Breadcrumb #136

MAYA MENON

Last year, my hallucination arrived late and sat in the empty chair at a meeting. She was decked out in a mesh bodysuit, manacles and spikes and sat with her legs spread apart on the table. No one but one other could see her all the times. He mostly saw her as self-destructive and attention seeking, when I insisted it was just healthy playfulness. I tried to whisper to him the story I’m going to tell you all but he always felt brevity is an art I’m unfamiliar with. I had to read his face because he didn’t entertain my quiet speech. I would blame him, but I shouldn’t. I imagined these words hanging above his head:

“Yet,
even the most feral animal can be taught to utilize sense
and social knack to exist among the human race.”

On some workdays, I shuffled through posters depicting sensual flowers at work, scoffing a little. O’Keeffe’s got it down, I suppose. Whether in rosebuds or fig leaves, sometimes I still covet brazen dishabille. Brevity is not for those whose passions are seen as excess.

I haven’t conquered subtlety, yet. 

As something I’ve been battling with since my pimply art-kid times of high school, it’s not always easy to achieve. Those days, my lunch break consisted of scribbling shock-value into pieces of used printer-paper. When the bell rang, I would accidentally leave doodles of men and women in various forms of undress on the table. Oops. I wasn’t completely oblivious that the special education class following mine could discover my pornographic scraps. It was amusing that in result, they drove my teacher crazy with anatomy questions. It wasn’t quite the rebellion he claimed I was committing. But just a curious puck-like humor that I sometimes have trouble getting across. I guess I didn’t see the dilemma. I just forgot my dirty pictures sometimes. I also didn’t see the dilemma when the security guard told me my thigh-highs weren’t school-appropriate, and I had to wear gym shorts over them because they were too distracting.

“I wasn’t completely oblivious that the special education class following mine could discover my pornographic scraps. ”

The catholic college I eventually went to didn’t require uniforms and liked my portfolio. They told me they had a liberal university art program that didn’t censor work, and would love to have me. At the time, I couldn’t tell if they were pretending to be blissfully unaware for the sake of trying to convert me or if they were in denial, and in need of students. I quickly began to realize it was the latter. In my first year there, I was working on a painting depicting two women I found in the lower circles of kink.com that appeared to be enjoying themselves. My professor asked me why their faces held no love. She blanched when I told her the scene was purely about sex- not making love, as I fashioned one of the women’s lower parts with purple pubic hair in a flurry of carefree brush-strokes. I had to take it off the walls mid-process. They weren’t the classical nudes my scholarship was paying for.

Today, I walk out of my home occasionally dressed in a button-down and blazer that covers my tattoos, pretending to be an adult. The older city folk know little of my erotic art hobbies. No one wise advises me in hushed voices to “tone it down a notch,” anymore. Not even him. I leave the controversially smug teenager back at home, oversleeping in twisted bed sheets. 

But there are moments, during the most lackluster meetings, where I sit in my chair, feeling a bit feral, scribbling grotesque phalluses into the margins of the agenda, looking ahead and nodding from time to time. The papers were going into recycling, anyway, living brief lives told only to those in search of a lack of subtlety.

• • •

Breadcrumb #135

KEN VALENTI

It was raining the day I was born. I remember this, I swear.

    Water thrummed at the hospital window from a grey sky and made me drowsy. Alive not yet an hour and already, all I wanted was sleep. A nurse placed me, all seven pounds, four ounces of me, on my mother’s chest and Mom said in a croaky, tired version of the voice I would come to know; “Welcome to the world, Stephen Elijah Warren.”

    And the rain rushed the glass.

_____

    Seven years later, a heatwave broke with a downpour, a trillion drops of water hushing the scorched sidewalk. I went for a walk in the downpour. No raincoat, no umbrella. Just me in jeans, sneakers and a cotton shirt, feeling like the raindrops that pelted me had fallen with the express purpose of soaking me. They wanted to break on me, run along my skin. And I spun, and stomped in puddles and sang, “La! La! La!” until my mother grabbed me and yanked me by the wrist back to the house.

“I went for a walk in the downpour. No raincoat, no umbrella. Just me in jeans, sneakers and a cotton shirt, feeling like the raindrops that pelted me had fallen with the express purpose of soaking me.”

    “Look at you! Look at you!” Her words came fast and low, as if she were talking to herself. She was rubbing me down roughly with a thick towel, fresh with the scent of Tide. I was horrified that she had made me strip down so she could dry me off. “What the hell were you doing?”

    “I’m sorry, mom. It reminded me of when I was born.”

    That got her to stop, at least for a moment. “What was that?”

    “Remember? When I was born? And it was raining outside, like this?” 

    “How could you possibly remember the day you were born?”

    “I just do.”

    “You’re eyes weren’t open yet. Besides, it was sunny.”

    “It couldn’t be. Maybe, like, it was sunny in the morning, but after I was born, it was raining?”

    “You mean you brought the rain?” A small note of mirth slipped into her rattled voice. “With your cloudy disposition?”

    "I don’t know. I like rain.”

    Really I loved the rain. Walking in a deluge, I had no worries. I didn’t have to look out for the big kids on my block, the ones that were almost teenagers. I had wanted to be their friend, but they made me pretend to be their pet cow as an initiation, then refused to hang out with me anyway. I had to walk around on all fours, eat grass and say, “Moo.” And when I stood up and said, “Now can I play with you?” Allen Teague, the leader of the group said, “Oops. You stood up before I said you could. You blew it. See ya later.”

    Now they always found ways to push me or get in my way. But when it was raining, the world was mine.

    “It was sunny,” Mom said, bringing my attention back. She got back to drying me off, though by then, I was as dry as I was going to get; “Do you think I would forget anything about that day?”

    “But we danced. In the rain.” My own comment surprised even me. I only remembered the dancing just then, and only vaguely. I wasn’t sure how it could have been true. But I was sure that it was.

    Mom didn’t bother to respond to me directly. She muttered to herself, something about being unable to put up with my nonsense.

    I tried to get my father on my side at dinner that night.

    “Dad. It was raining the day I was born, right?”

    But he only said, “I’d go with your mother on this.”

    “Stevie,” my mother said. “Stop being silly.”

_____

    The day she left, sun shone on the maroon Toyota she packed up to go away, making the car difficult to look at.

    “He couldn’t even come help,” my father said bitterly.

    “He thought there might be a scene,” my mother said. “He was right, wasn’t he?”

    “Just go.”

    When she bent down to touch my face, I could feel my father bristle, even though he stood behind me. I remember that sense, that perception of the bristling, even more than I remember the touch of my mother’s fingers.

    “Be my good little Stevie.” And she left me there, crying.

_____

    After she left, Dad took me to do more things. Ball games, sailing lessons, a local arts-and-crafts fair. I smiled a lot, and he smiled back, but each of us was doing it more for the other than for ourselves. After a couple of weeks, though, the smiles became easier. They were real again.

    When my first report card of the new school year came, I was scared. A D+ in science, C- in math. An F in history.

    I felt as if my insides were cold. Like I was becoming a zombie from the inside out. I waited for Dad’s fury when he looked over the marks. Instead he exhaled a deep breath and said, “You really miss her, don’t you?”

    And I cried all over again.

_____

      It was years before I raised the subject again. Dad had made my favorite dinner – lamb and beef burgers with a mess of fried onions. He’d been happy lately. He’d begun seeing a woman he’d met online. Her name was Sarah.

    I was almost 11 now. And when I saw the perfect dinner waiting for me, I was immediately afraid. Was he about to tell me he was going to marry Sarah? They’d just met! Did these things happen so quickly?

    Maybe I was trying to head off the serious talk about Sarah when I asked, “Wasn’t it raining? I mean, the day I was born?”

    It took Dad a moment to catch up, and he laughed in surprise.

    “Where did that come from, Steve?”

    “I remember being with Mom. And the rain. I remember her blue eyes.”

    “You think your mother has blue eyes?”

    I knew better than to say “Yes” to a question like that, so I went with the classic standby: “I don’t know.”

    Dad recovered a photo album he’d stored in the basement. He dropped it in front of me and opened it to photos of us on Cape Cod. One shot of her smiling over a cracked lobster, I could clearly see that her eyes were gray.

    “You see?” Dad said. “Do you see blue eyes?”

    I was surprised at how annoyed he was.

    But I know that, the day I was born, her eyes were blue. I know that it was raining. I remember it. And in that moment, I remembered so much more. I remembered how she held me up and smiled, and her eyes were so blue, and she wore a dress to match, a dress that I recognized as the color of San Francisco Bay, even though I would not see San Francisco Bay for another five years, when we visited her brother in Sausalito.

      She wore a delicate silver chain with a single silver drop on the end. Not a tear, but a drop of rain. She lifted me, and she took me outside and danced with me in the downpour. But I could not tell this to Dad, so I only answered his question. Did I see blue eyes in the photo?
“No.”

_____

    Dad died a few years ago. The other day, Mom’s brother called. He’s out East now.

    “You should see her. We hope she’ll remember you.”

    She’s in a nursing home a couple of hours from me. I almost didn’t recognize her. Her skin hangs loose on her face and arms now. But there is still some of the sandy color left in her hair and her eyes are still gray. Yes, gray, like in Dad’s photos. Not blue.

    Her head bobbed with Parkinson’s. Her hand shook as she turned the page of The Daily News. I had forgotten how religiously she had read the tabloid when I was a kid. Now, she barely nodded at me, just politely enough to keep a stranger from complaining that she was rude. Her eyes seemed to look only at the photos and to see nothing.

    I asked her in my best chatty voice what she just read and she frowned and said, “Don’t be a wise-ass.”

    It’s something I remembered her telling me when I was a kid. Did she recognize me, or did she say this to all people who annoyed her?

    “Mom? Do you know who I am?”

    The gray eyes roamed over my face. 

    “You?” she said, as if remembering long ago. “It’s you?”

    “Do you know my name?”

    Her head shook, but maybe that was just Parkinson’s. The nurse had warned me not to push her, not to try to force her to remember. But I couldn’t help myself.

    "I don’t remember.” Her voice was barely a whisper.

    “Do you remember anything?” I asked.

    Softly, she said, “It was raining the day you were born.”

• • •

Breadcrumb #134

KIM DIETZ

Up on the hills where the smoke from the mills fills the clouds and the hawks circle, crowding the treetops, as if the last animal to ever die just did. Crickets and katydids are all that are heard throughout the night. The mountains and blinding greenness fill the backdrop against the stark horizon. Nuclear veins branch outwardly across the sky as the rain blurs the silhouettes and flashing of images through the glass of the unwashed window. Children grimace and aimlessly meander on rusted, creaking bikes, throwing rocks at faces that appear to be watching.

     The water, it seeps like sap down the hill of mud and buried black tires. She used to play in them once. Rolling down inside at undeniably dangerous speeds. Her devilish grin upturned toward the warm sun, popping kernel-tinted freckles on her cheeks, arms reaching, fists clenched upward above her head, as if to say, I’ve conquered this.

     Every dog barks when you walk down these streets because they're not used to people. The people are not used to people either. There's no reason to be dressed up unless it's Sunday, so we're all a bunch of weirdos headed into a Denny’s in suits and dresses on a Saturday, sitting around a sticky table drinking black coffee.  

_____

     “Your grandmother was known as ‘Queen of the Hill’ around these parts, you know.”

     “She was all that and a bag of chips.” 

     “She never took no for an answer, and she had a sass to her that not many could handle.”

     “Strong-willed, quick, and a serious eye for fashion...there wa'n't much for ‘er here. She wanted more than jus’ the simple stuff.”

     “Her daddy was beggin’ her to come back after she moved up there to New York, but it's prolly better she di'n't.”

     “Heck yeah! They both woulda drank themselves to death... By golly, him and that moonshine…”

_____

     The steam from the mugs rippled off the surface of each cup — eyes closed, lips pursed, heads tipped backward, as throats swallowed with discretion.

     When Christmas was near, she practiced her wrapping; folding neat, tight corners in perfect edged triangular patterns, ribbon curling, bouncing, tearing, and placing the perfect amount of tape, just enough to be barely visible. She put the bows in her hair and decorated the tree in white angels with paper skirts and tinsel halos.

     Even as the years stole the golden brown color from her hair, she made gingerbread men with different-colored icing suits. One unique cookie for each unique grandchild. The smell wafting from the kitchen could send a pack of howling children into a rabid frenzy. Pasty flesh was kept pink and warm even when the heat didn't come on. She radiated joy, which was fitting, as that was her middle name.

     And all these men around here sure have some character to them, even after this funeral. Maybe it just runs in the family — the wisdom of a man who's lived with the spirit of a boy, expecting so much more time to play from the world and the gifts it has to offer.

     That's what we all need. Just a little bit more of that.

• • •

Breadcrumb #133

BRITTANY DIGIACOMO

The plan was to find out why this Birdie girl wandered around our rooms, stealing our things. Living in a dorm with over sixty of us, we’d all roam in and out of each other’s closets from time to time, borrowing clothes, flat irons, hair dryers, necklaces to match our shirts and stuff like stuff. But from what I could tell, Birdie was the only one who strolled around our quarters, pocketing Q-tips and razors, deodorant and dental floss. And no one had a clue why.

    The girls on the floor left it up to me to investigate the “Birdie situation.” I’d been known to not give a rat’s ass about poking my nose in other people’s business. It was true of course, but to my defense, I’d only get involved if it meant I could help someone. Like the time I’d spent a week spying on Jamie’s boyfriend Kurt. She’d suspected he was cheating and it turned out she’d been right. With a camera around my neck, I followed Kurt all the way down to the west wing of the theatre. While hiding in a hollowed-out section in the hallway, I watched him walk straight into one of the backrooms, aka, the hook-up rooms. Minutes later, Chelsea, not Jamie, walked in after him. The next day, anticipating nine pm being their usual meet up time; I hid under the desk in the same backroom they’d met in the night before. Needless to say, I caught the whole thing on film and went straight to the darkroom to develop the pictures. A day later, I presented my proof to Jamie. 

    Anyway, Birdie, from what I already knew, was a blue eyed, kinky-brown haired Minnesotan; a lover of country music and ice fishing. She wore the same silver antlers around her lanky neck every day, cut off jeans around the dorm no matter how cold the weather seemed to get. She called soda “pop” and ate peas straight from a can. And when asking her where the name Birdie came from, she told me, her real name was Blake, but her parents called her Birdie because she could whistle as good as any cockatiel.

“She called soda “pop” and ate peas straight from a can”

    I’d been following her for a few days now. Along with my camera strapped around my neck, I kept a small notebook and pen in the coat of my right pocket. From what I’d gathered, her morning routine seemed average, waking at six with the rest of us. After she cleaned her room and did the bathroom chores, she’d grab her bath caddy and either showered or washed up at the sink. But then – and this was where it got weird – if Birdie were at the sink washing up, real quick, while the person next to her was busy rinsing the soap off their face, she would reach into their caddy and snag a bottle of shampoo, conditioner, basically anything she could get her hands on. Then walk back to her room – not even bothering to shut the door behind her – open a dresser drawer and dump the entire caddy out into it. 

    The next morning, while everyone on my floor left for breakfast, I snuck into Birdie’s room and opened that drawer. It was filled to the brim with dozens of razors and body soaps, deodorants and lotions. Basically every type of toiletry you can think of – all of which were different brands. So the question now was: Were the things in Birdie’s bath caddy even her own?

    I stayed in her room, taking pictures of the drawer, and scoping out her closet, which other than black slacks and dressy blouses – the classroom dress code – mostly held t-shirts and jeans. So it was pretty clear everything other than the toiletries seemed to be hers. But that we already knew.

     Back in my room, I took out my notebook and wrote out my thoughts. Why toiletries Birdie, why? They were cheap and there was a trip to Walmart every weekend. Did she not have the money to buy her own? Or, maybe she had that obsessive-compulsive disorder where she just couldn’t help but take people’s bath supplies? I had no idea. And I was getting nowhere.

     So I kept an eye on Birdie for weeks, following her all around the dorm, in and out of the dining room, the mailroom. I even started hanging out and watching movies with her in the lounge. Sure, she was a bit corky, being a teenage girl, wearing teddy-bear pajamas, knitting herself a lime green sweater while sipping hot coffee through a straw. But other than that and stealing basic bath necessities, she was pretty ordinary, interesting even, telling stories about running into black bears on hiking trails, catching snakes and eating them too. Conversation never felt forced. And by no means did tailing her around feel like a chore. Truth was, spending all this time investigating Birdie made me kind of like her. 

     And then eventually all the extra attention I gave her opened my eyes to something new about the case. Just the other day, in history, the class discussion was about the colonial days. And somehow that led to us talking about people in those times never taking baths. To keep clean, they washed themselves with a cloth at a washbasin, which was basically just a pitcher or bowl of water.

     During the conversation though, I accidentally dropped my pen under the table and when I went to pick it up, I noticed Birdie’s hands fidgeting on her lap. I also noted that when the teacher called on her to answer a basic question such as What place suffered from hardship, disease, and hunger? Her face grew red and she claimed she didn’t know the answer. Even though the answer Jamestown was in the book directly in front of her.

     Birdie and I’d been hanging out for a while now. So later in the day, I just came right out and asked her why she got all tense in class earlier? She ignored me, changing the subject, going on and on about how annoying Frank had been, chewing gum with his mouth wide open.

    I nodded and smiled, but her behavior in class really got me thinking. I made some excuse about needing to be somewhere, then dashed over to the library and began my Google search on colonial days in Minnesota. It turned out, back then, Minnesota was unknown territory, basically untraveled lands and blah, blah, blah. Then, out of curiosity, I typed in: Do people in Minnesota take baths? All that came up was some crap about saunas and Epson salt being good for your skin. How ice baths could help you lose weight and more stuff like that, which got me nowhere.

    A week later, Birdie and I’d just finished eating lunch and were walking back to the dorm to change for sports. We stood on the stoop of Haryn Hall, chatting about our plans after graduation. Her posture drooped as we turned to climb the stairs and her backpack nearly slid right off. She gave her shoulder a shake to readjust the bag and, when she did, something fell out from the side and tumbled down to the bottom step. We both reached over to grab it, but I got to it first. It was a bar of soap wrapped in a cloth napkin. Both of us kind of froze there for a minute, staring at each other. I thought, now was the perfect time to just come out and ask her, Birdie why do you steal bath supplies? But a flush rose to her cheeks and I could see something troubling gathering behind her eyes. So I handed the soap back over, pretending I could care less about it. And just as I did, she responded in a language I didn’t recognized. “Dankie,” she said, casually, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. 

    Back in the dorm, she went her way, and I ran like hell to the library. On the computer, I typed in dankie and found the etymology of the word was Dutch. Pennsylvania Dutch to be exact. Then I asked Google if there was an Amish Community based in Minnesota. And it turned out there was.  

    I ran back to the dorm and waited for Birdie to leave her room so could I snoop around for mail. As soon as she did, I snuck in, grabbed a stack of letters on her desk and took a few pictures of the sender’s address, which, after another quick trip to the library, turned out to be an Amish village.

     Finally, the case was solved. Birdie stole our toiletries because she grew up without any of her own. Back home for Birdie meant going to the bathroom in a communal outhouse. The Amish didn’t use electricity, never mind bothering with commercial-like products. Of course Birdie collected all the supplies she could before returning home for break. As a matter of fact, from now on, I’d help her gather whatever toiletries she desired.

    But now the question was: What the hell was an Amish girl doing at a boot-camp boarding school in the backwoods of Connecticut?

    Whatever the case, from here on out, whenever the girls on my floor asked me what I discovered about Birdie and our toiletries, I’d smile and tell them I discovered nothing. Nothing at all. Then, the minute they looked away, I’d steal the soap right out of their caddies.

• • •

Breadcrumb #132

BELLE HANN

It’s not easy to be the son of the pineapple salesman. Seeing as Ralph’s still in Kalamazoo doing god-knows-what, I’m keeping the business going, and right now, that’s all I can ask for. Pop used to say the pineapples pretty much sell themselves. Most of our business is scratch-offs. The same old man comes every day and doesn’t buy anything; he just sits around and talks about how it was a mistake to keep the store in this economy, but what does he know. Besides, I love this stupid place. It was my pop’s idea to open a store that just sold pineapples. Back when he opened it, we sold pineapple everything: pineapple T-shirts, pineapple egg creams, pineapple hats, and if you wanted to just buy a pineapple, you could do that too. Now me, I wasn’t so crazy about pineapples. Still not crazy about them. I mean, I enjoy a pineapple now and then, but not like Pop did,  He was obsessed with the things. I overheard Mom telling her sister that when they went to Hawaii for their honeymoon, Pop was more interested in pineapples than making love to her. What a putz. The worst part was that Pop would walk up and down Main Street handing out flyers in this pineapple costume Mom made. It even had the spiky green things on top and a hole for his face to pop out. Boy, did we get shit for that when we went back to school.  He was only supposed to do it one time for the store opening, but after it opened, he kept at it, every Saturday, up and down Main Street.

“The same old man comes every day and doesn’t buy anything; he just sits around and talks about how it was a mistake to keep the store in this economy, but what does he know.”

    Ralph and I got sick of getting called “pineapple boy” day in, day out, all the time. And we were sick of hearing about nothing but pineapples. Pop was planning on wearing his costume during the county parade. We couldn’t stand the thought of Pop embarrassing himself in front of the whole town. Think of the teasing we’d get at school!

    One night, before the parade, we waited 'til everyone was asleep and took that pineapple costume and threw it off the Talmadge Bridge. It bounced all the way to the bottom of the ditch. Then we ran back home as if we had committed an awful crime, which I guess we had.

     Pop didn’t notice the costume was gone at first 'cause, you see, he’d only wear it on Saturdays — the rest of the time he was in the shop doing pineapple stuff.  Wednesday came, Thursday came, he didn’t say nothing. Friday came, and my brother and I started to feel like shit. We didn’t want to see Pop’s face on Saturday morning when there was no pineapple costume. So on Friday, again, in the middle of the night, we waited for Mom and Pop to go to sleep, and we crept back to Talmadge Bridge. You may think that a giant yellow pineapple costume would be easy to spot under a bridge, and you would be thinking wrong. It took about an hour to find it, and it was still in good shape. So we thought. We dragged it back into the closet and thought nobody would be none the wiser. Well. The very next morning, my brother and I ate our breakfast very slowly and watched Pop get into his pineapple costume. It had some dirt on the back, and Mom brushed it off without him noticing. Off he went, I remember he was even whistling as he left for work. What we didn’t know is a raccoon had made his nest in that pineapple costume. And in the middle of the parade, right when Miss Baldwin County was passing by on her float, that raccoons nearly bit his balls off. It caused quite a commotion, a big round yellow pineapple man fighting a raccoon out of his underpants.

    Pop said it was great for business. Now, he’s dead, not because of the raccoon, just old age, and so I ended up with the pineapple store. Never wore the pineapple costume, though. And right now, that’s all I can ask for.

• • •