I remember

I remember when journalism was respected.

I remember the feel of a manual typewriter, and how it would jam if you got too excited.

I remember deep shag carpets.

I remember how someone could smile with their eyes.

I remember the insurance salesman who would hand out his business card at the weekend picnic.

I remember celebrating Chinese New Year.

I remember bacon and beans, with cornbread.

I remember Robbie shooting out the window on Grandpa’s mobile home with a crossbow.

I remember Two-Two, the dog that danced with you.

I remember being able to watch TV as much as I wanted.

I remember mowing the lawn with a tractor.

I remember the beaded seat cushions Grandma had in her Volkswagen. I always wondered if she was a Jamaican taxi driver on the side.

I remember Battleship on the Commodore 64.

I remember how big horses were.

I remember the smell of the dump.

I remember the smell of oil.

I remember watching an egg being laid.

I remember Butch, and what a good dog he was. He was infested with ticks, on every square inch of his body. The only way Grandpa knew how to get them off was to paint him with motor oil, and suffocate the ticks. Butch didn’t survive.

I remember playing catch, and how often I missed the ball entirely.

I remember the first time I beat Mom at Scrabble.

I remember restoring the Volkswagen.

I remember hiking to the Colorado River and back the rim of the Grand Canyon in one day.

I remember how many blisters I had the next day.

I remember riding in the back of a car, across the country.

I remember getting lost on the Eiffel Tower.

I remember learning how to drive a stick-shift.

I remember being in charge of the campfire, and how I always let it get too high.

I remember hiking every trail in Yosemite.

I remember my first kiss.

I remember playing video games until the sun came up, and then rushing to bed.

I remember the smell of sex.

I remember my first night getting wasted. I had about 10 shots of vodka within a few hours at a friend's house. We played cards until we couldn't see straight then watched TV for a little while. I drove home and slept it off.

I remember listening to Bon Iver.

I remember Blackberries.

I remember Power Rangers, and how I always wanted to be the Pink one.

I remember learning how to dive.

I remember belly flopping the first few times.

I remember, just out of bed in the morning, red wrinkle designs in your skin.

I remember, when relatives come to visit, sleeping on the couch.


-Grace

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Free Solo

Higher, ever higher

Climbing at the pace of

The rock itself, looking

In vain for weaknesses, flaws

Any chance to gain a foothold.

Water trickles down a promising channel

Not there, it won’t share

Shadows are an ally, revealing depth

Holding the weight of a man

On the width of a hair

The wind roars, powered by the wall itself

Your grip, that tenuous cling to life itself, falters

The wind dies, and you remain, seemingly

As immortal as the granite itself

But as fleeting as the wind, now long gone


-Grace

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A walk in the park

Ryan finally convince Kate to come with him up to the foothills. It was an annual trip he used to take with his Dad ever since he could remember. But when his Dad died from a heart attack three years ago, Ryan made the trip as a pilgrimage on the same weekend every year, as something he could remember him by.

When he met Kate he knew that getting her outdoors would be a challenge. A suburban girl, her family never really left the city as she was growing up. In PE, she picked all the sports that allowed her to stay indoors, and carried through with women's volleyball into college. A wonderful woman who cared for Ryan, the great outdoors just simply was not Kate's cup of tea.

After months of subtle coaxing, many trips to REI for the newest gear, and plenty of assurances that they would not be eaten by a rabid bar, he was able to convince her to make the annual trip to the Great Smoky Mountains with him. In late April, the park is bursting forth with new growth and the creeks are running full with water the color of crystal. She was overjoyed at the sense of closeness that nature made her feel for Ryan. Sharing a bottle of wine by the campfire, Kate felt she had never been more at home.

The rouged coals languished long after midnight.


-Grace

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LAPD

John Hamm hated his beat. Mexicans and Negroes everywhere, in a low rent tenement area of East LA. The car was new, a 1946 Dodge, but the department stiffed him on a partner. Hamm was forced to patrol the streets looking for crime in the middle of the night, a middle aged cop with a wife and two kids, by himself. "Fuck bureaucrats", he thought.

LA was booming, with a huge influx of money and people after the war. It seemed like the wartime engine that sprang up to pull the area out of the Depression never wound down, and folks just kept coming. Housing prices closer to the center of town were skyrocketing, so areas like John's beat were growing quickly. If you needed to live within a bus ride of downtown, but couldn't afford to live there yourself because you washed dishes for a restaurant, then you eked out a living in a rotting apartment in East LA.

Hamm turned the corner on 15th Street and put the pedal down for a few seconds to wake himself up. He had another hour until his break, when Monica was working at Sunnyside Donuts, so he'd have to battle sleep until he could get a hot cup of joe from her. When he stopped for the light at Broadway, he heard something a faint "pop pop, pop" down an alley.

"Badge 592, Dispatch."
"Go ahead 592."
"I have a possible 5150 in progress on Broadway, 400 block. Requesting assistance."
"Copy 592. 5150 in progress, sending officers your way. Dispatch out."

Hamm pulled over quickly and got out of the Dodge, closing the door quietly. He began working his way over to the corner of the alley, hoping to peer down and figure out how many bad guys had been shot. When he looked around, what he saw surprised him.

Laying in the center of the alley was a severed hand, attached to a semi-automatic Browning pistol. A note lay in the center of a streetlight's orange glow, trapped at the corner by the barrel of the pistol.

"She is no longer alive. You can stop looking Hamm. It will do you no good in the end."

The first squad car reported to the scene as John finished reading the note. He knew his beat would never be the same again.

-Grace

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Cinderella Remix

Despite her excitement that she was finally dancing with the Prince at the ball, Cinderella was careful to take heed of her fairy godmother's advice. "You must leave the palace before midnight, as that is when my magic will disappear," she had been warned. With the hour rapidly approaching, Cinderella ignored the longing in her heart to stare for just one more moment into the Prince's warm almond shaped eyes, and with a rush began towards the palace gates. The Prince raced after her, attempting to convince this beautiful woman who had begun to steal his heart to stay with him, at the palace. He reached for her arm, but only caused Cinderella to lose her balance, and a slipper in the process. Safely inside the carriage with minutes to spare, she raced home before the spell wore off.

The next morning, the Prince began his relentless search for his new love. Slipper in hand, he was determined to locate the mysterious seductress from the ball and marry her on the spot. Arriving at Cinderella's house, he was greeted by her stepmother and sisters, all fawning over the Prince who decided to visit them. He proceeded to test fit the slipper on the first sister, and was promptly disappointed when her foot wasn't even close to fitting the dainty shoe. When he tried the second sister's foot however, he paused. It was a close fit, with a little wiggle room in the heel, but very close nonetheless. He pulled the slipper off, looking the sister in the eye. She stared back at him, with a deeply satisfied smirk on her lips. Not entirely convinced, he asked if there were any other daughters to test fit the shoe on. At that moment, Cinderella quietly emerged from the pantry, unwillingly to let her step-family allow the Prince to walk out of her life.

When the Prince looked at Cinderella, he knew she was the one. The sweet, pure sparkle in her eyes was one of a kind, with none of the veiled narcissism or spite like her sisters. Elated he had found his mysterious Princess, he rushed forward and carried Cinderella onto a kitchen stool, eager to confirm the obvious with a test fit of the slipper. When he touched her foot, he paused. They were swollen and red, with no obvious insect bites. She looked up at him, with tears in her eyes, as he set her foot gently to the ground. The Prince stood and said, "Ma'am, with your permission, I would like to ask your daughter's hand in marriage." Cinderella's stepmother was beside herself with joy, bouncing up and down and attempting to hug the Prince before his guards gently removed her. He looked down at Cinderella one last time, before he led his new bride out to their carriage back to the palace.

And that, boys and girls, is why you break in new shoes before you go dancing.

The End

-Grace

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Poetry

My early poetry was horrific. As with most bad poets, I as unaware of this fact, secure in my arrogance that the very act of creating gave worth to the worthless abortions I was spawning. Mother remained tolerant even as I left reeking little piles of doggerel around the house. She was indulgent of her only son, even if he was as blithely incontinent as an unhousebroken alpaca.

Don Balthazar never commented on my work; primarily I assume, because I never showed him any of it. Don Balthazar thought that the venerable Daton was a fraud, that Keats and Robert Frost should have hanged themselves with their own entrails, that Woodsworth was a fool, and that anything less than Shakespeare's sonnets was a perversion of the language. I saw no reason to bother don Balthazar with my verse, budding and rife with genius though I knew it to be.

I published several of these little literary turds in the various hardcopy journals  that were in vogue in the various European libraries, the amateur editors of the associated journals being as indulgent of Mother as she was of me. Occasionally I would press John or one of my other playmates to uplink some of my verses to Mars or Jupiter, and thus to the ever growing interstellar colonies. They never replied. I assumed they were too busy.

-Grace

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A woman scorned

The disgust was like a bile, a feeling so strong it manifested itself as a reaction inside her body. Meina Gladstone had approached this moment with the same calm, cool, pragmatism she utilized in law school, but the preparations and years of dedication almost made the words being spoken by the judge cut through her cold exterior and unleash the torrent of rage she had carried for so many years.

In a land of individual choice, with judicial precedence founded on the idea that each and every man woman and child was created equal and granted with the power to determine their own destiny, their own interpretation of the American Dream, Meina had never found freedom. No matter what tactic she employed, be it reason, empathy, sympathy, justice, or anger, her opinion was always stifled. No matter how much she disagreed, no one ever gave an inch of ground.

This across the board defiance had inspired her. A middle of the road student as an undergraduate, Meina achieved the grades necessary to get into New York University Law School, where she worked tirelessly with her professors to achieve academic excellence. Within four years, she had achieved every possible academic merit possible at the school, and graduated as Salutorian. Though she delivered a short and somewhat lackluster speech, her professors were hopeful about Meina’s future. Perhaps careers in Education or Social Policy, as those were the two issues that seemed to energize her the most while at the University.

However, the mere fact that people were guessing which direction she would go befuddled many of her alumni. A driven young woman, who never looked into apprenticeships at any firm, or even negligible ties to any sort of campus community, was unheard of at NYU. In a profession with upward mobility and opportunity controlled by who you knew, Meina seemed to be treading in uncertain waters.

Three years later, she finally brought her case to the District Court of Northern California. Her unusual move to enter a personal claim against the Federal Government, and then choose to represent herself, drew media attention to the case. The normally sleepy, wood paneled halls in San Francisco had been abuzz for weeks, with CNN and FOX news channels speculating on what the decision in her case would mean for the interpretation of the 1^st and 9^th Amendments. With constitutional challenges already creating hype because of gun control and immigration, Meina’s case added fuel to the fire, and the press loved it.

After three weeks of testimony, both the prosecution and the defense rested their cases. The judge took the rest of the day to deliberate, and resumed the trial the next morning. At 8:03 am, he announced, “I have ruled the defendant, not guilty”.

Her disgust was palpable, and the TV cameras showed a woman who didn’t think twice about broadcasting her disdain for the judge’s opinion. Walking quickly out the huge oak doors and onto Golden Gate Avenue in order to avoid a TV interview, Meina promised herself she would move the case to the 9^th Circuit, and appeal all the way to the Supreme Court. It was not the route she had hoped for, but one she had planned contingencies around. Her grey eyes had finally cooled, the rage contained, the ice back in her stare.

-Grace

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