Breadcrumb #612

JOSH Boardman

Here lies an unimportant man. One of those who spoke of himself as a drifter because one summer he drove all the way from Michigan to Los Angeles in one go. It was better he learned to make a journey without drugs than with them. He vowed to return to Los Angeles. After failing out of the communications program he moved halfway north. The hunting was not bad you couldn’t get lost in the snow. He reenrolled in community college for nursing (his mother compelled him) and bought a Siberian Husky named Rabbit. He met a fine lady and though she wasn’t a knockout (his father said over a snifter of whiskey) she was steady and rustic and strict. The fine lady got pregnant. He was accepted into the nursing program at state college. They had a girl. His wife stopped working while he became a nurse practitioner and his mother was happy and they lost Rabbit. His mother died and a boy was born and then his father. Then he was the oldest man in his family his wife showed wrinkles his children went to highschool and college and he bought a cabin. Bourbonconked by eight o’clock. The man owned a rifle but now he was an old man and never shot a deer or a rabbit or even a pheasant. He died before his wife. She threw a sleepy funeral with heavylidded snapdragons (her favorite) and all the younger generations of his family. His son spoke at the rostrum—my father was the most important man in my life. We ask so much of the dead. He never returned to Los Angeles. Trudging through the snow he deceived himself. He did not miss the warm Venice wind on his back. He did not miss the tideworn pebbles between his toes. He swore he knew joy in his life.

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Breadcrumb #578

ALIFAH OMAR

To be heard… 

You think the dead are really listening? Have you ever stood over a grave, which ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of grass, and talked to it? I’ve visited … thought something miraculous or celestial would happen but there was nothing. I remember the white light of the sun behind some clouds. I remember the cemetery caretaker on the grounds looking as creepy as what you’d expect someone in a horror film to look like. I spoke some words to the grass. The grass didn’t respond back. So, I left. 

Just send flowers next time.

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Breadcrumb #510

J. BRADLEY

I saw Tim running around the corner, his father’s Glock in hand, the one he showed me the one and only time I went to his house for his birthday and I just stood there. I knew he was looking for Madison because Tim asked her to our end-of-class dance last week in front of a bunch of people and she said there was no fucking way I’d go out with you if you were the last boy on earth loud enough for her to get three days of detention (punishment doesn’t stop just because the school year is ending). I tried yelling he has a gun but I stood there, knowing what was going to happen: it’s not your life he wants, my brain said. After I saw Tim turn at the end of the hall, I hid in the janitor’s closet, crying after the first shot came, then the second, and then nothing. I didn’t leave the janitor’s closet until someone found me, the school resource officer, the one who’s too fat to do anything except keep our school not very safe. Steve, he said, surprised that the star lacrosse player was crying. Is…, I tried asking if everyone was fine and it came out as snot and more crying. I almost thought to ask if Madison was OK but then that would let the school resource officer know that I knew what Tim was doing and then I didn’t stop him when I could off. The school resource officer pulled down one of those giant rolls of toilet paper used in the school bathrooms and handed it to me. Get yourself cleaned up and then come out when you’re ready. No one needs to see you like this. I unrolled some of the thin toilet paper and blew my nose and pocketed the wad. I did it again and again, the roll never getting smaller. I waited 15 more minutes before coming back out. The hallway was empty. When I was asked where I was, I said I hid in the janitor’s closet when I heard the first shot; no one questioned me. I saw Madison across the parking lot, sitting on the back of the ambulance, soaked in Matt’s blood. You need to stay where you are, the school resource officer said. But I’m her boyfriend, I said. I don’t think it’s a good idea to see her right now, he said. I wondered whether he knew I knew what Tim was going to do when I saw him run down the hallway. I wondered whether he knew how I froze when Tim ran past, his father’s Glock in hand, the one he showed me the one and only time I went to his house for his birthday and I wondered whether I should have gone to more of his birthdays, talked to him with my mouth more than my hands, talked him out of asking Madison out since we were together, since no one deserves to have their feelings publicly executed.

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Breadcrumb #469

ASPEN JUNE

After the ceremony he takes you out on his boat. His grad students are there too, leaning their beautiful bodies against the rails, wetsuits folded down at the waist. Strapping themselves into equipment like they know how to keep themselves alive under a hundred feet of water.

Luckily you are the only person on this boat who can drink this good champagne because you are the only one not planning to increase the pressure inside your body till your blood wants to bubble in its veins.

He handed you his award to hold while he’s diving. It’s just a ceramic disk on a ribbon striped like the flag. You could have bought it at a party store, or at least a good mimic. The edge of the ribbon is making your wrist itchy where you’ve wrapped it.

“It’s just a ceramic disk on a ribbon striped like the flag.”

You lean your elbows on the railing. It’s just windy enough to pull bits of the dark surface up into foam. You’d never get into it like he does, like his students. They go under like they’ve been fantasizing about that cold wet on their thighs.

The water looks at you like it expects something from you. You are wondering what he’s been giving it when he goes down and kisses its floor. Why does it think it can keep him?

You have to do this thing to get him back and you don’t need anyone to tell you. He’s not the only one who can know secret things about the ocean.

You set the champagne glass down by your feet and unwind the ribbon from your wrist. It falls fast but there is a moment when the ribbon spreads itself out on the water before the disk pulls it under.

But you have saved him, look, there he is, rising from the water, pulling up his mask, laughing.

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Breadcrumb #457

KHAHOLI BAILEY

Growing up, I used to cry for things that never happened: my brother’s death, the day we go homeless, a doctor’s sigh before revealing a devastating diagnosis. I would cry and cry and feel like I was standing on a pedestal in the center of a windy abyss. I would fold those feelings somewhere deep in my mind, tight and complicated like origami, so that when I open up I am prone to bending in the same directions over and over again. But on the bright side, if any of those atrocities do happen, I will have had deft practice in the ways of suffering.

My pediatrician called it anxiety. That wasn’t the evolutionary diagnosis I’d been waiting for, so I kept on making up things to cry about.

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As a teenager I would lay awake and fantasize about my pending adulthood. I would imagine myself in the clothes of a woman, only overdone or underdressed like a girl’s fantasy.  I would be walking in stilettos down a Manhattan street and hear the train rattle underneath the sidewalk grail. Against my better judgement, I’d be off to a sprint. People start staring at me and in the way my uncle warned me about. Don’t fall, they’d say with their eyes, don’t ruin it for us. Miss the train by a margin of a second so that it’s wind can blow up your skirt they way we know you hoped it would. But I never make it to my Monroe moment. I’d feel all the faces upon me, closer and closer like an elbow-throwing rush hour crowd. Their attention deadens  my own and I fumble: I’d trip on my heel, silly little girl that I was, and nosedive into the pavement so violently that I couldn’t bear to end it with an image. Just cut to black and I’d be back in my bed, staring at an arthritic tree outside my window.

My friends called it normal, so I kept on fantasizing about patent leather pumps and planned how I would face an embarrassing death with dignity.

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In my 20s I had dreams of food stamps. I would sit on the sofa, lopsided as it was with the bent mattress springs underneath, and eat oatmeal from a plate. In my mind I was strolling the wide aisles of Costco, picking up king crab legs and organic grapes and mini cinnamon rolls to impress my guests. I would eat like a queen because I was a pauper.  I’d tell my son to bow his head before his meal and thank the state of New York.

My application was denied and the fantasies ceased. My oatmeal diet didn’t. My doctor told me it wasn't normal to cry for things that happen and gave me a prescription for Xanax.

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