Free Futile Efforts by Tom Piccirilli Page B

couldn't feel his arm anymore, the dog's teeth deep in the muscle, severing veins.   He turned back and saw that the German Shepherd still had its eyes open, blowing bubbles frantically from its nostrils.   The dog was too panicked to swim to shore but wouldn't give up.   Vin felt the same as they clung there together under the pier with the battering, crushing tide coming in, the eastern sky diffusing a wintry blue, the water growing a richer red around them, and yet despite all that had happened and might still happen before them, he would not let go.

Introduction to "Around It Still the Sumac Grows"
     
    by Tom Monteleone
     
    "A round It Still the Sumac Grows" is special because it plays across that great and wondrous keyboard of classic themes, leaning on several emotional chords and spanning more than few octaves of unease. Wolf's "You can't go home again" riff has nothing on going back to high school. A scant few of us actually had fun during those four long years, while the rest of us spun down the circles of hell where getting an "F" was the least of our worries. To imagine that time and place as some staging ground for Il Purgatorio (at best) is a brilliant touch, but the real power of this tale reveals itself in Tom's seamless prose–he makes something so painful seem almost lyrical.
     
    –Tom Monteleone , author of EYES OF THE VIRGIN and FEARFUL SYMMETRIES

Around It Still the Sumac Grows
     
    S omehow, you never made peace with ordinary, familiar dread.
    The many everyday weaknesses continue to prod at your conscience.   How you can't hit a curve ball and flubbed every lay-up shot.   How you can't hammer a nail in straight or spackle a hole properly.   Your father's toolbox is a well of shame and remorse.   You're nearly forty and have never figured out how to change a tire.
    There are things you can't let slide anymore.   Life is a desperate undertaking now, and it doesn't allow for naiveté once you've turned twelve.   After that you're just inept and absurd.
    It's the working of the world.   You can't sit back and enjoy the day while there are kids nearby.   Not in the park and definitely not on school grounds.   This is the modern age.   Security guards buck up and give you the killer glare as if daring you to make a play for one of the children.   Jesus, you're not doing anything except sitting here.   Everybody wants an easy excuse for murder.   You can imagine them hauling one of the teenage girls off the bus and waving her at you like bait.   Here, you want to try for it?   Come on, come get some candy.   With the safety off, hands at their gun belts.
    The lunacy of ninth grade never leaves.   Overwhelming delight, guilt, duty, the bitter embrace of adulthood.   It's set the tone for the rest of your life, and you judge everything based on what you knew at that time.   No cars have the same muscle or style as a '79 Mustang.   No laughter as ugly as that of Mr. Vulatore , sophomore biology.   No dog as friendly or smart as Hercules, who followed you to the bus stop every morning until your father backed over him.   Twice.   No smile as perfect as Linda Abutti's , with her eyes crinkling at the corners, the grin igniting every nerve ending in your pudgy, pale, underdeveloped flesh.
    Maybe you've committed a crime by surviving this long, and that's why you feel the need to return to the scene over and over.   Or perhaps the crime has been perpetuated against you, and it's grown too hazy to understand anymore.   Did somebody tug on your tinkle in the boys' shower room?   Did you get your nose shoved down into dog shit at recess?   One tiny torture is as good as another.
    Anyway, you're here, and you've got to get back in, take a look around.
    You are fairly certain that you left your soul in the utility closet of seventh period study hall.
    Busloads of kids are arriving, and the noise is much louder than you remember.   Near deafening, ear-splitting.   Christ, you drop your