late on the deadline . . . been a bit overwhelmed

perhaps due entirely to my technological ineptitude, I've yet to figure out the google group . . .

They moved to Albuquerque from Ann Arbor in summer of ’95, at the onset of Dave’s sophomore year of high school. It was also the summer preceding pretty-haired Susannah’s entry into Vassar, the summer that Amy turned six, the summer after their mother had married Jack.

Dave noticed first the way the water didn’t hit his skin; the way that this sun sucked every drip of moisture out of him. It pulled even the snot from his nose and by the third day there he woke up with a nosebleed that stained his blue sheets brown and red. He pulled the sheets from his bed, gathered them in his arms, and walked across the hall to Susannah’s and Amy’s bedroom. He rapped twice on the door and heard Susannah moan, then pull herself out of her bed. She answered wearing a tanktop and shorts, her face flushed with the unbearable night heat.

“Gimme Amy’s sheets. I gotta run my own load,” Dave said.
Susannah, infamous for her inability to wake in the morning, walked to Amy’s twin bed and pulled her out. The smaller girl stirred, but her breathing slowed and her limbs relaxed as soon as she and Susannah were safely in Susannah’s bed, curled into each other. Dave put his own sheets on the floor, pulled off Amy’s, and carried both sets down to the basement.

Both girls were tied in their dark blonde hair, their curls looser in New Mexico’s aridity. Amy wore hers long and graceless, a tangled imitation of her older sister. Their hair was where their similarities ended: Susannah had the sharp and angled features of her father; Amy the full cheeks and green eyes of her father.

Hey...You...Guys...

Ho-laaa mis amigos de literatura,

I'm gonna throw it out there first thing, in case you don't read the rest of this post (have I already lost you?): Posting Deadline #3 this Friday. Let's make it happen.

Of course, Stacey and Sara are ahead of us all, posting wonderful stuff in between pseudofficial deadlines (coloring outside the lines, I like it). But for the rest of us, let's post a little something by Friday. Awesome turn-out last time. And don't be shy about commenting! I'm gonna vomit reactions all over your work (you can try to stop me, but it doesn't usually work...ask my friend Steve how the backseat of his old car is doin after he drove me home after a long tailgating weekend at Mizzou...we call his two-door beater the Black Panther, and now it smells like the similarly-named cologne in Anchorman), I just have a lot of feelings.

My past week was spent making a scrapbook for my mom's friend's 60th birthday party. Collecting stories and photos from everyone who's ever known her and recreating a life over more than half a century of jobs, cities, love affairs and shenanigans, was quite a job. But I did some lovely nostalgic anecdote writing, so I should be in fine shape when Hallmark comes calling.

I also applied for a few jobs and submitted creative work to a couple of journals. The journals were sweet because there was no fee, not even for postage since I was allowed to submit online. And they were both new start-ups, so there's a better chance my stuff will be read, at least. They were Broken Plate, out of Ball State U, and the Oklahoman Review, out of Oklahoma State. I think the deadlines have passed for those now, Stacey and everybody, but venues like that seem like a slightly better bet.

Today, I took my mom's other friend to the hospital and waited while she got new breasts. She had a double mastectomy in March, and says it feels like she's been wearing a metal Madonna-style cone bra under her chest-skin for seven months, so the real-er thing has gotta be better.

And finally, the last piece of good goings-on news in my life is that Mike, one of my best friends since junior high, who was hit by a car and suffered severe brain damage in March (that month kinda sucked for me), has started using his vocal chords to talk to us (he's way ahead mentally of what he's capable of expressing physically)... The cool, and naturally, typical Mike thing about it is that most of what he vocalizes are movie quotes. He does a mean Darth Vader impression ("Luuuke"), and also Sloth, from The Goonies, hence the title of this post.

And so. I just adjusted Barb (new boobs)'s pillows and am going to bed myself. To Stacey's question of what we're reading, I just finished Steinbeck's Travels With Charley and loved it. Now I think I have to read my uncle's teenage copy of A Clockwork Orange before I have to return it at Thanksgiving. But I'm open to suggestion.

Lastly, what was everyone for Halloween? Post pictures. I couldn't come up with anything and pulled something together at the last minute, a play-on-words costume. How very English major of me.

If you held on til the end of this post...sorry. Ruth! Ruth! Baby Ruth! Goonies never say die!