bio

Meghan Sweeney has a fleeting wit and mediocre intelligence, and has been accused more than once of smelling like hot dog water. She is a full-time prose ninja and part-time robot in San Francisco. Occasionally, she attends Creative Writing classes at SFSU where she is getting her Masters Degree. She has unpaid work in Laundry Pen and Branches Quarterly's Best of 2003, and her story "Concrete" was nominated for a 2003 Pushcart Prize.

Concrete

She pops a red mint through her red lips and into her dry mouth. She imagines it's a Valium. She is in the movies. Placing her palms on the cold porcelain of the kitchen sink, she turns to smile at the imaginary cameras. She smiles at the window over her sink. She pats down her brown, graying hair, twists the ends together and tosses it over her bare shoulder, noticing once again that the dye is already fading. It seems to fade faster each time. She pushes her tits upward, defying the gray, and adjusts them inside the warm satin fabric of her bra. These are glorious tits. Slowly, she brushes her tongue across her top lip then puckers them into a long distance kiss.

The whine of Derrick's aged Ford struggling up the hill on their street forces her hands back down to the cold sink. The staggering guilt of playing with her breasts, again, in front of the window, turns her body away from the cameras and forces the back of her hand along her lips, over and over again, until all traces of redness are obliterated.

She looks down at the smears across her hands. The red paints a map across her excited veins. The blue rivers of blood cut through the divisions.



A river falls through the background of their honeymoon photo. There's only one photo and that one waterfall, but there's two of them.

In that photo, they stand still and close together, their cheeks almost touching, but not quite. She's 18 years old and three months pregnant, almost showing, but not quite.

His right arm is draped over her perpetually tanned and freckled shoulders in mock casualness, his large fingers not quite knowing whether to grab the flesh of her arm and hold on or dangle carelessly over the bone of her shoulder. So instead, his fingers are caught in mid-thought. Pointed outward and strained.

With his left hand, he holds the camera in front of their faces, his arm fully extended -- the greater the distance between the camera and their faces, the less distorted their noses will appear, he says -- she gives the camera a gum-filled smile. He doesn't. Instead he winces.

Sometimes she stands in front of that photo for hours killing her entire morning, studying the skin around his sharp blue eyes. The skin gathered in folds like pressed laundry. The skin of a wince. That foreboding expression of regret as if he could see, could feel, could know, something beyond her. Maybe it was the sun or the flash or something just beyond the border of that photograph, something that she couldn't quite see. But she felt the separation of that wince. She knew now, after seventeen years of marriage, seventeen years of staring at that photo in its wooden frame, that they were separate -- Derrick's head was smaller than hers.

She wants to get out her measuring tape to make the discrepancy official. She could slide it right over his head, acting like she was hemming a pant leg of one of his work suits. She could cluck her tongue and nod her head in approval and declare: It's official -- Shelley's head is bigger than Derrick's. Then she could draw a moustache on his face, the kind that curls at the end. And they would laugh so wildly that the neighbors would call the police. They'd call to report the unusual behavior seeping out of 349 Anne Sladon Court. You know, the sad house with the concrete yard.

The police would arrive. She would answer the bang on the door, still laughing, and the officer would ask her, "What seems to be the problem, miss? See, the officer would think she was a "miss" because her laughter would have melted the worry wrinkles that landed on her forehead one day when she wasn't paying attention.

Derrick would stroll over -- easing his arm around her waist and pretending to twirl his ink-made moustache with his spare hand -- to explain to the officer that they had discovered their heads are different sizes. And the officer would understand.

She has looped this scenario through her mind many times around. It keeps her there, standing in front of that picture. But when she looks at his wincing face, she knows she can't do it. The silence in the house is invasive.

Instead she leans over and draws a line across the silence at the kitchen table: This is your side and this is mine.



He pulls up on the emergency brake. The dilapidated car moans its twenty-two years of service, its grievances, its pains. It sounds tired as its engine sputters to off.

She follows the sound, opening the front door and standing in the doorway. It's a sticky evening again. She folds her arms, the sweat already seeping through the cotton of her shirt, the stench of fertilized farms creeping across her skin.

She closes the door quickly behind her to prevent a horsefly from swimming past her through the viscous air and into the house. Unable to stroll across their concrete yard, she stands there wondering where to put her arms, where to set her gaze, how to even lean against the house.



It was hot the day Derrick decided on the concrete lawn, and even hotter the day he brought home the cement mixer.

He spread homemade blueprints across the living room floor. Blue ink on white paper, detailing the new yard -- a yard filled with concrete, and a plan filled with hope that the neighborhood cats would stop crapping on the lawn.

When she heard the angry whir of the cement mixer start up, she walked across the floor, over the sheeted plans, to get to the window, secretly enjoying the sound of crinkling paper beneath her toes. She brought a lawn chair, a yellow one with blue stripes and white plastic arms, and set it up in front of the blueprints and behind the window, feeling the carpet instead of the earth on her feet. A low-seated chair, her butt skimmed the floor, so she could just barely see out the window. She imagined she looked like a strange pair of eyes and worried forehead to Derrick, who periodically waved to her from outside.

She stayed at the window for the whole of the afternoon, sipping lemonade and pretending to be hot despite the fan blowing on her at full throttle. The mechanical whir of the cement mixing itself into that messy pile of goop, drowned out any sounds of the fan, even after traveling through the pane of glass.

Derrick had already torn down the big eucalyptus tree, to replace it with smaller, more controllable species. He destroyed her mom's gardenias, those red and purple flowers she would water at night. He ripped her grandma's clinging strawberry plants out from the earth. Now he had a lemon tree, a lime tree and six cacti. He planted them in individual, identical clay pots, of different sizes, on account of the roots. Each plant would be placed five yards apart and two yards away from the new chain-link fence.

While she watched the ripping and the chopping and the pulling and the pouring of the cement on top of the dirt, and the placement of the new plants, she was as ambivalent as Mona Lisa. At least, that's how she saw it. See, she had stopped living there years ago. So a little cement meant nothing to her.

Now the cats crap in the pots, even the cacti, but she doesn't shoo them away. The concrete, baking under the California heat, burns her feet when she tries to walk on it.



She puts on her best smile as Derrick gets out of his car.

"How was your day, honey?"

He looks at her through his sunglasses as they slide down the sweat that has gathered on the bridge of his nose. His forehead and armpits are also drenched in sweat. It's one of those weeks described as a heat wave by the weather channel: "Today's going to be another scorcher!" Those weeks when dogs and babies die behind cracked windows.

"Fine, dear."

He closes the gate behind him. The sound of metal hooks latching into each other. Clicking together so eagerly. As he passes her, opens the door and goes into the house, she feels a rush of cold air hit the back of her neck. A small luxury. She stays there, listening for the sound of the television coming alive. She waits, but the drone of the newscasters doesn't begin. The proverbial laugh track is not chuckling.

She leans on the railing of the front porch steps, pulls out a cigarette and places it between her dry lips. She doesn't smoke anymore. She just enjoys the way they smell before they are lit. The mix of tobacco and paper. And she loves the way it looks in the sunlight, between her lipsticked lips in the reflection of the kitchen window.

She wants to be standing in front of that window now, but she stays. The wind swirls the scent of feline shit around, keeping her company in shared exile.



It was their honeymoon when she realized that wind had a destiny, somewhere to go, somewhere better to get to.

They were traveling up the Pacific Coast Highway in their brand new Ford. She was sitting on a rock covered in yellow lichen, on the border between California and Oregon. The rock had formed itself into a seat, inviting her to join it. So she sat. She planted her feet among the clumps of dry grass. A family of yellow and green and brown blades burnt from the sun stuck out from the seemingly unfertile dirt that covered the hillside, the blades poking their necks out from underneath unwieldy rocks, hanging carelessly over the edge of the cliff, gripping onto the soil, confidently and without fear, to get the best view of the Pacific Ocean.

They were bold blades of grass that reached the middle of her shins. She felt like an intruder among them, so she sat even more still and focused her sight on a few of them.

The wind was pushing them over, but they stayed there, firmly planted in the dirt as they bent with the wind. They stayed. Maybe they thought if they kept firmly planted in that earth that the wind would change someday. Maybe the wind would blow them the other direction, or maybe the wind would stop and just rest for a day. And she thought of Derrick waiting in the car on the side of the road.

She grabbed the tops of her thighs and leaned forward, letting the wind rush into the red hood that protected her head from the winter air. It rushed inside and filled her ears. It moved between the fabric of her hood and her tangled hair, swirled in circles then back out and across the ocean. The wind came in bursts like love, eager at times, silent and hidden at others.

She felt as fragile and strong as a blade of grass. She felt the urgency in the wind, its eagerness to travel across the waves. Felt its destination.

She knew the wind was rushing to dance with wind chimes in Japan. And that someday she would let Derrick know.



Instead she watched Derrick's gradual disappearance. When he started coming home smaller every day, the wind seemed unimportant. She thought her husband must be getting squashed inside some huge factory press, but he didn't work in a factory. He worked outside, building buildings. Launching the world upwards. There must be some secret machine in one of those office buildings. A few buttons, one green and one red, a large lever -- a human press.

If he asked her, she would tell him he was lucky to work outside. If he asked her, she would tell him his job sounded exciting. But he came home a bit shorter and bit more silent, every day.

She imagines that press working down on him. Just a tad, so he wouldn't notice its strength, so he'd suffer in silence. A slight knock on the head. Another tap, his shoed feet on the concrete, and down he'd go.

She knew one day he'd be gone like the rest of them. Gusts and swallows and everything impermanent.



With the dusk settled in, she puts her cigarette back in the pack, tucking it neatly underneath the yellow, potted tulips on the porch. These are her tulips. She goes back inside. The television is still quiet.

Derrick is sitting in the dark, at the kitchen table. She hurries past their honeymoon photo to turn on the lights, eager to see his face for some reason. It is wincing.

"You want a drink?"

He nods his head and runs his short fingers through what is left of his vanishing hair. There used to be more of him, you see. She pours him a glass of single malt scotch. Then she pours herself one. She sets his down in front of him, and tosses hers down her throat.

Braver after the alcohol, she decides to attempt a conversation.

"Do you want to talk about it?" she asks, glancing down the hallway at the still silent television.

He sips his scotch and stares out the blackened window. She stays silent behind his chair. She imagines herself as a blade of grass and pulls her shoulders back, but the courage doesn't last long with her. She considers sneaking away to another part of the house, disappearing until his mood passes, disguising herself in front of the television, but she feels like too much of an intruder to coexist with the house. So she stays, shifting her weight from one leg to the other, like she's at a party, feeling her age.

She tries to think of something interesting to say. Perhaps an anecdote about her day. Maybe a funny story about the neighbors. She stands in silence.

She wants to tousle the remaining hairs on his head. She wants to laugh the way she used to. Instead, she places her hand on his shoulder. The only gesture she can manage. In her hand, she feels his shoulder start to shake.

She tries to concentrate on the movement as if he is the wind, but he isn't. He is Derrick. She feels far away. She squeezes his shoulder to convince him that she is there, hoping that is all he needs, knowing she can do no more, as she flashes her best smile at the blackened window, hoping to catch his gaze in the reflection.