Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of Paint It Black Review of The i Tetralogy Poetry Zoology By Patricia Murphy Framed Gift By Sheila McLaughlin Sikorski Friends 'n' 'at or Ode to Pittsburghatory By Betta Risa In My Father's Shoes By Richard Fein Freedom By Skip Shea Fiction Quitting Time By Barbara Archer Tumbleweed By Thom Brennan Maternal Instincts By Diane Kimbrell You Should Write People Dead By T. M. Warfield Spring Fling By Patricia Murphy About the Contributors © 2007, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Vacant Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Sen. Fiction Editor - Patti Kurtz Sen. Poetry Editor - Neeldhara Misra Sen. Creative Nonfiction Editor - Brenda Coxe Copyeditor - Kathy Skaggs Contributing Editor - Robert Dittman Blog Contributing Editor - Maggie Koster Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/subs.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit VolunteerMatch. |
You Should Write People Dead By T. M. Warfield You should write people dead. That’s what they all said--the school psychologist, the principal, my mother. They didn’t go so far as to encourage printed homicide, though that was the idea. “Cognitive therapy” was the term they used. To help control the violent urges through stream of consciousness free-writing. Counting to ten for the emotionally disturbed kid. They said instead of hurting someone, just imagine doing it and write the thoughts down like a story. This was after my umpteenth referral for physical harassment. In short, I hit someone again. # I was pretty much a normal seventh-grader. Held a B average, played third base. My math teacher said I could be an engineer or an architect. There were no real problems aside from a small outburst every now and then. My conscience was fine tuned for making Mom happy. My oldest memories include her telling me how proud she was. It became almost instinctive to think about how Mom would feel if she got a call from the teacher or some referral notice in the mail. She would be so ashamed and disappointed that she could never love me again. So I stayed away from trouble. When Dad stopped coming around, so did the money, so Mom had to find a job. In less than two years we moved from the house to a rental, to one apartment, then another. As the homes grew smaller, so did my patience. # The first incident occurred after a friend said Mom had cigarette breath. It was my neighbor, Bobby, at his house during his sister’s twelfth-birthday party. He said my clothes smelled nasty too. I clenched my teeth and my fist and aimed at his mouth. When he pulled himself up there was a dark red smear from his left nostril across his cheek. Everyone else was half frozen, glaring with mouths open. Bobby ran toward the bathroom, catching his blood in a cupped hand, and I ran out the front door and up the street. The pain in my chest wasn’t so much from the sprinting, but it wasn’t from regret either. It didn’t stop until I reached home. I saw from her eyes that Mom had already received the phone call before I walked through the apartment door. She shook her head, and I broke down and cried into her shoulder. She said God didn’t give us hands for hitting. We turn the other cheek and use our words to solve problems. The trouble was that words always started the problem. # Only a week later I would find myself in the school office, sitting across from Principal Schaffer and the psychologist, Dr. Daryl. He was a young guy, and held an all-too-friendly smile you just wanted to knock off his face. Mom was to my left, looking nervous while they went over my options. My head pointed to the floor while they gawked at the bruise on Ms. Kearney’s upper arm. They told me I couldn’t go to school there anymore, and I bobbed my chin into my chest a couple times. They asked why I would do such a thing. Why would I punch her? Why would I threaten her? Do I know how serious that is? What could have been running through my head? But they didn’t want a response. Those were just the hypothetical questions that only get you into more trouble if you try to answer. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? All just words, anyway. Words I never expected to hear from Mom again were how proud of me she was. Dr. Daryl rolled a chair around to the side of the desk and slapped a pencil and a sheet of lined paper in front of me. He wanted me to write down my feelings about hitting the teacher. “Let’s go,” he said, “don’t roll your eyes. Just write.” The tension in my face released to let my fingers hold the pencil tighter and push harder on the paper: He said to write my feelings about being kicked out of school. Scratching at the paper again: “Be honest,” he said, “you won’t get in trouble for anything you write on this paper.” Without pausing, I wrote: Mom shifted to take the pencil from my hand, but Dr. Daryl said it was okay. He said it was good for me. It felt good. “Now, I promise you, if you never hit anyone again, no matter how angry you get, I’ll leave you alone. Principal Schaffer will too. Okay?” More head bobbing. Mom seconded the promise. “Instead, you just hold it all in and then later you can write down what you felt like doing. Just don’t show it to them afterward,” he snickered, looking at Mom and the principal. “Sound good?” “Whatever,” I mumbled, and clenched my teeth again. # It was hard the first time, not hitting the kid. At the new middle school, everyone kept staring, giving me dirty looks. Every teacher sat me at the back of the class. During lunch, some badass named Paul Wilson said to eat my lunch outside. Poor kids couldn’t eat in the cafeteria. Lifting my chin and pointing my eyes to his ugly, freckled face, I scowled, begging him to push, spit, take a swing, whatever. Give me a reason to bust his teeth in. But before anything could happen, a teacher separated us and escorted me out of the lunchroom by the ear. Out of that night came a two-page story about slamming Paul’s face into the table and smearing cafeteria meatloaf over the back of his head. I hung it on the fridge. The results were always pleasing. The more I imagined my stories to be real, the more real they became. Nothing worried me anymore: the kids, the comments, my history teacher, the bus driver. Paul always seemed afraid, but that’s normal after being beaten to near-death six times. # Each day the inventory grew. More and more just begged to be punished on paper. By winter break I had filled up three notebooks with therapy. It wasn’t too long until I began going out of my way to look for reasons to hurt someone. That girl, Lindsay, who bounces her feet on the back of my desk--I’ll kick her in the shins with steel-toe boots. That guy who bumped into me on the street--I’ll push him off a cliff into a pit of jagged rocks. Mom’s latest boyfriend--just imagine. It was gratifying to envision the array of tragedies that would transpire on them later in the day. If they irritated me again, that meant writing all the harder to make sure they were properly dealt with. People that were once infuriating became menial annoyances who could just be flicked away with the stroke of a pen. # One day in my freshman year of high school, I came home to hear that Mom had flipped through a few of the more descriptive murder stories. She told me she was worried and had made an appointment with a counselor. I refused. The doctor guy promised me. I wouldn’t have to see him or any of them anymore if I stayed good, and I did. I had a dresser drawer full of notebooks to prove it. But Mom, too busy washing dishes to even look at me, said I had no choice. I ran to my room, slammed the door, and spit profanities into the pillow for several minutes. After my fingers cramped up from digging into the sheet, I let go and rolled off the bed. Sprawled face-up on the floor, gasping for air but drowning in my tears, I thought about what I could do. I would rather die than have to get help. See a doctor. Take pills. Have Mom upset with me. I would rather die. There was a pen on the floor, and some loose pieces of paper, so I gathered them and started writing. The pen scratched furiously across the paper, scolding Mom for lying to me. For not listening. For going behind my back. How dare she do that! How dare she! It must have been after eight pages of words nobody would ever want to read, that, on paper, Mom collapsed of a heart attack and died. I scribbled hard after that, crossing out the words, and the paper shredded under the pen. I tore the rest of the pages from the notebook, crumpled and tore them, and began to snivel. Scooping up pieces of my murdered mother, throwing them in the trash, I kept whispering between sobs, “I just killed Mom. I just killed her!” The only person I loved. The only one who cared for me. The only one I wanted approval from in the world. Gone. My mouth opened wide and wailed. Crying so hard that it became a challenge to inhale between howls. The door flew open and Mom rushed in to find me curled in a ball. She fell to her knees and grabbed me, holding me, asking what happened. After I could breathe again, I sprang to my feet and stared at her as if she had just come back from the dead. My heart felt like it was trying to beat itself out of my chest. My groans turned to whimpers while I apologized over and over. “I didn’t mean it, Mom! I didn’t mean it!” Her mouth and eyebrows twisted, confused. Her frightened lips muttering a prayer. “Sorry.” I stopped writing after that night. It wasn’t so much that I was scared, but it was satisfaction. Mom was back. She loved me again and nothing was more important. To come back from the dead like that, she had to love me. So I quit for Mom. So that I wouldn’t lose her again. # One year ago today, Mom was taken from me. She died of heart disease at the age of seventy-one. At first I accepted it. We gave her a beautiful funeral service and my daughters and I cleaned out her mobile home at the senior community. The smell of stale smoke lingered in every room, and for some reason a reminiscent grin forged its way onto my face. While sorting through her things, I found one of her old waitressing nametags and broke down to tears. Spending time with my wife and kids helped to ease the pain. And things seemed to be back in order, but a few weeks after the burial they saw me as a different person. They said I never talked, was losing a lot of weight, and didn’t get enough sleep. They wanted me to get help, but I shrugged it off. It was when my boss woke me up at work that I noticed a real change. It wasn’t so much that I never slept at the desk, but it was my snapping at him after waking me. He backed up in a defensive position. I sort of panicked and started apologizing. He nodded and told me to go home, take some time off, and look for some help. So I found some. As soon as I got home, I grabbed the phone book and a pencil. After dialing the number of the first shrink I found in the yellow pages, I started writing in the margins: The receptionist answered, and I hung up the phone. It had been thirty-seven years since I’d released my anger in written form, and now there I was breaking my promise. But it felt right. I picked up my pencil and finished the story. # The problem escalated much quicker this time. Everyone said I looked healthier, and was improving my attitude at work and home. But it worried the hell out of me. In secret, I was writing them all dead. I wrote my co-workers dead, my best friend dead, and even my wife and daughters. All dead. They didn’t do anything to deserve it, but they didn’t need to anymore. I just had to remove them from my world. To separate them from me. To protect them. I’d always blubber about it—killing my loved ones over and over—but I couldn’t keep them in a world with such a horrible character. He didn’t deserve happiness. He was disgusting, and shouldn’t share his infectious despair with anybody. He deserved to be alone. # Yesterday, with a shaky hand, I killed myself on paper. All it took was a pint of vodka, a bottle of aspirin, and a revolver. After loading up myself, and the gun, I pulled the trigger and blew my brains out. I sat back in my chair and took a deep breath. Reading my suicide over and over, I began scratching out words and writing new ones, editing and revising for more vivid language. To make my death perfect. And in the back of my mind, I knew death--for real--wasn’t too far away. But I wasn’t suicidal. Miserable, maybe. It wasn’t that I was depressed--it was more on the side of delirium. According to everyone else, my life was getting better and better. And, to be honest, I couldn’t agree more. But the price was an hour each night of self-medicating with fiction, and burying it at the bottom of the trashcan. # After falling asleep last night, I dreamt about my world. Not a soul existed anymore, not even my own. There were no frustrations, yet there was no happiness. My world was without hate, but also without love. Without life. By the way, when a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around, God hears it. To create a world just to destroy everything I build is pointless. Once I’m all alone, what is left to justify my existence? Nothing. Then, out of the void, Mom appeared in the dream. It was the first time I’d seen her since she died, and the emotion slipped back in. With tears taking the place of words, I cried into her shoulder once again. I apologized, begging her forgiveness for my actions. For breaking my promise. “What did I do, Mom? Help me. I am so sorry!” I pleaded. She didn’t speak--only smiled. # When I woke up this morning, I slid out of the bed so as not to wake my wife, and left the room. Creeping past my daughters’ bedroom doors, I made my way down the dim stairway, and continued straight to the garage. With the dim light of a gray morning sky seeping in through the garage door windows, I began to write. I wrote good things about myself, very detailed. I made sure there was no doubt that I still existed, and that I was happy. I resurrected my wife, my daughters, and even though she is no longer with me, my mother. And for the first time in forever, I feel content. This story is the last I will ever write; and after it is finished, I will tear up this notebook. The psychologist was wrong, you know. He said writing negative thoughts on paper would help me feel better, but fuck that. You should write people alive. |