From Curriculum of a Western Landscape

LEONA THEIS

Creative Arts

When I was sixteen, to impress a boy with the drama of it all—of being me, sensitive teenaged girl—I asked if he’d drive me to the cemetery north of town. There, with the wind in the pines and an appropriately melancholy twilight sifting down, I collapsed in tears beside Dad’s grave. I recall, or believe I recall, the scent of the grass and the close-up view of ants as I rested my arms on the lawn, my forehead on my arms, and sobbed. I don’t know if I managed to impress the boy; whether I impressed myself was not, at that time in my life, a question to which I paid attention.
      In a town not far from here, I once met an old-timer who knew my dad back in the day:
      Mike, yuh, he was the fellow with the very thick glasses.
      That would be him.
      Mike, yuh, he and that other fellow had that mouse race they took around to all the little fairs. Lotta people said that game was crooked. I never thought that, though. I never believed it was rigged. I always said Mike was an honest guy.
      I asked the old-timer what it looked like, this mouse race. It was, if I interpret his description accurately, a terrain built inside a big box, a wooden frame closed in with wire mesh. The terrain amounted to a racecourse, with obstacles and tiny swinging doors and such, and people would lay bets on the mice. I’m not drawing conclusions, but it does sound like an apparatus that would allow a man with an aptitude for invention, a man like my dad, to predetermine the outcome.


(Excerpted from Brick 81, used by permission of the author)