Featured

The Golden Girls Make Me Sick

I was in my late twenties and cancer took a great deal from me – mountains of money I didn’t have, a year of my life, some body parts, several friends, and “The Golden Girls.”

“The Golden Girls” ran for seven years on NBC, a whopping 180 episodes in total. By any standards, that’s an impressive run. The star power of the cast was undeniable. Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty delivered adult but family-friendly comedy, occasionally with a touch of drama to mix things up. The show’s staying power is impressive, its reruns are still available on streaming services and on demand via Hulu.

And to this day I cannot watch an episode without feeling a near overwhelming desire to vomit. This condition has improved over the years, but beginning in late 1991, a few years before the show ended, I could not so much as hear the show’s opening theme music without violent gastric distress. 

In 1991 I had cancer. Bad enough on its own, but add in a hospital wing being actively remodeled and a wall-mounted TV that got exactly one channel (NBC), the unfortunate timing of my chemotherapy, and the heavy rotation of  “The Golden Girls” reruns in the afternoon, and you’ve got yourself a witches brew, a confluence of ingredients ready made to create lasting associations.

I was in my late twenties and cancer took a great deal from me – mountains of money I didn’t have, a year of my life, some body parts, several friends, and “The Golden Girls.” The financial impact of cancer and the year of illness and recovery, these were temporary impacts compared to the Golden Girls-adjacent nausea. The body parts (I’ll spare you the gory details) while permanent losses, were manageable and sustainable losses, necessary for my survival.

The friends who walked away because they couldn’t handle the fact I might die or because, in at least one case, they thought I had AIDS, these too were sustainable losses – other friends rose to the occasion and remained steadfast during my illness and beyond.

But cancer has destroyed my enjoyment of “The Golden Girls.” My inpatient chemo was perfectly timed to run through the lunch hour. A nurse would hook up the IV bag, dial up the dose, then head off for their lunch break, a set-it-and-forget-it process, interrupted by the arrival of my hospital lunch. The quality of my meals, and I’m just being honest here, was rarely good on the way down and did not improve on the way up. 

But I had to eat and couldn’t always count on a visitor to bring me my favorite “I’m too sick to eat” meal of a baked potato and Frosty from Wendy’s. It was a struggle that dropped my weight from an unhealthy 275 pounds down to an even unhealthier 175. Although, on the upside, I had a 34 waist again for the first time since high school and could once again fit into my old American-made Levi’s. Nevertheless, it is not a weight loss strategy I can recommend.

There I would be, stuck in my hospital bed, a remote control for the TV that had two big and noisy buttons, On and Off, because there were no channels to change, and a few hours after starting my chemo both the nausea and the Golden Girls would arrive. “Thank You for Being a Friend” became the theme music for both the TV series and my episodes of retching. 

One might ask, “Why not turn the TV off?” and I would answer because I was stuck in a hospital bed, unable to sit up to read and desperate for any distraction that would help the time pass and simultaneously drown out the sounds of construction reverberating through the walls and floors. Also, the association between the sitcom and the sickness didn’t become apparent to me until the first time I watched the show at home after my treatment was complete and I was on my way to recovery.

I remember with absolute clarity the first time this complex relationship made itself manifest. It was one month after my last hospital stay. I was at home, alone, making dinner. I turned the TV on and by coincidence it was the top of the hour and “The Golden Girls” theme started playing. I was in the kitchen, the TV was on in living room – I couldn’t see the screen. Within seconds, I was making a beeline for the bathroom. Once I’d ejected everything I’d manage to eat that day, I entered the living room and plunked myself down on the sofa.

And I felt worse. Much worse. I decided to turn off the TV and put aside the meal I was making. The moment I shut off the television I started to feel better. Soon after I felt like I could get up, make dinner and go for a walk. Without thinking about it, I turned the TV back on and within seconds of Bea Arthur and Rue McClanahan exchanging a couple of snarky lines, I was ill again. 

Shut the TV off, and I felt better. That’s when I knew, “The Golden Girls” makes me sick. I know the title of this essay does not use proper grammar. Proper would be to say “The Golden Girls Makes Me Sick” because we’re talking about a singular TV series, but I like my title the way it is, there’s a better flow to it. At any rate, there’s one positive to this, which is the original Andrew Gold version of “Thank You for Being a Friend” is not now, nor has it ever been, a part of my medical oddity.

I’ve never been a big fan of the song, but it’s also never made me puke. I’ll put that in the plus column. Regarding “The Golden Girls,” as part of the writing of this essay I started an episode on YouTube, to see if the connection was still there. Sadly, it is safe to say, “The Golden Girls” still makes me sick.

In the grand scheme of things this problem is small and unimportant. But it’s an unusual remnant of a long-ago period of my life, one that reminds me more than anything else that I survived cancer and have now lived more years since I was diagnosed than I had lived before I fell ill. That’s at the very top of my plus column. You might say I’m durable, like a beloved sitcom, albeit not nearly as funny and hopefully never as nauseating.

One final note. After I recovered I spoke with a lawyer. I had been misdiagnosed by an ER doc who refused to listen to my symptoms and wrote my condition up as “stress induced gastritis.” He gave me a shot and sent me on my way. A few months later, the cancer had spread into my lungs and was making a forced march toward my brain. The lawyer told me, and I’m not sure he was right about this, but he told me I didn’t have a case for medical malpractice because I hadn’t suffer any permanent harm. I could debate this on any number of points, but from my current perspective, I’d say losing out on what was arguably one of the greatest sitcoms of all time represents a significant loss. There’s also that bit about the money and the body parts, but like I said, those were survivable. This Golden Girls issue is not going away.

Featured

Fitting In

Honorable Mention: Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2022

My short story “Fitting In” was published by The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. This month it received an Honorable Mention in the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2022 from Winning Writers. That’s top 12 out of over 2400 entries.

You can read it here, on the Dead Mule website or check out the judges comments and link to the story at Winning Writers.

Winning Writers is one of my favorite online resources for writers. Whether you’re starting your writing journey or are well-established, it has invaluable content and links to a long list of writing competitions.

Featured

Shoes

Shoes

A piece of flash fiction published by Drunk Monkeys – written a long time ago but seems quite relevant during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. You can read it here, or visit Drunk Monkeys and check out their other content.

https://www.drunkmonkeys.us/2017-posts/2022/3/14/fiction-shoes-ronald-mcguire

WordPress doesn’t like the Drunk Monkeys URL so I can’t embed it. A simple link will have to do.

Shoes

If I ask about your shoes, there’s a reason.

I was sitting in the waiting room – I’d driven a long way to see this one particular doctor – and I knew I had a long wait.

There was an elderly gentleman sitting alone when I got there. I checked in, then sat down near him.

I was filling out a stack of forms – I was a new patient and I had to tell them my life story. Do they think I remember the date when I had my tonsils out? Let’s skip that line.

I sit down, start filling in lines that are too small for my handwriting, and this elderly gentleman compliments my shoes.

I’m deliberate about my shoes. I have shoes for every occasion. As a bonus, my shoes last a long time. I have some I’ve never worn. I’m convinced one day I’ll be in a forest with an axe and those steel-toed shin-high American-made Red Wing boots will say “I told you so.”

“Those are nice shoes you have. One must have good shoes, and those you have are very nice.”

He says this with a German accent. I know this because I’d just spent the summer in Germany, and, yes, I speak German.

Everybody in Germany wanted to speak English. Everybody except the people protesting against the US military. What did they expect? We send plane-loads of 18 and 19 year-old kids over there and you think they’re all gonna behave? No way.

That didn’t have anything to do with me. I was there with my backpack kicking around while the Berlin wall was being broken down into a billion little pieces. I got bored after a while, so I hopped a train to Greece while I waited for the guy I met in Italy to meet me in Belgium to go to a concert. I thanked God, and my parents, every day I was there for the Unlimited Eurail Pass.

I speak enough German that I knew his accent was German.

I thanked him in German, which is easy, and you woulda thought I handed this man a bucket of gold coins. He was really happy. Which, to be honest, made me happy.

Since we didn’t have anything else to do, we talked about shoes. In German. Well, not entirely in German. My vokabular was pretty good, but it wasn’t that good.

He believed shoes were important, that you could learn a lot about someone from there shoes, and even more from how they felt about their shoes.

Maybe it sounds weird or crazy, but the alternative was to sit there in silence and wait to get called back to see the Doc. Why not have a conversation in German about shoes instead?

I don’t remember every word, but we kept at it until his grandson sat down next to him.

This is when things got interesting.

His grandson, a handsome dark-haired thirty-something with a lovely smile and a beautiful soft baritone voice, sat down after finishing up at the check-out counter. Is that what it’s called? I don’t know, the place in the office where you pay and set your next appointment, if you need one.

The handsome grandson sits down and listens to us talk in German then gives me this big perfect-white-toothy smile before he introduces himself. For the barest of seconds I thought about hitting on him, then I checked myself. Grandson wore a ring.

I asked grandson if he spoke German too, and he laughed and said “No way, my grandmother forbid it. My dad doesn’t speak German either.”

Oh. That’s curious. What’s up with that?

Grandad sees the look on my face and starts to explain.

He told me how he fled Germany as a young boy, when the Nazis took over. He escaped, his future wife escaped, and both of them lost their entire families to the concentration camps.

They each, separately, made it to England, with lots of help along the way, especially in France. Their paths didn’t cross until they were placed with two different families on the same street in London. Then they had to get out of London because the verdammt Nazis where bombing the hell out of the place.

They met, they fell in love, they survived the war, and they had not a penny to their names and no relatives left alive. They did what anyone back then would do – they went to America.

“Wir haben das Memo über Israel nicht erhalten,” grandad said, with a smile that looked a lot like grandson’s.

Once again they found themselves living with two families in the same neighborhood, this time in New York. They found jobs, saved up their money, and when the time was right, he proposed.

She said yes, on one condition.

He said “You name it” and she said “We will never speak German in our home, only English, and our children and their children and all the children that ever come after will never speak German.”

Grandson confirmed this, so I know it’s true.

Grandad agreed, they got married, and grandson was the son of their first child. They had five children and twelve grandchildren, so far.

Not one of them speaks a lick of Deutsch.

We went on like that until they finally called me back.

There was something peaceful and sweet in his manner, and about our talk, that caused time to stop for a while. I think other people were listening. In fact, the receptionist sent somebody back before me that should have gone after me. I was fine with it.

In the short time we had together we conversed about shame, hatred, family, love, country, forgiveness, a few other things you wouldn’t expect, and shoes. Sometimes indirectly, when to be direct wasn’t possible.

From this conversation I learned an entire philosophy of shoes, which I believe to be solid to this day.

So, like I said, if I ask about your shoes, there’s a reason.

Featured

So You Want to Be a Writer? Part 3

[My third essay for The Dillydoun Review, in which I make the case that writing is the journey and publication is the (first) destination.]

Writing is the First Step

So you want to be a writer, and the starting point seems obvious, write something! Therein lies the problem. Writing, creating, storytelling, that is the beginning of the journey, not the destination. The next step is getting published, and as hard as producing good work can be, getting it in front of readers (other than friends and family) can be the most difficult step to take. 

Let’s say you’ve done the work, you’ve refined your novel, you’ve even got objective feedback and some editorial guidance. Now what? Find an agent or a publisher or go the self-publish route? There’s a lot to unpack related to those decisions and processes, so I’m going to save that for my next essay. 

In this essay I’m going to focus on the business of getting your short work published digitally, in print, or both. Because you can go big and swing for the fences with your first novel if that works for you, but there are rewards to be reaped when you go small and submit your short stories, creative non-fiction and essays for publication. 

A quick search of the internet will turn up thousands of places to submit your work, including literary journals (online and print), writing contests, publishers (particularly anthologies), and several blogging/self-publishing platforms (e.g., Medium). The latter of these offer an opportunity to build and monetize an audience in a ways that didn’t exist before the internet. 

Before I dive into the more traditional offerings from this short list, I want to caution new writers. If you choose to post your work on a blog (even your own), or on sites like Medium or Wattpad, be aware that the overwhelming majority of literary journals, writing contests, and publishers consider anything published to any digital platform to be previously published work. This means either they will not consider the work for their platform/publication our it will be treated as a reprint, which at a minimum means any pay rate for the work will be lower than that for previously unpublished work. 

I have a WordPress site and I publish almost nothing there. I post links to my published work, which helps both my site and the publishing website. Right now my site generates about 2000 page views per day, which means several hundred people every day have the potential to discover new platforms where my work exists. Is it breaking any records? No, but if a literary journal publishes your work it’s in everyone’s best interest if you direct readers to that journal. The goal, as a new writer, is to get published and connect with readers. I recommend that you consider yourself in a symbiotic relationship with any publisher that gives your work a platform. 

With all that said, let’s talk about my three favorite places to submit work, and why. 

First and foremost, I love literary journals. I said there were thousands, but this is an understatement. There are online and print journals to match any and every taste and genre. Some are run by large well-funded teams affiliated with a university, others are side projects by young writers, some still in high school, and still others are the result of dedicated writers and editors who are passionate about the written word and give their heart and soul (as well as time and money) to an effort that might never generate revenue. 

One of the great things about submitting your work to a journal, whether online, print, or both, is that quite often you will receive editorial feedback on your submission. You may pay a reading fee to get that feedback, but as I said in my previous essay, this is a legitimate and useful tradeoff, a win-win situation. 

Keep in mind that most literary journals have limited resources and it takes time for submissions to go through the review process. Patience when submitting your work isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. If you’re not comfortable waiting, perhaps months, to find out if your work has been accepted, then you’re a good candidate for additional fees. In other words, if you want an expedited response, there are quite a few journals that will give you one for a price. To me this is fair, but keep in mind you are likely one of many writers who have submitted and paid a fee for a fast turnaround. The fee guarantees nothing beyond the response time – your odds of acceptance don’t go up, and might even go down due to the speed of the reply. Spend your money wisely. 

It’s a good idea to have multiple active submissions at any given moment, even if you’ve only produced one piece of work you feel is ready for submission. I personally do not like simultaneous submissions (submission of the same work to multiple journals). Yes, it is a numbers game to some extent and you need to write, submit, repeat. But as good as it feels to get a “yes” from one journal, if you’ve submitted to multiple journals you’ll have to withdraw your work from consideration from all of them. This is not fun, and while most journals accept work that has been submitted elsewhere, having a piece of work withdrawn is no fun for them either. 

My strategy: write, write, and write some more. When I’m not writing, I’m editing. When I think a piece is ready, I find a match (if I haven’t already) and submit. Then move on. Once you submit, it’s out of your hands so you might as well start something new. 

Because you never know when an opportunity is going to pop up, a call for submissions or a contest, that is a good match for your work. 

Writing contests are second on my list of favorite places to submit my work. Second because they tend to have a long run-up before even a short list is announced. I submitted two stories to a competition and by the time the winners were announced I had revised both stories several times and they were accepted for publication at two different journals. This is where my simultaneous submission rule breaks down. I’d rather withdraw from a competition if my work is accepted for publication than miss out on a chance to get published. To each their own on this point. 

Whether you win a competition, make the short list, or are rejected outright, there’s a lot of value in the process for new writers. At the least, you’ll see where you stand against other writers by reading the work of those who place in the competition. In some cases, your submission will garner critical feedback. Such a competition may have a higher entry fee, but in many cases it’s worth it. Just be clear on the vetting and feedback process before you pay your entry fees. As with anything, not every competition is worth the price. Of course, there’s always the chance your work will win the top prize. If this happens, make sure you shout it from the highest mountain top because you deserve the recognition, as does the competition. For lists of sites that can guide you to excellent writing competitions, check out the links in my first essay in this series. 

Finally, let’s talk about publishers. In this case I’m referring to book publishers who also publish anthologies of short work. An example of this would be Ab Terra, the sci-fi imprint of Brain Mill Press. While Ab Terra’s focus is on publishing novels, they also produce an annual sci-fi anthology. As with most publishers, submissions for these publications are usually open for a brief time once per year (more often for more frequently published anthologies). This is where preparation and patience are critical. Make sure your work is ready because there are no do-overs, and be certain you are a good fit for the publication because it could be months before you learn whether or not your work is accepted. 

The beauty of submitting your work to a publisher for an anthology like this is that the publication will be available in print, and if your piece is accepted, there’s nothing quite like holding a book and opening it to the page where your short story or essay lives. I just ordered two copies of the “Queer as Hell” anthology from Haunted MTL to give away because I honestly can’t wait to crack open the cover and see my story in print. This may not be special to everyone, but to me it’s the first time one of my short stories will appear in print, and in the end, getting published is, for me, the point. Getting published in a print anthology? That’s icing on the cake, and who doesn’t love a little icing now and again?

Just remember, like I said, it is a numbers game. If your work is solid and you know it’s ready, submit it and get back to writing. The more your write, the more you can submit, and in so doing, shift the odds a little more in your favor. Yes, you’ll have to deal with more rejection, but if you’re not ready for rejection, you’re not ready to submit. 

But if you’re truly ready, rejection will only make you stronger. Keep writing, keep reading, forge on. You got this.

TIP: If you’re submitting your work, you need a third-person bio. If you don’t know what that is, or how to write one, check out this great set of tips from the folks at Coverfly. (https://www.coverfly.com/5-tips-for-crafting-your-perfect-writer-bio/) Note that these tips are geared toward screenwriters, but they are still useful in helping any writer hone their “pitch.”

Featured

Fitting In

Fiction published by The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. This goes to a dark place, it is not for the faint of heart. If you can make it through to the end, you’ll see that the story is really about owning your truth, no matter the cost, because the lies will eat you alive. This story received an Honorable Mention from Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2022, a Winning Writers competition.

Enjoy it here, or visit Dead Mule for some truly extraordinary writing (and some fascinating “Southern Legitimacy Statements”).

Trigger Warnings: Violence and offensive language.

Ronald McGuire : Fiction : Sept. 2021

Fitting In

As a boy, I longed to speak like the other boys I met when we moved to Georgia.

My parents divorced when I was 4, and my earliest memories are blissful and dreamlike days and nights on my grandparent’s farm in Iowa, early dawn hours of sweet air laced with dew, drifting in with the birdsong through the open window by the bed I shared with my uncle. He was eight, and my moon and stars. I was parked there for a year while my mother went out of state to work and figure out how to make a new life as a single mother.

She married a man in Texas, and his job took us from Houston to New Orleans, then landed us in Georgia, just outside Atlanta. 

We got to Georgia as I was starting third grade. A teacher decided there was something wrong with the way I talked, so they set me up with a speech therapist. I don’t know what they set out to fix, but I could take a guess.

All I know is I wanted to sound like all the other kids. 

The boys in Georgia would say things like “ain’t” or “dang-it” or “fixin-to” or “crik” and I soaked it up like the earth soaks up the sun. 

My mother had no intention of raising what she called “a redneck kid.”

“You won’t go anywhere in life if you don’t speak proper English,” she would say. I never dared ask her what that said about her new husband, the man I called “dad,” and his Texas drawl.

I secretly cataloged the Southern-isms I heard and by high-school I could pass as a native, at least among those who didn’t know the truth. 

It felt good, those times I was anonymous, and could drop into the drawl and twang at will and be accepted like any other kid. 

It had other uses too, like the time a cop pulled me over for speeding. “Awright young man, I’m gonna write you a warnin’ this time, but I ketch you drivin’ hell-bent for leather agin an’ I’m writing’ ya for real, ya unnerstan’?”

“Yessir, I do, you ain’t never gonna see my face agin, offsir, I swear.” 

I could start a new job and slip into a conversation with the other employees without anyone asking me “Where you from boy?” 

Living this dual-dialect life also came in handy as training for how to deal with bigger problems. 

Like being gay at a time and in a place where such a thing could get a person killed, without much consequence. 

I had to talk a certain way, walk a certain way, be a certain way. I had to fit in. 

I perfected the act, until one day in Texas, senior year in college, when the lie was ripped away and the truth spilled out like the bloody entrails of a butchered animal. 

I had to face a new reality. I had to deal with it. I had to survive those walks across campus where it seemed everyone found joy in shouting out words like “faggot” and “cocksucker” and “queer,” perverting the beauty of their colloquial speech. It was a small school in a small town and everyone was in on the game. 

Then one Friday night, I had to fight it. 

A fraternity brother, Greg, came to my apartment half drunk and full of rage. He pounded on my door, screaming those words I heard every day. I could hear some of the other guys at the bottom of the stairs. “Damn, boy, give it a rest” or  “you’re gonna have the cops here, let’s git outta here” and  “what the hell’s wrong with you, man, the girls are waitin’ fir us.” 

I’d had enough. I was cornered, there was no other door. I couldn’t run if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to, not this time, not ever again.

I opened the door, and he rushed in. He must have thought being gay made me smaller or weaker. It made me scared, yes, but that night, scared made me dangerous. 

He came at me, eyes bloodshot from chugging cheap beer. Greg always drank before he drank. I fell back to buy some space, then grabbed his shirt and swung him around, intent on shoving him back out the front door, ready to throw punches. 

He was heavier than I expected. Instead of flinging him back the way he came, I sent him through the bank of windows set low in the wall next to the door. 

He crashed through and landed on the porch. I heard a familiar voice shout “Holy shit!” 

I stepped onto the front porch, looked down to the parking lot, glaring at the three below me. All of them dropped their “shit eatin’ grins” in a hurry. 

I looked back at my former friend, trying to extract himself from a glittering field of shattered glass, blood already flowing down his face in black-red rivers. 

My first impulse was to tell him I was sorry, to rush inside and grab a towel to staunch the bleeding, find some way to roll back the clock, try somehow to make things right. 

When he looked up at me I could see the force of his hatred rising, the pale blotches of his face  turning red, framed by ribbons of blood.

“You fuckin’ faggot!” he screamed, and started to rise. 

His scream purged that place in me that housed my empathy.

I was six foot two, and two hundred pounds of well honed muscle, with adrenalin and sobriety on my side. 

I grabbed him by his shirt again, pulled him the rest of the way to his feet, and flung him down the stairs. 

I hadn’t noticed the two guys rushing up, almost at my landing, until I released Greg to the open air. The ascending and descending forces collided, neutralizing one other. They fell back, none the worse for wear. 

It could have ended there. They tried to pull Greg away, to end the mayhem. The neighbors would put up with a lot, especially when it came to me, but screams and shattering glass crossed the line. 

Greg shook them off, shoved them away, then turned to look up at me. Before he could speak, I started down the stairs. 

All my life, even before that night and ever since, I have experienced profound states of calm in the most dire of circumstances. A car accident, a boat sinking beneath me, a gun pointed at my face, all of these things, and more, had already happened to me before that Friday night. Such situations, when most panic, bring me to an intense mental focus and physical calm. Some special cells in my brain take over and say, “You got this, let’s go.” 

When this has happened, people have said I looked different, like another person, like no one they’ve ever seen before, someone that frightened them. Only years later did I learn it had a name – dissociation. 

In the case of Greg, my first two steps toward him brought him to a halt and silenced his voice. 

I didn’t stop. 

He step backwards and slipped on his own blood. He stumbled down to the shared landing between the two second-floor apartments, and fell to his knees, leaving another puddle of himself on the concrete surface. 

I kept going. 

He couldn’t get to his feet, instead grabbing the next step below him and dragging himself lower. The two who had abandoned him on the staircase came back. They grabbed him by the armpits and dragged him the rest of the way to the parking lot.

I maintained my deliberate pace.

The four of them backed away, all now speechless, until finally the one who I knew wanted least of all to be there said “awright, dammit, awright, it’s a ‘nuff already.”  

Then I stopped. His voice grabbed my attention, then his eyes held it.

In a flash I relived all the times we’d spent together, Mark and I. The football games, the parties, the booze, and of course that one particular night, after the party died down, our lives coming together in a fearful embrace that grew into something more. Something I thought would last forever.

Until I walked into his room one afternoon, using the front door key he’d given me almost as an afterthought. I knew the man he was with that day, but even if I hadn’t, my heart would still have broken. The image of the two of them together, burned into my memory.

I made my threats, and he made his, though mine were empty and his became my new reality, placing us on the path we were all now walking. 

I suppose there’s a fine line between powerful love and raging hate, and I’d found the way to push him, and everyone else it seemed, across that line. He told a few friends, and in a few day’s time my secret life became an open book, a story to be told and spread with whispered voices in the halls and courtyards and ballfields of higher education. 

I didn’t know it then, but though he seemed safe behind his accusations and condemnations, his world was growing smaller and darker than it had ever been. Hindsight educates my understanding of him in a way the experience couldn’t. All I knew then was betrayal and the pain that came with it.

I looked into those pricing blue eyes, and felt it all again. I had to look away from him, to hold back my tears. 

I scanned their faces, took note of Greg’s fear, then returned to the source of my suffering. When I saw the look on Mark’s face, with no hint of sadness or regret, I didn’t feel like crying after all. 

“Forget I exist,” I said, choking out all the disgust my throat could carry, “I’ve already forgotten you.” 

I turned away and headed back up the stairs as the wailing sirens grew closer. I climbed up to my porch and sat on the edge, my legs draped over the top steps. 

They piled Greg into the backseat of Mark’s car and before he got in, Mark looked up at me. His face never changed, even as he raised his right hand and shoved his middle finger into the air, a performative act for everyone peeking out through their curtains to witness. I laughed at the impotence of it. He responded by getting in the driver’s seat and slamming the door behind him.

I watched the life I’d known drive away, taillights rushing into the darkness, until the space around me filled with flashing blues and reds, sounds of brakes screeching to a sudden halt. 

Four cars, eight officers in all. I guess someone convinced them it was necessary, or maybe they were just bored cops working in a small town. 

They held a little confab below me, then one of them made his way up the steps, scanning with his flashlight, trying not to step in any evidence. 

I knew him and he knew me. I’d done a month of nightly ride-alongs with him as part of my criminal justice curriculum. 

“Hello Tom,” I said. It’d been a while, but I knew we were still on a first-name basis, “how ya doin’?”

“I might ask you the same question,” he said, “you wanna tell me what happened?”

“Not really.” 

“Any of this blood belong to you?”

“Nope.”

“You wanna file a report?”

He was standing with his eyes level to mine, just a few feet away. I looked down at the gaggle of officers in the parking lot, all of them with a hand on a hip. 

“No,” I said. My voice was calm, my heart beat slow and steady, I felt lighter than I had in years.

“This gonna be a regular thing, ya think?”

“That’s not up to me.”

“No, I guess not,” he said. 

With a look down and a nod of his head, everyone but his partner returned to their cars and drove away, lights blinking out as they went.

When they were gone, he leaned in and stared into my eyes. I returned his stare. 

“Buddy,” he said, knowing I liked it when he called me that, “you know we can’t protect you. There’s just not…”

“Did I ask you to?”

“It’s my job…”

“And you can’t do it.”

“I’m not your enemy…”

“Yes,” I replied, cool as a Hill Country winter, “you are.” 

He pulled back and his voice rose an octave when he asked “How so?”

“The truth used to be my enemy. Now it’s the lie. You’re part of the lie.” 

He raised his palms up, “Whatdya want me to do?”

“Nothing.”

We looked at each other until he shook his head and let out a sharp exhale that sounded like defeat. 

“You sure you wanna stick it out here?”

“I’ve got three months, then I’m done, nobody’s taking that from me.”

“Might be easier for ya back in Georgia.”

“Here, there, what’s the difference?” 

I looked over my shoulder at my ruined window, then down the stairs at the blood already drying on the steps. 

“Besides,” I said, “I think I made my point.”

“You think this is gonna quiet things down a bit?”

“Yes,” I said, and believed it, “it’s a small town, news travels fast.”

After that night, I moved through the world like a boulder in a stream, life rushing around me as I waited out the weeks. Some still shouted their hate when I walked across campus, while a few made attempts at eye contact, flashing fervent smiles filled with sadness. 

None of it mattered.

I was alone, an outcast in a world filled with lies. 

But I wasn’t afraid anymore.