On a Case of Pathless Anxiety

42:00:00:00
In just forty-two days, you will be a college graduate. Only 10,008 hours, 60,480 minutos, 3,628,800 seconds, and you will walk across the stage in front of your family and friends. You will flick the blue and red tassel from right to left, a metaphorical windshield wiper clearing away the detritus of the majority of your life. For the first time in twenty-two years, you will not be a student. You will have a degree in Creative Writing with a minor in Linguistics y un otra en Espanol. But what is that worth when the price is your identity?

37:18:22:42
You could have applied for grad school, clung to the title Student a little longer, put off the inevitable for four, maybe five, more years. But in the end you’re right back here, unsure – afraid – of what is waiting on the other side of the stage.
You couldn’t afford it anyway. Your student loans are already enough to buy a good-sized mansion. It is a conundrum; go out and work, pay down the debt, or take on more. you can’t afford more debt, Mastercard just turned me down, the Experian report would only be considered reasonable if it were out of 100. But when you have the credit score, when the banks won’t laugh me right back out the door, will they let you back in? A Catch 22, poor Yossarrian.

25:22:42:16
Mom offered to let me come home. Just until you get it all sorted out. You almost believed that Bon Jovi song. But no, you can’t go home. Dad’s already called the contractor about his new home theater.
Twenty-five days. Your toes grip the edge of the precipice of graduation, fighting the forces behind me. Look down. It’s a long-ass way to fall.

20:15:44:20
You had a teacher your junior year. She taught you how to curse in Espanol. Mierda. It’s not like when you learned them in English. When Dylan’s dad said a palabra sucia at his sixth birthday party. It was a sleepover and someone – John Thomas – had decided having a soda fight would be a great idea. No, now you are an adult, you can learn dirty words in class. You are an adult, right? Nine days until you find out.

14:21:17:19
What about your dreams? Will the world destroy them? Stomp on them like the playground bully? Will you be left a broken shell, more child than man? Empty pockets, a brain full of useless knowledge? You should never start a story with dialogue, unless you like staring a story with dialogue. An allomorph is one of two or more complementary morphs which manifest a morpheme in its different phonological or morphological environments. Me llamo Andrew. Donde es el bano? Show, don’t tell, except when it is acceptable to tell. In English, verb+ed results in past tense. Ditto with plurals. Except there are always exceptions should you choose to accept them. Buenos dias señorita. Tengo un gato en mis pantalones. Quoth the raven, nevermore.

9:42:01:00
You want to be a writer when you grow up. When you grow up. When will that be? Did you miss it already? Like elementary school. You know it happened, tu madre has lost fotos to prove it. Pero, no se, you don’t remember. Was there a moment, a single frame in the motion picture of your life, when suddenly you were a grown up? You have changed a lot in these cuatro anos, si, enfolded in the hallowed, ivy-clad walls. But did you really grow up? Are you now – gasp – an adult? Does the world judge you capable of taking care of yourself? In the eyes of the law you have been an adult for many years, but what about your eyes? Too late. Nothing gold can stay. Time to sink or swim. The real world is coming. Ay dios mio!

7:01:42:06
Every college should require classes on being an adult. But there were no lectures on investing wisely. No prof pulled you aside and told you how much things will really cost. And that the world will take American Express, but it prefers payment in time and souls. There was no average annual income pie chart illustrating how much of your hard earned denero will be sucked away by los bastardos a las utility company. Countless classes you could take but there was never one on how to survive after you leave the comfy shelter of campus. You played blissfully in an isolated Eden, spared the daily terror of the ‘real world.’ It awaits you, biding its time. But in just seven days…
Life 101, graduate requirement por todos estudiantes. “Welcome to the world me muchacho pequeño. She’s a bitch. But we will do our best to help you navigate the turbulent agua o adulthood. We will walk you through the problems of insurance and Big Brother. Give you insider secrets about the corporate pit bulls waiting to suck out your souls and deposit them in the cubical Hades of 9-5. If you’re lucky. Abandon all hop ye who pass thorough these emblemed doors! You will leave these peaceful halls with a confident/competent stride as you skip down the fools’ gold road of life.” No Universidad de conocimiento should shove its students across the graduation stage without it.

1:03:37:42
The night before graduation you realize that your life’s dream es un sham. The pointless pipe dream of an unambitious slacker. Un novelist, por dios. There hasn’t been any thing original since the Greeks. Not even them. Shakespeare got close, but the ever elusive original plot slipped through his ink-stained fingers time and again. Every story has been told and retold through so many colored lenses that only the dimmest light finds its’ way through anymore. You can attempt to create something original, but you will only come up with a life story. Or a love story, which is, in fact, just a twist on the life story. Es no possible, señor. Lo siento. The entire literary/story telling history of the world is just an elaborate rehashing of the same story, over and over again, until we believe we have stumbled on something shiny and nuevo. How simple our little minds must be. My Bog have mercy on our ignorant soles.

00:00: 25:07
Un dia de reckoning es aqui. The cheap, red polyester sticks to your damp neck. So the red and blue tassel will migrate across your forehead, cutting the carotid artery of your simple life in its relocation . Your worth will no longer be evaluated on a scale of 0-100; gpa doesn’t exist in the real world. No more sylibi, no more cram sessions, no more student discounts. No more excuses. There is no longer winter and summer break. Life is 24/7, 365.
The fat person smell, that semi-sweet mixture of cake and b.o., wafts over from the muchacha next to you. She is smiling. Mi Dios, such beautiful idiocy. Maybe she has a plan, a job lined up in Daddy’s company; maybe she doesn’t belief the real world is waiting, just licking its lips on the other side of the stage, to swallow her up like the ravenous Cerberus it is. Its teeth tearing her childish dreams to bloody ribbons as it gluts itself on the smorgasbord of new grads. All of this – the time, the money, the effort – for a putrid piece of animal skin. A useless condom to frame so you can point to it one day and say, “Si, I did it.” A brief, shining moment of self admiration. Drink it in, savor it, it will be the last time. The apocalypse inches closer. Closer. Done with the K’, on to the L’s. You turn, searching for desperate comfort in the puertas of the auditorium. They recede, stretching into the distance. You can’t flee back into the safe arms of undergraduatehood. M’s. Uno mas!

0:00:00:00
“Andrew Michael MacLeod.”
The horror, the horror.

Stage Fright

Standing before them, I feel naked.
Unseen eyes bore into my flesh like weevils.
The flames of embarrassment leap around me
As I stand,
Lashed to an imaginary stake,
At center stage.
I can feel the heat rising through my body.
Burning my chest,
My throat,
My cheeks.
In the black abyss of the audience, someone giggles.
My stomach flies into my mouth,
Desperate to escape the heat of the foot lights.
I open the gate of my clenched teeth to let it escape.
My line tumbles out,
Sticky with the saliva of fear.
Then relief,
A deep breath.

The show must go on.

Self Reflections

The best laid plans of mice and men,
Oft’ go astray.
Many days, I wake to find
Life getting in the way
Of my goals, my dreams, my grand design,
Of simple plans for today.
Or could it be,
That it is me
Who is standing in my way?

Horizons

Jessica sat on the worn, wooden steps of her father’s farmhouse watching the weak November sun as it struggled to burn off the morning fog. She pulled the patchwork quilt tighter around her shoulders. It still smelled of him; sweat and cigarette smoke, sun and dust. It was hard to believe Daddy was gone.

She squeezed her eyes shut to hold back the tears. She waited, without daring to breathe, to hear him in the kitchen, his heavy work boots thudding down the hall, curses as he spilled coffee trying to open the screen door. But there was nothing. Just the cooing of doves somewhere in the mist.

The sun began to win its battle with the fog as she gazed blindly over the yard. She could make out Daddy’s old pickup. Soon the barn and John Deere parked out front solidified a little further away. Slowly the fog retreated to reveal the bleak West Texas landscape. Jessica shivered as the miles of ironed-flat land stretched out before her. She had never been comfortable with so much horizon. Driving through a place like this made you feel like you were crawling. Living in it was even slower. There was nothing to break it, nothing to race toward.

The day she left for college in Austin, where there were too many trees and skyscrapers to see the horizon, she had asked Daddy why he had stayed, after Mama left and Grandpa died, how he kept sane with so much space. He had squinted out over the cotton fields, the way he always did when he wasn’t sure how to answer. But then he had looked up into the cloudless blue sky and smiled just a little. “Living out here, it makes you realize how small you really are. That this world ain’t really about you, you just live in it for a time. It keeps you honest with yourself.”

She hadn’t understood what he meant. She was standing in front of her Civic, her entire life jammed into the trunk. They had both been crying. Had both said a lot of things that only made sense at that moment of separation. But as she sat on the cold porch steps years later, huddled in a moth-eaten quilt, thinking about his coffin as it was lowered into the ground, she knew that he was right.

Sunrise Over an Australian Beach

Velvet ebony
To the color of wet steel
Dyed indigo.
A shy hint of violet
Blossoming to rose.
Gold spreading over the waves.
Dawn.

Elephant in the Corner

Do you see the elephant?
The spotty gray one
In the corner?
Just standing there,
Smiling.

It is your fault.
My fault.
It’s there.

The thing between us
That we both want to talk about,
Scream about.
But instead we bite our tongues
Till we taste blood.

It’s there,
In my eyes.
The way they run from you like escaped convicts.

It’s there,
In your mouth.
The way it turns down when I walk by.

The elephant stares.
Its red-rimmed eyes
Laughing.
As we circle each other
In silence.

It stands there,
Grinning.
Until we
Open our mouths.

“We need to talk.”

Spoiler: an excerpt from The Adventures of Tony the Kid

At dawn the sun rises over the southern edge of Quintarra. There it is met by one of the four sun gods of the major religions or, every fifth day, by one of the nine sun deities of the minor religions*.

Nanzame is waiting now, not because it is her turn, but because Quar’s dragon came down with a mysterious case of indigestion only hours before he was to greet the sun. She had planned for months. Getting a sun dragon to eat nitro berries is almost impossible and it is even harder to slip past the guards into the solar stable where the animals of the sun deities are kept under close guard. But she has done it. She will be riding proudly across the sky during her followers’ annual sun festival. She will be there to soak up their collective power right from the source. She smiles remembering Quar’s fury when he found Sol belching fireballs. Nanzame sweeps her badly charred cloak* over her shoulders and steps into her bronze chariot as the sun settles into its path behind her. She clicks her tongue and the curly-horned goats begin the slow trudge across the sky.

Nanzame scans the skies in front of her. She frowns. Large clouds are building over Ukekinstron where the majority of her nine-hundred and thirty-seven believers are preparing for the festival. The only festival held just for her in the world. She has no proof, but she knows Quar is behind the sudden storm clouds. She glares at the puffy gray masses and hopes they won’t cost her any more believers. Less than nine-hundred followers and the sun goddess of the Third True Religion will be removed from the rotation all together. Sighing, Nanzame forces herself stand up straight. Clouds or no clouds, today is her day to escort the sun.

Their journey will take them past the four major continents if Quintarra, over the top of the towering, cloud covered mountain, Deius Monte, at the center of the world. But Nanzame’s goats don’t really care about these things, they resent having to leave their evergreen fields of sweet grass to pull an armor-clad woman and a huge burning ball across the whole sky. They are unimpressed by the great capitals they pass over; New Malum, Queenstown, River City, cities made of so much glass and polished stone they appear to be made of light. The goats only plod along the well worn path dreaming of the little purple flowers that taste like pepper.

At dusk, the journey done, the sun will slip past the once great island empire of Brighton as it sinks below the northern edge of the world.

Although there is much disagreement as to who exactly is pulling or pushing the sun across the sky, the majority of the sentient inhabitants of Quintarra believe the next day the sun will rise again in the south to repeat its journey. And so it will be.

*The decision to rotate solar escorts was decided at the Treaty of Deities after the thousand years war ended in an inevitable stalemate. Along with decisions on the granting of prayers to other deities and the size and design of residences in the Celestial City, it was agreed that the squabbles and sabotage occurring between the thirteen sun deities was unproductive. Thus a rotational system was implemented to alleviate the need for so many chariot repairs and veterinarian visits. For the most part the new system has eliminated such incidents.

*The result of trying to get a Sol to eat something he really didn’t want to.

Even Cows Have Dreams

The cow
Stands munching
Emerald blades of grass.
Her sad eyes
Roam over the sweeping plains.

To be a bird
To fly

But now,
Only the quiet chewing.
And the yearning,
Deep in her soul-

Even cows have dreams.

Spoiler: an excerpt from Chasing Shadows

Daniel waited in the darkness. The rough bark of the oak scratched at his skin through his thin jacket, but he didn’t dare move. The witches were out there; maybe close. The Reverend would be furious if he accidentally warned them. He tried to exhale silently. His breath hung like clouds in the cold air.

The almanac said the frost would be early this year – near the middle of November – but it was only the end of October and already he could smell the snow in the air. Daniel smiled; Aunt Ruth had been right.

He looked out over the newly harvested fields to the river; his eyes followed its silver ribbon south. In the moonlit distance, the Arch rose up over the landscape.

Great-grandpa had said that when he was a little boy St. Louis was a magnificent city. Then the terrorists had set off their bombs, killing all the machines. You used to be able to take a small train to the top of the Arch and look out over miles of country. People had been trapped at the top of the Arch when the bombs went off. The way great-grandpa had said it, Daniel had never got up the courage to ask if they had been rescued.

And the cars. Great-grandpa always came back to them. All the colors you could imagine and they could go hundreds of miles without stopping. His father had driven the 2057 Ford truck. It had never started after the bombs fried the electronics. Great-grandpa would gaze at the rusted out shell behind the barn every day as they came in from the fields and each time he would put his hand on Daniel’s shoulder and sigh, “This was gonna be mine the day I turned sixteen.” Every time the same.

But the part that amazed Daniel, the thing he wished he had seen, was the airplanes. Great-grandpa said they could take you all over the world in just hours. When he was younger, Daniel would beg great-grandpa to tell him about the planes. He would close his eyes as great-grandpa described looking through the small window and seeing the ground spread out below like a green and brown quilt; or the cities, how when you flew over them at night they seemed like magical kingdoms full of twinkling lights. There was no sleep those nights. Instead he would spend the dark hours trying to imagine what it would have been like to fly.

But great-grandpa had died two winters ago and Daniel was too old for stories. The closest he would ever come to the grandeur of the old man’s cities was the sunset reflecting off the broken glass of the distant high rises.

The muddy smell of the river broke through the warm cloud of memories. This was not the time to get lost in the past; this was a time to be sharp, alert. His soul depended on it.

Grocery List

Bread. Milk. Eggs. We're running low on dish soap. Get Dawn, it works better. Compassion, if you can find it. I haven't seen it in a while. Just check. Apples. A green vegetable for dinner tomorrow. Maybe broccoli or asparagus. Whatever looks fresh. Understanding. I used the last when Uncle Pete got drunk at James and Danny's wedding. Tomatoes. Spaghetti noodles. A sense of humor. Not the store brand that relies on slapstick gags and potty jokes - something more refined. Mint. Passion. Not that kind, we still have plenty. The fist shaking kind. Like the night I met your brother for the first time and he said writing wasn't a real job. Your words left deep red gashes on his ego. Read the label. Be sure it has lots of conviction - and bubbles. Movie theater butter microwave popcorn. Accountability. I thought we had enough but after last night - when you yelled at the dog because he got into the bag of Doritos you left of the coffee table. You should pick some up. And some Doritos. Self worth. I am tired of crying because the clothes will never look as good on me as they do on the faceless mannequins at Kohl's, comparing myself to the airbrushed teenagers on the magazine covers. And you, your stomach in knots over things you should have said, should have done. So afraid no one will like your poems - or worse, no one will listen - that you give up with the words half written. You may have to go to more than one store. Maybe a dozen. Paper plates. Ground beef. Hope.

Family Symphony

My family is like an orchestra. My sister is the violin. She is always the center of attention; filling the halls of our house with her dramatic melody like the treble diva fills the concert hall. My mother comes in second, but only by a measure. She is the cello, carrying my sister's melody just an octave below. Her voice floats under my sister's but is never lost. I am the viola. I hide in the music, supporting the melodies of my sister and mother, without drawing too much attention; stealing the spotlight every once in a while, just to keep the audience guessing. My father is the bass. He is slow and steady, the rhythm that holds us together. He keeps the tempo so we don't rush or lose our place on the page. But sometimes, he is a jazz bass, in a smoky blues bar, so full of soul and beauty that the rest of our orchestra falls silent.

Letters to a Friend

You deserve handmade paper
With crimson silk thread curling through the pulp
Heavy enough to support these emotions.
But sometimes there is only cheap, lined notebook paper
And an open heart.