Sequined Hearts
Hair askew
and sequins in her eyes,
black silk dress
clinging to her curves.
Little sparkles
polka dot his palms.
He itches to slide
her sexy dress,
glide it past her hips,
uncovering to find
sunken treasure there.
Hidden in her pockets,
he finds more sequins
fallen from her hair,
sticking to his fingers,
gluing them together
never will they part,
sharing forever
one sequined heart.
the man across the street
The first time I saw him was Halloween. We had just moved in and were taking the girls trick-or-treating. My older daughter was a witch, my younger a watermelon. When we turned left at the end of our driveway, I saw him sitting in his yard across the street with his eight-year old son. A fire was burning between them in a portable fire pit. He was speaking to his son loudly enough that I could hear him from across the street. Couldn’t make out the words, but it seemed like theater. Like he was acting.
We walked down the street in a cold drizzle. Not a good first Halloween. My older girl did fine, but the little one could barely hang on. Too many steps up porches and back down. Too many people, too much stimulation, too hard for me to hold her hand and the umbrella and her plastic pumpkin full of candy. We crossed the street and turned towards home, ringing door bells on the opposite side.
As we approached the man’s house I heard him coaching his son on scaring trick-or-treaters. He said these girls coming up – my girls – were too small for him to do the thing he did with that last bunch. His eyes were on me.
In the spring, I was digging up dead bushes and the girls were playing in the yard when the man decided to fix his front door. The front door he never used. He came and went through the side entrance off his driveway. Never opened his front door at all. Not until that day he decided to fix it. While I was in the yard with the girls. He had a couple of tools. Screwdriver. Wrench. Whatever. He wasn’t doing any fixing. When we went inside, so did he.
My wife suggested he was gay, and interested.
In the summer, I was reading on a couch near the window when I saw him on the roof with a rake. He was clearing off debris from the trees. There was a young girl up there with him. She was wearing a dress and was maybe six or seven.
“What kind of man takes a girl that age onto the roof?” I said.
“You know when you’re sitting there, he can see you,” said my wife. “I always see you when I pull into the garage.”
“Is that his daughter?” I said.
In the fall, as I was raking leaves to the curb and my girls were jumping in the piles, he crossed the street for the first time and stretched out his hand.
“I’ve neglected to make your acquaintance for far too long,” he said. False smile. Sporadic eye contact. He told me his name.
His hand jiggled coins in his pockets. His knees waggled like he was jogging but his feet remained planted. He watched the girls as we talked, but that didn’t seem odd because they were running and jumping and I kept having to say no baby, or be careful honey. He asked if I was a Buckeye fan and suggested we watch a game sometime down at Leigh’s house. He said the girls could play in the basement with Leigh’s kids and his. I said sure, but I didn’t mean it.
In the winter, after putting the girls to bed, I sat on the couch and looked out the window. Police cars were lined against his curb. No lights flashing, but every room in the house was lit up. The front door was wide open. Officers stood in the yard. A plain clothes cop was walking the perimeter, talking on a cell phone. The man’s wife was in the yard, talking with an officer.
I’d only seen the man’s wife outside once before, when she planted flowers around the enormous buckeye in their yard. My wife and I had joked about her being a mail order bride. We were only half-joking. The flowers died after a few weeks.
I called my wife into the room and gestured excitedly out the window.
My wife noticed the van. The nondescript van. My wife loves her tv cop shows. I hadn’t noticed the van (it was nondescript). But my wife, she loves those cop shows.
She crossed her arms. She didn’t like the man across the street. She has a gut sense about people. I have it too, but she has it more. The one time she was in the same room with the man at Leigh’s house, the man left. Not the room. He left the house. Practically bolted. That’s how strong her gut sense of these things is. He felt it.
A plain clothes cop emerged from the house carrying a computer tower. He carried it to the van.
I guessed child pornography. I was only half-joking. I told my wife she watched enough cop shows to know it had to be child pornography. Unmarked van. Plain clothes guys in and out. Computers being trucked out. What else could it be.
She stood there half glaring, half in shock.
Across the street, the man’s wife went back inside. The front door that never opened closed behind her. One police car left. The others remained. So did the van.
The next day, my wife called me at work. She said she was picking up my youngest at pre-school when Leigh grabbed her by the arm, her own daughter at her side. Bleary eyed, Leigh asked if anyone from the news had contacted us. My wife said no. Leigh said they were doing a story about the man across the street. He’d been arrested for child pornography.
“Why do you think they didn’t contact us?” I said.
“Probably because we never let our girls in his house,” she said.
“What are you, anorexic?”
I mean, well... no.
No, I'm not anorexic. I want chicken nuggets. I eat, I swear. Have you seen me at home? You'd be surprised, I think. I eat like, three portion sizes for dinner because I didn't want lunch at school.
No, I'm not anorexic, I'm twelve. I have a fast metabolism.
No, I don't work out, I'm just skinny. I eat a lot of junk food but I don't gain weight. That's just how it is.
No, I'm not "too skinny," and I don't need to "put meat on my bones." It doesn't work. I've tried.
No, I'm not anorexic, I'm fifteen. I know I don't have curves, and I know I'm skinny, but I eat. Who's supposed to love a girl like me? No curves? More like no body. I guess I'm just a ghost. A waif.
When I look in the mirror, I see what you mean. I have bruises in the shape of my spine from too many sit ups. I can see my ribs when I breathe in. People cringe when they touch my shoulders and apparently my elbows are rather sharp. I'm sorry I'm too skinny.
"I wish I was as skinny as you."
You sound oddly wistful. Why would you want to be like me now that we're all grown up? No one has ever wanted to be like ugly, skinny me. But there you are, praising me like the second coming of Christ. For all the times I tolerated those insults, to hear them as compliments was almost... nice.
I guess I should watch my weight a little. Being skinny is all I've ever been known for, and my identity formed around that, in a way. I was the anomaly that could fascinate people at a party, spark comparisons and jokes that I was in the middle of, in a good way. What did a low, never-changing number on a scale mean compared to that? Little, like my weight.
I was looking at myself in the mirror, taking in the bones that are all anyone has ever been able to see of me. My boyfriend came and wrapped his arms around me, kissing the crown of my head and looking at me in the mirror too.
"You're so pretty." I'm sorry, don't you mean... anorexic?
A Treacherous Web
Lost in the dark, tangled in silken threads.
The black widow before me begs to be fed.
Devious and cold, a demanding deadly trickster.
Resplendent and ravishing, but don't succumb to the whispers.
Haunting, yet refined. All attraction proves fatal.
Detrimental. Toxic. Endless warning labels.
I sift through the threads to see the fiend clearer,
Until my fingers strike glass. Alas! Only a mirror...
Free.
I am. Everything you will never be because of course, you are not me. I am like nothing you have ever seen, because of course, nothing quite like me has ever been. In existence just to breath and feel and live. Each moment belongs only to me, the same as yours to you. Each moment of my life lasts only that, and then must be set free as a gift from me to my past. My future is nothing but a dream, living well ahead of its time. I am. Living in the moment, just this one. Free.
On Disordered Eating
How do you know when it is out of control?
When does a diet become a disorder?
Is it because of the tears that fell
Down my pathetic face when I did not
Get in my run? Or because I went over
1000 calories and tried to throw up in the bathroom?
Yet despite you telling me it is bad,
Why do so many tell me they are proud?
15 pounds lost in a month is a blessing
So why do you treat it like a curse?
Nonfiction—Geography and Centipedes
Today, I had a rather innocent and ill-informed student inspect an atlas on the wall (one with only the boundaries of countries but no printed names), point to Vietnam, and say, "I think that's South Koran."
He meant Korea.
I asked him if he was 100% sure and he said, "Well, no, because I thought Korea was near the Middle East."
"No," I said, pointing to Africa, "It's closer to East America, although Middle-Earth is between them."
"Oh! I should have known that."
"And across the ocean is the United States," I said, pointing to Greenland. "And Canada," I said, pointing to Canada. The student screwed up his face in confusion (was something finally getting through?), and I added: "the map's upside down."
We had fun, I corrected the mistakes, and we moved on.
Later, someone made a disgusted snort at the mention of The Human Centipede (I didn't bring it up, they did). My student, perceiving a mean remark, protested. "Hey, human centipedes are cute, too! All bugs are, even if you don't like how they look."
We (that is, the class) quickly surmised that he didn't know what we were referring to, and so we stalled at a certain crossroads. We wanted to end his ignorance on the subject, to enlighten the little fellow, but we didn't want to corrupt his innocence. The human centipede is a concept contrary to decency and goodness. It embroils oppression and futility and the depravity of man's imagination into a singular, iconic combustion.
Instead, we tiptoed.
"We're not talking about a bug, exactly."
"It's a way... for people to get together."
"It's like a team building exercise."
"It's not a sexual thing," someone assured him.
"Is it hard to do?" he asked.
"Not if you have the right attitude."
"But it's exhausting."
"Is there also a human caterpillar?" he asked.
"No, no, no."
A human caterpillar made me think of a human cocoon, and I shuddered at the image of a wet sack of living, struggling flesh. For a moment I envied the know-nothings and little-minds, only to realize that really, the degrees of difference between myself and this student were relatively minor, only I'd been shielded from the world's true evils by Rated R movies and comic books, cloistered in a school that looked like a prison, secreted into a suburb with invisible but tangible walls, as ignorant of greater powers and principalities as a centipede, its face turned ever-downward in its small, contained clamor.