You asked me to go with you to an estate auction thirty miles south. You told me about driving with your twin, how you would lay your head in his lap as he drove. After I moved in, he would call and leave messages like, “Watch ‘Night Court,’ it’s funny.” We stopped at a Dairy Queen on the way, probably the same one I stopped at ten years later with a student, on our way to a reading, thinking how far away I’d gotten from myself. Then we drove through a town called Friend, with the sign, You’ve Got a Friend in Friend. The auction was a bust, tables of orange sunburst jewelry and green pressed glass. It was a chance to hold hands in the car, I guess, listen to the radio play “Precious and Few,” like we did the night I told you why I did not want to move in, or like we did at the theater, watching Murphy’s Romance, my jacket thrown over our hands. Reprinted with permission from The James White Review, Copyright © 1997 by James Cihlar

LINCOLN AVENUE by James Cihlar

Start with the granite stones laid at the base of the white post fence with grapevines wound through. Someone had to place them there. Go to the English Ivy trained up the green slate wall, sheltered even in winter. How hard would it be to stay in one place, year after year, locked into family and father? Every day is a prop against leaving, until you feel the weight upon you: sour water in the plastic wading pool, the play-worn spot where grass will never grow. Some day it will all come crashing down, and you will think, I must give up to save myself. Look at the terraced yard where the weeping willow has shrugged off its leaves. I’ve left, too. The light has retreated into windows, and the day has put its color away. Someone will have to go back and pick up what has fallen. Reprinted with permission from Minnesota Monthly, June 1998 Copyright © 1998 by James Cihlar

WHAT I KNOW AND DID NOT KNOW by James Cihlar

I know my name. I remember when it was another word to learn, a new taste on the tongue. Then a way to reach me, a spoon against the rim of a glass. Now a stroking inside my chest. I know my age. When I was six I figured out how long I’d live after my father. I told him, as he sat in his grease-stained work clothes at the round, gray formica table. I did not know he would leave me long before he would die. But now, inside me is a father who knows the words of every place, although I can’t find him always. He can reach the words on the ceiling, lay them down on the table in daylight, or shake them loose from the corners of the throat. He can see the words and he knows the end of the story. Reprinted with permission from Norheast, Winter 1997-98 Copyright © 1997 by James Cihlar

Bibliography Commentary Buy a Book James Cihlar's Page Writers On-Line

Return to The Rock

Nebraska Center for Writers