Barnie’s Last Sanctuary

I drag thick fingers down my face every morning in front of the mirror, hoping that when I open my eyes, all the purple will have faded into something closer to flesh.  I have a closet full of shirts and jeans I used to wear as a kid.  Now only the delicate touch of dust fills the seams and collects around shirt buttons, in jean pockets.  I can hear the children outside my window, shouting, shouting, to come out and play, screaming I love you and you love me like the last anthem on this damn Earth.  It took a few months, but I dug a tunnel from the basement of my old apartment that streams out into an old sewer drain, hardly wide enough for me to fumble through on my oversized legs and skinny arms.  But it gets me out of the house where I leave a note on the window: howdy y’all, I’ll be out tomorrow.  And tomorrow.  And tomorrow. 

It’s not easy to smile when I walk into the dive-bar down the street, everybody laughing and shouting, if it aint that fat fuckin’ dinosaur.  But I laugh and take my position in the back where I know I can fade out after a while with a few bottles of Bud and a few shots of Old Grand Dad whiskey to wash away the crooning voice in my thick throat and the crooked teeth I begged my mother to fix with some braces when I was young.  She always said they didn’t make braces for people like us.  Yeah, people like us.  My father marched on Washington in the sixties for the rights of dinosaurs, but even the people he marched next to, all those screaming for civil rights and liberties and all that laughed and said hit the road toad-face freak, you’re turning the whole thing into a joke.  And who could blame them?  They were right.  So I just sit in the back of the bar everyday trying to skip work, my immortal prison, because my oppressors won’t fire me and they won’t let me quit.  They keep saying that if I leave, they’ll run me out of the neighborhood.  They say if I leave, they’ll stir up some sex scandal: purple bastard touches children in bathroom.  I would say that’s fine, I’m leaving, but I could just see the look on my mother’s face.  Disappointed.  Ashamed.  Knowing they were all lies and knowing I should never have let it happen.  So I stay strong and drunk down in the bar and hope I might wake up tomorrow, dislodged from the thick purple shell of embarrassment that has followed me like a stench through my entire life. 

I try and see the positive side as much as I can.  Fake it till you make it, kids!  Doesn’t always work, but on the days I have to go to work and run around singing I love you and lets all sing and fucking dance and hug because the world is great, I just remember that stuff  like this is just a temporary gig.  These kids will love to laugh at me one day and love to fire me the next.  I can wait, wait real patiently, hoping every day that something changes and when I wake up and run my thick fingers down my oversized face in front of the mirror in morning, I will not see purple, but yellow, or black, or orange, or red, or white, or clear, and maybe I can rest.  I can sleep.  I can vanish and disappear with some notion, some damn modicum of dignity and respect for myself and my ancestors that fought adversity and segregation, fought being treated like museum exhibits and circus-acts all the way to the last drop of our six-million year-old bloodline.  

Terrance Manning:

"I am a recent graduate from the University of Pittsburgh with a BA in Fiction Creative Writing and English Literature.  I grew up in and around McKeesport PA, moving often, and spending more time as a kid playing on railroad tracks, swimming in rivers, and getting hurt than reading or writing.  I picked up writing more as a means of documenting myriad memories than a venting or therapeutic process.  As I grew up, and actually read a little, I began to appreciate and love the way writing could be manipulated to not only recreate memories and experiences, but create new worlds, new places, people, conflicts and resolutions. In much of my writing, I attempt to characterize a style that captures mostly obscure moments, lingers on and indulges in beauty and ugliness, and develops themes through implicit meaning, psychological resonance, and how the tangible and intangible worlds collide to form literature representative of our contemporary moment.  Using Fiction as a vehicle, I want to discover some bridge into personal and worldly struggles (both internal and external), desire to overcome the mundane and the extraordinary, and how that speaks to us as people and the society we live in. 

I admire writers like Tobias Wolff who seems to have unearthed the perfect balance between reality, the imagination, and yearning; Amanda Davis for her exceptional skill in walking the line between past and present (as well as how that affects and influences her characters); and Raymond Carver for his powerful control over the psychological and the tangible worlds.  I've had the opportunity to learn and shape my Fiction at the University of Pittsburgh through working and studying with writers such as Jeff Martin in Fiction, who taught me the importance of complex characters (character flaw), Dawn Lundy Martin in Poetry, who with an unflinching attention to concision, form, and image, taught me about the importance of encompassing beauty, ambiguity, and impact in succinct moments, Jonathan Callard, Christina Burroughs, Micki Myers, and Fiona Cheong, who helped me appreciate the true importance of understanding narrative arc. 

I'm currently in the process of finishing my first Fiction novel, Riverboys, a story of two young friends—on the brink of adolescence—trapped in the chains of youth and reality, and fighting physically, emotionally, and mentally to break from those chains.  I'm very excited to finish—more so because I can't wait to see what these characters do with the massive problem they've been faced with."