Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art
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    • Jay Merill "Cherry Red"
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  • Archives
    • 2017 >
      • Fiction 2017 >
        • Kathryn Holzman, "Eating Meat"
        • Kaitlyn Burd, "Nature with You in It"
        • Katie Young Foster, "Promotion"
        • William Cordeiro, "Selections from Whispering Gallery"
        • Alexandra Renwick, "The Life of an Artifact in Duodecadal Glances"
        • Lizzi Wolf, "My Brother's Therapist"
      • Poetry 2017 >
        • Keith Mark Gaboury
        • Mark Decarteret
        • Douglas Piccinnini
        • Matthew McBride
        • Jim Daniels
        • Sally Ashton
        • Raymond Farr
      • Nonfiction 2017 >
        • Charlie Moses, "Dear Friend"
        • Pamela Woolford, "This Is What Happened"
        • Jennifer Martelli, "Phobiacompendia"
    • 2016 >
      • Fiction 2016 >
        • Loie Merritt, "The Edge of the Sea is a Strange and Beautiful Place"
        • Mitchell Grabois, "i"
        • Kelle Groom, "25 Reasons to Attend the Gala"
        • Mike Shepley, "Killing Symbols"
        • Jody Azzouni, "Owning Things"
        • Dan Gutstein, "Like Airplanes and Stars"
        • Kate Imbach, "Diamondland"
      • Poetry 2016 >
        • Jeff Alessandrelli
        • Daniel Coudriet
        • Peter Leight
        • John Wells
        • Jenna Cardinale
        • Isabelle Shepherd
        • Michael Robins
        • Will Walker
        • Bridget Sprouls
        • Allan Johnston
        • Hugh Behm-Steinberg
        • Caroline Knox
        • David Dodd Lee
        • John Deming
        • David McLoghlin
    • 2015 >
      • Poetry 2015 >
        • Adam Clay
        • Kyle Hemmings
        • Matthew Henriksen
        • Megan Kaminski
        • Emily Kendal Frey
        • Noelle Kocot
        • Katy Lederer
        • John Lowther
        • Nathaniel Sverloff
        • Franz Werfel -- James Reidel
      • Fiction 2015 >
        • Erin Bedford, "Riesenrad"
        • James Braziel, "Jick's Chevrolet"
        • James Braziel, "Vittate"
        • Adrian Class, "Or Flights"
        • Erica L. Kaufman, "It Buried Us"
        • Nolan Liebert, "Gravity of Hearts"
        • Heather Noland, "Cosmic Slump"
        • Tom Whalen, "In the Cathedral"
      • Nonfiction 2015 >
        • Rebecca Cook, "What the Hammer Said When the Hammer Hit the Girl"
        • Margot Kelley, "Companion Species"
    • Fall 2014 >
      • Poetry Fall 2014 >
        • Stephanie Anderson
        • John Buckley and Martin Ott
        • Vanessa Couto Johnson
        • John Estes
        • Anne Gorrick
        • Henry Israeli
        • Keegan Lester
        • John Loughlin
        • Douglas Luman
        • Danielle Mitchell
        • Alexandria Peary
        • Marcus Slease
        • Georg Trakl / James Reidel
      • Fiction Fall 2014 >
        • Matt Rowan, "Dog's Best Friend"
        • Kelli Anne Noftle, "Before She Was Olive"
        • Chris Okum, "Ratatat"
        • Jon Fried, "Cashing In"
        • Lisa C. Taylor, "Visible Wounds"
        • Sarah Kahn, "Break"
        • Rebekah Morton, "Big Sis"
      • Nonfiction Fall 2014 >
        • Stephen Benz, "Night Then Morning: Elko, Nevada"
        • Joseph C. Jiuliani, "Of Stealing and of Being Stolen"
        • Lindsay Chudzik, "Jailface"
        • Robert D. Vivian, "Just After Rain"
    • Spring 2014 >
      • Poetry Spring 2014 >
        • Simeon Berry
        • Molly Brodak
        • Wyn Cooper
        • Brian Foley
        • Tim Kahl
        • Caroline Knox
        • Rob MacDonald
        • Benjamin Paloff
      • Fiction Spring 2014 >
        • Gareth David Anderson, "Cupcake"
        • Halsted M. Bernard, "Your Hands"
        • Patrick Cole, "Pick-up Lines"
        • Joshua Graber, "This Fine Experience"
        • Lola Grace, "Natural Birth"
        • Robert E. Tanner, "Non-Disclosure Disagreement"
      • Art Spring 2014
    • 2012 & 2013
  • Pedagogy
Picture

KELLE GROOM
​
25 Reasons to Attend the Gala



1.         A galaxy, any galaxy, calms me. Sky of darkness full of light. Stars inside us.

2.         Gala’s from a party robe, not milk.

3.         I’m trying to learn a song.

4.       My shoes are not soft, but glitter. The ladies in the Presbyterian Thrift Store approved. Dress bright blue. Gold apples on gold chains swing from my ear lobes when I speak. A girl ironed my hair. C is late, having her hair curled at the foot of the mountain. Black eyelashes glued to her eyelashes, one by one. She picks me up at my condo, drives to the fancy restaurant on the lake. A rhino greets us, the mascot. I look into his eyes but they’re drawn on. Maybe slits were cut in the rhino’s face, or his eyes are in his always open mouth. Inside the Lone Rhinoceros room, C leads the way to the bar.

5.         I’m easily suspicious. Ever since the sailor at a picnic in Spain asked me out when I was sixteen.  I feel sixteen, alone again in a new place.

6.         A colleague, B, tells me about the oldest tree in the world, a bottlebrush or bottlepine, which makes me think of bottlenose dolphins, the photo I saw of our brains a similar size. The bottlenose I found on the deserted national seashore in Florida. Sometimes when a turtle died there, a ranger would come and spraypaint a red cross on its shell. Dead. But the dolphins were left to the turkey vultures. I’ve seen a sea bird stand guard over its own dead in protection. To stave off, or maybe, just goodbye goodbye. Hunched black wings of turkey vultures announce the dead on the beach. They hovered in twos over each body, like surgeons about to operate, conferring. When I’ve approached, they’ve sauntered in nervous circles, glancing over their shoulders. Afraid I’ll steal their meal: a giant tortoise, seagull whose ice-cube eyes have melted to black pinpricks, and a bottlenose dolphin so still, I think he must be gray driftwood from the hurricanes, a piece of boat or porch. But the vultures waited nearby on a caved-in roof. The tail folded like a newspaper, flukes calm as hands resting into one another. Beak a crumpled bottle, so I guessed the name, but what’s a name when something has opened your insides, pulled intestines into the sand, like wet laundry still in knots, dull pink, even the blowhole tired, dry, no more clouds. One vulture spread his wings to show me how big he is, how he and the others will cover the dolphin. But the chemical makeup of my body is indistinguishable from the ocean, so I stood beside. At night the sea came up, took him back.

7.         B said one man had convinced those in charge to let him cut sections from the oldest of the oldest trees. Not too far away, in an uninhabited place. Location of the trees kept secret. Cut, the tree died. B’s friend has been collecting photos of the tree from across time. His friend is almost ready to make a sculpture from the photos to resurrect the tree. But B said, He’s dying of leukemia. He speaks slowly, stopping himself from telling side stories. He tries to stay on track, but it seems a struggle. He seems to have a lot he’d like to tell me, or maybe not tell me, but tell someone.

8.         I’m suspicious of the oldest tree story. I research The Oldest Tree, which I think B may have actually called The Oldest Living Thing. And here it is: the bristlecone tree, 4,841 years old. It has a name: Methuselah, “the oldest non-clonal organism on earth.” “Located in the White Mountains of California in Inyo National Forest.” Its exact location is kept a close secret to protect it from the public. “An older specimen named Prometheus, which was more than 5,000 years old, was cut down by a U.S. Forest Service graduate student in 1964.” You can visit the grove where Methuselah grows, but they won’t tell you which tree it is. The Mother Nature Network shows a photo of a tree, asks, “Could this one be it?” Swirly, magical tree, like the trees at Green Lakes near Syracuse, place of the enchanted trees, the lake I’d thought to drown in. The spring of 2002 which felt like winter.

9.         B told me the truth. Our town in Nevada only five miles from California.

10.       That night, C said she was going to punt, asked B if he would take me home.

11.       B’s van was a Volkswagon converted to a Subaru, at least it said Subaru on the back. Tires so high I had to grab a handhold from inside the door, pull myself up to sit on the tire rim, then hoist myself up into the seat. I didn’t mind. Though it was twenty degrees outside, and my nylons, glimmer shoes were for other weather. The cold in the van metallic, just over the edge of bearable. You could live in this van, a stove behind me, bed back there somewhere.

12.       Earlier, I’d been staring at our colleague across the table, as if drunk, drawn to his light-hair, lightweightedness. I forgot he was real and could see me. Toward the end of the night, he appeared in a chair to my left, B to my right. Asked if I’d like to go to the bar afterwards.

13.       Later, someone at the bar asked, How could B get lost? He comes here every Friday.

14.       In the van, B said. If I get distracted, or if I’m talking to someone, doing something, and you want to leave, just tell me. I can take you home whenever you want to go.

15.       We’re surrounded by very tall trees like hundreds of cathedrals. I don’t know where I am, B said.  Really lost. And he’s lived here 17 years. Or taught here, living down the mountain.

16.       At the bar, I ordered water and realized I’d brought no money. My mouth felt stuck, as if I’d been out in the cold a long time, much colder than this. Cold enough to freeze my mouth.

17.       A girl danced by herself, in graceful, closed-eyes, sliding. Another girl touched my bright blue knee as I sat on a barstool watching B play pool. Pretty, she said. I wish I could wear a pretty dress.

18.       Why don’t you? I asked, but she was too far away by then. One of the art professors invited me to play blow-job shuffleboard. Blow the puck across the salty board.

19.      The light-haired man asked me to play “hit-the-ceiling-first-with-the-ping-pong-ball,” and “around-the-world-ping-pong.”  It took five people running around the table together to keep the ball in motion. My shoes unstable.

20.       The ping pong ball landed in the crook of my arm.

21.       When K from the office left, I got a ride. As I was leaving, S said it would get really crazy around 3 AM. I asked, They’re still open?

22.       There’s no last call in Nevada.

23.       One woman kept slapping her ass with her hand in time to the music. A foot or two away from her, I felt like a piece of a boat. 

24.       The next day, I’ll throw the second-hand, tinsel shoes away.  
​
25.       The cold outside like metal, and K said, It feels good.


Copyright © 2016 Map Literary

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Kelle Groom is the author of a memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster), a Barnes & Noble Discover selection, New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, and a Library Journal Best Memoir. An NEA Fellow in Prose, her work has appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, and Ploughshares. She is MFA faculty at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe, and Director of the Summer Workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

published by
The Department of English
College of Humanities & Social Sciences
The William Paterson University of New Jersey
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