UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Marine

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Marine Biology A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts by Kyle Zaffino December 2013 Thesis Committee: Professor Mark Haskell Smith, Co-Chairperson Professor Andrew Winer, Co-Chairperson Professor Elizabeth Crane Brandt Copyright by Kyle Zaffino 2013 The Thesis of Kyle Zaffino is approved: Committee Co-Chairperson Committee Co-Chairperson University of California, Riverside Table of Contents Bull Market 2 Regicide 4 Arc of the Covenant 13 Country Fried 24 Spring Forward 31 Whitecaps 40 Sabra 45 Braille 57 Pay it Backward 62 Angel Hair 77 Marine Biology 100 DOT 119 iv while we used long fingernails to carve epitaphs into the floor you were scratching freedom from concrete living in a world of gamblers and murder victims I walk these corridors knowing of the net beneath your defiance has become legend within these walls and we sit in our cells and hope you live enough life for the rest of us who did not make it out ~Scott Hull, Alcatraz Metaphors 1 Bull Market Park Tavern is a squat gray concrete box, slightly elevated above the south side of PA State Route 5. With its short pale walls and the sloped dirt parking lot, the establishment looks like a major league pitcher's mound, although in a ballpark the Budweiser and Coors signs are on the outfield walls rather than beckoning the fielders from within the rubber. The interior of the tavern is composed of darkly-varnished lumber, dotted here with a 26” LED television and there with a vintage bicycle in the rafters. Though the televisions are the only thing in the tavern younger than the average medical student, everything is tidy and well-maintained; the room has the soft umber hue of a Scout camp's mess hall. James is a regular at Park Tavern. He frequently brings his fiancee and their two daughters to enjoy the seventy-five-cent tacos on Wednesdays. The kids are five and twelve, they haven't grown into their appetites yet, so he can usually feed the family for twenty bucks after tip if he and Dana don't order booze. This is important when you’re trying to feed a family on what you make teaching phys-ed at Iroquois High School. This week James and Dana do order booze, he a Manhattan and she a Cosmo. This week the girls aren't restricted to tacos—James springs for a white pizza and eighteen butter garlic wings. This was their older girl's last Wednesday of elementary school—Emily's starting at Harborcreek Junior/Senior High next year. 2 It's a good evening—Emily is old enough to appreciate that she's taking a big step, but not old enough to bitch about her parents making a big deal out of it. They savored the pizza, mouths dripping olive oil as if they were Roman vampires, and when the wings were gone the girls squabble over the wet-naps like sparrows jostling for a branch and the sight is too goddamn adorable for Dana to chastise them. As the family steps out of the bar and into the receding warmth of the early- summer sunset, holding hands all in a row like a miscut chain of paper dolls, James hears a truck come to life with the snarl of a lion in estrus. He squeezes the hands of his fiancee and his baby girl and slows down. He turns to warn Emily in time to hear the popcorn crunch of plastic being pulverized and the sudden sharp thud of heavy metal colliding with substantial metal, sounds that reverberate past your eardrums and somehow make you part of the collision. His head snaps back up as he notices a green truck across the parking lot drawing a scraggly breath and watches it drag his station wagon five feet before the brand-new car next to his jostles his car off the truck’s frame like a football ref breaking up a post-tackle scrum. 3 Regicide Amanda sat in trigonometry class transcribing some equations into the labyrinthine order of a Japanese newspaper and sketching corresponding figures amongst the symbols; Goku pointing to a variable to indicate that it’s over nine thousand, Bill the Cat in his tighty-whities blearily wheezing a theta into an equation, Woody pointing to another equation with the remark “Buzz Linear, space remainder.” The teacher went Baptist revival on one particular equation, starting on one side of the twenty-foot blackboard with a conversion and painstakingly scrawling every single step of a proof. When it was clear that he wouldn’t be turning around for at least ten minutes while he turned their math lesson into a Lego manual, Amanda wrote her phone number on the top of the page, then tore her creation from her binder--a light pull to loosen it, a deft jerk to rip it quietly--and glanced right to be sure Billy was still frantically writing everything the teacher said and wrote. When he shifted to the right to continue his blistering pace, she slipped the sheet of sketches on his left. He started when he saw the paper enter his vision, a short line crossing off the word “cosecant” in the manner of a No Smoking sign as, in his distraction, his pencil got away from him. He had to chew on his eraser for a solid minute to keep from laughing aloud. She looked back up to see the teacher at the blackboard and hear “…and so we get…” which indicated the end of the lesson. Perfect timing. 4 She wrote the conversion and attendant description on the farthest right side of the board, skipping the intermediate work—she figured the answer was as important as the question, but the intermediate conversation was malleable, not meant to be transcribed. She went to close her binder only to narrowly miss Billy’s hand as he passed her a note of his own; he’d sketched a dancing Ren and Stimpy surrounding a triangle with a natural log in one corner, Ren pointing while shouting “It’s better than bad, it’s good!” and Stimpy holding his hands aloft agreeing “It’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood!” She snickered, and glanced over at him with a modest smile. She slowly swung down to her right to put her binder in her backpack, being careful to catch his eye and to tuck the drawing into her binder when she knew he was looking. “How are ya, Billy?” He smiled, looking as though he wanted to look as though he hadn’t expected this. “I’m doing. How about your own bad self?” “I’ve been bad, huh?” She bit her lip, with an exaggerated wink—as far as she knew he’d never really dated, though being a grade apart their social circles did not intersect much. A full blush, at this. She meant to keep him on his toes, so this was a welcome development. “Yeah, if you don’t eat your meat you won’t get any pudding,” he said. If this was meant to be a joke, she didn’t get it. “Duly noted. Dessert’s my favorite part of the meal. What are you up to tonight?” 5 “I have to go to work,” Billy said. He emphasized “have to” with an eye roll; she knew he worked at McDonald’s, which is a job that solved some problems but not the problems of being broke here and now or of ever not being broke. She wanted to give him an excuse to call off, but she gathered by the fact that he’d said it at all that calling off wasn’t an option. “How are you getting to work today?” “I was going to walk, it only takes like a half-hour or forty minutes.” “Would you like a ride?” “You don’t have to do that, if you don’t want to.” He looked at her for maybe five seconds after he finished speaking, as though he wanted to say something, but was lacking the words, or maybe the courage, a thing he couldn’t really quite put his finger on. She smiled, fairly confident she’d just proven her suspicion. “I do want to, you goofball. Meet me at the front door in ten minutes? Or will that make you late for work?” “Sure, let me drop my English book at my locker and I’ll be right there, thanks.” She smiled at him and waved—holding his gaze long enough for him to turn and hit his funny bone on a wall-mounted fire extinguisher and do a little bunny-hop in pain and wince, then covering her mouth and looking pitifully at him to let him know that she thought his clumsiness was endearing. 6 Amanda pulled around the front of the high school in her cobalt Nissan Altima to pick him up, pop bottles and McDonald’s bags courteously swept off the back seat to the floor to accommodate Billy’s backpack. She shifted the flamingo air freshener hanging on her rearview mirror so it wouldn’t hang cockeyed and distract her while she drove. She looked away from the flamingo to the front of the school to see Billy exit, stepping uncertainly forward as he panned the lot for her. It occurred to her then that she hadn’t told him what kind of car she drove, so she killed the engine, got out, and waved.

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