Better Late Than Never by Kelly Butler

I walked to school every day until I was ten years old. In the late summer, when school was just beginning, the air was warm even in the early hours of the morning. My friends would ride their bikes to school and I remember seeing them fly past me. The wind blew at their faces, and the sticky summer air turned into a cool blanket. It swirled around them as they arrived at their destination. I would run alongside them, trying to move my tiny legs fast enough to keep up with their ten-speed bicycles, but to no avail.  Their bikes would carry them effortlessly along the pavement, while mine stomped along the sidewalk trying to maintain pace. I remember my first bike—a bright pink Huffy that had swirls along the frame, it was the perfect vehicle to carry me to school. There was only one problem; I didn’t know how to ride it. Every day before I went to school I would sit on it, hoping to learn through osmosis, but with little success.  Finally, the day came where I had had enough. I asked my mom a question that had plagued me for a while “Can you teach me how to ride my bike?”


Her words hung in the air “Sure, I’ll teach you this weekend.” Even such a simple response sent oceans of nerves to my head. The anticipation made the next few days unbearable. Each hour crawled by at an agonizingly slow pace that made snails look fast. Finally Friday came and I ran home from school in pursuit of my bright pink bicycle. I imagined myself gliding down the street just like my friends had, with my feet peddling me along. I arrived home and waited impatiently for my mother to return from work. I paced in front of the door like a dog, and even stood at the window once I heard her car come up the driveway. I told myself to give my mother enough time to settle in before I asked her to teach me how to ride a bike, which to my ten year-old brain meant enough time for her to walk through the front door. She just gave me a gentle “In a minute” but I could not wait another second. My melodramatic brain threw a fit and caused my mother to banish me to my room and revoke my biking lessons for an entire day. My tiny feet stomped up the stairs in protest as I made my way to my bedroom. This is where I remained until dinner, wishing with all my heart that I knew how to ride a bike. That night, I dozed off to visions of roads and sidewalks painted by my pink bike. The wind blew my hair back and my long, auburn strands melted into a sunset of roses and reds.


The sound of my brothers running in the hallway woke me up. My clock read 7:00AM, a modest time for my rambunctious five year-old brothers to cluck everyone in the house awake. I got up and dressed for the day rushing downstairs to assemble my arsenal of safety. I adorned an oversized helmet, courtesy of my older brother, as well as knee, elbow, and shin pads. My mother came downstairs and saw my apparel, and knew that it was time for me to learn how to conquer my pink beast on wheels.
Arriving outside, I stared the pink fiend down behind the visor of my brother’s helmet. Not only did it seem to have grown three sizes since the day before, but the handlebars were suddenly sharp and capable of the deadliest offenses. My mother held the bike up and told me to get on it. I stood on my highest tiptoes to mount the monstrosity. Looking back on it now, it only stood barely two feet high and I could have easily made the feat. My mother giggled as my lanky arms twisted around the handlebars and my legs wrapped the frame in order to support myself. Slowly but surely, I had affixed myself onto the bike. Now was the hard part; staying there.


I don’t remember exactly how many times I hit the ground that day. To say that it was a few would be an understatement. My palms were raw from hitting the pavement and I swear that I lost a kneepad that day. My mother saw how meek her efforts were at keeping the gangly ten year-old atop a vehicle, so she took solace in my father, who had just arrived home from work. I looked up from my bike at my dad, casting a tall shadow over my worn face. He told me to “Make a game of it. Time yourself and see how many seconds you can ride before you fall.” A game? I liked games. I accepted his challenge and walked my bike to the farthest edge of my driveway.


My mother positioned herself behind me, holding me up, and I began counting. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three—and then I would lose it. My father encouraged me to pedal faster. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four miss—and I would fall again. This time, however, I stayed down. My hands were raw and my knees were bloody from hitting the ground. I began to cry. Why was it that everyone else could ride a bike and I couldn’t? Was I stupid?


My dad saw me crying and picked me up. He told me not to give up, and that if I got it the next time I tried that he would take me to the store and get me my own helmet and pads. I accepted his offer and climbed the bike once more. I had to get it this time. I had to be able to do it. I closed my eyes and remembered my dream. I imagined myself floating down the street with the wind at my face. I opened my eyes. My mother was right behind me and I started to pedal. I counted in my head one Mississippi, pink tassels, two Mississippi, my feet were gliding alongside the bike, three Mississippi, the bike tilted to the side, and I was afraid that I was going to fall, but recovered, four Mississippi, I feel the wind at my face, five Mississippi, I tell my mom to let go, six Mississippi, she already had.


The next morning, I saw my friends on their bikes riding to school. They waved for me to run alongside them, but instead I shook my head and went back towards my garage. I looked at my pink vehicle. It was no longer a symbol of what I could be, nor was it a device laced with fear and pain. Suddenly, standing there ready to go to school, it was a symbol of freedom. I would no longer have to run beside my friends. Today, my feet would pedal alongside the pink frame instead of stomp the hard pavement. Mounted upon my bicycle, I cycled myself outside towards my friends. Once they saw me upon my rose masterpiece, they pedaled around me, birds flocking to a new member of their group. My heart soared with excitement as we made our way to school, because today, with my bike, I could fly.

Kelly Butler is an undergraduate student at Columbia College in Chicago. Being a native of Chicago, she is often inspired by the music, childhood memories, and the vast landscape of the city.

Sound by Jacquelyn Mixon

It was a gray afternoon with clouds filling the sky. The air was damp and would have been chilly if not for the constant breathe of all of the people waiting outside of the Shoebox Theater. The weather was not exactly pleasant, but that is what you expect when you venture to downtown Seattle in early autumn. The crowd there was less than desirable. The sickly sweet smell of marijuana and the bitterness of cigarette smoke would constantly invade your nasal cavity. I had never even listened to the band before the show, but at the time I was less concerned with the music and more distressed by the man in a leather jumpsuit with the dilated pupils in front of me.

Concerts had never really been my thing, especially when they involved such an obnoxious crowd.
Everyone had been screeching at friends who were at different parts of the line or cackling at some lame sex joke. My brother, Sam, had been dying to see the band play. They were his favorite and they forced his usually sullen attitude out the window to be replaced with one that resembled a child on Christmas. I never fully understood his love for their music until that day. I was more concentrated on how out of place I felt instead of the experience.

Big, burly security guards dressed in all black stalked up and down the long line of people, howling, “No recording of the concert is allowed! That means no photography, no video, and no sound recording!”

Their strange mantra continued as the doors were opened and we were all herded inside to get our first look at the place.  The interior of the theater was smaller than I expected. The lightning gave it a magenta hue which made the attendants’ faces a light wan color. The ground was made of smoothed out concrete that gave the impression of someone forgetting to add the final layer to the floor plan. There was a makeshift, off-white table in a corner selling over-priced purple and blue t-shirts. It wobbled and threatened to topple over whenever anyone leaned against it. A woman dressed in the same garb as the security guards stood in front of the doors handing out pink and purple ear plugs.  

I was separated from my brother soon after the opening band came on and everything got worse from there. He moved effortlessly through the slew of people to the front of the stage, while I awkwardly tried to follow. I ended up ramming my lips into the side of a six foot tall behemoth of a frat boy. I basically ended up licking his bicep and reeled in disgust. He tasted vinegary and sour, like an expired bag of chips. He did not even glance back at me while I forced my way through the crowd, threatening to vomit from his taste.  I ended up being pushed to the side next to cast away trunks from the band. I sighed and just sat down on the ground, regretting that I came. The opening band sounded like a dying a vulture. I do not even remember their name or what they looked like. I was miserable and was reduced to just watching everyone clumsily gyrate to the music. The opening band finally took their last bows, and moved off stage. I pondered just leaving then while I had the chance, but my fear of being alone in the big city beat out my melancholy.

My Bloody Valentine finally took the stage. The members were relatively older, most of them in their fifties. The band had hit their stride in the early nineties and was doing a comeback tour after twenty years of separation. The front female vocalist wore a lime green dress with a dark brown cardigan and tapered heels. She looked extremely elegant, which was surprising considering the crowd she produced. Her hair was brown, curled, and fell delicately onto her shoulders. She carried an electric guitar with a brown strap that melted into her hair. The front male vocalist had a gray curly mop of hair on his head and wore slacks and what looked like a tweed jacket. He looked more like a professor than a rock star. The theater erupted as they came on to the stage. They all seemed to form a single voice, which begged for them to begin. I slouched further into myself, feeling out of place with all of the die-hard fans. Then, they began to play.

It was of course loud, but a different kind of loud than the opening band. It was some sort of out-of-this-world mixture of soft voices and exhilarating instrumentals. The woman who was dressed in green sang like a dove. She literally cooed. In different circumstances it would have been ridiculous, but there it was lovely. Also, it was a striking contrast from the loudness of their guitars and the mashing of effect pedals from some unseen magician. The male vocalist was lower and almost had a gravely sound to his voice. His sound was a stark difference from hers that somehow merged together perfectly.  Listening to it caused relaxation and a feeling of intoxication.

When the concert ended it felt like waking up from a dream. Everything was hazy and wonderful. I reunited with Sam and we walked out into the Seattle streets completely dazzled by what we had experienced. It was especially cold that night, and a bit windy. Goosebumps prickled our skin as we waited for our ride. Words were not really said then because nothing needed to be said. I just finally understood his love for music after witnessing first-hand what phenomenal sound was really like.



Jacquelyn Mixon was born in Fountain Valley California in 1997 and moved to Morton Washington in 2007 with her older brother and mother. She is currently a student at both Centralia College East and Morton Senior High School with hopes of becoming a novelist.

The Pottery Barn Look by Wes Adamson

The man…his face was one you could get lost in. His face shared the daily wear of years of gazing…pondering…and being encompassed by the blistering Mexican sun. My new friend’s facial lines seemed to run as rivers dividing his features into years of hardships. During our exchange of good morning gestures Antonio was particularly expressive when he smiled.  His facial lines would meet and seem to overflow into a canyon of a smile showing numerous darkened earth tone teeth at the mouth’s entrance. I never knew if he was smiling or laughing at such a funny American guy attempting to use body language to assimilate his way into Spanish culture.

His name was Antonio and his microscopic plot of land was enclosed by barbed wire fence to either define his poverty lease or mark what he had borrowed from mother earth. This simple dirt square was not his, but a temporary loan from a distant affluent landowner.  In this case, the dirt beneath his feet could be erased at any time the landlord nodded his head. His brownish sun faded face, reminded me of some fashionable Pottery Barn accent color advertised for its stylish southwestern stonewash look. But the eyes of that face had more of a dull opaque look; they had seen much more than one lifetime usually allows. His eyes teased me; I wanted to go inside and rewind his life like watching a 3D movie to dissect thoughts…visions, related to years of insight living in a simpler world. I would later recognize comparable features in other eyes when we encountered homeless people in Cincinnati, and similar reflections in the eyes of HIV infected men and women pigeonholed in an isolated neglected AIDS Camp, which our group worked at in the Bahamas. I remember again that disconnected distant look in the eyes of people we met, discarded on the mountainous poverty roadsides of Appalachia. These eyes are all repeated glimpses of diverse shapes, sizes and colors, all showing a deep dejected view of a struggle lost. They represent the once dazzling eyes of youth’s bright vision of life’s dreams, but these become quickly suspended for survival reasons and/or shelved in some box in a spider-web bedroom closet, never to be opened again.

My Mexican friend, Antonio, with whom I communicated that week with countless warm eye smiles and hand hugs, lived under a tin roof, inside a dirt floor shack nearby the dwelling we were building. He was so thrilled and nodded his approval on the day that the west sidewall of the small house my group of students were building for his neighbor was raised providing him desirable shade to sit and wash his prized empty glass bottles. The bottles he unearthed at the dump would be cleaned with a smudged rag affixed to a stick by a crooked nail that scrape the glass bottle edges every turn of the stick, echoing the chilling sounds of fingernails itching a chalkboard. The bottles gurgled in the dust-covered water surrounded by dented, corroded metal tub sides, to later be sold for a few centavos at the local street market. Antonio invited me to visit him in his home one morning showing his one-room hard-packed earth floor surroundings where he slept and prepared his food. The bed consisted of layers of old worn sheets, cushioned with large pieces of rags or cloth, topped off by a tattered frayed blanket for a cover. The thought-provoking observation is that our two lab dogs, Jake and Blue, had a better sleeping bed area than he did. But Antonio never seemed to complain about his living conditions or display any jealousy over what we were building next door. Antonio, I feel, accepted that this was what the hand of cards held for him. He, like many of his Mexican peasant community, seemed to recognize and value simple daily pleasures versus the burden of possessions that clogs the drains in life.



Wes Anderson grew up on a farm in southern Ohio. A lot of what he writes about comes from the basic understanding of nature, animals, and people learned through the insight of his parents who knew how to interweave it all into a meaningful life.

The Man Who Hated Dogs by Jean Venable

Dogs were without question at the top of the list. But there were other creatures for whom he had little affection as well: Deer, for instance, the ones who nibbled at the seedlings in his newly created tree nursery. For these he had devised a special deterrent: a sturdy slingshot which he fastened to the railing of his deck with a vice. Whenever he spotted deer dining in his nursery beds out in the meadow he would take a cherry bomb, pull it back as far as it would go in the sling, light it, and let it rip, aiming it in a high arc over the heads of the perpetrators. When it went off, there would be a precipitous dispersal of the munchers, and the nursery owner, who was also a college professsor and my father, would go back into his house a satisfied man.

Dogs were another matter. There was nothing that they did that was in any way harmful to his person or his property; he just didn’t like them. Thought they should be exterminated from the United States. They slobbered and licked and smelled bad, and worst of all, in social situations where interaction could not be avoided, he had to camouflage his repugnance.

One day dear friends of my parents were coming from New Haven for a visit. Their children were grown, and the light of their lives was their Dalmatian, Jires. For an hour-and-a-half before their arrival there was animated discussion about the likelihood, or not, of their being accompanied on this visit by Jires. My father could not believe that they would be so presumptuous as to  do this without at least calling first. My mother, sister, and I thought it was extremely unlikely that they would appear at our door without Jires. My father suggested that we put our money where our mouths were and make a three-to-one wager: if Jires came, he had to give us each a buck, and if there was no Jires, we owed him three bucks.

When the couple arrived, we tried not to be too obvious peering past them when we opened the front door, but there was no Jires to be seen. After the initial greetings my father, barely concealing his smirk, casually inquired as to the absence of Jires. Our guests’ faces fell, simultaneously. “We were too upset to break it to you over the phone,” the wife said, struggling for composure, “but we lost Jires last Thursday!” My father, perhaps utilizing the Thespian abilities that had dazzled his philosophy students, let out an anguished, “Oh no!!! What happened???” whereupon the details of Jire’s passing were laid out – a scenario during which there was minimum eye contact among the members of the host family. After our friends had gone, we agreed that under the circumstances, my father’s was not a clean victory, and by the time we all went to bed, he had magnanimously waived the three dollars we owed him.

My father’s antipathy toward dogs was not limited to situations in which he was forced to be in close contact with them. A particular object of dislike was the German Shepherd owned by his neighbor, Sweeny, who himself was not a favorite. Sweeny had made the mistake early on of appearing uninvited in his bathing suit at the edge of my  father’s pond. Sweeny’s house was located at the end of my father’s long driveway, part way up the dirt road that led to the highway. Whenever you drove away from our house you had to Pass Sweeny’s place and brace yourself for the onslaught of the Shepherd, who would come tearing out of the bushes, barking and leaping toward the car. It was indeed unnerving, partly because you knew it was going to happen, like waiting for the toast to pop, and partly because you were afraid you might inadvertently run him over. My mother and sister and I didn’t like it any more than my father did, but we were extremely uneasy when he came back from an errand one day and announced, “I’ve solved the Sweeny dog problem!” To our relief, the solution turned out to be simply that he keep a pile of fire crackers on his dashboard, and as the dog crept out for his attack, my father would light one with his Zippo lighter and toss it out the window as he drove by. After his initial success it took only one more drive-by and detonation for the dog to lie low whenever my father approached. As my mother and sister and I weren’t interested in dealing with incendiary devises while we drove, we continued to endure the annoyance of the dog. One day, however, I was low on gas and borrowed my father’s car to go to the market. My stomach muscles tightened as I approached Sweeny’s place, but the dog took one look at the car and did an immediate about-face, slinking away with his tail between his legs. When I got back and reported this to my father, he was pleased with the carry-over effectiveness of his method, but seemed slightly deflated that the dog’s fear was based solely on the car, rather than on his intimidating presence. He did grudgingly admit that the car recognition on the part of the dog indicated a certain amount of intelligence—an attribute he had never been willing to ascribe to the dog’s owner, Sweeny.

My father’s attempts to control his environment were occasionally thwarted by creatures other than dogs and deer. One evening when my parents came home after a party, they were greeted with the sight of a large raccoon in the middle of the dining table, making a meal of the fruit decoratively assembled in a glass-stemmed bowl at the table’s center. It had apparently entered through the special door my father had rigged up for our cat. The cat, who was never allowed on the table, was sitting off to the side on the rug, observing this tableau with what my parents claimed was an unmistakable smile, anticipating the punishment she knew awaited the raccoon.

A wild chase ensued, with my father shouting, “Scram, beat it!” and the raccoon running with fructose paws all over the chairs and the couch, in every direction but toward the door opening onto the deck. By the time my father succeeded in getting it out, there were juice stains on every surface, and the only vestige of contentment was on the part of the cat, who followed the raccoon out, perhaps feeling that this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Several weeks later, it was the deer who were again to be my father’s bete noir, when he spied two of them at the far side of the meadow, gnawing at his andromeda bushes. When he went to the garage to get a cherry bomb he discovered that he had run out. Thinking quickly, he grabbed the covers of two tin garbage cans, and using them as cymbals, tore across the field clashing them and wildly shouting at the deer. As my mother and sister and I looked on from the deck, the deer glanced up at my father, turned to look at each other, looked back at my father and resumed peacefully munching.



Jean Venable was a writer/producer for NBC Network News in New York City for 25 years. Married, one son, seven stepchildren. Recently published in Biostories.com (upcoming April 2014) and A Narrow Fellow, Journal of Poetry.

A Year in Review by Sarah Karpovich

Nonfiction

“I had a good day,” Michelle says to me on the phone. “For once.”

It’s always the little things: the funny guy at the coffee shop, the warm bagel, getting to the bus stop on time. I wonder briefly, stupidly, how long the stages of grief typically last. What was this, acceptance? What comes before that?

A year before this, she called unexpectedly. We spent the first minute not speaking; we couldn’t. When she finally choked out a few words, I misheard her. Didn’t I? I had to have misheard her. She cried some more. I cried. We hung up. Did I dream this? I couldn’t go downstairs and relay the message because it wasn’t true and wouldn’t that be just an awful story to make up? What did she say, then?

The day before the funeral we sat together at her kitchen table. The doorbell kept ringing; family and friends kept arriving, kept sobbing, kept smiling. She smiled gently, offered them food, gave them drinks. She washed dishes. I crawled under the stairs to cry on the phone while she put her mom to bed. In the cafe at Walmart she told me very matter-of-factly that her dad was the one who had pushed, who had motivated her, who had believed in her, as if he were the only one. She didn’t know where to go from here, and I didn’t know what to tell her. I just held her hand.

Sometimes, on days when I don’t even talk to her, I’ll get a flash of something and feel the familiar sting at the corners of my eyes. Someone will speak with his accent or say, “Sorry about the mess,” and it’ll set off a silent montage. The navy hat he used to wear, that sly little smile, his silly Halloween pranks, the way he apologized to me every single day for the clutter on the dining room table that we both knew wasn’t going anywhere. Once he recorded his catch phrases for our friend Julia. “Be cool,” he said. “Stay in school!” I wonder if she still has that old phone, if maybe we could hear his voice today. Then I wonder if we’d want to. Would it send Michelle back to square one? Would it help?

She and her sisters have called me their own since we first met, and it’s always been true, but when I go home for holidays I still get to hear my dad laughing in the next room. I get that warm, safe hug. He checks the tires on my car. He makes pancakes and tells the same jokes he’s been telling me my whole life. So we’re sisters until we remember that we’re not, that we don’t have to suffer the same fate. We’re sisters until some chasm opens up and separates us. I can’t cross over, can’t be in her place, can’t bear that pain for her.

What can I do, then? I’ve tried all I can think of. I wrote poems and letters, sent flowers, flew to Atlanta, drove to DC, drank and ate and sang. I came to visit when she was alone. I came to celebrate when all her sisters were together. I asked how her mom was doing. Last spring I would have skipped the entire first week of class if it would have helped. Ten hours on a bus was nothing. Holding her hand at the cemetery didn’t seem like enough. I wanted so badly to fix it. I wanted so badly to make her better. But if there’s anything that can accomplish that task it isn’t me. It’s just time.

I’ve been waiting for today’s call for eleven and a half months. I’ve been waiting to hear her smile. When we’d hang up after a discussion of alternate realities, or a movie about a dead four-year-old, when I’d curl up under my blankets and feel so small and far away, I was always waiting for this. The next call had to be the one. The next day had to be good. 


Sarah Karpovich recently graduated from Loyola Maryland with a B.A. in Spanish and Writing. She lives in Baltimore and works at a cafe, writing mostly latté orders and daily specials. She has published electronically in The Journal and The Hunt.