27 April 2011

Twelve, Part 6

NB: Last part of the series! Read Parts 1-5 for the whole story. It's worth it, I promise! Enjoy. -m


The ship had been moving for over an hour, and Tiberon was antsy. He refused to sit still. Up, down, back and forth…he was all over the place.

“Tiberon. Seriously. You’re driving me crazy,” I said.

“That girl is driving me crazy!” he yelled, shoving his finger in Tessa’s direction.

“What am I doing?” Tessa said, eyes wide like a doe in a thicket.

“You’re…you’re…Just stop it!”

“Tiberon, she’s not doing anything,” I said. It was hard to keep my voice even, because in reality, Tessa really was doing something. By not doing anything, she was doing it. She’d promised to make our lives really difficult when it was time for her to take the next pill. We all knew that this was in about ten minutes.

Tiberon punched the wall, mumbling to himself and generally making a lot of noise. I sighed and puffed out my cheeks, playing with the air in my mouth. Five minutes passed. Two more minutes. Thirty seconds. Six nanoseconds. The closer we got to the two-hour mark, the slower time seemed to move. I looked down at my hands and felt guilty for even considering getting my gun or any of my knives.

“Tessa, please just take the pill?” I asked.

“Nah,” she said. “I’d rather not. Thanks though.” I rolled my eyes and looked at the clock on the wall. We had just over a minute. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the little bag of eleven pills, carefully opening it in plain sight and tapping a tiny brown pill into the curved palm of my hand.

“How does it taste?” I asked.

“Like puréed vegan,” Tessa said. I snorted, then wiped my nose with my wrist. Tiberon was glaring at me, but all I could do was shrug.

Tessa, who had been sitting in a chair not far from the door, stood up and went to stand in front of me. “I just want you to know,” she said. “That I appreciate you not using your gun on me.” I nodded. Sounded like a good bye speech to me. I took a deep breath, preparing to grab that little neck and shove the pill down the throat inside it. Tiberon was getting ready, too, cracking his knuckles and stretching out his arms.

And then…someone knocked on the door. We three looked at one another in surprise. No one was supposed to disturb us. Tiberon was closest to the door, so he was the one who slowly edged forward and reached his hand out for the slick silver handle. He barely had it turned the whole way before someone’s foot smashed it in.

“Look out!” Tiberon yelled as he dove for cover. Before I had any time to react, a mini bazooka-like machine gun was thrust into our room. It fired at the window, which shattered. Gotta admit, it was a pretty cool sound, but at that exact moment I was trying to figure out the best way to untangle my limbs from where I had fallen next to the bed. Tessa was laughing.

“You guys are so easy!” I sat up. The window was whole, and Tiberon had his fist around the knob of a closed door.

“Stop it, Tessa. Avel wants you to get safely to America,” I said.

“Avel can shove it!” Tessa said. Then she disappeared. I could still hear her giggling, however, and I jumped straight for the sound. “Ow!”

I tried to find her mouth, but it’s very difficult to differentiate invisible noses from invisible chins, and she was fighting me tooth and nail. “Tiberon, help me!” I glanced up to see where my partner was, but he had sat back down and was grinning benignly.

“See? That’s how it’s done, girl,” he said. “Never doubt a man with biceps like these!”

“What are you talking about? Help me!”

“I know, I thought she’d never let us do it,” he said. Then he pulled a knife out of his pocket and started trimming his nails.

Tessa’s laughter stopped just long enough for her to whisper, “Pay attention to me!”

“Take the pill!” I countered. She reappeared again as she crawled to the space of carpet underneath the window.

“No!”

“Avel will be angry!”

“Then you take it!”

Her hair was disheveled and her eyes were wild, and without thinking I decided to take her advice. Why not? We didn’t have enough to get there, anyways, and maybe if I took the pill myself I could surprise her enough that I could shove the next one in her mouth.

I tossed my head back and dropped the pill in. Tessa laughed triumphantly and tilted her head back in her signature move of illusion-preparing. Her fingers flexed, her eyes unfocused, and she grinned like a hyena.

She did it again.

And again.

And once more.

But…nothing changed. Her eyes grew wilder and angry.

“Why don’t you react?! Why don’t you see it?!”

I looked around the room. “See what?” It must not have been the correct answer, because Tessa screamed and lunged at me.

But instead of landing on me, she landed on my bag, which was right next to me. I heard a zipper and a swish of metal on fabric, and I was in the air and trying to tackle her when she turned the gun on me. I froze.

“You don’t want to shoot me, Tessa,” I whispered. I was out of breath and could feel my heart pounding in my throat.

“Watch me,” she said, backing up into the window, which she hit with a small thump.

“Please just take a pill,” I said.

“No,” she said. And then she turned the gun on herself.

“Tessa, please. Tessa…”

“I’m not taking it,” she said. “Not ever.” She swallowed hard and started squeezing through the safety of the trigger.

“Tessa, stop!” I took a step forward and she pointed the gun back at me, tears streaming down her face.

“No!”

She flipped the gun back around and squeezed the trigger. The window exploded behind her, but there was no blood. The last thing I heard was laughter like ringing in my ears. The last thing I saw was Tessa’s right foot as she dove through the shattered window and into the water below.

No, scratch that. The last thing I saw was the clock, which read noon straight on, and then I saw tiny black stars. There must have been something funny in that little brown pill.

Making a Difference

NB: I didn't re-edit or rewrite this. I just found it and thought it was interesting. Please forgive the weird spacing; for some reason I can't change it. Enjoy. -m.


The red brick building off of W. Colfax has wooden floors that creak with every step and smells like cooked chicken. From the outside it almost looks like a cross between a church and a community center nestled between houses with neat front lawns. A hand-sized cross ornament is hooked on a nail in the windowsill in the big meeting room, but it’s not a church, even if all the neighbors refer to the building as such.

“It’s fascinating to be strategic about collaboration,” Jude says, pausing to wave to a woman leaving the building with her kids. “Hey, great job today!” he says. “Now you can go home and make me some enchiladas, huh?” The woman grins and manages to wave back, even though she has a baby in one hand and a Ziploc of chicken drumsticks in the other. The Mothers of Preschoolers group had taken a class from a food scientist about how to make a chicken last for five meals, hours later the meeting room still smelled like a home-cooked meal.

Jude and Cindy Del Hierro began Confluence Ministries as a sort of response to a world of volunteers with bad communication skills. According to Jude, some churches and non-profits seem to view volunteering as a competition. Churches may expect the people they serve to show up to church the following Sunday, and counting numbers can be a favorite game of both groups. It becomes about which group can help more people, not about what kind of relationship the community needs to form with volunteers.

“We just asked ourselves, ‘What are we doing? And what could we do differently?” Jude says. “How do we close that gap?” It’s how they decided to be a catalyst for grassroots groups with a heart for helping.

The Colfax community in which Confluence lives doesn’t have the best reputation in Denver. It’s been compared to run-down versions of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and New York’s Greenwich Village, but a drive down the road from Golden to Denver shows marked improvement.

Before Jude and Cindy moved to their neighborhood near Colfax and the building got its renovation, volunteers trying to serve downtown kept on running into each other. “One group would come at six and hand out burritos, and half an hour later a guy with some sandwiches would show up. He’d be all like, ‘Why don’t they want my sandwiches?’” Jude says with a grin, then spreads his hands. It’s part of where Confluence began, to create a matrix of people who wanted to live in a posture of serving a community in which the average household income is $35,000 and 82% of the kids in the public schools are getting free school lunches.

Jude is dressed for meeting people. Black jeans, t-shirt, and crocs may not be his daily outfit, but they are worn at the edges and he seems ready to meet politicians and help out the Mothers of Preschoolers group. His wife, Cindy, is wearing jeans and a black tank top, and her eyes shine from behind her glasses.

Confluence is about getting everyone in the community to flow together, according to Jude, Cindy, and several Confluence volunteers. They raise all their own fundraising and have a couple of part-timers as well as a couple of full-time people.

Reaching a community such as Colfax isn’t an easy task. Perfect solutions sometimes just don’t exist. So Confluence partners with anyone and everyone who has ideas, meaning that some of the things that get planned range from passing out bagels and balloons at the AIDS Walk, to connecting local musicians with kids for music lessons.

Jude and his wife Cindy were associate pastors at Church in the City when God told them it was time to make a life change. They moved to W. Colfax, got a hold of the creaky old building, and began networking faith-based ministries and other non-profits as directors of Confluence Ministries.

It’s easy to see how it got that way. Voices play in the background like a movie soundtrack. As a ministry hub, all sorts of groups and organizations use the building. City Councilman Rick Garcia holds neighborhood meetings there, as well as Whiz Kids, and study groups for ESL learners, and GED students. It’s all part of the vision to be a good neighbor, and to build relationships with a community that needs them badly.

One day a volunteer group came in looking for something to help with, and Confluence set them up cleaning a neighborhood block, doing yard work, and otherwise making the area more beautiful. Now, the project is known as Extreme Community Makeover.

Before the red brick building was home to Confluence Ministries, it was a hideout for the homeless and for troubled youth, a place where people spent their time sniffing powders and fooling around in cobwebbed corners. In 2003, the renovations began. Windows had to be replaced, cleaned, and inspected. Floors were redone, molding was glued and nailed. It takes a lot of work to get a ministry hub into motion.

The last item on the renovation list is the kitchen. At the moment, it’s a large room made of wooden studs, nails, and some wires strung through large holes. The chicken dinner smell doesn’t reach the real kitchen yet, but soon it’ll be done and more than chicken will be made downstairs.

Organization Saves You Money

My mother has a very “sophisticated” system in place for organizing her coupons. It’s a blue folder and both sides of it hold a random, chaotic array of money-savers. I’ve gone through it a few times and found coupons that had expired three years earlier.
Everyone who uses coupons should have a way to organize them, because if you know where to find your deals you save time, money, energy and maybe even annoyed glares from fellow shoppers. (Remember that time when you kept apologizing but you just knew you had a coupon for something? It’s OK. It happens to all of us).
I organize coupons by keeping them in an accordion wallet; coupons that I want to take advantage of as soon as possible go on a magnetic board by my bathroom mirror. Needless to say, I’m just a bit more organized in this area than my mom is. With kids to take care of and a job on the side, life--not sorting coupons--is her priority.
But it doesn’t have to be a nightmare to organize your coupons, and for those of you who don’t have a touch of OCD like I do, these ideas will make the task all the easier.
1. Come up with a system
Don’t just cut out your coupons and stash them in a shoebox. If you do all of your coupon cutting at once, make an organization board so that you can cut and sort at the same time. Just get a poster board and use a yard stick and a marker to divide it into boxes about 4 inches by 6 inches.
Write a category name at the top of each box. As you clip out the coupons, place them in the appropriate box on your board, and when you’re done the only thing you’ll need to do is put all of your stacks in their appropriate holders.
2. Decide on a chest for your treasure trove
I chose an accordion wallet because it is small, portable, and has snazzy index tabs to fit labels into. My grandma drops her coupons into an envelope, and one of my friends sticks hers on the fridge. Other coupon clippers use index file boxes, Ziploc baggies, recipe boxes and Tupperware with cardstock dividers.
Storage should be sturdy and easy to move, since you probably don’t want to lug around a pile of flimsy envelopes that need to be replaced every few weeks. Do a little bit of research on the Internet or watch other people as they shop. Even I was surprised by the many different ways of organizing that I found; I was impressed with the ingenuity one woman showed in turning her son’s old trading card binder into an easy-access, organized coupon utopia.
3. Expiration dates.
Whether you use envelopes, an expanding file, or a photo album, create twelve different categories, one for each month of the year. You can stick this month’s stack of coupons in your purse or glove box and empty it out at the end of the month.
4. Products
This is great for those of us who are very picky about the coupons we clip. If you buy a limited number of things with coupons—such as Herbal Essences Shampoo and HP Ink—you can get away with having only those categories in your collection.
5. Stores
Some stores send out more coupons than others, and many of us shop at the same handful of stores every week. By organizing by store, you know exactly which products you’re looking for, and where.
6. Categories
To sort by category, just think of the layout of your store. Most grocery stores are set up the same way, with produce on one side, foodstuffs in the middle, and health & beauty and things for the home on the other end. Many stores and internet coupon websites already organize their coupons by category, so all you have to do is label your categories like they do. This also makes it easy to find coupons at the register.
7. Double Up
If using only one of these ideas isn’t enough for the amount of coupons you use, instigate more than one of them. You could store everything by category, then by product or by expiration date.