Breadcrumbs #694

Emma Stewart

Memoir #1

My mother describes my birth as; it was raining that day. Passed through the forced lips of the c-section complicated into my mother’s belly. How bitter, that second between “raining” and “you were so skinny! I could’ve had you myself”. And another hand takes my from my mother.

Memoir #2

Another hand takes me from my mother, sitting in the counselor’s office at the Calexico Mental Health Center. “How old were you when your father remarried?” They, the two of them are outside the glass and I am suddenly some strange bastard. Did I come out of my father’s thigh? Who else gave me these eyes? This unending desire to pull things out of my body in order to somehow become whole, or to clean myself like a house made for anyone other than me. I’m 14 and I don’t understand what people don’t see, so I lie “like...6?”

Memoir #3

So I lie and for the next 4 years I don’t talk to anyone except a really nice woman who says “you remind me of my friend, she always has these amazing acrylic nails and paints them wild colors” and I say “I made friends with some vampires, and we go ghost hunting at 3am on weeknights”. All of the homework packets I get from the double-wide trailer at school have the answer keys on the back. I wake up at 3pm, watch cartoons and eat at Denny’s almost every day. When mom takes me to hand in my homework to my one teacher, she sits with the other mothers. Mostly no one says anything about what we look like, but occasionally someone leans over and whispers “so when is she going to start showing?” Mom thinks it’s hilarious that I would get pregnant at 14 surrounded by other pregnant 14 year olds. One of my friends has a pool so we hang out there a lot. His parents are never home. I’m proud of myself; I’m 14 and I only hang out with people older than me. We smoke clove cigarettes and they get the resident goth of El Centro to come hang out. He’s even older than them and knows a lot about ghosts and magic. He buys two big bottles of Jack Daniels from Food 4 Less, his and her’s. They last the length of our 3 year relationship. Mine lasts longer, I think it’s still in his freezer next to his son’s dino chicken nuggets and the champagne from his marriage in ‘98 when he started losing his hair. At 19 I date a man everyone calls Satan. His room is an impossible archeology of his own life piled high and tight so we have to squeeze through the door and walk on two feet of his discarded self. When we’re not high he’s mean. Satan keeps telling me I’m an adult, and adults don’t cry to their parents. My mother helps me fill hefty bags with my stuff while Satan stands at the edge of the bed and cries. She holds my hand in the car.

Check Points
We wanted out, wanted weed not money, scraped bowls, we worked just long enough, didn’t step up when someone said prove yourself, didn’t want proof. We had the desert, all the desert, and time but we couldn’t do anything with time, burned through it like the asphalt in August. Hummed still, low next to the AC condenser unit blaring in what was left of Mike’s backyard, wrote on the couches we found on the street “FUCK THE POLICE” “THIS IS FLAVOR COUNTRY” “YOU CAN’T SIT WITH US” at one point wrote a whole story on the back cushion with Elly, that got cannibalized by some back shadowed bubble grafitti of Gyro’s name in silver Sharpie (tm). We wanted to get out. When the weed rolled through the Valley and left us with nothing we made gas money out of lies and other people’s time, followed it to LA. Put Bule in the Crown Vic and the drugs in the Toyota with me and Mike and watched Bule get searched, his heavy lower lip, his tired-of-this-shit eyes following our car from inside the cage while border patrol waved our white faces through. We wanted to get out of the desert but Echo kept trying and his car got totalled by a falling tree last time so we accepted that the valley was a black hole and went back to scraping bowls when the weed and the money went dry. Headaches. Boot weed. Loud music, louder music, whole days sat high next to the condenser in 115 degree heat. In the winter, we took the screaming wind and threw music under it, out in the salt flats where no one would call the cops. When friends came in from the city with X we pointed up at the stars and let them fall on their asses for the whole night and tell us they wanted all those stars. We wanted to be faster than sandstorms. Looked at the flat horizon and waited for the dirt devils to stop  fucking around and take the desert away. Drove from Calexico to El Centro to the burning haystacks at midnight and watched with all the neighbors we didn’t know. Broke into the abandoned school house and yelled FUCK until something slapped Mitchell across the face in a busted classroom. We wanted ghosts. We wanted to know what ghosts wanted. On the drive from Mike’s place to mine we talked about not wanting to see Echo fail again, and how it gave us an ugly sick gut to see Bule handcuffed and caged while dogs went at the Crown Vic. We didn’t want to be stuck between the border and the checkpoints anymore and they were making the one that led to San Diego permanent because it caught more of us than the one to Arizona. We were tired, we were trying, we weren’t dead yet. We wanted to get out. We wanted to have somewhere to go. We went back to wanting anything else instead.

Breadcrumbs #693

Jessica Pavia

Halfway through college, I will be sitting with my friends in our apartment, sipping on cheap red wine, playing charades, when someone mimes a back tuck and we yell out cheerleading. I will find myself slightly tipsy, telling them for the first time about the handful of years I spent on a team, throwing girls into the air, shouting chants out to bleachers. I’ll ask my mother to text photos of me in the uniform, on the mat, during the games — my small red face pulled tight by the high pony, bright green turf flowing out behind me, the hint of cleats rushing across the field, my mouth caught in a perfect “O” —to prove to them that yes, I was a cheerleader.

I’ll say I did it because I wanted to be like Kim Possible from the Disney cartoon: a young, beautiful, redheaded cheerleader who fought off bad guys on the side. I’ll say I was in love with her in a way I couldn’t explain then, that I wanted to be like her, mold myself into her.

             We head home in the storm. Mom drives our carpool tonight, her car planing over the rivers that form beneath bridges. I’m up front in the passenger seat, curving my body around the black leather chair to look at the other four girls: a pair of blonde twins, two brunettes, sweaty hair stuck to our foreheads from two hours of running and jumping. In the backseat, Dani pulls out her violin and plays.

My stomach flips and rumbles, but I ignore it. In this moment, I have eyes only for these girls of my cheerleading team — my equals, according to our coach, but I'm no longer sure.

When Dani plays, I smile big. Cheer her on. Clap. Even as the strum of each chord rattles my brain and stings my teeth.

Dani is part of the popular group at school, a group that I thought I would magically float into once I made the freshman cheer team a year early. But I still feel like the odd one out. I watch how their bodies relax into the cushions. They seem to know much more already: How to hold their shoulders, how to draw attention, how to move their bodies the way boys like. I’m rounder than these girls, who are so small and slim. I wear the largest size skirt. Even then, it’s about an inch shorter in the back than in the front — a result from having a growing body already moving out of juniors sizes and into women's. The blue bodysuit, a size large, pinches my neck.

My mom returns to this story often: It was pouring rain, I couldn’t see in front of me, and this girl in the back starts badly playing the violin. It always gets a laugh.

I get embarrassed, defensive. I remind my mom: We were young, foolish. All trying to impress the other.

The next day after school, the five of us walk down from the high school to the primary school. This is a rite of passage, a daily exercise in alliances. I tag along with Dani and the other carpool girls. I don’t know if they want me there. I feel like a burden on these walks. I try to fall in line with them. I don’t know what they’re talking about. I listen. Something about some boy in their friend group who has a crush on Dani. I don’t think any boy has had a crush on me ever.

The gym walls are lined with blue mats. The wooden floor squeaks of a fresh clean. The room is fluorescent, an entire ceiling covered in lights. There are bodies everywhere; girls already in their pastel soffe shorts and white sneakers, stretching out on the hard floor.

We head over to the massive storage closet with doors nearly touching the ceiling. We split off into groups of two and three to carry the mats out into the gym, the top wavering high above our heads. Once we’re in the right spot, we drop the mat on the ground with a thud. Dust, eyelashes, pieces of hair, fingernails, toenails fly off in a huff. We line up on one side, brace our knees, lay our hands firm on the roll, and push. One mat after another covers the floor. The coach, one of the several who trains us, comes in and has us start running.

Five laps later we come to a halt and spread out into a circle. The three captains  count off 5-6-7-8. Then, they start doing cheer jumping jacks, jumping out and holding the lunge for a bit before returning to center, always keeping their elbows straight. We join. The gym rattles as we count to fifty, our legs jumping in and out, but all I focus on is how I can feel my breast lifting and landing against my chest, can only wonder whether my shirt is lifting up to reveal the jiggling tummy below. I look around the circle and watch: their arms, their legs, their bodies.

“Natalie, do you have my straightener?”

“I do. Give me five minutes.”

“Nat, I need it. Come on. Bring your own next time.”

The twins are bickering in front of the locker room mirror in the primary school. Their bodies take up barely any space. I catch my eyes falling down to their skirts, let them linger on the soft skin that falls beneath the hem. I think if I wrap my hand around their thighs my fingers would touch. It’s photo day and they look great in the uniform.

I didn’t think to bring a straightener. I didn’t think to bring more makeup. I watch in the mirror as they fuss with their hair, pinch their cheeks for a rosy glow, flit around their already perfect bodies. My top cuts so tightly into my armpits, it’s hard to expand fully when I take a breath. I walk over to where Nat stands, by the sink mirror and study my own face. Flyaways poke out of my hair in all directions. My skin is blotchy, covered in small bumps that aren’t quite acne but are certainly not smooth.

I ask Nat to move over and position my hands under the running faucet, then use the water to flatten my hair. One final look in the mirror reveals a tired young girl who knows her uniform doesn’t fit, knows somewhere in deep down in her toes, that this company doesn't either, but still cannot bring herself to admit it.

In a few years, another girl on our team will wish the twins a happy birthday via an Instagram post. The post will say something about high school memories of drinking four locos in the woods. Maybe something about weed. That part of me deep in my toes knew this was happening. But I heard none of it. I was far removed from this world and them.

Where was I when they planned these outings? Would they whisper to each other, bodies tucked into corners, heads cocked to see visitors, stopping hard in the middle of sentences when I came into view? Or was I the naive one? Thinking all that partying and sneaking around was just something in the movies. Or maybe I was simply walking through the motions, being a cheerleader because Kim Possible promised a life I never found.

When my college friends ask, I’ll say I loved youth cheer, with the innocence and magic that comes with night-wet grass and body conditioning done under the stars. That it got bad in high school because everything does. The girls got mean because they always do.

But I was outside. Forever a new cheerleader, becoming like my television hero, pushing my weight up on swing-set rings. Kim Possible is flipping, high kicking her way through crime fighting; I’m flipping my head over my toes, watching as the world topples over, feeling the weight of blood in my stomach. I look up at the clouds, high enough to flip over this whole set, when this new castle, all stone and grey, shimmers into existence like some desert mirage. And I wonder how much harder I have to kick to get there.

Breadcrumbs #692

Antonio Underwood

Me need you, my need is you. Me knew you, you left me. Your need is him or her.

My needed you and let me know before. You left me before i was gone. In the last words to you, as confusing as maybe you never heard them. It had gone so long, wrong.

From that day you left I became all me again. You became gone. Like now, like then, like none, none other. Like love, no friend like none. Faintly, but never forget. Impress, no regrets. I'm not much with words or what comes next.

I fix my mind and stay tuned to what I believe in. What I choose to have in my life. Freedom of choice, but is it? Can we choose who decides to stay with us when things get hard? Would we choose other if we knew they would run, or just stay alone, calling the only one who really cares, Mom who know what to say. Oh, she’s gone too.

Sitting out on the softball field lawn, it’s where I practice, fix my lips and jaw to warm the embrochure. The right air to flow a velocity of a stream, a stream of air that gives a certain tone a certain expression, it all comes in the wash of sound and tempo.

Now say to yourself, “How do I create that wonderful melody that cheers my mood? Where did it go, I woke up too late" I choose for it to come back. I choose to have that feeling again. Now is it freedom of choice, or what happen when we set if free enough to accept and enjoy?

Cause expressing dislike why they loved you, right? My time here, like time on earth, my time. Time to remember what sticks so deep in my life. To say this without music is what makes people come around and be apart without the audiences’ hand shakes, admiration, then distance.

Maybe it’s heard differently and not so abstractly. It gave me the chance, cause in my statements, they all heard me play a melody and improvise on the theme of my existence, but still afterwards I look around and no one listens. Many times they saw me before I arrived. You couldn’t miss the hue that has a certain connotation, an assuming what is the way you be, to be, need be.

They all know I was serious and didn’t skive, feel like a jerk. Dive right in most of the time with good humor. But they all thought I was just like everybody else.

Now how does this speak out without a horn in my diction and expressions? Is there a piece of music I can read from or do I always have to make it up?

Practice time sitting alone, so easy to observe. It’s up to you. You know we all want to know what’s true to everyone, no, when true to you. Now, back to me, all there is right now.

When you left, I know you grew a new arm, but me I stayed alone, trying to remember the notes I use to play on my horn back before you. Way from want wasn’t true between me and you. This is me, that was you walking away.

Rhymes go flowing easily when you know what you are trying to say. Unless they are incongruent, time never, then never so fluent. When chemicals are the imbalance. Brain chemistry likely, words that seem to fit when together like people never say all that need to be said, so they complete the phrase or, or melody, left as motive or motif, incomplete.

I came to you and you came to me. Here we come still apart. Hi how are you? Fine and you. I have work. Talk soon. Never did it work. We saw each other even across the room, we knew each other. Now, how? Two people know each other instinctively, can never understand each other.

“I still think about what it was like. I think about how hard it was in my dislike. Coming around again, it always does. Leaving a bitter taste. Running away never stays too long.”

A closer view of sadness from the falling and breaking apart, and tragic madness it brought. That’s all I knew. Me knew you. You left me before I was gone.

Going to an ole place we would spend time, saw her again. Pleasant chat. She explained how hard it was to watch me struggle and the amount of darkness she saw coming at me all the time.

“You are dark skinned with such a bright and they are light skinned with so much hate and darkness of spirit. I loved you, but my heart couldn’t watch you suffer any longer. It seemed to never stop"

It happened when I needed her less. She married someone else. She has a family and children that look at me as if I were different than I thought I was. Like a stranger that the parents have said to stay away from. That stare from children that dangers exist.

She has the look of a caring and comfortable connect to a man that asks as they walk away, “who is he?” “Oh, no one…just a guy I knew in school…” Obviously it was school, cause I learned.

It’s Mother's Day and out for a stroll. She would’ve wanted me to. This day brings back memories of closeness. No one closer than the ones you love. Or is it a choice, obviously? Obviously, seen differently, and treated differently than I thought.

Or did I know already, and thought she, who knew my mother, would look past them instead of past me, before I was gone.

• • •

Breadcrumb #691

Impish Praniti

There’s a lot that goes into your dad being a doctor. When your dad is a doctor, you get to step into a white coat that almost blankets you; covering you from head to toe. You get to wear a stethoscope around your neck, and check the heartbeat of the walls, as you go about injecting no one in particular. And then, you get this unlimited supply of lollipops and chocolates that are ideally meant for children who howl and scream during vaccinations, but in all honesty, you could not care less. You become the heart and soul of the waiting room, getting your tangled mop of hair ruffled, and your cheeks pulled.

But, as you grow older, and your comfortable feet touch the hot, tarry roads of (almost) adulthood, the lollipops meant for children who howl during vaccinations do not melt in your mouth, instead they stick between your glow and dark braces. From sunlit waiting room days, you move into sultry, diary-and-pen nights. Your tangled mop of hair is a knot on the top of your head, and you hate it being touched, let alone ruffled. And suddenly, when you are seventeen and three quarters, your dad who is a doctor stops coming home. You hear the mention of long nights and cramped halls, and one day, out of the blue, someone mentions a pandemic. And then, when you ask what a pandemic is , a doting relative says that it is a part and parcel of the medical world. It is one of the things that goes into your dad being a doctor.

A sense of obviousness has been imposed on you. After all, there are a lot of things which are part and parcel of the medical world. You shrug this off, and plug in your earphones, seizing every bit of the extremely temporary oblivion that rock music bestows upon you. It isn’t as though you don’t know what the pandemic is about. Of course, you do know about the virus, the mask and the sanitizer. Wearing a mask, or being surrounded by the pungent odor of sanitizer does not feel strange. Again, these are some of the things that go into your dad being a doctor.

On one crispy-thin, frost-hemmed winter afternoon, you decide you want to go out and get some fresh air. As you step outside, you see the pitiful wisp of moon. Clad in a veil of clouds, which seem to be haphazardly woven together, it is trembling. The incompleteness of this celestial being engulfs you, and suddenly, something within you starts to ache.

You wince and look around for your inhaler, almost instantly anticipating a bout of asthma. But, moments later, you realize this ache is not something that emerges from a place as simple as the chest. It is rooted in a place that is deeper, complex, and much more intricate. And suddenly, you begin to want.

You want your white–coated doctor dad. You want that white–colored, antiseptic scented hug and you want to feel the crinkle of the lollipop which he would, more often than not, force into your unwilling teenage hands. As you go back inside, you reach out for your cellphone and dial his number. After all, you are a human, and you cherish instant gratification, no matter how big or small your want may be.

“As your fingers run, or rather skid along the keyboard, you pause. You do not remember whether it is a nine before the eight, or a four before the eight. You are confused. Lost, even.”

Finally, you dial his number. A woman picks up. She asks who you are, as your lips struggle to form the word ‘daughter’. The woman mutters something about death, about your mother already being at the hospital. She continues to converse, her words blurring at the thin line between condolences and apologies, but you cannot hear anything. You are cold and numb, pushed to a state of immobility. The blackness of the sky seems to have vaporized into absolute whiteness. It is a whiteness which isn’t like any ordinary kind of whiteness. It is the kind of whiteness that would overwhelm your gaze when your dad who is a doctor would lift you and hold you close. Your open eyes would press against the golds of his white coat, and the whiteness that would fill your gaze then, was not just absolute. It was intense, and most importantly, it was pure.

They see you standing in a supposed trance, a little away from the balcony. I think they misunderstand you. They take you down – you are hugged, but you don’t hug back, you are spoken to, but you don’t speak back, you are looked at, but you don’t look back. And then, suddenly someone says that maybe, just maybe, you were prepared for it – and expecting it all along.

After all, death is just one of those other many, many things that go into your dad being a doctor.

• • •

Breadcrumb #690

Jess Sobanko

Helen sat on a park bench, her hands on the little swell on her belly, which had still been entirely flat just a week earlier.

She’d never pictured herself as a mother.

But when it happened, she knew it was just what she wanted.

She thought it meant the three of them would always be together, that they’d be a family. The good sort of family, like she saw in picture shows.

You see, sometimes, Helen believed the lie.

She’d spent so long telling people she was older than she was, that she was from a different city, that she was Helen Dawson. So sometimes it felt real. Helen Dawson felt like a real person. Not someone she had created out of thin air.

She knew that things were going to change. When he came back into town next week, she’d tell him about their baby.

The truth is, Helen never meant to fall in love with some Yankee truck driver who stopped in Memphis once every two months.

When she came to town, she’d come for one reason. She wanted to be a singer. Well, she wanted to be a star really. She wanted the glamour, the applause, but most of all, to be someone important. Someone people would remember long after she was gone from the world.

She grew up listening to the blues. Late at night, when she couldn’t sleep, she would sneak into the living room and turn on her father’s radio. She’d just close her eyes, while she listened to singers like Mae Glover. And she wanted to sing her own blues away.

Even as a little girl she’d had plenty. Everyone did back then, but she was certain hers were the worst in the world.

Maybe she was right, maybe she wasn’t.

But she didn’t like to spend much time thinking about life before she was Helen.

And Helen wasn’t much of a singer. She couldn’t carry a tune or match a pitch. Sam Phillips himself had told her that when she auditioned for him.

She did have one thing that helped her get by though. Her beauty. And she quickly learned to use it.

Men were always doing little things for her, offer a bit of extra attention, in the hopes she might return it. But she never did. Even the most handsome, most kind men never got a second look from Helen.

Yet, they continued to admire her all the same.

And it wasn’t just the men who were kind to her.

Everyone in town liked Helen so much, they never even called her out on it if she slipped up on one of her lies.

Then came that damn Yankee.

She hardly gave him any attention at all the first time he approached her, as she was leaving work one afternoon.

He was too old for her. 29 or 30. He was too tall. 6’3 or 6’4. And he talked very, very funny.

“I ain’t the slightest bit interested in what you’re selling,” she’d told him.

But six weeks later when he came back into town, her favorite song was playing on his truck’s radio and he was singing right on along—not all too well—and she decided that maybe she’d give him a chance.

They ate breakfast together. It was at the same place Helen ate breakfast every morning. She even ordered her usual eggs and toast, and they just talked.

“I never been on a date with someone rich before,” she said, after a while.

“You think I’m rich?”

“You ordered enough for two breakfasts,” she said. She looked down at his plate full of eggs, bacon, breakfast sausage, and toast. “Besides, ain’t all Northerners rich?”

“No,” he said, laughing. “Where are you from anyway? I know it’s not here.”

“Edgerton, Missouri”

She hadn’t meant to tell him the truth.

“Never heard of it.”

She was relieved.

“Why’d you come to Memphis?”

“To be a singer.”

“You any good?”

“Not really.”

They laughed. He always seemed to get the truth out of her.

And she didn’t know it then, but she was falling in love with him.

But he knew, the experienced man that he was, so the night he left, he kissed her, and he told her, “I love you.”

She believed him too, of course she did.

When he came back into town two months later, he asked her out again.

That time they ate lunch together in the park and fed bread to the little ducks in the pond.

“Did you miss me while you were gone?”

She didn’t ask if there had been anyone else, though she wanted to know.

People in town had warned her about him. They said she wasn’t the first girl who’d struck his fancy. They said she should find a nice boy her own age.

But Helen wanted to be special, and so she believed him when he said,

“Of course, I did. I thought of nothing but you while I was away.”

“And so, they ended up in the back of his truck, where he let her sample the Georgia fruit he was delivering, sweeter than anything she’d ever had before.”

She never expected to make love in the back of a truck. Or anywhere, ever.

But she had, and when Helen started crying after—she wasn’t really sure why and even if she was, it wasn’t anything she felt like talking about—but he just told her everything was alright and that he loved her.

The next night, she snuck him into the apartment. And that time she didn’t cry. She never cried again, in fact.

Instead, she would just lay her head on his chest afterward and listen to the sound of his beating heart.

It became a routine of theirs and eventually, two days every other month just wasn’t enough for her anymore.

Helen wasn’t much for prayer. She used to pray constantly, long before she was Helen, but God never seemed to be listening back then.

And so, she never planned on asking Him for another damn thing, if only to save herself the disappointment of another unanswered prayer.

But Helen loved him so very much, that she had to try.

“Dear Lord,” she said. “Make him stay with me.”

Helen didn’t believe it worked. Not at first.

But a few weeks later, she was late.

So, she went to the town doctor and he confirmed what she already knew.

Helen was happier than she’d ever been.

A baby was as good a reason to stay as any, and Helen believed he would.

She told him early in the morning, after a night together in her bed.

“Are you serious?”

She nodded. “I went to Doctor Hart and everything.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. She’d never seen him so quiet before.

“I gotta go,” he said.

“Go?”

“I can’t have any part in this, Helen.”

“You already do,” she said. “I thought you’d marry me,” she added.

There were tears in her eyes, as she looked up at him. For the first time, she realized she didn’t know him at all. Just the sound of his lying heart and the gentle pleasure of his sinful touch.

“I’m already married, Helen. I have two kids back in New York.”

Helen wanted to believe that was a lie.

But it wasn’t and so, she never saw him again. It would be just her and the baby.

And once again, Helen couldn’t picture herself as mother.

But she became one. She became a lot of things.

“All men are the same, Vera,” she’d say to their daughter one night, years later, too drunk to remember her words come the morning. “They’ll say anything to get you to spend a night in their bed. And they never mean the things they say.”

“So why do you do it?” Vera would ask.

And the girl would be too young to be talking about what they were.

“Because the only thing worse than being touched by a man who doesn’t love you is being all alone at the end of the night. And sometimes, lying there in their arms, it feels just like it did with him, and then it’s worth it.”

And for a moment, Helen would almost believe that was true.

• • •