HELLO CLONE, I WILL SAY
Myself having a religious background can understand your point. Sometimes I too wonder if identical twins have souls or only half-souls. Until cloning has been fully researched, no one knows if clones will live productive lives as human beings. As humans, however, we have placed ourselves on top of a ladder, God’s power in our hands, and with time and research, any bumps and risks can be smoothed just like anything in the middle of being discovered. After school some days, I picture me in a clone sisterhood where we gang up on the prime-numbered sisters, good-naturedly, though I am not a prime number in the scenario. Seeing versions of ourselves everywhere is cautionary, and we exercise like madwomen then strip down to our underwear in full-length mirrors to compare. We all kiss different clones of the same boy and mix ourselves up, sometimes on purpose, in case it tastes somehow different. We get old and pass kidneys around and get mad at Dad together. All our birthdays fall on the same day and that day is my birthday.
COMPLAINT
This is going to give me away but, whatever. Can you, Holly, an adult, presumably knowledgeable in the world’s rubbytouchy ways, tell me in good conscience that it’s my mind caught in the gutter when I lose my composure while singing, “Cool and creamy / We like cool and creamy / Cool and creamy / We like it a lot. // Do you like it in your face? / Yes I like it in my face. / In your face? / In my face! / In our face!” One go-through I could handle, but three? When in the second verse, we sing, “Do you like it in your ears?” And in the third, “hair?” Can you honesty tell me the song was not written with the intent of making naïve children sing about ejaculate? That an earlier draft was not instead called “Hot and Creamy” but that the author’s buddy got the bong out of his mouth long enough to suggest the author cover his tracks just a little? The truth is: You pulled me from morning cheers because I get the joke. The truth is: You barely got through your own scold with a straight face.
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Dear Mom,
How often have you asked me what I would do without you? Five days apart, and we seem to have our answer: I would live, Mother. I live.
Billy Matthews
HARD YEAR FOR EVERYBODY
This game is Counselors-Only and begins on brooms. Fanciful, the way we like it, based on a movie my friend made when he saw a book a pretty girl was reading in the contemporary cinematic facelift of The Crucible. You drink and ride and drink and span the blacktop until you fall over. We rush around you and say what you’ll be, based on how you’re lying. Like one girl was spread-eagle so she became a patriotic ornithologist. One girl was dead so she became a ticket dispenser on I-90. One girl never fell so we cursed her children’s blood. It’s just fun, Holly. If you’ve got a better way of discovering God’s plan for my postgraduate life, scrawl it on a donut receipt, find some bored talons to stick it in, then tape up the bird and mail it wherever my soft body crumbled.
COMPLAINT
What’s so fun about Water Pong? Since when is hydration a penalty?
CANTEEN BUCK CAPER
It’s come to the staff’s attention that a traitor among you has started her own canteen buck mint. This camper would need access to a Xerox machine, the yesteryear restraint to keep from spending her last canteen buck, pale green cardstock paper, the moral bankruptcy not to care, and the brains to pull it off, so already that rules out most of you, including all first-timers and all inner city scholarship kids. A part of me just wants to shut down camp early over this mint — I am serious as a broken pact here — a mint whose counterfeit product is realistic enough to fool even myself, having surveyed thousands of spent bucks in search of the mark of the fake. It’s the fact that I can use the word thousands that tipped us off, our week-end sales usually hitting the mid to high hundreds. That and the tummy troubles evident among a certain contingent of Cabin 2 girls. And the series of increasingly elaborate disguises said girls donned to purchase well past their camper daily health limit, a disguising that was permitted at the time for its ingenuity, for the “This is what camp is all about” feeling it gave on-duty staffers. And a Twix supply that ran out on day two, Twix being the fluke corporate item our townie vendor vends us, meaning our supplies are down to such complaint card name-checked perennials as Miss Marie’s Chewbarb Taffy and Mishima Confectionary’s Mangoflave Gingercakes, and so there will be no cause for fold-up chair-kicking outbursts when I pronounce the canteen closed until the culprits come forward and Stop. Ruining. Everything. Did I mention that each cabin is currently being searched, starting with Girls Cabin 2? Confess in the next thirty seconds and there’s a fresh hot cola in it for you, brewed personally by Ole Maud, a sweet blind townie whose story’ll just break your heart if you let her tell it.
TESTIMONY
Last year, I didn’t do like I said. I said I was going to change and for awhile I did change but then I went back. I went back to what I was before I changed without even realizing I’d gone back. Sometimes I would remember I had changed and would try to change back to how I had changed and then I would change again. But my friends would not see the change, or else they would see the change but they wouldn’t like the change because we had made friends before the change, and they would try to change me back. So I would change back. Now being back here has reminded me that I really do want to change, and what I want this time is to change for good. And I want you all to hold me accountable and in exchange I will hold you accountable. I feel really bad that I didn’t change before. Really, really bad. Thank you.
SNOW DAY
In half a year, the Caucasians among you will be more so. On the front end of winter, we’ll spend Christmas nursing our generosity, New Years kissing it goodbye. On the back end, we coast through Ash Wednesday fine if we notice it at all, spend Easter wearing the colors we’ve painted our eggs. It’s between the first snow and the last time Dad runs his salty white car through the wash that you won’t believe there was ever a summer, ever an us here together now. As the arc of your relationship to snow begins to mirror that of the romances the facially symmetrical among you are cooking up now, you’ll have to try to float on those perennial comforts: Friends who wait outside your house so they can shock you with something wet, stinging shops whose temperature regulators overcompensate for what the outside is up to, satellite electronics, parents at jobs, oversleeping, sugar drinks, the taste of fruits whose vacillating prices you won’t notice until the day it’s you doing the buying. I say this not to ease the shock of winter but to ease the shock over the shock. The sooner you realize winter is annual, the sooner you’ll buckle down on those grades and start dreaming of a college in the never-fading sun of some golden country.