{"id":35907,"date":"2017-06-18T11:30:18","date_gmt":"2017-06-18T17:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=35907"},"modified":"2018-09-22T20:24:20","modified_gmt":"2018-09-23T02:24:20","slug":"read-local-first-tamara-pace-thomson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/read-local-first-tamara-pace-thomson\/","title":{"rendered":"READ LOCAL First: Tamara Pace Thomson"},"content":{"rendered":"
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READ LOCAL SUNDAY\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>is your glimpse into the working minds and hearts of Utah\u2019s literary writers. 15 Bytes regularly offers works-in-progress and\/or recently published work by some of the state\u2019s most celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction and memoir.<\/p>\n

Today, we feature Provo-based\u00a0Tamara Pace Thomson<\/b>\u00a0and an excerpt of her short story \u201cLaura.\u201d\u00a0<\/em>An MFA candidate at Brigham Young University with an emphasis in fiction, Tamara also writes poetry and creative nonfiction. She is currently working on a collection of short stories that are all centered on a group of youth patients in a state mental hospital.<\/p>\n

So . . . curl up with your favorite cup of joe and enjoy Tamara Pace Thomson!<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Laura<\/strong>\u00a0(excerpt)<\/em><\/h4>\n

L<\/span>aura carried the laundry out of the laundromat herself. Who else would do it? Perhaps a maid in black patent-leather shoes? What a joke. Not even Steve would ever help her. The canvas bag bulged with kid underwear and socks. Who knew if Steve would ever show his sorry face again. Not that he even knew how the laundry got washed. He would happily wear his jeans until they had to be scraped off his skinny legs if it wasn\u2019t for her. It didn\u2019t matter. He probably couldn\u2019t even figure out how to get quarters for the machines. And then, thought Laura, what a surprise that the clothes got clean at all in the dirty laundromat that smelled like hairspray and rubber toys.<\/h4>\n

What a mess. What a joke. All the cars in the lot seemed shiny and expensive. The concave back door of her Taurus screeched\u2014corroded steel against steel\u2014when she opened it. She heaved the bag (practically as big as her) in with piles of fast food wrappers, baseball hats, old CDs, and used up lotion bottles. A teenage boy and girl walked past\u2014all cheer and self-absorption. He wore tight green pants and a fur boa\u2014she had freckles and dimples and Laura remembered the girl she hated when they were state patients together\u2014so long ago but vivid in her mind as if these fifteen years were fifteen hours and the girl had just arrived on the dorm, all gloom and crying when her mom left and Laura remembered her sitting with her knees pulled up to her head in the hallway, sobbing, and Laura heard the staff talking about her chart. \u201cShe\u2019s a smart one,\u201d said Tina, with her long black braid crimped over her shoulder.<\/h4>\n

And Laura heard Matt, another psych tech, say, \u201cI went to school with her older sister\u2014head cheerleader and homecoming queen\u2014a bit of a snot.\u201d And Laura could see so clearly Matt inviting the girl into one of the TV rooms and talking to her all interested and concerned, and after all this time how Laura still hated her, her soft arms and low top Converse without a star.<\/h4>\n

Laura remembered how smugly the girl with freckles said, \u201cI like to rock climb,\u201d and \u201cI like poetry and French films,\u201d like a little pussy when she introduced herself at the dorm meeting the night the new girl arrived. Laura was the dorm president and in charge of the meeting. The other girls sat rapt on the coral colored couches like the girl was a fucking celebrity and even now Laura could feel her eyes narrowing in disbelief\u2014all the male staff just as enamored as the little lunatic patients\u2014and the girl with her big white teeth that made Laura think of a horse and her eyes still red from crying all afternoon and she never wore mascara or lipstick and she flossed her teeth every single night even though she had to ask for floss from the office (dental floss being a hazard since Camilla tried to strangle herself) like the queen of personal hygiene. \u201cMay I please get my floss,\u201d Laura remembered her saying to the staff each and every night.<\/h4>\n

In the laundromat parking lot, buildings and billboards cast long shadows on every car but Laura\u2019s. After heaving the laundry into the back seat, she opened her door. Soda cups, half-empty water bottles, store receipts, a smashed box of tissue\u2014languished in the heat of the car\u2014the ashtray overflowed with butts, and the sour stench of resin-filled filters in the closed-up heat nearly made her sick. Damn the filth and the scum, thought Laura as she climbed onto the blistering seat then dumped the whole ashtray onto the asphalt without bothering if anyone could see her. The kids were out of school\u2014the whole summer lay ahead like a white hot black hole\u2014nothing to do and nowhere to go, she longed to take them somewhere cool, to the mountains, someplace with a pool like the campground in Tabiona where they went in June the year she was seventeen and in the State Hospital and they slept in giant teepees with wooden floors and swam for hours at a time, and the cooler was always full of Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper, crisp and wet to be drunk whenever they felt like it, even after 5:00, and her therapist stayed all week, even slept in the same teepee and whenever her therapist spoke Laura felt understood and confident, soothed and comforted, and from the path to the pool was a view of miles of aspens and sage brush and the metallic turn of a stream.<\/h4>\n

But here, west of State Street, where she drove through the heat to her motel-turned-apartment, the swimming pool next to her apartment had half-crumbled into itself and it bred mosquitos in the puddle of rain and muck at the bottom. Here, in June, was just the guilt and fear of shifts in the convenience store\u2014the kids at home, Steve god-knows-where, and her weekly AA meeting in the white-plastered basement of a church and the endless blah blah blah of sob story drunks with nothing to do but drink dirt-flavored coffee and talk about how their higher power this and their higher power that.<\/h4>\n

Laura waited at a light, the air in the car like a vacuum voiding her energy. From a black souped-up truck next to her a rabid guitar blared out of the windows. And she thought of last week\u2019s AA meeting when the man with hair so blond it was white and whose mustache grew like a cowboy\u2019s mustache said, \u201cI\u2019m Chris and I\u2019m an alcoholic.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\u201cHi Chris,\u201d the crowd all responded like a bunch of kindergartners.<\/h4>\n

And Chris said, \u201cI didn\u2019t want to come to a meet\u2019n\u201d that is how he said it, meet\u2019n \u201ccause yesterday was the worst day that ever could have been. My mom and dad had my little nephews over to tend and they needed somethin\u2019 for lunch so my dad got in his truck to head to the store and my little nephew, only four years old, he went runnin\u2019 behind that truck and my dad didn\u2019t even know it and now that little guy,\u201d here Chris paused, his eyes were blue and oddly bright, \u201cnow that little guy is in heaven and I didn\u2019t want to come here tonight, no I didn\u2019t, but I knew this is the place I am supposed to be cause my god knows me and he knows I need these meet\u2019ns and my little nephew is where he is safe and where he\u2019s bein\u2019 takin\u2019 care of.\u201d<\/h4>\n

And Laura felt the weight of it. This terrible thing that Chris, with his white hair and long mustache, told a basement full of drunks, and she felt the wordless glaring of something bright and appalling into her gut, and its weight and its brightness was too much and she didn\u2019t want it there, lurking, leering at her, waiting for her to cry or to scream and so Laura thought, My god, what kind of higher power is that?<\/h4>\n

#<\/p>\n

Tamara Pace Thomson has won numerous awards for her fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and for her critical work. You can read more samples of her writing in\u00a0<\/em>Inscape\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0where two of her poems and one of her short stories are published. She lives near Rock Canyon in Provo.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/article>\n

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