SFWP Annual: Selections from the SFWP Quarterly
140
SFWP Annual: Selections from the SFWP Quarterly
140eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781939650726 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Santa Fe Writer's Project |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2017 |
| Series: | SFWP Annual |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 140 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
SAMANTHA EDMONDS
The Quarterly Issue 3 Fall 2015
How to Be
Decide
You're a happy kid. Sit in the back of the church-house three times a week with your feet propped up on the fuzzy red pew in front of you. Wear tights under your scratchy dress — your mother makes you anyway — so that this position is not quite as scandalous. Take off your shoes, black strappy sandals with a silver buckle. Balance a blue three-ring binder on your knees and scribble stories on wide-ruled notebook paper while the preacher shouts, Can I get an Amen? and the congregation says, Glory, Glory. Give these stories titles like "A Dog Called Hope" and "Mad as Heck But Still Best Friends." Declare yourself a writer at the age of ten and show everything you write to your mother as soon as you're finished.
To try something (good lord, anything) else, go to page 77.
To be a writer, jump to page 41.
RANDON BILLINGS NOBLE
The Quarterly Issue 1 Spring 2015
Moon and the Man
Everyone asked Neil Armstrong what it was like to walk on the moon. But how did the moon feel?
Four-and-a-half billion years ago the moon formed, the result of a tragic union between the Earth and an unknown, careening planet. Slowly, lento, largo, the Earth pulled itself together and the wreckage of this collision resolved itself into an orbiting moon.
Billions of years later, after the prokaryotes and the eukaryotes, the bilateria and the fish, the insects and seeds and reptiles and mammals, after the birds and the flowers, Homo sapiens evolved. In 35,000 BC, in what is now Swaziland, one of them carved twenty-nine notches into a piece of bone to make the earliest known lunar calendar. Even then we were tracking the moon, measuring it, fixing it. In 1609 an Englishman looked at the moon through a telescope and cut through nearly 239,000 miles of mystery. Maps were made; then globes. In 1839, photographs were taken. We knew what the moon looked like, we had charted all we could see, but what was there?
In the English language the moon was masculine until the sixteenth century. Then we remembered Selene, Luna, and Diana and the moon became the passive, feminine reflection of the sun' s light, the capacious surface for all our projections, the accommodating repository for our myths and inventions.
*
In 1959 the first man-made object, Luna 2, crash landed on moon. Did the moon feel a difference? Without an atmosphere to protect it, the moon has been bombarded with comets, asteroids, and meteoroids for its entire existence. Without wind or rain to erase and efface, each crater, pit, and pock remains. But perhaps now the moon felt a difference, being hit by something metal and not rock, something systematic, focused, and intentional, something that was not random, but a harbinger.
For millennia the moon's far side was invisible, unknowable, subject only to our speculations: aliens lived there, or ghosts; it was a version of heaven, hell, or purgatory. In 1959 Luna 3 returned the first hazy images of the no-longer-dark side: a rough and barren landscape of crater and shadow.
Then came the Apollo missions, named for the moon's opposite, the god of the sun; the god of music, art, and poetry; the god of knowledge. Apollo's mission was to know the moon, to apprehend it, to master it. A few years before Apollo 11 landed, C.S. Lewis wrote that the moon belonged to all humanity: "he who first reaches it steals something from us all."
When Armstrong's boot hit the surface of the moon in 1969 he stepped into the Mare Tranquilitatis, disturbing its equanimity. For the first time in all its long history a living being walked on the moon. Was there a quiver of longing? A shudder of revulsion? Or just the gray puffs of indifferent dust?
Legend has it that on the moon can be found everything that was wasted on earth: misspent time, squandered wealth, broken vows, unanswered prayers, fruitless tears, unfulfilled desires. What did Neil Armstrong find there? From his life? From mine?
*
Armstrong died when the moon was in its first quarter, on 25 Aug 2012. His ashes — gray as moondust — were buried not in the earth but the sea. His family asked that when you "see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink." A wink is given to indicate that something is a joke or a secret; it can also be a signal of affection or greeting. Does the moon share this jokey affection? Is it smiling — or merely beaming reflected light? Does it feel a sense of loss or is it relieved that that the first man to walk on its surface, to mark it, to leave his tokens and footprints and memory behind, will never return?
The wordless moon has no way of knowing the word "wink" comes from the word "wince."
In September, I drink tea and eat moon cakes, thinking about what I want during the Earth' s next orbit around the sun. How do I want to spend my time, what vows will I keep, what desires will I try to fill? What are my fixed relationships and how will I navigate them? What will evolve and what will be ongoing?
But my last prayer is for the moon itself — for it to have what it wants or to be at peace with what it has — silence and sterility while locked into orbit with this blue teeming earth.
CHAPTER 2
SAMANTHA EDMONDS
The Quarterly Issue 3 Fall 2015
How to Be
Rather than
Get accepted into the university of your choice, five and a half hours away from the boy you promised to marry, an hour from your mother. It will take you over two years to get your degree, more if you pursue the PhD, and in that time, he is not willing to relocate to be closer to you. His life has roots, unlike yours.
Leave him. Do not want to, but do it. Cry when you do. Watch him cry, too. Regret it. Think he was good and kind but average. Do not miss him, not at first. There are other boys in your cohort and they have chosen the path you have chosen, the one your ex thinks is crazy, the one made out of words and not tangible things. Perhaps you will fall in love with the words of one of these new men, but maybe not. It doesn't matter. You are here to write.
It is hard. It is, to be honest, mostly miserable. Get a studio apartment to yourself, the first time you have ever lived alone. On weekends, don't leave your apartment. Go two days or more without speaking to another human. Wonder if you exist. Dream of sex, but have none. Drink. Smoke. Spend your money on those vices instead of groceries. Miss your mother. Start to even miss, much later, the golden-eyed boy you've left behind. Wonder if you have made the wrong choice.
Start forgetting to call your mother every day. Settle on every other, then once a week. Then every two. Run out of things to say to her when she starts calling you. She does not know the names of your new grad student friends. She does not know what you're working on or what your apartment looks like.
Go out on weekdays with the students in your cohort and order PBRs and talk about Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace in smoky bars with no windows. Is the Mona Lisa just like the Most Photographed Barn in America? Will post-postmodernism ever catch on? Bring work home with you. Greet in the office on Monday the same people you shared Saturday night with. Write. Write. Write. Find in this terrible sadness some reluctant joy, surrounded by people who think like you, write like you. These peers will call your work prolific, but you will just call it lonely.
Wonder what your mother would think of it.
To give it all up, to move back and call home, go to page 69.
To keep following the words even into the darkest void, go to page
N. R. ROBINSON
The Quarterly Issue 6 Summer 2016
Our Institutions
Imagine Nichols Avenue, because Nichols is where we are headed. Granddad Alvarez does not take the usual Sunday scenic route: through downtown D.C., past the Lyndon B. Johnson White House and the sunburnt, sign-shaking Vietnam protesters. Instead, we hook a right from Randolph Place, and head down straight North Capital Street, past groups of Negroes huddled around bus stops and streaming from Catholic and Baptist and AME churches. My seven-year-old sister, Cookie, stares out at the hubbub. Because nothing will hold still in my nine-year-old head, I clench my eyes and study the glowing red of my inner eyelids.
It is 1965 and Gemini 5 is orbiting the planet. It has been two years since Cookie and I came to rest in the welter of the Alvarez home, a place where days are so unpredictable and like any other that time seems to stand stock-still. Two years since seeing hard-mouthed Grandma rheumy-eyed and wailing, "Lord ha' mercy, they done killed our President!" And TV images of a white man's head jerking under a halo of flesh-and-blood mist as his pink-suited companion scrambles over the trunk of their long black convertible. Two years earlier, Grandma signed Mama over to Saint E's, the city's government-run loony bin. To be fair to Grandma, Mama was on to her fourth suicide attempt.
This trip to see Mama, like our first trip two years past, is sometime after Halloween but before New Year's Day. We rumble down into the New Jersey Avenue tunnel, up onto the Southeast Freeway, over the 11th Street Bridge, and into the rising stench of the snot-green Anacostia River. Braking hard into the first exit, we descend onto Nichols Avenue. My anxiety builds through the slow climb up the gradual hill. Where Nichols levels out, a twelve-foot high brick wall ribbons the right of the avenue as far as I can see. We turn into the second gated entrance. Beside the elfin slit-window set into the stone of the guardhouse, a weathered bronze plaque announces: "Saint Elizabeth's Hospital est. 1855."
The Oz-like vista no longer surprises me. I could have sworn, back on our first visit, that we were entering some hidden-away fairy town, with ancient street signs set into winding roads leading to dozens of diminutive castles, and small groups strolling paths carved into the snowy slopes of a postage stamp village with a hilltop view of D.C.'s historic skyline.
On that first visit, Grandma mused, "Way back when, Saint E's was called The Government Hospital for th' Insane. Yo' Mama's docta' said it was th' world's first and largest asylum. Over a hundred thousand been locked away hea' — all types of crazy I neva' heard of." Grandma's minimus moved across the pamphlet: "Manic-depressive an' phobics; psychotics, paranoid an' schizophrenic; dis-so-ci-a-tive sickness," she sounded out, "amnesia an' multiple personalities; delirium an' dementia."
"What kinda' sick is Mama?" I asked, fear under my affected carelessness.
Following her own thoughts, Grandma said, "The docta's give 'em counsel'n.' But, if you ask me, ain't no way to fix 'em." She told us, "He said they can't get enough nurses or' docta's. Must be why them nutjobs is all nasty and beat up th' way they is."
Unwinding that first visit in my mind, I marched up the snow-covered walkway, my rubber-soled sneakers slipping on the slick sidewalk as I examined Mama's new home. Like many of Saint Elizabeth's buildings, hers was red brick stacked gothic style. As if some fantastic fortress, the structure had a tall center turret sandwiched between two smaller towers with crenellations along the top. In the keep-like lobby, a guard looked up from his Jet Magazine. After registering our names, he grunted into a black rotary handset and then pointed without looking at an ancient elevator. We jerked and rattled to our destination floor, and then spilled into a cube of a hallway. A small wall sign read: "Ward 3." Granddad pushed the single button set into the frame of the windowless door and we waited.
As Cookie squeezes my hand this day, I fidget alongside Granddad, standing stiff before that same windowless door. Grandma mutters, "Don' know why dese people always take so damn long!"
My stomach churns at the now-familiar fecal odor mixed with the smell of urine and Pine-Sol, a biotic stink that creeps beneath the door along with screams and the manic laughter that never fails to whip up fear within me: fear that whatever has touched Mama is budding within me; fear of being consigned to St. E's and locked in a ward like this.
Mama's mental illness, as I have experienced it, blossoms from a kind of unwilling hysteria. Because a feeling is a feeling (that cannot be reasoned with), I have decided that my own path to sanity is unemotion. I have deduced that strong-mindedness — control over anger, sadness, and, yes, fear — is the key to mental health. So I maintain my façade of calm through the clanking of the lock turning and the heavy door swinging open.
The four of us push through the Babel of voices into the now-expected semicircle of residents swarming like an audience settling in to watch some unintentional theater; faces expressionless, or twisting in laughter and sorrow; old, young, male, female, Negroes, and Caucasians all sporting the standard getup of pale green hospital gowns with tie-strings dangling over exposed buttocks.
Back on that first visit, half-circled by the residents as we are this day, I watched as a thin big-jointed man with Orderly In Charge sewn across the breast of his white jacket shooed the half-circle, "Get on now! Go on back to your bus'ness or you ain't getting no cigarettes."
We stood in the same cavernous room. To the front and right of the room sat then, like now, a chest-high counter behind which the two other white-jackets casually lounged. The very casualness of those uniformed men in that chaotic setting exuded a certain authority, a sense of inevitability. The nearest white-jacket nodded toward a corner where sunlight pushing through a barred window illuminated a ratty brown davenport and matching easy chair. That part of the room lay at the end of a long hallway punched with cave-like doorways. It was from one of these doorways that Mama emerged.
Before that first visit to Saint Elizabeth's, Cookie and I had gotten no news of Mama for months, since before her last self-destructive compulsion. Whenever we asked, Grandma'd said, "Y'all 'a find out soon enuf." But soon enuf never showed up. During those news-less months after Mama's disappearance, we'd been inconsolable: Cookie's face leaking tears and emitting a nonstop sibilance; me, withholding my emotions until bedtime when I'd wept then slept and, more often than not, pissed into my thin hard mattress; mornings awakened by cold urine-soaked sheets, a hurried stripping and flipping of the gray-striped pallet, then lugging my mess down to the basement washroom as Grandma followed, "You fucked up my good mattress n' sheets." I'd sent out psychic messages. Even, at times, cried out, "Come back, Mama!" But, it was Grandma who'd inevitably answered from her sofa-in-state, "Shut that racket, boy!" Living under Grandma's thumb took concentration and an odd sort of noncontrol, a kind of surrender, so that the hurt zipped right through, leaving no damage at all. This, at least, is what I believed then.
On that first visit to Saint E's, mitigating my enthusiasm was the fact that I had no idea what to expect. The very air stood at attention that day. When Mama emerged from one of the cavernous doorways, the in-charge orderly guided her. Knobby fingers encircling Mama's pale-slender arm, he whispered what I imagined were encouragements as she shuffled toward us in a gait different from the light prance we'd known. Her chestnut hair was electric, her pale skin paler. A hospital gown hung from her thinner-than-usual frame. Most noticeably, Mama's typically animated façade was as expressionless as the face on a nickel. Incredibly — incredible because it's difficult to convey how this could be true — Mama was still beautiful.
What was beautiful about Mama on that first visit was the stately manner with which she tried to right herself when she stumbled, and how she struggled to keep her sagging head erect, the slipping gown on her still-elegant shoulders, the feeble but dignified attempts she made to shrug out of the orderly's grasp. Mama was beautiful in the instinctive way that she, in spite of the circumstances, tried to maintain dignity and a sense of independence.
"Mad'line, you be good," the orderly said with a plugged-in sort of grin. "I'll be back ta get you in a few." He winked familiarly at her, then us, before turning and joining the other white-jackets chatting it up back at the nurse-less nurse's station.
Cookie threw her head and shoulders into Mama's lap. "Mommy!"
Grandma trilled, "Cheechee, why yo' walkin' round hea half-naked like yo' ain' got no home trainin'?"
During the orderly's instructions on that first visit, Cookie's hugging and crying, and Grandma's chiding, Mama sat immobile and placid, as if an invisible membrane sheltered her from the surrounding chaos. Perched at the edge of the easy chair, I watched, torn between wanting to run away from Mama and needing to bury my face between the bumps of her small breasts. Just then Mama looked up; her eyes locked with mine. Even in their dull emptiness, they were the eyes I'd always known. Her contrite-but-porcelain gaze shifted down to where Cookie clutched at her gown. "Hi, babies," Mama muttered in a soft, garbled voice.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "SFWP Annual Volume One"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Melanie J. Cordova.
Excerpted by permission of SFWP.
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