird songs. Robert’s sister had begun explicitly asking him not to bring me over. I felt him slipping away from me, and so I did what any reasonable girl would do in order to re-wrangle her man: I gave him an ultimatum. Either we get rid of the apartment, leave Minneapolis, and head out on the road together, or we were so over.

Guess which option he picked?

Soon, I was packing our knapsacks for the journey and teasing Robert’s long, thinning hair into dreadlocks. I told him they looked sexy. They looked terrible, like some winged creature had had the runs on his head and decorated the mess with gaudy plastic beads. Our plan was to hitchhike to Duluth first, Robert’s hometown, so that he could say goodbye to his parents. I conceded to this on the condition that we head to California straightaway afterwards and not look back for at least a year. A year, I figured, would be enough time to make him see the truth: that I was the only woman he needed in his life. No sister. No mother. Just me—All Ali, All The Time.

The two-and-a-half hour trip to Duluth took us a full eight hours by hitch. We stood on on-ramps in the soggy June heat, thumbs outstretched.

Didn’t look like this.

Our backpack straps cut into our shoulders. I’M TOO HOT, I screeched, my bare calves brushing against the scratchy, unmowed roadside grass. Robert reminded me calmly that this was my idea, and so I proceeded to ignore him for the next two hours, sniffing back tears and scuffing my boots sullenly in the dirt.

Twenty miles outside of Duluth, in tiny Carlton, MN, there’s a casino with a shuttle bus that runs hourly to downtown Duluth and back. One of our rides was headed to the casino, and we figured we’d stop there, use the restrooms, and hop the bus into Duluth like the lawless rockstars we thought we were.

But it did not happen exactly like that.

In the casino bathroom, I pulled down my shorts. There, clinging to the inside of my upper right thigh like a mountain climber to a cliff, was a tick—tiny, brown, unassuming, calmly sucking my crotch blood. And there, on my upper left thigh, was another one.

At this point, there are two things you should know about me.

One: in all of my time hitchhiking and sleeping under bridges and in the woods, I had never once found a tick on my person.

Two: I have lived my entire life with an irrational fear of insects—the kind of fear that prompts hyperventilation and ridiculous panic attacks. Because, if you haven’t figured it out yet, 23-year-old me could be considered something of a lunatic.

I pulled up my shorts and rushed out of the bathroom, moaning quietly to myself in order not to alert casino security. I met Robert outside the main entrance, where he was doing what he did best: smoking a cigarette with a dead-fish look in his eyes. Just as I was semi-calmly alerting him to my predicament, I felt something scuttling up the small of my back. And that’s when I completely lost my shit.

Tick.

AUUUUUUGH, I screamed, hopping around and swatting uselessly at my body with my hands. GET THEM OFF GET THEM OFF, I blubbered, sprinting back and forth in front of the casino as if the ticks were a swarm of bees that I could somehow outrun. (This was my mistake.)

Robert grabbed my arm to hold me still, then motioned for me to turn around. He lifted the back of my shirt and saw the tick had already sunk itself into my skin. So my valiant and disgustingly dreadlocked white knight flicked open his pocketknife, used it to pry the insect off me, flicked the knife closed, and slipped it back into his pocket. (This was his mistake.)

We waited for the shuttle bus for what seemed like hours as I became more and more agitated, feeling dozens of real or imaginary ticks crawling on my body. I writhed. I moaned. I got in Robert’s face and called him an idiot for making us come to Duluth in the first place. He just silently stared at me—then, past me, out into the casino parking lot.

Ali, he said.

SHUT UP, I yelled.

Ali, he said, his voice cracking. What’s happening?

I followed his gaze and saw that a squadron of police cars, and at least ten uniformed officers, had quietly surrounded us. And every single one was pointing a gun at our heads.

SIR, STEP AWAY FROM HER, one cop shouted.

GET ON THE GROUND, shouted another.

DO IT NOW, shouted another.

My heart dripped into my shoes. We lay face-down on the hot pavement while a drug dog sniffed through our backpacks. Still, I couldn’t stop squirming—I could feel ticks feasting on my armpits.

The police handcuffed us and led us to separate areas of the casino parking lot for questioning. Apparently, one cop told me, a casino visitor had seen Robert pull out his pocketknife and thought that he was assaulting me with it.

NO NO NO, I bawled, horrified at the misunderstanding. I shook my leg and tried to explain that there was a tick crawling up my leg as I spoke. LOOK FOR YOURSELF, I said. He didn’t look.

Robert and I were stuffed into separate squad cars to wait while the cops ran our ID checks. Finally, one cop pulled me out and uncuffed me, and told me I was free to go. My boyfriend, however, was not. It turned out that, although the cops were willing to forgive the mix-up, they were not willing to forgive an old bench warrant that Robert had for unpaid parking tickets. They were taking him to the county jail. I was welcome to bail him out, of course—if I had $800. (I had $100 to my name.)

It all worked out in the end, sort of. I called Robert’s sister, who screamed at me. I called his mother, who screamed at me in a slightly nicer voice, then came to bail Robert out of jail. Robert spent the rest of the night pulling a dozen engorged ticks off naked, hysterical me. We broke up after his family staged an intervention for him and convinced him I was a bad influence. I’m not sure they ever found out that he went to jail for his parking tickets, and not actually because of me at all, but I have a feeling they wouldn’t have been too interested in technicalities.

The morals of the story, of course, are as follows: Never brandish a knife at a casino. Never trust a woman with dreadlocks, or a woman who wants to give you dreadlocks. And always use a good DEET-based insect repellent.

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Alicia Catt is an MFA candidate at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Pinch, 1966, Pithead Chapel, The Citron Review, and elsewhere.

The Arsonist Flasher

By Jason Quinn Malott

I remember finding a book of my father’s matches when I was about four years old and setting my parent’s bed on fire. They were outside washing the car and thought it was cute the first time I toddled out to the front porch and said “Fire.” After I said it again they decided to investigate. Thankfully, the mattress was flame retardant, so only a dinner plate sized patch had burned before they threw a glass of water on it. They kept that mattress for the rest of their marriage and would occasionally call me into the room to remind me of

Matches

it.

After my sister was born, I developed a penchant for elaborate stories. The most stunning one happened because I was bored, naked, and in possession of a green magic marker. I drew a line of dots up the inside of both thighs to my groin, then a line of dots up my arms and on each side of my ribcage. Where ever I thought bolts would go if I were a robot. If only it had stopped there, but no. I then dressed and went out to play with the boys and girls in my neighborhood.  When I told them I was a robot, they demanded proof, so, I led them behind a tree in our front yard and showed them my green bolts.

It’s the only time anyone has ever gasped in amazement when I’ve dropped my pants, and may be the reason my love-life has been so spotty.

In the second grade I sprang a crush on a girl named Carla Eichman. She had curly blonde hair and dimples and wore those giant, late 70‘s, plastic framed glasses that made everyone look like owls. I was eight and sure I’d found “The One.”

We went to the same Lutheran church in Dodge City, KS, and from the second grade until the end of eighth grade we saw each other six out of seven days during the school year.  I had a recurring dream we were married and lived in a tiny village under the church pews. We had a kid who set our bed on fire and showed the neighbors his penis.

And, of course, at least once a year for the next seven years, I asked her to be my girlfriend and each time she’d tell me she didn’t think it was a good idea, or that she didn’t want to ruin our friendship, or that opposites didn’t work out.

One colloquial definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. By that measure, when it came to Carla, I was insane, and she knew it. On Valentine’s Day, 1981, I crammed 23 Looney Tunes cards into an envelope and had to wait all day to give them to her. The quick and furtive exchange happened in the hall as school let out. Without a word, I thrust my little package of Bugs and Daffy and Elmer festooned cards into her hand. . .and then ran away.

In between the doomed efforts to get her to “go with me” I tried to ignore her. After all, I had crushes on other girls. It was like a hobby, or practice.  There was Natalie, Stephanie, Cherity, Sarah, Rachel, Heather, Becky, Kristen and Jennifer. Lots more. I even agreed to go with a girl I only talked to on the phone, named Penelope, but who turned out to be these guys, Jim and Jeff, who thought it was a practical joke.

Anyway, my Carla affliction was evident to everyone, especially the grown-ups at church. If Carla was in the same room, my infatu-crush blazed like a lighthouse on a foggy night. So, when it came time for the Christmas pageant our fifth grade year, they thought it would be cute for us to be Mary and Joseph. Carla played her part well, kept her eyes lovingly transfixed on the manger and the plastic baby Jesus. I, however, couldn’t stop staring at her, hoping she would see it as a sign from God, like I did.

We started confirmation classes in the eighth grade, which meant we saw each other on Wednesday nights for our midweek catechism classes on top of school and Sunday services. Also, everything assumed a particular desperation when my parents decided we were moving to Wichita, KS. I was going to lose her forever if I didn’t do something. Problem was, I had no idea what to do until it was too late and, even then, it wasn’t a very good idea.

At the last school dance of the year, I passive-aggressively refused to take no for an answer.

“Come on,” I pleaded. “It’s the last dance and then we’ll probably never see each other again. Just one dance.”

“I still don’t think it would be a good idea,” she said.

And so we stood there staring at each other through the last slow song. You’d think I’d remember what the damn song was, but I don’t. It might have been something by Journey, or maybe Chicago. When the song ended and the dance was over, she slipped away in the crowd.

After the school year ended and before we packed up the moving van, I wrote her a letter. Told her I loved her. I didn’t expect a response, but when I got one there was a brief moment of hope – right before I started reading it. Her letter rehashed every reason she’d given for turning me down; opposites didn’t work, she didn’t think of me that way, it would ruin our friendship, etc. Then she told me to keep my faith in God and take care of my soul because “If we never see each other again, I’d kinda like to see you in heaven.”

It was that hedge, “kinda,” that finally broke the spell. I decided that if she wasn’t sure she wanted to see me in heaven then, well, I didn’t need to humiliate myself by being there. I’m not saying she was the reason I gave up Christianity, but it was the first catalyst to my departure. The dubious honor of killing my faith goes to the combination of an aborted suicide attempt and an apocalyptic, tongue-speaking Methodist youth group leader who hated heavy metal, claimed to know the date the world would end, and secretly harbored so much rage at girls he snapped off the trigger on my battery operated water gun while shooting it at the cute girl who lured me into the group.

I could write a memoir on all the stupid things I’ve done because of girls. All of it, oddly, some variation of setting things on fire or inappropriately flashing my junk.

#

Bio: Jason Quinn Malott earned his BA in Creative Writing from Kansas State University and his MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University. His novel, The Evolution of Shadows was published in 2009 by Unbridled Books and was a November 2009 Indie Next pick and a 2010 Kansas Notable Book. He is a co-founder of the fledgling literary and arts website Eunoia Solstice (http://eunoiasolstice.com) and host of The Outrider Podcast (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-outrider-podcast/id707526920?mt=2).

Bow-legged Cowboy

By Samantha Ten Eyck

This story ends with a 12-year-old girl trying to drive a motorcycle for the first time, who also just had her period for the first time, who also did not know how to properly insert a tampon.

Bow-legged Cowboy

That girl was me.  My sister moved out of our house to Madison, Wisconsin, where, as she explains it to me now, she drank a lot, fell up and down stairs, out of one window, and into at least one man-hole (the type in the ground, not a man’s butt, which can’t be fallen into easily).  My brother was somewhere.  One thing about my brother is that he was really good at jumping on Olympic-sized trampolines.  But you’re reading because you want to know about that painful and funny thing that’s supposed to happen, not about how many backflip rotations my brother could do with just one high jump (a lot).

***

It was after the German foreign exchange student and before Chewy killed Piggy.  Chewy was a black mut.  Piggy was a pug.  It was after I demanded my Desiree CD back from a friend-turned-enemy and before my mother ran barefoot in the snow to lie and murmur to herself in an ice-coated hammock.

It was my first period, and it came one Saturday afternoon when my dad was working on the station wagon. (In the days of my youth, when I think of my father, I often think of two oily, hairy legs sticking out from under a wagon).

I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask my mother how to use a tampon.  Ever since she collapsed, for no good reason, outside the school she was teaching at, she was acting strange.  She stopped hugging me or saying she loved me.  She said weird things, like how she was pregnant with the messiah and that it was Al Pacino’s seed.  I don’t care how good an actor you think he is, it’s just weird.

I went to the bathroom in the east wing of the house (it was a big, mostly empty house), where my rifling couldn’t be heard.  I took out the Sam’s Club sized box of Platex tampons.  I breathed in the sweet chemical scent – the one meant to mask the earthy aroma of my new liquid womanhood.  Gross.

I’ve always secretly loved the smell of tampons.  If Barbies had veins and you could cut them open, I think they’d smell like Platex tampons.

I studied the box.  It had some pictures.  I surmised this:

• Unwrap
• Make sure you are inserting the rounded end, not the pointy one
• Cram it up there
• Go play beach volleyball in a white bikini if you don’t have an unruly teenage bush (not illustrated)

***

You see, these were tampons with applicators.  Once you get the cotton part in, you throw out the plastic helping-device.  You don’t walk around with it in unless you have a sick wish for awkward vaginal distress.

Rebel

I put some new underpants on and tested it.  I walked around like a man trying to coyly adjust his balls.

I thought, “It has got to be easier than this.”

I walked around some more.

“Wait, women are always complaining about their period.  This is probably normal.”

I continued to think.

“My labia will be scratched by this skinny pink rod thing that keeps a string prisoner.  It will be scratched for 3-7 days every month.  This is just how it is.  I need to know what it feels like to do normal stuff.”

***

I tried not to walk like a bowlegged cowboy with a herpes flare-up out to see what my dad was doing, but I did.

He had just bought a motorcycle from my aunt.  It was a Honda Rebel.  My dad was always buying, selling, and fixing automobiles and houses.

He ran his hand over the bike and explained its features.  He asked me if I wanted to learn how to drive it.  Like, right then.

I hesitated, shifted my weight from one foot to the next to see if I could still feel the thing I was not supposed to feel.

“Sure!”

I got on it.  I half-listened to his instructions, half listened to the madness I was feeling in my pants.  I did something with the handles and the gears and the gas and as I did the bike lurched forward.  The tampon lurched too, and pain shot between my thighs.  The bike ran into our parked truck.  I got off.  I said I was sorry, that I wasn’t very good at this.

#

Samantha Ten Eyck is teaching English and studying Chinese in Beijing.  She has an MFA in Poetry from Minnesota State University, Mankato. Her work is published in some journals you’ve never heard of.  Available for birthday parties.

The Lock Out

By Molly Beth Griffin

It was a really embarrassingly stupid thing to do, and I did it twice. 

The first time was in high school when a friend and I drove downtown for an event at an art museum.  I felt all grownup heading off alone like that.  But I don’t even remember what the event was, because we never made it inside.  Instead, I locked the keys in the car… with the car running.  We just had to wait there, next to the car in the museum parking lot, while my mom drove in with the spare key to rescue us.  We waited, in the rain.  And the best part?  We were both wearing white t-shirts.  Awesome.  When my mom showed up we were lying on the hood of the humming car in our soaked clothes, trying to stay warm.  Maybe I wasn’t as grown-up as I thought.

So it would be bad enough to admit to doing this ONCE, but then, in college, I did it again.  I was driving some friends from our tiny college town into Iowa City for shopping and lunch and general hanging out.  And once again, I felt cool.  I felt like an adult.  I was the one with a car, I knew where I was going and I could get us there.  We were going to get Indian buffet for lunch, stock up on good food at the co-op, and browse the ped mall.  Instead, as I was fishing for change to feed the meter, I managed to lock the keys in the car with the car running, again.  It was, once again, raining.  We had to use the phone at a nearby café at least half a dozen times—nobody had cell phones in those days—and then we had to hang out there, with the running car in sight, while we waited (forever) for AAA.  Oh, the shame.  I was not the self-sufficient adult I thought I was.  I was an irresponsible kid who shouldn’t be trusted with a car.  And my friends now knew it.  The memory of it burns to this day.

And yet, friends forgive us for these things, when they are real friends.  I’m still in touch with the gal from high school who was with me for adventure #1.  We swap photos of our toddlers on Facebook.  She probably doesn’t even remember the keys incident (she won’t until I send her this blog post, anyway).  One of the friends from the college key debacle actually married me.  So maybe I looked stupider to myself than I did to the others.  Maybe I should stop feeling dumb about it.   Maybe I should let it go.  We all do stupid things, right?  Sometimes we even do stupid things more than once.  And life goes on.

#

Molly Beth Griffin is the author of the picture book Loon Baby (Houghton Mifflin 2011) and the award winning young adult novel Silhouette of a Sparrow (Milkweed Editions 2012) which is now out in paperback.  She holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hamline University, and she teaches at the Loft Literary Center.  For more info about her books, classes, critique service, and the Picture Book Writers’ Salon please visit www.mollybethgriffin.com.

Kiss Grotto

By Susan Montag

When I was growing up, my dad owned a junkyard. He would buy junked out cars, and then sell parts to guys who showed up at the junkyard looking for something they needed. These guys would not always have the cash to pay my dad. Fortunately for them, my father was a magnanimous man, and he would trade for whatever they had on hand right at that moment. That’s how I ended up with an eight-track tape of Kiss’s Destroyer album when I was in fifth grade.

We all gathered around the tape when my dad brought it home—my parents, my younger siblings and I—and we regarded it suspiciously. The illustrated album cover shows the members of Kiss stomping on a ruined city. They look like apocalyptic sex monsters, which is what I’m sure they were going for. My parents decided quickly that this tape was a bad thing, and not something our family might enjoy. However, they didn’t throw it away. Maybe they thought they would give it to someone—or perhaps trade it for something better—and it ended up alongside the Conway Twitty and Marty Robbins eight-tracks next to our stereo.

I was only ten at the time, and I was still fiercely aligned with my parents. If they liked something, it was good. If they didn’t it must be bad, so I tried also to disapprove of the Kiss tape. Whenever I had the chance, though, I secretly studied the drawing on the front. It made me feel something, a kind of excitement that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. And then, one day, when no one was home but me—I played the tape. The first notes of “Detroit Rock City” slammed into my soul. By the end of that song, the innocence of my childhood had ended, and my adolescence had begun. I loved something that my parents disliked. I loved Kiss.

By the time I was in seventh grade, I owned every Kiss album that existed.

I am a very, very loyal person, so I refused to buy—or really even listen to—any other music. It was all Kiss, all the time. Deeply scornful of all other genres, I often wore a T-shirt that stated: “Disco Sucks.” When I wore this T-shirt, random people would give me thumbs up or say, “Hell, yeah!” which totally reinforced my musical xenophobia.

In addition to being loyal, I also tend to be compulsive, and I decided that all four walls in my bedroom should be covered with Kiss stuff. I don’t mean that I had a lot of posters up. I mean that every square inch, floor to ceiling, was covered by a Kiss related clipping. My room became a visually stunning Kiss grotto. Upon seeing it for the first time, people would gasp, either with pleasure or shock, depending on their sensibilities.

I was about twelve or thirteen years old by this time, and my younger brother Paul was eight, which is the worst sort of age split between an older sister and a younger brother. I found him to be profoundly revolting in every way possible, and he found it hilarious to do anything that pissed me off. He often followed me around a public place, pointing and shouting, “That’s my sister!” while walking in a spastic way. I didn’t think I could hate him more deeply, but then he did the unthinkable. He came into my room and removed a small piece of my Kiss grotto and he flushed it down the toilet.

Honestly, I didn’t even notice right after it happened. The piece in question was about an inch square, and considering the massiveness of the collection, I might have gone months before I spotted that tiny bit of bare wall showing through. My not noticing, however, spoiled the fun for my brother, and he pointed out the bare spot and told me what he had done. I immediately told my mom. I thought he should have been locked in a small cage in the basement with no food for a couple weeks, but he got away with just a mild scolding. So I seethed, and I plotted my revenge.

To carry out my plan, I needed to be home alone for an extended period of time, so I waited for just that moment a few days later. My brother did not have a massive grotto of any particular theme in his bedroom, but he did have treasured items, along with a whole lot of junk. His room was a minefield of broken toys, army men, random Legos, ruined socks, marbles, baseball cards, rocks, and candy wrappers. My plan was to spare nothing. I went into the room with several huge garbage bags and I began to fill them. I took it all—down to the sheets on the bed. I even took the light bulb. And I hid it all in the shed behind the house. There was nothing left in his room to indicate his existence. Nothing. I had wiped him off the face of the earth.

I lounged nonchalantly as my family came home, and I waited. Then it came—the piercing wail of rage that can come only from the lungs of an eight-year-old boy who has discovered that everything he loves is gone. Ha! Ha ha ha! I thought.

I briefly held out when my mother demanded to know where the stuff was, but I could tell that she was seriously, seriously pissed, and that I better not mess with her. I brought the bags in. To my chagrin, after he removed the things he wanted to keep, the rest of it ended up out on the curb with the trash. My mom marveled that the room looked really nice now, without all the junk. So I had inadvertently cleaned by brother’s room. Unfortunately, he did not fail to see the humor in this.

A few months later, I turned on the radio and I heard Tom Petty singing “Don’t Do Me Like That.” There was a quirkiness to his voice that intrigued me. I felt a momentary pang of guilt for liking the song, but it didn’t last long. Shortly thereafter, I began to dismantle the grotto and to buy other music—Tom Petty, Phil Collins, Supertramp, Manford Man’s Earth Band. The Kiss spell was broken. It was time for me to move on.

Today my musical tastes trend more toward Bluegrass than heavy metal, but I have to admit, the first few notes of “Detroit Rock City” still get to me a little, every time.

#

Susan Montag teaches writing at Alexandria Technical & Community College, and is the author of Finding the Way: A Tao for Down-to-Earth People. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University and is the parent of two almost-grown-up children, whom she currently lives with, along with her husband and her seven cats.

Poop Story

 

By Clint Edwards

After my Dad went to jail I started having anxiety related diarrhea. I was 14. Regularly being on the cusp of shitting myself was embarrassing, so I lied about it. I lived with my grandmother. She was in her mid 60s and stood five two with brown hair and a short round nose, traits she passed down to my father and then to me. I suppose what I am most ashamed of is that I lied mostly to her. I spent hours in the restroom, crouching, grunting, and sweating. I turned on the tub to hide the sound. When Grandma knocked and asked what I was doing, I told her I was taking a bath.

“Why do you take so many baths?” she once asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just like being clean.”

She probably assumed I was masturbating.

Lying about my diarrhea lead to compulsive, outlandish, lies. I told her the school gave me a scholarship to attend Space Camp, when really, I just wanted to spend the weekend with a friend. I wrecked my bike and came home with a black eye and scuffed knees. I told her a cougar attacked me next to the Provo River. I was full of shit, a fact that was confirmed regularly as I crouched over the toilet.

My lies came to a head during freshman P.E.. The class was playing softball on a far-off stretch of grass. I caught a ball and it knocked something loose. My stomach turned, and instantly, I needed a restroom. I dropped the ball and ran, but I couldn’t run the whole way, only in short bursts, slowing every dozen strides to flex my cheeks. I can only imagine what people thought of me. One moment my hands were waving franticly, my legs in a dead sprint. The next I stopped and walked while clenching my butt.

Young Clint pressing out another rep.

There were two restrooms. One was in the new wing. This restroom was clean and had a lilac air freshener. The other was in the old wing, across from the metal and wood shops. It smelled of grease, wood shavings, and urine. Several of the toilet seats were missing. Naturally, the latter was the closest.

Once in the building, I had to grab my butt and pinch it together. It worked. I was going to make it. Just before the restroom doors, my stomach calmed. I felt fine. I got greedy and headed for the cleaner restrooms.

Two steps later it happened. I lost it in my gym shorts, and found it in my socks.

I went back to the restroom and cleaned myself with toilet paper. The back of my shorts and the back of my socks where now a brownish black. But from the front, I looked normal.

I kept my back to the hall wall and headed to the payphone. Ahead was an open classroom door. If crossed, all the people in the room would’ve see my shitty pants. I imagined it. One kid would notice first and scream, Hey, that kid crapped his pants! And then the laughter would come with damning statements mingled in: He smells like a nursing home, He’ll never get laid now, and the worst coming from the attractive brunette in the front row, And I used to like you. I quickly crossed the hall. I was forced to do this half a dozen times before making it to the pay phone.

Once outside, I called Grandma. “I need you to pick me up.” I said. “Right now.”

She asked why, and I told her a nonsense story about a bomb at the high school. She paused, exhaled, and said, “Horse shit. Are you in trouble?”

I didn’t respond.

“Damn it,” she said. “You’re just like your father. Whenever he gets in trouble he tells some jackass story and I come running. I’m through. Is that what you want? To get locked up like your father? Cuz that’s where you’re headed.”

“I crapped my pants,” I said with sincerity, honesty, and fear.

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “You’re a grown boy.”

We went back and forth, her attempting to uncover the truth, and me repeating it in a forceful whisper, hopeful that it would sink in.

Eventually I said, “Please, please, please come. And bring a towel.” Perhaps it was the terror in my voice, or maybe it was that I asked for a towel, but she agreed.

I sat outside, my back against a brick wall, and waited. I smelled terrible. Time passed. I told a math instructor I was ill and waiting for a ride, I told the secretary that my house was on fire and I was waiting for a firefighter, and I told the truancy officer that my brother had an accident on a roller coaster. “A bolt came loose and busted him in the head,” I said. He wished me luck.

I was scanning the road when I saw Samantha Jones. I loved her. She enjoyed Metallica. Her glasses were thick with heavy brown frames that matched her hair. She was just the right mix of nerd and rebel. Sometimes she hugged me. At night, my imagination projected flickering films of Samantha onto the ceiling: Samantha ascending stairs, gracefully, naked, always naked.

I tried not to make eye contact, but she ran to me, and like an idiot, I stood so she could hug me. A hug from Samantha Jones was everything. I wanted to get excited by her soft body. I wanted to smell her hair and her perfume. But all I could smell was my shit. We separated and exchanged a glance. She knew. Her nose scrunched and she swatted it.

“What smells?” she said.

“I don’t smell anything.”

She leaned in and took a sniff. I waved my hand in front of her nose.

“You smell terrible. Did you shit yourself?”

“No!”

I was a mix of anxiety, cold sweat, love, and lust. She smiled, grabbed my left shoulder, and attempted to turn me around.

“Let me see your butt.”

She peeked over one shoulder and then the other as I moved my hips from side to side. She asked what was on my socks.

“If you didn’t shit yourself than what smells like a turd?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You?”

A pathetic childish refute. Samantha’s narrowed eyes and rigid shoulders, the way her jaw moved from side to side seemed to say, you did shit yourself. And as she walked away, I knew she was going to tell everyone.

Grandma honked the horn. She leaned across the seat, opened the passenger door, and said, “Get in.”

I placed the towel across the seat and sat down. As we drove, Grandma rolled down the windows and told me I smelled rotten.

“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you,” she said.

Then she told me of a time when Dad was fourteen. He called home and told her some cock and bull story that she couldn’t recall. He said he needed a ride home. When she picked him up, he had a black eye.

“He’d been in a fight,” she said, “and he didn’t want anyone to know he’d lost. I didn’t want anyone to know he’d been in a fight. So I took him home and put makeup on his eye. I did it each morning until it healed.”

She didn’t say anything for a while. Once our house was within view she said, “I’ve been covering up his mistakes for some time. Trying to believe his lies. Maybe that’s why he’s locked up.” We parked and Grandma looked at me. “People are smarter than you think,” she said. “Telling lies will catch up with you.” Then she looked at my shorts. “Go take a bath,” Grandma said. “I’ll wash your shorts.”

#

Clint Edwards is a tutor coordinator at Oregon State University. He is also the former co-host of the Weekly Reader on KMSU and a graduate of the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato. His writing has appeared in The Baltimore Review, The Blue Earth Review, The MacGuffin, North Dakota Quarterly, Post Road, Redivider, Yemassee, and elsewhere. “Poop Story” in an excerpt from his memoir in progress. Check out his blog here.

Liars, Pine City 1978

By Scott Wrobel

On a summer evening at our lake cabin, which was actually a crappy house more than a cabin, I was in the basement watching a rerun of the Captain and Tennille Variety Show. Next to Charlene Tilton, Toni Tennille was the hottest celebrity on my closet door. Thirty-five years later, I bought the DVD collection of the variety show and watched the first episode, and two of the major platforms of my childhood were destroyed: A) I learned that Toni Tennille was not hot. She had huge teeth and a phony laugh, and B) Darryl Dragon, “The Captain,” talked a lot. The running “bit” on the show, I remembered, was that The Captain was silent, but during that first episode, he was downright chatty. At age 44, I got mad about these lies. So let me tell you about the weekend in 1978 when I committed murder and learned that God was a lie.

Captain Talked

I was in the basement watching TV and the neighbor brothers, Shannon and Chris, came over. Shannon was fourteen and Chris ten, my age. Shannon was tall and muscular and wore wife-beater shirts. He drool-talked in a low, coarse voice, and wore thick glasses. Chris was obese and had kinky red hair that looked primped with one of those waffle iron things. I was short and had no distinguishing features except for an oversized head. I feared these guys and always tried to impress them because they talked knowledgeably about Bob Seger and “scoring on chicks.” They asked if I wanted to go fishing tomorrow, not on the lake, but the river, and I said “Sure,” even though I didn’t want to because Shannon did things like shoot pellet guns and talk about scoring on chicks. My dad, though, liked me to hang out with these guys because, though he didn’t say it, he thought I was a pussy – I read books and watched variety shows — and so to make him happy, I agreed to go fishing.

The next day, we walked the shoulder of the road to the river, Shannon and Chris in front. My legs were so short that I couldn’t keep up with an obese kid. Shannon said things like, “I’d go banging on a chick like that,” and Chris said things like, “No shit, Sherlock,” and I didn’t say anything because I was out of breath.

Big Head, Bird Murderer

When we reached the river, I, not yet having had a chance to express my manliness, started picking up rocks and firing them at trees. Even though I was not as mannish as my father hoped, I could throw stuff. The fellows still weren’t paying any attention, though, and I saw some robins hopping in a clearing, just being happy and looking for worms and seeds, so I picked up a rock and fired at a bird, trying for a near-miss. The bird toppled, flopped its wings and then lay still. I ran to it. Blood drooled from its eyes. I dropped to my knees and started bawling.

Shannon and Chris finally turned around and looked at me.

“I killed it!” I said.

“Quit being a pussy.” Shannon said. “It’s just a bird.”

“Yeah,” said Chris. “It’s not like the world is running out of birds.”

They walked to the river and left me.

Too weak to stand, I crawled around the dirt and grass and found a rain-soaked shoebox someone had used for bait, smeared inside with dried worm dirt and night crawlers. I set the box on its side, grabbed a stick, and with hands quivering like a diabetic, shoved the bird into the box. I walked home, weeping and staggering on the shoulder of the road.

On the other side of our house from the lake was farmer’s corn field that hadn’t been used for years, so I buried the bird there. At night, from my bedroom window, I could look out into the field and see fireflies like stars, and think about the bird.

Later in the day, I told my dad the story.

“Shannon called you a pussy?” he said, squinting at me. Then he left the house. Ten minutes later, Shannon and Chris came over and asked if I wanted to go the Pine County Fair the next day for the wrestling match at the grandstand. I should have refused the call just like I should have stayed in the basement instead of going fishing, but my favorite AWA wrestler, Buck “Rock and Roll” Zumofe, was on the ticket, so I said, “Sure.”

Everybody Lost

The ring was set up in front of the grandstand. Grown-ups sat in the bleachers and kids stood next to the ring. Mean Gene Okerlund introduced Baron Von Raschke and Buck Zumofe, who walked right by me with his boom box on his shoulder. I was so close to the ring that I could see Zumofe pin Von Raschke against the ropes and pummel his face, Raschke’s head snapping back with each punch, except Zumofe was missing by six inches to a foot. Not even close. After the match, which Von Raschke won, I got his autograph. He shook my hand with a weak grip and spoke American. I later found out he was a school teacher.

In less than 48 hours, I’d killed a bird and learned that wrestling was fake, which launched me toward my current conditions of Atheism and misanthropy. I learned that it’s dangerous to live to impress others, especially dickheads like Shannon and Chris, and that most everything is a lie. Shannon and Chris, however, didn’t brood. Instead, after the wrestling match, Shannon said we should walk around the fair’s midway and try to “score some tail.”

#

Scott Wrobel began writing by imitating Rush Lyrics. Since, he has had children and moved to the suburbs. His work has appeared in Minnesota Monthly, Pindeldyboz, The Great River Review, Night Train, and Third Coast among others. His book of short stories, Cul de Sac, came out from Sententia Books in 2012.