Thomas Christopher

New Novel

2011-08-08T10:25:00.001-04:00

Joe slung the rifle strap over his shoulder and pointed, but his older brother Frank didn’t say anything, even though he was looking in the right place.

“Over there,” Joe said. “Don’t you see it?”

Frank must’ve finally caught sight of it because he stepped back like someone startled.

“I see it,” Frank said. “Stop pointing.” He knocked Joe’s hand away. “We need to get out of here.”

Down through the woods at the bottom the bluff was the flat river. On the other side was a rocky embankment that led up to the old road that was hardly ever used anymore. For one thing, no one around there had a running car or truck unless it was hitched to some horses. No one had gas or diesel anyway, not for a long time. That’s why Joe was so surprised when he saw the black tires of an overturned vehicle. It was something you would never expect to see.

More Dangerous Than Lies

2010-11-17T15:40:00.005-05:00

The truth is still the truth, no matter where it comes from. That’s important to remember because this story doesn’t always present me in a very good light. Matter of fact, you may not even like me by the time you’re finished. That’s up to you to decide. I will say this, though—my story is as honest and truthful as I could possibly make it. You may even be familiar with some of the fact since the incident aired briefly in the national news. What you don’t know is my intimate role in the whole case, from the very beginning to the very end. More importantly, you need to know that what happened to me could’ve happened to anyone. It could’ve happened to you, and that’s the point. That’s why I’m telling you this.

"Little Terrorists"

2007-10-29T09:20:00.001-04:00

My short story "Little Terrorists" is now in The Louisville Review.

2007-10-28T19:05:00.005-04:00

Short Fiction

2007-09-30T09:17:00.003-04:00

Clearing the Snow, Redivider
After he tried to slip his hand beneath her nightshirt, she rolled over away from him and curled up beneath the comforter. Darren rose up on his elbows, looked as if he was going to say something, and then started to reach over to touch his wife again, but stopped, and got out of bed instead. He left the bedroom, walked down the hall, and turned the light on in an empty room. continue...

Swimming After Midnight, Small Spiral Notebook
Nathan was late for work that night. He'd gotten interested in a TV show about the mysterious disappearance of Amelia Earhart over the Pacific in 1937 and lost track of time. Now that he was all alone in the house, he had the television on a lot, often without the sound. He liked silence, but not emptiness. The glow of the other faces, other lives, made him feel less alone.

Scratches, The MacGuffin
The girlfriend I had before I met my wife told me this story. I’ve invented some parts, filled in gaps, embellished, the usual stuff, but all the central events are true. . . . Both Anne and Seth looked through the grass again and saw their parents all naked, slipping into the creek like otters.

"Riding the Storm"
"Riding the Storm" is in an anthology edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel.
Standing in the hayloft of the old gray barn, I looked out the open hay shoot and watched the bruised blue storm coming toward us over the jagged mountains. Lightening from deep inside the storm sent white light bursting like flash bulbs against the dark clouds. For a moment I wondered what my wife and Julia’s husband were doing at the camp site up in the mountains. No doubt they were huddled in the tent, prepared for the storm, and wondering what happened to us down here in the valley.

Teaching

2007-09-14T11:01:00.000-04:00

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

English Intructor & Tutor, Crieghton University, Omaha, NE, 2006-present.
World Literature I, Intro. to Composition, Writing Center Tutor.

Intro. to Composition, 2007.

English Instructor, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, 2004-2005. Thought & Writing.

English Instructor, Kellogg Community College, Battle Creek, MI, 2004. Writing Improvement.

Instructor, Upward Bound Program, Kellogg Community College, Battle Creek, MI, 2004 & 2005. Literature/Composition II & IV

Teaching Assistantship, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, August 2002 to April 2004.

RSS FEEDS

2007-09-13T12:53:00.000-04:00

Music Videos

2007-08-30T08:31:00.000-04:00

Bio

2007-08-30T08:25:00.009-04:00

Thomas Christopher was born and raised in Iowa, where he graduated from the University of Northern Iowa. After that he lived in Seattle, New Jersey and Montana, before getting his MFA at Western Michigan University. He has published short stories and articles in The Louisville Review, The MacGuffin, Redivider, Small Spiral Notebook, Cooweescoowee, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College, as well as in several anthologies. Currently, he lives in Verona, Wisconsin with his wife, Jesscia, and his son, Holton.

My beautiful wife Jesscia.
Jessica & I at Pistons game.

My wonderful Mom and niece.

Spillway Video

2007-08-27T11:29:00.000-04:00

This video is for a young adult novel that I was unsuccessful in finding an agent for, although there was a lot of interest and a few agents who came close to accepting it. Eventually, I decided to strip the novel down into a short story that will be published soon.

Here is the pitch I used: In Spillway, seventeen-year-old Paul is caught between love and friendship when he falls for the new girl in school, who might not feel the same way, and when his best friend's violent behavior leads to a possible rape.

Favorite Fiction

2007-08-21T11:39:00.003-04:00

A Listmania! list by Thomas Christopher (Omaha, NE United States)

1. Delicate Prey: And Other Stories by Paul Bowles

2. Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera
Thomas Christopher says: "The Hitch-hiking game""

3. Open Secrets: Stories by Alice Munro
Thomas Christopher says: ""The Albanian Virgin""

4. Dubliners (Penguin Modern Classics) by James Joyce
Thomas Christopher says: ""The Dead""

5. Exile and the Kingdom by Albert Camus

6. House of the Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories by Yasunari Kawabata
Thomas Christopher says: ""One Arm""

7. Death in Venice: And Seven Other Stories by Thomas Mann

8. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

9. Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories by Raymond Carver
Thomas Christopher says: ""The Cabin""

10. At the Jim Bridger: Stories by Ron Carlson

11. Difficult Loves by Italo Calvino

12. Harmony of the World: Stories by Charles Baxter

13. The Coast of Chicago: Stories by Stuart Dybek

14. Pricksongs & Descants: Fictions by Robert Coover

15. Blow-Up: And Other Stories by Julio Cortazar

16. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country & Other Stories (Nonpareil Books, #21) by William H. Gass
Thomas Christopher says: ""The Pederson Kid""

17. The Knife Thrower: and Other Stories by Steven Millhauser

18. The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka
Thomas Christopher says: ""Country Doctor," "Metamorphasis," "In the Penal Colony""

19. A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor

20. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition by Ernest Hemingway

Detroit

2007-08-20T10:26:00.000-04:00

Published in Small Spiral Notebook, 2002.

I left in the middle of the night. Threw some clothes in my car and drove away. I hadn’t thought about where I might go until I got close to the Mississippi River, and then I decided I’d drive all the way to my brother’s place in Detroit. He’d be surprised to see me, but glad, too. Anyway, when I got near the Mississippi River bridge in the Quad Cities, the traffic went down to one lane. There was a lot of flashing red and blue lights and one big flood light shining on a smashed up car.

As I got closer I could see it was a woman trapped in a mangle of jagged and twisted steel. She had a neck brace on and bloody bandages on her head and looked dead or passed or maybe they drugged her. I don’t know. There were some rescue workers prying at the steel. Some man was carrying what looked like a chain saw. Off to the side a bit was a big diesel Ford pickup, and I noticed a man sitting in the backseat of one of the cop cars holding a bandage to his head. God damn drunk driver, I figured. The whole scene made me sick and I had to pull off at a truck stop and get some water and coffee, then a slice of apple pie.

After day break I blew a tire and swerved over to the side of the road. An International Harvester was churning through a field of corn in a cloud of dust, leaving in its wake a growing distance of stubble. I opened the trunk, got out the spare tire, and set it against the bumper. The smell from the trunk was musty, but the air outside was cool and dry. As I reached in to get the jack and tire iron, I noticed in the corner, near a dead battery, a pair of white panties, all dirty now. I knew they were hers, but I didn’t know how they had gotten there. I could suddenly see her in them: the hard light from the bathroom spreading into the small dark bedroom where I lay on the bed watching her bend over the sink in the cramped bathroom as she washed her face before she got into bed with me.

I grabbed the dirty white panties and put them to my face, but they didn’t smell like her panties smelled. They smelled of oil and exhaust. I balled them up and threw them in the ditch and put on the spare tire. Inside the car I wiped my blackened hands on a old road map. The harvester was still churning, leaving less and less corn behind. There was nothing in the rearview mirror and nothing ahead in the distance, so I started up the engine. Detroit was three hours away, and I was in Indiana.

Clearing the Snow Video

2007-08-17T22:51:00.001-04:00

Little Terrorists

2007-08-13T12:12:00.000-04:00

Published in The Louisville Review, Fall 2007.

Me and Walt were killing these terrorists because we had to rescue our buddy, who the terrorists had taken prisoner and were no doubt torturing to within an inch of his life. They might even cut his head off. But the terrorists had us pinned down on the other side of Mr. Buck's creek, about a quarter mile away from my house. We were huddled behind a tree along the edge of Mr. Buck's recently harvested cornfield, where rows of severed stocks stuck out of the ground like spikes. We used the discarded corncobs that littered the ground as grenades and I pulled one out of my jacket pocket. I flung it across the creek and made an exploding sound when the grenade went off. But the terrorists kept firing at us from all sides. It was no use. There was only one thing we could do. We had to charge and kill as many as we could. But just as we whipped around the tree, firing our pellet guns, a plane flew overhead.

"Bombs! Bombs!" Walt shouted.

A second later, bombs were falling all around us. I puffed out my cheeks, my mouth full of spit, and made the loudest explosions I could, one right after another, until my face hurt and I felt dizzy. We hunkered down below a fallen tree and waited out the fire storm. When the bombs stopped falling, but the air was still thick with smoke, we made our move. We charged down the embankment and dove over the creek. Then we scrambled on our bellies up the other side to Mr. Buck's hay field, where we scared up a rabbit.

Walt saw it first and fired. Miraculously, he hit the thing because its legs went out from under it. But the rabbit kept running, only it looked like one of its legs was flopping out to the side.

"Get it!" Walt shouted. "We got those dirty terrorists on the run now!"

We charged after the wounded rabbit, chasing it like mad, seeing only a rotten terrorist, until we found it in a grassy ravine. The rabbit was sort of sitting on its side with its mangled back leg sticking out at this crazy angle, like someone had ripped it off and then stuck it back on all backwards. The rabbit was breathing so hard it was shaking. I felt sorry for the poor thing.

"We got you now," Walt said. He pumped his pellet gun and aimed it at the rabbit's head. "Say you prayers, you dirty terrorist."

The rabbit, its little body still shaking and trembling, had one eye on Walt, staring at him. Then it turned its head away, kind of slow, like it knew what was coming.

Walt fired and the rabbit's head jerked and then sunk in the grass. Blood oozed out just above its eye.

"That was awesome," Walt said.

I stared at the dead rabbit. "Should we take it with us?" I said.

"Naw. It's just a stupid rabbit."

"It seems wrong just to leave him there."

"What? Are you going soft on me? Get it together, soldier!" Walt laughed.

"Let's take a break," I said.

Long yellow rows of cut hay stretched over the hills, ready to be bailed, and Walt and I lounged against one of the piled rows facing the white road not far away. Walt had a box of matches and we smoked pieces of straw, sucking in the fiery smoke that made my lungs burn. We both coughed and our eyes watered. But we kept at it because that's what soldiers do when they relax. It's in all the movies.

After a while Walt noticed a jogger running along the white road. He perked up and pointed out the jogger and dared me to take a shot at whoever it was.

"I bet it's Christy Hiedeman," Walt said. "I've seen her jogging before by my house."

Christy was a sophomore in high school. She played softball, basketball and ran cross county and rode the same school bus as me and Walt. Walt liked to flick the ends of her blonde pony-tail until she whipped around and yelled, "Knock it off, you little creep!" She was beautiful. Full of piss and vinegar, as my father would say. One time she punched Walt in the forehead and left three bright knuckle marks on his skin that turned to bruises the next day.

"It's her," Walt said. "Take a shot at her."

"No way," I said.

"What? You a chicken? You gonna start wearing a dress and baking cookies?" Walt laughed.

"Come on, soldier. It's a dirty terrorist. Are you some kind of pussy?"

That did it. I was no pussy. That's for sure. I pumped the pellet gun five times. Then I leveled it toward the road, took aim at Christy's running figure, and followed her along in my gun's sight lines. I didn't know if she was close enough to hit or not, but just having the sights aimed on a real person, a person I knew, with an intent to shoot at her, made me feel uneasy. And I was worried she might turn and see me in the field with the gun pointed at her.

"You got her?" Walt said.

I followed her in my sights.

"Yeah, I got her," I said.

I pulled the trigger and the gun popped. I looked at Christy running steadily along the road. Then she stumbled. My heart went up into my throat. But she didn't stop, or turn to look around, but kept running as if nothing had happened. She must of tripped or something.

"Shit, I thought you hit her for a second," Walt said.

"So did I." My heart was racing, but I felt relieved.

"I need a smoke now," Walt said, and lit the end of a piece of straw.

After we smoked and coughed a while more, Walt began lighting matches and dropping them on the hay as I slapped and blew them out. He laughed.

"You're gonna set this whole field on fire," I said.

Walt leapt onto the other side, and next thing I knew, he shouted, "Terrorist attack! Terrorist attack!"

I turned and saw smoke. "Put it out," I said.

But we both just stood there on opposite sides of the smoke. Then these orange flames snapped up in the air like whips. A moment later the flames started spreading faster through the pile of hay until it was a fire. Just like that, it was a fire.

"Put it out! Put it out!" I cried.

We began stamping at the flames with our sneakers. We tore off our jackets and slapped at the fire as a black ring of burnt ground grew around us.

"Keep it from going down the row!" I shouted.

Walt and I continued to fight what we thought was an inferno. We slapped and stomped at the flames until our jackets burned and our sneakers started to smoke. It seemed we fought the fire for hours, but it kept spreading. The left sole of my sneaker had a hole burned clear through.
But the fire kept going and going.

"We gotta get out of here," Walt said.

"We can't leave it," I said.

"They'll know it was us, you idiot."

"We'll just say we found it."

"Not me. I'm getting out of here."

Walt started to run toward my house.

"Wait," I shouted. "I'm coming."

But when I started to run my left foot hurt. I stopped and looked through the burned hole in my sneaker and saw a big red blister.

"I'm injured," I shouted.

"We can't stop," Walt said.

I looked behind me and couldn't believe how big the fire was getting. The flames were going real high, shooting up like bunches of arrows, and the smoke was like bubbling and swirling all around.

"Come on," Walt said.

I ran.

When we got to my house, we stuffed the burnt shreds of our jackets in the burn barrel out behind the shed. Since I was responsible for garbage, no one would notice them. We snuck through the garage and up the back stairs to avoid my mom, who was in the kitchen. Then we went into the bathroom to wash up.

Walt swore the fire was an accident, but I knew it wasn't. He was always doing stuff like that on purpose. But I didn't say anything about it.

We crept down the hall to my bedroom. I hid my sneakers, planning to stash them in the burn barrel later, and I put on clean clothes and gave Walt a clean shirt. When we looked out the window, black smoke was curling and rising higher and higher into the air behind the shed. It didn't look good. Then my mom ran out into the backyard, where she wiped her hands on a towel, looked up at all the smoke, and then turned around and ran back inside.

Me and Walt, we stepped away from the window.

Resume

2007-07-30T08:55:00.000-04:00

EDUCATION
M.F.A., Fiction, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, April 2004

B.A. Humanities, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA, May 1992

PUBLICATIONS
"Little Terrorists." The Louisville Review. Spalding Univeristy. Fall, 2007.

"Lightning." Cooweescoowee. Claremore, OK: Rogers State University. Fall, 2005

"Clearing the Snow." Redivider. Boston: Emerson College. December, 2004

"Building Blocks, Legos, and Lincoln Logs: Helping Composition Students with Organization." Teaching English in the Two-Year College. NCTE, September, 2004

"Scratches." The MacGuffin. MI: Schoolcraft College, June 2004

"Swimming After Midnight." Small Spiral Notebook. New York: Felicia Sullivan, January 2003

Detroit." Small Spiral Notebook. New York: Felicia Sullivan, February 2002

TEACHING EXPERIENCE
English Intructor & Tutor, Crieghton University, Omaha, NE, 2006-present.
World Literature I, Intro. to Composition, Writing Center Tutor

English Instructor, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, 2004-2005.
Thought & Writing.

English Instructor, Kellogg Community College, Battle Creek, MI, 2004.
Writing Improvement.

Instructor, Upward Bound Program, Kellogg Community College, Battle Creek, MI, 2004 & 2005. Literature/Composition II & IV

Teaching Assistantship, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, August 2002 to April 2004.

CONFERENCE AND SEMINAR PRESENTATIONS
"Little Terrorists", Michigan College English Association. Michigan State University, September, 2005

"Using Urban Legends to Teach Creative Writing", Association of Writers & Writing Programs. Chicago, March 2004

"Evaluating Teacher Responses to Student Writing", Seminar for new teaching assistants in composition. Western Michigan University, August 2003

"The Fall of Classical Rhetoric in the Late Nineteenth Century", Conference on College Composition and Communication. New York City, March 2003

Fun Stuff

2007-05-20T11:02:00.000-04:00

Favorite books of short stories on Amazon's Listmania.

Funny, self-deprecating video of writer Steve Almond.

Make it funky! Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.

2007-05-11T21:03:00.000-04:00

New video of short-short Detroit and Clearing the Snow.

Mexico Vacation, Pt. 1

2006-02-07T10:53:00.000-05:00

Scratches

2006-01-31T15:25:00.000-05:00

Published in The MacGuffin Spring/Summer 2004, 247-251.

The girlfriend I had before I met my wife told me this story. I’ve invented some parts, filled in gaps, embellished, the usual stuff, but all the central events are true. A while back I saw her at Dick’s Health Food store and asked her if she remembered telling me that story about when she was a kid. She lowered her head and smiled. She told it to me one night after we made love next to a stream in Dylan Marshall State Park. I don’t want to give too much away, except, according to her anyway, nothing much happened beyond that first time when she and her brother went to the creek.

“You would remember that,” she said.

I told her I was going to make a story out of it, and she said she wanted to read it when I was done. She said she had met a nice guy from Cedar Falls who was a tool and die maker and they were thinking about moving in together. That was great, I said. But I didn’t get her new phone number, and the one listed in the phone book had been disconnected.

******

Anne was in bed when her little brother Seth opened the door.

“Hey,” he said.

“What’re you doing?” she whispered.

The light from the hall, which her parents always left on at her request, shined in her eyes. Seth closed the door and Anne flicked on the lamp beside the bed. She was afraid he was going to wake up their parents.

“What do you want?” she said.

He crawled onto her bed and sat Indian style in front of her and had a devilish look in his eyes, like he knew something, and he did.

“I know what they’re doing,” he said.

Anne sat up, pulled her nightshirt over her legs, and brushed her hair behind her ears, ready to listen. Even though Seth was her little brother, he was good at telling about things that made her want to listen.

“Who?” Anne said.

“Mom and Dad.”

“So?” she said, trying to be grownup about it. “That’s what parents do.”

She had glimpsed them once through a crack in the door when she was supposed to be outside playing, so she thought she knew all about what adults did.

“But they’re not in their bedroom,” Seth said.

“Where are they?” she said.

“They’re outside.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw them.”

“You saw them—”

“I saw them go outside and that’s where they’re at.”

But then Anne started to think he was making it all up and they really shouldn’t be talking about it, especially if their parents heard. Their room was right next to hers on the second floor landing, where the cedar bench containing old smelling quilts sat next to the attic door across from Seth’s room.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “That doesn’t make any sense. Go back to bed.”

She tried to lie back, but Seth grabbed her knees and looked straight into her eyes and said, “It’s the truth. I swear on a stack of Bibles.”

“You’re not supposed to swear,” she said. “It’s true.”

His eyes got really big. “The other week I was looking through my telescope and when I went to adjust it, I looked away and saw them sneaking across the backyard into the cornfield. So I went out and tried to follow them, but couldn’t find them till I heard noises.” He emphasized that word and rounded his eyes again. “I followed the sounds till I came to the end of the field. In the grass along the creek, I saw them.”

At first, Anne believed him. She wanted to believe him, but then she had her doubts again about his story.

“You’re fooling me. I know it. You’re always making up stories,” she said. “If you want to stay and sleep, that’s fine. But I don’t want to hear any more.”

“I’ll show you,” he said. “Prove it to you.”

“Seth, we have Bible School in the morning.”

“Well, I’m gonna just sit here then.” He crossed his arms.

“Fine,” she said, and clicked off the light.

Anne wedged herself beneath the sheet, curling her legs against Seth’s bony shins, but his hot breath kept blowing against her face, and it didn’t smell pleasant. She opened her eyes and nearly screeched. His eyes were right in front of hers, bugged and wild-looking. She sat up quickly and bumped her forehead against his nose.

“Jesus Christ, what did you do that for?” he said.

“You scared me.”

“Well, you don’t have to knock me in the goddamn head.”

“Watch your mouth. And it’s your own fault.”

She clicked on the light. He scrunched his nose back and forth to make sure it was okay. “Are you coming or not?” he said.

Anne looked at him. “I guess,” she said, saying it like it was no big deal and she was doing it as a favor, when actually she was curious, but didn’t want to show it.

“Awesome,” Seth said, and jumped off the bed like a loose spring.

“Let me get my shoes.”

Anne took off her nightshirt and put on a pair of jeans, a t-shirt, and a pair of old sneakers, her tromping-around-in sneakers.

Seth returned to her room and said, “Let’s go,” and grabbed her hand.

He led her out the backdoor. They hurried across the backyard, passed the big maple tree with the tire swing, to the fence that ran along the cornfield. The moon was full and the sky jammed with stars. The grass was scattered with moonglows. All the brightness made it easy to see in the dark until they crossed over the fence and came against the black corn towering high above their heads.

A tremor of fear went through Anne. “Why don’t we take the lane? It would be easier,” she said, looking up at the dark corn and all the leaves tangled in the rows. “We won’t be able to see in there.”

“No way,” he said. “They might be coming back that way and see us.” Seth took hold of her hand again and had to pull. “Come on,” he said.

They crashed into the row and the leaves instantly scratched and grabbed at her. She couldn’t look up or keep her eyes open for fear of being slashed in the eye, then she stumbled on some dirt clods, but she didn’t fall because Seth kept pulling her along by the hand. Leaves whipped at her face as they rushed through the blinding row of corn stalks. It was like she was being stoned, like in the Bible, rocks flying down on her from all directions.

“Down,” Seth said.

Anne slumped to the ground, disoriented, her head flung forward toward the dirt and her hair hanging around her face.

“Look up,” Seth said.

He shoved at her shoulder. She hesitated, pushed her hair out of the way, and turned toward him. He was kneeling low and peering through a separation in some tall grass at the edge of the field. Anne crept up next to him. She smelled the open soil and the yeasty corn. Above the tall grass, through the corn leaves dangling down like arms, she could see the dark sky and the scrawl of stars. She crouched beside Seth and separated some more of the grass near his face where he was staring through the opening.

“You see them,” he said. “I do. Look.”

He moved aside slightly and Anne slowly raised her head high enough to see through the grass. But all she saw was a moonlit landscape of trees and hills, so she raised her head some more until she saw the glimmer of water in Broken Run Creek. A moment later she spied her mom and dad. They were on the other side of the creek, lying on a blanket spread beneath the trees in each other’s arms. Anne thought for sure there was something wrong about her looking at her mom and dad like that, but she couldn’t stop.

“Do you see them?” Seth said. “Do you see them?” “I see them.”

She hadn’t known what to expect before she looked, but what she saw was something like the pictures of Eden in her illustrated Bible. As Anne watched them on the blanket with the creek rushing past, she didn’t think of the two people lying there as her mom and dad. For some reason she didn’t feel strange about watching them that way either, which puzzled her, because she figured she should be ashamed about what she was doing.

“It’s not right,” she suddenly said. “We shouldn’t be here.” She turned her head toward the corn.

“What?” Seth said.

“We should go.”

But before Anne had a chance, she heard her mom laugh. Both Anne and Seth looked through the grass again and saw their parents all naked, slipping into the creek like otters. They were laughing and splashing each other. Anne couldn’t believe it. They seemed so happy and free in the water, not like usual when they were so serious and telling everyone to behave. They seemed like children playing, not parents or grownups.

After they finished bathing, they dried each other off with a white towel that seemed to glow as they ran it all over the other’s body. Anne stared at them for a long time, scrutinizing how their bodies looked. Her dad’s penis hung down between his legs and she wondered what it would be like to have such a thing dangling down there between her own legs. In comparison, her mom was short and showed a little tummy and her breasts drooped like heavy sacks. Anne wondered if her breasts would look like that when they were fully grown and put her hands on her chest and imagined two sacks.

“What’re you doing?” Seth said. “Nothing,” she said, and dropped her hands.

“Can I?” he said.

“No,” she said, automatically. “Don’t be silly.” But then she reconsidered just as quickly and said, “Okay, maybe a little bit.”

He put his hands on her and pressed them against her shirt. She watched his hands move as if they were disembodied, and focused on the sensation of having someone else’s hands on her.

“Can I see?” he said.

Before Anne realized it, she had her t-shirt pulled over her head, surprised at how quickly it happened, without her even thinking about it, as automatic as the “no” before. He touched her again, only it was on her bare skin now and the feeling was different, more real. But then she started to feel wrong about Seth’s hands on her.

“Stop,” she said, and brushed his hands off her bare chest like dirt and looked through the grass again. “They’re leaving,” she said. “We should get back.”

“Yeah,” Seth said.

“Hurry,” she said, and put her t-shirt back on.

Seth led the way through the corn again, but he was going too fast and didn’t have a hold of Anne’s hand. She tossed her arms up into the sharp leaves, fighting them off, trying to keep the leaves from hitting her in the face and at the same time keep up with Seth. The dark corn seemed to close in around her. She fell once, scrambled back up, afraid she would be caught there in the dark tangled row. She knew she was crying, but she couldn’t open her eyes; she was too afraid. The leaves were grabbing at her like hands, like they wanted to keep her there, hold her there in the darkness.

Finally she made it to the fence and Seth was waiting for her.

“Hurry,” he said.

They crawled over the fence and dashed across the backyard. In the house, they scampered up the stairs and into their bedrooms. Anne pulled off her t-shirt, but not her jeans because she didn’t have time, and slipped her nightshirt over her head and jumped beneath the sheet on her bed. She closed her eyes and heard her mom and dad coming up the stairs. “Shhh, Gordon,” she heard her mom whisper, “the kids.” Anne tried to calm her breathing and be silent, as if she were asleep. Her door latch clicked softly and she froze as she realized her parents were looking in on her.

When she finally heard her parents’ door close, she opened her eyes. A strip of light from the hall ran across her bed and against the wall. Anne got up, shut the door quietly, turned and stood in her dark room, then faced the open windows and the moon-full night shining and streaming in on her. After she took off her jeans and pulled off her nightshirt, she went to the windows and looked out at the stars and at the grass covered in moonglows and darkness. The soft air flowing through the screen wrapped around her bare skin and pulled at her toward the shimmery night outside. She looked at her arms, at the long red scratches cris-crossing her skin and noticed how they burned. She knew then she would have to think up some kind of lie tomorrow to explain the scratches to her mom, because they weren’t there when she went to bed that night. Scratches like that didn’t come from just sleeping.

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Could Shakespeare Come From Humble Beginnings?

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Okay, Kids, Lesson #1: Raymond Carver

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Videos

2005-10-13T10:46:00.000-04:00

Clearing the Snow

2005-10-10T12:03:00.001-04:00

Published in Redivider, Fall 2004

After he tried to slip his hand beneath her nightshirt, she rolled over away from him and curled up beneath the comforter. Darren rose up on his elbows, looked as if he was going to say something, and then started to reach over to touch his wife again, but stopped, and got out of bed instead. He left the bedroom, walked down the hall, and turned the light on in an empty room.

In the kitchen he opened a cupboard and took out a new pack of Marlboros. He was barefoot, wearing only pajama bottoms and a t-shirt, and felt the cold linoleum beneath his feet. After he lit his cigarette on the stove he went to the backdoor and put on a pair of thermal boots and sat down at the kitchen table. He tapped the ashes of his cigarette in the dirt of his wife’s cactus plant.

For five restless nights they waited in the hospital, hoping, but in the end there was nothing the doctors could do; the baby had been born with too many complications. At first Darren felt the same way as Kate, that somehow they had done something wrong, they were somehow to blame for what happened. But after seven months Kate’s feelings hadn’t diminished, instead they ran deeper, longer, and more troubled than his own. Darren was starting to put it all behind him, to pass the experience into memory and clear a space for other events to fill. But what had happened was still too alive in Kate’s heart for her to even try. She felt as though there was something fundamentally wrong with her body, that something inside her had turned against the child and might do it again in the future. That’s what she told Darren. He didn’t know how to change her mind, to help her get over the pain.

He crushed out his cigarette in the dirt of the cactus plant and went to the window and peered through his reflection at the snowflakes falling silently on the snow-covered backyard. He touched his fingertips to the cold glass, then pulled them away. He went to the backdoor, flipped on the yardlight, and looked out the window at the deck he had built last summer. Snow fell through the pale yellow light on the deck, collecting on all the smooth white snow that had been falling steadily since early that evening.

Darren gabbed a long, dirty coat off a hook. He removed a stained red stocking cap from one of the sleeves and stretched it out over his head, then put on the coat, zipped it up, and took from the pockets a pair of blackened leather gloves and slipped them on. He opened the backdoor, twisted the knob too far as he stepped outside, and closed the door behind him.

****

Kate heard the door open, then shut, and she got out of bed and went to the windows. She pushed back the curtains and saw her husband walking down the steps of the deck and disappearing into the garage. She stood there, watching the snow fall through the light of the backyard, and looked at the vacant footprints her husband had left pressed across the deck. She wondered what he was doing. Then he came out of the garage carrying a shovel. He still had his pajamas on, and he hadn’t laced up his boots either.

She watched her husband set the shovel against the door and sweep snow off the railings with his hands. After he finished, he picked up the shovel again and started scooping snow and tossing it over the railings, then stopped, and pushed the snow across the length of the deck and over the edge.

Kate watched him from the window a while. She spread her hands against the soft flesh around her belly then hugged herself tight. She crawled back into bed, clutching her pillow with both hands, and stared at the window before turning over.

*******

As he continued to shovel in the cold night air, the snow falling down all around him, Darren felt a warm tingling in his muscles. He stopped once, looked up at their dark bedroom window, then resumed shoveling until the deck was clear. He returned the shovel to the garage and walked back across the deck, already covered with a thin new layer of snow. At the backdoor he grabbed the knob and tried to turn it, but the doorknob wouldn’t turn.

“Dammit,” he said, and slapped his coat several times, feeling for a set of keys, but there weren’t any. “Dammit,” he said again, and went back to the garage.

He found a set of keys hanging from a hook inside the door, returned to the backdoor, and began inserting them into the lock and turning the knob. The snow kept falling down all around him. When none of the keys worked, he thought of banging on the door to wake his wife, then he thought about punching his gloved hand through the glass, but instead he returned to the garage to get a screwdriver. He pried it into the key hole. After that didn’t work, he wedge the screwdriver between the door and jamb until the lock popped and the knob turned in his hand.

Back inside, Darren removed his coat and gloves. He slipped out of his boots and padded barefoot across the cold kitchen floor, then walked up the stairs to their closed bedroom door. He opened it, saw the curtains were pushed back, and realized he’d left the yardlight on, but he didn’t want to go back now and shut it off. The yellowish glow outside the window had crept into their room and lay a soft yellow sheen across the blue comforter where Kate lay curled in a pocket of darkness. She didn’t stir as Darren walked to his side of the bed. For a moment he stared at the back of his wife’s curled body before he took off his clothes.

At the time, what happened next seemed like the only thing he could do. He grabbed the edge of the comforter and yanked it off the bed. Kate flinched, but she didn’t roll over. Darren grabbed the sheet next. It billowed out like a sail before crumpling out of sight. He leaned forward, grasped her forearm, and yanked it too. Kate flipped over on her back, and Darren pulled her across to his side of the bed, where she lay sprawled out beneath him. When he got on top of her, she tried to resist at first, but after a while she stopped struggling.

Short Fiction

2004-05-14T09:47:00.005-04:00

Swimming After Midnight, Small Spiral Notebook
Nathan was late for work that night. He'd gotten interested in a TV show about the mysterious disappearance of Amelia Earhart over the Pacific in 1937 and lost track of time. Now that he was all alone in the house, he had the television on a lot, often without the sound. He liked silence, but not emptiness. The glow of the other faces, other lives, made him feel less alone. continue...

Scratches, The MacGuffin
The girlfriend I had before I met my wife told me this story. I’ve invented some parts, filled in gaps, embellished, the usual stuff, but all the central events are true. . . . Both Anne and Seth looked through the grass again and saw their parents all naked, slipping into the creek like otters. continue...

Clearing the Snow, Redivider
After he tried to slip his hand beneath her nightshirt, she rolled over away from him and curled up beneath the comforter. Darren rose up on his elbows, looked as if he was going to say something, and then started to reach over to touch his wife again, but stopped, and got out of bed instead. He left the bedroom, walked down the hall, and turned the light on in an empty room. continue...

Lightning, Cooweescoowee
My mother told me Shelly Svenbold had died in a car accident with some man she’d met at a bar. I was standing at the kitchen window listening to her on the phone. She told me the man wasn’t on his way to take Shelly home to her second husband because the accident had happened on a back road three miles past Shelly’s house toward the town of Willawood, where the man lived in a farmhouse with his aging mother and a mentally challenged sister.

"Riding the Storm"
"Riding the Storm" is in an anthology edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel.
Standing in the hayloft of the old gray barn, I looked out the open hay shoot and watched the bruised blue storm coming toward us over the jagged mountains. Lightening from deep inside the storm sent white light bursting like flash bulbs against the dark clouds. For a moment I wondered what my wife and Julia’s husband were doing at the camp site up in the mountains. No doubt they were huddled in the tent, prepared for the storm, and wondering what happened to us down here in the valley.

Out With the New and In With the Old

2004-05-14T09:18:00.000-04:00

Of Birthdays Past & Present

2004-04-17T10:26:00.000-04:00