Writer Statement
My brain tends to follow character arcs instead of the plot when I read. When I study history, I am curious about the people’s motives, not the timeline. I learn people as if I am studying the biography of a fictional character.
For as long as I can remember, I have thought in stories. As a toddler, I acted out scenes with my toys and tried to teach myself how to type so I could print my stories on paper. It infuriated me that I didn’t know how to share the stories in my head. I tried to draw and create picture books to give to my parents but that form of communication has never been successful for me. There were words in my head that I wanted to share, but couldn’t until I learned how to write.
When I write, my mind starts with a character. Sometimes when I put pen to paper, I know what event of the character’s life I will focus on. My brain sees their character arc and I identify something as the climax of their life. Other times, my first drafts are more of journal entries where I embody the character. My work provides space for the reader to fall headfirst into the story, and unify with the main character. It doesn’t matter if the story is fiction or nonfiction, my writing invited the reader to be entranced by the people the story is about; to escape their own personalities and empathize with someone else’s experiences.
Personal Essay: January 1, 2020, to now
A little less than a year ago, I had never heard the word “pandemic.” My history class hadn’t reached the twentieth century to cover the 1918 H1N1 pandemic. In his State of the State address, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said, “A new vocabulary to define a new reality. A hard, cold reality. One that far exceeds the reality of Minnesota’s harshest winters.” I didn’t own a face mask. I didn’t have frequent headaches from staring at screens. I felt like I had finally reached a point of control with my anxiety. I didn’t get so anxious every time I walked into a store.
Walz said, “I know there are athletes out there who were prepared to go win state championships on diamonds and fields across the state.” In a lot of ways, 2020 was my year for tennis improvement. My goal was to get as good at playing matches as possible. To walk off every court with the confidence that there was nothing else that I could have done and know that I didn’t spend all of my brainpower on trying not to have a panic attack in the middle of a set. I reached that point.
There were no known cases of COVID-19 in the state. I played a simple Universal Tennis Ranking (UTR) tennis tournament the night before. Two timed 1.5-hour matches from 6 to 9 at night. I won both those matches, got home at 10, ate dinner, and was in bed and asleep near midnight. I woke up at 5 am that Monday and drove to Rochester for the second tournament. It was a one-day tournament, four eight-game untimed matches. I woke up exhausted. I ate one power bar for my first match, and my dad and I thought we could find food in between, but the fancy tennis center had nothing but stale mac and cheese. I survived off of power bars and Gatorades. I was hungry, exhausted, my muscles pounded, but I put my mind in front of my body, and I continued. I got to my last match, and adrenaline took over, and this time, it wasn’t the kind that caused anxiety. I walked away, sweaty, with a trophy. I put on my sweatshirt with my school newspaper printed on the front, and my dad took a photo for my coach. I looked like I desperately needed a shower, and you could practically see how swollen my legs were. My coach hung that photo up on the wall by my home courts. Anyone who saw that photo that wasn’t one of my coaches probably didn’t realize why it meant so much to me. It wasn’t that I had beaten some girl. I had beaten my mind. For one match, I conquered anxiety.
There were 289 total cases in Minnesota when Lifetime first closed. At the time, I wanted to believe that it wouldn’t last long. That soon enough, I would be back on my home court laughing about someone bringing a pizza to practice again. But the days went by one by one, and it didn’t matter how many at-home workouts I did on my driveway. My shoulders, even though the world had fallen off and was rolling around on the universe’s floor, felt heavier. A New York Times story entitled, “Teens in Covid Isolation: ‘I Felt Like I Was Suffocating,” said, “Research shows that adolescents depend on their friendships to maintain a sense of self-worth and to manage anxiety and depression. A recent study of 3,300 high school students found that nearly one-third reported feeling unhappy or depressed in recent months.”
I was more anxious than I had been in 2020 during the first few months that I didn’t have group practice and school was online. But as if someone had paused the movie of my life, skipped ahead, and pressed play again, I got used to it. The first three months of the year feel a little more like a dystopian novel than diary entries.
I remember having panic attacks in the middle of the night over the summer. My brain couldn’t stop firing. My body clenched every muscle tightly. I felt like my mind and body were trying to hold onto each other during a hurricane. Those full-on types of panic attacks lessened once I got used to the state of the world. The pandemic became the new normal. Being scared of an invisible monster became expected by myself and by society.
“The companionship we normally lean on to get through difficult times—a hug from a grandparent, coffee with a friend, or a laugh with a co-worker—forced out of reach. Vacant streets. Deserted classrooms. Empty pews. Chairs stacked on restaurant tables. Graduations, weddings, and funerals postponed,” Walz said on April 5 when there were 935 total cases in Minnesota.
Before the day that the country shut down, I spent every afternoon at the gym, with my feet condensed into my court shoes as I pounded them on the concrete tennis court for hours at a time. In the summer of 2019, I’d go from three-hour practices under the hot sun, with burning concrete under our rubber soles, to laying on a lounge chair, nose deep between the pages of a book while eating a quesadilla and sipping on a chocolate smoothie. I studied the feeling of my skin changing colors and the sound of children splashing in the pool as it made its way past the music playing through my earbuds.
Every day last winter, my dad picked me up from school, and depending on how much time I had before my first tennis lesson, we would either sit at Caribou or Lifetime’s cafe. Walking into Caribou, we made a b-line to the large rectangular dark-stained wooden tables covered in coffee stains in the back corner. Whoever had the lowest computer charge got to sit nearest to the outlet. We tried not to get the table by the back door because the seal was broken, and it’s hard to work with the Minnesota winter wind blowing down your back. Still warming up from the thirty-second walk from the car to the front door, I kept my coat on as I walked to the counter. There’s one guy who works there every day, and when he saw my dad’s leather briefcase and my letterman jacket walk through the door, he started on our matching orders. Two hot crafted presses with a half shot of dark chocolate and half shot of caramel. I paid, and he handed them to me and put whatever mini egg sandwich I picked out that day in the oven.
On days where I didn’t have an hour and a half before my first tennis lesson of the night, we headed to Lifetime’s cafe, where we became friends with the manager. She made the best vanilla lattes in the state, and they only ever offered larges. I ate the same four meals on rotation, and when I didn’t know which one to pick, she decided for me. I was almost always late to practice because she brought me into a conversation about a book recommendation or my latest writing project, or she had something to say about the book I was reading for my American Literature class. She always seemed to talk me into buying another latte. It was usual for me to bring large cups of coffee to the tennis court or onto my mat in the free weight area to take sips while doing a core workout. It doesn’t matter how late at night it is; I always find that a hot latte simulates the feeling of a sunrise: warm, soothing, only slightly energizing.
I was the girl drinking coffee at a 7 pm tennis practice and never seemed to have enough power bars. When I complained about being hungry, one of the guys would ask, “but you just ate a power bar?”
“So? I’m still hungry.”
We often teased each other about the aspects that made us who we were, but a chuckle and someone throwing a ball into someone’s back and the conversation moved on. When 9 o’clock hit, we took off our shoes and laughed at our sweaty footprints. Like kindergarteners preparing for their first recess with snow, we spent fifteen minutes pilling on sweatpants and coats, taking our time walking up the stairs and out the front door, waving goodbye to each other through the sunless sky. Every night, someone asked, “You still can’t drive?”
Even though we found ourselves at completely different schools and following completely different schedules, my tennis friends and I Snapchatted each other in between every class. I talked about them way too much and spent every Tuesday and Thursday trying to move too quickly through the day so that I could get to the court a little faster. It made my passion for studying the sport even more captivating. These couple of hours we spent together on the court were a break from society. It was a break from the stress that brought us down every day. It was a place where we could enter, be teased about our angry mood, and then move on like everything that had gone wrong that day never happened.
I had fallen sick with the flu in early February, before the Rochester tournament. I spent most of my time on the couch throughout the month, feeling weak. I felt healthy before the tournament, but my body didn’t recover once I got home. I forfeited matches, missed any practice that was longer than an hour, and got through school by asking friends for notes because I got dizzy if I stood for too long. It took a long time before my body felt strong enough to go to practice, and by the time I was back on my home courts consistently, the country shut down. I was always the type of person to feel the weight of the world on my shoulders. The world had fallen off of my frame.
There were 31,328 total cases in Minnesota when Lifetime opened. The few members of the group that came became closer than ever. We couldn’t hang out before and after practice like we had used to, but conversations became even more critical. We all craved human interaction, and practice was an excuse to talk to someone. We took our “storytime” seriously.
Lifetime closed for the second time when there were 249,962 total cases in Minnesota. It helped that we were predicting it. People at Lifetime started making bets on how much longer the club would be open. We spent the last 218,634 cases preparing for the last day of practice. We treated it like usual, not wanting to say “goodbye.” My tennis friends and I text every day as if we’ll see each other tomorrow. We’ve made plans for “once the pandemic is over.”
Short Story: Dr. Holland’s Office
My dad drops me off at Dr. Holland’s office, and like always, she asks how I’m doing without acknowledging his presence. I politely smile, nod my head, and say, “I’m doing great. How are you?” before zoning out and walking through the door. This time, I look back at him before she closes the door, and disappointment dominates his face. During the drive here, he explained how Dr. Holland couldn’t help me if I didn’t tell her the truth about how I felt. As Dr. Holland shuts the door between my eyes and my dad, I want to tell him I’m sorry. I want to try to explain again that it’s simply not in me to tell a stranger the truth of everything that happens in my head. I try not to think about what happens in my head. Instead, I try to shut a door on my anxiety, hoping a deadbolt will keep it at bay. Dr. Holland seems to know a lot about me. All I know about her is that she likes to diagnose her dog with mental health disorders. I sit down on her couch, and I begin to scratch my thumb’s cuticle with my chewed index fingernail, rubbing the dead skin until it disconnects and falls into my lap. I stare at my hands, trying to ignore how uncomfortable I am. The woman sitting in an armchair across from me writes the date on the top of a clean page in a legal pad.
“So, Anne, tell me about your past week,” she says, pen waiting above her paper. The excitement behind her voice only makes me shake in my seat more.
“It went well,” I say. Silence follows. I know that I should try to say something within the next hour, but that thought causes my heart to gain weight. She’s a stranger to me, yet she thoroughly understands how my brain functions. I want the massive iron gate I’ve built across my mind to block her out, but I think she cut the wires to its motor. I feel the gate held wide open, leaving my brain guardless.
“Tell me about it the last few days. What went well for you?” Dr. Holland tries to coerce some topic out of me to lead the conversation. “What did you struggle with?” She waits for me to say something, but I’m stubborn about keeping the room empty from my voice for as long as possible. She flips through previous pages of her notes. “You had a biology test on Tuesday, right? How did it go for you.” She flips back to the blank page, set up with my name and date, situating her pen on the following line.
I take a deep trembling breath in before I speak. “I don’t have my grade back yet, but I think it went average for me,” I say, still refusing to look her in the eyes. I hate silence even more than I hate the gaping holes in the military defense around my anxiety.
“You’re a straight-A student, right?” she asks. I guess it comes with the diagnosis.
“Not right now,” I say. My voice fluctuates between showing my disappointment in myself and trying to laugh it off. “I only have a B in the class.”
“What are you struggling with when it comes to studying for biology tests?”
“I can’t remember it. I can do the homework when I have all of the information in front of me, but when I get to the test, I don’t remember anything,” I force my lips close because I know that I’ve talked for too long. Now Dr. Holland knows that there is something wrong with me. “I just don’t study enough.”
“A lot of my patients like you benefit from using flashcards,” she says, “Have you tried them?” Of course, I’ve tried flashcards. They’re supposed to be perfect. The part that nobody advertises is that they take hours to set up. I don’t have time in between school and workouts and practice. “Some patients tend to argue that they take too much time to write them all out, but I have a few patients that have started to make flashcards from their notes after class. That way, once the test comes, they’re all made.”
“I’ll give them a try,” I tell her. I won’t try flashcards.
“Did you have a match last weekend, or do you have one coming up?” At this point, she’s just trying to remember random facts about me to push a conversation into the air. This routine is usual for our appointments.
“Yeah, I played in a tournament last weekend. It didn’t go well.”
“Why not?” she flips through her notes again, not even looking at me.
“I lost in the second round of the consolation bracket,” I say. Usually, when I tell people that I lost, they find a way to leave the conversation. I sometimes forget that my parents pay her to continue the discussions on which most people would walk out.
“So why didn’t it go well?” she pushes. I don’t even know why it didn’t go well. I want to ask if we could talk about it later because I didn’t prepare for this question. “Walk me through each match.”
“Well, I’m sort of injured, so I was taking Advil all weekend, and I hate the way that it makes my muscles feel blurry when I play.”
“How were you injured?” I know she furrowed her eyebrows to signal that she cares, but it seems like she cares more about ensuring that her notes are thorough.
“It’s just an overworked muscle somewhere in my shoulder or arm. It’s from the weekend before,” I say. My mouth opens and closes a few times before I find a way to explain myself. “It happens when I get anxious in a match. I’m used to it, though. I just tape it up and keep going. It’s not a big deal.”
I hear her pull a breath in, trying to look focused, not shocked. “Okay,” she draws the word out as she scribbles notes down, keeping me from saying anything more until she finishes her secret analysis. I know this will come up again. “Tell me more about the weekend.”
“The first match I played was against a really impressive girl. I’ve played her before, and I haven’t beaten her yet. I wanted to, but I don’t know. I just couldn’t stay focused during the match.”
“What do you mean you couldn’t stay focused?” she asks. I don’t know. “Do you know what you were thinking about?”
“My brain just couldn’t only think about the match,” I say. Unfocused is the smoothest way I can describe it. It felt more like I was hyperfocus on every gust of air conditioning that blew through the vents. “I don’t know.” She nods her head and continues to scribble.
“How about the next match? Did the same thing happen?”
“The second match went fine. I won, but I didn’t play well.” I feel a heaviness that I’ve come to know far too well push me down, deeper into the couch. I hate when I get disappointed in myself.
“Do you think that you didn’t play well, or did a specific type of shot not go well?” she asks, removing the tip of her pen from her notepad for the first time since I walked into the room. Now that she relaxes her shoulders into the back of her chair, her eyes feel like they’re beating me down. I want to cover my face or leave the room, but with pressure squeezing on my muscles, I don’t think I could push myself off the couch.
“No. I just got too emotional. I wasn’t angry or sad, but I definitely got anxious even though I was winning.”
“Do you know why you got anxious?”
“Because I wasn’t playing well,” I chuckle in annoyance.
“But you won, so I bet you were playing fine. You just didn’t think you were playing your best, so you got anxious, which made you play worse. It’s a horrible cycle, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Wasn’t she supposed to tell me how to fix the cycle?
“You played one more match, right?” she asks. She places her notepad on the side table next to her. I watch as she folds her hands in her lap and smiles at me. I liked it better when she wrote down every time I grabbed a tissue from the box sitting next to a throw pillow in the corner of my seat. “Sorry,” she chuckles, “I’m not a very sporty person.”
I force a slight smile, “Yes.”
“Okay, how did that one go?”
“It was early Sunday morning, and I’m horrible at getting up in the mornings,” I say and pause to swallow and wipe my eyes with an already damp tissue. I know that this isn’t a topic that should cause me to tear up, but I don’t feel like I have control over it. “I didn’t get there early enough to prepare.”
“How long does it take you to get ready for a match?” she asks. She picks up her notepad again and restarts her frantic notes.
“I usually like to get there about an hour before to warm up,” I say. I know Dr. Holland will give me her advice on what I should do before a match. Everyone always seems to have a great idea of how to erase any sign of nerves before a player walks onto the court. Listen to the same music before every time you play. Refuse to talk to anyone but the voices in your head for thirty minutes before they call your name. Journal the night before. Go to bed, visualizing your groundstrokes and serves. Stretch until you can’t feel your muscles. Sprint until you feel every single muscle fiber pull from the wiggle of a single toe. Rafael Nadal apparently forces himself to vomit before every match.
“What exactly do you do to prepare?”
I wonder if this is the answer she wants when I say, “I like to stretch and jump rope before my matches, and if I get there early enough, I’ll sprint a little.”
“Okay. Different things work for different people, and as I said, I’m not very sporty. I only have a few patients who are student-athletes like you. I do have one patient of mine that journals before every one of his games, but,” she flips through her notes, to one of the first pages, “I believe that you’ve told me before that,” she reads explicitly from her bullet points, “journaling is really tough for you because you believe it makes you more nervous,” she looks directly at me.
“Yeah. That’s right.” I knew my answer wasn’t going to be the right one.
“Okay, well, if you ever feel like you need prompts, just let me know,” she pauses. I know I’m supposed to ask for them. Instead, I nod and look off into the corner. “Well, we’ve talked about school and tennis today. Is there anything else you want to make sure to bring up?”
“No, there’s not anything that I can think of.”
“Okay. How do you feel about your friends? Do you have many?” she asks.
Friends isn’t a topic I feel comfortable sharing with her. My relationships with other kids my age are the same as my conversations with her. Forced and awkward. Like neither of us wants to be there, but both of us know that it’s more embarrassing to stand in silence. “Yeah.” I try to make my voice louder and sit up so my shoulders don’t point to the floor. “I have friends.”
“And you don’t feel like your anxiety keeps you from making friends?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Okay. I have another patient who’s very similar to you, and we’ve found that they procrastinate making friends because it makes them feel anxious. She actually made a huge breakthrough for herself recently. Her friends invited her to a sleepover, and at first, she wasn’t going to go. She created the excuse that she had a math test that she needed to study for all weekend. In reality, she felt confident about the upcoming math test, and she didn’t need to study for three days. It was just an excuse, so she didn’t have to deal with the anxiety that comes with making new friends and putting yourself out of your comfort zone,” Dr. Holland explains and waits for a reaction from me. “You know a lot about the anxiety that comes with meeting new people and doing new things, don’t you?” I chew the corner of my mouth and nod my head in such a subtle manner that I guarantee most of the nodding happened in my head. She asks, “Do you think you do something like that patient?”
“No, I don’t think I do that,” I say. To make up excuses to skip a sleepover, you have first to be invited to one. I’ve never been good enough friends with anyone to be asked if I wanted to go. Dr. Holland doesn’t need to know that, though.
“Let’s talk about friends for a moment.” She scrunches her eyes, trying to find some emotion in me besides my desire to hide. “Who are your greatest friends, Anne?” she asks, and she flips to the next page to place the tip of her pen.
“Well, I’m better at making friends with guys. I always have been,” I explain. People don’t usually like that I have more guy friends than the average girl. Adults don’t trust that there’s not something else going on. Whenever I see one of them twice within a week, my mother has to ask three times if there’s something more happening before she’ll leave me alone.
She crashes the end of her palm on her leg, making sure her pen never touches her business pants. She closes her eyes as she forces herself to remain in her professional composure. “You didn’t answer my question, Anne. Who are your best friends? Give me some names.”
I hesitate. Maybe one name won’t be good enough for her notes. “I guess I probably spend the most time with Nathan. He’s a pretty good friend.”
“Thank you, Anne,” she says as she writes the name down. She sets the notepad down and caps her pen. “I like to keep track of some names in my notes, so I know who you’re talking about in future appointments. I’m not very good at remembering names of faces that I’ve never seen,” she says, tempting another chuckle. “Okay, so what do you and Nathan do? Do you just play tennis together?”
“Yeah. We go to drills and groups together. Sometimes we will just meet up and practice together too,” I say.
“And he’s your best friend,” she double-checks. I thought I made it pretty obvious.
“Yes.”
She rolls the sleeve of her blouse up to her forearm enough to check her watch. “We only have a few minutes left, and I have a few actionable items that I want you to work on until we meet again. Can you meet at the same time next week?”
“Yeah, that should work fine,” I say, already thinking about what excuse I will tell my English teacher about why I have to leave early again.
“Okay, great.” She stands up from her chair and walks to the desk only a few feet away. She picks up a packet and hands it to me. “I want you to read through those once you get home today. I will also email you a few breathing exercises. Please practice those a few times before our appointment. You’ll probably have them by tomorrow. Let me know if you have any questions, alright?” She opens the door for me, and I stand up, keeping my head down
“Thank you, Dr. Holland,” I say as I walk out of her office, hear the door close, and find my dad in the waiting room.
He looks up from his phone and asks, “Are you ready to go?”
“Let’s go,” I say as I hold the door open for him and begin walking in front of him, down the long hallway back to the elevator. He knows that I don’t want to talk about anything that happens in the office until we’re at least back in the elevator. He follows me, walking much slower than I am, and catches up to me as we wait for the elevator to come.
“Did it go well?” he asks. I know that he doesn’t want to pry in the confidentiality of the appointment, but the simple question seems extensive.
“Yeah, it went fine.” The elevator dings, and the doors open. My dad motions for me to enter first. I press the button to return to the first floor.
“Did you tell her about your panic attack yesterday?” he asks.
“No, Dad. I’m sorry, it didn’t come up,” I say. I knew that I had forgotten something.
“Anne, you have to tell her what’s happening. She can’t help you if you don’t.”
“I know, Dad.”
Flash Fiction: Welcome Home
The last time Graves was here, he was seventeen years old. His father had left at the first sign of light for work. It was a big day for the railroad. They had received funding for a new line and were set to start building that morning. Graves was supposed to go there after school to keep the other trains running. He usually didn’t work Monday nights, but most of the other employees for the company were assigned to build with his father, so they put him on an extra day. He never showed up to school that day or at work, and he never made it home.
The high school made all of the boys listen to a guest speaker about joining the army the previous week. Most of the boys thought it was insane to join voluntarily. Their fathers and brothers had either died overseas in the war or came back with one less limb or blind, and they all came back scared. Graves’s older brother had voluntarily joined, and while he never actually came home, Graves knew he was alive. When the Sargent passed out fliers, most of the boys politely grabbed one, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it to the side of the hallway. Graves neatly folded it and tucked it into his back pocket.
The trailer is more run down now than in the baby photo Graves carries, but not as much as he expected. It had only been a few years, but it seemed like it had been much longer. As he walks up the front porch steps, he stops at each new level to trace the tip of his steel toe boot across every crack that he remembers. The third step up was broken in half. That’s new. The railing was more rusted than he recalls. There’s still not a front door. Instead, the same screen door that he grew up with was there. He doubts his father ever fixed the lock. He checks to the right of the stairs, and his fists unclench when he sees that the wooden box is in its usual place. When he was a baby, his mom used that box to place a metal bucket on top of to wash him in the front yard. He had grabbed two pictures before he left home. One professional one of him and his mom when he was only a few weeks old, and one of him in the bucket.
Graves never expected to return home. When he left, he felt comforted, knowing that he would never wake to rain dripping through the same ceiling and onto his forehead. He never thought the airforce would need to send him to the middle of nowhere Kentucky. He still didn’t exactly know why they did. His best military friend had held an envelope up to Graves when they set their trunks at the foot of their bed where they were staying. He told Graves that they were given a location to go to, to learn about what they were doing there. As Graves sat in the passenger seat of the car they were given, he tried not to remember where his mother’s funeral was, who his teacher’s names were, or that he had worked on every railroad they crossed. He stumbled over his words when his friend asked him where exactly he had grown up, but eventually, he responded with the name of the trailer park. His friend drove around a little more before pulling into a dirt field with mobile homes strewn about. Most people would assume they all had to be abandoned by their condition. He stopped the car and told Graves that he might not have a chance to return.
Graves opens the screen door to the trailer and slowly walks heel to toe into the living room, trying to minimize the squeaking of the floorboards like he had always done as a kid. His father, now much older, looks to be bent over a photograph of him and Graves’s mother. He still wears his overalls from work. Graves says, “Hey dad,” as he approaches the old man, gently laying a hand on his back. “I’m Graves. I came back. I’m sorry it’s been so long.”
Short Story: Generations
My father told me he would come back with a little toy car for my collection. I was twelve and asked for a red one. He pulled one side of his mouth into a grin and said, “Got it, kiddo. One red car coming right up,” and he shut the door to my room behind him. Even little me got a big feeling in my gut. He never came into my room to kiss me on the forehead before he went to the gas station to pick a few things up. I tip-toed to the closed door and squished my ear against it. I heard him kiss Mom. She asked him to pick up another gallon of milk. Dad said, “I’ll see what I can do, Lisa. The kid’s going through a gallon in a day or two. You know that the last paycheck was tight.”
“And you will make it work. Austin is a growing boy. He needs calcium and protein. If he wants milk, he will get it,” Mom said.
“Is there anything else I should pick up?”
“Grab me a pack of my favorite cigarettes.”
“They’re expensive.”
“Please?”
“Fine. But don’t get mad at me if the power goes out.” He kissed her again. “I love you.”
“I love you too, silly. Now go. I’ll have dinner waiting by the time you get back,” Mom promised. I peeled my sweaty cheek off the door and went back to playing on my race track.
I went out to the kitchen as soon as I could smell Mom’s famous meatloaf. “Is Dad back yet?” I asked.
“No. Dad should be back soon. I’m just going to keep this warm until he does.” I watched as she pleased it back in the oven and turned the temperature down. “You’re not too hungry yet, are you?”
“No, I can wait.”
“Good. Can you fold laundry for me? It’s waiting on my bed. I just haven’t gotten to it today.”
“Fine.” My gut felt heavy, and I didn’t know why.
I had finished folding laundry when she called me back into the kitchen. She handed me a plate with a slice of meatloaf. “I’m sorry, we’re out of milk.”
“Is Dad not back yet?”
“No. I don’t know why. Just eat in your room tonight. Please.” I never ate in my room. She made a point to have the family eat together every night. But I listened. I dragged my feet into my room and closed the door behind me. I took one bite into dinner, and she knocked on my door. She opened it a crack, just so her eyes could look at mine. “I’ll be back, Austin. Don’t leave your room,” she closed the door, and a few seconds later, I heard the door to the apartment open, close, and lock.
When she came back a few hours later, I knew that it was far past my bedtime. I jumped into my bed, pulled the covers over me, and closed my eyes. She opened my door, turned on the lights, and said, “I know you’re awake, Austin. I heard you running.” I pulled the covers off of me and sat up. “We need to talk for a minute, honey. Get up,” she said. I followed her into the living room, where she patted the spot on the couch next to her. I hesitated but eventually sat down, making sure to keep my hands in my lap. She tried to explain that sometimes dads leave and decide not to come back. I could tell that she didn’t fully understand it herself. Her voice shook underneath the fake tone of confidence she tried to put on for me. She told me that I was the man of the house now. I told her that I could never be. I told her that I was just a boy. She said, “You’re strong enough. I wouldn’t want anybody else to be.” She told me to stay where I sat, and she went to the front door and pulled a little box out of her purse. She handed it to me, and my eyes went wide. She said, “I heard you telling him that you wanted a red one.”
⋯
My wife told me to tuck our son into bed. He’s six months old and just begun goo-ing and gaw-ing. I’m rocking him to sleep, and I tell him, “Anthony, I’m not strong enough. You and I both know that. Do me a favor, and never do what I’m about to do to you or what my father did to me. You don’t deserve this, and neither do your kids. I’m just not strong enough to fight who I am.” I place him into the crib and walk to my wife and I’s bedroom. She has already tucked herself in and fallen asleep. I mouth “I love you” through the crack in the door and walk out the front door of our house.
I live in the same neighborhood as I grew up. My wife and I bought a house on one of the nicer streets. We haven’t had to worry yet about if we would be able to pay the electricity bill or not. My wife is strong. She can handle being an only mother. Anthony is a good kid. He’s only six months old, but everyone in their right mind can tell that he loves his mom. I tell myself that I’m just going to the gas station to pick up a gallon of milk and a pack of cigarettes. We threw away our last gallon of milk this morning. I haven’t smoked a cigarette since high school. It took away my stress then. Maybe it’ll do the same now.
Once my dad left, my mom told me that I wasn’t allowed to go to the gas station where my dad disappeared from our lives. She said it had bad luck and that we were better off going to the one a few minutes farther away from home, even if we ended up pushing the car there. I don’t feel like driving the extra few minutes tonight. It seems like the perfect place to go.
Once I walk in, I do just what I promised myself. I grab a gallon of milk, and I go up to the register to ask for a pack of cigarettes. They might be for the drive home, and I’ll split the box with my wife. She’ll giggle as we sit on the back porch smoking them. She’ll feel like she’s seventeen again, hiding out behind the bleachers and skipping math class. We’ll laugh about how her parents always thought I was a bad influence on her. The truth was that I most definitely was. She smoked her first cigarette with me. Drank her first beer. She told me on our wedding day that the first time that I pulled out the back door of the high school after lunch was the first day that she felt her heart beating a little faster. She felt alive. Maybe I’ll drink the gallon of milk as I drive to somewhere that I’ll decide on the way. The people passing me on the highway would think I’m a maniac. Who drinks a gallon of milk while smoking and driving away from his life?
When I ask for the cigarettes from the clerk, I’m not even quite at the register yet. His face is mostly hidden by the chocolate bars that I’m determining if I need or not. I decide to stick with my plan. Milk and cigarettes. That’s it. I place the gallon on the counter as he does the same with the cigarettes. “I once did the same thing too.” I look into his eyes for the first time. I know that color blue from anywhere. They’re the same as my eyes. I put my head back down, and he scans the milk. I hand him a twenty, and he smiles. He gives me back the change, and as I walk out the door, he says, “Go home. Make sure your kid sees you when they wake up tomorrow morning.”
Short Story: Small Town Drama
Jane had taken an extra shift at the hardware store Saturday night to cover for a friend. She sipped bitter coffee from the break room and nibbled on candy from the register as she reorganized and refilled the tiny drawers of nuts and screws. The store was empty. A person or two walked in to buy a case of water and left. Jane told the other worker to go home. He was a young high school student with a Psychology essay due the next day. Six hours wandering a ghost-like hardware store left Jane dozing off at the register. Once it was time to turn off all the lights and lock the doors, Jane left through the back employee-only door and drove to her apartment.
David found a way to keep himself busy. Jane told him to wait for her in her apartment once he got off his library shift. Before she left for work, Jane tucked a key underneath the welcome mat for him. When David arrived, someone else was with his back leaning against the door, looking down at his phone.
“Um. Can I help you?” David asked the guy looking too comfortable waiting at someone’s door.
“Oh,” he lifted his head from his phone, “Hi. No,” he stumbled over his words as David pulled him from his mind, “I’m just waiting for Jane,” he said before returning to scrolling.
David’s fist tightened around his car keys, “Who are you?”
“My name’s Sam,” he said, raising an eyebrow at David’s flexed shoulders and white knuckles. “Do you know her?”
David released a quiet chuckle before his voice rose, “What are you doing waiting for my girlfriend?”
“Girlfriend? Jane’s your girlfriend?” Jane never talked about David. She learned to keep the relationship quiet and secret. Most people knew of it, and most everyone who did also disapproved of it. A few months ago, they had begun looking at houses outside of town to get away from everyone’s opinions.
David ground his teeth, barely separating them as he spoke, “Where do you live?”
The man spoke slowly, concerned, “Just down the street.”
David clenched his muscles and shook his head, “You knew we’re dating. Everyone in town knows we’re dating.”
“I thought those were just rumors. I’m sorry I didn’t realize you two were actually dating.” The man was honest. His face had turned white with guilt, and his voice meagerly whimpered.
“You never answered my question,” David’s voice continued to get louder, “What are you doing here?”
“Well, I was going to ask her on a date but I will leave now.” The man began to wave and walk away, excusing himself awkwardly.
“You’re not going anywhere.” David was sinister. He had never shown this side of himself in front of Jane, but he never pledged to dispose of it either. Even if it might all be rumors, once a murderer is always a murderer. David kicked the welcome mat out of his way and picked up the key, unlocking the door and instructing the man to go inside. David followed behind him and relocked the door, double-checking the deadbolt. David asked, “So how do you know Jane?” He walked into the kitchen, where the other man couldn’t see him from where David left him in the living room. David opened the knife drawer and picked one up.
The man shoved his fists into his pockets. “Um, we work the Sunday morning shift together at the hardware store.”
David walked back into the living room, knife in hand.
…
“Jane!” David called through the pharmacy aisles as he walked towards Jane, who cringed at the voice as she sifted through the plastic bin of miscellaneous travel-sized conditioner bottles. She ignored him, but he closed in on her and stopped directly behind her. He pushed himself against her, making room for the mother trying to push a cart down the same aisle, pulling a young girl behind her. “Jane, we need to talk,” David whispered down her neck, trying not to catch the careful ears of the small town gossipers who bought their purse caramels from the back corner next to the photo printer. Jane ignored David again and mentally kicked herself for finding comfort in his hot breath. David placed a hand on Jane’s lower back, and she leaned into it. “We can go for a walk. I’ll buy you coffee.” It was a low blow to bribe her. His breath was cold, his hand burning.
Jane took a deep breath in, “No.”
“We need to talk about what happened.” She could tell by his whisper that he didn’t sleep last night. She hated that she knew that much about him.
“No, we don’t,” Jane picked up a Pantene travel bottle. She knew what he was talking about. She could only assume until now, but the way he insisted that they needed to talk proved him guilty. “I have nothing to say.” she had plenty to say, but she cared more about forgetting that she spent her Saturday night digging her nails into the carpet of her living room and staining her clothes with bleach than saying anything that was on her mind.
“I’m sure you have plenty of questions,” David said. Jane didn’t respond, and he expected that as he watched her purse her lips and walk to the register. Following her, David felt the town gossipers’ eyes on him. “I’ll meet you in the car, babe,” he said loud enough for them to hear. David walked out and sat in his SUV parked next to the pharmacy’s entrance. Jane paid for her minuscule bottle of conditioner and walked down the sidewalk past David’s car. Her favorite coffee shop was two blocks away, and she thought buying herself a latte would be nice.
⋯
Jane slowly shut her apartment door behind her. The still-stained carpet smelled rancid and was still wet with bleach. She closed her eyes, rubbed them, and pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to take a break from her throbbing headache. Just looking at the partially cleaned-up scene made her heart race and her mind jump to conclusions about what happened the day before. She didn’t want to think about it.
Jane locked her door and double-checked the deadbolt. She gulped her latte and kicked off her tennis shoes, refusing to move from the small patch of tile in front of her door. Jane placed her purse next to her feet and pulled out the small bottle of conditioner. She sunk her toes into the saturated floor. Her nose scrunched, and a tickle moved up her spine. She made her way into the bathroom at the back of her small apartment.
Jane and David were friends in high school. They weren’t good ones, though. Only someone they recognized in the hallways, maybe someone to work in class with, and the last resort as someone to sit with at lunch. David could never remember what the Spanish homework was, and Jane would always respond to his texts. They didn’t make a point to talk after graduation. After David confirmed the time of their Spanish final senior year, Jane didn’t hear or see his name again until rumors spread through their tiny hometown that he was in jail. Jane grew up in Willowdale’s rumor climate, so she knew not to believe in most tales the town cultivated. She was naive enough to disbelieve that David went to jail, and she refused to even listen to the absurd stories they created for why he was incarcerated.
They ran into each other in a parking lot three years after graduation. Jane worked at the local hardware shop and didn’t believe that David had just been released from jail. As if they were long-lost best friends, David called from across the lot, “Wait up, Jane!” He chased after her and hugged her. As his arms reached around to her back, she anticipated her muscles tightening, but she was relaxed. As if they were back in high school and the seat next to him was the only one left in the lunchroom, she felt comforted knowing that he was near.
Jane got out of the shower and put on sweatpants and an old sweatshirt. She brushed through her hair and walked back out to her living room. The stain was still prevalent. A part of her hoped that once she washed the blood from underneath her fingernails, the stain would disappear with the rest of the previous night. Her kitchen sink was already full of brown stained rags, but the stain persisted. She grabbed a bucket, the almost empty bottle of bleach, and another rag. She poured the remaining bleach into the bucket, wincing as the inside of her nose burned again. She filled it with cold, cloudy water from her tap and carefully carried the bucket into the middle of the stain. She knelt and plunged the towel into the bucket, lightly wringing it out before throwing it on the carpet. She began scrubbing around her. Her nail beds bled as the bleach destroyed her skin, and the carpet pulled pieces away from her fingers. Her mom never taught her how to clean a body-sized bloodstain out of tan shag carpeting well enough that she would receive her full damage deposit when the lease ended. Jane didn’t believe that it was a topic she could call her mom to ask for advice about either. This wasn’t as simple as a wine stain after New Years’.
When news made around town that David asked Jane out for coffee, everyone thought Jane was putting her own life at risk. Jane thought it was just two friends catching up after high school. She didn’t even realize it was a date until he held her hand and walked her to her car. Jane didn’t know why she felt reliant on David, but she knew that she felt magnetized to him when he held her hand. A year into their relationship, Jane stopped imagining her life with anyone besides David. Now, her bleeding hands scrubbed someone else’s blood deeper into her carpet and pictured how she would spend the rest of her life attempting to avoid him.
Jane didn’t know what to do. Her carpet was still as stained as when she left in the morning to the pharmacy, and she knew that David was waiting for her somewhere.
There was a knock at her door. “Jane, let me in,” David said from the other side.
“Leave me alone. I already told you that I don’t want to talk to you.” Jane still kneeled on her wet carpet floor.
“Don’t you have questions for me? I’m literally giving you the opportunity to ask me anything that you want.”
“You’re sick. No, I don’t have any questions for you,” Jane said, surprised by his attitude. She didn’t understand why he would be so willing to tell her everything. He was reluctant to tell her what he had for breakfast two days ago.
“Jane, I know you read all of those murder books.” David always hated that she read murder mystery novels. He thought they were childish like things teenage girls talked about at sleepovers, but at this moment, he wanted nothing more than for her to lean into her obsession, “Don’t you ever want to be the protagonist?”
“Please leave, David.” Jane didn’t think she could handle the emotional strain he put on her. She was sleep-deprived and felt that she hadn’t had a moment for a good cry as her mind desperately craved.
David stretched his words, exaggerating how annoyed he was through the door, “Fine. I have a question for you.”
Now Jane was intrigued. She wasn’t the criminal, so she didn’t know why he would have questions for her. She stood up from her knees and unlocked the door. Opening it enough to see David with his head slightly lowered and his hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans. Cautiously, she asked, “What do you want to ask me?”
“Why haven’t you called the Sheriff?” David spoke softly with the corner of his lips slightly pointed upwards. Jane hadn’t thought about the police. Once she saw the scene, the body was already gone. She assumed David took care of that. The only job left was to get the stains out from the stab wounds.
“I don’t know the full story,” she said. She had made hundreds of assumptions and created a dozen different stories in her head on what happened in her living room. She knew that one of them was probably right, but she didn’t know which one.
“You could still send a tip into the Sheriff’s office,” David said, brushing her arm. “You know it was me.” Jane’s eyes twitched to where his fingers intersected with her sweatshirt. It took her a second to force herself to flinch away.
“Why are you trying to convince me to help you to go to jail again?”
“Well, you’ve always been the good girl. I don’t want you to change the entirety of your personality because of me.”
“I changed when I came home to bloodstain the size of a body in my living room, David. You need to leave.” Jane began closing the door, but he grabbed the handle pushing it back open.
“Just ask me one question. I came all the way here to give you the chance to ask me a question about last night. Ask me one.”
“I already told you. I don’t want to know about last night,” Jane said.
David was annoyed with her. He traveled five minutes to her apartment, intending to tell her what he did, and she didn’t care about the details. He had already committed himself guilty to her. “Fine, Jane. Be like that.”
Jane felt a tiny amount of fiery courage bouncing in her chest. “You know what, I do have one question for you.” She jutted her hip into the door, widening her stance, and asked, “For the past four years, I’ve refused to listen to the town’s rumors about you. What did you go to jail for after high school?”
David looked around. He leaned his head closer to the gap between the door and the wall and spoke in a low and quiet voice, “Same thing I did here last night.” Jane pressed her body into the door, using her weight to shut it as he attempted to push it open, and she carefully locked it again.
Jane didn’t want to call the Sheriff and tell him about the stain. The Sheriff kept a watchful eye on David. He had even called Jane a few times during their relationship to make sure she felt safe, but the conversations began and ended with Jane saying, “I’m fine. Everything is fine.” Up until now, everything had been fine. Jane slowly learned to love David, or at least how he made her chest burn. Jane still viewed her time with him as happiness. She had already partially cleaned the bloodstain, but now looking back to the bucket and towel she had left in her living room, the stain still hadn’t decreased.
David began knocking on her door again. Her mind saw his white knuckles clenching his fist closed pounding on the door. He yelled, “This is all b.s. Jane. Let me talk to you.” Jane walked back to her living room, picked up the bucket and towel, and disposed of each in her sink. “I’ll wait here,” he yelled again.
Jane’s head continued to pound. She rested her elbows on the countertop and held her head in the palm of her hands. She took deep, unsteady breaths to accommodate her aggressive heartbeat. Her throat burned from stuffing her escaping emotions back into her gut. She walked back to the door, reached down, and pulled out her phone from her purse on the floor. Taking another deep breath, she looked out the door’s peephole. He reminded her of the serial killer she had read about in the book she finished at work the previous night while David stole her sharpest kitchen knife. She walked away from the door and called 911. “I need to talk to the sheriff,” she told the dispatcher.
“Excuse me, ma’am, you need to tell me what’s happening,” the dispatcher said calmly. Jane recognized the voice. Everyone in town could have recognized the voice. She was always the instigator of the town’s weekly drama. She probably only applied for the job to learn more drama. Jane had smiled at her at the pharmacy only a few hours prior. She had been refilling her purse with candy.
“It’s me, Martha. He’ll want to talk to me.”
“Ah,” she said, already knowing too much. She would have the word out within an hour. “I’ll put you right through.”
There was another ring, and then the sound of a middle-aged man huffing too hard and keys jiggling as the man picked them up. The Sheriff spoke quickly, “Jane, I’m on my way. What happened? You’re at your apartment, right?”
“Bring backup. You can’t handle him on your own,” Jane forcefully dragged out her words. Her breathing demanded labor. Her hand shook, her phone seeming too heavy.
“Jane. Listen to me. What happened?”
“He’s banging on my door.”
“Okay, I can hear that.” Jane hears the Sheriff call out to someone near him, “You drive,” and two car doors slam shut. He spoke to her again, “Are you okay?”
As David began to hit her door harder and began shaking in its frame, she released a few tears. “There’s blood on my floor. I can’t get it out,” she swallowed, trying to manually stuff her panic attack back down her throat.
“We’re on our way, Jane. Stay on the phone.” She nodded.
Personal Essay: 1992 Harbor Master
I was eight years old when my mom came home from a bad day at work and proclaimed, “We’re buying a boat.” Third grade me didn’t know what that meant. I don’t remember caring what my parents were doing, just annoyed that they dragged me from marina to marina as they shopped for their purchase. My youngest brother was fifteen at the time and the most involved member of the family. He was furious that our parents refused to buy a speedboat. At 20 years old, our older brother was at Gustavus Adolphus College. He hadn’t come home in weeks; he was growing up, and we were growing apart.
The family was falling apart, and it didn’t matter how many Saturday night road trips we took to Gustavus for a family dinner. My parents made a hail mary, crossing their fingers that something big would change our destiny.
…
The cockpit is the place where you drive the boat. The helm, especially in modern boats, is covered in gauges measuring everything from fuel level and engine temperature to how straight you’re technically driving. Heads are the bathrooms. The name comes from sailing ships and goes back in time for centuries. The boat’s front used to be called the head, and bathrooms were always placed at the boat’s front on sailing ships. Nowadays, the front of a ship is referred to as the bow and the back as the stern. Pirates called kitchens galleys. Staterooms are bedrooms; the word came from the 16th century, most commonly reserved for royal passengers. The living room is called the saloon, which is a French word because sometime during the history of boats, it was decided that ships needed to be fancy, and French is obviously the fanciest language.
…
My grandparents owned Twin Cities Industrial, the best motor repair shop in the state. When my mom was a toddler, she played with her Barbies in the back room, and when she got a little older, she winded the motors’ copper coils. My grandpa insisted on “trading” the family boat every summer for a different one, except for the one summer that he traded it for an RV. My mom holds six different summers on six different boats as memories in her head. She reminisces revarnishing the hull of a wood boat with her dad before and after a boating season, the day they watched a boat blow up into flames, and the day they somehow flipped a pontoon upside down.
…
There are three types of people who own boats in Minnesota. Rookies take their boat out once, sometimes twice a year. Standing on land, you can watch boats fill the Mississippi and St. Croix Rivers on the Fourth of July. Packed together like people at the Minneapolis Boat Show, shoulder to shoulder, the boats circle their poorly secured anchors. The number one thing that a marina advertises is its proximity to fireworks. You can find every boater secured in their slip by nine o’clock at night on the fourth; every rookie will have their anchor dragging through sand, beers, and red solo cups lined up across the helm.
…
The boat that my parents bought was way over our heads. It was a 1992 45′ Harbor Master Coastal Cruiser. Two helms. Two heads. Two staterooms. One saloon. One galley. Twin Volvo Penta Engines. When we purchased her in 2012, she was original to 1992, except for some of the carpeting. A quarter of the inside was wrapped in the original green shag carpeting, and the rest was replaced with blue shag. We named her Knotted Together.
My mom stood in the middle of the empty saloon the first day that Knotted Together was ours. As my dad walked inside, she asked him, “So what do we do now?”
“I don’t know what to do. This was all your idea. You’re the one that spent your whole childhood on boats.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t really do anything. I was just a little girl. I hid in the bathroom every time something went wrong.”
…
By our second year of owning Knotted Together, we had renovated the whole inside and started replacing engine parts. The blue and green carpeting was now replaced with a subtle tan that my brother and dad worked every day after school for a month. Gorgeous oak pieces that my dad created replaced the stairs and hatches. He woke me up an extra hour before school for weeks to put a coat of varnish on them before I left. Her engines were still mostly 1992 antiques. We got good at turning the key and listening closely to the sounds, or lack of sounds, that the engines made and then describing it to Google. We passed a yellow legal pad around, writing down possibilities. We learned everything from YouTube videos and online boating chat rooms. Everyone in the marina knew who we were; we had 24/7 access to the marina’s shop’s back room, where they stored extra parts.
We were trying to make our way to Red Wing for the second time. It was Friday afternoon, and after spending an hour trying to start the engines, we started our usual routine of finding solutions. The sun had gone down, and my brothers were taking turns in the engine room, trying anything they could think of. The whole dock had soon grabbed their dinner and folding chairs and gathered around the back of Knotted Together. This wasn’t the first time that some of them kept us company on the long nights of trial and error, but this was the single night that my family realized that our lives had changed. As my mom would say, everyone on the dock that night came from different walks of life, yet we joked around as if we were family.
My brothers were getting discouraged. My oldest brother, hating negative emotions as much as he does, said, “Oh come on. We can do this. This isn’t rocket science.”
“This guy over here might disagree,” someone said, pointing at this old guy who never spoke much. “He won’t tell you, but he used to be an engineer for NASA.” The man he was referring to simply smirked and nodded his head.
…
The hail mary worked. I became the only little girl on the playground who didn’t complain about her big brothers. I was also the only kid in elementary school that, when asked about their favorite place, responded with Lock and Dam 2. In the speech my youngest brother gave to fulfill his high school graduation requirement, he accredited Knotted Together as the sole reason he still had a big brother. My brothers both became Biomedical Engineers. It’s a known fact that if they didn’t talk with a retired NASA engineer while replacing engine parts, they wouldn’t be where they are today: developing electrode implants and a new type of medical imaging. I wouldn’t have a portfolio full of writing about Knotted Together and the Mississippi River.
…
I have two big brothers that I wouldn’t have without Knotted Together. She will always be the first place where my brothers and I learned who we are. She will always be the first place that felt like home because home is truly where your loved ones are, and my loved ones were always with her.