Spring 2014 Column: Biking With Dogs

Here's the link to my column.

Spring 2014: Rough Draft Poem 5

Assignment: a poem about something I fear.

The One Thing Worse Than Senhor Testiculo, Brazil's Mascot For Testicular Cancer

A three inch long cockroach

Six inches from my face

At 3:37 AM.

I ran out of my room,

Screaming and naked.

No shoes, no wallet, no glasses, no phone.

Couldn't get to a store or pay for Raid

Or see or call for help.

Just me, my laptop, and the contents of a suitcase

I hadn't bothered to unpack after a trip.

I waited until the sunlight reflected

Off of the windows down the street

Into my window before charging into my room armed

With a noisy vacuum cleaner and a frying pan,

Which I used to pummel the mattress

Over and over and over, yelling and laughing

At the thought of what I must look like.

Spring 2014: Midterm Narrative

Assignment: 1-2 page young adult fantasy narrative. This is one section of the midterm. I also had to do stuff with this narrative, but this is the fun part.

Al Henrys looked up from where his Mastiff, Penelope, was laying a steaming pile on the boulevard. He winced. Jake and Tony Easting were ambling down the sidewalk towards him with smirks on their faces. Al pretended to ignore them. “Good girl, Penny,” he said when the dog was done with her business. She turned her enormous head upward in a slobbery dog grin.

Al was already reaching into his pocket for a used grocery bag when Jake sneered, “Aren't you gonna pick that shit up, shrimp?”

“Ugh,” Tony made a show of grabbing his nose. “That stinks!”

Al rolled his eyes and said nothing. He told himself they'd be bored of him someday- as he had for the last two years. With a held gulp of air, Al bent to pick up the smelly pile. There was a shove at his back and Al had to propel himself further forward into a somersault to avoid landing in the muck. What he'd already picked up flew out of his plastic-covered hand in an arc, landing on the grass inches from his face. Rage flooded his head as the stench flooded his nose.

Before Jake could start laughing, the usually dull and amiable Penelope had tackled him to the pavement. Her teeth shone from beneath dribbling jowls and the growl coming out of her throat sounded like an enraged tractor. Jake shielded his face with his arms, but couldn't rise with the two enormous paws on his chest.

The sudden act of canine loyalty was the least surprising thing: Tony had hardly made two steps toward his fallen brother when three squirrels dropped out of a tree and started mobbing him. One climbed up his leg, onto his shoulders, and started darting round and round his neck biting his ears. Another nipped at his left ankle, and the third followed the first upwards to perch on Tony's shirt collar and scratch the bridge of his nose.

The beady eyes and cheeks swollen with acorns must have a daunting one when it was so close it had to be viewed cross-eyed. Tony flailed and ran off.

A few seconds passed and Al got to his feet. Penelope was still standing on Jake. Al stood over his head and said in a forced calm, “You have something to say to me?”

Jake's face scrunched up a little. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

That was as good as it was gonna get. All straightened a little more. “Thank you.”

“Freak,” Jake muttered.

Penelope looked up at Al, back down at Jake, and then squatted where she was, peeing all over him.

When Al and Penelope got home, a man in his late thirties and wearing a red fedora with a few too many peacock feathers was sitting on the bench by the curb. “I know what you did back there, kid.”

“What're you talking about?” Al said.

“With the critters. Nice trick,” the man nodded thoughtfully, not taking his eyes off Al. “Especially for a newbie. What's your name, kid?”

“Al.”

“Al. Short and simple. I like it.” The man fished in his inner jacket pocket and produced an honest-to-goodness scroll complete with a velvety bow. “You'll need this.”

“What?”

“Now that we've confirmed your abilities, your magic will be blocked until you accept the dangers that come with it and learn the rules.” He shoved the scroll into Al's hands.

Al wondered if his blank look would be enough to get any more explanation.

“Only open it when you're ready. The string will know. One pull and there's no turning back. Bye now.” And the guy disappeared. Along with the bench, which come to think of it shouldn't have been there in the first place. How had Al not noticed that?

Spring 2014: 10 vivid memories assignment

Assignment: 10 vivid memories in as much detail as possible in 5-10 prose lines. (Line counts work out in Word, but I'm not sure how they'll convert here.)

1) When I was in Israel, we spent a night sleeping in a huge tent at a Bedouin camp in the Negev Desert. Before bed, our guide led us out of the camp and over a mild hill, reducing the glare of the floodlights to a dim halo. Itai whispered to us to separate and find a place to sit or lie down where we could hear him but couldn't see anyone else. The ground was a mix of stones, pebbles, and dust punctuated by shrubs barely two feet tall. I found a flattish spot, took off my shoes, and put them under my head as I lay down. So for ten minutes, I was alone with the desert night. It wasn't windy, but it wasn't still either. The air moved like the planet was breathing, and the stars wouldn't stay still in my vision as I tried to take them all in. They kept moving in little circles while I tried to focus and the Milky Way looked like a glowing cloud stretching across the sky. When the Itai used a quiet melody to call us back, I was the only one who saw the shooting star over our path back to camp.

2) I was 12 when Blizzard died. I'd slept in the cottage at the top of the hill the night when the dog had scratched at the door, wanting to be let out of the boathouse so he could find a quiet, dignified place. That morning, I went out to the porch to see Blizzard standing dejectedly at the top of the path. There were patches of white foam in the grass, and I watched as he puked up some more. He only took two sips of water. Uncle Maury shoved a tums down Blizzard's throat. Grandpa Roy, Grandma Fradie, Danny, and I got into the Park Avenue and drove to Winnipeg. It was the only time I've ever seen Grandpa speed. My brother scolded me when I tried to break the tension by calling Blizzard's basketball-hard stomach humonginuous. The vet took an x-ray. His stomach was twisted around itself. His chin was in my hands, which rested on Grandpa's when he died. I wished he could trade with that other guy's golden retriever who had been sent home with meds. I hated the guy whose dog lived.

3) On Labor Day in 2010, all of the aunts, uncles, and cousins who were in town went out to Uncle Billy's river house on the San Bernard. I was the only cousin who still enjoyed tubing and wasn't too tired so Billy, my dad, and I went out on the boat with the freshly inflated tube. Uncle Billy drove the Malibu. It zigzagged and circled up and down the brown, brackish river. After ten minutes or so, the boat turned just right. It was going around 15 miles per hour, but the tube behind it was probably arcing around half again that fast when it hit the wake and sailed 8 feet straight up. It flipped. The world blurred and spun for half a second. Impact on my stomach. Pain. Like someone had slashed a knife down the middle of my belly. My first thought was, “Do I have a hernia?” I floated in the fetal position until the boat came back for me. Because it was the first fall of the day, I kept on for another hour, trying to ignore the rough Velcro chafing my ankles. My whole ribcage was shifted 2 inches to the left.

4) A ski fall slammed my head into the hardened snow. After telling my dad that my neck hurt, I had to lie still for ten minutes before the ski patrol arrived. After strapping me down to a body board, they loaded me into a toboggan and dragged it down the slope with my parents pacing them within earshot. The speed and scratching of the toboggan skates on the snow was the fun part. And then they stopped a chair lift to attach the whole toboggan to the back of a chair and send us back up the mountain so we could go down the right trail to get to the ski patrol clinic for x-rays. My mom sat between the two ski patrol guys and my dad rode on the next chair. Strapped down, all I could see was the sides of the toboggan and the cloudless blue sky bisected by the lift cable. The chair swayed in the wind and the clattering of the walls against the chair reverberated inside the toboggan, convincing me that it was going to fall off. I cried the whole way up.

5) I was probably 3 when my probably 5 year old brother decided to scare mom by taping a live cockroach to the kitchen's white plastic-y tiles where it would be stepped on after turning the corner from the living room. It was a Texas-sized horror bug as big as my whole child-sized hand. I'll never know how Danny caught it. We crouched a foot away from the thing, giggling like nobody could hear us. We would have been smarter to hide at the inside of the turn under the oven, but mom never showed. Or at least she didn't in the 30 seconds it took for a determined 3 year old to get bored. That's only time I remember enjoying stomping on a roach. It crunched. I jumped on it over and over. Barefoot.

6) We did a lot of gardening as a family when I was young. One of the last times I remember doing this was when I stabbed myself. I was assigned the role of using a hammer to smash quartz rocks into smaller pieces for lining the bottom of flower pots. After breaking several of the big crystals down, I got thirsty, so I pushed myself up to my feet with my hands. The pain was sharp, hot and immediate in the heel of my left hand, drawing a scream that most sopranos would find challenging. I crouched back down on the driveway and shook my hand. Thinking that the quartz shard was out, I got up again the same way and pushed it further into my hand. This time I was on my feet, and I didn't even get out of the house's shadow before my dad came to see what was wrong. He ushered me into the bathroom where tap water and cloth competed with peroxide and cotton to add the most agony. White globby spheres about a millimeter across leaked out with the blood. Dad called it subcutaneous fat.

7) Shelties have horrible breath. I'm not just talking about dog breath. I'm talking about a smell that is so rancid that it induces gagging. Nica's breath smells like a combination of everything that could ever die, curdle, and rot purifying together and getting wafted in your face. Crunchy kibble and dental kibble did nothing and doggy toothbrushes just made her red gums bleed. In high school, I was lying on the oriental rug (nicknamed the oreo rug after what I called it when I was a child), scratching Nica behind the ears in another failed attempt to bond with the almost personality-free dog when it happened. Her mouth opened and closed erratically and her tongue pushed forward repeatedly as though someone had rubbed peanut butter on the roof of her mouth. She coughed once or twice and something fell out onto the rug. Its whole surface was greenish-blueish-blackish and it smelled like death. It was a molar.

8) I'd been dancing for 1 year when I decided to compete for the first time. Just for fun. It was the beginner Jack and Jill at the 2009 Lonestar Championships in Austin, Texas. They gave me my number on Friday and told me to bring it with me on Saturday for the prelim. Of course, I forgot it. So I had to write the number 273 on a piece of printer paper and pin that to my shirt in place of the sturdier card stock. Naturally, my first partner ripped the number in half. Peter Strom, an internationally famous dancer who would still break six feet if he slouched was the emcee and he walked down the long line of couples between songs and said into the microphone, “This won't do.” He grabbed the remains of my number, read it, and yanked it off with a flourish. Turning to the judges, he said, “Alright. Write this down. The girl with the cute hat is number 273. Got that? The girl with the cute hat is 273.” I blushed.

9) When I was a college freshman in Oregon, I had the worst possible roommate match. Don't get me wrong- Mandy wasn't a horrible person. We just had very different standards for the shoebox we lived in. I was messy and ate on my bed regardless of the crumbs. She made her bed with 17 pillows and two stuffed animals that went in the same place with their seams facing the same way every single day. Since she left for a wedding the weekend before school started and we hadn't made our super duper official roommate agreement yet, I didn't know she didn't want people sitting on her bed with her gone. So of course when some new friends hung out in our room, one of them spilled diet Pepsi on her comforter. Noting the precise arrangement, we took pictures before yanking the comforter off and running it down to the laundry room. We made the bed back up just so and dubbed messy situations “code blue” after the Pepsi label's color. I told Mandy the day we moved out. She yelled at me.

10) One afternoon in high school, I was in bed reading the third book of the Song of the Lioness quartet for probably the 10^th time when there was a muffled bang. I ignored it in favor of a sword fight. Another bang. A pause. And another bang. A handful of bangs later, my curiosity and annoyance overcame my urge to keep reading and I went looking for the source of the noise. I followed the sound all the way across the house and out the back door onto the driveway. I don't know what I was expecting to see, but my brother swinging a sledgehammer down onto an old computer tower as hard as he could was far from it. The dented motherboard hung above his laptop as a warning for years.

Spring 2014: Poem 4 Rough Draft

Grandpa

Dead of malpractice

In an understaffed hospital

On Christmas eve;

“Jewish bitch”

Still learning to forgive.