The much talked about Between The World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is about murder—the murder of black people by white people in a country that has thrived, since its inception, on the abuse of black bodies. This thriving is economic, but it is also cultural and, therefore, part of our identity as Americans. Over and over again, Coates describes this culture, providing painful examples with piercingly beautiful language. Coates writes to his son:

I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had the luxury. I think you know (9).

Between The World and Me is an honest open letter from Coates to his fifteen-year-old son, written in the wake of the not-guilty verdict in the Michael Brown case. The book addresses the climate of fear, rage, grief, and sadness around the tradition of violence against black bodies in American society. Through chilling direct prose, Coates describes the vulnerability of black bodies, leaving unearthed the truth that American history has authored this violence, fed it, and normalized it. Coates’s writing draws overlapping circles around his questions about Black culture as it has evolved within this institutionalized violence, and traces his own intellectual and emotional growth within both American culture and the Black community. American history and Black history are part of one another; the violence, the guilt, and the deep belief in race are inexorably linked. But Coates describes a world white people may not know. Or rather, they know it, but they have only ever known it from the perspective of dominance. In this letter, Coates provides a nuanced view, not found in the media. The primary intention of the letter is not to be our teacher, yet it is a teacher—drawing strength from a perfect entangling of intellect and vulnerability, from direct storytelling and fluid, poetic language.

This is the book I want to hand to the person who says they don’t believe in racism, the person who thinks that Black Lives Matter is overly dramatic, the person who sees no connection among Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Dontre Hamilton, Eric Garner, John Crawford III, Ezell Ford, Dante Parker, Akai Gurley, Rumain Brisbon, Jerame Reid, Tony Robinson, Philip White, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, and Freddy Gray.

Coates describes the mechanism of racism, pointing to white culture’s investment in it. “The people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration” (97). This is the book I want to hand to the person who says they don’t believe in racism, the person who thinks that Black Lives Matter is overly dramatic, the person who sees no connection among Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Dontre Hamilton, Eric Garner, John Crawford III, Ezell Ford, Dante Parker, Akai Gurley, Rumain Brisbon, Jerame Reid, Tony Robinson, Philip White, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, and Freddy Gray—all unarmed black people killed by police during 2014 and 2015.

I got those names through a single Google search. I searched “black men killed by police.” I was fairly confident that I could have access to that list quickly, and that the names would exceed the cases I myself had heard about. That list does not even include the mass murder of black churchgoers last summer or any acts not perpetrated by police but by white civilians who are guaranteed more legal protection than a black person would be if they murdered a white person or child; don’t forget—Tamir Rice was just a child. I want to give this book to those who do not grieve these losses or who grieve them less than the loss of white bodies. Between The World and Me is a gift to American culture from a brilliant writer who was willing to write about his wounds and his pride and his love for us to read. “It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this” (10).

Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author. (Photo by Liz Lynch)

Coates writes about the fear weaved into life, masquerading as courage. “The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length, fur collared leathers, which was their armor against their world … I think back on those black boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered ‘round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away” (14). Coates’s writing serves as an x-ray, revealing the bones under the culture. We sense the lineage of fear informing everything. He describes the culture of the boys as, “A catalogue of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired” (14).

Through chilling direct prose, Coates describes the vulnerability of black bodies, leaving unearthed the truth that American history has authored this violence, fed it, and normalized it.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between The World and Me. New York: Spiegel and Grau. 2015. Print.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between The World and Me. New York: Spiegel and Grau. 2015. Audio Book.

Meredith Arena is from New York City and resides in Seattle. She is a student in the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in SHIFT Magazine, a queer literary arts journal. Meredith Arena is from New York City and resides in Seattle. She is a student in the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in SHIFT Magazine, a queer literary arts journal.

I was hoping that at some point I would figure out what this book is about—maybe you are too. – from The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction by Dean Young (p. 153)

It’s difficult to digest all of The Art of Recklessness into an annotation, probably by design.  Writer Dean Young often loses the reader with lines like: “It is the very overabundance of referential capacity that makes for the breakdown of any single referential stability, or at least conscribes it.” Then a few pages later, he redeems his academic-speak with: “If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it’s probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it’s like to be that lobster in the pot, that’s in poetry too.”

What you’ll like here: Young’s ideas of desecration and recklessness.

What you won’t like: long, overly academic dissections of historical movements, pieces of art, poems, poets, etc.

The Art of Recklessness will remind you, slightly, of Poe’s Eureka or D.H. Lawrence’s The Fantasia of the Unconscious. Both are long, if sideways, ars poetic, and profoundly affective, in ways you can only suspect and catch out of the corner of your eye. They seem to employ a strategy of over-complicated, drawn out, partly absurd dissection and analysis interrupted by bright shafts of dark profundity—like poison in a hearty soup.

You’ll make a lot of marks in this book; many, many lines will be underlined, many things will be drawn—squiggles of importance and notes written in there.

Young’s book, though, doesn’t quite reach those magical depths. Perhaps that’s a personal failure—failure of audience not author. There is so much in the book that is good, that expands and unfolds truths about poetry and about the self, but this reader may not have reaped any real dark truth or transformation.

So, you’ll like his ideas of desecration as a creative effort to reach divinity—destroy the idol and in the pieces something shines through. And you really will be affected by his recklessness—much more so, though, after actually seeing how all this works in his poetry.

You’ll make a lot of marks in this book; many, many lines will be underlined, many things will be drawn—squiggles of importance and notes written in the margins. It’s a good book, but long. It takes a long time climbing over a lot of big words, college words.

Dean Young. Photo by Jana Birchum.

You’ll also really appreciate this:

“We must cut ourselves out and off to move toward a sophisticated sense of the art beyond our sense of self, to develop a historical sense, to see what we write in dialogue with the poetry of the past, to see poems as things, material to be manipulated…We must risk a loss of passionate connection to distance ourselves from our work, to grow a little cold to it in order to revise, in order to look at a poem as a series of decisions.”

That will ring true. You hadn’t really thought of that deliberate cutting out so deeply. Most of your poetry was all personal eruption, for nobody but the passion of the moment. And you like all that stuff, but it’s often unsophisticated and uninteresting. Too personal, much self-pity, self-centeredness.

So you’ll appreciate this idea of distance, deliberate distance, and recognize yet fear the risk of it. The calculated gaze of an author is much different from the curiosity of the child.  “Poetry is not discipline,” Young says, but it is. It’s a series of decisions, made recklessly and with much risk. You’ll like that. The distance isn’t always so far, but it’s so the connections and passion aren’t hugged to death and smothered in petty subjectivity.

Also, the idea of conversing with history and recognizing the conversation is important and fun, too, like a dorky sort of party. Young’s position is that poetry is not just a revolt against convention, which is adolescent and reductive, but a dialogue with what is being resisted, historically. The dialogue is then affirmative and playful and not so self-serious.

Young’s position is that poetry is not just a revolt against convention, which is adolescent and reductive, but a dialogue with what is being resisted, historically.

You’ll sometimes feel that he is on the edge of something, and you’ll want him to go further, risk a little more, believe a little more. He says in his discussion of modernity:  “The futility of existence is related to the inability of identity, of subject, to take on the stability of authority and knowledge, of insight, to not be a victim of itself, the jarring loose of the single vanishing, point meaning the vanishing of god.” He goes on to disagree, thankfully, and makes the metaphor that the beauty, not futility, of the self is in this inability to hold together.  That the destruction is like music and life is like music, moving from one electric disruption to the next, constantly rebuilding. “If there is divinity in us,” he ponders, “it is in the process of allowing ourselves to unmake and remake ourselves.” So close! A tease! What is that process of allowing, Dean? Go on, more.

The self is fluid. Yes you’ll want him to say. Always deconstructing, stitching itself up, but there is the possibility of decision. Self can be discipline, but vulnerable discipline. A gifted, magic discipline that feels kin to surrender, that comes from somewhere else other than inside, not you. He suggests as much in his poems, too. They are not without a believer’s hope, but are beautiful in their hope.

Also, you’ll keep remembering bits out of order, like debris floating up to the surface. You’ll enjoy when he muses about copying, “… your originality will come from your inability to copy well: YOUR GENIUS IS YOUR ERROR.”  To seek out that error, it’s playful.  It’s funny. You’ll want your poetry to be that.

Young, Dean. The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2010.

Joshua Roark currently lives with his beautiful, amazing, fellow writer wife in Los Angeles, working as a homeschool teacher for young kids while pursuing an MFA from Antioch University. He also works as an assistant editor and web manager for Antioch’s literary magazine, Lunch Ticket. His poetry has been published in San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly, Killer Whale Journal, and 3 Elements Review, among others.

LA-based writer Wendy C. Ortiz writes about her loss of innocence in her debut memoir Excavation, which has received rave reviews since its 2014 release. Ortiz’s writing is rife with figurative language like simile, metaphor, personification, parallel structure, alliteration, and repetition, but it is also incredibly self-reflective. Whether it’s the temporal distance that gives her this perspective (a forty-something Ortiz is far from her adolescent self) or her background in psychology (she holds an MA in clinical psychology), we the readers relish the connections she deftly makes and the brave insights she offers through the hindsight perspective and a strategic sampling of literary devices.

It is by way of simile that Ortiz introduces us to the man who strips her of her naiveté. “Chalk dust scattered away from him [eighth grade English teacher Mr. Ivers] like an aura,” she writes (11). Pages later, his eyes meet hers, and a thirteen-year-old Wendy is biting her lip (15). All too soon, he’ll be “pressing his hardness against [her] and licking [her] thighs, then [her] clit” (23). All too soon, “the fevered rub of hips against the floor, the burn of carpet through clothes, the clenching of toes” will mean young Wendy’s undoing (29). But Ortiz is sure to convey said undoing beautifully. She compares the purple of concealed hickeys to flowers: “A small field of hickeys hid like violets under my t-shirt,” she says, thinking back on an afternoon romp with her former teacher. She has been marked, and it will take decades to excavate the hurt—to free “her body from the bitumen” (234). 

Predators can sniff out girls like she once was—girls who come from broken homes where Mom is “despicable with drink,” Dad is an “occasional apparition,” and “I love you” is something you say “to the sidewalk.” As predators go, Mr. Ivers has a highly-attuned sense of smell.

Unfortunately for Ortiz, predators can sniff out girls like she once was—girls who come from broken homes where Mom is “despicable with drink,” Dad is an “occasional apparition,” and “I love you” is something you say “to the sidewalk” (30, 141, 63). As predators go, Mr. Ivers has a highly-attuned sense of smell. He notices Wendy when her own parents do not. He takes an interest in her writing and in her “dormant sexiness” (23). He steeps her in praise, then makes “unspoken promise[s] of sex” (23, 39). He hones in on the child with the “cream-colored Princess phone” and has her seeing cream as the stuff of sex, instead (44). Ivers sexualizes his student before she’s ready, whispering salacious suggestions in her ear and playing games of “tongue and touch” (73). (Notice Ortiz’s use of alliteration there too, with “cream-colored” and “tongue and touch”.) The narrator puts it succinctly: “I imagined I was a woman … actually, I was a girl” (177). It is lines like this that make the reader think: This lady gets it. She’s done the hard work of “brush[ing] this bone off” (235). She’s reflected. She understands her story.

Author Wendy C. Ortiz holding a copy of her second book Hollywood Notebook. Photo courtesy of FORTH Magazine.

The disparity between girl and woman is all the more pronounced as Ortiz inserts her young adult voice into the narrative as a counterpoint to the authorial voice of reason. The innocence of, “‘So like it doesn’t have to be specifically about school?’” contrasts sharply with the adult voice that explains, “It would be years before I could find the words that would fit my experience” (16, 41). Likewise, her “little girl’s headboard” and “little-girl dresser” and “cobwebby stuffed animals” sit in stark opposition to the “men in cars that stopped and offered [her] rides,” the “hit of acid,” the “inhalations of laughing gas … the next sexual encounter that … spoke of love” but reeked of wine coolers and marijuana and illicitness (93-95; 90; 162; 172; 135). The adult narrating lets us know she is at the helm with statements such as, “I felt thirteen, which was becoming more rare” (60); or “I saw my expression go from fourteen to ageless” (70); or “Suddenly, ‘fun’ sounded like something a fourteen-year-old would say” (87); or “I realized that was maybe the sixteen-year-old thing to say. I was often guilty of this” (178).

This guilt is something Ortiz wrestles with until her experience comes full circle—when she becomes a teacher to young students herself and later, a parent. “Could I ever imagine having some kind of sexual relationship with these kids?” she asks almost rhetorically when she is “twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one.” The answer, of course: “absofuckinglutelynot” (28). Now, as a mother herself, she says, “I want nothing like what happened in my life to happen in hers … I want a magical existence for her” (233). And if you follow Ortiz on social media, you’ll see how beautifully she’s rising to the challenge (and also that her daughter is freaking adorable). As an adult in two authoritative roles, Ortiz is changing the narrative. She is reclaiming control. She is breaking the cycle. She is assuaging the misplaced guilt of her youth—the guilt that should be saved for Mr. Ivers and the “parents who were [in]capable of interpreting those [help me] signs” even though she “had undergone unthinkable acts right under their noses” (106, 233). With this book, the narrator bares herself, removing the “cloak of secrets and shame around [her] shoulders … [that she] would wear, always” and revealing instead a self-assured woman (read: perceptive, edgy, cool) and a proud member of both the queer and literary communities (212).

Ortiz, Wendy. Excavation. Portland: Future Tense Books, 2014.

LA native Melissa (pictured here with Ortiz at the 2016 AWP conference) is a graduate of Antioch University Los Angeles’s MFA program, where she studied creative nonfiction writing. In her past lives, she freelanced for various entertainment magazines and local papers, taught middle school English, and custom-fit women for high-end bras at a specialty lingerie store in Toronto, Canada. Most recently, Melissa lived in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, but now she‘s back in sunny Los Angeles, where she works in communications at a local private school, teaches mat and Reformer Pilates, reads a whole lot of nonfiction books, serves remotely as Copy Edit Manager for Lunch Ticket, and tries to sneak in the occasional Netflix viewing, usually while on speakerphone with her Canadian boyfriend as he drinks maple syrup straight from the source, and she nibbles daintily on dark chocolate (it’s an antioxidant, and besides, she deserves it after all that core work … or so she tells herself). 

The Ecstatic is Victor Lavalle’s intriguing debut novel cataloguing two months in the life of Anthony James, a 23-year-old horror-movie loving, obese, unstable, socially inept, obsessed with cleaning, sometimes-schizophrenic, college dropout. Anthony’s narrative begins on September 25, 1995, when he is abruptly rescued from “living wild in his apartment” (3) in Central New York and hauled back to the family home in South Queens by his women-folk, which include: his also sometimes-schizophrenic mother, his 93-year old tabloid aficionado grandmother, and his 13-year-old half-sister, Nabisase, a beauty-pageant debutante. Here, he is ensconced in the basement of the house for his own “safe keeping.”

Anthony, in a type of stream of consciousness conversation with the reader, narrates The Ecstatic in first person. He tells the reader about the ins and outs of his new life. The audience only ever sees the world through Anthony’s eyes. The dialogue of others is given to the reader by Anthony in hearsay. Rather than using customary dialogue techniques, employing bi-directional conversations with punctuation and quotation marks, the author begins sentences meant to convey dialogue with m-dashes. This technique has the effect of locking the reader even further in the mind of the protagonist. Scenes, which would otherwise be felt as taking place between people in casual, expectedly real world settings are, instead, narrowly focused and conveyed, unfiltered through Anthony’s mind’s eye. Add to this that Anthony’s descriptions are only “moment specific,” that is, he doesn’t give you an overview of any of the people or places he experiences, just specific (and remarkable) descriptive observations about one or two particular characteristics about them. The reader is left with a distorted view of both characters and their surroundings. Unable to gain any accuracy of perspective of what is actually going on in Anthony’s world, the reader has to live it with him on a moment-to-moment basis.

The reader lives every detail of people, places, things, and events strictly through Anthony’s incredulously fractured perspective. This tactic on the part of the author works implicitly—creating a window that appears natural into Anthony’s unsteady, erratic unnatural world.

In this manner, Lavalle never allows the reader an exit out of the protagonist’s mind. Anthony’s inner thoughts and perspectives are the reader’s only companion, the reader’s only window into the world of The Ecstatic. The reader lives every detail of people, places, things, and events strictly through Anthony’s incredulously fractured perspective. This tactic on the part of the author works implicitly—creating a window that appears natural into Anthony’s unsteady, erratic unnatural world:

We reached Baltimore –What exit? I asked my mother.
—None.
—I thought we were going to Maryland.
—Virginia. You don’t listen.
I had been to Baltimore once, that bipolar city. On one block was moderately regal Penn Station, then four blocks over a quadrant of desiccated row houses. The neighborhoods went like mood swings, good to bad, horrendous to opulent, without warning (86).

The instability and unreliability of the main character, in combination with the unusual point of view created by the author, makes reading The Ecstatic much like walking through a house of mirrors inside the mind of a madman. The reader feels trapped, disoriented; perceptions are unreliable, distorted. The overall mood is detached and effectively surreal. The Ecstatic’s first person point of view limits the exposition of the story from being seen from any other perspective other than that of the offbeat narrator’s. Lavalle peppers Anthony’s descriptions of his experiences with a multitude of peculiar, yet creatively effective similes and metaphors. This further defines the odd character of Anthony making him seem almost larger than life.

Hence, the plot of The Ecstatic is minimal, the story heavily and almost exclusively character driven. The overt tone of the protagonist as he tells his story is curiously light-hearted, almost casual, as if the crazy things he does and experiences, the social exchanges he has with secondary characters, are completely normal and expected in his world. This only adds to the air of madness that plays about the narrative.

The instability and unreliability of the main character, in combination with the unusual point of view created by the author, makes reading The Ecstatic much like walking through a house of mirrors inside the mind of a madman.

In this manner, Mr. Lavalle diligently leads the reader, through Anthony’s unconventional perspective, to the real under-story masking the overt one: though we, as a society, tend to judge and classify others based on collective, established norms of behaviors and expectations, we all may be at one point or another in our existence people whose actions and behaviors are difficult to understand, “in some way like strangers”… “people at the mercy of their minds,” or ecstatics (the title: an explanation).

The author, Victor Lavelle. Photo by E. Robateu. Courtesy of Random House.

At first, the abrupt ending of The Ecstatic may put-off the reader. Its conclusion leaves the narrative abruptly hanging, unfinished, its purpose somehow unexplained. Yet, upon reflection, it seems evident that Lavalle may have purpose, and a very surprising conclusion he hopes his audience will get as they muse and lay hidden within the folds of flesh that envelope them when they, reading, become a part of Anthony and live life through his tilted focus.

The author presents an unexpected parallel between living the human condition and the pack of feral dogs that willy-nilly roams and dominates the neighborhood. That parallel seems to indicate that whether you are young or old, rich or poor, American or foreign, black or white, male or female, perpetrator or victim, ecstatic or seemingly normal, living the human condition is like living the hard, mean, conflict-driven existence of “a dog’s life.” In The Ecstatic, and for Anthony, this implication seems to carry a double meaning, as living “a dog’s life” seems to suggest both a “dog-eat-dog world,” and/or “a dog’s life of Riley,” depending on circumstance or opportunity. “Now there really are only two ways to react to the extraordinary,” says Anthony, “The first is to ponder the grand purpose until all the fun is sucked away and the second is to enjoy it” (271).

The author seems to further clarify this meaning as the pack of feral dogs race around the neighborhood in mirror and parallel to the absurdity of the human condition of racing through life, trying to get ahead, only to start all over again:

The dogs sprinted along 145^th Avenue until they reached 225^th Street. There they made a right for one block, right again on 144^th Avenue, down to Brookville Park, right once more to the corner of 145^th and started again. A good-sized circuit. I thought some driver, at least one, would beep at the dogs and scatter them, but not one did. (271)

The Ecstatic also provides an illustration for the way society’s labels and stereotypes isolate and separate people from each other. The reader is meant to ponder whom is actually the crazier, the one who maintains and adheres to the tedium of social expectations and appears normal, or the one who, out of “madness,” chooses to disregard them altogether in favor of a more personalized, yet reviled type of freedom.

The Ecstatic also provides an illustration for the way society’s labels and stereotypes isolate and separate people from each other.

Overall, the take-away from this curiously different narrative is the fresh and innovative perspective Lavalle presents on characterization. However, for most of the narrative, The Ecstatic moves roughly, disjointedly and unreasonably between scenes retold by an unreliable and unlikeable narrator and takes too long to get to its point. Anthony is obviously intelligent, and yet he makes repeated decisions that are unwise, improper or just foolish, and the reader is forced to go along with it, or quit reading. Secondary characters are intense, in-your-face, but equally unlikeable. It is hard to have sympathy for either Anthony or the people that populate his world. And, even though the message of societal freedom versus bondage and the plight of the human condition is commendable, the message comes too late in the narrative to be truly appreciated or integrated in conjunction with the developing story.

In the end, varying degrees of annoyance at all of them undermines sympathy for the characters and their plights.

Miriam González-Poe holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Antioch University Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in The Round-up, Culture Shôk, Fine Linen, Inner Circle, and other publications. She is currently a staff writer for Drunk Monkeys and lives in Los Angeles with her family, where she spends her time balancing the demands of the real world with her personal harmonic convergence. She is also an award-winning jewelry artist, producing works under Mac Originals.

I started firewalking after seeing a picture of a monk burn himself to death, but of course it’s more complicated than that. The monk came to history class where we were studying Vietnam, talking about what a mistake it had been, and about the protests against the war, in our country, and over there, where they took it a lot more seriously. You see, in Vietnam they’re Buddhist, and they’ve got monks, and to make their point these monks didn’t carry signs or pass out flowers; instead they’d go to busy city streets, douse themselves with gasoline, light themselves on fire, then just kneel down and burn, not moving a muscle, not flinching, or even gritting their teeth. They’d just burn and melt and die. In class we were looking up at a slide of one of these monks in flames. Maranda was in class with me, sitting across the darkened room, and I glanced over to see the side of her face catching the light from the screen. Her eyes were fixed ahead like the others and then she asked, “How did he do it? Not feel any pain?” Our teacher said it had something to do with meditation, detachment, letting go, some kind of crazy Buddhist trick he didn’t quite understand. The room was quiet for a few more moments then somebody mumbled something about paper cuts, another mentioned toothaches, and most everyone agreed that this guy was not like us, not even close. But I knew they were saying that because they didn’t understand. And though I didn’t understand either, how he did it, I knew we weren’t that much different from each other, that monk and me, it was just that he’d figured it out, how to control his thoughts, shut off his mind.

*     *     *

That night I was sitting in my friend JD’s basement playing poker. It was about ten o’clock, I had a pair of jacks, and was wondering if it was good enough to win the four dollar pot. Then I realized I didn’t care either way. I folded, then at the end of the hand got up and said I was leaving.

“What?” JD asked. “Why?”

“I just don’t see the point in it.”

“Come on, Owen,” he said. “We’re having fun, hanging out, there doesn’t have to be a point, does there?”

“Maybe not, but I just …”

“Is it Maranda?”

“What do you mean, is it Maranda?”

“Something happening with you two?”

“Come on,” I said. “We’ve been friends since first grade.”

“You’ve been acting funny around each other lately,” he said.

“They haven’t even been talking to each other,” my other friend Pete added, and I looked at the both of them incredulously, as though they were confusing me with someone else, though really I couldn’t believe they’d noticed, that they’d been paying attention at all.

“I’m just tired of playing cards, that’s all,” I said and left.

*     *     *

On my way home I walked past Maranda’s house. She lived on the same block as I did, our big backyards touching at the corner. I saw the light on in her bedroom and slowed but didn’t see her. We’d been friends, like I said, for a long time. She’d never been a tomboy exactly, but had always liked to play—kickball, soccer, ghost in the graveyard, that was our favorite. Base was the cedar deck on the back of her house, and there were lots of good hiding spots in the evergreens that ran between our yards. Some days if it were just the two of us we’d race back and forth from one end of her yard to the other. Maranda was faster than I was when we were kids and usually won, but neither of us cared. It was just fun to race.

We weren’t quite kids anymore though. That had all changed the last weekend of summer. Maranda had been gone July and most of August, to her aunt’s farm in Gettysburg, where she went every year. When she returned, I didn’t recognize her. I was at a party and I saw her profile from across the room and I said, “Wow, who is that?” When she turned and smiled at me I realized it was Maranda, but she looked taller, thinner, with her cheekbones higher on her face. Her skin had a new glow to it, and she’d let her hair go long; it was down to her shoulders, and lighter than its usual brownish-red. She walked up to me smiling and gave me a hug, which was something new. As she held me, I felt her breasts on me, and this was new too.

“Owen,” she said finally. “How are you?” Even the sound of my name coming from her mouth was different. This was a new Maranda.

The party was at Ginny Bauer’s place, which was an old farmhouse with a big barn, silo, and a few acres of property. Most of the houses in our town were built in the ’50s and ’60s, so when you went to Ginny’s you really felt like you were going somewhere, doing something different, and because her parents liked to travel, she had a lot of parties. This night just about everyone was there, and there was lots of beer, which I was drinking, and rum punch, which Maranda was drinking, but neither of us had ever been much at drinking, and we began to feel pretty carefree in a short while. It was a warm night, the house had a big in-ground pool, and most of our friends were hanging out there, doing cannonballs or complaining about being splashed, but Maranda and I found ourselves stealing away, walking back behind the barn where we sat on some old tractor tires and unexpectedly began to kiss. At first I couldn’t believe it was Maranda and me, but she was so warm and curvy, such a good kisser, that after a few moments I forgot about that. And as we kept on I forgot about everything else. I’d kissed girls before, but only awkwardly. This was different, it was like the rest of the world had disappeared, and I think I really lost track of myself for the first time in my life.

But I guess you can only kiss for so long, or maybe Maranda had drunk more than I, but after a while she stopped kissing me and was unbuttoning me, and all of sudden she’d taken us beyond just the kissing, and I guess I’d been dreaming about something like this happening, of course I had—daydreams, night dreams, all kinds of dreams—but I hadn’t expected them to ever come true. In a way, I was more awash in sensation, the tingling feeling shooting all the way to my fingers and toes, but at the same time the world had come back to me, and I opened my eyes, was looking around, trying to get my bearings, checking to be sure no one was watching, and then I guess I couldn’t resist looking down at Maranda, and she was pulling her hair back from her face, and like I said, this new profile of hers was absolutely beautiful, and I felt myself smile at the sight of us. But I guess she must’ve felt me looking at her because she opened her eyes and looked up at me, and from straight on she looked like the old Maranda, the old friend I’d played with all my life, and she must have seen something too, maybe the same thing, because she pulled herself back quickly, as if startled, and then we both looked away from each other. She got up and stepped away while I stood and buttoned up. She’d pointed herself away from me, and I felt I myself wanting to say something, but only let out a low “Uhhmmm …” She began to walk quickly back to the party with her long, loping stride, and I followed behind.

*     *     *

We’d avoided each other since then, not so much as looking each other in the eye, and I’d been doing all I could to stop thinking about her, but it was hard, because I didn’t know exactly what I was thinking. I only knew that I didn’t feel like myself when I thought about her and that I’d wake each morning before five o’clock, with the feeling that all the air had been sucked out of me. I’d try to fall back to sleep, but never could, feeling at turns dirty, raw, weepy, weak, or desperate, and this anguish was something I’d never really experienced before in my life, as everything had always gone along just well enough. My friends—who I’d always done most everything with—they and I didn’t do sports, or drugs, and we didn’t have girlfriends. I’d been getting tired of that, had hoped it might change that year, that something might actually matter, but then finally something of consequence happened, and it was only making everything worse.

*     *     *

When I got home that night my parents were out, gone as every Friday during the season to my brother’s football game. Our town was mad for football and my brother was the team’s starting center. He said it was one of the most important positions on the team, but I figured who’d want to be the center, having the quarterback putting his hands between your legs every play? Sometimes he wanted to practice snapping the ball to me, but after the first time I always came up with a good excuse to avoid it, and he’d get our dad to do it instead. I guess I didn’t understand football, or my brother, or my parents that well. But this had never been a big problem for me. It’s not like I thought I’d be better off with another family. My mom, with her television shows and coupons, my dad with his job and newspaper, my brother always hiking his football: They were my family. I couldn’t imagine things any other way. It just so happened that I was the one always on the outside. Sometimes I even felt like a visitor, like I was watching them be a family. But this was just the way things had always been. I was used to it.

I went to my room and started looking through some boxes of old papers and pictures and stuff. I knew I was too young to be sitting home on a Friday night reminiscing, but there I was, looking over old class pictures from grade school, wondering where the years had gone. And there were other pictures too—a big group of us eating popsicles on Maranda’s back deck on the Fourth of July, Maranda and me at Six Flags, smiling at the camera, not a care in the world. I wondered again how it had happened. There’d been no reason for us to wander off together, go sit on tires, kiss, any of it. We’d even talked about it over the years, when others had coupled up; we could see how silly it was: the handholding, the phone calls, the dates, the inevitable breakups. “Just gets in the way,” we’d agreed, though exactly what it got in the way of we didn’t say. I thought maybe we’d talked about others as a way of talking about ourselves, but it never felt like that. It just felt like, well, Maranda and me, like it always did. I shook my head and told myself I had to stop thinking about her. But I knew it wasn’t as simple as telling myself to stop. I had to keep my mind occupied.

I put the pictures away and went through some of my old schoolwork, finally pulling out a report I’d done on firewalking in junior high. According to my report, firewalking had been used as a ritual by lots of different cultures, as an initiation into manhood, proof of faith or bravery, or an act of penance. And even though the fire would be between 600 and 1200 degrees, the key was simply telling yourself you wouldn’t get burned. You had to be “in the moment,” and unafraid, which isn’t easy because we’re born with two fears—of falling and of fire.

I thought about that, and the fact that we acquired all our other fears over time, through living. It seemed to me that fear of falling and fear of fire were both kind of the same thing—fear of death. I figured that’s what all fears were based on and thought that would have been an interesting angle to add to my report, though of course I wasn’t thinking about that in junior high. I stopped and tried to remember what I had been thinking about then, what had kept my mind occupied, but I couldn’t do it. Then I thought back to that monk we’d seen burning up in class that day, and that’s when I decided maybe I should try it—not burn myself or kill myself—but firewalk. I needed to do something, and thought if I could walk on fire I’d kind of be like that monk; at least I’d have more control over things.

*     *     *

In our town you could burn your leaves, and the next Friday night, after my parents had gone to the game, I raked the leaves from the back yard into a ten by three foot section behind the garage. I covered them over with small pieces of kindling and mulch we got for free from the city dump, then doused it all with lighter fluid, threw down a match, and watched the fire burn. I couldn’t walk until the flames had died down and there were only coals, the embers. While waiting I tried to sit and relax, not meditating exactly, I didn’t know what that was, but I was just sitting there close to the fire, watching the flames dance, feeling the heat, listening to the crackles and hiss. All week I’d been thinking about it, preparing myself, imagining myself walking over the coals. Now I was going to do it.

I had a small tub of water set up at the end of the run, just in case. After the flames had died down, I got up and walked around the edge of the bed barefoot, figuring to build up to it gradually, like settling down into a steaming hot bath. I did this a few times, concentrating not on my feet or the fire, but my breathing like I was supposed to. Finally I told myself it was time to go through. I stood at the edge, and standing close like that, in my bare feet, it was easy to stay “in the moment” because all my senses were paying close attention. Survival instinct, I suppose, like peering over the edge of a cliff. I stood a few moments, took some deep breaths, looked ahead, exhaled one more time slowly, then took a step, then another, then a third. The coals felt crunchy, like eggshells. I could feel that, but not any heat, not any pain, and I felt myself smile at this realization, and then I felt it—sharp prickles of heat under me, and I lunged forward, getting off the coals in two quick strides. I stepped into the tub of water swearing quietly, but when I stepped out a minute later I couldn’t feel any pain. Back in the house I inspected my feet and saw there were no blisters or burn marks. I rubbed a little Aloe vera on them just to be safe, then told myself though I hadn’t made it all the way, it was a start. I’d walked on fire, and more importantly, I’d been “in the moment,” “let go,” and stopped thinking about Maranda. Of course, once I told myself this, I started thinking about her again. But still it was progress. And nice to have gotten away for a while.

 *     *     *

The next Friday night I set up another fire. As it got going, I strolled around the perimeter again, breathing in and out, visualizing myself going through. When it was time to walk it, I did so without a thought, not feeling the fire at all, not even realizing I was moving until I was done and stepping back onto the grass. When I looked back over the fire bed I could hardly believe I’d just gone through it. I had no recollection. My feet felt fine. I waited a few minutes, then did it again. Same result. I did it again. Success.

“What are you doing?” a voice asked from behind me. I looked over. It was Maranda.

I was sure she’d seen me so there was no sense in denying it. “Firewalking,” I said.

“Why?” she asked, calmly.

“Something to do, I guess.”

“Can I try?” she said, coming closer.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “You’ve got to plan for it, you’ve got to think about it, you can’t just jump on and—”

“I’m going to try,” she said, taking off her shoes.

“I don’t know, Maranda.”

“You just did it, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, and she looked straight at me and shrugged. This was how she’d always been. If I or someone else could do something, climb a tree, go off the high dive, bike around the block in under two minutes, she could do it too. Or at least she’d try. So I didn’t argue with her, but just watched as she stood on the edge of the fire and took a few deep breaths. “Just breathe,” I said. “And don’t look at it.” She gazed ahead, which gave me an opportunity to really look at her, and again I was amazed that this was Maranda, so regal and lovely and curvy. She was wearing a snug white sweater and blue jeans which she’d pulled up around her calves. She exhaled once hard, then took a step forward, then another. I walked backwards to the end of the fire, and looking at her face almost straight on I could see again that she wasn’t as beautiful as from the side: Her eyes were a little too close together, her chin a little square, there was still some of that obtuse matter-of-fact quality in her that had always surfaced when she was concentrating. She looked like the old Maranda again as she was making steady progress across the embers towards me. As soon as she’d finished though, and set her feet onto the grass beside me, she relaxed and smiled, and I was nearly knocked over by her transformation back to a beauty.

“Wow,” I said.

“I did it,” she said excitedly.

“Yeah.”

When she turned to go past me I could smell the shampoo in her hair. She went to pick up her shoes, turned halfway towards me, then said, “You know that party?”

“Yeah,” I said quickly.

“I don’t know what happened.”

“Me neither,” I said. “That was … strange.”

“I never, I mean, I never did that before,” she told me. “I don’t want you to think that I—”

“No,” I said. “Of course not. I didn’t think that. I just … well, I guess I don’t know.”

“We can just forget about it, right?”

“Yeah, we should. I mean, well, maybe …”

“You don’t want to forget about it?” she asked, turning towards me.

“I don’t know,” I said, looking down.

I could sense she was waiting for me to say something more to her, but nothing came to mind. “Well, I think we should just forget about it,” she said, then turned and walked back towards her house.

After she left I realized I’d been spending my energy trying to stop thinking about Maranda and what had happened, but hadn’t considered what she’d been thinking, or feeling, and I began to think about that, especially what she was thinking about me, and this was even worse. I didn’t feel just empty, but nauseous. I tried to walk the fire again that night but one step and my feet were burning. Concentrate, I told myself. Then I said, No, don’t concentrate. And then I gave up; I knew I was trying too hard.

*     *     *

During the week I tried to do other things to keep my mind busy. One day I went to the basement and tried to work out with my brother’s weight set. Another I went for a long walk to the park at the other end of town. I worked on some old card tricks I used to be able to do pretty well. One night I snuck two beers from the basement fridge and drank them while I played chess on my computer. But nothing worked. When I’d see Maranda at school I couldn’t help but watch her, but she never looked my way. When my eyes were on her I’d get those tingling sensations, but I could hardly enjoy them because as soon as I looked away it was like I was catching myself, and then I’d feel lost, adrift, like a kid left behind at the mall.

*     *     *

Finally Friday came and I could do my firewalking again. And Maranda came over again too, and we took turns walking the fire, not talking much in between, and when we did, it was just about the fire, or school, or something else unimportant. We didn’t talk about each other, or that night. We weren’t comfortable like we’d been before, but when I was with her I didn’t feel quite so beat up about things; everything in me just sort of quieted down. Still, we didn’t look each other in the eye, even when we said goodnight, and she went through the evergreens towards her house. After she left and I put out the fire, I tried to get to sleep as soon possible, because I knew if I waited too long, the swirling would come back.

*     *     *

We took turns walking the fire, not talking much in between, and when we did, it was just about the fire, or school, or something else unimportant. We didn’t talk about each other, or that night. We weren’t comfortable like we’d been before, but when I was with her I didn’t feel quite so beat up about things; everything in me just sort of quieted down.

Somehow news of our firewalking got out, and the next Friday night there was a small crowd of kids from school gathered in my backyard watching me set up. A few said they wanted to try, but most just wanted to watch. I’d never had much attention paid to me, so this was something new, and I kind of liked it, those dozen or so people, watching me get the fire going, asking questions, waiting to see me walk it. JD and Pete were there, and they were looking at me like they didn’t know me. “You should try it,” I said to them, but they just shook their heads.

Maranda came over just after I’d finished my first pass and she said, “What’s going on?” to no one in particular, and they filled her in, as if she had no previous knowledge of the firewalking, and she let them believe that was the case. After I’d gone, two guys who’d been suspended from the football team tried, but neither could make it more than two steps without yowling and jumping off. Then a guy from the soccer team tried and he made it across, but nearly ran doing so, and not surprisingly burned the balls of his feet. A couple of girls consoled him while a guy named Rob, who’d been a kid with us all along, but who’d been sent away to a juvenile detention facility that summer for winning a fight a little too decisively, tried next, and he moved across the coals gingerly, methodically, breathing loudly through gritted teeth, but he made it all the way across. When he was done he got high fives from the other guys and said it was just a matter of “tuning things out.” But I could see when he pulled his socks and shoes on that his feet were hurting a bit. I did another pass then someone got a call on their cell phone about a party starting up, and everyone split, and it was just Maranda and me.

“Why didn’t you walk?” I asked her.

She just shrugged and bent to take off her shoes. “I’ll go now.”

Because I’d run out of leaves to burn, and maybe because there’d been a crowd, I’d added extra wood chips and the fire was hotter than ever before. Though Maranda walked it without getting hurt, she said she’d felt it a little, the heat on her skin, and told me to be careful when I said I was going to go one more time.

I stood at the edge of the fire, looked down at it, then up at the night sky, the branches of the empty trees swaying in the wind. I took in a deep breath and even with the fire before me, I could smell October in the air, I could feel the chill of autumn coming, and then I almost laughed at the ridiculousness of it: walking on fire in my backyard. It was as if it were the first time I realized what I was doing, as opposed to just being bent on doing it, and I felt glad, like something had been lifted off of me. I looked over at Maranda, she was looking at me, and I felt myself smile at her. I looked ahead then, took a few deep breaths, and stepped forward. I took two, three steps and felt nothing. I was even able to tell myself I was feeling nothing, and still keep on. I took another step, then another, into the middle of the fire, the hottest stretch of it, then I felt myself coming to a stop and I began counting: one … two … three … four …. While before when I’d walked the fire successfully I’d had no clear thoughts, had shut them off, just a blank mind, this time I was still aware of myself, with even a dim recognition of the fire hissing below me. But I felt no pain, felt nothing, and just stood motionless counting: … five … six … seven …. I got all the way up to ten then felt something—Maranda’s hand grabbing mine. Then I felt myself grabbing back. And then the pain came rushing to me, the feeling of my feet getting seared, as if the skin were being peeled off. I jumped sideways towards Maranda and we got twisted around each other and fell onto the edge of the fire, her shoulder dipping into the coals, the ends of her hair getting singed. She let out a little scream as we scrambled together onto the grass. And then we just lay there, wrapped around each other. I had my eyes closed, then opened them to see Maranda looking straight at me.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Hurts a little,” I said.

“Me too,” she told me. She was looking right at me, and I realized she was beautiful, even straight on like this.

“But this feels good,” I told her and pulled her closer to me.

She sighed and pressed her head into my neck and shoulder. “Me too,” she said. “I feel good.” And we stayed there a few more minutes until finally she put her mouth to my ear and said, “Let’s go to my house.”

“Okay,” I said, and we got up and picked up our shoes. My feet stung a bit, but it was bearable, and Maranda and I put our arms around each other and went through the evergreens towards her house. When she let out another sigh, I kissed the top of her head and pulled her closer to me. Maranda, I thought. Maranda. I didn’t want to stop thinking about her after all.

*         *        *

Steve Nelson lives and writes in Milwaukee and Chicago. He earned his PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and has had work published in The Rambler, Storyglossia, eye-rhyme, The Absinthe Literary Review, The Rathalla Review, and elsewhere. His essay “Mind Wide Open” is included in the anthology The Runner’s High: Illumination and Ecstasy in Motion, and “Night at the Store” was published in Phantasmagoria and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.