Waves

The ocean is a living fossil testifying in courts of terrifying uncertainty,

Late at night under new born ancient starry skies,

Wave after wave pounding against sandy beach resorts,

Washing away footprints of a thousand fat beerbelly bikini bearded bronzed faces,

Washing ashore seashell memories, lonely grains of shameless sands,

A dancing dream of blue reflected in the eyes of naked Haitian children strolling through their vacationer-less coastlines littered with first world comforts: glass coke bottles, broken ragged plastic wrappings, grotesque green or orange packagings so unearthly,

The great connected oceanic waters creeping from all destinations to arrive in angry explosions of foamy crashing splatters on the windy wharfs of Los Angeles coasts, liquid with infinite itineraries soaking jutting rocks of Cape Cod, endless stretches of wiggling waves kissing acres of Canton rice patties,

In the dark ununderstandable clothing of blackness the ocean wears at night,

With my fragile freckled feet firmly footed in dark brown sand feeling mushy like mush,

Waiting for the terrifying tide to return,

To cool my boiling human heart throbs,

A moment passes,

Where possibilities of hellish demonic fears smother my eyes shut, knowing I’m doomed to cry, be alone, linger in limbo-like life loveless and sleepless, like laughter hides loneliness like plastic surgery, knowing I didn’t choose to be born and I didn’t choose to die,

And then the rushing cold wet watery wave washes over my warm ankles shaking, shivering my soul, shaking all the dead soul-skin leaves out of my sob story self, cool cool soothing smooth water, foamy white waves rolling closer in the night like white smiles against black faces, nothing to do but smile back.

Freedom, It’s Yours

Time,

It eludes always my fingers grasping for it, grappling for it, opening my palm to find nothing but air,

When was the last instance you remember touching time?

Time caressing cheeks, warming past flesh to bone,

Time not spent but felt,

Felt like fine, free-flowing hair fluttering against a breeze.

Not the tick-tock time of the work day desk clocks,

Nor the thoughts of stress, upset, and debt time,

Not the blank-mind, fidget time,

Nor budget, bills, sign on the line time,

Not school, tests, productivity time,

Nor future,

Nor past,

But here and now time.

Remember memories of smooth, watery, playful time,

Before our incarceration into divisions of freed time and work time and art time,

Before we needed time to escape

Before we needed time to vacation

Before we needed time to relax.

Time permeates all around like sounds,

Hear time speak to you and speak back,

Exist and know you are always in free time,

Do not let time waste you,

For you cannot waste time.

To Smile

I’m grand, doing really grandly feeling like a thousand bucks,

Up on my luck I’m wondering if my wanderings will

Free my blue, fateful, lonesome, absolute stillness.

But the freezing carseats dark, dark and sharp, arid engine breeze

Freeze-dry my restless heart, melts me apart

Into scattered dirt forever nourished and nourishing.

Dirt so collective pushing me skyward as I trot, toward leafless boughs mincing sunshine

On my soft scattered facial muscles stretching, contracting, contorting just to smile,

Releasing teeth wrapped up in pink, red, gummy flesh slick and slimy to freedom.

A man’s toils under the boiling sun beating down on whooshing fields of wheat,

A woman winnowing the chaff and washing the grain to give to

A man driving a lonely truck through quiet, unmarked earthen country, passing

Women already up, wrapping their hair in buns for work and

Men driving dilapidated trucks toward the city, finally arriving to

A fresh buoyant boy loading packs of the grain into processing racks getting

Packaged, prepared, and presented as bread with a name, a description, a category.

And the happy clerk clanking opening the cash register as I coyly browse brainwash magazines

Before he gives me change, bread, a goodbye–to which I wander home and eat up, to give me the energy, the muster, to smile.

The Neighborhood

There was a beast that lived in the caves of the forest. The forest was behind a little neighborhood subdivision.

The beast had four, large black cat-eyes and a serpent’s tongue that waggled out from between his white teeth. He was missing an arm, his left one. He lost it when he was rummaging around an old, abandoned car by his cave one day and got a gash from the charred, rusty metal of the car. He contracted a deep infection and tore his arm off to save the rest of his body from becoming infected.

The beast made a living selling rainbows to the locals in the subdivision. People would bring him food and water: usually raw, pink pieces of pork and mop-buckets full of murky tap water. He swallowed the raw pork down his throat without chewing, making a slurping sound. And he lapped up the tap water with his little serpent’s tongue, taking him two hours and fifteen minutes to finish the mop-bucket of water.

And business was booming for the beast. People needed rainbows all the time.

Inside a house in the subdivision just a few blocks outside the forest where the beast dwells, some humans are preparing for dinner in the late afternoon.

A mother is stirring up a large kettle of soup on the stove, wiping her hands on her black-and-white apron. She wipes her hands because they are perspiring a lot. The late afternoon light spilling in through the window sheers warms her face. Her husband is at the dining room table, reading the world news section of the Greenwood Gazette. He takes a drink of vodka, on the rocks, from his short, fat little glass and sets it on the table. “Russia’s at it again,” he grumbles. He smashes his fist on the table. “Damn Russians!” he shouts. The glass of vodka with the ice in it tinkles and sounds like bell chimes.

“Oh Charles, cheer up,” says his wife. “I’m making your favorite.”

“Not that lentil soup again, Marla,” says Charles. “I hate lentils. Can’t you make something with any taste?” he sneers.

Marla sighs, wipes her hands on her apron, and brushes the sheers away from the window to peek outside. There are four rainbows in the sky above the forest that is a few blocks away.

“Do you think it’s time?” she asks.

Charles puts down the paper and looks at her, thinking. He gets up and walks out of the room.

“Honey, where are you going?” asks Marla.

“The basement.”

Marla turns the stove-knob to simmer, then walks over to the dining room table where the vodka in the glass is still shaking a tiny bit. She picks up a polished silver picture frame. On it is a photograph of a boy, about seven. His face is pudgy with leftover baby fat. He’s standing dressed in a little sailor’s outfit next to a clump of bushes. She can hear the sound of his little chuckle as she runs her finger along his face. It leaves a wet, sweaty finger-streak along the metal frame.

In the basement, Charles is standing in the dark in front of a large freezer all yellowed and mildewy. When he opens it, the orange light illuminates the dusty toolbench behind him, the rusty worn tools hanging on nails on the wall, and the junk he doesn’t ever want to throw away strewn about at his feet. It smells like dust and mold, a little like rotten fruit. He takes out some ziplock bags and closes the freezer door again quickly because he doesn’t want to see the mess anymore. He scurries back upstairs into the house, where he fills up a bucket of water at the sink.

He walks past Marla, who is now ladling soup into large round bowls. She doesn’t say anything. She knows where he’s going. He’s gone there every Wednesday evening for months, years.

As Charles heads toward the forest that looms over the neighborhood, he sees people sitting in their front-yards, in lawn chairs. They are looking at the rainbows that are arcing out from the depths of the forest. The sight-seers are all smiling. Some have koozies of beer in their hands.

One old man sits alone in his front lawn, bringing a pair of binoculars with a string tied around his neck up to his pale, wrinkly face every so often.

Charles sees a yellow, diamond-shaped dead-end sign posted at the end of the street. Past the sign, the pavement turns into a dirt-road. Beyond that, there is a foot-worn path leading into the forest. The innards of the forest are obscured in darkness. Beside the entrance to the forest is another dead-end sign, this one a lot more rusted and worn-down. Its corners are bent and the yellow sign has faded into a rough rusty brown.

Charles stands at the edge of the pavement, where the sidewalk ends.

“You better get in there quick,” yells the old man, his binoculars shaking in his old, palsy hand. “It’s getting dark out.”

Charles looks back at the man. “Mind your own damn business,” he barks.

Bob smiles and puts his binoculars up to his eyes and looks at Charles through them.

“Stop it,” Charles says.

Bob focuses the binocular lenses on Charles’ face, looking at his angry expression that makes the old man belch out an old man laugh: a little like a wheezing heavy breathing, almost like he’s dying.

“I said stop it,” Charles says again, more seriously. He walks up to the old man, slaps the binoculars off his face, and grabs him by the shoulders.

Bob, scared, puts his hands up to his face. “Go away,” he pleads, shaking with fear.

Charles now realizes that everyone on the block is now looking at him. “What do you want?” Charles cries defiantly at the whole block of people. He lets the old man go and walks into the forest.

In the forest, the trees form a thick wall around Charles as he walks deeper. The trees absorb the sound of the outside world and distorts it into watery frequencies and airwaves. It seems to envelope him, the distorted sounds of cars driving by, lawn mower motors spinning devilishly, water faucets dripping down onto hard surfaces in booming resonances. The atmosphere is cooler in here, where the shadows of the trees seem to suck the light out of everything, so that there isn’t even a twinkling of a bug in the air. The cold wind that whips through the heavy tangle of trees slashes around his face like stinging scrapes that redden his cheeks. He holds onto the bucket of tap water tighter, he clutches the ziplock bags of meat closer to his heart that’s beating heavier. The leaves underneath him are half-dying, indistinguishably black within the mucky, soggy dirt. They are soundless against Charles quickening steps.

Charles hears the panting of the beast as he gets closer to his lair; with each step Charles seems to lose the use of his legs as he begins to be guided onward almost against his will. Suddenly he sees the beast, crouched over at the entrance of the cave, its hideous face turned away from him. The beast brings his head up, slurping down a wet piece of meat with a ferocious shaking of its powerful neck. The beast is huge, almost twice the size of Charles. The beast’s four eyes emanate no light, his pupils have overtaken the whites of his eyes from years of living in this dark, soggy, damp forest-cave. The beast turns and looks at him, all four eyes blinking sideways. His wild, tangled, dirty, putrid black hair shake from his movements.

Charles throws the meat at the beast, and puts the bucket of tap water on the forest floor. He tries to kick the bucket toward the beast, but it falls over and spills. The beast snarls a deep, low growl that makes the branches of the nearby trees bend away from the beast, trying to escape the rotten, dead air coming out of the beast’s flaring nostrils.

“I..I want a rainbow,” Charles says.

“Shut up,” says the beast, in a thundering, demonic voice. “I know what you want.”

“I’ll take it right away then,” says Charles.

The beast tears open the ziplock bag and wolfs down the meat, his four unblinking eyes never leaving Charles face as he guzzles it down.

“You make me sick,” Charles mutters under his breath.

The beast suddenly spews out the unchewed meat and charges up to Charles in a flash, who covers his face but stands his ground. The beast smacks Charles hands away from his face with his one arm and breathes deeply right up against him, their noses almost touching. “You made me this way, remember?” the beast growls.

Charles’ face and spine stiffen now, and he looks deeply into the top two eyes of the beast. “You’re nothing to do with me,” he says. “You make rainbows for us, to make our neighborhood a better one, that’s all.”

The beast puts his one remaining arm around Charles, trying to hug him. Charles coils back. “Get away from me,” he screams, “You monster!”

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” cries the beast, in a child’s voice, in a sobbing voice that sounds like a pudgy child’s laughter.

“It’s for your own good,” says Charles. He brushes his shoulders, wiping away some of the beast’s tears and turns to walk away.

The beast gathers up the remnants of the regurgitated meat and licks it off the forest floor. He defecates onto the dead leaves outside of his cave and blows at it, making it spin and spin. His excrement starts emitting a white light that grows up like a beanstalk, separating into the colors of a rainbow.

That night the neighborhood sleeps under a high arcing rainbow that lights up the neighborhood in a glowing red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet mosaic. The sounds of slurping coming from some deep dark part of the forest keeps Charles awake until three in the morning. He goes to work tired the next day.

I’m An Abyss in Motion

The psychiatrist has me sit on a day-bed. It has a hard leather material with a slight softness near the middle, where countless other patients must have lain. The psychiatrist has a peppery mustache and a pair of thin-framed glasses. He has a brooding serious face that he wears when he asks me to tell him the problem.

“I want to tell a lie, any lie, that can give me a reason for me to believe my friendships mean something,” I say. “Perhaps I should explain. I was at the park in the middle of the night, swinging on a swing set, all drunk with an old friend of mine. I lied repeatedly about stories that I’ve experienced and lives I’ve lived and experiences I had. I told of my trip to South Africa with my father who was on a business trip. I said we had giraffe rides and ate with our hands in little huts next to unblinking natives. I used such moving detail and descriptive story-telling that it was believable even to myself. I began to have fun with it, making it a game that made me feel like I was playing a joke on him.”

The psychiatrist nods while I talk, listening with a pen in his mouth. At times he seems as if he is about to say something. He takes the pen out of his mouth, juts his neck forward an inch, and noiselessly mouths some syllable before putting the pen back into his mouth.

“And it’s hard to believe what’s real sometimes, when you can convince yourself of these things. And it doesn’t help that I read so much, that I read other stories that could just as well be true as anything that I hear in the news or from anecdotes I hear from friends. I can’t sleep sometimes because of it.”

I take my hands out of my pockets, and fidget with them, rubbing my face, grabbing at the clumps of hair hanging over my ears.

The psychiatrist looks at my hands and I see him suppress a yawn, water leaking out of his eyes. What a boring job he must have, listening to chumps like me.

He doesn’t help, he just gives me a slip of paper with a certain amount of milligrams of a certain kind of multisyllable drug written on it. And I walk in the robotic automatic doors of the all-night pharmacy stores late at night, past aisles of seasonal Thanksgiving trinkets, past solid-colored cotton shirts on sale three for ten dollars, past shelves of candy bars, past cosmetic oval mirrors that make your face elongate for a second when you walk past them. I walk all the way to the back where mothers and children and old men wait in chairs in a corner section with industrial strength blue carpet covering the floor. I go up to a counter where young pharmacists in flowing white lab coats fetch me the multisyllabled drugs written on my now crumpled slip of paper. They check to see if my address and phone number are still the same before I leave. They aren’t, but I don’t care, I move around too much anyway.

I swallow the pills and they numb me out for a while, or make me focus focus focus focus focus on one task, one task, one task, a project to get things done, get things done, get things done, done, things, getting done, get.

And then the focus fades, fizzling out into my blurry mind again.

“I often say things to others,” I tell the psychiatrist, “I always find myself repeating these little pithy sayings.”

The psychiatrist pushes his glasses up with a finger and blinks at me.

“Like when my friends are feeling blue,” I continue, “I’ll tell them something like, ‘Life is too short for that shit.’ Or I’ll tell them that living an nonreligious life requires a constant battle with meaning. I think I do it as much for myself as for others, though…maybe even more so for myself. Oh, how it’s so hard for me to handle changing beliefs bought on by this growing up thing. I feel like it’s not helping at all, how I reassess. I empathize with others. But I empathize with myself, too, do you know what I mean?”

He nods. “I’m afraid our session is up,” he says, uncrossing his legs and getting himself up from his chair. He takes a pad of paper from his desk and comes back, scribbling something on there. “I’m writing you a new prescription. I believe you’re suffering from something far more serious than what I’ve originally assessed you as having.”

I hear the rip of the paper as he tears it off his prescription pad and simultaneously feel the rip of my money from my wallet and feel the rip of my time from my life and the rip of my existence off this psychiatrist’s conscience. I try to make eye contact with the next patient in the waiting room as I leave, but she doesn’t let her nervous gaze leave the floor.

Inside and Out

There’s a shaky situation where I find myself at times, riding on the Chicago city bus. It’s a sunny Spring afternoon, so everyone’s using the unusually comfortable Chicago weather as an opportunity to walk outside. There are perhaps a couple people aside from myself riding. They clutch their reusable cotton-knit grocery bags and stare absentmindedly out the window. It’s a vacuous, deserted, moving space. The sunbeams cut into the bus and light up the residue left behind on the blue velvet seats: potato chip crumbs, specks of glitter, strands of gray hairs, loose change, tattered bits of paper, dust and ashes. The hanging o-rings for people’s hands sway back and forth on the long metal bars along the main aisle. The bus shifts left and right over potholes, bobbing the passengers and myself back and forth, cradling the babies and the elderly to a half-sleeping state.

I smell the scent of sweat and piss on some of the seats from where I sit, all the way in the back, in the middle seat. From here the bus aisle resembles a long hallway waiting room, where people read magazines and papers they find on the seats as they enter. Some stare at the advertisements adorning the side-panels and some stare out the window and some stare at the other passengers. They wait for worn-out names to be called by some unseen male voice: “Damen, Ashland, Racine, Halsted, Roosevelt, Canal, State.” Then they get off. But I ride along, waiting for the driver to loop back around on his route back south. Traveling in circles comforts me.

And so the night darkens the alleyways while streetlamps and storefronts flicker lazily on to illuminate the drunken humans making their way across the sidewalk-stages, their makeup and wardrobe prepped in time for their own personal stage performances, acted out with each gesture and line. Each joke is followed by a cackling laugh and each sip of beer is followed by a belching sigh.

I step off the bus and meet up with my friend Dorian, the greatest shit-talker known to the Chicago south side neighborhoods. The streetlights are off, probably from a power-outage.

It’s dark and my eyes take a few minutes to adjust to the darkness around me. Eventually I make out things: trees decorated with torn plastic shopping bags, rusty benches riddled with graffiti, red-eyed rats making off with a piece of garbage in their mouths, the crooked porches of houses, loud cars with shiny spinning rims, unattended children running past carrying naked dolls and faded playground balls.

A voice cuts through this dark neighborhood toward me.

“What the fuck are you doing, you tryin’ to get yourself killed?” Dorian spits out in an admonishing whisper. “Get over here.”

I spin around, squint my eyes, but can’t see where he’s hidden. Beside me, I hear a faint knocking on glass. I peer into the back window of a minivan that’s next to me. The windows are tinted and I can’t make out anybody inside. Suddenly, the car behind the minivan flicks its headlights on and off quickly. I walk over and clamber into that car.

“Power went out or something?” I ask.

“Motherfucker’s can’t even give us one month without some sorta bullshit, man, I’m telling you,” he says. “Last month was that firetruck that took two hours to get here. Two hours! You know what it’s like to see a little baby girl burnt up and crying her soul out, man?” The whites of his eyes grow big in the darkness and I know he throws his hands up in exasperation as he talks because I hear his fists thump the roof of the car. “Fuck it man, let’s drive.”

He starts his car and his headlights shoot into the back window of the minivan in front of us, revealing two small children cuddled up under a blanket. Like moths, they get excited by the light and come up to press their noses against the window, knocking on them as we drive away.

“You’re a brave guy to be still here,” I say. “I mean I don’t know if you have a choice or not, but I admire your courage.”

“Naw man, it ain’t like that, man,” he says. “People be sayin’ it’s bad but it ain’t. I know I talk sometimes like it is, but it ain’t like that.”

I feel bad, like a judgmental prick. “I’m sorry for being like that,” I say.

“Ain’t nothin’ to it,” he says right off. “You keepin’ it real.”

He puts on a CD of Bukowski reading his own poems in his angry old man voice: something about how people’s best and worst trait is hiding their own fear.

We drive downtown to the bright lights and foreign business peoples in black business suits. We drive further north to the young revelers wandering between the parties in the dark neighborhoods. “Want to go to that bar?” I ask, pointing to a sign with a single flickering sign, “The Friendly Tavern.”

“Nah, I got a spot,” he says.

We drive past a large public park lit up by tall, strong lights. I see brown-skinned kids scurrying around on torn up grass playing soccer and hear them yelling Spanish at each other. I’ve seen them before, playing in the same corner of the park every week using large orange cones they stole from street construction sites. The field they play on is brutally beaten up. Really, they are playing on dirt with islands of grass. I can see the skin on their ankles, calves, and shins caked in dirt kicked up by their cleats. Behind them are middle-aged men and women playing baseball at the diamond with an outfield boasting smooth, green, uniform lawn. A couple times, a baseball would be shot into the middle of the Mexican kids’ soccer game and a pale, blue-eyed outfielder clad in a numbered jersey would run up and grab it without paying any mind to the soccer game.

I look back at the park as we drive further away, the baseball players and Mexican kids getting smaller but the large prison-like lights still jutting into the black-yellow sky like glowing eyes.

Dorian takes an exit for the Stevenson Expressway, heading south. I don’t bother to question where he’s heading. I trust his wisdom, a wisdom one gets from having troubles in one’s life.

“Aye man, check it out,” he says, pointing to the orange construction posts lining the expressway. “Like I was sayin’, they can’t give us one month without some sorta bullshit.”

We hit a long line of cars that stretches off miles off into the distance. All the cars with their red brake lights blinking off and on crawl along like one giant caterpillar. The crawling slowly shakes my eyelids closed and I dream about green caterpillars bursting into butterflies, a painfully inevitable metamorphosis. I awake with a start.

The air whipping into the open car window onto my face has a hint of the country air in it. I open my eyes and find the huge black sky engulfing Dorian and I in his little sedan gradually curving southward on the gray highway surface tattooed across the Illinois earth. “Where are we going?” I wonder to myself. Sweet smells of cornfields and pungent manure float in and out of the car.

There are flashes of lightning off in the distance, lighting up everything for a split second at a time. In that split second the flashes illuminate the sleeping earth and all that covers it. Silhouettes of rotting barns outlined by lightning. Vast cornfields and their green-yellow heads like a million little children packed together off into the horizon lit by lightning. The clouds slowly drifting by, uncovered by lightning. The flashes of lightning quicken pace, bursting like a photoshoot in the distance.

“This is beautiful,” I say.

Dorian shrugs.

“Is this the spot?” I ask.

“Nope,” he says.

A lightning flash makes him look like a mad scientist, his dread locks like a pile of shaking snakes bathed in the silver light. He adjusts his square-frame glasses and presses down on the pedal, churning his beat car onward. It starts to rain and so he closes the windows. He tells me about how he hates how kids are in the neighborhood where he lives, how they sit around with their beat lives and grow more jaded about it with every forty ounce they drink or every cigarette butt they flick into the street. I tell him about how I hate the old people in the neighborhood of the small town where I’m from, how they only step outside to mow their lawns or how they coop themselves up to watch their daytime soap operas and bitch about how the neighborhood’s going to hell whenever some youngster drives by with their car that’s way too loud.

Thunder claps ring around our conversation.

We didn’t go to a spot. We just drove and drove and talked and talked. And when we got tired we turned around. The sun came up, orange light getting into Dorian’s gaping mouth as he slept in the passenger seat. I squinted to see the yellow highway lines against the sunrise searing into my eyes.

The Fine Line

There’s the fine line in front of Vill’s head, staring into him. He’s sitting at an all night diner, laughing about it, at the fine line that follows him around, out of reach like a shadow.

Vill lives in an apartment complex, under two goth girls who blast heavy metal music and hold all-night vampire parties. When they pass each other on the front steps, the goth girls give him a knowing smile; their cigarette-yellow teeth snarling beneath black lipstick. Vill doesn’t smile back, just tucks his newspaper deeper under his arm and walks to the bus stop. He whistles a little song to walk to. The whistle gains him friendly nods by other pedestrian walkers. Vill feels a thousand miles closer to the fine line during these morning walks to the bus stop.

Far, far away from his apartment complex, at the end of the East edge of the city, he finds the gargantuan Lake Michigan separating his native Illinois from that of the wooded Michigan towns nestled across the waters. It is there at the lakefront where he trudges out into the icy cold water on sweltering summer days, trying to get closer to that fine line that is drawn somewhere in the vast blue waves. He walks out into the water with slow unexacting steps, looking down at the dust cloud explosions of sand his heavy feet create, muddling up the wet-brown sand-crests with size ten footprints. The numbing cold water creeping up his legs makes him want to squeal and spasm like hitting the funny bone, except that feeling throughout his whole body. Little by little the numb becomes normal and accepted and okay. He thinks he’s closer to the fine line this way. He thinks.

As an overworked manager of a grocery store, Vill frequently forgets to feed his goldfish in his living room. The innocent orange creatures just prance about their glass cage, not even remembering who Vill is, not knowing the hand that feeds them. Yet they exist and swim around within the fine line. Sometimes he feels the fine line crawling into his mind in the high afternoon, when every single person surrounding him seems to be busy with their dog walking or office work or vacuuming. When Vill lounges in his hammock in the backyard, looking up at the clouds swoon over the wind, he sometimes looks down at his feet so far away from him and feels that they are not his own. He feels like he’s living in a ghost of himself, an universal spirit borrowing this odd human body to experience the wonderful suffering of this world. And he looks at the tiny brown birds that fling themselves off of power-lines, their suicide attempts foiled by a natural instinct to live, to fly, to be one with the air so high and even higher. But that only happens in the noontide afternoon, when the fiery sun has reached it’s zenith in the sky and makes all the shadows of buildings, trees, people, and ants cower into hiding, into themselves.

And the fine line happens when Vill gets kicked in the face with a soccer ball. One night he was playing soccer as a goal-tender at the net. Under the bright stadium lights of a park in the evening, Vill is not paying attention to the soccer game and instead stares at the softball game going on at the other end of the park. He is focused so much on the baseball field that the roar of the soccer game is just a dim hum to his inattentive ears. Imagining a baseball hitting someone on the head and possibly killing them freaks him out. He is daydreaming about all the blood and the ambulance and the sullen air of sadness it would all cause. The wind blows a cool, refreshing breeze on his sweaty neck. Then, he gets pounded in the face by a soccer ball. The soccer ball is an unexpected hard pounding on his cheek. And as he falls to the ground, in that split second, the baseball game, the soccer field, the clouds, the Lake, the universe all disappears from his knowledge and he is toeing the fine line. But then it all rushes back; he doesn’t know whether the throbbing of his face or the embarrassing blood in his cheeks burns more. Then the game comes rushing back like a typhoon and the people crowd around looking down at him. He needs to talk to the people and assure them he’s okay and that there’s nothing to worry about. He needs to feel the anxious feeling of everyone’s attention being directed at him but wishing only that everyone would get back to the game. And when everyone did get back into the game, he forgot about the softball game and went back to goal tending. He was quite far from the fine line after getting back into the game.

That fine line cannot be painted. When he paints, he tries so hard sometimes to paint that fine line. He starts with the deep logic of it, of mixing the right colors for the right mood, a green-blue calm balanced by a fiery red-orange. He knows there are fine lines between the boundaries of the colors, but these are not THE fine line itself. He eventually blends out the boundaries out of an exasperated surrender, and during these sloppy strokes, he is experiencing the fine line within his very own bloodstream.

The fine line between past and present, between right and wrong, between happy and sad. It pervades around us like invisible, fleeting fog so fine we can’t see the shapes from the lines.

The Giants

A high-pitched grinding is screeching loudly outside my window. It’s like a giant is outside, dragging a tree-sized fork against the side of a metal warehouse.

I wake up earlier than usual and brush my teeth, the screeching reaching my ears through the bathroom door, accompanying the swish-swish of my toothbrush on my teeth. Lanky, greasy hair all wet from this awful summer heat is slathered on my forehead like sleeping baby worms. And it really is awful, how you wake up drenched in sticky, sweaty fluids. When I’m wearing sweat like a wetsuit, it’s almost religious how good it feels after a cold, cold shower. And just getting up the nerve to jump in that cold shower is terrifying because of how jarringly cold it’s going to be. I can’t even bear to test that cold water with my feet or else I’ll get nervous. It’s all or nothing: I psyche myself up to jump in and let the stinging cold water drench my warm, sweaty skin. And most of the time I’m so tired and confused that I just laugh aloud to myself, feeling the cold water hammering little headaches into my temples as it sprays my head.

When I get out of the shower, the screeching has faded into the distance. After I wipe myself dry and wiggle into my clothes like a hula-hooping performer, the screeching has stopped. Hm, I think. Hm, hm. There must be something awfully interesting going on outside, but I make a bowl of cereal first. I fill the bowl so full of generic Fruity Loops that I need to hold down the red, blue, and green rings with my palm as I pour milk in so they won’t tumble over. I find a plastic spork lying next to the empty silverware drawer.

Outside, sitting on my front stoop, I find no sign of the screeching culprit. A couple semi-trucks crawl down the street like centipedes on their eighteen rubber wheels. Maybe Fred would know what was making the noise. Fred is my neighbor, an old man who takes his morning and afternoon and evening walks after breakfast and lunch and dinner. He often comes by and we chat about the neighborhood. He’s not one of those old timers who tries to ask you about your studies or work or family or drags on the conversation to try to fill up their own boring lives, he really just says what’s on his mind. So I saunter down the sidewalk, taking an apple with me. My first bite of that apple is so crispy and seems to snap into the air around me. Oh, how good fruit can be on a summer-morning walk!

When I get to Fred’s place we talk about something lively that I don’t remember. For him the ways of the world can’t be much better than a supply of toothpicks and a bucket of beers. He’s so perfectly simple. He’s like a country-mannered fellow wedged into an urban neighborhood. When I ask him about the screeching, he doesn’t really know what to say. He just nibbles on a toothpick wedged in-between his teeth. Well, I guess he just doesn’t really care or maybe didn’t even notice it; that’s just the way he carries on with his day. It would take a nuclear holocaust to put him in distress. Even then, he’d probably be twenty notches calmer than the screaming people around him. And so I leave his place to find something to do. I’m at a point of being jobless, single, and absolutely certain of only the good feeling of wind on my face, something I’ve picked up and grown to trust from my years as a skateboarder back in high school. All I’ve ever enjoyed is skateboarding. I’d skateboard on the bikepath in the woods near my house to get to the post office and mail a letter. The smell of maple trees swishing their sappy juices past my skin and the smooth, bumpy imperfections of asphalt pushing against my feet made me fall in love each morning. It was the rush of it all: of your lungs hurting so bad and so exhausted and your thighs so furiously hot and overworked. And I skateboarded in my head, too, constantly picturing myself doing the act on desktops, ledges, bedframes, and stairwells. I skateboarded away from this world of greasy gray materials with its greasy brown food and greasy pale faces. I skateboarded away from the garage where my brother worked on cars and I skateboarded away from my family that loved me with more love than I deserved. I skateboarded to the city, where the prospect of prospects invited me. But as I walk down the sidewalk now, I can’t think of anything to do that could make me fall in love like that again.

So I weigh my options in front of me. The weather is too beautifully bright to stay inside. My natural inclination is to go grab a drink or some weed and wander up and down the neighborhoods. So I phone up Solomon to try to score some of the cheap hash that he lets loose for dirt cheap. He tells me to come over. I hop on the Ashland bus heading north to Grand, giving the driver a timid “thanks” as I step off. The houses grow older, fainter, and more worn as I walk further west. The afternoon sun beats down yellow all around, and the off-white sidewalks don’t do anything but shimmer the light back up at my eyes. When I arrive, Solomon is sitting on his front-porch rocking chair smoking a cigar and reading the funnies in the paper. He looks up and nods at me before getting up and shaking my hand with all the relaxed energy of a man whose work involves helping others escape their own reality.

“My main man,” he says. That’s what he started calling me the second time I met him. “Oh my main man, you’re looking good,” he says, eyeing me up and down with an child-like smile. “Come in, come in,” he says.

Solomon’s house is a travesty of an impoverished drug-shack. On the outside there are panels of siding gone missing and graffiti sprayed all over. On the inside, plush sofas sit on bright red shag carpeting. There’s some sort of Arabian folk music playing with some droning voice singing over a sitar. The walls are decorated with hundreds of framed-art the size of fingernails. As I look at one of a thumb-size doodle of a hilly-billy type guy screaming because he’s getting bit in the arm by his mule, Solomon puts out his cigar. “You like those?” he asks. “I got a midget friend who does those. She says drawing so small helps with her penis envy or some shit.” He laughs loud, but I’m not sure if he’s joking. He hands me a beer, something called Fernando’s Balls. The paper label on the bottle has two soccer balls on fire, falling from the clouds.

“That’s my brother’s brewing company,” he says.

“Where’s he located?” I ask.

“Tempe, Arizona. You like it?”

“It’s good.”

“Let me tell you a secret about why,” he says, leaning over, “Fernando likes to put a tad bit of his balls in the beer. Yep, every once in a while he’ll just walk into the brewery and teabag the shit out of those fuckin’ vats of fermenting alcohol.”

“Um,” I say, not sure if I should smile or not.

He slaps me on the shoulder and laughs. “Loosen up, dude, I’m just kidding,” he says. I’m not sure if he is.

There are strings of Chinese characters written on paper squares hanging from the ceiling. Every once in a while they sway from a breeze blowing in through the open living room window.

“Listen, Solomon, I’d love to stay and chat but I’ve kind of gotta get going,” I say.

“Oh, come on, you gotta stay!” he insists. “I haven’t even shown you my new turtle yet!”

He brings me over to a clear aqua-tank the size of an office desk. There are two small garden snakes coiled near each other, slumbering. “That’s Greg,” Solomon says, pointing to a turtle standing in a corner, facing the wall away from us. He grins at me with the happy teeth of a madman. I grin without making eye contact, only wanting to leave this place which makes me so uncertain of things.

“Feel like having a dinner with my friends in a bit?” he asks. “Just stay a little longer, I promise you it’ll be worth it. Have you had my couscous? You haven’t had real Mediterranean food ’till you’ve had my couscous, I promise you that my main man!”

I sigh, reluctant as ever but still wanting to be polite. “Sure, I’ll stay,” I say. Solomon is delighted. He goes to warm up the couscous, which he has stored in large tubs in his refrigerator. That’s all he has in his refrigerator actually: just giant metal tubs of couscous and six packs of Fernando’s Balls. I’m looking out the window at the red-orange late afternoon sun and the long, skinny shadows creeping up the buildings across the street when the guests arrive: a tall, sullen looking man with frizzy hair like dark brown sagebrush and a girl with charcoal black eyeshadow and shiny black hair slicked around her thin, bony face. Solomon yells from the kitchen, “Make yourself at home, I’ll be out with the cuisine in a bit.” He laughs after he says this, digging the folk music still playing, jiggling his feet on the linoleum floor a little while he stirs the grains on the stove.

“Hi, I’m Fernando,” he says, shaking my hand vigorously. “This is Adilah, my girlfriend.” Adilah doesn’t take notice of me nor Fernando’s introduction. She looks impatient and taps her foot a bunch. Fernando sees the beer I’m drinking and his face lights up with his teeth and eyes all enlarged and shining. “Hey! That’s my beer,” he says. “You like my beer, man?” He excitedly titters a little tee-hee.

“We have to stay here for a week?” Adilah says in a whiny pout. Her face looks at the place with contempt, like it’s not giving her something she wants. Fernando takes no notice.

Dinner is amazing: huge helpings of couscous with seasoned potato stew and with plenty of grainy bread all filled with little seeds and soft and warm. I forget to drink water because I’m enjoying it so much.

When it’s all done Solomon takes me to the door. “Hey man, listen, you’ve been my friend for how long now?” he asks.

“A few months,” I say.

“Well here man, here, take this.” He hands me a plastic baggie of hash, all smelly and crispy. “For my loyal friend. Call me up sometime, we’ll have some more fuckin’ couscous, yeah?”

I say goodbye to him and Fernando and Adilah. Fernando is drinking his own beer trying to tell Adilah a story about the history of his brewing company, but she is focused on painting her nails pink in front of the television.

Out in the street, the heat is starting to go down a bit with the sun, but I still feel a little moist with sweat. Maybe it’s my body trying to burn off all that food. I stop to smoke a little in the alley to relax my nerves. I walk around town for what seems like hours and hours until darkening twilight, taking in the smells of people’s smiles, oily chicken, raw sewage, bursting fire hydrants, fireworks that boom down the neighborhood intersections. There’s something sad about it all, the lonely feeling of passing others with nothing but a half-hostile glance, the lonely families with their delicate situations, the lonely lovers erasing themselves into each other one by one, the nervous cats scurrying down the lonely alleys under lonely balconies. I can’t help but smile at it, the whole experience of life together like this under sky pollutioned by orange-yellow light, the progression of it all, of this breathing furnace of a city all busy with a million lonelinesses. Oh what uncertainty it is to be young and existent!

So I walk with excited energy up to a friends house near Elston and Ashland while thinking about all of this, where a party is supposedly happening. I hear the din of commotion from two blocks away. It must be a huge shin-dig. There are people packed to the brim in the huge front lawn, tightly packed all the way up to the black metal gates where I barely squeeze in. It’s all yelling and crazed and hopelessly and hopefully youthful in there. Bottles clank on the sidewalk and against the walls of the brick buildings beside the house and on the bones of people’s arms and legs. I spot an old buddy I haven’t seen for years, Scary Sammy, a nickname we gave him one Halloween when he showed up as a Thunder Cat. Last time I saw him, we were skateboarding in California, packed in some one-bedroom apartment with nine other skateboarders. “Sammy!” I say in surprise, joy, and excitement.

He smiles all big with his lips and teeth spread way apart. “Haven’t seen you in years, dude!” he screams, hugging me. “I’m so glad you’re here!”

“I’ve been here all along,” I say, smiling and nodding to the beat of some funky hip-hop beats blaring from inside. At this his smile fades.

“Let me tell you, dude, the last time I saw you I was in a horrible condition,” he says. “I was lost and completely depressed at the time.”

A tattoo on his arm reads, “My Hell comes from inside” in cursive. I ask him more and why he doesn’t skateboard anymore.

“Skateboarding is like Laguna Beach these days,” he says, “You have your crew of friends who have beef with other crews who talk their shit behind each other’s backs and on and on. The reason why I skateboarded was so that I could hurt myself. I felt like throwing my body down huge gaps, stairs, and rails all in a self-destructive chaos. It was totally unhealthy for me. I study philosophy now…and I paint.”

“Who do you read?” I ask.

He takes a sip of his beer. “You have to study Nietzsche first, then you have to study the Existentialists,” he says. “Oh and Bukowski. I studied his book Women and it made me completely change my outlook on my sexuality.” His voice is excited and eager. His eyes reflect the sullen world of the party that we’re at, making me feel like I’m witnessing a precious moment in the heart of the thrashing foolishness of rebellious youth. “I felt like I was addicted to the orgiastic experience. I wanted sex and I felt it and it was beautiful. But every time, every single time afterwards, I felt this emptiness and complete darkness in my heart. It’s not a good thing to experience sex like that.”

“So what next then?” I ask.

“Well, I’m going to New York to pursue painting. I just didn’t want you guys to think I just disappeared and stopped calling because I’m an asshole. I wanted to vindicate myself and explain myself.” He pulls out his phone. “Here let me show you something,” he says, handing me his phone. It’s a photo of a painting of his: a little blue figure with a blue dunce cap on his head, sitting in a rickety old wooden chair facing the corner of some melancholy green room; you can make out a feeling of total despair in the figure’s expression. “I paint the problems of this world and all the problems all around us,” he says as I hand him back his phone. Suddenly he sees another old buddy of ours and cuts his way across the crowd to go greet him and maybe give him the same sad spiel.

I go inside and see the people clustered into their clusters, drinking beer to oil the silent moments and releasing the laughs repressed during the sober hours. There are a couple girls in white blouses and faded black jeans selling cold PBR out of a mini-fridge. I notice a tall, lanky, tired man handing money to one of the girls in slow, gracious movements. His long hair is tied up in a bun and his bushy beard looks like a furry bird’s nest. It’s good ol’ Puck. He walks up to me with a beer in hand, nodding his head with a calm smirk showing on the corner of his mouth. “How’ve you been living, man?” he says.

“Good,” I say. Puck taught me to be my own person back in the day. On our long drives to the skatepark on rainy days, he’d curse the strip-mall skate fashions and the greasy fast food diet that I had. I respected him for that, he gave me ideals to believe in. I hadn’t seen him for years, only hearing that he stopped talking to everyone and became a recluse. I imagined him as my father when times got rough at my own house.

At this moment, I don’t want to talk to him, I guess I don’t even want to find out his wretched, smiling state of life. I feel like I can read into him already. We can impose our own interpretations of others for them if we don’t give them a chance. Puck did nothing but remind me of something sad from a book or movie or something. Because of that, that’s how I register him in my head: the self-loathing, once honorable but now given-up, bitter Willy Loman reluctantly dragging his feet around the stage. I’ve lost faith in him the way one loses one’s health: slowly, inexplicably, in hopeless denial at first but with stoic acceptance later. The most horrible loss of faith isn’t of religion but of your role models; a marker of your own change more than theirs.

I say goodbye to Puck. He goes on smirking, walking off to spread his smirk like a gem to the world that pays no attention to it.

My kicks are over for the night and I walk home. Parties aren’t what they used to be. I stuff the rest of Solomon’s dank under the blanket of a man sleeping in the shadow of the recessed doorway of a bakery. I got high just looking at the peaceful, empty night streets while walking home. Across the street from my house, there is a tiny, brittle black woman with her back bent over in a big floppy sunhat, slowly pushing a shopping cart filled with cans and cans of non-perishable foods down the street. The bottom wires of the cart have caved under the years of use and drags along the sidewalk, screeching like a tree-sized fork against a metal warehouse. I walk along side her, both of us silently listening to the music of her work. I help her unload the cans into a food donation box and walk her home.

Mmm, the flow of alone and together knitted like patches of beautiful squares on the fabric of time.

Our Will Be Done

My fancy, grandiose younger brother visited my house today. His face full of affection or sympathy, he eyed up and down the dirty fluff coming from my couch cushions. As we left to get lunch, his smiling face cut into my heart, that same face that failed to cushion the blows from my stepfather’s pulverizing arms when we were younger. How he can smile and I can only smirk with false earnestness is the mark of how we cope with our past. And our past is bonded and glued together by wicked memories of pain, of crying, of a prison-house we had to return to every night. It was a house where my brother and I hid from the living room where my stepfather–his father–watched television, isolating ourselves in separate rooms to seclude ourselves into the mind-numbing, comfortable alter-reality of video games and books, where pain is merely virtual and not felt like it is with pulled hair, bruised bones, and felled egos. Books and video games were a world that made sense, where if you got hurt it was your own fault and nobody else’s. We starved ourselves in our rooms, save for the snacks we would sneak up with us. We knew the risks of going to the kitchen, which required traveling through the living room, which was a minefield of his biting words, arguments, and physical pain. But sometimes the pain would come upstairs. So when we heard his heavy footsteps coming up the stairs we would pause our game or look up from our book and hope he wouldn’t burst into our room furious about something. We would hope those infinite moments of his coming up the stairs would pass like a bad nightmare. But when he came for you there wasn’t much to do. What was there to do? It was the worst sort of pain–senseless pain, pain without being given a reason why, pain that felt unjust, pain you couldn’t do anything about except go back to day after day.

Our waitress served us tortilla chips and salsa with two plastic glasses of ice-water. She spoke English dappled with Spanish accents. I ordered the dollar-fifty tacos, one carne asada and one vegetarian. He got a shrimp torta. We munched on the complimentary tortilla chips and salsa while we waited for the food. We didn’t talk much aside from my strained, almost unnatural seeming questions about his work, his family, his health. He worked as an accountant, and was a damned good one. We both excelled in school throughout our childhood, but in high school our achievements diverged. While I, being the older brother by two years, meandered through my classes with an eye more on girls and good times than on my grades, he went on to join our school’s state-title-winning math team and scored a perfect 36 on his math ACT scores. I became a temp bouncing from corporate cubicles to unemployment offices. Yet my brother, Timmy, still looks up to me with all the admiration of a child reading about a comic book superhero. I’ve always found him fascinating for that. The waitress came to fill up our glasses. After she finished and we thanked her, Thomas spoke.

“Are you happy?” he asks me.

“What do you think?” I say.

“You’re not somebody that I can imagine being truly unhappy. You’ve got stamina in you, and I know because I’ve seen it.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Come on, Phuong, you’re the only one I know that can make due with what you have under what you’ve gone through. Your car getting towed, your apartment flat getting burned to the ground, and mom dying–all within a matter of weeks–that’s not something anybody can endure, you know?”

“What’s it matter? I’m not going to get those fuckers to give me my car back, I’m not expecting my apartment and possessions to reconstruct itself, I’m not…”

“You’re not expecting mom to come back?”

“She’s not coming back, no.”

He glared at me with an open pondering mouth and those intelligent eyes of his.

“You don’t have any emotion left, do you?” he asked. “Not once did you call me, or any of us for that matter, after she died.”

I don’t say anything. I look at my chips, eat them, the crunches breaking up his truthful words. Frightening truths are lessened by focus on something else, like eating tortilla chips and thinking about their texture or discerning each individual deep-fried crunch on the tongue. It was the same focus on the details that got me through the times when you were getting yelled at and waiting for the pain to come. You would stare at a corner of the ceiling so as not to look at the deliverer of senseless pain in the eyes, waiting patiently for the blows to rain down but thinking only about the dusty texture of the corner of the ceiling of the living room. The truth was I didn’t think anybody should need to depend on anyone else. Tragedies should be endured independently. We only have ourselves to rely on, it’s just that most of us are blessed with good enough friends or family to never know this terrifying truth. To be alone is beautiful in that way.

“You’re breaking apart from the family,” he said. “Every year that goes by that you don’t call or come home, you’re floating away from us.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean you think it’s normal to skip out on Thanksgiving and Christmas, to just completely forget that your family is there celebrating it without you? Your very own family that saw you grow up and leave on your own?”

“You think I fucking don’t know this dude?” I snapped.

Silence. Timmy looks about, glad that there aren’t a lot of people dining around us, listening to us. He faces back toward me, blinkingly aggravated.

“Well just tell me why?”

“I don’t have a family, I don’t have a home or any damn Thanksgiving or Christmas that I was ever a part of.”

“You’re crazy, you know that? You really are.”

I don’t know what’s worse about his berating me: his not knowing my daily torment of berating myself for having such a loveless life or my inability to reach out to him, my half-brother who endured the hard years along with me. And I blame his father, who had married my mother seemingly out of the blue one day and came into my life like a black, cancerous infection.

“Do you think it would have been different had mom divorced?” I asked.

He shook his head no, but more as if he were saying he didn’t want to answer the question, and looked down at his hands. Our mother would talk to me about divorce, about her loneliness and depression. She told me these things when I was older, when our relationship was already estranged by her crazy work schedule and my bouts of passing out drunk and sleeping in parking lots in my car so I didn’t have to come home to my stepfather’s disapproving eyes. Eventually my being out of the house worked, in a way. The house eventually felt alien to me, like a cheap hotel shared by unhappy tenants. And when I would stumble up the stairs into my room in the early morning to catch some sleep and leave again, my mother would be splayed out in her bed sometimes, crying. I would stand there frozen in the middle of the flight of stairs, out of her sight, listening to her quiet sobs that held a low whimper underneath tiny sniffling. It was terrifying facing my mother like this, her usually resolute, strong face that she bared against my stepfather in their arguments seemed so distant when she was alone crying. And I told her to catch a movie, to pick up a hobby or travel more…anything, anywhere. And I used to recommend her books but she brushed books off as uninteresting and unable to hold her interest. She would ask me about divorcing my stepfather a lot. At first, when I was younger, I would plead with her to go through with a divorce, trying to bring up the worst of times to her mind, telling her it’s a terrible situation she’s in and telling her how much I hated him. “No,” she would say to me, “He’s a good man, he’s a good man for what he’s done for us.” Then she would look at me with big wet eyes like a child begging you reassure her that Santa was really real and say, “He got us our citizenship into this country.” Truthfully, that fact has always kept me from completely running away from the family altogether. My green card and citizenship certificate are because of this wretched man and we both saw him as the price we paid. When I grew older, I no longer pleaded for her to take action. I knew that she would continue to rationalize her marriage with him, but not out of love or even gratitude for the legal and financial security he’s provided for us. She is deeply afraid, absolutely sickened by fear of being old and alone with nobody to turn to in this legendary country she had so much hope in, where her only blood-family are two quiet sons.

We decide to walk around the city after our lunch. It’s a yellow-gray day, one of those days where the clouds are so everywhere-gray and mixed with sun that you don’t know whether to bring an umbrella or sunscreen. But the people didn’t care, the people were out and about like they are every afternoon, walking across the street and driving down them and foraging in garbage bins for bottles to recycle and giving you a look and not minding you at all and sad and grinning and friendly.

“For a long time I didn’t really know you,” I told Thomas.

“Well there’s not a lot you did to try,” he said. “You can at least try.”

We were walking past a group of teenagers lounging on a stoop with loose clothing and mean faces. Two were laid back on their elbows on the steps and one was standing, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. He watched me pass him and muttered something in Spanish before flicking his flaming cigarette at me. I glared at him. He walked up to me and said, “What you lookin’ at, bro?”

“Why’d you have to do that?” I asked.

His friends got up and began walking toward us, snickering with each other. The main guy held his arms up like a cross, I guess in an attempt at seeming larger than he was, like a peacock would. “Don’t fuckin’ look at me, bro,” he said.

Thomas grabbed my elbow. “Come on, Phuong, let’s go,” he urged.

“You better listen to your boyfriend there if you know what’s good for you,” said one of the minions standing behind the leader.

Without looking away from them, without blinking even, I said, “He’s my brother.” At this, the group burst out laughing, one of the minions nudging the other with his arm, saying, “Hey what kinda whore bitch they’re mother is, man, squeezing these two ugly ass motherfuckers out of her whore pussy!”

At this, I lunged at the group, my skinny, languid body fueled by a rage against meaningless hostility, fueled by a subliminal racist hatred, fueled by a searing embarrassment for not trying to be a good son, a good brother, or a loving family man. What happened was obvious. I got my ass kicked, the feeling of a bag of fists being dumped onto my face drilled away my blinding rage and left me a limp, ghost-like body on the sidewalk.

I sat in the hospital bed staring out the window. I didn’t think about the black eye or the stitches on my face or the bruises on my ribcage like purple-blue stains. They put me on the top floor, where I asked the nurse to draw back the blinds so I could look at the painfully bright city stretching into the distance as if it were sown into the horizon line. My brother had just left.

“Sorry I ran, Phuong,” he said. “I just couldn’t, you know, I didn’t want to…”

“I know, it’s okay, it was my battle.”

“No, it wasn’t, it was both ours, I just thought it wasn’t worth it, you know?”

“I was just asking for it. But look…about what we talked about earlier. What I meant when I said I didn’t really know you was that I didn’t really know myself,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” he asked. “You’re you. You’re my brother.”

“Listen, you’re half white, man. Your dad’s a fucking white Irish American. Do you know what it’s like growing up Vietnamese, growing up with my mother like this? Do you know what it’s like comparing yourself to others, trying to be someone else all the time to pass off as American? Do you know what it’s like years later when you run out of people you look up to who you can compare yourself to and then one day you wake up and you’re no longer sure who to be anymore? I thank God that his blood, your father’s irrational, abusive blood isn’t in my blood. I just don’t want that. But you have to understand that I can never be a part of the pumpkin-pie Thanksgiving family member or visiting your brother family member or even the unconditional love family member for you. I’m sorry.”

Now, in the hospital bed surrounded by people hurting and dying, all of them thinking about the afterlife and family and their personal philosophies or just hoping to make it another day, I feel so much a part of a family. If only for a few days, this white-walled room is my warm, dreamy, legendary America.

Where the Shadows Fall

“I want to try to be a construction worker,” Priscilla thought. She saw their orange vests and tanned skin all along the highway. She saw them from her comfortable backseat booster chair on the long drives her family would take her on to visit other family. She was a little girl then, her world was one without the sharp biting sense of schedules and routines. She worried about playing only. She had sets of dolls and houses and tiny porcelain tea sets.

Twenty years later, she was folding clothes into neat little squares at a strip-mall clothing store. She did everything carefully, gingerly handling articles of clothing and using white-out on her vacation-request forms. One day, while her hands slipped around the stiff new cotton shirts, her face became contorted and twisted. She started to cry tears that streamed through her eyelashes and around her meaty cheeks. “What’s the matter?” her co-workers asked her. She didn’t answer, but she knew she was unhappy with her clean, consumer retail life. She wanted to work with her hands, to strain muscles and feel exhausted at the end of the day. She didn’t really want to say this though, for fear of her fears becoming and seeming too real. But she wasn’t wanting to become a brawny butch girl either. She had a reverence for delicate things. Her dog was a tiny little wiener, with legs that scurried like an insect and a face that made people remember how delicate life is. She still appreciated cleaning things. After vacuuming the dust that had gathered around the floor-panels of her living room or cleaning the toilet bowl with one of those bristly brushes, she would smile to herself and feel more free to go join social functiona. Most days though, she stayed in and watched movies or read. It wasn’t so much that she was anti-social as much as that she didn’t feel like she deserved to go out after her value-less workday of rearranging cotton shirts on racks by size and color.

When her boyfriend called, she would often be quiet and unresponsive, conversing only out of a feeling of obligation rather than an actual want to talk. Whenever she watched the film Pulp Fiction, her mind would always race around in circles when Mia poses a question to Vincent: “In a conversation, do you listen or wait to talk?”

She always wanted so badly to listen. But sometimes she really just waits to talk. Like when her boyfriend, Mark, was complaining of the messy spider monkeys at work (he works at a public zoo), and she really just wanted to talk about something that’d been bothering her instead of listening. She wished that people would be more something…more empathetic maybe. Something that would make people more susceptible to a good conversation. She had a talk at a street corner one afternoon with a stranger while waiting for the pedestrian light to turn into the green walking signal. It had just finished raining and there was a rainbow, the most vivid one she had ever remembered seeing, painted high and bright in the blue sky. She looked up at it and turned and saw another pedestrian beside her, who looked at her too. “It’s so full and filled in,” she commented. He nodded and smiled. She liked that conversation, even if it was really just an exchange of thoughts.

But what she wanted to tell her boyfriend was that she wasn’t sure about her relationship with him anymore, about their time spent together and their treatment of each other. She felt unappreciated and deserving of better. He would often scold her about being too boring or not interesting enough. She would apologize, but wanted so badly to tell him how she wished he would just hold her and take her out on a night meant just for them or even just say how much he loved her sometimes. But she didn’t say these things, out of a hollowing fear of being left dejected, lonely, heartbroken. Still, they loved each other and completely needed each other.

The first night he had spent at her house, he woke up excited and satiated. She was happy and bubbly. But that night, her father pulled her aside when she walked by the living room and told her how much she needed to get a job, a life, a family. “You’re my only child, you understand that?” he said to her. Then he grabbed her by her shoulder with a tough, almost painful grip and said, “You need to get your act together and make something of yourself. I won’t have you ruining the family name, not under my watch you won’t.” She smelled warm, strong whiskey on his breath. She watched him let her shoulder go. She watched him walk with hard, clumsy steps back to the couch. She watched him watching television, pouring himself another drink. “Asshole,” she whispered to herself, under her breath, feeling a scalding sea of rage under her emotionless face. She used this anger, this resentment, this aggravating feeling of detachment from her father to love her lover more. She knew that when she locked lips with his that there was something she could rely on, a somebody in her life that countered all the murky, foggy, uncertainties in her life.

She had an artistic eye, having been a visual learner since she was little, when she would insist on playing I spy over and over with her older brother. There was a painting she did with trees all swirly, soul-red leaves blending with mushy brushstrokes into green-yellow tree trunks. Trees stacked upon trees in a forest thick like tangled hair. In-between the spaces of the trees, where the shadows fall, you could make out the ghost-outlines of people looking out at you.

One day there was something that drove her to want to quit her job. So she did one morning. Her large eyes glowered in determination as she handed in her two week notice, forcefully shoving the form into the manila envelope taped to the human resources office door. That afternoon, she showed up at her best friend’s door with her dog. When the door opened, she said, “Can you watch Ferdinand for a while? I’ve got something I need to do.” She handed the dog over along with a tote-bag of doggy toys and treats. She got in her car after that and pressed on the accelerator hard, screeching out of the driveway. She laughed to herself as she zipped across the expressway lanes, thinking about how cheesy her peel-out of the driveway was. Then she began thinking about Mark and her laughing mouth closed into a fist-like clamp.

“I’m leaving for a while,” she said to him, sitting at Mark’s kitchen table.

“Where to?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet,” she said.

He chuckled a little. “What are you talking about Priscilla?” he asked. “Is your family going on another trip?”

She didn’t say anything, her blank face punctuated by her tight, almost quivering mouth. Mark got up and poured himself a glass of milk. He took a drink and looked out the window and then at his nails. The television was on in another room, explosions, gunfire, and yelling drifting through the silence between them. “Well, have fun,” he finally said. “Call me when you get back.”

She got up, grabbed her keys from the table and walked upstairs without looking at him. He grabbed his milk and went to sit on the couch, turning the volume up. After a couple minutes, she came down the stairs with a bag of her things hanging from her shoulder and a painting under her other arm. She walked out the door without saying goodbye, the sounds of explosions and violence louder than before. In her parked car under the evening sunlight, her mouth opened as she breathed a huge sigh of relief. Her body shook like a toothache as she started the car with her trembling fingers. She looked over at the painting resting on her passenger seat, a painting of her destination. She looked at the painted weave of trees and the dark, dim figures looking at her from the shadows. Her stomach felt like it was fluttering and sputtering like a deck of cards being shuffled. Her mouth broke into a smile so big her pink gums felt the warm rays of sunshine hitting her face.