Adelaide Literary Award Anthology 2019 - ESSAYS

ESSAYS ANTHOLOGY

“Oh,” she says. “He looks familiar.”
Scharff dies, her now inert and shining frame unstable,
bursting in a flash of dust, a “wisp of smoke.” Manzeppi es-
capes, the Philospoher’s Stone is kept from the hands of the
madman. West and Gordon head off for more adventures. The
remains of the stone – scraps of gold leafing – are left with
Mama Angelina, the Italian cook who comes in to clear the
dinner dishes on their train. She dims the lights, opens the
window, the moon transforms the scraps once again into a
pecking bird. Mama finds it, tucks it away for her child. The
quest continues. Roll credits.

Hank Kalet is a poet, essayist and journalist and the author
of three chapbooks and he full-length As an Alien in a Land
of Promise, a collaboration with photographer Sherry Rubel.
His poetry and prose have been published in The Progressive,
In These Times, Main Street Rag, The Idiom, The Aquarian
Weekly, Big Hammer, Big Scream, the Journal of New Jersey
Poets, City Belt, The Higginsville Reader, The River Poets Pres-
ents, The Writer’s Gallery, Middlesex: A Literary Journal, Flux,
The Other Half, Potomac, Pop Transit, Pop Matters, The Sub-
terranean, Adelaide, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars,, and
numerous other publications.He is teaches journalism at Rut-
gers and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale
Community College and writes regularly for NJ Spotlight and
The Progressive Populist.

49

Runaway

by Noelle Wall

I ransack the drawers, pulling out one sweater, then another,
then stuffing them back in again. I’m frantic, far from tears.
Tears would mean letting go, and I can’t. I have to focus. Deep
breaths. It’s not too late to change my mind. I can unpack the
carefully folded little shirts and pants and jammies I’ve stuffed
into a pillowcase; I can put the stack of diapers back on the
shelf beneath the crib. Pack; unpack. I look around the room,
the crib with my sleeping baby across from my bed, the high
ceiling, the double window, lights from passing cars flashing
by in the night. We moved to this big brick Colonial, set on
a hill next to the high school, only a few weeks ago. I love the
house. With its spacious rooms, glass–enclosed sun porch and
front and back stairs, it is more elegant than the small ranch we
lived in for 12 years. My father had wanted the bigger house
for my sister’s wedding the following summer and, I thought,
perhaps for Mark and me as well.

I go to the back of the house and look out at the detached
garage. Kevin’s car sits waiting in the driveway. A week ago,
when I secretly met him at a friend’s house, he begged me to
stay with him. I had only seen him a few times since Mark
was born, nearly a year and a half before. Kevin had come to

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the hospital then to see Mark, and I had a few minutes with
him before my parents sent him away. That was the deal. I was
to remain under their supervision until I was 18, no phone,
no friends, no leaving the house alone––except for school,
straight there and straight home––and then only because I was
required to attend by law. If Kevin loved me, he would wait
for me. Pregnant at fourteen, shamed and terrified, I agreed.

But Kevin persisted, sending notes through friends at
school and finally getting me to agree to see him. Sneaking out
one night when my parents were away, I climbed the wooded
hill behind our house, and Kevin granted me a wish I could
only imagine. He drove me to the Peppermint Lounge in New
York where we danced the twist as if we were any other carefree
teenagers. My parents had miscalculated when they hired a girl
my age to help me with Mark and keep watch over me while
they were gone. We became friends, and she helped me sneak
out. It was nearly morning when Kevin dropped me off at the
top of the hill. He wanted me to stay with him, but I was afraid.
I climbed down through the woods in my bare feet, praying no
one would see me. The house was silent; Mark was still asleep.
That adventure lightened my daydreams for weeks after.

Now I am sixteen. My parents are out for the evening, and
I am running away.

I finish packing and carry my things downstairs, pillow-
cases and grocery bags full of our belongings, clothes, bottles,
baby food, toys. Kevin stacks them in the trunk of his Pontiac.
I hadn’t recognized the car at first. When we were together,
he’d driven a red and white 1956 Ford but, of course, that was
the car he’d wrapped around a tree the previous spring, when
he’d broken his leg and wrecked his ankle. I’d learned about it
at school and skipped classes to rush to the hospital. His face
was bruised and bloody, his body twisted and bandaged, leg in

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a cast. I was wracked with guilt, guilt over not being there for
him, guilt over disobeying my parents.

Now it’s time. I go into the house and up the stairs one last
time. I pull up the comforter on my bed and fluff my pillow. I
laugh at myself for making the bed, even now trying to avoid
disapproval. Yes, she ran away in the night, but at least she
made the bed. All these months I thought I could be redeemed
by suffering. I thought I could earn back their love by dutifully
serving my sentence, forfeiting all without complaint, holding
my head up at school, doing my homework late into the night,
helping at home, caring for my baby: laundry, bath time, steril-
izing, feeding, rocking, singing, waking and rocking some more.

I reach into the crib and change Mark’s diaper while he
sleeps. Then I lift him into my arms and snuggle him against
my neck. It didn’t matter what I did or how I tried. I picture
my mother, her lips drawn tight with contempt. More than a
year and most of our talk is about Mark. How cute he is, what
funny thing he is doing. We have found a middle ground where
our love for Mark supersedes all else. There’s a routine now, and
I carefully avoid doing or saying anything that could elicit the
expletives of a year ago. Whore. Slut. Liar. Selfish bitch. But
they are there. Recently she told me that she longed to be free
of us, and it was because of me, of Mark and me, that she was
forced to stay with my father whom she hated. And a few weeks
ago she said, You know, I might have had some respect for you,
if you had stood up for your love and gone away with Kevin.

I grab Mark’s blankie and hold it around him while I carry
him down the stairs and out to the car. Kevin takes Mark while
I get in the front seat, then hands him to me. It’s a bench seat
and, with Mark squirming on my lap, I slide closer to Kevin
as he starts the car. I feel a flicker of hope, a beginning. Where
are we going, I ask.

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Noëlle Wall’s background is in advertising and television,
though writing is her first love. She is an alumna of the New
York State Writers Institute at Skidmore College, and a member
of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild and Fiction Group. Her
short story, Secrets, won first place in the New Millennium
Writings Short Story Contest. She recently completed her first
novel, Flesh and Bone, about a young woman’s quest to dis-
cover the secret that haunted her grandfather and endangers
her life. Noëlle lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband,
the photographer, Tom Wall.

53

The Deposition

by Michael R. Morris

I was escorted into a hushed and windowless room full of law-
yers, asked to sit down behind a conference table too big for
a game of ping-pong. As I settled into my chair, I calmed
down enough to see that the room wasn’t actually filled with
lawyers, but only two—one representing my mom, the other
representing my dad—along with an assistant and a stenogra-
pher. I was overwhelmed, like a puppy in a house filled with
too many guests.

After the introductions were made, my mom’s lawyer Mr.
Stevenson, a well-coifed man with a mustache and a pinky ring,
asked if I knew what was about to happen. My dad’s lawyer,
Mr. Duncan, sat to the side of the meeting, wearing a jacket
and tie with jeans and what was almost a mullet. Apparently he
was not the one running the show. These weren’t his law offices.
Mr. Stevenson was the one getting the bigger check.

“I think so,” I muttered.
“You’ll be giving a deposition. It’s like a court hearing, but
without the jury,” Mr. Stevenson explained. “You just have to
swear to speak the truth under the penalty of perjury. Do you
understand?”
I nodded and swallowed.

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After I held up my right hand and swore to speak the
truth and all that, both lawyers adjusted the papers in front
of them, armed with pens. Mr. Stevenson ID’d the date, time
and location of the deposition while the stenographer pattered
away at her dwarfish keyboard.

“Now, if you please, Mr. Morris, tell us what you re-
member about what happened before the altercation between
your mother and father. From the beginning.”

The swiveling chair beneath me vacillated, denying me a
firm platform from which to speak. So I steadied myself and
cleared my throat.

“Well, it was my dad’s turn to spend part of the afternoon
with me. I believe it was his idea to go to the Natural History
Museum. But my mom wanted to make a copy of my apart-
ment key so she could come and go as she pleased. She decided
to stay with me, while my dad found some cheap hotel down
in the east village…”



It was going to be my graduation day from college. I should be
more proud and say “university.” New York University. Tisch
School of the Arts, Film and Television. Yeah, that’s right! Four
years of going to school in Manhattan and making student
films. Graduation was supposed to be an important day, but
the whole thing made me uneasy. I couldn’t decide whether
I should invite my mom or my dad to the ceremony. They
would both have to fly from Los Angeles, so there was no easy
answer there. I already knew by this time in my life that my
parents couldn’t be allowed in the same room at the same time.

When I was 11, my mom came to my dad’s apartment to
pick me up for soccer practice. She tried to enter the apartment

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to see what his new girlfriend looked like, but he wouldn’t
allow her inside. He had to grab her arms to prevent her from
barging in. As I stood in the hallway with my knee-high socks
and cleats, watching my parents wrestle with each other, I
edged toward the sixth floor fire escape, hoping that one of
them wasn’t going to throw the other over the edge.

A year later, my dad came up to the house in Topanga
to pick me up for his every-other-weekend rights when my
mother grabbed at him, trying to get him to listen to her as
we were trying to drive away. He batted her arms away, yelling,
“You’re harassing me! You’re harassing me!”

When I listen to an old cassette recording of one of my
first Christmas’s—I’m just a goo-goo voice, cooing at new
presents—it sounds like my parents barely acknowledged each
other.

For as long as I could remember, I knew my parents
couldn’t be allowed in the same room.

I was 22 now and you’d think my parents—ten years after
their divorce—could have come to a mature truce. I knew I
might get into hot water, but I had to make a decision. They
should both come to the graduation. Why should it always
be thrust upon my shoulders to be my parents’ parents? This
was my day in the sun and I wanted them to be proud of me.
Both of them.

My dad wanted to take me to the Natural History Mu-
seum that afternoon, but my mom didn’t want to be stranded
in my apartment. So he and I left for the subway station while
my mom tagged along, saying she would find a key copier
somewhere on the street before we reached the subway stop.
The three of us walked from my apartment on 5th Avenue
and 19th Street up to 23rd street together, still no sign of a
key copier. My mom just wanted to keep on walking with us

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until she found one. She insisted on copying my apartment
keys. She insisted on staying at my apartment during her stay
in New York. Did I want her to stay there? No. But I had a
cold and she used that as an excuse to stay close—as a mother
should—and give me abundant helpings of her herbal rem-
edies. How can you refuse your own mother? is the voice that
popped into my head as soon as I considered asserting myself.

Now we were approaching the subway stop on 23rd street
and still no place to copy my key. I didn’t really care what
she was going to do without one. She could have wandered
the streets for all I cared. She could have stayed locked inside
my apartment, too. My roommates Ze’ev, Laura and Johanna
might have to deal with her, but let them discover what I had
to grow up with. I was too sick of it all to offer an alternative.

Standing at the top of the stairs to the subway entrance,
my mom came to an impasse. My dad was fidgeting impa-
tiently for her to get lost, so that he and his son could spend
an afternoon together. He had lost custody of us over a decade
ago and was forced to treasure his moments with me when he
had them.

But now my mom said:
“Well, why don’t I just come along to the Natural History
Museum. I’d like to see it, too.”
“Mom.”
“Well why can’t I? Just because you’re both going doesn’t
mean I’m not allowed to go. I’ll just go on my own. I’ll sit away
from you on the subway.”
With that, my dad threw in the towel. He didn’t actually
have a towel handy, so he used what he was holding: his um-
brella. Fed up, he launched the umbrella to the bottom of the
stairs like a paper airplane, a sarcastic gesture not furious but
just a percolation of rage. He had had it.

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When my mom planted her heels, she never budged.
Powerless, my dad walked down to the bottom of the
stairs to pick up his umbrella. I didn’t want to see him come
back up the stairs with it. I knew something like this was going
to happen. I knew that they couldn’t even manage to be civil
together. Without wanting to imagine what shouting or wres-
tling match was going to occur next, I turned right around
and walked away.
I remember dodging a lamp post in my hasty retreat,
so hateful that my parents were doing this again. A distant
glimmer within me thought I shouldn’t run away, but most
of me said “Get the fuck out of there!” I was a little boy again.
A little child, helpless, unable to stop my world from caving
in, unable to stop my universe from splitting into two and
colliding against itself. I had expected the worst, and now the
worst was happening. It was time to give up, so I did. I gave
up on my family.
I returned alone to my apartment to blow off steam. Our
four-bedroom loft apartment was empty except for my room-
mate Laura’s gray Chow Chow named Winnie. Winnie never
liked me, and I never liked Winnie. Sometimes I would enter
my own apartment to find Winnie standing inside, watching me.
Just for fun I would crouch low and keep my eyes riveted to her,
like I was about to pounce on her. Sure enough, Winnie growled
at me. We were enemies, and I was quite comfortable with that.
Fifteen minutes later, my mom knocked on the door.
When I opened it, she gave me that ‘mom’ look, as if to say we
should all be ashamed—‘we’ meaning all men. She never for-
gave me for being a man; that is, being more like my father than
her. Whenever I defied her or showed frustration to her, she
accused me of acting like him. Well, between her and him, who
else was I supposed to act like? I can’t learn everything from TV.

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So she entered my apartment rambling about things I
never pay attention to, the details of which I have long since
been trained to tune out because my mom didn’t know when
to shut her off her verbal faucet. She could have been saying
“strangled me on the sidewalk” in the same sentence as “a few
drops of oregano oil mixed into a spoonful of olive oil work as
a natural antibiotic” and I wouldn’t have detected a ripple of
urgency in her tone.

It was in my dad’s voice that I detected something had
happened out there on 23rd Street. He eventually came back
to my apartment, probably after he’d sulked several square
blocks, and asked to take a walk with me. We walked from
19th Street to 20th Street, over to Broadway, back down to
19th Street and then returned back to 5th Avenue. During that
time, he told me this:

“I—I think I really went too far this time.” There was a
tremor in his voice that shook me to my foundation. “When
I came back up the stairs and saw you were gone, I just lost
it. I grabbed your mother by the collar and screamed at her,
‘Where’s Michael?’ I think I really scared her.”



“‘I think I went too far this time’,” I told Mr. Stevenson. The
stenographer pecked away at her mini-keys as content as a
pigeon in Central Park. Happy to have a job and listening to
other people’s problems.

“Is that all he said?” asked Mr. Stevenson.
“Yeah. It was his tone of voice that affected me. Like he
was truly sorry—or afraid—for what he did. That’s what I re-
member.”
“But all he said he did was grab her and yell at her?”

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“Yes.”
“According to your mother’s report, she says he grabbed
her, pushed her all the way across the sidewalk and slammed
her into a building. She knocked her head and got a concus-
sion. Now think harder. Are you sure that’s all your father
said?”
“Excuse me. He already told you what he remembered,”
Mr. Duncan cut in. “There’s no need to ask him more than
twice.” Apparently this is why he was present. His job was to
keep his rival in check during the deposition.
Mr. Stevenson turned to Mr. Duncan, eyeing him as an
obvious inferior. “I didn’t ask him more than once. I asked him
if he was sure he remembered correctly.”
“He already told you what he remembered his father said.
There’s no need to read out his mother’s statement in front of
him. You’re trying to put ideas into his head.”
“I’m just reminding him of his mother’s testimony.”
“You’re calling into question his own eyewitness account.
This is a deposition.”
Mr. Stevenson sighed. The stenographer waited. Mr.
Duncan watched me.
“Okay,” Mr. Stevenson continued, “scratch it from the
record.”
“Let’s keep it,” Mr. Duncan said.
“Ms. Coady?” Mr. Stevenson turned to the stenographer.
Ms. Coady looked over what she had just typed.
Ms. Coady used a pen to make a mark somewhere on
the roll of paper. I had no idea what this meant. I would end
up later with a manuscript of the entire meeting to look over
and make corrections. I don’t remember if they scratched that
dispute from the record. But my dad would test the weight of
the manuscript and say, “Look at that. Just like a movie script.”

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A week later back in New York, I handed it to a filmmaker
friend named Jonathan Chance and told him, “It’s just like a
movie script, isn’t it?”

Jonathan smiled wryly and said, “You could have made
your own movie for what this probably cost.”

Mr. Stevenson laced his fingers upon his notes of my
mom’s testimony and wriggled his shoulders as if wrestling
with the notion of strategy.

“Now Michael. I know this is very difficult for you. No
one can ask you to choose sides between your parents. But this
is a very important case. Tell me. Do you think your father was
telling the truth?”

“I don’t know.”
“What I’m asking you is, do you think he gave your mother
a concussion or did he just grab her coat and yell at her?”
I looked at both the lawyers. I didn’t want to be there. He
was right. How could I choose between my parents? What he
was asking me was if I thought one of my parents was in the
wrong. Better yet, if one of my parents was suspiciously evil. I
really didn’t know. They were both wrong. They both fought
since as long as I could remember. They wanted me to tell
them which of my parents was more wrong than the other one?
For all I knew, I was in the wrong for being born unto them.
“I don’t know what to believe. To tell you the truth, I be-
lieve both of them. When my mom tells me that she hit her
head on the side of a building, I believe her. When my dad
says he just grabbed her and screamed at her, I believe him. I
wasn’t there. I can only tell you what they told me afterward.”
“So, you don’t have your own opinion on what happened?”
“No. I don’t have an opinion.”
For as long as I remember, I’ve never had an opinion. Even
at nine years old, I backed away from arguments, never chose

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sides. Growing up with vague stories from Nicaragua, Lebanon
and the Soviet Union, I saw the whole world fighting and didn’t
want to have anything to do with it. Instead, I just went out-
side and created my own world of action adventure fantasy. I
waged wars between my X-wing fighters and my Stretch Arm-
strong, and used firecrackers and Raid-can flame throwers to
seal the fate of the loser. Luke Skywalker teamed up with Spider
Man to blow up a fortress manned by stormtroopers and that
floating robot from ‘The Black Hole.’ My battles always had a
fiery ending. And if one action figure or another didn’t melt in a
puddle of lighter fluid, they would fall burning from my second
floor balcony into a thicket of Topanga Canyon weeds. Yes, my
battles had a definitive conclusion.

But the battles that went on inside the house went on
indefinitely. Even after my dad had left, the battles still raged
on in our hearts. My brother lashed out for being grounded
and punched holes in the walls. My mother would go bawling
into her bedroom when her two sons refused to do chores. I
accused my brother of stealing from my collection of comic
books, hiding my most precious even though I had no proof
he’d ever done anything.

In high school, I never judged anyone. I was too concerned
with fitting in to enjoy the audacity of having an opinion about
anybody else. I remember what a high school girl in the drama
department asked me after being caddy about someone else:

“You think I’m mean, don’t you?”
“No. I never thought that.”
More truthfully, I never thought anything. I was only
concerned if she liked me or not. I don’t mean, liked me ro-
mantically. I mean, liked me enough to not make a face and
walk away when I spoke. Something a countless number of
girls did in junior high.

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“I don’t judge people,” I told her.
Little did she know how harshly I judged myself.
Little did I know.
The deposition ended on an unsatisfying note. If either of
the two lawyers had been looking for some juicy testimonial
that either sealed or sank their case, they didn’t get it. I had
remained safely in the middle, suspended somewhere between
right and wrong, between good and evil, between black and
white. I was gray.
Outside, Mr. Duncan pulled me aside on the sidewalk
along Lincoln Boulevard.
“Listen, Michael. I know you don’t want to be in the
middle of all this. But if you could just understand how much
this is costing your parents. I don’t want to take your dad’s
money. He’s struggling to pay me in installments.”
“What can I do about it?” I told him. “I can’t control what
they do.”
“Well, if there was just some way for you to convince your
mother to settle this another way. Get them to talk to each
other. You could save a whole lot of your parent’s money if they
could just talk to each other.”
“Look what happened the last time.”
“I know, I know. But I think all your mom really wants
is an apology. From your dad. She doesn’t have to go through
these expensive lawyers to get that. She just wants her pain to
be acknowledged. This whole thing, with the head injury, I
just don’t know. Maybe she’s just made it up to get him to say
he’s sorry.”
Sorry. Sorry for everything he’s ever done to her? Sorry for
the marriage he destroyed by running out on her while she was
back east at her mother’s funeral? Sorry for a life ruined beyond
her control? How could anyone apologize for that?

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I watched cars pass on the boulevard. Normal people with
normal problems. How to pay the bills, getting fired, spoiled
children, voting Democrat. Did my mother make her head
injury up? When she returned to my apartment after the ‘al-
tercation,’ she didn’t look like she had suffered an injury, she
didn’t complain about her head. Yet, several months after she
returned home, I began to hear allusions over the phone about
her memory loss or lack of motor coordination or a “melt-
ing-tingling” sensation in her brain, sprinkled amongst her
usual ramblings about alternative medicine or other things my
father did wrong. In her quiet hours at home, had she con-
cocted a conspiratorial plan to take vengeance upon my father
for all he had done to her?

But that tone in my father’s voice. He had done some-
thing wrong and he knew it. But was that thing he did wrong
just a violent grab of her clothes? Yelling into her frightened
face? Or did something happen that afternoon on 23rd Street
in Manhattan that he didn’t want to admit?

In a growing necessity for schizophrenia, I chose to be-
lieve them both. It was all I could afford to do. They were my
parents. I came from both of them. My body and my mind was
created and molded by both of them. I was the amalgamation
of two people that should never have met. So I would merely
switch channels when I was with either one or the other, just
wanting to create peace and comfort in both camps, forgetting
what my other self might think:

I hated them. I hated them for meeting and I hated them
for having me. I did everything I could to accommodate
people, to not get in the way, to try to fit in. To be invisible.
Because I wasn’t worth the space I took up.

Funny that I went to both the film and theatre school at
NYU, hoping to do two programs at once, to work twice as

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hard to be both an actor and a filmmaker, to use my recog-
nized talent to become more famous than humanly possible,
to prove that I was larger than life, that I was more important
than anybody else. And all this because I felt so small, so insig-
nificant. I would spend the next 15 years struggling, burning
myself out to prove that I was worth something. It wouldn’t
be enough to get a job and get along like everybody else. I had
to be something magnificent. I had to be something immortal.
To prove that I had lived and that I was important. This is hard
work for somebody who deep down didn’t think too much of
himself. I had my work cut out for me.

“I know there’s not much you can do, Michael,” Mr.
Duncan concluded. “But see what you can do anyway.” With
his battered leather briefcase, his jeans, tucked-in dress shirt
and tie, he navigated the Lincoln Boulevard traffic to get to
his Toyota Camry on the other side.

I had walked away from my parents that afternoon on
23rd Street because I was powerless. I couldn’t do anything to
stop them. God knows I had learned that truth by the age of
three.

But what if I hadn’t walked away? If I stayed. If I stayed
and just…didn’t do anything. Just stopped. Not let my con-
ditioned emotional reaction shirk me away from what was oc-
curring. Maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe my
mom’s ongoing litigation wouldn’t have continued for another
decade afterwards.

What would I have seen if I didn’t walk away? If I hovered
on the sidewalk, invisible…

My dad came up from the bottom of the stairs holding his
umbrella. He saw that I had disappeared. He saw my mother
standing there with that reprimanding scowl. Without being
able to control himself, he grabbed the collars of her coat and

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shoved her all the way across the sidewalk, causing pedestrians
to dodge and veer. Ten feet across the sidewalk and then bam!
She slammed against the large windows of a bank. Her head
snapped back and hit the glass, then popped forward again, her
eyes in shock, faced with a pair of eyes that mirrored hers. My
dad had pushed her too far. All his life. Now she had hit the
wall and she wasn’t going to forgive him for it.

A week later I went to my dad’s apartment in Santa
Monica and showed him the ‘movie script’ that he had joked
about. My job was to take it back to New York and correct any
inaccurate statements. My dad was sorry I had to go through
all this, too.

He walked me out to my car and tried to talk about little
things. It was then that I decided I could do something, even
if it ended up for nothing. The point was that I could take a
stand. Whether it was right or wrong, it didn’t matter. It’s just
that I could, and that made me a human being that deserved
to live.

“Dad,” I said to him. “I think you should write an apology
letter to mom. I think that’s all she really wants.”

My dad looked at me and vacillated. It must have been
a difficult thing for him, after all they had been through, to-
gether and apart. But something rang clear about what I had
just asked. It seemed possible somehow. It was absolutely un-
reasonable in many ways, but it could be done.

“Okay,” he said, unable to shake the naïve clarity of my
words. “If you think it’ll help. I’ll write a letter to her.”

Michael Robinson Morris is an accomplished artist in film,
music and prose. After graduating from NYU’s Tisch School of
the Arts and subsequently working many years in Hollywood

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film development, he has written and directed several released
feature films. His writings have appeared in magazines such
as Adelaide, Pure Slush and Down in the Dirt, while excerpts
from his forthcoming and highly personal memoir won grand
prize at the Eyelands Book Awards, published by Strange Days
Books based out of Greece.”

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Such Were the Joys

by Jeffrey Loeb

A small gap opened between the writhing bodies, just wide
enough for me to chop down hard on the girl’s head. The brute
scuffling noises and blunt shock of the knife still live within
me. So far as I know, the act was totally spontaneous; I have
no memory of any forethought or seething childhood grudges,
just that the brief space within the scrum of kids disappeared
right after I struck. I do remember staring at the dull, rounded
blade and hearing the girl’s screams rising above the hubbub.
After that, I don’t know; I may have dropped the knife or tried
to hide it. Somehow it ended up in my mother’s hands, and
several days of punishment followed. It turned out to be some-
thing of a neighborhood scandal, in fact.

The setting – a small sandpit just outside our back door
– is locked in my memory, so I can narrow my age down to
somewhere between two and five. We’d moved at the younger
age to Riley Manor from a basement apartment in my grand-
parents’ home, and then again during kindergarten to a new-
ly-built tract house on the “good side” of town. By then, I had
one baby brother and another on the way, and we’d outgrown
the second place. From my mother’s meticulous annotations of
my baby-book pictures, I’m confident the year of the violence

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was 1951; in fact, using the same source, I have reason to be-
lieve the stabbing may have occurred on my fourth birthday.
The brutal assault is one of my four distinct memories from
this period; all, on some level, are traumatic.

I‘ll mention the other three here so as not to leave you in
suspense, though I have no notion of the correct order: First,
my dog, Eric, a dachshund (all things German and Japanese
were popular in those post-war years), was run over on the
street in front of our apartment. He’d gone bounding after
something apparently too seductive to pass up and died in the
street as I watched; I can remember his labored breaths and
the light slowly leaving his eyes. Several years later, my parents,
having given up on dogs in favor of children, named one my
brothers Eric, a bit of irony lost on him but surreptitiously
used by me to torment him.

Second, along with one of my first friends, Doug, I kicked
out the glass of a neighbor’s in-ground greenhouse. The man
had meticulously crafted the small enclosure over a two-week
period, fashioning it on a sunward slant to range from a few
inches at the base to about five feet at the top. We did the
deed with our bare heels and for no particular reason except
the urge to destroy. Afterward, we made our way to the small
neighborhood market and bought ourselves ice-cream bars. I
still bear, Trump-like, a small scar from this episode, though
my own way out of the draft when the time came was to join
the Marine Corps.

Third, I let myself be seduced, serially in fact, by an older
girl, Patricia, who wanted to handle my penis and was also anx-
ious for me to view (and touch her in the general area of ) her
vagina. We performed this rite several times until I’d become
quite adept at zipping down her jeans and shoving aside her
underwear – skills she painstakingly taught me. Many of these

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Adelaide Literary Award 2019

episodes took place outside, but were caught by my mother in
my bedroom when we finally moved our hobby inside. She
deemed our actions so serious that punishment was delayed
until my father got home and beat me with a hairbrush. I don’t
know what Patricia suffered, if anything.

As for the stabbing, I remember the instrument’s being a
well-worn kitchen knife apparently relegated to the outdoors,
where it seems to have earned a permanent home as a digging
instrument in the bare, treeless back yard. I don’t know if my
actions would have changed, however, had it been steely sharp
and deadly as a dagger.

What was the situation itself? A roiling mass of kids in the
sand, the same sand on which the entire housing project was
erected, a quarter-section mound of arid prairie so undesirable
that developers of the surrounding single-family houses had
carefully avoided it; our own cookie-cutter apartments – old
two-story army barracks modeled on those at nearby Fort Riley,
divided by thin walls into four separate units, each with its
own indoor staircase and entrances – had been hastily slapped
together to accommodate the burgeoning number of young
families. The fight itself seems not unusual to me, nor does the
fact that both genders were equally represented in the melee.
These battles needed no real provocation, occurring more or
less spontaneously anytime a certain critical mass of bodies
was reached with no parents immediately present to intervene.

I remember my victim fairly well, though no name comes
readily to mind. She lived in our building, I believe, because
her mother arrived on the scene about the same time my own
did, both sprinting out their back doors to fathom what the
bloody-murder screaming was about. How long they had been
our neighbors I have no real idea, but the fact that that I don’t
recall the girl’s name (and the concurrent one that we soon

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moved) suggests it was a relatively short relationship. My only
real memory of her family was that they were the first ones to
own a television set, one on which we kids were all occasionally
allowed to watch snowy episodes of The Howdy Doody Show on
its only available channel, horizontal bands rolling up through
the picture. Perhaps I envied her the attention.

I also remember that she was somewhat younger, possibly
an important factor since our social mores were deeply primi-
tive and, when adults weren’t present, predicated on survival of
the fittest. I should hasten to say that it could just as easily have
been I on the receiving end of the knife had the circumstances
been slightly different, meaning there was probably no real
rationale for the violence except a perception of vulnerability
within the victim.

And that was her crime, I’m sure: being younger and
weaker (otherwise, she wouldn’t have been on the underside of
the pile; I suspect now that I needed no larger motive). All our
encounters were rife with violence of some sort, and it seems
when I recall the after-school, pile-on beatings of kindergarten
year – lurking just over the horizon at this point – that we fell
into a type of atavistic order, like the one where the proverbial
chicken-with-the-spot gets pecked to death by her fellows.

I also don’t recall feeling rejected or having suffered any
verbal slights or unrequited embarrassments, at least from this
group. Ours was the uphill side of the neighborhood, the kids
here somewhat younger, unlike those from the slightly more
worn residences downhill: Riley Manor’s initial houses, sin-
gle-story duplexes whose residents had been there a few years
longer and whose children – at least the senior of them – were
older, their sense of violence and alienation more sharply
honed. Doug, in fact, had lived down there since birth; his
older brother, Terry, born ten months after Pearl Harbor, was

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one of the leaders of a roving downhill gang of marauders. I
was forbidden to wander that direction or to play with any
of the kids who lived there. We were “better than them,” my
parents frequently told me, I suppose because my father was
a college graduate and my mother, an avid social-climber, had
attended one year.

So what lurked within to drive me to such unprovoked
violence? My actual memory serves up only that fleeting image
of the girl’s head surrounded by a blur of movement – arms,
legs, bodies: a target very like the ones I would at some point
encounter bird hunting or, even later, in Viet Nam. I struck
quick, a single downward hack, handle gripped firmly, dull
blade aimed at her naked temple. In some vague way, I have a
muscle memory of the shock at the end of the arc. Afterward, it
was all shrillness and blame, mothers suddenly among us, girls
open-mouthed with horror, boys with puzzled faces. I found
myself being hustled through the back door, my mother firmly
gripping my arms. I actually think that, for just one fleeting
moment, I somehow felt protected, even vindicated, by her
purposefulness.

I have no recollection of the consequences or my mother’s
inevitable shame or my father’s anger – all surely fueled by per-
ceived and actual threats to their hard-earned status, their class
insecurities. Eventually perhaps they may even have felt con-
cern for the girl. And I don’t remember the ensuing beatings,
which surely happened, or my parents’ hurried rationalizations
and eventual recriminations against the victim, who, after all,
must have said or done something unthinkable to invite such
a response.

Strangely, I now imagine, there may have been some
whisper of pride in their inflated souls that I, their firstborn, had
had enough confidence to carry out this act at such a tender age.

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Jeff Loeb lives and writes in New York City. Prior occupations
include: US Marine, bartender, construction worker, waiter,
truck driver, furniture mover, carpenter, college and university
teacher, radio reporter, assistant city manager, cable television
company manager, photography studio owner, farmer/rancher,
and teacher. He has a PhD in English from the University
of Kansas. Journal publications include Adelaide (multiple),
American Studies, African American Review (multiple), En-
glish Journal, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood (multiple), and War,
Literature, and the Arts (multiple). Book entries include “Fore-
word” in Black Prisoner of War and “Afterword” in Memphis,
Nam Sweden.

73

Prey

by Megan Madramootoo

“Let me talk to you for a second.”
I dropped what I was doing, catching my breath abruptly

inside my throat. His usual deep and soothing voice had be-
come foreign to me, and the sudden sound of it startled my
insides. Suddenly, I realized how cold and quiet the bedroom
was, even in the hot month of August. The only thing I could
hear was the muffled sounds of the PlayStation, which Ernest’s
cousin Darren was playing in the living room some fifty feet
away. Considering he had at least four young children, spread
between just as many mothers, I didn’t understand why he had
nothing better to do on a Saturday evening. But there he was,
in our apartment, playing a fucking video game.

Ernest didn’t speak, so I slowly resumed my breathing.
With my back still facing him, I placed the socks in the top
of the oak dresser where they belonged, and gently closed the
drawer. I then cautiously turned my attention to him and
waited – arms by my sides, heart thudding inside my ears–for
him to speak.

“You killed my son. You were the reason why he died.”
My jaw fell. Ernest’s words seemed to have leapt from his
mouth and raced towards me with a punch that delivered more

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power than his own fists could ever achieve. All I could do was
stare dumbly at him. Stared at him as he continued to watch
me through his narrowed eyes, as if he were a voracious lion...
and I was his targeted prey.

After a moment in the silence of that room, I closed my
mouth and swallowed, completely thrown off by his vicious ac-
cusation. His dark eyes began to scare me, and after swiping my
tongue across my dry lips, I told him quietly (and respectfully):

“Well…since you feel that way...I’m just gonna pack my
bags and leave.”

Even though his words stunned me, I think I’d been
waiting for a reason to vacate the apartment he and I had
shared for the past year. Since Isaiah died three weeks ago, our
living arrangements had become unbearable: Ernest barely had
anything to say to me since leaving our lifeless baby, Isaiah, at
the hospital, choosing to avoid me at all costs, and his presence
at the apartment was also becoming a thing of the past, as he
now spent most of his time with Darren. My five-year-old son
Caleb was having trouble processing what exactly was going
on, and Ernest’s sudden decision to ignore his presence made
me realize that he now hated my son for still being alive when
his son didn’t make it past his six days here on earth.

My movements robotic, I turned to exit our small bed-
room with the intention of grabbing my suitcases from the
hallway closet as fast as I could. Reaching for the door knob,
I made a step to leave, but Ernest beat me to it, instantly
jumping from his place on the floor and charging towards
me like a determined football player. In one swift motion, he
effortlessly turned me around so I was facing him, grabbed me
by my neck, and lifted me inches from the floor before slam-
ming my back against the small space that separated the dresser
from the bedroom door. His long black hand began to squeeze

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Adelaide Literary Award 2019

hard, instantly stopping the flow of oxygen between my throat
and my nose as he pinned me to the wall. I felt my eyes being
forced from their sockets as I watched his own eyes morph into
something I had never seen before in my twenty-four years.

“You’re gonna fucking listen to what I have to say,” Ernest
spat at me, his once-handsome features turning demonic by
the seconds that seemed to take forever to pass. And that’s
when I knew this was it. That this was the moment that all
the days of silence and avoidance were going to prove to be
nothing but a simmering pot of anger, blame, and utter devas-
tation that finally reached its boiling point, at this very moment.

“You’re gonna fucking listen to me because you haven’t
given a SHIT about my feelings since my son died!”

He released me. I collapsed on the floor, gasping for any
breath I could find, feeling a wetness begin to make a path
from my nose to my mouth. I carefully touched the liquid
with my fingers and saw that it was blood. I didn’t dare look di-
rectly at Ernest, though, as my peripheral noticed him calmly
reclaiming his place by the closet.

“Look at me, Megan. LOOK at me!”
I started to cry, not wanting to oblige his request and give
away any remaining power and self-respect I still had left. After
strangling me with a rage he had never used on me before, he
was now demanding that I obey him, like I was his fucking
child. I was confused. He had never choked me before. Never
held my life in the palm of his bare hands like he had just
done. And what usually preceded our fights was my yelling
and screaming about something I felt he had done wrong. But
I had been quiet this time. I hadn’t yelled. I hadn’t screamed. I
hadn’t been in his face, complaining about something or the
other. I had even offered to leave. And normally, after our
fights ended, a switch would automatically flip inside his brain,

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compelling him to feel terribly about what just transpired, and
he’d begin to wipe my tears away...

“LOOK AT ME!”
My head snapped to attention and I reluctantly faced my
dead son’s father. Just then, I heard a man curse from the living
room and remembered that Darren was in the apartment. I
knew he could hear what was going on—why didn’t he come
in to help me?
“Now you’re going to listen to what I have to say, and
you’re gonna watch me cry…”
Oh, my God. What the fuck is wrong with him?
“…and you’re not gonna leave until I’m finished. You hear
me?”
I nodded, and at that point, a mixture of hatred and agony
summoned from the deepest and most secret depths of Ernest’s
soul quickly appeared in the form of dark tears, replacing the
comical eyes I had once known only weeks before. I cried even
harder as I listened to him tell me how it was my fault that
Isaiah died…that he had told me that I didn’t have to continue
to work my physically-demanding job while I was pregnant...
that after our baby died, I had never once asked him how he
was doing. How could I? He was never home anymore. And as
he talked and vented and used me for his verbal punching bag,
I cried even harder. I cried because my throat hurt. I cried for
my dead baby who had shitty parents who could only leave his
body behind in a cold hospital because they couldn’t afford a
proper funeral. And I cried because I sat there and let a man
continue to abuse me, even in the wake of losing a child.
Before I knew it, he had me in his arms, crying his heart
out into my chest, telling me over and over again that he didn’t
mean to say those things, that he had a problem, and that he
was sorry he hurt me, once again. He then laid me down onto

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Adelaide Literary Award 2019

my back and began to undress me from the waist down, telling
me over and over again that we could try again…that we could
make another baby.

I let him have sex with me, bleeding and everything from
giving birth less than a month ago. My soul faded away with
each of his thrusts, becoming as nonexistent as Isaiah’s had
when his little body finally tired of the disease that claimed
him from the moment he was born.

When I woke up the next morning, my debit card was
missing. My neck sore and my body still trembling from Er-
nest’s wrath, I quietly showered and dressed before going for
my debit card so that I could withdraw my share of the money
to renew the lease for the next 12 months. When I couldn’t
find the Bank of America card that I religiously kept inside my
wallet, I began to panic.

“Ernest, I can’t find my debit card anywhere–have you
seen it?”

He could barely look at me. I wasn’t sure if guilt and
shame from the night before took over his eyes, or if he merely
couldn’t stand the sight of me since he blamed me for Isaiah’s
death. He shook his head slowly. “No, I haven’t seen it. You
look everywhere?”

I blew out my panic, my heart slowly starting to pick up
its pace. It just so happened that Ernest almost choked the life
out of me the evening before, my debit card was now missing,
and...it just so happened…that Darren was nowhere to be
found. I didn’t know if he had spent the night or left while
Ernest had me trapped in our bedroom. But I had always kept
my handbag on the door handle of the coat closet, which was
inches from the front door. I called my bank and reported the
card missing.

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I was outraged to learn that $600 had been withdrawn
from the ATM, located less than a mile from the apartment.
And it was taken out in three separate transactions of $200
each just a couple of hours ago. I looked at Ernest, who seemed
to be waiting patiently to hear what the bank had to say. It
wasn’t unusual for me to hand over my debit card to him, in
case he needed to buy some things for Caleb while I was at
work, so he knew my PIN. There was no way he could have
given the PIN to Darren...?

“Do you want us to do an investigation?” the customer
service agent was asking me on the other end of the line.

I took my eyes off Ernest, tears beginning to form for the
thousandth time since Isaiah had passed. I couldn’t believe this
was happening to me...not now...not at this time...not when I
just lost my baby. “Yes, please,” I almost begged her. “And can
you tell me again what time these transactions took place?”

“Surely, Ms. Harris. The first withdrawal was at 7:45 this
morning, the other one was at 7:47, and the last one was at
7:49. If you go to the police station and press formal charges,
we’ll be able to bring up the picture of the person who did this,
since our ATMs have built-in cameras…”

I pulled the cell phone from my ear and looked at the
time on the front of the phone’s screen. It was now nearing 10
a.m. At 7:45, I was still asleep, tucked away in the bedroom
with Ernest. I knew I had my debit card on me yesterday, be-
cause I had used it to pay my cell phone bill.

“Okay...yes, I’ll go to the police station as soon as I can to
file an official report.”

“Okay, Ms. Harris. And in the meantime, we’ll do an in-
vestigation on this end and have the money back into your
account within seven to ten business days.”

I told her thank you and ended the call.

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Adelaide Literary Award 2019

I wiped the water from my eyes and threw my cell into my
bag, making a mental note to keep it on me at all times from
now on, even if I had to sleep with the damn thing around
my shoulder.

“What did they say, Megan?”
I didn’t answer Ernest. When he saw I wasn’t budging, he
came over to the dining room table where I sat and looked at
me.
“Your cousin stole my money.”
His face drew a blank, and then suddenly turned into an
expression of understanding. Was this planned? Did he put his
cousin up to stealing my money? Or was he not at all surprised
that Darren had done such a bastard thing?
I took a hard look at Ernest for the first time since we got
back from the hospital the day Isiaiah had died. He had lost
weight–maybe five or eight pounds–his hair was growing un-
controllably curly, defying his usual close cut, and he still wore
the bracelet the hospital had given him weeks ago, identifying
him as Isaiah’s father so he could get into the NICU with no
problems. He was unrecognizable.
“I’m gonna call my aunt and see what we can do.”
I didn’t want him to call his aunt for help. She had been
nice enough to me during the couple of interactions I had with
her, but I knew she didn’t like me. I said nothing, though, a
newfound fear of him now buried inside of me after last night.
All I could do was remain at the table, limp as a Raggedy Ann
doll, and watch him disappear into our bedroom with the
cordless phone in his hand.
Twenty minutes later, he emerged and took a seat back at
the dining room table. His thick, once kissable lips began to
turn upright at the corners of his mouth, and for a second, I
was grateful because I hadn’t seen him smile in weeks. But as

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I continued to watch his face, his mouth began to twist into
something that was sinister and self-satisfied.

“Aunt Alicia said that we should go to our banks and apply
for a loan, and that maybe you should go apply for one first.
She also said that if you can’t get your life right with God, then
we can’t be together.”

My heart tripped over a couple of beats before slamming
against my chest for a short pause. I’m sorry–what?? I stared at
him, completely astonished, as his smile dissolved into complete
smugness. My mouth ran dry, and before I knew what I was
doing, I stood, absentmindedly knocking over the chair that
I had been sitting in. Tears began to blind my eyes once more.

I began yelling. “I’m the one who’s supposed to go ask for a
loan?! It was your cousin who stole my money! And then, you ask
the same aunt for advice…the same aunt who had NOTHING
to do with me when my baby died?? Fuck, Ernest—it was her
son who stole MY MONEY!”

He just watched me—his face void of any emotion except
pure joy from the nervous breakdown I was having in front of
him. Aunt Alicia had been able to convince him that I was the
enemy all along–from the very day we lost Isaiah–when she
provided solace for him at her family’s house while I was left
alone in the apartment to grieve by myself. I was quickly losing
it because not only did Ernest hate me–his family hated me,
too. And that meant I had no one left on my side. Fuck! What
could she say to him to make him believe that it was my fault our
child died?? I was in a world that didn’t belong to me anymore,
and things were spinning out of control faster than I could
handle. I started to hyperventilate, my chest rising and falling
uncontrollably. Why couldn’t this nightmare just end?! I opened
my handbag–the same one Ernest’s cousin helped himself to
just hours before–and began rifling through its contents until I

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found my prescription bottle. Just then, I heard a loud, sarcastic
smirk from across the table before I heard Ernest announce:

“See, look at the pills you’re taking–SHIT! You’re not even
fit to be in any kind of relationship with me! Look at you–
you’re pathetic. No wonder our son died!” Loud bellows of
laughter erupted from my son’s father as I quickly forced the
cap off the medicine bottle and popped two Ativans into my
mouth, swallowing them down with only traces of spit.

I put my prescription bottle back into my bag and, in a
brave move, told him:

“I’m leaving. I can’t take this anymore. I can’t take this
anymore, Ernest!”

And then he slowly and dramatically held his black hands
out in fake resignation and asked me:

“Do you need me to help you pack?”
And that’s when the dams gave way, and the tears started
spilling over the bottom lids of my eyes. I cried openly and
desperately. “What? You really want me to leave??”
“If you’re not gonna get your life right with God, we
can’t work this out, Megan. C’mon–” he casually shrugged a
shoulder– “I’ll help you pack.”
I couldn’t believe what was happening. I walked around
to the other side of the table where Ernest stood, clutching the
glass table with my hand, as if it were the only thing keeping
me from falling over. Huge tears continued to splash sloppily
everywhere. “Ernest, please! I don’t want to go. I just need you
to listen to me. Talk to me, not your aunt. I need you to JUST
LISTEN TO ME!” My whole body shook, but I continued to
watch Ernest as I waited for some kind of miracle to happen.
Waited for him to change the carefree look on his face, and to
reach out and hold me, and to tell me that he was sorry, like
he always did whenever things went too far.

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But instead, he lifted his right hand, cracked his mouth
open, and waved good-bye.

I stared, wide-eyed, crazed, still holding onto the glass
dinner table for dear life.

“Bye, Megan,” he openly reiterated.
My mouth dropped, the tears refusing to stop. I wiped
my face and forced my mouth to close. I looked directly into
Ernest’s eyes and searched hard for the man I thought I knew.
“Ernest, nooo.” I spoke softly through my tears. “I’m sorry.” I
abhorred the weak girl who stood there, begging a man she
knew didn’t deserve her. But as I watched her during the tem-
porary out-of-body experience I was having, I understood that
was all she could do, because what other choice did she have?
He placed his hands gently on both of my thin shoulders,
jerking me back to my reality as he turned me towards the hall
that led to our bedroom. He then removed his left hand and
used it to point straight down the narrow hall towards the
room, repeating his disgust for me, in case I hadn’t caught it
moments ago:
“Bye Megan. Get your things and go.”

Having received her Master’s in English and Creative Writing
from Southern New Hampshire University, Megan Madra-
mootoo is currently focused on completing her memoir, which
will ultimately be a collection of personal essays. Her works
usually include pieces of her past that she uses to help others
who’ve experienced the same. On a normal evening, you can
find her typing furiously away, a glass of Merlot close by her
side. She resides in Marlyand, just north of the city of Baltimore.

83



FINALISTS



Looking One Way,
Going the Other

by Gabriel Sage

This all happened because of a street named Del Norte, a bi-
cycle, some wet concrete, two fractures in my left knee, and
a few toes the color of fig jam. But it began two weeks later,
when I cleared the gauze wrappers from my desk and found
my passport renewal form. Something about seeing the num-
bers written on the page made everything concrete. What
was once a line had become a circle—a trajectory turned
back on itself. Suddenly, the slow drip of days spent dulling
pain were irrefutably attached to the calendar. Three months
from now will be sometime in June. And not only would this
wheelchair keep me from flying to Copenhagen, but I will
be in it to wheel myself across the threshold of my thirtieth
birthday.

There is a feeling I have recently become unfortunately ac-
quainted with. A sort of hot twisting and pulling, like standing
in a humid greenhouse with a sheet tied around my face that
makes my nose numb and my breathing labored. The first time
it happened the ER doctor had just shown me the x-ray of my
knee. Two parabolic lines in my tibial plateau that looked like

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Adelaide Literary Award 2019

cat hairs stuck to the monitor demanded immediate surgery.
The sheet gripped around my skull.

“I need to go outside. Can I go outside?”
“I really don’t recommend it.”
Looking down at my expired passport—the flag of my im-
mobility waving in the sky of an Ikea woodgrain desk—put me
back in the sweltering greenhouse. I thought about the back-
yard, the purple outdoor couch cushions and the clear view of
the sky. It was one roll to the door of my room, and one flight
of stairs down and out. Eventually, I would fall attempting to
take the stairs with a load of laundry, but I was not ready to
be that brave or dumb yet. I moved as far as the hallway and
stopped, double checking the brakes on my chair. It’s a narrow
flight flanked by an uneasy iron railing painted thick with nu-
merous layers of black paint. Edges protrude everywhere. For
the first time since moving in last semester, I counted the stairs.
There are eight. The same number of weeks until a plane will be
leaving LAX without me. The same number of screws holding
my knee together.
People keep asking me what happened and telling me I’m
lucky. The nurse was the first person to hit me with it. He was
actually prepping my IV—wrestling on purple rubber gloves
and peeling the plastic back on assorted syringes—when he
made the point of reminding me that had this been a cen-
tury ago, all I would get was a wooden splint and spoon. I re-
sponded by adding whiskey to the list of archaic remedies, and
he responded with morphine. I suppose it was an understand-
able sentiment, it could have been worse, and I am thankful
that it wasn’t. But when you start thinking in terms of luck,
you enter into a type of speculation that can be dangerous for
someone with ten to twelve weeks to sit in a wheelchair and
think. One day you’re twenty-nine, the next you’re thirty, and

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there was still a lot to figure out. Maybe I always imagined
luck meant life would sort itself into clarity, and nothing had
taken shape yet, so every day made me look harder, like some
kind of realization, or at least closure, was close up ahead. If
others could see my fortune, I wanted to see it too, but so far
there was just the shifty circular motion of my chair gliding
me through.

The other thing people keep telling me, is that I should at
the very least get some good writing done from of all of this.
I suppose that was understandable as well. I did go back to
school to study English and creative writing, and if there was
ever a way to make it as a writer, pain is surely the best editor.
But my decision to attempt a career in words has been slowly
becoming less romantic and more uncertain. I worry about
submissions and grades, publishers and editors, and often I’m
reminded that getting a book sold is running across a freeway
in rush hour. I still love to write, but it’s not fun in the same
way it once was, and recently, every word carries the weight
of success or failure. Not just for the sentence or stanza, but
in a scarier and more profound way. Now I’m also looking for
inspiration in long days spent in bed and the walls of my room
are plaster pages on which I try to write a story.

My first trip out of the house was to the AAA office in
Berkeley. I still couldn’t bend my leg and I was in the back-
seat of my dad’s car with a few pillows, bracing myself against
the door as we took the same winding road that ruined my
leg. Preferably, we would be taking another route, but there
was only one road to Berkeley from my house. The tree lined
street looked calm in the warm light of midday, and had the
circumstances been different, one of us would probably be
commenting on how lovely a day it was for a ride. We ap-
proached the exact turn where I lost control and I swallowed

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air. Instantly, I felt trapped by the full circle of being back at
the beginning—reminded of a trajectory turning on itself. I
had been moving straight along for the most part, but my
momentum felt newly directionless, like a pendulum going
nowhere but back and forth; a circle closing in. Life had be-
come a series of repetitive loops—wraps of ace-bandages and
Xeroform strips that gave way to figure-eights on my wheel-
chair in the living room, and everything always ended with an
ice pack, leg elevated on a few pillows. My dad looked at me
over his shoulder.

“How you doing back there.”
“I’ve been better.”
“Yeah, adversity is hard to face. Everyone does it though.”
“I’m not sure how to take that.”
“I say it with love. But you’re pretty negative.”
“What?”
“It’s alright it isn’t easy. What was it Hemmingway said
about learning things?”
“There are some things that cannot be learned quickly.”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
It did get easier to think about other things in passing the
location of my accident, and I did try to be positive, or at least
reasonable. But at the time, there was still some road rash on
the palms of my hands and they rippled against the car’s inte-
rior as we turned onto Del Norte and stopped at a red light. I
looked back at the curb where I had sat waiting for a ride to the
hospital and tried to estimate where I fell in the street, but my
recollections only came in grainy frames that were out of order.
Looking back at my bike in the road. The plaid of the pants I
was wearing. Scratches in the silver of a ring on my left hand.
Someone saying “Oh my god.” Then, from the back window
of the car, I could see the outline of a figure coming down on

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a bike, riding through my invisible wake. As they rounded the
bend to share our stop-light, I could see it was a man with a
long grey beard. The basket across his handlebars was full of or-
anges, and he was wearing sandals. He looked into the window
and nodded at me just as the light turned green.

For six dollars and a doctor’s note, the state of California
will let you park just about anywhere. AAA even brought the
red plastic placard out to me in the car. We tried to use it at
a Walgreens on the way back home, but both of the disabled
spots were taken. My dad pulled into a spot a few rows back,
and because my wheelchair doesn’t fit between parked cars, we
had to move down the long isle and all the way around to get
to the entrance. Tedious and daunting travel. Even with my
dad pushing me, the lot stretched on. My chair veers to the
left; probably because I got it used online, and I pounded the
pavement with my right leg to pull the chair over and correct
our burdened progress. Each inch seemed like a trip that could
be plotted on a map; but then again, there is no way to mea-
sure that kind of distance in miles.

We had almost reached the sliding doors, when a Mer-
cedes backed out of one of the disabled spots, revealing the
familiar white stick figure always painted against a blue back-
ground sitting in three-quarters of circle. I rolled in front of
it and we were mirror images. I never noticed before, but the
arms are pointed straight out; reaching for something. I sat
looking at the grasping gesture, wondering what the arms were
hoping for. It was really just a line of paint, but for me there
was something more, something specific out there just out of
reach.

Back in the car, the same figure was printed on the placard
still hanging on the rearview mirror. I reached into the front
seat and pulled it down. Bold letters printed at the top said:

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Adelaide Literary Award 2019

Temporary, which felt alright; then I read the fine print at the
bottom that said: If found or if the placard holder is deceased,
return to DMV. When we got back to my house, we parked in
the driveway.

The next morning, I made it down to the kitchen for
coffee. It was early and the cold night air still clung to the
quartz countertops. The chill tingled through my knee first,
outlining the healing scars on my leg before moving into the
tight skin of my purple and yellow calf. My kitchen is narrow,
basically a hallway with appliances on either side. I learned
quickly that in order to get anything done, it was best to move
backwards. There is no room to turn around, so I wheeled
myself to the cabinet with the filters, put them on my lap
and pressed my heel into the ground, rolling backwards to the
coffee maker. It’s hard to do and often the wheels of my chair
clip the counters, especially because of its drunken veer. But
sometimes, I can go back and forth perfectly, like the chair is
on a track, looking one way and going the other; and I think
there is something to that.

After the coffee made it into my cup, my roommate came
in, carrying a book.

“Listen to this. You’ll like this book. It’s about language
as building blocks. Written by this architect turned linguist.
Talks a lot about how our relationship with language shapes
the world around us. As a sort of vehicle.”

“Sounds like William Blake.”
“Yeah. It’s a lot like that actually.”
Blake knew about circles and the way they can close us in.
I thought about vehicles, about wheelchairs, and the perma-
nence of words and bones. My thoughts had been moving to
that a lot lately. About what writing can do and all the hours
spent at my computer, digging and working, just for a chance

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at it. Blake first published at twenty-six and maybe I am al-
ready behind. But there is something about not taking chances
that feels like giving in, and I’m not ready for that yet. Maybe
that was why I went back to school and took classes in poetry
instead of business—because I just can’t seem to stop taking
chances. The only problem is that the handful of unfinished
writing projects saved onto my laptop are tickets to Copen-
hagen already paid for, and I’m realizing that one day you’re
twenty-nine, and the next you’re thirty, and sometimes you
don’t get to take the trips you planned. I left the kitchen and
looked up the stairs, all eight of them, thinking about language
as a vehicle as I waited for someone to help me up.

Later that night and I was in the kitchen again, putting
leftovers into the fridge while my dad did dishes. Hiding in the
door was a single beer and it looked fantastic. I had forgotten
all about beer, but was about to remind myself. I wiped the lid
off on my shirt and my dad turned off the sink.

“What are you doing?”
“I’m having a beer. What does it look like?”
“You can’t drink beer.”
“Why not?”
“Well with all the blood thinners and pain meds you’re on,
it could kill you.”
“That can’t be true.”
“You know, you’d think you wouldn’t be taking chances
anymore.”
I put the beer back in the fridge, until he left to go up-
stairs. Then took it back out, clicked back the aluminum tab
and poured it into my gut. I took the can and hid it under a
carton in the recycling, washed my mouth with water, and
gave it a minute to see if my head would explode. I didn’t
die, but when my dad left later that night, he forgot to turn

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Adelaide Literary Award 2019

off the light on my desk and bring me my crutches, so I had
to wait out the morning with the blankets over my head, the
sheet around my face and having to pee, which may almost
be the same.

There are twenty-nine sutures in my leg and it reminds me
that soon I’ll be thirty. My roommate’s friend is staying with
us and it turns out we have the same birthday and it reminds
me that soon I’ll be thirty. When we have readings in class, the
other students share stories about being in high school and I
still have another year here and who knows about grad school
and I wonder if it is possible to make it all up this late. Maybe
too much of my time had been spent thinking and not enough
working hard and maybe my vocabulary is supercalifragilistic-
expialidocious, but no one cares, and you can’t buy things with
letters anyway, not unless you get paid for them, and so far the
most I have received was a token payment for a short story I
wrote called Bad Days Come in Dozens that was so negligible,
I donated it back to magazine. Maybe part of the circle I’m
in is making wishes, but all day in school I read books that
have shaped history and wonder desperately how that is done,
fearing deep down that if I never write anything worthwhile,
it will be failing at the one thing I really and truly wanted. On
top of everything I’m scared about walking again and when
the sheet is pulling on my face and there is nowhere to go it
reminds that there is always some white stick figure reaching
and lurking and pulling everything into three-quarters of a
circle and I miss standing up in the shower and laying on my
stomach and that reminds me that soon I’ll be thirty.

The next day I went to school. The Campanile—the clock-
tower on the campus of UC Berkeley—reaches up from the
ground like a stone arm holding a fistful of bells and history. I
can see the tip of it somewhere above the tree line of Eucalyptus

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that grows at the base of campus where my dad parked for my
first lecture back. It was my idea to park there, but I quickly
realized it was a bad decision. Cal is built on a hill and we were
heading all the way up it. Incidentally, it took me another few
trips before I started parking at the top of campus and letting
gravity take me to class. This time, my dad pushed and my right
leg worked fervently to maintain progress while the wobble of
the chair tugged against us. Halfway there and my dad was
panting heavily behind me. I wished we hadn’t done this but it
was too late. I felt like a kid who started up a tree only to realize
he can’t get down, and that the tree is also on fire. My dad was
pushing less and less. The whole school felt like it was enclosed
in glass walls, the sheet slid across my temples.

“Let’s take a break by that bench over there.”
“Great. I think that’s the best idea you’ve had all day.”
We stopped at a cement bench and sat in the shade of my
guilt. I knew my dad was just exercising his right as a father to
make bad jokes. But underneath the humor was a frustration
that was obvious. He’s been complaining of his own knee for
the past few years and instead of being in the calm of his retire-
ment in LA, he had to come here and drag me up this hill. He
would never directly say anything. He is a proud father and all
the broken knees in the world wouldn’t change that. So instead,
we sat for a while without saying anything. Then he wiped the
crown of sweat from his brow.
“I just realized. There is something wrong with this pic-
ture.”
“What’s that, dad?”
“Well, at my age, it should be you pushing me in a wheel-
chair.”
After class, we rolled slowly back to the car when someone
else in a wheelchair approached. It was the first time I had come

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Adelaide Literary Award 2019

across another person in a chair since receiving one of my own,
and I don’t know why, but it made me feel nervous. Maybe I
wanted a nod; to pass some tacit sign that acknowledged an
understanding of steep hills, the frustration of broken elevators,
and the annoyance of heavy doors. After a few weeks of strug-
gling in and out of cars, up curbs, into public bathrooms, and
across fast changing walk signals, it was good to see someone
else who knew. That was my second mistake that afternoon.
The guy in the chair moved quickly through the crowd, unen-
cumbered in the way I was. His chair was compact, nothing
like mine, and it held his legs in place with a nylon strap. He
sang passed me without even a glance, his hands pumping the
wheels in a powerful rhythm that moved with incredible preci-
sion. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful.

For some reason, it made me ashamed. My gaze cast down
at the leg rest that awkwardly protruded from my chair, foot
up to prevent swelling, yellow hospital sock leading the way.
I was guilty that I hadn’t seen what my dad meant in the car.
That even if I had, I wouldn’t know what to do differently,
and that I was still waiting around for luck or inspiration and
mainly feeling sorry about it. I was guilty because what I had
really wanted when I saw the other wheelchair, was not a nod
of shared understanding, but of self-pity. And of the two of us,
only I was mired by my condition. A temporary one at that.
People keep telling me I’m lucky. Maybe they’re right.

I keep waiting to have nightmares about all this—crazy
vivid visions about being stuck in wet cement with busted
joints and the immediate need to run. I keep waiting for my
subconscious to catch up with the facts and for the dissonance
in my head to erase. Maybe because the unexpected details of
dreams are easier to interpret, to congeal into some kind of
meaning. Or maybe just because they end with the morning.

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But there is no way for me to dream about a broken leg, be-
cause I wake up with one, and that means there is still a lot to
figure out. Maybe that is the hardest part of all this—about my
leg and my words and birthday—there is no figuring things
out. I keep waiting for the signs to align, for all of this to
make sense in some profound way. But I’m learning there is no
epiphany or denouement, no secret or flash of insight. There is
only looking one way and going the other; being twenty-nine
one day, thirty the next, and maybe that is okay.

A few days after that my dad left to go back home to LA
and I would be on my own for the next couple weeks. He left
in the morning and drove off into a thick fog. I told him to call
me when he got home and I sat at the door for a while after
he left. You can see the Golden Gate bridge reaching across
the bay from my front porch. The fog encircled everything
and it was mostly impossible to make out more than two red
dots against a grey back drop, but I stared at them for a while
with my yellow sock extended into the damp morning before
going inside. I approached the stairs to room, and gripped my
crutches. No one here to spot this time. I held the iron rail and
one at a time, climbed up all eight.

Back in my room, there is a filing cabinet under my desk.
I built it with my dad in the garage a few summers ago. We
tried to install spring loaded drawers that close by themselves,
but we didn’t drill the holes right and now every time you shut
it, it opened back up a little bit. It’s funny, I don’t remember
why we built it, maybe one day I realized I didn’t like having
my paperwork stuffed into a Trader Joes bag on the floor of my
closet. The passport and renewal forms were still lying in plain
sight and I picked them from the desk. I opened the wobbly
drawer and put everything into a manila folder. When I shut
it, it opened back up a little bit.

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Adelaide Literary Award 2019

The writing of Gabriel Sage is a sludge-covered collision of
consonants and conciseness; a concentrated examination of
delicate daily minutia converging as existence. He attempts
to trace the promiscuous line between order and chaos with
phonemic precision, but often ends up tossing words into a
rucksack and climbing the nearest mountain. The result is a
shapeless oeuvre impossible to define without engaging in the
same unabated filigree of humanness that is simultaneously the
object and subject of his work. Gabriel is currently composing
his second book of poetry while studying at UC Berkeley.

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