Category: Nonfiction

Wheels

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Gujerat

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The Box

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Family Cookbook

Beans

Because they’re cheap and good and always last longer than the government checks that boil away in the Pyrex pot that sits on the flame building pressure and steam to slow cook the garlic and salt and bay leaves to a river-brown broth that soaks to the bones that bloom from the cactus of your mother’s garden to fill up the table like supper.

 

Tortillas

Which you love more than bread but never get right with an ingredient missing from the salt shortening flour that sticks to your skin with a white you can’t wash so you form instead an imperfect round ball rolled into the shape of a ghost ship from Iowa where your father came from before he sighed through the curtains of a hospital room to fill your house with a silent moon on a cast iron comal you watch through the window of a telescope lens at the end of a tunnel where you wait with a plate the size of the hole in your stomach.

 

Enchiladas

Rolled up tight or laid out and layered like your mother’s whole family in the back of the Buick on a bed of quilts as warm as onions and cheese while they drive from Los Corrales to Los Angeles to Los Corrales again so Carlos can paint enough wartime ships to fill the mouths that sleep through the desert with road stripes stabbing like forks and knives to pull them apart before they’ve even arrived.

 

Milk

The pint-sized shadow you watch over your shoulder from the junior high quad where Chicano boys launch cafeteria bombs to stain the blond pages of history books drying sour as promise while you try to adjust the misplaced target that hangs on your back.

 

Hamburger Meat and Fried Potatoes

Filling the pan like a family reunion in your grandfather’s yard for the cottonwood shot of Uncle Mike and his Schlitz and Tony’s Dean Martin sheen and Georgina’s Rita Moreno smile and your mom’s “Nixon No” eyes and your Creedence Clearwater bangs and everyone mingling like salt and pepper made moist from the steam and sticking together to come undone like a mismatched salad of crispy and soft that feeds you like nothing else can.

 

Chilindron

Because you never eat turkey on Thanksgiving Day since your mother adopted stray ducks geese and owls and planted a branch of dried cedar in a tub of rocks from the Rio Grande where the Christmas tree stood and said “Being different is good” and if you really want to know the truth she’s more Basque than Latina and made of garlic and red peppers and ham and chicken and lemon juice and white wine and olives and tomatoes that retain their own flavor while still remaining whole and isn’t that the point of sustenance anyway?

 

Smothered Steak

Your deceased father’s favorite pounded soft with a mallet until the muscle breaks down and the fiber gives way and the Gold Medal ash is forced into the folds and served up with brown gravy and drowned Southern-style like a history you don’t know and a family you can’t name and a serving you can’t swallow no matter how hard you chew.

 

Frito Sandwich

When the fridge is a warehouse of forklifts and crates and your sister spoons filling from a cherry pie can while your mother draws bones on a university canvas and you sprinkle corn dust on a heel of bread to convince yourself that the salt crumbs are sugar.

 

Oatmeal

With warm water and chicken bouillon cubes because your dogs will eat anything when they’re hungry enough.

 

Chile

Red like the sand of the Jemez Mountain stream where you swim to escape the chlorine eyes of the North Valley rich kids and sleep in the sun on a saucepan boulder sizzling with oil and water and salt to make a paste from the grains that dry on your skin and fill your pockets with an ember glow that warms your belly and fires your lips until you fan your face and hold your breath and try to smile to extinguish the pain.

 

Betty Crocker Cake Mix

Any flavor any kind when the first check comes and the grocery cart fills and you pick one treat to carry you through from one Friday to the next from Lost in Space to All in the Family with a silvery glow in the darkened room that you just might find by licking the spoon.

 

Posolé

Steaming the kitchen windows in red amber and green through the Christmas Eve boil of pork hominy garlic you see your own face staring in from outside like a ghost on the ditch on the way home from school with his hand raised hello like the dreams of your father who was born on this day and now waits in a box of photos in the closet to swallow the moths of memories that pass like the snow drifting down into paper bag candles filling with feathers of light.

 

Cinnamon Bread

Because it wasn’t as bad as it might seem and sometimes you walked through the kitchen door to find your mother at the counter with white flour and brown sugar making from scratch a kneaded loaf with a yin-yang eye curling toward a center uniquely its own to show what she said and what you try to believe that yes being mixed can be good.

 

Chile

Green as the cottonwoods above your bed and the water in the acequia behind your house and the horizon in the morning as you leave for good and the taste in your mouth that won’t go away and the cans you open 1,000 miles east and the bland you swallow when that’s all there is and the image emulsion behind your eyes and the roasting drums in the parking lot and the capsaicin smoke that writes your name across the sky that lets you know that the burn you feel is real.

 

Beans

One more time at the end of the month when the glass bowl rises like a mesa on the llano with shoulders to carry the whole damn family to an aquifer you swim with both hands wide to reach the roots you use as a spoon to drink the broth that fills furrows that reflect the clouds that that pulls the rope along the highway that draws you home.

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Watching You Sleep on the 5th Day of Your Life

The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart.

                                                ~Michael Chabon, Summerland

 

 

1.
Son, fathers fuck up. Fucking up is what fathers do. I’ve spent my adult life trying not to be my father—a man who loves quickly and leaves even quicker. But I see him in me—his chin, his nose, his long dangling earlobes. You have his chin, his nose, his long dangling earlobes. My hair is thick and black, like his. Your hair, even when you emerged into the world, is thick and black, like fine spun silk. I see my father. In me. In you. One day you will look at me and think, My father is a fuck-up, like how I looked at my father five years ago, waiting for me in the lobby of a Bangkok hotel after a two-year absence. I stayed hidden, spying him from behind a column, noticing how age had had its way with his body that sags and slouches, and thinking, I love you, but you have fucked me up. At that moment, anger turned into pity. “Let pity, then, be a kind of pain…,” Aristotle wrote, which makes me think his father fucked up, too. When the time comes, son, do not pity me. Let me apologize now, when you are asleep and dreaming, I hope, of whatever makes you love. And forgive.

 

2.
Son, you came into being like a Florida thunderstorm—quick and hard. Elephant rain, your Thai grandmother likes to call it. You announced your arrival through your mother’s screams. The commotion out of her mouth was your commotion. Her anguished face was your face. The midwife and nurses could not find your heartbeat, that rapid little sound I loved to listen to during prenatal check-ups. It vanished. I knew something was the matter. I knew by the organized chaos in the room—the fifteen or so nurses buzzing around, everyone doing something. And then, in the midst of this hectic-ness, you came out. “He’s arrived,” the midwife said. Arrived with the umbilical cord wrapped twice around your neck. There was a forever second of silence until you cried. And then I cried. That night, at the hospital, I could not sleep. I hovered over you, as I do now, checking the rise and fall of your chest, the twitch of your tiny fingers, making sure you were breathing and alive.

 

3.
Son, when you become a father, time will lose meaning. Your mind will propel you into the future, your child grown and happy. You hope you are responsible for that happiness. Or, you will imagine the unimaginable, and it will knot your jaw, and it will fist your hands. Time for a father is not linear. I have seen you through college, seen you married, seen all your successes and regrets. I have gone backwards, too, when you did not exist, when I did not exist, witnessing this lineage of fathers, who strayed. My past is your past, son. Time intertwines like a suffocating weed. It is not measured by light, but memory, which is timeless and unpredictable. Where, I wonder, will this memory of your sleep be thirty years from now? What will harken it? At my death, it is this memory I want to slip into and carry with me into the next life.

 

4.
Son, a few days before your arrival, a man entered a nightclub and extinguished forty-nine lives. When news broke, I shut out the world. I wanted you to enter a happy world, in a happy family, in the arms of a happy father. Happiness, however, is illusory. The truth: the world hurts. Six hours before your arrival, I finished Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir, Between the World and Me. In it he writes to his son: “I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.” There is so much that I want to shield you from, so much I do not want you to witness. But I wonder if you already know the world is broken. Sometimes you furrow your brow in your sleep, like you do now, a look of someone betrayed, and I think we all begin our lives with a cry, our first breath the beginning of suffering.

 

5.
Son, your mother worries people will not know you are hers. You have inherited all that is Thai in me. She fears, when you look at her, you will not see a mother but a simple white woman. But she wanted this. “I hope he looks like you,” she said. “I hope he looks like you,” I said. You look like this country. You were born from a yellow man and white woman, who wakes you with kisses, who holds you so tight fearing you might evaporate. Son, love your mother. Son, love her more than you love me. See yourself mirrored in her eyes. But do not forget your father. He will be there. He promises. He promises so many things.

 

 

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Drew Ex Machina

…originally published in 40.2 of The Florida Review.

 

July 2, 2004

Pulse opened in Orlando, Florida, when I was nineteen and Drew had just turned twenty. We had met the first week of college, eleven months prior.

 

Drew danced like a maniac. Sometimes he would pull you up to him and slam his body against you. It was the same way he hugged. And tickled. With loving force, one might say.

 

We didn’t go to Pulse the night it opened. Instead, we spent the weekend in Clearwater with my family. We played Dance Dance Revolution at the mall, talked about doing a semester abroad in London, and danced in my room to Drew’s favorite song of the moment.

 

“Murder on the Dancefloor” by Sophie Ellis Bextor.

 

October 10, 2004

Pulse was remarkably non-Orlando-esque, according to Drew. Since I had only been to gay clubs in Orlando and Tampa, I didn’t have much basis for comparison. But I trusted Drew when he told me this was what the clubs in bigger cities were like.

 

Our favorite was the white room. He described it as “…rather miraculously immaculate. You’re not quite sure if the walls are windows, mirrors, or projection screens. Hoorah for ambiguous decor!”

 

I loved the whimsical way he would describe things.

 

April 13, 2005

“Club partners for life!” we screamed at each other on the dancefloor that entire night at Pulse. And then the next night at Firestone. Whenever we were together, a ten-foot wall couldn’t have kept people from wanting to spend time with us.

 

That’s the way we liked it.

 

Drew was like a soul-brother to me. Maybe it was because we were both Geminis (and he would swear to you this was exactly the reason). Maybe it was because we both had endless amounts of energy. I didn’t care what it was. I could have gone out with him every single night.

 

That year, it seemed like I did.

 

April 23, 2005

We attempted to crash Grad Nite at Disney World.

 

We talked about it for weeks. We would join up with the group from my high school because they had extra tickets. It would work out because we both still looked like we could have been in high school.

 

It failed because my friend on the bus never answered her phone. I am a terrible liar, but attempted to pretend that Drew and I were separated from our group. The manager took us to the Grad Nite ticket counter and once they looked up my high school, our plans were thwarted. He was laughing hysterically while I was on the verge of having a panic attack for lying and nearly getting caught.

 

We talked about crashing Grad Nite every April. We swore that one year, we would finally succeed.

 

We had infinite chances, right? We would look seventeen and eighteen forever, right?

 

May 1, 2005

From Drew’s journal. Gemini’s horoscope: You’ve never understood people who refuse to try new things. In your mind, even if you give something a shot and it doesn’t work out, it’s still better than being bored. That attitude is about to come in plenty handy, thanks to an interesting new friend who’ll bring you the opportunity to broaden your horizons. If your passport isn’t current, better see what you can do about that. You may end up with an invitation to travel.

 

A song lyric from one of his favorite bands, The Pet Shop Boys, comes to mind. We were never bored because we were never boring. Using the past tense still hurts.

 

November 6, 2005

Another excerpt from Drew’s journal. I told him he should write a story about this. How right and how wrong he was.

 

I imagine the end of humankind not to be in the form of a nuclear winter, a massive AIDS virus, or the evaporation of natural resources. Instead, I see the men and women of this earth reaching a quiet, still end.

 

Terribly, suddenly, all women would become infertile. At first, there would be a race to find a cure. All the scientists would rally together around this one cause — the fight for the survival of our species.

 

But eventually, hope would dwindle… the young would grow old, the old, older. Nightclubs and coffee shops and college campuses would close down, religions and governments would grow quiet. There would be no war or famine. The last remaining people would lie down in silence, no one watching. The end of humankind would be gone. In a whisper.

 

The future wouldn’t have much meaning to this sort of people. The only thing left after their departure would be the good things, and bad things, that humanity has done. The only way they could find peace would be to make amends to the world.

 

I’m not sure that they could.

 

I’m not sure they could, either.

 

April 30, 2006

Something I remember about Drew is that he was always down on himself. About his looks, about not fitting in with “the gay community.” I often felt similarly. It was hard to finally find a community, but to feel like you didn’t necessarily belong to it.

 

I wish he knew just how beautiful he was. I think he found that after college.

 

“Do not wish to be anything but what you are, and try to be that perfectly” was his personal motto. He did do it perfectly, however painful or awkward it may have been.

 

November 16, 2006

Diva Invasion was a huge drag show put on by UCF’s GLBSU every year. I was one of the event planners and had convinced my mom to join us.

 

I remember watching her laugh while grabbing one of the drag queen’s boobs. She said it was unfair that they were nicer than her own.

 

The after-party that night was at Pulse. My mom bought all of my friends a round of martinis. While Drew and our other friend, Christopher, were busy dancing with my mom Night at the Roxbury-style, my girlfriend and I snuck off to make out in the bathroom because it was a safe place to do so.

 

April 16, 2007

The Virginia Tech shooting was something that felt so close to home, yet so far away.

 

How? Why? These were the questions that kept popping up. These were the questions we would continue to ask for years to come. How could someone do this? Why aren’t there tighter gun laws?

 

Drew wrote: I’m feeling kind of shaken about the events at Virginia Tech today. I didn’t find out until I got home from class and went into the office. At first I didn’t really understand what was going on. Now I’m feeling like I could cry about it.

 

It’s hard trying to find a balance between caring and understanding (how could we?), and distancing yourself from the situation, passing it off as just another 32 bodies; as lifeless, heavy sculptures, as silence.

 

But, are we even supposed to try and find a balance? Are our emotions honestly constructed so mechanically?

 

[The] bodies weren’t enough. The implications of this could be so much more.

 

Sociologists will be happy. Not since Hitler has a mass murderer given so much fodder to disassemble and analyze. Maybe we’ll get inside the mind of a killer, but at what cost?

 

January 20, 2008

“You’re already in New York! All you need is a monkey and a popcorn machine!”

 

That was Drew’s response to my mini-existential crisis while I was deciding between psychology and writing graduate programs. After graduating from UCF, I’d packed up my entire life and moved to New York to live with my family for a while before figuring it out.

 

Instead of figuring it out or becoming a street performer per Drew’s suggestion, I fled the country and backpacked through Europe for six weeks.

 

Sometime in 2010

I had finally chosen writing for my graduate degree and stayed in NYC to pursue it. Sometime in 2010, Drew and I had a falling out. I don’t remember the specifics because this is how juvenile it was.

 

He was a die-hard anti-Apple Android fanatic.

 

He bought an iPod.

 

I made a joke about him buying an iPod.

 

That turned into a heated argument. He told me my “literature” “made his eyes bleed.”

 

I told him that a therapist should be more sane than his patients.

 

And we didn’t speak for several years.

 

June 2011

Every Monday, I would meet my New York friends at either Stonewall or Duplex. We would drink on the cheap at both places and play Guitar Hero at Duplex.

 

It was odd to think about drinking and dancing at a place with so much historical context.  In fact, I’m not sure I even thought about it at the time. The Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street is where the riots started that set the tone for the entire LGBT movement. But by now, as at Pulse, we felt safe there.

 

When we played Guitar Hero, there were a few times that I thought of Drew. I remembered, very vividly, a photo of him, Christopher, and our other friend Andrea. They were sitting on my couch the night of Christopher’s twentieth birthday. Drew had just bought him the game.

 

I thought about it, but I didn’t reach out. Twenty-somethings can be like that.

 

September 6, 2014

After pacing back and forth through the Barnes & Noble on Colonial eight times, I sat down in the cafe and pulled out my phone. I had moved away from Orlando six years prior. I lived in New York, Alabama, and was now living in Denver.

 

I had just gone through my usual series of unfortunate events post-breakup:

find a rebound,

rebound,

be hurt by the rebound,

regret breaking up with my original girlfriend to begin with.

 

I hated that I was in Orlando. Somehow, the humidity made the hurt feel worse. Somehow, it made me feel more stuck.

 

Drew was the first person I texted. He and I hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years because of the iPod debacle, but had begun speaking again from our respective parts of the country. He texted me back immediately, and just-so-happened to have been in the same shopping center.

 

“Fair warning: I look like shit,” he said.

 

“Fair warning: Same,” I responded.

 

We sat and talked for two hours before deciding to head back to his apartment. He lived around the corner and wanted to show me his place and force me to play Dance Dance Revolution with him—something I hadn’t done since college.

 

That evening, it felt like no time had passed. We talked about all of our silly college inside jokes, read the DSM, watched a bit of Eurovision, and took some photos together.

 

He still had the mug I made him for his birthday, years prior. It showcased photos of us from the evening we tried to sneak into Grad Nite at Disney in 2005.

 

After I left his apartment, I got a text message: “You left your sunglasses here!”

 

I responded for him to hold on to them. I’d get them from him the next time I saw him, which would, we hoped, be sooner than several years.

 

We were better at staying in touch, but didn’t see each other for a year and a half because I was living in Denver and he was still in Orlando. I had no idea how, of all of our friends, he was still the one to remain there. He always talked about moving but never pulled the trigger.

 

May 29, 2016

After spending two days texting back and forth about plans, Drew and I finally agreed to meet for brunch on Sunday. I finally got to meet Juan, the beautiful boyfriend in all of his photos.

 

We met at International Plaza in Tampa and went to The Cheesecake Factory for lunch because I couldn’t make it to Orlando. We, of course, made fun of ourselves the entire time. I think “Tampa’s finest!” was the caption on the Snapchat I added to my story. That afternoon was the first time I’d seen him in over a year. He and Juan were so cute together. It looked like they shared a wardrobe, which I found out­—they did. Drew seemed more calm. Way more calm than I’d ever seen him.

 

He still hugged me too hard. He still made an “mmm” sound when he did it. The way he hugged made me feel like he was hugging me with different senses. Can you taste a hug? I bet he could.

 

He felt older that day. We felt older that day. And not just because I had just turned thirty-one and he was about to turn thirty-two. Another thing we had in common was what some would call a “Peter Pan Complex.” It served us well. On my thirtieth birthday, he wrote to me saying, Welcome to the first day of the “wow, there is no way you’re actually 30!” club.

 

Before parting ways, he gave me back my neon green sunglasses. He’d held onto them for a year and a half.

 

June 10, 2016

How about the weekend of July 8th? We can go to Global Dance Festival at Red Rocks!

 

This was the last discussion I had with Drew. I was about to buy my tickets for the weekend-long dance music festival in Colorado. I had already begun planning out our entire weekend; all the vegetarian restaurants and breweries I’d take them to, a beautiful hike or two, and, yes—a gay club.

 

I warned them when I was sitting with them drinking strawberry lemonade in Tampa: If you come to visit me in Denver, you’ll end up wanting to move.

 

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Drew said with a smile.

 

June 12, 2016

The morning of June 12, I woke up inundated by text messages and missed calls. I defaulted to text messages, even though three of the missed calls were from my mother.

 

“Oh my god, I am so so so sorry Sara” was the first one I read.

 

“How are you holding up? I am so sad to hear about Orlando.”

 

“My thoughts are with you. I can’t believe what happened.”

 

“Have you heard from Drew?!”

 

Eight hours earlier, I was sleepwalking. My dog barked to go out at about one in the morning, and I sleepily walked to the door, put his leash on, walked down the stairs, and walked him around the block. A neighbor screamed my name, and I distinctly remember telling her I was sleepwalking.

 

That’s the thing about sleepwalking. Much like hypnosis, you are somewhat cognizant of what you are doing, but you can’t control it. I waved to her and kept walking around the block.

 

I came home, took Baxter’s leash off, put my sandals back where they belonged, and got back in bed.

 

At that very same time, one of my best friends from college was lying on the floor of Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. At that very same time, he and forty-eight other people—his boyfriend, Juan, included—were being shot by a madman with a military-style assault weapon. And killed.

 

After reading the text messages and not having a clue what anyone was sending me condolences about, I opened Facebook. There were several more messages waiting for me there. But the first thing I saw when I opened the app was Drew’s mother, Christine. All over Facebook. All over the news. She was in tears. She had heard about the shooting right after it happened and, while Juan was already at the hospital being treated for gunshot wounds, Drew was still nowhere to be found.

 

I was hoping, like many of the rest of us, that he was just in shock and hiding somewhere. But for him to not check in on social media or answer his text messages? Unlikely. I sent him a text message at 8:57 a.m. MST: “ARE YOU OKAY?!?!?!”

 

That would be the last text message I sent him.

 

I didn’t know what to do. All I knew was that I couldn’t be alone. A week prior, I had begun dating someone new. And as soon as she woke up, she asked if I needed her to come over. No questions asked.

 

So she did. She lay in bed with me while I obsessively checked my phone, texted with my friends from college, and took phone calls from my friends and family. They were looking for answers.

 

I didn’t have any.

 

Twelve anxiety-inducing hours went by before anyone had any information. All day, I spoke with other people from our college friend group. My friends called me crying. As the hours dragged on, my hope that Drew was in shock and hiding grew dim.

 

All I could think about was the heat and humidity and the bodies. The blood all over the walls of the white room at Pulse. The couch that we used to sit on and take photos. I couldn’t believe they would take so long to remove the victims, considering the weather conditions.

 

Then I thought about how maybe it was a homophobic issue. How maybe they had to take extra time because it was a gay club and it was gay blood and, even though we are in 2016, there are still laws barring gay men from donating blood.

 

This is the way my anxiety thoughts work. These are the things that scamper across my brain constantly.

 

I couldn’t do much that day besides stare at the one police scene photo that was on every news story. The blue and red lights together created this amethyst, purplish color.

 

It somehow felt better than blue and red.

 

June 14, 2016

I went to the vigil in Denver that Monday. Besides the rainbow over the park, I found absolutely no solace in being there. I hated every moment of it. The executive director of the LGBT nonprofit I used to work for made it all about him.

 

All about his experience.

 

All about Denver.

 

All about a community who didn’t know Drew. All about people who had never been to Pulse. All about people who may not have ever even been to Orlando.

 

I felt selfish for thinking this way, which triggered more anxiety. I texted my other best friend from college, Christopher. He was at a vigil in Houston. I assumed he was feeling similarly.

 

Pulse Nightclub was a place in Orlando that I went to every week in college. Sometimes twice a week. Oftentimes with Drew.

 

When it was time to light the candle at the vigil, all I could do was watch the wax drip down. All I could do was feel the pathetic fallacy of the rain and hear the pitter-patter of the raindrops against umbrellas and ponchos.

 

I still didn’t cry. I felt like I was still sleepwalking.

 

June 15, 2016

I spent the day trying to make travel plans for myself and Christopher because he was working in the clinic all day.

 

The city of Orlando came together in a huge way that week. Several airlines donated flights and many hotels worked with the city Chamber of Commerce to help those who were grieving.

 

I booked our flights and hotel, completely free of charge, while on a hike with my friend Becca. She convinced me that getting outside and climbing a mountain would help.

 

When we got to the top, we sat back to back on a rock and looked out at the wilderness below us. I couldn’t help but be terrified about the next few days and how they would play out. I had only been to funerals of people who lived full lives. Who died of old age.

 

And still, I sleepwalked down the mountain.

 

That evening, the new girl I was dating came over and sat with me while I made bracelets for my friends. They said THEDRUPROJECT, which was Drew’s Internet handle for everything. I didn’t know how else to keep busy. I didn’t know where to put this sad energy.

 

It was as if he created the memorial for himself while he was still alive. He was always working on himself. He was always a project in progress.

 

June 16, 2016

When I arrived at the airport and checked in, I tried to muster the words to thank the people who worked for the airline who flew us for free.

 

Instead, they thanked me. They told me how sorry they were. They walked me through the airport. They gave me a voucher for food and drink. They put me on the airplane first.

 

I was sleepwalking then, too. I was moving through the airport, nodding my head, saying the words back that seemed like the words I needed to say.

 

I don’t remember any of them.

 

I remember landing at the airport in Orlando. I remember getting my bag. I remember getting in my friend Ashley’s car and her driving me to the hotel.

 

But it was all a blur. I felt as though I was peering through the eyes of someone else. Someone who was grieving. I wanted to extend my sympathy to this caricature of myself.

 

When I got to our room, I hugged Christopher for a good five minutes. Resting my head on his chest felt right. It was the first thing that had felt right in days.

 

June 17, 2016

The morning of the wake, Christopher and I walked across the street to the memorial set up at the Dr. Phillips Center.

 

There were photos of all forty-nine victims. Tons of flowers. Rainbow flags. Emotional support dogs from Alabama, even. People from all over the country were there, paying their respects.

 

I hung one of THEDRUPROJECT bracelets on the photo of Drew.

 

We went to lunch. Slowly, people came to meet us. Slowly, we made our way through the day until it was time to go to the wake.

 

“Will you walk up to the casket with me?” Christopher asked. “I need to see him. It’ll be some sort of closure.”

 

I agreed, but felt funny about it. I had never been to an open-casket wake or funeral. I wanted to be his support, though.

 

The wake was a procession of friends from my past. I hadn’t seen most of these people since graduating. We all sat around, watching the slideshow of photos from college. We shared Drew stories.

 

I hugged his mom for as long as I could. I had no idea how she was smiling. How she was comforting other people.

 

Christopher and I waited until the very last second before walking up to the casket. The wake ended at 8:00 p.m. and we approached at 7:30. The second I looked, I finally broke down and cried. Because looking at his body in a casket—the first body in a casket I’d ever seen—was like visiting a wax figure museum and seeing a cheap knockoff of a celebrity I once loved.

 

That was not how I wanted to remember him.

 

After the viewing, I went and got a tattoo of a phrase I’d been thinking about for five or six years: deus ex machina. The literal meaning is “machine from god.” In literature or theater, it is a plot device–a random character is dropped into the story to guide it to a happy ending.

 

I sent a note Drew had written to a friend of mine who does lettering for a publishing company. She pulled out all of the letters to create the phrase just perfectly.

 

He’s my Drew ex machina now.

 

June 18, 2016

“You and Drew were my first friends in the gay community.”

 

“You made me feel safe to come out.”

 

“The way the two of you welcomed any new friend into your group had such an incredible impact.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

A lot of people came up to me at the funeral or the days leading up to it to tell me versions of that. I had no idea that’s how we were viewed. I had never even thought about it. I’m sure he hadn’t, either. We might have been self-conscious and felt like we never fit in while in college, but nobody would keep us from being our authentic selves—whatever that was.

 

I don’t remember much from the funeral itself. Being inside of a church made me rather uncomfortable, if I’m being honest. It was a Catholic service inside of an Episcopal church, but what difference did it make? When it was time to take the cracker, neither my mother nor I knew what to do. So, two Jews went up to the altar and had a snack.

 

It was disgusting. The cracker, death, being at a friend’s funeral, the lack of gun laws, all of it.

 

July 17, 2016

Today, one day short of a month since the funeral, was the first day that I forgot to wear my THEDRUPROJECT bracelet.

 

I noticed I had forgotten it as I was walking to my car, but didn’t stop to go back because it would have made me late. It did make me pause, though.

 

It made me pause like so many moments in the first month post-Pulse. Like the moments where I had panic attacks in enclosed public spaces because I was afraid of being shot. Like the moments where I thought of something I wanted to tell Drew and couldn’t. Like the moments where I paused to reflect on how Congress could have turned down four common sense gun law initiatives while contemplating even one of the 200+ pieces of legislation that were proposed to discriminate against the LGBT community.

 

When will we, as a country, stop sleepwalking and do something? Remembering is simply not enough. Remembering is what we do.

 

I will never receive a too-hard hug again because we haven’t done enough. I will never be able to send my friend a song I know he would like because we haven’t done enough. I will never be forced to watch Eurovision or play Dance Dance Revolution again because we haven’t done enough.

 

We need to do more than just remember.

 

August 12, 2016

Another anniversary. It’s been exactly two months. It somehow simultaneously feels like two days and two years and it feels like a Sisyphean nightmare where I finally feel like I am okay before a find out a new detail or something reminds me of him or I just do that thing I do where I spend an hour looking at photos of him and I have to go chasing after the boulder as it races back down the mountain. Call it sleeprunning.

 

I know it’s not productive.

 

But neither was trying to eat 63% of a container of melon the other day. His mother posted on Facebook that his heart weighed 250 grams. No mother should know that. Nobody should know that. But now I knew, and it was a matter of time before something triggered me into needing to find out how tangibly how much that actually is.

 

The thing ended up being a container of pre-cut melon I bought the other day. I took it out of the fridge to have a few pieces and when I was putting it back, I noticed the container said 680 grams. I stopped everything else I was working on or doing or thinking about and stared at the container for a good several minutes before delving in and trying to eat as much of it as I could. I needed to have exactly 63% of it. Because then it would weigh 250 grams. And then I could feel what Drew’s heart felt like.

 

I couldn’t force myself to eat enough of the melon, so I took it out of the container.

 

I stood in my kitchen and held the container.

 

And immediately felt shame. What a morbid thing to have done. All I can wonder is when I will wake up or the boulder will just stay put long enough for life to feel normal again for more than a few days—for the anniversaries not to seem like every 12th, every Sunday, every day.

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Where Do All the Dead Names Go?

…originally published in 40.2 of The Florida Review.

 

Three days after the shooting, I walked into my therapist’s office. She said, “Talk.” I didn’t know what to say. What do you tell people, after something like that? Do I tell them how when I was nineteen and barely out, I walked doe-eyed into Pulse with X’s on my hands and the hope that a girl might ask me to dance? Do I tell them that I felt safe to be myself for the first time, that we were all there for the same reason—to be open and unafraid? That we were all untouchable, then, and even though I left without a dance I understood that this was a place I could always go.

 

Do I tell them that people like me are more than twice as likely to be victims of violent crimes? Sometimes you forget that there are people out there who want you dead. They want you to die. Every day I am alive is an act of defiance. What do I tell people?

 

How do I tell them what it was like, waiting to hear from friends who’d gone out that night? Answering messages to let people know I was alive. I was not there, but God, I could have been. I could have been with friends on the dance floor, sweating to music, spilling the secret that I had a crush on a friend who was dating another friend, rushing out to the patio bar to avoid a girl I slept with once who never called me again, stuffing dollars down the briefs of a young dancer. Ordering a vodka and cranberry. Admiring the shot girl’s legs. Dancing so hard that I got hungry and stumbled across the street to order fries off the value menu at Wendy’s. I could have been.

 

In the days after the shooting, I had an older gay woman put her hand on my shoulder and tell me it shouldn’t have happened. That she and others marched and protested in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s so that now people like me would be safe. It should have been us, she said. Not you, not you.

 

How do I tell them that my brother was one of the first responders? That a man’s bullet came for his skull but instead got his helmet. That he came home with blood on his boots. How do I tell them how much he cares? Would he run into the building again, knowing a bullet was coming for him? A thousand times over. I want them to know him, to know that his hair curls tight like mine, that his favorite film is The Empire Strikes Back, that he’s a vegetarian. He’s my brother. Those first few days after, I had to prove to myself over and over again that he was still alive. I felt like I had to protect him. I’m part of the Pulse community, but also knit into the world of law enforcement. I don’t think about what should have been done. Did the police take too long? Did they not want to go in because the people trapped inside were queer? No. No. Maybe people don’t remember the UpStairs Lounge arson attack. Thirty-two gay men burned to death in 1973 at a gay bar in New Orleans. A man’s charred remains were visible to onlookers hanging from a window well into the next day. Press was minimal, jokes were made on talk radio. The police called them queers. No one was arrested. The case was eventually closed. Pulse was not the UpStairs Lounge. This is not 1973. Things are not how they were. This was not the UpStairs Lounge. My brother, and every single one of his fellow officers cared. At least that much is different. At least I know that.

 

When we were alone, finally, I laid my head against my brother’s chest and listened to the beat of his heart. Every steady pulse saying I’m still here, I’m still here, I’m still here. I listened to the pulse I almost lost, remembered the Pulse I did lose.

 

And later, alone in my room, I sat in silence and mourned for the forty-nine heartbeats that no longer were. The heartbeats of my other brothers and sisters. I repeated their names, struggled on pronunciations and felt the syllables twist my tongue, and now those names live forever in the spaces between my teeth.

 

How do I explain?—I want to know where all the dead names go. I want to know who swallows them. I cannot. I want to ask, when will it okay for me to move on? How do I carry these ghosts on my back? I can’t imagine putting them down—I’ve already promised to hold them forever. They are mine now. I carry their heartbeats in mine. I wish I could say I am not afraid, but there are days I am terrified. I have been practicing being unafraid since the moment I cut my hair and took the hand of a girl I loved on a crowded street. I am starting to understand that is something I will have to practice all my life.

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Dancing in the Dark

…originally published in 40.2 of The Florida Review.

 

The headlight fell off again. It’s a little sooner than expected, but I’m not altogether surprised. When it rains, water creeps under the packing tape securing it to my car, gradually weakening the adhesive so that over a few days it peels off completely, leaving me driving ten MPH under the speed limit and dragging my front left headlight down the road by its cord like a stubborn dog that’s got its own ideas about where we need to go, which currently is the nearest CVS and quick.

 

I’ve been making excuses for not fixing it for the past six months, since I lost control of my steering wheel at a Pollo Tropical and careened into the white picket fence bordering the restaurant’s friendly front doors, bulldozing a family of shrubs along the way. Seated in the wreck, I counted down the seconds wondering when someone would emerge from the building to ask me if I was okay, or at least scold me for driving with headphones on, but no one seemed bothered. Unsure of a proper course of action to take and growing more annoyed that no one had as much as pointed and laughed at me, I stepped out of my car and tip-toed toward the fence to survey the damage. No harm done. The shrub had simply been pushed to a lean, like it had clocked out for its smoke break and would be back to work in a minute. Except for the fallen headlight, my car, too, seemed blithely unfazed by the accident, so with no one to answer to, I went on with my day, driving to work savoring my stale Get-Out-Of-Jail-For-Crashing-Into-a-Global-Conglomerate card.

 

Ever since, it’s been all “You’ll fix it with your next paycheck” and “It’s not like the light doesn’t work. At least now it has character.” Even more dumbfounding, my stepfather is a former mechanic and I have a close friend who recently repaired my taillights who would be delighted to help with the headlight problem, yet I don’t ask either of them for help. Part of me believes I deserve this headache, as if by getting away with crashing into the Pollo Tropical, I owe it to the universe as cosmic penance to be burdened with this slight inconvenience.

 

It’s not just the Pollo Tropical. Three years earlier my legacy of driving into things that are not roads began when my right front tire collided with a curb on a side street outside of Pulse, the Orlando gay bar with the least accessible parking, almost all next-to-impossible parallel spaces. Inspecting the damage with my fingertips and feeling the rubber only barely dip where it had scraped the concrete, I thought, “Idiot. You are such a lucky idiot.” Add to my cosmic debt the time I almost drowned in the community pool in my uncle’s apartment complex when I was ten. When I got a flat driving home from school and my car skidded down a six-lane road and glided neatly into a ditch. Being rushed to the emergency room after donating blood and fainting just steps outside of the Big Red Bus in full sight of a team of nurses. And being gay, because—despite the rush of revolt I get when I put on my patent leather boots and silk floral blouses in the morning—I am often confronted with the irrational idea that I’ve survived being gay. Irrational because surviving being gay seems like such an antiquated notion. My generation doesn’t survive being gay. This is 2016. My mother watches Ellen. Ellen watches Modern Family. A drag queen has a single on the Billboard dance charts. Even so, when I got the call from my best friend that a man had walked into Pulse, our Pulse, and used his gun to do what guns do, I was again thrust into acknowledging the harsh truth that I have survived being gay.

 

I don’t want to ask myself what I would have done had I been inside of Pulse between 2:02 and 5:15 a.m., yet I still do. “Would you have made it?” I find myself wondering while doing the dishes, surrendering to my pesky ego. “Would he have looked at you and seen something worth sparing?” In these moments of selfishness, I am the universe’s incontinent pet and it is shoving my face into a puddle of my urine, trying to house train me by asking, “Why do this? What are you going to learn from this mess?”

 

A coworker, a classmate, a woman at a garage sale noncommittally perusing through a copy of Atlas Shrugged all are interested: “Did any of your friends die?” Each time, my face is pressed back down to the floor. “Why do you ask?” I want to know. “Do you really think this is going to get us anywhere?” Each time, I could say no, thank you for asking, and maybe attribute my apparent sudden weakness to something else, perhaps a potassium deficiency, anything that would give me a valid reason to grieve when none of my best friends are dead at Pulse.

 

In the chaos of the first few days after the shooting, when there are still phones inside of Pulse ringing, a nagging pang in the back of my head follows me wherever I go, questioning my certainty that everyone I know is safe. In describing this doubt to a friend, I tell him that I feel like Catherine O’Hara in Home Alone. I am at the airport running towards my gate, already late for my flight, when suddenly it hits me: Kevin. The people I love the most are accounted for. My best friends are safe, I believe, but what about Kevin? Am I forgetting Kevin?

 

I remember a night at Pulse several years ago—the same night I rammed into the curb. It’s the week of my twenty-first birthday and I’m electrified by the power of gay spaces, partly because I can finally legally order a drink at Pulse. I rush home after the club to write in my diary, still buzzing from too many well cocktails and schmaltzy after some of my first public flirting with being a gay man. I recall a vow I made with myself that I would only drink one beer so that if my tire was deflated by the time I got back to it at the end of the night, at least I would be sober, and how I promptly broke that promise when I ran into my ex-boyfriend inside the club. Given the choice between being drunk on the phone with Triple A or lucid at Karaoke night with the guy that broke up with me over text message, I opt for an all-you-can-drink wristband and fall in love with the first cute guy I see. He’s a blur with a blond Mohawk and he’s punching at the air a few feet away from me on the dancefloor. Even in the dark I can make out how white his skin is, as if all the lights in the room have conspired to make him someone important. I’m not even beside him, but I’m already imagining us reading back to back in our country home in Connecticut and laying my head on his chest. I don’t introduce myself but I do Charleston a few times in his general vicinity which is just as good anyway as long as my goal is to drive home alone on a bad tire. I never get his name. All of my best friends are safe, but three years later, I worry about Kevin.

 

I could stretch the truth. Yes. To those who are curious if anyone I loved was there, I could describe the night I met one of the victims, not exactly a friend, but someone that I used to know. I could catalog the drinks it took me to grow the balls to walk up to him that night at Savoy, the gay bar popular for its aging go-go boys and $3 beers, the bar with the shotgun behind the counter that one of the bartenders once told a friend of mine is always kept loaded “just in case.” I could feign wonder at how despite not quite being drunk, I still found myself serendipitously falling into him, pretending to catch myself on his pleasantly toned arm that barely seemed to register the new weight of me. I could admit that the mixture of a recent breakup, liquor, and a tough pop song about life after love had me diving wholeheartedly into my own private rom-com. I could say that when I kissed him, silhouetted against the lurid neon lights spotlighting our half-empty glasses of booze, wrapping my body in his like this is what my arms were always meant to do, I thought, “Finally! So here is why it’s all been worth it.” I could recall his mouth, soft and sticky with cocktail syrup, so that when I took a step back to get a better look at him, late 20’s, with an impish grin that made him seem like he was keeping a good secret, I could still taste the lingering sweetness of him on my lips. I could tell them he had a boyfriend back then, watch their faces closely to see if that changes what they think about him now that they know he’s not perfect—this is a real man who is now gone. It wouldn’t matter, really. Either way, they would just be glad that I’m safe, that it wasn’t me, that I survived being gay.

 

The inquisitive woman at the garage sale who wants to know if any of my friends has died asks me for help piling her second-hand loot into the back of her car. “I’m so proud of your generation,” she says, handing me a trashcan designed to look like an antique apothecary jar to stow in her trunk. She looks at me warmly, adopting me in the way true parental spirits take in all stray children, and drives off satisfied, convinced that she has nothing to worry about. I would have never been there, not her sweet, chaste, not-that-kind-of-gay son. It’s almost like it never happened at all. But her story is wrong. She is too eager to get back to her daytime soaps, and her picture of me, of us, is not complete. It has been sanitized like the tools of the apothecary that inspired her fun, new trashcan.

 

Flashes of bad times come to me, too. A time, for instance, when I find myself in front of Jarred—from a year ago—with a half-naked twink in a full Rambo getup.

 

“Hey,” Jarred says. He turns to his friend and whispers loudly in his ear, “He’s friends with Michael.”

 

His friend appraises me up and down. “That would make sense.”

 

“Edgar’s an apathetic blogger,” Jarred goes on.

 

“I’m an apathetic blogger,” I say, testing the role out. I run MarthaStewartVEVO.tumbler.com.”

 

“You’re short,” the friend says out of nowhere.

 

“I found your underwear under my bed the other day,” Jarred says.

 

I try to hide my disgust that he only just found the old briefs I abandoned in a whirlwind after we hooked up more than twelve months ago. “Congrats!” I almost say.

 

But Jarred isn’t finished. “I almost texted you, but I wasn’t sure it would have been appropriate.” They both giggle and elbow each other and roll their eyes.

 

“What do you do for a living?” Rambo asks.

 

“Nothing,” I say. “I’m not alive.”

 

“Cute.”

 

“Did I upset you two?” I ask. “Because I don’t understand why you’re trying to be mean to someone who has done nothing to either of you.”

 

“I’m just a cunt,” the friend says, so genuine it hurts. “You have pretty teeth,” he adds.

 

Friends of mine have joked about how the catch-all slogan of late—Orlando Strong—sounds like a 5K marathon, disguising the unquestionable homophobia motivating the shooting with a baffling motto that sounds like a quote from The Incredible Hulk. “Orlando Strong!” The Hulk would bellow, tearing his lab coat to smithereens before growing three times his size and pounding on the bad guys. Erased is the queerness essential to the LGBTQ lives lost, replaced with generic calls to action to be McOrlando McUnited as if acknowledging our varying sexualities, genders, or authentic stories would make our lives any less worthy of reverence. Of representation, civil rights activist and author Audre Lorde wrote, “The visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.” I want to make myself visible. I need to be strong, not just #OrlandoStrong.

 

When I am fourteen, I wade into the full potential of my power when I tell my mother I am gay at a Saks Fifth Avenue. Even so, I prepare for this moment like a breakup, doing it in public in the hopes that she won’t make a scene. When I am sixteen, my history professor asks me to prove my worth, instructing our class to debate whether gay adoption should be legal, a debate in which I am the only student who believes I am not inherently a bad role model. At twenty-two, my best friend is sexually assaulted at another gay bar in Orlando. I am almost handcuffed for “disturbing the peace” after screaming at the officers called to the scene to stop laughing. For years, that is what being gay has felt like: disturbing everyone’s peace.

 

I have stripped off my mesh tank top to dance in midnight foam parties, undressed in cars tucked deep into parking garages with strange men I met on the internet, had my first kiss with a boy folded inside the lush red velvet curtain in sophomore drama rehearsal, a kiss so new and strained it felt like banging cutlery. Alongside all of this, I have survived being gay. Never tragically—always magnificently, absolutely fabulously. Still, I would be lying if I said I’ve gotten away with it unscathed. My queerness has, in fact, had its toll on me, a price of admission I can only imagine many closeted LGBTQ youth are skeptical of paying in the wake of so much hate. Even when it doesn’t get you, death snags you, tearing off your outer layer like in a horror movie where the virgin outruns the masked villain, leaving him behind clutching her crumpled cardigan, knowing they are destined to meet again in Act 3. But the real world isn’t a horror movie. In the real world villains have Sig Sauer MCX assault-style rifles and their stories are echoed in today’s pop hits, cleverly concealed in the lyrics to Foster The People’s deceitfully mellow “Pumped Up Kicks” blaring out of the stereo system at The Gap. They doff their corny masks to reveal centuries of support backing their hate: doctors declaring us mentally ill, legislation banning my friends from donating our tainted blood, preventing us from holding jobs, turning partners away from visiting each other in hospitals, expelling our transgender brothers and sisters from bathrooms, conveniently forgetting to hold our killers accountable in countless, nuanced ways.

 

Days after the shooting, gun sales in Florida double—people thinking that if they had weapons of their very own, they would have made a difference, or else worried that this will be the last straw, the deadliest mass shooting since Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook. A Florida congressional candidate announces a contest on Facebook to give away an AR-15 rifle. Now that we’ve seen the worst of it, surely gun legislation will tighten. Better stock up while we can.

 

However, this fight is not entirely unfair. We, too, are more powerful in disaster. Even when we are killed, we cannot die. We are like the mythological beast Hydra—cut off one of our heads and three will rise in its place. Stop our Pulse and our hearts will beat three times as strong. We are faeries, they tell us, and I believe them because we are nothing short of magic. I have witnessed our enormous political and social power first hand. The morning after the shooting, lines at blood drives wrapped around blocks—our indomitable, mighty dragon’s tail. At vigils, swarms of us gathered so tightly in grief that in the rooftop images splattered across every major news outlet we resemble the shadow of a fantastic beast hovering just out of sight. More than all of this, though, I am most overwhelmed by our power over death at every Orlando gay bar the week of the shooting, packed with the fiercest of activists bouncing along to our favorite queer anthems, my comrades in revolution singing along to three different versions of “Born This Way.”

 

Three years ago at Pulse, I am in trouble. My best friend has ditched me for a one-night stand and my ex-boyfriend has teamed up with a drag queen to openly debate whether I qualify as being short, yet a moment on the dance floor redeems it all. That night, I write in overly romantic prose, hoping to trap the moment like a lightning bug in a jar: I’m finally 21 and I’m alone on the dance floor flailing around to the tune of “MMMbop”, alone and engulfed in a swarm of gay guys. They are anything but apologetic. They have a few drinks in them and are at their most honest. They push when they are intruded on and shout when they have something to shout. You’ll never see a gay man so political as when he’s dancing to Hansen.

 

Looking back at that night, it’s easy to imagine that I’m still in that crowd on the dance floor, singing along to the nonsensical words of a cheesy ’90s song, alone yet part of a tribe more powerful than any dynasty I’ve ever heard of. It’s hard not to laugh at myself for ever feeling bad about a drag queen calling me short when all along the only thing that truly matters about that night and every night since is that there was a drag queen at all, that I got to be at Pulse in the first place, just as it doesn’t matter that there aren’t really words to “MMMbop” as long as in my memories there will always be music to dance to and a gay space to lose myself completely in. I can’t help but think of anyone who has ever been to Pulse or any other gay club as my friend, my clan, in the truest, most authentic sense: Who else will you allow yourself to unapologetically sing along to Hansen with? Where else could I have ever learned to take my first steps toward love? As last call pulled everyone away from the dancefloor, I remember feeling my best friend grab my hand. He did not leave with his one-night-stand after all. Together, we make our way to my car a block away from Pulse. Lo and behold, the tire did not deflate. It’s looking a little rough and is featuring a brand new gnarly war-wound, but it will be fine.

 

Back in the CVS parking lot, again I find myself patching up my car. I reinforce the headlight with a fresh layer of packing tape, securing it into place and testing it to make sure the light works. It does. Despite falling off and being dragged through two hundred feet of pavement, it’s still burning bright. I know it’s dangerous, if not altogether stupid, to not get it professionally fixed, but I can’t help but dismissing it as yet another thing I’ll get to eventually. Right now, I have to get to work and there is so much work yet to be done. It’s only for a little while longer, anyway, I tell myself. It’s a rough bandage, but in a bind, I can trust it to help me see where I’m going.

 

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Vanish

…originally published in 40.2 of The Florida Review.

 

In Italo Calvino’s version, the world began at one point, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nk_0—with all of her love, she made noodles for the boys—and then, like that, stars appeared. Land, the moon. Ocean waves, curling and releasing. Doves. Palms.

 

In my version, I am not as pivotal as Mrs. Ph(i)Nk_0, and I may never be, but I made noodles for the ones I loved: The woman I was dating, and the man who asked me, softly—“Can you teach me how to put on makeup?” And I said, without hesitation, “Yes,” and the woman I loved—she helped, too. I remember this: We went to the drug store, and I pretended the makeup was for me. He chose red, plum—the colors of autumn. And then we drove to my rental room, and Douglas sat on my bed, and Anna did too. I made spaghetti. We opened tubes of lipstick, palettes of eye shadow.

 

In the time it took for a woman’s love to become the land, tell me—did the sky stretch and open? Did the boys press their hand­s to its boundary, cupping each burning star? I’ll never fully understand the journey from one point to many, but I can tell you this: Every day we create worlds.

 

And in my rental room, on my bed, Douglas and Anna and I—we navigated a world that felt new, its boundary moving outward like a wing, or like oak leaves fading, then deepening, into umber.

 

If nourishment is the link between our true selves and the stars, then I wonder what can ever be their undoing. Bullets, golden and sparkling. A false map that says: Love is not love is not love.

 

The night of the massacre, music played, humans kissed. Queer humans. It was Latin night. Douglas, Anna and I stayed home.

 

With one bullet, the land and sky caved in.

 

And another, and another.

 

This is not the story of finding oneself. This is the story of how the universe became one stone.

 

Sometimes poetry is not enough to bring us comfort.

 

Sometimes, not even the language of the human heart can cup autumn’s colors, hold them dear in their becoming.

 

Sometimes we tell stories of love, of how one kiss can fill a soul with abundance.

 

Sometimes we go to sleep, and when we wake up—so much has vanished.

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Moonlight & Roses

1.

My mother loved crooners—Andy Williams, Perry Como, Jerry Vale. Especially Jerry Vale. His voice has a curvature, a rounding of the Rs that made him sound more Midwestern than like a guy from the Bronx, and a higher pitch than the others that added yearning, and maybe hope.

 

I know she liked his looks. Short, with lustrous black hair and sparkling brown eyes, Jerry had a smile that covered the bottom half of his face, his teeth gleaming and strong. He looked nothing like my tall, stooped, blond, green-eyed father, whose dentures came out the minute he stepped inside the front door, who sang “Waltzing Matilda” when he sang at all.

 

My mother listened to Jerry Vale as she did housework—“The Impossible Dream” while scrubbing the bathroom, “Two Purple Shadows” as she washed windows, and always, she sang along, a clear, trilling soprano, trained in the church choir. She even accompanied Jerry in Italian—“Amore, Scusami,” “Al Di La”—note for note. She pronounced pasta as “paste-uh,” but Jerry guided her effortlessly through the language of romance.

 

His calm tenor confessed love of the most resonant, enduring kind, and enunciated it so slowly and clearly, his sincerity couldn’t be doubted. My mother, with her faraway blue eyes, wiped a rag slowly over the bathroom mirror as she and Jerry admonished their hearts to “Pretend You Don’t See Her,” to instead smile and pretend to be gay. When I mocked the songs—there were so many good lines to ridicule—my mother looked hurt, and usually said something on the order of, “Just wait, honey. Someday, you’ll see how true these songs are.”

 

That idea brought me up short later, when I was alone in my room. When had my mother picked the April rose that only grows in the early spring? Whose fingers had touched her silent heart and taught it how to sing? My father? His fingers were yellow with nicotine, and the rose bushes he planted in holes in our lawn all died before eking out a bloom.

 

With their absolutes and abstractions, Jerry’s songs glorified relationships I deemed unhealthy, songs in which the beloved was the singer’s reason to be living. While my mother swooned at the implied subservience—If they made me a king, I’d be but a slave to you. Your kiss is all I need to seal my fate. You’re my everything. Love me with every beat of your heart—I worried about the all-encompassing nature of this love, which seemed like a beast ready to swallow one’s life whole. In the songs Jerry sang, even a chance encounter ended with the lovers at first sight being in love—and staying together—forever.

 

The songs I listened to created more troubling particulars—romantics hiding behind bottles in dark cafes, or solitaries driving the snowy turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston as they bade goodbye to the moonlight ladies. Nobody’s love was undying or encompassing. Even the most buoyant tune conveyed love’s trepidation—The dizzy dancing way you feel gave way to love being just another show, from which your final responsibility was to leave ’em laughing when you go, and if you care, don’t let them know.

 

And gosh almighty, baby, yes indeed—sometimes the terms were laid out right up front: You and me will only see tonight.

 

2.

The flat truths and bleakness of the songs I loved, my mother found depressing. “What about the moonlight and roses?” she asked once, near tears, as we argued our conflicting soundtracks. I was, at most, sixteen, and if not completely inexperienced, then close enough—a fact I tried to hide with a knowing smirk.

 

She said my ideas about love were all wrong. Someone brought you the roses, arranged with ferns and baby’s breath in a crystal vase. You admired them in the moonlight streaming through the tall windows of your hotel room, in Paris maybe, listening to a tinkling piano from the next apartment, while you sipped champagne—with someone. Someone was the key to your happiness. Moonlight and roses simply set the stage.

 

I probably turned sarcastic, asked when she’d ever been to Paris, had roses delivered, sipped champagne in a hotel room? Maybe she said, Well, not Paris, but Stuttgart, that time your daddy and I went to a banquet there, and stayed overnight. And I would have snapped back, Oh, that time you fell on the stairs and broke your ankle? Was that because of champagne? I was under the impression that you were drinking bourbon that night.

 

Her “someone” picked his nose at the dinner table, walked around the house in his boxer shorts, left his dirty socks balled up on the floor for her to pick up and throw in the hamper. He kept stacks of Penthouse and Playboy magazines on his bedside table, beside an ashtray filled with cigarette butts that she’d empty the next morning when she made their bed. He got angry with her over trifles, called her stupid when she did something wrong. Sometimes he introduced her as “my first wife.” When the other person looked puzzled, he’d explain, “It keeps her on her toes.”

 

I don’t know why I couldn’t let her have her fantasies. I’m not sure what I got out of making her feel sad, unless it was a tightening of my own precarious grip on a world that I’d barely tested—and that had barely tested me. She knew I laughed at her plastic flower arrangements, her treacly music, her bedside copies of The Daily Word, the musicals she watched open-mouthed on TV, weeping as couples sang their devotion. I laughed when she periodically broke into song, sometimes just a single line—Starlight looks well on us! Moonlight becomes you! Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars! So much moonlight you’d think my mother carried a beast inside her that yearned for lunar liberation.

 

3.

It’s a warm June evening, a full moon hanging above the blue spruce—the strawberry moon in this hemisphere, but the cold moon down below. Trees and bushes encircle our small backyard so that at night, it feels almost like a room with a wide door at either end, the occasional breaks in the foliage like windows onto the alley. I like just to sit out here and feel the night weighing in around me with all its mystery and substance, all its scents and secrets. Sometimes I hear small disturbances in the underbrush—rabbits, the neighborhood possum, an elusive groundhog the size of a small dog that’s lived around here for years. Sometimes I hear an occasional, abbreviated birdcall, as if some parent bird’s reassuring a nestling. Sometimes people walk down the alley, quietly talking, and I watch them, motionless and invisible in the shade of my neighbor’s hemlock hedge. The moon casts shadows that seem clearer cut than those in the day—a literal black and white demarcation on the grass.

 

But this night, my husband and I are dancing under the full moon. Blood on the Tracks plays from my iPhone—the same phone I used minutes earlier, to call him down from his study, to lure him into the backyard to see the moon. Damp grass cool against my bare feet, long cotton skirt swaying against my ankles, I’ve had way too much wine and my husband is cold sober. I’m not sure how one is supposed to dance to “Tangled Up in Blue,” but we give it a shot, holding hands and jouncing around the yard, laughing.

 

I like to think that whatever illusions we had about one another vanished years ago, victim of daily familiarity and perceptiveness. We’ve been together nearly forty years, married for most of it. Marriage is not a straight line, it’s a wheel. During one declension, my husband told me that if he had to make a choice between his work and me, he’d choose his work. He knows if the boat was sinking and I could only save one person, it would be our son. We have hurt one another deeply. We have helped one another vastly. He brings home champagne for special occasions. We’re the best of friends.

 

Only four of the twenty-nine rose bushes in our yard were here when we bought this house. As we twirl around the yard, I point out how the white and pink roses shimmer, almost phosphorescent in the moonlight. Their scent hangs lightly in the summer air.

 

The song ends and my husband says, “Let’s hear it again before I go back upstairs.” He’s working on a poem. Having hammered all day on a story that won’t give, I’m letting off a little steam. This time we slow dance, moving with awkward familiarity. “Stop trying to lead,” my husband says, as he does each time we dance. Of this song, Dylan remarked, “You’ve got yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room, and there’s very little you can’t imagine not happening.”

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What the Bats Say

… an excerpt from A Million Fragile Bones, out later in April 2017 from Twisted Road Publications. A Million Fragile Bones details the beauty and peace of Alligator Point, Florida, before the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico spewed an estimated 4.9 million barrels (210 million gallons) of oil, affected 68,000 square miles of ocean, and washed ashore along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Florida. Connie May Fowler had spent sixteen years in the haven of Alligator Point before being immersed in the year-long nightmare that was the Deepwater Horizon spill.

 

 

We are one decade into the new century and spring is glorious on the sandbar. All manner of new life—winged, finned, footless, and four-footed—is emerging on land and in the sea. The estuaries and marshes are alive with activity as birds mate, lay eggs, tend to their young. The water churns with promise: baby fish, newborn dolphin, tiny sharks. Life below and above the surface is abundant. It’s as if my known world is throwing a party.

 

The frog that lived in my shower all winter has moved to my garden. The banana spider (AKA “Banatula”) is spinning a splendid, huge orb just outside my living room window. In the early morning it shimmers with dew diamonds. Cedar waxwings were here for one delightful day, ascending and descending in balletic perfection from the pines towering above my studio. Purple martin scouts arrived three days ago; their families will soon follow. I dig in the dirt on the kitchen-side of the shack and discover a cache of pearly white, oval eggs the size of my little fingernail. So, it seems, the lizards are doing their part to keep up with the promise of spring. A rat snake has taken up residence on the back deck. The dogs keep their distance. Wrens fly in the house, swooping, darting, as they hurry to find the perfect nesting site. A pair of mating osprey obsessively brings sticks to the platform at the top of the osprey pole where they are engineering a very messy, large, but functional nest.

 

Nearly everything out there in the deep blue sea is heading my way.

 

Embattled, overfished blue fin tuna are spawning. We’re only one of two marine nurseries on the planet that host the blue fin. They favor the Gulf’s northern slope, which is a critical habitat for them. Indeed, as the Gulf goes, so goes the blue fin tuna population.

 

Gag grouper, other species of grouper, snapper, and spiny lobster are also spawning. And all their babies, over the course of the next few months, will migrate to the estuaries and marshlands of the northern Gulf where they will find safety and nourishment. They will grow. Life abundant will happen. Again.

 

Brown shrimp are at their reproductive best April through May and September through November. Their eggs float through the Gulf, eventually turning into larvae. Plankton is the larvae’s manna. As they grow stronger, nourished by plankton, they, too, travel into the northern Gulf along with their seafaring cousins. There, amid the nutrient-rich estuaries and marshes, they will begin to resemble shrimp.

 

Bottlenose dolphins, full-timers in the Gulf, are giving birth right now: March, April, May.

 

Oysters, the beleaguered lifeblood of my zip code, are spawning in the waterscapes of my front and back yards.

 

Some sea life remains in deep water as they trek northward, but those requiring oxygen, such as sea turtles and the twenty-eight species of dolphins and whales that make the Gulf home for at least part of the year (twenty species are full-time residents), necessarily spend much of their time near the water’s surface.

 

To celebrate the Gulf’s bounty—its vibrant cycle of life, life, life—nearly every coastal village and hamlet hosts seafood festivals. There seems to be one close by every weekend. Oh what I would give to be crowned Panacea’s Blue Crab Queen! But I’ll settle for a T-shirt and the knowledge that nature’s delicate balance appears steady, prolific, bountiful.

—

In the midst of all this new life I, too, have given birth of a sort. How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly, my seventh book, is winging its way into the world. This inevitably means I have to follow it out there to places far from the sandbar. I hate leaving the Point in the spring. And I also still feel very much like a newlywed, which makes sense given Bill and I have been hitched only a few months. So I bop back and forth, spending as little amount of time on the road as I can, always hurrying home so I can measure how much progress the jasmine has made (a lot), if baby mullet are jumping yet (yes), if the baby osprey are flying yet (no), if we have any crabs in our traps (sometimes yes, sometimes no), if Bill’s blue eyes still make me shiver (yes).

—

Bill doesn’t waste any time. As soon as I hit the road for my book tour, he takes it upon himself to paint the interior of the shack, put up new shelving, and renovate the kitchen, including the addition of recessed, built-in shelves. I call him from a central Florida hotel room that smells like wet swimsuits and stale beer.

 

“I miss you,” he says in a southern drawl that confounds me since he is a Midwesterner.

 

“I miss you, too.”

 

“I love you.”

 

“I love you, too.”

 

“You sure do have a lot of things.”

 

“What do you mean?” I thought I lived the life of a frugal hermit.

 

“Your altars. I’m having to disassemble them so I can paint.”

 

“Oooooh.” I imagine my poor husband collecting all the bits of bones and shells and dried flowers and spell books and feathers and more, gathering them into assigned portions of the kitchen table so he doesn’t lose anything, so the altars can be reassembled just the way he found them.

 

“Pile it all up and I’ll deal with it when I get home,” I say, sensing his unease at the responsibility he feels for the ephemera of my life. But I also know the painting, the building, the renovating: It’s his way of nesting, of making the shack ours, not just mine, of him working his way into the mysterious nooks and crannies of married life and paradise.

—

The newlywed in me has decided to cook a five-star worthy dinner every night, using homegrown ingredients whenever possible and creating every morsel from scratch. Though it looks like I’m cooking (and I am), I’m also casting spells. I whirl through the kitchen, seeking spices and solutions. Heart, home, love. Heart, home, love. Heart, home, love.

 

I’ve just finished kneading my dough for tonight’s dinner bread: Cuban bread complete with a palm frond down the vertical length of the loaf. My whole body—crown of my head to tips of my toes—is dusted in a thin layer of fine flour. I think about working my way up to pain de campagne, a daunting recipe in Julia Child’s Baking with Julia. It requires “capturing and nurturing airborne wild yeast” which floats in the air only after many days of tossing yeast about as part of the bread-baking ritual. I’ve never had the nerve or need to “coax wild yeast and bacteria and harness their energy.” That sounds like a job for a physicist. I sneeze. Flour, if not yeast, flies through the air, resembling dust motes. I catch my reflection in the mirror that hangs on the wall closest to the living room. I appear painted, ready for battle. I study the birdfeeders hanging from the rafters of the deck. A bevy of hummingbirds sup. My back aches. My hands hurt. Why didn’t I just pick up a loaf of French bread when I was in town? Who am I trying to impress with all this homemaking mania? He’ll be home soon and I’ve got to get this place cleaned up … oh my God.

 

I tiptoe over to the door, snowing flour as I go, trying to make less sound than the wind. Perched at the same feeder are a rose-breasted grosbeak and a blue grosbeak. The blue grosbeak could easily be mistaken for an indigo bunting, but the grosbeak is larger and has broad, cinnamon wing bars. I don’t think there is any other bird one could mistake for the rose-breasted. Its deep crimson shield glimmers against its white belly and black head.

 

These, like the avocets, are two birds I thought I’d never see—individually or together—unless I move to Mexico where they winter or the Great North where they breed in the summer. Once again, I experience the thrill of living on the edge of the world, a cusp where water and forest meet, a dynamic wonder-ground.

 

I do not take lightly the responsibilities of living at a migratory crossroads. Seed in the feeders. Parsley for the swallowtail caterpillars. Milkweed for the monarchs. Bee balm and hibiscus and honeysuckle for the hummingbirds. Clean gourds for the purple martins. Bat houses for the bats. Seashells placed in the birdbaths so butterflies can drink without risk of drowning.

 

It is April 20, 2010, and all seems right with the world.

—

The following day, April 21, as the sun descends into the Gulf’s blue horizon, washing the cumulus-slurried sky in ribbons of purple, gold, aqua, and radiant hues as yet unnamed, Bill and I are enjoying what we call “bull bat hour”—cocktails amid the bats newly emerged from their slumber, mammals on the wing feasting on mosquitoes and no-see-ums.

 

Out here on the sandbar, twilight shimmers. Dragonflies stir the air with the metallic thrum of transparent wings; they hover and flit, dive and ascend, resembling tiny bursts of tumbling stained glass, occasionally resting on a stem, a limb, a blossom, my hair. Purple martins pierce the jasmine-laden breeze, competing with the bats—the former eating supper and the latter breakfast. Seabirds return to their roosts. Overhead, terns chatter so raucously my dogs bark at them. As the birds glide out of sight and earshot, the dogs exchange satisfied glances. I believe they think their barking drives away the noisy aviators. My favorite pair of great blue heron plaintively squawks, their voices calling each other home to their nocturnal rest in the sentinel oak at the edge of the harbor.

 

If one is lucky enough to be on the water at bull bat time in a calm wind, you will hear the creak of the pelicans’ wings as they skim the water on their way to the western end of the Point where they gather in a great feathered conclave, on a beach populated only by ghost crabs and what the surf brings in—star fish, sand dollars, sea urchins—until daybreak when they take to the sky again.

 

But it is the bats I watch. Their scientific name, chiroptera, means hand-wing, surely one of the more appropriate and poetic designations ever made by science.  Evolution has gifted these animals to the point that it is only a minor exaggeration to say, physically, bats are exquisite wings attached to tiny faces.

 

I have had many close encounters with bats, the first being when I was perhaps eleven or twelve. It was a blistering August evening and I was watching Sanford and Son with my mother when I happened to look down and see a saucer-sized bat resting atop my sweaty bare foot. I said, “Oh, oh!” instead of “Holy shit!” because my mother was the only person allowed to cuss in our house.

 

Fear spiking, I was trapped in a quandary: stay hidden and still while hoping for the best (translation: maybe the bat would just fly away) or run into the world—visible, shouting, flailing (translation: risk the ridicule of my mother and all humanity). Inaction versus action and its attendant but unknowable results is a puzzle that confounds me to this day.

 

Mother, steeped in her own time zone, laughed as Redd Foxx grabbed his chest and delivered his classic quip, “Elizabeth, I’m coming to join you!” With her cigarette bobbing between clenched teeth, she glanced at the bat—the whites of her eyes flashing with Bette Davis flair—and muttered out of the left side of her mouth because the right side was in charge of the cigarette, “Son of a bitch! Goddamn it. Don’t move.”

 

She marched into the kitchen—I remained immobile, fearing any movement would inspire the winged Fury into a feeding frenzy—and then returned with her pine-handled broom, which she held aloft with fierce conviction, her pose reminding me of the Joan of Arc prayer card I kept hidden in my top dresser drawer beneath a nest of fading underwear.

 

I was terrified Mother was going to beat the bat to death and, in the process, reduce my foot to pulp (she swung a mean broom), but instead she simply proceeded, her cigarette fashionably akimbo, to chase the bat out of our roach-infested rental, screaming “Out, out, you bastard!”

 

Fearing my foot might be infected, I dabbed it with what was left of my Coca Cola (the boys down the street had told me Coke could take rust off a radiator, so surely it would fizz bat germs from flesh). I looked up. Mother was back, her hair on end from the struggle with bat and broom and screen door.

 

“How do you think it got in here?”

 

“How the hell do I know?” She tilted the broom against the doorframe, flopped onto the couch, lit another cigarette using the ember-end of the old one, and that was that: my first bat encounter.

 

But it would not be my last. Indeed, walking at twilight remains hazardous. Bats simply don’t see me. When foolish enough to take an evening stroll, I bob and weave in an attempt to avoid head-on collisions, looking as if I’m performing a spastic imitation of Mohammed Ali’s graceful ring dance.

 

My theory (untested and probably without a shred of scientific merit) is that the bats’ echolocation bounces right through me, rendering invisible my corporeal self, this being a result of low blood pressure (mine, not theirs; I’m not even sure if bats possess blood pressure).

 

And, yes, surely there are other explanations: the bats are drunk, having feasted on fermented fruit; a rabies epidemic; they just like to fuck with me. I don’t know. I’m sticking with the low blood pressure-echolocation theory because it makes a good story.

 

But the plot thickens. On a sultry summer night in 1996, I walked to my downtown Nashville hotel after a book event. I felt pretty full of myself. I’d given a good reading and signed lots of books. The storeowner was delighted. Even the sales rep who’d made a surprise visit seemed appropriately satisfied. So I might have had a bit of a swagger. I might have even caught my reflection in a skyscraper’s plate glass window and not recognized myself. In short, I was happy.

 

As I approached the civic center, which was a mere two blocks from my digs, chaos splintered the placid evening. People driving home after a production of Carmen honked and cut each other off and made obscene hand gestures and behaved, generally, the way folks normally do in a traffic jam: as if their very lives depended on them being the ones to lead the elephant parade.

 

The cast and crew milled about on the sidewalk, waiting for buses to take them to their next tour stop. Their hump-backed equipment, scattered hither and yon, resembled brooding prehistoric snails. I noticed most in the gathering were male which, probably due to anthropological reasons, made me both fearful and excited. When this realization tumbled to the front of my brain—poof!—Confident Connie was gone, and in her place stumbled a gal haunted by her past, riddled with self-conscious angst.

 

No longer buoyant, I threaded my way through a Gordian knot of noisy masculine chatter—all of it in Spanish or Italian, I wasn’t sure which, maybe both—bodies and shadows in motion, cased musical instruments, suitcases, props. I felt unmoored, as if the night had suddenly been infused with a bad case of buckle your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

 

Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a dark shadow glide through the air and then felt it unfurl in a soft embrace against my neck. It fluttered, gentle and feminine, in the light Southern summer breeze. An image of Isadora Duncan (whom I desperately wanted to be once I got over the shock I would never, ever look like Sophia Loren no matter how many hours I lay in the backyard dirt while slathered in iodine-laced baby oil) wafted through my consciousness: Isadora dancing through life, a fabulous long scarf floating in her wake. One of the men—they were yelling and wildly gesturing—must have tossed into the Tennessee Williams night a crepe paper streamer.

 

In addition to hoping the paper was yellow or pink so it would complement my pale linen suit, I did what my mother taught me to do when men acted the fool: I ignored them.

 

But it didn’t work. Their catcalling escalated. Still, I marched on. Don’t you dare look at them, you little heathen.

 

The crepe paper caressed my skin in a rhythmic beat normally reserved for something with a pulse. Since when, I wondered—my fear nebulous, unfocused—did crepe paper possess cadence? I grabbed at my neck, took hold of something soft and warm—the men screamed—gazed at my hand, and delivered (at least in my emotional mind I did) a shriek that scarred the night.

 

In my very own hand—a hand that only moments prior felt very ordinary—I held a small bat. Or rather, it held me. The creature clung to the fatty rise of my palm, pinching my skin with something tapered and sharp. Fang or claw? I did not know. I flicked my wrist as hard as I could. The bat’s talons—or were they teeth?—dug deeper. Its wings fluttered in black vampire perfection against my chunky, yellow Bakelite bangle. The goddamned bat, as my mother would have said, wasn’t letting go.

 

The teeming mass of male humanity shouted what I assumed was advice. I did not speak their language because, though I made As in high school Spanish, I retained very little knowledge except that one should never develop a crush on the new guy, at least not while he’s still new and untested.

 

Clueless as to the meaning of the men’s swift phrasings, the rapidity of their words in all likelihood fueled by fear, I continued to vehemently shake my arm. I could not bring myself to pick off The Creature of The Night, which was unfortunate because no matter how hard I shook, flung, or gyrated, this demon seed of Dracula remained attached to me like a black diamond wrist corsage.

 

There, amid the heat and wavering light and cacophony of male counsel, I brought the bat closer and inspected, faintly fascinated, and praying I wasn’t bleeding.  Its little face resembled that of a wee dog with giant ears.

 

The bat looked at me as though I was a mere curiosity and it held all the power. The good news: It had not fanged me. The bad news: I realized bats possessed tiny, powerful thumbs crowned with flesh-ripping claws.

 

I am superstitious. Of this, I am unashamed. After all, I was raised by a woman who believed she spoke to demons. How could I not believe in signs, ghosts, spells, Barnabas Collins, and the possibility that all bats are secret goatsuckers? I didn’t need a refresher course in the occult to know a clinging winged rat was not a good omen.

 

Panicked to the point of nearly losing control of my mind and bodily functions, I flicked my hand so violently I distended my wrist. The bangle flew off, ricocheting into the tangle of men and equipment. Pain radiated up my arm and fissured in the maze of my elbow and shoulder. The bat, possibly suffering from thumb distension or shriek-induced deafness, did, however, release me, promptly disappearing—a shy apparition—into the chaos of moon-filtered chiaroscuro and city bustle.

 

Before I could begin to track down my Bakelite or worry myself into a frenzy over how many agonizing rabies shots I would have to endure, a young man jumped in front of me, danced an agitated jig, and said in a thick accent, his eyes wide with what I interpreted as both fear and wonder, “No worry, ma’am, no worry. Bat good luck!”

 

What the hell was wrong with this guy?

 

“It was a fucking bat!” I said, rubbing my wrist, the sensation of the creature’s claws and wings haunting my neck and hand. I triple-checked: no broken skin, which I was pretty sure meant (a) I didn’t have rabies and (b) I remained an outsider among the ranks of the vampiric dead.

 

“I know, I know!” His feet slowed as did his speech, and he repeated himself, allowing the syllables to hang in the air longer than necessary, each vowel oozing into a viscous slur. “Noooo wor reee.  Baaaat goooood luck.”

 

Fourteen years and many trials later, I stand on my back porch, testing fate again, wondering what sort of luck I would have had without that bat encounter. Bill hands me a glass of wine as I watch the evening’s first wave of chiroptera flicker though the gathering twilight—black silhouettes shattering a prism sky. I take stock. Was life a series of mistakes and trials interrupted by small moments of joy? That would suck. Was it a mixture of luck and fate, good karma and bad, depending on a cosmic roll of the dice? Did cataclysmic things happen to decent people just because? Did the Old Testament God occasionally wake from his eternal slumber and screw with people simply for shits and giggles?

 

A bat swoops within a foot of me. I don’t flinch.

 

“That was close,” Bill says, bringing his Jim Beam on ice closer to his chest, as if he suspects bats have a proclivity for brown liquor.

 

“Do you think Job deserved those boils and plagues?” I ask, slapping at a no-see-um.

 

“Absolutely not,” Bill says, keeping his gaze pegged to the sky that is now quite crowded with winged creatures. I think Bill is about to expound on what he thinks of God’s treatment of Job and it probably isn’t complimentary of the Lord Almighty, as a faded relation of mine oft refers to Him, but our attention is snagged by a thread of conversation emanating from the house. We had, like poor earth stewards, left on the TV.

 

A CNN talking head reports that overnight in the Gulf, gas, oil, and concrete from something called the Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded up the wellbore to the deck, where it caught on fire. Eleven platform workers are missing. Rescue and recovery operations are underway. A Coast Guard petty officer insists there is no sign of a leak.

 

“A rig exploded and there isn’t a leak? How can that be?” I ask Bill. I gaze out at Alligator Bay, worry mushrooming through every corpuscle in my body. I can’t survive the destruction of this pristine estuary, this amazing ecosystem where if you are a fish, a marine mammal, a land mammal, an insect, a bird, a mullet, you’ve found one of the greatest places on the planet to birth babies. Or, if you are a grown woman with a painful past, you find solitude and grace, states of being that if you’re lucky lead you down the path toward forgiveness and new love.

 

“They’re lying again,” Bill says, a matter-of-fact nonchalance lacing his words.

 

One of the herons glides to its roost in the big tree. It lands amid gnarled branches and squawks—a warning, an avian sigh, an issuance of old pain, a call to its mate (I’m home. Where are you?): Which one I don’t know. But I fear Bill is right.

 

I rest my head against his shoulder, watch the winged world feed, my memory flashing on a horrific ingrained image: oiled birds dying horrendous deaths in the wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster, and I find myself praying to whatever is out there. Please, dear God, no.

 

Then I voice a hope that makes no sense, at least not to my husband. I slip my hand into his and say, “The sky is full of good luck tonight.”

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Manpower

Abuelo was the picker. Apá was the packer. Alex and I took turns harvesting grape and carrying the heavy boxes of fruit down the row to our father. We had started out a group of seven, but the foreman said the group was too large. So tío Rafael, who was an exceptional packer, was asked to form his own group with tío Ramón and Juvenal, our cousin. That made sense since that was also how we split up between two cars to get to the fields. We came together as a family again during lunch hour but the rest of the day Alex and I had to stand opposite of Abuelo, who reprimanded us at every turn. We worked too slowly. We talked too much. We left the grape too shiny. Since his hearing wasn’t very good, we learned to whisper and to catch the words through the dusty leaves, over the sound of the squeaky hinges on three pairs of scissors.

 

“What are you going to do with your first check?” Alex asked. This was a question my father had asked us almost every day that first week on the job. It was his way of encouraging us since we were going to give up most of our summer to farm labor. Abuelo had already made it clear we were not going to be allowed to vegetate in front of the television when school was out. “Al fil,” he said. To the fields. Like every other kid who, at fourteen, was old enough to work.

 

When the task became tedious, when the heat became oppressive, we threw that question out as a way to keep going. No one was going to stop us from dreaming.

 

“I want to buy a pair of dress shoes that aren’t made of plastic,” I said.

 

“Plastic?” Alex said, pausing for a second.

 

“You know, fake. They make your feet sweaty and stinky. I hear that the ones made of leather keep your feet fresh.”

 

“Okay, but what do you want leather shoes for? You’re not going to the prom. You don’t go out on dates. You have no girlfriend. You don’t dance.”

 

“Neither do you,” I countered.

 

“So what do you want them for?”

 

I wanted to say that I wanted to feel like a man for once, but I didn’t really know what I meant by that. I had seen pictures of Abuelo in his youth, his mustache so black and preened to perfection, showing off the tattoos on his forearm. He was wearing dress pants and a pair of shoes that shone so clean and new they made him look respectable, despite the tattoos. During Apá’s days as a musician, he was also pictured with bright shiny patent leather shoes. All the glamour of their pasts was on display in the footwear. Their present was dirty sneakers and work boots. That was my present as well. I wanted to claim my moment of glamour.

 

“Take that box out,” Abuelo barked. He was only visible from the waist down, but I could see how he pointed to a full box with the ends of his scissors. I imagined his mustache punctuating his severe expression underneath that hat he always wore when he stepped out of the house.

 

It was Alex’s turn, so he crossed underneath the vines. The rustling reminded me of rain. An odd image to invoke in the near hundred-degree heat, the sand around my sneakers growing warmer by the hour. Another desert deception, like a mirage.

 

As soon as Alex was out of earshot, Abuelo began his griping. “I’m not sure what your brother is thinking, skipping school and running off with your good-for-nothing cousins. Without school he’s going to end up here, with us. He thinks this life is easy, well, he’s about to find out.”

 

I knew by now that Abuelo did not want a response, just a listener. I let his words dust each bunch in my hand as I inspected it and determined that it was ripe enough to pick and place in the box. One thing I did admire about Abuelo was how he dropped a bunch so fearlessly from as high as the vine, confident that it wouldn’t fall apart, grapes bouncing off in all directions. When I asked Apá about this he said that it was decades of skill. “And he doesn’t give a shit anymore,” he added. “He knows the packer has to clean it before it’s packed.”

 

Abuelo kept on: “And your father, running around with that woman, as if he were a teenager. Even you boys don’t bring us that kind of trouble.”

 

Trouble meant that Amelia, Apá’s soon-to-be wife, was pregnant. I didn’t particularly like her, but I liked Abuelo less, and I didn’t appreciate any poison coming from his mouth, no matter where it was going. He voiced these things to me, to Abuela, but to no one else. He was cowardly that way.

 

“I need to use the toilets,” I said, and walked away.

 

At the end of the row, Apá stood at the packing table, shifting his weight and shaking his leg. I knew how painful it was for him to stand all those hours from 6:00 a.m. to quitting time, sometimes as late as 2:00 p.m. He saw me coming and smiled. His dark skin looked even darker with that red shirt he was wearing.

 

“Where’s Alex?” I asked.

 

“I told him to bring me some water. And I’m thinking why don’t you go get me some water too.”

 

I pursed my lips. I knew the code. It was my father’s way of letting us stretch our legs, and to give us a break from Abuelo.

 

As I walked out into the dirt avenue toward the water truck, my body ached just watching people bend, then stand still as they picked grape on the hot soil, the long sleeves of their flannel shirts covered in sulfur. My eyes became moist. I felt sorry for Abuelo and Apá and everyone else who had to do this an entire lifetime. I was not yet out of high school, but I was already certain this would not be my fate. All that talk about colleges in my homeroom got me excited, though I had not yet revealed to my family what my plans were for the near future. I didn’t want anyone—especially Abuelo—to get in the way. But I wasn’t too sure about Alex’s fate now that he had dropped out of school.

 

“Save me some,” I said to him as I approached.

 

“It tastes funny,” he said.

 

“Everything tastes funny here. Even saliva.” I poured water into the paper cone. In a few hours, when the cones were exhausted, there would be a single dirty cup sitting on top of the tank. At that point nobody cared about hygiene and passed the cup from mouth to mouth.

 

“And what are you going to do with your first check?” I said.

 

“I don’t know. Save for a car.”

 

“A car? With the little money we’re going to make? You’re going to start with a tire?”

 

“Or maybe a fucking bicycle, okay?”

 

I didn’t take his snapping at me too personally. The heat gave all of us short tempers.

 

We each filled a cone of water to take to our father. We already knew where his paycheck was going—to the new baby.

 

“What kind of car?” I said, as a way of assuaging Alex’s hurt feelings.

 

“A convertible. I want to ride with the top off.”

 

Alex with his baby mustache that would never grow beyond chicken scratches was only fifteen but he already knew how to drive. I wasn’t sure how this came to be since I was a year older and I had never even practiced getting behind the wheel of car. Driver’s ed was still a semester away.

 

“Where would you go?” I asked.

 

“I don’t know. I’d just go.”

 

And I realized that this was his way of dreaming about leaving. I had been plotting my escape as well.

 

My father took the cones and threw the water into his mouth. He crushed them and dropped them at his feet. They looked so out of place there, white crinkled paper over a small graveyard of discarded fruit not good enough to pack. He smiled. My father had a handsome smile but I resented it because he never got me braces and my crooked upper row embarrassed me. When I was younger I kept pleading until he finally shut me up by telling me that they would straighten themselves out naturally. “My teeth used to be uglier than yours, right Apá?” And Abuelo agreed from the couch, complicit in the deceit.

 

When we took our places at the grapevine again, Abuelo was gone. Our respite from his supervision was extended.

 

“He hates to work, doesn’t he?” I said.

 

“Yeah, and so he takes it out on all of us.”

 

Usually it was Abuela who worked in the fields and Abuelo stayed home to cook. But his younger brother, tío Justo, had come to visit from who knows where and he wouldn’t stop teasing his older brother about how he had become the woman in the marriage.

 

“You should lend him your aprons, María,” he called out, and no one dared laugh. Tío Justo cackled at his own jokes for all of us.

 

Even my grandmother wasn’t amused. She stood behind the stove, making faces, bothered that Abuelo had asked her to do the cooking, which she didn’t like to do. Nor was she much good at it. We couldn’t stand Abuelo, but we sure did appreciate his skills in the kitchen because Abuela’s dishes were usually inedible.

 

Tío Justo was the only person who could shame Abuelo. He ridiculed Abuelo’s belly, his bald spot, his lack of gold jewelry and flaccid muscles, and the fact that he didn’t pay attention to young women anymore. At the supermarket tío Justo would goad him, elbowing him whenever a pretty young girl walked past them. Abuelo looked so awkward trying to keep up with his brother’s ogling. The entire theater of masculinity was mortifying to all of us because my father never acted like that and neither did he expect us to.

 

And so here Abuelo was, trying to prove to his brother that he was still a man by coming to work and forcing Abuela to stay home, and I knew that neither of them was happy about the arrangement. It almost made me feel sorry for him, until I saw him walk back to his spot.

 

“Remember when someone we know bought exercise equipment to impress someone else we know?” I said to Alex. The mischief in my tone made me blush. We had reached that part of the day when we started making fun of Abuelo.

 

Alex giggled. “I certainly do. I still use it. All he did was remove the packaging.”

 

“If you’re ever that mean to me when we’re old, Alex, I promise you I’m going to kick my nice leather shoe up your ass.”

 

“And if you’re as ridiculous as they are when you get old, I’m going to run your ass over with my convertible.”

 

We couldn’t contain our giggling. And it wasn’t until Abuelo told us to cut it out that we slipped back into the coma of the hot weather.

 

At quitting time, we weren’t as relieved as everyone because our car was parked the farthest. This was one of Abuelo’s bright ideas: to show up before everyone else so that we could nab the best parking spot on the side of the road. Sometimes it paid off because the work route took us toward the road and we were the first to reach our car, but if the route took us away from the road, we had the longest trek to Apá’s precious blue Mustang.

 

Sure enough, we were the last to leave. And just as we settled into the hot vinyl seats, another heartbreak: the car wouldn’t start.

 

“Now what?” Abuelo said. He wiped a ring of sweat underneath his hat.

 

“I don’t know,” Apá said. “We have gas. Let me check under the hood.”

 

As my father went out to inspect the problem, Abuelo went at it: “What does your father know about cars? He’s always buying these useless pieces of junk. He never has any money to invest on something that’s not going to leave us all stranded in the middle of the desert. And now with another mouth to feed on the way, he’s going to be broke for the rest of his life.”

 

Wound up by his own anger, Abuelo got out of the car to join my father.

 

“And what the fuck does he know about cars?” Alex said.

 

We were getting too sweaty in the backseat so we got out as well, only to find Apá and Abuelo arguing as one pulled on this wire and the other yanked on that cable.

 

“This is a piece of shit car,” Abuelo said.

 

“You’re not being very helpful, Apá. Why don’t you go back inside?”

 

Abuelo grumbled but he did just that though not before calling the obvious: “And keep your eye out for anyone passing by, maybe all we need is a jump.”

 

“Do you want us to walk to the main road, Apá?” I said. And that’s when the tears started welling up in his eyes. So he smiled as he wiped them away.

 

“Dude,” Alex said.

 

“I didn’t do anything,” I said.

 

But I had done something. I had reminded him of what was upon us: Alex wasn’t doing well in school, Apá was expecting another child with a woman I didn’t want to accept as my future stepmother, Abuelo was inflicting his insecurities on all of us, and I was about to leave forever, though no one but me knew that. Or maybe my father did know—a parental intuition that told him he was about to lose his son. But at the moment, here we all were, stuck because my father bought the cheapest car he could afford. We had worked close to nine hours and now he had to watch his sons beg for help from a stranger on the side of the road.

 

“This is not the kind of life I wanted for you,” he said, weeping with his hands flat on the car.

 

The raised hood kept us hidden from Abuelo’s sight, but neither Alex nor I knew how to comfort our father. We were not used to gestures of affection. That was not manly behavior. Alex kept knocking on my elbow with his fist, as if encouraging me to make the first move. But I didn’t know what that move should be.

 

“Stop crying, Apá,” I said. “Don’t let your father see you.” I couldn’t help but blurt out a phrase my own mother had said to me many times when I became too emotional when my father was nearby. It felt useful but not right. “Alex and I will get help,” I continued. “You wait here in case anyone passes by.”

 

Apá’s sniffling was the last sound we heard as we made our way to the main road. It was going to be a wait because these were the grape fields and it was past harvesting time. Even the stragglers had made it home by now. Our best hope was one of our kin, an undocumented alien taking the back roads for safety, or a driver who had made a wrong turn somewhere. The nearest payphone was miles away at the closest gas station.

 

“What do you think is going to happen?” Alex said.

 

“Oh, don’t worry, a truck will come by and give us all a lift to the gas station.”

 

“No, I meant, about Apá.”

 

“Oh,” I said. I looked behind us. Abuelo was looking our direction as if that could make us walk any faster. We were hungry and thirsty, and I knew Alex’s legs were as weak as mine at the moment.

 

“I think he feels bad he left us with our grandparents after our mom died. And now that Amelia is pregnant, that means he’s never coming back or even coming to get us.”

 

“So that’s it then.”

 

“Yes, that’s it. And Abuelo is pissed because he knows Apá will be asking for money from him and Abuela.”

 

“What a shitty father,” Alex said.

 

I didn’t want to ask if he meant Apá or Abuelo or both. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t care. I was sleepy suddenly and I began to fantasize about the college dormitory room I remembered from the brochure that awaited me in a year or so. It would be the first time I would have my own bed.

 

When we exited the blocks of grapevines we were met with a breeze. It was refreshing and liberating. But there was no movement as far as the eye could see. And not much sound, except for the vibrations of the telephone cables above us.

 

“So what are you doing with your first check?” I said.

 

Alex smiled. “Buying my dad a car so he can get our asses to work. You?”

 

“Same thing.”

 

“What about your fancy shoes?”

 

I shrugged. Fancy shoes seemed so useless all of a sudden. But a bicycle would have helped. I let out a laugh.

 

“What’s so funny?” Alex asked.

 

“Nothing. I was just thinking that maybe you weren’t wrong about the bicycle after all.”

 

“I told you, stupid. You and your fancy ass shoes. Where do you think you’re going?”

 

The answer was complicated: I was going to leave eventually. I was going to leave him. But that didn’t seem like the right moment to tell him. So I simply said, “Nowhere. I’m not going anywhere yet.”

 

“That’s right, Turrútut. Like it or not we’re stuck here together you and me.”

 

I had the strangest sensation that Alex was trying to tell me something, but I was too brain-dead. Or maybe I was reading too much into his words. Our father had abandoned us, but my leaving was not the same thing. And not for a few more years. Perhaps all he needed was reassurance. Especially after seeing my father break down in front of us.

 

“Hey, listen, Alex, it’s going to be okay. I’ll always be here for you. I promise.”

 

Alex looked at me intently. We had to try to read each other’s minds. Unlike Apá, he was not one to let his defenses down. We locked eyes for a few seconds and then he turned away. We slipped into silence again. That was all the sentimentality we were going to manage between us.

 

No car passed us by for an additional thirty minutes but we didn’t have to wait any longer because the blue Mustang came speeding out of the dirt avenue kicking up dust. My father honked the horn and our bodies jumped with excitement.

 

“We got a jump from the foreman,” Apá said. “He was making one last inspection and your grandfather spotted him.”

 

Abuelo raised his chin slightly, acting like the hero of the story.

 

I patted Abuelo on the shoulder in gratitude. “Good job, Abuelo!”

 

“And don’t you dare stop anywhere, Apá, in case the car won’t start again,” Alex said.

 

“Yeah,” I piled on.

 

“Listen to your sons. Listen to your sons,” Abuelo said.

 

Alex and I climbed in and we set off for home. I made eye contact with Apá through the rearview mirror for a fleeting moment. In the back seat, as we sat side by side, a glorious comfort came upon me and I might have held my brother’s hand if it weren’t the least manly gesture of affection I could imagine. So instead I joined the banter and laughter until we reached the freeway, where we blended into the traffic, just one more anonymous unit of Mexicans in the desert. It felt good to be in the company of these men. For once, I felt I belonged to this private world we called manhood, which wasn’t perfect, which was sometimes painful, but was my birthright.

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