R J Hembree - Writers' Village University

RJ Hembree - Publisher & Editor-In-Chief 

Priscilla Fagan - Managing Editor 

Judy Simpers - Associate Editor 

Janet Smith - Associate Editor 

Carolann Neilon Malley - Poetry Editor 

Roy Berman - Associate Editor 

Graphics & Design - RJ Hembree 

Cover photo Jed Brown, Dreamstime 

Copyright 2008 T-Zero Quarterly 

Writers' Village University 

http://writersvillage.com

Girl In A Park 

a poem by David Nourse 

4 

Diagnosis 

a poem by Kathy Kubik 

5 

Trapped 

an essay by Sergio Troncoso 

7 

Sergio Troncoso 

an interview by RJ Hembree 

15 

The Manic Muse 

short fiction by Shanna Lewis 

20 

The Beaded Sandals 

short fiction by Carolann Neilon Malley 

27 

Trying To Beat The Moon 

short fiction by Kathy Kubik 

32 

Letters of K 

short fiction by Shirley Eaves 

37 

The Pond 

short fiction by Laurel Wilczek 

42 

Turning Your Creative Talents Into Hard Cash 

an article by Helen Rossiter 

51

4 

She glides slowly at first, 

this slight figure skater, 

traces an orbit 

that tightens with speed 

on a sweet-smelling rink, 

freshly mown green 

flings out her arms, 

spins on the spot, 

stirs up the soft grass, 

giggles as world whirls, 

twirled by her fingers 

and blurred by the swirl 

in her delicate ears 

a spiralling journey 

above the park benches, 

above time and place -flies 

ever faster 

until she collapses, crash-lands 

in a confusion of limbs, 

a splash of bright laughter. 

David Nourse is a retired Australian bureaucrat and former computer journalist who 

lives in a quiet suburb of Canberra, Australia's national capital. Dave has done 

graduate work in English, linguistics and computing, and belatedly took up poetry as 

a pleasant change from writing officialese and software reviews. He has previously 

published poems in Loch Raven Review and The Barefoot Muse.

The sky drops, and I coordinate my dress 

with premature funk. 

My slippers are even fuzzy black. 

I’ve felt the change in your day-old corpse skin, 

the snuff of your eyes. Your walk slower, gait longer, 

lower to the ground even. 

Parts of you expand; others emaciate. 

Neither of us wanted to say the C word, 

Irish superstitions paramount. The day you left your oxfords 

on the table, I whispered death is in the air. You threw the black intruder 

at me, laughing, silly girl. 

We’ve done everything: blood tests, x-rays, 

biopsies, ultrasounds, homeopathic remedies, 

even couples reiki where I held onto the intrusive mass 

with both hands, performing hand to chest. 

And we’re left with this. This heart-stopping, fist-punching cement, 

diagnosis. 

Nothing left to do but pray; finger onyx rosary beads 

as you pack up your things, hide any unmentionables. 

Meanwhile, the sky is falling. 

Kathy Kubik is the author of four books of poetry; her most recent collection is 

entitled Universal (Moon Journal Press). Her poems and short stories have appeared 

in publications such as: The Mississippi Review, MiPOesias, Aoife's Kiss, Lily, Hiss 

Quarterly, Poems Niederngasse, Wicked Alice and The Mad Hatters' Review. She is 

currently working on her first novel. Samples of her writing can be found on her 

website, www.kathykubik.com. 

5

I 

am trying to write, to work. I drop the kids off at the Bank Street School for 

Children, and linger for a few minutes with Isaac, the younger child, and 

pretend that I am still needed in his 9/10’s classroom. Aaron had left me in 

the lobby, and only wanted a quick kiss, and a look that reassures him that 

somehow I am not angry at him for another offense (he is quick to notice when I 

am, and perhaps I have been harder on him). But he is more aggressive and 

outwardly sensitive (touchy?), so I react more quickly to him than I do with Isaac. 

This laptop, the Taekwondo clothes, I carry like a mule, outside of Bank Street, 

across Broadway to Oren’s Coffee, where I get the regular blend, extra light. 

Another thing to carry. I carry everything. Why doesn’t Laura drop off the kids 

anymore? I am tired, and I have just begun my day. Will I write anything that 

matters anymore? Maybe I am just someone pretending to be a writer, too. 

At Columbia, the African-American guard --bald, with thin, round glasses 

and a snappish demeanor-- glances at my ID card; he usually studies it like a 

philosophical text, but not today. He waves me in. What convinces him this time, 

the striped oxford shirt or the new black windbreaker? The heavy, ridiculously 

large laptop? But Mr. Smiley-Who-Is-Not-Ever-Friendly does ask me what’s in the 

bag, and I tell him Taekwondo clothes (not mine, but Aaron’s, for after school), and 

he waves me in, again, into my occasional literary sanctum, Butler Library. I need 

to work. I need to focus. Why haven’t I written five books already? Why do I want 

to? 

I find an enclosed desk on the first floor in the reference area, a huge room 

with thirty-foot ceilings, usually jam-packed with undergraduates during exams, 

otherwise empty. I notice the particularly young, beautiful, and raw women. 

Women with tattoos. Women badly dressed, yet possessed of young bodies. 

Women with thick library glasses and prim hair, yet with furtive, incessantly 

curious glances. But surprisingly I do not linger on them today; I have to work. 

Maybe I am getting old. This room, cavernous and bleakly lit and usually quiet, is 

also about being alone, or pretending to be alone, or wanting to be alone to 

jumpstart the work, to jumpstart the mind into something that might last beyond 

this flesh. The desk, like a small temporary tomb. Claustrophobically enclosed, 

deeply dark brown, for an individual trying to block out the world. Small oak walls 

encircle my immediate perspective and force me to focus on my work, on my self, 

on my solitude. Why do I do this to myself? Yet this self-deception usually works, 

7

8 

with only one problem. The Internet. 

At my tomb-desk, the Ethernet connection, electricity, and even wireless 

signals reach for my laptop like outstretched, ghostly fingers. My laptop is a 

window beyond these self-imposed walls, a window too tempting for me, at least for 

the first few minutes. I return e-mails. I secretly hate anything from the Hudson 

Valley Writers’ Center, because I am thinking of quitting their board. Sure, it’s 

important to me (is it?), but other members are too tempted by commercial writing, 

by petty, destructive politics, and one, who shall not be named, is simply the most 

manipulative control freak I have ever met. She smiles, and is ‘nice,’ in a passiveaggressive, 

Nixonian manner, and I often want to drive a pickax through her skull 

after she stabs me in the back, yet again. Another is rich and lazy, and absolutely 

without shame, and yet she can always charm the board with her Benjamins. Why 

do I waste my time with these people? I must be a masochist or a weak human 

being, or both. I should be writing. 

I check my stocks and read a few articles on My Yahoo! and glance at the 

headlines of the El Paso Times and review, always with this ridiculous hope of the 

Lotto, whether my books are selling on Amazon.com. They’re rarely higher than 

the 51,634th place. I pluck my eyebrows, I notice this amorphous pain in my left 

lower abdomen (cancer? a hernia? intestinal blockage? an overgrown parasite?), 

and my head throbs because I woke up at five in the morning with a sneeze, and I 

don’t ever sleep that well. I am sitting at my desk-tomb, and I am not writing. 

Why? I unplug the Internet, and push away from my laptop, the blue-and-white 

Word icon at the center of my rural-dirt-road-into-the-forest desk background. I 

am going nowhere, and I have a picture of it. Here I have the opportunity, the 

time, the space, and I am not working. What is wrong with me? 

I slump into another chair behind me in front of a Columbia computer, 

trying to escape my self-disgust, and punch in my name in the Factiva database to 

see if I exist as someone to write about, someone to mention, a writer worth his 

salt, not a waste, and not a quasi-sentient being casually drowning in this 

godforsaken land. I am the king of procrastination. I am now truly enraged with 

myself, and I return to my tomb-desk and avoid the eyes of a young student in a 

ponytail, whose jeans are tight and who has smiled at me from the foursome table 

a few feet away. I don’t think she is flirting with me; she probably feels sorry for 

me. Finally, refocused at my tomb-desk, I click on the jazzy, palpitating Word icon, 

and sit down to work. My butt will not move until I make progress. I hate myself, 

and then I don’t, and then I make myself work. 

As I am rereading my novel-in-progress, the specific chapter I am trying to 

finish, my right leg bounces up and down like a piston possessed under the desk. I 

have always had this problem. Too much energy, expended, consumed, needed. In 

high school, I remember a writing teacher, Bruce Lambert from the Blairstown 

Summer School for Journalism, lecturing me about how I had a problem with my 

leg, a certain lack of control, and too much nervousness, perhaps curable, and 

perhaps not. He, in a bow tie, New England to the core, I, a sixteen-year-old

Chicano at a private school in New Jersey for a summer, confused. I didn’t want to 

drive a pickax through his head, but instead smiled, and stopped pumping my leg 

in class, and waited for all eyes to return to the lesson at hand, embarrassed. But 

this leg problem, and my loins, won’t ever leave me in peace. Yes, I think it’s 

connected to my loins. I want to have sex all the time, or at least I think I want to 

have sex all the time. (Have old New England gentleman lost their appetite for sex?) 

I have this warmth between my legs that causes my leg to jump, that prevents me 

from averting my eyes from beautiful women, a warmth that seems a source of 

excess energy, and anger, and motion. Sometimes I just want to run for five miles 

to cool it down. No luscious maiden need be in front of me. I could be staring at 

my Internet cable, its connection to nothing, and my mind could turn to the 

warmth between my loins, to this energy that wants to explode, and I start to 

imagine, look for a tight blouse, or go back in time to a memory, or think about my 

wife. Yes, that’s one benefit of my malady. I love being with my wife, and I make 

her consistently happy (unless I have deluded myself), and I am proud of that. Not 

macho proud, just warm-in-the-gut proud to please her at night. That’s the 

channeling, that’s the productive use of this leg problem, that’s what society 

expects, wants, and winks at. But there’s still so much more energy left over at 

this tomb-desk, on Broadway, when I am simply semi-asleep at night in our 

bedroom, attempting to get a good night’s rest for once. There’s too much loin 

energy, and it seems to spill out from my pores as if I were a cracked, bottomless 

drum of reacting chemicals. I need to work to let this excess energy out, in my 

way, in words, in stories and books. 

Now, at Columbia, I am actually writing, and thinking in a new way. I am 

trying to write and think in a new way. Yes, I am writing, being productive, and my 

leg is still bouncing. And my accursed warmth is still there, but at least I am 

putting fingertips to the keyboard, and words, sentences are forming. I am using 

my senses, and not analyzing anymore, not interpreting, this nuclear body my 

vehicle. Robert Olin Butler taught me that. Not the person, but his book, although 

the reason I bought the book was because I met the person, and briefly chatted 

with him, and he seemed friendly and funny. I think Butler-the-Book is mostly 

right (we should write through our body, which is the one thing we share with 

every reader), although I worry about our visual, glib culture, and what it has 

sacrificed in the name of making books entertainment. Do we not trust any author 

to have anything to say to us, in conclusion or analysis, anymore? God is not only 

dead, but the author as God is dead, and we have many bodies writing wonderfully 

--experiences, perspectives, personal histories-- but rarely about the meaning of 

modern America, or morality, or what should be done. We write with our bodies, 

but what happened to our minds? We are lost as a culture, and that in itself is 

entertaining, until it matters. Until we have a war. Until China conquers us. Until 

we realize we have crumpled under our own weight, and become another France, 

without the good wine. Or worse. Right now at least I am writing, and that’s all 

that matters. It is hard writing, writing in this new way, through the senses only, 

but I am writing, and my day has meaning again. But it is oh-so-hard, and I only 

9

10 

have three pages before my stomach growls and groans. I lug my computer across 

Broadway to Ollies, and pray that I do not meet anyone I know in this loathsome 

state. 

Back at Butler, after a few more hours of writing, and semi-writing, and my 

leg jumping up and down aimlessly, tirelessly, I pick up the kids. My three o’clock 

deadline. I am at the Bank Street lobby, waiting, and I am thinking of the noise 

around me, the chatter from children, mostly, and their parents. How would I 

write about that noise? How could I put it into words? I am trying to practice 

Butler’s suggestions, use my body and its senses as a vehicle for my fiction. I 

block everything out; I do not sit on the wooden benches. I stare at the floor, kids 

and adults walking by, and I am focusing on the noise, the hum, the fragments 

and words and yelps and pleas, and how to put it into words, in a possible scene. I 

know I am not paying attention to the people walking by, parents, some of whom I 

know casually, others carnally (in my mind that’s a body that’s a mind). They leave 

me alone, and my head is hot with Butler, and my interpretation of Butler, and my 

writing hot fog which has followed me to Bank Street, somewhat pleasantly, yet 

also insistently, and I don’t want to give it up, because I have such precious little 

time to write, or to think about writing, that I use every spare moment to try to 

further my cause. I simply enjoy myself when I am writing, or when I think I am 

writing well, or when my head seems at a slow boil, and I am in a scene, and I 

actually get it on paper (or computer screen) in a gut-wrenching, wow-the-senses 

way, in a way perhaps that I’ll keep, instead of destroy. I relish it, this writing 

physicality, and occasionally, it produces a fruit that nourishes me somehow; but 

the real pleasure is this head, this warmth, this over-focus, this becoming lost in 

words and their sense and a scene that transports me beyond the present. This 

thinking. I am simply trying not to lose it for a few more minutes, to log some 

conclusion or revelation in my mind before Isaac shows up, or Aaron, and searches 

for me, and calls me to the present, away from my dream, my child’s eyes, beacons 

too strong even for my mind. 

But PG shows up. I don’t know why he stops in front of me with his 

practiced smile, why he insists on standing there, smugly awaiting conversation, 

when I am staring at the floor. I don’t want to talk to him, but I smile and I do. 

Once, when I was writing a book review in the lobby before my children came out, I 

put my hand in his face and simply said “No” to PG when he approached me; I 

wanted to finish the work before it escaped my head. And he departed in a huff, 

and didn’t try talking to me for weeks until I smiled at him again. PG is an artist, 

and a decent one, but he is also a father who picks up his children, and maybe 

that’s why he wants to be with me, so that he doesn’t feel like an island at Bank 

Street. I think he also sees my concentration (I am often reading, or lost in 

thought, or scribbling on a yellow pad), and strangely this attracts him. Why 

doesn’t it repel him? I am not ‘trying’ to be an artist; I just don’t have much time 

on my hands, as the primary caregiver to my children, and I need to work, or semiwork, 

with most of the spare minutes I have, even as I wait in the lobby for Aaron 

and Isaac. My piston-leg calls me to work, in my head, in my blood. I also don’t

give a damn what anyone else thinks, nannies and mothers included, many of 

whom believe a solitary man not into socializing must be an oddball. So I stay 

within myself, and try to work, and occasionally I am rude to those like PG who 

don’t take the hint. But I am not rude today, and I don’t know why. I decide to be 

pleasant. Maybe I am getting soft; I am, indeed, often weak. We chat about stupid 

things, and I find him full of himself, yet he is a good father, the best compliment I 

could give to any man. Isaac, suddenly, greets me with a big hug, and I happily 

turn my attention to my son. No one will deny me that. I wave goodbye to PG as I 

allow Isaac to lead me to freedom. 

Isaac and I drop off Aaron at Taekwondo; I will pick up Aaron in one hour. 

Meanwhile, I walk with Isaac to our apartment, and my back is hurting because 

my laptop weighs about thirty pounds, with the books and papers I also stuff into 

its case. Isaac’s Hebrew lesson begins at home, and I take the opportunity to walk 

Aaron to Taekwondo. The Hebrew teacher is fine with Isaac at home, and I do 

trust her. I walk Aaron back to our apartment, another fifteen blocks. I calculated 

the other day that I walk roughly between three to four miles each day, for exercise, 

errands, lessons for the boys, playdates, groceries. Aaron then has his own 

Hebrew lesson, while Isaac finishes his homework. Eventually, our exuberant 

Hebrew teacher leaves, and the boys finish their homework at their desks, 

occasionally shouting “Dad! Could you come over here?” or “I don’t understand 

this!” or “Should I do what’s due on Thursday too?” I cook dinner, and feel like a 

servant. ‘Sergio’ in Latin means ‘to serve,’ ‘servant,’ or ‘soldier.’ Yes, I am the 

soldier of this house. When my wife Laura walks in at 7:30 p.m. from her job at 

the bank, I am slumped on the sofa, having finished washing the dishes from 

dinner and preparing the coffee pot for tomorrow morning. The kids are watching 

TV. I am exhausted; my head throbs. Aaron and Isaac will not be asleep before 

9:30, their bedtime, and Laura and I will go to bed at a few minutes before 

midnight. I imagine the bed as another sanctum, my deep sleep a bucolic 

rejuvenation, but for what? The Eternal Recurrence of this day? 

Should I turn away from my children, from Laura? I sometimes think I 

should, simply to get more work done. I have this friend of mine who is gay and a 

writer, and he doesn’t have any serious attachments for very long. He tells me 

about them, a new boyfriend, another one, he’s in love, and then he’s not. It’s a 

merry-go-round. I have another friend, also a writer, but older, and he dates 21year-old 

college students for a few months, women less than half his age, and 

leaves them, or they leave him, and he’s alone. Then his particular tilt-a-whirl 

begins again. These two writers know each other, and hate each other, but they 

are actually similar as persons. They think about themselves first and foremost, 

they are talented writers, they love an entourage, and they are obsessively 

materialistic. They envy me, and my family, they both like Laura and my children; 

they also indirectly criticize me for focusing as much on my family as on my 

writing. I envy them for their independent lives, for their literary production, for 

their so-casual treatment of their lovers. First and foremost is their work, and the 

promotion of their work, and their bragging about their work. They love to talk 

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12 

about themselves. They want everybody within shouting distance to pay attention 

to them. I am like them, and I am not. I brag about my work, when it is done, and 

when it is successful, but I am also loyal to Laura and my children. That’s the 

price I am willing to pay for my work. That’s how I am made. Sometimes I think I 

am right, and sometimes I think I am stupid. But that is who I am. 

I am not saying I cannot be heartless; I have been, and I am often mean. But 

it pains me, and stays with me, and gnaws at me until I actually can’t work. I am 

fulfilled by having a long-term love that prompts me to take risks, to write whatever 

I want, to be in a way ‘heartless’ with my writing. That word is certainly the wrong 

one. I mean ‘risky,’ or ‘against the grain,’ or ‘anti-commercial,’ or ‘antientertainment,’ 

or ‘without compromise.’ Does this make any sense? When your 

life is wild, or out of whack, I think you expend needless energy. But what should 

be the focus? The petty dramas of your life? Or what’s going on inside your head? 

For Butler-writing, perhaps, it would be better if I just abandoned my love life, à la 

Gauguin, and write about my petty dramas of lust and desire, conquest and 

disappointment, my travels to the exotic. But what takes you further, into new 

possibilities beyond your time? That question also gnaws at me, and is a part of 

me. When I read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics years ago, I vividly remember one 

thing that rang absolutely true: we are ‘moral’ not just because it is right, but 

because it feels better, because being ‘immoral’ consumes so much of your psychic 

energy to the point where it starts damaging other parts of your life, including the 

life of your mind. But have we reached a point where the moral is pointless, and 

the life of the mind is a waste of time? 

I don’t think what my writer friends do is ‘immoral;’ it is simply the way they 

are, and maybe it works for them, and they can live with it, and their lives are 

endlessly entertaining. For me, being a good father and husband works for me, 

and my feelings, and my mental makeup. I don’t abstractly wish I were different; 

I’m not even sure how I could do that, and mean it. Yet I do wish to be more like 

my friends, in part because their dramas seem to produce more stories that 

publishers want to publish. I have read many of their stories, which are 

beautifully crafted, yet these stories rarely teach me anything, rarely take me 

beyond the small world of their entertaining personalities, and yet that’s what we 

often take the time to sit down to read. What has happened to today’s reader? 

What has happened to today’s publishers? What has happened to today itself? 

What has happened to me? 

Yes, I am full of contradictions, I am perhaps a hypocrite, and I can’t explain 

myself half the time. Maybe trying to explain the human being I am, in time, over 

many different moods, and years, and successes and failures, is a losing 

proposition. I wish I could write as much and as well as I can imagine I should 

write, and love, and also take care of my family. I wish I could think and write, and 

write about thinking, and my life of the mind, as a loner, as a father, as a husband, 

as a witness to today. I wish people would want to read that work, because it 

would speak to them, and perhaps it could help them, or at the very least point

them to some internal revelation which they could then use in their lives. Is this 

too much of ask of life? Of writing? 

Our apartment on Manhattan’s Upper Westside is quiet, and for once I am 

writing, working. Will it be of a quality that I can keep? My head, my eyes, seem 

to palpitate with pain, yet my mind is thinking, and my fingers are moving over the 

keyboard, and I am working. I will work until my mind is blank, until I feel faint, 

to reach a point where this day is not wasted in my head. Why have I set such a 

standard for each day? Is there not something wrong with thinking that your day 

is wasted if you do not write words, good words, literary words? What kind of 

strange beings are those who measure themselves in this way? Sometimes I 

remember, too acutely, that words are not life, but representations of it, symbols. 

Yes, the writing of words is an action, yet a solitary one, and one in which we are 

usually writing, not about writing, but about this life of tragedy, or love, or loss, or 

confusion, or outrage that has little to do with words. 

Do writers, or those who think they are writers, lose themselves in the 

importance of this world of words? I know that these words, once I write them and 

then judge them to be worthwhile, these words remind me of my life, or of 

thoughts, or of conclusions I once had. Without words I can’t go back and easily 

remember, and clearly see the traces of my life behind me. I can’t see the road I 

traveled, and what I was, and how I have changed, or haven’t. Without words, 

maybe, it seems as if I didn’t exist. Yet words are such a pale reflection of what I 

actually did, what I actually experienced, who I was, when I kissed my children 

goodnight and heard them say their prayers and goodnights to Ocistar, when I had 

an argument with Laura about how she knew so little about the children’s 

schedules, cutting her to the quick, and then, when I reached beyond myself and 

was decent, with no expectation from her to be anything, and my effort, from 

nowhere, brought her back to me for a moment, ameliorated her guilt. Words just 

capture a glimpse of these moments, and remind me of them, or moments like 

them, and I fill in the blanks with my mind, and there is this residue, in words, 

that I was there, as a person and as a writer, that I loved my wife, that I kissed my 

children goodnight, that I sacrificed my life, each day, to be with them. Words are 

a curse. Life is a curse. Words escape life. Life escapes words. What in God’s 

name am I? How does someone name a God? What is it to name yourself? 

Tonight, before I go to sleep, I will take a sleeping pill to sleep well, to pacify 

my loin energy at night, to ensure a good rest, and so wake up to fight my trap. I 

need to work. I need to create. I need to have boundless energy. I need to never 

tire of taking my children to school, bringing them back, paying the bills, loving my 

wife, listening to everybody’s complaints and dreams and absurdities. I need to 

talk to the people I want to pickax at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, and not 

talk to them as if I want to pickax them, but in a ‘nice’ way, to get what I want, to 

convince them that quality literary writers, emerging writers, writers of color, need 

to be our focus, lest they forget our mission. I need to never have a victimcomplex, 

because once I start feeling sorry for myself, I won’t get anything done. 

13

14 

1 

God, with or without a name, won’t help me; a good night’s sleep will. I need to 

help myself. I need to have more character, and more talent, and everything my 

writer friends have --the savagery and the time and the ruthless focus on work and 

the immediate focus on the dramatic self-- to get more work done, to believe I exist. 

I need to be mean. I need to love harder. I need to think I am getting really old, 

and what my legacy will be, and why I haven’t written more books than I have. 

Maybe I even need to start thinking about Heidegger again, and all his beingtowards-death 

shit, and have my death inexorably in front of me, to spur me out of 

my trap. But that is motivation by hate. How long can that last? 

Yes, I know I am my trap, perhaps I am inside several traps, and I am 

rattling the bars from inside these cages, and occasionally I stick my arm out and 

whack a passerby, who turns to stare at me and see what or who the hell just 

smacked him in the face. Yes, I am trapped, and yet every once in a while I, or my 

arm, or my spit, or my lips, or my imagination, escape. 

Sergio Troncoso graduated from Harvard College, and studied international relations 

and philosophy at Yale University. He won a Fulbright scholarship to Mexico and 

was inducted into the Hispanic Scholarship Fund's Alumni Hall of Fame. He is a 

member of PEN, and teaches at Yale University. 

Troncoso's stories are featured in many anthologies, including The Norton Anthology 

of Latino Literature (W.W. Norton & Company), Latino Boom: An Anthology of U. S. 

Latino Literature (Pearson/Longman Publishing), Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of 

Texas-Mexican Literature (University of New Mexico Press), and New World: Young 

Latino Writers (Dell Publishing). His stories and essays, to name a few, have 

appeared in Encyclopedia Latina, Newsday, The El Paso Times, Other Voices, 

Pembroke Magazine. He runs the weekly blog, Chico Lingo: Writing, Reading, Money, 

Argument.

Sergio Troncoso, philosopher, economist, and writer, graduated from Harvard 

with honors, earned a Fulbright Scholarship, and then added a few 

graduate degrees from Yale for good measure. He teaches at Yale and 

speaks at writing workshops in universities and schools across the country. His 

stories and essays are available in numerous publications and anthologies, 

including The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (W.W. Norton & Company), 

Latino Boom: An Anthology of U. S. Latino Literature (Pearson/Longman 

Publishing), and New World: Young Latino Writers (Dell Publishing). 

In 1998, the first issue of T-Zero featured an interview with Troncoso and 

included his short story, “Espíritu Santo.” The Internet, maturing from infancy to 

toddler but still a little wobbly with frequent crashes, frustrating connection 

speeds, and refrigerator-art websites, changed the world. But we had IRC chat 

rooms by then, and Sergio, his short story collection awaiting publication, was 

brave enough to join us for a Writers’ Village Guest Chat. This was no small 

accomplishment—in a loosely moderated chat, we demonstrated the ability to carry 

on a dozen simultaneous conversations, a testament to human cognitive capacities. 

So began the Age of Multitasking. 

Now ten years later, resuming my role of Editor once again, it’s only fitting to 

complete the circle and find out what our friend has been up to. I began my 

research, and Sergio Troncoso, as I suspected, was not hard to find. He’s authored 

the award-winning book, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, the highly acclaimed 

novel, The Nature of Truth, and weighs in at exactly 12,400 Google search results. 

Once again, Sergio, multi-tasker extraordinaire, the undisputed champion, weighs 

in for T-Zero’s newest incarnation, T-Zero Quarterly. 

HEMBREE: Reading The Nature of Truth, I’m reminded of Skinner, Koestler, 

Eco, Nietzsche and others who’ve fused academic disciplines with fiction, 

bringing their ideas alive in literature. Did the structure of The Nature of Truth 

grow from philosophical ideas, and then life representations created to illustrate 

them, or did the story unfold on its own, perhaps naturally illustrating the ideas, 

a combination, or was it some other process? 

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TRONCOSO: The Nature of Truth began with a series of ideas in my head, about 

exploring moral culpability, and the obsession with seeking justice, and the 

academic world, where I had experienced crazy, determined, intelligent people 

who pursued their sense of 'truth' with a vehemence which I always imagined 

could easily turn violent. I was also exploring the question of how someone 

categorizes a person, objectifies them over time, to do harm to them, to justify 

doing harm to them. 

In my mind was also Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. I believed 

Dostoyevsky did not go far enough with his story. Raskolnikov's redemption 

through Christianity, at the end of the novel, I thought was somewhat of a copout. 

And Raskolnikov's murder for the sake of money also did not go far enough. 

I wanted to explore murder for the sake of truth, for the sake of murder. I 

wanted to see someone lose himself in the pursuit of truth, in righting a wrong, 

such that he (Helmut Sanchez) loses who he is. I also believed it was possible to 

create a character and situation in which the murderer not only gets away with 

it, but does not recant his ideas, does not say what he did was 'wrong'. The 

point is that he gets away with it, and the point is that he, by the end of the 

novel, is on his way to getting over the crime he has committed. Helmut is in a 

way who I was, as a crazy, determined graduated student pursuing truth pellmell, 

to wherever this pursuit took me. Helmut is also someone who believes 

when you find out the truth you should do something about it. There is no 

Socratic separation ("Knowledge is not sufficient for Virture.") of knowing the 

right thing in your head, but not doing it. For Helmut, if you know it in your 

head, and you don't do anything about it, then perhaps you don't really know 

the truth. It's the depth of his righteousness. 

HEMBREE: The Nature of Truth paints a dark picture of Yale: cutthroat politics, 

abuses of power, sexual manipulation of students; what kind of reactions did 

you get from colleagues? Did any see themselves as models for your characters? 

Did you fear for your job? 

TRONCOSO: I got a surprisingly positive reaction from my Yale colleagues. They 

have been at Yale, and understand how it is. And I also know they understand 

that Helmut accepts much of what is Yale, this obsessive pursuit of the truth, as 

the right thing to do. So the novel is a comment on people like Helmut as much 

as it is a comment on Yale itself. 

I didn't use any Yale professor as a model for the characters in The Nature of 

Truth. It's interesting that you mention that, but so many wanted to be models, 

wanted to believe they were Werner Hopfgartner, in a way. There is nothing like 

someone writing about you, giving you that importance, even as an evil fictional 

character. 

Another interesting point is that reviewers often assumed I had used Paul de 

Man, I think a Comp-Lit professor at Yale, who had been discovered to have Nazi

ties years ago. It was a scandal, and reviewers just assumed de Man was my 

model. Yet I still know nothing about Paul de Man, except perhaps a paragraph 

or two I read in the Yale newspapers about this incident. After the novel came 

out, I started hearing this, "You must have read what happened to Paul de Man" 

mantra. It's interesting how the mind makes connections, to try to understand 

the world, even when those connections did not exist in reality. This 

overthinking tendency speaks to some of the questions of creating crazy 

categorizations, too much connecting the dots, that the novel discusses as the 

root of justifying the murderous, the brutal. 

HEMBREE: Robert Olen Butler is mentioned in your essay. He’s quickly 

becoming a household word among writers. What is your opinion on his method 

of writing, and have you personally tried his From Where You Dream approach? 

TRONCOSO: I think Robert Olen Butler is right on target with his book, From 

Where You Dream. It's not necessarily how I wrote at the beginning of my 

career, but when I read ROB's I thought it helped me visualize characters and 

situations in a way in which I had never done before. So I added it as another 

part of my tool kit as a writer. 

I met ROB at a restaurant, at I think an AWP conference. My friend Dagoberto 

Gilb introduced us, and ROB was gracious, and asked me serious questions, 

and really, in a few minutes, inspired me. Right after that meeting, I bought his 

book, and loved it. 

HEMBREE: How is your new novel coming along, and what is it about? 

TRONCOSO: Well, I don't like to talk about my novel until it is published. But 

it's an immigration story of a Mexican-American family and how each family 

member struggles to become 'American,' and how they struggle to remain a 

family. So there's that family drama about acculturation, but also the question 

of what is it to have a home and to leave home. I have finished a second draft, 

and I'm editing it at the moment, before I start submitting in earnest to literary 

agents and publishers. 

It has been a productive year for me. I've published several essays, "The Father 

is in the Details" and "Apostate of my Literary Family," in the Westchester 

Review and Pembroke Magazine, respectively. I will also have a new story in an 

anthology, Hit List: The Best Latino Mystery Stories, by Arte Publico Press, and 

which should be published in early 2009. Finally, I started a weekly blog, 

www.ChicoLingo.com, about writing, reading, money, and current affairs. 

HEMBREE: Are you working as full-time writer now? 

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TRONCOSO: I am mostly working as a full-time writer. I still teach a summer 

course at Yale, and I also get invited by different schools and universities to 

teach writing workshops for a week or so, throughout the year. 

HEMBREE: Can you tell us about your writing schedule? 

TRONCOSO: I try to write in the morning, after my kids are gone to school. I 

find the morning the best for my brain. I am usually working on continuing 

something I have already started, or editing something I have finished 

preliminarily. The more I work, the more I seem to be able to work. So it's a 

matter of focusing on what I should be doing, instead of getting distracted by 

things, demands, extraneous to my work. I usually write until the afternoon, 

after which I return emails, or go to the post office, or update my website, or 

return phone calls. The bureaucratic work of writing. 

HEMBREE: You taught writing at Yale, perhaps have worked with other 

beginning writers over your career. What do you think most separates beginning 

writers from the pros in writing quality? 

TRONCOSO: Well, perhaps persistence, and the ability to be open-minded 

enough to improve, but not self-destructive so that any criticism undermines or 

destroys your ego. It's a balance. I noticed, in my Yale students, it's not 

necessarily the ones who are good writers at the beginning of the seminar, but 

those who work hard, who keep improving bit by bit, who learn to improve by 

themselves, above and beyond what I have said or tried to point out, those are 

the writers that in the long-run take giant leaps in the quality of their writing. 

HEMBREE: Was there a turning point in your career, where something 

discovered or learned significantly impacted your writing quality? 

TRONCOSO: I don't think it was a revelation, or a book I read, but sitting down, 

by myself, and writing a story until my head hurt. Until I couldn't do it 

anymore. And then getting up the next day, and doing it all over again. Until 

you train yourself to do this, day after day, you will not be committed, or give 

yourself the time, to improve. And it's not just banging your head on the table, 

and going nowhere, it's thinking, 'what am I doing wrong?' or 'can ROB help me, 

or some other book?' or 'maybe I should read another story, just get my mind 

somewhere else, and come back to it.' It's wiggling to work, it's finding a way, 

it's not giving up, ever. 

HEMBREE: Knowing some of your background, and in reading The Nature of 

Truth, it's clear you've gained more than an average knowledge of many

disciplines. Do you feel it's a natural or acquired compulsion to seek and absorb 

knowledge across the board, and how does this play in your creative and writing 

processes? 

TRONCOSO: I would probably say it's a natural compulsion to know things, to 

understand questions, to delve deeply into topics, however unrelated they are. 

When I am learning something new, I feel alive. It's as simple as that. I have 

tried to set up my life so that I am always able to read, to ask questions, to 

learn, to explore. 

I don't do this because I am writing, but this obsession to learn, to know, helps 

the writing. When I am writing a character that works on Wall Street, I can 

certainly talk about certain financial topics knowledgeably. I like to learn 

languages, because I want to read certain writers in the original. So this type of 

exploration helps me to broaden the kind of literature I am exposed to. I believe 

learning by doing, and so I do. I crack the books, I ask questions, I listen, I am 

in motion, and I want to be productive. Being a writer, for me, is about 

channeling this great and unending curiosity about the world and the questions 

of the world. For me, writing is how I have put my act of breathing into words. 

To learn more about Sergio Troncoso, and read his work, visit his website at 

http://sergiotroncoso.com and his weekly blog at 

http://chicolingo.blogspot.com. 

RJ 'Bob' Hembree lives in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina and is the founder of 

Writers' Village University. He was educated at Columbia College, NOVA and Old 

Dominion University. Bob is also a musician-songwriter, and has recorded two 

albums with Concrete Sky. 

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Neighbors gaped at the pile of clothes, compact discs, and other items 

strewn across the last patch of winter brown on the green lawn. Miriam 

cringed. Guilt clamped down on her like a vise. A clock radio flew out the 

window and landed at her feet. Daffodils and tulips quivered in the breeze. A 

shiver ran through her body. She pressed the desire to cry down into her stomach, 

where it churned and ached like a stone caught in a whirlpool. Tears were of no 

help here, she reminded herself. She called out, “Jake? Jake!” 

A couple of books whizzed past her head and crashed into the growing heap. 

Papers blossomed into the air and fluttered down like falling petals. Ignoring the 

knot in her stomach, she pressed her hands against her hips to still the trembling. 

Jake stuck his head out the window and grinned. “Mom! I’ll come down.” 

A couple from across the street confronted Miriam. The woman pointed at 

Jake. “Why don’t you do something about him? He shouldn’t be allowed to live 

alone. What kind of mother are you anyway?” 

Miriam stared at her, unable to answer. 

The man said, “I worry about my family with that psycho living here. He 

belongs in a nuthouse.” He pulled his wife away. They headed toward their 

apartment. 

Miriam recoiled from this ignorant hatred. Heat flooded her face. She bent 

down, stacked some books and folded a shirt. The sweet scent of the budding 

dogwood trees that lined the street momentarily masked the bitter taste in her 

mouth. Two young women gawked, their faces hard with fear. I have to explain, 

Miriam thought, Jake isn’t dangerous. It’s not him. It’s the illness. She was about 

to speak when the door swung open. Jake strode towards her. He wore clothes 

she’d never seen, light tan doeskin pants and an expensive looking black blazer. It 

would have been an exotic handsome look, but on his bare chest, framed by the 

cashmere lapels, he’d drawn a sloppy outline of a dragon with a green felt tip pen. 

Dirt and dried blood caked his bare feet. 

“Mom! I’m glad you’re here. Let’s go for a spin in the new ride.” He pointed to 

a silver Jaguar convertible parked in the carport. “I’ll take you for lunch downtown 

to celebrate my first book contract.” 

The scratchy waistband of Miriam’s skirt pinched her side. She hadn’t 

changed from her work clothes. “Oh, Jake. What are you doing? You can’t afford 

that car or those clothes. Why are you throwing all of your things out the window?”

up.” 

“I’m cleaning! It’s spring, remember?” 

Miriam picked up books from the grass. “Let me help you. I can straighten 

“Don’t worry about that stuff. Come on, there’s a great new store that I found 

that has all kinds of leather and furs. You’ve never had a fur coat have you? Let’s 

go buy you one. You deserve it. You are the mother of a soon-to-be-published 

poet.” He took her hand. The overpowering smell of cologne surrounded her. 

A police cruiser pulled up. The siren and flashing lights stopped her 

thoughts like a door slammed shut. 

Jake grinned at the officers, “Hey guys! We were just headed downtown. 

Want to come? Call your wives. They can join us.” 

Miriam braced herself to make the plea that she made so many times before. 

At least this time Jake was in his cheerful, generous mode. The officers look nice. 

Perhaps they’d understand. 

*** 

That night Jake slept, sedated, in his old bedroom down the hall. Miriam’s 

bones ached as she changed into her nightgown. She put the tweed skirt onto a 

hanger in the closet. Dark powder spotted her favorite blouse. Toner leaked on her 

when she lifted Jake’s printer off the floor. The events of the day spilled through 

her mind. Once again she’d convinced the policemen that Jake was harmless and 

she’d be responsible for both her son and his mess. The officers helped take him to 

the doctor. It was lucky that he hadn’t lived in Brockton before. The police didn’t 

know him yet. 

Since the car was undamaged and had only been driven to the apartment, 

the manager at Exotic Imports had been kind enough to return the down payment 

to her. There wasn’t anything she could do about the clothes and other things he’d 

bought. They were all ruined. She wondered how Jake got new credit cards with 

his poor credit history. 

Miriam collapsed into her sagging bed. Luminous reds, greens and blues 

from the Tiffany lamp on her dresser illuminated the dark room. The lamp had 

been David’s gift to her on their wedding day. His side of the old bed felt 

particularly empty this night. Twenty-four years since cancer consumed him, yet 

she still felt tender, a scar of loneliness that never healed. Jake’s only memories of 

David were those of a frightened five-year-old watching his father die. How different 

things would have been if David had lived. 

She had to figure out a way to help Jake. Maybe a different medication would 

do it. She’d heard about a new one that was working well for others with bipolar 

disorder. Maybe that was the answer. She’d ask about it when they went to the 

psychiatrist’s office. Now, it was time to get some sleep and get to work on time in 

the morning. Her many sudden departures from work had already irritated her new 

boss at the dental clinic. She turned off the light and pulled the threadbare quilt 

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over her shoulders. 

*** 

After a month on the new medication, Jake was better. It seemed like a 

miracle. Miriam helped him settle into a place in Campburg and found him a 

decent used car for a reasonable price. The money she’d been saving for her trip to 

Florida was just enough to buy it. His book agent gave him an old laptop so he 

could write again. 

*** 

Tears burned Miriam’s eyes. She clutched her purse as if it would keep her 

from falling apart. Jake’s car was parked amid broken daisies and squashed 

petunias in front of his apartment. She’d hoped that it would work out in this 

place. He’d promised to stay on his new medication. She’d prayed that this time he 

would. 

The apartment manager stalked out of his office and over to her, barely 

containing his anger, “Get him out of here. Clean the apartment, write me a check 

for the flowers, new carpeting and paint, and I won’t call the police.” 

He followed Miriam to the front door. She went in. He stayed outside. Her 

nose stung from the smell of rotting food and cedar incense. Jake sat, eyes closed, 

on the bed in the middle of the studio apartment. He swayed back and forth. Wax 

from the candles surrounding him pooled into congealed blobs on the blanket. 

She remembered the words of the psychiatrist, “If you keep solving the 

problems he creates, he’ll never take responsibility for his own mental health.” But 

he was her son. How could she abandon him? 

“Jake?” 

He didn’t respond. Stacks of books, magazines and newspapers lay 

everywhere. She picked her way into the room. The walls were covered with 

pictures of Dylan Thomas. A sticky amber substance dripped from under each 

photo. She touched it. Honey. Open newspapers covered the floor by the 

kitchenette counter. When she stepped on them, eggshells crumbled beneath her 

feet. She walked to the bed and blew out the candles. 

Jake’s eyes popped open. “What are you doing, Mom?” 

Miriam met his gaze, but he looked away. “What are you doing, Jake?” 

“I’m contacting Dylan Thomas. You’ve ruined everything.” He swept the 

candles off the bed. 

“Why are there newspapers covering eggs on the floor?” Perspiration formed 

on her underarms. Fatigue draped itself over her shoulders. 

“I dropped them, but I didn’t have time to clean up, so I covered the floor 

with paper so I could walk in there.” He pulled a piece of soft wax from the bed and 

kneaded it.

“Have you been taking your medication?” She knew he hadn’t taken it for 

weeks. Overturned wine bottles littered the sink and counter. 

“Have you been taking yours?” 

Miriam grimaced. “I don’t need medication, but you know you do.” 

“I don’t need it. I won’t ever take it. Why do you want to poison me? Are you 

trying to kill me?” He added more wax to the ball in his hand. 

She tried to put her arms around him. He flinched away, still gripping the 

wax. “Get out of here.” 

She backed off. “Let me help you clean up.” She started peeling pictures off 

the wall. 

“No!” He leapt off the bed. “You’ll disconnect me. Don’t touch it. Get out.” 

Lurching out of control, he slammed against the wall. The sheetrock exploded with 

a crash. Dust filled the room. 

The manager stormed in. “What’s going on in here?” 

Jake stumbled toward him, covered with white powder, a gaping hole in the 

wall behind him. “You’re a crook. You caused the AIDs epidemic. You’re evil.” 

Miriam interrupted, “Don’t say that. Please, come with me. I’ll take you 

home.” 

He turned to her, “You are his assistant. You’re as evil as he is. Why are you 

poisoning my water?” 

The voice of the psychiatrist swirled in her head. “You enable him to stay 

sick. You can’t keep rescuing him.” 

She took a long breath. “Please, come home with me.” 

Jake picked up a bottle and smashed it against the wall. Red wine dripped 

down, staining the ragged hole. The pictures of Thomas looked as if they were 

splattered with blood. 

The apartment manager glared. “Get him out of here or I’ll call the police.” 

Jake screamed at him. “Good! Then they can come and get you and this drug 

dealer too. She’s trying to kill me.” He turned to Miriam, “Get out. Get out of my 

house.” 

His words fell like mortar shells. She thought, how can I go on like this? Her 

chest tightened as if her lungs had shrunk. In a strangled voice, she said, “Call the 

police.” 

When the police arrived, she gave them her contact information. She sat in 

her car and watched as they dragged Jake from the apartment. He fought and 

flailed. They forced him to the ground and handcuffed him. She gripped the 

steering wheel to keep from leaping out of the car to help him. Her head pounded 

with guilt and fear. 

Jake screamed as they put him in the squad car, “Why are you doing this to 

me? Don’t let them take me away. Please.” 

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The police car drove away. Repressed sobs broke free and racked her body. 

Anguish twisted deep inside, burning from her ribs out to her fingertips. As she 

pried her hands from the steering wheel, questions whirled in her mind. Will I ever 

be free to do things I yearn to do? Will my life ever be simple? 

*** 

Every day for ten days she faced the barred windows and the crow like nurse 

at the state hospital before Jake agreed to see her. The ward door closed behind 

her. The heavy thud reverberated in her chest. The stench of disinfectant and urine 

pervaded the dank air held by gray walls. Twelve years, she thought, twelve years 

since Jake was first admitted here and this place still terrifies me. She sat down at 

a table covered with a sticky layer of grime. Guilt chewed at her. Questions crashed 

against the inside of her skull. How could they help him here? How could she face 

him? Would he forgive her? 

Hands curled and shaking, he shuffled over. “You’ve got to get me out of 

here. They’re trying to kill me.” Red streaked his eyes and he spoke with a slur. She 

knew this was from the tranquilizers. He hadn’t been eating. The green hospital 

pajamas hung from his body like a shroud, as if his spirit had fled, leaving only the 

shell of her son. 

“I brought you some chocolate and a notebook. I thought you might want to 

write.” It seemed a cruel thing now that she had said it. He took the pen and 

notebook she held out to him. Tremors vibrated his arm. He tried to write, but the 

scrawls on the page were illegible. The pen fell from his hand. He threw the 

notebook after it. Another patient’s screams echoed around the visiting room, 

momentarily drowning out the drone of the television. 

“Please, Mom, get me out of here.” He held her hand and she felt the 

uncontrollable quivering of his muscles. A yellowish green bruise marked his neck. 

“How did you get that?” 

“One of the other patients tried to choke me. He wanted my chair by the 

window. I told you, they’re all trying to kill me. You’ve got to get me out of here.” 

His words pierced her heart like shards of hot glass, “Will you take your 

meds?” 

Jake dropped her hand onto the table. “No. They’re poison. I can’t write when 

I take them. They suffocate my muse. No words come. I might as well be dead.” 

Tears welled up in her eyes and, as always, she forced them back. Years ago 

she decided there was no use in crying. “The meds keep you out of trouble, out of 

the hospital, can’t you see that?” 

His shoulders hunched like he was trying to protect himself. “Can’t you see 

that the meds destroy my soul? They put out the light so the poet can’t see. I can’t 

live like that.” 

Miriam knew how the medication changed him, how awful the side effects 

were. She didn’t blame him for not wanting to take them, but what other choice

was there? 

“You can’t live a normal life without them.” 

Jake straightened and looked directly into her eyes. “What’s normal? Why do 

I have to be like everyone else? Do you want me to find a job where I sit in a cubicle 

all day and move memos from one side of my desk to another and wait for the next 

meeting?” He paused and clasped his hands together like he was trying to quell 

the tremors. “I’m a poet. I need to be allowed to live my own life. The medication 

cuts me off from who I am. I can’t live that way.” 

“The medication let you finish college and write your book. You would have 

never been able to do that without it.” She remembered the pride she felt when he’d 

told her about the book contract. She’d felt like a champagne glass overflowing 

with bubbles and sweet wine. All she’d ever wanted in life was for her son to 

succeed and be happy—wasn’t that all any parent could ask for? Now, all she felt 

was the twist of guilt and the throb of frustration and fear. 

He looked away from her, his body stiff. “Those were all poems I wrote before 

I started the meds. I just finished the work I’d begun before I started taking them. I 

can’t write more if I stay on them.” 

She felt like a traitor. “You’ll keep getting in trouble if you don’t take them.” 

The air felt dense like it held their mutual frustration suspended in its heavy 

pall. “Why won’t you help me? You let the police take me. Why did you do that?” 

Guilt pressed down on her. Miriam looked at the gray walls and straightened. 

“Because you’re an adult. If I keep rescuing you from your own choices, then you 

will never be responsible for yourself.” 

He stood up. “Then let me make my own choices. I choose to stay off meds. I 

hate them.” He swayed a bit. 

Her body sagged. “But what will happen to you?” 

“Nothing. I can handle it.” He bent, slow and stiff like an old man, and 

retrieved the notebook and pen from the floor. 

She’d had this exasperating conversation many times before. “Jake you can’t 

handle it. Look what happened when you went off. You spent all of the money from 

your book advance on friends and partying. You got evicted from your apartment. 

You have no credit and you lost your car. Is that handling it?” 

He placed the notebook and pen on the table. “That won’t happen again. I 

won’t let it.” 

Miriam steeled herself. “I don’t agree with you.” 

Jake sat back down and held the pen in his shaking hand. “Will you sign me 

out of here?” 

She tried to swallow. Dry-mouthed, her throat constricted like she would 

choke. How can I leave him in this place? She knew she could sign him out. He 

knew it too. Sweat formed on her palms. I promised myself that I would stop 

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helping him if he refuses to help himself. I can’t cave in. She couldn’t will herself to 

say no and she wouldn’t say yes. She teetered on the dark brink of her choice. No 

matter which way she looked there was only the brown murk of frustration. 

Jake stood at the window where the late summer sun contrasted with the 

gloom of the hospital ward. The bruise on his neck looked larger then before, like 

she could see the imprint of the hand that made it. Guilt rose again, closing over 

her head as if she was sinking into a stagnant pond. 

“I’ll go talk to the doctors and see if they’ll approve your release.” 

*** 

The phone woke her from a deep sleep. Despite being snuggled under the 

new down quilt that she could ill afford, a chill permeated the room. Red and green 

Christmas lights from the neighbor’s house reflected on the fresh snow outside. 

The clock read three a.m. 

“Miriam Cohen?” 

“Yes.” 

“This is Officer Carruthers from the Greenfield Sheriff’s office. We have your 

son, Jake, here at the station. He’s been charged with vandalism and theft. He was 

painting a letter to Sylvia Plath on the side of the library, using paint and brushes 

that he’d taken from a neighbor’s garage. The judge will release him without any 

bail being posted if you’ll sign for him. When you come you might want to bring 

him some warm clothes and shoes. He was only wearing a bathrobe when we found 

him.” 

Jail, Miriam thought. He’s really done it this time. If I don’t go, he’ll stay in 

jail. David would be so upset. David never had to deal with this. I can’t help Jake. I 

don’t have the power to cure him. I’ve tried so hard. Forgive me. She looked at the 

picture of David, Jake and herself taken so many years ago. She had been happy 

then, truly and completely happy. Could she ever feel like that again? 

She closed her eyes and whispered, her chest tight and her hands cold. “I’m 

sorry, but I can’t come.” 

Miriam hung up the phone and wept. 

Shanna Lewis is a freelance writer, photographer and radio journalist. Her work has 

been broadcast on National Public Radio, Voice of America and numerous radio 

stations. Her freelance print work and photography has appeared in the Denver Post, 

the National Post (Canada) and many other publications. She is the recipient of six 

Colorado Press Association awards for reporting and photography.

In his modest wooden stall Pir Gul hunched over his sewing machine, stitching 

a man’s turquoise vest. Every stitch had to be perfect, an invisible part of the 

whole. So intent was Pir on his small task, he didn’t notice Ismail Jan and his 

grandson, Mullah, until they entered the shop, but, even then, he might not have 

looked up from the tiny world in front of his bespectacled eyes, had he not heard 

the uneven thump of Mullah’s gait. Zipping around easily on his four-month-old 

crutches, gangly as a camel, Mullah moved as quickly as when he had two legs. 

“Zaher said you still had some of the shoes from the engagement party,” 

Ismail said. “Mullah needs a new shoe. There is no point in buying two.” The old 

man wore faded trousers and a frayed gray turban, not quite as dark as the bags 

under his eyes. 

“They are in the wooden wheelbarrow behind the counter at the back,” Pir 

said. He bent back to his work and concentrated on sewing the left seam in a 

straight line. 

Beyond a table which held rolls of colorful cloth, ribbons and braids, the 

wobbly wheelbarrow held a motley collection of shoes and sandals piled in a cairnlike 

heap. Pir did not like to think about the shoes, let them be brought into his 

shop only because it would have been a shame to throw away perfectly good shoes. 

Mullah dug around in the wheelbarrow and pulled out a brown adult sandal 

with strips of leather that tied at the side. 

“That shoe is too big,” Ismail said. “Here is one that will fit you better.” 

“But this is Abdul’s shoe. I will grow into it, and I could not do better than to 

grow up like Abdul, could I?” 

“You must take a shoe that fits you. You need something sturdy that will not 

fall off and trip you up when you walk with the crutches.” 

“But baabaa-” 

“You think because you have survived a bombing, you are a man. You must 

not argue with your grandfather who takes care of you now that your mother and 

father and brothers are gone. That is being a man, Mullah. Respecting your elders, 

your country, your traditions.” 

“I respect you, baabaa. It’s just I don’t want anyone else to have Abdul’s 

shoe. Maybe I can take two. One that fits me and one to grow into. Can I not take 

two?” 

Pir looked over to where the two stood. Mullah held two leather shoes, one 

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much larger than the other. Even from the distance, Pir could see blood splatters 

on the strap. “If no one from the families has claimed them by now, no one will. 

Better you wear them, Mullah, than that they sit in the wheelbarrow forever. Abdul 

will be honored.” 

The boy hid his losses well. He would grow up to be a better man than many 

with two legs. Pir wanted the boy to take all the shoes, but who knew when 

someone else would need a pair or even if someone would need just a right shoe in 

this broken land of broken people. 

The boy and Ismail approached Pir. Mullah carried two right sandals. The 

pair kicked up dust from the dirt floor as they walked. 

“Do you need anything else?” Pir asked. 

“Someone to help work the farm would be nice,” Ismail said, “but you don’t 

have that here, do you? It is hard with my two sons gone. Both at once. And how 

are you doing, Pir? It must be lonely for you. I hear you’ve been sleeping in the 

shop. It is not good for a man. You come to visit us. Let my wife feed you. You 

shouldn’t be alone all the time.” 

“I’m not ready for company.” Even more, he was not ready to return to his 

house with its empty rooms, its absence of the sweet music that escaped from 

Jamala’s throat as she hummed and worked to keep their home tidy and 

comfortable. 

“It’s been four months. Your wife is gone. Like the others. Like my two sons 

and their wives.” 

“If I could have buried her….” He did not want to think about unidentified 

body parts. 

“I know it is hard. All of Kakrak suffers.” 

The boy pulled at his grandfather’s arm. “Let’s go. We have a lot to do. I’ll 

race you.” One shoe tied to each crutch, he took off before Ismail had time to turn 

around. 

“Youth,” Ismail said. “They heal more quickly than we do, but you are still 

young, Pir. You must get out again, see friends.” 

“When I am ready.” He would never be ready. His heart was in as many 

pieces as his wife, pieces gone in a huff of smoke, as if they had never existed. 

“My heart burns, too, Pir, but I must go on for the boy. It is too bad you have 

no children, but you still have time.” 

“What good is time without Jamala?” 

Ismail put his hand on Pir’s shoulder and squeezed. “Jamala was a good 

woman.” 

After Ismail left, Pir continued to sew a lining into the vest. He loved working 

with cloth, with its contrasting textures. Mistakes could be fixed. Rips could be 

mended.

When he was done with the vest, he packed it away with five others that 

would be taken to market in the city. He put away the leftover scraps of cloth and 

his box of thread and swept the dirt floor, cutting a wide path around the 

wheelbarrow. 

Then he unrolled his prayer rug and knelt. It was hard to pray when his 

heart was heavy with thoughts of Jamala, how she had looked the last time he saw 

her, wearing her brown burka,. her beautiful dark eyes visible through the mesh. 

She had loved small things: the plants that struggled to grow in this hostile 

environment, the brilliance of the light, even the goat’s rancid smell. “It is the smell 

of life,” she said. When they were alone in the house, she would take her burka off 

and reveal her beautiful face, her laughing eyes. She would remove her shoes and 

dance with naked feet. “Life is good, yes,” she would say. “We have each other.” 

Always she would be waiting for him when he came home, the sweet smell of tea 

filling the house. Her skin was smooth, tan with sunshine. 

When he was through praying, Pir rolled the prayer rug up and bent over a 

small counter where he prepared green tea and tore himself a piece of naan for his 

evening meal. He would heat up some leftover lamb stew that Sardar Rahim had 

brought him, cooked by his wife’s sister who had come to the village to take care of 

him. That night he would sleep on the mat he kept under the counter. Again, he 

would not go home. 

He was ready to close the shop when a man he didn’t recognize entered. The 

man’s hands were dusty from travel. Pir hoped he wouldn’t handle the cloth. 

“I hear you have shoes here that can be got for free. I am looking for women’s 

sandals,” the man said. He was well dressed. His trousers were a brown and gold 

weave and his long cotton shirt hung over them. A wide gold sash wrapped around 

his waist. He drove a new jeep that he had parked right outside the door. Pir 

wondered what he needed with the shoes of dead villagers. 

“They’re in the wooden wheelbarrow behind the counter.” Pir didn’t like the 

idea of someone from outside the village digging through the shoes, but the sooner 

they were gone, the sooner everyone could go about business as usual. 

The man went behind the counter. Pir did not watch him. He was tired and 

anxious to close the door and be done for the day, even though he knew he would 

not sleep. 

The man was careless with the shoes. Pir heard some of them hit the ground 

as they fell from the wheelbarrow. It was disrespectful, and it took all of Pir’s will 

power not to yell at the man. Finally, he came to Pir and showed him the four pairs 

of women’s shoes he had chosen. 

“These will do for my servants,” the man said. 

Pir was glad there would be four less pairs of shoes in the barrow. When it 

was empty someone would roll the wheelbarrow away and put it to another use, 

but not before every last shoe was gone. 

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30 

The man set the shoes on the counter in front of Pir. “These are barely worn,” 

he said of the pair on top. 

Pir did not want to look but his eyes were drawn downward. They were there, 

the tan sandals with the tiny beads Jamala had worn the last time he saw her. Pir 

had stitched those beads on for her. 

“You can only take one pair,” Pir said, “and you can’t take these. They are 

promised.” He lifted Jamala’s sandals from the pile. 

“What? You can’t do that. Those are the best. If I can only take one, that’s 

the one I want.” 

“You can’t have them. They are promised.” 

“Then promise a different pair.” The man reached for them, but Pir pushed 

his arm away. 

“Take the other three, but not these.” 

The man hesitated. Pir thought they might come to blows over the shoes, but 

he would not let this pair go. The man shrugged, picked up the other three pairs 

and left. 

When the stranger was gone, Pir put his wife’s shoes in a box. He added a 

tiny shirt sewn for his unborn child and shrouded the box with his sturdiest cloth. 

Then he closed the shop and left with his package. 

He passed the stall where Mohammed Khan made buckets, shoes and rope 

from rubber tires and the one where the Farook brothers made rope beds to sell in 

the city. The door to Haji Abdullah’s butcher shop was closed, and the slabs of flycovered 

meat which hung in the open air earlier in the day had been moved inside. 

Pir looked down at the craggy dirt road that cut through the village when he 

passed the house where the engagement party had been held. He did not want to 

see the shrapnel holes that still pockmarked the mud brick wall, but he couldn’t 

stop himself from looking. There, just beside the door, Jamala and the other guests 

would have taken off their shoes and placed them in the wooden wheelbarrow 

before entering the house as is the custom. To reach the kitchen where the women 

prepared the feast, Jamala would have passed through the entrance into the 

courtyard where children played and set off fire crackers. In a separate courtyard, 

old men would have been drinking tea and eating biscuits. In the beginning it had 

been no different than any other engagement party. 

Pir had gone to his shop to collect the pottery gift for the bride and groom. He 

had purchased it from a Nomad en route with his camel from the lowlands to the 

summer highland grazing grounds. Pir should have been in the house with Jamala 

when the bombs were dropped. 

He had run to the wounded structure which clung to the rugged landscape 

like a hardened scar. In the courtyard, ripening pomegranate and mulberry fruit 

contrasted with the dun-coloured earth and echoed the red splotches in the 

courtyard. There was no trace of Jamala.

On the outskirts of the farming village, stone mounds rose from a barren hill 

like rows of melon. Some of the bodies were whole, identifiable. Others were not. 

Pir hugged the parcel to his chest as he approached the small mud brick 

house where he and Jamala had lived. Someone had fed and watered the goat and 

donkey. He had not thought of them once in all these months. 

Even before entering the house, he went to the side and dug a hole in the 

garden next to purple and yellow spidery flowers that Jamala had tended. Someone 

must have also taken care of them while he stayed away. He was glad they had 

survived, glad his neighbors, all of whom had suffered loss, had cared, glad of 

these small living things. 

He buried his wife’s shoes and the tiny shirt. Only then could he enter his 

home. 

Carolann Malley is a former prize-winning news reporter for the Republican in 

Springfield, MA. She has covered government; politics including national political 

conventions; police and courts; and has written features, a political column, 

restaurant reviews, travel pieces, investigative pieces, human interest stories and 

editorials. She now writes freelance travel and feature stories. She is former poetry 

editor for Peregrine literary journal, has won awards for her fiction, poetry and non- 

fiction, and has been published in literary journals and anthologies. Her awards and 

recognitions include: an Editor’s Choice Award from Shaye Arehart, finalist in the 

prestigious Faulkner Wisdom competition for a novel-in-progress, winner of the Carrie 

McCray Literary Award for fiction, winner William Penn Warren poetry contest, 

second place in the Pen and Brush Inc. prose contest, and winner in several writing 

conference competitions. . She was a lecturer in journalism at the University of 

Massachusetts and has led creative writing and poetry workshops for inner city 

youths, women and elementary school children. 

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32 

T 

he big rig pulled into the BP gas station. The driver stopped to fill up and 

wipe the dead bugs off the small, round headlights. “It’s hard ‘nuff to see 

the road without these damn bugs cloggin’ up all the light.” He said it 

aloud to no one in particular. 

He pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up his sweaty nose, gassed up, and took 

off down the wide strip of highway. A billboard advertised an adult bookstore. He 

was tempted but the thought of a bookstore in the middle of nowhere, even an 

adult bookstore, was too weird. 

He hadn’t left a town so much as he had left things, a dead marriage, a 

pregnant soon-to-be-ex wife, courts and lawyers. He wanted to forget all that and 

live in a place where he could hide. If he got far enough away, he could belong to 

this world of truck stops and porn shops. His mind coated the truth with these 

sugared reasons, good reasons, yes. But not the truth. He knew the real reason, 

the anger. He had to get in before dark. That’s when it would find him. Anger had 

sprouted in his father, and once the father died, it pollinated the son. His father 

used to beat him and his brother into the ground like tent stakes. His brother had 

killed himself at sixteen. 

He passed a Denny’s. His stomach growled. Black clouds covered the denim 

blue sky. He looked in the side mirror. An SUV pulled behind him, a white Jimmy, 

on his ass. He looked again in the mirror, expecting to catch his own reflection, but 

the hard face of his father stared back. 

“Motherfuckin’ drivers!” 

His rage caught him and latched on. He slammed the brakes and let the 

Jimmy hit him. First came the skidding of the Jimmy’s tires, the driver discovering 

too late what was going to happen. The crunch sounded like a beer can when you 

smash it, but a million times louder, the aftertaste, the bitter sound of nails on a 

chalkboard. It flattened like an accordion, so fast, one minute the Jimmy was 

there, bright as newly bleached laundry, the next, the bed of the truck, no driver, 

no front, and nowhere left to go. Jimmy careened into the reservoir ditch next to 

the highway. He kept driving; a Mack truck would beat a Jimmy any day. 

He drove miles and miles. Sirens wailed in the distance, but he’d be off the 

road soon. He took Exit 73, drove a short mile down to the old farmhouse he 

rented and pulled into the drive, the smashed Jimmy, an afterthought. 

The farmhouse stood on a four-acre lot. A bright motion detector light glared

down at him as he walked through the backyard to the door. A canopy was set up 

in back, like the ones displaying goods at a carnival, but the only thing underneath 

it was a worn white plastic table and forest green lawn chairs. Next to that was a 

beat up abandoned trailer. Living out here, folks erected a pop-up trailer in the 

backyard and called it done. Someone had painted “Go Heat!”on the side of the 

barn with a lightning bolt drawn in egg yolk yellow. The farm hadn’t operated in 

years. 

Clouds hid the full moon against an onyx sky, the only visible piece of it, a 

sliver like a clipped toenail. It stretched open like someone scratched the end of the 

earth until a tiny crease wrinkled the world and let in light from the other side. He 

started to itch, felt his skin burning with rage. The Jimmy had relieved some it, 

but there was a whole night full to let loose. He needed to get inside. 

He walked up the porch and grazed his hand along the chipped paint railing. 

In the kitchen he opened the old refrigerator and grabbed a beer. He sat at the 

table and smoked, using his bottle cap as an ashtray. The farmhouse was silent. A 

ringing echoed in his ears as he downed his beer, hoping it would quench his fury 

like a wet towel. It didn’t, so he grabbed another. 

Hours later he woke up, his fleshy arm a pillow against the table. The setting 

sun streaked in through the slanted windows. He had to shut his eyes tight against 

it. He wondered if possessing anger was like being a vampire, that, when his father 

hit him, it was like a vampire bite, contagious. He shook the thought out of his 

head. That was crazy. He got out of the chair, took a quick shower, and realized he 

was hungry. He stepped outside. It was already early evening, but the air was hot, 

even when the wind blew against him. 

The sky looked like a mismatched quilt, velvet indigo mixed in with the robin 

egg blue like a strip of water taffy on the bottom and a white strip above that, 

smooth and seamless. A shadow of clouds approached. A storm was headed his 

way. 

It was Sunday. He got into the small pickup that he used on his days off and 

drove down to the local diner. He approached slowly, felt like he was sleepwalking. 

He stood outside, reading the specials. His shirt buttons were undone, his jeans 

loose from not being washed in weeks. He squinted at the menu, shook his head, 

and walked into the diner. A bell chimed as he opened the door. 

A young waitress approached him. “Hey, there. I’m Rae, your server. Pick a 

seat, any seat. They’re all empty, as you can see. Everyone wants to see that 

eclipse, so they herded out of here like cattle. I’m actually about to close up for the 

day.” 

“Eclipse?” 

“That’s what they say. Looks more like a storm to me.” She set a menu in 

front of him. An old coffee stain marked the cover. She was pretty, but not in the 

usual way. Her nose was a bit too wide, but her hazel eyes offset that. She had 

long, wavy brown hair that was clipped back loosely. 

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34 

“I haven’t seen you in here before.” 

“I’m not from here. This is my second day on the job. I’m on my way out. I 

like to move from town to town, pick a place that fits.” She put her right hand on 

her hip and looked around, fanning herself with the extra menu in her hand. “This 

is a transitional place, more like a bus depot or train station.” 

“This is a temporary place for me, too. Where do you want to live?” 

“Oh, everywhere!” she laughed and walked to the kitchen. “Want some 

coffee?” 

“Sure.” 

She brought back the pot and lifted his cup to turn it over. Her arm brushed 

his, making the hair on it stick up like bristles in a toothbrush. She wore a silver 

bracelet. It was cold against his skin and he shivered despite the heat. The sky 

darkened and a bolt of lightning illuminated the diner. “Mother Nature is a miracle, 

that’s for sure.” She walked away and set the coffee pot back on the burner. She 

rubbed her hands as if she was cold herself, and her fingers lingered on the 

bracelet. 

The diner served breakfast all day, so he ordered eggs, sunny side up, with a 

side of crispy bacon. He ate quickly, washing it down with black coffee. She set the 

bill face down on the table and started clearing away his dishes, getting ready to 

close. He looked at the bill and saw that she had scrawled her number at the 

bottom. He thought of dirty bathrooms with numbers written in permanent ink. 

“For a good time, call…” 

He left a ten-dollar bill next to his plate and opened the door to leave, but 

glanced back. She was watching him as she wiped down the table, bent over, her 

cleavage glistening with sweat. “Want to watch the eclipse at my place?” The offer 

was out of his mouth before he could take it back. 

“That would be different. Let me get my things.” 

They walked out together. It started to rain. He got into his truck; she 

followed in her beat-up Volkswagen Rabbit. They drove the few miles to the nearest 

grocery store to get some beer. At the house, he put the beer in the freezer to get 

cold. “Let’s go outside,” he said. She put her arm around his waist as if she did it 

every night. He couldn’t remember the last time his wife had touched him this way. 

They walked around the pond in the dark, sat on the deck underneath the 

awning, and listened to the sky. “Have you ever counted how far away a storm is?” 

she asked. 

“What do you mean?” 

“You count like this.” She took his hand. “When lightning strikes, you count 

how many seconds until you hear thunder. One mile per second. So if you count to 

five, the storm is five miles away.” 

They counted to two. 

“When you hear the boom of thunder after the lightning strikes, then it’s

ight on you.” She still held his hand. He leaned over and kissed her. Her lips were 

dry and her mouth hot. She broke their embrace and murmured, “Wake me up 

when it’s time to dance.” The words didn’t make sense. They came out slowly, like 

a train coming to a stop. He leaned back and looked at the sky. 

The lightning continued to strike, one, two, three times, like the flicker of a 

TV screen. The clouds looked like waves on a dark ocean. One cloud looked like an 

alligator approaching them, its jaws open, showing teeth. 

It was amazing how quickly the pond cleared when the lightning came. He 

kissed her again, harder and pulled her hair. She broke away. “That hurts!” 

The fear in her eyes only fueled his fire. He knew he wouldn’t be able to stop. 

The darkness was here. 

He pulled her to him. She smelled of vanilla and cinnamon with something 

musky beneath. She smelled like his mother. The perfume his father hated, said 

she wore it to attract other men. The perfume that got under his father’s skin. He 

threw her over the railing of the deck. She fell into the mud, her twisted skirt 

exposing everything. She wore no underwear. He watched this like he watched the 

TV. She writhed on the ground and quietly sobbed. He jumped down next to her 

and started hitting. He hit her and thought of his father. He hit her and thought of 

his wife, his unborn child. She put her right arm across her face, an attempt to 

protect herself. He remembered trying to protect himself the same way against his 

father. Something glinted and blinded him for a second. It flashed like lightning as 

he struck her. Distracted, he looked closer at her wrist. It was the silver ID 

bracelet that had brushed against his wrist in the diner. It had a pink ribbon 

etched into it. He turned it over. There was a quote: “Never, never, never quit.” 

Churchill. Underneath the quote was one word – survivor. 

She was still moving. There was still a chance she was alive. Barely 

breathing, but alive. The anger slowly let loose like a black balloon. He released 

her. She deserved to live. 

He went into the house and dialed 911. Then he walked into the bathroom 

and opened the medicine cabinet. He saw bottles upon bottles of medicine that his 

doctor had prescribed to keep the darkness at bay, Strattera, Wellbutrin. How 

ironic that he would be finally taking his doctor’s advice now, when it was too late. 

He opened each bottle, emptying its contents into his open palms. When his hands 

were full of the reds and whites, he threw them into his mouth like popcorn and 

drank beer to wash them down. The medicine cabinet was an empty shell. 

He went outside. The storm had ended. The clouds looked the way blankets 

do when they cover you at night. Not just any covers, but covers that your mom 

threw over you, creating a parachute, billowing once, twice, then the third time, 

cleanly covering you, making you safe. 

If the sky was flesh and the sun its heart, what was the ground but to put 

holes in - holes that people dig when they leave this earth? The ground was a 

graveyard, only good for putting down the past. He started digging with his hands. 

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36 

The mud made it easy. His pale white hands became black with it. He knew the 

darkness would hurt everything in its path, and it would hunt him down. His world 

would always be white, then black, eclipse or not. He lay down in the shallow hole 

and grabbed wet handfuls of dirt and tried to cover himself with it, bury the 

darkness, end the cycle, once and for all. 

A transparent charcoal gray cloud covered the sun, which was a fissure, 

tearing the night sky and cracking it wide open. Blood covered the moon. The 

eclipse had come. 

The ringing in his ears was gone. He saw the lights before he heard sirens. 

The red and white lights strobed across him and the wounded body of the girl. The 

eclipse ended and the moon came out. It exposed all round corners shining across 

the sky, a prism of clear light interrupted only by the flashing red, then white, then 

red, then white, white, white. 

Kathy Kubik is the author of four books of poetry; her most recent collection is 

entitled Universal (Moon Journal Press). Her poems and short stories have appeared 

in publications such as: The Mississippi Review, MiPOesias, Aoife's Kiss, Lily, Hiss 

Quarterly, Poems Niederngasse, Wicked Alice and The Mad Hatters' Review. She is 

currently working on her first novel. Samples of her writing can be found on her 

website, www.kathykubik.com.

Dear M, 

I wanted to let you know I’m not in Arizona. I packed the Jeep full to 

bursting with as much of Sedona as it would carry, the red rocks from atop 

my desk, my books, laptop, writing notebooks, camera and photo albums, 

two cases of green chili beer from Cave Creek, and the four potted cactus 

that I couldn’t bear to leave on my patio. I filled a plastic baggie full of the 

warm red dirt and tucked it into my glove compartment to fondle if I get too 

homesick for the place. 

Mattie, Dad’s office assistant, says that Dad is not getting on too well, 

although every time I talk to him he says he’s “Fine. Just fine.” He still goes 

into the law office every day but Sunday. It’s a good thing he lives so close to 

the office and can walk there. I doubt that he could pass a driving test as 

bad as his eyesight has gotten. His neighbor, Don Henderson, gives Dad a 

ride on Sunday mornings to church, with a stop for donuts and coffee before 

the ten o’clock service. 

I took a leave of absence from the hotel to help Dad out for a while. I 

also needed to sort some things out for myself, but haven’t mentioned that to 

Dad just yet. The morning I arrived after my exhausting two-day trek, I 

wanted to jump out of the Jeep and crush Dad’s broad chest to me. Instead, 

I just took his hand and asked how he had been doing. He was “Fine. Just 

fine.” He walks with more of a stoop than when you last saw him and his 

blue eyes have a little more haze over them. I guess his next operation will be 

for cataracts. Sometimes when I walk into his study and speak to him, it’s as 

if I’m disturbing him from some deep reverie. I don’t know if it’s because he 

is concerned about something or merely daydreaming. Dad has always 

believed in keeping his thoughts to himself. 

Marshall hasn’t changed much. That comforts me since my personal 

world has changed so drastically. The town square looks like it did when we 

were here in December two years ago. You don’t know the Marshall of my 

youth, with its bustling Ben Franklin store, Orchelan’s Hardware, where my 

mom worked, or the Rexall Drug and its soda fountain, where all the kids 

from high school liked to hang out. All those stores are long gone, but the 

heart of Marshall, the small town with its friendly quaintness, never changes. 

I thought Mattie would break my hand, squeezing it in her excitement 

at seeing me again. She tells me I look just like Mom did at age forty. 

37

38 

Michael, we are forty, and Mattie still thinks of us as kids. This aging 

business is difficult to fathom. Mattie is a little grayer. Her face has a slightly 

more mottled tone. But her heart is still as big as the sky. I don’t know what 

Dad would have done without her these years with Mom gone. She truly is 

the world’s best secretary. 

I’ll write more after I’ve settled in. 

--K 

Dear M, 

I took a long stroll to the city park today, where I loved walking as a 

girl. I sat on the same bridge that overlooked the same creek where I dreamt 

for hours. I went away to college. As much as I loved Marshall, I always knew 

that I would not live here forever. Dad knew it too. I saw his eyes tear up the 

day Mom drove me off to school. As I sat on the bridge it felt as if my 

childhood had belonged to someone else, some character in a book I’d read. 

Maybe one day the seven years we lived together will feel that way, too. That 

thought makes me feel sad. 

I went to Dad’s office with him today to help with his computer. Can 

you imagine? They had not backed up their hard drive for an entire year. I 

called a computer company that works for the college, and they are going to 

put his office on their network and do monthly maintenance. I teased Dad 

about pounding his legal briefs into tablets of stone. 

Dad and I rented the movie Casablanca last night. We both still love 

that old Humphrey Bogart. Dad said he hadn’t used the DVD player we got 

him for Christmas much. He says he can’t handle all the modern TV clickers 

and equipment. He’d rather read a book. I think I’ll get him some books on 

tape. 

Watching the movie made me remember the nights we made buttered 

popcorn. We ate it out on our deck and drank wine and looked at the sky, so 

incredibly clear in Arizona, not at all like the humid skies here in Missouri. I 

remembered the night you told me Orion is your favorite constellation. You 

proposed the same night. I was so excited that I jumped up to kiss you and 

spilled wine and popcorn all over both of us. I remember that we made love 

right there on the deck, tangled in a mess of soggy popcorn and Chardonnay. 

I don’t think that I’ve ever been so happy. 

Maybe someday I will show these letters to you. For now, I’ll place 

them in the same green trunk that I used to store my rocks and stamp 

collection in as a child. In fact, the collections are still there.

I hope you’re doing well. 

--K 

Dear M, 

Today it rained and Dad didn’t go into the office. We sat on the front 

porch swing, talked and drank cinnamon coffee. He knew that’s my favorite 

and purchased two cans of it at the corner grocery when I arrived. The soft 

pitter-patter of raindrops soothed me. He asked me why I’m here. I told him I 

wanted to make sure he was still comfortable living on his own. He said, of 

course, he was all right. His eyes were in need of repair but the rest of him 

still worked. He’s not ready to be put up on a shelf just yet, he joked. He 

asked me pointedly if I was okay. That’s a complicated question, I said. I told 

him that you and I had decided to part ways, but I didn’t tell him why. He 

asked me if I missed you, and I had to answer yes. 

Last night I lay in the bed that I slept in as a girl and thought about 

the first day we met. I never dreamed that a girl who majored in hotel 

management in a Missouri college would fall in love with a park ranger in 

Sedona, Arizona. My love for Sedona began the first day I drove my Jeep into 

town after transferring in with the Hilton Companies. Two weeks later, we 

met in the bookstore. We reached for the same book, poems by Charles 

Simic. You wore denim jeans, boots, a brown tee shirt and a cowboy hat. 

Your shoes had red Sedona dust on them. I said, “You don’t look much like a 

poet.” “All cowboys are poets,” you said. 

We decided to go for coffee together and wound up at a truck stop at 

midnight, eating biscuits and gravy, still full of conversation. You said you’d 

been a loner all your life and loved the desert like a mistress. You were a 

cowboy at heart and wanted nothing but a cold beer and a steak after a long 

day in the wilderness. You fixed your steely gaze on me and told me that you 

felt your life was about to change. We were as smitten with each other as we 

were with the red rocks, so who could blame us that we ended up living 

together after only two months? I know that you know all this since you lived 

it with me. But writing it down is comforting to me, somehow. 

I hope you don’t forget to wear your sun block, as you have a tendency 

to do. That hot Arizona sun wreaks havoc on your skin. 

My cell phone number hasn’t changed. I’ve thought about calling you 

a thousand times, but I don’t know what I’d say. It seems we said it all, 

before we had to split. 

39

40 

I’m traveling to Kansas City tomorrow to see my old high school friend, 

Susan. I haven’t seen her in ten years. I’ll stay at her downtown apartment. 

We planned to hear a local blues band. I’m looking forward to Kansas City 

barbeque and shopping. My jeans are beginning to feel tight on me, already, 

so I guess I’ll shop for clothes. 

--K 

Dear M, 

I convinced Dad to schedule the eye surgery two weeks from now. I’ll 

stay on here until he has fully recovered. He is as stubborn and independent 

as I am, so I imagine that he will do well. 

I’m homesick for the desert, although I’ll hate to leave Dad. My Sedona 

apartment is nice. The walls are a rich yellow taupe color and the appliances 

in the kitchen are stainless steel, like what I tried to talk you into purchasing 

for your kitchen when we lived together. The apartment is a nice combination 

of rustic and modern, much like me, I guess. 

Yesterday when I stopped in Dad’s law office, he was mad as hell. Said 

a girl had just asked him to represent her. He referred her to Beau Desmond, 

that young attorney who has bid to buy out Dad’s practice over the last year. 

I know I’ve told you about Beau. Nice man. Dad said that the girl brought in 

a child custody case where the father shirked his duties. He ranted and 

raved about the declining morals in our society and the lack of responsibility 

the youngsters seem to have. His face was so flushed that I asked him to sit 

down and brought him some water. I’ve never seen him that upset about a 

case before. 

He asked about you and asked if you knew. I acted stupid, as if I didn’t 

know what he was talking about. 

“I’m talking about the baby and that you’re pregnant,” he said, and 

pounded on the desk. “Does Michael know?” 

I didn’t know he had figured it out. He said he heard me sick a few 

mornings when I thought I was being quiet. It poured out of me all at once. 

You were adamant about not having children and I had agreed. You had a 

screwed up childhood and didn’t want to inflict yourself on a son or a 

daughter. We got careless that one time. How you asked me to take care of 

it. “Take care of it,” you said. As if it was a spider on the wall or a 

troublesome mouse in the pantry. Before it happened, I didn’t think that I 

wanted children, either. But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it, and that 

was our undoing.

Dad cried. He sat at his desk, cried huge tears, and said that he was 

proud of me. He told me that he had never been prouder of me in his life, 

and that he understood. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to my father. I guess I 

have you to thank for that. And for the tiny life growing inside me, my baby 

lets me know we’ll be okay. Each morning I look in the mirror at my growing 

belly and remind myself that life is full of choices. I’m sad that you couldn’t 

choose us. 

I will continue to write these letters to you and to keep them. Even if 

they only end up in a trunk for our child to find, years from now. Some 

things are meant to keep. 

Yours always, 

--K 

Shirley Eaves was born in Marshall, Missouri and has lived in the Midwest most of 

her life. She currently lives in Glen Carbon, Illinois and has been writing fiction for 

two years. She has been a member of Writer’s Village University since March 2007. 

She is also a member of the St. Louis Writer’s Guild. 

This is Shirley’s first published short story. 

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42 

A 

t the break of dawn, before Bill Mundle roused his daughter, he stood over 

her bed and watched the light drop, moth-like, upon her face and sip from 

the shadowed pools beneath her eyes. Sometime during the night she’d 

kicked the comforter to the floor and now lay huddled beneath a thin blanket, her 

spine curled and her knees tucked into her stomach. One hand was hidden 

beneath the pillow, the other fisted inches from her mouth. Her hair flowed gold 

against the sheets. 

“Annie?” He stood amidst a haphazard collection of stuffed animals, teen 

magazines, and paperback romance novels. He suspected that she’d hidden a 

message to him in this mess, a message he had yet to decipher. 

He looked at the chaos surrounding his daughter and almost changed his 

mind. Then he remembered how often he'd found an excuse to postpone this trip 

and he knew his weakness had made his family vulnerable. 

“Get up, Annie.” 

Her legs kicked under the sheet. The tip of a fuzzy sock popped into view at 

the bottom of the bed. 

“What for?” she mumbled. 

“We’re going for a ride.” 

He placed a warm egg sandwich wrapped in a napkin next to her nose. Her 

eyes popped opened. When he left, she was seated upright on the edge of the 

mattress, her feet planted in the shag carpet, her hair mussed, and the sandwich 

clutched like a stone in her hand. 

He found his wife lying on the bed in the guestroom, shrouded with blankets. 

He went to the window and raised the shade. The vestiges of a late frost lay like 

glass splinters on the lawn. 

“Time to get up, Rachel.” He turned away from the window and flicked the 

light switch on his way out of the room. 

In the master bedroom, he put on a flannel jacket, checked his wallet for 

cash before shoving it into the inside pocket, and made the bed. Rachel’s scent 

lingered faintly in the sheets. He placed the pillows side by side so that they 

touched. 

Annie appeared in the doorway. She wore a pair of hipsters and a sweatshirt 

with “WHATEVER” printed across front in scrawling red script. A thin wire ran 

from the earphones she’d slung around her neck to the i-Pod clipped to a belt loop

of her jeans. 

She glanced at the bed. Her face paled until the freckles across the bridge of 

her nose stood out like tiny pinpricks. “You guys gonna get a divorce?” 

Stuffing his keys in his pocket, he walked past her into the hall. 

“’Cause if you do, I want to stay with you,” Annie called after him. 

“Wait in the car. I’ll get your mother.” 

Route 29 ran southeast from Lambertville to Trenton. Flanked by the 

Delaware River on one side and the outskirts of the city on the other, it slipped 

beneath Skudder Falls Bridge and past The Calhoun Street Bridge before it 

expanded into three lanes and entered the business district of the city. As Bill 

drove towards Trenton, the morning light cast the clapboard siding of Trenton’s 

oldest homes in silken tones of gray and the homes took on a nostalgic aura that 

soothed the desperation from the neighborhood. Bill soaked up the illusion and 

tried to ignore the space between himself and his wife. 

Half way across the Calhoun Street Bridge, Annie’s face appeared inches 

from his own. Her head bobbed in time to the thrum of rubber on steel. “Cool. I can 

see straight down into the river. Think we’ll fall?” 

“It hasn’t fallen, yet.” 

“It’ll fall someday.” 

“Not today.” 

“Says you,” Annie sat back. A heavy staccato beat drifted from the back seat. 

“That better not be rap,” he warned. 

“Everything else sucks.” 

Gritting his teeth, Bill leaned forward and adjusted the heat. His gaze 

skimmed Rachel’s lap. Her hands rested there, palms down. As the jeep cleared 

the bridge and swerved onto River Road, she turned and gave him a long, 

searching look. 

River Road followed the shore of the river along the Pennsylvania side. From 

this side of the Delaware the state museum stood in silhouette against a colorless 

sky. Beneath it, the dome of the planetarium sat like an inverted cereal bowl. 

As they left the bridge behind, they entered the old Pennsylvania suburbs 

and saw many stone-faced mansions with multi-leveled roof lines. The homes sat 

far back from the road, fronted by deep lawns and onyx driveways that bumped 

against three-car garages or slipped out of sight behind expensive landscaping. 

fists. 

“Everything looks so perfect,” Rachel said. 

“It’s an illusion.” 

“I know that.” Her shoulders sagged and her hands shriveled into two small 

“I miss you.” The word escaped from him before he could stop them. He 

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44 

glanced at her hands. The shiny tips of her scars were silverfish hiding from the 

light. 

They came to an old restaurant at the corner of Common Street and River 

Road. The sign hanging out front read, “Stocker’s Inn.” Olive drapes in the windows 

pressed heavily against the glass panes. On the porch, a pair of rocking chairs sat 

empty. A yellow dog napped on the welcome mat, blocking the way to the front 

door. “Isn’t this where your brother sold his catfish?” 

“I didn’t mean to do it.” 

He glanced at her, seeing that her eyes flowed like the river, calm on the 

surface with a hint of turbulence running throughout her dove-colored irises. She 

buried her hands between her thighs as he turned off River Road and left the 

Delaware behind them. 

Bill drove past Wally’s Plaza, which was a strip mall with a laundry, pizza 

shop, and dollar store. Rachel sat up straighter as they approached a steep hill 

topped with a wooden bridge. He slowed and edged the jeep past two fishermen 

who stood against the railing. They’d pushed their tackle boxes aside and out of 

the way of traffic. The tips of their poles pointed out over the milky waters of the 

canal. 

“Catfish,” Bill said. 

They stopped at the traffic light where Common met Main. He peered across 

the intersection at the pharmacy on the corner. The roof sagged, the gutter facing 

the street hung slightly askew from the eaves, but the sign on the door said, 

“OPEN.” Along the side of the building two ducks, one, a speckled fledgling, 

huddled together as though chilled. 

Annie’s head appeared between the two front seats. The earphones swung 

from her neck. She stared at the corner store. “I bet people die after getting 

medicine there.” Turning to look at Bill, she said, “Can we feed the ducks?” 

“Ask your mother.” 

“Like, that’s an answer.” Annie retreated back into the rear of the jeep. 

The light turned green. He drove through the intersection, past the 

pharmacy. A flimsy hedge lined the road, a poor barrier to stem the water that lay 

beyond it. His wife’s shoulders curled forward 

“I didn’t want to feed the stupid ducks, anyway,” Annie said. 

Bill saw his wife’s lips part as if she were about to speak, but they arrived at 

the entrance to the churchyard, and her focus shifted from Annie to the small red 

sign, “United Methodist Church.” He forced himself not to look at his wife as he 

made a right turn into the gravel parking lot. Cruising past a copse of young willow 

trees, he pulled up to a log placed there to keep a vehicle from rolling into the 

pond. Bill turned the ignition key with a snap. The engine stopped. 

No matter how many times Bill saw it, the pitch-black water still took him by 

surprise. The water at the center of the pond shone like a newly mopped floor, but

the lacquer finish dulled as the water approached the soft, sandy banks. A coating 

of pollen, avian dander, and leaf debris discolored the water around the shoreline, 

so that the water took on a milky sheen like the cornea of an old man. Although 

the windows were up, the sweat of the pond crept through the vents like a pungent 

gas. 

He leaned forward and closed the plastic slats over the vent in the 

dashboard. A series of clicks filled the silence as the engine cooled. He settled 

himself deeper into the seat. He knew the pond terrified Rachel—the pond, which 

beneath its placid camouflage, glistened like black oil in the sunlight and clung 

with leech-like tenacity to the rear foundation of the old Methodist Church. He 

chased that image out of his head, unsure what part of him had drawn it. 

Annie fumbled with the door handle. Bill tilted his chin up and peered into 

the rearview mirror. 

seat. 

“Let your mother take a look around.” 

He heard a long sigh and the squeak of vinyl as Annie settled back into her 

Peeking at Rachel, he found her staring, trance-like, through the windshield. 

“I can’t believe they haven’t drained it and paved it over,” he said. 

“They did. The parking lot sank within a few months and the water came 

back.” She drew a deep breath, got out of the car and stood with her body shielded 

from the pond by the jeep door. “There’s an underground stream that feeds it.” 

Bill got out. He waved his hand in front of his face. “This place stinks like 

rotten garbage.” 

Soft cumulus clouds drifted in the sky above the pond. A hazy reflection, 

marred by the dirtied water, mimicked their progress across the pond’s surface. 

Around the shores thick-trunk willows sprouted out of the ground at various 

angles. Some leaned toward the water and dragged the tips of their whip-like 

branches through the brown water. Others grew away from the pond and draped 

their long branches across the tops of cars parked at the traffic light on Main 

Street. Near the center of the pond, leaves and small twigs drifted in lazy circles 

hinting at mysterious currents beneath the water. 

Bill spied something floating in the water a few feet from where they stood 

on the shore. He heard Rachel gasp. 

Just beneath the water’s surface, a duck carcass spun as though caught in 

a circular flight pattern. The bird’s neck bent back at an odd angle. Its head 

disappeared into the layer of sludge that coated the bottom of the pond. One wing 

had been stripped of its feathers. The other wing folded over the bird’s white 

breast; the tip of its flight feathers stuck out of the water like a child’s fingers. 

Rachel stepped back, as if to reenter the jeep. 

“Why don’t we go and visit the monastery?” he said. 

Rachel glanced past him at the structure that sat at the edge of the pond 

45

46 

reflecting the solemnity of the water. Ivy clung to the walls of the building and hid 

much of the gray stonework. Someone had pruned the encroaching plant back 

from the windows and the threshold of the door. Above the arched entranceway the 

parasite had conquered the bell tower and rendered it indistinguishable from the 

chimney that rose on the opposite end of the church. 

“It’s a church,” she said. She shut the door and walked away from the jeep. 

“This is boring. Can I look around, Dad?” 

Bill bent down and peered into the back seat. “What is your problem? Your 

mother’s sister died here.” 

“Yeah, like a century ago,” Annie leaned forward and peered over the front 

dashboard. “It doesn’t look that deep.” 

“I’ll come back for you.” Bill slammed the door and hurried after his wife. His 

footsteps crunched as he walked across the stones. Away from the pond, the smell 

of rotten vegetation receded, replaced by an earthy odor that reminded him of the 

old forest. 

A stone wall, built from the same stone as the church, stretched from the 

road along the length of the parking lot and veered away to the left. Midway across 

the lot Rachel suddenly changed course. She stopped at an iron gate embedded in 

the wall. Reaching out with both hands, Rachel grabbed the metal framework. Her 

fingers wound around the delicate scrollwork and disappeared into the growth of 

wild ivy. As he joined her, Rachel shook the gate. The ivy leaves rustled. 

“Maybe that’s not such a good idea,” he said. 

She rocked the frame back and forth. The vines snapped. The gate swung 

inward upon rusted hinges. Inside, a field of weathered tombstones sat under 

oceanic skies. Rachel stepped into the field. The hinges squealed as the gate swung 

back into place. Bill stood on his side of the wall, unsure whether or not he ought 

to enter the cemetery. He’d been raised to respect the dead, not walk among them. 

Rachel had no such qualms. She moved further into the graveyard, increasing the 

distance between them. 

From across the parking lot he heard a door slam. Annie stood next to the 

jeep with her back towards him. 

“Get back in the Jeep!” Bill yelled. Annie turned her head slightly as she 

gazed at the pond. He looked at his wife, standing among the gravestones, then at 

his daughter who approached the shore of the pond. “I’ll be back in a minute.” Bill 

left his wife. 

“Annie, I told you to stay in the car,” he said as he came abreast of his 

daughter. She stood on the bank, her toes nearly touching the water. Her gaze 

locked upon the dead bird. A sliver of wetness that ran down the side of her cheek 

surprised him. 

“Poor thing,” Annie said. 

“Yes.”

“Do you think it just gave up and died?” 

“Most living creatures have a natural desire for survival.” 

“Most,” Annie said, “but not all.” 

Bill exhaled. “Sometimes, the instinct is out of sync.” 

“Do you think it felt guilty about leaving its family behind?” 

“I don’t know.” Bill placed his hand upon her shoulder. He realized she had 

grown almost as tall as Rachel and that her body possessed solidity not previously 

evident in her slender frame. When she looked up into his face, their eyes met. Her 

gaze darted away from his and alighted on the pond. 

“I don’t get it.” she said, “It isn’t mom’s fault Aunt Lydia drowned.” 

He watched as the bird’s carcass spun deeper into the mud, propelled by an 

invisible current. “Sometimes, terrible things happen—things we can’t forget.” 

“I’m scared.” Tears leaked out of the corners of Annie’s eyes. 

“Me, too.” The duck’s wingtip sank beneath the surface. He squeezed his 

daughter’s shoulder. “Do you think his mate left him to die alone?” 

Annie flinched. She stared intently at the white breast visible under the 

water. 

“Because if she did, he probably suffered very much. I would have.” Bill 

dropped his hand and turned away from his daughter. “Please wait in the car. I 

need to be with your mother.” 

He crossed the gravel and discovered his wife had entered the cemetery. 

Rachel stood with the dead. She’d closed her eyes to her surroundings. As he 

halted outside the gate, she lifted her hands to her mouth and cupped them so 

that the heel of each palm touched and the tips of her finger pressed together to 

form a funnel. 

“Hello, Mr. Ramfield, 1926! Do you want to play tag?” 

Goosebumps riddled the back of his neck. He peered nervously at his wife. 

“My God, that’s morbid.” 

“You brought me here.” 

“Not to talk to dead people.” 

“Where have you gone, Miss Ethel Bowman, 1931? It’s time to have some 

fun, fun, fun.” 

Her whisper drifted across the beds of the sleeping dead, siphoned by the 

flesh of her hands. The gate squeaked as he leaned on it. “Stop it,” he said, “there’s 

no one here but us.” 

Rachel dropped her hands, opened her eyes, and looked at him over the gate. 

“I hate the pond,” she said. 

“Me, too.” 

She took several exaggerated steps away from him as if she played a game 

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48 

with ghostly entities. Arriving at a succession of graves, Rachel bent her knees and 

extended her arms. The scars in her inner wrist stood out against the pale flesh. 

When she spread her fingers he thought of the duck swallowed by the pond. 

“I.” 

Jump. 

“Am.” 

Jump. 

“Immortal.” 

Jump! 

Her left ankle buckled. She tumbled onto the last grave. Her head just 

missed the gravestone. Bill leapt through the gate, dropped on one knee, and 

gently probed her ankle. “You’ve sprained it.” 

Rachel reached out and tapped the marker with her index finger. “Tag, you’re 

it, Mr. Baxter.” She rolled onto her back and stared at the sky. Shadows drifted like 

bloated spirits across the irises of her eyes until they glistened like the pond. 

“The pond drowned my sister,” she said. 

He took her hand. 

“It sucked her down.” A thin trail of water trickled from the corners of her 

eyes, dripped into her hair, and onto the grave. “It ate her feet, then her legs…” 

He slipped his hands under her, lifted her, and carried her back the way 

she’d come. 

“The mud choked her.” 

“I’m here.” He pushed through the gate and crossed the parking lot. Halting 

beside the front passenger door, he fumbled with the chrome handle. The door 

wouldn’t open. 

“Annie, hit the locks.” 

“She couldn’t even scream.” 

“Annie?” 

“I tried to save her, but the pond wouldn’t let her go.” 

“Annie, open the damn door!” He banged his knee into the car again and 

again. 

Rachel grasped his collar and pulled herself higher against his chest. Placing 

her other hand flat against his cheek, she turned his face until her lips brushed his 

earlobe. He felt the gristle of newly healed scars rub against his cheek. “I should 

have died with her.” 

The rear door popped open. Annie stuck her head through the opening. She 

stared at him with reddened eyes. Raucous music blared as she yanked the 

headphones out of her ears. Her mouth formed a large ‘O’ when she saw him 

standing beside the car with Rachel in his arms.

“Unlock the doors,” Bill ordered. 

Annie withdrew her head into the car. The locks in the jeep snapped open. 

Bill paused to look over at the center of the pond where a patch of utter darkness 

floated like the pupil of a giant eye. He put his wife into the front seat, buckled her 

seatbelt, and leaned in so that he could look into her face. 

“You belong with us,” he said. And taking each of her hands, he flipped them 

over and kissed her scars. “I will never let you go.” Stepping back, he shut the door 

on the sight of her damaged wrists. Then, he faced the pond. 

Twigs and leaves gathered near the shore, pushed there by rings that 

emanated from the pond’s eye. The ripples nibbled at the shore, taking mouse-like 

bites out of the soil. 

As sunlight descended into its vastness, the pond devoured every bit of it. 

Bill sensed the monstrous depths hidden beneath its dull sheen. 

“You can’t have her!” he said. 

Something slapped the tip of his shoe, something that spat droplets over the 

bottom of his trousers and soaked his socks. He squatted on his haunches, placed 

his hand upon the ground for balance, and angled his head so that he could see 

beneath the Jeep. Rank water stained the gravel a deeper gray than the shadows 

that lay there. It left an imprint that reached out from under the vehicle with long 

damp tendrils. 

Bill jerked his hand off the ground. He stared at his palm, frowned, and 

wiped off the wetness on his trousers. 

It sucked at her feet, then her legs… 

“What’s wrong?” Annie demanded from the back as Bill climbed into the 

driver’s seat and slammed the door. 

“Buckle up!” he said, over his shoulder. His keys jingled. The engine roared 

to life. Bill popped the emergency brake and shoved the stick into reverse. He heard 

his wife panting great gulps of air. “Hold on, Rach.” Keeping his gaze on the pond, 

he pressed down on the accelerator. 

The front wheels slipped in the damp soil. Gravel and sand pelted the water. 

“Bill!” “Daddy!” His wife and daughter shouted. 

The steering wheel refused to turn in his hands. Bill yanked it back and forth 

and beat it with his fist, but the jeep wriggled like a fish caught on the end of a 

hook. The rear wheels dug a trench into the soft base beneath the gravel lot. There 

was a loud thump. The front end of the jeep dipped and it slid another few inches 

into the pond. 

“What the hell was that?” 

Rachel gasped as the log rolled into view. Her hand dropped onto his thigh 

and clung there. The wheels had churned the up sludge from the bottom of the 

pond. A layer of scum appeared, spreading out to the center of pool where the 

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50 

shadows lurked in predatory stillness. Bill craned his neck to look through the rear 

window at the parking lot. 

"Daddy, the water is coming through the bottom of the door!” 

“Bill,” Rachel cried, “Please don’t let it get us.” 

“Hold on.” He pressed the accelerator again. This time, he rocked the steering 

wheel as he turned it. Rachel let go of his leg. She reached into the rear seat to 

take Annie's hand. The vehicle lurched; Water splashed the hood. Droplets 

splattered the windshield like flecks of dirty saliva. "We must be caught on 

something," Bill said, frustrated. He punched the center of the steering wheel. The 

horn blared. 

The wheel unlocked and the jeep slipped back onto solid ground. Bill 

slammed his foot on the brake. He stared at the narrow peninsula of land between 

the Jeep's front bumper and the pond. In the water off shore, a milky whirlpool 

hinted at something moving, unseen, beneath the surface. 

He exhaled. 

Annie’s breath tickled his ear. “Are we safe, Daddy?” 

“Yes.” 

“This place sucks!” 

Rachel’s hand crept across the console and nested in his. 

He drove past the copse of young willows to the exit and stopped. In the 

rearview mirror, he saw the pond. Its surface rippled like the hair on back of an 

agitated cat. The log bobbed gently, as though nibbled by the teeth of a submerged 

animal. Slowly it began to sink. One end rose and pointed at the sky. 

“I don't want to come here again,” Annie said. 

“Okay,” Rachel said. She looked through the window at the road beyond the 

Jeep's hood. Her fingers tightened. Bill felt her wedding ring pressing into the palm 

of his hand. 

He pulled onto road and drove past the pharmacy. The two ducks still 

crouched by the building, but more had come and formed a flock. Some of the 

ducks preened their feathers with bright orange bills. Others forged for food in the 

stick weed that bordered the parking lot. Beyond the white birds, the pond shrank 

and the hedges closed around it, fencing it behind naked thorns. 

Laurel Wilczek lives in the beautiful Pocono Mountains in Saylorsburg, Pa. A 

graduate of Moravian College and a member of Writer's Village University, Laurel 

considers herself a cross-genre reader and writer. She discovered a love for the 

literary short story during her participation in the MFA program at WVU. Laurel 

believes that life is simply fiction minus a plot and designated word count. She 

shares her writing space with her husband, two children, three nosey dogs, and a 

cockatiel named Pipkin.

When I was asked to write an article for T-zero on promotional copywriting, I 

wasn’t quite sure how to begin. 

I looked at the type of person who would likely read T-zero. It would be 

mostly creative writers, fiction writers; people who would like to write the Great 

American Novel but needed to earn some money in the meantime. 

So, I decided to begin this article with why I chose promotional copywriting 

as a way to pay my bills, and feed and clothe myself. I also hope that I can 

encourage you, the reader, to give promotional copywriting some serious 

consideration while working on your Great American Novel. 

Five years ago, my full-time, long-term, well-paying job came to an end. I was 

in limbo, too young to collect a pension, too old to compete with the twenty- and 

thirty-something year olds in the workplace. I looked at my options. 

I knew I could make a living by freelancing, writing the same sort of material 

I’d been writing for the past fourteen years as a paid employee, but there was 

something almost soul-destroying when I considered a future of churning out dull 

proposals and business reports for other people in the isolation of my home office. I 

didn’t want to spend twelve to fourteen hours a day writing about things I had little 

interest in, then fall into an exhausted sleep only to start over doing the same thing 

the next day. I wanted to work part-time, spend time with my grandchildren, go to 

movies, enjoy the company of friends, and have time to work on one of my many 

unfinished novels. But most of all, I wanted to enjoy earning my living. 

Then, unexpectedly and propitiously, I sat next to a woman at a networking 

session and we got to talking about what we were doing in a roomful of people we 

didn’t know, looking for work we weren’t sure was even available. Like myself, she 

was middle aged and suddenly unemployed. And like me, she wanted to do 

something she could enjoy. An avid gardener, she had dreams of starting up a 

landscape gardening business in her neighborhood, but wasn’t sure how to find 

clients. 

We batted a few ideas around, and then she asked me if I’d like to write a 

brochure for her. Sure, I told her, I could write her brochure, but why not write a 

newsletter instead? Her potential clients were her neighbors, and a newsletter 

seemed like a much friendlier and more personal approach than a cold brochure. 

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52 

To make a long story short, it’s been over four years since that first 

newsletter went out to 500 potential customers. I wrote a couple of brief articles on 

gardening, added an interesting fact about earthworms (did you know there are 

over 2,700 species of earthworms?) and introduced my new friend’s new business 

to her neighborhood. My first client has been phenomenally successful and she 

attributes much of her success to that newsletter, although I know she’s worked 

hard for her success and deserves every bit of it. I still write regular newsletters for 

her, because her clients ask for them and enjoy the read. 

Following that exhilarating start, it didn’t take long to find other people in 

similar situations; people who needed someone to write promotional copy for their 

new businesses. So, armed with a small but respectable portfolio and growing 

confidence in my abilities, my freelance copywriting business was on its way. 

SO MUCH ADVERTISING 

What exactly is promotional copywriting? To put it simply, promotional 

copywriting is writing that sells a service or product. 

Copywriting is edgier, more emotional and certainly more creative than 

regular business writing. A good copywriter has to be part psychologist, part 

creative writer and part marketing expert. And it doesn’t hurt to have some 

knowledge of and knack for graphic design so that you can visualize the finished 

product, because most advertising today is highly visual. Television commercials 

rely heavily on graphic imagery, and magazines and billboards use graphics to 

impart their messages. Yet, over 98% of all advertising uses the written word in 

some form as the basis of their message. Think of Mazda’s “Zoom Zoom” – only one 

word, used twice, but someone had to come up with it. 

When you consider that the average North American is bombarded by 

roughly 3,000 advertising messages every day, you can see why the demand for 

copywriters is so great. If you don’t believe you see this many advertisements each 

day, look at all the advertising in the newspapers and magazines you read, the 

television you watch, the radio stations you listen to, the websites you browse, the 

direct mail and the flyers that drop through your mailbox. Add to that all the 

messages to buy or use a product that are in every store, on every street corner, 

bus stop, commercial vehicle … you get the picture, right? 

There are thousands of writers who are successful at what they do, but there 

is a real demand for writers who understand how to sell a product or service. You 

only need to watch television commercials or listen to radio ads to know that some 

are so bad that they turn potential buyers off. On the other hand, how often have 

you felt the urge to pick up the phone and buy something on a whim when you see 

it advertised, or fill your virtual shopping cart on the Internet with things you don’t 

really need? 

What is it that makes people buy? It’s emotion, pure and simple, and is 

generated by the writer. Of course, delivery and presentation of the writer’s words

are important. You’ve only got to watch Billy Mays, advertising spokesperson 

extraordinaire, to understand how important presentation is. Billy Mays 

successfully persuades people like you and me that we can’t do without a certain 

product - brush, cloth or tool. However, even the great Billy Mays needs good copy 

to sell successfully. The next time he interrupts your television viewing, listen to 

the words he uses rather than his tone. You’ll catch the copywriter’s creed at work. 

This creed, AIDA (for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action) has been around 

almost as long as the opera of the same name. Hundreds of articles have been 

written on it. Google “AIDA copywriting” for all the information you need. Suffice it 

to say good copywriters know which emotional buttons to push to ensure the 

reader or viewer will re-act by writing a check or pulling out a credit card. 

Direct mail is another hugely successful form of copywriting and covers all 

the junk mail that hits your mailbox every day. It can be a postcard, a letter, a 

flyer, a catalogue or brochure. Every successful piece uses the AIDA creed. 

The next time you’re tempted to throw out your junk mail without reading it, 

don’t. Study each piece carefully to observe how the copywriter has used words to 

urge you to spend your money. Take note of the personal, one-on-one style of most 

direct mail. Sentences are short. Certain words appear over and over again. Look at 

how the writer grabs your attention, gains your interest, invokes desire and then 

encourages you to act – all with carefully chosen words that stir up emotion. Oh 

sure, you’re saying, I don’t fall for that. But if thousands, even millions, of people 

didn’t ‘fall for that’, direct mail marketing wouldn’t work. It does work. American 

Express, Publishers Clearing House, Book-of-the-Month Club are just three 

businesses that have used direct mail advertising successfully over the years – and 

have made a few copywriters extremely rich and given others an above average 

income. 

Now let’s look at the Internet. Each year, a growing number of people turn to 

the Internet for information, education, communication and shopping. In fact, 

more people now use the Internet as their primary area of research. This has 

opened a huge market for good copywriters. Why? Because just about every 

business, whether it’s a Fortune 500 company or the mom and pop store down the 

street, knows the value of a good website. 

Writing for the web takes a special kind of skill. The average person browsing 

the Internet takes less than seven seconds to judge a website. If the site doesn’t 

grab them immediately, they’ll hit the back button and go elsewhere. Sure, great 

graphics can make a website look interesting, but if someone has to plough 

through lengthy paragraphs and verbose sentences to find the information they’re 

looking for, they won’t hang around. 

Again, check out the websites of competing businesses and take note of 

those that work and those that don’t. You’ll find a pattern in the writing of the 

successful ones, and this pattern once again is emotion based. The writing appeals 

to you, the viewer, directly with short and simple words, sentences and 

paragraphs. It engages and involves you in the process, and it leads you to take 

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action, whether it’s filling the shopping cart, dialling a phone number or sending 

an email. 

There are literally hundreds of outlets for a creative writer to find work 

writing promotional copy. There’s direct mail, there are websites, flyers and 

brochures, press releases and white papers, case studies and articles for trade 

magazines. There are slogans and tag lines, banners and headlines. 

It’s not a hard business to break into if you go about it the right way. I was 

lucky in that my first client actually found me, and for a year or so, I took any 

copywriting job that came my way. But I soon realized that there were some 

aspects of copywriting that I didn’t enjoy or that I wasn’t good at. I can’t write tag 

lines or headlines. I don’t enjoy writing product data sheets, and case studies can 

be a drag. Now I specialize in promotional newsletters and a limited amount of 

direct mail. 

Where and how can you find your clients? It’s not a good idea, when first 

starting out, to approach advertising and marketing agencies. Most agencies do use 

freelance writers, but they have their pick of the very best, so an unknown writer 

has little chance of breaking into the big time this way. 

Most small and medium businesses can’t afford the expenses of an agency, 

and frequently use freelance writers to help them put together brochures, flyers, 

newspaper advertisements and mass marketing letters. When I first started out, I’d 

put together my own direct mail package, consisting of a promotional newsletter, 

my business card, and a return, self-addressed post card asking for more 

information from me. I sent this package out to 250 local businesses two or three 

times a year. Most times I ended up with more work than I could handle, but I 

must admit that sometimes I received no responses. When that happened, I’d 

simply send my package out to another 100 businesses. 

To get started, here are some suggestions of the best books I think have ever 

been written on copywriting. 

The Copywriter’s Handbook by Robert Bly. Although this book was originally 

published in 1985, it has since been updated, and covers almost everything a 

writer needs to know about how to write good copy. 

The Well-Fed Writer and Back For Seconds by Peter Bowerman. These two 

books are prominent on my bookshelf, and I refer to them regularly, especially 

when I’m going through a lean period and no one’s responding to my own direct 

mail. 

There are also numerous free e-zines you can subscribe to. The above Peter 

Bowerman has an excellent one. Check out his website at 

http://www.wellfedwriter.com/ezine.shtml to sign up. 

And don’t forget the importance of networking. Networking brought me my 

first client, but even if you don’t find a client at a networking session, hand out 

your business card and information about yourself to all and sundry. You never 

know who might pass it on. 

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If you want to earn some serious money writing creatively before your next 

novel is turned into an Oscar winning movie, start learning everything you can 

about writing promotional copy. Find yourself a couple of clients. Find yourself a 

niche. 

Good luck and most of all, have fun and enjoy. 

Helen Rossiter learned journalism 'on the beat' in London, England after graduating 

from high school in Kenya, East Africa. She worked for a small town newspaper in 

New Zealand before immigrating to Canada thirty years ago and now works parttime 

as a freelance promotional copywriter in Ottawa, Ontario. 

55

R J Hembree - Writers' Village University

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