OMG (From the Cheersbro.blogspot.com)

The faces on the train can be so trying.

The advertisements you encounter before the morning rush are awful; from the crass and tasteless posters for horror films, the dregs of the underground product shilling, to the unsettling and truly very stupid ad for “Rescue Me”, the latter apparently some compellingly idiotic show about Dennis Leary’s distended neck. The atmosphere takes a slight turn to the more upbeat and jaunty as you exit the train: Hey! iPod ads! Colorful! All of the substance of a reggaeton song from a Newark summer of ’05! Drawing back into the trains, the most recent droll and insipid poster features a desperate woman, face oily and mascara running (undoubtedly the result of emotional feelings pertaining to the state of the MBTA), partially obscured by a chain link pattern. Captivity®! What the poster doesn’t show is that, if you panned the focus back a few feet, you’d notice the fact that the chain link pattern was a fence, not a wall of a cage, a seven foot tall fence at that, and the top wasn’t even that imposing, actually having those little twisty things that any eight year old can bypass without a scratch. Like the ones they have around elementary schools. And also relevant would be the fact that, like those school fences, there was a gaping gap about 15 feet down the fence. Captive, indeed.

Everyday the train rocks back and forth like the denizens of Central Square, caroming through the tunnel at a helter skelter pace, barreling around some corners only to stop for no apparent reason midway through the two relevant stations. The capriciousness of the train and its operator make each day a feast for the senses, and a fantastic workout for your core. For the bargain price of a $2.00 ticket ($1.75 for MBTA card holders, the gentry of underground transit) you can rock back and forth for as long as you can bear, shifting your weight in time with the lurching car. Crunches be damned: the green line is the low impact mama of the future. Focus your weary eyes on the gallery of advertisements as you sculpt your body. Learn Swahili. Teach English in China. Get that medical experiment easy money.

Teach English abroad. Sounds like fun. Screw you, mom and pop, and crusty high school counselor. College was a waste of time. I spent my childhood learning real employable skills. Mastery of English, bitches. Mastered it. Making loot and visiting foreign lands to teach them the native tongue. Figure the other skills I’ve picked up and honed over the years must be valuable as well. Figure I can cut them a deal for my expertise, you know, ‘cause I’m already acting as a consultant. Speculation skills, about all sorts of things, are a specialty of mine. Doesn’t matter how little I’m familiar with it. There’s that one. I can come up with opinions on the spot, at the drop of a hat, new and novel each time if necessary. I’m willing to peddle that shill at a reduced, package rate. I’m pretty well versed in websites, the internet. That fabulous beast. I can show the peeps of the world how to surf the web for hours. (Surf the web. Threw in a little lingo there. Free sample, to show them I’m legit.) Passive research. The World Is Flat. Pick up a copy of that tome on Amazon.com. In Mandarin. Cause I don’t have the time to be reading it to the client and, truthfully, English is a hard monkey to tango with. Your not going to pick up every little nuance if your not a native speaker.

My general cultural knowledge. Expansive. A vast pool of resources I’m willing to make available to the inquisitive soul who has a thirst for knowledge. I’ve got knowledge of comics, video games, and popular music from 1994 to 2005, inclusive, with the exception of Spring 2004, when I was studying other cultures abroad in New Zealand. I’ve read lots of abstracts on Lexis-Nexus, and I’ve got Swank’s password to the premium section of the New York Times website, so I’ve got that going for me (and for the client).

Teaching English to a non English speaker. Could there possibly be a more ridiculous job? And why, of all places, would any right minded English speaker place those ads in the Boston arear? The last thing the World needs, besides transplanted ‘2004 World Champs’ Red Sox caps spread liberally across the globe, is a legion of Japanese people students and business men speaking with a Southie accent. The Southie Pacific accent. Ha! Give us a break.

A word we shouldn’t teach the clients? Appetizer. Ban that word. Stricken it from the English language. Because it’s a paradox. An appetizer cannot feature over 2000 calories. That, in common parlance, is called a meal, in American English, also known as a days worth of sustenance in the FDA’s words. That is an appetite. Someone pulled a fast one on us, dropped the –e for an –izer. Appetizers should be like tapas. You want an appetizer? Go for a run. Refrain from food consumption for six hours or longer, give or take one purging. Your body will create a natural appetizer. It’s called ‘hunger’.

T.G.I.F. Fridays cannot sell appetizers any more, because it’s a contradiction in terms. Food has to be palatable, appetite inducing, for you to consider it an appetizer in these times, and we all know the food at the Teeg is none of the sort. Appetizer. It’s kind of misleading. Let’s just call it ‘meal’ and be done with it. (T.G.I.F.; This, guaranteed, is foul (parenthetic expression; another grammar tip, gratis). And I really don’t recommend teaching people abroad about appetizers. The irony of teaching a Chinese person about the delight of ‘Potstickers’ or ‘Lettuce Wraps’, when their grandparents lived through the Cultural Revolution, might be a lost and pointless cause.

Getting paid for talking English. That’s like your Grandparents giving you money for getting A’s in elementary school. No work. Easy. Who needs a job? You really did learn all you needed to know in life in kindergarten. English. I learned that shit by the time I was six. Teaching English is one rung up the ladder from giving your consent for paid medical studies and selling your sperm. I can’t help but wonder if the English teaching thing is really one big experiment also, subsidized by the Federal Government and T.G.I.F. Fridays to provide wages to otherwise unemployable liberal arts majors and spread to the developing world the gospel of appetizers and appletinis. Or maybe the is government is paying the Chinese Communist Party fees to displace Bostonians in a foreign land to see the long term effects of being removed from the center of the Universe for an extended period of time. Or to see if they would develop a Napoleonic Complex for a Sino-version of New York. In any case, there are even odds that someone would end up stabbed when a compliment of teaching prowess in broken, Southie inflected English is tragically and unintentionally interpreted to imply ‘better than you’ status.

You Figure It Out

I overheard someone reminiscing about friends. They said...
"My friends and I..."
Whoa. Stop right there. Friends? And you? Hanging out? Major. So what do you and these friends do? Listen to the latest Top 40 Billboard hits? Dance to these hits? Maybe a little basketball, sports, and when you dribble by them you yank their pants down, because it's funny! And then you'll all go for a dip, a little swim in the local pool, and you'll do the sickest water jumps. The cannonball. The jackknife. The gainer. The incontinent lush. The promiscuous older sister. Ha! I made those last two up! That's how reckless we were as kids, the friends and I. We didn't let stodgy old farts tell us how to do our water jumps. We came up with our own shit, man. We improvised. Sign o' the times. The "geriatric transsexual substitute teacher". Total classic. The "inconvenient truth". You did this one when you had to pee real badly and hadn't been in the pool for a bit. The "precocious onset of puberty". That one was the most popular and got the most attention, although it also stood the best chance of getting you pregnant.

Ah, friends, they were great. Sit around during the summer with your pals, maybe listen to a little Garrison Keillor, then rep it like you hailed from Lake Wobegon. But everyone knew you didn’t. They called us posers. Posers? Please! They were just jealous of that Mini ‘Sota flavor you rocked. And you talked like them, too. Affected a nice accent. And your mom would get all pissed and tight in the pants. Say Garrison was no good and that he objectified women and called them ho’s and how she didn’t trust people from Minnesota, and how they smelled funny. But when she saw one of them she’d be so polite. “Oh, I love lakes! And all the gophers! You must feel so lucky, growing up with all the gophers! And your cheese is splendid!”

Minnesota. Always made me think of baking soda. That was a lie! Baking soda. It was more like baking detergent. Clean my Girbauds in that shit. They probably called it baking pop in Minnesota. What the hell was it for? You would always be making some treat, a delicious batch of muffins or something, and you’d get down towards the end of the ingredients list and see B.S. sitting there, like an unwanted guest. Baking soda? Who invited you! You taste like shit! And it was always so pointless, when you were only allowed to put in like 2/8ths of a teaspoon. What good would that do? But you know that there’s someone out there in the world eating muffins, and they’re like, “ Ah, ack! Where…you can’t even taste the baking soda in this!” Must be diet baking soda; Baking Soda Zero. But at least it didn’t give you diabetes, at least you got to keep your toes. Baking soda had that going for it.

But baking soda was an uninvited guest, like that awkward kid in elementary school who overhead you say in class that you were having a party at Chucky Cheese and then showed up there himself and tried to play it off as a coincidence You didn’t just stop by Chucky Cheese on a lark! It was not the Olive Garden! This was an event. You’re never just “in the neighborhood”, unless you lived under the highway underpass, which, in retrospect, that kid might’ve. Like anybody says “in the neighborhood”, anyway. You were not! You’re a party crasher! You’re worse than baking soda!

Chuck Cheese. In my town it was called Showbiz Pizza. That’s fun. You got to be in The ‘Biz. Funny thing though: I expected more hookers and blow in The ‘Biz. But I know Michael Bay likes a slice of ‘za, and they did that right. And then sometime Chuck moved in on Showbiz’s turf. Kicked the joint to the curb. The show was over. Chuck rolled up in the spot, all loose like he was your chum. But let’s be honest – he was a giant rat. Could you really trust your kid’s birthday party and pizza to this character? And he totally rode the employees. “ Hey, bud, it’s Mr. Cheese to you. Charles Montgomery Cheese. Catch you slippin’ again and I’ll have one of my animatronic, hillbilly bears lodge a skee-ball up your ass.” Chuck was a real ball buster. But he didn’t get to the top of the birthday pizza party game by letting things slide. He was a ruthless businessman; you fucked with the pizza king, bitch, you’d get sliced! That was an industry specific joke. Sliced like a pizza, you know. It’s a joke, and not true. The reality was, if you crossed Chuck, he’d just come after you with a baseball bat with a nail in it, wrapped in barbed wire and dipped in mutagen.

Beth

Beth, short for Bethlehem, the little town of the song where Jesus was born. Beth, she of tendrils of thousands of hairs drawn together in unity on her lovely head. Why did her parents name her such? The casual mistakes that would come like the mailman (rain, sun, snow) with her name; and why wasn’t it short for Elizabeth, and could her parents have been mistaken? How was this her name, or could they have gotten it wrong? Where do names come from? Maybe she should have been Lucy, Jill, Claire or Connie. It could be that she could change her name, but she started out as a Beth, short for Bethlehem. A long name for a short child.

How could I ever forget the day I met Beth? I saw her out at a Saturday’s market, the sort of recidivistic place where Intel chip farmers hawk their sincere produce to those of us who can afford to spend a little extra on Kale. I was perusing the spread of turnips one particularly odiferous vendor had brought for sale, when I had the prescient impulse to look over, possibly to avert my nose, possibly from fate. Who was that? Somehow all 4 feet 11 inches of this girl seemed to rise above all the distractions of the scene. She was considering the virtues of arugala grown in a grimy valley east of the bay ( I had tried it; it was unremarkable) versus the charm of the stalky red lettuce that filled its strained packing box fat (hm, I was intrigued). Hello, can I help you pick vegetables? Could any act be more intimate? Take the testicular qualities of kohlrabi, hard like a kidney stone, the bulbous carrots like a fat man’s prick, mix them and… well, perhaps intimate isn’t quite the right word. But you see how close we could become in these quarters, amongst the lust of organic food? I approached her willingly, and she did not refuse my attention for long. In short order we walked side by side through the stalls and halls of the outdoor market surveying the entire scale of offerings like a king and queen newly joined and eager to view their lands.

We made love that very night. Can we say making love is synomous with sex? Or do we oblige each other that pass? Her apartment was a shrine. The tapestries she had brought home, to the states, from Nepal and various other countries on the periphery of China that I had heard of before but could not reveal much about, were laid about in fell across the living room which also served as the bedroom. The walls were white, except where they were blue. She had painted them herself, she mentioned. When I reported to the toilet after, I noticed she had a transparent shower curtain. The tiles on the floor were chipped in a corner, and her laundry burrow was overflowing with a wealth of clothing and magazines. Was that a Vogue peering out at god and whomever else might stumble across it? The porcelain basin featured black hairs in the familiar crevices a casual cleaning doesn’t disturb. I examined my face in the mirror; still there.

Outside she was frying something over the stove. She wielded a heavy iron skillet like a wand, like a heavy broadsword employed in the holy missions of Jesus. Joan of Arc, this Beth. The contents crackled and popped and spit back at her from the cruel heat, never consigned to their fate. She wore only a lavender skirt (how did it feel across her body?). Her back displayed a map of freckles that hinted at some distant treasure, the kind men agonize over obsessively until they drive themselves mad. When she smiled the darkness showed between the gaps of her teeth, not quite white. She focused all of her attention on the lucky, doomed denizens of the pan, leaving me alone to make tea. She liked hers with honey instead of sugar.

We sat over the small coffee table, the lone one of its kind in the apartment, on the wooden floor. She had fried the eggs, and the spices seemed as foreign as the woven art on the wall. Never cumin, never rosemary, of course. The fork sat in her hand like a little girl’s, the top poking out bare from the knot of her fingers. Beads of sweat down her breasts, a summer’s kiss. We talked but didn’t say much. Godard spoke to her. We’d never had much to say to each other. When I finished my eggs she scrapped hers onto my plate. They had gone cold, rubbery: I had finished my eggs, but here they were, more eggs on my plate. I would never hold that against her, or her lavender skirt.

The futon pulled down into a bed. A changeling couch, or was it ever even a couch? It had long since dried, and now it smelled of benign fabric. It was our spaceship. The open window was our air conditioner. There was no clock. What time was it? It was dark, though that only let on part of the picture. Did she fear losing me? She shuddered as she fell asleep, as though her body shivered from cold, or some Penecostal spirit moved her. The street, hidden from my eyes (but not my ears, always the more resourceful), droaned on, cars and maniacs rambling across the concrete. They had no idea what was inside. They couldn’t see through the walls.

When I woke, I realized I hadn’t realized I was asleep. I could recount the shade of the ceiling without the lights on, and that was it. It hadn’t changed, and didn’t tell me how long I’d been out. Cad. The mat was still warm from her body, her spot was still there, but she was not. Oh, did you also have the nightlys? There was a thin promise of light around the edge of the bathroom door. Some things are sacred. Have your peace and I will have my sleep.

When I woke a second time the light was in the window. Morning. What does it take to keep the interloper out? Relentless and always uninvited. My clothes reminded me of the day before, their smell testified to it. The plate was still there on the table, flakes of overcooked egg settled on the lip. Had we really eating breakfast for dinner? Or were we free of such conventions? They had tasted good, especially with the sweetness of salt. She had tasted good; could I salvage some from my lips, my fingers? Had I been to greedy? Gluttony of the flesh, the most delightful excess. The light was still on in the bathroom, the outline outshined by the its newfound rival, diminished against the door in the grey room. Some things are sacred. But there is a time for everything, and so I went for the knob. I had the faint inclination to knock, but it came too late. A lesson to procrastinate. I probably would have ignored it just the same.

The light inside was absolute, with no windows to invite competition. Poor, prideful light. We had spent most of the night together. Had the light been there all the time? She wasn’t inside, and it was a very small room, with no nooks and crannies. But, was she kind enough to leave a note? A box sat in front of the bowl, on the tile that was chipping in the corner. Wood in front of porcelain.

When I opened it, it was empty. It smelled like lavender.

Skidding versus Sliding

As Jake exits the ski lodge, the big, ancient one that sits around 6000 feet above sea level and has all of the finely lacquered wood sculptures of bears and wolves inside its cavernous halls, the first thing that catches his eye is the fray going full tilt, the one that explains the blood on the snow.

On the way up the mountain it had been snowing. Big, obscuring flakes that threw themselves under the tires and threatened to send the Saab wagon careening off a sharp turn and into the waiting arms of the firs below. Jake hated driving when it snowed like that; besides the fact that he had a number of certifiably terrible childhood associations with this sort of weather (delays; deaths; skinned knees), it also meant that the trip to the summit was shaping up the hours with each flake, falling like grains of sand in an hourglass. One of his friends had suggested they pull over and lace the wheels in chains, but they were almost there and chains were a royal pain in the ass to deal with, certain to give him grief, so in his passive aggressive manner he’d set a loaded question aloud about whether they really thought chains were necessary. The lodge was about six miles off the highway, on a 6 or 7 degree incline that would take about six minutes to ascend going the speed limit. Going twenty miles an hour it took the wagon the better part of twenty minutes to climb up there, the tires spinning whenever they took a turn and the prospect of sliding helplessly into a two story tall snowdrift gradually built up through months of snowy days very real.

The red of the blood looked very bright on the muted white on the fresh snow not yet packed by the meaty rubber tires that adorned the wheels of seemingly every auto in the lot save Jake’s. Kind of like a cherry snowcone, Jake thought. A crowd had gathered around the two flailing, slipping bodies with the smashing fists and smashed faces. Usually it happens that the onlookers have no stake in these public frays. But like a car wreck on a highway, maybe we’ve all got a stake, the blood and the flesh being rent before our eyes a part of us. One thing he’d noticed, and he admitted he hadn’t seen a lot of fights, but one thing he’d noticed about the ones he had was there was likely to be either a whole lot of talk, or none at all. No in between. Either both of the guys would be yapping, barking insults and the crowd jeering wordless cheers, and that meant they’d waste a lot of energy on fussing instead of fighting, and most of the fire would fad into the air. Or the other option, which was they wouldn’t say anything at all, the only sounds from bodies shuffling and two breathing souls pounding on one another, the soft noise muted on the folds of billowy snow.

He’d actually never skied much as a child, nothing substantial anyway. Most of the people he’d spent time with as an adult had, trips with their families to the mountain, and so it felt prudent to him to learn how to do so, otherwise he feared he might find himself alone in the city on winter weekend without anything to indicate that it was a weekend at all. Things like that didn’t come easy, the physical rhythm of it all: none of it was intuitive, and he was far from a born athlete. Him being full grown probably made the venture even tougher, trying to teach a body whose bones were set new tricks. He took a few bruises, but the spills were actually something he appreciated; little bumps and bruises to show he was trying, little merit badges writ on his body with authority- the legitimacy of scars.

Jake wasn’t sure if he had any stake in these two whipping at each other. He didn’t recognize either one. None of the people he come up the mountain with were there. Both of them were wearing the bulky pants and jackets meant to keep the cold and the wet out, doubling now as armor of another sort. He wondered if they’d purposely kept their jackets on, or if the thought wasn’t even there to consider, given the circumstances. The fight had definitely turned out to be one of those quiet kinds; neither of these guys looked like the talking type. Actually, who’s to say; it could be, you meet them at the bar they’d chat a blue streak, and maybe it was the setting that left them speechless. No need or want for words. When the odd chance happened, and one of them actually landed a fist to face, the pop crumpled out sound like the noise it made when Jake would hit the snow, tumbling after he slipped the learning curve and took a turn too tight, or caught an edge and gravity sent him down. He knew the two sensations must be worlds apart, but honestly he’d never taken one to the face, and knuckles were certainly packed tighter than snow.

He hadn’t wanted to screw with the chains; couldn’t somebody make those damn things any easier to work? So he blamed them for being so difficult when the tire hit a patch of ice and the wagon went floundering into a bluff. The tires were still spinning, and that sucked them into the drift like a vacuum, same sucking sound and everything. The whole right side of the car was tilted off lopsided, sunk in so you had to get out of the driver side doors, the others packed shut by the snow up to the windows.

It had seemed really daunting at first, and he didn’t feel confident in any way that he’d ever get any better. Seemed like a hopeless cause, to start so late in the game, years behind and everyone of those seasons that passed that he’d spent doing something else that didn’t do him any favors now were being called into question, an inquisition of the past by the present. But he’d done his best to see those types of things as sunk cost, wasn’t anything he could do about them, and dwelling on them only served to mire him down. He’d been feeling more inclined towards the power of positive thinking, and that sort of obsession with the past was worthless weight dragging on him. Every time he took the slopes a little faster and managed down on his feet without taking a snow bath, he’d swear that weight lifted a little. The gravity of going downhill was making him light, like the snow falling and covering the mountain, all the jagged rocks and the knots of trees sitting on the surface of the ground that would otherwise be exposed covered in the quiet powder. And when he did slip, the snow was forgiving. He’d almost relish the falls, the tumbles that kicked up the spray of flakes like a stone thrown into a still lake, skipping off the surface a few times before it settled. It was good to know what to expect when he fell. He skied a little faster every next time because of that knowledge.

The blood that had spilled out sank little furrows in the snow, the warmth the drops took with them as they left their bodies melting, mixing the water and the blood and diluting the red into a pale pink. When Jake stepped between the two of them in a break that opened just enough space for him to slide in he hadn’t thought about what he was doing. He’d been watching them for some time, and as he noticed the crowd his eyes naturally refocused from the fight itself to the break and contours of the different heads surrounding, the up and down of the varied heights making little crests and peaks of the bodies. A jagged range surrounding the scene. When he jumped in he put his arms out to make space, his palms open to distance the two. There was a moment when he thought it a very real possibility that one or both might turn their attention on him, bury their fight in the interloper. And while they did come at each other again, they didn’t swing, he didn’t take a sharp fist to his face for the first time, just pushed up against his outstretched arms like guardrails on the side of the road, and maybe they had wanted someone to step in, to call the fight off for them. He stood between them and they pushed on him, but they didn’t swing. And after a while, their arms became softer and their red in their faces drained out, and they leaned off him, and he didn’t move from that spot despite it, still standing their with his hands open where little flakes collected and melted against the warmth of his skin.

Walmart

Wal-Mart, for me as a child, was something like I imagine Santa’s Heaven to be like. Every time my sister and I, and often our cousins would be there too, to share in the festivities, would visit our Grandparents in Cleburne, Texas, we would visit the local temple to capitalism in its most prevalent form, consumerism. Oh, the excitement that began to bubble up from the nether regions of our little bodies at the mere mention of that Shangri-La that promised untold riches and personal satisfaction in the form of Ninja Turtle action figures and miscellanea and whatever it was that the female element of the grandchildren were enamored with, which, if the furnishings of the room I occupy at my Grandparents is any indicator, fixated heavily on various iterations of equine and princessly distractions displayed in a wide spectrum of pinks. One of the first signs of change I noticed as a child, an indication that one has seen enough and experienced enough to be able to recognize something that once was this way is now different, and therefore a sort of marker of time itself, was the conversion from the relatively modest Wal-Mart of my earliest youth, of the He-Man and Thundercat and Nintendo years, to the upgraded, next version, the evolved Super-Wal-Mart of Ninja Turtle and Super Nintendo era, as though this Wal-Mart was the next logical and superior iteration of the Wal-Mart genus- Neanderthal meet Homo Sapiens, if you will. That old Wal-Mart, the archeological remains of which still remain across the street from the next generation superstore, are to this day still intact, the façade of the store having been occupied by a non-apex scavenger, a Kroger’s supermarket. That old, antiquated Wal-Mart almost seems prosaic in the ether of my memory in comparison to its Super successor, like some sort of Mom and Pop Wal-Mart, as ludicrous as that seems.

The inevitable and keenly anticipated ritual trip to Wal-Mart was a childhood fantasy-rent-material. Nearly any toy or treat was available in its cavernous halls, the labyrinth of artificially low priced goods which would seem daunting to those unfamiliar with the undulating passages that led to the prime areas, a treasure map inscribed through countless excursions onto the cerebrums of my fellow children and I. This was a routine part of visiting Cleburne; it was part of my childhood. And it seems appropriate that my cousins, my sister, and myself wholly embraced this sort of unabashed, unalloyed, and unashamed materialism. Materialism is the heart of childhood; what child doesn’t have a mind absolutely receptive to the accumulation of more and varied loot. To a child, more is always better. It is only as we begin to gain a more nuanced appreciation for the world, for the concept of quality, for the immaterial and, to some, not entirely convincing concept of self deprivation, that we begin to realize that we have somewhere in the past segued from pure childhood to some degree of difference along what may be described as a linear chart of maturity, from the adult in mature body only to the ascetic, who reviles at the slightest hint of pleasure. And for a realization of cause and consequence of our actions. My own experiences lead me to wonder if Wal-Mart isn’t stuck in a state of arrested development as well, that the people who indulge in all of the rock-bottom prices and colossal volumes available at these warehouses of goods aren’t gently refusing to grow up a little themselves. Another part of me is quick to point out that I don’t fit the demographic of the typical Wal-Mart acolyte, and that it would quite disingenuous, as well as certainly quite elitist, for me to make any such assertions about the emotional maturity of the shoppers who spend their dollars at Wal-Mart. What I can say is that my own knowledge of Wal-Mart has expanded beyond what was once a sort of juvenile solipsism, an oblivious, blissful ignorance dedicated to the myriad joys of the splendor of Wal-Mart. I now know about the business strategies that the corporation employs when they enter a new community, like the thousands upon thousands of American ones they have already entered. I also know about the ways in which the nations largest private employer treats its enormous workforce, the methods the company utilizes to reduce the amount of health insurance and overtime pay it is obligated by federal law to provide for full time employees. All of these interests and methods are wholly in line with what I expect a business in a capitalist country to do, precisely the sort of behavior the Wal-Mart stockholders hold the management accountable for, indeed, demand of them. I admit this, and don’t vilify them for it. I can also say, however, that I feel a distinctly different emotion when I approach Wal-Mart in Cleburne today. I cannot deny that there is still a strong nostalgic pull towards the hallowed land it occupies, so familiar to me over the years and seasons of my life. I don’t resist going there, afraid that my reticence born of insight might jeopardize one of the precious last vestiges of a very fond and cherished childhood I enjoyed with my parents and Grandmother, as nearly all of these features have disappeared now, fallen by the wayside along with my interest in Ninja Turtles and full days spent watching Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. What I can promise is that it is very unlikely that my children will have the same experience with Wal-Mart as I did as a child, and will never look upon one of those behemoths with the same bittersweet eyes as their father.

A Cross of Flowers

In the hollow in the forest lives a monster. It is a terrible monster. Deep, deep in the forest, where the light can’t go and so it’s always dark. I don’t know where the monster came from. Do we ever know where they come from? Maybe they are always there. Maybe the monster has always been there.

When I close my eyes, I see flowers of every kind. The kind of beautiful flowers that I cannot name, because I’ve never heard their’s. Red and purple. Blue and green and yellow. And orange. When I see these flowers, I know they don’t exist. But they smell sweet to me, all the same.

When I was a boy I saw my mother die. A man who wasn’t my father hit her and hit her until one day she broke. At the funeral I didn’t cry, and the suit I wore itched my neck fiercely. She was a shade of pale pink and purple, with hints of red and blue. Her skin looked like a flower petal’s, against the black of the wood and the brown and grey of the dirt. She was at my sixth birthday, and she brought me my favorite toy, and she didn’t come to my birthdays after.

When I think of my grandmother, I think of white, like her hair. Thin and faint and white. Like a cobweb. I hadn’t wanted to go and live with her, on that hill in her big house, but the people who found me said I had to. My mother gave me candy and sang songs to me to help me go to sleep. There wasn’t any candy in my grandmother’s house, and she never saw me to sleep. Her house creaked and moaned. I could hear ghosts at night, who wouldn’t let me sleep. I lost my toy, somewhere in the house, and my grandmother cursed at me and said I couldn’t have another. I think the ghosts took it, and they hid it from me, someplace I would never find it, someplace I’d be too scared to go. My grandmother was old, and she could be very mean. She didn’t eat much, and said I shouldn’t eat is she wasn’t hungry. She loved god. She talked to god. I couldn’t ever hear him talk back. All I could hear was her talking to him, telling him about all the bad things my mother and I had done. She had to tell me what he said to her, and she laughed when he spoke, and told me god was laughing to. God said I was a mistake. He said my mother never wanted me.

My grandmother had a man to tend her house and the hill. He never told me his name. I couldn’t say the one she told me, and she laughed at that. I called him Frank, after a character I had seen in a movie with my mom, though that wasn’t his name, and never when he could hear me. And when he did hear me, he pushed my head under the water of his mop bucket. The water was cold and filthy, and it burned my eyes when I opened them and the water got to them. He did that a lot. I could hear my grandmother laughing, outside the water. I thought it was strange to be able to hear underwater, and her laugh sounded far away and different, like from another room. Frank never laughed. He just grinned, and his mustache looked like a fuzzy caterpillar on his lip.

One time when I was under the water, and my lungs burned cause I hadn’t breathed much, I thought I saw something at the bottom of the bucket. The water was grey, and murky, but it seemed clear as a photograph to me. It glowed at the bottom. I saw a cross of flowers, all kinds in full bloom, there, at the bottom. I wondered for a moment if Frank could see it, but then I heard my grandmother’s laughter, and I knew that they hadn’t seen it. It was there, but only I could see it: a cross of flowers, glowing just for me.

When I would get scared at night, my grandmother wouldn’t sing me songs. She would just laugh, and tell me I should be glad I was inside, because outside, in the forest behind her house, lived a monster who liked nothing more that to eat people. But most of all, she said, he liked to eat children. And he would get me if it weren’t for her, if I went outside, and I should be glad for her. What a spoiled child I was, she said to god, and god agreed.

Each time Frank put my head in the water, I could see the cross of flowers brighter and brighter. I worried that it might get too bright, and that Frank or my grandmother might notice and pull me out of the water, away from it and never put me there again. I did things I knew would make Frank put me under, just to see it. And each time, I wanted to stay a little longer, just to be with the flowers. And one day, when Frank went to pull me up, I held my head down. I wanted to stay there forever, because the cross of flowers was more beautiful each time I saw it. I wanted to stay there forever.

After that time, Frank didn’t put me under water anymore. I had been at my grandmother’s house for a long time.

I started helping Frank outside the house. I wasn’t as spoiled as I had been, my grandmother said, and god agreed. I was older, and my body was changing. And one day, when I was helping Frank outside, I blinked from dust off the rocks we were crushing, and when I closed my eyes I saw them, for the first time. Flowers. And every time after that I closed my eyes I could see them. They were beautiful.

As I got older, my grandmother did too. And though I didn’t think it would happen at first, Frank got old, too. That furry caterpillar turned grey. Like the color of dust. Frank couldn’t do as much as he used to, so he need my help more and more. One day, he said we were going into the forest to do some work my grandmother wanted done. I didn’t mention to Frank about the monster that lived there. The one that was in the dark, and liked to eat people whole. I was older, and I knew better then. I wasn’t a boy any longer.

We walked back into the forest, so far that I couldn’t see the house as it disappeared in the trees behind us. It was farther than I had ever been. We had out picks from crushing the stones that lay around the house. Frank said we’d need them for our work. The path got thinner and thinner, until we were practically crawling through the overgrowth. Finally, deep in the forest, where the trees grew thick overhead and blotted out the sunlight, the overgrowth fell away into a clearing. My heart was pounding, I noticed then. The hair on my neck stood stiff. I wasn’t a boy anymore. I knew better than that. When I closed my eyes, I saw flowers. And when I opened them, I saw a monster. Frank was screaming at it, but it didn’t help. I watched as the monster had its way with him, the little grey caterpillar stained red and yellow.

I hurried back through the overgrowth. But I knew it would never be fast enough. When I saw the house, I thought my lungs would explode. I ran in, because my grandmother was an old lady. I heard her in her room. Talking to god. I thought I had been fast enough, but when I looked in the room I saw I hadn’t. The monster was already there. She screamed at god to help her, but he must’ve not heard her, because he didn’t reply. When I was young, I believed her, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe she never talked to him at all. Maybe he’d never been there at all. She was an old lady and she couldn’t stop the monster. I just closed my eyes, and they disappeared. Flowers.

In the hollow in the forest lives a monster. It is a terrible monster. Deep, deep in the forest, where the light can’t go and it is always dark. I don’t know where the monster came from. Maybe they are always there. Maybe the monster has always been there.