Alli Marshall's Blog, page 6

Work in progress

One of six poems examining the intersection of seeds and language and how both are transported, evolved, devolved and lost through migration.

Vintage image from a packet of dill seeds.

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Zine cover reveal

Hey hey! I’ve been working on a collection of poems about animals, which will debut at this year’s Asheville Zine Fest. The Literary Circus will have a table at the Saturday, June 30 event. More info here.

And a peek at my project in process here:

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Room to bloom: Rethinking Beltane and Fertility Festivals

After I separated from a partner of 15 years and was headed for divorce, I found the return to pagan traditions to be a great comfort. I connected to the cycles of the moon, the agricultural calendar, and my ancestors. I joined a community of women. I rediscovered my sense of magic. But as Beltane neared, I felt outside again. Middle aged, single, full of questions about sexuality and my relationship to relationships (ha!), I couldn’t envision a place for myself in Beltane’s celebration of fertility, conception, passion, marriage, and sex-positive heteronormality.

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Xochiquetzal, left, by Thalia Took, and Artemis by PinkParasol

But, as my connection to the divine feminine and earth magic deepened, my perspective began to shift. Traditions are important, but spirituality is a living thing and, as such, breathes and morphs and expands to serve the needs of its practitioners. Our connection to spirit shapes us, but we’re active participants. We shape spirit, too. We evolve with it and in it and of it.

I was recently at a metaphysical fair where, at a table of crystals, I met a woman wearing a medical mask. We talked about stones and how to choose one (I like to hold several and keep the one that feels most tingly and at home in my palm). The stone that her hand lingered over was a Shiva lingam. When I explained its significance — related to the divine masculine and associated with fertility — she was crestfallen. She’d lost her reproductivity to cervical cancer and was still battling the disease.

It came to me then that the definition of fertility and reproduction is often too narrow. What about art? What about ideas? What about the healing modalities and activism with which we engage? What about the communities — virtual or physical — that we foster? In that moment I knew that if my sister lost her womb to illness but was called to work with a Shiva lingam, her connection to fertility and divinity was meaningful and sacred and would bear wondrous fruit.

Let us remember that pagan observances morphed as needed, making use of what resources were at hand while also allowing space to change — by necessity and sometimes by force of conquering Christianity. The scattering of beans was a ritual, but it was also practical. Seeds needed planting if there was to be a harvest. A millennium ago, cattle were driven though the smoke of a bonfire to bless them because blessed cattle likely did more work and fed more hungry villagers than un-blessed cattle. And fertility meant crops and babies and the survival of the species.

But even the goddesses long associated with fertility rituals were subverting the paradigm of what it meant to be fruitful. Artemis, the goddess of the hunt and childbirth was, herself, graysexual. She chose abstinence in order to focus on her craft and expected the young women in her circle to also eschew romance with men (going so far as to drive a pregnant handmaiden into the wilderness). When the hunter Actaeon spied on Artemis as she was bathing, she turned him into a stag and he was set upon by his own hounds. Artemis wasn’t playing.

Athena, too, in the pantheon of so-called “virgin goddesses,” is most often depicted in a battle helmet rather than a feminine crown of flowers. Quinquatria, the festival of Athena’s Roman counterpart, Minerva, was celebrated the week of the equinox and Ostara — in honor of rebirth — but both Athena and Minerva lent their skills to the arts, classical learning, freedom and democracy rather than conventional partnering and raising families.

The Aztec goddess Xochiquetzal, a patroness of childbirth and fiber arts, was associated with female sexual power. “The goddess who seduced a priest and then turned him into a scorpion as a mark of her power, was no soft touch,” says an article on MexicoLore.com. “Unlike other fertility goddesses, she encouraged love-making as a means of pleasure, not reproduction.” Today, Casa Xochiquetzal, in Mexico City, houses retired prostitutes who, along with craftspeople, are under the protection of the deity.

And Persephone, whose return to earth heralded the end of winter, is perhaps the truest representative of the complex lives of women. Perhaps she left her home for love; perhaps she was taken by force. Perhaps her time with Hades, in the underworld, is a love story, perhaps it was a misstep, a toxic relationship, a detour away from self and health and wholeness. But the thing is, Persephone did return. Perhaps still as a young woman, perhaps as an older person with many hard lessons under her belt.

Still, she re-emerged. Still, like so many of us, she rose.

After all, isn’t healing the self and returning to wellness the ultimate rebirth — the embodiment of spring? Each of us are called, many times in our lives, to embark on an underworld journey. We encounter the splendor of darkness in the face of divorce, health scares, bereavement, estrangement from partners and family and community, loss of jobs and animal familiars, and reckoning with the personal stories we’ve long clung to, only to realize they no longer serve us.

So we go into the earth, into the cave, and we tend to our wounds and our healing and our growth. We tend to our dreams and misplaced hopes and long-neglected skills. And then, when we’ve done the work of stripping and shedding and breaking down, we rebuild ourselves and make our way back into the light. We are the daffodils and the tulips that sometimes bloom before the final snow because we are arriving and we’re here and we have a giant, resonant Hell Yes to shout out to the universe.

That is Beltane. The arriving. The hell yes, no matter how it’s received. And the blossoming, no mater how far removed we are from our reproductive years or reproductive organs or the desire to bear children. The blossoming — no matter if it’s met by a willing partner, no matter if our particular blooms are considered charming or pretty or desirable — marks our place in the dance. Our perfect creation. Our consecration. Our offering to the goddess.

We bloom into desire for ourselves, for the lives we’ve germinated in the rich compost of our wounds and pains and disappointments. We bloom into the understanding of our talents and how to use them. We rise like the April sun, like the flowering forsythia, like the new shoots of grass.

We’re intricately woven into the web of the agricultural calendar, but the seeds we sow don’t need to produce a harvest of beans or babies. We grow, instead, wisdom and patience and compassion. We grow our communities and our craft and our connection to mission and vision. We ripen and blossom, even if we’re well past maidenhood and headed fearlessly toward our crone years.

Even if our femininity is our own potent take on the theme of what it means to be a woman. Even if our best partnership is with ourselves.

All of that verdant rebirth is fertile, and it’s ours to claim, ours to emulate, ours to celebrate, with or without a spin around the phallic Maypole. We can simply acquire a Shiva lingam at a metaphysical fair and feel our power.

We can call in Beltane any way we want to, any time we feel the blossoming of our persistent spirits reaching toward the light.

 

Can a poem be a form of resistance?

[image error]I don’t know the answer to the title of this post. Writing a poem in the face of injustice feels both pointless and like the strongest thing I can do. The story of Chikesia Clemons, who was assaulted at a Waffle House, by police, after requesting plasticware with a takeout order and having the audacity to protest an upcharge, enraged me. I know I’ve gone all kinds of sassy, snarky, uppity and uncalled for in the bank when things didn’t go my way. I’ve vented my ire at more than one undeserving customer services representative. But I’m white. I can behave badly and suffer the hangover of shame and move on. What of the black women who are my neighbors and coworkers and community? Where is the justice? How do we stand with them and for them?

This poem ripped through my guts, born of fire and fury.

THE DESCENT

For Chikesia Clemons

What goes unsaid

is that you were given a double-serving

of injustice. Twin lashes

for your duplicitous sins of being born

female and black. You,

the Queen of Heaven, sent into a life

of fun house mirrors that distorted

your every truth, reflected your image

back wrenched and marred

and nightmarish. Sorry

isn’t even a drop in the bucket

it would take to quench your burning. But who

would spare their own piss

to put out the fire you walk through? We

are all tethered

to our individual pain and muzzled

by the promise of a little relief in exchange

for our complicity. Sad animals plowing

an endless row to escape the whip

while calling the rut

a moat, calling the prison a palace. So

as you were assaulted in a restaurant,

knocked to the ground, breasts

exposed, the other diners went on

eating waffles and fryer grease

and shame, like your humiliation

was just dessert. Like your body

is every girl we can’t protect

from eyes and hands and entitlement

and toxic masculinity and violence

and oppression

and oppression

and the bad dream of oppression

that plays out over and over

in daylight, like reality TV. Like

your skin is the flag of our collective

land grab, your bones a litany of our

trespasses, your pleas

and anguish that must be unlistened

so that we may unhear

all of the cries. To help you up

would be to admit to all those subjugated

before you. To admit you’re not a carpet,

not a corner stone, not a headstone,

but blood and breath and dream.

Your body is not a woman

broken but our ancestral homeland,

which we also could not save

from greed and appetite

and eyes and hands and entitlement

and oppression, and oppression, and

the rising tide of apathy. To see

your humanity would be to see

our own inhumanity and then what?

Would we get up from our waffles

to tear down the cities built upon

your sweat, your ache, your grief, your

blackness, your womanness, the space

you take up by being here despite every effort

to erase you?

Karma is a revolving door, bitches,

says the one who birthed the stars, the one

who stirs the cyclones to retrace, season

after season, the path of the slave ships:

Remember, remember, remember, and still no one

puts down their fork. You take your

double-serving of injustice, your

twin lashes, like a to-go order. Like

a take out meal you paid for

even though it tastes of bitterness. Like

you’ve been rocked

in the hold of a nameless ship

for eons, your story a retelling

gone on so long the words

have lost all meaning. Like

what goes around can’t

boomerang back soon enough. But

isn’t it prescribed to offer cakes

to the Queen of Heaven at her altar

rather than her grave?

 

 

‘Sleeping on Rooftops’ performance, May 9

If you live in Asheville and missed the debut of Sleeping on Rooftops at The ReHappening in March, here’s one more chance to see the show! We’ll be at REVOLVE on Wednesday, May 9, 7 p.m. The show also includes a solo set by musician Sally Ann Morgan.

 

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Sleeping on Rooftops + Sally Ann Morgan (solo set)

Wednesday, May 9, doors at 6:30 p.m. / show at 7 p.m.

Tickets $10.00

Sleeping on Rooftops, a collaborative work of spoken word, dance and experimental cello music, follows the model of the hero’s journey, as explained by mythologist Joseph Campbell. The story is of a young woman who ventures into the world for the first time. The piece was inspired by the collaborations of Black Mountain College artists M.C. Richards, Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and their collective foray into the source of creativity, and it debuted at the 2018 ReHappening.

Performed by: Alli Marshall (spoken word), Sharon Cooper and Coco Palmer Dolce (dance), and Melissa Hyman (cello).

Tickets are available here.

Collar of wasps

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COLLAR OF WASPS

I could have been a droning “caller of wasps” perhaps?

I just invented that job, I like the sound of it. — Neko Case

The frantic rush of the morning and all

its tasks got to be too much. I had

to send myself out to the rain. And because

the mud portends the spring I went in deep

up to my knees, wallowing, aboriginal

in the earth that bore me. I know my voice

is more raven rasp than songbird but

I’m not so out of tune as out

of place. My ancestors would have built

a shrine to the likes of me, brought offerings

of honeycomb, made me space to work

in smoke and poetry and dreaming.

But they might have sunk me in the river,

too, with a boulder lashed around my waist. Left

me to make an amulet of blood

and bone, my own blue eye for a nazar.

So I’ll live here, in the water, in the snow-

fed chill, my patience a whittling knife slowly

carving down a mountain. My hair

uncombed, my ankles uncrossed,

my handbag full of subversions. A pen,

a needle, a still-smoking lightening bolt. Try

to tame me with a corset, a marriage,

the yoke of my unrepentant womb. Even

if I speak softly, it is to curse anyone

who dams my freedom or clips my wings. Tie

around my neck a collar of wasps, saying, “That

will keep her in place. A million angry stingers

aimed at the jugular.” Bring it

and I will wear it like a jeweled breastplate,

my vestments of battle, my voice still rising

from the primordial tremor and buzz.

LETTERS TO ATHENA: A workshop on healing, writing, and accessing the goddess within

I’m so excited to announce my upcoming workshop. I hope you’ll join me — and Athena — on an adventure of words, stories, healing, and connection.

Letters to Athena uses mythology and the archetype of the Greek goddess to reframe our own stories. There will be writing prompts, response writings and free writes all aimed at connecting with Athena energy and our inner warrior goddess — but this is not a writing workshop as much as an afternoon of personal empowerment and communing with the creative power of the goddess. Join me Sunday, May 20, 3-5 p.m. at Asheville Raven & Crone, 55 Merrimon Ave.

[image error]Why Athena? The goddess of wisdom, courage and the arts is exactly the spirit we need to call in right now, in this time of #METOO, political and environmental anxiety, and the kind of reshaping and intense transformation many of us are experiencing. Athena is also known as the goddess of war, but I prefer to focus on her qualities of justice, strategy and strength.

Athena is a creative source, ruling arts, crafts and skill. By finding ways to tap into our own maker energy, we can commune with our inner Athena while also crafting beauty in our personal environments and the world around us. When strength and courage meet artistry and skill — the result is unstoppable!

And, finally, as a virgin/maiden Goddess, Athena transcends the typical roles of women, opening up the definition of womanhood. She serves as illumination and focal point to women across the gender spectrum and can be worked with as an archetype no matter one’s lifestyle and a/sexual expression.

The workshop seeks to explore how we can tap into the Divine She by discussing Athena’s stories and our own intrinsic knowledge of her. We’ll also incorporate guided meditation, a few gentle stretches and yoga-type poses to embody the goddess, and personal shares as well as readings of the work we create in the workshop (for those who feel called to do so).

The title for the workshop is taken from a writing prompt where we’ll compose notes to our inner Athena and engage in a heart-to-heart with our personal warrior goddess spirit, our untapped creative potential, and the parts of ourselves and our herstories we wish to heal and nurture.

Space is limited and registration is required. Sign up today:

$15.00

Registration is non-refundable. Any remaining spots will be available for cash registration at the door on the day of the event. Questions? Email allimarshall@bellsouth.net

Community Author FTW!

I’m so thrilled to share that I’ve been chosen to receive the 2018 UNC Asheville Ramsey Library Community Author Award. “The award provides a writer in Western North Carolina with a yearlong residency in UNC Asheville’s Ramsey Library, with a courtesy faculty appointment that provides a library study carrel and other campus resources,” says a press release. “The residency will run through December 2018, and will culminate in an opportunity for Marshall to showcase her work at a campus reading.”

Read more about the initiative and my wildly imaginative plans for what I’d like to accomplish (dream big, right?) here.

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Me, living in the library, with all my best book friends.

Observer in residence

I was invited by online arts and culture magazine HOLLER to be an Observer in Residence for a week in January. It was an fun challenge to post a photo and up to 300 words describing what I was thinking about or inspired by that day.

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This is a snippet from Day Five:

There are tiny altars everywhere. I’ve started to notice them, focus in on them. A Buddha in a tattoo studio, a crystal scattering light on a window sill, a bell calling us to the present moment, a murmuration of starlings swooping, in formation, in the deep blue of evening.

 

Find all of my posts here.

Find the entire Observer series here.

“Catching Out”: 2016 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize-winning story

At long last my short story, Catching Out, which won the 2016 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, has been published. You can read it in the 2018 edition of the The Thomas Wolfe Review or, more immediately, you can read it in full here:

CATCHING OUT

[image error]Granted, it wasn’t everyone who showed up to the gym in flannel and work boots, but Nevada Bloom could just as well have been carrying a sign to say she didn’t belong. Not there, and not anywhere, really. The night before she’d shaved the hair on the left side of her head clear down to the scalp. The prickle of stubble that snagged the threads of her stocking cap would grow back blond, a poor match for the feathery black strands still covering the right side of her head. But she was okay with the dichotomy.

Nevada shoved her hooded sweatshirt into a locker and quick-changed into ratty track shoes, mainly because work boots made too much noise on the treadmill. The soccer moms in their pink tops and grey knee pants stared at her as it was. She also kicked off her black jeans so she was just skinny, hairy legs in green running shorts. Denim chafed after a few minutes of jogging. It was a problem she’d have to address another day, though the point was not to have to jog for very long. Not if she did it right the first time.

Nevada’s routine was to work up to a five-minute flat-out sprint on the treadmill before moving on to sit-ups and pull-ups. The sit-ups she did on the floor, toes braced under the back-extension bench, while hugging a twenty-pound weight disk to her chest. In her peripheral vision the weight lifters hovered and paced, waiting for her to get out of the way, but she didn’t care. Nevada had learned, as soon as she died her hair black and traded her pastel angora sweaters for drab zip-up hoodies, that men were actually afraid of her.

Just to test the theory, because she liked to keep it fresh in her mind, Nevada bugged her eyes at one of the weight lifters as she walked back past him. He staggered back two steps and muttered, “What’s her problem?”

Nevada didn’t have a problem. She woke up one day and her world was different, that’s all. The trains that rolled along the track just behind her house — the trains that had not been there when she signed the contract on what was advertised as a quiet house with plenty of privacy — suddenly shifted from adversaries to friends. Instead of rattling her from her sleep, they began to lull her into her dreams each night, and those dreams took on strange proportions. Images of far-off places played against the screen of her subconsciousness. The wheat fields of Kansas, the muddy Mississippi River, the Rockies rising vertically, and the horizon west of California extending almost forever, until the Pacific met the sky.

Nevada had never seen the Pacific Ocean, but she began to think she might like to.

Then one morning, as she ate her cereal over the sink, looking toward the break in the trees where the trains clattered past, she saw a man jog alongside a slow-moving boxcar. He reached out for the ladder, swung himself up, and disappeared into an opening. It happened so smoothly and quickly that, had Nevada blinked, she would have missed it.

. . .

But she didn’t blink. As a child Nevada had mistaken a comment — one about the neighbor boy at bat at Little League practice — as unblinking. “No, Nicole,” her mother said. “Unflinching. It means he got the hit because when the ball came toward his face he didn’t wince. He swung.”

But still Nevada — when she was called Nicole and later, when she’d become someone else — saw unflinching, in her mind’s eye, as unblinking. To be one was to be the other. Blinking was as good as flinching. It still meant you jumped at the critical moment. So she dedicated herself to controlling her blinks. She could do it if she slowed her breathing and focused her gaze. Mind over matter.

Some people said it was a waste of time. Why practice not blinking when you could practice card tricks or foreign languages or cello? For god’s sake, the periodic table would come in handy. At the very least that time would be better spent watching TV, which might pay off in a trivia match, or watercooler small talk.

“I can practice not blinking while I watch TV,” Nevada said, though she didn’t have a TV. Not anymore. She’d sold it on Craigslist and put the money toward a backpack. She could have just bought a pack — her job in the university registrar’s office paid well enough. But once you were on a train, there was no telling how long you’d be on. It could go to the next town or to the next state. You might get stuck in a boxcar, even once the train stopped, if the railway yard security was tight. Not worth risking a fine or a night in jail, better to keep riding. And if you were riding for days, you didn’t need to be thinking about all the TV shows you were missing. All the sitcom jokes you weren’t laughing at, all the quiz show questions you weren’t shouting out the answers to. There was so much hypothetical money you wouldn’t be amassing — and risking losing with one wrong answer — once you were riding the rails and beyond reach of the things money could buy.

By practicing not blinking, Nevada figured she’d already seen at least a third more of the world that the average person. Fleeting things — a humming bird, a shooting star, a dolphin leaping beside a ferry. If her world was filled with minutiae, it was richer for those glimpses and flashes. And, by not blinking, she’d seen the man board the train. Nevada knew in an instant what she’d witnessed. A hobo. As a noun it sounded lumpy. Roly-poly. A joke. But as a verb it was quicksilver and flawless. A flight, an updraft, a vanishing act.

She knew that’s what she wanted. The train ride, probably. The placelessness, the wanderlust. But mostly the suspended moment of reaching and catching, of swinging into the dark car. Leaping from one world into another.

. . .

It was strange to become someone else while working in a registrar’s office, a place that was all about middle initials, birthdates and social security numbers. But Nicole Bloom’s name didn’t matter. She was a decade past college. She hadn’t even updated her resume in three years. She thought the name change would be harder, but the university was a place where young people were forever trying on new personalities. One day her boss said, “Nicole, can you update the work-study files?”

And Nicole said, “It’s Nevada.”

“What’s Nevada?”

“My name.”

“What? I thought it was Nicole.”

“It was. I changed it.”

“Oh,” said Nevada’s boss. “Well, you might have to remind me.”

On her lunch break, Nevada scrolled photography blogs of freight hoppers. The pictures from the Depression era — men in button-down shirts and caps with hobo bundles slung over their shoulders — were comfortably sepia-tinged and softened by distance. The colored photos of contemporary freight hoppers were different. Kids with tattoos and grease-smudged clothes played banjos, ate from cans, and sneered menacingly into the lens. They looked battle-scarred and hard around the eyes, but they had each other and the muscular propulsion of the trains.

The first time Nevada went to the rail yard, she saw a group of them. They were sprawled on a bank below the tracks, out of sight of the railway workers. They were a tribe in their patched canvas pants and facial piercings.

Nevada was conspicuous in her office apparel — khakis and a soft blue sweater. She felt herself flush, though the freight hoppers didn’t even glance her way. How had she ever thought she might be one of them? Nevada wondered. And then, how had she ever thought she was someone who wore khaki and a blue sweater, and entered data into a computer at an Ikea desk?

She drove to the mall, bought black jeans, and wore them out of the store.

. . .

The gym membership came later. Nevada had walked to the end of her lawn, to the break in the trees where she’d seen the man board the train. There was a chain link fence, six feet tall. Nevada stuck a sneakered foot into one of the diamond shaped holes and lifted herself up. Her arms felt weak, her abs quaked with the effort and, at the top, she was pretty certain that, even if she was being pursued by rabid hounds, she wouldn’t have the strength or daring to heft herself over the sharp wire points.

If she was ever going to be able to jump onto a boxcar, even a slow-moving one, she needed to build some muscle and some nerve.

Working out at the university gym was a possibility, but the students were all so bright-eyed and healthy. Volleyball players, cross country runners, and the thick-thighed soccer stars with their all-season tans and shiny ponytails — they made everyone except for their barrel-chested coaches feel guilty for having aged past twenty-two.

Nevada already felt guilty for enough, though it was hard to pinpoint exactly what, and more difficult to explain why. Hers was a free-floating anxiety, an existential dread that couldn’t be shaken. It lived in the hollows of her days, in the directionlessness that underscored adulthood. If the answers were supposed to come with time and experience, Nevada found only routine and an uneasy suspicion that whatever she was meant to grasp and ride had already passed her by.

But now the sign had presented itself, clear as an X on a yellow background, clear as a set of flashing lights, and a long, low horn.

Life had not waited for Nevada Bloom, and trains didn’t pause long, either. But a train could, once in a while, be chased down and caught. Nevada had seen it done; she knew what was expected of her.

. . .

Sneakers wouldn’t do in the rail yards or on the miles of highway or backroads that might have to be walked. Nevada cleared out her closet, delivered a trunk-load of ballet flats, pumps, and stylish ankle boots to the Salvation Army. She swapped pasted sweaters for plaid button-downs and traded stockings for waffled long underwear. She bought a pair of lug-sole work boots and wore them every day, despite the blisters that rose and wept and finally gave way to tougher tissue.

At night she organized her backpack, fitting in extra socks, a clean bandana, a paperback book and a bottle of Vitamin C. It was hard to know what she’d need. The kids in the rail yard looked like they had some combination of the essentials — sleeping bags, battered hats, tin pans for cooking — and the things that reminded them of either who they’d once been or who they were becoming.

When Nevada thought about who she’d once been and who she was becoming, there was the gasping vertigo of gazing into a bottomless chasm. Nevada threw open the windows of her house and listened to the insects and, finally, the swelling wail of the locomotive.

It was a song of mourning, but a sound that blotted out all other sounds, including the internal broadcast of everything that can’t be and everything that never was.

. . .

There was something about the freight-hoppers that disturbed Nevada. The grime that clung to their skin and clothes was a pervasive dirtiness resistant to soap and water. But the kids in their patched jeans and self-cut (or uncut) hair showed no concern for the filth. They lived in it, let it define them among their tribe and separate them from everyone else.

The train was the momentum of that unorthodox life. It was the vehicle to the world between worlds. But the grime — the tattered clothes and unwashed hands — was the badge. It was the uniform. Nevada wondered if she could assume that mantle.

In the railway yard, in her black jeans and heavy boots, Nevada dared herself toward a group of kids. Some were older, she realized. The roundness of their faces was carved away by time and elements and maybe hunger. One boy held up a hand in dingy bandages, two fingers missing. A girl in a grayed t-shirt pressed a cell-phone to her ear, her fingernails five black half-moons.

Nevada was about to walk away when a boy caught her eye. He half-smiled. Nevada smiled back, self conscious. He wore dark blue jeans, stiff with newness, and a white t-shirt with the sleeves cut out. Nevada wondered if she’d seen him before — if he was the one who’d jumped on the train behind her house..

“Catching out?” he asked.

Nevada shook her head at the phrase she’d only recently learned. The words for hopping a train. “Not today.”

“Me either.” He crossed his arms over his chest and gazed toward the stopped locomotives. “I used to hobo all the time, but I’ve been off the rails for a couple of years.”

Nevada pretended she understood. “So why are you here?”

He shrugged. “Old habits. I feel at home in the rail yard, visiting friends.”

Nevada wasn’t sure if he meant the scrappy group huddled in the grass, or the boxcars stretched out along the tracks.

“Eamon,” said the boy, and held out his hand.

Nevada shook it and said, “Nevada,” which felt overly formal. But she was glad she didn’t have to say “Nicole.” And gladder still when Eamon just nodded, like of course her name was Nevada. And of course she was there, watching the trains, able to board one at any moment.

. . .

That night, Nevada dreamed of trains. She felt their rhythm run through her, the clatter and shudder. But even as she tossed on her mattress, she knew that her dream knowledge was a particular kind of fiction. It could only shunt her from one shore of sleep to the other. The next day, as she ate her lunch, she thought of Eamon. Thought of looking for him, asking him to tell her what it was like and how to do it.

She could just as easily Google that on her phone, though. “How do you jump on a train?”

“How do you do the thing you fear?”

And, “Can pretending to be someone you’re not eventually lead you to a more authentic version of who you actually are?”

That last question, though the most pressing, was the hardest to enter into a search engine. What groups of words should you put the quotes around?

In the end, Nevada walked across town to the rail yard. She took the battery from her cellphone and laid the silenced device on the tracks. When she stood back, she saw Eamon watching her.

“Are you running away from something or toward something?” he asked.

Nevada shrugged.

“You’ve got to know,” he insisted.

Nevada’s biceps ached from the extra set of pull-ups she’d done. Her form was good, though. She’d been keeping her pack in her car trunk, practicing jogging it with in the university parking lot. She’d already mailed her next rent check and put a hold on her mail. Nearly everything was in order.

“I’m going just to go,” she said, squinting into the late afternoon sun. “Just to know I can.”

He kicked the tracks. “I still catch out now and then, just to keep the muscle memory,” he said. “But after awhile, home or away, it doesn’t matter. Wherever you go, you’re stuck with yourself.”

Nevada had cut her nails short and bought a tin coffee percolator that hung from her backpack by a carabiner. She had matches in a ziplock bag and a small first aid kit with extra antiseptic wipes. She was ready to ship out to war or disappear deep into the forest. She was ready to face her fears. She was ready to face herself.

She hoped that self like coffee.

“Maybe I’ll see you if I make it back this way,” she said to Eamon.

He took the red bandana from his back pocket and tied it around her neck. “For luck,” he said. “Happy trails.”

. . .

The first part of the morning, before the sun rose over the trees, was still cool and dappled in pale light. Nevada shouldered her pack, climbed the chainlink fence, and dropped down into the tall grass. It wasn’t long before she heard the rumble and screech of metal on metal. Then the train was approaching. It charged and snaked, not yet up to speed, but breathing smoke nonetheless.

Nevada rose and began a slow run. She spotted the boxcar and the ladder. She moved toward the track, uphill, her shoulder at an angle with the side of the train.

The backpack chafed a little, but it was mind over matter. Arms reaching, body swiveling, hands extending. Unblinking, unflinching. At the moment of contact, there was no time to second guess. It was a tight clasp, a single pull-up, then swinging one booted foot after the other onto the rungs.

The world along the track blurred and fanned out as if it was moving and Nevada, clinging to the side of the boxcar, remained still. She closed her eyes and felt the wind on her face.

And then she pushed away from the car, stumbling slightly but managing to keep upright when her feet hit the ground.

It was enough for one day. The catching, the leaping from one world to the next.

There was nowhere to go and forever to get there.

Nevada adjusted her pack and started back toward the fence. She didn’t even bother to watch as the caboose neared and passed and vanished around the bend.