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Agave Magazine
1. A G A V E M A G A Z I N E
L I T E R A T U R E : A R T : P H O T O G R A P H Y
Vo l . 2 , I s s u e 4 { S p r i n g 2 0 1 5 }
2. AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
It has been an unpredictable spring here in the United States. In
California, we continue to face unprecedented drought, as water, our
greatest natural resource, dwindles towards depletion. The anomaly of
water, strong enough to buttress ships but imperceptible enough to slip
through one’s fingers, is an extraordinary concept. In fact, if someone had
to describe its properties, it most certainly sounds more chimerical than
it does real.
Yet here we are, mostly liquid ourselves, able to access different modes
of creation, states of being, and cultivate sensibility through words and
images. More often than not, we can be transported without having to
leave the confines of our homes, subway seats or café arm chairs. This is
the marvel of the literary and artistic worlds, two spheres which compel
us to be readers, viewers and explorers alike.
In approaching this issue, I thought about the age-old proverb from
Thomas Fuller’s compendium: “In like a lion, out like a lamb.” We can
observe this seasonal change, entering forecefully as a winter storm and
departing on a summer breeze. There is a duality to the spring, as there
is with all seasons, but none quite as remarkable as snow giving way to
burgeoning flowers, trees brimming with green leaves, and the promise of
new life. Spring is hope, and “hope springs eternal” (to quote Alexander
Pope, another fine writer).
In this issue, our contributors push boundaries to explore and to
document universal themes of the human condition. Theirs is a quirky
world, often of darkness, where life plays out in the in-between, those
moments of consciousness that occur in the day-to-day when all bets are
off and no one is watching. It is an interesting perspective to navigate, to
say the least, and one worthy of further investigation.
Over the next few months we will be welcoming several new additions
to our editorial staff to help meet the demands of our expansion. As
Agave Press launches its Limited Edition Series in 2016, we will be
opening up a reading period for manuscripts and portfolios this fall.
More specifics are available on pg. 65 of this issue. All in all, we wish
to create more opportunities for expression through literature, art and
photography and to continue to welcome new readership worldwide.
To our outstanding contributors: I wish to thank-you for bringing a mix
of style and emotional savvy. It has been our absolute pleasure to select
your work and to get to know each of you as creatives through this issue.
To my editorial team: Anna, Deb, Grant and Issraa—thank you for your
continued support and dedication to our publication. It means the world.
Without further ado, I present to you, our treasured readers, Agave
Magazine {Spring 2015}.
{EDITOR’S NOTE}
Dear Readers,
Ariana Lyriotakis
Founder/Editor-in-Chief
Yours truly,
3. AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
HONEY
Tomas Narmontas
7
DARK BLUE
—Charles Thielman
8
OCEAN AT NORTHERN CALIFORNIA - CARMEL
—Melvin Lockett
9
CALIFORNIA
Skaidrite Stelzer
10
THE ECLIPSE
Norah Vawter
11
MY LOVE’S LOVE
Charlie Weber
15
UNSEEN BEAUTY IN A NEIGHBOURS’ EYE
Stephanie Daly
15
WINDOWS #1
Myrta Köhler
16
5 “HAIKUS”
Glenn Halak
16
HOW HE’LL GET ALONG WITHOUT HER
Richard Cecil
17
LIFE AFTER DEATH
Laurie Martin
18
CARRY YOUR SISTER
Tyler Oshiro
19
HARSH MAGENTAS: ESTHER #3
Ryan Kim
25
CHELSEA NIGHTS
William Doreski
26
MORE P.S.’S THAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Arturo H. Magaña
27
THE PHILOSOPHER’S HAND
Howard Winn
28
CRACKED CRACKERS
Edward Ferri, Jr.
28
BOB
Daniel Adams
29
{Contents}
4. AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
VEGETABLES
Kirie Pedersen
31
ELK RIVER
Daniel Lassell
36
THE CHARM
Liv Lansdale
36
THIS SHIP
Ethan Cunningham
36
TRADE WINDS
Paul Weidknecht
37
SUCCULENT
Ethan Cunningham
40
MYANMAR TRAVEL EXPEDITION #49
Pradeep Raja
41
ALONE IN THE TROPICS
John Grey
42
TARANTULAS IN PARADISE
Kelly Weber
42
CONFIDANTS
Natasha Natale
44
AFTER THE FIREBIRD
Ekaterina Vasilyeva
45
YOU COULD PLAY THE GAME
Bennett Durkan
47
RUMMAGE
Ethan Cunningham
50
ODE TO PROMISE
William Aarnes
50
THE MONTHLY BILL IS WHAT?
Robert A. Bak
52
MAN EDGE
Richard Vyse
53
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
Chad Lutz
54
5. AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
DESERT WALL
Brad Garber
55
THE CLEARING
Katherine Holmes
56
REMEMBER
Pavel Petr, Trans. by Sylva Ficová
57
TRIFOCALS
Leonard Orr
57
BAMBOO TRAIN
Maria Picone
58
SMOKE AND FOG
Anne Whitehouse
59
OUT AT SEA
Adam Lau
60
UNEASE
Brian Tatum
60
AND IN THE END YOU’LL HEAR ME CALLING
Terry Barca
61
SOUL ROSE
Kareem Berjaoui
66
THE ELEMENTS
Michelle Matheny
66
THE COLOR SERIES
Jyoti Omi Chowdhury
67
FIDES
Merridawn Duckler
69
MY FATHER’S BARN
Michael McManus
69
FORMATION
Christopher Mulrooney
71
TO UNCARING
Tatjana Debeljacki
71
CHARDONNAY
Michal Onofrey
72
AFTER GRACE
Connor McNulty
77
NUMBER 8
Sherley Wijawa
77
DREAMS #7
Alexandra Vacaroiu
80
6. AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
The story behind this photographic series
of images stems from facial or bodily flaws
that afflict us all, but which some women
try so desperately to hide. The objective was
to produce editorial photographs which
impart an easy, effortless beauty, the kind
of physical impression some women strive
to achieve. Dried flowers were used both to
indicate and to highlight the vulnerable
areas. The images were then created in
studio with daylight from a window on the
righthand side, along with the employment
of a reflector to diffuse greater amounts of
light overall.
{ON THE COVER}
—Nicole Lim, “Leave Her Wild”
Credits:
Model: Arina Z
Hair & makeup: Chris Toh
8. —7— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
HONEY
Perhaps
you could send me
some more.
I used only a drop
to soothe my throat.
But now
I sweeten my tea too.
—Tomas Narmontas
9. —8— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
DARK BLUE
First adagio threading stems,
I wake
to write before dawn,
dark window to blank wall.
Spirit bound by cedar incense strands,
and long tendons of wind-blown fog,
illusions ladled into my eyes
below another jet-contrailed sky.
Perhaps, spring wrapped yellow
on the eastern horizon will thread
soul glow through agate then pearl.
Votive flame through glass.
Dew beads on a crow’s wings
as time washes chalk lines off asphalt.
I peer inside receding dark blue,
raven feathers on antlered skull
one dream stride from road gravel.
My life
on a flatbed truck gathering starlight.
—Charles Thielman
10. —9— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
—Melvin Lockett, “Ocean at Northern California - Carmel”
11. —10— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
CALIFORNIA
The place beside an ocean where I could sit on a crag
watching waves expand,
now seems shrunken, overtaken.
The Sufi swirl in Peoples’ Park,
nakedness wishing to reveal more than freedom;
how did the fabric stretch then,
which now is knit so tightly?
Delusions and diluted soup
snap back suddenly into this new world
of computers that seem to promise
something else behind the screen,
behind the gray space,
or blue.
The place the words come from,
responding to the tap of dead fingers.
The world grows smaller.
The ocean turns the eye back,
not allowing infinity.
But today Kelly brings me an eggplant.
Unexpected,
on my desk it glows
like a waxed black heart.
—Skaidrite Stelzer
12. —11— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
THE ECLIPSE
—Norah Vawter
In the months before my 12th birthday, I started overhearing whispers among
the adults about my father Max’s health. By February, I could detect a faint bluish
tinge to his lips. I always knew Max had a heart condition. He’d had surgery when
I was a baby. Nobody talked it about much, and he never seemed sick. But in April,
shortly after I turned 12, he told me that he would have to undergo another open-
heart surgery.
That April morning, a Sunday, we were sitting on a picnic blanket on the beach,
the particular stretch of the Atlantic that Max and I had decided belonged to us. We
both had bundled up in thick sweaters. Beside us Max had dug a fire pit and was
using it to grill steaks for the two of us.
He lit a cigarette on the flames as he explained what a quadruple bypass was.
“You don’t remember my first surgery. You were only one year old.”
“Rose remembers it.”
“Don’t call your mother by her first name.”
“She’s been telling you to quit smoking for years. Why are you still smoking?
Even now?”
Max ran his free hand through his graying hair. He looked very, very tired. He
had been working so much lately, getting in at midnight from conventions in Boston
and New York, sleeping until noon or later, and wearing his old red bathrobe around
the house. “Every man has his poison.”
“You could at least try to quit.”
“I am.”
That was when I asked him if he was going to die.
And he laughed, but not with his eyes. “No, honey. Of course I’m not going to die.
This surgery is really quite routine.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
The night my father died there was a lunar eclipse. A full lunar eclipse. In order
for the entire moon to be in shadow, it must align with the earth and sun precisely,
carefully, and perfectly. The calculations are tedious and beautiful at the same time,
and I spent the day of Max’s death working out the geometry, the angles of earth,
moon, and sun. I sat in my bedroom‚ the room that had once been Aunt Beth’s. I
sat underneath the glow-in-the-dark stars I’d arranged into the constellations on my
ceiling, and I did not cry. I was alone in the house most of the day. Everyone else was
at the hospital.
When they got home from Boston Memorial, my mother had been unable to
speak for almost an hour. I already knew. I knew as soon as I heard the front door
open and the group of them thumping and rolling into the house. I left my room for
a minute to peek down the stairs and see my mother, my aunts, my grandfather, and
Mina, all sitting or standing or walking around very quietly. If they spoke it was soft
and sad. I could not hear what they said. But I knew.
I wondered if Max had had a dream about this.
I had had a dream about this. Perhaps that’s why I went back to my four-poster
bed, underneath my fake stars, and worked on the math until my mother came in at
last.
Mina pushed Rose’s wheelchair over the hump of the doorway before smiling
sadly at me and leaving, closing the door behind her. My mother had been confined
to a wheelchair since I was four years old, when an accident had severed her spine
and paralyzed her from the neck down.
In my dream I had been very still. In my dream I had worn the same black t-shirt,
the same red lipstick, the same worn-out jeans. In my dream Max’s voice had been
singing, “Take me out to the ball game,” coming from some place beyond the fake
stars.
In real life, there was no singing. My mother seemed to have lost her speech. In
the silence, I imagined his smooth, deep voice.
Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out to the park,
Buy me a hot dog and cracker jacks,
I don’t care if we never get back,
Cause it’s root, root, root for the home team,
If they don’t win it, it’s a shame,
Cause it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out,
In the old ball game.
13. —12— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
“Love,” she said finally. “I need to tell you something. Something I never wanted
to have to tell you.” I could see her keeping back tears. I could see how brave she was
trying to be for me. I didn’t know what to say.
“He couldn’t make it, love,” she told me, one tear running down her cheek. “It’s
just...”
And for my mother’s sake, I pretended to be surprised. “What do you mean?” I
said, the fear in my voice half real, half fake. “He didn’t...”
“He died, Anna. He just couldn’t make it.” I cried real tears. I got up off the bed
because I knew she needed me to be as shocked as I was supposed to be. I wrapped
my arms around my mother and we cried for a very long time, and we didn’t speak
much at all, and I don’t know who was comforting who.
Max had never broken a promise to me before.
Max died at 6:03 Eastern Standard Time. The date was August 1, 1992. He died
at Boston Memorial, in a narrow white bed I never saw. He wouldn’t let me visit. He
didn’t want me to see him that way. My family has told me, in the years since his
death, how lucky I am not to have seen him gray and weak and hooked up to all those
wires and tubes. They have repeated this maxim over and over and over again.
Lucky girl, to have your father strong and wise in your mind, not a broken bird of a
man.
Lucky girl, to say goodbye in your own way.
Lucky girl, to stay a girl for a while longer, to be shielded from death.
Lucky girl.
And I sat beneath my fake stars, and I erased my lines if they went jagged, and
thoughtofthedozensoftimesthatIhadbeendraggedtothehospitaltosaygoodbye
to my mother. In a way, I suppose I said goodbye to her every morning when I woke
up and every night right before I went to sleep. Regardless of whether she was
particularly ill. With Rose, there was always a chance that in a moment, she would
be gone.
My room looked a hurricane had hit it. Clothes were strewn along the floor,
books piled haphazardly around the room, and I had hung all my posters at strange
angles. Earlier in the summer, I had painted lines from books and songs I liked onto
my mahogany furniture. The paint on the expensive furniture was black finger nail
polish, the kind with just a touch of sparkle flowing through it.
At 10:35 pm on August 1, my mother rolled into my bedroom again. I had
pretended to go to sleep. When I heard her coming, I had just enough time to stash
my math and my flashlight underneath my pillow. She said nothing, simply rolled
in close to my bed, and sat there for some time before engaging her power chair
and driving straight backward. There was no room for her to turn around. As she
maneuvered out of my doorway, I opened my eyes for just a fraction of a second and
saw the tears streaming down my mother’s face. I remember thinking how strange it
was that she was able to cry so silently. Usually she was terribly loud when she wept.
Theeclipsewouldbeginatmidnight,accordingtoourlocalmeteorologist.Iliked
the clarity of that beginning, as if the moon was only going into shadow on the first
day of my father’s death. At 11:15, precisely, I got out of bed, put on my sneakers,
and climbed out of the window and carefully down the drainpipe. The moon was
still full, and it was a clear, cloudless night. As I walked toward town, I pulled on a
faded blue sweatshirt I had stolen from my father’s wardrobe. It said, “The City That
Care Forgot” in graying black letters.
Willie Plum sat on the dune that he and I had claimed as our own, some 100 feet
from Max’s stretch of beach. He sat on an old blanket, his shoes off, his feet dug into
the sand. Beside him sat a brown paper bag. He was reading a book of short stories
by Nathaniel Hawthorne with the aid of a blowtorch.
“Really Will?” I asked as I sat down beside him, tossing my geometry into his lap.
“That same book again?”
“I like it. It’s comforting. Wow, Anna. This looks solid,” he said, looking at my
geometry.
“It ought to be. I‚‘ve been working on it all day.”
“I’m so sorry, Anna. How’re you holding up?”
I looked out at the black water, at the way the moonlight ran across the waves and
the sea foam.
I shrugged. Willie pulled out a bottle of bourbon he had stolen from his father’s
liquor cabinet, and two ice-cold cans of Coke. Neither of us had ever had a drink
before, and I knew Max would be furious, but something inside me longed for the
sharp, bitter taste of liquor. I had asked my mother once why people in movies made
faces when they drank, and she had told me about this taste. So I sipped at the Coke
as Willie told me to, creating a space at the top, and nodded as he poured a dash of
bourbon into it.
“I don’t know how strong this is going to be. So go slow, Anna Rose,” he said with
a sad smile.
The waves beat against the shore, reminding me with each small crash that the
world was still here.
I felt like I was in good hands. Willie’s mother had died when he was five after
all, the year before I met him. He didn’t talk about it much, but I knew that he
14. —13— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
remembered her.
I smiled back my own sad smile, and sipped the bourbon and Coke from the can.
It tasted worse than I expected, and I felt my eyes popping at the taste of metal and
sin. Willie was making a terrible face.
“Goddamn,” he said.
“Yeah. Give me some more.”
“More?”
I nodded, and watched as Willie poured another dash of bourbon into my Coke
can. This was the first time all day that I could feel any kind of sensation, even if the
first shock of the liquor was now making me fuzzy, almost numb. Suddenly, without
any warning, I felt tears running down my cheeks. I leaned into Willie’s arm and put
my head on his shoulder. “Did I tell you I think Max was an alcoholic?”
“I never saw him drink, Anna Rose.” Willie was staring at the water now.
“Exactly.”
“There’s plenty of people who just don’t drink,” Willie said as he stroked my hair
with his free hand. “Don’t think bad things about your father just because he broke a
promise he never could have kept in the first place.”
“It’s not a bad thing if he was an alcoholic and he stopped.”
Willie looked at his watch and told me that we had 15 minutes before the eclipse
would start. He began to read his book to me. I listened only for the rhythm of his
voice. I already knew the stories. He held the blowtorch a good distance from my
face and hair, but I could feel the heat from the flame on my left cheek.
Finally the shadow arrived. Willie put out the blowtorch and lay down his book.
Neither of us said anything. We just watched as it slowly crept across the gleaming
moon, stealing one glimmer of light after another, until the moon was a half moon,
then a fat crescent, and then a very tiny crescent. As the light went, the night got
blacker and the water got blacker.
“Five minutes until totality,” Willie told me, stroking my hair once again.
“Goodbye, Max,” I said as the shadow took another sliver of moon. “We had a
grand old time.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Watson,” Willie said, his voice choking a little. I sat up to see my
friend wiping tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. “Say hello to my mother.”
“Do you ever stop missing her?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “No,” he said. And then, “Your dad was really solid, Anna
Rose.”
“He was a superhero.”
“Maybe he was.”
“I wonder if he dreamed about this.”
Willie glanced at me with narrowed eyes. “What?” he said.
“Nothing. Silly thought,” I told him with a small, sad laugh. I drank another gulp
of bourbon and Coke. “Do you feel drunk?”
“I don’t know what drunk is supposed to feel like. I feel kind of dizzy though.”
SodidI.Ilookedbackatthemoonjustintimetoseethelastsliverofmoonlighteaten
byshadow.Igaspedasthatlightdiedouttoleaveonlyadarkimprintwherethemoon
had been. Willie wrapped his arm around my shoulder and pulled me closer to him.
“He’s gone, Willie,” I said, my voice not quite steady. “He’s actually gone.”
“I know.”
“We can’t go to sleep tonight. We have to stay up all night.”
“A vigil?”
“Something like that.”
“There’s only five minutes of totality, Anna.”
“We should say something about him,” I told Willie as I sat up and ran my fingers
through the sand. “What will you remember about Max Watson?”
Willie sat very still for a moment, looking at the dark moon. He gulped his
bourbon and Coke and narrowed his eyes at the sky. “I’ll remember that book he
stole from the Boston Public Library for my dad. And his fried chicken. And the way
he always looked you in the eye when he talked, even if you were a little kid.”
I smiled at Willie.
“What about you, Anna? Three minutes of totality left.”
“A lot of things. The way he made me hold my breath as we crossed over the state
line. The way he made things special when they weren’t really. The half-birthday
party he threw for me when my mother got paralyzed. The southern accent that
crept into his voice when he was tired. His hand on my waist, teaching me to dance.
His wingtip shoes. The way the wind felt when he was around. The way the world
felt when he was around. Like it could fit together. Like we could make a truce with
God.”
“Do you believe in God?” Willie wanted to know.
“I don’t know. God seems to have it out for me, if he exists, so maybe it’s better if
he doesn’t. Do you?”
“No.” He sighed and looked back at the place that the moon should have been.
And though I didn’t say it out loud, I thought to myself then that I did believe in
numbers. In arithmetic and algebra and geometry, in the calculus I hadn’t learned
yet but I had heard was the mathematics of time. I believed in counting to infinity.
I believed in the number of feet in a mile, in the number of inches it would take
to circle the earth. I believed that a second was based on a heartbeat, and that all I
needed to live my life was a good watch, a good ruler, and a TI-82 calculator.
I didn’t learn about entropy until later.
Entropy tried to nibble the numbers away from me whether I knew its name or
15. —14— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
not. And that night, I felt the concept of entropy creeping into my life even more
so than it had done before. Because Max had been a keeper of order and light. Max
had been the one that would save us all no matter that the world had every reason to
swallow us up and spit us out. No matter that we should all be pulp.
I should have been a heroin addict, but I had heroes in my life.
So that night as I wept silently and held Willie’s hand, I looked at my watch to
count down the seconds. “30 seconds,” I told my friend. And then I tried to make my
body as still and quiet as I could, so that I could count 30 heartbeats. I listened to the
waves beating on the shore and the wind blowing off the waves. At 31 heartbeats, I
saw a tiny bit of crescent moon re-emerge.
“That’s it,” I said, not sure if I was talking to Willie or the ocean or the air or to myself.
“That’s it.”
We sat in silence for a long time, watching the new moonlight dance on the waves,
watching it change from a sliver to a real crescent to a half moon, and finally, at 1:17
it became whole again.
“Do you want to go swimming?” Willie asked when the moon had been whole
for 10 minutes.
My Coke can was empty and the world looked indistinct. “We’ve been drinking.”
He laughed a hollow laugh. “That we have.”
“Drunk people are always going swimming and drowning. I’d rather not drown.”
He contemplated this idea for a minute, and nodded seriously at me. “You want
to go wading then?”
I shrugged and began to roll up my blue jeans. He did the same, and then stood
up and pulled me up with him a second later. “It will be cold,” he said, swaying a little
on his feet. “I just wanted to remind you of that.”
I did a fake curtsy and almost fell over. “Thank you, kind sir,‚ I said, and one tiny
giggle escaped from my lips.
We half stumbled, half ran to the waves, and when we got there, I felt like a baby
just learning to walk. I stuck my foot in the ocean and shrieked at the water’s frigid
temperature for the first time in years.
“What kind of New England girl are you now?” Willie asked.
“The kind that didn’t see snow until she was six.”
“It doesn’t snow in New Orleans?”
“You’re not that stupid, Will.”
“You’re not that southern, Anna Rose.” He grabbed my waist with his right hand,
my right hand with his left. We waltzed in that ocean, as Willie counted the beat, his
breath on my ear. “One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three.”
“I love three’s,” I said with perhaps too much enthusiasm.
He laughed. “I know. I don’t get it, but I know.”
“It’s a dreadfully important number, Will.”
He laughed again. “Of course it is. And this is the only dance step I know.”
“Max taught me the jitterbug, but I’ll never get it right at this point.”
“We’ll stick to the waltz.” And for some reason, Willie found this extraordinarily
funny. He laughed like a hyena. After a long while, I laughed too.
At 4:30 the sun came up. We had spent the last couple hours reading Hawthorne
aloud and pinching each other whenever we were about to go to sleep. At 5:00, I told
Willie that I thought we could sleep now. So we lay down next to each other on the
old, scratchy blanket, my head on his shoulder, his hand holding mine.
I woke up as Willie shook my shoulder roughly. “We should get home, Anna,
before we get in trouble,” he said.
I blinked in the full morning light, feeling the throbbing of a headache. We both
crawled to our feet. Willie grabbed up the blanket, his book, the blowtorch, and
stuffed the liquor bottle and the empty cans back into his brown paper bag. I glanced
at my watch. It was 6:03 am, Eastern Standard Time.
Max had been dead for exactly one half of one day. A day is measured by the time
it takes for the earth to rotate once, from light to shadow and back to light again.
So Max had been dead for half a rotation, for twelve hours, for 720 minutes, for 43,
200 seconds, for about that many heartbeats. I wished that I had been counting the
breaths that I had taken, the steps that I had stepped, the number of times I had
thought of him, the number of angry thoughts I had had every minute since he died.
Willie and I walked together until he turned left on Oak Street and I turned right.
As I crept into my house, I thought for just a second that Max would be there. I
imagined him running down the stairs, furious at me, telling me that he wasn’t going
to let me outside for a month, and forget about parties and bonfires and boys , telling
me I wasn’t going to prom, let alone anywhere near Willie again in the near future.
But nobody came running down the stairs.
As I climbed up the stairs, I glanced back down at the parlor. Honey lay on the
couch, looking up at me, but she looked too sad to be angry. She just shook her
head and shut her eyes again. “You can’t sleep either?” I whispered. She shook her
head, then nodded towards my Aunt Izzie, who was snoring on the other couch. I
understood that Izzie would not be as forgiving.
Lying down in bed, I didn’t bother to brush the sand off my clothes or out of my
hair. Something about sleeping in a gritty, uncomfortable bed appealed to me. As I
fell asleep, I could smell the salt in my hair. I tried to remember what Max smelled
like, but I couldn’t place a single smell with my father. So I imagined that he smelled
16. —15— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
like the ocean, because he had been a force of nature, and because he had left me
alone in the Greek Revival, left me like an ocean wave that is sucked back into the
deep playland of the sea. My glow in the dark stars were dull and yellow now, weak
imitations of the actual stars that had also left me. I was alone with the sunlight. I
burrowed my head under the pillow, looking for a tiny bit of darkness. I found it as I
drifted off to sleep.
—Stephanie Daly, “Unseen Beauty in a Neighbours’ Eye”
MY LOVE’S LOVE
Our bodies
intertwine
one last time
qualms vanquished
from fatigue
your lips, burned
press on mine
I breathe in
our presence
in waves of
orange, rose
violet
at day’s end
our faces
feverish
an artist
fervently
places brush
to canvas
—Charlie Weber
17. —16— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
—Myrta Köhler, “Windows #1”
5 “HAIKUS”
I
black lava rock mesa and scratches of red cedar
a heron skims past an old fence and ruins
no one knows how to live here anymore
II
rivulets in sand; foothills and their giant gullies
skinny lines of limestone; fossils of the horizon
thoughts; contrails in a pale sky
III
dog on a leash, nose to the ground
watercolor brush on a small rectangle of paper
the bright odor of ochre soil
IV
passing beyond starlight
a traveler plunges into darkness
rain starts to fall, craters in the cold dust
V
depths of orange in the western sky
the roadrunner must be in bed by now
a sudden cry; is that the sound of love?
—Glenn Halak
18. —17— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
HOW HE’LL GET ALONG WITHOUT HER
Tofu dogs and tater tots for supper.
Betty Crocker biscuits and jam for breakfast.
Visits from Hooper, the next door neighbor’s cat.
(Yes, you can come in, Hoops, she’s away.)
A cellar full of wine to inventory,
but not to drink. Les Miserables in bed
every night until his eyelids droop
and the big book slips his grasp and thumps his chest.
Long evening walks. Afternoon free concerts.
Library DVDs of trashy movies,
his chance to take in Men In Black at last!
Unmade bed, uncleaned toilet, so what?
The kitchen will become the chemistry set
his mother wouldn’t let him have for Christmas,
and when his loaves bake into leaden bricks
he’ll eat, not throw away, his bread mistakes
(hmm‚ not bad with moldy cheese and mustard.)
When he wakes pre-dawn to no one sleeping beside him,
Morning Edition’s host will talk to him,
and when he trudges home from work at six,
All Things Considered’s hosts will fill him in
on terrible things that happened, but not to him:
not drowned, not starved, not under investigation
for money laundering. He’ll never launder a thing,
28 days on a pair of Levis jeans
and a gray flannel shirt that will not show its stains
and will not stink because he’ll shower daily.
In the midst of dirt and disorder, he’ll keep clean,
and he won’t go wild‚ except at night in dreams.
—Richard Cecil
20. —19— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
CARRY YOUR SISTER
—Tyler Oshiro
Two weeks before my 17th birthday, the Nobuko girl went missing. The news
washed over Kohola, our small Big Island town, like the slow rush of the dark blue
sea. Back then, I told my six-year-old sister that we lived on the top of a humpbacked
whale.Ourworldrockedwitheveryshiftingtide.Intimeslikethose,whenthewhole
town sunk into uneasiness, it was impossible to ignore. The trade winds carried
gossip like rippling heat across the pale blue sky and even the black and yellow myna
birds, chattering in the grassy shade of our plumeria tree, seemed to be discussing
the fate of Sarah Nobuko.
When the news reached me, I was bent over a leaf-shaped plank of wood and
foam nine feet long, grating steel mesh against its uneven edges. In 1983, when your
surfboard broke, you made a new one yourself.
My mother stepped into the doorway of our makeshift garage, a rusty metal roof
propped up on mismatched two-by-fours. She crossed her arms to hide her missing
breast.
“the Nobuko girl is missing,” she said.
It stopped me for a second before I could continue the back and forth of steel
mesh against grainy wood. I didn’t have time to worry about her. I had to finish the
board in time for my 17th birthday and it still needed smoothing and casting in resin.
“Yoshio, did you hear me? I said Sarah Nobuko is missing.”
I stopped and looked up at my Mom, what the cancer left of her. Red kerchief
tied around her bald head, drawn in eyebrows. Narrow eyes that I didn’t inherit, thin
lips and smooth skin that I did. She was beautiful even in her sickness, like a fading
flower. I turned away.
“Yeah, I heard,” I said.
“Okay, then. Let’s go. The whole town is going to look for her.”
I dropped the mesh onto the board, which sat lifeless on its wooden horses, the
way it had for weeks.
“For what? She just hiding. She going come back like last time,” I answered back
in pidgin, even though Mom liked to use proper English since she learned it in
college.
The Nobuko girl had wandered off before, but they found her at the park on
the seesaw within hours. If they were smart, it would have been the first place they
looked. But everyone was always so worried about the other dangers of our town,
the feral pigs that roamed forest at our backs, the unpredictable lava that blazed
down the southern coast. That, combined with the general paranoia of economic
collapse and the threat of mushroom clouds; adults tended to fear the worst.
“Kenneth Yoshio, you will come with us to look for her. What if your sister was
missing?”
I picked up the steel mesh again, ground it in my hand, stretched my tired arms.
“Then I go look myself. For what make the whole town go look? They don’t know her,
how they going know where she would go?”
“That doesn’t matter. We need to go and support the Nobuko family,” she said,
narrowing her eye. We’re leaving in five minutes.”
Mom turned on her heel and marched back into the house, slamming the screen
door behind her with a loud thwack. She still moved with the grace of a dancer,
refusing to let the chemo slow her down. Mom always said Dad was the strong one,
so brave, him, fighting in the war. He’s a lieutenant, you know. But I didn’t know. The
most we got from him was a letter at Christmas, return address “Private Training
Facility, Tempe AZ” and a small check every month from the U.S. Army.
He came back once, for my 10th birthday. He was all smiles, tall and blonde, a
pure white longboard tucked under his big arm: my birthday gift. He never learned
how to surf, he told me, that’s why he couldn’t fit in. But maybe if I learned, the
people of Kohola would accept me. Back then, I couldn’t tell him that they just hated
the color of his skin, but we both knew. He wasn’t from here, and he couldn’t stay. He
didn’t even last a week that time but it was long enough for him to father a second
child. He’d only seen Sachiko in pictures and my Mom didn’t even tell him about her
cancer. She never shared her problems with anybody. Sometimes not even me.
I’d spent almost seven years giving up on my father ever coming back, but in
those same seven years, I’d taken that white longboard to the waves every weekend.
I shared the Nobuko girl’s need to escape from it all, to duck-dive under the waves
and paddle out through the whitewash or wander off to a secret place where no
one could find you. But each victory was hollow. At the end of every day, the waves
pushed me back to shore, where my responsibilities waited. At the end of every
search, the townspeople led Sarah home, careful to keep her from ever slipping off
the smooth back of the whale into unforgiving waters.
I passed through the house, avocado-green carpeted floors creaking underneath
my feet. When I turned into the hallway, my thigh bumped my sister’s face.
“Ow.” She rubbed her little nose. “Ma said hurry up. We gotta find Sarah.”
“I’m coming. See?” I said.
“You stink.”
21. —20— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
“Oh.”
I dipped into my room to put on some deodorant and change my shirt. By the
time I walked to the front yard, my six-year-old sister and my mother were waiting
together impatiently. Mom watched me, eyes narrowed in the harsh glare of light off
the bright green grass, her lips pursed tight. She’d give me the cold shoulder after our
argument, let me feel guilty. That was her style.
“Yo-yo,” Sachi asked, tugging on my tank top. “Try pick me up?”
Sachi called me Yo-yo since she learned how to speak. She had trouble with the
sh- sound, and Mom feared something was wrong with her brain, like the Nobuko
girl. Even though Sachi’s face wasn’t characteristic of Down’s like Sarah’s, Mom had
heard stories. Sachi learned over time, though, and got smarter than I was at her age.
But even after she could pronounce my name, Yoshio, she never stopped calling me
Yo-yo.
“For what? I thought we gotta go,” I asked Mom. She ignored me.
“To pick one flower for my hair. Sarah likes um. Maybe she going see um and
come out from hiding.”
I rolled my eyes. “No be stupid.” Sachi stuck out her lower lip and made a habut
face.
“Yoshio, carry your sister,” Mom said. Every Japanese mom, kindergarten teacher
or not, must have practiced their scolding voice with the other Japanese moms. They
all used that same “I-know-better-than-you” attitude. And normally she stared at me
until I obeyed, but this time she looked away instead, clutching her bad arm. She
always took Sachi’s side. Maybe she felt she had to. Mom hadn’t been able to carry
Sachi herself since the surgery.
The old plumeria tree framed our house in its knobby gray branches and long
green leaves. I gave in and lifted Sachi up to meet its bright pink petals. My arms
were strong from lifting sacks of mac nut husks at work, but they burned from the
daily strain. I ached with fatigue, with the wear of time and repeated labor. Even little
Sachiko felt heavy.
She picked a flower from the tree then closed her eyes.
“Okay, put me down.”
I put her down.
“Get sap?” she asked. She held it out at arm’s length, the way she held sparklers
on New Year’s Eve. I took the flower from her hand and rubbed the milky bottom
against a branch. I blew on the stem and held it out to her.
“There.”
Her hazel eyes lit up as she grabbed the plumeria with her tiny fingers. The pink
blossom shone bright against her little brown pigtails. Her bangs cut straight across
her forehead, the chawan-bowl haircut that looked like Mom had put an actual
bowl over her head and cut around the edges. Sarah’s mom cut her hair in the same
Japanese style.
Even though we were only half-Japanese, since Dad was haole, Mom was intent
on us looking the part of full-blooded like her. She taught us how to use chopsticks,
to take food when visiting our friends, to honor our responsibilities. I didn’t let her
touch my hair anymore, though. It grew long and parted in the middle‚ the style of
the time.
Sachi tugged on the little floral print dress Mom had sewn with fabric from
Shintaku General store. “Okay, let’s go,” she said and marched across our small lawn
and into the street. Every two steps she looked around carefully, as if the Nobuko girl
might appear at any second.
I hesitated. “Ma, you sure you going?” I turned to her, trying to make up for the
argument earlier, “I can just take Sachi and go look.”
“Of course I’m going, Yoshio. I’m not helpless,” she said harshly. We both knew
that wasn’t the case. I couldn’t forget the sound of vomit hitting the porcelain edge
of the toilet bowl, the sight of her smooth black hair thrown into the rubbish can, the
feel of my hands on her thin frame like handling broken glass as I tucked her into bed
on those nights when her eyelids closed against her will. After two years of fighting
her cancer, I woke up every day hoping to find her in the kitchen, not sure what I’d
do the day I found it empty.
She turned her shoulder on me and followed my sister out. Sachi waited for us
at the corner where our driveway met the red dirt road. Our town was too small for
sidewalks so we stuck to the edge of the road, just in case, as we followed the path
down to the run-down Sugar Mill. I tried not to look at the horizon, where the ocean
met the sky and the pull of the tide awaited my return.
The afternoon sun burned hot on our backs and shoulders. It bounced off of
everything. I squinted my eyes to make out the rusty metal sign of the general store,
the empty seesaw on the park playground, the pale yellow goalposts of the Kohola
High football field.
Sachi reached up to grab Mom’s right hand, then drew back quickly. It was the
bad side, the one that had swelled up after the surgery. Mom didn’t notice, but I
watched Sachi switch to her left side and grab her hand tight. Mom had refused to
tell her about the cancer. After we visited her in the hospital, after the surgery, I spent
the entire car ride home convincing her that Mom was just sick, like when she had
a cold, only it was a really bad cold, and she needed really strong medicine to cure it.
Sachi listened quietly in the passenger seat as the car rocked over the hills of Saddle
Road.
Mom had just taught me how to drive the month before, before she got sick. For
weeks I fumbled with the clutch, working the pedal with my goofy foot as the car
22. —21— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
bucked and she laughed at her own bad advice, passenger seat rocking, clutching her
chest. I learned that I did not have her grace and that I hated stop signs.
I only passed the driving test because old man Fukumoto knew about her surgery
in Hilo. Everybody in our town knew. That’s why they gave us those looks of pity as
weapproachedtheSugarMill,wherethetowngathered.Thefamiliesthatstayed,the
ones that hadn’t lost their jobs or moved away when B&D Corporation announced
the sugar mill closures, the remnants of our town watched us walk down the street:
Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Hawaiians, and even Haoles, race didn’t matter. This
community had gathered together to search for the Nobuko girl, perhaps because
we were losing everything and we knew that soon all we’d have left was each other.
Their glances softened as they saw my mother and her sunken cheeks, Sachi holding
her thin arm. Their eyes fell on me, too, the man of the family, and a felt a flush creep
up my sun-browned cheeks. Sometimes I thought if I paddled out far enough on
my board, I’d reach Atlantis, or Arizona, and leave everything behind. Someone else
could get cancer instead. Then I wouldn’t have to suffer because of it.
I stepped away from the shame of my family once we got close to the crowd. My
best friend Jimmy was already there, toeing the dirt with his slipper, so I went to
him quickly, bowing my head so I matched his height. His real name was Hajime.
I recognized him by the rat tail running down his back, which only made his face
look more rat-like. His beady eyes shifted left to right. I didn’t blame him for being
nervous.SarahNobukowashisgirlfriend’ssister.Hesmiledwhenhesawmecoming,
scrunching his eyes into crescents.
“We thought you guys no going come,” he nodded his head towards my Mom.
“Whynot?Notlikewenogetlegs,”Isaiddefensively.Ididn’twanttodealwithhis
pity again; I got enough of his hand-me-downs and handouts. Jimmy’s dad foresaw
the end of the sugar cane industry and threw his money into Hawaii’s new crop:
macadamia nuts. He gave me my job when we started getting the bills for Mom’s
treatments, said he was happy to help.
“Yeah, yeah. Sheesh. No need get all habut.” He jabbed me in the ribs, covering
up his worry with his typical humor.
“Ow. So what, then? We going make one perimeter or something?”
“Ho, Yosh. Been watching too much Hawaii 5-0 reruns, ah? Go tell Officer
Asuncion, go home‚ cuz you get um, Danno,” he wagged his eyebrows.
“Aw shaddup, Jimmy.” He laughed, but his smile faded when he saw the Nobuko
family talking to Officer Asuncion, the town’s chief of police. Julie Nobuko’s father
held her close, his arm around her shoulder, her eyes rimmed with red.
“You talked to her today or what?” I asked quietly.
“She never come school,” he answered, eyes fixed on his sort-of girlfriend. They
were going steady, but she told him to keep it secret at the time. Even Jimmy knew
he embarrassed her. No one took him seriously.
“You went call her house?” He shook his head, nervous. Julie was secretary of
our student government, even though she was only a sophomore like us. She sat
with Sarah every day at lunch. We all grew up on the same street, we knew Sarah had
Down’s, but we liked her anyway. She did great impressions of The Three Stooges and
knew all the words to the Cheers theme song. She sang it at least once a week.
Near the dying mill, people started to quiet down. Iron-rich Kohola dirt charred
the once-white metal walls of the building, walls waiting to crumble into metallic
dust and gears. In the air, the smell of burnt sugar hung thick as the molasses it came
from. Sunbeams blazed through the haze of cane waste and dust, setting the red dirt
alight. Officer Asuncion began assigning families to groups and locations around
town.
“Brah, no make sense, this,” I whispered.
Jimmy nodded. “You telling me. Not like she never did this before.”
“She no like people find her, she stay hiding. She going come out when she ready,
watch.” I understood her need to escape all too well.
“Yeah.Butwhatifshenoturnup?Imean,shegetDown’s,Yosh.Whatifsomething
went happen to her?” His eyes flickered to the peak of Kilauea, the source of the
orange-red lava and down to the thick green forest, trees and vines tangled tightly in
a dense wall.
“Then somebody gotta find her and bring her back, ah?” I said.
When we were kids, Jimmy and I read too much Hardy Boys. We thought we
could solve any problem— my Dad leaving for the military, his brother leaving for
the university, by searching for clues in the hidden places. The answers were just
hiding from us and we could find them if we tried hard enough.
He looked over to where Julie smoothed out the pleats in her pale blue skirt
with shaky hands. “We go tonight, then. The bamboo grove. That’s the only place
Asuncion don’t know about.”
Even at that young age, Jimmy and I learned that the world didn’t offer up its
secrets willingly. But in our search for clues, we did find secret spaces, places we
weren’t supposed to know about. We kept them secret. It made us special, that
knowledge. It gave us power. Maybe we couldn’t answer our problems, but we
learned how to hide from them when we needed to.
I knew Jimmy wanted to find Sarah himself, impress Julie and try to keep their
relationship alive. But I had my own priorities. Like finishing my board.
“Tonight? No can.”
“Why not? You gotta babysit again? Boy I tell you.”
“Shaddup, Jimmy. I stay trying for work on my board.”
He frowned. “How come taking you so long?”
23. —22— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
“Maybe cuz I gotta work for money, not just get from my dad, yeah? Life not that
easy for all us, k?” The words came out harsh. I had meant them to sound funny.
“Jeez, Yosh, no need the lecture. I get um. You going choose your surfboard over
one missing girl with Down’s. Some guy, you.”
“No make it, Jimmy. You know I no more time.”
“But you know they not going find her now,” he said, “We gotta be the heroes,
Yosh. We know where for look.”
It was true. Maybe we should have just gone then and there, but in those days,
we thought things would last forever, that we ruled time, not the other way around.
We thought somehow Sarah would stay alive until we found her, even if we made her
wait until late at night. Jimmy always dreamed big, liked to think of himself as the
hero. In his head, Julie would thank him for finding her sister alive and love him for
good. He wanted that more than anything. At that point, though, I just wanted to go
home and work on my board. I had my own problems.
“I still gotta be here, ah? Still gotta waste my time when I could be at home.”
“Eh you know what fine then. You think you so much better than all us cuz your
life so hard well fine then. I no need you.” He stuck his bottom lip out.
“Fine.”
“I just going go by myself, in the dark, with the pigs, by myself.”
“Fine.” Officer Asuncion called the families together. I started towards my sister.
“Maybe the obake going come get me, who knows? And my best friend stay at
home working on his board cuz he no care.”
I threw a shaka over my shoulder. I made up my mind to go long before that, but
it was fun to watch him suffer. Sometimes Jimmy and I were all each other had, and
if no one found the Nobuko girl by nightfall, we were her only hope. I found my
mom in the crowd by her red kerchief. My sister shifted from foot-to-foot at her side,
pigtails bobbing.
“Where you was?” she asked. She made her face into a miniature half-Japanese
version of Mom’s— eyebrows furrowed, lips tight.
“Talking to Jimmy,” I said.
“We gotta go down to the beach. With the Kaluas and the Galindas.”
We met up with the Kaluas, the Hawaiian family that lived near the school, and
the Galindas, the Filipino family that owned the town’s bakery. I waited in silence
as the adults talked story, the Kaluas and the Galindas asking, How you, Asami?
and Mom saying, Oh fine, I’m fine, because she was Japanese and tha’s how she was
supposed to answer. I heard Grandma lecture Mom for 11 years about that. After
Grandpa died in World War II, she had no one else to scold. Then Mom got pregnant
again by her stupid haole husband‚ and Grandma gave up. It was easier to pretend
we weren’t related. When Mom gave birth, she named her daughter Sachiko, happy
child. I think she hoped that my sister would grow up happy, live the life she always
wanted for herself. But when the cancer came, she realized she wouldn’t be around
to see it.
A couple of months earlier, I caught her in the kitchen on her hands and knees,
days after a chemo treatment. She held a scrub brush in her good hand, thin muscles
and brittle bones showing through her skin as she washed the floors, dipping into a
bleached blue bucket of soapy water. She was bald and weak and she wouldn’t admit
it, but I knew the chemo hurt her like poison.
I asked, “What chu doing?” angrily as if asking What chu thinking? and dropped
tothefloortotakethebucketawayfromher.Sheclutchedthebrushharder.Sudsran
down her arms. Me: Give it, Mom. Her: No, I can. And then me, in tears, insistent,
Give me the brush. And her in tears, no, I can, I can, sounding stubborn like Sachiko
and then the two of us stopping, both clutching the brush and covered in soapy
water and then laughing and crying at the same time. My mom, she didn’t listen to
anybody, not even me.
She insisted on walking along with us as we searched for the Nobuko girl. So after
an hour of yelling and watching the sun sink into the blue horizon, I got worried. But
she was fine. It had been a couple of weeks since her last treatment. She still yelled
with everyone else, “Sarah! Sarah Nobuko!”
Meanwhile, the teenagers‚ Äîme, Danny Kalua, and Lisa Galinda, hung at the
back of the group, looking for the Nobuko girl, but trying to act cool at the same
time. We couldn’t try too hard, even if we did want to find her. The sunlit clouds
faded to deep orange and pink as the trade winds picked up along the shoreline.
The waves folded over themselves in glassy curls, and I had to resist the urge to run
straight into them, had to settle for the coolness of the damp sand between my toes.
I strained my eyes against the setting sun, eager for any clue that would make this
search end faster, but still I saw nothing. No footprints, or sandals, or any signs she
was ever there. Maybe our only chance to find her would be at night with Jimmy.
I got so caught up in my own thoughts, I almost didn’t notice when Sachiko
nearly fell over in front of me, tired from all the walking. She stumbled in the sand,
rubbing her eyes. Her pigtails drooped. But she wouldn’t admit she was tired.
“We go home,” I told Mom. She opened her mouth to protest, then saw Sachi.
We looked around one last time, but the beach lay flat and empty. Mom nodded,
looking at Sachi, who held onto her hand.
“Carry your sister,” she said. Too tired to argue, I picked her up. The sand trailed
from her feet. Her chubby cheek fell softly onto my shoulder and she dozed off,
thumb in mouth. My bicep ached under her weight, but I tried not to complain.
We said our goodbyes to the Galindas and the Kaluas. We told them we hoped
someone found the Nobuko girl soon. They said the same.
24. —23— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
As the sky darkened from pink to deep purple, we walked along the side of the
dirt road back home. My muscles burned, so I kept adjusting Sachi, trying different
positions. But I was scared to wake her. The pink plumeria wilted from the heat and
wear. It draped itself over her ear.
We got home around 7:00 and Mom started dinner. I set Sachi onto the couch,
since she was dirty and couldn’t go in her bed. I was headed into the garage to get
back to my board when the phone rang. It would have to wait. Again.
“Hello,Asamispeaking,”Momsaid,“Uh-huh...noweneverfindher,didanyone?...
still missing. I see. Please call if you hear anything. Thank you. Goodbye.”
“Nobody went find her?” I asked. She shook her head.
“That was Hajime’s Mom.” She grabbed a knife from the block and sliced an
onion.
“What happens if we no find her soon?” I asked. Mom paused. She looked up. ‚
“Thenshe’llprobablydie,Yoshio.GrabtheotherboardandcuttheSPAM,please.”
She waved the knife as she said this. I was less nonchalant.
“What you mean, she going die? She’s only 12, she cannot die,” I said as I rustled
out the other cutting board.
“Says who, Yoshio? Who says bad things don’t happen to good people? Nobody
gets to pick and choose when they’re going to die, that’s not how it works. You better
learn that soon.”
“Soon? Why soon?” I clanged pots together, pretending to struggle to find the
cutting board, but really trying to drown out her words.
“You know why soon,” she shouted as she grabbed the cutting board herself and
dropped it in front of me. “The doctor said.”
“I know what the doctor said. But how he know? We get time, Ma.” The words
sputtered out as I pounded the SPAM from the can onto the counter.
“Yoshio, don’t play dumb. Someone has to be responsible for this family.” She
grabbed my arm in her hand firmly. Her bones felt hollow, like a bird’s. I shook her
hand off and stormed over to the door.
“Where are you going?” she called as I jammed my feet into my slippers and
swung the screen door open. “You better not be leaving.”
“I going find the Nobuko girl. We get time.”
“Yoshio, don’t you dare walk away from this family.” She pointed the knife at me
from across the kitchen and narrowed her eyes into a harsh glare.
I slammed the screen door behind me and sprinted all the way to Jimmy’s house
under the dark blue light of evening. I arrived at his window, panting, to collect him
for the search. We dragged our feet along the street to the park as the blue faded to
inky black. The yellow glow of the single streetlight and the pale white light of the
rising half moon barely lit the dark night. The park looked frozen in the shadows, as
if suddenly forgotten. The seesaw balanced halfway up, waiting for a push. An empty
swing hung patiently. Far at the edge of the park, at the edges of grass overgrown
with weeds, the back opened into a secret grove of bamboo, one of many hidden
places Jimmy and I had found. We sat down heavily on the swings, putting off the
search a little longer.
“I thought you no was going come,” Jimmy said, kicking up sand with his toe as
he pushed himself a few inches back and forth.
“How come?” I came for Jimmy, but sometimes I was sure the only thing we still
had in common was a love of pakalolo and a dream of getting off the rock. But then
again, we all wanted that.
“Well that surfboard so damn important to you.” He forced a smile. “I get
one surprise. Cuz kinda spooky out here, yeah? Going help with the nerves.” He
pulled out a baggie from his pocket. His fingers trembled as he rolled up the white
parchment of the joint.
“So what? It’s up to us, ah?” I asked.
Jimmy lit the joint with a shaking orange flame. He french-inhaled, sucking the
milky white smoke up into his nostrils, then exhaled heavily. It clouded in the air, fell
apart, and drifted up to meet the blinking stars.
“You got it, Yosh. Just like old times.”
“You really think she stay over here?” I asked him. It was our favorite spot, a
bamboo grove whose thin stalks grew thick with leaves, covering a clearing. The
clearing itself was nearly five square feet, closed off by a metal fence on one side. In
this space, we had shared our first joint, our first jug of sweet Sangria. We knew that
beyond the fence, Kohola’s back sloped down into its unforgiving forest.
“Well she never get taken out to sea, ah?”
“I no think so, we went look all over the beach and no sign of her.”
“And if she went to one other town, we would have heard. So she could only be
over there.” He jerked his head towards the cross-linked fence that blocked our town
from danger. Maybe Jimmy was right this time. He knew how to escape, too.
By the time we reached the fence, we finished the joint. I stamped it out with the
sole of my rubber slipper. Through our bloodshot eyes, the fuzzy world flickered at
its edges. Cricket chirps cut through the still air.
“Okay. But how come she go come over here?” I asked one last time. Officer
Asuncion had assigned a group to check the forest, but I knew they would only
search along the wide, marked entrance a mile uphill. No one else knew how to get
in this way.
“Maybe she thought she go hide here,” he said. “She could have found um when
she was wandering around, you know.”
I shook my head in disbelief before I realized what lay beneath my feet beside the
25. —24— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
white end of our joint. Under my slipper, crushed pink petals bent and spread, five
from each flower. Before I stepped on them, they were perfect pink plumerias, like
the one Sachi begged me to help her pick that morning. She said Sarah liked them. I
looked up. Even in the near darkness, the flowers shone in the moonlight, a soft and
inviting shade. The arms of the tree reached over the fence to us, dropping blossoms
and leaves in the bamboo clearing, where they glowed softly. The hairs on my neck
prickled.
“Shit.”The only sounds were my Converse sneakers and Jimmy’s Air Force
Ones rattling against the tall fence as I sprinted up it and he followed. At the top, a
panoramic view showed us the way the land sloped down on the other side, dipping
into the forest valley. Only the tops of trees caught the moonlight, which scattered
through the leaves.
I climbed down. Jimmy followed carefully. He opened his mouth to ask what
was going on, but shut it, silenced by the emptiness of the dark forest. Our almost
useless eyes could just barely tell a fern from a bush, and the silence rang hollow in
our ears. But there, to the right of me, the soft ground gave way to a footprint. Next
to it, more flattened leaves lay crushed underfoot. I followed the trail with my eyes,
tracing shapes in the scattered moonlight. I felt Jimmy tense up quick next to me. He
gripped my shoulder hard.
There, eyes glassy in the moonlight, downward brow bloody, lay the Nobuko girl.
Her pale skin was covered in bruises, and in her hand, I could barely make out the
outline of soft pink petals clutched in a lifeless grasp.
“Yosh‚“ Jimmy said. “That’s her.” He was right, but the empty darkness sucked the
warm breath straight from my lungs.
I gasped for air to speak, but found none. The forest was empty. All I could do
was nod. She was dead.
“Yosh‚ you think she went make?”
“Yeah, Jimmy.” Her neck stuck out at a strange angle. Her empty eyes stared
out into the trees. She must have fallen trying to pick a flower from the tree. I tried
looking away, but I couldn’t stop staring. The chills spread from my neck and ran
down my spine, hard like a tattoo needle. When it reached my fingers, they tingled
so much it hurt. She had found the ultimate escape.
“What we going do? She went make. We found one dead girl.” His voice was
barely audible in the silence. His grip tightened so hard on my shoulder it I thought
it was going to separate.
“Nothing. Let the police come find her tomorrow. What difference going make if
they find her tonight?” I said through gritted teeth. Every muscle in my body coiled,
ready to run away, to put as much distance as I could between that corpse and me
and forget it all.
“But that’s Julie’s sister, Yosh. They gotta know. We gotta tell them.” His eyes
pleaded with me for some sanity, some explanation, but I had none. We had no
excuses. I shook his hand off. I turned my back on the Nobuko girl and climbed the
fence again.
“Tell them what, Jimmy? That we was out smoking weed in the middle of the
night and just so happen we went find their daughter dead in the forest? You know
how stupid that sounds or what?” I had found my voice again. It used too much air,
escaping in short bursts.
“I don’t know, Yosh, but we gotta tell them something. It’s our fault, brah.”
He stood staring at Sarah’s lifeless arms, flat against the forest floor. His shoulders
fell limp, hopeless. I knew what that felt like. It’s the way I sank into myself when they
told me about Mom’s cancer. It’s staring death straight in the eyes and knowing you
are powerless to stop it. It’s fear and guilt that pulls you under until you’re suffocating
because you know it’s your fault but there’s nothing you can do.
We were too late. We couldn’t give up our childhood spaces, and like idiots we
thoughtthatbyignoringtheproblem,itwouldgoaway.Butitdidn’t.Weknewwhere
she was, and we thought we had enough time. We always thought there was more
time.
Maybe Jimmy was right, and it was time to own up.
“Call when you get home, then. Make anonymous or something. Eh, but Jimmy.
We was never here, ah?”
He nodded slowly and followed me back over the fence, into the town, where life
went on. We didn’t even say goodbye. We walked in silence, one foot in front of the
other. All we could do was go back home.
The handful of families still left in our town came out for the funeral. They held
it that Sunday, an afternoon as hot as the day we searched for her. They held the
service in the church down the road, and people like Julie read touching speeches
and people cried. We all sang a Christian hymn. Then a Buddhist hymn, too, just in
case. Then we followed the procession outside, where a hole waited in the lifeless
earth,surroundedbyrowsandrowsofflatgravestones,thespacesabovethemempty.
A single tree threw scattered shadows over the graves around Sarah’s plot. Its leaves
shuddered in the wind.
In some ways it was a fitting end to a rough week.
“Why would you run off? You want to end up like the Nobuko girl?” Mom had
accused when I got back, dishrag in hand. The countertops and floors in the kitchen
glared at me, inhumanly clean.
I had a million good comebacks but I didn’t have a good answer to her question.
26. —25— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
“You want to leave that bad? Answer me!”
“I no like,” I said, struggling for the right words.
“You no like what?”
“I no like have to carry this family. How come gotta be me?”
“Because.” She paused. And my mother, the strongest woman I know, angry even
in her sickness, graceful even in her defeat, said, “I cannot.”
I wanted to tell her she couldn’t give up like that. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t that
I didn’t want to take care of Sachi, but that I didn’t think I could. I wanted to tell her
that I had no idea how we could go on without her. But I also knew that if I said it out
loud, then it would be real, and the doctors would be right. So we never said those
things. Maybe we should have, but we never did.
“Fine,” I said. I got up and walked away, refusing to look into her eyes, knowing
they held only defeat. I would have to find the strength somewhere else.
I ate dinners at Jimmy’s house that week and we tried to lift each other’s spirits. I
couldn’t face my mom. We spent most of our time helping the Nobuko’s set up for
the funeral, trying to figure out what I should do. The whole week I gave up on my
board, too. It could wait.
At the funeral my Mom wore a black dress and a black hat over her bald head.
She left Sachi’s hair down. I went over to join them. Mom had to pretend her broken
family was doing fine, and I thought if we pretended hard enough, maybe it could be.
I stood next to them but said nothing. I didn’t need to. We watched them lower the
Nobuko girl into the welcoming earth. Together, we attended the reception and gave
our last condolences to the family, half-bowing in apology as the shifting clouds lit
up golden in the sunset. As we headed back to the house, Sachi struggled again, tired
from the sun, the food and the tears.
“Carry your sister,” she said.
I picked her up and we walked back on the side of the road. The pain in my
muscles dulled as the dark night swept across the sky. When we got home, I plucked
a flower from Sachi’s tree to tuck into her hair and laid her on the couch. I didn’t
know how I was going to take care of her alone, but I had to figure it out soon. It
couldn’t wait.
Mom watched me from the hall. In the evening light, her cheekbones appeared
thin and sharp, an uneven edge I could never smooth. Even the bright red of her
kerchief looked faded, like a portrait of the past. She nodded and shut off the light,
and as the darkness washed over the room, she disappeared under its wave with a
trusting nod.
A week later, I made it out to the waves for my 17th birthday. Jimmy helped
me finish the board. It sparkled white in the blue rush of the ocean, catching the
warm sunlight. The clear water curled up like textured glass, then crashed overhead.
In those moments I held my breath, completely surrounded by blue, fighting the
urge to panic. I always resurfaced, though, breaking the plane of the glass waves and
climbing back on to my waiting surfboard to do it again. The Nobuko girl had found
herfinalescape,butasfarasIcouldtell,mytemporaryoneswereenough.Attheend
of the day, when the waves returned me to my place on the whale’s back, I welcomed
the hot black sand and the promise that someone waited for me there.
—Ryan Kim, “Harsh Magentas: Esther #3”
27. —26— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
CHELSEA NIGHTS
Toting snacks in a plastic sack
from Gristedes, the avenue
fiery in the rain. Bagged trash hogs
most of the sidewalk, but people
squeezing past each other lack
time or patience to complain.
The first thunder of the spring
perfects the dark. Up brownstone steps
to unlock the ornate front door,
then up a flight to a borrowed
apartment with steam heat ticking
and tap dancing in painted pipes.
Bill Evans, Portrait in Jazz,
on the tiny hi-fi system,
the undulation of his chords
impossible to fix in the mind
but impossible to forget,
since he’s probably still playing them
a quarter century after death.
I settle for a glass of whiskey,
a cup of peach yogurt, an apple,
and, Bill Evans being exhausted,
a little Thelonius Monk.
At last I lie as flat as I can
on the strange bed and try to forget
the drawer full of condoms beside me.
Something happens on Chelsea nights—
Friday, Saturday, Sunday nights—
but I don’t want it happening
to me, the honk of horns defiant
and illegal, but nothing out there
except the roar of fire engines
adult enough to tempt me.
—William Doreski
28. —27— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
MORE P.S.’S THAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
—Arturo H. Magaña
Dear,
The door of the bookstore was nailed shut three days ago. I forgot about
it yesterday, like how I’m trying to forget you and me through the
chapters of this life. Today the door thrust out to the street. It’s a feeble
building with red-brick walls and dirty shelves and a cool cat circling
casually; as you know, I’m allergic to cats, but I threaded through the
dust and dander, the cook-book section, the romantic memory of your
dark complexion.
I stole a book for you. The cover is frayed, and the title hard to make out,
but the ink is bold. I found a library within that book‚ seashores, triple-
masted galleons in the shallows, and men of long ago, shipwrecked in the
struggle of finding meaning through philosophy.
You said once, “Imagine all the stories that have been lost to time and war.
Are they like us?” Maybe they are read in heaven, and they are archived
there, ‘neath corbelled ceilings and causeways. And maybe the old stories
hide within new stories, different dates and names and places, but the
same themes and hopes.
Please, babe, sing me a song like you once promised.
I’ve said enough and too little,
The Writer.
P.S. : I’ve attached a picture. As you can see, I’ve grown a beard. I know
you don’t like men with beards, but even John Lennon had a beard.
P.P.S. : You’ll pour and I’ll drink till drunk and dumb.
P.P.P.S. : I don’t have anything else only to say that my favorite number is
three.
29. —28— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
THE PHILOSOPHER’S HAND
Having spent seven thousand dollars for the Sears Estate Mower,
he rides in lonely grandeur atop the machine between his legs
over his long lawn and around his splendid house in the woods,
a Thoreau of the Twenty-First Century.
He believes in absolutes because he must have certainty,
but confronting confusing nature without his tools
leaves him feeling defenseless against entropy.
Physics’ Uncertainly Principle unhinges his understanding,
and the mower jams with grass cuttings and too-tall weeds.
Reaching under the idling machine, he grasps clumps
and the whirring, conscienceless blade slices his leather glove.
His hand, not completely protected, receives a cutter edge
slice that admonishes his mortality with skin nipped and bruised.
Warm blood is shed, but it is only a lesson about the power
of this heartless machine that should be at his command.
Emergency room doctors and nurses stitch his hide a bit,
and he returns home to his natural woods and unnatural lawn.
He retreats into his philosophy where he is comforted.
He will, however, remember the practical lesson
concerning the power of the efficient machine
that does not know the difference between flesh and flora.
—Howard Winn
CRACKED CRACKERS
Late night snack
Fresh box of crackers
Extra sharp cheddar cheese
Great expectations
As crackers blossom forth
From round paper wrap
Immediately I see
Every cracker is cracked
Every last one
Cracked in the middle
I silently groan
I begin to quibble
Where does one register
A complaint, late at night
About the cracked crackers
That have come into your life?
—Edward Ferri, Jr.
31. —30— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
This series was created with the intention of representing the
days of my life where I do nothing but everyday things, as do the
rest of society – but with the surreal element, allowing myself to
familiarize with the character but also to distract myself from
that same reality.
I aimed to create an imaginary figure, using the paper mache
head to add that element of anonymity. However, it also acts as
a disguise, which implies that the subject is hiding from his/her
own reality.
The images were shot in my university flat to add in some sort of
familiarity into them, thus bringing the images back to reality.
The aspect of the subject being alone is present as well, to add
the effect that he/she is on this journey by themselves.
This series was created with the inspiration of Ralph Eugene
Meatyard, who used a similar concept of paper mache heads in
everyday scenarios.
—Daniel Adams, “Bob”
32. —31— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
VEGETABLES
—Kirie Pedersen
“Have you ever known anyone who went mad?”
I am driving a famous poet to the place she’ll be staying while she visits the
campus where I’m teaching; her question seems odd for such casual acquaintance.
“Never,” I say. In my calm, careful, studious life, of course not. As if she has not
heard, she repeats her question. Now I would turn the question back on her. Now
I would know she had her reasons for asking, and I would want to know what they
were. Then, young and full of myself, certain the world wanted only to hear about me,
I paused.
“My God,” I say. “Yes. I did. I did know someone who went mad.” The famous
poet looks at me strangely. “Vietnam,” I say. “The war drove him mad.” As I drive
along the wet dark roadway, I clutch the steering wheel. The rain falls harder, and
within minutes, half the lane is covered, and I steer the car uphill through a dark
torrent of water that surges down towards me.
“Careful your brakes don’t fail,” she says then, utterly calm. “That sometimes
happens in the rain.”
My nickname then was Rat. You might think this means I’m a shifty person or
a shitty person, and of course you’re entirely right. But really, the name came from
the Vegetable Crate, Paul’s car. My nickname was Carrot because Paul (Cabbage)
insisted for a time that everyone who rode in his car take vegetable names, and I just
went along. Jen, the pretty one, was Cucumber. I barely remember the others who
rode in that car, and they’re not much a part of this anyway, although Julie (Radish?)
went on from those early outings in the Vegetable Crate to become a world famous
yoga teacher.
Whereas almost everyone else merely went insane.
Toward the end, I lay on the floor of the blood-stained hotel room in Mazatlán,
hoping to die. I was eighteen years old. At the end of the third day, I knew Paul would
never return. I got dressed, paid my bill with my last coins, swallowed a handful of
speed, walked out onto the highway and stuck out my thumb.
Paul was one of the most truly beautiful men I have known. He was tall and slim
with light brown, very curly hair. He wore it long before it was the fashion for men
to have long hair. His locker was next to mine in high school, and he dated my pretty
sister, Jen. I didn’t know him very well then, just as I didn’t really know my sister well;
only that the two seemed perfectly suited to each other.
I got to know Paul better in the summer while I was waiting for college to start
in the fall. I was walking near the waterfront when he drove past me one Saturday
in his 1952 Chevy Styleline with most of the paint chipped off, the powerglide
transmission groaning. The car’s rear end arched like the rump of an old and elegant
woman, holding a luminous bumper sticker that instructed me to ‘Boycott Grapes.’
“Ride?” Paul asked, pulling to the side of the road. Once in the passenger seat, I
politely inquired about the Farmworker’s Strike, and soon ended up in a line of men
and women of all ages and backgrounds standing on the pavement outside a Safeway
with more ‘Boycott Grapes’ signs clutched to our chests. I admired how Paul stood
up to hostile shoppers and buyers of grapes with courage and love, but I also found
I was afraid for him, that one of them might hit him in the face.
When our small group of picketers left that evening, piled into Paul’s Vegetable
Crate, the box boys just off duty climbed into their cars and followed us, shouting
obscenities from their windows and trying to run us off the road. Paul didn’t even
seem to notice, and after awhile, they spun down a side street and disappeared.
Jen and I were what is called Irish twins, born just a year and five months apart.
She always had things better than I did. From the start, everyone raved over her.
How pretty she was, how funny. I was plain-looking. “Doesn’t take a good pic,” my
mother wrote in my baby book. Although I eventually learned how to use make-up
and choose flattering clothes, Jen never needed any of that. When we went to the
city, men stopped her on the street and asked her to model, thrust business cards
into her hand. I just stood in the background smiling, and then told her she was
stupid to even talk to those bastards.
I feared for her, always, afraid she would go crazy or get hurt. If she stayed out late,
I was the one who lay awake for hours and cried at the thought she might die.
The night of the picket line, I rode home with Paul to the house where he lived
with his mother, Lena. Lena was divorced from Paul’s father, and she offered us wine
and marijuana, implying I could sleep in Paul’s room. Paul placed his large hand
over my mouth and gently pushed me into a chair beside the piano. He removed my
shoes and socks, filled a basin with warm water, and gently placed each of my feet
into the basin.
DespiteJen’sbeautyandwit,sheseemedtomefragile.Shewasincapableofdoing
anything for herself; people did things for her. When we were growing up, I was one
of those people. I found her a job. She was fired from that job for day-dreaming.
Later, after I left for college and she tried to follow me there, I found her a live-in
33. —32— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
housekeeping job, and the lady she worked for fell in love with her too, wouldn’t you
know it, pulled her diamond ring from beneath her mattress and gave it to Jen. Did
I get any thanks? No. She said I had always tried to manage her life, that she was sick
of being my trained seal.
“It’s a two-way street,” I said, but she wouldn’t listen. She would go into insane
screaming furies and say whatever came into her mind, as if later it could be erased.
As if anything could be erased and should be.
Like Jen, Paul had always seemed different. Strange. That’s why he and my sister
made sense, she with that distance of hers, a kind of fog that seemed to envelop her,
though for brief moments she broke out of her fantasies and talked like a real human
being. Paul, with his angelic voice, his guitar, and his songs about fairies and elves
was the perfect match for Jen. They seemed to protect each other.
During the Vietnam War, when boys turned eighteen, they had to register for
the draft. Then there was a lottery, and if they drew a high number, they had to go to
Vietnam. Basically that was it: how it worked.
Paul drew a high number. That meant that he had to show up for a physical and
make a decision about what to do. First, he became active in the Unitarian Church,
its services held in a funny old church on Capitol Hill called First Church of Christ
Esoteric. Professors from the University of Washington led groups, and a yoga
instructor from the Free School taught tantric yoga. Once, when I went with Jen and
Paul to the yoga class, Jen glanced up to see the teacher staring at her, thrusting his
pelvis back and forth in rhythm with hers.
After the services or classes, everyone leapt up to hug someone. I tensed up while
I waited for some bearded stranger to throw his arms around me and hold me too
closely, too intimately, but also felt out of place because Jen and Paul were wrapped
in each other’s arms and then because nobody reached out for me at all.
At the services, Paul played his guitar, inventing long and complicated ballads
as he went along. Later, if asked to sing the song again, he remembered every word
as if the singing of his thoughts committed them to memory. His voice was perfect,
of professional quality, yet it was also a little strange, mournful; when he finished
a song I could see my own tears mirrored in the eyes of others, and then someone
would quickly call for the wine or the joint. Then, if the night was warm and clear, we
all ran outside to dance, each alone, beneath the stars.
That summer, I was taking care of my parents’ city house while they went, as
always, to the beach cabin. At the last moment, for reasons she explained to no one,
Jen went with them. For the first time in my life, I had a house to myself. Every night,
friendscameoverfordinner,andsomehow,Paulbegantojoinus.Heusuallybrought
an armload of fresh carrots, leaf lettuce, and sweet yellow onions from Lena’s garden,
and I made bread from scratch using squash or apples and whole wheat flour.
Sometimes Paul played the piano or guitar or sang, and sometimes everyone
just talked. That summer, we were writing plays, protesting this and that, which we
produced in a local theater. Sometimes I grew irritated with Paul, wanting to be with
my other friends who were more mature, more solid, but then Paul would invent a
little dance and I would find myself laughing along with him. Even in the midst of
our group, he remained slightly separate, and he seemed a sort of fey balance to my
seriousness, as Jen might have been if we had liked each other. But his difference
couldalsobetiringoratleastpredictable.Whateverwasexpectedinasocialsituation,
he could be counted on to do or say the opposite. If everyone was taking some kind
of drug or passing around a joint, Paul could be counted on to reach out his large
hand, seize the entire stash, and swallow it before anyone could stop him.
“You could die,” I once said. “You’re mixing wine with pills.”
“What’s the difference?” Paul asked.
One evening a group of us were writing a play about the Farmworkers. Paul was
supposed to be doing the music. Instead, he danced around the room and sang an
odd off-key song. Finally, one of the other men told him to leave. Paul did leave,
face blank, but for the rest of the evening, I felt uneasy and separate from my other
friends.
As the summer progressed, Paul became increasingly tense about whether to
enlist and ‘protest from inside,’ as one of our group did, to flee to Canada, or to
apply for status as a ‘conscientious objector.’ I knew he was meeting regularly with
a minister to explore his options. One time that summer, our group attended a war
resistance conference at the University of Washington. As we left the final seminar,
Paul talked about his fear of jail.
“It’s simple,” I said. “Don’t go.”
“Fuck you,” Paul said.
I felt as though he had slapped me. And Paul was right; it was easy for me to say
how simple it was.
We finished our production about the mistreatment of migrant laborers in
the grape fields. Our production was successful, and showed to sold-out houses.
Neighbors I never would have expected to see joined us on the picket lines. Paul’s
music was a huge part of the success.
Then, near the end of summer, just a few weeks before I was to leave for college in
a distant city, Paul stopped showing up. I called his house. “He left last night,” Lena
said. Her voice sounded odd. “He’s catching the mail boat up the Snake River in
Idaho.” The boat stopped in every village along the river and picked up passengers.
“Did Jen go with him?”
34. —33— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
Lena hesitated. “I’m not sure,” she said.
“I hope he’s going to relax,” I said. “I hope he returns full of new songs.”
A few days later, I was sitting alone in the living room of my parents’ house at
dusk. Although it was summer, the evening was cold, and I had a fire in the fireplace.
I thought I heard something outside, and I went to the window. Paul was standing
on the front porch, silent as he stared through the window at me, his face strange and
hard.Onhisbaby-face,anewlysproutedbeardseemedincongruous,evengrotesque.
He had a huge coat slung over his shoulders, reaching to his ankles so that he looked
like a mummy. I wondered how long he had been standing there watching me.
I threw open the door to greet him. The woods around my parents’ house were
thick, almost blue in the twilight. “Where’s the Crate?” I asked him. “I didn’t hear
you drive up.” He lifted me off the floor in a bear hug.
“You’re looking good,” he said. Something in his voice made me stand back. “I
wrecked her,” he said then. He was trembling. “I wrecked the Vegetable Crate.”
He stepped over to the fire and held out his hands. “Can I stay here tonight?”
“I guess so,” I said. “You don’t want to go home?”
“I can’t. She hates me.”
“Lena hates you? Paul, what happened?”
“I’ve been sick,” he said. “Real sick.”
It struck me, as odd thoughts do in moments of crisis or danger, that Paul’s bones
had somehow become chilled. Or was the Snake River trip itself another of Paul’s
fantasies? “Did you have fun on the river?” I asked.
“Pile of shit,” he said. Paul still stood stiffly by the fire. His body seemed rigid,
and I touched him on the arm. Then he grabbed me around the waist and flipped me
around so I faced him. “Hold me,” he said. I hugged him for a moment, and he pulled
away so quickly I almost fell. I pushed logs into the fire until the flames rose up and
pushed Paul into a chair.
“I’ll make some hot tea.”
“Cup of tea. Sure.”
When I returned from the kitchen with a tray holding steaming cups of Assam
tea, honey, and a plate of fresh bread, Paul had disappeared. By then the house was
dark, and so was the night outside, although streaks of orange and red remained
for another hour. I set the tea tray on the edge of the fireplace and began to search.
I called his name loudly to drive away my vague sense of danger, and when I heard
the trembling in my voice, I felt foolish and vulnerable. A few minutes later, I found
Paul in my parents’ bedroom, where we had sometimes gathered to write our plays,
everyone snuggled on the bed while one person wrote at the desk that stretched
from one end of the window to the other.
He was seated on the floor with my mother’s wicker garden basket in which she
stored flower bulbs, a small trowel and rake, and her gloves. These were dumped in a
heap on the bed. Paul had filled the basket instead with objects he appeared to have
gathered from around the house. He had removed the kickstand from my bicycle.
He had one of a pair of beaded moccasins I had found, almost flawless, in a second-
hand store. He had removed the cash from my wallet and a serrated fishing knife
from my father’s tackle box. As if in prayer, he sat on the floor, the basket in front of
him. When I stepped towards him, he leapt to his feet, seizing the knife as if to ward
off a blow.
“Paul,” said. “What are you doing? It’s me. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Helpme.You’vegottohelpme.”Hetookasteptowardsme,theknifestillupheld
in his hand, and I remained frozen in the doorway. “This is my vessel, the suitcase
for a world traveler,” he said. Then, as if he forgot me, he began to cavort around the
room, singing in that odd off-key voice so unlike his own real voice.
“Damn you,” I said. “Just stop acting like this.” He looked at me as an animal
might. Then, for an instant, I thought I recognized him, the real Paul. “Hey, Paul.”
I laughed, waiting for him to join me, to tell me it was all a joke, one of his odd
games, and he would be all right now. He muttered something and padded back to
the fireplace, and as I followed him warily, he began to sob, like a small and helpless
child.
“Isn’t this pretty?” He stopped and leaned over a begonia sempervirens in a pot.
“Can I have this?”
“You can have a start. I’ll break one off for you.” But Paul pulled the plant from
the pot and shoved it, the roots dangling in the air, down the front of his coat. Then
a frightening thought emerged.
“Paul, where’s my sister?”
“I told you. We went on a cruise up the Snake River for 40 days and 40 nights.”
Paul started to sing a hymn. Forty days and forty nights. Thou wast fasting in the wild.
“Jen left me,” he said. She disappeared.” Paul giggled.
“What do you mean?” I was a little panicked by then, although I couldn’t imagine
that Paul would ever hurt anyone. And yet another awful part of me hoped that my
dream, since birth, was at last true, and Jen had vanished forever, as if she never
existed.
“There was this haze all around her,” Paul said. “And she disappeared in a cloud
of smoke.”
I left Paul to his collecting, stepped out onto the porch in the shivering night air,
and called Jen. Her phone rang on and on, and I was about to give up, when at last
she picked up. She was furious.
“I was asleep,” she said. “Don’t ever call me this late.” She slammed down the
phone.
35. —34— AGAVE MAGAZINE, VOL. 2, ISSUE 4SPRING 2015
“Do you think you can sleep?” I asked Paul. I honestly believed that if I could
tuck him into bed, warm him back to life, I could heal him.
“Help me. Please help me. You’ve got to help me,” he said. I tucked him into my
parents’ bed, wrapping him in the blankets that comforted me when I was a child.
He tensed and then relaxed, and fell instantly asleep.
Sometime in the night, towards three, I was dragged from my own sleep by
strange banging or thumping noises from somewhere in the house. I thought of the
large black rabbit Jen owned as a child. One day she decided to allow the rabbit
to run free, and the rabbit, stunned by freedom, moved further and further from
the house until she vanished into the woods. Later, I found her body, darker and
damp with blood with two bullet wounds through the head. She had stolen fresh leaf
lettuce from the neighbor’s garden, and so the neighbor shot her.
Then, still half asleep, I thought Jen had relented of her anger at my calling her the
previous evening. Now she was at the door, and she would soothe Paul. I wandered
towards the sound.
In the living room, I found Paul. He had removed his pants and was dressed only
in a tiny coat that belonged to my youngest brother. The coat was made of some
kind of ugly fleece, grey and torn off in patches. The front came to Paul’s belly, and
the sleeves barely reached his elbows, so his arms were held out awkwardly in the
air. Over one of these stiff helpless arms was my mother’s wicker basket, and as if
appointed by some deity that this was to be his life’s work, Paul was completing his
earlier task of collecting small objects. Periodically, he stomped one bare foot against
the floor as though to warm it, or as though it irritated him; this was the pounding I
had heard. Then I saw he had cut himself, perhaps with my father’s fishing knife, and
he was marking the boards of the floor with his blood.
It was at that moment I deserted Paul. I hadn’t signed on for this. Some part of
me, perhaps simply a need for my own survival, closed or hardened. I left Paul to his
collecting, returned to my bed, and slept deeply until morning.
When I awoke, Paul was gone. I was relieved. I swept the dirt from my ruined
begonia off my parents’ white bedspread, and then swept the floor. I even cleaned
the ashes from the fireplace. Just as I finished, Lena called. That morning, as part of
Paul’s decision to apply for status as a conscientious objector, she and Paul had an
appointment with the Unitarian minister. As they began to talk, Paul pulled out a
knife, backed the minister against the wall, and threatened to kill him.
“Will you go with me to see Paul?” she asked. “You’re the only person he seems
to trust.”
Lena and I drove through a wind and rain storm that seemed as if it would blow
us off the highway. Paul was on the seventh floor of a huge orange-painted building
that stood on top of the hill as though it guarded the city’s destiny. We shouted our
names through a small barred window. The entry door slid back and closed again
behind us, and we were faced by a second wall, this one made of bars. A grim-faced
man slid this door open and then closed it behind us. After we passed these barriers,
we were left alone, and we entered a hall with a series of doors that opened into small
rooms, each framing a silent white-robed man.
In the last room, half the size of the others and stuck near a stairwell so it seemed
even smaller than it was, we found Paul. And then I wanted to open the door I had
shut against him that morning, the same door Lena must have shut that afternoon,
or even before. Paul looked as if a giant hand had flung him onto the bed.
“Please make them stop,” Paul said when we came in. “The shots. Killing me.” He
wassoweakhecouldnotlifthisarmsorlegs.Theinjections,presumablyintendedfor
this very purpose, were like a living embalmment. Lena and I helped him straighten
his legs, and then we sat on the edge of the bed. Paul’s body seemed too large for
the narrow cot. When he tried to talk, saliva slid from his mouth. His pillow was
soaked. But a few moments later, when Lena conferred with someone in the hall,
Paul managed a smile for me. “I loaned your kickstand to an old woman down the
street from your parents’ house,” he said. Speaking seemed to cause him pain. “She
needed it to grow sweet peas. Of course I’ll return it in the fall when her flowers die.”
We were not encouraged to stay long, and at first, as Lena drove south along the
interstate, slicing through grey mist and rain, neither of us spoke, as if we too were
worn out by injections of huge quantities of sedating drugs. Then, out of nowhere,
Lena asked if I thought Paul was interested in girls, women.
“Ofcourseheis,”Isaid.“Heandmysisterhavebeendatingforyears.”Sheglanced
over at me, then down at the steering wheel. She said the day before Paul left for the
Snake River, the next door neighbor complained that Paul had bothered her 12-year
old son, whom Paul was tutoring. She threatened to call the police, but Lena talked
her out of it, and then confronted Paul.
“Do you believe her?” Lena asked. She started to cry, and I reached out to touch
her but let my hand fall to the seat of the car instead. To Lena, it seemed to me then,
the chance Paul might be gay was worse than pulling a knife. If he had pulled a knife.
Was Paul locked up and shot full of drugs now because, somehow, of this call from
the neighbor?
“What does bothered mean?” I asked. “Did he do something, or was he just
acting strange?”
“I don’t believe her,” Lena said. “I think she made it up.”
And then I felt angry at Lena again because if Paul had molested a child in his
trust, then he was no better than my father’s friends who so freely abused me when I
was growing up, and Lena no better than my own parents for failing to protect me.
Shortly afterward, I left for college. From time to time, I received calls from Lena
