Words, Galaxies, and Stars
The following stories were published in the Hillside Nest between 2005 and 2023.
Mission Creek
The wind blew, sending swirls of dust dancing past the old, adobe church topped with a large, plain, wooden cross as Neil Sparks gathered his coat collar and walked quickly from his battered pickup, across the parking lot that was once a river, toward the church door. He didn’t notice the other small car in the lot, in which a young couple was waiting for him. A big, full desert moon glowered as the massive cross creaked and swayed slightly under her tidal pull and the indifferent, dry wind. Neil looked up at the cross, for him silhouetted in the moon, and hurried inside.
Behind the altar at the far end of the church, Neil lifted a wooden ladder and positioned it against the back wall. He hoisted a coil of heavy rope over his shoulder and climbed, feeling the beers he had drank while focused on Linda a short time ago. He shoved open the trap door that led to the roof with his head and shoulders and clambered out. Above him, the big cross moaned under the weight of the moon and wind. He had to secure it, so others could see it and believe things he no longer did. It was good rope, but when Neil surveyed the work he had completed, tightly anchoring the cross to the ancient, petrified roof beams, he knew it was just a temporary fix. Tired and sweaty, he descended the ladder. Back inside the church, in front of the altar, Rusty and Randi Lannon waited for Neil to reach the bottom rung. Ready to baptize their child, born out of wedlock in their senior year, the now married (by Neil) Lannons could smell the beer on Neil’s breath as he reached the bottom and wondered what he had been doing on the roof.
“Windy up there,” a vaguely confused Rusty suggested to Neil, who turned from the ladder.
“Yeah. I think it will hold.”
“The lord will see to it, Reverend,” offered Randi.
“And the old rope will help, too,” added Neil
Ten thousand years earlier, the ground in New Mexico where the Mission Creek church stood had been a murky morass, fed by the Rio Grande River, then as wide as the Mississippi today. When the river shrunk, the morass was drained until it was a series of “creeks,” one of which survived to the colonial era and gave the town its name when the Spanish built a church on its bank. In Neal’s time, there was no visible trace of the creek, but the local Pueblo people had traced the water’s path across the paved church parking lot, believing it would help protect the people of the church. But some of the more pious, white Christians who dominated Neal’s flock cried “animism!” And the parking lot was repaved, the creek and the ancient morass memorialized by cars.
When the interstate came through, the town’s identity morphed from having been the home of an historic Spanish mission church to a rest stop on the highway, featuring fast food and plenty of low-paying jobs. The population grew from all the people who came to work at the service stations and fast food restaurants that catered to the interstate automobiles and their human occupants. Attendance at Neal’s church swelled with believers seeking to enrich their faith and rationalize their belief in cars and the good things found in all the highway retail to which they could drive.
And sometimes they drove to Nino’s. And when they left Nino’s bar, they were often drunk, and some of them burned up in fiery crashes on the interstate on and off ramps. Nino's place seemed to have been there forever, from before the creek was paved and the interstate built. No one really knew how Nino came to be the owner or how his daughter, Linda, seemed to arrive one day out of nowhere. All anyone knew was that she had been staying with her mother and now lived there. There was an air of intrigue, but not really for the bar’s patrons who were generally unconcerned about the lives of the darker skinned people among them, except to assume that they were doing something illegal.
Nino’s was on the side of the old road, halfway between the church and the interstate. Its dusty, dirt parking lot was usually filled with a combination of pickups and sedans, locals and those who ventured away from the interstate exit. The dark, smokey interior was divided by a long, wide, wood bar on one side and a scattering of tables and chairs on the other. Nino bartended, and three times a night, his daughter Linda danced atop the wide bar, the smudged faces of local laborers and the reddening white faces of travelers looking up at her, some with great interest, some with indifference, and some seemingly, but shyly obsessed. All tipped her, some modestly, some lavishly. The jukebox blared both rock ‘n roll and country, but Linda danced to her own music, giving just enough of herself away to the men at the bar to hold their interest and get their cash. She wore a yellow bikini, tight against her brown skin and curves and not at all hiding the long scar on her back, which no one seemed to notice. And no one paid too much attention to the man in reflective sunglasses who came in once a week, carrying his dark blue suit coat over his shoulder.
Martin Brent, a regional DEA agent, came in to collect from Nino. During his visits, a dark van was always parked in the lot until he left. It was a world where people were used to dark vans and “agents” in suits or heavily armed and armored paramilitary types. No one cared beyond a vague, fleeting sense of horror when someone with brown skin was whisked away in a dark van. As long as people could drive their cars to go to work and then to stores to buy stuff and then some to bars to forget and feed their rationalizations, what difference did the presence of secret police types taking away dangerous illegals matter? And no one who looked like them would ever be bothered.
But Martin Brent walked on both sides of the law, rendering it meaningless - the law as a means for control and profit and having little to do with justice now. That would have to be found elsewhere as a hot, dry desert wind coated the vehicles in Nino’s parking lot with a thick film of fine dust. Inside, Martin Brent spoke briefly with Nino and walked away, sliding an envelope into his inside coat pocket, which he re-slung over his shoulder as he walked out of the bar, across the lot, and into his black sedan, covered in dust. When his car pulled out of the parking lot, the dark van with blackened windows followed.
In addition to booze, Nino sold the finest weed in the state, delivered wholesale by Brent, who oversaw the smooth passage of the large bales of premium ganja across the border. Brent knew that Nino was undocumented, so the bales and envelopes kept coming whether Nino wanted to sell the weed or not. And there was little profit in it for Linda’s father, just assurance, credible or not, from the corrupt Brent that he would be left alone and not lose his bar or be deported. And just to make sure, to diminish the threat of a reversal, Linda had to be “nice” to Bent in a way she didn’t have to be with the patrons of the bar where Nino enforced a “no touch” policy with a shotgun he kept behind the bar. But Nino was never concerned about Neal.
Growing up in Mission Creek, Neal Sparks knew of Nino’s - everyone did - but he only went in there once, in his senior year as something the boys did - a wild night out before the prom and graduation. This was before Linda came, and Neal was mortified by the other boys urging him to slip a dollar into a dancer’s bikini string. Neal was pious and devoted to his sweetheart, Connie. The dancers' curves and moves stirred him, but he had no idea what to do with those feelings in the presence of real people. He and Connie never “went all the way,” and Neal headed east to divinity school a virgin.
Raised in a religious household, Neal was an obedient child, driven to obey his parents and the laws of God because he feared the terrible sanctions that would be imposed should he stray. “Bad boys” face eternal damnation, but even worse, they risk losing their parents’ love, the supply of which, in Neal’s case, was limited and reserved for the “good” ones. So he did all he thought he was supposed to do according to the authorities within him. He earned straight “A’s” in school and didn’t drink or do drugs. He respected Connie, which according to Neal’s father meant never touching her in an arousing way. So, he kissed her quickly and held her hand and sometimes put his arm around her, all of which aroused him a great deal and made him feel guilty and contrite. He had no idea whether Connie was aroused or not, a lack of knowledge that persisted throughout his marriage.
When he said goodbye to Connie at the bus stop, he promised to be true, and he was for the four years he spent studying the word of God and other words, like the Henry Miller books he read late at night and sometimes first thing in the morning, in New York. On each visit back home to New Mexico, where he split his time between his parents and Connie, he felt a reassuring sense of comfort from the familiar while all the while desiring the difference of New York, which excited him in ways he did not fully understand. Later, when he married Connie and settled in Mission Creek, he still felt the same pull, just stronger toward the even less familiar. While in school, away from his family and Connie, he would wander the streets of Manhattan around Time Square, thrilled by the propositions he received from street walkers, with whom he never went. One night, he daringly entered a strip bar and bought a dancer on break a split of champagne for fifty dollars but declined her offer for a private dance session in a back room. It wasn’t because of the money.
But he thought of that woman and could easily recall her taut dance and drug-addled body pressing against him while part of him pressed back and while he pressed himself into Connie on their wedding night and occasionally later as husband and wife. Something was missing, and Neal spent his days as a dedicated minister at the Mission Creek church - a job he took over after Connie’s father retired - and a devoted husband and then retreated to his secret thoughts at night.
One evening, when Connie said she had a meeting of her Bible study group, Neal, with no forethought, walked into Nino’s as if he were going home. Inside, the smoky, perfumed air and dusty, dim lights filled his head and took him away. He felt something, when he saw the woman on the bar top, familiar - but not from memory - something he had been searching for, something, or someone, who could bridge the distance, in his heart and mind, between New Mexico and New York, recreate the tired space between piety and profanity. He seemed to find her at Nino’s. Linda’s eyes, when he first met them and later, too, confused him and made him realize that he knew nothing about love, that his understanding was stuck in times and places where what was called love was really something else, a product of Mission Creek, the church, old Times Square, streetwalkers, Connie, and his family - times, places, people like partial glimpses of his unknown, overly determined self. Linda lived in a time and place he hadn’t been to but which he hoped existed. She was also on the bar top, in Nino’s, in Mission Creek, and the guys at the bar saw her, her body, as another purchase option, an opportunity to spend to quench an unquenchable thirst. While Neal felt differently, lust, yes, but something else, the excitement of doing something heroic, saving her, as if that was his to do, as if he could save her from the terrible history of the world through a newly remembered story of him and her.
Connie didn’t seem to mind Neal’s late nights; in fact, she was relieved by his absence, preferring to be bored alone. Neal was at Nino’s every night until close, and then most nights he spent in the bed of his pickup with Linda, holding her and looking up at the stars. He told Connie he was working with the Lannons on the upcoming baptism, but he probably could have told her the truth. She didn’t care. Her ennui consumed all, including her husband, whom she now viewed as feckless. Connie had once been turned on by Neal’s distant piety, the same as her father’s, but once they were married, in the bedroom, she wasn’t moved. She watched TV at night and usually fell asleep in front of the glowing screen.
Neal and Linda would make love and then lay in the truck bed, Linda naming the hundreds of constellations visible in the desert night sky in an ancient language that had no name. When Neal asked her how she had learned it, Linda shrugged. She didn’t know that, but she remembered every word. She never spoke of her father or the bar or her mother, and when Neal asked who the man in the dark suit and glasses was who came into Nino’s every week, Linda turned away, bursting the idealized hemisphere that Neal had built around her, which had enveloped her, separating her from him, even as they held each other. He could only see her from outside the unreal sphere, like admiring a glass enclosed figurine of a woman he didn’t know or a woman frozen in time in a glass display at the LaBrea Tar Pits.
“What’s wrong,” he asked her.
“You won’t understand.” She turned back and looked him in the eye.
“Try me,” he said with a confidence that was already waning.
“I go with Brent sometimes.”
“Who?”
“Brent. That guy in the dark suit and stuff.”
“No -”
“He’s bad. He could take Papa. He makes Papa sell the weed. I’d do anything for my dad.”
Neal now stared at the sky but didn’t see the moon and stars. “He makes you?”
“Papa - never. No, Brent. At first.”
“At first?”
“Yeah. I got used to it. It’s not so bad.”
Neal watched a dark cloud pierce across the face of the moon, and the sound of the old cross creaking filled the desert night.
Neal immersed himself in planning the baptism, just a week away. He spent his nights pouring through scripture verses, searching for the perfect words to cleanse the Lannon baby’s soul and his, too. The night before the ceremony, Neal decorated the old church with white and gold balloons and inflated white doves and gold crosses that he could not get to stay in place. As he struggled with one of the crosses, he accidentally stepped on one of the doves and heard a loud bang. But the dove was fine; it was someone at the door.
Linda, her gaze fixed as she looked at Neal, who had trouble looking at her, implored, “You’ve got to hide us. Brent - he’s after us - ”
For a moment, Neal felt a surge of relief thinking Brent was after them because Linda had refused him.
“ - He says Papa crossed him. He’s gonna kill him.”
Neal’s relief vanished as he opened the door for Linda, who retrieved her father from the side of the church. They joined Neal in the old, cramped knave, and he ushered them down to the basement used to store relics said to be from the sixteenth century, but no one alive could say for sure. Linda cleared some space behind some boxes of charred skeletal remains said to belong to a group of martyrs slaughtered by natives who had a different god, and she and her father settled in. Neal came back with blankets and water and said he’d return with food. As he got into his pickup, he had forgotten about finishing up the decorations and felt right, knowing he was protecting Linda and her father, but, maybe more, he felt good knowing Linda could not be with Brent tonight - a knowledge confirmed when he returned home.
Ultimately, Neal could not get beyond his already determined ideas and feelings about love and desire, their coupling sought but never found because they were not real. Linda was real. But Neal had taken a mysterious feeling - the one felt upon first seeing Linda - and applied it to an idealization, that was not of the desert or the stars or the moon, but of himself. There was nothing romantic about Linda’s story or anyone else’s. But there was great beauty, often born of terrible suffering, available to the open-hearted who could see and listen and remember.
Neal went straight into his kitchen and started boxing food for Linda and Nino. He was on a mission, driven by the need to make right, as he had been trained, the sins of the world and their terrible effects, when he left the kitchen to get more blankets from the bedroom and found his bored wife in bed with Martin Brent. Again a sense of relief, Brent was not with Linda. Connie didn’t matter, and Neal was not yet realizing that Linda was not with him and had not been with him, at least not with the kind of worldly commitment Neal always thought love included.
Driving back to the church, Neal wondered if Brent might have suspected Neal was hiding Linda and her father. But he knew Brent wouldn’t mess with the baptism. Randi Lannon’s estranged father, whom she hadn’t seen for ten years, sold meth for the corrupt DEA agent, a fact Linda had told Neal when he was gloating over the ten thousand dollars Randi Lannon’s father - Neal didn’t even know she had a father - had paid to the church in honor of his infant grandchild, whom he had never seen. But Neal, Randi, and Linda did not know that Randi's drug dealing dad was already dead.
The baptism ceremony, overly lavish for an aging adobe mission church, was well-attended and proceeded uneventfully, except for the outburst from an old woman in the back whom no one had seen before and who shouted that the baby was born in sin and belonged to the devil not God. The woman - her voice and image - dissipated as the congregation vigorously chanted “Praise Jesus!” Neal calmed and then exalted the passions of churchgoers with a stirring sermon about love and forgiveness, inspired by the many scripture readings poured over and not his own experience in the world, sacred words that he used to lacerate himself, drawing on the rituals of the penitents on the other side of the mountains that bordered Mission Creek. The congregation applauded, and after Neal's blessing, filed out of the church into the desert sun.
No one noticed Brent lurking on the side of the church, but everyone screamed when he jumped out, gun in hand, and grabbed Randi and the baby and held them in front of the church that was built where a river once flowed. The terrified congregation scattered in the parking lot, stirring up a wispy cloud of brown dust that settled on the baby’s white baptismal gown, re-staining a soul with the original sin committed by two looking for love, a long time ago and over and over again.
“I just want Nino,” Brent was calm. “I’ll let them go. I don’t want to hurt them.”
Neal, also strangely calm, had quietly made his way to back behind the altar and climbed the ladder to the church roof, carrying a large axe that had belonged to his great-grandfather but that neither his grandfather nor father had taught him how to use.
Outside in the parking lot where the Pueblo had once known how the river flowed, Brent stepped out a few steps away from the church door and toward the panicked pious, again demanding Nino. From up the road toward the interstate, a giant, swirling dust cloud raced and thundered to the church. All eyes turned and Brent tightened his grip on Randi and her baby, when four dark vans with blackened windows swung into the lot and took positions behind the stunned congregation. An array of armored men, automatic weapons at the ready, spilled out of the vans and formed a semi-circle whose radii all led to Martin Brent and the terrified Lannons, except Rusty.
A desert silence engulfed the world until it was broken by the sharp thuds coming from the roof where Neal effectively wielded his great-grandfather’s axe and brought it down, again and again, on the rope that he securely tied in six places a month ago. The cross wobbled as the church door burst open and Rusty Lannon emerged dragging Nino with a frantic Linda following just after. One of the armored men shouted, “Drop the gun, Brent!”
Rusty shoved Nino toward Brent. “Here he is…I’m pleading with you…let them go.”
The armored men readied their assault weapons. “Drop it Brent. You’ve got one, two, three…”
Brent acknowledged the guns pointed at him and then turned and shot Nino dead. Then the last fall of the axe, the whip-snap crack of a severed rope’s recoil, and the splintering creak and roar of the liberated cross as it tumbled to its inevitable reunion with the earth where it crushed Martin Brent. Linda screamed and fell on her father’s lifeless body. Rusty, Randi, and their baptized baby formed a tightly held cluster. Connie stood and blankly stared at the cross that her father had loved more than he had loved her and its broken victim below who would never rise again. The armored men lowered their guns and filed back into the vans. The congregation raced for the security and sanctuary of their holy automobiles as Neal exited the back door of the church.
Linda’s wails were heard by the Lannons, who turned to comfort her. They brought her into their embrace. Later, the Lannons would re-babtize their baby “Linda” in a ceremony at the spot along the creek that had flowed past the mission and presided over by a Pueblo elder who spoke in a language used to name the constellations of stars that filled the desert night sky. Linda became little Linda’s designated guide for navigating through the timeless world where some plants only flower every one hundred years and streams gurgle past rock islands. The world had done what it had to Linda, but she lived and was beautiful. Neal never knew that beauty, nor was he there when Linda, with yellow flowers in her hair, was married one day by the life-giving river that once flowed through Mission Creek. Neal walked on, not remembering where he had been.
What Ever Happened to Oneida Carmichael
A fluid rainbow of young people, bouncing and bobbing on the sidewalk, approached Ben. He heard their calls and shouts, brash and bragging. “She was all dead and shit!”
“Maybe not…I heard an ambulance coming,” a tired young woman in a white t-shirt and jeans shorts responded with new freshness.
“You fulla shit, Starla.” A tall young man directed his attack at the Starla one with a pointed bob of his head down to her taut shortness.
She demurred and said almost to herself, “Love is love.”
It was lunchtime. Ben was walking from his Washington Square office to his favorite spot on the Westside – the new waterfront park at the site of the old Christopher Street Pier. His name was Ben now. When he first met Oneida Carmichael, he called himself Benjamin. He remembered this as he looked up at Oneida’s high rise apartment building. Ben reached the edge of the crowd and worked his way through it to get a look. There was Oneida Carmichael dead on the ground. Her body, in a finely tailored suit, was a tangled wreck, and her long, brown hair was splayed out on the concrete in a rapidly growing pool of blood.
Ben did not linger there too long. He thought perhaps he should say something to someone about something, but he took this confusion down to the Hudson River and sat down on a bench. What happened.
He thought he had been in love with her, but, though it took him forever to admit it, he knew that Oneida felt nothing that way toward him. He was a sociology professor, and Oneida was a grad student in social work. He oversaw her practicum, or at least he did in the beginning. It had been weeks since Oneida had kept a meeting with him. He blamed it on his feelings – though he had never approached her with them – spilling over into their professional relationship. His feelings toward women were always blameworthy, and so he was alone.
He took her out to dinner twice. He experienced a major letdown the second time when Oneida told him that her name was given to her by her father because of his fondness for his summers on the lake with the same name. Ben had been sure that she took her name from the Iroquois nation tribe with the same name. It wasn’t the same. Her dark hair and eyes lost their ancient, exotic appeal. Only the mystery remained. He knew only fragments of her past. She wore the same turquoise earrings everyday – a gift from her mother, not a Native American heirloom. Her parents were wealthy, old school – they had benefited greatly from New York capitalism so their children would have careers in public service. They were good people and Oneida was a good girl. Oneida was their only child who wanted to be a fashion designer but became a social worker. Her parents were proud and set her up with a generous allowance in a fine apartment on the river in the West Village in one of those new high rises that disturbed the skyline and disrupted the sight line for those less fortunately positioned inland. Ben was impressed with Oneida’s dedication to her work. Her course work was stellar, but she really shined on the job. Despite her privileged upbringing, Oneida seemed most at home on the street. Ben thought she moved almost too easily from the protected confines of her luxury apartment to her clients’ rough and tumble world of drugs and prostitution.
The agency Oneida worked for had its offices in a church basement on Hudson Street a few blocks below Christopher. Her clients were referrals from the criminal justice system, mostly young women arrested for prostitution whose problem was mostly drugs. Oneida’s job was to offer counseling and referrals to appropriate agencies. She loved her job and somehow felt more at home amidst the troubled young women than she did high up in her apartment. She seemed to dwell in two different universes – the luxurious but still cold, austere one provided by her parents and the provocative, tumultuous and slightly dangerous church basement.
Then, for Oneida, there was Starla, a young, compelling, beautiful, confused and confusing reason for Oneida to go to work each day. Starla spent her time between her mother’s place in East New York and various crash locales in lower Manhattan. Starla dabbled in prostitution, just enough for alcohol, cocaine and maybe some food. Like Oneida once did, Starla dreamed of being a fashion designer. She often brought her sketches to their sessions. Starla and her cohorts – a rag-tag jumble of street kids, gay and straight, male and female and tranny – saw themselves as a future fashion consortium, designing, marketing, modeling their street fashion creations to an awaiting world. It was a dream that would blossom in woozy, sun-filtered mornings and fade in drug-addled, wasted nights. Starla disrupted Oneida. She brought forth feelings that cut through Oneida’s own enigma. No need to fuss over who she was. Identity fell away in the scorch and blaze of desire all its own.
That summer morning Starla was wearing a tight white t-shirt and short cut-off jean shorts. Starla’s hair was long and full and played off her back. Her eyes reigned in shadowed sockets emanating early lines toward her temples and hair. She had a rounded gently puffed nose with nostrils that flared slightly with each breath. Her mouth was full and broad, her white teeth unburdened by her lifestyle. Starla’s thin shoulders and arms framed round, slightly sagging breasts, and, in a way that did not surprise or bother Oneida at all, Oneida could focus on just one thing – the way Starla’s white shirt slid back and forth against her braless chest making her nipples rise and poke. It was their sixth meeting in and as many weeks, and Oneida ended the mid-afternoon session by asking Starla out to lunch. She had crossed a line. For just an instant, questions flashed – Where was she? Who was she? Questions she would never be able to really answer again.
Starla spoke animatedly through a lunch with wine which slid without hesitation into more drinks at a Hudson street bar. Oneida mostly gazed at Starla and smiled, laughed and asked an occasional question feigning a need to make some sense out of Starla’s preposterous, desperate life. Through more stories and more drinks, Starla’s gestures grew in size and began to catch Oneida’s hands and arms, and then her hair and face. Lost in this storm of expression, Oneida was barely surprised when Starla blurted out, “Do you get high?”
Oneida fumbled with “I don’t know” and “Well, yeah, in college” and a smiling “What do you mean?” But it didn’t matter. Oneida was already willingly given to Starla’s direction, and so she was handing Starla fifty dollars and her address.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Starla said over her shoulder, which it slid out of her top as she moved toward the bar door. Oneida felt full of excited nervousness as she paid the bill, gathered her things and hurried home.
A half hour later, Starla was at Oneida’s apartment door. She came in quickly, hugged Oneida and set about preparing something with little plastic bags and one of those cracked glass pipes. Oneida poured them each a glass of wine. Soon thick, acrid smoke filled the air and then filled Oneida’s lungs. They threw off their clothes and moved on each other – tongues and fingers swarming everywhere. Oneida’s knees buckled. Outside became inside. Inside Out. She had lost all bearings. Starla became all – warm, soft nose and mouth, tongue and a thousand fingers. Oneida exhaled and moaned, completely present, completely lost.
Later, from a dream, Oneida found Starla at the edge of the bed. Starla finished buttoning her shirt and raised her head, flipping her brown hair back off her face and over her shoulder. “Love is Love…You got twenty dollas?”
Oneida fumbled with sheets and hair. “Sure..let me get it.” She bent over the side of the bed, reaching at strewn clothing.
Starla watched intently. “Love is Love.”
When Starla had left, a jittery Oneida poured herself a glass of wine, drank it quickly, poured herself another and settled back in bed. In the window, there was still light in the sky and Oneida remembered that she was having lunch with her parents the next day. She set the glass down on the night stand and rolled over.
Somewhere in the darkness, her buzzer was ringing. It was Starla, and Oneida let her up. Oneida handed Starla two twenties through the opening in the chain-locked door. “I’ll be back. Love is love.” Starla repeated as she scurried off. Oneida ran her fingers through her hair and she sat back down on the bed and stopped herself from wondering what she was doing and concentrated dizzily on what she wanted.
Two hours later, Starla was back. Smoke and more smoke. Wine and more wine. Love and more love.
Oneida’s eyes and brain opened at the same time. Who? Where? Memory crept in. She pulled the covers over herself and rolled over. Then suddenly. The time? Lunch?
She fumbled, washed and dressed. She was all shaky and sick. She did not want to face her parents. Then a gagging, convulsion of nausea. Her mother’s earrings were gone and she had not had a chance to tell Starla that the phrase she kept repeating didn’t mean anything.
Ben rubbed his face in his hands, sighed, got up and started to walk out onto the green-lawned park which stretched like a finger into the river. His imagination had no room for the trouble that lay in between a colonial Indian woman, a lake in upstate New York, a denizen of a West Village high rise, and a dedicated social worker. He only knew it was all a terrible waste.
Becky and David
David was one of the first in his suburban neighborhood to switch from a gasoline burning leaf blower to an electric one. Al Skeppa had mocked David, calling him a “tree hugger,” but David felt good about his efforts to fight climate change. He and Becky recycled religiously and used metal, refillable water bottles, which Becky always carried, deliberately and proudly, high in front of her as she walked the ten feet from their front door to her car each morning.
David bought a fifty-foot orange extension cord at Home Depot to go with his leaf blower. Don Sedoux, who lived next door and had no leaves on his emerald lawn, had recommended it, although when he did, David had struggled to hear him over the roar of Don’s sit-down lawn mower. The choice of that particular cord, though, was confirmed by Leslie Hoppa, who David encountered in the Home Depot parking lot when her car alarm had been going off for absolutely no reason for three hours. A passerby had googled “stuck car alarm” on his phone and discovered there was nothing that could be done about it unless the government barred dark skinned immigrants and cut taxes. David found Leslie leaning against her Mercedes and watching Instagram reels and oblivious to the shrill, intense sounds emanating from her shiny new car. “Oh, for real, get the orange fifty-footer,” she confirmed. A week later, Becky excitedly announced that Leslie had started a Go Fund Me page for herself because she needed a new car.
David trusted Don because he had tipped David off about Bitcoin, and even though David and Becky had lost thousands from their digital currency investment, Don had made a fortune as evidenced by his classy, pronounced lack of conspicuous consumption. Indeed, Don proudly shopped at Costco, shouting to David over the roar of a pool vacuum, “A bargain is a bargain. It is what it is.”
Becky and David loved their pool, especially Becky. For a while it had been a nuisance to clean - all that tree mess - but when Don cut down the forty foot mulberry tree that had lived on his property for eighty years longer than Don had and which always made a horrible blue-purple berry mess each summer, they got the idea to have the even bigger sugar maple tree on their side taken away. Once the trees were gone, they enjoyed their pool, but Becky was upset that she burned more easily now with no shade. But then, fortunately, Don tipped them off to a special on cases of sunblock that was running at Costco. Not wanting to be spotted shopping there, Don asked Leslie Hoppa, after he had finished making love to her in the back of her Mercedes, to pick some up for them. After that, the trees gone, her skin protected, Becky luxuriated in the pool, only bothered each time she dropped her phone in the water. Don dutifully replaced each ruined phone, and always wanting to keep Becky happy, he only timidly suggested that she not bring her phone in the pool, a suggestion unheeded as Becky’s aquatic Instagram photos received thousands of heart likes.
Don loved his eco-friendly blower and never thought about how the electricity to run it was generated; it would have made him confused and uncomfortable. Once, though, when he was scrolling Facebook on his phone, next to but not in the pool where Becky was, he felt a vague sense of reassurance when he saw a picture of a giant array of solar panels in China. So, he shared it with Becky (on Facebook) and shared it to his own page. For some reason, Don Sedoux reacted to the post with an angry emoji.
All was well in the neighborhood. All were content with the ease with which they dispatched with the unease generated by their screens by buying more stuff. The lawns and paved over and concrete yards were free of anything alive or once alive or never alive, free of any mush or swamp or smell, until Al Skeppa lost his mind.
Al lived across the street, a paved over country lane where big Dodge Ram pickups, owned by people who used them mostly to carry their Costco loads of toilet paper and snacks, sat idling all day while their owners scrolled in oblivion from behind the wheel. Al had been regarded as just “slightly peculiar” for some time. He was a nice guy, super-friendly and fastidious in his lawn care. But he cut his grass - at least twice a week, unless it rained, then more times - wearing brightly colored, tight short shorts that looked like something seen on a basketball court in the early 1970s. But other than the strange garb, Al was exceedingly “normal.” Then one day, while talking with David and Don, each positioned in his pickup cab, Al asked, for the third time that week, “When is garbage picked up?” Then the next day, he asked again. Some of the people in the neighborhood sometimes forgot when recycling was picked up, but no one would ever forget garbage pickup, which liberated the town’s consumers from their mountains of discarded stuff, purchased, sometimes surreptitiously, from the big box bargain stores and also online. David and Don grew concerned, and then everyone became alarmed when Al bought a tractor and started riding it up and down his driveway, trying to mow the pavement and sending small stones screaming through the air, one of which struck Marybeth Holderlaine in the head and left her blind and unable to walk. Al apologized to the Holderlaines, but the next day he was seen without his short shorts, carrying TVs - big ones, eleven in all - out of his house and onto the front lawn. Don asked him why, and Al informed him, surprisingly correctly, that trash pickup was that night.
There were many indiscretions that the residents of the town where Becky and David lived could overlook, but discarding perfectly good televisions, barely out of their big boxes, was intolerable. The police were called, and Al was taken away. Later they found the body of his badly beaten wife in the refrigerator. The townspeople were briefly shocked that something could go terribly wrong in their pristine paradise, but then later they felt okay.
Summer came, and Becky and David opted for a staycation at home by their pool with their phones and electric powered tools, including a cordless pool vacuum they purchased from Amazon by mistake since David really enjoyed twisting and stretching and flipping his long extension cord all around the yard. He’d grown adept at whipping the thing behind him as he blasted even the tiniest of leaf fragments off his property until the wind invariably blew it back. One early morning, as David stretched the extension cord as far as it could go in order to blow a dead impatien flower that was malingering on the other side of the pool into Don’s yard, he heard a furious splashing in the pool. Unbeknownst to David, the fifty foot orange extension cord had wrapped around his beloved ten-thousand-dollar cockapoo, Flecka’s, neck and sent her hurtling into the pool where she floundered and then drowned. David was inconsolable for weeks over losing his beloved little friend, but Becky got over it. She had lost interest in Flecka just a few weeks after they had flown back from Phoenix where they had purchased her from a breeder they had found on Instagram.
David moped and neglected his yard. The leaves began to accumulate, some even floated in the pool, pictures of which Becky posted with the caption, “Responsible husband wanted!” David’s prized electric Roundup sprayer, a gift from Leslie Hoppa, gathered dust in the garage as bees and fireflies began to appear in the yard. Becky was at her limit. She texted her husband who was well within earshot, “Great, now we have bugs. You are USELESS!”
Don noticed the sudden drain on the electric current that powered the neighborhood when his new blender, violently mixing the smoothie recipe he had watched being executed on Tik Tok, suddenly slowed. He went to the kitchen window and saw a puff of smoke rising from Becky and David’s pool.
Becky’s electrocuted body was found floating next to an electric leaf blower attached to a long orange extension cord plugged into an outdoor outlet. David was found dead behind the driver’s seat of his Dodge Ram, whose engine still hummed inside the garage where countless unused electric power tools hung on the walls.
Becky and David had gone to grade school together but drifted apart when they went to different high schools. Later, when they reconnected as undergrads at Franklin and Marshall majoring in Business Administration, they confessed their mutual grade school crushes: Becky said, “I liked you,” which meant a lot more than that and made nineteen-year-old David turn crimson.
He blurted, “All I could think about was you.”
“Wow.”
That was it, that was enough. They married their mysterious childhood crushes to their young adult lust and committed to each other. They liked making plans, although they were also woefully unimaginative, and so they looked around - not far - and picked out the available plans offered by the world as they had become used to seeing it, a world with boundaries, the illusion of freedom, the illusion of choice, a comfortable place to live. Becky googled, “list of things to do in life” and found the following:
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Play
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College
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Career
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Marriage
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House
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Dog
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Kids
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Work
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Retire
Becky added “10. Die,” which made them both laugh, albeit nervously, but then she deleted it.
After college, they attended one friend’s wedding after another and farmed ideas for their own, for which Becky’s parents spent lavishly. Big, cream-colored limousines shuttled the guests from the church to the reception and then to the hotel booked from top to bottom for Becky and David’s big day. In the backs of the limos, as they sat in traffic between stops, the chatter was the same: “This reminds me of Gelnda’s wedding.”
“I know, right?”
“I like how everyone in the wedding party looked exactly the same.”
“And I like how all the men at the wedding are wearing the same-colored suits and have the same haircuts.”
“And those brown shoes.”
“Right?”
“The women look nice like they did at Farla’s wedding.”
“Exactly. They do.”
From one bland, off-white limo to another, the same confirming conversations, everyone engaged in building each other’s comfortable, rationalized space, within which everyone convinced themselves they were not only special and unique, but also safe. They were horribly wrong.
Stepping out of one of the oversized automobiles, Tony Lind, whom, according to Becky, David had spent too much time with as a freshman smoking weed, remarked, “Look at that blue sky. It’s a miracle how blue our atmosphere and oceans are.”
His companion, Lisa Maddox, exclaimed, “Awesome,” but she was referring to her friend Donna Feldor, who emerged from her limo having positioned a white flower from her bridesmaid’s all white bouquet in her faux blonde hair.
And so it went…
For Becky and David, the house next to Don Sedoux and across the street from Al Skeppa soon followed. They decided to put off having a child until after they had travelled, but they never did either. They changed their plans after Becky read an article that had been shared with her on Instagram that explained that it was better to travel after retirement when you would have more money and are able to travel in greater comfort. The article didn’t address having children, appealing to a young, rich millennial demographic not interested in diapers. David read the same article when Leslie Hoppa, with whom David started an affair, shared it with him. It enabled him to justify his time with her, “Yeah, I got married too young and still have things to get out of my system. I’ll travel later when I am more settled.”
Leslie was hardly confused, “I understand.”
Those things from David’s system never made it to Becky who remained childless from year to year, but her confidence that she would someday be a mother never wavered even as she noticed she was thirty-five one morning in the pool when six hundred people wished her “Happy Birthday” on Facebook. This outpouring of sentiments inspired Becky to pull out their eighth-grade yearbook that night. She and David felt tinges of nostalgia over the various team sports photos, but they had trouble remembering most of the student photos. The written names had detached from the photographs. And they couldn’t remember who they were then either. They couldn’t remember playing or dreaming or staring in wonder at baby fish and robbins’ eggs or falling in love or the streams in the woods that eddied around rock islands before joining rivers and oceans.
Hillside Nest
Fall 2016
A List of People and their Circumstances Upon No Longer Remembering
1. Pel Laningham started wearing a red baseball cap when he noticed his hair had grown thin and wispy and when everyone else started wearing one, too. The hat became part of him, and he never took it off. His face wasn’t noticeable, a white scrim with pale red blotches. He was tall and thin, and when he walked the palms of his hands faced backwards, except when he was carrying his phone, and then one hand cradled the phone, while the digits of the other, except for the extended pinky, scurried continuously on the screen. One day, Pel was walking down the street, his eyes fixated on the glowing screen which made his white face whiter, when a great gust of wind, which came out of nowhere and tore away the tops of buildings and knocked over tall trees, grabbed Pel’s red hat and threw it away from the earth. Pel didn’t notice that his long-time companion hat was gone, nor did he notice anything anymore that wasn’t on his screen.
2. When Elizabeth Fust was little, she would sit on the toilet and become confused and worried, wondering where all the poop that comes out of all the people in the world every day ended up. She had forgotten that and now sat on the toilet scrolling Tik Tok. She cradled her phone in both hands and used her thumbs to swipe and like. Having finished what she came into the bathroom for or maybe just having gotten bored with her phone, she placed it on the sink and turned for some toilet paper. She didn’t see the live images of children lying dead on the ground. She heard screams but assumed it was a fake. She didn’t pay attention, and so she couldn’t remember.
3. Carol Ansha was desperate to find out what she should do to avoid catching the deadly virus that was spreading around the world. She scrolled and swiped furiously, her agitated eyes stared unblinkingly at a screen that sprayed distractions and things to buy to ease the panic. But there was no cure. So she tapped and joined a risk group that shared pictures of skin blemishes and posted videos of feverish eyes and coughing. Did she have it, too? She did not notice the yawning crack in the sidewalk ahead of her. She fell face first and broke her neck. Then she could not notice the little girl standing nearby with her mother, who was fixed to a screen, screaming, “Mommy, that lady dropped her phone!” Carol could not remember anything then.
4. Tanton Scott only took his earbuds out when he showered. He loved to listen to podcasts discussing bitcoin investment strategies. He was paid handsomely for his work strategizing advertising for a giant pharmaceutical company. He had even sold an ad package to his favorite podcast program, “Millennial Investors,” but he didn’t listen to the ads because he was already taking too many pills. One morning, after exiting the shower that he didn’t remember taking because he was thinking about what he had done the night before with that guy, whose name he couldn’t think of and whom he met online and did things with that left him with new body odors, he routinely inserted his ear pods in time to find out the that the price of bitcoin was up again. He didn’t hear the sirens wailing or the frantic knocking on his front door. Later, as hungry scavengers poked through the smoldering remains of Tanton’s house, a passerby with a cracked phone screen, spotted the still white earbuds lodged in Tanton Scott’s still smoking skull and wondered if they still worked.
5. Blaise Hanrahan had met Kathy Lancit on the Bumble app. They texted each other throughout each day and night for an entire week. They decided to meet for a drink, but it didn’t work out. They couldn’t remember how to talk with someone in person, and they were both gravely disappointed because neither looked anything like their pictures on the app. Afterwards, Blaise fell into deep depression and lived without meaning or purpose on a couch at a friend’s house until the house was lost in the housing market collapse. Kathy, also unsettled after things didn’t work out with Blaise, joined a neo-Nazi militia. She excelled at target practice with her assault rifle until a stray bullet from a comrade’s gun caught her on the side of her head and splashed her memory in the sky.
6. Klessa Van Nook went to the best restaurants for food photos. Her Instagram following had peaked past 30 million, and she made a fortune posting food. But not eating any of it. When they found Klessa, she weighed only sixty-five pounds. Her saliva-streaked phone lay on the ground next to her body, its screen forever fixed on a picture of a too pretty, inedible cheeseburger.