Eric Rossborough Eric Rossborough finds Southern Wisconsin an exciting place, full of undertones and spiritual energy. Originally from the Boston area, he lived in Southern California for seven years. Before moving to Madison he spent the winter in a tent in the woods of Northern Wisconsin. Eric has been writing since he was sixteen. His work has appeared in Premiere Generation Ink, Schizmogenesis, Speak Out!, The Madigan Pages, Sun-Optikos, and other publications.

Maine Coast

     Wheee! Me peering down through the hole in the floor at Uncle Ray's house, the guest bedroom. The hole was a kind of grate thing, with bars. I could look down into the lighted kitchen from the darkened bedroom after I'd been sent to bed. I could see the goings on in the kitchen, the warm talk of the women, my mother and aunt, drying the dishes. I don't think they'd mind if I watched. One night Uncle Ray put me to bed and I said my prayers and he said some too. I had these rote prayers I said every night. I had no idea what they meant. He told me he remembered me in his prayers every night. I was like — really? I mean I only saw him once a year. He thought about me every weekend and all year? Wow. I didn't think about him all that much, when I wasn't around. How could he remember me every night when I didn't see him for so long? It seemed like a good idea, I knew, to remember him every night in prayer, but it would mean including my sister Amy, and Aunt Jean and Uncle Norman, and it was just too much work. I wasn't going to sit there at night and pray for everyone I knew. It would take too long. I'd be up all night. The house was on a spit of land that stuck into the raw open sea. It was enough to feel secure sitting on the tucked in sheets with the wood all around. You could see the studs in the walls, painted a simple gray. There were collected seashells sitting on the two by fours. My mother said the mattresses were uncomfortable, and she never really got along with her brother. He hit her in the head with a roller skate when they were four years old. Threw it across the room and hit her. That house was closer to the water, closer to the earth. It stood on stanchions and the underneath was covered with a latticework of slats painted light green. You'd step underneath through the door of slats and you were still standing on the ground. Uncle Ray kept his lawn mower under there. One morning he got out a rifle to go after a porcupine or squirrel or something that had been fucking with his garden or chewing up the wood on his house. I wanted to go with him, but I was told to stay in. My sister Cynthia screamed at him. "Pig! You're a murderer. You're going to kill a defenseless porcupine!" I knew right then and there that the fun of shooting something would overtake whatever was wrong about doing it. What did Cynthia know about porcupines anyway? She'd probably never even been near one. My mother wouldn't allow shells and sand and guns to be trucked into our house. I knew then, I guess. And that was even before I started reading about Daniel Boone. Uncle Ray's bookshelves were full of paperback westerns with color covers, I loved them. I was too young to read a whole book with no pictures, but I could look at the covers and dream of the day. In the bedroom there was a whole box of curse filled read and forgotten westerns. I knew they dealt with sudden violence and dry places and there was something in me that instinctively reached out to that. No one else cared about these westerns. A-dults would sit and smile indulgently as I went from cover to cover kneeling by the bookcase. The men would sit back in the soft chairs and smile indulgently as they sipped their martinis, smile in the midst of small talk. Now I can see that they were bored. I know, I've been in their shoes since. They should have gotten off on my trip. I would have shown them something.

__________________________________________

King Of The Road

     "Trailers for sale or rent/rooms to let fifty cents." Roger Miller wrote the first line off a sign and then he was stuck, so he bought a little toy hobo and stared at it in a motel room Œtill he came up with the rest of the song. Now you can't rent rooms for fifty cents, so people put a sign in the bathroom mirror of a highway rest area. HELP. WE ARE STRANDED WITHOUT MONEY AND ARE TRYING TO GET TO RELATIVES IN COLORADO. WE ARE IN THE BROWN STATION WAGON TO THE RIGHT. The brown station wagon looks mighty unmoving when you come out from taking a leak. A kid hangs out the half opened window, something orange smeared on his chin. Some other people lay on the grass in front of the car grill. Oh boy. Let's get out of here. Rest areas will become de facto cities of their own. The toilets will stop up. It won't be safe to take a leak in the urinal. You'll have to stop by the side of the road and pee into the sagebrush through a wire fence.
     That "King Of The Road" is such a wholesome couch listening type of song. My mother hummed along when I put it on their record player recently. I can picture my parents mixing drinks in their gameroom in Wayland in the early sixties, humming that song. They would have been in their forties then. The prime of life. My Dad told me about the suburbs when I was a little kid, about how good it was. I'd follow him around as he did his yard chores, asking a lot of questions. "Well," he said, "when I was growing up in the thirties the suburbs hadn't been invented yet. They didn't have anything so good back then." He told me about the dream of owning a home with a yard to putter around in, space for your children to play. It was an unheard of dream in the thirties when my father's father worked for the Whiting Milk Company. He delivered milk in a horse drawn wagon and did not miss a day of work for six years. My father and I stood there, on the lawn, as he clipped hedges, sweating. You could smell the newly turned dirt for the marigolds underneath us, rich and black. In the sixties, such leisure cost only forty hours a week, and your wife could stay at home. Twenty and more years of good economy, since World War Two. My parents had no reason to imagine that we would ever want for anything.