Breadcrumb #467

MARA SILVÉRIO

I never was allowed to have a hero
listening to boring teachers in the back of the classroom
returning home and feeling invisible in your eyes
when you were there
I don't remember how many times you were there
I was lost in supplication for love
building plans on canvas and drawing my confusion on paper
hiding my childhood inside of my backpack's pocket
not receiving kisses like the others girls
being the weirdo, but pretending I didn't know
not having the same, helped me to find my creativity
being alone at home producing, watching the fake snow.

I was the messy kid looking for her first shot of vodka
leaning against the wall at the entrance of the bar
thrilled to feel hungover, trying not to throw up
like the ultimate challenge for a triumphant night
but resisting your hands pressing my tights in the dark
almost like the pictures I saw in the hidden erotic books
screaming beneath the bed when I was not around.

I never was allowed to have a hero
so I created my own
a black woman born as a contemporary goddess
she would struck gently my hair
she would never talk about my color skin
she would say that I'm beautiful
but not untouchable
that I can feel lost
that I can completely fail
that I can explore the difference
enjoying the horny sounds of my body.
My hero would play Isaiah Rashad for me
while I make peace with my daily struggle
Wat’s wrong, wat’s wrong, she says quoting
while pimping my butterfly in orange
smoother like a motherfucker
my hero would buy me popcorn as an eternal kid
but afterwards would sit in front of me listening as a calm adult
without any forbid
without any commitment
without any bid
because that's my advice: don't put me a grid
I can go over
I can fall and hurt
I can heal and punch.

I want a hero who doesn't set me a location
who prays the Lord God while holding my ash
who follows me to the midnight tent - fearing
who chases me inside of the car - starting
who is inside of my fast beating heart - maintaining my anesthesia.

I want a hero who sees the sin even in a saint
praising adventures like a secular faint.

• • •

Breadcrumb #466

RACHEL PARSONS

I woke up at 5:53 a.m. with an insistent bladder. The room was cool and N was snoring softly beside me, his face hidden by a mountain of hotel pillows.   We were on the way to our wedding, halfway between Brooklyn and Detroit, sleeping at the Marriott in Canfield, Ohio.

I threw off the large duvet and stumbled into the bathroom. The room was dark, except for a small nightlight near the mirror. I spotted the pregnancy test in its midnight blue wrapper on top of the toilet tank, where I had left it the night before.

My period was two days late, which wasn’t unusual. I did feel a little off, but I also knew how skilled I was at fueling my anxiety. A potential pregnancy was a great way to give form and language to the chaos that was my current inner world. I was hoping the test would quiet my mind so I could focus my energy on the impending acrobatics of navigating two families coming together.

“A potential pregnancy was a great way to give form and language to the chaos that was my current inner world.”

I ripped open the wrapper and read the instructions:

Your result will appear within 3 minutes, and some results may be shown in as little as 1 minute. A ‘Pregnant’
(positive) result will remain on the display for up to 6 months. A ‘Not Pregnant’ (negative) result will remain
on the display for approximately 24 hours.

It seemed straight forward enough. I peed on the stick and held it in my hand for a moment before setting it on the tank behind me. In my half-awake state, the test landed too close to the edge and clattered to the ground. I sighed and bent over to retrieve it, results side up.

Even in the dim I could see the pink plus sign. I stared. Only 15 seconds had passed. Maybe they all started out as a plus and then dissolved back into a quiet minus? But six minutes later, the lines remained.  I sat, immobile, until the shock lost its grip, then bolted into the bedroom where my partner was sleeping.

N! Wake up!  He lifted his head from the pillow and squinted at me from behind a curtain of sleep. Impatient, I flipped on the lamp, and waved the damp pregnancy test an inch from his nose. Look at this!

What?  He shook his head and tried to focus. A few seconds later, he succeeded. Whoah. He rose quickly, throwing off the covers. I am up.

My pregnancy changed everything. I predicted the wider hips, softer belly, and weaker pelvic floor. What I hadn’t anticipated, though, became clear just a few days in: I would no longer do anything, ever again, without first considering Baby J. I felt heavy: panicked. Fierce independence had been my survival mechanism from an early age. Who would I be now? In a time where all the external messages were you are supposed to be happy, grief settled in.

N, on the other hand, was excited. At night he would recline in bed, reading parenting blogs and pregnancy articles. I laid in his arms, silent, the screen lighting up my expressionless face.

I resented him: his uncomplicated joy. He would talk about our new journey, his exuberance drawing approval from friends and strangers, already winning society’s rewards for being an engaged father. My half smiles and obtuse comments drew quizzical glances. I would sit next to N, feeling the itchy stretch of my belly across my growing uterus, the sharp pain of sciatica shooting down my right side. It didn’t feel much like we were traveling anywhere together; he was on his path, and I was on mine. It was lonely.

I tried to push the feelings down and deny their existence, but this made it worse. I woke up most mornings in tears, got into fights with those who were closest to me, and overall just felt like shit. I was worried that my anger would be displaced on to Baby J. That the fear, guilt, and grief would soak into her spirit through the amniotic fluid.

I decided to morph my anxiety into doing. I did everything I could to give Baby J the proper materials to grow a body, heart, and mind. I read all the books, went to prenatal yoga, enrolled in comprehensive birth classes, ate/did not eat all the right foods. I researched placenta encapsulation, delayed cord clamping, and natural water birth. I learned Hypbnobabies birthing techniques and listened to positive affirmations on my daily three-mile walk.

That winter, as I waddled through the neighborhood attempting to envision my easy, comfortable birthing timefrom within my bubble of peace, I would get lost in thought. I’m sorry that I am your mother, kid, instead of someone who is more excited to meet you. When the tears came, I turned up my headphones, unzipped my coat, and walked an extra ten blocks before returning to my front door, sweaty, dizzy, and panting.

• • •

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.

• • •