I was eight years old when my father finally let me on his fishing boat for the first time. I remember waving goodbye to the swarthy fisherman who sat on the docks sorting nets and ropes, his wide silhouette disappearing in the folds of the low morning clouds. Soft wisps of white shrouded everything, curling around the other boats in the harbor like whispers of snakes lovingly intertwined. The whispers encircled us, too, and in the ring of white it seemed like we weren’t moving at all. My father stood solemnly on the deck with his eyes closed. I closed mine, too, and heard the muffled tickle of the ocean against the boat. Then, as the clouds began to dissipate and the world reappeared, I felt taller, lighter. Blue prairie stretched out in all directions, and above my head, the mast pierced the sky, a single steeple pointing to the sun.

My father likes this story. He always ends it by telling how he watched my expression as the fog lifted, and laughed, saying, “Juan, this is just a boat. We’re here to catch fish.” As the spray from the breaking waves sprinkled over my face, though, I imagined the icy flecks of water soaking through my skin and into my bloodstream.

Today on my father’s fishing boat, molded by his own thickly veined hands, the brush-stroke clouds and the usual mist speckling my cheeks are absent. I can’t feel them like I did nine years ago. A fish head rolls over my foot, the purple feather gills hardening. The rigging screams, and a rumbling voice summons me to throw in the nets. Fine grains of sawdust fill the tiny spaces underneath my fingernails. They pack in so tightly that my nails bend away from the skin, almost ready to snap off. I think about diving into the cold water and swimming until they all dissolve.

Soon there is a break in the schools. The water that had bulged with the masses of silver bodies darkens and empties.  My father begins to prepare more lines and nets, but I sprawl out on the deck and pull a tiny wooden figurine from my pocket. I’ve been working on her for a few days, and she really is as beautiful as I imagine she’d be running across the Serengeti.  Her legs are thinner than our thinnest rope, but the wood is strong and durable. I shape her body now, shaving thin strips of wood off layer by layer. More sawdust packs under my fingernails.

My father comes up behind me, and I quickly slip my knife and the gazelle into my pocket. His face is like granite as he summons me back to work. Hours of salt and wet rope gnaw my skin; hours of sweat and the smell of fish infuse my shirt.  When we return to the harbor, the sky behind us is dripping pink and orange. We talk with some other fishermen before heading home, and my father discusses the tides, the weather, and the movements of the fish. He walks with a slight lift in his step, only the balls of his feet touching the ground. The rest of him belongs to the sea.  I know he’ll stay excited and anxious until tomorrow, when we slither out into the white mist of curling snakes and splash, once again, into the water.

I work more on the gazelle after dinner. The swirling grains of wood are fingerprints on her flank, and I trace the subtle contours for a few moments. I finish carving sooner than I thought I would, and I place her carefully on the shelf by my bed. She is frozen, mid-leap, next to a swan, horse, eagle, and elephant.  I can almost feel the wind rushing past her.  The only grey thought that slinks into my mind as I smile back is that tomorrow I won’t have anything to focus on besides fish.

Sometime in the night, I wake suddenly.  Bewildered, I see a shadow next to my bed blocking out the moonlight. My throat convulses as the shadow turns slightly. Yellow light washes over my father’s face. I relax for a moment, but just for a moment; while the face glowing above me is his face, it’s a face I’ve never seen. He is staring at my wooden animals, unaware that I am awake, and his eyes are glistening. The corners of his mouth lift upward, and he looks like he’s listening to a faraway song, or to the memory of a song.

His thin body sways forward, his left hand reaching up, and for a moment I think he’s going to fall. I must have made a noise, because he looks straight into my open eyes. His expression is that of someone caught; I feel like I’m intruding, and not the other way around. No words come.  He turns and walks quickly out of my room.

“I know that look,” my father says the next morning. We are on the boat again, and those are the first words he has said to me..

I glance over my shoulder at him. I see my own face in thirty years’ time. He has kind brown eyes in a face eroded by the wind and sun.

“Oh, yeah?” I laugh. “It’s my I’m-going-to-catch-a-bigger-fish-than-you look.”

“Yes,” he says simply, quietly. I grip the railing tightly.

“Let’s take a break,” he suggests, pulling his lines in.

I watch him warily as he springs to his feet, more agile than any worn, stone man. I can’t connect this new man to the fisherman with whom I spend every day. He has that laughing crease near his eyes, and I wonder again what this is about.

As if I’d asked him, he nods at me, and I stare at him in amazement as he climbs over the railing and flings himself into the sky. I run to the starboard side, and he’s grinning like a boy, bobbing in the water, arms windmilling to keep him afloat. I hear two sounds, like yells, but less controlled—shorter and ecstatic. We’re both laughing. Before I know it, I’m climbing the rail too, and then flying, and then shocked from the water. The salt pricks my eyes, and I’m breathing in sharply and splashing. The current pulls at my legs, but I’m stronger, and I swim out away from the boat before circling to join my father. I can’t see the bottom, and my feet dangle in the ocean. I let out a howl. I feel the sawdust lift out from under my nails.

—Leah Schecter is a staff writer.

and when I asked
for the waking
to stop, a frost gauzed over
every nerve
that could answer, who,
a slit of clear was barely
scraped from the window-ice,
small rune, chipped away
by the beak of some
liquid breathing god, whose
seedblood-soaked tongue licked
visible oil palimpsests, thumbprints
on glass, floes ripped, bobbined to
red threads, new wet, in chest, who,
I can never codify, cut, cull or
love appropriately, what
lashes over me, clotlight
staining, knifing through eyelid,
constant as the sinuous
wet contortions of your sleeping
anatomy, who, gone still
on French leave, dunes dry to
ruins, Colombian, Chinese,
to re-summon your
jasper calves I’ve touched
is like excavating
a fear, described once under
hypnosis, the sudden
fury of ten proud horses,
the cruel tongue-prick of juniper

—Justin Wymer is co-director of staff writers.

When I was three and a half years old, my parents informed me that in a few months I would no longer be an only child. They took me to childbirth education class for kids, where a kindly earth mother told us how wonderful it would be to get a little brother or sister while our parents watched approvingly. At the end of the class, we were each given a large baby doll and shown the proper way to cradle it. The doll had hardly been in my arms a few seconds when, overcome with revulsion, I threw it on the ground and stamped its head with my foot as hard as I could. After my new baby sister, Lydia, was brought home, I was not permitted to touch her, no matter how many times I asked.

But I never hated my sister. It was dolls that repulsed me. At four, my best friend Jacob had several dolls, but if I came into contact with one, I would throw it across the room immediately, much to Jacob’s confusion. When given a doll as a gift, it was exchanged the next day at Toys “R” Us for an art kit or a gumball machine. When cast as Mary in the church production of the nativity scene, I refused to touch or even be within five feet of the baby Jesus.

When I was five, some relative sent me a Barbie doll for Christmas. This was different. Instead of a lumpy ball for a head, this doll had elegantly defined features with purple eyelids and breasts. My parents put the doll in the pile that needed to be exchanged, but when no one was looking, I grabbed the unopened box, took it into my room, and opened it. Barbie’s sexy clothes could come off, be put back on, and promptly be taken off once more. I was intrigued.

My sister Lydia received her first Barbie one year later. Not sure what to do with it, she tried pointing it at people and shouting, “Pow pow Barbie.” Guns were a no-no in my house, and even imaginary violence was frowned upon. My mother forbade us from using our Barbie dolls as pretend guns. Naturally, I encouraged Lydia to keep it up.

When I was six, I was introduced to cable television, and subsequently the “Cut ‘N Style Barbie.” The commercial showed the multi-racial little girls gradually cutting off all of Barbie’s hair until she had the equivalent of a crew cut. While the voice sang, “You can cut and style it, over and over. Long hair like magic, over and over,” the hair sparkled, and an instant later was as long as if it had never been cut. I was less impressed by the opportunity to cut and style a doll’s hair than I was intrigued by the magic that would make hair grow long in mere seconds. I imagined all the things I could do with this newfound power. Determined to see this magic happen in my living room, I diligently saved my two-dollar a week allowance for five weeks, until “Cut ‘N Style Barbie” was mine. Expecting a magic wand, I was surprised to find a foot long hunk of Barbie hair. Nevertheless, I avidly cut off all of Barbie’s hair and incanted the lines of the commercial. After several varied attempts, my crying attracted the attention of my parents, who gently explained that “long hair like magic” meant Velcro on the back of Barbie’s head.  This disappointed me even more than the absence of a shower of foam berries after taking a bite of Berry Berry Kix.  Cut ‘N Style Barbie would be the first of many Barbies to lose her head. We buried her in the back yard next to our dead cat.

Cut ‘N Style Barbie was not the last advertisement to catch my attention.  That same year I discovered the my-size Barbie Car.  After seeing it on the shelf of Toys “R” Us, I could think of little else.  All day at kindergarten, I daydreamed about how I would make my escape, zipping down the road like a grown-up headed to a pink hotel with turquoise walls as my parents begged me not to go. I asked Santa for a pink one but he made no promises.  Undeterred by the foot long “Barbie Glam Convertible Car” I found under the tree, I resolved to force myself to dream about driving one every night henceforth so as to enjoy the experience in my imagination. My recitation of the words “Barbie Car, Barbie Car, Barbie Car” before falling asleep failed to make this happen, although they did succeed in aggravating three year old Lydia sleeping the bunk bed below me.  One night my wish did come true, except that my “dream car” was equipped with an en suite toilet as well as a miniature version for the forty or so stuffed bears that were along for the ride.

As our collection of Barbies grew, so did the intensity of our games.  The addition of a Ken doll changed everything, as all the women now had to compete for the one man. Our Barbies developed a violent streak, and our collection was divided into villains and heroines. I instructed dark-haired Lydia to bite off the hands of the brunette Barbies, in order to mark them as villains who would then antagonize the blonde heroines more closely resembling myself. Several years later, she asked if I knew how her Aqua Barbie lost her hand. I told her that I couldn’t remember.

There was often trouble in the paradise of Barbie and Ken’s romance. Barbie disappointed Ken the day after their marriage in her refusal to wear sexy lingerie. Every time they passed by Victoria’s Secret, he would offer to buy her a sexy present only to be reviled as a “Terrible pervert!” and that he mustn’t say such things in front of the imaginary children. In art class, I made small ceramic plates (after finishing my clay dinosaur) that Barbie could then throw at Ken during their innumerable marital fights. Only one of our many Kens managed to keep his neck whole throughout his life and was permanently christened “The Ken Without a Broken Neck.”

However, domestic scenes of tax arguments grew stale when Lydia and I learned about the mechanics of sex. Our mother was very straightforward in her description of the process. But it was Barbie and Ken who taught us about sexuality. When Barbie was adorned in one particular pink and gold dress, we knew just how badly Ken wanted her. Our family discussions about sex were so frank and without taboo that some social cues did not come naturally to us. We were very confused when our mother told us that the airplane was not an appropriate place to shout, “She’s sooooo irresistible,” nor was it a good place for naked Barbie and Ken thrashing. To prevent another scene, she temporarily confiscated our Barbies before visiting our seventy-one year old grandmother.  The discovery of our grandmother’s collection of harlequin romances from the 1970s kept us occupied during the trip and inspired many new storylines for our Barbies to re-enact.

At thirteen, I could no longer publicly admit to playing with Barbies. While I may have “given” my Barbies to Lydia, I still could be found “watching” her Barbie plays continually, giving her extensive directions on what the plot should be. It came to Lydia’s attention after seven years of sharing Barbies that I had made it a habit to suck on Barbie shoes. We could never find two of a kind, and the shape fit so comfortably in my mouth that I never thought of them as good for anything else. Lydia was appalled by my behavior and blamed me for the absence of matching shoes. She informed me that I was no longer permitted to “assist” her in the Barbie storylines. I proceeded to object, but she pointed out that the Barbies were now her property. When she wasn’t looking, I pocketed four high-heeled shoes.  They vanished from my desk the next day and were found in the back of the piano (our new cat’s favorite hiding place) one year later, along with a dozen other tiny shoes.

The day came when even Lydia would abandon her Barbie games in favor of real boys and evening gowns she could fit into herself. Our favorite surviving dolls, who, coincidentally, were all blonde, and “The Ken Without a Broken Neck” rest peacefully in an Adidas box at the bottom of my closet until the day when our children will be old enough to discover the keys to their own innocent childhood imaginations.

—Julia Winn is co-director of staff writers.

Flat-colored gecko, sun-bathed
       mossy back, shovel nose, one eye gleaming,
       the other half-asleep and twitching
                                behind damp eucalyptus leaves.
                    Tail curls into
the corner of the cell, whipping green to glass.

       Twitching,
          the runners race on treadmills to the clouds,
           a whirring, gasping rush, sabotaged air streaming.
              Their backs are leaking, nostrils bloom and collapse,
                             one eye is glazed,
                             the other, rolled toward the clock.
                         The effort and the heat foam,
                             gurgling over
                                reddened cheeks and spinning
                                   strips of rubber.

                       So, tap,
                               the crush of green and smooth, shrill
               translucence, mime cages with real glass,
                the other side, untouched snow,
            white even in shadow.

Leaping off the supply of sweat-heavy air,
         like stepping from Earth’s atmosphere
              to watch far planets swim in thick jelly,
                     large marbles in a deliciously
                                                              silent jar,
                               sealed tight,
                                  not one breath
                                    to move the space,
                                      nothing
                                         to break it.

—Stephanie Wang is an associate editor.