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A Clean Break
April 16, 2013
One month before I ran from the police with my mother, I threw a baseball for the last time. I was twelve years old, in the eighth grade, and I had been cut once again from the middle school baseball team. Surely this was a reflection of the coach’s poor judgment, not my skills, as I intended to prove that late spring by digging my toes into the batter’s box for the town recreational team. There, I would send red-laced balls arcing through the sky on such a preposterous trajectory that they would crane the necks of the opposing outfielders—from neighboring Connecticut towns—who, seeing how far they’d have to chase my blasts, would simply give up. Just drop their gloves beside them and take a seat on the grass, awed and frustrated by the fact that I was—would be—what they could only dream of.
It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie
April 16, 2013
In the locked unit an old woman slumps on one of the mismatched sofas that line the walls, crocheted blanket draped over her head. Beatrice, I think. She snores softly, and I consider nudging her awake, leading her to the dining room. But I don’t. I need to hurry. Ada is yelling at one of the others to “Wake up! Wake up!” I grab the cassette player from the shelf near the door and head to the dining room—crowded with six tables, a wall of cupboards and a cart of bibs—to keep the residents busy while they wait for their eggs and toast.
Delusions of Grandeur
April 16, 2013
David is a certified helicopter pilot, a culinary chef, tried to serve in the U.S. Army but was discharged prior to enlisting because he bit a hole in the side of a sergeant’s cheek, has a medical degree, is a ninja, is the mathematical email assistant to a physicist at Harvard and, to keep the hundreds of girls who are after him at bay, he started sleeping on the couch in my son’s apartment. So he says.
Under the Cloud
February 12, 2013
On October 19, 1942, nearly eleven months after the United States declared war on Japan, Major General Leslie Groves, the military head of what came to be known as the Manhattan Project, sat with Robert Oppenheimer on the Twentieth Century Limited. They must have appeared an odd pair—Groves with his bulldog face and elephantine body sitting across from Oppenheimer, his frame nearly skeletal in its thinness as he fidgeted and chain-smoked Chesterfields. At an undefined point as the train sped between Chicago and New York, Groves made his decision about the scientific leadership for the bomb, “the Gadget,” as some subsequent combination of secrecy and perversity named it.
Stealing Pears
February 12, 2013
I knew there had been attacks here sometimes, men exposing themselves or robbing people who strayed here. I associated this area and the tramps who I thought lived here, wrongly, with the regicide judges, Goffe and Whalley, who, my mother told me, had hidden from King Charles I in Judges’ Cave, up beyond Whitney Avenue in West Rock Park.
My War Zone
December 10, 2012
by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough
When I was growing up war always hovered somewhere in the background. I was born after the Second World War ended, but for a long time, at least until the early ’60s, its presence was still palpable. We lived in an apartment building that had survived the fighting, though the one next to it hadn’t, and some ruins still remained. All over town there was rubble. When I was very little, I still heard warnings of kids finding unexploded bombs and being blown up. Soon most of the ruined buildings were bulldozed, but their underground cellars filled with bricks and debris were perfect places to play. The braver and older among us would explore them and tell hair-raising tales about skeletons and ghosts in Nazi uniforms.
Arts and Science
December 10, 2012
I was half in love with Tom McAfee before I ever met him because Shirley Tarbell, my friend from Waynesville High School, who taught me to inhale and lent me her copy of The Waste Land and later told me there was no scientific proof of the existence of the soul, came back from the University of Missouri and told me that she was in love with her English teacher, a romantic Southern gentleman with a beautiful voice and artistic hands. Shirley and I had already been in love with Elvis Presley and Montgomery Clift and several other unattainable men (and Shirley was very fond, too, of Mario Lanza), so it was only natural that we would fall in love with Mr. McAfee, an older man, a sensitive English professor who was also a poet.
Ostrander at the Door
July 24, 2012
by Aaron Gwynn
He stood six-foot two in socked feet, six-three in boots, and his hair was the color of rotting straw. His father was a former Green Beret who referred to his combat tours as “paid vacation.” His older brother, James, was an off-the-shelf psycho. James got shot in the leg one night at Dandy Donuts, drove himself to the hospital, had a doctor remove the bullet from his thigh and inject him with penicillin, drove back to Dandy’s, beat the man who shot him into a coma, then started in on the night-shift workers who’d watched it happen. So now the father was in prison for trafficking meth and the brother on his way for aggravated battery. Connolly Ostrander was fourteen at the time. He dropped out of high school and became a man.
All Ages Were Represented
July 24, 2012
by Jim Dameron
I don’t usually ride at night, but here I was setting out at about 9:30 PM. The evening seemed to grow lighter as the rain ended, and a matte-gray sky gave way to fast-moving clouds and a coral-colored sunset. It was cool for June, even by Portland standards, but I warmed up as I rode. I kept to the back streets, riding slowly, riding solo. But when I got within a few blocks of my destination, I saw more and more bicyclers. Two young women passed me on Sandy Boulevard riding no-handed, their arms spread outward like wings. I imagined them as fledglings, too big for the nest, eager to break out and fly.
The Blue Boot
July 24, 2012
by May-lee Chai
Starting out, my mother is excited to be driving. She sings along with the radio. The sunlight is yellow and bright on her left arm. She wears sunglasses and looks like a blonde Jackie O. But as we get closer to my grandmother’s house—past the six-hour mark, maybe seven and a half—after we pass through Iowa and we’re weaving through traffic on the I-880 bypass around the Quad Cities, definitely as we enter Illinois, she becomes visibly more nervous, tapping her nails on her thigh, worrying the cloth of her slacks between two fingers so that the fabric chirps like a cricket. She’s playing her Mother Angelica tapes, and you cannot sing along with a bunch of geriatric nuns who cannot carry a tune in the first place. Listening to their tapes is a form of penance in and of itself, and the fact that my mother has brought the entire set of twelve cassettes angers me. “Why do you have to listen to that?” I snarl. I am nearly eighteen, and snarling comes easily to me.
My Days with the Antimafia
January 6, 2012
by Thomas Swick
I followed Edoardo up to his office on the second floor. He told me the previous tenant had been a Mafioso. In one corner hung a large cutout of a tree with head shots of men—Libero Grassi, Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino (the two anti-Mafia magistrates assassinated in 1992)—pasted on its branches. Above them arched the words, in Italian: “You are not alone anymore.”
Strange Comfort
January 6, 2012
I had been going to Mia for about a year, and all of this was routine: the slight ping of the needle as it pierced my skin and the tap-tap of Mia’s finger as she delicately and authoritatively plunged the sharp tip to a painless spot below the surface. It always felt as though my body were a wall and she the handyman, expertly punching the Lilliputian nails into place. With the needles set and the blanket warming me, I rested on my back with my eyes closed and my arms by my sides. Several minutes must have passed. And then something really weird happened.
![34.3 (Fall 2011): "Legacy" [Cover art: Mosh Pit 2000 by Dan Witz]](http://www.missourireview.com/archives/files/3403big-150x198.jpg)
Dancing for the Bomb
October 8, 2011
As best as I remember, the super 8 silent video camera was a present for my fourteenth birthday. It involved a certain amount of pleading and door-banging and huffing and goose-stepping around the living room and usual good old-fashioned blackmail—but not too much, as my parents, in conflict with one another and, unbeknownst to their children, near divorce, were easy prey. Now, over thirty years later, the number 800 sticks in my mind—as in 800 Iranian tomans, equal to about $120 at the time, a large sum (about five months of our live-in maid’s salary). Or was it 8000 tomans, $1200? Eight thousand sounds more realistic for a foreign-made video camera in the prerevolutionary Iran of the mid-1970s. The super 8 was a Sony, black and sleek, with geared, battery-operated buttons for zoom and focus, the clicky turning of which sounded like happiness. Its hard case was padded with soft, spongy foam. Its manual, colorful and bright and glossy, was in multiple languages in parallel columns—a small modern Rosetta Stone in Tehran, the city in which I was born to a middle-class Jewish family and that I had come to think of as the land of my childhood exile.
The Carroll Capris
October 8, 2011
It was not that we thought they were gangsters when they walked through the door. In their long coats and stingy-brim hats, in the way they stood and the expressions on their faces, we could see they were from the rackets squad, and they were scary. By the time I was fourteen years old, I had attracted the attention of the police a few times, and I thought I knew what they were like. But the calm, almost bored look of these guys, who had simply strolled into the Capri Athletic Club on Carroll Street, was new to me.
Elegy and Narrative
July 17, 2011
The year after my wife died, I compulsively watched television. I needed distraction, to be entertained. What I could not stream online or order through the mail I sought out at the local video store. I was living in a suburb of Indianapolis, about a mile from a strip mall where I could rent, in a pinch, midseason discs of The Wire, The Office, Friday Night Lights. I got to know the clerks by name, then their shifts, finally their tastes. Once, I tried to make a formal complaint against the corporate headquarters regarding the suspicious and perpetual absence of Battlestar Galactica. It seemed unjust that the universe would conspire to deny my knowledge of its fictional origins. I worked up a good head of steam before leaving, distraught. The offense was egregious, and entirely my own. I went back a few days later, during a different shift.
Cruising through the Necropolis
July 17, 2011
As a tenth-grade biology student in suburban Cincinnati, Ohio, I was required to assemble a leaf collection. Aside from the catalpa, gingko, oak, maple and maybe buckeye, I can’t recall any of the other specimens that I ironed between two sheets of wax paper, identified by kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species, then handed over in an awkward three-ring binder with embarrassing sloppiness and bare-minimum ambition, to our teacher, Mr. Matthews. I squirm today to think of how my dunderheaded, adolescent indifference then was an insult to whatever Adam first named the hickory and the larch, the locust, the hornbeam and the leatherwood, and to all those later poets who tuned the language of the flora even further, with names like frosty lacebark elm, Warren’s red possumhaw, mountain silverbell, common rose mallow, weeping purple European beech, prariefire crabapple and sparkleberry winter holly.
Lay of The Land
July 8, 2011
Kabul, Afghanistan, November 2001
From my bed I hear Bro and our other translators laughing downstairs.
Eight A.M.
I slip on my clothes without bathing. We have little power, and the water never warms. I have decided to hold out against the frigid shower for days if necessary, until I can no longer stand my funky self. I run downstairs and warm water for coffee on the kitchen hotplate.
On Loneliness
July 1, 2011
At twenty-two, I joined the Peace Corps. There are plenty of reasons why people do this; some are ill conceived and don’t get shared aloud, perhaps because they can’t be articulated. For me, it was the need to escape what seemed the loneliest feeling in the world: I was in my twenties and sure I’d never be loved, equally sure that no one but I had ever felt this way before. I was years away from reading Lyn Hejinian, who illuminated the direness the woman I was at that time was certain of but couldn’t have expressed. “I would be single all my life and lonely in old age,” she explains of her own thoughts as a young woman. “In such a situation it is necessary to make a choice between contempt and an attempt at understanding, and yet it is difficult to know which is the form of retreat.” My retreat? I left the “Country Preference” line blank on my application and hoped whereever I was sent would be far enough away that nothing could follow me. I was assigned to a small village in the middle of Uzbekistan. It could have been anywhere: Africa or China or South America; it didn’t matter.
U.S. and Them, 1971
July 1, 2011
My father worked in a white T-shirt, off-white overalls and construction boots that were spattered with paint and crusted with Spackle. His fingers looked like wooden spindles, whitish as if they’d been stripped and then antiqued, and no matter how he scrubbed or what he wore, my father always smelled like turpentine: kind of clean and kind of poisonous. Maria said her father was an executive at General Electric. Terri’s father worked at the New York Stock Exchange. Donna told me her dad was a corporate attorney, and I had heard enough. Corporate attorney, commodities trader, CEO: suit-and-tie occupations. With the luxury of sitting behind a desk, my classmates’ fathers might as well be wearing slippers, too. I never went out of my way to tell anyone that my father was a house painter but I never denied him or what he did for a living. Whenever someone asked me who my father worked for, I was happy to announce that he worked for himself. I took pride in the fact that my father really worked for our bread and butter.
Helpline
July 1, 2011
by John Hales
Although we weren’t exactly drug-dependent, at least in terms of how drug dependency had been defined in the mimeographed packet we’d been handed while undergoing volunteer Helpline training, and we weren’t stoners compared to some of our friends who toked even more than we did, most of us who worked shifts at the university’s telephone crisis line smoked a lot of marijuana. We joked that it was an occupational hazard. All that stress. All those panicked calls from people not right at that moment enjoying the effects of their own drugs of choice, or telling us at great length the ways their lives truly and deeply sucked. We lit up the second our shifts were over, often on the way to our cars in the union building parking lot, sharing a joint and, if someone had thought ahead, a bottle of something, anything, alcoholic. And then, weather permitting, adjournment to a nearby city park to smoke and drink some more. All that drug talk on the phone; all that human misery we couldn’t avoid ingesting a fair amount of as it cascaded over the phone: fears of where bad trips were heading, thoughts of suicide, more mundane yet really depressing narratives of loneliness—I’m so ugly, I’m so alone, I’m so pathetic I’m calling you.
A Vocabulary for My Senses
March 1, 2011
After six months at language school in northern Ethopia, we finally moved south to our first mission station. Father, whose career as a doctor had been on hold, was posted to a hospital near the town of Soddo, in Wallayta district. There, we occupied a real house instead of a temporary apartment.
