PRESENT: I want to go back to when I looked at life when I was eight.

I crossed out number one on my Wichita Bucket List today with a hike through the Great Plains Nature Center.

Though I could have done without the cement walkways, it was a bring-me-back-up-north kind of experience. Once I left the white brick road and took to the dirt paths into the woods where I could no longer hear the traffic from I-96, I left Kansas and was back in Wisconsin where the trees are plenty and the water is always moving, never still. I was the only person that existed.

That feeling of “I’m home” only lasted for a moment when a group of kids came barreling down the path: Two boys, dirt up to their knees as if they had on brown socks, came at each other with swords made from snapped off maple branches. A girl trailed behind them yelling, “I’m gonna tell” over and over again.

They made me remember all the time I spent in the woods behind my house climbing the sumacs, digging up the clay in the crick and spreading it over my face like war paint, and, of course bending over the pipe that jutted out of the hillside and drinking the water that flowed out of it. Felt good to feel like nothing else matter but that moment when the woods seemed like magic. . . . I stared at the line of painted turtles sunning themselves on the log in the pond as though I had never seen one before.

I want to go back there.

PAST/PRESENT: "Stash" continued . . .

“Daddy! Daddy! I need to go!” shouted Raine from behind the door.

The sprinkler hitting the glass grew louder and louder, drowning out the cries from his daughter as Roy stared with frog eyes at his divided self in the mirror. Half of his upper lip was now whiter than the rest of his body. Needle pricks of blood escaped the skin.

“Daddy! I really need to go bad!”

Roy knocked the can of shaving cream off the vanity as he frantically reached over the sink to break off a square of toilet paper from the roll, which he found empty as usual. His wife was a good decorator but not much of a housekeeper. Sweat rolled down the sides of his face.

“Daddy!”

He could not walk around with half a mustache. He had that big meeting today. Roy shook the shake out of his right hand that had done the deed and stripped away what was left of his mustache and rinsed the patch of fuzz from the blades. The hair vanished down the drain. Roy looked at the man in the mirror, a man he hadn’t seen in over thirteen years. His face appeared rounder, younger. He rinsed the blood off and inched the door open.

Raine’s dark hair, like his own, was tousled and tucked behind her newly pierced ears. She stood in her knee-length yellow nighty. Her legs were crossed as she cupped her crotch with her hands, trying to hold it in, but when she looked up at her father, her hands dropped to her sides, her lips trembled, and she began to cry.

“Raine, it’s Daddy,” Roy said, moving toward his daughter.

Raine stepped back; the floor creaked beneath her bare feet. Her body began to shake with her lips, and then she wet herself. The urine slid down her legs onto the hardwood floor. “You’re not my Daddy,” she whispered and ran down the hallway screaming for her mother.

Roy covered his naked mouth as though he had just exposed himself in front of his daughter.

(To be continued . . .)

PAST/PRESENT: "Stash" a short story I began in 08.

Roy pushed back his shower-soaked black hair from his lined forehead, revealing his 29 year old receding hairline to the florescent lit bathroom mirror. Wrap in his daughter’s pink princess towel, the only one left, sweat bled down his spine and chest. A purple candle, lit by his wife, flickered on the toilet seat’s back and sent a stream of lilacs upward. He had reminded her time and time again to not light candles in the house, but she did anyway. “They top off our décor,” she had told him. Décor? Some idea she had picked up from shopping at Pier One too often, turning our home into a catalog.

Roy examined himself in the glass. As long as he kept the front long, his wife wouldn’t even notice that he was going baled. She always joked that she hadn’t married him for his looks, but someday he would have a island on top his head like his father—a moat of scalp, surrounding a patch of hair.

But, for now, his facial hair made up for what he lacked on top. He combed the broad patch of coarse hair that grew over his upper lip and reach the corners of his mouth with one of six black palm-size plastic combs in the drawer. Julie, his oldest daughter’s collection. Each comb was given to her by the photographer’s assistant on school picture day, so each child could fixed themselves up, especially the ones who had forgotten that it was picture day. Julie never forgot picture day; she was like her mother—always unruly beautiful. Long red hair, the greenest eyes, and patches of freckles sprinkled over their defined cheekbones made them identical.

Roy took his razor from the yellow cracked ceramic toothbrush holder. Wrapped in between its three silver blades were orange curly hairs—his wife’s. He began pulling out the hairs one by one but then gave up because their slinkiness slipped through his finger tips. The blue strip above the first blade had worn away down to the bone, and the handle was covered in a pink film from her shaving cream. She never tried to be subtle about using his razor, but she never admitted she used it, which she couldn’t because he never asked her. He liked that she used his things, for it made him feel there, which he wasn’t too often after receiving a promotion three months ago.

Roy retrieved another blade from the pack that sat next to his wife’s pack of Lady Shicks in the medicine cabinet—the same pack that had been there for years. He rewrapped the towel about his waist and snapped on a new set of blades. He wiped the reappearing sweat from the mirror with forearm just as the sprinklers went off outside and sent a stream of water banging across the bathroom window every sixteen seconds when the spout rotated. Oshkosh was on a strict ordinance for water conservation since rain had been scarce for the past six months, but that didn’t stop his wife. The lawn had to match their house. Roy lathered his face in his wife’s shaving cream; his was empty. Cherries flavored his pores from his sideburns to the dip in his chin. With short strokes, he brushed the razor over his cheeks, leaving a ring around his mustache for last. His daughters adored his mustache; they would call him Mario from the Nintendo game as thick as it was, and his wife would always rub her nose into the bristles after they made love. Roy couldn’t even remember what he looked like without the mustache. He’d let the strip grow once he was accepted into the university. He wanted to look older. Now, the mustached, much like his name, was part of him.

Roy trimmed the mustache with the black comb underneath, making sure he didn’t take too much off. He steadied himself, placing his left hand on the vanity, and began shaving around his mustache with his face just inches from the mirror. As he was finishing, fits pounded on the door and made him jump. His hand slipped and the blades took off the left side of his mustache.

(To be continued . . .)

PRESENT: No Dogs Allowed

Ok, so I was told you could bring dogs to the Great Plains Nature Center. Wrong. As soon as I got Brody out of the car, and he was ready to mark his territory everywhere, including the parking lot, I see a sign: “No Pets and No Skateboards.” So, number one on my bucket list would have to wait.

To the dog park we went. . . . Location: BFE, aka South Hydraulic.

When I was five or six, I remember terrorizing my mother when she took my sister and I to the grocery store—asking if we could have anything and everything (especially the pink and white circus cookies), scraping the frost from the pizza coolers and eating it, and of course doing cartwheels down the aisle when she wasn’t looking. She’d always say, “Just wait until I tell your father, or wait until we get into the car.” Nothing happened in the car, and she usually forgot to tell Dad by the time we got home. At times, while we were in the store I think she’d tried to act like we weren’t her kids. I felt the same way with Brody when we first entered the dog park—that is not my dog.

Instantly after getting him inside the chain linked fence, he plowed into a rat terrier mix and two dachshunds as if he was trying to start a game of tackle tag. The women with the dachschunds tried to be polite and act like she didn’t care, but as soon as I turned my back on her, she was gone, along with her dogs. (She only lasted five minutes with Brody.) Immediately, I thought that it had been a bad idea, but luckily, the rat terrier owner, having a terrier himself, seemed to be more understanding. And Brody, for the first time, laid down and relaxed after chasing the rat terrier around for a good half an hour, a success. He didn’t even try to hump another dog once.

I wondered if my mother had taken us to a park and let us run wild for a good hour before shopping, she wouldn’t have hoped for a boy next.

PRESENT: My Wichita Bucket List

Ok, so I feel like I am sitting here waiting to graduate, waiting to head back up to WI, and since I’m giving myself a break from my novel, I need something to do other than read short story collections, take my Jack Russel, Brody for walks, and sweat to P90X. My crazy Irish friend and fellow fiction writer told me to create a “bucket list” of all the things I want to do in Wichita before I leave. So I’m taking his advice. Here is the list. (Yes, I know it is very short, but I only have a week.):

1.Walk through the Great Plains Nature Center with Brody. I have driven by it so many times, and every time I do, I say to myself, “I should stop in there and check it out.”

2.Run down the ice cream truck that goes by my apartment complex and get a fudgesicle or whatever they sell. I have never got ice cream off a truck before. This might be the most difficult because it goes by but never actually stops, so I will have to keep my ears open and make a mad dash for it.

3.Drive to Old Town and see the Keeper of the Plains, the statue Wichita is known for.

4.Take Brody to the dog park on Hydraulic because he is definitely in need of some time running free. I think if I didn’t hang the lease up, he’d hide it on me.

5.Have sushi at Sumo or Hana; preferably, Hana because you don’t have to wait two hours for a table there.

6.Walk around WSU’s entire campus and see all the statues that my students talk about, but I have never stopped and looked at.

7.Sit in the hot tub at my apartment.

8.Play quarters at Kelly’s.

I know I should have ten because that’s a good number for these types of list, but eight works. I don’t want to sit here and think of what I want to do.

Well, there you have it. Tomorrow I’ll hit up the nature center with a poop bag.

PAST: Catching Minnows

Before my sister and I had goldfishes for pets, we had minnows. Not the kind that you get at the bait shop but wild ones.

Using our mother’s washed-out ice cream pails (she never throws anything away) we’d scoop cold water from the crick that runs between our house and the neighbors as if we were bailing out a boat. My sister's long blonde hair dipped into the water and would have left with the current if it wasn't attached to her head. Mine was always pulled back, a mousey brown color. My sister had a hard expression, but she was beautiful. I didn't think much of myself at that age. I was "ok." Nothing special too look at. I had the awkward stage that last too long.

With every pail full, I then cupped my hands like a sieve, and my sister slowly poured the murky water into my hands, so I could catch the minnows as they rode the stream of water down.

Once we had what we wanted, we dumped everything else—the snails, the water sliders, the slime that stuck to the bottom—back into the crick. Every now and then we’d catch a frog in the pail. Pushing it in my face, my sister would hold its back legs tight, so tight that I thought she might break them, but that was the only way to hold a frog if you didn’t want it to get away from you. I never held one, never touched one, not until I got to high school and we had to dissect them in Biology, but I don’t think you could consider them frogs. They smelled like science: unnatural, phony like plastic dolls left in the sun too long.

After we caught enough minnows to call it a school, we’d take them in the house. Setting them on the window sill in the kitchen where our parents put their car keys and junk mail that didn’t need to be opened right away. The pail sat there until they began to smell and our father would tell us to get rid of them. They weren’t pets.

We’d fish again, and again, and again. . . . We didn’t care that we had to start all over, didn’t care that we were continuously losing. The minnows were never really ours.

I think about all the things that I try and catch now, but, now it is different cause I care.

PRESENT: I’m Stuck: Don’t Matter Where

An introduction: I’m Jodie. I am a Sagittarius. I never really got why people feel the need to tell you their signs; seems like a copout because it is an easy detail, but there it is. You don’t need to know how old I am that doesn’t matter. I like to make hot dog omelets when I’m too cheap to buy cooked ham. (Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried.)

I have been in college for seven and a half years. No, I'm not a doctor. Nope, in two weeks I will have earned my MFA in Creative Writing. Yes, Mr. Foley (Chris Farley), I want to be a writer, but a degree doesn't give you that title. It’s the writing, and of course, who you know.

So until then, what do I do besides practice? Well, I was raised by two German Irish mozzarella makers, who have both worked 12-hour shifts for over thirty years, so holding out for the dream job is out of the question. No couch and bond bonds for me. So I’m looking for a job. And with this economy, hopefully, I'll find a job that, if nothing else, gives me some material for stories.
Until then, I’m stuck, and it don't matter where.