When they found her dead none of us could believe it, really. You don’t have much like that going on around her. You do in the bigger cities and towns close by, but we have nothing more than a grocery store, a Family Dollar and what was a Pizza Hut that shut down and got reopened as a hamburger stand.

 

Her body was found hid away down in a deep place where kids swim in the summer at the bend of the creek, up in under a bank that set out a bit and is always clustered up with ice and snow in the winter. It was nearly a cave under there. She was there seventeen days before someone thought to check the swimming place. I’d been through there a couple of days before they found her. I told my wife I was tracking a deer, but I was mostly just walking out under the winter sun. I liked watching the snow melting off the trees and the dazzle of the sun on the ice. The sky was the most crystal blue that day and the limbs of the trees were showing bare in places, like bone under the flesh of the heavy snow. In the bare places, there were sparrows. I remember thinking why there were so many, so many sparrows. My grandmother used to say they escort the souls of the dead from the land of the living.

 

No one thought she would come to much. At least that is what they said of her because of her people, mostly. An uncle in the ground of a bullet in the ear by his own hand. Grandfather known as deadly mean. Momma run off pregnant. Secretly some of them wondered if she’d be like her momma, who she’d marry or if she’d leave, like so many do now after high school. They compared her to their own daughters and found them come up short. Hid that down deep, and pondered it, some of the women. The same ones that didn’t turn out for her funeral, and sat on the phone going over with one another the likely suspects, all of them trailer park boys from the place out near the old chicken farm..

 

She didn’t get their attention because of her smile and all that long thick hair. It was the spark she held. We saw who she was, a few of us. Other ones thought that most likely some man would take her off her momma’s hands. Some rough man. That come true soon enough.

 

Her arms were not the long winsome arms most men admire. In fact she had a short frame, and a few extra pounds would have given her a pudgy quality. Rounded. That would be a good descriptor. She did have a laugh that we knew her by. You could be four aisles over and hear it and know she was in the store. That was where she wound up working her first job, at the Kroger’s off Main Street running the cash register.

 

I liked her. So did my wife. When we finished our grocery shopping it was her I would steer the cart for and she would see us coming toward her and start to smile a little close lipped smile. By the time we reached the checkout she would have looked us square in the face and give us a big grin, always moving though, never letting whoever it was ahead of us feel like she was diverting her attention away from them. She had the way of making everyone around her feel noticed. It was one of the things made people remember her. She wore a little necklace with a thin silver chain. On it was a little charm, a real four leaf clover frozen forever in a tiny block of clear resin. She fingered it when she talked, thumb and forefinger holding it boxed between them, and slid her other two fingers up and down the length of the silver chain on her throat. In some it would have been a nervous gesture, jittery. In her was calming, her white fingers gliding at the base of her throat while she talked with her whole face, everything about her alive.

 

She didn’t get a lot of attention from her mother, we all knew that. Her mother had growed up not far from my wife, and was the daughter of a man who was known for beating his wife and kids. Eventually they all got free, some of them sooner than others, and his wife finally, too, when he died sitting in his car on a Saturday night smoking cigarettes and listening to the Grand Old Opry on the radio, of a sudden heart attack at fifty six.

 

They said grandfather fairly doted on the girl. But not for long because he was gone before she was even three years old. Her mother worked a lot. And when she wasn’t at work there was a fellow that she dated two three nights out of the week and was gone most of the weekends up to his house, cooking and cleaning for him.

 

The girl spent a lot of time with her grandmother, who by that time was a shadow of a woman, stick thin, grey hair, tired in the way women get when they’ve had to much on them for too long. But that was where she got her laugh, from her grandmother. And her molasses brown hair. Her grandmother had been a beauty before life took that too.

 

I sat and thought about it. How life will devour you. And I thought to myself that girl was too beautiful for life to take her that a way, one slow year at a time, ate up by caring for kids, and looking after a man. I wanted her to be young always. Just stopped in the middle of a laugh, her eyes twinkling, like a perfect afternoon that never had to dim.

 

And she’d remember things. One time in early March I was buying my wife a birthday present and decided to run in the store to get her one of those boxed cakes fixed up with her name and Happy Birthday on it. I came through her register and she was there, wearing a pretty yellow blouse that was too thin for the cold day we were having. I said to her, you going to freeze to death in that, she laughed and said, Mister Nester, don’t you know it’s my first day of spring, March first. I laughed too, puzzled, and said no, honey, that’s the 21^st of March, right? She said no I get an extra three weeks because I hate the winter so much. And she remembered my wife’s birthday after that. She would pick some flowers, crocuses, or whatever had sprung up and stick them in the space between the metal flag and the mailbox on my wife’s birthday. Every year they’d be there, just like clockwork. My wife would keep them until they’d fade. She always said, “That girl is something, isn’t she, John, just some kind of girl.”

 

She lived close to us, just a few miles down the road. My wife had taken a real liking to her the way some older women will take a younger one under their wing and pet them. She had known her mother growing up; they’d been friends for a while. I though maybe that was the reason for it. But one day, when I asked her about it she just looked out the car window and said, “Some people just don’t get enough, honey. They live on scraps of love, and they learn to do with the scraps, and even be grateful and thrive on it. That girl, she deserves more than scraps.”

 

“Clover,” I said. “She should have love like clover.”

 

 

 

(The Momma)

My baby is dead. There is nothing nobody can do to bring her back and I know it. It just rolls over me first thing when I get up in the morning and it is like thunder, blackest darkest thunder inside me. I want to go where she is gone but I can’t. There are times I see her at the corner of my eye, in a blue dress. Standing there, smiling. Then she is gone. I want to sleep all the time because that is when I can see her and be near her and smell her hair and talk to her. “Momma,” she says, “what if I wear the red sweater with this.”

 

In my dreams, a lot of the time, I am watching her dress for school and I am frying her some eggs. Coffee is making in the Mr. Coffee she got me for Christmas last year. She has a look on her face, a little bit angry because it is Monday, and she is always mad with me on Monday mornings because I never get home early enough to suit her on Sunday nights from Tom’s. “Momma,” she says, “Are you even listening to me.” And I go over to her and pat her face with my hand and I say, “Baby, don’t be dead, ok, because I need you. Please don’t be dead. Just stay here in the kitchen with me and eat your eggs and have a cup of coffee with me, honey, your momma loves you.” She smiles at me then. Then she takes the eggs in the skillet off the stove with one hand. And I wince because it is the iron skillet and surely her had will blister bad. Before I can say anything she holds them out, right next to me, right under my nose. I look at the eggs, fried, the edges transparent and crisping in the bacon grease. She says her voice low and each word she is saying in a rumble like thunder out over the field, winter thunder. She says, “Momma, why didn’t you make them scrambled, and it would have saved me but you fried these eggs. It’s on you, Momma. You could have took the time and made me good eggs.” And her eyes are wide open and looking at me and not blinking. They are frozen, milk eyes.

 

The skillet falls and the eggs and grease hit my bare feet but I don’t feel it. She raises up her palm to me. It is not seared from the iron skillet, not blistered. It is cold and white and her nails are blue and ice crystals web her fingers.

 

And I wake up. Sometimes the dream is different, but always she is there and I have her safe, for just a little while, but then the knowing comes, I could have saved her by just doing something small a little bit different. But I didn’t because I am a terrible mother. I was a terrible mother. Because I am not a mother any more. I do not have a child anymore. My child is dead. And now she is buried in the cemetery near my own mother and father and one of her uncles who killed himself.

 

And I am dead but walking and talking. Tom says give it time and I don’t want to talk to Tom and I wish it was him that they found in the bottom, in that frozen creek, or one of his kids, not mine. I hate Tom now, most times. But not like I hate my own sick sad face and the black dead heart in me. It is like my life has a got another layer, an underground place where you go when this happens and you are shelled off from the light and under place plastic, breathing and eating and driving and everything but living up under the porch of life, your soul had gone someplace else and it is not anywhere the lights are.

 

(One of Many Friends)

 

Trudy is dead now but she was my friend in Junior High school. In fact she was the first person I told when I got my period and she had this old yellow macramé purse and went down in it to find me something to wear. She waited in the bathroom until I was straight and walked with me to 5^th period geometry. She gave me a squeeze around the shoulder without looking at my face and a little shove through the door. And I just watched her walking off, and then she turned and gave me a look, like “get in class little girl”… then she smiled. She looked just like that girl that played that girl boxer in that movie, with her hair pulled back in a pony tail and she’d lost some weight. I can’t think of that actress but you will remember her face. That’s what Trudy looked like only with more cheeks and lips.

 

But not like that in her coffin. I don’t want to think about that because it bothers me a lot. Especially since we don’t know much about what happened to her, how she died I mean. Only that she was in that creek for a long, long time. Froze in there. A lot of people say it was her bad genes, and that she killed herself. The investigation is ongoing and I know they will figure it out … and find the one who killed her because I will never believe she killed herself. I hope they catch them and I hope they really do something to them just as bad as whatever was done to Trudy. Because she DID NOT deserve it.

 

When they buried her I put a letter in the coffin with her that I had passed around the class and all of us had wrote a little something on it like you would do with a yearbook. I wrote that I liked her a lot and that she made me feel better to be around her, and that she had a beautiful smile and could I have that yellow purse to remember her by? That felt right but also if felt stupid. Because she would never ever know the things we said and that paper would just be folded up there beside her body forever. Death is weird. I want to shove the whole thought of it in the bottom of the ocean and never have to have anyone else I know die.

 

 

 

(James Lee Mann, Arrested and Released Twice Within A Week)

 

Man, I am sick and tired of these shitheads who call themselves people. I’ve had four cops by here this week on me, wanting to ask me where I was, and what I was doing. They are NOT people. I could leave here if I wanted, any time I want. My uncle told me come up to his place in Maryland on the Amtrak he’ll send me a ticket. He got a garage up there and I can change oil, learn to be a transmission man.

 

Okay, yeah, she’d dead. So what. People die, right. One day you’re here eating, working, going to sleep, getting up… next day… bam … gone. That’s life. Maybe I sound cold but man, who can sugar coat this shit.

 

Trudy knew this. She told me “I won’t have no kids, Jimmy, it won’t be like that for me.” She never like, had big plans, you know. She was…. Uhm. Wait, let me light this off yours. Thanks. She was like day to day. She looked at the morning and got up and had the coffee she fixed for her mom, and she was happy about it if her mom said, hey, good coffee. That was the kind of stuff that she liked. Or at the store, if one of the people came in and told her some story about their kid or dog or whatever, she’d tell me about it. She would be amazed at regular every day stuff, like if somebody’s kid was in a school play, a neighbor kid that she babysat for. She would go to see them. Sometimes little kids would bring her a drawing or a flower. For her, wow, it was like, very cool. I didn’t get it then. I guess maybe I get it better now. For her not for me. That shit would do zero for me. That was her life, and that was the good parts of it because it had bad parts believe me. And it was going to end and I am glad she was able to at least, like, enjoy, something, man. I’m glad for that. Really. She deserved some good stuff to happen to her. And I’m done talking about this now, for real.

 

 

 

(Trudy)

 

There is ice in here and it is above my head, close to my face and water is running in my ears. It is day. I can see the light of day. Something is yellow. No. That is a dream I am having. I keep having a dream of a yellow thing. Someone wants something yellow that I have…sheets on the clothesline blowing with sunflowers on them in my back yard? I see them blowing but I am here under the water. My feet are in the soft grass and the shade has been on the yard all morning and all night and the grass is cold. My feet are cold. I am almost asleep. In my mouth…something…a little pebble, a cube like sugar, but…tastes like metal in my mouth…it might be a spoon of medicine. My sheets are cold and white and my mother is putting medicine in my mouth for me to swallow.

 

I am inside of a red ball, but it is not a ball, it is a balloon, it is lifting up, and it is a red balloon and inside of it I can see my hand prints on the rubber, powder rubber interior I smell rubber I am lifting up curved into the round of it and it sound like someone singing oh too loud singing. to a beat of a drum. it is quiet and just me and the round balloon are sailing up into the sky and the night is coming and.

The End