Tag: micro cnf

Pet Cemetery | Benjamin Davis

Growing up, we had a lizard, ferret, parrot, rat, six dogs, eleven hamsters, and a holocaust fish who died with such startling frequency, that it was as though we’d bought each without bothering to check the expiration dates. Fish went in the toilet. Our mother dragged us by our names to the bathroom where we’d find her with a little green net in her hand. Inside there was always Rebecca, Ariel, Sarah, Anastasia, or whatever other fish had died. She’d cry, as she did when any pet died, then plop it into the toilet. “Everyone say bye, fishie!” She’d say. We would, and as the toilet gulped them down, she’d hum a little tune that I’m pretty sure was the national anthem. Then the hamsters. “Rodents,” our mother called them. Her only rule was that we could only have one at a time. So I doubt she was thrilled when we bought “Mama” who birth to six wiggly tablets that all would’ve grown to plague our home if Mama hadn’t eaten four of them, choking on the last, leaving us with reproducing siblings and a lesson on how nature surely doesn’t believe in God. Years passed. Hamster after hamster. It wasn’t our fault—not really; heart attacks, tumors, cold snaps, electrocutions, and embolisms. They always died in winter when the ground was too hard to bury them in. So our mother placed them in the four-by-six, three-foot-deep basement freezer in leftover shoeboxes beside the freeze-pops, chicken pot pies, and TV dinners, accumulating over years of forgotten springs. By my teenage years, a full two rows of shoeboxes lined the left-hand side of the freezer. When friends came over we’d go hunting for freeze-pops, and they’d ask, “What’s in the shoeboxes?” I’d say, “Hamsters, mostly.” And they’d laugh. Like it was a joke—which I always thought odd. What did they think, that we froze our shoes? If pressed, I’d open a box to show them a fur-matted, frozen stiff, rodent-popsicle. Hamsters don’t die gracefully. As my friends lost grandparents, I wondered how many hamsters equaled a grandparent. I’d see them grieve and think, well, I was a little sad when Anastasia died, was I ten percent of grandparent-sad? If we had ten hamsters die, would I have grown as much from my grief as they from theirs? Twelve? I made a mental note to count the shoeboxes, but I never did. Years later, I came home to find that my brother’s hamster had died on a beautiful summer day. Our mother reverently carried it outside. Our father dug a hole. My brother wept until all of his tears were used up. Until the hole was filled. Then they turned and went inside as if that were the end of it.

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[Redacted] | Joanna Acevedo

In the weeks before Michael’s death, I quit smoking. Not because of anything, but just because I can, because these moments of rudeness and grace that we are dealt are sometimes more than we can handle. After he is dead, B— will smoke a cigarette, outside, with my cocaine dealer. They will talk about [redacted]. I worry they will talk about what it is like to fuck me, but the subject never comes up. 

In the cult classic movie, Fight Club (1999), based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, a commanding Brad Pitt tells us:“The sixth rule of Fight Club is the fights go on as long as they have to.” The fights, as the movie shows us, are quicksilver speedy—men grapple with each other, arms and legs akimbo, their fingers finding eye sockets and armpits, their toes hugging the polished concrete or hardwood. It’s not often that one thinks about their capacity for violence. 

Fight Club was successful, and continues to be successful, because it shows us what we could be—dual sides of the coin, both the unnamed narrator and the sexy, confident Brad-Pitt-as-Tyler-Durden. We could be reckless, rebellious, if we only stepped out of our comfort zone. All of us, in our ways, have this capability. We’re just not reaching for it. The possibility is there, and this possibility is enough for most people. 

In late March, I offer B— two of my extracted wisdom teeth; a peace offering. Michael has been dead three months. I know what my capability is—I have glanced sideways at the knife block as our voices rise, but I will never act on these urges. I do not know how to handle my grief. I read his obituary again, and it streaks through me like lightning, fresh as paint. 

Fight Club offers us a way out through violence—but it’s a fantasy, and in the movie, unlike the novel, it’s also a love story. Violence will not save us, and neither will love. What will save us is [redacted]. Our only way out is through.

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My Life as a Frog | Tina Kimbrell

I spent my days in a pond with the frogs. I stood with the tiniest tadpoles and the tadpoles caught in the in-between, their little legs sprouting from their bulbous teardrop bodies. My body loomed among them—a foreign pulse. I stepped around the edges, watched the grown bodies dart away in waves and bellyflop back into the water. I sat alone in the tall grass nearby, legs chigger-bitten and scabbed, and watched the cattails wag with the weight of red-winged blackbirds. Their nests were buried somewhere deep in the weeds. They would leave and return again and again.

At night, my mother worked at a factory, deboning whole chicken after whole chicken with her gloved hands. My father drank beer after beer after selling couch after couch all day. At 11:00 each night he left to pick up my mother from the factory parking lot. I was in bed but not asleep, sprawled on top of humid sheets. When I saw the headlights glide away and across my bedroom walls, I walked out onto the back deck in the dark and listened to the constant chirp of tree frogs, the low trill of bullfrogs. My eyes adjusted just enough to see the outlines of trees among the glowing confetti of lightning bugs, the yo-yo bounce of bats overhead. But the frogs remained invisible and loud. Their throats throbbed a woven chorus, blanketing the night with me inside it.

I would sit and wait. I would cling to the wood and watch for the familiar headlights turning back again onto the gravel.

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Clothes Rack | Niles Reddick

The Sears store was cold compared to the hundred degrees temperature and humidity outside in inland Florida where the coastal breezes cease, and Mom was lured there after receiving the sales circular in the mail. I had eaten my gummy bears and fidgeted with the clothes on the rack.

“Leave the clothes alone,” she said. “Play with your cars.”

 “Are you almost finished?”

“No,” she said, pulling a hanger with a dress from the metal retail rack, holding the dress on the hanger just below her chin, looking at it in the floor-length mirror on the wall, putting it back on the rack, and scraping groups of hangers with dresses to the next one she liked.

“I’m ready for the Happy Meal,” I tugged on her clam diggers.

“If you don’t stop your ants in the pants, you’ll eat fried liver for lunch.” She shooed me away like the gnats we fanned when outside. 

I crawled on all fours to the center of the rack, imagined it a teepee, sat with my legs crossed, my spine lined with the stainless-steel totem pole, and watched my mom move clockwise around the rack, her clogs stepping like the slow dances on Lawrence Welk. I rolled my cars, parked them in a lot, whispered invitations to imaginary drivers about a race, and then sped the cars and drivers until they crashed.

What I didn’t know was that my mom didn’t know where I had gone, called my name, and ran to the cashier’s counter.  Salesclerks fanned out, and the manager made an announcement over the intercom.  Something brought me back from the race, and I saw clogs, reached through the dresses, and pulled on Mom’s pants. The lady screamed, and one of the clerks came, pushed the clothes on the rack, and saw me.

“Come out of there, boy.”

Mom ran over when she heard the commotion. “You about gave me a heart attack.” She yanked me by the arm, and I dropped my Porsche.

She turned to the lady shopping. “I’m sorry he scared you.”

“It’s alright,” she said, fanning herself.

“I can’t take you nowhere.”

“What about my Happy Meal?”

“Ain’t nothing happy about the meal you’ll get when I get you home.” 

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The Waiting Room | Allie Griffith

In the hospital waiting room, we harmonize as we wait. A woman clutches an emesis bag to her lips, setting the rhythm: short, rapid breaths in and out — a whoosh then crinkle of plastic. A boy coughs in wet, staccato bellows. Half-asleep in her wheelchair, a woman chants, “I used to live in Fairlawn, Ohio,” to no one and everyone. On cue, the man on the phone next to me segues into the bridge, “‘What do you do for me?’ Bitch, I pay bills.” A moan, sneeze, hiccup. A cell phone alarm and groan.

A sign on the wall: Please note that emergency room patients are called back according to priority level based on medical history and current condition, not arrival time. 

I weigh my mortality against the sounds in the waiting room, listening for the most pressing diagnosis. Which cough is Level 3 (“Urgent”)? Which whimper is Level 4 (“Semi-Urgent”)?

In the seventh hour, the waiting room reaches capacity. Our melody crescendos into a desperate requiem, a spiritual polyphonic score that stops time. Coughs become battle cries and moans mark last wishes. A teenager paces up and down the aisle, yanks at his hair. We have transcended South Bend, Indiana and have arrived in purgatory. 

I sigh, softly. My own symptoms (sharp abdominal pain, fever) have muted and I start to wonder why I am here. I want to transpose the entire song, offer up my revisions to the composer.

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Orange Meets Green | Emma Schmitz

I’m burning rubber on pavement, matching the positive to the negative, trying to get something to spark. The drive from the Northwest Sierra to the Southeast Sierra of California stretches like an octopus with so many routes to go. Manzanita, sinewy pines, bushy firs, and sagebrush lull in and out like a foamy-mouthed ocean on rock and sand.

If I take the iconic Tioga Pass, I won’t see the classic Topaz Lake. If I make time for the glossy June Lake Loop, I probably won’t have time to see the chalky Toufas up close. It’s a shame, the decisions we’re forced to make.

The book I’m listening to says to get quiet. To figure out my gift and share it with the world. It says some people go their whole lives not using their gifts, and I worry I’ve dropped mine somewhere or wasn’t invited to pick it up in the first place. I’m worried I was too busy worrying about other people’s ideas to discover my own gift, and I remind myself to stop worrying.

That night, I’m more concerned with finding a spot to camp than weighing the pros and cons of going back to school for a STEM degree I can’t afford, nor do I remotely qualify for. The next day, I’m too busy hiking up a mountain and sliding down spring snow to fantasize about my never-gonna-happen career in glittery media production or highbrow publishing.

That evening, I’m too distracted by the clever conversation and cackling of my two best friends to give a shit about what I do for a living. All of us in communications and marketing, writers at heart – those rare, deep connections we find as adults. There is no space to mis-fit in the vastness of a high desert forest.

There is no hard decision to make when one thing inches seamlessly into another. Where the desert meets the mountains, where orange meets green. Sometimes, things make the most sense at the point of connection – when one edge meets another to provide contrast, perspective. Where I don’t have to choose, where I can flow between.

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