No, I’m not talking about someone being born or diagnosed with cancer or anything like that. I’m talking about my grandson’s sister and her friends checking their cell phones for another text message from one of their other friends and texting them back. These girls can’t live without their damn cell phones. Sure, I know, the boys are doing it too, but it just doesn’t bother me the same way it bothers me when I see girls doing it. I don’t know why, it just doesn’t.
It’s become such a natural thing for these young people to have their phones out and texting or surfing the web (you know they can do that now) or playing some kind of game. Cell phones have become an extension of the young people, something that is part of them, part of their identity. Almost like a growth or something. A wart.
Maybe that’s why I don’t like seeing girls fiddling around with cell phones so much. With young men you expect to see hands that are rough around the edges, signs of imperfections here and there, dirty fingers feverishly moving to cause some kind of change in the world. It’s the mark of manliness, in a sense.
Girls just shouldn’t have warts on their hands. Girls needn’t worry so much about making a difference in the world. Girls were meant to have painted nails and pleasant handwriting. Girls were meant to be pretty.
I’m sorry to say that my grandson’s sister has become most unpretty to me as of late.
“I guess you could say that. Leslie and I got into it pretty bad over something stupid and I ended up sleeping on the couch. I’m beginning to think that woman has completely lost her mind, I tell you. She’s becoming her damned mother, you know? Know what she did? There I was in the bathroom, shaving my face knowing I would have an early start today, and she’s lying in bed, talking about something I can’t remember now and getting louder and louder and louder by the minute. So she’s talking and I suddenly cut my lip with the razor. It didn’t hurt, really. In fact, I didn’t feel much of anything, but the damned lip wouldn’t quit bleeding no matter what I did to try and stop it. I put my head in the sink and let cold water run over it for awhile, but that didn’t help. I pinched it until I thought my whole lip would turn white, but as soon as I let go it would start up again. And of course I tried putting some toilet paper over it, but it turned into an unmanageable, soggy mess. Meanwhile, Leslie is still going on and on about the same thing she’d been going on about before. Finally I say to her, ‘Would you mind keeping your voice down while I try to keep from bleeding to death?’ She stops talking, comes into the bathroom and helps me stop the bleeding with some kind of cream she keeps in the medicine cabinet. It was actually quite sweet and I thought I’d be going to bed in a very nice mood, but as I sat up against my pillow and began to read a few pages of my book she turned to me with a serious look on her face and says, ‘You cut your lip on purpose, didn’t you? You cut yourself on the lip so you could change the subject and not have to answer any of my questions. Am I right?’ Needless to say, I looked at her with one of those looks, you know what I mean? We screamed at each other for a few minutes until I got tired of it and went downstairs and slept on the couch. You believe that, Mack?”
“Did you get any blood on the couch?”
“I don’t think I did. Leslie had it patched up pretty good and the sofa I slept on has very dark upholstery.”
Ned’s mother had always told him he would smoke himself to death one day. He used to come home on the weekends, back when he was in college, and sit out on the porch after lunch and read his school materials, all the while smoking his cigarettes and sipping on water with a few cubes of flavored ice in the glass. He would tell his mother about his friends, about college, about girls, and about the professors and their ideas and lectures. She would tell him that he was turning into a human ashtray.
He had quit smoking a few years ago when his first child was born, but he was smoking now as he drove to visit his mother at the care home. He always smoked before seeing her. He always went to visit her alone.
When his mother’s memory started to deteriorate and she moved into the care home, Ned went to visit her every Saturday after mowing the lawn. The forgotten details became more significant over time and it wasn’t long before Ned’s mother no longer recognized him. For a few weekends Ned and his mother would converse like strangers until Ned would say goodbye and that he would see her next Saturday. Same time. She would ask him why he would do a thing like that and turn to the television.
Ned began smoking just before his weekly visits after receiving a call from the care home during a particular week. They told him that his mother had begun speaking to a young orderly as if he were her son, telling him that his habit would kill him just as it had killed his father. The orderly had just returned from a smoking break and was convinced Ned’s mother believed him to be Ned. On his next visit, Ned sat in the care home parking lot, smoked a half dozen cigarettes, walked into the common room where his mother had been seated, sat down beside her and said hello.
And they talked to each other.
It wasn’t real conversation, of course, and it never would be. Ned’s mother only talked about how Ned shouldn’t smoke so much. She said it would eventually kill him. She warned that he’d never find a nice girl until he quit. To this, Ned always nodded his head in solemn agreement, passively looking for scuffmarks on the linoleum floor.
In the end, he knew it was nothing. He knew his mother was capable of living without him; that she might never again think of him were he to suddenly stop visiting her on these Saturdays. He often wondered if that wouldn’t be the best thing to do under the circumstances. He wondered if it wouldn’t be better for his mother’s mind to have complete rest from him. He reasoned that it would most certainly be better for his own health.
He smoked one more cigarette before walking into the care home. He looked at the bits of cut grass on his shoes as his mother told him that a girl would never marry a man with yellow teeth. It all made him feel like a new kind of son. Not the happy kind, but the kind that sits with his mother in a care home and is simply content.
The neighborhood cats roam around in my front yard late at night. I look at them through the blinds of my window when I have trouble sleeping, which is most nights these days. I’m not privy to the reasons behind their gathering at this place, my home, and they don’t seem to notice me at all.
For weeks I watched them saunter across my manicured lawn, without any thought or concern as to how I felt about their being there. Finally, it became too much. I wanted to make it clear that I was tired of being treated like a nobody; tired of their assumption that no one of consequence lived at the house where they held their nightly meetings; tired of them acting as though someone wasn’t watching them through the blinds of his window.
It was usually around 2:00 AM when the cats gathered on my lawn. I adjusted the timer of my sprinklers accordingly.
I am writing you down because Allen told me I should. “I don’t know how you haven’t started doing this sooner,” he said to me at last Thursday’s meeting… Hmm, that’s funny. I was about to say that Allen is a good guy and I’m glad he’s in the group, but the fact is he’s a creep and that’s why he’s in the group in the first place. I guess I’m still struggling with the notion that I’m in the same room as some of these people, mostly because I don’t think I’m a creep at all. At least not like Allen. I’m just a very angry person right now.
Allen is angry too, but he is the violent kind of angry; the kind of angry that made him break both of his hands on the hood of his car because it wouldn’t start. That, as they say, is a very bad kind of angry. People don’t need to worry about me like they need to worry about Allen. I couldn’t be violent even if I wanted to.
Allen says what makes him angry is when he thinks about when his dog ran away and got killed. He always talks about that dead hound at the meetings, saying he knows it was his fault the dog got out and that he didn’t look for it right away. He says he broke his hands on the hood of his car because the anger poured over him like an ocean wave. He couldn’t get it to start and that made him think about the dog and that made him lose his cool, he said. Like a bad chain reaction.
I guess I’m understanding Allen a bit more now that I’m writing about him. I’m starting to think he isn’t as creepy as I thought he was just a few minutes ago. I say that because I can relate to that feeling of anger he described; how it washes over him, pulls him under, and drags him out.
I feel the same way whenever I think about what people said to me after the accident. They didn’t really know what else to say, I guess. I’m not so sure I would know what to say were I in their position, but the fact that I was forced to complete the thought on my own, well, that wore me down real quick.
“You’re not dead,” they would say with a sincere, thoughtful, ‘we’re gonna pull through this together’ expression on their face. It always seemed like they were saying it to make themselves feel better about my situation, about my becoming, in an instant, totally incapable of moving or feeling anything below my collar bone.
I remember it was the doctor who spoke to me first: He told me what had happened, told me time would tell, told me I wasn’t dead. The pastor came by, told me to pray, told me to have faith, told me I wasn’t dead. My wife came in, told me she was sorry, told me things would get better, told me I wasn’t dead. And every time I heard it I would think the same thing. (I don’t want to write it down for you because I’m trying to get it out of my system. Allen says it’s good to get rid of what he calls “negativity baggage” or something like that…)
I’m gonna have to ask my wife to remind me to ask Allen at the next meeting what the name of his dog that died was.
William stared at the empty glass on the table and felt sick to his stomach. Not because he didn’t like the taste of the tap water and not because it was poisoned, but because he knew that every glass of water he would ever drink from that moment on would have a molecule of water in it that he had, at some point, already drunk. He had performed the necessary calculations and figured that he had been alive long enough for this to be the case. Now, however painfully, he would have to live with the fact that drinking water, that most essential action to human life, would never again be new and fresh. It would always be a repeat.
He had not, however, performed the same calculations for alcohol, so he willed himself to the bar on the corner and took solace in the reality that he probably had some twenty or so years before he would need to cross that proverbial bridge.
Extreme deviations in nature often require that such deviations be placed on the extremes of the social structures to which they most closely adhere. Take, for example, the albino frog, who is white while his comrades are greenish. This discrepancy creates serious problems in many areas, both natural and social, to be discussed herein.
Naturally, the albino frog lacks the evolutionary advantage of camouflage. Predators can easily spot him at night as well as during the day due to his inability to blend in with his natural environment. Socially, this places the albino frog in an especially tough spot. As greenish frogs begin to recognize the albino frog’s propensity to attract predators both day and night, they will decide that it is in their best interest to either ostracize the albino from their social group or leave him altogether and seek out a new home for themselves, but most likely the former.
In nature, the albino frog’s pale skin prevents him from spending a lot of time in the sun. Because he must avoid the sun, the albino frog finds himself deficient of many essential vitamins that would normally aid in his psychological development. In frog society, the albino frog’s paleness is a great hindrance as it prevents him from socializing with other frogs while they bathe in the sunlight. Additionally, the aforementioned lack of vitamins from the sun takes a developmental toll on the albino frog, making him irritable, antisocial, and generally unpleasant to be around. This typically leads to the greenish frogs’ decision to either ostracize the albino frog from their social group or leave him and seek out a new home for themselves, but most likely the former.
The albino frog naturally develops a set of eyes quite different from those of his greenish counterparts. His pupils are white, as if glazed over by a permanent fog. This trait drastically inhibits the albino frog’s eyesight, making him, in almost every case, legally blind. This development, as you can imagine, has significant social repercussions that can prove disastrous to the albino frog. One such occurrence can be witnessed in the area of frog courtship. When a male albino frog approaches another male frog and begins to flirt with him, mistaking him for a female (owing to his poor eyesight), the albino frog suffers horrendous ridicule and embarrassment at the webbed hands of his comrades. This can lead to the albino frog’s resolution to either ostracize himself entirely from the social group or request of the other frogs that they leave and seek out another place to live, but most likely the former.
“So tell me about this girl,” he said, bending over to tie one of his shoes.
“There’s not much to tell, really. I was with Jake when I met her. It was at the sporting goods store on Addison… Why don’t you have Jake tell you the story? Like I said, he was there.”
“Because I want to hear it from you, that’s why.” He sat back in his chair and scratched at his chin.
“Well, Jake wanted to go in and look at the guns they had in stock. I don’t really care much about guns but I didn’t have much going on so I said alright. We looked around for a bit, mostly at the guns, then we saw her behind a glass counter near the apparel and decided to talk to her.”
“What was she selling?” he asked.
“What’s that?”
“What was it that she was selling behind the glass counter? You’re saying she worked there?” He made a few notes on his paper as he listened.
“Oh. She was selling knives and binoculars, I believe.”
“Why are you smiling?” he asked.
“Hmm?”
“You smiled when you said she was selling knives and binoculars. Why is that?” He made a few more notes on his paper.
“Oh, I don’t know. I guess because I think it’s a little funny that she was selling binoculars. It seemed fitting, now that I think about it.”
“Go on.”
“I don’t really know how to say it. There was just something about her eyes, I guess. It was something about the way they made her look. And it might seem strange, but for the life of me I can’t remember what color they were. Has that ever happened to you? Anyway, I looked into them for a while as we talked over the glass counter about knives and what she knew about them. But now, lying here, the only thing I can really tell you about those eyes is that they made her look stupid. It may seem callous, but there it is: She had stupid eyes.”
“Interesting. And did Jake say anything to this young woman?”
“Yes, but it was like it always is when Jake talks to anybody. He tries to get their attention but they always act like he isn’t even there. No one listens to him, they just ignore him and talk to me. It makes me feel awful, as you can imagine.”
“Embarrassment for others is part of the human experience,” he replied, making another note on his paper.
“Oh, what do you know? You’re just like everybody else I talk to; you’re no different! Jake has been sitting here politely this entire conversation and you have yet to answer his question regarding where you got that nice blue sweater.”
My name is LaShawndra Michaels and this is my story.
It was just a job to me; something that I could do to help out my husband and our family and make sure my boys would have a chance to go to college. My husband is a clerk in an office building and don’t get paid much for what he do. I didn’t go to college, didn’t even finish high school until I’d already had my first baby. I got a job working with the TSA because it paid alright and wasn’t too far away from where I lived at the time. I have three kids, all growin’ boys, and I’d do anything for ‘em.
I know y’all don’t want to hear about me and my family, though. You want to hear about the thirteenth day of January, 2012. Well, since the reason I’m telling you this story is so you can understand, so the world can finally understand, why what happened happened, I guess I’ll get right to it.
I had patted down a lot of people that day, just like every other day. There had been a lot of uproar, as I’m sure you know, all you TSA haters, that us inspectors wasn’t doin’ our jobs the right way. People thought we was inspectin’ people who didn’t need inspectin’ and touchin’ people in ways we shouldn’t a been touchin’ ‘em. We all worried about it, but at the end of the day we all needed the job because we all had families.
Anyways, I still remember when they came up my line and opted out of the body scanner. Dorothy and Madeline Whitaker, a mother and daughter most people might think belonged in some kind of mother-daughter magazine. The mother, Dorothy, she had on some nice clothes, don’t exactly remember what, and beautiful straight, blonde hair. Madeline, as you know, wore that awful red coat that made her look so round and heavy.
The two approached me and right away Mrs. Whitaker pulled out her smartphone and started recording.
“And now we’ll see how the maniacs of the TSA grope and molest my innocent little girl in front of this crowd of strangers,” she said. “The internet is going to love this!”
I saw her recording me and I got scared. I knew the airport security camera behind me was also recording everything and that if I didn’t do my job they way I was supposed to I could get fired. I thought about my growin’ boys and them having to see their mother get called a groper and a molester on the internet and thought about what people would say.
“Calm down, ma’am,” I told Mrs. Whitaker as I knelt down in front of her daughter. The girl looked at me with a kind of scared look on her face, like her mommy was takin’ her somewhere she didn’t want to go. Anyway, I’m not afraid to admit it and I never have been: I didn’t give the girl a proper pat-down like I should’ve. I looked into her pretty little blue eyes and lightly felt around her waist and legs. I really thought she was just a sweet little girl a bit on the chubby side. I then gave her mother the full pat-down for trying to embarrass me in front of everyone. She didn’t make a peep about it.
I know that I deserved to lose my job. I know that the shame I carry now is worse than what it might’ve been if I’d done things by the book. I was afraid of how I might look to the world and it cost me more than I ever thought it would.
I want to say that I’m sorry. To everyone. I’m sorry to my family for being an embarrassment. I’m sorry to the TSA for not doing my job like I should’ve done. And most of all, I’m sorry to the victims and their families for failing to uncover the explosives that Dorothy hid beneath her daughter’s red coat.
I’m not quite sure how to end this; with a “the end,” maybe?
Richard Fiedler sent his wife after some bread and locked the door behind her, knowing he wouldn’t have much time before she returned. He sat at the kitchen table, brushing off the last few crumbs of the evening’s supper and pulling the candle nearer to himself. He cleaned his rusted bifocals on the underside of his shirt and put them on again. Finally, with marked hesitation, he pulled out the envelope from his coat pocket and set it down in front of him. He hadn’t been mistaking.
Earlier that day, when the courier had given him his letters, Richard had noticed this particular envelope and the symbol it bore on the front. He hadn’t taken his glasses with him to the post office, but he thought he could make out the familiar mark and promptly hid it from his wife until opportunity allowed him a better look. Now that he saw it and knew what it was, Richard feared even more for his wife’s early return and hurried to see what the letter contained.
He struggled to open it. He tracked his eyes from the candle’s flame to his smooth and disfigured hands. The scars were old and many and, though it pained Herr Fiedler to think about it, had been the birthparents of countless scars just like them. After ripping open a side of the envelope and taking out the letter, Richard began to wonder if the terrible progeny of his hands had not yet seen its end.
He hoped the letter had been typewritten, but was disappointed to see that someone had taken the time to write it by hand. Richard read the first line:
FROM THE OFFICE OF COLONEL ABEL VON BERGMANN, DATED MARCH, 1938. ATTENTION: LIEUTENANT RICHARD FIEDLER (RETIRED)
The rest of the letter was difficult for Herr Fiedler to read under his constraints. Quickly and with great effort, he managed to decipher enough of the Colonel’s handwriting to understand the purpose of the message.
GREETINGS, HERR FIELDER. I HAVE THE DISTINGUISHED HONOR OF WRITING YOU… EXEMPLARY ACHIEVEMENTS AND INNOVATIONS DURING THE GREAT WAR… ADVANCEMENTS IN TECHNOLOGY VITAL TO PROGRESSION… FRUITFUL RETIREMENT… YOUR WORK ON THE FLAMETHROWER… NEW ADVANCEMENTS CURRENTLY BEING ENGINEERED BY TOP SCIENTISTS… MY DISTINCT HONOR TO EXTEND TO YOU AN INVITATION TO OVERSEE AND MANAGE THESE TESTS… FIELD OPERATIONS AND LODGINGS IN DORTMUND… LOOK FORWARD TO YOUR REPLY.
For a moment Herr Fielder could do nothing. The awful letter shook in his trembling hands as he fought the urge to scream in anger. His eyes became wet and his throat began to throb. He had fooled himself into thinking that time would remove him from the equation; that the pain had been so hot and so deep so as to make it impossible to feel pain like that again, like some kind of horrific burn. He had always believed that fire was terribly magical that way.
His wife knocked at the door and Richard hid the letter in his coat. He would have to get rid of it some other time. And he already knew how he would do it.
George Mentes ordered himself a drink and an appetizer. With him at the table were two junior accountants, sharply dressed in navy and gray suits, respectively, and the new guy from human resources, a portly man with thinning hair and a bad taste in neckties. They finished their first orders and looked around the restaurant, each waiting for one of the others to say something. The junior accountant in the gray suit finally spoke.
“How about Melanie and those box stamps today? Don’t get me wrong, I think she’s a sweet lady and all, but sometimes I wonder if she’s got any brains in that head of hers.”
The guy from human resources nodded indifferently, staring down at a black speck next to where his utensils had been placed. It was quiet again at the table. After a few minutes the drinks arrived and George took a sip and cleared his throat.
“You know, the brain is a pretty funny thing,” he said. He took off his suit coat and hung it behind him on the back of his chair and loosened his tie. ”I once met this guy on a business trip,” he continued, “must’ve been some ten, twelve years ago, by the name of Al Simmons. I’d left Calgary and was heading back home to Spokane, where I lived and worked at the time, and decided to stop at the national park that’s in Montana, I think it’s called Glacier or Glacial National Park or something… Anyway, I drive through the park and it’s really lovely. I get hungry so I stop at a burger place to eat, and while I’m eating my lunch at this place I feel someone tap me on the shoulder. I turn around and this gentleman who was about my age excuses himself and asks me how I got the scar on the back of my head - well, I mean you’ve all probably seen it, it’s pretty conspicuous. So I tell him that I fell off the bleachers when I was at a college rally and split my head open and had thirty-four stitches.
“‘Ok,’ he says to me.
“‘Why do you ask?’ I say.
“‘Well,’ he says to me, ‘I used to be a brain surgeon and was just curious if you’d had an operation.’
“‘Nope, just stitches,’ I tell him. ’And what do you mean you used to be a brain surgeon? You don’t seem very old. Have you already retired?’ I ask.
“He says to me, ‘Well, let’s just say that something happened a few years ago and I can’t practice medicine anymore. I’ve got a new job out here now that I enjoy and that keeps me busy.’ I assumed he had some kind of important job because you have to be pretty smart to be a brain surgeon, so I asked him what it was they had him doing out there in the park.
“‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’m on a crew that digs ditches, basically. You see, they don’t want to bring in heavy equipment up here in the park if they don’t have to, so, when there is digging that needs to be done, they call on me and my crew to go in and do it.’
“‘Gosh,’ I tell him, ‘that sure seems different than poking around in someone’s skull for a living, if you ask me.’
“‘That’s true,’ he says, and here is the good part of the story, ‘but digging is a great thing to do if you enjoy your own thoughts. I’ve spent more than enough time up to my arms in other people’s brains, but out here I get the quiet of the country and the pleasantness of my very own thoughts and imaginations.’”
The guy from human resources nodded his head indifferently and continued to stare at the black speck. It was quiet once again at the table until the junior accountant in the navy suit spoke.
“Well now, that’s something to think about, isn’t it?”
The waitress came back to the table and asked the men if they were ready to order. They said they were. She began with the guy from human resources.
“What can I get you, sir?” she said. ”And by the way, I think that’s a really fabulous tie you’re wearing.”
Every year around this time, whether I like it or not, I’m reminded of what it truly means to be a hero. This will be the ninth time I’ve had to sit through this particular form of torture, but, like any good American, I’m here at home, watching television. The special programs help my brain reinforce the idea that a hero is somebody that runs into a burning building to save people; someone who will rush a cockpit, kill some terrorists, and purposely crash a plane to preserve the lives of others; someone who, against all odds, survives this or that or whatever, makes it back to their family, and lives a happy, quiet life with the occasional interview on NBC. That is what a hero is, what a hero does, and anything less is, well, unheroic.
Even though my brother was killed on September 11, 2001, I know that most people wouldn’t consider him to be a hero. That’s because late that Monday night he got piss drunk and wrapped his little white sedan around a telephone pole on a remote road outside of Las Vegas, killing him and a friend. They didn’t find them until early the next morning, so while most people in my time zone woke up to chaos and burning buildings on television, I was at home with my parents, grieving for other reasons. Every year since then, when people unite and talk about the heroes of New York and Flight whatever, I sit by myself and think about my brother, the unhero.
I want you to know it’s not true, my brother being unheroic. He taught me how to ride a bike and shoot rabbits and smoke without getting caught. He was a hero to me, even if the world wouldn’t see him that way. Anyways, I loved him.
I still can’t get over it … In fact, I almost have to laugh … An entire city, chock full of heroes … Heroes to spare and yet nothing left over.
Mark is what you would call a bully. He’s big, even for a fifth grader, and he likes to make fourth graders like me turn red in the face in front of all his friends. I’ve seen what he’s done to other fourth graders and have learned to stay away from him. I do this by hiding in the farthest corner of the field by where the fences meet and the trees drop a bunch of leaves on the ground. I usually sit there during recess and lunchtime, watching out for him and his gang. I know if they found me they would make jokes about me, or maybe even try to pick a fight. Grown-ups say that bullies are bullies because they don’t know how else to express the feelings that they have. Why couldn’t they just play football or something?
Anyways, this one day at school I had a really close call. It was about the middle of recess and I really had to go to the bathroom. I didn’t usually go back toward the classrooms until after I heard the bell ring, but I was scared I might have an accident and that everyone in the fourth grade would make fun of me once we got back to class. I quickly walked past some kids playing football, and then some kids playing basketball once I got to the courts. I didn’t see Mark and his friends anywhere, which made me glad. But when I opened the door to the bathroom I heard Mark and one of his friends giving some kid a swirly. They were in the big stall at the far end and didn’t know that I was there. Like I said, I really had to go, so, without making a sound, I went up to one of the empty urinals and went pee (I didn’t even unbutton or unzip my pants because I was afraid they might hear). Then I waited for them to get to the part of the swirly where they flush the toilet, and when that happened I flushed at the same time and ran out as quick as I could. I walked back out to the corner of the field where the fences meet, sat down, and waited until the end of recess. It really was a close call.
Just so you know, I washed my hands in the drinking fountain on the way back to class. I wouldn’t want you to think I’m dirty or anything.
