Category: Issue 4 Non-Fiction

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Issue 4 Issue 4 Non-Fiction

GENERATIONAL GERMINATION

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By Aubri Kaufman

Every time my three-year-old falls down, he tells me he “crumpled,” like, “I crumpled, mama,” and I hold back a laugh because I’m not sure where he learned the word. From me, I suppose, though in different context. He probably saw me ball up and toss some junk mail, crumple it, the way I saw my mother fold into herself over and over, creating irreversible creases each time. My son saw me cry last night, asked if I was okay. Asked if I’d like to jump up and down with him. Asked if that would make me feel better. I told him, yes, let’s jump together, and he laughed without reservation each time my feet left the ground.

When he saw that my still-puffy eyes hadn’t yet returned to the happy-crows-feet-mama eyes he knows well, he said, “You’re really sad, mama. Can I make you happy?” I pressed my lips to his forehead, told him, “That’s not your job, baby. Mama can make herself happy.” I listed things that make mama happy, to prove I knew how. To alleviate the burden. Coloring. Walking outside. Deep breaths. Things he understands, careful not to mention all the things he does to make me happy. Careful not to leave him feeling responsible.

Two days ago, he fell and cut his finger on the stick-like stem of our oregano plant. It’s a small cut, but the kind that peels back a layer of skin revealing fresh, raw skin underneath. We bandaged it up, kissed the wound, cursed the oregano plant, even though it wasn’t the plant’s fault. Now, he looks down to the healing cut. Band-aid removed, new skin acclimating to the air, turning color to match the rest of the finger. “Ouch,” he cries again. “It hurts, mama.” I try to convince him the wound is healing. It’ll be better soon. Probably by tomorrow. Soon he won’t even remember it happened. It’ll look good as new. He’s unconvinced. Tells me it hurts. I ask him if it hurts now, or if he’s just remembering that it hurt when it happened. His face crumples as he tries to determine the difference, and I realize I cannot explain the difference to him either. I realize maybe there isn’t one. I stop trying to make it better. I hold him while he hurts for as long as he needs me to.

Aubri Kaufman is the co-founder and co-EIC of Icebreakers Lit. Her work can be found in Pithead Chapel,trampset, HAD, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. She’s on a bunch of the socials as @aubrirose and she totally wants to talk to you.

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Issue 4 Issue 4 Non-Fiction

RUNOFF

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By Ryan-Ashley Anderson

The Youngsville realtor had no answers when we asked why the trees at the edge of the woods bent sideways, why the puddles towards the back were neon green, or where the water came from that fed the pond across the street from our house. We were fine with not having answers because this was the only house my parents could afford, and it seemed like they were trying not to pick at a thing we could not change. 

This was the first house that either of my parents had owned, so it did not matter that the yard—camel-colored packed mud, dry and cracked as a sun-baked desert—would be impossible to seed; it did not matter that the house was too small and poorly made with paper-thin walls; and it did not matter that the neighborhood our house sat outside of was filled with people my mother had already decided we would want nothing to do with.

Our new house sat at the edge of Horseshoe Acres—the only real neighborhood in our town of 900—and Horseshoe Acres sat in a valley below the farmland that surrounded us. The town consisted of a single intersection and around that intersection sat everything a person from a town like this might need—a gas station, a diner, a Piggly Wiggly grocery, a video rental store, a small doctor’s office, a post office, a bank, and a small strip of three antique shops. 

While moving in, my mother got agitated by what she characterized as inappropriate attention from the neighbors. Curtains were pulled to the side, people stood on their back porches looking in our general direction, and cars seemed to slow as they passed our house.

“Don’t these people have anything better to do than to spy on us?” my mother complained.  “Haven’t they ever seen somebody move in before?”

“They’re probably just curious about us,” my step-father explained. 

“Let’s. Go. Say. Hi!” I begged between strained breaths while playing tug of war with my dog, Kentucky.

After a few days had passed and most of our boxes were unpacked, I convinced my parents to walk the neighborhood and introduce ourselves to all the people we wouldn’t be spending time with. I hoped some of these people had kids my age and that, once my mother met them, she’d realize they were fine and then let me play with them. I pulled on my shoes and fantasized about Friday night sleepovers—giggling over J.T.T. from Home Improvement, arguing about the proper way to sing the chorus of Hanson’s “MMMBop,” freezing each other’s bras like I’d heard some of the older girls talk about in Girl Scouts. I’d never had a real sleepover but I imagined they went something like that. In fact, I hadn’t really lived anywhere long enough to make real friends, and I was nervous. I wondered how I should act to make sure all the kids liked me, and practiced introducing myself in the bathroom mirror.

“Hi,” I said, hand extended for a shake, “My name’s Ryan, what’s yours?” No, that wasn’t right. Kids don’t shake hands. At least, here they probably didn’t. The last thing I wanted was for them to think I was some pretentious asshole. I did, however, want them to think I was smart. It was basically the only thing I had going for me. 

“Hey, I’m Ryan. Who are you?” No, that sounded lazy and rude and my mother would never let me hear the end of an introduction like that.

“Hi! I’m Ryan! Want to play?” No, no, no. That definitely went against the rule of not spending time with these people and I’d be opening a can of worms my mom would have to spend years sealing back up. 

“Hi.” That’s better. Be quiet, be small, be good. “Hi” wouldn’t get me into trouble. It gave nothing, asked nothing, and made no invitation. Perfect. I practiced saying hi with my mouth while pleading please invite me in to play with my eyes. 

Right before we left for the walk, my mother said, “Remember, don’t tell anyone here anything about our family. They are not our friends and don’t need to know our business.”

Just a couple door-knocks into our stroll and my mother’s suspicions were confirmed—those people were not our people and we were to do everything in our power to ensure they didn’t think we were one of them. Those people smoked in the house, watched television at all hours of the day, and let their kids run around barefoot. Those people kept their dogs chained up in the backyard (we would never do that to Kentucky, I thought), swore out loud, drank in front of their kids, and had bad teeth. My mom always told me that these were the kinds of things poor people did. And we weren’t poor. Poor kids ran around outside without shoes on. It was how they got worms, she’d said. And the implication was that we don’t get sick with the same kinds of things as poor people because we are educated; we know better; we are better. I saw lots of kids playing outside during our walk, the bottoms of their feet caked with earth. I felt bad for them. They probably had worms and didn’t even know it. I wondered if I should warn them. I imagined what it would feel like to have a pile of worms twisting around inside my stomach and was perfectly happy to do whatever I must to avoid that. My mom was already mad about how often I needed to go to the doctor and worms was definitely on the list of preventable ailments I’d be punished for.

*

When I was a baby, I had bad ear infections. So bad that the doctor wanted to do surgery. For whatever reason, the surgery never happened and I ended up with scars on my ear drums. As I got older, I had to be really careful. If I wasn’t wearing special ear plugs, I wasn’t allowed to get my head wet at the pool, for example. If someone splashed my face or I forgot and did a cannonball, I’d get inconsolably upset. I’d push my beach towel as far into my ears as I could, to get all the water out, but I’d often still end up with an ache anyway. I’d try to hide it from my mom, but she could always tell. For days during an earache, she would obsessively inspect my ears after baths and showers, making sure no water was left behind that might nudge the ache into infection territory and I let her, because an infection meant a doctor’s visit, and a doctor’s visit meant time off work, and time off work meant we wouldn’t have enough money, and that was a big problem because my mom didn’t want to be poor. 

By the time I was three, she was carting me back and forth to court-ordered physical exams and therapy appointments. Some stuff about my dad that I didn’t fully understand. Just that there were lots of stuffed dolls involved and, after it was all over, I wasn’t allowed to be alone with him again unless a legal chaperone was present. 

The year we moved to Youngsville, I’d also been diagnosed with a skin condition, lactose-intolerance, and some phantom digestion issue that made my body turn all my food into big, impassable lumps. I was on lots of medications for that. Laxatives that made me vomit, and pills for the heartburn caused by the vomit. And the worst part was that it didn’t even make things much better. I’d alternate between explosive diarrhea in the middle of the school day (often shitting my pants and needing my mom to bring me a change of clothes) and hours on the toilet at home, with a huge lump of shit sticking a quarter of the way out of my ass, crying and begging for it to pass. I really didn’t need to add worms to the list.

*

I was careful not to act too excited during our walk. I really liked everyone we met but didn’t want my mom to notice. She would have felt betrayed. She was a very “with me or against me” type of person. When their doors opened, I could smell how different our neighbors’ homes were from ours—smoky, warm, and sweet—and I could see how different they looked inside. These were not the homes of people who ate boiled chicken and broccoli every night for dinner and kept everything tidy and sparkling. No, these were clearly pizza people—people whose walls were covered with family photos, whose floors were covered in toys, who shouted dinner time into the void from the back porch at dusk each evening. Most of them were friendly and easygoing. I noticed they didn’t seem to think too hard about things before they said them, or worry much about what we thought. I wondered how I might be more like that. I wondered if I’d get a chance to learn.

Turns out, I would spend most Friday evenings at home, watching ABC’s T.G.I.F. programming block on my own or with my mom and step-dad. I didn’t talk to them about how much I liked J.T.T. because little girls weren’t supposed to think of little boys like that. My mom was already worried that I was too ‘mature’ for my age, so I just kept it to myself. 

*

We soon discovered that heavy rains made the pond across the street flood and push over into our yard where it then sat for days atop the unyielding clay before finally, slowly, finding its way back into the ground. We learned that the little creek in the far back would darken and swell and overtake that end of the yard, reaching toward the bent-over trees, making mosquito birthing grounds of my new favorite hangout spot. We stayed out of the yard and away from the woods when it was wet out. On dry days, though, the backyard was mine. Sometimes I’d lay across the crooked trunks at the edge of the woods, imagine my body was part of the tree, and wonder if it felt me there. On others, I’d crawl through the brush to explore. I liked to get far away from the house and pretend to get lost. I wondered if my parents would search for me and secretly worried that they wouldn’t.

While I was out there, I searched for the lime green, electric looking puddles. They seemed like the stuff monsters were made of, and something told me not to touch them. Instead, I poked at the greasy water with a stick and watched the oil make magic on the surface where large mosquitos sat, miraculously without sinking. 

*

That first summer, my mother became obsessed with growing grass. The days were made of endless trips to the hardware store where we could never seem to get enough grass seed, mulch, and fertilizer. We rented aerators and seed-spreading machines and the three of us—my step-father, my mother, and I—worked together like a solid little army, synchronized and determined to make something grow. While my mother used the aerating machine, I’d beat at the earth with a metal rake, and my step-father would follow closely behind with the seed-spreader. I helped by adding more seed when it started to run low, and after, we would take turns watering. By the end of the summer, our yard looked like it had been fitted with hair plugs. Grass grew frail and sparse and my mother made sure none of us walked on or cut it until it was strong. How long would that take, I wondered? 

On days my mother started drinking early—early enough that the sun was still high in the sky—I took advantage of her condition. I’d swear that, if she would let me play outside, I wouldn’t mess up a single blade of grass. I’d only walk on the dry spots, between the blades, I’d tell her, and then just hang out in the far back where it was all dirt and moss anyway and there was nothing to worry about me ruining.  

*

Even a couple summers into living there, I really hadn’t made any friends. Me and the other kids, we weren’t the same. But it wasn’t because of money—I’d realized by now that we were pretty much in the same boat as them, if not worse off—it was because I was a difficult kid with a difficult mother and other people’s parents just didn’t want to deal. The stomach issues were also a complicating factor. What was some other parent supposed to do when the neighbor kid got stuck in their only bathroom for hours? It was always just easier to be close to home if something wasn’t feeling right, so I spent a lot of time back there in the yard on my own. I’d talk to the trees or sit by the creek, looking deep down to see what was inside. Sometimes I looked so closely that I’d start to lose my balance. I’d imagine falling in and sinking down, deeper and deeper and deeper. I wondered if it would be cold down there or if, at some point, temperature starts losing meaning. I wondered if there were creatures and could have sworn I saw the long, thick body once of a prehistoric-looking snake.

I wanted Kentucky to hang out with me back there—something about having him around made me want to disappear less—but my mom said he had to stay up at the house on the chain, or in the garage. He didn’t know how to be careful with the grass, she said. But I’d get lonely back there talking to myself, so I started pretending that one of the weirdly-shaped trees was a person.

And I named that weird person-like tree Jonathan.

I was eight by this point. It was 1995. I was still watching Home Improvement and my crush on J.T.T. had grown into a bit of an obsession. Especially since his role as Simba in The Lion King the previous year. I’d cried desperately along with Simba when his father Mufasa was trampled in the wildebeest stampede and I wondered if knowing that would endear me to him one day.

So when I saw an advertisement for his fan club in a copy of Teen Beat Magazine during one of our trips to the Piggly Wiggly, I ripped out the page and pocketed it. I just had to join. At home, I emptied the piggy bank I’d squirreled a little cash and coins away in, stuffed the money into an envelope along with the entry form, put it in the mailbox across the street by the pond, with the flag up high, and awaited my personalized letter and fan kit from J.T.T. 

I started fantasizing about a life with him and imagined the reactions on people’s faces when I told them the story of how we met—Oh it was WILD! It all started with a fan club when we were both kids. We just started writing letters back and forth and, eventually, his parents flew me out to meet him in person and join them on set for the taping of one of the Home Improvement episodes. It was just…love at first sight…and it’s been happily ever after ever since.

I really thought it could happen. That this was how things did happen. That this was how little girls like me found a way out of towns so small they’d like to squeeze the life and dreams and future right out of you. 

I started spending time with tree J.T.T. in the afternoons, rehearsing conversations I imagined having with him in real life someday. At first, I’d sit across from him and talk ‘face to face.’ Soon, I was sitting against the tree, imagining J.T.T.’s arms wrapped around me. I asked him, between soft kisses, whether I should call him J.T.T. or Jonathan, and started rubbing my body against the bark. 

I was mostly hidden from view, but my heart raced and my palms slipped with sweat during intimate moments like this. I was terrified of getting caught, so I’d keep one eye trained on the back porch where my mom tended to sit, talking on the phone with friends and drinking wine after a long day. I knew that if she saw me, she’d stop allowing me to play out there by myself. I had a sense that I was damaged, and that everything she did was to keep the seams sewed up tight so none of that would ever spill out in front of other people. She was always talking to me about how important it was to be appropriate. She’d probably even take me back to the therapist, but I was too old to play with dolls now.

So I’d stand there quietly, secretly, hidden just out of view, and coo, “J.T.T., oh, J.T.T., I’m your biggest fan. I love you, J.T.T.,” while grinding against the tree’s rough, bark-covered trunk, “ … and I think you could love me, too. You will love me, too. One day. You’ll see.”

Ryan-Ashley Anderson is a conceptual artist and writer from the rural South. She has publications in X-R-A-Y and Icebreakers among others, work forthcoming in Rejection Letters and Vlad Mag, and is an editor at Pool Party Mag. Anderson is currently writing a memoir about sex work, the patriarchy, and belonging, and pursuing dual masters degrees in critical studies and art.

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Issue 4 Issue 4 Non-Fiction

A LITTLE PATIENCE

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By Aaron Burch

“Remember,” Mr. Dye reminds your class. “You should start thinking about what song you’re going to perform for your final.”

Your classmates groan. They sigh. They respond the primary way a room full of kids on the brink of teenagerdom respond to almost anything said by an adult.

“We don’t have a final paper or test,” Mr. Dye continues. “Just practice your performance. And remember, you need to turn in typed up lyrics as part of your homework. There shouldn’t be any curse words or anything else that wouldn’t be allowed on the radio.”

You wonder what he means by that “anything else.” What else other than curse words aren’t allowed on the radio? What else might disqualify a song?

You also wonder who actually needs the reminder. You’ve been thinking about it for weeks.

After school, you close yourself in your room and again listen to all your Weird Al tapes, over and over and over, trying to find just the right song. You listen through “Weird Al” Yankovic in 3-D and you listen through Dare to Be Stupid and you listen through Even Worse. You lay on your bed and close your eyes and mentally note the pros and cons of performing each song; you get up and stand in front of the full-length mirror hanging on your closet door and sing along, watching what you look like with each. “Eat It” or maybe “I Lost on Jeopardy,” “Like a Surgeon” or “Fat” or “I Think I’m a Clone Now.” You keep listening and considering, relistening and reconsidering.

You’re worried which song performance will lead to the highest grade. You’re also worried someone else might do the same song. You’re really worried someone else is going to do the same song and do it so much better. But, more than any of that, you’re worried about which song will least likely embarrass you and/or most likely make you look cool, two ideas that sometimes overlap and sometimes don’t but are always, together, at the core of your being. 

You’re shy, but maybe more than anything, you’re self-conscious. Your shyness and tendency toward indecision are borne largely out of a fear of doing or saying something stupid or, even worse, wrong. You are so scared of having a wrong opinion, of liking something that everyone else knows isn’t cool, or not liking something that obviously is. How does everyone else know what to like, what clothes to wear, what music to listen to? You know enough to be embarrassed that you like New Kids on the Block, but not enough to know who you should like instead. 

A couple of months from now you’ll overhear a couple of the other kids at your bus stop raving about some new tape by someone or a group or something called Candyman and so the next time you go to Wherehouse Music with your dad you look through everything until you find it, flipping through pop and rock and finally finding it in rap. Ain’t No Shame in My Game by Candyman. You’ll buy it, having no idea what to expect and even still it isn’t what you expected. But, apparently, it’s what people are listening to, so you keep listening until it grows on you, until you’re ready to overhear others talking about it so you can chime in. You’ll never overhear anyone mention it again. 

You wear cardigans to school, which seem dressier than what anyone else at your junior high wears and you feel like you stick out but that’s what your mom buys you when she takes you school shopping and they seem nice when you try them on in the store. You don’t have any other, better ideas. You get excited for new clothes, like you’re presenting your best self and isn’t that what everyone’s trying to do? You wake up early to put a lot of mousse in your hair and try and get it just right…but it never looks just right, and it doesn’t look like anyone else’s, all these kids with their parted straight hair and you with your curls that your mom and grandmother say are gorgeous, they say girls would kill for, they say you’re going to have so many girls you’re going to beat them away with a stick, but that very much isn’t the case, no girls ever tell you they’d kill for your hair, no girls even come close enough that you’d be able to touch one with a stick, but less so many of them swarming to the point where you need to fend them off. You roll your eyes and wish your hair was straight and would just part in a wave to the side like everyone else’s.

You look through your tapes, looking for anything else that might fit. 

Novelty songs, you remember Mr. Dye saying. Novelty songs work especially well for this.

You wonder, for the first time, how Weird Al came to be almost the totality of this genre, all by himself. 

“Any ideas for novelty songs for me to lip sync for my class?” you ask your parents.

“What about Kermit the Frog singing ‘It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Green’?” your mom suggests.

You roll your eyes. Rolling your eyes and sighing and mumbling “whatever,” or being a sarcastic Smart Alec, is becoming one of your most common reactions to your parents. 

“I love that song,” your mom says. “It’s so sweet.”

What is your mom thinking? You don’t want to be sweet. She doesn’t know anything about being twelve.

You go back to your room, close your door, lay on your bed and keep brainstorming. 

Mr. Dye says he’s going to take volunteers until no one volunteers and then he’ll have to just start calling on people, until everyone’s had their turn, and then the semester will be over. You don’t want to get called on, but you don’t want to volunteer either. You really want to go somewhere in the middle. You want to blend in. Well, you want to stand out for doing a great job, but not too much, and definitely not for the wrong reasons. 

No one volunteers at first and you feel your whole body—your fists and your arm and leg muscles and your teeth and your neck and your chest and your brain—clench. Is Mr. Dye going to have to call on people the whole time? Am I going to end up getting called on first?? You wonder who would possibly ever volunteer to go first. And then one student raises their hand, and then another. 

Please don’t do my song, you think to yourself as every student walks to the front of the class and waits for Mr. Dye to hit play. Like a mantra, telepathy, a prayer. Please don’t do my song, please don’t do my song, please don’t do my song.

No one does a Weird Al song. No one does any kind of novelty song at all. Not the first volunteer, not the second, not any of your classmates who go that first day. Not anyone on day two either. 

At first you watch, thinking they’ve all made a misjudgment. Hadn’t any of them been at parent-teacher night? Hadn’t Mr. Dye told you all what kind of song worked best? It was like he’d given you a sneak peek at the final exam and you had to look up all the answers on your own, but you knew the questions. Why would anyone not follow a suggestion given by the teacher, the person who would be giving you your grade? But then, as you watch classmate after classmate perform popular, Top 40, non-parody songs, you realize you’ve made the misjudgment. You’re going to seem silly. You’re going to look like a little kid singing this dorky joke while everyone else has chosen a real song. You wonder if it’s too late to change. You’ve already turned in your lyrics but maybe you can talk to Mr. Dye, maybe you can explain your mistake, maybe you can quickly find and memorize and type up the lyrics to a real song, before you make a fool of yourself. And then Mr. Dye calls your name and it’s your turn and you stand up out of your desk and make your way to the front of the classroom, dreading what’s about to happen. 

Ten, twenty, thirty years later, you won’t remember what song you ended up choosing and performing. You’ll remember all the practicing and choosing one song and then changing your mind and choosing another one and practicing anew. You’ll remember typing up lyrics on your family electronic typewriter, with its little display that would show a couple of lines at a time, saving it all onto some kind of typewriter hard drive, and then printing out the whole thing all at once on command. You’ll remember listening to the song over and over and over, typing as you listen, rewinding your tape every twenty seconds or so before it gets too far out ahead of you. You’ll remember how typing up the lyrics like that helped you memorize them even more than all your practicing, and also how it reminded you—at the time, and will still remind you all these years later—of one of your favorite episodes of Growing Pains from a few years before. 

“Reputation.” Mike Seaver—played by Kirk Cameron at the peak of his popularity and charm, long before he starred in the Left Behind series; before, in fact, he’d become a Christian at all, converting midway through the height of his career on Growing Pains and beginning to insist that storylines be edited to remove anything he thought to be too adult or inappropriate—had gotten to the point of being in danger of failing the class, so he’d stayed up all night writing notes on the soles of his shoes. In class the next morning, Mike sailed through the test, knowing all the answers, not once needing to look at these two cheat sheets on the bottom of his feet. After the commercial break, the teacher gave back everyone’s graded test, announcing with total surprise that the best grade had been received by none other than class slacker. Mike Seaver. Mike jumped up out of his seat, did a little dance, high-fived the classmates sitting around him. Sitting back in his seat, proud of himself for doing so well on a test for once, Mike leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head in a perfectly 1986 sitcom way, and kicked his feet up onto the desk of the student sitting next to him, putting his night’s work on full display to the teacher and the camera. Cue the studio audience gasps, cut to commercial. 

You’ll remember that not one other person did a goofy or funny or parody song, though you won’t remember what they did do. You won’t remember if anyone did Janet Jackson or Mariah Carey or Madonna; it seems unlikely that anyone did “U Can’t Touch This” or Faith No More’s “Epic,” because surely you’d remember that, but it’s possible; they were both huge songs that year. 

You’ll remember only one performance. Matthew. 

Matthew sits in the back of the class. He’s a year older than you, has long, almost shoulder-length hair, a little like Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites, though that’s still four years away, or maybe like Kurt, though you don’t know who that is yet, you haven’t heard of Nirvana, you have no idea Bleach came out last year. Matthew’s hair hangs down, veiling his face, as if hiding him away from Mr. Dye or anyone else who might notice he isn’t paying attention.  

When it’s his turn, when Mr. Dye finally calls his name, having run out of volunteers, Matthew slumps and sighs like he can’t believe he has to do this. Did he think he’d just somehow never get called? 

“Matthew, I don’t seem to have your homework with the lyrics anywhere here,” Mr. Dye says, looking around his desk, through his stack of papers.

“Yeah, I didn’t get to that,” Matthew replies.

“Well. How are we going to fix that? You can’t go unless I can look over the lyrics first and have them to follow along, and you can’t pass the class if you don’t do this assignment.”

Matthew shrugs and then starts digging through his backpack down at his feet. Everyone in the class is quiet, watching, wondering how this is going to go. 

Matthew pulls his Walkman and then a cassette case out from the bottom of his backpack. He takes the tape out of the Walkman and opens the case and pulls out the liner notes and walks both up to give to Mr. Dye. 

“You’re gonna faaaaaail,” Matthew’s buddy says, chuckling at himself, laughing like his buddy having to repeat the eighth grade is the funniest thing he’s ever heard. Mr. Dye looks at him and shakes his head.

Matthew’s buddy stops and the room is silent, everyone watching Mr. Dye reading the small-print lyrics that Matthew has pointed out in the unfolded cassette tape liner notes.

“What are these asterisks?” Mr. Dye asks.

“What do you mean?” Matthew gets closer, looks over Mr. Dye’s shoulder at where he’s pointing. “Oh. That’s just whistling.”

“Are you sure? There aren’t going to be any surprises, are there?”

Matthew shakes his head. “Just whistling. I promise.”

Matthew puts the tape into the class boombox and rewinds it back to the beginning of side B.

“Let me know when you’re ready,” Mr. Dye says.

“I’m ready.”

Matthew doesn’t look ready. He’s in the middle of the front of the class, where you all stood when performing your songs, but he’s just standing there. His body is slack; he doesn’t look nervous or excited. He looks bored.

Mr. Dye hits play and there’s seconds of silence while you all wait for the song to start. Matthew does that thing where he reaches up and grabs his hair and pulls it back out of his face and then lets go and it falls right back to where it was. Someone on the tape says, “One. Two. One, two, three, four…,” and it’s startling, this break of silence, like you’d forgotten what you were waiting for, why everyone was quiet in the first place. Then an acoustic guitar and Matthew starts swaying, subtly but perfectly, and somehow you realize Matthew had mouthed along to the counting, so casually you hadn’t even noticed at first, but also purposeful and natural, like he’d known exactly how many seconds of silence there was going to be, like he was in fact counting down to the song starting rather than just mimicking.

Some whistling joins the acoustic guitar—the asterisks!—and Matthew purses his lips and closes his eyes and keeps swaying. You think about all that time you spent practicing in front of your mirror, figuring out what to do with your body, your hands. Not quite choreography, but almost. You overenunciated every word, overemoted every lyric, thinking that was the goal, that would be how everyone knew you were doing a good job. Meanwhile, Matthew doesn’t look like he practiced, he kind of doesn’t even look like he’s doing anything at all, but it looks so much… better. There’s almost a minute of whistling and acoustic guitar while Matthew sways and lipsync-whistles, and it’s mesmerizing.

“Shed a tear cause I’m missing you…”

You finally recognize the song as Guns N’ Roses’ “Patience,” and then Matthew’s swaying back and forth makes even more sense than already just looking natural and perfect. It’s that Axl sway. You’ve seen the music videos—“Welcome to the Jungle,” “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” “Paradise City.” You usually flip past them when they’re on, but sometimes you watch when your parents aren’t around. You find them curious but you don’t really get it; you group them together in your mind with all the other hair metal bands—Poison and Ratt and Cinderella and Mötley Crüe. All these bands that have long hair and wear makeup but also their album cover art feature snakes and skulls. You find it all silly, but also confusing, but also dangerous and kind of scary. 

Next year, Guns N’ Roses will release Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II on the same day, and they’ll be huge, but then a week later, on the very next record release Tuesday, Nirvana’s Nevermind will come out, a week that will feel like a clear demarcation of before and after. Two entirely different eras. 

At the end of that school year, one of your friends will write “Guns N Fuckin’ Roses!” in your yearbook and you’ll be shocked, at both the language and the sentiment. You’d thought they seemed silly and then passé, like you’d been too young for them, and then immediately too old. You’d assumed everyone your age thought the same. You didn’t think anyone you knew listened to them. You’ve never talked with that friend about them. You’ll take a black marker and cover up “Fuckin” so your parents won’t see when you show them your yearbook.

“Said woman take it slow, and it’ll work itself out fine. All we need is just a little patience…” 

It doesn’t seem like a Guns N’ Roses song, and it doesn’t seem like a junior high Public Speaking class lipsync assignment performance. It’s a long song—almost a full six minutes of acoustic guitar and whistling and power ballad singing and it feels as long as it is, it feels like it lasts forever, but you’re never bored. You’re hypnotized. You kind of want it to last forever. 

And then it ends. Matthew stands there, finally still, no longer embodying the song. 

Matthew walks over to Mr. Dye and takes the tape and the empty cassette case and the liner notes with the lyrics and the asterisks and puts them all back together. He walks back to his desk and you turn around a little, trying not to stare or make your admiration and the awe you’re in too obvious. You watch him slump back down into his seat and drop the tape back in his backpack and then the bell rings and class is over and the school day is over and it’s time to go get on your bus and head home.

Aaron Burch is the author of A Kind of In-Between and Year of the Buffalo, among others, and the editor of How to Write a Novel: An Anthology of 20 Craft Essays About Writing, None of Which Ever Mention Writing, and the journals Short Story, Long and HAD. His next book, TACOMA, is forthcoming from Autofocus Books. He’s online lots of places, including here: www.aaronburch.net

Categories
Issue 4 Issue 4 Non-Fiction

WILTS

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By Corey Lof

Wilts saw the ocean for the first time when he was twenty-six. Thank you, he said. We were on the Oregon coast where a waterfall was coming off the cliffs, landing on the beach and running through a spiderweb of trenches to the shoreline. The sun had set and what was left of the light had turned the waterfall, and everything really, the rocks, the sand, us, the ocean, translucent and purple.

Thank you, thank you, he said, breathing like he wasn’t sure he would ever get to do it again. I half expected to turn around and find him facedown making angel shapes in the sand, like he was talking to God, or the earth or something. I hoped he wasn’t talking to me. I wanted to be riding around on Aprhi’s shoulders in the shallow, taking selfies. I didn’t want to be credited with whatever Wilts was experiencing. I ignored him, but he kept saying it. Thank you. Thank you for bringing me here. 

It was always like this with Wilts, we’d be doing something normal, like getting gas or watching an ambulance tend to a car wreck, and Wilts would experience some profound depressive episode. It was nothing to be jealous of, but there I was. I wanted to push him over into the sand, fill his mouth with it. 

Man, thank yourself, I said. You pitched on gas too.

The second time Wilts saw the ocean he almost drowned. We were burning driftwood on a campsite in northern California, surrounded by long beach grass. The sand was cold and the air was a thick, salty mist. The moon never rose and so turning away from the fire basically left you blind. 

You go swimming? Aphri said, looking over my shoulder to where Wilts stood, soaked and shivering, with some girl in his arms. He kept grabbing her like he was checking she was there. They bashed their foreheads together and panted in unison.  It was obvious, whether he saved her, or she saved him, or they’d just tripped into a puddle together, Wilts saw it as a cosmic sign. The universe was always telling Wilts that this was it, he’d arrived, and it always ended with his heart looking like sidewalk vomit. 

Who the fuck is that? Aprhi asked. 

The fire flashed in the girl’s wide eyes. She pet Wilts’ chest, looked up at his chin. 

The three of us had been staring into the fire since before dark.

We hadn’t even noticed he left. 

He moved into the girl’s van and the next time Aphri and I saw him was in Hollywood. Though he disappeared early that night too. Aphri borrowed then bled on Wilts’ only nice shirt while in a friendly fist fight over a flowery necklace given to us by a homeless man.

It was me who punched him.  

I got into it with Aphri twice that night. 

Later, while Wilts was asleep, or wandering all woebegone through the Hollywood streets, Aphri warned me against going behind a bar to smoke weed with a black guy who had neck tattoos, so I called him a racist and he smacked me in the face and told me a story about how he was robbed at knifepoint in Guatemala. 

I said, I wish I had a knife, I’d take you for everything you got. 

What did I tell you about threatening me with violence? he said. I’ll whoop your ass.

I dumped what was left of my beer in his lap and took off while he was still trying to figure out what happened. 

But I was so unaccustomed to being alone, I didn’t know what to do. I ended up in some bushes, just off the Boulevard, with my pants down. I thought I might jerk off, but it was hopeless. The mood wasn’t right. I don’t know what I was thinking. Parts of my life were slipping away so fast it was as if I never lived them. Maybe I was hoping to get more time with them. Maybe I thought I’d get that time while in prison as a sex offender. I don’t know. But that was me there, bare ass in the mulch, hand on my soft dick, scrolling through old photos on my phone of all the people I loved and never told.

Wilts told us he was leaving for good one night in a dry lakebed outside Boulder, Nevada—the Boulder no one talks about, that consists of a laundromat and mechanics shop and not much else, the one I’d confused for Boulder City, Colorado and for years wondered what all the hype was about. 

We pulled off the road, into a dry lakebed and drove in circles as fast as we could until we lost interest when we realized that was the extent of it, circles. There were no giant cracks or other worlds for us to fall into. No one was chasing us, no one was watching. 

We parked, dug a hole to protect our fire from the wind, ate mushrooms and stared blankly into what was a bleak, album cover sort of horizon. 

When the sun set, Wilts, Aphri, and I wandered around the dry lakebed in the dark. Wilts had my guitar with him. He plucked the odd low note and let it ring out. Eventually we laid down. 

That’s when Wilts told us he was leaving. He laid on his back and looked up at the sky and spoke to us as if he were telling us he was going to die. Again, that’s how he was. His tone always terminal, his sentences always punctuated with deep sighs of resignation. He spoke of love and chapter endings, new beginnings, and a whole bunch of other shit I was embarrassed to even hear. 

I gave him a hug and told him we’d miss him but other than that, I stayed quiet. I didn’t want anything I said to betray the fact that I saw this as a non-event. There was no great sense of beginning or end. Wilts was leaving. I always knew he would. It was clear from day one, when Teo left and Wilts replaced him, that he couldn’t hack it. Not on the road, not with Aphri and me. He was too open and too sticky. Everything we passed became a part of him, yet the crucial pieces of himself, the ones that stand you up in the morning or stop you from tripping backwards into your own head, those he’d just let fall out wherever he happened to be or he’d give them away. 

There was never a choice. Not for him. He was always going to leave. 

I’m surprised he lasted this long.

He asked me if he could take my guitar and since I wasn’t playing it, and I said, Sure. If you got fifty bucks.

It was a fluke that he’d ended up in the van to begin with. Years ago, I was sitting in the park in Toronto with this girl I’d started seeing even though I was about to leave town, when Wilts called. I hadn’t spoken to him in months. I remember thinking, is this really something I feel like taking on? The shortest phone calls with Wilts could leave me with an overwhelming sense of guilt and a deep pain in my gut. He had the power to both brighten the world, bring it into clarity and at the same time make it feel hopelessly out of reach. 

I sighed a sigh I learned from him, one of his deep, what difference does it make, sort of sighs, and answered the phone. Hello? 

He was silent for a while, then all he said was, I see you.

He was right there, right behind me in the same park, somehow wearing on his face every possible implication of the time past between our seeing or speaking to one another.

I told him I was leaving and he said, Can I come?

It’s only ever a matter of gas pitch, I said.

But I still wonder, what if I didn’t answer the phone? What if he’d seen me screen his call? Would he still have approached me, still have had me turn around? 

Years later, after Wilts had come and gone, I ended up back in Toronto for a stint, more or less squatting in his apartment, while he tended to another broken heart in the safety and comfort of his childhood home. 

I’d been to the apartment once before, when his girlfriend still lived there. I remember being amazed by how full of life it was, how full of stuff, creamers and sauces, photos stuck with magnets to the fridge door. They had cactuses and clay cats and little glass bottles lined up along the top of the door trim. They had little things lined up along any little thing that jutted out from the wall, really, anything that resembled a shelf. Coffee cups with sailboats on them, pictures of people at weddings. 

But now that she was gone, the apartment was barren. All the life that I’d seen was hers. He’d just been clinging to it, calling it his own.

The next time I heard from him was a few years after that. 

I was back in Toronto, waiting for my car at a mechanic shop. He sent me a message saying he had all his stuff and nowhere to go. Not a clue. He said his most recent breakup happened to coincide with his landing on the wrong side of a line drawn in the sand by his mother after his father’s death. He said, I don’t really want to get into it.

He said, But I hear you’re in Toronto. Me too.

I was living with the woman that would become my wife, that with more time, would have our child, and live quietly with me in a life most would call normal—and I guess what I’m really wondering is if that sort of normalcy can find me in time, then why not Wilts? 

I knew he would be a terrible house guest, that he’d permeate our entire four-hundred square foot apartment with his incurable melancholy, but I’d already answered the phone. 

Where in Toronto? I said, and immediately spotted him across the street from me, a hopeless lump slumped over a rolling suitcase. He still had my guitar.

He stayed on my couch for two weeks. My wife—my then girlfriend—worked at a bar and so we spent most evenings on our own, Wilts and me, getting stoned and showing each other music on YouTube. Between songs he told me of his plan to fly to California and win back the last girl—in an endless string of girls—who’d broken his heart. 

I was working on my own at the time, turning people’s tiny, unfinished basements into illegal apartments, with six-foot ceilings and windows you couldn’t fit a basketball through, if any. So, on the day of his flight, I took the morning off. We had breakfast together at a diner and over cheap coffee and eggs Wilts sighed and went through his plan with me one more time. He would post a photo of himself on the coast in a place of romantic significance for him and his ex, then wait until she saw it and came to find him …

Pulling away from the airport that morning, I cried like I’ve never cried for my own life, like it was my mother’s heart he carried around in his chest.

I mourned Wilts’ death years earlier, while still in his company. He didn’t need to tell me he was suicidal. I mean, he did, on several occasions, but he didn’t need to. It was obvious. And it didn’t take much for me to accept it as an inevitability.

I was in no shape to help him. 

We lived in different worlds. 

His every breath was the result of a war being waged inside him—you could hear a village burning when he opened his mouth—and there I’d be, standing right beside him, feeling nothing, staring at a shoe.

I was his friend. 

I answered the phone when he called. 

I say all this, but he might not even be dead. Maybe he hasn’t done it yet. Maybe he won’t. 

At this point, I wouldn’t know. 

It’s been years.

Corey Lof lives on an island in the North Pacific with his wife, son, and many animals. His writing can be found in Hobart, Vlad Mag, Rejection Letters and several other places online. He would like to acknowledge that the first 300 words or so of Wilts was published as a flash by Back Patio, under the same title, in 2022. (@coreylofsatwit)