For Which I Stand

On the sidewalk, I hesitate in the lazy drizzle, pedestrians bustling past me like I’m a ghost.  Then the revolving door, with its suction of warmth, tugs me in.  I step into the quiet, dry lobby, along with a trapped gust of the loud street.

              The sight is an unremarkable financial district bore: men in tailored suits, legs crossed just so, peer at the stock pages.  A gray haired Mexican janitor mopes around, checking the trash in stainless steel little cans.  Businesswomen stomp briskly across the marble floors, staccato ringing in their wake.

              No one even glances at me; the security guard is mired in a Maxim magazine.  Besides, I’ve dressed for the part: long, gray wool skirt, a pressed blouse, large leather shoulder bag.  I walk towards the stairwell, back past the elevator shafts.  I’m not in a hurry today.

              The stairwell is empty and smells like metal and recycled air.  I begin the climb at a steady pace, keeping in mind the long haul.  But I need to distract myself by more than watching my feet.  This has already been thought out, all the kinks and frills cut away.  I don’t intend to let my mind monkey around with my convictions, not today. 

              The landing of each floor hosts a double-paned window on alternating sides of the staircase so I have views of the south and west of Seattle: gray, cluttered vistas that have been the theater for my life.  However, catapulting back in time is not what I need; I need to stay steady.  But at the fifth floor I’ve climbed high enough to catch sight of the Federal Building, the orange brick phallus rising amid the mix-and-match courts, offices, and low-income apartments on its periphery.  And I can’t stop the memories from flooding anymore than I can stop my abused lungs from sucking air, already winded.

              The rain comes in wind-divided waves.  Hard, large drops, like handfuls of pebbles.  The compact crowd is prepared, in multi-colored slickers, a rainbow of bobbing hoods.  The cops are prepared too, donning black ponchos that conceal their bodies and their badges.  They’re monochrome and uniform and big, a swath of black stitched together with the dark brown of nightsticks, held sideways in front of them.  Traffic hisses by in the rain slowly, gawkers, supporters, and opponents of my mother’s cause behind streaky windshields.  There is a horn in solidarity, then the beginning of a heckle from a SUV, erased by a bus pulling away. 

              It is 1991.  I am eleven.  I look up, blinking into the sky.  Leaping and shaking signage breaks my view, phrases bleeding their ink in the rain, crying their messages: No More Blood For Oil; Bombs Don’t Recognize Children; Peace Is Patriotic; US—NOT World Police. 

              My mother seizes my slippery hand and pulls me close.  We hunker down behind a row of women with joined arms, crowing with rubbery old voices that they’ll go to jail for justice. 

              “Kayla, can you tell what’s going to happen here?” she asks from beneath her hood, the amber eyes I inherited turning like dials.  I nod, but I’m not sure what the answer is supposed to be. 

              “Ok, well I want you to back up to the sidewalk.  Do you know where the bus stop is?” 

              I nod again, this time sure. 

              “If they take me away, don’t worry.  Your father will be home by seven.” 

              I nod again, because I’m on a roll, but I find rain and tears are mixing in my eyes.  To conceal it, I flip my hood back and bare my face to the downpour—I don’t want her to see that I’m afraid because I know that courage, like responsibility, is very important to my mother.  Though she’s blurry, she is smiling, and her kiss comes down on me like I’m just beneath the surface of a swimming pool. She squeezes my hand and pushes me gently away. 

              From the sidewalk I hear the warning come, static and rain-distorted through bullhorns.  My mother and the ranks around her link arms and sink to their knees.  Maybe a third of the crowd splits off, drifting backward.  The police fan out, their nightsticks drumming against riot shields, a sinister, martial tempo. 

              By the time I see my mother carried to a paddy wagon by two of the robotic cops, still shouting Peace!  No War!  Peace, peace!  No War! I’m no longer crying.  I feel a stab of love instead, like I do when she comes back from a long trip, and I turn to find the bus home, to a dinner alone with pop. 

              I notice by the tenth floor that the rain has mostly choked off and the sky is brightening tentatively in the west—just a flat, nascent glow.  It’s keeping pace with my ascension: not terribly fast. 

The last time I had dinner with my folks was a week ago, a couple of hours before their red-eye flight to Amsterdam for some academic conference.  The meal was comfortable and bustling, a bit manic, like dinners always have been for us.  Everyone trying to cram every bit of news into a half hour that also has to suffice for consuming and digesting dinner. But that night I’d felt a bit dazed and didn’t say much—wished afterward I’d been more present. CNN unrolled its gory script of the day in the corner, and NPR competed with other statistics of war from the kitchen, the mournful Jewish intellectuals droning on, much like my father will do when he’s feeling expansive.  The atmosphere was just too full and I ignored the feeling in my gut. 

With hurried smiles, my parents said goodbye on the cold curb of Seatac airport.   Maybe mom caught something in my gaze, because she turned around once and met my eyes again, as if looking for something—looking for a promise that I’d be okay.  So I smiled, too, giving her the lie through my teeth.  She’d worried enough over the last six months.

              But I had a terribly cynical thought there as I watched them recede against the mélange of passengers.  I thought mom’s gonna read her one anti-war poem and dad’s going to explain the coming fall of the American empire between cocktails.  It is true that my folks have become a bit left wing bourgeois in these last few years, that their vitriol has quieted and refined, but we’re still on the same side.  Mom once told me that eventually almost all leftists slide toward the center, burn out and become apolitical, or swoon into cynicism and embrace the right.  That was years ago; I don’t know what she’d predicted for herself.  It’s clear to me that by leaving behind the bold actions of the past, she’s slid center, even if her views haven’t changed.  Being progressive in a ferociously right wing time demands action it seems to me.  But I still respect my parents, even if the academy has cooled the fire in their veins. 

              But now, marching up the dank, echoing staircase, I know it’s not okay with me on some deep level.  I find that I’m scowling at them on the inside. 

The sun has shot one tentative ray straight out from the northwest and it splinters on the glass and steel towers that mark the “progress” of my city.  In the swank top-story restaurant of one skyscraper, not even a year ago, Andre put the spell over me.  Had a bouquet already at the table when we arrived.  Had the champagne chilled and had made some sideways deal with the pastry chef to ensure a supply of crème brulé, even though it wasn’t on the week’s menu. 

“It makes me feel resentful to have to thank you for all this,” I tell him, letting my eyes dance.  He winks, reaches for the bottle. 

              “Oh, just let your thanks come natural, hon, you’ll figure something out.” 

              “What if I’d expected you to propose tonight, bozo?  You weren’t that prepared.”  I see the shadow of hurt blow through his features, but he shakes it off and grins. The candle on the table is guttering in a red bowl and it throws the hue up into his green eyes.  The effect is somewhat frightening, sexy in a dark way, and he seems to see the sudden desire in me. 

              “When I propose, it’ll surprise you right out of your fucking wits.”  And he leans forward, winks again and tosses the blonde bangs out of his eyes.  I swallow champagne and the evening eases into a sweet blur.

Later, in the bluing hour just before dawn, in the bed warm and damp from hours of lovemaking, he sighs once and something horrible in me awakens.  His dumb half-grin, his boyish evasiveness are enraging.  He sees this, but he’s just him, just Andre, and this is his way.  So he dodges my eyes as he tells me what he’s hoped to never have to: that he’s a full-fledged National Guard Reservist and probably due in the blood-soaked desert in a matter of weeks.  It seems so absurd, combined with the dreaminess of the previous evening (and the booze), that I almost laugh; Andre might not be the liberal arts graduate my parents would prefer, but he’s a ecologically conscious, northwest outdoor enthusiast—he was a goddam vegetarian for while, for Christ’s sake.  He’s going to war?  Andre picks at the comforter, looking anywhere but at me, as if he’s admitting to some practical joke gone awry, as if just smiling and living his wild and whimsy way will make it all come off ok.

              In my memory, this is where Andre goes gray—I can’t remember very many distinctive images after that.  It did turn out to be weeks before he left, but it’s as if a pencil whipped through my mind in that awful moment, erasing the outline of my lover.  I clung to him every spare moment we had; I tried to force him so deeply inside of me that he’d linger even when his body didn’t.  I wept through our lovemaking, hardest after orgasms.  God, he was so helpless and confused at that.  I punished him with my sorrow and poisoned the last of our time.

The sunrays have swung further south, and my last glance of the restaurant is from the thirteenth floor.  The tinted black glass conceals any similar scenes of love that might be unfolding at the very table he and I occupied all those months ago.  It’s on the next landing that I can suddenly see the dive bar, the twisted, red neon crown of it, pulsing on a corner.   

The phone call from Andre’s stepmother yanked down a partition inside of me.  She didn’t have to actually deliver the words, which I hope made it easier on her.  All she had to do was dial and breath, whisper Kayla, it’s, it’s….. 

The mail came one hour later.  His uncanny script looped my name, my address, a little heart sailing off the end of Kayla like a flourish. 

              I barely recall the bus ride, but I know it happened because the nineteen has a stop right in front of my house and another in front of that seedy watering hole.  I found a crinkled vinyl booth and managed to order vodka before I opened the letter. 

              Now, remembering, it’s as if I had ripped it up and given the shreds to the winds inside my head instead of the salty wind off an Oregon coast cliff.  As I climb upward step by step, these snatches of the gone words return to me. 

              I have to tell you, baby….worse than you said it would be… I wasn’t ready before to concede that this was a bad idea……you’ve always been quicker than me on that political stage……I won’t paint the worst of the pictures for you....the butcher shop that was hit, confusion between human and slabs of cow…..some AWOL fantasy, to tell you the truth…..never again….. I think I see you in a crowd…….losing my focus…….home for good.

              Between those lines I fall apart. I’m also under the hammer of an unknown number of vodkas.  There is a strange moment along the trajectory of a bender, when it is as if you awaken and look around yourself, like the long drunk has been a dream.  I see myself leaned over the counter like a cliché, talking at the bartender, a small man who is drying a glass and smiling uncomfortably at me.  I recognize the slur on the ends of my words, the blur in the edge of my sight, but it only prods me on in the sloppy determination to break this hurt out of my chest. 

              “It’s absofuckinglutely not just.  He didn’t know any better—he never fucking signed on for this war, he just wanted to help people. Goddamit….”

              The bartender is now splitting his glances between me and a figure a few stools down—outside of my present universe.  That is, until the figure coughs and says something short and sharp.  I notice him then.  But I’m still on my roll with the bartender.

              “I fought hard to stop this war—shit, my mother fought hard against the real beginning of this war, ten fucking years ago—and then it wins, the fucking bloody war wins and takes.  Takes, like the world does.  Takes your love, destroys love.” 

              “You should be ashamed of yourself, little girl.” 

The comment floats down the bar and I see it register on the face of the bartender, who blanches a bit and then smiles more severely.  I turn and try to focus—I’m short sighted and petite, but I’ve been told that my darker expressions can maim.  The man is fat and has a ball cap tilted way back on his fat head.  He doesn’t bother to face me, kills his mug of beer instead, rummages for his keys as if he’s getting ready to leave. 

              “What did you say to me?” I ask him, the murder racing into my veins as I make it real by voicing it.  “Would you repeat what you just said?”  I’m talking to this guy like I’m out looking for a fistfight. 

              “Damn shame your boyfriend got killed—and too bad he sounds like a bit of a coward, but you really spit on his grave coming down here and disrespecting all the brave people over there fighting for your freedom.” 

Now he deigns to turn his torso toward me, a bland and infuriatingly calm nothingness on his face. 

“Not to mention the Iraqis—you go whining about how your boyfriend’s life was ‘wasted’ to some of those Arabian mothers who don’t have to hide their kids from Saddam any longer.”  He stands now, tossing his keys up and down casually.  I’m so flabbergasted and my mind is lurching along at such alcohol saturation that I can’t yet speak. 

“So,” he concludes, “you should go home and sleep this off—then wake up and rethink your silly little hippie ideas.”  He gives me a mock smile with his small mouth and turns to go.  I feel the tangled strand of rebuttal implode in my head and the pathetic consolation of

“Fuck you—fuck you!  Who are you?  Huh?  Fuck you!” is puny indeed. I spit after him, too, but the saliva never detaches from my lip and swings back onto my blouse as I half-fall off my stool.  The man is out there in the night now, cloaked by the anonymity of the city.  That bartender must be an ally, however quiet, because he puts me in a cab, props my head out the window for the imminent vomiting, and sends me home with a whisper of his condolences. 

The numerals 4 0 swim into my vision as I pant to the landing.  I feel absurd at my poor physical condition, as if I ought to have trained physically for this instead of spending the last weeks in bars and bookstores, bus stops and beds.  I’ve always been a little hard on myself, truth be told, and I know that if there were ever a time to be kind to myself, it’s now.  So as I wipe the sweat out of my eyes, I turn to the window to allow myself to witness the skyline, broken with reminders of who I am and what I’ve done. 

I stand again and find that the endorphins have calmed me some.  I hold my palm up and it’s not shaking, at least not perceptibly.  The sun spills ribbons of crimson now, finally freed from the clouds, just in time for the last moments of day, and the foothills of the mountains awaken in the light.  For a moment I try to fight it, instinctively, because recalling will bring pain.  But then I let it go because pain I can handle today—pain can’t even hurt me anymore.  It is, in fact, probably necessary.  Suddenly I can breathe deeper and I even find a smile trying to curl my mouth as I let memory storm out of its cage. 

              In a corner of my Capitol Hill apartment, I’m lying in an easy chair, literally.  I’ve been sinking toward this unnatural position for the past two hours.  On the screen there is an incomprehensible scrambling of green, red, and black.  If it weren’t for the pinwheels of explosions hurling shards of light, and the CNN caption that tells me this is war, I could be watching an abstract art film—or some surgical procedure.  Excitedly, Wolf Blitzer is repeating as often as possible that this spectacle is called “Shock & Awe.” I feel neither, just very sick and very tired.  All the tatters of peacenik pride—marching downtown with mom, winning a debate contest in eight grade over the first gulf war, perfecting my critique of this current one, now being launched before my eyes—go the way of snowballs on a woodstove.  All the fight and years seem puny and wasted, even the champagne moments when I’d felt that wondrous and fleeting thing: righteous.  This shit on the screen now looks like the newest Sega II video game—it’s going to sell like crazy.  Then the door swings open and Andre bursts through, calling out my name with elongated, mournful vowels as he staggers toward me. 

              “Kaaaaaayyllaaaaaaaa!  Noooooooo! Not the neeeewwwssss! God, anything but the neeewws!” 

              He sneaks his hands into my armpits from behind and wiggles his fingers just enough to show me what he could do.  In a matter of thirty seconds I have gone from a deep malaise to a giggle.  Within the next ten minutes he has me up and dressed and out the door, to the mountains for an afternoon of fun, he says.

              The trail runs along the spine of a ridge just minutes east of Seattle above a waterfall absurdly called Denny Creek.  Our path rises and falling with innumerable saddles, knifing deeper and deeper into national forest.  It’s thin, so we can’t walk side by side.  Andre’s at my back, smacking my ass with the Frisbee and holding forth on whatever jumps into his mind. 

              “Yeah, so, we should totally think about buying this van.  If we can scrape up even just a few hundred I could get Jerry to detail it and I bet he’d even throw in some extra TLC, you know how he likes to make people smile, prince of a guy, yeah?”  Smack, the disc hits my ass.  I nod, expressively so that he can see it from behind.  “So, anyway, if we get her up and running, fill her with some canned goods and candles and the whole nine, we’ll always be ready to hit the road, flee the cities, subsist for a spell.  I like the idea of that, I do, and not because I share your doomsday predictions about this society”—Smack—“but because I just don’t know, I think I might have to just go wild and flee at some point—with you, of course.” 

              The charm of the hike has become monotonous and I have slipped back into melancholy—when we pulled in at the trailhead there was a Chevy parked and the driver, his crew cut barely grown out, was thrashing in a nightmare in his seat.  My eyes flew to a National Guard sticker on his window and the sight somehow half-poisoned me.  I know this road is not a happy one and that I could wind up very low by the end of the night, notwithstanding Andre’s valiant efforts to distract me.  I stop at a high point underneath an Evergreen, which is shedding its jigsaw bark and offers a large loop of shadow.  Tenuous Balsam Root, Indian Paintbrush, and one tiny hook of a Tiger Lily peek up at me out of the grass.  I look in Andre’s dancing eyes while I fish the water bottle out of his pack.  After a sip, I kiss him, tender but firm, and I feel the gooseflesh rise on his skin.  There is a still moment when I feel like anything might happen; there is a tension, a density rising as surely as the gooseflesh.  There is something to be said—or done—to respect it properly.  Andre just holds my eyes. 

              “Hey, you’re making me tingle,” he whispers.  Then, quarterback-quick, he lances the pressure of the moment by pushing the Frisbee into my chest and dashing ahead down the trail.  “I’m going long!”  he calls back over his shoulder. 

              We are at a particularly narrow segment of the ridge; the slopes that fall away on either side of the trail are rather severe.  The wind is gusting, too.  I shake my head at him.

              “Andre, there’s no way.  I’d have to be good at this, to say the least.  I don’t want to lose your Frisbee.” 

              But he’s waving at me to bring it on, let it fly.  “Don’t be such a girl!” 

He knows that will do it, and it does.  I hurl the red disc and it flies true about three feet before tilting left and veering off down the near-cliff, bouncing a hundred yards or more, vanishing at last in a thicket.  I spread my arms in I-told-you-so exasperation.  But Andre keeps his eyes on the long red-dirt and shale covered incline, as if calculating. Then he looks up and gives me the exact same look that he will give me again, just three months later, when he tells me he’s on his way to war.  It’s a sheepish but still mischievous kind of look.  Andre shrugs and leaps off the trail as if to do a cannonball into a swimming pool—indeed, when he touches down, his legs sink to the knee in rock and soil, toppling him head first into the long downward trip.  I wince with each clumsy somersault and cart wheel that gravity hurls him through, bouncing at times off half-buried boulders and baby Pines. 

              I literally have to wait several long seconds for the human avalanche dust to settle; I wave it out of the air in front of me.  Finally I can see the bottom of the canyon, but all that’s visible of Andre is one foot—the rest of his body concealed by the thicket.  And then he backs out of it, spindly branches lifting his tee shirt to reveal welts and scrapes along his side and back.  He turns back to me and stands up, blood running freely down one cheek.  With that huge grin of his breaking his handsome face, he hoists the Frisbee with both hands above his head, a red circle, like he’s captured the dying sun. 

              I’m at the 60th floor before my friends start flashing in my head.  I’ve spent the last week house-sitting for my parents, the very place that had been the theatre to the formative moments of my friendships.  In that house, I’d had sex for the first time (on the downstairs bathroom floor, the farthest possible point from my father); I’d weathered my first ecstasy trip, my first breakup, and my first tastes of political outrage, courtesy of my mother’s documentaries, newsletters, and wine-fueled spiels in the cozy living room.  But recently I just haven’t felt home there.  I spent the days doing odd jobs for dad, trying to straighten out the messes that I knew he never would get around to.  Then, evening would roll around and I’d take out my list of friends To Call: at least a half dozen that I hadn’t even seen since returning from my long, grieving road trip.  They’d all been so concerned when I packed my Subaru and disappeared.  I’d thought about them—Sally, Derek, Gita, Lillian, Mamie—a great deal while I haunted the northern California and Oregon coast.  But when I found my peace, made my decision, while sitting on a driftwood tree trunk in the dregs of a February sunset, they’d all vanished from my mind’s eye, as if they’d joined my blood, and flown into my heart to stay—silently. 

              So over the last week I never dialed any phone numbers, just listened, sometimes until the off-the-hook buzzing started. Just a fucking drink, I’d say to myself, trying to picture it: a martini at a dive bar with Gita, a bottle of Merlot on my roof with Mamie, like we used to do.  But like it used to be is a stupid dream shattered on the bright, booming lie of the war.  My friends don’t know how to talk about the war, to say nothing of Andre.  All the college activist fervor ran dry, apparently, not long after college did. 

And my parents have felt just as closed, just as impenetrable and insulated from this hurt that sometimes bends me fetal in my empty bed.  They try their best to make talk about the war—rote dining room choir-preaching—stand in for both action and any real discussion of the horrid irony that I’ve lost my love to that madness.  I think that they were uncomfortable with me dating someone as simple as Andre in the first place; to their scholarly senses, I should always be intellectually challenged—but also comfortably settled into a union of shared, left-of-center ideology.  The actual soldiers are abstract, unfortunate fodder.  For all their lives of anti-war rhetoric they had no idea how to react when the war actually reached out and slapped their daughter.   

But now I find that my friends and parents are all clear and crisp in my mind.  And now I find my pulse is lurching a little, and there’s the first hint of tears in my throat, and I try to smile at the faces as they float free of my dark heart, wheel through my head. 

              The last city view I get is at the 80th floor: the sun is starting to riot its finale.  The Space Needle stands like a bowlegged alien, the red beacon flashing slowly at its tip, a drop of blood blooming.  Swords of orange light are dancing and thrusting over the city, which is thickening with rush hour, metro buses like big purple and yellow caterpillars, orange taxi carapaces, the indistinct blur of the interstate.  Everyone going home.  Me too. 

              The door to the roof is just ahead now, and I stop, breathe, and say a silent prayer.  This is the part I worried most about, this is what could whisper my house of cards into disarray.  With caught breath in my chest and cold sweat on my brow, I try the handle.  It clicks open.  The wind is fierce, though, and I have to lean hard to slip outside.  I’m in the grasp of the sky now, and the wind doesn’t have a direction any longer, it’s just whipping madly about, ballooning my blouse and skirt, spinning my head in my own hair.  I lean into it and am grateful for the sound and the fury because it muffles my mind and I can’t hear the sabers of doubt rattling. 

              I can see the edge, though my eyes water.  This might only be the second tallest skyscraper in town, but from here it feels like the top of the world.  I’m above all the lesser buildings, staggered heights, the streets just canyons of the city. I slip my bag from my shoulder, kneel behind a big vent and pull out the musty old flag, the only gift that my grandfather ever gave me.  His WWII flag, his only tangible reminder that the travails of a distant blood-soaked land were his, also. 

              There is some warmth in it as I wrap it tightly around me. With safety pins, I fasten this uniform to me, pushing and hooking them through my clothing to the fabric of Old Glory.  Then, finally, as I’d watched myself do so many times in my mind’s eye, I pin the envelope securely to my chest.  It contains my last protest, my condemnation of empire, of slaughter for oil, contains the ostensible reason for my dramatic exit, which in the end might be something like placing a daisy in a soldier’s rifle—just as silly, nothing more.  But that’s ok by me.  I want to. 

              Now there can only be inertia, doubt, and fear, but I’ve mentally trained for it. I allow the gusts to shove me toward the edge.  My city yawns up at me.  The sidewalk below is empty.  I close my eyes and tilt forward. Then there is just the empty whistle and roar of brief air, the grid of the hard world imprinted on my retina like only a sketch. 

              I can see my parents, tomorrow, crowding each other on the front stairs.  They’re bickering about some perceived slight: mom thinks that a colleague tried to upstage her in some cocktail hour match of intellects.  Dad, foolishly, is taking up for the woman.  They all but spill through the door then split away from each other.  Mom drags herself to the kitchen table, slaps down the newspaper and sighs.  After a piss, dad marches to the bedroom and, exhausted, falls face first onto the mattress. My letter—the truth of my heartbreak, not political at all, just broken—flutters up off the pillows and into the dead air.  He unfolds it, brows knitting.

              In the kitchen, mom unfurls the paper with another sigh, kicks off her shoes under the table.  The article seizes her eye because suicide and protest always do.  As she reads, she’s pinning the paper to the table like it’s fighting back, her eyes are scanning faster, then going wild.  She makes a broken sound every few seconds, like words are climbing her chest but dying in her throat.  She knows for sure when she reaches the text of my manifesto, reprinted faithfully, thank God.

              My parents encounter each other in the skinny hallway between the kitchen and the bedroom.  The lighting is bad, the walls yellow from decades of living.  But they can see one another’s eyes well enough, both of them clutching crumpled paper to their chests, pallor flooding their worn faces, the slow wound of comprehension opening. 

And that is the part that hurts. 

But the pavement might as well have been cloud.  I like to believe I was smiling, that it wasn’t just the fierceness of the air pushing back my lips, baring my teeth at the end.

Eli Hastings earned his MFA and taught Creative Nonfiction and English courses at the UNC at Wilmington.  He currently lives in Barcelona with his wife, Lili. His work has appeared in: Rivendell, Third Coast, Cimarron Review, Pinyon, Whetstone, Alligator Juniper, Pedestal Magazine, the Seattle Review, Wandering Army, and the Tulane Review.  The essay he placed with Third Coast was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the essay at Alligator Juniper won their nonfiction contest. His story published in Whetstone, “Out of the Blue,” is in the pre-production stages as a short feature film by Westbound Films (www.westboundfilms.com).  He’s earned a place on a Fish Publishing contest short list and an honorable mention in a New Millennium Writings contest.  A book of essays, Falling Room, which was my graduate school thesis and won Best Nonfiction Thesis in 2004, is now out from Bison Books (University of Nebraska Press) in their prestigious American Lives Series.  A memoir, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah, a collection of stories, Splitting, and a novel, Invading the World, are all finished but under the knife.