Living the Dream

                                   (Continued from West, This is It, and The Story of Everything.)

Jennifer closed the fence behind her and slipped into the alley, which was empty except for her neighbor’s trash can. She clapped her smokes against her grease-stained palm, then opened the pack and lit one.

The trash can was overflowing, oily pizza boxes staging their escape. She looked up at the house with its worn yellow paint and under-performing AC unit. Underwhelming as all get out. A rat torpedoed out from under the can.

“Shit!”

She jolted back against the fence as the rat took off.

She wasn’t sure how much longer she could hide her smoking habit by skulking in alleys with rats. Brooklyn was almost three, and she was starting to develop what Jennifer’s brother called “spidey sense.”

“You can’t say shit around her, Jen!” he’d said. “Like, she knows which words are bad. She won’t repeat any nice stuff I teach her!”

“What, all those SAT vocabulary words?” she’d jabbed.

But her brother was right--Brooklyn absorbed everything. Jennifer didn’t need anyone else judging her, especially her daughter.

Her back pocket vibrated. Shelly.

Can you work 4 me tomorrow? Btw Dena’s fuel pump came in.

Jennifer visualized the tally she kept in her head.

Did she owe Shelly a favor? Shelly helped her study for their last test. But then Jennifer had bought Shelly a sub sandwich when she didn’t have cash two weeks ago. But Shelly had lent her a fake ID on Friday…

Jennifer hated her mind’s tendency towards transactions. But she couldn’t stop it. When the tally was complete, Jennifer texted her friend back:

Yeah, I got you.

She ground her cigarette out with the heel of her work boot and went back inside.

“I’ve got to fill in for somebody tomorrow. Can you keep Brooklyn?”

A timer beeped, and Jennifer’s mom bent to pull a casserole from the oven.

“What else would I be doing?”

“Mommy!” Brooklyn shrieked from the living room floor.

“You should go play with her now, at least. You’re gone all the damn time.”

“Mom, seriously? I’m in school literally every day, and I’m lucky Chuck can pay me for the extra time at the shop. I am trying as hard as I can to get out of your house and give Brooklyn a good life.”

“By being a mechanic,” her mom muttered, pouring an envelope of lemonade mix into a plastic pitcher.

“I am not having this fight again, Mom! Jesus.”

“Jesus!” Brooklyn said, swinging a My Little Pony around by its tail.

“Don’t throw that!” Jennifer said, at the same time as her mother spat, “Don’t say that!”

The pink pony flew over Brooklyn’s head in an impressive arc, then collided with a lamp, which rocked a few times before settling flat on its base, its shade askew.

“Brooklyn!” Jennifer scolded, scooping the child up on her hip. Brooklyn, knowing she was in trouble, began to wail.

“I just think you’re better than your current choices, that’s all,” Jennifer’s mother said, raising her voice. “You could have stayed in college. Gotten a real degree. A real job.”

“Do you see this dirt under my fingernails? It doesn’t get much more real than that.”

Jennifer swung Brooklyn around to her other hip and bounded through the front door.

Brooklyn cried louder.

“Will you just be quiet!?”

She set the toddler down on the dried-up grass of her mother’s front yard.

“I’m--hungry!” Brooklyn gulped between wails.

Jennifer threw her head back. She understood why all those people in movies screamed at the sky. Her brain reeled.

Better than her current choices! My current choices, she thought, are just what comes after my past choices! Sometimes you don’t exactly get a choice.

Jennifer had graduated from high school before getting pregnant. She would always give herself credit for that. She’d spent a semester at University of Texas at Austin, living in a dorm and everything. She took pottery and psychology and played intramural flag football. And she hadn’t been irresponsible. Which, she knew, maybe wasn’t the same thing as being responsible.

The rest of the scenario was so predictable it was embarrassing. She started puking over Christmas break. She did the shop-of-shame for a pregnancy test. Her boyfriend got spooked and peaced out. She moved back in with her mom. She dropped out. She craved Doritos and watermelon and maybe still smoked on the sly, even though she knew it was bad for the baby. She went into labor and cried because Brooklyn would never know her father. Her mom pushed her sweaty, pink hair back from her forehead and said, “This baby is going to have more love than it even knows what to do with.”

And she did love Brooklyn. Of course she did. But Brooklyn wasn’t going to make her drop out of the rest of her life.

Her phone rang.

“What?” Jennifer snapped.

“Oh, wow. Is this a bad time? Sorry. It’s Dena?”

Jennifer let go of a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.

“Dena! Sorry. No, it’s cool. Hey, the RV part came in.”

“Hell, yes. That’s awesome. When can you install it? Chris wants to make it to Santa Fe by day after tomorrow. If that’s possible, I mean.”

Santa fucking Fe. Dena had no idea how good she had it.

                                                                                                      ***

The Chinook whined for a second when Chris cranked the ignition, then heaved to life. Dena and Jennifer sprung into a spontaneous victory dance, swinging each other around like some sort of western do-si-do.

“You fixed it! It works!” Dena laughed.

“No big,” Jennifer said. “I better get an A in this course, is all I’m saying.”

Chuck, Jennifer’s instructor, just grinned and shook his head, pacing back into the garage.

Inside the RV, Chris was posing for an on-the-road-again Instagram selfie.

“Hey, can I ask you something?” Dena said.

“Shoot,” said Jennifer.

“I don’t mean to be all weird and serious, but like--how did you find this place? How did you know you wanted to be a mechanic? You and Shelly and everybody--you guys are kind of living the dream.”

Jennifer looked at Dena--Dena, who was everything she had set out to become. Educated and untethered and adored.

“I don’t know,” Jennifer said, fumbling in her pocket for her cigarettes. “I think it’s only a dream until it’s yours.”

Written by: Dot Dannenberg
Photograph by: Jennifer Stevens

Southern Framed Joy

In the summer it gets hot. So hot that the temperature holds as the sun goes down, and even the moon makes us sweat.

This is where I live. It is not where I have always lived, though that place is not so far away either. That place, so full up of wheat fields and family; so full up of God. Filled to the brim and runneth over with churches that were once small and white and chapelesque, but are now behemoths, megachurches; congregations with mic’d up pastors and acoustic guitars, home to not only worship, but high school graduations, Starbucks, and daycares. You’ll find Catholics where I’m from, and Methodists, Lutherans, and dancing Baptists. You’ll also find angry billboards crowding interstates, their messages forged by hate groups masquerading as ones of hope.

Alas, I live there no longer. I left not because of God, not because of billboards or the Baptists. I left because that is what some people do. They leave where they are because they are curious and hopeful for the unknown future. They are not beat down by being human and raising family and following their dreams. They are not beat down by traffic and mass killings and car wrecks and breakups and heartaches, or whatever else. They are not tired. Not yet.

So they leave like I left and like thousands and probably millions of people leave the place of their birth, and maybe some of them go back to that birthplace, and perhaps it is something in the water that drags them there like the north star dragged gifters of frankincense. I learned to spell the name of the spice on a black chalkboard as a child. In the summer we decamped from our video game postures, from our aimless wanderings, from baseball fields and pool parties. We left those things behind for something called “Vacation Bible Study,” which was no sort of vacation I was interested in. They did, however, excel at spelling long-winded Bible names, and in retrospect perhaps there is some camaraderie to be gained from that time before I left; Wednesday night youth group, arms raised, free pizza. As if there really is a club. As if there really is support if you go to enough meetings.

I am not the only one who left, some of us choosing to make a home rather than being made by one. And of course, we never forget that we left. We might compare our places of past to that of our foreseeable future. In this practice we are looking backwards and forwards, always leaving out the present.

But enough about where I was and where I will be. I’ll have plenty of time to sit in the well of my past when I’m older, looking to the light above, smoking my pipe in a splintered rocking chair made of wisdom and wood, creaking along with the chorus of crickets in the evening.

Where I live it is so hot, but it is wonderful. And is that not a true southern sentence? To both criticise and cherish? Recognizing the imperfections of where you are from with a celebration and analysis that slip into romanticism. If you are from the south then you are born with this romanticism that runs like a red ribbon from your gut out of your mouth. I have dreams of someone pulling this red ribbon out of me, and pulling and pulling and finally when it is done, and I am on my knees panting like a thirsty dog, then it makes sense that I am southern. I am ecstatic and perturbed. Happy to be rid of it but always in longing for it. To be southern is to be addicted to this sentimentality.

Clarification may be necessary in even my term “southern.” I am not southern with accents, though ours is there as well. I am not southern with antebellum white pillars that are Greek in birth but sometimes still prejudice in practice. Blanche Dubois is as foreign to me as she is to Stanley Kowalski. I am not that kind of southern. I am not from there.

I am from cowboy boots and country music and mesquite trees and the fondling of B-B-Q, which can be spelled no other way but to look delinquent. I am from coyote howls at night and smoky casino floors in the morning, when the remnants of double-wide fortunes leave charred patches of red shame on the soul.

I am from a place of oil derricks that look beautiful and science fiction at the dawn or dusk of the day. A place that runs desert to the west and forest to the east, as you sink into the Gulf of Mexico, as you pay tribute to your southern neighbor, where Spanish is an absolutely breathtaking and beautiful language full up of breathtaking and beautiful people.

I am from line dancing where the term “honky-tonk” inspires nothing but agreeable nods. I am from campfires and peeing blindly into the woods and fucking blindly into the woods with girls named Mary Lou and sometimes girls named Kathy. I am from football and Friday night lights, where pickup trucks circle bonfires like summer Junebugs to a naked porch light, and country music mixes gleefully with booty dancing white girls and black girls and those aforementioned Spanish lovelies.

Where I’m from, people smile at one another and this is important for the sanctity of positive, glowing energy that moves with the wind through the trees and down past our tongues into the souls that the preacher has saved. Everything happens for a reason, they say, and that smile must surely be the reason.

And when you look back, when you ask why you left, it’s so that you can carry some of it along with you, in your briefcase, in your knapsack, in your fingertips and touch, and spread it around where all of us can have a drink, all of us can smile, and maybe when you’re done riding the trains, criss-crossing our home like the trappings and strings of a net, perhaps then we’ll have some purpose. Perhaps then we’ll catch a gleam of happiness, far out there, rising from the line of the horizon, silhouetted by the sun, riding a fucking horse.

Written by: Logan Theissen
Photograph by: Daniel Vidal

Rosamund Parker

“I heard there are alligators in these swamps.”

“Bullshit,” I reply. “Maybe further east but not here. Someone would know if they were here.”

Like royalty, Big Jonny and I sit surveying our kingdom, drinking beer we are too young to buy. This is Texas and we are celebrating our country’s independence. There are parties scattered around the lake, pods of the American semi-nude, and as the sun goes down the water acts like a mirror reflecting the sky. The image is of twin suns stacked like bunk beds, one on top of the other. In this twilight, I am dreaming of Rosamund Parker.

“Fuck alligators,” I mutter. “I’ve got more important shit to deal with. She doesn’t even know my name.”

She doesn’t even know my name, Jonny sings. He sounds like a fine country singer. I love her, and she doesn’t even know my name.

“I’m serious,” I say, “It’s pathetic.”

Big Jonny nods and chugs his beer. He finishes and leans back in his orange lawn chair that’s worn out like blue jeans, and casually crushes the empty can between his big sausage fingers. Jesus, I think, those fucking hands could crush a skull.

As for Rosamund Parker, her beauty is refreshing like an oasis in the desert. She wears big, rangy glasses, and has brown eyes, and looks very serious until she smiles. She seems to have this Miles Davis cool about her, though to be honest I don’t know anything you can’t observe from a distance. I study Rosamund Parker like one would study a Great White shark. She is mildly popular at school and moves graciously among the groups that bunch the hallways. She smokes with the freaks, lunches with the nerds, and parties with the jocks. She’s the consummate lead in school plays and in third grade she punched Sally Jenkins in Social Studies, letting everyone know, even then, she was not to be trifled with. For whatever reason, she does this all with siren-like blue hair. Troll Doll hair. She has freckles that go great with anything and if I were a different person leading a different life she would be my girlfriend.

Big Jonny smashes another beer can, this time with his cowboy boot. The cicadas soundtrack the night and there are teenage shouts from the party nearby.

“Best get on with it,” Big Jonny drawls. “I suppose she will be here, big party and all.” And here he begins to sing again, passionately and embarrassingly.

I can feel it cu-ming in the air tonight…hold on!

“Nice, Phil Collins,” I mumble.

I’m nervous at the party, drinking too much and stealing glances at Rosamund Parker. I know this is my last chance as she’s soon leaving for college. The stage is set and now the requisite fright is setting in. To soothe the nerves, Big Jonny suggests a keg stand, and it’s fresh off this keg stand that I find myself surrounded like a press conference, offering explanations.

“I just kept drinking,” I say. “Nothing else to it.”

“That was the longest I’ve seen,” says a cute blonde girl, and then from the back of the crowd a muffled, “That’s what she said.”

And finally, between the laughs, “Your name is Stan, right?”

I turn to find Rosamund Parker. She’s grasped my arm. I panic.

“What?”

Slowly, she replies, “Stan. Right?”

“Right,” I say. “Stan.”

She doesn’t smile at me, but she doesn’t take her eyes from mine either. Instead, she squints at me as if I’m far away. I think she is the most beautiful, most drunk creature I’ve ever seen.

“Rosamund,” she says. “Rosamund Parker.”

That night we slept together. It was my first time, and as it turned out, her last.

As time has taken an eraser to my memories, I’ve lost many of the details. Perhaps the incredible nature of the morning that followed somehow dulled the preceding night – like trying to see in the dark after turning off the light. As it is, I remember snapshots of the nocturnal tryst that even when pieced together reveal only the corners of a puzzle.

I remember her pink bra crumpled on the ground, the feel of her hipbones to my fingers, and how she attacked my ear with her teeth. I remember the sound of sticks breaking as we rolled in the dirt, and her sweaty palms as she led me through the darkness of the woods to seclusion. Most of all, I remember her blue hair.

In the morning I’m awakened by screams. The sound leaves no time for a fuzzy adjustment period but even standing and awake I can’t believe my eyes.

Rosamund Parker is being dragged. Only her torso is visible. She is wearing my pearl snap shirt and the look on her face, years later, will keep me staring at ceilings for nights on end. There is a grating sound, like something being crunched and torn at the same time, and the sound sparks one excruciatingly obvious thought.

This is Rosamund Parker being eaten by an alligator.

Before I’ve taken a step, the gator has her in the water. There is thrashing, screaming, choking, crying, and ripping. The last I see of her is the hair, but really it’s over before it even began.

In the moments following, there is an eerie calm as I take in my surroundings. I am on the shore of a swamp and the water is low and muddy. Surprisingly there is no blood, as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. In the coming days I know there will be questions and newspaper stories, national interviews, and a Jaws-like hunt for the killer beast. They’ll eventually find bits of her in the animal’s stomach, and remnants of a toenail will acquit me of murder.

It was my sixteenth summer. A summer of firsts. The shade fought the heat, the bugs stretched their wings, and nature laid Rosamund Parker to rest.

Photograph by: Jaemin Riley
Written by: Logan Theissen