Stranger in a Strange Place

                                              Mr. Ligon wit h his original artwork in the background     It was orange, slightly pear-shaped, and effervescent, just like Scott. He had an angular drape of naturally bright orange hair brushing over his nose to his chin, and abruptly shaved tight on one side. He was the comic-book reading, model-painting, early video-game playing type, but don't mistake that for being inactive. We used to walk the rails, or at least I always wished he was walking the rails with me. I don't remember anymore.      He was a surrealist- he was always painting, sculpting, spilling paint on carpet, eating junk food and sewing old keys to his military jacket like jangly badges of repetitive nonsense. Very Dadist. He was witty and so weird but amiable and fun and child-lik...

                                                                     The bodies of the women and children were lying in burning heaps among the wreckage of tipis  and scattered belongings, smoke trailing towards the electric blue sky like an offering to the gods.  Crackling skin sizzled and popped as the corpses blackened and began to turn into glowing tangles of  limbs and skulls. The aroma of cooked flesh had attracted the attention of a pack of coyotes now sitting  on the ridgeline, waiting for dusk for their chance to reap the benefits of human violence against  humans. At least the coyotes eat what they kill. Besides the sound of the burning bodies and the whistle of the wind in the grass, there was a horrible quiet sitting like a fog over the ...

    It occurred to me that I never wrote about Ruby. I never told her story in full because its such a sad one- I have spent 23 years feeling like I’ve carried the unspeakable around- protecting other people from knowing about the darker side of motherhood I was trapped in for a brief period of my life. Even though what happened is incredibly common among women of childbearing age, it’s still a fact of life that nobody wants to hear, so I kept my story buried below the pleasantries and superficialness of being around others who haven’t experienced something as nightmarish. Nobody wants to have me bring down the room with my bummer of a life story. Even if it’s the biggest event in my life that affected me in every way- even if I think about it every day, I don’t talk about her because of other people’s discomfort at hearing it. I hate the faux-pity and the way people treat me when I have confessed this burden.  And also, just telling someone some of the basic facts do...

  As an infant, my mother observed right away that I didn’t have the same coloring as my two other sisters. Abby and Mindy were light haired, pale blue eyes with alabaster white skin like the Scandinavians on my father’s side of the family. I recall many sunburns over the summers of my childhood- those two being literally the fairest of us all were blistered and slathered with vitamin E reliably. I was born with an abundance of dark wavy hair and green eyes, likely passed genetically from the Smith side of the family who are mostly British and Scottish. Although I also had freakishly pale skin that took a tan only slightly better than my sisters, all it took to mark me as different was having dark hair and green eyes to be set apart from my older sisters. It also didn’t help that my mother took to dressing Abby and Mindy in matching outfits as if they were twins, and that Abby had to have all the things Mindy had or she would melt down into an exhausting tirade. Even had to have ...

    “What is that?” Oscar asked, tracing the outline of my birthmark with his chubby toddler index finger in the lamplight as we were snuggling up before bedtime. His warm little body nestled into mine just like it did when it was still tinier than a chicken egg- “no matter how big he gets- he will always fit-“ I think to myself, inhaling the smell of his golden perfect hair deeply before making up a gigantic lie. “It’s a secret mark. I was born with it.” I replied with dead seriousness. He became still and quiet, his attention hooked exactly as my lie had intended. The birthmark on my lower left thigh is called a “speckled nevi” and it is at least three inches in diameter. It’s pigmented slightly darker than the rest of my skin and has irregular edges like a cloud, and has a collection of freckles sprinkled throughout, all of varying sizes and shapes. It’s rather unique- I’ve seen Port Wine birthmarks, Café-Au-Lait birthmarks and Strawberry birthmarks, but not many sp...

   Part 1 It took some piecing together to figure out how old I was then. I know it took place at the Clearfield Swimming Pool, so that meant the Layton Swimming Pool had not yet been built. A cursory Google search failed to reveal the date when the Layton City Municipal pool was constructed, so I sat back and searched my memory banks, reaching deep into silhouettes of long passed tree-lined sunsets at the Layton Commons Park, chain link fences at the adjacent baseball diamonds, the nearby pavilion beams all casting old shadows of history still in my brain somewhere- how old was I when I used to peer through the fence at the rippling water lapping at the square walls, waiting for the pool to open? At least six. This was before then. Clearfield Swimming Pool was indoors, and obviously in Clearfield, a bit North of Layton, where we lived. Clearfield was the seat of Hill Air Force Base, which meant a completely different more busy, international type of culture than the sle...