RED CEDAR REVIEW

20th Anniversary 1963—1983

An Accidentally All- 
Women’s MSU Prize 
Winning (where are all 
the good male writers?) 
Issue

$2.50


RED CEDAR REVIEW

Vol. XV No. 2

© Copyright 1983 by Red Cedar Review


CONTENTS

Brenda Miller

Rappelling.......................................................................... 1

Essentials .......................................................................... 22

Why I Don’t Wear Rings ............................................... 61

Annette Weathers

I Think ............................................................................... 5

Cartoons ....................... 6

When I Was Younger I Was a Shyness..................... 7

Carol Morris

May Day............................................................................ 8

Maria Bruno-Holley

Primal Scream.................................................................. 10

Andrea Yockey

An Archaeological Dig in Central Ohio..................... 24

Leonora Smith

Catching Flounder: Self-Taught...................................... 26

When You Travel Alone................................................. 29

Gwendolyn Ashbaugh

Scant Rations.................................................................... 32

Editor’s Note.......................................................................... v

Contributors’ Notes.............................................................. 64

Editors’ Page ........................................................................ 65

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Editor’s Note

Upon perusal of the final manuscript of Vol. 15, No. 2 (the 
first issue of our 20th Anniversary year) I was surprised to 
discover that all the contributors were women. We did not 
plan an all women’s issue, believing that such selection, 
though politically laudable, might lower the artistic standards 
of the Red Cedar Review by constricting the number of 
possible contributors. Coming up with an all women’s issue 
“accidentally” leads one to question the state of the art, since 
RCR receives submissions on a national basis. Are there more 
good women writers than good men writers? Is it just our area 
that finds itself short of good male writers? In the six months 
in which manuscripts were reviewed for publication not one 
man sent poetry good enough to be included. We had already 
filled the space designated for fiction with women writers before 
a worthwhile story by a man appeared (see Paul 
Shuttleworth’s “The Quiver of One Moment” in the upcoming 
issue of RCR). Was it purely by chance that this issue came to 
be composed totally of female authors? If so, then it would 
also have to be the case that it was by chance that all three 
places in fiction and poetry were swept by women in the 1982 
RCR Creative Writing Contest. Those winners comprise the 
greater part of this issue and merely by reading their work 
one can tell that it was not by chance that they took the contest 
or fill this issue. Diane Wakoski writes, “women as 
writers are up to the same things men as writers are up to— 
that is, converting the imagination into something tangible 
and beautiful...” Perhaps it is true that, beyond politics and 
economics, men and women are artistically equal. But as for 
the East Lansing community, it would seem that, for the moment, 
(some might argue ‘always’) the greater concentration 
of artistic talent in the population resides in the feminine 
side.

Paul Murphy 
Editor RCR


RAPPELLING

The men in thick boots

and khakis bounce off the dark walls

with a smooth flow of rope 
in their gloved hands 
while I

my thighs and hips in a seat of ropes 
wait my turn

among the other novices

and I think of you, Bryan

for I would not feel the need to be here

if you had taken me to climb

the stadium walls as you promised

a petty thought

but then there is a kind of pettiness

in waiting to struggle down

20 feet of the inside of a building 
giving in to a

not too sly ROTC recruiting technique 
just so I can feel my hands on the ropes

This is what I wrote of you in my diary once: 
“Bryan—the man I never want a romance 
with, because he brings his problems and 
drinks beers with me, my first close 
male friend. It’s not hard to decide 
between a fling for six months and sixty 
years of friendship.”

The line moves slowly.

The instructors come and tug at 
my waist, the cross of the knots at my hips, 
checking the tightness of the ropes

In Wyoming, on a search for more money, 
you hold the pick in your hand, 
hitting fine cracks in the rocks, 
looking for the shining veins 
things remaining hidden until now

1


A year since you are gone 
and the memory of the nights by the river 
strong, winter nights 
with ice floes breaking by our dangling feet 
on the edge

you would talk of important things 
women and wild nights with your male friends 
and promise to take me climbing, you, 
in clothes that were never clean 
something exciting about 
dirty hands gesticulating 
against stars in a November sky 
two thousand miles away now, and 
I haven’t heard from you in three months

I choose gloves from piles on a table 
fawn colored ones too big 
but with a fine rough texture/

whatever it was I wanted

has come and gone 
here alone in my small hand sex 
I try to account for it

two years of reasons why we did not climb:

“The sky is strange. You must be able to lay back on a roof 
in clearness.”

“I want the river tonight.”

“It’s too late. Early tomorrow.” 
etc.

and you returning from nights with the men 
would come to me and talk 
this is not about a woman 
dying to be machisma

this is about a woman who wanted to climb walls 
to be alone with one man 
in a vast stadium 
a rite of friendship

2


an initiation that never took place 
over two years

I start to climb the ladder.

Three men talk to me at once

“Are you nervous/ 
that’s a switch/ 
call out loud Rappel on 5.” 
I pull on the rope with two hands 
testing its tautness

clutched in my two hands one drink, 
in front of my face an enormous 
dumb Bison head, six feet in diameter 
and remarkably out of place 
on the apartment wall. Bryan 
and four men talking loudly and 
laughing in the center of the party: 
“I can’t believe we got it—Administration 
Building’s tough. Tom covered security, 
but even then we had to haul it from 
the second floor. Bob was totally wasted— 
no help at all.”

I place my hand on the small of 
my back and feel center there.

I lean back, 
a conscious fall off the edge. 
and am suspended, 
my hard fist to my back 
like a pin to an insect, 
my feet lightly tapping wall

your hand lightly tapping the window 
leaning back against the dark wall by my bed 
feeling fear

then anger that you would 
break into my room,

I,

not a person to climb with, 
but that night a place to break into 

3


on the far wall,

a uniformed man with a brushcut 
descends Australian crawl style, head first, 
twenty feet at a foot tap, 
down the enormous silent rope, 
everyone below cheering.

my own feet touch ground 
hands still holding the rope 
hands that could twist hard through hair 
the thick twines 
long threaded kisses 
to the left 
a uniformed man waits 
to hand me a button 
on it a picture of a thick boot in a rope 
and the words “I did it” 
to my right

long lines of men and women 
inching toward the wall

I pull back my hands from the rope 
and let go

BRENDA MILLER

4


I think

if I ever see my Mother’s red Plymouth 
pull away from me in another dream 
I’ll cry

if my legs won’t

move

to catch the open door.

I think

if my step-father spanks me in

another dream

I’ll cry

because my shoes match the mud prints 
alongside his sapling oaks

pulled over.

I think

if I ever see my Mother cry

because he threw me onto the porch 
from the living room

maybe I’ll cringe

again because I still remember 
and because after all these years

I can still see her and feel my 
side hit the boards.

ANNETTE WEATHERS

5


cartoons

sometimes my friend will sit across a table from me 
in a delicatesson or lesser restaurant

just staring to the world beside me

one quarter inch from my ear.

she stares from the neck up she stares 
with eyes like the stones of wedding rings 
beside my ear—those stones graze my cheek 
nick my tongue and i realize i cannot speak 
when she looks so hurt so young. 
so i smile like an idiot, 
like a horse

trained to raise an upper lip for sugar 
and if i could teach her how to live lonely 
i would i would

i would bottle it.

and if i could make her face a poem

i would never write again.

o i would never

o no

not ever.

ANNETTE WEATHERS

6


when i was younger i was a shyness 
and i knew the feeling of smelling 
a popular body 
and watching a popular smile.

i knew the feel of being a 
daydreaming steaming 
streaming yellow girl 
behind a lawnmower.

my vibrating green metal Buddha 
monster in front of me 
laughing happy and spitting 
wet green staining rows 
like high school hallways

are white staining and white straining. 
then i never knew that people had 
as much to offer 
as horses because they 
didn’t carry me as high 
or as far or 
as fast for 
as long.

but since i still remember i’ll 
think now to be sorry 
for all daydreaming 
crickets that i caught unaware, 
even though i have not 
been apologized to and

my world is still a box

in a box.

ANNETTE WEATHERS

7


MAY DAY

Friends thought the best thing we did together 
in the marriage, was his drawing and my writing. 
Each in our separate rooms.

I’m sitting at the typewriter,

Vivaldi’s on the radio,

and a rhinoceros is on the left side of my brain.

It’s late afternoon and the light is shrinking.

Air bubbles float from my mouth;

I brush an ant from between the keys.

Through the doorway

I can see him,

a steaming cup of coffee at his side,

a newly lit cigarette.

He wrestles the paper to the floor, 
smoothes it out with his hands, 
then begins the endless inking of the hairpin lines.

His penpoint flies in and out of the rose and moss coloured 
pots, 
like a hummingbird.

As he scoots around the paper,

his boots are crushing a mandala shape into the rug.

For hours his right hand has moved steadily, 
precisely, surgically,

manufacturing a dollhouse the size of a castle.

The rhinoceros blinks its black pupil-less eye.

It moves its pale and razored little tongue.

Waking as the rectangle of his switched-on lamplight enters 
my room.

It rages, bellows, lumbers from room to room 
out to the yard

8


where little chartreuse things are pushing up.

if I were a cat I would scratch

if I were a tulip I would refuse to sprout 
if I were a star I would be falling

moons are disappearing from my fingernails

The rhinoceros is loose.

May day, may day.

CAROL MORRIS

9


PRIMAL SCREAM

September 27, 1980

Dear Claudia Michelle,

We can safely entitle this letter “SLEAZEBALL WHO’S 
NEVER BEEN KISSED.” That’s me all right, Miss Hot Stuff 
of Whitman High, the victim of a bum rap. Remember that 
kid I wrote you about before, Larry Pinnazo, the guy that 
picks his pimples and smears the excess on the lab slides in 
Biology I? He cornered me the other day by the gym entrance 
and pushed me into a dark comer, all the time rubbing his 
chest against mine. He said he wanted to feel my “Chicamun- 
gas.” That’s what he calls them, can you imagine? He put his 
stubby fingers into the opening of my blouse and started pressing 
me with his whole body. I was completely grossed out. I 
mean, the kid has these acne pits, and this real yellow breath, 
and a nose the size of an enemy torpedo. And when I could 
feel the fingers creep into my underwire support, I bit his nose 
and held firmly like an attack dog that isn’t content with a 
quick nibble, but likes to hold on and tear a little flesh. Anyway, 
Larry yelped, all the time holding on to his big Italian 
nose. He screamed that I couldn’t fool him. He knew what I 
let the other boys do. They had told him. I let them all unsnap 
my big white bra and let them feel my big pink breasts, and if 
I really liked the guy, I’d let them go “down there.” I should 
have gone for his nose again after that remark, but he was 
drawing a rather sizeable crowd. He announced, like a stage 
actor to an audience, that I shouldn’t have lured him to the 
corner if I hadn’t mean’t business. I wanted to clean his clock 
for the “down there” remark, and I would have too, I mean, I 
would have leveled him, if Jeffrey Van Wagner hadn’t been in 
the crowd, looking at me with those big puppy eyes. Well, he’s 
never going to give me a second look now. He heard it all himself. 
Larry Pinnazzo might as well have taken out an ad in 
the school paper: MISS CHICAMUNGA PUNCTURES 
PROBOSCIS IN LURID SEXUAL ENCOUNTER. What I 
want to know is, where does he get his information? I have 
been chased, poked, teased, grappled with, since the fourth 
grade when I got my first brassiere, but I have never been 

10


kissed. I have never been on a car date or slow danced. In gym 
class my partner is always Juanita Alvarez for square dancing 
because the boys never ask either of us. God, I hate these 
breasts! I hate them! I want to wear a Grow-bra like everyone 
else, not this big cotton thing with wires and elastic and a 
spandex fastener with extra hooks and eyes. I call it my steel 
belted radial special and it digs into my skin and makes me 
sweat red rivers. I hate walking low, always appearing shorter 
than I am, just so I can slouch over and cover my chest 
with my books. I hate the boys yelling “Hey, Jugs,” “Hey, 
Jungle Tits,” and Larry’s dreadful “Hey, Chicamungas.” No 
boy will ask me out because they think I am too fast, too 
dangerous, yet in the shadows of the school, they reach for 
me, they brush up against me, and whisper dark things into 
my ear. I want to take a knife, Claudia, one of those big 
butcher ones that Mama uses in the kitchen. I want to take it 
and cut a pound or two from each breast, and somehow, 
miraculously healed, I will be sweet, and demure, and will be 
able to wear stretchable knits or mohair sweaters or t-shirts 
that are 70% combed cotton. I don’t want to hide behind books 
or my folded arms or a blouse with vertical stripes that only 
an old lady would wear. I want to, as God is my witness, go 
out on a car date with Jeffrey Van Wagner without his wondering 
if I was a possible carrier of Herpes Simplex II. I have 
had these THINGS since the fourth grade and I am

Singing the D-Cup Blues,

Your forever friend,

Franchesca DiGregorio

October 2, 1980

Dear Frankie Di,

Before you decide what to do with your surgically removed 
poundage, you’ve got a live market right here in Des 
Moines. Just send it to me, Claudia Michelle Weber, who will 
be forever grateful for the Care Package. I have my own 
nemesis, right here in Des Moines, a regular twit named Dickie 
Butts (I know what I’d like to do with that name). Dickie 
sits behind me in French II, and although he doesn’t pick his 

11


pimples and send his fellow students to Cringe City, he has 
this annoying habit of zipping and unzipping his fly, so you 
can hear the faint whirrings while you’re conjugating verbs. 
Anyway Dickie calls me “Nubs,” right out loud, and for the 
French translation: “Nubbette” (He thinks he’s being cute). 
He says he wants to get the number of the steam shovel that 
ran over my chest and he tells everyone he’s finally found a 
place to stuff his dirty gym socks. He says a bread board with 
two stationary peas on it has more curvature than I do. Frankie, 
I’d like to sympathize with your problem, but I would kill 
for a Grow-bra. My ma says I don’t even need one. She says if 
I don’t want my nipples to show, I could wear an undershirt 
(Oh, sure, Ma, maybe I could buy some Superwoman Underoos!), 
or I could tape them with small pieces of masking 
tape. She said she read that bit of advice in Heloise’s Helpful 
Hints. Great. That’s the same newspaper column where she 
finds out how to remove grape juice stains from carpet fibers 
or bubblegum from Shinyl Vinyl. She thinks she can solve my 
emerging womanhood with two strips of tape. Arghh! ! I did 
finally talk her into getting me a bra, after all, I am in the 
tenth grade. But I have an even bigger problem. You know 
how I once told you how the boys lurk outside the school 
swimming pool, waiting to see which girls are sitting out that 
day on the bleachers, so they can figure out who has their 
period? I think I mentioned it in the same letter that they pelt 
these girls with sanitary pads (God only knows where they 
get them), when these particular girls walk down the halls. 
The boys act so smug. You’d think they had discovered the 
secret for the atomic bomb, the way they strut down the hall, 
making Midol jokes, doing some exaggerated pelvic flinches, 
and aiming the unwrapped pad with menacing precision. 
Well, I’ve never sat out of swimming, except for an occasional 
cold or the time I had an abscess on my finger. I am fifteen 
years old and I haven’t even gotten my period yet. I hate to 
admit this, but I’d give anything for one of those Kotex missiles 
to graze my body, I am so worried I may have freeze 
dried ovaries or worse yet, that my insides have rotted and 
turned a dusty grey, and that I will never be able to have 
babies when I grow up. My Ma says she may have to take me 
to one of those doctors with stirrups and rubber gloves and 
long, cold, metallic instruments. I am really scared, Frankie. 
Do you have any suggestions? Would my jogging help, maybe 

12


shake up a few clogged tubes? How about warm showers? My 
older sister, Samantha, says I should put a tampon under my 
pillow and pray to the “God of Missed Periods.” I tried it 
but. . . nothing. Heloise’s Helpful Hints hasn’t addressed this 
problem yet. She did a piece this week on saving tin foil. I’d 
appreciate any suggestions because I’m

Freeze Dried in Des Moines, 
Claudia Michelle Weber

October 8, 1980

Dear Claudia Michelle,

I asked my mother about your problem and she said to 
book a vacation trip to Aruba, buy a white Jantzen bathing 
suit, and sure enough! you’ll get a period. She says it works 
for her every time. I think she was joking. My mother says to 
wait, that things will happen naturally, and that you’re what 
they call a late bloomer. But I have done some concentrated 
research. It said in the Sunday supplement that jogging in 
any form can cause jogger’s kidney, jogger’s heal, and penile 
frostbite. (I looked that one up, and we don’t have to worry 
about it.) The article also said that with serious female joggers, 
the menstrual period will “cease to flow.” It’s a proven 
fact with statistics and everything. So you ought to think 
about quitting track before your whole future as a woman is 
endangered! To further my research, I asked my friend Louisa 
Afficionado all about it. She’s the girl that holds court every 
morning in the smoker’s bathroom before first hour. I think I 
wrote you about her before. She knows a lot about life. She 
car dates with college boys. She smokes long cigarettes and 
gives French Kiss lessons to the girls in the bathroom mirror. 
She even wears tampons. Anyway, I mentioned your problem, 
and she said cranberry juice. Definitely cranberry juice. 
You’ve got to start drinking it. She says it cleans out your system. 
Pretty soon, she says, you will be sitting out of swimming 
for something besides an abscess. You will be bombarded 
with sanitary pads.

As for my problem, I don’t think there is any research 
that can help. I told Louisa Afficionado about my problem one 

13


morning and she stood quiet for a moment, letting her thick 
lips blow perfect smoke rings from her Virginia Slims. She 
talks with a great deal of authority, after all she’s one year 
older, and has just been held back. She told me to stand up 
straight, stick out my chest and enjoy all the male attention. 
And when the boys snap my bra straps or grab for my breasts 
or knead them like they were mounds of yeast dough, I should 
smile and act mysterious, let my eyes widen, and act like I’m 
enjoying it. She said it was a proven fact that boys like 
breasts, and that biting Larry Pinnazo’s nose was a mistake. 
That was not being mysterious at all. She asked me how was I 
ever going to get a date if I got the reputation as a ball-buster? 
(I’ll have to look that one up.)

The new tall and mysterious, 
Franchesca Angelica DiGregorio

November 30, 1980

Dear Tall and Mysterious,

Tear up all my previous letters because I am in love. L-O- 
V-E Luvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv !!!!!!!!!!! And it is not with an 
immature tenth grade boy who lurks outside of swimming 
pools, or who tells me I need a melon transplant, or who 
spends half his time adjusting the traction on his skateboard. 
I am in love with a real man. His name is Rodney Allan 
Forbes III and he is my language skills teacher. He wears herringbone 
tweed jackets, and wide maroon ties with grey 
flecks, and he reads us Robert Browning, and he has the most 
perfect teeth in all of Des Moines. And I know I’m in love, 
really truly in love, because when he smiles, or reads this 
Browning guy, my underpants get wet, well, moist, really. 
The first time it happened, I thought I might have peed my 
pants, but you kind of know when you’re actually doing that. 
Then I thought, just looking at him made me get my very own 
period, but I checked after class, and that wasn’t it either. But 
I guess, on account of me sitting in the front row, and picking 
up all of his psychic vibrations, and looking at those white, 
glossy teeth, I just became a woman and fell into true love. 
Anyway, I have volunteered to do all sorts of work for him, 

14


and I’m going down to Cunningham’s to get some of that coral 
lipstick they have on special, and I’m going to buy a padded 
bra with fiberfill. (I’ll have to hide it from my Ma. She says 
good Christian girls don’t wear padded bras. But, I’m desperate, 
and when one is in love, one will do anything.) And, I’m 
going to get some textured pantyhose! Maybe he’ll notice me.

Just signing,

Miss Claudia Michelle Weber

Mrs. Claudia Michelle Weber Forbes III

Mrs. Claudia Forbes III 
Mrs. Rodney Forbes III

December 15, 1980

Dear Mrs. Forbes,

What you are experiencing is what Louisa Afficionado 
calls “creaming your jeans.” She says it happens on car dates, 
in roller rinks, and at rock concerts. She says its natural and 
it means you are a real woman, well, practically, but if it 
bothers you, you can invest in some of those everyday minipads. 
My mother says big business would invent a pad for 
every natural function if they could, and she said don’t waste 
your money. Rodney Allan Forbes sounds divine and a lot better 
than my language skills teacher, Ms. Haskell. She buns 
up her hair, wears grey wool suits, and looks like she’s been 
sucking on citrus for at least a decade. She doesn’t read 
Robert Browning. She likes to diagram sentences and pontificate 
about the generic YOU. She gave me detention for coming 
to class with just one shoe. I tried to explain to her what 
had happened, but she told me to take my seat and see her 
after school. The reason I lost my shoe had to do with Teddy 
Klender, who is a lot cuter than Larry Pinnazo and is on the 
swim team, and on first impressions seems trustworthy. One 
day, a few weeks ago, he asked me to go sit in his car. I 
thought maybe Louisa Afficionado’s advice was finally paying 
off, so I followed him out to the school parking lot and got into 
his car, thinking, hoping, he was going to ask me out for my 
first real date. Well, you can call my first male-female car encounter: 
PROWLING FOR THE WILD CHICAMUNGAS.

15


Teddy Klender didn’t waste any time. He unsnapped my bra 
like he had taken official lessons, and in a matter of seconds 
my breasts were straining against the fabric of my blouse, 
and he pounced on me, and my head hit the dashboard, and 
his hot, sticky breath coated my ear, and he kept whispering 
“let me lick them, please, let me lick them.” He said he had 
been dreaming about them for months, and I tried, I really 
tried, like Louisa told me to, to look doe-eyed and mysterious, 
and to look like I was enjoying it. But when he whispered he 
wanted to lick them, my stomach did a violent turn, my lips 
shriveled and contorted, and I began to think very fast. I 
kicked off my shoe, lifted my leg, even though he had me pinned 
to the seat, began honking the car horn with my big toe. 
Teddy’s head just about hit the ceiling. He sat up quickly, 
straightened his shoulders, and peered through the car window 
to see if anyone was looking. I opened the door, ran from 
the car with only one shoe, my arms folded over my chest, and 
I bent real low, like I was walking against one of those tropical 
winds, and I ran, limping back to the school. I never got 
my shoe back and Ms. Haskell gave me detention for violating 
the dress code. Is there no justice? I told my mother about it, 
and she threatened to call up the Klenders and tell the whole 
pack of them to “F___off* and die.” I’ve never heard her speak

that way before. My father made her apologize for her language 
and sent her to her room. He told me she just hasn’t 
been the same since she started going to these assertiveness 
training groups. He told me boys would be boys, and he had 
found himself in a pickle in the backseat of a Studebaker 
once. Sometimes, though, I wonder if my mother is all right. 
She doesn’t make pasta on Thursdays anymore, just Sundays, 
she loses Dad’s socks (he says deliberately), and my father’s 
latest kick is that he says he knew he should have married a 
woman from the old country. She gets sent to her room a lot 
lately. Oh, she puts up a fight, knocks over a few plants, kicks 
the heat register, but still she goes on up, probably just to 
avoid a fight with my father. Sometimes, when she doesn’t 
know I’m looking, I find her in the laundry room screaming 
into the washing machine. It’s empty, the agitator isn’t moving, 
and she’s screaming her primal scream, that’s what she 
calls it. After daddy had sent her to her room for this Teddy 
thing, I went up to see her. She had piled some pillows 
against the wall, then had laid her head back, closing her 

16


eyes. I sat next to her and she ruffled my hair, the way she 
always does, and said the next time a boy did that to me to 
forget the horn, and aim for his family jewels. She bent her 
knee and thrust it into the air like a karate champion, and 
pointed to her body and showed me where to aim, and then 
pointed lower to show me where to go for the second jab. I 
asked her if that was being a ball-buster (Remember? I tried 
to look it up, but it wasn’t in the Random House Edition), and 
she chuckled and said “Yes.” Then she got to looking kind of 
sad, and turned her head to the wall, pulling the covers up to 
her neck like a sick child and spoke in a soft, low voice: 
“Promise me, Franchesca, promise me, you won’t make the 
same mistakes that I did.” I wanted to ask her what she 
meant, but she closed her eyes and turned her body to the 
wall. I thought after this Teddy thing, I might want to come 
and live with you, but now I see my mother needs me.

Merry Christmas, 
Frankie Di

February 3, 1981

Dear Frankie Di,

I’ve been doing a lot of extra work for Mr. Forbes now in 
his office, and I can even go into his top drawer for paper 
clips. He has books all over his office, beautiful hard-bound 
books lined in neat rows in wooden bookcases. The room 
smells of pipe smoke, a cherry blend, I think, and he hangs 
his herringbone jacket with the suede patches on the sleeves 
on the coat rack by the door. Did I tell you he wasn’t married? 
Ever since I found that out I have been in heaven. And I have 
more good news. I can sit out of swimming now for something 
more than post nasal drip! ! And as if the two had something 
miraculously to do with the other, I can now completely fill an 
A cup, Teen Queen, sans fiberfill. I cut down on my jogging, 
drank cranberry juice, buried a tampon in my father’s vege 
table garden under two feet of snow (that was my Aunt Idah’s 
idea, she’s Polish and they do those kind of things), and I did 
isometrics for my breasts and VOILA ! Dickie Butts is even 
laying off in French now. He’s quit the steam roller routine 

17


and modified his peas on a breadboard (he’s upped it to two 
prunes), and best of all, Rodney Allan Forbes let me read 
some of his original love sonnets. I think the tenth grade is 
turning out to be the best year of my life !

A-Cupped and thrilled, 
The Future Mrs. Forbes III

May 18, 1981

Dear Claudia Michelle,

We gave Louisa Afficionado a baby shower in the bathroom 
before first hour yesterday. She got four teddy bears and 
a box of Huggies Disposables. She’s moving with her about-to- 
be future husband, Nickie Rocco, a serviceman, to Antler, Oklahoma. 
She’s going to live in a trailer with a Hoover portable 
washer and cable TV. Louisa said she could have stopped herself 
from getting pregnant, on account of she knows all about 
those things, but she was bored with school and wanted a 
baby to love and to love her back. She said Nickie Rocco is 
okay, even if he does slick his ducktail with Vitalis and carry 
a pearl handled knife when he’s out of uniform. Of course, I’m 
in shock, and gave up my French Kiss lessons on the spot, and 
I’m going to take my time to consider all of Louisa’s previous 
advice. I don’t want to end up in Antler, Oklahoma in a 
mobile home, and I don’t want all the boys whispering that I 
squish when I walk, like they do about Louisa, and I don’t 
want to car date with older boys with slick hair and slick 
grins who treat my body like a slab of stewing beef. And I 
want to listen to my mother who says my body will catch up 
with my breasts, like hers did for her, and I don’t want to go 
to bed at night dreaming of pounding and binding and slicing 
my breasts in my twilight sleep.

Of course, I think your Rodney Allan Forbes III sounds 
wonderful, but he is an older man, and I’d hate to see you in 
Antler, Oklahoma talking babies and trading venison recipes 
with Louisa Afficionado.

Yours forever, 
Frankie Di

18


June 8, 1981

Dear Franchesca,

I was never going to write another letter again. I just 
want to hide myself in my room and never see or hear from 
anyone, but I figured I owed you an explanation. I am mor- 
tified. Crushed. Grossed out. I want to die, or at least be a 
nun. Everything around me looks grey and dirty, and it 
shouldn’t; school is almost over, and it is warm and bright 
outside. My Rodney Allan Forbes, my Mr. Tweed, my Robert 
Browning is like all the rest. He’s like that Larry Pinnazzo, or 
worse yet, Dickie Butts, but I would say in the final analysis, 
he’s much like that Teddy Klender fellow that made you lose 
your shoe. And you know, if you get up real close and get a 
good look into his mouth, his teeth aren’t so white. They’re 
wearing little yellow cardigan sweaters, each and every one of 
them, and his breath is horrible, at first smelling like a strong 
flower, but underneath, there’s a current of ugliness, a smell 
as yellow as his sweatered teeth. I bet you’re wondering how I 
got an A-number-1 close-up view of Mr. Wonderful’s mouth. 
First of all, if I tell you, you’ve got to promise not to breathe a 
word of this to a living soul, because if my mother finds out, 
she’ll ship me off to a Bible Camp in Plainfield. Well, last 
week, I was in his office after school, stapling and paper clipping 
and straightening the papers on his desk, just like I usually 
do. Mr. Forbes walked in and stood in the corner, leaning 
against a bookcase, staring at me. I noticed he had closed the 
door, something he had never done before. The stapler jammed. 
He grinned at me, and at that point his teeth still looked 
quite lovely and white. “Did I tell you what a wonderful job 
you’ve done all year, Claudia?” he asked, then he moved towards 
me and stood behind my chair. “I really appreciate it,” 
he continued. The coarse fabric of his tweed jacket grazed the 
back of my neck and it started to itch, I wanted to scratch it, 
but I was afraid to move, so I kept fumbling with the jammed 
stapler. He pulled me up from my seat with his big hands and 
turned me around and that was when I got a good look at 
those teeth, and smelled the stale, ugly breath. And then he 
was pressing himself against me, and I could feel it, I mean 
IT, and it was like he was carrying a rock in his pants, and all 
I could think of was it must have been long and a purplish 

19


pink, like in those lab transparencies we have in Biology I. I 
could have used some of your mother’s karate instructions at 
that point, but I couldn’t think. And then he kissed me, a wet, 
tongue kiss that made me want to vomit right there. I just 
ducked, and crawled out from his grasp and ran like hell to 
the bathroom where I wiped the wet kiss from my lips with 
some brown paper towels, and washed out my mouth with the 
warm faucet water, and I locked myself in a stall, and just 
cried. I waited till everyone had left the school, and went 
home, hoping my mother wouldn’t guess what had happened, 
hoping there wasn’t a rash on my neck from the tweed, or 
some telltale sign on my lips. I didn’t eat dinner, just went to 
my room, and I haven’t felt like doing much since. I sit in the 
back row of his class now, and I rarely look at him, I just sit, 
barely listening, looking out the window at the gray and dirty 
parking lot, praying that the term will be over. Did I say the 
tenth grade was the best year of my life? Just sign me

Disillusioned in Des Moines, 
Claudia Michelle

June 12, 1981

Dear Claudia Michelle,

Well, you can entitle this letter: YOUR GOD HAD 
CLAY FEET. Ms. Haskell, my English teacher, explained 
that to mean, we shouldn’t set anyone up as a god, because 
they’ll only disappoint you. I personally don’t think Rodney 
Allan Forbes III should get away with this, on account of according 
to some extensive research on my part, he is guilty of 
fourth degree sexual misconduct to a female minor. I personally 
think he should be lined up and shot right there in his office. 
If I could tell my mother, she’d probably call your school 
board and tell them to all go “F___off and die !” for hiring

him in the first place. But, in order to protect his job, he’d do 
what Larry Pinnazo did, he’ll say you “lured” him into the office, 
you shut the door, and that you’ve been bothering him all 
term. In court, he’ll bring up the Jungle Coral lipstick, the 
textured pantyhose, maybe even the fiberfill, and when he got 
on the stand, under oath, he’ll say you, yourself, pressed 

20


against him, and grabbed the rock in his pants. I’ve seen all of 
this before on made-for-tv movies. By the time the hearing 
was over, the boys would be saying you squish when you walk 
and Rodney Allan Forbes III would be promoted to Vice-Principal 
(I accentuate the VICE). You’d have to move away, or 
your mother would have to send you to Bible Camp for deprogramming. 
My advice is to go into your mother’s laundry 
room when no one is home, lock the door, open the washing 
machine, and make sure it’s empty so you have a real good 
echo, then SCREAM ! SCREAM that primal scream my 
mother says is so therapeutic, and let that echo fill your head. 
Perhaps it can wipe out the memory of Mr. Forbes and the 
yellow, wet kiss. I tried it last week after Larry Pinnazo 
called me FranCHESTA, and it worked !

Here’s to the eleventh grade,

Franchesca DiGregorio

MARIA BRUNO-HOLLEY

21


ESSENTIALS

A scientist,

in performing an experiment, 
asked a three-year-old 
to explain his first memory.

The child replied,

“In there it was warm and red.”

this was great news

in consciousness studies—

I read of it now

in The New England Medical Journal.

Imagine, 
at three, 
still grasping the very essence of things.

Someone knocks at my door now 
and I put the book down.

If that child stood beyond

the wall now,

reaching his hand out to the panel, 
what would he see?

What do I see?

A door,

just a door,

for once the wood not a statement 
on my entrances and exits, 
or the condition of the logging industry in Oregon, 
or the departure of an old love, 
but a door,

the oak the strongest part of the wall 
to lean against after coming home, 
comfort in the smooth shine handle 
cool to touch, 
precision in the oiled turn of the hinges, 
the round knob the motion of 
grabbing out to it again and again 
eyes always ready to jump at a world beyond, 
the door a flat cradle

22


rocking back and forth 
between old and new pleasures 
perhaps all

beginning with the first door 
at the bottom of the lake 
of dark rhythm waters 
bursting through with no handle 
it was not warm 
it was not red

it was

just the opening

BRENDA MILLER

23


AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL DIG IN 
CENTRAL OHIO

We walked, stoop-shouldered, sore-armed to the pond. 
Our skin, melting like Swiss chocolate in the hot sun, was 
aching for the relief of the murky water. Mike sat down next 
to me and pulled both skin and sock off his feet. They dangled 
disjointedly beneath the surface of the pond.

find anything? he said

drainage tiles . . . you?

nah

I stared at the clay under my nails. It looked as though I 
had been scraping the skin off of a black man.

i feel guilty, i said finally

why?

at night i dream of indian warriors

but when i wake in the morning, i find 
nothing but dead cicadas lying in silent 
heaps around my tent

have you been threatened

i bowed

by the villagers?

they throw old chicken bones at me when i walk to the showers.


sometimes . . .

i take showers with my clothes on. i bowed still 
further

do you think violation is an act of love? i asked

24


He pulled his bony feet back onto the grass and 
slipped both skin and sock back on.

i will tomorrow, he said finally

We walked back to the pits, dug 6 feet by 8 feet by 6. 
I bowed as the horses rushed past.

ANDREA YOCKEY

25


CATCHING FLOUNDER: 
SELF-TAUGHT

(for Norman Hindley)

My father was a pilot out of Maxwell field. 
He’d fly home in a yellow Ford convertible, 
put me on the aquaplane between his legs. 
His buddy Jim would tow us into the Gulf, 
toss cans of beer from the boat 
he’d reach up and catch with one hand.

I’d balance between his ankles,

suck wake-spray salt and beer foam from my hair, 
sure some day I’d learn

to catch a can of beer like that one-handed.

Afternoons we’d crab,

tie chunks of beef bone to string, 
dangle them off the splintery dock.

I’d lie face down,

watching crabs creep at the meat 
from the black nowhere of the water 
until he scooped them with the net 
I never learned to use.

Nights in the right season, 
we’d gig for soft-shells, 
the lantern’s fragile ash mantle

I wanted to touch so

making holes in the dark water,

shining crabs like deer,

so father could spear them escaping their shells 
But he never took me fishing.

Then he’d be gone, 
mother on the phone: 
bad check, bad debt, overdue loan.

She’d lie on the chaise,

long hair spread around her

while I wrote alphabet letters on my slate, 
chalk soft in the ocean damp.

26


I knew you could make a word out of these letters 
if only you could get the trick of it.

I’d write letters and spell them out:

“f r p What does that spell?”

“s r d What does that spell?”

And she’d call back from the porch,

“Nothing. It doesn’t spell anything.”

One day I spelled j o b.

She cried and said it spelled Job.

She’d lie there, 
prostrate beauty queen 
turned to prayer by j o b.

It was boring as Sunday school,

set me to fishing: 
clothes-pole, string, bent pin.

I didn’t think of using bait.

But one day I did catch a fish, 
something pulled against the pole,

I screamed “help.”

But no one came.

Somehow I dragged it onto the dock, 
a flounder must have hooked off the bottom 
by accident, both eyes looking cock-eyed 
up at me like someone smashed in the head 
but still gruesomely alive.

Norman,

this is where I want to start to lie, 
to say I found a stone, 
sharpened the edge, 
slit the poor one-sided fish, 
found sticks, 
made fire, 
cooked it, 
demonstrated your fisher’s skill. 
I want to say it tasted delicious 
but I don’t remember what happened next. 
The phone words were AWOL and prison, 
we moved North,

my mother got a job at Harrison’s 
examining radiator holes.

27


My fish was never cleaned, never eaten, 
poor flattened bottom fish 
never made it to finnan haddie, 
just dragged off by someone’s cat 
or simply rotted.

I didn’t throw it back. 
It didn’t give me a wish.

But Norman, I did catch it, 
did pull it out of the water, 
learned that when people say, 
“It spells nothing,” 
when you have no father 
to teach you how to fish, 
you grow fanatical for instruction 
yet miss the knack of taking it, 
start with a pole, 
a piece of string, 
a bent pin with no bait.

LEONORA SMITH

“Catching Flounder” is reprinted from Vol. XV, No. 1 of Red Cedar Review with 
apologies to the author for several unintended errors in the text.

28


WHEN YOU TRAVEL ALONE

You notice, an aisle over,

a blue the color of a spring, twilight sky 
half-way between the moon and the horizon. 
It’s a flannel shirt.

The man wearing it is reading

Life in the Forest. His eyes 
trace the page, widen, jump to the top. 
What poem, you want to ask, what image 
caught you?

An old woman

claims the seat next to him, 
complains of a cabbie, her voice 
brittle, sharp as splinters.

He arranges her coat, 
a laying-on of hands.

She blinks, her voice drops, she 
settles in the blue light 
of his full attention.

Your copy of the book is in your luggage.

If you had it,

it would be a matched carnation 
to wear in your button hole. A wink 
to signal your half of the pair.

A man in paper products sits next to you, 
figures his expense report.

You ascend, watch the city 
go regular and clean, the farm land 
plotted out, hills 
swirled by contour plowing 
like patterns made in a sandbox 
with a stick.

Distance

makes the world seem hieroglyphic, 
enough to make you believe . . .

something.

29


The blue shirted man

has Jack Daniels from the steward’s clicking cart. 
You expect it—

(it’s what you drink)

and his voice—low, throaty

with promise of stories. A high water table 
witnessed by full wells.

You pretend a story 
talking you to sleep.

Your head crinkles the paper 
on the head rest. You dream your face 
against his shirt, 
open your mouth on it, taste blue.

It would be soft, a little furry 
inside your lips, 
his chest silky and solid under it.

Like putting your mouth 
on the stomach of a baby in pajamas.

You dream his scent. . .

When you wake, 
he is asleep. The scattered lights below 
are like pinholes in black paper 
you used to hold up to light 
to pretend the constellations.

You want to tell him this.

He’d be your missing piece of jigsaw, 
the eye

that makes the mottled, pinkish shapes a face, 
the line of coast that gives you shore and sea. 
You want to be his wife, or a child 
slung on his chest to bed, 
drowsing against that blue, blue shoulder . . .

You land, 
you’re in the aisle together. 
If you let yourself drop 
against him, 
his lips would be on your temples. He smiles, 
stands back to help his seatmate with her coat.

30


Shallow puddles on the tarmac catch light, 
flurry like ruffled feathers. You slow 
for the click of his boots behind you.

They speed up,

you are ready to say, “ . . . that book,” 
when he passes you,

his arm raised toward the lit observation deck 
where a woman semaphores.

You have to dodge

to miss the bag he’s put down to meet her.

He flashes blue arms toward her, 
reaches,

swings her. Her hair flicks the air.

How much you look like her, you think.

Or like the dark-haired, page-boyed daughter 
who prances around them,

waving a tiny

red

pocketbook

on a strap.

LEONORA SMITH

31


SCANT RATIONS

“Herrick? Why do you always paint desolate farmhouses?” 
He looked at her, startled. “Remember that old Victorian 
clapboard, with the outhouse in the foreground?”

Which one?”

“The farmhouse with the light on in the kitchen window. 
There was a road, a teetering one-holer with a slant roof?”

“Oh, that one. There wasn’t a road. What do you mean, 
'Why did I paint it?’ I painted it, that’s why. Why do miners 
pick the coal snot out of their noses? I don’t know.”

“What about the other one, the still life with the rusty old 
Coleman lamp and the pan and pickaxe?”

“What about it?”

“I like it. I like to pretend that the Coleman from the still 
life is in your other painted house. It’s what’s lighting the 
kitchen window. Some old duffer’s probably inside, eating 
beans and picking his nose.”

“Yep. Beans keep him company. One tin and he can 
spend all night chasing after the barking rats with his pickaxe.”


“Barking rats?”

“You know—farts!”

“Oh, Herrick! Why did you paint it?”

“Jesus, Morgan, don’t you know how to let a guy alone?”

“Ok, Ok, sorry. Can I drive when we get to Huerfano 
County?”

“No.”

“You ought to let me drive the jeep once. Can we pull 
over and put down the top? It won’t rain till later.”

“No.”

Morgan unlaced her sandals and tucked her feet up next 
to the glove box so her toes curled around the hand grip on 
the front of the dash. She tried to think of it as another toy 
journey, no different from the little toy journeys they had 
made with matchbox cars in the dirt at the Estate. Beyond 
the dash, the mountains were no different from the little windrows 
in the roadside at the Main House, made by dragging 
out the tire ruts in summer for their little toy towns. Even 
then Herrick had driven a jeep, and Morgan knew that if he 
still loved her, it was because she didn’t nag him about the fu


32


ture, accepting his eccentricities with curious childlike resignation.


As a child, she had pressed flowers. She took them from 
the fields in the spring and flattened them in the big books in 
the library at the Main House. She had ruined the dictionary 
with pink stains of saxifrage, blue smear of lupin, yellow 
smudge of marshflower. She pressed them in order to name 
them and in order to keep from losing them. It was in the 
same spirit, grown up, that she wanted to know Herrick just 
the way he was, to keep him always as in a kind of 
springtime, nevermind the colors bleeding a little into the 
blurred script of memory. Herrick was different because he 
had been adopted. He didn’t collect living things. He painted 
in oils and rarely opened a big book unless it had pictures.

“Hey, Morgan, reach back there in the back seat. See the 
brown pack? Unzip the left side and grab that little bottle of 
pills.”

Morgan felt the little triangle of sun slide down the red 
cotton of her shirt onto the bare patch of skin above her baggy 
jeans. “Can’t reach it. Gotta unfasten this damn seatbelt.” 
Morgan came back up, popped the clasp and disappeared 
again into the well behind the driver’s seat. She fumbled for 
something too heavy for pills until she worked the zipper and 
found herself staring dead into the barrel of a handgun. 
“Jesus Christ, Herrick,” she popped back up, “is it loaded?”

“You must always assume, Morgan, that every gun you 
see is loaded, cocked, and about to go off.”

“Is this?”

“The bullet’s not in the chamber. You unzipped the wrong 
compartment. Get the pills.”

“What kind of gun is it?”

“A Walther semi-automatic pistol.”

“Jesus Christ, scare the hell out of me.” Morgan found the 
pills and zipped the pack back up, being careful to point the 
gun so that if it went off it would blow through the floor of the 
jeep. On her way up, she noticed another gun, a holstered revolver 
it looked like, stashed between the driver’s seat and 
the drive shaft. It was pointed straight at the engine. She 
didn’t ask.

Herrick lit a cigarette. “Whatever possessed you to wear 
that old ratty red shirt? Looks like the top to a pair of thermal 
underwear.” His speech was gurgly and rocky from trying to 

33


work up enough saliva to swallow the pills.

“It is.”

“Well?” He swallowed.

“Well, I like it. I figure if you’re going to sweat, you may 
as well sweat in something that soaks it up. I think it was 
dad’s old shirt.”

“I wouldn’t take you to a dog fight in it.”

Morgan grinned. “What does one wear to a dog fight? 
Saddle shoes? Yes? And maybe one of those felt circle skirts 
with pink poodles glued on?”

“Even pink poodles would look better than that dismal 
rag.” Herrick jammed the gear shift into third and cornered 
around a pothole. “Damned highway. We haven’t got the 
chance of a pin on a cribbage board. Road’s ripped up worse 
than your goddamn shirt.”

The sun was beginning to bake through the canvas jeep 
top. Morgan craned foreward to get a glimpse of it, plum over 
their heads. Dead noon. They were just entering Huerfano 
county, and there was a hot dry wind blowing down off the 
foot hills. She watched an orphan tumbleweed, a little huerfano, 
blow up and stick against a snowfence, keeping its doilylike 
shadow exactly under it. She wondered if it was a blessing 
to have no roots, to wander, dried and hunched into a 
ball over the southern plains of Colorado. She wondered if 
Herrick ever wondered about his real parents. The mountains 
were beautiful today, deep blue and wrinkled like the loose 
skin on the flanks of beached and petrified buffalo. Morgan 
found her Indian, a mountain silhouette like a chief lying 
prone in all the glorious costumes of death, headress feathers—
really fall lines—smoothed and fanned down towards 
the four corners of the earth, round-toed moccasins framed 
against the blue.

“They look pretty nice, don’t you think Herrick?” She 
pointed.

“Yep.”

“Purple-Mountain-Majestic.”

“Yep.”

Morgan thought of the long ride from Denver to Trinidad, 
and of all the names of poverty and hardship: Ludlow, scene of 
a miners’ strike and massacre; Walsenberg, Agilar, Las 
Animas—all mining towns, hope black as the coal under 
them. She saw the clipped barred mesas, a cluster here or 

34


there of heat-drugged cows: white Charolais, brown Hereford, 
Black Angus. They passed a deserted wheatfield, each stalk of 
wheat blowing subtle as a candle-flame breathed by winds of 
speech over the family dinner table. “The wheat, you know, 
it’s beautiful.”

“Yep.”

“Like the wheat in your painting. What’s the secret to 
painting wheat?”

“It doesn’t blow in one direction, so you can’t paint it 
leaning in one direction. See out there? See the eddies and 
spirals?”

Morgan looked past Herrick to the east, and looking 
taught her what it meant to speak of a “prairie sea” stretching 
to the horizon, leagues and leagues of wheat, striations of 
green, gray, and yellow, blending all the swells and hollows in 
a gentle movement that suggested water instead of land.

Herrick downshifted; the jeep lurched and swerved. 
“Damn, this highway’s got more holes than a whore. Morgan, 
get me another cigarette. There’s a new pack in the glove 
compartment.”

Morgan watched him unwrap his cigarettes. He always 
bought them in a hard pack, and he kept the hard pack in a 
leather case with a fancy lighter, this one a solid silver, turquoise-
studded one. He threw the cellophane out the window 
and it hissed and slapped the canvas before it was gone. Then 
he put the pack neatly into the old leather pouch, dropped his 
cigarette into the flame shielded by his cupped hand, and 
drove the jeep with his forearm until he got a good draw.

“Where’d you get that lighter?”

“Oh, a guy down in Raton was stuck off the highway last 
winter and I winched him out. Afterwards, he asked me how 
he could repay me, and we were sitting there smoking, and I 
noticed his lighter and I said, ‘Well, if you want to repay me, 
you can just give me that lighter you got.’ And he just looked 
up, blinked a couple of times, and handed it over.”

“Sounds like you didn’t give him much of a choice.”

“No, I didn’t. It’s a damn fine lighter. I wanted it the minute 
I saw it.”

“Do you still treasure that watch of great-grandfather 
McLeod?” The clouds reminded her of it, dark filigreed swirls 
rising over the Sangre de Cristos, inking an old initial across 
the sun.

35


“Yep. I have the watch and the stand. I told mom she had 
to give it to me after that time in the mountains. You remember, 
the time I took Mark and Ian up Devil’s Gulch and 
we stayed at The Estate.”

“Tell me again. I forgot.” But Morgan hadn’t forgotten. 
There were some things that she never forgot. Once, at breakfast, 
he looked up from his newspaper, scrutinized her up and 
down and said, “You know, you’d make a great widow.” 
Another time, he told her how he would die an old man all decked 
out in his Easter best on a big four-poster mahogany bed. 
“I’ll just sign a few papers, make some choice parting remarks, 
and blow my brains out.” He had it all planned.

“Well? Please tell me.”

“Well, me and Mark and Ian—god what a couple of 
idiots. Old Ian, if you stuck an ice cream cone up his ass he 
could tell you what flavor—”

“Herrick!”

“Sorry. Anyway, the three of us came up in the jeep and 
camped out in the old Maid’s Cabin. The two of them got 
waxed and while they were thigh slapping and chewing the 
fat and baying the lights off Prospect Mountain, I snuck out 
and headed the long way around to the Main House. There 
was nothing special about the night, no eerie music, no full 
moon, no scrotum-shrinking screams—just a typical star- 
studded night in the mountains. I felt like skulking around, 
so I went down past the wood house and the barn and skirted 
all the cabins from the pasture side. I wound up climbing up 
the rocks where we had the sack swing—remember that rock 
hollow you made us dig out and fill with water so you could 
have a spa for your dolls? Well, I almost stepped in the damn 
thing, Jeese-o. But I got to the Main House and suddenly got 
this queer feeling like I had to go in. A sort of magnetic attraction.”


“Wasn’t it all locked up for the winter?”

“Yep. Mom locked it up the week before, but I had the 
keys.”

“Gee, scare the hell out of me.”

“Well, I wasn’t scared. I figured whoever was in there 
would be wishing he’d worn brown underwear because I had 
my .44 Magnum revolver pistol with the silencer screwed on 
the end and I figured, ‘click’—I could drop him like yellow out 
of a fried egg—‘click’—that’s all the noise it makes.”

36


“Burrr, Herrick, I hate all your damn guns.”

“Well, somehow I knew I wasn’t going to find any weirdo. 
I had this feeling—I’d had it for a long time—that I was 
going to meet the old man himself. Great-grandfather 
Theopholis.”

“A ghost?”

“No. Him. Theopholis.”

“But he’s dead.”

“Well, he wasn’t that night.”

Morgan scowled at him. “Aren’t silencers illegal?”

“Yep.”

“Isn’t it illegal to have guns in the car?”

“Yep.”

“Theopholis? Herrick, you couldn’t have seen Theopholis. 
Mom’s grandfather? Our great-grandfather? Jesus, Herrick, 
you never even met him. He was dead before we were born.”

“Yep. But ever since I was a small boy, I’ve had the feeling 
that he was waiting for me, watching me. After a while, I 
learned to sense his presence. When mom locked the house up 
that summer, I could feel his presence really strong. It was 
the last summer. Mom sold it that winter. Didn’t you ever feel 
it?”

“Well, not really. I found a dime once in the road, 1909, 
and I guess I thought maybe it could have been his dime, 
maybe he dropped it or something, getting into his old Lincoln 
Touring Car.”

“Well, I had been noticing strange things. I remember 
putting his picture in the bottom drawer of the old roll top in 
the living room, and then finding it, for no reason, laid on the 
keys of the player piano, under the dust cover. I just happened 
to lift the lid.”

“But Herrick, anybody could have moved it. Maybe mom, 
who knows?”

“No. I’m sure she didn’t do it.”

“What else happened?”

“Remember those goats we had that summer? Remember 
the one who hanged himself by his halter rope?”

“Yeah, so what?”

“Well, it was about that time that I noticed I was sick.” 
The first raindrops, like cracked eggs, blatted on the dust- 
caked windshield. Herrick switched on the wipers and they 
made two brown crescent-shaped smears that completely 

37


obstructed their view of the road.

“Grab my army canteen out of the back seat.” Herrick 
downshifted and stuck his head out of the side window to 
steer.

“You shouldn't have switched them on so soon. What if it 
doesn’t really rain?”

Herrick took the canteen, pulled himself up by the roll 
bar and drenched the front window outside on the driver’s 
side.

“What about my side? I still have to squint through the 
dead bugs and the mud.”

“Here.” He passed her the canteen. “But don’t use it all. 
We might need it.”

“Why would we need it?”

“Just don’t use it all.”

Morgan drenched her side, saved a quarter of it, and took 
a swig. “Want some?”

“No.”

The thunderhead came out of nowhere. Morgan loved the 
Colorado weather. The sky could be blue and sunny, and then 
all of a sudden a big rolling tumbleweed of a cloud would 
somersault in off the mountains and dump its contents on the 
prairie. “Gee, it’s really going to come down!” They drove in 
silence, and Morgan watched the rest of the mud above the 
eyebrow-shaped swath of the wipers slowly dribble into the 
blades. The sudden darkness made her aware of the cozy 
gadgetry on the dash and the smell of leather which she always 
associated with her brother. Leather and flannel and 
denim—that was Herrick. He downshifted again, and leaned 
foreward to see better through the blur.

“Did you ever find Theopholis?”

“I’ll tell you later. Shut up, I can’t see through this toadstrangler 
anymore. Worse than a cow pissing on a salt lick.” 
“What?”

“I said, it’s coming out of the clouds like shit through a 
goose.”

“Herrick, for god’s sake.” Morgan zipped the rest of her 
window shut and brought her knees up to her chest on the 
seat. The rain went suddenly into hail, little pearl-shaped 
beads wrapped in the nacre of the storm, bouncing like dropped 
B-B’s on the pavement. The mountains turned pointillist, 
and the steam started rising off the plains. “I think—”

38


“What?”

“It’s like some old grandmother dropped a box of moth 
balls down the attic stairs.” She was proud of her simile.

“What?”

“Nevermind.”

The din on the roof was too loud for further conversation, 
and it crescendoed until Morgan thought the hail would rip 
through the canvas top and stone them to death. Morgan remembered 
how she used to shake the ripe crabapple tree in 
the driveway and stand all hunched over under it until they 
stopped falling. She relaxed her shoulders; the noise had 
stopped except for the squeaking sound the wipers made as 
the windows dried, and the sound like gravel—really 
hailstones—pelting harder into the fenders as Herrick downshifted 
back into high gear and lit another cigarette. They 
drove out of the hail, through hissing puddles that looked the 
same as heat mirage on the pavement. It was like dying. The 
sky relaxed like the bellows of a sick, wheezing lung. Her 
father had died like that, and afterwards the house was full of 
silence and the smell of fresh rain.

“Do you realize Morgan, that in that tiny pack back 
there, I have enough supplies to keep alive for a week in the 
wilderness—except water? But I always carry water. Water 
enough for a few days.”

“Really? Gee.” Morgan didn’t want to ask him how he 
could possibly last a week in the wilderness now, now that 
he’d need at least one good kidney, besides insulin, if he was 
going to survive a week. She remembered how he’d always 
had little duffle bags and army packs, always packed and 
ready to go. Her mother told her one time how she had 
taunted Herrick about his things. “Well, if you’re all packed 
for a survival outing,” she had said, “why not just go? Clear 
out the old cobwebs in your brain. It would be good for you.” 
But Herrick never did go. He just stayed ready, and his favorite 
pasttime was to unpack and then pack again, rearranging 
something, or adding perhaps a Swiss Army Knife and some 
snake bite antidote. He loved little boxes and tins and 
gadgets, since in his past life or in his genes, he said, he was 
cut out to be an Army General. Herrick kept saccarine tablets 
in a brass hollowed-out bullet that fastened to a chain to his 
belt loop, and he kept candy in the jeep tool box in case of insulin 
shock.

39


Thirst had been the first herald of his diabetes. Herrick 
was sixteen then, running up from the welding shop by the 
barn to drink out of the sprinkler. Morgan wondered what he 
must have thought as the thirst grew on him, the new unquenchable 
thirst, and she pictured him walking into the concentric 
slapping spray from the sprinkler, jamming it with his 
foot, drinking long and greedily from the clean arc of water, 
looking up anxiously as though to try to size up his thirst 
against the heat of a cloudless Denver summer day. He always 
wore cowboy boots, even in July, and Morgan pictured 
him walking out of the hissing range of water, letting the 
drops pepper the back of his leather vest without quickening 
his pace.

Morgan unzipped the jeep window and dangled her bare 
foot out of it. The sun was glittering on the washed granite in 
the pavement. She sneezed.

“Bless you.”

Both of them watched the rainbow bloom and fade over 
Fisher’s Peak. Herrick took the long way through town, over 
the brick-paved streets, past Victorian mansions built by coal 
barons and railroad royalty. Trinidad was set between 
Fisher’s Peak and Simson’s Rest, the latter sporting a neon 
“Trinidad” sign; the former so symmetrically leveled that it was 
a peak in name only. By the time they turned up Colorado 
Avenue, the sky had almost completely cleared. Herrick backfired 
the jeep by switching the ignition off and on, a loud 
flatulent pop. The bells on Bell Block chimed out “Nearer My 
God to Thee” as Herrick skidded into the driveway of his 
house and jerked to a stop. Herrick never thought of his jeep 
as a mere means of conveyance. To him it was a highly refined 
instrument of percussion, a feat of mechanical artistry, 
and he reveled in the purring, popping, skidding, knocking, 
chugging symphony of jeep. Morgan always delighted in her 
rides with him because he was a safe but aggressive driver. 
Once, to avoid an accident, he deliberately hopped a median, 
crossed three lanes of on-coming traffic, and stopped neatly on 
the opposite shoulder of the highway. ‘Close as a shaved 
baby’s ass.’ Then he waited for all lanes to clear, hopped back 
over the median and headed down the road without saying 
another word about it. He was, to use one of her mother’s Vassar 
expressions, ‘Completely unflappable.’

Herrick’s house was an old 19th century Victorian, half


40


painted a rich French blue with ox-blood gingerbread and 
slate-gray trim around the windows. Morgan packed her sandals 
under her chin on top of her sewing and nightgown and 
walked the railroad ties that lined the access to the front 
porch.

“Ouch, dammit!” Morgan hopped about on one foot, spilling 
her things onto the lawn.

“Coal tar creosote. Jeese-o Morgan, your supposed to go 
up to the house like a white man, not a coal train. What do 
you think the sidewalk’s for?”

Morgan tried to rub the tar off* on the needles under the 
spruce tree.

“It’ll come off with gasoline. There’s some in the shop behind 
the saw. I’m going to pick up the U-Haul.”

Herrick made a quick tour of the house, unlocking all the 
doors. He emerged on the south side, climbed in the jeep, popped 
the clutch, and squealed rubber out of the driveway. Morgan 
watched him until he turned off Colorado Avenue, and 
then she gathered up her stray underwear and embroidery 
threads and hopped on one foot into the shop.

This was it. This is what happened to people. They got 
sick; they moved; things changed. Herrick used to have a 
wife; he didn’t anymore. His wife used to be thin; now she was 
probably still fat. They were both collectors, but his wife must 
have decided one day to keep her possessions right on her 
where Herrick couldn’t mortgage them: she ate and ate. Then 
one day she left. She had to. She had to run away from her appetite 
and from Herrick. Even back then, Herrick was a dead 
man. He was impotent. He had to run his blood through a 
sieve every couple of days. She took the cats with her.

Morgan found the kerosine behind the table saw. She 
found an old T-shirt on the fly wheel and used it to rub the 
liquid into her arch. Little by little, all the cross-hatched lines 
in her feet re-emerged, till the arch and callouses were shiny 
white. She kept rubbing anyway, watching her fingers travel 
over the ball of her foot, letting her gaze fall out of focus and 
gather her into the blur of Herrick’s tidy workroom, into the 
dance of tiny particles in the sunlight. She shook the shirt 
and sent them flying. This was it.

At the Estate, one time, she had actually seen where a 
packrat lived. Her father had hoisted her high up above his 
shoulders so she could see into a hole in the lath under the 

41


floorboards of the Main House. Inside was the most elaborate 
assortment of goodies: lint, nutshells, pinecone cores, a rubber 
soldier, a pencil, a firecracker, a playing card, a marble, bobbie 
pins. The rat wasn’t home at the time, so Morgan unsnapped 
her favorite pink barette off her braid and put it on what 
she thought might be the rat’s front porch as a surprise. When 
her father let her down, though, she regretted her impulsive 
magnanimity. That night, she put her ear to the linoleum in 
the kitchen over his nest to see if she could hear if he was 
glad.

From then on, she always thought of Herrick in terms of 
that rat. She thought of his locked treasure room by the foyer, 
full of guns, brass candlesticks, egg coddlers, cloissone boxes 
Theopholis got in China—almost all of it besides the guns 
was loot from the Estate. Morgan thought how if people from 
another century were to open Herrick’s treasure room, they 
would know—just like they knew when they opened the 
Egyptian tombs—that everything inside the room had special 
significance. Well, maybe they wouldn’t know. After all, they 
could have just placed Tut in there with some decorative salvage, 
but they probably didn’t. Same with Herrick. Everything 
he owned meant something to him, and it was hard to 
covet anything he had, since his attachment to his possessions 
far exceeded any interest an outsider could muster. Every 
once in a while, he could be persuaded to sell something, but 
only for roughly three times its worth.

This was it. Today they were going to load as much of 
Herrick’s workroom as they could into the U-Haul. Herrick 
agreed—although Morgan was dubious—to transfer into the 
Denver dialysis ward, and Morgan had promised to help him 
store his tools at her mother’s. She heard the jeep pull in, popping 
like the fourth of July.

Herrick trudged through the house.

"I'm in here.”

He came in through the kitchen and paused in the door 
way. “You look like forty miles of bad road—what’s got you?”

“I don’t know. I’m sad.”

“Why should you be sad? I’m the one that’s dying.”

“Well, I’m still sad.”

“Well, cheer up. We’ve got to dismantle this shop by sundown. 
Get off your duff and help me load this stuff into the 
boxes in the hall closet. I’ll give the orders. You do the work.”

42


Herrick grinned.

They spent the whole afternoon in the workroom. Herrick, 
exhausted from the drive down, sat in an overstuffed 
chair, smoking and instructing Morgan as to how to pack his 
tools. Boxes of hardware, porcelain plumbing fixtures—even 
the antique marble sink Morgan had given him as a wedding 
present that he had never installed. Every possible size socket 
wrench, a full wall of pigeon holes, each with its special contents. 
Herrick was meticulous. Morgan had to pack, seal, and 
label everything.

“You sure you want to take all this stuff back to Denver? 
You sure you’re not going to change your mind?”

“Yep.”

But Morgan knew he would change his mind, and he 
would keep changing it until one day, asleep in his mahogany 
bed, a tree would grow up entrunking him and she would be 
turned into the sparrow Isis, dipping and singing in circles 
around him.

The last thing Morgan could squeeze into the U-Haul was 
a treadle whetstone Herrick had pilfered from the Estate after 
their mother had sold it. It looked like a spinning wheel, but 
the pedal turned a stone about two inches thick and three feet 
in diameter. Morgan heaved it into the U-Haul and locked the 
door for the night.

In the kitchen, Morgan found Herrick heating soup and a 
casserole their mother had fixed for them to take with them. 
Morgan looked at him, whittled down to nothing by his illness. 
“You never told me what happened.”

“What?”

“At the Estate.”

“What, when?”

“After you went in with your loaded gun to the Main 
House.”

“Oh, well, I just had a little chat with Theopholis. That’s 
all.”

“What do you mean, ‘a chat?’ What happened?”

“Well, I was in the living room by the round table. I don’t 
know what it was that drew me to the table. I guess the fact 
that I knew he had presided there, that was where he sat and 
looked each of the members of his family in the eye. I guess I 
figured I’d find him there.”

“It was the biggest table I’ve ever seen. Do you remember 

43


how we used to slide the salt across it?”

“Yep. So I started to walk around the table. I stopped 
once to light a candle on the sideboard, and then I just walked 
and walked. I must have circled that table twenty times.”

“Well?”

Herrick heaved a big spoonful of casserole onto Morgan’s 
plate and slid it down the counter to her. “Well, he finally just 
walked in.”

“From where?”

“From the master bedroom.”

“What did he do? Did he say anything?”

“Well, at first he seemed kind of distracted, like he was 
looking for something. He patted all the pockets of his trousers 
and vest, and then he looked at me and started to walk towards 
me.”

“Jesus, Herrick, weren’t you scared?”

“Yep. But then he stopped. We just stared at each other, 
he looking at me and me looking at him.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Not exactly, but somehow, I knew what he was saying.” 
“Well?”

“Well, I knew he was looking for his watch, and I knew 
that the reason he was looking for it was because he wanted 
to give it to me. Then, without really saying it, he told me 
that he had bought the watch in Salt Lake, from a little watch 
maker named Weybrecht.”

“Weybrecht! Jesus, Herrick, isn’t that the name of your 
real parents? Remember that time you told me you sneaked 
into Mom’s files?”

“Yep.”

“What did you say?”

“I thanked him for giving me the watch. I told him that 
the watch was safe in Mom’s jewelry box and that I would get 
it from her and keep it forever. I told him that I was grateful 
for the sign from my real parents, since I knew I would be sick 
someday, and would need to have a reserve.”

“A reserve?”

“Someday, I told him, I would send it back to them as a 
sign.”

“But how could you? You could never find them.”

“I have ways.”

Morgan gulped the last of her casserole and went to the 

44


stove to serve herself more. “A reserve?”

“Jeese-o Morgan, you ate that like there was a band of 
armed Mexicans on the veranda.”

“A sign? A sign of what?”

Herrick wouldn’t answer. Talking to Herrick was like 
going on a timed ride. When the ride was up, that was it. Herrick 
unscrewed the bullet and tapped some saccarine into a 
cup of instant tea. To save the bother of getting a spoon, he 
opened his Swiss Army Knife, stirred, wiped the blade on his 
flannel shirt, and re-deposited it in his pocket.

“I’ll do the dishes.”

Morgan collected the plates and put them into the sink, 
and Herrick went in to watch the news on the T.V. When she 
finished, she took coffee to the table and listened to the muffled 
sounds of the news, watching the tired light fade on the 
oak tabletop. Like all the other rooms in his house, Herrick’s 
kitchen was pervaded with an air of stark readiness. An old 
butcher block dominated the center of the foor, and an antique 
stove that Herrick had re-nickeled warmed the house in 
winter. Herrick had restored the walls with new wainscoating 
and his wife had papered above the wainscoat and decorated 
the windows with ruffled yellow chintz. As in many other 
houses of the era, Herrick’s kitchen had more doors than any 
other room in the house. The dining room, study, bathroom, 
workroom, and back porch all radiated from the kitchen like 
streets from a glorietta. From the back door, left open since 
early afternoon, the smell of grass and day lillies blew in and 
circled the vacant chairs.

“Well,” said Herrick, “my lust for life seems to be on the 
wane.” She heard cane creak on the wicker settee and then she 
heard him punch off the T.V. “I feel like I got chewed twice, 
digested twice, and shit out of a Charolais. I’m going to bed, 
but you can stay up and howl if you like. Your bed’s in the 
first guest room. It’s still not wired. I think it has sheets, unless 
they were hers.” Herrick walked painfully through the 
kitchen to get his cigarettes , and then she heard him fumbling 
with the padlock in the foyer on the treasure room 
door.

“What are you doing?”

“Arming myself.”

“What for?”

“I always do.”

45


He pulled the string, locked the door, and as he ascended 
the staircase, each step an effort, Morgan could hear him 
screwing his silencer into the .44 magnum revolver for the 
night. “Goodnight,” she called, and then she called out the old 
family cautionary adage: “Watch out for the wheelbarrow.”

“You too. Goodnight.”

Morgan made one last swathe with the sponge and then 
switched off the kitchen lights. In the study she propped some 
pillows on the couch and pulled the end table up close. She 
ran her fingers across the titles of Herrick’s art books, finally 
stopping at a collection of the paintings of Andrew Wyeth. 
She pulled it down and turned to her favorite painting, 
“Ground Hog Day 1957.” Of all the paintings in the book, it 
was the most evocative of Herrick. It was a painting of a 
corner of a kitchen, and out of the mutin sash window there 
were two logs, one bitten by axe strokes and one sawed. Inside 
on a bare table was a plate, a coffee cup, a saucer, and a knife. 
They were white. The table looked as though it had been set 
for sunlight itself. A long even shadow slashed the wood and 
the wallpaper. The picture looked the perfect formula for 
peace, for the solitude that foreshadows some personal revelation. 
Painted white as prayer, the wood work, the cup, and the 
empty plate bespoke a hunger so old the smell of food and 
drink had gone from it. There was no smell in the picture. No 
smell of coffee, of warmed lineoleum, of damp cuttingboard. It 
reminded Morgan of Herrick’s supplies in the jeep—enough 
to keep alive in the wilderness for a week.

Suddenly Morgan felt forlorn and afraid. She closed the 
big book and pulled the light strings and crossed the floorboards 
to secure the lock and retrieve her panniard from the 
darkness of the stairwell. She took the stairs two at a time to 
the guest room. She tried the wall switch but no light came 
and then she remembered about the wiring and found the 
candle and the matches on the nightstand, little paper fingers 
dipped in sulfur, and she struck one and the light bloomed on 
the ceiling and on Herrick’s wife’s sock-monkey doll still propped 
on the pillow. The light flickered on Morgan’s nakedness 
and on the pool of clothes at her ankles, and then steadied 
when she was safe in her flannel nightgown, the colored embroidery 
threads strewn over the quilt and the monkey hugged 
close. She threaded the needle with sea green and the 
light settled shyly around her wooden hoop and she began 

46


stitching an eye where only blank muslin had been before. 
Slowly, over the blind membrane, she built an iris, pouring 
her wakefulness into it stitch after stitch. Then she threaded 
her needle with black for the pupils and heard Herrick coughing 
in his bedroom and wondered how the gun was pointed. 
She found gold for the arched brows and heard his muffled 
footsteps and the sound of retching and moaning and the 
toilet flushing from the bathroom. Then red thread and silence, 
and Morgan patiently stitched a smile into the muslin 
thinking how she would thread the candle wick next and sew 
light into the face until the wick was gone. Then she would 
gather up the melted wax while it was still warm, molding it 
to her own face, giving away the last of her features while the 
light sputtered and died. Little crewel-work flowers and a valentine 
on the cheek, and she plaited the long blonde yarn of 
her hair while the Santa Fe Train howled through the town 
northbound to Denver. By 4:00 a.m. she was wearing the caul 
of the dream, and light as a sparrow she stepped off the dirt 
road that led to the Main House of her mother’s grandfather’s 
Estate. She walked through the yarrow and wet sage past the 
old pump to the hitching post, recognizing it as the same post 
she had tried to tightrope as a little girl. She turned and faced 
the old barn, locked and string-latched, a suffusion of bluish- 
gray light on the shingles, green shadow smeared on the 
hinges and crowded into the slits in the double doors. It was 
the old barn. There was no mistaking it, for it was here that 
her mother—or at least the disembodied presence of her 
mother said, “I’m quite sure, thinking back, that it was my 
anxiety, not having enough for your brother Herrick to eat, 
that kept me from the world.”

Morgan was fumbling through the keys, the paper labels 
having gotten all tangled up with the metal. She stopped, for 
without even going into the barn she had the presentiment 
that the hay shutes had been blocked, and that there was no 
unplugging them, no sliding down them as they had done 
when they were children. Of course she wasn’t sure what had 
blocked them, perhaps lint that the mice had brought in, odd 
castaway objects mingled with dirt and hay, the hand-me- 
downs of the pack rats. Nevertheless, she was certain that it 
was at that moment, for the first time, that she was made 
aware of the enormous difficulties her mother must have 
faced in order that her older brother might have enough to 

47


eat. She turned to her mother—or the presence of her 
mother—and expressed her amazement and concern.

“Yes,” continued her mother, “if it were not for the tremendous 
responsibility of having to feed Herrick, I am sure 
none of this would have happened.”

“But Mother, it was thirst.”

Standing thus by the barn, Morgan suddenly had the 
transcendent sensation of being the bluish-gray light, tan 
gling in the sage, winding through the stalls where the ghosts 
of horses stamped, flicking away flies, waiting, which is what 
horses do more than anything, for the dank grain, the salty 
halters. For it was with the fluidity of light that in her mind 
she went up the road to the Main House, slid through the 
shutters into the living room where the furniture had been 
piled and covered with old sheets. And it was with the softness 
of light that her fingers grazed the keys of the player 
piano, the G where the ivory had chipped, soaking the dust up 
from her fingers into the mote that was herself, for she was a 
mere shaft, dusty with memories when the sun fell on her 
from somewhere; a black funnel indistinct from ordinary 
darkness when it did not.

Of course, this statement of her mother’s was quite a surprise. 
That so much could be reduced in her mother’s mind to 
the difficulty of feeding Herrick, well, it was a bewildering 
thesis, and Morgan could not but think it another glaring 
example of her mother’s feeble powers of analysis to attribute 
to the appetite of her adopted older brother the collapse of an 
estate within her own soul, and of course all the other 
things—closed shutters, shrouded furniture, stalls emptied of 
horses—that were attendant on the collapse. But then, she 
reasoned, her mother often said things that were so preposterous 
that they couldn’t be salvaged by reason or feeling: statements 
that bloomed unexpectedly, like Fireweed.

There she was, picking through the keys, turning over 
the faded labels, “Maid’s Cabin,” “Coal House,” “Barn”—Ah! 
the barn, but it was the old skeleton key, and she wanted the 
padlock key. When she found it, among the keys that had lost 
their labels, and sprang the lock, she became excited and a 
fraid, for the years that had separated the opening of the barn 
door seemed more ominous to her than had the distance, when 
she was a child tightrope walker, between the hitching post 
and the ground.

48


The door opened with a sharp cry, and three moths tumbled 
into flight, and she entered. When her eyes had adjusted 
to the darkness and her nose to the salt-leather and ammonia 
smells, she was relieved to find everything as it had been, the 
buckets hanging from their hooks, the pack saddles wrapped 
in gunny sacks, the bailing wire wadded up under the grain 
bins. For an instant she thought the horses might be out to 
pasture, or that she might turn again and see her brother 
running down the road, his legs churning like beater-blades; 
that they might have planned a ride to Captain’s Rock of Gem 
Lake. She gave the low horse whistle her mother had taught 
her. The sound startled her.

The three notes of the whistle made her mistrust the fact 
that she was alone, and knowing, as she did, that in all 
dreams there are unseen listeners; and trespassing, as she 
was, with stolen keys, she felt more urgently the need to 
sweep the corners for their eyes and signal threads. She 
mounted the stairs gingerly, and the gooseflesh was all over 
her, and she thought of her mother’s grandfather’s hired 
hand, who slept in the garage and pushed the pedal of the 
whetstone all day like a spinner, sharpening the axes and 
shovels.

She gained the top of the stairs and threw open the hay 
window. She knew she had come for some treasure, something 
to keep, to remember; a symbol, perhaps, of Herrick’s thirst. 
The gray light flooded the loft. There was nothing blocking 
the hay shutes—she had grown up, could not slide down 
them, that was all. She rummaged through the harness, found 
a broken singletree, an old horse collar turned porcelain with 
dust. Where had they put it?

She found it behind an enormous heap of rusted box 
springs in the corner. It was an old harp with a woman’s head 
carved on the front. The gold leaf was cracked, milky with 
dust, and the spiders, as though to repair it, had spun their 
traps in the strings. The face was stony, slightly mad, an innocent 
turned wood for gazing on the forbidden.

Morgan dragged the old harp out of the tangle of springs, 
old bailing wire of the hired man’s bed. Stirring a cloud of 
groggy moths, she lugged it to the open hay window, fastened 
it with harness reins, and lowered it down.

The moths followed, like angels at a resurrection.

Tangled with the threads on the bed were harlequin 

49


patches of red, yellow, blue and green from the stained glass 
in the south window. Morgan thrust her wrists into them and 
they were hot. She found the monkey by her pillow and used 
its red sock-toe mouth to soak up her sobs. Fragments of her 
dream, red, yellow, blue, and green, winked at her through 
the semi-darkness of her tears. The monkey smelled of time, 
like the quilts at the Main House when they were first taken 
from the closets in early summer. Maybe the monkey smell 
had fomented the dream imagery of grief and loss. Morgan 
knew that dreams are never generous, that darkness was 
what Herrick strained his blood against. The quilts were hot; 
she threw them off and made for the bathroom. She knew 
Herrick was up since there was an empty insulin bottle on the 
vanity, so she dowsed her face quickly in the sink and put on 
her same old dirty jeans and red shirt. She couldn’t find her 
shoes, so she went downstairs barefoot.

Herrick was coming in through the front door.

“Where have you been?”

“Where have I been? I’ve been up for hours. I roused myself 
at zero dark-thirty, went to Shop-go for my morning cake 
doughnut, took a drive around the courthouse and went to the 
parts store when it opened for an air filter for the jeep. When 
did you get off the rack?”

“Just now. I had a bad dream.”

“Well, did you snap your underwear?”

“Snap my underwear? Jesus, Herrick, what’s that supposed 
to mean?”

“Well, in my opinion, a man can always tell what kind of 
day he’s going to have by how hard he snaps his underwear 
elastic in the morning. A real healthy vigorous snap on both 
sides so it stings will guarantee him a good day; a feeble weak 
snap on one side and the whole damn day will be mediocre.”

“If I tried to snap my underwear, it would either disin 
tegrate or fall down. But you must have snapped the hell out 
of your underwear. What’s the plan?” Morgan wandered into 
the kitchen.

“I thought we’d go to Raton.”

“Raton? What for?”

“Oh, there’s a little antique store I’d like to check into.” 
“What about packing?”

“Forget packing.”

“Forget packing? But Herrick, don’t you want to move 

50


that stuff up to Denver? Don’t you want to go up and live with 
Mom someday so you don’t have to drive 100 miles to Pueblo 
to get dialyzed?”

“Nope. I don’t.”

“Jesus, Herrick, what are we going to do to today, unpack?”


“No. We can take all that workroom stuff up to store in 
the carriage house behind Dad’s old shop. I’ve already unpacked 
what I’ll really need to tinker around here now and 
then.”

“But what about Mom? How’s she going to feel about you 
living down here with nobody to look after you?”

“I’ve got all the neighbors. You’ve met Margaret, lives 
across the street with her Scottie dog?”

“The old lady with the Wedgewood collection? Herrick, 
she’s older than Prospect Mountain. How’s she going to keep 
the walk shoveled, feed the fire, or jump start your jeep for 
the drive to Pueblo in the winter? She has trouble putting in 
her false teeth, nevermind storm windows.”

“I’m not helpless, you know. It’s summer. By Christmas 
I’ll have the house sold. Besides, I don’t think I could stand 
living with Mom and her constant ragging. Storm windows, 
ha! Mom wouldn’t buy me any last winter; I practically froze 
my can.”

“Well Herrick, she supports you completely as it is. She’s 
got rocks but she’s no Stonehenge. She’s no Easter Island.”

“Well, she may not be Easter Island, but she sure has the 
money to go flying down there to look around.”

“Well, why shouldn’t she travel? It’s her money, not 
ours.”

“It just makes me so damn mad.” Herrick kicked the 
footstool, stomped over to the stove, and slammed the copper 
teakettle so hard on the burner that it sang without being 
hot. “All I have to do is think about it and my blood boils hotter 
than a popcorn fart.”

Morgan remembered waiting in the car in the freezing 
snow by the Passenger Pick-up at the Denver Airport. It was 
always a thrill to see her mother’s tall aristocratic figure, a 
healthy tan showing above her tweed coat. On the way home, 
her mother told her all about the statues at Easter Island, and 
the best thing about them to Morgan was the fact that they 
faced inland—not out to sea. No man is an island, she 

51


thought, but if he tries to be one anyway, he better build his 
gods so they face the enemy.

“But Herrick—”

“Oh, for crying in a bucket, Morgan, leave me alone.” 
Herrick reached for the bottles on the kitchen table.

“What are those pills?”

“Well, the white ones make me pee, the tan ones make 
me shit, and the yellow ones are to keep my heart from stopping. 
They bind the potassium.”

Morgan watched Herrick limp over to the sink and swig 
the water for his pills straight from the faucet.

“Do your legs hurt?”

“Oh, a little. By the time I get off* the machine, my body is 
so cramped it’s practically fossilized. Sometimes my hands 
cramp up too, Jeese-o, like those dinosaurs in the Museum of 
Natural History.” Herrick made his fingers into a shape like a 
small garden rake. “Holy Monument it hurts. The machine 
drains all the sodium out of the muscle tissue. Afterwards, 
you feel like a sucked scorpion.”

Morgan was still thinking about the tall elegiac statues 
of Easter Island, carved of volcanic tufa, each leveling its 
monolithic scrutiny on the windswept grasslands. On the 
backs of those that had fallen face down towards the inland 
there was not a trace wrinkle of lost dignity. They had simply 
transferred their gazes earthwards. Looking at Herrick, she 
realized that it was not always the sea that swells and diminishes 
the shoreline. Herrick was tethered to a tide all his 
own. His Easters came three times a week now, the tides 
pulled out of his body as though through the eyes of some 
strange pillared being. Dialysis really was a kind of redemption, 
and Herrick was born to be redeemed, first by her parents, 
then by insulin, and now by the machine.

Morgan knew that her mother would be dismayed by 
Herrick’s capricious change of plans, but that finally she 
would be unable to stop Herrick from doing whatever he 
wanted. Her mother had always been wealthy, and had always 
nurtured in her children that peculiar dependency for 
which wealth was the only cure. In her, there was a fragile 
balance between an essential generosity and an inbred inability 
to abandon that generosity to the gratitude of her children. 
What seemed to be a lack of trust on her mother’s part 
was really just a fear of loneliness, the loneliness of corner 

52


cupboards full of expensive china and monogramed silver; the 
loneliness she must have felt as an only child hunting Indian 
Paintbrush at the Estate, dreaming, perhaps, of the romantic 
playmate she would finally marry.

Perhaps it was in the first shadow of disillusionment with 
that elated loneliness and romance that her mother had decided 
to adopt Herrick. She had no doubt assumed that he 
would feel as she did, that when he grew up he would take 
things like brass candle snuffers and egg coddlers for granted; 
that he wouldn’t pack and unpack for impending journeys, or 
have on hand enough guns and supplies to fight a small 
foreign war. Morgan knew that her mother would keep on 
paying for Herrick, always accompanying her checks with the 
gentle criticism and suggestions that boiled his blood to a 
steam toxic enough to warrant dialysis in its own right.

Morgan poured herself some coffee and traipsed around 
the house looking for her shoes. She found them in the shop, 
parked neatly beside the boxes Herrick had removed from the 
U-Haul.

“What are we going to do about the rented truck?”

“Oh, I’ll take this load up to Denver to store in Mom’s carriage 
house and explain my change of plans.”

“I suppose this means you will stay in Pueblo’s dialysis 
ward?” Morgan trailed her shoes into the kitchen by their 
strings and plopped them down by the kitchen table.

“Yep.”

“Do you think they might have any doll shoes at the antique 
store?”

“Stella’s got everything. I’m sure she’ll have shoes. Is that 
what that bag of cotton in the back of the jeep is for?”

“I’m making another doll. So far, all I’ve got is the head 
and body. I’ve got tubes for the legs but they’re not stuffed 
yet. I’ll show you.” Morgan took the stairs to the bedroom and 
swept the doll parts off the quilt into her panniard.

“What should I call her when she’s finished?” She 
brought in a torso and head, its embroidered face frozen in a 
cheerful smile.

“Jeese-o, I don’t know.”

“Just making her hair the other day took two skeins of 
yellow yarn. But her eyes are green, the color of lichen.”

“Name her Lichen, then.”

“Lichen? But that’s a mold that grows on the rocks. Her 

53


eyes are the color of verdigris, you know, brass rust.”

“Name her Verdigris, then.”

“Verdigris? I never thought of naming her Verdigris. Do 
you think it’s a name that will scare children?”

“Why would it?”

“Ok. Her name’s Verdigris. Let’s go.”

Morgan grabbed her doll legs to stuff during the drive to 
Raton. She laced her sandals and scrounged for the scissors 
and thread in the bottom of her panniard.

Outside the sun cast a chalky light on the spruce tree. 
Morgan remembered to avoid stepping on the railroad ties, 
which were sticky as birdlime with hot tar. In the glove box of 
the jeep she found a pair of expensive army sunglasses that 
Herrick reserved for guests and when she put them on the 
lawn and house leaped away from her, tinged with olive. Herrick 
waited, listening to the staccato idle of the jeep before he 
burned rubber out of the drive. He made a U-Turn around the 
median and as he headed down the hill Morgan caught a last 
glimpse of the house, framed by the canvas, the U-Haul propped 
on its hitch in the drive and the spruce turned verdigris 
through her glasses and the scratched plastic of the window; 
verdigris, the green mold of nostalgia on treasured metals.

At the corner of Colorado and Commercial Street the 
house slid out of view and they headed down I-25, the old 
Santa Fe Trail, towards Papa Wooton’s Toll Road, already 
bloodied with the red dirt of Raton Pass.

“What are we going to get at the antique store?”

“Oh, some things.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, but I do know that whatever it is, it’s there 
and I’ll get it.”

“I had a dream last night.”

“Of what?”

“Of the barn, and the Main House at the Estate.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, I found a harp. It was the spring because the yarrow 
was out.”

“A harp? What deep psychological significance could you 
possibly ascribe to a damned harp. Did it have tits or something?”


“Tits?” They laughed. “Well, almost, but that’s your 
dream. No, it was Dad’s harp, the one in the poem by Edna St.

54


Vincent Millay. He used to recite it to us. He recited it to me 
the night he died, in that dying voice he had that sounded like 
he was under water. You remember:

There sat my mother

With the harp against her shoulder

Looking nineteen

And not a day older,

A smile about her lips

And a light about her head

And her hands in the harp strings

Frozen dead.

You do remember it, don’t you? The harp had a woman’s head, 
and the mother’s little boy was starving, and they burned the 
chair, and she wove clothes for a king’s son for him all night 
Christmas Eve?”

“Yep. I remember.”

“I’ve always wondered why he liked it. I asked him once, 
and he said it was because of the rhythms, as though a shutter 
were loose, flapping in the wind. He recited “The Listener” 
too, and “The Forty Singing Seamen” by Alfred Noyes, but he 
ran out of wind when he got to “Casey at the Bat” and he fell 
asleep.”

“Weird.” Herrick struck the flint of his silver lighter and 
brought the flame to his mouth. Clouds of smoke billowed into 
the windshield from his cigarette. A sign said, “Welcome to 
the Land of Enchantment.”

From the top of the pass, Raton looked no more than a 
cross-hatched reddish grid in the valley. New Mexico was enchanting, 
vales of mesquite and pinon; forest-green florettes 
in a reddish-brown tapestry. But when they turned down 
lower, the whole vista was spoiled by the gigantic letters on 
the hillside west of town.

“Why do they label the town like that? Are they trying to 
make it look like a tombstone?”

“No. It’s just the only thing the goddamn Mexicans know 
how to spell: the name of their hometown. At night it’s a 
lighthouse for truckers.”

Herrick pulled into Stella’s, cut the ignition, and waited 
for the last sputtering peroration of jeep before he grabbed his 

55


cigarettes and swung himself out. They tinkled through the 
glass door, rigged with chandelier prisms knotted on lace.

“Hello? Stella?”

“Oh, Herrick, it’s you. The voice came from behind an 
antique tailor’s dummy that was decked out for a wedding 
and covered with harness.

“Stella, I came for that ivory-handled pistol. I brought my 
little sister Morgan.”

Stella stuck her head out and nodded. Morgan nodded too. 
People always stared at her a little longer when Herrick introduced 
her as his little sister. She was almost a foot taller. 
She walked cautiously around a table piled with blue china to 
see what Stella was doing.

“Do you think you might have any doll shoes?”

Stella was sorting a box of large metal records from a 
music box. She indicated a chest of drawers with her chin. 
“Doll stuff is in there. A rich Texan rummaged through it yesterday, 
but I don’t think she got the shoes.”

Morgan went to the chest and lost herself sifting through 
the little ironed piles of lace collars, monogrammed hankeys 
and christening hats. Crocheted antimacassars pressed flat as 
Columbine, old rolls of hand made lace; she even found a 
small disembodied arm with a pop-bead socket. In the third 
drawer was the perfect shoe, a ballerina’s slipper, but there 
was only one. She took it to her panniard and tried it on the 
foot of her doll. The stuffing bulged prettily. She would 
change the doll’s name to La Cenisa. One shoe was enough. 
She found Herrick at the register, squinting into his tiny pistol 
and spinning the chamber like a kaleidoscope.

“How are you going to pay for it?”

“Oh, I have ways.”

“What’s it for?”

“I’ve always wanted it.”

“Is it real ivory? How can you tell?”

“The grain. Besides, I know when it was made.”

Stella pushed her way through the dutch door to the 
counter. “Did you bring the watch? Let’s see.”

Herrick unhooked the gold clasp on his vest and pulled 
out their great-grandfather’s watch. The elaborate incised initials 
seemed to bite into the light.

Stella looked down her nose through her half glasses, and 
her pince-nez chain glittered and swayed over the register.

56


“It’s a fair trade, certainly.” She looked up. “Want a receipt?”

“No. But Morgan found a shoe. How much?”

“Nevermind the shoe. It’s on the house.”

“Gee, thanks.”

They walked back into the sunlight. The door made a little 
shattering sound and clicked shut. Herrick stabbed the 
key into the ignition and pumped viciously. Morgan heard the 
ruthless firing-squad sound; a soul rising up in the engine.

“What’s the matter?”

“Give me a break, Morgan.”

Morgan reached for the solace of the doll’s leg in her panniard. 
She fingered the red stitching on the tiny leather sole 
and watched the sunlight travel across the facets of the 
rhinestone ankle button. When the jeep hit the dirt road she 
looked inquiringly at Herrick but his face was set.

“I’ve got to shoot off some steam.”

“Where?”

“One of Daddy Wooton’s little gullies. The old Toll Road.” 
“Herrick, you didn’t have to trade the watch.”

“God damn her. Do you think I can live on the measly two 
bits she sends trickling down here when the mood strikes 
her?”

“You mean Mom? Did you have to get that ivory pistol?”

“You think I would have traded that watch for the hell of 
it? I’ve been planning this for a long time. Herrick McLeod 
might be content to let his life tick quietly away hooked to a 
goddamn fob in a blood shop, but not James Andrew Wey- 
brecht. Weybrecht’s got plans for that little pistol.”

Herrick jammed the gear shift into second; the red dust 
bloomed around them.

“Shit.”

Herrick veered off the dirt road and yanked the keys out 
of the ignition. “You ever shot off a Thompson sub-machine 
gun?”

The red dust clotted and sank.

“Jesus, Herrick.”

Herrick heaved a briefcase out from under the seat and 
slammed the jeep door so hard behind him that Morgan 
winced, forgetting it was canvas. Without looking back, he 
trudged painfully out of sight into the green of pinon and 
sage. The door yawned on its hinges.

Morgan felt dumb and small. How could she have thought 

57


that one shoe was enough? It wasn’t. She sat waiting for the 
deafening explosions, wishing that Herrick would come back 
so that they could go to Stella’s and comb the chest for the 
other shoe. How could one shoe be enough? Herrick had 
parked the jeep crooked and it irked her to see the door hanging 
open like the tongue of a suppliant. It upset her sense of 
symmetry. Stella hadn’t even told them for sure that there 
wasn’t another shoe. Then the sounds came, yesterday’s first 
raindrops on the windshield, the faint stutter of bullets filtered 
through a silencer.

In the afternoons at the Estate, she and Herrick would 
cuddle together on the wicker porch swing like fattened emperors, 
sharing grapes from lunch, watching the jagged lightening 
rip through the curtains of rain like pinking shears, 
randomly sacrificing here or there one of a repeating pattern 
of pines. They counted the seconds before the thunder, trying 
to read the sky as though it were the score of some terrible 
music.

At night, the coyotes would circle her bedroom keening 
orison. It was the sound that made her vulnerable, the plangent 
wailing breaking on the old quilts and soaking her fear. 
In the morning, the orphan bleating of the goat would blend 
with a trace odor of camphor and she would wake to the staccato 
pealing of flattened bells, a screen door slamming somewhere 
in the Main House.

Morgan could not move. This was it. Her fear had curled 
around her and turned gelatinous. Her forehead had stuck to 
her knees with sweat; her arms had fused with her shins; and 
her feet, stuck up on the dash, had become an amalgam of 
bone and the metal of the hand grip. She stared into the red of 
her shirt as into the walls of a womb, and her blinking became 
systolic, a spasmodic fluttering of wings still wet in a 
chrysalis. She listened to the bullets, trying to make out their 
rhythm, sometimes a little scattering of sixteenth notes, 
sometimes an even slapping. She wanted to run into the fire 
like a child into a turning jumprope:

One for the money

Two for the nurse

Three for the lady

With the alligator purse

58


One for the money

Two for the show

Three to get ready

And four to . . .

Nothing. She pulled her forehead off her knees like an old 
band-aid. After a silence of sage, Herrick limped towards her. 
He threw the briefcase onto the hood of the jeep and the sound 
echoed through the metal like a recess bell. He took the gun 
apart and methodically put the pencil pieces inside. ‘Click,’ 
‘Click’ and then he heaved it towards the back seat and followed 
it in on the momentum. Herrick had always known how 
to make noises in his throat like a jeep, and Morgan wondered 
if he made them now, the jeep turning gracefully as though 
guided by giant fingers down the red road to the highway.

At the top of the pass, Herrick pulled over and stopped. 
“You drive. I have a goddamned headache.” He lugged himself 
toward her, forcing her out the canvas and around to his 
side.

Morgan sewed the road shut behind her. Past Herrick’s 
profile, defeated by pain and exhaustion, the mesquite was 
faded green calico, a fabric turned inside out and blurred by 
the heat. She wanted him home before the rain, home, helping 
him down out of the jeep, home, over the tar-baked pilings, 
up the wooden stairs with their half-disintegrated carpet.


“Let me take off your shoes.”

Herrick was flopped over on the bed, all the stuffing slapped 
flat in him or sunk to his feet. When she pulled the laces, 
they popped open like the seams of dried pods, swollen with 
edema.

“What time is your dialysis tomorrow?”

“Noon. Pueblo.”

“Do they know you’re coming?”

“Yes. I called.”

“Pills?”

“Nope.”

“I’ll wake you at dinner.” Morgan turned again at the 
door. “Do you think you’ll ever be Herrick again, or just 
James Andrew Weybrecht from now on?”

“Leave me alone, Morgan, I’m beat.”

Morgan went downstairs and dialed the phone in the sun 
room.

“Stella?”

59


“No, Stella’s gone for the day.”

“Oh.”

“Message?”

“No thanks. Later.”

She found some meat in the freezer and set it out on the 
cuttingboard to thaw, and then she headed out the back door 
up Simpson’s Rest. It was a steep climb. The sky was black 
but there would be no healing rain, and she wanted to put the 
town below her while Herrick slept, watch the clouds brood 
and scatter before the dusk.

The rock itself was an old Indian ambush, carved up with 
hearts and initials, and Simpson was laid out beside it under 
a concrete slab with a bronze marker.

Morgan sat on him. Scattered in the valley below her 
were the baled houses of Trinidad. Morgan wondered that it 
was a town at all. The rains were scant rations, hoarded by 
the yucca for their pink blossoms in spring. She could see the 
church, the museum, the courthouse, and a sprinkling of colored 
roofs. One day a great tongue of water would come again, 
swamping the town, carving new mesas, lapping up the foothills 
and sloshing against the Sangre de Cristos. Then he 
would say, “The days of biscuits and hard tack are over,” and 
they would laugh, the house bobbing and creaking and the 
light bulb swinging in circles from its cord over the kitchen 
table. And then they would hold up glasses full of yellow wine 
to toast their opulence, armed and alive, with enough supplies 
to last out the flood.

But until then, Herrick’s secret pile of sweepings would 
lie ignored under the threadbare carpet of the town. She 
would have to keep searching for the parts to him, holding out 
now and then a bottlecap or rubber soldier. Until then, there 
was her mother to think of, and getting the watch from 
Stella’s. Tomorrow, his wrist threaded in the red strings of the 
dialysis machine, he would dry out again like the prairie after 
an afternoon rain, and when he swore from the cramps, she 
would lay his legs out and press them against the sheets, 
pressing his blood back in because she knew that for now he 
would keep better that way and because that was the nature 
of redemption.

GWENDOLYN ASHBAUGH

60


WHY I DON’T WEAR RINGS

Working at the bakery on a cold day 
we are on second break

I sit next to Paula

who has coffee and Marlboros

and shoves her fingers

in and out of a floppy white plastic disk, 
a ring sizer.

She,

owning more rings than anyone I’ve ever known, 
finds one finger swollen a size 
from the birth of her second child,

passes by two fingers

she lost parts of in a machine, 
and decides on a size eight 
for a finger that comes closest to being pretty, 
though it has scabs from an old skin infection. 
In trying to decide between synthetic rubies 
or a real black diamond,

she turns to me, almost accusingly, asking,

“Brenda, why don’t you wear rings?”

Paula, I could tell you the truth—

I do own one ring.

I set it in wax myself, 
but the design is so plain 
you would not like it.

One day when I was working 
in my garden last summer 
it got lost in the weeds.

I thought of it this morning

just after waking 
when it was still dark out

(you were probably already here, firing the ovens)

I saw the soldier in the tan uniform

again in my backyard

(and I did see him, because I would tell you my dreams) 
from my kitchen window

I saw him kneeling in the fall cold, 
scraping out great hard clumps

61


of soil with his helmet, 
coming again and again 
upon strange raw white roots 
that somehow seemed to be 
pieces of my mother 
in the fresh turned earth 
yet they did not interest him 
I know it is the ring that he sought 
because he picked through each helmetful 
careful as an archaeologist 
with a fine brush in his fist

I would rather have the invasion of a whole army 
on my bare back lawn 
than to continually see 
that one solitary figure 
with metal bars on his breast 
intent on his search

But here at the bakery, 
Paula, you are tired, 
and I know you don’t want to hear 
things that will make you think I’m strange. 
You trust my judgment, 
so I tell you a blue star sapphire 
is a beautiful stone, 
knowing I will soon find 
among all this yeast 
a blue star sapphire 
breeding with the rhinestones 
and intricate gold bands 
you have hunted down at flea markets 
and leave on the counters, 
the windowsills, 
scattered among the weights and measures.

I put my own finger in the white floppy disk, 
a 5½.

I brush the flour off my bare hands. 
The thought of rough khaki 
is so out of place here, 
yet I can almost taste 
the crunch of his cold pork lunch

62


in the wilderness,

the feel of the boots in the weeds.

I rise to go back to work 
still thinking of the ring 
ugly shining circle 
still buried

BRENDA MILLER

63


CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Gwendolyn Ashbaugh is a graduate student in English at 
MSU. Her story “Scant Rations” placed 2nd in the 1982 
RCR Creative Writing Contest.

Maria Bruno-Holley has an M.A. in creative writing from 
MSU and currently is a teaching assistant at the university 
in English. Her story “Primal Scream” placed 1st in 
the 1982 RCR Creative Writing Contest.

Brenda Miller is a graduate of MSU with a B.A. in English. 
She has plans of going into small press publishing. Her 
poem “Rappelling” won the 1981 Decadent Chocolate 
Poetry Prize judged by Diane Wakoski.

Carol Morris is a graduate student in creative writing at 
MSU. She works fulltime for the state government. Her 
work placed 1st in poetry in the 1982 RCR Creative Writing 
Contest.

Leonora Smith has had poetry and fiction in Poets On, Happiness 
Holding Tank, and Red Cedar Review. Her work 
placed 2nd in poetry and 3rd in fiction in the 1982 RCR 
Creative writing contest.

Annette Weathers’ work placed 3rd in poetry in the 1982 
RCR Creative Writing contest.

Andrea Yockey is a graduate of MSU and is currently serving 
with the Peace Corps in Zaire. Her work was among 
the finalists in the 1982 RCR Creative Writing Contest.

64


RED CEDAR REVIEW EDITORS

Paul Murphy

Deidre Pence

Kathy Crown

Tim Tessin

Maria Godoy

Eric Pominville

RED CEDAR REVIEW is a biannual magazine of the literary 
arts published at Michigan State University. Manuscripts 
may be submitted to 325 Morrill Hall, Michigan State University, 
East Lansing, MI 48824. Please include return postage.


Our Thanks to MSU College of Arts and Letters, English Department, 
George Kooistra and University Publications, and 
Albert Drake.

A special Thanks to Jim Cash who has funded our annual 
creative writing contest for the last four years, and to Diana 
Hurlburt of Pro-Comp Typesetting for graciously allowing us 
the use of her equipment and her experience in the preparation 
of this issue.

Typesetting and keylining by Paul Murphy. 
Printing by Thomson-Shore, Inc. of Dexter, MI.

Figure without caption.
RED CEDAR REVIEW is partially funded by the 
ASMSU Funding Board.

Back Issues of RCR.....................................................................$1.00

One Issue of RCR.........................................................................$2.50

One Year Subscription of RCR...................................................$4.00

Postcard Mysteries, fiction by Albert Drake..............................$2.50

Love at the Egyptian Theatre, poetry by Barbara Drake .... $2.50

65


In This Issue

Poems by: 
Miller 
Weathers 
Morris 
Yockey 
Smith

Fiction by:

Holley

Ashbaugh