Paperclips
by Seth Fischer

I once worked writing memos for a politician who wouldn’t let us use paperclips. She was a powerful and decent woman. I liked paperclips, but I didn’t complain. Legend had it that after the energy companies stole billions from the poor, and after the President had refused to do anything about it, she stuck her finger in the Vice President’s chest and said, “You can’t do this to these people.” He said, “Lady, there’s a lot about economics you don’t understand.” This all happened before I worked for her, but I’m certain the briefing she’d read that morning had not had a paperclip anywhere near it.

I wrote her a memo once on the closing of a bus stop in Sunnyvale. I used a stapler. Around then, a five hundred pound smart bomb landed on the wrong house near Mosul. The US government said five people had died. The house’s owner and the AP put the number at fourteen. Seven of the dead were children, and there is nothing left of them, not even the hairs on their arms or the little bones inside their ears. No one could prove anything except that there is now no house where once there was one. I should have written a memo about those nine people. It would've been fifty pages long. It would've included their best photos and translations of the lyrics to the last song they heard and recipes for their favorite kind of soup. That year the President said thirty thousand Iraqi civilians had died in the fighting. Other estimates put the number at a hundred thousand.

How do you bind the obituary of seventy thousand people? I could’ve used a binder clip. She didn’t have a problem with those. But the memo would’ve been too long for her to read; it would’ve taken too long for me to write. She had a lot of chests to poke, and my job was to write about bus stops. So I quit, and now I work in a museum. I use as many paperclips as I want. I unfold them and use them to pick at the area around my nails. They’re perfect for peeling off the dead skin until my fingers are pink and raw.

Benediction
by Jacqueline Doyle

I’m sitting in the waiting room at Quest Diagnostics in Castro Valley, waiting to be called in for blood work. It’s unusually gray for spring in California. Around noon some pale sunlight begins to shine through the front windows, which could use a wash. Usually there are addicts or alcoholics waiting with counselors for urine tests, but I don't see any today. It's Monday, and the room is packed. I forgot that Mondays were so busy.

It's already been forty minutes. It will be at least an hour before I can leave. I've run through the magazine collection: People, Web MDs, and a Good Housekeeping from 1997. There's not much to look at in the room, decorated in pale green and salmon like so many doctors' offices. Water-colors of flowers on the walls. Stained beige carpet. It's been quiet, but now people start shifting in their seats, once in a while murmuring to each other in undertones. "Didn't he come in after you?" "How long have you been here?"

The most talkative is a fat, red-faced, white woman in navy blue stretch pants with a red and white-striped shirt hanging over her belly. She's in her thirties, maybe, but looks older, her hair in a sausage-curl perm. She's talking to the heavy black woman next to her but also, it seems, to the room at large.

"Nothing works - I've tried everything! You can see -" She jiggles her ample stomach with both hands. The teenager next to me snickers.

"Have you had your thyroid checked, honey?" The black woman is sympathetic.

"Yes ma'am. They done checked my thyroid, they done blood tests, they done other tests. I keep tellin’em, I personally think there's something in there - you know, in my digestive." She rubs both hands in a circular motion on her stomach, indicating her intestines maybe, it's hard to say. "They just can't explain it - I eat and eat, and I'm still hungry ALL the time. ALL the time." She shakes her head.

The black woman turns in her seat and peers at the white woman for a moment before she says, "That a MIND thing, sweetheart. That gotta be a mind thing." She spins the gold bangle bracelets on her arm, and settles into her seat. She's dressed in bright colors - purple, orange, gold - and seems to carry her weight proudly, though she tells the white woman she's on a diet for borderline diabetes. "No way I'm gonna let that happen, unh huh. I'm eating healthy, now."

"I try,” the white woman says. “I try! I just can't stay away from that junk food - I see junk food I just gotta eat it. But I do keep away from that diet soda. D'you know there's more junk in that diet soda than in regular soda?"

"Lord, yes!"

"You can read it on the can. I drink regular soda when I want a soda."

A girl with a blond ponytail checks in and stands by the receptionist’s window with her clipboard of forms and insurance card.

"I just don't like having my name and all that personal stuff on all that paperwork," the white woman complains. "It's just not right. I shred it all at home - I got a shredder. You know, like those credit card offers. You gotta read the whole thing, but you look through all the pages and way at the back, you know, at the bottom of the page at the back, you'll find your name written where anybody could find it. You gotta be careful these days."

"Ain't that the truth."

"And I get so mad at Long's Drugs, the way they put your name and all your information on them pill bottles. I block it out with a magic marker."

There's a long silence as the black woman seems to consider this. "Things can happen," she says. After another pregnant pause, "There be another woman with my name - Sherilee Johnson. One time - been a long time ago now — I spent two weeks in jail cuz they thought I was her."

The white woman looks startled, and squints like she's searching her mind for something to top this story. She gives up.

"I kept telling them. In 1969 I woulda been in the first grade. How could I be robbin' a bank and killin' my husband. But they wouldn't listen. No sir, they wouldn't listen. Just imagine, robbin' a bank and killin' my husband. In the first grade. Of course, I got me some money later, cuz of what happened, but it didn't really make up for it. Bless the Lord."

Sunshine streams through the windows, and they call my name.

Oh That Charlie
by Ami Sletteland

After a long year of paperwork and grueling interviews with social workers, my father has finally been awarded his social security disability crazy money. The final diagnosis is post traumatic stress disorder brought on by the stabbing from uncle Terry. This is a man who, long before the whiskey stabbing incident, would regularly show up at my house with a coonskin cap, demand I put it on for protection, and take me on a joy ride to Weaverville to loot the craft stores of ill fitting underwear and bags of waxed oranges. The coonskin cap was used as a shield. By my father's logic people do not suspect others when they are wearing Davy Crockett hats.

The first thing my father did when he received his check was purchase a used Harley Davidson brand golf cart and some scuba gear. I understand the lure of the golf cart as I myself have been seduced by such vehicles, however when asked about the scuba gear my father will insist there is treasure to be found on the bottom of Shasta Lake. He has this great story about his dear friend Charlie and scuba diving; but unfortunately I’ve heard it so many times that it’s erased from my memory, like a video tape that’s become fuzzy and distorted with use. I called my father to ask about the Charlie scuba diving story and all he would say is, “Oh, that Charlie. Don't get me started on Charlie.

Charlie usually dresses in what I call the hobo tuxedo - jeans with a button down flannel shirt. It's what homeless people wear when they’re dressing up. On one occasion he spontaneously attended my daughter's second birthday party, upon my father's request. I guessed he hadn’t had time to change into his formal wear, as he arrived in oversized overalls, with no shirt underneath and one strap down 1993 style. He and my father spent most of the party drinking behind the gymnastics building where the party was being held, periodically meandering inside, which caused concern for the other parents, I was warned by mothers I was already unconformable with that a couple of homeless men had wandered in the building. and I understood their confused faces when I proudly exclaimed that, no, it wasn’t a homeless person tying newspaper around his feet, stuffing cake into his pockets, and trying to warn others of the government corn conspiracy, it was my father.

My parents got pregnant with me at a very young age, and separated before I can remember. I always looked foreword to my visits with my father and despite his young age I believe he did a reasonable job parenting me - My only affects are an unreasonable fear of aphids, and the fear I’m being timed when I go to the bathroom. I also make arbitrary associations to describe people, places, or things expecting others to understand them. “Oh 3? 3 as in Bob?” “Oh you know, periwinkle like fat people.” But I guess all families do that?

It’s hard to imagine being seventeen, drug addled, and finding out you’re going to be a parent. I imagine I would have cleaned up my act, but perhaps I, too, would have sent my seven year old into the 7/11 to crack stink bombs and steal candy for kicks. I‘d like to talk to my father about what that was like - becoming a parent so young - ask him if he has any regrets, but he’s still upset I haven't taken him to the zoo yet, so it’ll have to wait.