We’d been in Alaska for two weeks when we heard about the missing family. Bowl of cereal on the counter waiting to be eaten. Wallets, coats, and cars still in the house, still in the garage. Even the dog was gone. Complete disappearance. Ghosted into another world.

We became architects of imagination—the mom had to get her 3 and 5-year-old on the run to keep them safe. The boyfriend would meet them with the dog. We created a religion of circumstances to make the story hold water so it could walk on it.  Armies of angels scoured the land for clues. Cyprian, patron saint of occultists, gave up after 54 days.

Back home under Midwest sunsets, we dreamed of the long dark months of winter and how the 5-year-old might name the stars, since they were there all the time. Hi, Harry. Morning, Robin. Or is it night, Aloysius? She let her little sister name all the moose that crossed their path. We hoped the dog would keep them warm.

Almost a year later, their bodies were found less than half a mile from their home. Murder-suicide. The boyfriend.  His body 13 feet away from theirs. With the dog. Had he saved the dog until last? The cherubim shrugged. The seraphim lit their cigarettes and sighed, their breath a halo of smoky prayers shivering in the air. After all, the simplest explanation is the right one. There is no God.

My newspaper, Nicole News, was published semi-weekly when I was seven years old. It described the goings-on of our family and launched the careers of many a stuffed animal into celebrity. I wrote it. I re-copied it. I handed it out to mom, dad, and Jason. I was the only one who read it.

My next project was more monetarily satisfying. When I crafted a fleet of origami boxes, frogs, and fruit shapes, stuck price tags on them, and held a sale in my room with a banner that read “EVERYTHING MUST GO,” I expected that the sign alone would ensure the purchase of every item. It did not. (Had I imagined stores using this billboardage to not allow customers to leave without buying something? “Hey buddy, you saw the sign—everything has to go. Your entrance into this place is a binding contract. Now, you must buy something.”)

Due to the underwhelming customer turnout, I had a “prices slashed!” sale the next night so that truly everything, for fuck’s sake, would go.

Mom deliberated about what room she’d decorate with a particular penguin. (No, my hands weren’t adept enough for the fine motor-skilled likes of crane-making.)

Both Nicole News and the Origami Entrepreneurial Project of 1991 fed my hunger for something of mine to be enjoyed by the masses. But my parents weren’t massive enough. I needed to take my show on the road.

Daily recess with Roxie, who loved The Little Mermaid as much as I did, showcased our 2-person competitions, in which we repeatedly tortured Ariel’s solo when her glowing voice-ball is plucked by Ursula from her esophagus like a ghost-meatball extraction—these competitions inspired me to Ahh-ah-ah! my way into convincing Roxie that we should start an acapella group. Our friend Mindy wanted in and Laura would be our conductor. Thus, The Rainbow Rockers ™were born.

When Sacred Heart School released its crucifix grip on the students for recess, the boys in our class played touch football, the cool girls played softball, and everyone else ran around the fenced-in parking lot. Not us. We stood near the train tracks, the passing freights often drowning out our sweet beats. Laura would gesture to her ears—be louder! and I would force Mindy into baritone submission—buh, buh-buh, ba-da! while Roxie and I vied for the pretty soprano frolic of higher notes.

After I had groomed The Rainbow Rockers ™ into a 3-song juggernaut of musical domination, I knew our brilliance deserved more than a parking lot whose cracks sprouted weeds and whose corners sometimes housed mysterious small, clear balloons that the softball girls laughed at me for touching.

So, I booked our first show.

“We’re going to perform for the class!” I announced one day.

Roxie shook her head. Mindy and Laura shrugged.

“I already talked to Mrs. S. about it, and she’s going to let us do it on Friday after the spelling test.”

In the next days, Laura kicked it into high gear and conducted the shit out of us. The 15-minute recess gave us ample opportunity to practice our intricate and byzantine rhythms of our 3-song set easily 5 or 6 times over.

“Let’s take it from the top!” I’d say, bristling with jargon-fueled enthusiasm.

Friday arrived. Roxie looked like she was going to puke over all the words of her spelling test.

I felt excitedly nauseous with the knowledge that the world’s ears were about to be penetrated by every spurting color of our rainbow.

We stood in front of the jury of our peers—the boy with the ears that stuck out who all the girls liked, the aloof gymnast whose body awareness translated into her popularity, and the 18 other students who we would spend 5 more years in school with. Our small class was our world premiere.

Roxie was still shaking her head when Laura counted off, “1, 2, 3, 4!”

And we sang our little glowing voice-balls out. We left everything out on the red-tape-for-the-reading-circle carpet. I knew with billboard certainty that everything had to go, and our classmates would buy up every chord.

Afterward, Roxie quit the band, Mindy shrugged, and The Rainbow Rockers ™ dissolved into obscurity. At that age, I trundled forward with freight unstoppability. But today when members of the band came together, this thirty-something lost her confidence. I didn’t know what to say. Roxie and I stood next to Laura at the memorial for Laura’s mom. No recess ease. No parking lot legend to make the story end happily. The three of us stood, knowing where we’d been, feeling the length of time to what brought us to now. Laura’s little boys jumped around her like staccato notes. Her family had picked the same design on the memorial cards that I did for my own mother, four years earlier. Laura’s kids had gotten to know their mother’s mom. Mine never would. But not now. No. Now, I needed to perform. So without further ado, I smiled, hugged her, and opened my mouth.

Love,

I cannot tell you why I need to be alone

When I put these words to paper.

Only that, when I am alone,

I snorkel in the deep,

Deeper than anyone has ventured,

And around the corner of the coral,

A creature no one has ever seen before waits for me to play

Hide and seek.

Here, the water has a heartbeat

My heartbeat

And its pulse so far down is

My pulse,

So I swim toward the peeking beast,

My syrup-slow hand reaches out so I can almost touch it,

Almost glimpse it,

But your voice saying my name

Pulls me upward too fast,

And I’m spitting up, choking, can’t breathe

Spluttering. I was so close, so close to reaching it.

“Going to bed soon?” you ask.

Your words travel so fast,

Snipping, slicing, and cutting up what it looked like down there,

And I try to grab at the slivers of what I saw,

But it’s sand in my sieve-hands,

Sieve head

Gone. Gone. Gone.

No. I’m not going to bed soon.

I have to go back.

It’s gonna take me awhile to get there.

Geraldine has always gotten to have more fun.

She used to sing in a cabaret, she said.

She tells everyone her voice sounded like sequins.

She doesn’t realize we’ve been trapped in this room for twenty years now.

Sure, he moves us around, sometimes on the counter, sometimes at the table,

As if a new view will make me forget I can’t get around on my own.

Geraldine forgets where we were yesterday,

Forgets my name,

Forgets her name,

But laughs anyway, as though life’s a big joke that I don’t get.

Well, I can’t forget.

Every morning my name greets me as clear as glass. Agnes.

I can see through it.

Agnes has nothing to hide.

No mystery, no jack-in-the-box surprise to trigger a chuckle.

And every day, her plastic smile makes everyone like her more.

“Okay, Geraldine,” I say, patting her leg. “Have a good laugh now.”

But I’ll have the last one.

Sad, flat, stiff-crepe disc

Never tried to rise, stuck in

Nut flour despair

The fiscal properties of the sea were originally found in that which was rare, namely, shipwrecked human goods such as silverware or golden doubloons, but Triton’s meteoric rise to power from his famous campaign that branded humans as “tailless, scaleless, and soulless” and subsequent quashing of human-made goods as currency created a black market that traded in such objects. At one point, one thumb-sized piece of sea glass went for twelve conch shells, the currency of choice of the tyrannical Triton, a choice mightily protested by the crustacean delegation. At that time, the demand for illicit human goods rivaled the incidence of the illegal mer-organ harvesting, which largely dealt in tail augmentation and scale-therapy.

Ultimately, Triton’s youngest daughter halted the heyday of the underground human goods trade when she turned human, causing him to realize that a free-market approach concerning found treasures would move the kingdom forward, and that legalization and regulation would enable all parties to get along swimmingly.

“Much of what we buy today is meant to break or wear out long before we’re done using it. This is called planned obsolescence.” – Rachel Jonat

The end of the game has been foretold by the creators.

My “game over” will be a stroke or two,

Encoded already in my DNA,

Flowing through me now in some untriggered form.

And when it will happen,

Maybe I’ll recall the little girl holding her grandmother’s hand steady

To practice writing the alphabet’s shape,

To relearn the movements

Of walking with a right leg that doesn’t speak the same language as the left

Of tying shoes with a hand that grasps for a foreign tongue,

And I’ll misremember it,

Thinking that I am the grandmother

And that I’ve been through this all before.

When I was the little girl, the stroke made her voice call me by my mother’s name.

It sounded out of tune on her tongue.

But when my clock reaches the stroke of forgetting,

I’ll switch roles in the scene where

The little girl takes the old lady to the washroom

And I’ll think, since this has happened to me already,

There’s no need for shame.

The body that will have turned against me

Will allow these small mercies

To pave the road to obsolescence

With sardonic land mines.

Oh, giant nose hair tweezers,

You comically large tooth-puller.

You make me feel like I’ve shrunk and I’m living

In a world of things that don’t fit right.

I laugh at you now,

But when you pluck away the word that

The tip of my tongue fumbles,

Or when your coldly ridged teeth gnaw on

The vivid yellow and glowing white of our first kiss

On the wiffleball field when it was just starting to rain,

Or the red flower he plucked and stuck in my hair

On a Pietrasanta piazza,

And you grow hungry for more,

My hands will grasp blindly for the memories you’ve stolen

In the night, in the day, one breath ago.

You’ll be the narrow, stilt-legged nightmare

Whose pincers click mechanically,

Applauding your own crimes.

Every time my parents left me home alone,

I knew where it was hidden and headed right for it as soon

As they closed the garage.

In the corner of the dining room,

behind the chest, inside the long box, in a white bag.

I’d note the way each container faced,

The way each flap folded closed

So that I could cover my tracks.

I’d remove the gentle cloud tissues to exhume

the white candle whose creation our family watched several summers earlier.

Dipped in a rainbow of colors over and over,

It looked like the rings of a tree when the artist cut into it,

Carving the wax deftly,

Slicing into its skin and folding it back

To unearth the network of purple veins along a flower stem,

A swan,

A butterfly,

That had all been hiding inside, eager to be revealed.

The candlemaker drew the beauty out into the open.

When I feared hearing the garage door,

I would hide the beauty away

In a box inside a box inside a box

That’s where beauty was supposed to go.

And I’d lie in bed at night after they’d gotten home—

The phantom garage door panic having robbed me of an hour longer

In its fragile presence—

And my fingertips tried to recall the smooth ribbons of color woven

Into one another like a present’s bow

That is never undone,

Never untied to bring to light what lies within.

Hotcha! Hotcha!

Check me out!

Perpetual jazz hands,

Tiny fingertips jangling,

snapping to the stride rhythm heartbeat.

When someone blew dandelion fluff at me,

I made a dozen wishes bungee jump.

I live for heavy eyeliner, mood lighting, and

the spotlight.

Gimme gimme, says a shimmy.

C’mere, c’mere, beckons the tassel.

You can’t hold me.

I twist gleefully free.