Blissfully unaware of what lay ahead, we saddled up with leash and treats; glaringly absent was the most fundamental accessory, bottled water. How did we survive?

Anywhere else, a warm, sunny day might inspire unoriginal sighs like 'What a beautiful day.' But in the streets of an overpopulated metropolis, ordinary thoughts are overridden by senses immersed in objectionable smells, unwelcome sounds, and a heaviness of energy. It was a peaceful, albeit unremarkable, journey to the park passing the usual dogs walking their usual owners.

Occasionally Rudy and I would decide to go rogue by breaking the park rules by letting him off-leash. Rudy was highly trained and remarkably receptive to commands. He always stayed nearby despite his all-day confinement to a micro-apartment, a necessity in a city so overcrowded it often felt like living in a human swarm.

Rudy had an off-leash pattern you could count on, and I took advantage of the respite as well by sitting at the base of a tree with no other job except to enjoy the day. Rudy would run in circles expending pent-up energy and circle back to me for a treat; run, rinse, repeat.

The hillside we always chose sloped sharply to a woodsy edge of the park, hidden from view. Beyond that, the landscape rose up over the greenery to reveal stacks and stacks of banal architecture molded out of the red bricks and cool, grey mortar of the 1960’s. Beyond that, the horizon became more industrial with far-off cranes erecting cell towers and unnamed steel skeletons piercing the space meant for clouds.

Rudy ran. I sat, not necessarily with the gratitude I would have today, but contented and with joy. And that’s close enough.

After his run, I clipped the leash, and we continued circling the park before heading home. I glanced back at where we had just been to say farewell to the cranes and skeletons, only then did I notice. In the center of the field of grass and dandelions was an overturned, rusted steel trash barrel and its scattered contents. Looking around to see if anyone else took notice of this travesty of nature. How could they have missed it, and more so, done nothing, I thought, piously.

Before Rudy realized his under-developed sense of smell betrayed him again, I settled him in a shady spot beyond the strewn potato chips and set off to the moral high ground on the lower side the hill. Of all the park goers I was the best suited, having been raise on a farm, to clean up what would surely be a level of disgusting most cannot endure. I righted the barrel while accepting my misfortune. With cheap napkins to use as a barrier between me and future untreatable skin conditions, the clean-up began. So far so good with the majority being fast-food bags, random plastic containers, plastic kids’ meal toys, aluminum beer cans, a dead headless chicken, more fast food -- wait.

I don’t know how long I stood staring at the incongruence of such an animal in such a place, and in this state. Trash from the overturned barrel was spread far and wide and the grass had not recently been cut. It was only a few inches high, but high enough to disguise all scattered garbage as looking roughly the same. But it was not the same. There was a fully feathered chicken carcass among the refuse. Okay. I guess this is what we are doing today, Rudy. With my napkin in hand, I picked up the former chicken by one of its legs but could not resist inspecting it to be sure I was in fact looking at a real chicken and not a toy. As I held the headless corpse up to the hot sunlight in bewilderment, the animal lover within me began to feel tears well. As disorienting as the discovery of dismembered remains in a publicly funded park, that feeling was compounded by the sight of a condom hanging from the chicken’s nether regions.

As I walked toward the barrel still coming to terms with the flood of information, I came upon another chicken. Same condition. Despondent, I added it to the body count and dropped them in the barrel wincing at the reverberant thump. Another chicken, and another. I began walking past the trash and looking for chickens. Upon final collection, I had picked up eight discarded chicken carcasses, all headless, all feathered, all violated. As hard as it was to continue, the keeping our parks clean initiative was abandoned for the noble attempt of giving the chickens, and all living things, a measure of dignity by concealing their shame. I also wanted the chickens to be at the bottom of the trash can so I could cover them with remaining garbage in hopes that no one else would be subjected to the discovery. No one else would have nightmares, and no one else would be recalling this memory 26 years later.

We walked home in silence.

Even now as I write this, I’m taken back to that time, my throat is swelling, and my eyes are watery. Although I give no thought to the contemptable creatures that defiled our beautiful park, I remember my dog often. Upon our solemn return that day, we dismounted the high horse and discarded our appurtenances. Rudy could tell that something was different. He sat with me as I held him, stroked his head and buried my salty eyes into his wiry coat.

My mother was the kind of woman who could be brought to tears with a clever card trick or at the news of a child’s unfinished homework 5 minutes before bedtime. Were it not for widespread availability of Valium, prescribed and likely invented for “hysterical” housewives, she might have been buried in a casket full of her own tears. She immediately called my father at the university where, much to the dismay of his students, he attempted to teach things. Not to say that he wasn’t terribly bright or adept at his discipline; he was. It was the conveying of such disciplines that left others confounded, not an optimal outcome for paying customers.

"Tell him it's a death message,” she stated matter-of-factly to the secretary.

Hours passed with no return call, so she called again. "Did you tell him it’s a death message," she repeated. The secretary assured her he'd received it.

My mother was born into the Great Depression, wore rubber bands around her shoes to hold them together, watched her 15 year old brother drown, was sleeping when her 19-year-old sister died of heart failure in the bathroom, and grew up in a time when women couldn’t open a bank account without a man being on the account. She and misery were not just acquaintances; they had pillow fights, talked about boys and braided each other’s hair. The dilemma of what ditch to dump the body of a despicable, gratuitously critical mother-in-law is admittedly unpleasant but not the complexity of roofing in July or bathing a cat. One might even approach it with party-planning enthusiasm, to each their own. Some see tribulations as opportunities, but most can only see tribulations.

At his usual arrival time, my father strolled in, met by my mother's frantic face. "Why didn't you call back? Didn't you know it was a death message?"

"Yes," he replied.

"Well then, why didn't you call back? The hospital has been calling..."

"Well, I knew it had to be my mother or one of the kids, and there wasn't anything I could do if they were already dead, so I finished my classes," he said, in a nonchalant fashion that belied the true nature of mind that processed calculous first and feelings dead last.

• • •

On the special day I, at the age of nearly 6, noticed that people were acting strangely, and why were we driving the old woman’s car that smelled like French fries and melted crayons had a baby? Where is Granny? My mother, in her ever-frazzled state of being, appeared to actually be melting while I, an unsophisticated child of country folks was elated just to be going somewhere. I cannot stress to you how infrequent trips were, in a car, on a road to absolutely anywhere.

My sister may or may not have been in the backseat as well. Despite her obscene overuse of the English language, she is surprisingly forgettable and often mistaken for an oversized container emitting white noise.

As my aunt drove in silence save the occasional you kids sit down back there, and my mother shuddered and shifted holding a tissue that was well overdue. My backseat script was well rehearsed, "Where are we going? How far is it? How long is it? Where are we going? Minnie Mouse’s little hand is on the. . . " My mother was too distraught to entertain babbling rhetoric, this much was clear but only this. Evidently our destination was a secret, so we must be going somewhere special.

The drive was long with nothing to do and no conversation as the only thing my sister did more frequently than eject spittle-drenched words of no value was to sleep, both protractedly and with dedication.

We arrived at a busy building with adults milling, standing, going in and out and speaking in hushed tones. The building, generic in style and taste, reminded me of my grammar school—linoleum tiles, wide hallways, and a small sitting area near the entryway with metal furniture and square vinyl cushions meant to look modern and even doubled down on modernism by sacrificing all comfort. The only person I recognized, aside from immediate family, was my aunt Lyla who had since acquired, and become one with, a wheelchair.

I could not tell where Lyla began and wheelchair ended. She was a strange bird, which may be over stating the obvious given that she was my father’s sister, and all aunts are a little kookie to be fair. No sense of humor, no stories, no gum from the bottom of her purse. Overweight with warts on her face, horn-rimmed glasses, and still sporting a 40's hairstyle in the 70’s complete with pin curls that had no clear purpose but to advertise her complete lack of self-awareness. What caught my attention was her leg, which wasn't a human leg. It was a metal pole that came down from her real knee to plastic foot incased in an orthpedic shoes. It seems the pin curls were not the only accessory with no clear purpose.

Unaware that I had a glaring and wide-eyed stare at the disharmony, she joyfully said, "That's my leg!" I reached out to touch the shiny pole, but a nearby stranger grabbed my hand. "Don't touch that, that's rude." That’s rude?

Scolded and goaded off in another direction, I took the hint and wandered into an adjacent room with terribly low light save one end of the room where a bright spotlight shown. There was a low hum of whispers as nebulous shadow people moved about in methodical patterns, almost like a dignified one-person square dance stirring quietly from one handshake to the next. No one noticed me as I made my way toward the light if only to see better, or at least something more than rippling layers of jacket tails and pant legs.

Still not knowing where I was or why, a large metallic, light blue box revealed itself through the waves of widows and black-party goers. The color was mesmerizing. The glittery shimmer gave the box a sense of majesty while its elevation concealed the mysterious contents from children of a certain age, perhaps by design.

As no one had taken notice of me still, instinctively I knew that forgiveness was easier granted than permission. There were shiny metal bars (someone must have had a sale on these) running the length of the box clearly intended to aid in mounting, and so I began to scale the casket with little effort. What other purpose could the bars be for, and how else was one meant to see inside?

The circle of life is never more present than on a farm, I'd seen quite a few dead things by kindergarten age. But I had not seen a dead person. I saw her long enough to know who it was, and at what stage, or the absence thereof. Finally, an otherwise self-absorbed onlooker took notice of my inappropriate behavior and firmly pulled my tiny hands from the brightly lit, pillowy white satin and the cold, steel bar beneath my feet.

I was shuffled out of the main ball room and returned to a grouping of family members sitting on and about the modern furniture, but I was not sad. I was baffled and irritated that no one told me where we were going or what was to be found, mourned or celebrated upon our arrival.

As I sat, I looked around. My mother was tearful, my brother was crying a little but likely faking it, and my sister’s third and perpetual state of consciousness other than talking or sleeping was crying, no News at 11. I realized that everyone was crying except me – and predictably my father – so I started crying. Although it garnered unwanted attention, it also seemed to put the group at ease and distracted them from my unsuccessful limbing expedition.

A woman I’d never seen before kneeled and began comforting me. My mother introduced her as a distant but random relative I cannot now recall and said straight away that she had horses. I stopped crying.

Now transfixed on the horse owner, I noticed she was very pretty, a shiny feathered brunette wearing the colors of the time. Browns, yellows and oranges deeply died into corduroy bell-bottoms made her look taller than she was, but the brown and yellow argyle sweater vest with large square glass frames sitting halfway down her nose brought her back down God-given height. She then sat across from me but leaned forward to keep me engaged. She spoke with the warmth and kindness of a genuinely concerned stranger.

Part of me believed I would get to ride horses, run and jump with reckless abandoned on this real, or possibly fabricated ranch, maybe even get my own sweater vest and corduroys. The other part of me knew I would never see her again.

As she comforted me with a soft, sweet southern voice that spoke of ranches and horses and sunny, happy days, I couldn’t help but notice that without any prompting, she told me exactly where we were going. And, why.

Word count: approximately 1,400 words

I believe that children are born with hearts as big as the fallow acres my father tilled and cleared in the midwestern heat while breathing in what often seemed more like bath water than dusty air. Sweat rolled and backs sprained to plant food that would serve to help us grow, but not as a family, only taller in the end. Among many glaring deficits, we were devoid of any commonalities, incompatible as it were, each one of us without a single tether to one another. Wait, that’s not entirely true. Although my oldest brother and I were adopted as infants after a decade of “trying” and my mother finally becoming just that, her body finally relaxed with bliss only to bear a natural daughter. To say merely that they were close would be a disservice, but not the worst thing I’ve said about either of them. Without connection there is little meaning, and without meaning there is little purpose leaving the lot of us to languish on a cellular level as we sat in the wood paneled den in front of an unnecessarily large piece of glowing furniture night after night entirely and unwittingly alone. Few resuscitation attempts were made in the decades to come, but despite our separate paths each child somehow managed to lead a life of discovery. Perhaps the only bar put forth that mattered is that none entered a life of crime.

Despite my thick, leathery layer of self-sustained obstinance, one of the many rites of passage for the middle child, one or two dew droplets of wisdom seeped into the cracks of my rebellion despite the trail of smoldering bridges in my wake. The tough exterior encouraged by my father and equally discouraged by my mother, neither of whom I obeyed, was a critical feature honed and developed over years so that when called upon to be tested, I would most surely pass. Who would have guessed the test would be hiding ostriches. Well, parts of them.

Commonly the very big, very tough parts that cannot be gnawed through by farm dogs, particularly the sly and cunning Bubble, an abandoned rough collie who hobbled up to my door nearly dead one day. We knew our long-time neighbor at the top of the hill, an old pig farmer, had passed but that had been over a year ago and we didn’t’ know he had a collie. After his death, and on my occasional morning jog, I would see her at the house next door to the pig farmer, a nice ranch style painted fir green and set back 50 yards from the gravel road. Perhaps she'd just visited there during her wanderings after his death, scraping by on scraps and goodwill for that time before finally staggering to my door. She would greet me to say a brief Hello, a sweet and soft-spoken hound that somehow kept herself clean despite living among farmers. I thought she lived at the fir green house, but she adamantly told me that day that she absolutely did not. I named her Bubble because she seemed a bit on the dim side at first, but once she was fed and watered for a week or so, she got back to being her brilliant and optimistic self despite a bit of arthritis giving away her true age. We didn’t know the green-house neighbors or in fact most of our neighbors except a handful by name only. Upon finalization of the purchase of our property, in 1967 my father wasted no time systematically alienating, threatening and making enemies of everyone within a 1-mile radius ensuring he, nor any of us, would be bothered with the annoyances of friendship.

Our considerably less brilliant neighbors – it is after all the rural south, ignorance abound – discovered the breeding and selling of ostriches was quite lucrative. And, this is true but only for those with the capacity for complex thought, experience and understanding are successful. Charging forward as ignorance so often does, they attempted to build a fence for such foul fowl and a proper fence is actually two fences. You can begin by building one fence, except that this fence must be open at the bottom all the way around the fence and high enough for a person to drop and roll out. This is for safety; when the bird or birds has a real or perceived slight, they will attack you by whipping their necks back and then whipping them forward again aiming usually for your head. Although rare, this can prove fatal. I have no accurate statistics on hand to support specific numbers, so let’s say the blow would smart considerably and should be avoided. The second fence surrounds the first and is standard in nature and goes all the way to the ground containing the birds entirely. However, when I rolled up the driveway returning from my institution of higher learning to find feathers, and internal organs of unknown origin scattered about the property, I didn’t know they were ostriches, but I did know I could not identify the remains, and this was vexing.

The Killings

Then another smaller dog went missing, one that I was keeping over the summer while the original owner was off doing some ambiguous military duty I can’t now recall. This was not just noticeable but concerning as I had taught the dog to play dead and roll over only two days prior and also taken her to the vet to the tune of $88, a small fortune for a full-time student working 2 part-time jobs. In the woods, all pets have both autonomy and agency. It is not uncommon to see them once per day or even less depending on the temperament of the dominant breed within the dog – farm dogs are rarely one breed and if they happen to be, expect them be stolen in short order and sold at a flea market so the seller/thief can buy their child a Christmas present that year. Or meth, but certainly one of the two. I waited a day or two with still no dog and decided to walk over to the neighbors and simply ask.

We were not friends, nor did we know one another. Each household both divided by a gravel road, a barrier of tall, thick trees on either side and, of course, the impenetrable air of disdain. In the country, there is always a minimum of one person outside tending to one thing or another, car repair, a garden, or an animal. In a place where there is little convenience, this is one. I easily found a man I’d never seen, likely in his early 30’s, milling about. I introduced myself and explained my dilemma asking if he’d seen the dog, all short white hair, about 18 pounds named Winnie (short for Winter, not creative but also not my dog.) He said he had not seen her, but I could tell he was lying. He was evasive and vague; country people are neither. Seeing the fence and birds as we walked and talked, I learned the source of the feathers and body parts I’d accumulated, none of which I mentioned to him. I asked all I could about the ostrich business trying to seem genuinely fascinated but surreptitiously trying to learn how this related to the disappearance of Winnie. Once I saw how the fence was built, and I emphasize fence in the singular, I concluded exactly what happened to Winnie. Simple people built a simple fence 18 inches off the ground but neglected to build the second fence to completely contain the birds. The birds could not get out, but dogs could get in. And, if you’ve never had ostrich both Winnie, Bubble and I could tell you how very delicious they are . . . or were. Well, I could, Winnie is dead, shot for hunting Ostrich. Not long after my meeting with the spurious simpleton, another family member whom I know slightly better as we were childhood mates, and unaware of the first reported “story”, let it slip that Winnie was caught hunting the birds and had to be stopped to protect their financial investment.

But this story is not about Winnie. It’s about Bubble. Bubble the bright and noble collie who survived for over a year on her own was the culprit of the feathers, the discarded bloody sacks of fascia and sinew that were simply not chewable and likely undigestible. And the legs. My god, the legs. The legs of ostriches are covered in skin that is most like elephant skin. It’s grey and wrinkled, fibrous and tough and no match for the teeth of a 12-year-old herding dog. The legs were roughly 60 inches long on average, and although they didn’t look heavy, imagine picking up a 5-foot bar of steel with a foot on the end, that has a 6-inch diameter at the smallest point. It may only weigh 20 pounds, but that weight is awkwardly distributed at one end, and oh by the way it is an ostrich leg! Imagine then, to keep your dog alive you must hide this and subsequent severed legs.

Every day that I returned from school, I quickly and covertly collected legs and random body parts from both inside and outside of the bird, and discarded them in a heavily wooded, overgrown area of our farm where they are likely still there today. On any given sunny summer afternoon in the late 90’s, you might find a girl, 5’4, 118 lbs. dressed in men’s salvation army clothes (men’s clothes are cheaper at The Salvation), covered in pottery clay from hair to Redwings dragging ostrich legs by hand across the property and flinging them into the thickets and brambles all in pursuit of saving a dog that came to her for food and water when all else had failed. Bubble was special, as are most dogs I suppose.

I am writing this down not to complain about unsophisticated neighbors or dead ostriches. I am only reminding myself and anyone who reads this (after someone involuntarily drags me off to be disposed), that preventable burdens, ones that drain you at a time when you have little extra physical or mental capability to give is when you are creating the colorful and textured person you were meant to be. Especially when it is inconvenient.

5 years ago today, I was left on the steps of an abortion clinic, you know. AFTER, and for over two hours, waiting for my reluctant ride, my boyfriend. This is good though. It’s this exact circumstance, this exact situation, that forces you to either make better choices, or at least ask yourself, “how did I get here?” I am so grateful for those bad choices though. So grateful . . . because those choices culminated into unforgettable lessons... at least within the context of this journal entry. I wish I could tell you this was my first abortion. I thought for a long time repetitive bad decisions characterized me as a slow learner. But really, it’s all contextual. And the fact that I'm still alive means I learned quickly enough, didn't I. I called him to relay what I considered to be bad news...... that I had inadvertently conceived, despite the odds considering our less than frequent encounters, and of dating a desperately inadequate lover........ the last part I left out, of course. His first question was , Is it mine? In my experience with Hollywood Movies and other failed fiction, I find this question rarely falls from the mouths of great men. I feel compelled to mention that we were dating exclusively. I hung up on him, he called back. As a woman who's never had any interest or even considered motherhood, I made clear the outcome that was not up for discussion, we agreed on that at least.

The Drop off

He agreed to be the chauffeur and to his credit attempted to be thoughtful and attentive on the scheduled day. Although I didn't realize at the time how glorious and extraordinary his level of selfishness was. Was it obscured or was I oblivious? We had only been dating 3 months, and he had never been asked to show a thoughtful side; I guess I assumed it was there all along.

I am not a girl who requires a lot of attention or conversation - aside from growing up rather isolated, both socially and geographically, people have been a learning curve for me, something I still struggle with today. Side note: People. Not humans; humans I understand, humans are animals you can explain in scientific studies; people are the application of those studies and frankly more often than not, I’m not all that thrilled with the application. Spoken like a true introvert I suppose. I listen considerably more than I speak, and if people just said what they really mean I certainly would not be writing this story. But I digress... now back to our regularly scheduled abortion.

. Whether he was doing his best to be as emotional support is neither here nor there, this is not a story of heroism or valor. It's a story of two people at their worst in a difficult circumstance that many have lived through. Once plans were laid, he went into the waiting room with me and intended to wait. The attendant instructed that the full waiting time may be as much as 2 hours. Not wanting to wait that long in an uncomfortable waiting room of any clinic much less "abortion", understandable, he left to run errands and would return in 2 hours. Today, I don't believe they would allow the accompanying party to leave during the most minor of procedures, so this policy in retrospect was unprofessional, at best.

Share Jane March

The Pick Up

The next thing I remember is being escorted groggily into the waiting room where he was not. It had been less than an hour it turns out, and predictably I was not allowed to recover as one might have hoped. I felt as you do when coming out of a surgery where $500 gets you only so much time and anesthetic, nauseous. I just wanted to get out of there. The thought of sitting in a semi-glossed, beige-painted, folding-chaired, fluorescently lit waiting room where nothing inside that room exists in nature, including the nurses, was a thought I could not bear. I don't know how long I waited in that room, but eventually I went to the nurse and told her my boyfriend was waiting downstairs, a lie. She hesitated a bit knowing he was supposed to be there with me but let me go anyway as I seemed that sincere. I kept thinking I would run into him in the hallway, or the elevator or the next hallway, or the entry way. I made it to the outside steps, beautiful steps to a beautiful building as passersby jogged, laughed, ate and made their way about the city unknowingly. I scanned the traffic jammed streets and sidewalks for him, and I waited. I sat on the steps. I laid on the steps. I leaned back on the steps. For 2 hours. During this time, I must have looked like death itself because 2 separate women about 30 minutes apart touched me on the shoulder and asked if I was okay. I wonder if one or both happen to know what happened on the 3rd floor. Maybe. I think about them as much as I think about that time, that day and that boyfriend. They showed as much care as the boyfriend that day and more than the paid caregivers. When he did arrive, he was shocked to see me on the steps. Turns out he had gone back to his neck of the woods to pick up his dry cleaning. Traffic in the city is terrible you know. There's little left of this story; we broke up soon after. I'm sharing this with you so that anyone who reads this knows that this sort of thing probably happens a lot and you are not alone, or weird, or terrible, or dumb . . . or alone. On any given day, we can all be Jane.