🙦 The leaves have not quite fallen yet, but this month we celebrate the inner autumn of the soul. All things fade and die! Hurrah!
Poems: Trickertreat — Ava Hixson; Albion — Michael Thomas Jones
Essays: Some Reflections on the Dating Culture — Nathan Stenzel
Stories: Somebody Drives Me to Hannaland — Eliot Stevenson; Once They Were Young — Tali Rose West; Wendy and the Boy — Alaska Youngren
🙧 Poems 🙦
The trickertreat
I took my bag and stood on the doorstep
Teeth twiched before my sore head
Knees knocking, older sister does the talking
My hands, sweaty, my sweater, sticky,
My mom, made me go treat’er’tricky
Older sister insists to press the bell
For sweets, for sweets, her soul to sell
Anticipating, joyously elating!
As where we stand waiting, waiting
Inside, our ignorance was shown
The windows gray, we should have known
Inside that bell rang and rang
“TRICKERTREAT!” my sister sang
But o to no end, the house dry as bone
We should have known, we should have known
No one (i mean, no one) was home.
hours wasted of that glory night
From afar, a horrid sight.
Yelling, pleading for a smidge to eat
If only we realized, we shouldn't wait for a trickertreat.
Ava Hixson
Albion
Build me an affordable fairyland
fumbling the globe in an iron hand;
life becomes liquid, intelligence wicked.
I wonder what happened to Nick Land.
factories are the glowing bones of the gods,
interstellar machines behind cathedral facades.
undersea cables are the world soul's neurology.
invisible churches, ambient abbeys.
I love you,
your rainy green land,
your mechanical womb,
your delicate strands.
pale skin like fish is crawling and floating,
transmuted humans cold-blooded boating,
transmitting their minds into the ether,
their bodies to the freezing stars.
the spectre of spiralbound dealbreakers shadows
each word and feeling that we hold so hallowed.
westminster wraiths translated to orion,
albino souls of albion.
humankind is annihilated
in interplanetary circuit litigation.
the letter, the law, the spirit, the fire,
is melting our minds down inside the wires.
london bridge is falling down,
falling down, falling down,
london bridge is falling down,
my fair lady.
Michael Thomas Jones
🙧 Essays 🙦
Some Reflections on the Dating Culture
When it comes to a community’s dating culture, being able to point out flaws, immaturities and foibles among its participants is like being able to point out green on the grass: it’s not really the kind of exercise that merits a pat on the back.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that we ought to pretend we don’t see the flaws in a community. When you have a community of young Christians (viz. New Saint Andrews College) all participating in the dating process (whether actively dating, pursuing someone or just staying alert to whatever opportunities the Lord brings their way), you’re bound to get a culture with its own distinct blind spots and blemishes. No need to pretend that isn’t the case.
That said, there are flaws and there are flaws, as the author of last month’s piece on dating culture noted. She rightly observed that the dating culture among Moscow’s Christian youth is not tainted by unchecked promiscuity or a long trail of broken hearts. Rather, it is marked by “wife hunters” and women who are discouraged from pursuing career opportunities. These are very different sets of flaws, if we want to call them that.
It should be noted that these criticisms are unfalsifiable: if I were to survey 500 New Saint Andrews students, former and current, about their experiences with dating in Moscow, I’m certain that the author’s points could be corroborated. However, I’m also sure just as many of my hypothetical respondents would contradict her criticisms. And in all likelihood, most of us here in Moscow could both corroborate the criticisms and rebut them.
So, because addressing these criticisms directly would seem avail little, we must address them obliquely, which brings us back to the point: there are flaws and there are flaws. For the sake of argument, I’m willing to concede the points raised in last month’s piece: wife hunters, deferred career aspirations of young women, unnecessarily quick engagements and any other points I’ve forgotten. But we must do more than point out flaws. We must ask, what is the nature of these supposed flaws in Moscow’s (Christian) dating culture? Are they errors warranting serious attention? I don’t believe so. I believe that these flaws, real or imagined, are simply the byproducts of a correctly-oriented dating culture. That is, I believe the Moscow/New Saint Andrews dating culture to be fundamentally healthy, with a few excesses due mostly to the immaturity of its participants.
Regarding wife hunters, the author of last month’s piece averred that some young men come to New Saint Andrews with a hungry look on their face—they’re just here to find a wife. Maybe so. Is this wrong? In itself, I don’t believe it is.
If a young man earnestly desires a wife, such that it is a first-order goal for him upon his arrival at college, he may go about things awkwardly and he may even make a couple girls uncomfortable (which he ought not to do). But while the incidental excesses of his wife-searching may truly be excesses, they are excesses born of a correctly-oriented disposition. For all the young man’s awkwardness, he nevertheless recognizes that “he who finds a wife finds a good thing” (Prov. 18:22). Thus, he may be wrong in some ways, but his bumbling failures are the blessed result of his having the correct orientation.
While the excesses of the young man’s wife-ward orientation may still bear the vestiges of immaturity, we ought to bear patiently with him, not disparage him for being a “wife hunter.” And at the risk of creating a false dichotomy, I would much rather be embarrassed by the occasional awkwardness of the “wife hunters” than have a culture beset by male indolence and passivity.
The same can be said of the other criticisms. A young woman may naively forgo promising career or educational opportunities in hopes of getting married, but her fundamental orientation is still laudable: she desires to be a wife and mother, a truly noble and godly desire. Likewise the young couple quickly engaged and married: perhaps their haste is unwarranted, perhaps it is the fruit of immaturity. Nevertheless, their desire not to prolong the engagement should be commended, especially in a culture where multi-year dating relationships and indefinite engagement periods are commonplace.
I should once again make it clear that I do actually believe there are flaws in the dating culture of Moscow/New Saint Andrews. However, whatever flaws there may be I firmly believe to be the best kind of flaws: the kind that are the result of people—especially young people—trying to live in a distinctly Christian manner and occasionally making a hash of it. We should be quick to remember that there are no failed attempts at obedience for us to complain about without honest attempts at obedience, and there’s no sanctification that doesn’t involve plenty of failed obedience. And glory to God for all of it.
Nathan Stenzel is a junior at New Saint Andrews College and a former wife hunter. His wife hunt was successful.
🙧 Stories 🙦
Somebody Drives Me To Hannaland
We were on our way to Hannaland, a campground in the Idaho backwoods, and the driver was overconfident in his ability. The backroads twisted and contorted like lines on an angry sunburnt face and my sense was that we were going much too fast along them. In the past half-hour, Lost Lake Lane had come to resemble a dirt footpath rather than a road designed for actual automobiles such as our gristly station wagon. This did not matter to the driver, who was crunching the car around every bend. I wanted to be determined against all this, because I had not vomited in five years.
Since this trip, the driver’s name clawed its way out from my mind, but I remember his distinct facial features. He was bearded and his teeth were braced - bright, chrome and green. His eyes were beach-glass blue. The inner part of his bottom lip was badly chapped - I presumed it had something to do with the braces - and you could see coagulated blood when he spoke or when he smiled.
I glanced over at the speedometer. Huh. It felt like we were going faster than fifty miles an hour, so the sight of the speedometer needle was an indication that not only the driver but his vehicle too had a much different grasp of the situation than I did. I thought to myself, “Good thing I didn’t say anything about slowing down.”
Had I mustered the spirit to say something stupid like, “Please slow down I am going to vomit,” in the face of a speed limit surpassment of only 25 miles per hour, the driver might have spat in my face. I had seen him do it.
Lost Lake Lane’s horizon was warped by heat. The unsure stretch of road quivered drunkenly so that oncoming traffic often seemed very directly oncoming and for a moment, right before each massive logging truck slid by, my heart would try to beat backwards. When there were no oncoming cars, I was occupied with my laundry-machine stomach. I kept my mouth shut about our velocity or anything else for as long as I could.
We had started driving south from Sandpoint, Idaho, where the driver and I both lived. I didn’t know him. I just needed a ride to Hannaland, and he said he could give me one. We met in a parking lot. He asked if I had enough cash to pay my share of gas expenses, then we got in and drove. He smiled staring straight ahead through the windshield when he said, “I hope you don’t mind; I’m taking a detour to pick up my girlfriend.”
That sounded fine to me.
Attention had initially been dispensed between the two of us as from a box of tic-tacs, up until two hours in when I realized that we had headed west instead of south and that the driver had added eleven hours to a four hour drive, without clearly alerting me. He was headed to the Washington State Ferry Harbor, so, unfortunately, I was too. The ferry would take us across the glitter-scraped water of the Puget Sound, from Seattle to the Olympic National Peninsula. He only spoke to tell me that he'd leave my “bastard ass on the side of the road” if I tried anything with her.
“I’m not paying for 500 miles or whatever amount worth of gas that I never agreed to,” was my response.
“Who cares? I don’t want your money and I don’t want any of your mouthing off either.”
“Well, I’ll still pay what we agreed-”
“I said I don’t want it!” He would not look at me. “And I definitely don’t want you to speak to her. At all.”
Once we reached the harbor, we pulled up into the line of cars eager to board the ferry. Our engine was just starting to smoke a little bit, and I said something like, “uh, should you check the oil?” which he did his best to ignore, but the smoke was beginning to crawl over the windshield. He began to chew his battered bottom lip, then he gestured to the land mass on the horizon.
“See that’s where her campsite is.”
I said: “Nice.”
I thought the tollbooth guy was overdressed, in his short-sleeved button-up with a bowtie, but he remained seemingly unpretentious, probably because he wore a blue bandana on his head.
As we pulled up next to the booth, smoke was escaping out from under the hood and flooding into the tollbooth, as well as into our car through the windows. The tollbooth guy didn’t even begin to ring us up for the ferry ride. He coughed then he spoke, “You need to pull out man. You gotta pull out ASAP, and head to-”
He was interrupted by his own, now-more-bubbly-and-phlegmy cough. He swallowed and leaned his head out the window to his right to avoid the smoke which had infiltrated his booth.
“Pull out of line and get on your way to Meineke Car care.” he shouted, “We’re not letting that thing on our ferry.”
The driver did not flinch.
“How’s it goin’? We’re headed to the Olympic Park!”
“Get out of the line! We’re not letting that thing on our ferry.”
“Well, too bad, ‘cause we are not letting your bastard-ass stand in our way.” The driver continued, “We’ve got a compatriot ready for pickup, and she’s on that coast right there waiting for us.”
None of us, including the driver himself, were able to see farther than a couple feet through all the smoke, so his gesture in the direction of the park had a diminished dramatic effect.
“Ring us up for a boat ride, guy!”
The tollbooth guy stopped squinting. His dimples disappeared. He braved the smoke. He slowly swung his torso into it, so that he was directly across from the driver. He glared calmly at him.
“You’re the one who’s just some ‘guy.’ Not me. I’m the tollbooth guy. You know about everybody who needs to pick up their ‘compatriots’ off that coast? Well, either they go through me… or they don’t go at all. You’re not going through me, got that, guy?”
That is the only time I’ve ever seen an adult spit in someone’s face. The tollbooth guy was at a very convenient distance. The driver barely had to move to hit his target. He just conjured up the contents of his mouth, spat, then rolled up his window and waited.
As the tollbooth guy phoned security I watched his white shirt, through the dark smoke weaving around it. The shirt now had a small stain which was a slight pink, since the driver's lip-blood had been so watered down with his saliva. They banned the driver from ever using that ferry.
At Meineke Car care, the driver called his girlfriend, while I watched the history channel in the waiting room. The mechanic fixed the car and I got in and the driver got in and quickly grabbed his sunglasses from the dash, putting them on in order to cry. I don’t know what happened on that phone call, exactly, but I can imagine being stranded on the Olympic Peninsula by your boyfriend probably does not endear him to you.
In some of the flatter dirt beaches there, the tide encroaches on the land in real time. I can imagine a wet peninsula isolation watching the water slinking towards you with its sly tiger shoulders. No escape, no ride. She had reason to be pissed. I’d be pissed. I was pissed.
The dissolving sunlight pelted him through the windshield. Shiny glasses, shiny braces, shiny tear-anointed face. Tiny beard boy.
Of course, by the time we were nearing Hannaland, the sunglasses were off and his eyes were dry. I asked him questions mainly with the intention to keep my mind off my stomach. “Is the olympic peninsula pretty?” “Why are you going to Hannaland?” “Have you ever been to Meineke before?”
With each of my inquiries, he answered by increasing the car’s speed, which made me more sick and more desperate to distract myself by asking questions which further irritated him into leaning deeper into the gas pedal.
Finally, I said to him, “She has every right to be angry with you.”
His shoulders relaxed. We hadn’t slowed down but his shoulders were relaxed now. He spoke softly, “If you want to… I’ll still let you pay for gas. I didn’t mean it.” He looked right at me. My heart kind of stopped. Beach glass. I could see that he didn’t know how to make this okay.
Then I threw up. My mouth swelled as I held my breath, the pressure increased too drastically and the seal of my lips broke. I stuck my head out the window. The torrential wind which was stampeding over the car whipped a twisting spray of vomit out from my mouth and into oblivion. Twice.
I sat back down in the car, loose-mouthed, teeth like the inside of a coca-cola bottle. Glass of acid. The end of an era. I had not vomited in five years.
Eliot Stevenson
Once They Were Young
Patricia had always hated her name and, although she’d turned forty last month, she still insisted on being called Trixie. Recently she’d noticed that her husband, Allen, no longer directly addressed her in front of other people, and she couldn’t decide if this was because he was embarrassed to associate his slightly overweight and graying wife with the girl detective from the 1950s mystery series, Trixie Belden, or because they’d been married for so long now that she no longer existed in his mind as anything other than “wife” and “mother.” At home he called her “honey,” “babe,” or, most detrimentally, “dear,” and, as if to fulfill all that this implied, she had taken to reading Better Homes and Gardens in the tub at noon, the water so thick with rose scented bubbles she couldn’t see her own sagging breasts and doughy middle. She wasn’t old, but it had been a long time since she was young, and she missed the people she and Allen had been.
She was thinking about this, and about what flavor of cake she should make for Tabby’s thirteenth birthday on Saturday, as she drove home from dropping her three daughters off at school. Suddenly she slammed her brakes. In the middle of their quiet neighborhood street milled a wake of vultures, at least fifteen of them, hunching their wrinkled red heads and black feathered shoulders, apparently unperturbed that she’d almost driven into them. She craned her neck to see what they scavenged, but nothing dead lay on the asphalt. She honked. A few flapped their wings, annoyed, but none retreated. She honked again, and eased her foot off the brake. When they still didn’t scatter, she experienced a totally surprising, and almost overwhelming, desire to climb out and wring each of their scrawny necks. Instead she pounded the gas and careened straight toward the throng.
At the last moment, however, she lost her nerve and swerved around them. Breath strained and pulse rapid, she sped the last half mile home, up the driveway, and into the garage, which she closed before opening her door and hurrying into the house. Breakfast dishes littered the kitchen, and she spent half an hour sudsing and scrubbing, the whole time trying to shake the feeling that those birds had been watching her. Waiting for her, in fact. She told herself this was ridiculous, even macabre, but their modest ranch-style home seemed vast and shadowy, and when she went out to fetch the mail that afternoon, she couldn’t help peering around for the birds.
They were nowhere to be seen, thank goodness; the street was empty except for her next door neighbor, Crystal Davis, who met her on the front walk. Touching back platinum flyaways with brilliant red fingernails, Crystal flashed a sparkling smile, then kissed Trixie on each cheek, as if they were French.
“Darling,” she said, “I have the biggest favor to ask. Is there any chance you could take in our mail and feed our sweet new kitty next week? Dan found an absolutely fabulous last minute deal on a cruise and we simply couldn’t pass it up.”
Of course they couldn’t, Trixie thought. They were always jetting from one glamorous destination to another, as carefree as newlyweds, though they’d been married longer than she and Allen. How had they so impeccably preserved their youth?
“I’d be happy to,” Trixie said, and followed her across the manicured lawn and into the sandstone two-story, where Crystal showed her the litter box and food bowl, and pictures from their last cruise to Cozumel, and offered her a glass of moscato, which made Trixie check the clock and realize that she would be late picking the girls up from school.
She sped all the way there, but the carpool line was empty by the time she arrived. Lizzy and Sophia tumbled into the back, and Tabby slid into the passenger seat and slammed the door.
“This is why you should just let us ride the bus,” she said. “You’re always late.” Biting back a litany of the horrors of school buses, as well as various retorts regarding her continual service and sacrifice for her three little ingrates, Trixie said, humbly, “I am so sorry, honey. The Davises are going out of town next week, and she asked me over to see about the cat. I couldn’t get away.”
“Can we swim in their pool?” Lizzy said.
“I didn’t ask.”
“Please, please ask,” Sophia said.
“I wish we just had our own pool,” Tabby said. Her hair hung in her eyes, and Trixie resisted the urge to tuck it behind her ears.
She gripped the wheel with both hands and asked, “What kind of cake do you want for your birthday?”
“I don’t know if I really want one.”
“But I always make you one. Every year. And now you’re turning thirteen. You’ll be a teenager.” She blinked. She refused to burst into tears.
“Yeah, I know how old I am.”
“What’s for dinner?” Lizzy asked.
“Can we have pizza? Please,” Sophia begged.
“If you really want to make a cake, I guess chocolate,” Tabby said. “With ganache and strawberries. Not anything cutesie.”
“What about Chick-fil-a,” Sophia said. “Then you won’t even have to cook.”
“I can’t wait to go swimming. They’ve got the best floaties.”
“I’ve been thinking, and I don’t want to do a slumber party this year. I want Jake and Dylan and Tommy to come,” Tabby said.
Trixie sighed, but said, “That’s fine.”
“Thanks,” Tabby said. She finally flicked her hair out of her eyes.
“We could do McDonald’s,” Sophia said. “That hardly costs any money.” Trixie turned on the radio. Lizzy and Sophia sang along, loudly.
—
She made spaghetti that night, with ground beef and sausage in homemade sauce, and a Caesar salad. When Allen had still not arrived at a quarter to seven, she dished up plates for the girls, but left hers empty. She wasn’t sure if she was actually waiting to eat with Daddy, as she told her daughters, or simply hoping to berate him with her silent nobility in the face of his disregard of her culinary efforts. While Tabby scarfed her pasta, and Lizzy picked out the tomato chunks, and Sophia launched into the saga of her day, Trixie texted Allen a picture of her white plate, with the caption, “Dinner’s ready, come on home.” The message shouldered against the rest, in the barren white box of no replies.
This was unlike him. He may have developed the unfortunate habit of fastening all his suit jacket buttons, and untucking his shirt to clean his wire-rim glasses, and not only listening to but also discussing NPR broadcasts, but he’d remained a kind, conscientious, and, most of all, a punctual husband, who doted on his daughters, and, if his assurances were to be believed, adored his wife.
Where is he now? she wondered, and her pulse quickened, because what if he’d been in a car accident? What if thugs had stolen his phone and left him to bleed out in the parking lot behind Cohen, Cohen, and Co. Insurance? What if that flock of vultures had not been waiting for her, but for him?
The garage door shuddered open. Shouting “Daddy!” Sophia hurtled through the laundry room and flung her arms around his middle, just the way Tabby and Lizzy used to do. He bustled in with her still fluttering around him, his suit jacket tossed over his shoulder, briefcase in hand, and smudges on his glasses, despite the fact that his shirt was untucked, as if he’d just been cleaning them.
“Allen,” Trixie said. She did not peck him on the lips as she had done every night, at six o’clock sharp, for many years.
He didn’t meet her gaze. He said, “I’m sorry I’m late.”
“What happened?”
He sat down and heaped spaghetti onto his plate. “I got held up at work.”
“Why didn’t you answer my messages?” she asked, scooping sauce over his pasta.
“What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?” Tabby said.
“The Spanish what?” Lizzy and Sophia said.
“I was working, dear,” Allen said. “Not checking my phone.”
He still had not looked into her eyes. His skin seemed gray, his movements flaccid. The overhead light glinted off a sprinkling of white hairs Trixie had never noticed before. White! She felt a hint of suspicion, slivered with fear.
“You had your whole commute home, you couldn’t have phoned?”
“Can we please talk about this later?”
“It’s a simple question. I just want to know why you’re over an hour late, and why you didn’t have the decency to let me know that you were not, in fact, dead on the side of the road.”
“Leave him alone, Mom,” Tabby said, defensive of her father, as usual.
“You stay out of this,” Trixie snapped.
“Are you fighting?” Sophia asked.
“Where were you?” Trixie said.
“I lost my job.”
Trixie’s fork clattered against her plate, and time seemed to slow, life nothing more than the purr of the air conditioner and the clunk of the ice machine.
“Girls, go do your homework,” she said finally.
“We already did.”
“Just go to your rooms. Now,” she said, and for once they didn’t argue. She cupped her hand over Allen’s. “Honey,” she said.
He took off his glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “They gave me a month’s notice,” he said.
“One month? After all these years? How can they do this to us?”
“Budget cuts.” He spit the words out and, dropping his glasses to the table, looked straight at her for the first time. “So that’s why I’m late, dear. I wanted to make sure I had a plan of action to present before I came home with the news.” His eyes flashed, the blue so sharp she had to stifle a small gasp.
“You don’t have to present me with anything,” she murmured, stroking the hairs on the back of his hand.
He pulled away, clicked open his briefcase, and handed her a sheet of graph paper covered in his precise all-cap lettering. Income, expenses, savings, severance package…all laid out in undeniable black ink.
“We could be okay for quite a while,” she said.
“Two months. Three, if we’re really careful.”
“But we have our savings.”
“And our mortgage.”
“I’m not disappointed in you, Allen,” she said.
He shoveled a forkful into his mouth. Sauce dribbled down his chin. He did not wipe it away.
“It’s not your fault,” she said, trying to make her voice soft and comforting. She dabbed at his chin with her napkin. He snatched it from her.
“Don’t patronize me, Patricia. I can see your cogs spinning, calculating what I did wrong, why they booted me.”
“That’s not true!”
“If you’d had a job any time in recent history, you’d understand things have changed. I probably got fired by a computer, for god’s sake.” He spit on his glasses and rubbed them furiously with the dirty napkin, spreading a red film over the lenses.
“That’s not fair,” she said, shoving her chair back. She knew he was simply upset, perhaps embarrassed and feeling he’d failed his wife and children, but she would not be spoken to like this. “You can load the dishwasher yourself for once,” she said as she stomped to their bedroom, and did not slam the door.
—
The following morning, she claimed to be suffering a migraine. Allen dressed quietly in the dark, woke the girls, and helped them fix breakfast and sack lunches. Their voices rose and fell in the kitchen, and every now and then she caught phrases like “the economy” and “job market” and “savings,” Allen explaining the situation to his daughters in calm, even tones, assuring them that everything would be all right.
But what if everything was not all right? What if he never found another job and they lost the house and landed on the streets and had to stand in soup lines just to eat watery beef stew? She wanted to gather the children into her arms and sob over their heads, baptizing them in the sweetwaters of her maternal love.
What else could she do? She’d been out of the workforce thirteen years, ever since she’d had to go on bedrest while pregnant with Tabby. Before that, she’d been a manager at Macy’s. She wondered if they would hire her back. Surely someone would hire her. Her resumé didn’t exactly sizzle and pop with savvy and experience, but plenty of jobs didn’t require much, like dumping fries in a vat of oil, or scooping meatloaf at the school cafeteria.
She sniffed resolutely. If that’s what her family needed, yes, she would be a lunch lady. Easing herself off the mattress, she slipped into her bathrobe and puttered out to the kitchen, only to discover that everyone had already left. Dishes cluttered the table and counters. The dishwasher light blinked green.
Instead of cleaning immediately, as she usually did, she plodded over to the family desktop and typed “employment opportunities DFW” into the search bar. The number of available jobs made her wonder at unemployment statistics. After searching until her eyeballs bleared, though, she realized just how difficult this might be, with all the special experience and certificates and education the most banal work required.
She exited the browser, emptied the dishwasher, and reloaded it. She wiped the counters and scrubbed the floor, attacking the grout lines with Sophia’s splayed unicorn toothbrush. Sweat trickled from her hair and beaded the backs of her knees, and she flung her bathrobe to the couch and continued scouring on hands and knees, her breasts loose and heavy in her flimsy nightgown. She wished Allen were here, and that he’d forget everything, and tuck his glasses beside the bread box, and take her hem between his fingers, and slowly draw the threadbare satin up, up. It had been a long time since they’d made love anywhere but the bed at night, lights low and fan on. With a deep sigh, she grabbed the countertop and heaved herself up.
All the job searching and cleaning had not shaken the shadow from her heart. No matter how many times she assured herself they would be fine, she could not stop thinking of Allen’s face last night, so gray and tired and resigned. He seemed to be handling the job loss well, but what if he snapped? It wouldn’t be so uncommon.
Perhaps it would be wise to go for a walk and clear her head. After dressing quickly, she let herself through the garage and out the side door. As she rounded the corner of the house she froze, hands over her mouth.
Vultures crowded the end of her driveway. There were more of them today, at least twenty, heads bright scarlet and seeming to glimmer with moist blood, though again she could not see a carcass anywhere. The birds watched her with black, beady eyes and she stared back at them. She felt she should run at them, chase them away with a fierce, defiant shriek, but she could not summon the energy she had felt yesterday, the glorious rage that had made her long to wring their necks or mow them down. In fact, the very thought of touching their naked skin made a lump rise in her throat and tears to her eyes. She slunk back to the door, unlocked it, and slipped inside. Hurrying to her room, she curled on Allen’s side of the bed and clutched his pillow to her chest. Ordinarily she would call him to talk things over, to ask for a bit of comfort and advice, but it didn’t seem right to put any further strain on him now. She buried her face in the pillow, an unsung scream brewing in her belly.
—
The next three days mirrored each other: girls to school, dishes washed, jobs searched, cat fed, girls home, dinner cooked, dishes washed, girls to bed. Pale terror masked in the march of the mundane.
On Saturday, Trixie gasped awake. Dawn light laced the edges of the curtains. Allen snored gently beside her. She’d dreamed her family huddled on a highway corner, holding cardboard signs that read “Homeless: Need Work.” She couldn’t fall back to sleep. She stared at the shadowed popcorn ceiling. When Tabby was little, she’d point to the animal shapes she saw up there and tell long and involved stories about them. Now she could hardly stand to pass the time of day with her mother. And she had invited boys to her party, which only made Trixie more nervous than she’d already been. Birthdays always made her anxious. What if the cake flopped? What if the crepe paper caught in the fan and stopped up the motor and burst into flames? What if Tabby hated her gifts, or was embarrassed of her family?
Trixie rolled out of bed. There would not be a speck of dust to be embarrassed by, she’d make sure of that, and she’d start the cake so early she wouldn’t even need to stick it in the freezer to cool.
By the time the rest of the family woke around ten o’clock, the house was spotless and the cake was cooling on the counter. She was determined to keep everything perfect for Tabby. She snapped at Sophia for picking at the crumbs, and called Lizzie a selfish pig for wanting to play with a friend instead of help blow up balloons for her sister. And when Tabby left a half eaten bowl of mac and cheese on the table at lunchtime, Trixie said, “If you want your friends to see you live in a dump, that’s fine by me,” and Allen said, “Enough, dear, that’s quite enough.” So she hid in a bubble bath and cried until her eyes were even redder and puffier than usual.
After that she felt better. She didn’t scold either Allen or Sophia for swiping a finger of ganache, and she even let Tabby borrow her favorite pink lip gloss and her best pearl earrings. When guests arrived at seven, the crepe paper was hung, the balloons blown, and the chocolate cake with strawberries displayed in the center of the kitchen table, surrounded by bowls of chips and pretzels, popcorn and candy.
She and Allen greeted the kids and chatted with the parents, and she wondered if any of them sensed a change, a devastation looming over them. She smiled her cheeks sore. Eventually the parents filtered out, and Tabby opened her presents and ate her cake, surrounded by giggling girls and awestruck boys. She did look beautiful, golden hair sweeping to her waist, perfect pink lips, and not a pimple in sight. Allen was always saying he’d have to beat boys off with a stick if she got any prettier, and Tabby would slug him in the arm, and smile and blush.
While the kids settled in to watch a movie, Trixie scraped frosting and cake crumbs from plates. As she organized spoons in the dishwasher, she suddenly remembered she had not fed the cat that day. Allen walked over with her, and as they strolled across the lawn she almost expressed all her fears and anxieties like waving a flag of war, but the yard was clear, the moon bright, and for the first time in a long time she felt pleasantly light and airy, Allen’s hand holding hers, and him humming in the back of his throat the way he did when he simply wasn’t thinking of anything at all. Even the thought of the vultures lurking somewhere in the shadows did not disturb her now.
Inside the Davises’, she stacked the mail in order of importance—bills, personal, junk— and watched her husband cuddle the cat to his chest and pace around the kitchen. He flipped a switch by the sliding glass doors and the pool light flickered on.
“I don’t remember the last time I went swimming,” he said.
“The lake. Last Fourth of July,” she said, carefully aligning the corners of the envelopes and fliers.
The cat sprang out of Allen’s arms, and he dragged open the sliding door and stepped onto the patio. “Honey,” he said, glancing back at her. He stood in the shadows and she could not make out his eyes.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry.”
She drifted onto the deck and slipped under his arm.
“I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that the other night,” he said.
“We’ll be all right.” She patted his hand, and he caught hers and held it to his cheek. “That’s what we always used to say. When we were fighting. Remember?” She laughed. “You’d yell it across the room like an insult, but it was somehow still comforting.”
He shifted his weight and guided them toward the pool, where June bugs floated amidst a scattering of leaves. “Remember our honeymoon? Skinny dipping in all those waterfalls.” “And dreaming!” she said. “What happened to all our dreams, Allen?”
He stiffened slightly, drawing just a touch away from her, but she pressed closer to him. She knew that question had no answer.
She said, “I’m sorry for what I said, too.”
He smelled faintly of cologne and wet summer air, and when he kissed her she felt a fluttering in her heart like the breath of wings. He slipped his hands down her body to the hem of her dress, and right there on the neighbor’s deck in the full light of the brilliant moon, he lifted it over her head. She began to protest, but he quieted her with another kiss. He pulled off his own shirt and stepped out of his pants, and they stood together in their underwear, his potbelly fuzzed with pale curly hair, her stomach a wrinkled canvas of stretch marks and scars. “What are we doing?” she gasped.
“Swimming,” he said, and waded into the pool.
She stayed firmly planted on dry ground. “This is ridiculous. Let’s come back tomorrow with the girls.”
“We used to say we’d travel the world,” he said. He was nearing the deep end now. Water lapped around his armpits.
“I know,” she said, but she crossed her arms over her breasts.
“We still could.” The pool light illuminated him from behind, and rather than disappointed or morose, he looked young again, bright and enthusiastic as he had been when they first met. “We could live again, Trixie.”
When he said her name, she moved toward the pool as if drawn by a spell, not feeling the ground beneath her feet, and, although she stood at the shallow end, she dove in, skimming the surface like a great blue heron gliding over a lake. Allen met her in the center and cradled her in his arms.
“We never wanted to stay here,” she said.
“We could move.” He spun her in slow, gentle circles.
“The girls would kill us.”
“They’d get over it. We’d go somewhere beautiful, somewhere we could see the stars.” Trixie let her head rest back, her body weightless, and gazed at the black sky. Not long ago she would have murmured dissent, told him to stop being ridiculous, but today anything seemed possible, the job loss suddenly not a looming devastation, but a scissor snip to a bound kite now set free. She felt as though something were expanding in her chest, some deep and meaningful emotion that she had tamped down for years, now stretching and growing with an intensity that startled her. She dropped her feet to the pool floor and stood, Allen’s arms still around her shoulders.
Suddenly his grip around her tightened. “Do you hear that?”
There was a rustling sound in the shadows along the fence, and then the shadow crept toward them, and the wake of vultures appeared on the deck at the other end of the pool. “No,” she said. “No more.”
She swam across the deep end and heaved herself out of the water, scraping her gut on the ledge. Allen followed and hoisted himself up beside her. For a moment they stood still and quiet, dripping chlorine in the hot summer night, and then the scream that had been brewing in Trixie’s belly rose up and burst from her lips. She ran at the vultures as her wild cry reverberated against the house.
The birds did not scatter when she raced into their midst. They simply parted, giving her a clear pathway. She turned and ran at them from the other side, and again they made way for her, blinking their beady little eyes, red heads shining in the glimmer of the pool light. She shrieked again, like the call of a banshee, and this time Allen shouted with her. He grasped her hand and together they ran at the wake, both shouting with all they had. The vultures ruffled their feathers and flapped their wings and began to migrate across the deck.
Allen stopped suddenly and turned his back on them. He looked into her eyes and said, “Trixie girl,” just the way he used to, and inexplicably they both bellowed with laughter. Standing there in the midst of a flock of vultures, they laughed and laughed until tears streamed from their eyes and tracked down their damp cheeks. And then, in their wet wrinkled underwear and the weight of the passing years, they ran and ran like children, pale skin glowing phosphorescent as they chased the birds around the pool and through the bushes and past the trees and finally over the fence and out of the yard.
Tali Rose West
Wendy and the Boy
He pocketed his chin in his palms. His mother, sitting across from him, had a face like a withered medical glove.
Wendy, watching them both, was happy to notice that he didn’t carry this trait. His body was rigid. He was steeling himself against the jolts and jumps of the subway car. He began to point at her and said something to his mother, but the clamor of the car entering the tunnel swallowed his voice. Wendy tugged at the strap of her book bag and continued to stare him down.
He smiled and she noticed he was missing a front tooth. She smiled back briefly, her pale cheeks flushed, and gazed down at her lap. The train had passed through the tunnel. She glanced back up. He was still staring at her. His mother was looking at her watch. She tugged at the collar of her purple pea-coat and glanced at the boy, and then back down at her watch. It was the type of watch runners wear. When she pursed her lips she reminded Wendy of a tortoise.
The boy wasn’t saying anything now, but his lips were moving slowly and his thick black eyebrows were melting into one. She squinted at him and then turned to look out the window. It was overcast again. They had to have recess indoors that day because it had been raining, and when the bell rang she had gone to the park with Avery and Beckett, and they had poked at worms and splashed in puddles. Her dress was soaking. Her mother might get mad. She’d change into her pink one as soon as she got home.
The doors opened and shut. Wendy had two stops left. Her stomach dropped as they descended into another tunnel, and then she could see the boy’s reflection in the window. He had both hands wrapped firmly around the pole behind her seat and was staring at her. His eyes were the same color as her dad’s. Same green, like the center of a pond. Wendy gasped a little and her eyes widened. “Hullo!” he said. When she didn’t respond, he spun out into the aisle, almost toppling an old woman’s suitcase, and marched back to the seat across from his mother. Wendy watched him. He was still staring at her.
Wendy felt a warm exhalation on her neck and looked up. A man in a graying, oversized sports jacket was licking his grizzled gums and murmuring softly to himself. He was swaying a little too compliantly with the motions of the car. Where other people managed to stay somewhat upright, he seemed to have the resistance of a dandelion on a blustery day. He smelled bad. Wendy swung her head back around to concentrate on the boy.
They pulled into the next stop, Granville. One more to go. His mother stood up and tugged at her collar again and exited the car. The boy’s gaze didn’t falter. Wendy watched the woman stride across the platform and down the wooden steps. And then the train was speeding forward again. Her eyebrows jumped. “Your… your mom…” She stuttered.
He didn’t seem to notice. He was leaning forward in his seat and his eyes were watering. Then he squeezed his eyes shut and slumped back against his backpack. “Ugh! You win!” he proclaimed loudly. Her face went warm.
An Asian man in a construction suit looked at the boy disdainfully, then back at his book. She got up and went to sit in the woman’s seat. “You’re pretty good at staring contests,” he said. “You don’t blink. Are you like those snakes that have sideways eyelids?”
He was talking too loudly, and the men around them were shifting their weight and looking up at the ceiling. She pulled her book bag onto her lap. “Why didn’t you go with your mom?” she asked softly. He stared at her. His eyes were watching her mouth, trying to read her lips. “Your mom, why didn’t you go with her?”
The car screeched and shuddered and the force of it knocked his head against the train pole next to his seat. He chewed his lip and stared at her. Then he looked down at the floor. She followed him. He was kicking a piece of gum and spreading it around with the toe of his sneaker. The gum was barely blue. It was spotted with little grains of dirt and as he distributed it over the floor of the train car, it grew darker. He scraped his sneaker back abruptly but kept leaning forward, focused on the floor. She looked back up at him. His eyes really did look like her dad’s. Her dad was a lot bigger than him though. And he liked to wear red or white. The boy was wearing a green hat and a blue coat. He had a ratty looking orange scarf that was tied in two knots and slung over his shoulder. His face was getting red. He kept crossing his arms, uncrossing them, and crossing them again. He shivered. She placed her hand in its white mitten on his knee, but he didn’t look up at her.
“Loyola.” The voice sputtered over the intercom. She grabbed the train pole, heaved her book bag onto her back and exited the sliding car doors.
Alaska Youngren
🙦 What are your plans for Thanksgiving this year? What are your plans for Halloween? What are your plans for the endless siege? What are your plans for when the midnight men refuse to leave and crawl in long fading cloaks across the eaves?
Best part:
"Nathan Stenzel is a junior at New Saint Andrews College and a former wife hunter. His wife hunt was successful."
Mr. Stenzel, your argument is very good.
I think you excelled in your point about "wife hunting" not being itself a problem. I am told (I cannot access it myself) that the original article spent a long time on the other two points - career interruption and extended dating. While I agree with your rebuttal on those topics, these rebuttals are disproportionately brief, consisting only of the 2nd to last paragraph. Brevity, however, was your friend - it always is when responding to rants. Perhaps you could have more evenly distributed your arguments in the same short space?
I also think you gave an exaggerated dismissal of the flaws at some points which clearly contradicted other statements where you rightly acknowledged these flaws. For instance when you say "these flaws, real or imagined, are simply the byproducts of a correctly-oriented dating culture." Real or imagined? You should not introduce the notion that these flaws are imaginary. You yourself do not believe they are imaginary. The admission that, 'yes, there are flaws,' builds your credibility and proves you are not ranting. Excess is, after all, the very thing you are saying is wrong.
Thank you for this essay. It was a joy to read, and I think that despite possible flaws, your response is overall, like NSA dating culture, very healthy.