BY KELLE SCHILLACI CLARKE
Terri got hers falling from the appaloosa she’d purchased through a newspaper ad. She’d trained the shy gelding to walk through puddles, and he followed her like a smitten puppy. Maybe he’d had a bad day or was bitten by a horsefly. Either way, she landed on her arm, and snap! Bones splintered through skin; orthoscopic surgery. Ignoring the popular adage, she never did climb back into the saddle. She sold the horse to a cowboy named Carl with anger issues. Serves you right, she whispered to the horse, as the cowboy whipped him aboard the trailer and drove away.
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Rust wore a hole through the floor of Carl’s ‘51 Chevy pick-up, for which he’d paid $75 in 1966, and now required the strength of two people when making sharp turns. It was beneath the accelerator pedal, covered by a flimsy piece of cardboard. Carl liked that he could see the road through the hole and that it offered “free air-conditioning” in the summer; his son Cory saw it as an escape hatch when he got pulled over and needed to dump the drugs. Maybe they’d laugh about it one day over Miller Lights, finally letting go of the past.
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Cory ate blowfish at a restaurant known for its “challenging” delicacies, its fermented beans and still-squirming octopi. He was there for the danger: Fugu sashimi that, in his case, carried a near-deadly dose of tetrodotoxin. He didn’t die, but the tissue-thin sliver of fish did a number on his nervous system, leaving him with a tremor and story he’d tell anyone interested and even those who weren’t, like the passengers beside him on the small aircraft months later, deep in the desert. He adjusted his parachute straps, sucked in wind, and jumped. Some people wear their scars on the insides.
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Cory’s wife Carolyn blames hers on pregnancy. She tripped on a block while pregnant, jamming her kneecap into a toy racecar on the floor of the Montessori school where she’d been interviewing teachers. You can’t plan early enough, she told her friend Sarah over Caesar salad, running a finger over the itchy stitches surrounding her knee, before the real pain struck. Miscarriages run in the family, she told her husband later in the hospital room, as they lost another in a cluster of cells and tissue. An optimist, she kept her name on the preschool’s waiting list, just in case.
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Steve’s motorcycle struck pavement at 45 mph around a curve in the Berkeley hills, when a deer leapt into the road, looking like they do on yellow warning signs. Only now it didn’t look like anything. Sarah clung to his waist during impact, burying her face in his leather jacket as she screamed; a howl he’d hear long after her body careened down the gravel road. He’d silently loved her for years, then silently served as best man in her wedding, wheeling her down the aisle to marry the EMT who’d saved both their lives, but couldn’t save her legs.
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Carolyn’s slice went from hip to hip, unlike the less intrusive procedures where they insert surgical tools straight in through the bellybutton, leaving only a smiley-faced stitch beneath your navel. They said she’d be released in a couple of days, but she couldn’t stop crying. She cried so much it scared the younger girl sharing the hospital room, who left without a gall bladder. She tried stopping, but she couldn’t. “It’s the hormones,” the young doctor explained, again. As in, you don’t really have any anymore. As in, there’s nothing left inside. As if that might make her feel better.
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Terri’s son Robby has a Power Wheels Cadillac, a miniaturized version of the model driven by his Dad, a salesman who travels. His dad likes to talk about his son and his Cadillac, and also his own Cadillac; how his son drives his Cadillac down his suburban cul-de-sac, waving at neighborhood girls lined up on the sidewalk, waiting their turn to ride. Maybe nothing bad will happen to Robby, but if something does, chances are it will happen when dad is off bragging about his son and his miniature Cadillac. Chances are, it will happen. Chances are, it already has.
Kelle Schillaci Clarke is a Seattle-based writer and journalist with deep L.A. roots. She received an MFA from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and her work has recently appeared in Superstition Review, Blood Orange Review, Pidgeonholes, Orange Blossom Review, and Barren Magazine. She's on Twitter @kelle224.