One Winter Month’s Gas Bill
by Bree

when i was eighteen i had a lingering sore throat and no insurance so i went to the Free Clinic on Euclid Ave. i waited a tortuous two hours to be seen, during which time i decided i would ask for a pap smear, while i was at it. when they finally called my name i got into a smock and waited in a room the size of a British phone booth.

the doctor entered my “room,” (the larger half of the rather large woman doctor was actually outside of the room) looked at my throat, and told me it was “red,” and then she took a culture. she went down under, next. then she hooted, and came back up to proclaim, “looks like somebody has herpes!”

“really?” i asked her, aghast.

“that’s incurable, right?” i stammered.

“you’ll have it the rest of your life,” the doctor told me.

when i started immediately crying, she scolded, “get yourself together!”

she said it so mean it made me feel smaller than somebody who has just been told she has herpes would normally feel.

the doctor tested me for all the other testable STDs: ghonnoreah, chlamydia, etc.

“call in three days for the results,” my doctor said.

and i had to go out into the waiting room where my boyfriend waited expectantly to find out how my throat was doing.

by some fluke my boyfriend wasn’t angry about the herpes. funny, because we’d been together for nearly a year and to suddenly ‘have’ herpes would indicate cheating on my part. even tho i hadn’t. so, funny that i wasn’t upset with my boyfriend, because if i hadn’t cheated, then, naturally, he had.

instead we held hands in the car and headed to the bookstore together to investigate herbal remedies for herpes. i spent a small fortune at the Food Co-Op on herbs and nettles for my sick pussetta.

three days later i was at work and remembered to call the Free Clinic, find out what else i might have.

“negative,” was what my doctor told me on the phone.

“negative for which?” i asked her, “the ghonnoreah? chlamydia?”

“you are STD free,” she told me.

“do you mean i dont even have herpes?” i said, astounded.

“no herpes either. all of your tests came back clean.”

what was missing from the good news was an apology, you know, maybe an “I’m sorry if i caused you undue distress,” or something, from the doctor.

i had been working for seven dollars an hour on seven hour shifts 13 days for every 14, and shelled out $700 rent, plus utilities and food for me and my boyfriend (who didn’t work because he was a genius.)

i had gone to the Free Clinic to save myself some money, but i spent a winter gas bill on needless tonics and tinctures. and, i still had a sore throat. so i buckled down and went to the fancy Clinic. the doctor at the Clinic was surprised a doctor told me i had herpes. when she had a look downstairs, at my junk, she told me i am “a little red” down there, on account of i had a bacterial infection from not treating my sore throat.

Bree is the founder of Green Panda Press, which has published countless poets and artists of the small press. Her full-length memoir “The Rainbow Sweater” is online at rainbowsweater.blogspot.com. She is the author of “Laying Pans” (Ecstatic Peace 2009), “Sleeping With the Sun In His Eyes” (Green Panda 2009), “was chicken trax amid sparrows tread” (Temple Inc. 2009), and “A-Awol” (P2B Press 2009).

“RAINY DAY AT THE GUN RANGE”
by Travis Catsull

It rained all weekend, which ruined my plans to go camping and
fishing. Instead I went to Red’s Indoor Range to shoot my guns. I keep
a shotgun near my bed and a .22 rifle in the closet. It’s fun to shoot
clay pigeons with the shotgun or cans with the .22. I bought a scope
for the .22 and decided I’d mount it and take it to Red’s for
target practice.

Red’s is an interesting place. I’d never been before. First of all,
there was a line for the shooting range. In fact I had to wait an hour
before a bay was free. This gave me lots of time to look around in the
gun shop, listen to the patrons and talk with the people working
there. Oddly enough, most of the customers seemed interested in
assault rifles. M-16 or M4 type guns that are used in the military.
Also, factory guns are simply not good enough for these guys. Flash
lights, laser scopes, double moon magazines, folding gun stocks and
aftermarket barrels were flying off shelves so enthusiasts could
personalize their machine guns. So I just stood there drinking my
ginger ale listening to a room of all white men talk crazy gun talk.

Eventually, a young guy in army fatigues asked me if I needed some
help with anything. I said I was interested in renting a hand gun for
target practice and would like to see which guns they had for rent.
The kid introduced himself as “Scout” and showed me the case where
they kept the rentals. Of course there were about a hundred different
guns you can rent, including AK47s and Dirty Harry cannons, but by
Scout’s recommendation I rented a Sig Sauer 228 9MM. After a quick
lesson on how to use the pistol and what all the levers did, I was
ready to go. I jumped in my bay with boxes of ammunition, two rifles
and a handgun.

I felt strange. Guns going off all around me being shot by strangers
and the only thing between them and I was a slice of particle board. I
didn’t feel completely safe because here’s the type of people I shared
a completely full and crowded gun range with:

The two frat boys – These guys look like they just walked off a party
barge except they have a Glock in a plastic HEB bag. One of them keeps
it under the seat of his lifted Ford F350 SuperDuty w/ mud grips that
he drives back and forth to his job waiting tables at Baby A’s. They
walk in with a few jokes on their lips, buy a 100 rounds and sit there
shooting the Glock tilted like a gangster saying things to the paper
target like, “Take that bitch!” and “You looking at my truck
motherfucker?” as they squeeze off a few rounds.

The ex-Vietnam soldier – He’s quiet and confident. He shoots an old
M-16 w/ no mods or scope. He’s had the gun for 30+ years and it’s
worn and well oiled. He also shoots a Desert Eagle .50 cal because
it’s bad ass and if he’d had that in ‘Nam things would’ve been
different. Both guns work like they should. He’s got on a camouflaged
jacket, some prescription shooting glasses and a hat stating his
division and branch from back in the day. He knows everyone who works
at the range. He’s been reading Guns & Ammo magazine since he was a
teenager and can tell you what type of gun it is by the sound of it.
The brown ‘86 Dodge truck with the camper on it in the parking lot is
his. A bumper sticker on the tailgate reads, “I love my country, but
fear my government.”

The grandpa and grandson – They are there together with a deer rifle
and a few boxes of ammo. They are probably shooting a .243 or maybe a
Marlin or Winchester brand 30/30 with a scope. Something traditional.
For some reason the boy’s father isn’t into hunting and Grandpa thinks
he should learn how to shoot. Once the kid gets used to the recoil
he’s having the time of his life and can’t wait for deer season when
he and Grandpa will go hunting.

The 26-year-old ex-Special Ops guy – This is the Jason Bourne guy who
comes out to simply keep his skills honed. He’s a fucking professional
killer and he’s shooting the M4 tactical assault rifle with a $1,500
laser scope with the target as far away as it will go. He’s in his bay
crouched like a sniper and when his target comes back there’s only two
places where shots have registered as he’s been practicing his “double
tap.” His gun is modified in so many ways he’s probably the only one
who can make it work. He’s got a buzz cut, pays in cash and doesn’t
say a word to anyone as he quickly and completely breaks down his
rifle and puts it back into the stainless steel case custom built for
this gun from some video game future.

Me – The guy looking around watching everyone else wondering if I’m
going to get shot while loading bullets into my .22 rifle hoping the
meth head with the hand cannon next to me doesn’t shoot a hole in my
leg while trying to pick up the cigarette lighter he just dropped.

Last month my partner, Irene, and I were able to take our six-month-old daughter to San Francisco for a few weeks and, despite the wonderful time we had out and about with friends all over SF and Marin and the East Bay, the one experience I can’t seem to stop talking about involves dolphins. Matt Dillon, an old friend of mine who is now a graduate student in religious studies at Rice University in Houston, led me through the Land’s End Trail, which wraps around San Francisco’s Sea Cliff and features sweeping views of the Golden Gate itself. Not the bridge, although you can see that too, but the edge of America (which was once the edge of Mexico and, before that, the edge of what Neil Young called “the homeland we’ll never know”).

Matt and his girlfriend, Rebekah, shared with me the unexpected and magical appearance of a large school of playful dolphins just below a secluded cliff where we stopped stop. “This is fucking beautiful,” one of us exclaimed while the dolphins jumped in and out of the water before us, their private audience.

When he happens upon an undeveloped trail, The East Bay Express‘ Nate Seltenrich also blurts out “This is fucking beautiful” in his new piece about a recent solo hike through Henry Coe State Park—Northern California’s largest state park.

I hope you enjoy Nate’s story below, and I also urge you to recall, and perhaps write about, the last time you uttered the words “This is fucking beautiful.”

“Henry Coe, Alone”

By Nate Seltenrich

This may be the coolest place I’ve ever been, alone or otherwise.

What does one think about when hiking alone? I was finding out.

It was an overnighter in Henry Coe State Park, Northern California’s largest state park — maybe its most rugged, too. One thing, perhaps the thing, to know about Henry Coe is this: What is up must go down, and what is down must go up. A long way up.

The whole massive park is a series of rocky ridgelines peaking evenly around 2,100 feet, cut with lush, narrow valleys harboring shallow streams and, along their banks, gorgeous native grasses. Their hillsides are oak savannahs – or, at the highest elevations on the sunniest slopes, a sort of high-desert chaparral dotted with stubby, burgundy bushes. I don’t know their names, but I know their faces.

From above, Henry Coe must resemble some deranged hedge maze. From the top of any given ridgeline, the peaks and valleys extend as far as the eye can see in every direction – unless, if you’re above 2,300 feet or so, and the air is clear, to the east you get a view of the Central Valley and the snow-capped Sierra Nevadas. But there’s enough scenery close at hand to dismiss those mountains. Leave them to the crowds.

I wonder what Jos is doing right now.

My wife was back home in Oakland, alone, but not by choice. I was perched atop a rock outcropping, looking west toward the setting sun, eating a dinner that consisted of a cookies-and-cream-flavored Clif Bar and the rest of the water in my one-liter bottle. I wasn’t exactly comfortable: my seat left much to be desired ergonomically; my body was chilled by a stiff, cool breeze meeting me head-on; my legs were sore from twelve miles on the trail. But I was all alone, utterly alone, enjoying the solitude and the view I’d earned, and I felt good. Yeah: It was one of the coolest places I’d ever been.

Even with a light pack, maybe 25 pounds, getting here wasn’t easy.

Whoever built this trail must’ve been a masochist, daring hikers behind him to gain this ridge in the most direct way possible. Asshole.

That was a few miles back. After hiking 1.2 miles and 1,200 vertical feet on the Willow Ridge Trail and summiting its eponymous spine, I’d continued another couple miles east along the ridge-top, then dropped down into another valley, walked along a creek at the bottom, and climbed back up the other side. A half-mile north on that ridge led me here, to my rocky seat. Twenty feet away, my campsite was semi-shielded from the wind by the outcropping on which I now rested.

This is it! I’d said to myself when I found the spot.

This is the most badass thing I’ve ever done! Not true. I’d hiked alone in Henry Coe before. I’d swam across a lake, drunk, at midnight. Etc. But this was cool. Backpacking solo holds the capacity for such exaggerated revelations. There’s no one else around to check your emotions, so they’re all yours.

My foot hurts. I wonder if I have a blister. I think it’s just raw.

All this isn’t to say that hiking alone must be some ferociously profound experience. It is also mundane. I was hiking in sandals – Tevas – for the first time. I loved it. My feet felt fast and light. But my right foot also burned a bit. I thought about it for many miles, almost as much as I long about the hills and the trees and the views.

Mmm. That was good. (After dinner.)

It’s windy as balls up here! (Setting up camp.)

My first tick! (A little guy scoping out my left thigh. I flicked him away. Always ticks at Henry Coe.)

I wonder if Adam would want to do this hike. Or Jos. Or Wally.

While the solitude is deeply satisfying, there is an urge to share the experience. To have someone vet my exhilaration, my serenity, my triumph: Yes, Nate, this is cool. You are right.

Hiking alone, I think a lot about solitude. About what it is. About what it means. About what it means to me. By bedtime, I hadn’t seen anyone in eight or nine hours. That’s not much. But it feels deep. That’s proof enough that solitude is only natural. It’s something we all need, something we crave, whether we know it or not. Backpacking alone, we get a piece of this. A taste. Even if our time alone is mundane; even if it is boring, or painful, or lonely. For me, it’s wonderful, even for one measly day.

I used to think my favorite thing about backpacking was self-reliance. But that wears off. Now I think it’s getting away from any signs of people. Solitude.

This is what flashed through my mind earlier in the day. Also:

Jos is gonna be pissed at me. Is this smart?
…
Here goes nothing.

When I diverted from my original route.

Where is the damn trail?

When my diversion turned out to be an overgrown, non-maintained trail.

This is fucking beautiful.

When that overgrown, non-maintained trail descended into a new valley I’d never seen before. The sun, now low in the sky, cast filtered yellow light on tall green grasses growing from edge to edge of the small valley, through the narrow stream making its way lackadaisically down the middle, to the brown and grey rocks in the creek bed reflecting refracted light back up at me and speaking their own round wisdom.

You can’t just walk into solitude. You can’t seek it out. It must find you. The rocks may have said this to me, or the oaks.

My favorite thing about backpacking alone is you can do what you want. Different people want to rest at different times, eat at different times, drink at different times. I get to do what I want.

It wasn’t selfish to be here. I was sure of that. I was proud, happy to be alone. But I couldn’t resist that nagging urge to broadcast the minutiae of my experience. To prove I’d been here. To document what I saw.

I wish I had my camera. I have to get a picture of this.
…
No, I don’t. Just keep going.

My thoughts kept coming, unregulated. They were mostly mundane. But they were profound, too – because mundane thoughts become profound upon their exposure to a place like this, as blood turns red when it meets oxygen.

There is so much water! It’s like twice what it was last time.

I am definitely taking a dip tomorrow.

Now this is wilderness.

Recording my internal monologue was a strange process. I wondered if the knowledge that whatever passed through my head would make it onto paper in any way affected what passed through my head. I tried not to let it. I wanted to learn what one thinks about when hiking alone. What thoughts run through the mind? What do they stand for?

I should check for ticks again before I go to bed.

Thank God for the trekking poles. I would not be doing this without them.

I talked to myself. I kept myself apprised of the situation. I monitored my progress. I cheered myself on. I assessed my physical condition. I described the scenery. I conversed with the world.

At night, a windy night, I had a dream.

My tent had blown over and was resting on its side in the middle of the trail. I was still inside. Instead of the tent floor, I was laying on one wall. Suddenly, I became aware of someone unzipping the other side of the tent. A face peered down through the open door. Someone had come upon my overturned tent in the middle of the night and was checking to see if I was alright. I felt a rush of panic.

I awoke to find myself lying on the tent floor and staring up at a moonlit sky, gusts of wind still shaking the tent. I was alone, invigorated by momentary fear. I had communed with something deeper. This sort of dream does not happen at home, where there is no danger. There is no real danger here, either, but the mind is freer to roam.

The next day, I hiked back out. I ascended ridges and descended into valleys.

This motherfucker is steep.

At one point, a few miles from camp, a lizard appeared on the path. I decided to talk to it.

Where’s your tail?

No answer. Or, he might’ve said, “I lost it.”

Did you lose it? I was making sure.

He cocked his head.

Are you a horned lizard?

Again, no answer.

Well, have a good day.

I took a step forward and he scurried into the underbrush.

Later, I came across a rattlesnake. It happened like this:

OH SHIT!!!! I actually said this out loud. There was a fully grown rattlesnake occupying most of the single-track trail three feet ahead of me. I had startled it as it had startled me. It coiled up, hissed, prepared to strike. We peered at each other for three or four minutes. It wouldn’t back down, still coiled, still poised to strike. I knew I was beaten. I turned around and retreated fifty or so paces. I got out my camera. I waited a minute. I headed back. The snake was gone.

When I get to the next trail, I’m going to have some food and then change into shorts.

I did.

I think I’ll treat myself to a burger at Carl’s Jr. on the way home.

I did.

My first time hiking was in Oregon, in the shadow of Mt. Hood in Oregon, where the landscape is so lush you expect a Hobbit to run by. Sadly, I was 23 years old and drumming for a touring rock band based in San Francisco; our debilitating penchant for partying made a few-mile hike feel like a marathon.

Only in recent years, living in Colorado and New Mexico, have I been able to spend quality time with loved ones, and sometimes alone, in swaths of nature that say more than any writer can. Well, most. Poet Derek Pyle, a teenage Naropa University student, bucks the prose-only trend of Stays Magazine today with his embryonic sunset journey, “Emigrant Creek, Oregon.”

Emigrant Creek, Oregon
by Derek Pyle

a neighbor’s shotgun
cracks
sunset sky

Half a ten-strip deep, the Doug Fir woods cleared
to reveal grasses, downhill toward the creek. From
the top, we – Thaddeus and I – ran as fast as we
could, feeling the wind strong. Over the barbed
wire and across the creek, there a few feet from the
water, a pregnant cow

purple
calf legs and head
sticking out

The rest still inside the womb. Thaddeus laughed
the kind of laugh appropriate when nothing else is,
but I was clear:
“I’m going to deliver this calf”

prompting and
pulling
mom pushes

Thaddeus left, he saw “too much,” but my duty
was with this cow. Physically opening the vulva to
get the calf:

gasping leap in
frame-vision,
maggots spill from the womb

We struggled until mom couldn’t anymore, calf
still stuck. Exhausted, we lay there together – mom,
baby, and me – covered in shit like cows sometimes
are. Relaxing into the final breaths, I thought she’d
die lying like that but

she walked feebly,
a final
creekside thud

—
Derek Pyle and artist Cathy DeForest run Jubilation Press in Ashland, Oregon, selecting poetry and prose that creates meaning in people’s lives by providing inspiration and encouraging reflection. Derek and Cathy print on Jubilation Press’ two antique Vandercook cylinder printing presses.

“Lassen”
by Nate Seltenrich

Within the first half-mile, I felt the weight. So did my friend Tom, who was out of shape. I’m not sure if Ben did; he was too tough to show. The trail was still wide, the parking lot barely out of sight. We stopped to yank on our shoulder straps, bounce up and down on our toes, and let the packs settle on our hips. This eased the pinching on our collarbones. The soreness in our shoulders was surprisingly prompt — they’d toted hardback books across campus, but never this; never food and clothes and gear and fuel, and too much of each, for five nights in the wild. Never the foldable metal shovel and clay poker chips we’d foolishly brought along, yet not without some pride. They weighed heavy on our backs now, but I wouldn’t undo it; they’d come in handy.

Our steps were proud as we strode along, down a gentle path among pine and fir trees. The path narrowed. Within another half-mile, we hit a shaded patch of icy snow. It bridged the trail, festering in a spot the sun never saw. It’d last snowed here over a month ago. Pools of water gathered in divots in the snow. Mosquitoes hovered there, sling-shotting toward our hot skin as we passed. Our boots crunched in the snow. I snapped a picture or two, not realizing we’d encounter much more – of the snow, but especially of the mosquitoes.

I’d last been backpacking about five years earlier. Two friends and I descended into a gorgeous side canyon of the Grand Canyon to celebrate our high school graduation. When we hiked out five days later, we were brown with dirt and sweat. We drove from the rim and across the Hoover Dam straight to Las Vegas. We weren’t 21, and the Strip shone infinitely glamorous. Reeking of exertion and looking worse, we tried for a room at the Luxor. The price was too high, so we ended up down the street at New York New York. That evening, we cleaned up in our $150 room and made a go of it in the world outside. We were college grads. We drank rum and coke. Pat instigated an altercation with a sidewalk mime. We got lost in a service entrance to the Bellagio. I think.

Tom and Ben had never been backpacking. It was my chance to share with them the incomparable joys of self-reliance in the great outdoors. We were three suburban kids from well-to-do high schools and a posh liberal arts university. Lassen National Park didn’t know much about that. It knew about mosquitoes, thunderstorms, dry creeks, and steep trails — and soon we’d know, too. We’d figure out what had been hiding inside us all along. We’d learn how far and how long we could carry too much weight and what we’d do with three Ziploc freezer bags full of clay poker chips.

It was mid-June. Still winter, nearly, in the high country. This we hadn’t exactly planned on. But it meant we had the park to ourselves. No one in the parking lot. No one on the trail. Not yet, at least. This was a good thing. The illusion of our strength might’ve been shattered by a fitter compatriot trotting into the wild.

I remember the first lake we came upon. It was wild, for sure. Thin, golden reeds grew up from the bottom. They broke the surface like pins through a bed sheet. The mosquitoes were there. It was midday. They were everywhere. Not necessarily swarming, but poised. Waiting. We were hot; our shoulders ached, so we swam. The earth on the lake floor was soft and muddy, unsettled. We went to the middle, and the lake was shallow all the way out. Even here there was danger. Leaches? Bacteria? Fear was part of the game.

We dried off and continued along. A few miles later, we entered a dense forest and decided we were ready to call it a day. We set a branch across the trail and headed into the forest at a ninety degree angle. We stopped when we found a clearing, the trail effectively left behind. Fresh water was, too; we’d not considered one of the most important rules of camp. Still, the mosquitoes found us and feasted on us – particularly as we spent an hour at dusk attempting to hang our food bags high in nearby trees to discourage tampering by the bears whose droppings we’d passed along the way. We opened our bags of poker chips and a deck of cards and played on a tree stump at least four feet in diameter. We sipped whiskey. We nursed sore feet. It was good.

The next day, it rained on us as we crossed a massive, lunar field of pulverized grey volcanic stone. Our footsteps left a three-inch-deep path behind us. The raindrops left little dark splatters on the ground, more paint than mud. We sprawled in exhaustion among a stand of three or four fir trees and devoured Vienna sausages and tuna and beef jerky. I did, at least. Our food load lessened only slightly. Tom found hiking made him lose his appetite.

Six miles more and we arrived at our stopping point. It was mid-afternoon and we were more than ready to rest. But the unnamed creek, a thin, blue, promising, jagged, bastard of a line on the topographical map, was dry. It wasn’t so much dry as nonexistent. It didn’t exist. We were tired, hungry, sore, thirsty. But, we might’ve told ourselves, this was part of the game. Outside we traded moans and feigned resignation. Inside we needed something to keep us going, something more than thirst and a poker game at the end of the line. Poor preparation and untested fitness and a nonexistent creek: this was survival.

We trudged along the shoreline of Snag Lake, the second-largest lake in Lassen Volcanic National Park – so named, perhaps, because I’d lose a fishing rod in it the next day after yanking too hard on a snag. We walked another four miles to the other end of the lake before we found an inlet that was flowing. It was beautiful, beautiful: clear, clean, fresh, flowing water. From snowmelt or a spring. Into a massive lake that we had all to ourselves. We still hadn’t seen or heard another human soul – only the soul of the wild, if that was what it was.

Above this creek, also unnamed and curiously absent from the laminated trail map I’d highlighted and brought along, was a gentle slope that rose to a few hundred feet above the lake. Tom collapsed there at the bottom, head and chest on one side on the creek and legs extended across it like a bridge, resting on a rock on the other side. He placed his round-brimmed hat over his face like a cowboy and snoozed deeply for at least an hour. Ben and I hiked up the hill to make camp, a camp away from mosquitoes and offering a fine vantage point of Snag Lake. Incomparable, really. Utterly magical. We’d all soon agree.

We lit cigars. We started boiling water on our pair of small camp stoves, as poor planning left us already almost out of iodine tablets. Dehydrated and exhausted, we drank hot water into the night. It was cooled only through submergence in the creek for as long as we could bear to wait. We found that water went down our throats easiest when cooled to about 100 degrees. It refreshed and almost felt cold. Survival, again.

The view. It was spiritual. Here was this massive lake and we had it entirely to ourselves. Up high on the hill, we almost owned it. We spent two nights there, drinking, relaxing, hiking, watching, resting. We played poker – outside during the day, inside the tent at night.
The second night, a thunderstorm rolled in. We watched it approach from the north, a heavy, dense mass in a darkening sky. We watched it scatter lighting bolts and dump thunder across the quiet landscape and upon us. When the hail came, we scurried inside our tent, in awe at this performance only we beheld. It is not easy to fit three college students inside a tidy two-man backpacking tent. It’s even harder when they’re sitting. But we were too charged to sleep, so we played poker and we talked. For hours. At one point, I made a dazzling comeback. In the end, Ben won. Five more dollars out the door.

We awoke on the morning of the fourth day much as we had the three before it: emerged from the tent, boiled water for breakfast, absorbed the view, appreciated where we were. Few moments can compare. Yet, hiking away from our hillside paradise a few hours later, we were back where we started: sore, unprepared, laden with unnecessary weight.
Headed for a trio of lakes in the backcountry for our next night’s stay, we hoped it’d be an easy jaunt. The terrain was, at least, flat: flat under cold rain, over icy patches of snow, through plagues of mosquitoes. We knew we were within a quarter-mile of water whenever the bastards reappeared. Ben, God bless him, had sprayed a whole can of mosquito repellent on his arms and legs the first day, so we were left with about half of a can for the three of us to share: somewhat less than ideal. And so, exhausted as we were, we kept on – past the lakes, away from the worst of the bloodthirsty buzzers, through a sizeable region of the map for which I’d allotted two days.

We finally reached a point about five easy miles from our exit and located camp under the only tree in a field peppered with volcanic rocks. I don’t recall the type, but I remember it was short – maybe thirty feet – and scraggly. Not much protection, at least, from the onslaught visited upon us by yet more storm clouds overhead. It rained when we set up our tent, it rained when we made dinner, and it rained when we went searching for another huge stump to roll across the field to our camp and employ as an ersatz poker table.

Tom sacrificed his thin plastic poncho to fashion an awning over the table. We procured smaller logs to serve as seats. We dug Ziploc bags from our packs and stacked chips in front of us. We laid out the cards. We lit cigars and grinned at what we’d done. Though the cards immediately became damp, we played, and we became damp, too, thanks to an inconvenient arm hole in the poncho. I don’t know how long we lasted; whatever it was, it was long enough to prove something worth proving: that we could lug unfit bodies, a folding metal shovel, too much food, too much fuel, poor mosquito protection, not nearly enough water purification tablets, suburban histories and urban sensibilities, an innocence to nature, and a certain obliviousness to all of this that only young men possess, miles into a wilderness free of other humans, and emerge both the same and changed forever.

Listening to “It Covers the Hillsides” by Midlake, I can see by looking out our casita’s kitchen window this morning that about a foot of snow covered Santa Fe last night. Spring has been here a few times, but has yet to stay. However, today we have a compelling story from Boulder’s Rebecca Diaz called “It Was the Fourth of July” that certainly will stay with you for a long time…especially the smell.

It Was the Fourth of July
by Rebecca Diaz

“What the hell is that smell?”
“I don’t know, but it gets worse every day.”
“I’m sick of this shit, every day it’s something else.”

Marty knew it was the refrigerator. It stopped working a week ago. Everything inside thawed. She didn’t have time to clean it and didn’t bother mentioning it to Joe. Coffee and cigarettes were the only two things Marty and Joe consumed in the home since the summer began. Marty was busy working while Joe volunteered with a local Peace and Justice organization. They both thought an isolated cabin in the mountains would give them space to reconnect.

“Marty, have you seen this shit?”
“Seen what?” she said.
“The refrigerator must have stopped working and all that Costco chicken is rotten now.”
“Just leave it and I’ll get it this weekend,” she told him.
“I’m not leaving it here now.” Joe’s voice entered her chest.
“Joe, we have to be in town in twenty minutes. Leave it.”

Marty breathed deep in preparation for battle. The tightness in her chest grew.

Marty was in the bathroom blow-drying her hair when the smell hit her. She walked into the kitchen to find Joe standing at the opened mini-fridge filled with rotten meat.

“I told you to wait,” Marty said.
“This is disgusting.”

Gagging, he disappeared into the bedroom. She heard him rustling in the closet. He walked into the kitchen with knee-length rain boots, a gas mask his father bought him after 9/11, and utility gloves. He fumbled with the straps of the mask. It was crooked on his face. He choked. A few flies gathered on the windowsill. The smell completely penetrated the apartment. Marty wrapped plastic shopping bags around her feet, tied a pair of pajama pants around her face and slid on some double-lined blue cleaning gloves. Joe brought the garbage can in from the garage.

“I told you to wait. Now look at this shit.”
Joe gagged again and again, “I can’t take this.”
“I have to work in less than fifteen minutes,” Marty said.
“It’s ridiculous that you have to work on a holiday.”

He walked out onto the porch near the kitchen. A few flies snuck in through the open door. Marty tried to continue where Joe left off. She gulped a mouthful of rotten air. Her back arched. Her body shivered. Marty walked out onto the porch where flies buzzed round Joe’s head.
“I’m not cleaning that alone,” she huffed and spat.

“This is revolting.”
“No shit, that’s why I told you to wait…”
“Until little magic scrubber bubbles clean it out for us?” He said.
“No, until we have time to figure out what to do with it.”
“And live with rotting chicken in the fridge?”
“It’s better now?” she asked. “Our apartment smells like fucking Jersey!”
“Come on, let’s get this over with.” He motioned towards the door.

They walked back into the apartment. Joe stifled his vomit. Marty dry-heaved. They both looked up at the flies. Marty grabbed the cat, tossed him into the bedroom. He meowed and scratched at the door.
Marty slopped an individually wrapped piece of chicken onto Joe’s utility glove. Joe tossed the rotting meat into the garbage can.

“This would never have happened if we were home once in a while,” she told him.
“I knew this was coming sooner or later.”
“Well, you don’t need to drink every night,” Marty looked at Joe and put another piece of meat onto his glove.
“It’s not every night and it’s summer, besides…”
“I like to be home,” she interrupted.
“I’d like you to take care of the kitchen.”
“Fuck you! You take care of the kitchen.”
“It’s your job,” Joe said as chicken-sweat splattered on his glove and gas mask.
“Oh, yeah, I’m the woman so I take care of the kitchen,” she slammed another piece of meat onto his glove.
“That’s not what I meant.” Joe smashed the meat into the garbage can.
“Who pays the bills around here so you can run around pretending to save the world?” Marty looked up at him for a reaction.
“Look, I know your massahs will be angry with you for being late, but you don’t have to take it out on me,” he said.
“I will take it out on you. I told you to wait on this shit,” she said.

Marty piled the last of the rotting meat onto Joe’s glove. Joe dropped it in with the rest. He pulled the refrigerator from the wall. Marty examined the freezer where the chicken had thawed. Yellow chicken-sweat filled an inch of the freezer’s bottom. Marty tried to scoop it out.

“This isn’t working. We have to get it out of the house.”
“How’re we gonna to do that?”
“We’ll have to carry it.”
“Maybe we can get Sid’s truck, bring it down to the dump.”
“Everything is closed today. Sid’ll be back in the morning.”
“Guess we’re camping tonight,” he said.
“Let’s wrap it in plastic and tape, and then take it into the woods by the barn.”
“We can’t leave this in the woods; we’ll have bears and mountains lions hanging out down there.”
“It’s a good distance away. We’ll be fine. Stop being such a wrench,” she told him.

They cleared the rest of the fridge. Marty handed Joe a role of duct tape. She pulled out the economy-sized trash bags from under the sink, opened one up and slid it over the top of the fridge. She pointed to it.

“What’s wrapping tape around it gonna do? We need to clean it out.”
“Do you have time to clean it out?” she asked, “Do YOU want to take this outside and spray it?”
“Ok, I see, because wrapping it in plastic will keep out the animals,” he said.
“Do you want to have chicken sweat and bears in the grass?”
“How’re we going to take this down to the barn? We’re not putting it in the car.”
“We’ll drag it down the gravel road,” she said after a minute.
“We’re gonna drag this a half-mile down to the barn on a dirt road?” he asked, “That makes sense.”
“Just tape it and we’ll figure out what to do when we get it outside.”
Joe threw the tape down. “We need to open a goddamn window in here.”
“Don’t do it, Joe, there are flies out there and we have no screens.”
“Fuck, I hate this place,” he said. “Did you close the window in the bedroom when you chucked the cat in there?”
“Shit!”

Joe opened the bedroom door. Flies swarmed into the kitchen. The cat was on the bed watching all the movement. Joe and Marty stood on separate sides of the apartment. In the midst of flies, and the rotting chicken, they looked at each other. “Close the damn door, idiot, you’re letting in the flies,” she said. Joe’s feet moved first. Marty followed. They unwrapped their faces and stood on the porch staring at one another batting away the black clouds. Marty stomped her feet on the porch.

“I can’t deal with this now. I can’t believe how late I am.”
“Suck it up! Let’s finish this bitch and get’er into the woods.”
They wrapped the fridge in layers and duct taped it in silence while the flies buzzed around them. Joe motioned for the fridge. Marty took the top and Joe grabbed the bottom. They carried it onto the porch.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Here,” she said, “We’ll put it on this and drag it down the hill.”
Marty held up an oversize orange plastic snow sled she found outside the garage. Joe disagreed.
“This is all we got.”
“If it falls off, I’m not putting it back on.”
“I’ll hold the back, you pull the rope,” she told him.

Marty crouched behind the sled pushing it either to the left or to the right depending on which side was slipping more. Joe pulled at the front with the rope. They walked this way down the gravel path to the barn. When they reached the steepest part Marty screamed to Joe, “Stop! The fridge! The fridge!”

Joe turned as the fridge slid his way. It slipped away from them. He didn’t say a thing. He jumped out of the way, and then ran after it. The speed of the fridge surprised them.

“Kick it, maybe it will slide all the way down,” Marty screamed to Joe as she ran. When she reached the fridge, she started kick-pushing it. They both did. The tape and plastic ripped. The rope had made a loop around Joe’s ankle. He kicked; the weight of the sled knocked him off balance and he crashed face first into the rock and dirt of Mt. Arkansas.

Marty did not stop kicking. She kicked until she could not kick anymore. Her face filled with color and sweat. She looked up at the cloud of flies hovering, then at Joe’s body lying in the dirt. His head slowly lifted from the ground, he cursed while he untied the sled from his leg. Joe limped towards her. They shoved the fridge off the road; they’d take care of things tomorrow.

Today, its work time and Fourth of July time and let’s start-over-do-it-right time. God, she thought, I hate my life, but maybe tomorrow will be better.

(Poet Rebecca Diaz is a graduate of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and a fierce political and social activist based in Boulder, Colorado. Diaz and her husband Ryan Hartman, of Students for Peace and Justice and Left Hand Books, run the Boulder Wellness Center.)

["Sunset In Denver" foto by Greta Olivas]

“Settling In”
by Travis Cebula

As I get older, year by year I find that rituals are becoming more and more valuable tools as a means of conserving my increasingly more limited cranial capacity. I think of it as practicing life, such that some things can be done without thinking about them. It is the kind of imprint, repeated over years, that allows my mind to wander outside mundane activities and really take notice of the world around me.

It took a big chunk of my childhood for me to walk without worrying constantly about tripping over things. Even now I find that the first few minutes of a nature hike, regardless of how improved the trail is, will be a myopic view of my own boots scratching across rocks and gravel. Sometimes if the terrain is particularly tricky, as in the case of the rocky beaches and tidal pools around Bartlett Cove in Alaska, my head will never come up at all—resulting in annoying neck cramps and headaches the day after.

Constant repetition allows me to confidently bring my nose into the air and look around. I’ve been taking morning walks daily around my neighborhood for a few months now, and have only recently really started to notice the wider view for the walk’s full duration. The neighborhood in question is a kind of border territory: not quite rural, not quite urban. It exists at the highwater mark of Denver’s 1960’s westward suburban expansion. When the waters receded, it became a somewhat forgotten pool, partially undeveloped and still unincorporated. Now it exists as a mosaic of brick ranch homes with good-sized yards scattered with larger, 1-5 acre parcels that cling doggedly to agricultural zoning. Our home falls into the latter category. And lest you think the “our” here is either a regal designation or an impending accusation, there actually are a wife and dog here with me, the latter being the impetus for early morning excursions.

We have about 3 acres of yard in various states of wildness, a welcoming home, and a small pond complete with Monet lilies and, on occasion, a raft of waterfowl. My wife loves to watch buffleheads and hooded mergansers patrol the edges for meals and my dog loves to chase Canada geese off the lawn. I suppose she enjoys the honking and commotion of pinioning wings, something a dog might find cathartic (or in her case just funny). I love mallards, the prototypical every-man’s duck with their green heads and nagging wives. I even love the incessant quacking, perfect in its essential duck-ness.

Sometime early last October I was really getting a feel for my walks. The dog knew where the turns were, and I’d give her the option at intersections to choose whatever olfactory view she’d prefer for the day. Inevitably, given a choice, she’d pick a course that would include a short—not more than a block long—walk along a trail that follows an irrigation canal (an anachronism in itself that I still have a bit of trouble getting my head around) under some cottonwood trees. The east access to this trail emerges a few blocks from our house in front of one of the neighboring properties, which also happens to have a few acres and a large pond.

Earlier in the summer I might not have noticed anything unusual, being still involved with my own feet and pulling dead critters out of the puppy’s mouth, but as I wasn’t tripping over my own shoelaces any more I did: the neighbor’s pond was loaded with ducks; at least a hundred mallards were milling around packed up against the south bank. I didn’t think much of it at the time, “Hmmmmm. Curious.” I let it be, walked home, and enjoyed watching wood ducks grazing for windfall pears under in our back yard.

After a few days it occurred to me that wood ducks were all I was seeing on our pond and that my beloved mallards were completely missing (this is not meant to disparage wood ducks, I just like variety). It also occurred to me that our walking ritual took the dog and I past the neighbor’s pond at the same time every morning (give or take ten minutes) and that the huge ball of mallards was in the same spot every single day. This got my wheels, seemingly ever-so-slow to engage these days, turning. What could make ducks act like that? It wasn’t long before an image of a five-year-old me walking into a city park with a bag of bread came to mind. THOSE ducks acted like that.

It isn’t much of an imaginative stretch to go from a bag of stale bread to an old cookie sheet loaded down with about ten pounds of cracked corn, especially when it’s something I know people in the neighborhood do already. Ducks love cracked corn, but evidently cracked corn doesn’t always return the sentiment. I’ve heard more than one rumor of exploding ducks tied directly to expanding corn. None of the ducks I saw just after sunrise seemed to be bursting into shrapnel. Quite the contrary, they seemed conspicuously fat and content, quacking away in what seemed like a happy tone. I missed watching the mallards’ churning on our own pond, with my kitchen comfort and my morning coffee, but I figured that selfishness isn’t necessarily the best motivation for activism. And so I kept quiet.

I eventually mentioned it to my wife, who suggested calling the Division of Wildlife to serve the neighbors a citation. In typical husband-fashion I let this go, hoping things would work themselves out, and continued walking as normal. It wasn’t until October and the first hard freeze that I became openly alarmed by the situation. That first morning of the year without open water found us walking down off Table Mountain. We were greeted by the sound of hundreds of ducks circling forlornly overhead, looking for a place to land for an easy breakfast. I skidded to a halt on the gravel, tipping my head back to watch them fly racetracks back and forth over where they would normally be gorging on corn. I thought, “It’s October and you should be on your way to someplace where this freezing water won’t be an issue. Get going.” In my head I gestured south emphatically.

The water thawed the next day and the ducks stayed. I knew, having been taught, that feeding migratory waterfowl was a “bad idea.” Completely apart from swelling corn niblets and related deaths, the birds will learn to reside year-round and become native populations. Parks up and down the front-range have become “plagued” with geese who (funny, my spell-check is insisting right now that I should use “that” rather than “who” when referring to geese, what does that say about society?) have only started to winter over in recent decades. I was aghast at these mallards being subjected to a temptation that could lead them to ignore one of their most essential traits: their magical ability to migrate hundreds if not thousands of miles every year using mysterious memory and instinct.

If the ducks were to stop migrating, would they still even be ducks? The rhetoric I’ve heard levelled against resident geese makes me believe that residents are somehow less than real geese, and instead are something more along the lines of cheap copies of geese you might pick up at Wal-Mart. My first instinct is to cringe at the thought of Wal-Mart ducks—poor things, fat and paddling in circles like machines, with all their wildness and better judgment forgotten in favor of an easy meal. Why would they do such a thing? How could such a beautiful, wild creature forget themselves?

But then a new thought occurred to me: why wouldn’t they? It’s not really that un-natural of a behavior at all. Many species will sit down to a meal and only leave when the meal is gone. That’s called survival. I hold up all migrating species of antelope as an example. Creatures crawl back and forth across Africa and the Arctic relentlessly eating everything that they can. Their movement is dictated by the availability of food and water. Let us not forget the locusts, biblical paradigm of eating everything in one place before moving on. My Dad has a friend in Idaho who raises goats—they’re the same way, not even stopping at vegetation. So who am I to criticize or belittle a duck for not wanting to fly a thousand miles to get its next meal?

Who am I to condemn people for the behaving the same way? Maybe it’s not so strange for us to stay in one place (or many places) consuming everything nearby. Maybe the problem isn’t that we’re behaving against nature, rather the problem is that we’ve just gotten too good at playing the game. Our ingenuity has placed a big chunk of the planet’s resources withing easy armchair-reach, and by God if we won’t plop down and reach. Our ingenuity has made it so we just don’t have to work hard enough for what we get to muster any kind of gumption to a) move around or b) stop. However, this is—as the saying goes—perfectly natural.

I have returned from my walk with my ears numb and my hands tingling, a little frost collected on my mustache. The dog is curled on the rag-wool rug over near the fireplace happily chewing away on a piece of rawhide. So now I sit in my warm kitchen, sip my cup of coffee, and look out the window. There is a ten-foot-square patch of open water, give or take, where we’ve managed to get a little flow in to refresh the water. Two mallards and a wood duck have managed to find it. They paddle around in tight circles, looking ecstatic in the morning sunlight. I wonder how far they have come to find this puddle. Across the street or five hundred miles? I roll the warm mug back and forth in my hands and realize in this moment I don’t care. They are beautiful.

[Travis Cebula holds an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University. His poems, photographs, essays, and stories have appeared internationally in various print and on-line journals. His first solo collection of poetry and photographs, Some Exits, was released in 2009 by Monkey Puzzle Press.]

It’s been a tough winter for some. Pouty Peyton Manning got angry and lost the Super Bowl last night in Miami. Former U.S. Marine and Iraq War critic John Murtha (isn’t it funny how pro war politicians are usually the guys with half a dozen deferments?) sadly lost his life at age 77. And President Obama has at least temporarily lost the outspoken courage and tenacity that got him elected on the basis that he’d fight for change. As our theme for February is “Winter’s Love and Loss,” I thought bringing a little levity made sense. And thus Naropa University graduate and Philadelphia native Nate Antar, who follows in Henry Miller’s dirty footsteps with honest, explicit tales of lust and loss, makes his Stays debut today with a sordid tale about the “end of an era.”

“A Last Hoorah for the Star-Crossed: The Delicacy of Parting”
by Nathan Antar

I heard a friend once say that bladder cancer supposedly is the best sort of cancer. What does that mean, really? Does it come with a free large drink and your choice of two sides? A time-share, perhaps?

The best?! How repugnant! It is absolutely fascinating, and at once disconcerting, how we’ve come to church-up the tragic, and make the pill seem less jagged with painless language. Don’t soften the blow. Make your jabs quick and precise; Make them count, make it felt.

This seemed to be the redeeming quality, what I came to like about Cecelia: she displayed not a modicum of hesitation or mercy—she was direct. However, with directness, there always comes a frigid, hard honesty; a truth which cannot be ignored.

“You know,” she said, “we can’t do this anymore when he comes back.”

“Jesus, there’s no need to pour salt in the wound, dear.”

“I just wanted to make sure you know,” she went on.

“Believe me, I know. I’ve known from the start. There’s always been a time limit; there was never the option to take this too seriously. Not to mention all the grief I’ve suffered due to that manipulative bastard of yours.”

She glared at me sternly.

“OK, OK, forget it.” I complied. “How about another margarita?”

“You know what happens when I mix too many margaritas with beer, don’t you?”

“I surely do.”

And I did. I had every intention of working up that lofty sundress of hers. Not that she needed to be drunk, but her ambivalence flared up all too often at improper moments, and some mild, tacit persuasion may lend its hand in my favor. But I didn’t want to deceive her, there were no ill-disposed objectives, it wasn’t even lust. Something had been dead in me, crippled for quite some time. And now it began to stir and vibrate: this foreign sensation Cecelia pulled from my depths. It felt natural and was beyond overlooking. Though I couldn’t quite make claim to it; I didn’t wholly understand it. It plagued me. What is it about Cecelia? Is there even good reason to feel this way? Or is this just the result of psychological trauma?

The reasons are usually difficult to articulate. But even with a rhapsody of neatly drawn sentences this particular situation teemed with hopelessness—and to be slightly more candid, futility. She had plans of leaving the country indefinitely and of spending her last remaining days with a man more dear—and I was not to see her again, understandably. Which is why I avoided that conversation; I didn’t need it, it was unnecessary. It infringed on the basic nature of the evening: an undisturbed, intimate farewell.

I couldn’t help but dwell on it; the night had shifted paradigms. She had completely ruffled my feathers, ruined the ideal that I anticipated. I went back in for her margarita, a scotch for myself, and a few moments to speculate. I wondered how, in this foul change of climate, I was going to pull myself out of the trench. It seemed doomed. That lousy, shyster, bamboozling, shape-shifting, grifter God always shows his face when it’s time to cash in on simple pleasures and basic emotional needs. But fuck all that. There was no time to concern him with human affairs and institutions—the amoral prick. The tender was on his way back with the drinks.

How did this all become so flustered? The evening carried itself so stereotypically: we dolled ourselves up, took an early-dusk stroll around the city, sat for an aperitif and a production at the theater. Some may even coin it a date. You would think the kiss and the lay would be coming soon. As it were, we steered terribly off track.

I attempted to shake it off, reapply my grin, and put myself back on the chopping-block. We spoke about something airy, something young lovers would discuss—like dreams. What bred the conversation is hard to say, but it allowed more room for cute intimacy; it allowed more possibility, more time to forget the self-evident.

As the general procession of nights like this go, we had some more to drink and became a bit lighter. I was still curious about my stance, but the situation seemed comfortable—all was merry and bright. We took our walk home leisurely, passing the time with quirks & quips. When we approached the intersection where I was either coming or going, I coyly asked:

“So, what do you got going on now?”

She coyly responded, “I’m a bit tired. I think I may pack up some things and go to bed.”

Before we could reach that tense, awkward pause where we both feel faintly timid and stupid, I grabbed her brazenly. She reciprocated with fanatical force and we kissed savagely—how I imagine cheetahs might kiss, if they did. I began to vulgarize her on the corner—squirming up her sundress, going to work, flashing her ass at traffic. To my slight surprise Cecelia didn’t seem bashful at all. She was exposed to all onlookers and passer-bys. Perhaps she was more of a whore than I gave her credit for. And in truth I dig that, was in fact waiting anxiously—it’s damn charming. Once I got in a bit more edgewise she became stiff and excited…then pulled her head back.

“I told myself I wasn’t going to make it with you tonight,” she interrupted.

Make it with me? Where does this broad pick up her vernacular, a malt-shop?

“Darling, if you weren’t interested we wouldn’t be in this precarious position,” I said, massaging that little, windswept Georgia O’ Keefe of hers. “I know you feel some guilt because of him, but the cold fact is that you’re gone. You don’t owe him anything and you don’t owe me anything. You need to do what’s right for you, what you want.”

I knew what she wanted—even if she didn’t. And I didn’t mind pushing the subject, because I knew what I wanted. Not that I was being deceptive,—after all, Cecelia had something of mine which was now hers—just simply unrestrained, depraved, licentious. I have a deep respect for women and a profound faith in what’s called the feminine characteristic…but there is also a part of which is a sex-hungry chauvinist. That’s not to say that I would degrade or humiliate a woman out of chauvinism, but I’d take a long, hard look at her ass. I’m just exploring a healthy sexual curiosity, as Woody Allen would put it. And better a healthy exploration, I say, than suppressed tumor-causing rage.

She was a tough firecracker, this Cecelia, but she was too red in the face to resist.

When we arrived at her place I pissed in the bushes and went to wait in her room. It wasn’t a long wait and we didn’t waste any time talking. We certainly made lemonade out of the situation. However, we got caught in the whole foreplay fiasco: I was getting to it quickly while she wanted to slow the pace. She wanted to play with me a little, she said; an endearing way to put it, I suppose. So I let her; let her take the reins, so to speak. Once I did, the rhythm raised back up to a compromising tempo, possibly quicker. She dropped below and stuck me in her mouth, going at it with pure, unadulterated zest. Where it suddenly came from I wasn’t sure. Did she finally realize, too, that it was our final encounter? Was she literally trying to extract all the juice out of this moment? I didn’t think long on this. I pulled her up, threw her on the bed and pulled what remained over her ankles. She was already swollen, so I succored her with ointment: slopping-up every last crevasse to relieve the pain. After the initial exercises, I slithered up and slid my end in. It was high-time that she gets a feel of me under her ass. She let me work at it a while—rougher than usual—until she decides she wants to roll me under. She lets go with an uninhibited fervor that I was yet to experience from her. She then straightened and arched her back, relaxed her chest, writhed and moaned, and I exploded…releasing millions of microscopic disappointments. I wanted it to last till sunrise.

After a minute or two I was standing tall again and figured we should have one last go at it. I propped myself into position behind her, but halfway through she had had enough, she lost interest. Perhaps she could have cared less whether I was there or not. She seemed weary.

We decided it was best that I leave before I became too romantic. I have a tendency towards the melodramatic, of being over-zealous at these times of premature separation. I react wild and crazed and fall into a manic episode…and she had no need to be subject to my irrational, despondent fits.

I staggered home in a funk: brooding, pining, cursing the heavens. All the while I have been anticipating this end, and now the time has come to accept its passing—which is no easy chore. Although, I was filled with great joy for Cecelia; she was ending an era and beginning anew. She was leaving all the staleness of quarrelsome relationships and venturing towards the unknown; towards the freedom in fulfilling the righteousness of herself, and away from the hazard and ties of sterility. I shouldn’t be of any concern and neither should that other bastard I mentioned. Cecelia gave us what she needed to. The delicacy of parting doesn’t always require a light touch…on occasion it’s a hard thrust, definitive and direct.

Continuing our February theme of “Winter’s Love & Loss,” Tijeras’, New Mexico’s Dane Benko, a UNM graduate and “amateur writer,” speaks capably on the loss of color. There’s actually myriad colors in New Mexico right now: out the kitchen window of our Santa Fe casita at the moment I can see another round of crystal-white snow quickly falling, scattered brown and green foliage, and the consistent sight of adobe. When you juxtapose all that Southwestern Winter Wonderland stuff with other-worldly, rainbow-colored sunsets, it frequently makes memories of my childhood winters in Pittsburgh seem like so many gray scenes from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And gray is exactly what Dane Benko’s story has in mind.

“The Utmost Gradient of Turkey Dinner”
by Dane Benko

Winter in New Mexico is typically mild, and the city of Albuquerque barely gets rain. Up in the East Mountains, however, the weather is variable enough to live up to the old adage “Don’t like the weather? Wait five minutes and it will change.” Mountain kids do not expect much out of their winters by way of snow-sports and school days off, and when they wake up to see a pile of snow they know that they can expect it to stay on the ground anywhere from five minutes to thirty days.

The day Mom and I had Thanksgiving dinner alone sticks out for me because it was a perfectly even, consistent gray. In no other day in my life had pathetic fallacy realized itself so directly to true experience. Mom spent the entire day cooking a turkey feast fit for a regular Thanksgiving of dozens of people, but this year we were entirely alone, and nobody was invited. Dad had left and was living in Louisiana, where he would shortly die. My sister was off at college and had other people to be with. No friends or family members were available, and it was with some consideration that Mom decided she wanted a turkey dinner at all, deciding in the end that she would make leftovers frozen to last and we could enjoy the holiday like any other year.

But the day was gray. The table was lit in gray and we turned on no lights. The mood was gray, as we quietly ate our dinner together without talking. I was sitting with my back to the fire but the fire was in a closed stove of metal, which was gray. The usual colorful Thanksgiving dinner with its orange yams and red cranberry sauce and white potatoes with brown gravy was all gray. More importantly, for the first time in my life I got a sense of my mother’s mortality, as she sat small and curled into herself as she slowly ate her dinner, her face and her hair gray. The lines on her hands as she ate her gray dinner seemed to gray as I watched them move methodically with gray utensils. I could not shake the clarity of the gray, how well defined and clear everything was and how deeply saturated it was in this sad, dull color, and I knew Mom’s and my relationship with each other was being profoundly affected that day.

[foto by Greg "Danger" Klein]

However, in contrast to the gray was the taste. I account for it the same way I account for the gray. That event was strikingly literate – all senses seemed to reflect the existence of all things; we were shrouded in symbols. I took a bite of turkey and was greeted with the warm pleasure of fatty juices I have never, in my entire life, been able to reacquire since. The yams were pure and sweet in a texture I cannot anymore find outside of dreams. The cranberries were a tartness that has made all sauces sugared down disappointments thereafter. The mashed potatoes were rich with garlic and gravy that has ceased to exist among the known recipes of man. The turkey, though…. the turkey seemed to tremble with flavor; it promised in every bite that I would never go hungry, that its crisp skin and moist meat would give me nutrients through pure memory.

Our entire discourse that meal consisted of four syllables: “Mmm, good,” and “Mm-hmm.” Mom had given something in herself into that meal, an act that terrified me because I assumed I was consuming it all, never to be used again. However, I could not stop eating, as it was important and necessary. I had to pull as much of that experience into me as I could, for fear of wasting any moment of that turmoil the gray and the rich taste sent spinning inside of me. When we were done, we slowly and methodically cleaned up, together. Mom had made the meal herself but we portioned the leftovers and did the dishes and cleaned the table as a unit, as if in eating the meal I had imbibed the necessity of the spirit of working the meal into the day, kneading every aspect of it into my muscle memory as well as my brain.

The day ended before the sun went down when my mother said, “Thank you for having Thanksgiving dinner with me.” No other part of that day was significant, except for the continual gray, which lasted until it became black.

That turkey dinner lasted for a year as frozen leftovers, and maintained its taste. Nobody else ate of that meal but Mom and me, and when it was gone she decided to make a turkey dinner every year for the same purposes. None of the follow-up dinners have been the same. They never will be. The part of Mom I was afraid I consumed did not disappear, as the nutrients of that meal went right back into our lives. I believe I am unique in the world for having digested every molecule of a turkey dinner, retrieving from it every nutrient, the real and the imbued. Even now, I am what I ate that day.

(Dane Benko is a graduate of the University of New Mexico’s Media Arts department and is working in the film industry. He is an amateur writer who composes prose on his free time. When not working, he likes to engage himself critically in multiple media.)