Tiny Lights 8^th Annual Contest Winners

Summer 2002

For your on-line enjoyment, Tiny Lights presents the winners of the 8th Annual Personal Essay Contest. We hope that you are sufficiently moved by the words themselves to order the contest issue for $3. In this way, you will enjoy the work as it was meant to be presented, and provide vital support to the small press community. Make checks payable to:

Tiny Lights Publications, P.O. Box 928, Petaluma, CA 94953
 

You may scroll down and read the essays in order,
or you can jump to an essay by clicking one of the links below:

First Prize: The Lightning in My Eyes by Jean Hanson

Second Prize: The Dairy Queen by Ken Rodgers

Third Prize: Confessions of a Deviant Pastry Chef by Melinda Misuraca

Honorable Mention: Broken Mare by Linda Hershman

Honorable Mention: Snapping Turtles by Carol Howard

Contest 2002 Finalists

FIRST PRIZE: $250

 

Deborah Garbor

THE LIGHTNING IN MY EYES

by

Jean Hanson

My new husband and I are driving through South Dakota. It's been hot, an uncomfortable day for a long car ride, and the landscape is monotonous. But suddenly I see the tall grass on the side of the road turn liquid. Then the plains come alive: they breathe and relax, breathe and relax. We are going, Chris and I, to visit my grandparents in the tiny town of Wilmot. I know this, of course, and yet at moments I feel I've left this reality behind and I'm observing myself, Jean, as if she is some curious artifact. I close my eyes. When I open them, flashes of lightning bolt across the sunny road. Chris doesn't slow the car. The lightning is in my eyes, not in the atmosphere.

My grandma, a woman with a face wrinkled like a spoiled peach, walks down the painted cement steps to greet us, and steers us to the kitchen for conversation. When I talk, my voice comes from the other side of the room, as if I am a ventriloquist. I am of the world, but I'm not. I press my index finger to my thumb, but my digits move through each other like gelatin, tingling.

My grandfather is thrilled with Chris, whom he keeps calling Pete. He displays the wooden coat hangers he carves, the best hangers in the world; he shows off his immaculate Buick, the best car in the world; he serves us Reunite, the best red wine-no, in honor of Pete, my husband of Sicilian heritage-the best Italian red wine in the world. I hear this as pleasing but insignificant background static. I'm not exactly here, though Jean is.

Dinner is circular. Serving dishes pass around and around the table. Forks move in slow rotations around our plates. There are voices: first Jean's, then Chris's, Grandma's, Grandpa's, Jean, Chris... These spherical rituals are an orchestral accompaniment, my consciousness the melodic line moving above it. I am disengaged and hovering, monitoring Jean and the others. Chris puts his hand on my arm, as if to ground my flight, but I resist: I'm rising. My head is helium. I'm taking everything in, seeing patterns and meaning. I'm on the verge of understanding the whole, crazy, profound lot of it.

Later there is nausea. In the guestroom, I crawl into the bed my father was born in. He has died two months before. His high school graduation picture is on the bureau, and he watches as I leave his realm and move into pain as pure as frozen winter, an icicle poked in my forehead.

If I ask you to define "migraine," you will call it an excruciating headache. Well, yes. And no. For those like me-among the distinct minority who suffer "classic" (with aura) rather than "common" migraine-the journey is more circuitous.

On days when you're singing through the mundane details of life, admiring the warmest chambers of your husband's heart and feeling lucky, you may be on the verge of a migraine. The migraine prodrome is often a nearly euphoric sense of well-being-George Eliot described it as feeling "dangerously well." It can also manifest as apprehension, a texture of strangeness. You can't shake the notion that the world is being dismantled, its edges unraveling.

Sometimes your husband knows before you do. He's noted a certain posture in your sleep and a slowness in your reasoning. Your sister hears it in your legato voice: there's no melody, she says; you've gone flat. Then a glass slides from your hand. You mail your wallet.

Warning. If you're in the supermarket, abandon the shopping cart. Drive directly home. Narrate out loud: Green means go. Red means stop.

Your body is a miser now, retaining fluids, keeping all to itself. Your face turns pale as milk and half-moon circles, blue like bruises, appear under your eyes.

Next, you experience "aura," a complex neurologic mischief. The brain has a fine time of it-entertaining you or terrifying you, depending on your disposition. With the right attitude, you can traipse along, admiring the chicanery of your cortex. Consider Alice Through the Looking Glass, for instance, a fantasy based on Lewis Carroll's migrainous visual disturbances. Carroll perceived distortions of size: diminution, enlargement, and zoom vision.

Did the religious visionary, Hildegarde, really see "The Fall of the Angels," "The Living Light," or "The Aedification of the City of God?" Perhaps. But these visions may have simply been the cinema of headache, like the lightning in my eyes. The scotoma of migraine is measurable, as swarms of phosphenes cross the cortical field.

During aura, you might, as I once did, get lost in a building where you've worked for a year. You wander the halls. Just where is that office of yours? It takes an hour to find. Then you close and lock the door, turn off the lights, and ring your husband, relieved to have mastered the trigonometry of dialing a phone. The husband who answers is yours, though you can't quite place his first name.

You request the television be turned off with the words, "Petal shower ringing."

Your vision narrows, as though you are viewing things through the wrong end of binoculars.

You look in the mirror and are shocked: your eye has moved. On closer inspection, your whole face has been segmented and rearranged. You're a living portrait conceived by a cubist painter.

Only after your brain shows off, establishing who is in charge, do you move to the next stage, with its nausea and vomiting, sensitivity to light, sound, and smell, and the legendary headache.

To imagine the severity of the pain, consider, historically, the extent to which you'd go for a cure: allowing physicians to purge you, bleed you, lobotomize you, chop a chunk from an artery, drill a hole in your scalp. Other age-old remedies include looping a hangman's noose around your skull, anointing you with moss from a statue's head, binding to your brow a clay crocodile stuffed with magic herbs.

And none of it helped.

Migraine resolves when your body becomes generous once more. You urinate copiously, then receive a gift of sleep. Some migraineurs are exhausted after an attack. Many, like me (and Freud, who credited his good health to "the regulatory effects of a slight migraine on Sundays"), are renewed. We appreciate. We see clearly. We get a lot done.

My husband and I are supposed to make a weekend foray, but I am downed, so we defer to my defective neurons instead.

I am not only sick, I am guilty. This is my fault, I know. Haven't the pundits-from Pliny the Elder to Aretaeus the Cappadocian-told me it is? This "mygrame and other euyll passyons of the head" is due to my bilious humours, my hereditary taint, a hysteria of my uterus. My nervestorm is caused by masturbation, violent passions, and errors of diet. Experts of the 1930s note my retarded emotional makeup: I am perfectionistic, inflexible, and obsessive. By the late 50s, though my sins of ambition and rigidity are set in stone, I'm no longer bereft of charm. The oft-quoted Alvarez describes the small trim body, firm breasts, stylish dress, quick movements, luxuriant hair, and eager mind of the female migraineur. "These women age well," he insists.

If only it were possible to cure my disease by refashioning my personality, I'd become more easy-going. I'd relax more. I'd worry less. But today's research dashes these hopes.

Migraine strikes the indolent as often as the driven, the sloppy along with the neat, the profligate with the parsimonious. It's an organic dysfunction, and like all biochemical disorders, it's poorly understood. Essentially, migraineurs don't have effective brain filters. Our volume is turned up and we let in static. Circuits break, sparks fly, and neurotransmitters run amok. The poets of medicine call it the "chain reaction," the "cascade," the "avalanche" activated when we encounter any number of everyday "triggers."

Say, for instance, that you're driving at night in a snowstorm. Your headlights illuminate swirling flakes, which seem to give birth to a million fireflies. This is a visual trigger that can bring on a migraine.

Or you're caught in the California Santa Anas. You face the Argentine zonkas or the Swiss foehns. These dangerous hot winds are migraine triggers all. (Go to France or Canada, instead. The cool mistrals and chinooks have no effect.)

Say you forget to eat. Or you drink red wine.

And remember to avoid the three C's: cheese, chocolate, and citrus. Of course, spurn the vile potato and the wicked garbanzo bean. Consume no bits of bacon, bites of hot dog, or slices of pumpkin pie. And be wary of: too much sleep, too little sleep, lights, glare, altitude, stress, sex, garlic, smells, noises, humidity, travel... 

You may agree to give up Chianti and sauerkraut, but not vermicelli alla puttanesca. Not Argentina. Not sex. The world causes migraines and who wants to avoid the world?

So you strike back. The pharmaceuticals you use are beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, antiserotonins, antihistimines, anticonvulsants, antidepressants. The self-help books are entitled Overcoming... Fighting... Beating... Victory Over Migraine-as though, in order to live, you must do battle with your own brain.

But still the hot neural storm disrupts your life, like a twister uprooting a tree-maybe not four times a week, but twice a month. In moderation, you can accept the brain's imperialism. You can stand back and watch your mind build its cathedrals.

It's summer in North Carolina. Chris, Rich, and I are driving in the mountains. At a stop light in a small town, I look at a billboard. Something is awry, undone. I can't read. I try to sound out words, concentrating like a first grader for whom each letter is a new challenge. But if I look at one part of a word, another disappears. Soon, I see the problem: there's a hole in the world and whatever I observe falls into it. My very gaze is fatal.

I touch my cheek and lips, rub my fingers together, and brush my hand down my arm. A cold front spreads through my body, numbing one side of it.

We pull off the road. Rich and Chris disappear with fly-fishing gear, and I follow the sound of water. The vegetation is lush, and though there's nowhere to sit on the bank, I see a huge boulder in the stream. I long for this rock and wade out unsteadily, conscious of a dizzying sweep of water.

I climb onto granite: solid, steady, old as the continent. It's been a long week. Chris and I have been sharing a beach house with our long-time friends, Rich and Carol, who are smoking again. Their placid babies have grown into restless toddlers. The eldest slams her sister's hand in a door; the youngest grabs shrimp off our dinner plates. It's been hot, and I haven't slept well.

But here, the air is cool, and this moment a ballet-me pirouetting on a rock, the water twirling, and upstream, Richard and Chris casting, happy to be together. Suddenly it's quite clear: I know this dance. Perhaps I've even rehearsed it. All our steps have been precisely and lovingly choreographed. Today is a work of art, orderly and resolute, and this is its performance.

Now I stretch across the stone and feel its warmth on my cheek. Soon, the pain will come, with its paralyzing but cleansing purity, and then sleep. When I awake, the sun will be in a different place in the sky. I'll be grateful for good friends and their children. My eyesight will be renewed, the edges of my life newly distinct. And though the potent elixir of knowing more than I am meant to will have dissipated, the memory of it will linger.magical, mysterious, mine.

 Jean Hanson's essays and short stories have appeared in numerous magazines including North American Review, Zoetrope, Indiana Review, and Creative Nonfiction. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has received an artist fellowship from the Colorado Council on the Arts, the Hackney Prize in the short story, and a Poets & Writers award for emerging writers. This essay was nominated for a 2002 Pushcart Prize.

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Second Prize: $150

Kamil Dawson

The Dairy Queen

by

Ken Rodgers

Me and Pretty Boy and Augie Doggie were parked in front of the Dairy Queen. Pretty Boy turned to Augie Doggie and asked, "The same thing?"

"What's it to you?"

Pretty Boy glanced over at me and shook his head. I looked through the spokes of the steering wheel and noticed a lot of dust on the chrome ledge below the speedometer.  I stepped on the accelerator hard, even though the engine of my Dodge Dart was shut off. I fantasized about running over Augie Doggie, leaving him pancaked on the pavement. I shot Pretty Boy a half-smile. He turned his head and stared across the street at the fire department. I resumed gazing at the ledge.

"Banana split for Augie Doggie. And a Coke for you, Boomer?" I started to dig money out of my right front pocket. "I'll fly," Pretty Boy said and climbed out. The door croaked as if it were pinned against the body.

Augie Doggie rolled down his window and hissed at Pretty Boy, "Asshole."

I looked in my rear view mirror and positioned Augie Doggie in the center, like I was lining him up in the sights of an M-16. The piping on top of the backseat upholstery was split. I noticed little strands of stuffing wiggling in the breeze coming through the open window. It seemed I could tally the blackheads on Augie's face, then doubted my ability to see that well. Must be the dope, I thought. "Panama Red," Augie Doggie had called it. "What's that mean?" I asked.

"Means kickass shit," Pretty Boy said.

We had driven in the desert for eternity, got lost in some bottom land near the arena where the Chicanos race horses. We'd gotten confused out there on the low sandy roads meandering between the arena and the mountains where the reservation line runs. After we left town, Augie Doggie rolled a fat joint. He was showing off, rolling it with one hand. He was always practicing that skill. When we finished smoking, the rocks and sand seemed disconnected from the dying lupine and tired Saguaro cactus. My mouth was dry. The car made sounds that seemed to come from some other place, sneaking sounds. Sounds that made me wonder if the Dodge was going to break down. We weren't that lost, just winding around on the sandy tracks, not really giving a shit, listening to Dirty Mick singing "Gimmee Shelter" on the underground station out of Phoenix. Every little bump summoned visions and memories, the music like a wind tunnel roaring over our sensibilities, swooping our minds around the creosote bushes that dotted the landscape. We knew we were about seven miles northwest of town, but we just didn't care. We were pouting. We'd lost something and couldn't find it.

We started to come down. "Let's roll another one," Pretty Boy said.

"Fuck this light-weight shit," Augie Doggie said. "Take me back."

"I'm thirsty," I said. A big cold Coke got in my head, sweat beads slipping off like drops of blood before coagulation.

"Hurry the fuck up, asshole," Augie Doggie said to no one in particular. He sounded unhappy. Augie Doggie was always unhappy. Couldn't get it back. As if any of us could. As if any of us could choose his own time to lose it.

Sitting in the car, I looked at him again in the rear view mirror, seeing a target waiting to be popped. He was wearing a T-shirt without sleeves, the ribbed kind, white, like my old man wore under his uniform when he went to work. The tops of Augie Doggie's shoulders stood out and were muscled, his dark hair was clipped short. He was clean shaven, just like Pretty Boy. Not like the rest of us, trying to grow mutton chops and beards and mustaches.

In fact, Augie Doggie and Pretty Boy looked like straights, or narcs who hid among the freaks, turning stoners in for money, or the chance to be accepted, or to be kids again, carefree, stealing cigars from the grocery store. Fucking narcs, fingering people, getting them busted. Could be, I thought. Both had been in jail, and not just for possession, but possession with intent to sell. Big time, pen time shit. Both had gotten off on technicalities. I was faintly nervous. Maybe the technicalities were based on future information to be delivered.

I looked closer at Augie Doggie in the mirror. His brown eyes darted around, as if he was trying to take in all directions at once. Disgust with the world was etched on his downturned mouth, his high cheek bones, his long nose, his cleft chin. He slapped the back of the seat in front of him and screamed, "Fucking shit."

I asked, "What's the matter with you, asshole?"

"What the hell's taking him so long?"

"He just went in." I knew what was wrong with Augie Doggie.

"Fuck you, too, punk."

That made me chuckle. I said, "You'll never go back to women." Women liked Augie Doggie a lot. They liked Pretty Boy more. Something about the essence of danger. Ever since I had gotten back from Nam, I'd missed the hair raising that combat delivered. I craved the thump of the heart, the rush of being on the edge--death on one side, escape on the other. Augie Doggie and Pretty Boy were always courting trouble. Then too, maybe hanging around these two would make the women spend some energy on me. Women didn't pay much attention to me, which bothered me a lot, but I tried hard not to let anybody know.

"Need a fix?" I smirked.

Augie Doggie glared at me.

I continued, "Well? What the fuck, over?"

"I ought to whip your ass," Augie said. His face was getting red. I could see it in the mirror. I thought of crosshairs on his forehead.

I watched him closely, not wanting to get jumped when I wasn't looking. You could never tell about Augie Doggie. He loved to talk shit and jive ass around, but I never knew when he might try to pound my ass, just because. People do stuff like that when they're angry about losing something they think they never should have lost.

Augie Doggie's face was tightened up like a piece of leather drying in the sun, his lips straight and slightly open, allowing me to see just a slit of his teeth. His eyes looked hard and glassy. They always did when he was loaded. They reminded me of the glass hypodermics I saw him and Pretty Boy using to shoot up their heroin and cocaine, and sometimes a combination of the two. They called that, "Hitting up speed balls." Seemed to me that when they got shit-faced on that crap, it was like they just got stupid. Watching them, I decided I didn't need any more stupid than I already owned. Besides, I'd always been afraid of needles.

Pretty Boy had the heroin habit when I got back from Nam and when Augie Doggie got back a few months after me, he had the habit, too. Started out on morphine he stole from the battalion dispensary. Now both had the craving for anything that could get them into some space where they had no memories of that thing they lost.

I didn't know this then, but I got it figured now, it doesn't matter what you do, there's no forgetting something like the Nam. You can do all kinds of groovy shit and get high, but that won't change anything. You can't get back to the way it was. You can dress like you're twenty years younger, get your face stretched, your tummy slimmed. That's all fluff. Time doesn't go in reverse. Back then I was hoping it did. I felt like somebody needing to be ten years old in a twenty-three-year-old body. I just wanted things to get simple again even as an ancient voice in the back of my brain bitched at me to grow up.

Yeah, and right there in the back seat of my car was reality; Augie Doggie being a shitty-ass because he was out of heroin and didn't have prospects for getting any in the next fifteen minutes. I thought about climbing back there and slapping the shit out of him, just to give him something to really bitch about, but that's all I ever did in those days. Just thought about it.

Pretty Boy came out of the Dairy Queen carrying a tray with our junk. He had Augie Doggie's split and my Coke and something for himself, too. He was smiling wide and acting happy, though to listen how he always went on, there should be no reason for it. I could see the girls inside the Dairy Queen looking at Pretty Boy. I figured he was going to get laid. I looked at Pretty Boy's face. It was cut like some fine glass my mother had sitting on a shelf over the TV. He reminded me of a woman-his nose and cheekbones, his baby blue eyes. And his tall thin body, his delicate feet. But that was all deceptive. He was like a cat, Pretty Boy was, and sometimes mean like a Doberman. Quick and mean, and he could hit like a guided missile. He broke my old man's windshield when he got mad at some chick for not giving him any, just shattered it with a hard right hand. We were drunk. Good thing that chick wasn't around then. He might have busted her ass instead. Christ, my wrist hurt for weeks just from watching him make little spider web cracks across that damned glass.

Augie Doggie got out of the car and reached to get his banana split. Pretty Boy said, "Slow down, I'll give it to you."

Augie Doggie said, "I want it now."

Pretty Boy laughed and said, "Cool it, asshole."

Augie Doggie's face got red as the fire truck across the street. He yanked the tray away from Pretty Boy. The banana split splatted on the pavement. Ice cream sat there like a mountain of snow. Pretty Boy said, "Shit, Augie Doggie."

Augie Doggie threw the rest of the junk on the ground and said, "Fucking shit. Nothing ever works out right." He turned and kicked the fender of my car. The clunk of shoe on metal suggested the sound mortars make when they leave the tube. Augie Doggie yelped and hopped around on one foot. I saw my Coke run into the gutter alongside the street. Some napkins were caught up in the flow. My tongue was dry.

Pretty Boy watched Augie Doggie dance. "You fucking clumsy maggot," Augie Doggie screamed. Pretty Boy shrugged his shoulders in a strangely pious manner. He was accustomed to playing the martyr, something he'd learned while protesting the loss of his right to always be naive. But when Augie Doggie snarled and grabbed his shoulder, Pretty Boy wasn't martyred long. He reared back and threw a right. I saw it in slow motion, the fist moving like a bullet, knuckles tight, scars on the fingers, bicep flexed, veins standing out. I imagined needle tracks in the tissue. The fist smacked Augie Doggie's chin and he crumpled to the pavement, his face slapping the black of it, his eyelids flitting wildly. Some pigeons flew over our heads. The flap of their wings hinted of helicopters. I looked at the pigeons, then at Augie Doggie. He reminded me of a condom once fat with heroin, now flicked aside, spent.

Pretty Boy walked around and opened the passenger door. It croaked with the sound of metal caught on metal. He smiled at me as he got in. I smiled back and started the car. Augie Doggie was ancient history.

As I drove away, I looked in the rear view mirror and saw Augie Doggie on the ground and the plastic tray, too. Some ice cream was still there, along with the banana. Two large cups lay on their sides, empty. And man, it was long gone.

Ken Rodgers lives and writes in Sebastopol, CA. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from USF. Ken spends a lot of time pondering the notion that he may be the last redneck remaining in west Sonoma County.

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Third Prize: $125

 

Deborah Garbor

Beer, Butt-pinching, and Bavarois:

Confessions of a Deviant Pastry Chef

by

Melinda Misuraca

It's gotten so that the thought of a cold beer is the only thing that gets me through the last few hours of my shift. It hovers in my psychic periphery as I boil sugar syrup and whip egg whites for an Italian meringue, peel tuile cookies from a baking sheet and roll them into cigarettes, and give the manager a tongue-lashing whenever he even looks as though he is about to grab my butt. He talks dirty to me as I slap yeasted dough to see if it has assumed the texture of a young woman's ass (I still remember my own ass, way back when, that fragile moment in ephemera when flesh and dough are at their most sweet and buttery).

I've downed more beers during my career as a pastry chef than in any other period of my life, but unlike many of my comrades in the kitchen, I never drink on the job. The chemistry of pastry is too delicate, too easily upset into a domino effect of fuck-ups. The work of a pastry chef requires the manifold arms of a Hindu deity, with each hand gripping a different utensil, and a revolving head that spins continuously, monitoring the various concoctions of sugar, flour and butter in their myriad stages of becoming.

I first popped the pastry cherry while I was a sauté pan-slinging line cook in a manic Italian kitchen. A French bistro around the corner needed a pastry chef and I went over there, all cocky in my chef's jacket with knot buttons and swinging my slick knives, figuring I could wing it. At the end of my first and last day there, after I had suffered over a tart with a crust as indestructible as Zwieback and a custard filling with an eerie resemblance to cellulite, the chef didn't even bother to look at me as he told me he'd be in touch.

On that ego-pulverizing day, I learned that you don't wing pastry. I spent a humbling year under the tutelage of a pastry chef named Gilles, who patiently endured my countless batches of curdled crème anglaise, and bumbled through several more years of oh shit! moments before I reached that coagulation point where I could simultaneously pat my head, rub my tummy, and bang out a perfect crème brulee.

Despite the fastidious (okay, anal) requirements of dessert making, I am intrigued by its more sensual, suggestive aspects. If I were to choose a character from Shakespeare to be a pastry chef, I'd pick Oberon, the Fairy King of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a dark sort of alchemist whose motivations are lust and the satisfaction of manipulating mortals by using various forms of trickery.

It is lust and trickery that elevate a dessert to the realm of mythology. A mere mortal takes a powdered grain that predates civilization, and with skill, luck and the benevolence of the gods, combines it with the most decadent of edible substances. It was, after all, a ripe, juicy apple (in a woman's hand, of course) that led Adam to his undoing, or, in the eyes of some, to the pleasures of the senses. Milk, cream and butter have feminine references to abundant breasts and rich body fluids, while chocolate has been renowned for centuries for its aphrodisiac properties. Throughout history, pastries have been made to resemble the nipples of Venus or substantial cream-filled phalluses. Like love, desserts may be light and ethereal or densely evil in texture, slathered in cream, soaked in exotic liqueurs and covered with an endless summer of fruits and fragrant candied flowers.

Since it is the task of a pastry chef to create not just a dessert, but a mind-blowing bad-is-good love festival of the tongue, you can imagine the pressure we are under, and perhaps understand why some of us hallucinate cold beers during those last stress-laden hours.

During the summer, the temperature in the kitchen can reach a point where the brain sizzles in its own juices, its cerebral functions regressing to a Cro Magnon-like state. The kitchen crew stumbles around slack-jawed and grunting in monosyllables, their cooking techniques reduced to a dangerous display of gross motor movements. Reaction times plummet, resulting in a lot of nearly inedible product. One of the fast-cheap-and-easy ways we camouflage a culinary mistake is to attach the qualifier rustica to the name of the dish. Torta Rustica or Sopa Rustica denotes a badly burnt tart or scorched soup, presented as rustic peasant fare, and perceived as quaint by the populace. I can truthfully state that few items of such nature come from my territory of the kitchen during those heat waves, being that if I make any noises about using the oven, the cooks hurl expletives and culinary verbiage such as flay or quarter, to describe the butchering techniques they will employ upon my anatomy should I do such a thing, and inspiring me to do sorbets, semi-freddo and fresh fruit bavarois.

After working all day in the heat, just thinking about that after-shift beer sends a feeling of relief coursing through my body. I imagine throwing my head back, like some wholesome weekend partier in a beer commercial, the cold, bitter brew tickling my throat, the fuck-ups of the day falling away. I picture myself peeling the label off the bottle while waxing philosophical, or talking the usual trash to my fellow ingrates about the manager, how he pinched my ass again and almost made me drop the charlotte aux framboises. After my shift, if I am in a particularly pissy mood, I'll sneak a cold bottle of beer out into my car. As I am about to drive away, the manager's face will inevitably appear at my car window, leering at the bottle stabilized between my legs. All afternoon, in a kitchen averaging 110 degrees, I've been imagining the sensation of that cold glass on my inner thighs, so I'll tell him to fuck off as I peel out of the parking lot.

The arrogance of the pastry chef is an integral part of the complex web of checks and balances that keeps a restaurant kitchen running smoothly. The trading of transgressions--a stolen beer, a pinch on the ass--have a way of coming out even by the day's end, and if they don't, there are ways to make sure and get the cold beer one is owed.

Awhile back, I was suffering through a particularly noxious pastry gig in a San Francisco restaurant where the kitchen staff would fantasize about using the meat grinder to make Manager-Burgers. One fateful day, said manager reached MAC status (Maximum Asshole Capacity). When he pushed his clueless waitress/girlfriend down the stairs and broke one of her front teeth, I decided that the time had come to collect that proverbial last cold beer. We had a five-course catering for the Joffery Ballet scheduled the next night, and I was to construct the makings of a humongous three-tiered croquembouche, to be assembled at the site. One of the line cooks, Oscar, decided to bail with me. He was going into the army anyway. Oscar was a six-foot-four hulk from Guanajuato who, on good days, would dance behind the line, doing a scary sort of mambo we called the Tantric Lizard.

A couple of chefs from the pretentious bistro down the street agreed to join us for the early morning festivities. I unlocked the door at 5 a.m. and went behind the bar, setting up a beer tasting of the finest pilsners, ales and stouts during the hour when I ought to have been shooting up millions of choux with cognac-flavored pastry cream and clothing them in spun sugar. Oscar used the beer as a tequila chaser, the bistro boys sampled fine wines, and Shane McGowan howled on the stereo. We argued whether or not to exact our vengeance by popping naked out of a cake (too risky, we decided) as we tossed our empty bottles into the insulated crates that ought to have held the desserts for the ballet dinner. Along with the bottles, we threw in a dozen or so potatoes and onions, like something a naughty child might get in his Christmas stocking, and an evil-looking sign written in ketchup that read MANGIA BENE IN HELL. Then we loaded the whole mess into the walk-in.

We figured the manager would swing by in his van sometime in the late morning, find our nasty little surprise and have to hustle up a chef-at-large to whip up a zabaglione or something. We heard from a friend that he was too busy organizing last-minute details, and didn't get over to the walk-in until the dinner was well under way. He didn't even bother to peek inside the crates to see if all was well before speeding them across town to the event.

According to our sources, the prep drones in their spotless whites (still under the foolish illusion of future grandeur as chefs), were already setting up the plates and readying a rolling damask-covered table for the dessert masterpiece when the manager rushed in with the crates. Upon opening them, he emitted an inhuman scream that silenced the entire room of Joffery prima donnas and their consorts. We were told that it sounded like a poor slaughterhouse creature who knows the moment of reckoning has arrived. Oscar and I did an ecstatic Mexican hat dance as our friend described how the manager ended up serving some freezer-burnt vanilla ice cream and anemic strawberries that he had sent one of his frightened waiters to the store for after he found his voice.

I must confess that no conscience sat on my shoulder and wagged its finger that night. I knew those ballerinas were all on diets anyway, but for several months after our prank, I would hear unsettling rumors that a North Beach Mafia boss was looking for me, and all those odd early-morning meetings the manager had held in the walk-in with men in heavy coats and foreign accents would suddenly make terrible sense.

After drinking all morning on the day I burnt my culinary reputation to a crisp, the boys from the bistro had to get to work and Oscar and I, newly exiled black-listed bridge-burners of the culinary world, took a last stolen six-pack up to Coit Tower. We were pretty lit up and couldn't stop talking about our past exploits in the kitchen--the stress and the heat, the assholes we had tolerated, the culinary feats we had achieved. We liked being cooks, really, we did, now that we were on sabbatical from the kitchen. We'd been happy slinging sauté pans and cursing sugary concoctions gone awry. We were already missing the point and counterpoint of the swelter of the kitchen and a smoke in the cool parking lot, of wearing industrial-strength support hose under our chef's pants all day and nothing at all during a midnight swim in the river, of butt-pinching managers and a cold beer between one's thighs while driving away.

Melinda Misuraca's favorite writing studio is her car, parked in the shade of an old oak tree. Having given up the glamour and cachet of a pastry career for that of a writer, she is currently slogging through an MFA program and tortuously writing her first novel. She still bakes to assuage midnight sugar attacks and on occasion, to bribe her sweetheart. She lives in Northern California.

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Honorable Mention: $50

Kamil Dawson

Broken Mare

by

Linda Hershman

"Can you remember a day you didn't want to die?" I ask Nancy. I'm foraging for strengths to pull out of this broken, suicidal woman. Nancy survived years of physical and sexual abuse by various family members, only to hook up with an addict who first sold her possessions, then sold her to his drug buddies in exchange for crack cocaine.

"A few times a year I have days I think I can make it."

"What's different about these days?"

She stares at her hands. The nails are bitten and jagged, cuticles scabbed. She has ceased tearing at her flesh with whatever sharp or blunted objects she finds, but continues to gnaw on her fingernails like a puppy worrying a bone.

"My nails," she says. "I get my nails done and figure no matter how bad I feel inside, if my hands looks good, I have a reason to live for the rest of the day."

She starts each therapy session with the same question. "Why won't you let me die? "

Because I'm not trained to give up. Because, although I'm not convinced there's a life out there worth living for this woman who wears her victimhood as easily as other females don lipstick, my job is to tease out shreds of hope. Because if Nancy dies by her own hand, I never again will be able to look a patient directly in the eyes and say, "I think I can help you."

Sometimes I wonder whose life I'm trying to save.

Nancy grips the knife shaft, her whitened knuckles chalky against the glinting silver blade. The blade slices through the soft surface like a diver breaking water without a splash. She lifts the knife, grinning as she inspects reddish-brown goo clinging to metal.

"I'm free!" she says.

Amidst cheers and applause, she cuts the chocolate cake and doles out pieces to her party guests. Our eyes meet when she hands me my plate. She glances at her extended wrist, a road map of lines, the reminders of another knife. Nancy's level, brown-eyed gaze lets me know she, too, is remembering the first gathering of her treatment team shortly after she was court-ordered into the locked psychiatric facility. Our team was awarded the task of mending a heart far more mutilated than her wrists.

She tears into each gift as if opening Valentines. An envelope from Dr. Anderson, her psychiatrist, contains a prescription for anti-depressants. "This is the present that keeps giving," says the doctor. "You'll have to come back every thirty days for more."

Jerry, the burly psych tech who shadowed Nancy for the past year to prevent her from harming herself, hands her a small, flat box. She rips through the wrapping paper, lifts the cardboard lid, and picks up a tiny yellow training fork and spoon, the kind toddlers use.

"Thanks, Jerry. I'll use these whenever I need to get in touch with my Inner Child," she says. I recall the day Jerry found her scrunched in the corner of her darkened room, digging at her wrists with plastic ware from the hospital cafeteria. She ate sandwiches for weeks afterward, until she earned privileges and was deemed safe enough to eat with plastic again.

Nancy opens the rest of her presents: a decoupage Box of Wishes created by her peers in art therapy; a CD from the music therapist containing "I Believe I Can Fly," a song Nancy sang repeatedly when she least believed this, her rough voice wrapping itself around the chorus like a life preserver. Laurel, the unit head nurse, presents her with a photo she kept on her desk. Nancy loves this framed picture of a black mare poised in an open field, silhouetted by the sun. Every time she gazes at that picture, she promises, "I'll be free like that horse someday."

She saves my envelope for last. Her lower lip trembles as she rips the paper. I know she is not as anxious to leave this dingy, crazy cocoon as she pretends. Twelve months is a long time to live in a mental hospital. The routine comforts Nancy.

Nancy examines the nail salon gift certificate close to the group home where she will be living. She studies her fingernails, which have grown out during the past few months. "I can count ten reasons to live now," she says.

Nancy phones occasionally from the group home. She assures me she is taking her medication and likes her new therapist, although he took some getting used to. She tells me she still hasn't bitten her nails. She frequents the nail salon whenever she has the money. "It doesn't always stop me from wanting to die, but it helps."

After eight months, she calls with dreaded, yet expected news. The hope in her voice oozes through the phone.

"Robert went into a recovery program and he's out now," she says, referring to her abusive, pimping lover. "He wants me to come back. He says he's different."

"What does your therapist think?" I ask, trying to maintain an appropriate boundary while aching to shake her and scream "NO!" or build a wall around the group home high enough to barricade her from thieving, strung-out boyfriends. I want to protect her, and know this is something she needs to learn for herself.

"My therapist thinks I should give it time, maybe do some couple's work. But Linda, he sounds like he's got his head on straight. And he loves me. He said so, and I believe him."

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change...

At first, all I see is darkness. As my eyes acclimate from the brightly-lit corridor to the dimness of the room, I discern a form under the bed covers. A hand peeks from under the sheet, swathed in white gauze.

"Nancy?" My voice is barely a whisper. Then louder. "Nancy."

Her tousled brown head emerges. She blinks, seems to struggle with focusing, lumbers to a sitting position. "Linda. What are you doing here?"

"I work in this hospital now. I'm going to be your therapist again."

"Why can't you just let me die?"

I asked myself the same question when I saw her carried into the hospital, sliced and bloody.

She tells me about Robert, who stayed clean long enough to persuade her to sign over her house and car, which he promptly used to settle up with his dealer. She describes the abandoned building where they found scant shelter against the cold, living without heat or water, the acrid stench of urine, feces and crack seeping into her pores, assaulting her like a disease. She speaks of the unspeakable acts she was forced to perform on the street to keep them fed and pay for Robert's insatiable habit. In a tone flat as her dulled, dark eyes, Nancy recounts the day the dealer's boys burst through the flimsy door of the apartment and insured Robert would never owe money again.

"I can't be fixed anymore, Linda. I'll never be free like that mare." She nods her head toward the photo on her bureau, stripped of its glass frame when she was admitted to the psychiatric ward. "When a horse breaks its leg you have to shoot it. My heart is too broken to put back together."

"You're not a horse, Nancy. You're a woman."

And I am a healer. Nancy tests my faith in this when she slashes her wrists or lives as a human punching bag, but as long as she remains alive, I will not give up.

"Let me help you mend," I say, extending my hand. She regards my manicured fingers, then her chewed stubs poking through the gauze bandages.

Nancy holds out her trembling hand. I slide my palm into hers, like a bridle slipping into a mare's warm, soft mouth.

Linda Hershman is a Marriage and Family Therapist practicing in the Philadelphia area. She specializes in treating substance abuse and eating disorders. Linda's articles have appeared in national magazines. She conducts creative writing workshops at various bookstores and through adult education programs.

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Honorable Mention: $50

Deborah Garbor

SNAPPING TURTLES

by

Carol J. Howard

Once a snapping turtle latches onto something, it won't let go until night falls or thunder rolls-or so the superstition tells us. Common as the mud they love, snappers thrive in almost any river, lake or pond east of the Rockies, north into Canada, and as far south as Ecuador. They can strike with a speed most uncharacteristic of a turtle, and their powerful jaws close in a vise-like grip.

I can vouch for their tenacity. More than thirty years of nightfalls and countless rolls of thunder have passed since my first encounter with snapping turtles, and they have yet to release their hold on my imagination.

I was six years old. It was my family's second summer at a lake cabin in western Wisconsin, our haven from the heat and hustle of the city. One late-August morning my father had promised me a trip into a nearby small town, whose bakery boasted the "Badger State's best bismarcks." I spotted my father out by the shore and, visions of jelly doughnuts in my head, I ran down to see what was keeping him.

As I approached, I saw a whole procession of tiny turtles, not much bigger than quarters, with tails as long as their bodies. There must have been two dozen of them, all freshly hatched and set out in search of the water. My father stood over them, a garden rake in his hand. I watched in wordless horror as he began to kill the baby turtles, driving the hard metal prongs of the rake through their still-soft shells, skewering them like shish kebabs.

"They're snapping turtles," my father explained when he saw me standing there. "A big one could snap through the handle of a broomstick," he said. "Just imagine what it might do to a little girl's fingers or toes." I wriggled my bare toes in the grass uncomfortably, imagining the babies' mother coming back to look for them. I wondered how a big one might fare against a garden rake.

Maybe if they'd received a proper burial, the turtles would have rested more easily on my mind. But my father scooped their punctured bodies into a brown paper bag. Not only would those hatchlings never reach the water alive, they would end up in the dump, tossed out with the week's accumulation of garbage. That was the worst of it somehow. No longer a potential threat to human digit, if not to life and limb, the turtles counted no more than cigarette butts and soggy Cheerios.

I stared silently out the car window all the way to the dump. As my father heaved the bags of turtles and family trash out onto the heap, I recited to myself the only prayer I knew in full-"Now I lay me down to sleep"-seeking divine intervention of some sort. I no longer remember whether I prayed for the dead turtles or for my father. We drove on into town, but I had no stomach for jelly doughnuts.

That was the first battle in a war my father was to wage for many years to come. My mother, meanwhile, fought her own battle, though her foe wasn't so much the turtles as the muck in which they lived. Our cabin was located on a quiet inlet of the lake, where the muck lay deep. My neighbor Kippy and I spent hours slogging through it, delighting in its cool squishiness, as we stalked frogs and tadpoles, crayfish and assorted non-snapping turtles, testing our reflexes against theirs. Best of all was to find a group of turtles sunning themselves on a log. We'd have to sneak up on them carefully, quietly-no mean feat as the muck sucked at our ankles-for as soon as any one of them sensed us, they'd all dive off in succession. With a splashy last lunge, we'd each try to grab one, just as it hit the water. We'd marvel at our catches, then let them go. 

My mother, however, had little use for the muck. She had dreams of a swimming beach, with crystal clear water and a firm layer of pure white sand underfoot. And she was determined to make that dream a reality. One day a dump truck arrived, filled to the top with sand. Twice the truck came, backed its tail to the edge of the water, and dumped its load into the lake in front of our cabin. But my mother had underestimated the power of muck. The thick, rich ooze simply swallowed up the lifeless particles of sand, leaving the lake bottom only slightly more solid to the foot than it had been before.

My mother conceded. Five years after we moved into the original summer cottage, my parents sold the old place and bought land about a mile down the lake, where the bottom was muck-free and the wildlife less abundant. They had a new cabin built, according to their own designs, set at the edge of several acres of woods. Fifty feet of sandy beach stretched between our cabin and the water, providing ample space for games of badminton and horseshoes, for bonfires and bottle rockets on the Fourth of July.

The lake still had its snapping turtles, however, and my father's campaign continued. Something beyond the safety of his children's fingers and toes seemed to be at stake. Something about the turtles themselves must have offended him-their reputed stubbornness, their ugliness, or perhaps their non-rational reptilian brains-I've never known for sure. But the killing of the snapping turtles became his annual ritual, one to which each of us children bore witness in one way or another, a rite of passage of sorts. By the time my sister came of age, my father had traded in his garden rake for an ax, splitting each turtle in two atop a stone slab he kept behind the cabin expressly for that purpose. Later, he recruited my younger brother to the cause, paying him a nickel a head to catch small snappers for the chopping block.

Snapping turtles were our monsters of the deep-shadowy, primitive beasts that haunted the lake, lending it a depth far beyond its sixty or so feet of water. Unlike the "normal" turtles Kippy and I liked to catch, snappers don't climb out onto rocks or low-hanging branches to sun themselves, preferring instead to bask just beneath the water's surface. And they're as likely to walk as to swim, plodding their way along the lake bottom. I remember hearing stories of ducks and other water birds that vanished suddenly, seized by the feet and pulled under by a hungry snapper.

Sometimes when I was swimming, I'd dive under water and peer about to see what might be lurking down below. I'd see myself swimming back to shore and hobbling stoically up to the cabin, snapping turtle firmly attached to my big toe. "You missed one, Dad," I'd announce, holding my foot up high to show him.

All my toes remain intact. One time, though, Kippy and I were out in the canoe, drifting lazily, as he casually dangled his fingers in the water. I looked down and saw a huge snapping turtle-bigger around than the circle of my arms-swimming alongside the canoe, headed straight for Kippy's thumb. With its great hooked beak, ragged coat of brown algae and several fat leeches affixed to its neck, it was as wonderfully awesome a creature as any I'd imagined. Kippy and I both yelped and jumped to the other side of the canoe, nearly capsizing it in the process. The turtle dove deep and disappeared among the weeds.

I subsequently learned that people are far more likely to eat snapping turtles than the other way around. (I'm told their eggs, too, are edible, but only if fried-even incipient snappers refuse to be hard-boiled.) The turtles, for their part, eat mostly fish, invertebrates, and plant matter.

In high school I read Kafka's short story, "The Metamorphosis," and for some time thereafter, I half expected to awaken one morning to the sound of my mother's screams. Running to my parents' room, I'd see in the bed where my father ought to have been, a gigantic snapping turtle, sprawled helplessly on its back, legs flailing the air in an effort to right itself.

Nature works according to her own principles, however. From about the time my family moved into the new place, the lake level began to rise. Gradually, but continuously and inexorably it rose, regardless of the amount of rain and snow that fell in any given year. Water covered our fifty feet of sandy beach, submersing the horseshoe and badminton courts, and dousing the bonfire pit.

Old-timers around the lake assured us that the lake rose and fell according to a seven-year cycle; soon, they said, the water would begin to recede. But seven years passed, and seven more, and still the lake kept rising. Birch trees that lined the shore died a watery death. Their papery white bark peeled away in strips, and they were left standing naked in several feet of water. The lake crept up around the big elms that had shaded the cabin, and encircled the smaller locust trees whose foliage once nearly hid the place from view. Their roots submerged, the trees drowned and dropped their leaves, exposing the orange wooden shell of our cottage.

As the lake started to eat into the small hill on which the cabin rests, my parents had a concrete retaining wall built-our last line of defense against the uprising. But the water worked away at the wall, too, undercutting the south end. Each year, several new loads of rock had to be added to reinforce the crumbling concrete.

Some neighbor suggested that a dam on a nearby river was the source of the problem. It had changed hands and reportedly no longer was opened, thereby raising the water table in the area-or so the theory went. Despite organized protest by landowners around the lake, the keepers of the dam remained unconvinced, and no action ever was taken.

I've always had my own theory. I feel sure the lake will rise just high enough so the snapping turtles can swim through the front door of the cabin and make themselves at home in our living room. I secretly root for the turtles. And when the Minnesota Zoo ran an animal sponsorship program to raise money, I "adopted" a snapping turtle, thus ensuring that at least one member of the species will be safe, if only within the confines of the zoo. My efforts have had no effect on the lake-money tends to be of little use in such matters-but it seemed fitting to make my father grandpappy to a snapping turtle.

Several years ago my parents finally gave in to the rising waters. They bequeathed the sinking summer cabin to their offspring and built themselves a year-round home high up on a hill overlooking the lake-well above any level the water could reach without the aid of another ice age. My father, now near retirement, has long since abandoned the snapping turtle hunt. He's taken up bird watching and has only minor skirmishes with the squirrels that raid his bird feeders. I migrated to the ocean's edge, some 2000 miles away from that restless little lake of my childhood. But I take comfort in knowing that the place is still inhabited by my sole heir and most ancient of kin, the snapping turtle.

Carol Howard is the author of Dolphin Chronicles (Bantam Books, 1996). She currently works as a science writer for the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing and is a member of the Feckless WOE writing group. Carol no longer can claim the snapping turtle as her sole heir: at age 43, she became a mother. Her daughter, now eight, has announced that she won't swim in the lake next summer because "There are snapping turtles!"

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