The Open Road



The petulant visitor worried the deadbolts on the front door as she sat in the close and airless room---a tinny Glenn Miller track trilling.

"Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me.
Anyone else but me.

With anyone else but me..."





She stood up and checked the locks. Then she checked them again. And one more time. Just to be sure.

He was sneaky, this snake-oil-slinging swashbuckler poised outside her door. He was also unexpectedly patient. More patient than she could ever hope to be.

The trembling tip of her cigarette leapt to life with each reckless inhalation as she contemplated his infuriating endurance.


Hiding inside the inky darkness she remembered the time he knocked on her window in Denver, and how, by the light of a waning moon, he somehow convinced her to move to Los Angeles, California where she didn't have a job. Or friends. Any home. Or a plan.

It would not be the first time she'd crumbled.

"Just pack your stuff. Just go!" he'd harangued her as the moonbeams puddled at her bare and frigid feet that stood in an apartment she could no longer afford, when he convinced her to move from New Jersey to North Carolina.

"Just one thought, can change your life."

And so, she left. She always left eventually. Even after "sitting on her hands" like her friend Debbie Devito had taught her to do whenever she contemplated saying or doing anything incredibly stupid or juvenile.

She sat on her hands a lot.

She also did a lot of leaving, because her gentleman caller was charming and alive and he smelled like the beaches in San Felipe and the hotel rooms in Europe, and cross-country Greyhounds, and vast open spaces and how you'd think think freedom would smell, if it had a scent.

The grandfather clock ticked off the fading moments of indecision as she wondered if she had finally outgrown him. If the fanfare and the new had somehow lost its lustre, or allure.


"Be fair to me and I'll guarantee...
I won't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but you, till you come marching home."

She placed one hand, upon the door.


-Tara Callahan

Skin Deep Beauty


As I stood at a gas station eking out its squalid existence on a stark stretch of road just south of nowhere, I glanced up to see a billboard sign emblazoned with a six-foot-tall elk head. Under the unfortunate head the sign read:

Taxidermy--1/2 Mile.



The ancient gas-pump coughed and whirred, its dingy mechanical digits heaving skyward as I propped myself on the hood of the car to ponder this macabre omen.

It was all very The Hills Have Eyes meets Night of the Living Dead and as I watched a discarded Diet Coke can rattle across the parking lot, I was fully prepared for a team of lurching zombies to burst out of the men's bathroom armed with a rapidly mutating virus and gargantuan elk heads.

I'm always fully prepared for something plausible to happen.

As the hairs leapt to attention at the base of my skull and the goosebumps on my arms sprang to life, I got to thinking that right about now would be as good a time as any, to own a gun.

Thankfully the gas tank filled and I hopped into my ride and sped away before I was forced to fend off any infected undead or homicidal maniacs. But my manic brain couldn't leave the taxidermy sign alone and while fishing around on the internet a few hours ago, I stumbled upon a website that was in some ways, creepier than the shiftless little zombie-infested service station.

"Learning Taxidermy the Fun and Easy Way---on DVD! 40% off the perfect beginner course!! Four-DVDs including Deer, Fish, Duck and Squirrel!"

Grotesquely intrigued, I clicked onto the informational link where an audio clip of a waxen and lifeless looking gentleman (pictured here)
informed me that whether I was simply looking to save hundreds by doing my own taxidermy---or looking to make thousands of dollars by starting my own taxidermy business, this was the course for me.

That audio must have been recorded right before his business partner turned him into a bipedal mount.

Now, far be it for me to find fault with someone else's hobbies. I mean, I have some whoppers of my own so I try not to be too judgemental. Or mental.

But taxidermy? I don't know. I think that might be a deal-breaker. Like, say I was asked on a date by a super good-looking guy who shared many of my dreams and aspirations, who didn't have any ridiculous emotional baggage and happened to be the head surgeon at Duke with a summer house in Vermont that he flew his biplane to every other weekend.

Say that same guy asked me out on a date and we got along like peas and carrots and laughed until our sides ached.

If that same guy brought me to his home and shared this little hobby with me?

I'd shut it down. Post haste.

It just seems that the next logical step after skinning an animal and stretching its chemically- treated flesh over a stuffed semblance of that same animal---- is skinning a date, and stretching her chemically treated flesh into some sort of suit jacket.

Call me crazy.

-Tara Callahan

Inside Out

"Well honey, the yard certainly needs weeding," my mother informed me over breakfast on the back porch just yesterday morning.

"Look at them. They're taking over the yard. The situation is out of control."

I glanced up from our daily Garner, North Carolina newspaper, otherwise known as "The Baptist Manifesto," and stared into the legion of trees flanking the lawn.

"You know what? I don't see any weeds Mom."

This wasn't the rhapsodic response she'd hoped to illicit. I could tell. So she tried again...

"Oh don't be silly honey, they're right there. How can you possibly miss them?"

We've been having the 'weed conversation' for approximately 3 months now, and seem to possess entirely different views on what constitues the nature of a weed. Where she sees a weed, I see an innocent sapling trying to sprout out of a maliciously shorn trunk. Where I see an innocent tree, she sees an invasive interloper hell-bent on making a mockery of her prudent pièce de résistance---aka, The Yard.

What I did not know until I moved into my parent's home a few months ago, is that my mom's diabolical definition of a weed is anything she didn't actually plant in the yard herself--- be it a rogue wildflower, a tangle of tulips, or an entire cluster of crape myrtle trees.

Against my better judgement and because this is not my house and I therefore do what I am told without asking questions--- today I donned a pair of raggedy gardener's mitts, grabbed a rusty hedge trimmer, and set out to singlehandedly rid the yard of unwelcome vegetation.

My Dad threw out a bit of local wisdom, just before jumping into the car and driving away--

"Remember, if it has three leaves, leave."

That bit of color commentary was supposed to prevent me from getting into a tussle with one of more than a thousand poison ivy patches dotting the perimeter.

It was at about this point that I started thinking about my former life as an adult, in Los Angeles, California. And my gardener who would show up every Wednesday evening to blow leaves from my stoop, pull actual weeds from my shrubbery and water the dusty pavement.

Now, somehow, I am the gardener.

I'm not a tree hugger by nature, simply because I don't have what it takes to actually put myself behind any sort of cause for more than three seconds before feeling that the cause is asking too much of me.

But today, I felt for the trees. And the flowers. And well...the weeds. Because they were simply trying to do their thing.

Manicured lawns and razor-edged driveways and woodchip-lined walkways never really made any sense to me. It's like systematically trying to make the outside of the house, be the inside of the house.

"Here is the carpet. We call it the lawn, but it's really the green carpet. We like the lawn to be approximately as long as the carpet fibers in the livingroom. Can you do that? And trim up those edges. We need a straight lines."

The guy next door mows his lawn so precisely that I'm convinced he's devised an exit strategy to prevent footprints.

But again, this is not my home. And when my services are needed, I must comply. So I trimmed. And I tore. And I traumatized not a few young tree-lings.

The morning sort of went as such:

"I'm sorry..." snip.

"I know, I should seriously consider growing a backbone..." clip.

"Why did I ever decide to go back to school? I hate school..." rip.

"Please don't hold this against me. Look, I'll save you. Let's just cover you in a bit of mulch. You can still breathe right? Just don't move ok? You can still photosynthesize through that one free leaf, right? Don't try to SPROUT for christsakes. Stay put. For the love of God, she's watching."

Euclid would be proud. We are now far more geometrically consistent than we were at 9am this morning.

I however, am not proud. But I can't deal with another fall now anyway.

--Tara Callahan