Breadcrumb #395

SUSAN CLARKSON MOORHEAD

As for dating, there wasn't much to do. By my second month on the island, I was wearing his younger brother's clothes, even his outgrown boots, something Creedence found somewhat unnerving when he slipped a hand beneath one of his brother's Henley pullovers to wander over my breasts. My suburban summer clothes were all wrong up here faced with the surprising cold, the mud slicked paths on the trail from the boats to the house, the surprise of daily passing rain, heavy as if a great grief had momentarily overwhelmed the sky. There was a constant dampness of living practically on the water, the house on stilts with all its unfinished pockets and edges, and those first weeks when I slept on one of the boats until they acquired a pregnant cat to introduce fear to the bold and rampant mice.

    We'd claim some reason to go to town, but it was just to get away from his family, too close in the small house. We'd take a dory across the bay to the mainland and walk the harbor down to the end where an old retired fisherman kept house in a boat that never went to sea anymore. In his working days, he'd been kind to Creedence, the oldest of a pack of kids, all boys, whose parents had escaped the lower 49 as they called it. Former hippies who couldn't abide by the whole peace/love thing, they had sulked their way through Alaska until they found their spot, cheap land on an island thirty minutes across a glacier bay. They named their boys after favorite bands, taught themselves how to build a house, grow and forage for food, can their own jams and to pickle everything. People at the salmon cannery told me they were considered to be a little crazy, but, as the old fisherman winked at me, who wasn't in Alaska?

    He had a great story about a bear swimming all the way across from the island lured by the smell of grilling bacon and halibut steaks on the old man's hibachi set up on the dock. The bear hoisted himself up on the wooden slats of the walkway, hunkered down and swiped an eager paw at the sizzling bacon. "I crept right up behind that ole bear and booted his rump right back into the bay," he said, roaring with laughter. In another version of the story, he'd whacked the bear over the head with his cane. No matter which way he told it, we'd smile, listening until enough time had passed that he'd say yes when we asked to borrow the truck, a rusted Ford that Creed kept running for the old man.

“The bear hoisted himself up on the wooden slats of the walkway, hunkered down and swiped an eager paw at the sizzling bacon.”

    Sometimes we'd go to the dump where Bobby, a pal of his from high school kept watch from the back of his pick-up, rifle in hand, ready to fire in the air or off to the side as a warning shot for any of the bears snuffling through the garbage when they got too curious about folks driving up to ditch their trash. The first time we drove up, Creed was talking to Bobby and we stood by his truck overlooking the vast field of piled up garbage. I saw a stack of books tilted into a mountain of discards and went to take a look. Rounding a tall heap of refuse, eye on the books, hardbacks no less, I failed to notice a very large brown bear chomping at something one garbage stack over. We both saw each other at the same time and froze, and then the bear stood up as if reaching that great height would allow him to make sense of me in his small round eyes. I noticed the ragged strands of his meal hanging from his mouth, the impossible length of his curved sharp claws, and then I heard Creed's choked voice not far behind me, urgent and low, saying, "Baby, don't turn around, don't run." I let his voice hold me like a praying hand, walked backwards slowly, talking low and sweet to the bear who dropped to all fours and took a few inquiring steps my way. "I mean you no harm, stay back, please, bear, stay back, " I said in a slow repeat. He paused when he heard the truck, Bobby roaring over to pick me and Creed up, and the bear loped off. "You make a fine couple," Bobby yelled at us in the truck, "two damn fools!" but when I tried to talk no words came and anyway, Creed gave a shake of his head to hush me. Bobby's hands were shaking on the steering wheel.

    Creedence was due to head out on a boat for a job, staying away for three weeks while I endured his family who only endured me. They'd liked me enough when I was money in their pocket, a girl who'd come up from Arizona to work in the salmon cannery, looking for a room to rent. But once we started going out, they didn't like me anymore. Their oldest boy was their pride and joy. I heard his mother hissing in the kitchen at him, "why her? All those nice girls in town and you pick her?".

    The night before he was to leave we borrowed the truck and he took me for a drive. We headed farther out from town than we had ever been and part of me hoped we would just keep going. But he turned onto a highway, driving over a spill of chain link that had once roped the road off, a tilted rusting sign saying we were east bound on 84. We drove a mile or two, whip fast, the wind rushing by our open windows, not a soul beside us on the road. He started slowing down and it felt like the forest was closing in. He slowed to walking speed and then braked, the road ending abruptly in front of us. Nothing but a wall of fir trees and the smell of pitch. "They ran out of money, " he said with a grin. "Does that just beat all?"

    I thought he would reach for me then and turned towards him, but he was pulling out a paper bag he'd tucked under the seat. He pulled out two oranges, the palm sized ones that cost five dollars a piece at the market in town that we never bought, the price too high. He handed me one, and we peeled our oranges in the car, the air filling up with bright citrus notes. We separated our oranges into segments, eating them slowly, and then I fed him a piece and he fed me one. Each bite seemed sweeter because of the portion of bitterness left in the strands of pith that still clung to the fruit. I wiped my hands on his brother's jeans that I wore and settled in the crook of his arm, and we looked out at the fence of trees in front of us, listening to the wind stir in the branches.

• • •

Breadcrumb #394

SHIMETSUKAGE

growing old is mandatory;
remaining a child all your life isn’t.

i prefer my health.
want me gone? might as well
put some unnatural causes
in a bottle.

when you fall down,
you wonder what else you can do whilst
you’re down there.

you’re getting old when you get the same
sensation from a rocking chair that you once
got from a roller coaster.

it’s frustrating when you know the answers
but nobody bothers to ask you the questions.

time may be a great healer,
but a lousy beautician.

wisdom comes with age,
but age comes alone.

• • •

Breadcrumb #393

JOSH DALE

One of the highlights of elementary school was the variety show. It was a grand production led by Mrs. L. She instated the stage crew, talent selection, emcee, art, and all the production equipment. It was held in the afternoon on Friday and parents and siblings sat in rows of metal chairs. The entire 3rd and 4th-grade chorus sang: “We welcome you all to our variety show. Lots of different things to see before you go…and don’t forget to cheer for the stage and art crew. That’s what God wants us to do.”. I recall doing a skit with two other boys, J. and T., for a ‘modern’ rendition of some boy band. We danced and sung into a fixed microphone; K. was watching my shoddy routine. Some others sung, read poetry, performed talents one could only dream of. K. and her friends performed something similar, like cogs in the machine of 90’s pop culture. I forget who won the ‘best act’; I think it was an underclassman singing a show tune. I sat far away from K. for the remainder of the show.

• • •

Breadcrumb #392

COLLEEN ENNEN

Pull impatiently on your father’s hand.

    Wait for the crossing light, your mother will say.

    Try to be good. Fidget. Watch the red and brown leaves swirl; listen to them crunch under your new boots-a-half-size-too-big. Feel the cold on your cheeks and nose; feel the warmth inside your knit mittens and knit tights.

    I hope it doesn’t rain, your mother will say.

    I don’t like the look of those clouds, your father will say.

    The light will turn green.

    Skip when you cross the intersection. Wave at the police officer with the whistle and yellow vest. Phtweeee! his whistle will shriek. There will be many families all smushed together on the other side. You will see other children running and laughing and drinking hot chocolate. Ask your father—pretty please—for a hot chocolate. He will grumble about the price, but he will buy it. It will be watery and hot and so sweet sweet sweet. Hold with both hands, careful.

    You will hear the music first. Dart forward, around the knees and hips, and under the bags of the strangers. Do not hear your mother shout. Press your quivering body to the barricade.

    The turkey will be thirty feet tall and riding a truck. It will have two small pilgrims on its back. A woman holding a pumpkin will hand you a red balloon. Another woman will give the boy next to you chewing gum.

    Wish you had been given chewing gum instead.

    Look up. Beautiful giants will swim across the sky, lead by long strings. Charlie Brown. Babar. Kermit. Shriek with delight. Clap.

    Santa fifty-feet-long will loom over you. His shadow will stretch half the block. Santa six-feet-tall will follow on the street with his sleigh and his reindeer and his Mrs. Santa. Wave at him until your elbow hurts.

“His shadow will stretch half the block.”

    Time to go now kiddo, your mother will say.

    That’s the end of the parade, she will say.

    Ask to say just five minutes more—But look there are more balloons! Please just to see those? Point down the street. There will be a host of shining white figures floating uptown.

    A new part of the parade maybe, your father will say.

    I didn’t see anything about it in the paper, your mother will say.

    The shining white figures will come closer. Watch them. When they reach your block you will see that the figures are children. They will swoop and twirl and play. Shriek with delight. Clap.

    There’s no strings, your mother will say. Her hand will be on your shoulder.

    Where are the people controlling them, your father will say.

    A shining white girl about your size and age will pass overhead. She will be dressed in old fashioned clothes like the costumes you have for your doll.

    Wave at her. She will wave back.

    Smile at her. She will smile back.

    Hold out your arm and open your mittened hand. Watch your red balloon float up up up to the shining white girl. Watch it pass through the space of her chest and keep floating towards the blackened clouds.

    The screaming will start further up the block. Your father will lift you to his chest. He will try to push through the crowd but it will be too thick.

    Hurry, your mother will say. Her hand will hover over your head.

    Above you the shining white girl will burst. In a spray. Of blood.

    More inverted pops—like gum sucked in through your teeth—will sound up and down the street.

    Shriek with delight.

• • •

Breadcrumb #391

NICK PERILLI

Mr. and Mrs. Dallas squeezed their way through the small wood opening leading to floor four of their dear son Jamie and his best friend Scotty’s treehouse. To get to this point, the Dallases had to guess the first two guards’ super-secret passwords and shove the last guard into a pile of discarded wood and things the children had collected.

      1. Password? Open sesame.
      2. Password? No girls allowed. Except Dana Transue because she’s into the cool anime and shit.
      3. “Just shove the kid,” shouted Mr. Dallas.

    Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Dallas were pleased about having to shove their son’s fifth or sixth best friend—little Oliver Deak—into a pile of discarded wood . They knew he scraped his elbow, but they told themselves they could smooth that over with the Deaks when they saw them next week.

    Tonight, they were tired after working all day. Tonight, Jamie needed to come down and sleep in his own bed after watching some TV with his parents.

    “How many floors does this place have?” Mrs. Dallas asked as her and her husband climbed yet another ladder that would lead to another spiral staircase. A pleasant aroma of fruit snacks and sap weaved through her nostrils.

    Mr. Dallas didn’t want to answer her. He knew she would not like the answer because he didn’t like it much at all either. He pretended to choke on a speck of something that floated down the wrong pipe to stall. Buying the deluxe version of the treehouse for Jamie and his best bud Scotty was his idea and his alone. Despite his pleadings, his own father never built him a treehouse and he resented him fully for it.

    He mumbled a multiple of five to his wife.

    The two entered a sizable wooden ballroom, where a masked boy danced to silence with a phantom partner.

    “Whispers say,” the masked boy hummed, “the house grows with the wood of the world tree.”

    “Greggy Schuler,” Mrs. Dallas said in a curt tone. “Knock that off and let us through.” She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, smearing dirt across her slick brow.

    “Password?” Greggy Schuler said. “Can’t let you through without one, Mrs. Dallas. Jamie wouldn’t like that at all. He wouldn’t be my friend anymore.”

    Mr. and Mrs. Dallas huddled together, quickly deciding not to shove this kid out of the way. Mr. and Mrs. Schuler were lawyers. The cries of Oliver Deak still lingered in their ears, the little shit. No matter that this was Greggy Schuler, who wet their sofa during a sleepover two years ago.

    “What did he call us when we confronted him about that?” Mr. Dallas said.

    “Fuck-faces,” Mrs. Dallas nodded. It was a bold, daring moment for the kid—well worth the punishments his own mother would have for him at home.

“The cries of Oliver Deak still lingered in their ears, the little shit.”

    Greggy Schuler removed his mask and bowed to his phantom partner. He moved from the door. “Proceed.”

    As Mr. and Mrs. Dallas stepped past the boy, he grabbed their arms. His eyes pooled with tears, and he whispered to them.

    “Do you think I can go home now? Do you think my mom will be mad?”

    “Furious,” Mr. Dallas said. “It’s a damn school night, Greg.”

    Snot dripped from the boy’s nose, now. “School,” he said moving towards the descending stairs. “I remember it.” His voice faded. “Jamie and Scotty are not the children you built this treehouse for, Mr. Dallas. None of us are.”

    The air changed from there. How long had it been since they lost Jamie to his treehouse? Mr. Dallas said it had only been a few hours since dinner, but Mrs. Dallas felt the seconds linger as they moved beyond the reasonable floors. They met more of Jamie’s friends. At the very least, they could see he was popular at school and in the neighborhood. The two of them worried about that.

      5. Password? Fraggles
      6. Password? The New Deal
      7. Password?  1906
      29. Password? Ecclesiastes
      46. Password.
      47. Password.
      48. Password.

    On the 49th floor, Mr. and Mrs. Dallas expressed some regret to each other about resorting to shoving as many children out of the way as they did on their journey here. But the passwords grew more complex with the rising floors, and the two of them only grew even more tired. So, they shoved. Knocked these kids down and left some of them there crying into the seams of the treehouse’s bones.   

    Dana Transue—eating peanut butter, despite her fatal allergy—greeted them on the 49th floor. She wore a ‘cool’ anime t-shirt over a long crimson ball gown. She knew what Mr. and Mrs. Dallas wanted to say to her, so she interrupted them with a biting tone. “Don’t be so dumb,” she said. “We are above allergies in this tree. Beyond their reach. Beyond yours.”

    Even so, she had a fresh epi pen just an arm’s length away from her on the table.

    Mr. and Mrs. Dallas stood ankle deep in peanut shells, having to wade through them to get to Dana.

    “Password?” Dana asked, opening a box of crispety, crunchety, peanut buttery Reese’s Puffs. Family size. “Jamie and I are going out, you know.”

    “Oh, we’re thrilled,” Mrs. Dallas said, smiling. “You’ll have to come over for dinner.”

    “We’ll see,” Dana shook her head. “Jamie, Scotty and I are thinking of moving up here for good. Just get away from it all, you know?”

    “Sure,” Mr. Dallas said.

    Mrs. Dallas grabbed the epi pen and pressed it to Dana’s thigh. “Go home,” she said. “Come for dinner tomorrow.”

    Dana laughed and threw Reese’s Puffs at the Dallases until they left. Mr. Dallas caught one in his mouth, and it was better than the egg whites he had for breakfast this morning despite how much he knew he needed the egg whites to survive his impending heart attack.

[]

    Jamie Dallas ladled water from a shallow bowl over the back of his neck. He sat hunched over in the middle of the floor and breathed out when he sensed his parents in the doorway.

    A dense heat washed over Mr. and Mrs. Dallas. The moon shone bright through cracks in the treehouse’s roof.

    “We’re close to the moon,” Jamie wheezed, “but the sun isn’t far either.”

    Scotty Agnew—Jamie’s best friend since tee-ball—lay in the corner of this darkened wood room. Violence lived here until recently. The boy breathed despite bruised ribs. He chewed on the strings of his hoodie to calm himself. His brother recently broke into a neighbor’s home, so Mr. Dallas forbade Jamie from seeing Scotty again. Just like that. Ripping the potential bad seed from the heart of his healthy son.

    “I’ll admit I’m scared,” Mr. Dallas said to Mrs. Dallas after they conferred about the Scotty situation in bed yesterday morning. “About how much damage I’m about to do.”

    Jamie ran from them when they told him. Scotty was—as ever—waiting outside by the Dallas’s basketball net. Jamie grabbed his hand and pulled him towards their tree house in the deeper grove of trees. They climbed it. They climbed beyond it and shouted to the neighborhood as they did.

    “We can revisit the Scotty situation,” Mrs. Dallas said to her son. “We reacted too quickly.”

    “We’ve moved past it,” Scotty said, a gleam of nasty in his moonlit eyes. “I told him, I said, I told him you were right about the deviant in me.”

    Mr. Dallas knew it. He put his hands on the hips over his khaki legs. This damn kid.

    Jamie ladled another scoop of water over his head. He ran his hands over his skull, next. Drops streamed softly from his fingers to the bowl.

    “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’re thinking of the next password.”

    A door in the shadows beside Scotty only then became apparent to Mr. and Mrs. Dallas.

    “This used to be the top,” Scotty said, humming to himself. “We could go farther.”

    Mr. and Mrs. Dallas went to the window together and looked out over their neighborhood. The houses stood dark, underneath the shadow of the tree. Clouds seeped in through the window and the cracks in the treehouse’s wood.

    “We can go farther,” Mrs. Dallas said. She moved away from the view, towards her son.  

    Mr. Dallas sat against the wall under the window. A splinter had found its way into his thumb; he plucked it, and oozed one drop of red from his finger.

    He had work in a few hours. All of them moved together beyond the morning.    

• • •