OF AIR AND EARTH

Of course they’re only dreams: the face of God,

the daughter drawn from constellation flames,

an ever-present sky devoid of void,

the peace you hoped your mother found at home.

They speak of nothing meaningful as mud.

Sometimes, though, you wish you could buy those dreams,

accept that world of elder men who toyed

with callow minds, who shook their heavy tome

of answers in your face.

                                        Beneath the sod,

mute bodies lie below their stone-carved names.

Sometimes you lie in dreams until you’re cloyed

with doubt of doubt.

                                  Keats lies unnamed in Rome.

Your body roils with air and earth alloyed.

Of air we make dreams.

                                        Of earth we make loam.

THIS BE THE OYSTER

This be the cup, brimming fathoms of nectar
This, the well that flows from forever

This be the saltcellar, trencher of tears,
and also the teardrop, stone-wept from ocean

This be the stone, lost among cairns,
and there, another, hidden in middens

This be the hull that casts off its seed—
thus grows the reef, encrusted with life—

This, ancient vessel, anchored to reef,
This be the ark where life resides

and this, tiny cradle, bearer of treasure,
This be the oyster, slow-rocked by tides.

ORIGINS

“Crowds of people, walking round in a ring”—1

That’s us, collating the first Greensboro Review.2

The “academics” thought we were a zoo:

Frauds and phonies, our Program a plaything

For poseur slackers unfit for studying;3

And, to be honest, I guess there were a few;4

But most were earnest and to their art were true

And gathered notice what note honest work may bring,5

Though that was nothing they would prophesy,

Bob Watson and Peter Taylor, when they planned

A program to square with the resources on hand.6

“We do not want an artists’ colony.

Let’s teach them,” Peter said, “to learn to read.”7

That sounded duly modest. So Bob agreed.8

 

1. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, I, 56. This line became something of a refrain during the activity described in Note 2. I think, but cannot avow, that Bob Watson first recalled it to mind.

2. The Greensboro Review was the brainchild of one of the students, Curtis Fields, a fiction writer and jazz saxophonist. The first issue was delivered to the MFA office from a local printer in separate sheets. The students began collating by laying all the sheets out on tables and then walking from one stack to another, putting them in order. Bob Watson was directing the action. After a while he called me and I came over.

3. Here is a sampling of remarks I heard from my academic colleagues as I walked to and fro from classes: “How’s your little nest of singing birds?” “How many geniuses have we got this year?” “How many Pulitzers have your little crew picked up so far?” “Got ’em writing Odes to Spring yet?” “Can you really teach someone how to write?” “Melville (Hemingway, Steinbeck, Milton, Shakespeare, et al.) would never have taken an MFA degree.” “When’s your first Nobel laureate due?” Etc. Routine stuff.

4. Names omitted to protect the dubious.

5. You may find their works here in Walter Clinton Jackson Library and in thousands of other libraries around the world.

6. The MFA Writing Program was born of desperation. The state legislature, having decided that North Carolina needed fewer colleges and more universities, made it imperative that graduate programs be installed in institutions unready for such and not enthusiastic about the prospect. The English Department was ordered to furnish one and the chair, Dr. Joseph Bryant, came up with the idea of a creative writing program. He hated the idea, but library resources were not sufficient for a solid scholarly graduate program. Once the writing program was installed, he was no friend to it. This made the situation harder for all concerned.

7. Pretty nearly an exact quote.

8. Because a sonnet has only 14 lines, Bob Watson’s contributions are direly slighted here. But to do his labors justice would require an epic about the length of The Faerie Queen . . . Not that he would countenance any such thing.

EDITOR’S NOTE

As Fred Chappell notes in his poem “Origins,” a tribute to Robert Watson, after the writing faculty in UNC Greensboro’s English Department reluctantly installed a formal MFA writing program in 1965, the program faced neglect and disrespect.

A year later, when its first students wanted a publication in which to publish their work, Watson as the program director begged $500 from the chancellor for the project, and The Greensboro Review was founded. Fred Chappell and Peter Taylor served with Watson as faculty editors, with Lawrence Judson Reynolds and Thomas W. Molyneux serving as the student editors. Watson’s wife, Betty, designed the logo for the cover.

The magazine was to be published only once or twice. Printed in the UNCG campus duplicating shop, the first issue was collated and stapled by hand with students and faculty going around and around a table to pick up the sheets.

“For all we knew,” Watson once recalled, “the first issue might be the last, and we never knew from one issue to the next if we would have money for another.” For that reason, he added, the Review was designed as “a no-frills magazine, plain and dignified.” And the first issue looks very much like this our hundredth issue.

Faculty editor Tom Kirby-Smith put in herculean efforts to keep the journal afloat, but it remained so broke that instead of a Tenth Anniversary issue, the Review could publish only a sixteen-page index to its first decade. It did create the Amon Liner Poetry Award, honoring a poet who died soon after finishing the program. Liner, as the Asheville Poetry Review has proclaimed, is one of “10 Great Neglected Poets of The 20th Century.”  The award is presented annually to one of the best poems written by a current MFA student, and the first award went to Kathryn Stripling Byer, who became a North Carolina poet laureate.

By the time Lee Zacharias assumed the editorship in 1977, the  magazine had increasingly opened itself up to the work of such writers as Joyce Carol Oates and Ezra Pound, and when she became president of AWP in 1981 the Review had become a decidedly national publication, featuring stories by the likes of Madison Smartt Bell, Lewis Nordan, and Julia Alvarez.

Still, the Review prided itself on discovering new voices, often publishing the first work of new writers. The same year I became faculty editor, Robert Watson provided funds to start a Greensboro Review Literary Awards competition, with $500 prizes for both fiction and poetry The first story to win our fiction prize was later selected by Margaret Atwood for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 1989.

When Watson retired, we put together a special issue of the Review dedicated to his work and career. The cover was pumpkin orange in honor of his favorite holiday, Halloween, and it was the fattest issue of the Review ever published.

The winter of 1991 brought our Twenty-Fifth Anniversary issue, and in the summer of 1992 we published a special “Peter Taylor Homecoming Issue,” featuring tributes to Taylor’s work and the publication of one of his shortest stories, “At the Art Theater.”  Because of a stroke that severely affected his speech, I copyedited the story by sending him letters with suggested editing and yes and no boxes he could check off, accepting or rejecting the changes.

To work so closely with one of the greatest short story writers ever was a highlight of my career as an editor. Another happened in the fall of 2006, when we published our Fortieth Anniversary issue. In my introductory essay, I got to celebrate the great success of one of our former poetry editors, Claudia Emerson ’91, who had just won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her collection Late Wife.

The joy of discovering new literary voices has been one of the best parts of my thirty-year editorship of the Review. Yet in some ways even more pleasing has been working with fledgling editors, many of whom have gone on to distinguished careers as writers, editors, and teachers.

The Greensboro Review office is actually an editing laboratory, where the editors and editing interns at both the graduate and undergraduate levels learn the finer points of copyediting, proofreading, style, and usage. Our Bible is The Chicago Manual of Style. In conversations with one of our former editors, George Singleton, he never fails to mention how I made him and others of my publishing students memorize the Chicago Manual by chapter and verse.

If I stacked all the books published by Review editors in the last half century, the pile would reach almost two stories high. In addition to tomes of mainstream poetry and fiction, they have produced award-winning children’s literature, a new Little House on the Prairie series, dystopian looks at the future of America, and nonfiction books on everything from candy to the oysters of America and the history of apples.

Even more remarkable than the prolific and diverse nature of their writing is the widespread success of their careers. Our editors have gone on to start dozens of literary journals, and still others have started such celebrated publishing houses as Small Beer Press or become editorial assistants to folks like the president of Harvard University and novelist John Irving. They teach in or direct writing programs at institutions like Florida State University, University of Missouri, Goucher College, and Clemson University. One of our fiction editors now holds the William H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross.

In the last few years alone, Review editors have won, among others, the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, a Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, the Agnes Lynch Starret Prize, the Nilsen Literary Prize for a First Novel, the George Garrett Fiction Prize, and the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Earlier this year, former editor Kelly Link ’97 was one of the finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

In the ranking of MFA programs based on alumni publications  in the prize anthologies, we are consistently in the top ten, with our editors making the pages of such publications as New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, and The O. Henry Prize Stories.

Perhaps most fittingly, in this our 50th anniversary year, UNC Greensboro has awarded two of its highest honors to Greensboro Review alumni. Kelly Link has received the Distinguished Alumni Award, and Kelly Cherry ’67, a member of the first MFA class whose poetry appeared in the first issue of the Review, has received the Alumni Lifetime Achievement Award. Link told The Millions in a recent interview, “My favorite thing [at UNCG] was working on The Greensboro Review. I loved reading the slush, and I loved proofing the stories that we published.”

Not bad for a stepchild program that was once taunted on campus with such sarcastic questions as, “How many Pulitzers have your little crew picked up so far?”

The answer, fifty years later—only one, but we’re just getting started . . .

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem ALMA REDEMPTORIS MATER

Marketed by Purdue Pharma as a strong, but non-addictive relief for chronic pain, OxyContin was received as a miracle drug and widely prescribed throughout the Appalachian region.
                                                                                                    —Communities Digital News, March 11, 2014

 

Pray for this heavy, lightning-scraped body.
Pray for the halved mountains and sludge fills,

the ridges of fingernails, the ache of the knees.
Pray for the whites of the wrist, the salt-spilled

milk of the breasts, for our swollen hazel eyes
and each of their stolen colors. Pray for the muddled mines

and jagged gas lines, the sky’s hyperventilating blue,
the white-knuckled river waiting for a sign. Pray to

the flicked cigarette, the heap of pine needles, that there
will be no flared uprising in the night, that our blackened

lungs will burn out, vanish like monarch wings midair,
leave us as if we had never been here, cleaved, pinned

against the light. Let us raise our drought-choked throats.
Let us step to the edge and hope the sky can hold us.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story THE DYBBUK

The first are those souls of the wicked who, after their death, do not merit to enter Gehinnom. They enter living people’s bodies due to our numerous transgressions, speaking and telling all that happens to them there, as is known, may the Merciful save us.
                                                                                                                                                 —Sha’ar HaGilgulim

Dina’s eating breakfast the Monday after Trav’s death when she hears a buzzing noise. She worries another yellow jacket has made its way inside through the tears in the kitchen window screens, then she asks her dad, Ronnie, if she’s adopted. She’s told him Trav was just some boy she never spoke to, the same way she doesn’t speak to any of her classmates, pretty much ever.

“I saw you come out of your mother,” says Ronnie. “So no, you’re not adopted. Sorry.”

“Dad, that’s disgusting.” She fixes her scowl on him for a moment, then looks at the table, her own hands. She cracks her knuckles one by one and rubs her eyes, which are bruised from lack of sleep.

Ronnie hands her a plate of French toast made from stale Whole Foods challah, and she drenches the stuff in agave nectar. He reminds her he’s out late tonight to teach the elder yoga class at Beth Achim. But Ronnie’s not just a yoga instructor; he also runs the synagogue’s adult ed programs and the Sunday Hebrew school. He soothes the Hebrew school kids’ tantrums, tutors the occasional nervous convert, and runs a weekly kollel for twentysomethings. Dina likes to sit on the couch in his synagogue office and observe his effect on people, the way they lean in when he talks.

“I have a thing this morning,” she says, just as Ronnie adds oil to the pan in which he’s making their breakfast. It smokes and sizzles and drowns out her voice.

So Dina gnaws at her rubbery toast, her head still buzzing. Strange, but in that buzzing she could swear she hears Trav, the groaning noises he used to make when they fooled around in his Aerostar. She can’t see a yellow jacket anywhere. Maybe it’s trapped between a screen and a closed windowpane.

She knows she’s not adopted. Why did she ask that?

When they’re done with breakfast, she and Ronnie go to the living room for sun salutations. There is no buzzing here. Side by side, Dina and her father stand with feet planted on the carpet, backs arched and hands taut toward the ceiling, like the elastic limb of a bow. They fold forward and touch their feet. Work back one foot then another in order to stretch their legs. Return to the standing position.

Ronnie prepares for a second salutation, the next step in a routine they’ve carried out faithfully since he started working on his teaching license at East Side Hatha seven years ago. But Dina’s running late. “I have to leave. There’s a special assembly,” she says.

“Have a good day, sweetheart.” He frowns for a moment before easing back into his beatific sun-saluting face. As he lifts his arms to the ceiling again, Dina puts on her backpack and sandals, and ducks out the front door.

On her walk to school, she wonders again why she brought up the adoption thing. How weird of her.

The special assembly in Kathleen Williams Collegiate Academy’s gym is about Trav. Principal Anders leads the Pledge of Allegiance, then Counselor Lewis gets up and invites everybody to discuss it: how they miss their classmate, how disturbing it is when a young person chooses to end his life. Only when Counselor Lewis holds out the mic and asks, “Who wants to speak first?” all anybody can think to do is rock their fold-out chairs back and forth, or tighten, then loosen, the straps of the backpacks in their laps, or squeak their shoes on the wooden floor.

The gym windows are open. A dog yips in the distance, and the buzzing returns to Dina, as if the giant fluorescent bulbs overhead are preparing to burn out again. But didn’t the janitor replace one of the bulbs last Friday? Dina remembers him dragging his rickety ladder out of storage and marching it through the long halls of Kathleen Williams.

She finds herself standing. “It’s cool,” she says, loud enough to cut through the buzzing, though she doesn’t mean to talk in the first place. “He doesn’t miss any of you pussies either.”

The shoe-squeaking stops; a hundred curious teenage faces turn her way. Mortified, Dina claps a hand over her mouth and makes for the double doors that lead out into her school’s hallway, except Counselor Lewis is too fast. He hands the mic to Principal Anders, hops off the stage, and grabs Dina’s arm.

“I know you and Travis were close,” he says, which is his way of acknowledging that Dina dated the dead guy, the suicide. “You shouldn’t lash out.”

Dina opens her mouth to apologize. She wants to tell the truth, that she and Trav had stopped being close when she broke up with him two weeks ago, that a part of her is relieved he’s offed himself with his father’s Glock. Instead, she yells out in a voice deeper than her own: “White power!”

Counselor Lewis drags her into the office and tells her he’s worried about the white power thing because of what he calls “your heritage.” He says Trav was a troubled boy, which Dina understands is another euphemism, a way of referring to all those Confederate battle flag stickers on the bumper of Trav’s van. Then he says it would be a shame for Dina to hate herself, because everybody knows the proponents of white power aren’t too fond of what he calls “your people.” It’s uncomfortable how this man struggles to avoid the words Jew and Jewish, the way Ronnie can never call anybody black or Mexican. And speaking of Ronnie, he’s been contacted. He’s on his way.

Dina feels a headache coming on, hears the bell ring for the end of assembly. She says, “Don’t tell her what to think. You want to talk about her heritage, the camps weren’t even real.” Dina concentrates on her mouth, on not saying anything else terrible, but it happens anyway, pours out in a jumble, the words she intends and the ones she doesn’t: “Sorry, I don’t believe this stuff, and I don’t know why I’m saying it. FEMA’s building real concentration camps all over the country, and they’ve got my mom.”

“Dina, we both know that’s not what happened to your mom. Right?”

“Is my dad here yet?” she asks.

Counselor Lewis tells Dina she can’t come back to school until she finds a good therapist, because she’s clearly struggling with Trav’s death in ways her teachers are not equipped to handle.

This at least Dina agrees with. Every night after the breakup, Trav would call her cell phone and stay silent, just listen to her say, “Who’s there? Stop it Trav, this is creepy.” This past Wednesday, he walked up to her desk as everybody was sitting down for precalc and he grinned, sheepish, and she thought maybe things would be okay, maybe he’d decided to be her friend.

Then he put his hands on her desk, held himself up that way, so close she could taste his breath. “I want to die because of you, Dina. If I die, it’s your fault.” He said it quietly, so no one else could hear. Then the bell rang one last time, and the teacher urged Trav to find a seat. He turned on his heels and went to a desk in the opposite corner.

So now she wonders if it really is her fault. Not just that her ex-boyfriend shot himself, but the other thing. That he’s in her somehow, speaking through her, making her mouth off. Dina should be scared of ghosts, scared of possession, but instead she’s overwhelmed with guilt. If some piece of Trav’s soul is lodged in her, if his spirit is that stuck on her, then what did she do wrong? How did she hook him?

If she were anyone else, she’d have friends to tell her she’s not responsible for a boy’s decisions. But Dina’s a pariah. In third grade the other students would sit next to her at lunch and draw swastikas on the table—Ronnie said it wasn’t their fault, they probably picked it up from their parents. In fourth and fifth grades she won the class spelling bees, and both times everybody booed. In middle school, as if being one of the handful of Jews were not enough, she was the first to grow breasts. Boys and girls took to cornering her in hallways, snapping her bra straps so hard they left red welts on both shoulders. If Ronnie asked, Dina would blame the welts on bug bites, claim some mysterious insect got her when she wasn’t paying attention, and then Ronnie would go buy her Benadryl cream.

When her class moved up to Kathleen Williams, the bullying tapered off. Now nobody bothers her, but nobody talks to her either, unless it’s for a group project or they’re playing in Strategic Games Club, which is where she met Trav. He showed up in a mist of Axe body spray, sat at her table, and beat her at chess. He and his dad had just moved to town from Abilene.

“My mom ran out on us,” he said, “so it’s just me and him.”

“Me too,” Dina said. “I live with my dad. My mom died.” She turned up the corners of her mouth in a strained smile, so he knew she was okay with her dead parent. That she was fine.

But Trav seemed not to see her smile. “Sorry. Shit,” he said. “Now I feel stupid.” He hadn’t been around long enough, Dina guessed, to know who she was, to know she wasn’t worth his feeling sorry or stupid or anything at all.

“It’s really okay,” she told him. “I was a baby. My dad talks about her like she just stepped out.” She smiled again, and this time he nodded.

They played four games that day, and Trav won them all. He was gracious about it too, apologizing after each victory. He asked Dina about her life, and she found herself talking about how she was going to UT Austin in the fall, having been turned down cold by Harvard, early decision, her long shot.

“That’s so far away,” Trav said. “Would you’ve really gone? My dad says I can hit up Cedar Valley in a couple years, but first I have to apprentice him. He’s a plumber.”

Dina wasn’t sure why Trav, who looked like he might already be eighteen, would need his father’s permission to go to community college, but she made some listening noises, and he kept talking. The other Strategic Games people went home, and the janitor came by because it was time to shut down the building. Dina picked up her backpack and told Trav she’d see him tomorrow.

“Don’t walk home in the dark,” he said. “I can give you a ride. My mom left her van. It’s mine now.” So Dina got into his Aerostar and had him leave her on the corner. She didn’t want Ronnie to see the stickers on his rear bumper, the battle flags.

When he dropped her off, Trav looked into her eyes and said, “Dina, you’re a good listener. Can I tell you something?”

“Well, sure.” She chewed the inside of her cheek.

“We think my mom was taken. Because the feds don’t like some stuff my dad believes. She left a note and all, but we think it’s fake.” He was blinking rapidly now, like maybe he wanted to cry but he wasn’t going to let himself.

Dina was skeptical. But she wanted Trav to feel listened to, the way he’d been making her feel listened to all afternoon. She did her best to look attentive while he talked about all the places his mother could be—labor camps, secret prisons, a mental hospital where she’d be force-fed LSD every morning—then he stopped short, kissed Dina’s cheek, and drove off.

Within the week he’d kissed her on the mouth. He’d asked permission to put a hand under her shirt, and she’d been charmed because nobody ever asked before, and then he’d invited her to be his girlfriend and she’d said yes. He told her things that couldn’t be true, like the president was a secret Kenyan or the Israelis blew up the World Trade Center. And Dina’s no idiot. She knew the very first time Trav went off on the Israelis he meant Jews, meant her, but then he brushed her cheek with the tips of his fingers and said maybe she wasn’t even Jewish. Maybe her dad stole her from a Christian family. Then he smirked like he wasn’t serious and she felt the urge to bite his neck, to eat that Axe spray off his skin, and the whole conversation slid off the rails as they fumblingly removed each other’s pants in the back seat of the Aerostar.

It was the first time she’d ever seen a boy’s private parts. She slid Trav’s intact foreskin up and down with her fingers, sucked experimentally, and came home to Ronnie with a lie about losing track of time during a game of Risk. She knew she was making a catastrophically bad call, but she liked Trav’s company, the stream of conversation directed at her and nobody else.

Ronnie’s at Kathleen Williams in fifteen minutes. In the car they talk about Trav. “Principal Anders says you’re upset about the death,” Ronnie says. “You told me you didn’t know that boy.”

“I didn’t want you to worry.”

They stop at a red light. “Was he a friend, or . . . ?” Ronnie arches an eyebrow, but Dina won’t respond. “I am, in fact, worried about you. You don’t really think FEMA’s got concentration camps?”

“No, I keep blurting stuff out.”

“You sure scared your principal. Just know I love you no matter what.” He takes one hand off the wheel and squeezes Dina’s shoulder.

“You ever miss someone who was terrible?” she asks.

He says something back that sounds like “zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz,” only that can’t be right because his lips are moving. That’s when she loses control again.

“Trav wasn’t terrible, I was terrible,” Dina says. “No I wasn’t. Yes I was. I shouldn’t have led him on.”

Ronnie eyes her as he drives. She hopes to show him she’s fine, so she says, “Not really, I know I wasn’t leading anybody on,” but then she adds, “Wrong, I’m a huge bitch, Dad. The hugest.”

“Oh, honey.” By now Ronnie’s turning into the synagogue parking lot. “I can tell you feel conflicted, but it’s got nothing to do with you. I can promise that much.” He squeezes her shoulder again. “There’s no knowing how some boys get so unhappy.”

A week after they started dating, Trav drove the Aerostar up 71, pulled onto a dirt road, and stopped in a field by a barbed-wire fence short enough to step over. He swore his dad knew the guy who owned the place, and then he opened up his trunk, where he kept two guns in a plastic bin.

Dina froze, and Trav explained these were Ruger Mark IIs. His dad took him out for target practice every weekend so they’d be prepared if the UN sent in troops to conquer Texas. There was a place along the back end of the barbed-wire fence where his dad’s friend had strung up a straight line of targets made to look like the president, and now Trav wanted to show Dina how to shoot those targets in the center of mass, the chest.

“There are rapists crawling across the border every day,” he said. “I just want my girl to know how to protect herself.” He raised his arm to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. Dina could see the edge of his farmer’s tan poking out from inside the sleeve of his T-shirt, the stringy muscles of his arms drawn taut.

It took her a minute to unfreeze because she felt so horrible for the president, but Dina followed Trav out into the field and shot at a target, so far off the mark she couldn’t tell where the bullet went. Trav said to just forget about it, and then he came up behind her in a bear hug and moved her body around so her form was better. “Exhale,” he said. “Pull.” This time she got the president in the hip.

Trav said she was a natural. They started going to the field each day instead of Strategic Games Club, kept it up the rest of the time they were dating, except the one Friday after the dog. On the way home from target practice, she’d rub baby wipes on her hands to get rid of the ammonia smell of spent gunpowder. Ronnie would ask about her day, and she’d talk about a Spanish test, how fue sounded nothing like the past tense of es, or she’d tell him she’d run a nine-minute mile in gym, and the whole time, in her mind’s eye, she’d replay the impact of bullet on paper, the meditation of aim, the satisfaction of her accurate shot.

The day she and Trav broke up Dina figured target practice was over for good, so she walked home from Kathleen Williams alone, went into Ronnie’s study, and used his new widescreen computer to download a bootleg copy of Call of Duty. The bright explosion of the Russian broadband jammer over Wall Street filled the whole display, Ronnie’s fancy speakers playing back the intricate death cries of Russian infantrymen. She’d finished the first three missions when Ronnie poked his head in and said, “Isn’t that violent?”

Dina paused the game. “Yeah, but it’s a skill. It’s soothing. I have to concentrate to get it right.”

Ronnie sniffed. “Well,” he said. But he didn’t make her stop.

The day she gets sent home from Kathleen Williams, Ronnie takes Dina to his office at Beth Achim and pulls out his laptop. “You can use the big computer.” He points to the boxy Mac that sits on his desk. “Are you really into those shooting games? You can play one if you want. Just keep the volume down.” The rabbi, a too-thin, too-serious man who Ronnie likes to joke is barely older than Dina, works in his own office down the hall. The rabbi wouldn’t appreciate Call of Duty or anything like it.

So Dina promises to be quiet, and Ronnie lets her borrow his credit card to buy the latest Tomb Raider. Then he gets on the laptop to design fliers for the Purim picnic. It’s one of those rare moments when Dina’s sincerely frustrated about her family situation, being raised by a chronically relaxed man. He shouldn’t be pawning her off on a computer game, getting back to his own work. He should notice her crisis.

She goes to say something along the lines of “It’s possible I’m being controlled by my dead ex-boyfriend,” but then a painful force slams her teeth together, her jaw sprung like a mousetrap. An invisible leash pulls her face to the Mac’s screen, her fingers to the keyboard and mouse, which she uses to fire up the game. Lara Croft becomes curious about Kitezh and sets out for Syria. An hour after that, she’s in Siberia, stranded by an avalanche.

Dina as Lara is shooting her way toward an abandoned Soviet mine when Ronnie taps her on the shoulder. “How’s it going?”

At that exact moment the building’s ancient central air kicks into gear. The vents make a sound like someone playing kazoo one room over. Is it just Dina, or is the room vibrating? “This is some penny-pinching Rothschild shit,” says a voice that Dina can’t, at first, identify as her own. “Cheap fucking building. It has to be some sort of disguise, like you people keep gold bricks in the basement, right? Or did you Texas kikes do something to piss off the Elders?”

“Sweetheart, you’re scaring me,” says Ronnie. His expression is level as ever, but the skin of his cheeks is pale and a quiver has snuck into his bottom lip. He’s finally noticed something wrong. “Why are you talking like this? What’s happened to you?”

Dina can hear the voice that is and isn’t hers, is and isn’t Trav’s. “I loved your daughter like you would not believe. She didn’t judge. I loved to kiss her and I loved her tits and everything. Did you make her break things off, you old shit? You tell her she has to marry one of your Christ-Killer buddies to propagate the race? The kids would only be half-breeds. I know she’s not really yours. You should have let her go, half-dick. I’m here to haunt you, you kosher fuck.”

The worst day, the dog day, they went out shooting and Trav said they should get the president in the dick, or about where his dick would be, low on the middle of the torso. Dina thought he was just being an idiot, just being Trav, but at the same time she was tired of always aiming dead center. Shooting the president in his gonads was a way to mix things up. She shot, and a hole appeared in the crotch of the president’s black suit.

“Let me try to get his foot.” She shot again, low to the ground, and missed. Another hole, this one at the bottom edge of the target paper where it was blank and white, equidistant from each of the president’s dress shoes. That’s when she heard a shriek on the other side of the fence. She dropped the Ruger and ran toward the noise. It was a chocolate Lab, chained tight behind the targets to the other side of the barbed-wire fence, and the poor thing was foaming around the corners of its mouth, each rib jutting from a too-narrow chest, but with a swollen belly. At first Dina thought it must be pregnant, a girl dog, but then she saw where its hot pink dog penis was sticking out.

The Lab looked Dina in the eye and stopped shrieking. There was thick blood oozing out from its back, but more distressingly, there were masses of earlier cuts and scrapes all along its legs and up its sides. Flies buzzed around the open wounds.

“Trav,” Dina said.

“Yeah.” He was already standing next to her. She hadn’t noticed.

“Trav, this is just beyond . . . We should call someone.” She took her phone out, but Trav grabbed it and put it in his own pocket.

“I’m sorry, Dina, but we’re not really allowed to be here, not like I told you. My dad’s friend would be pissed,” Trav said.

“You mean we’ve been trespassing all along?” She recognized that her voice sounded whiny, uncool, even babyish. She thought, for the first time, about all the reasons someone might own a field in the middle of nowhere. “Is that—does this dog belong to your dad’s friend? Did you know it was here?”

“I didn’t know, but . . . ” Trav stared at the ground, at the unmown grass that swished around their feet. “I can’t say I’m surprised. You just head back.”

Dina still can’t say why she turned and walked toward the road, but she did. A few seconds later she heard a gunshot. She knows even now that was the right thing for Trav to do, a mercy killing, not unlike what a veterinarian would do in the same situation. She knows her single shot meant the dog had to die, and it was her fault for aiming at the president’s foot, Trav’s fault for taking her out there, her fault for enjoying herself. Both their faults. But she mostly blames him.

Trav caught up to her back at the car. “I apologize,” he said. “This is complicated. My dad’s friend—he doesn’t spend a lot of time here, but he wouldn’t like it if he knew I was coming without my dad. And I’m not allowed to talk about it. Not with you, not with anybody.” He handed her phone over.

“Then why bring me out here, Trav?”

“I apologized, Dina. It’s all I can do.” He opened the door for her to jump in the Aerostar, then he drove her to the corner near her house. Neither of them spoke for the whole drive. She walked inside and told Ronnie she was sick and skipped dinner.

The next day at Kathleen Williams, Trav smiled at her during assembly, and they sat together at lunch, and he picked her up after school in his Aerostar like she’d only imagined the last twenty-four hours. Only she knew she hadn’t, because they didn’t go back to the field. He bought her enchiladas at Torchy’s, and it turned out he had a pack of cold Dr Peppers and a checkered blanket in the trunk. They picnicked at the Arboretum, watched a Little League football team practice tackles on the grass.

And then it was the weekend. Not just any weekend, but her mother’s yahrzeit, which she hadn’t told Trav about, because what could he do? He couldn’t roll the Aerostar, flags and all, into Beth Achim’s parking lot. He couldn’t make conversation with Ronnie’s friends: people like Rich and Cindy Kirbaum, a dentist and divorce lawyer respectively. Or grouchy Mr. Kaplan’s granddaughter Julie, who was a medievalist, a postdoc at UT. Sometimes Julie would carpool with her professor friend, who studied illuminated manuscripts. Rather than kiss the torah, the professor would put down his siddur and bring his face close, scanning the polished handles, the velveteen mantle for some clue.

Dina struggled at times to talk to these eccentric grownups, could barely answer their yes and no questions, and Trav? Trav would be lost. So she did him the favor, when they were together, of pretending Beth Achim didn’t exist.

That Saturday she rose with Ronnie for the Mourner’s Kaddish, and everybody looked at them—Ronnie’s friends and the stern young rabbi and the hyper children and their parents and the old folks who made up the bulk of Saturday worshippers, the ones who came into the office after yoga to pinch Dina’s cheeks—and all of them knew Ronnie, and therefore knew her, and swathed them both in pity.

She knew when she went back to the field on Monday, the dog would be gone. Trav would handle it. What she’s most ashamed of is how she played along, let him pretend things were normal.

Trav taught Dina to like herself—only then she understood how liking herself meant she should stop dating him. He might not be all bad, but something bad was in his life, leaking into hers. So after three months of skipping Strategic Games Club to cruise around in the Aerostar, of letting Trav lick her breasts in secluded parking lots, of lying to Ronnie, she managed a separation. When he sat down next to her at lunch, she handed him a typed note, got up, and went to the bathroom to splash cold water on her face.

She didn’t know how to bring up the dog, so Dina settled on college as her excuse for hurting Trav’s feelings. College, which was just around the corner. Any day now, she wrote, she’d be into biochem or polisci or computers, pre-med or pre-law. She’d live in the dorms at UT, only a short drive away but at the same time another universe, a cocoon of young adulthood, a place where he couldn’t follow and would never be at home.

So I know this is the best thing for both of us, she wrote. Please don’t get the wrong impression. I’m really glad I met you, Trav. I really want you to be happy and have a good life. I really want us to stay in touch, if that’s okay.

After her outburst in Ronnie’s office, Dina faints. When she comes to, she’s supine on the couch with one of Ronnie’s thick Kosher Sutra books tucked under her head. Ronnie crouches over her, holding a mug of water. Dina gulps the whole thing down, spilling some on her face.

“Sorry,” she says, wiping her mouth with the back of her sleeve. “I feel strange today.” She sits up.

Ronnie opens his mouth, inhales, closes his mouth. Opens again and starts to say something. Gives up. Opens one last time and closes. Dina knows they’re in a serious situation here, but can’t help thinking her father looks like a fish, gulping.

“Let’s go to the studio,” Ronnie says. “My class won’t start for hours.” What he calls his yoga studio is just a converted attic. It used to be accessible only via trapdoor, but when he started training at East Side Hatha, when he started talking about yoga classes on the synagogue property, Beth Achim’s board agreed to install stairs.

He reaches out a hand and pulls Dina so she’s standing, so she’s hugging him. Her father smells like peppermint Dr. Bronner’s. “Thanks, Dad,” she says, then she hears a noise like gears grinding. “I hate you.”

He sucks in his breath with a hiss but does not stop hugging her. “I know this isn’t you,” Ronnie tells her, which Dina appreciates. She knows this isn’t her either. He gives her one last squeeze and takes his arms away. “So, upstairs.”

They march past the rabbi’s office, and as luck would have it, the rabbi does not poke his head out into the hall. They go upstairs, and on the way up Dina keeps talking, or rather, Trav does. “Where is your Jew gold?” he asks. “Where are your horns? Dad, I’m so sorry. Don’t you hear that whining? It’s like someone brought a Chihuahua in here.”

Ronnie’s face is stony, like he’s girding himself for battle, and he says nothing. They get to the top of the steps and enter the empty attic room with its sloped walls. He motions her over to the mats. They unroll two, facing each other, and he tells her to lie down with limbs loose. Eyes shut. The sound is so loud now, like a running chainsaw inches from her nose.

“The FEMA camps,” Dina says as she gets into position, “are totally real. I think my mom got sent there.”

“Feel your spine straightening out against the floor,” Ronnie says, and then he sniffs like he’s crying, only his eyes are still and unblinking, and a person can’t cry that way. “Feel it stretch and release tension, savasana. Breathe deeply. Feel your energy rise and fall with that breath.”

Dina breathes deeply. The windows of this studio are open, and car brakes squeal in the street below. Her energy rises and falls. The brakes squeal and squeal. She says, “Sitting congressmen have spoken about the camps. Glenn Beck on his show. Those places are where they take the dissidents and the true Patriots. And the true Patriots’ mothers.”

Ronnie talks over Trav. “Raise your right knee and bring it to your chest,” he says. She stays there for several moments, releases, does the same with her left knee. “Feel your legs relaxing. Feel how they’re longer now.” The cars stop squealing their brakes and start honking. Someone pounds on a horn for ten seconds, twenty.

“It’s for the New World Order,” Dina continues. “They have to crush the Patriots to keep the American population compliant when the UN reveals itself as the one-world government.” In her head, in the part of her brain that’s still her own, Dina enjoys the poses. They stretch out the achy place where her back meets her hips. Only she can’t relax too much, because a fire alarm is going off somewhere, or is that a chorus of baying wolves? “When they’ve cleared out all the dissenters it’ll be time for population control. Random executions, only not really random. They want to destroy the white race. They’ll start by killing Aryan babies.”

Ronnie’s jaw is clenched tighter than Dina thought possible, but to hear him, you’d think he was unfazed. “Sit up on the center of your mat with your legs straight in front of you. Support yourself by placing your hands behind your back on each side. Now raise your hips and lean your head backwards. Try to form a straight line with your body.”

Dina does what he says, and the blood rushes to her brain, blotting out the noises, blotting out Trav. A whelming. “This is working?” she says. “It’s working, I think, Dad.” She stays in the pose for a long time, for minutes, until she’s shaking.

“Back to asana,” Ronnie says.

There’s a pause while Dina moves to a sitting position. She’s trying to hold on to that whelming feeling, the head rush. She’s trying to make Trav pliable, make him shut up.

Ronnie stands. He does the fish thing again with his mouth: open and shut, open and shut. He asks, “Let’s say, in theory, the person I’m speaking to right now is Travis. What does Travis want?”

And the piece of Trav that cleaves to Dina says something almost reasonable: “I’d be happy with an apology.”

“Trav, I’m truly sorry,” Dina says. “I liked you, I did, but I was so lonely, maybe I would have liked anyone.”

It must not be what he wanted to hear, because he reaches out from inside her, curls her fingers into a ball against her will. Next thing Dina knows she’s punched herself in the eye. She sees blotches like she’s just had her picture taken, like she’s been staring into the sun, and her lips form the words: “I don’t accept her apology.” The blotches take over her field of vision, and the head rush comes back full force.

“Take it easy, Travis,” Ronnie says.

Dina gets up. She’s aware of dust motes floating in the studio, the humming fluorescent lights above her head, the creaking noises a building makes as it settles, and she’s still saying it, “I’m sorry,” over and over like a chant. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

But it’s not helping. There is an anvil on her forehead, a hammer pounding away at her hairline. Her legs are on fire, and she’s kicking her yoga mat to the side, arms extended, fingers reaching out, twitching, for Ronnie. He doesn’t move, even when she wraps her hands around his neck and tightens her grip.

“I’m going to kill this hippie cliptip,” she says. “Trav, don’t.”

Ronnie doesn’t try to escape. Dina’s thumbs are bearing down on the space just above his Adam’s apple. “Stop me please,” she says.

“Dina, you have to stop. You,” Ronnie sputters. He’s turning red, but his arms hang by his sides even as Trav, as Dina, tries to throttle him. “If Travis is in your head, kick him out.”

Dina turns inward, examines the topography of her brain. There is blackness and a keening that might be her own voice. She’s still in the studio, still assaulting her father, but she’s also chained tight to a barbed-wire fence. She’s trapped in a body that won’t do what she tells it. Ronnie’s wheezing under her thumbs.

“I can’t,” she says, so her father says, “Forgive me,” and that’s when he slaps Dina across her cheek, not as hard as he can but hard enough.

Her head snaps to the side and bounces back in a jerky, lightning-fast motion, and she relinquishes Ronnie. She feels the painful rip of two souls separating, for real this time, as Trav flees. Then she crumples onto the floor. She hears cars honking as her consciousness contracts, the central air whirring and her classmates reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. She hears the cries of Patriots in FEMA camps, the savage howls of UN Peacekeeping troops as they land on the beaches of Galveston in the dead of night. Every dog on the planet whining for release. Shots fired, the low chant of a Mourner’s Kaddish, and on top of it all the known universe roaring apart, flipping inside out for her benefit.

ANOTHER MARIA MITCHELL READS THE FORECAST

Snow is water cooled crystal-quick,
mineral and posed;

sleet is snow cast off a lattice,
scaffoldless and smooth;

and hail is rain that fell up, gathered like belief
until its weight gave in to the fact of Earth.

Tonight the sky is clear but
late October in southern New England

I ought to be ready for anything. I take off
my ragged hat. I stand upon my roof alone,

hunched apostrophe waiting for the telescope
to fill with a light that falls only in darkness.

Up here no one to speculate how fast
I might descend.

From the shared and unpredictable night
I pull a new precipitation,

drop a comet on the world.

The Amon Liner Poetry Award IN THE HUMMINGBIRD EXHIBIT AT THE ARIZONA-SONORA DESERT MUSEUM

A green bird hovers above red rock
and disappears into a thicket of ocotillo.

Dashes of color flit around our heads,
dive between branches, rise
to the netted ceiling, scatter

like flecks of paint: blue topaz,
magenta, tangerine.

You grab my shoulder and point
to the cactus beside us—Remember
that one, Kate? Jumping cholla.

My ankle like a spiked bat
in your lap as you pulled the two-inch
spindles from my flesh.

How could I forget? It only takes one time
to learn what not to touch in the desert—

seat-belt buckles, the horned toad,
the blood that shot from its eyes
when I brought it in the house.

Your hand still gripping my shoulder,
the words I knew would come spill
softly from your mouth: diagnosis,

prognosis, atrophy, months. There are tears
in your blue eyes, and my whole body
feels far away, trapped under rock.

You take my sun-warmed hands in yours.
We watch the birds, the fierce choreography

of their rituals, until it’s time to pass
back through the curtain of long rubber slats,
the antechamber and two sets of doors

that keep them inside. As I help you
to your feet, a sliver of purple lands
on your shoulder, decides you’re its flower

for a moment, then shudders from sight—
a piece of dust blown from a band of light.

I read that if a hummingbird lingers
near, it brings with it the power to achieve
something impossible. But when

a sliver of sunlight kisses
the wrinkles of your neck, tickles
your skin with the tips of its wings,

what does that mean? The ruby-throated bird
lifts from the cotton of your shirt, floats

as close as it can get to the sky,
and I wonder where it would go,
what it would do in the world

if it could. Drink chuparosa in Oaxaca?
Steal thread from a red skirt drying on the line?

When the sun staggers behind the Catalinas,
the hummingbirds hold their breath.

THIS IS IT

In the spring of 1983, I was given the chance of a lifetime: to be guest editor of The Greensboro Review while the editor, Lee Zacharias, was on leave. I was nervous because while I had edited an alternative newspaper, The Greensboro Sun, for a number of years, I had never done much in the way of literary editing.

When my first issue arrived, I quickly tore into the printer’s shipping boxes and, to my dismay, found the blue cover stock way too dark to clearly see the names of the writers on the cover. But my “Damn!” was mild compared to reader response.

Disgusting!

How could you?

That story has no fitting place in a literary magazine.

The story in question, “Morrison’s Reaction” by Stephen Kirk, was about a dentist named Dr. Morrison, contemplating his approaching retirement after thirty years of dealing with rotten molars. In walks Vincent, the patient from hell, who represents three decades of odiferous decay by negligent patients who refused to practice simple hygiene. Vincent requests a marathon session of dental work but refuses all painkillers and becomes increasingly abusive to the dentist. The story concludes with Dr. Morrison’s violent revenge.

Perhaps because I grew up in South Florida with a family of fishermen and barroom comics for whom exaggeration was the norm, or perhaps because every dentist I had ever known was an extreme risk-taker prone to wild swings of mood, I found nothing out of the ordinary about the story. However, many disagreed and I was asked by the Chancellor’s office to forward a dozen copies of the new issue for the Board of Trustees.

My saving grace was John Updike, whose early stories I’d always greatly admired. He selected the story for inclusion in the 1984 edition of The Best American Short Stories, alongside such writers as Joyce Carol Oates, Madison Smartt Bell, and Andre Dubus.

In a way, this polarizing story was a precursor of my long thirty-year-plus tenure as editor of The Greensboro Review.

The tumult subsided and my stint as guest editor came to an end. Lee Zacharias returned and made me her editorial apprentice. Over the next four years, I learned her award-winning techniques of literary editing. When she officially handed the reins to me, I was bombarded with comments: “Up to your old tricks again?” “That lead story didn’t make one lick of sense.” “You gave your first Literary Prize to that story? I just don’t get it.”

This time it was “Kubuku Rides (This Is It)” by Larry Brown from Oxford, Mississippi, who admitted to me nobody got the story. After criticism from readers, the story was selected by Margaret Atwood for The Best American Short Stories 1989, where it appeared alongside work by Charles Baxter, Bharati Mukherjee, and Alice Munro.

With two Best Americans under my belt, I had a mandate to seek the most “out there,” exaggerated, risk-taking stories I could find and subject them to the highest standards of literary editing.

One example that comes to mind is Lou Gallo’s “Bodies Set in Motion,” which won the 1993 Literary Prize and which, as I let my editorial staff know in no uncertain terms, I detested, at first. The protagonist, Pepe, does absolutely nothing except think interesting thoughts about the universe and his place in it:

Give me an anarchic jokester, not a mere stand-up (or in Pepe’s case, a sit-down) comic . . . Aren’t entropy stories as common as all those other stale tales of kids trying to figure out their lives via algebra homework.
. . . How do these overdone topics catch on?

My rant—and my eventual change of heart—became  an essay about the Review’s editorial process in Warren Slesinger’s The Whole Story: Editors on Fiction. We require our student editors to read this piece so they can continue our tradition of selecting stories that are both unconventional and, as I describe, “bolted to a narrative drive that makes me reach for my seatbelt.”

This essay also explains my insistence on editorial deliberation—even for those stories we loved from the beginning. If I believe our team has engaged in intense editorial debate, I don’t mind admitting that a story won me over on the first read.

These are the editorial standards we’ve refined during my tenure, the methods I’ve attempted to instill in my editors.

So it is with great pleasure that I hand off the editorship to Terry Kennedy. Terry was my teaching assistant here in the MFA Creative Writing Program nearly twenty years ago. I liked his teaching style, which involved his climbing up and sitting on the desk to lecture. It reminded me of the Review’s founder, Robert Watson, who also used to climb up on the classroom table to lecture—and supposedly sometimes while standing on his head!

Now I have never seen Terry stand on his head inside or outside the classroom, but I have watched him work many other wonders, including his editorship of the online journal storySouth. Under his direction, the journal has garnered many awards, including Best American Poetry 2008, Best of the Web 2008, and e2ink-1: The Best of the Online Journals.

If Lee Zacharias took the Review from a local journal to a national one, Terry is sure to develop a global following in the digital age. By upholding the storySouth mission of finding and promoting the works of promising new writers, Terry shares the goal The Greensboro Review has held from its beginning: to showcase the best writing possible.

When I first published “Kubuku Rides (This Is It),” Larry Brown was a relative unknown serving as a fireman and working in a Mississippi general store. As I talked via telephone with him on story edits, I could hear the store’s screen door creak open and shut as he waited on customers. He said he’d had a difficult time placing the story, and went on to write in his “Contributors’ Notes” for Best American:

I kept it around the house for nearly a year after I’d finished it, scared to send it out because I thought nobody would like it, or understand it. When I finally did send it out, to a major magazine, I believe the phrase that accompanied the rejection slip was “boringly monotonous.” But fortunately, Jim Clark at The Greensboro Review didn’t see it that way. He did call me up and ask me what the title meant. Jim, this is what it means: a bolt of lightning through the head.

After his publication in the Review, Brown went on to publish several novels and short story collections, and he won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for Literature, as well as the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award.

In the decades since we published “Kubuku Rides,” the pages of the Review have been filled with some of the most outrageous barnstormers, chicken killers, schoolyard psychics, and circus performers. We publish stories about finding Eden and the fabled fruit of knowledge, about men transporting truckloads of penguins, about evil spirits entering living people and causing mental illness. More than thirty years after I first assumed editorship of The Greensboro Review, I believe stories like these exemplify both the kinds of writing we look for and the editorial eye that can spot the talent others might miss.

Terry, I am sure, will preserve the Review’s legacy of publishing the work of newcomers, the next Larry Browns of the world. He will find the unconventional, the “out there,” the bolts of lightning, the kinds of stories that make us shout, This is it!

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Story DON’T KNOW TOUGH

Still feel the burn on my neck. Told Coach it was a ringworm this morning when he pick me up, but it ain’t. It a cigarette, or at least what a lit cigarette do when it stuck in your neck. Just stared at Him when He did it. No way I was gonna let Him see me hurt, no way. Bit a hole through the side of my cheek, swallowed blood, and just stared at Him. Tasted blood all day.

Tasted it while I sat in Ms. Miller’s class, woke up in algebra tasting it. Drank milk from a cardboard box at lunch and still, I tasted it. But now it eighth period football. Coach already got the boys lined up on either side of the fifty, a crease in between, a small space for running and tackling, for pain.

This my favorite drill.

I just been standing back here, watching the other boys go at it. The sound of pads popping like sheet metal flapping in a storm.

“Who want next?” holler Coach.

I tongue the hole in my cheek, finger the cigarette burn on my neck, and step into the crease. Coach hand me the ball and smile. He know what kind of power I got. Senior year, too. They got that sophomore linebacker lined up cross from me. The one they hoping can make the starting team. He thick in the neck and thighs, but he don’t know.

Coach blow his whistle.

I can see Him smiling as He stuck the hot tip in my neck, smiling when He put Little Brother out in the pen. I grip the ball tight, duck my head, and run at sophomore linebacker, hoping to kill him.

When we hit, there real lightning, thunder explode ’cross the field. The back of sophomore linebacker head the first thing to hit the ground, arms out like Jesus on the cross. I step on his neck as I run past him.

The other boys cheer. Coach blow his whistle and already the linebacker getting up, like I ain’t nothing. He shaking his head, laughing, and standing again. Disrespecting me?

Disrespecting me?

This time I spear him with the top of my helmet. I dive and go head to head with him. There’s a cracking sound—not thunder, not lightning, and damn sure not sheet metal—this the sound of my heart breaking, the sound of violence pouring out.

Coach blow his whistle like somebody drowning. Sophomore linebacker scream because he don’t know what’s on him. This boy a poser. He don’t know tough. Don’t know nothing. Bet his momma woke him up this morning with goddamn milk and cookies. I try to bite his cheek off, but the facemask, the mouthpiece. I see only red, then black—a cigarette, a dog pen.

I’m sitting outside Principal office, still got my pads on, when Coach call me in.

“Billy,” he say, “What got into you?”

I look straight at him, nod.

“You realize the kind of shit you in?” say Principal.

Cuss for me, old man. Make me feel at home. I raise my chin to him.

“Boy, I swear,” say Principal.

“What got into you out there, Bill?” say Coach.

I feel my jaw flexing, feel like, if I could, I’d just grind my teeth down to the gum, spit blood and teeth in Principal face. Not Coach though. Coach alright.

“You hear us talking, boy?” say Principal.

I nod and raise one eyebrow, slow.

“Swear to God,” say Principal. “Tell you what I ought to do. What I ought to do is call the Sheriff. How about that? Let him charge you little ass with battery.”

I keep nodding, knowing bullshit when I hear it. We was on the field, old man. It called football.

“But he ain’t gonna do that,” say Coach.

“You lucky you got Coach,” say Principal. “Damn lucky.”

“Listen, Bill. I’m gonna sit you for the first game. Principal think that best. Okay?”

I hear Coach but don’t. My ears ringing. The burn on my neck turn to fire. “Call the cops then,” I say.

Principal laugh. Coach don’t. He know I’m serious.

“Come on, Bill, it’s just the first game,” say Coach. “Lutherville bad this year too. We’ll beat ‘em a hundred.”

“Senior year,” I say.

Coach breathe in deep through his nose. Look at Principal, who already turned back to his computer. “Billy, I know, but damn son,” say Coach, “Austin got a concussion. Was out cold for ten minutes.”

I nod, waiting for Principal to say something, at least turn from his computer and see what he just took from me. But he don’t. Whatever on that screen bigger than Billy Lowe. I’m out the door before he ever turn back, running with blood in my mouth. I swallow.

“Aw, hell nah,” say Momma.

Little Brother dangle from her arm like a monkey. I see tiny fingers, white at the knuckles, holding onto her shirt like he know how it feel to be dropped. And Coach wonder why I ain’t never fumbled, not once.

“First game senior year? And Coach sittin’ you? For what, Billy? What’d you do?”

“Nothin’.”

“Don’t lie.”

“Just a drill, at practice. Hit a boy hard, real hard. Just kept hittin’ him.”

“Football practice?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Nah, hell nah,” say Momma.

She already got the phone out, already dialing Coach when He walk in, smelling like beer sweat and gouch.

“Who she talking to?” He say to me.

I don’t say nothing back.

“Boy.”

“Coach.”

He make a jab for the phone in Momma hand. Momma jerk away. Little Brother hold strong.

“Calling Coach,” say Momma. “Done kicked Billy off the team.”

“He ain’t kicked me off. Just—”

“Nah,” He say, grabbing Momma by the shirt now, pawing for the phone, “no goddamn fuckin’ way.”

“Yes, hello,” say Momma, but it ain’t her voice. It the voice she use when she talk to the light company, DHS, teachers, and Coach. She talking fancy, slow. Don’t sound nothing like her. “This Billy’s Momma.”

The man who live in our trailer but ain’t my daddy start pacing. He got a bottle of Nyquil in his hand. Probably all He could find. He pull from it and wipe His mouth with His sleeve.

“Billy say he ain’t gonna play the first game?” say Momma. “That right?” She stop rocking Little Brother. Look at me. “Austin in the hospital?”

He start to laugh. “Shit yeah, that my boy.”

“Alright,” say Momma. “I understand, Coach.”

She still got the phone to her ear when He take it. “Billy the only fuckin’ chance you got. You hear me? Either let him play or we take his ass down the road to Chillerton. How ‘bout that?”

He pause. Chugs the Nyquil.   

“Yeah. That right, Coach. See you at the game tomorrow, and if Billy don’t play—Billy don’t play.” He jab the phone screen three time with his thumb then throw it at Momma. Momma lunge for it. Little Brother hold tight but the phone corner hit him in the back, a sad, hollow sound. Little Brother don’t cry, though. He know.

Coach let me go through everything but say he still ain’t gonna let me play. Gave me my jersey to wear at school. Even let me dress out. I ain’t said one word all day, not one. Didn’t say nothing to Him on my way to the bus. Didn’t have to. The Nyquil bottle empty. Everything empty when I left the house.

Now it game time and Coach still letting me run out through the tunnel and the paper the cheerleaders spent all day coloring. I stay in the back. The band blow they horns, but they ain’t blowing them for me. Used to blow them loud and sing the alma mater when Billy Lowe run cross the goal line. Not tonight though.

Sophomore linebacker here. In a wheelchair, God, a fuckin’ wheelchair. Ain’t nothing wrong with his legs. Wearing sunglasses too. I walk up behind that wheelchair three time, just stand there, while our team beat the hell out of Lutherville. Lutherville sorry as shit. Coach knew. And as I’m standing there behind that wheelchair, smelling sophomore linebacker hair—smell like girl hair—I hear Him start hollering from the stands.

“Ain’t got shit without Billy Lowe!”

I start gnawing at my cheek because He so stupid. It a stupid thing to yell when we beating Lutherville by three touchdown already.

“Bes’ play my Billy!”

And now Momma too. I can tell by her slur, she gone. I look back quick to the bleachers, time enough to see Little Brother dangling from her arm, Billy Lowe jersey on: number thirty-five.

“Fuck this shit.”

“Yeah. Fuuuuck this shit.”

Ain’t no telling them apart now.

Coach a true believer, though. He out near the twenty, fighting for a holding call. Don’t matter we up three touchdown. He know what it mean to fight. He still ain’t heard them yelling, either. Got his headset on, talking to them other coaches, talking about that holding call. Don’t see Principal wading through the stands like a linebacker on a backside blitz.

“Nah, hell nah. Don’t touch me.”

It Momma. She know Principal coming for her.

“Swear to God,” He say, like He the kind a man do something ‘bout it. He ain’t. He all talk and shit and empty bottles. “Swear to God, you touch her, old man—”

Little Brother crying now. Get it out, boy. Get it out because you cain’t cry much after this. Got a year left for crying, maybe less.

“Sue this place for every fuckin’ penny,” shout Momma over Little Brother cries. “Have you ass on channel seven news, tomorrow.”

I ain’t looking. Not no more. Got my back to them, watching Coach fight for that holding call even though we up so big. He laying into the ref, calling the man by name.

“Steve, that boy had a fistful of my nose-tackle’s jersey. Damn near ripped it off.”

Sophomore linebacker stand from his wheelchair. He got the sunglasses pushed up in his shampoo hair. He ain’t hurt.

“Don’t touch her, don’t you touch her.”

Principal must really be getting at Momma.

“Boy, you listen,” yell Principal at Him. “You touch me and I’ll have the Sheriff up here faster than greased lightning. You hear me?”

Sophomore linebacker eyes go wide, but I ain’t got to turn to know He won’t do shit. He’ll bark some. “Ought to whoop you ass, old man.” Something like that. But He won’t do nothing, ‘cause Principal a grown-ass man. Principal ain’t a kid like Little Brother. Principal ain’t living in the trailer hungry. And He know Principal would get the Sheriff up there, and the Sheriff got Tasers and clubs, and He don’t want no part of that. He ain’t tough.

“We going, alright? We gone,” I hear Him say.

“Don’t you touch me,” say Momma, and I ain’t looking but I can just see her jerking free of Principal. Little Brother hanging on, not even crying no more ‘cause at some point you ain’t got the tears.

Coach finally see. Lutherville got to punt so he turn to the sideline, hollering for the offense, and he see. I still got my back to them, but I know it ugly, embarrassing too. Feel them hot on my neck. I look to Coach to save me. Just put me in the game, send me to the locker room, take me by the facemask and beat the fuck out of me, anything, but don’t leave me standing here on this sideline.

“Come on, Billy.”

It Momma.

“Fuck this place. We take his ass down the road,” she scream. “We take Billy Lowe to run the ball at Chillerton.”

But I don’t want to run the ball at Chillerton.

I roll my neck. The burn crack open. Hot blood on my back. My mouth an open wound. I think about spitting on sophomore linebacker, covering his face with my crazy. But I’m watching him watch my people in the stands. Watching Momma. Watching Him. Little Brother holding on. I look one more time to Coach. But it third and six and he got to call a play. Sophomore linebacker still watching Momma holler for me. Watching Him too. Now it obvious He drunk and it embarrassing, fuckin’ embarrassing.

And then sophomore linebacker save me. He elbow another sophomore in the ribs, kinda point up in the stands, point right over me like I ain’t nothing. And now he laughing and pointing at my Momma, at Little Brother.

“Come on, son, fuck this place,” He yell. But He ain’t my daddy, and that does it.

This time there more blood. My blood. His blood. Little Brother blood. The blood that connect us. I feel Coach tugging my pads. I seen a cop try and pull a pit bull off a lab once. I’m headbuttin’ the boy now. Got his arms nailed down, headbuttin’ him when they get the Taser in me.

Principal won’t even touch me on account of the blood. Ambulance light go red and blue as they drag me away. I ain’t fighting, though. Let them do what they got to do. Coach over there, kneeling beside sophomore linebacker. Look like he whispering something in his ear. Bet he’s saying, “Billy didn’t mean it. Billy a good kid, heck of a running back too. Billy just got it tough. And his momma crazy and won’t stop fucking. And yesterday he got a cigarette stuck in his neck, and he took it like a man, and that was after his momma boyfriend put his little brother out in a dog pen, and he had to take that baby boy scraps for lunch and dinner, then breakfast the next day. Billy didn’t mean nothing by it, but he was embarrassed, stuck on that sideline, right there close to them, close enough to feel the heat. Can you imagine? You imagine that, sophomore linebacker?”

No. You cain’t.