The Life of an Apple.

     
From the mother tree to the hands of a consumer, an apple has a very ordinary life. Rarely is it rejuvenated. Seldom are its seeds acknowledged, planted and patiently attended to.

For the great majority of people, the process of eating an apple has a clear beginning and end. First, an apple must be chosen. Apples are organized as if to assume they are all the same, as if picking up one will ultimately end in the same satisfaction of any other. They are always piled together, yet separated from all other varieties. They are not separated by quality. They are not separated by smell.

The smell of each variety of apple is different, let alone the smell of each individual apple. The secret is to smell the apple at its core, near the stem. Its true life, flavor and richness can be derived from this aroma. The pungent scent of a perfectly ripe apple may even jolt you into the future, the moment when the knife breaks the apple’s thin barrier, and the first succulent piece is slipped into your mouth.

The smell is one thing, but the beauty of an apple is another. There must be no brown marks intruding in the fantasy of perfection. The design of a worthy apple is a unique painting, with only red, yellow or green paint at its disposal. For beauty that prevails over limitations is even more extraordinary.

A lonely shopper may linger in front of the apple stand without a record of time, searching for flawless individuals. Until the perfect group is composed, which in all likelihood is never, the lonely shopper will not be contented. Other curious shoppers may look and wonder what mystery lies in finding the perfect bunch of apples. Soon this brief experience with curiosity will float out of their ears and baby food, potato chips and bacon will return.

The apples are placed in a fruit basket with an array of other fruit upon returning home, their individuality once more taken away. Rarely will an apple be eaten immediately. It’s as if they ought to be forgotten. Days will pass, but the apples remain in their place, ever so modestly. Forgetting their presence makes having them so much sweeter.

A red glint catches your eye while standing in front of the pantry. And you remember them. Their simplicity settles your indecision.

The knife is out, and the apple is standing upright, its posture prepared for the sacrificial moment. The best way to cut an apple is into sixteenths. Eighths are entirely too big, and thirty-seconds butcher the exquisite crispness of a well-chosen apple.

You place the apple slices into a shallow bowl. Like clockwork, they disappear, one after another, time taking no toll on even the last piece. The bowl sweating the apple’s remains is usually placed into the sink and forgotten. But something is in the air. Something is different. You look down at the bowl, millimeters before its submersion into the murky dishwater, and you notice a little brown seed.

As if planting seeds is a completely revolutionary idea, you realize you could plant this seed. You could have your own apple tree. New fantasies race through your mind, not of perfection, but of growth.

Out of ten apple seeds, only about three will germinate and live to adulthood. You have one seed. It takes more than six years to even discover whether the seed you plant will grow into a full-sized tree and bear edible fruit. There is a one in twenty chance of having a tree with edible fruit. There is an even smaller chance that the fruit will be as tasty as its mother. You are tempted to throw away this apple seed like all the others, and continue buying apples that you aren’t required to invest anything in. Your mind searches for reasons to abandon your familiar practices to consume and discard. You remember a concept you have often applied to your own life: it is the not end result that matters, but the process from which you learn everything.

So you plant the apple seed and wait. Maybe you’ll learn something along the way. But don’t forget, you need two trees to make fruit. Apple trees cannot pollinate themselves. And now you’ve already learned something, no matter how well you care for your little apple tree, its purpose will stay unfulfilled without a companion to complete the cycle, to take the ordinary out of its life.

Detailed Description of Home

Ahhhhhhem,” my father clears his throat while drinking coffee on the toilet. It’s a few minutes before six a.m. I was dreaming of uncooked noodles and star-shaped candies mixed with mint-flavored milk when a pudgy adolescent gray tabby pounces on my stomach for the benefit of his stomach.

I get out of bed topless, shielding my breasts with my arm, and pour a meager bowl of low-fat, high quality cat food. I get back into bed. My mother paces nervously from one end the house to the other. Coffee, prepare breakfast, soup for his lunch, kiss, goodbye. My father comes in and kisses me before he leaves. I drift back asleep to the sound of cat teeth crunching.

I wake again, this time by my own body. I put on a shirt and walk outside. The air tickles my skin. I feel cold in South Florida. My mother talks while my mind gradually moves from sleep to wake, “I am going to clean Garp's cage now,” she says. Garp is a five-foot iguana. I walk back inside and sit on the couch. The TV isn’t on.

She speed walks past the front window. I hear water spitting from the hose. The cat walks to the screen door and watches the outside from inside.

My father calls. I tell her through the screen door that he’s on the phone. She walks over dragging her feet in dark blue polka dot rain boots.

She walks back past the front window, now with a waltz tempo, still rushing. She comes inside, sits on the couch and changes her shoes, “I’ll be sad, but I’ll be happy when we finally decide to let Garp go.”

I realize life looks very different when you’re watching and listening, instead of thinking and analyzing. My eyes are open.

We put on our bathing suits and decide to bike to the beach instead of drive, “It’s good exercise, good for my bones,” she says. Pedaling down the street, we’re silent. On the side of a truck I read, ‘send a smile.’ How does one ‘send a smile’? Is it flowers? There’s no explanation. Another bumper sticker reads, ‘1-20-09 Bush’s last day.’ There’s a rainbow sticker on this car as well.

We pass some panting fat Canadians on the bridge that leads to the beach. They’re carrying oversized beach chairs, and their hair isn’t wet.

We arrive at the beach. I lay down an large, orange beach towel, take off my clothes and walk to the edge of the water. My mother eats a nectarine in the shade. The water covers my feet, then retreats, now my ankles, then back, now my knees. I raise my arms and stand on my toes. My entry into the ocean is shy, then abrupt.

I return to my towel with wet hair. I lie down on my back, untie the neck straps from my bathing suit and tuck them in between my breasts. Eyes closed, warmth. I see my mother lie next to me through cracks in my eyelids. She’s covering her aged skin with organic suntan lotion. I notice the varicose veins spidering up her legs. She’s sixty-seven, had me when she was forty-four. She raises her chin to the sky, closes her eyes and puts lotion on her face and neck. We bask in the sun for while like iguanas. My happiness is simple like an iguana's happiness. I fall asleep.

I wake up and join her in the shade. She holds another half-eaten nectarine against the sky; red and orange against blue, “Look, look at the contrast, it would make a nice painting,” she says. I see a little white sticker on the side of the nectarine, ‘Chile.’ That nectarine has traveled farther than I have, which either means I haven't traveled enough or it has traveled too much. Or both.

I ate the nectarine with her in the shade, one piece for her, one for me, so impartial, even though the fruit is in her hands. I put on my clothes, wipe the sand from my feet and we leave.

We bike home riding on the opposite side of the road. I notice a bustling Italian bakery and begin biking towards it. My mother follows. We paste our faces to the window and peer inside. Fashionable people are eating gelato and paninis. Little cakes are posed on golden platters in a golden display case.

We pass a coffee shop that isn’t Starbucks, and I'm intrigued: ‘Undergrounds Coffeehouse’. A television is creatively or lazily positioned on top of a piano. An old George Harrison movie is playing. They’re selling paperbacks for two dollars. I notice Fahrenheit 451 sandwiched between two grocery store romance novels.

We stop at the bank to take out cash because I owe my mother money. “You birthday is a day before mine,” says the teller, “same year?” I say.“Same year,” he replies. I could have left the conversation there, but I feel compelled to connect with a stranger. “I wish my mother held me in a few days longer, then I could be born on Halloween,” I say. He replies with an awkward smile. I leave with a failed attempt to socialize looming over my shoulder.

I hand my mother the money, she hands me back a ten and smiles. I smile. Maybe that's how a smile is sent.

We bike to the grocery store to get ground turkey. I was full on samples before we left. My mother grew up with very little food to eat. She revisits sample booths three or four times.

We get home, and shortly after, my father gets home. He shows me a trick for blocking a man from touching my breasts, “It’s all in the arm,” he said.

We make turkey burgers: swiss cheese, tomatoes, onion, pickles, mushrooms. We eat our burgers in the screened-in porch. The cat meows to go outside. I drink a glass of Orangina. My shoulders feel less tense, for a second, my mind pauses.

The color of despair. The color of freedom.

The girl tapped her manicured maraschino cherry fingernails on the shopping cart handle as she scrutinized the bagged lettuces. She had a dainty structure: short legs, railroad track hips, childlike hands, and a lipless mouth. Her hair was tied up in a chaotic ponytail, the sixth in series that failed to suit her definition of the “grocery-store level” of hair disarray.

A tall, sinewy man stood in front of the tomatoes, his eyes concealed in the shadows of a sand-colored fedora. The hat was garnished with a paltry red feather, so as to hint it was not passed down from grandfather to father to son, but bought at a trendy Haight street boutique, and made in China. The grin on his face broadcasted a poised demeanor and his long-sleeve, rolled up, thrift store purchased dress shirt hung off his shoulders in a relaxed fashion. She drove her cart past him like a mosquito hovering over human flesh. Her eyes buzzed over him; her hips swayed coarsely from side to side. First it was a pepper that so fittingly danced away from her memory, then a cucumber, then an artichoke.

Standing on the other side of the produce section she schemed her own reality. She would stroll over to the tomatoes, grab one and feign its accidental plummet to the linoleum grocery store floor. The man would scurry after the tomato to retrieve it. While he held the red fruit in the palm of his masculine hand, their eyes would awkwardly flutter across each other’s, and thus, give birth to a lingering sexual silence. And then he would say, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” And a life full of love and companionship would ensue.

The girl reached out in front of the man, her fingernails ghosts hovering over the tomatoes. She selected a tomato below another in a precarious position, and down it went tumbling like tumble weed across the desert of a floor. It stopped at the feet of a knurled old woman who was in the process of searching for an immaculate head of white cabbage; a head of cabbage she would boil in her lonely 1950’s style kitchen with carrots, celery and onions; cabbage soup she would eat sitting at her boundless mahogany dinning room table, while thinking of youth, love, and exquisite pain (the three often originating from the same events).

The old woman bent over holding her arthritis-ridden back, picked up the tomato resting on the tip of her white orthopedic shoes, and handed it to the girl as she thought to herself, “Oh the joy of still being able to bend over.”

“Oh her yah go sweetie. You betcha those nails can make pickin’ up a tomato a bit of a pickle!” The old woman continued cackling at her vegetable pun through her worn smoker’s throat as the girl turned around and watched her fantasy cross the produce section.

The girl left the store without tomatoes. She didn’t even like tomatoes, with their furry and slimy seeds that resembled a thousand tiny babies growing in unison within her food. But, the girl did like fantasies. They defined her.



The girl was employed as a secretary by a Christian doctor in Berkeley that believed abstinence was obligatory behavior until marriage, and even then, sex was only a manner in which to procreate. He often openly preached his old-fashioned beliefs to the fledgling college students that entered his office for STD testing and free condoms, and to his employees, many of them who were not, in fact, getting laid. Thus, the incessant Godly advice to his staff came only as a reminder that they were not worthy of condoms or sexually transmitted diseases, however much both of those things were not coveted.

The girl wore pencil skirts to work that clung to her waist, and accentuated her shapeless body. Her hair was a dull brown color but she always found some colorful headband or earrings to draw one’s attention away from her underlying drabness.

At work, she fantasized about being discovered. Among the youthful students, there were thirty-something businessmen that occasioned the doctor’s office. In her whimsical mind, a businessman would open the bell-laden office door, walk up to the counter, sign in, and before retiring to the row of linked waiting room chairs to sit tediously for over an hour, he would look up at her, circle her face with his eyes, and tell her she was model material. He would complement her on her high cheekbones, hand her his card, and tell her if she ever wanted to walk the runway instead of the doctor’s office hallways, she should contact him. The card would read something along the lines of “Trent Bobby, professional photographer, Vogue magazine.”

Today was her day. Everyday was her day, but today was her day. She felt it vibrating in the air, glistening on the shiny pastel waiting room wallpaper, and loitering outside on the sidewalk with the cool winter air. But time passed and only furrowed relics of decades past, and markedly rotund pregnant women paraded the office hallways that day.

It was five o’clock and her faith was beginning to drift away with the salmon-colored winter sun. The office closed at six o’clock. Rainer Summers was the last appointment. He was coming in for a check-up on his fractured shoulder blade of six months prior (but really to get a refill for his Oxycodon addiction). And then the door jingled.

A man in a business suit sauntered through the door and to the front desk. Her heart started fluttering as he signed the sheet with a bulbous pen that had etched on the side of it, “Ambien CR-Experience the Difference.” He opened his wallet and pulled out a business card. Her heart began boomeranging off the walls of her chest as if it were a depraved inhabitant of a mental institution bouncing off the padded walls his cell. He looked up at her, paused, tilted his head, smiled disparagingly and asked, “Mosco’s is the sandwich shop next door, right?” Confused, she answered, “Yes,” her scrunched eyes causing hills to form on her brow. The man dropped his business card in the fish bowl next to the office window that read, “Leave Your Card, and Win a Free Lunch for Two at Mosco’s, Home of World’s Biggest and Best Sandwiches!”

The man sat down in the row of connected waiting room chairs and picked up a copy of Sport Fishing magazine. The girl wondered how there could be a magazine entirely devoted to fishing, while the man wondered if he should buy a SeaSucker vacuum-mount rod holder for his new yacht. Shortly after, the nurse opened the waiting room door, “Mr. Summers, Dr. Franklin can see you now.”

The girl waited for the nurse to close the door. She listened, as the small talk grew softer and more distant. When she heard the door of the examination room click-closed, she stuck her hand in the bowl and took out the man’s card, “Rainer Summers, Attorney, Smith and McKinley Associates.” She held the card between her pointer and middle fingers like a cigarette, and smiled as a devious thought inserted itself into her presently bitter mind. She took the card in both hands, ripped it in half, ripped it in half again, and threw it vehemently into the garbage. “Now,” she thought, “he doesn’t have a chance either.”



The next morning was a Saturday. On Saturdays the girl always ran in Golden Gate Park, from the steps of the California Academy of Sciences to the rose garden and back again. Afterwards, she met her friend Katy for lunch in the Haight district. They sat at the window of a fluorescently painted burrito shop, and talked about nothing and everything as she ate a burrito and Katy drank a diet coke. The girl carped of a lack of excitement, how her life had begun to feel like piece of stale gram cracker, bland and without the anticipated crunch. Disregarding her friend’s misery like women disregard the hoots and hisses of construction workers, Katy complained of too much of excitement in her life, “I mean, I can’t continue eating nothing and doing everything. I mean, like I know being a model is super prestigious, and everything, but I can’t like keep taking all this Adderall to suppress my hunger. I mean, like sure, I get to meet all the best people in the world. You know, I met Brad Pitt the other day. He’s not that hot up close.” Katy talked but never listened, as did the girl, so the conversation was as good as two whiny pop songs playing simultaneously.

The girl sat on a bar stool with her back slouching against the burrito shop window. Katy sat erect with her feet coiled around the legs of the stool. Katy was one of the girl’s old college friends. They met at freshman orientation the summer before classes started. Their friendship was convenient, but in no way was it intimate. They were the oil and vinegar of camaraderie; they had similar interests but lacked the ability to thoroughly mix.

The girl had just relocated to San Francisco the previous summer for the job in the doctor’s office. She had attended a small liberal arts college in Ohio and barely obtained a general liberal arts degree. All the girl could really do with her degree was be a secretary, or a schoolteacher in some states. She loathed children, so her only option was to be a secretary. Children were too pure to her, like some vague dream of a real person. They hadn’t materialized yet as individuals, so she didn’t see the point in interacting with them. The funny thing about the girl was that she hadn’t become a real person either. She was still a child, with a basic understanding of existence. Thus, her abhorrence of children was, indirectly, an abhorrence of herself.

Her mother, an acclaimed psychologist who plushly resided in a penthouse apartment on the island of Manhattan, had bore a hole, a boundless cave of a hole, deep into her daughter’s sense of self. She felt that her daughter had an inability to decide, which, thus, she reasoned, lead to ineptness to succeed. What her mother didn’t realize was that her daughter simply lacked heartfelt interests, passions, and driving desires. Except, that is, an interest in envisioning a world where she was the nucleus of humanity, with an idealized man at her side and a train of admirers who regarded her as the picturesque beauty.

Katy continued ranting about the hardship of being a someone, while the girl glided into another fantasy. Katy would bring her to the next gathering of famous people where she would meet directors, actors, actresses, models and photographers. They would all listen with reverence as she spoke about the meaning of life and all existence. She would become their guru and all their best friends. No longer would she be at their feet, begging for approval, or, better yet, in line waiting to beg at their feet, but high above them on a pedestal of popularity. She would be their leader, and the newspapers would call her “the new religion among rich and famous.”

“Katy, when are you going to another one of those parties, like the one where you met Brad Pitt?” asked the girl.

“Oh, I go to them like almost every weekend. There’s always some famous person having some party somewhere. The company I work for always sends me to them for publicity. And I always get to wear some avant-garde dress that some stupid designer made. Next weekend, I think there’s some big thing in LA I’m flying out to go to. I don’t even, like, know what it’s for.”

“Do you think I could go with you? I don’t have any plans this weekend, and I’ve been saving up money, so a flight to LA wouldn’t be a big deal.”

Katy paused awkwardly and rearranged herself on the diner-esque glittery red stool, “Um… I don’t know, I mean it’s not really like anybody can go, you have to know people, you know?”
“Well, I know you, don’t I?” The girl’s eyes were frozen seeds of desperation as she waited for her friend to respond. The world wasn’t working with her. It never had. It never gave her what she felt she deserved. Time and time again it disappointed her. She couldn’t quite understand how life never worked in her favor, which was the root of naivety of existence. “Wasn’t it bound to work out at some point or another, just by chance?” she thought. If she was patient enough, one fantasy will come true. It just has to, by chance.

“Look, I’m really sorry, but it doesn’t really work that way. I wish you could go, but it just wouldn’t make sense for you to go, you know? Your presence wouldn’t do anything for the group, no one would know what to say to you, and you wouldn’t know what to say to them, and that’s why you would get to go in the first place. You have to be able to contribute something, or represent something.”

The girl melted into a puddle of her own sorrows, but her face remained a statue of fake happiness. Her slightly yellowed teeth peeked out from behind her thin, flat lips to force a smile. She tensely clasped her hands together, her tiny fingers nesting in each other, “Oh that’s cool, I just thought I would ask, you know. I thought it couldn’t hurt.” She cleared her throat for the quandary that clung to the oxygen molecules in the air, and looked out the window at pairs upon pairs of young people with dancing feet of happiness, and strands of fluttering weightless hair.

“Well that being said, I think I should go. I have to meet my agent to go over some shoots I have this week. Check ya later girl.” Katy walked out of the burrito shop, and the girl watched her friend’s glossy red leather purse glisten in the sun as she walked down Haight street, through the throngs of stylish San Franciscans that flooded the sidewalk.



The girl woke up Sunday morning with a gallon jug of gloom pressing her into the earth. With the exodus of slumber, her habituated mind commenced its churning of fantastical possibilities. But this Sunday morning proved unlike the others: the thought of some unclaimed reality twisted her stomach into a greasy county fair funnel cake.

She lied in bed, only her eyes peaking out from under a deep crimson down blanket that spanned her queen-sized bed. She listened as the pigeon mother outside her apartment window dutifully shoved insects into the mouths of her defenseless, whimpering chicks. She listened to the click-clacks on the sidewalk and the wide mouths laughs of the liberal San Franciscans, the jovial, water-drought Californians. She listened to the tires of visitor vehicles screaming up and down the precipitous city streets.

“Every new place is a strange place”, she thought, “But my whole life has been strange; from childhood, where shyness overtook me like the plague, to now, where I’m throwing business cards into the garbage resentfully, as if that will change the fate of my own life. Is it just some inevitable truth, that being alive is inherently strange, inherently inadequate, or am I just inadequate? Probably both.

Is this the truth of our existence: to feel as if our lives are not within the grasp of our own hands? Why do we feel this? Because our lives are not in our hands? Because we are nervous little apes, with too much mind and too little instinct to just jump up and catch the currents of existence, and see what happens? Why have I been given this fate of nothingness, and Katy, a fate of popularity and excitement? Who the fuck gets to decide these kinds of things?”

She felt uncomfortable in her own bed; the thought of a lack of control both frightened and infuriated her. She tossed and turned, rearranged her legs and arms, but no matter the endless positions in which she could mold her body, her mind was lost in the alleys of human strangeness, and thus, she felt strange. What used to feel like an infinite well of possibilities, now felt like a black box of seclusion. A series of prospects had become a series of discontents.

She always thought about life like this: that, in the world, there were an infinite number of ways things could turn out, and that becoming aware of this infiniteness allowed her to be driven in the right direction, the happy direction; as if acknowledging the possibility that she could be discovered, or wooed would somehow initiate a chain of events that led to it actually happening.
She was only adept at putting herself in a position where others could act on her thoughts. But only she knew her thoughts. Silly girl. Her life was a fantasy of a fake life; a life she didn’t hold in her hands but one that flew above her in the abyss of idealism. And desire is no substitute for action.



It was six pm. A week had skipped by her like a little girl in pick tails. “Ha ha ha,” laughed Time, “I’m still passing, and you’re still in the same place”. She continued to go to work, but no longer did she think of confident businessmen walking in the door. Work was a monotonous bundle of actions, almost a dance of between her hands and the swivel chair in which she sat; from one end of the counter to the other, filing this, signing that. She didn’t think; she didn’t feel; she didn’t fantasize. She didn’t call Katy, and when she went to grocery store, she made a list and was in and out in under twenty minutes.

On Thursday night, she laid sprawled out on her thrift store corduroy couch watching TV, and becoming more like a zucchini as time passed. While flipping through the flashy consumerism images, she came upon a wildlife show about birds, narrated by none other than David Attenborough. She fell asleep to the soothing English intonation of Mr. Attenborough’s voice and gently from reality to reverie.

In her dreams, she was walking through a field of yellow flowers on the coast of California. She heard the ocean synchronously crashing against the cliffs, like the metronome of the earth. Her footsteps made no sounds. The tall grasses growing where she walked failed to whisper in the wind. All she could hear was the sounds of the waves. The sound of the crashing waves then began to morph into the deep oboe of Mozart’s Serenade for Winds. And all of a sudden, as if they were creating the music, as if the earth was singing to her, a thousand red birds flew up and speckled the sky. As the birds flew higher, she felt herself lifting up slowly, following them. As she flew higher and higher, she could feel the curves of her mouth turning up, and she smiled. In her dreams, she smiled.

She woke up the next morning with a thought. “This is it,” she thought, “I’m going to fly. If nothing else is going to go my way, this will. I’m going to fly.”



Now, it was Sunday. She stood at the top of Mt. Tamalpais, ten miles from San Francisco. Ants of people were crawling around on the ground below her. Her toes hung over the edge of the mountain. She could see San Francisco in the distance and the fog that frequently kept the city company.

Her feet hesitated on the edge, but she knew if she just jumped, she would fly. And then without a thought she jumped.

“How do you like the view?” asked the instructor who attached her to the bright red paraglider that hung above them. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

Three.

Society told me I was meant to form a growing interest in sex at the same rate as my breasts enlarged, or the hair under my arms grew. In Sex Education, where we were given dry explanations of the purity of our existence, I never completely understood the hilarity of the penis. Most of the students were giggling out of nervousness, because looking at a picture of a penis made the boys think about using theirs, and the girls think about touching one. The giggling was a clear sign of interest.

The penis fascinated me as a child. It had such a funny shape, like a banana, but I soon realized how cliché it was to make that connection. My mother never really talked to me about sex, it just came naturally to understand those kinds of things. I do remember her asking me if there was anything I wanted to know, and I said, “It’s simple, right? A boy puts his penis in a vagina, and a baby grows in your belly?” “That’s about it, you’ll figure out the details as time goes on, but that’s really the basic idea,” she responded. By the details, she meant love.

My solitude during childhood enhanced an ability to learn about myself faster than the average student in middle school. Others hadn’t purged my beliefs or preferences quite as extensively as the average child. I had a lot of time to think about things.

My eyes often wandered to the subtle things: the spider eating a moth in the ceiling corner of our school cafeteria, the jester of a boy placing his hand briefly on a girl’s shoulder, her eyes gazing at his hand, while her head remains facing forward. I wanted to see everything in that place, that pool of chaotic bodies, from the minor details to the rationalized generalizations.

In middle school I spent most of my time painting trees with acrylic paints. I would paint the leaves brown and the truck green, just to see what it would look like. What if life were opposite, I would wonder? What if I was boy? What if the sky was white and the clouds blue? What if taught my teachers how to be child, instead them teaching me how to be adult? The infinite possibilities consumed my barely developed mind. Why were things the way the were? Why was I always separated from everyone else by some invisible force? Why didn’t I understand how to be a child? Why didn’t I look at boys and dream and dream?

No doubt, I was fascinated by sex. It was an expanse I had only begun to think about, an essence I couldn’t quite grasp or imagine. I couldn’t imagine sex however much I tried. In middle school I met Rainer. He was 12. I was 13. He had light brown hair that hung low around his ears and toes that stuck out of his feet like a yard rake. He would often stare at me from across the room. I could feel his adolescent eyes on my neck.

It wasn’t until near the end of my last year of middle school that we met formally. I rode my bike to school early to get breakfast before anyone else. The cafeteria ladies would save me the sweetest fruit because I would get there the earliest and listen to them talk about their woeful lives. That morning, when I arrived to school, the smell of vanilla lingered in the hallways. I stood before the closed cafeteria doors and inhaled deeply sucking the vanilla into my lungs. I opened the doors and vanilla surrounded me like music, like the rocky shore music of my childhood. The vanilla smell lingered through the school all day, leaving the corners of my mouth turned up, and my spirit unusually high. Everything looked beautiful from then on, even my worn tired math teacher, Mrs. Bacallao. I noticed the sweetness behind the wrinkles in her eyes; how, one day long ago, she must have beautiful.

That morning when I was walking out of the cafeteria with a perfectly ripe Bartlett pear in my hand, shortly before all the other children would arrive, Rainer walked in while I was reaching for the door handle. For a second we stopped, time stopped and we stared at each other.

And then he said, “Anna.”

And I said, “Yes that’s me.”

“You were in my art class last year. I remember you. You would always twirl your hair around your finger and you sat in the front of the class.”

“Well it’s nice to meet you. What was your name?”

“Rainer.”

“Well it’s nice to met you Rainer. I really enjoyed that art class last year. I learned how to draw trees really well.”

“You like to draw trees? I really like drawing animals. I sometimes go to this area inland that has a lot of birds to draw and a lot of big trees.”

“Oh that sounds wonderful. Where is it?”

“I can show you this weekend if you want. I was planning on going there anyway. Do you want to go?”

“I’d like to, yes, that sounds nice.”

“Well, then…how about after school on Friday?”

“Oh sure, can we can ride our bikes there?”

“Yes, yes we can.”
He paused awkwardly for a moment. “Well I should be going, I have to help Mrs. Bacallao cut pictures for the hallway bulletin board,” I said.

“It was nice meeting you Anna…finally.”

“It was nice meeting you too Rainer see you Friday,” and I turned and walked away. I could feel the warmth vibrating on my neck and I knew he was watching as I walked away.

Two.

When I was two years old I walked to the edge of the cliff near our house on the Pacific coast and sat for hours staring at the ocean. My mother found me there in the late morning sitting on my knees with my dainty baby fingers resting on my lap. She didn’t panic as she searched the house, as she crouched on her knees to look under the bed, or when she pulled the refrigerator out from the wall. I had crawled out of bed in the morning, before she woke, out the screen door, and down to the edge of the rocks. My thin-skinned baby knees were bruised and dirty when she found me. My hands had made hand marks with orange dirt on my thighs.

My mother delivered me atop a hill so that I could see the vastness of the world when I was born, so she wasn’t surprised when she found me sitting at the edge of the cliff that overcast April morning, looking out at the infinite Pacific Ocean. The clouds were rolling in from the north and rain could be seen in the distance, an ominous mass tumbling over the rocky shore. She often told me that she knew she should have looked there first, but it might have just been one of those ‘after the fact’ kinds of things.

I was a house cat of a child when I was young. Through out the day, I would come in search of food and attention, and after acquiring these things, I would return again to the mythical land of the outdoors. I knew she liked when I would silently come in the side door, grasp the meaty part of her arm from behind and lean on the tips of my toes to kiss her cheek. I had freedom only because I followed her rules. I let her know I was still alive through out the day, and thus I had the freedom to play without her parental eyes limiting my imagination.

I often played down by the rocks, near the shore. The waves would smash into the cliffs and a symphony would compose itself in my head. The crashing waves were my metronome. The rocks were my orchestra. I would direct them with my eyes closed, my hands waving violently. Sometimes when I opened my eyes, anxiety flooded my spine. I could forget my place in the world or who I was when my eyes were closed. Reality was often too intense for my fragile child mind. There was all this beauty around me, real beauty, but I choose to live in my head. It wasn’t a defense mechanism. I wasn’t running from anything. It was side affect of an overwhelming imagination.

I started school when I was seven years old instead of five. My mother seemed to think there was no rush. I attended a small K-12 school about two miles away from our house. I rode my bike five days a week, for eleven years, up the dusty dirt road to the town that lied directly east of our house. The town was modest: oak trees lined its streets and pale earthy colors covered its buildings. The school building itself was new. It had replaced the old school house that was originally built in the 1920s, and, according to the town’s people, was too dated to house its future generation. So the new school was built, but our books remained old. Rumors were spread that they had accidentally spent too much on the school gymnasium to afford new books.

The first day of school my mother came with me to show me the way and to make sure I was placed in a class that didn’t plague me with boredom. I can remember sitting on a blue metal bench, watching her wave her hands with the same drastic swings as I did when I conducted the geological orchestras in my younger years. I couldn’t hear what she was saying because of the cloud of children that stood between us. My mother motioned to me. I got up and walked like a quail to her on the other side of the school patio, small steps, head forward. My tiny seven-year-old body cradled her arm as I peered up at my schoolteacher’s venomous eyebrows.

“Anna, what’s seven times seven?” my mother asked.

“Um...forty-nine?”

“How do you spell elephant?”

“E-l-e-p-h-a-n-t?”

She smiled at me and I could tell I had done something right.

“Mrs. Rabinowitz, I understand your hesitancy with placing my daughter in second grade because she’s starting school late, but I can guarantee that she will do fine. She’s actually ahead. She’s been doing math and reading lessons since she was four,” said my mother with only her eyes smiling.

“Mrs. Hendrail— ” started Mrs. Rabinowitz.

“It’s Ms. Hendrail,” snapped my mother.

“Oh…I apologize. Ms. Hendrail, I understand your concern but we simply can’t put Anna in second grade without testing her, and the testing sessions have already passed, she will have to wait until January for the next sessions.”

I was placed in first grade amongst the six-year-olds. When one’s years are so limited to begin with, age is an insignificant factor in choosing playmates. For the first time in my life I played with other children. Sharing came naturally, as did taking turns. It made sense to share, and even as a seven year old, I felt the desire to give to those that I found interesting.

One day during lunch a girl with blond ringlet curls and a pudgy face was crying. My wonderment of her sadness drove me to sit next her; her tears a vast ocean waiting to be explored.

“Why are you crying?” I asked. Speaking slowly, I attempted to sooth her with my voice.
“My mother forgot to pack me a lunch today, and she forgot to give me money. She said she would when we were leaving in the morning but then she forgot. And now I’m hungry and I don’t have anything to eat and water is so boring,” she complained with her voice reaching the higher octaves and her lower lip protruded. She must have been mimicking a little girl she saw on television.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I know that it doesn’t feel good to be hungry, but you know it isn’t going to last forever and your mother might make a really good dinner because she forgot. But here you can have half my sandwich, then we’ll both be sort of hungry, instead of you being really hungry and me being full.”

The girl’s face lost its tightness, as if my words had exorcised a demon from her frail child body. I felt a bubble of contentment expanding inside my chest when she took that peanut butter and jelly sandwich. When her face relaxed, a flood of joy drenched my mind, and I felt a connection between another human being. Even at seven, there was an air of meaning I sensed in human connection. A happiness and relief transferred from her to me. It was beautiful.

Some Fiction in the Works

One.

(I'm not really sure where this is going. It's a first draft.)

I grew up in the rolling hills of northwestern California, near the border of Oregon. I often played by myself as a child, partaking in only-child activities, like reading books, and envisioning grand adventures. I remember reading The Chronicles of Narnia when I was eight years old and believing I lived there. The swelling hills and massive redwood tree forests were the stage for the whimsical inventions of my childhood. As far as I knew, I lived in the land of enchanted animals, those that hid the secret of grasping the beauty and rawness of existence in their black orbs of eyes and primal movements.

The imagination of only-children is often more exquisite than that of children with siblings. I had to weed though the masses of people to find my friends. I wasn’t born with them waiting outside the hospital room door, their baby carrot fingers fretfully grabbing hold of their mouths. There was no one waiting for me except my mother, no one wondering if they’ll like me, or how my emergence from the womb will alter their everyday lives. There wasn’t even a door to wait outside. I was born atop a hill overlooking the ocean. My mother was alone, as I often was alone as a child.

I still wonder today how she gave birth to me without the help of doctors, or family or friends. There was no one to scream to push, no one to hold her hand, no one to cut the umbilical cord when her body began to tremble from exhaustion. She said she chose for it to be that way. She said she wanted to be satiated with the pain and struggle of giving birth, that birth wasn’t an experience that should be dulled, or eased. But my mother was no masochist. She lived for feeling things deeply, for reaching her arms down the dark well of existence into the obscurity of life, and pulling out with her bare hands, the meaning of it all, that beauty, that rawness.

After giving birth to me, she walked down a narrow dirt road with the umbilical cord still attached to home nestled between two coves, right above the Pacific Ocean. Upon arriving home, she promptly cut the cord that attached mother to daughter, cleaned me, fed me, and fell asleep with me in her arms. She tells me her valiant story of my beginning often, as a reminder of how extraordinary I am. “There is strength in our genes,” she would whisper in my ear as a baby, “and flowing through our Hendrail veins.”

My name is Anna Hendrail. I live in Paris and I’m eighty-seven years old. I’m average height, or at least I was, and I couldn’t tell you if I am beautiful or not because I don’t know how to gauge things like that. Even if I did say, you would probably think I of me as modest or pretentious, so there is really no point anyway.

I haven’t many friends, but it’s possible my definition of “friend” is different than yours. I have one friend. Many others have come and gone over the eighty-seven years of my existence, but she has firmly cemented herself into my life and I have let her remain. I’m sure she would say the same about me.

I would say I’ve lived an ordinary life but only because I wish everyone could have lived a life like mine. In my eighty-seven years and counting, exquisite pain has made me human, loneliness has made me an individual, overwhelming beauty has flooded my brain with moments of bliss, and passion has tied a rope around my body and mind and pulled me firmly to it. There’s one thing you should know though, I’ve never been in love.

The Lonesome Red Flower.

When I was a kid I always wondered why my pet iguana, who was free the roam the house along side us humans, would crawl to the top of the tall wicker bookshelf that stood in the corner of my parent’s living room and remain there for days, until some bodily function called him down again. The lizard’s hearty nails wore through the small holes in the wicker, leaving the bookshelf worn and unattractive. It remained in the corner until he died, and then my mother put it out on the curb.

I felt like my childhood pet iguana standing on top of a hill on the coast of California, in Trinidad. I could see everything in the distance: the vast Pacific Ocean, the hill upon hill that lined the shore.



I felt safe and boundless. Then the fog whirled its way up the coast and all I could see was white with the outlines of hills and gulls and rocks.



The fog lifted as quickly as it appeared, but it all too soon came tumbling over the hills again. I took advantage of what I could see when I could see it, all the while perched on a rock that jutted from the hill like a diving board. Standing above everything in sight nurtured my self-confidence, even if sudden death loomed underneath.

I can remember standing on a hill off interstate 70 in the southern Utah canyons.



I felt vulnerable and diluted at the bottom. I was at a point in my life where I had to come to terms with a certain truth; the kind of truth that sits in the corner of the room with its hands folded in its lap. No matter how much I screamed obscenities, spiting as I yelled, or how I cried with my face in my hands at its knees begging it to leave the room, truth still sat there looking down at me with empty eyes. But when I reached the top of the hill, the wind was blowing fervently and it took with it the overwhelming pressure that had formed in my brain and chest. All the rejection of truth blew away like sand.

As I stood on the hill overlooking the turbulent Pacific Ocean, a cool draft came in from the south. The snails of sweat slowly dripping down from my temples to my chin evaporated. I thought about the healing hill in southern Utah. I realized there is something about wind that can restore to one back to mental health. If I close my eyes I can almost see a big hand wiping my mind and body clean of pain or anxiety. The feeling of the wind on my skin nourished me like the taste of bowl spicy red curry with rice, or like the smell of gardenias. I hadn’t noticed that the beauty of life could be perceived through all the senses individually, each different from the others, but tied together by some overarching purpose.

I left the wind to blow without the expectation of healing and continued down the narrow dirt trail. I found an opening in the bushes that led to the sounds of seals I heard below. I followed the path, many times pausing, looking back up the brushy half-trail and considering to turn around. But I never turned around. I was driven to stand alone on a secluded beach, my red toenails poking out from under the gray California sand, and watch the seals warm their blubber in sun and raise their fat necks, squealing violently.

Through the bushes I saw an asphalt road. My spirits dropped but rose again when I realized the road was forbidden and a well of undiscovered details. To my right, I saw a lighthouse.



I could hear the buzz of the light turning off and on. A foghorn off in the distance was in tempo with the buzz. Horn. Buzz. Horn. Buzz. The squealing seals added the melody.

I walked towards the lighthouse. In my head, I was acting out what to say if I was found on this forbidden road, notebook in hand, semi-professional camera around my neck. Maybe I would just say I’m lost, but I don’t think the coastguard understands actions without criminal motives. The place breathed trespassing.



The metal gate to the lighthouse was locked. A gate leading to a staircase overgrown with plants was locked.



Everything was locked and desolate. I could still hear the seals below. A tall metal fence separated me from them.

I sat down Indian-style on the asphalt. I couldn’t figure out what drew me to the seals. I think they fed my solitude. Living in Salyer, which consists of a general store and a post office, civilization and people had become an encounter, like seeing a mountain lion in the forest. I’ve grown accustomed to solitude. I read. I write. I talk little. I sustain myself with self-discovery, and I rarely get bored. When I get lonely, it’s this investigative kind of loneliness.

My solitude has resulted in the hibernation of my body. I’m just a mind right now, living off new experiences. Feelings shoot straight to my brain to be analyzed. And when I’ll have people close to me again, I’ll change. I’ll have a body again.

I tried to remember what its like to be touched by a human being, to have a body. Vague images and sensations flashed by. Little feelings living in my subconscious rattled for posterity’s sake. It feels so far away. Everything feels so far away, the past, the future. All the while, I still feel alive. I still feel the beauty that floats around in the air like pollen in the spring, the beauty that is only perceivable when I take a deep breath, sucking it all in through my nose.

I didn’t want to go up to the path the way I came, through the branches that left little red streaks all over my arms and through the poison oak. But all the locked gates restricted me from leaving in a comfortable manner. I climbed back up the way I came, brushing against the venomous poison oak, and holding my camera close to my chest to shield it from the branches. I never found the secluded beach. I never saw the seals.

I came out of the bushes at the same spot where I went in. The snails of perspiration were crawling on my temples again, and now under my stubbly armpits and my breasts. I was smiling when I came out, and I continued smiling as I walked down the tan rocky path. Small accomplishments make me smile these days, like tromping through the bushes on steep hills without the thoughts inability plaguing my confidence. I’m not the anxious suburban woman I was before.

A man dressed in loose white linen pants walked past me as I stared through an opening in the brush overlooking the Trinidad coast. I asked him what the boats were looking for down in the bay. About five or six tugboat-looking vessels were anchored not far off the Trinidad shore with large black balls strung to the front of them.



He said they’re looking for crabs, but that this year wasn’t a great season. I thanked him for the information, and he smiled, bowed his head and walked out of my life, back into his own. With eight billion people in the world, these short encounters with strangers must have some significance; that two, out of sea of people, meet for a second and then part, as if life were dance. These experiences, I thought, must be trying to teach me something. I watched him walk away, a collection of stringy scarves dangled around his neck. He didn’t look back, just kept walking forward, his scarves whipping around in the wind behind him.



As I neared the end of the one-mile loop that took me all day to complete, I paused in front of a lonesome red flower with yellow spears shooting out of its center like rays of the sun. My camera still hung from my neck. A middle-aged man adorned in stylish hiking attire walked by, smiling in my direction.

“Capturing beauty?” he asked.

And I said, “I’m trying.”

Third Sunday

It’s beautiful sunny day today because of me, a wild beard dull-colored old man declares as I walk towards the booming adobe-style building. He’s sitting outside on the friendly California grass playing a 5 minus 1 string guitar. My phone rings. I walk away without acknowledging him. I wonder if my response is the norm, or a minority.

I sit in the backseat of my slowly cooking silver Honda with my feet resting on the shoulders of the front seat chairs. A moon-shaped sweat stain forms under each breast as words from an old friend flow into my ear. I walk back to the abode-style building with a sense of place, with a gentle smile growing on my face.

A flash of the two-finger peace sign accompanied by a side-lipped smile leaves room for personal space but still hints at that cliché connection we SHOULD all have. I’m not sure if I do.

People momentarily dance to the ultra hip-hop Girl Talk as they walk about the coffee shop; I’m sitting in the corner drinking Mate, with a comprehensive view of all the twittering human bodies. I have a sliver of the outside porch in my view, where violently waving hands lead lips through conversations.

A young man walks in without shoes or a shirt. There are no signs plastered to the wall informing of mandatory clothing. Not here, not anywhere in Arcata, I’m sure. His small white shorts parallel his crew-cut beaming blond hair. No one looks up. He isn’t an oddity; he is normality. Everyone is comfortable.

Dreadlocks spring from the head of one of the employees. A girl walks over, eye contact, “It’s fucking hot today,” she says as she opens the door. It’s probably 72 degrees outside. I make a futile attempt to connect by offering to open the windows close to my reclusive corner. Another employee calls out prepared drinks as questions, "Chai MooooKA Laaattee?"

White shorts walks back in. He's wearing shoes now, but still no shirt. Now I think he might be gay. His toe-concentrated, hip-swaying saunter exudes his sexuality.

A little girl walks in dancing. Her mother is wearing a fluid black dress, with ideal exposure of the earth tattoo on her back. “We are all one” is tattooed underneath the back dominating earth. A baby does a little finger-pointing dance move in the woman’s arms.

An impoverished man taps a woman on the shoulder. She dropped a dollar and he's telling her with his hoarse, mucus-laden voice. He walks outside and spits. He sits down outside at a quaint picnic table, next to his pile of random items. Jam and bread are sprawled over the table. I peak out the window to get a better look. His sun-spotted jaws are moving. His indented chest is exposed. Another shirtless human. He’s eating out of a metal saucepan, with his brittle elbows hovering vertically over the pot as a spoon shovels food into his dehydrated mouth.

All the while, a comparatively plain woman tutors a comparatively plain man general chemistry. She’s getting progressively more frustrated. He’s getting progressively less educated.

I smell garage. It reminds me of Paris. I feel all nostalgic. The impoverished man is moving around outside.

A woman with an asymmetrical haircut clicks her pointy purple boots on the scratched wooded floor.

I look out the window and sigh, reflectively not sadly. The Douglas Fir trees are peaking over the tattered shops that are lined up across the street.

The music changes. “Sugar magnolia, blossoms blooming, heads all empty and I don’t care…”