My father stayed up some nights, sleepless in front of the TV, for hours trying to discern words out of the fog of English. Out of guilt, I would stumble into the living room in my pajamas, and he would let me translate. The hostages in Iran stayed captive. Reagan amassed vote after vote in the primaries. Walter Cronkite signed off with And that’s the way it is. Papi watched and I watched the way it was, trying to decipher the code—why our lives were like this, what we were becoming, how to understand America—as if that could piece our family back together.
The morning after my brother got lost, my mother tossed me out of the motel bed while it was still dark. The furnace rasped out heat, and she crammed all of our things back into their bags. Alberto couldn’t hold anything with his frostbitten hands, so my mother dressed him. My father solved his grief by ordering everyone from one side to the other in the tiny room, then prodding us into the truck cab.
As he started the engine, my father switched the CB on and then off, and started the Neruda eight-track at the beginning again. My mother didn’t even notice. When I started to hear The verses of the captain . . . the furies . . . in you the earth for the twelfth time that trip, I could feel a little ball of sorrow in my throat, choking me.
When my father turned off the engine and got out of the cab to get gas, the silence was a relief. Across the street, the relics of Christmas lights were still up and blinking. An American flag waved in a shop window, like a wizard’s curtain with no one behind it.
My father, the Last King of Open Roads, slammed the heavy door shut, started the ignition, and swung back onto the interstate. Dominoes skittered underneath my swinging feet. I realized I’d left the troll next to the motel bed, but I said nothing. Snow blew up off the road from the tires of cars. Doomed snowflakes hurtled toward the windshield like missiles. A blizzard was forming, but we didn’t realize it yet.
Papi told my mother he’d forgotten the snow chains, and he gripped the steering wheel hard. Mami hummed herself a song in Spanish to keep calm, some melody I didn’t recognize, as Neruda crooned, Tied, we went down to sink without untwining . . . the rose of my echoing country . . . Perhaps your dream drifted from mine . . . my eyes and close them. Beside me, my brother waved his frostbitten hands in front of my face and whispered Kiss-ih-me over and over to make me cry.
And just like that, the blizzard came. The road I thought my father had carved out for us disappeared before our eyes. Keep your eyes on the road, Papi said, and we stared into the furious white.
About the Author
BRENDA PEYNADO is a writer of stories, nonfiction, and other exaggerations. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Threepenny Review, Black Warrior Review, Cimarron Review, Pleiades, and others. She received her MFA from Florida State University, where she was a Kingsbury Fellow, and her BA from Wellesley College. She is currently on a Fulbright grant to the Dominican Republic, writing a novel about the 1965 civil war and American intervention.
MEET THE ILLUSTRATORS
After a nomadic childhood spent doodling, eating, sleeping, and growing, MICHAEL HIRSHON ended up in Saint Louis, where he studied illustration and design. He’s currently in New York City, in the Illustration as Visual Essay master’s program at the School of Visual Arts. His clients include the New York Times, American Express, the Washington Post, and AARP. His work has been recognized by the Society of Illustrators, 3x3, American Illustration, Creative Quarterly, CMYK, and the AIGA. To learn more about Michael, visit www.hirshon.net.
FORSYTH HARMON is an artist and writer based in New York. She received a BA in visual arts and an MFA from Columbia University. Her work has most recently appeared in the Asian American Literary Review, on the cover of Marisa Crawford’s 8th Grade Hippie Chic, and in a group benefit show at Bridgette Mayer Gallery. She is finishing an illustrated novel called The Woo, is inspired by everything from William Blake to The Baby-Sitters Club, and spends lots of time listening to certain songs on repeat. You can find her work at forsythharmon.com.
KEITH CARTER was born in 1978 in Tacoma, Washington, and went to Western Washington University in Bellingham, where he received his BA in fine arts. He later went to Pacific Northwest College of Art, but left a year before completion of his BFA to accept a job at Seattle design firm Ames Bros, where he worked for two years. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and spends most of his time painting pictures of animals and people. See more of his work at kcarterart.com.
BROOKE WEEBER, based in Portland, Oregon, finds her inspiration from various natural landscapes, as well as Greek and Native American culture. She has been drawing since she was a young thing but started focusing on it in high school and college. After receiving her BFA in painting from the University of Oregon in 2003, Brooke fled her native Northwest for the big city, where she focused on her other passion—professional baking. She received a degree in professional pastry baking from the French Culinary Institute of New York in 2005 and worked as a high-end cake decorator. Craving more trees and more drawing space, Brooke packed up her apartment and rerooted herself in Portland in 2009. She has been cranking out art pieces ever since and has had shows at Mississippi Studios, The Farm Café, and Tribute Gallery.
MARYANNA HOGGATT was born in the Philippines and raised in the dusty deserts of Arizona. She now resides in the rainy forests of the Pacific Northwest with her partner, Jake, and feline son, Theo. She spends most of her days painting and drawing Battle Animals in her home studio in Portland, Oregon.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to our wonderful contributors.
Special thanks to Courtney Dodson, Day One’s fantastic poetry editor.
Thank you to the team at Amazon Publishing: Ed Park, Serra Hagedorn, Ashley Saleeba, Chrissy Wiley, Kris Beecroft, Daphne Durham, Jeff Belle, Amy Hosford, Tara Parsons, Brent Fattore, Justin Renard, Alexandra Woodworth, Maggie Sivon, Erin Pursell, Gabriella Page-Fort, Lan Trinh, Sarah Funk, Jimmy Healey, Elaine Bongiorno, Michael Temple, Megan Jacobsen and Vivian Lee.
DAY ONE
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COVER GALLERY
Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014 Page 28
