Free Riverine by Angela Palm

all the time, why did people have to say out loud everything they had done wrong?
    Bread and Wine, 14
    After Catholicism ignored me, I went to the Methodist church in town. If I stayed at this church for a year, I would become an official member and a blue name tag would hang on the welcome board each Sunday, and each Sunday I would pin my name tag with my very own name to my sweater. After a while I might be asked to be responsible for something important, like handing out napkins during refreshment hour. To exhibit enthusiasm for this church and to show my commitment, I signed up for community events that they hosted—car washes and working at Wednesday dinners. At Wednesday dinners, anyone could eat a hot, home-cooked meal with seconds and dessert for three dollars. At first I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want home-cooked food when everyone knew eating out was so much better. It seemed like a crappy combination. You had to go out and pay, but you ate bad food. But after a few weeks, I decided I’d rather eat than help in the kitchen. As it turned out, the food tasted amazing and came from Family Recipes. My family had no Family Recipes. We ate overcooked pork chops with no seasoning or boiled hot dogs and canned vegetables or went to McDonald’s. Even our potatoes came canned, or else in flakes. I was angrier than ever because my mother had never cooked manicotti.
    Astral Projection, 15
    The religious roulette ended after the Methodist dinners stopped. It ended up being one more community that was inaccessible to a fifteen-year-old without a whole family alongside her. Books, though, had never shut me out or made me feel like I didn’t belong. When I gave up churches, Mandi and I started asking our mothers to take us to the nearest bookstore to hang out on Sunday afternoons. We read for hours at Barnes & Noble—the closest bookstore to my parents’ house, a forty-minute drive away. We became interested in alternative religions and purchased instructive books on dream interpretation, palm reading, and astral projection. After studying up on astral projection, we decided to try it ourselves. We locked my bedroom door and dimmed the lights. The book said to lie supine , but I confused the term with lupine , imagining my eyes as two bright, sunward-reaching flowers. A diagram on page four of the book helped me correct my error. In addition to the bookstore trips, I had also checked out nearly every book on the single shelf reserved for texts on non-Christian religions in our school library. I had read the Tao and the Bhagavad Gita and books on Buddhism. I put the flowers to rest and lay on my back, trying to focus on the imagined apple that hovers eight inches above my mind’s eye. The book suggested an apple as the focal point for novice astral travelers, and I was one for following directions. I didn’t like red apples, so it was a yellow apple I used to tempt my soul to emerge from its hiding place and rise up, up. I would position it on my bed, where it would look down at me freely, unencumbered by my body and the clothes my mother made me wear. I tried to coax it from where it rested, dormant but simmering with energy, at the bottom of my spine. I asked it to slowly boil and bubble up my vertebrae, hop pop hop pop , to come out of my face, transform into a mutant hand, and take the apple. Hold it, bite it, gag me with it, whatever it took to get it out . It was like trying to pick a dandelion that weighed a thousand pounds. Mandi lay three feet from me in the same position, palms to the unknowable god we had both abandoned. There was no second Jesus coming for us. Mandi now had a stepdad at her mom’s house and a slew of young women at her dad’s house, and I was suffocating in my life. We would not keep praying for other people to learn how to change, to see us as people with our own thoughts and feelings. Mandi’s apple was red because that was the kind her mother bought. We disagreed on those