25 Lives
Senior Creative Writing Project
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For a Degree Bachelor of Arts with
A Major in Creative Writing at
The University of North Carolina at Asheville
Spring 2006
By Cyrus Atkins

Thesis Reader
David Hopes and 
Thesis Advisor Gary Ettari

Carl
Carl waxed the floors, swept under pews, dusted the kneeling wooden figure, its praying hands like spires.
Carl came home to a dusty kitchen, to the sleeping doors of rooms never entered.
Wednesdays, Carl vacuumed the traces of AA meetings. Thursdays, the Boy Scouts.
Fridays,
Carl polished a golden cross, stained glass windows painting the floor with their watery pigments.
Sundays,
Carl kneeled in a smaller church, his black hands clean and open to the Lord.

Richard
Richard came home in 71.
The stores were brighter, the children were older,
the drive-in theatre was a cinder block landfill beside
a cracking highway.
Richard got a job. He sold real-estate
to young families, to fresh men who had never fired
a gun, who had never seen the horrible contrast of red on green.
Richard married. He had three boys, a girl, and a silver flask
in the pocket of his tweed blazer. He sailed a thin river
of booze into the 80fs.
Richard started taking insuline
in 1983. His nerves cried.
His fingernails split in two
like dry bamboo shoots.
Richard's kept drinking.
He drank with vigor, with spite, with the last few hours
before he drank away his wife.
Richard lost his legs in '99.
His wheelchair sounds hollow as it bangs against the bathroom's narrow door.

Henry
Late Saturday afternoons,
the sun oozing
over downtown benches, we'd go see Henry.
Bowed and mumbling,
a dirty smile curving under the
brim of his cap, hefd shake our hands.
With crumpled dollars and criminal facelifts, we'd linger behind Fleeman's convenience store.
Two Newports, One Camel.
Hefd nod, sifting the bills through his hands like an aging carnival worker.
Minutes later, our minds buzzing with anticipation, he'd return with our bounty.
Virginia Slims, some Basics,
and three dollars gone missing into the shallow grasp of
Henry's back pocket.

Chris
The day was transparent.
Chris ran barefoot through his back yard, grass clippings clinging to his feet like papier-mache.
He swung a bamboo pole. It whistled, blurring like a giant green fan.
Beyond his lawn, a creek cut slow into the earth.
Chris's feet pressed shallow prints into its muddy bank.
Below him, each catching the sun like a tiny mirror, a thousand dead fish floated narrow and cold.

Betsy
I dreamt of rivers, green hills, flowers and creatures.
I dreamt of pillows and beds, of a softness impossible and refined.
I dreamt of Michael, a little squash in his crib.
I awoke under covers, thirsty like summer gravel.
My hands traced the black hall to the bathroom. The water splashed in my cup, echoing over porcelain tile.
I crept to Michael's room.
I saw him between bars, silent, still.
I dream of bruises.
I dream of Michael, his face like a rotten apple, his breathless form like a bag of spoiled marrow.

Ginny
Ginny sweeps the floor after hours, while perverts fill booths and cops perch paired on lacerated vinyl stools.
She jams napkins and packets of jelly into shiny metal cages, her fingernails cracked beneath their garish enamel.
There's a dull coffee stain for every smoke she puts in her dry mouth, a subtle wrinkle for every joyless midnight.
At home, with her children just rising in the first sheaths of the sunfs distant fire, Ginny pulls a blanket over each dusty window.

David
There isn't much on a Tuesday except a mute jukebox and David James.
His elbows sink into the bar. His left hand cradles his beer hand, his beer hand already numb with cold.
In the dark light, David studies the scars on his hands. He traces hours with the bald scratches, the tiny reminders.
He remembers a bow saw, a kitchen knife, a fist through the window behind his wife's head.
There are burns, slick patches where hair never grows.
There are documents of nails and splinters, a lifetime of sharp things in the meat of David's hands.
He drains his bottle like a winded runner.
There isn't much on a Tuesday.

Edward
Edward watched.
He saw people. He saw his neighbors through TV windows, throwing arms, scattering muffled words across their spotless kitchen.
He saw children. He saw old men gasping for air, bent over their canes like carrion statues.
He saw the homeless. He saw teenage girls go bouncing by, their cherry shorts screaming off milky thighs.
Edward watched.
He saw mothers. He saw garbage men clinging to their trucks like cavalier deckhands.
He saw babies. He saw couples in the park, held to one another like flightless birds.
He saw lawyers. He saw prisoners on the highway, picking up trash beneath the smiling barrel of a twenty gauge shotgun.
Edward watched.

Matt
Who’d imagine saintly Matt, a surgical mask and latex gloves, an apron and a cap, white running shoes on a floor caked in pet dander.
Who'd imagine the carts, filled to the brim with little mummies, patches of fur poking through the wrappings.
Who'd imagine the flames, the heat, the stink of burning hair, the steady swing of Mart's arms in the rhythm of work.
Who'd imagine Fluffy, once the joy of old Mrs. Finklestein's heart, careening into her blazing last home with the arc of Matt's elbow.
Who'd imagine Dakota, proud in his life and swift on the trail, now a sorry pile of ashes in the back of the oven.
How do you do it, Matt?
How do you swallow the embers
we shudder to see?

Lou
Lou wore
his sister's underwear.
On nights alone, parents at dinner, sis out sucking some boy's lamprey tougue, Lou got naked.
He slid through the house, the calm air like a sponge across his liberated lap mates.
He cooked popcorn, watched TV, mixed staggering drinks from the unlocked liquor cabinet.
Then, with the house muted and the blinds like closed eyelids, he crept into her room.
Everything was soft, the light, the covers, the animals stuffed in their innocuous watch.
Her panties were the perfect skin.
Her bras cradled his chest like tiny arms.
He watched himself
in the mirror, his sinewy body
from his sibling's mold.
Lou fell back, the bed catching him like a giant Maxi-pad; with he, the red spot of life within.
But always, before the crank of the garage or the snap of the front door lock, he was reverted, busy in his room like a teenage boy.

Lea
Lea repeats the motion: channel up, channel up, channel up. No scene is ever the same.
The colors, hard edged and static, glare out their lives in full-framed seconds.
The telephone, plaintive on the floor like a dog who is close to death, does not ring. Lea's eyes lock on it with jittery confusion.
Eight red pills dance, Lea's swollen hand fumbling to lead.
There was a time
when this was fun,
when the moments came easier,
when the blood seemed thicker.

Paul
Those were close times.
Sharp lines of floss sent crimson rivers over bracketed teeth.
My face was unfired clay. It filled my mirror like a ruined mosaic.
Recent memories rolled around the back yard, playing with small dogs in the October sun.
We ticked off minutes of school with stolen cigarettes, smoking them in the forest like daydream outlaws.
Those were close times.
I know those evenings of two wheeled triumph, when we cut the corpulent night air like mangled children of glass.

Hunter
Hunter runs to the bus stop, his backpack bouncing like a fledgling jockey.
He waits, watching the bees bury their fat bodies in the azaleas.
Children gather. They swarm and mill like insects.
The bus arrives. Bunches of fiber force their way through the ripped plastic seats as Hunter sits down.
Three boys board.
They scan him
like famished hyenas.
They attack, filling all sides, squeezing him like a rusty vise. He thinks of the bees. He thinks of their soft petaled fortresses.

Mattie
Look Mommy!
The child is not sitting down.
She pummels the floor like a kid show extra.
The child is not sitting down.
Her bulbous cheeks stretch with impatience, her curly hair pampered like the ears of a spaniel.
The child is not sitting down.
She dances Shirley Temple waltzes in cut time by the door.
The child is not sitting down.
She stands
sentry on stools,
her shoulders slumped,
her balance like a bottle
on the surface of a stone.
The child is not sitting down.
She weaves circles around her mother with her baby fat pudge.
The child is not sitting down.

She is a mystery to her mother and her master all the same.

Gary
Scene 16:
Nine scotches into it, Gary sways in the dance floor's splintered light.
Thirteen year olds swarm awkwardly like upright iguanas in heat, casually avoiding this unlikely uncle.
Scene 17: Mozzeltoff!
Ten down, the eleventh only seconds away.
Gary staggers, blind to the worried glances of the giant, booze slinging penguins behind the bar.
Scene 18:
Twelve scotches into it, Gary nearly shirtless, flailing. Juvenile eyes circle him with wonder.
Scene 19:
Unclear as to how many
scotches into it,
Gary palms the skull
of a confused adolescent,
his fingers tapping time with
Kool and the Gang.
Scene 20: Gary is missing.

Scene 21:
Gary emerges from
the bathroom, his pants
pulled over his head,
his fists full of toilet paper.
Scene 22: Gary collapses, his urine barely visible as it pools on the dance floor.

Alex
It's glorious, the fire and glow, the orange flame whispering smoke, burning green into ashen white crags.
Night cannot conceal.
Light breaks shadow. Nightmares dance in the siren's high drone.
Steel cages crawl
hungry, slow, strobing red,
strobing blue.
My vision is muddled. The radio is buzzing.

Johnny
Music, sweet music
binds young Johnny to his pipe.
Ten o'clock, his parents pulse like sedated pistons on the pillows below, pushing and pulling dry filtered air in blissful withdraw.
Johnny lights again, the flame a hook,
the chilled smoke a serpentine elixir,
the clandestine chorus of bubbles like
a skin diver screaming in a small child's drink.
Outside, the street steams with spilled rain and abandoned summer heat. Legions of mist wind into the blackness like ghosts of the missing.
Inside, Jimi tears a screeching infant from the womb of his incinerated stratocaster.
Johnny lights again, his mind flashing like a field full of razors.

Kurt
I pass hours. I walk along fields and wonder at the alabaster moon, the gathering morning.
Houses file silently together, their windows extinguished.
On the main road, street lights form a luminous spine. The sidewalk gazes up in electric surrender.
A gas station is open.
I trigger the door's feeble bell.
The cashier strays from
his filthy magazine, his filtered cigarette.
He pulls a long drag. The smoke crawls over fake tits and little hairless hideaways. It rises into the stringent lights.
We lock eyes, lost in brief puzzlement. I buy a lighter, some Salems, a magazine like his.
At home, I cut out the faces and set them in a row. Someday, I will know what happened.

Kathy
The irony of her doctor's word: positive.

Levon
Caned in the darkness like a dishonest merchant, his lines never connected.
The invisible machine strung him from every tree. It softened his bones. It weakened his will.
He circled
granite buildings like
a child fingering a loose tooth.
He slept in the beds of jaded women, scanning their morning bodies, their disheveled hair, their eyes set to the corner of the room.
Mid-afternoon, passing cars blurring his vision, he mastered the sidewalk, its single squares, its requisite lines.

Jason
It is not a rare boy, who pisses on a dog, who swings a cat by its narrow tail.
It is not a desperate boy, who spies the thin line of a budding girl's bra strap, who snaps it back with viperish pleasure.
It is not a violent boy, who pushes and throws, who finds red ecstacy in bringing terror to the weak.
It is not a servile boy, who becomes the flunky, who breaks bottles over the face of his own altar.
He is not a strong boy, but he is a real boy.

Tom
His basement is finished with work benches, racks and safes, powder, shot, casings and primers.
A rounded beetle, his hands
white under the incendiary
gleam of a desk lamp,
Tom doctors and
shines. He
coddles his
weapon
like an
elderly
nurse.
Sweat
beads huddle beneath his scant rows of thinning hair. His fingers become slick with oil and burnt grit.
As a top forty station blares out the hits of today, Tom considers the hits of tomorrow.

Lisa
Her face is a note, a white piano in an empty room.

Kaye
Dusk delivers us.
The moon tongues the sky, swollen and lost. Rusty machinery scrapes out a quiet rhythm.
Crickets grind out warnings, their hind legs sawing through the smell of white winter.
A shuffling of leaves, a murmur of life,
the clang of fallen cans, this pasture,
they lie down together and mix in the snow.
It swallows our bodies, this industrial field.

Bill
After that,
she
could not recall.
After that,
he
bought the groceries.
After that,
he
could not leave
her.
After that,
he
helped
her
bathe.
After that,
they
moved into the home.
After that,
she
stopped reading books.
After that,
her
bed was a hazard.
After that,
she
lived under nurses.
After that, she
lost all her words.
After that,
the silence was white.