breaking the rules

 All at once I knew there was no list of deserving girls waiting to get into St. Theresa's; I'd been accepted without delay, and I'd seen empty beds in some of the rooms. Each occupied bed meant six thousand dollars tuition, and the nuns were not about to give that up, regardless how many demerits any of us collected. Inside of me a hot, sour column rose, and I swallowed hard to keep it from my mouth.

"We've made a commitment to your mother to help her with your upbringing," the Mother Superior said as she opened the door for me, "and we intend to to just that."

My head felt curiously light as I walked down the empty hallway. Everyone else was in class. The sound of my shoes against the black and white tiles was like applause, mocking my futile plans of escape.

Such a shame she was widowed so young...

I'd rather be with you than with anyone else...

Lies. All of them.

In the bathroom I ran the cold water until it turned icy. I cupped my hands under the faucet, bent down, and drank for a long time. When I stood up, my nose and chine were wet; in the mirror I watched two drops of water run down my neck.

Such a shame she was widowed so young...

Of course she would have told the nuns that. And they'd believed her. Just as I had believed everything she'd told me.

I wiped my hands against the sides of my skirt and, quickly, left the bathroom. I knew if I waited, if I let myself think, I'd never go through with it. I started running. Opened her office door without knocking.

She was sitting at her desk, one hand holding down the pages of an open book. Through the small window panes the bright afternoon sun slanted, breaking into a pattern of yellow squares on the floor.

"What is it?" She frowned.

I stepped through the tiny particles of dust that floated in the light.

"Yes?"

"I'm--" My voice sounded too loud.

She took off her bifocals. From the hall came the ringing of a bell, announcing the end of classes.

The air felt dry against the inside of my throat. "I don't have a father. I'm--" And then I said it, the word I'd never even tested aloud inside my room at home--"illegitimate"--a word so powerful it filled the office.

At first she didn't believe me. I could tell by the way she looked at me, hard and probing. But I kept staring right back into her eyes until--finally--they turned unforgiving.

--from Unearned Pleasures by Ursula Hegi

kids on a couch 1994

you are shocked. "he looks like a booger."

oldest girl cousin ignores you, singing along. "...mom and dad will never understand."

oldest boy cousin is slurping OK soda. you stare at the black and white cartooned can in silence. your little brother is having an imaginary fight with a dinosaur; a fleck of his spittle lands in your eye.

why were you dumped here again? they wonder. later, every kid you know will make you understand that you are overbearing. you are too loud, too opinionated, use too many vocabulary words, are interested in weird things like water fowl instead of  mtv. are foolish enough to be a mouthpiece for your father's opinions about youth culture, raining on everyone's parade. saying "bill clinton sucks" and "green day is gay". you are a social tragedy who lost your destiny in the first act.

later you will play tag football in the yard on that hot summer night in a neighborhood full of kids. you will huff and puff and know that you will never be one of them. but how you loved them. how, as your parents drove you and little brother home, you imaged in your child's mind that heaven must be an endless summer night playing outdoors with cousins...

the lost girl, part 2

She panicked.

Her friends expected her to be at the party in an hour. An hour to learn how to use a tampon.

She locked herself in the bathroom and grabbed her Mother's box of OB Super Absorbent. Not even an applicator. How she moaned against the violation of Satin's Cotton Little Finger, until at last success.

Now comes the horror of the bathing suit. She had always been a thin child until puberty's first flutterings that 6th grade year. Now she was all fleshy breasts, pudgy hips and bright blue stretch marks. She sighed at her reflection in the full-length mirror. I'm 12 but I look like grandma. 


15 minutes until the party, one neighborhood away. She asks her mother for a ride.

"Take the bus."

She has never taken the bus before. It's a confusion of large, loud vehicles and a scatagory of numbers. Where does this number bus go? How about that one? She takes a gander and stands waits at the one on the corner, oblivious as to where it's going except that it's a bus and mother said take it.

The bus drives in the opposite direction from the party and stops at a hill. You wait nervously, so old in your shoes, but really just a little 12-year old, as the bus driver gets out to urinate on the side of the road. He is annoyed to realize he still has a passenger when he re-enters the bus.

"Where you going?"

She timidly offers her friend's address. "Girl, you on the wrong bus." He offers some directions. She remembers them, the way she would a new word she had to learn how to spell, and manages to get on the bus. She gets off two blocks early when she recognizes her friend's street. Just in case. She arrives at the party 30 minutes late.

Party friend's mother answers the door, harried looking. She wordlessly points at the open cellar door, which beckons like a dark gaping maw. You can hear music playing. Garbage. You can touch me if you want to.


Without fail, they're all there. Including Best Friend, dagger in heart, mistress of the dark night of the soul. And she's all over him, twittering about, giggling, shrieking, pinching, tugging with naked desire, like a hummingbird in heat. You see Him...smiling the smile that slices between your legs like a knife under the covers at night. But, behind it, you can see the faint tremble.

"Spin the bottle!" jokes Jennifer, the ugly fat one who can make jokes like that because everyone knows it can never happen with her. You hate her so much right now it's impossible to feel sorry for her.

How did it happen? 


You catch your breath now. You've passed the youths on the basketball court, made it past their judgement, their eyes and the mutual disgust that could flow between. As you walk back towards the house and the rotting corpse inside that you have yet to decide what to do with. It hits you.

Here. I'm here. 


The house is a mere row away. You stare in disbelief at the pink chipping paint. You wonder who lives there now. Who cares, it doesn't matter. Funny how an event freezes all other time before and after that point in a person's mind.

That is where it happened. It doesn't matter why or how. It happened. It happened there. It happened.


Your eyes glaze over. Red seeps in at the edges, like the blood had suddenly leaked out from the sleepless vessels.

It happened.

writing as a process of engagement & escape

John Le Carre giving his last interview on Democracy Now!

"If you want to report on human misery, you should share it."
-- Graham Greene

girls in a cabin 1997

You lie on the top bunk facing the wall, reading the graffiti and wondering how old it is. (Is it still there now?) Books before boys because boys bring babies.


"Boys before books, because books are boring," sneers Abbie. Her smiley face t-shirt is snug tight against a generous chest. She is 12 years old, only 1 years older than you, but her breasts are as full and round as oranges. You want to squeeze them to verify if they feel like koosh balls.

You've already had your medicine and peer down at the others waiting their turn. Abbie is taking her inhaler. Trish, the tough junior councilor, who wears her army fatigues even to bed, is next on deck. Later she will sneak out to make out with her new boyfriend, another junior councilor who is both black and two years younger than her. You are afraid of her and are glad that you don't have to talk to her. Behind her stands your best friend...your ex-best friend. You aim murderous x-ray vision in between her shoulder blades.

Blonde Julia, curly-haired and doll-faced, lies on a bottom bunk with her chin in her hands, lazily humming along to the Shania Twain song coming out of her headphones. The dumpy twins in the top bunk above take advantage of her distraction to whisper about her. "Why does Ace even like her?" hisses Laura in despair. "Whatever," retorts Leigh, peeling off a chip of nail polish with her teeth. "I don't need some goon hanging off me all day, grabbing my boobs in front of my friends." You are distracted from your attempt at telekinetic murder by their conversation. Oh Ace. He of the classic good looks kept from being too intimidatingly handsome by baggy jeans, greasy hair and crappy self-designed Big D and the Kids Table hat. You want to eat him with a spoon, but he's too busy untying Julia's bikini top after she falls asleep sunbathing to notice you. You console yourself by thinking about that time you touched that nubile Australian councilor while the whole camp was playing capture the flag. The sweat on his bare torso was as thick as motor oil. Later, during arts and crafts you saw him talking to Krystal, the pretty hippie councilor. She told him her favorite Grateful Dead songs were "Dark Star" and "Uncle John's Band." You applied lots of glitter to your popsicle stick creation and imagined what Krystal and the Australian might do together after lights out, when they were alone and under the stars. You assumed it would look like something you saw on Baywatch.

Carrie is singing now. Oasis, of course. She never stops talking about that band you never heard of. She sits cross-legged on the bunk above your ex-best friend's bed. Her frizzy hair is smooshed into an aqua scrunchie. In between bubble gum smacks, she chirps: "where were you while we were getting high?" In this stupid cabin. She is the one who reminds you that you are here because you are sick. Not like other camps where you would be the loser and the others would be cool. Well, it's true here, too, but now everyone's sick. You are here because you are sick. Carrie frightens you, but not in the same way that Trish keeps you on guard. She strikes you as a cross between Kimmie Gibbler and Fairuza Balk in The Craft, always following everyone around and going on about seances she did with her cousins despite the fact that everyone is obviously creeped out/annoyed by her. But when she starts singing "Champagne Supernova," everyone leaves the medicine line despite the gripes of the varicose vein-strewn cabin nurse and piles on her bed, screaming along. Where were you while we were getting high?

good head, part 1

"I just want you to know that I'm truly sorry."

She stares across the coffeeshop table at the words coming from the beautiful mouth of the boy--now a man--who almost killed her. Who made life almost unbearable.

She looks down into her cappuccino, stirs the foam, smiles demurely. She looks up to see his face relaxed. He thinks he's off the hook.


She decides to indulge him.

"I don't know what you're talking about." She sips her drink, lets the foam sit on top of her lips just a little too long before daintily wiping with the napkin.

"Come on..." He's annoyed now. Embarrassed. "I went out of my way to find you. I mean, I'm not a psycho. I'm not stalking you or anything, I just felt really bad..."

"Alex," she says with an authorative sigh, "that was high school." Hie. Skule. The words cut. They are dirty.

"I thought of you everyday after you left, after you dropped out. I know that sounds crazy, but it's been eating away at me for years. Years. How old are we know?"

"Well, I'm 28. How about you?" She crosses her legs and tosses the empty cardboard cup into the trash can behind her with a pointed flick of the wrist. I am on fire. I look so hot. 

"Yeah...there must be a reunion coming up some time soon." He looks pained. Or is that wistful?

She doesn't want to lose the momentum. "I already threw away my invitation. I'm not going. You won't see me there."

"So you are still mad?" He raises an eyebrow.

He's flirting with me. "Well...I know how I could not be mad anymore."

He grins. He always was a handsome fuck. "How's that?"

"You can give me head."

safe sex: our love is a machine

Did you tie up your love after you pulled it out?

Of course, my love.

Do you know that in the old days, before they knew how it worked, they thought it was the doing of it that made it happen.

Oh really?

Back then, babies didn't come from sperm and eggs, they came from orgasms.

Back then you probably always made a baby. Or a miscarriage. Or a dead woman. What do we make now? Our freedom is teaspoon of funky white liquid tied up in a piece of latex.

Ah, science.

Tell me about it.

But that's just it.

What do you mean?

I mean that it's for us to decide what it is.

It does seem meaningless, doesn't it? All this thrashing around, often with someone you don't even like, all for a little mess. And that mess could have been half a person. We are in a sorry state.

But it's still creation. It's always creation. And whatever comes with a coupling, whether it's love or ecstasy or boredom or hatred, it's a unique thing, like a baby. Just like a person. And there are all kinds of persons...maybe for our time, the experience is the baby. The physical act of living and creating is the new soul, just not incarnate.

You have some really weird ideas.

the lost girl, part 1

The old woman sat in her seat in the open turret, gazing down at the children playing in the street below. Here I am, the old witch, thinking evil thoughts about innocent babes. They were some of the only children in the neighborhood; almost everyone left was her age or older.

That morning she found her mother dead in her bed. She wasn't sure what to do about it, so she decided to sit. Sit and watch the children play.

How did this happen...how did I do nothing? How have I become nothing?


She wondered about the children on the playground in her old neighborhood. She walked down to that legendary field of her childhood, the one where she struck out during baseball games and went on to watch the t-ball games of her younger siblings.

It was empty. Barren. She had played baseball with her, the one who started the ball rolling or, rather, the one who brought her carefree rolling stone to a grinding halt.

Yes, I blame you. I've earned it.

She walked up the hill where she used to go sledding as a child. Typically, in the winter, the snowstorms would be followed by stinging rains that froze atop the snow, creating spectacular ice slicks on the sides of hills she and her friends most frequented. It's a wonder we didn't all break our teeth.


She was her first friend. They met as children, both the firstborn of guilt-ridden boomer thirtysomething women, doing what, for their mothers, was unthinkable: working in the man's sphere and abandoning the children to a daycare. To a stranger.

For the children it was much less dramatic.

Magical, even.

Their sitter was old with poor eyesight; she doesn't remember being watched very much. No, she and the lost girl, they were alone in the sandbox. Wasn't that what it seemed like?

She was her only friend. And now where have you gone? You, with your Gwen Stefani belly and cheap vanilla perfume? Your aquiline nose and your green braces. You were so beautiful.


She was not alone. Dark figures on the horizon, black children on the swings, Hispanic teenagers on the basketball court. The ones she was taught to fear as a child and still feared as an old hag. Hated for destroying her void of despair.


I loved you. It startles me so. Yes, I loved you. She dropped to her knees and looked up at the sky. The sun was high and cold.

Why did you betray me. Why did you choose the others over me? 


They were twelve years old. The pool party. She remembers sitting with the other girls in the basement, still shivering from submersion in the chlorinated water. She was embarrassed that the others might see her chubby, pubescent body in the so suddenly too-small bathing suit. She had a towel awkwardly covering her, tucked under her armpits. I look like Mom coming out of the shower. 

They were playing truth or dare with him, the boy, the dream of every girl in their sixth grade class. He sat uncomfortably, the only boy at the party, in the middle of the room like a cauldron between witches. And they churned their bitches brew.

How strange it must be for a boy that age to be so desired?

I shouldn't think about things like this anymore. I am supposed to have forgot about this long ago. Or I should laugh about it if I must think of it. I am such a silly old woman. But oh why did you point him out to me?


She bit her pillow at night thinking of him. The morning of the pool party she awoke to find that she had bit inward, through her body, through her desire, and come out through the unspeakable seat of it all: the drops of blood in the toilet, a liquid sigh.