Jasper, Blight, and Daisies
Molly Bonovsky Anderson

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Decrepitude

Here you have a mining house. There’s a shower in the basement where the men slicked the tiles red with clay, grime and ore dust. Or you have a meth-house. After the tweakers moved out you still found rubber tubing snaked through the porch lattice, and the iron pellets scattered in the basement you thought were discarded dogfood were for growing hydroponic weed. Or you have a historic house, a manicured lawn and painted pillars. Registered. Slatted shutters. Or you have a burned up house with peeling tarpaper skin, a rotted roof, and a trampoline in the front yard.
 
Chinese woman seeks mechanic on foot

This is the small-town way to do things. I’m good with accents but the car-talk is foreign to me. She approaches as I round the corner with my son in a stroller. Something’s wrong with her transmission, something’s leaking—these things I gather. I know squat about cars and what’s more, I have no idea who does good work around here. She makes it clear she’s been had, maybe because she’s a woman, maybe because she’s Chinese, maybe because she’s a Chinese woman living in the middle of downtown Ishpeming, Michigan, population six-thousand, five hundred and thirty two. A peninsula connected to the rest of the state by a five-mile bridge. I nod and use my go-to phrases. “Yeah. Oh, man. Geez. Wow.” I can’t stop looking at her eyes. Her lids are lined in chunky, crooked kohl. Her eyebrows have gone away somewhere, and only a few stray hairs sprouting like winter weeds remain. They’ve been gone over in black too. The whites of her eyes are yellow. She’s harder to look at than to listen to. But her leather jacket is smart and she’s wearing fashionable shoes. She’s become my companion here on the street for a while. I keep saying, “good luck, sorry I can’t help more,” thinking she’ll cross the street and be on her way. But she keeps a steady pace with me. I feel we’re friends. I don’t know how much to tell her, how much she cares. I want to ask her what in the world she’s doing here; a question I wish someone would ask me.
When I go inside the Oasis station to use the ATM and restroom, and buy my son an Ocean Spray, she’s there, asking the clerks and customers who does good work. They seem to know her there. Of course they do. I feel guilty for thinking her so alien.
 
Buzz the Gut

Buying diapers and ginger beer down at the Mom & Pop, I ask the blue-aproned young clerks what’s going on in town tonight. “Down on Division,” I say. “People are lined up in chairs like they’re waiting on a parade.” My vowels are open and echoic like aluminum pipe. I don’t fight it anymore.
“I wonder if it’s ‘Buzz the Cut,’” the girl in a crunchy perm and eyeliner says. She might’ve said, “Bust the Gut.”
“What’s that about?” I say, rhyming ‘about’ with ‘goat.”
“Old cars,” she says, before the guy in line behind me, wearing flannel in July, interjects.
“Pasquale’s run,” he says. His eyes are slanted; cat-shaped. He’s textbook obese. “Dey start down in Negaunee. Don’t know if dey come up dis far, dough.”
That must be it, I say, and carry my Huggies and Cock ‘n’ Bull out in a plastic bag.
 
The Knob

A grey-haired couple in a white truck with Wisconsin plates rolls past, turns, and doubles back. "Is that Jasper Knob?" they ask me, pointing to a hilly expanse of trees and rock on the opposite side of the road. I tell them yes, just go up the little stone staircase to find the path. I answer this question about once a week.
Later, the white-truck couple have come down from the knob and settled on old-timer Bill Lauer's porch across the street. The woman baby-talks to Sasha, the black and white toy poodle who wears a red vest. If they didn't know the knob, they don't know Lauer, but strangers only stay that way so long, and they're talking like old friends.

Jasper

It's the striped rock wall that lines my street, it's the street I live on, it's the name of the  brewery uptown, it's the knob, it’s what my husband’s late father called him as a child, it's my son's middle name. I know nothing of mining or jasper or iron ore. I grew up two states away in a Granite City—a stone that sounds light and clean. My grandfather shaped granite into tombstones for a living, into owls and roses for his family. He breathed in granite dust all day. He died of emphysema.

On Second Street, two young men, both lean with long torsos, shirtless in low-slung cargo shorts, stand on the crumbling sidewalk outside a string of low-rent apartments. The dark-skinned one gingerly applies balm to the lower back of the other. Scratched open bug bites glow red on his white skin. They laugh and share a joke. It's an endearing gesture, and they're safe as milk, but looking at them, I can't see them leaving this city, and the thought of my son, that age and still here, standing on a street corner in a backwards baseball cap, troubles me.

I stop next to a burned out building and adjust the stroller awning. "This is one of those blight buildings," I whisper. The city’s been allotted funds for a "blight removal project" in which some eleven buildings; eight residential and three business, will be torn down. Burned-out buildings evoke stories of meth, cigarettes, negligence. When I return home, I found I've left the waffle iron plugged in, and had my house burned down, the same could've been suspected of me.
 
Downtrodden

There is a meme on the internet: a picture of boxer Mike Tyson, infamous for his lisp. The text reads, "Ithpeming is methed up," the joke being "methed" instead of "messed" is actually pretty accurate. It's funny, and painful.
Yesterday I called the cops on my neighbors across the back alley. From what I could hear, a big bad man was stalking his girlfriend around the house, screaming obscenities and mocking her tears while a couple of children shouted in the silences between. She screamed back, voice wavering, desperate. It took me over half an hour to contact someone, as the phone number listed both in the phone book and on the police station website yielded only a long series of rings, a click, and more rings. When I finally reached an officer through 911, I told him this. He said something about the other officer being out on patrol, that's why no one picked up the non-emergency line. This makes sense in Mayberry in 1960, but in no city in the 21st century. I didn't tell him that I'd grabbed my son out of the kiddie pool in our front yard, still wet and naked, and rushed inside the house, locked the doors and pulled the curtains. I assume everyone here has guns, and that this guy, after he lost it and shot his girlfriend, would come for us, because my son had been shrieking happily and splashing in the pool, and no one gets to have fun around here on this guy’s bad day.

This is where long-stemmed daisies sprout like snowdrifts from every grass border, alongside wild yellow blooms, Indian paintbrushes, and purple clover. I never mean to sound like I think I’m superior. This is my home and it's what I absorb and project back out, whether vitriolic or bucolic.
Still, we have to get out of here.  Outside some houses, you can smell the poverty.

There’s a building on Hill Street with a handmade sign out front. “For sale by owner. 5 1-bedroom units. Way below appraisal.” I can’t imagine anyone living there in its current condition. The front’s not sided, it’s just old, damp looking dark wood slats that go straight down into the grass, and nothing that looks like a foundation. A bare lightbulb swings in a top floor unit. The back door is open to a dim and crooked staircase. I’m reminded of the scene in “Pretty in Pink” where Molly Ringwald, the girl from the wrong side of the tracks, tells rich kid Andrew McCarthy to "just drop me off here," because she doesn't want him to see where she lives.

Pigeon house

The front half is occupied but the back has been taken over by birds that nest under the eaves and have coated the siding a dove-grey hue of shit. The whole house coos. It trembles, spits out feathers, hums and breathes with the life of busy, ring-necked raptors. Sometimes they flash out, unexpected and expedient like the sudden blast of a blowtorch, over my head, over the alley and out into the city.
This is a poor city. Sixteen miles from a college town.
Student loan debt is a comedic, Jabba-The-Hutt sized monster, pushed back under the bed and snickered at. The sun will collapse and fall blazing to the earth before it’s paid off. At the income-based rate of fifty-seven dollars a month, it's like throwing popcorn at the moon.

It's no secret, no guess; the future here is reduced priced lunches. There’s history here, sure, like anywhere—crack a book, thumb through a brochure, search “world’s largest gemstone outcropping,” once a booming mining town full of theater and enterprise, but this particular history is mine. Uncatalogued, unchecked, unfiled, fluttering around loose-leaf, like tarpaper scraps torn from rooftops, solstice leaves and gutter wrappers.
 
At the IGA, a mom and her teenage daughter are in line front of me. The mom wants her malt liquor double bagged. ‘Oh my god, Mom, no one cares,” the daughter says.
 “Well, I’m walking down the street,” the mom says, rhyming “down” with “stone.”
 “Mom,” the girl insists, “this is Ishpeming! Everyone drinks.”
When I get in the car, I tell my husband this, and he nods. “It’s true,” he says. I deposit a 6 pack of Corona in the back next to the baby seat.
One day I’m pushing my son in a kiddie swing at the park, while his father shoots hoops. A kid rides a fat-tired bike in circles in the parking lot. He calls to his friend, presumably the owner of the bike.
 “Man, it’s hard to pop wheelies on this thing.”
 “I know,” the other kid says. “The tires are bigger than my dick.”
 
A green house on my street that looks like a rotten tooth and stinks is to be torn down as part of the blight removal project. I’m glad, but embarrassed that something that close to my home is such an eyesore it needs to be destroyed.
Over a plate of soft cheese and a couple beers, my neighbor Joe tells me how one guy on this street, drunk off his gourd, took a fluorescent tube-light and went at a lamp-post, Jedi light-saber style, and smashed the thing to shards that flew into Joe’s garden.
What Joe and his wife don’t want to tell me, is that a decade ago in the house kitty-corner across the alley from theirs, a man named Lompre stabbed his wife to death, then blew his own life through his ribcage with a hunting rifle. He’d recently had brain surgery, and worked at the prison. One or both of these things must have messed him up. A family with kids lives there now. Sometimes I see them with their noses pressed up against the screen door, staring.

Anthony

​​I run into an acquaintance in the street. He's an educated, articulate man, with both a lisp and a stutter. His daughter, maybe eight years old, is a beautiful creature in cornrows and a faded sundress. He seems simultaneously displaced, and like he's been part of the scenery forever. He carries an air of defeat. He tells me his wife will have C-section next week. She’s forty years old and diabetic. “That’ll make seven of us, packed like rats," he says, in their small house on Main Street.  I compliment his daughter on her dress. She tells me she isn't supposed to talk to strangers, and stares into a puddle on the curb outside of Brogie's bar— black water choked with cigarette butts. 
 
Somewhere, my son has lost a shoe. I’m irritated because he only has two pairs, and these were his sole summer sandals. In St. Vincent DePaul's store, while I clacked through used picture frames, a little girl of six or seven had approached him, grabbed his hands, and nearly climbed in the stroller with him. When she looked up at me, she had that unmitigated joyful smile that seems exclusive to children with Down syndrome. Later, when I notice the shoe is missing, I wonder if she'd taken it and slipped it in a grimy pile of secondhand clothes and toys. I backtrack over the crummy sidewalks, alleys and side streets, but don’t find it.
 
A week later, Anthony finds me at work, at the University. He carries a digital camera with photos of his newborn son. He’s in scrubs, his hair under a blue shower cap. I don’t remember him being in the nursing program. He tells me he just came from the hospital. His son was born an hour ago. He had to get out of there for a while, he says.
 
Blight, unremoved
 
The green house was supposed to go down—the city said they’d complete the project before the first snow, but it’s already October. I spy for things to steal, but there’s nothing I want. A broken mailbox, a torn Easter basket on the lawn, some dirty plastic flowers. The grass is waist-deep, the wooden fence around the back yard bows out into the alley. An animal or child could go missing in there for days. I’ve been growled at from that tall grass. I spy rusted coffee cans through the streaky windows and raggedy curtains. Every doorway leans and sags, primed to fall with the weight of a single footstep. Ropes dangle down from the roof-peak, hooks on the end. I imagine scaling up only to sink through the soft shingles. Long ago, someone must’ve had the idea to re-roof the place. That idea must’ve died, but the ropes stayed, and I imagined the occupants scaling their own house in the middle of the night, to sober up in the moonlight while I slept.
 
Old-timer Bill Lauer says we’re getting new sewer and gas lines. They’re going to repave Jasper Street. The asphalt is full of green and purple spray paint circling storm drains, arrows pointing out the flow of waste from house to sewer to facility to churn into clean water and come back again. Our property value will go up. This may be, not long from now, just another small-town street where yellow leaves fall at the edge of  yards,  a mix of old and new houses, all occupied by nice people, some with secrets, but nothing you need to know—all you need to know to live here is that your house is the best one on the street, because you see these things, because you care, because you try to beautify with lawn ornaments and flower gardens and windsocks, and because you stay, when everyone else is moving away. Staying like the daisies that crop up on long, hearty stalks, too stubborn to be cut. 

About the Author:
​Molly Bonovsky Anderson is from central Minnesota. She studied Philosophy, Art History, and English at Northern Michigan University. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Passages North, Penduline Press, Big Fiction, Driftwood Press, The Flexible Persona, Burrow Press Review, and other print and online journals. She lives in Upper Michigan with her husband and son, and is fond of train whistles and lawn ornaments. 

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