Empty Windows

by Sara Birch

"You know, Short here saw angels in his window one night. They were floating around outside, lookin' in at him. He said they were beautiful."

My stepfather came closer. I shrank back and peered at the little man he'd brought into the house. They both smelled like liquor, old sweat, and something else. Something sinister.

Short lived up to his name. A tiny man, his face, whiskers and clothes were gray, a wraith who rose from the desert floor and seeped under our door like fog. He was beaming, a pilgrim who had seen the face of God and lived to tell about it. Short was a believer, right down to his scuffed shoes and empty wallet.

We had recently moved to a rental house in Phoenix. Our living room had a television set balanced on a wobbly metal stand and two faded chaise lounges we found in the backyard. The house was dusty, battered. There were spiders in corners and stains on the walls.

The sliding glass doors were fly-spotted, greasy with fingerprints, cracked at the bottom. Beyond the doors, the lawn had turned to straw long ago, bleached by the sun. Far from my friends, my only visitors were jet streams, white billowing lines that shattered the blue as people left the desert for somewhere else.

I was seventeen years old that summer. A high school graduate, I had barely earned my diploma. A career truant, I was steeped in too much trauma to tolerate the normalcy of school. When my mother and step-father announced they were venturing west again, I had reluctantly signed on. There were no other options.

So, two months before, I had helped push an old washing machine up the ramp of a U-Haul trailer, along with beds, lamps, and clothes, the detritus of a tattered life. Cardboard boxes, once filled with memorabilia, were a reminder of a past when things weren't as crazy. We had fallen on hard times. My step-father was a drunk and a cruel man. My mother was confused, depressed, and strapped with a toddler. Her boxes held a lifetime of broken dreams. They'd decide where to go in the morning. A flip of a coin. All I knew was we were heading west. Maybe California or Arizona.

The sun rose, and it was off on another trip down Route 66 in the back of a pickup truck. I hung on to my old cat in her crate. We careened through mountain passes and across bridges that spanned canyons so vast, it was tempting to jump from the truck and fling myself over the guardrail to see if I could fly somewhere better, where men weren't cruel, mothers didn't cry, a place where hope might guide us into something brighter. The frightened cat urinated. It seeped out of the crate and into my clothes. I reeked of urine. The wind across the bow of the truck bed was chilling, stiffening my jeans.

We drove all day and into the night. Overhead were a million stars, chips in the ragged night as though it wore sequins. "At least there's that," I thought. The stars didn't care who I was, or where I was going. They danced for me the way they  did years ago, when I was a little girl and wondered what hid in the folds of darkness.

*

When I was four years old, teachers at my Sunday School gave me a picture of Jesus in Sunday School. His likeness fit in the palm of my hand, and it glowed in the dark. I huddled deep in the closet among the shoes and dirty clothes, staring at his serene face, which was bathed in a greenish light.

When I was seven, I wrote letters to God and tossed them in the fireplace, hoping He read the smoke signals as my words rose from the chimney and into the universe.

My mother re-married when I was twelve. I left Jesus behind on the closet floor. We journeyed down empty roads with the Devil at our backs. But sometimes, the Devil walked through the front door with a guest.

*

Short got the extra bedroom. He slept on the floor in a blanket. I did my best to avoid him, but he'd corner me, sharing stories of angels. He saw himself as a missionary for a celestial realm, there to guide us on a pathway to Heaven. Foul breath breached yellowed teeth and struck my face in clouds. Recalling the picture of Jesus in the closet, a thirsty space in me wanted to believe in Short’s angels. I carried his words into my room like a disciple and unpacked them on my pillow each night. Nothing appeared in the windows, nor did I hear heavenly music. The only sounds were a dog barking at dawn, and the furtive noises in a slumbering house. Nights were disappointing, and the days glared in the desert sun.

One afternoon, Short and my step-dad staggered in, beer burps tangling with onions and peanuts. They had been on a bender, days spent at the nearby Elbow Room, a hollowed-out nest for drunks and vipers.

"Short's going back home. I'm gonna put him on a Greyhound." my step-father announced.

Nodding, I went back to reading a book, feigning indifference. I figured I'd never know if angels peered in the windows now that Short would take his crusade elsewhere.

Short said goodbye, rheumy eyes dancing in his head. He left under the guidance of my step-father. They leaned inwards towards each other, shuffled out to the pick-up truck, an ark in a sea of sand. 

*

The next day I walked four blocks to a pay phone and waited.  At four o'clock, it rang.

"Hi," I said.

My boyfriend's voice was far away. About fifteen hundred miles as the crow flies. He was a nice boy who came from a good family. He had no idea what I had gone through for years. None of my friends did. In my family, we wore our secrets well.

He held me tight the night before I left. We stood on the front steps at midnight. The porch light had burned out long ago. The truck and trailer crouched in the driveway like mongrels who hungered for the road.

"I'll miss you," he whispered. A chilling wind blew through our clothes, ruffled our hair. I saw his silhouette in the dark, placed my head on his chest.

"I'll miss you, too," I said, then stepped across the threshold and closed the door on normal.

Every week, on Sunday afternoon, I stood in the phone booth, cooking in the heat. A few cars honked as they passed. I closed the door and turned my back. Wiped the sweat from my forehead.

"How are you?" he asked, his voice warm and concerned.

"Good," I lied, knowing I'd never see him again. I held the dirty phone to my mouth as we talked, wondered who else spoke into it, or thumbed through the ripped pages of the directory. What other nomads had stood here tethered to a cord that reached across the miles?

*

Years later, a man would follow me home from a train station in the Midwest. He'd write a song about me and the angels Short had promised. We'd sing in coffee houses, then dance in empty boxcars by the railroad tracks.

By then the angels would be just part of a story, a chapter in a life spent counting telephone poles along empty highways.

But on that day, in the summer of my seventeenth year, I opened the phone booth and stepped onto an uneven sidewalk. Looking down, I noticed weeds pushing through the cement. Weeds that would survive long after the sidewalk crumbled under the cruel sun. Weeds that flourished and never gave up, no matter how often they were stepped on.

That night, I parted the curtains in the bedroom, pretended the tears on my cheeks were milk from the moon etching stars on my face. I wondered if I looked like an angel through the pane to seekers who passed in the darkness.

Sara Birch writes about growing up in an unconventional family. As a young girl, Sara moved multiple times throughout the United States. Her dream was to stay in one place long enough to find her way around in the dark. She currently lives between the mountains and the sea, with rain as her muse.

A Memory of Smoke

by Stephen Beckwith

From the street, my neighborhood was the perfect post-war collection of starter homes. Boxy ranch houses and faux Cap Cods constructed on large lots among the old growth oaks and sassafras. All fifty-six houses were built in the six years between 1948 and 1954.

          Horsebrook Creek ran along the back of our property on the west side of the street. Beyond the creek westward was a land of woods, fallow fields, abandoned orchards, meadows, swamps, ponds, railroad tracks and, farther west, the town’s airport runways. Beyond the airport the woods and farmland ran unbroken for sixty miles.

          This was not Christopher Robin’s tame Hundred Acre Wood populated with sweet, befuddled English countryside creatures. In the winter this was the Yukon, in the spring a muddy battlefield in France. In summer we would dam up the creek and go swimming like Huck and Tom. And in the fall, from just after the start of school, until the first snowfall around Thanksgiving, ‘across the crick’ was a forbidden world of pheasant and deer, and red-hatted hunters.

          I first began to explore these wild lands when I was six, and these fields and woods became my principal reality. Family, home, chores, these were all illusionary when compared to time spent atop old fruit trees aiming wormy apples at fat grey squirrels. My buddies and I would dig foxholes deep into the soft black peat bog and we would lob hand-grenade-shaped quinces at each other.

          In the summers’ the gang would break for dinner at six, gather in the field behind our house at seven, and, once more, wade the Zambezi into darkest Africa until nine.

          Horsebrook School sat atop a small promontory on a bend in the creek three houses south of our backyard. The hill was high enough for sledding in the winter. Every classroom window faced west overlooking the creek and the wild lands beyond.

          On those first bleak fall days when the weather still felt like late summer we would gaze longingly out the schoolhouse windows at a world of lost pocket knives, hidden treasures buried in tin cracker boxes, and scrap wood fortresses cobbled together with bent nails and weathered grey two-by-fours, built, twenty-five feet up in the canopy of the apple trees. All with the precarious surety of an eight-year-old carpenter’s confidence that ‘dangerous’ was a spurious adult concept.

          I would, even in the forbidden fall, wander off on my own over the creek and tramp the autumn fields of golden wild grasses. I would walk the old orchards stomping the rotting apples. I would let my imagination gallop free across that landscape as I watched the hunters work their dogs through the fields from my regular perch in the orchard.

          But by the end of September our focus on that world across the creek would largely shift to the street. Westwood Avenue was a pretty typical 1950’s Midwest neighborhood street, except that there were no sidewalks and several large oaks sat at the very edge of the asphalt.

          Every yard on Westwood had eight to ten old growth oaks scattered around the large yards. With this many trees, constant raking was an unavoidable fall ritual. My father would rake every autumn evening after work and all day Saturday. Our job, my brother, sisters and I, would be to load up an old canvas tarp with piles of the moist leaves and drag them across the lawn to the street.

          This frenzied raking and hauling would culminate each night with Westwood Avenue ablaze. The street in spring, summer, even winter was wide enough for two cars to pass, but in the fall the street narrowed to one lane and a contiguous boarder of flames lined both sides of the asphalt. My little brother and I would lie on our backs in the front yard and watch the burning leaves lift on the hot air and float toward the treetops.

          To this day I can conjure up in my mind the sweet, acrid smoke of burning oak leaves. It is, more than anything, the odor of my youth. I catch myself thinking of it as the singular smell of an entire decade. In my mind this smoky world is inexorably linked to family, and home, and a place and a time where innocence and friendship had a deeper meaning.

          As September gave way to October a crispness in the evening air would arrive abruptly and all legacy of summer would be gone. We knew that once the first weeks of November arrived, the grey skies would descend and not lift again until April, but the October nights were clear, the moon low in the west, and the stars brighter than at any other time of the year.

The leaf smoke would grow thick until Westwood became an odd amalgam of “Father Knows Best” and Dante’s Inferno. Each dad manned his fire, rake in hand, while thick grey smoke and flaming leaves rose on the autumn breezes, curling Heavenward.

          By mid-October the leaves had been collected and burned each evening in every yard except one. Three quarters of the way down the block, in the only brick house on Westwood Avenue, lived a widow whose husband and son had died in the war. The children of the neighborhood knew her as Aunt Sue. Aunt Sue owned two carefully manicured park-like lots with thirty large oaks, a few maples, and an ancient horse chestnut.

          Once or twice a year each child on Westwood would, in turn, spend the night at Aunt Sue’s. It was a long-established tradition by the time my brother and I came along. Aunt Sue did not own a television. You would eat cookies and talk with Aunt Sue in her parlor until eight o’clock. You would go to sleep in her spare bedroom, her son’s old room, and wake to a large country breakfast in the morning.

          The weekend before Halloween each year all of the parents, and children old enough to wrangle a rake, would gather to clear Aunt Sue’s property of leaves and dead branches. The resulting pile was as tall as a ten-year-old boy. A torch would be passed down the eighty-foot-long pile of leaves and the conflagration would grow, burning all afternoon and into the evening. Aunt Sue would supply the hot dogs and marshmallows and the neighborhood, parents and children together, would sit on Aunt Sue’s grass, leaning against her stately oaks, eating dinner and laughing until the fires died down and darkness reclaimed the street.

          These were the rituals of the season. A time shrouded in swirls of oak leaf smoke, leading up to the climax of fall, All Hallows Eve.

          By Halloween the evening smoke had permeated every corner of our small community and hung over the creek bed like spring fog.

          Halloween was the culmination of all that childhood should hold for children— the unfettered imagination. The Christmas Season may celebrate children, but it is really an adult holiday. Halloween, however, is not simply about children, it touches the true child in all of us, and we remember. What I remember are the smells of fall, the fire’s warmth on a chill evening outside, and God help me it smells like the earth, and family, and love.

          As I grew older my solitary fall walks across the creek became more introspective and, slowly, I lost the ability to see the natural world on an equal footing. I had fallen victim to that arrogance of age; I grew up and became the center of my world, as we unfortunately all do eventually.

          The orchard was plowed under for a rail switching yard and the fields became an industrial park. A small copse of trees still stands across the creek behind Aunt Sue’s old house. There still are no sidewalks on Westwood. Leaf burning has been banned since the mid-Sixties and the houses, built in the early Fifties, have clearly passed their golden age.

          I don’t go back to Westwood anymore.

          A few years ago I was driving around in the country on a late fall evening. I had my window down and you could smell the snow clouds on the horizon. The crisp cold air had grown heavy with the anticipation of a new season. I caught an old familiar scent on the wind. Jack-o-lanterns leapt to mind, and the sweet, sour, stickiness of a caramel apple. I remembered my father standing in the dark street, coffee mug in hand, watching as my brother and I ran from house to house, across familiar lawns, begging for candy.

          I turned down a rutted country road and watched a farmer and his son raking leaves into the space between the lawn and the road. The fire danced over the leaf piles in the dusk. I stopped, got out of my car and climbed up on the hood. I sat there leaning against the windshield smelling the burning leaves for more than an hour. It was pitch black outside except for a few coals glowing Halloween orange when I climbed back behind the wheel and headed for home.

          I had children of my own and nurtured them as best I could through the prism of my own selfishness. But once a year, when the harvest was done and the late Fall wheat was cut and stacked, when the long sleep of winter loomed heavy over the now smokeless evenings, I would ask my children who or what they wanted to be for Halloween. For a few moments each fall as I waited to hear my children’s answer I could smell the oak leaves burning and see the sparks jump on the breeze, rise up in true Halloween spirit and pretend in those few seconds to be stars.

Stephen Beckwith’s parents met in a writer’s group. The die was certainly cast. He has worked in words most of his life, first as a copywriter, then as a creative director, and finally as a writing instructor. He taught writing at Grand Valley State University and has, for the last twenty years, taught fiction workshops at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts. Beckwith has published five nonfiction books on communications, written eight novels, two books of noir-ish short stories, three volumes of poetry, and a historical biography of Louis Campau. He continues to teach workshops and write. There are too many stories to tell and never enough time. 

My Precious Stuff

by Joesph O’Day

Inside a bureau drawer in my parents’ dining room, there’s a grayed envelope filled with old pictures. I take it in hand and wonder if I should do a quick flip-through, a close inspection, or store it for later. Maybe I should just throw it out, since I’m already overloaded with photos.

I’ve taken this August week off from work to clear my mother’s house and prepare it  for sale. Since Dad’s death twenty years ago, Mom has lived alone in this large two-family, until the need for permanent nursing home care forced her to leave. At this moment, this first day of cleanout, the house’s sole occupants are seven decades worth of stuff, a testament to my family’s distaste for letting things go.

I inspect the envelope. Hidden beneath familiar prints are five 2 x 3 color photos, a family series—my mother and father, and Dad’s mother, father, sister and brother. They’re dressed formally, perhaps having been to church or a wedding. The day is sunny and dry, the background, the Salem Willows. My favorite is of Dad and Mom together. Dad’s in suit and tie, his arm around her waist. Mom’s in high heels and yellow dress, nestled into his side. They smile broadly. The date stamped on back is 1946. A year prior, my father had completed his World War II tour as an Army Medic. They’ll marry in three years, have my sister and me in eight. Mom told me how shy my father was when they dated. He was exactly what she wanted, a gentleman, quiet and mild-mannered, not savvy with women, physically strong and courageous. And a non-drinker; she’d witnessed enough alcoholism in her young life to want alcohol out completely. It’s a beautiful photo, something I’ll always treasure.

Realizing how close I came to trashing these pictures, I resolve to take the time necessary to scrutinize everything, even if it means making a clearinghouse of my own

 home. I begin packaging items using any containers I can find, including old wooden boxes having the musty smell of dust and grime.

On the second night, I wake up at two am in a panic, wondering if I’d discarded my little wooden bank, the one Mom gave me in grammar school. I rarely used it and forgot it existed until I touched it yesterday. But now I want it not to be gone, want it in place

 until I decide its fate. When I search the dumpster the next morning to no avail, I know it’s gone for good.

I discover the palm-size stainless steel transistor radio I used to listen to Boston Celtics games in the era of John Havlicek, Bill Russell, Sam Jones. I’d hide under my bed covers late at night so my parents wouldn’t know I was awake, our home team’s

 victories causing announcer Johnny Most’s sandpaper voice, and my joy, to rise to the stratosphere.

The ceramics. For years I witnessed my mother’s pride arriving home from ceramics class each week, carrying creations that would accompany us the next forty years. The beige French poodles, the small black dog, the big white cat. The basketball-size green

turtle and frog, set on their respective parlor end tables. I’d sit between them having intimate conversations with my father about problems and sports and colleges and

career choices. My mother would listen from the kitchen, preparing supper, shouting out perspectives and advice.

Day three arrives and my wife Kris comments on my expanding take-home list, saying she “hates clutter.”

A friend tells me there’s a term for my style of house clearing. “Hoarding,” she says. “It’s called hoarding.”

A cousin stops by offering to sell items at the flea market. When I mention I’ll keep the old kitchen set, he looks at Kris and says, “He’s bad!”

A month after the house is cleared, we’re walking with a friend on a sandy street towards his Hampton Beach cottage. Kris discloses objects I’ve brought to our house,

underscoring how movers let slip my mother’s “sixty-year-old” couch, causing it to tumble down her staircase, tear off four balusters, and make her cry.

His advice, gathered from experience with his own parents’ house, is to “Throw everything into a dumpster.”

“But I want to preserve memories.”

“That’s what pictures are for.”

The pictures. Thumbing through my parents’ wedding album, I find several that I’ve seen for decades displayed throughout the house. I find others, less familiar, that seem more candid, more real. A young woman readies herself for marriage with friends, sharing her last moments of singlehood. Mom’s sister holds open a limousine door to help her exit, both of them so young, so happy, so hopeful. Dad and Mom kneel at the altar, expressions solemn, focused on the Priest’s instructions, making sure they’re getting things right. Mom laughs at a man’s comments in the reception line while Dad, standing next to her, wipes his lower lip. These do more than preserve memories. They broaden the picture of my parents’ lives, allowing me to view them in new ways, making me want to keep every photo, not just the flawless ones.

Day five. I can’t believe the pain I feel going through my parents’ belongings. I find letters from my father to Mom from overseas during the war, saying she certainly is not a pest, writing so much. I find items they especially valued in her cedar chest: my mother’s wedding garter, her wedding crown, the top of their wedding cake. When I show the top of the cake to Kris, she says it’s nothing special. I know she means it isn’t a special one; probably inexpensive, unremarkable. But to me, it is special. It’s the top of the cake that celebrated their joining. How can I eliminate something that was such an important part of their lives? Where is the utensil Dad used to bang the pipe to wake me early weekend mornings so I’d work with him at the carwash? Can I save it and somehow bring him back, just for a moment, just for the time it takes to tell him how much I love him, to hug him and not let go?

In a tender moment last night, after a tiring day, Kris told me that I have my memories and carry my parents inside. To take a few things of theirs and call it a day. “Filling up our house doesn’t bring them back.”

In the end, although I keep many of their possessions, including the turtle and frog, I relinquish countless others. I donate the kitchen set to the Vietnam Veterans of America, pieces of furniture to the Salvation Army, unsalvageables to the dumpster.

On the seventh day, except for a few remnants (refrigerators, electric stoves, leftover furnishings), the house is empty—old white paneled walls and ceiling lights with burned out bulbs and worn rugs with holes.

I do multiple final walkthroughs, stepping into each room, recalling scenes past. I’m in the cathedral ceiling attic and see my father as a boy, living in one of two unheated bedrooms, leaving a closet door open on winter nights, stealing warmth from the heated floor below. I see him years later, arriving home late one night, unannounced, on army leave, not wanting to disturb his family, sneaking up the back stairs to his attic room, getting discovered by his English Setter, Buddy’s frenetic barking causing his mother, father, and sister to wake, to join in on the dog’s jumping and kissing and welcoming home.

I take the back stairs to the cellar, see my father in retirement puttering with plumbing and wiring and furnaces, wearing coveralls that were his uniform for twenty-five years at his car wash. I see him on his last day of life, interrupted by my three-year-old daughter’s request to come outside through the bulkhead and witness her rope jumping prowess… one jump, stop… one jump, stop, her brown curly hair bouncing up and down,my wife telling me how he laughed his wonderful, blissful laugh.

___________

The house will be sold “as is” on a Friday in October. The Sunday before closing, I check it one last time. Garages, attic, cellar, first floor—all clear. Second floor—clear, except for a lone paper scrap on a kitchen shelf. I lift and turn it over, discover it’s my grandfather John J. O’Day’s funeral mass card. He died on August 11, 1955, a year after I was born. He’d known me for a year but I would never know him, except in stories my father told, and in memorabilia I’ve recovered: his gold pocket watch; his winter police coat with its brass Salem Police buttons; his policeman’s badge; the silver Mayor’s Cup he won in 1916 for being the force’s best marksman; photos of him directing traffic, of him sitting comfortably in a yard chair outside the house he purchased in the early 1900s and would pass on to my father. I place his mass card inside my shirt breast pocket. I want to protect it until I can get home and add it to my valuables.

Joseph O’Day obtained his BA and MBA from Salem State University and BS from Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. He has served as the Director of Pharmacy at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital since 1998. He has taken several graduate writing courses and is a long-standing member of Salem Writers’ Group. His writing focuses on the personal essay form, exploring family relationships and life transitions. Besides pharmacy and writing, he enjoys athletics and spending time with his family.

Violations

by Jenn Gilgan

     When atrocities of ISIS destroying priceless ruins became news last March, I felt incensed. On the heels of brutal murders, the terrorist group obliterated their culture’s past. Their excuse: destroying idols that were false gods. They justified their actions through their faith—Mohammed is the only prophet to the only God, Allah. They manipulated the beautiful words of their prophet into ugly acts of brutality and greed. The antiquities were pre-Islam, and so, in their view, unholy.

    Each video clip of a sledge hammer smashing carved stone to dust felt like a blow to my head, shaking loose memories of a trip my parents and I took to Iraq in Spring 1978, our second year of living in Beirut, Lebanon. Truthfully, I do not remember much from that trip; I was only twelve. My brain repressed what should have been the interesting parts: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, mosques with golden domes. I vaguely recall these sites; photographs and the awful scenes on the news help to pry loose my memories.

          One detail of that fated trip I vividly recall is my dad’s severe case of Montezuma’s Revenge. Not because he was so sick, but because of events I could not escape as he commandeered the back of the taxi, our primary mode of transportation. Iraq was not the hubbub of tourism, even pre-Gulf War, so bus tours were nonexistent. Mom sat in the back with Dad, attempting to provide some comfort from the heat, the nausea, the bumpy roads, a nasty combination for my ailing dad.

Even more vividly, in my visceral memory, I recall sitting up front with the Iraqi taxi driver and a Lebanese gentleman, Sami, an important client of my father’s employer, an international bank. He had volunteered to accompany us as a translator since we did not speak Arabic beyond the basic pleasantries. This man had wealth and prestige. He had a handsome face, light brown hair and bright blue eyes. He was tall and athletic, a descendent of the fair Phoenicians. He also had, as I was to discover, an eye and a roaming hand for young girls.

I was not raped, but over our week-long trip, I was violated multiple times in the front of the taxi. He found ways to grope the training-bra sized bumps on my chest or to massage between my upper thighs. He deftly hid these acts by unfolding the over-sized paper map across our legs. Not knowing how else to behave, I sat still, frozen like an ancient statue. Internally, though, a chaotic battle raged: my mind screamed NO, STOP, but my hormones were curious, tempting me to let go and enjoy the scary, strange, thrilling sensations. At night I promised myself I would refuse his next attempt; each day I fell mute, cowering to his position of power—both over me and over my dad’s career. My unconscious must have understood the adult dynamics and politics.

Over three decades later, I have wondered why I couldn’t get past these memories. Why have they haunted me? Why must I remember that my first sexual contact was uninvited and confusing? While I felt ashamed that my twelve-year old body craved learning more of the strange internal warmth that flooded my body, my adult brain could intelligently articulate that he was at fault. That he was the creep. That underneath his handsome visage, he must have had a serious flaw in his psyche to prey on a twelve-year old who had hardly begun to blossom.

After years of journaling, counseling, and eventually confessing to my mom about Sami’s pedophilia, I thought I had moved past the rage and disgust of those memories. Until recently. Watching the antiquities long associated with the vacation of violation smash to the ground in plumes of dust released an unexpected rage in me.

Many of the antiquities that ISIS has destroyed are those that my twelve-year-old self visited. I was hardly impressed by history or ruins when I was a kid. The trip was my parents’ idea. I had wanted to see the pyramids in Egypt, but since that was the time of Camp David, Egypt would not have been a safe destination for

American tourists. Instead, we went to Iraq, not yet a danger zone for Americans. As a typical twelve-year-old, I rolled my eyes at yet another tour of crumbling ruins (in my mind the Sphinx or pyramids or the land of Cleopatra were not crumbling, and so much cooler to explore). My parents had a history of taking my brother and me on educational trips: the Parthenon, Athena’s Temple, a Grecian Olympic stadium. We had visited Byblos or Baalbeck or both in the mountains and fertile valleys of Lebanon. Before living overseas, my parents took us to what counted as American ruins: Mystic Seaport, Washington Irving’s home in Sleepy Hollow, the Newport mansions, and the Hudson River Valley robber baron castles. In 1978, I considered this trip just another educational tour my parents imposed on me.

So, if I didn’t care then about the immensity of the history before me, why suddenly did I want to rip out the throats of those thoughtless, careless scalawags on the news? Because I had more than just seen the ruins. My cellular memory had never let go of the sights, the sounds, the sands of Iraq. The ruins were me, and I the ruins. Now, via the sights and sounds of technology, I saw the terrorist attacks against their own history as akin to the personal affront I experienced.

On the surface, the antiquities are ruined beyond repair. No master archeologist will be able to repair the pieces to their previous state. On a deeper, longer-lasting level, I’m reminded of the classroom lesson about bullying: have students take a clean sheet of paper and then crumple it into a ball. No matter how they try, students cannot “fix” the paper back to its original pristine smoothness. Harsh words and actions make the same lasting impression on people as the creases in the paper. I had been bullied in one of the worst ways, and so were the impressive statues of Tikrit and Mosul. No amount of counseling, confessions, or apologies could smooth the scars inflicted on me or the stone statues.  My scars were emotional. The statues’ scars historical.

More universally, those statues and my childhood innocence represent a higher state of understanding than either my personal terrorist or the ISIS terrorists can appreciate. Terrorism on any level is not an act of intelligence. That is not to say that the perpetrator in my story or the ISIS men are not intelligent. I know for a fact that my molester was incredibly intelligent. But, his actions were selfish and uncaring and lacked wisdom. The same holds true for the recent actions of ISIS: There is no sense, no caring, no wisdom in destroying priceless artifacts.

The author and her mother, 1978

I have a photograph of my mother and me in front of one of the statues that guarded a town. It towered over us, its face kind and gentle. The face and beard of a man, the body of a horse, wings of an eagle, and cloven feet of a goat. In Tikrit maybe. I don’t remember. That is what I have repressed. That is the knowledge I have lost forever because something frightening and unexplainable took precedence in my memory. I hate that man for all that he robbed from me: my innocence, a chance not to fear intimacy, and my chance to remember extraordinary history on an extraordinary trip. I hate the terrorists for what they are robbing from the world: the foundation of great civilizations and creativity and genius and tolerance. So few have had the opportunity to visit those sacred lands because of the constant upheaval in the Middle East, and now, many of the reasons to visit any of the historic sites—Babylon, Bybolos, Jerusalem, Petra, Palmyra, Cairo—have either been smashed beyond recognition or have become too perilous to visit. The world should not allow anyone or anything terrifying to obliterate our collective memory of our beginnings. Whether you connect to the Middle East through genetics, religion—this includes Christianity and Judaism—or not at all, those ruins once governed fertile and prosperous lands. Trade routes from east and west crossed the Tigris-Euphrates valley. Your genealogical tree likely has someone who once walked that fertile valley. This is not a land to fear. It is a land to rejoice and celebrate.

Today, Iraq may seem like a wasteland to many. Desert sands. Bombed out. Citizens turned refugees. At its heart, though, is a vibrant, caring, god-fearing culture, whether that god be God or Allah, or even Yahweh, Buddha, or Vishnu. Yet, hate and prejudice prevail despite each religion’s teaching to love and tolerate our brothers and sisters of every land. We are all human. Shakespeare’s Shylock cries out, “If you prick me, do I not bleed?” We all bleed. We all laugh. We all cry. We all need safety and protection and love. If we do not unite to protect that which needs protecting—our heritage, our children, our future—then we risk a chasm in the web of humanity.

The terrorism occurring across the Middle East parallels my personal turmoil. My story is one of many, and the religious terrorists are only one story of mass hatred. The ISIS terrorists hide under the beauty of Islam’s Koran. The words meant to inspire the beauty of compassion, faith, loyalty, and love have been misused to justify hate crimes and murder. They are a larger, scarier rendition of the handsome man who abused the trust of a young girl.

Jenn Gilgan aspires to inspire. She lives in Tampa, FL where she teaches high school English. Her writing draws on her experiences from when she lived in Beirut, Lebanon as a child and London, England as an adult. When not inundated with teaching and grading, she enjoys exploring the world through her cameras and researching ideas for both lesson plans and novels. “Violations” is her first published piece; she is currently drafting and re-drafting a YA novel influenced equally by her love of Celtic mythology and her life in Lebanon.

Eddie and Me

by Rick Kempa

What we had in common were our differences from everybody else: he was the heaviest kid in our school, and I was the smallest. In a high school of over 1,600 boys, these distinctions mattered. Our lot was to bear their taunts and nicknames. Thanks to a cruel gym teacher, I became known as "Peanut," a name especially galling because it suggested not only my size but the root of all my troubles at that time, my prepubescence. Eddie, too, shuffled back and forth between classes with his head down, dodging nicknames.

One year ahead of me, he was initially my older brother's friend, with whom I hung around by invitation only when they needed more bodies for the hockey games that were played in his backyard. (To lure friends over, his father and he had sculpted a miniature ice rink, piling up dirt embankments in the fall and diligently flooding it all winter long.) In Eddie's eyes, I was of the same low rank as his younger brother Joey, a sixth grader. In fact, I was inferior to Joey because I couldn't skate. Thus I was always the goalie, my mission not only to keep the puck from entering the makeshift goal, but from smacking their back door. A fearful sight it was, to see Eddie advance like a mountain in motion and then loom above me, poised to strike! But I had three things going for me: agility, a goalie stick big enough to guard my groin, and a fierce, almost suicidal hunger for respect. I lived for the sound of being cussed out when I stopped a breakaway.

Winter was not half over when the hockey season abruptly thawed out. For my brother and the rest of the gang, Eddie's thirty‑by‑thirty‑foot rink, with its no‑slap-shot rule and his smiling mom always in the window overlooking us, suddenly became claustrophobic, and they began instead to hang out in someone's garage. I was not invited, and neither was Eddie.

No greater misery exists than to come home from the school halls full of laughter, shouts, and promises of phone calls and to have nothing better to do than watch cartoons. For two sad weeks Eddie skated slow circles in his backyard, a hockey stick dangling from a gloved hand. Then he called. He asked first for my older brother, knowing full well he was out, and then he informed me curtly that if I wanted to come over and shoot the puck around for a while, I could. And so out of sheer need our friendship was born.

Our routine that winter involved two games, pinochle and chess. Always we played at his house, huddled over a card table in his unfinished basement. His mother would unfailingly appear with milk and cookies. A transistor radio, its antenna pointed towards the one square shaft of light, would be tuned to top forties. In time we were comfortable enough with each other to croon along with the songs that held no literal meaning for either of us: "Honey, Sugar Sugar. You got me lovin’ you.”

Pinochle was Eddie's forte, chess mine, and so alternating the games meant switching roles of champ and underdog. Eddie kept a record of the pinochle results, arranging the data in as many ways as he could think of: won‑lost record and percentages, total points scored, average points per game. These tabulations were posted on one of the basement beams, open to the world, had the world cared to see. I kept the chess records in my diary, along with blow‑by‑blow accounts of the games.

 When the weather broke, we added a third game to the repertoire, one‑on‑one basketball on Eddie's backyard court. In this we used our physical traits to full advantage. I would run like mad, side to side, back and forth, until Eddie dizzied and I could break for the hoop. Eddie's main move, infuriatingly unstoppable, was to back in towards the basket, guarding the ball with his body and fending me off with his elbows, until he got to a certain familiar crack in the driveway, whereupon he would whirl and unleash a hook shot. Swish!

And so my first year in high school swung from worst to best. Having an upperclassman for a friend raised my status immeasurably, at least in my own eyes. The heckling probably didn't diminish any—it may have in fact intensified, to celebrate the sight of the two of us, Biggest and Smallest, together—but I was newly deaf to it. As for what our coupling did for Eddie, what I lacked in terms of status I made up for with raw devotion. I was like a cute pet. His mother could've saved herself a sack of sugar that winter. Had she fed us bread and water instead of cookies, I wouldn't have gone anywhere.

When the locker next to Eddie's became vacant and Eddie helped arrange for me to move into it, our happiness was complete. As often as our schedules would allow, sometimes for just a few seconds, we would meet there. At last we could add our own spirited voices to the babble of sound! We belonged.

But although we rubbed elbows all day long, we would not make after‑school plans in the hall; we had a more delicious way to do that. We lived just two blocks apart, but took separate busses. I would race home to drop my books and change my clothes. Then, just as I was getting my sneakers laced, without fail every day the telephone would ring and Eddie would nonchalantly ask, would I like to come over for a game? Oh the sweet shrill sound of that phone! The respectful gaze of the younger brother!

The following year, Eddie was the first of any in his class to learn to drive, which restored to him the status of the backyard hockey days. This was especially so because he drove a car befitting his size, his uncle's Monte Carlo. He steadfastly refused my brother's overtures to be the chauffer for the Friday night dances, but he was soon recruited for the week night "open gyms," those three‑hour‑long orgies of pick‑up basketball. You'd think Eddie would not bear up well in such a scene, but he did fine. Sure he was slow, but he was a master at positioning, a true force beneath the boards, and even without cracks in the floor to guide him, a deadeye.

His only problem came when, playing with guys who did not know him, he would end up on a "skins" team, the ones who were supposed to play without shirts. Eddie would flat‑out refuse to take his off, pretending not to hear the other's orders, turning his back on their snide remarks. Finally he'd bark, "You know who I am. Let's play.”

With his fleshiness and my persistent hairlessness, the locker room continued to be a place of shame for us both and so we conspired to avoid it. At night's end, when the gym moderator would herd us all off the floor, Eddie and I would dawdle at the water fountain or stare into the trophy case, until we were sure that the other boys were safely in the shower. We'd then hurry to our lockers where, back to modest back, we'd shed our gym suits for street clothes.

---

The rate of change in high school is phenomenal. Weeks are like years, while each school year, punctuated by the infinity of summer, is a lifetime. And in each new life, the allegiances shift as easily and quickly as in an evening of pickup basketball.

In my third year, Eddie's fourth, the luster was gone from our after‑school routine. We still enacted it a couple of times a week, when I wasn't involved in one of the after‑school clubs I'd joined. (He knew my schedule; the phone still rang on cue.) But pinochle and chess were definitely "uncool," and our one‑on‑one basketball games were serious affairs, in which winning, or as we said it, "owning" the other, began to matter too much.

The truth was Eddie was "uncool" too. For me, all kinds of welcome changes had occurred. I had worked my way into a clique that specialized in all‑night poker games. I got a driver's license and ventured out on a date or two. But the best development by far was physical: I had begun to grow, an inch at a time, and had finally sprouted body hair. Eddie, meanwhile, seemed to stay the same, a big relic from an earlier, darker age.

There came a day when, to his phone invitation, "Whattya say to a game of one‑on‑one?" I answered, too proudly, "No thanks, I'm going over to some other guy's house." In the few seconds of stunned silence, his breath came fast and wheezy. Finally he muttered "no problem" and hung up. From then on his calls were studiously irregular, and his voice, when he did call, had a fierce don't‑care‑if‑you‑do tone to it.

In fact, Eddie was doing his own desperate best to belong, ventur­ing out with my brother and me to the Friday night dances, where he'd plant himself stoutly at the fringe and pretend it wasn't agony to be there. We would drop in on him between our forays out to the parking lot to swill more apple wine. But as our alcohol‑levels climbed, our visits grew more in­frequent and less genuine. It became possible to forget that he was there.

Dropping him off at his house at the end of one such night, we indulged in one of those mindless fits of cruelty that can come so naturally to young people. As Eddie was walking up the driveway in the glare of our headlight beams, his shadow looming against the garage door suddenly struck us as funny. My brother began to flash the brights on and off. He revved the engine, inched up close behind Eddie, so that the shadow was immense, and we began to chant, mimicking, I suppose, his mother, "Eddieeee! Eddieeeeee!" He fled inside.

The enormity of our crime dawned on me at once. The look on his face had been more like terror than anger, as if we might hit the gas and run him down. All night on the slow drift back to sobriety, that look was fixed on me. Sometimes it shifted to one of reproach—how could you do this on my own turf?—then back to the blind fear of the hunted animal. These were not mere dream images; he was lying wide‑awake in his own bed, I knew, and these were his eyes. I wanted to race back over that very minute and beg forgiveness. The next day I did go over, but a long leaden sleep had blunted my urgency, and I did not beg. His mother did not smile, and Eddie would not see me. Not then, not ever again.

---

There is one more scene. It is near the end of my third year, Eddie's last. I am up in the balcony of the gymnasium with four hundred other boys. Down on the gym floor, a game of dodge ball is in progress.

As with all forms of war, the rules of dodge ball are few and basic: two teams of thirty or so boys, four soccer balls, each team trying to decimate the other, either by smacking opponents with a ball or by catching a ball and thus eliminating the thrower. There's a safety zone for each team at opposite ends of the gym, a line which the other team may not cross, and so, seen from above, the action is more wavelike, ebb and flow, than it is chaotic.

The contest proceeds with the usual quick attrition until on one team there remains four of the best and strongest, while on the other team just one, and lo and behold it's Eddie.

It looks bad for him. Each of the four guys has a ball, and Eddie is backed into a corner of his safety zone. The crowd is laughing, yelling out fat-boy jokes, itching for a quick, fierce kill. My ears are burn­ing, my lunch flip‑flopping inside me. I'm afraid of the hurt that is occurring, that is going to get worse.

The four unleash their throws all at once, and as if he has an eye for each ball, Eddie twists and turns, like a ballerina in slow motion, and eludes them all. He manages to capture one ball, while the other three bounce back to his attackers. Again they synchronize their throws, again he writhes away, and again captures a ball.

Up in the balcony, the tide is turning, the insults snuffed out by a growing sentiment for the underdog. Twice more his attackers throw, and now Eddie has all four balls, and, with two of them under each arm, he is advancing.

The four are running backwards to their safety zone. They don't have to retreat; instead they could surround him, like wolves around a lone bull, and simply wait. In order to attack, he'd have to put down one, maybe two balls; he'd have to turn his back on half of them.

But a host from on high is pounding its feet in unison, screaming in a rising frenzy, "Go! Go! Go!" It's not one against four, it's four hundred and one. Against such odds, teamwork means nothing. Each of the four is running for his life.

And Eddie is advancing. His bigness is not fat, it's power. The four are not wolves, they're jackals scattering before a lion.

When they can retreat no further, Eddie puts down two of the balls. He paces back and forth along the edge of the safety line. He singles out one of the four, glowers at him until the kid is half dead with fear, then finishes him off with a scorch­ing blow to the back. The multitude is delirious. He does the same with the second guy, but this time one of the survivors catches the ball on the rebound, and like any cornered beast will do, he charges. Eddie scurries backwards, drops the ball he's hold­ing, and faces the kid head on, palms open. The throw gets him right in the belly and he smothers it. The kid is out. Eddie then reverses himself, bears down on the last guy, who is squat­ing above one of the other balls. Smack! The impact is heard even above our shrieks (for I am shouting now too). The kid is sent sprawling, and Eddie is alone on the floor.

And now amidst our bedlam a new chant is taken up. Soon the gym is rocking with "Eddie! Eddie! Eddie!”—a no‑nonsense cry of adulation this time. In his person, every boy's fantasy has come true, has been exceeded even. The anonymity that was his life before now is no longer. He could be student body president. And I'm clapping and stomping with the rest, but not chanting, because I'm too choked up. And I'm wondering, Eddie, does this destroy the echo of that other chant?

He does not wave or even look at us. He walks to the sidelines, to the back-slaps and high‑fives of his teammates and to the locker room, where, finally, he too can shower with pride.

Rick Kempa lives in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where he teaches writing and philosophy at Western Wyoming College. His most recent books are the anthology Going Down Grand: Poems from the Canyon from Lithic Press, which he edited with Peter Anderson, and a poetry collection Ten Thousand Voices, published by Littoral Press in Richmond, CA. Visit his website to learn more about his work.