Because We Were Assigned to Write Bad Fiction

We were trying to write something bad, to explore what makes bad fiction. The woman with hair like olive branches wrote to her grandfather, a kindly old man who whittled wood on his front porch. The letter she wrote was filled with the voice of the young girl she knew he imagined when he thought of her. She read it to us slowly, as if she had to articulate that this was clearly not the woman she was, that clearly the tone in her voice carried the weight of each unspoken word. And, to be honest, it worked. When she looked up from the small notebook she had written it down in, an obvious concern she had for her grandfather’s need that it be written by hand, the room was silent for just a little while longer. We each envisioned him opening that very letter, his whittling set aside, the knife blade sledding through the glued lip of the envelope flap, the starling he had been carving, waiting patiently in his lap. And in the silence, the obvious pain of her love rose into the air. What the letter didn’t say was this: that the olive tree loved a woman, that she never planned to marry, that he would never raise her children into the very lap his starling rested in just then as he read. And then each of us imagined the letter we would write, how it would keep from saying the same thing, too. The omission branding our love no matter where or whom we loved, no matter how well or how poorly we loved, no matter the season or the day, the earth rotating us away from that very moment rapidly, blindly, dislodging us wherever we sat for the rest of our lives, if we felt the slightest pull from it at all.

(A Section from a Larger Piece)

then

Isaac watched the squad car drift by. It did not slow down in front of their place. It did not have to. It was the third one that week.

He had felt this way before. Eleven. Coming home from the pool. Cutting through the public park between the pool and the long uphill walk to his home with the neighbor boy, who was two years younger, whom Isaac spent time with because it was easy. A boy whose family moved away and whom Isaac hadn’t thought about except when he thought about this.

Off the path before the bridge that crossed the Kishwaukee River, they stopped. Glass glistened in the sunlight. They left the path, searching the high grass for bottles they didn’t have in their collection. Brands their fathers didn’t drink.

They set them up in a row along the edges of the picnic tables. They found thirteen new ones in all.

They knew what to do with the rest.

The glass chimed against the horseshoe spikes. Green and brown and blue beads of glass reflected the sun like cool drops of rain. One after another, glass ripping over the iron.

What the hell you boys doin’

They turned, bottles raised above their heads ready to be thrown into the growing piles. Neither boy spoke. The neighbor began to cry. Isaac looked at the neighbor boy, then back at the officer who took the bottles from their hands.

“Don’t tell our moms,” he said, voice steady, eyes locked on the large man before them.

They raked the glass into trashcans under the officer’s supervision. He made them rake the whole area and just a little beyond that, too.

They walked home and waited.

The call never came.

if

Isaac and Sarah slept.

Tomorrow became them.

then

“This has to end.” Isaac said to Alex, staring blankly down at the opened suitcase. He meant his own running.

Alex didn’t look up from his work. “I know,” he said matter-of-factly, licking the flap of the bag to secure it. He meant his own, too.

Alex rolled the bag closed and laid it on top of the row of bags inside the briefcase. It was the fist of the second layer.

“I know,” he said again, absently, already forgetting everything, weighing an empty bag to measure it against the weight of the universe already resting there.

He pulled out an empty bag and filled it with a large bud from the half-pound bag.

“Hold on to that,” Alex said, tossing it at Isaac. Isaac trapped it against his chest with his hand.

He clasped the baggie in his fingers and tossed it back at Alex. “Keep it.”

He knew Alex knew what he meant. He could tell by the silence that followed him out of the room.

IF THE WEATHER HOLDS, SHE SAID

Though she could just as easily have meant

the bridge they have been building,
placing word over word,
fastening phrases and clauses
together.

From this distance
the bridge stands out against the landscape,
trees and slow rising skies
disappearing into endlessness,
birds drifting through, dipping here and there like disparately immutable memories,
calling them—the trestle, cream clouded coffees, the pond, the silver backs of geese
resting on the banks, the trails of bread crumbs . . .

did they not toss them there together?

Sometimes, while they are working,
those heavy sounds of hammering the
past perfect in to the present,
the whistling of drills drifting across the horizon
feel likethe very soil beneath their feet.
Every so often they checkto see if it is true,
lifting each foot carefully, one at a time,
eyeing the solesof their shoes,
testing the ground where they stand
to see if it will hold,that this may work as proof
of the strength of their efforts,
the future still resting in the shallow road bed
and taking shape
between them.

600

When the final pin
tips,

spinning one last time
before falling with the rest,

when the gate comes down heavily
and brushes the pins aside,

when you turn at last and smile,
your friend's cheers slicing into the silence that held you the last ten frames,

this brand new drama
unfolding before them all (not once, but twice),

those inward gazesfinally focusing
on the beer bottles lining the wall,

on the ash trays piled high with
smoldering butts,

smoke rising high above their heads
so suddenly and slowly

it's possible it arrived before them,
this will all seem unfinished. all of it.

like you're waiting for that proper turn of phrase
that never comes,

the kind that shift conversations
to new topics with greater promise of being carried further

of being plumbed to their absolute depths
before they give way to the nothing

of lost words, of all those downed pins
and everything else that must learn to die within them.

(A reposting of an earlier work)

DAYDREAMS AND TALKS TO HIS NEIGHBORS

I could have called Ralph's name, to bring him back to the lesson I had planned. Instead, I followed his gaze out the window, to the empty playground. Beyond the playground lay the empty field, just plowed under, naked against the blue sky. Beyond that were houses, speckled across the horizon. Beyond that was all that was farther than I could see.

I removed my glasses to clean them. I did this even though each time they were just as dirty before as they were after. But everything was a blurr without them. A green and blue haze. Impressions. The place beyond the furthest point I could ever see, even with my glasses. A place I thought about often. A place that looked like this, that looked like the world without my glasses, that looked like tomorrow, how tomorrow fit against the cotours of my life. A vague semblance of something I once had seen so clearly.

And then, at that moment, I could sense the other students waiting. They were near that point where they would look around the room at each other to wonder why I was no longer talking. That morning he gave me a picture. He folded it over like a card. I don't know what he meant by it. It was as if he knew something I didn't. And I don't mean about my job, that I was losing my job. I mean about me. Like he knew something I didn't know about me, about what I was thinking, about what I'd already thought, what I might think. He looked at me without saying anything as he handed it to me. Never once smiled, his eyes without expression except to tell me, without a word but for the look in his eyes, that the piece of paper he held before him was for me, jabbing it in the air in my direction for emphasis. It read, "Some Shoes Are Hard to Fill." Beneath it he had drawn a picture of a dog, walking casually, with a shoe in its mouth. He even signed the picture in the lower right hand corner, the way he usually did when he intended to be remembered for what he'd done.

Sometimes, his actions carried this cache. He had signature actions. This staring he did, this gazing out across the world with so much determination was one of them. Even then he was looking out across the field in a way that said, I look this way. Whenever I called on him to return his attention to the room, it was with that same exact stare that he gave me when he handed me the picture. It was with the same identical signature.

Sometimes, I would just let him go on gazing. Every time I asked him to turn from the window, within minutes he was either at this pose again, or he had engaged his neighbor in a conversation, a joke of some sort. I don't believe that I was ever the source of this laughter. He told me once, while the kids were all copying the last three pages of the D's from the dictionary (a punishment I often used when they could no longer be controlled . . . we started with the A's) that he knew why and that he never wanted to hurt me. He smiled only in the corner of his lips and walked quickly back to his seat, slowing just enough to tickle the ribs of the girl who he had proclaimed to love once during show and tell (much to the surprise of the girl and the laughter of everyone else). She then, in turn, stood and told the class that she loved him too, which was followed by "oohhs" and a chorus of "first comes love."

With the card in my hand, I turned my head to face the window, to hide the moisture in my eyes, which I had no name for. I stared a good long time, before it was apparent that I was being watched by the students, who had one-by-one lifted their heads from their work to gaze upon me with wonder, the same way I was staring at something I once believed to be true, as if I had done something profound. I meant to look at them sternly, but smiled instead. They all returned their gazes back to the task before them, which they each worked on diligently, stopping only to shake the cramps out of their hands now and then, until the afternoon recess bell rang. Without one reminder, they lined up single-file, without a single shove, without a single tease, and shuffled out the door, Ralph at the head of the line, stepping in a rather calculated rhythm, which each student behind him followed.

When I went to pick up their work, I found a note, an apology, which Ralph had written and gotten every one of the students to sign. Some students wrote hearts beside their names, some wrote smiley faces, while others wrote in the neatest penmanship I had ever seen from them before. I watched them as they filled the empty space before the empty space whose depths I'd never seen, each of them playing diligently, absorbed in that very moment, as if no other moment existed in time, either before or ever after. I sat and watched, filled with what I thought should be shame. But it wasn't.

I placed the note in the top drawer of my desk and joined them outside, playing tag, and four square, until it was time to go in. When the bell rang, they all turned to me for direction. And there, in the middle of that open green field, we stayed. We finished what we had come to do, we finished what we had started.

Then, after we returned to the room, we each wrote a story about a stranger, someone we had never met before, who always was different than we were. I wrote one too, my story filling three pages before I stopped to see their faces watching me, asking me to share my story first. I stood, and after clearing my throat, I read to them.

When I was done, and I looked up from what I was reading, I found them all looking out the window, to the very farthest point beyond the very last thing they could see. We stayed this way, looking, listening, breathing in unity, remembering not to forget each moment of our lives that came to us this way, with far off gazes, with wonderment, with nothing but the world laid out before us just like this, whether we were here or there, but always just this way.

When we each of us had shared, we posted our stories by the door, to remind us every time we walked out into the world from no matter where we were that felt just like this, that it was we who believed or didn't believe. Those stories stayed up until the end of the year. Students added to the wall pictures of their pets, their families, their favorite movie stars, building and layering the stories of their lives as strangers until the stories were the stories of themselves. Some even took down their papers and replaced the names of their characters with their own.

From that day on, we never wrote from our dictionaries again, except to look up words we wanted meaning to, which we added to the wall, until the wall was filled from floor to ceiling and spilled out into the hall.

At the end of the year, we took it all down, sharing the pieces of ourselves with each other, writing notes on the backs of pictures to say "stay in touch" and "you are my friend even though we never say it." And, I think this is what Ralph saw. I don't know how, but I think this is what he saw when he handed me that card, that card with nothing in it but vast improbable horizons, far beyond the one's I 'd never seen. And he wasn't telling me, but asking me, and asking me to ask each one of them just what it meant to mean this to themselves.

Like Living Neither Nor Dead

(A Day or Maybe Even Less)

part of a larger piece

Rain sprinkled.

Thunder settled like a mist over the next horizon. And Lee?

“Gargoyle,” he thought aloud.

The ground gathered its hands together beneath him, ready.

“What if I took your life?” he had asked.
“No. Not even you,” she smiled, shaking her head.
“Do you really love me then?” his heart stuttered.
“Yes.” hers answered. “But not even you.”
“Do you understand?” her lips asked his ear, her arms slipping over his shoulders. One hand nested its finger in his hair.
Sometimes we purr. Lee did.

There were twenty times three stairs. That he knew for sure. He had counted. Every step whispered beneath their feet as they ascended the cast-iron staircase that clung to the back of the building. Zigging twice, zagging once.

“I suppose,” Lee had said, looking as thoughtful as he could manage, “that I would want to be a horse . . . a wild horse.” Though he meant it, it was a reflex answer. He knew she knew.

“Why a horse?” she asked, slipping off her sweater and laying it on the over-tarred rooftop. This he knew she knew also.

“They’re beautiful animals; strong,” he said. He meant her. “And they can see behind them. There’s no sneaking up on a horse.” He meant him. She unfastened her skirt with his eyes and tossed it over her sweater, over the tar, over the stone put in place a century ago and still right where it had been left. She glistened with sunlight reflected off the moon. Her breasts nodded as she stepped toward him. He was firm in his desire.

“Yes.” she guided his pants to their cuffs. Together, they hugged his ankles. In two steps, he broke the embrace. “And I would be a horse too. To love you like a horse can love another.”

Yesss, whispered his shirt over his flesh. Paper against paper makes this sound. Even in books.

Even Nietzsche.

dear friends
i apologize for my long absence.
i have been tightening up a novel
and woking out
a publication deal
my book
if i should sign
will be published this fall

CAMERA SHY

Slowly, you rise from your armchair and slide
to the seat next to me on the couch, our knees

touching. I let you ease the yearbook from my
hands, surprised by your eagerness to hunt out

the face of The King. Until now, I never knew
you to care. To you, he was always a punk, a

delinquent and unworthy of your time.
The details you recall help us to narrow the search:

which hour English class; who his friends were;
who your friends were and why your paths never crossed.

We pause over the photo of the yearbook staff
long enough to find you standing in the last row,

smiling wide, your arms draped warmly over the shoulders
of your friends beside you. A photo you were certain

you had missed because you never showed your face
on picture day. On the very next page, we find

you again, posing with the speech team, again
standing in the back, again smiling wide. Because

I was always tall you say with pride as if this mattered
more to you than did being a part of the team.

It is no great surprise when, a few pages later,
we also find you as president of the drama club.

It does not surprise me, yet it is strange to see.
I have searched countless times through our family albums,

and have never found a picture with your arms around me
or your lips pressed against my cheek in a fatherly kiss.

I often wonder if you can still picture the day you left--I held
the door as you stormed out of the house, shoulders shrugged,

hands raised in defeat and bare as winter trees as if we
had robbed you of your leaves. Maybe this is what you

mean when you say that you are camera shy, that you wish
to remain unknown, unrecognized for the things you have done.

At last the search has come to an end. I am the one who
finds him in the Glee Club photo. We have searched the

entire book. This is the only place we find him. The King,
Elvis Presley, like you, is standing in the back row, smiling

a big southern smile, half a head taller than the others. You
can’t believe we have found him at all, that we have found

him on a page opposite you, both your heads just above the crowd,

your bodies hidden and completely out of view