Lacey Mercer is 40 years old and lives in Buckeye, Arizona.

My First Memory

It was my first memory. I am sure I’ve had many more before it, but this is the first one I can recall. This memory shines vividly in my mind and it was of him.  I was about 4 or 5 years old in my Grandma’s backyard. I always went to stay with my grandma in the summer. She had an amazing house – the kind you see when you’re driving and turn to the person next to you and say, “Wow, it would be nice to live there!” It was white, two-stories, with a wrap-around porch, and balcony on the second floor. It was a farmhouse and although looked picturesque from the road, up close, you could see the small imperfections and wear left by many generations of use and love. My family didn’t have money, but they had that house. My grandmother used to tell me, “Someday this house will be yours, and you will raise your family here.” I would smile and run through the halls, into the backyard playing and laughing like any child, not knowing how precious those moments really were.

The backyard was big, with flowers lining the house and a large oak tree on the side. In my memory was swinging on a tire swing that hung from the oak tree, being pushed by Ethan Myers. He was one year older than I was and tall for his age. He lived a few houses away and would walk the quarter mile down the dirt road almost every day to play. Ethan lived with his mother, father, and three much older brothers. By the time Ethan was born, his parents were done raising children and let him roam free, which was fine with me. I loved playing with Ethan. He was kind and patient. I think his reason for coming over was as much to play, as it was to stay for supper. His family was poor, so going without a meal was a normal occurrence. My Grandmother didn’t mind though. She was the kind of woman that would feed the entire neighborhood if they came over. While Ethan pushed me on the swing, I laughed and yelled, “Higher, higher!” On the back swing, the tire hit the trunk of the large oak tree. The jolt sent me flying. I landed on my shoulder and could feel the tears starting to come. Ethan was instantly by my side, “Beth, are you okay, are you okay?”

I winced in pain, “My shoulder.”  I reached up clutching it tightly as the tears began to leave my eyes. Ethan pushed my sleeve up to examine the damage. There was no blood, but it was a little red. The next thing he did is what is burned into my memory – He gently brought his face down, closed his eyes, and softly kissed my shoulder. He pulled his head up and looked at me wiping away one of my tears, “Is that better?”  His words asked with the innocence only a child could have. I nodded, and it was better. I should have known then to hold on to him tightly, to not let him slip through my fingers as life can do to us with so many people we hold dear.

Years later, here I stand; an old woman looking over over Ethan’s grave not knowing him past my childhood. My life was my own fault, a string of unfortunate decisions only compounded by the one not to choose him. I stand here feeling sorry for myself, sorry for the life that could have been, and all the missed happiness that my mind wonders with. The scenarios built up in my head about the life I could have had with him, but that was not the path I chose. In our youth, we do not recognize how the smallest decision we make on a whim can shape the outcome of our short time. How some people who could bring us so much happiness are put in our path and we let them float away like bubbles in the air. So here I stand, remembering my first memory, and at my age, I am sure very close to my last one. Now I realize that true regret is not something you can fix; it is something you hold onto. It feels like a hollow place in your chest, constantly reminding you of the wasted years and the foolish choices made in the arrogance of youth.

For years, Jim was a creative director (copywriter) at two top advertising agencies. He wrote a variety of national TV commercials and ads and is on a first name basis with the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Green Giant and several Keebler Elves.

Florida on My Mind

I had no idea she was a sword swallower.

How was I to know? Watching her delicately drizzle a dollop of honey onto her biscuit, take a delicate bite and slowly swallow it revealed nothing about her unusual profession.

Hearing her backstory in a Sarasota, Florida coffee shop was an eye-opener. Once the winter headquarters for the Ringling Brothers Circus, Sarasota became the forever home of trapeze artists, clowns and stone deaf human cannonballs.

My next Florida encounter was with a roofer and serial biter named Harley. He recently moved into his 308-lb. girlfriend’s tiny home where he shares any remaining space with her two out-of-wedlock kids. Recently, he and his girlfriend got into a fight and he took a chunk out of her upper arm.

The girlfriend isn’t without her issues, either. Having that 308-lb. “canvas” to work on, she has covered herself with tattoos that appear to tell the history of the world, with very little space left over for next year.

I met twin sisters who have been battling for the past 30 years. One has an eating disorder of such magnitude, she eats only small amounts of salmon and shrimp, then cleanses daily. While she and her husband are at work, their dog is locked in his cage and forced to listen to Christian music for 10 hours. The dog is not pleased.

Days later, I met someone who works for a Port-a-Potty company. Her job is to dispatch drivers to pick up and deliver these plastic palaces to alligator and snake-infested building sites. There are no words to describe the state of these potties that have been used all week at an insanely hot, humid Florida building site.

One day, I met a chain-smoking, overweight middle-aged woman who was about to have a “Pirate” wedding. Guests were going to be encouraged to dress accordingly and to bring a bottle of rum. Wooden legs and eye patches were to be optional.

Meanwhile, trying to eat healthy in Florida is a lost cause. Bacon finds its way into virtually everything on the menu. All fish seems to be fried. Salads are seemingly nonexistent. Looking around a strip mall breakfast joint, you see folks with massive guts, and chowing down on biscuits and gravy. They just don’t seem right in the head.

A trip to a Dairy Queen exposes you to people who look like they’ve either just robbed a mini-mart, are thinking of robbing a mini-mart or have just been released from prison for robbing a mini-mart. How else to explain the conversation that stopped as I walked by or the lingering, smoldering assessment of me (Cop? Detective? Snitch?) as I got my Blizzard Blast and made quickly for the door?

For family fun, adventure, lasting memories and eye-popping experiences, who needs Disney World? It’s all right there for free as you wander around Florida.

Carly E. Husick is an MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire studying fiction. Her favorite activities include watching Queer Eye on Netflix, binge reading YA novels, and playing with her new baby nephew. She has most recently been published in Gravel Magazine, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and FlashFiction Magazine.

Catching

           In the bathroom she blacks out sitting on the toilet and when she comes back to the room, doing the one-two-three-triple-I’m-not-an-RA-knock she says she dreamed she was Lady Gaga playing a sold out concert at Madison Square Garden. She tips more Vlad into my solo cup half-filled with fizzing peach fresca and when I take a sip the cheap vodka goes down with an after-taste like what nail polish remover mixed with rubbing alcohol smells like. Nina is spiked up black hair and a heart that she’s carved into her own chest where her right breast peaks out under her navy-blue camisole. I’d thought it was a drawing at first, something she could wipe off in the shower down the hall, but then she told me. It’s a tattoo, she said and showed me how she used a razor blade to etch the edges and a balled-up tissue to blot the blood. I reached out and ran my fingers across the surface, it was pebbled and puckered against my skin, a scab forming on soft tissue.

           Nina goes to the gym every day after breakfast. Once I went with her, climbed on the treadmill by hers, and walked while I watched TV on the horizontal screen of my smart phone, cheap earbuds crammed in my ears. Nina set the incline high so she climbed a mountain and dabbed at sweat with a dandelion yellow towel in her black converse high tops and she started to run so she was climbing and running and sweating and I could almost see the bones in her chest and that scar pushing out through her skin. A skeleton running.

            She used to have problems with eating, she told me when we met the first week of classes. She would come over to my room and raid the care packages my grandmother sent – dried sugared strawberries and Nutella and my roommate’s cartons of goldfish disappearing between her chapped lips while I sat on my bed and practiced the poem I had to perform for my English class. Give it more umph, she said between finger licks to free her skin of chocolate, say it like you mean it.

            When she started sleeping with my friend Jared he turned down a dark corner and I found him one night on the quad sitting with his backpack in his lap, hands buried beneath the zippers, winding around the knotted neck of a noose contemplating the worth of his own life against hers. Nina’s. And I saw how he watched her at meals counting the bites she took from her plate, her fork dancing through angel hair pasta and crunching against frozen lettuce leaves as if the cacophony of silverware against pottery would distract her captive audience from the food that did not travel past her lips. I watched Jared watch Nina shrink to cellophane wrapped around bones and I watched as the heart on her chest sunk down and the blistered hardened goose flesh of its healing scar remained an open wound.

            And when I went to my professor about it I said, I’m worried. I sat in a chair across from his desk and said, I think her issues are catching, spreading. And my professor just looked at me like – what do you want me to do about it?