Poetry

Fiction

Nonfiction

poetry

Haymaker

Gale Acuff

I'll be dead before you know it I tell
Miss Hooker after Sunday School today
but that's all right since I'll get to see God
soon and she said Well, Gale, you need to be
saved first before anything else happens
good to you because where you're headed now
if the Lake of Everlasting Fire but
I don't even know how to swim in water,
then she smiled, her teeth are bright-white like new
tombstones, I mean if they're made of marble
but the ones in our church cemetery
are kind of a stubbly blue-gray granite
and her smile is like a small valley, maybe
meadow, it starts at a high point and then
dips and comes out on a high point again
and her nose is like a haystack but hay
-stack built by hand and not by baler and
as for her eyes, call 'em pools, Doc Savage
has such eyes but his are yellow or gold,
I think Miss Hooker's are about as
blue as you could want, the blue of clean pond
water or of course blue sky or how glass

appears blue-some if held up to the light
and as far as her face in general, milk
or maybe yogurt without fruit, maybe
the fruit's on the bottom and you haven't
stirred it up in the yogurt yet--you'd be
surprised how much detail you can notice
in just a few seconds, especially
if you're in love, which I am, I'm in love
with Miss Hooker and she's in love, too, though
with God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost
and not me, not like I'd like her to, not
that I know what I'd like, not all of it
anyway, I'm only 10, 25
is her sum so what do you do with love
that you try to send out but goes nowhere?
In fact I even asked Miss Hooker that
so as to change the subject, if it was
a change, I'm not sure, I don't want to go
to Hell but even more I don't want to
talk about it and she replied Maybe
that's why Jesus died and I said All right
and maybe it really is. Love's hopeless.

Life Is

Candice Kelsey

a seven-mile stretch
of coastal road
in Carlsbad
California
North County
offering order
& form to the chaos
a gesture
of negotiable lines
paved sketch
astride
the ocean’s face
a reminder
as we drive
at any moment we could
become one
with vastness
the wine-dark voice
of sirens
this
grassy slight inland
village
calls us away
from curiosity
for pilgrim mercies
know
we will seize
the eastward road
toward
predictability
safety & land
never
turning west
toward the wild
terrifyingly
wild salt spray risk
smudged
sand-lick vignette
fools
we trust this coastal road
we miss
the billows we
miss
the beauty.

Up Here, All Things Float

Dan Cardoza

We know what makes
a balloon float,
clouds without string too.

After all, we built magic
up there, if just to redeem
prayer.

All things ascend somewhere.

So much so,
the dark vault of sky
impossibly sags

clouds buckle like
riveted steel beams with cracked
seams, impossibly so.

For now the patched stitches
won’t sieve, though a few
believe it’s only a matter of time.

VOID OF GOD

Paige McBride

after Elaine de Kooning's painting Bullfight

your painted breathing black feet lost all reflection
in the color of light in the world you never knew

the vacant ivory veil of bloodless snow covered
up your blind spiritless eyes of pallid uninspired
color

the choices to step void of head spoke little
as you watched your hand and brush melt
into the fast strokes of your colorless canvas

void of prayer void of divinity void of God

little dark dove with no soul while living
why did you abandon your gift from the light

at this moment as I stare into the bullfight
of once your mind once painted on a canvas

I think about the empty brush
strokes left by your overshadowed dark
hands and feel nothing.

Past the Millennium

Trent Busch

Nothing has come around the house
this morning I wasn’t expecting,
the wren’s quick song a false alarm;

still, winter’s first snow on the lawn
quite surprises me, and I recall Hardy’s
thrush announcing a new century.

To think it over a hundred years
ago he leaned upon his thicket gate
in woe far different from our own.

Could I, I would say to him, now
fully targeted as his Tennyson,
We still look up and give a start—

if sometimes from the fifteenth floor
on tubes you wouldn’t understand—
at the moon’s full gaze upon our art.

And add, could he listen, the bird’s song
I heard today still sounds its promise;
the century’s gate’s as it was then.

Car Trip

Connie Jordan Green

Somewhere in the rain
and mist of a winter day
you travel with your family—
those souls that have fled
still united in the gray Ford,
your father’s cigarette smoke
eddying around your head,
your stomach turning, nausea
as dizzying as the steep mountains,
your mother’s cool hand
passing you a lemon slice,
the bitter bite of it like a fresh
wind that pushes down the bile,
and once more the world
is icicles hanging from stone
outcroppings, battered houses
clinging to the mountainsides,
the car turning, turning,
curves and drop-offs lurching
past like dreams that sometimes
pursue you through the night—
but for those few hours all
you hold dear secure in that car
making its way from shadow
into sunlight.

In the Leaves, Something

after Mary Oliver

Connie Jordan Green

In last fall’s brown leaves
something coiled,
not a rope

unless a rope is patterned
yellow and black,
more intricate

than the leaf’s own mottling,
unless a rope
waits like a spring.

The cats stand back, lean
toward the curled mass,
their curiosity

hovering thick as the snake’s
patience, birds sing
from the maples,

nests tucked among
this year’s
green leaves.

Trees breathe in, out, summer
and her extravagance
ready to strike.

Last Evening in June

Cameron Morse

I hear the reports of fireworks—
or thunder—too early
for the fourth. Storm clouds unfurl

slowly in the smoke of their own
incineration, burning flags
draped over the coffin of the sky’s

west wing, obfuscating the truth.
Which I might as well tell you
is that I live for these moments of absolute

solitude, dogs already caged
inside the house, darkness gathering
in the arms of the rosebush,

arms already empty. Blossoms so soon
spilled, cake the elbow of the sidewalk,
dead-end receptacle for lavender
and white, piercingly
white lips.
Farther down
the fence line, honeysuckle leaves
lift up the beetles
in prayer which sleep and feast upon them,
little iridescent angels of death,
mandibles grinding like teeth.

The Sultriness

Cameron Morse

A bumblebee slips its long hairy tongue
down the throat of the Rose of Sharon blossom.
Below the branch, rosebuds encrust
the sidewalk. Wind roughens its caresses,
whispering in the dark morning sky.

I no longer feel like the carpenter ant
caught walking across the bathroom mirror
and coaxed into a Mason jar, bottlecap
screwed behind me. Moving back
into my parent’s basement, I wondered

if I’d returned to my place of birth
to die. Now, like the ant that has come
to rest at the bottom of its invisible
world, I’ve acclimated to the sultriness
of my own breath against the glass.

The Mainland

Victoria Shippen

She was always here before now.
I’ve never had her not here at least.
I am confused without her. How could she be gone dead?
Is it the 49 years of always that makes this island of no motherness so cold and lonely?

I worry I’ll vomit from pain.
I wish I could.
My skin is hot and swollen.
I worry about its ends continuing to meet.

In my demented state, I like anorectics. They deny need.
I am sure we are kin. I feel less lonely.
Fleetingly I wish for membership:
skateguard collar bones and chicken wing shoulder blades.
Would I feel good then?

Is there hope? I cry so hard I get sore throats.
I cry wherever I am. I have lost all privacy.
I worry I’m insane; it is only me who howls,
a pup left too long, too late at night,
except I am 49, and half-person.

At 6 a.m. I have no gravelymothervoice to call,
I ache for her “Oh, there you are, dear”
me, a fundament of her universe,
a locating device I didn’t know I relied on.

All provinces, now met alone, seem demonically barren.
I am an estate of otherness, sure that pain and life are the same word.
It no longer matters that she was horribly cold, even malevolent.
My life’s internal horizon, was her, every day, not that I knew it.
I thought my soul inseparable from its points of arrival and departure

52 Trumbell Street

Victoria Shippen

My father, Robert Shippen, born to replace
his dead older brother, couldn't.
Raised by cook and nurse,
common to his culture, he was put
to his mother for afternoon tea.

Washed at 3, in his navy suit, by 4,
nurse would carry him downstairs:
"Be still, Bobbie, be good.
Remember she doesn't like you
to look at her, and don't talk.
That's a good boy."

Nurse didn't stay in the room. She was Irish.
She'd stand in the doorway, watch for his errors.
Obediently, as much as he could do, he did.
He'd hold his chubby little hands behind him, stand
still, look at the wallpaper, count and sort, play picture.

Sometimes, in those twenty minutes, his mother talked:
the sky, weather, flowers, the rug, cook, father.
But the usual sound was the two gold coins of her bracelet jingling,
or the tea cup landing on its plate, or the soft rub
of her fingers on a coin.

Once she'd had him on her lap, lifted him
to sit on her thick red dress.
He had leaned into her, the smell of her.
She stroked the bracelet, showed him his initials
but two dates: b. 3/’18 d. 8/’18. “Your brother who died,” she said:
“wonderful Robert, who played on my lap for hours.”

This son smiled up at her. He could sit still like this forever.
He could feel her warmth, and it was coming for him.
He reached out and touched the tingling coins.
She put him off her lap and called for nurse.

Removing a Colony

Sara Eddy

Pressing my cheek against the wall
I feel their industry in my skull
and smell the sweetness
of their hive bond before
I see any trace of them.
They’re invisible, the ghost
workers in our wall,
but we’ll have to make them leave.
The weight of their honey will
warp the wallboard and bring down
the house, and the sight of them
careening in and out through
their narrow entrance in the siding
will frighten the neighbors.
We call in a white suit with smoke
and tools and patience to open the wall
and slice out their comb,
relocating room and board and
bees into hive boxes. He takes
each laden leaf of comb gently,
his goatskin gloves dripping gold
and the house soon stinking
of bees and wax and honey.
He is careful to find the queen
and lift her with deference
into her new kingdom.
The workers will all follow,
refugees now, and they’ll
ride in a pick-up for miles
through fields of strange flowers
to a new hive home, leaving me
strangely bereft, wondering
if there might have been
other possibilities.

Fingernails of Grain, Which Kept Safe My Childhood

For my father
after Aleš Šteger

Erin Wilson

I think there is no learning ahead of me. I think all of the learning to happen is behind me.

You gave the silk of your manness like a white flag. You surrendered. Oh, you gave yourself willingly, nightly, like the moon to the sky.

There were nights beyond the barn—but only in theory.

All else rested nearby, illuminated by your sphere.

We were swollen ticks, glamoured in the thickness of our bedclothes. The rooster quivered once, but it was only a settling of its feathers. The nervous hens closed their eyes and dropped all that was held by their bodies into their laps. Dappled slates, they awaited their fates, while the voracious weasel burrowed meticulously. Everything was in its place, from the forehead, to the furred paws.

The engendering:

1. Nest inside your body with now's narration: now come here, now shovel shit, now pound some nails. A saga, for instance, is a carrot pulled from the ground when you're hungry.

2. Hold things: axes, buckets, springs and greasy metal workings, knives, forks, mom, me, the thread fed through the eyes for jigging.

3. Be—and never worry.

The wheat is poor. Or the wheat is rich. The wheat is enough if parcelled stoically.

 Everything is to be gained.

 All will be lost.

It Happened a Long Time Ago and Keeps Happening

Erin Wilson

It's happening
right now
and I'm looking at it
but I'm startled
that each day
it could be told
in infinite ways.

i.
For instance, my mother,
at her kitchen table,
is wringing her hands.
The air between us
is gentle. I know her.
And because of my life
I know where she has been.
She addresses the loss.
The cornice of her face
hits the table
alongside the apple pie.
She keeps talking.
I'm very slowly
nodding, yesss.

ii.
Or, my mother is excited
by a thin strand of lights
she's strung up
over her kitchen sink.
It's off. She turns it on.
See? she asks hopefully.
I've learned to lie gently
over the years. Oh, I respond,
it's lovely.

But just how many lights
might it take to illuminate
this house as brightly
as she feels she needs to?

A house is made of time.

iii.
Even the plastic flowers
on his grave
fade.

Driving in Puerto Rico After Hurricane María

Dorsía Smith Silva

I.
It’s dark now.
September.
Quite cruelly hot.

II.
Barreling down the streets, full of large chunks
of black tangled wires, shattered glass, and splintered stop signs,
I swing from lane to lane,
crisscrossing across the double yellow lines like bursting lattices.
Now that the earth has fallen around me,
my car crushes all that is underfoot.
Locked into its roaring appetite,
the tires take the asphalt hostage, so effortlessly
shake the concrete barriers,
gather the flesh of gravel pebbles.

III.
And here in a land without traffic lights: day after day,
there is a firm shade of understanding,
so that my car chops down all like a chainsaw,
forging a new path in the sea of debris.
In this season of hurricanes, I grow fearless:
a warrior consuming one road after another,
of the many wild domains.

fiction

Forest Succession

Paul Lamb

David woke in the night and reached for Kathy, but she wasn’t there. He stayed still for a moment in a darkness that seemed too dark then remembered that she was in Kansas City for the weekend with her mother and he was at his Ozark cabin. The chill outside of the quilt touched the skin of his shoulder and he guessed that the fire in the potbelly had died. And so he faced the choice of rising from the bed in only his briefs to stoke the stove again or to remain wound in the quilt where he could keep warm enough to reach the dawn. He chose the bed and let his thoughts drift until he had fallen asleep again.

At first light, which seemed too bright, he woke and found himself more tired than he expected. Outside the cabin snow had fallen in the night. Had he given attention to the forecast he would have known this was coming, but that would have made no difference for his escape from a tedious, girls’ weekend of salads and forced smiles. The cabin was a place he had come to so many times over his decades that he no longer needed planning or preparation; he could arrive with just the shirt on his back and feel reborn.

The day before him bore no specific chores, other than what could always be undertaken at a neglected cabin in the woods to keep it standing in the face of entropy and the relentless, reclaiming force of nature, a nature that always wins in the end. For this visit he had decided to take down a pignut hickory that was crowding his grandson’s small plantation of spruce trees. The spruce had been planted in a clearing not far from the cabin the spring after Clarkson was adopted so that they would grow as the boy did, entwined in a way that they all hoped would draw him to this family place, now in its fourth generation, fifth if you counted Clarkson’s great, great grandfather who had first bought the hundred acres, a man David never knew but felt a lifetime of debt to.

The plan had been to plant a single tree for Clarkson and then to nourish it as they would the boy, but the conservation department had more trees to offer than they had space for planting. They accepted the minimum two dozen and then put as many as they could sensibly fit in the clearing, scattering the remainder throughout their forest to survive as they might. Most of those were lost, but the grove of spruce was visited and tended and nurtured. David had been skeptical of the idea, or rather of the location, noting that if there was a natural clearing in the forest, there was a reason for it and that introduced trees might not survive there. Of the original planting, ten now remained, sinking roots in the thin Ozark soil, despite David’s misgivings, and reaching, as all young trees in this old forest must, for their share of the sunlight.

Spruce were not native to Missouri, and it had always been David’s plan, his land ethic as Kelly had come to call it, to cultivate only native plants in his forest. Yet Curt and Kelly had been so on fire about these particular trees – something different for their forest – that David had muted his objection and supported their plan. He had begun to acknowledge then, though only to himself, that it would not always be his forest, that it was becoming Curt’s and Kelly’s, and eventually, he hoped, it would be Clarkson’s. That the spruce were doing well mitigated his concerns – it seemed that the clearing had been waiting for these very trees – and that Clarkson had soon claimed them as his own stoked in David a love for the little grove that nearly matched his love for the boy. Each season meant a photo of him there, Clarkson growing at first faster than his trees, but he was soon outpaced, and now, more than a dozen years later, the trees were tall and confident just as the boy seemed to be.

Yet a single hickory to the south of them, a little way down the hillside sloping to the lake, was spreading its crown, its own bid for the light, and shading the spruce. David had long thought of removing the hickory, thus allowing Clarkson’s grove more sunlight and a better chance to thrive. Its bole was not especially thick, and David, well practiced in this woodcraft, felt he could take down the tree easily himself. This would be that day.

Breakfast of instant oatmeal – once he had resurrected the fire in the stove – followed by a careful collection and checking of the gear he would use filled David’s morning. There was no hurry in his movements but no waste either. Everything he needed was in the cabin, including warm clothing rough enough for work in the woods, and once the sun had advanced above the south ridge to begin giving what cold warmth it could this January morning, David prepared to set out for the spruce grove.

His wish had been to receive a new chainsaw at Christmas, but when that didn’t happen – Kathy confessing that such a purchase needed to be made by him so he got exactly what he wanted – he hoped to be surprised with one at his birthday in March. Thus he was left with the latest in the long succession of chainsaws that had come to the cabin over the decades. A perfectly fine machine, older but he judged still reliable, and sufficiently matched to the task before it.

When he stepped onto the porch and met the cold light, the silence of the forest washed over him. No birdsong, no chirring insects. Even the air was still, and he stood for the moment listening to this absence under the vast blue sky until it was finally broken by the calls of two crows on the south ridge. He watched as they flew across the frozen lake, on whatever mission was before them, then hefted his gear to take to the hickory.

The crunch of his boots in the crust of snow set the rhythm for his walk. The snow was not deep; it would not hinder his work or when he drove out the next day, but for now its white shroud robbed his forest of color, broken by the dark verticals of the tree trunks and the blue-gray of their slanting shadows. Branches around him were limned with snow. His familiar looked unfamiliar.

Ahead David could see the pale blue green of the spruce, a mass of color that directed his steps. In the old days this part of the forest had been peppered with cedars, which also stayed green all year. But it had been his father’s mission to remove all of the cedars near the cabin, a mission David took up in turn, then later Curt and Kelly, and now one that Clarkson seemed to share as well. The canopy of the oaks and hickories had thickened in the many years they’d all been coming there, shading the forest floor, and now most upstart cedars were starved of light and did not survive. David had half believed that his father’s ambition was hopeless, and yet here it was, successful. David’s words, the first he’d spoken since arriving, broke the silence around him. “You were right, Dad.”

David often spoke to his father, though the man was gone for nearly twenty years. He’d never stopped missing the man. He still felt like an apprentice in his father’s forest. He let himself think of his father as just far away and not seen for a while. A comforting pretense that was easy to do in this place where the two had shared so many important, perfect moments of their lives and where David could still feel his presence.

Walking in the snow, carrying the chainsaw and gasoline, had warmed him though he could see the plumes of his breath. His breathing came harder in the cold air. He set down the equipment a few steps from the hickory and studied the tree. He removed his gloves – a bright orange pair that Clarkson had given him that Christmas – and ran his fingers down the bark. It felt like cork and was not cold to his touch. The sloping ground favored his plan but he wasn’t sure he’d get a clean fall to the forest floor given the dense trees on the hillside below. Still, if he could get it most of the way down, the spring storms would likely finish the job and return it to the earth as everything must do. Or it might hang dead in the embrace of the other trees for years. Either outcome was fine if its sacrifice meant more space and light for Clarkson’s trees.

Three cuts would do the job. Make the wedge and then start the back cut. Step away when the tree began to lean and then listen as it fell, grasping desperately at the trees around it, fighting its premature end. A task David had done countless times and a skill he still hoped to teach Clarkson, his own son, Curt, having never been much interested.

And yet, in his way Curt had been interested. He’d paid close attention to David’s early lessons with tools and fire, acting as though all of his father’s supposed wisdom was a mild joke yet showing a competence in the end nonetheless. And later Curt’s interest transformed, from his rotation in the ER and especially once he had a son of his own, into an abiding concern for doing such work safely. His gift for his father that Christmas had been a pair of chaps to wear when using the chainsaw. In all of their years of cutting firewood there had never been a single mishap, and David knew this was due to their diligent and patient method. The chaps fit perfectly with this practice.

But the chaps were back at the cabin.

Below him the lake boomed as the morning sun warmed the ice. David, alone in his frozen forest, supposed he was the only one to hear it. It was a rare sound since he visited the cabin less often in the winter than he did the rest of the year. A serious, portentous sound, to add to a lifetime accumulation of sensations in his Ozark woods. He wished at that moment that Clarkson were with him to hear the booming, but the boy was with his parents at some Caribbean island for a week, taking in different sensations and building his own lifetime of accumulations. There would be other chances.

On his walk back to the cabin to fetch the chaps, David steered his crunching steps to the hillside above where half a century before he had buried his dog, Buddy. That had been a day of sensations, difficult ones, but important, and still felt. His father had raised a sandstone slab over the grave and scratched the dog’s name into it with a nail. The slab had fallen many times, and David reset it whenever he found it on the ground. Yet on this winter morning he could not find the grave. Even this deeply familiar was made unfamiliar, not just with the blanket of snow but with the decades of growth and change, both in the forest and in himself, that altered the landscape from what had been burned into his boyhood memory of the day. He realized he was the only person alive who even knew of this any longer, and he vowed to return in the spring to reset the slab once again and preserve his memory. As he sat on a stump to rest for a moment, he could feel his heart pounding in his chest. The air felt cold and un-nurturing in his lungs.

The track of his footprints in the crusty snow had wandered widely on his way. This warty oak still holding its dead leaves. That ancient chunk of sandstone dusted white. The cleft in the hillside where water sometimes flowed. The view of the glinting, ice-shrouded lake through the trees. The spot where Curt had, amazingly, once found a rusty horseshoe half buried in the soil, speaking of even older, long-gone tenants on this land. All memories he savored, as important that morning as the chaps, and no rush for any of it.

But his steps did finally reach the cabin, and he welcomed the warmth inside as he sought the orange chaps on the tool shelf. He’d not worn them since Christmas morning when he had pulled them on over his pajamas to everyone’s delight, so he spent some time making sure he had them snapped and buckled correctly. These would certainly add color to the forest when he emerged from the warm cabin.

The hickory awaited, and though David wanted to linger and rest a little he also wanted to face what was before him. He poked a couple sticks of kindling into the stove so the fire didn’t die and the cabin would be warm when he returned then passed through the door.

A breeze stirred the dried leaves hanging in a tall oak near the cabin. Their many touches sounded crystalline, but soon the crunch of his boots was all David could hear. Above, the pair of crows watched from their perch in a tree but then rose and flew before him in the direction of the hickory. David followed.

Not long after, the whine of the chainsaw filled the forest, but no one was around to hear it. And no one was around to hear when it stopped. The lake boomed.

Flashes of the Future

Drew Pisarra

The world reveals itself to us over time, albeit somewhat coyly. We get glimpses of what’s real not on a daily basis but periodically, in flashes, as if the days were a series of playing cards flipped over in quick succession and we were simply awaiting the appearance of the Queen. Any Queen. The rest is just a lot of numbers in red and black interrupted by the occasional feint of a Jack, Ace or King. If we miss the Queen of our desires on the first time around, then we simply have to wait until She comes up again. Or settle for a different Queen. And so the cycle repeats itself over and over until we perhaps put together a winning hand or at least see a pattern unfold or we fold ourselves and die having never witnessed the big reveal. One small, not entirely inconsequential thing I’ve learned so far. Not every deck comes stacked with a Joker.

I don’t think I first realized that I wasn’t just gay or “perverted by longing” (as my pastor once put it) until right after my senior year in high school. That was the summer, my friend Patti and I went down to New Orleans for our last adolescent vacation. We christened it our Bon Voyage to Adulthood. I don’t think either of us had any grand scheme attached to the theme. We certainly weren’t looking to lose our virginity. Patti had given hers away years ago to a now live-in boyfriend and mine was discarded in the back of a van in the parking lot of a diner just outside the Beltway. How we scraped together the money for this trip, I don’t completely recall. I suspect I stole some of it from the cash register at the bagel factory where I worked. Maybe Patti’s dad chipped in. That seems likely. What I do know, most definitely, is that we stayed at a Marriott since my dad was a chef at a sister hotel in Crystal City, Virginia. Because of that, he was able to snag us a deal. Not free but pretty close. I also remember that once we got off the air-conditioned Greyhound bus, the terminal was inhumanely hot, even though it was 8pm. One question though: Can you call a parking lot a terminal?

Anyway, no one had bothered to tell us that the lower, off-season rates for New Orleans were because no one in their right mind would travel there willingly at this time of year. August in N’awlins – as the locals pronounced it – was the thermal equivalent of a medically induced coma. We realized immediately that our week away was probably going to be a lot less adventurous than expected but even so, the night we arrived, we trundled off to our hotel, tossed our bags on our beds, then hurried down to Bourbon Street where our NARAL and ACT UP T-shirts were instantaneously patterned with sweat as we sipped from supersized souvenir cups aslosh with Hurricanes, the toxic local fruit punch. Our eventual choice to go into an unmarked club called Tina’s – tucked away on a side street, Dauphine perhaps? – instead of one of the main drag’s touristy, open-air jazz clubs wasn’t curiosity so much as a desire to escape the humidity. Nothing sounded as inviting as air conditioning and the windowless Tina’s had a line of rickety AC units built right into its cobblestone wall. We entered without a second thought.

What we found inside was a quasi-respectable nightclub looking like a low-budget tribute to GoodFellas. Small tables for two were topped by semi-white tablecloths; a chipped disco ball with shards missing revolved over the audience, conferring a glittery if fractured benediction. As to the crowd itself, it was small but immaculate: a dozen or so patrons who looked as though they’d paired off with makeup artists in the powder rooms before heading over to an in-house dry cleaner that handed out fresh-pressed suits, linen every one of them. Everyone was wearing a blazer except Patti and me. And this included the waitstaff, who favored tuxedo jackets, although sometimes without pants. Spider web fishnets were in that year, if memory serves me right. Feeling somewhat underdressed on top and overdressed below, we soon found ourselves seated at a table far from the center, further from the front. We’d been ushered to a railed-off, elevated semi-balcony that was a literal step up and a metaphorical step down. There were some advantages to the vantage point. Mainly, we could see almost everything.

Onstage was a cabaret act that seemed pretty Vegas. Or at least Reno. Impossibly tall women runway-strutted in slinky gowns, slit up the side, often to the hip. Since the loudspeakers were directly behind us, it took me awhile to figure out that the headliners weren’t actually singing but were merely mouthing the words or some facsimile thereof. (I’ve heard “peanut butter watermelon” is a good go-to if you forget the words while lip syncing since the phrase incorporates a wide variety of consonants.) The disconnect hardly diminished the impact of the show. To the contrary, I was shaken to my core thanks to the speakers right behind me. If sound can simulate a nervous breakdown then this was like cracking up in stereo. These seats came with a case of the musical jitters and I was trembling but just too tired to move. Heat exhaustion makes everything tolerable, even an over-amped bass.

On the main floor, the audience below looked somewhat stupefied. I knew New Orleans had a reputation for being the South’s Sin City but there was nothing to indicate excess or extremes here. Strategically exhaled cigarette smoke created miasmic veils in front of genderless faces that appeared almost entranced, possibly stoned. Disoriented and dehydrated, we ordered ginger ales. Our waiter either disapproved or misheard since we ended up being served a pair of potent grave diggers. At most the drinks contained a splash of soda.

I still get the order of events somewhat confused after that but rather than get into a detailed timeline that’s undoubtedly wrong, let me skip ahead closer to the end when our not-exactly-friendly server started to leave with one of the customers. The revue – although not the music – stopped with the suddenness of someone slamming on the brakes. Quickly awakening from our stupor, we watched as the lead showgirl pointed at either the patron or her co-worker while yelling something we couldn’t hear. I’m pretty good at reading lips though so I’m pretty sure what was shouted was “That one’s mine.” What “that one” referred to was infinitely less clear. The patron? The staff? Regardless, the six-foot tall singer leapt from the stage in her four-inch heels and chased the newly minted couple who’d exited only seconds ago. Faintly heard screaming ensued offstage by which I mean the lobby. What followed next I’m less sure. That trio was out of sight and out of mind once the DJ turned up “I Want to Dance With Somebody.” God, I love Whitney Houston. Plus Tina had stepped onstage.

She was a severe change from what had preceded. Short, not svelte. Wrinkled, not young. You could say that what she lacked in beauty she made up for in assurance. Which was doubly remarkable given that she was stinking drunk. It’s like the whole scent of the space changed with her arrival. I only know who she was because she told us so. She told the whole room: “I’m Tina, goddamnit. This is my place. My house. You don’t like it, you can leave.” One person definitely got the message and filed out as if on cue. The show continued. A spotlight narrowed our focus. The vamp of a burlesque tune came on. A laugh punctured its arrival. Was it Patti? I don’t think it was me. If Tina heard it, she didn’t show it. She peeled off a single fuchsia elbow glove then stopped. The music followed suit. Tina stood there in silence as if suddenly depressed. “I want to tell you a story,” she slurred. Like a jazz singer waiting for the band to jump in, she began to recite the opening section of Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is,” although I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time. It just seemed like a very strange story. If you don’t know it either, that song’s intro is done a capella so the initial lack of a background track was pretty organic, all said. “I remember when I was a very little girl, our house caught on fire…” Tina murmured as if she were telling Patti and me a mean-spirited secret. Hers was a whisper with an edge. It was that quiet. That ominous. As she forged on, whoever was manning the sound booth quietly slid the carnivalesque piano underneath so that when the recitative ended and the verse began, it was all of a piece. Tina went back to stripping in a perfunctory way, although she’d clearly forgotten to remove the second glove.

The rest of the clothes came off as if she were getting ready for bedtime, starting with a hair clip that landed on the stage with a clunk. She tried to unclasp the pearl necklace only to give up and jerk it off so the beads spilled around her like mercury. The lyrics got fuzzy. “And then I fell in love with the most wonderful son of a bitch who gazed into a river until I pushed him in when he tried to get away.” I could follow Tina’s logic here even as I wondered where this might go. Removing the dress was easy for Tina because it was basically a spangled sack with a zipper up the side that she yanked down in a single movement before stepping out of it like a magician’s assistant exiting some treacherous box.

What was revealed was confusing. I looked to Patti for help but she’d fallen asleep with her head resting on her arms like a swan-hippy hybrid. Tina was a mix of things too with a strangled midsection held in place by silver-gray duct tape that commanded her body into an hourglass figure by pushing the fat up and below. But that was about to change as Tina unraveled the strip of tape like a molting mummy. Unfortunately, before she’d made it halfway down her torso, she got stuck. The tape wouldn’t give. She let out a short cry as it tore at the flesh. Suddenly, she had a gash below one nipple on a chest that no longer wanted to play breast. Even so, the music continued. That Peggy Lee song is long.

Tina bent over for a bit so that I assumed she was trying to find the other end of the tape with her teeth so that she could resume her unpeeling from the bottom up. I got scared that a big reveal fraught with disaster lay ahead. Up until then, Tina’s privates were tucked or shrunken, maybe removed, maybe painfully small. I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t looked closely. I couldn’t. I was in the back, remember? Plus, I was inebriated. Intoxicated but alert. But whatever it was that Tina had been doing bent over was now complete. She rose, the lower tape untouched, her mouth like a slit, her eyes like price-scanners. With her right, still-gloved hand, she pulled off her wig. There was something sad about the sweaty half-bald head she’d uncovered. Yet that was nothing when compared to what she held in her left fleshy fat fist, which she opened to reveal a small pink and white dental plate. What followed were a gummy smile and the final refrain. It was the most vulnerable thing I’d ever seen anyone do and because of that, strangely beautiful.

That moment has stayed with me for a long time, even though Patti has been known to insist it never happened. She acknowledges we saw a bald performance artist decked out in industrial tape, a postpunk superbaby who spun around in the darkness under a broken disco ball to an empty hall. But it was so much more than that. Even that part. Because after the lights in the house flickered on and off, Tina appeared committed to giving the two of us a show until the very end. Slowly, she began to spin in place, just like the ball overhead, and in this half-light I could make out a loose piece of black tape swinging around as if she’d somehow acquired a thin useless tail. A misplaced umbilical cord. An electric cord. As if she were more than human. As if she were an oversized toy whirling and twirling for the public’s amusement. Or a robot finally free of the outlet, no longer plug-dependent. I felt as though I’d seen the future so I stood. It was a gesture of respect. But I vomited because I stood too quickly. Only then, were we asked to leave.

Neither of us ever went back to New Orleans. That last big hurricane felt as though it had wiped away the magical city we’d visited forever. But New Orleans wasn’t the only thing that had irrevocably changed. The iPhone had arrived. So had YouTube. So had trans rights, karaoke culture, air-conditioned outdoor spaces, sippy cups at Broadway shows, and Chaka Khan’s frankly amazing cover of that Peggy Lee song on her underrated ClassiKhan album. (Check it out if you get a chance.) Patti and I drifted apart. She’s got two kids, a second husband, and a chip on her shoulder now. None of which were there before. I ended up in NYC, living in a shoebox apartment where I could touch the ceiling without stretching my toes. Tight as the space was, my friend Kitty stayed with me there for three months. Needless to say, we slept in the same twin bed, took turns sitting in the one chair to eat at the desk/table/countertop, then sat together on the stoop outside and smoked. Those stairs were my living room.

Kitty was a lighting designer who’d just returned from Maine where she’d done a residency which simply meant she ate for free and slept on a friend-of-a-friend’s couch in another state so she could add a self-important line to her burgeoning resume. It was she who’d recommended I check out Eye I Aye, an experimental performance installation at a small, oddly well-funded interdisciplinary lab in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. Her description of the experience, although confusing, was intriguing. She raved about the show because there weren’t any actors. She said, it proved Gordon Craig’s theory that the live performer had become obsolete. I had no idea what she meant by that since she insisted there weren’t robots or puppets in their place but I went down to someplace not far from the Bowling Green subway stop and entered what looked to be a dentist’s office where, appropriately enough, I was asked to sign a few forms, even before I’d paid my admission fee which was cheap. I’m guessing there were fifteen of us in attendance, max. We were all excited, adventurous individuals – strange to each other and perhaps to society. We’d each heard about the production from a friend. No one shared their names. And no one asked. If you’d bugged our conversation, it would’ve sounded as though we were in line for some new recreational drug or black-market gadget. Potentially dangerous. Likely not.

After a short wait, the second, interior door to the actual performance space opened. A long knotted rope was uncoiled at our feet. We were instructed to lift the rope to waist level then make our way into the room, hand over hand, until we were engulfed by a fog so dense that we all lost sight of the world as we knew it. I vividly recall that my hands had vanished. As had the rope. I saw nothing, a nothing of whiteness, which is quite distinct from a nothing of blackness, which always suggests something unseen but still there. Absolute whiteness presents nothing in a very different way. We were told to keep silent. A few people giggled when the door clicked shut behind the last of us. But nothing here was funny. No one had come for a laugh.

Soon, we had all retreated into some form of inner silence. Without a single additional word of direction, I continued to follow the rope, like a hiker going on a treacherous path that was irrationally horizontal. It’s weird how unsettling walking can be when you can’t see your feet or the path ahead. I was surprised how long I was able to move forward without reaching some sort of end. Was this the point?

We had been told that once we were comfortable, we should let go of the rope and move into the open area. I worried that I’d bump into someone but I never did. Evidently the space was big. Or we all let go and fell into some weird cocoon of self-imposed paralysis. The experience was very interior. I stood somewhere. Alone. That I know. There may have been a chandelier overhead or snakes below. Since I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t tell. But I wasn’t thinking such things. Not then. The sound of trance music could be faintly discerned. It struck me as ominous, and frankly a bit corny. I thought, “Oh, this is going to be an audio experience,” which struck me as a total cop-out. But as the trippy soundscape quietly built in volume, some colored lights came into play. At first, it was fairly unimpressive. Nothingness got a tint. Nothing was pink. Nothing was baby blue. Imagine absence in orange or yellow. Strange but hardly earth-shattering. But then the strobes were activated and that triggered a very different result.

How to explain this? Sudden honeycomb patterns emerged. If they were rhythmic in nature, it was to a count I couldn’t deduce easily. Yet some form of logic seemed to underlie their behavior. These were strange gridlike strings of shapes that had emerged -- hexagonal webs, monochromatic, contiguous but refusing to adhere to a set size. They seemed to be building upon themselves then just as quickly breaking down to smaller blocks as if relaying a non-verbal message related to a hive-like mind. Is it weird to say that they seemed to be living? I suppose the ambient sound added a layer of meaning. Maybe not. Perhaps the sound didn’t matter. Reality as I knew it was gone. I felt the third dimension disappear. For real.

The world had gone flat. These hexagonal patterns or beings didn’t exist in the space-time continuum I understood and presently missed. It became hard to breathe. Although there were no atmospheric alterations or gravitational trickery at work, I felt compressed, as if I were being asked to flatten out myself. This was claustrophobia at its most extreme. It became hard to expand my lungs. I lifted my hand in front of my eyes for reassurance then tried to psychically ohm through my anxiety. I knew it was all in my head. And as I got inside my own head, I realized, suddenly, that the whole idea of life on other planets or even this planet wasn’t a matter of green-skinned aliens and man-eating blobs. Such visions were completely beside the point. The other existences need not be restricted to a particular dimension with all its dimensional limitations. We could be surrounded by such creatures, such things right now. It wasn’t like ghosts who are basically humanoid echoes in a minor key. This was a whole other tonal scale. And it wasn’t expansive. It was flat.

My new world was now flatter than a photograph and proposed a reality where 3-D simply didn’t exist. The reality I walk through was being obliterated before my very eyes. It was terrifying, liberating, lovely in a way that I didn’t want to watch. It made me uneasy, as if it were showing me that our universe had cracks, fissures, not black holes to swallow you or crush you but hairline fractures that, when hit the wrong way, might result in a damage beyond repair. This was the edge of chaos. It was razor thin and cut just a nastily.

For years after that, I cringed whenever I saw a strobe light, a cop’s flashers, the warning stage of a blinking hand at a crosswalk, a turn signal on the back of a car that wasn’t turning quickly enough. All of it made me wary, as if these secretly coded visuals were inviting me back to this other realm, which abided by its own rules and didn’t like the ostentatiousness that came with three dimensions. Life itself seemed to be a performance that was constantly unfolding in front of this hidden audience that couldn’t see, think, sense, or care. It blinked. It knew. And I knew too. There was the moment and nothing more.

Funnily enough, shortly after this event, I landed a job in television. Why funny? Well, because TV is so clearly a translation of 3-D into 2-D that I was completely comfortable with. Although my role had nothing to do with the on-air creative aspects of the medium, I nevertheless had to sign a non-disclosure agreement that I would never mention the shows with which I had worked after I left the network for a period of three years. So you’ll just have to trust me when I say that the shows were big. I only left the job a year ago.

Without giving away any details, I can tell you that a lot of my job involved going to the Cons. Name a convention with even a peripheral relationship to television and I’ve probably attended it: Comic-Con, Dragon Con, Flame Con, Gen Con, Wonder Con, Pax East, Pax West, and GoPlay. I’ve been to them all. Inevitably, one year, I attended CYST, a less consumer-friendly but still important electronics/technology convention that showcased cutting edge technological advancements and games generally targeting non-entertainment industries. Like many of these low-on-celeb cons, this last one took place in Vegas and I confess that despite my many travels, I never got that familiar with the original Sin City so I ended up getting lost. And so, somehow, I ended up in the older part of town. The old strip, some people call it. Attempting to find my way back without my phone, because sometimes I like to try to pretend I’m not tech-dependent, I stumbled upon the BAE/SExpo -- Best Adult Entertainment Sex Exposition -- which by that time had become the largest pornographic convention in the world.

Attendees were almost all male, almost all white, almost all middle-aged, almost all unattractive. There were long lines to see a surgically-enhanced woman named Tuna. And I heard two men fawning over an autograph coupled by a kiss made by sitting down. Strange as it may seem given these particulars, I’d actually been hoping to attend BAE for years because everyone knew that the big technological leaps in terms of interactivity were happening in this field. But good luck trying to get sign-off on that from your Human Resources department. The long and the short of it is that getting lost suddenly didn’t seem so bad anymore. I started looking for virtual reality simulators for while I appreciated the potential you might be able to extrapolate from Puss the Sexbot or a pair of Clamgloves, my whole reason for making this trip was to find something with marketable potential for a TV show. Virtual reality was all about exploring environs right now. I wanted to see if porn had a different spin.

It did. And it wasn’t simply that the headgear I put on was covered in pink fur or that the fourteen electrodes they taped to my body resembled nipples. Those were all just titillating gimmicks. For what the SwapMeat promised was not a new world but instead a new you. When you put on the helmet, the ‘trodes allowed the system to scan your body and then put together the most beautiful version of you imaginable in the opposite sex.

It was incredibly disorienting standing at a mirror in this alt world. Not simply because I was now a different gender but because I was so unnervingly hot. I recognized myself: the eyes, the one (now only barely) discolored tooth, the birthmark on the neck (now without any irregular texture and less raised from the surface). And yet it creeped me out. It wasn’t funny or arousing to see myself re-gendered. It was shocking. The system asked if I wanted to make any adjustments – perhaps blonde hair instead of brunette, blue eyes instead of green, a waspier waist. That sort of thing. But all the adjustments I wanted to make were refused.

I wanted to stay bald on top. The system permitted a crew cut but nothing further. I wanted a bigger stomach, which the system kept misinterpreting as wider hips or a shift in the placement of my navel. With each rejected request, a voice that sounded suspiciously like mine but higher and softer said, “You don’t really want to do that now, do you?” And then she/we/it laughed. The bottom line was the program didn’t allow ugly. It was pretty or nothing. Take it or leave it.

I looked down at my body, this body, her body, our body, and I saw the woman I’d never become. I could see the curve of my breasts (too large) but I couldn’t feel the curve, not really, even as I slid my sensory-enhanced fingertips against my relatively flat chest. I remember distinctly, making a hmm sound but the sound was wrong. Or it wasn’t mine. Or it was me but it wasn’t me. I took the helmet off. I didn’t even look in the game’s closet with its naughty nurse and sexy witch outfits.

The busty attendant had a smirk on her face. “Enjoy yourself,” she asked when she knew damn well I had not. “It’s not as easy as it looks,” she added coquettishly but I wasn’t sure how to interpret this “it. ” Did she mean navigating the game? being a woman? being beautiful? redefining yourself? WHERE IS THE VIRTUE IN VIRTUAL REALITY read a banner directly behind her. I was more interested in the smaller sign just to the left of it. It had the reassurance of the familiar. EXIT it simply said.

Afterwards I found myself in a hall that was empty except for a payphone and a slot machine. It seemed such a strange pairing of objects – both of them asking for a quarter that might bring deliverance and might not. I opted for the latter device, dug the proper coin out of my pocket and slipped it in the slot. It landed with a clank as if it were all alone. I pulled the lever of the one-armed bandit and listened as the symbols whirled round and round. I could barely make out the shapes. Lemon, cherry, BAR, 7, a horseshoe with all its luck running out. What did I want to come up. Some sort of match. Did it matter which one? Were the odds in my favor? And what could I possibly win? Life seemed like such a sad gamble with only the slimmest chance at one final surprise. And yet I was willing to play. Whatever the prize.

creative nonfiction

KALAUPAPA

Kirby Wright

Damien’s Trail began as a walkway from Kamalo Gulch that turned east for Kuana Ridge. From there it veered northwest to Papa’Ali Pali. It snaked through ravines and along the spines of ridges. Before the summit could be reached, the volunteers from Saint Joseph’s had to cross the Land of Tree Ferns and enter the clouds. After making the crest, the trail to the colony zigzagged down the mountain’s face. The final leg of the journey appeared easy. But a slip or stumble could prove deadly. Julia had once ridden Sparkling Eyes to the trail head, where she saw the path vanish in a rolling sheet of mist.

* * *

The morning was clear and warm. Pheasants flew over the volunteers from Saint Joseph’s. Julia felt good in Chip’s old work shirt and her denim breeches. She’d laced up her boots as tight as possible. She gazed up—reaching the pali seemed a forever climb through kiawe, scrub, and boulders. She could make out paths in the ridges and along the crest of a black gorge that was Hina Falls. Julia was worried. This hike would test her strength and willpower. Did Chipper feel guilty driving off and leaving her behind? It seemed he’d given up too easily and was more concerned with work than her safety. Could she trust Ben Keokeo to lead them up this mountain and down the other side? It was a noble thing to do but Julia doubted she could make it.

Ben and Josephine led the way up Kamalo Gulch. It was a narrow, steep-sided ravine winding through kiawe and walls of lava. The Satos maintained a steady pace behind the leaders. Julia was next. She lugged a satchel packed with bear claws, long johns, and tubes of toothpaste. Zellie Buchanan, a heavyset Portuguese woman, was behind her. Zellie had changed into overalls and pulled on a pair of combat boots. She carried a knapsack stuffed with candy. Eddie, the youngest of Joao’s sons, brought up the rear lugging two small cans of kerosene. Julia noticed how he kept his eyes on Josephine.

Everyone was bringing something, from rolls of toilet paper to gauze to soap to chocolate bars. Ben had stuck a bottle of carbolic acid and vials of chaulmoogra oil in the canvas pocket of his hiking belt. Pastor Riel had said the resident doctor was desperate for the vials.

The climb tested Julia’s legs as she kept pace with the Satos. She’d thought she was in good shape from hiking the west end but this was challenging. The ranch had gentle plateaus and shallow gulches that were easily traversed. On the east end, everything went straight up.

Ben had a machete in a sheath attached to his belt. The sheath bounced against his gray dungarees as he advanced through the lantana. The multi-colored blossoms had a wild smell. The parishioners made it to the top of the gulch, where the trail leveled out. Ben led them into a clearing of wet earth. Julia’s boots got caked with mud and started feeling heavy.

The first rest stop was halfway up Helani Ridge. Ben pulled a canteen off his belt and passed it to his niece. Josephine drank deeply. She wore red shorts and a white tee. Her thighs and calves were muscular.

Josephine handed the canteen to Julia. She took a swig and passed it on to Lane. Julia looked down at the flatlands and saw the steel cross on Saint Joseph’s steeple. The Church looked miles away. Had they really climbed this high so fast? Their progress renewed her faith they’d make it to the colony.

“Next stop?” Eddie asked.

“Kuana Ridge,” Ben answered, “den Papa’Ala Pali.”

"Will that put us near the summit?" Julia asked.

"Nah," Ben replied. "Da pali only halfway deah. Why? You stay tired, Julia?"

“No.”

"We go Hina Falls."

“Lead the way,” said Eddie.

Ben hustled up the hill. The volunteers trudged on. The kiawe and scrub gave way to pine and sword ferns that cut if you brushed their fronds with bare skin. Sourgrass rose up five-feet high and Ben slashed through it his machete. He led them to the edge of a precipice, one that overlooked a falls spilling down glistening lava. Ben said the falls had been named after Hina, the goddess who gave birth to the island. The parishioners nodded solemnly before resuming the climb.

Lane tripped over a root—Julia caught and steadied him.

“Tanks,” he said. “Owe you one, Julia.”

Ben kept slashing. There was a steady rhythm to his strikes. Josephine followed closely behind her uncle. She stomped down on the cut grass with her boots.

Julia saw the brilliant green slopes of the Seven Sisters, a mountain range north of Kamalo. The valleys between them were skinny and shallow, making the Sisters appear to be one big mountain with folds in it.

Eddie picked up the pace until neck-and-neck with Julia. His cans clinked and she heard the fuel sloshing inside. Julia let him pass.

A buck and two does charged out of a lava crevice. The parishioners watched them leap over a baby pine and bound away. The deer didn’t stop until they reached a glade sheltered by eucalyptus.

At the top of Kuana Ridge, Josephine found a footpath covered with an orange string-like vine.

Ben knelt and studied the vine. “Dis kauna’oa lead us to Papa’Ala Pali,” he said.

“Launananui Ridge mo’ fastah,” Lane suggested.

Josephine shook her head. “Beeg rain last night,” she said. “Launananui goin’ be solid mud.”

“We go pali,” Ben decided. “Okay, Lane san?”

“Okay,” Lane replied.

Josephine led the parishioners up the vine path until they reached the edge of a gorge so deep it looked black. It flanked the easternmost Sister in the range.

“Dis gorge make big kine rivah,” Ben said, “every wintah.”

“We gotta cross it?” asked Eddie.

“No need,” Josephine answered and hiked on. Her legs seemed to get stronger with every stride. Her thighs glistened with sweat and she swung her arms like a runner. Country strong, Julia thought.

The climb was steep and the volunteers were winded by the time they reached the gorge's peak. The ground flattened out and the parishioners caught their breaths. The footpath connected them to Pu’Uhoi Ridge. Pu'Uhoi was the spine of the Seventh Sister. From there it was a straight shot north to Meaula Ridge, which led to the summit above the colony.

Julia was hurting. Her thighs and calves felt like mush. Her ankles ached. She felt green compared to the others. Julia wondered if Chipper would come for her if she got hurt or lost. She hoped he was back home by now and sleeping his hangover off.

The aina got bright green higher up. Besides pines, there were mountain apple trees, ohia, and bamboo hillsides. Pheasants scurried through the brush. They entered the Land of Tree Ferns. The only way through was either to duck under the giant fronds or to hold the fronds down and crush them under your boot. The hikers held onto the fern trunks to keep from falling.

Eddie stumbled. One of the cans fell and rolled. He slid down the slope on the seat of his pants to retrieve it. Josephine chuckled watching him slide.

Zellie shook her head. “Mud stains nevah come out,” she said, “no mattah how hard you scrub.”

* * *

The volunteers made it to Pu'Uhoi in good time, a ridge marking the start of the highlands. The air was cool and crisp. Pines were scarce. Mist drifted over a silvery meadow filled with stumps. Julia couldn't figure out why the trees had died. Had there been a drought? The summit loomed above the mist, its brilliant pali cutting the sky open like a great green ax. The ground was mushy and it sucked at Julia's boots.

“Meaula Ridge next,” Ben said. “Only get half-mile moah.”

Julia noticed that guava trees this far up were the size of shrubs. The mountain apple trees were small too and only a few bore fruit. They entered a sweet-smelling patch of molasses grass that felt like a carpet under Julia's boots. They reached the mist and pushed on through the bellies of clouds. Black goats grazed. The sun burned through the clouds. Julia saw Ben standing at the edge of a cliff. Behind him was the deep blue of the ocean and the pale blue of the sky.

Ben turned to the parishioners. “Dis da Meaula Ridge trail,” he said. “We stay close.”

The Meaula hike gave Julia a sweeping view of the island’s eastern shore. It was a rugged coast with lava beaches, turquoise bays, and narrow valleys. A series of falls cascaded from the peaks down the sharp vertical mountains. Lane pointed out Pelekunu Bay with its fringe of white sand. Ben told Julia that Pelekunu was adjacent to Kalawao, where the first colony residents had been tossed overboard.

Soon they were at the trail head. Ben led the descent through their first switchback, with Josephine and Eddie at his heels. The Katos were next, followed by Julia and Zellie. Cement steps stuck out of the mud. To Julia, they looked like the rungs of a ladder. She took her eyes off the switchback trying to catch a glimpse of the village below. She could hear waves rolling but couldn’t see the coast through the forest of eucalyptus and ironwoods. Lime-colored lichens covered the boulders on either side of the trail. The mauka side of switchback number twenty was lined with stalks of timber bamboo. Going downhill seemed easy to Julia at first, but the muscles in her thighs and calves began to feel like jelly. She wobbled and nearly fell.

Zellie reached out and steadied her. “Careful, young lady.”

Julia had never hiked on Oahu. Sue and Kay had also disliked the great outdoors. The one exception had been Jackass Ginger, where the Wright girls had ridden ti leaves down a muddy chute and slid into the pool beneath the falls.

* * *

Doctor William Goodhue raised his binoculars. He spotted the hikers near switchback number thirteen. They were halfway down. Goodhue let the binoculars dangle from the strap around his neck. He fished in the pocket of his white coat, pulled out a gold watch, and popped the cover. It was half-past one. Last month’s group had arrived by noon. “Better late than never,” Goodhue grumbled, caning his way through a cemetery of concrete headstones.

The doctor reached the grounds of Saint Francis of Assisi Church. Patients had assembled on the makai lawn. The men wore white linen shirts. The women had on white holokus with hems that brushed the ground. A nun blew into a pitch pipe that resembled a black wafer. The patients matched her pitch with their voices and began singing, “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence.” A baritone sounded off-key to Goodhue but the others sang with such passion that it practically drowned out the foul notes. Goodhue hated himself for being a perfectionist. His body was breaking down and he disliked himself more and more every day. The choir finished the first stanza. They reminded the doctor of soldiers in white uniforms.

“Angelic,” the nun told her singers. “Now for the second stanza.” She pressed the pitch pipe to her lips. A Korean man hummed her note and the choir raised their voices.

Kalaupapa was Goodhue’s jail, but not because he had Hansen’s Disease. His bum hip had caused a self-imposed imprisonment. The doctor could still manage to ride a mule topside but the pain caused by the rocking saddle was excruciating. The continual throb of bone grinding bone had robbed him of his appetite. Whiskey dulled the agony but, if he drank too much, it felt as though knives were ripping open his guts. On bad days, he stayed in bed and played solitaire. Nurses made him limu koho soup, Noni juice, and Mamaki tea. A kokua massaged him using her lomilomi technique. Sometimes lomilomi restored his appetite enough to eat eggs and sausage. But that kind of eating was rare for Goodhue. He kept a loaded pistol in his dresser drawer in case it got to be too much. Yet, whenever the doctor wrapped his finger around the trigger, something kept him from pulling. Enough of him wanted to live, the piece that made Goodhue feel as though he was part of something bigger.

Goodhue entered Saint Francis through a side door. The design of the Church was Italian Gothic. Three arches graced its entrance and the windows were arched too. A bell tower rose up behind the altar. The exterior walls were Arctic white. The gable roof was made from sheets of corrugated iron. The interior of Saint Francis was eggshell-white, with Ionic columns supporting the forty-foot ceiling. Life-size statues of Mother Mary, Saint Francis, and Joseph were perched on alabaster pedestals. Goodhue considered the Church a masterpiece, despite the fact it was made from reinforced concrete. A rope was threaded through a hole in the ceiling and one end hung beside the marble font. The doctor put his cane down on a koa table and wrapped the rope's end around his right hand. He tugged and released. The bell rang softly. He tugged harder and released again—it rang louder. He tugged and released over and over until a steady clang-clang-clang resonated through Kalaupapa.

The nun told her choir that practice was over. Her singers headed down Damien Road. Elders left their cottages and beachfront shanties. Girls rushed out of Bishop Home and headed for the village. Boys in distant Kalawao heard the bell and flooded out of Baldwin House.

Patients congregated outside the General Store. There were the young, the middle-aged, and the old. Girls jumped up and down in anticipation of the visitors. The boys arrived. Nurses and nuns supervised the throng. Some of the boys teased the girls. A girl cried. A nun scolded the boys. The choir stood shoulder-to-shoulder outside the Long House, opposite the General Store.

“Wot dey wen bring?” a boy asked.

“One big kine surprise,” a man answered, “but you keikis no touch da visitahs. No touch nobody.”

The children nodded.

Guests were rare at Kalaupapa, although the Saint Joseph parish tried sending volunteers once a month. Mai pake had blinded some of the residents. Those who could see led the blind. A former paniolo had one good eye. Two had no eyes at all, only sockets. But the excitement of visitors overwhelmed everyone, to the point most joined in when the choir began singing, “Angels We Have Heard On High.”

Goodhue was still at the Church when he heard their voices. He retrieved his cane and wobbled up a rise overlooking switchback number twenty-six. That final switchback led to an entrance path of sand and shattered lava. Goodhue raised his binoculars—Ben Keokeo’s face appeared. The doctor had kept a close watch over Puanani, Ben’s thirteen-year-old daughter. He cherished Ben’s visits because he almost always found time to spend with the boys. He’d taught them how to throw net, where to find best opihi, and the proper way to treat girls. Ben had told Father Dornbush he wanted to bring down surfboards but the priest said paddling into heavy surf was too dangerous for the children.

Ben whistled. "Howzit, doc!"

The doctor waved his free hand while studying the other hikers. He recognized them all, except for a haole wahine bringing up the rear. He quit waving. She was somewhere between a girl and a woman and looked more city than country. He adjusted the focus. Was she married? She seemed too young. Her hair was bobbed and she glided over the path like an angel. He could hear his heart beating in his ears. The throbbing in his hip eased. Goodhue’s blood felt young. “Honolulu wahine,” the doctor said. “Lordy, that is one sexy girl.”

* * *

The parishioners followed Goodhue through a field of headstones and markers. Most were nameless. Julia noticed the few that were marked had Hawaiian names, with lives dating back to the 1830s. Sophie had told Julia that entire graveyards were divided by nationality.

Julia and the volunteers entered a village of white-washed cottages with green roofs. The patients, most dressed in white, waited outside the General Store. A Chinese woman smiled at Julia. She smiled back. Ben told a joke. The patients laughed. Nurses and nuns supervised, keeping residents and guests ten-feet apart. A nun grabbed a boy who tried sneaking under a nurse’s outstretched arm. Goodhue told Eddie to take the kerosene to the General Store. Eddie took off.

The doctor ambled over to Julia. “Welcome to Kalaupapa, miss,” he told her.

“Thanks,” she replied.

“I’m Doctor Goodhue, the resident physician.”

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Julia.”

“Are you from Honolulu?”

“Kaimuki.”

“Oahu, right?”

She nodded. “The town behind Waikiki.”

“I see. Can you guess where I’m from?”

“Boston?”

“I was born and raised in Quebec. Is this your first trip to our settlement?”

“Yes.”

“Your visit today means so much to our people.”

The Church bell clanged five times and quit.

“To Paschoal Hall,” Goodhue announced.

The throng headed up Beretania Street. The head nurse, a buxom redhead, placed parishioners up front and patients behind. Nurses and nuns formed a wall between the groups. The marching feet kicked up a cloud coral dust that stung Julia’s eyes.

Paschoal Hall squatted on the edge of an expansive lawn. The grass was tall and Julia liked how the wind moved the blades in patterns, making them look like waves on the ocean. The hall’s exterior walls were pastel green and it had a brown shake roof. It stood two stories high and was surrounded by giant coconut trees that seemed like guardians. The hall’s front porch had white railings and six wooden columns supporting the porch roof.

Ben climbed the three steps up to the porch and swung open Paschoal's double doors. The volunteers followed him down a linoleum hallway that smelled of disinfectant. They entered an auditorium with balcony-high seats on twin platforms behind them. A silver screen was against the northern wall. Two nuns escorted the volunteers to the front of the auditorium. Nurses led the patients up an aisle between the platforms. They were seated in no time, with elders up front and keikis behind.

Julia felt as though she were an actress here to perform a play for a small town audience. She mingled with the rest of the parishioners on the auditorium floor.

“Good crowd today,” Pearl said.

Lane nodded. “No ka oi.”

“I like chocolate!” a boy called from the balcony.

“Hush,” a kupuna woman scolded from the front row. “Ya damn pest.”

The patients laughed.

The head nurse scooted behind a long central table near the screen and opened a fold-up chair. She sat. Her fellow nurses took up positions behind smaller tables on either side of the center one. The head nurse was the only one sitting.

“Visitors forward,” the head nurse said.

Ben led the way and the parishioners followed. They formed a line in front of her.

“First visitor,” the nurse ordered.

Ben stepped forward. He pulled a bottle and vials from the canvas pocket on his belt and placed them on the table.

The nurse jotted notes in a small black book and waved him away. “Second visitor.”

Zellie hustled up. She turned her knapsack upside down and shook it—an avalanche of chocolate bars fell out. A few bounced off the table. A blonde nurse came over and picked them up.

“I like chocolate!” A boy said.

“Me too!” a girl joined in.

“You keeds kulikuli,” grouched the kupuna.

“Third visitor.”

Julia approached the table. The head nurse had a stern expression, as if the Saint Joe’s folks were more trouble than they were worth. She opened her satchel and turned it over—pastries and toothpaste tumbled out. The patients applauded. Someone whistled. Julia joined the other parishioners standing beside the makai wall.

Josephine and the Katos were next. Their offerings of gauze, bandages, toilet paper, and hypodermic needles weren’t as well received by the residents.

Nurses gathered up the treats and placed them on the makai table. More nurses picked up the medical supplies carried them to the mauka table. Goodhue slipped in through a side door and filled the pockets of his white coat with vials and syringes.

“Residents forward,” the head nurse said.

The patients filed out of their seats and proceeded down the steps to the auditorium floor. The nurses organized two groups—the adults and the children. The adults went first and formed a line in front of the makai table.

“First resident,” the head nurse said.

A Japanese woman approached the table and selected a bear claw. The second patient took a long john. The elders got most of the pastries. The children grabbed the chocolate bars. There were enough sweets for everyone. The patients took their treats outside and ate on the hall’s cement landing. The parishioners followed a group of nurses through the double doors and congregated on the porch. A nun shut the double doors. The nurses supervised, making sure the patients maintained a safe distance.

Julia saw people missing their noses, ears, and eyelids. Some held pastries with club hands. There was a haole woman slightly older than Julia with blotches on her face that went so deep they looked like holes.

The kupuna drifted back to the hall and stood below the porch. They talked story with the visitors. Zellie said her ahupua’a had gardenia groves in the uplands. Pearl talked about living on the west end and preparing shrimp tempura. Julia said she was from Oahu and worked at the Moloka’i Ranch. Several of the patients were from Honolulu and asked her how the city had changed. She did her best to describe the bustling downtown scene and the new hotels going up in Waikiki.

The keikis got bored and left the grounds of Paschoal Hall. The girls headed across the wide lawn toward Bishop Home. The boys walked slowly to their side of the peninsula. Some of the boys glanced back at the girls. Two girls watched from the road and waved.

The double doors sprung open and Ben joined the parishioners. He spoke to the head nurse before approaching Julia. “Like go with me?” he asked.

“Where?” Julia asked.

“Da Long House. Someone special stay waitin’.”

“Puanani?”

“Ae.”

Julia walked with him to the coast. Ben told her that Father Martin Dornbush and Sister Benedicta ran the settlement but rarely participated in the distribution of gifts from Saint Joe's. Dornbush was the Resident Priest. Benedicta had been promoted to Mother Superior. Dornbush was consumed with building his library. Benedicta served as emotional ballast to keep the priest focused and on schedule.

Ben and Julia turned left upon reaching Damien Road. They were the only ones on it, except for a hopping toad. They passed Wilcox Hall. Julia heard the waves onshore. They reached a beige house that was long and narrow. It had a row of windows that could slide up and down. They were all shut with their latches locked. Ben led the way up a wooden staircase and swung open the door. Julia entered the one-room Long House with Ben behind her. A narrow table fifty-feet long had a raised mesh of chicken wire that divided it in half. There was a patient side and a visitor side. A girl sat on the patient side.

“Puanani?” Julia whispered.

Ben nodded.

His daughter wore a white cotton uniform with a stiff, starched collar. There was an empty chair opposite her, on the visitor side. Two nurses stood beside Puanani. One nurse had her arms crossed. The other nurse glared down at the girl as if she had done something wrong.

“Howzit, Honey Girl,” Ben greeted.

Puanani gave her father a half-hearted wave.

“Treatin’ you good kine?” Ben continued.

Puanani ran her palms over the table’s surface. Julia noticed her index finger was missing its tip. There were shadows on her forehead and chin.

“Hands off the table,” a nurse told Puanani.

The girl removed them. The surface had deep scratches.

On the visitor’s side, a third nun washed her hands in an aluminum bowl with a chemical odor.

“Know wot stay in dat bowl?” Ben asked Julia.

"No,” she said, “but it smells bad."

“Carbolic acid waddah.”

“What for?”

“Acid kills da mai pake, or so says Goodhue.”

The nun wiped her hands with a white cloth and approached Ben. “You are Puanani’s father?”

"Yes. Can my friend stay?”

“Family only.”

“She be quiet."

"Your friend can wait outside."

Ben patted Julia’s shoulder. “Dey no like you fo’ catch mai pake.”

“I’ll take the risk,” Julia replied.

“No risk to take,” the nun said. “You must leave.”

Julia left. But she snuck along the outside wall of the Long House and gazed in through a window. Ben sat in the chair on the visitor side. He peered through the mesh and gestured wildly with his hands. Puanani showed little emotion. Her lips barely moved. There was a sadness about this girl, something that told Julia she was giving up on life. Julia tapped the window. Puanani didn’t look over. She tried again, this time banging her knuckled against the pane. The nun sauntered over. “God will punish you,” she said through the glass. Julia kept banging. The nun wagged her finger at Julia and Puanani smiled.

* * *

After the trek to the Long House, Julia accompanied Ben back to Damien Road. He didn’t want to discuss Puanani, although he did thank Julia for making his daughter smile. She couldn’t blame Ben for being private. Something was going on but it was none of her business.

Ben paused to chat with the Satos and the doctor in front of the General Store. Goodhue bragged about dropping ka’ka lines off the lava shelf on the Kalawao side and pulling in monster uluas.

“Wot you use for bait?” Lane asked.

“Octopus legs.”

“How can pull in ulua wit’ bum leg?” Ben asked.

“I manage,” the doctor replied.

Julia grew bored listening to Goodhue’s fish stories. “I wanna see more of Kalaupapa,” she said.

“Go,” Ben told her. “I find you wen time fo’ leave.”

Julia headed down School Street and turned west. She returned to the lawn between Paschoal Hall and Bishop Home. She heard girls talking in the dorms. A plover flew by. She picked a wild orchid and crossed paths with Father Dornbush and Sister Benedicta. Julia knew who they were because the sister wore a habit and Dornbush’s collar was lying on a stump. The priest was a robust man with a ruddy complexion. He wore dungarees and a blue cotton shirt. Dornbush was measuring the foundation for his library and comparing his calculations with those on a blueprint. Sister Benedicta looked tired. Her black lace-up boots were scuffed and the hem of her black ankle-length dress was covered with burrs. Ben had told Julia that Dornbush and Benedicta were still mourning the 1918 passing of Mother Marianne Cope, a nun who’d been at Damien’s bedside.

A Hawaiian man was helping the priest. He held one end of a tape measure and walked through the field.

“How far is that, Ambrose?” Dornbush asked.

The man stopped. “Seventy-three feet.”

“Far enough.”

Ambrose returned to the priest’s side. Dornbush rolled up the blueprint and handed it to him.

“Hello,” Julia greeted them. “My name’s Julia. I’m with the group from Saint Joseph’s.”

“Thank you for hiking over,” the priest said. He introduced himself and the nun. Julia was curious about Mother Marianne and asked what she was like.

“She was a risk taker,” Dornbush said.

Benedicta nodded. “If a mountain needed moving.”

Julia got the feeling that, although Dornbush and Benedicta appreciated the Saint Joe’s visitors, they considered them intruders. It made sense, Julia thought. After all, the patients made a big fuss over the topsiders while the caregivers took a back seat.

“You’re both doing God’s work,” Julia said.

“We do what the Lord commands,” the nun replied.

“Have any patients escaped?”

Benedicta took her eyes off Julia and gazed up at the pali. “A few have tried,” she replied. “But they discovered living topside is no simple task.”

Benedicta introduced Julia to their helper. Ambrose Kanewali‘i Hutchison was a piha kanaka maoli who’d been a patient for forty-three years. He had dark skin, a narrow nose, and a wide jaw. The only signs Ambrose was affected were the missing chunks in his ears and pink streaks on his arms. Ambrose told her he’d served as Kalaupapa’s superintendent, after marrying Mary Kaiakonui, another patient. Damien had performed their ceremony in 1881.

“Did you like Damien?” asked Julia.

“That Belgium priest was no-nonsense,” Ambrose said, “yet the most loving person I have had the fortune to meet.”

“We followed his trail over from Kamalo.”

“Damien was a master topographer.”

Ambrose told Julia he’d signed the Kūʻē Petitions of 1897, a protest by native Hawaiians against the annexation of Hawaii by the United States.

“My grandmother signed that petition,” Julia blurted.

“Oh? And who was she?”

“Kulia Naoho, from Waihee town on Maui.”

“Piha kanaka maoli?”

“Pure.”

“But you look haole. I see no Hawaiian.”

“Ae,” Julia said, handing him her wild orchid. “But Kulia’s mana beats in my heart.”

Julia recognized years of disappointment, regret, and distrust in the Hawaiian man. Damien had probably been the only haole he ever trusted.

Ambrose spun the orchid between his thumb and index finger. He quit spinning and studied the purple blossom. “I sense your kupuna was my kindred spirit,” Ambrose told her, “and so are you, Julia.”

* * *

A Hawaiian girl on the landing of Wilcox Hall waved at Julia. She was clutching a thick book and looked about the same age as Puanani. She wore a burgundy dress and a silver locket on a chain hung from her neck. It appeared she didn’t have Hansen’s Disease but, as Julia approached, she noticed blistered patches of skin on her cheeks and at the corners of her mouth. She was holding The Bible.

“Wot yo’ name?” the girl asked.

“Julia. And yours?”

“Aouli.”

“How long have you been here, Aouli?”

“Since small keed time.”

Julia walked up the stairs to the landing.

The girl backed away. “No come close.”

“It’s okay, Aouli. I’m not scared.”

“No?”

“Not in the least.”

The girl walked forward, stopping a few feet away. “You need guide, Julia? Show you around?”

“Sure.”

“Cost you.”

“How much?”

“Two dollah.”

Julia pulled out her coin purse. She dug out the bills and Aouli snatched the money. She watched the girl fold the dollars in half and then in quarters. She tucked them behind the cover of The Bible.

“Did you get any of that chocolate?” Julia asked.

Aouli chuckled. “Two bahs.”

The girl led Julia back to Damien Road. They reached the Long House. Julia looked in through a window—Puanani was gone. The nun was sitting inside scribbling in a book. They continued on until they reached a meadow. Nohu vines mixed in with the grass. Bees buzzed the yellow blossoms. The Bishop Home For Girls was on the far end, framed by a pair of lava pilasters. The home was a large one-story painted white. It had a brown shake roof that reminded Julia of the first mansions in Palolo Valley. A row of smaller houses, also painted white but with green roofs, were tucked behind the main house. Girls in white played croquet on the front lawn.

Aouli led Julia to a small home that served as her dormitory. Aouli opened a door and Julia followed her into a cozy room with a pair of twin beds. A Hawaiian flag quilt was spread over one of them. Aouli put The Bible on the dresser. Photos of her parents were thumbtacked to the wall. They lived in Honolulu.

“When did you see them last?” asked Julia.

Aouli stared at a photo. “Eastah time.”

“Do you know Puanani?”

“We stay roommates. Puanani da bess.”

“Did she do something wrong?”

Aouli lowered her eyes. “I no can tell.”

* * *

Julia and Aouli left Bishop Home and headed back to the village. Julia saw Awahua Beach in the foreground. Except for Josephine and Eddie walking the shore, the strand was deserted. Nobody swam in the sea. There was no barrier reef, only deep blue. Swells slammed against the lava pinnacle at the edge of the bay.

Aouli took Julia to St. Francis Church. Julia slipped a dollar in the Offertory Box and lit a candle. She asked Saint Francis for her mother’s forgiveness.

Aouli tapped Julia’s shoulder. “We go.” She led the way to Kalaupapa Landing, where a cement pier with a loading dock had been built offshore. Aouli said the biggest day of the year was Barge Day in mid-July. That’s when the once-a-year barge docked and the crew unloaded thousands of tons of freight.

“Everyt’ing from bag rice to case Spam comin’ off,” Aouli said. “One time even get bus.”

“Have you been topside?” Julia asked.

The girl gave her a quizzical look. "Wot fo'? Not'in' good fo' go up deah."

“You could go to Kaunakakai.”

“Townsfolk run from mai pake wahine.”

Julia saw Ben leading the parishioners down Damien Road. Josephine and Eddie followed holding hands. Was it already time to leave?

Zellie spotted Julia. “Hui!” she waved.

Lane whistled. Pearl motioned for Julia to join them.

“Time to hele,” Julia said. She held out her arms to Aouli.

The girl backed off. “No can.”

“I’m not scared, Aouli.”

The girl came close. She touched Julia’s breeches and put her hands on Julia’s waist. Julia wrapped her arms around Aouli’s shoulders. They hugged like mother and daughter before the girl pulled away.

“No forget me, Julia.”

“Never.”

Hugging Aouli felt good. But Julia felt bad leaving the girl behind. She knew she would probably not see her for a long time.

Julia joined the parishioners. The Satos thanked her for coming. Zellie said she’d changed her mind about Honolulu girls being weak. Ben nodded his appreciation.

Josephine patted her on the back. “You get planny guts, wahine.”

Julia turned to wave goodbye to Aouli but the girl was gone.

* * *

Ben led the volunteers to the footpath running above Awahua Beach. They passed the mustard-colored walls of the slaughterhouse as they closed in on the start of switchback number twenty-six. Julia cringed thinking of cows, pigs, and sheep getting butchered. "People gotta eat," she told herself. She thought about all the suffering on the peninsula and prayed a cure would be found soon for the disease.

* * *

The volunteers made it to switchback number ten in an hour. Only nine more, Julia thought. They were within striking distance of topside. Julia was glad Chipper would be waiting. She wanted him to kiss her and hold her tight. She wanted him to tell her how much she meant to him. She promised herself not to get mad if he stunk of whiskey.

Julia was exhausted but happy. That happiness put a hop in her step and hiking seemed easier going up than coming down. The trees folded in and darkened the trail. Mosquitoes swarmed but Julia didn't care. She was energized by an unexpected burst of exhilaration. For the first time in her life, she had made a difference in the lives of strangers.

But Julia's pace slowed when she thought about Puanani and Aouli. The girls would live and die in their prison paradise. Neither would marry unless they found boys at Baldwin House. Love might be their salvation. Julia knew the disease could never defeat the power of love. She found solace knowing the girls were strong and that they would help each other battle into the future.

* * *

Julia found Chipper on the ground with his back pressed to the Phallic Rock. He held a bottle of Wild Turkey against his heart. His eyes were shut tight and his head bobbed up and down. She walked over an ironwood branch—it snapped.

Chipper cracked an eye. “’Bout time, woman.”

“Hair of the dog?” Julia asked.

Chip raised the bottle and took a slug. Some of the booze missed his mouth and soaked his shirt.

Julia knew he’d been at it for a spell. He may have gotten the bottle from George or Old Man Joao. Or maybe he’d stopped in Kaunakakai on the way home.

“Gettin’ late,” he told her. “Have fun with da Church folk?”

“Gimme that bottle,” Julia said.

“No. And quit givin’ me da stink eye.”

She held out her hand. “Give it here.”

Chipper took a pull. She grabbed the neck of the bottle. The glass was slippery in her hand and he tugged the bottle away. She tried again but he hurled the Wild Turkey down the slope. Julia watched the bottle roll across the crabgrass, dodge a post, and tumble off the cliff.

Dead Ear

Mekenzie Dyer

The sun has set, but the air is not as crisp and cold as it should be at the end of Fall in Flagstaff, Arizona. I don’t even have my coat on as I walk into the pub house. Barry Smith has just lifted his bow to his cobalt blue violin as I order a sarsaparilla. I pick out a seat on the warm oak bench, unpadded, unlike most of the seating in the room. Normally packed with the literary community for weekly readings, the bar is strangely empty on this night for music, and I am glad to have my pick of seats. As Barry begins his electric fiddle tune, I can feel it, the vibration of the speakers. The notes on either end of the spectrum, deep booming and high pitched, resonate through the wood planks. I have to splay out. The more flesh that makes contact with the wood grains, the more I feel it in my bones. Press my chest against the high back, let the sound vibrate through my breath. Let my occipital lobe, the very back of my head, rest there, send my brain into a tizzy with the shaking of it. Even my dead ear buzzes if I press it up against the wood.

I was ten years old when it happened. Thanksgiving 2004, Buttercup, Imperial Sand Dunes, California. It’s family tradition, to pack up our toy-hauler loaded with out ATV quads, stuffed to the brim with all of the Thanksgiving fixin’s, side by side with a caravan of trucks and trailers, friends and friends of friends, making the migration to the desert. Almost as soon as we left the driveway, I asked to turn the radio on, and I sang quietly in the back seat to classic country songs I knew by heart. After four hours of driving (though it felt longer than that to me) we rolled into loose sand and looked for a space large enough to set up camp. The trucks and trailers circled up, like wagons of the wild west. It was Wednesday night. We had already spent a whole day out in the dunes, tackling the steep sloped sand like it was a wave to be surfed.

Every night, when the setting sun had taken its warmth with it, we would light a fire in the center of camp, large enough for all of the near forty people to sit around. On this particular night, the fire was small, most people still finishing dinner in their trailers. I had eaten fast and decided to set up my family’s chairs in prime territory, out of the drifting smoke and close enough to roast marshmallows.

Out of some other trailer sauntered three guys, all late twenties to early thirties, each clutching a can of Bud Light in one hand. I think, now that I am closer to their age, I would describe them as stereotypical dude-bros, but I didn’t have the words for that back then. I didn’t know them; they had been invited by a friend who had been invited by a friend of the family. They seemed like they were there more to drink than they were to ride the dunes. Drunk, they pushed and shoved each other too close to the fire, chuckling and sloshing beer out of their open cans. The distinct smell of alcohol mixed in the dirt-tinged air. But I tried to ignore them and set up my chairs. Eventually, they finished their beers and tossed the cans into the fire, along with what I assumed was more trash, before running rather sloppily away. And then the world exploded.

There is a unique sort of culture that runs parallel to the gear-head nature of the dunes. Pyrotechnics. Near everyone is obsessed with them, and dangerously so. Over the holidays, when as many as 200,000 people gather to ride, there are almost as many injuries from fireworks as there are from crashes. Most popular are Sobe bombs, glass Sobe bottles filled with gasoline and placed in a fire pit (when the gas vaporizes, the cap shoots off and a mushroom cloud of flames can spill upwards of 100 feet into the air). It is illegal to light off fireworks at the dunes, and glass bottles have even been banned, but every night they are seen and heard for miles.

Unbeknownst to me as I stood two feet from the fire, they had thrown fireworks in along with the trash. I don’t remember much, other than the sound, like the first explosion in an action movie with the volume up too loud. I was knocked to the ground, covered in embers that began to singe through my clothes, but surprisingly not on fire. Our camping chairs were though, and the logs from the fire had been launched in all directions, one landing two hundred feet away, one camp over, shattering the front window of an unsuspecting diesel truck. I stayed on the ground, brushing off embers with one hand, and clutching my right ear with the other. My right side had been facing the fire and had taken the brunt of the explosion. I felt like someone had driven an icepick through my eardrum. Both of my ears were ringing.

The whole camp came running to find me writhing in the sand. I couldn’t hear their questions over the ringing in my ears. But somehow they worked out what had happened. My parents were furious. My dad, a 6’ 3” broad-shouldered firefighter gave them an earful about everything that could have happened, how they were lucky no one was killed, etc, etc. But my mother, 5’ 4” and petite, nearly beat them to death, according to family lore. I wouldn’t put it past her to have at least punched them in the gut and kicked them in the balls. Regardless, they were out of camp by morning.

I insisted I was fine and once my dad gave me a once-over to be sure, camp life returned to normal. I spent the rest of the week in our trailer though. The pain and ringing gradually faded but prevented me from getting close to the roar of quad and dirt bike engines. After the holiday, it was not apparent that any permanent damage had been done. But every year since then, I have lost more and more of my hearing in my right ear. That, I don’t mind much. There are other ways to hear. When I drive, I place my leg against the speaker in the door to feel my music better. I stand with my left side angled toward people talking to me so my better ear hears all it can. For the most part, I don’t notice the deficit, unless someone calls out to me in a wide open space. In situations like that, it’s hard for me to locate where the sound came from. But like I said, I can deal.

However, I was left with an additional effect from the explosion. It left me with category 3 hyperacusis in my right ear. That is, in layman's terms, hypersensitivity to what sounds I am able to hear. A medical professional would say that the damage in my ear causes even normal sounds to seem overly loud, but that’s not an accurate description. What I hear instead sounds like a mix of TV static turned all the way up and the feedback from a microphone placed too close to a speaker. And even worse, it occurs with a broad range of sounds, at high and low decibels and frequency levels. Plus, it’s completely different every day. Some days, something as simple as talking will set if off, other days I can blast my music in my car with only feedback at the highest notes. Indeed, hyperacusis has fundamentally changed music for me. There are some songs that trigger it, no matter the day or the volume setting. It’s often just one note, repeated in the chorus or maybe its just in there once, at the climax of the song, but it’s a note I don’t get to hear. Not truly. To me, these songs sound different from what the artists intended, as if my ear has remixed them.

But here’s the thing: some of my favorite songs are the ones that trigger my hyperacusis the most. They are songs with that one note that seem to have the best rhythm, the best lyrics, that speak to me on some level and send a flood of energy through my body as I listen to them, and I listen to them on repeat for days on end until my ear rings from the abuse. And I love it. In every other aspect of my life, I take precautions to avoid the ear-splitting sound of hyperacusis. I spend most of my time with an earbud in my ear, with nothing playing through it, because it acts like a protective barrier in my mind (even though noise-canceling headphones couldn’t do much to ease it). I sleep with an ambient noise machine (that ironically sounds like TV static) so noise from outside my room doesn't set off the static in my brain. I only stay so long at family functions because the Dyer clan together can be very loud. And yet, music has never been like that for me. I am a little bitter, perhaps, that I will likely never see my favorite artists in concert. Between the volume of the music and the noise of the crowd, it would be too much for me to enjoy the music. But otherwise, I take no care to avoid triggering my hyperacusis with music.

However, I do wonder what my favorite songs really sound like. What is Annie by SafetySuit if not “Annie, you are the one song left in my symphony, thisshig like you were made for me” or Van Nuys by Sixx:A.M. without “everyone’s mouth is dry, but nobody wants to die kgkkkrrr in Van Nuys gkrlgkrl”? There’s a way I can find out, a non-invasive treatment, called HRT. But it is experimental, expensive, not covered by insurance, and not a one-hundred-percent fix. In essence, it is a way to retain the tonal tolerance of an ear through sound therapy, but it’s really just desensitization.

And even if I could afford it, I’m not sure I would do it. I think I like my music too much to risk changing it. Because of my hyperacusis, music I listen to is uniquely mine; no one else will ever hear music the way that I do, even someone else with hyperacusis. And I do not want to desensitize myself to that.

Back in the bar, Barry’s final song has reached a fever-pitch. His bow is sending out waves, reverberating through the very air, tangible even through the glass of my soda bottle. It makes my hair stand on end with the tingling of it. The final note rings through the bar, rings in my ear with one last crackle. After applause, I stand and leave the bench for the cooling air outside. I pop my earbuds into my ears, not satisfied with the silence after such a performance. I shuffle through the first few songs before settling on “Face Everything and Rise” by Papa Roach. Down the street, a rowdy group of boys exits one bar, crossing the road to enter another, shoving each other and laughing loudly. I roll my eyes and walk the other direction and Jacoby Shaddix’s voice sings in my ear, “Running in the fire, I'll never be the same, I come alive when I am burning in the flames.”