We are artists

Found Art

Theory

The Poisoned Story



Con

Name Me

I spent the weekend in Vegas. With me were my mom, dad, and sister which makes for an enjoyable yet not surprisingly restrained time. My mother thought it would be good place for transition, a pit stop between a grey summer in Virginia and what I expected to be an orange-ish (burnt orange maybe?) fall in Tucson. So I limboed in Nevada.

Part of Vegas means casinos - means gambling - means free drinks. But what do drinks mean? Especially the free kind? Frequent trips to Vegas restrooms. On one such excursion I followed my mom and sister to a restroom in New York, New York. They went in together while I leaned, arms crossed, and waited.

A short time passed before I was surprised by a hovering figure. A figure draped in white satin with a meshy, lacey veil. I want to say she had a slight glow, but instead I'll remind you of the earlier mention of free drinks. She leaned forward, told me sternly, "You need to smile," and produced a shiny new belt buckle from between the drawstrings of her purse. I took it just before she marched off into a forest of flashing lights and identical burgundy dresses. Gone forever.

I wondered as I turned the gift in my hands, did God just send me a belt buckle?
And if so, I pray:


Dear Lord,

Please send me a sign so I will know where to stand to receive the belt to match.

Sigh

The 'cool' button on my hairdryer is stuck down.

My boss is the ice cream man

Something about Cub Scout camp yesterday made me think of my seventh grade science teacher, Mr. Garton. I think it may have been the “outdoors” station where a mustached old man taught us about the ecosystem and the food chain. (I am an omnivore) Or perhaps, it was the way that out of my fourteen webelos, eleven of them could easily have stepped out of the same mold. Apparently short, round, sandy hared little boys are all the rage right now. (I, by the way, have access to a white panel van already stocked with ice cream. Small fee required.)

Part of our curriculum that year was an extensive inquiry into heredity and genetics. We spent weeks talking about beans, bees and purple verses yellow flowers. We wrote mini biographies on Charles Darwin and papered the walls with full color Mendel squares. By the end we could follow from start to finish the recessive gene’s losing war against dominance and plot its probability every step of the way.

We didn’t talk about human conditions until the last week. We naturally stuck to simple, safe subjects like the color of our hair and whether a baby will have blue or brown eyes. A few minutes before class ended one day a boy, Geoff, asked a question.
“Both of my parents have blue eyes, but my eyes are dark brown. How is that possible?”

I distinctly remember turning my full attention to Mr. Garton in the front of the room absolutely ready to take whatever came out of his mouth as fact. I know I didn’t notice it then, but there must have been at least a moment of hesitation as he debated inside what to tell him. I do remember, however, the carefully chosen phrasing of his answer.

“It must be caused by some kind of slight mutation in the gene that controls your eye color.”

A dangerous sentence to direct at the new boy who had been walking the outcast/in-crowd fine line since the beginning of the year. Naturally, it didn’t take long for my classmates to take to ending all his arguments with:

“What do you know, Mutant?”

At time I was a little mad at him for being so clearly the cause of the nickname. I couldn’t figure out why he didn’t just lie and tell him he didn’t know what his mysterious brown eyes meant.

Now, when I think back to his question and all the possible reasons for his impossibly brown eyes, I try to imagine what I would have done. It amazes me how quickly the nickname was picked up and its actual cause was dropped. Thinking about this (and the fact that its been this long since I have thought about Geoff and his eyes) I find myself revising my slightly damaged opinion of Mr. Garton. Now, surprisingly, calling the boy a mutant doesn’t seem all that cruel.

I tried to find the cat's name. I didn't though.

I remember the first time I ever felt betrayed. I was three and a half and my sister had just turned five. My parents were throwing a Halloween party for all their friends and coworkers on base. It was a costume party. I was a strawberry. About an hour into the festivities a monster walked trough our front door. It’s funny because I distinctly remember being terrified, yet completely reassured knowing my father would never stand for such an awful thing in his household.

The monster, as I would find out years later while leafing idly thorough an old album, was a good friend of my parents. He was dressed to the nines in a full on CATS costume inspired by the Broadway show. Admittedly, if I had met the man now I’d be floored by the brilliance and, really, perfection of the costume. But what the hell kind of person would do that to a three year old? Jesus, there were kids at that party.

That, however, has little to do with my sense of betrayal. My father greeting him jovially and shaking his hand has everything to do with an early experience of utter confusion and terror, but not betrayal. That comes later, in the kitchen, with the one person who should always, always believe you when you are being your most earnest.

My sister and I were both cowering behind the kitchen table, equally relieved to find another who could see the thing in the living room for what it really was. My mother came in with her empty hors d'oeuvre tray and gently prodded us to get out there and show off how cute we looked all dressed up. My sister was a pumpkin. We were steadfast in our refusal.

She began to leave and we began to whimper, begging her not to go out there because there was a monster sitting on the fireplace. There was a monster. I knew had never been so right.

I wanted her to stay so badly. I remember her kneeling down, or maybe she didn’t, regardless I know I wasn’t listening to her reassuring words. I do remember, though, her turning around and walking out that door, carrying a new tray of very small hotdogs and toothpicks. Taking snacks out to the monster sitting on our fireplace and leaving my sister and me in the kitchen alone.

I tried to find the cat's name. I didn't though.

I remember the first time I ever felt betrayed. I was three and a half and my sister had just turned five. My parents were throwing a Halloween party for all their friends and coworkers on base. It was a costume party. I was a strawberry. About an hour into the festivities a monster walked trough our front door. It’s funny because I distinctly remember being terrified, yet completely reassured knowing my father would never stand for such an awful thing in his household.

The monster, as I would find out years later while leafing idly thorough an old album, was a good friend of my parents. He was dressed to the nines in a full on CATS costume inspired by the Broadway show. Admittedly, if I had met the man now I’d be floored by the brilliance and, really, perfection of the costume. But what the hell kind of person would do that to a three year old? Jesus, there were kids at that party.

That, however, has little to do with my sense of betrayal. My father greeting him jovially and shaking his hand has everything to do with an early experience of utter confusion and terror, but not betrayal. That comes later, in the kitchen, with the one person who should always, always believe you when you are being your most earnest.

My sister and I were both cowering behind the kitchen table, equally relieved to find another who could see the thing in the living room for what it really was. My mother came in with her empty hors d'oeuvre tray and gently prodded us to get out there and show off how cute we looked all dressed up. My sister was a pumpkin. We were steadfast in our refusal.

She began to leave and we began to whimper, begging her not to go out there because there was a monster sitting on the fireplace. There was a monster. I knew had never been so right.

I wanted her to stay so badly. I remember her kneeling down, or maybe she didn’t, regardless I know I wasn’t listening to her reassuring words. I do remember, though, her turning around and walking out that door, carrying a new tray of very small hotdogs and toothpicks. Taking snacks out to the monster sitting on our fireplace and leaving my sister and me in the kitchen alone.

Imagine:

You're three and a half and this walks into your house.



I think you'd be under the kitchen table with your sister begging your mom to ignore the hors d'oeuvre tray and cower in the kitchen with you too.

How I keep myself from doing what I shouldn't be doing

More of a stolen form...


Afterliving



Facade



Late Night Poetry

I think this is my favorite conversation ever.

I have just run into a friend of mine who transferred schools for a semester:

Chris: Hey, how's it going!

Me: Oh good. How are you? I haven't seen you in forever! (I always say this to everyone, all the time.)

Chris: Good. I'm back.

Me: Yep.

Awkward silence...

Chris: I have a girlfriend now.

Me: Oh! Well, I have a boyfriend now.

Chris: Oh really, what's yours like?

Me: (shamelessly excited to one-up him in the romance department) You'll like this, he was my TA.

Chris: Oh yeah, well mine's a grad student... How old is yours?

Me: 25!

Chris: Mines 26.

Me: (This will get him, keep in mind mine is the younger one) Mine just got into a PHD program and is going to Iowa next year.

Chris: Mine was married when I met her!

(This is where I gasp and fall over in shock and defeat)

I'll spare you the three page versions

I think you should call me soon because I am tired
of pretending I know how
to occupy myself.

***

I've spent my weekend in the rain. The city is flooded and I think I got lost in the grey.

Saturday I spent my night in a downpour while a gay magician performed at his own 50th Birthday party. I watched through the windows and, when it was over, handed ice cream through the doorway while party-goers complained of their hands getting wet.

Sunday I had to be rescued from the company of strangers at my own neighborhood picnic and had a cheeseburger forced on me by a woman who thinks I'm pretty.

Today I cowered in a flooded pavilion with 200 Boy Scouts while a man in a camo pancho belted out three renditions of America the Beautiful for no apparent reason. I swear I had more muddy footprints on my pants than little boys present.

I think tomorrow I'll do a some laundry and neglect to charge my phone.

Art is precious

I am in my chair when the disability group comes into the gallery. My quiet sitting and looking at photographs from far distances and low angles is interrupted when six of them tromp through the glass door in a tidy line and immediately take off in separate directions.

Nightmare.

I hop up and follow a boy wearing a laminated nametag. STEVEN. He is twice my size and more excited than I have ever been about anything ever, let alone spending time in the gallery.

Steven has somehow managed to fit an entire plastic Slurpee cup into his front pocket and appears to be using it as a kind of makeshift wallet. Luckily, the kid only pays in change so no valuable bills catch in the wind as he insists on skip/gallop/electric sliding through the rooms. I herd him closer to his chaperone and we exchange pleading eyes. Mine win and she grabs a hold of his hand.

There is a girl with them. Fat and rectangular with Down Syndrome (or one of those other developmental diseases everyone calls Down Syndrome because it is a strikingly easy to remember name). Unlike the human piggybank, she walks with a measured precision. As if she were carrying a sleeping, fuzzy creature in her purse and the slightest jostling would disturb the all-too-cute slumber. She walks slowly and carefully up to one of Callahan’s photographs. The picture is of his wife and daughter, both naked, laying on the bed. Sunlight from an open shade leaves their skin and curves illuminated against a black background.


The girl stops in front of the picture and stares blankly for a moment. I watch her lean closer, as if for a better look, until her soft, ghostly pale face is pressed nearly to the glass. I can’t figure out what she could be searching for until I realize she isn’t looking at the image at all. She’s staring through the imperfect body in the photograph at her own reflection. I watch as she looks critical, brow furrowed, and reaches up to fix a single flyaway strand of hair. She then quickly turns and walks to the next room, holding her purse and moving with as much calculated dignity as the elegantly dressed women from the 1950s Chicago Street Shots directly ahead of her.

Do you remember that time when I was nine and you were eleven

and we lived in that house that always smelled like the swamp?

You and I used to drag our bikes into the backyard after school and position ourselves at the top of the hill next to the vegetable garden. We would take a moment to point out the new spiderwebs covering each other's wheels and gear shifts and violently drop the bikes if one of us ever found an egg case. Then we'd rush around looking for long twigs and once the offensive mess had been safely isolated on the top of the stick the bikes would be up-righted and I would push off, hurdling myself downwards into the trees. The ground leveled off just before the chain link fence rose up and I always cut too sharply, leaving myself sprawled on the dead leaves, soaking up their musky dampness. Then you would push off, nosily crunching leaves under your tires and I would scream at you not to hit me. Sometimes you wouldn't.

There was a tree swing too. The only one we've ever had. Jim attached it to one of the branches at a funny angle so when you pushed off and finally got a little height to your swing the whole thing would veer to the right so your fingers nearly grazed the thick bark on the way up. You'd let out a sigh of relief at the top. And on the way down you'd smack into it back first.

Past the fence was the creek. We would stand on the edge of the floating dock with a butterfly net collecting mud and mosquito fish. While you crouched down looking intently into the murky water I would creep to the other edge and with one powerful jump I could send your feet three inches into the water. You'd scream at me, furious and threatening to tattle. Of course, neither of us would ever notice that the jump sent my feet four inches deep first.

We plotted to make it to the other side of the creek. Twenty feet past the far shore rightfully belonged to us and though we could plainly see every inch of it, we were determined to make good use of all four corners and every edge of our property. When low tide came and the dock's four barrels stuck firmly in the mud we gathered up our jelly shoes and butterfly nets and headed in. I think I made it two steps before my leg suddenly sank knee deep into the fast acting mud. Naturally you jumped back to the safety of the dock and watched as I struggled to free my poor leg. You were pretty scared when I managed to get my other leg stuck and both sunk nearly waist deep. (You know, I wasn't afraid until I realized you were and that's why I started screaming for you to get dad.)

I waited in that mud for so long while you ran through the fence, up the hill, and into the house to find Dad. I was too scared to move. For one, I thought I might get sucked completely into the mud like Mario when he's too slow hopping through the level two quicksand, for another I couldn't help but imagine how furious Mom would be if I got mud all over my white shorts. I gripped the hems and pulled them as high and away from the mud as legs would permit.

When Jim came down the first thing he mentioned was the dirt on the shorts. And that's when I started crying. He could actually reach out from the edge of the dock and pull me out by the outstretched arms. That's how far out I got. When he easily extracted me the suction of the mud kept my jelly shoes and the holes where my legs had been collapsed instantly, sealing their fate. I lied and told Dad I hadn't been wearing any shoes. He then walked me up to the side of the house by the vegetable garden and used the icy hose water to clean me off before sending me inside to explain to Mom what I had done to my nice, white shorts. I don't know what you did then.

I wonder sometimes if you ever think of that creek. If you're still just as curious about what lies on the other side. Or, if after all these years you've come to your senses and know the only thing that mud kept us from was twenty more feet of dead leaves and spider webs.

Sometimes the best way to avoid an awkward situation is to run away and never look back.

I stayed up all night listening to a boy reading me scary stories online once. He’d read them to himself then summarize the best ones over AIM. He told me it was because he couldn’t sleep and for him reading was the best cure. I believed him and read every story he sent. When the night was over he asked me if I would watch the sunrise with him. I said I was too tired and instead went outside to watch the sunrise with the boy on the other end of my telephone.

He showed me his notebook when I came to class early one afternoon and was the only one in the room. I was surprised he would show me love poems. Outside of Instant Messenger I had never talked just to him and would have expected poetry to be too intimate an ice breaker. Eddy showed them to me, though, and I read them. They were awkwardly graphic. I lied when I complimented the eyes/thighs end rhyme and told him I thought he should show them to the girl they were written for. He slammed the book shut when a classmate walked in and scurried out of the room.

I forgot about the poetry until a few weeks later when he came to me with a new poem. I told him what I liked and didn’t like about it and he told me he would keep working on it. I thought that’s what he wanted. I thought that’s why he kept bringing them to me.

Valentine’s Day didn’t even occur to me when he told me he had something for me. I don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day. It’s just not my thing. I don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day, but I did that year unexpectedly when Eddy made good on a promise I had forgotten he made online late one night.

Leah and I were sitting in our usual spot outside the classroom before the bell. A few of the lockers around us were decorated for Valentine’s Day with red paper and pink balloons. Eddy hesitated next to one of these lockers before setting his jaw and coming towards us. Confused, I watched him as he came closer, picking up the pace the nearer he got until literally breaking into a run. He reached into his bag and we suddenly understood each other for the first time as he pulled out a red velvet heart-shaped box. At that point we both knew it was too late and the only thing to do was hurl the box at my feet and bolt down the hall without a word or a second glance.

I picked up the box and knew I couldn’t justify my surprise. So I slid it quietly in my bag before walking into class. Eddy came in fifteen minutes late and sat across the room facing the wall.

It was an entire year before he spoke to me again. After I left for school and had spent a few months living across the country he popped up online one night just to say a quick hello, wish me a happy Valentine’s Day, and tell me about his new girlfriend.

I realized not too long ago that works as a metaphor too

Death surrounds the world of aquarium and hobby fish retail. Anytime you put that many small creatures with an already short life expectancy into cramped quarters, rarely feed them, and chase them around their home a few times a day with a green plastic net you can probably expect a few casualties. It comes with the territory.

There are a few different deaths, varied styles, that can befall the unfortunate fish. Few of them are graceful, though I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who can maintain their dignity while dying publicly in a glass display case, fish or not. The closest would have to be the one-minute-you're-fine-swimming-happily-in-circles-back-and-forth-across-the-front-of-the-tank-the-next-you're-belly-up-caught-in-the-tiny-whirlpool-of-suction-as-the-filter-hums-undisturbed-below-you death. Which happens more often than you'd think.

Another quick end is death by hungry tank mate or distracted store clerk as she absentmindedly sucks you into her vacuum (while supposedly making the tank a nicer place for you to live). She'll gasp the last profanity you'll ever hear before your tiny body breaks and the two pieces of you slide down the algae colored tube into a collective vat of fish garbage.

Of course, there's also the day long fight for life where you float perpendicular to the ground at the mercy of the water's air bubble turbulence, only perking up and swimming straight when you see the green of the net hovering overhead. Maybe you'll fool them again. Buy yourself another hour or two.

Sometimes death comes from a botched escape attempt. Like when the cover is left off a tank and one of your brothers takes advantage of the rare opportunity to explore the world. You watch as he gets as far as the tile floor or maybe the next aisle over and flops helplessly around collecting bits of dirt and hair before his once glistening body dries and hardens. He waits in a dull stillness for his mind's death to catch up with his body's. Once you remember seeing this happen to a swordfish from the tank above yours. Only just seconds before the air took her over a well meaning patron scooped her up and dropped her in the tank nearest his convenience. The carnivorous cichlids finished her off before he even had the time to circle back and realize what he had done.

Diseases are bad as your eyes crust over or your gills open up in two identical gaping red sores. You're taken to the back of the store and confined to the 'hospital' tank under the pretense of quarantining, medicating, and curing you. So you stew in chemicals surrounded by strangers unrecognizable by their own grotesquities, until ultimately your disease gets the best of you, or perhaps it's one of theirs.

Or let's say you do make it and you survive. But you survive a bit too long and your season ends, like the pond fish in fall. Out comes the big black garbage bag and you pray to be one of the last to go in so you can suffocate quickly on the top while your comrades squirm beneath you loudly gasping your death through their mouths and gills while begging for their own.

When I worked at Wally's one of my favorite things was cleaning the tank where the rosies were kept. It was a huge tank in the back room filled with little whitish pink fish with red eyes used exclusively to feed more expensive fish. Rosies aren't the strongest swimmers and when I put the electric vacuum in the bottom of the tank by the time the water got to only two inches high there would be about fifty of the little fish pressed up against the blue machine's mesh underside. When I'd turn it off they would pour out excitedly. Stretching their fins and darting back and forth, touching every side of the tank before settling back down as I switched hoses and the water level once again began rising.

unprocessed postsecret

I packed two cookies in my bag the morning I left Tucson. It was exactly half the remains of the batch Leah and I baked a few days earlier. I wanted to save them so I could give one to Amy when she picked me up from the airport and we could eat them together before the hour-long drive home.

My trip typically adds up to five hours on the plane and five more driving or waiting in the airports. It’s hard to sit on the airplane for those five hours with nothing to do. It’s even harder to sit there with nothing to do except not eat the two cookies you have in your bag. I did it though.

Amy called while I waited out my layover in Denver and asked me to call her when I landed in Baltimore. I did.

She told me she was on 95 south of DC (not even 1/3 of the way to the airport). I put my bags down and watched the luggage carousel as the other people from my plane collected their things. All the while laughing at myself for packing carefully so I only had carry-ons. I actually thought I’d save some time after the long flight.

Ten minutes later my mother called to tell me not to worry, Amy was on her way and I just had to be patient (and that this was all Amy’s fault because she had told her to leave at 2 and obviously Amy had not heeded the advice). Five minutes after that my dad called to say it would take at least two hours and I should start looking for alternative routes home. I said I thought I’d wait for Amy.

An hour later a man with snake skin shoes and a cell phone was edging closer so I moved up to departures and called Amy. She was crying because my mother yelled at her for missing the B/W parkway. It would be at least another hour so I pulled out my cookie and ate it while the little boy sitting next to me emptied nearly the entire contents of his Thomas the Tank suitcase before his mother noticed. I thought he deserved a cookie too.

Somewhere in the wait my dad called again and told me the next Mark train would be leaving in 45 minutes. He said if I took it to Metro Central he could pick me up when he got off work. I thought Amy would make it before then. I also thought he should have skipped the part about picking me up AFTER HE GOT OFF WORK.

Half an hour later I hopped on the bus going to the train station. I timed it perfectly so I had just enough time to buy my ticket, climb onto the train, and have it depart with minimal waiting. My dad timed it perfectly so that he could tell me Amy had just arrived at the airport and I shouldn’t buy a ticket. I stepped out of line.

It’s a five minute ride from the airport to the train station. Somewhere in that five minutes my dad’s over-the-phone directions and my sister’s nighttime driving took different paths and it was half an hour before they found each other again. The closest thing to ‘inside’ at the train station was a tiny glass room with two sliding doors and a single parking ticket booth. I waited inside with a woman who checked for the bus every 45 seconds by leaning forward towards the doors so they slid open letting what little bit of warmth I had created in the previous 45 seconds slip out. I ate Amy’s cookie and took a picture of a festive wreath while in the booth.

Amy finally made it and asked me to drive home. When we arrived my parents hugged me and pointed out the Chinese on the kitchen table before leaving for the Burks’ Christmas party. Amy and I ate dinner together before she left for her boyfriend’s house because she couldn’t “handle any more of this.”

I put my things in my room but didn’t bother to unpack. We would be leaving at six the next morning anyway to drive the ten hours to Georgia to attend a family reunion.

California steals from me

There’s something strangely deafening about the white noise of packing paper. Tonight at Topher’s house it took me three practice hands to understand the rules of a game I’ve played before. Somehow his mother’s voice couldn’t carry over the noise his father was making wrapping plates for next week’s move. I found my mind and my eyes wondering away from the piles of clubs and spades to the little red dishes. Afraid for them, I worried about their trip rather than my trumps and tricks and when she told him to throw away any he found with a chip, I became anxious that one would be left behind.

When we sat down to play I insisted I was his mother’s partner. I’m always his mother’s partner, though I seem to be the only one who remembers this. We win the first two games and best out of three quickly becomes best of five. There’s no other family I’ve found that gloats so shamelessly when they win and pouts so violently when they lay a bad hand. It’s infectious. We lose the next two. Though, in our defense, that’s when the chocolate came out (mysteriously ever-present in this house). The eight o’clock deadline didn’t stop the final game when it came down to one hand. She and I took 8 tricks to win against the odds (which is really the only way to win) and celebrated accordingly.

The old bar counter they used as a kitchen table gets carted outside in the morning for easy loading when the moving van comes. It has to wait out in the cold and the wind to find out who wins the rematch scheduled for the kitchen floor, same time tomorrow night.

It rained this morning as we opened our Christmas presents. Poured really. It finished as we did and while sitting around the kitchen table sharing pecan pie and the oranges from our stockings (of which mine was actually a grapefruit) we watched three blue jays, two cardinals, a woodpecker, four very small blackbirds, and a squirrel hopping around our small backyard. I half expected a festive holiday boarder and the words "Virginia is for Lovers" to appear above the trees.

It was a good Christmas to be at home.

It was a bad Christmas to be a worm.