Breadcrumb #465

CHARLES CONLEY

In purgatory, every day is the first day of spring.

You wear your light jacket—it’s all you can ever seem to find—and in the very middle of your walk, snow starts to fall. The puddle in your path is deeper than you thought and, on the far side, the mud a lot more slippery.

All your other pants are in the washing machine, which is always falling off the brick that keeps the left side level, leaving it filled with a soapy lukewarm soup of semi-clean clothes that need to be run through the wash again, which you can only do after you tweak your lower back trying to put the brick under the leg of the machine where it belongs. You toss your filthy, soaking pants in, add a little more soap, and hustle yourself gingerly back to your apartment.

The attractive woman from the unit down the hall who’s never home at this hour sees you from behind, and you can guess what she thinks that mud on the back of your boxers is. You turn around to explain what happened, but she’s constantly on the phone. You hear her say, “Remember that guy I was telling you about?” as you shut the door.

It’s perpetually the day the landlord turned off the heat, and you never remember in time that the only thing you have to wear are those exercise shorts you really should’ve gotten rid of fifteen pounds ago. There’s a pull in your favorite sweater, and, no matter how careful you are, you never walk past the dining room chair without the sweater catching on it somehow.

You burn the bacon, break the yolks of your fried eggs, and only have the heels of the loaf to make toast with. You use too much salt. The coffeemaker stops working halfway through, and that was the last of your coffee grounds.

“You burn the bacon, break the yolks of your fried eggs, and only have the heels of the loaf to make toast with.”

When the UPS guy comes, he always needs you to come downstairs to sign for the package. The package is never for you. You get locked out of the apartment because you forgot to put your keys in your pocket when you changed out of your dirty pants. Not only does the super always give you a hard time when you ask him to let you in, he also makes fun of your shorts. He’s not wrong to.

You get that phone call you’ve been waiting for, but the phone dies, and the charger isn’t where it belongs. When you find the charger and plug in the phone, its operating system automatically updates. After the update, your passcode inexplicably fails to work.

You’d take care of that hangnail but seem to have misplaced your nail clippers. You only have two inches of floss to work with. The hot water runs out before you’ve even finished rubbing the shampoo into your hair. Your bath towel, of course, is in the laundry, and you have to dry your whole body with a hand towel.

There’s always a big game to look forward to watching that night, but you never remember to put the beer in the fridge. The pizza guy is always getting lost. Right after every national anthem, the news cuts away to a press conference with President George W. Bush.

When you go to bed, you comfort yourself with the thought that tomorrow has to be better. It never is.

• • •

Breadcrumb #464

JOSEPH MILLS

Jeff isn’t in a hurry to go home. Grace has been texting updates throughout the game about the fight she has been having with their oldest daughter, Eliza. The last text had simply been a gif of an erupting volcano. He isn’t sure who it represents, but either way he and Bobby should stay a safe distance away, particularly since the sight of her little brother would be sure to upset Eliza.

Last night, Bobby had asked about Carissa, one of Eliza’s friends, “Why does she have poison ivy on her face?” Jeff had explained it was acne because the girl had been going through puberty, and Bobby had replied, “I’m never going there.” What should have been a cute moment had enraged Eliza, who had railed, “Oh my God, could you get any more stupid?” Bobby had ignored this, which had enraged his sister even more.

Lately, not just Bobby, but everyone in the family irritated Eliza. On good days. On bad ones, they infuriated her. Since she was going through puberty herself, most days were bad days. Jeff or Grace only had to walk into a room to elicit eye rolling, sighs, and high volume complaints. The surprise of parenting had been to discover so many of the clichés were true, or at least clichés for a reason. Teenagers were different beasts, and it happened fast.

Jeff had always resolved never to be that parent who bemoaned the passage of time. He constantly heard people say how they missed the littleness of their children and to tell their kids “stop growing.” That seemed to him like regretting the tides or the phases of the moon. Shouldn’t the changes be celebrated and appreciated? He knew so many parents whose houses were full of kindergarten photos even though the kids were in college or long gone. The places felt like mausoleums, but families were evolving, living, organisms. Eliza and Bobby weren’t toddlers anymore. Those children didn’t exist, and Jeff wanted to enjoy the people they were now. That was the theory. In practice, Eliza was making that difficult. When he would ask her a question about school or friends, she would say, “What’s the point telling you anything? You don’t really care and I’ll just have to tell you again because you never listen.” It was frustrating that his daughter wasn’t letting him be the parent he wanted to be. As he complained to Grace after yet another fight, “She is making me into an asshole!”

“The places felt like mausoleums, but families were evolving, living, organisms. Eliza and Bobby weren’t toddlers anymore.”

Jeff could pinpoint the moment of the latest big change. One breakfast he had walked by Eliza, and as he had done hundreds of times before, he had reached over and given her a squeeze, his arm crossing her chest like a bandolier. Except this time, his arm didn’t lie flat. His hand came to rest on a bump, a bud, and he realized he was groping his daughter because suddenly there was something to grope. He had recoiled, walking from the room with his hand and face burning. Eliza had kept eating her oatmeal, not having noticed anything, but he knew that everything was different. The world had changed. From then on there were new house rules. Bathroom and bedroom doors had to be closed. Bobby had to give his sister privacy. They all did. It was like she was in lock-down or solitary confinement. No wonder she was angry. His attempts to stay close in other ways were met with scorn. No, she didn’t want to walk the dog. No, she didn’t want him to take her to school or pick her up or go for a smoothie or come close to her anywhere outside the house. He felt like if she could, she would have gotten some kind of restraining order to keep him away, except, of course, when she wanted him to drive her to the mall, or her friend’s house, or Starbucks, or a school event, or …

When Jeff and Bobby had left this morning — “sneaking out like cowards” is how Grace put it — Eliza had been in the shower. Again. She would be in the bathroom for hours, sometimes taking a shower in the morning and another before going to bed. So much steam had been filling the hallway that the photos hanging there had warped. After she had finished and eaten breakfast, according to Grace’s first text because they updated one another on their daughter’s status like she was a major weather system, Eliza had wanted to “have a talk.” Grace had put a warning emoji with this. Eliza wanted to talk to her mother constantly even though, Grace assured Jeff, she too apparently never listened. If she repeated back exactly what Eliza had said to show that she was listening, it would turn out, “THAT’S NOT WHAT I MEANT! YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING. YOU HAVE ZERO UNDERSTANDING. ZERO!” Neither she nor Jeff had realized puberty was going to be so loud.

“I always thought this was going to be a special time, talking and bonding with my daughter,” Grace had said. “I was going to be different than my mother. She never said a word to me about my body. I guess she thought my sisters or friends would fill me in. They didn’t. I literally went and looked up things in the library. But I’m done talking. I am done. I don’t want to talk about anything anymore, especially since I UNDERSTAND NOTHING!”

Jeff couldn’t imagine talking to his parents the way Eliza talked to them, but then he only vaguely remembered going through puberty. He had monitored a line of hair sprouting below his belly button, and, yes, he had thought people around him were stupid, but that was because he had been surrounded by people who were stupid. His dad certainly hadn’t been as cool or as tolerant as he was. Eliza had no idea how lucky she was to have him as a father, and, frankly, he was resentful that she didn’t. When she yelled, “YOU ARE HORRIBLE. I HATE YOU” or some variation of the constant refrain “YOU NEVER YOU ALWAYS YOU NEVER” he felt like responding, “FUCK YOU! FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU!” It wasn’t fair. His mother had been a hard woman with a short fuse, who thought nothing of shouting at him. Now Jeff had a daughter zeroing in on him. When would it be his turn to yell? Would he have to wait for the retirement home when he wouldn’t have the breath to do it?

Jeff doesn’t admit it, even to Grace, but he has begun to scrutinize his daughter’s face for pimples. He wants to see them. He wants her to get zits. A nice case of teenage poison ivy. It would serve her right. If she is going to act ugly, then she should look ugly. Acne was nature’s way of issuing a warning about danger, like fangs or horns or rattles. “Be careful,” pimples on a teenager say.

Jeff knows this is a horrible thing to think. He knows he needs to be careful because he was right. His daughter is making him an asshole, and he has zero understanding how to keep it from happening.

• • •

Breadcrumb #463

PAUL SUNDBERG

The Sidewalk is impossibly narrow, walkable only by one, or two in single file, or me and a dog on a long leash, and the sort of cat that follows freely for a while just to irritate that leashed dog.

But, it’s suburbia and no one was ever supposed to walk on it really - everyone driving or being driven - the concrete ribbon meant only to lift to just the right height the wheels of lawn-mowers dutifully driven on late Saturday mornings, or to stabilize the Monday through Friday afternoon wheels of the tricycle driving toddlers (honestly, no one could wait to drive) watching for the big kids to get off the bus.

It was rolled out in the early Sixties, after all, when walking was reserved for hallways and aisles and the people who sadly, hopelessly careened through their driven lives in big cities. And even there, when late in the decade the marches came, the marchers took to the streets and highways, leaving the sidewalks to white men standing behind badges, and lenses, and the times.

As I walk the concrete ribbon now I think of it as an artifact of a world long gone, a memorial to the men who cut its course, set it forms, and poured a new world into being - this suburbia. Each embedded pebble a drop of sweat, a buck earned and penny saved in the hope of a lawn-mower of their own and a child on a tricycle.

The roots of trees have raised the sidewalk’s edge. Torn the ribbon jagged - it trips me into paying attention to the blade gouged lawns, the children in the street pedaling, dodging cars driving to and from the city, and the fractured fragments of the impossibly wide suburban dream once so neatly tied up with concrete ribbons.

• • •

Breadcrumb #461

LIZ KELSO

Bundles of humans cling to the ground, as
the sound of city lulls them to sleep
They are not seen as part of the landscape

Hungry ghosts. Tracked, smacked & methed
Close to death, they devour their meal
& feel like greedy, wild dogs

They sit in prayer pose for that dollar
Wail & holler, “I’m just tryna eat, man!”
But none can stand for their supper

An upper, a downer, or a rock,
set their mouths aflow & their spirits
aglow with hopes of a hit. They sit,
pray, sit for hours

A catatonic stupor invades
their mind. They just need one person
to be kind. One person to help them
silence their hunger.

• • • • • •