UGLY BIKE

ESCAPE: LOWELL

HAPPINESS

part of a larger piece

Opossum Day

The opossum is obviously dead.

We each poke the body with our toes. Ed picks up a nearby

stick and jabs at its head, pushing back the lips a bit to reveal its teeth.

The headlights of the Chevette shine directly on the body and cut us off just above the knees. Mosquitoes and moths skim across the grass, in and out of the light. It is warm, the first warm night of the year. We are all still wearing our track uniforms, tanks and shorts. Matt, whom we call D’oh, has his warm-up top tied around his waste. Lightning shuttles back and forth across the horizon, miles and miles away from where we stand.

We spent the better part of an afternoon convincing three local girls that not only was it National Opossum Day, but Belvedere was the Opossum Day capital of the U.S. and host to the biggest Opossum Day parade in the Midwest, an event second to only the New York parade, which followed, according to Ed, the last leg of the marathon route and ended with a complete lap around Central Park. What made his tale sound so real were his hand gestures, the way he drew a circle in the air before him to signify the loop around the park. Even we watched as his hand made the slow circumference. For a second, it seemed real. The girls looked at each other, then back down at the imaginary scene in the park.

“What are the odds?” Tom laughs, finally breaking the silence. He is the one who started the whole thing. It is his car, too.

It is dark in center field except for the lights. The practice diamond is between the parking lot and the track. We were cutting across in the car just because. No other reason. We didn’t see the opossum until it was too late.

“Yeah, Opossum Day,” Ed repeated to the three girls he had decided we needed to pick up before the track meet was over. “Today.” He looked, without flinching, into the eyes of each girl. “You never heard of it?” It was a line so bad it had to work.

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.