Shatterglass

She grew up thinking that all the mirrors were broken & wondered why until the day she realized nobody else knew it. Her mother caught her patting the glass & touching her face & frowning. Looking up, she asked, mama, why does the mirror lie? Her mama asked what she meant, & the girl said, that's not my face. That's not what I look like inside.

Her mama knelt beside her & said, see? Here's my face, & here's my reflection in the mirror. They're the same. But the girl shook her head & said, no, they're not. Can't you see? Nobody looks like they do in a mirror. The mirror doesn't show how beautiful people are. She looked at the mirror & then her mama in disbelief & asked, is this what everybody else sees?  

Her mama smiled at her & said, that's what makes people like you special. Always look at what the mirror doesn't show. But the girl stopped looking for a mirror that showed who she really was, & carried the ache in her heart because she knew that all the mirrors in the world were broken.

all the better to...eat black cherries with

She looked into the future, at all the dark, interestingly scary places in it, & said, my, what big teeth you have, & the Future shrugged back & said, well, at least we'll never bite off more than we can chew, & what were you expecting? These adventures come with a warning label. She blinked & thought about it for a moment & realized that was exactly what she wanted.

fath agus uaigneach

In all reality, summers at home are lonely. Summers at home where you're supposed to be preparing for a test that really isn't all that preparable for is an even bigger isolater. Throw in a cell phone with limited service and you've got yourself one heck of a I'm-so-feeling-sorry-for-myself fiesta just waiting for the violin music to get started.

You know it's pretty bad when my whole family, grandparents included, sit out by the chicken pen in the evenings to watch the ducks chase my turkeys, which incidentally are also afraid of the chickens. What can I say? No TV. So that's been my entertainment. The five movies I have on good ol' Righin here have been watched until I can recite, word for word, the engaging reparte between Watson and Holmes, and hum the theme music to Gladiator in my head. Ugh. Also, I'm learning to pronounce Irish. Righin means stubborn, which my computer is. Ha.

So Kelly's half grown kitten is a blessed relief. I've never decided if I'm more of a cat or dog person. I don't think it's really important, honestly, no matter what it tells about a person's character (?). Kind of the way I feel about Ben's wacky INFJ classification. It's just the way it's gonna be.

But this cat...she makes me laugh. So absolutely her own personality, so crazily communicative that she gets more across than a lot of verbal types I know. Felines may be short on sympathy, occasionally, but what she lacks in submissiveness she makes up for with snap and spice, and what I swear is amusement. Crazy cat.

MCAT in one week, three days. Pray for me?

Black cat on a fence
Would have you think her path is chose by random chance
But really, nothing a cat will do is happenstance
No question to her keen cool mind where she will wonder hence

Green eyes flashing in the night
She can sense a thousand things that lesser creatures miss
The rustle of a mouse’s step, the cool wind’s faintest hiss
She carries her own ghostly glowing effervescing sight

Lady of audacity and perfect self-possession
A master of the twitch of tail, and tilt of head to show disdain
For called commands, and gesturing hands, and any drops of rain
A narrow slitted eye and spitting growl to greet transgression

Ronny.

He steps out of the truck and I think, Well hello, Hickville. Where have you been all my life?


Ronnie is the epitome of a redneck, a medium-height, skinny older man with scraggly grey hair and a questionable sense of humor. As he approaches us in the falling dusk he is weaving slightly, although for the amount of beer he consumes every night it is a miracle he could even stay on his feet. I’m fairly certain that if I were to ingest half of what he does, I would die of alcohol poisoning. But he does so cheerfully, and keeps right on trucking.

One of the most eccentric people I know, his scrawny-ness is completely offset by his wife, who towers over him in both height and girth—the kind of person at whom my uncle Keith shakes his head admiringly and says, “Now that’s a big woman!”

On this evening he’s dressed in what I later find out is totally typical Ronny attire—ragged short cut-off shorts, an old white wife beater with the axel-grease of bygone days still decorating it, knee-high used-to-be-white socks, and laced high work boots. On his head was an old confederate hat from the Civil War days, complete with a blue jay and cardinal feather, and numerous old buttons—across his chest was what looks like the type of man-purse that Davy Crocket would wear, canteen shaped, with a long leather fringe hanging off of it. His .25 pistol is stuck in the back of his pants and his long musket is propped up in his back window, but no, Ronny isn’t here to fire guns with us, although he did take a shot with the little brother’s new Beretta. No, Ronny is there to fire his cannon.

This marvel of modern engineering is handmade. Currently, it consists of a large rusty pipe about three, four feet long, six inches in diameter, with two handles at the bottom and a piece wielded on to make it stand up at an angle. Still weaving slightly, he hauls it out of the truck and proceeds to pack it full of gunpowder and cans of baked beans, beating it down with a shovel and pouring water down the barrel. He tells us, “The blueberries were too expensive, and I couldn’t find no sauerkraut, so I got the beans.” I just look at him in disbelief.

Now, mom has only heard about Ronny. This is the first time she has had the privilege of meeting him, and he’s drunk as a skunk, dressed like the Redneck poster child and about to fire a handmade cannon off of our new house site to Lord knows where, armed with a shovel, baked beans and a handful of bottle rockets. For the fuses, you know. Her eyes can’t get any wider. Even my dad is grinning because we’re not sure if he’s about to fall over or blow himself to kingdom come.

They set up on a pile of evacuated dirt. The cannon is pointing somewhere between the direction of my grandfather’s house, a mere ½ mile away, and John’s old abandoned place in the jungle, which everybody knows it haunted. It’s getting dark at this point, and mom and I crouch down in the cement stairwell and peer over. Dad and Alex retreat to a safe distance, and Ronny goes up to light the fuse, which he does with his cigarette.

He retreats. Nothing happens. The fuse has gone out, although it’s still glowing quietly. None of us know what to do—it’s like the bomb that won’t go off. Except for Ronny, Ronny always knows what to do. With the fearlessness of the perpetually inebriated, he grabs the shovel, strides over to the cannon, and begins beating it. At this point, my mom is clutching my arm and uttering squeaks of alarm, because she just knows we’re about to be splattered with alcohol-soaked little pieces of Ronny, and she can’t stand it. I’m laughing too hard to do anything about either one of them.

He finally realizes that nothing is going to happen, so he bends down to the now burned-off fuse and relights it. Three and a half seconds of retreat, and the thing spectacularly explodes in a shower of paper, sparks, and the distinctive smell of baked beans. The cannon itself is shot backwards five feet, and we’re all dancing around like proper heathens, yelling, whooping, and hollering as the sound rolls in a palatable wave over the mountains, deep like thunder sunk into your bones.

At this point, we notice a light flashing erratically across the top of the opposite field. It’s my uncle Keith, and he’s hiding behind a massive pile of dirt and plant life, yowling at the top of his lungs and trying not to wet himself. I don’t blame him. It’s not every night you have a drunk Confederate soldier shooting baked beans at you out of a cannon.

Jack

His name was Jack and he was six foot six, blue eyed and husky with years of work. They were young farm boys, most just turned eighteen, fresh out of high school and headed straight for the Vietnam war. He and his buddies were caught between the dread of the unknown and a strange excitement from traveling so far away from home, some for the first time. He was nineteen.


To the man they were masters of marksmanship—any one of them could pick the eye out of a squirrel at hundreds of yards. They’d done their basic training, but they’d been trained from the first time they carried a gun that it was never, under any circumstances, to be turned on another person. They talked about it quietly among themselves, wondering to each other if they’d be able to do it, to pull the trigger. Jack couldn’t imagine it, himself. Despite the desperate situation overseas, he knew that the enemy was going to be made up of other young men just like himself, just with a different skin, a different language. With the others, he asked himself if he could pull that trigger—and there was no answer. He dreaded finding out.

They were dumped out on the edge of the jungle after the long flight, and sent straight out to hassle a formation of the enemy, and hunt them down. For several days as they pressed inward through the steamy verdancy, so foreign to all of them, there was no resistance. They were apprehensive, but growing bolder as the hours passed and no shots were fired. He remembers they were cracking jokes; the sergeant just shook his head but didn’t say anything.

And then, as Jack haltingly says, everything changed. They reached a site where the Vietcong had just vacated, dust still settling from the air. And in the middle of the abandoned camp was the body of a soldier, not American but one of the Allied forces, strung up by his testicles, left to die. He was still warm.

The Vietnamese had left him there to intimidate the new American troupes following behind. It was the worst mistake they could have made. Jack cried as he sat in the chair in the office, reliving the moment when a bunch of innocent, uncertain farm boys transformed into mad killing machines. He choked out that they had torn across the jungle after that, mowing down anybody they came across, without a thought in their rage. Everyone. His broad shoulders shook as he sat with head bowed, telling us what he had never told his family, grieving for the loss of innocence in that boy he had been. And I thought, someday, Lord, make them pay for what they did to him. Make them pay.

oats are kind of...sharp

I could call this the summer of the wheat. Or the oats. But it's more like the summer of long silences, and solitude, and study, interspersed with bouts of furiously hard work.

Stacking sheaves of oats into rain-shedding shocks.

Hiding like a wild creature, seeing what they see.

My daddy, temporarily taking the team's place.

Life is so fast paced at times that's imagining an era where everything was done by hand is beyond our reach. Except, not anymore. I love knowing how to do these things.

1988

I wish I could say today has been off to a good start, but I'd be lying, and I have a strict no-tolerence policy towards lying. I wish I could say that Amanda let me have the shower first, but if I did, I'd be passing over the exquisite agony of a cascade of icy water. I wish I could say she'd hugged me. Or Alex. Said something different than "I need my comb back." I love my family, but they're not terribly demonstrative, at least, we kids aren't.

I'd like to pretend mom and Amanda didn't get into an argument after breakfast. Mom wanted to make a special dinner and she wanted help thinking of ideas--Amanda let her know she didn't care. I'd rather it have ended there, but instead, it evolved into a request for her to just stop watching movies in the evenings, be a part of this family, and culminated in my little sister walking out after declaring that all we do it bitch to her all the time.

I wish I had more than a shaky grasp on my temper. Then, perhaps, I'd not have these fingernail marks on the palms of my hands from trying not to lose it. I'd like Amanda to know that I love her, more than my own life. I'd give anything to not have it come down to harsh words because as much as I don't want to fight, I will not stand by while she hurts our mother. Our mother. Who walked out near tears because my sister doesn't seem, sometimes, to care about anybody but herself.

So I will finish studying here, and I will answer some phone calls. I will run by the store and pick up things for tonight, and I will go home and start so that when mom gets home, and dad finishes work, there won't be any scrambling before Sabbath arrives. And that will be the only part of today that redeems it, and it will be more than worth it.

I wish this had happened any day but today. Happy birthday, me.