Cops
Dorothy Parker was disappointed by her arrest for protesting the electrocution of Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. They didn’t even take her fingerprints! But, she joked to the press, showing them a bruise on her arm, “They left me a few of theirs. The big stiffs!” In the end, she pleaded guilty to loitering and paid a five dollar fine. Not all interactions with the police end so gently, as our writers attest in this issue. On the other hand, who you going to call in an emergency? Cops. It’s complicated.
Sergeant Hummingbird
Word Count 431
I had a friend who was a cop in New York City. I’d known him as a gentle soul who had gone into policing in his 30s, after having been an electrician for years. I called him Sergeant Hummingbird, because he would text me in spring to let me know when the first hummingbird of the season had come to his feeders.
I was in Times Square one busy Saturday night taking out-of-town friends around, when out of the crowd came Sergeant Hummingbird, who threw his arms around me. I hugged him back and could feel his Kevlar vest beneath his uniform. We marveled at having found one another in that sea of humanity.
Civilian Police Academy
Word Count 1012
The first class of the Civilian Police Academy met in a dingy city council room attached to police headquarters. Over the next eight weeks, my fellow attendees and I would tour the county jail, meet police chiefs, a sheriff, a district attorney, an internet and sex crimes detective, the medical examiner, a fish and wildlife officer, a canine officer and his handler. We would spend a night with dispatch and 911, reenact the investigation of a major crime scene and spend a day studying firearms simulation training films, followed by a half day at the range. In the application process, I had disclosed my journalism background, arguing the academy training could only enhance my work. In the interest of full disclosure, I added I was writing a novel and thought of the class as research. When I passed the application process, I was dizzy with excitement.
One Wedding and a Funeral
Word Count 1614
In late May 2021, my son and his bride said their vows under a huppa, then celebrated with a reception on a refitted ferry docked on Elliot Bay across from the Space Needle in Seattle. Since David is a police officer, it was a cop wedding. We had two hundred donuts instead of a dazzling white cake, the center ones spelling out “Mazel tov!” in donut letters. Afterwards, we dropped the leftovers of the buffet–Northwest salmon, roasted vegetables, sourdough rolls– at David’s precinct for the shift of police who weren’t at the wedding. The couples’ old friends danced to the DJ together, even the ones who had called the cops “pigs” the summer before, during the George Floyd protests.
A month later, there was a cop funeral. Lexi Harris worked in the same unit as our son. On her way home from work, while off-duty, she had stopped to help a motorist pulled over on the freeway. Another driver hit her, instantly killing the thirty-nine- year-old policewoman.
The Dog Run
Word Count 1844
I woke up that morning agitated, angry. I needed to run far and fast.
I pulled on a pair of ugly lavender running shorts and a tiny tee top. I would heat up during the run, no need for added layers. I grabbed the leash and Sadie, my black lab, and headed for the park.
We ran down the treed parkway, watching for roots that could take you down. My breathing started out heavy then slowed as I fell into a steady pace. The dog ran obediently by my side.
I had been a mess for weeks. A business started two years earlier with my brother and his wife was now completely in their hands and I felt as if I lost a part of me. I had definitely lost them.
Joy Ride
Word Count 4412
1966
The road was dark and slick with rain. Passing semis flooded our windshield, drowning the wipers. Oncoming headlights blasted out of the mist. A smear of red taillights snaked up the hill ahead of us and disappeared into the fog.
We weren’t exactly running away. I just hadn’t told my parents where we were going. I was driving my mother’s 1961 lime-green Chevy wagon, a boat-sized behemoth that lunged and bounced through lake-sized puddles. Despite the fact that I had only gotten my license a few months earlier, my father had let me have the car for the weekend. My mother was visiting family in Washington D.C. and wouldn’t need it. I let Dad think we were just going over to Elise’s house.
The car jerked and started to spin. I gripped the wheel, trying to keep from fishtailing.
Cock Fight
Word Count 1492
One beautiful summer morning, as I bent to pick up my newspaper, I was attacked by my neighbor’s four bantam roosters. One of them, white neck feathers ruffled like a burgher’s collar in a Franz Hals portrait, lunged at my leg, puncturing my skin. As I screamed and frantically kicked him off, another came, and another, and in the seconds that followed, I screamed and kicked as four roosters, all puffed up in fighting mode, lunged and pecked at my legs with beaks or hind claws. Finally, Nelson, my neighbor, heard my screams and came to my aid, batting them away with his weed whacker. In shock, with rivulets of blood running down my legs, I screamed,” Keep your fucking chickens off my driveway. I never want to see them on my property again!” and quickly headed up the hill for home.
Cop a Feel
Word Count 873
It is 7:00 a.m. I am in my office a few blocks from the federal courthouse where I am expected to make my closing argument in a case involving an American diplomat who is accused of drugging and raping multiple foreign nationals.
Right now, members of the press, the public, and government officials are forming a line outside the courthouse.
Usually, a prosecutor would be preparing for her closing argument in her office right about now. I am leaning against the window sill, face pressed into the detective’s clavicle, the chain attached to his creds tangled in my teeth, body sandwiched between an evidence box on one side and unused sex kits stacked too high on the other.
I can see my box filled with trial shoes. I still haven’t decided which ones I’ll wear for closing. Shoes are everything, especially for closing argument.
The detective didn’t even take his gun belt off or undo the top button of his field pants. This must be what it’s like when he takes a piss.
His nine-millimeter Glock rubs against my hip making his dick seem infantile and making me wish I was fucking the Glock instead.
I Walk the Line
Word Count 1754
Lauren and I were in Boone, North Carolina on a girl’s weekend. Or a woman’s, or maybe people’s weekend, the complexity of this escape’s definition being, I suppose, part of the problem. All we knew is that we’d both wanted a break from Florida, a place each of us had moved to from Manhattan—she ten years earlier to help out family, me four years ago as part of my husband’s retirement. While we lived on opposite sunshine state coasts, we seemed equally out of water, she in a 55+ Boynton Beach community, me in a Naples gated golf community, two city pals with liberal values challenged, cultural and curiosity yearnings unmet, missing diversity and freedom.
For years we’d reenergized by alternating cross-state visits to each other, but decided it was time to switch it up with a short trip.
Visiting Hours
Word Count 1119
When my youngest brother was arrested for a bank robbery at 22, I was devastated. A future flashed before me where we would drift so far in different directions we would barely recognize one another, a future I was already living with our older brother who was incarcerated in a distant state. I could not bear the thought of losing another.
As James sat in the county jail detoxing from the drugs that nearly killed him, I made plans to visit him with Shane, my one remaining brother still on this side of freedom. I left my purse behind, carrying only my car key and license, not wanting anything to jeopardize our visit. I wanted to see his thick mane of dirty blonde hair, to search those blue eyes that had been lost since our Mom died. I worried she was the only one who could reach him beyond the plexiglass, both adrift in other realms.
It was an unseasonably sunny day for November, a jarring contrast to the dim waiting room.
Seize and Desist
Word Count 1732
“You’re not pregnant too, are you, baby?” my sister Angie teased.
I was on winter break from my freshman year of college, and my dad and I had arrived in San Francisco from New York hours earlier to visit her and her new husband Ray.
We wandered a rundown patch south of Market in desperate search of a bathroom. Finding no better options, we ducked into the Greyhound Station where I raced to the women’s room.
“Better?” my dad asked after I found them all huddled together on one of the few benches that didn’t hold a sleeping drunk or mumbling addict.
Snow Show
Word Count 866
Chicago mayors’ political careers live or die by how fast the roads are cleared after a blizzard. In 1979, the mayoral campaign was particularly unruly because the city was between Daleys. Mayor Richard J. Daley had died and mayor-to-be Richie Daley Junior was still learning the ropes in the Illinois Senate. The city council elected an interim candidate to hold the position until the next election. but he was failing the snow-removal test. Voters were pissed.
Enter Jane Byrne, a feisty, petite woman whose practical talk resonated with voters. She was mentored by established Democrats but had turned on them, offering herself as the alternative mayoral candidate. I liked her. She gave us blonds a smart, strong image.
The Spaghetti Incident
Word Count 1730
It started as we sat around the square table beneath the five-point chandelier in our condo’s dining room in rural New Hampshire. I was 12, my brother Aaron was 9, it was 1992. My 15 year old sister, Sarah, was talking about her boyfriend, Paul. Music practice had drawn them together; she was in the choir; he played the trumpet. Every year, amid a few new songs, the band always played “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel. Sarah and Paul had been dating for a few months at the time of the incident.
Sarah was talking about Paul when my mother interrupted her. “I want you to know that you’re lucky I like Paul. ” she said, waving her saucy fork in a circle toward Sarah’s face.
“I don’t care if you like him,” Sarah answered. “ I like him.”
“I’m a Mind to Run You In”
Word Count 1344
Today, Azariah asked me to drive her way out in the country to an abandoned farm. She wanted a white vinca plant from a graveyard for her garden.
The dusty road was empty, both ways. No neighboring houses. Southern rural desert-land. There wasn’t even a piece of the house left.
Az walked straight to the little cemetery, stepping over a broken gate – she’s so tiny, the weeds swallowed her almost to her cropped white head. Her hair used to be a shining crown, but she’s whittled it down to dandelion fur.
“Why white vinca?” I asked. “Why from a grave?”
“Spirit flower,” she said.
She pointed at some weeds. I pulled them away for her – and there was this stone, a big rough rock.
All around us, a dozen rocks, maybe a foot and a half high. “What is this, Az?”
“Slaves.”
Slave graves?