2024 Pocket Change Creative Nonfiction Contest
Editor’s note: For a bit more on our contest, read a note from EIC, Camille Griep, here.
Grand Prize - Rebecca Tiger
Strandbeest
I am taken with my friend Bill’s miniature sculptures, metal and string contraptions that look like overgrown spiders with hinges in their legs, makeshift joints that allow for stilted movements. They are scattered in Bill’s, and his wife Peggy’s, garden, surprises as my admiration for their colorful flowers turn to wonder at these peculiar creations.
Teeth stained from red wine, the three of us gather around Bill’s computer to watch a video of the original Strandbeest, Dutch inventor Theo Jansen’s magical creations, which his website describes as a “a kinetic structure that lurches its way on uneven surfaces.” Jansen’s Strandbeests are enormous many-limbed wayward creatures made of PVC pipe and plastic tubing held together with zip ties.
~
My mother opens the door wearing a flimsy nightgown that has slid down her shoulder exposing her shrunken frame. She smells like shit and piss.
“You look like my daughter, Rebecca,” she says with wonder. Her eyes are watery with a milky film.
“I am Rebecca.”
“Oh! That’s my daughter’s name too!”
My parents’ once immaculate house is filthy - unkempt piles of papers on the floor, dust coating the furniture, blood stains on the carpet, mold in the toilet.
I open the oven; there is a lump of flesh covered in maggots. The refrigerator is stuffed with rotten food, fruit reduced to a fuzz-covered liquid in dozens of plastic containers.
My mother’s car is full of yellow sticky notes written in my father’s shaky scrawl:
NO MORE BLUEBERRIES
Bananas
Vanilla ice cream
She stuffed these grocery lists under the car seat, in the glove box; the backseat is littered with crumpled instructions that she ignored as she drove but forgot where she was going. One time, the sheriff brought her home after she was gone for several hours. My father was angry. Hungry. Why didn’t she come back right away like he told her to?
~
In the video, over a dozen shivering sweater-clad spectators are standing on a windy beach, dense clouds overhead, waiting for Jansen to unveil his updated creation. Like a giant mutant spider, the beest moves its legs on the sand damp from the rain coming down in large heavy drops. As Jansen is coaxing the beest, it turns sharply to the right and, with the wind at its back, scurries into the North Sea. Jansen looks on as his creation is lost to the choppy frigid water. I can’t tell from his expression if he’s surprised, disappointed or resigned. This unruly creature is his creation, after all. Maybe he’s impressed by its rebellious nature?
~
“Is it raining out?” my mother’s lunch companion asks me. The sun is streaming into the dining room of Menorah Village Memory Care Center. My brother and I brought our mother here after my father died.
“No, it’s sunny.”
“Great! We can go outside after lunch then,” my mother says. Her face is crestfallen when I tell her that it’s too cold today.
“What season is it again?”
“Do you work here?” my mother’s companion asks. She is slowly eating from a small plastic cup; the red pills have discolored the vanilla pudding pink. I point to my mother and say, “No, I’m her daughter. I’m here to visit her.”
“Do you work here?” she asks my mother. My mother’s forehead creases, she turns to me and asks, “Do I?”
“No. You both live here. This is your apartment building. But there are a lot of other people who work here.”
“Tell it like it is, Rebecca,” my mother snaps. “It’s a hospital.”
My mother’s lunch companion looks at both of us as if she doesn’t quite believe anything.
“Is it raining out?” she asks. I shake my head and say, “No, it’s sunny. But too cold to go outside.”
~
The larger the creature, the less elegant its movements. Bill’s small Strandbeests need a bit of wind to hobble a few steps, but he expects no more of them. They are pretty to look at and you can marvel at them even when they are still.
The many arms and legs of Jansen’s large Strandbeests often go in unintended and unpredictable directions and because of this, they are prone to wander off, in unsteady loping strides. The movement is what Jansen is after, so this is not entirely a problem, but their self-destruction is a flaw in his design.
~
Someone is trying to get in my mother’s room. It’s a newer resident.
“I thought this was my room,” he says. “I must be confused.”
He turns and wobbles down the hall. I watch his legs hold him shakily, as if it’s the ground underneath that can’t be trusted. He lists towards the wall, to steady the limbs that seem to be moving in different directions and at cross-purposes.
“Who was that?” my mother asks.
“It was someone else who lives here, Mom. He was lost.”
“Can any of us truly say we aren’t lost?”
~
I marvel at Janssen’s patience. You would think he would give up on these unwieldy creatures, leave them behind to pursue other inventions. But he persists with his quest to design a beest that will move as commanded and be lithe and adaptable. He is trying to tame something whose defiance seems to be built into its very nature.
~
I get a call from Menorah Village. My mother fell trying to get to the bathroom. She forgets that her legs no longer work, that she should use the wheelchair by her hospital bed. She has shit on herself and has her fists up, calling the health aides who get near her “bitch” and “whore.”
“What are you doing there?” I ask my mother.
“Are you crazy too, like these dummies who work here?”
“Whatever I am, I got from you!” I answer.
I pick her up. I walk her to the shower. I clean her. I dry her. I put lotion on her body.
“Don’t forget my diaper!” my mother directs.
“Ah, the cycle of life,” I answer.
We laugh.
My mother and I repeat this ritual many times over 13 months. She will fall, I will help her back into her wheelchair and clean blood and shit off her body and clothes. I will remind her that her legs don’t work. She will forget.
~
Strandbeests have gone through a dozen periods of evolution since 1990: Now, they can fly. But because their legs naturally seek sand, Jansen has designed a device that allows the granular particles to fly under the beest, helping to guide it aloft and away from the unstable surface to which it is drawn.
~
Therapeutic fibbing: telling lies to people with dementia to quell their anxiety. It gives me and my mother the illusion of control, of a future together. My mother asks how her dead husband is doing.
“He’s fine.”
“Will I live with him again?
“Maybe, once you’re stronger.”
“Can I live with you in New York?”
“I would love nothing more, Mom.”
“We’d be partners in crime!”
“We could get in a lot of trouble together.”
“Two single ladies in the city? You bet.” My mother is smiling, stirring her lukewarm coffee with a plastic fork.
I imagine taking my mother out to dinner, something she’s always loved. We walk with ease down busy streets, sit with cappuccinos in the park, watch the elegant ladies dance to Chinese music, the basketball games, the kids playing on the swings.
The next day, my mother falls again. When I come into her room, she points at me and asks a health aide: “Who is she?”
~
Jansen is trying to make his simple creation more complex and will not give up. He has designed a Strandbeest that he hopes will anchor itself to the earth if it senses an approaching storm and retreat to safer ground when threatened.
~
After my mother dies, people tell me how patient I was with her, unlike my father and brothers, who could not tolerate her dementia, who would snap at her repeated questions. I visited her almost daily. I savored her small moments of lucidity, when she could remember my name, or I could talk about the past and she had a peaceful rather than confused or frightened look.
But when I walked into room 105, I never knew what I was going to find. My mother was the most disoriented when she was waking up, prone to fall, hit her head, shit on herself, yell “HELP! POLICE!” when she didn’t recognize me. She told me once that whores had come into the lobby and lured my father away, could I go find him?
I did much of this with her final days in mind. I had heard that in the moments of terminal lucidity, as the organs shut down, people with dementia re-emerge as they were before their minds were ravaged. Dementia is, by its nature, volatile but I persisted with the few moments of clarity as reward.
My mother, heavily sedated with morphine, stares at me with wide eyes and asks what I am doing there. I tell her that we live together and she says, “Wow, wow,” and claws her frail hands at the air. She tries to get up but even small movements exhaust her. She falls back on the bed and closes her eyes for the last time.
~
“Mechanical nerves trigger reflexes that border on thought,” a website devoted to the Strandbeest explains. “Always, survival is the goal.”
Even though my mother is dead, I still puzzle over her transformation. I recently had a dream that she was dying and made her last call, to me, but I didn’t answer it. I heard her clear voice on a recording saying, “Hi Rebecca, this is your mother,” like she used to when she knew who I was, she was, who we were. In my dreams, my mother comes back to me, her mind whole; we laugh about her dementia as if it was a phase like adolescence.
I do not give up on my mother. I twist the wire of memory, hold fragments together with zip ties, re-assemble the parts, all in search of stability, a creature whose lithe and predictable movements remind me that she and I once could lurch on uneven surfaces together, only a little scathed.
~
Rebecca Tiger teaches sociology at a college and in jails in Vermont and lives part-time in New York City. Rebecca’s stories have appeared in Bending Genres, BULL, JMWW, MER, Peatsmoke, Roi Faineant, Tiny Molecules, trampset and elsewhere.
Slightly Less Grand Prize - Bella Mahaya Carter
Horse Story
In Taos, visiting a friend, I take a solo walk while beating my new handheld drum. Thump-pa-dump. Ambivalence wears a sneaky grin and pokes my side, but an inner voice tells me to ignore the ribbing. Thump-pa-dump. I want to be a woman with many stems and brilliant blooms, like the Scarlet Bugler, prolific and regal under the desert sun. But it’s April—Mom’s birthday month—and cold. My chest is frozen and my ankles wobble. As I walk, I imagine my skinny hollow calves filling with blood and sucking water from the earth—life beneath life—to support each step. Words stuck behind my tongue taste bitter as I try to outpace a mind full of judgments and expectations. What are you waiting for? Your clock is ticking!
Thump-pa-dump, thump-pa-dump, thump-pa-dump. I enter a neighborhood cemetery I’ve never seen before, keep the beat going while wandering among the dead. Roberto Martínez, Padre. Carmela Arcón, Abuelita. María Duende, Hermana, Hija, 1967–1988. Twenty-one. Her resting place is marked with what looks like a sandcastle made of sunbaked mud. Perched on top, the wings of a plastic cardinal on a stick rotate like a pinwheel in the wind. Its whipping sound startles me. I resume beating my drum. Two purple feathers, attached to the cardinal’s wings with black onyx beads, flutter and flail.
Nearby, behind a chain-link fence, a penned horse meanders my way. I continue drumming and strolling and begin to sing folk songs from my childhood: “Donna, Donna,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and “500 Miles Away from Home.”
I stop singing and walking but continue beating my drum gently as I read another tombstone: “Our baby, Esperanza, 1980-1981.” Esperanza. Hope. Expectation. Perished in her crib. The wind kicks up. I zip my jacket.
The horse whinnies me over. I walk toward it, humming Donna, Donna.
We come together at the fence, which is about five feet tall. I peer over it and into the horse’s eyes. Murky brown basins of sadness. I meet them with lyrics about a calf with a melancholy gaze and a swallow careening through the sky.
The horse watches me. Its mouth is open, upper lip curled, revealing large, yellow-brown teeth. Its ears perk up and forward. It lets out a benevolent neigh.
I sing about laughing winds and then riff and rhyme off the last “Don” of my song, crooning about not having to be alone, about speaking on the phone to the ageless, genderless God who appears in my dreams on a throne, encouraging me to roam.
The horse sighs heavily through its nose.
I slow my tempo. Soften my tone. Begin a new song about times of trouble and good old Mother Mary—and mothers everywhere—showing up when you need them most.
Over time—I cannot say how long, nor after how many songs—the horse’s head and neck droop. Its ears relax. It sits. Eventually it sprawls over the ground onto its side. A few minutes later, in the wake of my lullaby, its eyelids close. Soon, its lower lip quivers.
I sang a horse to sleep. How hard could a baby be?
Slumber swells my chest and quiets my mind. Breath dilates my vitals. When I stop drumming and humming, my body feels like the sky. My solar plexus, the sun. My legs, prisms. My guts, polished stones. I feel the earth beneath my feet and imagine how warm it must be underneath the horse’s muscled flank.
I wonder if she dreams.
~
Bella Mahaya Carter, an award-winning author of three books, believes in the power of writing to heal and transform lives. A devoted wordsmith and lifelong student of spiritual psychology, Bella facilitates online writing circles for writers, artists, healers, and seekers. She’s currently working on an intergenerational family memoir in flash.
Honorable Mention - Ellen Notbohm
The People I Meet as Bookmarks
TO STEPHANIE, WHO DIDN’T FILL HER PROZAC PRESCRIPTION
Stephanie, I found your Prozac prescription in a library book. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. A book that dares to make us think about what goes into our mouths.
Did you too face such a dilemma? Should you put that green and white capsule into your mouth? I wonder if you questioned the good it would do you, weighed against the possible ill it might inflict.
Did you find your answer when you searched “Prozac side effects” and got 17,000 hits in .33 seconds?
Nausea? Take after eating.
Insomnia? Take it in the morning.
Drowsiness. Take it at night.
Sweating? Wear loose clothes.
Headaches? Diarrhea? Drink fluids
Lowered libido? Switch medications.
Panic attacks? See your doctor.
Shaking hands, fast heartbeat. See your doctor right away.
Suicidal thoughts. See your . . .
Did you decide that the cure is worse than the disease? Holding your Rx, I sense defiance. You didn’t accidentally misplace this, did you? And you’re not depressed, are you? I picture your doc, scribbling this out, “if you want to give it a try,” a sidecar to your annual physical, while you’re thinking, Prozac for PMS? Really?
I wonder if you’re the person who put the deep dog-ear on page 23 of the book, like it’s pointing to the line, “So that’s us: processed corn, walking.”
And what made you ditch the Rx at page 148? Did your reading end there? Maybe the part about how “Artificial manures [synthetic fertilizers] lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals, and finally to artificial men and women.”
Perhaps you didn’t need to read further. You’d found your answer. Return the book, refuse the synthetic serotonin, the artificial brain chemicals. Real woman, walking.
I crush your Rx into a tight ball and toss it into the woodstove. Purification through flame.
TO SIMON, WHO IS MISSING A PAY STUB
Simon, this is to let you know that your pay stub from 6-18-2004 ended up 2,784 miles from home, sixteen years after you buried it in a copy of Irvine Welsh’s novel Glue. It made its way from you in Canada to a Thrift Books outlet in Chicago, then to me in Oregon, arriving in June 2020, to take part in my pandemic year commitment to reading foreign authors.
I’d never heard of Queen’s University or Kingston, Ontario. Did they treat you well and fairly? I examine the numbers on your pay stub. It’s not snooping; you left it in a book. Your YTD earnings in June were $4,000. Were you a new employee or should I be concerned? Current pay period, $1,500. Hmmm, not bad in 2004 dollars.
I didn’t get too far into the book. Welsh’s trademark Edinburgh dialect was too much for me. Topsy hud been oan at ays aw week; at school, then at oorwork, aboot ays no gaunt ae the Hearts game. That, and the grating repetition of the filthy-term-for-female-that-starts-with-c. I word search the book’s online preview and find I’ll be meeting up with that word at least 150 times, and that’s a big no-can-do for this kid. Yeah, I know it has a broader meaning in the British world. A fool, a blockhead, an irksome, despicable person of either sex. But here, more than one dictionary defines it as I do, “a contender for most offensive word in English.”
You too, Simon? The Thrift Books description: An apparently unread copy in perfect condition. As New. You didn’t read it either. This makes me smile. Across time and distance, we have something in common. I keep the pay stub and leave Glue in a Little Free Library to await the next reader, perhaps one who loved Trainspotting. Lang may yer lum reek!
TO LITTLE BOY LOST, SOMETIME AFTER SCHOOL PICTURE DAY
Little boy, you startled me, you in your apple red polo shirt, smiling your school-picture smile up at me when I turned the page of the forgettable library book I was reading. I dropped the book. Just a few inches to my lap, but I felt the thump.
Who would do this to a child? was my admittedly melodramatic reaction. Shut him up in a book and give him away?
Look at you, the very definition of a child in transition, your incoming permanent teeth competing with your remaining baby teeth, your ears a little rambunctious, a little large for your face. Your beaver-brown hair sporting tufts that didn’t meet up a comb before you sat down in front of the camera on picture day. You’re not an attractive child, but you are adorable. You-er than you, as Dr Seuss says.
I try to read your expression, guess at your thoughts as you sat on that stool in front of the camera. Uh-oh, Mom forgot it was picture day. She’s gonna screech when she sees I wore the shirt with the crumpled collar. So you smile big, big enough to eclipse the shirt.
Still, I wonder who would leave such a personal thing in a book, whether they ever realized it was gone, whether it meant anything to them, whether they missed it. Your photo is “trading size,” suggesting there are many of them. Maybe you’re more than one casual bookmark.
And maybe I’m reading this all wrong. Maybe you like the idea of being a trading card, traveling around in a book and startling people like me. You imp. So be it.
I shut the book and send it back to the library, on to the next person who will, I hope, be just as glad to meet you.
~
Ellen Notbohm’s work touches millions in more than twenty-five languages. She is author of the award-winning novel The River by Starlight and the nonfiction classic Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew. A thrumbled Does It Have Pockets alumna, her short prose and poetry appears in many literary journals, including Eclectica, Brevity, Halfway Down the Stairs, Quail Bell, Bookends Review, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, and in anthologies in the US and abroad.
Honorable Mention - Donna Cameron
Peace and Desist
“I don’t have the energy to fight with your mother over this baby’s name.”
Those, I imagine, were my mother’s words to my father shortly before my birth. In one hand she holds a Chesterfield cigarette, in the other, a martini, like most sophisticated pregnant ladies in the 1950s.
My father, Walter, had accepted a transfer back to his hometown of San Francisco. He and Connie had met and married in Chicago, and were waiting until their second child was born to make the move. They were hip deep in packing and goodbye parties.
In a letter to Anna, the mother-in-law she’d met only twice—a woman who thoroughly intimidated her—my mother made the chatty mistake of revealing the names they’d selected for their forthcoming child. If a boy, Scott or Brett. If a girl, Dana Lee.
Anna wasted no time writing back that the boy’s names, while not common or preferred family names, were, she supposed, acceptable.[1] But Dana Lee was not. You cannot give another girl child a boy’s name. What will I tell people? You mustn’t!
Since my sister’s birth four years earlier, Anna often reminded my parents that she detested the name they had given her. Kim. Not Kimberly, just Kim.
“It’s a boy’s name,” Grandma bemoaned, “and a foreign one.” The fact that Connie and Walter had tipped their hat to his mother by giving Kim the middle name Ann did not placate Grandma in the slightest. And now she was vehement that another grandchild not be branded with a ghastly, androgynous name.
My father was a peacemaker and a peacekeeper, and he also adored his wife. I imagine that his response to Connie’s quiet exasperation over his mother’s vehemence was, “If you want Dana Lee, we’ll go with Dana Lee. My mother will get over it.”
To which my mother—who adored him equally—likely responded, “It’s not worth angering your mother, let’s find another name we like that she can live with.”
After a moment’s thought, “How about Donna?”
“Donna Lee?”
“No, your mother says Lee is a boy’s name.” Long and very pregnant pause. “How about Donna Jean?”
Thus, peace reigned, delivered by a name no one especially liked, but everyone was willing to accept. Peace was going to be important. Walter’s parents still resided in San Francisco and the thought of living so close to her in-laws, who wanted her to call them “Mom” and “Dad,” sparked anxiety for Connie. She had never lived anywhere but Chicago, and, growing up in a loveless foster home, had never been blessed or burdened by family.
On top of everything, her in-laws were devout Christian Scientists. Connie was aware—though her husband’s parents had yet to discover—that she already had three strikes against her, being a smoker, a drinker, and an atheist. She had taught Walter to smoke and drink; he already shared her atheism.[2]
So, they were heading west, debauched by the big city and undoubtedly damned. “Donna Jean” was a small price to pay for harmony.
Connie didn’t entirely surrender. She tucked Dana Lee away in a pocket, to be pulled out occasionally and polished like a treasured trophy. She didn’t call me Dana Lee or misspell my name on birthday cakes, but every time we encountered someone named Dana, Mom would sigh That should have been your name, and recount the story of why it was not.
She knew better than most that names needn’t be permanent. She had shucked her own birth name, Maebelle, while still in single digits, and likely found comfort in telling herself, “Donna Jean is temporary. As soon as she’s old enough, she can change it to whatever she wishes, and I’ll tilt the scales toward Dana Lee.”
I started school aware that my name was a placeholder, a stand-in, like the substitute teachers we sometimes had. Acceptable, serviceable, but not the real deal.
For years, the name seemed off to me, like I was wearing someone else’s shoes. Donna had a breezy, blond frothiness that juddered against my self-perception. Introducing myself—gangly, plain, near-sighted—I felt I should apologize for falling short of expectations.
Despite my name ranking in the top twenty of girls’ names over the last century, I never encountered another Donna until I entered high school. Then suddenly, there were several. A slender, blond Donna played Laura in the school’s production of The Glass Menagerie. Another Donna—tall and nimble—was on the girls’ basketball team. A short, dark Donna sat two rows behind me in Spanish, and I sometimes shared a lab table in Chemistry with a skinny, bespectacled namesake. Did their mothers ever tell them they had the wrong name? The Donnas I met in high school were nothing like me, nor were they like one another. Yet each, I saw, was entirely a Donna. For my part, I was the Donna who joined the yearbook staff and participated in student protests against the Vietnam war.
The name didn’t define me, but perhaps I could define it. I began to see that it was up to me to embrace my name and shape it to who and what I would become. Slowly, I started to like Donna. And Donna started to claim me.
If my name had been my small cross to bear, Mom’s cross was her pious and imperious mother-in-law. My grandfather died within two years of our move back to the Bay Area. We lived about thirty miles from Grandma and saw her often, crossing the water to have dinner with her, or when my father was beckoned to make some home repair. At least one Friday a month, he would swing by her house on his way home from work so she could spend the weekend with us, then be dropped off again Monday morning.
Grandma had long abandoned hope of rescuing the souls of her son and daughter-in-law, but her youngest granddaughter was still ripe for the picking. While we played cards on those weekends she visited, she would talk to me about God as if He was someone she lunched with occasionally, and they both hoped I would join them.
“You do believe in God, don’t you?” she asked.
I didn’t want to disappoint her. I liked playing cards with her and suspected she sometimes let me win. Even at that early age, I understood my role in the family.
“I don’t know,” I answered. It was the best I could do. I'd stopped believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and I likened God to the myths I’d grown too big to believe in.
“Don’t worry,” Grandma said. “One day, you’ll know. On that day, you’ll see that God loves you, and He’ll always be with you. If you love Him and believe in Him, you’ll join Him in heaven when you die.”
Had my parents heard these conversations, my father would have rolled his eyes and my mother would have sputtered and topped off the vodka in her coffee cup. They knew better than to try to dissuade Grandma from proselytizing, but they also rejected her talk of religion.[3]
My father’s death when I was eleven put a stop to these weekends. It also sparked the only vocal disagreement I ever heard between my mother and grandmother. Mom considered funerals and memorial services to be barbaric, having been traumatized, at four years old, by her mother’s open casket funeral. She was determined there be no ritual of that sort for her husband. My grandmother was appalled. Everyone has a funeral. What would people say if we didn’t? She insisted with a mule-like intractability she knew her daughter-in-law could not overcome. As with the naming incident eleven years before, Mom had not the energy to face off with her mother-in-law. Recalling her husband’s abiding efforts to avoid discord, Mom gave in to a memorial service in a non-denominational chapel, and Grandma chalked up another victory.
Did Connie resent her domineering mother-in-law, the woman who overrode two decisions that should have been hers to make? She never said so. She called Anna weekly until Grandma’s death nearly twenty years after her son’s. When she died at age 97, there was no funeral.
Totally unaware of the irony accompanying her displeasure with my name, Mom frequently reminded me that my runner-up moniker need not be permanent. “Changing your name is easy,” she’d offer. She also encouraged me, at age sixteen, to bleach my hair, going so far as to buy for me hair coloring in a light shade that no teenager ever had come by naturally. She hoped I would start my senior year of high school as a slim, popular, silvery blonde—a delusion I didn’t share.
Noses, too, my mother informed, need not be permanent. This came as a surprise—not that people got nose-jobs—but that my particular nose was anything less than perfect.
Mom saw me staring into the mirror one morning, girding myself for another day of high school. “Don’t worry,” she assured, “if your nose gets any bigger, we can have it fixed.”
I liked my nose. It was long and straight, and didn’t curl up on the end as so many cheerleader noses did. It fit me. It was a Donna nose. Evidently, my mother would have preferred a Dana Lee nose.[4]
Perhaps I was obstinate, or just lazy, but more likely, content. I never changed my name, bleached my hair, or resculpted my nose. Would I be the same person I am today if I had, or if my mother had had her way all those years before?
Dana Lee, I think, would have been sprightly and athletic, perhaps a cheerleader. Donna was none of these and never wanted to be. Would we have made the same friends, taken the same career paths, married the same man? There is little value in speculating on the difference a name makes, or a nose. Thanks to my grandmother’s narrow-minded obstinance, my mother’s capitulation and discontent, and my own determination to make my own way, I have stumbled into myself.
I’ve accepted that I am Donna and embraced my Donnaness. Perhaps not perky, nor as fun at parties, I am my father’s legacy. Donna has been my destiny, determined even before my birth: peacekeeper.
[1] This from a woman who named her firstborn Dudley. My father, as second son, dodged a bullet.
[2] Being denied urgent medical care as a child because of your parents’ religious beliefs can do that to a person.
[3] They were not going to be lunching with God any time soon.
[4] Years later, Mom commented on the amplitude of my nose in front of my boyfriend. He immediately took issue and told her my nose was absolutely perfect and he loved it just as it was. That was the last time Mom disparaged my nose. Reader, I married him. Wouldn’t you?
~
Donna Cameron’s work touches readers worldwide in many languages. She is author of the Nautilus gold medal winner, A Year of Living Kindly, and the popular blog by the same title. Her short prose appears in many literary journals, anthologies, and other publications in the US and abroad, including The Washington Post, Writer’s Digest, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, SugarSugarSalt, and Brevity.
Honorable Mention - Doug Jacquier
Cooler Than Kerouac
The first car any of my friends had was a third-hand Australian-built Holden Torana. My pal, Greg, inherited that clapped-out shopping buggy from his Mum. However it served our suburban version of teen rebellion well enough, ferrying us to rock concerts and dark basement coffee shops, where it was a toss-up between the coffee and the folk singers for the level of gritty bitterness. On the weekends we would take off somewhere on a whim and leave the practicalities to fall where they may.
At that time, for us everything exotic and wild and dangerous was American or European. We were all fans of Chicago Blues, the writings of Kurt Vonnegut, and foreign movies with subtitles. It was generally thought we were weird but that suited what we imagined was our ineffable destiny.
One Saturday, Greg, Wal and I set off from Melbourne up the Hume Highway, with no plan other than to get back in time for work on Monday. Equipped with a road map and not much else, we were sure legends would follow, so we started taking detours into small towns along the way, based on their exotic names. None were remotely exotic and we spent an uncomfortable night trying to sleep in the car.
On Sunday, our scouring of the map unearthed Dora Dora (we figured that like New York, New York it had to be so good they named it twice). However, there were no Yellow Cabs; just a pub, a general store and a post office. All three were housed in the same building.
We entered the premises and were greeted by a bar of minuscule proportions. Behind the bar, a middle-aged man in a top hat, ensconced in what seemed to be a museum, kept reading his newspaper.
Hungry, I asked if he sold bread and ham for sandwiches. He said he did but he couldn’t sell them in the hotel. He stepped sideways about a yard and asked what we wanted. Having filled our order and it being a hot day and all, we decided to have a beer. ‘Three Carltons’ Greg said and the proprietor said ‘I can’t serve those in the store’. Retracing his steps, he proceeded to pull three beers in the ‘hotel’. Meanwhile, Wal had been examining a rack of dusty and faded postcards and said ‘I might send one of these to my Mum as a joke. Can I buy a stamp?’ The proprietor said ‘Sorry, it’s Sunday. Post office is closed.’
Defeated, we decided to abandon our half-baked Antipodean impersonation of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’ and head for the comforts of home.
Driving back to the City in the early hours of Sunday morning we pulled into what we’d learned to call a gas station on the highway. As we were about to get back into the car, we were approached by a couple with small backpacks.
From their accents they were clearly European, around 30, he bearded and she fashionably disheveled. Being the sophisticated, insightful young men we were, we fell for their story about being abandoned by their previous free ride and their need to be in the City as soon as possible to connect with their plane home. After a brief conference, we decided to help them out.
First mistake.
So we three Musketeers (or Mouseketeers in retrospect) bundled into the front and gave them the back seat. Wal drew the short straw of endangering his masculinity astride the handbrake. As we drove through the wee hours, the first inklings of having been duped emerged in my mind. The couple claimed to be French but it was clear that they weren’t far ahead of my lame schoolboy French repertoire.
The final straw came when it became patently obvious that they were engaging in the sort of conjugation that can only be achieved by contortionists in the back seat of a Torana.
Greg had had enough. He veered off the road and ordered them out. They were still fumbling with their clothing and pleading their desperate case when we sped off into the breaking dawn. Wal had back seat privileges as compensation for his discomfort in the front. He said “Hey, they’ve left one of their bags behind.” Greg said “Anything worth going back for?” Wal rummaged through the contents and emerged with a handful of passports, all with pictures of our so-called French hitchhikers, but each with a different name.
Such was our teenage outrage at being duped (and having had to listen to a couple of strangers get their rocks off with no regard for our hormone-fueled sensitivities), we decided to become virtuous citizens and hand over this damning proof of some sort of international conspiracy to the Police.
Second mistake.
In a moment that can only be excused by lack of sleep and having seen too many cop shows, we decided this needed the attention of Police HQ in the City.
Having breasted the counter with a sense of self-importance and what we imagined was urban cool, we told the duty sergeant our tale and showed him the passports. What we had failed to take into account was our own ragged appearance. And, believe me, there is no odour stronger than that generated by three sweaty, flatulent young male smokers in a confined space.
With impressive but terrifying efficiency, a senior detective decided that we were almost certainly accomplices of these villains and, having had some sort of falling out with them over the proceeds from some nefarious activity, we were now exacting our revenge.
I will spare you our pathetic attempts to provide a rational explanation for our odyssey and our fawning pleas of innocence but ultimately it appeared the police had decided we were too dumb to be accomplices and let us go.
We drove home without speaking but I remember thinking ‘This wouldn’t have happened to Kerouac.’
~
Doug Jacquier writes from the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. His work has been published in Australia, the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and India. He blogs at Six Crooked Highways and is the editor of the humour site, Witcraft.
