Issue 11 - Spring 2021

Creative nonFiction

Trail Magic

Amy Bee              

My friends can give you a ride to Bishop, but the driver’s on mushrooms, she says, eyeballing the tan lines that stop at our ankles, our scratched-up calves, our grimy backpacks. Other day hikers flow around us like we’re two giant boulders in a river. Aaron and I exchange looks. After eighteen days in the High Sierra, hell yeah, we’ll take a ride from a guy on shrooms. We grab our packs, socks, shoes, trekking poles, and each other’s hand, hobbling with stiff legs and aching backs behind the smooth, clean curve of our rescuer. She guides us to her friend’s car, where a woman with skin as pale as a desert mouse greets us, opens the rickety red door, and hands us each a peach before piling us in. A man with golden-orange sunset hair reaches from the driver’s seat to toss a jumbled mess of hiking gear into the trunk. We fold ourselves into the leftover space, Sunset Man looking deep into our eyes, grinning until we grin back, until all four of us are grinning, any collective shyness absorbed by an impromptu road trip.

He slaps the steering wheel and starts the car and questions us about our journey in a voice as raspy as a rusty gate. After days and days of walking, we are suddenly moving, engaged in motion no longer tied to our own effort and volition. I cup my peach gently with one hand and clutch the door handle with my other. We’re flying over cracked and rutted blacktop, the landscape speeding past as if we’re viewing it from the eye of a tornado, and is this how life has always been? A forward momentum where details can only be gleaned and glimpsed?

Aaron slurps his peach, pointing to the one in my palm and then pointing at his mouth: Eat the peach, he says, in that silent way married people talk. I shake my head. Not yet. I’m dazed and exhilarated, watching through my window as green foliage and cool rock crumble into the buttery soft grasses of the foothills, our road cutting through the splendor, efficiently whisking me away from my beloved Sierra Nevada. The towering shape of mountainous peaks and summits crowd the rear window, like a family waving good-bye, steadily shrinking into a memory. Aaron nods in understanding. Our knees touch, our eyes glazed with overstimulation, giddy as we imbibe on sensory overload. Can you believe…isn’t this just so…is this real…our hearts flutter back and forth.

Sunset Man fills the car with his tales, his fiery eyes framed in the rear-view mirror. Mouse nods, tripping along in her own quietly animated way. I want to tell them how the scent of their soap is like standing in an ocean of lavender and honey, how it collides against the wall of our sweaty stench and roils over like a tsunami. Outside, the earth opens and expands; the air paints itself in bittersweet hues of purple and burgundy. Bishop twinkles in the dry valley, a distant star looming, growing in intensity. I want to tell them how I’ve never been exhausted into happiness like I am right now. Sunset Man veers onto a gravelly vista and slams the brakes. We all spill out of the rickety red car and seep into the everywhere. I want to tell them how I can see the universe breathing in unison with me. How the sky reaches for a horizon it never meets. Mouse is humming like a little bird, rubbing warmth into her chilly paws. Aaron scurries into the underbrush to take a leak and scare the quail. Sunset huffs and puffs, circling the group like a wolf, a lone wolf afraid of being left in the wilderness. I stand to the side, my silhouette straining to stand out against time. I want to tell them so much. I do. Instead, I eat the peach.

Amy Bee contributes to the Sacramento News & Review and Good Times Santa Cruz. Her work has appeared in Ozy, Salon, New Ohio Review, The London Reader, and others. Her essay, The Adult Section, won the 2017 Sunlight Press Summer Creative Nonfiction Award. She's currently working on a memoir about loving what you're not good at (which, for her, is life in general). When she isn't writing, Amy likes to backpack long distances.

Bartered Time

Gregory T. Janetka

It's ten years since her husband died and over sixty since they wed. A war came early in their marriage, separating them. Although he never made it overseas, to her, he was always staring down death. Every night she fell asleep praying for his safety, and every morning she woke dreaming of his warm body.

In their circles, he was referred to as “the dabbler,” owing to his wide and varied array of interests—dentistry, ham radio, photography—anything that struck his fancy. It was a revolt against a poverty that left school inaccessible. For several years he was absorbed by jewelry making, forging, among other trinkets, the ring that hugs her finger to this day. And yet, for all this dabbling, he never looked farther when it came to women—he had many passions throughout his life, but only one love. 

As the hostilities of the world waned, they were together again and soon joined by two little girls. Money was scarce. They fought and cried and swore, but more often they laughed and made love, remaining together until his death, two years after their golden anniversary.

And now, if you ask her about him, she says, “I wish I'd gotten married,” forcefully waving her hand as if to shoo away the daydream. The faded photograph of her husband on the windowsill is one of the few personal possessions in her room, but it means nothing to her. Nestled among photos of other strangers, it may just as well have come with the frame. Times of nursing him through colds and the flu, of picnics with the kids, of his unromantic but utterly charming proposal while out foraging for mushrooms—these, as well as the year he spent dying from a blood disorder—are gone, wiped out, never happened.

Her voice retains the same cadence and inflection, but I no longer know where the words come from. She looks like her but isn't her. She's nobody, nobody who continues to speak, breathe, eat, laugh. Her actions aren't mechanical or instinctual but still born of humanity. Yet, for all practical purposes, this 78-year-old woman has existed no longer than the better part of two years. Each time I visit she's cordial, but there's no resemblance of the familiar, of babysitting me so my parents could have a night out, of our special trips to the mall for pizza, of sitting with me in the car when I wet my pants at the zoo and couldn't stop crying. She's become closer to the volunteers and nurses than to me, allowing any mention of family to disappear down any of the number of twisting halls of the home.

I wish I'd never gone abroad. She was coherent when I left, wishing me luck and giving me $20. For the first couple of months, she sent letters each week, usually recipes from the Tribune that I'd never make. While I spent my erratic days drinking between (and during) exams, I'd come back to my room to find her letters and know such things would go on forever. After returning to the States, I started stopping by each week to see her for a few hours, although I would spend more and more of that time in my car crying. I drop in on Thursdays—my one day off—the same day as the local high school volunteers.

I can't stop replaying an incident from when I was nine. She was watching me while my parents took in a play. Assured everyone was as indestructible as I was, I began horsing around, pulling her back and forth, begging her to play some game, or watch some show, or go somewhere. Who knows what I wanted; all I know is I knocked her down, causing her to fall and hit her head against the worn corner of an armchair. The sound was sharp and hollow. Maybe that's what broke something and started this. Who knows? Then again, I'm always finding ways to blame myself, give myself power in this powerless world. Regardless of the cause, this is how things are. When I arrive at the home, she's sleeping off her early lunch, her breathing shallow. Taking a seat beside her to wait for her to wake, I watch her fall over and over again, hearing that ugly crack of her skull echo through the room.

She coughs herself awake, groggy from sleep and the sun. I smile and give her time to get her bearings. Then, setting myself up for heartbreak, I introduce myself as her grandson and wait for a flicker of recognition. She replies with a forced “hello” and the assurance that she had not been sleeping. I struggle to come up with open-ended questions, end up inevitably complimenting her sweater, and we pass the time in a mutual haze. 

When conversation draws to a halt, my eyes wander the room for something to work with. Daytime television commercials yell over groans, cracks, and coughs—the beauty of the aging human body—but there's never much talk among the residents. Individualized cocktails of meds are passed around in tiny paper cups. The nurses at the desk, in between visitors and confused residents, gossip about last night's reality shows. A shriveled man sits in the darkened dining hall. He's there every time I visit, alone, dressed in the same checkered pajama pants and green shirt, going through the same motions. Other than an old wicker basket containing sugar, salt, ketchup, mustard, and crackers, the unset table is bare. No one ever pays him any attention. Examining each package of crackers as if inspecting a diamond for purity, he settles on one, eats them plain, brushes his mustache with his handkerchief, grunts, then gets up and hobbles off stage, his mouth flopping open and closed. Returning in short order, he repeats the process four or five times before disappearing for good, just as the staff arrives to set up for the second lunch.

The field of drooping white heads perks up when the volunteers arrive. Lindsey, a girl of sixteen, draws laughter and smiles from my grandmother, whereas my efforts elicit little more than blank stares and half-hearted grins. Sitting alongside, I watch my grandma regard this girl, this stranger, with the warmth and kindness she lavished on me for so many years.

The two of them have in-jokes and poke fun at the other residents as I look on. While we share blood and genes, I'm no longer family, but for that matter, neither is she—to anyone. We are unpersons together, only she doesn't know it. During family gatherings, we'd goof around while everyone else discussed who was dying of what; now my words fall flat. It's as if she made a conscious decision to forget the past, the loss too much to bear, and I happened to be collateral damage.

Losing her before physically losing her, my twentysomething selfish heart became determined to make myself part of her life again. Relatives—everywhere when I was growing up—died, moved away, became generic Christmas cards, and I grasp at the few connections remaining. My grandma used to love telling me stories, and so I tell her one. Forget remembering; this is starting over. On my next visit, I sit in the car until the volunteers arrive and walk in with them. Before Lindsey can get to her, I rush to my grandmother and introduce myself, careful to use a name not found in our family tree.

“Hello Malinda, I’m Charlie.”

She smiles and relaxes her hold on the cane she always has in her hand, seated or standing.

“Have a seat, Charlie.”

She motions toward the couch with her free hand, and in the movement, her ring catches the sun. Despite everything else, she never removed it. The idea of my deception stings, and I whisper apologies to her and my grandfather but continue the charade.

“How’s your day? Been outside at all? It’s beautiful right now.”

“The sun'll only age you,” she says. “Don't want to start looking like the rest of these old codgers!” She winks and chuckles to herself, then asks about my family.

I change the names but otherwise leave the family history—our family history—intact, and for the first time in years, she unwittingly takes great interest in her own relatives. She listens, asks questions, and even pats my hand in sympathy in response to my father's cancer. When she looks out the window and says, “I don’t have any family left, they‘re all dead,” I express my regret and feel my heart break clean in two.

She begins to remember me—as Charlie—from visit to visit, and I shoot a bitter eye at Lindsay for trying to steal my last remaining grandparent. But it's dementia I'm angry at, not a teenage girl willing to give up her free time to provide companionship to the forgotten. We laugh again, and I relish the warm moments, even though they haunt me at night. She doesn't often retain details but shocks me when she brings up something from weeks earlier.

Short of getting her back, it's everything I could ask for. Her favorite game of tooling around in a stolen wheelchair, making fun of the other residents, is ours now, not Lindsey's. She even asks me some of the same pestering questions I'd grown tired of as a child, telling me I'm too skinny and insisting I “at least have an apple.”

#

When I sign in, she isn't in the lobby. I take the elevator to the second floor, walk past the breakfast nook, wave to the fish in the tank, and go to her room. No answer, and no longer a name on the door.

I lost my grandma a second time, Charlie lost his new friend, and this time no stories or clever tricks can change that. The hallways melt and reform as I hold onto the wall, but no tears come.

In the elevator, there's a list of upcoming birthdays posted on circus-themed paper. Lindsay's at the card table, playing games with another white-haired old lady, and I hurry past, straight into the dark dining room. The man in the green shirt sits alone, eating dry crackers. He's earlier than usual—the tables haven't been cleared yet from the first lunch, and for once, he looks appropriate. Grabbing an untouched green apple, I say, “Thanks,” to which the old man, thinking I spoke to him, says “Thank you, son,” and smiles, spitting pieces of dry cracker onto the table.

Gregory T. Janetka is a writer from Chicago who runs the history site One Hundred False Starts. His work has been featured in Glass Mountain, Gravel, The Phoenix, and other publications. More of his writings can be found at gregorytjanetka.com.

Lucky Thirteen

Sarah Key     

I
Under the blue Bicycle cards, my grandmother’s calico quilt was frayed, but my mind stayed with the game. Clock Patience, my favorite game from 150 Ways to Play Solitaire by Alphonse Moyse. It would be hours before our mother was home from law school. Our parents had recently divorced, so my sister Jen and I had moved with my mother into our grandparents’ summer apartment. My sister was downstairs watching The Brady Bunch. By age eight, she was already a master of multi-tasking, stomach-down on the floor, her head bobbing between screen and book. I liked the quiet of the cards.

II
There is no skill involved in most solitaire games other than the ability to pay attention. With Clock, each time a new hand is dealt, there is a one in thirteen chance of winning. Each re-deal, my odds are the same. The illusion is that the more hands in a row that one loses, the more likely the next hand will be won. But that is a false perception.

III
Looking back, I wonder what possessed me to waste so much time on Clock. Or was it a waste? Time itself is a human-imposed numbers game, dividing years into days into hours into minutes into seconds. Maybe it was a way to beat time which had been divided into a before and after with our move from a public school in Alexandria, Virginia, to a private school at the Jersey shore. Long division had been covered before fourth grade in my new school, and I struggled in math for the first time. I had nothing to hide from the clock of cards on my bed, the way I hid from my new friends that I had divorced parents. The cards were totally in my control. Or at least it seemed that way.

IV
Games have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. My sister and I have always been serious rule-followers. Jen especially could not abide any rule-breaking in herself or others. The first thing Jen did when playing a new game was to read and memorize the rule-book. She did not like to alter the rules in any way. Cards were the game of choice in my family, though there was also watching University of Oklahoma football games, but that was more like a religion.

V
My granddaddy started playing gin rummy with us as soon as we were able to hold ten cards. The stakes varied from a nickel to a quarter, real money back then. He never went easy on us. He took our money without trying to teach us where we went wrong. Granddaddy Hugh liked to bet illegally on Oklahoma sports teams. Mother opposes gambling of any sort. Jen and I savored winning itself. We didn’t need money to sweeten the pot.

VI
My sister and I became excellent card players. We were so competitive with each other that many a game of spit, war, crazy eights, and concentration ended in tears. Gin taught us the basics of remembering cards played and how best to strategize with suits and numbers. We often beat the grownups.

VII
Considering how often cards were my favorite distraction, I never thought about how cards connected to the calendar: fifty-two cards for fifty-two weeks in a year; four suits for the four seasons; two colors for night and day; thirteen cards in a suit for thirteen lunar cycles in a year; twelve court cards, Kings, Queens, and Jacks, for twelve months. Why in fifty years of card-playing did I not think about that before?  These reminders of the natural world reveal how far our rage for order reaches. Cards give entry to the lowest-tech cave of human-made rules. The metaphorical power over worlds and timelines is the same, however, whether using computer screens or cards made of paper: the illusion of control. Deciding when to turn a card over in Solitaire is power. I have been manipulating the calendar.

VIII
My friend Allen introduced me to a new card game. Called Thirteen, it is reputedly a popular card game in prison, but I never asked Allen how he knew that. I wonder how Allen’s prior life as a bouncer at a strip club called The Naked Eye prepared him to become a Thirteen master. Also called Three Thirteen, it is a gin-based game in which eleven rounds are dealt out, starting with three cards each, adding one card each hand, four, then five, on up, ending with a thirteen-card hand. After losing again and again to Allen, I would press him to play again. No matter how many times in a row he beat me, Allen was always up for another game.

IX 
When Allen heard my sister was struggling after a break-up with her boyfriend of fifteen years, he told me Jen could come visit him any time in San Diego. He would sleep on the couch and give her his bed for as long as she needed. He offered this, never having met Jen, whose rule-following had led her to law and a partnership in a large Washington, DC firm. Though I had trouble seeing Jen in Allen’s Imperial Beach apartment, the offer moved me.

X 
After years with a troubled man, and taking on too many family financial burdens, my sister had developed a serious anxiety disorder. The strong, funny sister I grew up with was buried in anxieties that crushed her as if an earthquake had collapsed a building upon her.  For a couple of months, I moved in with her. She was no longer able to watch sports, reality TV, read true-crime novels, all the things that provided relief from her high-stress job. I tried everything to snap her out of it. We meditated, took walks, went to museums. Some days there seemed no escape from the anxiety that came in waves.  Crying episodes possessed her with such force that often, she was knocked to the ground.

XI 
One day as she was rolling on the floor sobbing, I had an idea. Why not go back to our childhood of cards; perhaps it was a distraction worth trying. I would teach her a new game. If Thirteen worked in prison, maybe it could give Jen relief from her prison. I taught Jen how to play Thirteen. For the duration of the game, she stopped crying. From then on, it was my magic pill. Whenever I couldn’t bear one more second of seeing her in pain, I would pull out the cards and say, “Thirteen?” like some crazed game show hostess. For some reason, this card game was just the right balance of focus and rules for her brain to cling to without making her feel over-taxed or anxious.

XII
The patience I had developed as a child playing Clock solitaire came in handy. The endurance to watch my sister worsen day after day and show her that I believed she would get better was like waiting for a winning hand. I clung to the illusion that the more days in a row she was down, the greater the chance she would triumph tomorrow. For the first time in all our years of playing cards together, I was tempted to let her win.  I had more practice at Thirteen, so I was better. It seemed cruel to keep winning.  But she would know if I let her win. I believed that as she played more, she would get better, and she did.

XIII
The optimism of Thirteen is that your luck can drastically change from hand to hand. You have eleven times to start over. After a string of bad luck, starting over becomes more and more important. If players are evenly matched, and luck goes back and forth, either player is able to win the whole game if she has a strong showing the last hand. Thirteen helped us get through a hard time. My sister and I live hundreds of miles apart, but we speak on the phone every evening. I am still watching the Clock and know even if Jen is no longer downstairs watching TV, that more games of Thirteen are in the cards for us, as one day we will want to teach my new grandson how to play.

Sarah Key’s work includes cookbooks, essays on the Huffington Post, and several dozen poems in print and online, including anthologies such as Nasty Women Poets and American Writers Review 2020. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Calyx, Poet Lore, Minerva Rising, Poetry Center San Jose, Tulane Review, and Tuesday; An Art Project. After studying poetry at Frost Place, Cave Canem, and the Unterberg Poetry Center, Sarah now learns from her students at a community college in the South Bronx where they call her Poet in Practice. Find her online at sarahkeynyc.com.

Two Parties

Chris A. Smith        

That night we lingered in my driveway, seven or eight of us, shooting baskets and drinking beer. It was the last night before everything changed.

We had all been at a house party, circulating between the muggy backyard heat and the bone-chill of the living room, where we tried not to spill beer on the Turkish rugs and Barcelona chairs. The outlines of these parties had become comfortingly familiar over the years--drinking skunky MGD, blasting Jane’s Addiction and the Dead, hanging out with people I had known since grade school.

When it was time to leave, three of us sat in a friend’s car down the road, headlights off, doing whippets and listening to hip hop. We cued up Eric B. and Rakim’s “Paid in Full,” the song that sampled Israeli singer Ofra Haza’s ethereal wail.

Thinking of a master plan

There ain’t nothing but sweat inside my hand

As we huffed our nitrous oxide balloons, Rakim’s baritone wobbled on some sublime frequency. The air in the car vibrated; the beat turned itself inside out. I leaned my head back, undone for a moment, melting into the warm vinyl seat.

Then we drove through the suburbs of Detroit, windows down, the rushing air clearing our heads. We headed for my house, the usual site for the after-party.

It was August of 1990. I had just graduated high school, and nobody was watching over what I did. My parents, who had separated the previous year, were locked in a War of the Roses-style divorce, and I was learning to operate in the yawning spaces between them.

In those days, my mom rarely left her bedroom, and I went days without seeing her. In some ways, this was for the best, because she thought I was conspiring with my father against her. She cut my dad’s face out of all our family pictures and rekeyed the locks after discovering I had spoken to him. For dinner, I’d microwave hot dogs or make a turkey sandwich, trying to avoid her until I could retreat to my room upstairs.

My dad hadn’t moved very far away, but I had only visited a couple of times since he’d left. I asked him about the man-sized stuffed teddy bear that had materialized in his foyer; was it a gift from a new girlfriend? He said he wasn’t seeing anyone. Later I got a call from my stepsister-to-be, inviting me to the wedding in Atlanta.  

My house was old and rambling, of vaguely colonial style, its white bricks crawling with ivy. The backyard, where I had sledded in winter as a kid, tumbled towards a desultory creek and the “pumphouse,” a decrepit, mossy building that looked like something out of a slasher film. I was an only child, and had the house’s upper floor to myself. I spent most of my time in the rec room, sprawled on the blue-and-white checkered couch, reading and listening to the stereo my dad had left behind, a tank-like, audiophile system with wood-grained speakers as tall as my sternum. As chaotic as my life felt back then, my house—it had long ago ceased to feel like “our” house—had become, paradoxically, a refuge.

That night in my driveway, Eric drove to the rim in a frenzy of dribbling, the ball loud on the asphalt. Carlo, a half-foot taller and fifty pounds heavier, swatted the ball into the bushes, eliciting a muted roar from our little assembly. All of us were off to college soon—mostly to Ann Arbor or East Lansing, close enough for weekend laundry runs. I was on my way to North Carolina, where I knew no one. I desperately wanted to get as far away from my family as possible. But now, as my departure loomed, I was quietly terrified. This was the life I knew. This was my normal.  

Midnight passed. Bugs spun dervish circles under the floodlights. Eric tossed me a beer from the 12-pack in his trunk. I had learned to skate and snowboard with him, first got drunk with him in the woods nearby. I looked around at my friends; these guys were all I had. And this night, I realized, was the last that we would all be together, just like this.

I plopped myself down on the rough rock wall at the driveway’s edge, suddenly unable to remain standing. A few seconds later. the sobbing rose up and washed over me. I was helpless, overcome by a mix of loss and gratitude that even today I can’t fully parse. Doug, the gentlest of us, put a paw-like hand on my shoulder. We had always mocked him for his temperament, but I was glad he was there. The heaving subsided, and my head began to throb as I stared at my feet. I couldn’t remember the last time I cried.

###

By the time I had my first summer break at college, my mom had moved to a smaller house. The move had surprised me; I hadn’t expected her to do it so quickly.  After my freshman year, I came home to work as a camp counselor because I didn’t know what else to do, and I lived with her. I missed the old house, and out of a vague sense of unfinished business, I decided to throw a party there. The place hadn’t sold yet, and I still had a key.

That first summer, we all came back, and none of us came back. A friend who had been straight-edge was now a stoner. Another talked incessantly about film. I had been a punk-rock kid, but that spring I had pledged a fraternity. I was having trouble reconciling these sides of myself; they would never fit, in fact, but I didn’t know that yet. That summer, I put all of my punk and metal LPs in leftover movers’ boxes and sold them to a dingy used-record store on Woodward Avenue. I still regret that decision.

Maybe twenty people came to the party at the old house: close friends like Eric and Kyle and Tony, other high-school types, and a smattering of new people like Susie, whom I had met at a party in East Lansing. She was everything I wasn’t: outgoing, spontaneous, endearingly loud in her enthusiasms. During the divorce, I had walled myself off from strong emotions of any kind, and my life since then was marked by a utilitarian blankness. The psychological term, I’d learn later, is dissociation. Someone at college nicknamed me “Little Buddha”; others thought I was just a burnout—too many drugs, too early in life.

Susie and I only lasted a few months, but she sparked something in me, a fire I couldn’t access on my own. We snuck into condo complexes late at night to soak in their hot tubs; closed down hockey bars in Windsor, across the Detroit River in Canada; and went to dollar movies where the audience shouted advice at the screen. At The Silence of the Lambs, we roared at Clarice Starling: don’t trust that cannibal!

We all hung out in the kitchen, its 1970s beige linoleum faded by the sun, the cabinets’ brass knobs scrubbed dull from decades of use. I leaned against the marble counter, where I’d eaten countless breakfasts as Gordon Lightfoot and America played on WCAR. I had written a shameless rip-off of Sartre’s No Exit for drama class at this very counter, drinking coffee late into the night. I watched the party happen as if from outside myself, drifting, emptily content.

The house was empty—this was before home staging became routine--and the den opening off the kitchen looked cavernous, our shadows dancing across the walls. The sliding glass patio door banged open and closed as people went out to smoke cigarettes or pack bowls. Our voices echoed through the empty rooms, the sound hanging in the air before finally, grudgingly melting away.

Toward the end of the evening, I wandered off by myself, a ghost on his final rounds, to the sun room with its blue shag carpeting, where I had opened presents under our Christmas tree—a fake tree, because of the cats. The living room, where I had slept next to the fireplace when a midwinter ice storm knocked out the power for days. Then upstairs, to my bedroom. The door was still plastered in punk stickers, a mosaic of skulls and flames and leering, iridescent devils riding skateboards. A realtor’s nightmare, no doubt.

Opening one of the windows, I climbed out onto a flat portion of the roof. A susurration of voices wafted up to me, Susie’s husky shout and Eric’s staccato laugh, along with snatches of music from the CD player. Someone was playing Nine Inch Nails.

I sat out there for a while, knees pulled up to my chest, overlooking the driveway where I had launched myself off kicker ramps and played clumsy basketball. The landscaped hillside was running riot from months of neglect, once-manicured bushes a little sinister in the spotlights. The air was cool and still; a perfect Michigan summer night.

I breathed out, and some of the tension drained from my limbs. Then I stood up and stretched. Time to leave.

Chris A. Smith is an award-winning San Francisco journalist and writer who has reported from Middle Eastern war zones and American protests, profiled big-city mayors and squatter punks, and produced deep dives into everything from political messaging to asteroid strikes to African acid rock. Find him at chrisasmith.net or on Twitter @chrisasmith.