So, we have admittedly fallen behind a bit on the online portion of tulip. That, however, is because we are moving right along with the print issue. Just a few more submissions to go through, and then we are off to the printers.
Trust we have your submission and will be replying shortly. To hold you over until then, here is the cover we have decided upon for issue numero uno:
By: Mel Bosworth
Freddy says he likes the new me but I remind him that the new me is still the old me underneath the new haircut and polyester sport coat/I bought the sport coat at the thrift store for the price of a draft and I reminded myself of this as I flicked the silver in my palm but one less drink was what it would cost to turn Veronicas stare my way again/Simple math really/The haircut is compliments of Freddy and we drink while he cuts plastic comb snapping on the scissors and stubs with red cherries twirling out the window as the train howls past/Freddy uses a dog brush to swipe my shoulders clean and he says Good Luck and I say Thanks Freddy and I stumble but not so bad down the sidewalk to Veronicas nail salon/A dozen roses from the sidewalk Korean and I rap on the glass forgetting that Veronica told me not to that the ink on my knuckles frightens the women with the orange hair/She comes out in a red dress her mane pulled back and resting on her neck like a gourd and Jimmy Flavor follows behind looking smarmy and before I know it Im smashing his teeth and the roses flake apart on the concrete and Veronica stabs a hole in the side of my sport coat with her stiletto and tells me Ill never fucking change.
By: Dustyn Logan Peterman
By: Doug Mathewson
Buddy loved surprises, both to give and to get. Buddy wasn’t dumb, but he wasn’t exactly right either. The Group Home’s rules said for your birthday you could order whatever you wanted for supper. Buddy did a funny voice and surprised everyone yelling steak! At dinner on his birthday, he had another surprise. He gave his steak to Big Eugene, who ate it with his fingers, while Buddy palmed the special knife. Buddy wasn’t stupid, just had his own different ways. Late that night when Mr. Jackson the janitor came to hurt the girls, and make them cry, Buddy had a surprise for him too. A six-inch stainless steel surprise with a serrated edge and a wooden handle that Buddy ripped all the way back to the bones in Mr. Jackson’s unshaven surprised throat.
By: Gary Moshimer
The priest’s head bobbed outside the cafeteria window. For some reason he always hid in the bushes to jump out at us. He waved us toward the ER. We burned our lips with coffee getting to him.
His face was meaty red and the blue swirls of his eyes had clouded gray. “This is bad,” he said. The bright April sun lit rivulets of sweat on his bald head. Veins rose and redirected the rivers as tears.
“Father, what is it?”
He flipped his shades down against the blazing white of our orderly outfits. “Your girl is dead. Come.” He hurried across the parking lot. “Before they take her to the morgue.”
I hyperventilated. My legs went numb and I fell behind. Father called back, “Not your Mary. The Boys-in-White-Suits girl.”
Paul said, “My god. Why?” They stopped to let me catch up. I still wasn’t right. I felt dizzy.
“Hit by a car,” Father said. “Neck broken. DOA.”
“Why didn’t you get us sooner?”
“Nothing to be done. Plus her father was in there. He’s gone. Now we can go in.”
We stood at the ER side door. Paul threw up a little in his mouth and that made me gag. Father took our arms. He had the strong hands of an ex-wrestling coach. He squeezed to bring us around. “It’s not your fault, okay. It happened at her school.” Because he knew that every morning when we walked to work the girl, pretty and seventeen with the mentality of a five-year-old, would call and point to us, “Boys in white suits!” and try to break from her father’s grip and run to us. We had to stop waving to her, for her safety. We had to ignore her. We could hear her cry when we stopped looking.
We slipped through the curtain. She was there in the room by herself. A sheet covered her to her shoulders. She was marble. There were no marks on her, just a strange tilt to her head, as if she listened for something. She listened for us, the boys who had stopped talking to her. I watched her eyelids, expecting them to open. I lifted the sheet and touched her hand. Her nails were painted pink.
Father said a quick prayer and we left her. We found our supervisor and told her we were sick.
“Both of you?” she said.
We walked down Parkwood to our apartment. The cherry trees chose this day to bloom. In the brightness our place seemed empty even though nothing had moved. We didn’t know what to think so we did what we did every day– lit the bong and turned on Mr. Rogers. We pulled the shades.
Mr. Rogers put on his slippers, watching us. “If we look around us carefully,” he said, “we can learn something new every day.”
By: Dave Erlewine
“He won’t say anything,” the school nurse said, her reading glasses dangling.
“Where’s my son?”
“Mr. Anderson, we’ll find out who did this. We’re going to remove it the safest way. But he won’t tell us who –”
He opened the door behind the nurse. His son stood against the far wall. The letters “STUTT” lined his forehead. “ER” nearly covered his right cheek, “ER” the left.
More than one student must have held him so still while someone carefully formed block letters. They used blue, red, and yellow markers in an alternating pattern.
He looked over his son’s head, knowing he needed to hug him, not inhale the chemicals, not look at his face again, not scramble into the halls.
END
By: T. R. Healy
Shading his eyes with his bruised left hand, his long legs crossed, Tanana sat alone on the top row of the rickety wooden bleachers. A half empty can of Diet Pepsi sat beside him along with a pair of surplus binoculars. Scarcely looking at the kid at bat, his eyes were on the batter on deck. A short compact kid with wrists as thick as two crowbars, he loosened up by swinging a steel pipe instead of a bat. His name was Brian Scheewe and he was a catcher. The first time up he was much too aggressive and swung wildly at the first pitch and missed, took the next one, then lined out to the shortstop. The pitcher barely worked up a sweat.
In another moment, after his teammate flied out to center, Scheewe was back in the batter’s box, tapping the head of his bat on home plate. This time he took the first pitch, which was called a strike, and appeared as if he was going to take the next one but then swung at it weakly and dribbled the ball back to the mound. He was pretty quick for a catcher but was thrown out by a couple of strides. Angrily he ripped off his batting helmet and slammed it on the ground then kicked it back toward the dugout.
Tanana leaned back and took another swallow of Pepsi, got out his spiral notebook, and underlined the word “aggressive,” which he had written down after watching Scheewe bat the first time and beside it added “impatient.” Then he wrote “heart” with two huge question marks beside it. The catcher would get two more at bats but he had seen enough and slung the binoculars over his shoulder and made his way down the bleachers while the inning proceeded.
Tanana was a part-time scout in the Orioles organization, what was known in the early days of baseball as a “bird dog.” He had never made much money at the job, earning a commission only when a player he recommended was signed, but kept at it because of his fondness for a game he had been involved in since he was eight years old. Over the past three years eleven players he had spotted were signed to contracts, and a couple even suited up for the Orioles. He had yet to find one who played for a full season, however, but each time he looked at a prospect he hoped to find one who would.
“You leaving already, Gabe?” Red Colbert, another scout, asked as Tanana walked past the concession stand.
He nodded. “There’s another game across town I want to check out.”
“Anyone here interest you?”
“Oh, I had my eye on the home team’s catcher. I’d heard he had a pretty quick bat.”
“But you aren’t that excited, huh?”
“The kid can play. No question about it. But his heart concerns me.”
“That’s always the major issue for you, Gabe,” he laughed, after lighting his stub of a cigar. “You know you’ve missed out on some good prospects because of such concerns.”
“Maybe I have, but to me it’s what determines whether someone has what it takes to make it to the big leagues.”
Back in his car Tanana sat a moment, looking over the notes he had taken of the catching prospect. So far, his numbers were pretty solid, might even get better by the end of the season, but he doubted if the kid would ever earn a dollar in the game. Years ago, when he was still playing, a pitching coach pointed out that any donkey in the stands could tell if someone had the physical tools for the game.
“You don’t have to be Branch Rickey to see if a kid can throw hard or make a tough catch or get good wood on a ball,” the coach observed. “But it’s what’s inside him that really counts. What I think of as the climate of his heart. Is it usually calm and under control or is it in turmoil all the time? If you know what his climate is like, you’ll get a better idea if he can make it. As a player, you have to be able to handle adversity because you’re sure as hell going to get your share of it.”
*
Tanana was a very good pitcher in high school, with a lively fastball and a pretty decent slider. He was signed by the Orioles as soon as he graduated, and by his eighteenth birthday had half a dozen starts in Double A ball with three wins and one loss. In another year, he reckoned, he would be promoted to Triple A and maybe called up to Baltimore at the end of the season. To his surprise, though, he never got out of Double A, his fastball becoming a little slower each season, and after his third year was released and realized his dream of pitching for the Orioles would remain a dream. He was crushed and returned home, without any idea what to do now that baseball was no longer a part of his life.
On the recommendation of an uncle he got a job as a groundskeeper for the Park Bureau and started out cutting grass at two parks on the west side of town. Slowly he rose through the ranks, serving the past year as the assistant supervisor of Sharpley Gardens until he replaced his boss who retired earlier this spring. He assumed he would be there until he retired but the past few days he was not sure if he wanted to remain with the bureau. For the first time, since he started working as a scout, he was thinking about applying for a salaried position with the Orioles or some other club.
*
It was already the bottom of the third when Tanana arrived at the other high school game he wanted to see this afternoon. Some other scouts were seated along the first base line, six rows from the top of the steep bleachers, and he joined them after checking the scoreboard. The game was tied at a run apiece.
“You forget what time the game started?” Bud Yeager asked as Tanana sat down beside him.
“Nah, I got stuck in traffic,” he explained. “Some truck got sideswiped on Armitage Road and, of course, everyone had to slow down and gawk at it.”
“I guess you should have got an earlier start.”
“I couldn’t. I was watching a game over in Walnut Grove.”
Suddenly, a ball was crushed deep to right, well over the outfielder’s head, and looked as if it might be a home run until it struck the foul pole. The crowd groaned in disappointment.
“Anyone over there worth looking at?” another scout, Hank Jurgens, asked, shelling a peanut.
“There were a couple kids who showed some promise but I’d have to look at them a few more times before I know if they can play at the next level.”
“I assume you’re here to see Ashby throw?”
He nodded. “Isn’t everyone?”
“Well, you’re out of luck,” Yeager snapped in irritation. “His manager says he’s developed some tendinitis in his shoulder and didn’t even suit him up.”
“Swell,” he groaned, slumping back on the bench. “I busted my tail getting over here for nothing then.”
“The trials and tribulations of the life of a bird dog,” Jurgens cracked, shelling another peanut.
The batter, after taking the first two pitches, laid down a feathery bunt and appeared to beat the throw but was called out by the umpire who was roundly booed.
“More than once I’ve asked myself why I continue to look for prospects,” Yeager admitted. “And of course the answer is obvious: I just can’t get this damn game out of my system.”
“You ever think about doing it on a regular basis?”
“I have, Gabe, especially when I was just starting out, but then I realized I didn’t want to be away from my family as much as I’d have to be if I was getting a salary.”
Tanana did not respond but watched a lazy foul ball drift into the stands.
“Why do you ask? Are you thinking about getting into it full-time?”
“It’s crossed my mind.”
“Not me,” Jurgens said adamantly. “It’s tough enough doing what we do, driving to every town in the state with a baseball team, putting as much mileage on our cars as a damn bus.”
Yeager agreed. “Doing it full-time would be a grind, all right, and probably lonesome as hell.”
“You’d be living in your car or in motels most of the week.”
Yeager looked at Tanana. “What’d ever make you want to scout for a living? You’ve got a good job with the Park Bureau. You should be content doing it part-time.”
He shrugged. “Sometimes you get tired of doing what you always do,” he said tentatively. “You’d like to have a change of scenery … do something else for a while.”
“If I were you, Gabe, I’d leave things just as they are,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with being a bird dog on the weekend.”
Jurgens, snickering, chirped, “Nothing at all.”
*
Not quite five weeks ago Sid Krugman, the superintendent of parks, abruptly resigned his position without explanation, catching everyone by surprise. Then, the following day in the morning Monitor, it was disclosed that he had sexually abused an underage girl almost eight years ago. People who knew him were stunned. He was such a gentle and considerate individual, about the last person anyone would have suspected of committing such a crime. The shock quickly turned to revulsion, however, and no one was more outspoken in public than his replacement as superintendent, Vic Mincher, who had served as his administrative assistant the past year and a half. At a news conference he indignantly condemned his former boss, regretting that the statute of limitations had passed so he could not be prosecuted. And insisted if aware of what Krugman did he would have reported him immediately to the authorities.
Tanana was at the conference, which was held in the lobby of the bureau, and listened in disbelief. He and Mincher were not particularly close but they were hired around the same time so they knew one another fairly well. And one evening, while sharing beers together after work, Mincher revealed to him a rumor he had heard about Krugman once having an affair with a fourteen year old park volunteer. He did not believe it, thought it was all the beer in him talking, but now of course he realized it was true. And he was astonished to hear Mincher claim that he had no idea such a thing had happened when he told him about it less than six months ago. For an instant, he was tempted to raise his hand and remind him of what he said, but he knew he would deny it. He wanted the job of superintendent too much to admit he had known about Krugman’s transgression before the other morning.
That evening, after he got home from a college game on the other side of the river, he cracked open a beer and sat down at his desk and looked at the notes he had taken on the pitcher he went to watch. The stocky southpaw threw hard but had control problems, walking four batters the first two innings, but then settled down once he got command of his slider. This was the third time he watched the kid, and though he didn’t regard him as a great prospect, he believed he had a chance to earn some money throwing a baseball because the climate of his heart was sound. He never got rattled in any of the games Tanana had seen, despite some very stressful situations, always seemed the most composed player on the field.
Sipping his beer, he stared at the blank sheet of paper on which he intended to write the first draft of his assessment of the prospects of the young southpaw, unable to get down a single coherent sentence. All he could think about was the startling contrast between the performance of the hard throwing pitcher and that of Mincher at his news conference. Time and again, the kid demonstrated composure and integrity on the mound, which were critical if he hoped to sign a baseball contract, while Mincher was full of bravado and deceit, clearly willing to cut any corner if it served his purpose. One overcame adversity, the other cravenly capitulated to it.
He took another swallow of beer then decided to write his report on the pitching prospect tomorrow. Now he planned to write a letter to the chairman of the Board of Advisors of the Park Bureau and let him know that at least for the past six months Mincher was aware of Krugman’s sexual assault. He intended to sign it, too, hoping to show some of the heart he had witnessed on the mound that afternoon
By: Tom Sheehan
The deep woods glistened with a scary silence, now and then broken and highlighted by the crack of a freezing limb swearing it would fall to earth, yet promising a minor distortion. Sometimes that crack or cry sounded like a baby in the night, a wailing, a voice given to what has no voice. We stood, some yards apart, some huge oaks apart, their ugly and monstrous arms clawing at the daylight, my friend and I. It was the moment of pure silence before we would set the forest on its ear with the roar of our chain saws. Apart we measured each other, having worked this forest for a full year that was to prove eventually a twelve-year spin at cutting and hauling wood. A friendly prophet could have cast this duo; not one word of argument had crossed our lips, ever, or one word of advice. That had covered the years since we met in a carpool heading off to our jobs some twenty-five miles away from home, another twenty years earlier. The other, each assumed, was old enough and wise enough to do his duty, enact his wisdom, share his energy. We fished, we played cards, we drank beer, we watched hockey games on TV because our own skating was long over, we lent tools and energies to the other’s needed tasks… car brakes, roofing jobs, electrical problems, you name it and we did it.
But we never argued and never gave advice. Now the silence penetrated each of us, was mystical in its impact, the deep cold making it so much clearer for a listener in this deep forest fifteen miles north of home.
From the crest of the hill just above me, my long-time friend, carpool companion, fellow fisherman and logging buddy, Eddie LeBlanc yelled down at me. “Wood burns twice, you know. That’s what they say up in Moncton and Memramcook, in New Brunswick, the wood-burning LeBlancs.” And he was so right. Sweat ran on me though the temperature had continually dropped since our arrival in the deep woods. Droplets gathered speed until they hit an obstruction… a belt line, an elbow, a high ankle sock. If I stopped working, my joints would freeze up.
It was a sudden December storm of 1971 and the energy crunch was on, oil prices escalating with frenzy. We were cutting trees and hauling logs, part of a State Forest Management effort, in the Willowdale State Forest in Topsfield, MA, not far from the Topsfield Fairgrounds. Being throwbacks, we had committed ourselves to do something about energy and conservation. Tight, cast iron, wood-burning stoves had been trundled into our homes, chain saws and six-pound mauls brought into our tool collection, our energies dedicated and fused: two saws, two vehicles, two temperaments at one task. In my then-231 year old house, one of the two chimneys that had serviced four fireplaces on each side of the house was re-lined. Eddie had erected a new chimney on an outer wall of his house, which was a mile away from mine. We’d do battle our way; gunshots of the maul.
For close to eight years the whole wood-burning routine was a snap, though the work was hard. Many Saturday mornings and parts of Sundays were spent in the forest. Sometimes the struggle versus the weather more difficult than the work. But we were a team.
On the way home on the good days, the season right, the van and truck laden to brims, cooling down from the first heat of the wood, having a noon sandwich, a quenching beer, we fished Pye Brook or the Ipswich River for the elusive and phantom trout. Now and then across the water a quiet nod at each other when the first nibble came or a hungry carnivore snapped at our line. At times, I’ll swear to eternity, we were in Elysium. I’ve always believed that can only happen with keen and lasting friendships. On that account I have always been right.
And the harvested log, for that matter, still burns twice, I keep telling Eddie on the phone these days. Close to twenty years ago he moved to Orlando for a job opportunity and we talked every weekend until the computer chat room came upon us two years ago. Then it was every night, his old chain saw, above the mantelpiece, a hard trophy of our efforts. And I do not go to the forest alone with a chain saw, but manage to cut down a few neighbors’ trees, hustle drops from the town tree workers now and then, pick up logs piled at a curbside, scrounge through the Recycling Center at the town dump, often unloading logs from another vehicle right into mine.
Wood still burns twice no matter how you look at it.
Mostly, for me these days, it is with the maul, the exercise decent and productive in many ways, for a number of reasons. But I don’t think I’ve ever swung the maul over my shoulder when I have not thought of my friend’s downhill shout that “wood burns twice,” knowing the graces of communal effort, feeling like a throwback to another time.
So much comes out of concerted energy. So much gets done. So much is learned. About yourself. About others. Comes about you knowledge and command and respect, trusts deeper than most friendships. Eddie would say, as the wind started to rise, the chill coming on, “If you want to keep your feet warm, wear a hat.” It was an old survivor’s saying. He’d been in Scouts for years. Or “Don’t let your shadow fall across the water when fishing.” For years he had fished with the legendary Artie Tash and Brother Bentley and Ray Costanza Exel, getting his limit every opening day on the Saugus River, beside one of the fairways of Cedar Glen Golf Course. That river’s gone south these days, as far as the trout are concerned, in a manner of speaking. Eddie’s there too.
Yet the maul arcs, the logs crack apart some days like gunshots, neighbors mark the energies, the stacked pile climbs higher in my back yard, sweat rings and rises and is cast off in vapors. I look at the growing cords of wood, the coming winter, and make no assumptions: more first-time heating is needed, so the second heating can drift inward, lift itself slowly and surely through this old house, can climb stairs, most welcome tenant, when the Montreal Express beats at the outer walls.
The arc, swift, accurate, concerted, catches silver from the sun on the maul’s edge, where the sun splinters itself into smithereens, joining my fusion. I move into another experience of my life and bring along what I have learned: Wear a hat if you want to keep your feet warm… Don’t drop shadows on top of trout… Wood heats twice (or more) if you have to cut and haul, and split it… Spending time in Elysium with a friend does not have to pass away from being. The maul in my hands, like any good tool, does wonders for the soul, for old statements made by my body, for respect and friendship anchored by sweat and good service to one another.
When we cut up a neighbor’s apple tree one evening’s rush into November, as a favor for neighbor, as a ruse to rouse winter apple smoke, the words ran through me like music…They have all gone now, the fire engine-red Macintosh, under batter with cinnamon, gone to day school on yellow buses with brown-baggers, or bruised to a freckled taupe and plowed under for ransom and ritual. Some will have the life crushed out of them for Thanksgiving cup. Standing on the stiff lawn downwind of winter, I drop the first cold moon of November into a fractured wheel of apple limbs and hear the bark beg away. A pine ridge, thicker than a catcher’s mitt, grabs half the wind riding off Vinegar Hill and squeezes out wrenching cries that hang, like wounded pendants, on necks of far, thin stars. Deep in the Earth, in a thermal tube of its own making, an earthworm grows toward a rainbow trout sleeping under ice and waiting to be heard, or the last of an apple’s pips still this side of the grass.
It all ends up, most generously, in a letter I once sent to Eddie continually ringing in my ears these days as winter plows through: “All day this December, cold is a secret of my fleece lined jacket and the bottom of my mittens. The senseless wind, without any direction and purposeless, gets hung up in the muffler I wear as some corrective device, thick and woolly and itchy, around my neck. It’s the one you left in my van the last winter we cut wood in Topsfield and waded through that white tide until we fell exhausted. You used to laugh about wood heating twice. Now you’ve gone south, and I can hear the cry of the gnarled and aged oak as it lets go and throws the Earth out of kilter, the topmost branch brazenly and suddenly at hand, an old nest scattered. I walked quietly there yesterday, snow thrown like paint everywhere except on the sun side, and half-gray birches, like stalkers sly and half-white in the wind, made me think of Finnish ski troops the Russians didn’t like around or our own boys of the 10th Mountain Division rampaging 1944’s northern Italy. I suppose there are pieces of the battlefield left down south, but I bet you think of Topsfield when a cool wind grabs your neck, an old jacket lets out secrets, your fingers remember wood’s endless caress, and all across a sunset sky falling downhill to your ears, a chain saw’s evening prayers. I swear to you, Eduoard, I can feel it all in the handle of the maul. It’s like this: A three-beer push on the maul handle. My shoulders shooting nerves into fibrous white oak, elm never letting go, maple reporting splits clean as firecrackers, one time good wood lets go. Out and beyond an Arab watches me through the eye of a coin hung on edge. I hear the flag sing in front of the house, my own drummer beating high on a hill, and, in strange field, crevice and creek bed, from here to foothills of the Montanas, gunshots of the maul, and my chain saw’s deep roars, my Howitzer in the fray.
By: Dr. Toshiko Yamagushi
DEAR BENEFICIARY!!!
Congratulations to you as we bring to your notice the
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Email Address:fedexcourierservice_113@yahoo.com.hk
Telephone:+2347034627057
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Yours Faithfully,
Dr.Toshiko Yamagushi
Information Officer.
By: Shelly Rae Rich
Tide comes in and brings the sand sharks, looking for dusk munchies. He hasn’t been away from me for a whole day, and I feel like dinner. Wanna, wanna, hunny? I sunbathe topless to make them crazy, maybe make me more powerful cause I could break their fish mouths, crush those torsos. I’m the Great White.
My beach has white sand. There’s a woman who cooks for me, I think I pay. It’s saffron rice and conch with scotch bonnets. She makes a mean dish. I clean the bathroom.
It’s midnight and she’s getting drunk with me on Pusser’s Rum we mixed with pineapple juice and more rum. She has some talking bird named Coconut she’s trained to say “Come see, boo” and “Yah-mahn.” I keep thinking he’s come back. I never noticed he sounded like a bird.
The magazines say there are ten ways to tell when he’s lost interest and I missed them all. Not that it matters much. A crab bites my toe and I offer another to him.
We smoke fine green with the little red hairs. I ask her for brownies, but she’s off the clock. Her lips are pretty when we shotgun and I kiss her a little. She giggles, slaps my bottom and runs off to swim. I just watch the light bounce off the tide, out now, and she barely makes a ripple.
