a moment in the day: aunt

The place is a dive. Pool table, video poker units, beer advertisements on the walls. I take the end stool at the bar and wait for the bartender who looks to be the only employee running the show. I'm here to order food to go because after a long day of working on the kitchen remodel, Stephen googled where you could get hotdogs in the neighborhood.

Swiveling to get a look at the digs, I flash on the way it works in the movies when a woman bellies up to a bar. Some man catches her eye. Soon enough, he's coming up and starting the quippy pickup conversation. 

I order the food from the bartender and she tells me it could be a while because they only have one air fryer. I pay the check. The place is two thin rooms divided by a center wall with an open doorway on each end and a glassless window in the middle. Half full, a few folks at tables, a couple playing pool. If I look long down my side of the bar, there are the video poker and some arcade games bunched together, no one down there, and for a moment I consider going and seeing if they have like an old-school pinball game to play. But I can see through the glassless window lined with multicolored Christmas lights, across at the far corner of the room, that a band is getting ready to play.

All four of the guys have white hair. The lead guitar walks with a cane until he steps up on the tiny raised platform and gets in position. He wears a black button-up shirt with flashing gold curlicues on the arms. 

The band rocks. The music is sixties-style blues-rock with electric piano and harmonica riffs. The bartender bops happy at the air fryer. I wish I could tell my aunt Kathy about this place. She would love the vibe, the music, the whole thing. 

Up near the ceiling in one corner of the room, so the bartender can see it, is a monitor divided into four, showing the output from security cameras: the video poker area, the sidewalk tables, the parking lot, and an alley with a gray wall bare except for where someone has drawn a small red heart.

Now a young guy wearing a backwards baseball cap comes up to me to ask where the bartender went. 

His eyes linger. He says, "You know, you look so much like my aunt. I hope that's not creepy."

For some reason to reassure him that it's not creepy, I start to ask him her name, and at the same time he says, "Her name's Linda. You could be her sister."

He moves off. In from the outside door comes a small woman in leggings and a flowered top with a differently flowered backpack. She beelines past me, down the room, slipping the backpack off as she goes, to a video poker machine directly at the back of the house, immediately starts playing.

The band sings, "Don't let that greenback fool you."

I wonder if she's someone's aunt. I listen to the music and pretend to project this scene through the veil to the great beyond. "Kathy," I think toward her memory, "don't you just love this? Listen to these guys!"

The video poker squares spin and stop. Spin and stop.

I realize I was wrong about greenback. The lead guitarist with the flashing gold curlicues sings, "Don't let that green grass fool you. Don't let it change your mind. It's always greener on the other side."

My nephew comes back to the bar, "hi, aunt Linda," as he goes past.

The bartender, rocking to the music, hands me three to-go boxes and tells me there's ketchup and ranch dressing inside, and Kathy would be all over that ranch dressing, and as I put the boxes in my tote, the video lottery woman leaves her station, comes back down the aisle, and goes out the door just ahead of me.

We walk home together, me on one side of the street, she on the other, just ahead. The sky is that deep, heavy blue of nightfall. At a neighborhood intersection, she cuts across the lawn of a church to a couple of tents set up there, and I turn the corner toward home.

a moment in the day: happy

Sunday morning in our dismantled kitchen, and our friend Brad is due any minute. He and Stephen are going to be patching this skeleton of wood with drywall. Quick I go upstairs and look through my pens. Grab a pink one. I take it downstairs and, alone in the kitchen, I go over to the crisscross of bare wood that frames the space where the walls used to be. I lean in over the space where the sink used to be and draw a tiny happy face on the wood. Two dot eyes and a curve of mouth, size of a ladybug. 

I go to another spot and get close in, put a happy face on the rough side of a two by four. Cross the room, another happy face. Dot, dot, mouth.

On one length of wood, I write, horizontal,

Hi

Hi

Hi

I wonder if Stephen or Brad will see it. Or if they'll (more likely) cover it up unnoticed. I make sure to hit all four sides of the room.

Dot, dot, mouth. Dot, dot, mouth. Little bits of positivity planted in our walls.

H

A

P

P

Y

K

I

T

C

H

E

N

a moment in the day: worm

We're cleaning up after the electricians have finished working in the kitchen. I've just put a big piece of, I don't know, drywall?, in the outside garbage, and as I head back from the bin through the soft rain, Stephen is heading over with a full trash bag to chuck. 

On the wet concrete not far from my shoes is a worm. At first it just looks like a thin streak of shadow, but it's moving. Making a mosey toward the house. I don't want it to get stepped on. I stoop, make the fingers of both my hands as delicate as I can to pick it up. 

It shrinks at my touch. As I gather it in my hand, Nicholas's spirit runs from the worm and into my skin.  

I don't believe in magical things, in spiritual things, as a rule. Still. At night in bed when my defenses are down, when my daily projects are quiet and I'm missing people and worrying about people, I close my eyes, squish my head into my pillow, and try to send a ghost thread of me out into the air, into the atoms, through the wood of my house, the drywall and dust, into the night, into the all of the everything, try to send it out far enough to make a connection with someone on the other side. 

And fall asleep.

I guess I can't complain that I'm such a good sleeper.

The worm squiggles in my hand. I go over to the grass, crouch down, and let it go.

a moment in the day: ceiling

Down in the basement, standing on a wooden box, I hold my hands just over my head, flat against the ceiling, as Stephen uses a drill to work out the screws holding the ceiling panel in place. 

One after another, the screws unscrew and fall to the floor. Tink. The buzz of the drill runs along the panel and tickles my palms. My arms are getting tired. Tink. 

A sudden weight as the last screw comes loose and the panel disengages. Both of us work together to heft the piece of ceiling down to the floor, but as we're leaning it up against some sort of pile of basement boxes, Stephen says, "What is that?"

Extra kick to the word that. 

He sounds weirdly alarmed. I turn. But the that, the thing he's just discovered on the floor, looks like a stray, half-crumpled strip of electrical tape. 

He says, "It's underwear!"

Giving his shoulders and both his hands a kind of shake like imagining he touched it. 

I look over my head at the wide hole in our ceiling. 

Underwear just fell from our ceiling.

I say the only appropriate thing to say under these circumstances: "Take a picture."

I turn back and Stephen's already got his phone out, stooping to focus. What looked like a crumple of electrical tape is a scant, looped strip of lacey fabric in two tones, green and blue. Who knows how long it's been hiding in our basement ceiling or how the hell it got up there.

Stephen straightens, checking out the shot. I go over and crouch down to get a better look. 

"Don’t you touch it" Stephen says. "Or I’ll never be able to touch you again."

a moment in the day: text

I text my mom that I hope she has a better day today than yesterday. Tell her I love her. Immediately on my little screen are the three little dots and then she writes back me too, love you too, and a kissy face emoji. 

I go to shoot one back but the kissy face is missing from the frequently-used lineup of emojis in my phone. There are plenty of other faces, the smiley, the tongue-sticking-out, three kinds of frownies. There's the cupcake, the rainbow, and a torso wearing some sort of service cap for some reason. And then I realize something else is missing. The strings of animals I used to always have in there. The ant, spider, snake, snail. The pig, camel, bird, bird, bird. All the fish.

Those were Steve emojis. Often when I texted him some question, if his answer was in the affirmative, he would respond with a line of them: ladybug, fish, other fish, crab, heart, other-colored heart, flamingo. No words, just tiny images running in a rainbow of exuberance across my screen.

I had gotten in the habit of talking to Steve in strings of emojis, mirroring his Steveness back at him. Knowing his interests, I often had fish swimming across my text fields. Sharks and dolphins. Tiny surfing men. Fish and surfers meant yes, meant happy.

After I find the kissy face and respond to my mom, I pop over to my text thread with Steve. I look at the last message I ever sent him, that he likely never saw. Think about sending a fish out into the void. Click my phone off.

where it all began, for me, with steve arndt

Truly, Steve Arndt is the reason I am a part of what feels like the best, most thriving and supportive literary community in the country. If you're a part of that community, this may be true for you too. And if you're part of that community, I'm sending a big hug as we all get used to the hole he leaves behind.

I've been doing what I do when I lose someone. Looking at pictures and reading what I have written about them and our story together in my old journals. I wanted to share a little. This collection is some journal entries and some emails, actually, because it tells the story better.

My backstory is that I had been emailing back and forth with Stephen (my Stephen, the O'Donnell one) for months without having met him, and was going to be taking a trip to Portland to visit my family and meet him in person for the first time. That first visit to meet Stephen, I also met Steve.

From my journal, October 5, 2004. This is before the trip. In here, I'm writing about chatting with my aunt Kathy on the phone about the man I was coming up to meet.

When I said his name was Stephen, she said that was funny because she has all sorts of Stephens around her, and she wanted to introduce me to Sienna’s boyfriend Steve, who is a writer and has taken a year off to write a book and who is connected to the apparently very huge writing community that is in Portland. He is involved in writing workshops and such, and I guess she told him about me, and she says he’d like to talk to me. So that was interesting, too. I said, you know, I’ve always been afraid of the social aspect of the whole writing community thing, and I realize that maybe if I want to get anywhere, I have to jump into it. Very terrifying, but I would like to meet and talk to him and see how things go there.

Now from October 25. I'd flown up, hung out with family, met Stephen, and here was my first meeting with Steve, out at dinner on, I think, the third night of that visit. (When I mention "Seth's book," that was a novel I had been writing at the time.) 

We were sort of in the middle of that discussion when Steve and Sienna came. That shifted the dynamic of the conversation, but it was still very nice. I enjoyed meeting Steve, who is involved in writing and has an accomplished mentor. I can’t remember all that he said, but a couple times I found myself intrigued by the way he speaks about writing or art in general. I remember talking to him about the voice I use in Seth’s book, how I think it’s a good point of the novel. He expressed an interest in giving me some encouragement, and we exchanged email addresses. And all laughed over some pistachio dessert that no one liked but Stephen and which Kathy remarked quite loudly was, “Really crappy.”

This photo is the very first photo I have of Steve, from that dinner.

Now, an email from him from the next day.

last night, if i talked too much, forgive, so nice to be in a conversation about art with artists. not that its some kinda exclusive club. really like stephen and hope to know him better over time.

please if you wanna have a dialoge about writing and won't mind my shity spelling, please e me with your thoughts and concerns. my biggest thing right now is just sitting down and doing writing. in a relationship what you thought was good use of time in the past slips into another good use of time.

hope you arrive safe and strong, steve arndt

And from a later email:

let me know the next time you come up. would love to introduce you to my mentor here in portland, tom spanbauer, ('the man who fell in love with the moon," a pulitzer nominee in 93 and most recently, 'in the city of shy hunters').

yes to stephen, same way i spell it, he has an easy humility that gives comfort.

yes to bob dylan, 'he not busy being born is busy dying.'

take care, thanks sea

I don't know if the yesses were in response to anything in my own correspondence or just Steve talking poetic, as he tended to do without thinking.

Another email. This is me to Kathy on November 1, 2005. She'd told me if I wanted to move to Portland, I could stay with her while I got myself settled. And she offered to pay my way to take some classes at PSU if I wanted, because they had (have) a writing program, something that you could actually earn a degree in. A degree in writing was, at least at the time (I don't know about now), a rare thing.

Hey, I'm thinking seriously about PSU. There are so many reasons I feel it would be something smart for me to explore. I'm actually looking into getting my college transcripts and such together now. Who knows if I'd actually get in, but I really like what I've read about the English department—and Steve Arndt (sp?) has really done a lot to sell me on the writing community there. I was telling Mom: it's more than just school, I think. I've always tried to avoid the idea that to get somewhere with writing you need to get involved in a writing community, do workshops, network... all stuff I was terrified of. I kind of feel like, yes, I need to do this type of thing to get me out there—but that I'm really too shy to do it on my own. And I feel like, hey, Steve might help me feel comfortable enough to... kind of go for it.

This is what Steve did for people. This is what he did for me.

Back to my journal. I want to share one last entry. This was when he took me to meet Tom Spanbauer. I said "class" below, and Tom did famously run a class, his Dangerous Writing workshop, but this was a one-on-one session between them. In it, Steve took a chapter of the book he was writing and read it aloud and then there was discussion about the pages afterward. I felt very privileged to be able to sit in on this intimate work time between them.

February 12, 2005. 

I went to class with Steve and it ran an hour overtime. I felt very welcomed by Tom, and I made a couple comments about Steve’s chapter, and Tom received the comments and engaged me. At one point, Steve looked across the table at me and asked, “Would you say that’s written like most writers write their books?” Or something. And I said, “Do you ask that because you’re not sure or because you already know the answer?” and Tom laughed. 

Steve had said that this latest offering was kind of bland and he wasn’t all that happy with it, yet it was brilliant. I told him after he’d read that it was so good I almost didn’t want to join the class. And they both took that as the compliment it was meant as. And Tom actually told me that at times, he’s been jealous of Steve’s work.

Yes, I think I'll leave this collection of snippets there. I think Steve would (reluctantly and self-deprecatingly) approve.

Book Cover: If I Go Quiet

One of my winter projects has been the cover to the novel If I Go Quiet, from The Portland Murder series by MM Desch. This series is described as, "a collection of novels and novellas that weaves together intricate plots of psychological suspense and criminal investigation. Set primarily against the atmospheric backdrops of Portland, Oregon, and Durango, Colorado, the series delves into complex themes of corruption, betrayal, and the dark undercurrents of human relationships."

For this project, I was hired by, and worked directly with, the author to bring to life her vision of a third cover after Tangled Darkness...

and Lethal Loyalty...

...two covers that I didn't design but which we knew we should emulate—especially Tangled Darkness, as the story in If I Go Quiet follows the same protagonist, psychiatrist Leslie Schoen, as she goes undercover to investigate a murder at a remote wellness retreat, where the treatment is not necessarily wellness...

Working with Mary (known to her readers as MM Desch) has been great, because she's very savvy and knows what she wants but is open to experimentation. Her first idea was of a small, cramped room where a boy is being kept against his will. She gave me specific information: dim lighting coming from LED strips, a thin mattress against the wall where the boy lies. I started to do image searches, but it was difficult to find what I wanted. Particularly the right kind of small, cramped room. When I went back to ask some clarifying questions about the space, she said:

"I've been thinking about another idea for the book cover, Gigi. What do you think about — A ceramic urn sitting on a stone bench with steam rising, the vapor forming a barely-visible skull shape. — the background is ... Fog threading through Douglas firs at dusk, a single lit window visible deep in the trees."

I went back to my image search, this time looking for different things, the foggy firs, the urn, the stone bench. I left the prospect of creating a skull out of steam for later. I didn't know how I was going to do that. I do like doing things that I don’t know how to do. That's part of why I enjoy cover design, to be honest. But yeah, I wasn’t exactly sure how to make it happen and how to make it look good.

So I started with the forest. I found an image I really liked on Pexels. I loved the slant of the trees, and the layers.

On the same site, I found an image that had a window that I liked, courtesy of Maria Shikhireva.

I took both images and went to work in Photoshop to, first, darken my forest, and then nestle my window into the foggy firs. That's easier said than done. If I were adding a house on top of my fogscape, it would be a much simpler task, but I needed to make it look like that window was hiding in the trees and fog. After the first step...

...I decided I needed more than the window. There had to be a hint of structure around it to make it look realistic. So I added a bit of facade from a different photo of a building, laying that behind the window and erasing meticulously until it looked like the building was behind the tree to its left...

...and then added more trees in the foreground. I did that by taking some clip art of trees, removing the background, and fiddling with the color and darkness and feather in Photoshop until I could lay them on top of my structure and make them blend in as if photographic trees in the same woods.

Then I got started on my urn. 

I was surprised how difficult it was to find an urn. Or. One thing you find out about urns when you start looking for pictures of urns is that urns can be kind of any type of vessel. Containers for ashes, ornamental vases, receptacles for brewing or serving coffee or tea. Lots of things are called urns, and a whole range comes up when you do an image search with that word. I asked Mary what specific type of urn she wanted and she sent me a couple examples.

Here's some of what you get when you try looking up urns through sites with images available for creative and commercial use.

OK, yes, I saved those images. Sometimes when I'm doing an image search I get so frustrated by not finding what I want that I save a bunch of stuff I know won't work, just for the hell of it.

But I made a document with the better urns I'd found, which I sent to Mary to look through. In there, I did some cutting and pasting of a few of the pictures to show her how I could, if I spent some time in Photoshop, make the images look more urnlike.

Happily, she liked some of what I had and chose two favorites. I took to Photoshop to turn the image on the left to the image on the right.

And to turn the image on the left to the image on the right.

Then I found a stone bench for the urn to sit on, which Mary liked, and I started to put my scene together. The last step in that scene, outside of the text, was, of course, the skull made of steam. I started with an actual skull. I removed the background and brightened it up until it was white. Then I erased the dark areas like the eye- and nose-holes, the spaces between the teeth.

Then manipulated it with the smudge tool and the eraser tool. I left my steam skull with its face a little slanty so that it didn't look too perfect. 

For the type treatment, I stuck close to Tangled Darkness. It was fun to experiment with different colored backgrounds and text and dark overlays. I sent Mary some samples.

I don't remember why I started with the one urn, but when Mary came back with feedback, she said she'd like me to try using the second urn, because she liked the texture and the wider lip. She also said she was rethinking the skull. That it might be looking too Halloweeny. 

I liked that take and went back in to simplify my skull into a simple wisp of steam. At the same time, Mary was working on writing a tagline, so when I updated my layout, I added a line of text to hold space for that. 

More experimenting with color.

I sent more samples. Meanwhile, Mary had finalized her tagline and sent that my way. And she asked for more steam coming from the urn. 

And finally I hit my stride in the steam department. With more work with the smudge and eraser tools and layering different snippets on top of each other, I was able to take my steam from skull to wisp to something I was suddenly really excited about. 

And with my new steam and Mary's new tagline, and as we narrowed down what we liked best, we finally landed on our cover.

If I Go Quiet comes out officially today, January 27. Mary tells me that in honor of that, the ebook of Tangled Darkness is available for just 99 cents. And watch for If I Go Quiet to drop to 99 cents as well by the weekend.

More info on If I Go Quiet and all of Mary's books can be found on the author's website here. And here's a taste from the opening of the book:

Sunday, May 5th—Afternoon

Leslie Schoen’s finger traced a line on the toxicology report. Fentanyl, 60 ng/mL. Enough to stop a heart in seconds. She flipped the page, avoiding the smiling graduation photo of the dental hygienist. Twenty-three. No chance for naloxone. No chance.

Across the kitchen table, Izzy Turner shook a bottle of prenatal vitamins, the pills rattling like dice in a cup. Golden afternoon light slanted through the window, catching the amber plastic and illuminating the scattered medical documents with a honey-colored beam.

An early May morning left dampness on their outside patio. The wisteria leaves draping their pergola dripped occasionally. Only in Portland, Oregon, could a rainy start to the day make spring even more vibrant. Azaleas in red, salmon, and purple sparkled at the rear of their backyard, in contrast with the warm burnt orange and cream accents of their kitchen.

“Iron makes me queasy in the afternoons now.” Izzy set the bottle aside and reached for the DHA supplements. “Baby’s getting particular about timing.”

Leslie glanced up from the autopsy photos. Izzy’s face existed in a different universe from the stark black-and-white. Her wavy, blonde hair tumbled to her shoulders, framing the creaminess of her face. Warmth radiated from her skin—a brightness that defied the exhaustion pulling at the corners of her eyes. Leslie had once dismissed the “pregnancy glow” as a cliché, but there it glowed, luminous in the afternoon light.

“Try taking them with dinner instead. The protein might help.”

“Already tried that.” Izzy sorted the bottles by size, creating neat rows on the placemat. “This one’s opinionated about everything. Just like their mother.”

The front door burst open, hitting the wall hard enough to rattle the framed botanical prints in the hallway.

“Izzy! Leslie!” Brad’s voice carried an edge that froze Leslie’s hand over the case file. Her father-in-law never barged into their Grant Park neighborhood home—until now.

He appeared in the kitchen doorway, touching the frame three times—index finger, palm, thumb—his unconscious ritual when stressed. Gray hair stuck up at odd angles—evidence of anxious hands raking through it. His leather jacket hung open, shirt untucked on one side.

“William’s missing.”

Izzy’s hand slipped. The vitamin bottle clattered to the floor, pills scattering across the hardwood.

“What are you talking about?” She gripped the table edge, knuckles white.

“Four days. His girlfriend called me a couple hours ago. He told her he planned to attend some wellness center for the weekend, left Thursday night. Haven’t heard from him since.”

Typical William. The thought arrived before Leslie could stop it, sharp and automatic. Always disappearing, always—

She caught herself mid-judgment, guilt twisting in her chest. Her brother-in-law wasn’t some case file to categorize and dismiss. He belonged to her family. Their unborn child’s uncle.

“Did she try calling there?” Leslie bent to gather the spilled vitamins, needing something to do with her hands.

“That’s the thing.” Brad paced to the window above the sink, back to the table. “Place called Ascension Grove, up in the West Hills. They claim he checked out Friday morning. Said he seemed fine, mentioned heading to the coast.”

“But he didn’t go there?” Izzy’s voice stayed level. Her hand moved to her belly, fingers splayed protectively.

“His car’s still in their parking lot. I alerted them anyway. Claimed they never noticed.”