SARA PRITCHARD

IN THE NEWS TODAY/​SARA PRITCHARD
published in Literal Latte, Vol. 9, No. 3,
July-August 2003

August 2002—In the news today, two university students have drowned, one trying to save the other, who was caught in an undertow, and in Louisiana, an elderly man has died from West Nile virus, the twelfth recorded human death from the disease this year in the US. In other parts of the world, a two-mile-thick brown cloud is hovering over South Asia, over the entire Indian subcontinent from Sri Lanka to Afghanistan, and 200 scientists are warning it could kill millions of people in the region and pose a global threat. “It can travel halfway around the globe in a week,” a United Nations Environmental Program chief commented at a London press conference. The brown cloud, the 200 scientists say, is a cocktail of aerosols, ash, soot, and other identified and unidentified particles.

In Washington, DC, the Center for Science in the Public Interest reported that thirty-three people have suffered vomiting, diarrhea, and other ailments after eating Quorn, an FDA-approved imitation meat made from fungus and used as a low-fat substitute for ground beef and chicken and in a brand of frozen dinners. In North Carolina, a man who ate a tasty meal of chicken fettuccine Alfredo made with Quorn broke out in hives and had trouble breathing.

In other news, the world population has reached 6¼ billion, and on Connie Chung Tonight, an American couple will discuss their decision to use cloning to have a baby. In a sidebar decorated with a waving American flag, readers are invited to submit a proposal for a T-shirt design commemorating those who perished one year ago in the September 11th terrorist attack on America. The winning T-shirt will become an official souvenir that will be sold at the ground-zero tourist site where the World Trade Center towers used to be. The newspaper also wants to know—vote yes or no, by telephone or online: (1) Should Congress subpoena Martha Stewart to answer questions about her sale of ImClone Stock? and (2) Should U.S. President George W. Bush be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace?



* * * *

Last weekend I went to a poetry reading. A poet named Ben Doyle, who lives across the cemetery from me, read a sestina he wrote with the help of the Internet. He picked a line from a Shakespeare play, then did a Google search on each word in that line, and then took the first lines of the pages Google found for him and cast them into a poem. I liked the poem. It captured something about the great absurdities and ambiguities of being. It reminded me of the time I used the Google search engine to find some botanical information about marsh or swamp mallows, which are wetland plants with large pink flowers, related to hibiscus and Rose of Sharon. Where Google took me to was a plain white page with Courier type that asked me to enter my exact weight into a box that was part of an equation, and then hit GO. The answer to the equation was the number of marshmallow peeps I would have to eat in order to kill myself. I think the number was fourteen hundred and something. I have been feeling kind of low lately, and I thought maybe I would feel better if I wrote a poem. I thought maybe I could write a poem like Ben did, using Google, but instead of a Shakespeare quotation, I would base my poem on the first-page headlines in the electronic edition of USA Today, but then after I read that page with all the stories I mentioned above, I didn’t feel like writing anything at all.



* * * *
I never read the papers, especially the news. The news can make you crazy, I think. The news makes me cry. When I was younger I read Dear Abby and Your Daily Stars, and sometimes I would look at the section that had marriages, engagements, and births to see if anybody I knew was getting hitched or procreating. After a while, everybody I knew was already married and had had their families, and most of them were divorced, and I started to read the obituaries to see if anybody I knew had died. I would also read any obituary if the deceased was my age, and I also started to read Dear Dr. Gott to see if I recognized any of the symptoms of the diseases he discussed. Now I don’t read any of the paper. Not even the weather.

Three days ago a man I worked with—a man fifteen years younger than me—died suddenly at home. He had always been very overweight but just this year had begun a rigorous diet and exercise program. It was just beginning to pay off, people said. He must have lost about fifty pounds. The week before that, early one morning, a neighbor of mine fell from the third story balcony of his home onto a concrete patio. He was a scholar, a charming and pleasant man I will always remember who had an endearing way of slightly bowing and bobbing his head as he smiled his greeting. He leaves a young daughter and a lovely wife who is an accomplished musician and, I have heard it said, suffers from agoraphobia.

A friend of mine named Julia died last September 7th. Some of her friends said it was a good thing she died before the 11th because she was a sensitive soul, and she didn’t need to know about all that evil, all that human suffering. It was good she had her own private death before September 11, people said, uneclipsed by the horrors of that day. Julia was a cancer survivor and had had elective surgery to replace a valve in her heart, which had been damaged by chemotherapy. The new heart valve was supposed to extend her life, but she never fully recovered from the heart-valve-replacement operation. Julia was on Hospice care. She knew she was dying. The night she died she woke up a few times from a deep sleep. She opened her eyes and looked at her husband and asked him, “Am I dead yet?”

I don’t know what he said.

Julia had the most beautiful, rippled red hair—like in a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti—and a tiny, sweet voice. Some time ago, I was in a fiction writing workshop with her, and she wrote a well-crafted story that I admired so and have thought about time and time again, although it was quite frightening. The story took place in San Francisco and opened with a young woman who had just hitchhiked there from the East. The woman had red hair and was standing by a blooming pink hibiscus, and a green sports car was coming up the hill toward her, looking like some kind of insect, the red-haired woman thought. Heat was rising in waves from the pavement, undulating, and distorting her vision. In the trunk of the car was a rope.

Almost exactly a year before Julia died, another neighbor—a man my age whom I had known for thirty years—was found dead in the concrete stairwell leading from his patio to his basement. He had died from a fall, the obituary said. The moon was full the night Martin died, and his patio furniture was all overturned as if there had been some kind of struggle. The last place he was seen alive was outside a gay nightclub downtown. An investigation ensued, but the findings were inconclusive, and the case, soon thereafter, was closed.

A few days before his twelfth birthday, my friend’s son died from leukemia. Randy had been diagnosed with leukemia on what would have been his first day of school when he was six. A few weeks before he died, his mother—my friend Vickie—told him that he wasn't going to get better. His doctor had just explained to her the imminent stages of his inevitable, slow death: loss of short-term memory, loss of motor functions, loss of consciousness, coma, death. Randy had gone to Sunday school where the teacher said that everyone has an immortal soul that’s like a bird in a cage, and at the moment of death, the bird is released and flies up, jubilant, to Heaven. When Randy died, the teacher said, his dog Rosie would be waiting for him there in Heaven, next to Jesus, barking and wagging her tail. Randy had known other children in Pediatric Oncology who had died. He had gone to his friend Collin’s funeral. When Vickie told her son that his cancer was terminal, she did so because he had suffered so very long and was in such misery, such terrible pain, and because she was broken and could no longer pretend. She wanted to be honest with him. She imagined he had known this truth for quite some time and that it would be a relief for him to talk about what he really felt instead of what video to rent.

What Randy said after Vickie told him he was going to die was, “But, Mom, why me?”



* * * *

When my husband’s brother was five years old, he crawled out of his own bed one night, scuffed down the hall in his Dr. Denton’s, and climbed into bed with his father, who was reading the newspaper. He snuggled up against his dad. “Daddy,” he said, “how do you stand it, I mean, knowing you’re going to die?”

“Oh, you just get used to it, buddy,” the father said, patting Keith reassuringly on the back. This year, Keith and Kevin’s father celebrated his ninety-first birthday.

In October, my dog, Worty, and his brother Latke—my friend Sharon’s dog—will be thirteen. That’s ninety-one in people years. Worty’s back legs don’t work very well. When I take him for a walk in the cemetery, he often collapses, and when I hear him coming upstairs to see what I’m up to in my third-floor study, I hold my breath and pray he won’t fall down the steps like he’s done three times before. Latke is becoming incontinent. Sharon called me this morning to tell me she had just let him out and then he came inside and peed on the dining room floor. When Sharon and I call each other, we pretend it’s our dogs talking on the phone.

“Woof. Woof,” Sharon said when I answered the phone this morning.

“Woof. Woof,” I barked back.

Two weeks ago, I sent my sister-in-law, Marg, a birthday card. On the front was a close-up photograph of a cute little beagle dog, taken with a fisheye lens, and the words In dog years . . . Inside it continued: . . .you’re dead! I signed Worty’s name, like I always do. To do that I make my hand into something like a paw and stick the pen in my paw in an awkward way and make the letters in WORTY backwards and in all different sizes and sometimes with two or three ‘Ts’.



* * * *
When I was five years old, my grandfather took my sister and me to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The circus was at the county fairgrounds in a big top with three poles with flags on top, and blue-and-white stripped sidewalls. We sat at the very top of a set of bleachers right above the center ring. A bear was riding a motorcycle around and around in a circle when I started to choke on popcorn. My grandfather slapped me on the back, but that didn’t work, so he held me by my ankles and shook me over the back of the bleachers until I coughed up the popcorn kernel that was stuck in my throat. That day I was wearing my favorite dress, which was a hand-me-down from my cousin Rhonda. It was a party dress really, not the kind of thing you’d wear to a circus, but my mother let me wear it anyway because I wanted to. She let me wear anything I wanted at any time, to any place. I really pushed the envelope on this, so to speak. On my first day of school, I wore a Halloween pirate’s costume, complete with an eye patch and a rubber knife I carried clenched between my teeth.

This dress I wore to the circus was gray polished cotton, flocked with pink roses. It had a crinoline that my mother used to dip in starch and let dry in the basement, spread over an open umbrella. It had puff sleeves, smocking, and a pink polished-cotton sash, also starched, that I liked to suck the starch out of when no one was looking. If anybody pointed out that the end of my sash was wet, I crossed my fingers behind my back and said it fell in the toilet. When my grandfather turned me upside down and shook me by my ankles, all the beautiful pink roses blurred and swirled around me in a shimmering gray sea. After that near-death experience, I liked to get that dress off its hanger in my closet and turn it inside out and then stick my head up under the skirt and spin around until I got so dizzy I fell down.



* * * *

A friend of mine has a friend whose five-year-old daughter died last spring from an infection, the same thing that so swiftly killed Jim Henson when he was only fifty-four—my age!—and still in his prime, people said. Sydney complained of a sore throat, and a day and half later, she was dead. Her little voice was still on my friend’s answering machine, thanking her for a birthday present of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the name of which she couldn’t quite pronounce.

How do people go on? How do they live through such things, and then get up in the morning and go to work or school or wherever it is they have to go and are supposed to act like everything’s OK? The thing about grief is it gets way down inside you. It gets under your fingernails and in your pores and in the follicles of your hair. It burrows down deep into the marrow of your bones and makes itself at home there. It bores into your cells, their atoms, the nuclei, and spins around there like a minuscule perpetual motion gadget designed by the late Buckminster Fuller. And it never really goes away.



* * * *

The only time I can really cry is when I’m vacuuming. My vacuum cleaner came from Sears and cost $449 (although I got it as a floor model for $200 off). It’s called something like a WIND MACHINE or WIND TUNNEL. It has powerful suction and is as loud as a riding lawn mower. When I feel like crying, I drag out my vacuum cleaner and I put on my CD of Eddie Vedder and Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn singing, “The Long Road,” which is from the score of the movie Dead Man Walking. The song is sixteen minutes long and goes like this:



We all walk the long road,

cannot stay.

There’s no need to say goodbye.

All the friends and family,

All the memories going round, round, round.



I have wished for so long
how I wish for you today . . .


I turn the CD up real, real loud, push REPEAT, and go around the house vacuuming and crying. I cry for Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn who died of cardiac arrest in London when he was only forty-nine years old. I cry for my mother and my father and Randy and Sydney and Julia, and for my mother-in-law who died a slow death from Alzheimer’s disease, and for all the dead people I know and all the people who have died in wars and airplanes and falling buildings, and for all the suicides. I cry for all the living, too—the survivors—and all the sadness and meanness in the world, for those in hospitals and refugee camps, for all the desperate people who feel like they’re at the end of their rope, all the drunks and drug addicts, those who hunger and those who mourn and will never, ever be comforted, and for all animals that are sick and feeble and old. I vacuum everything. I vacuum real good.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn was a Pakistani who was considered one of the greatest singers of Sufi devotional music, a style known as qawwali. He had liver and weight problems most of his life. In addition to performing with Eddie Vedder for Dead Man Walking, he also wrote and sang songs on the soundtrack of Natural Born Killers.



* * * *
I first started to feel that I couldn’t go outside about twenty-five years ago. I was in my twenties then and married to my first husband, but there something about him I didn’t like. I was a little afraid of him. Slowly over a long period of time, a panicky feeling had been growing inside me, like mold in a refrigerator. I thought I was afraid of Death because my mother had died from breast cancer when I was young, but what I was really afraid of was Life, only I didn’t know that until many years later. Back then, sometimes I would drive someplace—like to the grocery store—and then I couldn’t get out of my car. I would just sit in the parking lot, frozen inside my car like a crash dummy, sometimes for hours. Sometimes I would go to Giant Eagle and after I’d done all my shopping and was waiting in the checkout line, I’d have to abandon my cart and run out because I’d start having trouble breathing, just like the man who ate the chicken fettuccine Alfredo frozen dinner made with Quorn. Sometimes I’d get all dressed up to go some place, and I’d open the door and stick my foot out like someone testing the temperature of a bath, and then I’d go back inside. I’d wait an hour or so and try again. Sometimes I would want to get the mail out of the mailbox, but the mailbox was across the road, and I’d have to wait until night closed in and pulled the mailbox closer. I stayed inside almost all the time, unless I had to go out to get dog food or Tampax, cigarettes, or booze. I smoked a lot of cigarettes. I drank a lot of cheap scotch. I read a lot of books.

For a while I had a prescription for an anti-anxiety drug called Xanax, but I was afraid to take it. I was afraid it was just something else to be addicted to like cigarettes and alcohol. I thought if I took it there would be no hope for me at all, that I would surely end up like my Aunt Jess, who my brother said lived off of pills, cigarettes, and Coca-Cola, and who, before Uncle Jimmy married her, may have been a German spy. Aunt Jess wouldn’t go out of the house or open the door or answer the telephone. She and Uncle Jimmy didn’t have any children. When they came to visit, which was only once or twice, Aunt Jess didn’t get out of the car. She stayed in the car with the windows rolled up, smoking her cigarettes. My sister and I watched her in the smoke-filled car, taking turns peeping down at her from behind the sheers on our bedroom window. Aunt Jess couldn’t see us because she wore a hat pulled down over half her face like Marlene Deitrich. My mother made my sister and me put our coats on and go out in the driveway and say hello to her through the rolled-up car window. My sister knocked on the car window. Aunt Jess turned toward us and made a startled expression like she was surprised to see us, as if she’d never seen children before. Aunt Jess had a sad, pretty face. Red hair, green eyes, bright red lips, and a beauty mark. She opened the vent window and gave us each a stick of Black Jack gum and told us in a funny accent to “be goot leetle mädchen and go back eenside das hoos.” Going back up the porch steps, my sister told me that the beauty mark was probably fake, that you could make one with a Mabelline eyebrow pencil, and then we went upstairs and tried it. “You be goot leetle mädchen now,” we’d say to each other for months on end after that and laugh, “Meet you at das hoos.”



Or I thought I might end up like my father’s brother, my Uncle Jack, who shot himself in the head, right after he telephoned my father to come get him and take him back to the VA hospital. Uncle Jack and Aunt Enid used to live right near us, and I used to play dress-up and Uncle Wiggley with their daughters, my cousins Rhonda and Becky, who were a little bit older than my sister and me. On top of our piano, we had a photograph of Uncle Jack when he was a cadet at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Aunt Enid was a WAC, and they met in the South Pacific. Sometimes in the 1950s, when I was a little girl, I’d wake up in the morning and go downstairs and Uncle Jack would be sitting at our kitchen table with my father, smoking cigarettes and drinking black coffee. He’d stay with us for a few weeks and sleep in the extra bunk in my brother’s room. He’d go to work with my father every day and sit in my father’s car and drink coffee from a thermos and read his books while my father worked. He’d come home with my father after work and eat dinner with us and then sit in the living room and read his books while we watched television or did our homework or sang Stephen Foster songs while my mother played the piano. Uncle Jack could do card tricks and play the piano, too, and, like my father, he had a beautiful tenor singing voice. One time we all went on vacation together, both our families, Uncle Jack’s and ours. We went way up into Canada, across the St. Lawrence Seaway, way up into Quebec to go bass and pike fishing. We stayed in a cabin out in the middle of nowhere for two weeks, on a lake called Lac du Sur.

One time when Uncle Jack was not living with us, my father drove my mother, my sister, my brother, and me to a town that was pretty far away so we could all get new shoes from Uncle Jack, who had a new job in a shoe store. Uncle Jack measured our stocking feet with one of those cold foot scales, and we each got two pairs of Florsheim shoes, and my sister and I got to stick our feet in a machine that showed our foot bones like a glow-in-the-dark Halloween skeleton. When we were leaving, Uncle Jack threw his arms around my father. He laid his head against my father’s shoulder and started sobbing.


* * * *

During the time in my life when it was so hard for me to go outside and I was afraid I might turn into Aunt Jess or Uncle Jack, I had a job as a waitress. Once I was at the restaurant I was pretty much OK as long as no one really looked at me or spoke to me directly, but I had to count the footsteps it took to get there: nine hundred and ninety-four, and how many footsteps from the kitchen to each table and back to the dishwasher, and I had to stay in bed all day with the blinds closed to recover from being out in the open at the restaurant every evening and to get my strength up to go back there again the next night. When I was at the restaurant and I got a table, I would just go to the table and stand by it and pray for someone to notice me standing there and just begin ordering, without asking any questions. Then I would write furiously in the guest check book with my head down, and if any of the people at the table asked me any questions like what was the catch of the day, I would just point to the blackboard where the specials were written in colored chalk or I would print the answer on one of the guest checks from the back of the book, rip it off, and hand it to them. Most of the customers were tourists; they thought I was a deaf mute and left me big tips. In between the times when I had tables, I stood outside alone, no matter what the weather, and smoked cigarettes behind the dumpster and took little sips of scotch from a small plastic flask I kept in my apron pocket. After dark and the restaurant closed, it was easier to walk home. If my husband was home and still awake when I got there, I’d sit under the deck with my dog until I was sure my husband was sound asleep.



* * * *
The night before Ben Doyle read his sestina, another writer, Jane Vandenburgh, read a personal essay about her family, about how she had grown up in California in the 1950s, right smack dab in the middle of the land of milk and honey, and how her parents were intellectuals and bohemians, her mother an artist and an alcoholic who had mental problems as well and on top of that had to work for Walt Disney, and how her father was an architect and also an alcoholic with mental problems but was also gay, and one day during his coffee break when he was still a young man in his late twenties and Jane was nine, he took the elevator up to the top floor of the building where he worked and then walked up a flight of stairs to the roof, smoked a cigarette, and stepped off the roof onto the concrete parking lot below. During her reading, when Jane read the line about her mother joking years later, “That was one helluva coffee break your father took,” I think I was the only person who laughed out loud. And then I felt quite bad.

After the reading, I rushed up to Jane and told her how much I admired her essay and complimented her on the way she read it with such grace and poise. “I could never read something that personal or tragic,” I told her. “How can you do that?” I asked her. I told her I was worried that I might have to give a public reading some day, and the thought of it made me dizzy and sick.

“Oh,” Jane said, “actually the thought of reading in public makes me sick and dizzy, too, because I have agoraphobia . . . but I have the secret remedy.”

“Please don’t say Toastmasters,” I said meekly. That’s what a number of people—including my sister—told me would help me overcome my fear of speaking in public. My sister is a Grand Toastmaster. So are her husband and her daughter.

“Toastmasters!” Jane laughed. “Oh, Gawd, no! The secret is drugs! Not Toastmasters! Ha! Toastmasters? Ha ha. Ha ha ha!

“The secret is Xanax. Half a Xanax,” Jane leaned over and whispered in my ear. Her hair was very curly and I wanted to touch it. “Half a Xanax,” Jane repeated. “It’s an anti-anxiety drug. And if that doesn’t work, then there are other things called beta blockers. Beta blockers prevent you from shaking. Beta blockers eliminate the flight response, too, so you don’t have to run out like you were in a grocery store or something.”

I knew immediately that I liked Jane,

“I’ve had agoraphobia, too,” I confided in Jane, “and what I don’t really understand is, Why doesn’t everybody have it?”

“I know what you mean,” Jane said. “They should. They really should. Everybody in the world should have it.”

“It’s scary out there,” we said in unison, nodding our heads up and down as a line of people formed behind me, all of them holding Jane’s book.



* * * *

It’s been nearly 90 degrees or close to it here, and terribly humid for weeks now, too hot to go outside, and I feel like I’m getting cabin fever, if that’s really possible for somebody who doesn’t like to go outside. Just today, they’ve cut down five old trees in the cemetery between Ben’s house and mine. Men in blue shirts with chain saws sawed them up in pieces and were coming and going all day, loading up the wood in a bright red truck. Birds were flying hither and thither, blue jays and crows and mockingbirds, screaming.

Sometimes when I go to bed at night, I close my eyes and see again the birds I saw from my third-story window that day. A flash of blue; a yellow warbler; the blueblack crows; the white dove that now and then flies over the cemetery from the direction of Ben’s house—a trained bird, my husband says, somebody’s pet; the little brown sparrows who come to drink from the rain gutter just underneath my window. When my husband’s brother, Keith, was a little boy, he aimed his pellet gun at a crow way up in the air. “Bang,” he said and fired, killing the crow, a terrible thing he cannot forget and something he never really meant to do at all and could never have done if he tried.

Sometimes I lie awake at night and think about the little boy in My Life as Dog, the boy named Ingemar who couldn’t stop thinking about Laika, the dog the Russians sent into space in a Sputnik, knowing the Sputnik would never return to Earth. Ingemar was always making comparisons. “You have to compare things,” he says. “You have to compare so you can get a little distance on things. . . It’s important to keep a certain distance. . .

. . . Just think about the train wreck I read about. A train ran into a rail bus at Glycksbo. Six people killed and fourteen injured just as a comparison.”

Toward the end of My Life as a Dog, Ingemar locks himself in the summer house in the dead of the Swedish winter, and when people try to coax him into coming out, all he does is bark: “Woof! Woof! Woof-Woof!” His mother has died by then, and his dog has been given away. I found this movie in Blockbuster Video. “COMEDY” it said on the box.


* * * *

A psychic named Donna Sims told Kevin last Valentine’s Day that somebody besides the two of us lives in our house. A spirit or ghost. A woman named Monica Bozza used to live here, but that was at least ten years ago. Some people say she was a black woman, straight and tall, built like a floor board, with grizzled hair and very big tortoise shell glasses that dangled from a chain with simulated pearls. Some people say she was a graduate student in English literature and favored Virginia Woolf. We still get mail for Monica Bozza regularly. Some days Monica Bozza gets more mail than we do ourselves. Catalogs and bills and coupons and once a chartreuse greeting card envelope that said Shoebox© in tiny print on the back and with the front addressed in a very curly, cursive hand. Kevin and I joke that Monica Bozza still lives in our house. She wears my glasses, we kid, and sets them down weird places, like on top of the refrigerator, so I can’t find them for days. She hides my keys and has done something with a pair of Kevin’s sandals. She has a dog, too, an Airedale named Bosco who pushes Worty down the stairs, scrunches up the good carpet into a ball when we go out, and once or twice has had an accident on the floor. This morning the phone rang, and I answered it by saying “Woof!” thinking it must be Sharon.

“Is Monica Bozza there?” a voice at the other end inquired.





Sometimes I lie awake at night and think about who Monica Bozza might have been and wonder if the ghost of Monica Bozza might really still live here. Sometimes I think about my own life. About when I was a little girl fishing with my father and mother, my sister and brothers, my aunt and uncle, and my cousins, way up in Quebec at Lac du Sur, about how it really was so dark at night you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. About the strange fish-smell of the deep water and the place full of lily pads and the mud-oozy lake bottom; the sound of our little wooden boat bump-bumping all night against the dock and the spooky creak of its oarlocks; and the loons in the moonlight, with their babies riding on their backs, calling and gliding across the lake; the way the fuel from the outboard motor made the lake water look like one of my mother’s old taffeta recital gowns that I used to play dress-up in; and about the night we sat on folding chairs in our camp and the wolves began howling in the woods beyond our cabin, and the Northern Lights came flashing and blooming over Lac du Sur, and after we had all gone to bed and put out our lanterns, we heard Uncle Jack outside singing what my father said, years later, was an aria from the Bach St. Matthew Passion, and how that night as we lay on our cots, when Uncle Jack started singing, Rhonda—or was it Becky—reached across under the covers and took hold of my hand.

Sometimes I dream I’m flying. Not flying really, more like hovering. I love those dreams. I hover near the ceiling like one of those special-occasion helium balloons above the checkouts in Giant Eagle. Usually I don’t move around much; I just hang out above the piano, hovering and observing, minding my own business, counting the thistles on the wallpaper, sometimes whistling a little song to myself. But if in my dream I remember that I really can’t fly or even hover, then I become so terrified and panic that I’ll fall.

Sometimes I dream I am falling and I wake up with a start, flopping in my bed like a fish out of water. I catch myself and right before I open my eyes I see again so clearly the gray sea of that polished-cotton dress I wore nearly fifty years ago to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, its ashes-of-roses blossoms swirling before my eyes. Sometimes I imagine I’m sitting with Julia in a dim hospital room while she’s dying, and she wakes and asks me, “Sara, am I dead yet?” and for the life of me, I don’t know what to tell her.



Sara Pritchard was the winner of the 2002 Katharine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prize in Fiction, sponsored by the Breadloaf Writers Conference. Her winning manuscript, Crackpots, will be available in August 2003 from Houghton Mifflin. Sara and 2003 Bakeless Poetry Prize winner Jennifer Grotz will be reading from their new books on September 8, 2003 at the National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York, NY (www.nationalartsclub.org).