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Vortex Quarterly By Kelly Poe Wilson Surprisingly, it was raining the day that I agreed to join forces with the Sun God, Re—one of those Northern Arizona summer downpours that sneaks up on you with no warning, and leaves just as quickly. That wasn’t exactly the way it was presented to me, of course—what was offered, if I remember correctly, was simply a chance to become an editor for the Vortex Quarterly, a national magazine that was put out in nearby vortex-filled Sedona. And, to set the record straight, Re himself was not the one who offered me the position; although even if he had I am sure that I would’ve accepted it: at that point Beelzebub himself could’ve offered me a job, and I would have accepted, because I was that desperate for money—any money—even the kind that comes from ancient Gods. Money had been kind of tight around our Flagstaff home ever since the spring, when my husband Bryce had lost his job at Ace Tortoise Removal and I had encountered some unforeseen financial difficulties of my own. Bryce’s job at Ace had taken him to Henderson, Nevada, a town that—as a suburb of Las Vegas—is surely going to be one of the first in line to be the next boomtown. Or it will be, once they get the Bureau of Land Management to lighten up about that whole “endangered species” thing. Henderson’s problem is that you can’t so much as drive a “Future Site of Starbucks” sign into the ground without finding an endangered desert tortoise—and according to BLM rule 284.6, once you find an endangered desert tortoise it then becomes your job to move that endangered desert tortoise before any more construction can take place. And by moving them they don’t just mean tossing them to the side; they mean actually removing them from the scene altogether. Gently. Nicely. And most important—permanently. Of course, if you don’t want to move the tortoise yourself you can always hire someone. That’s where Bryce came in. As a certified BLM tortoise remover it was Bryce’s job to go out and scout the next day’s construction site; if he found an endangered desert tortoise he would “remove” it all the way to a cardboard box in the trunk of his rental car, thereby “saving” it before its burrow became overrun by the pink stucco walls, red tile roofs, and jetted whirlpools that are known as “lifestyle envelopments” in the Nevada desert. At the end of every day he would drop off all the tortoises he had collected and then head back to his boss’s room at a nearby casino, where he would collect his fifty dollars per diem and take off for the nearest titty bar. Or at least that’s what he would do, until the tortoise removal boom went bust. To be honest, at first I was glad that he had lost his job. Not only did it mean that now he wouldn’t be spending every night hitting on girls named “Destiny” and “Charisma,” it also meant that he would finally be through with what I had begun to call “The Final Solution.” Understand this: when he dropped off his tortoises every evening it wasn’t as if he was driving them deep into the Nevada desert where he would sing “Born Free” as they scampered (slowly) away, but rather he was taking them to a “research station” on the outskirts of town; once there, they would never be seen again. He claimed that he didn’t know what kind of “research” they did at this station, but I didn’t believe him. To me, it sounded like a turtle concentration camp. It had only fueled my suspicions further when right before he lost his job he had called me, drunk and repentant, from Larry’s Villa, a self-proclaimed “family-style” strip club far from the main drag. He told me then that he had seen “terrible things,” and rambled on about weapons research and the new “slow bomb.” He asked me if I would love him no matter what he did. I said I would not. I yelled at him, first to make myself heard over the din of someone (probably Larry’s mother-in-law) gyrating to “Love in an Elevator,” and then out of disgust. “Tell me, Bryce, how many turtles did you deliver to Dr. Mengele today?” “Ashley,” he slurred. “It’s my job. And I told you—they’re not turtles, they’re tortoises.” “Ja wohl, capitan. Baby turtle killer.” He was silent for a moment, and then I knew that I had pushed too far. “Hey—at least I don’t burn them alive, like some people I know.” That again. He was trying to change the subject by referring to the other reason we were so desperate for money, and as usual, it worked. Really, one little mistake and you’re branded as an arsonist for life. I didn’t tell him that the Forest Service had just sent me a bill for seven million dollars—I figured he was under enough stress already. And anyway, I was sure that later that week, after I had had my first meeting with Ranger Steve of the San Francisco Peaks Ranger Station, that everything would be worked out. After all, where was I going to get seven million dollars? You can’t get blood from a stone. Little did I know then, but Ranger Steve was about to drop the worst financial news on me that I had ever received in my entire twenty-two years: I was going to have to get a job. At first I didn’t realize how serious he was, probably because I wasn’t really paying attention. I was sitting in Ranger Steve’s office, staring at a kindly picture of Smokey the Bear, and I guess I just kind of drifted off while Ranger Steve was lecturing me. It was hard not to—his voice just droned on and on about “historic cabins” and “rare riparian habitat”, and soon all I was thinking about was Smokey. Smokey, I thought, now you would understand how difficult it is to remember to do everything when you pack up a campsite; how little things like putting out a campfire can get lost in the shuffle. Smokey, I thought, now you would cut me some slack. And Smokey just might have. Ranger Steve, on the other hand, was a real hard ass. “Luckily for you,” he was saying, “the Forest Service doesn’t expect you to pay the entire seven million dollars”—I snapped to at the mention of money—“we realize that the chances of that ever happening are slim—but it does expect that you will make some kind of restitution. We think that five thousand dollars is more than fair. After all, that’s approximately what we spent on bottled water for our crews alone.” I was stunned. Bottled water? Weren’t they fighting a fire? Why couldn’t they just drink out of the hose? He continued on. “And since we are, of course, a government agency, it is entirely within our rights to garnish thirty-five percent of your wages until this debt is paid.” Well, that was that, then. I smiled, stood up, and held out my hand for him to shake. “Great,” I said. “I’ll let you guys know just as soon as I get a job.” I’d like to see you try and garnish thirty-five percent of my plasma check. “If,” he said, ignoring my outstretched hand, “you are currently unemployed, then you can repay your debt by working for the Forest Service this summer at the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. At that rate you could have your debt disbursed in as little as six months.” I sat back down. “Are you any good with a shovel?” he asked me. “Not at all,” I replied. “That’s ok,” he said, and now it was his turn to smile. “You will be. You will be.” All of a sudden Ranger Steve looked downright evil. I looked again at the poster of Smokey the Bear behind him, and noticed that Smokey wasn’t looking so kindly anymore himself. His eyes glinted cruelly, and as I watched it looked like the “you” in “only you” turned into a wisp of smoke and curled up around the shovel in his paw. I shook my head and leapt to my feet. “I’ll bring you a paycheck stub by the end of next week—sir.” So you can see why, when the job offer for the Vortex Quarterly came out of the blue a few days later, I jumped at it without question—it almost seemed like divine intervention. In fact, I was so grateful that at first I could just babble at the woman on the other end of the line, and missed most of what she had been saying—all I could think about was how relieved I was to get out from underneath Smokey’s paw. It wasn’t until the very end of the conversation that I thought to ask a question. “How did you know—um, hear about me, Mrs., um Miss, um…” “Blessing. My name is Serene Blessing. And it was one of your former professors, a client of mine, who told me that he thought you might be interested. Something about seeing your name in the paper recently made him think you were available. There was some question in his mind, however, as to whether or not you had actually received your degree. Not that it would matter if you hadn’t, but still…” I interrupted her. “Oh yes, yes, I graduated. Just a minor misunderstanding with Parking Services, that’s all. My parents, er, I, took care of all that.” “Good. Well then, I’ll expect you tomorrow at noon. Our office is at the corner of Burning Bush and Flowing Stream in the new Canaanite Subdivision. Can you find that ok?” “No problem. Burning Stream. Gotcha.” I hung up the phone and turned to my husband. He had been sleeping a lot lately—ever since he had gotten back from Henderson a few days earlier. At least I think he was sleeping—he would crawl into bed and then pull his arms, legs and head under the covers until he was little more than a lump in the bedspread. Sometimes he would stick his head out slowly and look around a bit, then pull it back under the covers. He flailed all of his limbs spastically though when I grabbed for what I guessed was his shoulder. “Hey,” I asked him before he could retreat again, “where’s my degree?” “Your what?” “My degree, my degree, where is it?” The last I had seen it he was using the blue vinyl cover for a coaster. “Christ, I don’t know. Under the couch, I think.” I ran to the couch and pulled my degree out from under a stack of phone books and Land’s End catalogs that were standing in for a missing leg. The cat jumped off of the couch and glared at me as I opened the cover with a sticky creak. “Northern Arizona University,” it read. “Bachelors of Arts in Creative Writing—Honors” I kissed it. “I knew you would come in handy some day,” I told it. Then I stuffed it back under the couch.
The next day, however, my elation had already started to fade. My morning had started out roughly, with me placing my foot in a fresh pile of cat shit the moment I stepped out of bed. I muttered darkly about “Ace Cat Removal” as I got dressed, but the cat was unimpressed. Driving around the circuitous streets of a new Sedona subdivision as I tried to find my new job didn’t improve my mood any either. All of the houses were the same muddy beige, and they all had the same standard issue desert landscaping of one ocotillo, one mesquite tree, and one barrel cactus. The only thing differentiating them were the flags flying by the mailboxes: a rainbow here, a flower there. It was as if the Care Bears had suddenly discovered nationalism. I finally found the address among a catacomb of streets nestled at the base of Coffee Pot Rock. I had expected some sort of office building, but instead there was only another brown house. A sullen teenager with blue hair opened the door when I rang the bell and mutely pointed me to the garage. I knocked on the automatic garage door and shouted “hello?” and then immediately felt foolish for shouting at a garage. With a grinding shriek, the door rose to reveal three desks, two people, and approximately 1500 boxes of papers labeled in what were either hieroglyphics or really bad handwriting. A middle-aged woman, dressed in flowing red robes, was standing by the door. “Welcome,” she said, “to the home offices of Vortex Quarterly. I am Serene. You must be Ashley” Looking around, I saw that the other occupant of the garage was a pony-tailed man in his late thirties. He remained at his desk, scribbling furiously while listening to a set of headphones. Serene gestured at him and said, “This is Sage,” at which he lifted the headphones off his head briefly and gave me a nod; I could faintly hear what sounded like barking coming from them. His robes were purple. I looked down at my jeans and yellow sweater and wondered if I had missed something about a dress code. Serene must’ve seen my confusion, because she said: “Sage is a child of the Indigo Generation. And I,” she added, gesturing at her own robes, “am a child of Magenta. What latitude were you born at?” I told her I was born in Phoenix. “Hmm. Taupe.” It didn’t take long for her to explain to me how things worked. It was really fairly simple: Serene would dictate the articles into a tape recorder, Sage would transcribe them, and I would edit them. “You write all the articles yourself?” I asked, impressed. “Oh no, not me. Didn’t I mention it to you on the phone? The spirits write all of the articles; I’m just the vessel that they chose as their channeler.” A picture of a grinning Smokey the Bear handing me a shovel floated through my head, and I smiled at her brightly. “How nice that must be for you.”
Our days settled quickly into routine. I would arrive, don my yellow robes, and get to work. Most of the editing was more like proofreading—replacing homonyms, correcting grammar, and maintaining proper tense. After a few weeks it didn’t even feel so strange anymore to address my comments to members of the spirit world. “Ariel,” I’d write, “in ‘Touching Your Inner Child—Legal in Nevada?’ please note the difference between ‘affect’ and ‘effect’—it makes a difference.” Or, “Isis—in “Jesse Jackson: Leggo My Rainbow” do you mean imply or infer?” After a while I even felt free to scold them. “Orion!!! Watch out for excessive exclamations!!!” And “I don’t know how they feel about nominalizations in your dimension, Pleides, but here they are a definite no-no.”
After a while, and, in spite of the obvious weirdness factor, the office and its occupants stopped seeming so strange to me, and it wasn’t long before we fell into the habit of wasting time gossiping just like people in normal offices do. Unfortunately for me, though, most of the gossip brought in by Serene and Sage was incredibly dull. Serene, for one, always insisted on telling us long drawn out stories about her “spirit friends”. Or worse, about her spirit friends’ spirit friends. (We’d try and gently remind her that, since we had never met them we weren’t that interested that Sea Bright Morningstar’s best friend’s daughter just said “the cutest thing”, but she never got the hint). All Sage ever did was complain about the environmentally unfriendly toilet habits of the people he lived with at “The Ranch.” (“If it’s yellow, let it mellow, if it’s brown, flush it down! What’s so hard about that?”) I had to start talking about my home life just to spice things up. That’s why, standing around the wheat grass juicer one day, I let it slip that Bryce and I weren’t exactly getting along lately. Of course they both pressed for details, and offered advice: “How was his chakra? I wasn’t letting another woman touch his chakra, was I?” I told them as far as I knew, his chakra was untouched. “Maybe you should try touching it”. I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but the truth was the reason we weren’t getting along was actually because of them, or more specifically, because of them and the job. The whole idea of it creeped him out. “Don’t you remember The Exorcist?” he asked me when he found out about the spirits. “One day Linda Blair is innocently playing with an ouija board, and the next thing you know she can’t even get a bit part in a straight to video movie.” “That’s not true—I just saw her in an infomercial with Suzanne Somers.” “You see what I mean? Cursed.” Not that he had that much room to complain. VQ paid me very well, and with the tortoise removal industry still in a slump I was the breadwinner in the family for a change—even after my weekly garnishments I still made enough money to support both of us. I was happier than I had ever been, too, and, as I reminded him, I was sure the tortoises were happier as well. In fact, I think I would’ve seriously considered making a career for myself in New Age editing if it hadn’t have been for the arrival of the Sun God, Re. He was the first “big time” spirit Serene had ever channeled, and she was as excited as a junior high girl who gets to go to the prom with Brad Pitt. “Such an honor,” she said. “I get goose bumps just thinking about transcribing him,” added Sage. Even I was a little excited when Sage handed me the transcription of Re’s first article, “Sunless Tanning, Tool of the Devil.” My excitement, however, soon turned to disgust once I started reading it. No wonder the ancient Egyptians had communicated with pictures—Re’s grammar sucked. His writing skills weren’t much better, either. At first I tried to be diplomatic. “Re,” I wrote in the margins. “Please cut back on the word ‘just.’ In fact, consider cutting it out of your vocabulary altogether. You used it twenty-six times in a 500-word article.” When diplomacy didn’t work I got a teeny bit rougher. “Have you ever considered picking up a copy of The Chicago Manual of Style?” I asked. “Specifically, look up the proper usage of ‘amongst,’ ‘between’ and ‘betwixt’, especially as they refer to ‘sun-dappled breasts (an adjective choice you might want to reconsider, by the way).” I was beginning to think that my admonishments were falling on deaf ears when I noticed one day that Serene wasn’t looking too good, and every time I handed her a newly marked copy she looked a little worse. One rainy lunch break, after handing her a particularly strident revision of Re’s “Dare to Go Bare: A Girl’s Guide to Waxing,” she sighed and pushed aside her bowl of barely touched wheat-free organic Spaghetti-No’s. “Maybe we should just run it like Re wants it,” she said. This went against all of my newly found professional principles. “Hey,” I replied. “It’s your magazine. If you want all of the other spirits to think that Re’s an illiterate, that’s your business.” She grudgingly reached out two fingers and took the copy. “OK, I’ll show it to him, but I’m letting him know that you’re the one who wants to make all the changes.” “Ok,” I agreed, and watched as she trudged back to her desk. Even her robes hung limply. That day, when I got home from work my husband was waiting at the door. “What the hell is going on down there?” I put on my best innocent/dumb look, the one that once got me out of a speeding ticket in Utah, and smiled. “What do you mean?” He pulled me inside and sat me down on the couch. “It rained today. In the yard.” “So? That’s good, right?” “I don’t think you understand. It rained tortoises. My tortoises.” “How could you tell?” I asked. “I don’t know. They just looked at me like they knew me. Like they remembered. Anyway, what difference does it make how I knew? It was raining freaking turtles in the yard today.” “Tortoises,” I said, but he ignored me. So, I thought to myself, Re wants to play hardball, but out loud I said, “It’s nothing, just a little trouble with one of our writers.” “One of your writers? You mean a spirit, don’t you?” “Well, yeah, ok, a spirit.” Jeez. “Are you crazy? Picking a fight with a spirit? My God, you can’t even win a fight with AOL, and now you’re taking on supernatural beings?” “That’s different,” I said. “AOL has my credit card number.”
The next morning Serene was waiting for me at the door. “I showed Re your suggestions,” she said nervously, “and he made a few changes.” "Few" was right. I took out a brand new box of pencils and got to work. “Re,” I wrote, “newsflash: colons are not just a funny looking pair of dots. They actually have a purpose. Also, rethink your usage of ‘that’ and ‘which.’ Hint: is it a restrictive or nonrestrictive clause?” Serene and Sage barely spoke to me that whole day, except every now and then to mumble something about “lightning strikes.” “Give me a break,” I said once, “it’s Re, not Zeus,” but they still kept their distance. To preserve what was left of my good mood I decided to leave early, and I was glad I did as soon as I saw what a beautiful day it was outside. The sky was crystal blue against the red rock canyon walls, and I found myself singing, “I fought the Re, and I won,” as my car climbed out of Oak Creek Canyon. When I got home, though, my mood—and the sky—changed. I had to use my headlights as soon as I turned onto my street. In fact, by the time I pulled up in front of our house, the sky was pitch black, and the whole neighborhood was humming like it was underneath high-voltage power lines. I had just shut off the engine when the first locust hit my windshield with a wet thud, leaving behind a green smear and one leg before it hopped away. It was soon followed by another, and then another, until the car started to rock gently back and forth from the impact of so many little bodies. In a few moments the majority of the swarm had landed and I was able to make a dash for the front door while they were occupied destroying the landscaping. I saw my neighbor staring out her front window in horror as her prize-winning chrysanthemums were reduced to stubble before her eyes. In the space of my brief dash from car to door at least fifty of the little demons managed to attach themselves to my hair and clothes, and they leapt off and sprang around the house as soon as I got inside. The cat was in heaven, chasing them down and devouring them. My husband, sitting motionless on the couch, was clearly not, but he didn’t say a word to me about anything, not even when he got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and stepped into a big pile of grasshopper-filled cat puke. The next day he was gone—his note said that he had gotten a job removing non-native goats from an island in the Caribbean. I remembered that job—he had turned it down because it required him to present the goats’ beating hearts to the island’s chieftain. In his note he said he’d be in touch.
Given all that, I wasn’t really surprised when I saw Serene waiting for me outside the garage the next morning with copy in her hand. I scanned it quickly, and was pissed to see that none of my suggestions had been taken seriously; I grabbed a pencil even before I had gotten my robes on. Serene immediately scooted away from me. “Re," I began, “despite its name, an adverb is actually not a verb at all, and, as every six year old knows, every sentence needs a verb—even yours.” I could feel the boils welling up on the back of my neck before I had even finished writing, but I ignored them and pressed on. “Furthermore,” I added, “you are still using a self pronoun where only a personal pronoun belongs. Have you ever thought about suing your 5th grade teacher for incompetence?” All of a sudden an enormous wind filled the room, sending papers and magnetic wrist supports flying every which way. Serene and Sage clasped their hands together in the middle of the room and hummed, reminding me of the way that a llama will hum when it gets really nervous, right before it pees on your foot. I kept my head down and kept writing—I was suggesting that Re look into some classes at the community college when with one final whoosh the wind stopped, and the room felt oddly peaceful. My boils, I noticed, had vanished, (along with the really nice tan that I had been working on all summer). I looked at the huge mess of papers that used to be our office and thought that someone was going to have a hell of a time cleaning up. “I’m going out for some cappuccino,” I said. “Anybody else want to come?” Sage jumped up and brushed off his robes. “Sure,” he said. “I’d love a chai with soy.” Serene sat motionlessly, still humming. When we got back two hours later Serene was back at her desk, but the mess was still untouched. Shit, I thought to myself as she got up and glided over to me. “I’m sure you will be happy to hear,” she said, “that Re has left us.” Well that was something. I tried to look appropriately disappointed, and failed. “In his place, however, I have been sent an even more powerful deity—Gaia, Mother Earth, Goddess of Fertility, Mother of All. I’ll have her first article for you tomorrow.”
Driving home I was feeling pretty smug about vanquishing Re, even though I’d had to spend the rest of the day refiling papers. I didn’t feel the least bit of trepidation about any looming battles with Mother Earth. Fertility goddess, I thought, what’s the worst that she can do, make my breasts grow? I swerved slightly to avoid a family of turtles crossing the road then turned on the radio to NPR, just in time to catch Terri Gross interviewing the mother of the Iowa septuplets. “So tell me,” she was asking, “how did it feel to have seven children inside of you all at once?” I turned off the radio and pulled over, resting my suddenly sweating forehead on the steering wheel. Serene’s words, mother of all, kept floating through my head. I thought back to the turtles. Were they turtles or tortoises? I thought about going back to check, but even if they were still there, how were you supposed to tell the difference between the two, anyway? And just like that I knew what I had to do. I started driving again, but this time, instead of heading towards my house I was heading to the San Francisco Peaks Ranger Station, and to Ranger Steve; I wasn’t the least bit surprised when I stepped out of the car and it started to rain. As I rushed into his office he looked up like he had been expecting me. This time, I noticed, both Smokey and Steve had the same knowing look. “Is there any chance,” I asked breathlessly, “that I could get my shovel in taupe?”
About the Author Kelly Poe Wilson lives in Flagstaff, Arizona with her husband and two children. Her work has appeared in Brain, Child; Northern Arizona Review; and The View From Here, a collection of Four Corners essays. Her weekly column, “The Mother Load” can be read online at www.flaglive.com.
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