high

i don't want to bother you
and i wish i could dilute the color in my eyes
fade softly into the yellow curtains
and dissolve into the amber corners of the sky

but i don't want to bother you
so here's where i'm going to stay
pull the thin white blanket over my eyes
rest my heavy thoughts on your slinking sighs
and then smile as their weight evaporates
   and mirrors the clouds that dot the maple sky

but i don't want to bother you
so here's where i'm going to stay
i'll place this pendulum heart on an invisible string
and sink into a fall breeze as it breaks off and away

save as draft, to be continued

First thing’s first. Change the font. Change the size. Cambria is obnoxious, as is size 12. Size 12 is for writing that is meant to be read. Not the trite shit that you’re going to punch on the screen. Don’t get any big ideas. In fact, get small ones. Size 10.5, to be exact. A writer’s first mistake is thinking they can write. The second is writing in font size 12.

Anyway…

“Where’s Susan?” the woman asked. She was wearing a floral printed blouse with lavender tapered pants. Velcro shoes. The combination seemed a bit odd for a funeral.

“Oh, hello, Mrs. Jackson. Well, Susan and I got divorced about a year ago, actually.”

Mrs. Jackson shook her head in utter disbelief. “Well isn’t that a darn shame,” she said. “I liked her a lot. You all looked like you all got along real well together.”

The sad thing was that Mrs. Jackson had shaken her head in disbelief five times now. She had grey hair and liver spots and was senile.

“I know,” Rob said. “It’s for the best though, I think.” He looked at the artificial flowers that surrounded his childhood friend then back at the old woman who stood before him. “We, you know, function better as friends.”

He didn’t know what the word function meant. But it sounded nice when it dove quietly from his tongue. Real pretty and soft, like a swan.

Mrs. Jackson placed her wicker hand on his shoulder and looked at him with watery eyes. “Oh, hon. I’m sure you do. I’m sure you do.” (He found the subsequent pat on the shoulder very patronizing.) “It’s a shame she couldn’t be here for Benny’s funeral, you know. You three used to be quite the trio. Called y’all my little muskateers, you know.”

He smiled. Wondered why there wasn’t an open bar at funerals. Seemed more than appropriate. “I know,” he laughed in the most fake way possible.

“Alright, sug,” Mrs. Jackson cooed. “Glad you could make it. Benny’d be real happy to know you came down here to see him off.”

“I’m sure,” Rob replied. “I’m sure he would be.”

Mrs. Jackson left, and Rob found himself making his right hand form a spindly C where his drink should have been. He saw it, then shook it off like he would a spider. It had been about seven years since he had seen Benny. They’d been childhood friends in Rolesville, before he went away to Vandy and before Benny went to work for his dad’s tobacco farm. Years behind books and plows had separated them quite a bit, but when Rob got the phone call last Wednesday that the boy whom he’d swapped spit and blood with had died in a car wreck, he was quicker than a jackrabbit in booking his flight from Boston to his hilly hometown.

It was a hit and run. Apparently Benny had just left the farm one evening and was making the quick and routine walk back to his house. It was only a mile commute, and the weather was nice that day. Benny’s mama said that he was just walking along the main road and then bam, he was a bug on the windshield of a Dodge Ram. Asshole didn’t even bother pullin’ my baby from the ditch, she said. Benny’s mom had to go powder her nose after she said that. Damned jackass didn’t even wipe the dirt from his face.

Rob didn’t know what to say to that, nor did he know what to say to Mrs. Jackson’s comment about his ex-wife. The truth of the matter was that he was still completely stuck on Susan: her figure, her laugh, the dainty lines that formed in the corner of her eyes when she smiled. They reminded him of the little hash marks his mom made in the cherry pie so it could breathe in the oven. He’d tried fucking other women, yeah, but he just couldn’t get it for them. No matter how hard he tried. It was all cherry pie and giggles, and all he wanted to do when he was in bed with another woman was cry.

In silence, he walked over to Benny’s casket. He could see the makeup that had been piled on his face by an overpaid mortician. Stack after stack after stack of unnecessary shit like a gourmet cheeseburger. Benny, or Ben, as he was in his thirties now, probably would have clawed at his face ‘til all that shit was gone, however death had rendered him unable to do so. Rob had to fight the urge to laugh, to tell him that he looked like a real city boy now. That now they could get along well. But that faraway look in Benny’s eyes had him scared. Rob wondered where Benny was looking. Wondered what his heaven looked like. Wondered if Benny even thought heaven existed.

Rob got the phone call from Susan last Wednesday. He was at work, going through a recent deposition, when he saw her name pop up on his caller id. She wants to reconcile, he thought. She’s realized she needs me. That we’re meant to be together. That fifteen years of sharing the same street, friends, and bed wasn’t a joke. He grinned to himself as he picked up the phone. Today wasn’t going to be a bad day at all.

“Hey,” Susan said.

(He loved the way the –ay sound still swung from her vocal cords like an old tire swing.)

“Hey,” Rob replied, on the edge of his seat.

“So Benny died,” said Susan.

He pulled the phone away from his ears and looked into those dark little holes, expecting Benny’s goofy grin to pop out like a jack o lantern. Not real, he thought. Benny was always going to be fine. He had always been fine.

“Are you listening, Robert?" Susan asked. "His mom just called our—my house” The final t of his name stung his eardrums like a wasp. Reminded him of when he was younger and his father asked him to bring in a switch from the backyard when he brought home a report card with more than one C. He had never been good at science. But that didn’t matter then and it didn’t matter now.

“I…I heard you.” Rob clamored into the phone. He thought immediately back to the day he and Benny jumped into the lake and Benny didn’t come up after a minute. Rob thought Benny had died or hit a rock or something. 120 seconds later, Benny’s blonde head bobbed above the water along with his high-pitched laugh. “Goddamn it, Benny,” Rob muttered.

“Well,” Susan mumbled, “the funeral is going to be held this weekend.”

“Are you going to be there?” he asked.

He could see her head recoil like a rattlesnake’s tail. “I would, but I’ve got a client to meet this weekend. Big case. Hamptons. Trophy wife wants to suck some money from her old sugar daddy. You know.”

His heart sank. He loved the way she spoke. She made last wills and testaments sexy. “Right,” he said. “I understand. See you soon.”

Silence.

“OK,” Susan said. “You doin’ ok? Little Benny…he’s gone. I can’t believe it.”

He cleared his throat into the phone. It was so heavy on his wrists. It might as well have been an anvil now. “Yeah,” he struggled. “I’m OK. Gonna head home this weekend, I guess. Think I can manage that. I’ll say ‘hi’ to everyone for you.”

“Thanks. Gonna send some flowers.”

He could hear the sound of her sweet floral breath on the other line, and then the sound of phlegm. She cleared her throat. “Alright, well, bye.”

He inhaled for a moment to silence the “I love you” that had come so naturally to him for the past ten years now. “Right…bye.”

Click.

The flight home was a long one. He tried to distract himself with paperwork, with the shiny packaging of in-flight trail mix, with the Hawaiian-print acrylic nails of the clerk at the rental car kiosk, but all to no avail. It was just Susan.

All through the hills of Rolesville, he thought of her. To be fair, he thought of Benny a lot, too. About how when they were little they played dead to scare their baby sitter, about how when they went to Sunday school together and Rob didn’t know the bible verses Benny would get Susan to write them on a piece of coloring book paper and pass them his way before the teacher could swat him for not remembering what the Corinthians said about love. When he saw the way she dotted her I’s, though, he knew he what it really was. Love was the delicate white eyelets of Susan’s laced socks that framed her fuzzy peach skin; love was the thin vanilla colored part of Susan’s strawberry colored hair. Love was the way she would make a simple word like “hill” resemble one in speech. Hee-yul. A rise and fall, two soft and gentle syllables. Sweet and southern and symmetrical. Rob was nine years old at the time, and his concept of life hasn’t changed much to this day.

In between the identical strip malls of each highway town, he thought of Susan’s hands. How he missed holding them, how the callouses on her fingertips felt like firm little pillows, how they created beautiful sounds from the cello he had bought her with his pay check from his first trial. They were hard, but boy were they lovely. What they could make. That’s what he loved about Susan. Tough as a nail on the outside, but once you penetrated the veil, you eased into her like quicksand.

The problem was that he couldn’t get out. Even at the funeral of his best friend. Even when looking at the fake purple irises that rested obnoxiously close to Benny’s casket. Suz loved that shade of purple, Rob thought. But she called it violet. She didn’t like purple because Crayola invented the name. He chuckled to himself. That’s right, he thought, she called purple violet.

The pastor delivered Benny’s eulogy and service, and before he knew it he and approximately 40 others had migrated to a buffet. With drinks. People were eating soggy chicken wings and noshing on watery potato salad and talking about their memories with Benny. How he was a real pal, how it was a shame he hadn’t married, had any kids. Some people talked about Mrs. Jackson, his mama, and how it was good that she was too old for the memories to really stick. It would kill her, they said. Plain cut her heart right out.

No one recognized Rob at the reception. Although, he did keep quite aloof. By aloof, he meant he kept quite a warm seat at the bar. He had had four jack and cokes at the end of the first hour and was beginning to think real sour thoughts about his high school classmates that showed up to Benny’s reception. They didn’t give a shit about Benny. They just wanted to save face. There was Bettie, who won homecoming queen his and Benny’s senior year of high school. She had big melon breasts and white teeth the size of Chiclets, but he would never forget the day she got her boyfriend to egg his car when Benny didn't buy her a pack of menthols. And then there was Don, the hunk of his grade. He had a crush on Susan when they were in English together. They would get in fights about T.S. Eliot to win Suz’s affection, even though she hated the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to begin with. But to this day, Rob would still chuckle to himself when he thought about how after sixth period they would cut out together and smoke non-filtered cigarettes and talk about existentialism, then duck back into class when the school bells rang. It felt exotic. New, different. Don had a receding hairline now, and the vertical lines of his oxford shirt were swollen and stretched around his midsection. This made Rob happy. And even though he and Susan were divorced after only fifteen months of marriage, Don’s bald spots made Rob feel like he had won.

little rubies

The light is red and I'm wedged somewhere between a school bus and a hearse like a long necklace suffocating between the sweaty breasts of a top-heavy woman. My windows are down, so the exhaust of both of these ample-reared vehicles makes me a bit weary of breathing. For a minute I see the battery-powered magic of light up tennis shoes as they enter and exit the fingerprinted doors of the banana colored bus. Little flashes of ruby seep in and out of the cheap rubber soles of her shoes. I think back to when I wished paste flavored ice cream existed because I thought it smelled fancy, and when I used to stack the deck at Candy Land so I could beat my grandmother during the afternoons I spent at her house eating gingersnaps and drinking sugar-free lemonade. The blinking lights must distract me because soon enough the familiar drone of the yellow bus grows softer and is quickly replaced with the heavy honk of the hearse behind me. The dead are impatient, apparently. I'm moving, asshole, is what my eyes say to the asterisk-mouthed hearse driver staring menacingly into my rearview mirror. My light is green now, so I accelerate and begrudgingly continue on my way to the job that I find mildly depressing. And I exhale, even though I know that one day that hearse is going to catch up with me again and swallow me into its silk-lined hole. I just hope my driver is more patient with young ladies who like to take their time.

I don't understand war. Why we go to it, how we wage it, and most importantly, how we can ever truly win it. Some rather stone-faced men and women who grate their teeth like they would their nails on an emery board have told me that all life is war in one way or another, yet it has always seemed to me that a battle is only "winnable" so much as it is possible for a field mouse to sprout wings and fly away from the clawed clutch of a feral cat. It just doesn't happen, and thinking otherwise is plain naive.

When my grandfather was alive, I was far too young to ask him questions about his experiences in Vietnam. My knowledge of that country started and stopped when I played "Where Will Savannah Live Next?" on his globe in the playroom. In that particular afternoon, I scampered back there and gave the globe a whirl, watching as my sparkly turquoise nails touched the country's grooved and raised spot when the miniature world finally stopped spinning. I always wanted to land on France or Monaco, or maybe even the peaceful beaches of Wellington, New Zealand. But Vietnam? No, thanks. Not prime real estate. I was never too curious about what all he had experienced while he was over there until it was too late, and all of his memories were sealed in a silk-lined casket six feet under. And even when I was, the only help I really had was framed pictures, flags, and medals in velvet shadowboxes. And those didn't help me understand anything at all.

Recently, my mother and I were out to lunch and began to discuss the war in Afghanistan over Caesar salads. The fact that we talked about war as we would the latest George Clooney flick is mildly disgusting, but it is what it is. Curious about my grandfather's story, I asked her what she thought about her dad's account of war. Mom said that when she was younger and her dad had just gotten back from Vietnam, he would get in fights with his brother-in-law, Don, at the dinner table. Don was a commercial pilot during Vietnam, and therefore would always fly at altitudes of more than 30,000 feet. To Don, the Viet Kong and guerrilla warriors may as well have been grains of sand on a beach, and the omnipresent explosions were little more than a few small seashells. Everything looks pristine from far away, I suppose.

And that's exactly what my grandfather would argue. "No, Don," he would say with his burly hands, his elbows occasionally making the gravy boat tremble when his arm hit the table, "it's not like that. Once you get your head out of the goddamn clouds, it's a completely different story. Once you see with your own two eyes what you're doing, things change. You don't want to do it anymore. You don't want to do anything anymore. We lost, Don. We lost so much and you can't even see that."

Mom said that whenever her dad would mutter that word to Don a fire would light up in his brother-in-law's eyes and make you wonder how much his fangs would sting when they entered your skin. Apparently he was like one of Pavlov’s dogs when the word loss would leave someone's tongue: steaming, white saliva would collect in the corners of his downward curled lips, and he would spew his conservative-spun propaganda onto whoever was closest to him, hiss like a tea kettle, and ball his fist so tightly it looked whiter than a ghost. Don would stare at her dad harder than a statue, and the two would eat the rest of their cold mashed potatoes in silence as their own truths mixed like oil and water.

The other night, I went over to a friend's to drink and play music. While there, I met her cousin, Dean, and her brother, Tom. The latter was rather bloated and belligerent, and left me wondering what inner battle he was trying to suppress with his thirteenth Budweiser. Though in his more coherent moments, he would complain of American ignorance and intolerance, to which I would have agreed had there been a small, saving breath in which I could have responded. However, there wasn't, and I soon felt as if I were a POW to the drunk whose harsh generalizations quickly transformed him into the ass he was so hell-bent against becoming.

After he passed out for the first time, his cousin was finally able to speak. Quiet and reserved, Dean said that he had recently returned from Afghanistan and that he was sorry for his cousin's behavior. He also said that he went into the military for a few years to help pay for his ultimate goal: a college degree. What he would learn in books, I responded, was most likely far different (and perhaps less important) than what he would learn while on the field, to which he meekly laughed. I asked him the standard questions, and soon found myself feeling like a child sitting transfixed at the feet of her grandfather while he told stories of The Way Things Used To Be. How different is it Over There, I asked. What are They like? How does it feel knowing you can take away someone's life with something that's no bigger than a baby carrot? What did you learn? Are you glad to be Home?

I'm sure my arsenal of seemingly unceasing questions was just another reminder of the place he was so happy to have left, however he quietly and courteously answered each one of them with a pleasantly surprising amount of grace, as opposed to his now-comatose cousin, the freelance porch prophet extraordinaire. "No," Dean said, "it wasn't that different over there, there just seemed to be boundaries and borders even if there weren't any fences in sight." He called them limits. You could really feel the limits. Those who were brave enough to be around the armed "peace bringers" were warm and hospitable, he said. It was us who weren't. "When the guys got bored," Dean continued, "they liked to go into town and fuck with people. Just because they could. Just so they'd know they were alive."

While I was aware of the destructive potential of idle hands, I was wholly unaware of the fact that there was any time to be spared. "It's not always combat?" I asked rather dumbly.

"No," Dean responded, "it's not. Lot's of times it's just waiting, which in some ways is worse. It's easy to pull a trigger, you know? It's harder to think about it."

"...did you ever kill anyone?"

All of a sudden, I sensed a small, blurry stir in my peripheral vision. It appeared that Tom was showing signs of life, his body twitching like a grizzly bear at the end of hibernation. His eyes flickered open, and I backed away from him, fearing a vomit-filled eruption as he raised his sweaty head from the porch swing. With a fat finger, he pointed to his cousin. "This guy here," Tom slurred, "this guy here has cried about things you and me have never even dreamed of." Tom smiled at me and proceeded to blink erratically like a light bulb that's just about to burn out. And then, just like that, his eyes closed and he fell back onto his side and into his slumbers once more.

After it was determined that the fleshy volcano was dormant again, Dean continued. "Yeah," he said, "I did." He looked down into his beer can, swilled the remainder for a second, and took a swig. I bet he wished there were more. "Yeah, I did. I did. And you know what, I'm still in therapy for it. Don't know if I'll ever be out."

A wave of hyper self-awareness hit, and I soon felt as if I had shown up to a funeral wearing a Hawaiian t-shirt and Bermuda shorts. "I'm sorry if I asked something I shouldn't have," I said.

There was more silence. I began to wonder if the flowers on my imagined shirt were growing larger and more saturated. Perhaps I had brought a ukulele, too. "Naw, it's OK," he finally replied. "It helps to talk about these things sometimes, I think."

"Did you know their names?"

"Whose?"

"The people you, you know, killed."

He shook his head. "No, not at all."

"Oh, wow."

"The worst part," he began, "was not feeling anything. That's what made me lose it. When I felt like my finger was a fuckin' accessory to a machine gun. Those fuckers blind you over there, you know. They make you numb. There's already sand in your eyes and you're already lonely as shit and they just suck up what's left of your heart 'til all you've got is muscles and a helmet.  Guy with lots of badges says shoot and you do it and you say 'sir'. There's nothing human about it. They tell you to be a fuckin' man and defend your country and all of that other bullshit, but what's worth saving if you don’t even got yourself?" He threw his now empty can to the floor, watching as the spitty residuals pooled into a small half moon shape by his feet. "Courage, my ass," he said. "If I had any real courage I wouldn't be sitting here and talking to you about this shit, now would I? People dead, and for no reason. Not one, good goddamn reason. And what do I have to show for it? A fuckin' medal that haunts me every night as I sleep." Dean paused and stared at his hands, now trembling. "And I swear to God, Savannah, if you cut me up right now my blood wouldn't even fill that damned beer can."

To that, I was left completely and utterly speechless. As he spoke, I watched his 22-year-old forehead arch and furrow with wave-like wrinkles that he had most likely accrued while on tour. For whatever reason, I thought of how the young Marie Antoinette's hair turned white as a dove the night before she faced the guillotine. There was no doubt in my mind that Dean had cried about things I'd never dreamed of. After all, time and stress had carved veritable fjords into his barely legal face, and I knew that what I was witnessing was just the tip of the iceberg. All I could muster in response was a paltry
"I'm so sorry," but really, what more could I say? I wasn't there, and God permitting, I never would be.
Like my Uncle Don, I was flying above the clouds, in a place where tanks and landmines didn't exist. I would never know what he saw, just like my mom would never really know why sometimes her father made the gravy boat quiver at dinner. I wished I could have said something more comforting, something more powerful, maybe, but I just couldn't find the words within me. I was at a loss.

So instead of searching for words, I searched for flesh, instinctively placing Dean's prematurely wrinkled hands in mine. They were dry, tan, and calloused, and for a moment I wondered if I was feeling the cracked and compacted earth of Afghanistan that was currently being tread by soldiers' boots so many miles away.

"Wow," I muttered quietly.

"What?" he asked.

"Oh, nothing," I replied, "your hands just feel real warm to me." I smiled, and in silence we listened to the soft song of cicadas and Tom's snores as he rocked slowly back and forth on the rusty porch swing.
He shook his head, and from the corner of my eye I watched as a tear fell from his eyes and disappeared into the tiny tributaries that lined his face. "Damn," he said finally, "it's been too long since I've held one of these."

I looked at Dean and into the depths of those dark blue eyes whose stories I would never fully understand, then up to the starry night sky, squinting slightly as I watched the firefly red lights of a passing plane dance among them. "I know," I said. "I know."