JENNIFER A. HOWARD / 2 CASES
THE CASE OF THIS AGAIN
A fawn born in your backyard thinks, this is the world! Oversweet lilacs, dandelions in poof mode, a telephoto lens leaning out a window. Yes, you realize as an adult, you messed up everything—most everything—but, relief, get this: thimbleberries flower every year, even in 2020. And 2021. Before lockdown, you went to the steakhouse for afternoon drinks with work friends, just to play fancy in an iron ore town. Two teen boys at another table ordered slice of cake after slice of cake at 4:00 pm. Twenty years ago, before phones had cameras, you chatted up Kato Kaelin at a karaoke bar in Burbank. It was winter where you had come from, but not here, not there, in California, and you post-gamed the Packers playoff win with him. Dogs born in winter, in Wisconsin like Kato Kaelin, think they need to poop on snow. Spring brings a terrifying chaos of green grass, negative space everywhere, fewer and fewer places to squat. You drank enough that night that you, as if you were in the Midwest, asked Kato to hold your gin and tonic while you went outside for a smoke. Like those teens, coastal wild with somebody’s steakhouse money, perhaps planning for planning a wedding someday. Later, the fawns will learn the woods, the creek, the terrifying road, but you’ll still be working out how to read the thimbleberries, blooming again. Is constant, insistent goddamn renewal good news or a failure to join the revolution. Answer: what better life you could have lived with more preparation, what in your next life might you be built for.
THE CASE OF UNNECESSARY NUANCE
(content warning: sexual assault)
In the 1960s Alice from The Brady Bunch stopped your dad, a teenager then, to ask directions during the Traverse City cherry festival. She was in a play. Likewise, a stranger in a new town and after a dark cold February of wondering why, the sun will come out for one glorious day and your cat will nap belly-up in the windowslant of light on the floor. You spent much of your life not realizing you could say more than what a dick I’m so sorry in response to the news that a man, or a boy, assaulted a friend and now your anger is the red of cherries on the cover of an Erma Bombeck paperback. But you learn new words, and it hits you: it is not just your cat. Every pet in town is napping in the strips of the same sun on their own floor. And oh, that girl—terrible at clarinet—who was pregnant in your junior high band. She was raped. Imagine the roofs all gone and you are flying over the sunning dogs and cats, the napping children yet to be pinned down, their dream drool. Thousands, even in your small town, and at least one of the Brady girls, and Fluffy, who ran away in the pilot. Did Alice even remember that or know which one.
Answer: we call a doctor’s note for medicine a script.
Jennifer A. Howard teaches and edits Passages North in Michigan's snowy Upper Peninsula. Her most recent chapbook—Flat Stanley Reports Back to His Third Grader—was published by The Cupboard Pamphlet.